NON-TE XTS-IN-PHILOSO PHY Philosophy has always been preoccupied with the content and form of the texts its discourse produces, especially since the time it first felt its existence become threatened by modern empirical sciences. The perceived threat triggered defensiveness, which — whether it came from honest worry, career envy or visceral egotism — has resulted in an academic style that now seems to itself undermine the discourse from within. Form and content are now highly successful in slowly but steadily cleansing philosophy of itself.
Hard sciences needed a discourse that supports accessibility of data and methodologies, a discourse that ensures these methodologies are founded on firm grounds, a discourse that validates itself through an enforced hierarchy of previous findings, hypotheses and freshly proven theories. Such a discourse also needs and presupposes a uniformed, pragmatically structured writing style where aesthetic qualities are not only not an objective but are undesirable, i.e. considered noise. Eliminating this noise serves the purpose of reliability and efficiency but renders texts of the scientific discourse non-texts, and reading them non-reading. These quasi texts although at first resemble texts in their form — they are written in language, they have a title, they are composed of paragraphs, etc. — at a closer look they fail to live up to their definition once they are approached with expectations lifted from non-academic reading experience. In effect, one’s reader persona triggered by facing a linearly structured linguistic flow keeps tipping over whilst perpetually trying to manifest itself through the process of reading. Us, readers, are not present in academic texts, we are by the discourse’s and by our own design rendered pure receivers of the author’s intentions, which are in fact accordingly fully exchanged for the intentions of the data. Content is thus limited to be expressed merely through itself, and not through form, as formas-text by necessity gives its place to a form that cannot express content in itself and by itself. This limited form comes into being by forcing itself to make do without time and subtext; the former a tool of the reading activity, while the latter emerges through time the reader spends on constructing meaning. This new, empty, on its surface purely pragmatic form well delivers its promise, yet by intentionally not interfering with the explicit content of the text, it strangles itself into insignificance. Without time and subtext, the unfledged, limited form becomes what it had hoped to overcome; it itself becomes noise, an obstacle to understanding, negative space displacing potential meanings. This new noise forces us to constantly suppress our reader potential and keep our reading activity in check. We are
18