My dying breath is a magician.
This sits, written in chalk dust, on the board, bored bored bored board. Metaphor, all three elements from Aristotle, those elements it’s not supposed to have (supposedly), the tradition that’s opposed (opposedly) by Lakoff and Derrida, with metaphor as domain translations or catechresis as metaphoric literality.
The moment that is unexplainable is the new. The poetic metaphor. That which is ruled out of court or which doesn’t fit into the domain maps of Lakof (is it one F or two?) and Johnson, that which doesn’t accept itself as catechresis, which isn’t reducible to simply a concept. He focuses on one moment. For some of the terms of the proportion there is at times no word in existence; still the metaphor may be used. Each time the word that seems to be used is a good metaphor and allows someone to see something.
I never know what to make of this. I remember a long time ago a science fiction story about a community of blind people, about the way in which they adapt their social environment to become a touchable space and interlacing bodies, about – I think – someone on the run who takes refuge in this community, about the strange eroticism of the body in a space where the blind revel in exploring the positivity of the touch that is dominant without ever falling foul of a notion of lack (there is never any lack).
To talk of seeing things is just too facile. So they use the greek don’t they – theorein – to see. Theoria, theoros, the spectator, theoreo, to look at. Supposedly. The greek root seems to be thea. My dictionary cites it as ‘a seeing, looking at’ as well as, in the listing before that which mentions sight – with a minor change of accent – goddess. But they wouldn’t deign to speak of the goddess.
The story, the anecdote (good philosophy always needs a good anecdote), is about a lecturer on Hegel, Professor Harris, this is Paul’s anecdote not mine, a lecturer on Hegel who is tedious, boring, Hegelian (all Hegelian’s are fools) and who is being listened to by Paul and his colleague and Paul turns to his colleague and says ‘Harris is Quixote’ but not the Quixote of the first book alone but also of the second where the Quixote of the first book victimises the Quixote of the second who is the real Quixote of the fictional Quixote that Cervantes invents who now reveals Harris as tilting at Hegelian windmills. ‘Harris is Quixote’ is said with some humour but Harris is then lost, like the Quixote of the second book, under the weight of the metaphor, the new vision.
I see him anew. This is the only form of new metaphor. I see it anew.
I sit and stare at this chalk dust line. The magician brings about a magical event. The magician transforms things.
Like a dying breath.
My explanation is death.
The metaphor can be paraphrased but the poem cannot.
"Metaphor is the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion. Thus from genus to species, as: ‘There lies my ship’; for lying at anchor is a species of lying. From species to genus, as: ‘Verily ten thousand noble deeds hath Odysseus wrought’; for ten thousand is a species of large number, and is here used for a large number generally. From species to species, as: ‘With blade of bronze drew away the life,’ and ‘Cleft the water with the vessel of unyielding bronze.’ Here arusai, ‘to draw away’ is used for tamein, ‘to cleave,’ and tamein, again for arusai- each being a species of taking away. Analogy or proportion is when the second term is to the first as the fourth to the third. We may then use the fourth for the second, or the second for the fourth. Sometimes too we qualify the metaphor by adding the term to which the proper word is relative. Thus the cup is to Dionysus as the shield to Ares. The cup may, therefore, be called ‘the shield of Dionysus,’ and the shield ‘the cup of Ares.’ Or, again, as old age is to life, so is evening to day. Evening may therefore be called, ‘the old age of the day,’ and old age, ‘the evening of life,’ or, in the phrase of Empedocles, ‘life’s setting sun.’ For some of the terms of the proportion there is at times no word in existence; still the metaphor may be used. For instance, to scatter seed is called sowing: but the action of the sun in scattering his rays is nameless. Still this process bears to the sun the same relation as sowing to the seed. Hence the expression of the poet ‘sowing the god-created light.’ There is another way in which this kind of metaphor may be employed. We may apply an alien term, and then deny of that term one of its proper attributes; as if we were to call the shield, not ‘the cup of Ares,’ but ‘the wineless cup’." (Aristotle, Poetics, XXI)
The space of blogging is a particular instance of the space of writing and the space of philosophical blogging is itself a particular instance of the space of writing that intersects with a more general ‘space of reasons’. This last is the name given by Wilfrid Sellars to the particular realm of justificatory discourse, although it is sometimes taken to refer more broadly to the realm of any discourse whatsoever. For Sellars, ‘to know something’ is not a general fact which can be empirically tested somehow by checking a mental or neurological state of the entity claiming to know, it is rather to to identify an object that operates inside a particular ‘game of giving and asking for reasons’. This implies that if we characterise something as a knowledge claim then we are entitled to ask for reasons for the claim – how and why do you know this? That we’re entitled to ask for reasons doesn’t imply that we have to. We may well – and commonly do – accept a large number of claims that we take to be knowledge claims on the basis of a kind of trust, a default acceptance that operates until we are prompted to challenge the claim.
Some people want to extend the space of reasons to be co-extensive with the space of discourse itself. This is the move made in Kukla and Lance’s book, ‘ “Yo!” and “Lo!”: the pragmatic topography of the space of reasons’ (Harvard, 2009). Robert Brandom defines the space of reasons as a space of ‘inferential relations’, in which each participant occupies a slightly different perspective because of their variable observational position but is able nonetheless to engage with others, governed by ‘deontological score-keeping’. Both of these develop Sellars initial idea in interesting directions but the point of the original distinction was to distinguish a space of reasons from a space of causality, thereby enabling a kind of double-articulation theory which prevented radical reductionism. No longer would it be necessary or possible to reduce propositional, conceptual or intentional objects to physical, empirical or material objects. The space of reasons aimed to guarantee an autonomy to propositional, conceptual or intentional objects. These objects would be found in the form of claims of one sort of another.
If the space of discourse is co-extensive with the space of reasons then any mode of discourse is open to a call for justification. The nature of the justification, however, would still depend largely on the nature of the object. If the object is a knowledge claim then it calls for reasons but there is an ambiguity here. Some objects of discourse might be thought of as expressions of knowledge, others as expressions of an absence of knowledge. The latter would, it seems, no longer be subject to the call for justificatory reasons. If the expression ‘I don’t understand’ were responded to with the question, ‘well why not?’ then the ‘justification’ is likely to be entirely circular – ‘because I don’t’. Pedagogically these type of cases call for careful negotiation – a good teacher who is faced with a pupil who simply says ‘I don’t understand’ has a duty, owing to the social role they’re engaged in, to try and work out why there is an absence of understanding. Usually this might involve taking the pupil back to a position they’re happy with and feel they do understand and then slowly working forward again to find the gap or breach in the discursive network. Nothing, however, guarantees that this strategy is capable of success. In principle some things are simply not available to be understood by some understanders. To think otherwise would be to suggest that a complete coincidence of position can occur between two perspectives, which would be absurd since this would render the very ‘perspectival’ nature that prompts dialogue to be non-existent. Put another way, there is only a need to ask for reasons if there is a condition of difference between the claimant and the respondent and a ‘pure co-understanding’ by a respondent of the claimant would render communication and discourse no longer necessary.
The space of blogging offers a curious example of this necessary failure of pure understanding which renders philosophical activity almost redundant if such activity is taken to involve the production of agreement, a kind of commonality akin to pure co-understanding. Occasionally philosophical bloggers produce arguments that are ‘stand-alone’ objects but more commonly they produce arguments in the more mundane sense of a disagreement. Here, in the disagreeable blog, the argument is a series of claims, with justifications, as to why X is wrong, bad, weak, incorrect or somehow or other in error, with a general view to reduce the value of the opponent in what presents itself as a zero-sum game, a trial of strength. There are occasionally ‘argument objects’ produced but these respond not to any specific opponent but rather to the demands of reason more generally. It is more common to find these argument objects within philosophical books, not least because of the mitigation of ‘call-response’ dynamics that are the condition of the space of blogging. It is, perhaps, for this reason that in general philosophical discussion in blogs is weak, limited and riven by a kind of personal politics that is amusing to watch but perhaps exhausting and unproductive to participate in. Philosophy and in particular the production of argument objects benefits less from discussion than might originally be thought. Perhaps this is why Deleuze seems to touch on something important when he decries the value of arguments in general – it is not that he doesn’t want to argue with you, rather that he wants to respond more directly to the demands of reason.
The blog here has been a little quiet as I’ve become more and more immersed in my research. I took a years unpaid sabbatical from the University of Greenwich where I work as a part-time philosophy lecturer in order to work on a book tentatively titled ‘Necessary Matter’. Things are progressing with that project and hopefully there will be some concrete output fairly soon from this long process of immersion in texts and thoughts. In the course of the research, which initially began from a curious encounter between my interests in Leibniz, Deleuze and Brandom, I have engaged more and more with the interest in objects that has arisen over the last few years. The work of Harman and Bryant, coming out of the speculative realist current and drawing on Bruno Latour, strikes me as interesting if unsatisyfing. This, I find, is often the most productive type of encounter. The uninteresting simply passes by, whereas the satisfying offers a kind of succour that might be ill-advised but is often rapidly consumed. Satisfaction leads to passivity, not usually a good thing in terms of thought, although no doubt it is necessary at times.
One of the things I find most unsatisfying about the object-orientated philosophy is a kind of amorphous objecticity. I’m never entirely certain quite what is not an object, for example, or what differences there are amongst objects, if indeed there are any at all. ‘Latour’s litanies‘, as Harman calls them (following Ian Bogost), are a particular example of a curiously unsatisfying encounter with objects, reminding me a little of poetry but less of anything I can think with or through. It is therefore interesting to find Levi Bryant engaging explicitly with exactly what sort of objects there are, a taxonomy produced through developing a mereology (an account of the part/whole relation). He has produced an interesting presentation using Prezi which I’ve embedded below. I make no comments on this at the moment, that can come later.
Being Is Flat: The Strange Mereology of Object-Oriented Ontology on Prezi
A new speculative realist journal is about to begin and has issued a cfp, details over here. The new journal seems to be only an online journal, although I’m not entirely sure about that. No details of a print version are mentioned. Unfortunately it’s not very imaginatively titled, simply called ‘Speculations’, although I suppose this is kind of a ‘it does exactly what it says on the tin‘ name.
The new speccy movement has a large number of virtues no doubt, although I’ve never been that comfortable with the whole ‘branding’ attitude. Mark Fisher reports Graham Harman talking about branding in a positive light, claiming that it is a ‘universally recognised method of of conveying information while cutting through information clutter‘. The claim is, as seems quite common, both provocative, far-reaching and seemingly ‘against the orthodoxy’, although I’m afraid I don’t quite buy it. Easily able to be hidden inside the ‘conveying information’ phrase is a major assumption, namely that information is neutral. This would then miss the point of those who might criticise branding as a problematic device, something that is deployed to manipulate information flows rather than merely convey. It connects, however, with something I read Harman saying on another website, which is that he specifically envisages the creation of a philosophical movement as a project. There is something intensely interesting here in the way the speccies, with the force of Harman at their centre, create a series of alliances, devices and connections. Just as in the case of the pasteurisation of France, a kind of alliance of associations is underway, with the explicit ‘naming’ (branding) of the movement as a form of ‘fulcrum point’. Harman has, no doubt, learnt the lessons of Latour. Under this assumption I take it that the point of speculative realism is to create an asymetrical moment, to win a battle and shift the terrain of forces.
Obviously this idea of asymmetry, a form of ‘breaking history in two’, has some resonance with Nietzschean attitudes to forces, though there is something uniquely ‘human’ in the way the speccies are going about the job. Rather than the thinker engaging in time, valiantly trying to carry out the heroic task of untimeliness (some latent transcendent existentialism no doubt), the speccies offer up a movement. Now sometimes this is not quite so obvious. I get the sense that speculative realists are often taken to be offering a new argument. For example, Steven Shaviro comments that ’what’s so energizing about Harman’s “object-oriented philosophy,” or about “speculative realism” more generally, is that it refuses to subordinate its arguments about the nature of the world (or about anything, really) to (second-order) arguments about how we can know whether such (first-order) arguments are correct.’ Now, of course, there are always new arguments and all of the speccies, in one form or another, bring forward new arguments. The ‘new’ here is not yet the New (whatever that would be, if indeed it is at all). The idea, for example, that philosophy should make first-order arguments about the world is not that uncommon. The point, presumably, is that it’s uncommon in our current philosophical conjuncture. It is not so much, I feel, the arguments that are crucial (not that they’re unimportant by any means) since they seem to be unable to be discussed without being located within the movement that is speculative realism.
The slight problem I have, however, is that this notion of a movement that attempts to re-invigorate philosophical first-order arguments under the banner of ‘speculative philosophy’ seems aimed specifically at philosophy. The content, of course, still comes forward as first order arguments, but the structure or dynamic of the movement looks on this account to be second-order (a kind of ‘metaphilosophical’ movement). That may or may not be a positive thing, I’m not sure, although I’m certainly uncertain. What is clear, however, is that a new fashion is on the rise and at the centre of it is a brand name rather than a ‘proper name’. Despite any misgivings – and a terribly old-fashioned dislike of fashions on my part – it will be interesting to see how this movement continues to develop and what possibilities for thought it opens up.
Speculations journal details over here
Philosophers no longer talk about God and if they do nobody listens. At the time of Leibniz and the Enlightenment the reverse was the case – philosophers always talked about God and if they didn’t then nobody listened. This, no doubt, was a hangover from the impregnation of Christianity that occurred in the middle ages, during which time the bastard child of philosophy and Christian apologetics is produced, what Heidegger would later call ‘onto-theology’. Being (the ontos) is spoken of within the framework of God. This is the butchery of philosophy by Augustine and Aquinas, the butchery of pagan thought by monotheistic madness. A language and framework that is in effect absent from the initial movements of Socrates and Plato comes to dominate any attempt to think. To think without God becomes, by the time of the Leibniz, almost impossible. At the same time, to think with God also becomes almost impossible. Thought is threatened by God since metaphysical abstractions now implicate God. The situation is analogous to artists under Stalin’s regime. To speak is to speak of God – or Stalin – and so to speak is to invoke danger and attention, not always a good idea.
At the heart of Leibniz is a peculiar pairing of two seemingly opposed ideas that produces a problem. On the one hand there is the idea that the world – Being – must have a necessity to the way it is. On the other hand there is the idea that God – the supreme Being – must be free and ultimately unconstrained by anything, including any necessities of mere matter. We can encounter this problem in the following way. Let us assume that God exists and has created the world, indeed all of Being. Let us also assume, following Leibniz for a while, that the world which exists is ‘the best possible world’. Now Leibniz wants to argue that the world is the best possible world because it must be the best possible world – it is not the best by accident but because only the best possible world could exist. Thus, if God created the world and it is the best possible world is it the best possible world because God created it or did God create it because it is the best possible world.
The problem is right here – was God forced by ‘some sort of necessity’ to create the world as it is because it is the best possible world that there could be? Did God have no choice over how the world is – or even that the world is? If this is the case, then God is powerless in the face of this necessity – nothing more than an empty origin.
The situation gets worse, however, if we try and say that the world is the best possible world because God created it. If God is free to create any world and the world that is created is the best possible world then we can ask why is this world better than any other? It must be because God chose between more than one option the best – but for it to be the best there must be some reason that can be given, it must be more than a more whim of God. God, then, becomes again subject to the reason behind the choice of one world over another and couldn’t have acted freely if he acted rationally since he would have had no choice. Alternatively the world is a mere whim and in that case it cannot be said to be in any real sense the best. Either the world has a necessity – in which case God is subject to that necessity – or it is a mere whim, in which case it might very well have been different, indeed it might still now be very different from the way we experience it. If the world is a whim of God we are left with the same problem of the Caliph’s vision1.
It’s not just Leibniz who works with this difficulty. In Descartes too we find the problem of why and how God relates to Being. If God is given complete freedom then what’s to stop him from having a huge joke at our expense? What prevents God from making the false seem true and the true seem false, from making the appearance radically different from the reality? If we respond, because God is good, then surely if God is good he would have created the best of all possible worlds and then we are back to the lack of freedom on the part of God. God is free and the world is possibly a joke or the world is necessarily the way it must be – the best – and thus God is no more and no less free in his creativity than the mathematician is in the production of a solution to a given problem.
1 Nicholas Rescher, following Bertrand Russell, poses the problem as a formal dilemma and as follows – ‘According to the Principle of Perfection [what I have been referring to here as 'the best of all possible worlds] God acts in the most perfect way possible with regard to the creation of the world, and he does so either necessarily or freely. If he does so necessarily his freedom is destroyed, and all that follows as a result of his perfection – i.e., everything that happens in the world – is necessary. If he does so freely, in accord with Leibniz’s principle, a sufficient reason must be adduced for this free act, and this in turn must be either free or necessitated. Thus an infinite regress is initiated.’ (Rescher, 1967: 43-44) Rescher’s formulation of the formal problem (that of an infinite regress) avoids the problem of the powers or forces at play in the inter-relation between the concepts of God and Necessity.
In the instant of diamond time duration incarnates and shatters itself. Many types of duration must exist, this seems to be true almost ‘by definition’. Duration is, after all, a multiplicity. Yet the time that fascinates, that holds attention and throws itself upon us, captures and eludes us, is predominantly the moments of diamond time, daimon time. We uncover these moments not through attention – our attention is always held by this time, this daimon diamond time – but through thought. We are forced to think, in the most perfect example of the forcing of thought, by this encounter with diamond time.
The eternal return is perhaps the most celebrated thought of the diamond time. The difficulty is often in extracting any sense of the eternal return from the peculiar and slight traces it left, not least in the peculiar way in which the eternal return is brought back to the moment, to the instant logical game of that which is both there and not there, here and not here. There is no instant of the eternal return since it shatters the moment and explodes the instant, taking us directly into the daimon of time, diamond time.
Time is not a passing, a going or an arriving. Time comes. When it has come it never goes. Almost no human being exists who has not yet had time come to them but there will be some, just as there will some plants, some rocks, some stars for whom time has not yet come – although it will. Aion sits softly on the lap of all and none may avoid the diamond time, no matter may avoid the daimon of time. Aion holds all in time and captures all, in time.
The encounter, however, is that which thought struggles to arrive at. To encounter time is to become shattered by it, at least at its most potent, in its daimon diamond form. We live as time, of course, we project the horizon of temporality up to and into the moment of the possibility of our impossibility but this living of time, this ecstatic temporality, always lacks that which it dismisses as impossible presence. The transcendental condition of ecstatic temporality is diamond time.
No doubt it is difficult to extract thought from its almost inevitable subsumption of diamond time into the subject. Kierkegaard perhaps offers the most abject lesson in this loss. The eternal, encountered as truth, God, Christ and the choice loses Aion in the incarnation of the daimon. We seem to be told that it must be the idea, that which is conjured into existence ex nihilo from the pure power of the subject and yet in this case the instant absorbs time rather than embracing it. It sucks up into the present the eternal that simply couldn’t be here in a moment. Diamond time is instead that which none want to encounter, the explosive truth.
Robert Vallier reviews what looks like a fascinating book, Brett Buchanans’, Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. During the course of the review the following struck me:
The animal has an Umwelt, surrounding and enclosing it, much like a soap bubble. Each animal has its own Umwelt, and one soap bubble may enclose many others within it or be enclosed in other, larger bubbles. Unlike Leibniz’s monads, these bubbles have windows, or at least intersect and interact with each other in concrete ways. The Umwelt is not merely given, but rather produced by the animal through the functioning of its body, its sensory and instinctual apparatus, and the objects it encounters. Uexküll devotes years of his productive life to the study of the Umwelt, its formation, and how it constitutes a ground for understanding animal being. From this research, several astonishing examples emerge, most famously the behavior of the tick; but more than that, two major theoretical constructs also come to the fore. First, the plan of nature constitutes a kind of melody. An extensive musical metaphor or "theory of the music of life" runs throughout Uexküll’s work, and later becomes important to Merleau-Ponty later on. Buchanan neatly summarizes and translates the metaphors, but misses an opportunity to return to and evaluate another philosophical source for Uexküll, namely, Leibniz. The soap bubbles may not be monads, but they exist in a kind of pre-established harmony in the composition of nature. It is this harmonious composition that constitutes the plan of nature, or better, the plan is a kind of musical score. Deleuze later characterized Uexküll as a "Spinozist of affects." Given this, it seems that the background of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant would be a particularly fecund area to mine in order to understand better the rise of modern biology. Buchanan can’t be faulted for not developing this background, for to do so would have doubled the manuscript. While some mention of it could have been helpful, the absence of it stands as an invitation to his readers to engage in further research in this direction.
The reading group on The Fold progresses well, with a core of 6 people attending and a rhythm to the sessions as we work through various moments in each chapter before trying to establish something like a broader ‘shape’. Yesterday’s session focused on Chapter 5, ‘Incompossibility, Individuality, Liberty’, where the text moves onto a different terrain from the ‘ontological’ pure and simple. The famous example of ‘Adam the sinner’ and the world in which he sins being the best possible world is what the chapter opens with and the dynamic is to work from the concept of incompossibility through to the ‘moral’ problem addressed by the Theodicy. The chapter title, naming these three peculiar concepts, tracks this trajectory.
As usual we retired to the Amersham Arms after the session for a pint or two and a decompression, finding ourselves drinking in the outside garden, a kind of side alley to the pub strewn with a vibrant graffiti art exhibition. Towards the end of the reading session I had increasingly questioned the viability of the account of morality that Deleuze draws and we had encountered one of the perennial questions of Deleuze scholarship and discussion – does a Deleuzian ontology exhibit a kind of moral injunction to radical lifestyle? There is a reading of Deleuze, that is now frowned upon perhaps, which used to take the work of Deleuze and use it to justify ‘extremities’ of lifestyle – wine and strange drugs as a means to ontological intellectual intuition. It’s doubtful that it much matters whether this is an ‘accurate’ reading of Deleuze since it is no doubt possible to draw upon his work to either justify or berate such a lifestyle, such means of knowledge. It is clear, even from just this chapter of F, that there is some sort of injunction that can be drawn from Deleuze, an injunction that is found here in the form of ‘increase the clear region of your monad’. Take the following for example:
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Chapter 2 of F begins, if possible, even more obscurely than Chapter 1. The first line of F, Chapter 1, is ‘The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait’ (F:3). This might be a dense sentence in that it’s implications will need to be unpacked and explored but compared to the first sentence of Chapter 2 it seems relatively transparent.
‘Inflection is the ideal genetic element of the variable curve or fold.’ (F:14) So begins Chapter 2. It continues – ‘Inflection is the authentic atom, the elastic point. This is what Klee extracts as the genetic element of the active, spontaneous line’ (ibid).
One of my fellow readers at the group had done some useful background research and traced the diagram or illustration that occurs at the beginning of Chapter 2 (F:15), tracking it to Klee’s ‘Pedagogical Notebooks’ where I didn’t notice any immediate reference to inflection but where the curve is described as ‘an active line on a walk for a walk’s sake’, which a number of us commented on as it seemed close to the image of the schizophrenic on a walk that Deleuze and Guattari use at the beginning of Anti-Oedipus.
These ‘backgrounds’ that can be filled in by tracking down some of the more allusive and elusive sources that fill Deleuze’s work help in the activity of familiarising ourselves with the text. In particular the diagram, which stands in the text unsourced, becomes less random and seems located, allowing us to feel like there is a work of unpacking to be done in reading F that is not without some point or purpose – that we’re not, as it were, on a wild goose chase. Nothing in the Klee reference, however, immediately illuminates quite what this notion of ‘inflection’ is doing here.
Another reader had tracked down some background that more specifically focused on the meaning of inflection, tracking it to a a possible geometric source where we can find that there is a use within the realm of differential calculus, where an inflection (inflexion) point has a specific role to play. Now it is not the case that the geometric usage needs to tally with the claim Deleuze makes (‘Inflection is the ideal genetic element of the variable curve or fold.’) since it is not a geometric claim that is being presented, at least I am not taking it to be such. It is rather a philosophical claim. It is clear from the presentation that it is Klee, not geometry, which Deleuze is drawing on and moreover it is Klee’s ‘methodological’ or ‘philosophical’ comments. Quite what philosophical claim is it, however, that Deleuze is attempting to put forward?
Notes on Deleuze’s ‘The Fold’ resulting from the work being done as I attend the excellent new reading group hosted by Matthew Dennis at Goldsmiths College, with thanks to him for the opportunity to study the work and for the others at the group for stimulating and interesting conversations.
Matthew Dennis made some introductory remarks when we first met for the reading group and noted that one of the first things encountered in the book is the architectonic metaphor of the room with two levels. Dennis rightly, I think, drew our attention to the way this particular image can stand in conversation with the Platonic cave. We can articulate two philosophical dynamics or views by allowing these images to stand as the organising centres of thought.
Curiously I had tended to glide over the image on this reading of the text. I’ve read ‘The Fold’ numerous times before, only gradually getting to grips with its peculiarities and only recently feeling even slightly familiar in its surroundings. The familiarity of the image had perhaps encouraged its disappearance in my horizon, in that common effect of presentation whereby the common becomes the invisible. It was good to have this foregrounded, therefore and in the course of such foregrounding to have my own familiarities de-familiarised. I had been reading straight past the image – but what then had I been reading?
