Defined as both presence and absence, desire is a peculiar entity. Presence: a firm pressure on one’s gut, begging for release; a wind pressing one’s sails forward. Absence: a ghost, a mirage, a memory no longer here, a future of unknown location. The everyday mentality with which one resolves this presence/absence dilemma is as follows: one’s desire is a void, a lack, whose contours perfectly match that of the desired complement, as a piece might complete a puzzle. According to this everyday thinking (or un-thinking) desire is the silhouette of presence. How rude it is to say that others do not know what they want; but, given this presence/absence dilemma, is it not strange that anyone could know what one desires, that there could exist such obviously matching pieces?
To be fair, desires may often seem obvious: I rarely need a doctor’s consultation before my bathroom visits, nor is a culinary expert required to tell me when to eat. Although, it is true that these events (eating/defecating) are proceeded only by a pressure on the gut. Occasionally, and thankfully this is a rare occasion, hunger and nausea may mix into an abdominal miasma with no clear resolution. Even hunger, which is perhaps the first desire one learns to identify, is prone to its own confusions. Societal directives on when and what to eat remain potent, particularly for those that are unable to match desire and its outlet as two perfect pieces. Knowing that I must eat rarely suffices in resolving my indecision over what to eat; the nutritionist endeavors to explicate this latter point.
So, if desire is an unclear entity, and if even hunger is included in this troubled pool of desire, then how is one to make sense of the common poetic expression: “I hunger for your touch”? Perhaps the wish expressed therein is to have one’s desires rendered more visceral and thence more neatly delineated. But how strange that the body’s missing piece is no longer a troubled cloud, a brackish eddy, but now a ghost with a name and a sparsely costumed silhouette. Naked desire: an idiomatic expression used to address an absence with no flowing, nebulous garments; instead, naked desire lays claim to self-knowledge through pure simplicity.
But I cannot imagine such pure simplicity any more than I can understand the statement: “I hunger for your touch.” I cannot even understand the lesser claim: “I hunger for touch.” An itch, a bite, a rupture beneath the skin that struggles to come to air–all these desires I can understand. But I struggle to metamorphose those desires; I cannot say, as do the Greek philosophers and physicists, that an elemental earth seeks its center, with water over earth, and air over water, and ethereal fire above all. I cannot seem to understand how it is that I might say: “It has been so long since your little finger traced the line from my forehead to chin, so long, in fact–that the absence of such delicacy has turned my stomach into a rigidly churning pit–that I hunger for touch.” And does one’s hunger for touch manage to know how one is to be touched? Where? With what textures, what pressures? Such a simple thing as contact becomes impossible to prove once one has a small enough lens.
And so how, then, is one to understand the stronger claim: “I hunger for your touch“? In other words, the one who utters this statement knows that touch is needed and in what form. Is it that one desires touch how the other offers it, and hence “I hunger for touch as you have touched me”? But then one would ultimately be stating that one hungers for a particular form of touch, such that it remains to be seen whether a new masseuse could be trained to take the lover’s place. No, the one who utters–“I hunger for your touch–declares love more boldly. “I know that no other can replace your touch.” Perhaps even the most minute details–the creases of a palm, the swirls of one’s fingertips, the dots and crescents of an iris as they travel the ideal distance to arrive in one’s own–make it so that the desired touch is un-substitutable. The romantic lover feels such utter paroxysms of the flesh that even a pea beneath one’s mattress leaves one restless; and, in the midst of such pains, the romantic can trace perfectly the obstacle to one’s peace, perhaps like a widowed artist drawing the loved one’s flesh from memory.
The troubadours castigate me as an insensitive lout, unaware of his own hunger; and so, too, my spiritual upbringing admonishes me for remaining blind to the contours of desire’s absence, as I am told: “man does not live by bread alone.” And indeed that crucial, final word “alone” complicates the whole business. It is as if the puzzle cannot lay flat, but instead overlaps and knits with itself, making desire’s contours ever-more confounding. For what is religion if not this binding, this constant admonition: “not alone”? And so I consider loneliness to be the most spiritual hunger, the desire whose presence is the most difficult to locate, to trap in place. Is it found in the strange and sudden twitch, in even my littlest toe, which seeks to press against my neighbor’s? It’s an impulse that I cannot explain, and would rather excuse as a shiver, would rather declare a mischievous prank (to prod you), would never admit it as a lonely attempt at finding contact’s claustrum, an enclosing embrace for my even most remote cells.
The text, too, induces desire. I do not intend merely to state that this text attempts to induce desire precisely by invoking it as a concept. Rather, I mean to say that every text induces desire, and that any piece of media is successful to the extent that it manages to induce and resolve desire (perhaps the desire induced will always exceed, by varying degrees, the desire resolved). The examples that come first to mind: an author of mysteries, who must make the reader enjoy the labyrinth enough to seek its center; the romance-writer whose audience cannot wait for the lovers’ union, even if found only on the page, and especially if on the page, because the audience cannot substitute in their own imagination the emotions elicited by the author’s pen; the philosopher whose enigmatic declarations induce in the cynical student a need to find worldly, particular examples. By a similar process the composer sways the listener’s spine to an ordered rhythm, and can resolve an open note into a closed chord or melody.
We might better understand the concept of how “every text induces desire,” by investigating the difference between revision and response. It is an everywhere accepted truth, and yet seemingly nowhere proven, that the phenomena of revision and response are and indeed ought to be distinct. Should the question be posed in terms of creation rather than discussion, this supposedly obvious difference vanishes; it becomes evident that—as theologians have declared for centuries—no mortal may create ex nihilo. No “blank page” is truly void, nor is any space uniform. As a rather potent demonstration, at a pivotal point in her education, Bisa Butler was assigned to begin her work on a dark rather than light canvas; immediately, she became drawn to those vibrant and neon colors which were most often associated with traditional African Art, and which were most readily discernible from the black background. We might say, describing Butler’s experience with the canvas, that the text of the page desired its own response.
And we might also say, thinking of how even a blank canvas emits a call, that there is always noise. Silence is not the absence of sound, but is rather a state of being where noise does not destructively interfere with an agent’s intended activity, nor does it constructively interfere, as in the case of signaling.
And so, because there is always noise, Hume was unable to find some unalterable self, could think of himself as nothing other than responding: “For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception, and can never observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible to myself, and may truly be said not to exist.”
In a similar line of inquiry, Anne Carson, among other things, (1) describes a man who searches for the most soundproofed room, one that has been reduced of all acoustics, all environmental reverberations, only to find there the overwhelming volume of one’s own heartbeat; (2) contemplates the Japanese poets’ term jikan, used to describe the silence between two thoughts, as well as the American poet Wallace Stevens’s claim that whiteness is “color…/In which the sense lies still”; and (3) asks: “If, according to [John] Cage, silence is what we’re not noticing, can we say that silence noticed is stillness?” Based on such examples, one might say that thought is always a response to something, that all writing is a response, while revisions comprise a subset of responses: those that aid in a process of signaling.
But this argument is still missing something. A call-and-response is temporally more expansive than a revised statement. In the realm of writing, there is a marked difference between the experiences of writing anew and writing afresh, writing over an old piece and writing a new piece, between palimpsest and citation.
Take the following scenario, wherein Discursive Agent #1 utters a statement, and Discursive Agent #2 corrects it. In the logic of the moment, Discursive Agent #2 is providing a revision; in the logic of the story where both agents are characters, discursive agent #2 is offering a response. (Similarly, one could think of literary criticism, and wonder whether a re-view is truly a re-vision, or merely a response.)
Or, as part of our attempt to understand the need for responses in addition to revisions, we might ask ourselves why it is not possible to speak in single statements, or in sentences with only one independent clause. The response occurs when it becomes necessary to have a conjunction, a dependent clause. One must therefore assume that there is an ultimate density to any statement, at which it becomes impossible to revise, necessary to respond.
We might think of the revision in terms of that key-word above, where discursive agent #2 corrects the other’s statement. Literally, a cor-rection makes a path more direct, upright, straight. A straight path requires one movement, whereas a bent path requires multiple. What is the minimal number of movements? Does a response change the linguistic field, thereby making an edit possible, decreasing the minimal number of movements; in other words, is a neologism, once understood, a shortcut for its otherwise unwieldy definition? (An aside for my Derrideans: Is this the differànce between response and revision?)
In saying that texts should better aim to resolve rather than induce desire, I am claiming that contemporary discursive practices favor responses to revisions. In my impatience with responses, I am skeptical that merely inducing desire can suffice for the one who seeks to become a great artist; the more worthwhile task may be identifying those hungering ignorances within us, so that we may better define and find those elusive objects of our desires.
Indeed, what is escapism if not the substitution of a real need for a fake one? Escapism–an impossible concept, thrown loosely around. Let’s improve upon it: what does inducing desire entail? Escapist literature is written by both the one who fails to read before writing and the one who writes by citing, since neither achieves the ultimate act of the writer, which is to condense momentary experience under the weight of memory. A response is often a citation, and citations are rarely the same as revisions; a revision need not cite its precedent; no, a careless citation is intended to make the reader submit, to induce in the reader a desire to find the origin.
“Guess what?” “Did you know?” Simple questions, but they are rather common methods by which we coax the other’s curiosity from its dingy cell. And with that term, curiosity, we invoke a long tradition of assigning good and bad desires. For Augustine, curiosity [curiositas] is an improper involvement with worldly affairs, an eager involvement which replaces more serious, spiritual questions. And so, too, the existentialists hate the inauthentic in everyday life, as artists loathe the bureaucrat (and perhaps, also, as contemporary philosophers loathe the scientist). “Fun facts” lose their utility as facts the more that they function as mere diversions: a reciprocal induction of desires in those of an informed class, as they perform these kinds of simple, verbal repetitions. So what desires, then, may be legitimately studied, if one need not memorize personages, dates or plot-points?
“How late have I loved thee!” Augustine writes in his Confessions. The sentence indicates that the good-to-be-loved was always present, but that one had been erroneously inattentive to it. And so love-knowledge and knowledge-love intersect at the point where thought allows desire’s strange contours to become visible; or, where love, the submersion into these contours, enables one to think them. [Citing Augustine, Marion has said: “man can neither desire nor love anything that he does not first know (according to the principle that one may love only what one knows).”]