Meditation and the Escalator Principle (on Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine)
[In the following essay, Chambers explores the narratological and philosophical significance of open-ended digressions and subjective contemplation in The Mezzanine. Contrasting Baker's novel with Descartes's Meditations, Chambers contends that the discontinuous narrative and trivial private preoccupations of The Mezzanine serve to shift the narrative structure of the novel in favor of “progressive extenuation” and “paradigmatic lingering” rather than closure.]
So essential to the productive economy are the small pleasures of “fugue”—napping in class, calling in sick, walking the dog—that time out is sometimes actually institutionalized and scheduled into the regulated hours of work. We take annual vacations at predetermined dates and go to lunch each day at the appointed hour. To the extent that it tells a story, Nicholson Baker's novel, The Mezzanine, tells the story of such a period of scheduled time out. A young office worker on lunch break leaves his place of employment on the mezzanine, takes the escalator down to the street, walks around a bit, buys some lunch and a pair of shoelaces to replace those that have just broken on him, sits in the sun with a copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in his lap—and takes the escalator back up to work.
This, from the point of view of conventional literary expectations, is an impoverished and trivial scenario. But the poverty of narrative interest is an indicator, perhaps, that Baker's text seeks ways to give pleasure and earn authority other than those that are characteristic of narrative. What are these ways? How do they relate to the requirements of narrative interest? Can we understand them as something like a narrative equivalent of time out, providing a break from the goal-orientedness of story in the way that lunch hour provides a break from the requirements of economic productivity?
The triviality of Baker's narrative suggests, in turn, a hypothesis that has more to do with philosophical questions than with narrative as such. What kind of text treats the trivial as significant? How does it go about establishing the importance of the (supposedly) trivial? What modifications does this suppose in conceptions of knowledge, and in the evaluations on which our recognition of knowledge rests? Is there something like an epistemological “time out” that might have philosophical, educational or critical interest?
The essay that follows attempts to find a passage between these two sets of questions: the question of textual pleasure as a counternarrative practice, and the question of the transvaluation of the trivial and its consequences for knowledge. In so doing, it will be led to explore a thematics of passage in Baker's own work, which, I will contend, substitutes for the principle of narrative, which inevitably tends toward closure, the principle of meditative genres of thought and writing, which is the idea that one thing leads, not to an end, but to another. The escalator, as we shall see, is the text's figure for this meditative principle, which is also the principle of mediation.
But the escalator is also the means of transport that takes us down from our orderly offices into the relatively unconstrained world of the street, where we walk around a bit before taking the escalator back up again to work. What forms of connectedness does it imply, then, what to-and-fro passages does it authorize, between counternarrative practices and narrative constraints? Between philosophizing the insignificant and more majestic modes of thought? Between arts of fugue and the world of productive work? That is the question (the set of questions) that underlies this essay as a whole.
THE ESCALATOR PRINCIPLE
In U and I, an essay on John Updike that bears the motto: “It may be us they wish to meet but it's themselves they want to talk about” (Cyril Connolly), Nicholson Baker—talking about himself, then—takes issue with Updike for a remark about a descriptive passage that “would clog any narrative”:
What he meant to say, I thought, I hoped, was that Edmund Wilson's passage was simply no good, not that one's aim was to avoid clogging narratives with description. The only thing I like are the clogs. … I wanted my first novel [The Mezzanine] to be a veritable infarct of narrative cloggers; the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally revealed not blank mass but unlooked for seepage-points of passage.
(72)
(I've omitted from the second sentence a long descriptive clog about the signs of impatience Baker gives “when, late in most novels, there are no more [clogs] in the pipeline to slow things down”—a clog that is further clogged by a parenthesis that compares picking at the price-sticker on the back of a book as one reads with the delight shared by Updike and Baker, of “picking a psoriasis lesion.” Welcome to Nicholson Baker's world, and let us note immediately that unclogged narratives, going straight to the point, have no time for the trivial whereas Baker might have said of the trivial what he says of clogs, that it is the only thing he likes. His work effortlessly realizes the potential for aesthetic and philosophical transvaluation that lies within the trivial, and hence implies a positive valuation of “having time.”)
Linked associatively (not narratively or logically) to this passage, the following paragraph digresses, or appears to digress, into the description of a clogged sewer-pipe that turned out to be obstructed by tampons: “their strings caught on a tufty invading root and expanded to the full extent of their puff, about thirty of them. Earthworms took up residence in them [producing] an Edenic scene in the lower garden near the standpipe: around the probe … was a roil of roots and black tampon-fruits and pinkly prosperous earthworms” (74). “And why shouldn't this clog clog some narrative of mine?” Baker asks rhetorically, omitting to specify that it has just done so. “To the worms it was not obstructive, it wasn't revolting, it was life itself. It is life itself.” And he goes on, in another parenthesis, to compare their owner's use of tampons to Elvis Presley's profligacy with scarves in his decline, “barely touching them to his neck before flinging them mechanically out to the audience as souvenirs.”
Rhetorical appeals, especially to “life itself,” are pretty dubious, but it's worth noticing that, if narrative clogging is Baker's pleasure, his intent has something to do with representing an alternative, worm's eye view of what life is—a complex “roil” that resists narrative and can only be approached descriptively, with the aid of connections and associations that are essentially metaphoric in kind (Wilson's clogged narrative and the blocked sewer; a price-sticker and a psoriasis lesion; Presley's scarves and an excessive consumption of tampons). My problem is how to approach such luxuriant writing critically, especially when criticism is habitually so invested in narrative, with its speed and selectivity. Loiterly writing, of which Baker's is exemplary, is anticritical in its very principle (that is its own critical function): it blocks critical gestures with the same glee that it delights in clogging narrative structures. The temptation is therefore simply to quote Baker's prose in extenso, transmitting the pleasure his sentences give. But criticism is by definition discriminatory; it works—like narrative—by hierarchizing (this is significant, that is secondary), and its aim is not to be comprehensive but to comprehend. As Roland Barthes points out in The Pleasure of the Text, a theory of pleasure is inevitably inadequate with respect to pleasure itself, and it is in part a theory of the pleasure that Baker's text gives, not pleasure itself, that my essay aims to deliver. You have been warned.
What is at issue in Baker's clogging of narrative is, then, to use the vocabulary of some of my recent work (“Etcetera”), a certain reversal of proportion and emphasis between narrative structure, with its reliance on story and its beginning-middle-end grammar of closure, and the paradigmatic dimension of discourse that spins out a narrative enunciation in time, employing devices like description, parenthesis, asyndeton, digression, so that the supposedly secondary comes to occupy the foreground of attention and the hierarchizing distinction between the relevant and the pointless, on which story depends, begins to lose its own cogency Baker, he says (73), gets “that fidgety feeling” in reading novels and starts to pick at the price-sticker as the fiction moves toward closure and allows less occasion for clogs. It isn't delay in getting to the point but the failure to delay, too hasty point-making, that makes him itchy. Barthes's theory of textual (really readerly) pleasure has been unfairly reduced to the sentence that describes the erotic site in text as comparable to the place at which a garment “gapes” (and we will come in due course to the matter of textual gaping). Of more immediate relevance here, both to Baker's writing practice and to his readerly fidgets as closure approaches, is the passage in The Pleasure of the Text in which text is described as a kind of “time out” in what Barthes calls “the war fare of ideologies” (whereby Barthes means something like instrumental uses of language). Textual pleasure is like the relaxed moments that are so precious to the combatants in warfare proper when there is time to linger over a beer or a quiet conversation; one does not want such moments to end. And Barthes goes on to account for this “withdrawn” position of texts with respect to ideological discourse by referring, precisely, to their paradigmatic dimension. In them, discourse undergoes a process of “progressive extenuation”; the story is spun out and language is stretched—and a stretched text will eventually come to gape.
Like Barthes's dichotomies (the readerly and the writerly, the text of pleasure and the text of jouissance, etc.) this one—between closed, point-making, ideological discourse and extenuated or spun out, pleasurable text—should be understood as merely heuristic, and it is certainly not part of my own intention to absolve loiterly texts of an ideological function. Pleasure, too, has its place in the “polemological space” (de Certeau 121) of culture. It's evident, too, that story-structure, headed for closure, and paradigmatic lingering, enacting the etcetera principle, are mutually dependent and inevitably co-occur. But in texts of pleasure it's nevertheless paradigmatic extension that predominates: in them time, constructed in narrative configurations as end-oriented, becomes more episodic and extendable, as the vehicle of a readerly pleasure that might, ideally, never end. Baker puts it this way, in a later passage in which Updike is again upbraided for a hasty judgment, this time of Nabokov (accused by Updike of failing to generate narrative suspense): “[R]eally, the only suspense a book needs, as Updike by now must know, having tolerantly motored through dozens of much more experimental bad novels [than Glory] for our benefit, is not ‘What will happen next?’ but simply ‘Will I ever want to stop reading?’” (121).
Let's not forget, though, that the defense of clogging with which I started had a point of its own, which was the revelation of an alternative view of things. “[T]he trick,” Baker said, “[is] to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up” until it reveals “unlooked-for seepage-points of passage.” The submerged pun, here, suggests that the trick of clogging is so to “blow up”—distend or extenuate—narrative discourse that its end-oriented linearity is “blown up” in the sense of exploded. But the point of the explosion is to substitute for linear narrative syntax a “roil” of other connections, like the tangle of worms and tampons in the sewer, connections made possible by the discovery of unexpected “seepage-points.” What is an “infarct” to the narrative is “life itself” to those worms. To obstruct the unidirectionality of narrative opens it up, then, to the unlimited potentialities of textual multidirectionality, such that, through unlooked-for seepage-points, it can move, at any moment, in any number of possible directions (which are “digressive” with respect to the narrative but not necessarily, for that reason, incoherent or irrelevant). And because the points of passage are “unlooked for,” the alternative view of things that emerges contrasts pleasurably with the predictability of conventional narrative structures.
In The Mezzanine, this exploded aspect of clogged narrative is simulated on the page by a riot of footnotes that divide the reader's attention at various seepage-points and induce the exquisite pleasure—and anxiety—of hesitation. One can't quite decide whether to continue following the text (and miss the relevant material in the note) or to plunge into a luxuriant note (and risk “losing track” of the text's direction). These notes, in other words, enact both the pleasure and the frustration that digression induces because they stage as an actual alternative a certain nexus between a simplifying sense of order and a dehierarchizing disorder, between simply following a given direction and the “pathlessness” (aporia) that is a product of multiple options. Or so it would be if “text” could be straightforwardly identified with narrative in this novel and “footnotes” viewed as departures from a simple story line. But Baker's narrative, such as it is, is already thoroughly clogged and his footnotes are themselves expansive and subject to digressions of their own, having the same “Will I ever want to stop reading?” quality as the text “proper.” The option they stage is therefore not between linear “narrative” and disjunctive “digression,” but between something like the continuity of an already extenuated, distended narrative text and supposed discontinuities that are in fact scarcely distinguishable from the extenuations that are the natural product of the spinning out process itself. The supposed alternative—an ultimately false one—is between a text that is “blown up” in the sense of extended and a text that is “blown up” in the sense of exploded. This is exactly the difference (that does not admit of distinction) between Barthes's text of pleasure and his text of jouissance; and Baker's footnotes are points of seepage that have the particular quality of enacting the erotic moment of Barthesian “gape.” But points of seepage are everywhere in his text and the gape corresponds only to the moment when the continuities of seepage have become so stretched that they are perceived as discontinuities.
Digression, as the “seepage” of thought that disturbs its linear progression, enacting textual extenuation as a phenomenon that baffles the distinction between continuity and discontinuity, is, then, the pleasure that Baker's writing luxuriously explores, in the text, in the footnotes, and in the relation between the two. As in Perec (Chambers 1994) or Proust, digression's “counternarrative” affinity with the paradigmatic dimension, the dimension of lists and listing, is itself associated with memory, as the faculty that both realizes mental continuities and, on occasion, interrupts them with sudden disjunctions, or “second messages.” (In ordinary conversation, “Oh, that reminds me of …” is both a way of keeping the discourse flowing and a device for changing the subject.) Just so, washing the face is described in The Mezzanine as a pleasurable moment of memory-induced gape, in which “sudden signals of warmth flooding your brain from the nerves of the face, especially the eyelids, unmoor your thinking for an instant, dislodging your attention from any thought that had been in progress and causing it to slide back randomly to the first fixed spot in memory that it finds” (95). But the gape itself, “dislodging” and “unmooring” as it is, nevertheless becomes an experience of continuity here; it is a “slide” of the mind into randomness that is halted when one hits on a “fixed spot” and commences another “progress”—a progress that is, of course, liable to interruption in due course from further slides.
Whereas some digressive writers tend to explore the implications of the disjunctiveness and pathlessness inherent in digression and its power to “change the subject,” Baker is generally more concerned with the continuity digression also implies, a continuity-in-disjunction that induces metaphors like “seepage” or the “slide” of memory and derives from the fact that digression is not a random occurrence but a mediated, and so motivated, phenomenon whose dislodgings, unmoorings, interruptions and disjunctures can therefore never be absolute. If metaphor is Baker's characteristic mode and the principle vehicle of his digressive style, it is because metaphor inevitably implies similarity in difference and difference in similarity, since the terms of metaphor are by definition unlike each other yet assimilable to each other. Indeed, the more apparently unlike they are, the more vivid and effective is the perception of their similarity.
But both memory and metaphor thus pose the problem of mediation as the slide through “randomness” that connects two fixed points. The mediations are so fine, subtle or complex that language, a differential system, cannot represent them, and their multiplicity is experienced as chaos a kind of swoon of the analytic consciousness as it slides “randomly” between the points that it is able to grasp or fix on. The multidirectionality of pathlessness that is prized in a clogged or blown up text such as Baker's is thus ideally realized in those between moments of slide that the text itself can't represent because they elude the descriptive powers of language. To speak of a “roil” of earthworms in a sewer-pipe is both to designate, and to give up on, a problem of description: “‘I found your problem,’” the rooter called up nonchalantly, and beckoned me down to an idyllic scene in the lower garden near the standpipe: (…) ‘Best cut the strings off,’ he advised, and wrote “sanetery napkins” on the invoice—our vocabulary always lags reality” (U and I 74). Baker has no intention of “cutting the strings off” his writing, which aims rather to be all strings, and his vocabulary, fortunately, does not lag reality quite as egregiously as the rooter's. Indeed, the characteristic quality of his writing lies most obviously in the precision and close detail, the manic myopia and brilliant accuracy of his descriptive style, which borders on something that could be called descriptivitis, (or perhaps paradigmomania). But, as the rooter says, there's the problem. For no description can ever be complete; it is always obliged to imply an “etcetera,” corresponding to what memory forgets and language can't, or doesn't, say. Baker's prodigiously precise descriptions, characteristically adduced in support of a metaphoric relation between two terms, thus function, in the end, as mere gestures—gestures in the direction of making explicit all those mediations that can't be said—and hence as signs that the descriptions themselves require supplementation. It is, in other words, for the reader to supply the slides of memory, the leap between the metaphoric terms, without which the text is incomplete but which description itself, however, comprehensive it seeks to be, can never fully furnish. The instance of reading is thus an enactment of the textual “etcetera,” and the site of all the mediations on which the text depends but which it can't provide, and without which it fails as a vehicle of pleasure.
“Metaphor,” it is frequently pointed out, is etymologically cognate with “transport”: it gets us smoothly from point A to point B, a mediator of distance. In modern Greece, “metaphor” designates a literal means of transportation, say a bus or a shuttle. Reading, as the site where textual mediation is realized, might therefore be appropriately described as a vehicle of local transport, of travel without leaving home, in which one moves, metaphorically, on the spot. As the flâneur reads the life of the streets, making the connections that attempt to make sense of urban experience, the reader is a flâneur of texts, and the reader's pleasure is that of the mediating slide, the experience of continuity in discontinuity and discontinuity in continuity. As a child, the narrator of The Mezzanine informs us, he was fond as children are of boats, cars, trains and planes but was “more interested in systems of local transport” (35) such as (and here a long, carefully detailed, descriptive list intervenes, which I can only summarize) airport luggage-handling systems, conveyor-belts at the supermarket check-out, those connecting the store's interior to the parking lot, milk-bottling machines, marble chutes, Olympic bobsled or luge tracks, the “hanger-management systems” at the dry cleaner's, laundry lines, the barbecue-chicken display at Woolworth's and rotating Timex watch displays, or finally the cylindrical roller-cookers on which hot dogs slowly turn. But one further system of local transport—something like the list's “etcetera,” similar to the other items although already their other—remains as the one from which the adult narrator still derives pleasure. It is the escalator, which “shared qualities with all of these systems, with one difference: it was the only one I could get on and ride” (36). As the best metaphor of metaphor of them all, then, it is the escalator that furnishes the governing figure of The Mezzanine, which is framed by an account of an escalator ride and also uses the escalator as the vehicle of its own metaphoric self-definition, the figure en abyme of textuality as it is conceived in this text. So I will say that The Mezzanine exemplifies a particular variant of the etcetera principle that can be called the “escalator principle.”
Where the etcetera principle is a principle of open-endedness, its maxim being that there is always an etcetera, the maxim of the escalator principle is that one thing leads to another, and it is a principle of mediation as seepage—one thing leads to another, as the escalator takes us from one floor to the next, by slow and gradual intervening “steps.” But in the principle of seepage, as we have already seen, there also lies a potential for escalation: “blown up” incrementally—sufficiently slowed down and delayed, clogged in their movement toward a goal or destination—the steps of discourse are capable of exploding narrative linearity into pathlessness and multidirectionality. The “long hypotenuse” that is an escalator (59) seems at first blush an unlikely candidate as a figure for the multidirectionality of an exploded text: it is more obviously suggestive of narrative as a linear progression from a beginning to an end via a succession of intervening steps. But Baker's ingenuity as a master of metaphor is more than adequate to the task of suggesting, via a single image—that of the escalator—that there is a continuity between mediation as the vehicle of a smooth ride from point to point and mediation as the instrument of an explosion of linearity.
The crucial point in this respect is that the escalator is a set of gradually moving steps or graduations. Although there's no engineering reason why it shouldn't be a simple inclined conveyor belt, historical and cultural reasons have caused it to imitate a staircase (and Baker discusses his youthful belief that one should therefore advance on an escalator “at the normal rate you climbed stairs at home,” 100). In spite of its step-by-step structure, its motion however is conveyor-belt smooth: one can glide locally on an escalator from point to point, “in the pose of George Washington crossing the Potomac” (99), even though one is in fact advancing by degrees. But as a visual phenomenon—and again because it is made of steps that move—the escalator is not the vehicle of a smooth ride so much as it is an object that dazzles the eye, which is unable to maintain the distinction between successive steps on which linearity depends:
Grooved surfaces slid out from underneath the lobby floor and with an almost botanical gradualness segmented themselves into separate steps. As each step arose, it seemed individual and easily distinguished from the others, but after a few feet of escalation, it became difficult to track, because the eye moves in little hops when it is following a slow-moving pattern, and sometimes a hop lands the gaze on a step that is one above or below the one you had fixed on; you find yourself skipping back down to the early, emergent part of the climb, where things are clearer. It's like trying to follow the curve on a slowly rotating drill bit, or trying to magnify in with your eye to enter the first groove of a record and track the spiral visually as the record turns, getting lost in the gray anfractuosities almost immediately.
(59)
This effect of dazzle, it is clear, is for Baker a pleasurable one (cf. “I love the constancy of shine on the edges of moving objects,” [3]; and, in U and I, “[t]he only thing I like are the clogs”). But it arises here, on the one hand, from an effect of “escalation,” and on the other from the fact that the eye shares a deficiency with language in that it can only view differentially (it moves in “little hops”) what is nevertheless experienced as a continuum, whether it be the slide of memory between two fixed points in the progress of thought, or the slow upward climb of an escalator. The escalator blows up (magnifies) the mediating slide of metaphor or memory, and slows it down; but it still blows up (explodes) the sense of linearity by making it impossible to track its moving steps.
So the confusion of the eye that seeks to track the steps of the escalator in linear fashion is a figure for the “randomness” associated with mediating slides and imitated—in similarly blown up, slowed down fashion—by the multidirectional text. The eye hops here like that of the reader encountering a footnote and unsure whether to follow the textual continuity or to skip to the foot of the page, where disjunction is more clearly (but still deceptively) signalled. If the escalator is a “climb,” a gradus (as in Gradus ad Parnassum, the title of old handbooks of rhetoric), the movement of escalation nevertheless reveals how it is that linear progression, from point to point, is not incompatible with, and in fact can be seen to generate, clogging, seepage and blowing up—the delights of digression and multidirectionality. And the principle of escalation, it emerges, is the gradual which functions here like the pun on blowing up in the passage from U and I with which I began, in that “an almost botanical gradualness” is on the one hand the secret of the smoothness of the escalator's step-by-step ride, and on the other what baffles the eye, confronted with this “slow-moving pattern.”
If an escalator ride is therefore, as Baker puts it, failing to resist the obvious pun, “the vehicle of my memoir” (37), it is because memoirs necessarily invoke memory as the mediating principle that holds things together and simultaneously disjoins them, and with it metaphor as the mediating principle of continuity in discontinuity and discontinuity in continuity that governs the associative working of memory as it produces a clogged and blown up text. The Mezzanine isn't completely bereft of narrative structure, but its adherence to the escalator principle means that it coheres loosely, in the extenuated manner of the paradigmatic dimension, rather than tightly or syntagmatically (or metonymically), in the linear fashion of story structure or logical argument. Like lists and collections, it groups within the limits of a text a set of different items that are linked by perceptions of similarity and are themselves subject therefore to the etcetera principle. The list we just encountered of systems of local transport, in which the escalator functioned as an etcetera, might serve, therefore, as the text's structural emblem; and lists are indeed vital to this text's discursive texture. But metaphor is in turn the principle of lists, not because all lists group items that are specifically related by the figure of metaphor, but because the metaphoric phenomenon of continuity/discontinuity underlies the associative structure of the paradigmatic, which is why no inventory of paradigmatic relations can be securely closed. The “that reminds me” of memory can always intervene.
But, to repeat, The Mezzanine is not particularly preoccupied with the open-endedness of the inventorizing process. It even assigns quite significant limits to its own escalatory potential by limiting its narrative to a period of time out, the “fixed interval” (102) of absence, or at least withdrawal, from the workaday world that corresponds to lunch break and is enjoyed on other occasions by commuter-train passengers, or escalator riders. Its concern is less with the etcetera principle as such and more with connections, points of passage or seepage, that is with the baffling question of mediation as the escalator principle phrases it: how is it that one thing leads to another? Because of this preoccupation with passage, I want to describe Baker's “memoir” as a meditation, taking advantage of the etymology that links the words mezzanine and meditation—from the Latin medius, half-way, middle—with mediation itself, and understanding meditation as the genre of thought/discourse that is defined by the gradual, a genre in which step-by-step progress is consequently capable of exploding into multidirectionality.
WRITES OF PASSAGE
I entered a bookstore and asked, already thinking of writing this essay: “Do you have the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the Meditations of Descartes?” “Depends,” said the clerk. “Do you know who the author is?” It was a difficult question to answer tactfully, but I realized on reflection that it is not an irrelevant question to ask about meditations, which seem to be generically concerned with the possibility of self-knowledge on their author's part. “Who am I?” is, always implicitly and sometimes explicitly, their preoccupation; and a single meditation, however long drawn out, is rarely adequate to answering that question, so true is it that self-knowledge is subject to a law of limitless supplementation, whether in the linear sense of “One thing leads to another” or in the more escalatory sense that any given step may explode, and lead in any number of possible directions. It's symptomatic, therefore, that the texts grouped under the generic heading of “the meditation” (singular) most often bear a title in the plural: Meditations. And it's because of this potential for explosion of the meditative process that the classical tradition of meditation has been a tradition of discipline. Whether the meditation is conceived as an “imitation of Christ” (Thomas à Kempis) or as an application of the “method of rightly conducting the reason” (to coopt the long title of Descartes's Discourse on Method), the problem of meditators and their advisers has been to prevent the mind—like the eye attempting to track the grooves of a record or the steps of a moving escalator—from getting “off track.” Following an exemplary guide, keeping to the highway (“method” is from meta-hodos, a direct route or main road), are the standard precepts for meditators.
A reason why the question “Who am I?” tends to arise is, however, that meditating is a “time out” activity, when one is typically reduced to “one's own resources.” Marcus Aurelius meditated at night, after heavy days spent administering the Empire or combatting Germanic tribes in the region of the Danube. Descartes had his famous poêle, the warm room in which he withdrew from the distractions of the world. I get reflective myself, or I start to woolgather, on long journeys when I've run out of reading matter, there's no one to talk to and nothing to look at, or the in-flight movie is more than usually vapid. “One's own resources,” of course, are not in fact one's own, and thinking is a cultural, not an individual, matter; but the phrase “one's own resources” does describe a certain freeing of the mind from its habitual constraints that occurs when one finds oneself “at a loose end” and one thing begins, consequently, to lead to another. Religious or philosophical attempts to discipline the meditating mind are, in essence, attempts to take advantage of this freeing of the mind from its habitual concerns, without permitting the loose-endedness of the meditative moment (like tampon strings in a sewerpipe) to clog things up, with all the consequent “dangers” of the experience's becoming haphazard, random, multidirectional and open-ended.
French has an expression, de fil en aiguille, which is used, like “one thing leads to another,” when mediating connections are too complex or subtle to be easily tracked (as in the slide of memory). And it has another, avoir de la suite dans les idées, which refers to people who are unusually single-minded or dogged in their pursuit of a goal. One might say that disciplined meditations attempt to channel the de fil en aiguille, multidirectional potential of “one thing leads to another” into a single-minded “one things leads to another” that has de la suite dans les idées. We don't know how Marcus Aurelius conducted his nightly meditations—presumably with considerable consequentiality—but what we have inherited, in the “book” of private jottings he left whose original “title” (more like a filing label) was, symptomatically enough, To Myself, is a jumble of sententiae; and these can easily be taken to emblematize the potential randomness of meditative rambling to which reduction of the mind to its “own resources” can lead, by virtue of the “that reminds me” slide. Descartes's Meditations, by contrast, are the prime example of the logically controlled if not end-oriented philosophic meditation; their full title, Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the Existence of God, and the Real Distinction of Mind and Body, Are Demonstrated, clearly indicates both the directionality of the argument and the ease with which it lends itself to summary, always a key indicator of systematic as opposed to comprehensive thinking. But it is in Descartes also that one finds the emblematic sentence: “I who know that I exist inquire into what I am” (Meditation 1).
My hypothesis, of course, is that the two extremes of meditative reflection are never absolutely separable, and that the most haphazard of rambles show some degree of suite dans les idées (Aurelius's recurring stoic themes, for instance), while the most logical of meditative progressions can have moments of (acknowledged or unacknowledged) de fil en aiguille looseness. If that's so, the meditation can be described as the genre of non-narrative writing (“argument”) that demonstrates a nexus, between carefully controlled linear order and the looseness of paradigmatic cohesion that looks like disorder, that corresponds to the nexus of story-structure and textual “extenuation” or “escalation” in narrative. The Mezzanine situates itself intertextually as much closer to the “Marcus Aurelius” end of my hypothesized spectrum than to the “Descartes” end, since it is the Emperor's Meditations in the Penguin Classics edition that the narrator takes with him to read on his lunch break. But it does so in a way that's highly characteristic of the loiterly tradition, by positioning the intertextual other as classically noble or sublime, and itself, therefore, as modern and trivial. (Similarly Nerval alludes to Dante in “October Nights,” and Barthes to Chateaubriand in “Soirées de Paris,” as magnificent foils to their own unpretentious jottings.) Baker's narrator finds Aurelius alienating: “I was nearly ready to abandon it entirely, tired of Aurelius's unrelenting and morbid self-denial” (124). And if my hypothesis of a meditative continuum between randomness and discipline is correct, this distancing from Aurelius and his “self-denial” may also hint at a way in which The Mezzanine is closer to the modern and self-affirmative writer par excellence, Descartes, in spite of the latter's insistence on method.
The link with Descartes has to do crucially, I think, with a connection between meditation and the process of growing up that exercizes both the philosopher and Baker's narrator. “Today,” Descartes writes calmly in a programmatic sentence of the First Meditation, “since I have opportunely freed my mind from all cares and am happily disturbed by no passions, and since I am in secure possession of leisure in a peaceable retirement, I will at length apply myself earnestly to the general overthrow of all my former opinions” (79-80). It's not just Descartes' undisguised enjoyment of “time out” then that links him to the narrator of The Mezzanine, nor is it merely his clear linking of the meditative process with a project of self knowledge. It's also the fact that, in Descartes, self-knowledge is so clearly linked in turn with a procedure of discarding “opinions” that have outlived their usefulness—a process, that is, of maturation or coming of age that also informs The Mezzanine.
This kind of preoccupation refers us again to the close connections between the religious and the philosophic traditions of meditation, the way in which the imitation of Christ and the right conduct of reason can be oddly related, both through the religious and pedagogical concept of discipleship and through the initiatory theme of becoming “a man.” The meditation (meditations) is a capacious genre and its history, because of the crisscrossing of religious and philosophical traditions in the story of its emergence, is a tangled one. It was Aurelius' “philosophic” example that furnished a model for the Christian practices of meditation, which proceeded to develop the imitative scenario, or set of scenario, of discipleship. But these in turn, as Amélie Rorty in particular has shown, structure the Cartesian meditation, which straddles philosophy, theology and even religious mysticism, reconciling them through its mind/body dualism. An epistemology that depends on a demonstration of the existence of God grounded the scientific revolution. But the demonstration itself depends on self-knowledge (a methodical, step-by-step examination of “what I am” who know that I exist) and is simultaneously addressed to a reader positioned as a disciple whose own coming of age, as emancipation from prejudice, is also at issue: “I would advise none to read this work, except such as are able and willing to meditate with me in earnest, to detach their minds from commerce with the senses, and likewise to deliver themselves from all prejudice; and individuals of this character are, I well know, remarkably rare” (Descartes 73). That there is consequently some preoccupation in the Meditations with a problematics of passage is indicated, further, by the explicitly mystic moment, at the heart of the book, in which meditation—the step-by-step progress of “clear and distinct” ideas—yields to mute contemplation, the contemplation of an infinite divinity whose existence mediates the two parts of the Meditations' overall structure, the step from uncertainty and systematic doubt to the possibility of epistemological certainty (see Kosman). For example, Descartes writes: “But before I examine this with more attention, and pass on to the consideration of other truths that may be evolved out of it, I think it proper to remain here for some time in the contemplation of God himself … as far, at least, as the strength of my mind, which is to some degree dazzled by the sight, will permit” (110). Readers of Baker may recognize in this moment of “looseness” that has been so deliberately structured into the firm progress of the Meditations, not only a thematics of “blowing up” (examining “with more attention”) and of seepage (“other truths that may be evolved out of it”), but also and more particularly of the dazzle induced by the inexhaustible mystery, the de fil en aiguille “untrackableness” of mediation. But they may sense further that the problematics of passage that's defined here by the question of a partially unknowable God as mediator of the “steps” of thought mimes a question of maturation that underlies the “Who am I?” of meditation, a question that takes the form: “How and when do I become an ‘I’ worthy of philosophical and religious examination?” For it's a concern of Descartes that he choose, to write the Meditations, the precise moment of maturity that makes him worthy to give an account of the steps of thought that have led him, via self-knowledge and the knowledge of God, from the virtualities of doubt to their mature realization in epistemological certainty. The continuous process known as maturation needs to be marked, in other words, by a coming of age that divides the process into steps, a before and after.
In social life, the ceremonies of coming of age are called rites of passage; and what I'm proposing, therefore, is that Descartes' Meditations and Baker's The Mezzanine (and here is the place to mention also the endlessly proliferating autobiographical writing of Michel Leiris) have in common the fact that they are not so much rites as “writes” of passage. I mean by this that in them the fact of writing itself celebrates a coming of age, a point of passage into maturity that justifies self-examination and sanctions it as worthwhile. But such self-examination is itself necessarily an ongoing process, and it's the act of writing that furnishes the modality of this further coming of age. Writing in this second sense is the instrument of a meditation that is itself a rite of passage, whether it be conducted in linear, step-by-step fashion and, as Descartes puts it, “by degrees” or whether it be carried out, as in Baker, according to the principles of “escalation.”
Accordingly, Descartes writes in Meditation III, “holding converse only with myself, and closely examining my nature, I will endeavour to obtain by degrees a more intimate and familiar knowledge of myself” (95). I don't know whether the title of Baker's second novel, Room Temperature, refers quietly to the poêle in which, the Discourse tells us, Descartes liked to “remain the whole day … with full opportunity to occupy my attention with my own thoughts” (10), but it is in this text, whose meditative character is even stronger and whose narrative interest is even further reduced than that of The Mezzanine, that the interest of Baker's writing in self-exploration becomes fully explicit. “I certainly believed, rocking my baby on this Wednesday afternoon, that with a little concentration one's whole life could be reconstructed from any single twenty-minute period randomly or almost randomly selected.” (41) Here too it is specified that such a reconstruction involves a backward slide of memory: it is a matter of making “connections … that would proliferate backward” (41) in such a way that “everything in my life [might seem] to enjamb splicelessly with everything else” (92), a procedure that is significantly different, as the narrator points out, from proceeding “serially, beginning with ‘I was born on January 5, 1957,’ and letting each moment give birth naturally to the next” (41). The Mezzanine, in its own counter-narrative deployment of proliferating enjambments generated, in the perspective of memory, from the account of a brief period of relaxation in the narrator's day, does not proceed differently from what is outlined in Room Temperature. But where, in the second novel, it is paternity, I suppose, that figures the passage to maturity, The Mezzanine situates itself explicitly, as does Descartes, in relation to the general issue of coming of age.
Meditation, for Descartes, is indeed a matter too serious and its stakes are too high (given the sensitivity of the post-Reformation Church to departures from strict orthodoxy) for it to be undertaken lightly. Although he has been aware for several years, he writes, of the necessity of ridding his mind of false opinions, he has consequently waited to fulfil this task “until I had attained an age so mature as to leave me no hope that at any stage of life more advanced I should be better able to execute my design” (79). As a getting of wisdom, meditation, it turns out, is dialectically related to experience, through which one achieves a maturity sufficient to guarantee the validity and success of the meditative enterprise. But this indispensable prior experience without which there is no maturity is simultaneously, and by definition, a matter of living in error, so that while the fact of embarking on meditation marks the moment of passage from immaturity to maturity, it remains for the act of meditation still to realize this crucial passage, by achieving the displacement of error in favor of truth. The alternation in Descartes' biography of periods of travel with time out for quiet reflection (in Germany and later in Holland), as if travel in the world and meditation, as a form of travel without leaving home, were each other's natural complements, clearly enacts this Cartesian dialectic of error and its correction, experience and meditation. But meditation, in its textual embodiment, is itself dialectical in that it both celebrates and enacts the achievement of a maturity that is simultaneously already attained and still to be reached when meditation begins.
In a not dissimilar way, maturity in The Mezzanine is already achieved, justifying the “memoir,” and yet still in abeyance, continually in process through meditation. The narrator situates at age 23 the moment of his having achieved adulthood, and calculates that up to that moment he had spent seventeen years accumulating childish opinions. It follows, he thinks, that the moment of his coming of age inaugurates another period of seventeen years during which he can hope to accumulate enough adult opinions for these to outweigh eventually his old, immature views. That moment, which I calculate he will reach at age 40, will be the moment of his true Majority (47). The problem, though, is that we don't learn the age of the narrator when he undertakes his memoir; it is specified only that the events of the lunch hour he is remembering took place two years after the crucial moment when, at 23, “[his] life as an adult began” (47). Whether the narrative perspective is that of Majority attained, or of Majority still to be reached, is—as I suppose a general perception of the nature of maturity requires—strictly undecidable. If the autobiographical “pact” holds, identifying narrator with author, one can calculate from the author's biography on the back cover, which conveniently does conform to the conventional narrative order of “Nicholson Baker was born in 1957,” etc., that Baker himself will not turn 40 until 1997, which confirms, in contradistinction to the Cartesian case, the incompleteness at the time of writing of the process of maturation that would put the stamp of Majority on the text.
The closure of Cartesian meditation, its completedness as opposed to the open-endedness of meditation in Baker, is thus a significant difference between the two coming of age texts. So too is the treatment in each text of what coming of age itself implies as a measure of human potential. For Descartes it means nothing less than the achievement of epistemological certainty, the assured knowledge that “man” can know himself and his world, and have some knowledge of God. But Baker's narrator, who is repelled by the high-mindedness of Marcus Aurelius, similarly situates his own coming of age at a considerable distance from Descartes. To begin with, the moment one achieves maturity isn't necessarily discernible, although “luckily, I can remember the very day my life as an adult began” (47). The event, furthermore, had nothing obviously momentous about it. At 23, the narrator discovered, not a method, but a trick, specifically a way to apply deodorant when one is fully dressed. Delighted with this achievement, he then took the subway and spent his commute reflecting on the advantages of slicing toast diagonally rather than straight across and on the many styles of buttering that exist. A short while later, he has his revelation:
I realized that as of that minute … I had finished with whatever large-scale growth I was going to have as a human being, and that I was now permanently arrested at an intermediate stage of personal development. … I was set: I was the sort of person who said “actually” too much. I was the sort of person who stood in a subway car and thought about buttering toast. … I was the sort of person whose biggest discoveries were likely to be tricks to applying toiletries while fully dressed. I was a man, but not the magnitude of man I had hoped I might be.
(54)
Becoming “a man,” in short, does not necessarily signify achieving the exalted status Descartes attributes to humanity as the site of a mind capable of thought, and hence, in the chain of argumentative steps, of establishing the existence of God and therefore of knowing truth with certainty. The self-knowledge that marks maturity may be something like knowledge of arrested growth, that is, of permanent immaturity. In that case, becoming a “man” means discovering that one is not the “magnitude of man” one had hoped.
The historical difference between early modern “man” and the human subject of later modernity and postmodernity is demonstrated here. Let's hypothesize that, at least since Descartes, the meditation has functioned generically as a means of mediating transformations in the nature of knowledge. What meditation mediates, then, is epistemological mutation, the passage by which new knowledge comes to replace old, so that the personal coming of age it celebrates counts, from one angle, as the successful achievement of one's “education,” the getting of wisdom, while from another meditation functions as a teaching device through which disciples are created and the new knowledge one has achieved can be disseminated and replace old “prejudices.” In order to get wisdom and complete one's education, one needs to reject what one has been taught (Descartes has a long passage in The Discourse of Method that is critical of what he learned from the Jesuits at La Flèche) and to fall back on “one's own resources,” working “by degrees” from there to new certainties that then justify publication, as a step in the education of others. Thus it comes about that the forms of knowledge Descartes achieved through meditation are now part and parcel of what is taught, as a matter of course, to moderns; and it is these that post-Cartesian meditators like Baker are implicitly resisting, therefore, in the process of their own coming of age—a coming of age which, of course, in turn entails publication of the new results attained through meditation. The process of achieving knowledge only to make of it a teachable doctrine continues, although what counts as knowledge may thus undergo severe modification over the course of time.
If meditation in Descartes is a linear, goal-oriented “method,” it is because at its end (and hence presupposed from the beginning) lies the (fore)knowledge that new knowledge is attainable. If in Baker it becomes a pathless and apparently random inventorizing, however, it is because the (fore-)knowledge that controls the enterprise is that knowledge is beyond humanity's reach and that arrested growth is the best we can hope for. We can manage some cute tricks, but the highway of method is no longer for us. What has most crucially changed in this historical process is the understanding of the “self” itself, to whose resources the meditator is reduced as a rule of the genre. For Descartes, the self is self-contained, individual and knowable because it both exists as the site of thought and is distinct from everything else in the world, except God with whom it is linked through its defining faculty, the power of thought. It follows that the cogito must be an exercise in mental detachment: “corporal objects” being difficult to know with certainty, whereas “we know much more of the human mind, and still more of God himself” through the powers of cogitation, it is evident that in the pursuit of truth one should “abstract the mind from the contemplation of sensible or imaginable objects, and apply it to those which, as disengaged from all matter, are purely intelligible” (Descartes, 111). And Descartes' readers in turn, as we've seen, are invited to “detach their minds from all commerce with the senses, and likewise to deliver themselves from all prejudices” (73).
If the self is no longer knowable, though, the Cartesian follow-through from self-knowledge to a state of epistemological certitude about God and the world is no longer possible and the meditative process, still pursued as fact, is short-circuited as an act—it can no longer achieve the maturity that is its goal and becomes, instead, the process that confirms us in the knowledge that we are “not the magnitude of man” we might have hoped. Historically, it's the emergence of what could be called the “theoretical subject” that transforms Cartesian meditation in this way from a royal road to truth into a prejudice that, in turn, needs to be corrected through a meditative return to the self and its now diminished possibilities of “knowledge.” At about the time of Rousseau, the modern subject emerges in Europe, not as a self-contained and individual self but as a mobile and multiple consciousness constituted by alterity. Such a subject can believe itself to be autonomous, self-controlling, present to itself and capable of self-knowledge only as a consequence of suppressing what will come to be called the “unconscious,” the site in which constitutive alterity lodges. This is the “split” subject; otherness for it cannot be a matter of absolute alterity, but is rather a product of difference, the implication of which is that neither the “subject” nor its “other”—conceived in a mutual relationship such that each is the other's other—can lay claim to the Cartesian ideal of full selfhood, as that which would be individual and immediately present to itself. For, instead of enjoying self-presence, its existence is “subject” to mediation by alterity. But mediation in turn implies temporality—nothing that is dependent on an intermediary “step” can exist as a timeless “essence”—and the mediated self is consequently, not only incapable of self-possession because constituted by alterity, but also time-bound and historical. It has a temporal existence that is, like its ontological structure, “split” and experienced, therefore, as a matter of continuity/discontinuity, or of “enjambment.”
Where the Cartesian self is figurable as an island, the mediated subject, therefore, has the temporal structure of, say, an escalator or a toilet roll, whose apparent continuity is split (but not interrupted) by grooves or perforations, but whose discontinuity doesn't permit of “clear and distinct” separations such as those on which Cartesian step-by-step thinking depends. Furthermore, for the mediated subject, digression from linearity is always a possibility, for the reason that discontinuity is always inscribed in its continuity. The linear consequentiality of which the Cartesian self is assured by virtue of its unmediated self-presence being no longer either guaranteed or easily achieved, the split that constitutes the subject can become a gape, and escalate into multidirectional multiplicity. Perhaps Rousseau is the figure who historically dramatizes the moment when the Cartesian self begins to yield its sway to the theoretical subject, and it's symptomatic that as an autobiographer Rousseau, whose Confessions begin as a more or less orderly chronological narrative in the “I was born on January 5, 1957” mode but finally disintegrate into obsessive and paranoid ruminations about the power of others, was led to devise, in the Dialogues and the Rêveries, more episodic and open-ended modes of self-exploration. Soon thereafter, Xavier de Maistre's meditative Voyage autour de ma chambre begins to develop an early theory of the digressive subject not as an individual but a “dividual,” a divided “self.”
A subject whose existence is mediated cannot expect to know itself through philosophizing in abstracto, far from the cares, passions, involvements and prejudices of the historical world. To the extent that such a subject can achieve a degree of self-knowledge, it can only be through an exploration of its own connectedness. Thus, the one sentence in Marcus Aurelius that comes as a stunning revelation to the narrator of The Mezzanine is one in which, in absolutely anti-Cartesian fashion, a necessary connection between philosophizing and historical contingency is casually implied. “Manifestly,” Aurelius writes (and it is the “manifestly” that is so magnificent), “no condition of life could be so well adapted for the practice of philosophy as this in which chance finds you today!” (168). And the narrator comments:
Wo! I loved the slight awkwardness and archaism of the sentence … as well as the unexpected but apt rush to an exclamation point at the end. But mainly I thought that the statement was extraordinarily true and that if I bought the book and learned how to act upon that single sentence I would be led into elaborate realms of understanding, even as I continued to do, outwardly, exactly as I had done, going to work, going to lunch, going home, talking to L. on the phone or having her over for the night.
(124)
Thus is defined the mode of philosophizing, grounded in the triviality of the merely contingent (“merely,” that is, from a Cartesian point of view), that characterizes meditation in The Mezzanine as a radically anti-Cartesian pursuit. The assumption is not that thought is grounded in detachment from everyday life, but that there can “manifestly” be no point of departure for philosophy other than the “condition of life … in which chance finds you today!”.
There is a problem, though. The book, once bought on the strength of this crucial sentence, turns out to be disappointing because it gives no answer to the question of how to make the practice of philosophy responsive to the chance circumstances of life, how to enter “elaborate realms of understanding” while getting on with the business, or the busyness, of going to work, going to lunch, going home, talking on the phone and having a lover over for the night.
Chance found me that day having worked for a living all morning, broken a shoelace, chatted with Tina, urinated in a corporate setting, washed my face, eaten half a bag of popcorn, bought a new set of shoelaces, eaten a hot dog and a cookie with some milk; and chance found me now sitting in the sun on a green bench, with a paperback on my lap. What, philosophically, was I supposed to do with that?
(125)
This sentence, which—incidentally—offers a good account of the narrative content of The Mezzanine, defines the narrator's problem as that of the transvaluation of the trivial, a problem to which Aurelius' high-minded sententiae offer no solution. This is also, for what it is worth, a crucial problem in, and perhaps the defining problem of, contemporary cultural studies, faced as it is with the question of what it means for intellectuals to take seriously, as an object of knowledge, the ephemera and the banalities of everyday or popular culture. But already to pose the problem itself implies a criticism of the traditional practice of philosophy, the grandeur of whose concerns it is that defines the trivial as synonymous with the insignificant. That is, perhaps, why the narrator sunning himself on his green bench recalls Diogenes, who made sunning himself on the agora itself a philosophical practice, critical of the belief in more “elaborate realms of significance.” The answer to the question of transvaluing the trivial may lie, then, less in rethinking the allegedly trivial than in a revaluation of the practice of philosophy, a revaluation that itself depends on a criticism of conventional understandings of the status of knowledge.
Such a redefined philosophy, in other words, would have to be something more modest than the pursuit of “elaborate realms of understanding” and less portentous than Aurelius' “thing about mortal life's being no more than sperm and ashes” (124). Reflecting on and finding meaning in a broken shoelace, it can be familiar and approachable. Rather than driving relentlessly forward, like a systematic argument of the Cartesian type, it might be more like what U and I calls a “veracious stochasticism” (99), governed more by chance than by method, and more subject to the loiterly etcetera principle than inclined to hasten toward closure. Such a philosophy might be a philosophy adapted to the limitations of modern humanity, “not the magnitude of man I had hoped,” a humanity subject to historical contingency whose modernity consists of being “up to the minutiae” (U and I, 110) as much as up to the minute. Its narrating subject can therefore be something as apparently simple, if in fact inexhaustibly complex, as a young man sunning himself on a bench and whose only degree of maturity lies in the discovery of his permanent arrest “at an intermediate stage of human development.” Unlike Aurelius' grim pronouncements, such a philosophy might even be a source of pleasure. But it remains in the long tradition of the meditation, of which Aurelius was the distant ancestor.
PHILOSOPHIZING THE CONTINGENT
That philosophizing the contingent is a possible function of writing—indeed “the function of art”—was the view of Walter Benjamin. In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he wrote that the object of “philosophical criticism” is to demonstrate this function, “to make historical content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into a philosophical truth” (182). This is an important sentence because it locates “truth” in a mediating function—for Benjamin, that of the critical reading as the means by which philosophical “truth” emerges from history—and because it depends, therefore, on an understanding of the incompleteness of the work of art “in itself,” that is, its subjection to a version of the etcetera principle, its connectedness to a form of alterity figured by the reader. For Benjamin, therefore, temporality is of the essence: indeed, for him an actual time lag must intervene, causing a “decrease in effectiveness” of the work's initial historical embeddedness, so that it becomes a “ruin,” for it is only this entropic ruination of the work, making it into a readable allegory, that enables its philosophical “truth content” to be restored by the critical reader.
But supposing the work is always already a “ruin,” as Blanchot's concept of désoeuvrement implies? Its philosophical readability, in that case, would be a given from the start, or at least would not depend on a long historical time-lapse. Nothing resembles a ruin more than a would-be “work” that remains incomplete, condemned to a state of arrested growth; and some writing—that, for example, of the loiterly tradition to which Baker's belongs—does not even aspire to the status of work but seems to have no ambition other than to be a kind of ruin, already marked by temporality from inception. In either case, the function of “discipleship,” if it is understood as the reading of the ruins that are, in short or long term, by default or by profession, what writing is, acquires an emphasis and a significance that differs markedly from the construction of the disciple as an imitator—a mere follower—that is familiar from the philosophical and religious tradition of the classical meditation. The disciple as reader—an agent of signification—becomes the indispensable supplement called for by the work's own inadequacy to its task.
If, as I suggested, Baker's writing has some affinities with contemporary cultural studies in its concern with the problematics of philosophizing the contingent, its general adherence to the meditative tradition (that is, its yoking of the questions of culture and history to the meditative question of “Who am I?”) and its emphasis on the readerly function (as the site of memory's mediating slide as well as of philosophical supplementation) aren't particularly characteristic of academic practices, which haven't typically been prone to acknowledge either the embeddedness of knowledge in subjective positioning or its dependence on phenomena of mediation. I want to reflect a little, therefore, in these final pages, on the ways in which Baker's text seems to understand the conditions of cultural knowledge as a philophizing of the contingent, that is, on the condition of subjectivity and the condition of readability. But I am interested, too, in what this text conveys about the conditions under which meditative knowledge as a philosophizing of the contingent can be regarded as a mode of criticism, and not only of the ambitions of traditional philosophy. It's because the book's writing is both the vehicle of its knowledge construction and the modality of its critical functioning that I'll be led to return at some length, and with some risk of repetition, to the questions of narrative clogging and explosion—those of “escalation”—with which I began. But it's the thread of connectedness—the connectedness of subjectivity and the connectedness of reading, but also that of the critical gesture and its object—that itself links together the various topics I want now to traverse, producing them in their turn as items in a kind of list or paradigmatic chain, linked by a relation of discontinuity but continuity. And such connectedness, I submit, is an escapable theme of modern writing, but more particularly of writing in the loiterly mode that itself explores a paradigmatic or list-like view of things, because at its heart is the connectedness that defines the modern or theoretical subject, the mediated subject as opposed to the detached Cartesian self.
“Patty was at work” is the second sentence in Room Temperature the first of which (“I was in the rocking chair giving our six-month-old Bug her late afternoon bottle” [3]) establishes the narrator's meditative situation. In The Mezzanine also, the relation of meditation to the world of work is a fundamental preoccupation, since it is the workaday world that defines the historical contingency the narrator would like to philosophize, as well as the object of his critical attention. And the two are inseparably connected, as is suggested both by the way the lunch hour, with its “sunlit noon mood” and its explosive sense of freedom (106) is scheduled into the working day, and by the way the “long hypotenuse” of a mediating escalator triangulates the noonday relaxations of walking in the city (eating popcorn, buying shoelaces, sitting in the sun) with the employments of an office that lies, on the mezzanine floor, but a half-“step” away. In comparable fashion, too, the corporate bathroom, to which three of the novel's fifteen chapters are devoted, blurs the distinction between work and lunch. “Is a lunch hour defined as beginning just as you enter the men's room on your way to lunch, or just as you exit it?” (71). Urinating “in a corporate setting” can have a critical function as well as figuring the connectedness of trivial relaxations and powerful modes of social organization, and I'll return to this bathroom episode in due course (as also to the significance of learning to tie shoelaces, having a shoelace break and going out to buy new ones). But it's enough for now to note that meditative “stochasticism,” however “veracious,” can't be completely divorced from the orderly filing system of the “Pendaflex” world of corporate business, so that the connectedness that distinguishes the modern subject from the Cartesian self is also the connectedness implied by the relation of mutual alterity—the “split”—that holds between work and lunch, criticism and its object. And the model for this kind of connectedness, I suggest, is the inseparability of linear narrative from its explosion into multidirectionality through clogging, of the escalator as the principle of gradus and steady progression and the escalator as principle of “escalation.” The escalator, in short, connects meditation and work, criticism and its object, as well as narrative and the clogged text of meditation.
As a figure of connection, the escalator also quite naturally figures, as we know, memory, the principle of continuity and discontinuity in the temporality of a mediated world. And as we also know, from Perec, it is the problematics of memory that introduces paradigmatic disorder into narrative's syntagmatic ordering structure. “Reconstitut[ing] the events of that noontide for this opusculum,” the narrator of The Mezzanine is, a little like Marcel in A la Recherche du Temps perdu, a man remembering the more immature man of memory that he once was, and he knows that “the determinism of reminding often works obscurely” (60)—that memory is not easily subject to the controls of logical argument or linear narrative. Among the intertextual precedents his writing evokes, an allusion to Proust is consequently inevitable.
Incidentally, if you open a Band-Aid box, it will exhale a smell (as I found out recently, needing a Band-Aid for a surprisingly gruesome little cut1) that will shoot you right back to when you were four2—although I don't trust this olfactory memory trick anymore, because it seems to be a hardware bug in the neural workings of the sense of smell, a low-level sort of tie-in, underneath subtler strata of language and experience, between smell, vision and self-love, which has been mistakenly exalted by some writers as something realer and purer and more sacredly significant than intellective memory, like the bubbles of swamp methane that awed provincials once took for UFOs.
(109)
I couldn't bring myself to abbreviate this dense passage (although I have spared my reader the two footnotes that, in attaching to it, themselves enact the “obscure determinism of reminding”). But from it emerges, broadly speaking, both a certain solidarity with Proust—based on a common reliance on the dimension of memory and the shared knowledge that the triggers of memory are trivial, so that it is through memory that the contingent acquires (philosophical) significance—and a certain mistrust of the obscurer workings of what Proust criticism calls “involuntary memory,” but is here characterized as low-level tie-ins. For a writer who loves clogged sewerpipes to refer slightingly to hardware bugs and the bubbling of swamp methane in this connection certainly seems contradictory. But the contradiction is the sign of a certain ambivalence, and the narrator's preference here for “subtler strata of language and experience” that can be captured by intellective memory has much to do with the nature of his philosophical project, which is not conceived, like Proust's, as a quest for individual redemption—the rediscovery of an essential self in the dispersed multiplicity of the subject—or even as a quest for redemption at all. Baker's project could be described (too pretentiously) as something like an exploration of cultural modernity, one to which the personal dimension of memory is indispensable but in which the obscurer reaches of reminiscence, in which the purely personal resonates too strongly like a merely accidental “hardware bug”, are somewhat suspect. For a writer whose private meditation is also, albeit implicitly, a gesture of social criticism, the subjectively personal must also be recognizably “veracious” to the reader whose mediating role in the philosophising of the contingent is no less indispensable than is the writer's personal memory. That is one of the conditions of the embedding of knowledge in subjectivity. Baker's project, in this sense, is in fact more like that of Perec's Je me souviens, which is a random collection of collective memories stored in the privacy of a single remembering mind, the “je” of the title.
The Mezzanine's narrator is, in any case, quite conscious of the fact that his writing is a form of cultural study (although where cultural studies has emerged most obviously from philosophical scrutiny of the commodity, in Benjamin for instance, I would say that Baker's favorite turf is in the area of technological gadgetry and industrial design). It is the narrator's ambivalence about the role played in his study by the personal in the form of “kid-memory”—as if a state of “arrested growth” were not understood to be the condition of knowledge for us moderns—that is curious. His ambivalence about the personal vibrations of memory is not dissimilar, perhaps, from the shyness of academic cultural studies about its own literary origins and affinities, the desire in each case being to distance a certain project of knowledge from the prestige of authorship and from authority claims grounded in exceptional personalities and precious essences. Thus the narrator indicates, for example, that a whole history of social change is readable in the “disorienting” changes that have occurred during and since his childhood in everyday objects, like “gas pumps, ice cube trays, transit buses, or milk containers.” But, he adds:
the only way we can understand the proportion and range and effect of these changes, which constitute the often undocumented daily texture of our lives (a rough, gravelly texture, like the shoulder of a road, which normally passes too fast for microscopy), is to sample early images of the objects in whatever form they take in kid-memory—and once you invoke those kid-memories, you have to live with their constant tendency to screw up your fragmentary historiography with violas of emotion.
(41)
In other words, the exploration of self and the recourse to one's own resources that is characteristic of the meditation as a genre is thought by the narrator to interfere, by introducing “subjective” connotations through memory, with a philosophic investigation of everyday culture, an investigation that would not need to be such a “fragmentary historiography” if only impersonal documents were available.
What the narrator admits, slightly grudgingly, as a pis-aller—the fact that personal memory necessarily intervenes as a form of documentation when other documents are unavailable—might however be viewed more positively. If the everyday is that to which official institutions of knowledge, like schools and libraries, pay no attention, because it is “trivial,” then a philosophical approach to the significance of the everyday might not want to deny its personal connotations and investments, but rather to acknowledge and incorporate the “violas of emotion,” as part and parcel of its constitution. Many academic practitioners of cultural studies, aware for example of the degree to which their scholarly interest in popular culture is embedded in childhood interests and enthusiasms (not necessarily outgrown), might cheerfully accede to the proposition that forms of knowledge marked by conditions of immaturity (arrested development) are necessarily part and parcel of a historically modern epistemology. The Mezzanine, in any case, includes an interesting social history conducted through a remembered, child's eye, view of the changes in the delivery of milk to households (including a stirring hymn of praise to the designer of the contemporary milk-carton, 42-43).
It also includes many less developed observations which—childlike as they may be (and precisely because they are childlike in their ability to notice what usually passes unnoticed)—compensate for this “undocumented” character of daily life. Remarks on things like the etiquette of signature placement on office get-well cards (31), the mechanical ingenuity lavished on bathroom gadgets (72-73) or the courtesies of whistling in men's bathrooms, themselves provide raw material for future social historians. Their function in this text is not so much to demonstrate the social significance of trivial phenomena (as in the case of milk delivery) as it is to cause in the reader a certain shock of pleasurable recognition (“Yes, that's true”) combined with awareness that one had never attended to things that, in one's own child-like fashion, one had nevertheless noticed. The realization that one might nevertheless attend seriously to them—that Baker's description furnishes material for a future historiography, for instance—is the first step in the transvaluation of the trivial, or the philosophizing of the contingent. Reflecting, with or without “violas of emotion,” on the potential significance of these previously unremarked details, the reader becomes a disciple of the narrator's teaching. But the teaching itself is not demonstrative (like Descartes') and insistent on imitation, but consists only—somewhat in the mode of Jacques Rancière's “ignorant schoolmaster”—of drawing our attention to matters on which we might profitably reflect for ourselves. After the condition of subjectivity implied by the role of memory, this transfer of responsibility for signification onto the reader is then the second condition for philosophizing the contingent.
An example is the prevalence of perforation in contemporary material culture. The narrator writes that
People watch the news every night like robots thinking they are learning about their lives, never paying attention to the far more immediate developments that arrive unreported, on the zip-lock perforated top of the ice-cream carton, in reply coupons bound in magazines and on the ‘Please Return This Portion’ edging of bill stubs, on sheets of postage stamps and sheets of Publishers Clearing House magazine stamps, on paper towels, in rolls of plastic bags for produce at the supermarket, in strips of hanging-file labels.
(74)
(Like the escalator in the list of systems of local transport, toilet rolls go unmentioned, as the etcetera of this list, because they are in fact the point of departure of the narrator's outburst). We look in the wrong direction if we want to learn about our lives; we attend to versions of political—that is, narrative—history rather than to the more “fragmentary historiographies” in which the “rough, gravelly texture” of the everyday becomes visible, a texture, we recall, like that of the shoulder of the road that becomes apparent only when we slow down—when the narrative becomes clogged.
The narrator does not explain why the prevalence of perforation is more important than the events recounted on the TV news, but his text functions as the slowing down mechanism that brings it into view. As readers reflecting on the significance of perforation, we may then be led to see that its prevalence signals, or at least emblematizes, a culture of mediation—less one of ideas “clear and distinct” and progress “by degrees” than of connectedness, enjambment, slides and escalation. Perforation figures perfectly the effect of “split,” or continuity/discontinuity, that is produced by the phenomenon of mediation; and a perforated strip such as a toilet roll is itself in metaphoric relation (that is, a relation of continuity/discontinuity, similarity and difference) with those systems of local transport that work on the principle of the divided conveyor-belt, such as the luggage carrousel in airports and of course the escalator. Furthermore, the list of examples of perforation, from the zip-lock top to strips of hanging-file labels, doesn't merely illustrate the ubiquity of perforation in modern culture but is itself, metaphorically—as a list—an example of perforation, the listed items being in exactly the relation of continuity/discontinuity, of similarity and difference that perforation figures. Lists are like unfolding toilet rolls or forms of local transport on the principle of the conveyor-belt: the reader glides along them somewhat as one rides an escalator, in the stance of Washington crossing the Potomac, entering at zip-lock tops and exiting at strips of hanging-file labels. The implication of the unnoticed ubiquity of perforation is therefore that we live in a culture of mediated connectedness that is “structured” (i.e. unstructured) like a list, or a set (a list) of lists, while our attention is illegitimately solicited by, and given to, the constructions of narrative history.
The Mezzanine, of course, offers no explanation of the significance of this alternative but obfuscated, list-like way of comprehending ourselves and the world, corresponding to the grainy texture of the everyday over which we travel too fast, and unheedingly. But it teaches us, by its narrator's example, to attend to the paradigmatic dimension and to perceive the reality of the world it brings into view, and in its own writing it enacts the characteristics of the world it describes, so that reading it, in the role of disciple, becomes a pedagogical experience, an induction into a world constituted by lists. Here, then, is the philosophizing significance of its loosened narrative texture. The novel lists, for example, the class of events that correspond to the particular form of deceived expectation that makes breaking a shoelace so frustrating (13-14); it lists the events—from learning to tie one's shoelaces to ordering a rubber-stamp with one's address on it so as to pay one's bills and “deciding that brain-cells ought to die”—that count as major events in one's life and constitute the gradual process of coming of age (16); it lists, as we have seen, the systems of local transport that resemble escalators; it lists the items (from escalators to ice grooved by a skater) that make up the class of “grooved surfaces” (76), and the moving surfaces (escalator handrails, turning LPs, propellor and fan blades) that shine, glint and dazzle (3); even the narrator's plot summary, already quoted (125), is a non-narrative listing of events. Several of these lists “enjamb” on one another: the escalator and the shoelace, in particular, make it easy to connect, in a relation of continuity/discontinuity, a list of items that are associated with these objects from one point of view with a list of items that resemble them from another. The text teaches us, in short, that the world is listable as well as narratable—it can be constructed paradigmatically as well as syntagmatically—and we are left to wonder at our relative blindness to the alternative vision the text so convincingly embodies in its own perforated, continuous/discontinuous texture. So let us look a little more closely at how this texture is constructed.
It depends essentially on metaphoric relations, and the principle of the list is metaphor. But associations can arise also, by metonymy for instance, between items without obvious physical or functional resemblance, such as doorknobs and ties—and the father whose habit it was to drape the latter over the former (27). An associative list of this kind—from doorknobs to ties to father—has a greater looseness of texture than a list constructed metaphorically; the list in this case begins to “list” like a boat becoming unmoored (Baker's word for the effect on one's thought processes of washing the face).3 Associative drift of this kind can move a passage from a consideration of milk-containers (themselves part of a list of objects that have undergone disorienting changes in the narrator's lifetime), to a description of making iced coffee and from there to a discussion of the ice-cube tray, which itself “deserves” (and so gets) a “historical note” (445); or, by a combination of metonymic association and metaphor, from the beauty of grooved surfaces via a discussion of record-cleaning systems to a description of street-cleaning machines (65-67). “Listing” in this way, the text becomes what is called digressive, as the escalator or toilet roll-like linearity of the relatively ordered metaphoric list moves in the direction of a more “stochastic veraciousness” and the textual texture begins to gape and, by “unlooked-for seepage points of passage,” to move toward explosion. It becomes apparent, finally, that there is no difference that is absolute, none that cannot be bridged by resemblance or association, metaphor or digression, which merely represent poles of the continuity/discontinuity continuum, so that the writing mimes—not narrative or argumentative selectivity, with its teleologically oriented principle of “strict” relevance that aims at comprehension—but something like a potentially limitless, descriptive comprehensiveness. Between the poles of comprehension and comprehensiveness, of strict textual cohesion and the explosion of linearity, however, there is again only a relation of continuity/discontinuity, of gradual passage and of glide, since a plot summary can take the form of a list, and a list can itself “list,” drifting toward digression in such a way that cohesion is gradually loosened toward breaking point. Loosened, though, without the sense of relevance ever being completely destroyed, with the result that a true disjunction never occurs. Indeed, it cannot occur.
The text's play with footnotes mimes this failure to achieve disjunction. The narrator cannily adopts a classical definition of digression as potentially disjunctive, while defending the digressiveness of “essay-like” footnotes on the grounds of the comprehensiveness they permit:
Digression—a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation of the argument—is sometimes the only way to be thorough, and footnotes are the only form of graphic digression sanctioned by centuries of typesetters. And yet the MLA style sheet I owned in college warned against lengthy, “essay-like” footnotes. Were they nuts? Where is scholarship going? (They have removed this blemish in later editions.).
(122)
His own footnotes, of course, are often spectacularly essay-like, consisting of developments many paragraphs long and containing their own expansive lists and digressive drifts. The distinction between textual gradus and footnoted digression is further subverted by typographical means: “footnote” typography (in smaller font) frequently invades the text proper, not only in indented quotations but also in numbered lists, which consequently look like footnotes incorporated into the text. Finally, it becomes impossible to sustain the apparently clear difference between text and footnotes, so cheerfully digressive is the text “proper” and so substantive and relevant—or alternatively so undistinctively trivial—is much material that is relegated to the notes. There is on the one hand no distinct gradus and on the other no “movement away” from the gradus that might be thought qualitatively different from the movement away from itself that occurs in the text “proper.” The value of footnoting to the text, then, is essentially that, as the only graphic representation of digression “sanctioned by centuries of typesetters,” it makes for a visual representation, on the page, of the explosion of linearity that is achieved, both in the text proper and in the notes, by the narrator's paradigmomania, the desire for comprehensiveness that produces the whole text as a “veritable infarct of narrative cloggers.”
Take, as an example, one double page (14-15). The narrator is in the midst of recounting the episode of his broken shoelace, and there is a perhaps atypically long and uninterrupted stretch of pure story-telling, especially on page 15. But, starting on the previous page (13), this account has been clogged by a list of occasions that resemble breaking one's shoelace, and it is the fourth item on this list (attempting to staple when the stapler is out of staples) that occupies the greater part of the textual space of page 14. It does so because it is itself clogged with carefully detailed descriptive accounts of the act of stapling, of reloading a stapler and of toying with the left-overs from that operation, the first of these accounts being further expanded, in an indented paragraph, by an analytic retailing of the “three phases of the act” of stapling, each described with intense precision. But the mention of staples also gives rise to a footnote that digressively develops a metaphor relating staplers, locomotives and phonograph tonearms by comparing the three stages of their design history, from “cast-iron and upright” through “streamlined” to “the great era of squareness.” Note that description here is functional rather than merely amplificatory to the extent that the metaphoric point would be obscure without it; but this passage also contains a lengthy parenthesis which begins by comparing each device in terms of their relation to “their respective media of information storage,” and it proceeds with another list, this time of the kinds of documents that get stapled (the “kinds” being themselves specified in further lists) before comparing, over five lines of print, old staple marks in paper to the traces of TB vaccination on arms. The whole comparison collapses, moreover, with the remark that locomotive design in France and Japan is reverting to aerodynamic forms, the hopeful prediction that staplers are about to follow suit, and the regretful observation that CDs have made the “inspirational era” of the tonearm a thing of the past. (Another of Baker's footnotes, on page 82, is completely self-erasing, ending with the comment that “it is irresponsible of me to bring [the matter] up.”)
By the time one has read one's way through the long illustrative list of happenings, A through D, that resemble a shoelace-break, interrupting oneself at the footnote in order to digest the design history of staplers, locomotives and tonearms, returning to the list only to embark on an interpolated description of the three phases of the act of stapling, one returns to the narrative with a mind multiply distracted and ready to understand the narrator's later comparison of his own head to an exploded popcorn, “composed of exfoliations that in bursting beyond their outer carapace were nevertheless guided into paisleys and baobabs and related white Fibonaccia (… etc.)” (106). Reading has become an exercise in learning to redirect one's attention from the linear requirements of narrative, and to do so in a way that does not exclude narrative constructions but attempts to take into account all the fascinating paisleys and baobabs, the trailing “strings” that narrative tidiness ordinarily has no time for, cutting them off or hastily clearing them out of sight.
Baker's exploded text thus stands in relation to narrative as the messiness of everyday life to the artificially and expensively ordered paradise of the office: this is in each case a relation of continuity in discontinuity. “We came to work every day and were treated like popes—a new manila folder for every task, expensive courier services; taxi vouchers” (I abridge a long list of examples of corporate excess). “What were we participating in here?” asks the narrator (92-3), drawing attention in the first instance to the high profit rates of corporations that make such extravagance possible. But this luxurious “every day” of the work week nevertheless has within it a more ordinary everyday, the interest and value of which become evident in memory, that is, when one has left the job and its “problems, although they once obsessed you … turn out to have been hollow. … But coterminously, … the nod of the security guard, his sign-in book, the escalator ride, the things on your desk, the sight of colleagues' offices, their faces, … the features of the corporate bathroom, all miraculously expand; and in this way what was central and what was incidental end up exactly reversed.” (92).
In a similar way, the “lived workweek” itself has a syncopated, “Hungarian 5/2 rhythm” (92) that organizes the relation of work to time off, and of the respective values that attach to each. For finally, the orderliness of the office contrasts with the homelife of its workers who
return … and stand sweating in front of the chest of drawers, some hanging open, no ball bearings at all, and put the briefcase and the bag from the convenience store down on the floor and begin to pull handfulls of change and stubs of Velamint packs out of our pockets (… etc.). We walk around in our underpants and T-shirt waiting for the Ronzoni shells to boil. Can this disorganized, do-it-yourself evening life really be the same life as the clean, noble Pendaflex life we lead in office buildings?
(93-94)
Everything tells us that yes, as linear narrative is not discontinuous with exploded textuality, so the “everyday” of work and the messiness of the everyday combine in a single, albeit unevenly accented, rhythm. Pendaflex files (which themselves exemplify the continuity/discontinuity of toilet rolls and escalators) are not therefore fully remote from—they might belong in the same list of classificatory devices as—a chest of drawers with its drawers hanging open (and perhaps a few socks draped over them like ties over a doorknob). The philosophic genre of the meditation, itself “disorganized” in this case and generically “do-it-yourself,” exists here to teach us to attend to that relation, and perhaps to question the disproportion of the 5/2 ratio the disciplined, organized and anti-“do-it-yourself” working economy imposes, with its values of efficiency, productivity and progress.
The critical function of The Mezzanine as a philosophical meditation is not limited to the questioning it encourages, however. Clogging the linearity of narrative so that those 5/2 proportions are reversed, much as memory reverses the relative importance of the official values of the office and its everyday realities, meditative writing takes a kind of explosive revenge that is figured graphically by the device employed by the narrator when, attempting to “urinat[e] in a corporate setting,” he finds himself intimidated into retention by the proximity of a colleague. The trick consists, like that of the escalated text, in converting the blockage in plumbing into a liberating explosion. “When someone takes his position next to you … imagine yourself turning and dispassionately urinating onto the side of his head. Imagine your voluminous stream making fleeting parts in his hair. … Imagine drawing an X over his face (… etc.).” (84-85). It always works, the narrator comments, and in this particular case it works explosively. “I gave [the urine] a secondary boost from my diaphragm, and it blasted out.” (85)
It's in the bathroom, too—the liminal space, as we recall, between work and lunch—that he recommends another, parallel form of revenge. Angered by the cynicism of managements that allege self-serving and hypocritical reasons for economizing on paper towels by installing hot air machines, claiming greater hygiene and efficiency and forgetting that one doesn't wash only one's hands at the sink, he advises a tactic that combines the explosive pleasure of face-washing, generous use of the perforated toilet roll in lieu of the absent towels, and the satisfaction of clogging the plumbing.
You go into a stall and pull yourself a huge handful … and return to the sink with it. As soon as you dampen it with water, it wilts to a semi-transparent purse in your fingers. You move this dripping plasma over your face; little pieces of it adhere to your cheek or brow; then you must assemble another big wad to dry off with—but ah! now your fingers are wet, so that when you try to pull more toilet paper from the hundred-thousand-sheet roll, the leading end simply dissolves in your fingers, tearing prematurely [like a broken shoelace]. Deciding to let your face air-dry, you look around for a place to throw out the initial macerated flapjack, and discover that the wastebasket is gone. So you drop it in the corner with other miscellaneous trash, or flip it vengefully into the already clogged toilet.
(90-91)
Two things are worth noticing here. One, the frustration produced by managerial parsimony and the revenge that consists of clogging the toilet are coterminous; their meeting place is in the toilet roll. Two, managerial economy provides the means, through its own (false) economy, as well as the motivation, by the frustrations it induces, for the vengeful pleasure of making a satisfying mess in the hygienically clean and tidy corporate bathroom, in the same way that narrative economy supplies the means of its own subversion through the simple device of escalation, clogging it with details and blowing up the clogs. In the connected world of mediation, power structures provide the means of their subversion, but the pleasures of oppositionality can in turn, and conversely, only be opportunistic, turning manipulative means into unlooked-for devices of momentary release and revenge.4
Another occasion on which frustration and an experience of release combine is the breaking of a shoelace. I suppose the reason why learning to tie your own shoelaces is so widely regarded as a major step toward adulthood (it is first on the narrator's list of the coming of age events in his own life) is that, under the guise of achieving independence, it rather transparently figures instead the disciplinary principle that self-imposed constraints are more economical than, and achieve the same outcome as, externally imposed training, supervision and punishment. In an economy of production it is much more efficient for me to go to work daily of my own accord than to have to be rounded up each morning by, say, a posse of fellow workers or the police. We are encouraged, then, to learn to tie our own shoelaces. And the fact that shoelaces come undone, and sometimes break under the strains that are imposed on them, furnishes an appropriate metaphor, therefore, for the inevitable weakness in any disciplinary system, the place where untidiness and messiness enter the well-ordered picture, and with them the “noise” that, according to Michel Serres, hints at the possibility of an alternative economy, an economy not of production but of the freely given and of parasitism. The snapping of a lace, frustrating as it may be, also induces a sense of relief—the same sense of relief one's foot experiences when shoelaces come undone: “My left shoelace had snapped just before lunch. At some earlier point in the morning, my left shoe had become untied, and as I had sat at my desk working on a memo, my foot had sensed its potential freedom and stepped out of the sauna of black cordovan to soothe itself with rhythmic movements over an area of wall-to-wall carpeting under my desk” (11). Laces come untied, of course, because, as the narrator points out, the knot that constrains the foot is not a true knot but something more dubious, like an ideological construct or a mystification, “an illusion, a trick that you performed on the lace-string by bending segments of it back on themselves and tightening other temporary bends around them: it looked like a knot and functioned like a knot, but the whole thing was really an amazing interdependent pyramid scheme. …” (17)
So the frustration attendant on breaking a shoelace is not unlike the irritation one feels when some cherished belief or practice one has always held to be natural is suddenly revealed to be ideological. One ought to be relieved, and one is relieved, but one misses a certain order of things and its constraints because they had become familiar and habitual. And so meekly, like the narrator of The Mezzanine, we retie our loose laces (13), and if they break we go out in our lunch hour and buy ourselves a new pair, armed with which we return to our appointed place (at the office, in the factory, in the classroom, in the home), happy to lace ourselves again into the familiar constrictions. The time of the broken shoelace, between the relaxation of constraint and its reimposition, is “time out,” something the system knows how to foresee and provide for, accommodating itself to the inevitability of noise by incorporating the noise into its workings, so that any possibility the disturbance might suggest of an alternative order of things is held in check. The corporation can't foresee broken shoelaces but it can schedule lunch breaks and it can encourage us to use the latter to repair the former. And so, like the narrator returning to the office at the end of his “sunlit noontide hour,” I put down my copy of The Mezzanine, which I've been reading for the nth time with undiminished pleasure, and return dutifully to pounding out laborious sentences in the capacity of a professional critic. My task is to “theorize” pleasure; that is not the same as experiencing it. Lunch break is over.
The Greek word lysis, from which we derive “analysis,” “dialysis” and “paralysis,” refers to a looseness or loosening (as of the straps of a sandal), and it's to this loosening of discipline that the meditation, with its extenuated, step-by-step, spinning out of text, owes both the pleasure it gives and its ability to mediate change. Some meditations are analytic, however: they take things apart, like Descartes, with a view to putting them together again methodically, into a new and improved and possibly tighter system. Already in ancient times, the Greek word “analysis” was associated with disciplinary concepts like examination and investigation (historia, whence of course “story”). Paralysis, though, etymologically suggests a coming unstrung, a relaxing of the nerves such that one goes limp, like a puppet without its strings, and a truly “paralytic” meditation would be one that so explodes the constraints of narrative (or argumentative) ordering that a state of textual inertia ensues, from which there could be no return. In another study (“Changing the Subject”) I have looked at some texts in which the discontinuities inherent in the effect of continuity/discontinuity produced by mediation tend strongly toward actual disjunctiveness, and hence approach (but do not reach) a state of paralysis.
But The Mezzanine might be described as a “dialytic” meditation, in which the loosening of disciplinary constraints serves the function of permitting new and more pleasurable connections to be formed, and an alternative view of things to be glimpsed, without the separation from the world of discipline, here figured by the corporate office, ever becoming absolute. The connection is always there, just an escalator-ride away. Our narrator is a fellow who asks for his half-pint of milk in its zip-lock container to be stapled into a bag so that he can walk with one hand free to do with it slightly childish things, like slapping a mailbox as he passes. “I liked other people to see me as a guy in a tie yet carefree and casual enough to be doing what kids do when they drag a stick over the black uprights of a cast-iron fence” (8). That childish stick against the uprights, recalled by an older but still not fully adult narrator, is playing yet another continuity/discontinuity game, one that is quite comparable to the fun of riding an escalator. But the non-stick wielding hand doesn't only hold milk and one or two other items, including the rest of his lunch and a paperback Marcus Aurelius. It also grasps the new pair of laces the guy in a tie has bought and with which he is returning, up the escalator, to his office. Like blood in a dialysis machine, he remains connected; for a time he has left the constraining environment of the “usual channels,” but now he is returning to them, duly refreshed.5
Notes
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The etymology of “to list” (of a boat) is obscure. It seems unrelated either to the noun “list” or to the archaic verb “to list,” meaning to desire (as in “The wind bloweth where it listeth”).
-
See my Room for Maneuver for an elaboration of this.
-
The etymology of “to list” (of a boat) is obscure. It seems unrelated either to the noun “list” or to the archaic verb “to list,” meaning to desire (as in “The wind bloweth where it listeth”).
-
See my Room for Maneuver for an elaboration of this.
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Warm thanks to Michelle Chilcoat, who first introduced me to The Mezzanine, and to the friends, colleagues and students who were patient with my rambling enthusiasm for this text in Brisbane (Australia), September-October 1992.
Works Cited
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. London: Penguin, 1964.
Baker, Nicholson. The Mezzanine. New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. Room Temperature. New York: Vintage, 1990.
———. U and I. A True Story. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of the German Tragic Drama. London: NLB, 1977.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
Chambers, Ross. “Changing the Subject: Digression and the Et Cetera Principle.” Michigan Romance Studies 18 (1993): 103-138.
———. “The Etcetera Principle: Narrative and the Paradigmatic.” FLS 21 (1994): 1-24.
———. Room for Maneuver, Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.
Descartes, René. A Discourse on Method, Meditations and Principles. London: Everyman's, 1987.
Kosman, L. Aryeh. “The Naive Narrator: Meditation in Descartes' Meditations.” In Amélie O. Rorty, ed. Essays on Descartes' Meditations. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 21-43.
de Maistre, Xavier. Voyage autour de ma chambre. Paris: Corti, 1984.
Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991.
Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. “The Structure of Descartes' Meditations.” Essays on Descartes' Meditations. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 1-20.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Oeuvres complètes, I (Les Confessions, Dialogues, Les Rêveries du Promeneur Solitaire). Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade 1962.
Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1982.
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Tradition and Some Individual Talents
Riding the Pause Control: What Would We Do, Asks Nicholson Baker, If We Could Step in and out of Time?
