The Zone

Deleuze: The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events that happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film.

I daydream about a rebellion of matter. Of a writing, say, which no longer hears the demand of the bureaucracy, that develops lawlessly, which breaks the connection between sender and addressee. A rebellion of matter against form, a revolution of words themselves, as they come to resound with what shatters them. Resonance: the rebellion of matter as it resists reduction to the sign.

The world seems to have solidified as a series of signs. Strategic plans, quality assurance certificates, audits and appraisals – what is important is not so much performance but the appearance of performance; efficiency does not matter so much as the simulacrum of efficiency. Who am I, in this system? The functionary, the role, the stamp of bureaucracy’s power. Which is to say, hardly anyone (who I am does not matter). How else to evaluate the world? How to receive the world in another sense?

Think of ordinary words, placed one after another in the work of fiction. Think of Kafka’s cool prose; think of the pleasant lucidity of early Duras. Ordinary words – but by the fact of being so placed, the fact that they lie down alongside other words causes a trembling to pass through them. They become a conduit; a rumbling traverses them, a great trembling which is also a trembling of the world. Suddenly, reading, you know the system of signs is dislocated; know that proliferation and disorder have escaped the universal signifying power. A book, a little book, rests as though atop a volcano.

Resonance: books call to one another through their readers. Think, too, of the songs which sing to one another. Think of the films which touch one another. Watching Tarkovsky’s Stalker, I know the disparate objects in the pools of water (paintings, a syringe, money …) have undergone the alteration that prevents them disappearing into circuits of exchange. And isn’t this the miracle of the Zone? It is a place which refuses value, which has no value. The earth recovered; the becoming of the world reaffirming itself.

One day there will be a great rebellion of the earth. No: one day, we will notice this rebellion, which happens today and everyday (the future is happening). The pantheist speaks of Gaia, but that word does not reach to matter’s depth. In the end, it is not even a question of the rebellion of this or that thing – of the syringe, the banknote, the painting, but of all things. The refusal of matter, of the world, of the earth: in a sense, we are already outside it, walking across it as strangers. It refuses us; the entire order of nature refuses us. What is the source of this resistance? Bataille calls it immanence, naming by this word the depths of nature as it roils in itself as water does in water. Water in water: the lion, king of the beasts, is a wave higher than the others, but it is still a wave. Remember the example from Hegel: I say the word, lion, and I lose the lion in its lived immediacy; the word lifts the world off its hinges. This loss has been redoubled. Bureaucracy, administration: the world disappeared …

But there is art, there is the matter of art. The matter foregrounded in the work, that approaches us there. And the artist through whom the work might be born? Like Stalker himself, going into the Zone, he is marked by friendship – by friendship with those he takes towards the work (I wrote about this at In Writing ). With Stalker, there is a friendship with the Writer and Professor whom he guides across the Zone. Friendship because he was their guide and because of the Zone, and the rebellion of matter as it affirms itself there. And the artist? Friendship with those who are undone as the work reaches them, touches them as he or she (the artist) is also touched. (Links to something like a minor theory of art here.)

Still, this argument is incomplete. Matter does not refer simply to the expanse of nature. I am haunted by Blanchot’s words: only man is unknown. Unknown – which is to say Stalker’s journey with Writer and Professor, his relationship with them, passes by way of matter. The Zone, then, is not nature, but a way of experiencing the strangeness of the other person, of welcoming the other person as the unknown.

(I am indebted here to Philip Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion.)