As a literary scholar I am used to quote not only literature as source for my arguments but also other opinions on the subject I am writing about. Whenever I ask myself why I used that theoretical approach instead of another I give myself the answer – because it fits.
This is clearly a subjective perspective, a little bit egoistic and narcistic as well and would have count as a mantic procedure, which may lay before any hermeneutics, but is also less than any scientific interpretation.
Such an approach which always uses seemingly random theoretical bits to explain why something is written in this way and not in another resonates with a pretty obvious critique on post-modern philosophy as well as post-modern infused literary scholars. The critique is always the same: You cannot use everything you want! Anything goes might count as a pop cultural emancipatory gesture, but here on the battleground of science, meaning and truth anything is not legit.
Luckily, I am not the only one. And as for Michael O’Rourke “diffractive reading” as established by Karen Barad makes a difference: for him “anything” is first a “scene[] of engagements” and secondly part of an “intra-active reading of texts, figures, and archives”.1
The point is, that his account leads to a different formation of interpretation, because everything he quotes becomes an object of a scene with its simultaneously constituted relations. Remembering Karen Barad: neither relations nor relata are first.2
This is important because in this way O’Rourke tackles the problem of critique as destructive practice of reading and then writing about what one has read. One can say, that being critical towards something that is alluring as literature or other forms of art is important, critique sometimes destroys art. This does not have to be always a bad thing. There are positions in arts and literature which are racist, antisemitic or sexist and have absolutely to be – deconstructed. And this is the point O’Rourke makes clear regarding Barad’s affinity to Derrida’s deconstructivism.
Therefore, I want to think about why dark hermeneutics is not “hermeneutics of suspicion”3 and also “[…] is not close reading”4, but a form of diffractive reading. Also, I ask myself if it is a reading at all or a method of writing? Last but not least I want to come back to the trace of breath and breathing, which can be followed through all chapters.
First, the obvious: breath and breathing as in inhale, gap, exhale resembles reading, thinking, and writing. Secondly suspicion again isn’t always a bad thing, sometimes a feeling can lead to a suspicion, that leads to an important point of interpretation. But more often suspicion is the framing of hermeneutical approaches even if it is only the suspicion of meaning (and mostly of truth). I try not to have such a suspicion of meaning and truth while I read and write, especially because I do not write and read alone as Nietzsche once said: “Our writing materials contribute their part to our thinking”5 This is also true for our reading materials as well as for our thinking as Jane Bennett puts it in a more environmentally way.6 – It is truly an environmentality7 which constitutes reading, thinking, writing. And as Alan Turings Machine the triad of reading, thinking, writing is not only a form of input, processing, output but also of 1 and 0.
In this framework humans are as Nietzsche said, “perhaps only thinking, writing, and speaking machines”8 but also put into environments engaged with other nonhuman thinking, writing, and reading “machines”.
Environmentality therefore is what I call what is neither critique nor close reading, but what is pictured by breathing. It is related to Bennett’s “default grammar of agency”9 which sets subjectivity and objectivity, and attributes active and passive to actants. But dark hermeneutics “understands” reading, thinking and writing within an environmentality.
And such an environmentality is luckily also a triangle. Regarding Robyn Wiegman and Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick as shared by O’Rourke10 “the figure of the triangle” becomes a “critical hermeneutic”4. And so environmentality resonates with “what Wiegman calls inhabitation” regarding “weird reading” or “speculative reading”11. If we open this up towards thinking and writing in the wake of Nietzsche (and maybe Friedrich Kittler) environmentality becomes a new hermeneutic circle, which is actually a triangle.
Such a triangle echoes within many other configurations like as in Sigmund Freud’s oedipal triangle, or with René Girard’s study Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, Jacques Lacan’s Triad of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic (Friedrich Kittler’s Grammophon, Film, Typewriter), or Sedgwick’s analysis of erotic triangle relations as Wiegman explains.12
The triangle therefore consists of three barriers while – as shown by Lacan – signifiers and signified only have one “barre”. This makes it more difficult but introduces a complexity of differentiation within the process of understanding. Three points or lines of interference give out a prismatic mode, a diffractive and not reflective mode of critique. Even 1 and 0 is a trifold object – left, right or nothing.
- O’Rourke 2013, 191 [↩]
- Barad 2007, 334 [↩]
- O’Rourke 191 [↩]
- Ibid. [↩] [↩]
- Nietzsche 1882 [↩]
- Bennett 2009, 115 [↩]
- Arun Agrawal 2005 [↩]
- Nietzsche 1873-76, 110 [↩]
- Bennett 2009, 119 [↩]
- O’Rourke 2013,196 [↩]
- Ibid., 198 [↩]
- Wiegman 2019, 252 [↩]
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Martin Bartelmus (November 18, 2021). Chapter 15. Close reading or critique? The triangle of environmentality. Dark Hermeneutics. Retrieved July 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ngx1