Heidegger and Future Presencing (The Black Pages)

261 Pages·2019·2.046 MB·English

by  Spencer Golub

Heidegger and
Future Presencing
(The Black Pages)
Spencer Golub
Heidegger and Future Presencing
(The Black Pages)
Spencer Golub
Heidegger and Future
Presencing
(The Black Pages)
Spencer Golub
Department of Theatre Arts
and Performance Studies
Brown University
Providence, RI, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-31888-8 ISBN 978-3-030-31889-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31889-5
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To my sister, for her time.
C
ontents
1 Page (Rectangle) 1
2 Book (Decomposition) 43
3 Clock (Time’s Pre-sequels) 81
4 Horse (Why Is There Something Else Rather
Than Something?) 141
5 Human (Being) 201
Index 253
vii
CHAPTER 1
Page (Rectangle)
The blackboard, the black rectangle had three entrances through num-
bers 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 brack-
ets, unconstrained by outside descriptions, prohibitions, and expla-
nations. 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 arbi-
trary, perhaps axes meant to intersect at pertinent points that would
trigger some unseen lock to spring open. From there, the secret knowl-
edge would be released that was, however, already written on the sur-
face. 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, hid-
den 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
© The Author(s) 2019 1
S. Golub, Heidegger and Future Presencing (The Black Pages),
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31889-5_1
2 S. GOLUB
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 pres-
ent 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 cal-
culation of functional time. It is the glue that holds together the exis-
tential 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
1 PAGE (RECTANGLE) 3
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 pri-
ori 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 spatial-
ity, 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 determin-
ing 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, black-
boards, the black inside of an otherwise empty (perhaps picture or pro-
scenium) frame, a theatrical blackout, a darkened stage. Our ability to
orient ourselves directionally in this darkness only secondarily (belat-
edly) results from having something in mind (to which Kant referred),
the beforehand psychological interpretation postulated by the ego.
1 Lee Braver, Heidegger: Thinking of Being (Malden: Polity Press, 2016), 49.
2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), C§23:105, 102–3, C§23:110, 106–7,
C§24:110, 107, C§24:111, 107–8, C§24:112, 109, C§24:113, 110–11.
4 S. GOLUB
The apriority of directionality is not a sense of direction tied to mem-
ory 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 phenome-
nological 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 ques-
tions, certainly in Heidegger, is how one is able to maintain continu-
ity 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 evi-
dence.) 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 var-
ious human senses (most notably in Wittgenstein, “aspect-seeing”). One
3 Ibid., C§22:103–4, 100–1.