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.
Tuesday, 29 May 2007
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.
Thursday, 30 October 2003
The clichés of Dumont's Twentynine Palms
Bruno Dumont’s excursion from the Nord Pas de Calais to Twentynine Palms in the Californian desert can be read as proof that molecularity isn’t enough to save us from bad films, or instances of what Deleuze calls “organised ineptitude” (367). If localised violence and sexuality “in what is represented” characterise bad cinema, he writes in Cinema 2, “[R]eal cinema achieves another violence, another sexuality, molecular rather than localised” (367).
A man and a woman are on a scouting trip for locations to be captured in photographs for an unspecified project. They fail to locate anything which will suffice but their quest had, at any rate, receded very rapidly as they became subject to the forces of the desert.
In particular the forces to which the characters succumb reflect the altered density of the contemporary world, even its deserts, in the face of the colonisation of the wilderness by the possibilities of modern transport, settlement, infrastructure and communications. It is indicative that the camera which might have been used to scout for locations and to capture them fro future reference remains invisible throughout the film as if to underline the alienation from their environment (and hence from their object) experienced by these subjects, who are defined nonetheless by these lost relations.The most significant precursor for Twentynine Palms in terms of its geographical setting and place in the filmmaker’s emerging oeuvre is – as many have pointed out - Zabriskie Point. In Zabriskie Point Antonioni is drawn to the desert as a space in which character dissolves. For Pascal Bonitzer his cinema is in pursuit of the non-figurative, which one might describe in Lyotard’s terms as the figural (a concept revisited by Brenez too). Deleuze cites Bonitzer’s account (Deleuze 1986: 119) before going on to forge the link so central to the cinema books: in such a recourse, Antonioni, with his spaces and people adrift in ‘deconnected’ spaces, is registering a crisis in the action image. The rambling, strolling characters are not found in motivated sensory motor situations but rather in pure optical and sound situations (120).
To a degree this remains true of Twentynine Palms. However the utopian dimensions of Zabriskie Point as registered in the cataclysmic finale are atrophied in Twentynine Palms: its version of the cataclysm is rendered in the denouement which sees violence erupt in the liminal space of the motel (a ‘non-place’ in Marc Augé’s formulation). Both films share a tendency to deconnected spaces, characters sheared off from the socius and to pure optical and sound situations divorced from the sensory motor schema.
In some senses what has changed between Antonioni’s film of 1969 and Dumont’s of 2003 is the restriction of the space for action in the sociopolitical domain. While the central couple remains in the earlier film the space for a performative intervention, in Twentynine Palms there is less space in which such occupation might occur. The desert too is striated and blocked, whereas in Zabriskie Point barren spaces are invoked as smooth spaces of ‘flight’ or of potential – if impossible – ‘burrowing’ (see Orr 1993: 150).
Preparatory to the first of two shocking turns of event, David banishes Katia from the motel room leaving her prey to possible abduction on the highway. Seeking her out he confronts her and as she lies on the highway strikes her several times about the head.
Then follows David’s subjection to a rape which Katia is forced to watch. Finally the scene which delivers the film’s brutal ending. Unfortunately we are firmly in the domain of cliché here. The sensory motor schema may be subject to rupture in the emptied, oneiric open spaces through which and in which the characters are filmed traversing and pausing, but via clichéd psychosocial types Dumont bridges these divides. If, for Deleuze, ‘cliché is the sensory-motor image of the thing’ (Deleuze 1986: 20), despite its daring, Twentynine Palms remains content with such clichés. Death is an a priori form which Dumont’s film stamps upon ‘a life’. In short it operates as a form of reactive judgement rather than an affirmative and evaluative point of view. Dumont’s decision to embed the irrational violence of its final sequences in the non-place of the motel is, curiously, of a piece with the reinscription of it (the motel) as displaced domestic sphere (one is perhaps reminded of Irigaray’s description of the home – or, here its replacement - as place of ‘murderous control’). Correlatively, in the desert encounter brought about by the ‘trajective-domestic’ capsule of the 4x4 driven by the couple, a ‘psychopathic’ homosexuality (a cliché Dumont’s film shares with Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction) is figured as that which precipitates the disfigurement of the norms which are (barely, and until a certain point) holding out in the motel. Dumont is not interested in Godard, and it shows.
[An aside: there is a short distance between provocation of the sort Noé inscribes in his countdown to enable the audience to leave the auditorium and the self-congratulation that greets a job excessively done].
There is a monstrosity specific to each film, but whereas in Zabriskie Point the explosion remains aberrant and in some sense nonsensical - but, importantly, outside judgement - in Twentynine Palms the abject capitulation is to normative [albeit ‘monstrous’] heterosexuality, an acquiescence accompanied within the film by a form of judgement. It is a film drained of vitality presided over by organs and seized up subjects in subject-object relations whereas to some degree Zabriskie Point veers towards dis-organised bodies in a domain bereft of the loci that would facilitate subject-object relations.
Twentynine palms may be read as exploring the encounter between a type of vitality and a mode of atrophy, or between force and form. The force is sexual desire denuded of social mores. The imperatives of form trace themselves over the forces. In the Nietzschean idiom developed by Deleuze what arises here is a reactive formation, which as Brian Massumi reformulates it, is a mode of ‘back formation’ (Massumi 2002). Twentynine Palms continues Dumont’s reflection on the human being’s capacity for violence. It is also in the words of the director his attempt to deliver his ‘truth’ in a ‘form’ derived from Hollywood. This film, by one of recent French cinema’s least cinephilic directors (Frodon 2003: 20), is presided over by a ‘logique hétérosexuelle’ which, despite the film’s moves in the direction of an abstraction not necessarily at odds with what has here been identified as an aesthetics of force, retains the gridding implied by this logic. For Deleuze
Il y a une grande différence entre les virtuels qui définissent l’immanence du champ transcendental, et les formes possibles qui les actualisent et qui le transforment en quelque chose de transcendant (Deleuze 1995a: 7).
Dumont’s contribution to what I propose might be called a ‘cinethology’ examines the body as a mobile zone consisting of ‘poles, zones, thresholds, and gradients’. The body in each case is ‘traversed by a powerful non-organic vitality’ (Deleuze). If Dumont’s film comes close to an abstraction of the sort that might disclose something of that vitality, it is nonetheless in the detail that it implodes.
Friday, 22 June 2001
Overlope: a collaborative fiction (fragment)
Written in January 2001
CHAPTER 2
AFAR A POOL AFAR A MALL
Lacking coordinates ordinate yourself in the sand ceaseless shifting inscrutable there is a way out there is not a way out there is another place there is not another place where you are where you will be where you might have been where you were you are where you were where you always were in the sand in the sand not the sand of the coast not the sand where you trod arm in arm intermittent shingle the odd stone innumerable shells ah shells that is what is lacking here shells even one would do and pools are wanting too there is much here that is wanting that’s soon said but it remains undeniable to the extent that it is almost axiomatic vis-à-vis the place we are in if it is a place that is that there are no pools or rather that there are few of them although perhaps as many as you would expect in such a zone desert they call it but it’s just sand whatever fancy name you want to give it sand which shifts or doesn’t or which shifts so imperceptibly that it may as well not have moved as far as you are concerned
afar a pool afar a mall it is becoming crowded in this desert such facilities! and amenities! you are being spoilt for choice well it happens I’ve heard it said that in the desert you fall prey to illusions so it must be a case in point but the drought the drought it would get to you you would need a slaking to slake the infinitive by way of a first person modulation of the verb in question and its embodiment in a kind of vital charade to satisfy both protagonist for there we have you you squirming prototype and the audience come now you will do me the honour of attending to this little spectacle will you not? in short you are in need of a drink hence the mall hence the pool both afar both opposed both ablur
CHAPTER 2
AFAR A POOL AFAR A MALL
Lacking coordinates ordinate yourself in the sand ceaseless shifting inscrutable there is a way out there is not a way out there is another place there is not another place where you are where you will be where you might have been where you were you are where you were where you always were in the sand in the sand not the sand of the coast not the sand where you trod arm in arm intermittent shingle the odd stone innumerable shells ah shells that is what is lacking here shells even one would do and pools are wanting too there is much here that is wanting that’s soon said but it remains undeniable to the extent that it is almost axiomatic vis-à-vis the place we are in if it is a place that is that there are no pools or rather that there are few of them although perhaps as many as you would expect in such a zone desert they call it but it’s just sand whatever fancy name you want to give it sand which shifts or doesn’t or which shifts so imperceptibly that it may as well not have moved as far as you are concerned
afar a pool afar a mall it is becoming crowded in this desert such facilities! and amenities! you are being spoilt for choice well it happens I’ve heard it said that in the desert you fall prey to illusions so it must be a case in point but the drought the drought it would get to you you would need a slaking to slake the infinitive by way of a first person modulation of the verb in question and its embodiment in a kind of vital charade to satisfy both protagonist for there we have you you squirming prototype and the audience come now you will do me the honour of attending to this little spectacle will you not? in short you are in need of a drink hence the mall hence the pool both afar both opposed both ablur
Saturday, 10 June 2000
Sub-Lyotard (Economie libidinale)
Notes to an Archivist (June 2000)
You were there, out there, beyond the inflected space, variably twisting, folding in your curvature. Like a noise which beckons, like a smell which repels. Like a Being which waits. A metaphyics in abeyance. You were there, in your space which is not one, luminous, incendiary, abstract. I tried to speak to you, there, lodged in the circuitry like a loose log tossed on the foreshore, to leave something to you. But you are there circulating like a rumour spoken by yourself, and cannot hear me, cannot register this breath which is also an exhaltation. My breaths leave me, caressing the glottis; they lap along the tongue's shores. They are moistened, replete, overburdened. They leave. I articulate. I speak to you, there in your archive. But my utterance dissipates in the air which seems to separate us. The output of lungs collapses into air. I cannot reach you. Or, alternatively, a wind picks up, accumulates desert sand and sweeps across an ocean it defies. Parched it shifts across the maritime domain. It settles on you but in doing so loses any coherence it possessed when it swept in a continuum to you. The dust disperses. It may inhabit you, like a virus programmed for the millenium, but it has communicated nothing to you.
That is why I have chosen to call you sirocco. You possess the profound melancholy of circuitry, the oceanic swirl of maritime space and the porous facade of pixel. I am destined to send these words out to you, to leave this waste on the band you set aside for the communications of others.
You are divided, you are half shadow, half toxin. You murmur, you oscillate, you are vague like last year's news. You are nothing to me. And yet I must overcome you, even as you kill me, throttling me with circuitry and hardware.
You plunge into me. You say I have a corpse of velvet. You say I am a tract of slime, immeasureable stretching into the gulf we call a horizon but which you label, having been there, death.
What is this vestige of harmonics that I seem to ascribe us, knowing that your manner of inflecting space with an accent of tungsten is a stark disavowal of my guttural whine?
You were there, out there, beyond the inflected space, variably twisting, folding in your curvature. Like a noise which beckons, like a smell which repels. Like a Being which waits. A metaphyics in abeyance. You were there, in your space which is not one, luminous, incendiary, abstract. I tried to speak to you, there, lodged in the circuitry like a loose log tossed on the foreshore, to leave something to you. But you are there circulating like a rumour spoken by yourself, and cannot hear me, cannot register this breath which is also an exhaltation. My breaths leave me, caressing the glottis; they lap along the tongue's shores. They are moistened, replete, overburdened. They leave. I articulate. I speak to you, there in your archive. But my utterance dissipates in the air which seems to separate us. The output of lungs collapses into air. I cannot reach you. Or, alternatively, a wind picks up, accumulates desert sand and sweeps across an ocean it defies. Parched it shifts across the maritime domain. It settles on you but in doing so loses any coherence it possessed when it swept in a continuum to you. The dust disperses. It may inhabit you, like a virus programmed for the millenium, but it has communicated nothing to you.
That is why I have chosen to call you sirocco. You possess the profound melancholy of circuitry, the oceanic swirl of maritime space and the porous facade of pixel. I am destined to send these words out to you, to leave this waste on the band you set aside for the communications of others.
You are divided, you are half shadow, half toxin. You murmur, you oscillate, you are vague like last year's news. You are nothing to me. And yet I must overcome you, even as you kill me, throttling me with circuitry and hardware.
You plunge into me. You say I have a corpse of velvet. You say I am a tract of slime, immeasureable stretching into the gulf we call a horizon but which you label, having been there, death.
What is this vestige of harmonics that I seem to ascribe us, knowing that your manner of inflecting space with an accent of tungsten is a stark disavowal of my guttural whine?
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