[So it turned out there is a 5th part - I can't seem to let this stuff drop. Anyway it is here.]

Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.

(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)

In thinking about this sentence, I have really only started to come to grips with the term “things.” My purpose is to understand what the sentence means, to interpret it given the rather odd (from my point of view) relationship between concepts such as “thing” and “freeing themselves” and later the terms “anarchic and non-identical.” How can a thing be anarchic? What does it mean for something to be non-identical when there is no suggestion as to what it is non-identical with?

Summary: a thing in the phenomenological sense is not simply an object in a the universe of either-or. It is not the subject either. These terms are categories that can point to something in the world through language but the resultant word or concept cannot capture the totality of the thing itself.

What is it to be meaningful? Meaning is not inherent in the words but in the context in which the words are used. Can anything be meaningful? Yes. Probably. But what of it? What good is the meaning of the black sun if no other also knows it. Something has both meaning and value if it can be shared and form the basis of narrative development. That is, the shared meaning forms the basis of some other meaning. The value of the letter “e” is in the fact that it extends the envelope of erudition. “Thing” as the Phenomenologists mean it was once a lone “e” but it is not any longer. “Thing” has left its home in base matter and taken on a new conceptual life. Deleuze would be proud!

M. Bruns said “Imagine things freeing themselves” and of course “thing” did just that. But how?

“Thing” had an origin. It came with a much larger, largely unconscious, belief system. It was embedded in a world where “things” were “material object(s) without life or consciousness.” What happened was those tethers were called into question. Is a thing without consciousness? Is it without life? What does it mean to have a “life?” Can “life” be defined? Can consciousness? Isn’t it more a continuum than a black-and-white situation? If that’s the case then isn’t a human being as much a “thing” as a boulder?

Once those kinds of questions get asked the foundational belief system has already begun to restructure. Different kinds of connections get made. It’s not that the whole system goes down. It doesn’t shatter. We need foundational assumptions to achieve meaning out of inherent meaninglessness so we can’t eject conceptual frameworks wholesale but we can make it look as if we have.

Here’s an example: God is the center of the universe for most people in Medieval Europe. Then perspective comes in with the Renaissance. It didn’t make us get rid of the “center of the universe” concept but it did make us look at what we thought “center” actually meant. This new art made us see that the universe that we occupy actually extends from our point of sight and we ended up replacing god in the center with ourselves. Of course to some people it looks as if we destroyed the Medieval belief system but we didn’t really, we just changed some key factors within it.

Imagine what that must have been like at the time. The difficulty some faced in understanding the concept that the universe was to be measured by man’s measure! I’m not saying that Phenomenology is the equivalent of booting god from the center of the universe. Just that the immensity of the difficulty in reorienting our concept of “thing” is as difficult as the pre-Renaissnace man’s task.

For us this is thinking outside the duality of subject/object. Remember W A T E R M – E L O Π ? (See part 2, link at the end of the post.) If we refuse the transparency of “watermelon,” problematize the word and make ourselves question its existence then we stand a chance of opening a doorway into the sub-basement of the conceptual network which supports its meaningfulness in society. If the history of our capacity for insight (and the methods by which we achieve it) is to be taken as a future likelihood, then one way that we can help ourselves meet the challenge of this “new” concept is through linguistic play. That’s what poetry does, and why so many Phenomenologists seem obsessed by it.

In part two I asked what was outside the concept of subject/object and suggested that the way to grapple with this is through embodied cognition. The reason for this is that subject/object is likely to be a linguistic convention grounded on a long-established embodied understanding of the world. My suggestion is that the embodied “knowing” could have resulted in other linguistic orientations that were not subject/object. That it is the case that our physical presence in the world led to the development of these linguistic formulations was not necessarily so. In other words, our biological systems could have led us elsewhere just as the perceptual developments of the Renaissance could have replaced the concept of “center” with the concept of “there.” (Wouldn’t that have been fun! Instead of religions seeking the god-within, we’d have been hunting the god-over-there.)

In part three:

For me the real question is: Does language conscribe reality any more or less than the organization of our senses? I suspect not but since I also suspect that language is a development grounded in sensory structures, I think the question of what’s outside subject and object might be a misdirection at its heart.

So if it isn’t the right question what is? This is the right question. This question is how things “free themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.” It is by unmooring a concept from the question that originated it and the point of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s book What is Philosophy. How change of the Medieval-Renaissance magnitude takes place is that significant questions die and new ones force elemental reconnection. The new conceptual framework that we know as the Renaissance took hold when we found an answer and stopped asking the question.

So what is the thing itself? A question of course. That’s why it isn’t either a subject or an object. A thing is the foundation which allows concepts to take form and so, of course, is pre-conceptual and why, at best, poetry can only aim its letters and hope to illuminate the invisible door by the sparks contact ignites.

Part 1 http://tailfeather.ca/2010/07/phenomenology-poetry-and-sense/

Part 2 http://tailfeather.ca/2010/07/phenomenology-poetry-and-sense-–-part-2/

Part 3 http://tailfeather.ca/2010/07/phenomenology-poetry-and-sense-–-part-3/