Sisyphus, Outdone. Theatres of the Catastrophal
| September 3, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 20, Number 3, May 2010 |
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[ extract ]
§ “Ways of dying also include crimes.”1
§ I feel myself of another time, as though there were other time.
§ Side by side or superimposed, Paul Virilio’s Tilting bunker and Michal Rovner’s Outside #2 exacerbate – they reiterate – the time of decay : Rovner’s over-exposures2 bring to the surface of the Bedouin house its temporal degradation, granting it oblique equivalency with the bunker sinking into the sand. Rovner slows time, measuring its imprint, extruding from the house in the desert the implanted time of accelerated degradation. What Virilio’s bunker exposes (documents) Rovner’s anticipates by ennervation. There is the subjective disclosure of the subject’s disintegration in time, in a frame. What I see, in each instance, is not a house nor a bunker, but the work of time, the anticipation and accomplishment of death’s (de)composition.
§ Un événement de lumière.3
§ An event of light which is or might be a storm. Light storming the house in the desert. Light, which in this instance, is, has the potential to be, catastrophal. Bringing about. Standing the house more still.
§ The photograph lacks definition. A world (worlds) undefined.
§ The photograph does not lack definition. It draws out that which by definition is undefined. Undiscerned by instrument. Absent of designation.
§ Do I kiss it back.
§ Death’s (de)composition is (also) a theatre of war.
§ What are we waiting for.
§ In Guy Hocquenghem’s aspiration to objectless desire4 and Hervé Guibert’s consideration of subjectless photography5 there is the intimation of the removal of a self in order to unburden a context of its context. A voice without language or touch without touch.
§ “La sexualité indépendante de tout objet … sujet et rejet même.”6
§ In the last of language, language is subjectless. It ruins itself against an embarrassing hope for more. Its perversion is less than this. Less than its desire for itself.
§ Its rejection.
§ A ruined language is a language with neither subject nor object. It says nothing (or too much) of where it has been. Intimacy is, in this instance, intimation: “La ruine nous conduit à une expérience qui est celle du sujet dessaisi, et paradoxalement il n’y a pas d’objet à cette expérience.”7
§ Who was there in the first place.
§ The door is always open.8 This might be History’s proviso. An inhospitable hospitality. Suspect and ill at ease.9
§ The I might be a catastrophist. Taking turns. Turning out.
§ Seismically speaking, a split self is rendered unavowably speechless. Self without self. Irreferent.
§ Is it for lack of place.
§ Or: a siteless retort, pronounced out of place. The site ridded of seeing may be a way away from pronouncement. Built or borne.
§ This is Heidegger’s declaration: “The proper sense of bauen, namely dwelling, falls into oblivion.”10 This is the case, also, of the proper senses. Undwelled, obliviated.
§ The impropriety with which, for example, we are secluded.
§ For example: we bereave the sense of our freedoms.
§ A house which is built into its destruction.
§ RY King’s photographic dissolve marks the paper immutable. (Figure 1) Immutable in that it is always imbricated in a mechanism of deterioration. In this improper sense, the image is not separable from its degradation. Its substances are both paper and light. Thus they are neither, as they run into each other.
§ The bird, in this instance, which is scarcely discernible, is in a field of apparent surfaces. It comprises the surface by which it becomes visible, an irregularity on a structure of hay bales in a field of depleted colour. The photograph misdirects its intention. It intends for me to fall in.
§ In to America.
§ The identification of a site is improper in that it precludes situation. It steadies itself in a blur which I take to be my eyes. In this sense I become the photograph proper. It is in the skin and in the paper and against a wall. The door, here, is diminished, but not foregone.
§ The fall is ever a truncation of fallout. In this theatre of scarce forms, the photograph intimates residual catastrophe.
§ It is nowhere to be seen. It is this which the photograph comes between.
§ As gas mask or oxygen. Those particular theatres.
§ “What is architecture’s error?”11
§ That particulate which may be granular. What fastens the paper to its skin. A regional deference.
§ It comes with a number, assigned to a calcined human body which is incommunicable: . When it says “…j’ai besoin de catastrophes, de coups de théâtre”12 it abandons sense.
§ The lake is up to my knees in November.
§ In calx.
§ The time of the photograph is (always) after. This imprecision accommodates the numerous successions, the end upon seismic end. In a time without time, un(re)countable: still. In this, it is a perfect crime, “l’anéantissement anéanti, la fin … privée d’elle-même.”13
§ The photographic occasion, its occasional reoccurrence makes incontrovertible “l’épouvante lucide de la redite”.14
§ When you touch it, is it said?
§ “Le désastre est séparé, ce qu’il y a de plus séparé.”15
§ Réplique : The chairs change place. The armchair is taken out. The other one, however, the green one, is transported here as well as the rope that fastens the arm that’s coming away. In addition, there are two white painted chairs on a back, wooden chairs, despite a dislike for painted wood, one day and then the next, they stay there, at the entranceway, latent chairs, which haven’t assumed their function as chairs, but hold their place. The chairs are all empty and yet upon arrival it is impossible to sit down, the two cats occupy the twelve chairs including the bed.
§ Se-parare, without making ready.
§ Is it found or is it given or is it taken from what was (already) taken away ?16
§ For example, Sir Thomas Bouch, who had not yet been knighted in 1870, designed the wrought and cast iron two and a quarter mile Tay Railway Bridge without calculation of the winter gales over the firth into his design; the bridge collapsed scarcely a year and a half after its construction. It collapsed under a train full of people. The structurally deficient Bridge 9340 over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis collapsed in August 2007, at the height of traffic, forty years after its inauguration. The indiscretion is in history and in materiality, each of which may be cited as deficient in structure and design.
§ Is a catastrophic failure a failure of time, a tempest unaccounted for in number or incident.17
§ For body, substitute bodies. Reiterate indiscretions.
§ “Ce que l’on appelle usuellement une forme, c’est toujours, en dernière analyse, une discontinuité qualitative sur un certain fond continu.”18 Thom’s definitions misdirect substitution. He clarifies: the foundation of a problem in any of the sciences is an aporia. For once, the disappearances can be accounted for. Whether or not they manifest as (retinal) discontinuities or continuous underpinnings.
§ Mathematically speaking: something moves over something that doesn’t move. Conversely, something that doesn’t move touches something that does. There is no equivalency between the horse’s last run and the photographic fix. One moves without the other. Something is torn.
§ “Because the geometry / we seek is beyond coordination,”19
§ There is no perfect isolate. Simply a proclivity for destructions of all kinds. The aleatory conjunction of Fourier’s Arcades with Benjamin’s (sometimes contested) suicide is arguable against an ethics of encounter’s hermaphrodisms.20 But there is no possible proof of this. If Benjamin considered suicide at the age of forty, is the fortieth age the end (of) time?
§ Neuter, it is said. But neuter is without desire.
§ The city presented a sky that demanded an ocean, but there were none of these. (Figure 2)
§ To say “all kinds” is to invite various imprecisions. Benjamin’s lost attaché case is perhaps the most convincing piece of evidence.
§ A mode of somatic interrogation.21
§ For Derrida, it might be Nietzsche’s lost umbrella.
§ “It is, / I know, not true / that we lived, there moved, / blindly, no more than a breath between / there and not-there,”22
§ Because of its lostness.
§ The Roman ampitheatre is a spectacular place of slaughter. “La distance est immense entre la conviction personnelle et la démonstration:”23 A theatre, which continues in the present to command murder, is complicit with the injunction to (an) end. We are in the act.
§ Taken aback.24
§ This is not calculated into the displacement of materials and surfaces, but in their resistance, perhaps, to being moved. Removed. The thwarted Archimedean resolve (to drown).
§ In the Sisyphus text, there is talk of murder.
§ “Yes, a disappointed bridge.”25
§ It isn’t for want or lack. In the visage, the eyes are become too wide, too languid and imbecilic. Is this what it is (also) to look. “You behold in me, […], a horrible example of free thought.”26
§ It seems vital now, that we do this.
§ If not for any reason, other than the one cited. If it is true, for example, that “Il ne reste rien de l’évènement,”27 then photography, in Guibert’s projection, is predicated, first, on forgetting, and perhaps synchronously on nothing. In which instance, nothing, is what comes of light, as it happens.28
§ Green: “…into the subject of poisonous colours. It has been found that arsenic is sometimes used in the preparation of some wall papers, especially though not exclusively, the green ones. This has been known to produce effects of poisoning on the occupiers. It is almost the only case in which the air of our rooms is liable to actual poisoning for the effects of air that is foul from any other cause are not…”29
§ Historically speaking, our nothing is in our forgottenness.30
§ For Malraux, it is in the death count: “Le jour anniversaire de ma quarantième année, lorsque je passais clandestinement la ligne de démarcation avec le chat noir, j’aurais voulu être né la veille.”31
§ His year of quarantine.
§ The geometry of the poison is qualitative.32
§ In a logic, then, of photographic eventuality, we forget nothing.
§ “Un jour, toutes les photos seront dissoutes, le papier photo n’impressionnera plus, ne réagira plus, sera chose morte.”33
§ “It is my want that it is looked at closely and in light, please.”34
Click for larger view
Untitled RY King 2008
Click for larger view
Une mer attendue / An ocean that doesn’t arrive NS after RY 2010
4. Guy Hocquenghem. Le désir homosexuel, 121. « [Le désir homosexuel] est la pente vers la trans-sexualité par la disparition des objets et des sujets, le glissement vers la découverte qu’en sexe, tout communique. »
5. Guibert. « Comme la photographie peut n’être qu’un événement de lumière, sans sujet (et c’est le moment où elle est le plus photographie), j’aimerais un jour me lancer dans un récit qui ne serait qu’un événement d’écriture, sans histoire, et sans ennui, une véritable aventure. »
9. “Such that the question for me becomes a very simple architectural one, it is the question of the doorway, in French, l’embrasure, with its attendant gesturings toward desire. Who is standing at this door? Who opens or closes it. And what might this threshold become if we were to cross it, to cross it out?” N.S. “Some notes on death and the burning of buildings”.
16. A small stack of letters addressed variously yields the following occurences: (1) But it made me feel once again like The Murderer; (2) …and so here is another opportunity for me to feel like I’ve committed a murder; (3) Je n’en peux plus d’être le meurtrier; (4) So much that it seems I’ve committed a murder by coming here; (5) …and so I think that I must be a murderer of sorts, a murderer of people and of cities; (6) Because I have come to think of death as murder, and our complicity; (7) Etc.
24. Following a public execution, which he had attended with some conviction, Albert Camus’s father goes home, doesn’t speak, lies down on the bed, and begins immediately to vomit. “Ma mère raconte seulement qu’il rentra en coup de vent, le visage bouleversé, refusa de parler, s’étendit un moment sur le lit et se mit tout d’un coup à vomir. (…) Au lieu de penser aux enfants massacrés, il ne pouvait plus penser qu’à ce corps pantelant qu’on venait de jeter sur une planche pour lui couper le cou.” Réflexions sur la peine capitale, 143-144.
Translations
Translations are attributable to N. unless otherwise indicated.
Hervé Guibert
An event of light.
Guy Hocquenghem
[Homosexual desire] is the slope towards transsexuality through the disappearance of objects and subjects, a slide towards the discovery that in matters of sex everything is simply communication. (Tr. Daniella Dangoor)
Hervé Guibert
Since photography can only be an event of light, without a subject (and it is then that it is at its most photographic), I would like one day to launch myself into a narrative that would be nothing but an event of writing, without history, and without boredom, a true adventure.
Jean-François Lyotard
…sexuality, independent of any object. (Tr. Robert Harvey.)
Sophie Lacroix
The ruin leads us to an experience which is that of the relinquished subject, and paradoxically this experience has no object.
Hervé Guibert
…I need catastrophes, coups de théâtre.
Jean-François Lyotard
…the annihilation
annihilated, the end deprived of itself.” (Idem)
*
…the lucid dread of redundancy. (Idem)
Maurice Blanchot
Disaster is separate; that which is most separate. (Tr. Ann Smock.) I note with interest, Smock’s insertion of the semi-colon, making more distinct the separation between clauses.
René Thom
What is usually referred to as a form is always, in the final analysis, a qualitative discontinuity on some continuous ground.
*
The distance between a personal conviction and its demonstration is enormous:
Albert Camus
My mother relates merely that he came rushing home, his face distorted, refused to talk, lay down for a moment on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit. … Instead of thinking of slaughtered children, he could think of nothing but that quivering body that had just been dropped onto a board to have its head cut off. (Tr. Justin O’Brien)
André Malraux
Nothing remains of this event. (Tr. Terence Kilmartin)
*
History obliterates even men’s forgetfulness. [forgetting] (Idem)
*
On the birth day of my fortieth year, as I was clandestinely crossing the demarcation line with the black cat, I would have wanted to have been born yesterday.
René Thom
There is no escaping the continuum.
Hervé Guibert
One day, all the photographs will have dissolved, the photographic paper will no longer impress, react, will be a dead thing.