The Imperative

Jean Georges is one of four Michelin Three Star restaurants in New York city. It’s very French, so French that you’re just as likely to hear the language spoken as English. That and the environment in the main dining room—a single, enormous, plush chamber on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel—make the place feel monarchal and exotic.

The food is superb, although onerous and excessive, especially when brought out in wave after wave as it is on the seven-course chef’s tasting menu. Each dish meets the expectation of richness and complexity, but then adds a surfeit of flourish and of quantity. The result is physical and spiritual exhaustion. Nobody can make it through this meal, not because it’s too rich but just because it’s too much—too much on each plate, too much total, and too rapidly swooshed out in front of you with effete regal pronouncement.

At Jean Georges the food is not the problem. The food is stupendous. It’s the form in which the food is presented that makes an otherwise world-class meal feel oppressive.

It may seem effete and ostentatious, but I love the indulgence of excessively expensive, showy, and protracted chef’s tasting menus. The best such experience I ever had was at Moto in Chicago. The food is unusual on its own, even if I can boast that the style of molecular gastronomy was somewhat less old-hat when I first went there. But more importantly, the entire experience was different.

Jean Georges offers a seven-course menu, and I left feeling defeated. Moto’s is twenty-course, and I could have stayed forever. In part this is because the courses were sized in far smaller quantities… a simple move, but by no means a sufficient one.

The real magic of Moto was the context. Here’s how they describe it:

Incredibly well-rounded, the team focuses on the totality of each guest’s dining experience. Parallel to the intricately woven layers of taste, texture, and imagination in every bite of food is the detailed choreographed process of food preparation and presentation at moto. Each staff member pays attention to all elements of the total guest experience because each staff member has experience with every aspect of food preparation and presentation: at moto, every chef is a waiter and every waiter is a chef, as each employee rotates periodically from kitchen prep to tableside service, providing for a highly-knowledgeable staff.

This sounds like marketing, but it’s real. The chefs would come out and present their dishes, and they were always more than happy to talk about them—the ideas, their origin, the preparation, whatever. I probably spent six hours on those twenty courses at Moto. We closed the place down.

The Jean George-Moto dyad offers a useful lens through which to understand the successes and failings of Alphonso Lingis’s remarkable book The Imperative.

I’m not going to say much at all about the philosophical content of the book, although it’s just as exceptional as any of the creations that appear on the plates of Moto or Jean Georges. Lingis makes a simple argument, that perception and emotion is regulated by “imperatives” from without. In Lingis’s hands, things are more than just apparatuses, all pushing back on one another, clamoring for our attention.

It’s a position those of an object-oriented persuasion will find appealing. But even more remarkable than the position is the way the book presents it. Each page, each paragraph, often each sentence issues such an imperative. Lingis’s style weighs on the reader, but not like that of Heidegger or Derrida or Deleuze or Badiou, not as a swamp to be slogged through, but as a chain of tiny, secret mysteries one wants to unravel forever.

In that respect, every single phrase in The Imperative can be treated like a course on a seemingly endless tasting menu. One reads and wants not to move on, but to keep one’s eyes affixed, as if moving a scallop around in the mouth to extract all its texture and taste on every part of the tongue, even though we know in advance that we will never exhaust it and it will nevertheless vanish. As Lingis puts it, “the inner formula of a mango, a willow tree, or a flat smooth stone is never grasped; the real thing is before our perception as a task for exploration.”

And it’s here that the book’s one glaring problem arises. It’s the Jean Georges problem, if I dare make the comparison. There’s just too much, too fast. One sentence of Lignis’s prose is sufficient for an hour, a day, a week maybe. A lifetime in some cases. But the book wears on, as books do. Like a new set of cloches arriving with fresh fare, another paragraph, another page, another chapter oozes out after each one just completed.

It’s not Lingis’s fault, really. He wrote a book, as philosophers do. I suppose it would have been possible to write a more aphoristic book, one more Moto than Jean Georges. But aphorism isn’t the answer either, for in print every one-liner just spills into another. And more than that, the places Lingis takes us aren’t diced into the same sizes and shapes as if they were onions.

I can’t help but wonder how an extra-libris adaptation of The Imperative might feel. As segments on a radio program, heard on a commute. As quips from a carnival barker. As excerpts and images delivered slowly over time in a custom iPad app. As emails arriving weekly amid the noise of work. As a drip from the shower, as the strange incongruity of a solid flavor emulsified into foam.

In a recent interview, Graham Harman makes the following observations about style, observations that clearly reveal the influence Lingis (with whom he studied) has had on his practice:

I’ve always agreed with Nietzsche’s claim that the only way to improve your style is to improve your thoughts, but also believe that the best way to improve your thoughts is to improve your style. There is a tendency to think that philosophy is about explicit propositional content, and that style is merely pretentious ornament plastered on top of explicit propositions. Yet this assumes that correct representational statements about the world are possible, which is precisely what I deny. As I see it, truth is a matter of allusion, not of representational picture-drawing. To improve as a writer means primarily to improve one’s allusive and suggestive power. … This is why truly bad writers cannot be good philosophers.

Harman’s right, but he could take things even further: writing is a lovely and worthwhile pursuit, but it is only one form, only one style in which to develop a style. As I argue in my forthcoming book Alien Phenomenology, a more general strategy of “carpentry” is also possible: asking what we can make that does philosophy, and how we can develop styles commensurate with the unique abilities of different forms.

The Imperative is a prototype for carpentry, and its perhaps no accident that the term is originally Lingis’s. It’s a book that pushes on its binding, trying hard to be something more than that form of matter, desperate to be anything and everything. Despite the rare and considerable beauty and wonder this book offers, perhaps the most important lesson philosophy can take away from this 13 year-old work is just how fragile and arbitrary the form of the book really is, not because the book fails as one, but because with every sentence it makes the reader wish it were so many other things as well.