Alphonso Lingis and My Writing

 

Emplacements

A professor of philosophy who mainly used travel experiences as inspiration, whose works were structured by his own photographs, personal reflections, hypothetical experiential scenarios, switches of gender, ethnicity, culture, tribal identity; whose writing sometimes felt like anthropology, sometimes ethnography, sometimes autobiography, sometimes phenomenology, sometimes philosophy – Alphonso Lingis’s work throws down a gauntlet that shakes the ground and resonates for all who encounter it.

What genre is this? Why is it written in this manner? What work is it doing that another style of writing could perhaps not do? Lingis draws into question and makes us think about the ways in which we work and write across the disciplines. Why this style, these conventions, these aesthetic features?

Lingis’s work is indisciplinary in Jacques Rancière’s sense, refusing established partitions, exploring embodiment and phenomenology, affect, perception, the felt aesthetics of everyday life (what Shusterman calls somaesthetics), while elaborating, exploring, expanding or challenging some of the central ideas of major philosophers and influential scholars, often on the basis of nothing more than direct reflections on the practices of daily life, from waking up to lying down, dreaming, growing up, ageing, being a member of a South American or African tribe or a Californian bodybuilder.

In reading Lingis, I began to wonder what his work says about, or seeks to do, or does to academic writing, and hence what it suggests academic writing ‘does to us’ or to the things it takes as its object, in being as it is – ‘samey’ within specific academic spaces, and ‘different’ in precise, predictable and stable ways across the disciplines. What does this distribution mean? What does it do or prevent from being done? Does Lingis’s performative critique contain what he would call an imperative to respond?

Contacts

I decided to try to read some of Alphonso Lingis’s work after one of his arguments was mentioned in a work on ‘object oriented ontology’ (OOO). I found the rest of the work on OOO to be stupefyingly boring; but a single mention of one of Lingis’s arguments woke me up. I went hunting online for free PDFs.

I found a 1991 essay called ‘We Mortals’ and started to read. The first paragraphs had me. They described a life and effortlessly traversed miles of cultural and sociological theory. No references, no quotations, no paraphrases; just a clear, broad and deep grasp not simply of decades and more of cultural theories, but more precisely of the essential processes that those theories try to discern, feel out, sketch and comprehend. I was hooked.

I read more. I ordered books from online shops and found repositories of PDFs and EPUBs from which I harvested as many as I could. I took notes. I copied and pasted quotes. I didn’t exactly know why. My mind behaved like lustful hands as Lingis describes them in his essay, ‘Lust’. The hands in sensuous, sexual, lustful encounters don’t know where or why they are hungrily travelling, squeezing, caressing the other’s body; they just are. It is a deep sensuality, aimless, open, expansive, capacious. My intellectual fervour was like that. I just loved the words, the sentences, the sentiments. I wanted to grab them, to have them, somehow. I didn’t know what to do with them. At times it was like there was no ‘doing with them’, there was only a kind of trying to absorb them, to be absorbed by them; to merge with them, to merge them into me. Just like lust. Intense.

I realised that the effect of Lingis on me, the proper response that his work seemed to be demanding of me, was not the accumulation of evermore quotations and clever arguments. It had to be nothing less than a revolution in my academic language, a revolution that as yet had no model, but that was precipitated by the assimilation of something from Lingis into something about my writing. That revolution seemed to involve the poetic – the smashing together of poetry and theory.

Encounters

Shortly after, I went to Mexico. Gabriela invited me. There, I was to talk about AI and the crisis of the humanities, to do a workshop on tai chi and embodiment, and also to meet with PhD students that Gabriela had been priming for my visit by making them read old essays of mine – ‘On Embodiment’ and (even older) ‘Deconstruction is a Martial Art’. Before arriving, I looked again at these old essays of mine and thought ‘who was this person who wrote like this?’ I remembered David Huddart’s review of my first ever monograph. David said there that my writing was ‘limpet-like’, by which he meant that I stuck to details, and moved microscopically or micrologically, fixating on specific located details, deconstructing arguments on the basis of their most tiny loose threads. At that time, I was steeped in Derrida’s claimed belief that details are decisive.

But now these old essays were played back at me, and I felt two things. First, pity for the poor students who had to try to read them. And second, a kind of fear that I was going to disappoint, as I was no longer a limpet-like writer, or reader. Now, I had to be carried along on the waves and currents of a work that had to feel like a symphony, otherwise I would simply stop reading. But what about my writing?

Seven months later, in Vancouver, Gabriela – who loves the written word more than anyone I know – asked me why I don’t write like that anymore. I said that I no longer believed in Derrida’s argument that the devil is in the detail – or, rather, that I do believe that, but really that things change (as she said in her latest Substack essay, and as Sloterdijk has argued of ‘renaissances’) via sloppy misreadings, rather than precise hyper-vigilant close readings. I added that, since starting to read Lingis, I felt a need to change my writing, in much the same way that Walter Benjamin said the translation of a foreign body into another language should change that language. But, I added, that this would not mean ‘writing like Lingis’; rather, taking inspiration from Lingis and trying to find my own voice with Lingis in mind.

I guess this is most of what has changed over the years. I think I have found a voice. I no longer piece my arguments together via direct quotations or the reorganisation of someone else’s words. Of course, I do. Once you’ve read some Barthes or Derrida’s ‘Signature Event Context’ it is hard to think otherwise. But now, after Lingis, I feel like my voice is changing again.

In a quiet restaurant in Brighton, Daniel Mroz casually suggests that a key difference between writers like Derrida and, say, sociologists, is that while the latter want to say something about the world, the former want to have an effect on you, in you. One operates at the level of content (‘hey, here’s a fact about the world’), the other transforms the world for you, the reader, through the way it’s being written. Something like that.

In some anonymous review on Amazon of some book or other by Lingis – I forget which book – a reader makes the delightful observation that they love this book because although it is a book that is entirely about a specific thinker, it does not include one single quotation from the thinker that it is about.

I want to do both of these things.

Alternatives

In Mexico, I rave about my new love of Lingis. I even crowbar him into my talk on AI and the crisis of the humanities. I jam Lingis together with Ben Highmore’s essay ‘Aesthetic Matters’, in which Highmore argues that, really, we need to think about what we are losing and what we are missing when we make students conform only, solely, exclusively to the genre of the academic essay – the dry analysis of something and the predictable development, in form and structure, of a specific kind of argument.

My enthusiasm is contagious. Gabriela goes and reads some Lingis immediately. It puts a spell on her as it did on me. Within weeks, we are plotting projects together. She starts writing Substacks too.

Gabriela shows me another Alphonso Lingis. For me, Lingis had perhaps primarily shown me that another way is possible in terms of writing style, in terms of orientation, and in terms of making some kind of intervention – differently – Gabriela starts to show me just how far the unique content of his thinking, his argument goes; just how deep into the depths it all goes.

Thus, Gabriela’s readings give me another Lingis, one fused with her own deep understanding of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Nietzschean philosophy, and more. I learn from this, learn to find a place, learn to be reborn. I did not plan this, nor was it pre-ordained, though it is an elaboration, involving striving, affordances, obstacles, intrusions, events, reconfigurations.

One is born with forces that one did not contrive. One lives by giving form to those forces. Forms that one picks up from others. One takes one’s place in a place another has vacated. One sits in chairs, opens doors, rides a tricycle, giving the form to one’s posture and limbs that one picks up from the others. Chairs, doors, tricycles themselves require and indicate certain postures and movements of one’s limbs. For they are not made for one’s body in particular, but for anyone of a certain age and a certain general size. One makes oneself someone, another one, by taking on the posture and movement they require. Taking a seat in the library, working out the theorems of geometry as they have been worked out by generations of students in this library, one makes oneself a student, another student. Buying another car from the assembly line, paying for it with a check, driving to the supermarket and the disco, makes oneself a modern Westerner. Buying jeans and a business suit, walking in a stride, throwing the baseball with the full thrust of one’s torso, sprawling when sitting, one makes one’s originally polymorphously perverse infantile body male; buying a dress and lipstick, waving one’s fingers, sitting without crossing one’s legs, throwing the baseball with only one’s arm and not the full torso, one makes one’s perverse infantile body female. One gives one’s experiences form by identifying things with the names with which everyone calls them, by seeing the paths and the obstacles others see, by envisioning the goals others are turned to. One says, about the weather, about the boring town and the exciting big city, about the communists, about the football game, about the new album, what one says, what others say. To learn to think is to learn what others think, about physics, about astronomy, about molecular biology, about keeping up one’s car and about managing a business. One learns to see things by following the eyes and gestures of others; one learns to feel solid and flexible and liquid and textured things by manipulating and palpating things as others do. One gives the confusion of sensations and drives in one’s head form by feeling about the concert as others feel, by feeling about one’s wedding and about funerals as one feels about weddings and funerals, by feeling as one feels, as anyone feels, indignation about social slights and boredom over operas and disgust over snakes or pigs.

One makes oneself someone by giving oneself form, one acquires an identity, a gender, a function, a solidity, one overcomes the one malaise and feeling of impotence that accompanies the confused stirring of one’s forces and impulses. One makes oneself someone, another one of a series. The forms of one’s movements and postures, of one’s gaits and gestures, of one’s conversations and one’s thoughts and one’s feelings and one’s perceptions one picks up from others, passes on to others. One feels oneself a wave on a sea of life that comes indefinitely from the past and extends indefinitely into the future.