Discrepancy, Surplus and Rhythm

Johnson's rebuttal of Berkley's immaterialism was material enough: he stubbed his toe, a demonstration that reality and what Berkley thought about reality were discrepant.

But what about the hurt that stubbing causes? Why do toddlers complain (about, say, a bump on the knee) when the hurt itself has faded? Perhaps they're inventing memory, developing a sense of time in all its passing and perdurance: the hurt received back then versus the remedy just now delivered; what you thought was there versus what actually is there, and so on.

I quoted this from Scurati once before:

'Here in the zone of contact, the cause does not precede the effect. Here the chronological order doesn't matter. Here the cause of what has been done not only still has to be discovered but actually does not yet exist.'
(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

This variant comes from Wu Ming:

'We are on the summit of time, where the answer precedes the question, the effect precedes the cause, death precedes birth.

'You had to climb this hill to understand the journey you had taken.'
(Wu Ming: Manituana)

But time is also rhythm.

Lazzarato describes (in Videofilosofia) how Bergson distinguishes between, on the one hand, time as perceived by the senses and, on the other, time as conceived by the intellect. There is more 'reality' in sensation, according to Bergson, and that 'surplus' of reality in perception is to be sought, according to Nietzsche, within the body. He then traces the whole thing back to an Aristotelian sense of time extensively measuring the movement that is in Nature (in other words a cosmology) versus a neo-Platonic view of time as intension, as measuring out the movement of the soul.

In Svevo's La coscienza di Zeno the breathing of Zeno's dying father has a fretful quality which Zeno imitates 'almost unconsciously', before affording himself pauses which he hopes to pass on to his patient. The rhythm of the father's dying breaths seems to become part of the room 'from that point and for a long, long time after that.' In fact what Svevo seems to be describing here is the sort of entrainment whereby memory develops as a sort of felt persistence.

In a related passage Zeno plays the violin:

'Even the lowest sort of being, once he knows what three, four and six note figures are, knows how to pass between them with the same rhythmical exactness as his eye knows how to pass from one set of notes to the next. With me, though, once I've played one of these figures, it sticks to me and will not let me go again, so that it gets mixed up with the figure following and deforms it. In order to put the notes in the right place I have to mark time both with my feet and with my head, and so much for nonchalance, for serenity, so much for music. Music that comes from an organism that's in balance both is itself the time that it both creates and exhausts.'
(Svevo: La coscienza di Zeno)

And here, finally, for good measure, are some quotations from Sapienza in Onda, the Rome section of the Anomalous Wave, 18 March 2009:

'We have entered a new era. Today we can say this unambiguously, without prevarication. The recession is concrete reality: the government doesn't doubt it: police against the students, police against dissenters, police and baton charges against those who won't pay for this crisis!

'The Wave isn't dead. The Wave isn't some memory of youth. The Wave is alive and it doesn't intend to stop. The Wave causes fear.'

Christianity as a Narrative of Progress

'... in the Christian religious tradition there are two grand narratives: the story of Salvation, which tells of the shining path taken by man returning to God, and the story of the Fall, which instead narrates the dark business of the estrangement between creature and creator which followed Original Sin. Christianity in its pre-modern form developed the latter almost obsessively ... the modern version, by contrast, has insisted mainly upon the former, associating it with the layman's idea of progress: thus all would turn out for the best thanks to Science and Technology, which would resolve the problems of humanity, eliminating suffering and injustice from the face of the earth.

'Well I believe that now might be the time to go back and place more weight upon the story of the Fall.'
(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

A Third View of Obfuscation

'I may not be able to love but I force myself to pretend to believe in it ... For the future I don't have the slightest hope but I constrain myself to disseminate faith in that future, projecting it like a trompe l'oeil onto the pealing plaster of the school hall. I don't have dreams, those I had have fallen from me ... and yet I feel I have a duty to nourish those of young people [...] I am hard with myself and soft with them. From them I expect everything, and for them everything good; of myself I don't expect anything any more. I feel pity for everyone except for my own person. For myself I reserve a more perverse sentiment and a punishment that's more subtle: I know that I am not happy, and I blame myself for that, and I condemn myself, by way of retaliation, to pretend that I am.'
(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

Two Views of Obfuscation

‘One must always explain the matter clearly to an adversary. Only then can you be sure that you understand it better than he does.’
(Svevo: La coscienza di Zeno)

‘They never tell you why they are doing anything. That way they don’t find out that they don’t know themselves.’
(Chandler: The Long Goodbye)

The Artist as Serial Killer

The story of Pygmalion is a gloss by an optimist upon what gets done by artists. So in this story there's no murder. Having created her out of ivory, the artist falls in love with Galatea. After she is brought to life by Aphrodite she goes on to bear him a son.

Or perhaps you should 'murder your darlings'. This was Q's advice (Arthur Quiller Couch: On the Art of Writing, 1914) though it's been claimed on behalf of others. The context is what Q calls 'purchased ornamentation'. The ones you fall in love with are the worst. The artist must be rigorously unsentimental about such things and always chuck out what is dross.

Then there's Beckett's onwards and upwards version, likewise fairly terse: 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better,' which comes from Worstward Ho. Do it better next time, if you can: a story of making progress.

So 'fail better' towards some end? Which is where progress always leads us. Not necessarily. The same phrase was recently used, unacknowledged, as the title for a piece by Zadie Smith on writers and readers in The Guardian. Though she does quote Adam Zagajewski: a story of Hunt the self. But what exactly is the self? 'It likes to dress up, to masquerade':

'Neither custom officers
nor their beautiful dogs will find it. Between
hymns, between alliances, it hides itself.'
(Adam Zagajewski, from The Self)

'To me,' Smith comments:

'writing is always the attempted revelation of this elusive, multifaceted self, and yet its total revelation - as Zagajewski suggests - is a chimerical impossibility. It is impossible to convey all of the truth of all our experience.'
(Writing as Self Betrayal, from Fail Better)

But unfortunately there's a kind of prurient chastity about this sort of thing. The self plays Peekaboo. At the point of total disclosure time would stop. Whereupon the self would presumably stand there motionless and naked like the girls at the Windmill Theatre. Yet time doesn't stop like that. Rather it avoids such indecent truth because if time really were to seize up there would be no more artistic production, no more 'analysis' in Lacan's terms. Instead time just carries on regardless like the Ford or Fiat production lines in 60s capitalism. And in that case doesn't writing (don't all the arts indeed) become a sort of all encompassing narcissism (a kind of personal subsumption by each artist) for ever holding the floor and yet never quite reaching the end? I'd tell you everything about myself, is what's implied by this conception, except that isn't possible. Which also leaves the arts without any social dimensions. Or, like Mobius the Stripper in Josipovici's titular apothegm, a surface with only one side. (In Josipovici's split screen story Mobius reveals himself psychologically across the top half of each page. Eventually he kills himself, leaving the final top half blank. Conversely it is only during the remainder of that page that a writer who has been struggling to engage with what he's doing across each lower half can now begin writing fluently.)

Obviously there's a connection here with Ovid. Like Zagajewski's quoted poem, Ovid's telling of the Narcissus myth is a sort of parable of nominalism (how the word for the thing and the thing itself become detached from one another) and maybe too of phenomenalism: how the things of the world become bundles of sensory inputs. Echo loves Narcissus but she can only echo him, and so she pines away; she leaves behind only her voice. Narcissus loves the image of himself, and ends up suicidal.

But with this difference, that implicate in this version is the social dimension. Without a sense of herself, in other words, Echo is nothing; but without a sense of other people, Narcissus is also doomed.

*

And yet 'each man kills the thing he loves,' according to Oscar Wilde. So the impulse towards murder isn't just about moving on or about failing better despite what's been said above. Nor yet is it about something that's postponed through endless self revelation or about bringing all that to an end.

It's implicit in Catullus, for example:

Odi et amo, quare id faciam fortasse requiris.

Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and love. Perhaps you ask how I can do this.

I don't know, but I feel it happen and I'm crucified.

(Carmen 85)

Here a chiasmus structure binds together exteriority and interiority, positive and negative, empathy and exclusion ('hate and love' versus 'feel it [...] and am crucified') into a single unit, a completed conceptual object full of potential for action but without the action itself.

But whereas Catullus creates an object kept suspended in the present, Rodchenko describes an inflection of this, an object which is receding into the past or from which he himself is moving forward into the future: The lingering last hopes of love are destroyed, and I leave the house of dead truth'. This is history conceived of as a sort of numinous object: 'The crushing of all -isms in painting was for me the beginning of my resurrection,' was how he had also put it. It's something that results from some sort of course of action, that's equipped with both an outside and an inside (like the inclusion and exclusion in Catullus) even though it's since been emptied of its potential and is thus described as 'useless', and with a structure that had been sketched out through time rather as a building is stretched out in space but which now obtrudes, albeit briefly, into the present:

'When I look at the number of paintings I have painted I sometimes wonder what I shall do with them. It would be a shame to burn them. There are over 10 years of work in them. But they are as useless as a church. They serve no purpose.'

(Alexandr Rodchenko, in Novyi Lef, no 6, 1927)

The filaments of Kafka's Odradek, another inflection, in Die Sorge des Hausvaters, The Cares of a Family Man, stretch out not only through time but also in space. For Kafka, though, it's the narrator who is history, exceeded by his conception, some 'useless' thing or creature, some 'strange bobbin whose true form we will never know, still less the purpose of its existence' but which moves nonetheless in a contrary direction to that of Rodchenko's church, out of the past, through the present and so on into the future, like the progress of DNA, as Kafka contemplates his own extinction with disquiet.

Girolamo De Michele writes of it thus:

'It exists but it doesn't have any function; it has a form, and yet it is formless. It is suspended in an intermediate dimension, as though halfway between some useless object that has lost all function and an object that's going to be reused for purposes that are both new and unexpected.'

(Girolamo De Michele: New Italian Epic e allegoria, in Carmilla)

And Kafka himself writes as follows:

'I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children's children? He does no harm to anyone that I can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I do find almost painful.'

(Kafka: Die Sorge des Hausvaters, The Cares of a Family Man)

Of course, an object that's 'lost all function' has become entirely external in how it is perceived. Its pointlessness excludes us or we have turned away from what's within. However, it is still an object, something that's been created, retaining full interiority nonetheless. Conversely the object 'that's going to be used for purposes that are both new and unexpected' (the example De Michele himself comes up with is the McGuffin, the television protagonist of Wu Ming's 54) may have no content as such (the McGuffin lost its innards). However, it can still offer possibility, the possibility of approach and entering into, of filling with new content, thereby remaining an object. Even the surprise of disappointment is on offer:

'When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course I was surprised.'

(Wittgenstein: Culture and Value)

Or that which Duchamp offers in what Lazzarato calls the 'null set' of the readymade, which also remains an object, to which there's nothing added except the artist's choice.

*

In Hi/story, I wrote of time as extension (the winding road, the hands of the clock, how many hours have gone by) against time as intension: of how it feels to be here now, to be doing these things and to have these affiliations. The mechanisation of time is, in many ways, the beginning of its failure as a whole. Indeed the Taylorised factory may have begun along with the clock, whose hands complete and re-complete their frictionless journeys endlessly, over and over, without accumulation or result.

When Q advises murder it's in the service of one's craft, in the pursuit of some single and excellent object: excellence as a remainder. For Beckett that pursuit is in the plural, of better and better objects: steady progress up a hill. But for Zadie Smith it's the production line itself that really counts: an endless succession of essentially fungible manufactures, where time is never switched off.

In Carmen 85 the 'object' Catullus creates is fully formed, but all movement is in potential. That is, it has no extension, being virtually pure intension, pure affiliation. Rodchenko's 10 years' production, on the other hand, is his own artistic practice perceived as a sort of perdurance: thingness dividing itself into its various temporal parts as the world gets divided even as we travel along the road, through different towns and villages, watchful of the scenery. Whilst his 'useless ... church' is a sort of endurance: a sense of the temporal wholeness of the world as it continues, along with us. So that any decisive movement there is, whatever distance he sets, is not of time but of the attention and of purpose: he moves forwards, leaving his 'church' behind as a sort of detritus. Whereas Kafka privileges the object over the human, endurance over perdurance. So that whilst Humanity is maintained through successive generations the continuance of Odradek, by contrast, is as an entity that is permanently single, undivided.

In other words time, as a concept at least, persists.

*

And yet sometimes something happens that's quite different, that finally cuts through time. In Antonio Scurati's Il sopravissuto, a boy walks into the gymnasium of his school. He's meant to be taking his viva. Instead, in a destructively creative act (Scurati is explicit about 'the basis of its analogy with the work of art') he shoots dead seven teachers. Only one is left behind: the 'survivor' of the title.

So why exactly does he do it?

One theory (that of the criminologist, Dr Salini) is that the 'serial killer' works in a circle, that he selects 'trophies' (aspects of the loved one reflected in the victim), constantly narrowing in a deferred or indirect way the gap between 'the original' (the one that's loved and hated) and 'its similar', who's the victim, until Browne's 'mortal right lined circle must conclude and shut up all.' Until, that is, the circle reaches its end (or its beginning) 'either with the capture of the murderer or with the death of the loved one'.

Significantly, Salini delivers this explanation within the gym itself, where it's framed by an obscurity, by a lack of differentiation that's on the one hand both external and geographical ('[O]utside the gym ... in whatever direction one turned, North, South, East or West, one saw only accumulations of water vapour in suspension') and on the other both internal and temporal: 'Everything in the gym, the walls, the furnishings, the men, was pasted together out of blind materiality. One was in the instant prior to the creation of a universe that was endlessly deferred.'

So time has stopped. At least for now.

'We are living,' as the text announces later, 'through a back-to-front creation.' A more social situation than had been described within the gym, and one in which, as the survivor puts it, the killer (or the artist):

'wants it to be us that finds the reason for what he did, the reason not even he can understand. We and he are complementary moves within the same debate. In killing he has put the question. In living we have been asked to come up with the response. We have been called upon to complete that which he has begun [...] This is what he wants from you: he wants you to be the one that closes up the circle [...]

'Don't pay any attention to common sense. Here in the zone of contact, the cause does not precede the effect. Here the chronological order doesn't matter. Here the cause of what has been done not only still has to be discovered but actually does not yet exist.'

(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

Almost as though reprising Michaelangelo's painting of the Creation of Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the killer had even pointed his finger out towards the survivor ('It wasn't an act of aggression, rather it was an election') during the very moment of the killings. But with this difference, that in Scurati's version of what happens Andrea Marescalchi has to step forward from the crowd through the fact of his survival, through his (negative) selection by the killer, whereas the killer himself, Vitaliano Caccia, seems to recede from view altogether, just one amongst a crowd of disaffected youths, 'the pointed end of the arrow'. Indeed he has acted, according to the Public Prosecutor, having been 'chosen from within by a group of his own age to complete a death mission', 'a kind of collective mandate set by a group of his peers.'

Claiming the Rematch

'Revolution isn't showing life to people, but bringing them to life.'
(Guy Debord: For a Revolutionary Judgement of Art, 1961)

'Trained by millions of hours passed in front of the television these people reacted to each event in human existence, even one of tragedy and mourning, with the only behaviour necessary from the television watching public, with applause.

'But real life, that which like a death squad knocks on your door when you least expect it, grabs you from the comfort of the sofa in the living room, drags you out by your hair and then shoots you, by the side of the road, immediately claimed the rematch.'
(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

Hi/story

Time as emotional presence.


Marshall McLuhan is said to have quipped (he may even have done so) that, 'We drive into the future using only our rear view mirror.'

It's not just a matter of watching the past play out behind one like so much length of road or even of using that past experience, rightly or wrongly, in dealing with the present and the future. In a car one lives time linearly, privately. One excerpts oneself from the flux and multifocality of what goes on, locking the door on community and all that lies outside one's chosen focus.

In Travesty, for example, John Hawkes catches a car and its occupants in the act of moving towards catastrophe and death, which lie beyond the novel's ending. The experience of the present is all inside their metal box. Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi starts and ends with 'a parking lot' as the paving over of 'paradise'. Its emotional centre speaks of being excluded from a within:

Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.

But could one not perhaps live history in a more open way through being part of the molar and molecular arrangement, that flux, by which communities are made up?

When Dante meets up with Virgil, for instance, it's after the famously 'dark wood' and during a sleep akin to death. Virgil is part of the past: 'I'm not a man. I was a man before'. He leads Dante into a series of possible futures which are the present for those who find themselves there: a more social and more dimensioned sense of time. However, when Dante enters Purgatory he is warned against looking back, a reversal of the Eurydice principle, because 'anyone who does look back returns outside'.

And now here is Enrico Palandri in a 2006 conference paper, delivered in English, exploring Time & Literature. First he asks whether time appears in 'our culture' along with the written word:

'[W]e distinguish History from Pre-historic time precisely along the border marked by the invention of the written word. From that moment onwards we will have things and their linguistic and symbolic representation. I shall give a simple example of this separation: God will appear in the Bible as Ya-ve-he, I am what is, but the word which indicates what is cannot be written as it makes it past.'

So writing is looking back. And the US Constitution is a written one, a closing out of the past.

*

Palandri develops his thesis in a very particular way. He asserts, for example, that nowadays we orient ourselves in 'our time' by reference to its precedents. We use the rearview mirror, keeping that metaphor, through psychological relativism expressing itself chronologically. An objectifying process. Its effect on usefulness and presence isn't a good one:

'When Romanticism begins to describe the individual reading as 'subjective' interpretation, History begins to separate us from the past. We look at these books today and ask ourselves what did they mean for them, rather than what do they mean for us.

[...]

'Our time separates generation from generation through a severe objectivity, a material grasp of the meaning of words which dissipates any ambiguity, but possibly also any real proximity.'

His own take on Dante is as follows:

The development of this historical view of the past, mainly through philology, has given us reliable texts and a scientific attitude towards the study of our tradition [...] but it is worth stopping a moment and wondering whether it is not because of this further historicization of time that we cannot really imagine, like Dante, to have as a guide to the other world a poet born 1300 years before, and to meet all those poets and philosophers we would like to confer with in Limbo.'

Another Palandri text feels like background for this. His 2003 novel, L'altra sera, sets the personal experience of a broken family attempting (or not) to meet up within the public experience of a rioting, multicultural Paris during the 1998 World Cup. It's a short but complex book which can also be read as a dialectic between two competing times: the time of the job and the car, and the time of affiliation. (Close to the end of the novel there's a scene which embodies this dialectic quite precisely: Gilles, whose impatience is quotidian, attempts to chivvy Francesca, his wistful, delaying wife. And it's through her interruption of quotidian time that some kind of real reunion comes about.)

The emotional substance of the novel arises out of words but it forms a sort of surplus which words alone cannot capture. (A young victim of a knife attack is not the father's unknown son. So things don't ever quite come into balance.) Blanchot called death 'merely the side of life which isn't turned towards us.' Here it's night which provides the frame, at either end of the book. This is the side of death which remains as possibility, of construction as well as destruction: 'Night will come. Black night. Bare night. My night,' the repository of fear. Either the sky has been stripped of its constellations or else it's waiting to be (re)populated with new stars: a prelude to conversation. Later on these possibilities are reconstructed, through memory:

'In the evening the peasants called the animals into their quarters and the countryside was filled with cries that lasted for ages, cadenced and repetitive like songs [...] that seemed the calling of the stars, one by one, until night was made complete. In the perfect darkness, after supper, they turned off the lights in the kitchen to look at the constellations and to chatter a bit in the cool air.'

And within the body of the novel, there is indeed (ostensibly) precisely that bringing in, or bringing out. The procedures of desire (positive and negative; its indefinableness is often evoked by smells) as they are articulated in all their different tenses and their moods. The communitas (in Turner's sense) of the football, which is also the communitas of the rioters. The proposed family meeting disrupted by the riots. Affinities both real (a grandfather, an unborn child, furtive sex between cultures) and implied (a potential lover, a potential child and so forth). How Gianni, the student son, is subject to 'the irresponsibility of desire', as he attempts to construct a new present out of the theorised future, as he joins up with a group of Kurds and they attempt to destroy a car; though not Gilles' car, which gets through it all unscathed. How Giacomo, the father, seeks the (re)construction of a new present out of the legally separated past, whose own desire is more cautious:

'Superstition has taken up space again within me, that marvellous caution that accompanies us when a desire is so intense that it seems to produce reality directly out of hope, and then we endeavour not to break the spell, not to disturb the surfaces of things

'In order to be present,' as Simondon puts it using soul and body as an analogy (L'individuation psychique et collective à la lumiere des notions de Forme, Information, Potentiel et Métastabilité), 'the present needs the future and the past; through these two [...] the soul reaches the body. The body is what-isn't-present; it's not the material of some animating form. The present rises up from the body and returns to it; the 'anima' crystallises the body. The present is a work of individuation. The present isn't a permanent form; it's a form in operation. It finds its form in individuation.'

The novel ends as follows, more or less:

'Here it is. Night. Bare night. My night. [...] One shouts in its face, Don't scare me, Night. But actually you please me with the infinitude of your time which isn't beaten out by commerce and by the ordered living of families, of schools, of traffic. Your time is totally free, open to irregularities, to the tentative search for someone with whom to cross the darkness and come out on the other side.

'[...]

'I still wait for the night like a child, like a boy, like a man, and like someone who's grown old. That the day might come to an end...'