Patrycja Orzechowska

How to begin? Is any beginning possible at all? Despite its privileged position the first word never succeeds in becoming an absolute novelty; a blank sheet of paper usually turns out to be untouched and unwritten only at first glance. If we decide to take a moment to examine the structure of the blank sheet, its whiteness soon ceases to signify emptiness or lack, revealing something that we have not considered so far: presence of various traces. A similar thing happens with darkroom-processed photographs, where unexpected shapes emerge out the white of the photo paper under the influence of the processing chemicals: we have never expected to see them there, and yet we have anticipated their existence by taking a look at them. Every single sheet of paper that seems to be blank, carries within it traces of our earlier readings, vestiges of a completely different script that in a way determine our interpretation of a still unfamiliar text; they speak of what can be expected, and set a suitable horizon of expectations.

— Books: towards unhygienic literature —

The first word appears always already in the thick of citations and pre-suppositions which stand behind them, and is situated in a network of references that enable its reading and interpretation, but at the same time invalidate its heretofore unquestioned freshness and newness. An undoing of the often desired precedence of the first word may cause passing sorrow for its lost originality, but more importantly it results in a refusal of dominance, the need for conquest and subjugation of everything that has been unwritten, undiscovered and untouched. The realisation that we live in a worn-out reality that is always second-hand leads us to the uncanny. The men of the Renaissance that excavated the remnants of the ancient culture were quick to realize that their own era would be derivative and imitative, and that every birth could only be a rebirth. It turns out that all things around us bear the traces of others that have used our space. In other words, whether we want it or not, everything has already been visited by something or someone else.

Beginning anew, the desire for originality, creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo) and appearance out of nowhere are all bound with insincerity, as they are all about erasing or dismissing one’s antecedents. We live in the world of continuations, and that is why every first word is only one in a series, while the process of writing is like following in the footsteps of others or using a borrowed language that is somebody else’s property which never belongs only to us. Each of the words that I am using has its history and etymology, and carries within itself a specific context, but it is worn-out and jaded, not to say clichéd. I would like to look at my text like that, as a contemporary piece of writing which, as a whole, consists of words that are timeworn, and therefore haggard and decrepit. That would be a decisive step towards a heterogeneous, or more exactly, unhygienic literature: unhygienic, as it is poles apart from the desire for immaculateness that has rendered the aseptic scientific discourse sterile.

From now on every text that we hold in our hands, will refer us back to a library book that bears the traces of usage by other readers and their more or less appropriate handling, even if it is a text that still smells of fresh print. Readers of unhygienic literature will look for highlighted passages, become invested in marginal notes and enjoy finding objects (railway tickets, business cards, flyers, dried flowers and leaves) that have served as bookmarks. This is not all, however, as inside the book we will be able to discover more, even more material, sensuous traces: blotches left by tea, coffee and other drinks, fingerprints found in the most unprecedented of places, curly or straight hair of past readers, not to mention the distinct scent of the yellowed pages. One must admit that the consumption of unhygienic literature (that possesses its own hermeneutics and interpretive techniques) can be a source of history and much emotion, which in itself is potentially even more fascinating than the traditional ways of reading.

What unhygienic reading tells us is essentially that there is no such thing as a sterile, pristine text, and that literature of all sorts and shapes is always already second-hand. Therefore, even when we open a brand-new book fresh out of the printing press, we still get the feeling that it has already been touched by somebody else. It is within books that we discover ample traces of other people’s presence: Martin Heidegger’s remains, parts of Virginia Woolf, Aristotle’s somewhat decrepit relics. Literature is one of these uncanny, spectral, haunted spaces, where the already gone, past will to life leaves its imprint, creates its inscription and finds a shelter.

— Living in a second-hand reality —

The difficulty of capturing the moment of beginning stems not only from the nature of the writing process as such or the unique structure of literature in itself, but springs from the existential experience. Self-inception, or the moment of conception, that none of us remembers, is usually experienced as a thrust into a pre-existing, and hence used and fatigued world. We come to be in it unexpectedly, as if without a prior notice, but we are preceded by a succession of people, events and things. That is why the sincerest of texts, or rather texts that come nearest existence, do not have introductions, whereby the author decides to thrust his/her readers into the thick of action that has been going on since time immemorial. At the moment of inception, or beginning, everything seems to be new, surprising and unknown only because we see it for the first time.

What seems to be most surprising and remarkable at the same time is the fact that the world does not start only when we appear in it, but simply continues to be, unmoved by our birth. To paraphrase Leibniz’s philosophical sense of wonder, we could ask: why is there something rather than nothing that precedes us? Why does it have to be my world that somebody else must already have made themselves comfortable in to exist before me, as made apparent by the ample traces of usage nobody even tries to cover? Reality, as the name itself suggests, turns out to be a space filled with realia: remainsleft by people whom we have not met and events that we could not take part in.

The existence of the world is very much like a hotel room that has never been cleaned, but is still in use. The rotatinghotel guests keep finding the traces of their antecedents and then vanish themselves on the road leading nowhere; leaving behind shreds of existence that are carefully ordered and arranged by newcomers. In this context existence cannot be perceived of as something new, separate and unique, but it assumes the form of heredity or transmission. Therefore, each individual existence is not only oneself, an is laden with the burden that is not its own. When one looks at this series of spectres and the incessant existential bustle, it is worth focusing for a moment on what is left of it: things.

— Back to things —

Within the compass of traditional thought things are abused, and their study is conducted without much care, representing them in terms of passivity, silence, powerlessness and ahistoricity. Responsibility for such a state of things, or rather for their underappreciated condition, rests predominantly with the anthropocentric presupposition that humanity is exceptional: it is allotted a privileged position in theory and ascribed sole agency in the world. Another, equally important reason for the exclusion of things from the discourse of the humanities is their problematic and underestimated materiality. According to Graham Harman even the materialistically inclined philosophers that did care about things and their destiny,failed on a regular basis to recognize their separatedness, uniqueness and individuality, reducing them to a set of objects. This is only one of the many possible strategies of dissipating and reducing the material, singular existence of things into sensuous qualities, atoms, concepts or relations.

Putting aside Democritus and ancient atomists, one of the most serious threats to things in the history of the European thought occurred with the onset of the almost two-centuries-long British empiricism. In the eighteenth century George Berkeley postulated, among other things, reduction of objects to their human-bound perception, which meant that their existence was to be dependent solely on the cognitive capabilities of human beings. Immanuel Kant’s postulate of “things in themselves” (Ding an sich) was an answer to the dramatic state of things and simultaneously an attempt at saving them by making them independent from human thought. The only drawback of “things in themselves” was that one could not say anything specific about them, and most probably that was the reason why they went unnoticed and unspoken for ages.

Another of the great returns to things as such (zu den Sachen selbst), heralded as late as the twentieth century, was Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, but this proposal to come closer to things turned out to be a decided fiasco. Husserl was unconcerned with the secret life of things, instead taking interest in the process of their perception and the way they emerge in our consciousness. His anthropocentric perspective was the rationale behind the fact that the plurality and diversity of non-human entities, whose existence could have been accounted for, continued to pass unnoticedin favour of the human experience.

It seems to be only Martin Heidegger who noticed that the truth of things can be given to us in ways other than a theoretical reflection on them. Because of that he called for the so far neglected practical, i.e. utilitarian and manipulative aspect of the human relationship with things. Still, most of them are treated by the author of Being and Time as tools (things with purpose). It is possible that both the theoretical and the practical approach to things say less about them and more about our own needs and presuppositions concerning the undifferentiated totality of things which we invariably cherish. Perhaps an unbiased study of things can be conducted only in human absence, or at least when our privileged position is weakened: through a retreat and a withdrawal into the shadow cast by the thing.

— Things and annihilation —

We focus our entire attention on things only when we deal with the absence of the subject, for example when we lose from sight somebody close to us or when they die. It is at that moment that things come to the fore, regaining their meaning and significance. And yet, their purposeful exposition does not serve any theoretical inquiry into the nature of human cognition, or a reflection on the possibility of using them, finding for them a practical application. The only feasible, but also impossible work that we can perform because of them is the work of mourning. It is at the point of loss that we care about the tangible and material existence of things. We do have a disinterested desire to spend time in the company of things, surrounded by them, and interested only in their existential aspect: their calm, harmonious existence.

Things cannot replace the absent ones that we miss so hard, but their task is entirely different: they conjure up spectres, the faint and feeble presence of people gone. It is a presence too feeble to speak of its real existence and too strong to ignore. A spectral point of view is to a large extent based on the conviction that sterile things do not exist as such, as every single thing carries within a memory of a past reality. Initially, the thing appears to us as an item that belongs to a certain kind, as a concrete realization of a universal entity, as a suitable, unchangeable set of qualities necessary for the thing to exist. Only when looked at from close, every single thing turns out to have its singular history of being in the world that is completely invisible at first glance.

When we become convinced that isolated and alienated things in themselves do not exist, we turn to their relationality, their ties with the world, and their proximity to humans. Every one of them can be called an outliver without the status of a survivor, as in addition to their own fragile, material being, they all bear witness to the reality that is long gone: they provide a link between different temporalities. It is in this way that they carry within themselves stories of loss, absence and, most of all, of an inevitable end that they have been able to avoid for a while. Spectrality of things stems exactly from their ability to survive, an existence that is decidedly longer than the life of an individual human being. Existence as such, on the other hand, is about being a trace of the other as well as leaving traces that assume a separate life, a life of their own.

According to Jacques Derrida every presence emerges in lieu of an absence, as if it sustained itself at its expense. It is worth considering even for a second who or what we exist in lieu of, and whose coming will be enabled by our soon disappearance. One thing only is certain: what will be left of us are things, and our own will to life, impressed on them, will allow us to linger on for a moment as spectres, suspended somewhere between presence and absence. Things cannot save us from death, but they can surely store the memory of us and prevent us from being forgotten. Who am I writing this on? Whose trace am I erasing, while impressing and imprinting on paper the insatiable sign of my existence? Our things will survive us, cherishing the memory of their owners. Perhaps ancient Egyptians and all those that bury their dead with their keepsakes realized that only things can be of use to us and give back to us once we have died.

Whose absence made my presence possible? Whose presence will be enabled by my absence? I only sense them both. They are both available only through a trace and a promise, but the former comes to me from the past (the no-more), while the latter from the future (the not-yet): I will never encounter them in a form other than that of a spectre. The last word, just like the first one, never belongs wholly to us, but to those who always precede us or follow immediately after the full stop that is placed with some hesitation. Do we really want to use that full stop? Apparently, we do not have much choice, just like those that will follow us, who will repeat with surprise and in disbelief: “somebody has been here before us”.