SEXUATED TOPOLOGY AND THE
SUSPENSION OF MEANING
A NON-HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
WILLIAM J. URBAN
CHAPTER 4
AESTHETIC THEORY
The charms in beautiful nature, which we so often find fused, as it were, with beautiful form, belong either to the modifications of light (in coloring) or of sound (in tones). For these are the only sensations that allow not merely for a feeling of sense, but also for reflection on the form of these modifications of the senses, so that they contain, as it were, a language in which nature speaks to us and which seems to have a higher meaning.
There is no science of the beautiful, but only critique.319
The image suspends the course of the world and of meaning – of meaning as a course or current of sense (meaning in discourse, meaning that is current and valid): but it affirms all the more a sense (therefore an "insensible") that is selfsame with what it gives to be sensed (that is, itself). In the image, which, however, is without an "inside," there is a sense that is nonsignifying but not insignificant, a sense that is certain as its force (its form).320
As the discussion in the preceding chapter endeavored to demonstrate, (post)structuralist thought is aware how the hermeneutical pursuit of meaning has its limits and characteristically assigns these to the structural machinery of language itself. The present chapter on aesthetic theory also recognizes that meaning is not all there is, but further suspects that meaning is intimately linked to an even more senseless domain than the one occupied by those structural mechanisms which generate the phenomenal meaning-effect. Aesthetic theory further recognizes how this domain is not without its own phenomenal experience and if it is to access this domain, a methodology different from those thus far examined is required. The needed methodology would again turn to the experience of meaning, which was consciously abandoned as a primary pursuit by the (post)structuralist investigation into those structural mechanisms responsible for its phenomena. Without question the aesthetic theorist does use a phenomenology. Indeed the etymology of the very term aesthetic reflects this, having been derived from the Greek aisthanomai, which is translated as 'to apprehend through the senses.' However, this phenomenology is not a hermeneutical phenomenology but rather one that is decidedly non-hermeneutical. In this fourth chapter we examine aesthetic theorists who are keenly attentive to the ways in which the experience of meaning is disrupted and who actively seek to theorize these disruptions.
Section 4.1 briefly discusses three aesthetic theorists who find truthful and creative domains in the experience of the aesthetic object which disrupt our smooth relation to meaning. Section 4.2 centers on four contemporary French thinkers, who are discussed with respect to Kantian aesthetics. Through their work it is suggested how the aesthetic object itself can offer the possibility of containing and suspending meaning.
4.1 Truth without Meaning in Scripture and Poetry
Before turning to Baudrillard and Badiou, it is worthwhile to examine a text by Benjamin some three-quarters of a century prior to the formers' publications from the 1990s as it contains important insights regarding the translation of aesthetic works. Generally speaking, Benjamin would have us conceive the status of a translation as an afterlife of the original literary work of art in his "The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens" (1923).321 What this afterlife demonstrates is not only how the original thereby undergoes a change but how '[e]ven words with a fixed meaning can undergo a maturing process.'322 With expressed references to how words intend objects, which cannot but bring to mind Husserl, he explains that what translation shows is how meaning is not fixed in individual words or sentences but is in a constant state of flux, which translation perpetuates. These claims should all be seen as laying the groundwork for his thesis that the traditional approach to translation, which attempts to maintain fidelity to the word and literalness along with a faithful reproduction of meaning, must be abandoned. Impossible to accomplish at any rate, Benjamin argues how a proper 'translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification... so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement to the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio.'323 What Benjamin is aiming at with his notion of free translation is the regaining of the expressionless creative Word that is the ultimate essence of the original, its 'pure language.' Moreover, discernible throughout this article is a minimal distinction between meaning and sense. Although not clearly defined or maintained, it is apparent that translators are not to strive to reproduce meaning so much as the sense and then only tangentially: 'Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point...a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.'324 He continues to argue how translations themselves often prove untranslatable because of the 'looseness with which meaning attaches to them,' pointing us toward Friedrich Hölderlin's prototypical translations of Sophocles as evidence of this and as a general confirmation of all these claims regarding translation. Yet Benjamin acknowledges that the danger which always looms with his notion of translation is that meaning threatens to plunge irretrievably into the abyss of language. His solution is to shift the analysis to the non-meaningful domain of truth. As he writes, '[t]here is, however, a stop. It is vouchsafed to Holy Writ alone, in which meaning has ceased to be the watershed for the flow of language and the flow of revelation. Where a text is identical with truth or dogma, where it is supposed to be "the true language" in all its literalness and without the mediation of meaning, this text is unconditionally translatable.'325 Scripture is the greatest of all the great texts, the prototype of all translation as it contains its potential free translation between its literal lines. For Benjamin, proper translation should aim for the truth of the original text's creative Word as it alone puts a halt to the endless pursuit of the meaning in the original.
Where Benjamin wishes to overcome the threat of the void of language by an appeal to truth, we might say that for Baudrillard the only truth is that there is no truth to rescue us from this threat. But in contrast to the former, Baudrillard finds promise in such circumstances. The titular essay of his Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays (1996)326 scandalized the art world, provoking it with his claim that since art confiscated banality and mediocrity only to turn them into values, this licenses us to judge contemporary art as worthless. Moreover, that the art world thought this ruling scandalous was the true scandal. Here lies the duplicity of art: it asserts is nullity when it is already null. To understand this consider how the art world's bluff of nullity forces its consumers a contrario to give art work credence under the pretext that nothing could be so null, and accordingly they turn to contemplate its deep and hidden significance. Baudrillard is effectively arguing that it is precisely the art world's pretense of meaninglessness, which generates the meaning-effect to be had in the pursuit of the deep meaning of a particular piece of art. In contrast to this opposition between consumers' faith in the meaningfulness of art and artists feigning its meaninglessness, Baudrillard holds that true '[i]nsignificance – real insignificance, the victorious challenge to meaning – is the rare quality of a few exceptional works that never strive for it.'327 Yet this insignificance is something we are to strive for in the hopes that such striving will reverse our present situation. He explains that whereas in the past the image was the way the subject could represent the world to itself which kicked off the power of illusion, today the value of art is linked to a pure circularity, a virtuality whereby those subjects who enter the image accordingly lose the capacity for illusion. This implies that today '[t]he subject is no longer the master of the game' since the object has become 'a strange attractor.'328 However, this situation can be reversed and his entire project is in fact predicated on the belief that reversibility as such is indestructible. Accordingly the recovery of the illusion of language and of the world is what is called for and '[t]his passion for artifice, this passion for illusion is the seductive joy of undoing the all too beautiful constellation of meaning.'329 Here we are to let ourselves be deceived once again with respect to the world and its enigmatic function, which has nothing to do with the validation of its meaning. How exactly? By putting into play radical thought which stands at the violent crossroads of sense and nonsense, truth and untruth, and something (meaning) and nothing. This radical thought at the same time wagers on how the latter term runs underneath the former term in each of the foregoing binary pairs. Radical thought is a poetic thought, one which makes events unintelligible and makes that which is clear enigmatic. In poetical terms Baudrillard writes how 'meaning is unhappy' and critics who are 'unhappy by nature' are obsessed with it. By their focus on the unhappy content of language, critics overlook its 'happy form' on which radical thought focuses.330 This thought aims for an excentering of reality by attracting the void to its periphery, a 'virtual void [that] could be turned into a creative space. A creation out of the energy of signs, not of the accumulation of meaning. In fact the contrary is true: we must aim to destroy it. We must create a void such that everything that exists would have to assume a concrete form. Then a pure event would come about: a total spectacle. By "spectacle" I mean here the exact opposite of a representative spectacle.'331 For Baudrillard this pure event is one of form, a virtual void which disrupts the something of meaning and restores its illusory quality.
In an entirely different way the philosophy of Badiou centers upon notions of the event and the void. Although they are discussed throughout his Handbook of Inaesthetics (1998),332 they are especially taken up in its final two chapters, where he analyzes a prose text of Samuel Beckett and a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé. This last chapter on poetry culminates a trajectory from chapters on lesser art forms like dance, theater and cinema. But it is the first chapter which sets the stage for this analysis, enumerating three ways in which the relationship between philosophy and art has been schematized historically since Plato. These can be articulated via two categories: '"Immanence" refers to the following question: Is truth really internal to the artistic effect of works of art? Or is the artwork instead nothing but the instrument of an external truth? "Singularity" points us to another question: Does the truth testified by art belong to it absolutely? Or can this truth circulate among other registers of work-producing thought?'333 Four possible schemas result from these criteria. Both the classical schema (used by Aristotelian and psychoanalytic thought) and the didactic schema (likewise by Platonic and Marxist thought) hold art to be incapable of truth, but while the latter allows for its singular testimony of the external truth, the former does not. The third historically existing schema interests Badiou the most, as it does consider art capable of truth. It is here 'we find a pious devotion to art, a contrite prostration of the concept... before the poetic word, which is alone in offering the world up to that latent Openness of its own distress.'334 If these words hearken back to discussions had in Chapter 1 and 2 above, it is with good reason. For Badiou argues how the romantic schema is best represented in the 20th century by Heideggerian hermeneutics. Interestingly, poetry is the privileged art form for both Heidegger and Badiou. However, the problem with hermeneutic romanticism
'is that between philosophy and art it is the same truth that circulates. The retreat of being comes to thought in the conjoining of the poem and its interpretation. Interpretation is in the end nothing but the delivery of the poem over to the trembling of finitude in which thought strives to endure the retreat of being as clearing. Poet and thinker, relying on one another, embody within the word the opening out of its closure. In this respect, the poem, strictly speaking, cannot be equaled.'335
While Badiou agrees with Heidegger that art should be treated as rigorously coextensive with the truths it generates, against Heidegger he claims that these truths of art are not given elsewhere, even in other identifiable domains of truth such as politics, love or science. Simply said, the project of inaesthetics is to produce the missing fourth schema that the 20th century has failed to produce, one that upholds the truth of art in both its immanence and singularity.
This project can quite productively be seen in contrast to the Heideggerian interpretative strategy. The latter eschews the notion of truth only insofar as it does not adequately articulate the modern passing of the inaccessible meaning of being so as to fail to reestablish a link with this primordially lost semantic dimension. But within these parameters hermeneutical phenomenology does maintain a strong theoretical continuity between truth and meaning. In contrast, Badiou finds that meaning only comes forward after the question of truth is closed. From Badiou's perspective truth and meaning should be set in strict opposition. As he writes, philosophy should 'retain the conviction that, as strong as an interpretation may be, the meaning that the interpretation achieves will never ground the capacity for meaning itself. Or, in other words, that a truth can never reveal the meaning of meaning, the sense of sense.'336 Philosophy demands of us that we not revel in the meaning of the poem, which cannot but foster interpretation, but rather seek instead the meaningless primacy of its truth which proceeds as a subtraction from meaning. As his analysis of Mallarmé demonstrates, Badiou does not conceive the poem as the disclosure of meaning but as an (axiomatic-mathematical) operation. Accordingly one is to declare the autonomy of the poem's specific artistic procedure as the self-sustaining prescription of (mathematical) manipulations of the void. Such a procedure is a condition of philosophy and has its generic type, which follows a particular path. In simple terms, the possibility of an artistic truth begins with an event which is sustained by a subject who engages in finite artistic investigations in the name of that event; such subjective fidelity to the event results in a sequence of particular works, composing an infinite truth called the artistic configuration which operates as the pertinent unit for a thinking of art.337 Like (post)structuralist work, the phenomenal meaning-effect is equally lost when one follows the operations of the poem as it traces out this path, a path which provides the key to its syntactic, not its semantic, machinations. But what should further be taken away from the aesthetic theory of Badiou is how philosophy grasps truth as the interruption of the regime of meaning, as a break from all relations with poetic meaning. Semantic categories are external to the principles of truth's construction and so the poem's declaration of truth is entirely axiomatic. For Badiou, the turn of philosophy to truth and to the procedures of its production means it cannot be hermeneutical, for truths have no meaning but rather only come to be through the failure of meaning, composed step by step by the subject pledging its fidelity to the event.
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