Rice Pekinpah
I think that even though Meillassoux talks about the performance of Mallarmé’s writing, he never really thinks about the performance of his own writing. That leaves him in a weak place, because when you see what Meillassoux is doing as a performance, you could say that it is only another French philosopher talking about another French poet as the greatest thing that happened in the nineteenth century culture. Oh, the French! But I think the most important thing about Mallarmé’s work, and what I learned from Meillassoux’s decoding of Mallarmé’s work, was that it didn’t really matter if Mallarmé was French or not. The “wager system” of Mallarmé, his act of throwing himself into the ocean of posteriority, cannot be fixed inside one country or culture. Hell, it could have been some alien that wrote, found, and decoded his poem. What I am trying to say is that Meillassoux’s detective work is very thorough, but it has a hole precisely because it is thorough. The answer to the mystery that he finds can be put like this: 1) there is a definite answer that I discovered, and 2) there is no definite answer. But from what I understood, the absolute result of absolute chance is neither in absolute determinacy (of 707 or Meillassoux’s discovery of Mallarmé’s secret), nor absolute indeterminacy (of the complete meaningless of 706 or 705, or the possibility of Meillassoux not discovering Mallarmé’s secret). The answer is not split between an absolutely meaningful answer and an absolutely meaningless one. Instead, the answer is that there are, and can be, several meaningful answers and several determinacies.
Charles Baudelaire “The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays” Phaidon, 1995
Maybe 7 is much more meaningful then 707, or maybe the magic number is 700007, and maybe Meillassoux or any other person can find likely meaningful secrets in other artist’s work in other times and other countries. And if this is the true answer, then it opens up a new question: how to choose one determinacy over the other, and how to convey that choice in a convincing way to the readers. In this way we are back into the world of rhetoric, which is also a return to the world of “detective stories à la Edgar Allan Poe.” So maybe it’s all good, in the end.
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