Dividing Zero: Beholding Nothing

IT'S HARD TO IMAGINE THAT NOTHING AT ALL COULD BE SO EXCITING, COULD BE SO MUCH FUN.

— Byrne (Talking Heads), "Heaven"

6/1

How is it possible to write about nothing? Only by forcing it into one of something's categories; by turning it inside out so that its contours might become visible; or by clothing it in vapid vestments that pretend to show what they in fact disguise? If we begin by defining nothing as something that does not exist,¹ then nothing has already been negated on at least two levels: such a definition turns nothing into its ontological opposite (something) and then annuls its existence. In order to attempt to grasp, hold, pin down nothing, the grammatical subject of its definition must already be assumed to be the opposite of what is being defined. From this perspective, nothing can only be understood as the negation (does not exist) of the negation (something); it is rarely defined in terms of its own ontological categories. We can thus only approach the always already impossible task of writing or representing nothing by inverting the ontological categories governing such a definition and writing about nothing that does exist, nothing that is.

As long as nothing is put aside by thinking of it as something—which is to substitute it with a defined opposite—and then eliminating it as an object that exists, we cannot reflect on nothing on its own terms, cannot think of it seriously as nothing that is, as nothing that is open to the potential for engagement. Can we simply regard or behold nothing instead of trying to grasp and hold it? Can we experience nothing as both emptiness and plenitude? If nothing can be thought at all, it might be by means of a paradoxical poetics that necessarily questions its own enterprise—a poetics that tries to perform nothing, to produce non-meaning, but that cannot seem to escape asking for the meaning of that absence of meaning; a poetics that insists on nothing as an object of perception (and does not try to eliminate it or collapse it with the subject); a poetics that strives to articulate alternative modes of perceiving the relation between subjects and objects; a poetics that insists on nothing as existing, and on our capacity for experiencing it; a poetics, finally, that calls for accepting nothing for what it is, an impossibility that provokes possibility.

5/2

Must the act of perception always already involve an act of interpretation? Must what we perceive mean something? Can it not mean, and just be, nothing? Is it possible at all to perceive nothing for what it is? Wallace Stevens reflects on this problematic nature of perception in his early poem "The Snow Man," considering what it would mean to see the world without assigning it meaning. The paradoxical meaning of this non-meaning turns in on itself in the final lines of the poem, which climax in a trio of mind-chilling nothings:

13 [. . . ] the listener, who listens in the snow,
14 And, nothing himself, beholds
15 Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

(8)

In asking what it would mean if we were to recognize nothing not only as an object but also as a part of ourselves as subjects, Stevens's poem envisions a form of man able to perceive without interpretation. This man—the snow man—does not define himself in opposition to others: he is in harmony with nature. Though traditionally² man has been conceived as a creature that must distinguish himself from nature to see himself as complete, his recognition of nothing makes any absolute distinction impossible, in part because nothing escapes our categorization of the perceived world. It is therefore no longer possible for the "listener" in Stevens's poem to assign meaning and to establish hierarchies by appropriating the objects of his beholding. Instead, the poem posits a state of being that redefines...