Previous Installments
#1: Introduction, and On Sources.
Section V: Recurrence
To recur is to become present again: the representation of a theme or idea is its re-presentation in consciousness. Similarly, to recur is to occur again. This term signifies the phenomenon whereby an event is repeated. To recur, then, is to stand out again and also as foregrounded in relief against an existing scene, to become sharply visible in front of that relatively indeterminate background scene. “I encountered this theme before” is possibly one of the most productive moments in a meditative process. Once a theme recurs, it is encountered again in experience, and a thought process that started with a single text produces an offshoot in which an original exploratory process of meditation begins—but not from scratch. Once a theme or idea recurs, it becomes a new point of departure for thinking. Either it becomes a new, significant point of reference in its own right, or at least it becomes part of a broader context of ideas that spin out of the original text or work.
Sometimes, such themes surface unexpectedly as irritating grains of sand around which a protective tissue of rationalization and suppression accretes. At other times, one purposively produces variations on a given topic because it keeps occurring, thrusting itself forcibly into the centre of attention. When this happens, each time the topic is approached from a different angle it is experienced as a partial object, a selection from its many aspects.[i] It reveals itself gradually by continuously recurring and is uncovered by approaching it and experiencing its potentials in different contexts and chronological orderings.
Often, when a theme or idea recurs in thinking, it indicates a kind of unresolved tension, signifying how central this particular idea is in relation to the current line of thought. Every time it recurs, and one develops it, it is possible to add additional layers to its original meaning.
There is a close kinship between this approach and Peirce’s account of accumulating conceptual content.[ii] Growing and nurturing concepts in such a way accumulates meaning over time because their central logical or explanatory role is recognized again and again, and an initially embryonic idea proves its worth and resilience in different contexts.[iii]
Each new recurrent theme or thought becomes embedded in a new context: a context that is being modified through its very presence. But also, it is a context that was already present before the new representation came on the scene. This process has been called “differential repetition,” because recurrence does not produce duplicates, but instead a re-occurrence of the partially new within a given set of experiences.[iv] Merleau-Ponty described this phenomenon as “the writer constructing himself as a new idiom” in which recurrences take place. The author (or reader) reconstructs in the process of writing, reading or drawing what he perceives—and thereby he changes himself.[v] The thoughts and associations he forms turn on a few topics that recur and return by means of his attending to them.
Encountering a recurring theme can be a matter of noticing it as it enforces itself upon the perception, either by coincidence or through careful observation. However, it may also recur in a more diffuse manner, encroaching as a repeating pattern. On the one hand, it may become a leitmotif in thinking, or a point of departure in an unexpected manner, highlighting some of its different yet simultaneously present aspects.[vi] But on the other hand, a recurrence can be actively produced. When one writes, sculpts or sketches again and again, writing and re-writing takes place.[vii]
Thus, sometimes a recurrence is experienced as coincidental, sometimes its surprising presence is noticed through observation, and at other times it is the desired effect of a creative action. Once a work is approached anew or when it is “broken open” by subjecting its components to close scrutiny and transformation, its potentials often appear on the scene as recurrent, subterranean themes that well up to the surface.
Works that are used as point of departure for thinking are carriers of multiple meanings and many different types of content. Each attempt to rewrite, rethink, or redraw is an attempt at stabilizing some of its structural factors, while manipulating others. Such points-of-origin can be characterized as quasi-objects that are by definition unfinished, although some of their aspects appear more developed than others.[viii]
For instance, the composition of a building ensemble may be developed during a design process, while ideas about materialization are still relatively undefined. In this case, it is possible to refine an undeveloped theme by referring to the other, more matured parts of a design proposal. A similar case in a different mode would be the detailed exegesis of a philosophical text or extending some of its core ideas to show its contemporary relevance. The design theorist Donald Schön called this a “conversation with the materials of the situation”, although it would possibly be more accurate to say that often, creation consists in having intense, repeated exchanges with one aspect of the situation to illuminate others.
In the case of coincidental and targeted recurrence, the emergence of an idea in a context provides a novel creative impetus. Such differential repetition creates alterity (i.e., spaces of alternatives) in an exploratory process. Each series of recurrences may contain key moments that transform the understanding of the relation between idea and the process of meditation. The content that re-occurs determines new directions to explore. Taken together, a series of transformative moments trigger successive re-understanding of context and individual insights.
If a work is sufficiently shot through with differences, viable comparisons can be drawn. Each series of variations is an attempt to understand and develop an idea A in its entirety by representing it as a series of variations B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, C3 etc. The fact that individual signs (such as textual fragments, chapters, paragraphs, lines, spots, scribbles, sketches) can be reworked, revisited, rethought, and interpreted differently adds to their generative potential. The richness of the source material allows one to inhabit the space of thought (or space of experiences) that it opens up.
Texts and artworks like sculptures, paintings, sonatas and drawings may be “inhabited” and can be visualized as a plane or interactive context that can be interpreted and revisited multiple times. The iterative character of this “inhabitation” can lead to step-wise development of the various strata that make up this plane of recurrence. Through recurrence, a regimen of indicative and expressive signs is created that can be productively mined for new readings, developmental ideas, resulting in a renewed and deepened understanding.
Derrida speaks in this regard of the formation of a “fissure,” a rupture that creates an opening for new interpretations, according to what he calls, “the interval, the harsh law of spacing.”[ix] The spacing is in this case dual: first, it is a spacing of signs that create manifolds (or contexts), but second, it also implies a distance: each new version of a text is close to its predecessors in some sense, yet distanced from them in another. The spacing of alternatives or different versions of a work rearranges how it is understood.[x] In this manner, recurrence reforms the whole plane of understanding: comparisons and changes of perspective change how the themes are understood and re-understood once they recur.
The whole process aims at disclosing those features of one’s thought that are almost imperceptible: those aspects of an idea that must be developed to be fully understood, or that can only be understood through producing variations illuminating relevant “blank spots” in our knowledge about the idea under consideration. The whole range of outputs, ideas and scriptures that develops around a central issue is an “epistemic object,” an abstract entity that can be mined for insights.
When an idea recurs, one recognizes also that a text or work can be taken apart. One of its components is, as it were, highlighted and isolates itself from the background. There is a kinship here with the ancient Greek and Heideggerian idea of aletheia, truth as “dis-closing” or “un-forgetting.” The moment of recurrence opens up a new set of creative possibilities, that spur associative thinking, or, in a more formal mode, heuristic thinking. The possibilities for renewed understanding and/or development create moments of insight, as the possibilities embedded in a work come to the surface.
When recurrence happens, it often appears as a theme or topic that one cannot do without or that is impossible to pass. It positions itself within the stream of thought as an insurmountable barrier, or at least as an object that directs or re-directs the stream of thought. Its occurrence forces a movement of thought that might be experienced as enriching, irritating or both. In any case, recurrence has the character of something unavoidable—something that cannot be repressed but surfaces anyway.
A negative way of thinking about this is to see it as a symptom of circling unproductively around and around. An idea keeps occurring because the stream of thoughts leading up to it is essentially the same, and one is “going around in circles.” The productivity is negative in this case: the obsessive recurrence is a sign that one follows a track of thought that is wearing a groove into the landscape of understanding. Another way to say this is that the context becomes worn out by the concepts that occur over and over.[xi] Over time, this stratifies the landscape, constituting and pre-establishing the “perennial problems” of philosophy, and making it difficult to get beyond them.[xii] If the concepts and vocabulary that one uses to meditate are inherited, they recur in a new context or idea. Consequently, they have the power not only to stultify thinking in preconceived modes of thought, but also simultaneously to break long-established patterns of thinking.
The mode of recurrence is not always confrontational. Sometimes recurrences suffuse thinking, forming a diluted presence woven throughout experience. The fact that such recurrences are often contained in an implicit form in sources causes them to surface multiple times. One may think about, for instance, Kant’s moral and political philosophy, and then time and time again concepts like “duty” or “enlightenment” surface. As a central point of reference, they will always figure in thinking about this particular topic. In this manner, a recurring concept or idea serves as a reference point or mental beacon. It is an occurrence that one can use to orient towards or away from.
Not just individual themes of a given work recur—indeed the very obstacle of finishing an idea, or the nagging incompleteness of a problem may also recur. This thought is a central idea underlying negative dialectics.[xiii] Negativity itself is not a clearly demarcated phenomenon, but an underlying, silently persisting force working almost imperceptibly towards the foreground from out of the background.
As such, a new idea or text begs to be completed or at least changed to resolve the tensions inherent in it. This continuous experience of incompleteness is a creative impetus that stimulates thinking and that spurs development by alerting one to the “presence of absence,” as it were. Numerous alternatives, in the form of the thought “it could be otherwise,” impose themselves on the thought process. The presence of these alternatives presents a thinker with different configurations of ideas. Every time one has written a text, and one realizes that “it could be otherwise” insofar as different aspects of an idea recur as so many creative impulses.
And in this way, Nietzsche’s existential “eternal recurrence of the same,” which challenges each of us to affirm wholeheartedly and forever what simply cannot be changed about our lives, the static burden of the past, can be dialectically complemented by what we might call the creative thinker’s temporal recurrence of the different, the dynamic adventure of the future.[xiv] If the past is settled, the future is open. It necessarily offers possibilities for what Kant called a “free play,” thereby priming the potentials of human agency.[xv]
NOTES
[i] My sincere thanks to Charles Saunders for drawing attention to the fact that this text bears some close resemblance to Spinoza’s philosophy. In particular, Spinoza’s insight that substance can be experienced through (some of its) attributes in book I of the Ethics is a marvel of insight, making Spinoza an incisive philosopher of science and an early precursor to Object-Oriented Ontology.
[ii] See for an extensive discussion of this thought, see S. Haack, “The Meaning of Pragmatism: The Ethics of Terminology and the Language of Philosophy,” teorema 28 (2009): 9–29, at 15–17.
[iii] Or in establishing relations between different contexts. For instance, the concept of genetics neatly connected the domains of evolutionary biology, genetics, theories of inheritance, natural selection and biochemistry. One the central role of genetics is appreciated, the connections of this concept to each domain can be understood more easily, and the concept itself plays multiple explanatory roles at once.
[iv] For a full account of how differential repetition functions as generative principle in scientific practice, see H.-J. Rheinberger, Iterationen (Berlin: Merve Verlag, 2008). Note that Rheinberger’s approach is heavily influenced by the philosophy of Derrida and also the tradition of historical epistemology that developed in France during approx. 1900–1970.
[v] See, e.g., O. Paans and R. Pasel, “Drawing as Notational Thinking in Architectural Design,”in C. Storni, K. Leahy, M. McMahon, P. Lloyd, and E. Bohemia (eds.), Proceedings of DRS2018 4 (2018): 1474–1485.
[vi] C. Geldof and N. Janssens, ”Van ontwerpmatig denken naar onderzoek,” Achtergrond 3 (2007): 11–19.
[vii] For an extensive discussion of this process, J. Whyte and B. Ewenstein, “Wissenspraktiken im Design: Die Rolle Visueller Repräsentationen als ‘epistemische Objekte’,” in C. Mareis, G. Joost, and K. Kimpel (eds.) Entwerfen, Wissen, Produzieren: Designforschung im Anwendungskontext (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag 2010): 47–80.
[viii] W. Jonas, “Research for Uncertainty: Reflections on Research by Design,” in M. Buchert (ed.), Reflexives Entwerfen/Reflexive Design (Berlin: JOVIS Verlag, 2014), pp. 72–95, at p. 78.
[ix] J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G.V. Spivak (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997), p. 200.
[x] This thought leads to a kind of “local” coherentism. When all the versions of a work are seen as a mutually illuminating or supporting network of components, the whole truth of a work cannot be captured in a single version, making each artwork, text or work of architecture somehow incomplete. The other way of thinking about this is to say that therefore each work is infinitely open, and can be best understood through a “kaleidoscopic” point of view, considering multiple versions of one work when interpreting the final result.
[xi] The same point is well made by Richard Rorty in “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” New Literary History 10 (1978): 141-160.
[xii] Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have written this idea out in far greater detail in A Thousand Plateaus and named it “striated space” (Lat. striatum = stripe). The stripes or trails structure and determine the striated space. Examples are woven fabrics or architectural grids. In Seeing like a State, James C. Scott argues in a similar way that States inhabit a “God’s eye” point of view, neglecting details and personal lives in favor of an idealized structure. This is the projection of a striating structure on a smooth and undivided space—i.e. the social plane.
[xiii] See Adorno’s Negative Dialektik for a philosophical theory centred around non-identity. The dynamics of the dialectic as the presence of the negative are well described in C. Hubig, “Dialektik des Entwerfens,” in S. Ammon and E. Froschauer (eds.), Wissenschaft Entwerfen (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2013), pp. 274-276.
[xiv] My sincere thanks to Robert Hanna/Z for emphasizing this point to me.
[xv] This is a point that Nietzsche underlines in the second verse of a poem included in the Appendix to The Gay Science, dedicated to Goethe: Welt-Rad, das rollende / Streift Ziel am Ziel / Not –– nennts der Grollende / Der Narr nennts –– Spiel… (translation: World-wheel, the turning one / spawns goals every day / Fate –– sighs the yearning one / the fool calls it –– play). I use here the translation in F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. J. Nauckhoff and (of the poems) A. Del Caro, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001). However, this translation hides some alternative interpretations that seem to me closer to Nietzsche’s intentions. The German word “Not” does not merely mean “fate.” It also means “necessity” (as in “it is necessary to do X or Y”), or alternatively “being in trouble” (as in someone who is drowning). Thus, one mourns his fate because it cannot be avoided (since it is necessary, and eternally recurring) and also because it gives him the feeling that he’s drowning. A similar remark can be made with regard to the German word “Grollende”—this could mean rumbling, growling, or alternatively complaining. The word “yearning” catches some of this meaning but is too weak in conveying the lack of acceptance on the part of the person alluded to in the poem. The tragic character of existence is an insight in one’s predicament, the inevitability of it, and one’s inability to accept one’s fate. The fool is the one who sees the opposite side of this predicament: if everything is fated, then “all is permitted,” i.e., I am free to do as I like, no matter how horrible the deed. And that of course prefigures Raskolnikov’s tragic fallacy about the Nietzschean “overman” in Crime and Punishment, and Smerdyakov’s foolish fallacy about Ivan Karamozov’s Nietzscheanism in Brothers Karamazov.
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