Apocalyptic Piety

Ritual, liturgy: do they not offer the chance of warding off chaos and change for a moment, to plunge back again into the waters of eternity? To honour the gods and one’s ancestors; to receive their directives, their gifts anew – does this protect us from flux and decay? Catastrophes come and go, but quietly, alongside them, there are small acts of ritual and prayer: sacrifices in which you relinquish your place up as a particular person and take your place in the rite. You are one celebrant among others; others before you have celebrated, and others after you will celebrate once more. True, ritual is itself vulnerable; there is the chance that it degenerates, becoming a matter of stereotypical gestures, of hollow ceremony. Will is required. Intensity. Then the ritual can be alive and maintain a community in closeness to eternity. There is also the danger of zealousness, whereby those who fail to perform the ritual properly are expelled from the community. Violence is always close, too close.

To watch Tarkovsky’s Mirror for the umpteenth time – is this not, itself a ritual? And the admirers of The Sacrifice who go to the cinema for see it again, on a crisp new print – are they not gathered by the artwork into a a kind of community? Notice the way Tarkovsky makes us wait. He asks for patience when we watch Gorchakov cross the drained pool and when the protagonist of The Sacrifice strikes a match in order to set fire to everything he possesses. Remember, too, the long scene in Solaris which follows the car as it drives through a futuristic city. And the scene where Stalker and the others sit outside the Room. Perhaps these long scenes are linked to a sense of eternity, to what is repeated over and again in the ritual.

I read about the Russian notion of the artist as the cosmogonist who brings the world into being once again. Is this the eternity to which Tarkovsky attests, and towards which which his films draw us, as with a ritual? Think of the argument you find in Descartes that God sustains the being of the universe in each moment – that the creation is perpetually re-enacted. But isn’t there also the sense that ritual (think of the worshippers in the church in the mist in Nostalghia) has become impossible for us. But then I remember Abraham’s sacrifice, in which the ritual piety is itself placed at stake, sacrificed, according to the demands of a God who opens a future beyond ritual repetition. Isn’t an apocalyptic piety born at this moment (I am following Philip Goodchild’s Capitalism and Religion)? The chance of a future that opens beyond the repetition of the past? A future that demands the sacrifice that shatters endless repetition of the ritual?

Martyrology

The final movement of Beethoven’s 9th is the background to Domenico’s self-immolation in the square in Rome in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. Remember it is as though scratched or stuck. No glorious celebration of freedom and joy … the music stutters. What do I hear in this stuttering? A hesitancy within the artwork itself – within a beautiful artwork. A glitch in the beautiful which as it were divides it from its beauty. And it is thus with Domenico’s suicide: it is not beautiful. He falls and crawls along the ground, crying out. He dies – it is a martyr’s death. Martyrdom? But in the interval between the immolation and his death, he is just a man who has set himself alight.

Here is the mad attempt to negate the world, to draw the whole world into the fire of sacrifice and bring it shuddering back into birth. And this mad action is met with incomprehension that voids it of all beauty. We – the viewers – are not spared the hideousness of his agony. Far away, Gorchakov has heard of Domenico’s death. He takes the stub of a candle and begins to walk across the drained pool. It is madness, all of this. But a madness which is bound to the world’s plight.

We have seen people die violent deaths (swollen bodies, scattered limbs) and know death is not beautiful. But does the abjection of the martydoms which, in depriving death of its beauty, bear witness to the desparation and horror of suffering (think of the monks who set themselves on fire in protest at the Vietnam war)? Yes, witness is the word I would insist upon (isn’t it linked etymologically to the word martyr?)

But then remember Mishima’s ritual suicide: he would have cut open his own stomach – terrible pain – and his ‘second’ beheaded him. As I recall, the ‘second’ (was his name Morita?) did not slice Mishima’s head from his body in a clean stroke. It took several attempts (and wasn’t it someone else who delivered the final blow?) In Mishima’s aesthetics, was death not also a moment of beauty (it is more complex than that)? – A beauty that, we know, was linked by Mishima to the glory of the old Japanese order, to the emperor? This is not a martyrdom, for it bears witness only to the limitations of a reactionary aesthetic which requires Mishima step from the world of the writer (he wrote at night) into the daylight of the world. Reactionary? Yes, because as Tarkovsky understands, the work of art already bears witness to the world’s plight. There is no need to step into the light.

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.)

Resignation

Tarkovsky’s Mirror. The scenes with the narrator and his wife are barely alive in the screenplay, but in the film! The character of the wife, Natalia was added into the film as it was being made. Margarita Terekhova is astonishing. The narrator is guilty. The screenplay tempts us to identify him with Tarkovsky; and we see a poster for Andrei Rublev in the narrator’s flat. But he is someone else (who does the narrator allow Tarkovsky, allow us, to be?). – The narrator is irresponsible, he neglects his son, taunts his wife. He is remiss. We sense his father was similar – at least, his return is greeted as a sudden surprising benediction by his children. Perhaps the reasons for his behaviour do not matter. He seems dislocated – the world is not real enough for him. He is like a ghost.

I think of a book I read many years ago: Peace, by Gene Wolfe. You can find it in the science fiction section of the bookshop. The protagonist is a dead man. You have to work it out; it isn’t easy. Took me three reads to see not only that he is a ghost, but that he had been a murderer, too, and he remembers the murders he committed (though this is not clear to the reader). The same scene in Peace as in Mirror: the protagonist is told he has a limited time to live. It’s all coming to an end. And the same fantastic quality to that scene: it is not real, as it were, and it is not meant to be.

What does it matter? I am thinking of Mirror‘s narrator. Thinking of a sense of unreality I experienced today as I walked home from work. And a sense of responsibilities that will open before me one day that I could – could, not would – shirk. My excuse? I imagine it would be similar to the narrator of the film: I’m after something else, I want something else. How indulgent and melodramatic!

I read a screenplay many years ago by Bergman – The Touch – I’ve never seen it. I remember the male protagonist breaking up a marriage – why? Resentment? The desire to tear a hole open in the world, to break something open? It is more than resentment. A kind of frustration with the unreality of things, of the absence of affect. Where does it lead? Petulant rage … sabotage … self-indulgence. Smashing up lives.

I remembered the same character when I saw the film Liv Ullman made with Bergman’s script: Faithless. And felt a kind of anger at the philanderers who would smash up their lives to escape – to escape what? When I read The Touch, I did so as one who was outside, far outside the world of work. When I saw Faithless, I was on the verge of getting a job, but still outside (it was a short term contract …) Today, remembering both I thought: now I am the bourgeois with the job and the mortgage, I am one who will be able to shirk responsibility. I know I won’t. But what a strange feeling to be part of the world – if I experience the unreality of that world, I do so from a secure place within it (although my current contract runs out in 6 months …)

Natalia. Think of the way she looks at the narrator. They have had a life together, a child. They a share a history, yet what do they share? Now the narrator has turned from her. He gently satirises her account of her new lover, a writer. He is like a ghost, removed from everything. And his son? He is burning things in the yard, poking at them with a stick. Another ghost, a ghost in the making, just like me.

Destroy

Let’s say you are sick of a piece of music you have just heard. Dream, instead, of a kind of destruction that would lead harmony, melody, themes, to their ruin. Not elaborating them in the manner of Bach with King Frederick II’s theme (The Musical Offering). No – a battle needs to be fought. Sometimes a movement towards exhaustion is necessary – a theme must be run into the ground. Repeating it over and over again. Think of The Fall, or of Smog’s Rain on Lens. Something is being destroyed. The ‘substance’ of the work: an old form, a popular form. There is violence done to the ‘figure’ – to melody, rhyme and metre – without doing away with them entirely. This is not free improvisation. Destruction: lead the work to the point where it affirms its own materiality. When it affirms the matter from which it is born and reborn. Where it affirms its rhythmicality, its sonority, the nudity of music …

I have in mind the rhythmic composers – the early Stravinsky, Prokofiev…. Scriabin as the third piano concerto becomes pointillist – little dabs of music. Then Miles Davis’s polyrhythms. Then The Fall, with repetition, ceaseless repetition (Slags, Slates …) And sonority? I have written of this before. Yes, Berlioz is the composer of ‘pure’ sound. But he has not approached resonance. Resonance does not lie, as it were, at the end of his work.

Still this is too simple. What about irony, satire – Shostakovich’s terrible humour. So cold – it is hateful, even. And what does it hate? Itself. It hates what it is and yet it continues, laughing at itself, shaking with laughter through and through. Torn apart – nearly – by its own laughter. Then think of Bataille’s laughter which resounds through On Nietzsche, Guilty, Inner Experience … these books are lightning-struck.

Then there is the breaking apart of melancholy, loss. Eloge de l’amour. And isn’t Nostalghia a broken film – wonderful because of its monotony? Tarkovsky’s honesty saves everything he does from parable (except for one or two places … why does he stage the sacrifice in the Roman square as a dream? – it spoils the film, it’s horrible) And then the 15th String Quartet by Shostakovich: flakes of sound. Adagio follows adagio all the way to silence.

What I am trying to formulate: a typology of destruction. Of hatred in the arts. Of a destruction that occurs as the work. Not the serenity of Rothko, say, not the heroism of Newman. Not the purity of Pärt. – No it must be a work that devours what we receive as a work. I’m tired of abstract art, if I can put it that crudely. Tired of decoration and wallpaper. Where is the drama? Where is the intensity of affect? – This can be rapturous or lugubrious. An ecstasy that is joyful or solemn. It is intensity alone which sets it apart.

D, S, C, H

I ask myself: why Shostakovich? – Because it is never just ‘pure’ music that he affirms. In the end, emphasising the materiality of the artwork (my own discourse) is insufficient with respect to Shostakovich. Is this the abyss that separates the Romantics from Shostakovich? – ‘Pure’ music, ‘pure’ materiality is not enough. No – it is the tune itself that has to be deranged. The old forms must be destroyed – not replaced or supplanted (after all, he was not a serialist) but destroyed in the body of the music. So that the music destroyed itself in some sense. Laughed at itself. Laughed at the imposture that music is. Until all that survives is the 15th String Quartet.

But what about the D, S, C, H motif as we hear it in the 10th Symphony or the 8th Quartet (a way for the composer to spell his own name)? Is it a question, here, of autobiography – of programme music (think of the dismal 12th Symphony)? No – but of a resonance to which his music always returns, over and again. But it is a question of finding that resonance. And it can only be found in desolation. The ruin that was close to him as soon as he began to compose. He knew this before his Lady Macbeth was banned. But he knew, later, that it was that resonance to which he had to lead his greatest work.

D, S, C, H: the tone Shostakovich imposes upon resonance. When D, S, C, H names only the way resonance resonates through a space without name.

Indecency

Sometimes Shostakovich is unbearable. The last quartet, every movement marked adagio. You listen to Telemann instead, or Rossini. Sometimes the easy flow of Telemann is unbearable and anything other than the best Shostakovich (and a few other composers) seems indecent.

Indecent – why this word? Because of what happened, because the music that made Himmler weep belongs to a culture to which the Nazis could ally themselves. Is it the innocence of art that was sullied? Innocent art belongs to another time. A time before the genocides that were accomplished with the same technology that was supposed to liberate humankind. When culture was secure, when it was a flowering of the spirit.

The first world war already saw a great sense of the implausibility of culture. What was it all for? – The upsurge of avant-gardes, among them, Dada, Surrealism. Now the great attempt to escape art through art – to create another kind of work – to transform existence, to change life. The interruption of art – art as the interruption of the continuity of culture. Art had lost its innocence – or it had rediscovered its innocence as a mode of research, a voyage into the unconscious alongside the efforts of the analysts. Either way, it was no longer a question of the prestige of art, of the work that would lend itself to the unfolding of human potential celebrating the marvels of humanism.

But hasn’t the history of which Surrealism is a part simply run its course? Where are the avant-gardes? What are the political stakes of the existence of art, of literature? This question seems anachronistic. As if culture could matter in that way. As if it wasn’t debased, corrupted, indecent.

Levinas suspects that to enjoy art is to enjoy feasting during a famine. It is indecent…. It is that, or it is insignificant. And Celan? Blanchot? The latter wrote in 1945, ‘no more stories’. No more – the time of the work of art has passed. Innocence or indecency – is it so simple? Blanchot, after the war, no longer ascribes a specific genre to his fictions. They are works which come after, posthumously. But then Blanchot was a contemporary of the worst… What about those who come after?

Can art be as innocent again for us (who is this ‘us’)? Is it a question of a classicism – a return to the age of Telemann or Haydn, the age of politesse, the restraint of the passions? Then Romanticism, the time of the artist-creator, Beethoven, who thought of himself greater than kings and aristocrats. Not far from him to Berlioz, the artist who no longer believes in God or Bach – and Wagner, universal artist, artist-evangel, creator of the unified artwork, the Gesamtkunstwerk which would restore the original, vital relations of the mythos…

Now think of the broken artists – Beckett, Giacometti, Van Velde – artists who were born into a world that broke, and who work with fragments. But then wasn’t Avigdor Arhika one of that generation, rescued from Auschwitz, abstract painter? – He gave up abstraction. What does he paint? I remember a glorious still life of stacked towels in an airing cupboard.

I must stop these vague ramblings. Beethoven, Wagner, Berlioz: these are ghosts, however much I like to listen to excerpts from The Ring in my office. Ghosts – they are not present, living, for us (who is this ‘us’?). Depart from them entirely? No. Shostakovich quotes Rossini then breaks the tune, plays with it and smashes as if to say: it is not ours anymore. Breton wanders in Paris with Nadja. Ghosts everywhere. Bataille breaks up the novel into The Impossible. Then I think to myself: there are no new forms, only the ruins of old ones, like the ruined cathedral Gorchakov wanders around in Nostalghia.

From The Writing of the Disaster:
… sometimes concerts were organised. The power of music seems, momentarily, to bring forgetfulness and dangerously causes the distance between the murderers and victims to disappear. But, Langbein adds, for the pariahs there was neither sport nor music. There is a limit at which the practice of any art becomes an affront to affliction. Let us not forget this.

Age

The illusion with Berlioz, Wagner, Scriabin: the attempt to purify musical ‘matter’, to reach the nudity of music. With Shostakovich (the best Shostakovich …)? Ecstasis is not there (except in the worst pieces, and there are many of those …) This is music for those who are tethered to themselves, bound to an unavoidable burden. For those for whom the impossible is possible – ecstasy as superabundance, as sheer excess – but only for an instant. An instant: for we are tethered to ourselves, brought back to ourselves. The thresholds can no longer be remade. You are returned to yourself. It is the return that is unbearable. But you become used to the unbearable. And prefer the sardonic music which laughs at lyricism. You recognise yourself in a music that has grown old, and laughs at youth.

Youth: lyricism, romance, transport. Age: you come back to the same. You know how the world works and how it smashes inspiration. Occasionally, Shostakovich permits himself a lyrical passage, a section of compelling rhythm, excitement. Then – he crushes it. To say: it is impossible, do not lose yourself. No ecstasy. Why? Because of the world, the way the world is. Think of his horror at the anti-Semitic excesses of Stalin. What kind of art is possible after that? In the midst of that? The 13th Symphony. And his last works, the 15th Symphony and the 15th String Quartet? Truly the work of one who lived alongside the worst.

Remake the Thesholds

Think of Berlioz composing, tears running down his face. Why does he weep? At the terrible strength of the music. And perhaps because he is the custodian of this beauty; he feels thankful. This is a scene of inspiration. The music reaches you – and let’s say you weep, too. You are inspired – the music has brought you inspiration. What does this mean? Berlioz’s ‘gift’: he makes music out of rhythms and sonorities. Music is born from his fingertips. It is a kind of matter, a materiality that is shaped by him. Shaped, but in such a way that it is not wholly determined. Was he not the first composer who foregrounded nuances, tones, sonorities – the texture of sound for its own sake? Nude and barely adorned? Bare sound: it is a kind of matter that is affirmed.

– And what do you receive from the work? The gift that gives you giving – for are you, now, the locus of creation? – As though you had grown newer, finer organs in order to receive what you have heard. For it is a question of growth, of alteration, of a becoming which does not leave a ‘limit’ intact. There was never a limit. The self was never the form of the same. Inspiration: the self increases its powers. If it is a question of superabundance, of excess, this is not a transgression of a fixed prohibition. The thresholds are remade as you move across them. If it is matter that would bind you to Berlioz, it is matter as it unbinds you from yourself.

A whole line of composers lend themselves to be treated in this way. But what of those who do not? What I would like to think: a lugubrious ecstasy, a mournful rapture. More: a rapture that is suspicious of itself, its excesses. I will come to this one day or another. It is Shostakovich I want to write about – the composer of the 15th Symphony and the 15th String Quartet.

Spielberg and Associates

Godard’s In Praise of Love, Eloge de l’amour is an elliptical film, fragmented, we hardly see the actors, they speak from outside the frame, they are half glimpsed in hotel interiors. What are their motivations? What do they want?

Watching, rewatching the film is to find the plot slowly emerging. Part one – black and white. Auditions for a film about the four stages of love. The young woman with whom the protagonist, a director, is fascinated, has killed herself. She had tuberculosis; she spared herself suffering. The director, Edgar, had been working with her for a film on Simone Weil.

Part two, in supersaturated colour: two years earlier – Edgar’s trip to Brittany, where he first met her. We meet her grandparents, too – French Resistance fighters. Edgar admires the way the young woman, ‘Elle’ resists Spielberg and associates, who are trying to buy the rights to make a film about the Resistance. The old couple embody the project Edgar was working on when we met him at the start of the film: the four stages of love.

I will have to watch it again (and again). It is still not alive for me in the way Tarkovsky’s films are alive; it will be (how many times have I watched Pierrot le Fou?) Still – how to write this? Memory, loss, chance, fascination … what is given to me when I watch the film? It is as if my entire life has been lived again, as if I have been caught in the wave of a great repetition. – But also as though that life were not mine, or that I have been opened to what was not mine about my life. Not my life, but a life which I live again. In this way, the future opens amidst everything else that is about to open.

Tomorrow, I know what I will do … teach, mark essays, fill out forms. But tomorrow is as it were infused with the future. This is what the film gives me and continues to give me because it does not press a story upon me. Lost in Translation is, in the end, another Hollywood film. Listen to the music – trace the story’s arc. The film has no space for you. Why complain? Because there is no air left in film – it’s suffocating. The work does not allow us to breathe, to draw breath. To be inspired.

Bland conclusion: this is an age of the worst classicism. There is no work, nothing indeterminable in the work of art. Nothing escapes – nothing permits us to escape. The culture industry, Spielberg and associates, make films which buy our memories and our lives.

Daytime Insomnia

From Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka:

‘The only definite thing is suffering,’ [Kafka] said earnestly. ‘When do you write?’

I was surprised by the question, so I answered quickly:

‘In the evening, at night. During the day very rarely. I cannot write during the day.’

‘The day is a great enchantment.’

‘I am disturbed by the light, the factory, the houses, the windows over the way. Most of all by the light. The light distracts my attention.’

‘Perhaps it distracts it from the darkness within. It is good when the light overpowers one. If it were not for these horrible sleepless nights, I would never write at all. But they always recall me again to my own dark solitude.’

Ulysses

Thomas Carl Wall, from his lovely Radical Passivity:

So alluring, Blanchot’s texts remain ambiguous, void of content, hesitant, and of an uncertain status (are they poetic? Philosophic? Critical?). One can approach them, to be sure, in the manner of Ulysses, by strapping oneself to the sturdy mast of Hegel, Heidegger, Kojève, or whomever. (98)

I like this formulation very much. When I read it, I thought: but that is what I have done. But then I thought: isn’t Blanchot also Ulysses – and doesn’t he require of all of us who comment, or write, that we too are Ulysses? And doesn’t he also insist that all of us undergo the death of the ‘other’ Ulysses who drowns when his boat his wrecked against the Sirens’ shore?

The Day

A favourite quote from Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time:

We’ve come to the end of the day: let us say that in the course of that day something important has happened, something significant, the sort of thing that could be the inspiration for a film, that has the makings of a conflict of ideas that could become a picture. But how did this day imprint itself on our memory? As something amorphous, vague, with no skeleton or schema. Like a cloud. And only the central event of that day has become concentrated, like a detailed report, lucid in meaning and clearly defined. Against the background of the rest of the day, that event stands out like a tree in the mist[….] Isolated impressions of the day have set off impulses within us, evoked associations; objects and circumstances have stayed in our memory, but with no sharply defined contours, incomplete, apparent fortuitous. Can these impressions of life be conveyed through film? They undoubtedly can; indeed it is the especial virtue of cinema, as the most realistic of the arts, to be the means of such communication. (23)

No Excuses

I speak to W. on the phone. ‘Have you read anything?’ he asks; ‘nothing, nothing’. I tell him I have no time – admin, marking, proofs. Then he says ‘I’ll tell you something that will really depress you’, and he recommends the new edition of Angelaki, which has interviews with prominent French thinkers like Badiou and Serres. W. and I find these thinkers frightening. Publishing original articles at 18, studying in subjects other than philosophy and so on. The best bit, W. says, is when Serres advises the interviewer on no account to get a job in a university. The interviewer objects: how is he to make a living otherwise? W. is a great despiser of academia. We talk about a prominent young philosopher. ‘He has a research position’, I say, ‘not like us – well, that’s my latest excuse’. Ah, a research fellowship, the answer to life’s ills -. But no, the philosopher in question works as we work…. There is no excuse.

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’.

50cm

This is from an interview with Giacometti by Sylvester, where the artist is discussing his practice of painting his sculptures:

… I have to sacrifice the painting and try and do the form. In the same way as I have to sacrifice the whole figure to try and do the head. And as I have the sacrifice the whole landscape to try and do one leaf. And as I have to sacrifice all objects to do a glass. You can only get to do anything by limiting yourself to an extremely small field.

Up until only a year ago I believed it was much easier to draw a tablecloth than a head. I still think so, in theory. But a few months ago I spent three or four days simply trying to draw the cloth on a round table, and it seemed to me totally impossible to draw it as I saw it. I should really not have given up on the tablecloth until I had got a better idea of whether I could do it or not.

But in that case I would have had to sacrifice painting, sculpture, heads and everything else, confine myself to a single room and reduce my entire activity to sitting in front of the same table, the same cloth and the same chair. And it’s easy to foresee that the more I tried, the more difficult it would become. So I’d be reducing my life to practically nothing. That would be a bit worrying, though, because one doesn’t want to sacrifice everything! Yet it’s the only thing one ought to do. Perhaps. I don’t know.

At any rate, since I’ve become much more responsive to the distance between a table and a chair – fifty centimetres – a room, any room, has become infinitely larger than before. In a way it’s become as vast as the world. So it’s all I need to live in. So that has gradually put an end to going for walks. That’s why I don’t go for walks any more. When I go out, it’s to go to the café, which is necessary, and then I prefer to go by car rather than on foot, since it’s no longer for the pleasure of taking a walk. The pleasure of an outing to the forest has completely disappeared for me, because one tree on a Paris pavement is already enough. One tree is enough for me, the thought of seeing two is frightening. While I used to want to travel, these days it makes no difference to me whether I do or not. I am less interested in seeing things because a glass on a table astounds me much more than it used to.

A Lugubrious Ecstasy

An ecststic drunkenness sometimes captures me – the exuberance of the first or the second pint, the first half bottle of wine. Never think drunkenness is a matter of the removal of inhibitions – the ‘I’ is dispersed, the unfifying centre no longer holds; little remains ‘of’ me – above all, no self-consciousness divides me from what is said and done. This is ecstasy – sheer standing out of oneself, modifying no only the threshold between myself and the world, but all thresholds.

Are there other less joyful ecstasies? Today, hungover, the ugly phrase, lugubrious ecstasy appeals to me; I am thinking of a state in which an attention without subject roams unbidden across the world. True, there is a centre to these affects, but it is one that is born and reborn, ever remaking its thresholds, ever breaking and generating new limits and structures. Sometimes a hangover can be like grace.

Drunkards

Drunkards are so alike. Drink with other drinkers to the end of the night and there is a great camaraderie. Everyone else has left and a few remain. The jollity has gone, the exuberance. Drinking has become a serious business; you must match each other drink for drink. You are the last drinkers, barely coherent, no longer exuberant. Stoic. You have survived the evening. But this is not camaraderie. What do you share? Everything – you have drunk enough to become more or less interchangeable with the others. You are drunkards, all alike. But what you share is what dissipates each of you. You share a kind of dispersal. Tape your conversation and you would hear hesitancies, intermittiencies, inarticulate murmurings … it’s magnificent.

Arrhythmia

Perhaps the distinction between prohibition and transgression is misleading. Doesn’t transgression imply a boundary to be transgressed? But what if the boundary itself is remade in transgression? What if transgression reveals there never was a boundary – never an intact and self-identical kernel marked by a limit over which one would step. To step across the boundary is always to step too far; you cannot enter into the same river once and you cannot return to yourself after transgression. To where, then, do you return? In what direction do you ebb? Back to yourself? No: back to the habits that give you, for a time, the sense of remaining yourself. Or, again – back to a more reassuring rhythm, but one which is ready to dissolve at any moment into arrhythmia. How to think rhythm and arrhythmia together? They are not separate; rhythm is of arrhythmia and cannot separate itself from it. That is why prohibitions are required – but these are secondary formations, just as transgression is an inadequate name for the outbreak of chaos. Do not stabilise the threshold between rhythm and arrhythmia.

A Vision

Everything is traversal in the Thames Valley. Our contracts are getting shorter, our assignments more rarified. Who actually has a permanent contract? Who has a six month contract? A three month one? Never mind, there’s work to be done and the infinite labour of adapting oneself to this or that workplace. Yes, adaptation, for that’s what happening. By the tenth company, the twenty-fifth, the fiftieth, it takes you no more than an hour to adjust yourself to the system.

The law streams through you; you can hear its streaming. Listen. It makes no sense – empty orders, detached subroutines. Listen more closely – there is nothing there. The law has no substance, but is only the dissolution of substance. Listen and you hear only that great senseless roaring that fills the empty places between the stars.

How is it then that the law is able to assume the human face of your boss, the executive, the company director? How is it that it is hypostatised into the particular bodies of those who pass through the Thames Valley? (Ah, those marvellous bodies, pared down and sleek: bodies which will not offend clients or vendors, bodies anonymously sleek like the great cars which pass along the roads: how I admire them! How I would like to tone and trim my own body! To shape and streamline it like the sleekest car!)

The network is connecting us. The network dreams for us. The network speaks through each of us, I can hear it, even as I know behind these orders there is only empty noise. The network! Now I am a networker; my friends those with whom I network and who network with me. I close my eyes and I see sleek bodies climbing up and down a great ladder. Up and down they go, their shining bodies becoming indistinguishable. Until: a vision: the up and the down are the same and each body is the same. The temp worker and the boss are the same and we are each substitutable for one another.

The truth was mine: each worker was substitutable, perfectly substitutable. Our skills were equivalent and interchangable. Our bodies were sleek. There were others, it is true – bad machines: disabled workers, obese workers, mad workers, those who could work no longer and fell from the loving arms of Capital. And those who would never get connected, whom the network would not reach. We pitied them, all of them, but we had to keep our eyes on the job.

Faux Pas

The proofs of my book have arrived and I know now my book is an ungainly thing. Some passages are, it is true, reasonable. They have a momentum, a direction, and the phrases are well turned. But others – especially the ones I hastily added when I came close to the deadline – are like great swamps in which all forward movement is lost. I think of the scene in Tarkovsky’s Mirror in which soliders trudge across a marsh. It is clearly a book which languished too long and, when I finally received a contract, was subjected to a rewrite which confused the original argument. Still, if the original book had been published as I had written it, it would have been terrible, an embarassment. This way, it is merely a false step.

Parentheses

Why did Smog become (Smog) with Rain on Lens? Why put parentheses around a name? Out of discretion. The word, for Bill Callahan, is a word too many. The name is too imposing, too forceful. Isn’t this suspension – withholding, through parenthesis, the movement that would see this word take its place among other words – only a sleight of hand? Perhaps Bill Callahan is signalling to us that the name risks getting in the way – that Smog have become too imposing, that they are linked to a style. It is necessary to become minor again, to deviate, to rediscover a movement which has no coherence or identity in itself. And then to begin anew, as if from nothing. Remember the Japanese poets who, upon achieving fame in a particular place, would change their name and go elsewhere.

A Ghost

I am a ghost of the books I read. As I read, I incorporate – the book gives me my body. But when I close the book? My body fades away, I begin to forget everything but a vague sense that I was, not so long ago, more than a ghost.

As I read, I am swept up by what I read; the ideas inhabit me – I am the book, I am bound to its author (she and I experienced the same joy, the same ecstasy). But then when I finish the book, when I am beached on the shore, a great sense of loss, of mourning … until, just a few weeks later, I have already forgotten the experience and fevered annotations are written as though by another person. How I envy him!

Minor Reading

Too frightened by the strength of the major books, I take company with minor ones, obscurities, works that have not been buried in commentary. Then I learn minor works shine with the reflected light of major ones; I cannot avoid reading the great names. But then I learn the major books themselves do not constitute constants or standards, that it is always a matter of a minor reading.

Keep some steady books around …

Keep yourself within the draft of a strong book. It protects you. In discussion, it can speak through you. A magic circle: the books you show know well enough to allow them to speak through you. Let’s say (just a few): Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality, Heidegger’s Being and Time…. This takes a great deal of time, and many of us never reach the point strong thinkers achieved early on. We are commentators, many of us, lost in the forest.

Sometimes, close to a strong book, letting it guard me, an opening occurs and I am filled with confidence, I have the answers to questions…. But those questions were born and addressed in the strong book; just as, reading a novel, I imagine that I, too, could write a novel – or that writing would be as easy as reading.

The old problem in philosophy put so well by Socrates: you have to appropriate thought for yourself – you have to lay claim to it, to be able to defend yourself against objectors, and to transform what you think to meet new circumstances. Yes, this is the problem, and one I feel acutely when I leave the glade to which the strong book brought me. For then, I wonder, what have I kept from this reading? To where has this reading brought me? Confused, lost, there is only the sense of the overwhelming difficulty of philosophy and the hideous strength of strong thinkers.

The Drone

The words, the wisp of melody are born out of the drone as out of a primordial reverberation, the birth and rebirth of the world. The drone calls them back, too, even as it attunes them in the song – even as these words resonate with a deeper resonance. And this is the glory of Smog: the ‘content’ of the song answers to the profundity of its birth; the simplicity of the music – a few notes, repeated – lets be the unfolding and refolding, the pulse, of its source. Where does the song come from? Bill Callahan? The words issue out of the reverberation that is there before everything. They repeat the cosmogony by which everything becomes present. The tenacity of Smog (the greatness of an album like The Doctor Came at Dawn): drawing music again and again to the source.

Irony Mastered and Unmastered

Notes written in the margin of John Lippitt’s Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard’s Thought:

Irony: to say the opposite of what you mean (Quintillian)? To oppose the inner to the outer (Kierkegaard)? The danger of irony is that one it can run away with you. You have to know what your position is – you have to be sure what it is you mean; only then you can ironise responsibly. You must have made an – inward – resolution. Thus Socrates, according to Plato’s Symposium, says the following ‘most ironically’:

Dear Alcibiades, it looks as though you are not stupid, if what you say about me is true and there really is in me some power which could made you a better man: you must be seeing something inconceivably beautiful in me, enormously superior to your good looks. If this is what you see and you want to exchange beauty for beauty, you mean to take a huge advantage of me: you are trying to get true beauty in exchange for seeming beauty – ‘gold for brass’.

Vlastos comments Socrates’s indirect message is as follows: ‘You must be stupid if you think I’m falling for a deal like that, in which you gain far more (edification from the man you take to be the wisest in Athens) than I do (the fleeting pleasures of sex).’ Lippitt comments in turn: ‘A vital part of Vlastos’s point here is that there is no will to mislead or deceive here at all on Socrates’ part. Rather, Alcibiades (and the reader along with him) has been left on his own to ‘put two and two together’ by himself. (141).

Kierkegaard:

Particularly in our age, irony must be commended. In our age, scientific scholarship has come into possession of such prodigious achievements that there must be something wrong somewhere; knowledge not only about the secrets of the human race but even about the secrets of God is offered for sale at such a bargain price today that it all looks very dubious. In our joy over the achievement in our age, we have forgotten than an achievement is worthless if it is not made one’s own. (Concept of Irony, 327)

One has to make it one’s own – once again, a kind of autonomy is at issue. Still, is there an experience of unmastered irony – the joy of losing one’s autonomy, of abandoning any claim to seriousness or responsibility? How to construct a bridge from this to the irresponsibility of literary or poetic speech? I’m too tired to do it tonight (what a copout) …

The Night’s Dream

In a diary entry for January 26th 1973, Tarkovsky distinguishes between ‘two kinds of dreams. In the first, the dreamer can direct the events of the dream as if by magic. He is the master of everything that happens or is going to happen. He is a demiurge. In the second, the dreamer has no say, he is passive, he suffers from the violence done him and from his inability to protect himself’ (Time Within Time, 66)

… I have woken from several disturbing dreams over the past few nights. They were of the second kind.

The Sumerians used to recount their dreams upon waking, believing this dispelled the magic of the dream. You are not the protagonist of the dream you think is your own. It turns itself from you and turns you from yourself; it is as though you gaze into a mirror and do not see yourself. Beware then another legend: that the dream, ‘your’ dream – the one you seek to possess – belongs to the first interpreter, the first one to whom you narrate it. But you already know the dream cannot be unfurled; there remains, at its heart, something enigmatic and closed from you. What resists interpretation? The fact that the dream is not yours, but the night’s; you, dreaming, are as though turned inside out, and it is not you who dream, but the night.

A Strong Book

To take revenge on a book – a weak thinker wonders how he can take revenge on a book of strong thought. How is this possible? In the feeling of vindication that arises from taking issue with this or that argument – which already assumes, beforehand, that the book can be cut down to a sequence of discrete arguments whose arguments can be tested and found wanting. How, then, do you meet a strong book? How do welcome it? It is a question of finding its orientation and following it, of leaning with it into the wind.

Two Thoughts at Once

A few lines written in the margins of Jill Marsden’s remarkable After Nietzsche and Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation. This is really only a reading note, an attempt to open up something new for myself.

After Nietzsche, 24:

There are certain philosophical ideas that can be accessed only through self-abandon. For Nietzsche, the insight of Heraclitus into the ‘eternal wavebeat and rhythm of things’ is the product of a raw and restive meditation that has come to ebb and flow with this dark, inhuman pulse. It is one thin.g to declare: ‘it is the fault of your myopia, not of the nature of things, if you believe you see firm land somewhere in the ocean of becoming and passing away’: quite another, as Heraclitus attests, to actually ‘see nothing other than becoming’ .

What does Heraclitus see beyond the particular forms of things? Impermanence and unloosening. But how can he write about this if language cannot help but suggest permanency, if it always binds things – particular perturbations of chaos – to themselves, carving up the multiplicity of the world up into subjects and objects, and subordinating the multiple under the concept? By refusing to disambiguate his pronouncements, casting them in fragmentary and paradoxical form. Heraclitus suspends the thetic function of language allowing the ocean to rise up through this suspension. But how is this possible? Neither being (thesis) nor nothingness (antithesis) – nor the synthesis of the two -, Heraclitus, in the aphorism, affirms a thought that hovers between these contraries. Suspension, hovering between – are these the right words? It is equipoise, but a strife, a tension, a redoubled irreciprocity.

At some point, according to Blanchot, Bacchylides writes that because human beings are finite they must harbour two thoughts at once. Is this true? Yes, if thought is linked to an experience of the unconditioned, which no longer answers to the ‘I’ that would represent the world to itself through reflection. Two thoughts at once? The thought of the unconditioned and of the conditioned; the thought, that is, which answers to the world of determinate subjects and objects as they appear and disappear from the general economy of the indeterminable and chaotic. No longer does the known condition the unknown; it is the unknown and the unknowable that generates and dissolves the plane upon which subject and objects can appear. But this means the thinker, too, is caught in the flux of becoming; to think is also to endure an experience in which nothing exists in my place. What am I? Who am I? An open ecstasis, an ocean, in which the ‘I’ is only a wavebeat, a rhythm, which is done and undone, which appears and disappears.

Heraclitus is able to think two thoughts at once: he endures the experience of his own dissolution – some ‘one’, no one in particular, is wakeful and vigilant in thinking; a trace is left and marked in his writing. Two thoughts at once? Perhaps one could say he thinks thinking by sustaining a difference which will not close up into a unity – a vacillating movement which does not come to rest in one or other term. Neither one nor the other – why does Bacchylides claim that it is because we are finite that are thought is redoubled? I remember the famous lines from Heidegger’s ‘What is Metaphysics?’, roughly paraphrased: we are so finite we cannot bring ourselves into the nothing through an act of will. It reaches us; it touches us, disclosing a difference between being and beings (two thoughts?) And so too must Heraclitus have been claimed by an experience to which he was able to bear witness. But how was this possible? It is as if, before it began – before it even found its name – philosophy, in the West (Heraclitus gave us the word philosopher, I think – or have I got it the wrong way round?) – was turned from itself.