“One could therefore say, in an apparently paradoxical way, that the thing itself is precisely that which, while somehow transcending language, is nevertheless possible only within language and by virtue of language: the thing of language.”
Giorgio Agamben, The Power of Thought, Rivages Poche
Excerpt from Warmblood's Journal
Some sort of cave had appeared behind us. A moment earlier, I am certain, it had not been there. It is equally true that the previous moment had been exceedingly turbulent, and it is little short of a miracle that everything—the things themselves, time, the winds, the canvas, and our minds... above all Don Carrot's—had finally grown still. As though nothing unusual had occurred, and with that peculiar dignity which a stranger to our story might easily mistake for nobility, he resumed speaking with remarkable calm and precision.
— Beware, Warmblood, he said to me. It is difficult to believe... and yet... the circus and the rocks form a single whole, and there is danger in wishing to know that whole too deeply. The path leading to the subterranean sighs of the living earth is not the path by which one returns.
Don Carrot's naturalistic lyricism and his perception of the world as an organism forever in the making—as he conceived it: one immense living unity woven from history, fire, breath, and invisible currents—such, one might suppose, was what Warmblood could have said after reading what was written in Don Carrot's notebook... though truth obliges us, as well as the very few readers who may someday concern themselves with these pages, to admit that this was not, strictly speaking, what happened.
To begin with, Don Carrot's handwriting was utterly illegible. And had it been legible, it would almost certainly have remained incomprehensible. Except that, for reasons no less incomprehensibl, it was not... or at least not entirely, for Warmblood, who nevertheless could hardly, by any stretch of the imagination, have been described as an intellectual.
— It seems to me that I can discern a certain subtle truth—subjective, to be sure, as every truth is—in these writings... Yet I cannot shake the feeling that Don Carrot is withholding something from me. Certain signs suggest as much, though I cannot quite find the words for them; they emerge with curious regularity. It may also be that the depths of which he speaks—the depths of this island and his own—form, I fear as much as I secretly hope, one indivisible whole.
— Perhaps you know, Warmblood, to what extent we are saturated with images and narratives...
— You astonish me, Don Carrot! To think that these words come from you! From you, who are forever writing and drawing in your notebooks! I can scarcely believe my—
— Silence, Warmblood! To see what one believes is not to surrender to religious credulity or conspiratorial fantasy. It is to recognize that vision itself has already been structured, staged, and ordered according to a grid of intelligibility that we absorbed long before we ever opened our eyes.
Astonished, Warmblood could not resist interrupting.
— And conversely?
— Conversely, to believe what one sees is the contemporary form of submission to evidence... to whatever the image displays, whatever the statistic declares, whatever authority proclaims, as though every mediation had somehow disappeared.
— Evidence only deepens the distance between us, Don Carrot... It has become commonplace to say that we live in an age of "post-truth," as though truth had ever been that motionless rock against which thought simply collides.
— But truth, Warmblood—whether within regimes of knowledge or regimes of power—is always a matter of construction. The point is not to oppose falsehood to reality, but to understand how a visible order comes into being, one that, through sheer repetition, eventually becomes believable. An image is never a neutral document; it is a dispositif. Belief here is not a matter of conscious assent but of the world's implicit order. The child...
Don Carrot paused for a brief instant. A faint hesitation. Warmblood noticed it.
— There it is... he thought.
— Children... well... not all of them... in short, the child does not believe in school...
— Then what does he do?
— By necessity, he learns to believe in it by seeing what is presented to him as the true culture, the proper word, the correct position. The viewer believes a documentary film not because he is naïve, but because the film has successfully activated the signs of authenticity: the neutral voice-over, the absence of dramatic music, the grainy image. And the citizen believes in the legitimacy of power not because he has rationally examined its mechanisms, but because he believes what he sees on television, and sees what he has always believed to be the natural order of things.
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