Nilling: Prose

by Lisa Robertson

Nilling: Prose is a sequence of 6 loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading.

I have tried to make a sketch or a model in several dimensions of the potency of Arendt's idea of invisibility, the necessary inconspicuousness of thinking and reading, and the ambivalently joyous and knotted agency to be found there. Just beneath the surface of the phonemes, a gendered name rhythmically explodes into a founding variousness. And then the strictures of the text assert again themselves. I want to claim for this inconspicuousness a transformational agency that runs counter to the teleology of readerly intention. Syllables might call to gods who do and don't exist. That is, they appear in the text's absences and densities as a motile graphic and phonemic force that abnegates its own necessity. Overwhelmingly in my submission to reading's supple snare, I feel love.

Genres: Essays, Poetry, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory

87 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2012

Reviews

[Luna Miguel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hermosas imágenes sobre el acto de leer.

«Reading in the dark: Here is the acutely sought ruin of identity. Reading begins in me an elaborate abandonment. Desire and identity are not the same. At times it feels like desire displaces, or replaces, identity. Perception retreats or rather turns towards this dark interiority that isn’t my own. The codex continuously transforms desire and this has become a life».

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 5 out of 5]

30 pages in and I already give it five stars and thirty five dolphins eating Tom Cruise. Sorry, Not Sorry. Sun, No Sun. Ugh, my lift shattered into new life.

[Frank Keizer · Rating 5 out of 5]

These 'prose essays on noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporia's' deftly weave together a set of concerns - the nature of time, politics, humanity and animality, the city, the way we deal with our surroundings -that are deeply engaged with historically and textually and at the same time esthetically explored in rich and innovative ways. In a manner reminiscent of Lucretius, Deleuze and Leibniz, the prime philosophical tradition that nourishes this little book, Robertson collapses the distinction beween perceiving and thinking, continually folding her sentences into ever richer textures and densitites, reaching a form of critical thought that perennially stays in motion, in the present. I think I'm in love with Lisa Robertson.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

My only qualm insofar as this brief novella is concerned is Robertson's essay on noise (i.e. atonal music) -- I found it disruptive and disparaging, in that it required the constant interruption of my reading for the purposes of listening to lengthy noise works. It felt indulgent of said writer, and I found myself disgruntled with what would otherwise have been a blemishless work.

[Alan Reed · Rating 4 out of 5]

the review I wrote for Lemonhound:

Nilling is a book about books. It is a book about reading and a book about thinking, because for Lisa Robertson the two cannot be so easily teased apart. And it may be a stretch to say this, as it is a book about a great many other things besides, but alongside all those other things there is this thread to do with reading and thinking and reading as thinking running through the book—the kind of thinking at work in the act of reading and the possibility of that way of thinking carrying itself beyond the page.

To put it another way, it is a collection of six very distinct essays that range widely in terms of subject matter. The collection begins with two essays on reading: the first, “Time in the Codex,” is a lyric exploration of the act itself. The second, “Lastingness: Réage, Lucrèce, Arendt,” begins to elaborate the idea of reading as a way of thinking.

For me, this second essay is the heart of the book. It is here that she works out what she understands reading to be. In these pages it becomes a practice of profound openness. It is, first of all, a disciplined putting aside of the self, and the act of reading a way of allowing something else to settle into its place. This is the openness. It is an intimacy, an act of allowing another’s language to settle deep inside you, to mingle with your most delicate parts. It is an encounter with something unfamiliar, something strange, something new to you. And it is a secret. It happens away from the prying gaze of the world and in this there is a freedom. There is no expectation of what it should be, no practical use it is bound to. In the act of reading there is the opening up of a foreign and alien place within which something else is possible, something that can only reveal itself a step away from the world and only if you are willing and able to receive it from the text.

(It is worth mentioning, as an aside, how she works out this understanding of reading. It comes from placing the way that she reads alongside Hannah Arendt’s understanding of thinking, but to say this overlooks something crucial about what she does. For the act of reading that she passes through Arendt’s writing on thinking is specifically a reading of Lucretius’s De rerum natura and Pauline Réage’s Histoire d’O. There is something of Lucretius’s stoicism that inflects Robertson’s reception of Arendt, and then to elaborate what that leads her to she turns to the masochistic fantasy of Réage’s novel and the pleasures that animate it. There is a performative element to this book: it is important that the book does the thinking that goes into it, that we can see something of Robertson’s process happening on the page.)

There is a passivity that is crucial to how Robertson understands reading, a capacity to put aside the will, to let come what comes—in a word, this is the ‘nilling’ of the book’s title, an archaic word that is an antonym of ‘will.’ Paradoxically, this is a willed passivity insofar as reading is a deliberate act. I would say that it is this paradox at the heart of reading that is the question the book revolves around: the question of whether or not it is possible to think of receptivity as an act, and what it then becomes possible to do if receptivity can be rethought as an act.

Robertson writes: “Then, insistently, I cross the page to face the next sentence. Will is one of reading’s motions. And since this is so, and since I also experience reading as a posed receiving, a cognitive stance towards reception, combined with an ideal stillness of the body, I want to ask—what is the relation between passivity and will, within cognition? It is not oppositional, I think, but a fully implicated, mutual relation.” (p.26) There is a sense in which what the book does is elaborate what that relation is and what it is possible to do from within it.

After placing this paradoxically receptive act at the heart of reading, the book changes course slightly. Its scope widens. Over the next three essays—”7.5 Minutes for Eva Hesse,” “Perspectors/Melancholia,” and “Disquiet”—Robertson turns her attention to the question of the receptive act more broadly. She settles into sculpture and the phenomenology of the city in ways reminiscent of how she has thus far settled into books, and there is an essay that uses melancholia to more deeply probe the way of thinking implicit in this understanding of receptivity. There is, of course, more to these three essays than this, and each deserves more attention than these passing remarks. Each deserves to be addressed individually, in its particularity. There is a depth to each of them that I would dearly love to settle into and let play out in these words. For now, I want to speak to them as I have—distantly, as a whole, to understand how each fits into the overarching structure I see running through this book.

(There is something curious to how Robertson narrates this broadening of scope. There is a palpable lack of description—she does not describe Eva Hesse’s sculpture or Eugène Atget’s photographs when she discusses them, at least not with the same loving attention she pays to her copy of Hannah Arendt’s The Life of the Mind, the “softening beige 1978 paperback from Harcourt Brace, bought second-hand, and scattering from its pages yellowed Vancouver public transportation receipts.” (p. 24) (I have a similar fondness for the paper ephemera generated by the Vancouver transit system, despite not ever having lived there.) The mention of the physical book itself, the significance she insists upon for its materiality, is a fantastic touch, one that reinforces the performativity I mentioned before. It brings us to the scene she speaks of by reminding us that we are already there—we, too, hold a book in our hands. We are reading.)

In the last, untitled essay of the book Robertson speaks to what is at stake when we speak of poetry, of reading and writing. She imagines a way of speaking to one another that extends the openness she attributes to reading to the social sphere: a way of speaking in which we remain open and receptive to one another and ourselves, in which we make of language what we need it to be to place ourselves where we want to be in the world. It is an image of language that is fluid, responsive, constantly being reinvented to map ever closer to the contours of our lives. I say an image, not a description, because there is something utopic to what she writes about language. She is writing about a way of speaking and a way of being that is waning. It is being replaced with a different understanding and use of language, one that speaks in precisely defined words, whose poetics articulate around principles of limit and control. It is a rigidly categorised mechanism designed to quantify, regulate and subordinate to a specific political ideology. It is, in a word, the poetics of neo-liberalism, which is to say of capital: “Now language and money circulate using the same medium, a grammar which is digital, horizontal and magnetic, and politically determined. Maybe all language will be eventually administered as an institutional money: a contained and centrally monitored instrumental value.” (p. 78)

Facing this reduction of language to the ideology of capital, it is poetry that she finds hope in. It is poetry where there is still the possibility of imagining language differently, and it is by reading that we bring the possibility of that freedom into our lives. The practice of reading she has spent the book developing, sometimes subtly, indirectly and sometimes overtly, finds its reason here. Reading as a receptiveness to the radical otherness of the text now becomes the possibility of hope: it is a way of keeping alive the possibility of imagining another way of understanding the world and being in it. For Lisa Robertson, this is what is at stake in this book—or perhaps I should say in the book and the practices of reading that draw us into them.

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

An artefact of a different life, I am positive this has sat in various boxes and shelves of unread books since around the time of it's publication, which is the last time I can picture myself being interested in it. I came to it today in my effort to cleanse myself of years of guilt for unread owned books, and thoroughly did not like it. Though, I have given it three stars because the things I do not care for are inherent to the project that it is trying to do, and not the work itself. That work is best in the quotations and summations of other books that are probably more worth reading, though the poet's soul of the author does occasionally come out and that is what kept me going.

As with the majority of philosophy and criticism in the continental tradition the points made, when they are made, could have been made more simply and in a more concise manner. Firmly would not recommend.

[Isai Soto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robertson completely undersells herself as “attempting to describe” while she consistently provides clear examples of her concepts. Great writing, at times a little La La La laaaaaa, but very good nonetheless.

[Hillary · Rating 5 out of 5]

enjoyed very much! adding a soundscape to poetry is pretty cool

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

often i felt i warent getting it ... and yet i do think i got some its after all!

[Brian Alarcon · Rating 4 out of 5]

So heady. Did I even understand it? No. Did I enjoy it? Sure.

[Cléo]

so good and exciting omfg

[Abbas Zaidi · Rating 2 out of 5]

The expression "neither head nor tail" applies to this book. A postmodernist mumbo jumbo. No more.

[Jacob Wren]

Lisa Robertson writes:


In Kants words:

The light dove cleaving in free flight the thin air, whose resistance it feels, might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space. Just in the same way did Plato, abandoning the world of sense because of the narrow limits it sets to the understanding, venture upon the wings of ideas beyond it, into the void space of pure intellect. He did not reflect that he made no progress by all his efforts; for he met with no resistance which might serve him for a support, as it were, whereon to rest, and on which he might apply his powers, in order to let the intellect acquire movement for its progress.

I read Kant's casting of resistance or contingency as rest or support, necessary to movement or change, as a minimalist fable about the sociality of intuition: Nothing is represented to and for the intuition which has not met with the sheer resistance and partial histories of unpredictable bodies.

[Bill Brydon · Rating 5 out of 5]

"No binary is implicated. Neither individual nor instrumental, the linguistic aptitude accompanies the beginning of humans as a collective nature through which each subject, uttering “I,”“you,”“we,”emerges and survives or perishes. Any subject is supported, spoken, and carried or disallowed and foreclosed by others, in a matrix of reciprocity, empathy and power that conditions the very possibility of embodiment. As soon as she speaks and names, the political subject emerges. Her agency is a verbal one; architecture and governance can only interpret, fix or abstract the fluency of the linguistic given."

[Erin Lyndal Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have long wanted to read this and am finally getting around to it. This is an extraordinary book. Robertson is so very precise with her word choices, and I simply love the way her mind works. I also love the attention she brings to the experience of being a reader. I still have a few essays left, which I will surely relish.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

More dense & thought-provoking prose from the inimitable LR. I especially loved the presence of LR as a body in these essays, as opposed to the even-more-beautiful, but less personal, 7 Walks. And the last, untitled essay, is brilliant.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sooo loved this book, loved, that is, being "in company," because reading Roberston is like taking a walk w/ Janet Cardiff...--intimate and expansive, exploratory and exciting!