I’m Not There - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

I’m Not There

Ross Posnock

ROSS POSNOCK, a Fellow of the
American Academy since 2009, È
the Anna Garbedian Professor of
the Humanities at Columbia Uni-
versity. His books include The Trial
of Curiosity: Henry James, William
James and the Challenge of Modernity
(1991), Color and Culture: Black Writ-
ers and the Making of the Modern
Intellectual (1998), and Philip Roth’s
Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity
(2006).

Forse, like me, you have a propensity to collect

books without quite knowing why. Over the years I
have piled up books by and about, Dire, Ludwig Witt –
genstein, Hannah Arendt, George Santayana, Philip
Roth, Ad Reinhardt, Philip Guston, Franz Rosen-
zweig, Penelope Fitzgerald, Thomas Bernhard–and
not only not read them, but have no desire to do so.
I have kept busy working on other things. And for a
decade or two at a time, these texts simply gather
dust on my shelves. But then, inevitably, I am drawn
to these nearly forgotten volumes and, strangely,
they prove pivotal to a new project: I recall, for
instance, that Santayana ascended, literally, from
the obscurity of a low shelf to earn a chapter in my
book on William and Henry James. Wittgenstein
made an analogous, if more circuitous, journey from
the shadows, waiting untouched, until ½ve years
ago when I kept a long-held inner vow to read an –
other languishing tome, one that had stared me
down so often it had acquired an aura of intimida-
zione: Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason: Wittgen-
stein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy. It was indeed
intimidating, but also inspiring: that experience
opened the door to more Cavell–and to deeper
engagements with Emerson–and to Wittgenstein,
who has joined the sage of Concord as a central
½gure in my current project on writers, artists, E
philosophers who renounce their careers.

The peculiarities of this manner of book buying–
the absence of full consciousness and the long gap
between acquisition and reading–puts me in mind

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I’m Not
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of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking
My Library.” He starts with the premise
that “every passion borders on the chaot-
ic,” and ½nds that the passion of the book
collector unleashes a “chaos of memo-
ries,” where in each purchase “chance”
and “fate” seem to jostle against each
other. Benjamin speaks of his library as the
“accustomed confusion of these books.
For what else is this collection but a dis-
order to which habit has accommodated
itself to such an extent that it can appear
as order.”1 For decades, the “chaos” of my
own book collecting was a form of “dis-
order” that blurred agency and intuition,
chance and fate. And though this “disor-
der” helped shape my intellectual life, Esso
had been masked by habit and so escaped
my reflective notice. Questo è, until a recent
encounter with a passage from Nietzsche
helped shed light. But before that, some-
thing else intervened to nudge me to in –
terrogate my habit.

Around 2002, when I decided to write a
book on Philip Roth, I had at hand most of
his novels, having dutifully acquired them
over the years and, true to form, remained
largely indifferent to reading them. As I
burrowed into Roth’s oeuvre, Tuttavia, IO
grew aware of his close friendship with
the painter Philip Guston, a relationship
that became basic to my understanding
of what I began calling Roth’s aesthetics of
immaturity. That understanding was built
on what was also at hand: my pile of mono –
graphs and articles on Guston. No longer
inert objects but palpable presences, Questo
patient stack of Roth and Guston had un –
dergone a transformation that now struck
me as more than a serendipitous accident.
For the ½rst time, I wondered what was
going on: how did I explain my thought-
less buying and deferred reading; what
game was my unconscious playing? It
seemed to be busy working subliminally
(as if behind my mind’s back?), replacing
deliberate effort with intuition or in stinct

in order to quicken receptivity, keeping
me in a period of prolonged incubation,
as I ½lled my shelves in advance of my
conscious turn to works that would prove
crucial. Was it a professorial enactment
of what Emerson called abandonment: IL
“one thing which we seek with insatiable
desire” is to “forget ourselves . . . to do
something without knowing how or
why; in short, to draw a new circle.” This
famous passage–from the ½nal paragraph
of the exhilarating “Circles”–had always
been a personal favorite and a pedagogical
touchstone of my lectures. But who knew
I was living it?2
The possibility that I was indeed living

my own bookish version of abandonment,
that I had unwittingly–hence appropri-
ately–been drawing Emersonian circles,
apparently for decades, received sharp
con½rmation last year. Teaching a seminar
on Emerson and his avid admirer Nietz –
sche, I encountered a passage from the
latter’s autobiography, Ecce Homo: How One
Becomes What One Is, section nine of the
chapter “Why I Am So Clever.” This, at
last, crystallized matters. With brazen per-
versity, Nietzsche replaces the venerable
motto “know thyself” (now a “recipe for
ruin”) with “self-misunderstanding,” and de –
scribes his own self-becoming as a miracle
of self-forgetting. He begins by declaring,
“At this point the real answer to the ques-
zione, how one becomes what one is, can no
longer be avoided.” The question “pre-
supposes” that “one must not have the
faintest notion what one is.” From this per-
spective, “even the blunders of life–the
temporary side paths and wrong turnings
. . . have their own meaning and value,” as
if Nietzsche acknowledges that one’s self-
estrangement awakens one from the tun-
nel vision that plagues the certain knower.
What Nietzsche portrays in Ecce Homo
is the coming to being of the most “inno-
cent” of selves, questo è, one free of ressen-

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timent and full of “irresponsibility”–a
lightness gained from relinquishing the
guilt instilled by religion and other insti-
tutions of control. Knowledge is warded
off, permitting the “surface of conscious-
ness” to be kept clear of any of the “great”
imperatives, desires, parole, attitudes: Tutto
that would burden one with responsibility
and goals and make one a man of knowl-
edge. The grand words represent “so many
dangers that the instinct comes too soon
to ‘understand’ itself” and will be clogged
with meaning. Keeping consciousness
clear thus allows the eventual organizing
powers to grow in the dark as it were,
“deep down” in the depths. A self with
the capacity to reevaluate values requires
an especially intricate psychic develop-
ment–“contrary capacities” must be cul-
tivated–and must be carefully protected
from awareness of the “secret labor” of the
instincts. Nietzsche tells us how he thrived
as a stranger to himself:

Considered in this way, my life is simply
wonderful. . . . I have never even suspected
what was growing within me–and one day
all my capacities, suddenly ripe, leaped forth
in their ultimate perfection. I cannot re –
member having taken any trouble–no
trace of struggle can be demonstrated in my
life, I am the opposite of a heroic nature.
“Willing” something, “striving” for some-
thing, envisaging a “purpose,” a “wish”–I
know none of this from experience. A questo
moment I still look upon my future . . . COME
upon calm seas: there is no ripple of desire.
I do not want in the least that anything
should become different than it is; I myself
do not want to become different. . . . But that
is how I have always lived. I had no wishes.
A man over forty-four who can say he never
strove for honors, for women, for money!
Thus it happened, for example, that one
day I was a university professor–no such
idea had ever entered my mind, for I was
barely twenty-four years old.3

In “Why I Am So Clever,” Nietzsche
depicts himself as a version of his charac-
ter Zarathustra, the human being re –
deemed from the spirit of revenge and a
herald of the Übermensch. Of course, SU
one level this self-portrait projects a
grandiose aristocratic fantasy of immac-
ulate effortlessness. This is the Nietzsche
who, for generations, has intoxicated the
undergraduate aesthete, who has inspired
far less dangerous Leopolds and Loebs.
Those 1920s rich boys, precocious law stu-
dents at the University of Chicago, drunk
on Nietzsche, kidnapped and murdered a
boy, stylzing themselves as Übermensches.
Their lawyer, Clarence Darrow, described
his clients as victims of Nietzsche’s ideas.
Beneath his cynical opportunism, Darrow
had a point, if not an exculpatory argu-
ment. Hitchcock portrayed the duo, thinly
veiled, in the ½lm Rope (1948), where Nietz –
sche’s name is bandied about.

Yet the self-portrait also deflates gran –
diosity by making manifest the self-over-
coming that Nietzsche prizes–when we
experience the impersonality of our-
selves rather than af½rming our familiar
sense of identity. This impersonality–we
are “strangers to ourselves, we do not com-
prehend ourselves,” as he says at the start
of the preface to The Genealogy of Morals–
is a salutary rebuke to the fantasy dear to
the Western male psyche: the sovereign
individual as self-knowing master of ex –
perience. “‘Willing’ something, ‘striving’
for something, envisaging a ‘purpose,’ a
‘wish’–I know none of this from experi-
ence.” Renouncing the deliberative self
who formulates a plan of life (John Stuart
Mill’s notion) and renouncing “know thy –
self” (and its correlative “to thine own self
be true,” as foolish Polonius put it), Nietz –
sche challenges us to bear not knowing, A
live without why. To let instinct speak
opens us to new and hidden energies in the
self, beyond the reach of ra tional cognition,
that are normally blocked in the act of self-

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Posnock

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I’m Not
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reflection. Nietzsche, in sum, loosens the
hold of the Cartesian cogito, which makes
the knowing subject foundational.

He shares this philosophic anti-intel-
lectualism (the proposition that all expe-
rience is a mode of knowing) con, among
others, his beloved Emerson and his con-
temporary William James (whose theory
of emotion insists on the primacy of the
body: we are afraid because we tremble,
rather than the commonsense opposite)
E, Dopo, Wittgenstein (who says that
when one acts with “comfortable” cer-
tainty, one is to be regarded as a “creature
in a primitive state”; and when one fol-
lows rules, one does so blindly).4 For these
½gures, as for John Dewey, mind is em –
bodied and experience is not a “knowl-
edge affair,” but rather is where things
are suffered and endured, are had, before
cognized. Though James alone among
this group is tempted to dispense with
concepts and “fall back on raw unverbal-
ized life,” he also acknowledges: “both
theoretically and practically this power
of framing abstract concepts is one of the
sublimest of our human prerogatives.”5
But concepts are merely practical, UN
means to an end, insists James, a view
that tallies with Emerson, who remarks
that “in all unbalanced minds, the clas-
si½cation is idolized, passes for the end”
(277), and with Nietzsche, who grants the
saving power of our projected arrange-
menti, our conceptual grids, but at the
same time urges that we grasp them as
man-made, necessary ½ctions, arti½ce
whose function is to serve as equipment
for living. Concepts are not to be “idol-
ized,” as they are by philosophers who, In
their terror of change and movement, seek
to arrest becoming. Invece, concepts are
tools to be used to impose meaning upon
the innocent fatality of destiny.6
The passage from “Why I Am So Clever”

hit home, for it made sense of my own

self-opacity. The passage also made me
feel rather heady, as if I were now li –
censed to consecrate my blind book buy-
ing on the altar of the Nietzschean Über-
mensch, Amazon unbound. My temptation
to self-transport seemed not wholly inap-
propriate when I reflected that, as the
Emerson-Nietzsche seminar revealed on
more than one occasion, Emerson’s praise
of whim, intuition, and insouciance seems
at times to intoxicate Nietzsche and in –
spire him to new heights of rhetorical
audacity.

After the revelation afforded by Ecce
Homo, I revisited Emerson’s “Intellect” to
see if it too extolled the virtues of self-for-
getting. Not only did the essay offer more
shocks of recognition, but its discom½ting
thesis–that “we have little control of our
thoughts” thanks to “the superiority of
the spontaneous or intuitive principle
over the arithmetical or logical”–con-
tained seeds that flower in Ecce Homo’s
portrayal of how Nietzsche became what
he is (Essays and Lectures, 419). “Intellect,"
pure, made explicit what I had unwittingly
lived: that intuition is a “taking-in-stride”
that has a “complex temporality,” since
in Emerson’s version of intuition “the
mind does not immediately intuit what it
has taken-in-stride. His idea of intuition–
and hence its strangeness–is counterin-
tuitive,” as literary scholar Branka Arsic
has shown in her subtle reading of this
essay in her book On Leaving.7 “Long
prior to the age of reflection,” says Emer-
figlio, “is the thinking of the mind. Out of
darkness, it came insensibly into the
marvelous light of to-day” (Essays and
Lectures, 418). This lag between thinking
and reflection occurs, notes Arsic, be –
cause “perceptions affect one another in
the intellect without the mind knowing
anything about it” (On Leaving, 155). Questo
explains why Emerson, responding to his
rhetorical question “What is the hardest
task in the world?” answers: “To think.”

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This dramatically reverses the Cartesian
cogito, remarks Arsic: here “‘I’ is what
‘cannot’ think, what is not entrusted with
the power to think” (On Leaving, 160).
Logic is not absent in us, notes Emerson,
but is “virtual and latent” within the “intu-
itive principle”: logic is the “procession
or proportionate unfolding of the intu-
ition; but its virtue is as silent method;
the moment it would appear as proposi-
zioni, and have a separate value, it is worth –
less” (Essays and Lectures, 419).

What makes thinking so hard, why de –
ferral is as if built into it, is the incorrigi-
bility of our will; it doesn’t control our
power of thought:

What am I? What has my will done to make
me that I am? Nothing. I have been floated
into this thought, this hour, this connec-
tion of events, by secret currents of might
and mind, and my ingenuity and wilfulness
have not thwarted, have not aided to an
appreciable degree. . . . Our truth of thought
is therefore vitiated as much by too violent
direction given by our will, as by too great
negligence. We do not determine what we
will think. We only open our senses, clear
away, as we can, all obstruction from the fact,
and suffer the intellect to see. We have little
control of our thoughts. (Essays and Lectures,
418–420)

Intellect grows spontaneously; “without
effort,” some image, word, or fact im –
prints itself on the mind and that adher-
ence gradually germinates, unfolding “like
the vegetable bud.” “You have ½rst an in –
stinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge,
as the plant has root, bud and fruit. Trust
the instinct to the end, though you can
render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By
trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into
truth, and you shall know why you be –
lieve” (419).

Nietzsche and Emerson’s shared suspi-

cion of the will to self-knowledge and

their shared trust in instinct also precipi-
tated my turn to another volume that had
spent decades untended on my shelf:
Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge.
When earlier I described my prereflective
literary habits as amounting to a prolonged
period of “incubation,” I borrowed this
word from Polanyi; his book, never read,
long owned, had survived multiple moves,
its crammed, poorly printed pages now
made all the more uninviting by thin yel-
lowing paper and a cracking paperback
spine. Over the years, lured by its title and
some of its headings–“The Art of Know-
ing,” “Intellectual Passions,” and “The
Tacit Component”–I would periodically
rescue the book from my chronic negli-
gence, taking it up in a burst of enthusiasm,
only to set it aside, my impulse rebuked
(still too much science, I rationalized,
and besides, the print was a trial and the
pages loose). But in the wake of my Nietz –
schean and Emersonian induced epipha-
nies, the moment of Personal Knowledge
had arrived. I was ready at last for its cen-
tral point: “we feel our way to success . . .
without speci½ably knowing how we do
it”; this tacit dimension (the title of a
better known Polanyi volume) is “an
immense mental domain” acquired by an
“effort which went beyond the hitherto
assured capacity of some person making
Esso. . . . It relied on an act of groping which
originally passed the understanding of its
agent and of which he has ever since
remained only subsidiarily aware, as part
of a complex achievement.”8

Here was a “meta” moment so prized by
English professors: a work that celebrated
“groping” knowledge–unspeci½able, In –
effable, unempirical–mirrored the very
groping I had long been (tacitly) practic-
ing, most recently when I plucked Personal
Knowledge from (my) seeming oblivion at
a propitious moment. “Trust the instinct
to the end, though you can render no rea-
figlio. It is vain to hurry it,” Emerson had

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Posnock

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143 (1) Inverno 2014

I’m Not
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said. Trust in feeling one’s way forward
informally, in the absence of conscious
action, typi½es the incubation period of dis –
covery (one of four levels, according to
Henri Poincaré; and Polanyi tells us that it
follows preparation and precedes illumina-
tion and veri½cation [121]). During incuba-
zione, nothing happens on the level of con-
sciousness or behavior, even as we are pre –
occupied unconsciously: “the fact that our
intellectual strivings make effective prog –
ress during a period of Incubation without
any effort on our part is in line with the
latent character of all knowledge” (129).

The magnum opus of a distinguished
Hungarian chemist who abandoned sci-
ence for philosophy, politica, and econom-
ics, Personal Knowledge (1958) has always
lived in the shadows of the famous work it
anticipates, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure
of Scienti½c Revolutions (1962). As Polanyi’s
most recent biographer remarks, most
people ½rst know of Polanyi from Kuhn’s
remark in Structure commending his notion
of “tacit knowledge.”9 Polanyi’s work,
which joined Kuhn’s as foundational for
the new ½eld–the social construction of
science–argued for an alternative to the
positivist model of scienti½c inquiry as un –
alloyed objectivity and rational deliber –
ation. “True discovery is not a strictly log-
ical performance” but requires “plunges”
and “leaps” across logical gaps (Personale
Knowledge, 123). “Tearing away the paper
screen of graphs, equations, and compu-
tations, I have tried to lay bare the inar-
ticulate manifestations of intelligence by
which we know things in a purely personal
manner.” Neither subjective nor objective
but transcending their opposition, per-
sonal knowledge in

science is not made but discovered, and as
such it claims to establish contact with
reality beyond the clues on which it relies.
It commits us, passionately and far beyond
our comprehension, to a vision of reality.
Of this responsibility we cannot divest

ourselves by setting up objective criteria of
veri½ability. . . . For we live in it as in the gar-
ment of our skin. Like love, to which it is
akin, this commitment is a “shirt of flame,"
blazing with passion and, also like love, con –
sumed by devotion to a universal demand.
Such is the true sense of the objectivity in
science. (64)

Science joins art and mysticism in break-
ing “through the screen of objectivity,"
drawing on “our pre-conceptual capaci-
ties of contemplative vision,” capacities
shared, he repeatedly shows, by infants
and chimpanzees (199).

Like James and Dewey, Polanyi wants to
rescue experience from those observers
and instrumentalists who, “guided by
experience . . . pass through experience
without experiencing it in itself ”: what
keeps us aloof from things, their sound,
sight, smell, and touch is the very “concep-
tual framework by which we observe and
manipulate things.” But “contemplation
dissolves the screen, stops our movement
through experience and pours us straight
into experience; we cease to handle things
and become immersed in them” (197).
Because we start constructing frame-
works as infants, the experience of con-
templation tends to be precarious and
brief, won in the teeth of the con½ning
and indispensable presence of established
concepts. Scienti½c discovery demolishes
one accepted framework to construct an –
other, more rigorous one, but that act of
revision and discovery “bursts the bounds
of disciplined thought in an intense if tran –
sient moment of heuristic vision . . . Sopra-
whelmed by its own passionate activity”
(196).

This turbulence of creative freedom

that de½es, if for a moment, the “bounds
of disciplined thought,” recalls Kant’s
depiction of genius as a force of original-
ity indifferent to rules; hence the genius
“does not himself know how the ideas for

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it have entered into his head, nor has he it
in his power to invent the like at pleasure,
or methodically, and to communicate the
same to others in such precepts as would
enable them to produce similar prod-
ucts.”10 Genius dwells in the tacit dimen-
sion. Visual artists, immersed in the hands-
on interplay with paint and canvas, are
often evasive or reticent regarding re –
quests to stand back and explain the mean-
ing of their art. But they are rich in tacit
knowing, in intuition, that makes them
“willing to follow what the materials in
hand seemed to want to do,” notes the art
historian Richard Shiff, who quotes the
abstract expressionist painter Barnett
Newman: “‘How it went, that’s how it
was.’”11

Newman’s eloquently laconic remark
adapted surrealism’s automatism for his
own purposes, as if in his work of the
1940S, says Shiff, “he did little more than
allow his lines and colors to fall into place,
the places they wanted.” Shiff continues:
“Newman’s ‘how it went’ avoided the
preconceived formulas of geometric ab –
straction along with those of conventional
½gure painting, landscape and still life.
To some extent, he infantilized himself,
lending an animistic spirit and motivation
to inanimate entities and material stuff”
(68). His verbal shrug and appeal to the
artifact itself as the mute arbiter of ques-
tions are defensive strategies to protect the
workings of the tacit and intuitive from the
demands for explanation and classi½cation.
Describing Barnett Newman’s artistic
breakthrough–Onement I, created in 1948
–Shiff says, “it created him rather than the
other way around. By no means a product
of his intended action, the painting, he
claimed, changed his life.” Newman
“yielded control to his painting. It was an
intuitive act of faith in the midst of his
early doubts” (76).

When an artist such as Newman per-
mits the quality of anonymity to come

forward, letting the work rather than
maker take the lead, he allows the object
to speak for itself. Some creators in effect
adopt anonymity as a way to help deflect
the rampant American media pressure to
turn them into celebrities and their work
into commodities. Remember, for in –
stance, how Bob Dylan during early and
mid-1960s press conferences stymied
journalists by refusing to explain what
his songs meant or what politics they rec-
ommended, leaving his surrealist col-
lages of imagery and his more directly
folk or protest works equally mysterious.
Dylan’s insouciant vagueness communi-
cated his contempt for the crassness of a
literal-minded press corps, and was witty
homage to the elite high modernist stance
of deliberate opacity in the face of public
scrutiny. That stance became prominent
with Rimbaud, an early hero of Dylan’s.
“Je est un autre,” is Rimbaud’s signature
declaration. Todd Haynes’s brilliant Dylan
½lm, I’m Not There, which presents multi-
ple incarnations of the singer, deftly nods
to this modernist move by aligning Dylan
in his Rimbaud persona to the press con-
ference evasions.

Before Rimbaud, who quit writing at
age twenty-one, poetry had to make sense.
That imperative of meaning vanished
with Rimbaud’s breakthrough to radical
linguistic autonomy. When T. S. Eliot
mocks meaning as what the poet provides
the reader while going about his work,
the way the burglar offers the guard dog a
bit of meat to distract him, he implicitly
af½rms Rimbaud’s priorities. Dylan him-
self resented, he said in Chronicles, IL
way his “lyrics had been extrapolated,
their meanings subverted into polemics,"
rather than regarded as embedded within
“songs that floated in a luminous haze.”12
This last phrase, insisting on respect for
poetic presence–the refusal of clarity–
merits context: “I really was never any
more than what I was–a folk musician

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143 (1) Inverno 2014

I’m Not
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who gazed into the gray mist with tear-
blinded eyes and made up songs that
floated in a luminous haze” (116). Dylan’s
sentence neatly enacts his slipperiness:
what begins with the simple sincerity of a
tautology of self-identity turns out to be a
feint, suddenly swaddled in the hazy
“gray mist” of symbolist imagery.

William Faulkner had famously per-
fected the mask of evasion a few years
before Dylan. When questioned in grad-
uate seminars at the University of Vir-
ginia (sessions that became canonical
when published) Di, Dire, The Sound
and the Fury, Faulkner opined: you would
have to ask Quentin (referring to his
novel’s main character). An effort to
honor and preserve art’s mystery, its aura,
seems shyly to lurk in Dylan’s and Faulk –
ner’s advertisements of ignorance. Both
men heightened their own mystery by
swathing their early history in elaborate
legends: Faulkner claimed he was a ½ghter
pilot, Dylan says he ran away with the cir-
cus. Beginning with his borrowed name,
Dylan has crafted mask upon mask; In –
deed, “his refusal to be known” is a “pas-
sion that has shaped his work,” as Ellen
Willis once wrote.13 He has also refused
to be a knower.

It is tempting to write off the artist’s

public performance of estrangement be –
fore his own creations as a quintessen-
tially American pose that pledges alle-
giance to our most enduring native tradi-
zione: anti-intellectualism. But if we turn
anti-intellectualism from the familiar
philistine sense to a less familiar one–
philosophical anti-intellectualism–we are
more accurate. Not only does this prefer-
ence for anonymity protect art’s aura. Ma
the deadpan inscrutability of Dylan, IL
Southern gentleman misdirection of
Faulkner, the monosyllabic tautology of
Newman’s “How it went, that’s how it
era,” also enact artists’ refusal to enthrone

themselves as transcendental knowers in
sovereign control. Such lofty intellectual-
ism has always been the enemy of one
prominent strand of high modernism.
Recall, Ancora, T. S. Eliot, who wants an
aesthetic that fuses back together what
has been torn asunder: thought and feel-
ing, the intellectual and emotional. Eliot
sought to end the “dissociation of sensi-
bility” that he believed had occurred in
the seventeenth century (his phrase of
1921 took on a life of its own despite being
subjected to withering historical critique
in ensuing decades), and his colleague
Ezra Pound warns us “go in fear of
abstractions,” part of his doctrine of im –
agism. Pound’s friend William Carlos
Williams insists: “no ideas, but in things.”
Even that seemingly most aloof formal-
ist, Henry James, spoke in his ½nal pref-
ace of the bruising imperative of intimacy:
“I get down into the arena and do my
best to live and breathe and rub shoulders
and converse with the persons engaged . . .
the deeply involved and immersed and
more or less bleeding participants”–his
characters. Any act less intimate will
allow “the muffled majesty of authorship”
to “reign”–an “irresponsibility” to be
avoided.14

As if reacting against the modernist pas –
sion for sensuous particularity and im –
mersion, postmodern theory tends to be
skeptical of the unmediated in any form,
be it body or nature. Making unrelenting
war on the natural, theory reduces the
self to an ideologically constructed iden-
tity. One result is that theory inadver-
tently reinstates the gap between nature
e cultura, body and mind, emotion and
reason, and leaves feeling–or any imme-
diate experience or sensation–under
suspicion as hopelessly naive. Forms of
intellectualism pervade postmodern the-
ory: for instance, the belief in the ubiquity
of textualism (Derrida), rhetoric and ½g –
urality (De Man), and interpretation

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(Fish). Whereas literature, as De Man
famously wrote, is the “only form of lan-
guage free from the fallacy of unmediated
expression,” the practitioners of visual
art tended to embrace the fallacy of the
unmediated in their relish of the violence
of sensation.15 In his famous interviews
with David Sylvester, Francis Bacon
speaks repeatedly of painting as an effort
to record “one’s own feelings . . . as closely
to one’s own nervous system as one pos-
sibly can.”16 In effect, it was a job of art
theorists to tidy up the artist’s naive
belief in the power of the visceral, Quale
was grounded in engagement with obdu-
rately palpable materials.

But postmodernism’s programmatic
“suspicion over claims of naivete” has
produced a counter-response, one that
Richard Shiff articulates in Doubt: “Claims
for the ubiquitous ef½cacy of cultural
forces may be creating a more pernicious
mythology than speculation on the puta-
tively absolute value of aesthetic immedi-
acy and naturalness” (127). Shiff’s doubt
about postmodern orthodoxy leaves him
“hanging”: it “does not entail being con-
vinced of the real existence of the natural
self that certain artists may be continuing
to seek as a liberating alternative to cul-
ture”; Piuttosto, “our doubt merely indicates
how deeply dissatisfying it is to believe
that there can be no natural self and no
physical existence at all–no source of
sensation that might escape the general-
izing sameness of our various cultural
iden tities” (127).

Tired of “feeling pressured by the critical
indoctrination” that trains us to “all too
readily expose the super½ciality, the con-
structed spectacle, the mirage of sensa-
zione,” to “distrust our feelings more than
to trust them,”17 Shiff asks: “To what
degree are we . . . willing to trust and act
on feeling, especially when no theory sup –
ports it?" (Doubt, 25). He urges us to “stop
conflating the history of the criticism

and theory of art with the history of mak-
ing art” (131). The former depends on a
“fantasy world of the general and con-
ceptual” that “can only lead away from the
sensory world of the speci½c and the real”
(51). Though theory encouraged him to
be “extraordinarily wary of many of the
claims of the modern artists,” Shiff now
tries to resist his own distrust. In his effort
to keep faith in feeling, he enlists Polanyi’s
Personal Knowledge. When asked in an
interview “what is worth caring about,"
Shiff responds that we need to understand
“our cultural hunger for experience that
escapes conceptualization.”18

This hunger is deep in the American
romantic grain. Emerson called the hunger
abandonment, and his greatest reader,
Nietzsche, alerted me last year that I, pure,
had this hunger. For decades I had been
feeding it in my own acts of biblio-aban-
donment, my intuitive book buying, IL
urge “to do something without knowing
how or why; in short, to draw a new circle.”

A nother circle: concurrent with the

writing of this essay, I am teaching my
favorite novel, Henry James’s The Ambas-
sadors, which I have done many times
since my ½rst try in 1981. The simultaneity
makes me see that its protagonist, Lam-
bert Strether, is James’s great tribute to
“personal knowledge” and to Emerso –
nian abandonment. Strether’s “very grop –
ing,” writes James in his preface, “would
½gure among his most interesting mo –
tions” (12) since, not unlike Polanyi’s
“groping,” they are guided by no plan or
project: he is deferring and soon flouting
his ambassadorial duties for perambula-
tions in Paris (“wherever one paused in
Paris the imagination reacted before one
could stop it” [81]) that involve him in
prolonged acts of abandonment and
circle-drawing, acts that come to delight in
proportion as they baffle him. For what
he has managed to abandon is the tyranny

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143 (1) Inverno 2014

I’m Not
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of explanation: “his heart always sank
when the clouds of explanation gathered.
His highest ingenuity was in keeping the
sky of life clear of them. Whether or no
he had a grand idea of the lucid, he held
that nothing ever was in fact–for any one
else–explained” (114).

Falling in love with both Chad (whom
he has pledged to haul back from Paris to
Woollett, Massachusetts, to run the family
business) and Chad’s enchanting Parisian
mistress, Marie de Vionnet, Strether is
“letting himself go . . . diving deep.” At
lunch alone with Marie he feels the “warm
spring air” begin to “throb,” his senses
liberated not least because he has dis-
pensed with “explanations”: “it was at

present as if he had either soared above or
sunk below them–he couldn’t tell which.
. . . How could he wish it to be lucid for
others, for any one, that he, for the hour,
saw reasons enough in the mere way the
bright clean ordered water-side life came
in at the open window” (220). Soaring or
sinking, not sure which, Strether is im –
mersed in the “tacit,” whose etymology
is “to be silent” or grow dumb. He is, A
borrow Polanyi’s words, being poured
straight into experience, “overwhelmed”
by “passionate activity.” “I’m incredible.
I’m fantastic and ridiculous–I don’t ex –
plain myself even to myself,” he jauntily
exclaims near the end of the novel (355).
“I’m Not There,” indeed.

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endnotes
1 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 60.
2 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures (1841; New York: Library of America, 1983), 414.

Subsequent citations noted parenthetically within the text.

3 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals & Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans.
Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (1908; New York: Random House, 1967), 253–255.
Used by permission of Random House, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of
this publication, is prohibited.

4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (New York:

Harper, 1972), 62, para. 475.

5 William James, Writings, 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 755, 728.
6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Richard Polt (1889; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997),
18–19. The debate about concepts and intuition remains a live philosophical issue; a recent
incarnation of it sets John McDowell against Herbert Dreyfus. Arguing against the “myth of
the pervasiveness of the mental” that he ascribes to McDowell, Dreyfus stresses the “ab –
sorbed coping and acting in flow” that is found in the behavior of infants, animals, E
experts. McDowell, in turn, shows that Dreyfus subscribes to “the myth of the mind as
detached” and urges “an integrated conception of ourselves as animals, and–what comes
with that–beings whose life is pervasively bodily, but of a distinctively rational kind.” Their
essays, with responses by others, are collected in Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: IL
McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, ed. Joseph Schear (New York: Routledge, 2013), 54, 15, 56.

7 Branka Arsic, On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Cambridge, Massa.: Stampa dell'Università di Harvard,

2010), 154. Subsequent citations noted parenthetically within the text.

8 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958; Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1962), 62–64. Subsequent citations noted parenthetically within
the text.

9 Mary Jo Nye, Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), xii.

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (1790; Oxford: Oxford

Stampa universitaria, 2007), 137.

Ross
Posnock

11 Richard Shiff, Doubt (New York: Routledge, 2008), 68. Subsequent citations noted paren-

thetically within the text.

12 Bob Dylan, Chronicles (New York: Simone & Schuster, 2004), 120, 116. Subsequent citation

noted parenthetically within the text.

13 Ellen Willis, Beginning to See the Light (New York: Knopf, 1981), 4.
14 Henry James, Novels, 1903–1911 (New York: Library of America, 2010), 434. Subsequent cita-

tions noted parenthetically within the text.

15 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 17.
16 David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and

Hudson, 1980), 43.

17 Richard Shiff, “On Between Sense and De Kooning,” The Montréal Review (online magazine),
settembre 2011, http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Between-sense-and-de-Kooning
-by-Richard-Shiff.php.

18 Richard Shiff, “An Interview with Katy Siegel,” The Brooklyn Rail, April 2008.

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