Starting Again is Like Failing to Stop

Heresy and Movement in Three Contemporary Texts

Liam Burrell
200749091
A dissertation submitted for the degree of MA Contemporary
Literature

September 2014




















2




























3

Contents

I Introduction 6
II Atomised 15
III House of Leaves 24
IV The Odes to TL61P
34
V Conclusion 42

Bibliography 46
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5











Ma pense, cest moi: voil pourquoi je ne peux pas marrter. Jexiste parce
que je pense et je ne peux pas mempcher de penser.

(My thought is me: thats why I cant stop. I exist because I think and cant
prevent myself from thinking.)

Sartre, Nausea
1





Ich kann mit der Sprache nicht aus der Sprache heraus.

(I cannot with language get outside of language.)

Wittgenstein, Philosophiche Bemerkungen
2












I

1
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1963) p.145
2
Translation quoted in Warren A. Shibles, Emotion and Aesthetics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1995) p.202
6


Narratives are always moving, not in the sense that they are ever-changing but in the
sense that movement is an intrinsic characteristic of narrative. The very act of
experiencing a narrative requires a going-into the text, hence the vernacular of
navigation associated with reading: the student makes progress with theory, the
viewer gets so far into a TV series, the reader can lose oneself in a good book, and
so on. When we experience emotional affects, we say we are moved. Kinetics, as
Peter Sloterdijk puts it, is the ethics of modernity.
3

In its most basic formulation, a complete narrative requires a few prerequisites: an
author from whom the story is delivered, an audience to whom it is delivered, an
event which is the thing being delivered and a temporality with which to frame the
event. This assemblage is loosely referred to as the narrative structure and the
function that organises these elements is the human imagination. Narration is a
resolutely human endeavour, a primitive way of making sense of the contingency of
the world. Primordial myths, certainly, were early applications of ordering to formerly
unexplainable phenomena, especially in the sense of the creation myth which is an
attempt to think before humanity, to access that which is inhuman and therefore
unthinkable. Over time certain mythological narratives become so ubiquitous that
they become reified such that something entirely implausible will become doxa and
therefore entirely plausible. This would not necessarily in itself indicate a problematic
of anything if it were merely a pure act of the subjective imagination; it is when
mythologies begin to be enforced by power structures does this begin to indicate a
subjugation of thought or a control of the movement of the imagination. What I am
referring to here is the creation of orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy is a broad term that speaks to religious, social, historical, political and
epistemic concerns but can be thought of in a mechanical sense as the solidification
of narrative. Orthodoxy produces convenient, structured narrative teleologies which
transverse from genesis to apocalypse, conception to death, narratives with one
beginning and one ending and in a straightforward manner. In the eventual
transformation from myth to doxa, the mythic component is removed, which is to say
that when mythologies are assimilated into orthodoxy any questions of veracity are

3
See Peter Sloterdijk, Mobilization of the Planet from the Spirit of Self-Intensification in The Drama
Review, 50, no.4 (2006)
7

set aside: whatever is orthodox is nominal and accepted. As such, orthodoxy can
only come about within a community as, like narrative, it requires authors and
readers or, more appropriately, lawmakers and disciples. The value system by this
I mean the particular regulation of thought created within any given community
must have a relation with those that it seeks to convert and draw into its system.
These systems are more likely to be more readily accepted by the community if they
are based upon mythology with which the community is already familiar. This is why
we find various systems with similar orthodoxies that seem to be have a shared
mythological basis. Indeed, the field of narratology purports to discern these ur-
narratives and posit that sectors as diverse as politics, religion and literature are all
based upon similar foundations
4
. What we see here is the eventual transformation of
mythology into policy, law and canon. In the example of the Christian Church, Christ
is displayed as an exemplar which should be imitated and the community of the
congregation are instructed to act and think in the ways that this paragon
exemplifies. Any act or thought that transgresses or rejects this paradigm is
designated as sin and then punished. A normative ethical system such as this
universalises its doctrine and is therefore a transcendental affair, one that abstracts
from the immediacy of any given situation and appeals to values that are beyond or
above humanity. It is not too far a stretch, then, to also call orthodoxy inhumane.
5

The rejection of orthodox doctrine suggested above is the concept of heresy, which I
understand to be any belief that varies with the established paradigm, whether that is
a religious, political or an epistemic one. If heresy is opposed to orthodoxy it is
therefore also opposed to narrative, or rather it is opposed to the subjugation of
narrative. The heretic, by the mere fact of opposing orthodoxy, creates their own
narrative, a novel or original trajectory away from structured narration. It is therefore
an act of the human imagination, an attempt to imagine a here-and-now via radical
difference and is therefore an immanent critique of the world. Perhaps the heretical

4
My understanding of narratology is informed by Roland Barthes book S/Z, Vladimir Propps
Morphology of the Folktale and various nebulous materials by Mircea Eliade and Claude Lvi-Strauss
5
Here I am basically rehashing Nietzsches criticism put forward in The Anti-Christ of religious
morality as inherently nihilistic; in summary, I read Nietzsches claim to be that firstly, transcendental
systems of ethics abstract from the immanence of the situation and therefore are not fit to deal with
problems of humanity and secondly that the constant focus on a utopic afterlife which can only be
reached after living an ascetic existence and after one has died both promulgates the idea of this
life being worthless and inculcates a resistance and denial the vitality of life. This denial of the vitality
of life is what Nietzsche designates as nihilism.
8

statement par excellence is Nietzsches infamous proclamation that God is dead. In
a section in The Gay Science, entitled The Madman, the reader is told that a crazed
heretic runs through a marketplace in the early hours screaming:
Whither is God? he cried; I will tell you. We have killed him you and I. All of us
are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who
gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we
unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Wither are we moving?
Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward
in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying through an infinite
nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? [] God is dead. God remains
dead. And we have killed him.
6

The killing of God unmoors and unchains humanity, but also casts it adrift, allows a
terrifying degree of freedom and movement. Daniel Colucciello Barber, in the
introduction to his remarkable work Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-
Secularism and the Future of Immanence, begins his book by examining this claim.
Regarding interpreting the Nietzschean proclamation as an act of the human
imagination, he writes:
It is along these lines that we can understand Nietzsches proclamation to be
concerned not just with God but also with the power of the imagination that is, with
the imaginations productivity, its profligacy, its capacity to generate a world. In fact,
Nietzsches proclamation presumes that there is no world without the imagination of
that world, and that the world that exists is the world we have imagined. To imagine
is to make the world; to call for a different imagination, or to imagine differently, is to
make a different world. We should, in virtue of these claims, interpret Nietzsches
proclamation as having less to do with Gods existence than with the world produced
by the imagination of Gods existence. It is a proclamation that concerns theology,
but it is just as much one that concerns what is at stake in making a world. And to be
concerned with the making of a world is to be concerned with the political.
Nietzsches proclamation, then, is a theopolitical proclamation, one that concerns
both God and the task of making the world, but one that always and only does so by
way of the imagination.
7


Here we have two connotations of orthodoxy, the religious and the political, which
become subsumed under the banner of the theopolitical. This is to say that
government shares narrative foundations with religion and the church is also a

6
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974) pp.181-
183. See also: Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 2003)
p.41
7
Daniel Colucciello Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of
Immanence (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2014) p.2
9

political entity. Barbers analysis also designates the imagination as a creative force,
something that is productive and generative, capable of making and utilising
difference. It is implicit here that the imagination is a heretical tool and through
looking at the verbs associated with it one concerned with the movement of
thought. He goes on to say:
What is ultimately put forth by this proclamation is the task of imagining a world, the
task of worldmaking. If Nietzsches proclamation has charged us with a demand, then
it is not a demand to say yes or no to God, it is instead a demand to say yes or no to
the world we find ourselves always already imagining and there are, I think it is
clear, very many ways of imagining and making a world. The variety of responses to
the death of God, then, correspond to the variety of ways that the world may be
imagined, or to the variety of worlds that could be made. This is also to say that
disagreement about the death of God emerges from disagreement about the political,
where the political is broadly understood in terms of the decision or decisions made
about the world that is to be made. If God is important here and I believe God, or at
least the name of God, most definitely is then this is because it is with God that the
stakes of world-making are pushed to the highest degree.
8


If we say that god is in fact dead, if we commit heresy and say no to the world as it is
currently being imagined, then we are left with the burden of imagining and
subsequently making our own new and, more importantly, different world. The
implications for orthodoxy here are clear: that the imagination as a creative faculty
with the ability to generate heretical difference has the potential to defy the orthodox
walling-in of thought and, further, to make a new world free of such subjugation of
thought. Any unbound imagination outside of orthodoxy is heresy and the inherently
nomadic nature of the creative faculty of the imagination is antithetical to the
structured nature of orthodoxy.
Movement is then drawn into alignment with creation. If narrative is bound to
temporality, then movement is necessarily to do with place, of which there are two
primary traditional conceptions: (topos) and (chora).
9
We are perhaps
most familiar with topos, especially in the term topography, which we understand in
the capacity of the description of a place, a delineation of landscape. The term is
sometimes translated as commonplace, that which is spatially familiar; indeed, the

8
Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God, pp.2-3
9
The etymological components here are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary website and
Wiktionary.com. See topos, n. OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2014
<http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/203433>, <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/>,
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/> [accessed 13th August 2014]
10

OED defines the modern use of topoi as a traditional motif or theme (in a literary
composition); a rhetorical commonplace, a literary convention or formula. There is
certainly a parallel to be drawn, then, between topoi and orthodoxy or, more
specifically, between the mythologies that are concretised and then become
orthodoxy. Chora is harder to define; the term is first encountered in an ontological
capacity the Platonic dialogue the Timaeus, where it refers to a receptacle or a
liminal space in which the generation of the world comes about. It is a place that is
neither rationally intelligible nor empirically sensible
10
and Plato acknowledges the
difficulty in attempting to define it.
11
This meaning of this mysterious ontological
object has been the object of study for figures as diverse as Derrida, Heidegger and
Kristeva; in Khra, Derrida writes: It [chora] would no longer belong to the horizon of
meaning, nor to that of meaning as the meaning of being.
12
In the third chapter of
his book Chorology: On Beginning in Platos Timaeus, titled The X, John Sallis
writes, referring to the difficulty in translating this elusive term:
What about the word , if indeed in the Timaeus it functions as a word? The
interruption of its meaning entails an enormous complication of the question of its
translation. If one proposed to translate as space, the one would have to set
about immediately withdrawing from the word much that we cannot but hear in it. For
clearly the is not the isotropic space of post-Cartesian physics. Nor is it even
empty space, the void, as discussed in Greek atomism It would hardly be
otherwise if one were to translate as place for one would then have conflated
the difference between and and would risk assimilating Platos
chorology to the topology of Aristotles Physics.
13

If chora is entirely incommensurate with topos and evades concrete meaning yet still
maintains connotations of movement, space and being, how can we engage with it
and how is the concept useful? At the Institute for Cultural Inquirys event The
Critique of Pure Movement a paper by theorist David Kishik was read by Daniel
Barber. In it, Kishik argues that if topography is the practice dedicated to topos, then
the practice best suited to give us access to chora is choreo-graphy literally
translatable as dance-writing and what we would normally call, of course,
choreography. Rather than the location, address or the point on a map that is topos,
chora is the place conceived of as everything it contains, the way the light falls, how

10
Critique of Pure Movement, ICI Berlin, May 2013
11
Plato, the Timaeus cited in Sallis, Chorology (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999) pp.111-
116
12
Cited in Sallis, Chorology p.111
13
Sallis, Chorology, p.115
11

cold it is, the sounds passing through the space; it is a more embodied and
immanent way of looking at space and it is accessed via choreography. What I mean
by this, following Kishik, is that the subject of dance is always the chora.
14
When
Kishik states that choreographers inscribe chora in ways architects never even
imagined possible, his remarks are congruent with the aforementioned
incommensurability between topos and chora. Kishik cites modern dance
choreographer Merce Cunningham as describing dance as the obliteration of the
linear, measurable, agreed-upon space (topos) and time (/chronos) of the
performance. The dancers task is to establish a new chora or a radically different
place of being; not a utopia, but a euchoria. That topos is aligned with architects is
telling; there is the presentiment that one can reimagine chora as a heretical space
or rather that by moving towards, travelling through or even being in chora, one is
providing for the imagination a space in which to function that is radically other to the
orthodox configuration of place as topos. My wager upon embarking with this
dissertation, based upon these considerations of movement and heresy, is that,
firstly, there is something inherently nihilistic
15
within orthodoxy and, secondly, that
there is the capacity within the movement of the imagination to bypass language,
which is something (language) that helps keep orthodox systems in place. To this
end, when Kishik states that a chora can only be established by moving or when
movement is considered as a constituent of place, we should consider that kinesis
() means not only movement but also dance, change and revolution, in
both the kinetic and political conceptions.
The problem is that orthodoxy does not seek to halt movement per se indeed it
encourages it but attempts rather to redirect it. It attempts to funnel and harness
movement and creative energies for the benefit of the author of that particular
orthodoxy. Indeed, considering the etymology of the word is helpful here,
necessitating another return to the Greek: the word is made up of (orthos)
meaning true or straight and (doxa) meaning belief; I will be considering the
word in these terms of straight-thinking, that is: the rigid, structural thought that I
have already discussed above. To that end it creates barriers, architectures of

14
The entire event can be streamed at <https://www.ici-berlin.org/videos/critique> [accessed 3rd
August 2014]
15
As suggested before, by nihilism I do not refer to a lack of meaning but rather to a life-denying
force. Indeed, a resistance to concrete meaning is precisely what I want to advocate, in the sense that
orthodoxy both constructs and reinforces systems of meaning.
12

control and regulation, to contain and direct the flow of creative force. One such
barrier is the aforementioned mediation of doxa. Another is the wholehearted
endorsement of all kinds of communication.
Where does literature figure into all of this? If language is a prerequisite for or at
some level symbiotic with the establishment of orthodoxies, what about the text that
refuses to communicate; what are the spatial properties of such a text and what
space does it inhabit? When dealing with narrative form one is necessarily dealing
concurrently with the practices of space. Literature, too, is founded upon the
becoming-orthodox of mythologies. The novel is the cathexis of narrative, the site in
which narratives are given space to operate and interrelate. No other media can be
said to have the same relation to narrative as the novel; cinema, for example, does
not have the temporal flexibility to grant the reader the ability to engage with the text
at their own speed. As such, in novels, engagement with orthodoxy can vary
dramatically, from being informed by it to passive-implicit endorsement of the status
quo to outright rejection of it. Literature is a virile nexus for the potential production of
heresies and as such, another wager that I put forward is that such heresies are vital
for the avoidance of a slide into nihilism.
Heresy and literature are familiar bedfellows: we are familiar with the image of the
writer burning at the stake for secretly publishing some arcane tome or occult
grimoire or having the tenacity to translate the Bible from Latin into English. The
current grand heresiarch of contemporary theory is Franois Laruelle. In his work,
Laruelle claims to have developed a concept called non-philosophy which is to
philosophy as non-Euclidean geometry is to the work of Euclid: that is, it continues
under a similar vernacular to philosophy but departs from radically different axioms.
His claim developed in books such as From Decision to Heresy and Future Christ:
A Lesson in Heresy is that all philosophy is based on a prior decision: that
philosophers decide upon the point which they aim to prove and then go about the
construction of a system which attempts to prove this point, or, as Ray Brassier in
the article Axiomatic Heresy: The Non-Philosophy of Franois Laruelle puts it: a
formal syntax governing the possibilities of philosophizing. Brassier writes:
Laruelles importance can be encapsulated in a single claim: the claim to have
discovered a new way of thinking. By new, of course, Laruelle means
philosophically unprecedented. But what Laruelle means by philosophically
13

unprecedented is not what philosophical revolutionaries like Descartes, Kant, Hegel
or Husserl meant by it. Laruelle prefers heresy to revolution. Where philosophical
revolution involves a reformation of philosophy for the ultimate benefit of philosophy
itself and a philosophical stake in what philosophy should be doing heresy
involves a use of philosophy in the absence of any philosophically vested interest in
providing a normative definition of philosophy.
16

This use of philosophical material is what is relevant when it comes to this essay,
that rather than mysteries to be unravelled or have their worth proven by elucidating
how they are central to the development of the literary zeitgeist perhaps the
nominal goal of literary criticism literature can be imagined as potentialities to be
exploited towards the creation of new trajectories of thought. The generation of
novelty as such is absolutely antithetical to orthodoxy; it is in this sense that one can
begin heretical world-making. Brassier continues:
Like the revolutionary, the heretic refuses to accept any definition of philosophy
rooted in an appeal to the authority of philosophical tradition. But unlike the
revolutionary, who more often than not overturns tradition in order to reactivate
philosophys supposedly originary but occluded essence, the heretic proceeds on the
basis of an indifference which suspends tradition and establishes a philosophically
disinterested definition of philosophys essence, or, as Laruelle prefers to say,
identity. This disinterested identification of philosophy results in what Laruelle calls a
nonphilosophical use of philosophy: a use of philosophy that remains constitutively
foreign to the norms and aims governing the properly philosophical practice of
philosophy. And in fact, non-philosophy is Laruelles name for the philosophically
unprecedented or heretical practice of philosophy he has invented.
The materials that I will be using in this essay are three works by contemporary
authors that deal in some way with orthodoxy, both in the sense of resistance to and
compliance with it. These texts do not, however, appeal to the authority of tradition;
they all perform substantially differing movements, move towards various
philosophical positions and engage with their potential readers in dissimilar ways.
The irreverence towards orthodox conceptions of literature and the investiture in
foreign modes of thought are what make these books relevant and vital. When
looking at such work, Laruelles thought is useful in two ways: the fact that non-
philosophy is a methodology which makes no claims as to what is valid or worthy of
investigation and, insofar as Laruelles returning theme of heresy has a viable radical
analogue, it is a medium through which this material is taken up and put to use in the

16
Ray Brassier, Axiomatic Heresy: The Non-Philosophy of Franois Laruelle p.25. Accessible at:
<http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/axiomatic-heresy>
14

capacity of world-making. These two concepts bring non-philosophy close to the
realm of pragmatics and ethics in the sense that it can provide real, radical change
and has the potential to mobilise literature that would perhaps otherwise be ignored
by theorists.
Firstly, I will look at Atomised by Michel Houellebecq, a 1998 novel about siblings
attempting to come to terms with their middle age in late capitalism. I will focus on
the structure of the book and how the authors portrayal of the political situation is
useful as a descriptor. Then I will use Mark Z. Danielewskis 2000 book House of
Leaves as an example of how rejection of orthodoxy manifests itself in experimental
literature. Finally, Keston Sutherlands 2013 collection of experimental prose-poetry
The Odes to TL61P will be used in the capacity of radical heresy or indeed apostasy,
in which adherence to orthodoxy is abandoned almost entirely. This approach is not
without a problematic, which will be expanded upon in the final chapter, in which an
attempt at synthesis and creation of an original trajectory will be made. I will engage
with the texts in the order of their pace and structure, from Atomised which has a
slow pace and a rigid structure, to House of Leaves which varies its pace and
experiments with its structure, to The Odes to TL61P which is of an almost
breathless speed and contains very few structured elements. As suggested above,
then, this essay will proceed under the sign of a non-philosophical inquiry. As such, I
will be mobilising these texts not as a means to an end but as material for the
production of original or hitherto unexplored trajectories of thought. Its aim is not to
prove a hypothesis based on a prior decision indeed, I have not declared any but
to observe the effect of a collision of material and attempt to designate how such a
collision could be productive to the imagination.


II

Les Particules lmentaires, published in 1998 in the US as The Elementary
Particles and in the UK under the name Atomised, is a novel by contemporary
French author Michel Houellebecq. As mentioned, the narrative follows two half-
15

brothers, as they attempt to navigate the cultural landscape of late capitalism. In the
style of a bildungsroman, their lives are traced from childhood, through adolescence
and into adulthood through three sections of numbered and sometimes named
chapters. The text is bookended with a prologue and an epilogue. The prose that
makes up the majority of the novel is minimalist and uncomplicated and, at first
glance aside from a short poetic interlude following the prologue the topography
of the novel appears mundane; no extravagances are taken with vocabulary, there
are few fluctuations of prosody aside from the occasional foray into overtly scientific
language and there are no exciting experiments with narrative temporality. The
opening lines of the prologue are:
This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in
Western Europe, in the latter half of the twentieth century He lived through an age
which was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding
slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by
misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as
love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared; the
relationships between his contemporaries were indifferent at best and more often
cruel.
17

Two things are immediately evident here: firstly that the opening sentence bears
resemblance to both a scientific abstract and the beginning of a fairy tale
18
and,
secondly, that Houellebecqs assertions are given to the reader prima facie as
indisputable descriptors of the situation of the age. That such an assertion is not
elucidated upon is presumably because we are all too familiar with what is being
talked about, as the age is not some distant past but an uncomfortably close
present. Although simple in presentation, there is a self-referential flavour to this
opening in which the author presents the age in abstract, seemingly in an attempt to
have us encounter it from the outside or for the first time. Our present time is a time
that is haunted, troubled and sliding and characterised by a waning of affect. This
sort of parallel apocalypticism posits the contemporary era as a kind of end-times in
which
philosophy was generally considered to be of no practical significance, to have been
stripped of its purpose. Nevertheless, the values to which a majority subscribe at any
time determine societys economic and political structures and social mores.

17
Michel Houellebecq, Atomised, trans. Frank Wynne (London: Vintage, 2001) p.3
18
It is also worth noting that the first section of the novel is titled The Forgotten Kingdom, which is
reminiscent of both a fairy-tale kingdom and the kingdom in the sense of biological taxonomy.
16

This device immediately contextualises the novel and as such, as a short aside, I will
briefly consider a few reasons as to why the writer of this passage should think that
this is the case. In the half-century spanning from the 1950s to the dawn of the new
millennium, in what can be considered the postmodern era, the world emerges from
two volcanic global conflicts only to be plunged into a perpetual yet ambient Cold
War; theorists and philosophers, sensing a kind of increasing domination of
ideological establishments write works with names like The Society of the Spectacle
and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction; television and cinema
come to be the dominant media whereas books suffer dwindling audiences; the
environment is slowly deteriorating. A pessimist does not have to look far to have his
opinions confirmed.
Deploying a metafictive prologue in this manner also leaves us without much
narrative momentum, the trajectory of the book having been fully demarcated in the
introduction, but rather lends the novel a commentarial function. The reader is left to
move through the book without the expectation of narrative development which,
coupled with the interruptions of scientific prose, makes the book feel more like
anthropological field notes than a story per se. Indeed, Houellebecq makes this
effect explicit early in the novel proper via two devices: the character of Michel, a
molecular biologist whose narrative we encounter before his half-brother Brunos,
and deliberate juxtaposition of scientific material on the one hand and curiously
austere presentations of human affect on the other. As if to prefigure this point, the
second line of the novel proper describes: [b]ottles of champagne nestled among
containers of frozen embryos in the large Brandt refrigerator usually filled with
chemicals.
19
This literal adjacency foreshadows the textual adjacency that follows.
Later we encounter this passage:
Michel spent an afternoon running through the fields with his cousin Brigitte. A pretty,
gentle girl of 16 She grabbed his hands, swinging him round and round until they
collapsed in a heap on the freshly mown grass. He pressed himself into her warm
breast; she was wearing a short skirt.
which is made contiguous by the sentence Next morning they were covered in spots
and itched all over with:

19
Houellebecq, Atomised p.11
17

Thrombidium holosericeum is plentiful in summer meadows it embeds itself into
the bodies of mammals causing a painful itching. Linguatulia rhinaria is a parasite
which lives in the frontal and maxillary sinuses of dogs and, occasionally, humans.
The larva is oval and has a short tail and a sharp spike near the mouth; two pairs of
limbs are armed with long claws. The body of the adult is covered in barbed
spines.
20

In what is perhaps the most extreme example, the death of Michels grandfather,
which is afforded a single sentence, is immediately followed by an extended
description of the process of putrefaction, which takes up an entire paragraph:
21

His grandfather died in 1967. In temperate climates, the body of a bird or mammal
first attracts specific species of flies (Musca, Curtoneura), but once decomposition
has begun to set in, these are joined by others, particularly Calliphora and Lucilia.
Under the combined action of the bacteria and the digestive juices disgorged by the
larvae, the corpse begins to liquefy and becomes a ferment of butyric and ammoniac
reactions.
This abrupt shift of register appears again in the chapter named The Omega Male
in which the boys who bully a young Bruno are placed adjacent to a passage about
herd dynamics in animal societies.
22
In the tenth chapter of the second part named
Julian and Aldous
23
, which is presented in the style of a lecture on Brave New
World by a drunken Bruno, his diatribe is punctuated by Michels mundane thoughts
on his daily life. Later, the death of Michel and Brunos mother is only realised after a
fly lands on her eyelid and she does not move; Michel then identifies the flys
taxonomy in the same cold language as the tone in which he notes his mother is now
dead:
Diptera can be recognised by the fact that they have a single pair of membranous
wings at the second thoracic ring, a pair of balancing antennae (to stabilise flight) on
the third thoracic ring and a proboscis which pierces or sucks. When the fly began to
move across Janes eye, Michel knew something was wrong. He leaned over his
mother, careful not to touch her. I think shes dead, he said after a brief examination.

24

The proximity of these two kinds of register is jarring; the scientific examination
seems to immediately reduce any affect to a mechanical process, something that is
neither mythical nor mysterious. Something about this shift appears oddly inhuman
and it disturbs our humane sensibilities when we encounter it.

20
Ibid. pp.34-36
21
Ibid. pp.42-43
22
Ibid. pp.48-54
23
Ibid. pp.185-192
24
Ibid. p.312
18

Indeed, it is only when we come to the epilogue to the book that we encounter a
metafictive device that changes the way the entire book is presented. We are told
that Michel Djerzinskis work in molecular biology has led to advances in cloning
which eventually ends up producing an immortal post-human species populated
entirely by clones. The book is written by a member of this species and purports to
be a fictionalised account of Djerzinskis life adapted from his personal notebooks.
This revelation marks a shift not in the topos of Atomised but in the chora; the
architecture of the book has not changed, but the way in which we experience it has
been drastically altered. It is the kind of narrative device that makes readers
immediately begin the book again, to look at it with new eyes, as it were. That there
is a correlation between Houellebecqs authorial intent and the effect of this literary
device is not necessarily the point, what is important is the approach to orthodoxy
insofar as Djerzinski is the architect of what Houellebecq calls a metaphysical
mutation, which appears to refer to a radical shift in the general orthodoxy of
humanity. Aside from the shifting of perspective, the secondary consequence of the
ultimate revelation of the novel is to create a distancing effect which enables the
function of commentary hinted at above. That the clone species is superior to
humanity enables them to look down on us like humans would insects and
anatomise our sociological makeup, or rather, diagnose what caused humanity to fail
and become extinct. Not only, then, is Atomised a work of commentary but it is also
a work of history a speculative history of the present and history is necessarily
concerned with orthodoxy. The final lines of the epilogue of the book are:

History exists, it is elemental, it dominates, its rule is inexorable. But outside the strict
confines of history, the ultimate ambition of this book is to salute the brave and
unfortunate species which created us. This vile, unhappy race, barely different from
the apes, had such noble aspirations. Tortured, contradictory, individualistic,
quarrelsome, it was capable of extraordinary violence, but nonetheless never quite
abandoned a belief in love. This species which, for the first time in history, was able
to envisage the possibility of its passing and which, some years later, proved capable
of bringing it about. As the last members of this species are extinguished, we think it
just to render this last tribute to humanity, a homage which itself will one day
disappear, buried beneath the sands of time. It is necessary that this tribute be made,
if only once. This book is dedicated to mankind.
25


25
Ibid. p.379
19

The epigraph from Comte at the beginning of the aforementioned chapter discussing
Huxley becomes pertinent too:
When it is necessary to modify or renew fundamental doctrine,
the generations sacrificed to the era during which the
transformation takes place remain essentially alienated from that
transformation, and often become directly hostile to it.
(Auguste Comte Un Appel au Conservateurs)
As do certain lines from the prologue and the poem that follows it: the theses of
metaphysical mutations, the open[ing] up a new era in world history, the new
world order, these lines seem to be hinting at a possible trajectory away from the
misery and violence of our situation. The tone in which they are delivered does
appear to be morally neutral despite its prophetic and apocalyptic character. The
metaphysical mutation has a viral-apophatic flavour, a negation of values spreading
inexorably through a society. Akin to Nietzsches transvaluation of all values
26
,
heedlessly, it sweeps away economic and political systems, ethical considerations
and social structures, resulting in a completely new state of affairs. The humans
may be hostile to the clones eradication of their society, but they are powerless to
stop it.
What Houellebecq is doing here with commentary, when he shifts between the
register of realism and the scientific and by having a member of the nascent clone
bermensch
27
narrate, is explicitly drawing comparisons between consumerism and
consummation, in both the sexual and terminal senses of the word. The clones do
not need to breed; when they see fit to increase the size of their community they
simply create more clones via asexual reproduction. The implication here is that the
human libido is the cause of humanitys failure as a species, insofar as it leads to the
proliferation of difference through sexual breeding and is a terminal process. This
point of comparison finds its exemplar in the character of Christiane, Brunos
girlfriend. She and Bruno become libertines and enter a lifestyle where sexual
pleasure becomes the index of meaning; Bruno begins to weigh up, calculate and
measure the amount of happiness in his life at any one moment in other words, he
begins to commodify pleasure. At a swingers club, Christiane has an accident and is

26
See Nietzsche, The Antichrist 3
27
I am using this term in its literal sense of over-man, as in the next step of the evolution of man.
That the term carries connotations of tyranny and genocide is merely beneficial to my reading of what
the clones represent.
20

paralysed from the waist down. It is revealed that she was suffering from a
degenerative illness that she chose not to disclose to Bruno and that the indulgence
in the swinger lifestyle accelerated the diseases onset. Both her sexual organs and
her legs become insensate and she becomes unmoored from both her index of
meaning and her previous experiential paradigm. Soon afterwards, rather than
attempt to live a life paralysed and unable to move, she throws herself down a set of
stairs and dies.
28
Christiane becomes ensnared by the opportunities for the
enactment of libidinous pleasure that the capitalist situation affords her and is
eventually destroyed by them; in other words, she is consumed by her desire to
consume.

Nowhere else in the novel is the space between the restriction of movement and the
emergence of nihilism narrower. Through the metaphorics afforded by choosing
literature as his mode of expression, Houellebecq physicalizes and embodies this
problematic in Christianes paralysis, her despair and her suicide. A malaise within
her gestates until it causes her to become immobile; this is both a reification of a
metaphysical crisis and a political allegory. The commentarial function of the book
therefore allows a hypothesis to emerge: if the current situation is nihilistic, then we
should strive to bring about a revolution in orthodox modes of thought a
metaphysical mutation which will subsequently bring about a new physical
situation, one which affords us different kinds of pleasure, pleasures which do not
contain hidden within them an annihilative teleology. That the post-human age is not
named but the previously current age between the arrival of modern science and the
realisation of Michel Djerzinskis project is called the Age of Materialism
29
is
emblematic of Houellebecqs entire project: that is, the aforementioned diagnosis of
our entire age with a sickness, the symptoms of which are the restriction of
movement, bodily entombment, that the human mind is shackled within an
animalistic body. Materialism, then, refers to both capitalist commodity fetishism and

28
Houellebecq, Atomised, p.297. Houellebecq explicitly references Gilles Deleuze and Guy Debord at
this point as two leftist intellectuals who committed suicide. I do not think it is a mistake that these
figures are evoked at the point of the suicide of someone driven to their death by their inability to
enjoy, or rather, their gluttonous refusal to reject the paralysing conclusions of capitalist trajectories;
the point is especially pertinent when considering Deleuze, who suffered from a health complaint that
restricted his breathing and committed suicide by defenestration. The poetry of a philosopher so
enamoured with lines of flight ending his life in a moment of flight seems to be irresistible to
Houellebecq, although the coincidence with Christianes death is described as amusing to note.
29
Ibid. p.371
21

material in the sense of the concrete atoms of experience, the building blocks of the
Real; the gradual transformation of affective experience into something that is
codified, concrete or reducible to molecular phenomena. The cure for this sickness is
the creation of a speculative trajectory of the accelerated transformation of biological
material, requiring an overcoming of the limitations of human biology and, as a
result, a radical shift in the metaphysics and orthodoxy of the world. Houellebecq, we
can assume, sees this anthropocentric conception of world-making as a
transcendental method towards utopia. His move is revolutionary rather than
explicitly heretical in the sense that it performs a dialectical destruction and
recreation for the overall good of humanity although it does proceed under
heretical means. The narrator(s) write:

It is superfluous to note the hostility with which such a project was greeted by the
defenders of revealed religion; Judaism, Christianity and Islam were for once agreed,
and heaped derision and opprobrium on work which gravely undermines human
dignity in its uniqueness and relationship with the Creator.
30


We have to question, however, how utopic this immortal post-human society truly is
or, rather, whether thinking this conception of utopia is truly emancipatory. The
community of clones appears to be a racially, politically and spiritually homogenous
community, created in the image of the martyr Michel Djerzinski and founded upon
the eradication of all aspects of difference. That there is difference and different
communities at all is posited as one of the reasons for human suffering:
Probably the most profound criticisms focused on the fact that every member of the
species created by making use of Djerzinskis work would carry the same genetic
code, meaning that one of the fundamental elements of human individuality would
disappear. To this, Hubczejak would respond that this unique genetic code of which,
by some tragic perversity, we were so ridiculously proud, was precisely the source of
so much human unhappiness. To the notion that human personality might disappear,
he proposed the concrete example of identical human twins who, through their
shared genetic code, developed different personalities while maintaining a
mysterious fraternity which, as Hubczejak pointed out, was precisely the element
necessary if humanity were to be reconciled.
31


30
Ibid. It is worth noting that the move is not heretical purely because of the virtue that it is at variance
with religion, rather it is more the case that religion is the site in which the machinery of orthodoxy is
perhaps most apparent.
31
Ibid. p.375 Hubczejak is the scientist who brings Djerzinskis work to the masses.
22

The flaw in the claim that the clones will retain their human identity in the same
manner that identical twins retain theirs through independent interactions with their
surroundings is that eventually the biological homogeneity will similarly
homogenise the topos of this utopia which, in turn, will reduce the horizon of or halt
the movement of the imagination. The very fact that there is black skin as opposed to
white or female as opposed to male enables new trajectories of thought that would
disappear along with biological difference, indeed the very fact that human mortality
has been overcome inhibits the possibility of flux that mortality affords spaces; that
people are constantly dying means that communities are in a constant state of
becoming and cannot be static. Humanity was not sliding into nihilism because of
difference, rather it was the systems of control the theopolitical orthodoxy, based
upon an inculcation of the inherent values of community
32
that caused paralysis.
To abolish difference, then, is only to recoup a certain conception of religious
orthodoxy, the imitatio Christi, a community of the same; it is only to push these
orthodox values to their extreme. In the sense of world-making, the space that
Djerzinskis research creates can be named as an orthodox utopia but we are
tempted to read utopia as no-place here, impossible for humanity to access, as for
this world to be made the defining essence of the human is abolished. This, it
seems, is truly nihilistic.
It may be the case that Houellebecq is indeed advocating the establishment of a
genocracy, as it were, based on the eugenics and the eradication of subspecies
the politics of which, I hope it is clear, are dubious at best and strays into the realm
of Nick Land and the Dark Enlightenment, if not outright fascism, and a repudiation
of which are beyond the scope of this essay
33
however, I am taking up the material
presented in an attempt to mobilise Atomised as a dark satire on this kind of
orthodoxy and a kind of pessimistic speculation of the ultimate fate of the human
species which ends in the eradication of the defining traces of humanity, namely
difference. The book is, in the last analysis, a lament and a speculative elegy.

32
That there are different communities is not necessarily the problem, rather the problem is in the
inherent valorisation of the idea of a community in itself. As the creators of value systems,
communities are often places where orthodoxies arise.
33
See Tim Stanley, The neo-fascist Dark Enlightenment is more sad than scary,
<http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100255944/the-dark-enlightenment-is-more-sad-than-
neo-fascist-scary/> [accessed 11th August, 2014]
23

Atomised, then, has a third function alongside that of commentary and history that
it is, for all intents and purposes, a horror story.


















III
24


The second book that I am considering is also nominally a horror novel. In the most
reductive caricature of the work, it is a story about a haunted house, the age-old
story of people coming to terms with the intrusion of the supernatural, yet it has also
variously been referred to as a satire of academia
34
, a postmodern epic
35
, a
Derridean treatise on language
36
and experimental hypertext fiction
37
. Of course,
these modes of literature are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but it is certainly
rare that we find a book that draws together such disparate areas and yet is also
occasionally stocked in the genre fiction areas of bookstores and adorned with
epitext that would not appear to indicate something so innovative. This constellation
of readings, however, makes up what can be considered as the orthodox view of
House of Leaves, what I am attempting to do in this section is something different;
these readings want to know what House of Leaves means, I want to know what it
does.

Seemingly there are three primary narratives within the peritext of House of Leaves:
first we are introduced to an old man named Zampan who has written an essay on
a film called The Navidson Record; second is the relayed narrative of the film itself,
which deals with the eponymous Navidson family and their struggles; third is the
story of tattoo artist Johnny Truant who stumbles across the essay and pieces
together the fragments into something approaching a coherent whole. Upon moving
through the book, however, the reader discovers multiple sub-narratives, including
but not limited to the narrative of Johnnys mother who may or may not have died
whilst incarcerated in an asylum, the anonymous editors of Jonnys manuscript,
numerous ostensibly fictive texts mentioned in the book, including a report based
around 17
th
-century explorers who originally discovered the aforementioned house

34
Steven Poole, Gothic scholar,<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jul/15/fiction.reviews>
[accessed 4th August, 2014]
35
See Finn Fordham, Katabasis in House of Leaves and two other recent American novels in Mark
Z. Danielewski (Modern American and Canadian Authors) eds. Joe Bray & Alison Gibbons
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011)
36
See B. Wall, House of Leaves Derrida <https://mrwall.wikispaces.com/House+of+Leaves+-
+Derrida+Paper> [accessed August 4th 2014] See also:
<http://forums.markzdanielewski.com/forum/house-of-leaves/house-of-leaves-aa/493-derrida>
[accessed August 4th 2014]
37
See Sonya Hagler, Mediating Print and Hypertext in Mark Danielewskis House of Leaves
<http://www. english.arts.cornell.edu/publications/mode/documents/hagler.doc> [accessed August
4th 2014]
25

and a plethora of (mis-)quotations attributed to real authors and public figures. The
metafictive games become more complicated when we learn that the film the essay
is written on does not seem to exist indeed in true Borgesian fashion, we must
reassess our definition of exist or when we begin to suspect that the whole
assemblage may have been written by Johnnys mother. What is perhaps most
original in House of Leaves, however, is its modulation of textual form and the extent
to which it experiments with readers expectation when encountering such seemingly
orthodox and codified material.

Much like Atomised deliberately appears to typify the traditional novelistic form, the
building blocks from which House of Leaves is constructed are nominally those of
the academic essay. Like the novel, it is a language with which we are familiar
although it exists in a separate, more scientistic register, in the sense that it is
usually associated with texts that pursue empirical and rational ends rather than,
say, the allegorical or affective. However, in the main body of House of Leaves this
primary register is partnered with the secondary, more novelistic register in which
Johnny Truant at least initially describes the process of reading the original
essay. This particular narrative is told almost exclusively through the medium of
footnotes. Footnotes are the quintessential formal manifestation of commentary and
as such exist as paratext or marginal to the main body and maintain a kind of
superficial critical distance from the work proper. Like the prologue and epilogue to
Atomised, the commentarial material inevitably turns inwards towards the novel, in
both the particular and general senses. Therefore the books, further to being sites
from which imaginative trajectories emanate, perform their own movement; that is to
say that their methods of inquiry and exploration head towards areas that are beyond
or aside from the novel such as philosophy, science, or metaphysics.
If the movement that Atomised performs is a panoptic survey of the landscape of the
moment then House of Leaves, I claim following Finn Fordham, performs a
descending movement or engages in (katabasis); literally translated as
26

down-going.
38
Fordham uses the term in the sense of a descent to the underworld;
he claims that the deployment of the device in novels such as House of Leaves is a
deliberate attack against the novel qua novel insofar as it is nominally a convention
of the epic which, in Bakhtinian terms, is antithetical to the novel art-form.
39
In other
words, the introduction of certain narrative forms creates a break with the orthodox
conception of the novel and aligns the work with an alternative tradition: one can
think of this move as taking up material and using it as a heresy towards disrupting
an established orthodoxy.
Before continuing, I want to state that even though I am drawing a comparison
between katabasis and inquiry, I do not want to conflate the two. Previously I
suggested that Atomised tries to access and interrogate the very atoms of the
situation - this is not necessarily katabasis in itself as the action is performed on a
more or less immanent temporality; that is, it is mainly concerned with the immediate
present and therefore on a horizontal plane, ontologically speaking. To be even more
precise, the descension that House of Leaves performs moves it into the pre-
locutionary Real per se while Atomiseds horizontal movement drives it towards an
encounter with the Real in the sense that it is a traumatic rupture in the symbolic
order.
40
In this regard, the interrogative function that the two novels perform can be
said to be similar but not the same. The particular movements that the two books
perform, then, is correlative to this difference. To help elucidate this point we can
turn to the influential seventh chapter from Michel de Certeaus 1980 book The

38
Fordham, Katabasis p.33. The term down-going has more than a passing resemblance to the
German term untergehen, (literally: under-going) which features heavily in Nietzsches Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. Untergehen has connotations of fallen and is used to refer to both the setting of the sun
and can mean to perish or to die. At the beginning of Zarathustra, the eponymous prophet
descends from his mountain home to go and travel the world with the phrase: Thus began
Zarathustras down-going (see p.39 of the aforementioned edition.) However the term in Nietzsches
work begins to take up connotations of overcoming and transition; like the fact that the sun sets every
day, Zarathustra continually transitions from over-man back down into man.
39
Ibid. p.34-35
40
This foray into Lacanese is necessary to establish a distinction between the two texts. The point is
that Atomised never makes claims to interrogate language or its function while this is a primary
preoccupation of House of Leaves; Atomised interrogates a state of nature in which the world is
imagined in its pure materiality, in which human emotions are mere side-effects of the collision of
atoms in the synapses. The prime example of this is the aforementioned concatenation of human
affect and scientistic materialism. When one experiences a trauma such as the death of a relative,
one is forced to confront and acknowledge ones mortality and materiality: in the Lacanian
formulation, this is the real erupting into the symbolic order in which we are normally enmeshed it
forces us to examine our reality. House of Leaves, in the sense that it descends beyond normative
linguistic paradigms, moves into the vicinity of the pure Lacanian Real, that is: a space before or
beyond the orders of the symbolic or imaginary in which language does not exist. See footnote 60 for
further discussion of this concept with regards to how the novel and the Real interact.
27

Practice of Everyday Life which deals with navigation in relation to large structures.
Titled Walking in the City, the chapter is narrated by the author looking down at the
sprawl of New York from atop the World Trade Center and describes the
psychogeographical shift in perception in viewing the city from above, in abstract, as
opposed to when one is involved in the immediacy of traversing the city at ground
level. Certeau writes:
To be lifted to the summit of the World Trade Center is to be lifted out of the citys
grasp. Ones body is no longer clasped by the streets that turn and return it according
to an anonymous law; nor is it possessed, whether as player or played, by the rumble
of so many differences and the nervousness of New York traffic. When one goes up
there, he leaves behind the mass that carries off and mixes up itself in identity of
authors or spectators. An Icarus flying above these waters, he can ignore the devices
of Daedalus in mobile and endless labyrinths far below. His elevation transfigures
him into a voyeur. It puts him at a distance. It transforms the bewitching world by
which one was possessed into a text that lies before ones eyes. It allows one to
read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god.
41

Like the conception of the bermensch in Atomised, Certeaus going-up or rising
above the world appears both emancipatory and abstractive: the citys streets are
characterised as a singular mass of uneasy, bewitching movement that grasps and
clasps at the spectators body, both restricting and directing it, possessing and
claiming ownership over it. That the labyrinth of streets can be both mobile and
endless is indicative of the constant becoming of human communities and the
constant attempt to contain or redirect this pulsating mass. Only at the top of the
tower can the spectator view this mass in its entirety. But there is always something
falsifying in abstraction, putting the viewer at a distance and, indeed, making him a
viewer or a bystander and not a participant as such; the spatial is thereby
transformed into the textual and the subject is now merely a reader of a text. This is
precisely what the immortal clones of Atomised do: they raise themselves above the
human world, look down upon it and perform a panoptic study, abstract material from
the world and use it to, in this case literally, construct a text; as Certeau puts it: the
voyeur-god created by this fiction must disentangle himself from the murky

41
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1988) p.92
28

intertwining daily behaviours and make himself alien to them.
42
This approach does
not engage with phenomena in the immediacy and particularity of the moment nor
does it exist in the same spatial register: one is predicated on an ascent, the other a
descent. The immediate difference between House of Leaves and Atomised is that
the former text attempts to articulate a textual approach that bridges the gap
between the ivory tower of the text and the less-abstracted, more grounded and yet
tangled and intertwined situation of the reader. Indeed, Certeau states that the
ordinary practitioners of the city live down below, below the thresholds at which
visibility begins.
If the ordinary ground-level is invisible, then the underworld must be something else
entirely. Katabasis begins at this ground and then moves below. Fordham writes:
Novels and narratives generally are lured to the underground for several reasons.
As the films Brazil, Subway, Delicatessen, and The Matrix III indicate, both are
spaces associated with repressed forces, the services, the servile, the mechanical
and human servants, out-of-sight downstairs. Such spaces are arenas or pits offering
structure to counter-cultures in which strategies of liberation are planned, and from
which eruptive hell-like powers will one day belch forth the dead to judge the living.
They are thick with political symbolism: incubating undiscovered segments of secret
narratives, they are locations for sub-plots, subversive plots and subversions of
plots.
43

Fordham uses the term narrative in a different capacity to the way it is used in this
dissertation: he uses it more in the sense of media narratives, fictional stories,
whereas I am using in in a broader sense of structured phenomena, something that
is imposed and assembled. There are several things here which will be useful to
mobilise: the conception of underworld as a zone from which subversive forces burst
forth, the politicised element that Fordham lends to it and the idea of subversion of
narrative. However, Fordhams spatialized conception of underworld is more akin to
a zone into which subversive potentialities are forced by those above; the
underworld here is merely a topos in which alternative narratives or revolutions are
plotted the anti-structure to the structure of power. It is not useful here to take up
the idea of the underworld as an alternate construction for disruptive forces or some

42
Ibid. p.93. Here a contrast is established between two experiential paradigms, that of the voyeur
and that of the flneur: the former is a transcendent viewer who engages in abstraction of the world
whereas the latter is an immanent agent who aims to encounter the world in its particularities. The
clones of Atomised are in the former category whereas the explorers of House of Leaves are of the
latter.
43
Fordham in Mark Z. Danielewski p.36
29

pit into which the subaltern are cast; closer to what I am aiming at when taking up
this term is a conception of underworld as under-world, that is: beneath our
subjective episteme, out of our experience or away from our being. If we consider
underworld as that which is maximally other to our self, sense and experience then it
becomes antithetical to that which can be said to exist. Underworld now becomes
non-being, nothingness, an abyss of nihil. Therefore, now, to undergo katabasis is to
go into nothingness, to bring oneself into an encounter with the void, to move away
from elements of vitality such as life, movement and expression.
44

When Mircea Eliade calls descent into Hades an initiatory death
45
he is touching
upon this conception of underworld. Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, in Myths of the
Underworld Journey explicates Eliades assertion and aligns it with the rite of
passage myth:
The descent to the underworld fits into van Genneps schema of the rite de passage,
the three-part transition consisting of separation, liminality, and reaggregation. The
deceased separates himself from the world of the living, goes through a liminal
period in the realm of the dead, and is finally brought back into the normal world as a
new person. Such a pattern provides a coherent framework to unify a disjointed
narrative, since the tripartite schema delineates a nice beginning, middle, and end
that follow one another in logical sequence. The end result of such an initiatory
sequence must be, in the logic of this argument, the creation of a new identity for the
protagonist as he is reborn upon completing his passage through the realm of
death.
46

This resonates with remarks made by Baruch Spinoza in his Ethics in which he
states that:
I understand a body to die when its parts are so disposed that they acquire a different
proportion of motion and rest to one another. For I dare not deny that a human body
even though the circulation of the blood is maintained, and the other signs which
leads to its being thought to be alive may nevertheless be changed into another

44
Obviously here I am using a Wittgensteinian conception of world as everything that is; although I
am aware of the paradoxical existence granted to non-existence insofar as it must exist if we can
refer to it nothingness cannot be said to be a part of the world as its very essence is that of non-
existence, it is everything that is not. In this sense, this nothingness has a presence inside language
whereas true nothingness could not be referred to as it exists beyond the vicinity of linguistic
reference.
45
Quoted in Fordham, p.36
46
Radcliffe G. Edmonds III, Myths of the Underworld Journey: Plato, Aristophanes and the Orphic
Gold Tablets (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004). p.18. It is worth noting that Edmonds
does not endorse this interpretation and indeed goes on to posit a lengthy refutation of this viewpoint.
30

nature entirely different from its own. For no reason compels me to maintain that the
body does not die unless it is changed into a corpse.
47

These excerpts propose the possibility of temporary liminal non-death in which the
subject can die and return from this state many times, emerging each time different
to what they were before. In terms of story and thematics, House of Leaves
correlates more or less precisely to these tropes of katabasis, non-death and
underworld, but this is not what makes it remarkable, rather it is the way in which
Danielewski combines these concepts with the ideas of movement discussed
previously which makes the book interesting. As discussed in the introduction to this
chapter the perhaps eponymous haunted house is central to the story: the
characters find out that the house appears to be bigger on the inside than it is on the
outside; this is first discovered when the Navidson family return from an out-of-town
wedding to a sense of the unheimlich or, indeed, the un-home-like permeating
the house.
48

Later they find a door that was not previously there which leads to a hallway which
subsequently leads to an impossibly large space.
49
What they discover, however, is
only an antechamber to the real topography of this impossible space.
As they quickly discover, the void above them is not infinite. Their flashlights
illuminate a ceiling at least two hundred feet high. A little later, at least fifteen
hundred feet away, they discover an opposing wall. What no one is prepared for,
however, is the even larger entrance waiting for them, opening into an even greater
void.
50

After traversing this space, Will Navidson discerns that the structure beyond it
resembles a labyrinth and that somewhere in the endless weave of corridors there is
a staircase that leads downwards to an inconceivable depth. We are told that the film
at this point is entirely black; we rely only on Navidsons narration:
Heres a door. No lock. Hmmm a room, not very big. Empty. No windows. No
switches. No outlets. Heading back to the corridor. Leaving the room. It seems colder
now. Maybe Im just getting colder. Heres another door. Unlocked. Another room.
Again no windows. Continuing on.
51


47
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, (London: Penguin, 1996) (4p:39s)
48
Mark Z Danielewski, House of Leaves (London: Doubleday, 2001) pp.24-27
49
Ibid. p.57
50
Ibid. p.84
51
Ibid. p.64
31

The effect is disorienting. Further to this, the house seems to be able to modify its
architecture at will, with the Navidson reporting contracting staircases, shifting walls
and endless tunnels. Eventually the house begins to disintegrate and even swallow
some of the inhabitants:
Karen [Navidson] is upstairs placing her hair brushes, perfume and jewellery box in a
bag, when the bedroom begins to collapse. We watch the ceiling turn from white to
ash-black and drop. Then the walls close in with enough force to splinter the dresser,
snap the frame of the bed, and hurl lamps from their nightstands, bulbs popping, light
executed.
The idea of a space that is not only a host for movement but also can utilise
movement as a constituent part of itself and has the faculty to change its own
topography is a genuinely innovative idea on Danielewskis part. House of Leaves,
the book, too, begins to shift and move as we explore it: blank space encroaches
upon the body of the text; words loosen themselves from their formatting and begin
to spread out across the page; in a section which describes the characters
attempting to navigate a labyrinth, the text flips, inverts, even burrows through the
pages. Footnotes that are to be read in the reverse order to the text appear in
isolated squares and the reader can only access them once they have reached a
certain point in the text proper, necessitating a backtracking and a rotation of the
book
52
. In Paul McCormicks Houses of leaves, cinema and the new affordances of
old media, his analysis shows how House of Leaves generates these movements in
various shifting degrees and registers by imitating the velocities of cinema. With the
inclusion of various styles of literary diaspora, the possibility of new propulsive forces
is realised. It is worth quoting at length:
House of Leaves also successfully modifies its narrative speed by drawing upon the
grammars of cinema, concrete poetry and cartoons to experiment typographically.
For example, at one point Danielewski quickens the temporal duration by putting one
or two words on several pages in a row so that our experience of reading the text
parallels the speed at which the explorers race through the hallway; then as
characters squeeze through a door we read smaller and smaller boxes of text to
parallel that feeling of claustrophobia; then as the characters become disoriented we
need to repeatedly flip around the book to read the text; and the spaces between text
become affectively charged as they come to represent the empty space in the
strange hallway. Such typographic play strengthens our sense of the parallel
between the characters interpretive experiences in their story world and our

52
See pp.153-244, pp.275-312, pp.423-489, pp.623-634 and especially pp.119-148 for examples of
textual modulation.
32

experience as readers of this text. By manipulating what Jan Baetens and Kathryn
Hume call the mainstream average rhythm of the novel, Danielewski encourages
our identification with the explorers through typographic montage. Indeed, it is both
instructive and somewhat paradoxical to note how cinematic thinking allows
Danielewski to reimagine the page for its imagistic potentials, and thus to return to
the very medium and materiality of books, its print, as a resource for formal
experiments.
53

In other words, it is precisely the introduction of difference and literary diaspora that
affords the potential for the modulation of movement. What is crucial is that these
typographic experiments only begin to manifest themselves in the text after the
characters have decided to enter the mysterious door and go into the labyrinth of
black stone. In other words, the text only begins to defy its orthodox arrangement
after Navidson has undergone katabasis and gone under the world, the structured
and constructed plane of the mainstream, average and everyday.
54
After a lengthy
and gruelling journey, Will Navidson manages to traverse the labyrinth and descend
the spiral staircase, only to meet an apparently infinite hallway. At this point the text
begins violently shifting again: Nor does [the] endless corridor he travels remain the
same size.
55
Later, he reaches a point of almost total blackness; at this point there
is an epigraph to a chapter written in braille which reads:
The walls are endlessly bare. Nothing hangs on them, nothing defines them. They
are without texture. Even to the keenest eye or most sentient fingertip, they remain
unreadable. You will never find a mark there. No trace survives. The walls obliterate
everything. They are permanently absolved of all record. Oblique, forever obscure
and unwritten. Behold the perfect pantheon of absence.
56

The deployment of braille is indicative of a shift away from visual orthodoxy towards
a tactile experience; this is our indicator that the book is about to begin shifting,
falling apart.
57
Text retreats to the corners, curls into tiny squares and forms into
loops. Finally, Navidson ends up standing upon a single coffin-like slab of black
stone surrounded by an infinite void. I have no sense of anything but myself
Navidson mumbles into his tape recorder, although he is aware of his movement. He

53
Paul McCormick, Houses of leaves, cinema and the new affordances of old media in
Contemporary American and Canadian Writers: Mark Z Danielewski, p.64
54
It should also be noted that Danielewski deploys these techniques in order to bring into contiguity
the textual and the metatextual, or what happens within the book and what happens outside it. For
example, when the characters navigate a literal labyrinth, the readers have to navigate a textual one;
when the characters are running, the readers have to turn the pages more quickly etc.
55
Danielewski, House of Leaves p.426
56
Ibid. p.423; it is unclear whether Navidson or Zampan writes these words.
57
See pp.424-490
33

says: I know Im falling and will soon slam into the bottom. I feel it rushing up at
me.
58
One is immediately reminded of Nietzsches madmans proclamation: a
vertiginous continual plunging, falling away from all sunlight and heat. To provide his
own light and warmth Navidson begins to burn the pages of the only book he brought
with him a book which is called nothing other than House of Leaves
59
. Here,
perhaps we can draw the ultimate parallel between text, movement, katabasis and
initiatory death: House of Leaves is a work which attempts to unwrite itself, to cause
its own death. Therefore the novel undergoes a katabasis itself: it tears itself away
from what the novel is.
60

The true import of Spinozas claim is that one can die without becoming a corpse
and only ceases to live when one becomes a corpse. The predicate for a body dying,
for Spinoza, is when its parts are so disposed that they acquire a different
proportion of motion and rest to one another; in other words, when the body
disintegrates or is somehow dis-aggregated. The fictive novel House of Leaves is
annihilated when its pages are burned and the book we hold in our hands attempts
to do the same by attempting to have separate parts of itself acquire a different
proportion of motion and rest to one another. It is almost as if the book is trying to
tear itself apart but is constantly held together by some invisible fabric. One can draw
multiple superficial inferences from the title here a house of leaves as an uneasy
structure of fragile, independent elements, the book itself as an assemblage of
leaves of paper but the point is that it is the book itself that is trying to annihilate
itself, it is a self-immolation. This death takes place at the nadir of the katabatic
descent, at the very bottom of the down-going into the void, in which the text barely
begins to resemble literature.
61
After this traumatic section, Will Navidson is thrown
out at the surface: the scene is described as Karen crying on the front lawn, a pink
ribbon in her hair, Navidson cradled in her lap.
62
The signifiers of the cradle and the

58
Ibid. pp.471-472
59
Ibid. p.465
60
If we consider the void that Navidson enters to be the Lacanian Real, then the reason that the book
disintegrates at this point is because the novel, as the receptacle of language, enters a zone in which
language does not exist and therefore has no medium through which to express its being. The death
of the fictive novel is brought about by the desire of the novel we hold in our hands to undergo
initiatory death and encounter the very limits of language.
61
Ibid. pp.469-489
62
Ibid. p.523
34

ribbon are explicit references to the post-natal; Navidson has emerged from the
underworld reborn.
It appears, then, that a correlation can be drawn between the act of causing ones
own transient death, the rejection of orthodoxy and the introduction of different types
of movement. Further, it seems also that a practice of such a method can be
performed in order to bring about such change. With this in mind, I move on to the
final book I will be considering, Keston Sutherlands The Odes to TL61P.
IV

What are we to do when confronted with a suite of five odes, written mainly in prose,
to a now-obsolete product ordering code for a Hotpoint washer-dryer door
mechanism? It is perhaps easiest when first encountering The Odes to TL61P to
consider what it is not. If the orthodox ode is supposed to be musical, devotional or
neatly structured, Sutherlands Odes are none of these things in any conventional
manner, and defiantly so. They are not any type of recognisable poetry, nor appear
to contain any straightforward narrative nor, however, are they just a meaningless
concatenation of words; not merely a manifestation of T.S. Eliots heap of broken
images whose Waste Land is probably the primary genealogical precursor to The
Odes. The work is hard to digest, at once a solid block of text and a disorienting whirl
of allusions and unstable languages. Indeed, the sequence is predominantly written
in prose which by turns resembles modernist stream-of-consciousness experiments,
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E cut-ups or even the more accessible end of computer-
generated texts such as those produced by the RiTA generative literature software.
63

The ostensible object of reverence for these odes is the deliberately bathetic
TL61P, an item which conjures up both a sense of the mundane and the arcane
world of private industrial lexicons; that it is an object of reverence gives a sense that
every code is adjacent to and contains within it an ode. From the opening to the
first substantial drawn breath of a semicolon, the reader is met with:
Each time you unscrew the head the truths burn out and fly away above the stack of
basements inundated in aboriginal mucus, elevating the impeccable, hereafter

63
For more information, see <http://rednoise.org/rita/> [accessed September 1st 2014]
35

congenitally depilated Janine rescaled to a grainy blank up on to the oblong top of
the freezer whose shut white lid unhinged at the back alone preserves a pyramid of
rigid meat, budget pizzas, devirginated artic rolls, only ever kidding in a prophylactic
void torn into great crates of glittering eyeshadow, dousing all its stickiness in dark
empty swerves, for non-one is the radius of everything we are, a reinforced steel
artery in the very integument to be burst asunder, by reason of innately shattered
strobes as soon lived as burnt out, ramming an unplanned crack into the door
mechanism;
64

One looks at the huge columns of text in the first ode and imagines them as dense
edifices that must be laboured at or encountered head-on. At the very start of the
sequence we have a bathetic opening of Pandoras box, an unscrewed panel
releasing shattered strobes of truth that whirl about like spirits or clothes in a
washing machine, then follows a dizzying surge of allusions taking in industrial junk,
imagery of gelatinous sludge and daily ephemera and is threaded through with
furtive sexual suggestions. In terms of the profligacy of the imagination with regards
to world-making, the world Sutherland seems to be here imagining is a kind of
nightmarish supermarket of Francis Bacon-style meat and mucus, although shot
through with glitter and strobes. Continuing from that semicolon, allusions to games
and wagers appear:
who the fuck I am now speaking to or at or for or not at this moment is compensation
for being completed into a circle resigned to resume the first square, the first on the
entire board, and is listening there, afloat and spent yet lost in streaks to the opening
night
65

At first dense, certain lines from this excerpt stand out when brought into relation
with what is ostensibly a prologue to the work:
And the situation is like that of certain games, in which all places on the board are
supposed to be filled in accordance with certain rules, where at the end, blocked by
certain spaces, you will be forced to leave more places empty than you could have
wanted to, unless you used some trick. There is, however, a certain procedure
through which one can most easily fill the board.
66

This excerpt appears to be taking on the semblance of manifesto, or perhaps more
appropriately of an instruction manual, as if the poet is writing the prescription of a
method that is about to follow. The final line of the prologue is the clarion call: Wake
up my fellow citizens and middle class and go look in the mirror. Mirror and

64
Keston Sutherland, The Odes to TL61P, (London: Enitharmon, 2013) p.7, Ode I 1.1 lines 1-15
65
Ibid, lines 15-20
66
Ibid, p.5
36

situation are poetically and politically charged terms respectively and are conflated
here; the poet is both directly addressing his bourgeois peers and calling on the
reader of poetry to wake them. Due to the lack of commas, it is a double movement,
both calling for the middle classes to encounter themselves and the reader to
mobilise the bourgeoisie and then, later, to encounter themselves. This admission
that both the poet and presumably his readers are probably not proletarian labourers
and need to do a different kind of work or play by different rules is telling of
Sutherlands project. Here the poetic I is invoked we wonder if the allusion to chess
is also an allusion to poetry or politics, by virtue of the fact that it is the I attempting
to break with an essentially cyclical system which always returns the player to
square one. What is at stake here is that there is a way to circumvent this stalemate,
but the poet does not elucidate.
As a way into to this opaque wager, is it useful to consider other inroads to
Sutherland and his writing. In his introduction to a reading from the work by
Sutherland at UC Berkeley, the critic and poet Geoffrey G. OBrien states that:
There is an endlessly paraphrasable, restatable question running and it does run
through all Keston Sutherlands work: how could one be other than the final stage of
digestion for capital? How does one become the person or subject that could want
something other than what is? Who could want something better, could want better,
differently, such that desiring was not merely a flight from one part of the wrong to
another, where it wouldnt be felt immediately as such. How could one want others?
Connect to the rest in a non-vampiric, non-cannibalistic relation. The answer is not on
the page and not all at once and not totally, that is: not yet in time and not here in
space such as they are under capital. Though, thats no license to stop trying out
there and here in the nowhere of the page.
67

OBrien picks up on the metaphorics of digestion hinted at earlier and, like
Houellebecq, equates consumption with a kind of terminal process, an egregious
reduction of the subject into a cannibal, a vampire or worse, some kind of comestible
slab of meat. A central image that is picked up on by both OBrien in his introduction
and Matthew Abbot in his article for 3:AM magazine The Poetry of Destroyed
Experience is that of Gallerte, a German term for gelatine or jelly, with connotations
of frozen and clotted. Abbot writes:

67
Geoffrey G. OBrien. Keston Sutherland: Holloway Reading Series. UC Berkeley, September 26th,
2013. Accessible here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8UxioOblKU> [accessed August 14th
2014]
37

The word appears several times in the first volume of Das Kapital, usually after bloe
(mere), and always in the context of Arbeit or labour. It is the German for the gelling
agent obtained by boiling bones, skin, and other animal products... In English
translations the word has generally become congealed (as with, for instance, Ben
Fowkess congealed quantities of homogeneous human labour); Sutherland argues
this seriously fails to capture Marxs intention. Congealment means solidification. A
liquid or gas that is heated or (especially) cooled and in the process hardened has
congealed [Sutherland] challenges the implications of the metaphor. Unlike
congealing, gelatinising is irreversible: one can thaw ice and get water, but there is
no getting back to skin and bone. Which chimes with the second point Sutherland
makes about Gallerte. Its disgusting. What Marx wants to capture with the word is
not simply the idea that the flow of living human labour is frozen by capital, but that
human brains, muscles, nerves, hands, etc. are irreversibly and disgustingly
transformed by the capitalist into an object to be consumed.
68

The most unforgivable thing about the irreversible forced metamorphosis into human
sludge is that it is irreversible, a terminal teleology that ends in the eradication of all
potential movement how can the subject move if the powers that be have liquefied
their limbs? Such disgust with the orthodox political situation leads Sutherland to
want something different but also to wanting differently, to embark upon a project of
world-making that is at odds with other conventional projects that might be more
commensurate to and consumable by capitalism. Abbot continues:
Before it is a theoretical treatise, Sutherland argues, Das Kapital is a work of satire,
a work meant to do harm to someone in particular: it is designed to disgust the
reader, and specifically to provoke a kind of self-disgust in the bourgeois reader.
69

We are to understand that a similar movement is taking place in The Odes, a kind of
invocation of revulsion, an inculcation of disgust felt when encountering such an
alien text. The project is undertaken with violent speed, running or flying through the
nowhere of the page, the non-topos of utopia here being conceptualised as a kind
of tabula rasa topography or as OBrien states: the poem for Sutherland is not a
place outside the time and space of the present but it is a non-site within that
present that can convene multiple times and multiple places. In other words, it is a
site in which difference has the possibility to act and to be enacted and a zone in
which radical transformations of materiality can come about. Sutherland himself,
speaking in an interview to The White Review, states that:

68
Matthew Abbot, The Poetry of Destroyed Experience, <http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-
poetry-of-destroyed-experience/> [accessed 15th August 2014]
69
Ibid.
38

For me, the pressure which sustains poetry as a lyrical art, and which still compels
me to write, is something very akin to what Marx described as the absolutely
imperative need for revolution It remains, nonetheless, the horizon of my poetry to
attempt to express with the maximum conceivable and liveable pressure an
absolutely imperative need for the comprehensive revolutionary transformation of
human experience and relations.
70

Note how Sutherland shifts from revolution to transformation: his poetry does not
seek a destruction of the old order only to establish a new orthodoxy, but to
transform and to keep transforming. The work itself, I claim, is predicated upon two
movements which I will name as stress and modulation. The former term could
also just as easily be rendered as pressure, hard work or labour and speaks to
effort on behalf of both the author and reader; the latter names a shifting between
linguistic registers but in this case in a much more frequent and violent manner than
discussed in the previous two texts, breathlessly fluctuating between Marxist
polemic, technical instruction manual jargon, intimate confessional, garbled disjecta
membra and other linguistic junk. One of the most observable examples of
modulation appears in Ode II III, when confessional transitions through French non
sequitur into software nomenclature:
I would run words together like wall gashes strips thinking Id be right. But the
outcome would not be, but something else just dumped on it instead. Years of
my life wasted on war, depressed and miles away. Je le vis. The menu bar
and buttons are displayed above the text fields: The line below shows many
product codes; Use the menu bar to choose commands: In addition to the
standard menus; File, Edit and View, there is also the: Dialog toolbar for fast
access to frequently used commands in the toolbar can be activated and
deactivated at the View Toolbar.
71

This is a relatively easy transition when compared with an earlier section in Ode II
1.2, for example, where the constant and rapid modulation of register creates the
sense of stress:
only air required, shattering joy contradicts quantitative easing, replenishment
of liquid life that punctually runs out, to bar us in temptation and to keep the
flesh wrung dry; pure and fundamental to our blood sucked in sucked out and
sucked off at RBS to fuel one of mans innovative cost synergies you end up

70
Natalie Ferris, Interview with Keston Sutherland in The White Review
<http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-keston-sutherland/> [accessed 15th August
2014]
71
Sutherland, Odes p.33, III lines 13-24
39

all spunked out ABN-AMRO minus La Salle due diligence lite by lip sync,
cuckolding Barclays, writing off 1.5 billion which could have gone into wells
and malaria vaccines,
72

The affect is almost physical; indeed what is exclusive to this text, as opposed to the
other two considered, is the emphasis on performance and putting the text to work
out there, to borrow OBriens phrasing. It appears that there are at least two
versions of The Odes, the one written and the one performed. To what degree poetry
is reliant upon or symbiotic with its recital is beyond the scope of this dissertation, but
the question does pose a problem for my method; if I am relying purely on the textual
body and attempting to mobilise what is present in these bodies alone, to what
extent would it be legitimate for me to rely on Sutherlands reading of The Odes and
further, to what extent does the mobilisation of the words on the page by the author
reading it aloud affect the body of the text? The question is especially pertinent
when considering Sutherland who has been known to write descriptions for
performance as epigraphs to his poems and whose own body is seemingly moved
by the words on the page, rocking back and forth, straightening and tensing as he
reads. Complicating the matter further is the fact that each public reading of The
Odes to TL61P was unique; OBrien, again introducing Sutherland, this time a year
earlier and this time unprepared states:
I think it is only fitting that I need to spontaneously deliver something right before we
hear Keston read from his current project, The Odes, because its a project in which
hes tasked himself with a kind of ruinous relation to the enduring substance of the
text, insofar as he required of himself that he would perpetually revise the work until
the advent of its publication, which means that even those parts of it that at which he
is at one point pleased become if not moments of subsequent displeasure
irritabilities or opportunities for further consideration and self-erasure
73

The text then is a self-revolutionising thing, a thing which is in constant becoming
until it is published, which seems to indicate a kind of death, a final stasis in which
there can be no more change. There is still movement, but the potentialities for
creation have been somewhat dissipated by rendering the work as finished. The
work is a dead thing and yet still moves. Like Atomiseds game-changing revelation
in the epilogue or House of Leaves self-immolation, The Odes to TL61P is a self-

72
Ibid. p.26 1.2 lines 21-29
73
Geoffrey G. OBrien. Keston Sutherland and John Wilkinson: Holloway Reading Series. UC
Berkeley, September 15th, 2012. Accessible here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8UxioOblKU>
[accessed August 14th 2014]
40

destructive text, not just in terms of its creation but also in terms of its textual
makeup. In places, the speed of the text dramatically slows and contracts: in the first
ode, for example, around line X the prose begins to shift into free verse and then
congeals into neat rhymed quatrains:
Our glaring end annuls in light
what fire on the faded past
remains whose shadow cannot last
as you burn away in bright
and widespread too ecstatic loss
everywhere bends the eye
back on the slow infinity
that blocks the love it fits across
just as rehoused at random love
itself puts up its opposites
cut down to make the point it is
not wasted in the end to prove.
74


This section almost floats, only to burst straight back into the breathless prose. This
appears to be a perfect example of Spinozas proclamation: the text seems to
become something antithetical to what it was, to inhabit a completely different state
of movement and such an orthodox one at that only to return to the mode in
which it previously existed. In this way, the text mirrors its creation by taking up
methods of uncreation and unwriting; OBrien describes this process well:
His [Sutherlands] local set of laws by which he has constrained himself in The Odes,
although they are adamantly local, are about redrawing the local again and again,
also speak to a kind of continuity across a lot of Kestons poetic work and critical
work Poetry as a technology by which you can do something ruinous to the social
self and ruination itself has to change from work to work. Otherwise, it would congeal
into a signature, a fetish, a reification.
Therefore a certain paradox is embodied in the only stable thing being constant
change; in other words, the only absolute is that there is no absolute. Literature,
being so solid or stable has to work hard in order to inhabit this constant change and
indeed, the effect can only ever be temporary. Technologies, strategies and methods
must be established in order to reach this zone of becoming, although once
established, these methods must ruin themselves to save themselves becoming
solidified and therefore unable to move.

74
Sutherland, Odes p.12 I lines 173-184
41

So when one attempts to mobilise such a text, what does one actually mobilise? The
interviews where the constant fixation on becoming and transformation are revealed
as well as the readings and the rewritings, because they have been evoked here,
must all be taken up as one assemblage. The introductions and criticisms cited here
are ostensibly trying to elucidate some meaning behind such a dense text, but I have
chosen excerpts that focus on movement or transformation or transfiguration rather
than pointing to a certain image and claiming that it denotes or signifies X.
Nevertheless, they are readings themselves and are intrinsic in turn to my reading of
Sutherland. Taken as a whole, this uneasy structure of independent elements
congeals into a cohesive text that illustrates the difference between revolution and
heresy: the latter by mere virtue of its insistence upon constant becoming,
especially with regards to the transformation of language is absolutely adverse to
the establishment of communities, communication and orthodoxy. And so, like
Orpheus emerging from the underworld, we arrive back at the initial problematic
posed in the introduction.












42






V

In fact, the problematic was insinuated even earlier, even before the essay began,
outside the text, as it were. The two epigraphs to this dissertation elucidate the
problem of language in different ways: firstly, the quote from Sartre aligns being with
thinking and binds the two in a continuum. This goes further than the famous
Cartesian proclamation of I think therefore I am by invoking its mirror opposite: I am
therefore I think; in other words: my being constitutes my thought. If one cannot stop
oneself from thinking then that means that thought is constantly being generated and
constantly in movement, which means that thought and therefore being is in a
constant state of becoming. Indeed, the title to this work, starting again is like failing
to stop
75
, could easily be reformulated as becoming is being, if we constitute
becoming as a constant cycle of generation and annihilation. If becoming is central
to being and being can be equated with thought, then it can be said that thought is
always involved in an endless becoming.
This is where the Wittgenstein quote becomes relevant: if thought is constantly in a
becoming then language is somewhat antithetical to being insofar as it attempts to
codify and make orthodox this constant change; in a sense, language halts thought.
If language halts thought and is antithetical to being then it is, in a very real sense,
nihilistic. It is also absolutely inadequate to deal with anything outside of itself;
Wittgenstein, at the end of the Tractatus, famously proclaimed that whereof one

75
Sutherland, The Odes to TL61P, p.36, Ode 3 1.1, line 12.
43

cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
76
This could easily be rendered as
whereof one cannot write, thereof must not write. He has a point: what use is using
words when trying to get out from under the shadow of nihilism that language as the
first orthodoxy casts? A possible response is that words are the primary
manifestation of written language, which is perhaps the most visible of all languages;
thus, where better to deal with this language than in writing itself and its
manifestation in literature, especially when language is the realm of investigation of
such texts? What is implicit is that, like chora is always the subject of choreography,
language is always the subject of literature. To embody this pure interaction literature
appears to reach out to something extra- or post-linguistic; writing has to reach
outside of itself and embody other languages in order to critique the specific mode of
language that it is beholden to. Literature is the best place to do this; it is the only
place where this kind of investigation can take place precisely because of the lack of
words in other languages.
Through the application of the non-philosophical method, what has arisen is that
literature can help us visualise this movement, or that in it we can detect traces of
such a trajectory, if not embody it entirely. Atomised was illustrative of the way
orthodoxies work but also how shifts in a narrative can change the way in which the
reader experiences the space of the novel; House of Leaves showed that when
narratives move out of zones of nominal topography, orthodoxies of space begin to
break down, but also teaches us the harsh lesson that one must always return from
these outside planes; with The Odes to TL61P we see a text that vehemently refuses
the world and as such both seeks to replicate the struggle of imagining a new one
and showcases the attempt to construct a grammar of transformative experience
through political and erotic energies. Atomised journeyed downwards from a
panoptic voyeurism into an investigation of the immediate situation; House of Leaves
took up the narrative of katabasis and descended further, only to return to the
surface; The Odes attempts a formulation of the ethics of these movements and
makes steps towards a method by which to accomplish an actualisation of these
ethics.

76
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus trans. C.K. Ogden (Edinburgh: The Edinburgh
Press, 1922) p.90. The original German (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darber muss man
schweigen) is cited on p.162. Also rendered less poetically as what we cannot speak about we must
pass over in silence in the translation by D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1974)
44

The mobilisation of these three texts is just one possible trajectory out of an almost
infinite potentiality and I could have considered many other texts; indeed, the
constellation on show here is rather conservative and only contains books by white,
educated men. Other contenders for consideration were the nomadic works of W.G.
Sebald, the austere realism of Tao Lin, the absurdism of Haruki Murakami, or the
displaced poetics of Kate Kilalea.
77
The dissertation in that case may not have
focused on spatiality and kinetics: indeed, the point is to come up with radically
different ways of thinking-from. This dissertation itself could also have drastically
changed course; I have had to curtail myself from discussing, among other things,
photography as narrative-making, the union between the media and religion in the
capacity of excommunication, remediation as heresy and, perhaps most egregiously,
any real mention of Deleuze or Derrida whose absence is far more palpable than
their presence would be.
In summary: I posited that language is a system that is a primary constituent of
orthodoxy. Orthodoxies are created with language and certain kinds of linguistic
arrangement are maintained via the application of orthodox protocol. Therefore,
language restricts thought by its very nature. The connotation of this statement is
that language is inherently nihilistic. Indeed, language is the first orthodoxy from
which all other narratives are born. The nihilating process goes something like this:
language is necessary for communication which in turn brings about a community;
within the community certain narratives arise which eventually become orthodoxies;
orthodoxy begins to suppress and control the movement of the human imagination
and therefore cause a growing sensation of nihilism in the subject.
However, I also proposed that there is a potential capacity within the unbound
movement of the imagination to bypass language itself. It does so by refusing
communication and narrative, thereby establishing its own heresy: it says no to the
way the world is currently being imagined. To successfully reject the world is to
create an original narrative, one that has no goal or telos, one that exists in irrelation
to the word as it is currently being imagined, that does not refer to a previous

77
If I were not tasked with discussing literature in this dissertation, it seems that music would also be
a worthy avenue of exploration, especially improvised music. Not only does music modify its speeds
and tempo but exists within a language of which it frequently tests the boundaries. Indeed, it would be
interesting to compare music with literature and examine their shared vicinities and discover what
elements are mutually exclusive.
45

narrative nor anticipate a future one; to create a movement that travels out of the
topography of meaning and into a choreography pure unto itself that does not
necessarily denote, signify or manifest anything. We do not want utopia, the
nothingness of the void; we want euchoria, a zone where the infinite free movement
of the imagination is possible. Instead of orthodoxy, we want radical heterodoxy. To
envisage or move towards this zone is to defy communication, to unchain oneself as
the madman prophesised and, in the end, to attempt to avoid nihilism. This anti-
orthodox movement I have named heresy and if any normative statement is to be
gleaned from this dissertation it is that heresies should be encouraged and created
wherever we see orthodoxy causing the onset of nihilism. The rupture that this
heresy creates will only remain open for a certain time, after which the reifying effect
of narrative will form a topography of this rift and form channels through which
thought is forced.
The only conclusion to be drawn, then, is not to conclude. As soon as the heretical
method becomes a code it must take itself apart again; it must become a heresy
unto itself. This dissertation must unwrite itself; this method can never be performed
again.
You should burn this document.







46







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