Naught is More Real
Meillassoux, Bataille, Beckett: Towards a Sovereign Speculative Poetics
In her recent book, Cold Modernism, published in July of this year, Jessica
Burstein re-examines the work of a handful of twentieth century modernists in order
to call forth a hitherto hidden, because unrecognisable, current coursing through the
twentieth century reaction to modernity in the guise of a particular facet of artistic,
literary, and sartorial modernism: the impossible desire to manifest a realist aesthetics.
This is not the realism of art-world mimesis – a conduit that necessarily flows through
the human – but the realism native to philosophy that posits the world as it is in-itself
independent of the human thought of it. ‘A world’, Burstein reflects fleetingly in her
introduction, ‘of which many Samuel Beckett characters have despaired.’1 The term
‘cold modernism’ designates an aesthetic register ‘in which the mind does not exist,
let alone matter – or it does matter, but in the physical sense. Not “merely” matter: for
that would be a lament. There are no laments in cold modernism, for there are no
characters who would conceive of themselves as subjects.’ Burstein’s peculiar vision
of modernism has at its heart ‘the presentation of a world in which the individual has
no place’.2 Hence its invisibility to the latter.
Since Kant’s so-called ‘Copernican turn’, philosophical orthodoxy has
considered realism either as a folly - subscribed to only by those naïve enough to
believe reality to be entirely consonant with what appears as reality, or as an
epistemologically untenable and therefore outmoded position. In setting up her
argument, Burstein makes the obligatory allusion to the epistemological problems
attendant on the will to go beyond the human, but she does not follow it up, settling,
rather, for an extrapolation of the notion of the unknown into a methodological
conceit connected to critical recognition, despite the fact that she has already touched
upon the possibility of modernism beginning with Kant – a possibility (and this is
perhaps the point) that she deems ‘heartbreaking to someone trained in the early
1 Jessica Burstein, Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (Pennsylvania:
Pennsylvania State Press, 2012), 2.
2 Ibid., pp. 2-3.
twentieth century’.3 Burstein doesn’t return to Kant, and neither does she return to
Beckett, which is more surprising seeing that she has already inscribed him among
‘those [modernists] who strike me as cold’. 4
In the spirit of resituating Beckett, I’d like to take up Burstein’s notion of
modernism as a site of artistic engagement with the outside of human experience
along with its two phantoms – Beckett and Kant – in order to expose it more
explicitly to the fraught philosophical territory that Cold Modernism wisely evades.
And in doing so, I’d like to proffer a reading of Beckett’s Worstward Ho that suggests
a way of reconciling an understanding of modernity in terms of its realist prohibitions
with the aesthetic of the best worse.
So here is the heartbreaking premise: modernity begins with Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason in which he bequeaths to the modern age the irrevocable burden of
human finitude, a burden which comprises – thanks to Kant’s innovation of a priori
synthetic judgement – a representational problem and an epistemological prohibition
operating at the transcendental level of experience. Following the Critique’s model of
consciousness, when an object is perceived, its raw sensory material - what Kant
referred to as ‘the sensible manifold’ - is processed in the mind via the pure forms of
intuition: space and time. These forms are universal to human consciousness and
inhere within the mind rather than in objects themselves. In order for anything to enter
into human experience it must pass through these forms, which imbue it with an
exchange value, yielding it up to the synthetic function of the categories of judgment
that complete the process of exchange, inscribing the object in phenomena. It follows
that the sensible manifold is absent of any sort of spatiotemporal configuration before
arriving in consciousness. Rather, it is form-less. Thus, we can never know the reality
of things-in-themselves because their appearance is always mediated by our
perception of them: the in-itself is always already a for-us. This is our representational
problem, and one that will only intensify over the two centuries separating Kant and
3 Ibid., 18.
4 Ibid., 28.
Beckett, begetting a myriad of anti-realist positions that reach their apogee in the late
twentieth century proclamation of ‘the end of metaphysics’.5
Because this model of judgement locates the conditions for the appearance of
objects in the human mind itself it limits knowledge claims to the realm of the for-us,
effectively outlawing any knowledge of objects that do not manifest empirically. Thus
the representational problem bleeds into an epistemological one, leaving us with two
economies: the restricted economy of the phenomenal – a controlled appropriation of
the outside that fuels the human system of representation; and the general economy of
the noumenal – an anarchic alterity always operating in excess of the phenomenal,
formless, irrecuperable and unknowable. If one consents to give Kant this Bataillean
twist, the former reads as a veil that enervates the latter, distorting it through a process
of purification.
The full significance of these prohibitions becomes acute when applied to the
apprehension of the self. Kant’s theory turns around the pin of the transcendental
deduction, in which he argues backwards from the unity of experience to its
grounding in the unifying persistence of an ‘I’ which must be ‘capable of
accompanying all representations, and which is one and the same in all
consciousness’.6 For, if there were no persisting, logically identical, transcendental
unity accompanying the chaos of the sensible manifold and projecting the formal
qualities of space and time onto it, objects would not appear as consistently as they do
and experience would simply be incoherent.7 This ‘I’ or ‘transcendental unity of
apperception’ in Kant’s parlance, acts as guarantor for the unity of thought in
representation. The transcendental ‘I’ is at once the foundation of all possible
knowledge and the enigmatic origin of all experience. Although it is the ground of the
Kantian system, no keener explanation can be given, for it occupies the blind spot of
5 For successive reactions to it increasingly narrow the field of meaningful inscription
within human experience: idealism, phenomenology, post-structuralism’s focus on the text.
6 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Marcus Weigelt (trans. & ed.), (London:
Penguin, 2007), 125 (B132).
7 ‘It is only because I am able to comprehend the manifold of representations in one
consciousness,’ writes Kant, ‘that I call them one and all my representations. For otherwise I
should have as many-coloured and varied a self as I have representations of which I am
conscious.’ Ibid., 127 (B134).
the phenomenal world; and it is from its simple facticity that the entirety of Kant’s
system springs forth. Kant writes in the Critique:
‘Through this I, or he, or it (the thing), which thinks, nothing is
represented beyond a transcendental subject of thoughts = x. This
subject is known only through the thoughts that are its predicates,
and apart from them we can never have the slightest concept of it;
therefore we revolve around it in a perpetual circle, since before we
can form any judgement about it we must already use its
representation.’8
In this way, the moderns are the progeny of a schizophrenic cogito, condemned to
perpetual autopœisis, as if watching themselves endlessly on film.
This reading of modernity in which the epistemological prohibition of Kantian
critique is understood as its founding anxiety is recurrent in what has come to be
known in recent years as speculative realism. The most potent formulation of this
problematic appears in the work of Quentin Meillassoux whose 2006 treatise, After
Finitude, endows the malaise with a conceptual identity for the first time. Kant’s
legacy, he writes, is ‘correlationism’: ‘the idea according to which we only ever have
access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term
considered apart from the other’.9
Borrowing from colleague Francis Wolff,
Meillassoux paints the following image of post-Kantian anti-realism:
‘Everything is inside because in order to think anything whatsoever
it is necessary to be able to be conscious of it, it is necessary to say
it, and so we are locked up in language or in consciousness without
being able to get out… We are in consciousness or language as in a
transparent cage. Everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get
out.’10
The outside is implicated in the inside through the relocation of the forms in
the human mind, and yet, this simultaneously begets a vicious dualism between the
8 Ibid., 319 (A346; B405).
9 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (London: Continuum, 2008), 5.
10 Francis Wolff, Dire le monde, quoted in Ibid., 6
Outside-in-itself, or le grand dehors (to use Meillassoux’s term) and its inscription in
human thought. Meillassoux is explicit about relating correlationism to modernity,
calling it ‘the ontological requisite of the moderns’ whose being is marked by the
ubiquity of the ‘modern codicil’ of the ‘for us’ by means of which knowledge of
everything that can possibly be posited, by science or otherwise, as lying beyond the
boundary of human experience is relocated safely back within its borders simply
because this knowledge has to arise through human perception, thanks to the Kantian
prohibition.11 Realism’s central problem, then, is finding the point at which the inside
gives onto the outside and in lieu of this, it is dogged by the epistemological paradox
imparted to it by the limits of representation.
So, what does Beckett, a writer whose work is animated by a desire to get
beyond representation, have to do with a reading of modernity that begins with Kant?
In a letter to Alan Scheider in 1982, when he was working on Worstward Ho, Beckett
described the work in progress as ‘impossible prose’.12 Worstward Ho is a text about
two things: knowing and saying. It describes a consciousness representing itself
representing others. And this consciousness wonders about the part of itself that it
cannot perceive, just as the ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ – the post-Kantian
subject – wonders about, but can never access, the noumenal thing that is thinking it.
Is it possible, then, to read Worstward Ho as the staging of a failed attempt to engage
the real? Failed - necessarily, since it is an attempt registered in literature, and not in
consciousness where – and Meillassoux is perhaps the proof – this engagement might
at least be possible. Language can never touch the real. Because art exists as a
subsidiary of human experience, the idea of a realist aesthetics is self-negating, for the
realist programme is immediately betrayed as soon as it is relegated to a
representational system that does not exceed human experience.
Beckett returns time and time again to this problem notably in his writings on
art, particularly in relation to the work of the van Velde brothers – and in his comic
dialogues with Duthuit, where the two often come to blows because the latter is prone
11 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (London: Continuum, 2008), 28.
12 Maurice Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel
Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998), 421.
to confusing artistic representation with representation at the transcendental level.13
As Beckett repeatedly attempts to point out to his interlocutor, representing the
dissolution of the conventions of human representation and calling it dissolution-initself is supremely naïve. What I want to suggest is that, rather than (naively)
attempting to resolve this paradox through an art-form, Beckett inhabits it and thus
makes it acute on both the representational and the transcendental level – repeating
them within the text itself – so that not only do you have an analogon (and I am
borrowing this term from Meillassoux who uses the idea of a ‘phenomenal analogon’
to talk about the ways in which art can instantiate the real14 ) – so, not only do you
have an analogon of the representational prohibition of the transcendental level at the
level of artistic representation, but you have an analogon of the analogon unfurling
inside the representational space of the text as the represented-consciousness
represents itself representing others in the ultimate mise-en-abyme. All four thresholds
share the problem of the veil, and ‘the things (or the Nothingness) behind it’ (as
Beckett wrote to Axel Kaun in 1937).15 The outer threshold of course marking the line
between the for-us and the in-itself, which can only be traversed at the point of nohow
13 For example, when Duthuit says of Masson: ‘He aspires to be rid of the servitude
of space, that his eye may “frolic among the focusless fields, tumultuous with incessant
creation”. At the same time he demands the rehabilitation of the “vaporous”… You of course
will reply that it is the same thing as before, the same reaching towards succour from without.
Opaque or transparent the object remains sovereign. But how can Masson be expected to
paint the void?’ And Beckett replies ‘He is not. What is the good of passing from one
untenable position to another?’ Duthuit here elides the dissolution of traditional optics and
perspective with a dissolution of perception itself. Beckett sees all this at the transcendental
level, as the conditions for the representation of perspective’s dissolution, rather than the
dissolution itself, hence his ropeability. He apologises, not without irony, to Duthuit for
‘relapsing into [his] dream of an art unresentful of its insuperable indigence’ and when
Duthuit insists on resuming his discussion of Masson’s assault on ‘the traps of western
perspective’ Beckett famously ‘(Exits weeping)’. Samuel Beckett, ‘Three Dialogues’,
Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (London : Calder 1983),
140-142.
Meanwhile, Bram van Velde recounts a comment made to him by his admirer and supporter,
Beckett, when the two were together in his studio. Van Velde remarks that finally, he is happy
with his work, to which Beckett replied with complete sincerity ‘I don’t see why you would
be’.
14 Quentin Meillassoux, Robin Mackay & Florian Hecker, ‘Metaphysics and Extro-
Science Fiction’ in Speculative Solution (Editions Mego eMEGO-118, 2011).
15 Beckett, German Letter of 1937, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic
Fragment (London : Calder 1983), 171.
on – if we are to take the analogon seriously – a singularity at which representation
ceases.
So, I want to pay particular attention to the ‘head sunk on crippled hands with
clenched staring eyes clamped to all’ and also to the ‘dim’. This latter stands out by
virtue of being the one thing in Worstward Ho that has Being without being said:
‘Whence the dim. Not now. Know better now. Unknow better now.
Know only no out of. No knowing how no-only-no-out-of. […]
Beyondless. Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless
thitherless there.’16
‘The dim. Far and wide the same. High and low. Unchanging. Say
now unchanging. Whence no knowing. No saying. (96)
‘Dim whence unknown. At all costs unknown. Unchanging […] Old
dim. When ever what else?’ (101)
The dim is unchanging, ever-present and has no origin. Its instantiation is one
of simple facticity. We don’t know how it came about – the voice even tells a great
Kantian joke about this: ‘Say ground. No ground but say ground’ (90) – we only
know that there is no way out of it, and that when the dim goes, it goes for good and
everything goes with it. ‘All cannot go. Till dim go’. (102) It precedes and contains
the void, the figures, the foreskull, the saying and knowing. The dim is the analogon
of representation of the first degree: consciousness. And specifically, a veil-like
consciousness that distorts – or dims – the real. In fact, as Anthony Uhlmann has
pointed out, early drafts of Worstward Ho testify to Beckett’s original use of ‘veiled’
for ‘dim’ and ‘unveiled’ for ‘undimmed’ in certain passages.17
Now, the ‘head sunk on crippled hands, which is worsened to a ‘sunken skull
and stare’ followed by a ‘foreskull’ only, with ‘one dim black hole… agape on all.
Inletting all. Outletting all’ at its apex has an integral connection to the dim that the
other figures do not – which leads me to suggest that it is this figure that is projected
as a representation of the dim’s unknowable self, and that it is represented in turn
Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho in Nohow On (New York: Grove Press, 1980), 92.
All following references appear in-text.
!
16
17 Anthony Uhlmann, ‘Worstward Ho, Parmenides, Badiou and the Limit’, 91. Citing
Adriaan van der Weel and Ruud Hisgen, The Silencing of the Sphinx, Leiden: Private edition.
representing the old woman kneeling, the plodding twain, and itself again as other,
hence its simultaneous appearance at different scales – ‘There in the sunken head the
sunken head’ – and the frequent images of ‘Clenched eyes clamped to clenched
staring eyes’ (100):
‘There in the sunken head the sunken head. The hands the eyes.
Shade with the other shades. In the same dim. The same narrow
void. Before the staring eyes. Where it too if not there too?’ (97)
‘First on back to three. Not yet to try worsen. Simply be there again.
There in that head in that head. Be it again. The head in that head.
Clenched eyes clamped to it alone. Alone? No. Too. To it too. The
sunken skull. The crippled hands. Clenched staring eyes. Clenched
eyes clamped to clenched staring eyes. Be that shade again. In that
shade again. With the other shades. Worsening shades. In the dim
void.’ (99-100)
Unlike the one, the twain, and the void – which can all go and return – the
‘head sunk on crippled hands’ can only go for good – with the dim, at the point of
nohow on:
‘The head. Ask not if it can go. Say no. Unasking no. It cannot go.
Save dim go. Then all go. Oh dim go. Go for good. All for good.
Good and all.’ (98)
‘One can go not for good. Two too. Three no if not for good. With
dim gone for good. […] Dim can worsen. Somehow worsen. Go no.
If not for good.’ (103)
Beckett offers a summary of this representational hierarchy at the text’s very end:
‘Three pins. One pinhole. In the dimmost dim.’ (116)
In an important passage reminiscent of the one quoted earlier from the first
Critique, Worstward Ho’s narrating voice wonders about the words it speaks:
‘Whose words? Ask in vain. Or not in vain if say no knowing. No
saying. No words for him whose words. Him? One. No words for one
whose words. One? It. No words for it whose words. Better worse
so.’ (98)
‘Through this I, or he, or it (the thing), which thinks, nothing is
represented beyond a transcendental subject of thoughts = x. This
subject is known only through the thoughts that are its predicates,
and apart from them we can never have the slightest concept of it;
therefore we revolve around it in a perpetual circle, since before we
can form any judgement about it we must already use its
representation.’18
The self is ‘said’ but not known. The iteration of the verb ‘to say’ relentlessly
foregrounds the fact that these are representational and not ontological instantiations.
The further shift to ‘missaid’ and ‘so-said’ points up this epistemological void
alongside the text’s inherent incapacity as a representational medium when engaged in
the impossible task of representing the real. For the only valid strategy, the only
possible strategy, is to carry out a negation of what is.
Superficially, the aesthetic of the ‘best worse’ (like ‘clenched staring’ or ‘on
back’) is paradox-as-style, but it responds, on a profounder lever, to art’s subsistence
at one remove from the threshold of the real. Utterances such as – ‘The void. How try
say? How try fail? No try no fail’ – are indicative of an equivalence between ‘say’ and
‘fail’ – to represent the void is to fail to represent the void. As Beckett writes of the
crisis of the Paris School in ‘Peintres de l’Empêchement’:
‘[For] what remains of the representable if the essence of the object
is to evade representation? What remains is to represent the
conditions of this evasion.’19
What remains is the representation of representation’s incapacity – what Beckett calls
‘la peinture de l’acceptation/the painting of acknowledgement’ in the same essay.20
This acknowledgement or acceptance of art as a priori failure activates an inversion
of values: the worst representation, because it shows the conditions of evasion,
becomes an objective. It follows then, that the best worse is the best rendering of
18 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Marcus Weigelt (trans. & ed.), (London:
Penguin, 2007), 319 (A346; B405).
19 Samuel Beckett, ‘Peintres de l’Empechement’, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings
and a Dramatic Fragment (London: Calder 1983), 136.
20 Ibid.,137.
these conditions of evasion. If representation at the transcendental level is a veiling of
the real, then the imperative to missay instead of say, to ‘fail the head said seat of
all’ (97) equates to an elimination of this distortion. A dissolution of the veil that is
consciousness itself.
Indeed, the best worsening of the ‘so-said seat and germ of all’ occurs when its
‘clenched staring eyes’ are superseded by ‘one dim black hole mid-foreskull’ (114)
which recalls less an instrument of representation than its inversion: a pineal eye, an
organ that Bataille imagines ‘at the summit of the skull like a horrible erupting
volcano’; that Descartes believed united matter and spirit, and that is certainly no
stranger to Beckett’s prose.21 The pineal eye, for Bataille, figures as the blind spot of
knowledge in a way that is reminiscent of Kant’s X. He writes:
‘In the mind there is a blind spot that recalls the structure of the eye.
In the mind, as in the eye, it is difficult to detect. But, whereas the
eye’s blind spot is unimportant, the nature of the mind means the
blind spot will, in itself, make more sense than the mind itself […] It
is no longer the spot that vanishes into knowledge, but knowledge that
gets lost in the spot. Existence in this manner comes full circle… just
as it went from the unknown to the known, at the summit it has to turn
around and return to the unknown.’22
As a pun on know-how or savoir-faire, ‘nohow’ as destination posits a kind of
knowledge. A strange, particular knowledge, that exists beyond the limit it
simultaneously marks as nohow on – the limit beyond which things cannot go unless
they go for good. Nohow on marks the point at which absolute knowledge and le nonsavoir coincide, and indeed, a revelation is anticipated:
‘When nohow on. Then all seen as only then. Undimmed. All
undimmed that words dim. All so seen, unsaid.’ (112)
We are driven to this revelatory point by the unremitting compulsion to go ‘On
[…] Somehow on. Till nohow on’. (89) The ‘on’ denoting the work that language is
condemned to perform (in the Bataillean sense of ‘writing-on’) because it has to
21 Bataille, ‘The Jesuve’, Visions of Excess, p 74.
22 Bataille, Inner Experience, 141.
represent at a secondary level, the level of analogy, the level of failure; but as ‘nohow
on’ it also denotes the opposite of this, fixing a course for the thing-itself, activating
the death drive of art, the desire to exceed the point at which all secondary processes
cease, and if you say it backwards, it answers the question of who is speaking in
Worstward Ho: ‘no wo hon’. No one.
The point of nohow on indexes the material thing that thinks the
transcendental subject, returning mastery to matter over consciousness in the moment
where consciousness expires. It is thus the elimination of the final veil, the revelation
of the blind spot, the end of representation, death, and absolute knowledge in absolute
non-knowledge, because one has finally dispensed with the distortion that veils the
real and becomes real - in mindless materiality: the ‘mind mattering’, to hark back to
Burstein’s exposition. The inversion concurrent with the aesthetic of the best worse is
made epistemological and the paradox posed by realism is resolved.
Or is it? There are no ultimate resolutions in Beckett. Rather, the paradox has
the final word, for the voice issues a timely reminder that the threshold of
representation cannot be crossed in representation:
‘Said nohow on.’
Amy Ireland, Sydney, 2012.