Good afternoon, beloved —
I’m writing to you this afternoon from the endless gloom of a May that seems destined to remain late-winterish to its very last day, which makes it feel like a perfect time to discuss aporia.
Say what now? I’m sure I’ve mentioned to you that much of my reading over the past few months has consisted of titles with “life” in the title, ‘cause that’s what they're centrally about (e.g. What Is Life?, Entangled Life, After Life), as well as a series of books that concern themselves with the reassertion of that substance or quality in an environment comprehensively worked over by the hand of “Man” — here I'm talking about works like Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape, Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide, or Richard Mabey’s 1973 classic The Unofficial Countryside. In some sense these books are all research for the science fiction I’m trying to write, and certainly that’s how I intend to mobilize them and put them to work. But really it would be more accurate, emotionally as well as gestationally, to say that the science fiction I’m trying to write is a way of reframing this sprawling body of knowledge so that I can assimilate it more thoroughly.
I think it’s fair to suggest (as Nurri does) that my sudden interest in questions of life has more than a little bit to do with coming through a year more or less explicitly conditioned by death. Coming into the fullness of my middle age in this time of plague, coming to terms with the end of things, circumstances and beings I love, and all the possibilities they represented to and for me, I’m finding mortality approaching from a number of directions and in a variety of different guises. So perhaps this encroaching awareness of cessation is what’s driving my need to understand the processes of life (particularly in their generative, fructifying or productive aspects) as a way of shoring up my sense that, at least for now, that generativity remains a possibility for me. At any rate, that’s my working assumption.
And at the moment, it’s through the thought and writing of Eugene Thacker that I’m best able to approach such questions. In After Life, the work of his I’ve picked up most recently, his fundamental concern is whether there remains a place for a philosophical approach to the production of knowledge regarding life, between the reductionism of purely materialist science and the metaphysical dogmas of religion. The questions he asks in the course of this exploration are intriguing to me. Just how do we construct life, its limits, its outsides and its others? Without descending into vitalism, is it meaningful to discuss a force or quality called Life operating in the universe, a force that is somehow other and apart from a mere accounting of that-which-lives?
I myself tend to view this latter as a nonquestion, a frank category error deriving from the incommensurability of language (and human cognition really) with the reality it’s attempting to account for. But that doesn’t mean I won't happily spend a few days turning thoughts like this over in my mind, or considering the way others have engaged them down through the centuries. And in any event, Thacker is good company — a trifle chilly, perhaps, and certainly idiosyncratic, but never up his own ass in the way that writers of theory can so easily be.
After Life builds slowly and patiently, starting with a genealogy of neo-Platonist thinkers whose names I’d barely heard before, and not really registered: Plotinus, say, or the mysterious Syrian known to history only as “the Pseudo-Dionysius.” From the very start Thacker opens his discussion of their thought by deploying a basic philosophical vocabulary — affirmation, negation, the distinction between presupposition and presumption, and so on — as well as concepts drawn from the Western theological tradition, chiefly negative theology.
And it’s the former vocabulary that really blew my mind. Though I’d never heard it described in just those terms, conceptually negative theology is something I'm fairly familiar with in its Taoist and Zen Buddhist manifestations. It’s a tool I’ve been thinking with and building a practice on since, oh, 1994 or so, and I no longer find it anything but a matter-of-fact insight. By contrast, I find myself Googling most of the technical philosophical terms Thacker uses willy-nilly in his discussion of the neo-Platonists, just to ensure that I’m more or less on the right track, and the rigor of thought I’m exposed to in the course of this inquiry is just bracing to me.
This is particularly so regarding the notion of aporia, which is so fundamental to the kind of thinking and writing Thacker’s doing that he never bothers to define it. I mean, why should he? It’s an idea you most likely came across at some point early on in your studies. It feels like a very freshman-year-of-college thing to me, the Socratic method (or at least it would be in the States, I can imagine that it’s squarely high-school material elsewhere), and it seems eminently fair to take it for granted that any prospective reader of a work like After Life would retain comprehensive familiarity with it. But — such is the way of the autodidact — I’ve never really been properly or systematically exposed to this material.
Sure, I knew the Socratic method involves an interlocutor asking you as the person making a proposition a series of questions. I knew these are generally posed from a stance of feigned naivety, gently or mockingly as the case may be, depending on how arrogant you are in making your claims. And I knew that when undertaken in mutual good faith, we could describe this method as an attempt to refine, through a process of successive approximation, just what it is we might collectively be able to affirm about the subject under examination. But the idea that, having entered this encounter full of confidence in the correctness of your position, the very point of being questioned in this way is to lead you to a (hopefully fruitful) place of uncertainty, where you realize you know less about the topic of discussion than you did at the outset...and very possibly nothing meaningful at all? I don't at all mind admitting that this is a novel thought to me, or that it hit me pretty hard.
What landed with particular force about this is that — in unintentionally teaching me first-year philosophy in the slipstream, and therefore giving me a word for this state of being — Thacker has helped me recognize how very much time I spend these days in a state of extended aporia. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s where I've been living for awhile now. I’m not at all sure what it remains possible to affirm full-throatedly, whether about the purpose and value of my own existence, about the most productive way to join with others and work toward a goal I’ll still describe as “liberation,” or about the kind of stance we should adopt, as individuals or communities, in the face of the existential peril we find ourselves confronted with.
To be sure, others do possess that certainty, some of them people I admire greatly. But I have to tell you that whenever I encounter such steadfast self-assurance, on anything but the most basic and obvious questions, it generally scares me — it puts me in mind of Yeats. So maybe another way of understanding this relatively sudden turn toward the production of science fiction, speculative fiction, is right there in the name: it’s a way of articulating landscapes, launching probes, multiplying possibilities, and just maybe resolving this persistent state of aporia, in at least some limited regard. In the case of the short story I shared with you in its first draft a few weeks back, “The Inheritance,” I’m specifically interested in what happens when someone who thinks they’re equipped for (and in fact are undertaking) one kind of care realizes they’re being called to an entirely different kind. But there are other questions to engage, other limits and outsides to explore, and hopefully lessons to bring home from exploring them. Bear with me, won't you? I find the prospect easily as exciting as anything else I’ve ever done as an adult.
§ In addition to the above, I've been reading Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone, Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which may not be in the slightest bit authoritative but makes for a cracking afternoon read, and last week’s superlative issue of the LRB, just jampacked with goodness; listening to the new Nadja, Luminous Rot, plus the usual Lingua Ignota, Deafheaven, etc.; and watching the extraordinary State Funeral, a 150-minute epic cobbled together from contemporaneous footage of Joseph Stalin’s 1953 obsequies (with cameos from Zhou Enlai, Urho Kekkonen and Harry Pollitt).
Until next time, then: please remember to take care of yourself and those who need you, and to let yourself be taken care of. You have, as ever,
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 109 of Sunday, 23 May 2021, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊