Pure Texture: an internet book [under construction]




"Preface: A Manifesto on Reading Text(ure)" [draft] by Patrick Simpson


1: The End(s) of Everything: Differ(a)nce(-in-itself) and the Total Artwork [draft]

I have, unfortunately, attempted a Total Artwork. Pure Texture is the name of this text, but it is also, quite literally, everything for me. In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, artist Jenny Odell writes about Swiss curator Harald Szeeman's 1983 exhibition Der Hang Zum Gesamtkunstwerk (The Tendency Toward the Total Artwork):

"The artists he included in the Zurich exhibition ranged from very famous to obscure outsider artists, but they all had one thing in common: a total conflation of art with life, sometimes even an attempt to live one's art" (53).
What is Pure Texture? It is, in a word, what Jacques Derrida calls the "supplement." In Of Grammatology, Derrida makes visible a paradoxical quality in Jean-Jaques Rousseau's Essai sur l’ origine des langues ("Essay on the Origin of Languages"). Rousseau argues that writing is defined by the lack of the author's presence as embodied in their physical voice, and yet, Rousseau also observes that he feels more present in his writing. Derrida shows how this seeming contradiction is necessary:
"In the text it tells us what a text is, in writing what writing is, in Rousseau’s writing Jean-Jacque’s desire, etc. If we consider, according to the axial proposition of this essay, that there is nothing outside the text, our ultimate justification would be the following: the concept of the supplement and the theory of writing designate, as one says so often today, en abyme [literally “in abyss”—indefinite series of reflections as in a hall of mirrors—detail in coat of arms], textuality itself in Rousseau’s text. And we will see that the abyss is not here an accident, happy or unhappy. An entire theory of the structural necessity of the abyss will constitute itself, little by little, in our reading; the indefinite process of supplementarity has always already made a break within [entamé] presence, has always already inscribed the space of repetition and of the doubling of the self. The representation en abyme of presence is not an accident of presence; the desire of presence is, on the contrary, born from the abyss of representation, from the representation of representation, etc." ("... That Dangerous Supplement...", Of Grammatology trans. Gayatri Spivak 177)
Derrida's texts eat themselves alive, emerging from this "abyss of representation," from the "blind spot" of the text as a system of meaning. There is always a "differance" that escapes capture by language. It's this black hole-ish quality that makes Derrida a little scary as a thinker, his project of "deconstruction" often caricatured as an argument for nihilistic relativism. Derrida warns against this in Of Grammatology:
"This moment of doubling commentary should no doubt have its place in a critical reading. Without recognizing and respecting all its classical exigencies, which is not easy and requires all the instruments of traditional criticism, critical production would risk developing in any direction at all and would authorize itself to say almost anything. But this indispensable guardrail has always only protected, it has never opened, a reading." (172)
It's precisely this "moment of doubling commentary" that Pure Texture is interested in elaborating.

On the other side of Derrida's concept of "différance" is Gilles Deleuze's concept of "difference-in-itself," Derrida and Deleuze being the twin pillars of what's called "post-structural" thought. In Difference and Repetition (published a year after Of Grammatology in 1968), Deleuze develops repetition ("repetition-for-itself") as a concept that produces difference ("difference-in-itself"). While Derrida's project is concerned with the fundamental inability of any given metaphysics to ground itself---its "blind spot" being the inability of representation to represent itself to itself, so there's no possiblity of an entirely closed-off, perfect, self-sufficient system---Deleuze's project attempts to ground a renewed, constructive metaphysics on a positive concept of difference. Derrida's "différance" signifies what's always missing in any given metaphysical system; Deleuze's "difference-in-itself" signifies what was always already immanent, a positive concept for that which always escapes a regime of representation. I borrow this schema from Grant Maxwell, who dialecticizes the two in his Integration and Difference:
"Derrida and Deleuze, whom Lyotard aptly designated 'the two geniuses' of the generation that rose to philosophical dominance in the sixties in France, can be understood as writing at a liminal border between two epochs, 'suspended between two histories,' as Stengers writes, though whereas Derrida sees no viable way beyond the logocentric epoch’s closure, Deleuze provides an opening, a rift in the modern horizon, through which we can glimpse the exponentially wider world beyond that enclosure. Deleuze thus performs a central role in this narrative, enacting the forward-looking face of Janus, the two-faced Roman god, to Derrida’s backward-looking face. For integration, what is important in both Derrida and Deleuze, as in Hegel and Schelling, or numerous other dyads, is not what they deny, but what they affirm, which in Derrida’s case is the importance of the negative itself, a negativity beyond the negative, and in Deleuze’s case, among many other things, is the affirmation of difference, and thus the incompleteness and openness to transformation of any mode of thought, including the dialectic" (7).
The "hinge" between the two faces, as Maxwell analyzes, is the Hegelian negative:
"In my reading, Deleuze’s only major 'blind spot,' to employ Derrida’s term, is his reading of Hegel, which, although it contains an important critique and extension of Hegel, goes too far in a sustained argument which can be shown to deconstruct itself. And, without going into the details of this complex operation at this stage, the deconstruction of this one aspect of Deleuze’s work may serve to liberate the vast multiplicity of concepts he creates from this extraordinarily complex weight, this weighty complex, which in turn may allow Deleuze’s thought fully to inhabit a novel mode after the 'postmodern' rather than remaining with one foot in this liminal border and one in an emerging mode, necessarily carrying the deconstructive mode as a constitutive element in this novel mode’s emergence. In turn, I will suggest that, although Derrida is affectively prohibited from entering this promised novel domain, he sacrifices this possibility in order ultimately to serve as the 'conceptual persona' who provides the element missing from Deleuze’s thought, offering the gift of a potential integration of Deleuze with that which he denies, namely the Hegelian negative, which may constitute a necessary step in allowing us collectively to make the transition into this novel domain, this 'new earth,' rather than ambivalently lingering at the threshold" (7-8).
Pure Texture is an attempt to step onto "this 'new earth'"---in particular, by climbing the dialectical ladder laid out by Maxwell to reach subtler and subtler forms of difference.

Pure Texture is an ethical project intended to maximize difference, which is to say, this is a text intended to maximize freedom, both for readers and for me, Patrick Simpson, the real human being sitting here at his keyboard. Like Derrida's "Outwork" "preface" to his later book Dissemination, this "preface" is intended to make visible the paradox at the heart of writing, especially writing that pretends to complete a text by commenting on it from a position somehow "outside" of the text itself. I will elaborate the praxis of Pure Texture: a praxis based around the "text" as a singularity to be infinitely repeated, and the "reader" and "writer" as loci of absolute difference whom can only ever encounter, truly "touch" one another, through this medium of the text.

"Texture" is a term I intend to carve a "middle path" between Derrida's negative "différance" and Deleuze's "difference-in-itself." Texture is something that is, first and foremost, felt: it is wordless sensation, affect. I define a "text," then, as the coherency of a discourse that might be constructed from this pure affect: a reduction of affect into what we might call, with all the necessary post-structural trepidation this term calls for, "meaning." The "middle path" I intend to carve wants to emphasize Apollonian "meaning" as much as it emphasizes the Dionysian multiplicity of affect. There is an excess of texture that always escapes the bounds of any given text, but a text can also always be discovered or constructed within texture. Taking a page from Francois Laruelle's book, texture has a fractal shape. "Pure texture" is to be taken in the same sense as Deleuze's "pure immanence," as described in his final essay, "Immanence: A Life:"
"We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss. It is to the degree that he goes beyond the aporias of the subject and the object that Johann Fichte, in his last philosophy, presents the transcendental field as a life, no longer dependent on a Being or submitted to an Act --- it is an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers to a being but is ceaselessly posed in a life. The transcendental field then becomes a genuine plane of immanence that reintroduces Spinozism into the heart of the philosophical process" (Pure Immanence 27-28).
Pure Texture makes the mistake---the essential error, I hope---of taking Derrida's famous line, "There is no outside-text," as literally as possible. What if, as Zadie Smith ends the story "Kelso Deconstructed," "ALL THE WORLD IS TEXT"? At the end of this brief, self-aware narrativization of the last few days of Kelso Cochrane's life, "a young Marxist in dark glasses" passes out newspapers printed with this "brazen headline" at Cochrane's funeral.
"The time for transforming a dead man into words, into argument and symbol and history, this moment will surely come, but the mourners think it in bad taste that this young Marxist should ever have come here this morning, to the funeral of Kelso Cochrane."
Through this character, Smith admits to her own implicit exploitation of Cochrane's murder; of course, with the story itself, she has "transform[ed] a dead man into words, into argument and symbol and history." Smith carves a beautifully careful "middle path" throughout the story, humanizing Cochrane as thoroughly as she makes him into an abstract figure and symbol. The story is---and I mean this as the highest possible praise---tasteful. It has as much respect for Cochrane's irreducible humanity as it does for the necessity and inevitability of narrativizing, interpreting, generalizing from his murder. Cochrane was simply a man, but his murder was also the expression of a "deep structure:" "a form of tragic verse in which the slaughtered man is a kind of object and only the poet keeps his proper name" (196).

I didn't know about Kelso Cochrane before reading this story from Smith's collection Grand Union. I bring the story up to highlight the political stakes of what I'm attempting with Pure Texture. To have a proper name is to be recognized as a singular human being, irreducible to anything else except that name: Kelso was Kelso, not anyone else, and his one life was violently cut short by a man who could not or would not conceptualize him as anything except a "Black, Spade, Colored," names which, as Smith observes, do not name Kelso but rather "a certain kind of malignancy in the brain of Patrick Digby, the poet-murderer, whose name, like all proper names, describes him perfectly. Patrick Digby was the man capable of thinking that way and of writing this poem" (196).

You are who you are, which is to say, you are only ever what you do, the proper name simply identifying you as This Person, not That Person. To dehumanize is to reduce the singularity of a proper name to an abstraction, a sameness: Digby's "Black, Spade, Colored," or, the narrator's own description of Kelso as "the slaughtered man." It's clear, however, that "slaughtered man" is the more relevant abstraction---the fact that Cochrane was a man slaughtered not as himself, as Kelso, but as a "Black, Spade, Colored," is what makes him, "contra the poet-murderer Patrick Digby... precisely everybody's business [emphasis mine]" (197). The young Marxist who "wants to insist on relation" might be in bad taste, but he's not wrong: "To be noted is the great mix of people, black and white, young and old, men and women, as if they were all somehow in relation to it" (197). We are all the same in precisely this one respect: we are not objects. We are only our names to the extent that those names signify precisely nothing, nothing except for the fact of the proper name itself: that "Kelso is Kelso," "Patrick is Patrick." (I should note that it's a coincidence that I share a name with the "poet-murderer.") To be granted a proper name is to be recognized as a subject as such. It's the absolute identity of the proper name that grants one the privilege to be absolutely different to oneself; if I am always Patrick Simpson, Patrick Simpson can be anyone. I'm a pure subject. At the same time, it's this absolute freedom that means that I'm only ever what I choose, through my actions, to become. Patrick Digby chose---in a moment of drunken violence, which Digby, in his witness statement (quoted as a "poem" in the story), says was not unusual in his neighborhood---to become a murderer. He chose to make Kelso the object of his violence. He chose to take away someone else's choice of what to become. To be a pure subject is to have absolute power, absolute freedom: you can write the world, make it into something of your sole authorial fashioning.

This is merely to draw out the full implications of what I mean when I say that Pure Texture is intended to maximize freedom. The other side of absolute freedom is absolute negation: quite literally, death, murder. In Hegel's dialectic, consciousness only becomes free to the extent that it's willing to stake its own life in a struggle against an Other---to be absolutely free as a subject is to regard one's freedom as higher than one's own life. Derrida describes writing as a kind of "violence:" to assert one's irreducible presence in the world is to change it, do violence to it. We will not pretend otherwise and exempt ourselves from our responsibility as absolutely free agents.

Writing, however, is a particular kind of violence, only ever asserting its presence to the extent that a writer or reader actualizes it by writing or reading it, respectively. In this sense, writing is most keenly a violence against the writer's own embodied presence in the world; in writing, the writer admits their failure to embody themselves as themselves in the world, a world of ceaseless action, change, difference, movement---they admit that their only power is to exempt themselves from embodiment in this world. Writers---and artists more generally---admit, through their chosen vocation, that they can only become themselves through their own self-effacement. To make art---to fill one's life with the creation of dead objects, texts---is the ultimate weakness, but it is also only through this weakness that art is able to assert itself as the most absolute power. This is the basic premise of Pure Texture. It is also the conclusion of Hegel's dialectic, which is essentially Christian. The image of the crucified Christ---darkness descending over the land, three hours passing before he finally curses his creator, crying "My God, my God: why have you forsaken me?"---is the ultimate religious icon for representing the weakness of the individual human body in the fact of its existence as a material, manipulable object in the world. But I would like for Pure Texture, and for this "Preface," in particular, to be taken more along the lines of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, replacing Christ with Nietzsche's preferred idol, Dionysus, and simply saying to you, the reader:
"Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else" ("Preface," Ecce Homo 217).
It is unfortunate, then---but also, inevitably, my own choice---that Pure Texture is my best attempt at a Total Artwork. It's a Total Artwork in that I have attempted to read the world as text---not just as some artificial conceit for the purposes of this particular text, but quite literally in my own daily life. If we follow the model of Derrida and the other post-structuralists, it's clear that the act of receptivity that is reading is just as much a constructive act as writing. I have attempted to slice, like a knife, through the world [cite the Woolf line that Deleuze likes about slicing like a knife through the world], by reading it as much as I write it: to find the point at which the repetition of the act of reading coincides with the difference imposed by the act of writing. To become only what is necessary for the world, for the world read as text, like how Kurt Vonnegut describes his writing practice in the preface to Welcome to the Monkey House [can't find book now; he describes becoming only what seems necessary for the text; also describes being at his happiest while floating downstream in a river]. This is to say, I have attempted to construct as coherent and integrated a system of meaning as I can from my lived, embodied, multiplicitous experience, and to express this integrated system as fully as I can in the writing of this text. In other words, I have attempted to come as close as possible to closing Derrida's "blind spot." If Pure Texture is a success as a text, it should dissolve into the text of the world. It seems to me that this is what I ought to be doing with my limited time in my "one wild and precious life." With this "Preface," I hope to elaborate, in the strongest possible language, precisely why. To justify my existence. In short, I follow the formula that to read a text is to submit to its irreducible singularity, its irreducible difference---to feel, as fully as possible, the "texture" of it---and to construct from that pure affect a coherent discourse, which is to say, to imagine the text not as an object on which to impose my will, but as the creation of a subject not unlike myself. It is this latter act of constructing the "meaning" of a text that I would call, in the end, an act of love.

Pierre Menard becomes more himself, and decidedly does not becomes Cervantes, when he authors a text identical to Cervantes's Don Quixote in Borges's famous short story. As Deleuze writes in the Preface to Difference and Repetition:
"In this case, the most exact, the most strict repetition has as its correlate the maximum of difference ('The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer...'). Commentaries in the history of philosophy should represent a kind of slow motion, a congelation or immobilisation of the text: not only of the text to which they relate, but also of the text in which they are inserted - so much so that they have a double existence and a corresponding ideal: the pure repetition of the former text and the present text in one another" (xxii).
This "Preface" is my best attempt at such a commentary. To be continued (perhaps indefinitely)...

---4/3/2026 (Good Friday)

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Texts cited on this page

  1. Jenny Odell, "The Impossibility of Retreat," in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Melville House, 2019). Print book, paperback; own copy.
  2. Jacques Derrida, ". . . That Dangerous Supplement . . .", in Of Grammatology (Fortieth Anniversary Edition) trans. Gayatri Spivak (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Pdf download from Anna's Archive.
  3. Gilles Deleuze, "Preface," in Difference and Repetition trans. Paul Patton (Columbia University Press, 1995). Pdf download.
  4. Grant Maxwell, "Introduction: Turning Deconstruction on Its Head," in Integration and Difference: Constructing a Mythical Dialectic (Routledge 2022). Pdf download.
  5. Gilles Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life," in Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life trans. Anne Boyman (Zone Books, 2001). Pdf download.
  6. Zadie Smith, "Kelso Deconstructed," in Grand Union: Stories (Penguin, 2019). Print book, hardback; local library check-out.
  7. Jorge Luis Borges, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" trans. Anthony Bonner, in Ficciones ed. Anthony Kerrigan (Grove, 1962). Print book, paperback; own copy.