Implications of textuality

Timothy Morton

Today I'm going to talk about the ways in which writing can encode itself,

or imply itself, within itself. I'm using the word “implicate” to suggest this

reflexive operation, which I see a form of enfolding. Other scholars have

called it enactment, but there's a metaphysics in such a concept that I

suggest we drop. Enactment assumes that there is a reality definitely

distinct from writing which writing, under certain circumstances, can

embody directly, in a kind of short-circuiting immediacy.

I'm borrowing the notion of implication from David Bohm, Einstein's

student, a quantum physicist who argued that quantum mechanical

phenomena actually tell us something about the fabric of reality—his so-

called ontological interpretation. On his view, also expounded by Basil Hiley

and more recently by Anthony Valentini, the Universe is a Whiteheadian

process that Bohm calls the holomovement, that is, “undivided wholeness
 2

in flowing movement.” In other words, reality is a nonlocal, wavelike

movement that in some deep sense is unanalyzable and indivisible without

contradiction. We'll talk more specifically about matter in a while. But first,

poetry.

I'm interested in how this notion of enactment, promoted by the

Cambridge school of literary criticism such as F.R. Leavis and still alive

today, is very similar to cognitive theories of “enaction” posited by

Francisco Varela and others. While they dispense with the idea that the

mind has to contain representations of everything it does and perceives

(thus giving rise to an infinite regress), enactive theories of consciousness

do suffer from the same syndrome as literary critical enactment—they

suppose an immediate creation of actor and acted-upon that already

presupposes the very world that enaction has created. I've talked about this

elsewhere (and if you want to see it there's a lecture on this on iTunes U).

Today I want to show how, if we go with a model that uses implication

rather than enaction, we can achieve a more subtle sense of how textuality

works, thus helping us to do better close readings.

One big reason why to do this is that I think scholarship hasn't yet

caught up with the great discovery of structuralist and poststructuralist

theory, the discovery called textuality. When you think about it, textuality
 3

becomes much stranger and far more profound a notion than is often

thought. Textuality is certainly a whole lot more interesting than just

another way of thinking about the aesthetic dimension, for instance.

Because textuality affects the way we think about meaning as such, it has

implications (there's that word again) for ontology as well as for aesthetics.

In particular, textuality is not a supersized version of allusion, in which all

signs point to all others. In some more drastic sense, textuality means that

all signs directly are all other signs, an indivisible unity that we could call a

unicity just to make sure that we're not saying it's One as opposed to the

Other. It's a unicity the strong, Parmenidean sense that if you try to chop it

up, those pieces only make a very limited amount of sense, and the

chopping as such is in some sense impossible, as Zeno's paradoxes are

designed to demonstrate. This sort of unicity is what physicist Niels Bohr is

talking about when he says that determining the significance of quantum

phenomena makes no sense—you can't chop up the Universe like that

without getting involved in paradoxes. Plato thought that if you were skillful

enough you could indeed chop the Universe up—he uses the chopping

metaphor actually, talking about skillful versus unskillful butchers. What if

no kind of chopping, skillful or not, were ever going to work?

 4

The unchoppability may strike us as a scary form of holism—bad,

bad, holism! Unicity is not the same as holism. Holism means that the parts

the whole are replaceable, since the whole is greater than them. In unicity,

if you have different elements, you have a totally different unicity. Yet some

problems remain for understanding unicity, even if we realize that it's

different from holism. Unicity is a very different view, seemingly, than the

one that emphasizes difference and différance, but I hope you will see the

connection. (In any case I've been called a deconstructor and I'm quite

happy with this label.) One way to misinterpret Derrida is to say that he's a

nihilist who is asserting that fundamentally nothing has any meaning. This is

far from the case. Derrida is claiming that precisely because of the play of

difference, things can have meaning. So yes, meaning and meaningfulness is

always a shifting, fluid target, but it would be a big mistake to say that this

shifting fluidity is nothingness. That's the beauty of textuality—it causes us

to imagine something, even if it stretches our idea of what “somethingness”

might be. The flow of difference is the implicit structuring and destructuring

order that gives rise to meanings.

I'm going to argue that textuality is implicative. In other words,

textuality is a process of enfolding and unfolding—an appropriate nod

perhaps to the paper medium in which writing has so often been inscribed,
 5

until recently, but it works as a way to think about other media too. Let's

consider an aspect of textuality, the aspect we think of as literature. There

is no need to think of literature as different from non-literature in this case.

I'm simply asking you to think about poems and narratives because they are

what most easily come to mind. There is not necessarily an intrinsic and

special thing that literature does, such as refer to itself, or perform

meaningfulness in a relatively non-pragmatic way. Still, it does seem to be

the case that many works we now think of as literary do talk about

themselves or perform meaningfulness non-pragmatically. And in particular,

there do appear to be some of these kinds of works that talk about their

implicative properties, as we shall see. Some of these might be literary.

Tempted as I am to think that literature is explicit about the implicit

textuality all texts, I'm not sure I can totally buy it—though I love Derrida's

image of the poem as a curled-up hedgehog.

In the implicative view, one relatively autonomous feature of the text

(say rhythm) can become a carrier for another feature (say the imagery or

perception level). One feature can enfold another feature. In this view no

metaphysical priority is given to any level. This may seem confusing at first,

but it's actually easier on the mind than enactive views, which presuppose

some metaphysical hierarchy between form and content, such that the form
 6

ultimately expresses the content by enacting it—thus in the last instance,

despite the enactive view calling itself formalist, content is ontologically

prior to form (though on another level, it follows from it, as it's enacted by

it).

An implication of the implicate view is that all features of the text

may be enfolded in all features—that is, ultimately, the text is an undivided

whole. Notice here the difference between saying that the text is a sum of

its parts that is greater than them—holism. Holism paradoxically implies

that at one level at least, there is fragmentation, because the whole is

definitively different from the parts. Parts are substitutable members of a

whole that transcends them. On the implicate view, this is impossible.

Although every relatively autonomous feature (I'm saying this instead of

“part”) may contain information about every other one, this is only a

hypothetical inference that may be strictly unthinkable or at least

unspeakable. Thus a single word found in a papyrus may or may not be part

of a poem. If you chop a Shakespeare sonnet down to a single line or to a

single word, at some point it ceases to be that sonnet. The sonnet is not

“in” the single word.

Nevertheless, the sonnet as a whole talks about itself, and to itself,

on and between various levels. The implicate view is a non-essentialist view.

 7

It is also non-ontological in some sense, since it does not presuppose a

world within which texts have meaning, and ontology requires worlds. The

implicate view is materialist, but of a very expanded, opened up sort that

views matter not as shiny ping-pong balls but as richly encoded and

ultimately nonlocal information. It's thus congruent with developments in

materialism such as relativity and quantum theory (in case you wanted to

know). Moreover, a view of textuality as implication fits more easily

graspable facts about our reality. Consider a TV signal for example: it's an

ensemble of electromagnetic waves in which television images are enfolded.

One kind of phenomenon can act as a carrier wave for another one. In the

same way, the rhythm of a text can tell us something about the imagery,

and so on.

First let's unpack some terms I've been using. First, “relatively

autonomous feature.” Texts seem to be made up of various features that

have a degree of autonomy from each other. For instance, the rhythm of a

poem is autonomous from its imagery—the imagery can vary at a different

rate from the rhythm, the rhythm could be “hot” (intense, highly repetitive)

while the imagery could be “cool” (one image in twenty lines of verse,

several vaguely differentiated images clustered together, and so on). In this

sense, as I always tell my beginning close reading students, a text is like a

 8

rainbow—all the colors melt into one another but there are still distinct

colors. Thus we have structure—things to do with syntax, lineation, stanza

form, the general relationship between squiggles and blank space; texture

(rhythm and rhyme)—the way the text organizes physical sensations such

as overwhelm (or underwhelm), grooviness (or the lack thereof), sonic

vibrations induced by vowels and consonants and so on; and perception

(“imagery” is the usual word for this but perception isn't vision-centric)—

the world of tropes (which I call “spin” to my undergraduates) and other

figures of speech. Other features of the text include reference (I used to

call it “content” but this just gets confusing, especially since on my view

form is content, so there is no separation)—what the text appears to be

talking about (one thing, many things, points of view, narration and so on);

and context (who wrote it, why they wrote it and so on).

Now some phenomena such as irony act as wild cards that kind of

play between all the levels. Irony strictly is the aesthetic exploitation of a

gap or contradiction between 1+n levels of signification—I'm sorry, there's

no really elegant way to describe it, although in one recent class we came

up with “gapsploitation,” which I like very much. The way in which irony

plays between all the levels should alert us to the basically undivided

wholeness of the text as such—and again, let me be very clear and reassert
 9

that I'm not dealing with holism here, but possibly with a strictly

unspeakable, even nonconceptual lack of division.

Irony works, of course, because all features of the text interact

deeply, in the sense that they are all manifestations of textuality—not of the

text as a closed bounded “work” but as manifestations of an open-ended

flowing movement of signification. The major discovery of poststructuralism

and deconstruction (which takes the discovery to its logical non-essentialist

conclusion) is this phenomenon Barthes and others call textuality. The deep

interactivity of features of texts should remind us that the features we have

isolated by naming are only relatively autonomous, just as the color blue in

a rainbow is really inseparable from magenta and green, and inseparable

from our human eyes perceiving it from a certain location. So for instance I

now tell my undergraduates that they'll get a B+ if they talk accurately and

well about the first three features of the text in isolation—I make them

study structure, texture and perception because their minds tend to speed

up when they examine reference and they start saying all kinds of free-

associative things like “ ‘Twinkle’ is a depressing word so ‘Twinkle Twinkle

Little Star’ is a poem about depression.” But, I say, they will get A- if they

explore how one feature of the text “talks to” another feature. If they do

this lots of times about lots of features they will get an A. If they do this at
 10

an even higher level they will get an A+: for instance they might discuss

how one “conversation” between features contradicts another

“conversation.” I used to think that anything above B+ was vague and

impressionistically to do with “inspiration,” which it is, of course, but I was

able to make what I wanted much more explicit once I had figured out that

for me, texts are implicate forms that enfold significance on as many levels

as possible.

All this then implies that there are some kinds of text that talk

explicitly about what they are implicitly. A great example would be this one

by Gerard Manley Hopkins, nice and relevant for me because it does so by

talking about rainbows.

It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

The rainbow shines but only in the thought

Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone,

For who makes rainbows by invention?

And many standing round a waterfall

See one bow each, yet not the same to all,

 11

But each a hand's breadth further than the next.

The sun on falling waters writes the text

Which yet is in the eye or in the thought.

It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

For comparison's sake, let's step aside from implicate form and

examine how the enactive view works. My favorite example is F.R. Leavis's

reading of Wordsworth's sonnet “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge.”

Here, Leavis praises the way in which Wordsworth lets the phrase “lie /

Open” lie open. In Leavis's reading, the phrase “lie / Open” literally lies

open to the space of the page.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could not pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty;

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

 12

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Leavis argues that the eyes have to expand, that our reading has to “lie

open,” to take in the unconventional enjambment at lines 6–7: “the fact is

made present as a realized state in the reader's consciousness by an

expressive use of the carry-over (the ‘lying open’ is enacted)” (The Living

Principle, 118). It's a striking argument, though Leavis himself doesn't do

much with beyond using it as evidence of Wordsworth's overall badness

compared with Donne and Shakespeare. It is made more striking by a

certain enactive recursiveness in Leavis's own prose. The sentence in

which “lie / Open” is embedded also lies open thanks to the judicious

typography (see presentation).

 13

The poem enacts its environment, including the contact, in this case,

the blank paper surrounding the text. This lying open reproduces at the

level of form what the narrator says about London at the level of content.

In taking in the domes and spires from the bridge, the narrator widens our

view to include sky, valley, rock and hill. We are being asked to see more,

to become more aware. This heightened awareness is the real substance of

the poem.

Now an implicate reading of this poem could indeed account for

what happens in the lines containing the phrase “lie / Open” (6–7). But the

implicate reading would not assume in advance that this was because there

existed some reality outside the text that really was that way. The enactive

reading on the other hand always collapses in the last instance into naïve

mimeticism, the sort of thing that lets you hear, as it were, the clash of the

rapiers in line 7 (as Eagleton puts it) because of all the /c/ sounds. We are

then left with a basically Platonic view where words represent things, and

thus the potential for an infinite regress, for what “thing” does the word

“word” represent? (This is the “third man” way of taking issue with Plato. If

chairs are copies of ideal chairs, then of what is the concept “idea” a copy?

The third man problem also affects Whiteheadian materialism, from which
 14

I'd like to distinguish the view I offer here, though perhaps for reasons that

can only for the sake of time, remain, ahem, implicit.)

The implicate reading on the other hand would explain the phrase

“lie / Open” by talking about how the lineation becomes a kind of “carrier

wave” for the paper around and within the printed text, so that the

lineation starts to include another level—the paper on which the text is

printed. This level is then seen to include a perception level in which the

domes and theaters and so on appear to “open” to the fields and sky; an

image that also enfolds human perception into itself, since the opening is

also the widening of a gaze from some more focused attention to a more

floodlight-like condition. Notice that in the implicate reading, no feature has

ontological priority over another. They are all enfolded together, so that at

this level of interpretation at any rate, it becomes undecidable which one

comes “first.” There is a kind of cognitive chiasmus here that enfolds the

reader together with the narrator: just as I am standing on this bridge

opening my gaze, so you are reading these lines opening your gaze to the

poem. It becomes chicken-and-eggy to figure out which one of these

events, the one on the bridge or the one on the page, came first.

The temptation, then, would be to use this chiasmus as the basis for

an ideology of being embedded in a world that is always already significant.

 15

Indeed, Merleau-Ponty calls this kind of embeddedness the chiasm.

Phenomenology, from which derives this ideology, wants to see meaning

emerging within a horizon of meaningfulness. What can this consist of, in a

situation such as textuality, where outside and inside (hence horizons) are

precisely not rigidly there? Phenomenology opens up thinking in one way

only to close it down in another. And this phenomenological impulse is

where I think the enactive theory comes from. In the enactive theory, parts

of the text that enact their meanings are more powerful, more “real” even,

than others. Thus Leavisite criticism treasures them as examples of robust,

“muscular” language that's really getting to grips with things and giving you

something substantial to chew.

The implicate view, on the other hand, states that this kind of effect

is really happening all the time: the rhyme is always talking to the syntax,

and so on. It's just that there are moments at which so many features are

implicated together that it becomes obvious. There really is a deep

connection, then, between enactive poetics and enactive cognitive science.

Both come to the exciting yet oft-repeated conclusion that we produce the

world in which we already find ourselves. There is, finally, a world, and

some poems are better than others at evoking it. There thus appear
 16

pathological deviations from some normative, healthy way of doing poetry,

involving the kind of police work for which Leavis and others are famous.

The implicative view can do everything that the enactive view can,

without the metaphysical baggage, and it can do more, since it broadens the

idea that one feature of a text can bear information about something else.

In implicate poetics there is no hierarchy (say between form and content)

because there are no reified entities such as form as such or content as

such. If everything could act as a kind of carrier wave for everything else,

nothing is prior to anything else.

Now let's return to our Hopkins poem, and read it as an implicate

order. I like the way in which the rhythm implies the thinking, the hard or

impossible thinking that could unweave the rainbow. The rhythm implies it

via omission, for instance the first verse:

It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

The rainbow shines but only in the thought

Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone,

For who makes rainbows by invention?

 17

The caesura in line 3 is an obvious instance. So, however is the lineation gap

between lines 2 and 3—here we have an instance of rhythm and lineation

implying one another. Like in Wordsworth's sonnet, the blank space is

enfolded at this point. And in line 4 the strange rhyme—on an unstressed

syllable—with “alone” by “invention” short changes the rhythm, leaving an

implied gap: we sort of want there to be a pause there, a kind of unheard

stress.

Implicative poetics lacks a pecking order between aspects of

textuality that are implicated in one another. Indeed, phenomena such as

rhythm and rhyme (let alone more generalized abstractions such as form

and content) might also be approximations disguised as false immediacy.

This lack of ontological priority of any one textual phenomenon might be

one reason why textual implication is a very satisfying phenomenon that

induces us deeply to enjoy and appreciate them. There is a sort of “Aha”

quality about how features of the text start to imply one another in our

reading of them. The satisfaction we derive from this might naturally

indicate that our cognition is itself set up in an implicate way such that

different levels and features of significance “talk to” each other, because at
 18

some deeper level they enfold each other. It might also follow that the

mind functions in this way because reality as such is structured this way.

It certainly follows from our exploration that textuality functions this

way. Textuality can't be categorized as a thing with a boundary, since it is

precisely the way in which no sign or sign system has a rigid thin boundary.

Concepts such as form and content, then, however modulated, are really

just abstractions that appear falsely as immediacies. It's “common sense”

that rhythm is form, isn't it? I want to trouble this kind of common sense.

We are living through a moment at which common sense is indeed being

troubled on a global scale, let alone quantum theory, by massively

distributed phenomena such as global warming. The chewy muscularity that

appears in enactment theory is really just an abstraction appearing as a false

immediacy, in this precise sense.

Textuality is not an object in a Newtonian sense, singular, solid,

permanent, occupying a specific region of time and space. Textuality is

more like a field of forces, in the Einsteinian sense—a way of looking at the

world with which we haven't yet caught up, so it's rather hard to grasp. An

Einsteinian Universe is more like a flowing network of what Minkowski calls

“world tubes.” It only makes a kind of relative sense to differentiate one

text from another, so that the significance of a text changes depending

 19

upon circumstances. This is much more strange than saying that you can

read a text any way you like. You can walk around a single, solid-seeming

object and view it how you like. Textuality is not just a kind of

perspectivism.

What textuality is even more like, however, is the turbulent vortices

of probabilities that constitute a quantum mechanical Universe. It becomes

very hard to visualize or grasp conceptually what these vortices may be like,

since our way of seeing and thinking are part of the Universe that function

in quantum mechanical ways, so that what you are seeing and the fact of

your seeing it are implicated in one another. There's the problem: our

seeing is implicated in what we are seeing. This is even more drastic than

the problem posed by relativity. In some deep sense, there really is no

boundary, not even the relative sort of one between vortices in a stream.

Since there is no time and space at some quantum level—since these are

generalizations about what is the case that work only up to a certain

point—every text is, in some sense, literally every other text, as absurd and

as difficult as that sounds. It would then be a mistake to shut the discipline

of textual studies and literary theory off from other disciplines such as

sciences and philosophy, since, if we are to take textuality seriously, these

differences are only relatively autonomous arbitrary boundaries.

 20

Textuality means that we have to get serious about what we're doing

in literature departments. The fields of biology and physics, for instance,

appear to have been arguing for forms of nonessentialism that are deeply

congruent with textuality. Just read Darwin. The whole point of The Origin

of Species is that the word “origin” should really have been in quotation

marks with some kind of winking emoticon next to it. Darwinism discovers

that life is just like textuality: an indivisible, flowing whole that you can't

chop up into species, variant, monstrosity, class, genus, kingdom—you

name it. Of course we see all kinds of highly differentiated species scuttling

around. Yet these are phenotypical expressions of an implicate, mutating

process (the genotype, such as DNA and RNA) that unfolds with a high

degree of order, that is, seemingly at random, and with scant regard for

skin, cell walls, or other seeming biospheric obstructions. At the DNA

level, there is no rigid, thin boundary between life forms. There's not quite

enough time to go into all this today so you're just going to have to read

my book The Ecological Thought.

The kind of interconnectedness the textuality talks about is even

more evident in physics. A stronger and stronger case is being made in

physics that some kind of ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics

is in order—if “ontological” means anything at this level. (Probably not,

 21

since ontology implies a world in which meaning emerges, and the quantum

level does not constitute a world in a meaningful sense.) How else are you

going to explain the well-documented phenomenon of nonlocality? If

biology discovers how entangled life forms are, quantum entanglement—

which is why your flash drive works—brings a whole new level of

interconnectedness to the table.

It has been well established that you can entangle two particles (or

more) such that you can tell one particle some information (make it spin a

certain way), and the other one will instantaneously appear to have

received the same information. This works no matter what the distance—

“no matter what” rigorously means two yards, or two miles, or on the

other side of the galaxy. (They get away with saying these things in physics

departments.) The information sharing is instantaneous. Now you could get

rid of the speed of light but this sounds very dodgy to most physicists. Or

you could say that the two particles are not really two particles. They

appear to be two to us, but in some other deeper sense they are the same

thing—exactly the same thing. This sounds mad but the other option is

genuinely madder—it involves time travel and telepathy and all kinds of

woo woo stuff, so if you have trouble with nonlocality, you may find that

the alternative is a lot worse.

 22

To say the very least, nonlocality seriously forces us to rewrite our

ideas of matter and of materialism. Since my view is that we should be

reading texts in a materialist way, literary criticism should be taking account

of nonlocality. At any rate, we all need some remedial math and science.

Textuality claims that signification is nonlocal in almost exactly the same

sense as quantum nonlocality. Indeed, nonlocality is precisely a theory of

textuality at the quantum level, in which information is dispersed among

particles seemingly occupying different regions of spacetime. Literary

textuality is not simply like physical nonlocality—in some sense, it directly is

it. If there are any Alain Sokals in the audience, you may laugh now.

The University of California, Davis