Of Grammatology

The question of the origin of writing and the question of the origin of language are difficult to separate. Grammatologists, who are generally by training historians, epigraphists, and archaeologists, seldom relate their researches to the modem science of language. It is all the more surprising that, among the “sciences of man,” linguistics is the one science whose scientificity is given as an example with a zealous and insistent unanimity.

Has grammatology, then, the right to expect from linguistics an essential assistance that it has almost never looked for? On the contrary, does one not find efficaciously at work, in the very movement by which linguistics is instituted as a science, a metaphysical presupposition about the relationship between speech and writing? Would that presupposition not binder the constitution of a general science of writing? Is not the lifting of that presupposition an overthrowing of the landscape upon which the science of language is peacefully installed? For better and for worse? For blindness as well as for productivity? This is the second type of question that I now wish to outlines To develop this question, I should like to approach, as a privileged example, the project and texts of Ferdinand de Saussure. That the particularity of the example does not interfere with the generality of my argument is a point which I shall occasionally — try not merely to take for granted.

Linguistics thus wishes to be the science of language. Let us set aside all the implicit decisions that have established such a project and all the questions about its own origin that the fecundity of this science allows to remain dormant. Let us first simply consider that the scientificity of that science is often acknowledged because of its phonological foundations. Phonology, it is often said today, communicates its scientificity to linguistics, which in turn serves as the epistemological model for all the sciences of man. Since the deliberate and systematic phonological orientation of linguistics (Troubetzkoy, Jakobson, Martinet) carries out an intention which was originally Saussure's, I shall, at least provisionally, confine my-self to the latter. Will my argument be equally applicable a fortiori to the most accentuated forms of phonologism? The problem at least be stated.

The science of linguistics determines language — its field of objectivity — in the last instance and in the irreducible simplicity of its essence, as the unity of the phonè, the glossa, and the logos. This determination is by rights anterior to all the eventual differentiations that could arise within the systems of terminology of the different schools (language/speech [langue/parole]; code/message; scheme/usage; linguistic/logic; phonology/phonematics/phonetics/glossematics). And even if one wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and contingent signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities that are not purely sensible), it would have to be admitted that the immediate and privileged unity which founds significance and the acts of language is the articulated unity of sound and sense within the phonic. With regard to this unity, writing would always be derivative, accidental, particular, exterior, doubling the signifier: phonetic. “Sign of a sign,” said Aristotle, Rousseau, and Hegel.

Yet, the intention that institutes general linguistics ,is a science remains in this respect within a contradiction. Its declared purpose indeed confirms, saying what goes without saying, the subordination of grammatology, the historico-metaphysical reduction of writing to the rank of an instrument enslaved to a full and originarily spoken language. But another gesture (not another statement of purpose, for here what does not go without saying is done without being said, written without being uttered) liberates the future of a general grammatology of which linguistics-phonology would be only a dependent and circumscribed area...

... Linguistics and Grammatology, Jacques Derrida

Gardener and Garden

Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him!

... Daybreak, Friedrich Nietzsche

The Formation of Objects

The conditions necessary for the appearance of an object of discourse, the historical conditions required if one is to 'say anything' about it, and if several people are to say different things about it, the conditions necessary if it is to exist in relation to other objects, if it is to establish with them relations of resemblance, proximity, distance, difference, transformation - as we can see, these conditions are many and imposing. Which means that one cannot speak of anything at any time; it is not easy to say something new; it is not enough for us to open our eyes, to pay attention, or to be aware, for new objects suddenly to light up and emerge out of the ground. But this difficulty is not only a negative one; it must not be attached to some obstacle whose power appears to be, exclusively, to blind, to hinder, to prevent discovery, to conceal the purity of the evidence or the dumb obstinacy of the things themselves; the object does not await in limbo the order that will free it and enable it to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity; it does not pre-exist itself, held back by some obstacle at the first edges of light. It exists under the positive conditions of a complex group of relations.

These relations are established between institutions, economic and social processes, behavioural patterns, systems of norms, techniques, types of classification, modes of characterisation; and these relations are not present in the object; t is not they that are deployed when the object is being analysed; they do not indicate the web, the immanent rationality, that 'deal nervure that reappears totally or in part when one conceives of the object in the truth of its concept. They do not define its internal constitution, but what enables it to appear, to juxtapose itself with other objects, to situate itself in relation to them, to define its difference, its irreducibility, and even perhaps its heterogeneity, in short, to be placed in a field of exteriority.

These relations must be distinguished first from what we might call primary relations, and which, independently of all discourse or all object of discourse, may be described between institutions, techniques, social forms, etc. After all, we know very well that relations existed between the bourgeois family and the functioning of judicial authorities and categories in the nineteenth century that can be analysed in their own right. They cannot always be superposed upon the relations that go to form objects: the relations of dependence that may be assigned to this primary level are not necessarily expressed in the formation of relations that makes discursive objects possible. But we must also distinguish the secondary relations that are formulated in discourse itself. what, for example, the psychiatrists of the nineteenth century could say about the relations between the family and criminality does not reproduce, as we know, the interplay of real dependencies; but neither does it reproduce the interplay of relations that make possible and sustain the objects of psychiatric discourse. Thus a space unfolds articulated with possible discourses: a system of real or primary relations, a system of reflexive or secondary relations, and a system t of relations that might properly be called discursive. The problem is to reveal the specificity of these discursive relations, and their interplay with the other two kinds.

Discursive relations are not, as we can see, internal to discourse: they do not connect concepts or words with one another; they do not establish a deductive or rhetorical structure between propositions or sentences. Yet they are not relations exterior to discourse, relations that might limit it, or impose certain forms upon it, or force it, in certain circumstances, to state certain things. They are, in a sense, at the limit of discourse: they offer it objects of which it can speak, or rather (for this image of offering presupposes that objects are formed independently of discourse), they determine the group of relations that discourse must establish in order to speak of this or that object, in order to deal with them, name them, analyse them, classify them, explain them, etc. These relations characterise not the language (langue) used by discourse, nor the circumstances in which it is deployed, but discourse itself as a practice.

We can now complete the analysis and see to what extent it fulfils, and to what extent it modifies, the initial project.

Taking those group figures which, in an insistent but confused way, presented themselves as psychology, economics, grammar, medicine, we asked on what kind of unity they could be based: were they simply a reconstruction after the event, based on particular works, successive theories, notions and themes some of which had been abandoned, others maintained by tradition, and again others fated to fall into oblivion only to be revived at a later date? Were they simply a series of linked enterprises?

We sought the unity of discourse in the objects themselves, in their distribution, in the interplay of their differences, in their proximity or distance - in short, in what is given to the speaking subject; and, in the end, we are sent back to a setting-up of relations that characterises discursive practice itself; and what we discover is neither a configuration, nor a form, but a group of rules that are immanent in a practice, and define it in its specificity. We also used, as a point of reference, a unity like psychopathology: if we had wanted to provide it with a date of birth and precise limits, it would no doubt have been necessary to discover when the word was first used, to what kind of analysis it could be applied, and how it achieved its separation from neurology on the one hand and psychology on the other. What has emerged is a unity of another type, which does not appear to have the same dates, or the same surface, or the same articulations, but which may take account of a group of objects for which the term psychopathology was merely a reflexive, secondary, classificatory rubric. Psychopathology finally emerged as a discipline in a constant state of renewal, subject to constant discoveries, criticisms, and corrected errors; the system of formation that we have defined remains stable. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not the objects that remain constant, nor the domain that they form; it is not even their point of emergence or their mode of characterisation; but the relation between the surfaces on which they appear, on which they can be delimited, on which they can be analysed and specified.

In the descriptions for which I have attempted to provide a theory, there can be no question of interpreting discourse with a view to writing a history of the referent. In the example chosen, we are not trying to find out who was mad at a particular period, or in what his madness consisted, or whether his disturbances were identical with those known to us today. We are not asking ourselves whether witches were unrecognised and persecuted madmen and madwomen, or whether, at a different period, a mystical or aesthetic experience was not unduly medicalised. We are not trying to reconstitute what madness itself might be, in the form in which it first presented itself to some primitive, fundamental, deaf, scarcely articulated' experience, and in the form in which it was later organised (translated, deformed, travestied, perhaps even repressed) by discourses, and the oblique, often twisted play of their operations. Such a history of the referent is no doubt possible; and I have no wish at the outset to exclude any effort to uncover and free these 'prediscursive' experiences from the tyranny of the text. But what we are concerned with here is not to neutralise discourse, to make it the sign of something else, and to pierce through its density in order to reach what remains silently anterior to it, but on the contrary to maintain it in its consistency, to make it emerge in its own complexity. What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things'. To 'depresentify' them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude, which we usually regard as the primitive law of a discourse that has become divorced from it through error, oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or even the perhaps unconscious desire not to see and not to speak. To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance. To write a history of discursive objects that does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion.

However, to suppress the stage of 'things themselves' is not necessarily to return to the linguistic analysis of meaning. When one describes the formation of the objects of a discourse, one tries to locate the relations that characterise a discursive practice, one determines neither a lexical organisation, nor the scansions of a semantic field: one does not question the meaning given at a particular period to such words as 'melancholia' or madness without delirium', nor the opposition of content between psychosis' and 'neurosis'. Not, I repeat, that such analyses are regarded as illegitimate or impossible; but they are not relevant when we are trying to discover, for example, how criminality could become an object of medical expertise, or sexual deviation a possible object of psychiatric discourse. The analysis of lexical contents defines either the elements of meaning at the disposal of speaking subjects in a given period, or the semantic structure that appears on the surface of a discourse that has already been spoken; it does not concern discursive practice as a place in which a tangled plurality - at once superposed and incomplete - of objects is formed and deformed, appears and disappears.

The sagacity of the commentators is not mistaken: from the kind of analysis that I have undertaken, words are as deliberately absent as things themselves; any description of a vocabulary is as lacking as any reference to the living plenitude of experience. We shall not return to the state anterior to discourse - in which nothing has yet been said, and in which things are only just beginning to emerge out of the grey light; and we shall not pass beyond discourse in order to rediscover the forms that it has created and left behind it; we shall remain, or try to remain, at the level of discourse itself. Since it is sometimes necessary to dot the 'i's of even the most obvious absences, I will say that in all these searches, in which I have still progressed so little, I would like to show that 'discourses', in the form in which they can be heard or read, are not, as one might expect, a mere intersection of things and words: an obscure web of things, and a manifest, visible, Coloured chain of words; I would like to show that discourse is not a slender surface of contact, or confrontation, between a reality and a language (langue), the intrication of a lexicon and an experience; I would like to show with precise examples that in analysing discourses themselves, one sees the loosening of the embrace, apparently so tight, of words and things, and the emergence of a group of rules proper to discursive practice. These rules define not the dumb existence of a reality, nor the canonical use of a vocabulary, but the ordering of objects. 'Words and things' is the entirely serious title of a problem; it is the ironic title of a work that modifies its own form, displaces its own data, and reveals, at the end of the day, a quite different task. A task that consists of not - of no longer treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak. Of course, discourses are composed of signs; but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this more that renders them irreducible to the language (langue) and to speech. it is this 'more' that we must reveal and describe.

... The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault

The Great Longing

Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. 

We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange. Nay, it is deeper than my sister’s depth and stronger than my brother’s strength, and stranger than the strangeness of my madness. 

Aeons upon aeons have passed since the first grey dawn made us visible to one another; and though we have seen the birth and the fullness and the death of many worlds, we are still eager and young. 

We are young and eager and yet we are mateless and unvisited, and though we lie in unbroken half embrace, we are uncomforted. And what comfort is there for controlled desire and unspent passion? Whence shall come the flaming god to warm my sister’s bed? And what she-torrent shall quench my brother’s fire? And who is the woman that shall command my heart? 

In the stillness of the night my sister murmurs in her sleep the fire-god’s unknown name, and my brother calls afar upon the cool and distant goddess. But upon whom I call in my sleep I know not. 

Here I sit between my brother the mountain and my sister the sea. We three are one in loneliness, and the love that binds us together is deep and strong and strange.

... The Madman, Kahlil Gibran

Seriousness

The first salient feature of the hadith folk I have alleged is unremitting seriousness. One example of this is refusing to laugh. This was fairly common among ascetics of the late 8th century.Al-Fudayl ibn 'Iyad (d. 803) discouraged laughing and was never seen laughing by an associate of thirty years. The Antiochian Yusuf ibn Asbat (d. 810-11) did not laugh for thirty years or jest (yamzahu) for forty. The famous Syrian ascetic Abu Sulayman al-Darani (d. 830-31) advised, "The laughter of the knower ('arif) is smiling." This was also common in later traditionalist circles. Bishr al-Hafi (d. 84) is often loosely associated with Ahmad ibn Hanbal. He is said to have warned a laugher he would not die in such a state. Isma'il ibn 'Ulayya (d. 809) was angry with his disciples for laughing when Ahmad was in his circle. 'Abd al-Wahhab (d. 865) was the ascetic whom Ahmad is said to have named his successor. His son related that he had never seen him laughing - only smiling. When he once came across his son laughing with his mother, he asked, "Does a master of the Qur'an laugh in this manner?" Muhammad ibn Dawud al-Qantari (d. 871-72) and al-'Abbas al-Turqufi (d. 881) were two other Baghdadi traditionalists who were never seen laughing or smiling. It is probably a measure of how traditionalist were some, at least, of the 9th century Shi'is that the Kufan traditionalist 'Ubayd Allah ibn Musa al-'Absi (d. 829) was never seen laughing.

This is not to say that all hadith folk refused to laugh. Some did laugh, and all related hadith reports by which the Prophet would laugh until his molars showed (although usually with the gloss that his laughing was really smiling). If all had refused to laugh, those who refused to would not have been noteworthy. However, it does show that refusal to laugh was admired, while it is rare for the biography of a traditionalist to observe that he liked to joke and laugh.

The point of not laughing was mainly, I think, that one should restrict one's attention to solemn, religious matters. Remembered William James's definition of "divine" as "such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse or a jest." Jurisprudents of all tendencies debated whether laughter during one's ritual ablution or prayer would invalidate them. These traditionalists simply extended the ban on laughter to the rest of everyday living. Hodgson speaks of "devotion to the One expressed in the Qur'an, and to its moral demands," which nothing should be allowed to weaken.

Single-minded devotion manifested itself in many ways - for example, in traditionalists hostility to chess. Ahmad's close follower Abu Bakr al-Marrudhi (d. 888) related the hadith report from the Prophet, "He who plays chess is accursed, and whoever watches them is like the eater of pork." Other hadith reports had the Prophet calling on God to curse whoever played chess or reporting that God already had cursed them. What did they have against playing chess? Jurisprudents commonly objected that chess might be the subject of betting. Some Kufan traditionalists considered chess to be involved with Magianism. The qadi Abu Yusuf (d. 798) was said to have disallowed the testimony of one who had bet on chess or let it distract him from his prayers. (Hanafiyyah such as Abu Yusuf were not hadith folk, of course, and stories of their piety show mixed attraction and repulsion. Take, for example, two accounts from 11th century sources. According to the first account, Abu Hanifa was never seen laughing, merely smiling; according to the second, Abu Hanifa used to joke a great deal.) Gambling was forbidden, but fear that the chess player would forget his prayers agrees with hostility to other diversions, such as playing musical instruments.

... The Piety of the Hadith Folk, Christopher Melchert

Paintings

The artist paints his desire, paints himself desiring, torn apart, happy to be torn. He paints the desire to paint inasmuch as this desire is the subject to be painted par excellence, the inimitable subject of painting, absolutely. As if painting itself were something like desire: less desirable than desiring (and as such, infinitely heartbreaking - and desirable). What is painted here is representation as desire: not the desire to represent, but the representation itself, the painting, the image itself as desire.

It is as if the image were no longer the result of the product of a desire to paint, not representation achieved, but just a desire. An image-desire, which would thus no longer be an image-representation. (Which would imply, perhaps, that the desire is no longer to be constructed upon the representation of its object...) Just a desire, just the desire "itself," which no longer longs to render something present, or to render the presence of something - and consequently, to represent something - but which longs to desire. Desire that is, in and of itself, already pleasure: the pleasure, heartrending and happy, of going endlessly toward pleasure, of coming to pleasure, and not of having reached it. Something, thus, which would resemble the "fore-pleasure" that Freud considers to be the order proper of aesthetic pleasure - in art as in sex - which is none other than the pleasure of desire, and which remains, as he confesses, so mysterious to him. (He discovers it for the first time in his work on jokes, in the region of laughter: in fact, laughter is, for him, the first form assumed by "fore-pleasure.")

The desire to paint is the desire to paint endlessly. It is not the urge to conquer an image and to enjoy it, but it infinitely longs to not cease to be, to come into the coming of the image. It is the imagination, but in a sense that strips from this word all undertones of representation. It is the imagination of becoming-image: not to become an image, but to be the image that comes, inasmuch as it comes, to be the very plasticity of its fictioning - of its modeling. That is to say, the emergence of the visible as visible, the place, the time, and the gesture of light as it mixes with the birth of the forms it illuminates - like the moon, here, with the dance of a shadow. It is the desire to become, not the appearance, but the apparition, not the phenomenon, but the phenomenonalization, its phainestai. It is the desire to become the "surprise" that the poem presents as the essence of sublime beauty - the surprise that the woman is, that surprises the artist, that disconcerts his art, but in which his whole art becomes one of letting oneself be caught.

The desire to paint becomes arts' desire to let itself be surprised - surprised by a painting that will not have been executed as a canvas, but which will have come from the depths of the visible. A painting come from the depths of painting, from a place where nothing is painted, but where everything is in the process of blooming into the miracle of its own apparition. The place and the moment of this surprise are, here, those of laughter.

In this laughter, the presence (of the woman, of the artist, of beauty) desires itself in its surprising apparition - and surprises itself in its coming to presence. The woman's face is painted inasmuch as it does not compose a face but surprises itself, is the visibility outside itself where all faces (and their desire and their pleasure) burst. What is painted is the pleasure of painting, which surprises and disconcerts, which foils all desire for representation. Perhaps the painting of this laughter - this laughter of the painting - is nothing but the rendering in an image (in a poem) of these lines by Diderot: "What torture for the painter is the human face, the stirring canvas that moves, stretches, relaxes, becomes flushed or somber, in keeping with the infinite changing of that light and mobile spirit we call the soul! ... Does a woman have the same complexion in the expectation of pleasure, in its arms, coming out of its arms? Oh, my friend, what an art is that of painting!" ("Essai sur la peinture"). The soul of pleasure, the soul as pleasure, is what desires itself here, what imagines itself unimaginable, and laughs.

... The Birth To Presence, Nancy Jean-Luc

The Grotesque Image of the Body

Degradation and debasement of the higher do not have a formal and relative character in grotesque realism. "Upward" and "downward" have here an absolute and strictly topographical meaning. "Downward" is earth, "upward" is heaven. Earth is an element that devours, swallows up (the grave, the womb) and at the same time as element of birth, of renascence (the maternal breasts). Such is the meaning of "upward" and "downward" in their cosmic aspect, while in their purely bodily aspect, which is not clearly distinct from the cosmic, the upper part is the face of the head and the lower part is the genital organs, the belly, and the buttocks. These absolute topographical connotations are used by grotesque realism, including medieval parody. Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time. To degrade is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one. To degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth take place. Grotesque realism knows no other lower level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving.

This is the reason why medieval parody is unique, quite unlike the purely formalist literary parody of modern times, which has a solely negative character and is deprived of regenerating ambivalence. This genre and all the other modern forms of degradation could not, of course, preserve their former immensely important meaning.

Degradation, whether parodical of or some other type, is characteristic of Renaissance literature, which in that sense perpetuated the best tradition of the culture of folk humor (fully and deeply expressed by Rabelais). But even at this point the material bodily principle was subject to a certain alteration and narrowing. Its universal and festive character was somewhat weakened. True, this process was still at its initial stage as can be observed, for instance, in Don Quixote.

The fundamental trend of Cervantes' parodies is a "coming down to earth", a contact with the reproductive and generating power of the earth and of the body. This is a continuation of the grotesque tradition. But at the same time the material bodily principle has already been reduced. It is undergoing a peculiar crisis of splitting. Cervantes' images of bodily life have begun to lead a double existence.

Sancho's fat belly (panza), his appetite and thirst still convey a powerful carnivalesque spirit. His love of abundance and wealth have not, as yet, a basically private, egotistic and alienating character. Sancho is the direct heir of the antique potbellied demons which decorate the famous Corinthian vases. In Cervantes' images of food and drink there is still the spirit of popular banquets. Sancho's materialism, his potbelly, appetite, his abundant defecation, are on the absolute lower level of grotesque realism of the gay bodily grave (belly, bowels, earth) which has been dug for Don Quixote's abstract and deadened idealism. One could say that the knight of the sad countenance must die in order to be reborn a better and a greater man. This is a bodily and popular corrective to individual idealistic and spiritual pretense. Moreover, it is the popular corrective of laughter applied to the narrow-minded spiritual presence (the absolute lower stratum is always laughing); it is a regenerating and laughing death. Sancho's role in relation to Don Quixote can be compared to the role of medieval parodies versus high ideology and cult, to the role of the clown versus serious ceremonial, to charnage versus careme. The gay principle of regeneration can also be seen, to a lesser extent, in the windmills (giants), inns (castles), flocks of rams and sheep (armies of knights), innkeepers (lords of the castle), prostitutes (noble ladies), and so forth. All these images form a typical grotesque carnival, which turns a kitchen and banquet into a battle, kitchen utensils and shaving bowls into arms and helmets, and wine into blood. Such is the first, carnival aspect of the material bodily images of Don Quixote. But it is precisely this aspect which creates the grand style of Cervantes' realism, his universal nature, and his deep popular utopianism.

... The Grotesque Image of the Body and Its Sources, Michail Bakhtin

Post-modern Interdisciplinarity

In the second part of the Critique of Judgment, Kant offers the following definition of how a science or discipline is established: "The principles of a science are either internal to it, and are then called indigenous (principia domestica), or they are based on principles that can only find their place outside of it, and are foreign principles (peregrina). Sciences that contain the latter base their doctrines on auxiliary propositions (lemmata), i.e., they borrow some concept, and along with it a basis for order, from another science" (Kant, Judgment 252). The second of these two cases, the borrowing of a concept from another science or discipline, is a practice that is easily discernible in recent critical history. One need only think of the borrowing from Saussurean linguistics that enabled the development of structuralism. Yet, as the history and the intentions of structuralism already show, such borrowing does not lead to the formation of a science or even a discipline we could call interdisciplinary but rather, remains firmly within the practice of either a critical method or the idiosyncrasy of a particular critical interpretation. Indeed, in such cases, the claim to interdisciplinarity has more to do with affirming the ability to borrow from one discipline or another as a central principle of modern humanistic study if not the history of the humanities in general.

This principle is also central the passage just cited from Kant's Critique of Judgment. However, for Kant, the principle of once science, once borrowed, may be easily forgotten as another science or discipline emerges, a new science that quickly takes on all the trappings of a science in its own right. Clearly, modern interdisciplinary study would resist, both strategically and ideologically, the transformation Kant describes: the reproduction of itself as a discipline. Yet, to the extent that modern interdisciplinarity defines itself through a critical relation to the ideology of disciplines (to do otherwise is to define itself according to the limitation it sets out to avoid), it poses the question of its own existence - not in the sense that such a question denies existence to interdisciplinarity but in the sense that it questions how interdisciplinarity currently exists as a recognizable form of inquiry. In other words, interdisciplinarity raises the question of the place it now occupies as a guiding concept for the production of knowledge within the modern university. Having taken up this role, has interdisciplinarity become, in effect, indistinguishable from the science whose principle remains internal to it? Does its borrowing lead back to what has long been the preserve of individual disciplines: the production of guiding concepts?

There lies a more fundamental question embedded within these questions: whether anything such as interdisciplinarity is conceivable as a form of knowledge - or, indeed, whether it is only as a form that it is conceivable. The answers to this question already seem predictably unavoidable whether it be an empirically driven declaration that "you cant do interdisciplinarity" or, on the other hand, a defense that emphasizes a kind of hybridity, an in-betweenness that always asserts its difference to the way in which a discipline guarantees its knowledge by focusing on the questions that authenticate its guiding concept. By pursuing this question and the kinds of answers it so regularly elicits, the question of interdisciplinarity and its role within our modernity - not to mention the evolution of the university in the late 20th century - cannot be posed, and precisely because, these answers are not answers. Rather, they are the two opposed terms of a dialectically determined history in which interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity engaged in what Kant could have called a play of representations, each one agreeably assuring the survival of the other. For, without the disciplines, there is no hope of designating, however vaguely or figuratively, a space between that would be the space of interdisciplinarity. Without such a history, discipline always remains a point of reference and especially so in its critical negation.

Despite the force of this negation, Kant's subsequent remarks to the passage cited at the beginning of this essay would already imply that this history takes place within a systematic tendency. Whether the principles are internal or borrowed, Kant states, "every science is of itself a system" (Kant, Judgment 252). The act of borrowing or even the act of displacing the principle of one science or discipline does not impede the development of systematicity in another area of study. Within this Kantian paradigm, it is as if no knowledge is conceivable without, at some level, revealing a relation to systematic thought. Yet, this tendency is not wholly Kantian, it also appears in contexts that reject the limitations of Kant's critical project. Thus, Novalis will speak of "systemlessness brought into a system" and Deleuze will proclaim "an organization of the many ... which has no need whatsoever for unity to form a system" (Novalis 2:289; Deleuze 182). This allure of the systematic remains strong even within those contexts that have rejected unequivocally the impulse towards epistemological foundations characteristic of the history of systematic thought. Yet, it can be argues that the sense of system implied by both Novalis and Deleuze is itself merely a borrowing or even, in the latter, a performance in the post-modern sense. Such a borrowing would then allow this use of system t recognize the systematic impulse of German Idealism but without subscribing to its totalizing tendencies - a performance that would not and cannot assume the same for German Idealism.

... Post-modern Interdisciplinarity: Kant, Diderot and the Encyclopedic Project, David Ferris

Laughter

The idea of laughter can be pleasant as well as contemptuous, and can therefore form a part of a properly 'civil' life, had come to be widely accepted by the early decades of the seventeenth century. So it comes as something of a shock to find that, in the two best-known discussions of laughter in the next generation - those of Hobbes and Descartes - these assumptions are explicitly set aside in favor of a return to an unambiguously classical point of view.

This is not to say that Hobbes and Descartes restate the Aristotelian theory in its most blinkered form. They both picked up and reiterate the two developments of Aristotle's argument I have already discussed. First of all, they lay considerable emphasis on the concept originally introduced by Fracastoro into the discussion, the concept of surprise or wonderment. Descartes, for whom admiratio is a fundamental passion, opens his analysis of laughter in Les Passions de l'ame by stressing the importance of novelty and suddenness, arguing that we laugh only when something happens 'to cause the lung suddenly to inflate' so that 'the air they contain is forced out through the windpipe with impetuosity, forming an inarticulate and uncontrolled voice'. He adds that these distinctive physiological changes take place only when a new and sudden event is associated with feelings of wonderment. The blood coming from the spleen must be 'pushed towards the heart by some light emotion of Hatred, aided by the surprise of l'Admiration if the outcome is to be the form of dilation with which laughter is associated...

What is striking, however, is that neither Hobbes nor Descartes ever mentions the direct challenge to the Aristotelian theory that had arisen in the course of the Renaissance, an omission all the more surprising when one reflects that they usually go out of their way to express their scorn for Aristotle's philosophy. Descartes's principal claim about laughter in Les Passions de l'ame remains a purely Aristotelian one. 'Although', as he explains, 'the Laugh may seem to be one of the principal signs of Joy, joy cannot be the cause of laughter unless the joy is only moderate, and is at the same time mixed with an element of hatred or wonderment.' The connection of laughter with hatred and contempt is one on which he lays particular emphasis, and he later returns to it in his discussion of la moquerie: 'Derision of Mockery is a kind of Joy mixed with Hatred, and when this feeling arises unexpectedly the result is that we burst out with laughter.' ...

That Hobbes returns to the same classical argument is yet more remarkable, since he opens his discussion in The Elements ... his oft-quoted definition ... runs as follows:

"The passion of Laughter is nothying else but a suddaine Glory arising from suddaine Conception of some Eminency in our selves by Comparison with the Infirmityes of others, or with our owne formerly."

The invocation of glory, and the emphasis on glorying over others, have often been singled out as quintessentially Hobbesian sentiments. As will by now be evident, however, they amount to little more than unacknowledged quotations from Hobbes's ancient sources, and in particular from the analysis of laughter in book 6 of Quintilian's Institutio oratoria.

Hobbes further underlines his classical allegiances by emphasizing that the feelings of glory he is describing are invariably contemptuous and derisory: 'Men Laugh at the infirmityes of others by comparison of which their owne abilityes are sett off, and illustrated.' This being so, 'it is no wonder therefore that men take it heanously to be laughed at', for in becoming objects of laughter they are being 'derided, that is tryumphed over'. He summarizes still more brutally at the end of the chapter, where he presents his 'comparisons of the life of man to a race' and explains the role in this comparison of the different passions of the soul:

"To fall on the suddaine, is disposition to Weepe
To see another to fall, disposition to Laugh"

As in the case of Descartes, Hobbes basic suggestion is thus that laughter expresses a joyful and contemptuous sense of our own superiority.

Hobbes and Descartes enunciate similar theories, but Hobbes's analysis is a more elaborate one, embodying as it does a number of distinctive elements. One is the suggestion, put forward at the end of his discussion in The Elements, that we sometimes laugh not because we feel contempt for any particular person, but rather because we have been made aware of some general absurdity. This possibility allows for what Hobbes describes as 'laughter without offense', which is said to take place when we laugh 'at absurdityes and affirmityes abstracted from persons, and where all the Company may laugh together'. Such laughter will still be an expression of our scorn, but instead of mocking other people to their faces we join together in ridiculing some ludicrous feature of the world and its ways.

... Hobbes and the Classical Theory of Laughter, Quentin Skinner

My Journeys in Photography - Part 2

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be. ~Duane Michals

Portraits in the Getty Museum

I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing.  After all, you are taking some of their soul.  ~Mary Ellen Mark

Aerial view of Los Angeles

A photograph is like the recipe - a memory the finished dish.  ~Carrie Latet

Getty Museum's garden

I didn't want to tell the tree or weed what it was.  I wanted it to tell me something and through me express its meaning in nature.  ~Wynn Bullock

Cafe at the Getty Museum

Everyone has a photographic memory, but not everyone has film.  ~Author Unknown

Sunset at a wharf in Long Beach

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.  ~Henri Cartier-Bresson

Palm trees and sunset at Long Beach

Photograph:  a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.  ~Ambrose Bierce

Sunset at Long Beach

You don't take a photograph.  You ask, quietly, to borrow it.  ~Author Unknown

Long Beach bay

There will be times when you will be in the field without a camera.  And, you will see the most glorious sunset or the most beautiful scene that you have ever witnessed.  Don't be bitter because you can't record it.  Sit down, drink it in, and enjoy it for what it is!  ~DeGriff

Long Beach

The world just does not fit conveniently into the format of a 35mm camera.  ~W. Eugene Smith

Hollywood's Walk of Fame

I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don't find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.  ~William Albert Allard, "The Photographic Essay"

Hollywood

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.  ~Ansel Adams

The Kodak Theatre - place of the Oscars

Actually, I'm not all that interested in the subject of photography.  Once the picture is in the box, I'm not all that interested in what happens next.  Hunters, after all, aren't cooks.  ~Henri Cartier-Bresson 

LA Opera House

All photos are accurate.  None of them is the truth.  ~Richard Avedon

The famed Walt Disney Concert Hall

A Ming vase can be well-designed and well-made and is beautiful for that reason alone.  I don't think this can be true for photography.  Unless there is something a little incomplete and a little strange, it will simply look like a copy of something pretty.  We won't take an interest in it.  ~John Loengard

The Birth of Jesus - in a Mexican part of LA

Photographs that transcend but do not deny their literal situation appeal to me.  ~Sam Abbel

A captivating portrait hanging at my LA residence

A photograph can be an instant of life captured for eternity that will never ceased looking back at you. ~Brigitte Bardot

Universal Studios

Anything that excites me for any reason, I will photograph; not searching for unusual subject matter, but making the commonplace unusual. ~Edward Weston

Sunset at Santa Monica beach

Often while traveling with a camera we arrive just as the sun slips over the horizon of a moment, too late to expose film, only time enough to expose our hearts.  ~Minor White

My Journeys in Photography - Part 1

"If you see something that moves you, and then snap it - you keep a moment" ... Linda McCartney

The beach of Santa Monica

My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph. ~Richard Avedon

Aerial view of the mountains on the way to Los Angeles

The goal is not to change your subjects, but for the subject to change the photographer. ~Author Unknown

Vail Ski Resort - second only to Aspen

The photograph itself doesn't interest me.  I want only to capture a minute part of reality.  ~Henri Cartier Bresson

Taken from a moving car on the way to Vail

Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.  ~Ansel Adams

In a teahouse, from Tajikistan

While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.  ~Dorothea Lange

Walking out of my department on a snowy morning

There are always two people in every picture:  the photographer and the viewer.  ~Ansel Adams

My favorite reading spot by the creek during summer/fall

The camera can photograph thought.  ~Dirk Bogarde

The lawn in front of my department taken during fall

Every time someone tells me how sharp my photos are, I assume that it isn't a very interesting photograph.  If it were, they would have more to say.  ~Author Unknown

Boettcher Concert Hall - home of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs.  When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.  ~Ansel Adams

Sunset beyond the mountain - returning from meeting the President in Denver

The goal is not to change your subjects, but for the subject to change the photographer.  ~Author Unknown

My department

Most things in life are moments of pleasure and a lifetime of embarrassment; photography is a moment of embarrassment and a lifetime of pleasure.  ~Tony Benn

Portland, Oregon - is not only known as the City of Roses, but also as the City of Bridges

I never question what to do, it tells me what to do.  The photographs make themselves with my help.  ~Ruth Bernhard

Downtown Portland, Oregon - taken from the Rose Garden

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created.  It is a major force in explaining man to man.  ~Edward Steichen

Where it first began - in Seattle

If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn't need to lug around a camera.  ~Lewis Hine

Taken from a boat leaving Bremerton Island towards downtown Seattle. The Space Needle dominating the skyline

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget.  In this - as in other ways - they are the opposite of paintings.  Paintings record what the painter remembers.  Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.  ~John Berger

Twilight

"I dream about being with you, forever"

"Forever? And you are ready right now?"

"Yes"

"Is it not enough just to have a long and happy life with me?"

"Yeah, for now..."

Virginia Woolf

The last scene from my favourite movie, The Hours, based largely on one of my favourite author, Virginia Woolf's classic almost self-autobiography book Mrs Dalloway. Awesome and intense.

"Dear Leonard:

To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is.

At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away.

Leonard, always the years between us, always the years.

Always the love.

Always the hours."

I Am An Astronomer

In the shadow of the temple my friend and I saw a blind man sitting alone. And my friend said, “Behold the wisest man of our land.” 

Then I left my friend and approached the blind man and greeted him. And we conversed. 

After a while I said, “Forgive my question; but since when has thou been blind?” 

“From my birth,” he answered. 

Said I, “And what path of wisdom followest thou?” 

Said he, “I am an astronomer.” 

Then he placed his hand upon his breast saying, “I watch all these suns and moons and stars.”

... The Madman, Kahlil Gibran

Lions

Until lions write their own history,

the tale of the hunt shall always

glorify the hunter.

Heroes

Small heroes master their enemies. 

Big heroes master themselves.

Eternity At Sea

That if I would,

I would stand immortally at sea

Gazing for eternity at sea

The beauty struck sea

I’d set leave of quay

To immortally find way

Stand upon the ocean shore

Reverberating sea splashing at my feet

Shore washing sea, covering my feet

To close my eyes is to be at sea

This dream lasts all day to me

One day is like twenty years at sea

That if I would,

I would stand immortally at sea

Hoping for eternity at sea

Wonder covered sea

I would bless the shore

And leave to be once more

Out at sea to sail

And stand upon a ship and sway

Listen to the creak of the wood, and say

To close my eyes is to be at sea

A dream that lasts eternity

Eternity, guaranteed, to live

Would one day be eternity

I would spend it out at sea

Stand upon the ocean shore, foaming at my feet

... Annie Cordelia Adams