1 LANGUAGE AS UTOPIAN MATTER

In this section I will set-out what I see as the general speculative direction that Bloch’s materialism provides for contemporary reflection on language. Doing this will help to refine the types of questions that I will then ask in the context of attempting to grasp the figure of anacoluthon as expressive of utopian matter’s open intending for consummation. From the findings of the previous two chapters, then, I think that a number of points may be made:

[1] In view of Chapters I and II, the nature of language must, I think, in the context of Bloch’s philosophy, be derived from the open logic of utopian substance. This entails that language must be seen as a mode or a moment of forward-directed process-matter. I explained in Chapter I that, according to Bloch, no mode of matter is solid in itself but is a ‘figure of tension’ or a mode ‘of tendency’ in the process of becoming to an outfall that is in itself not-yet (PA, p. 259). Thus it can be said that the manner of being of language is as one still moving mode of matter, a qualitative mode (a

moment) of the open process of utopian substance. As Bloch writes with

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not merely mechanical, space filling matter, but that which blossoms forth historically, as a realisation of the possible.’ (LE, p. 113)

One of the benefits of this approach to the materiality of language is its non- essentialism: the nature of language, the nature of its materiality, it not fixed as one thing or another, but remains open and augmentative of new forms of linguistic existence (indeed, I will read the figure of anacoluthon as that linguistic site ‘where meaning’s former context is split open’ [LE, p. 100]). Of course, it could be objected that a Blochian speculative-materialist account of language presupposes that language constitutes a mode of matter’s

Erlösungssehnsucht (longing for redemption), and that, insofar as this is the

case, so then this approach is essentialist on the site that language must become, at some point, essential in itself. In other words, it might be argued that the essentialism of Blochian materialism lies in its presupposition that some kind of essence is reached in the end. This would then reflect itself in the Blochian determination of language’s materiality. That said, the eventual determination of essence remains open, as does the goal-directed performance of musicians in the mode of improvisation.

To my mind, then, it is the case that, for Bloch, a utopian logic imbues both being and thought (LM, p. 451). And language must be defined by the same prospective logic. As an object of speculation, language therefore undergoes a similar re-conception as do being and thought under Bloch’s pen, such that language expresses the compositional structure of the ontology of not-yet being: Incompleteness → Process → (possibility of an) Outfall. The figure of anacoluthon will enable me to articulate the real presence of this open structure in that mode of utopian matter that Bloch calls language.

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[2] The types of questions that emerge from this backdrop would be of the sort: how can Bloch’s underlying notion that ‘the horizon of the future […] gives reality its real dimension’ (PHE, p. 285; emphasis removed) be brought to bear on a materialist conception of language? Where can ‘a day break, a movement forwards’ (Bloch, 1980, p. 48; emphasis removed) be discerned in language, and how would this be connected to the kind of concept of matter that Bloch proposes? If, as I have argued, Bloch’s materialist metaphysics can be said to rise in the West and set in the East; that is, rise with the aporetics of an ontological incognito and set—as a possibility—in the dawning “Is” as final union with itself, then how does language harbour this process of possible outfall? I have already explained that determinations of utopian substance are produced or generated in and through a processual searching and finding the What of the That; that matter itself, as Bloch understands it, is an open process of searching for its own essence (‘[t]he whole of being’, Bloch writes, ‘is an inquiry into its own meaning’ [LE, p. 98]). I also noted how this process, as one of searching for a fulfilment that is not yet given in itself, necessarily entails exodus forms; that is, it entails the creation of forms that have nowhere yet been brought forth into existence. Another question would therefore be: are, and if so, in what way, are exodus forms discernible in language? In other words, in what way is language a

process of searching for its own non-given essence? These are questions

that Blochian materialism provokes within the philosophy of language, and they are questions which that materialism also provides answers for.124

124 _{These types of questions arise from the unavoidable problem of how best to lend precision to the}

notion that language’s quiddity—to recall the That-What relation—is precisely a searching for its

quiddity. This is an important task to fulfil, because, despite Bloch asserting that ‘being is no universal

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[3] To conclude these preparatory remarks, I would like to return to the Introduction of this study and reiterate the whole purpose of my investigation; doing so in the light of the journey taken so far will help to reconfirm what is at stake in this final stage. Recall that my broad aim is congruent with Avanessian’s (2016, p. 204) intention to theorise, in the context of Bloch’s materialism, a ‘realist or materialist linguistics’, in which language is seen as expressive of ontology. My claim here is that, in the horizon of Bloch’s materialism, language becomes shaped by that of which it is a part, namely, the ontological composition of matter, and that, as such, language expresses this ontological constitution. As a consequence of this, language’s being of matter shapes language according to matter’s becoming

to what it is. Such is language’s ontological correlate, is what language is

expressive of. It is this—to borrow Avanessian’s terms—that is the ‘ontological thesis’ that language ‘always already’ contains: in the case of Bloch's philosophy, an immanent utopian knowledge of transcending in the real to what has not-yet become (ibid., p. 199).125

For just as there is nothing between heaven and earth that cannot be taken over by the

psychoanalyst and given a sexual interpretation, so too there is nothing which cannot be regarded as a Blochian trace, and this indiscriminate use of everything comes close to meaning nothing. (Adorno, 1992, p. 210)

It is not without significance, however, that Adorno reproaches Bloch for the abundance of utopian traces that the latter witnesses in the world—I believe anacoluthon is as good a departure point as any for thinking the materialism of language within Bloch’s philosophy precisely because, much like analogy, anacoluthon itself is a trace in Bloch’s corpus. In my mind, Adorno’s charge can only be countered by employing precisely the method Adorno is suspicious of. If Bloch’s materialism does consist of a monist account of matter, then, as I have hope to outline throughout this thesis, it must count as an open monism.

125 _{This is admittedly not an entirely original observation of Bloch’s philosophy on my part. Holz (1965),}

for example, follows a similar line of inquiry, arguing that Bloch’s metaphysical materialism shows how linguistic-temporal modalities have an objective basis in reality:

Language implicitly arises from precisely the presuppositions that are developed by the ontology of not-yet being: out of the nuance [Abstufung] of being according to grades

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In this chapter, I develop these insights by showing that speculation on anacoluthon (speculation in Bloch’s sense of the word) can help to show that ‘the capacities and mechanisms [sic] of language can capture its realist ontological dimension.’ (ibid., p. 200) And I will do so by exploring the materialism of language neither in the sign nor in the propositional form, both of which could be said to constitute products of linguistic productivity, but rather via syntax (or better, a break or rupture of syntactical normality), which could be claimed to constitute the process of linguistic productivity. But why begin with, and just what is, anacoluthon?126

§2. Anacoluthon as Starting Point

It is important to reiterate that much as Bloch does not possess a self- standing aesthetic theory (Jung, 2012, p. 670), so he does not provide his

of reality, out of the presence of “Not” in being, out of the anticipation for the future in the present. (ibid., p. 117)

However, Holz repeats a common feature of Bloch-scholarship in his neglect of the figure of anacoluthon as it is present in Bloch’s corpus.

126 _{The consequences of Bloch’s ontology could be explored for semiotics. For example, in following}

the broad epistrophic tendency of classical metaphysics, Peirce (1998) envisages the sign’s basic function as one of re-presenting an absent object. By virtue of Bloch’s materialism, Peirce’s theory of the sign and of referentiality would require fundamental modification, in that its semiosis is tied to what Bloch terms elsewhere ‘an archaising recourse’ to retrospection (EM, p. 158). In accord with Bloch’s materialism, a utopian-semiotics would base itself on, perhaps, “pro-spection” (in the sense of the Latin prōspectus, “outlook-ing”—recall Bloch’s approach to speculation, referring to its original root rather than to the later link to mirroring, “speculari”). What this would mean is that the referentiality of the sign is not a “not-any-more” but a “not-yet” (see Kübler [1975, p. 273]). The sign’s temporal direction (Zeitrichtung) is no longer seen as a harking back, but as a harkening forwards to what has not-yet been (destinatory, day break). A Blochian semiosis would be a semiosis of anticipation as opposed to one of re-collection. One could also explore the implications of Bloch’s ontology for re- configuring logical-grammatical and/or subject-predicate construction(s). It has been suggested that the conventional subject-predicate construction is coextensive with substance metaphysics (see White, 2014), and thus precisely the type of metaphysics Bloch is contrary to. Siebers has somewhat treated of this direction of travel, placing particular emphasis on Bloch’s category of the Novum:

We have to somewhat qualify the normal pattern of substance and quality, and hence also the normal pattern of the S-P structures of propositions, to articulate this point, which bears structural resemblances to the speculative proposition in Hegel as a unity of opposites. The new does not lie outside of the entity as in a synthetic proposition, nor does it lie inside the concept as in an analytic proposition (Leibniz), for it is the new of that entity, and yet it is “really” new—it means for the entity, a moving beyond. (2013a, p. 66; see EM, pp. 39 & 41, where Bloch himself touches on this idea)

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readers with an explicitly self-standing philosophy of language. What this entails is that, whilst of course staying as close to the corpus as possible (the materialist principle that one must explain the world from out of the world must be applied to the text in this instance), speculation on language in and through Bloch’s materialism must be exploratory; much like the principle of montage outlined in the Introduction, Bloch’s corpus here becomes ‘a kind of laboratory, an open experimental space’ (HT, p. 226) for the materialist philosopher of language. So much is this the case that my endeavour here could mirror the process of utopian teleology as outlined in Chapter I: the figure of anacoluthon is immanent to the open, intending logic of Blochian materialism. Experimentally probing Bloch’s corpus in the hope of arriving at, if not a definitive answer to my study-question, then an answer that brings something new to current debates.

In this spirit I will do two things in the present section. I will [1] outline my reasoning for taking-up anacoluthon as a starting point, which consists of two related points: (a) anacoluthon’s lack of reception in extant Bloch- scholarship and (b) the fact that—as already mentioned—this figure is a trace in Bloch’s corpus itself. Having established the merits of proceeding in this way I will [2] get to grips with what anacoluthon as a syntactical figure broadly signifies. From that stage on I will be able to outline, in the context of Bloch’s materialism, in what anacoluthon’s materiality consists.