Professor Adam Gearey review of my paper Slowness and Conventional Forms

Press/Media: Expert Comment

Description

Joao’s paper is an experiment in writing and thinking. I read it as a working through of a relationship between style and content- if we can accept this rather crude binary; or, to re-phrase this point- academic writing is conventionally an erasure of style in favour of content. We all know that this is not how writing or thinking takes place: even the most conventional piece of academic writing has a conventional commitment to a style that is meant to be transparent, limpid, and, like a good guest, does not draw attention to itself. Joao’s paper – on the other hand- announces itself. I cannot remember who was described as writing in the same way that she spoke, but, what I found so exciting about this paper was its voice: an announcement of a way of writing that was immediately engaged with its own way of thinking.

Perhaps it was the Ginsberg reference, but, for me at least there is something beat about this paper- I was toying with the idea of making the wild claim that Joao is writing a beat jurisprudence- and I might still make this claim- but- the voice I think I hear is that of Kerouac- the ‘hot eager talk’ of those high on Benzedrine, cheap wine, poetry and friendship. I think I might stick with some reference to Kerouac to deal with what I take to be one of the main themes of this work of poetic thinking: speed and slowness – but- before getting to this point I want to make a slightly different but related one that seems to me to have priority as a way of grasping—quickly- the quality of this writing.

The quality of this writing is itself fragmentation. Nietzsche said of his aphoristic style that he wrote for people in a hurry or people travelling- making a link between the speed up of modernity, and a kind of thinking appropriate for its dizzying onward motion; no doubt, and to pick up on another theme of Joao’s work, this is the movement from the countryside to the city- a movement through physical space and time- to Thomas Wolfe’s adage that you cannot go home again; or to Marx’s sense that the most interesting thing in the countryside was waiting for the post to arrive, or even Lou Reed’s point in Songs to Drella: the best thing about growing up in a small town is that you hate it and wanna leave.

Before leaving this point to one side, I think that there is a lovely contrast in this paper between the silence and stationary nature of Heidegger’s writing, done by hand in his cabin in Todnau and the forward motion of Nietzsche’s aphorisms          (is Heidegger an un-aphoristic writer?). But both were great walkers, and I am struck by the story of Martin setting off in the snow for his writing cabin leaving Mrs Heidegger behind in Freiburg to look after the kids. But there are other writers, and spaces and times in which writing takes place: Ginsberg’s scribbling in motion, Pessoa’s relationship with poetry, book keeping and commercial correspondence, and Butor’s Jacques Ravel trapped in the labyrinth of Manchester and the his concern to write his way out.

One feature of writing aphoristically, or in terms of fragments, or a logic of fragments- which I take to be Joao’s compositional logic, is that of compression and linkage. For the fragments not to speed away from each other there needs to be some centrifugal energy; or, rather a kind of dance or arrangement of attraction and repulsion, a choregraphing of coherence and digression. This thought would, of course, take us to the nature of the fragments that are put in a field of tensions by this paper: Benjamin, Ginsberg, Marcuse, Rimbaud, Heidegger and Williams. If nothing else, putting fragments by these writers in touch with each other is a justification of this paper in itself, given the range of reference, the different traditions, and, indeed, the different kinds of writing which are pushed together like quarks in a collider.

And what energies are produced: themes orbiting other themes. In the interests of compression, and to build the point about attraction and linkage  – I would say that my reading of this paper found a real modernist sense of ‘making it new’- of inheritances from the past that have to be settled – lineages of ideas where thinking is always re-thinking. It may even be that there is something of the collage or the cut up to this essay- themes or shapes come into focus, are engaged with and juxtaposed – and  jagged edges remain.

To put this a little differently, and to go back to Kerouac and beat writing – perhaps the problem of kerouac’s style is similar to that of Jaoa’s- how to say everything- to tell the story of the self and American, to capture the energy, the flow of fragmentary perceptions, and to slow it down; to achive a kind of meditative stillness, to leave the meat wheel of conception to its mad rotations.

I read some paragraphs as notes to the future, promises of work to come- if there is time- if there is time to think through something like a revolutionary problematic; a problematic of, I think it could be said, the fragments relationship to some kind of totality; where the latter is hard to imagine for historical, intellectual and practical reasons; and a dialectical problematic- or even a stalled dialectic- change at whatever level seems frozen out.

There is a hint of a strategy, and I am thinking here about the concluding line of the essay (with all the suspicion we should have of beginnings and ends that are not dynamically undoing and re-doing each other): “a rhetorical dexterity is capable of creating authentic fantasies.” A nice tension – authentic fantasies (plural)- which, and if I am right about the final sequence of the argument, which is about seizing the time, of a kind of thought or writing that can become authentic by seizing itself, which is not perhaps a fantasy of completion or completeness, of the realisation of the truth or truths of a tradition or traditions, but, what happens when one seeks to make ideas productive again: to address ‘deadness’, lost time or stolen time, which would of course take us to an analysis of surplus value and the working day, and what counts as work. We might even say what counts for writing to work.

For writing to work, thought must make its own time- which is not an accelerated time, or the accelerated machine time of capitalist modernity, but a time of writing making time for ideas; and ideas, writing. This is I think that central thesis and tension of the paper and how – through the cunning of writing- Joao- or the writing that speaks in his name, pulls off a coup: the fragments are themselves subjected to a de-acceleration: the logic of the paper, which I take to be anti-accelerationist-asserts its own slow time- forces the fragments and the compression to open to their other: to connection and expansion- the forcing, as it were, of a space or even a rhythm (and is rhythm not a relationship between movement and interruption, beat and silence. It there is a beat jurisprudence here it is a slow dance to fast music.

But why a jurisprudence? There is clearly a section in the paper that engages with the law via Pufendorf, Pound and Kantorowicz as a system of social control- and- a system of social control adapted to market capitalism. But the slow dance of thought is also a sitting with the self – a questioning of the self. I think that this is the sense of the final section which engages with Williams: the problem of how to assume a narrative of the self; an authentic fantasy. My concluding point is that this question actually opens jurisprudence: it is the command of the Delphic oracle encrypted into the first chapter of the foundational text of contemporary Anglophone legal philosophy: Hobbes Leviathan: the command read thyself. Perhaps this essay suggests that this reading, and there is no reading that is not writing, will take us a lot longer than we might otherwise imagine. And that this is a good thing. A moral imperative.

Period22 Nov 2024

Media contributions

1

Media contributions

  • TitleProf. Gearey's comment on my paper
    Degree of recognitionInternational
    Media name/outletJoao's paper
    Media typePrint
    Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
    Date22/11/24
    Producer/AuthorAdam Gearey
    PersonsJoão Freitas Mendes

Workshop

TitleSlowness and Conventional Forms - IPS Belgium
LocationVUB
Period22 Nov 2024