The Space of Resonance

An oblique response to Steve’s post over at In Writing.

The commentator, you think to yourself, is the ape of the artwork, grotesquely supplementing something that is already sufficient unto itself. It is as though that self-sufficiency is intolerable – that the commentator is envious of what keeps the work closed from the world. But what about the work itself? The work arrives out of nowhere, spinning itself from matter, from words or from sonorities, from colours and tones, from marble or even particles of information. It does not clothe itself in matter as though it were a pure idea.

One might think it is like the dresser crab who seizes the ephemera from the ocean floor that would normally disappear into usefulness in order better to vanish amidst other things. It is this ephemera, the matter that is made to stand out and makes the addressees of the work stand out (ecstasis) is the ‘substance’ of the work. Or rather, it joins substance to an intedeterminable reserve, a chaos which refuses form and presence. That is to say, the artwork imitates nothing. It is not a representation of the real; it is not the concept which allow us to grasp singularities as particulars, ready to submit them under the universal. It imitates nothing. Might one say the work resembles nothing but itself – that it is undone or unmade according to this resemblance?

The work submits what is useful to a detour. The moment the dresser crab encrusts a pearl in its carapace, that pearl is no longer an object. What of the commentator? The commentator binds the work to the world, showing how the deterritorialisation of matter, its becoming, refers back to the ordinary objects we find around us. The commentator folds back the peculiar self-resembling of the work to show that it is, in the end, a work like other works; it is not unique.

But doesn’t this moment of commentary happen in the work itself? Isn’t what I have called commentary part of the very movement of the work? After all, the pearl on the carapace is still a pearl, whatever else it is; the marble of the state is still marble, even if the sculpture allows it to obtrude into a form. The work is already joined to the world – it is, in this sense, a commentary upon itself. It is its own ape, its own buffoon because it shows the work of art is nothing but a nudity, an affirmation without content, which seeks to clothe itself in order to give itself what is ultimately only the illusion of substance. But this is wrong, too – for the work is not an idea in the artist’s mind, sheer form. It is a piece of the world deterritorialised from the world, a becoming that has not settled into being, an existence that, as it were, seeks to refer to itself without existents. It is true, this is possible only the intervention of the artist. But if the event of the work consists of a deterritorialisation which is repeated whenever the audience encounters the work, then the artist is already a commentator, perpetually joining the work of art to the world.

But this is not right, because the artist is not there every time the work is there. The work is not the expression of a feeling. The work itself is its own commentary, reaching its audience through the contentless repetition that it ‘is’. This means that although the artist is the occasion of the work, the work of art is never expressive, never autobiographical. Think of Tarkovsky’s raindrop, Giacometti’s glass: these indicate something about everything in the world, about the deterritorialisation of the object. The work does not have an angelic function, joining worlds. But it unjoins the world – to invert a Heideggerian formulation, it is the unworlding of the world. And it does so by repeating and as it were commenting upon itself, giving itself to be encountered singularly, each time. This formulation is misleading, because it threatens to substantialise the ‘it’ of the ‘it gives’. Better, then: the work is a dissemination without determinable origin. A happening which repeats itself without determinable content. An ongoing reaffirmation. Commentary, autocommentary, ‘is’ this repetition.

The possibility of commentary is the possibility of a work. The work is not simply what gives itself to be repeated, it is to the extent that it is in this repetition. It is not only the aircrash which kills everyone on board, but the black box recorder which survives the crash. It is not only the nova, the star exploding, but the nova’s husk. Tarkovsky’s raindrop, Giacometti’s glass: the artist makes a more general claim about every object. In the microcosm is the macrocosm; in this glass, there is not only every possible glass, but every possible object. What is discernible in the work? The repetition which is the chance of a world’s coming-to-appear – the iteration upon which the presence of everything depends. What happens as the work? The unjoining of the opening of the world – a difference and a repetition – a difference that happens in and as repetition as things give themselves to be experienced. What is staged in the encounter with the work? The way in which the concept is never adequate to the world and the singular can never become a particular. But does this spell the impossibility of thought, of philosophy? No – it indicates the material conditions of thinking, of philosophising so far as they outstrip the adequation and conceptualisation.

The commentator is not the ape of the work, but marks the work’s apishness, its buffoonery, the way it has already tumbled from the tightrope. But this is also the repetition that allows it to become differently: the chance of the work as it belongs to the secret of its origin. What do I hear in this becoming, this differential repetition? What Steve calls, following Blanchot, the ‘space of resonance’.