TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

“and the matron mourns, forlorn and forsaken, like Hecuba:”
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

1. INTRODUCTION

“Bring something incomprehensible into the world(!)”. The rallying cry of Deleuze & Guattari resounded across the field of poststructuralism and theory, and then faded off into the distance. The field of theoretical practice today, while cognisant of the contributions of the generation of thinkers before it, seems to have quietly moved on and away from their stylistic presentations of thought. The practice of literary and non-standard experiments in thought seems to have fallen out of style. The paradox is palpable: while the field of thought today is so massively indebted to the contributions of the poststructuralists, it eschews their manner of practice. And while critiques abound of the modern world’s subjugation to the techno-capital order, and entrapment within the confines of a rigidly materialist-relativist episteme, these fail to explicitly draw the link between the crisis of thought today and its stylelessness.

This disdain for style should not be surprising – it is more thought’s norm than its exception. The segregation and disprivileging of style and the aesthetic traces its roots back to Plato, and is then on presumed in nearly every consequent major philosopher. The legacy this leaves on the field of thought is a mystification of the status of style in thought. This mystification constitutes a far more fundamental disprivileging manoeuvre than Plato’s denouncement of the aesthetic or Aristotle’s subjugation of the stylistic to a mere means of delivery of a more fundamental dialectic; it constitutes the failure of philosophy to provide for style an existence of its own. Style has thus always been condemned to exist only in an epiphenomenal sense – either the byproduct of a thinker’s accidental facticities, or as deviation from or conformity to a general fashion of the times.

I argue that in trying to accord for style an existence of its own, we must turn to Deleuze, whose concept of style – unwaveringly materialist and transversal – allows us to develop for style a status that goes beyond the literary and aesthetic. Further, Deleuze’s multiple and often inconsistent metaphysical systems, which situate the ontological in the noological, provide the perfect models within which to explicate the ontological/noological status of style.

The Historical Disprivileging of Style.
This research takes as its point of departure a series of provocations issued by thinkers ranging from Jameson to Lambert. Their lamentations on the state of thought and theoretical practice in the present age ring together in singular resonance with a general observation familiar to those of us in the field: that stylistic presentations of thought have faded away from the field, despite the fact that we were in the hold of some of the most stylized and inventive expressions of thought only a while ago with the generation of the French post-structuralists.

Whether it be public apathy, hostile critique, or a quiet walking away from, the relation of style and thought seems to be in a state much like what Lyotard and Heidegger predicted; “Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking – not even yet, although the state of the world is becoming constantly more thought-provoking” (Heidegger 4); a state of calculative, computerised knowledge, where radically new expressions and experimentations in thought and its presentation can no longer be executed or even imagined. Greg Lambert explicates this position by carrying on a pronouncement articulated by Deleuze, that thought is in a position of uninspired staleness because “the innovations (that took) place in philosophy (with the French Poststructuralist movement), had little effect in revolutionizing the greater part of the Western philosophical tradition, in part because these innovations were mostly relegated to minor considerations of “style” and thus did not fundamentally transform the dominant image of thought presupposed by traditional notions of thinking and ideas of “common sense”” (Lambert 6). One may interject and protest that the dominant image of thought of today has moved from one of identity and structure to one of difference. Here, Lambert reminds us that “these days everyone knows that difference is a common name for that which causes us to think, (and yet)… the concept of difference has grown stale and no longer even provides us with an image sufficient to shock us out of our usual furrows of thought” (Lambert 12). Lambert’s analyses of the crisis of thought we live in today trace its roots back to a moment in the 60s which saw an impetus to bring something new into the world, to radically challenge the way thought had been done, and invent a new kind or image of thought appropriate for the age. This was what brought thought into a struggle and a relation with non-philosophy and with style; out of which the concept of Difference was produced. Yet the concept of difference alone, plucked out of the field of stylistic and non-philosophical creation in which it was created, can and has become the new dogmatic image of thought, bringing us further from creating the new while simultaneously reassuring us that the different and the new are being affirmed under the auspices of a concept ripped from its generative soil.

Callus similarly remarks that “given current vicissitudes in the academy, theory… and its “dense mixing of styles” is “out of style” and perhaps, too, out of that style more particularly. According to him, theory in the style of the French post-structuralists has fallen out of favour, and what remains of theory is done outside of the style of the post-structuralists (Callus 8–9). He proposes that this may perhaps have been caused but how tiring the cryptic and energetically stylised work of the French post-structuralists might be to some, or perhaps the difficulty of stylised theory occupying a liminal space between literature and philosophy and operating at the very margins of thought. However, Callus also situates the falling out of fashion of style in thought, in a region beyond the lofty ambitions of the post-structuralists: “Style marks a faultline in the history of Western thought and culture that can be traced back to Plato and beyond. That faultline – and it is precisely one of style – is, putatively, between philosophy and poetry, or literature. On one side is philosophy’s relative disregard for style in its overriding pursuit of truth, and on the other is poetry’s – literature’s – all-consuming interest in style, even-perhaps especially-at the expense of truth” (Callus 9). Callus’ hypothesis do not find an easy resolution in his anthology, but alert us to the long history of the present crisis and, as we shall see with Badiou and Jameson later on, that the tensions between style and thought intrinsically involve a dispute over Truth.

The assessment that the stylised theory has fallen out of favour is echoed by those researching in the area, but what of more general assessments of the state of thought of today? Beyond Lambert and Callus, we hear disquietingly similar assessments from Deleuze, Fisher, Jameson, and Badiou, and though their analyses begin and centre around different aspects surrounding thought, they each imply that issue of style in central to the crisis. For Deleuze, we have moved out of the Foucauldian Disciplinary Society, and into a Society of Control. The Society of Control is defined by the reduction of the individual to the dividual, a social unit broken into codes and “surfing” upon a massive network of codes and passwords (Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”); the apparent age of endless production and minimal restrictions is assessed by Deleuze to be a rhizome of “mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements” (“Postscript on the Societies of Control” 6). Intellectual life manifests this in the following manner: “(f)or the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the “corporation” at all levels of schooling” (“Postscript on the Societies of Control” 11).

Echoing from another dimension this sentiment are Frederic Jameson and Mark Fisher’s respective diagnoses of the present moment. Their analyses focus more on the socio-cultural dimension of the present moment, and constitute the beginnings of a severe call for something to be done about the “crisis” of style we are currently in. Fisher’s prognosis of the present moment is that we live in Capitalist Realism, a state defined by a lack of political alternatives to capitalism resulting in a state of cultural and intellectual sterility (Fisher 77). For Fisher, intellectual life and the academy is in crisis due in part to the marketisation of the university; education is turned into a commodity and academics are forced to take on an inundating amount of bureaucratic tasks in order to remain employed (41–42). More overarchingly, “the affects that predominate in late capitalism are fear and cynicism. These emotions do not inspire bold thinking” (76). A thinker in the academy is in little position to ruffle any feathers by attempting a cryptic and stylised theoretical treatise challenging the boundaries of language and thought – their job is ever-increasingly on the line.

Jameson goes further by suggesting that the present age, which he terms postmodernism, can be understood as schizophrenic in the sense Lacan uses it, which is to say that it is defined as the “breakdown of the signifying chain, therefore, (under which) the schizophrenic (the subject under late-capitalism) is reduced to an experience of pure material signifiers, or, in other words, a series of pure and unrelated presents in time (27). This condition is emblematic of the state of cultural and intellectual production we find ourselves in, which he calls pastiche, “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion” (Jameson 18). Jameson and Fisher are extremely aligned on their assessments of the present moment, though Jameson formulates it differently. For Jameson, the schizophrenic age we find ourselves in and the abolishing “of any practical sense of the future” (46) and past leads to the destruction of anything meaningfully new from being produced, in thought and culture. Intellectually, Jameson describes the state of our thought as “Schizophrenic Nominalism” (360), a rejection of the modernist search for the universal or universals and which “marks a return to the concrete”.

Badiou emphatically echoes this, in alignment with the preceding thinkers, and goes further in connecting it with the current intellectual climate stemming from the left and from the theorists closest to us. Badiou argues that the current intellectual milieu is one he terms Democratic Materialism, a name for the dominant assumptions which characterise academic production today. Democratic Materialism is a particularly relativistic set of beliefs and assumptions, which posits that there is nothing beyond bodies and languages, that is to say, a kind of social constructivism wherein nothing beyond cultures, codes, logics, and things, exist. While it is a step up from previous intellectual climates in that it makes it such that “(a)ll human life is equally valuable or invaluable; all languages, cultures, and beliefs are worthy of respect” (21), it is deeply problematic for Badiou as such a system of thought understands truth to be nothing more than a judgement or logical statement; either a truth-function of some culture or a correlationist theory of truth. Thus, “Democratic materialism does not allow for the possibility of real change, but only believes in the world as it is” (20). While Democratic Materialism may intend to create a more equitable formation for the bodies and languages it studies, it cannot truly affirm the production of the new without a concept of truth understood as an event in excess of the bodies and languages populating the world.

The present crisis of thought is echoed by numerous thinkers, and in a myriad of ways each with their own unique and distinct contours, yet an analysis of their diagnoses reveals a common thread articulated by Lambert: that the crisis of thought is concomitant with its computerisation, datafication, and concretisation; and thus, conversely, a dissolution of the stylistic presentation of thought. The subject of thought in Deleuze, which he terms the (Russian) Idiot (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 147), is no longer comprised of intensities in a field of problems and provoked to thought in a struggle against a dogmatic image of thought, but a dividual comprised of “samples, (and) data” (Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” 8). For Lyotard, thought becomes computerised and a whole machinery of techniques to render thought translatable into computer language arise to facilitate the “mercantilisation of knowledge” and the ease with which knowledge is bought and sold (Lyotard 51). In this instance, the unique expressions of a thinker’s style, that part of a thought which exceeds the necessities of the market or the society of control must be expunged in order to facilitate the computerisation of knowledge. The nature of the thinking subject and knowledge have been transformed for easy circulation: the dividual Deleuze theorised is left a styleless subject, in a world where the production of knowledge has become computerised and destylised.

On the other hand, we have Badiou and Jameson’s assessment of the state of thought of the present moment. Where the Deleuze and Lyotard focused on the political dimension of the crisis, Badiou and Jameson take an epistemic approach. For them, the dissolution in the belief of universals, or anything outside the realm of the material, the space of bodies and languages, marks an epistemic shift toward the concrete. The “concrete” takes two forms, a positive form seeking to study and represent its object and its languages, cultures, and logics (Badiou 1), and a negative form, seeking to deconstruct its object (Jameson 218). In the former, the insistence on the concrete and the material implies a dismissal of the existence of Truth or Events, which relegate thought to, at best, represent, recognise, and protect, previously disenfranchised communities and cultures (Badiou 2), and forecloses the possibility of creating and imagining the new. For the latter, the critique and deconstruction of its object, bring theoretical practice into nominalism. As Jameson argues, the theoretical movement toward the concrete engendered a critique of the universals which tied philosophy together in a diachronic movement of thought; a critique which relinquished the very possibility of thinking at all, and thus leaves us in a state where it is impossible to pick up from and continue this task of thinking (Jameson 218–19). The concrete and the critical is thus all we have left. The focus on the “concrete” thus heralds a move away from the need for a new style, lexicon, or deployment language that would help us conceive of new worlds, the kinds of which the great metaphysicians of the past, from Hegel to Heidegger, utilised. In an apparent move away from the grand narratives toward what is immediately in front of us, theorising the world to the extent of examining even the language on a level daring enough to revoke and radicalise the very presentation of thought quickly becomes obsolete.

The crisis of thought today is thus concomitant with the fading away of the stylistic presentations of thought and from the preceding analyses occurs on two levels. Firstly, we have a socio-cultural milieu in the grip of late-capitalism and thus finds itself in a world in which the thinking subject and knowledge have become datafied and computerised for easy circulation. Those stylistic, aesthetic, and experimental aspects of thought which cannot be translated into computerised knowledge by the techniques available to postmodern society will be streamlined. Secondly, the intellectual culture of our present times finds itself in an epistemic quandary; without the ability to assert the existence of universals, thought is confined in the realm of the concrete and foreclosed to the possibility of attesting to or creating anything beyond what is already here, and thought that seeks to reorient and reinvent the very language or form of thought simply has no purchase in a world where a new mode of thinking or being are inconceivable.

To say that thought is in crisis is by no means new. Kant and Hegel open their magnum opuses with detailed exegeses on the crises thought faced at their respective times. However, the crisis of thought today is unique in situating the crisis within a relation between the stylistic and the conceptual, a the tension which harkens us back to the very origins of philosophy and the tension between thought and the aesthetic, most famously presented by Plato. Thus, we need to analyse the way in which philosophy has historically conceptualised its own relation to the aesthetic, what this legacy has done for the field of thought, and how it has brought us into the present moment.

Before we begin, it should be clarified from the outset and for the purposes of the following section that when we think of art, we are also thinking of style, even if later on we discover that there are important divergences between the two. Style, as we intuitively understand it may refer to two things. The first referent may be the arrangement of linguistic, syntactic, auditory, rhetorical, or logical elements of a work, a sense of the word we may trace back to Aristotle’s definition of the term L?xis in the Poetics (Kotarcic 36). The second referent, not entirely divorced from the first, refers to the aesthetic dimensions of a work; the level of a piece of work wherein the artistic is introduced and interacts with the content of the work. The first referent will be taken up again later on in our discussion. For now, engaging with it directly would bring us into the domains of linguistics, analytic philosophy of language, and mathematical logic, which would force us to adopt the presuppositions held by these disciplines, as well as be irrelevant for charting a historical disprivileging of Style, since it is typically the second referent which presents a more contentious set of problems for philosophy and thought. Simply put, the former is typically seen as the necessary building blocks for a work or thought and as such is less unsettling than the aesthetic dimensions of a thought or work which introduce differences of interpretation, vagueness, and dispute to the clarity and purity of the logos. For now, it should surmise for us to briefly remember that Plato’s critique against the sophist is precisely the same as his critique against the artist; both lead thought astray by obscuring, through simulation, the Forms (Plato et al. 598–601) (Plato et al. 2317–35). The  Sophist, who presents their arguments with all the flair, stylistics, and rhetoric available to them only obscures the truth in the way that the artist or poet obscures the clarity of the Forms. The notion that the artistic resides in thought as the stylistic is also found in Locke, for whom the stylistic dimensions of thought serve only to entertain, confuse, or mislead (Locke and Woolhouse 1046–48). Thus, we will be examining philosophies pertaining to style directly, as well as philosophies of art, which we shall interpret as applying not only to the work of art, but as extending beyond and into the work of a thought or a philosophy.

From Plato to Hegel, the very canon that nearly all thought must draw from to, interpret, critique and make anew, style has always, when considered in the same breath as thought or truth, been disprivileged. This position is expressed by Meiner, who traces this disprivileging through the figures of Aristotle, Spitzer, Riffaterre, Eco, and Barthes, and finds style to have been determined as deviation from an a priori form (Meiner 157–58). This disprivileging move is necessitated, Meiner claims, by the fact that Philosophy and the search for truth since Aristotle seeks a science of the general, and since an author’s style appears particular, disparate, and individually their own, style must be understood in relation to a more stable and self-sufficient concept, an a priori. This a priori form is either that of a general system of language, or the model of the genius. In the former, style exists only as an author’s unique way of writing which deviates from the standard use of language. In the latter, style exists as those features which mark out an author’s resemblance or dissimilarity to some ideal form of genius. Style is disprivileged by being denied a formal existence of its own, obtaining only as the epiphenomenal surplus of unavoidable deviation. Furthermore, these two options seem impossible to follow at this point, since we are writing and thinking in the wake of the overturning of Platonism, and the death of the author and the stable subject. Though Meiner’s analysis of the historical disprivileging of style focusses more on the topic of literary stylistics, it provokes us to apply it to thought, or what we may call Philosophy as well.

There is an abundance of genealogies available charting the different modes of relating art, style, and thought, and their accompanying conceptions, as they develop over the history of thought. Clive Cazeaux’s book Art, Research, Philosophy presents an overview in an aptly titled chapter, Theories that wedge art and knowledge apart. Cazeaux seeks to make the case that art has historically been demarcated as being separate from knowledge (11). This separation poses serious problems for artistic research, primarily because this thought suggests that there is an uncrossable divide between the realm of the experience of art and our thinking about it. Taking Meiner into account, this would imply that all thinking about art could only proceed by relating it to some concept more intelligible to thought, more ontologically fundamental, more objective. Thought such as Benjamin or Virillio’s, which does not seek to relegate art to the subordination of a fundamental a priori, and which seeks to research art in a way which thinks art through art itself, would be rendered unintelligible.

Cazeaux traces the division between thought and art through thinkers such as Plato, Descartes, Greenberg, Kant, Wittgenstein, Dewey, and the Vienna Circle. Cazeaux identifies 5 common manoeuvres thinkers utilise to perform this division; positing that art is in itself discrete from knowledge, claiming that experience is private, suggesting that aesthetic genius cannot be understood by science, asserting that art distorts appearances in divergent and multiple ways, and finally positivist requirements on what kind of sense experience can count as knowledge.

Another genealogy is presented by Aquilina in his chapter Traditional Theories of Style. In this Chapter Aquilina outlines 3 ways of conceiving of Style. The first sees style as being mimetic, or rooted in metaphor and externality. Style is in this sense understood as something “draped onto” a preceding thought or idea which “can be worn and discarded at will” (Aquilina 9). We see in this conception a clear demarcation between form and content, with content explicitly or implicitly taking the privileged spot. As Aquilina comments, even where such approaches may appear to be defences of style, there is often a teleocratic task at hand, comprehending style as “expressive of truth and of the individuality of the writer” (21). The second understands style in entirely anthropomorphic terms; style is that which establishes the human individuality of the author and expresses the author’s character and identity. Style in this sense particularises and distinguishes an author from another and serves as their “signature” upon the field of writing. The third, largely attributed to the thought of Marxist thinkers for whom style “makes us see the world in a particular way…(s)tyle comes first, and truth can only be channelled or created through it” (Aquilina 42). Lastly, there are theories of style which emphasise the importance and the role of the reader in engaging with the stylistic elements of a text.

There are a great number of points at which Cazeaux and Aquilina converge in the establishing of their respective genealogies of style. The researches mentioned above are poignant, and together give us a comprehensive overview of the history of style in thought. Meiner provides the philosophical “necessity” subordinating style to thought, Cazeaux gives us the different ways thought has been “purified” of style, and Aquilina gives us the various ways in which style has been conceptualised. While the aforementioned researches have touched on the disprivileging manoeuvres present in philosophical conceptions of style, what has yet to be done is to draw out a specific focus on the disprivileging of style itself in relation to thought, and articulate the philosophical motives for this disprivileging. From those genealogies presented, we see that there are two ways of disprivileging style when considered in relation to thought; that it ought to be purged from thought, or that it serves some function or other of thought and is granted a barely existent ontological existence hinging on its capacity to serve thought. Thus, in order to clearly and definitively conceptualise the kinds of disprivileging we are responding to in the present research, we shall briefly examine these two disprivileging manoeuvres brought forth by figures whose stature is canonical, or what Deleuze would call “Major”, and which have had a massive amount of influence on our thinking and on defining the contours of our present moment.

That which must be Purged. It is hardly controversial to assert that much of philosophy has historically, in one way or other, sought to expunge style from thought. Though we have already seen how Plato and Locke have asserted this point strongly, it is interesting to note how little the argument has changed in the almost two-thousand years that separates them. Style is to be removed from thought because it firstly confuses us as to what is true, and secondly because it appeals to the emotions thus leading us to believe what is not true. This position has been roundly been deconstructed, most notably in Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy, where it is demonstrated that the privileging of thought over writing and style is an unfounded manoeuvre, ironically because even Plato, in seeking to establish arguments supporting the purity and primacy of the Logos and the Forms, must draw from a dialectical and theatrical manner of presenting his thought, and utilises all manner of poetic allusion, metaphor, and analogy (Derrida and Johnson 67–71). The text also demonstrates that this manoeuvre rests on the creation of the opposition between Truth and writing, and shows that the privileged term in the opposition finds itself unable to exist without its disprivileged other (Derrida and Johnson 128). The oppositions, Derrida notes, arrange themselves in a network of further oppositions, such that Thought aligns itself to Truth and speech, while writing aligns itself with falsity and stylistics. A more modern and better fleshed-out formulation of this idea also resides in the logical atomism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a formulation drawn on or reconstituted in the other forms in the work of the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism. For Wittgenstein, “(t)he world is the totality of facts, not of things” (Wittgenstein et al. 5), with facts being comprised of atomic facts being comprised of the form aRb, “(t)hat “a” stands to “b” in a certain relation says that aRb.” (Wittgenstein et al. 13). This is the theoretical underpinning of what is colloquially called Wittgenstein’s “Picture Theory” of language, where language is theorised to be comprised of objects and their relations, organised in logical form, and which can thus be arranged to present us a “picture” of the world for empirical verification and returned to us with a truth value. This vision of language would do away with the stylistic dimension of a work of thought since it would at best bracket those stylistic elements of a text, and at worst condemn it for obfuscation, in favour of the logical picture painted by the thinker’s language which could then be scrutinised for its truth value. This is a clear step up from Plato and Locke, whose arguments relied overtly on an appeal to a transcendent truth or a realm of forms. The appeal of this version of the argument is in how firmly it rests on the certainty of both mathematical logic and the sense-certainty of our immediate experience. We do not need to go further than the final propositions of the Tractatus to find a critique of its own ideas, and even if we were to try and bolster them against the weaknesses of sense-certainty with something like Popper’s verificationism, it will suffice to say here that this theory not only renders the domains of aesthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics incapable of being spoken of in any meaningful way, but is also self-defeating; this picture of language does not and cannot present itself as a picture or objects and relations in logical form and thus fails the very criterion it sets up.

That which serves Thought. There is, however, a more nuanced position in the disprivileging of style which goes beyond the simple asserting that style be expunged from thought tout court. This position holds that while style is secondary to thought, it is nonetheless important in that it serves some function or other for thought. Aquilina has already noted that this is a position taken up in various forms by thinkers of Marxist aesthetics (42–43), but I want to show that this position has at its roots an earlier movement of disprivileging, exemplified in the works of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel.

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle states that “each kind of rhetoric has its own appropriate style” (5943). For Aristotle, the style of delivery of a thought pertains to the kind of rhetoric it performs, and rhetoric is defined as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion” (5687). Style, for Aristotle, thus belongs to the domain of persuasion, rather than the domain of thought, or logic, and must rely upon dialectics (Kotarcic 78). Aristotle goes on to state “ let it have been determined that the excellence of lexis is to be clear (for logos is a sign which will not fulfil its function if it does not make its meaning clear)” (Kotarcic 37). That there must be an underlying idea or argument which is presented in stylistic or rhetorical fashion does not disprivilege style in the way that Plato and Locke have. Aristotle, rather, is aware of the practical necessities of style, and its power to persuade, evoke emotion, and to make a thought appropriate for its context.

Kant is the next figure who subordinates aesthetics or style to thought, suggesting that the aesthetic is merely that which sets the faculties of Imagination and Understanding in “free play” with one another (116–17). Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason had already sought to distinguish between the “German” sense of aesthetics, which he thought better called the “critique of taste”, and the sense of aesthetics he thought could serve as the ground for a science of metaphysics proper (Kant et al. 66–67). Kant is in this regard similar to Aristotle, since he does not consider the beautiful in itself as capable of being a science of the universal. Further, Kant also seeks to assimilate the aesthetic into the service of the rational order of thought. The dynamism which the system explicated in the Critique of Pure Reason lacked is introduced in the Critique of Judgement through the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime.

In this vein, we must also consider Hegel’s aesthetics. In Hegel we find that the beautiful is manifestation of (human) freedom. For Hegel, the role of the aesthetic is that of a “conduit”. The beautiful serves the purpose of showing us the possibilities of our freedom (7–8). We should also note that Hegel also proclaims that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (11), since it has been freed from its former relation with religion and in its now secularised form no longer gives sensuous expression to the divine or the absolute. Philosophy, able to rationally and conceptually grasp the Idea, thus fulfils the role art-religion once performed, and the “end of art” is thus heralded. Once again we find the aesthetic subordinated to fulfilling some task or other of thought.

The three figures of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, are by no means exhaustive, and we could certainly have included figures like Augustine, Baumgarten, or Schelling, but these three will suffice to illustrate the type of disprivileging wherein style is subordinated to serving thought. These three figures however demonstrate a common thread which makes it hard to accept their position. Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel, have in common a privileging of thought, the logos, or the rational. For Aristotle, the transmission of thought is what grounds his discussion on rhetoric and style. For Kant and Hegel rationality is the centre of their systems; in the former rationality is what unifies thought and serves as the universal under which morality can follow from, and in the latter it is the order of the universe itself as we see in the famous line “what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” (Hegel et al. 20). Given the critique of a stable, transcendent truth provided by the likes of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida, it would be difficult to accept a conception of thought’s relation to style that relies so heavily on the existence of this notion.

However, there is also a tension we find in our reading of these figures of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. There is a sense in which the preceding formulations of the three aforementioned thinkers is a sort of caricature, and reads their work on aesthetics rigidly against their overarching reliance on the notion of transcendent rationality and, especially in the latter two, their respective projects to execute a project of enunciating a late-enlightenment project of rationality. For Kant, we could say that, if we bracket out his insistence on the explication of a universal system of rationality, the experience of the beautiful and its resulting “free play” is immanent to thought in that it constitutes and expands the possibilities of thought. For Hegel the beautiful could be said to precede thought in that it manifests freedom and the divine or the absolute; elements necessary for the development of thought and self-consciousness. If we remove Hegel’s centralisation of rationality in his system, we find that rationality as spirit does not ontologically or in any way meaningfully precede the beautiful, rather, the beautiful is immanent to spirit and constitutes it in its sensuous expression. The point here is not to critique these thinkers, and it would indeed be absurd to pick from such low-hanging fruit as thinkers who were thinking and writing several hundred years before us, but to acknowledge that where the aesthetic had been brought into consideration in a philosophical system, it was put to use toward the ends of fulfilling the rationality of that system.

The dense machinery employed to preserve the centrality of rationality by subordinating the aesthetic to thought is thus a fundamental assumption, even an axiom, to the enterprise of philosophy itself. “The whole philosophical tradition…impos(ed) on itself the ascetic mortification that dissolves elegance in labour…truth (for philosophy) demands a laborious science without style” (Nancy 61–62). From Plato to Hegel, the expenditure of such great and “painful” – to quote Nancy – labour suggests something fundamental about the tension between style and thought, for who would take on such torturous labour if it were not for something deeply important?

The answer can be partly found in Deleuze. “The one problem which recurs throughout Plato’s philosophy is the problem of measuring rivals and selecting claimants. This problem of distinguishing between things and their simulacra within a pseudo-genus or a large species presides over his classification of the arts and sciences” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition 60). This need to distinguish and select claimants is a fundamentally geopolitical, and geophilosophical, one, stemming from the structure of the Greek polis and its need to bring neighbouring and interrelated regions of territory into mutual and secular dialogue in the space of the Agora. The expansion of a “mythic order”, a Platonic and Athenian order, upon neighbouring territories shrouded under the guise of the rational (Vernant, chap.5) was thus the birth-impulse for the very structure of the enterprise of philosophy. Why then was it the aesthetic, and correspondingly the artist, beyond the sophist or the liar, who is the object of Plato’s scorn? As Wittgenstein has already demonstrated, the True is not opposed to the false as much as it is the senseless, since falsity still implies a relation to Truth. A person who spoke only lies could still be understood by inverting their statements, but an artist and their art cannot be rendered intelligible under the Platonic-Athenian order of the rational. The geopolitical and geophilosophical origins of the structure of philosophy show to us two things. Firstly, it highlights the arbitrary nature of the foundational impulse to purge style from thought – more a geopolitical necessity of the time that got baked into the structuring assumptions and axioms of philosophy, than a necessary move toward deeper and more productive thought. The labour of trying to assimilate this arbitrary axiom into philosophy got ever more torturous given the progressive nuancing and complexification of philosophical thought. Secondly, it highlights the fundamentally violent nature of the philosophical enterprise. It is not surprising that the impulse to purge style of thought is and has been concomitant with socio-historical movements of the violent and forcible assimilations of various systems of thought into one pure, destylised order of rationality. The fact that Colonialism corresponds with the Kantian critique – the violent assimilation of peoples, languages, thoughts, and cultures, an analogue for the assimilation of the Manifold to the faculties of the mind (and, recalling our previous analysis of Kant’s division between the two senses of the aesthetic, they are deaestheticised faculties) – has already been explicated by Land (Land et al., chap.1).

In a different formulation, this is the Laruellian critique of the Philosophical De-Scission. Philosophy splits reality into the True and the aesthetic, such that the former in its autochthonous truth may explain the dizzyingly confusing multiplicity of the latter, and that its claimants may have dominion over it and by extension the rest of the systems of knowledges of the world. Philosophy then sutures the True and the aesthetic back together through a movement of transcendence – whether that be the Kantian Sublime or the Hegelian rational as real – subordinating the aesthetic to the true, and gesturing to present a complete, interconnected portrait of reality as such. Thus, Philosophy, so long as it does not restructure and non-standardise itself, remains fundamentally unable to think Immanence in itself, or the Democracy of thought, that is, it cannot think reality as a truly immanent, democratic, and non-hierarchical whole (Laruelle, chap.5.1-5.2, 6.1). The struggle for us will thus be, when articulating a solution to the crisis of thought today, to articulate a vision of style and thought which is truly immanent, and does not consciously or unconsciously replicate the violent transcendence introduced by the philosophical decision. Thus, we shall analyse thinkers whose thought has sought to cut through the divides philosophy installs upon style and thought; that a third path beyond purging and subordination be forged, that style is inseparable to and constitutive of thought – properly immanent to it.

Let us recall that already, and precisely from the richness of the systems that we have already analysed from Plato to Hegel, when the eye toward a transcendent rationality is removed, a silhouette of a complex and nuanced comprehension of the role of the aesthetic and its inter-workings with thought can be glimpsed. The position that style is inseparable to thought is by no means new, and can be found in ancient thinkers ranging from Plotinus to Meister Eckhart, though it must be added that their thought was and still remains minor, contributing to the wealth of thought while not being able to fundamentally change or challenge the dominant structure of thought – major philosophy. Where this position begins to coalesce into a movement capable of affecting and restructuring major philosophy is found in thinkers in the German Romantic school of thought, such as Novalis and Hölderlin, for whom it was a “central conviction” that there were limits to philosophy which could “only be approached using the deeper linguistic potential of poetry” and that philosophy and poetry were inseparable (Novalis and Wood xxiii). Yet, while the German Romantics were key figures in the explication of this mode we will consider the thought of Heidegger instead when seeking an explication of this way of relating style and thought. While the German Romantics did much great work in explicating this position it is often disjointed and offers us a difficult and fragmentary vantage point in accessing this thought; Novalis, for example, wrote in short fragmentary paragraphs elucidating his observations in a particularly aphoristic style (Novalis and Stoljar). Hölderlin’s essays likewise also present themselves in “fragmentary character” as noted by his posthumous editors (Hölderlin et al., sec.Notes to the Essays). For these reasons we turn to Heidegger, whose work attempts to elucidate this mode of relating style and thought.

“Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking – not even yet, although the state of the world is becoming constantly more thought-provoking” (4), declares Heidegger. Heidegger’s first move in substantiating this declaration is to separate thought from the sciences, which he asserts as an activity which does not and cannot think:

Historical science may thoroughly explore a period, for instance, in every possible respect, and yet never explore what history is. It cannot do so, scientifically. By way of history, a man will never find out what history is; no more than a mathematician can show by way of mathematics-by means of his science, that is, and ultimately by mathematical formulae-what mathematics is. The essence of their sphere – history, art, poetry, language, nature, man, God – remains inaccessible to the sciences. (Heidegger 32–33)

Thus, Heidegger begins his meditation into the originary ground of thought. Heidegger begins by locating a sense of the word “memory” in the myth of Mnemosyne, which sees memory not as a mere recollection of events past, but as an “appeal” toward the primordial, toward Being. This movement of memory toward the fundamental, Heidegger locates in poesy and thought; “Poetry wells up only from devoted thought thinking back, recollecting” (11). Poesy, as in the poetry of Hölderlin, “summons us to what is thought provoking” (12) or what is fundamental, in the way that thought, distinguished from the activity of the sciences, seeks to uncover. What then are the contours of this relation between poesy and thought? For Heidegger thought and poesy “are the essential telling” (128), a telling not understood as merely a relaying of facts, but as a “laying”; a laying of the grounds of thought or poetry to proceed from. Heidegger also marks out the relation of thought and poesy to language. The common view, which Heidegger seeks to repudiate, assumes that language is merely their medium of expression, in the way stone would be the medium of expression of sculpture. Heidegger states: “rather, thought and poesy are in themselves the originary, the essential, and therefore also the final speech that language speaks through the mouth of man” (128). Thought and poesy cannot be understood to merely “employ terms” or articulate the sense of a ready-given word and must instead be understood to “speak words”. For Heidegger, there is a meaningful and necessary distinction to be made between language and thought/poesy; thought/poesy can be comprehended as that which introduces dynamism to language, and which animates the Destruktion of our ontological and everyday conceptions of the words and language we use.

With Heidegger, we can glean a theory of style which is immanent to thought, yet there remain for us certain reservations we must make clear. For one, Heidegger still maintains that thought/poesy “stands in its truth” (19), even if this truth is understood as Alëtheia or uncovering. While Heidegger does reject the conventional scientific or correspondence theories of truth, his notion of truth as the uncovering or disclosure of Being still introduces a degree of transcendence into his thought. There is still a “truth” which thinking or poesy is supposed to turn us back towards, even if it may be radically different the truths which Plato or Locke sought to set us towards. It is also unconvincing that the essence of the experience of poesy upon us is one in which we are harkened back to the fundamental, the primordial, and toward being, and thus risks excluding a whole host of writing from being considered poetic.

This articulation of the relation of thought and style in Heidegger helps advance us toward a conception of the immanent relation between the two terms but must be further clarified to move us away from a theory articulating the two in terms of a centralised and mystical Being. Heidegger has thus provided us an explication of style and thought as being primordial in the way they engender the production of thinking by setting us on a direction of thought which is radically free from methodological and structural constraints, in the way that science is, and returning us to what is a fundamental in the matters we are considering.

Style in the present moment.
The preceding section has shown that in essence, philosophy sought to distinguish who had the right to truth and who did not, and proceeded by installing a philosophical decision wedging thought and art apart in order to preserve the purity and access to Truth of the former; a movement which became increasingly difficult to sustain without increasingly complex machinery, and which to greater and greater extents, attested to the generative role style played to thought, and its immanent relation to it. The difficulty of this decision became increasingly unsustainable as the notion of thought as pure, scientific, and inaesthetic continued to point where philosophy could less and less defend itself from the possibility that the notion of and objective Truth was not only flawed and arbitrary but had led to an epoch of nihilism, technological horror, and violent dogmatism. In employing the literary and aesthetic tools available to the philosopher from within and without philosophy, thinkers ranging from Nietzsche to Heidegger to the Poststructuralists challenged the nature of Truth by undermining, in both their content and expression, the millennia-old opposition between thought and style, truth and art. The success of this assault has left us thus in a strange place. With there no longer being a Truth to rail against that would demand the leveraging of style, the centuries old wedge that had initiated philosophy in the first place, returns.

The wake of that moment in the canon brings us to where we are left off now, the present moment, and we can now see why it is unsurprising that much of the present moment can be characterised as having moved away from stylistic presentations of thought or stylistic experimentations in thought. Lyotard’s prediction that “that anything in the constituted body of knowledge that is not translatable (to computerised language) in this way will be abandoned and that the direction of new research will be dictated by the possibility of its eventual results being translatable into computer language” (4), while perhaps cynical, seems largely to have passed, describing the underlying state of clear, universalizable language that covers over the present moment. While Lyotard and the previous diagnoses of the present crisis of thought have been elucidatory, we need to go beyond a general analysis of the crisis and survey the field of thought of today.

That there is a hostility to stylised thought in some areas of the academy is hardly controversial – it has only been several decades since the so-called “Sokal Affair” has passed, and its implications both conscious and unconscious continue to affect the public consciousness, with the book Fashionable Nonsense standing as a kind of archive of the various attacks and criticism against unclear, stylistic, and experimental writing in the fields of theory and philosophy (Sokal and Bricmont). While the text appears ostensibly to be about criticising the misappropriations and abuses of science committed by theorists ranging from Kristeva to Deleuze and Guattari, much of the text is also dedicated toward criticising the imprecision (127) or  “deliberately overblown style” (262) of the theorists under scrutiny; whole chunks of text and arguments are also decried as being “meaningless” (158) without very much engagement at all. This line of thought is also advanced in Harry Frankfurt’s philosophical best-seller, On Bullshit, in which he distinguishes the bullshitter and the liar as differing along the lines of intent; the liar’s intent lies in hiding the truth, whereas the bullshitter intends only to construct a positive or self-serving image for themselves (53–56). Frankfurt thus declares that “bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are” (61) since the bullshitter is entirely unconcerned with truth whatsoever, whereas the liar knows and values the power of the truth, a point concordant with our earlier analysis of Plato. Though Frankfurt does not explicitly cite examples of theorists he considers “bullshit”, as Sokal and Bricmont do, his endeavour in this text is not merely restricted to personal or interpersonal instantiations of bullshit. In the conclusion of the text, Frankfurt states that the “contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality” or what he calls “anti-realist doctrines” (Frankfurt 64–65), thereby broadly grouping together and isolating for critique a whole swath of thinkers writing in the wake of the problematisation of objective truth. Frankfurt’s critique, given the context and timing of his book, is also likely to be read as being directed against theorists writing in the vein of postmodernism or poststructuralism, and his conception of “bullshit” can largely be interpreted as referring to the stylistic presentations of thought characterising continental theory, poststructuralism, and much of the researches of the arts and humanities. The book is interesting as it updates the first disprivileging maneuver we identified, the purging of style from thought, for the contemporary age. Frankfurt demarcates, as Sokal and Bricmont do, the work of such theorists as being “meaningless”, thus continuing on the Platonic move of relegating the stylistic to the senseless rather than the false. However, Frankfurt also provides an updated impetus for intellectual bullshitting. For Plato and Locke the impetus for the abuses of truth were either political advantage or self-illusion typically on the part of the metaphysicians; Frankfurt, however, suggests that it is academic posturing which leads the contemporary theorist to “bullshit”. Frankfurt suggests that an anti-realist position makes it impossible to produce any meaningful insight since such theorists do not seek “to arrive at accurate representations of a common world” (Frankfurt 65), and due to their lack of regard for the truth stemming from their anti-realist convictions, the theorist thus resorts to “bullshit” in order to construct an air of philosophical or intellectual profundity thereby ensuring their ability to continue publishing and researching. A profound ramification of this new designation of difficult texts or texts presenting their ideas stylistically as meaningless rather than as false is that it becomes near impossible and unnecessary to demonstrate from whom, where, and how this bullshitting or obscurantism is being performed. Since Frankfurt asserts that the only difference between lying and bullshit is in the intent of the thinker (53–56), he makes it such that little to no demonstration need be provided in order to charge a thinker as having performed bullshit. Sokal and Bricmont, in the same vein, copy chunks of text and simply submit it to the reader as self-evident that meaningless obscurantism has been performed. The mere possibility that there may be something important, some insight found within the text which at least in some way necessitated the difficulty of the writing, is rendered wholly unintelligible by Frankfurt’s thought. Frankfurt also sets up a contradictory and impossible standard with his text. Frankfurt takes as true the correspondence theory of truth (65) which calls for an “accurate representation of a common world”, and thus makes it impossible to ascertain whether or not someone is actually bullshitting since the defining characteristics for bullshit lie in a purely interior space, that is to say, in the realm of an author’s intention in response to some social situation or other that might impel them toward such an act, rather than responding with what he calls “sincerity”. Frankfurt would find it near impossible to definitively prove whether something was bullshit or not, given the inaccessible nature of the privileged access of a person’s intent. Even if one were to take up a Rylesian approach toward undermining privileged access (138) this would only mean that it is theoretically possible to uncover the intent behind an individual’s thought, not that it is immediately possible to; the latter idea being absurd since it would make it such that misunderstandings become a complete impossibility. Ryle’s position against privileged access is that one comes about one’s own thoughts in the same way one apprehends the thoughts of others, through a host of methods involving speech, introspection, revealing the context, and others (136–38). Thus, evidence would still have to be supplied to demonstrate a person’s intent, and given the manner in which Frankfurt, Sokal, and Bricmont, have executed their analyses of bullshit, obscurantism, and fashionable nonsense, it is difficult to say that they have brought us any closer to proving what obscurantism is, and how it may be proved, especially given their support for the correspondence theory of truth. The Rylesian picture of cognition actually complicates the matter further since it asserts that our privileged access is not our own; and that our thoughts and intentions are not immediately clear to ourselves and that they can only be progressively revealed to ourselves by engagement and communication with others; or, to use Frankfurt’s language, the bullshitter never really knows whether they are bullshitting or not. Perhaps, some version of bullshitting exists, and perhaps we have even experienced ourselves committing such an act, but how we could ever supply evidence of bullshit which lives up to the correspondence theory of truth seems to be an impossibility.

In sum, Frankfurt leverages a new attack against style which sets up a line of thinking in which no proof can or need be provided for charging someone with obscurantism or bullshit. While contradictory, it is often the case, as Zizek and Adorno have shown, that ideologies thrive on their own paradoxical and contradictory nature. By offering up an explanation of bullshit that can never be proved Frankfurt creates a way of thinking about stylistic presentations of thought which are determined in advance simply by belonging to a school of thought. Frankfurt’s paper is and continues to be influential, especially within certain sections of analytic philosophy where the sub-discipline of what Jon Elster calls “Bullshitology” (Elster 1) continues to be examined. Elster goes even further in the direction of Frankfurt’s thought by going so far as to suggest that “Bullshitology” ought “to be located within cognitive psychology” in order to determine the psychological causal mechanisms which give rise to academic “bullshit”; thus carrying Frankfurt’s refusal to even engage which stylistic texts at all to the full extent of rendering them obscurantist bullshit so far in advance that they ought not even to be scrutinised by philosophers or theorists.

The prominent Feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in her essay The Professor of Parody,  also concurs with Frankfurt on the thought that it is “French Postmodernist Thought” which has constructed the current climate of “lofty obscurity and disdainful abstractness” and that “obscurity creates an aura of importance”, but also extends Frankfurt’s critique to take on a more pronouncedly ethico-political dimension. For Nussbaum, Butler’s difficult and stylistic presentations present a weaving and aporetic cosmology of thought, more content to wrestle with the immutability and immovability of power and tussle with the political aporias and their concomitant networks of thought, than to get straight into dealing with “real politics”. Nussbaum suggests that Butler’s presentation of ideas isn’t just obscurantist, it also constructs a defeatist politics for those of us engaged in liberatory work. Butler’s work excludes those who are not already familiar with her interlocuters, and deals with power on such an all-encompassing level that it becomes difficult to imagine what kind of agency could lie outside of it, while also offering up little to no concrete “truths” or ways forward for any political programme seeking to draw insight from Butler. This critique of style is somewhat different from the conceptions and critiques of style we’ve dealt with up till this point. While the conceptions of style we’ve dealt with so far have dealt with style as the poetic or aesthetic dimensions of thought, Nussbaum is pointing at and critiquing a style which is slightly different. Nussbaum’s critique here is leveraged at a stylistics of writing which involves a departure from the clear and direct thought that Nussbaum implicitly advocates. In her essay she comments of Butler’s writing, “(a)mong the non-interrogative sentences, many begin with “Consider…” or “One could suggest…”–in such a way that Butler never quite tells the reader whether she approves of the view described. Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a mystification that eludes criticism because it makes few definite claims”. Thus far we have largely considered style insofar as it concerned the aesthetic dimensions of thought; Nussbaum here is pointing to a conception of style more focussed on a particular style of thinking or arguing than on the poetic or literary. Recalling Meiner’s declaration that style has only been conceived of as deviation from an a priori form, the form Nussbaum is pointing to is a less a form of the standard utilisation of words and phrases and more a form of the standard ways of arguing, though the two are, as Nussbaum shows in her analysis of Butler’s non-interrogative sentences, often closely linked. As Nussbaum states “(h)er written style…is ponderous and obscure”.

While there is definitely some merit to Nussbaum’s complaint that such a style of thinking makes it difficult to critique a thinker’s ideas, it would intuitively be difficult to follow her to the conclusion of her thought, that the job of the philosopher precludes throwing up aporias or impossible paradoxes for their audience to ponder, and conversely that the philosopher must submit emphatically views and conclusions which they then throw their weight behind. Thinkers such as Hume or Derrida who, like Butler, sometimes opt to critique or raise aporias rather than stand behind a clearly defined position must be said to have provided valuable contributions to thought because of, rather than in spite of, them moving away from conventional styles of writing and thinking. Much of eastern philosophy too, from Lao Tze to Nagarjuna, would fail to evade Nussbaum’s critique. Further, Nussbaum’s assessment that Butler’s ponderous style of thinking which provides us with no definite answers constitutes a politics of “hip defeatism” is also questionable in light of the many projects and philosophies which have promised certainty and surety for their political projects only to end up in disaster; think Kant and Hegel’s defense and portrait for the future of the enlightenment. Without getting into Derrida’s Cambridge controversy or Foucault’s alleged derision of Derrida as a practitioner of the method of obscurantisme terroriste by Searle (“Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle”), it can be said the rise of Anglo-American Analytic philosophy has brought along with it a good section of thinkers inhospitable to stylistic presentations of thought.

This is not to say that the disprivileging of style is strictly confined to the space of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, especially if we take Searle at his word. In the broader field of continental philosophy and theory, it seems as though thinkers have silently packed their bags and moved out of the domain of stylistic expressions of thought. I want to briefly consider four lines regarding style and thought in the broader field of theory which I believe constitute a significant portion of the field today.

Firstly, there are researches in the field of theory seeking to clarify, explicate, critique, and, extend the ideas of the poststructuralist movement. Thinkers like Dan Smith and Claire Colebrook come to mind, and their ability to explicate and work with some of the most difficult writings, arguments, and concepts of poststructuralism, with the level of clarity and precision they provide us is commendable. However, it is a section of the field which is engaged, though understandably by the nature of their endeavours, in a project seeking to shave off the stylistic dimensions of the thought of the poststructuralists in order to bring their thought to a wider audience.

Secondly, there is the burgeoning movement of Speculative Realism. While it is difficult to classify all of the different trends and trajectories which comprise this movement, the anthology The Speculative Turn establishes that “we propose ‘The Speculative Turn’, as a deliberate counterpoint to the now tiresome ‘Linguistic Turn’” (Bryant et al. 1). This short sentence clues us into the profound differences we encounter regarding the style of the presentation of their thought. Some of the key thinkers associated with the movement include Manuel DeLanda, Quentin Meillasoux, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman, and the projects they embark on take a substantially different focus than their poststructuralist predecessors. The issues tackled by the movement – a critique of correlationism, a scientific reinterpretation of Deleuze, and Object Oriented Ontology, and an overarching effort to sustain and think through the notion of Realism – stands in rather stark contrast to the issues and projects pursued by the French poststructuralists, possibly explaining their deviation away from stylistic expressions of thought. That the linguistic turn in philosophy, which the authors allude to with the figures of Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze, is tiresome for the writers could signal a desire to move away from analyses and critiques of the task of philosophy and its assumptions, and a move toward getting straight to theorising about the objects of their enquiry. The writings of thinkers within this movement overtly veers toward clear and precise writing styles, and texts like Intensive Science and After Finitude are more stylistically similar to works within Anglo-American Analytic philosophy than the continental tradition they draw from.

Thirdly, there is a loose assortment of texts we may call theory-fiction, such as Fanged Noumena, Cyclonopedia, which blend elements of theory and literature into a dense, and stylistically extravagant hybrid of thought and poetry. Terms like Ergodic Literature and Autotheory are also sometimes used to describe texts in this domain. While the aforementioned texts do seem to demonstrate a degree to which some thinkers are continuing to utilise stylistic and poetic expression in their thinking, it is hard to say that they constitute a significant new movement of the stylistic expression of thought since they are often delineated as being literary texts rather than philosophical ones and have yet to be afforded the same critical engagement as their more straightforwardly philosophical counterparts. Whether this is due to the nature of the texts themselves or the status of the field of scholarship in the arts at the present moment is hard to determine, but it will suffice to say that they have not broken into the academic mainstream. Lastly, there is the “old guard” of theory, and prominent figures still publishing in this group include figures like Badiou and Laruelle. While their writing is still overtly stylised, their work can be said to be stem from and be tied to a movement whose time is perhaps beginning to pass.

This certainly does not capture the field of continental philosophy, theory, and the multifarious schools and types of research being done in the arts in its entirety, but I hope to show that for the most part, this broad field of research has quietly moved away from the stylistic modes of thought that constituted the signature of its predecessors. The reasons for this movement away may be due to a combination of the epistemic, technological, and economic conditions defining the present moment, as Lyotard suggests, the need for elucidatory work, the need for work applying the insights of the theorists of previous generations, and the desire to get away from the “linguistic turn” (what Brassier suggests some unsympathetic critics call “deconstructionist sterility” or “constructivist extravagance” (Brassier 119)), as expounded on above.

2. WHERE WE NEED TO GO

The preceding research into the history of style and its relation to thought occasions that the relation between these two forces, especially given their central importance to the entire project of self-reflection and theorising the world, be examined and brought to light. Through the research we have seen how style, when considered in the same vein as thought, has always been disprivilleged, either by an outright call for it to be purged from thought, or by assimilating it into a system ultimately aimed at constructing a structure of reason, revolution, or some other more determinate and autochthonous a priori. We have also seen how, in their own way each of these disprivileging manoeuvres have proved untenable or unconvincing. Yet, we also find that the disprivileging of style does not, for all its argumentative shortcomings, fade away, but instead returns in the present moment and is given new contours. Initially the disprivileging manoeuvres available were either to declare it explicitly a deviation from the forms, or assimilate it into a system of reason, it appears now to have been decided as meaningless, unnecessary, or superfluous. The wedge between the aesthetic and thoughtful seems not only wider but presumed more readily, now more than ever; the literary to the left – the philosophic production of knowledge to the right. This change is particularly problematic as it absolves those critical or unsympathetic to the stylistic presentations of thought from having to perform any serious or in-depth engagement with the thought which is being decried as stylistic meaninglessness; for to even attempt such engagement would be to look for some meaning to critique in a body of meaninglessness.

It is precisely in response to this that the present research situates itself. The number of thinkers who have coalesced around the diagnosis that the present moment is in a crisis of thought, whether that be due to the dismissal or persistence of style, is alarming in size and in their resonance with one another, and in that new theorists each day are added to this group. The present moment thus demands from us a response, but the question remains, of what kind?

An instinctive response would be to uncritically take up the Deleuzo-Guattarian war cry to “bring something incomprehensible into the world” (378). However, in an interview Mark Fisher reminds us that “what’s also missing is this circuit between the experimental, the avant-garde and the popular. It’s that circuit that’s disappeared. Instead what we have is Experimental^TM, which is actually well established genres with their own niche markets which have no relation to a mainstream” (Broaks). The issue, as Fisher reminds us, goes beyond the mere fact that nothing new is being produced in the present moment, but that even if something new were to come into existence, it would never permeate the mainstream or it would be indexed into a corner of the market ready for consumers willing to and excited by that sort of work. The loss of a circuit between the experimental, avant garde, and the popular means that the novel is left to produce itself in isolation, since the popular sees no need to draw from it in a world in which endlessly recycling and rehashing pastiches of popular culture from the past suffices to capture profit and popular engagement. As Badiou would add on, without a collective with a concept of the truth as a truly new and revolutionary event shattering accepting norms, knowledges, and laws of the world, the new is apprehended as yet another expression of the myriad of bodies and cultures of the world, none any more meaningful or special than the other. Works such as Cyclonopedia, Fanged Noumena, and Spinal Catastrophism, and the truly novel thought and presentations of their thought they bring have certainly garnered a cult following among pockets of interested readers, theorists, and artists; yet it is hard to say that these works have broken into mainstream academic practice, much less mainstream consciousness.

If diving straight into bringing something incomprehensible into this world seems ill-advised, then what is left besides apologia? There is a sense in which the preceding research has made it seem as though the stylistic presentation of thought is obviously what is missing. Yet this would be foolhardy given the presence of two critiques: one mentioned above and one yet to be touched on. Firstly, there is the critique of “bullshit” from Frankfurt. Frankfurt’s overarching idea that “bullshit” is the dominant current in contemporary intellectual life can be shown to be false given the odd underlying motives he claims to have discovered, and the odd metaphysic he sets up to demonstrate it, we nonetheless cannot as easily do away with the possibility that the present age compels individuals to have an opinion on everything, and that it is seen as a kind of civic duty for a citizen to have opinions on matters concerning the state of affairs of the world (63–64). While Frankfurt sets up an impossible standard for discerning “bullshit” and far overreaches in declaring all “non-realist” thought to be performing it, we cannot entirely discount its existence. Here Frankfurt actually echoes the sentiment of Deleuze, who suggests that the present age isn’t “plagued by any…blocking of communication, but pointless statements” and that it is silence, or “the right to say nothing” which we are lacking (Negotiations, 1972-1990 129). Fisher’s analysis of the increasingly “post-Fordist” university also echoes this sentiment. However, it is Jameson’s concept of pastiche which I think most adequately sums up the first critique. The intellectual milieu does appear to be pushing us toward an over-proliferation of content and thought, but there is a real possibility and concern that a stylistic presentation of thought ends up being little more than a pastiche of past styles, aesthetic or argumentative, drawing from a schizophrenic myriad of different thinkers, schools, and movements, only to finally end up stillborn and confused having achieved little more beyond bringing itself into existence.

The second critique comes from Adorno and is directed toward Heidegger, a figure who from our earlier analysis appeared to have set the grounds for an intimate and genetic link between thought and style. Before we can engage with Adorno, we need to remember the central thesis of Heidegger which makes him such an important figure for the present research; for Heidegger, the relation between poesy and thought is a fundamental one, since true thinking can be performed only in the space cleared for it by a poetic Destruktion of the language which clouds our relation to Being. In the Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno leverages a polemic against Heidegger and the movement of Existentialism more broadly, for mystifying thought through the use of jargon made to “sound as if they said something higher than what they mean” (9). Adorno goes on to suggest that the Heideggerian longing for an unconcealment or a return to some originary meaning intimately connected to Being is “paying tribute to a blank nominalistic theory of language, in which words are interchangeable counters, untouched by history. Yet history does intrude on every word and withholds each word from the recovery of some alleged original meaning, that meaning which the jargon is always trying to track down” (8). This particular deployment of jargon and “the ether in which the jargon flourishes” (6), that is to say, the very style which Heidegger utilised to construct his philosophical system, is thus where Adorno locates his critique. While Adorno’s critique against Heidegger’s search for an originary meaning is definitely incisive, it does not invalidate Heidegger’s thesis that there is an intimate relation between thought and poesy, only that this relation does not involve a harkening back to an originary meaning. It is here that we may focus on the positive aspect of Heidegger’s destruction, which he asserts is a fundamentally positive operation aimed at “stak(ing) out the positive possibilities of that tradition (the history of ontology)” rather than merely “burying the past in nullity” (44). Though it may be hard to say that Heidegger fully realised the extent of his own positive project of destruction is hard to defend, especially given that he locates poesy in the myth of Mnemosyne, it is precisely this positive project that evades Adorno’s critique; a poesy in thought that allows us to create thought not predetermined by the conventional or historical uses of language, and which does not bring us back to originary meanings.

What then should we make Adorno’s assessment that Heidegger’s jargon gestures to sound more meaningful than it actually is? It must first be stated that Adorno is not easily dismissed as basing his criticism on a theory of truth that is logocentric, and the term as he employs it is utilised in a form closer to his thoughts on the truth content of a work of art, and far from traditional notions of truth. At first glance, Adorno seems to be echoing Frankfurt’s assessment that much of Heidegger’s thought is “bullshit”, or an attempt to sound more profound than it actually is. However, Adorno’s critique is far more complex and nuanced than a mere denouncement of Heidegger. Adorno’s critique is presented as follows:

Philosophical language transcends dialectically in that the contradiction between truth and thought becomes self-conscious and thus overcomes itself. The jargon takes over this transcendence destructively and consigns it to its own chatter. Whatever more of meaning there is in the words than what they say has been secured for them once and for all as expression. The dialectic is broken off: the dialectic between word and thing as well as the dialectic, within language, between the individual words and their relations. Without judgment, without having been thought, the word is to leave its meaning behind. This is to institute the reality of the “more.” (Adorno 12)

Adorno posits Heidegger is exploiting the transcendence of philosophical language, the very thing that secures for philosophical discourse its ability to say more than the words themselves contain, by “breaking off” the dialectic between truth and language by collapsing the two into each other. Through the highly stylised deployment of everyday terms, according to Adorno, Heidegger thus “demonstrates” that the truth was always already within language itself and merely had to be uncovered. There is a sense in which Adorno could be read to be dismissing Heidegger’s style of philosophizing as attempting to dress his thought in an aura of more meaning than it has, and certainly given the polemical style and political project, of the text it may appear thus. However, a more nuanced reading would suggest that Adorno is demonstrating the stagnation of thought which ensues when the dialectic between thought and language are collapsed, through which thought becomes an endless reflection into the infinite depths of words, jargon, and Being, thereby eschewing the need for the cultural, social, political, or “concrete” analysis that brings language into its dialectical relation with truth. In sum, we may say that Adorno is stressing the necessity for us to maintain the materiality of language.

A summary and reformulation of the preceding two critiques is made by Reza Negarestani, in an interview with Nero Magazine in which he explicates the two possible negative effects produced by a flattening of “the distinction between content and form” and the development of “an increasingly esoteric style” (“Engineering the World, Crafting the Mind | NERO,” pt.2. Cognitive Subversion). The first, which Negarestani takes to be exemplified by Nick Land, corresponds with our first critique; that the explosive impulses of stylistic and esoteric maneuvers create little more than an elegantly poetic pastiche of ultimately conservative thought without much in the way of being truly novel or subversive. The second, which Negarestani takes to be exemplified by Laruelle, corresponds with our second critique; that a thought or intuition, even if thoroughly novel, if shrouded in a dense undergrowth of stylistic and literary manoeuvres, invites all sorts of mystical (mis)readings and hijackings, or in our case of Heidegger, brings itself into mysticism.

What would it mean for us then, to articulate a theory of the relation of style and thought? And has this not already been satisfactorily attempted? Before addressing these questions, we shall summarise the demands of such a project as elucidated in the research we have done up to this point. Following Lyotard and Deleuze, it must engage its political dimensions. Following Badiou and Jameson, it must take into account the epistemic contours of the present day. It must, to avoid Laruelle’s critique, present a truly immanent portrait of the relation. It should also, following Adorno, affirm the materiality of language. Lastly, following Negarestani, it should lead us to neither disguise philosophically conservative thought nor mystification.

To tackle the latter question, while interventions into the region of this problem have been attempted, they have not been able to articulate a theory of style that is entirely immanent to thought; in other words, these interventions still take up, consciously or not, the bifurcation between thought and the stylistic. Among the works that have pushed forth an immanentizing of the relation are Barthe’s S/Z, Gadamer’s Truth & Method, and Derrida’s Spurs, but it is the last of these that is most interesting for the present project. In Spurs, Derrida performs an analysis of style through the work of Nietzsche. Aware of the Heideggerian critique of Nietzsche as the last heir of Platonism, Derrida seeks to demonstrate not that Nietzsche had found a way out of logocentrism, but that the multifarious and incompatible styles of Nietzsche perform his various critiques rather than simply elucidate them; though as Agosti notes in the introduction to the text, Derrida does not oblige that this is uniquely Nietzschean, but rather can be found wherever one pays attention to the incessant “coups” a writer’s style performs on their own text, thought, or ideas: “There are the coups du dehors (knocks from without), for example, which are heard at the door of Plato’s pharmacy. But inside the pharmacy, during the Philosopher’s night-long vigil, other coups (knocks) too are heard” (Derrida et al. 9). Derrida is even careful to not reproduce a mythic inversion of the traditional logos-style binary, stating:

In the question of style there is always the weight or examen of some pointed object. At times this object might be only a quill or a stylus. But it could just as easily be a stiletto, or even a rapier. Such objects might be used in a vicious attack against what philosophy appeals to in the name of matter or matrix, an attack whose thrust could not but leave its mark, could not but inscribe there some imprint or form. But they might also be used as protection against the threat of such an attack, in order to keep it at a distance, to repel it-as one bends or recoils before its force, in flight, behind veils and sails (des voiles) (Derrida et al. 37)

Style is thus the fragmentary, generative force residing in each text, simultaneously aiding a text in accomplishing its aims and undermining them at every step. Yet, in order to undo traditional understandings of style, Derrida had to still distinguish his conception of style from the logocentric version; and does so through the concept of the woman:

Out of the depths, endless and unfathomable, she engulfs and distorts all vestige of essentiality, of identity, of property. And the philosophical discourse, blinded, founders on these shoals and is hurled down these depthless depths to its ruin. There is no such thing as the truth of woman, but it is because of that abyssal divergence of the truth, because that untruth is « truth. » Woman is but one name for that untruth of truth. (Derrida et al. 51)

For Derrida, the figure of the philosopher, always a man – and here, he points out that Nietzsche too struggled with this dilemma – grapples with the difficulty of apprehending style, or the woman, because of her complex relation to truth; or better yet, untruth. According to Derrida, the philosopher-man is either perturbed by woman’s intimate relationship to the untruth, that which would unsettle any logocentric ambitions at hand, or is the

philosopher who believes in the truth that is woman, who believes in truth just as he believes in woman, this philosopher has understood nothing. He has understood nothing of truth, nor anything of woman. Because, indeed, if woman is truth, she at least knows that there is no truth, that truth has no place here and that no one has a place for truth. And she is woman precisely because she herself does not believe in truth itself, because she does not believe in what she is, in what she is believed to be, in what she thus is not. In its manoeuvres distance strips the lady of her identity and unseats the philosopher-knight. (Derrida et al. 53)

What Derrida is after is nothing less than a complete overhauling of the way we approach the question of style, woman, and difference, with his insistence on its uncapturable evasiveness and performative creativity. To attempt a project articulating the truth of style and or woman is already to misunderstand the interstitial manoeuvres of it/both, and fails to capture the generative moments and effects of both.

Yet, as we alluded to earlier, to critique the conventional (mis)understandings of style, Derrida has to reproduce it and its concomitant binaries – between man and woman, truth and untruth, philosopher and stylist. Despite Derrida’s careful attention to not simply invert the binary, a binary is nonetheless present at the margins, or between the lines, of this text. While he asserts the polysemy of style and its utility in both philosophical and artistic creation, the question of woman and/as style becomes intelligible against the backdrop of what he is critiquing. To put it another way, while Spurs asserts that a fragmentary/fragmented style occupies a generative place in all texts, Derrida is forced to make this point through a critique of conventional notions of style, woman, and philosophy, and thereby must still work within the thought-style binary of Plato.

However, Derrida’s contribution to the question of style is a massive step forward in our researches. While the necessity of undoing notions of style set up by the history of philosophy prevents Derrida from completely executing a truly immanent theory of style, it carefully and explicitly frees us from the logocentrisms permeating its apprehension. Further, Derrida’s meticulous analyses also bring us closer to an immanent understanding of style, by demonstrating its performative and generative forces – forces which may come to inhabit even movements toward a defence of philosophical truth and rigour, or an attack on style itself.

What is to be done?, is to be written?

We have set up high standards for the project at hand, or rather, the field in front of us demands a rigorous and novel attempt at a reinterpretation, reinvention, and reformulation of the problematic of style. One point Derrida leaves us, where we can begin, is in his demonstration that the style of all texts is fragmentary and fragments the texts itself. The excellence of this idea, lies in the fact that style is both at a distance from the text itself, and comes from a distance, from without the text (Derrida et al. 47); its disruptive movements are at odds with the “completeness” and seeming wholeness of the text, and these fissures within the text finding their trace in other texts, other signs, other places. The conclusion of considering these two points must be that the distance between the text and its style is a distance par excellence; in other words, style is a force that constitutes the text(s) without ever belonging to it. Style’s polysemy and fragmentary nature are irreconcilable with the fixity of the shards of a text and how they are apprehended. Nietzsche’s “I have forgotten my umbrella”, comes to us fully formed and complete, as do the rest of the aphorisms in Joyful Wisdom, yet the abyss between the strange remark and each aphorism, a fragmentary style as Derrida reminds us, send shockwaves impelling us to (re)interpretation and reconsideration.

Yet, to take this a step further, we may then ask, to what does style belong to then, if not its text? To itself – a style in itself. When we consider that style comes from a distance, a distance it preserves even as it constitutes the lines and movements of a text, then a style of walking, a painting, or of preparing a dish, all attest to the same style – a force of, recalling Meiner, constitution and particularisation, as much as a force of self-differing and fragmentation. On this note, we see that a third disprivileging manoeuvre may thus be added, beyond the mere repudiation of style, and it being forced into a position of subservience to reason: the third manoeuvre is that style has never been given an ontological status of its own.

To continue the insight of Derrida, we take two points from which to work off. Firstly, that style has an autonomous existence, requiring neither the text nor its ideas to establish itself. Secondly, that the style of a text is a rapier, and executes functions within and without the text. Thus, the project at hand will be for us to construct an ontology of style, asserting its autonomous existence through a mode of analysis, ontology, which performs and enacts that autonomy, beyond merely stating it.

_____

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