Rilke:
The world draws into itself; for things too, do the same in their turn, by shifting their existence more and more into the vibrations of money, and developing there for themselves a kind of spirituality which even now already surpasses their palpable reality.
Things only exist as the embodiment or sign of their exchange value. Hence their presence, their palpable being, is extinguished. Things then exist in a mode of absence – their (abstract) essence is elsewhere. They themselves become exchangeable representatives of that ‘apriori’ value. Heidegger’s ‘turn’ to the thing, to the immediacies of presence, the jugness of jug etc, is an obvious attempt to counter-attack this evaporation of Being. Before that, Being and Time is among other things, a waving goodbye to certain categories of things, and a celebration of their (now disappearing) form.
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Is the work of art a ‘truth event’ in the Badiou-ian sense? The formation of the art work reveals the ‘truth’ of the earth, a truth which was ‘already there’ yet at the same time does not pre-exist its emergence.
By contrast the temple work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come into the open of the work’s world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glimmer and shimmer, colours to glow, tones to sing, the word to speak. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of wood, and the hardness and lustre of metal, into the lightning and darkening of colour, into the clang of tone, and into the naming power of the word.
But how is this last on the same ontological level as the preceding examples?? How can language be grouped with ‘earth’? does language really ‘shine forth’ in a poem in a sense analogous to the shining forth of metal in the great temple.
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Language is in the world, doing jobs within the world – telling, revealing, disclosing, calling. And this is where those who think of language in terms largely of representation or misrepresentation get it wrong. They pre-posit the world on the one hand and representations on the other. The error, perhaps, stems from thinking of language as a self-sufficient system, with relations only within itself. Language is ‘available’, ready-to-hand, already out there and involved. “Language is as Dasein is.” Saussure – or some of his avatars – treat language as ‘occurent’ and have thereby assumed both too little and too much. Language and world are equiprimordial. Just as, with the hammer, we go through and beyond the hammer in realising our tasks, so, in communicating, words disappear into their target situation. But when the word has come to rest, disengaged from the active cluster and kinesis of praxis, only then does it gaze back at us as something (merely) occurent, does it assume a magical autonomy and apophantic resonance.