For an alternative
reconstruction
see D-K: Diels, h.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
.
weh" asks 'why way?
'; her "streamsbecoming" asks not "what way?
".
The ontological instability o f the Wake generates why-questions not what-questions: "Was liffe worth leaving?
"
10. 6 Masculinetautology
This feminine process of becoming is opposed to the masculine creative, sexual process o f repetitious identity, the continuous imprint o f man's own image and being on the supine woman:
while the man to be is in a worse case after than before since she on the supine satisfies the verg to him! Toughtough, tootoological. Thou the first person shingeller. Art, the imperfect subjunctive. (468. 16-09)
"Toughtough" suggests the German taufen, which means "baptism", a male baptism o f the female maybe, or the repetitious HCE expressing himselfthrough and as ALP, or ALP
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becoming this repetition, the why returning to counting. The male creative act is also tautological repetition, which is too logical.
Logic is the rational process of relating defined symbolic quantities or qualities; it is the process o f transforming identities into rationally equivalent and, hence, related series o f concepts. In this tautological creative process the man is worse off than before, since the verge (his penis) is satisfied only to the verge (the shore of the river, of ALP), and thus the woman remains outside o f his tautological equation. The man's movement through eros toward thanatos leads toward self-annihilation without the renewing transformation into the other, which is to break beyond the solipsistic limits o f Kantian metaphysics: the verge. The meta-sexual symbolism here traces the logic o f our metaphors as they construct the logic o f relations defining substance. This tautological process is opposed to the fluidity of the relations within the flux of the river, of which art is an imperfect imitation o f the streams "subjunctive", underlying connective, quality (226. 14-17). The result of the male creative process is a loss of creative energy, where he is worse off than before. In other words, his creative process is one-directional and not one of renewal.
This too is a part o f the principle o f identification, where, as Adorno asserts, "non- identity is the secret telos of identification" (Negative Dialectics, 149). Self-annihilation in theotherisneverrealized. YetJoycegoesbeyondthelimitsofidentityandcreatesakind of dialectic between "Thou the first person shingeller" and "Art, the imperfect subjective. " Structurally the "Thou" functions within a subject/object grammar. The "Thou" is both object (identified as a 2nd person) and simultaneously a subject (1st person): such would be "man's" definition o f YHWH as the first cause o f creation. The voice that identifies the
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"Thou" does not recognize itself nor claim the authority o f 1st person. This voice gains its identity in the succeeding sentence: "Art, an imperfect subjunctive. " This voice is both "Art", the Wake and its created consciousness, and an archaic form of "are", the verb associated with the second person "Thou". This verb, however, as an "imperfect subjunctive" functions as a continuous movement o f what we call our past. Whatever our motivations or desires, they remain incomplete, and thus create a future for us out o f our investment in our being ("Art": are) these possibilities we desire. This is a form of not-
being-toward-an-object. The dialectic moves between the 2nd person verb and pronoun, and yet neither the "Thou" nor the voice speaking through the verb can create themselves as objects. They exist as subjects who never translate themselves into an other, for such a translation is self-annihilation and tautological. This voice, therefore, stands outside of the creative power generated by the principle o f identification and differentiation that we associate with YHWH and HCE.
The feminine creative process constructs itselfas ALP, who contains hyperbolicallyallchange,alltime,inacontinualrenewal: "Mammywas,Mimmyis, Minuscolinie's to be. . . The same renew" (226. 14-17). This well known passage, unlike the earlier assertion that "Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be" ( 215. 24), begins to explain the mechanism o f time embedded within ALP's identity. The vowels in "Mammy" and"Mimmy"mimicthevowelsineachrespectiveandsucceedingverb. "Alphabetty
verbage" is introjected into the consonant world ofMMMY as if verbal tense were pulling being behind it. This pattern is foregone in the future tense. Identity begins to dwindle into the Italian minuscoline (feminine plural), very tiny "plurabilities". The future as a
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final goal is ahead of being and thus contains a vmmis-cailin (Gaelic, a young girl, a maiden, and one would suspect a virgin). The future then becomes a negative feminine space, but also a looking forward to a time when ALP's youth will be subtracted from her. Such a dwindling old woman recalls the Sibyl that Eliot invokes in the epigraph to "The Waste Land", with, however, the inclusion of what both the Sibyl and Eliot could not remember: "the same renew. " In the Wake constant renewal creates an eternal now of "tocoming", of self-transformation and movement toward the forever mysterious space of the "minuscoline". This is the present missing in Genesis: "all in the tocoming o f the semperetemal apeel spry with it" (508. 29).
ALP contains all time, as does Christ, but she herself is not an identity o f being as Christ is. "In the becoming was the weared, wontnat! " ( 487. 20-21). The Word has become Old English wyrd, time, change, becoming, but also destiny and fate, the space of the future created through the becoming that was, is, and will be, as a description of ourselves within our grammatical distinctions. This "weared" is apparently "wontnat. " A complex word that sandwiches a phallic "t" between "won" (victoiy and one) and "nat" (night and not, null, zero). Thus are Christ, HCE, and all dreamers and readers o f the Wake (whatever their gender) crucified and linked with the world o f identity (God) and theworldoftime(loss). Simultaneouslywithinthiscosmologyonefinds"wantnot"and "wont (dwell, abide) not". The interpenetration of the command to not desire (to abide) and to not abide creates an unsettled tension, a disruption that undercuts itselfjust as it attemptstocompleteitself(likefindingan"a"in'abide',"abiad"). "Wontnat"becomesa compressed but inverted version of "A and aa ab ad abu abiad", inverted because the
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"won" is crucified into "nat" and the "to" replaced with a "t". And what is most important in this inverted logos is the replacement o f desire with unspecified movement, and thus the failure to create an objective space toward which one can move.
This "weared" can never be resolved into the relatively static categories of language, and therefore not into any Word: "In the beginning was the gest he joustly says, fortheendiswithwomen,flesh-without-word"(468. 05-06). Thebeginningisnotthe sameastheend. Inthebeginningwasajest,anadventure,astory,agesture,andan "enterruption" (332. 36), the change ofthe established pattern ofrelations, a mutation that sprung from "he war", the jousting spear slung horizontal from desire for a damsel that cannot be named, captured, nor held within identity or tautology.
We must be careful not to repress the "with" and read this as "the end is women. " Rather this end must be read as either a masculine movement toward and into a relationship "with women", and/or an expression o f masculine fear o f women, who possess the end and therefore must be avoided or killed. The first reading asserts that the existential reality grounded in flesh and in the present possesses the identities which frame it. It inverts the dynamics o f possession and identity by creating a new sense o f possession. Ifwe look back a page we find: "thinking himselfinto the fourth dimension and place the ocean between his and ours" ( 467. 22-3). Within the Wake the sleeper's and the characters' possession o f themselves is impossible, as it is in time, within the "fourth dimension," where our selves unravel before the constant intrusion o f change. "His" and "our", therefore, represent the faith in identity, in possession, that holds our conscious selveswithintheontologyofdifferencedefinedbyYHWH. Theyarenot,however,the
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ground o f our being, if one can call it that, which lies, instead, within the ocean between "I" ("our"), first person plural, and "he" or "it" ("his"), third person singular: "Thou art" --
"It wham"?
The relationship between subject ("I") and object ("it") is explored in Joyce's
characterizationof"women,flesh-without-word". Thetransformationofthe"word"into flesh is analogous to the transformation o f an "it" into a "thou" discussed by Buber in I and Thou. This transformation redefines the relationship between subject and object by establishing a verbal consciousness created out o f the instantiating equation o f an "I" with the speaking self and the animation of "things", or of an "it", through its recognition as a "thou". ForJoycetheend,whatinthelanguageofconsciousnessisunderstoodasan identity or an object, becomes the actualization of a relationship "with women. " Women here are categorically defined, reduced to the existential condition o f mortal flesh, as opposed to the conceptual objectification o f words. While such a reduction is certainly a violent limitation on women, it does transform "women" into a "thou" and not an object, an"it". Fleshbecomesthecommonrealityofbeingforboththeselfandtheother;andas
the ground o f being becomes actualized as a presence which can define itself and interact with the "I" as an equivalent "I", that is, as a "you" within the grammar of this recognition.
10. 6 The limits of 'why"
The over 800 river names in Book I, chapter 8 cannot name this flesh, this "polycarppool"oftheunconscious. Althoughinsleepyouarenolongeryourself,you stillstreamalong,untired,throughthesubjunctivetiesofcreation: "Theuntiretiesof
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liveslivingbeingtheonesubstranceofstreamsbecoming"(597. 07-08). Beingis transformed into an active becoming ("livesliving") which cannot be totalized within an identity, but remains unentire, incomplete. Both Faust's "In the beginning was the Deed", and Yeats' "How can we know the dancer from the dance? " totalize the action o f being within an equation identifying the subject with the object, the beginning with the end. For Joyce, the incompleteness that moves through "livesliving being" is united within a single "substrance". Substanceispunnedintoasubstratethatisaperspective,aviewing,a tranceratherthanabeing. "Trancitivespace"(594. 03)isfilledwith"substrance",which isnotsubstanceatallbutsubjectivityreflectingitselfasitbecomesitself: "everybally being is becoming in its owntown eyeballs" ( 523. 12).
In Book IV, the feminine dynamic o f becoming begins to hide behind the coming light of day, or rather it fades into the gap between the developing identities of consciousness. The a Wakening sleeper must re-constitute being as identity. The father (abu) in ALP must be identified, differentiated, and established as a final end:
Or, but, now and airing out her mirgery margery watersheads and, to change that subjunct from the traumaturgid for once in a while and darting back to stuff, if so beyoumayidentifyyourself withhiminyou. . . sincethenourtoomanyofher, Abha na Life, and gettin on to dadaddy.
(496. 25-31)
One must clear one's head o f the waters o f Anna Livia, for a moment and alter the subjunctive flow o f becoming into an identity that is you. This is the transformation from "pluralities" of "Abha na Life" into the male creative process of "dadaddy. " The last line of
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the book moves as close to the world o f identities and nouns as possible without stepping out of the immanent "river of lives": "A way a lone a last a loved a long the"( 628. 15-16). The word is no longer "aplomb" (vertical), rather it moves like the spirit of God, in the second verse o f Genesis, across the surface o f chaos not yet ready to transform the unknown into the known.
Within the fluidity o f change the source o f creation is known, but the manifestation, the identity ofthis creation remains a mystery: "Ofcause so! And in effect, as? (615. 11). If the sleeper is to wake up he must jump from the 'the' to an identity. This re-beginning is the renewal o f the creative flux o f the "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's" withwhichthebookopens. Withinthis"streamsbecoming"onelosesone'sselftothe flowing totality o f the eternal now. It is only when the world is fragmented into a complex o f non-becoming identities that reality gains a definable substance o f being: "The untireties o f livesliving being the one substrance o f a streamsbecoming" (597. 07-08). "Untireties" are not entire; they are incomplete. When one is asleep one is no longer entire, or in complete control of oneself. Where does one look for oneself? In other peoplemaybe,callingitlove. Yetwithinthe"streamsbecoming"onecontinuestostream along,untired,throughthesubjunctivetiesofcreation. "[Ljiveslivingbeing"represents the transformation of identity and being into the action of living. The "untireties of livesliving" are equated with "the one substrance of a streamsbecoming". We remain
withinthe"hauntingcrevices"betweenidentities: "Verbumprincipiantthroughthe trancitive spaces! " (594. 02-03). The dynamic creative process is equated to the underlying, all inclusive, trancitive space o f incompleteness.
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The Bible tries to reduce why-questions to what-questions, to confuse meaning for substance as a way o f excluding the kind o f ontological instability creation myths explicitly domesticate. The process o f creation, as it is understood in Genesis, and as it is a return to consciousness and identity, hypostatizes creative power (transformation, becoming, making) into static forms that undermine this very creative power. God destroys himself. Thus, it is God who must be reborn. His rebirth flows through an equivalency between the created, the act of creation, and the creator. Yet this rebirth remains within an ontology o f identity, and thus it generates, in the image o f itself, a fragmented world o f identities. Joyce, however, recreates reality by defining creation within the "chaosmos" of the present, playing between the residual forms of identity associated with HCE and the dynamic becoming of ALP. Finnegans Wake continually follows and conflates being as becoming (ALP as "riverrun") as it leads to the discorded identity of HCE (Howth Castle and Environs). This is the movement of the first sentence. Joyce has reintegrated the present into a creative ontology by defining creation as a becoming o f potential, grounded in both the doer (ALP) and the doing (HCE). For Joyce, however, it is ALP who
ultimately becomes Christ, who drowns herself as did Phlebas, and loses her identity, but gains the eternal ability, the "Plurabilities," to become, to renew, and to always be a becoming o f herself.
But is ALP as this becoming only a figure o f speech? a transcribed desire for god reconfigured at the edge of a syntax associated for Joyce with the strange interaction between identity and being, internal consciousness and expression, which describes Augustine's exploration o f the Trinity, as much as Freud's articulation o f identity
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determined by desire and fear? In De Trinitate Augustine discovers the Trinitarian relations and identities embedded in our actual thinking, practices, and being, or rather he derives out of our experience the shifting set of relations leading to and expressing the Triune God. Joyce pursues a similar theological goal, but one grounded in the ordinariness o f our nocturnal life and one that rewrites Trinitarian Identities into flux, but a flux out o f which a consciousness may emerge. Self-reflexively dynamic ALP replaces through her "corrosive sublimation" the world of identities naming HCE. This process of replacement mimics Augustine's replacement in De Trinitate of how mind, knowledge,
and love determine our knowing of the world with how memory, understanding, and will redefine these Trinitarian images in self-knowledge: in knowing what we already know as ourselves. The complex relation between knowing and self-knowing rewrites the absolute nature of mind into the "notion of love as a 'search"'(72). 14 In other words, Augustine follows the "certainties with regard to the nature of mind", defined by mind, knowledge and love, into a study of our sensory awareness of becoming in time, within ourselves, and
towards God. Finnegans Wake embodies such a study in the "finnecies of [its] poetry wed music" (377. 17).
Music can seem an "A and aa ab ad abu abiad. A babbel men dub gulch o f tears" (254. 17), and in this approach mathematics. A mathematics o f this sort articulates an order, a pattern, a logic of forms: a syntax pretending to generate out of this logic a content (even if only at the limits of sense). Poetry asserts that its essence lies not in its parts so much as in its organization. At this level of abstraction Peter Caws' description of poetry makes sense of such a mathematics: "words that belong together, to be
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remembered and recited in a given but not intuitively obvious order" (241). 15 From this he makes the important observation that the first and in many ways most significant poems we leam are the alphabet and the ordinal numbers. This belonging together functions like syntax does for Quine, which determines what strings count as legitimate within a language. Poetry can, therefore, be understood as syntax. But a syntax for what? What is the meaning o f the syntax o f this kind o f nonsense? The creative logic, the relationship between being and becoming, in Finnegans Wake enacts this question as, what Geoffrey Hill calls, the menace and atonement attending, maybe notjust ofpoetry, but ofbeing human. Finnegans Wake becomes a special kind of poetry in which we have to discover what goes together and why it remains apart. In constructing this syntax we build and uncoverTrinitarianversionsofourselves,identitiesconstructedastime: mindand memory; knowledge and understanding; love and will oscillating into each other through our own "present tense integument". We measure ourselves in reading the Wake as it measures us, and in this count ourselves as countable into being "to becontinued's Tale".
But even this measurement is only another language game, although one in which we crucify ourselves: one might call this a grammatical game with ontological consequences.
1Big Typescript, translated and cited by David G. Stem, in Wittgenstein on Mind and Langauge, 157. 2ForadiscussionoftheabsentsleeperseeJohnBishop. JoycesBookoftheDark: FinnegansWake. 3Reported Sightings.
4 I will investigate the complexity of how this works in chapter 13. 5Ed. A. F. vonPauly,G. Wissowa,etal. Marcovichreplacestheprobablycorruptfinalword'sleep'with 'waking reality'. Although this reconstruction remains controversial, it is supported by the logic of opposition found in the proceeding phrase, a logic animating much of the Heraclitian corpus. A similar logic o f opposition is o f course central to the working o f Finnegans Wake.
For an alternative reconstruction see D-K: Diels, h. rev. W. Kranz. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th ed. Zurich, 1951.
5Heraclitus: Fragments, A text and translation with a commentary. The fragment is found in Clement's Stomateis 4. 141. 2
7 The Basic Works o f Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon.
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8Plotinus,7volumes,trans. A. H. Armstrong. Ifwereimaginethesoulasourformoflifeandexpand experience into the complex interactions between language games this is not unlike how time is exposed in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Because o f his separation between the grammatical and the psychological, however, time is not hypostasized into a metaphysical category.
9 See Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary, translated by John J. Scullion S. J. Also Tanalch: The Holy Scriptures. Also Walther Eichrody, "In the Beginning: A Contribution to the Interpretation of the First Word of the Bible" (1962), Creation in the Old Testament, ed. Bernhard W. Anderson.
10ClementofAlexandria, Stromata. Liber7, EnglishandGreek,translatedbyFentonJohn Anthony Hort and Joseph B. Mayor.
11 Finnegans Wake: A Facsimile o f the Buffalo Notebooks, VI. B1-VI. B. 4, preface and arranged by David Hayman, VI. B. 40. 47.
12The grammar of this "why" is, therefore, very close to Wittgenstein's description of the statement "I understand" that I examine in the first chapter o f my dissertation.
13SylvainBromberger,"Why-Qustions",InMindandCosmos: EssaysinContemporaryScience and Philosophy.
14Augustine: Later Works.
15Yorick'sWorld: ScienceandtheKnowingSubject.
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IV
WTTTGENSTEINIAN TIME
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11
The Ontology of Time
The previous chapter was meant to show how the measurement of ourselves in the measurement of time makes the variety of syntaxes we use and inhabit visible or audible as semantic (or symbolic) systems. A sustained reading ofthe Wake, tracing through the grammatical shifts that enact time as an aspect o f the limit between sense and nonsense and between ourselves and the text, precipitates a version o f the same crisis that Karl Barth describes, in The Epistle to the Romans, which I earlier claimed informs Eliot's poetics. I asked, "how do we stand 'before an irresistible and all-embracing dissolution of the world, o f time and things and me, before a penetrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy o f a negation by which all existence is rolled up" (iii. 21). Finnegans Wake shows that this crisis, as it was for Adams, threatens less the world or our language, as our status within both. I suggested earlier that the vanishing o f any intentional target for Wake&n language (pointing as it ostensibly does at the vanished person asleep) both picks us out as its target (again exposing a crisis about how we constitute our world as ours) and displays itself as an intentional mechanism within which the world emerges as the shifting limits between grammatical and symbolic relations. Finnegans Wake is a temporal descriptionofthehumanmindenactingthisvanishingintentionality. Thisdescription(or enactment) o f time instigates and demonstrates as way o f thinking toward the limits o f sense. This thinking is what I understand as the construction o f a theological language
and stance, traced along a complicated interwoven epistemological limit described by skeptical doubt, science, and a resistance to the ontological claims o f poetic metaphysics,
Notes for this chapter are on page 492
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Vico'stermforthemythologicalimaginationsofmoreprimitivepeoples. Thetranslation of thinking into an enactment of time was systematized along a single continuum (as opposed to the shifting multiple times in Finnegans Wake and Philosophical
Investigations)byHegel,especiallyinthePhenomenologyofSpirit. Iwillnotinvestigate Hegel's phenomenological dialectic here, but I will use an aspect o f this dialectic as a path from Finnegans Wake to PhilosophicalInvestigations. This aspect ofthe
Phenomenology should be understood as elaboration ofthe becoming ofmind (both historically and philosophically) through the intentionality o f the dialectic, an intentionality describedbyourinteractionswiththephenomenalworld. Iwillbrieflydescribeapattern o f temporality (although for Hegel this should be understood as becoming and not time)
that unfolds subjectivity through a shifting intentionality.
Augustine's description of the dialectic from mind to soul describes an
hermeneutic education, as does Finnegans Wake, that remakes our human stance toward the world and God by remaking the forms within which we configure both this stance and the world. We discover God and ourselves within our language and practices. One way of understanding Wittgenstein is that he constructs a dialogic dialectic of fragments between our practices within language-games and totalities (from sentences to form(s) of life). Dialectic might sound misleading within its sense o f linear movement toward truth, missing the circular and repetitive perambulations that describe (or that the reader is forced to follow in) Philosophical Investigations. I use it, however, to describe the way in which any entry into the landscape of philosophical problems and ordinary language enacts a path from some problem to others through alternative descriptions. This path
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may return to the same problems again and again, but even in this circularity these problems change shape and color. The nature ofthis change (something I will discuss in the next section) alters the nature of our relation to the world described by these problems by and in our language, and thus provides a picture ofa kind oftemporality. Wittgenstein spoke with approval of the dialectical method:
. . . the dialectical method is very sound and a way in which we do work. But it should not try to find, from two propositions, a and b, a further more complex proposition, as (C. D. ) Broad's description implied. It's object should be to find out where the ambiguities in our language are. (74)1
These ambiguities shape the world because we inhabit them, and through them our inhabitationoftheworldbecomesvisible. Thus,ourthinkingabouttheseconfusions,ata fundamental level and as it does for Hegel, describes the limits in relation to which we live. ThepictureofhowWittgensteinthinks(orwrites),therefore,displaystheworld. The depth ofthe world is equivalent to the depth ofhow we think (not necessarily ofwhat we think). 2
The problem o f time can be understood as the problem o f the specious present, our phenomenologicalexperienceofchangethatfigurestheworldasflux. D. Stemhas shown how Wittgenstein's grammatical analysis developed through his analysis o f his own temptation to first construct a phenomenological language of our momentary experience (in response to the skeptical temptation to say that only the present exists, and thus only my present exists). 3 Wittgenstein realized that a claim like "all is flux" is a misuse of 'flux': "Language can only say those things we can also imagine otherwise"
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(Philosophical Remarks, 54). 4 Wittgenstein's analysis o f 'all is flux', however, always proceeds from the assumption that it is a phenomenological description ofthe world, in whichcaseitisnottruethateverythingisincontinualflux. Theleavesareblowninto spiraling relative to the branches to which they are attached. In addition, as a phenomenological description the claim that "all is flux" describes our sense of the present constantlyescapingourgrasp. InPhilosophicalInvestigations,Wittgensteinrecalls Augustine's description ofthis passing:
Here it is easy to get into that dead-end in philosophy, where one believes that the difficulty o f the task consists in this: our having to describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience that slips quickly by, or something of the kind. Where we find ordinary language too crude, and it looks as if we were having to do, not with the phenomena of every-day, but with ones that "easily elude us, and, in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others as an average effect". (PI? 436)5
There is a confusion here between "all is flux" as a description o f our experience (which is false) and as a description of the ground of the world, as if from the ultimate End (which is nonsense). Why imagine the world from the End? "All is flux" opposes and can be negated by our identity or being. "All is flux" expresses the fact that the we can be lost intochange. Itneitherdescribestheworld(asmetaphysics)orourexperience(as phenomenology), but the fundamental limit in relation to which we organize our being as something opposed to the world. The kind o f writing which describes this limit (that often describes or has the form of a log on a river) is history. What my analysis of the
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temporality ofFinnegans Wake partly was to show was that one way o f describing our involvement in language is as time.
Hegel, at the beginning ofthe Phenomenology, in "Sense-Certainty", generates the initial stages o f becoming out o f and through an involvement (containment, stances, and actions within and towards) in cognition, akin to that which 1 describe here as our involvement in language. This involvement, however, is understood to be defined by our cognition, and functions within a vast array o f technical distinctions (concepts, ideas, T , subjectivity, and so on) describing the relation between human knowledge and the phenomenalworldastheymakemanifesttheAbsoluteintheirinteraction. Hegel,inthe
Phenomenology ofSpirit, attempts to construct a condition in which the logic of relation that figures a subject knowing an object dissolves into a fundamental temporality (of course, he understands this as a discovery and not a construction). 6 The Hegelian dialectic drives to replace things with relations. Even at the beginning ofthe phenomenology, or at the beginning of the history of our knowing in "Sense-Certainty," being becomes history: "the dialectic o f sense-certainty is nothing else but the simple history o f its movement"(109). The universal categories defined by language in sense-certainty, T, 'Now', Here1, and 'This', become the surrogates for subjective being. In the chapter following "Sense-certainty" the dialectic through an ontology o f perception will dissolve these universals into qualities. Similar processes continue throughout the Phenomenology and effect the dissolution o f Being as identity into the Becoming o f time. When reading Hegel in this way, one begins to sketch a metaphysics o f time that defines the ontological necessity o f History understood as the interaction o f temporality and representation (i. e. ,
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cognition). Hegel configures representation, both as our cognitive understanding and as texts or objects, within a subjectivity dissolved through its knowing, thinking within the containing processes ofbecoming in Time. Hegel understands this configuration to be literally the history o f the world derived from an ontology o f time that underlies the conditions for knowing.
11. 1 Knowing time
History, the representation o f time as what is past, pretends to answer an ontological question that Wittgenstein, in the Brawn Book, breaks down into an underlying grammatical confusion: "Where does the present go when it becomes past, and where is the past? "(108). In this question, one has mistaken the "present" for a "thing" and thus one has constructed a conceptual logic, a sentence, by means o f a false analogy between saying "the present event passes by" and "a log [on a river] passes by". Wittgenstein is concerned about exposing the infelicitous form o f relating time and objecthoodthatmakesthesekindsofquestionsinsoluble. Onecansaymore. This mistaken analogy is one in which an intangible idea is objectified and subsumed within the category o f objects. Time has not been sublated into another term, or condition, but is
translatedintoitsantithesis,intothatwhichitnegates. Howthenisthisfalseanalogyto be distinguished from the many "new similes" that Wittgenstein uses to clarify philosophicalconfusion? Oneisfacedwiththeneedforsomesystemofevaluationfor correctness or falsity.
Wittgenstein's answer:
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We are inclined to say that both 'now' and 'six o'clock' refer to points in time. This use o f words produces a puzzlement which one might express in the question: What is the "now"? ' --for it is a moment oftime and yet it can't be said to be either the 'moment at which I speak' or 'the moment at which the clock strikes', etc. , etc. Our answer is: the function ofthe word 'now1is entirely different from that of specification o f time. This can easily be seen if we look at the role this word really plays in our usage of language, but it is obscured when instead of looking at the
whole language game, we only look at the contexts, the phrases o f language in
which the word is used. (BB108)
One must determine the function ofthe word "now", its use in the total language game used to talk about time. One must understand that the relation between "today" and the date is like that between "a hammer and a nail", and not like that between "a hammer and a mallet". A hammer and a nail are both elements within a specifically defined practice. Analogically, they both have a meaning within the same language game. A hammer and a mallet, however, are both elements of different, although parallel, language games. Wittgenstein's claim, therefore, is that the relation between 'today' and the date function within a single language game. I want to say, however, that today functions in a language game with yesterday and tomorrow (A-series). Any date functions in a language game of specific dates, a history (B-series). Wittgenstein's argument, therefore, attempts to dissolve this difference.
'Today' and date can function in a single language game--as in 'today's date'. 'Today' and the date can also function as different expressions of how one figures oneself
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as part o f a history. (They can also work as analogues for events: thus the shift in English from a date [June 6] to T have a date' [an assignation or appointment] uses 'date' as a metaphor for the event. This is, ofcourse, a different usage of"date" and thus its logic does not counter that described by Wittgenstein. ) Time is itself not actual (not an entity) butanobjectiveeffectintertwinedwithourperception. Iamusingactualand'objective' here in a way descended from Frege:
A thought, admittedly, is not the sort o f thing to which it is usual to apply the term 'actual'. The world of actuality is a world in which this acts on that, and changes it and again undergoes reactions itself and is changed by them. All this is a process in time. We will hardly admit what is timeless and unchangeable to be actual.
Now is thought changeable or is it timeless? The thought that we express by the
Pythagorean Theorem is surely timeless, eternal, unvarying. " (Thoughts, 372)7
Is time (a date or 'today' as words or concepts) something which is acted upon, that is changed and "itself experiences reactions and is changed by them"? And yet can we say that time is "timeless, eternal, unchangeable"? My discussions o f Heidegger's "Das Ding" and Joyce's Finnegans Wake demonstrate that time is not a concept with that kind of stability. But as a word, 'time' describes (mentions) this changing; it describes a limit. If you ask me 'what time is it? ', I cannot say 'no time' (except as nonsense or as part of a Zen koan, for example). I might say 3 o'clock, and I might be wrong. I can communicate the time, but can I communicate time? Is not any communication a form oftime, an ordered description of a process of change. This model of time as a kind of semantic process (both nested and serial: a sentence) is what undergirds Heidegger's description of
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the thing in "Das Ding". The communication oftime as a sentence (or as a language game) is always self-reflexive in that this communication manifests anyone's containment within this temporality. Such containment, however, is not expressed as the present, or as flux, or as something passing, but is itselfa grammar marking the particularity of meaning as both emerging from and resisting the totality (that is, it is not all meanings) o f language. Thus, 'what time is it? ' has as its target a specific time (or date), but as part o f a particular language game it enacts a temporal order as the limit o f my involvement within this game
(ifI do not know the time, I feel as ifthere is a pause in time, at least for the moment of my initial confusion; time has paused because I have slipped out o f the temporal order enacted by the language game. I have, however, other temporal orders which can always emerge as dominant).
Wittgenstein shows how we build ourselves into metaphysical cul-de-sacs by mistakingananalogyforadescriptionorforourexperience. Heunderstands'allisflux' to be primarily a statement about our experience translated into a claim about the world. "All is flux", just as date and today, as I have suggested, however, figures our lives as
totalities within the greater totality of change, as part of history. Speaking of Jakob Michael Lenz and a trip into the mountains o f over 170 years before, Celan in 1960 puzzles out the date on which that trip took place:
Perhaps one should say that each poem has its own 20th o f January inscribed within it? Perhaps what is now in the poems which are written today is just this: that here, most clearly, one seeks to remain mindful of such dates?
(Cited in Derrida, 310)
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Remembered behind 1960 and this speech, only 15 years before or since 1939 or 1933, is not just the loss instituted by Time or any other personification of life aging into death, but extermination;
Black milk o f daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we
drink you
(Celan, "Death Fugue")
This of course is the moment for a melodramatic pronouncement on the value of memory- - which would then be countered by a list of the abuses of history that have supported tyranny, delusion, prejudice and hatred. Art cannot redeem the past, nor can history prevent many injustices; but the dynamic between the unique, the momentary, the living and the represented that Celan finds in art recapitulates the dynamic between being and representation in historical epistemology. This dynamic generates temporality as the actual condition for our being: cognition, the interaction between subjectivity and representation, generates Time.
This conception of temporality suggests that poetry defines an ontologic, a metaphysical logic in a Viconian sense: "That which is metaphysics insofar as it contemplates things in all the forms o f their being, is logic insofar as it considers things in alltheformsbywhichtheymaybesignified"(NS127). Thesesignifiedformsenmeshour consciousness within a network of relations that function as fundamental ontological definitions (showing what is as what it is): the production of meaning becomes the
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production of fundamental ontology. Thus for Rilke a poem condenses a condition of being into a single word; for Celan that word is a date, the mark o f being in time, the condensation o f being into the singularity o f the moment, and thus into an assertion o f existence. The poetic representation o f being becomes a way o f marking oneself as a limit to past-time and at the same time as a mark o f the distance between a mark as an identity (as if a grave stele) and our containment within the dynamic processes of nature or languageorbiology. Historyusedtosuppressidentitymirrorshistoryusedtopreserve
identity. The moral control over history becomes confused with the sheer opacity o f time; history constructed is time constructed, or as Benjamin writes "Telescoping o f the past through the present" ("Theory ofKnowledge", 60). Such constructions express and definethepowerandidentityofpersonsandgroups. Suchconstructionscreatean aesthetics oftime.
Wittgenstein's corrective analogy that today and date are related not as hammer to mallet but as hammer to nail is correct in our ordinary usages of these words to mark time as over and against us. But the analogy fails to capture our ordinary (or poetic, which I think is an ordinary use oflanguage) use ofthese words to express within different language games our containment within phenomenal time (today) or within serial time (date). Andthesearenot,ofcourse,theonlywaysofexpressingandenactingthis containment. Inrelationtotheentiresystemoflanguage,"now"anda"log"areformally equivalent, but functionally different. They are formal identities without content, which
can both serve as targets for expressing our sense o f loss. (There are many ways o f using a
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10. 6 Masculinetautology
This feminine process of becoming is opposed to the masculine creative, sexual process o f repetitious identity, the continuous imprint o f man's own image and being on the supine woman:
while the man to be is in a worse case after than before since she on the supine satisfies the verg to him! Toughtough, tootoological. Thou the first person shingeller. Art, the imperfect subjunctive. (468. 16-09)
"Toughtough" suggests the German taufen, which means "baptism", a male baptism o f the female maybe, or the repetitious HCE expressing himselfthrough and as ALP, or ALP
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becoming this repetition, the why returning to counting. The male creative act is also tautological repetition, which is too logical.
Logic is the rational process of relating defined symbolic quantities or qualities; it is the process o f transforming identities into rationally equivalent and, hence, related series o f concepts. In this tautological creative process the man is worse off than before, since the verge (his penis) is satisfied only to the verge (the shore of the river, of ALP), and thus the woman remains outside o f his tautological equation. The man's movement through eros toward thanatos leads toward self-annihilation without the renewing transformation into the other, which is to break beyond the solipsistic limits o f Kantian metaphysics: the verge. The meta-sexual symbolism here traces the logic o f our metaphors as they construct the logic o f relations defining substance. This tautological process is opposed to the fluidity of the relations within the flux of the river, of which art is an imperfect imitation o f the streams "subjunctive", underlying connective, quality (226. 14-17). The result of the male creative process is a loss of creative energy, where he is worse off than before. In other words, his creative process is one-directional and not one of renewal.
This too is a part o f the principle o f identification, where, as Adorno asserts, "non- identity is the secret telos of identification" (Negative Dialectics, 149). Self-annihilation in theotherisneverrealized. YetJoycegoesbeyondthelimitsofidentityandcreatesakind of dialectic between "Thou the first person shingeller" and "Art, the imperfect subjective. " Structurally the "Thou" functions within a subject/object grammar. The "Thou" is both object (identified as a 2nd person) and simultaneously a subject (1st person): such would be "man's" definition o f YHWH as the first cause o f creation. The voice that identifies the
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"Thou" does not recognize itself nor claim the authority o f 1st person. This voice gains its identity in the succeeding sentence: "Art, an imperfect subjunctive. " This voice is both "Art", the Wake and its created consciousness, and an archaic form of "are", the verb associated with the second person "Thou". This verb, however, as an "imperfect subjunctive" functions as a continuous movement o f what we call our past. Whatever our motivations or desires, they remain incomplete, and thus create a future for us out o f our investment in our being ("Art": are) these possibilities we desire. This is a form of not-
being-toward-an-object. The dialectic moves between the 2nd person verb and pronoun, and yet neither the "Thou" nor the voice speaking through the verb can create themselves as objects. They exist as subjects who never translate themselves into an other, for such a translation is self-annihilation and tautological. This voice, therefore, stands outside of the creative power generated by the principle o f identification and differentiation that we associate with YHWH and HCE.
The feminine creative process constructs itselfas ALP, who contains hyperbolicallyallchange,alltime,inacontinualrenewal: "Mammywas,Mimmyis, Minuscolinie's to be. . . The same renew" (226. 14-17). This well known passage, unlike the earlier assertion that "Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle's to be" ( 215. 24), begins to explain the mechanism o f time embedded within ALP's identity. The vowels in "Mammy" and"Mimmy"mimicthevowelsineachrespectiveandsucceedingverb. "Alphabetty
verbage" is introjected into the consonant world ofMMMY as if verbal tense were pulling being behind it. This pattern is foregone in the future tense. Identity begins to dwindle into the Italian minuscoline (feminine plural), very tiny "plurabilities". The future as a
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final goal is ahead of being and thus contains a vmmis-cailin (Gaelic, a young girl, a maiden, and one would suspect a virgin). The future then becomes a negative feminine space, but also a looking forward to a time when ALP's youth will be subtracted from her. Such a dwindling old woman recalls the Sibyl that Eliot invokes in the epigraph to "The Waste Land", with, however, the inclusion of what both the Sibyl and Eliot could not remember: "the same renew. " In the Wake constant renewal creates an eternal now of "tocoming", of self-transformation and movement toward the forever mysterious space of the "minuscoline". This is the present missing in Genesis: "all in the tocoming o f the semperetemal apeel spry with it" (508. 29).
ALP contains all time, as does Christ, but she herself is not an identity o f being as Christ is. "In the becoming was the weared, wontnat! " ( 487. 20-21). The Word has become Old English wyrd, time, change, becoming, but also destiny and fate, the space of the future created through the becoming that was, is, and will be, as a description of ourselves within our grammatical distinctions. This "weared" is apparently "wontnat. " A complex word that sandwiches a phallic "t" between "won" (victoiy and one) and "nat" (night and not, null, zero). Thus are Christ, HCE, and all dreamers and readers o f the Wake (whatever their gender) crucified and linked with the world o f identity (God) and theworldoftime(loss). Simultaneouslywithinthiscosmologyonefinds"wantnot"and "wont (dwell, abide) not". The interpenetration of the command to not desire (to abide) and to not abide creates an unsettled tension, a disruption that undercuts itselfjust as it attemptstocompleteitself(likefindingan"a"in'abide',"abiad"). "Wontnat"becomesa compressed but inverted version of "A and aa ab ad abu abiad", inverted because the
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"won" is crucified into "nat" and the "to" replaced with a "t". And what is most important in this inverted logos is the replacement o f desire with unspecified movement, and thus the failure to create an objective space toward which one can move.
This "weared" can never be resolved into the relatively static categories of language, and therefore not into any Word: "In the beginning was the gest he joustly says, fortheendiswithwomen,flesh-without-word"(468. 05-06). Thebeginningisnotthe sameastheend. Inthebeginningwasajest,anadventure,astory,agesture,andan "enterruption" (332. 36), the change ofthe established pattern ofrelations, a mutation that sprung from "he war", the jousting spear slung horizontal from desire for a damsel that cannot be named, captured, nor held within identity or tautology.
We must be careful not to repress the "with" and read this as "the end is women. " Rather this end must be read as either a masculine movement toward and into a relationship "with women", and/or an expression o f masculine fear o f women, who possess the end and therefore must be avoided or killed. The first reading asserts that the existential reality grounded in flesh and in the present possesses the identities which frame it. It inverts the dynamics o f possession and identity by creating a new sense o f possession. Ifwe look back a page we find: "thinking himselfinto the fourth dimension and place the ocean between his and ours" ( 467. 22-3). Within the Wake the sleeper's and the characters' possession o f themselves is impossible, as it is in time, within the "fourth dimension," where our selves unravel before the constant intrusion o f change. "His" and "our", therefore, represent the faith in identity, in possession, that holds our conscious selveswithintheontologyofdifferencedefinedbyYHWH. Theyarenot,however,the
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ground o f our being, if one can call it that, which lies, instead, within the ocean between "I" ("our"), first person plural, and "he" or "it" ("his"), third person singular: "Thou art" --
"It wham"?
The relationship between subject ("I") and object ("it") is explored in Joyce's
characterizationof"women,flesh-without-word". Thetransformationofthe"word"into flesh is analogous to the transformation o f an "it" into a "thou" discussed by Buber in I and Thou. This transformation redefines the relationship between subject and object by establishing a verbal consciousness created out o f the instantiating equation o f an "I" with the speaking self and the animation of "things", or of an "it", through its recognition as a "thou". ForJoycetheend,whatinthelanguageofconsciousnessisunderstoodasan identity or an object, becomes the actualization of a relationship "with women. " Women here are categorically defined, reduced to the existential condition o f mortal flesh, as opposed to the conceptual objectification o f words. While such a reduction is certainly a violent limitation on women, it does transform "women" into a "thou" and not an object, an"it". Fleshbecomesthecommonrealityofbeingforboththeselfandtheother;andas
the ground o f being becomes actualized as a presence which can define itself and interact with the "I" as an equivalent "I", that is, as a "you" within the grammar of this recognition.
10. 6 The limits of 'why"
The over 800 river names in Book I, chapter 8 cannot name this flesh, this "polycarppool"oftheunconscious. Althoughinsleepyouarenolongeryourself,you stillstreamalong,untired,throughthesubjunctivetiesofcreation: "Theuntiretiesof
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liveslivingbeingtheonesubstranceofstreamsbecoming"(597. 07-08). Beingis transformed into an active becoming ("livesliving") which cannot be totalized within an identity, but remains unentire, incomplete. Both Faust's "In the beginning was the Deed", and Yeats' "How can we know the dancer from the dance? " totalize the action o f being within an equation identifying the subject with the object, the beginning with the end. For Joyce, the incompleteness that moves through "livesliving being" is united within a single "substrance". Substanceispunnedintoasubstratethatisaperspective,aviewing,a tranceratherthanabeing. "Trancitivespace"(594. 03)isfilledwith"substrance",which isnotsubstanceatallbutsubjectivityreflectingitselfasitbecomesitself: "everybally being is becoming in its owntown eyeballs" ( 523. 12).
In Book IV, the feminine dynamic o f becoming begins to hide behind the coming light of day, or rather it fades into the gap between the developing identities of consciousness. The a Wakening sleeper must re-constitute being as identity. The father (abu) in ALP must be identified, differentiated, and established as a final end:
Or, but, now and airing out her mirgery margery watersheads and, to change that subjunct from the traumaturgid for once in a while and darting back to stuff, if so beyoumayidentifyyourself withhiminyou. . . sincethenourtoomanyofher, Abha na Life, and gettin on to dadaddy.
(496. 25-31)
One must clear one's head o f the waters o f Anna Livia, for a moment and alter the subjunctive flow o f becoming into an identity that is you. This is the transformation from "pluralities" of "Abha na Life" into the male creative process of "dadaddy. " The last line of
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the book moves as close to the world o f identities and nouns as possible without stepping out of the immanent "river of lives": "A way a lone a last a loved a long the"( 628. 15-16). The word is no longer "aplomb" (vertical), rather it moves like the spirit of God, in the second verse o f Genesis, across the surface o f chaos not yet ready to transform the unknown into the known.
Within the fluidity o f change the source o f creation is known, but the manifestation, the identity ofthis creation remains a mystery: "Ofcause so! And in effect, as? (615. 11). If the sleeper is to wake up he must jump from the 'the' to an identity. This re-beginning is the renewal o f the creative flux o f the "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's" withwhichthebookopens. Withinthis"streamsbecoming"onelosesone'sselftothe flowing totality o f the eternal now. It is only when the world is fragmented into a complex o f non-becoming identities that reality gains a definable substance o f being: "The untireties o f livesliving being the one substrance o f a streamsbecoming" (597. 07-08). "Untireties" are not entire; they are incomplete. When one is asleep one is no longer entire, or in complete control of oneself. Where does one look for oneself? In other peoplemaybe,callingitlove. Yetwithinthe"streamsbecoming"onecontinuestostream along,untired,throughthesubjunctivetiesofcreation. "[Ljiveslivingbeing"represents the transformation of identity and being into the action of living. The "untireties of livesliving" are equated with "the one substrance of a streamsbecoming". We remain
withinthe"hauntingcrevices"betweenidentities: "Verbumprincipiantthroughthe trancitive spaces! " (594. 02-03). The dynamic creative process is equated to the underlying, all inclusive, trancitive space o f incompleteness.
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The Bible tries to reduce why-questions to what-questions, to confuse meaning for substance as a way o f excluding the kind o f ontological instability creation myths explicitly domesticate. The process o f creation, as it is understood in Genesis, and as it is a return to consciousness and identity, hypostatizes creative power (transformation, becoming, making) into static forms that undermine this very creative power. God destroys himself. Thus, it is God who must be reborn. His rebirth flows through an equivalency between the created, the act of creation, and the creator. Yet this rebirth remains within an ontology o f identity, and thus it generates, in the image o f itself, a fragmented world o f identities. Joyce, however, recreates reality by defining creation within the "chaosmos" of the present, playing between the residual forms of identity associated with HCE and the dynamic becoming of ALP. Finnegans Wake continually follows and conflates being as becoming (ALP as "riverrun") as it leads to the discorded identity of HCE (Howth Castle and Environs). This is the movement of the first sentence. Joyce has reintegrated the present into a creative ontology by defining creation as a becoming o f potential, grounded in both the doer (ALP) and the doing (HCE). For Joyce, however, it is ALP who
ultimately becomes Christ, who drowns herself as did Phlebas, and loses her identity, but gains the eternal ability, the "Plurabilities," to become, to renew, and to always be a becoming o f herself.
But is ALP as this becoming only a figure o f speech? a transcribed desire for god reconfigured at the edge of a syntax associated for Joyce with the strange interaction between identity and being, internal consciousness and expression, which describes Augustine's exploration o f the Trinity, as much as Freud's articulation o f identity
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determined by desire and fear? In De Trinitate Augustine discovers the Trinitarian relations and identities embedded in our actual thinking, practices, and being, or rather he derives out of our experience the shifting set of relations leading to and expressing the Triune God. Joyce pursues a similar theological goal, but one grounded in the ordinariness o f our nocturnal life and one that rewrites Trinitarian Identities into flux, but a flux out o f which a consciousness may emerge. Self-reflexively dynamic ALP replaces through her "corrosive sublimation" the world of identities naming HCE. This process of replacement mimics Augustine's replacement in De Trinitate of how mind, knowledge,
and love determine our knowing of the world with how memory, understanding, and will redefine these Trinitarian images in self-knowledge: in knowing what we already know as ourselves. The complex relation between knowing and self-knowing rewrites the absolute nature of mind into the "notion of love as a 'search"'(72). 14 In other words, Augustine follows the "certainties with regard to the nature of mind", defined by mind, knowledge and love, into a study of our sensory awareness of becoming in time, within ourselves, and
towards God. Finnegans Wake embodies such a study in the "finnecies of [its] poetry wed music" (377. 17).
Music can seem an "A and aa ab ad abu abiad. A babbel men dub gulch o f tears" (254. 17), and in this approach mathematics. A mathematics o f this sort articulates an order, a pattern, a logic of forms: a syntax pretending to generate out of this logic a content (even if only at the limits of sense). Poetry asserts that its essence lies not in its parts so much as in its organization. At this level of abstraction Peter Caws' description of poetry makes sense of such a mathematics: "words that belong together, to be
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remembered and recited in a given but not intuitively obvious order" (241). 15 From this he makes the important observation that the first and in many ways most significant poems we leam are the alphabet and the ordinal numbers. This belonging together functions like syntax does for Quine, which determines what strings count as legitimate within a language. Poetry can, therefore, be understood as syntax. But a syntax for what? What is the meaning o f the syntax o f this kind o f nonsense? The creative logic, the relationship between being and becoming, in Finnegans Wake enacts this question as, what Geoffrey Hill calls, the menace and atonement attending, maybe notjust ofpoetry, but ofbeing human. Finnegans Wake becomes a special kind of poetry in which we have to discover what goes together and why it remains apart. In constructing this syntax we build and uncoverTrinitarianversionsofourselves,identitiesconstructedastime: mindand memory; knowledge and understanding; love and will oscillating into each other through our own "present tense integument". We measure ourselves in reading the Wake as it measures us, and in this count ourselves as countable into being "to becontinued's Tale".
But even this measurement is only another language game, although one in which we crucify ourselves: one might call this a grammatical game with ontological consequences.
1Big Typescript, translated and cited by David G. Stem, in Wittgenstein on Mind and Langauge, 157. 2ForadiscussionoftheabsentsleeperseeJohnBishop. JoycesBookoftheDark: FinnegansWake. 3Reported Sightings.
4 I will investigate the complexity of how this works in chapter 13. 5Ed. A. F. vonPauly,G. Wissowa,etal. Marcovichreplacestheprobablycorruptfinalword'sleep'with 'waking reality'. Although this reconstruction remains controversial, it is supported by the logic of opposition found in the proceeding phrase, a logic animating much of the Heraclitian corpus. A similar logic o f opposition is o f course central to the working o f Finnegans Wake.
For an alternative reconstruction see D-K: Diels, h. rev. W. Kranz. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th ed. Zurich, 1951.
5Heraclitus: Fragments, A text and translation with a commentary. The fragment is found in Clement's Stomateis 4. 141. 2
7 The Basic Works o f Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon.
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8Plotinus,7volumes,trans. A. H. Armstrong. Ifwereimaginethesoulasourformoflifeandexpand experience into the complex interactions between language games this is not unlike how time is exposed in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Because o f his separation between the grammatical and the psychological, however, time is not hypostasized into a metaphysical category.
9 See Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary, translated by John J. Scullion S. J. Also Tanalch: The Holy Scriptures. Also Walther Eichrody, "In the Beginning: A Contribution to the Interpretation of the First Word of the Bible" (1962), Creation in the Old Testament, ed. Bernhard W. Anderson.
10ClementofAlexandria, Stromata. Liber7, EnglishandGreek,translatedbyFentonJohn Anthony Hort and Joseph B. Mayor.
11 Finnegans Wake: A Facsimile o f the Buffalo Notebooks, VI. B1-VI. B. 4, preface and arranged by David Hayman, VI. B. 40. 47.
12The grammar of this "why" is, therefore, very close to Wittgenstein's description of the statement "I understand" that I examine in the first chapter o f my dissertation.
13SylvainBromberger,"Why-Qustions",InMindandCosmos: EssaysinContemporaryScience and Philosophy.
14Augustine: Later Works.
15Yorick'sWorld: ScienceandtheKnowingSubject.
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IV
WTTTGENSTEINIAN TIME
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11
The Ontology of Time
The previous chapter was meant to show how the measurement of ourselves in the measurement of time makes the variety of syntaxes we use and inhabit visible or audible as semantic (or symbolic) systems. A sustained reading ofthe Wake, tracing through the grammatical shifts that enact time as an aspect o f the limit between sense and nonsense and between ourselves and the text, precipitates a version o f the same crisis that Karl Barth describes, in The Epistle to the Romans, which I earlier claimed informs Eliot's poetics. I asked, "how do we stand 'before an irresistible and all-embracing dissolution of the world, o f time and things and me, before a penetrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy o f a negation by which all existence is rolled up" (iii. 21). Finnegans Wake shows that this crisis, as it was for Adams, threatens less the world or our language, as our status within both. I suggested earlier that the vanishing o f any intentional target for Wake&n language (pointing as it ostensibly does at the vanished person asleep) both picks us out as its target (again exposing a crisis about how we constitute our world as ours) and displays itself as an intentional mechanism within which the world emerges as the shifting limits between grammatical and symbolic relations. Finnegans Wake is a temporal descriptionofthehumanmindenactingthisvanishingintentionality. Thisdescription(or enactment) o f time instigates and demonstrates as way o f thinking toward the limits o f sense. This thinking is what I understand as the construction o f a theological language
and stance, traced along a complicated interwoven epistemological limit described by skeptical doubt, science, and a resistance to the ontological claims o f poetic metaphysics,
Notes for this chapter are on page 492
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Vico'stermforthemythologicalimaginationsofmoreprimitivepeoples. Thetranslation of thinking into an enactment of time was systematized along a single continuum (as opposed to the shifting multiple times in Finnegans Wake and Philosophical
Investigations)byHegel,especiallyinthePhenomenologyofSpirit. Iwillnotinvestigate Hegel's phenomenological dialectic here, but I will use an aspect o f this dialectic as a path from Finnegans Wake to PhilosophicalInvestigations. This aspect ofthe
Phenomenology should be understood as elaboration ofthe becoming ofmind (both historically and philosophically) through the intentionality o f the dialectic, an intentionality describedbyourinteractionswiththephenomenalworld. Iwillbrieflydescribeapattern o f temporality (although for Hegel this should be understood as becoming and not time)
that unfolds subjectivity through a shifting intentionality.
Augustine's description of the dialectic from mind to soul describes an
hermeneutic education, as does Finnegans Wake, that remakes our human stance toward the world and God by remaking the forms within which we configure both this stance and the world. We discover God and ourselves within our language and practices. One way of understanding Wittgenstein is that he constructs a dialogic dialectic of fragments between our practices within language-games and totalities (from sentences to form(s) of life). Dialectic might sound misleading within its sense o f linear movement toward truth, missing the circular and repetitive perambulations that describe (or that the reader is forced to follow in) Philosophical Investigations. I use it, however, to describe the way in which any entry into the landscape of philosophical problems and ordinary language enacts a path from some problem to others through alternative descriptions. This path
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may return to the same problems again and again, but even in this circularity these problems change shape and color. The nature ofthis change (something I will discuss in the next section) alters the nature of our relation to the world described by these problems by and in our language, and thus provides a picture ofa kind oftemporality. Wittgenstein spoke with approval of the dialectical method:
. . . the dialectical method is very sound and a way in which we do work. But it should not try to find, from two propositions, a and b, a further more complex proposition, as (C. D. ) Broad's description implied. It's object should be to find out where the ambiguities in our language are. (74)1
These ambiguities shape the world because we inhabit them, and through them our inhabitationoftheworldbecomesvisible. Thus,ourthinkingabouttheseconfusions,ata fundamental level and as it does for Hegel, describes the limits in relation to which we live. ThepictureofhowWittgensteinthinks(orwrites),therefore,displaystheworld. The depth ofthe world is equivalent to the depth ofhow we think (not necessarily ofwhat we think). 2
The problem o f time can be understood as the problem o f the specious present, our phenomenologicalexperienceofchangethatfigurestheworldasflux. D. Stemhas shown how Wittgenstein's grammatical analysis developed through his analysis o f his own temptation to first construct a phenomenological language of our momentary experience (in response to the skeptical temptation to say that only the present exists, and thus only my present exists). 3 Wittgenstein realized that a claim like "all is flux" is a misuse of 'flux': "Language can only say those things we can also imagine otherwise"
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(Philosophical Remarks, 54). 4 Wittgenstein's analysis o f 'all is flux', however, always proceeds from the assumption that it is a phenomenological description ofthe world, in whichcaseitisnottruethateverythingisincontinualflux. Theleavesareblowninto spiraling relative to the branches to which they are attached. In addition, as a phenomenological description the claim that "all is flux" describes our sense of the present constantlyescapingourgrasp. InPhilosophicalInvestigations,Wittgensteinrecalls Augustine's description ofthis passing:
Here it is easy to get into that dead-end in philosophy, where one believes that the difficulty o f the task consists in this: our having to describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience that slips quickly by, or something of the kind. Where we find ordinary language too crude, and it looks as if we were having to do, not with the phenomena of every-day, but with ones that "easily elude us, and, in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others as an average effect". (PI? 436)5
There is a confusion here between "all is flux" as a description o f our experience (which is false) and as a description of the ground of the world, as if from the ultimate End (which is nonsense). Why imagine the world from the End? "All is flux" opposes and can be negated by our identity or being. "All is flux" expresses the fact that the we can be lost intochange. Itneitherdescribestheworld(asmetaphysics)orourexperience(as phenomenology), but the fundamental limit in relation to which we organize our being as something opposed to the world. The kind o f writing which describes this limit (that often describes or has the form of a log on a river) is history. What my analysis of the
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temporality ofFinnegans Wake partly was to show was that one way o f describing our involvement in language is as time.
Hegel, at the beginning ofthe Phenomenology, in "Sense-Certainty", generates the initial stages o f becoming out o f and through an involvement (containment, stances, and actions within and towards) in cognition, akin to that which 1 describe here as our involvement in language. This involvement, however, is understood to be defined by our cognition, and functions within a vast array o f technical distinctions (concepts, ideas, T , subjectivity, and so on) describing the relation between human knowledge and the phenomenalworldastheymakemanifesttheAbsoluteintheirinteraction. Hegel,inthe
Phenomenology ofSpirit, attempts to construct a condition in which the logic of relation that figures a subject knowing an object dissolves into a fundamental temporality (of course, he understands this as a discovery and not a construction). 6 The Hegelian dialectic drives to replace things with relations. Even at the beginning ofthe phenomenology, or at the beginning of the history of our knowing in "Sense-Certainty," being becomes history: "the dialectic o f sense-certainty is nothing else but the simple history o f its movement"(109). The universal categories defined by language in sense-certainty, T, 'Now', Here1, and 'This', become the surrogates for subjective being. In the chapter following "Sense-certainty" the dialectic through an ontology o f perception will dissolve these universals into qualities. Similar processes continue throughout the Phenomenology and effect the dissolution o f Being as identity into the Becoming o f time. When reading Hegel in this way, one begins to sketch a metaphysics o f time that defines the ontological necessity o f History understood as the interaction o f temporality and representation (i. e. ,
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cognition). Hegel configures representation, both as our cognitive understanding and as texts or objects, within a subjectivity dissolved through its knowing, thinking within the containing processes ofbecoming in Time. Hegel understands this configuration to be literally the history o f the world derived from an ontology o f time that underlies the conditions for knowing.
11. 1 Knowing time
History, the representation o f time as what is past, pretends to answer an ontological question that Wittgenstein, in the Brawn Book, breaks down into an underlying grammatical confusion: "Where does the present go when it becomes past, and where is the past? "(108). In this question, one has mistaken the "present" for a "thing" and thus one has constructed a conceptual logic, a sentence, by means o f a false analogy between saying "the present event passes by" and "a log [on a river] passes by". Wittgenstein is concerned about exposing the infelicitous form o f relating time and objecthoodthatmakesthesekindsofquestionsinsoluble. Onecansaymore. This mistaken analogy is one in which an intangible idea is objectified and subsumed within the category o f objects. Time has not been sublated into another term, or condition, but is
translatedintoitsantithesis,intothatwhichitnegates. Howthenisthisfalseanalogyto be distinguished from the many "new similes" that Wittgenstein uses to clarify philosophicalconfusion? Oneisfacedwiththeneedforsomesystemofevaluationfor correctness or falsity.
Wittgenstein's answer:
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We are inclined to say that both 'now' and 'six o'clock' refer to points in time. This use o f words produces a puzzlement which one might express in the question: What is the "now"? ' --for it is a moment oftime and yet it can't be said to be either the 'moment at which I speak' or 'the moment at which the clock strikes', etc. , etc. Our answer is: the function ofthe word 'now1is entirely different from that of specification o f time. This can easily be seen if we look at the role this word really plays in our usage of language, but it is obscured when instead of looking at the
whole language game, we only look at the contexts, the phrases o f language in
which the word is used. (BB108)
One must determine the function ofthe word "now", its use in the total language game used to talk about time. One must understand that the relation between "today" and the date is like that between "a hammer and a nail", and not like that between "a hammer and a mallet". A hammer and a nail are both elements within a specifically defined practice. Analogically, they both have a meaning within the same language game. A hammer and a mallet, however, are both elements of different, although parallel, language games. Wittgenstein's claim, therefore, is that the relation between 'today' and the date function within a single language game. I want to say, however, that today functions in a language game with yesterday and tomorrow (A-series). Any date functions in a language game of specific dates, a history (B-series). Wittgenstein's argument, therefore, attempts to dissolve this difference.
'Today' and date can function in a single language game--as in 'today's date'. 'Today' and the date can also function as different expressions of how one figures oneself
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as part o f a history. (They can also work as analogues for events: thus the shift in English from a date [June 6] to T have a date' [an assignation or appointment] uses 'date' as a metaphor for the event. This is, ofcourse, a different usage of"date" and thus its logic does not counter that described by Wittgenstein. ) Time is itself not actual (not an entity) butanobjectiveeffectintertwinedwithourperception. Iamusingactualand'objective' here in a way descended from Frege:
A thought, admittedly, is not the sort o f thing to which it is usual to apply the term 'actual'. The world of actuality is a world in which this acts on that, and changes it and again undergoes reactions itself and is changed by them. All this is a process in time. We will hardly admit what is timeless and unchangeable to be actual.
Now is thought changeable or is it timeless? The thought that we express by the
Pythagorean Theorem is surely timeless, eternal, unvarying. " (Thoughts, 372)7
Is time (a date or 'today' as words or concepts) something which is acted upon, that is changed and "itself experiences reactions and is changed by them"? And yet can we say that time is "timeless, eternal, unchangeable"? My discussions o f Heidegger's "Das Ding" and Joyce's Finnegans Wake demonstrate that time is not a concept with that kind of stability. But as a word, 'time' describes (mentions) this changing; it describes a limit. If you ask me 'what time is it? ', I cannot say 'no time' (except as nonsense or as part of a Zen koan, for example). I might say 3 o'clock, and I might be wrong. I can communicate the time, but can I communicate time? Is not any communication a form oftime, an ordered description of a process of change. This model of time as a kind of semantic process (both nested and serial: a sentence) is what undergirds Heidegger's description of
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the thing in "Das Ding". The communication oftime as a sentence (or as a language game) is always self-reflexive in that this communication manifests anyone's containment within this temporality. Such containment, however, is not expressed as the present, or as flux, or as something passing, but is itselfa grammar marking the particularity of meaning as both emerging from and resisting the totality (that is, it is not all meanings) o f language. Thus, 'what time is it? ' has as its target a specific time (or date), but as part o f a particular language game it enacts a temporal order as the limit o f my involvement within this game
(ifI do not know the time, I feel as ifthere is a pause in time, at least for the moment of my initial confusion; time has paused because I have slipped out o f the temporal order enacted by the language game. I have, however, other temporal orders which can always emerge as dominant).
Wittgenstein shows how we build ourselves into metaphysical cul-de-sacs by mistakingananalogyforadescriptionorforourexperience. Heunderstands'allisflux' to be primarily a statement about our experience translated into a claim about the world. "All is flux", just as date and today, as I have suggested, however, figures our lives as
totalities within the greater totality of change, as part of history. Speaking of Jakob Michael Lenz and a trip into the mountains o f over 170 years before, Celan in 1960 puzzles out the date on which that trip took place:
Perhaps one should say that each poem has its own 20th o f January inscribed within it? Perhaps what is now in the poems which are written today is just this: that here, most clearly, one seeks to remain mindful of such dates?
(Cited in Derrida, 310)
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Remembered behind 1960 and this speech, only 15 years before or since 1939 or 1933, is not just the loss instituted by Time or any other personification of life aging into death, but extermination;
Black milk o f daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at noon death is a master from Germany
we drink you at sundown and in the morning we drink and we
drink you
(Celan, "Death Fugue")
This of course is the moment for a melodramatic pronouncement on the value of memory- - which would then be countered by a list of the abuses of history that have supported tyranny, delusion, prejudice and hatred. Art cannot redeem the past, nor can history prevent many injustices; but the dynamic between the unique, the momentary, the living and the represented that Celan finds in art recapitulates the dynamic between being and representation in historical epistemology. This dynamic generates temporality as the actual condition for our being: cognition, the interaction between subjectivity and representation, generates Time.
This conception of temporality suggests that poetry defines an ontologic, a metaphysical logic in a Viconian sense: "That which is metaphysics insofar as it contemplates things in all the forms o f their being, is logic insofar as it considers things in alltheformsbywhichtheymaybesignified"(NS127). Thesesignifiedformsenmeshour consciousness within a network of relations that function as fundamental ontological definitions (showing what is as what it is): the production of meaning becomes the
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production of fundamental ontology. Thus for Rilke a poem condenses a condition of being into a single word; for Celan that word is a date, the mark o f being in time, the condensation o f being into the singularity o f the moment, and thus into an assertion o f existence. The poetic representation o f being becomes a way o f marking oneself as a limit to past-time and at the same time as a mark o f the distance between a mark as an identity (as if a grave stele) and our containment within the dynamic processes of nature or languageorbiology. Historyusedtosuppressidentitymirrorshistoryusedtopreserve
identity. The moral control over history becomes confused with the sheer opacity o f time; history constructed is time constructed, or as Benjamin writes "Telescoping o f the past through the present" ("Theory ofKnowledge", 60). Such constructions express and definethepowerandidentityofpersonsandgroups. Suchconstructionscreatean aesthetics oftime.
Wittgenstein's corrective analogy that today and date are related not as hammer to mallet but as hammer to nail is correct in our ordinary usages of these words to mark time as over and against us. But the analogy fails to capture our ordinary (or poetic, which I think is an ordinary use oflanguage) use ofthese words to express within different language games our containment within phenomenal time (today) or within serial time (date). Andthesearenot,ofcourse,theonlywaysofexpressingandenactingthis containment. Inrelationtotheentiresystemoflanguage,"now"anda"log"areformally equivalent, but functionally different. They are formal identities without content, which
can both serve as targets for expressing our sense o f loss. (There are many ways o f using a
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