Did I really have time to pen such missives? I post this as a reminder of how much time I used to have to send letters to newspapers and magazines. Of course they didn't print it: must have been The Guardian or Time Out. Godard must be 80 in two years. Will he get a better treatment this time. of course he will. The hacks will read the biographies by McCabe and Roud.
The article (November 26) printed to mark Godard’s 70th birthday inadvertently gestures towards its own more pervasive shortcomings by way of several glaring errors. Godard was not the only director associated with the Nouvelle Vague to avoid simply “renewing traditional cinema” - as anyone familiar with the work of Varda and Rivette would attest. The surname of Godard’s second wife is Wiazemsky (not Wiamensky). As to whether she can be said to be “dull”, one can only speculate about the criteria the unnamed author of the article uses to judge humans - but presumably they are of a piece with those which permit him or her to dismiss Godard’s entire output of the 1980s and 1990s as offensive, callow and boring. Myriem Roussel, and not Juliette Binoche, played the lead role in Godard’s Hail Mary. If the author of the piece cared to check the archives he or she would find copious evidence that the condemnation which greeted the film in some quarters was far from universal. Regardless of the opinion one might have of Godard’s work it deserves better treatment than this. After all, according to the anecdote related in the article, even Godard at least did Brody the courtesy of one interview before denying him a second.
Monday 3 December 2007
Sunday 14 October 2007
Letter to the void
Pedantry is irresistible but always runs the risk of more precise pedantry. Is this why The Guardian wouldn't publish the following missive?
While the Coens (‘Stars and Gripes’, The Guardian
Weekend, Saturday October 13) would like Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Spectre (1971-1972, but released in 1974) to be remade in order, they quip, to be shortened (from its actual 255 minutes), they seem to be unaware that the director got there first, his 1972 film being itself already a ‘remake’ (or, more precisely, re-edited version) of his Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971) which, in its rare public screenings, comes in at 12 hours and 40 minutes. At its first public screening in Le Havre in 1971 and at the NFT’s retrospective in 2006 the longer work was presented over two days (the work was at first intended by Rivette for television broadcast). According to Rivette specialist Jonathan Rosenbaum, Rivette cut 10 minutes from the film after a 1989 Rotterdam screening, which would mean he has ‘remade’ the 1971 original not once but twice.
While the Coens (‘Stars and Gripes’, The Guardian
Weekend, Saturday October 13) would like Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Spectre (1971-1972, but released in 1974) to be remade in order, they quip, to be shortened (from its actual 255 minutes), they seem to be unaware that the director got there first, his 1972 film being itself already a ‘remake’ (or, more precisely, re-edited version) of his Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971) which, in its rare public screenings, comes in at 12 hours and 40 minutes. At its first public screening in Le Havre in 1971 and at the NFT’s retrospective in 2006 the longer work was presented over two days (the work was at first intended by Rivette for television broadcast). According to Rivette specialist Jonathan Rosenbaum, Rivette cut 10 minutes from the film after a 1989 Rotterdam screening, which would mean he has ‘remade’ the 1971 original not once but twice.
Thursday 11 October 2007
Priest with i-pod
An abeyant fiction
Mnsr Gribaldi adjusted the position of his ecclesiastical in-ear headphones and raised the volume of the Gotan Project’s second album, Lunatico, prior to fastening the clasp of his leather accordion briefcase , fixing his frock coat, securing his hat, and exiting the train at Kings Cross City Thameslink. No one know why it was still called that since the train company running the service between Luton and Sutton was no longer Thameslink but First Capital Connect. It also connected Gatwick and Luton airports on occasion, and it was from the former that he had journeyed, inserting his all-in-one ticket into the barrier at Gatwick with some trepidation, since the junior clerk at the Vatican who took charge of travel arrangements had been preoccupied of late with various papal excursions. Indeed the furore which greeted the pontif’s then recent affront to the Muslim tradition during his visit to [deleted detail] had the curious but highly localised effect of launching the travel office into the limelight not seen since the globetrotting days of PJPII. As the novice elongated his person to an upright position the gaze of several passengers both alighting and remaining, along with that of several joining the train or awaiting the next, were trained on him. Some fixed on his headwear, others on his complexion framed by the latter, others on the impressive frock coats with their many pleats. A few noted his elaborate black fabric belt, others still his general bearing, anachronous and geographically out of context appearance. Not a few were caused to pause for a second of false recognition, only to realise that what they recognised was their television screen staring back at them in the shape of an advertisement for Stella Artois. But many knew immediately what had caught their eye: all of the above compressed and set off by the dense symbolism and iconic status of the I-Pod.
Aside from the Gotan Project’s second album, a much misunderstood work in the music press due to the association of their first album with so-called chill out periods post clubbing. The experienced musicians involved had not made any such associations when they trawled Argentinian tango for beats and rhythms, the iPod’s repository featured sundry Latin American artists including Joyce, an Italian jazz quartet whom he could never decide were talented or not. Their cover version of [deleted detail] was affecting in its way, though less curiously so than the version of a track from the soundtrack of Emmanuelle which featured on the Gotan Project’s debut recording.
He disembarked and strode out into King’s Cross rain. The traffic at the junction of and the Pentonville Road was locked in the vice-grip of a cantilever bus. He dodged it by inserting himself perilously between its rear and the throbbing frontage of the one hard on its wheels. The driver revved and allowed the vehicle to lurch forward fractionally, a frequent amusement for some sadistic bus-drivers when faced with slaloming pedestrians frustrated by the rash of blocked pedestrian crossings brought on by the introduction of the so-called bendy bus.
Onward he plod, noting that since his last visit the lights at [deleted detail] had been changed so that now the island was dangerously full with pedestrians trapped by the seemingly excessive green on traffic turning left into [deleted detail]. He steered a course between the Amnesty International clipboard holding individual and the purveyor of London Lite and their direct competitor in the world of free newspapers. and headed into the building site that was the Euston Road. He passed the entrance to what would soon be the underground access under St Pancras. Adhesive backing was being peeled off some of the London Underground signage as he passed by. Further on the redevelopment of the Great Northern Hotel was proceeding with the entire facade now held in the skeletal embrace of an estimated [deleted detail] metres of scaffolding. He enjoyed crossing [deleted detail] where no traffic save for the odd construction vehicle now interfered with crossing pedestrians and went on past the ever-present Big Issue seller past the now closed Chapters coffee shop under the grim bunker entrance and into the courtyard of the British Library.
Mnsr Gribaldi adjusted the position of his ecclesiastical in-ear headphones and raised the volume of the Gotan Project’s second album, Lunatico, prior to fastening the clasp of his leather accordion briefcase , fixing his frock coat, securing his hat, and exiting the train at Kings Cross City Thameslink. No one know why it was still called that since the train company running the service between Luton and Sutton was no longer Thameslink but First Capital Connect. It also connected Gatwick and Luton airports on occasion, and it was from the former that he had journeyed, inserting his all-in-one ticket into the barrier at Gatwick with some trepidation, since the junior clerk at the Vatican who took charge of travel arrangements had been preoccupied of late with various papal excursions. Indeed the furore which greeted the pontif’s then recent affront to the Muslim tradition during his visit to [deleted detail] had the curious but highly localised effect of launching the travel office into the limelight not seen since the globetrotting days of PJPII. As the novice elongated his person to an upright position the gaze of several passengers both alighting and remaining, along with that of several joining the train or awaiting the next, were trained on him. Some fixed on his headwear, others on his complexion framed by the latter, others on the impressive frock coats with their many pleats. A few noted his elaborate black fabric belt, others still his general bearing, anachronous and geographically out of context appearance. Not a few were caused to pause for a second of false recognition, only to realise that what they recognised was their television screen staring back at them in the shape of an advertisement for Stella Artois. But many knew immediately what had caught their eye: all of the above compressed and set off by the dense symbolism and iconic status of the I-Pod.Aside from the Gotan Project’s second album, a much misunderstood work in the music press due to the association of their first album with so-called chill out periods post clubbing. The experienced musicians involved had not made any such associations when they trawled Argentinian tango for beats and rhythms, the iPod’s repository featured sundry Latin American artists including Joyce, an Italian jazz quartet whom he could never decide were talented or not. Their cover version of [deleted detail] was affecting in its way, though less curiously so than the version of a track from the soundtrack of Emmanuelle which featured on the Gotan Project’s debut recording.
He disembarked and strode out into King’s Cross rain. The traffic at the junction of and the Pentonville Road was locked in the vice-grip of a cantilever bus. He dodged it by inserting himself perilously between its rear and the throbbing frontage of the one hard on its wheels. The driver revved and allowed the vehicle to lurch forward fractionally, a frequent amusement for some sadistic bus-drivers when faced with slaloming pedestrians frustrated by the rash of blocked pedestrian crossings brought on by the introduction of the so-called bendy bus.
Onward he plod, noting that since his last visit the lights at [deleted detail] had been changed so that now the island was dangerously full with pedestrians trapped by the seemingly excessive green on traffic turning left into [deleted detail]. He steered a course between the Amnesty International clipboard holding individual and the purveyor of London Lite and their direct competitor in the world of free newspapers. and headed into the building site that was the Euston Road. He passed the entrance to what would soon be the underground access under St Pancras. Adhesive backing was being peeled off some of the London Underground signage as he passed by. Further on the redevelopment of the Great Northern Hotel was proceeding with the entire facade now held in the skeletal embrace of an estimated [deleted detail] metres of scaffolding. He enjoyed crossing [deleted detail] where no traffic save for the odd construction vehicle now interfered with crossing pedestrians and went on past the ever-present Big Issue seller past the now closed Chapters coffee shop under the grim bunker entrance and into the courtyard of the British Library.
Monday 11 June 2007
Law of stereo
While Stereo Total opt for Gainsbourg as a dominant referent, Stereolab weave from a wider, more dispersed web of referents. Both lead singers being French, however, and both featuring prominently in the songwriting, Sterolab and Stereo Total both draw upon French referents. Whereas in their lyrics 'Lab cite Castoriadis and Marc Augé, 'Total namecheck Godard films and cover Gainsbourg songs. The extent to twhich Total rely on a solid relationship of ironic citation, combined with rhizomatic proliferation is clearly suggested in 2001’s album. Track 15 on the CD only plays after a silence of several minutes which follows track 14. What follows is the two key members, Françoise Cactus and Brezel Goring singing Karaoke-style versions of ‘Hello is it me you’re looking for’ by Lionel Richie, and ‘These boots are made for walking’ made famous by Nancy Sinatra. They choose to lay bare in this occluded supplement the general principle of relation to their source material.
Tuesday 29 May 2007
Touching the image: Egoyan's The Adjuster
Notes made in 1998
The male characters in Egoyan’s breakthrough feature, The Adjuster, are characterised by their prosthetic hook-up to fantasy. The head of the censorship team is drawn to his job because the material which they must view arouses him sexually. Likewise the newcomer to the job.
The newcomer offers a pivotal moment in the film’s denouement as well as a pointed clue as to where the directorial judgement lies vis-a-vis the ethical and politico-sexual issues raised - by definition - by the film’s setting (in a film classification board). Herra, who often cannot bear to watch the violent, misogynist pornographic images which it is part of her job to rate according to an escalating scale of acceptability takes footage of the parts of films she knows will be cut or banned from public view. The reason, we only learn later in the film, is that her older sister (whom we never hear speak) is and always has been - even back in the unamed homeland (an Egoyan mainstay) - fascinated by whatever her other sister does outside the home. When her sister views the excerpts at home she is proud, Herra says, to see what her sister has, effectively, effaced. However, she is seen ‘stealing’ the footage (with the aid of a camcorder) by the newcomer, who promptly reports her activities to the head censor. Behind this act is a presumption on his part -later mirrored by the boss - that Herra copies the images for her own pleasure, or for that of her husband, and that through ‘bringing this into the open’, in the words used by the boss, the two males will be able to profit, whether through a fantasised complicity (fantasised by them) in the rape (which could be read otherwise) they seem to be attempting to carry out at one point. Schooled in the pitiful scenarios of pornography Herra quickly spots the set up: her response, one of laughter, freezes the would-be rapists, isolates them in the beams of the projector. Herra then is seen doubly to transgress the codes adhered to by her employer and his sidekick: first, she consumes pornography (but not by consuming it as such, rather by counteractualising it), but not for pleasure, unlike them. Second, she refuses the complicity presumed by her employer.
The Adjuster has no identity: just a tissue of cliches, codes, which he repeats to each victim. All are seduced by it. Herra, however, sees through it, finally (and perhaps all along: we suggest, on the basis of the suggestion that the adjuster meets her through an accident) leaves him - while his own house goes up in flames (he, finally, becomes a victim). In a superb finale the trio of Herra , sister and child are seen looking on as their house burns and an adjuster, not the same and yet the same, puts a comforting hand on her shoulder and mouths the same series of platitudes.
The male characters in Egoyan’s breakthrough feature, The Adjuster, are characterised by their prosthetic hook-up to fantasy. The head of the censorship team is drawn to his job because the material which they must view arouses him sexually. Likewise the newcomer to the job.
The newcomer offers a pivotal moment in the film’s denouement as well as a pointed clue as to where the directorial judgement lies vis-a-vis the ethical and politico-sexual issues raised - by definition - by the film’s setting (in a film classification board). Herra, who often cannot bear to watch the violent, misogynist pornographic images which it is part of her job to rate according to an escalating scale of acceptability takes footage of the parts of films she knows will be cut or banned from public view. The reason, we only learn later in the film, is that her older sister (whom we never hear speak) is and always has been - even back in the unamed homeland (an Egoyan mainstay) - fascinated by whatever her other sister does outside the home. When her sister views the excerpts at home she is proud, Herra says, to see what her sister has, effectively, effaced. However, she is seen ‘stealing’ the footage (with the aid of a camcorder) by the newcomer, who promptly reports her activities to the head censor. Behind this act is a presumption on his part -later mirrored by the boss - that Herra copies the images for her own pleasure, or for that of her husband, and that through ‘bringing this into the open’, in the words used by the boss, the two males will be able to profit, whether through a fantasised complicity (fantasised by them) in the rape (which could be read otherwise) they seem to be attempting to carry out at one point. Schooled in the pitiful scenarios of pornography Herra quickly spots the set up: her response, one of laughter, freezes the would-be rapists, isolates them in the beams of the projector. Herra then is seen doubly to transgress the codes adhered to by her employer and his sidekick: first, she consumes pornography (but not by consuming it as such, rather by counteractualising it), but not for pleasure, unlike them. Second, she refuses the complicity presumed by her employer.
The Adjuster has no identity: just a tissue of cliches, codes, which he repeats to each victim. All are seduced by it. Herra, however, sees through it, finally (and perhaps all along: we suggest, on the basis of the suggestion that the adjuster meets her through an accident) leaves him - while his own house goes up in flames (he, finally, becomes a victim). In a superb finale the trio of Herra , sister and child are seen looking on as their house burns and an adjuster, not the same and yet the same, puts a comforting hand on her shoulder and mouths the same series of platitudes.
Sunday 22 April 2007
Beckett, Ethics, Critchley, Adorno and much more
I was asked to write a chapter (of which this represents a large section) for an edited volume of essays. I don't think they liked my contribution since I still await the editor's response to my submission. It dates from 2001. I am oddly attached to it perhaps because it was always addressed to myself.
Perhaps one of the most surprising paradoxes of recent Beckettian criticism is the vigour with which his work has been re-enlisted to a metaphysical and totalizing project the spirit of which, for many, Beckett’s work represents the antithesis. Part of this vigour conceivably stems from an ethical turn in philosophy and in literary theory. Each of these contentious claims demands immediate qualification. First, it should be made clear that the term metaphysical is employed here in a specific sense which will be explicated below. Second, there have been several distinct ethical turns in recent philosophy and criticism and these need to be disentangled.
In the wake of the theoretical turn in Beckett studies, there has recently been an emergent demand that Beckett’s work be somehow rescued from the clutches of deconstructionists and schizoanalysts, that somehow the referent needs to be restored. In short there has been a return in Beckett scholarship to an implicitly metaphysical paradigm, one whereby Beckett’s work be reclaimed from those who would subject it to a complete loss of co-ordinates, sacrificing the critic in the process and abandoning the work to the vagaries either of the signifier or the schizoid.
Metaphysics being the philosophy of Being, it need not always be the case, however, that metaphysical enquiry have a foundational aspect or underpinning. Metaphysics as the study of first causes and of origins can also name that type of inquiry which ends up by proving the lack of validity of that very conception of metaphysics. This is why the term ontology may perhaps be more appropriate.[1] [ontology for Heidegger is the study of the Being of beings].[2] Ontology relates to a modality of coming into Being, of being-in-the-world, or (for Vincent Descombes) is to be thought of as an ontology of the present, of being now.
The question which I wish to address in this paper is has there been a return to metaphysical thinking about Beckett’s work? And, moreover has this return been felt moreso in philosophy than in literary criticism. Or, rather, is it more notable in the area of philosophical reflections on Beckett? An allied question will also be posed: what are the current set of relations obtaining between the two disciplines? Along the way it will also be possible to consider the notion - proposed by Gilles Deleuze - that Beckett himself is a half-philosopher. The set of questions posed here pertain to the inquiry that has underpinned much of this book, namely that which must be undertaken afresh each time the machinic phylum is forced to confront or undertake a negotiation and a relation with the machinic assemblage; the ruses and slippages, often into reification, but sometimes into molecularity, which occur when the Beckett corpus meets the critical hermeneut.
Beckett and the philosophers? Not only is this the title of Peter Murphy’s important article but it is also an enduring concern more generally amongst Beckett scholars, both those who may delve into the various Beckett archives in search of clues as to Beckett’s reading of the philosophers and those who may eschew such empirical researches in favour of speculative forays into retrospective intertextual explorations of resonances between Beckett’s work and any number of philosophical approaches from Aristotle, through the stoics, through Plotinus in the third century, to contemporary encounters staged between the work of Beckett and philosophers which he definitely did not read such as Baudrillard and Lyotard.
It is in part the very elusiveness of Beckett’s work, its untrammelled vital energy which defiantly remains unabated in the wake of such encounters that spurs critics and commentators to further efforts. It is always the case of encore un effort pour etre philosophe (avec Beckett). One of the most interesting manifestations of the philosophers’ response to Beckett, rather than Beckett’s response to the philosophers, is the extent to which contemporary philosophers have attempted to detect and to delineate the salient features of a Beckettian system.
There is nothing particularly strange about this common feature. Indeed it could be said to the critical act par excellence, one whose basic structure is discernible behind even the most enigmatic and epigrammatic of deconstructions. Of course this quality of critical response is the fundamental aporia of literary studies.
As Simon Critchley points out in the introductory remarks to the Beckett section of Almost Nothing, “there seems to be some sort of inverse or perverse relation between the resistance of Beckett’s work to interpretation and the philosophical abstraction and assuredness of the interpretation offered in its name.” (142). With comic panache Critchley caustically proposes a possible Kantian reading of the Beckettian œuvre (“What a broadening of the mind!” 144) before going on to point out that such a hypothetical project (which in Critchley’s view would amount to the philosophical reading of Beckett), like all of the valiant attempts that have gone before (one thinks for instance of Robbe-Grillet on Beckett as Heidegger, innumerable others on Beckett as cartesian etc.) have the end- product of the spectacle of “the philosophical hermeneut becom[ing] a rather flat-footed puppet dancing to the author’s tune” (144).
Let the parade of philosophical imps of the perverse begin says Critchley. First to be tested for hermeneutical adequacy is Derrida, the philosopher who famously - and paradoxically helpfully for many Derrideans wishing to make a inroad into Beckett studies - has remained silent on his work. Critchley echoes the move of many others by commenting on Derrida’s own remarks about his inability to say anything about the work of Beckett an inability brought about by the ethical demand that one avoid “The platitude of a supposed academic metalanguage” (144).[3]
Critical Apparatus: Diving and Dredging
If the cartesian diver - also known as a bottle imp - is a likely figure of the philosophical hermeneut, alternately plumbing the depths and ascending toward the sky of transcendence (by means of rat’s asses and sky-cranes as one Deleuzean - Welchman? - would have it), then Critchley in offers a timely reminder of the Derridean figure of the dredging machine He reminds us that it is the remainder, the irreducible remainder which resists hermeneutical exegesis, that is perhaps what Derrida gestures towards most forcefully by not speaking or writing on Beckett’s text. “In this sense, we might say that the goal of Derrida’s reading practice is to let the remains remain,” Critchley convincingly concludes (146).
Endgame, Beckett’s play of ending and gaming, is reclaimed by Adorno - to whom Critchley turns at this point in his study, having reached an impasse associated with Derrida (and identified by Critchley as equivalent to the impasse of deconstruction). Rather than merely a play that offers a straightforward expression of the meaningless of existence, and rather than exemplifying mere Heideggerian “thrownness”, Beckett’s text, by means of what Adorno sees as the author’s materialism, succeeds on the one hand in moving beyond the inwardness which characterises Heidegger’s dasein and on the other ruling out the possibility of situation being translated into “meaning”. Critchley follows Adorno whose words and conclusion he (favourably?) quotes: “the dissociation of the unity of consciousness into disparate elements, into non-identity” (149).
These remarks on Adorno, and on Critchley’s approval for Adorno’s conclusion need to be placed in their proper context. Adorno’s vision of the decline of metaphysics does not rule out the possibility of introducing his own metaphysical concepts. Indeed nowhere perhaps is Adorno more metaphysical than when in Aesthetic Theory he writes:
“Because it is different from empirical life, the work of art posits its unity, as it were, programmatically. Traversing the realm of spirit, the art work determines its oneness in opposition to the contingency and chaos of what grows naturally” (266).
While Adorno is thus committed to a view of art which eschews any conception of the latter as the unproblematic mediator of an external reality - a commitment reiterated throughout his work - he is fundamentally committed to a conception of the work as integrated. This will not lead to a naive conception of the art work as a harmonious whole unvisited by disjunction or dissonance. Nor will it necessarily posit the work as synthetic resolution of a conflict, although Adorno does in places seem to argue the contrary (“this oneness is more than just formal; it enables works of art to rise above internecine disjunction” 266). In Adorno, who champions early Schoenberg and late Beckett, that which is dissonant need not be neutralized in Hegelian sublation. In a manner emblematic of Adorno’s negative dialectics, while
“art is unable to bring about the identity of the one and the many, ... [it] ... incorporates this inability as a moment of its unity”
It is a combination of its programmed unity which can include within itself elements which jar with that unity (one of these being its inability to facilitate or enable the identity of the one and the many) that leads Adorno to posit the monadic status of the work of art. This monadism has a further consequence. If the art work is autonomous and sealed within its own spatio-temporal co-ordinates, then analysis of the work in question must remain immanent rather than claim to be produced from a position transcendent to the analysed work (257-59).
Immanent critique, as performed by Adorno, is designed to avoid the simplistic alternative of judging a solipsism on the one hand, or an art which self-negates because it functions merely as a commentary on society on the other (352). For, while Adorno considered naturalistic theatre a dupe of the culture industry, he also regarded socialist realism as infantile. Beckett’s work avoids both pitfalls.
“Beckett’s dramas exemplify the proper relation between the two contradictory desiderata, i.e. successful figuration and adequate social context.” (353)
Adequate social context, it must be added however, amounts to a negation of content, which would lead one to conclude that adequate social context entails a merely formal property or series of properties standing in a relation of resistance vis-à-vis conformity and reactionary thought and practice.
Under the heading ‘The Crisis of Meaning’, Adorno states that Beckett’s work seems to presuppose the experience of meaninglessness - but it doesn’t negate meaning - it negates traditional categories of art by carrying “the empirical process of the disappearance of meaning” into the midst of those categories. The revolution is one of form.
This process of “metaphysical negation” is one which attenuates the need for and the appeal of any metaphysical affirmation: “at the end of this tunnel of metaphysical meaninglessness ... there is no light (220).
Returning to Critchley, he concludes that the specificity of Beckett’s work for Adorno lies in the former’s interrogation of meaning, of what it is to produce meaning, and yet at the same time his work does not end up with that interrogation as its meaning, that is the meaning is the work’s resistance (via a reflexive consideration of its meaninglessness) to meaning. Again the characteristic Critchley phrase appears here: “a necessary and impossible task” (151).
Critchley follows this up by explicitly reminding the reader of his purpose, which is to show that Beckett’s work’s meaningless is an “achievement” rather than a task, and that that meaninglessness will refuse attempts on the one had to recuperate a meaning (even meaninglessness as meaning) and on the other what he refers to as the (nihilistic) comfort of meaninglessness.
Whichever way one puts it it is clear that Critchley is enlisting Adorno to support his own contention regarding the impossibility of Beckett’s text, the remainder which has silenced even Derrida. Derrida’s silence for Critchley indeed is the mute but eloquent signifier of the fact that for many others who do try to speak on Beckett “The dredging machine continues its work even as the water and silt escape it and because of this fact” (152).
What then of Adorno’s dredging machine? How will it manage to theorise meaninglesness in a manner which avoids existentialist and Heideggerian reification? Critchley points out that it is through a conception of form as social praxis that Adorno makes such a move. The utopian moment of “reconciliation” is tempered however by the acknowledgement that this moment is not reconciliation as it has been traditionally conceived (namely, one supposes within broadly Hegelian terms, as sublation). Critchley is compelling on how Adorno’s hectoring antitheses neutralise the prose under its scrutiny and testifies in Critchley’s view to the failure to evoke Beckett’s idiom (157). If issue is later taken with Critchley’s version of Deleuze no such qualms are felt in his judgement of the Adorno misprision of Beckett’s humour.
And yet Adorno’s reading of Beckett remains in Critchley’s words “the philosophically most powerful and hermeneutically most nuanced piece of writing on Beckett” (160). Would it disingenuous to respond to this by turning Critchley’s own comments (on Adorno) against their author by saying that perhaps this judgement tells us more about Critchley’s concerns than it does about either those of Adorno or indeed of Beckett.[4] Adorno, after all, leaves us in the space of a negative dialectic and in the utopian opening of a formal praxis. It is these two items which as a Levinasian Critchley wants to retain (even if his will be a messianism without the messianic, a secular Totality and Infinity). And, given the affinity between the two thinkers, this is why Critchley can find his quasi-Levinasian reading partner in Blanchot.
The reading of the trilogy which Critchley goes on to produce - out of his averred sense of the necessity, the demand - Levinasian one presumes - to go on - is largely predicated on the distinction made by Blanchot between narrative time and the time of dying. It is the latter which offers Critchley the forum for a Ricksian “syntax of weakness”, an idiom uttered in awareness of the impossibility of dying (Blanchot). Hence the interminability of the on, in Critchley’s view.
The enduring presence of Ricks in the development of the argument is surprising. Critchley makes of the former an obscure ally in a double-headed project: with Ricks a potshot (although not ‘ritualised’, as Critchley with some humour says of Ricks’ own reproaches to deconstruction) against “the complacent scepticism of certain philosophically challenged tendencies within contemporary debate”, and, pace Ricks, against a limited vision of the Derridean project (part of Critchley’s concerns in recent work has entailed a revision of his once highly critical view of Derrida in the light of the latter’s recent “ethical turn”). Finally Critchley parts company with Ricks by correctly indicating the fatuous assumptions surrounding what exactly art and life might be in the unreconstructed realist vision of his oddly chosen companion. Critchley offers us another clue as to where he is heading by attesting that while he is aware of the existence of something outside language (and it should be noted that he will take Deleuze to task for adopting a position on this issue reducible to or equivalent to a transcendent one), he is not sure what that outside is.
Keeping in mind his favourable comments on the question of form and its relation to social praxis, it comes as no surprise that Critchley envisages a utopian moment coterminous and coincident with Beckett’s syntax of weakness:
The undoubted felicities of Beckett’s bull do not return us to life as it is allegedly lived (for which mercy much thanks, GD), but rather engage in a massive and unrelenting critique and dismantling of the illusoriness of what passes for life, through which we can detect the faintest glimmer of a world transfigured by a messianic light” (171)
One senses the approach of Levinas.
Critchley moves inexorably then to Blanchot - the better to get to Levinas? - by asking Who speaks? That this question has often been asked within Beckett studies is well-known. Hence it is somewhat perplexing to see Critchley rehearse the various ways of responding “Samuel Beckett” as if it were the abiding refrain amongst that body of scholars; moreover, and more problematically, to read Critchley on this issue, one would have to be tempted to ignore the work of a diverse body of scholars many of whom for a quite considerable length of time have been offering a very different and often a very nuanced - perhaps even philosophically nuanced ! - reply to precisely the question posed in Blanchot’s 1955 essay. Yet Critchley’s red herring (since in a conference paper he had already identified the philosophical and psychoanalytic herrings of Beckettian studies, perhaps it is time to turn our radar to his own essay), it has to be said, does not quite have the sort of following amongst Beckett scholars that he implies.
And yet, when Critchley enlists Blanchot and endorses the latter’s claim that it is not I but it which speaks in Beckett’s work, one finds oneself unable to dispute that conclusion. However, Critchley’s next move is to proclaim that what Beckett’s work is striving towards, in its exhaustion of the possibilities of a personal pronoun having a referent however transitory, is a condition of the il y a, in other words the il y a of Levinas. [What remains to be asked here is limited to whether one wishes to ask the question of this il y a and therefore of Levinas more generally. Since Critchley already provides his own answer, in the shape of the opening essay of his volume on precisely this topic, the reader will be forced to make a return with him to explore the issue more thoroughly.]
It is clear that Critchley has come to rest at the moment of ethics, here conceived as pertaining to a moment of attention to what he calls, following Beckett, the buzz, or what in Murphy is described as the great blooming, buzzing confusion. But before drawing to a conclusion he has time for one further hermeneut, more subtle than Ricks but not as much as Adorno.
It is the contention of this chapter that in so doing he has time also for a surprisingly recuperative appropriation of an old adage long derided amongst certain scholars of Beckett, but enjoying, in some quarters an allied - although distinct - revival: “the meaninglessness of existence”. Critchley picks up Cavell’s rejoinder to this chestnut - meaninglesness as goal - and runs with it. Critchley’s quarterback , it will transpire, to Deleuze’s juggernaut. However despite the recuperative moment we are, Critchley wants very vehemently to argue, in a situation purged of redemption (he, like Beckett, will not sink to such depths as to require a salvific moment of redemption).
The messianic moment without a messiah to which Critchley is leading us is precisely an ethical one; it can be summarised in his view in one word : “Imagine!” This demand, he concludes, sums up the Beckettian corpus. The work is totalized by being inscribed in the encompassing volume of Totality and Infinity.[5]
[1] In his book on Freedom Jean-Luc Nancy distinguishes two modalities of ontology. The first posits a continuum - what Pierre Klossowski has called the suppot - wherein a Being underpins all individual (or singular) instantiations of that Being. The other modality entails the inverse relation (indeed Nancy says that the first entails a non-relation or rules out all relation) whereby the singular does not have a ground in Being but rather entails - in a Heideggerian sense - a relation to the present (and, presumably to the event).
[2]Despite Heidegger’s comments on slippage - and how the asking of the question of metaphysics cuts the ground from under the questioner - embroiling him or her in the whole of metaphysics, inaugurating the moment of anxiety which is equivalent to the experience of the nothing - there is a very strong sense in which the slippage remains under the auspices of an “ossifying” force. There is an insistent molarity in the thought of Heidegger which would make of Malone’s stick and pencil “propriative” entities. However, despite the fact that his question remains metaphysical, Malone is not committed to such an encounter with his surroundings. If fort is the other pole of da-sein, then it is true of Beckett’s Malone and his possessions that he and they remain in the zone of the fort rather than the da, the thrown away as opposed to inhabiting/participating in the condition of “thrownness”.
[3] See also Royle, Begam, Docherty and Katz.
[4] See Butler’s review of Critchley in Modern Language Review October 1999, 94:4 1180-1
[5]Imagine - that is make an image. Here Beckett’s work takes the place of the unimaginable divine, a secular reworking of the Judaic prohibition on the visibility of the Divine..that then is the messianic light invoked by Critchley.
Perhaps one of the most surprising paradoxes of recent Beckettian criticism is the vigour with which his work has been re-enlisted to a metaphysical and totalizing project the spirit of which, for many, Beckett’s work represents the antithesis. Part of this vigour conceivably stems from an ethical turn in philosophy and in literary theory. Each of these contentious claims demands immediate qualification. First, it should be made clear that the term metaphysical is employed here in a specific sense which will be explicated below. Second, there have been several distinct ethical turns in recent philosophy and criticism and these need to be disentangled.
In the wake of the theoretical turn in Beckett studies, there has recently been an emergent demand that Beckett’s work be somehow rescued from the clutches of deconstructionists and schizoanalysts, that somehow the referent needs to be restored. In short there has been a return in Beckett scholarship to an implicitly metaphysical paradigm, one whereby Beckett’s work be reclaimed from those who would subject it to a complete loss of co-ordinates, sacrificing the critic in the process and abandoning the work to the vagaries either of the signifier or the schizoid.
Metaphysics being the philosophy of Being, it need not always be the case, however, that metaphysical enquiry have a foundational aspect or underpinning. Metaphysics as the study of first causes and of origins can also name that type of inquiry which ends up by proving the lack of validity of that very conception of metaphysics. This is why the term ontology may perhaps be more appropriate.[1] [ontology for Heidegger is the study of the Being of beings].[2] Ontology relates to a modality of coming into Being, of being-in-the-world, or (for Vincent Descombes) is to be thought of as an ontology of the present, of being now.
The question which I wish to address in this paper is has there been a return to metaphysical thinking about Beckett’s work? And, moreover has this return been felt moreso in philosophy than in literary criticism. Or, rather, is it more notable in the area of philosophical reflections on Beckett? An allied question will also be posed: what are the current set of relations obtaining between the two disciplines? Along the way it will also be possible to consider the notion - proposed by Gilles Deleuze - that Beckett himself is a half-philosopher. The set of questions posed here pertain to the inquiry that has underpinned much of this book, namely that which must be undertaken afresh each time the machinic phylum is forced to confront or undertake a negotiation and a relation with the machinic assemblage; the ruses and slippages, often into reification, but sometimes into molecularity, which occur when the Beckett corpus meets the critical hermeneut.
Beckett and the philosophers? Not only is this the title of Peter Murphy’s important article but it is also an enduring concern more generally amongst Beckett scholars, both those who may delve into the various Beckett archives in search of clues as to Beckett’s reading of the philosophers and those who may eschew such empirical researches in favour of speculative forays into retrospective intertextual explorations of resonances between Beckett’s work and any number of philosophical approaches from Aristotle, through the stoics, through Plotinus in the third century, to contemporary encounters staged between the work of Beckett and philosophers which he definitely did not read such as Baudrillard and Lyotard.
It is in part the very elusiveness of Beckett’s work, its untrammelled vital energy which defiantly remains unabated in the wake of such encounters that spurs critics and commentators to further efforts. It is always the case of encore un effort pour etre philosophe (avec Beckett). One of the most interesting manifestations of the philosophers’ response to Beckett, rather than Beckett’s response to the philosophers, is the extent to which contemporary philosophers have attempted to detect and to delineate the salient features of a Beckettian system.
There is nothing particularly strange about this common feature. Indeed it could be said to the critical act par excellence, one whose basic structure is discernible behind even the most enigmatic and epigrammatic of deconstructions. Of course this quality of critical response is the fundamental aporia of literary studies.
As Simon Critchley points out in the introductory remarks to the Beckett section of Almost Nothing, “there seems to be some sort of inverse or perverse relation between the resistance of Beckett’s work to interpretation and the philosophical abstraction and assuredness of the interpretation offered in its name.” (142). With comic panache Critchley caustically proposes a possible Kantian reading of the Beckettian œuvre (“What a broadening of the mind!” 144) before going on to point out that such a hypothetical project (which in Critchley’s view would amount to the philosophical reading of Beckett), like all of the valiant attempts that have gone before (one thinks for instance of Robbe-Grillet on Beckett as Heidegger, innumerable others on Beckett as cartesian etc.) have the end- product of the spectacle of “the philosophical hermeneut becom[ing] a rather flat-footed puppet dancing to the author’s tune” (144).
Let the parade of philosophical imps of the perverse begin says Critchley. First to be tested for hermeneutical adequacy is Derrida, the philosopher who famously - and paradoxically helpfully for many Derrideans wishing to make a inroad into Beckett studies - has remained silent on his work. Critchley echoes the move of many others by commenting on Derrida’s own remarks about his inability to say anything about the work of Beckett an inability brought about by the ethical demand that one avoid “The platitude of a supposed academic metalanguage” (144).[3]
Critical Apparatus: Diving and Dredging
If the cartesian diver - also known as a bottle imp - is a likely figure of the philosophical hermeneut, alternately plumbing the depths and ascending toward the sky of transcendence (by means of rat’s asses and sky-cranes as one Deleuzean - Welchman? - would have it), then Critchley in offers a timely reminder of the Derridean figure of the dredging machine He reminds us that it is the remainder, the irreducible remainder which resists hermeneutical exegesis, that is perhaps what Derrida gestures towards most forcefully by not speaking or writing on Beckett’s text. “In this sense, we might say that the goal of Derrida’s reading practice is to let the remains remain,” Critchley convincingly concludes (146).
Endgame, Beckett’s play of ending and gaming, is reclaimed by Adorno - to whom Critchley turns at this point in his study, having reached an impasse associated with Derrida (and identified by Critchley as equivalent to the impasse of deconstruction). Rather than merely a play that offers a straightforward expression of the meaningless of existence, and rather than exemplifying mere Heideggerian “thrownness”, Beckett’s text, by means of what Adorno sees as the author’s materialism, succeeds on the one hand in moving beyond the inwardness which characterises Heidegger’s dasein and on the other ruling out the possibility of situation being translated into “meaning”. Critchley follows Adorno whose words and conclusion he (favourably?) quotes: “the dissociation of the unity of consciousness into disparate elements, into non-identity” (149).
These remarks on Adorno, and on Critchley’s approval for Adorno’s conclusion need to be placed in their proper context. Adorno’s vision of the decline of metaphysics does not rule out the possibility of introducing his own metaphysical concepts. Indeed nowhere perhaps is Adorno more metaphysical than when in Aesthetic Theory he writes:
“Because it is different from empirical life, the work of art posits its unity, as it were, programmatically. Traversing the realm of spirit, the art work determines its oneness in opposition to the contingency and chaos of what grows naturally” (266).
While Adorno is thus committed to a view of art which eschews any conception of the latter as the unproblematic mediator of an external reality - a commitment reiterated throughout his work - he is fundamentally committed to a conception of the work as integrated. This will not lead to a naive conception of the art work as a harmonious whole unvisited by disjunction or dissonance. Nor will it necessarily posit the work as synthetic resolution of a conflict, although Adorno does in places seem to argue the contrary (“this oneness is more than just formal; it enables works of art to rise above internecine disjunction” 266). In Adorno, who champions early Schoenberg and late Beckett, that which is dissonant need not be neutralized in Hegelian sublation. In a manner emblematic of Adorno’s negative dialectics, while
“art is unable to bring about the identity of the one and the many, ... [it] ... incorporates this inability as a moment of its unity”
It is a combination of its programmed unity which can include within itself elements which jar with that unity (one of these being its inability to facilitate or enable the identity of the one and the many) that leads Adorno to posit the monadic status of the work of art. This monadism has a further consequence. If the art work is autonomous and sealed within its own spatio-temporal co-ordinates, then analysis of the work in question must remain immanent rather than claim to be produced from a position transcendent to the analysed work (257-59).
Immanent critique, as performed by Adorno, is designed to avoid the simplistic alternative of judging a solipsism on the one hand, or an art which self-negates because it functions merely as a commentary on society on the other (352). For, while Adorno considered naturalistic theatre a dupe of the culture industry, he also regarded socialist realism as infantile. Beckett’s work avoids both pitfalls.
“Beckett’s dramas exemplify the proper relation between the two contradictory desiderata, i.e. successful figuration and adequate social context.” (353)
Adequate social context, it must be added however, amounts to a negation of content, which would lead one to conclude that adequate social context entails a merely formal property or series of properties standing in a relation of resistance vis-à-vis conformity and reactionary thought and practice.
Under the heading ‘The Crisis of Meaning’, Adorno states that Beckett’s work seems to presuppose the experience of meaninglessness - but it doesn’t negate meaning - it negates traditional categories of art by carrying “the empirical process of the disappearance of meaning” into the midst of those categories. The revolution is one of form.
This process of “metaphysical negation” is one which attenuates the need for and the appeal of any metaphysical affirmation: “at the end of this tunnel of metaphysical meaninglessness ... there is no light (220).
Returning to Critchley, he concludes that the specificity of Beckett’s work for Adorno lies in the former’s interrogation of meaning, of what it is to produce meaning, and yet at the same time his work does not end up with that interrogation as its meaning, that is the meaning is the work’s resistance (via a reflexive consideration of its meaninglessness) to meaning. Again the characteristic Critchley phrase appears here: “a necessary and impossible task” (151).
Critchley follows this up by explicitly reminding the reader of his purpose, which is to show that Beckett’s work’s meaningless is an “achievement” rather than a task, and that that meaninglessness will refuse attempts on the one had to recuperate a meaning (even meaninglessness as meaning) and on the other what he refers to as the (nihilistic) comfort of meaninglessness.
Whichever way one puts it it is clear that Critchley is enlisting Adorno to support his own contention regarding the impossibility of Beckett’s text, the remainder which has silenced even Derrida. Derrida’s silence for Critchley indeed is the mute but eloquent signifier of the fact that for many others who do try to speak on Beckett “The dredging machine continues its work even as the water and silt escape it and because of this fact” (152).
What then of Adorno’s dredging machine? How will it manage to theorise meaninglesness in a manner which avoids existentialist and Heideggerian reification? Critchley points out that it is through a conception of form as social praxis that Adorno makes such a move. The utopian moment of “reconciliation” is tempered however by the acknowledgement that this moment is not reconciliation as it has been traditionally conceived (namely, one supposes within broadly Hegelian terms, as sublation). Critchley is compelling on how Adorno’s hectoring antitheses neutralise the prose under its scrutiny and testifies in Critchley’s view to the failure to evoke Beckett’s idiom (157). If issue is later taken with Critchley’s version of Deleuze no such qualms are felt in his judgement of the Adorno misprision of Beckett’s humour.
And yet Adorno’s reading of Beckett remains in Critchley’s words “the philosophically most powerful and hermeneutically most nuanced piece of writing on Beckett” (160). Would it disingenuous to respond to this by turning Critchley’s own comments (on Adorno) against their author by saying that perhaps this judgement tells us more about Critchley’s concerns than it does about either those of Adorno or indeed of Beckett.[4] Adorno, after all, leaves us in the space of a negative dialectic and in the utopian opening of a formal praxis. It is these two items which as a Levinasian Critchley wants to retain (even if his will be a messianism without the messianic, a secular Totality and Infinity). And, given the affinity between the two thinkers, this is why Critchley can find his quasi-Levinasian reading partner in Blanchot.
The reading of the trilogy which Critchley goes on to produce - out of his averred sense of the necessity, the demand - Levinasian one presumes - to go on - is largely predicated on the distinction made by Blanchot between narrative time and the time of dying. It is the latter which offers Critchley the forum for a Ricksian “syntax of weakness”, an idiom uttered in awareness of the impossibility of dying (Blanchot). Hence the interminability of the on, in Critchley’s view.
The enduring presence of Ricks in the development of the argument is surprising. Critchley makes of the former an obscure ally in a double-headed project: with Ricks a potshot (although not ‘ritualised’, as Critchley with some humour says of Ricks’ own reproaches to deconstruction) against “the complacent scepticism of certain philosophically challenged tendencies within contemporary debate”, and, pace Ricks, against a limited vision of the Derridean project (part of Critchley’s concerns in recent work has entailed a revision of his once highly critical view of Derrida in the light of the latter’s recent “ethical turn”). Finally Critchley parts company with Ricks by correctly indicating the fatuous assumptions surrounding what exactly art and life might be in the unreconstructed realist vision of his oddly chosen companion. Critchley offers us another clue as to where he is heading by attesting that while he is aware of the existence of something outside language (and it should be noted that he will take Deleuze to task for adopting a position on this issue reducible to or equivalent to a transcendent one), he is not sure what that outside is.
Keeping in mind his favourable comments on the question of form and its relation to social praxis, it comes as no surprise that Critchley envisages a utopian moment coterminous and coincident with Beckett’s syntax of weakness:
The undoubted felicities of Beckett’s bull do not return us to life as it is allegedly lived (for which mercy much thanks, GD), but rather engage in a massive and unrelenting critique and dismantling of the illusoriness of what passes for life, through which we can detect the faintest glimmer of a world transfigured by a messianic light” (171)
One senses the approach of Levinas.
Critchley moves inexorably then to Blanchot - the better to get to Levinas? - by asking Who speaks? That this question has often been asked within Beckett studies is well-known. Hence it is somewhat perplexing to see Critchley rehearse the various ways of responding “Samuel Beckett” as if it were the abiding refrain amongst that body of scholars; moreover, and more problematically, to read Critchley on this issue, one would have to be tempted to ignore the work of a diverse body of scholars many of whom for a quite considerable length of time have been offering a very different and often a very nuanced - perhaps even philosophically nuanced ! - reply to precisely the question posed in Blanchot’s 1955 essay. Yet Critchley’s red herring (since in a conference paper he had already identified the philosophical and psychoanalytic herrings of Beckettian studies, perhaps it is time to turn our radar to his own essay), it has to be said, does not quite have the sort of following amongst Beckett scholars that he implies.
And yet, when Critchley enlists Blanchot and endorses the latter’s claim that it is not I but it which speaks in Beckett’s work, one finds oneself unable to dispute that conclusion. However, Critchley’s next move is to proclaim that what Beckett’s work is striving towards, in its exhaustion of the possibilities of a personal pronoun having a referent however transitory, is a condition of the il y a, in other words the il y a of Levinas. [What remains to be asked here is limited to whether one wishes to ask the question of this il y a and therefore of Levinas more generally. Since Critchley already provides his own answer, in the shape of the opening essay of his volume on precisely this topic, the reader will be forced to make a return with him to explore the issue more thoroughly.]
It is clear that Critchley has come to rest at the moment of ethics, here conceived as pertaining to a moment of attention to what he calls, following Beckett, the buzz, or what in Murphy is described as the great blooming, buzzing confusion. But before drawing to a conclusion he has time for one further hermeneut, more subtle than Ricks but not as much as Adorno.
It is the contention of this chapter that in so doing he has time also for a surprisingly recuperative appropriation of an old adage long derided amongst certain scholars of Beckett, but enjoying, in some quarters an allied - although distinct - revival: “the meaninglessness of existence”. Critchley picks up Cavell’s rejoinder to this chestnut - meaninglesness as goal - and runs with it. Critchley’s quarterback , it will transpire, to Deleuze’s juggernaut. However despite the recuperative moment we are, Critchley wants very vehemently to argue, in a situation purged of redemption (he, like Beckett, will not sink to such depths as to require a salvific moment of redemption).
The messianic moment without a messiah to which Critchley is leading us is precisely an ethical one; it can be summarised in his view in one word : “Imagine!” This demand, he concludes, sums up the Beckettian corpus. The work is totalized by being inscribed in the encompassing volume of Totality and Infinity.[5]
[1] In his book on Freedom Jean-Luc Nancy distinguishes two modalities of ontology. The first posits a continuum - what Pierre Klossowski has called the suppot - wherein a Being underpins all individual (or singular) instantiations of that Being. The other modality entails the inverse relation (indeed Nancy says that the first entails a non-relation or rules out all relation) whereby the singular does not have a ground in Being but rather entails - in a Heideggerian sense - a relation to the present (and, presumably to the event).
[2]Despite Heidegger’s comments on slippage - and how the asking of the question of metaphysics cuts the ground from under the questioner - embroiling him or her in the whole of metaphysics, inaugurating the moment of anxiety which is equivalent to the experience of the nothing - there is a very strong sense in which the slippage remains under the auspices of an “ossifying” force. There is an insistent molarity in the thought of Heidegger which would make of Malone’s stick and pencil “propriative” entities. However, despite the fact that his question remains metaphysical, Malone is not committed to such an encounter with his surroundings. If fort is the other pole of da-sein, then it is true of Beckett’s Malone and his possessions that he and they remain in the zone of the fort rather than the da, the thrown away as opposed to inhabiting/participating in the condition of “thrownness”.
[3] See also Royle, Begam, Docherty and Katz.
[4] See Butler’s review of Critchley in Modern Language Review October 1999, 94:4 1180-1
[5]Imagine - that is make an image. Here Beckett’s work takes the place of the unimaginable divine, a secular reworking of the Judaic prohibition on the visibility of the Divine..that then is the messianic light invoked by Critchley.
Wednesday 21 March 2007
Do you speak Deleuzian?
These are passages from 2003 from an abandoned review essay on recent books on Deleuze. I should have finished it. The genre of the book review is sometimes liberating. Getting this far might have helped me to do something else. I hope so.
Jacques Ranciére, for whom every act of commentary is a kind of elaborate and variously prolonged mis-saying, states in the course of an attempt to avoid the impossible in the case of Deleuze, that:
la pensée de Deleuze, je ne sais pas très bien encore ce qu’elle est, je le cherche…Comprendre un penseur, ce n’est pas venir coïncider avec son centre. C’est, au contraire, le déporter, l’emporter sur un trajectoire où ses articulations se desserrent et laissent en jeu. (in Alliez ed., 525)
Of course Ranciére here reminds us of the fact that a Deleuzean mis-saying will make the object of this act of critical ventriloquism speak in another tongue, the langue étrangere which Deleuze himself took inspiration from in Proust. At times Deleuze has ended up with surprising bedfellows: there has been a Hegelian and a Platonic Deleuze. We have also had the much earlier schizoanalysis-promoting philosopher mutate into Oedipus-generating daddy Deleuze. Every book on Deleuze to be published – and there have been a great many of these – has to find its own way of mis-saying the object of its scrutiny. So, does An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze speak Deleuzean, and if so with what accent?
Well in what is a first for a collection of essays on Deleuze to be published in English the accent is primarily French. Juliette Simont who has elsewhere published an impressive study of Kant, Hegel and Deleuze here augments the insights on the Kant-Delueze relation as articulated in that volume, under the title ‘Intensity or the Encounter’. The concept of sense in Deleuze is directly related to the need which he feels to take his distance from the concept of common sense as it is found in Kant in particular. Simont summarises the dogmatic image of thought lying behind the latter in these terms:
I (the subject) am the happy concord of my faculties, when they apply, with full necessity, to an object supposed to be the same (in Khalfa 27).
The preordained concord of the faculties ensures that common sense remains in common, and that it does not lose its coordinates in becoming dispersed in all directions as in dreams and paradoxes (Simont points out). Thought which emerges out of an encounter can be a violence to the thinker, says Plato (Deleuze points out in Proust et les signes), because the faculties are out of concert. But “l’usage disjoint de facultés n’est qu’un ‘prélude’ à la dialectique qui les réunit toutes ensemble en un même Logos” (132).
The sensible is for Kant an affront to thought, and yet the realm of the senses must be in accord and under the command of sensus communis. The affront is perhaps primarily in the fact that tiny sensations are imperceptible. Between 0=absence of sensation and 1=sensation there lie other tiny sensations (micro-perceptions?) or, as Simont puts it, time (is this analogous to drusiness?). “Henceforward everything which seemed impossible to master within the sensible…becomes…an object of possible knowledge” (32).
A dual concpetion wherein matter is the raw blind material subject to formation and form by consciousness is thereby established. The Kantian ‘manifold’ is informed, thus becoming an object of knowledge (33). Understanding may come too late (never being able to gain access to tiny sensations they are for us a pure past Simont points out: 40) but the fact remains that here we are confronted by two heterogeneous domains. That of which we can have an understanding, namely the phenomenal world, on the one hand, and that of which we can have no understanding, namely the noumenal world on the other.
Deleuze gives the name sentendium to that which is invisible in sensation: “that which should be felt but cannot be and which calls memory up” (41). So it is that each faculty is elaborated on a void, while each other faculty confronts from outside but then in turn confronts in its own domain, the effect of these lacunae resonating from one faculty to the other (paraphrasing Simont 41).
In this discord of the faculties God becomes time and the human a ‘caesura’, “the caesura which turns the 0 into a 1 and exhausts the 1 into an 0” (47) as the essay concludes.
Intensity is a recurrent concern in Deleuze’s work. If intensity is one of the modalities of the imperceptible then in the realm of vision and hearing cinema is for Deleuze both “inhuman and superhuman because of durations inferior or superior to our own” (Deleuze cited Ménil in Khalfa, 98). Alain Ménil has been an incisive commentator on Deleuze’s work on cinema. Perhaps the formost contribution his essay may make as a corrective to the still prevalent misconcpetions of the distinction whch Deleuze makes between the two regimes of the image is that it pertains “to a taxonomy obedient solely to the law of perception and not to a chronology more or less supplied by the history of cinema” (88). Picking up a question to which the contribution of Simont is also attentive, he points out how time image films (and the possibility of the direct time image haunts cinema since its inception as Deleuze himself notes, cited 90), in their inversion of the relation of time to movement, permit the direct presentation of time, albeit time out of joint (89). It is only once the possibilities of the movement image have been exhausted that the direct image of time becomes observable. The confusion arises when exhaustion comes to be thought of as strictly speaking historically locatable: this, he asserts, is to confuse the possible and the virtual – a distinction upon which Deleuze often insisted. The second corrective offered in passing by Ménil is that “the very idea of assigning an art to some philosophical directive sits ill with the Deleuzean conception of art, science and philosophy” as this is elaborated in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (93).
As Deleuze stated in Proust “La philosophie, avec toute sa méthode et sa bonne volonté, n’est rien face aux pressions secretes de l’oeuvre d’art” (119). The three volumes on cinema, literature and art written by Ronald Bogue and published in quick succession by Routledge represent a frenetic attempt to enshrine this idea by sheer force of numbers. The book on cinema makes little or no attempt to speak of films not mentioned by Deleuze or films made since the first volume was published twenty years ago, but then it is called Deleuze on Cinema, and if Dorothea Olkowski is to be believed then at least other Deleuzeans can content themeselves that there is at least something that might remain to be written.
However the volume on literature makes another this time more surprising decision: not to mention Klossowski, Tournier or Zola. That these are essays of philosophy rather than literary criticism does not itself explain the omission. Indeed the omission represents something of a contradiction in view of Bogue’s claim that he will not seek to describe a general system of literature as this might be extracted from the work of Deleuze. On the one hand not to refer to these important essays might bear out his desire not to find a general system, but on the other it might be objected that in omitting them Bogue is enabling a system to emerge willy-nilly. At any rate the three essays are part of the same volume, The Logic of Sense, which receives extensive treatment anyway in Bogue’s book. Bogue’s reputation however as one of the most important commentators on Deleuzean aesthetics (if such a thing exists[1]) has been well-earned, and his chapters on machinic are to be commended for the way in which they tease out the nuanced relation between the two meanings of the Abstract Machine as these appear in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari.
[1] See Ranciere's comments in the edited volume La Vie Philosophique.
Jacques Ranciére, for whom every act of commentary is a kind of elaborate and variously prolonged mis-saying, states in the course of an attempt to avoid the impossible in the case of Deleuze, that:
la pensée de Deleuze, je ne sais pas très bien encore ce qu’elle est, je le cherche…Comprendre un penseur, ce n’est pas venir coïncider avec son centre. C’est, au contraire, le déporter, l’emporter sur un trajectoire où ses articulations se desserrent et laissent en jeu. (in Alliez ed., 525)
Of course Ranciére here reminds us of the fact that a Deleuzean mis-saying will make the object of this act of critical ventriloquism speak in another tongue, the langue étrangere which Deleuze himself took inspiration from in Proust. At times Deleuze has ended up with surprising bedfellows: there has been a Hegelian and a Platonic Deleuze. We have also had the much earlier schizoanalysis-promoting philosopher mutate into Oedipus-generating daddy Deleuze. Every book on Deleuze to be published – and there have been a great many of these – has to find its own way of mis-saying the object of its scrutiny. So, does An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze speak Deleuzean, and if so with what accent?
Well in what is a first for a collection of essays on Deleuze to be published in English the accent is primarily French. Juliette Simont who has elsewhere published an impressive study of Kant, Hegel and Deleuze here augments the insights on the Kant-Delueze relation as articulated in that volume, under the title ‘Intensity or the Encounter’. The concept of sense in Deleuze is directly related to the need which he feels to take his distance from the concept of common sense as it is found in Kant in particular. Simont summarises the dogmatic image of thought lying behind the latter in these terms:
I (the subject) am the happy concord of my faculties, when they apply, with full necessity, to an object supposed to be the same (in Khalfa 27).
The preordained concord of the faculties ensures that common sense remains in common, and that it does not lose its coordinates in becoming dispersed in all directions as in dreams and paradoxes (Simont points out). Thought which emerges out of an encounter can be a violence to the thinker, says Plato (Deleuze points out in Proust et les signes), because the faculties are out of concert. But “l’usage disjoint de facultés n’est qu’un ‘prélude’ à la dialectique qui les réunit toutes ensemble en un même Logos” (132).
The sensible is for Kant an affront to thought, and yet the realm of the senses must be in accord and under the command of sensus communis. The affront is perhaps primarily in the fact that tiny sensations are imperceptible. Between 0=absence of sensation and 1=sensation there lie other tiny sensations (micro-perceptions?) or, as Simont puts it, time (is this analogous to drusiness?). “Henceforward everything which seemed impossible to master within the sensible…becomes…an object of possible knowledge” (32).
A dual concpetion wherein matter is the raw blind material subject to formation and form by consciousness is thereby established. The Kantian ‘manifold’ is informed, thus becoming an object of knowledge (33). Understanding may come too late (never being able to gain access to tiny sensations they are for us a pure past Simont points out: 40) but the fact remains that here we are confronted by two heterogeneous domains. That of which we can have an understanding, namely the phenomenal world, on the one hand, and that of which we can have no understanding, namely the noumenal world on the other.
Deleuze gives the name sentendium to that which is invisible in sensation: “that which should be felt but cannot be and which calls memory up” (41). So it is that each faculty is elaborated on a void, while each other faculty confronts from outside but then in turn confronts in its own domain, the effect of these lacunae resonating from one faculty to the other (paraphrasing Simont 41).
In this discord of the faculties God becomes time and the human a ‘caesura’, “the caesura which turns the 0 into a 1 and exhausts the 1 into an 0” (47) as the essay concludes.
Intensity is a recurrent concern in Deleuze’s work. If intensity is one of the modalities of the imperceptible then in the realm of vision and hearing cinema is for Deleuze both “inhuman and superhuman because of durations inferior or superior to our own” (Deleuze cited Ménil in Khalfa, 98). Alain Ménil has been an incisive commentator on Deleuze’s work on cinema. Perhaps the formost contribution his essay may make as a corrective to the still prevalent misconcpetions of the distinction whch Deleuze makes between the two regimes of the image is that it pertains “to a taxonomy obedient solely to the law of perception and not to a chronology more or less supplied by the history of cinema” (88). Picking up a question to which the contribution of Simont is also attentive, he points out how time image films (and the possibility of the direct time image haunts cinema since its inception as Deleuze himself notes, cited 90), in their inversion of the relation of time to movement, permit the direct presentation of time, albeit time out of joint (89). It is only once the possibilities of the movement image have been exhausted that the direct image of time becomes observable. The confusion arises when exhaustion comes to be thought of as strictly speaking historically locatable: this, he asserts, is to confuse the possible and the virtual – a distinction upon which Deleuze often insisted. The second corrective offered in passing by Ménil is that “the very idea of assigning an art to some philosophical directive sits ill with the Deleuzean conception of art, science and philosophy” as this is elaborated in Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (93).
As Deleuze stated in Proust “La philosophie, avec toute sa méthode et sa bonne volonté, n’est rien face aux pressions secretes de l’oeuvre d’art” (119). The three volumes on cinema, literature and art written by Ronald Bogue and published in quick succession by Routledge represent a frenetic attempt to enshrine this idea by sheer force of numbers. The book on cinema makes little or no attempt to speak of films not mentioned by Deleuze or films made since the first volume was published twenty years ago, but then it is called Deleuze on Cinema, and if Dorothea Olkowski is to be believed then at least other Deleuzeans can content themeselves that there is at least something that might remain to be written.
However the volume on literature makes another this time more surprising decision: not to mention Klossowski, Tournier or Zola. That these are essays of philosophy rather than literary criticism does not itself explain the omission. Indeed the omission represents something of a contradiction in view of Bogue’s claim that he will not seek to describe a general system of literature as this might be extracted from the work of Deleuze. On the one hand not to refer to these important essays might bear out his desire not to find a general system, but on the other it might be objected that in omitting them Bogue is enabling a system to emerge willy-nilly. At any rate the three essays are part of the same volume, The Logic of Sense, which receives extensive treatment anyway in Bogue’s book. Bogue’s reputation however as one of the most important commentators on Deleuzean aesthetics (if such a thing exists[1]) has been well-earned, and his chapters on machinic are to be commended for the way in which they tease out the nuanced relation between the two meanings of the Abstract Machine as these appear in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari.
[1] See Ranciere's comments in the edited volume La Vie Philosophique.
Tuesday 9 January 2007
Zidane's conducts of time
Screened at the Ritzy in Brixton around December 06 or January 07
First there is a vague halo of green, then as the camera retreats from the screen it begins by touching, 
or as if touching, two green squares rounded off by light which diffuses their boundaries, then, more, their geometrical arrangement becoming more evident and the contours which demarcate them becoming more defined. The camera continues its retreat until it is revealed that the object of its scrutiny which it has begun at its limit of being, at the very threshold beyond which it would not longer exist, is in fact a projection screen displaying a projected digital televisual image.
What the camera has touched here is the absence of image, at the same time as it has touched a vestige, a remain, it has touched the pixel itself, the constituent and support of the image. It has shown that at its core there is only this smudged square lost in light, fixed in its place, immovable, static, dead. Nowhere else has the uncanniness of the digital image been rendered in cinema so chillingly as in the opening sequence of the film Zidane: A Twenty-first Century Portrait.
or as if touching, two green squares rounded off by light which diffuses their boundaries, then, more, their geometrical arrangement becoming more evident and the contours which demarcate them becoming more defined. The camera continues its retreat until it is revealed that the object of its scrutiny which it has begun at its limit of being, at the very threshold beyond which it would not longer exist, is in fact a projection screen displaying a projected digital televisual image.What the camera has touched here is the absence of image, at the same time as it has touched a vestige, a remain, it has touched the pixel itself, the constituent and support of the image. It has shown that at its core there is only this smudged square lost in light, fixed in its place, immovable, static, dead. Nowhere else has the uncanniness of the digital image been rendered in cinema so chillingly as in the opening sequence of the film Zidane: A Twenty-first Century Portrait.
The footage for the film was captured by means of multiple cameras. Some mobile, some fixed, one famously borrowed from NASA, others parasitically drawn on in order to capture events missed by the dedicated cameras.
They may be dedicated but they are not dedicated to the recording of the spectacle of the sport of football as defined by its grid, boundaries and goalposts. The film is concerned with the vectorial (MacKenzie Wark has presented a typology of the vector in Virilio’s thought).
What is especially interesting in the particular conjunction created by Gordon and Parreno is the bringing into cinematic presence (at least for a while before going to DVD) of the two faces identified by Brian Massumi of the regularatory and the regulatory. It is the television itself, he argues, in an analysis of sport – football specifically – in its conjunction with televised sport which serves to emphasise this distinction. A distinction which serves less to indicate and hold either side to its position, than to emphasise the transitivity of our epoch (he hesitates to call it postmodern). The homes in which televisions screen football matches are themselves passable membranes, leaky facades, monads connected at a low level of communication, transmitting at low resolution we might say (see Virilio), often in the dark. There may be no home in the film, but this may be the point; there is only the network, only the televisual (see Derrida’s terminology).
Of course one of the defining characteristics of modern football is the intensification of the circulation of capital...another conduct of time which is analysed by Eric Alliez in his study Tales for the Conquest of Time...I will have to leave that excursion for another occasion.
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