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helen horgan
Helen Horgan is an artist and writer based in Dublin. She is currently enrolled in a Masters in Contemporary European Philosophy at UCD researching form and meaning in the work of Derrida and Wittgenstein. She is a member of The Writing Workshop and is co-founder of The Legs Foundation for the Translation of Things (LFTT) with writer and artist Danyel M. Ferrari (NY).

Helen Horgan, The Horses Mouths (20092011), mixed media installation, dimensions variable

The founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl believed our individual perceptions of things could be broken down in a way that revealed something simple and universal. As part of his phenomenological project of stripping away the veil of our natural attitude he required our intuitions to take a marked change in focus, away from the vagaries of the subjectively perceived instance and towards the essence that the instance exemplifies1. This is what he termed a process of eidetic reduction. The word eidetic at its etymological basis relates on equal terms to both images and ideas, stemming from the Greek

eidos meaning shape or form. Eidetic imagery however, although having on some level congruence with the things of the world, for Husserl is a product of consciousness. It is the minds direct intuition of something universal emanating from an instance of perception2. Because eidetic imagery is a product of our intuition perceiving something universal, that is, performing some sort of categorial analysis, it is taken by Husserl to be evidence of the reliable workings of consciousness reducing the complexities of experience to an ultimate simple. Since phenomenology is a science of phenomena and not things it brings

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From I to You
to light the debate regarding the relation between our perceptions and reality, and to what extent our mind might be constructing a vision of the world for itself. The question could be posed whether these perceived universals are merely a matter of things fitting in with our capacities for experience, or whether they are (as Husserl believes) a cognitive capability for receiving phenomena which emanate from the things themselves. A problem we are here made aware of is that there is forever a work of translation occurring between the mind and the world. We are moved to suspect (although we often dont reflect upon it) that our perceptions and ideas are of a wholly other substance to the matter of existence. The founding role of any language is to perform this work of translation and help bridge the gap between thoughts and things. When as children we first begin to learn our language we start by pointing at the objects that surround us, and are subsequently supplied with a corresponding name; such as ball, cup, spoon etc...but also hot!, hug and bedtime. In this way we start by perceiving singular instances and build up over time a memory bank of correlations between words and objects (objects in this sense also understood to be concepts, material qualities, or reoccurring events). Thus we can learn to expect the word bedtime to regularly refer to an event involving going-to-bed. At the same time with the help of the work of translation that language performs we dont further require having the object to hand (such as a ball) to understand the meaning of the word ball. (One of Wittgensteins curious examples is the notion of carrying samples of colour around in our pockets to be able to point to what red is.) We have moved from pointing things out in the room to recalling what that is in our mind. What that is, once it is removed from its originally learnt context is a tricky thing to ultimately define, and it is something that philosophers sometimes spend their lives toiling over. What famously divides various schools of philosophy is their subsequent alignment with either one of two branches of thinking; those that believe that all words can be said to point to something singular and universal, and those that believe a word will always mean more than one thing, that is the objects it refers to are irreducibly multiple and complex. In Italo Calvinos lecture series Six Memos for the New Millenium3 he suggests that a penchant for one way of thinking over the other might be a matter of personal disposition. The subject of the fifth lecture, Multiplicity, concerns writers who possess an encyclopedic nature; those that have a desire to systematize the world through language, to understand and pay homage to the subtleties of our everyday experiences. He introduces us to the writer Carlo Emilio Gadda who, he says wished to represent the world as a knot; to represent it without reducing its complexity.4 An engineer with an undisclosed love of philosophy he developed a style to affirm his elaborate style of thinking. Calvino tells us that Gaddas writing was determined by [a] tension between rational exactitude and frenetic distortion as [being the] basic components of every cognitive process At the same time another writer of technical-

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TITLE(basenine)

James Merrigan, GOTH-HEAD (in 2 parts) (2011) 2 part film, Part 1: 3mins 7secs, Part 2: 3mins, video, audio, subtitled text in Collegiate Font

scientific training, Robert Musil, was also caught between these two polarities, although employed a markedly different aesthetic approach. For him beauty lay in the mathematical world of harmony which he felt was frequently distorted by the imprecision of human affairs. Writing for Musil was a process of depositing all his thoughts into an ever expanding volume; his aim was ultimate order and classification, although the demands of his project were forever expanding beyond his reach. Both writers were made aware of the move between thinking and representing and the extent to which their deliberation could be causing a distortion. Whereas the passion for knowledge carries Gadda from the objectivity of the world to his own irritated subjectivity Musil manages to give the impression of always understanding everything in (its) multiplicity without ever allowing himself to become involved.

Gadda knew that: to know is to insert something into what is real, and hence to distort reality. From this arises his invariably distorting way of representing things, and the tension he always establishes between himself and the thing represented5. Husserls method of analyzing the conflation between consciousness and reality may have helped to highlight the link between thoughts and things but his phenomenological method curiously abstracted the first-person pronoun I; the pronoun for which Gadda explodes into a furious invectiveI, I!...the filthiest of all pronouns!...The pronouns! They are the lice of thought. When a thought has lice it scratches, like everyone with lice...and in your fingernails, then...you find pronouns: the personal pronouns Descartes Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) in the

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hands of Husserl became I think therefore there is thought. In an analogous way Heideggers da-sein as there-being is a move to find a way of standing beyond the first person pronoun: to translate a discourse born from personal experience into something more open and universal. But the doubling relationship between the singular and the multiple means that any move to encompass a totality is also a move towards self-annihilating abstraction. Calvino tells us how Flaubert declared in a letter to Louise Colet in 1852 What Id like to do is a book about nothing, and then went on to devote the last ten years of his life to the most encyclopedic novel ever written.6 Bouvard and Pcuchet, a novel about an epic voyage across the seas of universal knowledge in a quest to collate and catalogue everything, finally ends where they find themselves at the limits of translation, with an endless inventory of visions of worlds so contradictory that all hope of objective clarity is lost. Instead they resolve to end their days as scriveners copying out the words of all the books in the universal library. Should we conclude that in the experience of Bouvard and Pcuchet encyclopedia and nothingness fuse together?7 It certainly seems to suggest that the further our conceptions open to multiplication the more we erase the possibilities of arriving at a cohesive singular perspective. The famous explorer Jules Verne, Roland Barthes tells us, over the course of his travels constructed for himself a kind of selfsufficient cosmogony, which [had] its own categories, its own time, space, fulfillment and even existential principle. Barthes describes Vernes inclination towards ships and adventure as revealing a common delight in the finite, which one also finds in childrens passion for huts and tents: to enclose oneself and to settle, such is the existential dream of childhood and of Verne. 8 The image of ship here is that of a perfectly mobile finite space, where all the objects

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of our thoughts desire could be arranged within ease of reach. The greater the scope in circumnavigation the more we feel the embrace of its all-encompassing enclosure. In our quest to adequately capture our every experience and find a way of bridging the gap between words and things maybe the most daring adventurer would be one that follows the apostrophe in pointing to the land that lies beyond words, the space of silence, where the work of translation is forced to confront its impenetrable limit. Or maybe what in reality we would be doing in this instance is sending the words on ahead, beyond cognition, beyond adequation and beyond our desire to hold our own thoughts in our minds. As Barthes tells us; In this mythology of seafaring, there is only one means to exorcise the possessive nature of the man on the ship; it is to eliminate the man and to leave the ship on its own...The object that is the true opposite of Vernes Nautilus is Rimbauds Drunken Boat, the boat which says I and, freed from its concavity, can make man proceed from a psychoanalysis of the cave to a genuine poetics of exploration.9

1 The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy, Nicholas Bunnin and Jiyuan Yu, Wiley Blackwell, West Sussex, UK 2009, pg 201 2 Husserl makes a marked distinction between the terms perception and intuition but for the sake of ease of demonstration I have here conflated both terms. 3 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for The Next Millenium (Vintage Classics London 1996) 4 Ibid p106 5 Ibid p108 6 Ibid p113 7 Ibid p114 8 Roland Barthes, The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat in Mythologies (The Noonday Press, New York, 1972) pg 65 9 Ibid pg 67