Convening Onomatopoietics

J. Ryan Garner
Sep 3, 2018 · 6 min read

Let me set forth from an end rather than from a beginning. To begin at the end is to open on to a quest(ion) which is a summons to a journey of discovery. If anything our recent reading list has shown us is that our understanding — and its discursive movement — rarely proceeds by, or rests on, firm ground. We are often drawn forward, from afar, by divine allure. And so what question prompts my thought here? In anticipation of Luce Irigaray’s critique of feminine forgetfulness, it is apropos that our question be given life by a woman. Of course, not just “woman” in a generic sense, but by this woman: Jessica.

“Have any if our readings changed anything about the way you view your interests?”

In fact, questions can outline my following consideration. I begin with Heidegger’s question of Being and its implications on my interest in onomatopoietics. I continue by turning to the questions that Luce Irigaray poses to Heidegger to unsettle his masculine propriety over logos/being/thinking. In her questions I formulate revisions of my research inquiry of whether logos and its concomitant elements (names, being, laws, thoughts, etc.) can avoid economic propriety only through the “common” and the conventional?

HEIDEGGER. Without retracing every step of Heidegger’s sweeping system, it is important to note the question which niggles Heidegger. Namely, how can we think Being, especially, at the end of a historical epoch that has spent most of its time (or has progressed forward by) forgetting that question? He responds by including this forgetfulness in the very way of Being itself. Here, at the edge of Being’s oblivion, he proposes a way to recover Being via a careful reflection on the nature of concealment/unconcealment. In that rethinking — in that foray into revelation, into αλήθεια — it is Dasein’s unique property of logos, as some mode of mythologisation, that provides entry into the mystery of being’s disclosure. There, being-there, he now has a place, through his language (λογος), to give an account-for (λογος) and gather (λογος) Being into his thought.

Logos is a necessary “site” whence to encounter Being. In his earlier work, the role of death is critical in securing the logos. Namely, if all of being is unfolding in the interplay of disclosure and concealment, then thought — man’s thought — will have a hard time gaining any traction if it has no “location” whence to gaze (awe) at the brightness of disclosure. Thus, dwelling, as worldhood are a kind of private property which must be secured by edges. As is well known, the greatest of all edges, for Heidegger, is death. It is a horizon which permits of no beyond. Thus, all employment of logos — as a site forthinking or speaking Being — is circumscribed/located by the perimeters of death.

This system bears directly on all poetic constructions. In a sense, carving out a space to dwell, to think Being, is concomitant with naming/making things which comprise the “worldhood” of the thinking self. Thinking-Being is inelecutably onomatopoietic. So, creativity is both haunted by the death which informs Dasein’s projections, and open to the free play of design. If Heidegger is right, then all human actions are poetic/projected circumscriptions. Or, put differently, as “edging,” human acts are names. So, our indwelt thinking coincide with the “things” which we both make and discover as our projected worldhood. These creations are vulnerable to inverse movements. On the one hand, the names we give by creating things could lead us away from our death, subsumed in their present representation, and unto the forgetfulness of our own fragile, albeit authentic, making. On the other hand, the things we make can always begin again (rebeginnings) on the surface of a perpetual canvas.

But, then, I read Irigaray.

IRIGARAY. Irigaray’s question for Heidegger is deceptively simple (though her writing is anything but). She asks: what does man build his dwelling out of? What does he construct his names out of? Irigaray’s examination of Heidegger reveals a dark matter, heretofore unthought, which gives space and energy for man’s domain of thinking and being. This dark “matter” is the feminine gift of air that precedes the closed envelope of Dasein’s thinking/Being. That is, before thought could engage Being, there was a clearing and by implication, “something” was cleared.

Throughout the work she demonstrates how man’s thinking of Being is bound to his worldhood projections. It ultimately frames his relationship to Being’s so-called opening and clearing. Critically, he comes to believe that all of the things which are included in his horizonal projections are given from outside. That is, from Being’s disclosure. But, as she deftly shows, they, in fact, come from him because “Being” is founded by/in him. Man’s ontological reflections, and the ontic manifestations thereof, are not a response to Being’s disclosure but rather are the very thoughts which make Being an object at all. That is, his witnessing (λογος) of disclosure and his gathering (λογος) of Being into an understanding, are the parthenogenetic births of both “Being” and himself. If the ontological thoughts are born in him, then who gives him birth? Simply put: her. Thus, for Irigaray, this founding of thought in the opening/clearing of Being’s disclosure is a second moment which conceals a more original and more elemental gift or birth.

For Irigaray, his blindness to his appropriation of her leaves behind the original feminine “matter.” In the same way that Marduk uses of Tiamat’s body in the Babylonian epic The Enuma Elish, man is given birth/breath by a mother and then in turn cuts her up and uses her body to form the elements of his own dominion. Man delusionally roams in his domain, perpetually reinscribing his importance by delineating ontological differences.

For Irigaray, all is not lost in the forgetting. She can be recovered but not within the horizon of his own ontological sandbox. In the same way that she gives birth to him by making room within herself, he can/should do the same if he wants to come close to/meet the most originary questions. The sexual (secare) difference precedes the ontological diffference. That’s where she is.

Midway through the essay, her critique transforms my question: if man’s naming/circumscribing is locked in this sandbox of oblivion, then aren’t all the “proper” roles he gives to things in his worldhood merely as empty as his own delusion? In other words, in his proprietary control over being, then beings have no proper place. There is only one place, him, and it is death, at that.

THE COMMON AND THE CONVENTIONAL. So, I renew my earlier question: should logos be superficial and common in light of Irigaray’s simple but profound critique. Man has departed from the feminine who birthed him and has established a kingdom of propriety in which all proper existences are illusory. His proper delineations of “things” seem to depend on the private and proprietary depth of his own death. But this depth swallows up all surfaces and all difference, ironically, in the name of establishing them. For irigary, this swallowing reflects man’s attempt to reconcile the loss of his own birth. Can he return to her and cease his wandering?

Her resolution is one in which a shared birthing and living resituates naming-unto-death. Life can happen only if birthing, establishing place, is not unilateral. It is not proprietary, or to be appropriated, but common. I am increasingly persuaded then that the poetic activity outlined as naming/circumscribing/dwelling can be secured, not in thought, but in a convention that is a shared naming. If logos is shared, then it is not a depth but a surface where many are brought together and mutually enable one another’s life.

The “commons” can become the surface/site/place where life is legislated. όνομα and νόμος, name and law, respectively, have a peculiar affinity. In full Heideggarian fashion, by simply observing their visible similarity, a conceptual relation surfaces. To set forth law is to do so by naming or in the name of. Nomos, or law, has connotations of erecting a public monument (with a nominal inscription) around which people gather. Logos does not gather but is the result of gathering sexed others into a shared birthing; or gather unto a bilateral placemaking. The whole of this act, this common logos, we can call onomatopoetic convening.

J. Ryan Garner

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www.jryangarner.com

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