The Prosody of the WorldBatia Suter and WritingDieter Roelstraeten 1 the study of poetic metre and of the art of versification, including rhyme,stanzaic forms, and the quantity and stress of syllables. 2 a system of versification. 3 the patterns of stress and intonation in a language.It is difficult to deny that there is something inherently, intrinsically counterintuitive inJacques Derrida’s momentous claim, made most dramatically and comprehensively in his1967 landmark collection of essays entitled Of Grammatology, that the history of Westernthought has been the ‘story’, by and large, of writing’s subjugation to the imperious authority of the voice: as I write this first sentence down, rather than speak it out loud where noone would be able to hear me anyway, I seem to either confirm or revert to the much morecommonsensical view that writing somehow stands above speaking, that the writer’s searingsword is mightier than the speaker’s trembling voice, or (more banally) that the written wordis really built to last, whereas the spoken word seems only doomed to disappear.However it may be, it is philosophy’s perceived historical prioritization of the spoken wordover the written word – or over anything written for that matter, word or no word: of speaking over writing – that is the primary target of what Derrida, in the aforementioned book, firstidentifies as ‘de-construction’, and ‘grammatology’ as a self-appointed “science of writingbefore speech and in speech” becomes the chosen method of this deconstructive process.For the sake of the present argument, which will turn to writing, or rather inscribing, moreliterally in a few paragraphs, it is worth rehearsing some of Derrida’s basic assertions, somesounding (!) more or less outlandish than others (the italics are his).1. From Plato and Hegel and from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger, “the history oftruth, of the truth of truth, has always been (...) the debasement of writing, and itsrepression outside ‘full’ speech.”2. “The voice, producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and immediate proximity with the mind. (...) The written signifier is always technical andrepresentative. It has no constitutive meaning.”3. “The epoch of the logos thus debases writing considered as mediation of mediation and as a fall into the exteriority of meaning. (...) Writing will be ‘phonetic’,it will be the outside, the exterior representation of language.”4. “There is therefore a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divineinscription in the heart and the soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled inthe exteriority of the body.”5. “Writing in the common sense is the dead letter, it is the carrier of death. (...)What writing itself, in its nonphonetic moment, betrays, is life.”6. “The idea of the book is the idea of a totality, finite or infinite, of the signifier. (...)The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly aliento the sense of writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy, and (...)against difference in general.”7. “Before being its object, writing is the condition of the episteme.”8. “Writing (...) signifies forgetfulness.”9. “‘The tyranny of writing’, Saussure says elsewhere. That tyranny is at bottom themastery of the body over the soul.”10. “One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessnessof play, that is to say as the destruction of onto-theology and the metaphysics ofpresence. (...) The Phaedrus condemned writing precisely as play – paidia – and 226opposed such childishness to the adult gravity (spoude) of speech. (...) From thevery opening of the game, then, we are within the becoming-unmotivated of thesymbol. (...) The immotivation of the trace ought now to be understood as an operation and not as a state, as an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a givenstructure. Science of the ‘arbitrariness of the sign’, science of the immotivation ofthe trace, science of writing before speech and in speech: grammatology.”Once again seemingly counterintuitively, Derrida seeks overall to align writing with thebody (as opposed to speech’s marriage to the higher regions of ‘heart and soul’). This inturn helps to bring the critical thrust of his ‘grammatology’ into line with the long historyof philosophy’s rebellion against the culture of fear, repression and suspicion of the body,which philosophical orthodoxy itself has done so much to institute as one of the foundational principles of Western thought. In contradistinction to the voice’s heaven-bound propulsion – that which defines it as an instrument of what Derrida calls ‘onto-theology’ – writing,as an activity (operation, active movement) of the body, belongs to the sublunary, to theearth. Writing, in this sense, is not unlike walking – the body’s preferred ‘science’ of reminding itself of its own earthly embodiment (we always walk the earth, and really nothing else– such are the dictates of gravity): both are methods of tracing – arts of the trace.With this geo-logical ‘art of the trace’ we arrive, after the appropriately Derridean detour ofwriting-about-writing, at the ‘real’ scene of our present reflection – the (literally graphic) artof Batia Suter, more specifically her Surface Series project.Surface Series is a book of (found) landscape photographs – the nature of the landscape beingsuch that most photographs of it are aerial photographs, so they are also photographs of‘airscapes’ (and thus we continue the Derridean dialectic of celestial/vocal versus chthonic/scriptorial) – book-ended by two very similar images that mostly only differ in the darkness(or lightness) of their subjects’ surroundings. The first photograph is of a monstrous caterpillar vehicle plodding its way through an impossibly inhospitable landscape of endless pineforest and mud; the last one is of a vehicle very much like it, though this one is stuck in theblinding desolation of Antarctic snow. It is hard to discern anything like a human presencebehind the clogged, glaring windows of both trucks – the first picture seems to have beenmade in Siberia, the second was definitely made in Antarctica, and both could certainlybe called the world’s two emptiest places – and the book quickly reveals itself to be ‘about’human absence rather than human presence, or at least ‘about’ the traces left behind byabsent humans: one more reason why it may not, in retrospect, seem so far-fetched to inaugurate the current consideration of Suter’s work with a number of quotes from what Derridahimself conceived of as his most destructive critique of the age-old ‘metaphysics of presence’ (hence the tiresome charge of ‘anti-humanism’ in his work).Between both extremes of black and white and material resistance, a visual (prose) poem ornarrative of lines made by walking (the implied reference to Richard Long’s A Line Made ByWalking, just like Of Grammatology also from 1967, is very deliberate – and not just becauseit is the artist’s year of birth) and lines made by driving unfolds: of benchmarks, circuits,pathways and roads; tracks, traces and trajectories; scars and scissions; joints and disjunctions; erasures and imprints; formations and measurements; of ‘writing’ onto and into theearth’s crust, sometimes a mere jotting down of a fleeting thought, sometimes an elaborate,studied inscription on skin-like surface. Like other similar or otherwise comparable work inthis vein – let us call it an art practice overseen, in part, by the ghost of Aby Warburg1 – part(1) I should add here that Batia Suter’s previous large-scale photo-installation-turned-publication(perhaps it is the other way round?), Parallel Encyclopedia, was included in an exhibition curated by theundersigned at the Antwerp museum of contemporary art MuHKA in the fall of 2008. Entitled The Orderof Things – a reference to Michel Foucault’s eponymous study of the ‘archaeology of knowledge’ – thisexhibition also featured the work of artists such as Roy Arden, Luis Jacob, Peter Piller, Joachim Schmidand Steven Shearer, all of whom make ample use of found footage in their respective collage/montage 227of the pleasure of leafing through the book, ‘feeling’ its rhythm, or walking through theexhibition that this book has both been produced by and in turn become, resides in asophisticated kind of guesswork and the simple satisfaction of what the German tongue sobeautifully calls an ‘Aha-Erlebnis’: where are these pictures from, what am I looking at,where were these photographs taken, (strange) where have I seen this face before, why doesthis one particular image follow that particular other? Or, leading to the suspicion of sometraumatic charge or other, as in Walter Benjamin’s famed reading of Eugène Atget’s photographs of deserted Parisian streets: what (unspeakable crime) happened here? Whereas theactual answers to these questions (obviously) do not matter, the (more or less unconscious)guesswork that is folded into our aesthetic delectation of the imagery that triggers them – forthose pictures were naturally selected for aesthetic reasons – will inevitably lead to the spinning of certain associative tales, such as the one about human absence mentioned before.The juxtaposition of some images in this ensemble – a book always opens on two pages atonce, never more, never less – may thereby lead an impatient viewer to conclude that Suter’sSurface Series attempts to map out the grey zone where ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ become interchangeable quantities; as there are plenty of fringes and margins, border areas and peripheries or similar ‘interstitial’ spaces peppered throughout the book, it is indeed tempting toidentify this potential for confusion or ambiguity as one of the project’s governing heuristicprinciples. What is man-made, and what is not? Is geology, which could be called one of thebook’s iconographic subjects, the study of the earth before (or, better still, without) man, ordoes man himself constitute a geological force? Are natural phenomena eligible to the arthistorical status of ready-mades, or can this only be true of photographs of natural phenomena? Is the human passion for patterns naturally engineered (note the seeming oxymoron inthis formulation) or culturally determined? Are the Nazca geoglyphs, which do not featurein Surface Series (although I expect them to pop up at every turn of the page), the world’sbiggest visual poem? Where does ‘land’ end and ‘art’ begin?2 etc. The work’s virtue clearlyresides, in part, in the number of questions raised and left unanswered – the only image thatin truth seems to be missing from the book is not so much a Nazca geoglyph but a giantquestion mark seared in the earth’s unyielding crust.But let us return to the trace, so as to retrace our steps.When Jacques Derrida, in his Of Grammatology, readies himself to dismantle, once and forall (and he has been very successful in this regard) the formidable edifice that is the occidental tradition of a ‘metaphysics of presence’, he does so not merely to unmask its underlying“rage for unity” and totality as essentially totalitarian modes of thought – though this is ofcourse an all-important dimension of his singularly ‘anti-philosophical’ motivation – butalso with the debunking of the obsessive Western myth of origin (and originality) in mind.[“Where are you from? Where does this come from?” The answer is mostly the same: fromthe earth.] That so much of philosophy’s constructive energy should go into a destructivecritique of the interlaced mythologies of origin, unity and wholeness was of course onlypractices. Aby Warburg, whose work (and working method) has been the subject of a remarkably resurgentinterest on the part of visual artists in particular, in some sense acted as one of the project’s guiding spirits(although artists such as Tobias Büche, Geoffrey Farmer and Goshka Macuga, who address Warburg muchmore directly than the aforementioned, were not included in the exhibition). Another such spirit was thatof Michel Foucault himself; the title of the current essay is a reference to the first chapter of The Order ofThings, entitled “The Prose of the World.”(2) There are, of course, no images of Land Art projects to be found anywhere in Batia Suter’s fauxland-artsy Surface Series, though it is worth remembering some of the remarks of the movement’s most vocalproponent, Robert Smithson, in his essay “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” from 1968: “Theearth’s surface and the figments of the mind have a way of disintegrating into discrete regions of art. Variousagents, both fictional and real, somehow trade places with each other (...) One’s mind and the earth are in aconstant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought,ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits ofgritty reason.” Then, towards the end of this influential text: “a great artist can make art by simply casting aglance. A set of glances could be as solid as any thing or place, but the society continues to cheat the artistout of his ‘art of looking’, by only valuing ‘art objects’.”228logical, after a shell-shocked generation of philosophers had to take stock of the role thatthese very concepts had been allowed to play in the mid-century escalation of totalitarian ideologies in the former heartland of the European Enlightenment. And with the bittermemory of Martin Heidegger’s brief (and painfully unresolved) flirtation with NationalSocialism in particular in mind, it is also only logical that critical thinking had to vanquishthe looming spectre of origins first and foremost. (Second in line after the arch-Heideggerian question of origins was the ghost of totality or wholeness, against whom the testimony ofthe trace or fragment was invoked, cfr. infra.) Much of Derrida’s grammatological experiment revolves around the programmatic ‘forgetting’ of origins, and around the subsequentliberation of origin’s chimerical other, i.e. the trace. Here too, it is perhaps useful to remindourselves of some of Derrida’s utterances on the subject (the italics are, once again, his).1. “The trace is not only the disappearance of origin – within the discourse that wesustain and according to the path that we follow it means that the origin did noteven disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin,the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin.”2. “The (pure) trace is differance. (…) Differance is therefore the formation of form.”3. “The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying onceagain that there is no absolute origin of sense in general. The trace is the differance whichopens appearance and signification.”4. “Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious of thesubject.”5. “Within the horizontality of spacing (…). If the trace, arche-phenomenon of‘memory’, which must be thought before the opposition of nature and culture,animality and humanity, etc., belongs to the very movement of signification, thensignification is a priori written, whether inscribed or not, in one form or another,in a ‘sensible’ and ‘spatial’ element that is called ‘exterior’.”I conclude with this bizarre reflection on horizontality because it again leads us back toBatia Suter’s Surface Series (which, on the related note of the grammatological exterior/interior dialectic, does not seem to include any real interiors, moreover, and which is also atremendously silent affair): like writing itself, and although much of the views in it are seenfrom an Olympian ‘above’, this is a ‘horizontal’ art project – indeed, it is hard to think oftruly vertical surfaces (one cannot really write vertically: ink, like the very act of writing asthe casting – down – of thoughts itself, is subject to gravity3). Horizontal thinking critiquesvertical thinking as hierarchical thinking, if not onto-theological thinking (of a divine‘above’); in the psycho-geological terms of Surface Series, one could also conjure the naturalphenomenon of striation – of stratification. And finally: horizontal thinking is, necessarily,scattered thinking, or ‘rhizomatic’ thinking, in the once fashionable theoretical lingo ofyesteryear.4(3) Here, we should add that the aforementioned Parallel Encyclopedia is not just a book andassemblage of books, but also a table – that horizontal surface from which we eat and on which we write.(4) The geological metaphors of striation and stratification are central to the philosophical legacyof yet another French maître-penseur, namely Gilles Deleuze, whose ‘rhizomatic’ critique of ‘arborescent’thought – literally tree-like thinking, departing from roots (origins) to let its branches reach for the stars(transcendental concepts) – clearly echoes Derrida’s plea for radically horizontal thinking. Horizons as suchare in fact few and far between in the haptic kaleidoscope of Suter’s Surface Series, which I take to signifya symbolic acknowledgement of the ultimate impossibility of anything like the grand Olympian overview,if not an implicit critique of the pan-optic or panoramic. Though many of the photographs in the bookare of course taken from a great distance, the overall sensitivity to pattern that seems to have informedtheir selection suggests an interest in proximity rather than distance – looking at some of the grainy aerialphotographs that are assembled in Surface Series is not unlike looking at a patch of intricately woven fabricat close range, or at a microscopic life form at much closer range still.229And here, it seems, the hovering trace finally meets its maker – the fragment.Theodor Adorno (if I may be forgiven for ventriloquizing yet another dead Europeanphilosopher!) once famously remarked that “the whole is the false” – a reversal of an equallyfamous Hegelian quip stating that “the whole is the true”. Adorno’s truism can be foundburied deep in the pages of his Minima Moralia, a book first published in 1951. Althoughpredating Of Grammatology by some sixteen years, there is a notably Derridean quality atwork in this, Adorno’s most quotable collection of quotables. Indeed, it may have somethingto do with the writing’s tracing pace, a performative commitment to fragmentation as theonly way out of the quagmire of totalizing thought, the ultimate political consequences ofwhich were plain to see for anyone growing up among the ruins of two world wars. Now,since these books appeared four decades or longer ago, it sometimes seems as if the fragment and/or trace have become our only remaining reality – perhaps even our own onlyremaining totality. This, then, is the present-day whole: there is only scatter; there are onlyshards, the aerial view has long been lost – it only exists as a collection of, indeed, grainyblack-and-white photographs. Is that why we are so enamoured with the equation of modernity and antiquity? Is that why we love ruins (and the more modern they are, the better) somuch? Is that, finally, why the archaeological paradigm of digging, excavating and dustingoff, holds such immense appeal for all us inhabitants of a world we desperately want toexperience as ‘art’? For that is what archaeology does: it hands us only fragments and shards(‘traces’) where once, in fictitious geological times, there was – superficially – wholeness andone.