The blackboard, the black rectangle had three entrances through numbers and equations. Hard to find one’s way in, Harder still to find one’s way out, as the numbers moved onto each other’s lines, into their brackets, unconstrained by outside descriptions, prohibitions, and explanations. They simply attached themselves, compounding each other’s values. The entrances could only be opened from the inside, as if the black rectangle had been walled in and someone or something else was behind or inside it. The numbers were, no doubt codes, perhaps arbitrary, perhaps axes meant to intersect at pertinent points that would trigger some unseen lock to spring open. From there, the secret knowledge would be released that was, however, already written on the surface. Without the requisite understanding, though, the secret knowledge would be unfulfilled, incomplete. One imagined there were stairs on the other side, like those Charles Dodgson ran up when late at Oxford , hidden from the other faculty and students who were already sitting and dining at the long tables stretched lengthwise across the long hall. But I was talking about a black rectangle, not a staircase, although perhaps from the perspective of the interior staircase, the long dining hall was the black rectangle colored by a sea of black academic robes, each with hidden pockets that hid only those books that were small enough to fit inside them. Inside one of these books, a black page, 2 black pages, 2 black rectangles. The pages on either side of the black pages can be flipped in either direction without revealing any 1 of the 3 entrances. It is necessary to be still, to stand in the blacklight, in the studied blindness of foreground/background elision, for something to appear and to know what it is as appearance, an unconcealing of what was there as what was always already here, the book of the future, presencing.
Always Already
Heidegger time-travels in his writing, not in the metaphoric sense of moving from time to time but in the sense of repeatedly arriving before time—in the two senses of “before,” meaning in front of and pre-ontologically, primordially. His philosophy is advanced through this before-ness derived from his conceptual prime mover Dasein, so-called being-there, this “there” being-in-the-world, with-others, and (even) for-itself. Dasein is a sort of tree fiction with many linguistic branches, each one of which is taken apart and put back together to get to an idea of relevance that comes-into-presence before we come to language as it is commonly understood. Levinas’s face-to-faceness takes on a pre-social being that reaches toward the otherness that is already present in the “innerworldly beings” we are. This time-traveling, then, is, as is time itself, “always already ” as an idea. The apparent redundancy of the “always already” is meaningful in what it says about appearance as a self-limiting way of understanding being as a mere one-after-the-other problem. “Always already ” is on this level an anti-time signature (in the traditional sense), which, at second glance, is what it actually appears to be insofar as language—another way of structuring appearance—can be said to “be” at all, meaningfully. “Being and Time ,” which one assumes expresses a logical relationship between its two components uses “and” to cover the more nuanced idea that said relationship cannot be assumed but must be arduously worked toward from what may be a separateness that the use of the “and” forestalls with its familiar usage. Each “and” in Heidegger is also a “but,” a movement toward something that moves away from another version of what appeared to be the same thing—one and the same being one in the same as a measure of distance even in the comparison of what are apparent synonyms.
Heidegger’s “always already ,” ticking like a clock, like a compulsion compelling his writing, is more a thought-picture of spatiality than a calculation of functional time. It is the glue that holds together the existential structure of Dasein, “each aspect of which can be thought of as the most important, the key that unlocks all the others.” This reflects the fluid and imbricated sense of Dasein itself, a “fact” that Heidegger illustrates in the reflexivity of the nodal-hyphenates (being-in-the-world being the first and most expansive of many) that he coins.1 In his search for primordial being, Heidegger takes on the Kantian subjective a priori as a means of buoying up determinacy of (a) worldly character. For subjectivity, Heidegger substitutes “circumspect self-reference, which is grounded in a previous understanding of signification.” Space is not merely occupied by things. Things are encountered in their spatiality, because Dasein “has always already discovered a ‘world ’ that makes possible the existence of things in their spatiality.” Things-in-space and space itself are disclosed by an always already “referential totality” that is wider than the immediate three-dimensional context that the world sees and that is seen as (being) the world. Dasein allows us to circumspectly approach the world and “de-distance” it, bring it near(er), prepare for “having it at hand.” It is not enough to think that you immediately encounter it that way (“at hand”), though. “‘The world ’ as a totality of useful things at hand is spatialized to become a context of extended things which are merely present.” This matters to Heidegger, because it connects to the central theme of his philosophy, which is determining the previously neglected ontology of being (-in, -of, -with, -for) that underlies everything: “The fact that space essentially shows itself in a world does not tell us anything about its kind of being.” To get in front of space is to enter not presence , not liveness, not at-hand-ness, but a being that takes in others in its multiplicity, like a night with a thousand eyes. To make space appear is to birth it out of being. Heidegger asserts that you cannot understand space without confronting “the problematic of being of space [my emphasis],” which is more essentially ontological than was considered both before and even after he came along.2
Let us take Heidegger’s own example of entering a familiar dark room, our black rectangle that appears in this study as black pages, blackboards, the black inside of an otherwise empty (perhaps picture or proscenium) frame, a theatrical blackout, a darkened stage. Our ability to orient ourselves directionally in this darkness only secondarily (belatedly) results from having something in mind (to which Kant referred), the beforehand psychological interpretation postulated by the ego. The apriority of directionality is not a sense of direction tied to memory but to a being-ness-in-the-world which, if we are cognizant of it, does not leave us in the dark about which way to go. “The whereto in general is prefigured by the referential totality established in a for-the-sake-of-which, of heedfulness.” (There is “a regional spatial relevance” that belongs to the Dasein-determined “totality of relevance.”) Mainly, we are at home in the world, which does not necessarily mean that you won’t trip over the furniture passing through.
Heidegger is here (thus far) making an ontological, not a phenomenological point. But then, the basic direction somewhat facetiously given to and by actors to be careful not to trip over the furniture on a stage is not the same as an instruction that cautions the actor not to trip over the mise-en-scène. The latter indicates not merely the space of but the space for, as in what is this particular space for (why does this space appear?), what does it make room for and why? In this sense, mise-en-scène is akin to what we discover when we turn on the lights and the things in it act surprised to be seen. And yet these things belong there, because care has been taken to ascertain what makes them belong and to know what the nature and mode of their belonging is. These things belong less to the room per se than to the darkness, to that seldom seen being-in-the-world that is veiled even in/as an empty space. Mise-en-scène is less a matter of positionality (of subject-object positions) than of a “worldlike totality of relevance” which is non-representational, a “where” in which the idea of representation is irrelevant.3 It is a representation that makes us see this merely as blackness and not as a structure that is moving, not without difficulty, toward appearing.
There is always a prior (a priori) question that must be asked even if the essential question cannot be identified. One of the essential questions, certainly in Heidegger, is how one is able to maintain continuity in the face of what appears to be contradiction as regards the Being in beings from a definitional as opposed to an evidentiary perspective. (Here, definition is rendered as being abstract by comparison with evidence.) In Wittgenstein, this matter is at least partially addressed in his discussion of the “aspect(s)” of an image or a thing, although even here, the “problem” is the definitional relationship of the “aspect” to the various human senses (most notably in Wittgenstein, “aspect-seeing”). One may speak of pure Being but although one may perhaps refer to pure seeing and hearing as being (metaphorically) spiritual in character, one would be hard-pressed to do the same in relation to the remaining three senses (and metaphor is itself a sign of adaptation, a falling away from the absolute).
The problem here, as Wittgenstein presents it and Heidegger in his own way concurs, is that definition is impure. Definition is primarily a set of interpretations and interpretations that “presuppose another word-language” are translations into a word-language we already know. Thus, Wittgenstein suggests, the German word for “book” (Buch) works only because we can point to a thing we have seen before and know that we call it a “book.” Having already ascribed a name to a thing, we can refer to a word in a second language as corresponding to that same thing. But what, says Wittgenstein, if we point to a thing we have never seen before and say, “This is a banjo”? “Possibly the word ‘guitar’ will then come into [a person’s mind], possibly no word at all but the image of a similar instrument, possibly nothing at all. Supposing then I give him the order ‘now pick a banjo from amongst these things.’ If he picks what we call a ‘banjo,’ we might say ‘he has given the word banjo the correct interpretation’; if he picks some other instrument—‘he has interpreted banjo to mean string instrument.’”4
Each chapter in the present book is titled for or after both a thing and the word we call that thing. Each chapter interrogates what that thing/that word is and how what it is often escapes the innocence (naiveté) or prejudice of the ostensive definition of what its meaning is, of what its “is” is. While philosophy sets itself a goal of addressing essential questions, a process that as often as not leads to the return to prior (a priori) questions in their stead, performance philosophy being defined by its relationship to representation, being situated within a representational field, moves from a question that is already a prior question to another and another of this order. Here, the sense of being “prior” is meant to mean “recursive,” meaning not so much that something has come before as that something is being done (as in asked) again—that is, performed.
This is in one sense a flip book composed not just of the pages it contains but of its restless paging through to become what it already is, the thing it constitutes and is constituting. This way of constituting is what Heidegger calls “enframing ” meaning not simply a framework given to ordering, but “as a challenging forth into ordering sends into a way of revealing” [my italics]. This way of revealing or “unconcealment” shrinks away from causality and representation’s shrinking of the real into reportage while acknowledging that objects and their assembly are what we have been tasked to do something with. Unconcealment is not a matter of uncovering, which suggests a dominant human age...