Substance Abuse: Reconstitute/Explode/Redeem

I feel cheerful, but also desperate, for these difficulties are somewhat beyond my comprehension. I have a vague feeling of where we are, in terms of freedom, future, purpose, and history -- that is, the existential condition which we are in. Perhaps, I can express this existential condition, the vague entirety of this condition -- the motivations for believing this is so, and the questions of fate and future, and our role in that future, freedom and limitations, reality, etc.., where all these terms seem to tie into one another in not haphazardous but unexpected ways. That is, with some help from the Heart of Darkness, I'm going to try to elaborate this 'existential' condition -- with this word expressing the idea that freedom, limitation, and action is always foremost on our mind, even as we consider epistemic and material problems.

I want to call to attention in this title -- 'reconstitute / explode / redeem' -- to the various ways that we relate to the past, the various ways in which we read. Up to this point, we have always imagined reading as having to do with ruins. Recall that even this understanding of ruins is a step beyond what we are being trained or taught -- I mean, we have learned the lesson of stepping back from the naive belief in aesthetics, and immediate responses, and the reality of characters, emotions, and so on, to realize that there are bigger problems in the world than how we feel, and even to denounce the culture which places so much emphasis on feeling -- this aesthetic empire of media. It doesn't take much to realize this, perhaps a faith in Marx, or a understanding and a belief in racism, to realize that this empire is no good. But to return to the original point, we realize that the concept of 'ruin' is not even sufficient to describe what reading is, as the way we are using it, as Conrad is forcing us to consider this term.

And, indeed, Conrad is forcing us to consider this term -- putting it in the forefront, making it apparent. The empire is in ruins, and even this story is in ruins -- the form of what I call the 'shattered logics', where Marlow is like an incapable conspiracy theorist -- unable, for example, in the City of Death, to explain how this group of people have to do with one another, and with these fateful weavers. And what the brickmaker has to do with the manager, and so on. These considerations seem artificial and forced, since we are used to treating obscurity and illogicality with disfavor, and we are used to reducing these mysteries back to the personal, or the the author: "Conradian ruins, Conrads particular ruins".

Thus, we are used to a particular kind of reconstitution, which we know to work beyond whatever the author has to say -- we are used to reading against the author, ignoring him even. And, in the last example, Conradian ruins, we ignore the author, paradoxically, in order to reconstitute the author. Yet, all these practices go back to the original assumption or the readibility of the text -- or, to be more precise, the reconstitutibility of the text, with this word expressing the temporal process, the kind of fake history we associate with reading -- reading as ruined and (partially, in most cases) reconstituted by the reader.

What seems promising to me, at this point, is the principle of non-reconstitutibility, what appears as a radical aholisticity of the text, the timelessness of the text in my sense -- not in the sense of eternal, but rather not of a time or an era. This principle seems irresistable to me, since we are all tired of these pragmaticist and operational definitions ("perspective", "author", "racism", etc.) that form the endpoints and easy answers of any reconstitutive reading. But if reading is not reconstitution (in the sense understood above) then what can it be? And what do these latter two terms in reconstitute/explode/redeem suggest about reading?

But I want to take a breath here, and attempt to coordinate the above questions about reading with our original existential problem: how do these questions of reading tie into reality and to materiality? The coordination of these two problems seems is promised by the question of 'substance abuse': why does Conrad create an artificial ruin (all ruins are artificial, of course, but the Conradian ruin makes this artificiality apparent), as if engaged in 'substance abuse' -- abuse of the materials of reconstitution? Why does Conrad create an unnatural ruin (a ruin that cannot be further ruined by natural historical processes) -- as if this opposition unnatural/natural could be maintained at all? These questions seem to suggest the possibility of moving beyond the purely negative notion of aholisticity, since these artificial ruins of Conrad suggest a way of reconstitution which would not fall back into the traditional models of author and era. But how does this reconstitution take place, if we are not after merely a new holisticity? That is, if these artificial ruins are not to be the ruins of an artifical process?