Comments on: what is the relationship between your work and theory?

By: Corey

Corey — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:35:00 +0000

No worries, Tim, I’m with you. Cheers guys.

By: Corey

Corey — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:35:00 +0000

No worries, Tim, I’m with you. Cheers guys.

By: Tim Horvath

Tim Horvath — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:08:42 +0000

Yeah, great response, Corey. I’m no proponent of authors using characters as mouthpieces or baldly philosophizing. I was thinking more along the lines of how Saramago’s The Double or Ondaatje’s Divisadero address questions of identity, or Franzen’s The Corrections ruminates over materialism, or the way Delillo’s work considers “the real” as effectively, and in some ways more so, than works falling under the genre of philosophy do.

By: Tim Horvath

Tim Horvath — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:08:00 +0000

By: Roxane

Roxane — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:48:48 +0000

This is so very well articulated, Corey. I too cringe when I see an author writing in overtly philosophical ways. If I can see the philosophy or theory, something has gone awry but as you say, there is some really audacious theoretical work out there. The example of Deleuze is a really great one. I think texts like A Thousand Plateaus or Capitalism and Schizophrenia have a lot to offer writers as does Deleuze and Gauttari’s concept of the rhizome. I also think of someone like Bakhtin and his Dialogic Imagination. Anyway, I found your comment very interesting.

By: Roxane

Roxane — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:48:00 +0000

By: Corey

Corey — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:09:00 +0000

Roxane: that is a superb example, and highlights the fluid and ever-changing presence of theoretical ideas already in activity, in formation, of traditions, of history, working on the real, soliciting the real etc etc. It takes a theorist to put in the work, and by doing the work there is, on the one hand, a rigorous, analytical mobilisation of the idea, and on the other hand, productivity of new connections, new transversals, and new questions. A theoretical idea is never quite the same when it comes out of you after being invoked by you. I don’t think Tim follows through exactly with his thesis of “more dynamic” in a working-through ideas with literature when speaking of a “way of philosophizing about the world,” but it is in the direction of the notion of an interventional literature, a literature with consequences for reality. For understandings. For ideas. Though I don’t condone literature as philosophy, I do appreciate philosophy with the imagination – and the audacity – of fiction. But this might be my theoretical problem, my mistake, for me it isn’t a question I’ve resolved for myself. I can see that I privilege philosophers like Deleuze who invoke schizophrenia as profoundly significant for disrupting notions of subjectivity, of univocity, of universality, who allow schizophrenia as a concept ramified into genres of art, literature and music, psychopathology, sociology etc etc which, although rigorously considered psychoanalytically and philosophically, is instantiated to far lesser degrees in institutions of psychiatry, ethics, popular sociology, and news media. Naturally, I am attracted to this because it agrees with general prejudices of mine as well as being considered by years of the best of my reading and analytical abilities. So perhaps we should consider Badiou and consolidate the disciplines, in the service of the disciplines, certainly there’d be less dodgy philosophical literature out there. Doesn’t it make you cringe when you GET the philosophical notion an author has set out to investigate in their fiction? I think cringing is the right response. So, in conclusion, I think the dialectics between art and theory should be continually re-negotiated, criticism should be suped-up, the horizons should be stretched and stretched and stretched, and literature should respond to the new ontological and epistemological paradigms in formation, in action, in the world. But when literature starts to represent these paradigms, that’s when I start to wonder why I’m reading these one-dimensional characters playing out scripts in the service of a philosopher I could instead be reading.

By: Corey

Corey — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:09:00 +0000

By: Tim Horvath

Tim Horvath — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:26:46 +0000

I was thinking about this very topic as the other day I picked up Jacques Attali’s Noise, which had been dust-gathering on my shelf for years, with a cover sporting Brueghel bacchanalia–diabolical hats and fish on oars and one fellow who looks like a medieval Magritte. And the opening sentences, ah, how promising: “For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not there for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible….life is full of noise and…death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.” I was all ready to kick back and read it as a novel. But within pages the argument turned economic–the idea that music alters fundamentally when money is exchanged for it. I wanted a noisier argument, something with more feedback and, minimum, a bassline.

The lit theory that I find to be most compelling nowadays is that which ties together evolutionary theory and neuroscience with literature, although these connections are still in their infancy. Brian Boyd’s On the Origins of Stories, which looks at the Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who, is state-of-the-art in trying to stack together a bunch of different layers of explanation.

What about flipping the relationship on its head and treating works of literature as philosophy? Not of the variety “this is true” or live your life according to the ethics of this character/author/etc. More dynamic, as in this–undergoing literary experience–is a way of philosophizing about the world, thinking it through concretely, wrangling with it, putting to it questions that theory does overtly…

By: Tim Horvath

Tim Horvath — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:26:00 +0000