from "Continuing Against Closure" by Lyn Hejinian

Differences then, are essential. They are what we all have in common, namely that we never have everything in common with anyone else. But differences have a strange ontological status. They are basic but not, strictly speaking, elemental They exist in and as the details of what is — as features of substantives, rather than as substantives themselves. They are, indeed, instances of insubstantiality, because they mark points of mutability. They keep things susceptible to events, they allow them to participate in what happens. Differences are evidence of incompleteness.


Of course completeness has a strong appeal. It can provide emotional satisfaction, and even, as in the case of a job well done, material satisfaction. It can be exhilarating to finish a work of art, for example. It can be a relief, having cleaned up after a strained family dinner party, to stand in the relative silence of one’s restored idiosyncratic order and say: “that’s done!” — these are not words of regret.


And, though there is little evidence of completion and closure to be found in the actual state of things, and though the notion may seem a fiction to an empiricist, still, these fictions can exert cosmic fascination; as theology, even as ideology, they can be compelling. And, though I have termed closure a fiction, the desire for closure can exert real (though in my opinion often disastrous) influence. One sees this for example in relation to contemporary notions of justice.


We may speak of infinite mercy, but justice exists to keep situations finite. And when it is criminal justice that is under discussion, it is taken as a given that the people involved, especially the “victims,” have “right to closure,” and that that right is incontrovertible, proper, “inalienable.”

That the bringing about of closure is often impossible to distinguish from an act of vengeance (as in the carrying out of capital punishment) is, apparently, of no consequence. Which makes a certain sense — closure, by definition, establishes the condition of “no consequence.”


But this means that, if one is committed to consequences (to history, to social responsibility, to the ongoing liveliness of living), one has to be wary, to say the very least, of closure.


If closure is problematic ethically it is untenable semantically, since nothing can restrain meaning, nothing can contain all the implications, ramifications, nuances, and connotations that cascade and proliferate from any and every point in any and every instance of what is or is thought to be. And nothing can arrest the ever-changing terrain of ubiquitous contexts perpetually affecting these.


This alone must keep one in a condition that is the very contrary of closed. One must, to begin with, be conscious.


What has come to be of increasing interest to me over the past few years is not so much consciousness itself but the sites of consciousness. And by sites of consciousness I do not mean heads or brains but places in the world, spaces in which an awakening of consciousness occurs, the spaces in which a self discovers itself as an object among others (and thus, by the way, achieves subjectivity). My notion of these sites of consciousness, these zones of encounter, derives much from Hannah Arendt’s elaboration of what she termed “the space of appearance,” where human and world come into being for and with each other. Arendt’s “space of appearance” bears great similarity, as she points out, to the Greek notion of polis.


Full text here:  http://www.jacketmagazine.com/14/hejinian.html