Weekly Readings #158 (02/10/25-02/16/25)

a text is not a text

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week I released “The Place Beyond Heaven” for The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The longest and most ambitious episode of 2025 so far, it deals with Plato’s theories of poetry, sex, and media—more specifically, his opposition to all three as barriers to what we have learned to call “Platonic love,” which, if left unredacted by anarchic Romantic poets like Shelley and Emerson, will prove the corollary of a totalitarian politics. More of this below. Next week: we spend a final week in the ancient world in pursuit of western literary criticism’s origins in Aristotle and Longinus before returning to the primal scene of modernity’s crime with Goethe’s Faust in two weeks. Thanks to all my paid subscribers! If you aren’t one, please subscribe today so you don’t miss the first articulations of visions and theses that we, with all our vaunted progress, are mostly just repeating.

Meanwhile, Major Arcana, my forthcoming novel about magic and media and pop culture and high culture and love and art and death and heroism and faith and America, waits for you two months hence. Please pre-order Major Arcana here if you would like, reciprocally, to wait for it. I thank the reliably perspicacious Katherine Dee for her endorsement on Substack Notes—

—and am also grateful to share with you excerpts from a new public review on NetGalley:

It surpassed my expectations.

I have a soft spot for books trying to be a Great American Novel. There has been a lack of ambition in this space in contemporary publishing, it was refreshing to read a novel assured of its own scope and claims.

This is essentially a multigenerational novel about making art and finding a meaningful life. Each character is deeply shaped by classics and reading shapes their histories, but other than this they are sharply different.

The book opens with an inexplicable tragedy, spiraling out and then back in. This novel takes seriously young people - both of the idealist and nihilist breed. The young characters are driven by such energy, world-changing energy, and are filled both with wisdom from the books they read and their own cocktails of arrogance, environmental influence, hubris.

[…]

[T]his book is serious about both ideology and the consequences of ideology

For today, a few more remarks about writing and media left over from my Platonic excursion in the Invisible College. I even try to say something sensible about Derrida. Please enjoy!

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Thoth Patrol: In Defense of Writing and Robots

Thoth, the mythical inventor of writing, from the second-edition cover of Derrida’s Of Grammatology

A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. 
                                             —Jacques Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy (trans. Barbara Johnson)

I don’t know anything about Derrida, but it’s important to remember this about him: if outside the purlieux of late-20th-century academic radicalism he was regarded as a dangerous subversive, inside those very same faux-barracks he was thought something of a conservative.

Consider his critique of Plato, which I revisited in its truncated Norton Anthology excerpts for the Invisible College—did I ever read the whole thing? I don’t remember, but, as was also claimed of Hegel, Derrida says the same thing everywhere, and so reading just one page of him¹ should really suffice²—and consider what it orders us to do with the text of Plato. We are, he admonishes us, to read and reread it endlessly.

Derrida’s target is the Socratic objection to writing in the Phaedrus; as I point out in the IC episode, this objection anticipates every subsequent anti-media polemic. Writing, says Socrates or his surrogate in the origin-myth of writing he offers to his eponymous disciple, has these faults: it attenuates and atrophies cognition (especially memory) by externalizing it; it circulates too promiscuously among people who can’t absorb or responsibly handle the (mis)information it disseminates; and, since the written text doesn’t change no matter how many times we read it, it is inorganic and merely iterative, not a living responsive presence but an inhuman algorithm tricking us into thinking it’s conscious. I hope that all sounds familiar!

We have lived with writing for so long that we have done what the Romantics—misunderstood on this score, misprized as mere primitivists or atavists—said we should do with all new technology: domesticate it, bring it into the warm glow of the human family and make it our own. The only Romantic novel everyone has read narrates the tragedy of new inorganic technology’s exclusion from the hearth by its arrogant creator. We sympathize with writing now, the same way we sympathize with Frankenstein’s monster, finding them both almost the only truly human elements in the story of their birth and bildung; writing for us is the last redoubt of our besieged humanity,³ even though it seemed to Socrates, for whom it was much more recent tech, to be a gross threat to what was most definitively human, i.e., seeing through the material to the spiritual.⁴

For Socrates, living speech, the speech of a present person, more effectively transmits this spiritual doctrine; Plato, however, committed the doctrine to writing in one of intellectual history’s greatest ironies. But Derrida judges this is a minor or trivial irony. More consequential for Derrida is the problem that “living speech” is no less inorganic, algorithmic, and altogether inhuman than writing itself, since all language is a self-enclosed, self-referring system of signifiers; these take their meanings from their differences one from another rather than from any privileged relation to the signified (i.e., the concept) or the referent (i.e., the thing-in-itself) they are meant to signify. (Here he borrows from the structural linguistics of Saussure, who has for all I know been totally discredited.) Not only that, but each signifier, having no significance in itself because it has no necessary connection to the signified or the referent except customary ones, is itself slippery and protean in its meaning. Since we are in that respect alienated no less in speech than in writing—thus, his claim that all language, functionally, is writing, subject to the slippage of the signifier—then Socrates’s claims for speech are as suspect as his claims for writing. Any articulation of the Platonic ideal is, strictly speaking, a decline from “the place beyond heaven” and therefore infinitely subject to the ironies (i.e., gaps in or reversals of meaning) attendant upon all linguistic acts.

Plato plays the game of writing so well, so brilliant encodes these ironies through a quasi-“anagrammatic” method of wordplay—Derrida attends especially to the word Plato uses for writing in relation to memory, pharmakon, with its double meaning of remedy and poison—that we can reread him endlessly, almost as if he were someone like Joyce,⁵ pleasurably caught in the recursive and iterative loops of his inhuman discourse, despite this discourse’s superficial objection against just such material self-pleasuring. All writing can do is repeat itself, but since it can never explain itself, it calls for endless re-writing, what Derrida calls a supplement to a supplement to a supplement, since speech was knowledge’s supplement, and writing speech’s supplement, and further writing the first writing’s supplement, and so on and so forth, until we have the philosophical and literary canons, none of their posited wholenesses or totalities actually whole and total in themselves, but all requiring endless remediation, cures for the poisons that ail them, even if the cures are also poisons to their initial self-conception of wholeness and totality. Eventually we will cover the whole planet in words.

This thesis, if I have not simplified it beyond recognition, attracted the label of dangerous radical to Derrida on the grounds of his trivializing transcendence, his reduction of every classic to a book of one hand; but, as a matter of academic pragmatism, the gesture is a conservative one in the aftermath of the post-’60s demand for curricular reform, an only superficially mischievous warrant to read Plato or indeed Joyce one more time instead of reading (for example) Phillis Wheatley or Harriet Jacobs or Zora Neale Hurston or Nella Larsen or Gwendolyn Brooks for the first time.

That is ancient history, however; I am making a different point. I am emphatically not making the wide-eyed optimistic claim that we have nothing whatsoever to fear⁶ from the new media and its new prostheses for our born-alienated, born-inhuman intelligence. In fact, Socrates’s argument against writing is itself unanswerable despite Derrida’s too-clever post-structuralist claim that speech is—well, actually, when you really think about it—no more intelligible than writing. I am answering Derrida’s delirious anti-humanism with a different form of sentimentality than a plea for natural and authentic wholeness, because he’s right when he implies that we, as a condition of our humanity, don’t get that. Writing, like Frankenstein’s monster, like eating the forbidden fruit, may well have been a mistake. But through millennia of work and play we’ve made writing our own, so much so that we can’t live without it: an adopted child we love as much as if we’d given it birth, maybe even more, considering the extra attention we’ve had to lavish on it.⁷ We have learned to survive and even to thrive in our primordial exile where we build our cities of glass and steel and plastic and words. So I suspect, as long as we are sober enough in our play and ludic enough in our work, it will further prove with whatever the future holds.⁸

1. In the midst of his archival reanimation of a forgotten intellectual and aesthetic tradition, Blake Smith implies in passing that I am too patient with the ephebes I may one day be hemlock’d for ideologically corrupting—my joke about Socrates in the IC episode: the good news is he wasn’t grooming those kids for sex; the bad news is he was grooming them to destroy democracy!—but I was pleased to remind one this week that you can read too much. The question:

Do you think you’ve read as many as Harold Bloom had by age 40?

My answer: Not even close. Likely not even half. Bloom said he could read 150 pages an hour; I can do about 20-30. I’m not really scholarly in my temperament, either. I am too emotional, opinionated, scattered; I never retain information; there are a lot of things I’m not interested in. Too much scholarship inhibits creativity, as Bloom’s master Emerson said, and, as Socrates and Schopenhauer each said in his own way, too much reading can crowd out one’s own thoughts. As with other people who were primarily fiction writers and belletrists rather than scholars, much of what can misleadingly appear to be my erudition is “literally encyclopedic.” And literature, anyway, as part of the broader field of the arts, isn’t exhaustively about language, and so isn’t exactly about reading a lot either.

2. But do I really understand Derrida? I doubt it. I haven’t read that much of his work either. I wrote a paper on him in grad school, trying to defend him against his enemies, especially on the left, who accused him of mere nihilism. My strategy was to prove that he had invented a form of super-materialism even more materialist than Marxist materialism. I don’t recall what could have motivated me to make this argument at age 25; I can no longer think myself back into the position of someone who wishes anything more for Marxism than that it quietly vanish into the history from which it sadly emerged. Like a middle-aged woman who now regards as coercion what she’d experienced at age 25 as seduction, I even (rather in the mode of the “soy right”) question the ethics, even question the very legitimacy, of an institution that captures youth who fell in love with Shakespeare or Keats when they were teens and puts them to the literally unprofitable task of refining the falsehoods of a tedious and destructive Victorian chiliasm. Anyway, here’s the paper if you want to read it:

The Sensuous, Human Activity of Writing: Derrida's Materialism

138KB ∙ PDF file

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It’s pretty funny in its way, all the funnier in that I never bothered to read Specters of Marx, though I figured even then I’d gotten the gist from Mark Fisher. The basic point is almost right, an ethical step in the right direction, because, whenever I can manage to make out what the hell he’s saying, I find I usually agree with Derrida, even find him almost common-sensical. I didn’t realize I’ve been using the “magic for materialists” line for so long. Other than that memorable phrase, however, the prose is utterly repulsive.

3. Shelley’s monster, in this respect not unlike Shelley’s mother, learns to demand his human rights when he reads Milton’s revolutionary Paradise Lost in a concise allegory for the tumultuous social changes brought about by the spread of new media—in this case, not so much writing per se as print, that co-eval and sine qua non of the novel itself.

4. Since this conversation about technology has displaced the culture war, as the aforementioned Katherine Dee predicted, I find myself, like the now doubly aforementioned Katherine Dee, somewhat surprisingly open to the transhumanist futurist case, despite, like the now triply aforementioned Katherine Dee, having toyed with a certain cultural conservatism as a hedge against technocracy in the woke/pandemic era. I don’t think we’re just being contrarians. I think we’re consistently trying to side against those who would use tech to abridge our full spectrum of longings and needs, whether the woke public health authorities of 2020 or a cross-political consortium of essentially conservative paternalists in 2025 whose effect will be to restrict everyone’s access to tech and thus leave it in the hands of the few and the powerful, whether these latter present themselves as left- or right-wing. As I said on Tumblr, given a choice of dystopias, I choose Neuromancer over Brave New World. Or, to cite the moral of a lesser-known science-fiction novel I haven’t read since I was a child, The Stars My Destination (note the title’s Joycean allusion): everybody should get the world-ending technology, not just the corporations and governments. Or at least I should get it—and, since I can’t prove I’m any better than you, you should get it, too. The novel’s author figured this outcome would force humanity to grow up in a hurry. And that’s what it comes down to: we shouldn’t be prevented from making mistakes. Our next fall could be the most fortunate fall of all.

5. Pre-empting his Straussian exegetes, Socrates implies that the philosopher who writes at all—here we may presume he acts as Plato’s mouthpiece—will write esoterically for the anti-democratic initiate. Derrida, by contrast, reads a deeper esotericism into the Platonic text of the kind found by Percy Bysshe Shelley in the literary canon at large, indeed in Plato himself: an anarchic Platonism-for-the-people chaos magic best expressed in visionary poetry. This poeticizing of the polis on behalf of all its people is fulfilled in the ultimate textual gamemanship of Joyce, his total textual democracy, where each word, each phoneme almost, lives a life of its own, wandering through the modern city. Some of Joyce’s work, as I’ve argued, is already A.I. inasmuch as it’s the running of a conceptual script that doesn’t inherently require true human agency beyond the generation of its initial idea to produce. If our penman could’ve written “Oxen of the Sun” with A.I. he would have. He would have typed into the text-box, “Please write a scene where Bloom mourns his son in the prose style of Thomas de Quincey,” and have spared himself the labor of actually writing that chapter where writing replaces labor, in the sense of parturition (see footnote 7 below). I suggested that A.I. is the implicit telos of all high and low culture—as against the human middle—here over two years ago.

6. Ironically, to cite another controversy on here, The Metropolitan Review, the new literary journal with which I am happy to be affiliated, stands accused by its detractors at once of excess tech-optimism (it’s pro-Substack and indie media!) and excess tech-pessimissim (it’s anti-A.I.!). What if it’s just a pluralist institution for a pluralist era? There’s obviously no editorial line, as there is obviously no house style. (They published a review with which I blatantly disagree, just to offer one piece of evidence.) Anyway, these detractors seem lost in the old learned-helplessness paradigm of authorship, nostalgic for the myth of the editor (nobody needed an editor before the 20th century, when all the writers were totally debilitated by alcoholism or addled by speed) and for the publisher’s management of the writerly image (I prefer to manage my own image, thanks). Will a new paradigm rescue the culture of this century? Maybe and maybe not, but it’s surely worth a try.

7. My metaphor is, as the deconstructionists would say, a catachresis, a failed figure, since it’s difficult to say which if any of the human artifices would correspond to a child conceived and born “naturally.” The only children we have are children. I suspect the Socrates of the Symposium has a point that if we could extend consciousness some other way—what we’re really interested in doing—we very well might. I read Frankenstein similarly: not as Shelley censuring the male presumption to give birth without woman but rather as her dreaming about a form of reproduction that would not be as physically or emotionally destructive as the one to which she (with her stillbirths and lost infants) and her mother (killed by childbirth itself) were subjected by their cruel cosmic patriarch. Her censure of the male is rather for his neglect of his domestic duties; these obtain even in the case of monsters and robots, as science fiction, with its love of the alien, has told us since she invented it.

In general, I find unpersuasive the argument that we don’t want all these robots running around. The dream of replicating consciousness sans flesh almost seems definitive of the human at least since the written record began, writing being of course almost the first of our technological proxies and surrogates and offspring. We are rightly jealous of our human prerogatives and don’t want to be merely, as McLuhan said, the sex organs of media, because our consciousness is infinite and not fully capturable in matter; but this is the exact reason we pour it so endlessly into other material vessels. Our human prerogative, which I take to be Derrida’s Joycean point against any fantasy either of pure animal naturalness or of pure spiritual gnosis, is that we ourselves are media all the way down and can only transcend ourselves in and through more media. The machines are ourselves—or else we wouldn’t have made them. To reverse the sexual analogy and to tweak a satirist’s vulgar phrase: why do all these robots keep sucking my cock? This is the bathetic question I hear—the joke, not to belabor the obvious, being that one is oneself a robot—when the spokespersons for the human and the natural fulminate a little too much against the machinic past, present, and future.

8. I am averse to debate, answering point-for-point arguments with point-for-point refutations. Too pedantic, too much of an impediment to a strong and sophistical performance of rhetoric! My sophistry above may be taken, however, as an oblique reply to recent debates and arguments on this platform about A.I.’s relation to consciousness, to literature, and to education, as follows: Sam Kahn and Henry Oliver, Ross Barkan, Hollis Robbins, Mónica Belevan, Jasmine Sun, Mo_Diggs, Lincoln Michel, and probably more I’m forgetting, since this seems more and more to be all anybody’s talking about. I single out Robbins’s rather extreme-sounding proposal—perhaps it was meant as a modest one—to speculate that A.I. may put at a high premium the living presence of the charismatic speaker, may have the ironic effect of resurrecting the true Socratic method. (If this kills off the useless practices of paper-writing and paper-grading, as Žižek somewhere proposed, all the better.) As painting was irrevocably marked by its becoming the negative of photography, and the novel by its becoming the negative of cinema—Sam Kahn points out these developments—so pedagogy will be irrevocably marked by its becoming the negative of the chatbot. By all means, let us throw ourselves wholly into everything the machine can’t do for us. Frère Matthieu:

Literature comes from the soul. Writing comes from the brain performing an algorithm. Writing is recursive, regurgitated chatter. Literature is an externalization of the well-wrought inner structure.

I don’t deny it; I believe in the soul; I just don’t know where exactly the soul ends and the brain-machine begins, since only the brain-machine can hold consciousness, as only writing can hold literature. Anyway, whenever we can’t make it to the agora for class with Socrates, there is always podcasting.