Philosophers and madmen are probably the only ones with the habit of shouting into the void. Before you speak, you ought to know who you are speaking to; the first advice of writing – of any form of doing really – is to know your target. It is the direct way of assuring comprehension, digestibility, to link production with consumption, in short, to assure that what you’re doing makes sense. Philosophers – like madmen – pride themselves at being useless, of resisting immediate comprehension. This should not be confused, as Nietzsche insisted, with the opacity of muddy water. Still, the affinity of philosophy with indigestion, with reflux (thoughts going down and up the esophagus), vomiting even, cannot be denied. And it’s all due to that basic error that even the most pedantic writers will avoid making, of failing to consider one’s audience. It’s like a mania, as if the disappearance of one’s words in the abyss, the looming threat of silence, had become a source of pleasure. Philosophers love misunderstanding other philosophers; but it is in this institutionalised backstabbing and word-twisting that this strange flower blooms. More often than not, the pride of being incomprehensible is paid back with a refusal to read, as nobody feels addressed or “targeted” by these texts, thus most are more than comfortable to ignore them: a bunch of navel gazing nonsense with no ‘real world application’ written by who cares who for absolutely nobody.
This would be a mistake, however. It’s not a complicated point that a text produces the narrator that speaks it. When we read, bringing ourselves into relation with this message, the speaker of the message, the one who addresses us, is cobbled together and projected before us. The instruction manual, the menu, the newspaper, the blog, each and all constitute a position from which its narrator, formed by these signals, speaks. Philosophy is no different in this regard, producing its mad and frantic, slow and pondering, oblique and off-kilter elocutors. But philosophy, in speaking to seemingly no one, reveals a further truth: the audience itself is constituted by a text every bit as much as its narrator is. It is not only the case that we arrive at a text, and abracadabra up its narrator like a little homunculus to hear what it has to say, we also move ourselves to the place to where the message of the text is addressed. We are not the audience by default, we must become the audience. Thus, the structural positions of both narrator and audience are not given in advance, but both constructed by the text. Nietzsche of course, but Plato as well, knew this deeply. One doesn’t address an audience as a preexisting figure, one creates ones audience by affecting a dizzying transport in its readers. When reading, one goes to the place where Plato is speaking; on the dramatic level this is a conversation between friends and rivals, which one can eavesdrop on, and even silently interject. But this is the mere dramatization of the place where the audience is constituted, its empirical, aesthetic staging. The place itself is a particular vantage onto a particular set of concepts, situated within a horizon, a vantage offering novel relations of nearness, distance, clarity and obscurity among these concepts. These relations form the complex themes that circulate the play, and rumble beneath the masks of the actors and the positions of the audience, constituting both the sender and receiver of a signal. The sound of an ear, the appearance of an eye, the feeling of skin.
Philosophy is no way unique in this double constitution: it is a structural feature of all texts, the menu and the instruction manual included. It is just that philosophy makes this double constitution immediately apparent: insofar as it seems to speak into a void, we can catch its ‘audience’ at its zero point of constitution. It is struggling to construct its receiver. But unlike just any text, the construction of this receiver is an integral part of the machinery of philosophy: its explicit task is to create its audience, to produce in the reader a novel identity with novel thoughts and novel reactions who can rise to the task of thinking alongside the homunculus-narrator who speaks. The philosopher is the ‘friend of wisdom’, and it is peculiar but true that wisdom needs friends. Thus, it’s not philosophy, nor even madmen, that speak into a void. Their goals are the precise opposite: to constitute a listener, a friend, from out of that void. On the contrary, it is the tepid opinion piece that merely hopes to gratify its audience, the jokey commercial smirked at by everyone, or the easy-listening saxophone song of loquacious AI jibber-jabber, that truly speaks into a void; a friendless void that threatens to consume us the longer we effortlessly identify with it, hearing our name called in it, and feeling smug about being directly addressed.