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Matrix Pavoris: Material Dislocation in House of Leaves (CROSBI ID 68940)

Prilog u knjizi | izvorni znanstveni rad | međunarodna recenzija

Bekavac, Luka Matrix Pavoris: Material Dislocation in House of Leaves // Diseases of the Head: Essays on the Horrors of Speculative Philosophy / Rosen, Matt (ur.). Santa Barbara (CA): Punctum Books, 2020. str. 315-360 doi: 10.2307/j.ctv19cwdpb.12

Podaci o odgovornosti

Bekavac, Luka

engleski

Matrix Pavoris: Material Dislocation in House of Leaves

This essay explores the problem of space and its textual representation focusing on Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves – its inventive fictional elaboration of a non-correlationist object, its own spatial disposition as a graphic embodiment of inaccessibility, and its explicit links to other attempts at disconnecting spatiality from its phenomenological grounding (Derrida, Eisenman). In this context, traditional linguistic representations of spatiality within literary texts (building fictional objects/environments by recourse to literary tropes) will be of secondary importance, but “objective space” as a pure abstraction, made legible and available to thought by formalization and mathematization, will be equally insufficient. What is at work here is a non-phenomenological notion of space, marked by an inaccessibility to language which cannot be easily pacified by inherited frameworks of thought: a category barely distinguishable from matter (before its configuration into an object), hyle that precedes or possibly even terminally escapes articulation, quantification, and cognitive mastery. Literariness could be redefined as an equivalent of this unintelligibility, and writing as an apprenticeship in dealing with spatiality without subordinating it to purposes of a human viewpoint. Literary work would therefore be a peculiar engagement with materiality rather than an expression of an ideal content or a representation of an anthropocentrically distorted “reality”: a non-metaphorical processing of materials that relies precisely on the irreducible exteriority of matter to thought. This theme will be developed in two stages. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a highly evolved metatextual narrative which aggressively accentuates its own physicality – the volume and orientation of the book, the typesetting and coloring of the text etc. – comes to rest in the niche of horror precisely through its multileveled involvement with the problem of space. The haunted house stereotype, the cliché of home as the ultimate place of Unheimlichkeit, will be analyzed as the site of severe disturbance in spatial relations, particularly regarding the inside/outside dichotomy and the possibility of its accurate and stable formal/mathematical description, but also as a glitch in the temporal definition of reality (since the “content” of the house might be anterior to existence of humanity and Earth itself, making it a foreshadowing of Meillassoux’s arche-fossils or ancestral objects). Instead of being a basic unit of habitation (literally and ontologically), “house” becomes the locus of an abolition of constituted spatiality, collapse of space-as-orientation, evacuation from “being-situated” (alive) into pure, groundless space (death), finally emerging as a “monster”, the archetypal figuration of non-knowledge. Specific literary devices by which House of Leaves ceases to work as a representation of the unintelligible (space) and moves into unintelligibility itself, simultaneously making this process its explicit theme, will be examined further. The problem of cinematic or literary rendering of space in itself, considered not as a blank canvas for human habitation or exploitation, but as a shorthand for a complete lack of any discernible attributes and unavailability to quantitative description, necessarily makes every recognizable “style” of representation inadequate. If the space within the house (space-as-such) is radically ateleological and non-human, a “chaos” of matter before worldhood (“without form, and void” of tohu wa-bohu), then the only possibility of engaging it in literature is the irreducible materiality and exteriority of writing itself, considered outside of its semantic, representational or expressive capacities. This will lead towards Derrida’s understanding of materiality as a blanket term for inaccessibility to thought ; he is explicitly quoted in House of Leaves, and the basic theoretical backdrop to this section will be provided by deconstructive readings of architecture and spatiality (Eisenman), themselves derived from Derrida’s analyses of irreducible materiality of inscriptions in his early works on Husserl. In Eisenman’s words, if classical architecture is “the structure of reality, presence and objecthood”, relying on the human body and “the systematic privileging of anthropocentric origins such as scale and function”, the main difficulty of rethinking it will be opening towards “the possibility of dissonance, non-closure, non-hierarchy” in order “to dislocate that which locates”. Navidson’s house in Danielewski’s novel, as the eminent scene of such dislocation, will be reexamined in the light of Plato’s khora, elaborated by deconstruction in order to replace architecture as a science of dwelling by an attempt at confronting spatiality as a thoroughly non-human exteriority. The central problems of the final section proceed directly from this: “becoming-haptical of the optical” (Derrida, Deleuze) ; the book as a material/spatial occurrence, bound to temporality only by an index of our cognitive struggle with the alterity of writing ; reading as “secondary revision” of a thing whose primary modus of existence is simultaneity. This corporeal level of engagement with text (opposed to the tradition of a rational or conceptual access) demands our critical attuning to the non-semantic components of print: the unreadable, the illegible, the unintelligible. Such concretism of inscription emphasizes what can be experienced via a certain sensorium, binding the body with the matter of writing, rather than a culturally coded consciousness of a “recipient” with an “idea” or a “poetics” of a certain œuvre, finally postulating aesthetics as the first-hand sensible experience of materiality, versus the understanding of art as a production of meaning and its interpretation. Nevertheless, Navidson’s house, the ergodic mechanics of Danielewski’s book, as well as Derrida’s and Eisenman’s attempts to rethink spatiality and architecture, ultimately do not offer a definite and radically dehumanized alternate route to materiality as such (which would be the height of anthropocentrism, the final illusion of mastery over the exteriority): they necessarily remain compromise formations, transitional objects, haptic tools for establishing contact with the real that allow for partial readability, visualization, concretization, inhabitability, simultaneously obstructing the possibility of conceptual closure and provoking further attempts at access and participation.

spatiality ; materiality ; literariness ; horror ; architecture ; writin ; , Danielewski ; Derrida

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Podaci o prilogu

315-360.

objavljeno

10.2307/j.ctv19cwdpb.12

Podaci o knjizi

Diseases of the Head: Essays on the Horrors of Speculative Philosophy

Rosen, Matt

Santa Barbara (CA): Punctum Books

2020.

978-1-953035-10-3

Povezanost rada

Filologija

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