The Nothing That Is

Essays on Art, Literature and Being

Johanna Skibsrud

• Publisher: Book*hug Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781771665261
• eBook ISBN: 9781771665278
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Dissertations littéraires

Rather than making "something" out of "nothing," what follows is an endeavour to express the potential of language and thought to encounter what is infinitely beyond both yet to be imagined.

In The Nothing That Is, Johanna Skibsrud gathers essays about the very concept of "nothing." Addressing a broad range of topics—including false atrocity tales, so-called fake news, high-wire acts, and telepathy, as well as responses to works by John Ashbery, Virginia Woolf, Anne Carson, and more—these essays seek to decentre our relationship to both the "givenness" of history and to a predictive or probable model of the future.

The Nothing That Is explores ways in which poetic language can activate the possibilities replete within our every moment. Skibsrud reveals that within every encounter between a speaking "I" and what exceeds subjectivity, there is a listening "Other," be it community or the objective world.

“The nothing that is”

An Ethics

I. The nothing that is

There is nothing I can say. There is nothing I can write. There should be a writing of non-­writing. Someday it will come. A brief writing, without grammar, a writing of words alone. Words supported without grammar. Lost. Written, there. And immediately left behind.

This description of a non-­writing yet to come — from a late essay by Marguerite Duras titled “Writing” — is also a description of the poetic approach already underlying every one of her diverse creative texts (novels, plays, essays, and films). And yet Duras is right to cast the possibility of “non-­writing” into the future. To write, and to read, poetically is to cast beyond the perceivable limits of language and temporal being. As Michael Eskin puts it in Ethics and Dialogue, poetry “unsays” ontology. It speaks not from, or to, simple presence, but from the pre-­ontological grounds whereupon “nothing” becomes “something.” In other words, poetic writing challenges ontology by revealing and questioning the very grounds against which we perceive, and figure, “being.” It draws attention to the very fact of those grounds — and therefore to the interpretive process according to which ontology arises at all. At stake in this recognition is not only the ethical question of who, or what, can be imagined as “being,” but also the questions What are the limits of “something” and “nothing”? What, and who, can be addressed?

Through its emphasis on the continuous, rather than binary, relation between something and nothing, speaker and listener, Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man” illustrates a specifically poetic possibility: that of expressing the point of contact, and therefore of potential exchange, between the representation of a finite subject or object and what refuses, or is refused, representation. The poem’s negation of a coherent human subject within the figure of “The Snow Man” — described as “nothing himself” — emphasizes the capacity of poetry to test the limits of both subjectivity and discourse. It ultimately engages the reader in an unlikely encounter at the end of the poem with both “[n]othing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

Although “something” is certainly suggested by both of these iterations of “nothing” in the poem’s final line (especially by the use of the definite article and the copular verb in “the nothing that is”), this “something” is — in both cases — radically withheld.¹ Likewise, “nothing” in the poem can in no way be understood as a simple negation. Through a complicated “unsaying” of the grammar of subjectivity, the poem succeeds in suspending the categories of “something” and “nothing,” “speaker” and “listener,” “subject” and “object,” “being” and “non-­being,” to reveal the ongoing process of interpretation that precedes — and makes possible — both experiential and linguistic access to being, meaning, and form. What the poem ultimately represents, then, is neither an abstract concept nor a perceivable “thing,” but a moment of contact — immanent within every form of representation — between what is and what is not (or not yet) possible to perceive and understand.

“Modern poetry,” Simon Critchley asserts in Things Merely Are, “achieves truth through emotional identification, where actor and audience fuse, becoming two-­in-­one.” This “fusion” is usually conceived of in abstract terms, but it might equally be conceived of as a concrete space of encounter. Poetry — I argue — creates a point of potential contact and exchange by preserving the difference between the (known) parameters of the subject and/or art-­object and the (unknown) other.

To think this possibility through more fully, I propose turning to Null Object (figure 1) — an installation created in 2012 by the UK-­based London Fieldworks (Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson), with the participation of artist and activist Gustav Metzger. In keeping with both the aesthetic and political goals of the “auto-­destructive” art movement — for which Metzger penned the first manifesto — Null Object emphasizes the significance not of the object (or “non-­object”) produced and presented by the installation, but rather of the procedure that manifested it.

Instructed to think about “nothing,” Metzger was hooked up to an EEG that measured the electrical activity in his brain. This data was then translated into a set of instructions for a robot programmed to carve out the interior of a 50-­centimetre cube of 145-­million-­year-­old Portland stone. What we confront in Null Object is a depiction of the point of contact between “something” and “nothing,” as well as between the conceptual and the non-­conceptual. The material heft and sheer size of the art object can be neither abstracted nor ignored. Even the negative space at its centre is not truly “negative,” but instead the result of a set of positive instructions. Through the process of recording, interpreting, and representing Metzger’s effort to think “nothing” against the material limit of Portland stone, London Fieldworks represents the way that the “null” subject is rendered legible as a subject in contradistinction to the “null” object it helped define.

While Stevens’s “The Snow Man” asks us to recognize, and reconsider, the boundaries of something and nothing, self and other, through grammatical and rhetorical play, Null Object presents the point of contact and potential exchange between these categories in three-­dimensional and material terms. My hope is that by reading Stevens’s poem and its conceptual expression of “the nothing that is” alongside Null Object, we may arrive at a fuller understanding of the actual, material (rather than abstract, virtual) potential for poetry to address itself beyond the borders of subjectivity and self-­reflexive discourse: to become a sort of “non-­writing” that is also an ethics.

I intend ethics here both in a broad sense — as a way of thinking the integral relationship between self and other, known and unknown — and in the narrower one suggested by Stevens in his essay “The Necessary Angel”: poets should, Stevens writes in this essay, “help people live their lives.”² To “not-­write,” according to Duras’s use of the term, is an ethics in both of these senses. It is a resistance to the grammar of finite and self-­enclosed subjectivity — and thus a resistance to the equation of self and world. It is also a commitment to locating within each word (“without supporting grammar”) the point at which language touches upon, but fails to grasp, what shapes language by remaining utterly beyond it. To “not-­write” is thus to arrive at a way of attending to what poet and theorist Fred Moten calls “difference without separability”³ — and of locating within every perceivable power structure the real presence of what we can’t, or can’t yet, see or understand.

II. Address Circuits and Contact Zones

Addressed to no one in particular, “The Snow Man” can be considered an “overheard meditation, writes Jonathan Culler in Theory of the Lyric. It functions like the rhetorical figure of apostrophe: an “address to the reader by means of address to something or someone else.” But it also tests this formula’s distinction between the apostrophic voice and the listening other by representing the essential entanglement of subject, object, and reader. By the poem’s end, all three have collided within the single figure of the listener, allowing the poem to playfully disrupt a rhetorical or speech-­based model of subjectivity, as well as the categories of self and other, “something” and “nothing.”

The impersonal pronoun in the poem’s opening line — “One must have a mind of winter” — suggests a certain procedural distance and signals objectivity and uniformity, which the rest of the poem both builds upon and undercuts. The reader participates in this depersonalizing process as it progresses via the subtraction of human faculties: intellect, sight, feeling, and hearing. By the final stanza, it is not only the subject — and object — of the poem (“the snow man”), but also the reader who can be understood to exist as “nothing himself,” within the evacuated figure of “the listener.”

From this position, the reader (like “the snow man”) may indeed look upon, listen to, read, and know “nothing” — and thus, this “nothing” can hardly be understood as a conceptual void. Instead, the tensions and layerings between different linguistic and ontological expressions of “nothing” in the poem direct us toward a confrontation with the limits of perception and representation, inviting us to conceive of being not as a positive substance but as an interactive and an interpretive process. The poem, in other words, asks us to attend to the limits of being, knowledge, and discourse, not as lack or negation (despite its characterization of a world seemingly denuded of life and movement), but rather as an enfolding of plenitude and possibility. The snow man, the landscape, the listener — even “nothing” itself — are both there and not there. The poem itself functions as a site of indefinite, recursive, and infinitely renewable potential and exchange between being and non-­being, “something” and “nothing.” It allows for the possibility of contact with, rather than abstraction from, that which the subject and reader of the poem cannot yet apprehend — either because “something” has been taken for granted, or because it has been actively negated or denied.

What is described in the final line, then, within “the nothing that is,” is ultimately neither ontological nor linguistic. It instead refers to a pre-­ontological, prelinguistic terrain where these categories have not yet been applied or cannot yet be distinguished — not because “nothing” doesn’t exist, but because the very real presence of whatever “nothing” names has so far remained invisible or has yet to be acknowledged.

By emphasizing the inherent paradoxes of referencing and representing what is ultimately unrepresentable, Stevens resists merely rebranding “nothing” as “something” (or vice versa). Instead, his poetic-­ontological investigation foregrounds the continuities between subject and object, presence and absence, the finite and the infinite. Poetry, Stevens reminds us, offers a way of rethinking — and unsaying — the borders of the abstract transcendental subject by uncovering the grounds upon which those borders have been erected. It exposes us to the following questions: What is remaindered in the process of arriving at “something” — or someone? What do language and subjectivity cover over? What are the ethical implications of perceiving and reflecting on the “something” of “nothing”?

In his essay “Blackness and Nothingness,” Fred Moten, echoing Stevens, restates the fundamental question at the root of every rigorous poetical or ethical investigation of being and language: “The question is,” he avers, “Where would one go and how would one go about studying nothing’s real presence, the thingly presence, the facticity, of the nothing that is?” Motens’s answer — and Steven’s, too — is to study the “thingly presence” of the poem.

III. “Poesis, Poesis”

Although poetry maintains a unique relationship to what exceeds the bounds of its own discourse, it is important to emphasize the continuities between poetry and other modes of knowledge production. Rather than making an exception of poetry — rarefying and ultimately isolating it from the world with which it seeks to engage — we should recognize, along with Galvano Della Volpe, that poetry, too, is a “rational and intellectual procedure” not fundamentally different from the discourses of “history and science in general.” “The poet, to be a poet,” writes Della Volpe in Critique of Taste, “has to think and reason in the literal sense of the terms. He must come to grips with the truth and reality of things . . . no less than the historian or the scientist in general.”⁴

And yet Della Volpe overlooks an important difference between a poetic approach to “truth” and those of ...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Dedication
• Introduction
• “The nothing that is”
• Barbarians Among Us
• “If I were human”
• “The horror, the horror”
• “Refloating” the Falling Man
• Absence in “The System”
• Transcribing the Waves
• “Poetic Emergency”
• “If we dare to”
• Visual Histories
• A “Most Human” Call
• Works Cited
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Essais Series
• Titles in the Essais Series:
• Colophon