ZEN by JESSICA SMITH

JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN Reviews

Zen by Jessica Smith

(Lulu eBook (PDF), 2011)

The cover of Zen is important, so I reproduce it here:

If the cover can be trusted, it is some sort of rewrite of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; what kind, we don’t know yet.

Opening the volume, we find: 238 apparently blank pages. Or we would, if we printed out the PDF. I think immediately of other works of erasure, such as Ronald Johnson’s Radi os, Jen Bervin’s Nets, Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning, etc. And ask, is blankness the same as “erasedness”? Are erased pages blank?

But before I think too hard about the tradition of such work, I flash: blank/erased pages, a title that can resolve to … zen … clever total rewrite / reworking / negating of the concept of the übermensch … aha.

But is that it? Somehow I’m not comfortable leaving it at that. Then I realize why. Besides the fact that it feels too simple, the cover image: Is that Nietzsche sitting on what appears to be the corpse of a horse? How odd. As Béla Tarr tells the most famous story from Nietzsche’s biography at the beginning of his film The Turin Horse, “In Turin on 3rd January, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Alberto. Not far from him, the driver of a hansom cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse’s neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words, and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters. We do not know what happened to the horse.”

But we can be pretty sure Nietzsche never sat on it …

In some ways the picture performs the function of a koan. But, in spite of the way Smith’s book is commonly called Zen, it appears from a continued careful perusal of the cover, that the real title is Z:En. Zen and not zen. A koan and not a koan …  

Of course, once we pass beyond the cover, and into the text, I can’t help but think of Craig Dworkin’s No Medium, which is a study of “works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent”. It turns out that Dworkin has a long footnote that in part discusses Smith’s book. After discussing Marcel Broodthaers’ edition of Baudelaire’s Pauvre Belgique!, in which Broodthaers blanks out Baudelaire’s dissing of Belgium, he assimilates Zen/Z:En to Broodthaers' tradition of rebuke, in this case of the genre of erasure (as a reductio ad absurdam), and, surprisingly, finds her choice of title arbitrary (“Why the distributed ‘zen’, rather than ‘rat’, say?”). This last is not a rhetorical device, because he never does go on to figure out why this book is not called Rat (I don’t claim that Smith couldn’t have called the book Rat, I just claim that it would have been a very different book, and not the one in question). He concludes his discussion of Zen/Z:En by remarking on the “bite” of her “cynicism”, and “the possibility of a more sincere reading of the blank pages in relation to the title”; I am not very interested here (frankly, I am not very interested at all) in the cynicism, which relates to erasure as a genre (because I am not very interested in genre, really), tho I will enthusiastically endorse the possibility of the latter. And hope to, at least in part, provide a sincere reading here.

What if we assume for a moment that Smith means / intends, every aspect of her text? What if we assume that we must read this translation of Zarasthustra with as much sincerity” as we must read any other translation, not to mention the German text?

(More questions: did she erase the German? The cover is German, but how much does that signify? Did she erase a translation? Is this a translation of a translation?)

I am not asserting here that I have mastered the nuances of erasedness, or even of this particular collection of erasednesses. Quite the opposite. You will find more questions than answers here. But I am asserting that these erasednesses seme:

           

Asking whether signs involve sound images like tsupu, or whether they come to mean through events like a palm crashing down, or whether their sense emerges in some more systemic and distributed manner, like the interrelated network of words printed on the pages that make up this book, might encourage us to think about signs in terms of the differences in their tangible qualities. But signs are more than things. They don't squarely reside in sounds, events, or words. Nor are they exactly in bodies or even minds. They can't be precisely located in this way because they are ongoing relational processes. Their sensuous qualities are only one part of the dynamic through which they come to be, to grow, and to have effects in the world.

In other words signs are alive. A crashing palm tree-taken as sign-is alive insofar as it can grow. It is alive insofar as it will come to be interpreted by a subsequent sign in a semiotic chain that extends into the possible future.

The startled monkey's jump to a higher perch is a part of this living semiotic chain. It is what Peirce called an "interpretant," a new sign that interprets the way in which a prior sign relates to its object. Interpretants can be further specified through an ongoing process of sign production and interpretation that increasingly captures something about the world and increasingly orients an interpreting self toward this aboutness. Semiosis is the name for this living sign process through which one thought gives rise to another, which in turn gives rise to another, and so on, into the potential future. It captures the way in which living signs are not just in the here and now but also in the realm of the possible.

Although semiosis is something more than mechanical efficiency, thinking is not just confined to some separate realm of ideas. A sign has an effect, and this, precisely, is what an interpretant is. It is the "proper significate effect that the sign produces" (CP 5.475). The monkey's jump, sparked by her reaction to a crashing palm, amounts to an interpretant of a prior sign of danger. It makes visible an energetic component that is characteristic of all sign processes, even those that might seem purely "mental." Although semiosis is something more than energetics and materiality, all sign processes eventually "do things" in the world, and this is an important part of what makes them alive.

Signs don't come from the mind. Rather, it is the other way around. What we call mind, or self, is a product of semiosis. That "somebody," human or nonhuman, who takes the crashing palm to be significant is a "self that is just coming into life in the flow of time" (CP 5.421) by virtue of the ways in which she comes to be a locus-however ephemeral-for the "interpretance" of this sign and many others like it. In fact, Peirce coined the cumbersome term interpretant to avoid the "homunculus fallacy" (see Deacon 2012: 48) of seeing a self as a sort of black box (a little person inside us, a homunculus) who would be the interpreter of those signs but not herself the product of those signs. Selves, human or nonhuman, simple or complex, are outcomes of semiosis as well as the starting points for new sign interpretation whose outcome will be a future self. They are waypoints in a semiotic process.

(Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think)                  

And with that, I am going to pause a moment and ask the author some questions:

1) Is the name of this book Zen or Z:En or both or neither? And how did you come to choose that title?

Jessica Smith: “Zen (which is how I think of it, although it is also at the same time certainly not simply Zen, but Z:En, an already hinged text) stemmed from a discussion with my former partner, Martin Hägglund, who is a Derrida scholar. I remember discussing Nietzsche’s yes and Derrida's “opening” and their desire for the future, which seems opposed to (what I know of) the Buddhist concept of nirvana, which seems nihilistic. That is the opposite of Nietzsche, who far from wanting everything to be erased, wants to make love to that night demon who offers him eternal return.”

2) Can you tell us something about the cover image? (Provenance, etc. Anything you want)

JS: The cover image-- I don’t remember how I found it-- is not of Nietzsche, though it is intended to represent the scene you describe, where he ostensibly breaks down over the beating of a work horse.  As I told Dworkin, at the time there were a lot of erasure poems in the literary scene so this is a reference to “beating a dead horse,” and the internal completely erased pages were intended to be the last stop of erasure (a form which I now embrace, but at the time I felt like Dworkin recently at AWP, “I hope I never see another erasure poem again”). At the same time, there’s some deep pathos in that image, and its use is not accidental. Nietzsche—“Why I am so clever” Nietzsche-- breaks, forever, while witnessing violence against an animal. And then everything happens to Nietzsche in those “blank” ten years: in the blank space of his silence, his sister determines his image for the next fifty years. With these tools, the context of the cover, how does one read those 238 pages? Blankness certainly isn’t meaningless-- the blank space of the page is never weightless.

3) Is there anything above you disagree with? Anything you’d like to comment on / argue with / correct?

JS: I love that you call Zen a koan and perhaps this is both its irony and its potential power.

OK. There are a few points or comments or whatever that Smith makes to which I want to respond, because they relate to how I read this book.

First: “I remember discussing Nietzsche’s yes and Derrida's “opening” and their desire for the future, which seems opposed to (what I know of) the Buddhist concept of nirvana, which seems nihilistic. That is the opposite of Nietzsche, who far from wanting everything to be erased, wants to make love to that night demon who offers him eternal return.” Smith and I have very different concepts of “nirvana”. As best I understand it, an enlightened person “carries water, chops wood.” There seems nothing nihilistic about this. Therefore I don’t read Zen/Z:En as contradiction of Zarathustra, so much as of a sublation of it. Erasure is not annihilation. Especially when a trace (the cover) (the enlightened person??) is left. Is this book what happens when the eternal return meets non-returning? When a dream of the future meets the is? I’ll come back to this.

Second: “As I told Dworkin, at the time there were a lot of erasure poems in the literary scene so this is a reference to “beating a dead horse,” and the internal completely erased pages were intended to be the last stop of erasure (a form which I now embrace, but at the time I felt like Dworkin recently at AWP, “I hope I never see another erasure poem again”).” I should again make it explicit that the erasure of a genre (by completing it, perhaps) is of no interest to me here. That’s a whole other conversation.

Third: “And then everything happens to Nietzsche in those “blank” ten years: in the blank space of his silence, his sister determines his image for the next fifty years. With these tools, the context of the cover, how does one read those 238 pages?” With this comment, Smith appears to relate her blanking of Zarathustra to Nietzsche’s biographical erasure/blankness/(mis)interpretation. Thus (authorial-intention-wise), it would seem that at least in part the blank pages that make up Zen/Z:En are pretty purely representational. Which, besides indicating that, for Smith, blankness can perform a number of functions simultaneously, leads me to ask: Is one of the functions that she wishes to perform akin to that performed by Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s? I would answer: in part, at least, very possibly yes. Among the other things that erasure does, these blanked/erased pages can be seen to interpret Nietzsche’s text.

Fourth: “Blankness certainly isn’t meaningless-- the blank space of the page is never weightless.” This is certainly my contention.

Fifth: “I love that you call Zen a koan and perhaps this is both its irony and its potential power.” Given that, perhaps I should to leave the relationship between the Nietzsche’s title and text and Smith’s title and text as just that, a koan. But I’m not. I’m going to interpret it. No. I’m going to offer one possible interpretation. Not because I believe that it is the interpretation, the key to what is going on here, but as an example rather, of how erasure is never complete, and how even apparent blankness can seme.

The Verso Books blurb for Malcolm Bull’s Anti-Nietzsche (2011) reads:

Nietzsche, the philosopher seemingly opposed to everyone, has met with remarkably little opposition himself. He remains what he wanted to be— the limit-philosopher of a modernity that never ends. In this provocative, sometimes disturbing book, Bull argues that merely to reject Nietzsche is not to escape his lure. He seduces by appealing to our desire for victory, our creativity, our humanity. Only by ‘reading like a loser’ and failing to live up to his ideals can we move beyond Nietzsche to a still more radical revaluation of all values—a subhumanism that expands the boundaries of society until we are left with less than nothing in common.

Anti-Nietzsche is a subtle and subversive engagement with Nietzsche and his twentieth-century interpreters—Heidegger, Vattimo, Nancy, and Agamben. Written with economy and clarity, it shows how a politics of failure might change what it means to be human.

First, note the dates of these books. Smith’s was published two years before Bull’s. Therefore one can be pretty sure that Zen/Z:En is not in the Bull “tradition”. Yet I propose that the latter can be fruitfully read thru Bull’s notion of reading like a “loser”. And then some. I mean, let’s start with Bull. And then. Bull:

Nietzsche repeatedly refers to Supermen as being a different species: ‘I write for a species of man that does not yet exist: for “the masters of the earth.” He was not speaking metaphorically, either. He hoped that the new species might be created through selective breeding, and noted the practical possibility of ‘international racial unions whose task will be to rear the master race, the “future masters of the earth.”’

According to Nietzsche, it follows from this that, relative to the Supermen, ordinary mortals will have no rights whatsoever. …

Simply put, I am arguing that it is possible to say that if one were to erase everything in Zarathustra NOT aimed at “losers”, there just might not be much left.

Now, I know that Bull’s reading is controversial, and my point here is not to insist on it. I am not arguing that he has got Nietzsche absolutely right. I am arguing, rather, that his reading has at least some validity, and that it is possible to read Smith thru this lens. As Keith Ansell-Pearson writes in a review of Anti-Nietzsche at http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/the-future-is-subhuman Radical Philosophy, “For Bull although there have been an abundance of post-Nietzscheans keen to appropriate Nietzsche for their own agendas, there have been few post- Nietzschean anti-Nietzscheans – ‘critics whose response is designed not to prevent us from getting to Nietzsche, but to enable us to get over him’.”

Let us assume for a moment that there is value in getting over Nietzsche, or at least certain aspects of him, aspects perhaps best exemplified by Zarathustra and the whole Superman/masters of the earth/no rights for the rest of us thing. What are our options? We can read like a loser. OK. But that’s not getting over Nietzsche, that’s getting caught in a dialectical relationship with him. The very opposite of getting over.

How to sublate this dialectic? (I said I would return to this). Well, one way is thru the meditative techniques associated with zen (which, as I have indicated above, is in no way nihilism or passive or …). Or should I say Zen/Z:En? Note that this goes further than Bull does, at least according to the Verso blurb, which indicates that in his reading we would be left with “a subhumanism that expands the boundaries of society until we are left with less than nothing in common.” In my opinion, it is good to go further than that. who wants a world in which “we are left with less than nothing in common”? That is not the world of zen practice, which, at least in its monastic form, is utterly communal as well as individual, tho, as enlightenment approaches, the borders between communal and individual can be said to flicker and go out, at least in a practical sense. Or what else might it mean to be a bodhisattva? These are Dōgen’s Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts (John Daido Loori translation). They applied to lay practitioners as well as to monks:

The Three Treasures

• Taking refuge in the Buddha
• Taking refuge in the Dharma
• Taking refuge in the Sangha

The Three Pure Precepts

• Do not create Evil
• Practice Good
• Actualize Good For Others

The Ten Grave Precepts

• Affirm life – Do not kill
• Be giving – Do not steal
• Honor the body – Do not misuse sexuality
• Manifest truth – Do not lie
• Proceed clearly – Do not cloud the mind
• See the perfection – Do not speak of others errors and faults
• Realize self and other as one – Do not elevate the self and blame others
• Give generously – Do not be withholding
• Actualize harmony – Do not be angry
• Experience the intimacy of things – Do not defile the Three Treasures

You will recall Smith saying, “I remember discussing Nietzsche’s yes and Derrida's “opening” and their desire for the future …” Well, we have now sublated Nietzsche’s yes (which, as we have seen, may not be a yes for you, or a yes for me …) and arrived at a larger yes, and we have walked thru Derrida’s opening, into a possible future of bodhisattvas. Who neither win nor lose.

But I want to return once more to the picture on the cover. Let’s think for a minute about that cover image. It’s still just a puzzling. I am choosing here to read it as Nietzsche-Boddhisattva. Or not. This is a koan to gnaw on. But humor me. What does it say about the future? Perhaps that it will mean beginning again and again and again, failing again and again and again, beginning again and again and again … “Experience the intimacy of things – Do not defile the Three Treasures” …  face not an eternal return but an exquisitely engaging undetermined …

Which is not bad, given that we started with a cover and half a ream of erased pages …

But wait! The name of Smith’s book may not be Zen, but rather Z:En. What does that do to this reading? How does it change it? Aha! The reading(s) of this erasure, just like the future, may never end …

*****

John Bloomberg-Rissman has about a year and a half to go on In the House of the Hangman, the third section of his maybe life project called Zeitgeist Spam. The first two volumes have been published: No Sounds of My Own Making (Leafe Press, 2007), and Flux, Clot & Froth (Meritage Press 2010). In addition to his Zeitgeist Spam project, the main other thing on his plate right now is an anthology which he is editing with Jerome Rothenberg, titled Barbaric Vast & Wild: An Anthology of Outside & Subterranean Poetry, due out from Black Widow Press, Autumn 014. He's also learning to play the viola and he blogs at www.johnbr.com (Zeitgeist Spam).