“We will disrupt nothing with the fullness of nothingness”: a conversation between Susan Gevirtz & Julia Drescher

From April through the beginning of May, Susan Gevirtz (SG) & I (JD) had a conversation conducted through email about two texts: Beverly Dahlen’s essay “Tautology & the Real” & Clarice Lispector’s story “That’s Where I’m Going.” These two texts provided edges to lean on & fly from: below is the conversation that resulted (edited somewhat for clarity). Dahlen’s essay may be located here (page 215 in the pdf). The version of Lispector’s story we used is in The Complete Stories, Katrina Dodson, translator.

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(JD): I have been trying to think of questions to begin a conversation about the Dahlen & Lispector, but I have found it (wonderfully) difficult to do this, as it feels reductive(?) BUT perhaps that just means that questions might be collaborative/ might just develop out of a conversation. Below, I have just tried to throw a few things out there based on the beginning of Dahlen's essay...Let me know if you have something different in mind, though — I am very much open to other places of interest. (I have numbered them to make it seem like they're anything like "coherent" thoughts, or like I am using the form to trick the content into appearing:) magic!)

In "Tautology & the Real" I am struck by Dahlen's use of the word "progress" twice to refer to how she learned what "tautology" (& "redundancy") meant: “errors fatal to the orderly progress of thought”. Too, there seems to be a morality associated with tautology (& therefore progress?) in how its meaning is taught:  “To commit tautology was to be guilty…”

Lispector, too,  brings this question of progress along, even just with her title...& both seem to have a suspicion of (linear) progress— I want to think about this suspicion, perhaps in relation to poetry &:

1. place & time (i.e. since progress depends on arrival (& since tautology is associated with *not arriving*: then, where? when? exactly)

2. the relation-as-change (in Dahlen:  “What wears out is the real world of roses & moons. What changes is our relation to the real, & this change changes everything.” & in Lispector: how she keeps seeming to repeat/go in circles with the "I/me" *as a means of* 'getting to'(?) the "we" etc.) & a 'Nothing' both Dahlen & Lispector seem interested in

3.       Progress: “movement toward an outcome or conclusion” > so, is a tautology just a question refusing to conclude? As a means of remaining open? (Dahlen seems to be thinking of this in relation to language & poetry)

(Another interesting/related inquiry might be folding in/bearing in mind the definitions for "Tautology" & "Real"? i.e.

1.       Tautology: (one definition)—“unnecessary or superfluous action or word”

2.    Real: — “having a necessary, in contrast to a merely contingent, existence” >

3.    So that: What existence ISN'T contingent? Who (since it's always a 'who'?) decides the necessary-ness? (&, of course, in relation to progress—who decides what that is? — in poetry particularly:)

(Fun fact: etymologically, "Real" was apparently first associated with royalty-what was "real" was "worthy of a king", characteristic of royalty/nobility with regard to "power, wealth, or dignity" )

(SG): Yes absolutely, I think Dahlen very clearly implies that there is a morality associated with committing tautology. A whole order of gendered symbolic power and morality. 

"Tautology represents the case in which there is too little information for progress. Redundancy, on the other hand, represents an excess, a pile-up, a chaos of information.”

Later, in a very dense paragraph that I am not sure I understand, she uses the word “progress” again. It’s hard to excerpt this paragraph or this essay because it’s so dense and each word, each sentence pivots on the previous and the next, requiring a reading backwards and forwards at the same time, but I think that with this next use of “progress” she means that Spicer’s tautology was a kind of complete humanistic (?) system similar to a belief in the complete stable referentiality between things and words. Then she quotes Blaser as saying that Spicer, "regarded magic as ‘matter of disturbance, entrance and passion…’. So magic is opposed to Spicer’s tautology because, as Dahlen says “implicit in the theory of correspondence” is a belief that one can (… be at home in a world of unified and shared meaning).” And that is why that reigning sixteenth-century concept of progress, that version of being “at home in the world,” was in league with those who killed witches who practiced a magic guided "by the impulse to disrupt that order.” It’s funny because at first I thought Dahlen was on the side of Spicer and those who embrace tautology over progress. And now as I reread I think that maybe she is on neither “side” but has gone through tautology to another side and there found a magic witchcraft, that is to say a poetics, that disrupts both orders, and points with Lacan to “an emptiness which is the place of the real.” She doesn’t extrapolate but I am tempted to say she implies that no matter which bodies practice this it is a practice gendered female and is disruptive to a social order that relies on a belief in the one-to-one direct correspondence between things and their symbols — like, to be reductive, a priest and the true words of God.

(JD): I agree about the excerpting! The backward & forward movement in reading this essay is delicious & makes me think about the motions of reading in relation to (dis)place(ment).

I mean, I think Spicer never felt he had “a home in this world”—including the poetry world — & I think the poetry is all about questioning the reader/writer’s sense of this, making them uncomfortable, thwarting even the desire to feel at home. I think if there’s a “nostalgia” in Spicer’s poetry, it’s actually for disturbances—past & future/possible ones — & maybe, too, for disturbances that are always already present but “look like” (sound like) absences/lacks. (whenever I say ‘think’ I also always mean ‘feel’ as well—these are interchangeable for me, just FYI).

(Here I should also confess(!)to you that that whole argument(?) about words & things—it just doesn’t interest me LOL. I think when Dahlen talks about Stein, I agree with her disagreement with what Stein says etc. yet I am still drawn to the idea that the attention paid to it is a distraction—too, that’s it’s always conceptualized as a “loss/lack” “a gap”—that’s suspicious to me (even Lacan’s “emptiness which is the place of the real” I can’t read/hear without thinking of histories of coloniality/misogyny etc. etc. However, I am certainly still open to the idea that I *should* be thinking along these lines. But, for instance, in the Lispector piece, I get the sense that this is not the ‘real’ question interrogating the reader/writer—that, while different from, language is just as ‘real’ a thing as the things it points to or says…I don’t think she’s concerned with it & I am interested in the way in which she uses tautologies as a means of/a form for disruption (of both the self & the language for it) as a means of attempting to respond to the call/the question of love & the we…)

The Dahlen & the Lispector read together, along with your comments above, has me wondering about the connection AND correspondence of poetics to witches, disruption, & the interrogative as related to this modernist argument about the disconnection of language from the “real things” they represent that Dahlen works thru with Stein & Spicer, Lacan, etc. i.e. where “practicing witchcraft” is this twisted, complicated (entanglement!) thing: like, in terms of the witch trials in Salem, where what a woman says, what children say becomes what is considered real by their saying it (from/in a political position where *generally* this speech is always already suspect as speech, from/in response to a threat by those who benefit from excluding such speakers from the notion/experience of power in a political order). We (the Cotton Mathers etc.) believe in the devil, we believe you (any other) are always already impure/traitorous & against our order (because, of course, it *is* against you) & therefore we believe you are susceptible to the devil etc etc *so show us that we’re right*, affirm for us that what we believe is real.

& then, too, at the same time & in the same place what is also happening (thru & with the above) is this fucked-up means by which those who feel they are entitled to “feeling at home in this world” can recognize-as-a-means-of-not-recognizing their role in making this world shitty for everyone— for instance I see it as no accident that the whole Salem “colony collapse” begins by focusing on Tituba….what is that called—transference? “The act of conveying from one place to another”—wherein bodies are “made” into places—to be fixed & locatable as a means for owning, to be a fixed & locatable point (to be made), a place to offload your guilt your sins your pathologies that will hold them/bear them in the fantasy that this will make life more bearable for you….etc. etc. (exhausting) etc… So that “progress” seems reduced to (a need for) a comfort that is limited/exclusive to those with political power, reduced to the need for only one timeline to really matter (?)…

All this(!) to ask: does this kind of “political progress” you were speaking about: “being at home in the world” linked to “a whole order of gendered symbolic power & morality”: Do you feel this as (a real) tautological constraint? &, if so, is it connected for you/do you have a relation to this constraint in the how &/or why of your writing/reading lives?

(SG): Yes. It is a real constraint. But 1st I need to do some sorting and reminding for myself: to be clear what I/we/Dahlen mean by “it” : in the beginning of her essay Dahlen puts tautology in opposition to redundancy: “Tautology represents the case in which there is too little information for progress. Redundancy, on the other hand, represents an excess, a pile up, a chaos of information.” We are taught, she says, that these are errors that have in common the “the idea of repetition.” I agree that we are taught that these are errors and their wrongness is enforced as a law. You can call it grammar or institutional mores or whiteness (which has many symptoms, among them my alliance and/or ease with the idea of trespass without punishment— there are places my body and thought have been able to visit that are part of privilege I’ve assumed, incorporated (corporeal-ized). Its enforcement is mostly invisible, or we are so accustomed to its voice and command that it goes unnoticed and thus it is ultra pernicious.

Later Dahlen speaks of repetition as a sign of desire and a relation to the real. While she brings up Lacan even later in the essay, I think she has in mind a Lacanian idea of the real from the start. Later she quotes Lacan, “The real is the impossible.” And she goes on to say, “It is what is excluded (or in Lacan’s terminology “foreclosed”) by language, by the entire order which he named symbolic.” In my own work I am very interested in what is excluded— as much what I do not allow in and need to examine, as discarded consciously or not, as in the relation between the writing and its alleged subject. This last especially is, I think, an imagined relation like the relation between the real thing and real word, like the relation between repetition and desire— I’m with her on the idea that there’s always excess, never one-to-one correspondence (or only as a bait and switch until the next association is exposed —And that this is the fissure, the disruption, we’re going for. And that this disruption thwarts progress and I have no interest in poetry that progresses unless its progress is redundant. It’s as if she’s suggesting that the repetitive nature of tautology and redundancy is the symptom that reveals desire and our failure to satiate it. Fuck satisfying desire. No need to even try. Or to try not to try. Desire has us, not us it. In this realm I think I am aligned with her in my work in the sense that I am, and have forever been, interested in thinking that does not register on the page as developed essay-like thought. Tautology is one form that can take us there. So can some forms of redundancy (as Dahlen says “A rose is a rose is a…” would not work as well if it weren’t a rose. This is where the poet comes in…).

I think I understand your suspicion or just downright disinterest in the “gap” “lacunae,” read sign of the vaginal or feminized, error, space of the wrong… of nothing. I am aware of this possibility as one in a spectrum of possibilities. I am wondering, does it (all of these possibilities) assume an outside of language? I wonder whether another problem with the concept of “the real” is that it assumes an outside of language? If it does, that would be a huge red flag for me. I believe there is no outside of language. The political implications of believing there is an outside include some of the problems you and I list above. If there is an outside of the “real” — an outside of nothing— who occupies it? What speakers and bodies? I think it would be the ones who are not white, the ones who have not learned to properly discard tautology and redundancy, the ones who in the culture symbolically represent the outside: the colonized, the vaginal, etc…

OR, do all these possibilities refer to the plenitude of desire, kept pumped by the repetitions of redundancy and tautology — as in what Dahlen says in the end of the essay: “There will always be a reading of ‘nothing,’ in which it is full, rather than empty.” Maybe she suggests here something I hope and aim for: a subversion of the symbolic order by use of its concept of nothing. If those signs signify emptiness as error, we will disrupt nothing with the fullness of nothingness.

Yes, I agree, Lispector also is thinking in a parallel territory - even in her title. And yes progress implies and depends on arrival at a better destination than the previous. But does tautology really depend on *not arriving* as you say above? Or does it depend on arriving and arriving and arriving but not necessarily at a better place (as a progressive arrival- or view of history- implies) but at, as she says, “I at the edge of wind.” The “at” means “the edge of wind.” It is a place, though not a place with a proper name. Still it is a place that is also, as the next line shows, the title of a book, “The wuthering heights call to me.” So it is the place of a call and the place of a book. A place is a time in which something happens. I am called. I am reminded of writing; in fact as a writer I respond to the call and my response is a place in time that is an action— in the next line she says, “I go, witch that I am. And I am transmuted.” So I am wondering here whether Dahlen’s witch and Lispector’s both propose a practice that is not tautology or progress but what Lispector here calls “transmutation.” She says more in the remaining lines of the essay about what might count as her version of transmutation — a different poetics-place from Dahlen’s I think, but maybe with some overlaps.

In the discussion about Salem particularly, you are describing an order, a condition, I recognize and believe is very palpably still with us, alive, well and kicking —kicking people out, calling them other things, maybe not witch, but the equivalent. Are you saying that this order is itself a tautology? Do you think Dahlen means that?

(JD): I think I am saying that it (the order) IS a tautology—insofar as it is a political reasoning that exists to continually categorize Others as unnecessary/unreal (to its order) *so that* it (the order/people who believe in this order) can categorize itself/themselves AS necessary/real (& therefore not “dependent on” those deemed unnecessary—even though the whole reasoning is *based on* this kind of exclusion from the necessary/real). i.e. the tautology is just a re/affirming of an exclusionary idea of “humanity” (**without recognizing** this form as “an error” of tautology).

          I *think* Dahlen points to this, yes. As just one example of Dahlen pointing to this in her essay: In the paragraph that begins “More than forty years separate these works…” (this is after the quote of the Spicer piece from After Lorca):

“So the real is that which is left out or left over, that which is always necessarily beyond the frame of the painting or the margin of the poem. The induction of so-called real objects into painting serves, like the repetition of the word ‘rose’ in Stein’s poem, to demonstrate the lack of the real…A ‘newspaper’ is not a newspaper; its self-referentiality within the painting is a tautology, a hole in the painting that reminds us of the essential illusion of art.”

OK, so: this is super-interesting to me, & I feel like there are multiple “moves” she’s employing here (a “newspaper” has a self!) but in terms of *also* thinking in the vein of the tautological condition we’ve been discussing, “the real” here is aligned with “that which is left out or left over, that which is always necessarily beyond the frame of the painting or the margin of the poem.” (my emphasis) So that which is excluded (those who are excluded) from “the real”, are shown (as absence, as tautological hole) to be crucial to (the idea, the representation of) it. & then, that last phrase, I can hear as something like “a hole in politics that reminds us of the essential illusion of the law” : obviously, not what Dahlen means at all, just what her essay (& thru our discussion) disturbs me into thinking (I guess like a ‘line of flight’ that pulls me?). BUT not, to my mind, unrelated, given that the exclusionary practices of politics, of the juridical etc. can be “sent thru” to, can be functioning in, ideas about representation in art, how/why someone might “practice art” etc.

(That “sent thru” is a Fred Moten formulation (&, really, he’s one of the people I often just find myself following around because he “disturbs” me in the best/challenging sense) BUT, while I am drawn to what he says about “being sent by/what sends thru,” I also am mindful that I can’t just throw myself into that whole hoc—because, what *also* wants to be (& has been/is)“sent thru” me is whiteness, the juridical-man, etc. (I guess he might say what wants to “seize thru”, as distinguished from “sent”)—& so disturbing that as much as possible also means remaining suspicious of myself in a general sense, recognizing(?) when I fail at disturbing this function, when I perpetuate it etc. etc. I am here, too, thinking-as-following what you said above about the “excluded”, the “fissure, the disruption we’re going for” etc.)

So, again, I *think* Dahlen points to this, yes, AND ALSO the idea that the form (of tautology) might also be able to do *something other-than* this…

          In regards to your question about “not arriving”: I don’t know: I guess what I was trying to think about was: if progress is a “movement toward an outcome or conclusion” then this indicates a *fixed place* wherein “refuge” [home] could be found/achieved & so arrived at…whereas tautologies—“spinning one’s wheels” as Dahlen says—seem to indicate the motion of a refusal of the place you’re stuck in *without* leaving/being able to leave that place (i.e.(?) “That’s where I’m going”).

That the enclosure/constraint of tautology re both historical/literary ones & its “general”/administered meaning (which I vaguely associate the accusation of this—as Dahlen relates it at the beginning of her essay—with putting someone back in their “proper place” by deeming their speech “unnecessary”, “superfluous”)—that working thru/in/with this can also be a “cover” for “flight” within it: a recognition of disturbances that are already there (hiding-as-a-means-of-showing) etc. which might require giving up the desire to “arrive” at a place-like-an-answer/escape?? So that this makes me think about placeless space? Is there a placeless call a placeless response as a kind of different timing/timeliness? Unlocatable (in flight), disruptive of the idea of the locatable, the real? & then so maybe this is akin to your “Or does it depend on arriving and arriving and arriving but not necessarily at a better place”

Given “transmutation’s” etymology of ‘thoroughly beyond’ I think I agree with your take re Lispector’s & Dahlen’s practices…maybe the question for each (& maybe where there’s that difference you mention) is “beyond what/who/when”??? beyond even this question?

The whole "I at the edge of wind" followed by "wuthering heights" is just amazing in terms of reading & displacement, the motion/what happens in reading—& I see it as related to the "we" inasmuch as one way to read this is "the place" she becomes/always is *is part of the weather in the book of wuthering heights* — that's some awesome witchery! (&, not that I would at all argue this is what she was pointing to, just that our discussion is making me think of it— but those beautiful lines about the dog at the end, now I am thinking about how they hung 3 dogs as witches in Salem...)

Then, too, I wonder: if you are already conceptualized as disturbance (to a political order, to a REAL unified meaning etc.), how do you/ can you practice (say) a poetics of disturbance? (maybe that’s not a real question??)

Reading your responses above also reminded me of this Blanchot quote I have been thinking about:  “Flight is the engendering of a space without refuge.” (& I don’t read the use of “engendering” lightly at all).

(SG): Hmmm… I like the way you’re thinking about the fixed place and the refuge, I think you’re right that we’re in the realm of “the motion of a refusal” —  a refusal of the place one is stuck in while being stuck in it. This could, and does I think, in both essays, apply to so many things: to gender, to “the real”, to who/what counts as a witch — and to the “Flight” in the Blanchot quote (witches really do and don’t take flight through the air, do and don’t perform transmutation — or so it appears to anyone who doesn’t understand their other logic and method). I am left wondering—what is “Flight”? Shall we, can we, should we replace “Flight” with “Writing”? Is “Flight” here interchangeable with any other word or idea? Or why bother interchanging? You said above, “this makes me think about placeless space? Is there a placeless call a placeless response as a kind of different timing/timeliness?” Is that the place of the book?

I realize that when I read what Dahlen said about tautology — that we are taught early on that it is bad, that it is a “spinning one’s wheels” — I was imagining a slight irony in her “tone” or  suspension of commitment to the things we’ve been led to believe. This way of (perhaps erroneously) reading made me have a shred of hope for tautology, and think she might too, like maybe it could be a means of the kind of “motion of refusal” you mention. So a surreptitious recommendation to take the being trapped in what we were taught is a wrong use of language and bend it our own ends. Maybe this is the sense in which tautology is useful, or a transmuted tautology could be useful? Can we take the reprimand and rule against tautology, read (as you say above) the disciplining against it that our early encounters mandate, the rules against improper speech and bodies, can we use that “enclosure/restraint” for our own ends? If there is really no flight out of the house, then are flights of imagination the only flight available to us? Flights of imagination by which we recognize and reveal disturbances? Can there be a placeless real that is not empty (though possibly redundant) in its desire to keep taking flight? What is a practice of the beyond? Are either or both of them showing this to us in this writing? Can we point at anything that is it?

I wonder— is the kind of displacement we read/see in action there in Lispector’s lines, the action of the beyond we’re trying to name? Or rather that I wish to point to (like a hunting dog?) and call something…? Is displacement the place? Thinking of Sun Ra’s “space is the place”…

Wow incredible, I didn’t know that about the dog hangings in Salem! How savage women are in the intimacy with things as wild and domestic as a dog… If anyone could hear the grand  proportions my talking out loud to my dog have taken in the last 8 weeks alone with him they might at least take me in for questioning… Very curious how you see yourself practicing a poetics of disturbance in your work?

(JD): I feel very little difference between writing & reading.

(SG): Me too.

(JD): (this would also be in agreement with you about feeling “no outside to language”, I think, & what “the real”/the word-is-not-the-thing argument has traditionally assumed to be able to point to i.e. that “outside of language” that relates to my disinterest/suspicion, & that I think by the end of her essay Dahlen *is* rejecting)

(SG): Yes, as in an outside of language would equal an outside of the book or an outside of a piece of writing —where you & I might feel a permeable membrane.

(JD): So, generally, I try to practice a poetics of disturbance thru how/what I read & hope, I guess, that it comes thru to disturb the poetry—or also to disturb the “self” that is writing it, wanting to regulate it, etc. I read what I read to be unmoored from what I think/feel generally. This makes me want to consider a poetics of disturbed reading (which I think Dahlen practices in her essays & her poetry, but I am not sure she would agree?).

(SG): Yes, beautifully put. I too try to practice that —someday we could make a list of the many shades of disturbance we long for and try to find in reading. I think Dahlen would agree and probably does attempt this.

(JD): I have always been interested, too, in how (the act of) reading disturbs/can disturb. Lisa Robertson: “…it was Rousseau who said that any girl who reads is already a lost girl” (lost to what? to who?).

(SG): Yes!? Exactly— then I want to be lost. I read to get lost.

(JD): So, right now, I am thinking along the lines of this thru my childhood experiences. For instance, my parents didn’t finish college so it was made very clear to me that I was *definitely* going to get a degree etc. BUT often I got in trouble for reading “when I shouldn’t be”—inappropriate reading, reading “excessively” (which meant not for a grade in school) —reading as tautology AND redundancy!

I *think* where my reading ‘disturbed’ them was when it was interpreted by them as a “motion of refusal” (of, say, ‘family’, the ‘family picture’ at church etc.), & read by others outside my immediate family as a refusal of housework/childcare in a rigid-gender-norm sense (& still is!!!). (I mean, this really is a “same-as-it-ever-was” situation to a certain extent, the “spinning the wheels” that creates exhaust—& I am also speaking perhaps too broadly here).

One meaning of “disturb” is to stir up trouble—which, of course, implies the trouble is already there/present (& now I am thinking of witches again!)—&, too, more often than not, whoever/whatever stirs up that trouble is transformed into being the trouble/the problem (i.e. to point at it is to “become” it).

(SG): Yes - Bubble bubble toil and trouble.

I love the idea of reading as tautology and redundancy and thus disturbance in the form of EXCESS! 

The scene of the family is definitely the crucible of so many different kinds of reading—love that you’re looking into this. The “reading is a waste of time” idea fascinates me because it does lay waste to time as we know it outside of reading.

& I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about Freud’s injunction against girls reading- in Dora — equating it with the dangers of other erotic activities, especially masturbation, if I recall correctly.

(JD): What all of this also has me thinking — & related to the Blanchot quote—is that (for me at least) reading/writing IS a flight (that is also a dive), but not in the escapist vein (though sometimes people’s perception of it as being so is what might “disturb” them about it?). If it is “a space without refuge” then it (also?) disturbs that political/literary order we’ve been speaking about (that regulates ‘the female’ of me at the same time as making a false promise to the white part of me that I could be “included” in its supposed freedoms etc etc., which is one way it can seize thru me)—which means it’s a place of continual difficulty & preparation (i.e. no “arrival” at some redemptive/exceptional place).

(SG): Yes. I couldn’t agree more. A perfect place to leave the conversation…

Susan Gevirtz’s recent books of poetry include Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat). She is based in San Francisco.

Julia Drescher is the author of Open Epic (Delete Press). She lives in Colorado where she co-edits the press Further Other BookWorks with C.J. Martin.