Subjectivity 9042007281, 9789042007284

Table of contents :
INTRODUCTION
DYNAMICS OF SUBJECTIVITY IN THE HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDE
1. Introduction
2. An Analysis of Four Avant-Garde Texts.
3. Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
DADAIST SUBJECTIVITY AND THE
POLITICS OF INDIFFERENCE
Notes
Bibliography
SUBJECTIVITY IN A
POST-COLONIAL SYMBOLIC
THE ANXIETY OF JOYCE:
Notes
Bibliography
PROUST AND SUBJECTIVITY¹
1. The awakenings of the self
2. Mourning or the experience of the multiple self
The multiplicity of the other
The work of mourning
Albertine multiplied
The self of the hero multiplied
3. The sleeper, the mourner, the writer
Notes
Bibliography
A GLIMPSE OF THE SELF
1. The persistence of the approach of the self
2. Images of the approach of the self and the confrontation with this tendency
3. Monologue and narration in the dramatic texts
Notes
Bibliography
THE SUBJECT IN MODERN RUSSIAN
POETRY
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Boris Pasternak
Velimir Khlebnikov
The postmodernists
Notes
Bibliography
SELF-AWARENESS AND
SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Notes
TESTED TO THE BREAKING
POINT: POSTMODERNITY IN
MODERNITY
Knowledge and the critique of knowledge
The postmodern critique of the “modern” conception of language and
its consequences
Art and Ethics
Notes
Bibliography
The Russian Novel as a Serial Murder
or The Poetics of Bureaucracy
Notes
SUBJECTIVITY AS A
BASIC PRESUPPOSITION OF
MODERNITY IN MUSIC
Musical examples
Notes
NEW SUBJECTIVITY IN CINEMA
The Hitchcockian “Subject”:
Guilty by Jouissance or Confused in Time?
Vertigo: The Abyss of the Real and the Crystal of Time
Strange Days:
Brain Stimulation and a Bergsonian Ethics of Time
Notes
Bibliography
IT TAKES THREE TO
EPISTEMOLOGY
The problem
Epistemology
Method
Representation
Notes
Bibliography

Citation preview

INTRODUCTION

There is no doubt that “subjectivity” is one of the central issues of twentieth century philosophy and art. At the beginning of the century there is the “discovery” of the subconscious, which casts doubt on the existence of the authentic, unchangeable self, the “modern Subject” of Descartes. This Subject, conceived in the seventeenth century, the age of Reason and Progress, as the autonomous centre of knowledge and self-consciousness, in principle remained intact throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Modernism put an end to the belief in the unity and uniqueness of the subject. The self, confronted with its darker, unintelligible and uncontrollable side, lost its confidence, became multiple, fragmentary. The loss of the autonomous subject led to modernism’s characteristic expressions of the incomplete, unreliable self, but also to a persistent quest for the self – the belief that an ultimate, true self existed was preserved in modernism and resulted, for instance, in the subject’s flight into ideology (socialism, communism, nazism). This belief disappeared in postmodernism. For postmodernism the subject does not exist any longer as an important category. It is deindividualised and decentered. Roland Barthes proclaims the death of the author and the monologic of modernism is replaced by dialogue and polyphonism (Bakhtin). Attention is not focused on the “I”, but on the “I” and the “Other”; ideology loses its appeal and so do the “great stories” (Lyotard). Even history seems to have come to an end (Fukuyama). One might ask: what will happen now? The future, post-modernist subject will, in all probability, be virtual.

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Introduction

In this issue of Avant Garde various authors of various disciplines have dealt with the theme of subjectivity in the twentieth century. There are two articles on the modern and the postmodern subject in philosophy and one article each on subjectivity in music, film and dance. The other articles, not surprising in view of the theme, focus on literature and, in particular on the historical avant-garde – dadaism, surrealism, Russian futurism, Joyce, Proust. Beckett is somewhere in between modernism and postmodernism; the Russian conceptualist author Vladimir Sorokin represents the new avantgarde. The editors

DYNAMICS OF SUBJECTIVITY IN THE HISTORICAL AVANT-GARDE

Mario Moroni

1. Introduction In this article I would like to analyze some examples from the poetic production of the avant-garde movements (in particular surrealism and dadism), in which it is possible to see how the aesthetic production of these movements implied a philosophical and aesthetic problem still current: the critique of so-called subject-centered reason. I would like to show, however, that the approach made by the avant-garde to this problem was quite different form the one made by contemporary philosophical thought and theory. The avant-garde undercut the notion of subject-centered reason, or Western logocentric reason, without ending in a pessimistic negation of the potential capacities and resources of human reason as such, in respect to the external world and perception of it. I will try to show how the creative texts of the avant-garde maintained three basic principles: 1. that linguistic experience is always an intersubjective phenomenon; 2. that there is a realm of perception which is situated – in linguistic

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terms – between the sign and the object (or referent); 3. that such a realm is based on sensorial perception. As far as concerns the first of the three principles, intersubjectivity may be considered the condition of having validity in reference to more than one subject. Such a condition of validity establishes a common agreement about something in the world. In the case of the avant-garde, these artistic movements questioned the principle that language has a private and subjective value. According to the definition above, the notion of intersubjectivity is not opposed to objectivity, but rather to subjectivity, understood as an individual faculty of perceiving the world, which one may also relate to the more general sphere of romantic/idealistic aesthetics. In its turn, objectivity can be included in the notion of intersubjectivity, because a certain process of objectification may be necessary in order for more than one subject to come to an agreement about an object (of the world, of knowledge, of language). In an intersubjective process the presence of an external object is at stake, and it is toward this object that a number of subjects have to address their efforts to find an agreement. The avant-garde questioned the notion of subjectivity (understood as solipsistic individuality in art and in social life), linguistic meaning, and the institution of art codified by tradition and society; but at the same time emphasized the possibility and the need for the production of new linguistic meanings, and the possibility that such new meanings could work intersubjectively. The avant-garde’s effort was oriented toward the creation of conditions in which its message of novelty was appropriable by the collectivity, and in order to do so the artists elaborated means for widespread diffusion such as manifestoes, public performances and collective art shows. The aim of the avant-garde was not the absolute negation of the subject: it was, rather, the expansion of its perceptive capacities into a new sensorial sphere, so as to create intersubjective processes, understood as an alternative to the merely subjective dimension. One may say that the avant-garde questioned Western subject-centered reason, but not in order to criticize it abstractly as a philosophical notion, rather in order to transform it constructively, in the prospect

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of a socio-anthropological change from idealistic self-assured reason to intersubjective reason. The avant-garde never rejected the principle that language is able to produce collective values, and in this attitude one may also see one aspect of the avant-garde’s political significance, and of the potential political relevance of the notion of intersubjectivity itself. Now, I would like to establish the following scheme: linguistic sign

space of

(signifier/signified) intersubjective sensorial

object (r e f e r e n t)

perception

It is clear that in order for intersubjective phenomena to take place, a sphere of reference (objects) must always be at work; that is, a realm in which objects (of knowledge, of reality, of thought, of language) are perceivable, and in respect to which the passage from individual subjectivity to intersubjectivity is possible. We can call this realm space of the object (as in the scheme above). Of course, language also represents an autonomous sphere, whose phonetical materiality does not allow any direct referentiality, or mimetic correspondence with the signified object. The signifier can be considered the relatively autonomous element of language. In the scheme above we can see that the signifier is situated in its legitimate space of relative autonomy in respect to the signified object and to the linguistic sign – understood as the notion which incorporates both signifier and signified – but the autonomy of the signifier does not mean total separation between the two spaces, therefore I have proposed an intermediate space – a space for mediation and interaction – which I have called space of intersubjective sensorial perception. It is precisely in this space that it is possible to situate the work of the avant-garde. The avant-garde was certainly very far from proposing

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the referential or mimetic value of the text. Language speaks for itself, but still language is communication, and communication is only conceivable in terms of interaction among subjects. It is always, somehow, related to a referential sphere. 1 In approaching the problem of the status of the subject, as well as the relationship between subject and object, the artists and poets of the avant-garde proceeded by developing cognitive techniques of approach. They tried to mediate and transform perceptions of reality by means of several devices. In doing so they questioned the function of the subject, as well as its centrality in the perception of reality. They theorized and practiced devices such as “simultaneity,” “dynamism,” “tactilism” as theorized by F.T. Marinetti and the estrangement of words and objects from their usual context in everyday life (i.e. the use of tickets, pages from newspapers, and other materials, in the dadaist collages). The dadaist technique of collage is particularly important in the context of the work of the avant-garde, because it was not only a creative device, but also one of the tools of the dadaist attack upon the institution of art. At that time, the notion of the autonomy of art in bourgeois society was based, effectively, on the separation of art from social life. With their collages, the dadaists introduced in their art work – along with a principle of heterogeneity opposed to homogeneity – materials from that sphere of life which had been excluded by the institution of bourgeois art. This institution had made it impossible for art to intervene in any direct way in social life. The introduction of heterogeneous materials into the art work may be seen as an attempt to call the attention of the receivers, understood as a collectivity, to the need for reintegration of art in social praxis. In the “Foreword” to Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde , Jochen Schulte Sasse describes this phenomenon as follows: Its [the avant-garde’s] concept of art sees a chance to reintegrate art into social praxis if artists would create unclosed, individual segments of art that open themselves to supplementary responses. The aesthetic fragment functions very differently than the organic whole of romantic artwork, for it challenges its recipient to make it an

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integrated part of his or her reality and to relate it to sensuous-material experience. (xxxix)

I would like to add that the aim of making the recipients integrate the aesthetic fragment into his/her reality – with the consequential relation between the fragment itself and sensuous-material experience – may be seen as a signal of the attempt to establish precisely the process of intersubjectivity, for the receivers are brought out from their subjective sphere of merely contemplative reception, and are led into a sphere of sensorial experience in which they have to confront their own position in social life and its materiality which implies objectification. 2 I would also like to describe some other devices elaborated by the avant-garde. For example, the technique of “simultaneism” elaborated at first by the cubist painters and by Apollinaire – who also called it “orphism” in 1912 – approached the object cumulatively, from several different points of view, by presenting the object in motion. Through the notion of “simultaneism” one can make a first step toward the understanding of the position of the subject in respect to the sphere of external objects in the avant-garde. The presence of the subject – or, in the case of written texts, of the poetic “I” – at the moment of naming the object, is characterized neither by a sense of self-assurance and centrality, nor by a total dependence of the chain of signifiers, which would leave no room for an understanding of the object itself. The subject becomes, rather, “pluralized” – one may also say “dynamically multiplied” – in many points of view which, all at the same time, approach the object. What we have, then, is an object deconstructed by a pluralized subject, that is, an object which has lost its stable position in space, and has been put in a state of what may appear as “fragmentation,” yet is a state of multi-perspectivism in which the interaction between subject and object is kept alive The subject does not lose contact with the world of referents, which means – again in linguistic terms – that the relationship between the linguistic sign (signifier/signified) and the signified object (referent) has been mediated by an interaction. But we do not have a “representational” sphere either;

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we have, rather, an intersubjective space at work. The recipient of the avant-garde art work, in his/her turn, does not lose the perception – and, consequentially, the possibility of a cognitive process – of the presence of referential objects. What he/she receives is not the object presented in its plenitude either. He/she receives a stimulus for different points of view through which he/she can look at the world. As far as concerns a sensorial approach to reality, futurism’s aesthetic theory offered some interesting indications. In his short essay “Tactilism” of 1924, F.T. Marinetti theorised a technique conceived in order to establish a relationship between the subject and external reality based on touch. Marinetti presents “tactilism” as follows: I had to begin to educate my tactile sense. By sheer will power I localised the confused phenomena of thought and imagination of the different parts of my body (...) Among the different experiences, I found the following three preferable: 1. to wear gloves for several days, during which time the brain forces the condensation into your hands of a desire for different tactile sensations; 2. to swim underwater in the sea, trying to distinguish interwoven currents and different temperatures tactilistically; 3. every night, in complete darkness, to recognise and enumerate every object in your bedroom. In this way I created the first educational scale for touch, which at the same time is a scale of tactile values for Tactilism, or the Art of Touch. (110)

Of course, one has to keep in mind the didactical emphasis, as well as the taste for aestheticism, typical of Marinetti’s writing, but I think that it is important to notice the programmatic attention paid by avant-garde movements to the development and the practice of new ways of approaching the subject and its capacities for differentiated perceptions. Other interesting insights come from the theoretical writings of André Breton. In one of them – “Crise de l’objet” of 1936 – he wrote:

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Tout le pathétique de la vie intellectuelle d’aujourd’hui tient dans cette volonté d’objectivation qui ne peut connaître de trêve et qui renoncerait à elle-même en s’attardant à faire valoir ses conquêtes passées. Il n’est pas de raison qui puisse se tenir durablement pour acquise et négliger, de ce fait, la contradiction qu’est toujours prête à lui apporter l’expérience. C’est avant tout la poursuite de l’expérience qui importe: la raison suivra toujours, son bandeau phosphorescent sur les yeux. (22)

This critique of formal rationality is still one of the most productive lessons left by the avant-garde. The avant-garde, by means of several devices, tried to create a realm based on three forms of novelty: 1. new forms of perception, from the point of view of the subject/author; 2. new forms of communication, by placing words and objects in a different order for reception; 3. new forms of reception and perception, from the point of view of the recipient. Modern philosophical thought has looked at the work of the avant-garde in a very different way. The critique of the self-centered, or logocentric subject – as it has been expressed by Nietzsche, and subsequently by Adorno, Heidegger, Derrida, and others – has been too committed to attacking forms of domination produced by Western reason and language (metaphysics and idealism for Derrida; the enlightenment’s reification of reason for Adorno) to give an account to the creative and cognitive processes which were at play in the work of the avant-garde. Theodor W. Adorno was too committed to demonstrating that the avant-garde is conceivable and justifiable only in the form of a “monad”3 which works exclusively in opposition to reality and society. Thus, for him, communication was not only a negative aspect of the present state of art in capitalistic society, but also a form of compromise and an assimilation into capitalistic society itself. 4 From this point of view no cognitive process of perception and reception is possible either, because in order for such a process to take place there has to be room for an interaction between the subject and the sphere of reality. What remains active, in Adorno, is the notion

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of the “resistance” 5 of art to society, in the form of the fully and freely developed materiality of the work of art (versus the social utilitarian organization of materiality) in a state of “hibernation,” in the wait for a utopian moment of final deliverance. This situation also leads to an inevitable suspension of any form of social praxis related to art. It is true that Adorno, in the course of the development of his philosophical thought, dealt with the art work of surrealism, but the problem is that he conceived of the surrealistic effort as producing a new perception of reality in the prospect of a negative dialectic between subjective freedom and objective unfreedom, as in this passage from his essay “Looking Back on Surrealism” in Notes to Literature : In the face of total reification, which throws it back upon itself and its protest, a subject that has become absolute, that has full control of itself and is free of all consideration of the empirical world, reveals itself to be inanimate, something virtually dead. The dialectical images of Surrealism are images of a dialectic of subjective freedom in a situation of objective unfreedom. (88)

That is a form of subjective opposition which, in its denial of intersubjective communication through the materiality of the medium, ultimately reminds us of the opposition between art as a “monad” and society. As J.S. Sasse points out, referring to this passage: “Surrealism, like modernism in general, is reduced here to an artistic strategy of protest against society. Adorno’s concept and periodization of modernism and his pessimistic social analysis are two sides of the same coin.” (xix) A philosopher like Jacques Derrida, to cite another example, is also too committed to questioning the logocentric notion of the metaphysical subject. In order to deconstruct such a notion he inevitably has to negate any value (meaning) transmittable by language, because any process of knowability would recreate the absolute (logocentric) function of language itself and, consequentially, of self-centered reason. So he cannot conceive any room for intersubjective processes on either the artistic or social levels. It is not a coincidence

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that Derrida seems to accept only Artaud and Bataille among the artists of the avant-garde. These two writers are both out to remove the border between cultural practices and the evocation of an archaic sphere of irreducible “difference.” In Artaud the “place” of the difference is represented by his notion of “theatre of cruelty,” which is described as a virtual space where words and gestures would be performed only once.6 Derrida emphasizes the absence of center in cultural discourse, so that the subject cannot get any fixed meaning from language. Everything in language is, therefore, based on the work of the signifiers. I would like to argue, on the basis of the above discussion of the avant-garde’s aesthetic practices, that in the work of the avantgarde the chain of the signifiers is also at work, but the difference consists in the fact that such a chain is constantly made to interact with the sphere of the signified (meaning) in order not to lose contact with cognitive and communicative processes, which in their turn lead toward a relationship with the life-world. On the contrary, for Artaud, and consequently for Derrida (as well as for Beckett, and consequently for Adorno, as Beckett is one of the few artists that Adorno seems to accept totally among the avant-gardists),7 the process of communication is exploded by negative connotations. This is especially apparent in Artaud’s principle – conceived in order to recuperate a sort of original and “pure” meaning – that a word should not be repeated more than once, and in Backett’s general tendency toward “silence” (which represents another aspect of the same problem.) Philosophers such as Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas, on the other hand, have developed a different approach to the work of the avant-garde, and they give us the possibility, though in different ways, of a closer reading of the texts of these artistic movements. First of all, both philosophers (each one in a different culturalhistorical context) are sensitive to the existence of the possibility of cognitive and communicative processes in the spheres of art and the life-world.

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Benjamin understood the importance of the notions of “experience” in surrealism’s techniques. In his chapter “Surrealism” in Reflections he wrote: In such passages in Breton, photography intervenes in a very strange way. It makes the streets, gates, squares of the city into illustrations of a trashy novel, draws off the banal obviousness of this ancient architecture to inject it with the most pristine intensity towards the events described. (183)

These notions enabled the subject to establish a dialectic relationship with the world of objects, a “reality” which as such reveals itself at the moment of the creative process. With regard to the surrealistic principle of experiencing mystery, Benjamin defined the notion of “dialectic optic,”, by means of which the mystery itself, understood as a sphere of “otherness,” can find its deepest function precisely in everyday life, and can be experienced at its best in the sphere of the life-world.8 Benjamin related the notion of experience to the concept of “profane illumination”: “The reader, the thinker (...) are types of illumination just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. And more profane.” (190) But the condition of “illumination,” for Benjamin, is not limited to a state of “intoxication.” The sensorial “illumination” is intended to provoke a shock in the subject and, consequentially, a form of awakening of his capacities of transferring sensorial experience into consciousness, which is political and revolutionary to the extent that it is that of the collectivity. Benjamin suggests that the artist and the intellectual assumes the role of a political activist, and that he or she is, therefore, able to recreate reality precisely by producing such a process of shock and awakening, as a collective awareness. He does not pursue an attitude of solidarity with the proletarian masses, as many intellectuals did in the past. 9 For Benjamin, the concept of “illumination” is not related to a sphere of contemplation; it is related, rather, to artistic and political activity in the “image sphere,” a sphere in which “political materialism and physical nature share the inner man, the psyche, the individual, or whatever else we wish to throw to them, with dialectical justice, so that no limb remains unrent.” (192)

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Habermas is more sceptical than Benjamin about the results achieved by the avant-garde movements. In his well-known essay “Modernity versus Post-modernity” – to which I will come back in the conclusion of this article – he praises the efforts made by surrealism, but he also sees the failure of such efforts in the fact that surrealism emphasized exclusively art, which is only one of three separate spheres by which modern society is characterized (science, morality, and art, according to Max Weber), and whose re-composition would be, for Habermas, the only solution for achieving the still unfulfilled project of modernity.10 2. An Analysis of Four Avant-Garde Texts. In the second part of this article I will analyze texts by avant-garde poets, and try to describe how these texts deal with the presence and the function of the subject, and with the notion of subjectivity itself. The texts are: “PSTT” by André Breton; “Opus Null” by Hans Arp; “Dada philosophique” by Francis Picabia; “Philippe Soupault dans son lit” by Philippe Soupault. “PSTT” by Breton – first published in 1923 – can be seen as a typical example of a “ready-made” poem, according to the definition formulated by Marcel Duchamp to indicate objects taken from everyday life and shown as artwork, with the intention of provoking art as an institution, as well as its recipients. However, I would like to argue that in the case of “PSTT” we are confronted with a more complex problem, related to the function of the subject. What we can read in “PSTT” is the reproduction of one page of a Paris phonebook,11 in which people are listed whose last name is that of the poet. The first level of reading is, of course, related to the notion of estrangement of an object (the page) from its usual context and function, and presented as a “poem” published in a collection of poetry, and even signed by its author, A. Breton. The interesting thing is that, besides the estrangement of the page in itself, the last names listed on it correspond to the last name of the poet, and, at the same time, are not simply repetitions of the poet’s last name. The

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same last name becomes pluralized, thanks to the presence of the different given names, in as many Bretons as there are in the city of Paris. Each of them is not only dislocated in different areas of the town, but has also a different profession. In other words, each line of this poem presents a different individual identity. Both the different locations and the different professions are listed in the page. Now, what seems to be at stake in the “page trouvée” is not only its message of estrangement – along with the poetics of the “readymade” – but also the notion of pluralization of the subject/author (A. Breton), achieved by means of the “ready-made.” The pluralization of the last name corresponds to an opening to the simultaneous presences of different identities of unknown people, who are not connoted as literary authors or artists. The subject assumes different identities at the same time. In this way, the notion of repetition, implied in the list of the same last name, does not take the form of serial uniformity, but is open to the notion of variation. The page of the phonebook is the most appropriate object to establish this relationship between repetition and variation, thanks to its particular structure formed by the same last name and the individual given names accompanied by address and profession. The “page trouvée” projects the “Breton” subject/author into the plurality of the “Bretons” who belong to the sphere of everyday life. The page brings back the poet’s last name in that life-world from which the page itself has been taken. One may say that the “readymade” object, in this case, does not stay relegated to the notion of pure estrangement; it indicates its way back, rather, to the place from which the estrangement has taken place. The page goes back and forth between these two spheres by containing the last name of its author, which is also the last name of mechanics, barmen, undertakers, deputies etc... A relationship between subject and reality suddenly becomes established in a very unusual way, through what one might call a “social landscape” of the city, which a simple page of a phonebook is able to show. But this result is possible only under the condition that the subject/author is also identifiable as André Breton, the poet. This means that the original identity of the poet cannot be totally

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forgotten, or nullified; otherwise the pluralization would not work, or its capacity for producing a sense of reintegration of the author’s name in the plurality of a social context. One may also say that in “PSTT” the typical avant-garde process of estrangement follows a double path: on the one hand the author estranges the “page trouvée” from its everyday-life context and, on the other hand, the page itself does not stay passive, it pushes back the author, in the form of his name, into the life-world context, out of the page/text, among the multitude of people: it is the author himself who becomes subject to a process of estrangement. In “Opus Null,” by Arp12 – first published in 1924 – the process of pluralization of the poetic “I” becomes manifest in a different way, and a more expanded one, in respect to the literal pluralization of the last name of the poet in “PSTT.” The “Ich” presents itself in a very assertive way in the first line accompanied by the verb “bin”, which typically indicates a sense of the full presence of the speaker or writer. But this is only a momentary form of plenitude of the subject, because immediately thereafter the “Ich” attributes to itself the quality of a plural entity, created by the neologistic word “Derdiedas.” which includes the three genders of the German language. This is the first signal of the technical procedure adopted by Arp in this poem; in order to expand – and, I would say, to question radically – the notions of poetic subject and individual identity. The “Ich” becomes subject to a progressive decomposition and, in the meantime, to a process of simultaneous metamorphoses into different elements which, in some cases, do not even belong to the anthropomorphic sphere. The “Ich” becomes, progressively, the “Ozonstengel” (3); the “anonyme Einprozent”; the “linke Fuss vom rechten Koch” (8). On line nine we find again the “Ich” reaffirmed in its original grammatical plenitude: “Ich bin.” But at this point the subject has already been subjected to such a dislodgement that the claim “Ich bin.” But at this point the subject has already been subjected to such a dislodgement that the claim “Ich bin” sounds like a form of irony. Then the “Ich” becomes the “zwolfte Sinn im Eierstock” (10) and, at the end, the “insgesamte Augustin/im lichten Zellulosenrock” (11-12).

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The processes of pluralization and metamorphosis of the poetic “I,” in Arp’s poem, follow a logic of the illogical pushed to the extreme: the “Ich” is simultaneously projected in several different spheres: grammatical genders (“Derdiedas”); chemistry (“Ozonstengel”); mathematics (“anonyme Einprozent”); anatomy (“der linke Fuss” and the “Sinn im Eierstock”); organic substances (“Zellulosenrock”). Yet, despite the metamorphoses, the poetic subject does not totally disappear. It is still perceivable as a presence in the text, precisely because it sends to the reader simultaneous signals of its expansion from those different spheres. I would like to suggest that in this poem the poetic subject is at work in a form that may be defined as a “communicative pluralized agency,” which sends signals of its presence, but this presence is not situated only in one centre of transmission, or only in one point of view. Both the sender and the transmitted images are perceivable as coming from as many locations/objects/spheres/points of view as those in which they have been metamorphosed. In Picabia’s “Dada philosophique”13 – first published in 1920 – the reader is challenged in several ways. In this text we are again facing a problem of the function of the subject, and of its presence in the communicative sphere. In the two poems I have analyzed so far, we have dealt with a communicative presence of a subject which we have defined on various occasions as “estranged,” “pluralized,” “multiplied,” “expanded,” and “metamorphosed”. In “Dada philosophique” we are dealing with a form of “collective” subject: Dada itself. The poetic “I,” which we have seen questioning its own centred or full presence by means of different textual devices, in “Dada philosophique” is not directly at stake. Actually, it is absent from the text from the very beginning. Picabia seems to have radically questioned the presence of the poetic subject even before writing the poem. But this does not mean that the subject has been dismissed as an agent of communication. What Picabia decided to cancel is the “individual” poetic subject. What we find in “Dada philosophique” is, in fact, a communication from a collective agency. The message we receive is sometimes ironical, and sometimes subversive or iconoclastic, but it is always a message about the identity of this

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collective agency, called Dada, which is communicating its presence as an artistic movement, its cultural identity, and even its ethnic and physical identity. The repetition of the subject (Dada) at the beginning of many lines gives to the text a tone of political and programmatic statement, which goes along with Dadaism’s spirit of group as a movement. It is precisely at the beginning of the poem that we find the description of the physical aspect of this poetic “subject,” but the different physical characteristics are immediately associated with a plurality of ethnicities: “DADA a le regard bleu, sa figure est pale, ses cheveux sont bouclés; il a l’aspect anglais (...) DADA a les doigts mélancoliques, à l’aspect espagnol. DADA a le nez petit, à l’aspect russe...” (225) Again, we have a process of pluralization of the subject. In this case, however, such a process does not start with the introduction of an individual “I” into a sphere of plurality; the subject is, rather, presented from the very beginning as a plural presence, which is able to embody different physical and ethnic identities. I think that it is precisely the programmatic effort to form the identity of Dadaism itself as a movement which gives to Picabia the possibility of elaborating this “collective” poem. It is the cultural-political purpose implied in the text, which produces the semantic expansion of the subject. Unlike the previous two texts, this one does not achieve its message of pluralization by means of estrangement or metamorphosis. What is at stake in “Dada philsophique” is more the definition of the identity of a “new” subject, which never existed before, than the questioning of the traditional notion of subjectivity. The critique of the traditional notion of subjectivity is implied in the text, but DADA seems to represent a space for the possibility of intersubjective processes. We have seen a first signal of the presence of such an intersubjective process in the first lines of the text. Whatever was at stake there was the capacity of DADA to become a common ground for different identities. In the second part of the text the collective subject is presented as a thinking entity. The coexistence of different identities creates here the possibility of a collective mind, which is able to look at things in

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a non-traditional way. The Dada mind is able, again, to make differences coexist: “DADA songe à Byron et à la Grèce / ...à Shakespeare et à Charlot Chaplin / ...à Nietzsche et à Jésus-Christ.” (226) Different cultural references are joined together. In this case, the coexistence concerns cultural oppositions (Nietzsche/Jesus Christ), with iconoclastic intentions. This text also shows processes of linguistic estrangement, achieved by means of the combination of heterogeneous linguistic elements. I would like to point out three examples of such a process: “DADA a le cerveau comme un nénuphar.” (226) Here the organic part of thought is associated with a seldom used noun, which suggests a radical differentiation of Dada’s thought from the sphere of codified language. “DADA a le cerveau comme un cerveau.” (226) This tautological statement represents an ironical form of questioning the mechanism of metaphor. In order to establish a metaphor, the first term is joined to the second by “like” (“comme”); but in this case the first and the second term are the same. “DADA est un artichaut bouton de porte.” (226) In this case we have the most evident case of the combination of heterogeneous terms: “artichaut” and “bouton de porte.” They are not joined on the basis of any grammatical conjunction, but are put in a syntactical sequence, in which “artichaut” has the function of an attribute of DADA, and “bouton de porte” assumes the double function of noun and adjective of “artichaut.” In this line the process of estrangement concerns not only the level of the meaning of the sentence, but also its syntactical structure and logic. The third example also represents a verbal exemplification of what might be a pictorial dadaistic work, with the image of the combination of two objects at first sight strangers to one another, but whose relationship can be established through an act of pictorial imagination, by painting a door whose knob is an artichoke. The last text I am going to analyze is a very short poem by Soupault: “Philippe Soupault dans son lit,” first published in 1921.14 I think that the title itself has interesting aspects. In the three texts previously considered we have seen different ways in which the

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subject positions itself in the text, and what consequences such positions have on the relationship subject/objects; subject/reality, and on the communicative resources of the subject. In the case of the Soupault’s poem we are dealing with a paradoxical situation: at first sight, the subject/author does not seem to question its position in any way; unlike in the other poems, here the poetic subject presents itself from the very beginning with its full name, and in a very prosaic – and one may say “uncritical” – position: “dans son lit”. But the reader immediately realizes that the full and prosaic presence of Soupault refers to the image of the author in bed at the moment of his death. The contrast between the name of the poet in the title and the rest of the poem consists precisely in the prosaic image at the beginning which turns into the progressive disappearance of the subject in the eight lines of the poem. The message addressed to the reader concerns a radical and ironical undermining not only of the notion of subject/author, but also of the notion of autobiography. The poem is based on the paradoxical attempt to tell the entire life of the poet in eight lines. The subject is narrating his own biography at the exact moment in which he is dying. He describes himself even after his death in lines six and seven: “mort un samedi/enterré un dimanche”. The ironical autobiographic intention is explicitly declared in the last line: “c’est la vie de Philippe Soupault.” Unlike in the other texts, here the questioning of the full presence of the subject/author, as well as his identity, is not achieved by means of elaborate processes of pluralization, estrangement, or metamorphosis; it is, rather, achieved in the most linear and readable way: by describing the most important events of the poet’s life from the beginning to the end. This description is ironically synthesized in the seven days of the week, each characterized by one main biographic event. Of course, one may find a sense of estrangement in this sequence, but it is certainly a very elementary sense of estrangement; that is, the demonstration of how short the description of an individual life can be, and how provokingly simple the main events of such a life can be in the individual’s memory:

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Mario Moroni né un lundi baptisé un mardi marié un mercredi malade un jeudi agonisant un vendredi mort un samedi enterré un dimanche c’est la vie de Philippe Soupault. (4)

The syntactic structure of the lines corresponds to the extreme essentiality of the content: each line is formed by the past participle of the verb and the day of the week. It is precisely the incredible simplicity and essentiality of this sequence that provokes a sense of estrangement. But I think that there is more at work in each of the past participles, one can see that the autobiographic course is characterized by different aspects of the Catholic tradition: its rites (“baptisé”, “marié”) and agony (“agonisant un vendredi”), which suggests an ironic identification of the poet with the agony of Christ, which took place on Friday. Yet the passage from the agony of Christ to His resurrection on Sunday (Easter) is totally contradicted in the biography of the poet, for he just dies and on Sunday he is buried rather than that he is rising again: there is no resurrection for him. This poem does not seem to establish a direct relationship between the subject and reality, for it presents an itinerary more and more oriented toward the extinction of the poet’s life. I think, however, that these eight lines establish an indirect, and maybe more effective, relationship between subject and reality, precisely by resuming the biologic and symbolic steps of individual life in a very short period of time, and by showing how great the illusion of having a singular, subjective life can be. The act of questioning the status of the subject is not contained specifically in the structure of this poem, but in the message which comes out from the totality of the ironical autobiographic itinerary: the anonymity and the inevitability of the events in the subject’s life suggest the impossibility, or the pretentiousness, of claiming a privileged status for the subject.

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3. Conclusion I think that what still remains at stake today in the work of the avantgarde is an unresolved problem corresponding to an unfulfilled project: the possibility of art participating in social-cultural processes, understood in the widest sense (social emancipation and the transformation of language and of perceptive modalities of reality), in a world characterized by the separation of the different spheres of knowledge. The four texts I have analyzed have given us, on a small scale, some indications of the historical avant-garde’s legacy. In none of these texts can be found a sense of closure, of renunciation or nullification of the possibility for a differentiated approach to reality. One of the most interesting messages that these texts communicate to us is the possibility of a dialectical use of a de-centered subjectivity. 15 The avant-garde questioned the notion of subject-centered reason in order to stimulate a search for new modalities of presence of the subject, which were capable of having social significance. The message of the avant-garde consists precisely in the suggestion of the existence of a space for the production of new meanings in language, and of new values in society, on the condition, of course, that this production is able to establish a sphere of communication and effective interaction with the collectivity. Benjamin, similarly, theorized the function of artists as political activists in the “image sphere,” in which they are able to influence the collective consciousness by means of concrete modes of differentiated perception of the world of objects, and its revealing capacities. In order to have a social significance, the avant-garde necessarily had to question not only the notion of subject-centered reason, but also the status and function of art as an institution. I dealt with this problem in my introduction, when I mentioned the function of the dadaist collages. It is also important to consider the legacy on the avant-garde within the institution of art as one of the institutions in society. In this sense, Bürger and Habermas can give us important clues.

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Peter Bürger has pointed out the importance of the work of art, and art as an institution, in relation to social praxis. The phase characterized by this relation is possible, according to Bürger, only when art becomes conscious of its function in bourgeois society, its social status. In this peculiar situation Bürger sees a radical difference between so-called modernism and the avant-garde: modernism attacked the traditional writing techniques, whereas the avant-garde tried to alter the notion of the institution of art itself, by questioning its own status. 16 Habermas has expressed scepticism about the avant-garde, pointing out the uselessness of forcing a reconciliation of art and life. For Habermas, this attempt was futile because the real problem lies in the progressive separation of the three spheres (science, morality, and art) provoked by the Enlightenment’s effort to develop three objective realms, each ruled by its inner logic. This kind of rationalization has provoked a progressive specialization of the three spheres, to which corresponded an impoverishment of the lifeworld. At that point: A relation of opposites had come into being; art had become a critical mirror, showing the irreconcilable nature of aesthetics and the social world. This modernist transformation was all the more painfully realized, the more art alienated itself from life and withdrew into the untouchableness of complete autonomy. Out of such emotional currents finally gathered those explosive energies which unloaded themselves in the surrealist attempt to blow u p the autarctical sphere of art and to force a reconciliation of art and life. (10)

Habermas reconstructs the process which led to the surrealists’ reaction. As we have seen, this attempt was nonsensical because it was undermined by the mistake of privileging only art among the three spheres. But Habermas intends to dismiss neither the culturalphilosophical project of modernity (originally conceived by the Enlightenment), nor the project of the avant-garde. He tries to analyze the mistakes of these projects in order not to give up their

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important, and still promising, premises. He also tries to save the project of modernity, and the function of the avant-garde within the institution of art (still understood as one of the institutions of society) from the attacks launched by those who are interested in a total dismissal of modernity, as if it were the reason for all the discontents of our society. In order not to dismiss the project of modernity, as well as the legacy of the avant-garde, Habermas re-proposes some crucial points, and a modification of some attitudes which characterized the surrealistic poetics. He is very clear about his proposal in “Modernity versus Postmodernity”: A reified everyday praxis can be cured only by creating unconstrained interaction of the cognitive with the moralpractical and the aesthetic-expressive elements. Reification cannot be overcome by forcing just one of those highly stylized cultural spheres to open up and become more accessible. (11)

Despite the sense of scepticism that Habermas communicates at the end of his essay, his analysis of modernity – and his focussing the attention of the problem of the three spheres in which modernity has developed – is very important for the reconsideration of the legacy and the function of the avant-garde in a new and more constructive perspective. What Habermas says about the project of modernity in its complex (that it has not yet been fulfilled) may also be applied to the project of the avant-garde. In this article I have tried to give a partial account of notions such as subjectivity, collectivity, intersubjectivity, sensoriality, and art as an institution, as well as of technical devices such as simultaneity, estrangement, pluralization, and de-centrement, for the development of new forms of cognitive processes. All these notions and artistic devices remain important if we want to look at artistic phenomena as constitutive parts of culture and society, and as tools for the formation of a different way of considering the position of the subject in respect to reality: a reality the perception of which requires the presence of neither an idealistic self-assured subject, nor a de-

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centered subject understood as pure text, merely formed by the linguistic chain which governs it.

Notes 1

Nicolae Babuts in his article “Text: Origins and Reference” makes a similar point, though dealing with more theoretical problems. See in particular 69. 2

Peter Bürger, in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, deals extensively with the technique of montage and its significance and limits, focussing on the difference between montage and photomontage, as well as on the political significance of the latter in artists such as John Heartfield. See the section “Montage”, 73-82. 3

Adorno introduced the notion of “monad” in order to define the work of art, at several points in his Aesthetic Theory. See, in particular, the section “The Work of Art as a Monad: Immanent Analysis”, 257260. 4

The notion of “communication” is very often used by Adorno with negative connotations. See Aesthetic Theory, 6-7, 109, 200, 344, 374, 443. 5

The notion of “resistan ce” is of primary importance for Adorno in Aesthetic Theory. He associates it with the notions of “protest” , “opposition”, “revolt”. See, in particular, 31, 51-52, 73, 200-201, 253-254. 6

See Derrida, “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation”, Writing and Difference, 238-240. 7

For Adorno’s approach to Beckett’s work see, in particular, “T rying to Understand Endgame”, Notes to Literature, 241-275.

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See W. Benjamin, 189-190.

9

W. Benjamin, 190-192.

10

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See J. Habermas, “Modernity versus Post-modernity”, 8-11.

11

See a reproduction of the page taken from A. Breton, Clair de Terre, 49-50, in the appendix of this article. 12

All quotations from the poem will be taken from the anthology Dada Gedichte, 47. The numbers of the lines will be indicated in parentheses. 13

All quotations from the poem will be taken from Francis Picabia, Ecrits 1913-1920, 225-226. Since the text is a combination of prose and verse, only the page number will be indicated in parentheses. 14

All quotations from the poem will be taken from the original edition in Littérature . 15

In his book The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson affirms, though from a different perspective than mine, that only the dialectic “provides a way for ‘decentering’ the subject concretely, and for transcending the ‘ethical’ in the direction of the political and the collective.” (60). 16

See Bürger 22. Bürger also sees the consequences of the avant-garde as the ineffectiveness of the practice of aesthetic shock – which lost its disruptive function – and its predictability, after a first moment of questioning the institution of art. Thus, Bürger tends to see only a quantitative, and not a qualitative, development from aestheticism to the avant-garde, despite the fact that he formulates the development of the consciousness of art of its status in social praxis. One has the impression, however, that Bürger’s view is provoked by an old – and never resolved – ambiguity inherent in the phenomenon of art: its ability to both oppose and confirm bourgeois society. This problem

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was already posed by Herbert Marcuse in his essay “The Affirmative Character of Culture” of 1937, to which Bürger seems to remain rather close.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. 1984 Aesthetic Theory. Transl. C. Lenhardt. London/ Boston. 1991 Notes to Literature. Vol. 1. Trans. Shierry W. Nicholson. New York. Arp, Hans 1982

“Opus Null”. Dada Gedichte. Berlin.

Babuts, Nicolae 1992 “Text: Origins and Reference”. PMLA, Vol. 107, 1, 6572. Benjamin, Walter 1986 Reflections. Trans. E. Jephott. New York. Breton, André 1936 “Crise de l’objet”. Cahiers d’art, 1-2, 21-36. 1966 Clair de terre. Paris. Bürger, Peter 1984 Theory of the Avant-Garde. Transl. Michael Minneapolis.

Shaw.

Derrida, Jacques 1978 Writing and Difference. Transl. Alan Bass. Chicago. Habermas, Jürgen 1981 “Modernity Versus Postmodernity”. Transl. Seyla BenHabib. New German Critique, 22, 3-14.

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Jameson, Fredric 1981 The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, New York. Marcuse, Herbert 1968 “The Affirmative Character of Culture”. Transl. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston.

Negations.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 1971 Marinetti-Selected Writing. Transl. R.W. Flint and A. Coppotelli. New York. Picabia, Francis 1975 “Dada philosophique”. Ecrits 1913-1920. Ed. O. Revault d’Allones. Paris. Sasse, Jochen Schulte 1984 “Foreword: Theory of Modernism Versus Theory of the Avant-Garde”. In: Peter Bürger, Theory of the AvantGarde, vii-xlvii. Minneapolis. Soupault, Philippe 1921 “Philippe Soupault dans son lit”. Littérature, 19, 4.

DADAIST SUBJECTIVITY AND THE POLITICS OF INDIFFERENCE On some contrasts and correspondences between Dada in Zürich and Berlin 1

Hubert van den Berg

1. Dada is rarely described as one single movement – for a simple reason: Dada was anything but a homogeneous formation. As a consequence, Dada is generally portrayed as a set of individual branches with characteristics and particularities of their own. In this context Dada in Berlin, one of the major Dada branches, is often singled out for its outspoken political character, especially in contrast with Dada in Zürich, in which politics is supposed to have been a rather irrelevant factor, even though Dada as such is generally attributed a certain political dimension, since Dada can be regarded in some respects as a reaction to World War I (cf. Fiedler 1989). The implicit, concealed political character of Dada in Zürich, where Dada was founded in 1916 in the middle of the war, is supposed to have assumed a more definite and explicitly political shape in Berlin. Indeed, several of the Berlin Dadaists were involved in contemporary politics, e.g. George

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Grosz, John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde and Franz Jung became members of the newly founded Communist Party right from the start in January 1919. Much of the work and activities of the Berlin Dadaists possesses a poignant political edge. A clear example are the political graphics by George Grosz, which denounced the ruling classes as well as the excrescences of capitalism and militarism, and at the same time univocally sided with the Spartakusbund and the Communist Party in the civil war-like situation after the collapse of the German Empire at the end of the World War (cf. Schuster 1995). Contemporary political developments figure prominently too in collages and photomontages by Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, John Heartfield and – again – George Grosz (cf. Dech 1989, Züchner 1994, Pachnicke/Honnef 1991). Also unmistakenly political and partisan was a series of placards on the walls of the major Dada exhibition Erste Internationale Dada-Messe in the summer of 1920, with texts like: “DADA ist die willentliche Zerstörung der bürgerlichen Begriffswelt”, “DADA steht auf Seiten des revolutionären Proletariats”, “DADA ist politisch” (cf. Höch 1989: 6779). And political views and reflections were not only presented in the visual work of the Dadaists, but also in Dadaist literary expressions. Likewise satires by Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck and Walter Mehring possess an obvious political character. This seems especially true for manifestoes, like Dadaisten gegen Weimar and Was ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?, in which a Dadaist “revolutionary council” forwarded its ludicrous demands and objectives (cf. Bergius/Riha 1979). Finally, the exploits of the Oberdada Johannes Baader can be mentioned, who presented himself as the new president of the globe and as such in particular as the Dadaist alternative for the newly founded Republic of Weimar (cf. Baader 1977). There can be no doubt that politics played an important role in the ventures of the Berlin Dadaists. When, however, the difference between Dada in Berlin and Dada elsewhere, especially in Zürich, is described as a contrast between political and unpolitical Dadaism, this attempt to characterize the particularity of Dada in Berlin is anything but adequate. On the contrary, among the Zürich Dadaists am-

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ple political activity can also be observed. Although Walter Serner stated in 1920 that “les artistes dadaïstes en pleine guerre mondiale ne mentionnaient pas la chose d’un traître mot” because “ignorer la guerre était la façon la plus noble de protester contre elle” (1982: 108), he did not keep to his own maxim. Instead, in his Dadaist notes and manifestoes Serner extensively covered contemporary political developments, especially the war, the successful and failed revolutions in Russia and Germany as well as the anti-war and revolutionary movements on the left (cf. Serner 1981 and 1982 passim). Another Zürich Dadaist, Hans Richter, participated in 1919 in the socalled writer’s revolution in Munich, acting as the chairman of the official artist’s union, the Aktionsausschuß revolutionärer Künstler, in the people’s commissariat for cultural affairs and education in the second, communist Bavarian Council Republic (cf. Hoffmann 1982). And there is probably no one among the Dadaists, neither in Berlin, Zürich nor anywhere else, who left a political œuvre as extensive as Hugo Ball, the founder of the Cabaret Voltaire and one of the protagonists of early Dadaism in Zürich. Beside translating political essays by André Suarès, Charles Péguy and Romain Rolland, and contributing to the radical-left journal Der Revoluzzer and an unfinished Bakounin breviary, Ball was involved in the republican review Die Freie Zeitung, initially as a journalist, later as the editor and finally as the publisher. Furthermore, he was the author of a voluminous Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz (Ball 1980 and 1994), an idiosyncratic reflection on the deformations in German thought and politics, responsible for the war and the failure of the following revolution (cf. for a comprehensive inventory of Ball’s political writings: Teubner 1992). The only Dadaist, whose political œuvre may have exceeded Ball’s quantitatively in the years of historical Dadaism, was Franz Jung, who played a pivotal role in the foundation of the Dada branch in Berlin (cf. Mierau 1980 and Fähnders 1987). As an active participant, however, Jung withdrew from Dadaism already during 1918: “Sehr schnell wandte sich Jung gegen diese Art Veranstaltung. So konnte nichts erreicht werden. Hier fehlte jede konstruktive Idee, ja jede Idee überhaupt” (Cläre Jung, cit. Höch 1989: 331).

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2. One may argue, though, that in Zürich Ball and Richter in particular were deeply involved in politics indeed, yet not in the framework of Dadaism (as, in fact, is the case with Franz Jung in Berlin). In no uncertain terms Hugo Ball (1992: 163) rejected any politicization of the arts: Ich erkläre [...] unumwunden, daß ich die “Propaganda gegen die Kunst” für eine Propaganda gegen die Sterne halte. Es ist ein nihilistisches Bestreben, auch den Rest von Widerstand noch banalisieren zu wollen; wie sehr die Kunst innerhalb ihrer selbst um ihren Bestand und ihre Klarheit mag zu kämpfen haben. Politik und Kunst sind zwei verschiedene Dinge. Man mag die Künstler als Privatleute anrufen; man kann und darf sie aber nicht dazu anhalten, propagandistische Kunst (zu deutsch Plakate) zu malen.

Although Ball’s Dadaist work may contain some political allusions (e.g. in his experimental novel Tenderenda der Phantast, in which war and revolution are hinted at several times [cf. Ball 1988: 379417]), his Dadaist writing on the whole is indeed of an unpolitical nature. Yet, to a large extent the same holds true in Berlin for the œuvre of Grosz and Heartfield. Works expressing their communist views were – as a rule – presented outside of the Dadaist framework. Although the highly politicized reviews Der Blutige Ernst, Die Pleite and Jedermann sein eigner Fußball, partisan to the communist cause, are often described as Dadaist journals, they were in fact not presented or intended as Dadaist publications (cf. Herzfelde 1988: 23-8, Maier-Metz 1984: 197-8). And what is probably more important: beside works and activities addressing political issues, Dada in Berlin was anything but exclusively political. On the contrary, a closer look at Der Dada, the official organ of the Berlin Dada branch learns that at least in this Dadaist platform politics played only a minor role, not only in the two first issues edited by Baader, Hausmann and Huelsenbeck, but also in the third and last issue edited by Grosz and Heartfield and released by the communist publisher Wieland Herzfelde in his Malik Verlag. To some extent the same can be

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said for the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe. Mention has been made of the political placards on the walls of the exhibition. Although some of the works shown at the “Dada Fair” had an unmistakenly political purport, as for example a Preußischer Erzengel, a dummy hanging from the ceiling with a pig mask and a German army uniform, from which a trial ensued because of its purported insult to the military (cf. Schuster 1995: 140 and 143), most of the submitted works – also those by the communist Dadaists Grosz and Heartfield – were not political or at least not expressing party-political opinions (cf. for a complete list of the presented works: Pachnicke/Honnef 1991, ill. 8). Likewise the Dadaist soirées and matinées, which constituted one of the main forms of Dadaist articulation in Berlin and elsewhere, were certainly not primarily political manifestations. A comparison of the programs of these manifestations in Berlin and Zürich (cf. Bolliger et alii 1985 passim and Bergius 1989 passim) shows a striking similarity. Both featured the reading of manifestoes and proclamations, the recitation of so-called “simultaneous” and “bruitist poetry”, and the performance of Dadaist dances with masques and of experimental music. Though there are some apparent differences, these are not of a political nature. Symptomatic is, for example, the fact that Hugo Ball recited his sound poetry in Zürich as a “magical bishop” in a Cubist-styled shamanic costume made of cardboard (cf. Ball 1992: 106, Bolliger et alii 1985: 281), whereas the Dadaists in Berlin staged a competition between a sewing machine and a typewriter (cf. Korte 1994: 64-5). And to give another related example: at several soirées the Zürich Dadaists recited so-called “negro songs” (“Negerlieder”, “chants nègres”) – mostly sacral texts from indigenous African and Oceanic cultures meticulously collected from anthropological literature in an attempt to guarantee the highest grade of authenticity (cf. Tzara 1975: 441-489 and 714-718). In Berlin, on the other hand, where mainly George Grosz favoured and presented ‘nigger songs’ in a Dadaist setting, these were, however, not African or Oceanic “primitive” literary expressions. His “Niggersongs im Schädel” (1986: 45) originated, instead, from the slums of the North-American metropolis: AfroAmerican rag-time, cake-walk and jazz.

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What becomes obvious in these exemplary contrasts (as well as in the difference of degree between the ways, in which politics was addressed in Zürich and Berlin), is that they present different answers to the question which reality was essential, essential enough to be presented in the framework of Dadaism. Different answers, which – in turn – were related to diverging conceptions of subjectivity, or – to be more precise – of a specific Dadaist subjectivity. 3. Dada started in Zürich in 1916 as an informal artist’s society, uniting the writers and artists who had gathered in the Cabaret Voltaire. Originally called “Künstlergesellschaft Voltaire” (cf. Bolliger et alii 1985: 76), Dada was the umbrella term for a whole range of activities – a journal, a series of publications, soirées, a gallery etc. – in pursuit of the propaganda for and establishment of a ‘new art’ comprising by and large all the avant-garde isms of the pre-war period. Typical for this open, synthesizing character is the text on the wrapper of the first Dadaist anthology published mid-1916, Cabaret Voltaire, which describes the content quite adequately as “Futurisme Cubisme Expressionisme” (cf.Meyer et alii 1994: 124). At this point, apart from a firm commitment to the development of a “new art” and a declared international character, an elaborated Dadaist program is not yet existent (cf. Ball 1916 and 1988: 39, Tzara 1975: 556-8). Only when Dada in Zürich is rebaptized as “Mouvement Dada” in the second half of 1917 and a new Dada branch is founded in Berlin under the name of “Club Dada” in January 1918, a specific Dadaist program is developed: Dada as an agency of a particular Geisteszustand or état d’esprit, a specifically Dadaist state of mind, mentality or – to use another term – a specific Dadaist subjectivity. This turn from a synthesizing framework of avant-garde artists and writers into an agency representing and propagating a particular attitude towards life is initially displayed and probably also initiated in Berlin. On the 12th of April, 1918 Richard Huelsenbeck, a former Zürich Dadaist, who had returned to Berlin in 1916, launched his Dadaistisches Manifest at a soirée consecrated to Dada (cf. Goergen 1994). Whereas in an earlier version of this manifesto, or rather in an earlier draft of the program developed in this manifesto, Dada is

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still conceived by Huelsenbeck as a new artistic current, following the program of the soirée the Dadaistisches Manifest gives the first comprehensive account of “Dadaismus im Leben und in der Kunst”, offering the “erste theoretische Betrachtung des dadaistischen Prinzips” (cit. Goergen 1994: 9). Deviating from the earlier draft, which was published a few months later under the title “Der Dadaismus” in Reclams Universum, this Dadaist principle is not confined to art and literature anymore, but rather a principle of life. Whereas in Reclams Universum Dadaism is exclusively characterized as a “neue Kunstrichtung” (1918: 679), the Dadaistisches Manifest presents Dada as a “Geistesart” as well (1980c: 40). It is significant that Huelsenbeck in “Der Dadaismus” is still expecting this new artistic direction to become the general rule of all artistic creation “in allen Teilen der Erde” (1918: 680), whereas Club Dada as the agency of the new Dadaist “Geistesart” in the manifesto – published earlier, but obviously formulated later – already has “Mitglieder in allen Teilen der Erde” (1980c: 40). The Dadaistisches Manifest still starts as an artistic manifesto addressing the questions how art “in ihrer Ausführung und Richtung” should be orientated, and which art has to be regarded as “höchste Kunst”, as supreme art (1980c: 36). “DADA!!!!” is – as the manifesto continues – a battle cry uniting artists in pursuit of an art, “von der sie die Verwirklichung neuer Ideale erwarten” (1980c: 38). Unlike the wrapper of Cabaret Voltaire, the manifesto draws a clear line between Dada and Expressionism, which was fiercely attacked in the first half of the manifesto, as well as between Dada on the one hand and Futurism and Cubism on the other (cf. 1980c: 36-8). Here again Huelsenbeck’s manifesto differs from the article in Reclams Universum. In this article Huelsenbeck’s critique of Expressionism is maybe not as aggressive as in the manifesto, yet follows the same line of reasoning: Expressionism is characterized as a “Sammelstelle für die bequemen und untätigen Köpfe, die unter dem Schlagwort ‘Für den Geist’ sich den Forderungen des Lebens entziehen” (Huelsenbeck 1918: 679). Whereas the Futurists are denounced by Huelsenbeck in his manifesto as “Schwachköpfe” and Futurism disqualified as “eine neue Auflage impressionistischer Realisierung” (1980c: 38), in Re-

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clams Universum on the other hand it is still described as the avantgardism closest to Dadaism, as it also favours “Bewegung” and “das bewegte Leben” (1918: 679-80). Futurism lacks, however, “das dadaistische Moment der Ironie, die sich selbst gegen das richtet, was man im Augenblick schreibt; denn indem man es geschrieben hat, verstößt es schon als Feststehendes gegen das Gesetz der Bewegung” (1980: 680). Perpetual change and movement as well as the self-ironical momentum are obviously also the essence of the Dadaist state of mind described in the last section of the Dadaistisches Manifest (1980c: 14): Ein Gewebe zerreißt sich unter der Hand, man sagt ja zu einem Leben, das durch Verneinung höher will. Ja-sagen – Nein-sagen: das gewaltige Hokuspokus des Daseins beschwingt die Nerven des echten Dadaisten – so liegt er, so jagt er, so radelt er – halb Pantagruel, halb Franziskus und lacht und lacht.

The manifesto closes with an exemplification of the new Dadaist self-ironical mentality in the final slogan: “Gegen dies Manifest sein, heißt Dadaist sein!” (1980c: 41). A short time after the Berlin manifesto, of which Tzara was unwarrantedly presented as the first signatory, Tzara launched a comprehensive manifesto of his own in Zürich, at a Dada soirée devoted entirely to himself – a ‘Soirée Tristan Tzara’ on the 23th of July, 1918. Later that year, the text was published in the third issue of the Zürich periodical Dada. Tzara starts his manifesto, where Huelsenbeck had finished. “Pour lancer un manifeste il faut vouloir: A.B.C., foudroyer contre 1, 2, 3”, Tzara argues (1975: 359). He too intents to write a manifesto, however: “J’écris un manifeste et je ne veux rien, je dis pourtant certaines choses et je suis par principe contre les manifestes, comme je suis aussi contre les principes” (1975: 359360). Only a few lines later Tzara concludes his introductory remark with a slogan in capitals: “DADA NE SIGNIFIE RIEN” (1975: 360). Although no explicit mention is made of a Dadaist état d’esprit – this characterization can be found, though, in a later elaboration and

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clarification of his manifesto, “Conférence sur Dada” (cf. Tzara 1975: 422) –, the same turn from an artistic tendency into a principle of life can be observed in Tzara’s Manifeste Dada 1918 too. And, where Huelsenbeck situates Club Dada at the final count in the artistic field, since its main adversaries are Expressionism and Expressionist art, Tzara’s manifesto results in a more comprehensive, detailed account of a “dégoût dadaïste” (1975: 366). Quite different from Huelsenbeck, who appears to be particularly furious about the “blutleere Abstraktion des Expressionismus” (1980c: 40-1) neither abstract art nor Expressionism are subject to Tzara’s Dadaist repulsion – on the contrary. Whereas some deficiencies of Cubism and Futurism are pointed out, Expressionism as such is not attacked and Dada even defined as “l’enseigne de l’abstraction” – as flag, sign, mark of abstraction (Tzara 1975: 363). Although Expressionism and abstract art are apparently not causing Dadaist disgust, on the whole Tzara’s Dadaist repulsion (1975:366-7) has a much wider range than Huelsenbeck’s aesthetic irritations: Tout produit du dégoût susceptible de devenir une négation de la famille, est dada; protestation aux poings de tout son être en action destructive: DADA; connaissance de tous les moyens rejetés jusqu’à présent par le sexe pudique d u compromis commode et de la politesse: DADA; abolition de la logique, danse des impuissants de la création: DADA; de toute hiérarchie et équation sociale installée pour les valeurs par nos valets: DADA; [...] abolition de la mémoire: DADA; abolition de l’archéologie: DADA; abolition des prophètes: DADA; abolition du futur: DADA...

Tzara’s catalogue of disgust seems to leave nothing out, or otherwise put: seems to leave nothing as the only positive element in Dada, which – as Tzara already declared in his opening statement – “means nothing”. Remarks like this by Tzara and many other Dadaists as well as the comprehensive character of Tzara’s disgust are often interpreted as indications for the assumption that Dada solely indulged in negation and destruction, merely pursued a tabula rasa and maybe even strove for the pulverization of this clean slate (cf. Van

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den Berg 1997). However, even though nothing seems to remain unaffected by the Dadaist disgust, Tzara (1975: 367) closes his manifesto in an anything but nihilistic way: Liberté: DADA DADA DADA, hurlement des couleurs crispées, entrelacement des contraires et de contradictions, des grotesques, des inconséquences: LA VIE.

When this closing statement is related to the earlier slogan, Tzara’s message seems to be: Dada signifies “nothing” but is life. A paradox closely related with the frequently repeated avant-garde conception, to be found among others in the later writings of another Zürich Dadaist, Hans Arp, that abstract art is not a representation of reality, does not signify the reality of life, but is instead a presentation of reality, is actually the reality of life itself: Wir wollen nicht die Natur nachahmen. Wir wollen nicht abbilden, wir wollen bilden. Wir wollen bilden, wie die Pflanze ihre Frucht bildet, und nicht abbilden. Wir wollen unmittelbar und nicht mittelbar bilden. (1995: 79) Dada ist ohne Sinn wie die Natur. [...] Dada ist unmittelbar wie die Natur und versucht jedem Ding seinen wesentlichen Platz zu geben. (1995: 50)

In short: Abstract, Dadaist art shows nothing, but is something. 4. It was also from Arp that a short definition of Dadaism stems in an early panorama of the avant-garde, Kunst-Ismen (Arp/Lissitzky 1925: X), which points at another dimension of the nothingness evoked by Dada: Der Dadaismus hat die schönen Künste überfallen. Er hat die Kunst für einen magischen Stuhlgang erklärt, die Venus von Milo klistiert und “Laokoon & Söhnen” nach tausendjährigem Ringkampf mit der Klapperschlange ermöglicht, endlich auszutreten. Der Dadaismus hat das Be-

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jahen und Verneinen zum Nonsens geführt. Um die Indifferenz zu erreichen, war er destruktiv.

Not destruction, but indifference is the aim of Dadaism. This indifference equals nonsense and nothing, as Huelsenbeck pointed out in 1920, on the verge of withdrawing from Dada, in a series of retrospective publications on Dadaism – En avant Dada, Dada siegt!, the Dada-Almanach and “Die dadaistische Bewegung. Eine Selbstbiographie” – and as Tzara argued as well in his “Conférence sur Dada” from 1922. An indifference, which is not simply an artistic principle, at least not in the philosophical reflections of Salomo Friedlaender, a philosopher and writer of grotesques closely associated with Dada (cf. van den Berg 1995, Exner 1996). It was actually his conception of a “creative indifference”, a “schöpferische Indifferenz”, that was appropriated and elaborated by the Dadaists as the crux of their state of mind. According to Friedlaender, a new subjectivity had to be situated in a “Nothing” characterized by absolute indifference, not a “Nothing” as opposed to “Anything”, but rather a Nihil neutrale (1915: 859), a zero point mathematically situated in the exact middle between plus and minus. In a world, that manifests itself to ordinary man as a sea of relativities (described by Friedlaender as polarities and polar oppositions), indifference serves as a “absolute[r] Schwimmgürtel im Meer der Relativität” (Friedlaender/Kubin 1986: 28), as an “absolute lifebuoy”, that prevents the subject from drowning. And indifference is more than just that: it is at the same time the only absolute and as such only solid, steady foundation for the proper subject, “das Allerallgemeinste von der Welt, absolutes Weltzentrum” (1915: 879). This true subject should, following Friedlaender, not be confused with ordinary imperfect man of flesh and blood (“Mensch”) caught as well in a web of polarities and as such only a relative manifestation of the proper subject, called “Person”, “Ich” or “Selbst” (cf. Friedlaender 1918). This person can – as Friedlaender argues – only be a true “Individuum”, a true individual, as far as he is truly “Individuum”, undivided, not yet or not anymore marked by polar differences, residing in the indifferent neutral nothing and at the same

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time being such a neutral nothing, containing and balancing all possible differences in a state of absolute indifference, of complete balance. Arguing from a radical idealist perspective, in which the world is ultimately just a manifestation of the mind, Friedlaender’s subject regains in the balanced state of indifference his “eigne Allmacht” (cit. Friedlaender/Kubin 1986: 16), personal omnipotence, control over the world, which is in the end (or rather: from the start) his own world — as a “Waghalter der Welt” (Friedlaender 1915), a balance-keeper of the world, who has the world in his hands as an infinite set of polar scales, that has to be balanced continuously to stay in control. Although Friedlaender nowadays may have passed into oblivion, in the tens and twenties he was a widely known and, at least in German Expressionist circles, widely respected philosopher, and although Friedlaender’s philosophy may seem quite obscure (and was in fact anything but systematical, to say the least), it exerted an obvious attraction on the Dadaists, since it offered both an – at least provisional – answer to the crisis of the subject, that can be discerned already in the pre-war period in early Expressionism (the common background of most, if not all German Dadaists, who were also at the core of the Dadaist project in Zürich), and an alternative to the traditional identification of the subject with humanity or at least with the human being of flesh and blood. Common to most Dadaists is the firm rejection of “humanity” as a viable conception in regard to the apparent bankruptcy of this concept on the battlefields of Northern France and Galicia. Whereas many Expressionists indulged in an unrestrained “O-Mensch” pathos in response, the Dadaists were rather sceptical – “Die Menschen sind Schweine”, as Grosz put it bluntly (Grosz/Herzfelde 1925: 19) – and seem to have taken refuge in a subjectivity, which surpassed Western enlightened notions of humanity, in part drawing heavily on Friedlaender’s reflections. At least in Huelsenbeck’s and Tzara’s programmatic considerations regarding Dada, Friedlaender’s influence is obvious. In his introduction to the Dada-Almanach (1920) Huelsenbeck states (1980b: 4):

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Dada hat die Weltanschauungen durch seine Fingerspitzen rinnen lassen, Dada ist der tänzerische Geist über den Moralen der Erde. Dada ist die große Parallelerscheinung zu den relativistischen Philosophien dieser Zeit, Dada ist kein Axiom, Dada ist ein Geisteszustand, der unabhängig von Schulen und Theorien ist, der die Persönlichkeit selbst angeht, ohne sie zu vergewaltigen. Man kann Dada nicht auf Grundsätze festlegen. [...] Dada ist der Indifferenzpunkt zwischen Inhalt und Form, Weib und Mann, Materie und Geist, indem es die Spitze des magischen Dreiecks ist, das sich über der linearen Polarität der menschlichen Dinge und Begriffe erhebt.

In his “Conférence sur Dada” Tzara discusses the “véritable portée du rien” (1975: 419) of his Manifeste Dada 1918 and explains: Dada n’est pas du tout moderne, c’est plutôt le retour à une religion d’indifférence quasi-Bouddhique. Dada met une douceur artificielle sur les choses, une neige de papillons sortis du crâne d’un prestidigitateur. Dada est l’immobilité et ne comprend pas les passions. Vous direz que cela est un paradoxe parce que Dada se manifeste par des actes violents. Oui, les réactions des individus contaminés par la destruction, sont assez violentes, mais ces réactions épuisées, annihilées par l’insistance satanique d’un “ à quoi b on ” continuel et progressif, ce qui reste et domine est l’indifférence. Je pourrai d’ailleurs, avec le même ton convaincu, soutenir le contraire. J’admets que mes amis n’approuvent pas ce point de vue. Mais le Rien ne peut s’exprimer qu’en tant que reflet d’une individualité. C’est pour cela qu’il sera valable pour tout le monde, chacun n’accordant de l’importance qu’à sa propre personne. Je parle de moi-même. Cela est déjà de trop. (1975: 420; italics by Tzara)

The indifference of Tzara’s “propre personne” is – in accordance with Friedlaender – absolute, as expressed in the Dadaist work of art: “Ordre = désordre; moi = non-moi; affirmation = négation:

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rayonnements suprêmes d’un art absolu. Absolu en pureté de chaos cosmique et ordonné...” (1975: 362). Although many elements from Friedlaender’s reflections can be found in the Dadaist program of Huelsenbeck and Tzara, both authors did not repeat Friedlaender unthinkingly. Friedlaender’s “creative indifference” is emphatically a worldly, secular ontology, that tries to solve the question how the subject and – what is more – thought in general, be it ontological, be it ethical, be it political, can regain a solid foundation, after the breakdown and dissolution of all previous foundations, including the Christian (or, in the case of Friedlaender, the Jewish) God, whose death had been announced by Nietzsche (cf. Cardorff 1988: 42-3). When Friedlaender speaks of “eigene Allmacht”, personal omnipotence, the omnipotence of the “Person” replaces the divine omnipotence of the monotheistic divinity that had been in charge as the ultimate and absolute foundation in Western thought for almost two millenia; the God in heaven is replaced by the “Person” in his quality of “Gott ‘Ich’ ” – God ‘I’ (cit. Friedlaender/Kubin 1986: 88). This secularizing move is in a way reversed by Tzara, when he qualifies Dada as a “retour à une religion d’indifférence quasi-bouddhique”. Huelsenbeck (1984: 37), in turn, reduces the ontological dimension of Friedlaender’s philosophy to psychological behaviourism: Der Dadaist nützt die psychologische Möglichkeit aus, die in seiner Fähigkeit liegt, seine eigne Individualität loszulassen, wie man ein Lasso losläßt oder wie man einen Mantel im wind flattern läßt. Er ist heute nicht mehr derselbe wie morgen, er ist übermorgen vielleicht “gar nichts”, u m dann alles zu sein. Er ist der Bewegung des Lebens ganz hingegeben, er steht innerhalb der “Kanten” – aber er verliert doch niemals die Distanz zu den Erscheinungen, weil er zu gleicher Zeit die schöpferische Indifferenz, wie Dr. Friedländer-Mynona das nennt, nicht aufgibt. Es erscheint kaum glaublich, daß man zugleich tätig und ruhig, hingebend und ablehnend sein kann; und doch besteht darin das Leben selbst, das naive selbstverständliche Leben mit der Gleichgültigkeit gegen Glück und Tod, Freude

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und Elend. Der Dadaist ist naiv. Er will das selbstverständliche undifferenzierte, unintellektuelle Leben.

The spiritual-religious and psychological redefinitions of Friedlaender’s “creative indifference” by Tzara and Huelsenbeck are certainly not accidental or just a slip of the pen. It should be noted here that Tzara – unlike Huelsenbeck – does not mention Friedlaender by name. Instead he refers frequently to Chuang Tzu, an eminent Taoist teacher, as the “first Dadaist” and as an inspiration for his Manifeste Dada 1918 (Tzara 1975: 422 and 1980: 22). Nothing, indifference, balance, yin and yang are central notions in Chuang Tzu’s teachings. A comparable insistence on the profound spiritual dimension of (or one may even say: the spiritual traditionalism in) Dada can be observed too in the reflections of other Zürich Dadaists. Eastern spirituality (Taoism, Zen, Buddhism, Hinduism), medieval and early modern mysticism (Meister Eckhart, Mechtild von Magdeburg, Jacob Böhme) as well as so-called “primitive” shamanism, animism and totemism from Africa, Australia and Oceania are also obvious backgrounds and sources for the considerations of Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings and Hans Arp (cf. Sheppard 1979, van den Berg 1997). Mention has been made of Ball’s appearence as “magical bishop” in shamanic dress. Another indication for the spiritual dimension of Dada in Zürich is a soirée entitled “Alte und Neue Kunst”, which is in fact by and large devoted to these “other” religious and spiritual traditions (cf. Schrott 1992: 105-34). Whereas the “new art” refers to the works of the Dadaists themselves, the “old art” is in fact not primarily “art” in the everyday sense, but rather spirituality and mysticism. And it is certainly not accidental that Huelsenbeck’s first Dadaist poetry collection, published in Zürich in August 1916, has an incantation as its title: Schalaben schalabai schalamezomai (1916a), followed by a second volume a month later with the no less revealing title Phantastische Gebete – “phantastic prayers” (1916b). As Arp later claims, the reality envisaged by the Zürich Dadaists was “weder die objektive Wirklichkeit oder Realität, noch die subjektive, gedankliche Wirklichkeit, das heißt Idealität, sondern eine mystische Wirklichkeit” (1948: 82). Although Arp differentiates his

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mystical reality from an ideal, subjective reality, this mystical reality is actually reached through subjective contemplation and introspection, in other words: mediated by the subject. Whereas Tzara does not articulate himself in the same kind of mystical formulations used by Arp, he too assumes that the essential reality, which has to be presented in art and literature, actually resides in the subject. Thus, the work of art is an “[œ]uvre de créateurs, sortie d’une vraie nécessité de l’auteur, et pour lui” (1975: 362): Je parle toujours de moi puisque je ne veux convaincre, je n’ai pas le droit d’entraîner d’autres dans mon fleuve, je n’oblige personne à me suivre et tout le monde fait son art à sa façon... (1975: 361)

Likewise, Hugo Ball too described the work of art in the Erste dadaistische Manifest from July 1916 as a genuine expression of a subjective reality: “Ich will meinen eigenen Unfug, meinen eigenen Rhythmus und Vokale und Konsonanten dazu, die ihm entsprechen, die von mir selbst sind” (Ball 1988: 40). Furthermore, the early Huelsenbeck (as a Zürich Dadaist) positioned reality, at least the reality that has to be presented in art, inside the subject, or at least in a place only accessable to the subject; the subject is in control of (the presentation of) the artistic reality, the artistic subject appears as the creator of its own reality. In a newspaper article from June 1916, Huelsenbeck (1984: 23-4) stressed that the anthology Cabaret Voltaire was intended “zur Propagierung und öffentlichen Diskussion einer modernen Kunstrichtung”, as a new art was urgently needed which would be “fern von jeder episodischen Weitschweifigkeit”, beyond the traditional Western illusionist way of representing reality. Instead, Dadaist art and literature tried to present Das Ding an sich oder die Idee des Dinges [...]. Ein Baum ist zum Beispiel nicht ein Baum wie er uns erscheint, sondern wie er ist. Das Wirkliche des Baumes sind nicht seine Zweige, seine Blüten, seine Farben, sondern der transcendente Wert der Idee Baum, wie sie in der Seele des Künstlers vorhanden ist.

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Whereas the first edition of Phantastische Gebete is illustrated by Hans Arp with abstract wood rubbings, these images are replaced by graphics by George Grosz in the second edition, published in 1920 by the Malik Verlag in Berlin. Grosz’ caricatures are not of a direct political nature, they are rather genre images showing the daily reality at the fringes of metropolitan social life as well as the assumed decadence of the bourgeoisie. This portrayal of reality in all its aspects was also the declared objective of the Dadaist artistic practice according to the Dadaistisches Manifest by Huelsenbeck (1980c: 38): Das Wort Dada symbolisiert das primitivste Verhältnis zur umgebenden Wirklichkeit, mit dem Dadaismus tritt eine neue Realität in ihre Rechte. Das Leben erscheint als ein simultanes Gewirr von Geräuschen, Farben und geistigen Rhythmen, das in die dadaistische Kunst unbeirrt mit allen sensationellen Schreien und Fiebern seiner verwegenen Alltagspsyche und in seiner gesamten brutalen Realität übernommen wird.

In this way Dada matched the criterium of supreme art as stipulated at the beginning of the manifesto (1980c: 36): Die höchste Kunst wird diejenige sein, die in ihren Bewußtseinsinhalten die tausendfachen Probleme der Zeit präsentiert, der man anmerkt, daß sie sich von den Explosionen der letzten Woche werfen ließ, die ihre Glieder immer wieder unter dem Stoß des letzten Tages zusammensucht .

The Dadaist apprehension of reality or rather: the apprehension of the Dadaist by reality is not just an aesthetic principle, but also – as pointed out earlier – intended as a new principle of life, of accommodation with life. A major intertext of this understanding of the Dadaist Geistesart are the writings of Otto Gross (cf. Hurwitz 1979, Michaels 1983) and the pre-Dadaist circle of Die Freie Straße. Otto Gross was a dissenting psychoanalyst, who in contrast to Freud regarded psychoanalysis not as a therapeutical solution for individual

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psychic disorders, but rather as a social theory. According to Gross, one of the fundamental problems in contemporary society was the “conflict between the own and the other” (Gross 1914 and 1916): an inner conflict between the sexual inclinations of the – basically polygamous and bisexual – individual and the “Allgemeinheit”, society at large, in particular the moral regulations of contemporary – basically monogamous and heterosexual – patriarchal society (cf. Gross 1980: 16-20). Gross argued that this conflict caused psychic deformations due to the social impossibility for the individual to follow and satisfy his or her own urges. At the same time, as a result of a defense reaction of the individual to protect his or her “own”, i.e. natural sexual desires and identity, the conflict caused a growing isolation of the individual from society in general. To terminate the conflict between the own and the other, Gross propagated on the one hand a new morality that required the abolition of both patriarchy and restrictive sexual morality (cf. Gross 1980: 13-6), and on the other hand a new type of “Beziehung”, relationship, in which two or more parties invest. This “Beziehung” is, thus, not a matter of conventional “Leben”, life, but rather of mutual “Erleben”, of mutual experience and enjoyment, in which the single egos of the participating individuals transcend into a new collective “Wir”, a collective “We”, that does not require the self-negation and -destruction of the individual egos (cf. Gross 1980: 21-2). Whereas Gross’ reflections were by and large concentrated on the unconscious, on sexuality and relations between the sexes, his conceptions were broadened by the Expressionist/Pre-Dadaist circle of Die Freie Straße, that was engaged in the publication of an irregular series of pamphlets, in which the ideas of Gross were combined with a vitalistic view of the world. A world not envisaged as a stable, fixed entity, but rather as a “Geschehen”, as a set of events, as a continuous happening, a cosmic rhythm, in which the individual should participate by shedding off all individual and general barriers and inhibitions (cf. Jung 1915 and Jung/Gross 1916). At several points in Huelsenbeck’s Dadaistisches Manifest reference is made to these conceptions, e.g. in the only positive proposition in the closing slogans of his manifesto: “Für den Dadaismus in Wort und Bild, für das

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dadaistische Geschehen in der Welt” (1980c: 41, my italics, HvdB). Huelsenbeck also in later texts refers, at least terminologically, to the deliberations of Gross and Die Freie Straße by defining Dada as “Erleben” (1980b: 5-7). It should be noted here that Die Freie Straße acted as the actual publisher of the first Dadaist anthology in Berlin, Club Dada (1918). Whereas Friedlaender’s philosophy of indifference appears in the Dadaistisches Manifest mainly as the theoretical background to the polar conception of reality and the Dadaist self-irony manifested in the closing line, “Gegen dies Manifest sein, heißt Dadaist sein!”, the import of his ideas for the psychology of Dadaism becomes clear in Huelsenbeck’s pamphlet En avant Dada (1920), when Friedlaender’s creative indifference allows the Dadaist subject to throw his individuality away like a lasso, as quoted earlier. Friedlaender’s technique of differentiating and indifferentiating, that allows the self in his philosophy of creative indifference to be in charge of the world, becomes in Huelsenbeck’s conception of Dadaist subjectivity the main tool for the new subject to survive, persist and hold its own ground, even after opening itself for or even turning itself over to the outer, encompassing reality. 5. Whereas the Dadaists groups in Berlin and Zürich, or at least their spokesmen Huelsenbeck and Tzara in their main manifestoes share the concept of indifference, a vitalistic understanding of reality, the perception that destruction is necessary prior to the installation of a new art and the presentation of a new Dadaist principle, or maybe rather a new attitude towards life, a new mentality, at least one fundamental difference can be distinguished in their understanding of the relationship between the (artistic) subject and reality/life. In Zürich this subject and its “propreté de l’individu” (Tzara 1975: 366) constitute the centre of essential reality, a reality subordinated to the subject, an expression of “suprême égoïsme, où les lois s’étiolent” (1975: 362), since the expressions of the artistic subject are the only reality that matters (for this subject); reality is situated in the sphere of artistic subjectivity and is by and large identical with this sphere. Inversely, in Berlin essential reality is situated explicitly outside the

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(artistic) subject. The individual subject has to erase its individual self and to subjugate itself to the external reality in every respect, more or less like a chameleon or a sponge. This basic difference underlies both the tendency towards abstraction in Zürich and the preoccupation with the political in Berlin. An abstract, non-figurative art seems to follow naturally from the suspension of the outer everyday reality in favor of the pure expression of a private, inner reality or a mystical reality that has to be retrieved through contemplation and introspection. In turn, the extensive covering of political events in the work of the Berlin Dadaists can be regarded as a consequence of the conviction that the artistic subject has to turn itself over to everyday reality – this reality was dominated in Germany and in particular in Berlin by political developments: the fall of the Second German Empire, the November Revolution, the Spartacus uprising, workers’ and soldiers’ councils, the proclamation of the Republic of Weimar, the installation of the first social-democrat, Ebert-Noske government, the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, civilwar-like situations in the streets of Berlin, a disastrous social and economical situation etc. etc. Even though the importance of the political commitment of – in particular – the communist Dadaists, Grosz, Heartfield, Herzfelde and Jung, may not be underestimated in regard to the Berlin Dadaist preoccupation with the political, it should be noted here, that – as far as the political is addressed in the framework of Club Dada and its subsidiaries, like a so-called “Dadaistische Zentralrat der Weltrevolution” – the stand taken is not the expression of a communist partisanship or of another particular political current. On the contrary: the treatment of the political in the setting of Dada in Berlin as a rule excels in political indifference. Clear examples are the two main ‘political’ manifestoes Dadaisten gegen Weimar and Was ist der Dadaismus und was will er in Deutschland?, the first issued by “Der dadaistische Zentralrat der Weltrevolution” and the second by “Der dadaistische revolutionäre Zentralrat, Gruppe Deutschland” – both distributed as pamphlets in the tumultuous first half of 1919. Whereas Dadaisten gegen Weimar is already by its title directed against the proclamation of the new German Republic in Weimar, the

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pamphlet also imitates, parodies and ridicules the way by which this new republic is approached by the radical left, not only by the name assumed by Club Dada for the occasion, but also by the ludicrous alternative offered. “Wir werden Weimar in die Luft sprengen” by the installation of the “OBERDADA als Präsident des Erdballs”, the manifesto proclaims (cit. Bergius/Riha 1979: 44). Likewise the second pamphlet, Was ist der Dadaismus (cit. Bergius/Riha 1979: 61), starts with a catalogue of demands, like: Der Dadaismus fordert: 1. die internationale Vereinigung aller schöpferischen und geistigen Menschen der ganzen Welt auf dem Boden des radikalen Kommunismus...

Demands like these could be found in many other contemporary leftwing political pamphlets. In Was ist der Dadaismus (cit. Bergius/ Riha 1979: 62), however, they are ridiculed by a series of objectives in the second section of the manifesto, which may have a serious edge, but is at the same time rather absurd: Der [dadaistische] Zentralrat tritt ein für: [...] e) Einführung des simultanischen Gedichtes als kommunistisches Staatsgebet. [...] k) sofortige Regelung aller Sexualbeziehungen im international dadaistischen Sinne durch Errichtung einer dadaistischen Geschlechtszentrale.

As Huelsenbeck indicated in an explanation of this manifesto in 1920, the aim of Was ist der Dadaismus was, “daß Dada hiermit sich entscheidend von aller spekulativen Tendenz abwendet, gewissermaßen seine Metaphysik verliert und sich als Phänomen begreift, das ein Ausdruck dieser Zeit ist” (1984: 35-6) – an indifferent expression of the time, lacking any partisanship or utopianism. In this context, the placards and the Prussian Archangel at the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe may seem major exceptions, which break with the principle of political indifference. In fact, this exhibition was not only the apex of Dada in Berlin, but also its finale. In the run-up to

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the exhibition Club Dada had already started to desintegrate. Shortly after the exhibition, George Grosz published an article called “Statt einer Biographie” in the communist orientated review Der Gegner, edited by his fellow Dadaist Wieland Herzfelde. Grosz’ article was dated the 16th of August, 1920, the day after the official closing date of the exhibition. In “Statt einer Biographie” Grosz fulminates against the “Individualitäts- und Persönlichkeitskult, der mit den Malern und Dichtern getrieben wird” (1920: 68) and attacks the indifferent quintessence of Dadaism: Es ist ein Irrtum, zu glauben, wenn einer Kreisel malt, Kuben oder tiefseelisches Gewirre – er sei dann [...] revolutionär. [...] Ihr gebt vor, zeitlos zu sein, und über den Parteien zu stehen, ihr Mütter des “elfenbeinernen Turmes” in Euch. Ihr gebt vor, für den Menschen zu schaffen – wo ist der Mensch?!! Was ist Eure schöpferische Indifferenz und Euer abstraktes Gefasel von der Zeitlosigkeit anders als eine lächerliche, nutzlose Spekulation auf die Ewigkeit. Eure Pinsel und Federn, die Waffen sein sollten, sind leere Strohhalme. Geht aus Euren Stuben heraus, wenn es euch schwer wird, hebt Eure individuelle Absperrung auf, laßt Euch von den Ideen der arbeitenden Menschen erfassen und helft ihnen im Kampf gegen die verrottete Gesellschaft. [...] Das Getute um das eigene Ich ist vollkommen belanglos. (1920: 69-70)

Although Dada is not mentioned explicitly, one of Grosz’ major irritations is obviously the principle of indifference and the pretended “eigne Allmacht” of those following this principle. In conclusion, it seems as if the specific positioning of the artistic subject in reality and the specific handling of this reality by the subject not only gave Dada in Berlin a profile of its own: it also caused or at least contributed to the rapid desintegration of the Berlin section of the Dada movement. In Zürich too, it was actually the concept of indifference and the ego-centred subjectivity that played a major role in the collapse of the local Dadaist project. Inspired by the revolutionary events in Russia and other European countries, several

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Zürich Dadaists – Arp, Eggeling, Janco, Richter – participated in the short-lived group “Radikale Künstler”, which tried to unite the local avant-garde for an aesthetic contribution to the expected all-comprising social revolution. As Marcel Janco repeated in later years time after time, the foundation of the “Radikale Künstler” was not in the last place a result of frictions among the Zürich Dadaists, caused by the insistence of – in particular – Tzara and Serner on Dada as a framework for “Manifestationen der Verneinung” (1957a: 41) in accordance with the nihilist principle of creative indifference. Instead, the common aim of the “radikale Dadas” (1957a: 47) became a “wahrer, schöpferischer Dadaismus” (1957a: 45), which in clear opposition to Tzara’s Dadaist indifference was not guided by “méfiance envers la communauté” (Tzara 1975: 361), but instead – according to the manifesto of the “Radikale Künstler” – directed at a “Neue Sendung des Menschen in der Gemeinschaft” (cit. Hoffmann 1982: 22), rejecting the previous Zürich Dadaist understanding of reality as the exclusive expression of a “suprême égoïsme”. On the contrary, this kind of artistic subjectivity was condemned. In line with Grosz, in his contribution to the planned, but never published journal of the “Radikale Künstler” Janco stressed: “L’individualisme correspond en art au mensonge” (Janco 1919:3).

No te s 1

A more detailed examination of the topics discussed in this contribution can be found in my thesis Avantgarde und Anarchismus. Untersuchungen zur Bedeutung des Anarchismus in der Programmatik des Dadaismus in Zürich und Berlin (Amsterdam 1998), in particular in the chapters 7 and 8.

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Bibliography Arp, Hans 1948 1995

On My Way. Poetry and essays 1912 ... 1947. New York. Unsern täglichen Traum... Erinnerungen, Dichtungen und Betrachtungen aus den Jahren 1914-1954. Zürich.

Arp, Hans, and El Lissitzky 1925 Die Kunstismen. Les ismes de l’art. The Isms of Art. Erlenbach/München/Leipzig. Baader, Johannes 1977 Oberdada. Schriften, Manifeste, Flugblätter, Billets, Werke und Taten. Lahn-Gießen. Ball, Hugo 1916 “Notes redactionelles. Redactionelle Notizen”. In: Cabaret Voltaire. Zürich, 32. 1980 Zur Kritik der deutschen Intelligenz. Frankfurt/M. 1988 Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit. Ausgewählte Schriften. Frankfurt/M. 1992 Die Flucht aus der Zeit. Zürich. 1994 Critique of the German Intelligentsia. New York. Berg, Hubert van den 1995 “Tristan Tzara’s ‘Manifeste Dada 1918’: Anti-Manifest oder manifestierte Indifferenz? Salomo Friedlaenders ‘schöpferische Indifferenz’ und das dadaistische Selbstverständnis”. In: Neophilologus (79) 3: 353-376. 1997 “Dada als Emanation des Nichts. Anmerkungen zum dadaistischen Verhältnis zu Religion und Mystik”. In: Bettina Gruber (ed.): Erfahrung und System. Mystik und Esoterik in der Literatur der Moderne. Opladen, 82-101. Bergius, Hanne 1989 Das Lachen Dadas. Die Berliner Dadaisten und ihre Aktionen. Gießen.

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Bergius, Hanne, and Karl Riha 1979 (eds.) Dada Berlin. Texte, Manifeste, Aktionen. Stuttgart. Bolliger, Hans, et alii 1985 Dada in Zürich. Zürich. Cardorff, Peter 1988 Friedlaender (Mynona) zur Einführung. Hamburg. Dech, Jula 1989 Hannah Höch: Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser. DADA — Spiegel einer Bierbauchkultur. Frankfurt/M. Exner, Lisbeth 1996 Fasching als Logik. Über Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona. München. Fähnders, Walter 1987 “Franz Jung — Bibliographie”. In: Wolfgang Rieger: Glückstechnik und Lebensnot. Leben und Werk Franz Jungs. Freiburg i./B, 252-268. . Fiedler, Leonhard M. 1989 “Dada und der Weltkrieg. Aspekte der Entstehung einer internationalen Bewegung in Literatur und Kunst”. In: Manfred Hardt (ed.): Literarische Avantgarden. Darmstadt, 194-211. Friedlaender, Salomo 1915 Der Waghalter der Welt”. In: Die Weißen Blätter 2: 857894. 1917 “Eigne Göttlichkeit”. In: Neue Jugend (1) 11/12: 212-3 1918 Schöpferische Indifferenz. München. Friedlaender, Salomo, and Alfred Kubin 1986 Briefwechsel. Wien/Linz.

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Goergen, Jeanpaul 1994 Urlaute dadaistischer Poesie. Der Berliner Dada-Abend am 12. April 1918. Hannover. Gross, Otto 1914 “Über Destruktionssymbolik”. In: Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie (4) 11/12: 525-534. 1916 “Vom Konflikt des Eigenen und Fremden”. In: Jung/Gross 1916: 3-5. 1980 Von geschlechtlicher Not zur sozialen Katastrophe. Frankfurt/M. Grosz, George 1920 “Statt einer Biographie”. In: Der Gegner (2) 3: 68-70. 1986 Ach knallige Welt, du Lunapark. Gesammelte Gedichte. München/Wien. Grosz, George, und Wieland Herzfelde 1925 Die Kunst ist in Gefahr. Drei Aufsätze. Berlin. Heller, Martin, und Lutz Windhöfel 1981 “Das Neue Leben”. In: Künstlergruppen in der Schweiz 1910-1936. Aarau, 60-93. Herzfelde, Wieland 1988 John Heartfield. Leben und Werk. Dresden. Höch, Hannah 1989 Eine Lebenscollage, Vol. 1 (1889-1920). Berlin. Hoffmann, Justin 1982 “Hans Richter und die Münchener Räterepublik”. In: Marion von Hofacker (ed.): Hans Richter 1888-1976. Dadaist. Filmpionier. Maler. Theoretiker. Berlin, 21-5. Huelsenbeck, Richard 1916a Schalaben schalabai schalamezomai. Zürich. 1916b Phantastische Gebete. Zürich.

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1918

“Der Dadaismus”. In: Reclams Universum (34) 40: 679680. 1920a “Die dadaistische Bewegung. Eine Selbstbiographie”. In: Neue Rundschau (31) 2: 972-979. 1920b Phantastische Gebete. Zweite Auflage. Berlin. 1980a (ed.) Dada-Almanach. Im Auftrag des Zentralamts der deutschen Dada-Bewegung. Hamburg. 1980b “Einleitung”. In: Huelsenbeck 1980a: 3-9 1980c “Dadaistisches Manifest”. In: Huelsenbeck 1980a: 3641. 1984 En Avant Dada. Die Geschichte des Dadaismus. Hamburg. 1985 “Dada siegt”. In: Richard Huelsenbeck und Tristan Tzara: Dada siegt! Bilanz und Erinnerung. Hamburg, 7-53. Hurwitz, Emmanuel Otto Gross. Paradiessucher zwischen Freud und Jung. Leben und Werk. Zürich/Frankfurt/M. Janco, Marcel 1919 “[Aux Architectes]”. In: Zürich 1919. Programmatische Zeitschrift [proofs], 3-4. 1957 “Schöpferischer Dada”. In: Willi Verkauf (ed.): Dada. Monographie einer Bewegung. Teufen, 26-49. Jung, Franz 1915 (ed.) Was suchst du Ruhe, da du zur Unruhe geboren bist. Erste Folge der Vorarbeit. Berlin. Jung, Franz, and Otto Gross 1916 (eds.) Um Weisheit und Leben. Vierte Folge der Vorarbeit. Berlin. Maier-Metz, Harald 1984 Expressionismus – Dada – Agitprop. Zur Entwicklung des Malik-Kreises in Berlin 1912-1924. Frankfurt/M. /Bern/New York/Nancy.

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Meyer, Raimund, et alii 1994 Dada Global. Zürich. Michaels, Jennifer E. 1983 Anarchy and Eros. Otto Gross’ Impact on German Expressionist Writers: Leonard Frank, Franz Jung, Johannes R. Becher, Karl Otten, Curt Corrinth, Walter Hasenclever, Oskar Maria Graf, Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel, Max Brod, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada. New York/Bern/Frankfurt/M. Mierau, Fritz 1980 Leben und Schriften des Franz Jung. Eine Chronik. Hamburg. Pachnicke, Peter, and Klaus Honnef 1991 (eds.) John Heartfield. Köln. Schrott, Raoul 1992 (ed.) Dada 15/25: post scriptum oder die himmlischen Abenteuer des Hr.n Tristan Tzara. Innsbruck. Schuster, Peter-Klaus 1995 (ed.) George Grosz. Berlin - New York. Stuttgart. Serner, Walter 1981 Über Denkmäler, Weiber und Laternen. Frühe Schriften. Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 1. München Das Hirngeschwür. Dada. Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 2. München. Sheppard, Richard 1979 “Dada and Mysticism: Influences and Affinities”. In: Stephen C. Foster and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds.): Dada Spectrum. The Dialectics of Revolt. Madison (Wisc.)/ Iowa City (Iowa), 91-113. Teubner, Ernst 1992 Hugo Ball. Eine Bibliographie. Mainz.

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Tzara, Tristan 1975 Œuvres complètes, Vol. 1 (1912-1924). Paris. 1980 “Chronique Zürichoise 1915-1919”. In: Huelsenbeck 1980a: 10-29. Züchner, Eva 1994 (ed.) Raoul Hausmann 1886-1971. Der deutsche Spießer ärgert sich. Ostfildern.

SUBJECTIVITY IN A POST-COLONIAL SYMBOLIC THE ANXIETY OF JOYCE:

Christine van Boheemen

The most convincing demonstration of the constitution of human self-identity in and as language or narrative is to be found in the opening pages of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A fragment of narrative is Stephen Dedalus’s first recorded impression: “once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo”(7). To place himself in the verbal picture painted by the father (the representative of symbolic authority), the child, seeing himself from the father’s position and assuming the split between “I” and “he”, is forced to identify with the father’s perspective. The toddler Stephen inserts himself into the preexistent story and the cultural order by means of psychological and linguistic identification with the parent of the same sex, and the assumption of the masculine third-person pronoun for himself: “His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass He had a hairy face. He was

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baby tuckoo (7; my emphasis). Stephen’s self-identity is formed and confirmed by projection into the slot the father’s story provides. Without the medium of narrative, sensation would not have crystallised into subjectivity. Thus the human subject “inscribes” himself or herself in culture through language, and learns that the father’s word, and the father’s prohibition occupies a privileged place in the system of culture which Lacan named “the symbolic order.” Thus the entry into language splits conscious from unconscious, and moulds human identity with the binary exclusive stamp of gender. Not surprisingly, Joyce’s works have often been understood as the text-book illustration of Lacan’s notion of the subject-split-inlanguage condemned to perpetual desire.1 This identification is reinforced by Lacan’s naming of Joyce as the material witness to the truth of his insight into the nature of the psyche.2 Recent scholarship on Joyce, however, emphasises the specificity of his (post)colonial Irishness; and it seems to me that Joyce’s illustration of subjectivity is not only more subversively complex than Lacan’s theory would suggest, it is best seen as a gesture of defiant resistance to the hegemony of English culture in Dublin around the turn of the century – especially the felt lack of a distinctive mother tongue. Remember that the English language had ousted Gaelic to the remotest corners of West Ireland; and that the Irish, educated in English and heirs of the English literary tradition, were deprived of a tradition or a model which they could call their own. Joyce’s voice, I argue, is a minority voice in the sense in which Deleuze and Guattari use this term.3 Instead of lending self-presence and a stable sense of identity, the entry into language and the moment of access to subjectivity is rendered by Joyce as a wounding, and traumatic (in the psychoanalytical sense) confrontation which forever traps the subject in the attempt to flee and escape its occurrence. Instead of splitting it generates ambivalence, ambiguity, and wavering. Instead of mastery it produces anxiety. This means that Joyce’s rhetorical praxis is itself ambivalent and ambiguous: he sketches the process of Stephen Deadalus’ attempts at attaining subjectivity, but he at once demonstrates the impossibility of that ambition. Joyce weaves and unweaves the narrative of Stephen’s development into an artist. The reader may well

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ask: “What is the point of such ambivalence?” In designing a style of writing which portrays the anxiety and precariousness of Irish (and other forms of subaltern) subjectivity, Joyce invented a rhetorical machine which implicates the reader in that anxiety. Deprived of a definite meaning, a sure footing, the reader suffers a sense of alienation and dislocation which teaches the affect of being minor. Let us return to the beginning of Portrait to see how the scene presents a conceptual deadlock rather than the constitution of a gendered subject. Note that the text begins with a fairy tale which glosses ugly Irish reality as pastoral bliss. “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy.” Earnestly endeavours to identify with his own pre-inscribed role of a “nice” child encountering a maternal animal (Ireland), the little boy thinks of himself from the beginning only in the alienated masculine third person (“He was baby tuckoo.” “His father told him that story" “his father looked at him through a glass”; my italics). But because the authority of the (post)colonial father is dubious – he tells fairytales – this split in the self does not provide the authority and masculinity supposedly attending masculine gender. On the contrary, the father’s language is placed as falsely glossy and unstable by the child’s attempts to translate it into historical actuality. This instability increases in the song “O, the wild rose blossoms/ On the little green place” which the father, it seems, offers the child as “his” song. This rendition, it is to be noted, practises a revision of the original words in Thompson’s “Lily Dale,” which speak of “the little green grave” (Gifford 1967: 86). Assuming the father’s language means colluding with the repressive falsification of Irish reality and ignoring its heritage of death. When Stephen accepts the song as his: “He sang that song. That was his song,” his lisping of it as “the green wothe botheth” in turn substitutes “green” for “wild.” The wild rose turns Irish green, a fantasy creation, and Stephen redoubles the “fairy” element of the father’s tale. The symbolic as handed down by the father (already feminised as “fairytale” and “song”), does not provide the stability of a God-term. Inter-textuality, revision or rewriting, and the inability to denote and found truth are in-

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scribed in it from the beginning. In fact, the passage itself rhetorically enacts that groundlessness. It places us in mediated speech from the first word (“Once upon a time and a very good time it was...”); nevertheless, it drops the line “O, the wild rose blossoms” as if it were Stephen’s singing, immediately contradicting that suggestion in its lisped copy. From the first, the reader, too, is deprived of a sure footing in Joyce’s symbolic, never able to ground language in either a specific human agent or a referential reality. That instability in the Irish symbolic is in turn actualised as the conflicting social reality Stephen enters. With language, he also, immediately, encounters the dilemma of conflicting claims and different forms of appeal and modes of being pre-inscribed in his culture. Whereas the father “frames” him in a fairy tale, the mute mother plays music to make him dance. Culture provides two forms of symbolic address: Structured Language (Narrative, Song) primarily but not exclusively associated with the father (later the mother and aunt Dante will utter the rhyming threat to Stephen’s eyesight), and music, the rhythmic periodicity of sound, pitch, and melody which enlists Stephen’s body, related primarily to the mother who tends it. Neither of these modes of appeal provides the sense of interiority or stability of a “mother tongue.” Each is already partial and incomplete, and complementing the other. In Joyce, the felt absence of the mother tongue is allegorised in both the failure of the symbolic to fix truth, and the heightened appeal of the material effects of tone and pitch as the possible crypt of authenticity. In contrast to earlier readings then, I do not find here a classic Lacanian allocation of the symbolic and speech to the father and the relegation of the mother to the pre-linguistic. Instead, the symbolic, “language” itself, is split into two modes of expression which rival to engage the child. Neither the claim of the father (himself notoriously unstable given Stephen’s endless list of his father’s identities and attributes ending in “at present a praiser of his own past”), nor that of the muted mother offers a point of identification for a seemingly stable subjectivity predicated upon a split. Truth and the promise of a solid positioning of the subject are lacking in the father’s word, while the mother’s materialisation of language as rhythm and sound – while more physical

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and perhaps more primary – can, by itself, never ground the self in language. Indeed, Joyce’s redoubling/splitting of language – rather than the self – violates Kristeva’s or Lacan’s temporalization of the moment of entry into language as that in which the bond with the mother is superseded and broken by the symbolic. Here the mother shares the symbolic with the father, and their joint presence, never to be resolved, seems to set up a series of splitting redoublings which the text itself must keep trying to overcome. We here gain insight in Joyce’s attempt, throughout his oeuvre, to create an embodied textuality which would re-combine the materiality of rhythm, sound, and graphic inscription with the structuring power of narrative: As if a marriage of the mother’s mode of appeal to that of the father might generate the absent grounding for identification. The constitutive gap in the subaltern symbolic will give rise to endlessly renewed attempts to ground narrative in the body, in the periodicity of the drive, the flow of (menstrual) blood, in short, in the material. This will eventually lead to the reductive materialisation of the signifier in Finnegans Wake. The constitutive instability of the Irish symbolic also entails a redoubling and recrossing of gender. The colonial father is always already feminised: as a subaltern subject he fails as the representative of the cultural authority of language. As a Celt, moreover, he is perceived as the feminine other to the Anglo-Saxon Englishman whose language already rules the waves. The Irish father’s language cannot constitute truth. This situation is emblematised when Stephen’s father cannot prevent the quarrel at the Christmas dinner. The passage concludes: “ – Poor Parnell! he cried loudly. My dead king! He sobbed loudly and bitterly. Stephen, raising his terror stricken face, saw that his father’s eyes were full of tears” (39). In Joyce the figure of the mother, on the other hand, proves not muted, but the repository of a wordless language (a language of flowers), a public secret, a hidden letter, or a “word known to all men,” which she may transmit to her son. Moreover, she seems the instance of authority when she utters the command that Stephen must apologise. From Ulysses, the reader will gather that Stephen’s mother’s authority makes such impact because it is the extension of the transcendent power

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of the Roman Catholic Church. In Portrait the mother represents the law which, in Lacan’s and Kristeva’s theory, ought to have been centred in the father’s word. After situating this constitutive conceptual knot which generates splitting and redoubling, the text begins to introduce ever more complex forms of splitting. The two symbolic colours (maroon for Michael Davitt and green for Parnell) of aunt Dante’s brushes introduce the treacherous divisiveness of Irish politics (“Irrland’s [Errorland’s] split little pea” in Joyce’s words in Finnegans Wake). This split, in turn, brings into the text the breach between Protestants (neighbour Eileen’s family) and Catholics (his own). The passage concludes its build-up of repetitive splitting with the threat of violence to the boy: “the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.” This threat is not motivated in the tale. What did Stephen do to deserve this violence? Why does the child’s confrontation with the situation of gender roles in Irish culture solicit such violence? In wanting to marry Eileen, he conforms to the paternal example and answers the mother’s invitation to the dance of sexuality. In styling himself “masculine,” however, the child incurs inexplicable violence. It is as if the split-reality of the Irish symbolic itself made clear gender-identity impossible, creating a conceptual deadlock or double bind which produces perpetual anxiety. I suggest we understand this prelude to A Portrait as the impossible record of the moment of trauma which establishes Stephen’s at once tenuous and over-cathected linguistic subjectivity. It is the moment of inscription of the division within the trait, infinitely repeating a failed predication, instigating the faultline in the mirror of the self. Stephen’s first confrontation with threatened annihilation is here: “O, Stephen will apologise.” Dante said: “O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.” Pull out his eyes, Apologise, Apologise, Pull out his eyes.

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Apologise, Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologise. *

*

*

The threat to Stephen’s physical integrity, the impending pain, subsequent to something excluded from the story, send language into a spinning turmoil. In its chiasmic pattern of crossing over and redoubling it instigates infinite repetition – only to be framed by three stars or dots (the material sign used in cartoons to denote the effect of physical harm). The experience is rendered as overwhelming, annihilating, hence non-concluded and inconclusive; the young child is confronted with anxiety so massive that there is no response possible. He lacks language, words of his own to ward the experience off or work it through. No gesture or act, except trying to hide underneath the table, can let him escape. But underneath the table the voice still booms; now resounding in his own consciousness, his own memory. The child is reduced to a passive echo of his master’s voice: “pull out his eyes, apologise, apologise, pull out his eyes.” Intrusive, the refrain annihilates self-sentience, the self, the core and centre of his being. The Greek noun “trauma” is related to the verb “titrooskoo” – “to pierce or penetrate.” If the scene implies a threat to the eye, it presents itself as a piercing of the ear, as a rolling thundering blow to the tympanum which sends it resonating (or spinning) for ever. Perhaps it is not by accident that in Finnegans Wake thunder marks the commencement of life as “auradrama.” (Bishop 1986: 300). The archetype of the paternal is there incarnated as “Earwicker” (ear whacker?) or “Persse O’Reilly” (fr. “perce-oreille” (“earwig”) is literally “ear-piercer”), an incestuously penetrating violator of his children’s orifices. Though it is the mother (seconded by aunt Dante) who speaks in A Portrait, I suggest we do not understand this allocation to one gender as exclusive. Important is not the attribution to a single agent, but to note that the agency of language is felt as piercingly invasive, a “thunner in the eire”( Finnegans Wake 565.17) en-

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tailing a colonization of the self by sound; a colonisation which is symbolised by the eagles of the Roman empire, the emblems of colonial-religious imperialism. I hardly need point out that “ear” rendered as “eire” extends the application of the trauma of the linguistic invasion of the subject to that of the nation. A distinctive feature of extreme pain is its paradoxical effect – it can neither be denied, nor can it be spoken. Reducing the subject to a state anterior to language, the memory of intense pain may even remain unconscious, as Freud pointed out in “The Ego and the Id.” The only road to access the memory of pain is through the detour of language, finding words which, binding unconscious content, make unconscious thought – processes into retroactive perceptions. The sole strategy of survival for the child deprived of personal speech (and by extension the subject colonised by the hegemonic language) is therefore, paradoxically, to cling to language, to speech, even if in his state of shattered anxiety the only words available are the ones sounding the trauma, and to transform those words into poetry: pattern and rhyme. Psycho-trauma, whether caused by lifethreatening bodily harm, emotional or sexual abuse, entails the economy of slavery, the bondage of body and mind to the originating moment. This scene in A Portrait, a reworking of Joyce’s first epiphany, suggests a moment of wounding constitution of the self which locks it in a perpetual struggle to escape, while binding the self to that event in an endless repetition of undoing, of acting out and being and denying that trauma. Since the moment of trauma is also the moment of naming in the text, “Stephen” – as he is named after the martyr from this moment – will be the living habitation of this event which purloins his self, his “I”/“eye”. He forever “autographs” its re-enactment. In that sense he has “a shape that cannot be changed,” to use Joyce’s words for his creation (Budgen 1973: 107). Trauma involves paradox. The only way to access unconscious memory is through the detour of language, finding words which, binding unconscious content, make unconscious processes into perceptions. Thus the subject is “sentenced” to the repetition within language, to “work[ing] out the enigma of [his or her] position”

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(Joyce’s words in Stephen Hero: 209). As Felman and Laub point out in Testimony: “The accident” is known through its effects, “both to the extent that it ‘pursues’ the witness and that the witness is, in turn, in pursuit of it” (22). The unique form of subjectivity of the survivor, and I argue, the representative of a minority culture, exists in his or her being an enactment of the event. In the act of working out he or she bears witness to the existence and occurrence of trauma which might otherwise be forgotten or denied by majority voices. In the case of Stephen Dedalus that working out must take place in the discourse of the oppressor and entails an inescapable bondage to the voice and the ear. Voices constantly pursue Stephen, murmuring, clamouring, soothing, sobbing, reproaching, bewailing, whispering not only their keen commands and claims, but also urging him to wander and escape: “he would suddenly hear a command to be gone (...) a voice agitating the very tympanum of his ear, a flame leaping into divine cerebral life” (Stephen Hero 30). The web of voices, internal and external, of flesh and culture, becomes a labyrinth in which the subject “walks through himself”(Ulysses 9.1044-46), enacting the dubious/dividual drama of his symbolic wound which can be denied nor articulated, inviting and seeking the return of the unspeakable in the self. This labyrinth of trauma originates at the moment of the trauma itself. Stephen’s chiasmic repetition “Pull out his eyes, / Apologise, / Apologise, / Pull out his eyes. // Apologise, / Pull out his eyes, / Pull out his eyes, / Apologise” negates command by turning it into musical language, thus appropriating it to aesthetic transformation, while also repeating and propagating it. In the same act, meaning is enclosed in a transforming echo-chamber of literal meaning: the threat “Pull out his eyes” (re)turns into a vengeful command to “Pull out his eyes,” that is: compete with the aggressor. Thus language gains an extra, punning dimension, echoing as supplement to its received semantic meaning. Similarly the meaning of “apologise” turns from “presenting an apology” to “becoming an apologist.” According to the Oxford Dictionary: a “professed literary champion” like Stephen’s hero Cardinal Newman. Affirmation is also undoing. Every repetitive “yes” is also “oyes! oyes!”: “listen, watch out.”

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Let us try and listen to the text’s “encrypting” of a drama that resists articulation.4 From the first few pages Joyce depicts Stephen’s “education” as the de-sensitisation of the body in order to shift the locus of reality from physical selfhood to language. It is a process of subjection effectuated by the infliction of pain: Father Dolan’s pandying; the punishment from schoolmates; the pain of hunger, humiliation or loss; the destitution of the louse-eaten body; pain remembered or imagined in the future; or the eternal pain promised in the after-life; but always pain inflicted in the service of a repressive ideology which denies the free use of speech and the body, as when Nash and Boland batter Stephen who has his back in a barbed wire fence with a long cabbage stump in order to make him admit that the promiscuous and revolutionary Byron “was no good” (Portrait 80); or pain which intends to harness the individual’s productivity as when Stephen is called a “lazy idle loafer” (Portrait 49) and pandied. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that pain differs from other feelings in that it cannot be rendered linguistically. At the same time “physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of “incontestable reality” on that power that has brought it into being” (27). We might read Stephen’s education as the attempted inscription of self-alienating hegemonic linguistic or cultural subjectivity upon the subaltern subject through pain. Thus he is forced to acknowledge himself a “heretic” to his friends, to see himself as a “schemer” through Father Dolan’s eyes, to confess himself a “sinner” after the retreat. Curious and admirable in Stephen is that he has found a defence against the violent inscription of ideology on the body. Taking the discourse of one group or idea, he turns it against another, thus using language as a dagger to escape from the definitive stamp of linguistic-ideological determination. The five chapters of A Portrait show Stephen playing this game at ever more sophisticated levels. Thus the language of justice and freedom serves to vanquish Father Dolan. Against the “constant voices of his father and masters” calling him to sportliness, nationalism, manliness, courtship, all equally “hollow-sounding” (Portrait 84) to his ears, Stephen activates the “infuriated cries within him” (Portrait 92), the “voice” of nature, the

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“vague speech” of sexuality. The insistent claim of guilt voiced by the Church is appeased by confession; while professional allegiance to its Word is avoided by turning to the battle cry of art and freedom. Still, however skilful Stephen may be at the dialectical manipulation of language to prevent his taking a definitive shape, somewhere along the line something has gone wrong. He is alienated from his surroundings (he sees his fellow playmates as body parts: “legs were rubbing and kicking and stamping. Then Jack Lawtons’s boots dodged out the ball and all the other boots and legs ran after,” Portrait 10). Again and again alienation exacerbates into a state of fugue: “Without waiting for his father’s questions he ran across the road and began to walk at breakneck speed down the hill. He hardly knew where he was walking. Pride and hope and desire like crushed herbs in his heart sent up vapours of maddening incense before the eyes of his mind. He strode down the hill amid the tumult of suddenrisen vapours of wounded pride and fallen hope and baffled desire. They streamed upwards before his anguished eyes in dense and maddening fumes...” (Portrait 86) Once the overwhelming emotion recedes, Stephen calms down by means of attending to language: “He saw the word Lotts on the wall of the lane and breathed slowly the rank heavy air.” For all his pride and self-conscious superiority, Stephen’s self-conscious hold over himself and the body is tenuous even at moments of triumph. Thus Stephen’s exclamation “Heavenly God!” at seeing the girl on the beach, rather than to approach her, propels him to “set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands...” (Portrait 172). As Hugh Kenner once argued, wandering is one of Stephen’s ways of resolving conflict. What seems to play here, however, is more than just a tendency to take long walks; the precarious alignment of body and emotion in extreme circumstances suggests that linguistic subjectivity is at times dissolved by emotion so powerful, that it sets the body off in flight to recover itself and escape the emotion. The most extreme example occurs during the visit to Cork:

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To end this state of depersonalisation, Stephen has recourse to the most basic poetic form of language use, the recital of names, to keep his hold on reality. Sometimes he seems to lose that hold. Sick at school, he hallucinates the arrival of Parnell and the presence of ghosts. After the sermon during the retreat, he has an auditory hallucination, hearing the voices of the devils discuss him in hellish officialese. From the beginning Stephen also has the curious habit of speaking to himself, or reassuring himself of his own existence by means of language use. He repeats odd or remembered words or phrases, reads to himself “his name and where he was” (Portrait 15), as if in a private ritual protecting the self from evaporating. Indeed, we might read A Portrait as a whole, since it begins with speech repeated to the self, and ends as a diary – words written by the self to the self in order not to forget the self – as a speech act of linguistic self-maintenance in the face of the threatened dissolution of subjectivity. That Portrait, like the earlier Stephen Hero, is strongly autobiographical raises an important question. To what extent is Joyce, the modernist author in exile, homologous to the Irish subject Stephen? Although Joyce takes distance from this self-portrait in the subtitle “as a young man,” the textuality of the mature author shows signs of a rhetorical anxiety which reminds one of Stephen. But whereas Stephen is seen as struggling to escape the “nets” of his culture, James Joyce has elevated rhetorical imprisonment in a hegemonic language, and the repetitive and obsessive attempt to escape into the deliberate

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principles of his art. Thus Joyce made a point of blurring all distinctions, splits and margins. His work is characterised by the trembling of its contours; it is at once open-ended and circular. Finnegans Wake “really has no beginning or end,” Joyce wrote, explaining: “(Trade secret, registered at Stationers Hall). It ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence” (Selected Letters: 314). Thus the last words of the text: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the” (628.15-16) run on to join the opening words: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s...” (3.1). This hermetic construction which ties the end of the text into its beginning and unmoors the text from an anchor-point in a referential world, characterises, in different manner and degree, all of Joyce’s authorised narrative works. Thus Dubliners ends with “The Dead,” and begins with a story about death. (The title of the first story “The Sisters,” might equally fit “The Dead.” [Riquelme: 97]). As we noted, A Portrait begins as the memorised citation of a fairytale in which the subject inscribes himself and ends as a diary. Ulysses connects the “s” of Molly’s conclusive “Yes” with the initial letter of “Stately...” Thus all Joyce’s prose published during his lifetime participates in the technique of the serpent biting its own tale, or “Doublends Jined” (Finnegans Wake 20.15; note how Joyce plays on the Irish derivation of his practice). The paradoxical redoubling and preclusion of closure of Joyce’s works is so insidiously all-pervasive that criticism has had to adapt itself to this “lubricitous conjugation of the last with the first” (Finnegans Wake 121.31). It has demonstrated that the later work recycles versions of the earlier work, disrupting the boundary of the individual work. Since Finnegans Wake also includes citations of newspapers Joyce read, and even quotes from the critical reception of Ulysses, the distinction between life and text, metalanguage and object language is blurred. How do we find a frame to determine “the text”? This question prevails in its most literal meaning. The debate over “the scandal” of the “definitive version” of Ulysses has made clear that it is difficult to determine the “text” of the work, owing to Joyce’s habit of adding and revising up to the last moment, and even beyond that. The work was never complete and finished.

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Add to that Joyce’s failing eyesight, and the scholar is left with no possibility of ascertaining whether misspellings are just that or approved by Joyce. Consequently, some now study the text in the context of the avant-texte, the drafts, notebooks, proofs etc., not as a stable, material object, but as an ideal construction or a process of creative production. The subversiveness of Joyce is highlighted in his habit, after “The Dead,” of ending the text with a personal postscript: “Dublin, 1904 / Trieste, 1914” in A Portrait of the Artist; “Trieste-ZurichParis / 1914-1921” in Ulysses; “Paris 1922-1939” in Finnegans Wake. Work and life, text and self, reality and fiction, the objective and subjective are deliberately fused. This fusion is incremented by Joyce’s insistent habit of making his own life the subject of his art, so that it grows difficult to distinguish between the experience of Stephen or Shem and that of his author. Joyce also projects his sense of himself into personae like Bloom, and, transgressing genderlines, even a Molly, Milly, or Anna Livia. As Arthur Power relates, Joyce answered the query: “[I]s literature to be fact or is it to be an art?” with: “It should be life...” (34) The Scylla and Charybdis of the opposition between factual history and imagination is dodged in placing literature, no longer a metalanguage, on the same ontological level as existence itself. The dates post-scripting Joyce’s texts trace an unbroken, seemingly linear itinerary of writing as living – as if writing were the substance of life. They fuse self and text, self as text. In short, it becomes impossible to know what composes the inside or the outside of a work; the death or absence of presence of an “outside” is inscribed in the inside of the text. 5 But however consciously Joyce, in pursuit of stable subjectivity, elevates minority anxiety into rhetorical practice, the author by himself, the text can never access its own unconscious. It can only speak the repetitive effect of the trauma rather than the trauma itself. The only way the letter can arrive at its destination and lay the repetitive force of the trauma to rest, is if it finds a witnessing reader, or if it engineers a situation of transference which moves the listener into articulating what the text enacts. The text is in the situation of the ancient mariner who must grab the wedding guest to witness his tale,

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in the hope that the transference of the listener will liberate him from the death-in-life of the spell of the albatross. Significantly, Joyce wrote a poem entitled “A Portrait of the Artist as Ancient Mariner” in which the vicissitudes around the distribution of Ulysses which prevent this work from being read are figured as the albatross around the artist’s neck (Poems 143-44). Thus Joyce saddles the reader with the anxiety of Stephen Dedalus. In weaving his ambiguous and transgressive web, Joyce traps the reader into a transferential witnessing of its occasion. Portrait lets itself be read as an allegory of this rhetorical practice. It presents an anatomy of Stephen’s impossibility of attaining the conclusive framing which would provide a defence against the encroachment of otherness. Since Stephen’s problems with autonomy and detachment are metonymised in his writing and reading of his own name, the following fragment prefigures the reader’s problem of delimiting and circumscribing Joyce’s text in inverse order: He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was. Stephen Dedalus Class of elements Clongowes Wood College Sallins County Kildare Ireland Europe The world The Universe That was in his writing (...) then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything around the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall; but there could be a thin thin line there all round everywhere... Only God could d o that... God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen (P 15-16).

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Stephen’s problem of detachment is rendered as a problem of framing, of definition in the sense of “demarcating the end.” Stephen’s query bears on the relationship of self to the surrounding world. Inscribing his name in ever widening concentric circles of enlarged selfhood, that inflation also leads to the dissolution and voiding of identity. The concept of boundary is paradoxically married to the concept of unassimilable otherness: Without semantic boundaries there is no circumscribed selfhood or fixed meaning; but the notion of delimitation also evokes the spectre of an “other” – something outside the pale, unknown, unnameable, and without form – which threatens the idea of self-presence. No wonder that even the most fleeting suspicion of a presence, a realm of meaning beyond rational human intellect is repressed in favour of the stability of identity and meaning. Stephen attempts to be an exemplary practitioner of the traditional western strategy of coping with otherness. Thinking of the end of the universe, the spectre of unassimilable difference is displaced as a problem of signification. “But was there anything around the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?”(P16) In addition to the invention of a “nothing place,” thus denying the spectre of “nothingness” through its location in a specific point of space, the sentence strikes me in its revisionary shift from material circumscription to writing. This, in turn, raises the question of authorship. The source of the “thin line” must be an original agency. That original draftsman must have a name. That name is provided by tradition: “God.” Thus Stephen’s definition of the self is related to the name of an earlier “author/writer”, whose name guarantees the “thin thin line” separating meaning from chaos: “God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen.” In other words, the linguistic signifier “God” anchors the hierarchy of difference and identity; it lends stability to Stephen’s own identity and name. Only provisionally, however. What Joyce allegorises is the abortive process of identification with language of the subaltern subject. Though Stephen seems as yet not conscious of this, the English language will not provide him with a stable point of authority, a unified mirror

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image, an unshakeable concept of origin which can ground his identity in language. Later in A Portrait, we note that Stephen’s theory of aesthetics attempts to ground itself by means of practising a reversal. God is no longer the projected stable signifier of origin, but already a form of writing. Stephen’s aesthetic is pitched upon the example of the originary function of the demarcating line or wall: “In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended” (P 212). Only when the object is safely circumscribed, and has become familiar, does it grow possible to think of it as having a context and background: “the aesthetic image is first luminously apprehended as self-bounded and self-contained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas” (P 212). But such a vision of the object against a backdrop of nothingness, suspended in a void, is the product and effect of the firm, defining draftmanship which guarantees the illusion of boundary and meaning. It is the “wall” of the materialisation as writing which shelters us from the vertigo of the abyss of divisibility, the “abnihilisation of the etym” (Finnegans Wake 353.22). This act of inscription is never definitive, it remains related to the threat of meaninglessness in Joyce. In the earlier Stephen Hero we read: “And over all this chaos of history and legend, of fact and supposition, he strove to draw out a line of order, to reduce the abysses of the past to order by a diagram” (SH 33). These words from Stephen Hero express what Finnegans Wake still performs. In other words, Stephen’s modernist artistic vocation, and his credo of claritas, consonantia, and integritas is the symptomatically defensive product of the subaltern subject’s frantic attempt at definition and delimitation expressed in the metaphor of writing or inscription; and it is such a symptomatic strategy of framing inscription which delivers the mystic-epiphanic vision of seeing “that it is that thing which it is and no other thing”(P 213). Note that just as Ste-

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phen’s epiphanies are produced by an inscriptive act of preliminary definition, just so our reading of A Portrait as the representation of Stephen’s accession to artistic authority is predicated on our cultural habit of delimitation and repression. The manner in which we have been taught to read makes us draw a thin line around the text, spatialising its five-part repetitive structure to an instance of organic form where the oak at the end of the road is the apotheosis prefigured in the earlier acorn. Thus the Darstellung of Stephen’s definitive crystallisation into an artist (whether true or failed is beside the point) rests upon the convention of reading as framing. The stability and seeming self-evidence of such a reading should, perhaps, be understood as an indication of the reader’s own privileged positioning in a hegemonic culture. Thus Portrait brings into the open the reader’s unconscious ideological assumptions about subjectivity and “the sense of an ending.” The ending is where we place it, and endings serve to preserve us from the awareness of the skull beneath the flesh. The pedagogy of Joyce is that we learn to see that every time we wish to fix a circumscribed identity on his text, its seemingly self-evident coherence has already been blurred by the double exposure of its rhetorical anxiety. The text deprives itself of its self-identical “truth” in its materialisation of itself as doubly written. After all, it is not by accident that Joyce chose the verb “to forge” to indicate Stephen Dedalus’s artistic intention. He selected a verb which semantically redefines creation as a citational, derivative, echoing form of making present and material. To be clear: What I am claiming with regard to Joyce is different from what Phillip Herring called Joyce’s “indeterminacy principle”, which implies that Joyce as a conscious and almost malignant God behind the scene of his creation withholds from his reader the satisfaction of closure, the “Ithaca of meaning that can never quite be reached” (170) – as if Joyce, a malicious Sheherazade, planned to frustrate the reader. Whereas Herring understands Joyce’s textually as the effect of rational design and planned deviance, I am trying to show that its ambivalence relates to the situation of the English language in Ireland around 1882. Joyce’s indeterminacy or open-en-

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dedness is neither the irresponsible playfulness which post-structuralism attributes to it (“it always turns up again, laughing, behind your back” [Attridge 1984: 10]) nor is it the expression of Joyce’s malice. Instead, it is Joyce’s inscription of the death-in-life of the condition of being born Irish while lacking a mother tongue with which to identify, and his attempt to trap the reader in Stephen’s anxiety, in order to communicate effectively the deadlock of entrapment in a hegemonic language which can, by definition, not be rendered as narrative. That Joyce had designs on his reader is an almost proverbial cliché. That the explicit intention to keep the professors busy for centuries, his claims on an ideal reader with an ideal insomnia, his demand that we devote our lives to his text are perhaps not just the manifestation of modernist egomania, but the desperate attempt to be heard and given witness, is something which gains credibility when we place Joyce in a political (rather than a modernist-aesthetic) perspective. Only the emotional response, the articulation of its meaning by the witnessing reader can stop the insistence of repetition, its “bad infinity,” and stabilise the language of the text. Perhaps this is the object of the anxiety of Joyce’s Portrait. Joyce waits for his reader, just as Stephen metaleptically waits for the advent of the other to find himself: “He did not want to play. He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. He did not know where to seek it or how, but a premonition which led him on told him that this image would, without any overt act of his, encounter him” (P 65).

No te s 1

See Christine van Boheemen (1987) The Novel as Family Romance, and Garry M. Leonard (1993) Reading “Dubliners" Again: A Lacanian Perspective.

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2

Lacan, who had met Joyce in the bookshop of Adrienne Monnier, first mentions Joyce in the Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”(1966) where he refers to “A letter, a litter, une lettre, une ordure”. In the preface to the English-Language edition of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis he points to Joyce as someone who had “preoccupied” him much during 1971-72 (ix). And in 1975 he presented as opening address of the Fifth International James Joyce Symposium in Paris what would later be published as “Joyce: le symptôme I”, and which was followed by a series of seminars lasting until the summer of 1976. 3

See “What is a Minor Literature?” where “minority” is defined as belated and disruptive of the self-presence of the majority, which it subjects to resignification and self-translation. 4

The term “encrypting” derives from the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, L’Ecorce et le noyau, whose analyses give dramatic insight into the complex interweaving of hidden or secret information into memory and text. 5

See also Derrida’s discussion of the ‘parergon’ in The Truth in Painting: a supplementary, foreign or extrinsic object, an aside or a remainder, which is neither simply within nor simply outside [a text]. As frame, a parergon rests next to and in addition to a work. Its effect is to question the notion of the essence or purity of presence of/in the work itself: it points to a lack or absence at the heart of the work. It generates an effect which "comes as an extra, alterior to the proper field... but whose transcendent exteriority comes to play, abut onto, brush against, rub, press against the limit itself and intervene in the inside only to the extent that the inside is lacking. It is lacking in something and it is lacking from itself (56).

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Bibliography Abraham, Nicolas & Maria Torok 1987 L’écorce et le noyeau, 2nd ed. Paris. Attridge, Derek & Daniel Ferrer 1984 Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French. New York. Aubert, Jacques, ed. 1987 Joyce avec Lacan. Paris. Bishop, John 1986 Joyce’s Book of the Dark: “Finnegans Wake”. Madison. Budgen, Frank 1973 James Joyce and the Making of “Ulysses” (1934). Bloomington. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari 1990 “What is a Minor Literature?”, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. Cambridge, Mass. Derrida, Jacques 1987 The Truth in Painting. Chicago. Felman, Shoshana & Dori Laub 1992 Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York & London. Gifford, Don 1967 Notes for Joyce. New York. Herring, Philip 1987 Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle. Princeton.

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Joyce, James 1939 Finnegans Wake. New York. 1975 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Text, Criticism, Notes. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York. 1991 Poems and Shorter Writings. Ed. Richard Ellmann, et al. London. 1975 Selected Letters of James Joyce. Ed. Richard Ellmann. New York. 1963 Stephen Hero. Ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. New York. 1984 Ulysses. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler, et al. New York and London. Lacan, Jacques 1966 Ecrits. Paris. 1986 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. (1973) rpt. Harmondsworth, Middlesex. 1987 “Joyce: Le Symptome I” in Jacques Aubert, ed. Joyce avec Lacan. Leonard, Garry 1993 Reading "Dubliners" Again: A Lacanian Perspective. New York. Riquelme, John Paul 1983 Teller and Tale in Joyce’s Fiction: Oscillating Perspectives. Baltimore. Scarry, Elaine 1985 The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World. New York. Van Boheemen, Christine 1987 The Novel as Family Romance: Language, Gender and Authority from Fielding to Joyce. Ithaca, New York.

PROUST AND SUBJECTIVITY 1 Annelies Schulte Nordholt

In recent criticism, Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu is increasingly being qualified as a novel about subjectivity. But there is no trace of agreement as to the nature of this subjectivity: some, stressing the strength and significance of the I-formula, see this I as an absolute, almighty subject similar to the Hegelian self-consciousness (Campion 1992). Seen as the act of knowledge, that is of reappropriation of the world to the self, writing here becomes a way of mending the original division between these two. Others, more adequately, show how the act of self-consciousness uncovers only a part – and the least essential one – of the I. For the eminent Proustcritic Luc Fraisse, the Recherche is a “novel of consciousness – and of unconsciousness” (1988: 89), it opens “the era of doubt projected onto the individual consciousness” (ibid.), revealing a fragmentary, intermittent I. Yet another critic defends the surprising viewpoint that subjectivity degenerates into subjectivism, even into solipsism in Proust’s novel (Terdiman 1976). He sees Proust as the culmination of a progressive isolation of the individual in the French novel from 1850 to 1920. Proust’s radical critique of social intercourse (friendship and love) leads in his view to consider writing as a flight

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from the world and from fellow men. Since human relations are structurally impossible, since there is no experience of anything outside the self, the Proustian I implies a “paroxystic recoil into total subjectivism” (Terdiman 1976: 231). How to explain the great diversity of these views? At this stage, one should remember that, from the beginning, readers and critics have experienced the Proustian subjectivity as a mystery. Back in 1928, Leo Spitzer stated that the main character of the Recherche is a “mysterious self” (1988: 461). Keeping secret his name, his age and his other distinguishing features, at no point in the novel does he unveil himself. For instance all readers know that the I in Combray has no definite age: he is now a small boy playing, now a young man reading Bergotte in the garden, now a mature man reflecting on the past. This one example already makes clear where the “mystery” comes from: it is the complexity of the I, who is on the one hand what is commonly called the "hero" – the man who is, in the present, living through the experience – and on the other hand the narrator, that is the one who, afterwards, recalls the past and reflects upon it. This distance in time and knowledge between hero and narrator is of course inherent to any story: narration itself cannot do without it. But in Proust, even though the hero and the narrator are the same character seen at different stages, the distance between them has become an abyss, and the overcoming this or at least measuring it is the main theme of the novel. It can take on such an importance because the I who tells the story – his own story – is not only, strictly speaking, a narrator, but also a writer, an artist. Thus it is not the history of his life that he is telling but, more selectively, the history of his vocation as a writer. As Genette stated, the main theme of the Recherche is: “Marcel [i.e. the hero] becomes a writer” (1972: 75), it is a novel about the birth and development of literary creativity. When we turn now to other writings by Proust, we find that this abyss between the hero and the narrator, between the one who lives and the one who writes, is the keystone of Proustian aesthetics. In a famous passage in Contre Sainte-Beuve – in fact an earlier,

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incomplete version of the Recherche – Proust argues that it makes no sense to explain a literary work by referring to the life of the man who wrote it, since “a book is the product of another self than the one we manifest in our habits, in society, in our vices” (1973: 153, my translation). This other, “deeper self” (le moi profond) is only to be found in solitude, when we “abstract from others and from the self who knows others” (ibid., 162), that is from the more superficial, social, self. This “deeper self” is the same “true self” (le vrai moi) that comes up in the aesthetic meditation of Time regained. It is the creative self of the writer. Now these terms – “deeper self”, “true self” – have unfortunately led to a questionable, over-idealistic, interpretation of Proust. For many critics, the Proustian self is, on the surface, made up of a multiplicity of contingent, mortal, forever changing I’s, a multiplicity hiding, underneath, the “true self” – a unique, permanent and unchangeable self, the “fundamentum inconcussum” of subjectivity. In their view, the search for an authentic, creative self leads to the transcendental Subject of modern philosophy, as it was conceived from Descartes to Kant, that is to the subject as the act of selfconsciousness and knowledge (cf. Rousset 1964: 141–42, Tadié 1971: 31 and Campion 1992).2 I believe on the contrary that the Recherche is questioning the modern subject. The interpretation that I would like to put forward is the following. Certainly the hero, who cannot transcend his own experience, sees the multiplicity of others and of his own self as an imperfection, he still believes in the existence of an essence, of a unique and unchangeable personality. But the more he approaches to the position of the narrator, the more he realizes that this multiplicity, far from being a mere appearance, is the true nature of the other and of the self. The self is not one-dimensional, but made of successive layers, which are never available for consciousness all at one time. In the end the idea of a permanent, immutable personality is denounced as an illusion, a construction of the intellect: it is the oversimplified image we form of ourselves. Underneath, this unified appearance hides a multiple, fragmentary self. The creative self is the self that is in contact with this multiplicity of past selves, and is able

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to resurrect these selves through reminiscences and through their interpretation and expression in the work of art. We thus come to a totally opposite view of Proustian subjectivity. A creative subjectivity lying very far from the modern view of the Subject as the act of self-consciousness. Though this “true self” only becomes explicit in Time regained, it is in fact present from the very beginning – that is why, at the end of the Recherche, the narrator says that it resurrects or is reborn in him. All experiences where the hero sees his self fall apart – and thinks himself farther removed than ever from his goal – in fact bring him closer to it. In the following, I will focus on two of these experiences of loss of the unified self: the puzzling awakenings in the first pages of Swann’s Way – a key passage where birth of the self and birth of the novel come together – (§ 1), and the extraordinary description of the hero’s mourning over Albertine’s departure and death, in The Fugitive (§ 2). For the conclusion I will briefly return to the relationship of the awakening or mourning self to the creative self (§ 3). 1. The awakenings of the self The view is commonly held that the awakenings which open the Recherche represent one of the two aspects of the Proustian experience of time and of the self. It is the experience of “time lost”: time as discontinuity, contingency, oblivion. The I subjected to it sees itself as mortal, intermittent and without unity. The last stage of these awakenings, day-dreaming about past times and places, can only create a partial view of this past, where everything circles around the traumatic scene of the evening kiss. In contrast and opposition to this, there is the other Combray, generated by the madeleine-experience. Here, in the experience of past and present coinciding, another, more stable and permanent self comes forth. In overcoming time, a unified self is regained, which forms a prefiguration of the “true self” of Time regained. Even though a critic like Jean Rousset sees these two aspects – the temporal and the intemporal – as complementary in the Recherche

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(1964: 143), still a clearly negative tonality affects the first one, transforming the corresponding “I” into an unauthentic self, which has to be resolved in art. If it is to be resolved, then why does Proust stress it? If it is a false start to the novel, then why does he devote the opening pages to it, and why does he place it at such a strategic point of the novel? In short, I will in the following attempt a “rehabilitation” of the self of the “Dormeur éveillé”, showing how this key passage relates the genesis of the Proustian self. This self being the self of an artist, of a creator, the story is at the same time that of the genesis of the novel he is writing. Opening surprisingly with the absent, or only intermittently present self of the “dormeur éveillé”, the novel in its earliest stage warns its reader that, in spite of the initial “I”, it is not the autobiography of its author, but a fictional text. As I said, it is not the story of someone’s life, but that of an artistic vocation, and thus it selects only those elements in the life of the hero that refer to it. But at what point in time is this initial I in fact situated? Is he the hero or does he in some way anticipate the creative, “true I” of Time regained? He is neither, as Marcel Muller has convincingly shown, but is an “Intermediary Subject”: a figure of the I whose role is limited to these opening pages of the Recherche (Muller 1965). An intermediary subject, that means he is neither the hero – whose life he is recalling – nor yet the narrator, who has gone through the whole hero’s experience of life and has realized that he is a writer. He stands in between, relating the two to each other and making the narration of the novel possible. This go-between status can also be extended to the realm of sleep and waking: here too he belongs to neither, going back and forth between the two. Also in the sense that the hero is a sound sleeper, whereas the narrator/writer is an insomniac, as he tells us in Time regained, and the “Dormeur éveillé”, as his paradoxical name may suggest,3 is experiencing the transition between these two eras in his life. But why make the Proustian I spring from the darkness of sleep and the absence of the I, if not to make the genesis of this I, and of the self in general explicit? More precisely to bring to the foreground that the self does not found, or postulate itself in the act of self-con-

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sciousness, like the transcendental subject in modern philosophy, but can only spring spontaneously from the unconscious. And to underline that the unconscious, that oblivion and the absence of the I is the primitive, in the sense of original, and essential state of the human psyche. Consciousness is the exception to the rule of unconsciousness, or at best of semi-consciousness. The reason for this lies in Proust’s conception of perception: since the mind can only apprehend things successively, and is continually distracted by other random associations, what we call consciousness is in fact a succession of discontinuous states of consciousness (cf. Fraisse 1988: 76–77). To the narrator, the state of being awake is but an island in a big sea of sleep, and the writer must take this sea into account when describing human lives: “(...) because one cannot properly describe human life unless one bathes it in the sleep into which it plunges night after night and which sweeps round it as a promontory is encircled by the sea” (RTP II, 83).4 Now why does the ephemeral moment of awakening interest him to such an extent? Here the I is still bathing in the unconsciousness of sleep, but he has regained just enough consciousness, enough self to be aware of his unconsciousness. The “demi-réveils” – where the I is half-asleep, halfawake – are a privileged way of getting a glimpse of the inacces-sible life of the unconscious. This waking, or conscious sleeper is of course paradoxical, as Roland Barthes has observed: “to say ‘I am asleep’ is indeed, literally, just as impossible as to say ‘I am dead’” (1984: 316). Nevertheless, the paradox becomes less strong when one realizes that it is the narrator who is speaking, looking back, and not the “Dormeur éveillé” as an Intermediary Subject. What the “Dormeur éveillé” is after is to see himself asleep and to catch the birth of the self from unconsciousness. The difficulty being, of course, that either the self is still too deeply plunged into sleep to distinctly perceive the unconscious images, or else it is already too conscious, too much awake, so that those images are distorted or simply recede. Finding the unstable balance between these two is not only what the “Dormeur éveillé”, but also what the writer is after, in Proust’s view. One of his essays states that in the

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novel, “one has to extract reality from the domain of the unconscious to make it enter the domain of the intellect, while preserving its life force – neither reducing or mutilating it – as it would, otherwise, be destroyed by the sole light of the intellect” (Proust 1994: 336–337). And Proust goes on to compare this “act of recovering” of the unconscious precisely to “the effort (...) of someone who, still asleep, would like to examine his sleeping state through the intellect, without the intervention awakening him (or causing him to wake). He has to take precautions. But although seemingly a contradictory act, it is not impossible to do” (ibid.).5 The “Dormeur éveillé” being thus parallelled to the writer or creative self,6 it is clear that he is very far from being the “quantité négligeable” that many critics take him for. Let us now turn to the birth of the self, as it is perceived by the “Dormeur éveillé”. In the opening pages, as well as in numerous other places in the novel, the state of unconsciousness caused by sleep is described in the most radical terms. Sleep causes “the world [to] go hurtling out of orbit” (RTP I, 5). When “things, places, years” (RTP I, 6), that is world, space and time, turn around the I in the dark, he loses not only the knowledge of where and at what point of his life he finds himself, but also any notion of the self: “not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was” (RTP I, 5). What remains is “only the most rudimentary sense of existence” (ibid.), previous to all self-consciousness. The “Dormeur éveillé” can confuse himself easily with an animal or even with an inanimate thing: “it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V” (RTP I, 3). He can believe himself to be still the child he was many years ago, or can confuse himself with others, man or woman. Like when in his sleep he believes he has been calling his servant Françoise: “Was it Françoise who had come, or was it I who had summoned her? Was it not, indeed, Françoise who had been asleep and I who had just awoken her? To go further still, was not Françoise contained within me, for the distinction between persons and their interaction barely exists in that murky obscurity in which reality is no more translucent than in the body of a porcupine (...)” (SLT V, 132).7

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Since in sleep “A common oblivion obliterates everything” (RTP II, 1018), the awakening and surging of consciousness is a true miracle. How is it possible, the narrator asks himself again and again, that on awaking we find back our own self: “One is no longer a person. How then, searching for one’s thoughts, one’s personality, as one searches for a lost object, does one recover one’s own self rather than any other?” (RTP II, 86). In other words, how can the self be born out of utter destitution and chaos? Awaking, regaining consciousness is like pulling oneself by one’s hair out of the swamp: an impossible task. That is why the “Dormeur éveillé” is dependent on help from outside. He remains in a stupor until “memory, flooding back, restores to [him] consciousness or personality” (RTP II, 1014). Only then can memory reconstruct the lost self, and put an end to the “amnesia of sleep” (SLT V, 131). With a comical undertone, memory is called here “the goddess Mnemotechnia” (SLT V, 133). This stresses the Proustian conception of memory as not being a faculty that we have at our disposal, but a spontaneous gift which comes from outside ourselves, and which is independent of our will: it is “the instantaneous gift of memory” (ibid.). What sets memory to work is not our will to awake, but “some little aerolith extraneous to ourselves (hurled from the azure by what Unknown?)” (RTP II, 1013), such as “the habit of ringing for coffee” (SLT V, 133). The interesting thing in all this is that the famous unconscious memory comes up right here, in the very first pages of the novel, where the self is born, and not, as is commonly believed, only in the Madeleine experience. Turning back to the opening pages of the Recherche, what I want to show, is that the birth of the self is described here through different stages of awaking, which correspond each to a particular form of unconscious memory: the memory of dreaming, the body’s memory and the memory of day-dreaming. Each of these memories has a creative power, but the last one most, since it is that day-dreaming memory, and not voluntary memory, that generates the whole of Combray I, i.e. the “drama of the evening kiss”.

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The opening lines of the Recherche describe a sleep which is neither long nor deep, and yet, within a few instants, it loosens the ties of consciousness with itself and the surrounding world. This light sleep is a sleep filled with dreams, since in dreams, consciousness, though asleep, is at work and produces images, that it can still recall in the brief moments just after awaking. Dreaming is seen here as an intermediary stage between sleeping and being awake, between consciousness and unconsciousness. It is itself a form of memory. Here, it retains what the I has read just before falling asleep and transforms this material (church, string quartet or rivalry between François I and Charles V) by confusing it with the dreaming I (cf. RTP I, 3). But the memory of dreams can of course have a much greater extent in time: it can, in a traumatic way, make the I coincide again with the young child he was, scared that his uncle might pull his curls (cf. I, 4). This primitive age of his life is linked to the primitive age of humanity, which the I also experiences through dreams. Not only does the utter destitution brought about by dreams make him feel like a cave-dweller (cf. I, 5), but he even becomes again the primitive Adam: an unusual position of his thigh makes him feel as if a woman were lying beside him, making love to him (cf. I, 4-5). This is not just some erotic dream, but an explicit reference to how Eve was created out of a rib of sleeping Adam, and how she was to become “one flesh” with him. The beginning of the novel contains both versions of Genesis: the creation of Eve out of Adam (Genesis 2), but also the creation of the world and of man out of primitive chaos and night (Genesis 1). Indeed the nocturnal room, where time, space and the self are one confused mass, can be read as a reference to this. The presence of the two versions of Creation seems to confirm that these first pages of the Recherche speak about the birth of the self. At the same time, Creation must be taken here as an image of artistic creation, and consequently these pages also speak about the birth of the novel itself. The memory of dreams is a first mode of this literary creation. In the short moments of his first awaking, the I believes himself to be either an inanimate thing, or still a child or even Adam. He is at

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a total loss about his own self and time and place. It is clear that the body plays a primary role here. Nearly all the dreams described here have a physical cause: a deviation from the usual position of the body (for instance, the strain in the position of the thigh just mentioned), or from habits (for instance, the I falling asleep in his armchair). The interesting thing is that the body both confuses the I about itself and its surroundings, and restores these surroundings and the self. Indeed the body has a memory of its own, commonly called the body’s memory (la mémoire du corps). It is “the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades” (RTP I, 6). What the body preserves is less the sensation belonging to a place and time than the position it had, while sleeping, in a determined room. It primarily “remembers”, or rather stores away, in its depths, the orientation of the body in space, and with it the position of objects within this space. It “endeavour(s) to construe (...) the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay.” (RTP I, 6). And still, concrete rooms will only appear to his mind when the I gains access to one further stage of consciousness: that of “waking dream” (RTP I, 7), in French the “longues rêveries qui suivaient mon réveil”. These are dreams that come after the I is “well awake” (RTP I, 9) and aware of the room he is in. But still they are reveries, “rêve éveillé” or day-dreaming, although they come at night, or maybe in the early morning. Indeed the images of the rooms that the I has inhabited during his life spring forth spontaneously, and independently of the will. Besides, they are not clear representations but the diffuse sensations that correspond to those rooms: wintry sensations of agreeable warmth, or of a summer night’s coolness. Sensations of emprisonment or of freedom in space and, of course, the scents, colours and sounds belonging to the rooms described. It is clear that this “waking dream” reveals yet another form of memory: we could call it the memory of waking dream (or of day-dreaming). This is an unusually rich, creative memory: it makes the I recall “our life in the old days at Combray with my great-aunt, at Balbec, Paris, Doncières, Venice and the rest; remembering all the places and

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people I had known (...)” (RTP I, 9). The enumeration, announcing the structure of the Recherche, makes one nearly forget that it is this memory of a half-waking, half-dreaming man – and not voluntary memory – that produces the first forty pages of the novel, the “drama of the evening kiss”. 8 Be it the memory of dreams, or the body’s memory, or even the memory of waking dream, they all have a twofold creative function. Besides generating images, times and places, and more concretely Combray I, the “drama of the evening kiss”, they, first of all, generate the self that is going to experience these times and places. Thus the “demi-réveils” are placed at the crucial beginning of the novel because they tell us of the beginnings of the self, of his emergence out of the indistinct darkness of non-being 2. Mourning or the experience of the multiple self The multiplicity of the other The Proustian view of personality, not as a unified self but as a multiplicity of selves, is nothing new for the reader of the Recherche. Almost all the important characters in the book are manifold beings. The imagination of the hero involves them in a continuous metamorphosis: Swann and the duchess of Guermantes, Gilberte and, most of all, Albertine. It is to adjust to this multiplicity of aspects, that the hero, in turn, falls apart in just as many different selves: “It was perhaps because they were so diverse, the persons whom I used to contemplate in her at this period, that later I developed the habit of becoming myself a different person, according to the particular Albertine to whom my thoughts had turned; a jealous, an indifferent, a voluptuous, a melancholy, a frenzied person (...)” (RTP I, 1010). Thus the falling apart of the illusion of a unified self is only second to the experience of the multiplicity of the other. So let us now take a look at his – here Albertine’s – multiformity. Why, of all characters, is Albertine – and, to a lesser degree, Gilberte – perceived as the most multiple and impossible to gain access to and to know thoroughly? Because she is the beloved one, the object of the hero’s desire. And desire – as well as related faculties

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like imagination and memory – is what pulls apart the personality of the other, and breaks down his or her appearance of unity. This brings us to the well known Proustian “law” that only an unknown being can be desirable: “(...) one only loves what one does not possess (...)” (SLT V, 438). The desire of the hero, and his imagination, only remain active as long as he does not have true access to Albertine, and does not possess her. Such is the case during his first stay in Balbec, when he meets her for the first time (see Within a Budding Grove). His desire of the yet unreachable Albertine generates an infinity of Albertine, and he compares her face (and the human face in general) to “the face of the God of some oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces juxtaposed on different planes so that one does not see them all at once” (RTP I, 978). Here again, we encounter the Proustian view of human perception as defective, since it can only see one aspect, one facet of a person at one time. We are still here at the level of a pessimistic – and fairly banal – lament about the discursivity of perception and the resulting fragmentation of things and beings: it is what Luc Fraisse has called “le fragmentéchec” (Fraisse 1988: XVII). And still in this image of the multifaced primitive god, not only lament but also some kind of wonder is to be felt. As we will soon see, fragmentation will, at another level, take on a creative, aesthetic value in Proust. The work of mourning Towards the end of the novel Albertine, after having been the hero’s prisoner in Paris, suddenly departs and soon after that dies in an accident. In the impressive mourning process of the hero, Albertine multiplies even more radically, she becomes an infinity of appearances, and the self of the hero becomes manifold too. Memory makes him, once again, live through all the successive moments of his love affaire with Albertine. In each of these moments, a different self is resurrected. Just like in the “demi-réveils”, it is memory that, instead of unifying the self, fragments it and brings forth its multiplicity. This memory is an unconscious, or at least a spontaneous one. Recol-

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lections spring forth independently of the hero’s will, to the point of overwhelming him. The unconscious nature of these recollections makes them true. It constitutes a guarantee against erroneous constructions by the hero. For instance, on the first page of The Fugitive the grief inherent to these recollections denies all truth to the hero’s previous idea that he no longer loved Albertine. Grief, the narrator reflects, “is in no way a pessimistic conclusion freely drawn from an accumulation of baneful circumstances, but is the intermittent and involuntary reviviscence of a specific impression that has come to us from without and was not chosen by us.” (SLT V, 490-491). This means that grief is not an idea but an experience. In his grief, the hero not merely recollects his beloved, but for a moment, he becomes again the man who loved her. In the present, he experiences again a bodily sensation or impression received in the past, and the pain comes from the consciousness that the beloved is now absent, and that the sensation will never return. At first, Albertine is only departed, not dead. The hero tries everything he can to get her back. He lives through an obsessive stream of recollections of the common past, but does not at this stage abandon those moments. When news arrives that she is dead, the situation changes altogether. The stream of recollections becomes all the more painful because of his awareness that none of the recollected experiences will ever come back, and that he consequently has to take his leave of them. Mere pain becomes mourning, and its process is remarkably similar to Freud’s “work of mourning”, as described in “Mourning and Melancholia”. In the very same year 1915, both Proust and Freud discover that mourning is not a state nor a static moment, but a process developing itself in time. The hero’s mourning takes a whole year, from summer through winter, to the next spring and summer, and we will see the role that the changes of season play in it. But more importantly, as the expression “work of mourning” (Trauerarbeit) tells us, mourning is, in psychoanalytical terms, a process of transformation and elaboration, in and by the unconscious, of psychic material. Freud makes use of the work-metaphor by comparing the unconscious to a weaver, who puts his recollections of the beloved one on the loom to

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treat them: “Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected [or overdetermined], and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it.” (Freud 1984: 253). In other words, “Each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost object is met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists (...)” (Freud 1984: 265). The I will either die or withdraw his libido from the beloved object (and eventually reinvest it elsewhere). Although the process described by Proust is infinitely more complex and happily lacks the Freudian economical framework, its general structure is identical. Mourning is basically a phenomenon of memory, it is the resurrection, in succession, of a great number of experiences lived through by the hero with Albertine. But, unlike in ordinary memory, these moments are not resurrected in order to be immortalised, but to make the hero become aware that they are dead and gone, that they belong to an irreversible past. Just like the Freudian I, he has to experience once again his desire for her in order to let the desire die down and take his leave of her. Indeed, every recollected common experience at the same time produces the confirmation that Albertine, however vividly recalled, is dead, and the clash between past and present reality. Recalling for instance the common walks in Balbec: “Tomorrow, the day after, it was a prospect of life together, perhaps for ever, that was opening up; my heart leapt towards it, but it was no longer there, Albertine was dead.” (SLT V, 548). The news of Albertine’s death brings forth an extraordinary intensification of the unconscious activity of memory. The hero is flooded with spontaneous and therefore inescapable memories: at any moment, “(...) thousand invisible memories (...) continually exploded around me in the darkness; (...)” (SLT V, 547). As always in unconscious memory, those recollections are produced by present sensations and impressions. In turn, these sensations correspond to the different moments of the cycle of day and night, and later also of the seasons cycle. After Albertine’s death, the hero will first have to live through a hot summerday and night without her. A day and

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night where every detail or sensation brings back the days and nights spent together. For instance, the ray of the setting sun that penetrates the darkened room of the prostrated hero, makes him see “(...) that ray of long-ago sunlight which had made beautiful in my eyes the modern façade of Bricqueville l’Orgueilleuse, when Albertine had said to me: ‘It’s restored’.” (SLT V, 547). Sunset then becomes all the sunsets seen together in Balbec (cf. SLT V, 548). And even the oncoming of night does not bring the expected relief: “a glimpse of a star behind the tree in the courtyard was enough to remind me of the times when we used to set out in a carriage, after dinner, for the woods of Chantepie” (SLT V, 550). The linking of the recollections of the hero to moments and hours of day and night is a remarkably strong device. The cycle of day and night becomes an infernal one: there is no escaping from it, and these hot days and nights will come again and again, as many times as there are days in a long summer. The merciless character of this day and night cycle is enhanced by adding to it the seasons cycle. Every season since the news of Albertine’s death resurrects the corresponding season of the previous year, which saw the highlights of the hero’s love for her. The long summer days, the short nights, the heat: the hero has to go through all this to become aware of Albertine’s definitive absence. Just as he tried to take refuge from the merciless daylight in the night, he expects winter to put an end to his pain. But he does not have to wait for winter to know that it will make him recall that wintry part of his love: “But would not the first frosts bring back to me, preserved in their ice, the germ of my first desires (...)?” (SLT V, 553). And “(...) those January evenings on which she used to come, and which for that reason had been so dear to me, would inject into me now with their biting winds an anxiety which was unknown to me then, and would bring back to me (...) the first germ of my love.” (SLT V, 552). Albertine multiplied After Albertine’s departure, the hero, torn apart by jealousy, wishes her dead, because he thinks that would put an end to his suffering.

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But when the news of her death reaches him, the pain is, of course, in no way suppressed, but only redoubles. He then discovers how the psyche is always delayed in its reaction to external events. There is a considerable gap between the knowledge of Albertine’s definitive absence, and her vivid presence in the mind of the hero. The pain of mourning comes exactly from the incompatibility between these two experiences, and it is the function of the work of mourning to resolve it. This can only be a lengthy process, since also the process of getting to know someone obeys the “law” of perception according to which impressions of someone can only enter our mind one by one, we can never see them all at one time. Or in Proust’s own terms: “In order to enter into us, another person must first have assumed the form, have adapted himself to the framework of time; appearing to us only in a succession of momentary flashes, he has never been able to reveal to us more than one aspect of himself at a time, to present us with more than a single photograph of himself.” (SLT V, 546). That is why we can only liberate ourselves from these impressions by recalling them one by one and successively elaborate and forget them: “In order to be consoled I would have to forget, not one, but innumerable Albertines” (ibid.). Like in a series of slides, the hero sees now this, now that image of Albertine. Brief images, like flashes of lightning: the cyclist “swift moving and bent over the mythological wheel of her bicycle”, the walker in the forests of Chantepie... (SLT V, 558). The images of memory differ from any real slide or photograph, since they do not merely suggest movement by fixing it, but make the hero feel himself “carried back” to them (SLT V, 559), to a past experienced as the present moment. That is why these images trigger the hero to act, for instance to try to caress Albertine through her thick raincoat (ibid.). Every time this enterprise is frustrated, he becomes aware of her death and definitive absence, or more precisely of the death of that particular Albertine, of the cyclist in a rainy Balbec. That is how a fraction of the work of mourning is accomplished. Because they appear in such flashes, the images of Albertine are strongly stylised: “A little statuette on the drive to the island in the

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Bois, a still and plump face with coarse-grained skin at the pianola, she was thus by turns rain-soaked and swift, provoking and diaphanous, motionless and smiling, an angel of music.” (SLT V, 558, the italics are mine). The comparison of Albertine to a statue or an angel of course expresses her classical beauty, but also, more interestingly, her lack of distinguishing features, the idealized impersonality of her features. Indeed, the smiling angel of Reims, of whom the author may be thinking here, has no kind of individuality. The spontaneous and profuse memory of mourning, far from producing a unified image of Albertine, merely fragments her into a thousand pieces. In memory, Albertine can only exist “as she had successively appeared to me in the course of her life, that is, subdivided in accordance with a series of fractions of time (...)” (SLT V, 588). As opposed to memory, intelligence will always try to restore unity: “my mind, re-establishing unity in her, made her a single person, and it was on this person that I wished to arrive at a general judgement, to know whether she had lied to me, whether she loved women (...)” (ibid.). In search of “the truth” about Albertine, the hero has a series of inquiries made on her whereabouts, but they only make her all the more complex and unfathomable, since they make her fall apart into a multiplicity of Albertine. In the end, the multiple image will prevail on the unique image built by intelligence, which appears to be a mere construction. The self of the hero multiplied The work of mourning of the hero makes Albertine into a succession of innumerable Albertines, who resurrect one by one before his eyes. This fragmentation of the other in mourning – and in many other forms of desire – involves a parallel fragmentation of the self: “It was not Albertine alone who was a succession of moments, it was also myself.” (SLT V, 559). Each recollection of Albertine, each situation where the two are involved, awakens a different self in the hero, making him into a manifold being: “I was not one man only, but as it were the march-past of a composite army in which there were passionate men, indifferent men, jealous men – jealous

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men not one of whom was jealous of the same woman” (SLT V, 559–560) – a playful reference to Albertine’s multiplicity but also to her unfaithfulness. Even the pettiest sensations and movements of the hero are painful to him because other selves then discover the absence of Albertine. For instance, just after her departure, the hero is prostrated to the point of being unable to make any movement, to sit down, stand up or walk about, sit still or undertake action. The paralysis comes from the fact that whatever movement he makes, it would awaken a determinate – sitting, standing or walking – I, who does not yet know of Albertine’s departure. Thus the pain comes up anew at every such movement: “at every moment, there was one more of those innumerable and humble ‘selves’ that compose our personality which was still unaware of Albertine’s departure and must be informed of it; I was obliged (...) to announce to all these beings, to all these ‘selves’ who did not yet know of it, the calamity that had just occurred (...)” (SLT V, 490). To find comfort, the hero would have to forget not only innumerable Albertines (cf. RTP IV, 60), but also the innumerable selves corresponding to these. It is one of the reasons for the work of mourning being a lengthy and painful process. Now forgetting is often described in Proust as the dying of beings and things in the mind of the self. They die in the sense that they become out of reach for the present self, for whom they lose their function. Thus forgetting is painful, since it is a process of loss (of the other and of the self), but at the same time it is necessary and healing. At one point, the hero thinks that he can only be comforted if there is a “veritable extinction of myself” (SLT V, 554). At the time, taking death literally, he realizes that it is an impossible remedy to his pain, death leaving no self to be comforted. But later on, the narrator knows that, taken less literally, this death of the self is quite a common thing, that it is happening all the time. Mourning makes us see this process more clearly. Mourning and, in the long run, forgetting is indeed nothing else than the death of the ancient selves of the hero, that were attached to (different figures of) Albertine. After resurrecting for the last time, they are discarded or “die”.

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That is why, when we mourn a beloved one, we also mourn ourselves, the part of the self that was attached to the deceased. This is mainly what is at stake in Proust’s insistance on the multiplying of the self in mourning. This mourning of one’s self (or selves) may be attached to the attitude of the hero after the news of Albertine’s departure and later death. From that moment on, he shuts himself in the house, closes the curtains against the beaming summerlight and the outside world. Prostrated in his room for days, he is a kind of living dead, already lying in his tomb. Interestingly, this attitude of a living dead, cut off from the outside world, is exactly the one that the narrator will adopt, at the very end of the Recherche, when he is near to becoming a writer. In the last pages of Time Regained, writing means dying to the world, becoming “half dead”. Disease and nightlife are only the epiphenomena of this general fate of the writer, for whom everything, himself included, has to “pass through the idea of death”, that is lose its individuality, and with that its aliveness, to be transcended into the work of art. This death of the self is at first a mere loss, and therefore a reason for grief for the hero, but later on, when the work of mourning is nearly completed, he realizes that “new selves” have taken the place of the ancient ones (SLT V, 681). These “spare selves” (ibid.) are so different from the old one that they ought to bear a different name (ibid.), and the hero marvels at having become a being “who would find it easy to endure the prospect of a life without Albertine” (ibid.), “for whom the sufferings of his predecessor are no more than the sufferances of a stranger” (SLT V, 682). For this “new character” (ibid.), the beloved one and the self who loved her, are really dead and gone. An essential question now is the relation between these ancient and new selves within the hero. Is mourning a true transformation–process, a metamorphosis where the ancient selves are replaced by new ones, as the imagery of this passage seems to suggest? But in that case forgetting would have a radical, unproustian character. Ancient selves would be definitively dead and gone, and irretrievable, and the self would have no kind of – unconscious’ memory of itself, which would make the whole enterprise of the Re-

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cherche impossible! Elsewhere, The Fugitive gives a very different, more reflective view of the self, comparing it to a stratified mountain: “Our ego is composed of the superimposition of our successive states. But this superimposition is not unalterable like the stratification of a mountain. Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancient deposits.” (SLT V, 622). This is not the image of a metamorphosis or simple replacement, but of accumulation. Thus when in the work of mourning, new selves come and take over from the ancient ones, these are not entirely dissolved, but subsist as deeper, unconscious layers of the self. At first, this stratified mountain seems the perfect image of the Freudian ego, as if Proust had wanted to express the threefold structure of it (for instance, that of the ego in its earlier version, consisting of consciousness, pre-consciousness and the unconscious). But the narrator precisely refuses the static character of such a structure. His mountain, contrary to the Freudian one, is a young mountain, constantly affected by upheavals or even earthquakes. They make the different layers – the ancient and the new selves – constantly change places. A determined self can be discarded at some point, but it can very well surface again at some other moment, which means that it is being conserved in the unconscious. Unconscious memory can redeem it from forgetfulness. The death of a beloved one, as in The Fugitive, is precisely one of those earthquakes that make the self become aware of its stratified structure. 3. The sleeper, the mourner, the writer The awakenings and mourning are two experiences where the hero becomes aware of the multiplicity of his own self. The hypothesis stated at the beginning was that the deeper, true self of the creator is not the unified, permanent subject of modern philosophy, but precisely this multiple, everchanging, fragmentary self. In what sense then is the man awaking or mourning his beloved akin to the creator that he will become later? What relation is there between awaking, mourning and writing? I have tried to show that in Proust, awaking

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and mourning, although of course not identical to writing, are in a way prefigurations of the creative process, mainly because of the role of unconscious memory in them. Be it in awaking, in mourning or later in writing, the hero experiences a memory which redeems forgotten psychic material but without mutilating its unconscious nature, without transforming it in too clear a reality. In its different forms – the memory of dreaming, or the body’s memory, the memory of waking dream, or of mourning – this memory is a creative one. It generates past and forgotten images, times and places, and the selves corresponding to them. It is unconscious not only because it resurrects forgotten material, but also because it is spontaneous, as opposed to conscious memory (la mémoire volontaire). Reminiscences are brought up not by thoughts but by bodily sensations. Another analogy with the Madeleine–experience is that the reminiscences of the sleeper or the mourner make present and past coincide, be it for a short instant. Thus, the self becomes at least double, since it is simultaneously the present I , and another, past “I”. In spite of all these common points, the memory of the “Dormeur éveillé” and of the mourner is far from being identical to the unconscious memory properly speaking, as it appears in the madeleine or the reminiscences at the end of the novel. If Proust had thought them identical, he could have ended the novel at that point! First, in the “madeleine”-experience and later on in Time Regained, memory has a different structure. Here, one single sensation generates an infinity of past impressions, resurrecting a whole world (Combray, Balbec, Venice...). Whereas the memory of dreaming or of mourning rather has a one to one structure. The hero is flooded with a great number of sensations that bring back to memory one different impression or recollection each. The world that they make resurrect – Combray, Balbec, Doncières in the case of the “Dormeur éveillé”, his love for Albertine in the mourner’s case – is a fragmented, considerably chaotic one, recollections seemingly coming at random. The impressions resurrected by the memory of dreaming or the body’s memory are not only chaotic, but also fleeting ones: they can be contemplated only in the short instant in between sleep and wake.

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Now all reminiscences, the narrator states in Time Regained, are fugitive. They are brief flashes, and only by interpreting, by expressing them – that is by discovering their “laws”, their essence – can they be retained. Not the reminiscence itself, but the essence extracted from it, is permanent. Now this act of reflexion is precisely what the “Dormeur éveillé” cannot perform: he is of course more passive than the creator. Although here too there are forebodings of the future: the “waking dreamer” who, lying in the night, sees all the rooms where he stayed during his life pass by, is already imposing an order on them, and the famous “sentence of the rooms” (RTP I , 7–8) is a remarkable effort of synthesis. And not only this “waking dreamer”, but the mourner too, after the first stream of random memories, starts ordering them. As we saw, he again lives through the whole love story with Albertine, in its chronological order, from summer to winter and on to the next summer. And the “work of mourning”, of course, is also an elaboration and interpretation akin to that of the writer. Besides, looking for the “laws” governing Albertine’s conduct, for her “essence”, he is already performing the task of the creator, even if this “essence” is absolute multiplicity, that is the absence of any essence. Sleeping and mourning prefigure literary creation because they transcend the present, limited self and make it become aware of the multiple selves underlying it. It is now clear that this multiplicity of the self is not to be seen as mere fragmentation and dispersion, but rather as a succession. The self is a whole of successive selves, it is not one-dimensional, but is constituted by a multiplicity of different layers, as the geological image suggested. Most of these layers are hidden in the unconscious, but they emerge in turn, on the stimulus of some sensation or impression, transforming the self into an intermittent one (cf. Fraisse 1988: II ch. 4). Now to make this temporal multiplicity, or rather deepness of the self and of others perceptible is precisely what the narrator sees as his task, as a writer, in the very last pages of the novel. The awareness that, with the oncoming of age, we occupy an ever more extended place in time – whereas in space it is so restricted – generates the brilliant image, in the last sentence of the book, of men perched high

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on stilts, which are growing with their age. Besides this image of physical height, there is also here the imagery of deepness. Albertine seen as having time incorporated in her is a “deep Albertine”. As to the narrator, in order to hear once more, coming from a far past, the ringing of the little bell of the garden gate announcing Swann, or experience again any other past impression, he has to shut out present noises and plunge deeper into himself. In doing this, he becomes aware of his own deepness, caused by the fact that he is carrying in himself all these past times and places, that he is the whole of this resurrecting past. One could therefore give a more original, stringent meaning to the formula referring to the creator as the “deeper self” of the author. Instead of taking it in the psychological sense of a more essential or authentic self, one could relate the imagery of deepness in time to it. In that case the self of the creator is “deeper” than the social self because it has a temporal depth; its multiplicity is a multiplicity in time, it becomes aware of – and makes perceptible – all its temporal layers.

No te s 1

This article was written thanks to the support of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). I would like to thank m y friend and colleague Roy Bicknell for correcting my English. 2

It will be clear that I intend the word “modern” in the strictly philosophical sense of thought from Descartes to Hegel, and not as an equivalent of the literary terms “modernistic” or “modernism”. 3

In referring to these first pages of the Recherche, Proust himself uses this expression, which comes from the title of one of the Tales of One Thousand and One Nights. 4

Quotations from Swann’s Way, Within A Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah are taken from Remembrance of Things Past, vols. I & II, transl. by C.K. Scott Moncrieff & T.

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Kilmartin, Penguin Classics 1983. Abbreviation used: RTP I or II. 5

My kind thanks to Roy Bicknell for translating these two passages from Proust’s essays. 6

For this comparison, see § 3.

7

Quotations from The Captive and The Fugitive have been taken from the most recent Proust-translation: In Search of Lost Time, vol. V, transl. C.K. Scott Moncrieff & T. Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright, London 1996. Abbrevation used: SLT. 8

For this controversial thesis, see my forthcoming book on Proust and subjectivity, part II, ch. 1 (in French). When the narrator looks back upon the “scene of the evening kiss”, he sees it as only an isolated fragment of the past (cf. RTP I, 46–47), and concedes that Combray is more than that. Critics therefore included the scene in this “more”, in this dead remnant recalled by conscious memory (cf. Rousset 1964: 140). But the scene of the evening kiss is, on the contrary, very much alive in the psyche of the narrator! It reduces the past to only one fragment precisely because it is so intensely dramatic, obsessive to the point that it puts any other recollection into the background. Thus voluntary memory is only mentioned, but its products are not shown, since it generates only a dead reality. Another argument for seeing the “drama” as a product of waking dream is that many elements link the “demi-réveils” to it: the dreams bring the I back to Combray, the body’s memory reconstructs the Combray room. Moreover, both passages are about insomnia, and the insomnia of the “Dormeur éveillé” seems a continuation of the insomnia of the child longing for his mother. Indeed what is insomnia but “lying unasleeping, far from m y mother and grandmother” (RTP I, 9)?

Bibliography Barthes, Roland 1984 Le bruissement de la langue, Paris.

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Campion, Pierre 1992 “Le ‘Je’ Proustien. Invention et exploitation de la formule”, in Poétique XXIII, pp. 3–29. Fraisse, Luc 1988 Le processus de la création chez Marcel Proust. Le fragment expérimental, Paris. Freud, Sigmund 1984 “Mourning and melancholia”, in On metapsychology: the theory of psychoanalysis, The Pelican Freud Library vol. 11, Harmondsworth. Genette, Gérard 1972 Figures III, Paris. Muller, Marcel 1965 Les voix narratives dans la Recherche du temps perdu, Genève. Proust, Marcel 1973 Contre Sainte-Beuve, Paris. 1983 Remembrance of things past, transl. C.K. Scott Moncrieff & T. Kilmartin, vol. I & II, Harmondsworth. 1996 In Search of Lost Time, vol. V, The Captive. The Fugitive, transl. C.K. Scott Moncrieff & T. Kilmartin, revised b y D.J. Enright, London. 1994 Essais et articles, Paris. Rousset, Jean 1964 “Proust. A la recherche du temps perdu”, in id., Forme et signification, Paris, pp. 135–170. Spitzer, Leo 1988 Etudes de style, précédé de “Leo Spitzer et la lecture stylistique” de Jean Starobinski, Paris.

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Tadié, J.–Y. 1971 Proust et le roman, Paris. Terdiman, R. 1976 The dialectics of isolation. Self and society in the French novel from the Realists to Proust, Princeton.

A GLIMPSE OF THE SELF Defence of subjectivity in Beckett and his later theatre

Matthijs Engelberts

Il n’y a personne et il y a quelqu’un Textes pour rien (1958: 205)

Samuel Beckett and subjectivity: the topic seems strictly ineluctable. The self in Beckett has in fact been so massively commented on that it seems impossible to deny that the topic is important, if not central and all-pervading.1 And yet, so numerous are the critics who have fiercely denied the existence of the self in Beckett, especially in recent criticism and in reaction to earlier affirmations of the importance of the self in his work, that one wonders why the theme has been treated so thoroughly by them. Ambiguity thus seems the essence of the self in Beckett, for it stubbornly persists in criticism even when it is denied. Indeed the work stresses, I think, this ambiguity as much as the criticism of the absent self has more or less unwillingly done. That is what I would like to demonstrate here, with special reference to the later theatre, because the interplay of simultaneous presence and absence of the self has been explicitly emphasised even less with

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regard to the theatre than for the narrative prose. After having examined, in a first part, the tradition in criticism of the “absent self” in Beckett, I propose to probe some of Beckett’s texts, especially certain later plays, to see how absolute this absence is. For if, in Derridean terms, the metaphysics of presence is de-centred in Beckett, it may in fact be said that absence itself is also deterritorialised, pace Deleuze, by a persistent approach of the self, and is thus as deferred as is its positive counterpart. Presence and absence are both questioned in Beckett, and neither of them, to quote the title of Beckett’s late short text “neither”, is attained. The self casts its most distinct shadow usually at the end of the texts, in these I will examine the tendency towards the self, the images of the pursuit of the self, and monologue and narration as intimations of the self. That the concept of simultaneous presence and absence is not a vague compromise is what will be demonstrated, after the analysis of the texts, in the third part, in which I will try to define the nature of the persistent self in Beckett and to give an outline of its relation with certain philosophical traditions of the self. So we all know, at present, don’t we, that there is no subject in Beckett’s text, no self. Let us start at the end, as the reader is used to in Beckett (“Fini” is the first word of Fin de partie), and quote again the too often cited end of The Unnamable, for it is this last novel of what is commonly called the trilogy, written between 1947 and 1950, that is very often used as testimony to the disappearance of the self. “[S]trange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they [i.e. the words] have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” (1959: 418). We will come back to this passage later and see whether the self is lacking as radically as is sometimes asserted, but it is clear that there is at least some evidence that the self is missing in Beckett. “I’ll never know”: there is no answer to the well-known question the novel starts with: “Where now? Who now? When

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now?” (1959: 293). In the theatre absence seems clear too. In Endgame, Hamm, sitting in his wheelchair, anxiously asks Clov if he is in the centre of the room, whereas it is clear that his central position is lost. The absence of a self may seem even more unmistakable in the later theatre, where characters tend to be less distinctly circumscribed than they are in the first plays, thus echoing an earlier development in the prose texts. In That Time, the voice of an old man tells three different stories to the face of an old man floating three meters above the stage: the fragmentation of the self is materialised in this playlet. In Not I, the title itself epitomises the refusal of the “I” by Mouth telling her story to a faceless Auditor. And in What Where, four doubles torturing each other successively never get to know what “he” said, nor where “it” was said. In criticism, the void of the self has been heavily emphasised. The tradition of interpreting Beckett as writing against the subject is quite impressive. In 1953, the same year L’Innommable appeared, Maurice Blanchot published an article in which he tries to give an answer to the question the text starts with: “Qui parle dans les livres de Samuel Beckett?” (1959: 256). The question is then reformulated: “Quel est ce vide qui se fait parole dans l’intimité ouverte de celui qui y disparaît?” (1959: 257). A void replaces someone who disappears in the void: there does not seem to be a self in Blanchot’s Beckett. But although Blanchot applies his concept of the “neutre” (1959: 259) to Beckett, it is not clear whether for him the self disappears in all respects: Blanchot talks also about “une survivance parlante, le reste obscur qui ne veut pas céder.” (1959: 259). His essay could also be read, minimally so to speak, as a warning against the assumption of a self in Beckett that would correspond to the personal self of the author; and Blanchot has only written again about Beckett in 1990, in a very short text that does not give many clues as to how radically Blanchot denies the self in Beckett. In Germany, the problem was stated quite differently when Adorno published his “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen” in 1961. The essay is a Marxist interpretation, which is also a diatribe against existentialist philosophies, and existentialist interpretations of Beckett; and it ushers in

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Beckett as a negator of the self. Endgame is the “Endgeschichte des Subjekts” (1961: 230), according to Adorno: Die Unmittelbarkeit der Individuation trog; das, woran einzelmenschliche Erfahrung haftet, ist vermittelt, bedingt. Das Endspiel unterstellt, daß Autonomie- und Seinsanspruch des Individuums unglaubwürdig ward. [...] Die Position des absoluten Subjekts, einmal aufgeknackt als Erscheinung eines übergreifenden und sie überhaupt erst zeitigenden Ganzen, ist nicht zu halten (1961: 200).

“Endgame takes for granted that the claims of the individual to possess autonomy and ontological status have become implausible.” Later on in the essay, this statement is repeated in even more decisive terms: Zur Norm der Existentialphilosophie, die Menschen sollten, weil sie schon gar nichts anderes mehr sein können, sie selber sein, setzt das Endspiel die Antithese, daß genau dies Selbst nicht das Selbst sondern die äffische Nachahmung eines nicht Existenten sei. Hamms verlogenheit bringt die Lüge an den Tag, die darin steckt, daß man Ich sagt und damit jene Substantialität sich zuschreibt, deren Gegenteil der Inhalt dessen ist, was vom Ich zusammengefaßt wird. (1961: 226).2

Adorno’s negation of the self in Beckett has been given new vigour by Beckett criticism in the eighties and nineties, although there does not seem to be a direct connection between the more recent denunciation of the self and Adorno’s effort (as we will see, French philosophers publishing in the sixties and seventies gave impetus to the more recent strand). The following list of titles is by no means exhaustive, but only indicative of a particular trend: Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett (Moorjani 1982), Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, Text (Connor 1988), Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Trezise 1990), Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words (Hill 1990), Unwording the World: Samuel

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Beckett’s Works after the Nobel Prize (Locatelli 1990), Beckett’s Game: Self and Language in the Trilogy (Toyama 1991), Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction (Watson 1991), Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama (McMullan 1993), Samuel Beckett and the End of Modernity (Begam 1995), Echos de l’ego dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett (Hunkeler 1997).3 It will be clear from these titles that we are dealing here with more or less overtly postmodern and deconstructive critics. The critics of a “postmodern” Beckett have indeed sometimes been particularly zealous in spreading the good news. Joyously, the trumpets of postmodernism and deconstruction have announced the downfall of the self. It would go too far to quote from all these works to demonstrate in which way they show how the self is deconstructed in Beckett. Perhaps we can just take a few terms from two pages of a review one of these critics wrote about three books in which Beckett is read “according to the linguistic antihumanism of Derrida” (Connor 1992: 121): “a breach within the subject”, the “illusion of the self”s priority”, “disposses[sion] by time of [the] serene ontological self-inhabitation”, “condition of originary self-dispossession”, “the intersubjectivity that grounds and ungrounds every subject-utterance in Beckett”, “ontological unsettlings or alienations of the self from itself”, “intersubjective expropriation [of the self] by the other” (1992: 122-23). And why not add “deterritorialisation of the self”, or “decentering” of the self (cf. Toyama 1991: 64), or “un manque originaire et intrinsèque du sujet” (Hunkeler 1997: 196). Psychoanalytic (Freudian or Lacanian)4 critics usually adopt a similar terminology. Michel Bernard for instance quotes Jacques Lacan: “la «réduplication du sujet que le discours provoque»” (1996: 28). It goes without saying that this critical discourse has been made possible by the attack on the concept of man and author that has been greatly advanced by French philosophers in the sixties and seventies, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault especially. Foucault has even drawn on Beckett more than once to illustrate the absence of the subject in discourse. Having quoted Beckett in the beginning of his text “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur”,5 Foucault writes: “Dans l’écriture, il n’y va pas de la manifestation ou de l’exaltation du geste d’écrire; il

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ne s’agit pas de l’épinglage d’un sujet dans un langage; il est question de l’ouverture d’un espace où le sujet écrivant necesse de disparaître.” (1994: 793). The writing subject continues to disappear: Foucault uses a more circumspect formulation here than in his more combative declarations about the death of man. Nevertheless, negativity has been singled out by critics, and led to the topos of the absence of the self in Beckett. But today even critics that do not belong to the de-constructive and post-modern veins sometimes stress only the absence of the self. A critic like Micheline Tison-Braun,6 who comes to the rescue of the subject, states more or less reluctantly that “Beckett annonc[e] la désintégration de l’homme et de l’humanisme” (1990: 10) and she devotes a whole chapter, “Le Roi est Mort”, to the author only to conclude regretfully: “Si la conscience selon Sartre (et Husserl) s’échappe à elle-même et se projette vers son objet, le propre de la conscience Beckettienne serait plutôt de sauter toujours en arrière, pour se détacher de l’objet: “Moi, je suis loin”, (116) “Moi qui ne suis pas là où je suis.” (114) (1990: 294).7 Beckett is for TisonBraun the radical case illustrating the title of her book – Le Moi décapité – and of her chapter – “Le Roi est Mort”; in other words, the subject is dead. Now, without wanting to come to the rescue of the autonomous, unitary and controlling self – king of the individual world and master of the universe – I think it is time to ask to what degree the self does disappear in Beckett. Or, indeed, to ask to what extent does something that might still be called a self subsist after the radical exposure it faces in the Beckettian world of words? Or maybe one could even ask to what extent this radical exposure brings about the possibility for the self to reveal itself, even if such a revelation seems not very triumphal in Beckett’s world, and is rather an impending one than one that actually happens, in the sense that it does not yet occur, and that it seems threatening at the same time. It is time to see whether a defence of the self in Beckett is desirable and possible. ***

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Tout autre renoncerait. Avouerait, Personne. Plus personne. Tout autre que l’autre. L’autre attend qu’elle reparaisse. Pour pouvoir reprendre. Reprendre le – comment dire? Comment mal dire? Mal vu mal dit (1981: 20)

My claim is indeed that the self is not as absent as its criticisers have pretended – what kind of self we will try to see in the third part of this article. We should beware of linking subjectivity only and exclusively to negativity, of radically rejecting the idea that subjectivity is a goal of the discourse in the Beckettian text. In this part, I would like to discuss three aspects of the presence of the self, or at least of the groping for the self: the persistence of the tendency towards the self in a context of negation of the self, the images of the persistent (approach of the) self in the later theatre, and monologue and narration on the stage, in the later theatre, as ways of unsettling the self while making the issue of the self permeate the dramatic text. 1. The persistence of the approach of the self A glance at A Piece of Monologue, to start with. A man in a nightgown with white hair is standing next to a lamp, and tells a story in the third person of a man standing next to a lamp talking about “death” and “going”. “Two metres to his left, same level, same height, standard lamp, skull-sized white globe, faintly lit.” (265),8 as the stage directions have it. In this text there seems to be only absence, only “going” – even if it seems rather suspicious that these are duplicated when the voice tells us of the image of another “absent” man looking through his “absent” window; doesn’t fragmented absence seem to transform absence into something that is not absence any more? At the end of the story about absence, though, it appears that something definitely resists the general “going”. The story states that the light of the globe alone is failing, but not the other light on stage. Here are the very last lines of the story the man tells.

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In a play where there are supposed to be “never two matters” but only one, and only one room, there are two lights, one of which is “going”. It is the globe’s light, and not “the other one”. Now it is clear that the text makes the reader and spectator ask themselves what this “other” light would be, the “unaccountable” that comes from nowhere and from all sides at the same time. Quite elaborate interpretations have been proposed in criticism. James Acheson is particularly explicit in declaring that the light “represents the lives of men and women through the ages” and the “onward life of humanity” (Acheson 1997: 199). The unaccountable, mysterious light does in fact leave scope for many interpretations, and it is not my purpose to discuss the validity of these – although one cannot but remark that interpretation, in this instance of an Ingardian “Leerstelle”, means filling a gap that does not seem to fit with anything one tries to fill it with, even without considering the question whether the nature of literary texts is necessarily linked with their “polyinterprétabilité”. But it is not impossible to fix an order of plausibility in a range of interpretations by using a criterion that derives directly from the text. “Never two matters, never but the one matter” in a play where a lamp is standing on stage, not alone but next to a man with a definitely “skull-sized” head; to put it bluntly: it does not seem very farfetched to suppose some kind of confrontation between the man and the lamp, in A Piece of Monologue. Now if the “globe alone” is gone at the end of the play, dying together with the voice narrating about the failing light, the one matter that does not yet disappear is the man. The light is thus undeniably linked with the man on stage, who in A Piece of Monologue is in fact as “unaccountable” and “mysterious” as the light. By the way, there is another “gap” in the text that con-

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firms this link. For in the quote above, the two short sentences opposing the light of the globe and the other light are elliptical: “The globe alone. Not the other.” Four sentences separate the last occurrence of the word “light” from these two sentences meaning “[the light of] the globe alone, not the other [light]”. The gap manifestly links the man and the other light, since “the globe alone” (and not its light) is opposed to the “other” – the “other” of the globe on stage being without any doubt the man, one of the two “matters” on the stage. Man and light thus fit in the same unaccountable gaps – without filling it, for sure; but this essential link should not be neglected in any interpretation. The light that does not yet disappear coincides with the man on stage in the dramatic structure of A Piece of Monologue.9 “Never two matters. Never but the one matter.” But in fact there are two matters, as the binary structure of the sentences which follow immediately indicates: “The dead and gone. The dying and the going. From the word go. The word begone.” (269). A lamp, and a man: and the problem is that these are not quite the same “matters”. For the man is a very problematic matter indeed, being there and not being there at the same time: a mysterious, unseizable matter indeed. Is it possible to link this mysterious “matter” to the self, without resorting to a dogmatic dualism of body and mind, lamp and man, or without linking the light to divine presence and spirituality, and without restoring man to a privileged biblical position in the universe? I think it is. The light may seem immaterial, but it is not immaterial in the sense that it is radically different from material matter, since the lamp is also “lighted” for a while. It moreover may be mysterious, it is not transcendent in the sense that it necessitates a non-human force on which human presence depends. And finally, man may not be a lamp, but there is no need to suppose that his different nature gives him a privileged position as a dominating force. Absence is not the only force in A Piece of Monologue, then, for the mysterious light linked to the person on stage resists vanishing. There is certainly “No such thing as whole” (268, 269), and absence thus characterises the play, but at the same time there is “No such thing as none” (265, 266). It may seem curious to consider this presence as the presence of the self, since the light is explicitly described

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as inexplicable. But the close relation between the light and the man, and the dual quality of the light, “on all sides nowhere” (which makes it be and not be at the same time, and which moreover makes the speaker “barely visible” (265) and thus makes him present without cancelling out his absence), and even its unaccountable nature itself, which links it to an important strand of the western tradition of the self, as we will see, all of this indicates that the conjunction of the man and the light represents a self that subsists after the radical experience of loss it has gone through. What subsists on stage is what makes the man be when everything one normally considers as constitutive of the self, i.e. present activities, a past, relations with “he all but said the loved ones” (266), and even language, has vanished. The critical moment of which The Unnameable has said: “ça va être moi, ça va être le silence” (1953: 212) is materialised on stage in the ten seconds between the end of the story and the end of the play. Or, modifying the general statement of Film (“All extraneous perception suppressed, [...] self-perception maintains in being” 163), we might say: all extraneous sources of the self suppressed, the self (nevertheless) maintains in being – for a while. Self-perception in the theatre, especially when it is materialised by the presence of light, is at the same time perception by the audience: the mysterious light makes the audience see the man onstage. If the dramatic function of the light links it to the character on stage, the theatrical function of the light links it to the audience who can watch the character because of the lighting. Light, character and spectator thus coincide in the dramatic and theatrical structure: we will come back to this in the discussion of the question which kind of self is the stripped self of Beckett’s texts. Anyway, A Piece of Monologue is, I think, emblematic of the persistence of the self in Beckett: it shows that something remains, in the end, after the radical questioning of the presence of the self, something that is too important to be only residual and negligible, even though it is “unaccountable” and does not reveal itself otherwise than by its unfathomable nature. A Piece of Monologue is in this respect emblematic of the majority of Beckett’s texts. The self hovers at the centre: even when it is deprived of all its more or less traditional attributes (name, mastery over the body

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or even most of the body itself, memory, unity), there is a continual movement towards it, and in this respect, the self is the crux of virtually all texts. The search assuredly does not lead to a recovered self, but it seems to move closer to a certain kind of self, or at least moves away from what is rejected as not being the self (as in the trilogy) towards something that is a stripped self. The self is not only rejected, but there is at the same time a tendency towards it – or might we even say the it is at the same time exerting fascination and even sought after, for all the pain that the unstoppable quest causes. Let us consider Ohio Impromptu for a moment to examine these as yet unfounded assertions. Reader and Listener – “as much alike in appearance as possible” (285) – sit at a table and listen to a story that is read from a book by Reader. The story is about a man who has lost his companion, and to whom a Reader comes who, before leaving him, reads him a book about a man who has lost his companion, etc. Infinite regress, infinite doubling of an always postponed self: that is what one might be tempted to conclude in seeing these two look-a-likes parting again. The end of the play, though, does not seem to corroborate such a conclusion. Here is what happens when Reader (R) finishes the book: Nothing is left to tell [Pause. R closes the book. Knock Silence. Five seconds. Simultaneously they lower their right hands to table, raise their heads and look at each other. Unblinking. Expressionless. Ten seconds. Fade out.] (288)

This may be the end of a play in which the self is irredeemably split in two parts which cannot subsist without each other but are nevertheless doomed to separation, and which are, moreover, mirrored (the man in the story and his company, Reader and Listener) – it is certainly not an end that suggests only decay or the final disappearance or definitive deferral of the self.10 The act of looking at each

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other, after sitting during the rest of the play with bowed heads and not seeing each other, is on the contrary indicative of a heightened awareness of the situation. Now the situation may very well be that there is no way to integrate the self, the acute awareness of this separation at a moment of imminent paroxysmal separation – the departure of Reader – equals an asymptotic approach of a self that acknowledges its split nature, and thus overcomes its separation, at least momentarily. There can be no awareness of separation without any unity whatsoever. The mutual look materialises this unity in separation: direct contact of the split self with its hardly reachable self. The end of Ohio Impromptu is thus a highly critical moment in which the self is left on its own, without the crutches of narration and the other conceived of as a mere comfort, a moment where it should stand on its own. The self faces itself as it is foreshadowed, in a moment of rare consciousness about its situation. The self that appears at this critical moment is not a shipwrecked self, it is the self on the verge of being. The end of Ohio Impromptu as it is described in the stage directions is all the more telling because it is a departure from what the preceding story read by R told about the end of the reading. The linguistic version of the end of the last reading session is in fact quite different: “Through the single window dawn shed no light. From the street no sound of reawakening. Or was it that buried in who knows what thoughts they paid no heed? To light of day. To sound of reawakening. What thoughts who knows. Thoughts, no, not thoughts. Profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach. No sound. So sat on as though turned to stone. The sad tale a last time told.” (288). This version of the end is gloomier than the actual end on stage: no movement, no look. “As though turned to stone” the characters are “buried”, and either do not see and hear the “reawakening” or it does not occur. Death is much more present in this linguistic end, and no new albeit inexplicable self seems to arise as it does on stage. With the unnamable one might say once more that only after the story, in the silence, “it will be me”. And yet even the linguistic version of the end, in which language seems so intimately linked with death and absence, is quite ambiguous as to whether the-

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re really is no self at all. The intense concentration the end of the story depicts is in its own terms one of both “mind” and “mindlessness”, one of undecided absence or presence of “light” and “reawakening”. Even in the linguistic version of the end, the self is thus not only absent – just as in the stage version the self does not attain an unambiguous presence. The self is absent and present at the same time at the end of the story, as it is so often in Beckett, in a last moment of concentration in which absence and presence seem paradoxically both intensified to the same degree. One must however ask oneself whether the reflection of the self as it appears at the end of these plays is not closely linked to death, and whether this does not mean that the presence of the self is still after all more of an absence. The characters in A Piece of Monologue and Ohio Impromptu do not actually die, but especially in the first play death does seem to be impending. The woman in Rockaby comes even closer to the moment of her death, which might even actually occur on stage at the end of the play, when her head sinks to her chest. If death is imminent at the moment the self is intimated, there is the risk that the reflection of the self is very transitory indeed. The well-chosen title of Michel Bernard’s study is pertinent in this respect: Samuel Beckett et son sujet: une apparition évanouissante (Bernard 1996). Although, throughout his book, Bernard stresses more the latter quality of the Beckettian subject, its evanescence, and although I would like to insist more on the positive aspect of the Lacanian subtitle also, 11 that is the appearance of the subject (– albeit an appearance locked between the rejection of false selves and the immediate “fainting” of the appearing self), it is undoubtedly true that the fading of the self is imminent at the moment it is on the point of appearing. The complete cycle thus consists first of a gradual decline of the self or of multiple selves, until almost “nothing is left”, then an appearance in which the self is foreshadowed, but one that is destined to disappear immediately. How does this dying away relate to the presence of the self? It may be that the self cannot but waver and vanish, even in its most reduced and fundamental state, without for that reason having any consistency at all, or at least without shimmering constantly. Such seems to be the aporia of the self in Beckett,

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and in an important strand in philosophy, as we will see below. Death, that is the death of the body, is then the only way this process can “naturally” come to an end. But maybe, more fundamentally, the ultimate approach of the self brings about death, as though knowing the self endangers the life of the one who knows. Western culture is, after all, characterised not only by the gnoti se auton that was inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi, but also by the danger of knowing oneself. The classical myth that proved to be the most influential in the twentieth century shows this. Oedipus, who defeated the Theban sphinx but not the oracle of Delphi, knows that insight into the self may be disastrous. Destruction is thus sometimes, not only in Beckett, associated with the result of a radical, uncompromising search for the self. The imminent death may also be caused, more simply one might say, by the fact that the disappearance is constitutive of the self, in that the only way it has to assert itself is to disappear completely, in a gesture of radical refusal of being. This is what Beckett has quite explicitly advanced in Eleutheria, the early play he did not want to publish. “C’est là la liberté: se voir mort.” (1995b: 149), says Victor, the refusing protagonist of this play. He clearly states that to be free is to be able to see oneself refusing life altogether. The self in Eleutheria is thus to be attained only in death – and, by the way, already out of reach in this play, since it is impossible to see oneself dead, as Victor too is forced to admit. This would certainly be a way of explaining the close connection between death and the appearance of the shadow of the self.12 But it is doubtful whether the dual nature of the self needs the explanatory detour of the refusal of life that Beckett exploited so explicitly in Eleutheria. Maybe the Oedipal destruction as outcome of the pursuit of the self is a more fundamental, albeit more mysterious, association of the self and death. Anyway, the shimmering of the self may be doomed to be extinguished by death – or possibly even to concur with death – it is certainly not irrevocably denounced in Beckett as a mirage, as completely illusory. The possibility for the self to come about still exists somehow, even if the self can only be intimated. The moment at which the self is on

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the verge of coming into being is close to death, but the self is not death itself. At the end of That Time, the last play we will look at more closely before we go on to the images of the search, the self equally appears in a characteristic blending of absence and presence, which is far from being distinctive of Beckett only. Three recorded stories are told in this play to an old “listener” whose white face is the only visible part of his body. The stories, although told by the same voice (listener’s own, as the stage directions state), come from three different sides and relate three different aspects of what might or might not be the life of the man on stage. Three sides, three stories, three former selves, and a man on stage who only adds to the fragmentation and to the absence, due to his spectral appearance. Is there still anything in this shattered world that might be considered as a “presence, embryonic, undeveloped, of a self”, to quote a statement of Beckett that we will discuss further on? C: not a sound only the old breath and the leaves turning and then suddenly this dust whole place suddenly full of dust when you opened your eyes from floor to ceiling nothing only dust and not a sound only what was it it said come and gone was that it something like that come and gone come and gone no one come and gone in no time gone in no time [Silence 10 seconds. Breath audible. After 3 seconds eyes open. After 5 seconds smile, toothless for preference. Hold 5 seconds till fade out and curtain.] (235).

There is “no one gone in no time”, according to the third (C) story, and only biblical dust. But the end of the narration is followed by a quite unexpected gesture of the man on stage which counteracts this conclusion. A look and a smile, at the end of the play, on a face that is the single focus of a fragmented past, of which the fragments have been converging more and more during the play. This gradual unification and the projection on the single focus of the old face does not mean that a self is being constituted during the play; the face and more specifically the smile is casting the voices back, is reflecting

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them as much as, or even more than being the centre of them. Yet this ambivalent face with its ambivalent but fierce and non-submissive smile is nevertheless an image of the “no one” of the text, not within reach of the voices – of language and narration – and thus transcending them in something that is the nucleus of a self. This is not to say that the “image” on stage, the theatrical presence as opposed to the words of the dramatic text, should be unconditionally considered as the positive counterpart of the negative text. Presence against absence: those are the battle cries in a debate springing from the attack that the resolute post-modern critic Steven Connor launches against the undoubtedly existentialist interpretation of Waiting for Godot by the French “nouveau roman” author Alain Robbe-Grillet (Connor 1988: 115-118). But presence and absence are more subtly intertwined than this debate supposes, not only in the text of the dramatic character, but also in its theatrical image, the actor who plays the part in a set as described in the stage directions. In the case of That Time, it is not the old man himself that should be considered as the virtual presence of the self, it is his reaction, the look and the liberating smile, that is at the same time a challenge issued to the audience. The self cannot be located but in the transcending of itself; but this refusal acknowledges itself as such. The smile is like the “ghastly grinning” (265) of A Piece of Monologue, a protest against what is, and thus the start of something else, however unimaginable and out of reach that might be. When Beckett wrote Eleutheria, right after the war, the main character Victor was very explicit about this protest that is for him the only way to reach the freedom that is heralded in the title of the play: “Je ne serai jamais libre. (Pause.) Mais je me sentirai sans cesse le devenir. (Pause.) Ma vie, je vais vous dire à quoi je l’userai: à frotter mes fers l’un contre l’autre. Du matin au soir et du soir au matin. Ce petit bruit inutile, ce sera ma vie.” (1995b: 162). The self is thus not only absent. Even at the end of the story told by C, there is more conjoining of absence and presence than the “dust” might make one think. The expression “no one come and gone” seems in fact quite contradictory, for if one can easily think of a situation in which nobody comes and nobody goes, things get more

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complicated if no one has come and gone. The negation is retracted by what follows, although evidently not completely suppressed. Moreover, if the negation of “no one” is negated by what follows – and thus externally undermined – it is also internally ambiguous. For the term “no one” itself appears in this light as an oxymoron that epitomises the coexistence of absence and presence of the self. No and one: negation and affirmation at the same time, enshrined in a context that draws attention to the binary structure of the otherwise non-conspicuous negation: “come and gone come and gone no one come and gone”.13 “[T]here is no one and there is someone”, according to the Texts for Nothing (1995a:154) written more than 25 years before That Time; and in both texts the mutual annulling leaves space, not surprisingly, for both absence and presence. It is not only in the later theatre that the quest for the self persists. Throughout Beckett’s texts, the discourse is aiming at a self, at touching something that might be considered a self without being instantly rejected. It is not only because of the falsehood of the self, it is not only to attack or “deconstruct” the self that the topic of the self is present to such a degree in Beckett – and in the writings of his literary critics. The lasting force of the negation itself seems to indicate that there is more to the self than just non-existence, absence; but independently of this continuation of the negating force, I think there is also an effort to reach the self, an effort to create presence, despite an absence that, in Beckett, is far from being the absence “sans nostalgie” that Derrida called for, far from being “rire” and “danse” (1972: 29).14 “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet I,5), that is what we might say to critics who too intently look for absence and who think presence only is subverted by its counterpart. To consider only the falsehood, splintering and denunciation of the self is to deny a fundamental aspect of Beckett’s texts: the strive towards an answer to the question: what could the self be if it is not what is rejected in this text. The self is a “less” that would be “more”, to use that amulet15 of Beckettian criticism – which does not mean, obviously, that there is in Beckett a “renaissance” of a subject who fully knows and masters

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itself, and who uses this knowledge and mastery in extending it to the world surrounding itself. Maybe we can take a look at two prose texts that do not belong to the later work; in doing so, we can verify the statement that it is not only in the later theatre that the self persists, and see at the same time which critics have so far attempted to insist on the groping for the self that continues, notwithstanding the continuous rejection of the self.16 The end of The Unnameable has already been quoted above because it is often regarded as the final dissolution of the self: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” “I can’t go on” refers, for sure, to everything that makes it impossible to reach anything that might be constitutive of the self: language for instance, narration, or despair and the will to get rid of the incessant groping, and also disbelief in any progress whatsoever and in any goal that might be pursued. And yet “I’ll go on.” What is it that makes the voice go on? Language? Certainly not: language is what makes the voice fail. But though the voice cannot succeed, it can fail better, as Worstward Ho, the last text of the “second trilogy”, has it, and that is what makes it go on. I’ll go on, to fail better in continuing the approach of something that might be an “I”. There is apparently something that transcends the false self of language and narration, and that is therefore unreachable but nevertheless the point towards which the voice crawls. It is certainly true that the movement towards the self inevitably takes the searching subject away from the self, into language, narration, and therefore into continuous, vain striving. This is what David Watson stresses when he says: “The search for the real self compulsively re-enacts the entry of the subject into language.” (Watson 1991: 51). Thus the continuation of the approach is at the same time a way of postponing the self – or in more Derridean terminology: of deferring the self. “Je nous manquerai toujours.” (Beckett 1953: 87). But it should be stressed at the same time that the effort, although vain, is not aimless in the sense that it tends towards a specific point. And the aim is obviously not the postponing itself, the victorious absence of postmoderns – why should the approach be continued if the only reason would be to postpone the result of it; it is the unseizable, unattainable self.

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In an illuminating article entitled “Beckett’s Trilogy and the Limits of Self-deconstruction”, Helga Schwalm makes the following comment on the last words of The Unnamable: “The trilogy, then, seeks to deny the subject knowing that it can never be fully denied.” This paradox is not often enough recognised in criticism, which has for the most part seemed to embrace rather frantically (after an initial period of disregard for the problem or of a rather traditional approach which does not sufficiently take into account the problematic nature of the self) the idea of absence rather than the more discriminating, and equally more difficult position, of the paradox of absence and presence, of denial and affirmation (or should we say of denial of the self and of denial of the absence of the self). “Beckett insists on the impossibility and at the same time on the indispensability of the subject” (1997: 188). Only very rarely, and then it is mostly in quite recent criticism, astonishingly, does one find an illustration of this position as perceptive as that of Schwalm.17 There are a few notable exceptions, though, of which the most important one is undoubtedly Wolfgang Iser, who in 1972 rightly emphasised the complex nature of the self in Beckett’s trilogy. The title of his chapter is eloquent: “Subjektivität als Selbstaufhebung ihrer Manifestationen”. “Subjectivity as the autogenous cancellation of its manifestations”: the fact that all manifestations of subjectivity are rejected is for Iser itself a kind of subjectivity. While acknowledging the continuous discarding of the self, Iser stresses that this process is itself a manifestation of the self: “[D]er Grund des Selbst [kommt] im fortwährenden Überschreiten seiner Manifestationen zum Vorschein.” (1972: 261). The other notable exception is Wright, who fulminated against deconstructive interpretations of Beckett in 1983 — Iser did not yet have any polemical intention. But Wright’s resistance to the deconstruction of the subject concerns the author only, as if the self in a literary text is necessarily the author’s (we will get back to this issue below when discussing the kind of self that persists in Beckett’s text). Furthermore, Wright stresses the presence of the author so much (unfortunately without quoting many passages in Beckett that prove this presence) that the question of absence is overlooked.18 This more or less early recognition19 of the paradoxical nature of the self in Beckett

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are nevertheless, just as Schwalm’s more recent one and as most others,20 explicitly linked to the trilogy: it is time for a reappraisal that concerns not only that strongly stated and, in comparison to most of the later texts, almost explicit work. One might object that what I have tried to show may be plausible for the later texts, but does not seem to fit with the earlier work. After all, one could say – against those who see a remarkable continuity in Beckett’s texts – that apart from the pre-war texts, there is a difference between the texts written in the productive years right after the Second World War, and the later prose and drama texts. Handwerk (1992) is very unhesitating in this respect: for him, there is a Cartesian (“constrictive,” 1992: 66) self up to the first trilogy, and only afterwards can one distinguish the contours of what he calls an “intersubjective” (Lacanian) self (1990: passim). I would not defend such a radical periodisation as far as the self in Beckett is concerned – nor the transition from a “substantial” to a “differential identity” (1992: 71) Handwerk describes in Company. Although the later texts appear to linger less reluctantly at the frontiers of the nevertheless unfathomable self than the immediate post-war texts, the self is a significant and even explicit, relatively unchanging problem, not only in the trilogy or the later works, but also in the pre-trilogy texts. First Love was written right after the war, but before the trilogy, and is in many respects still imbedded in the style of the younger Beckett. Here is what the narrator of First Love professes, talking in a quite abstract way about his first sexual experience with Lulu: “One is no longer oneself, on such occasions, and it is painful to be no longer oneself, even more painful if possible than when one is. For when one is one knows what to do to be less so, whereas when one is not one is any old one irredeemably.” (1995a: 31). Read superficially, the first sentence of this passage seems to mean that to avoid pain, one should try to be oneself. But the pain the self feels as much when it is itself as when it is not itself announces the second sentence, in which the self is allotted the paradoxical task of suppressing itself. Not to such an extent however that the “mitigable” self, as the text has it (1995a: 31), gets lost altogether: the subject is needed to

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avoid itself, such is the dilemma of the inescapable subject. There is no way out of the dilemma of the self. There is certainly much mockery in these two sentences – philosophy in the wake of love perhaps seems suspicious anyway –, to such an amount that the whole subject of the too often reiterated “one” seems to be evacuated to the dustbin of philosophy; but at the same time the dilemma is very clear and the mockery bears as much on those who believe subjectivity to be a solid, indubitable foundation as on those who believe it a mere epiphenomon, a construction of a mind longing for mastery over itself, over language and over the world. The self is not in Beckett’s texts a solution to insecurity, a way to avoid fragmentation and instability; it is the confrontation with insecurity and decentring. One needs to be one, to see one is not one (for if one would simply be one, one would not see one is not one). What is expressed here in the burlesque mode is what the late theatre shows in a more pervasive, concentrated and austere way; there is a remarkable unity in the approach of the self in Beckett through time. The comic digest of First Love is not very different, in its basic assumptions, from what happens in Ohio Impromptu. Even though subjectivity is to a certain degree an invention aiming at avoiding the pain of the absence of a stable self, the complete absence of the self is a far more radical way of escaping the suffering. That is what makes the negation of the self unacceptable even in the hellish world of Play, in which the first woman says: “Dying for dark – and the darker the worse. Strange.” (157). If being oneself is not an option in Beckett’s world, being without a self, or more precisely, abandoning the approach of the self is even more of an impossibility. Such is the Beckettian dilemma, and, one might add – I will try to make this acceptable later on –, such is the modern(ist) dilemma in its most acute manifestation. 2. Images of the approach of the self and the confrontation with this tendency The reading of the end of some later plays has shown that the privileged moment of the approach of the self is the end of the text,

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partly the end of the discourse but even more so the end of the action, that is, the stillness of the “ten seconds” or so that precede the curtain and follow the words. But the asymptotic approach of the self does not only have a privileged moment, it is also accompanied by phenomena that seem to be closely associated with the approach of the self in Beckett. Two of these privileged phenomena deserve special attention because of their importance, and also because they are not generally recognised in criticism as closely linked to the movement towards the self. We have already come across them while examining the quest for the self in the later theatre: light and look. Now, it would be wrong to say these are symbols of the self, since there does not seem to be anything in the Beckettian universe that can make the self appear as something that takes a definite form. But it does not seem wrong to call them images of the tendency towards the self at the moment the approach leads to the critical point where it reaches a limit it cannot transgress. A special kind of light is indeed sometimes indicative of the pursuit of the self and the final approach of the self. This is especially true of A Piece of Monologue, in which the faint, mysterious light that does not disappear points to the persistence of the movement towards the faint and mysterious self. The use of this kind of light in earlier plays seems to have been an afterthought for Beckett. In Footfalls for instance, the stage is “[a]ll in darkness” (240, 241, 243) between the four parts of the play in which a mother and a daughter, May, consider the continuous pacing of the daughter, up and down the same narrow part of the stage. This is not the case any more in the French translation of the text, entitled Pas. There is now not only a “[f]aible spot sur le visage le temps des haltes” which is added to the lighting of the narrow strip of the English text, but there is also “[a]u fond à gauche, un mince rai vertical (R) 3 mètres de haut.” (1978: 8). This strange ray, which recalls of course the strip the daughter is pacing on, is not extinguished during the pauses (1978: 10,13,17), and only disappears at the final moment of the play, after the “ten seconds” of empty stage on which there is “[n]o trace of May” any more. The French text thus adds to the faint but haunting presence of the self in Footfalls a mysterious light which does not

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vanish when the other light dies, and that is constant as opposed to the other lighting which is dimmer after every pause. One might be tempted to say that the ray only indicates the presence of the mother, who is not on stage and whose voice only is heard. But the whole play is about the daughter “revolving it all” (1978: 240,243), trying to “tell how it was. [Pause.] It all.” (1978: 241). And the “it”, which some might want to link to the Freudian id, thus linking it to the fragmentation and the absence that are indeed so characteristic of this play, is explicitly identified with the daughter twice in the text, by mother and daughter.21 It, she and light: all absent, but all mysteriously present at the same time in a process of painful revolving. The afterthought in Krapp’s Last Tape is not testified in either the English text or the French translation. It is only after his being actively engaged in directing that Beckett has introduced a light that keeps on burning in his play about an old man and a tape recorder. In 1969, when he was working on the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt production, he wrote in his notebook: “Magic eye built in recorder case faint glow in dark till cut off by curtain.” (Knowlson 1980: 40). At the end of the play, Krapp seems to abandon his thrusting search for what would be constitutive of his actual self, and ends up returning to a former period, and even to something that in that period he has not experienced as something that was of any importance to his self. This may be called a regression when one adopts the position of the Krapp who successively rejects all his former selves. But does Krapp really renounce the search for the self in deserting his tape-recorded oeuvre? Or is the longing for fusion that manifests itself in the scene on the lake more constitutive of Krapp’s self than he wished to know? Krapp’s acknowledgement of the importance of a former, rejected self is quite uncharacteristic of Beckett, who has called this play, quite uncharacteristically, “nicely sad and sentimental” (Knowlson 1996: 399). But the approach of the self is not uncharacteristic. There is not only absence in the stillness of the end of Krapp’s Last Tape, in which two silences converge, the actual silence of the old Krapp and the tape’s silence, that “runs on in silence.” (63). Crucified by contradictions, Krapp is nonetheless characterized by a “magic”, “faint” but invincible persistence, of which the image is the

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light of the “eye”. Whereas this play so remarkably demonstrates the instability of the self through time, something keeps on burning in the void. Beckett even envisaged another instance of the “eye” in his notebook: “High on wall to cour of cagibi (cubby-hole) small convex glass or polished metal gives meaningless gleam throughout” (Knowlson 1980:40). The “magic eye” with its “meaningless gleam” condenses the quest for the mysterious self – the magic “I” – into a mysterious presence. It should be noted that the faint light is obviously not the only kind of light in Beckett’s theatre – nor the only kind connected with the tendency towards the self. Besides the subdued, dim light, there is for instance the harsh light of Happy Days and of the spot in the first part of Play. Winnie, embedded in the mound of Happy Days, lives in a deluge of never-ending light from which there is no escape: the umbrella she unfolds ignites, leaving her without protection. With the ringing bell that wakes her up at the beginning of each act, the light plainly represents an obscure, tormenting force that seems to be looking at her constantly. The man and the two women in Play are subjected to the same kind of light, in the first part of the play in which they tell their story of marital and non-marital relationships in front of a spot that lights them one after the other. Again, an obscure onlooker makes the characters be. But should this calling into being be connected with the self? Surely there is a relation with the character’s consciousness; but the conscious state that the glaring light provokes is usually accompanied by what could be called a presentation towards others. Winnie, dressed as a lady, starts her social talk, and the three characters of Play tell the story they lived together. The stinging light thus provokes a more visible self, one that is exposed to the look of others, a determinate social self. No wonder then that the characters are trying to get away from the glaring light, that is much more painful than the diffuse or only hardly perceivable light of A Piece of Monologue or Krapp’s Last Tape. The harsh light is the light in which the self is forced to be what it is already rejecting. Now this is not to say, and this is an important point, that there is no desire to also get away from the “poking and pecking” of the “[h]ellish half-light” (152), as the two women in Play call it. Even

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the dim light, although it is more indicative of the search for a self that possibly would not be rejected, provokes the pain linked to the question of the nature of the self, which makes the interrogated curse the obscure interrogator. Torture can thus be an apt description of the tendency towards the self, as What Where shows. In pointing out that there is an approach of the self in Beckett, I am indeed not saying there is no tendency towards eradication of the self, no movement away from the self. There is definitely a will to escape the search for the self; a more or less Schopenhauerian search for suppression of (the search for) the self, a repeated attempt to abandon the pursuit of the self altogether. “Time and grief and self so-called. Oh all to end.” (1995b: 265): those are the last words of Stirrings Still. Partly this will stems from the difficulties of the quest, and is thus a retreat from the pain of the movement towards the self. But it is also, more fundamentally, independent of the pursuit of the self in that it is its negative counterpart: if the tendency towards the self leads away from the false selves to a more fundamental self, there is also a movement away from the false selves towards not another self, but towards annihilation. The tendency to escape the self is thus as basic as the search for the self — almost as basic, as we have seen with regard to First Love. But it exists, I think, in addition to the pursuit of the self, and it is not the only tendency. This ambiguity of the pursuit of the self has been very effectively summarised by Beckett, in a burlesque mode that might conceal how poignant this résumé is, in one of the poems assembled under the title Mirlitonnades. Chaque jour envie d’être un jour en vie non certes sans regret un jour d’être né (1978/1992:39)

However, even if the tendency towards eradication actually were the only tendency, or the basic one, it should be remarked that the deconstruction of the self in Beckett is abortive, for there is no end to it. Like in Schopenhauer, the complete liberation of the self is out of

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reach: it seems impossible to circumvent the self, however painful that may be. The elusive self cannot be eluded. The persistent will to suppress the self does not reach its goal, ultimately. The erasure of the self thus leads to a persistent approach of a resisting stripped self, to an, in a sense, involuntary, but nevertheless inevitable, approach of a more and more nuclear self that cannot be suppressed. This is what Beckett’s Film shows us in what can be called a rather crude way. If one sometimes tries not to be one, one is still obliged to be one, at the same time: at the end of Film, Buster Keaton as E (eye), whom we have not seen before, is looking at Buster Keaton as O (object) who tried so much not to be seen or to see himself. It is as though escaping the self necessarily leads to the inescapable self. There is thus only an “abortive” deconstruction of the self, due to the resistance of the self which offers opposition to its dismantling and subverting. This resistance is assuredly not the same thing as a persistent quest for the self. But the outcome is quite the same. Willed or not, the nearing of the self is inescapable. The attempt to get rid of the self ultimately fails and therefore leads to a continuing approach of the self, which cannot be called a search but which leads in exactly the same direction and to the same result: a self absconditus only to be neared asymptotically. One last word about the search for suppression of the self. Are we to look Eastwards to find this opposite of the approach of the self, that is the longing for suppression of the self? We might tend to, drilled as we are to find the ‘other’ in the self, or “l’autre” in “le même”; in other words, the other undermining the latter from within. And one could certainly think of Beckett’s Schopenhauerian connection, and of the philosopher’s utilisation of the oriental escape of the self, to give some kind of plausibility to an eastern element in Beckett. But I am afraid it would be misleading to link the suppression of the self to the eastern tradition as such. For in Zen-Buddhism, for instance, forgetting the self is a way of gaining access to a higher state, a liberation that leads to enlightenment and a continuing state of harmony. Now there may be an escape from the self in Beckett, but there is certainly no salvation. Death may end the search, and perhaps the suffering at the same time, but enlightenment, salvation and

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harmony are definitely out of reach. Just as there is no guarantee whatsoever that the self, if it could be attained, would rule out the pain that pervades the Beckettian world, there is no hope that leaving the self behind leads to harmony and a higher form of consciousness and being. But let us return to the light as an image of the approach of the self, before continuing with the look. It should be noted that in the theatre, the light is certainly also the transmutation of a less obscure force, that is of the theatre itself with its relation between characters on stage and spectators in the auditorium. This is quite clear in Play, with its theatrical title and its theatrical spot, placed between the actors and the audience, which “provokes” the speech of the characters. The light is here very clearly related to the silent onlookers that the spectators are in theatrical reality. Now this does not mean that the light, in linking the real audience to the imaginary world on stage, is not at the same time an element of the imaginary world, where the spot forces the character to tell his or her story, and where it is an image of the tendency towards the self. In Play, one might say, the spot manoeuvres the spectator in the position of the self that is searching for itself. Self and audience are linked in the theatrical setting of Play – as if the audience was looking for itself. Self, light and audience are thus interrelated, as we already anticipated when discussing A Piece of Monologue; this connection will be useful in dealing with the question of the nature of the self in Beckett. If the light allows the audience to look, the character’s look on stage is also a phenomenon that is closely associated with the approach of the self. We have already noted this in Ohio Impromptu. There are more plays in which the mutual look of the characters materializes a heightened awareness in a critical situation which calls forth the inescapable but unseizable self. At the end of Happy Days, Willie has crawled to Winnie, and this is the first time the audience sees the couple looking at each other. Willie forces Winnie to acknowledge their situation, and his look prefigures the one of Ohio Impromptu. “What ails you, Willie, I never saw such an expression”, she says before the final look that ends the play, and, vehemently: “Don’t look at me like that.” (1986b: 167). They look at each

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other in a dramatically, critical moment which suggests that they are, or are forced to be, more fully aware of themselves than they have been up to that moment, and that they are thus nearing a more fundamental self than they have ever done. In Not I, the look is not a final one, but a continuous gaze. Negativity is anchored in the title of the play, which Kristeva has called the “aveu syntaxique d’un objet impossible” while linking it to a “sujet impossible” (1976: 262). Impossible, yes, but searched for all the same. The Auditor is “shown by attitude alone to be facing diagonally across stage intent on mouth” (216). And it is the Auditor who performs the “movements” after each “vehement refusal to relinquish third person” of Mouth: a “sideways raising of arms from sides and their falling back, in a gesture of helpless compassion” (215). Auditor and his or her gaze thus keep confronting Mouth with the self: a silent, dumb, insisting and yet compassionate emphasising of the self. The look is not always directed at another character or double: it can also be pointing at the audience. This is the case in That Time, as we have seen. It is doubtful whether the three looks preceding the final one that we have examined above can be interpreted by the audience as directed towards them, for the listener simply opens and closes his eyes to the rhythm of the voice that tells the story or stops telling. Listener thus seems to be just “staring beyond”, as the story in A Piece of Monologue calls it. But at the end of the play, the smile unexpectedly transforms the staring, unseeing eyes into the seeing eyes of a confrontation with an absent other – or self – due to the inherently communicative nature of the smile. The sudden manifestation of the self at the end of the play thus concurs with the unveiling of the presence of the audience, as if the fiction of an old man alone collapses into the reality of someone in front of an audience. The look here ties together self and audience. This is even more markedly the case in Catastrophe, Beckett’s “political” play, in which an actor is manipulated by a director and his assistant. The stage directions are unambiguous here: the actor, called Protagonist, whose head has been bowed throughout the play, “raises his head, fixes the audience” at the end of the play, before a “[l]ong pause” followed by the final “[f]ade-out of light on face” (301). The only active mani-

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festation of the manipulated Protagonist is this look directed towards the spectators. These cannot fail to feel that the look is directed at the spectators, since the reaction of a fictive audience (“Distant storm of applause.”) immediately precedes the look of the Protagonist. And they cannot fail either to consider this gaze as a manifestation of a self, albeit a stripped one, for the look is the only self-defined gesture of the Protagonist and has been explicitly rejected by the director. Here, the confrontation provoked by the look clearly not only reveals what can transpire of the self of the character on stage, but also discloses the presence of the audience, and even forces the spectator to define his or her attitude towards the action – quite an uncomfortable position, for should one applaud as the fictive audience has done, or refrain? The glimpse of the self at the end of Catastrophe thus induces a heightened self-consciousness in the audience. It is as though the audience was looking at itself and uncomfortably confronting itself, just like the character in Film is looking aghast at itself at the end. Light and look: these images of the approach of the self are linked, of course, for radiance and the eye are both needed to see. It should be stressed though that they are both evanescent phenomena. There does not seem to be anything lasting and ponderous to be associated with the movement towards the self in Beckett. One more thing should be noted then, before going on to the next aspect of the grasping for the unattainable but inescapable self. It is quite often suggested that the presence of the body in the theatre guarantees the presence of the self. Such a statement goes a lot further than what I have tried to show here about certain (evanescent) phenomena, look and light, that accompany (and do not guarantee) the tendency towards the self (and not the self as such). Schwalm (1997: 189) and others have advanced this equation of the body and the self, that seems to stem from an unreflective conception of the self and of theatre, as if Pirandello had not written Six Characters in Search of an Author for actors, or Strindberg the “interior action” of To Damascus, while at the same time calling into question the solidity of the self and the immediate presence of a self that is supposedly guaranteed by each actor’s body.

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The identification of the body in the theatre and the solidity of the character is in fact a persistent idea in Beckett criticism of the drama (e.g. Abbott 1996: 45, Lyons (1990: 116), Ben-Zvi 1982: 10), but one that does not deserve emulation. For one thing, if the presence of the body would prevent the destabilisation of the self, this effect would only be brought about on stage: there is clearly no actor in the text, whereas almost all critics who defend this idea are analysing texts, not performances. But even in the virtual performance as it is outlined in Beckett’s stage directions, it is doubtful whether the body has indeed the unifying virtue that these critics presume it has. First of all it is clear that the body is in Beckett’s theatre a far too problematic object to be elevated to the rank of founding the subject. Paralysed, stuck in jars or earth, doubled even as in Ohio Impromptu, torn apart as in Not I and even absent as at the end of Footfalls, its unity and power is questioned as much as the self. There sure is a physical quality of Beckett’s theatre (one should not deny this as Connor has tried too radically to do when he rightly attacked the idea of an “innocent self-evidence of the body”, 1988: 168, cf. 155-169), and this is a very important characteristic of it as opposed to the novels. The body of the actor inevitably gives a corporeal quality to the theatre, and Beckett makes use of the theatrical physicality and even stresses it. But this physicality does not provide a firm ground to a self rising as a phoenix from its ashes in the simplicity and solidity of theatre. The body is questioned as to its firmness, and even if it was not, one should not forget that the body of the actor does not equal the presence of the definite self, as Pirandello and others have shown. Moreover, if somehow the ghostly nature of the character could be attenuated by the presence of the body on stage, would it not be astonishing if the presence of that body would amount to the presence of a self in Beckett? There is, I think, hardly any philosophy of the self, except for the notable exception of Nietzsche’s provocation,22 which grounds the self in the pure corporeality of the human body as such,23 as if the body could miraculously solve the problems of the definition of the self. And there is, furthermore, no reason whatsoever to think that, for Beckett, the self does simply equal the body. This is not to suggest that in Beckett there is no cor-

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poreal foundation of the self, as if he were one of the radical dualists that so intrigued him for a time;24 but what should be avoided is to simply equate the self-evidence of the body and of the self. 3. Monologue and narration in the dramatic texts The persistent tendency towards the self has its privileged moments and is accompanied by privileged phenomena. Furthermore, it is often characterized by a specific linguistic form, which departs from the traditional dialogue. In the late theatre, there is indeed mostly one voice only. Frequently, it tells a story instead of being engaged in non-narrative monologue, the latter being usually more tied to the actual situation of the speaking character than narrative is. There is thus a high degree of mediation, of reduction to a single perspective through which all linguistic information is conveyed, as a result of monologue and narration in Beckett’s late theatre, which tends to explore the limits of theatre – without therefore abandoning the pursuit of the fundamentals of this art. Indeed, in Beckett’s later theatre, monologue at first (from Krapp’s Last Tape onwards) and later on narration (narrative monologue) have breached the law of the directness of theatre. In the case of monologue, the spoken text is limited to one character, which means that all the linguistic information is given from the perspective of a single voice. In Happy days, for instance, the audience has hardly any information about Willie who is silently hidden behind the mound, because Winnie is the only one to speak, and it is through Winnie that the audience gets all its information about the fictive world other than the information stemming from what can be seen on stage. In the case of narration on stage, mediation is even more present: in principle the narrated action is wholly mediated by the narrator, as the dramatic action is limited to the act of narration itself. Monologue and narration are thus forms of mediation, of indirection: the presumed direct action of theatre is reduced to a single voice. Between the action and the audience stands the one that speaks, however undefined and unseizable this “one” is.

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Now the theatre is very generally considered, since the beginning of literary theory in Antiquity, as an art where the action is presented “directly”, and not indirectly via a narrator as in the novel. It has, therefore, sometimes been defined as the objective genre, especially in Romanticism. But even if nowadays this view of an “objective art” appears to have declined as much as the idea of literary genres per se, the theatre as literary art is, today, still almost always distinguished from the novel and other narrative texts on the basis of the technical criterion of mediation: there is no mediation in the theatre because there is no narrator through whom the action is presented. In the course of the twentieth century, though, theatre has in various ways encroached on the novel’s territory in striving to incorporate mediation. Peter Szondi has insisted on this idea to such a degree that the German theoretician has made the irruption of the epic in the theatre the basic notion of modern theatre. It is in his view “das »Subjekt der epischen Form« oder das »epische Ich«” (1963: 13) that is characteristic of the modern drama since the end of the nineteenth century. In an epic context, Brecht’s theatre immediately springs to mind, and indeed Szondi treats this form of epic theatre in his book. But for our purposes it should be noted that Brecht is mainly concerned with a technique of acting which makes the actor present his character instead of identifying with him. The literary technique of indirect presentation in narrative is thus not a central concern for Brecht. There is, consequently, no play by Brecht in which the character or characters are engaged in storytelling exclusively, as is the case so often for Beckett’s voices from That Time onwards. And yet Samuel Beckett’s theatre can be considered emblematic of the tendency Szondi described, but in a more radical way than in the authors the critic examined. In the writer’s novels, subjectivity is, as we have seen, exploited as a theme and is at the same time a highly problematic phenomenon. As for the theatre, Beckett himself stated after the success of Waiting for Godot that it was for him a “relief” to write for this genre after working on the strenuous novels of the trilogy. It is true that in the first plays, characters tend to be more defined and subjectivity less problematic than in the contemporary novels of the author (cf. Abbott 1996: 43). The law of theatre seems to have

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been more or less respected. Even in these early plays, though, the “directness” and well-defined nature of the characters is attenuated by the suggested indirect nature of the action, which seems to be “performed” for, or in the mental space of, an absent and mysterious “spectator”. The “play” thus seems an emanation of a self whose relation to the “imagined” action is ambiguous (alienation or approach of the self), but whose mysterious presence in the background gives rise to the nagging question of the self. In the later plays, this problematic self is itself present on stage, as a narrator who tells a story: the theatre has invaded the novel. The ambiguous relationship between the subject and its “emanation” subsists in this narrative theatre: the story seems at the same time a rejection of the self and a way to approach it. To avoid misunderstanding, it should be stressed again that I am not pretending the narrator is in some way a solid subject, a unitary and lasting self, or the ultimate ground of the self. In most of the plays it is impossible to identify the narrator, if we can still use this term, and the story that is being told does not indicate that there is a foundational self to be found somewhere. On the contrary, narration always introduces a gap between the character on stage and what is related in the story, especially if the story is told in the second person (That Time) or in the third person (all other narrative plays). Moreover, story and stage image never coincide, even when the overlap is as substantial as it is in A Piece of Monologue. But monologue and narration do introduce mediation on the stage. Direct perception, the traditional basis of drama, is to a large extent superseded by indirect perception, and indirect means that the information about the fictive world reaches the spectator through something. Even though it may be unclear what this something is – is there anything else but “words, words, words”, as Hamlet mockingly said to Polonius –, the question of the nature of the mediation is inevitable. As there is only one voice, monologue and narration focus the attention on the question: who speaks? Even if the self is out of reach, exiled by the story that is being told, the telling of the story on stage gives rise to the question of The Unnamable: “Who now?” Narration by a single voice shatters the self while maintaining the question of the self.

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This monologic and narrative theatre is not, it should finally be remarked, novelistic work that can also be performed. It is markedly written for performance on stage, which distinguishes it from the novels. There is no indeterminacy in this respect, as is the case in some texts written by Marguerite Duras for instance, prose texts that are followed by stage directions. The theatre, where narration so blatantly undermines the direct presentation that theatre purportedly is, is still distinguished by Beckett from his novelistic work. It is therefore possible to defend the proposition that there is an effort to attain the specificity of theatre while at the same time negating what is generally held to be specific of theatre (cf. Engelberts 1992, 1993a). This search for a minimal, borderline, fundamental theatre gives rise to an interesting parallel with the self. Theatre is subverted while there is also a concurrent search for the fundamentals of this art, just as Beckett’s texts hover on the brink of the self, continuously rejecting it in a continuous approach of a more fundamental self. *** Je ne dirai plus moi, je ne le dirai plus jamais, c’est trop bête. Je mettrai à la place, chaque fois que je l’entendrai, la troisième personne, si j’y pense. Si ça les amuse. Ça ne changera rien. Il n’y a que moi, moi qui ne suis pas, là où je suis. Et d’un. L’Innommable (1953: 113-14)

If indeed the self is brought into focus in various ways in Beckett’s work, we urgently have to address the question what kind of self this is. For it is clear that the paradoxical intertwining of absence and presence of the self amounts to a very unsteady, wavering self – some might want to say phantasmal self. Although I would not defend this last designation and will continue to show that it is unfounded, it is quite impossible to deny that the self is unstable, vacillating, and that there is nothing but a glimpse of it in the text. We will try to see whether it is nevertheless possible to circumscribe the Beckettian self, if need be indirectly. We will by the same token take the opportunity to see whether the instability of the self and its unseizable

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nature in Beckett is in fact as novel as one is generally led to think when reading the critics of the absence of the self. It is evident that if the self in Beckett is anything, it certainly is a stripped subject, stripped of all padding that in Beckett is considered as not constitutive of the self: property, for sure, a proper name, professional or social activities, but also more essential attributes such as the capacity to say “I”, a more or less diversified emotional life corresponding to certain bodily manifestations, an unimpaired body, and a memory that one trusts enough to determine whether the recollections of one’s past are true or fictitious. There seems to be a kind of zero degree of subjectivity in Beckett. This zero degree however does not equal nothing. The self consists of hardly anything but an unspecified “being on the verge of being”, as Porter Abbott has said eloquently (Abbott 1996: 11). And we can think here of what in the early sixties, according to Lawrence Harvey, Beckett called literally “a presence, embryonic, undeveloped, of a self that might have been but never got born, an être manqué” as opposed to the “existence by proxy” that is “life on the surface”. “Beckett spoke also of the attempt,” says Harvey, “to find this lost self in images of getting down, getting below the surface, concentrating, listening, getting your ear down so you can hear the infinitesimal murmur.” (1970: 247). It is clear that these are not the words of someone who speaks only of absence or who thinks we are in need of an unsparing attack on the “metaphysics of presence”. True, it is the real Samuel Beckett who speaks here, at least the one heard by Harvey, and not the “implied” author nor the narrator of the texts. But in the light of what I tried to show above, I think there is no need, as far as this topic is concerned, to distinguish two Becketts – as has been done by Lukács with Balzac, who in the opinion of the Marxist critic was a royalist in his convictions as a citizen but whose work supposedly promotes the cause of the revolutionaries. In using Beckett’s statement, Harvey takes too little into account the embryonic quality of the self when he talks of the “authentic self” in Beckett (1970: 441), as if there were no difference between Beckett and Proust. But it would be preposterous to say that it is the critic Harvey who lured Beckett into

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the quoted statement about the self, and that Beckett’s work proves the opposite of his statement. The stripped subject is thus a rudimentary, vestigial subject; but it is more than just a “remnant”, more than a trifling remainder of something that has disappeared. For it is “a presence, embryonic, undeveloped”, and therefore eventually the nucleus of something that is less than the old self (because it renounces certainties that the old self defined itself with, but that might become more because it is a more fundamental self. Without a doubt, however, this self stays out of reach. Frederick Hoffman has put this very convincingly in saying that: “From his being a “thinking thing”, whose cogito confidently anticipates his sum, the self has become a groping, stammering, hesitant, fearful thing, a res haesitans.” (1964:60). Nonetheless, the res haesitans keeps on hesitating, understandably not always steadfastly, but continuously all the same: it keeps on groping for what one might call the vanishing point of the text. The Unnamable, even though it fiercely rejects the “I”, is very explicit in this respect. Me voilà loin, me voilà l’absent, c’est son tour, celui qui ne parle ni n’écoute, qui n’a ni corps ni âme, c’est autre chose qu’il a, il doit avoir quelque chose, il doit être quelque part, il est fait de silence, voilà une jolie analyse, il est dans le silence, c’est lui qu’il faut chercher, lui qu’il faut être, de lui qu’il faut parler, mais il ne peut pas parler, alors je pourrai m’arrêter, je serai lui, je serai le silence, je serai dans le silence, nous serons réunis, son histoire qu’il faut raconter, mais il n’a pas d’histoire, ce n’est pas sûr, il est dans son histoire à lui, inimaginable, indicible, ça ne fait rien, il faut essayer, dans mes vieilles histoires venues je ne sais d’où, de trouver la sienne, elle doit y être, elle a dû être la mienne, avant d’être la sienne, je la reconnaîtrai, l’histoire du silence qu’il n’a jamais quitté, que je n’aurais jamais dû quitter, que je ne retrouverai peut-être jamais, que je retrouverai peutêtre, alors ce sera lui, ce sera moi, ce sera l’endroit, le silence, la fin, le commencement, le recommencement, comment dire, ce sont des mots, je n’ai que ça. L’Innommable (1953: 210-11)

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“Inimaginable, indicible”: the self, although it continues to be targeted in Beckett, can only be approached in the tendency towards the self. There is only an asymptotic approach of the self, an asymptotic movement towards the self which can be intimated through the search only, in the movement towards it only. Maybe we can make the results of this attempt to circumscribe the nature of the self in Beckett more tangible by looking at what the self is not. First of all, one should refrain from identifying it with a character on stage or in the text (or with the body, as we have already seen). There are lot of Doppelgängers, especially in the dramatic texts, from Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot to Bim, Bam, Bom and Bam in Beckett’s last play What Where. But it would be impossible to indicate one of these doubles as being ultimately the proper self, be they silent as in Not I and Ohio impromptu or even if their degree of consciousness places them on a level that transcends the level of the other characters, as Vladimir or as either Bam or his voice in What where. The “pseudo-couple”, as l’innommable calls Mercier and Camier (1953: 16), is not pseudo because in fact it is one, or because one of the characters is the real one, but because it is split in two and one at the same time. The aporia of the couple is linked to the aporia of the self, as we will see below when discussing the tradition of the aporia of the self in philosophy, and it cannot be solved by identifying one of the characters as the fundamental one. “The danger is in the neatness of identifications”, Beckett has said writing on Joyce (1983: 19). So the self is doomed to stay a self absconditus. This term is a dangerous one, however, for it leads to the supposition that the self in Beckett is a mystic self. This concept supposes the surpassing of the self, the very difficult exceeding of certain forms, which is in fact quite in line with Beckett. But the problem is that in transcending the former forms of the self, the mystic finds a more “authentic” self which exists in an ontologically more full way than the other forms.25 In Beckett, on the contrary, there is no question of gaining access to something which exists prior to the search for it and which would liberate the self from its search. There is no authentic self (or nonself, or authentic liberation from the self, for that matter) waiting for

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the self to discover it. There is nothing beyond what the searching self is while (it is) searching. To illustrate this, one could quote Beckett describing Vico’s mysticism and apply the terms to Beckett himself: “He may still appear as a mystic to some: if so, a mystic that rejects the transcendental in every shape and form as a factor in human development, and whose Providence is not divine enough to do without the co-operation of Humanity.” (Beckett 1983: 26).26 There is nothing beyond the search itself. That is what makes terms as absconditus or via negativa so dangerous: their original context supposes that ultimately there is a fixed ontological fullness that precedes every effort to reach it. Needless to say one should avoid this fallacious presupposition of mysticism, since the self in Beckett is not a given entity that exists independently of the effort that is being made to reach it. If the self should not be linked to mysticism, it should not, on the other side of the scale, be identified with a definite person in reality either. This is what Porter Abbott for instance does in his Beckett writing Beckett: the Author in the Autograph, in which he explicitly defends the presence of the author in the post-war texts. For Abbott, “Beckett was consciously engaged in autography” (1996: 19), his texts being “personal scripts” (1996: 123). Now this would surely bring Beckett into line with the reinvention of the French autobiography by writers of the “nouveau roman” (Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, Duras) – even though Abbott distinguishes, unfortunately not very convincingly, autobiography from his neologism autography (1996: 2). And it is true that there are certain elements in most texts which in certain respects might be those of the life of somebody who is called Samuel Beckett in “real” life. Names, 27 most notably, although more markedly in the novels than in the drama, and autobiographical facts. No doubt the Isle of Swans in Ohio Impromptu may remind those who know of the walks Beckett and Joyce had together on this Parisian islet, as may the Latin quarter hat on the table, for Joyce used to wear a hat like that (Acheson 1997: 205). These autobiographical facts and names – this autobiographical residue – undeniably figure in the text; but to what extent do these more or less hidden names and facts, rather rare but so painstakingly and fervently unearthed by

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critics, make the entire text and the whole work bear on an “I” that supposedly is the one of the real author? If there are admittedly traces in the text of the life of the person who wrote this text (and supposing, although this is rather unlikely, that the reader or spectator knows as much as some critics about Beckett’s life), do these traces eventually make the self of the text coincide with the real author? Some critics might insist that this never happens, but in the case of Beckett’s texts, it will no doubt seem erroneous to many more people to claim this was so. These texts are not autobiographies in any technical or in any wider sense, and calling them autographies (or calling the author “the autograph”), as does Abbott,28 is still a way of linking them to a field of texts that is too narrow for them. The self in these texts is not only that of the real author, and it is not even primarily that of the real author, transposed into fiction or not, even though the autobiographical elements show that the author is inscribing his own self into the text and making it occasionally pertain to himself. But The Isle of Swans and the Latin Quarter hat do not turn Ohio Impromptu into an autobiographical riddle.29 The self in these texts is a far more open self, which is not appropriated by the author. The autobiographical elements are instances of the author “fitting” the self of the text, so to speak. “Appropriating” would not be the right word, not because post-modern criticism uses the opposite concept (depropriation of the self) to characterise the text, but because the self in the text is in no way wholly occupied by the persona of the author. If there is a hidden personal self in the text, it is not because the subject in the text is this personal subject, but because the self can hardly be explored without any personal reference at all. This is what Taylor, to whose study of the self we will return below, summarises in a quite peremptory but not unconvincing way when he says: “The subject doesn’t permit language which escapes personal resonance. [...] We either explore this area with such language or not at all.” (1989: 512). In exploring the self, personal resonance’s are inevitable, but the self in Beckett remains an unspecified self which could also be interpreted as being geared to the reader, the self who is reading the text.

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The reader? I think that if the gist of the self is not its realistic sense (the I of the “real” author), it is not even a personal self, either, in the last analysis. Saying this is in fact more or less equivalent to saying that the self cannot be identified with a character (in as much as characters can be called personal entities in Beckett), but it is worthwhile stressing this contention separately. The self in Beckett is not a “personal” self in the realistic sense that is the one of a person in the real world, but also not in the sense that it is an “I” that it is distinguished from other “I”s”. The property of this self is that it is looking for something that it might be identified with, something that would give it a firmer ground to stand on than a name, a past, the capacity to say “I”, etc., but that it does not find this firmer ground, which is one of the reasons why it can never be identified with a specific person. In Ohio Impromptu, there is, assuredly, a more or less personal self: the man who is told about in the story, taking his walks on the Isle of Swans. But the characters on stage are on a different plane, on which the story is a way of approaching a self that does not coincide with the “personal” self of the story. They read and listen to a story about someone, someone else who nevertheless is not clearly distinguished from them, and are thus engaged in finding an answer to the question who they are. Is that not the situation of every reader? In the last resort, the self in Beckett is an a-personal “I”, as Silverman has rightly stated: “[I]n Beckett the self never actually achieves what Locke, Hume, and others have called personal identity.” (1982: 153). This makes it easier to understand how the self can be linked to the reader, or in Beckett’s theatre, can be linked to the audience: the searching self is not different in each and every spectator, because the mere effort of the search itself is not personal, does not vary from person to person. The tendency towards the self thus leads beyond the subjective, since it is inescapable and every human being is forced to confront it. In Beckett, we may not need the other and the confrontation with the other to find the self, but at the heart of the movement towards the self, one finds the other as someone engaged in the same search – the other as the self. The search for the self is individual, and thus has a distinctively solipsistic flavour, but it does not lead to a wholly solipsistic universe.

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One last remark about what the self is not. From what I have already said, it is without a doubt clear that the self in Beckett is not the Proustian self either: the I “retrouvé”. There is no recovery of the self, which stays beyond the grasp of narrative. Now for some critics, the hold on the self of the narrator in A la recherche du temps perdu is not very tight, and it is true, for instance, that the cyclic structure of this novel dooms the narrator to an eternal quest; but it is clear at the same time that the Beckettian approach is even less triumphal in that there is nothing as positively found in the end as there is in Proust’s narrative. What Beckett and Proust share, though, is that they continue the approach of the self and that they do not reject the self, which stays constituent for them. Beckett is certainly more in doubt as to whether the search is worthwhile, as to whether the search should be continued, painful as it is, or even whether it is one at all. But every time the movement towards the self starts again, and ultimately leads to a point where the self seems more in reach than it was in the beginning. Do we know by now, after this tentative indirect approach, what kind of self is the mysterious self in Beckett, which clearly seems to be more the question about itself than the self, but which may continue to seem difficult to apprehend? The stripped, anorexic, always evanescing self, never at hand, and which maybe is best approached indirectly, may indeed continue to seem rather hypothetical, spectral even to some. There is certainly no reason to deny a certain degree of spectrality to the Beckettian self, as it never appears fully. But to what extent, in fact, one may ask, does this quality of the unseizable self in Beckett constitute a break with the western tradition of the self? For it is not an exaggeration to say that the philosophical investigation of the self has lead frequently to the impossibility of conceiving the self as something that can ultimately be defined. The Cartesian strand surely heralds a granite self identified with the cogitatio — although one should not forget that this absolute certainty springs from radical doubt: after all, it is only methodical doubt that generates the solid Cartesian self. But apart from this strand to which one can link, for the sake of succinctness, all philosophies that lead to certainty about the self, and apart from most theological inves-

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tigations, there are numerous and very different examples of philosophies of the self throughout modern times that stress the unsolvable problems inherent in the definition of the self. A chronological glance at some traditions hopefully suffices here. Berkeley for instance, whom Beckett quotes in Film (163), states that the mind or the self, as it is an “active being”, cannot be represented in “ideas”: it “is an active being, whose existence consists, not in being perceived [as the ideas], but in perceiving ideas and thinking.”30 Pseudo-Mayne underlines that the self only knows itself from one’s acts, but that one already has to be conscious of the self to perceive these acts as one’s owns. The paradox is thus that “Self is likewise the Subject, as well as the Object of Consciousness.” 31 In a quite different tradition, Hölderlin stresses (against Schelling and Fichte) the problem of the self as follows: “Wie kann ich sagen: Ich! ohne Selbstbewußtsein? Wie aber is Selbstbewußtsein möglich? Dadurch das ich mich mir selbst entgegensetze, mich vom mir selbst trenne, aber ungeachtet dieser Trennung mich im entgegengesezten als dasselbe erkenne. Aber in wieferne als dasselbe? Ich kann, ich muß so fragen; denn in einer andern Rüksicht ist es sich entgegengesezt.” 32 Friedrich Schlegel is just as resolved about the dilemma of the self. He talks about the “Rätsel des Selbstgefühls, des Selbstbewußtseins” that amounts for him to the “certainty of something unintelligible” (“die Gewißheit eines Unbegreiflichen”). “Denn alle Bemühung, sich selbst anzuschauen, sich in der Anschauung selbst zu ergreifen, ist, wie früher gezeigt worden, durchaus vergebens. Das Ich verschwindet uns immer, wenn wir es fixieren wollen. Das Gefühl dieses Unbegreiflichen ist aber unendlich gewiß [...]: und dieses ist gerade der Fall bei dem Selbstbewußtsein.” 33 All effort to know oneself is vain, says Schlegel, but the inexplicable self is nevertheless lasting: Beckett demonstrates quite the same thing in quite another way. For Schopenhauer (who, incidentally, was as Beckett said “one of the ones that mattered most to me” – Knowlson 1996: 248) the centrality of the will leads to the aporia of the self knowing itself not as knowing self (“[es giebt] kein Erkennen des Erkennens”), but as willing self. “Die Identität nun aber des Subjekts des Wollens mit dem erkennenden Subjekt, vermöge welcher (und zwar nothwendig)

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das Wort »ich« beide einschließt und bezeichnet, ist der Weltknoten und daher unerklärlich.”34 The self is the inexplicable knot (or node) of the world: that marvellous image is maybe too explicit to be Beckettian, but the idea is similar to what one finds in Beckett’s texts. The same thing could be said of Sartre’s expression: le sujet est “un être dont la caractéristique d’être est qu’il est dans son être question de son être” (cité par Frank 1991: 517). Finally it is not surprising, but nonetheless significant, that several psychoanalytic theorists, who necessarily acknowledge the composite nature of the self, stress the definability of the self and its paradoxical nature, without for that matter rejecting the concept.35 So when one considers the philosophical tradition of the self more generally, what is striking is how often the definition of the self results in a fundamental uncertainty, in aporia. Perhaps the best recent formulation and summary of this aporia can be found in Taylor’s widely discussed book Sources of the Self of 1989: “[T]his self which emerges from the objectification of and separation from our given nature cannot be identified with anything in this given. It cannot be easily conceived as just another piece of the natural world. It is hard for us simply to list souls or minds alongside whatever else there is. This is the source of a continuing philosophical discomfort in modern times for which there is naturally no analogue among the ancients. Various solutions have been tried – reductionism, “transcendental” theories, returns to dualism – but the problem continues to nag us as unsolved.” (1989: 175). The problem of the problematic self, of the unseizable self is not new, on the contrary. Taylor’s nagging discomfort is an apt description of the painful approach in Beckett’s texts. 36 Beckett’s self is thus not only not as absent, but also not as unseizable nor as new as one might be tempted to think. Today, an outstanding theoretician of the self as Manfred Frank, who does not reject this category as a mere epiphenomenon, and thus defends it explicitely against deconstructionist and postmodernist attacks, still very much tends to underscore its aporetic qualities. Indeed, in all his important texts, Frank quotes Hume’s prudent formulation of the enigma of the self in Hume’s reconsideration of his critique of the self: “this difficulty is too hard for my understanding.”

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(quoted by Frank 1986: 131, cf. 50; 1988: 28; 1991: 415, cf. 562). In fact, one could say that the modern predicament is the inexplicable nature of the self – and the modernist predicament is, looked at from this perspective, nothing but an acute awareness of this modern predicament. It is patent, then, that acknowledging a self in Beckett does not mean at all that we have to return to the “essential assumptions of the humanistic tradition”, as critics are tempted to call them (Abbott 1996: 41). That is the black-and-white picture that the critics who privilege absence like to paint of every attempt to talk about the self in Beckett, which is in their eyes nothing but a tendency “to recuperate Beckett’s complex writing and keep it anchored to a monadic centre” (Watson 1991: 84). For them, the self is equivalent to solidity. On its firm ground are founded, in their view, the non-shattered belief in facts and reality (as opposed to Nietzschean interpretation), in the individual being as an autonomous and unitary person (as opposed the Freudian, Marxist and Nietzschean unearthing of multiplicity and determination), and in language as a means capable of expressing a pre-existing inner and outer reality (as opposed to the view of language as constructing thoughts and reality). But the outline of the tradition of the aporia of the self that I sketched above shows there is no return to “la présence pleine, le fondement rassurant, l’origine et la fin du jeu” (Derrida 1967: 427) when we talk about the self in Beckett, and no “traditional” return either to a monolithic tradition of a solid subject. It would be a reductio ad absurdum to assert that. It is possible to underscore the interplay between presence and absence of the self in Beckett, without returning to “positions of transcendence or final stability which might enable the critic to reconstruct an all-embracing authorial vision” (Hill 1990: x). This would, by the way, be possible even without the philosophical tradition of the aporetic self. But the existence of this tradition shows that there is no immediate need for a critique of the metaphysics of presence to put into context the acknowledgement of the “absent” aspect of the unseizable nature of the self in Beckett. One thing should be said finally, though. It is clear that we should be beware of thinking that the presence of the subject, as opposed to

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its too often stressed absence, is a triumphal presence. If the absence of the self is not “dance” and “laughter” in Beckett, its presence is not either. First of all, we have already noted that the self is not the triumphal subject of the granite tradition of the beginning of modern times, a subject which is able to construct the world on the foundations of the solid self, and even master the world, whether physically in an extended world where machines and calculation help the mind to overcome the resistance of extension, or in the mind (Pascal)37 if the world gets too overwhelming. Second, the presence of the stripped self is also not triumphal because finding it seems out of reach, as we have also observed already: there is only an asymptotical nearing it. But the deferred presence of the self is also, and finally, not victorious because it is not tantamount to liberation. Although it should be stressed that the quest for the self eventually yields more than a single-minded discourse of absence and radical deferral suggests, the approach of the self seems very often linked to its subsequent disappearance. The tendency towards the self is indeed often, as we have seen, linked to an imminent death. Absence and presence, then. Or should we say neither absence nor presence? Here is the second line of the short prose piece “neither”: “from impenetrable self to impenetrable non-self by way of neither” (1995a: 258). What this line shows, in my view, is that the self is impenetrable and out of reach, but that it is not abandoned as such; it is still conceivable, and not only as the “esteemed commodit[y]” Beckett once called the self in his criticism (1983: 143). Furthermore, there is no surrendering to the non-self – which as a concept is by the way only possible if the self is still conceivable, and which is moreover just as impenetrable as the self and would thus not bring about victory if, by chance, the self would be lacking altogether. But instead of trying to arrive at certainty, maybe we should conclude that in the end there is only a question, in the end the self is nothing but a question, the question it asks about itself: Who is there? Who am I, if the one that is there should be called that way? Or in other words: “Am I as much as... being seen?” (157), the question repeated by M that ends the second part of Play, and that highlights the

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reflexive stance while putting it in doubt. Condemned to this question without a definitive answer, the self continues to nag us in Beckett’s text, whatever one may do to deny it.

No te s 1

Impetuous declarations of critics have highlighted the link between Beckett and the self. In 1961 already, Martin Esslin subtitled his chapter on Beckett in The Theatre of the Absurd (Esslin 1980): “ T h e search for the self” – without extensively developing this idea (see note 20). Today one still finds echoes of the idea almost everywhere. “Cette problématique du sujet est un aspect fondamental de l’œuvre de Beckett” (1996: 19), according to Michel Bernard’s plain statement in his book Beckett et son sujet. Steven Connor gives a radically more central place to the work of Beckett when he states that “the thinking through of the relations of subjectivity and signification cannot for the near future well proceed without close attention to the works of Beckett” (1992: 128)! A recent French study is entitled Echos de l’ego dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett (Hunkeler 1997). 2

However, Adorno does not state that there is no subject whatsoever in Beckett. Perhaps this is because Beckett’s negativity is for Adorno only a reflection of the negative reality, and thus denounces this reality as offering no place to the self that is therefore not fundamentally negated. Maybe it is his aesthetic theory, based on the reconciliation of subject and object, that pushes him to recognise a subject in Beckett, which is (rather astonishingly if one looks at the needs of the aesthetic theory, but understandably if one takes into account the negativism of Adorno’s essay and of his approach of the subject in Beckett) only defined in negative terms. “[W]as von Subjekt [...] im Angesicht der permanenten Katastrophe bleibt: [...] seine abstrakteste Bestimmung: da zu sein und allein dadurch schon zu freveln.” “Die ganz auf sich zurückgeworfenen Subjekte, Fleisch gewordener Akosmismus, bestehen in nichts anderem als den armseligen Realien ihrer zur Notdurft verhutzelten Welt, leere personae, durch die es wahrhaft bloß noch hindurchtönt. (1961: 202). Later on, Endgame is called the ending of

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subjectivity: “Mit der Subjektivität, deren Nachspeil das Endspiel ist, wird [dem Drama] der Held entzogen.” (1961: 214). This residual subject in Adorno’s essay is quite different from the one that will be emphasized here. 3

See Abbott (1996: 25) for bibliographical details on titles that are not included in the bibliography of this article. The first pages of Abbott’s chapter “Beckett and postmodernism” are a very useful and excellent overview of the modernist-postmodernist debate concerning Beckett (Abbott 1996: 23-27). 4

An exception has to be made for Jungian critics, who, in following the introduction of the concept of the self in psycho-analytic theory by Jung, distinguish a self in Beckett. I find it hard, though, to be convinced by a critic like Eva Metman when she resolutely identifies the self with the child in Endgame, for instance (1965: 135). 5

Foucault cites a sentence of the beginning of the third section of the Textes pour rien: “Qu’importe qui parle, quelqu’un a dit qu’importe qui parle.” (1958: 129). Foucault also quotes Beckett in his inaugural address at the “Collège de France”, L’Ordre du discours (1971: 8). As for Derrida, he has claimed that Beckett is so close to him that it is difficult for him to write about Beckett (1992: 60-62). This is a very peculiar way of annexing the work of a writer that has not previously been enlisted so effortlessly. Undoubtedly, Derrida is not the “ o r i g in ” of the discourse according to which Beckett prefigures poststructuralist or postmodernist theory, for it occurred earlier and rather frequently in various forms: “Beckett’s texts seem to provide the ideal site for post-structuralist critical revelry, particularly in its extreme anti-authorial manifestations.” (Wright 1983:66); “Beckett does in “novelistic” form what poststructuralists do in their writing.” (Toyama 1991: 108); “[T]he uncanny forethought possessed by a body of work which seems somehow to include and make possible the thought [i.e. Derridean linguistic antihumanism] which reads in it the image of itself.” (Connor 1992: 121); cf, also Watson (1991: 53-54). For a later occurrence, see Begam (1996: 4): “Beckett had already anticipated, often in strikingly prescient ways, many of the defining themes and

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ideas of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida”! For Deleuze’s references to Beckett, see Abbott (1996: 24). 6

Karátson (1995) is another example.

7

Tison-Braun quotes L’Innommable.

8

All undated references are to the Collected Shorter Plays (see bibliography). 9

Advocates of the dissolution of the self naturally tend to disregard the persistence of the light which is so strikingly underscored at the end of A Piece of Monologue. Anna McMullan for instance makes n o mention of it at all in her discussion of the play, and she insists only on absence: “Again, questions of birth and death, presence and absence, are transposed from purely human terms into a register of light, the descending hierarchy from sun to gas lamp to electric lamp on stage paralleling the fading of the fullness of presence represented by the absent sun which remains absent throughout the speaker’s life: ‘Years of nights’.” (McMullan 1993: 64 – McMullan’s italics). Notwithstanding this neglect of a light that does not fit with theories of the deceased self, McMullan proposes a more balanced picture when she writes further on in her book on Beckett’s later theatre: “[ T ] h e creative impulse and process [creates] a medium in which absence and presence, form and space, self and other are not oppositional, but through an alchemy of dramatic ritual and discipline, continually correspond and metamorphose, one into the other.” (1993: 122). Despite the rhetorical use of “alchemy” and “metamorphosis” which suggest too much miraculous equivalence, the basic idea in this quotation is that the absence is not absolute. 10

Even a critic who gives a marked priority to absence acknowledges this: “This gesture thus contradicts the closure of the narrative, and tends to emphasize the persistence of consciousness, rather than unconsciousness.” (McMullan 1993: 121). 11

Lacan uses the expression “apparition évanouissante” in conjunction with the unconscious (e.g. 1973: 33) and speaks about “a phan i-

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sis” (or “disparition”) in conjunction with the subject (e.g. 1973: 199). It seems to me that the passage where Lacan comes closest to Beckett is when he writes: “Le sujet, c’est ce surgissement qui, juste avant, comme sujet, n’était rien, mais qui, à peine apparu, se fige en signifiant.” (1973: 181). 12

In 1970, Leo Bersani already talked about “Beckett’s frank recognition that the inviolate, essential self “lives” only in the refusal to be, is equivalent to the death of the self.” (1970: 324). 13

The French text reads “personne”, an even more ambiguous expression of which the two sides are highlighted by the repetition (1986a: 24). 14

Although Derrida’s name will be cited a few more times in this article in conjunction with the “absence” of the self, it should be noted that his writings tend to be more subtle than those of most of the literary critics who have so insistently underscored the absence of the subject in Beckett. It has become almost a commonplace to make this distinction between Derrida and his followers (cf. Lloyd 1993: 7), but as regards the self it is possible to prove Derrida’s prudence — some will say “elusiveness”. Derrida underlines for instance, after having stressed the “laugh” and the “dance” that should replace the nostalgia for presence, “l’espérance”, that is the hope of “l’alliance de la parole et de l’être dans le mot unique, dans le nom enfin propre.” (1972: 29). This hope may be a rather abrupt and surprising return to nostalgia, it illustrates nevertheless what Derrida has said earlier in the essay: “[L]e langage de la présence ou de l’absence [...] est inadéquat.” (1972: 21). Beckett’s deviation from the Nietzschean gaiety of Derrida has sometimes been remarked on, e.g. by critics such as Wright (1983: 71), Schwalm (1997: 185) and Tönnies (1998: 5658). 15

“Less is more”, the motto of the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe that Beckett adopted and which is often quoted in Beckett criticism. 16

For the glimpse of the self and its relation to the other in a late prose text, Company, see Engelberts 1993b.

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17

I disagree nevertheless with Schwalm (as I will explain later on) when she says that it is through the “physicality of the subject” (1997: 189), through the body, that the presence of the self is established. In another recent piece of criticism, Michael Edwards analyses the end of The Unnamable in what could be called the same vein as Schwalm and myself, but he extends his comment rather sweepingly when he qualifies the end of the novel as an “intuition religieuse, au sens large” (1996: 119). Although some dutiful postmodern critics might allege that defending the presence of the subject in Beckett equals defending the presence of God, self and God both being in their view ultimate signifies aiming at arresting the play of the signifiers, I would plead for an approach that distinguishes realms as different as the self and God, and that does not, in a Beckettian context, jump from a self so hard to attain to something that seems much more out of reach. Where Descartes’ cogito allowed him to jump readily from I to God, Beckett stumbles to the limits of the self, but not a step further. 18

Peter Murphy’s endeavour to disengage Beckett from postmodernist interpretations, and to prove that Beckett “is trying to discover new means of integrating self and fiction and word and world” (1990: xiv), should also be mentioned here, and is at times as positively stated as that of Wright. As the title of his study shows, Murphy is not oriented towards the self, but towards “being”: Beckett is for Murphy “concerned with the problem of devising new languages for being” and with “making his art a living embodiment of a human presence in language” (1990: xiv, 173). Murphy also wants to prove that Beckett is “a great moralist” (1990: 171) and links Beckett and the (historical) Avant-Garde as defined by Peter Bürger. Being, moralism, avantgarde: Murphy goes a lot farther than I, and it is hard to be convinced that the three subjects are as inevitably linked as Murphy asserts. 19

After Iser, Hugh Silverman insisted in 1982 on the centrality of the self in Beckett in a rather schematic but interesting article. In 1962 already, Frederick Hoffman alluded to the end of The Unnamable b y writing: “To ‘go on’ is to persist in being one’s doubting self.” (1964: 159) in a book which, in spite of its title (Samual Beckett: The Language of Self), does not yield much with regard to a current reap-

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praisal of the self. For if one finds expressions that promise an approach mindful of absence and presence (“the spectacle of the self aware of steady disintegration and fighting it in desperate assertion and inquiry” 1964: 104), there are also less promising assertions (although they are daring if one considers the period they were written in): “The trilogy is, quite simply and superficially stated, a portrayal of the loss of self.” (1964: 128). Iser himself quotes Anthony Cronin, who in 1966 wrote: “It does seem that it is only by the adoption of a fictitious mechanism and the entry into a labyrinth that may never lead back to the self, that the self can be found.” (1966: 108). However, Cronin’s chapter, though entertaining and at times insightful, does not yield much for our purposes, and seems occasionally tending toward a traditional conception of the self: “[Murphy] gives expression to an attitude which is at the core of all Mr Beckett’s work: not of renunciation, for there is nothing but filth to renounce, but rather of desire, of yearning for selfhood, true selfhood at last.” (1966: 103). One should also mention Leo Bersani (1970), who is undeservedly missing from P.J. Murphy’s (1994) survey of Beckett criticism, and whose chapter about Beckett has been quoted here in note 12. Bersani and Dutoit authored in 1993 the following sentence, reminiscent of Iser’s title: “Devising a self as a story about others may be the principle activity of subjectivity.” (Bersani & Dutoit 1993:76). Apparently, they except Iser, without quoting him though, from their anathematising “irrelevance of almost everything that has been written about [Beckett]” (1993: 12)! At present, postmodern and deconstructive critics sometimes use expressions resembling those used here, for instance Connor when he speaks about the “shadowy interdependence of presence and absence.” (1988: 139). But as in the chapter preceding this expression, it is always absence that undermines the despised presence of the so-called “existential humanism” (Connor 1992: 121) in the writings of these critics. In his admirably well-stated study, Begam expressly rejects Connor’s oppositional schemes, and accordingly writes that Beckett “acknowledg[es] that an absolute transcendence of modernism is impossible” (1996: 7). Nevertheless, he somehow manages to reconcile this idea with the theory that Beckett “surrender[s] himself to a form of absolute textuality” (1996: 7).

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20

Martin Esslin though has indeed touched on the self in Beckett’s theatre in 1961 already, when the first version of The Theatre of the Absurd was published. However, for all the promise held by the subtitle of his chapter on Beckett, “Samuel Beckett: The Search for the Self”, Esslin only treats the self more or less substantially in the last two pages of his long chapter (1980: 29-91), (these pages seem moreover to have been added only in the third, 1980 edition). His formulations sometimes tend in the same direction as Iser’s: the self is called “elusive” three times and a “mystery” two times, “there and yet not there” (1980: 90). But his analysis finally stresses presence far more than absence, in rather traditional terms that abruptly discard the self in favor of “emotion” and “existence”: “For if the self is ever elusive, (…) then the only authentic experience that can be communicated is the experience of the single moment in the fullness of its emotional intensity, its existential totality. And that, after all, is what all art is trying to capture.” (1980: 90). Some recent criticism tends to underscore the subtlety of the self in the theatre. Lawley, one of the most heedful critics of Beckett’s drama, writes that the characters “ al l strive to stage an adequate presence” (1994: 103) – although the terms seem less well chosen here than in the title of the article (“Stages of identity”), which allows for more degrees of presence. Charles Lyons comes closer to the paradox of the self in Beckett in an interesting article in which he states that “[t]he desire to maintain the manifest presence of the subject and the equally strong desire to dislocate it inform Beckett’s drama” (1990: 116). But he links the disputable “manifest” presence of the subject to the “physical presence of the actor” (ibid.), a link which is in my view even more debatable, as I will argue below (sub 2). 21

“Where is she, it might be asked. [Pause.] Why, in the old home, the same where she– [Pause.] The same where she began. [Pause.] Where it began [Pause.] It all began.” (241). “A little later, when as though she had never been, it never been, she began to walk.” (242). 22

Nietzsche identifies the self with the body, but uses this concept of self to negate meaning, mind, soul and I: “Hinter deinen Gedanken und Gefühlen, mein Bruder, steht ein mächtiger Gebieter, ein unbekannter Weiser – der heisst Selbst. In deinem Leibe wohnt er, dein

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Leib ist er.” (Also sprach Zarathustra, “Von des Verächtern des Leibes”). 23

Materialists may nowadays identify (part of) the brains with the self, but not the body as such. 24

Descartes and Geulincx are the most notable examples (cf. e.g. Knowlson 1996: 206-7) 25 Cf. Tison-Braun who immediately links “mystère” and “espérance” (1990: 3). 26

I owe this quote to Marius Buning (1990).

27

Hill (1990: 103-117) traces occurrences of Beckett’s name hidden in a wide range of words, to such an extent that “it becomes in principle possible to interpret the whole trilogy as a vast encrypted text endlessly glossing the author’s own secret personal name.” (1990: 116; cf. Astro 1990)! Beckett scholars generally never fail to remark that the M which plays such a prominent part in some of the texts is the thirteenth letter of the alphabeth (Beckett was born on April 13th), and the first letter of Beckett’s mother May; and, if one is a mood hermeneutic enough to accept this interpretation, the M is also the capital sigma o n its side and thus reminiscent of a certain Samuel... (cf. e.g. Hunkeler 1997: 202). 28

Wright already pretended that the subject in Beckett is the real author: "[T]here is no modern writing in which the author, Sam Beckett, is so persistently present" (1983: 82). 29

The possibility and concurrent danger of autobiographical interpretations have been underscored ever since the beginning of Beckettian criticism, by critics as different as Martin Esslin (right from the first edition (1961) of The Theatre of the Absurd (1980: 68-70) and Maurice Blanchot (1959: 259). 30

In A Treatise concerning the principles of human knowledge [1710], § 139, cf. § 89. Mind, spirit and soul are largely synonymous with “self” in Berkeley: “[T]hat which perceives ideas, and wills, and rea-

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sons about them, [w]hat I am myself, that which I denote by the term I” (§ 139). Almost two centuries later, Francis H. Bradley has underscored that the self, although it cannot be denied, cannot be thought of as a “reality” (Appearance and reality: A Metaphysical Essay [1893], chapter X and introduction to the appendix, no. VII). 31

An essay on consciousness (1728: 147).

32

Urtheil und Sein [1795], in Sämtliche werke, Hrsg. Friedrich Beissner, Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1961, Bd. 4, 217. 33

Die Entwicklung der Philosophie in zwölf Büchern [1804-05], in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Hrsg. Ernst Behler, München (etc.): Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1964 Bd. 12, 333, cf. 334. 34

Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde [1813/1847], §42. 35

36

See Ritter & Gründer (1995: 307-308).

There is one single mention of Beckett in Taylor (unfortunately omitted in the index), that is interesting enough to quote here: “ A s with the via negativa in theology, the counter-epiphanic can be embraced not in order to deny epiphany altogether, not just in order to find a place for the human spirit to stand before the most complete emptiness, but rather to force us to the verge of epiphany. This is one way of reading the work of Samuel Beckett [...].” (1989: 485). “ T h e verge of epiphany”: that expression converges, even if it is slightly more reminiscent of transcendence, with what I have called the self o n the verge of being. It should be noted though that I certainly do not pretend the Beckettian self is linked with the moral issues that according to Taylor are inherent to the notion of selfhood. (“Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes.” 1989: 3) And I do not pretend either that the persistence of the modern self in our era is as general or as strong as Taylor pretends. But I do think that for both Taylor and Beckett, the problem

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of the self is ineluctable, even if they manifest this in very different ways indeed and with very different goals. 37

Cf. the Pensées: “Par l’espace, l’univers me comprend et m’engloutit comme un point; par la pensée, je le comprends.” (Fragment 104 ed. Le Guern, 348 ed. Brunschvicg).

Bibliography Abbott, H. Porter 1996 Beckett writing Beckett: the Author in the Autograph, Ithaca & London. Acheson, James 1997 Samuel Beckett’s Artistic Theory and Practice: Criticism, Drama and Early Fiction, Hampshire/New York. Adorno, Theodor W. 1961 “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen”, in: Noten zur Literatur II, Frankfurt am M, 188-236 (most recent English translation: “Trying to Understand Endgame”, in: Adorno, Theodor W., Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, New York, 1991). Astro, Alan 1990 “Le Nom de Beckett”, Critique 519-520, 737-754. Beckett, Samuel 1953 L’Innommable, Paris. 1958 Nouvelles et Textes pour rien, Paris. 1959 Molloy, Malone dies, The Unnamable, London (etc). 1978 Pas suivi de quatre esquisses, Paris. 1978/1992 Poèmes suivi de mirlitonnades, Paris. 1981 Mal vu mal dit, Paris.

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Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, London (ed. Ruby Cohn). 1984 Collected Shorter Plays, London. 1986a Catastrophe et autres dramaticules, Paris. 1986b The Complete Dramatic Works, London. 1995a Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, New York (ed. Stanley E. Gontarski). 1995b Eleutheria, Paris (most recent English translation, by Barbara Wright: London, 1996). Ben-Zvi, Linda 1982 “The Schismatic Self in A Piece of Monologue”, Journal of Beckett Studies, 7, 7-17. Bernard, Michel 1996 Beckett et son sujet. Une apparition évanouissante, Paris (collection Psychanalyse et civilisations). Bersani, Leo 1970 Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction, New York. Blanchot, Maurice 1959 “«Où maintenant? Qui maintenant?»”, in: Le Livre à venir, Paris, 256-264. Blanchot, Maurice 1990 “Oh tout finir”, Critiq ue 519-520, 635-37. Buning, Marius 1990 “Samuel Beckett’s Negative Way: Intimations of the Via Negativa in his Late Plays”, in: Jaspers, David & Crowder, Colin (eds.), European Literature and Theology in the Twentieth Century: The Ends of Time, Hampshire, 129143.

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Connor, Steven 1988 Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, Oxford (etc). 1992 “Review Essay”, Journal of Beckett Studies, 2,1, 121-129. Cronin, Anthony 1966 A Question of Modernity, London. Derrida, Jacques 1967 “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des sciences humaines”, in: L’Ecriture et la différence, Paris (English translation by Alan Bass in: Writing and Difference, Chicago/London, 1978). 1972 Marges de la philosophie, Paris (collection «Critique») (English translation by Alan Base: Margins of Philosophy, New York/Brighton, 1982). 1992 Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, New York (etc). Edwards, Michael 1996 Eloge de l’attente, Paris. Engelberts, Matthijs 1992 “Quelques thèses sur la narration et le théâtre chez Beckett”, in Marius Buning, Sjef Houppermans, Danièle de Ruyter (eds.), Samuel Beckett Today/aujourd’hui, 1 (Samuel Beckett 1970-1989), Amsterdam (etc), 126-137. 1993a “Le pantalon bousillé: spécificité des genres dans le “théâtre narratif” de Beckett”, in Buning, Marius, en Oppenheim, Lois (eds.), Samuel Beckett today/aujourd’hui, 2, 1993, Amsterdam (etc), 235-244 (Proceedings of the Second international Beckett symposium: Beckett in the nineties). 1993b “Le hérisson répond: le dialogue dans les derniers récits de Beckett” in Ritter, Henriette E.C. et Schulte Nordholt, Annelies E. (eds.), La révolution dans les lettres, Amsterdam (etc), 277-291.

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Esslin, Martin 1980 The Theatre of the Absurd, Harmondsworth (etc.): (third [revised and enlarged] edition). Foucault, Michel 1971 L’Ordre du discours, Paris (English translation by A.M. Sheridan Smith: “The Discourse on Language” in: The Archeology of Knowledge, New York, 1972). 1994 “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?”, in: Dits et écrits 1954-1988, éds. Daniel Defert et François Ewald, tome I 1954-1969, Paris (collection Bibliothèque des sciences humaines) (English translations in: Harari, Josué V. (ed.) (1979), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, New York: and in Bouchard, Donald F. (ed.) (1977), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Ithaca). Frank, Manfred 1986 Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität: Reflexionen über Subjekt, Person und Individuum aus Anlaß ihrer >postmodernen< Toterklärung, Frankfurt am Main (ES 1377). 1988 “Subjekt, Person, Individuum”, in Frank, Manfred, Raulet, Gérard & Van Reijen, Willem, Die Frage nach dem Subjekt, Frankfurt am Main, 7-28 (ES 1430). 1991 “Fragmente einer Geschichte der SelbstbewußtseinsTheorie von Kant bis Sartre”, in: Frank, Manfred (hrsg.), Selbstbewußtseinstheorien von Fichte bis Sartre, Frankfurt am Main. Handwerk, Gary 1992 “Alone with Beckett”s Company”, Journal of Beckett Studies 2, no. 1, 65-82. Harvey, Lawrence E. 1970 Samuel Beckett: Poet & Critic, Princeton.

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Hill, Leslie 1990 Beckett’s Fiction: In Different Words, Cambridge (etc). Hoffman, Frederick J. 1964 Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self, New York: (First edition 1962). Hunkeler, Thomas 1997 Echos de l’ego dans l’œuvre de Samuel Beckett, Paris. Iser, Wolfgang 1972 “Subjektivität als Selbstaufhebung ihrer Manifestationen. S. Beckett: ‘Molloy’, ‘Malone dies’, ‘The Unnamble’”, in: Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett, München (UniTaschenbücher 163), 252-273 (English translation in: The Implied Reader, Baltimore (etc.), 1974, 164-178. Karátson, André 1995 “Le Sujet occidendental selon Samuel Beckett”, Ben-Porat, Ziva, Wirth-Nesher, Hana, Runte, Roseann, Runte, Hans R., The Force of Vision 1: Dramas of Desire, Visions of Beauty, Tokyo (Proceedings of the XIIIth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association). Knowlson, James R. 1982 Theatre Workbook 1: Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape, London. 1996 Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, New York Kristeva, Julia 1976 “Le Père, l’amour, l’exil”, Cahiers de l’Herne, 256-268 (éd. 1985, le livre de poche, biblio essais). Lacan, Jacques 1973 Le Séminaire XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse [1964], Paris.

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Lawley, Paul 1994 “Stages of identity: from Krapp’s last tape to Play”, in: Pilling, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Beckett, Cambridge (etc), 88-105. Lloyd, Genevieve 1993 Being in Time: Selves and narrators in philosophy and literature, Londen (etc). Lyons, Charles R. 1990 “Beckett, Shakespeare and the Making of Theory”, in: Brater, Enoch & Cohn, Ruby (eds.), Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama, Ann Arbor. McMullan, Anna 1993 Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama, London (etc). Metman, Eva 1965 “Reflections on Samuel Beckett”s Plays”, in: Esslin, Martin (ed.), Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, N.J (Twentieth Century Views). Murphy, Peter J. 1990 Reconstructing Beckett: Language for Being in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction, Toronto (etc.) Ritter, Joachim & Gründer, Karlfried (Hrsg.) 1995 Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Basel. Schwalm, Helga 1997 “Beckett’s Trilogy and the Limits of Self-deconstruction”, in: Buning, Marius, Engelberts, Matthijs, Houppermans, Sjef (eds.), Samuel Beckett: Crossroads and Borderlines. L’Œuvre carrefour/l’œuvre limite, Amsterdam (Samuel Beckett Today/aujourd’hui 6), 181-191.

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Silverman, Hugh J. 1982 “Beckett, Philosophy, and the Self”, in Tymieniecka, A.T. (ed.), The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature, Dordrecht (etc), 153-160 (Analecta Husserliana, The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol. XII). Szondi, Peter 1963 Theorie des modernen Dramas (1880-1950), Frankfurt am Main. Taylor, Charles 1989 Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge (etc). Tison-Braun, Micheline 1990 Le Moi décapité: Le Problème de la personnalité dans la littérature française contemporaine, New York (etc) (Reading Plus, vol. 6). Tönnies, Merle 1997 Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Strategy: Audience laughter and the Postmodernist Debate, Trier (Horizonte, Bd. 23). Toyama, Jean Yamasaki 1991 Beckett’s game: self and language in the trilogy, New York (etc) (American University Studies, Series II, Romance Languages and Literature, vol. 157). Watson, David 1991 Paradox and Desire in Samuel Beckett’s Fiction, Hampshire. Wright, Iain 1983 “«What matter who’s speaking?»: Beckett, the authorial subject and contemporary critical theory”, in: Comparative Criticism 5, 59-86.

THE SUBJECT IN MODERN RUSSIAN POETRY Willem G. Weststeijn

One of the central ideas of twentieth-century philosophy and, following from that, of twentieth-century culture in general, is that it is impossible to know the “self”. Nineteenth-century positivism assumed that man could be explained causally from his birth and social environment,1 but towards the end of the century this “certainty” disappeared and gradually doubts arose about the possibility to know man’s inner life and thoughts. Characteristic for this new development, and of primary importance for twentieth-century culture, was the discovery or, better still, perhaps, the creation of the subconscious. 2 The positioning of the subconscious next to and apart from consciousness indicates that the human mind was no longer considered a unity. The self was split: part of it could be explained and to a certain extent was governed by reason, another part was unknowable, mysterious, irrational, chaotic and unpredictable. The modern subject has lost its wholeness and has become pluralized.3 Owing to this pluralization the subject loses its own face, its own identity, it becomes unclear and self-contradictory. The “I” is no longer the “I” but, in the words of the French poet Tristan Corbière, a “mélange adultère de tout”.4 The new ideas on the subject drastically changed not only philosophy and psychology, but also literature. The favourite genre of

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nineteenth-century realism, the psychological novel which is based on the unity of character and on “realistic” action, time and place, is in modernism replaced by new novelistic forms and new narrative structures and devices that unsettles these realistic unities. Remarkable is the general tendency to pay more attention to time and place than to character. 5 This already becomes clear from the titles. While the great novels of nineteenth-century realism often mention in their title the main character(s) of the book (Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, Effie Briest), in the beginning of the twentieth century, instead of the names of characters, we meet designations of time and place (Petersburg, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Der Zauberberg, A la recherche du temps perdu, To the Lighthouse, Das Schloß). In all these novels characters continue, of course, to play an important role (apart from action and the place where the action occurs, character is one of the three indispensable units of each novel), but the approach is entirely different from that in the nineteenth-century. There is no longer the attempt to offer a complete picture of a character, nor is a character “followed” during a longer period of its life to make it possible to give this picture. A typical example in this respect is Joyce’s novel Ulysses, which concentrates on one day in the city of Dublin. It is obvious that Joyce is not pri marily concerned with full psychological portraits. To describe his characters, he uses new narrative devices, such as the stream of consciousness tech nique, which shows that thoughts are moving continuously, in an endless stream, but on the basis of which a complete psychological image can hardly be constructed. Even more than in the novel, the changing views on the subject became manifest in modernist poetry. Whereas the novel always has to tell a story, in which characters are involved in an action, lyric poetry is not subjected to a narrative scheme and has more possibilities to express directly and in a concentrated form a person’s inner world. Since romanticism, lyric poetry has been explicitly connected with the expression of feelings, the prevailing thought being that the poet expresses himself in his poetry and that there is a complete identity between the “I” in the poem (lyric “I”)

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and the real poet who exists outside his text (empiric “I”). It is not remarkable, then, that modernist poetry mirrored the new ideas about the subject. In the work of many modern poets the problem of the subject is the central theme. The idea that the self is split, unreliable, inconstant, not a unity, has called forth various reactions in modernist poetry. One of the first poets who expressed feelings of doubt as regards the subject and as regards his own “I” is Rimbaud. His well-known sayings “On me pense” and “Je est un autre” led to a poetry in which the lyric “I” clearly differs from the poet himself. Rimbaud succeeds in doing so by ascribing features to the lyric “I” which are manifestly not autobiographical,6 or, as in the poem “Le Bateau Ivre”, to introduce an object as lyric “I”. In the latter case, the differences between the lyric and empiric “I” are very obvious and although one cannot say that the empiric “I” is entirely absent from the lyric “I” – the different identities do not preclude the possibility that the empirical “I” expresses himself through another identity – there is no “direct” relation between the poet and the speaker in the poem. It might be said in this case that, to use a term of T.S. Eliot’s, we have literally to do here with an “objective correlative” of the empirical “I”. 7 The introduction of a lyric “I” which substantially and obviously differs from the empirical “I” is to be found in almost all modernist poets. Some of them as, for instance, Rilke, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Benn, hide themselves behind masks and create various personae in their poems. Within the work of one poet, the personae can differ very much from each other and sometimes change from poem to poem. This can be the result of the wish to express a totally fluid identity (Hugo von Hofmannsthal) or to try to create, on the basis of these multiple personalities, a higher unity (Eliot).8 The mask or persona can, of course, also be introduced to hide the poet’s own uncertainty (or to express it in an exaggerated way) or to avoid the personal as much as possible. In the lat ter case the poet can, for instance, introduce a neutral voice, which does not refer to an “I” as the speaker and main “character” of the poem and

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which does not address anyone or anything. This can lead to complex, hermetic poetry (Mallarmé). Russian poetry has its own particular development but is, at least during the last three ages, connected with the principal movements of European literary history. Russian literature, too, has its classicism, sentimentalism, romanticism, realism, symbolism, modernism and postmodernism. This means that the problem of the subject, a predominant theme in European modernism, can also be found in Russian modernist literature. And just as the western European poets approached the problem of the splintered subject in various ways, the Russian poets dealt with this problem each in his own manner. Whereas the Russian symbolists as regards the expression of their own “I” resemble the romantic poets (lyric and empirical “I” can to a great extent be identified with each other),9 the modernist poets of the historical avant-garde offer an entirely different picture. In my discussion of these poets I will confine myself to three poets who belong to the various groups of Russian futurism, which came into existence a few years before the beginning of the First World War. Vladimir Mayakovsky Few poets have so extensively dealt with the problem of the “I” in their poetry as Vladimir Mayakovsky. His poetry is personal in the sense that in almost all his (not strictly revolutionary) poetry, the “I” occupies a central place. Not only does it appear as the speaker in the text, but also as its main element, its main “character”. The same can be said of Mayakovsky’s symbolist predecessor, Alexander Blok, but whereas Blok introduces a more or less stable “I”, which gradually changes in accordance with the gradual changes in the poet’s own life, Mayakovsky’s poetry is remarkable for the great changeability and instability of the lyric “I”. The “I” changes from poem to poem, sometimes even within one and the same poem. The “I” plays various, very different roles or is shown as

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something self-contradictory. The resulting image is an extremely complex one, an authentic self-portrait, perhaps, but in its complexity and inner inconsistency showing typical features of the modern subject. In his poetry, Mayakovsky often introduces a lyric “I” in the role of a poet. In his work before the revolution this poet is a rebel, someone who actively opposes bourgeois society and, in particular, the symbolist literary tradition, in which the poet was considered a special, superior being. As a rebellious poet, who wants to renew both society and literature, he often addresses his public in a provocative way. And if today I, rude Hun, am not prepared to pose in front of you – look I will burst out laughing and spit gladly, Spit you in the face I – the spendthrift and squanderer of invaluable words. From: “That for you!” (Nate!)

After the revolution, Mayakovsky also wrote poems in which the lyric “I” appears as a poet, but this new poet plays an entirely different role. He no longer opposes society and does not abuse his public, but has become a poet for the workers, who eagerly supports the Soviet state with its new economic relations. I am also a factory. And if I have no pipes, then it is, perhaps, for me, without pipes more difficult. I know that you do not like empty words. You fell an oak – that is work. But are not we too woodworkers? From: “The poet-worker” (Poet Rabochy)

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Mayakovsky’s contemporaries and many Soviet critics as well have related these two different “poets” in his work with the poet Mayakovsky himself in different periods of his life. It is evident that there is such a relationship, but this is only part of the story. In introducing the lyric “I”, Mayakovsky does not present the “I” as poet only, but gives it many other faces. In many of his poems the lyric “I” is not the “confident” poet, who opposes or supports society, but an unsure, indecisive and extremely shy person, who cannot find his place in the world, who does not feel free and who is tormented by a feeling of loneliness and a longing for death Half of my life is past, now you cannot break out anymore, The warder has thousand eyes, lanterns, lanterns, lanterns... I am a prisoner. Nobody can buy my freedom! The cursed earth has bound me with iron. (...) The soul shivers. She is fast in the ice and cannot move! That’s how, under a spell, I’ll walk the Neva embankment. From: “Man” (Chelovek)

A complex image of the lyric “I”, which undoubtedly matches the complexity of Mayakovsky himself, 10 we find in the long poem “A Cloud in Trousers”. At first the lyric “I”, appearing as a poet, is full of confidence Challenging the world with the power of my voice I walk – beautiful, twenty-two years old (...) If you like I’ll rage and roar on raw meat – and then, like the sky, changing my hue – if you like

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I’ll be unimpeachably tender, not a man, but a cloud in trousers!

When, however, the “I” turns out to fail as a lover and is rejected by a “Maria” who has chosen another one, he is over whelmed by a sense of despair and abandonment. The “personae” of the poet (who can be a prophet and saviour of the world) and of the rejected lover come together in the image of the crucified Christ with whom the “I” identifies itself. 11 I am wherever pain is – anywhere on each drop of the tear stream I have crucified myself. Nothing must be forgiven anymore! I’ve burnt out souls where gentleness grew, It was harder than taking a thousand thousand Bastilles! 12

In a number of his poems, Mayakovsky introduces the lyric “I” under his own name: Vladimir Mayakovsky. This reinforces the impression that his work is highly autobiographical and that the lyric and the empirical “I” are identical. Apart from the theoretical problem of his identicalness – as soon as autobiographical ele ments are introduced into a work of art, they cease to be strictly autobiographical but are in the first place part of the text structure and subservient to the meaning of the text – it is clear that Mayakovsky problematizes the subject in his work, revealing its lack of unity in its being a composition of contrasting and contradictory selves. Boris Pasternak Whereas Mayakovsky’s poetry concentrates on the representation of the lyric “I” in all its different, heterogeneous appearances, Pasternak solves the problem of the subject in an entirely different way. In his poetry, the lyric “I” does not hold a prominent place and sometimes even seems to be entirely absent from the poem.

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In contradistinction to Blok, Tsvetayeva, Mayakovsky, or Esenin, the lyrical part is comparativelyv rarely done in the first person. Then the personality of the poet was the central focus, and his works, extended by a diary kept over many years, prolonged by a narrative “about the times and about myself” constituted something experienced and a dramatic biography which was enacted before the eyes of the readers and was surrounded by the halo of legend. Pasternak avoids this concept and terms it “romantic”, “the biography of the poet for the sake of show”. He tells little about himself and carefully removes and conceals his “ego” (Synjavsky 1971: 116).

In many of Pasternak’s poems, it is not the “I“ which appears in the role of the main lyric hero, but the surrounding world, which speaks for the “I” and instead of it. The “I” is not an agens, but a patiens (Jakobson 1979: 125). Not the “I” itself, but the elements of the world around it, especially the elements of nature become the principal actors. The flagstones burned, and the forehead of the street was suntanned, and the cobblestones looked at the sky and the wind rowed through the lime trees like a boatman. These were all similes. (...) The sand was yellow and devoured the clouds. The time before the storm played on the eyebrows of bushes. The sky curdled as it fell on some blood-clotting arnica herb. From: “Marburg”.

In this personified and humanized world, the “I” does not inform us about itself and its inner feelings, but is, rather, the object of investigation of its surroundings.13 Behind them, blinded in their tracks in flight, Came the slant drops. And by the fence,

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An argument raged between the wet boughs And the pale wind. I was mortified. About me! From: “Sultry night” (Dushnaya noch’)

The lyric “I” and the surrounding world, nature usually, flow together. Feelings and emotions are not attributed to the “I”, but to the objects around it. The subject hides itself, as it were, behind its surroundings and is not directly expressed, but indirectly, metonymically, through the personified world in which it exists and which appears as the “objective correlative” of the “I”. Spring, I’ve come from the street, where the poplar is amazed, Where the distance is scared, where the house fears to fall, Where the air is blue, like the bundle of linen Of a man discharged from hospital. Where the evening is empty, like an interrupted story, Left by a star without continuation To the consternation of a thousand loud eyes, Fathomless and devoid of expression. “Spring” (Vesna)

In this well-known poem, in which the “I” is only mentioned once, in the first line, emotions are attributed to things, not to the lyric “I”. It is obvious, however, that everything that is said about these things is of the greatest importance for the way the “I” is represented in the poem. In his later poetry, for instance in the poems included in his novel Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak frequently writes about the role and the function of the poet and art in general in history. In these poems it is not the surrounding world behind which the “I” conceals itself. Instead, the lyric “I” is presented as an actor who plays a role. The high point in this type of poem is “Hamlet”, the first poem of the Zhivago-cycle. The noise is stilled. I come out on the stage. Leaning against the door-post

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Willem G. Weststeijn I try to guess from the distant echo What is to happen in my lifetime. The darkness of night is aimed at me Along the sights of a thousand opera-glasses, Abba, Father, if it be possible, Let this cup pass from me. I love your stubborn purpose, I consent to play my part, But now a different drama is being acted; For this once let me be. Yet the order of the acts is planned And the end of the way inescapable. I am alone; all drowns in the Pharisees’ hypocrisy. To live your life is not as simple as to cross a field.

In this poem the lyric “I” appears as an actor who plays the role of Hamlet. In the second stanza another role is added to the first one, that of Christ, who has to obey the will of his Father and to live out his tragic destiny. The three “roles” of the lyric “I”: the actor, Hamlet and Christ, merge and express the predicament of Pasternak himself and of the poets of his time. The three personae in the poem uniquely conceal and reveal the poet’s self. On the whole, Pasternak is not less personal than Mayakovsky, but he hides himself more effectively, whether behind the elements of the surrounding world or in various personae. The resulting image of the lyric “I”, which combines helplessness, alienation and dedication to its task is not less complex than Mayakovsky’s and in the same degree gives expression to the problem of the modern subject. Velimir Khlebnikov A third famous futurist, Velimir Khlebnikov, one of the great experimenters of Russian futurism, is quite different from most poets of

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his time as regards the expression of his own self. In both Pasternak’s and Mayakovsky’s poetry there are many distict appearances of the lyric “I”. Yet it is possible, on the basis of all these appearances, to construct a “personality”, a generalized image of the subject, complex and full of contradictions as it is. Khlebnikov’s poetry does not present such a possibility. The lyric subjects in his poems are so heterogeneous that we cannot combine them into one image. The “I” has so many different faces that it is impossible and, indeed, senseless to try to heap them together. Characteristic for Khlebnikov’s poetry is the minimal presence of the lyric “I”. In many of his poems the lyric subject appears only as a voice which makes a statement or tells what happens or is seen by an observer. What is described in such a way does not necessarily have any relevance for the inner world of the “I”, nor does it metonymically express it, as in the case of Pasternak’s. The “I” is, as it were, neutralized and disappears into the background. Instead, other aspects of the poem come to the fore. This can be language (for instance, the many experimental poems in which Khlebnikov uses and develops the futurist zaum’, transrational language), the description of a person, events, surroundings, or the expression of a general statement. When the “I” is introduced into the poem, it is often only as a focus of observation. I saw the young man, the young prophet, lying by the glassy strands of a forest waterfall. Where moss-covered trees stood grave as old men in the twilight, telling their beads on the strands of overgrown vines. Like a mother-chord of glass, a chain fell into the chasm, a chain of mothers and daughters of glass born of the waterfall, where the mother of water changed place with her children. Below, the river murmured.

Khlebnikov has also many poems in which the lyric “I” appears as a character involved in an action or an event. Such a character can be a persona, who does not bear Klebnikov’s own name, but can

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also be an autobiographical “hero”, connected with events in the poet’s own life. We encounter this hero, for instance, in the poem “The Gul-Mullah’s Trumpet” (Truba Gul’-mully), written on the occasion of a journey to Persia that Khlebnikov made in the beginning of the twenties. In this poem, too, Khlebnikov is not interested in expressing the thoughts and feelings of the lyric “I” (who is called Khlebnikov), but describes what the “I” experiences and witnesses. Today I am the sea’s guest. A broad tablecloth of sand, A dog in the distance. We both sniff around, chew what we find. We watch one another. I dined on a few little fishes, and caviar. It was good! You don’t eat this well when people invite you! From beyond the fence a boy shouts: “Uruss dervish! Uruss dervish! ” – shouts at me, ten times at least.

The word dervish is a key word in this passage. It puts the lyric “I” (i.e. the poet’s self) on a par with the Persian priests and prophets, who already in the beginning of the poem, when the “I” arrived in the country, welcomed him as one of their own. These are prophets come down from the mountains to meet the child Khlebnikov! (...) “Ours”, sing the holy men of the mountains, “Ours,” say the flowers – (...) “Ours, ” sing the oak trees and thickets, A golden clangor, the summons of Spring!

In Khlebnikov’s world, and this is demonstrated in many of his poems, the “I” is on one level with priests, prophets, gods, elements of nature and celestial bodies. The divine and the human, the

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earthly and the cosmic merge, which results in a mythologization of the world and a constant process of metamorphosis. 14 I am borne on the back of an elephant formed by the bodies of maidens. Everyone everywhere loves me – I am Vishnu anew, weaving this wintry vision. (...) I am the Bodhisattva on a white elephant: as always, pensive and slender. Russia, I give you my divine white brain. Be me. Be Khlebnikov. I am covered with hair – rivers... Look! The Danube streams down my shoulders. (...) The Volga fell down on my hands, And with a comb in its hand – a fence of mountains It combs the hair. Suppose I make a timepiece of humanity, demonstrate the movement of the century hand – will war not wither like an unused letter, drop from our alphabet, vanish from our little gap of time?

We find this device of metamorphosis also in connection with texts and text elements. The well-known metaphorical representation of the world as a book15 often occurs in Khlebnikov’s work as the analogy between the world (nature), the book and human life. The lyric “I” does not only appear as the creator of books (as, for instance, in the poem “The One, the Only Book” – Edinaja kniga), but also as a book itself or part of a book. I am the book of dried out seas (...) I am the children’s textbook

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Willem G. Weststeijn From: “The Sisters-Lightnings” (Sestry-molnii) Death! I am a blank page! Write all what you want! From: “The Real” (Nastoyashchee)

Khlebnikov’s life-long involvement with language and language experiments result in analogies between the lyric “I” and words and utterances (“I am a shout resounding in the field”). In his long poem “Zagezi” sounds and letters appear as the heroes of prehistoric times R, K, L, andG – The warriors of the alphabet, – Were the acting persons of those years The heroes (bogatyri) of those days.

The mythologization of the lyric “I”,16 which becomes manifest in a number of analogies between the “I” and (elements of) the text, nature, the world and the cosmos, gives an epic character to the work of Khlebnikov. When we consider his entire oeuvre we see a great many different “incarnations” of the lyric “I”. The subject falls apart in a number of apparently unrelated entities. The problem of the subject is, however, posited less clearly than by the other poets of the Russian avant-garde. The postmodernists The development in the twentieth-century from modernism to postmodernism has been described by the Russian philosopher and cultural historian Mikhail Epstein as a development from “super” to “pseudo”. This transition from the “super” to the “pseudo”, from the ecstatic illusions of pure reality to the ironic realization of this reality as pure illusion, accounts for the historical transformation of European and Russian culture in the twentieth

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century, and can be described as the movement from modernism to postmodernism (Epstein 1999a: 27).

Epstein maintains that modernism can be seen as a revolution which aspired “to affirm the hidden absoluteness of being”. We encounter this aspiration everywhere, in culture, philosophy, literature, ideology. It is defined as “matter and economics” in Marxism, as “libido and the unconscious” in Freud, as “stream of consciousness” in Joyce, “being” in Heidegger, “the power of workers and peasants” in Bolshevism, et cetera (Epstein 1999: 5). In certain respects, postmodernism is a continuation and elaboration of modernism, but in some respects it is entirely opposed to it. Postmodernism criticizes in the first place modernism’s belief in an ultimate truth, an essential reality beyond that of the signs. Instead, postmodernism claims that this essential reality is an utter illusion and that there is no other reality than the conventional, secondary one which consists of signifiers.17 The critique of postmodernism on modernism’s belief in ultimate truths led to a denial of these truths. Postmodernism has no place for ideals and utopias. Instead, there is general doubt as regards any metaphysical “reality”, nothing is taken seriously any longer, “anything goes”. As regards the subject: the “existential quest” which is characteristic for modernism and in which, despite the disunity of the self, an essential, ultimate “I” is craved for, 18 does not exist in postmodernism. Postmodernism does not believe in the subject, decenters it and opposes it to the Other (language, God, the unconscious). The self becomes insubstantial, inconsequential and disappears. Whereas in modernist poetry the lyric “I” is often complex, paradoxical and self-contradictory, it remains a mirror of the Ego, the poet’s self, a more or less stable centre with which the reader can identify. In the poetry of postmodernism The lyric “I” has lost its central place. Poetry is no longer in the first place a means to express personal thoughts and feelings, but is concerned with other aspects, such as, for instance, complex metaphorization, parody, linguistic structures.

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The shift in postmodernist poetry from the personal to the impersonal, from a lyric “I” to a lyric “It”19 is apparent in the work of the contemporary Russian avantgarde, particularly the so-called Moscow conceptualists. For the conceptualists, a group of poets and painters20 which was formed in the time of Brezhnev, but acquired international renown only after the perestroyka, Soviet reality is an important frame of reference. Reality, however, is not reproduced faithfully. What we see is, in fact, a simulacrum, a copy which does not have an original.21 Examples of such simulacrum art are the installations of Ilya Kabakov and the Stalin paintings (“Stalin and the muses”, for instance) of Komar and Mela mid. In lyric poetry such simulacra are created by language: by using communist slogans, colloquial speech and m at (swearwords). Soviet reality is not reflected, but exposed in all its banality and emptiness. One of the most popular conceptualist poets, Timur Kibirov, uses classic verse forms, such as the ode and the elegy, to describe Soviet reality. As he mixes, moreover, various levels of language, and frequently uses quotations from the work of other poets, the effect is, invariably, ironic. Famous is Kibirov’s “Song about Cervelat” (Pesn’ o servelate), in which sausage, a notoriously scarce product in the Soviet period, is described as something of world-wide, even cosmic importance. Sausage, sausage, o, salami, salami! O, beautiful name, high honour.

In another of his poems he uses a song that was popular in the sixties. His “adaption” runs as follows: Mummy, I love Lenin! Mummy, I will marry Lenin! Lenin is the blossom of spring The dawns of new generations – That is why I love him!

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On the road to communism Lenin takes the lead – That is why I love him! From: “Song about Lenin” (Pesnja o Lenine)22

Irony and parody are also characteristic for the work of Dmitry Prigov. One of his lyric heroes, who appears in many of this poems, is the Policeman. In the bar of the House of Writers The Policeman is drinking his beer Drinking in his usual manner Not even seeing these men of letters They though are looking at him Around Him it’s bright and empty And all their various Arts In the presence of Him count as nothing He represents Life Manifested in the form of Duty Life is short, but Art is long Yet in the battle Life will win the day

Prigov, who has an enormous production (his aim is to have written twenty thousand poems before the year 2000, which is a parody in itself) likes to describe the “reality” of Moscow. When there were mass arrests around the world And there was genocide and Kulaks lost their lands Various escaped Jews And Russians and Germans and Chinese Ran secretly, stealthily into the woods beyond Moscow And founded a town there: Moscow Hardly anyone heard of it afterwards And no-one has seen living Muscovites But perhaps they’re simple tales, shameless lies Besides, its name is strange – Moscow

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The subject, the lyric “I” which mirrors the poet’s self, has almost disappeared from the poetry of the contemporary avant-garde. However, postmodernism has almost run its course and will soon be succeeded by a new artistic movement. After the distorted reality of modernism and the simulacra of postmodernism, chances are that the new period will favour virtual reality. How to express the virtual subject seems to be an interesting challenge for a new generation of poets to come.

Notes 1

The principle of causality also determined positivist literary criticism. The French scholar and philosopher Hypollyte Taine introduced the terms “race”, “moment” and “milieu”, the German Wilhelm Scherer “das Ererbte”, “das Erlebte” and “das Erlernte”. When everything was known about the “background” of the author, he could be “explained” entirely). 2

“It is characteristic that the twentieth-century, having exhausted the reserves of the spatial expansion of culture (all geographical space has become ‘culture’; the ‘forefield’ has disappeared), has addressed itself to the problem of the subconscious, constructing a new type of space opposed to culture. (...) As a fact of culture the problem of the subconscious is not so much a discovery as a creation of the twentieth century” (Uspensky et al. 1973: 3-4). 3

“Die Annahme des einen Subjekts ist vielleicht nicht notwendig; vielleicht ist es ebensogut erlaubt, eine Vielheit von Subjekten anzunehmen, deren Zusammenspiel und Kampf unserem Denken und überhaupt unserem Bewußtsein zugrunde liegt” (Nietzsche 1980: 473). 4

Quoted from his poem “Epitaphe”, which contains the following lines: Mélange adultère de tout: De la fortune et pas le sou,

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De l’énergie et pas de force, La liberté, mais une entorse. Du coeur, du coeur! de l’âme, non – Des amis, pas un compagnon, De l’idée et pas une idée, De l’amour et pas une aimée. 5

See, for instance, Hansen Löve 1994.

6

“Das künstliche Ich nährt sich mit ‘idiotischen Bildern’, mit reizstoffen des Östlichen und des Primitiven, wird planetarisch, macht sich zum Engel und Magier. Mit Rimbaud hat die abnorme Trennung des dichterischen Subjekts vom empirischen Ich eingesetzt (...) die allein schon verbieten würde, moderne Lyrik als biographische Aussage zu verstehen” (Friedrich 1967: 69-70). 7

Eliot uses the term in a somewhat different meaning, to wit, the impersonal which transcends subjective experience, but the underlying mechanism, the conscious separation of the lyric from the empiric “I” is the same. 8

See for a description of masks and personae in the work of modernist poets the first chapters of Hamburger 1969. Interesting in this respect are also his remarks on the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who, as is well-known, divided himself into four distinct authors: Fernando Pessoa, Alvaro de Campos, Alberto Caeiro and Ricardo Reis. Hamburger quotes a posthumous sketch by Pessoa in which the poet explains this division: “The first stage of lyrical poetry is that in which the poet concentrates on his feelings and expresses them. If, however, he is a creature with mutable and multiple feelings, he will express a number of personalities, as it were, held together only by temperament and style. One further step, and we are confronted with a poet who is a creature with multiple and fictional feelings, more imaginative than emotional, experiencing every state of mind more intellectually than emotionally. This poet will express himself in a variety of persons no longer unified by temperament and style, but by style alone; for temperament has been replaced by imagination, and emotion by intellect. One farther step on the way to deper-

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sonalization or, better, imagination, and we are confronted with a poet who becomes so much at home in each of this different states of mind that he gives up his personality completely, to the point where, by experiencing each state of mind analytically, he makes it yield the expression of a different personality; in that way even style becomes manifold. One last step, and we find the poet who is several different poets at once, a dramatic poet who writes lyrical poems. Each group of imperceptibly related states of mind thus becomes a personality with a style of its own and feelings which may differ from the poet’s own typical emotional experiences, or may even be diametrically opposed to them. And in this way lyrical poetry draws close to dramatic poetry without assuming dramatic forms” (italics mine – WGW). 9

The lyric oeuvre of the best-known representative of Russian symbolism, Alexander Blok, can almost be considered a “novel” with Blok himself as the main character. The “hero” of the poems (the lyric “I”) changes the older Blok becomes and can always be connected with the empiric “I” and his personal experiences. 10

An excellent portrait of Mayakovsky is given by Boris Pasternak in his autobiographical work Safe Conduct. After having described the poet’s deliberate brusqueness and impressive appearance, he writes: “From these poses – natural in the highest realm of self-expression as everyday rules of propriety – he selected one of outward integrity, which is the hardest pose for an artist to maintain and the noblest one vis à vis his friends and those close to him. And he maintained this pose with such perfection that it is now almost impossible to describe what lay behind it. But the mainspring of his brashness was a farouche timidity, and his pretence of willpower covered up a lack of will, phenomenally suspicious and prone to a quite gratuitous gloom. And just as deceptive was the function of his yellow blouse (part of Mayakovsky’s futurist dress, worn to épater le bourgeois – WGW). He used it not to campaign against jackets worn by the middle classes, but to combat the black velvet of talent within him, whose dark-browed saccharine forms began to outrage him earlier than they would less gifted men” (Pasternak 1986: 86).

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11

The “I” as martyr and Christ-like figure in Mayakovsky’s work is extensively discussed by Stahlberger 1964. 12

A good analysis of “A Cloud in Trousers” and of other works by Mayakovsky can be found in Brown 1988. Brown begins his chapter on “A Cloud in Trousers” with the remark that “there are two loci classici that elucidate the subject of his [Mayakovsky’s] various and easily interchangeable selves.” The first is an article by Mayakovsky entitled “About the Various Mayakovskies” (O raznykh Mayakovskykh), the second a statement by Mayakovsky as to the origin of the title of “A Cloud in Trousers”. In this statement the poet elaborates on the nature of his various selves: from the tender lyricist to the cynic, barbarian and literary huckster (Brown 1988: 108). 13

“The ‘I’ in Pasternak’s poetry, or artistic prose for that matter, is not the pivot of a lyrical narrative, the principal point of reference. The self exists here, as it were, on a par with all the other elements of the heterogeneous universe – natural phenomena, inanimate objects, indeed with its own objectified sensations and states of mind. An integral part of his physical environment, of ‘nature’, he is treated as ‘object’ also in that he is no more likely to act than to be acted upon, looked at, appraised by, the things around him” (Erlich 1959: 327). 14

See, for instance, Hansen-Löve 1985; 1986.

15

See Hansen-Löve 1985; Weststeijn 1987.

16

This theme is more extensively discussed in Weststeijn 1987.

17

Cf. Derrida’s famous phrase “Il n’y a pas dehors texte”.

18

See, for instance, what Hamburger writes about T.S. Eliot: “What his work does tell us, and still conveys with great power, is that he succeeded in reducing his multiple selves to a unity and purity rare in modern poetry” (1969: 130). 19

See Epstein 1999b: 141.

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20

Just as in Russian futurism, in Moscow conceptualism poets and painters worked in close conjunction and developed the same kind of devices. Mayakovsky was a painter by profession; so is Dmitri Prigov, the best known conceptualist poet. 21

According to Jean Baudrillard, in the evolution of the image can be discerned four stages: 1) the image reflects reality; 2) it distorts reality; 3) it marks the absence of reality; 4) it becomes a simulacrum, an image which is a copy of a reality which does not exist (1983: 11). The simulacrum is typical for postmodernist culture. 22

For a more extensive discussion of Kibirov’s work see Weststeijn 1998.

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean 1983 Simulations. New York. Brown, Edward J. 1988 (1973)Mayakovsky. A Poet in the Revolution. New York. Epstein, Mikhail 1999a “The Dialectics of H y p e r : From Modernism to Postmodernism”, in Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover, Russian Postmodernism, New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture . New York-Oxford, 3-30. 1999b “Like a Corpse in the Desert. Dehumanization in the New Moscow Poetry”, in: Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover, Russian Postmodernism. New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture. New YorkOxford, 134-144.

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“The Concept of the Poet in Pasternak”, The Slavonic and East European Review, XXXVII, 89, 325-335.

Friedrich, Hugo 1967 Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik . Hamburg. Hamburger, Michael 1969 TheTruth of Poetry. London. Hansen-Löve, A. 1985 ‘“Die Entfaltung des ‘Welt-Text’-Paradigmas in der Poesie V. Chlebnikovs”, in: N.Å Nillsson (ed.), Velimir Chlebnikov. A Stockholm Symposium. Stockholm, 27-87. 1986 “Der “WeltÛschädel” in der Mythopoesie V. Chlebnikovs”, in: Willem G. Weststeijn (ed.), Velimir Chlebnikov (18851922): Myth and Reality. Amsterdam, 129-181. Hansen Löve, K.K. 1994 The Evolution of Space in Russian Literature. A Spatial Reading of 19th and 20th Century Narrative Literature. Amsterdam. Jakobson, Roman 1979 “O pokolenii, rastrativshem svoich poetov”, in Selected writings, V. The Hague, 355-381. Nietzsche, Friedrich 1980 “Aus dem Nachlaß der Achtzigerjahre”, in: Werke, Band VI. München-Wien, 417-925. Pasternak, Boris 1986 The Voice of Prose, transl. Christopher Barnes. Edinburgh. Sinyavsky, Andrei 1971 For Freedom of Imagination, transl. Laszlo Tikos and Murray Peppard. New York-Chicago-San Francisco.

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Uspenskij, B.A. et al. 1973 “Theses on the Semiotic Study of Culture (as Applied to Slavic Texts)”, in: Jan van der Eng and Mojmír Grygar (eds), Structure of Texts and Semiotics of Culture. The Hague, 1-28. Weststeijn, Willem G. 1987 “Die Mythisierung des lyrischen Ich in der Poesie Velimir Chlebnikovs”, in Mythos in der Slavischen Moderne, Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 20, 119-138. 1998 “Timur Kibirov”, in: Joe Andrew and Robert Reid (eds), Neo-Formalist Papers. Contributions to the Silver Jubilee Conference to Mark 25 Years of the Neo-Formalist Circle. Amsterdam, 269-281.

SELF-AWARENESS AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE Mental Familiarity and Epistemic Self-Ascription

Manfred Frank

I. In recent literature diverse arguments have been advanced for an exceptional position of self-consciousness in the area of epistemic facts. Two of them dominate clearly: The first argues for the essential subjectivity of self-conscious states (headwords are: “whatis-it-likeness” or “qualia”); the second defends the epistemological, ontological, and semantic priority of subjective self-attribution of mental properties over all other forms of reference and ascription. These two problematics share a number of characteristics (and that is why it will be important to work out their difference in a second line of argument). For instance, both concern what can be known with some kind of unmediated familiarity [Vertrautheit]. When I am in good spirits, I do not need additional perceptual or reflective acts to confirm my mental state, as if there were some real possibility that I might be wrong about them. I am immediately conscious of such states, and it makes no sense to suggest that this knowledge concerns a mere appearance rather than the true being of my mental state. John Searle has recently reminded us that the being

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of mental states consists exclusively in their subjective appearance, so that one simply eliminates them if one separates their being from how they appear to the subject.1 To describe our knowledge of our own mental states as “immediate” also implies that such knowledge does not arise via another consciousness – for example, by an act of judgment or through an “inner perception.” I still feel a toothache or the pangs of love or dread even if I am not reflecting on my feelings and make no assertions concerning them.2 Nor must I have an inner perception of some sort of (objectified) mental state. 3 Furthermore, “toothache” or “lovesick” are already concepts that I form retrospectively for an originally non-conceptual, nonlinguistic feeling.4 Of course, in reaching for such concepts I might conceivably make a mistake or an inappropriate choice. That is a matter of interpretation and insofar as fallible as any interpretation. Perhaps I have not correctly named how it feels to me to be in this unpleasant or confusing state. However, what is essential is this: One is conscious of how one feels (or of “what it is like”) even when one does not know in the slightest how one should classify the feeling.5 (It could happen that I am in love even though I lack a valid theory of love, or even lack the concept itself.) 6 A familiar objection (of Wittgensteinian inspiration) is that since one can retrospectively identify and describe mental states for which at the time of their first consciousness one may have lacked the appropriate concepts or words, does it not follow that there is an epistemic continuity between the two conditions? And if that is the case, does it not also follow that the subsequently explicit knowledge is propositional, and quasi-linguistic in character? In other words, since the explicit knowledge of my mental state is conceptual, how could it not be that the individualization of what such knowledge is concerned with does not at least implicitly require concepts? This objection demonstrates the power of a prejudice, one that has become more seductive that “the myth of interiority” against which it originally contended. So successfully has the fashion for linguistic analysis conditioned our thought that we now expect there to be an isomorphism between our knowledge and what is cognized.

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Since the belief that it is raining has a prepositional structure, we assume that what it is about (what makes the belief true) also has a prepositional structure. But the rain is an event in the world, not a proposition. Nor is my immediate mental state a proposition (or something isomorphic to one or virtually prepositional), even though it makes my knowledge “that I am so-and-so” true (without, however, a guarantee of infallibility). (Chisholm sees in this a supervenience of true beliefs, expressed in propositions, about immediate states of consciousness, and these immediate or, as he terms them, “self-presenting” states) . 7 What follows, then, is that consciousness itself is the criterion for the existence of conscious content. We would not say (at least not without some special explanation) that the existence of objects in the world depends on our awareness of them. Yet all the material processes in our brain (or more generally), in our central nervous system) that the neuro-biologist assures us are the physical basis of consciousness belong among those objects and events which we would not suppose to be self-conscious (as we do for our own experiences and acts). Hence the problem arises of how something in which there is no trace of consciousness could be the cause of co nsciousness, or even be identical with something (like us) whose very being consists in being-familiar-with-itself [Mit-sich-Vertrautsein]. That, however, is a problem I will not consider here. 8 Although there is now some consensus about this analysis of immediate experience, there is disagreement concerning the evaluation of its epitemic (or better, cognitive) relevance. Jacques Bouveresse has presented us with dozens of variations on the early Wittgenstein’s objectio to the effect that something that cannot be either true or false (as, for example, a pre-linguistic or non-prepositional mental state) cannot be a candidate for knowledge. referring back to Locke, the newer literature speaks of such immediate qualitative mental states as the feeling of pain, the taste of bitterness, or the emotion of hatred as “qualia”9 Frank Jackson, who jokingly and yet plausibly calls himself a “qualia freak” (EQ, 469), insists that no physical description can capture what we experience when we, for example, smell a rose. If “physicalism” is the conviction that

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only that exists which falls within the scope of methods developed in natural science (and in the final instance, physics),10 then “physicalism is false” – this conclusion runs like a leitmotif throughout Jackson’s work. A further point which Jackson makes is that our acquaintance with what Kripke calls immediate phenomenological qualities has the character of knowledge. That is what is meant by the well-known “knowledge argument for qualia” (EQ, 470 ff.). Let Mary be an excellent physiologist of the senses well acquainted with the latest research on the perception of color. By chance, however, she is obliged to conduct all of her research in a black and white room and to visualize it on a black and white television screen. Once released from this room and allowed to work with a color television monitor, she will undoubtedly have learned something about our visual experience. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. “Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.” (EQ, 471). There is a “modal” variation on this so-called knowledge argument. It is similar to the “absent qualia argument”11 and states that not even the most detailed physical information about someone’s neural paths necessarily implies anything about his or her consciousness. So there is a possible world in which beings identical to us in all physical respects enjoy the same physiological states as we do but, unlike us, they experience nothing of them. Since this is exactly the world that physicalism (in all its variations, even as functionalism) describes, and yet we unmistakably know by an immediate, intimate familiarity that we feel something, physicalism is therefore false (or, better, incomplete). In any case, physicalism does not completely elucidate the actual world as we know it to be (EQ, 472). Jackson pointedly, though probably not conclusively, exempts the qualitative experiences that concern him from those relevant to Nagel’s demonstration that no matter how detailed our physical information may be, it cannot elucidate what it would be like to be a bat (EQ , 427 f.). We should – so the argument runs – be careful not to confuse (1) Mary’s knowledge of the difference between a world

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seen in black and white and the same world seen in color, and (2) her knowledge that it is she herself who has these experiences. Qualia are in themselves not personalized. They consist in an anonymous feeling, given with immediate and infallible familiarity, but do not include a knowledge of the subject who has this feeling. Now the essential point for us is the fact that Jackson takes both of the two phenomena to be instantiations of “knowledge”. Exactly that is what Wittgenstein’s followers routinely contest. David Lewis has lately formulated an already well-known version of this objection.12 He denies the status of prepositional (or informational) knowledge to one’s own “knowledge” of one’s subjective mental states, but allows it the status of an ability (know-how) (WER, 516 f.). To know what it is like, say, to be in agony is to know how (1) to imagine something, (2) to remember it, and (3) to be able to recognize it again (MP , 131). The Ability Hypothesis says that knowing what an experience is like is just the possession of these abilities to remember, imagine, and recognize. It isn’t possession of any kind of information, ordinary or peculiar. It isn’t knowing that certain possibilities aren’t actualized. It isn’t knowing-that. It’s knowing-how. Therefore it should be no surprise that lessons won’t teach you what an experience is like. Lessons impart information; ability is something else. Knowledge-that does not automatically provide know-how... If the Ability Hypothesis is the correct analysis of knowing what an experience is like, then phenomenal information is an illusion. (WET, 516 f.). One may find the distinction between knowing-that and knowing-how prima facie convincing, and be willing to count one’s acquaintance with qualia as a kind of knowing-how rather than a prepositional knowing-that. Yet one may still want to charge Lewis with exploiting a semantic ambiguity in speaking of knowing-how. Dispositional (or rule-) knowledge is also a kind of knowing-how – for instance, knowing how to play chess or how to analyze an ablative absolute into an adverbial modification or a dependent clause. One might characterize such knowledge as implicit, immediate, or intimate. (When I speak German, for example, I am in some

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“immediate” way familiar with the grammar without any explicit knowledge of the rules I may be following, as M. Jourdain spoke prose without knowing it.) Yet such rule-based knowing-how is fundamentally different from the knowledge with which Nagel and Jackson are concerned. When I feel pain and “know how I am”, I do not have to know how to follow any rule for the use of the word pain (nor need I know anything about the causal role of painsensations). However, the reverse does hold: I could not develop the capacity to represent, remember, or predict pain if I did not already know pain by immediate familiarity with a feeling. To this extent at least, Lewis’ attempt to neutralize the knowledge-argument does not succeed. Therefore, Jackson had good reasons to reject the proposed division of labor between knowing-how and knowing-that which Lewis proposed to evade the force of the knowledge-argument (MWDK, 393). When Mary leaves her black and white dungeon and sees a ripe tomato under normal conditions, she does not acquire a new sort of knowledge; rather, she has new knowledge of something which she did not previously know, hence certainly a knowing that (something is like so-and-so). According to Lewis, however, she would already have possessed all possible relevant physical knowledge-that (and ex hypothesis there is no other sort of knowledge). Mary did not lack knowledge, but a capacity or ability to represent something to herself. 13 Against this interpretation it is again to be remarked that Mary’s “representational abilities” remain unchanged before and after her release from the black and white room. What changes is that Mary acquires previously unknown factual knowledge (WMDK, 394). Whether Jackson’s knowledge-argument convinces us or not – whether or not we are therefore prepared to ascribe epistemic relevance to the intimations of immediate self-consciousness – there is a related phenomenon to which Lewis himself attributes a cognitive nature. It concerns that variant of self-consciousness which he terms “epistemic self-ascription” or a “de se attitude.”14 Such epistemic self-consciousness is to be distinguished from qualiaknowledge (if it is knowledge). Clearly the difference is not that,

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unlike an awareness of qualia, epistemic self-consciousness can be grasped in purely physical terms. Lewis admits that a “de se attitude” eludes physical knowledge as much as do Nagel’s “what-it-islikeness” and Jackson’s “acquaintance with qualia” (ADD, 144). II. It should be noted, Lewis did not discover the exceptional position of what he calls a “de se attitude”, he only derived especially productive consequences from the conception. The innovator here is Castañeda, 15 to whom almost all later authors refer.16 Castañeda defends the thesis, already familiar to some from the work of Kant and Fichte, that the “I” of self-consciousness is not reducible to anything that we could refer to with a demonstrative pronoun, with a proper name, or with what Frege called a “Kennzeichnung” and Russell a “definite description.” For the moment, the thesis might be summarized as follows: Self-consciousness (as that to which we refer with the first-person singular personal pronoun) is not analyzable in terms of objects or objective events. To this Castañeda adds a further thesis that makes its relationship to the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Fichte even more obvious; namely, that it is only on the basis of a prior and “transcendental” consciousness of self that reference to worldly objects (events, states of affairs, and so on) first becomes possible.17 So formulated, Castañeda’s thesis acquires an idealistic touch. I will attempt to elucidate it in as concise and clear a manner as possible. Castañeda’s starting-point is the question of how we can ascribe self-consciousness to another person by using personal pronouns like ‘he’ or ‘she’. That there is a problem here is perhaps not immediately evident, but one can be convinced that there is by considering even a few examples. These sentences express intentional propositions – that is, propositions that attribute some intentional state to a person: for example, “Paul believes (thinks, knows, hopes, wishes) that Mary is happy.” Here we have a so-called belief de dicto: Paul believes the dictum (the proposition) “that Mary is happy.” However, Paul can as well have an object-belief or, as the Scholastics termed it, a belief de re. Then he has a conviction about something (or someone), as is articulated in the sentence: “Paul

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believes about Mary that she is happy.” There is a significant difference between these two ways of ascribing beliefs, as can be seen from the quite different conditions under which each of them is true. Paul can have the de dicto belief that Mary is happy even if Mary does not exist (he could have meant someone else and mixed up the names or he could simply be hallucinating, dreaming, judging on the basis of gossip, or who knows what else), On the other hand, Paul could not have a de re belief about Mary, according to which she is happy, unless Mary really exists. For the adverbial qualification ‘about Mary’ occurs outside/in front of the subordinate clause specifying the belief content (which could be a mistake). When Paul believes something about someone (here about Mary), the existence of the person, to whom it is ascribed, must be guaranteed independently of the content of the ascription. The situation changes, however, if we consider Mary’s beliefs about herself. Let us change (for good reasons) Mary’s proper name to be a definite description: being the prettiest woman of Schriesheim. Then we have again several possibilities. These can be formulated in the following ways: a) The prettiest woman of Schriesheim believes, that the prettiest woman of Schriesheim is being elected vineyard queen. Or: b) There is an x such that x is identical with Mary (namely the prettiest woman of Schriesheim), an x is believed by x to be elected vineyard queen. Or: c) The prettiest woman of Schriesheim believes that she herself is being elected vineyard queen. Sentence (a) is another example of belief de dicto. (Mary refers to the dictum [or to the proposition] ‘that Mary is being elected vineyard queen’), while (b) is a de re belief (Mary believes something about an object); and (c) is an example of what Lewis has suggested to call belief de se18 (here Mary believes something plainly about herself). Now the thesis is, that (c) is not reducible either to prepositional knowledge or to knowledge about objects. If this thesis is

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right, it shows the special status of self-consciousness in a world made up of propositions and objects. Eliminative materialists (like the early Rorty or Dennett) or radical nominalists or antirealists (like Wittgenstein or Dummett) are unlikely to be impressed by this observation unless it can be demonstrated that the irreducibility of he*/she* to an ordinary indexical expression (or a name or object) is of the most strictly logical character.19 So let us make an effort to uncover what sorts of implication are at work in our different formulations about Mary’s beliefs. (1) (a) implies (b) (in other words, de dicto belief implies belief de re). For if the prettiest woman of Schriesheim believes the dictum “that the prettiest woman is being elected as vineyard queen”, then there must be someone who is prettier than any other woman, and who is held by just this person to be elected as vineyard queen. One might fear that the implication depends on an invalid inference from an opaque (intentional) to a transparent (extensional) context, but that is not the case. The first reference to “the prettiest woman” in (a) occurs outside any intentional context (the definite description is outside the scope of the existential quantifier), and thus secures Mary’s existence independently of the content of any belief. (2) The converse does not hold; that is, the de re belief (b) does not imply the de dicto belief (a). Someone may in fact be the prettiest woman of Schriesheim, and may also believe that the dictum “the prettiest woman of Schriesheim is being elected vineyard queen” is true, without necessarily knowing either that she is the prettiest woman or that the distinction of being the future vineyard queen is being attributed to her. (3) The de se belief (c) does not imply the de dicto belief (a); for the prettiest woman might believe of herself that she is being elected as vineyard queen without necessarily believing that it is the prettiest woman who is the future queen (since she need not know that she is in fact Mary, the prettiest woman on the spot). (4) Nor, conversely again, does the de dicto belief (a) imply the de se belief (c), since the prettiest woman might believe that the

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prettiest woman is being elected vineyard queen even if she does not know that the expression “the prettiest woman” refers to her. (5) The de se belief (c) implies the de re belief (b), since one cannot believe something about oneself without ipso facto believing it of somebody. (6) Yet, again, the converse does not hold The de re belief (b) does not imply the de se belief (c): The prettiest woman might believe that the prettiest woman is vineyard queen without necessarily believing that she herself is either the prettiest woman or that she herself is being elected vineyard queen. In other words: Mary might be identical with the prettiest woman without knowing that she is; and she might ascribe the conviction of being elected as vineyard queen to Mary without knowing that she is herself Mary. Most of these theses will not be controversial. At most, (6) could appear contentious. For – one could counter – if somebody is soand-so and holds herself to be so-and-so, then she thereby has a belief about herself. To be sure; but that is not sufficient to secure the same truly de se content clearly established in (c), where the subject has a belief that is not only about her but that she knows to be about herself. If without knowing that the woman in the mirror is none other than Mary, she says of her that she is pretty, or if without realizing it she refers to a photograph that shows her, then while she does refer to or express a belief about herself, still, she does not know that she has done so, and such references cannot be said to involve selfconsciousness. Ernest Mach actually had an experience of this kind. Once when he was boarding an omnibus in Vienna, he saw a man getting in at the same time on the other side and was suddenly struck by the thought, “What a shabby pedagogue is that character, who has just entered!” – not realizing that he was referring to himself, because he had not noticed that opposite him hung a large mirror.20 But that he himself had had a perception, Mach would, of course, have assented to, even before he knew that it referred to none other than himself. – Or remember Winnie-the-Pooh meeting Piglet outside his – Pooh’s – house, jumping up and down trying to reach the knocker.

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“Let me do it for you, “ said Pooh kindly. So he reached up and knocked at the door. (...) But Pooh,” said Piglet, “it’s your own house!” “Oh!” said Pooh. “So it is,” he said. “Well, let’s g o i n . ”21

You could finally object that Mary’s belief de se has in any case the form of a belief in a proposition (‘that she herself is being elected as vineyard queen’). Chisholm, however, is convinced to have shown, by elucidating the implication relations occurring between the three example sentences, that this is a mere appearance. In fact, given the special logical status of the subject of epistemic self-ascription, there cannot be any first-person propositions (FP, 20). That this is so, had already been defended in 1979 by David Lewis to whom Chisholm refers. Lewis distinguished the peculiar immunity from error characteristic of epistemic self-ascription from that of the consciousness of qualia (whose cognitive relevance, as we have seen, he denies), and characterizes the self-knowledge of the de se attitudes as both cognitively relevant and non-prepositional. Attitudes (like believing, thinking, hoping) are directed towards something. Now you may ask: towards what? Possible candidates are typically objects or propositions “that p”). Mainstream analytic philosophy opted for the latter. (When I hear the patter of small feet in the hall, I expect my cat, or is the object of my expectation a proposition – say, that the cat will run in and cuddle up under my hand?) As an alternative to both of them, Lewis proposes properties as the intentional objects of attitudes (ADD, 134). What reasons does he advance? The answer demands, first of all, a look at Lewis’ ontology. According to Lewis, a proposition is a set of possible worlds, a region of logical space (ADD, 134). [this “logical space” is, as we will see shortly, differentiated from physical space-time (ADD, 138). In “Causation”, one finds a similar definition: “I identify a proposition, as is becoming usual, with the set of possible worlds where it is true.”] 22 Propositions are therefore sets; and the logical relations that they entertain with one another, are described using set theory (inclusion, intersection, and so on). Propositions are not in

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themselves linguistic constructions; they are not sentences, although they are expressed using sentences. Many sentences – for example, an English and a German one – could express the same proposition, while several propositions may be expressed with the same sentences, for instance, by sentences containing equivocal expressions. Furthermore, no natural language has adequate resources for the expression of all possible propositions. Like propositions, “properties” are also sets. Unlike propositions, they are those sets of possible objects that have that particular property (ADD, 134). All relations between objects including characteristics of similarity are also properties. Now it is stipulated that for any set of worlds whatever, there is a corresponding (relational) property of inhabiting some world in that set (l.c.). In other words, for any proposition there is a corresponding property of inhabiting some world where that proposition holds (ADD, 135). This one-to-one relationship between propositions and exactly one possible world makes possible the decisive coup of Lewis’ thesis: If we have one-to-one relations between all propositions and some properties, nothing (no information) is being lost if we restrict our ontology to properties only (l.c., 135 f.). From this replacement something essential arises for the theory of “attitudes”: namely that property objects have a wider range of application than proposition objects. So sometimes “property objects will do and prepositional objects won’t” (ADD, 136). In other words: Some objects of attitudes cannot be taken as propositions; but in our property ontology we acceed to all propositions.

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Now Lewis presupposes that every psychological subject of attitudes lives in exactly one world. He may have “counterparts” in other worlds, bound to him by relations of similarity, but he himself exists only i the actual world. If he accepts a proposition as true, then he in effect ascribes to himself the corresponding property of existing in that world which is uniquely correlated with that proposition. He thereby locates himself within a divided humanity, differentiating himself from its other members.23 From the perspective of Lewis’ “modal realism”, we are, however, situated not only in a logical space of possibilities, but also in physical space-time. Here a problem arises that disrupts the exact correspondence of propositions and self-ascribed (locational) properties. It turns out that a logical relation to a proposition is inadequate for locating ourselves in the physical world. Lewis illustrates this problem with an example taken from John Perry’s well-known paper Frege on Demonstratives. 24 Let us suppose that Rudolf Lingens has lost his memory. In this unpleasant condition he wanders into the Stanford University Library. None of the vast information that he can find there (which could include a detailed plan of the library, perhaps with an arrow indicating “You are here”, or even a book recounting the life of Rudolf Lingens) would lead him to these two pieces of knowledge: who he is, and where he is located (ADD, 138). Of course, the knowledge that he could gain from the resources of the library would not be entirely superfluous. It might help him to orient himself in logical space, and he could even come to know a number of true propositions about the very man he is (de re). Nor does he lack the ability to ascribe to himself (de se) a certain perceptual situation. What he is missing is the ability to self-ascribe one or all of the propositions he holds to be true. This ability (the property of self-ascription) simply does not correspond to any prepositional knowledge. It follows, therefore, that some knowledge is non-prepositional.25 And it follows, that such a self-awareness consists of real knowledge (not in a mere feeling) and as such is epistemically relevant. This relevance is shown by the fact that Rudolf Lingens will change his behavior as soon as he is aware that he himself is Rudolf Lingens.

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Another of Lewis’ illustrations concerns two gods who live in the same world. Suppose they are omniscient (know al true propositions), that they live on different mountains, and that they have some different attributes. Despite their omniscience, however, so long as it consists of a purely propositional knowledge, they would still not know who was whom, that is, God I would not be able to identify himself as God I nor God II as God II. No enlargement of their propositional knowledge would overcome this strange ignorance; for what they lack is the ability to self-ascribe the property of knowing a specific world. Such knowledge is, therefore, not propositional (ADD, 139). And if we suppose that they do know who they are, it follows that the object of this knowledge must be a property and not a proposition. Knowledge is not, therefore, exclusively propositional but can include the self-knowledge that we enjoy through the “self-ascription of properties” (ADD, 139). Finally, since propositional knowledge is knowledge de dicto, it also follows that knowledge de se – self-consciousness – is not a case of factual, propositional knowledge (ADD, 140). Through the self-ascription of properties (in the cases Lewis considers, the property of having an intentional relation to a specific world), we exercise knowledge whose epistemic relevance is beyond doubt. It makes no sense here to raise the well-known Wittgensteinian questions, such as whether it is proper to describe something that eludes the alternative between true and false as knowledge. The unhappy situation of Rudolf Lingens demonstrates decisively that an important kind of knowledge (self-knowledge) can be missing even if we allow that a considerable portion of knowledge is indeed of the sort that for Wittgenstein constituted the entire field of knowledge namely, propositional knowledge of factual states of affairs. The conclusion to be drawn from these considerations is that self-consciousness cannot fundamentally be grasped with a model whose ontology is limited to spatio-temporal objects, facts, and propositions. Wittgenstein’s nominalism and antirealism about the mental are therefore false. There would be no self-conscious subjects in such a world, for there would be nobody who could place him- or

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her-self in an epistemic relation to it. Since it is through competence with indexical words like “I”, “here”, and “now” that each subject of attitudes expresses the knowledge that situates the many propositions of logical space in the space of consciousness [Bewußtseins-Raum], self-consciousness is a fundamental form of knowledge. Only this makes the differentiation of the actual world from other merely possible worlds comprehensible. Each subject of a self-ascribed property also thereby ascribes to itself knowledge of that unique and singular world which it itself inhabits (ADD, 143). Furthermore, this knowledge could not be won through any scientific study of the world (which Wittgenstein once defined as the “totality of facts”). Lewis, a physicalistic realist and qualia-detractor, is surprisingly clear about this point: Some (...) say there is a kind of personal, subjective knowledge that we have or we seek, and it is altogether different from the impersonal, objective knowledge that science and scholarship can provide. (...) Alas, I must agree with these taunts (...) Science and scholarship, being addressed to all the world, provide knowledge of the world; and that is knowledge de dicto, which is not the whole of knowledge de se (ADD, 144).

The knowledge that you yourself are in a certain perceptual position towards the encyclopedias or to the biography of Rudolf Lingens or even to the small red arrow indicating “you are standing just here”, is simply not propositional knowledge. It is a “non-propositional belief de se” (ADD, 152). In opposition to objective or factual knowledge, this exceptional relation can be described as one of familiarity [Vertrautheit ] or of what (recalling Bertrand Russell) Lewis describes as “a relation of acquaintance” (ADD , 155).26 III. Behind this somewhat tiresome linguistic exercise hides a cardinal discovery with far-reaching consequences. Namely that we cannot cope with the nature of self-consciousness either via the truth of propositions or in a language of things and events. Even the system of indexicals does not get us any farther. “This”, “here” and

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“now” cannot be learned or understood except by one who has general, acquired awareness about him- or herself. The same thing holds for the identification of myself by means of propositions or singular terms: I will not be able to understand them as stating a truth about me or as referring to me unless I already have some selfawareness. Of course, it does not follow from this (an insight already noticed by the author of the Blue Book and soon after repressed), that in self-consciousness nobody is being identified.27 I might be a brain which, by means of the experimentation of a sadistic neurobiologist, is hopelessly floating in a tank of tepid water (and whose nerve endings are connected to a super-computer). Even when I no longer know anything about the appearance of my body (since I never saw myself in such a state nor shall I get to see or otherwise perceive myself thus), – even then I will still be able to grasp the thought: “Good heavens, I won’t let this happen again.”28 And surely, the ‘I’ of this thought refers infallibly to me, even though I lack perception or description of myself. From this, however, it follows that self-consciousness cannot be a case of perception, not even (or even less) a kind of a mysterious “inner” one. Objects are perceived, and sorts of such knowledge by perception are expressed in propositions de re. The Self is no such object; and when it is aware of itself, then there is no inner eye there gifted with the capacity of taking a glance at itself. Self-consciousness is not knowledge de re. In Castañeda’s words: (...) there is no object of experience that one could perceive as the self that is doing the perceiving. However it is that one identifies an object as oneself, whenever one does, one identifies an object of experience with a thing which is not part of the experience, and this thing is the one to which the person in question will refer to by “I” (... and another person will refer to by “he*”, or “he himself” (“He”, 142 f.).

So we meet once again the old Cartesian certitude that we are better acquainted (“notior”) with ourselves than with objects of perception.

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This certitude is grounded in the radical non-objectivity [Ungegenständlichkeit] of the self. In self-consciousness, we are aware of ourselves as subjects, not as objects. How, in fact, could we learn – without any further evidence – from an object outside of us that we ourselves are this object? For we do not mean properties or say “I”. “I” does not mean: this body which is just producing this sound. But “I” is not only distinguished ontologically and referentially. It has an epistemological priority as well. Finally, the subject-use of “I” is epistemologically prior to names, descriptions, and other indexical terms: It is from the subject (and its self-consciousness) that the knowledge mediated by indicators and concepts is built up29 – the knowledge which Heidegger termed “being-in-the-world”. Inversely, however, “I” is not to be learned by means of the semantics of our being-in-the-world, nor is it analyzable in terms of thirdperson demonstratives. One may term this priority of self-consciousness “epistemological”, since every other conscious reference to objects depends on two conditions: 1) the capacity to grasp oneself non-objectively (this is, prior to any reference to an object) and (2) the fact that our knowledge of objects (which I can refer to as “this here” or with a name or description) depends upon our knowledge of objects. So what Fichte thought seems to be true, namely that every mediated [mittelbare] reference to something different from consciousness is mediated by immediate [unmittelbares] self-awareness. This mediation may be called “transcendental” in the weak sense of the term, according to which what is transcendental does not pertain to the objects of which we speak or think but to the preconditions of such speaking or thinking – presuppositions that fundamentally include a subject immediately certain of its self. This is my conclusion. I hope to have shown that the fashionable attempt to marginalize or explain away self-consciousness, as it was discovered and described in outline by the early idealists, does not have the support of some of the most advanced positions in contemporary analytic philosophy. The same goes for the attempt to deny the epistemic relevance of self-consciousness. If there is a “myth of

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interiority” (Bouveresse) or a “myth of the subject” (Davidson), it consists not in the very idea of the subject or its fundamental selfconscious knowledge of itself, but in the inadequate manner in which this phenomenon has been grasped. To abandon the subject itself as “untenable”30 would not only be hasty but in fact groundless. It would be better to try to bring order to our thoughts concerning subjectivity. No te s 1

John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge 1992), 121 f. 2

For this reason Thomas Nagel holds such states, whose irreducible subjectivity he was the first to insist upon, to be non-propositional. In order to know how I am (“what it is like”), I do not have to hold a fully conceptualized statement to be true; I know it without further ado, immediately. Such knowledge is not propositional knowing-that (such-and-such is the case), but rather a non-propositional knowinghow (it feels to be in this or that subjective state). See What Is It Like to Be a Bat? in Mortal Questions (Cambridge 1979, 165-180), esp. 171, where he says: “Reflection on what it is like to be a bat seems to lead us, therefore, to the conclusion that there are facts that do not consist in the truth of propositions expressible in human language. We can be compelled to recognize the existence of such facts without being able to state or comprehend them.” 3

“The latter point is especially important; it shows that the knowledge in question is radically different from perceptual knowledge. The reason one is not presented to oneself ‘as an object’ in self-awareness is that self-awareness is not perceptual awareness, i.e., is not the sort of awareness in which objects are presented. It is awareness of facts unmediated by awareness of objects. But it is worth noting that if one were aware of oneself as an object in such cases (as one is in fact aware of oneself as an object when one sees oneself in a mirror), this would

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not be held to explain one’s self-knowledge. For awareness that the presented object was F would not tell one that one was oneself F, unless one had identified the object as oneself; and one could not d o this unless one already had some self-knowledge, namely the knowledge that one is the unique possessor of whatever set of properties of the presented object one took to show it to be oneself. Perceptual self-knowledge presupposes non-perceptual selfknowledge, so not all self-knowledge can be perceptual.” Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford 1984), 104 f. 4

The distinction between the immediacy of non-conceptual selfascription and the so-called incorrigibility of linguistic assertions has not been more clearly explained than by Alfred J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge, 6th ed. (Harmondsworth 1966), 36ff., esp. 61 ff. 5

One can quickly convince oneself of this through the following consideration: Claims and thoughts can be true or false, my toothache (or how I feel) cannot. It occurs or it does not; and when it occurs, I know it without any further mediation. In this case at least, it is consciousness itself that is the criterion of identity for its contents. 6

In recent essays, Davidson has suggested a compromise, according to which self-consciousness is in fact a theory-free “presumption”, although still constituting actual “knowledge.” (The “presumption” is that if one “knows that he holds a sentence true, he knows what he believes.”) Davidson pays for this concession (referring, for example, to Rorty) with the assumption that like all knowledge, self-consciousness is fallible; see Davidson, “First Person Authority”, Dialectica 3 8 (1984) 101-11, esp. 10f. On my understanding, this holds only for the reflexive (or linguistic) level, not for the immediate level of mental intimacy. To call that fallible would be purely senseless, because its truth does not fall under the bivalence principle. 7

Chisholm defines the idea of “self-presenting” as follows: If f is a self-presenting property that I have and am conscious of, then I am certain of my F-being; see Roderick Chisholm, The First Person: A n

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Essay of Reference and Intentionality. (Brighton 1981), 82 (hereafter cited as FP). Although this certainty is not propositonal, it is because of this non-propositional certainty that a propositional formulation about my F-being can be (empirically) true. Many theorists have called this the supervenient character of empirical justification. This means that I may only truthfully express the proposition “I am sa d” when I am sad and have an immediate, pre-propositional consciousness of it. I may, of course, be sad even though I do not explicitly form such a proposition, or perhaps even do not know the use of sad. Therefore subjective certainty has epistemic priority over the intersubjectivity of language conditioning (FP, 82 f.). 8

This is what Colin McGinn calls “cognitive closure”; see “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?” in The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford 1991), 3: “A type of Mind M is cognitively closed with respect to a property P (or theory T) if and only if the conceptforming procedures at M’s disposal cannot extend to a grasp of P (or an understanding of T).” The reason: “Conscious states are simply not, qua conscious states, potential objects of perception: they depend upon the brain but they cannot be observed by directing the senses onto the brain. You cannot see a brain state as a conscious state. In other words, consciousness is noumenal with respect to perception of the brain” (11). See also Saul Kripke’s famous objection to the identity-theory in his “Identity and Necessity”, in Identity and Individuation, ed. Milton K. Munitz (New York 1971), esp. 162-64. 9

See Frank C. Jackson, “Epiphenomenal Qualia”, Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982): 127-36, reprinted in Mind and Cognition: A Reader, ed. William G. Lycan (Oxford 1990), 469-77 (hereafter cited as “EQ”, references to the reprinting). 10

See the famous statement of Quine in his “Epistem ology Naturalized.” 11

See Shoemaker, “Functionalism and Qualia”, Philosophical Studies 27 (1975): 291-315, reprinted in his Identity, Cause, and Mind: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge 1984), 184-205. Although he is a

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functionalist, Shoemaker claims that we have direct access to the qualitative character of consciousness through introspection (189). 12

See David Lewis, “What Experience Teaches”, in Mind and Cognition, ed. Lycan (hereafter cited as WET). See also Lewis, “ M a d Pain and Martian Pain”, in Philosophical Papers (Oxford 1983), 1: 122-30, esp. the postscript on “Knowing What It’s Like”, 130-32 (hereafter cited as MP ). Frank Jackson reacts to Lewis’ objection in “What Mary Didn’t Know”, Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 29195, reprinted in The Nature of Mind, ed. David M. Rosenthal (New York – Oxford 1991), 392-94 (hereafter cited as WMDK, references to the reprinting). 13

“...a physicalist can admit that Mary acquires something very significant of a knowledge kind – which can hardly be denied – without admitting that this shows that her earlier factual knowledge is defective. She knew all that there was to know about the experiences of others beforehand, but lacked an ability until after her release” (WMDK, 393). 14

Lewis, “Attitudes De Dicto and De Se”, in Philosophical Papers, 1: 133-59 (hereafter cited as ADD). 15

In “‘He’: A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness”, Ratio 8 (1966): 130-57 (hereafter cited as “He”), Castañeda refers to Peter Geach, “On beliefs About Oneself”, Analysis 18 (1957): 23 f. See also Castañeda, “Comments and Criticism: Omniscience and Indexical Reference”, Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967): 203-10; “The Logic of Self-Knowledge”, Nous 1 (1967): 9-22; “On the Logic of Attributions of Self-Knowledge to Others”, Journal of Philosophy 6 5 (1968): 439-56; “On the Phenomeno-Logic of the I”, Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Philosophy 3 (1969): 260-66; and “On Knowing (or Believing) That One Knows (or Believes,” Syntheses 21 (1970): 187-203. 16

See Shoemaker, “Self-reference and Self-Awareness”, in Identity, Cause, and Mind, 6-18; G.E.M. Anscombe “The First Person”, in

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Collected Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, vol.2: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford 1981), 21-36; and John Perry, “Frege on Demonstratives”, Philosophical Review 8 6 (1977): 474-97. 17

See esp. Fichte’s Versuch einer neuen Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre (1797), Werke, ed. Hermann Fichte (Berlin 1945-46; rpt., 1971), 1: 519-34, esp. chap. 1: “Alles Bewusstseyn ist bedint durch das unmittelbare Bewusstseyn unserer selbst”, 521 ff. 18

ADD, 144.

19

Chisholm undertook this proof – explicitly referring to Castañeda and Lewis (FP ), 18f.). 20

Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Jena, 1886), 34 (Chisholm cites this example, FP, 19). 21

A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, (New York 1988), 77 f.

22

Lewis, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, 160 n.

23

“So it is in general. To believe a proposition is to self-ascribe the corresponding property. The property that corresponds to a proposition is a locational property: it is the property that belongs to all and only the inhabitants of a certain region of logical space” (ADD, 137). 24

Philosophical Review 86 (1977): 474-97, here citing 492.

25

“...if it is possible to lack knowledge and not lack any propositional knowledge, then the lacked knowledge must not be propositio nal” (ADD, 139). 26

Naturally one can continue Lewis’ line of argument and ask whether “properties” actually are the preferred objects of epistemically relevant self-reference. Rudolf Lingens’ problem is not that he cannot ascribe the property of being Rudolf Lingens, but that he cannot as-

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cribe it to himself. The knowledge he lacks is not propositional, but is it therefore knowledge of a property? In the end, I must ascribe to me myself the property of standing in a specific epistemological relationship to the plan of Stanford Library. And what in the property tells me that it exemplifies my epistemological relation, if not previous knowledge that confirms me as being the subject of this property? But then we have not really progressed from the original problem. In any case, the suggestion that a property (rather than a proposition) might inform me as to whose property it is, is circular. 27

Cf. Sydney Shoemaker, Self-reference and self-awareness, in: Identity, Cause and Mind. Philosophical Essays (Cambridge 1984), 618 (7ff.). 28

Elizabeth Anscombe, The First Person, in: The Collected Papers of C.E.M. Anscombe, Vol. II, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford 1981), 21-36, here citing: 31, 2. 29

“In order to keep knowledge or belief, or in order merely to rethink of the objects originally apprehended by means of demonstratives, one must reformulate one’s knowledge or belief or thought of those objects. One must replace each purely demonstrative reference by a reference in terms of (...) the ‘I’” (“He”, 145). 30

As Ernest Mach once said.

TESTED TO THE BREAKING POINT: POSTMODERNITY IN MODERNITY

Willem van Reijen

The debate around philosophical postmodernity seems to have largely worn off. On the part of the “moderns”, the wish to get over and done with this tedious affair once and for all has been felt for a while, at the latest since Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985). The “postmoderns”, on their part, seem to have formed academic circles in order to cut themselves off hermetically from infiltrators. Axel Honneth’s attempt (1994) to take over Derrida in order to accomplish Habermas’s “incomplete project of modernity” is the last indication fort the “modern” wish to sort out the tiresome problem with postmodernity – not out of a strained atmosphere (Frank 1993) but by force of argument. According to Honneth, who is one of Germany’s leading modern thinkers, Derrida departs from fundamentally wrong theoretical premises but, as Honneth at least acknowledges, Derrida supplements Habermas’s theory by valuable insights.

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If the philosophical opponent is not longer taken seriously in the radical nature of his approach, but is transformed into an object to be assimilated, one has to take this strategy with a pinch of salt (see my reply to Honneth, 1994). Is history, in this case, already – and prematurely – written as the “history of winners” (Benjamin)? At the semantic civil war front (Habermas), at least, modernity seems to have gained the upper hand. It is not only in the feature section of the press, but e.g. even in Bernhard Waldenfels’s recent and quite respectable study Deutsch-Französische Gedankengänge (1995, 14 [German-French Trains of Thought]) that “postmodern”, time and again, refers to everything having to do with “anything goes” and non-commitment; in addition, “postmodern” is not infrequently identified with the inability to enter a relationship, with chaos, fundamentalism or even with social darwinism (Frank 1993: 136). However contradictory these attributes may be – thus ironically testifying to the “postmodern” disposition of the critics of postmodernity – they dominate the battlefield. Before touching on the “assessment” of the debate about modernity-postmodernity, let us recapitulate the main characteristics of the project of modernity. “Modern”, for us, refers to the conviction that 1. our scientific knowledge grows at an exponential rate; 2. this knowledge can and increasingly will be used for the benefit of humanity; (Therefore, one can intervene successfully in the technological, social and politico-administrative realm.) 3. these interventions can also be legitimated ethically on a scientific basis; (Ethics committees claim to be able to provide good reasons in favour of or against decisions concerning euthanasia, abortion, genetic manipulation and interventions that are damaging to the environment.) 4. the subject thinks and acts autonomously, or at least should do so. As “postmodern” we may characterize those considerations which not only radically call into question the four main characteristics quoted above of how the moderns see themselves; they also criticize the universalistic claims to interpretation, foundation and action of this project of modernity.

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In the following I will not present the postmodern critique by referring to the points listed above, but in view of a theme to be developed by me. In doing so, I will concentrate my argument on two subjects which play a central role for the modern self-image: the question of knowledge and the importance of language. A brief remark concerning art and ethics will conclude my account. The theme of the postmodern critique I mentioned represents the conviction of the “moderns“ that truth, equality, justice, autonomy and solidarity are only conceivable and attainable if we refrain from reverting to “transcendent” principles, insights, values and norms. One assumes, in this respect, that the world of experience and the world of our judgements is homogeneous and transparent. This presupposition is called for both by the postulate to master our social and political conditions and by the desire to control natural circumstances and biological processes. For modernity, the intrusion of transcendence, of the “other” and of the heterogeneous is the quintessential scandal. 1 In an age of growing economic and political problems, the modern project appears to unveil itself. Not only a more transcendental, but even a Gnostic core becomes visible. The demand to eliminate transcendence inevitably reveals its transcendental state. The concept of a fully secularized, hence homogeneous, controllable world represents a promise of salvation just as paradise did. 2 Today, the cynical return of transcendence manifests itself in the market’s dominant role. Unlike any other social system of rules we know of, the market seems to manage without transcendent values. All conditions are supposedly regulated by supply and demand, i.e., according to purely immanent criteria, according to price. This phenomenon, first of all, masks the fact that the market’s mechanism, as Adam Smith already knew with his concept of “the invisible hand”, has itself obtained a transcendental status. And Marx, too, as is well known, spoke of the commodity’s theological whims, of fetishism and phantasmagoria when referring to commodities and their prices. It is not the formula “I think”, as Kant thought at the beginning of the Enlightenment, but “the price” which has to be able to ac-

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company all my representations. The attempt to eliminate all secrets of “value” by appointing the market as the big regulative principle increasingly turns out to be not only the intrusion of transcendence, but also the intrusion of evil. We do not put ourselves – a harmless sacrilege – in the position of the Christian God of Creation, who, at least in the theodicy, could be called to account for the existence of evil; after we have lost the skill of escaping responsibility (Marquard 1973: 73), we even behave as the evil, Gnostic God who creates a world in which – the ultimate perversion – human beings believe in a benevolent God. The market suggests that everybody can enjoy the benefits of all goods, i.e. of all values, as long as he or she supplies an adequate service in return, and it thus simultaneously installs an absolute principle of justice, along the lines of “Each according to his or her merits”. Yet, from a global point of view, most people meanwhile experience first-hand that this market society is not heaven, but hell. Its transcendental status shows itself in a mediated way. As is illustrated by advertising, goods can only be sold if the potential customer is convinced that he buys not only a product, but salvation itself. Those who buy a certain deodorant or aftershave, certain sunglasses (“Ray Bann – The face of charisma”) or a certain brand of sports shoes, not only buy “utility value” or even “lifestyle”, but at the same time gain access to salvation. Goods sell best when they have the status of sacraments (Bolz 1995). The market itself, however, eludes all criticism like an unknown God, who is both absent and omnipresent, who both promises and threatens salvation. I have inserted this short digression because it shows that modernity’s elimination of transcendence takes its revenge by a disastrous return on a “higher level”. Unlike modernity, postmodernity tries to look transcendence straight in the eye. In Europe, one of the remarkable features of postmodernity is the attention it pays to questions of epistemology and culture. It focuses on thinking about truth and normativity and their complete de-transcendentalization (“disenchantment”) by the moderns. In discussing this issue, I would like to start by considering the question of knowledge, and hence the claim for truth, because it

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constitutes that question which best exemplifies the debate about the self-image of the philosophical tradition and of post-modernity. I will continue my remarks with brief commentaries concerning the philosophy of language before concluding with a note on art and ethics. Knowledge and the critique of knowledge Let us, first of all, look at some examples of modernity’s self-criticism. In an article on this subject, Popper, who can hardly be suspected of having been sympathetic towards post-modernity, rejected the postulate I mentioned first of an infinite increase in knowledge. In describing how our stocks of knowledge have changed, Popper does not use the metaphor of a bucket filling up; instead, he chooses the metaphor of a lighthouse whose ray of light time and again makes something light up, which then, however, disappears again in the dark. According to Popper, not only do we keep acquiring new knowledge, but we also forget things. Another theoretician, upon whom the “moderns” like to lay claim as an early proponent of the belief in progress, Max Weber, also expressed his doubt about the linear model of development. He writes: “The increasing intellectualization and rationalization, therefore, does not mean an increase in knowledge about the conditions under which we live. But it signifies something else: the knowledge of or the belief in the possibility of experiencing it at any time, if only one wanted to; the belief that there are therefore in principle no mysterious and unpredictable powers, which might interfere; that one can rather control all things – in principle – by calculation.” (Weber 1919/1974: 594) Weber clearly considers “...the knowledge of or the belief in the possibility of experiencing it [the hitherto mysterious] at any time, if only one wanted to” to be naïve. In the very heart of modernity, its self-criticism thus systematically surpasses itself. In the following I will support the hypothesis that the “moderns” try to level off the “difference” which forms the center of postmodern approaches (I will consider Lyotard’s différend and

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Derrida’s différence as two ideal types) and in doing so attempt to realize the ideal of immanence, homogeneity and control. If we take the “moderns” seriously in the way they see themselves, i.e. in their effort to gain the maximum emancipatory benefit from disenchantment, then their attitude implies, as one can paraphrase Habermas time after time: “a battle against transcendence – of whatever kind it may be”. For recognizing transcendence always implies recognizing the heterogeneity of the empirical in relation to something non-empirical; of the rational in relation to something non-rational – in traditional Kantian terms: accepting the heterogeneity of the thing in appearance in relation to the thing-in-itself. The moderns are required to bridge the gap between empirical reality and the transcendental conditions of its knowability, and consequently to carry out the program of the complete transparence and immanence of our knowledge – even if these qualities are assumed to be counterfactual.3 Our postmodern philosophers, by contrast, insist on the gap (“différend”, “différance”) between the phenomenological world and the constitutive conditions of its knowability. In their view, this gap is already manifest in texts, but also in the perception of things and in language. There is a rift, we may say, even in the empirical realm, and it ought to be considered as a manifestation of that heterogeneity which, from time immemorial, has been constitutive for philosophical reflections on ideas and concepts on the one hand and the material world on the other. Postmodern philosophers try to underline heterogeneity as an epistemological factor and therefore consider thinking in opposites as the only possible adequate form. The follow the Kantian distinctions between Verstand and Vernunft, i.e. between rationality and reason, between pure reason and practical reason, between the beautiful and the sublime rather than Hegel’s vast historical and systematic synthetizations. I will illustrate this position by taking a closer look at the philosophy of language, even though a detailed examination of their respective theorems would go beyond the scope of this essay.

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The postmodern critique of the “modern” conception of language and its consequences Habermas refuses to ground his philosophy of language in anything different from the Lebenswelt. It is this life-world which furnishes us with the criteria (truth, normativity and truthfulness) by which we come to the conclusion that the telos of understanding is inherent in language (1981: 387); in addition, with the help of these criteria we can, in Habermas’ view, decide whether a certain consensus is genuine, whether it has been obtained by trickery or by force. Grounding the consensus in practical experience necessarily entails devaluing or eliminating a transcendental dimension as the constitutive factor of language, thought and action.4 Habermas is afraid that the recognition of immanence may jeopardize the subject’s emancipation from religious and political dogmas, since, in his opinion, it deprives the subject of his or her power. With Heidegger and Gadamer we would have to consider the subject as being possessed and spoken by language rather than vice versa. In that case, the subject would no longer be master, but the effect of historical developments or structures. Habermas is still interested in legitimate distribution of scarce goods (money and power) and in non-violent solution to conflict. This, we may say, is a purely world-immanent affair and the philosophical method is correspondingly immanent. Transcendence, in this context, seems to be nothing more than a disruptive factor. Lyotard’s différend and Derrida’s différance counter this argument with the hypothesis that the difference in the empirical realm, and hence transcendence, represents a constitutive factor in language, thought and action. If we make transcendence taboo, or even if we seek to consciously eliminate it, we reduce the complex relation between thought and reality to a one-dimensional connection – the one of causal explanation, of calculated intervention and of moral codes understood as a process and as existing independent of specific situations. What is more, we blind ourselves to the heterogeneity – which can be ignored in practice, but which cannot be

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resolved in theory – between the empirical realm and the conditions of its knowability. In the short study to which he owes his initial fame, La condition postmoderne (1979), Lyotard rather briefly sketched the big disappointments caused by the emancipatory movements of modernity. the historical grand récits of modernity, Enlightenment, Idealism and Marxism, all of which promised to free humankind from immaturity, ignorance and poverty, achieved exactly the opposite effect of what they promised to do. A few years later, in Le différend (1983), his principal work up to now, Lyotard analyzed the causes for these historical failures while simultaneously warning against excessive hopes for a foundation of theoretical insights. Lyotard, in this work, systematically rejects the idea of a comprehensive language, i.e. of a language which, in the name of homogenization, synthesizes all discourses, thus simultaneously furnishing the basis for a progress that is conceivable in a linear way and whose foundational program would provide its legitimacy.5 It is not so much the various national languages, but rather the individual codes of technical terminologies and the differences between elocutionary, performative and other ways of speaking which turn the concept of an all-embracing language into a phantasm. That is of course not to say that practical though we may be, we are helplessly at the mercy of a fragmentary reality where we can no longer establish links between the individual sectors (or, to use Lyotard’s favorite metaphor of the archipelago, between the various islands). We realize very well the change of codes, the playful use of expectations e.g. in the case of a joke. But it is to say that we conceive of these links or transitions (“passages” in Lyotard’s image of the ferry service) in a way different from their relation to a comprehensive “unity” of these fragments, which cannot be grasped in terms of a definition. Historically and systematically, modernity promises something which it cannot keep, and it sets itself a goal which it cannot reach: unity and consensus. If modernity welcomes the differentiation of different sectors of action because, that way, every realm may develop the maximum capacity for solving problems by virtue of its auto-

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nomous laws, then this attitude implies in practice the breaking up of that all-embracing concept of unity to which one stubbornly holds on. Since modernity feels under an obligation to universalism – if it interprets particularism as nothing but the disposition to radically defend egoistic interests even if they involve the use of violence –, it is forced to charge the program of rationally grasping reality (by means of abstracting, formalizing etc.) with a claim to grounding which it cannot fulfil. For a foundation, in this context, would imply producing a homogeneity between empirical facts and a Grund or foundation which cannot be grasped empirically, since it is precisely the founding basis of the empirical realm. Postmodern philosophers underline this dilemma, for they continue to be interested in proving that the law-governed formulation of relations between phenomena ought to be followed by another step which is the true domain of philosophical reflection. This step is not to be understood as the traditional program of grounding, since, as has been shown, the traditional concept of Grund or foundation proved to be fatal and erroneous, both historically and systematically. The reason for this failure lies in the fact that, time and again, philosophers have defined and objectified this foundation as something clear-cut, the source of truth, transparence and/or morality. Rorty (1979) found the right critical words to sort out this problem. Here again, then, do we find a clear convergence with Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s concepts of language and truth. Postmodern philosophers such as Lyotard and Derrida try to evade the reification of the Grund in their attempt to conceive of that which used to be declared as “Being”, the “One”, the “Good” and the “True” as “rupture”, as “in-between”, as discontinuity and “difference”. Derrida’s concept of différance puts special emphasis on the discontinuity in what we consider to be secure knowledge. When we think we understand something, e.g. by abstracting, generalizing and mathematicizing (or even by just putting something into words),

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we follow the traces of something which is not truly present. We imagine the absent to be present. The perception of absence as presence, of the unequivocal as ambiguous and of the ambiguous as something which is real is by no means the result of a pathological obsession with originality that postmodern philosophers display; rather, it is the attempt to do justice to a complexity or an antagonism which reduces modernity to a certain kind of ambiguity. This reduction does not represent a leveling of differences within the respective continua of material qualities; on the contrary, to understand this kind of difference in terms of laws, and to manipulate reality on this basis is precisely one of modernity’s strong points, which is not at all questioned by postmodern philosophers. Yet, as the spelling of différance suggests, the difference that concerns Lyotard and Derrida is different from that familiar difference between red and green, or wood and iron; they emphasize the difference between the ontic and the ontological, which manifests itself in the empirical realm. (That is why Habermas is quite right when identifying Heidegger as one of the ancestors of postmodernity.) Modernity, in short, attempts to eliminate the dimension of the transcendental and to reduce everything to pure immanence. In this way, it excludes the ambiguity of the transcendental. This necessity derives compulsorily from the program of secularization. In modernity, everything has to be explained, understood and legitimated without reverting to transcendental aspects. This program demands to part from founding our knowledge on principles or introspection and to abandon absolute claims of the traditional conception of truth. From now on the decision “true”/“untrue” is a matter of consensus between experts, who have the same information and who discuss according to certain rules (which themselves are subject to consensus). It is easy to see that such a decision is inevitably exposed to revision. Its evolutionary advantage is obvious: it facilitates adaptation to rapid exterior changes.

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Lyotard and Derrida, whom I cite as the most important representatives of postmodern philosophy, feel no need to question the practical use of modern science, as far as I can see. They, too, know that modern science enables us to build relatively reliable cars, to generate electricity and to perform successful surgery. They criticize, however, the fact that modern philosophy with its perspective of operationality and consensus claims to provide the only, and, most significantly, the all-englobing perspective upon reality. Art and Ethics The tensions between modernity and postmodernity are manifest in the realms of art and ethics, above all. As for the philosophy of art, postmodern philosophers take up the old discussion about the beautiful and the sublime. Traditionally, the beautiful is what satisfies certain needs and hence produces pleasure. The sublime, by contrast, is of time immemorial tinged with ambiguity. As Kant says, it give rise to Lust and Unlust, i.e. to pleasure and to displeasure or pain. The sublime in nature, as it is chiefly understood by Kant, the overhanging cliffs, thunderstorms and the violent sea give rise to fear, because we are conscious of the mortal danger they denote; yet they also produce pleasure because we are aware of existing as rational beings precisely when experiencing our immortality. According to Kant, this ambiguous experience of the sublime is transferred from the spectacle of nature to the experience of art. In this process, that constellation of pleasure and pain is passed on which consists in our observation that we have ideas which we cannot imagine. This insight causes displeasure as far as the limits of our imagination are concerned, but the awareness that we have at our disposal concepts superior to our faculty of presentation also produces pleasure. Similar to Gesamtkunstwerke, total work of arts, postmodern works of art, we may generalize, attempt to overwhelm viewers. They overwhelm them either by confronting them with the “incommensurable”, as does Barnett Newman’s “Who’s afraid of red,

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yellow and blue?” (and to which Lyotard dedicates a detailed analysis, 1989: 141f) or by presenting excessive significations. Postmodern art prefers the allegorical form and, from this point of view, it is not by accident that it often “cites” baroque works of art (Van Reijen 1992: 261ff). If, in this context, we experience that ambiguity which Benjamin analyzed in his Origin of German Tragic Drama, it is not because we are being “postmodern” in the sense of surrendering to an attitude of “anything goes”, to non-commitment, chaos or to the irrational by laziness or powerlessness; rather, it is because the social disposition in the Baroque Age, in the Weimar Republic and today (times of crises par excellence) was and is a thoroughly antagonistic one. It was not and is precisely not a matter of pluralism or “anything goes”, but of irreconcilable political, religious and cultural differences. The ambiguity in the realm of the empirical is, then, not to be understood as the negation of the principle of contradiction, for one would already have assumed its validity; instead, it is to be understood as indicating that what can be represented by the senses and what can be grasped discursively refers to something inconceivable and to something which cannot be defined discursively. This idea need not appear any more mysterious than necessary. It is exactly what Kant, the philosopher of the Enlightenment, pursued with his Ideenlehre. The ideas of freedom and of justice (who would want to do without them?), in particular, are assigned this status. However, as has been shown, Lyotard’s différend is different from Kant’s ideas in that the différend is neither conceivable nor representable. Analogous thoughts hold for ethical and moral reflections, as I would like to remark in conclusion. Habermas’ discourse ethics is positively meant to be a reflection in practical terms. It equips us with instruments by which we can control faculty meetings, make decisions in the local council and solve social conflicts peacefully.

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Postmodern reflections on ethics are unable to do any of that. They consistently refuse their theoretical assent to translating theorems which claim to be universally valid into directions for action. And they do so for the simple reason that they consider formalism and universalism in ethics to cover up the true reasons for the existence of good (and of evil). For the good thus conjured up urges us to regard the criteria for the decision good/evil as criteria immanent to practice. This attitude erodes the difference between practice and a critical reflection on practice. The realm of the ethical implodes – what becomes visible is the momentum universalism and formalism have gained of their own, which, contesting all transcendence, is precisely nothing but transcendence glossed over as immanence. But can we, then, still talk about ethics – in a postmodern and yet meaningful way? No doubt only in a certain negative sense, namely as a warning against the comprehensive (and encroaching) claims of a universalistic and formalizing ethics. A true discussion between philosophical “modernity” and “postmodernity” has not taken place. In this context, we can indeed talk about different paradigms in the Kuhnian sense of the word. That is, a combination of these different options is not possible. We can draw upon modernity for practical actions and justifications, but it deserts us when truly philosophical questions are concerned – postmodernity helps us with those latter questions, but it is not “useful”. Thanks to Bert van den Brink and Rob van Gerwen for their criticism.

No te s 1

Admittedly, one may of course distinguish between a philosophical modernity and a liberal free-market modernity. Philosophical modernity would altogether like to relativize the significance of religious

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transcendence, while the modernity of free-market enterprise wishes to relativize any orientation according to values that are not economic. They share the conviction that “immanence” is the highest point of reference. It is here that they are attacked by postmodern critics, whether the latter are justified in smoothing differences, or not. 2

Every political order and every administration just as every economic order has to abstract itself from the individual case and has to stick to universally valid rules. In this sense, reality is homogenized. 3

One can accept those as political companions who, like K.-O. Apel (1987: 116 ff.), agree to transcendental attempts to ground communication (Letztbegründung, the ultimate foundation), but methodologically one can no longer take them seriously. 4

The fact that Habermas feels obliged to describe the foundation of his theory of consensus as ‘quasi-transcendental’ does not contradict my argument. For a further examination, see Van Reijen, 1995. Thanks to Harry Kunneman for a stimulating criticism of this essay. 5

Given that Habermas, and many others with him, continue to emphasize the importance of that “differentiation” mentioned before for processes of modernisation and emancipation, one has to take into consideration that this diversification is, in the final analysis, understood within the scope of a sweeping universalisation.

Bibliography Apel, K.-O. 1987 “Fallibismus, Konsensustheorie der Wahrheit und Letztbegründung”, in Forum für philosophie, 116-211. Bohrer, K.H. (ed.) 1983 Mythos und Moderne. Frankfurt/M.

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Kult Marketing. Düsseldorf.

Brink, B. v.d./Reijen, W.v. (eds) 1995 Bürgergesellschaft, Recht und Demokratie. Frankfurt/M. 1987 Forum für Philosophie, Frankfurt/M. Frank, M. 1993

Conditia moderna. Leipzig.

Habermas, J. 1981 Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt/M. [The Theory of Communicative Action, transl. by Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge, 1987]. 1983 “Die Verschlingung von Mythos und Aufklärung.” in Bohrer, ed. 1985 Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne. Frankfurt/M. [The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Transl. by Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, 1987] Honneth, A. 1994 “Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit”, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42, 195-220. Horkheimer, M. /Adorno, Th. 1947 Dialektik der Aufklärung. Amsterdam. [Dialectic of Enlightenment. Transl. by John Cumming. London, 1979]. Kamper, D./Reijen, W.v. (eds) 1987 Die unvollendete Vernunft. Moderne versus Postmoderne. Frankfurt/M. Loo, H.v.d./Reijen, W.v. 1992 Modernisierung. Projekt und Paradox. München.

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Lyotard, J.-F. 1979 La Condition postmoderne. Paris. [The Postmodern Condition; a Report on Knowledge. Transl. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester, 1984]. 1983 Le Différend. Paris. [The differend: phrases in dispute. Transl. by Georges van den Abbele. Manchester, 1988]. 1988 “Les lumières, le sublime”, Les Cahiers de Philosophie [“Die Aufklärung, das Erhabene”, in W. Reese-Schäfer, Lyotard zur Einführung, 103 ff. Hamburg, 1988]. 1989 “Der Augenblick, Newman.” in Lyotard, J.-F., Das Inhumane. Wien. [The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Transl. by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Cambridge, 1991]. Marquard, O. 1973 Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie. Frankfurt/M. Reijen, W.v. (ed.) 1992 Allegorie und Melancholie. Frankfurt/M. Reijen, W.v. 1992 “Labyrinth und Ruine”, in W.v.Reijen (ed.). 1994 “Derrida – ein unvollendeter Habermas?”, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 1037-1044. 1995 “Die Beweislast der politischen Philosophie”. in van den Brink/van Reijen (eds). Rorty, R. 1979

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton.

Waldenfels, B. 1995 Deutsch/Französische Gedankengänge. Frankfurt/M.

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Weber, M. 1973 [1919] “Wissenschaft als Beruf”. [“Science as Vocation”] in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Tübingen.

The Russian Novel as a Serial Murder or The Poetics of Bureaucracy Boris Groys

It is a well-known truism that Russian subjectivity hopes to see and discover itself in the first place in the mirror of the nineteenth century Russian classical novel. In his novel Roman, Vladimir Sorokin turns to the tradition of the Russian classical novel in order to pose once again the question of Russia and of how Russia defines itself within this tradition. Roman was written in 1985-89 and was published in Moscow in 1994.1 In this period occurred the downfall of the Soviet Union, Soviet communism, Soviet ideology and Soviet literature, whose stylistics Sorokin used in his earlier texts. When on the ruins of the Soviet Union Russia appeared anew, the broad masses of the Russian intelligentsia turned to the pre-revolutionary tradition of Russian culture – and especially the village-dacha culture – looking for authentic roots, values and orientation. The Russian landscape and the tender, good and patient Russian national character, sung by classical Russian literature, again took their place of honour in the general mythology. Sorokin’s novel is, in the first place, a reaction to this mythology.

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The plot of the novel is quite simple. The action takes place somewhere in old pre-revolutionary Russia. The young lawyer Roman Vospevennikov gives up his lawyer’s practice and life in the big city, which he finds banal and tedious. In search of freedom he goes to live in a village, where he intends to occupy himself partly with farming and partly with painting, for which he discovered a sudden and unexpected calling. Roman takes up his quarters with his relatives, the couple Vospevennikov, who once took the place of his dead parents. Against the background of the typical life of a nineteenth-century nobleman in a village: hunting, fishing, mowing, extinguishing fire, visiting the church, et cetera, the hero meets the heroine, Tatyana, the foster-daughter of a forester. After the declaration of love follows the wedding, which culminates in Roman’s slaying with an axe first all his relatives and acquaintances and next all the peasants in the village. Afterwards he performs a kind of black mass in the local church, using the entrails of his victims, kills Tatyana and at last dies himself. The first, longest part of the novel, more than 300 pages, is devoted to the description of Roman’s life in the village until the moment of the extermination of the villagers and has been written as a typical nineteenth-century novel à la Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The second, much shorter part (less than 100 pages) has been written in an ultra-modernist prose-style and contains only the description of the ritual of destruction and selfdestruction staged by the hero. The sudden change from the traditional, psychological way of story-telling to literary modernism coincides with the sudden change in the hero’s behaviour, which goes far beyond ordinary human behaviour. Without any doubt, this moment of change is crucial for the understanding of the entire structure of the novel. Moreover, such a sudden change is characteristic for the greater part of Sorokin’s texts, especially his short stories, and is, therefore, expected by the reader who knows the author’s narrative practice: Sorokin’s reader always waits for the moment when it will start, that is to say when the deceptive narrative idyll changes into the description of something horrible.2 Such an expectation is, incidentally, in the first place typical for various forms of popular literature, such as the

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detective novel or erotic literature. Having learned from experience, the reader obediently reads the introductory “realistic” pages, which, according to the tradition of the European novel, are full of descriptions of nature, details of the environment, of the outward appearance and the character of the dramatis personae, et cetera. He is waiting for the moment when, at last, the first corpse or the first naked body will appear. And from that moment the reading becomes interesting, although at the same time probability decreases to a considerable degree. Sorokin’s texts are, in essence, built on the same device of expectation that something, in the end, will happen. In his texts, however, expectation lasts much longer than usual. In Roman it continues, as I have already remarked, for more than 300 pages. Sorokin tries the reader’s patience to the utmost and makes expectation unbearably long. For his suffering the reader is, however, amply rewarded: something utterly strange occurs, something which goes beyond the criminal and beyond the erotic, so that, in the end, the general budget of the reader’s emotions is in balance. This balance is slightly upset, however, by the above-mentioned concurrence of the sudden change in the plot and the not less sudden change in the way the story is told. As a result of this concurrence we have the impression that “as a matter of fact” nothing has happened, except a simple change from one style into another, so that the “horrible event” loses its status of a fact of reality described by the text and is entirely de-dramatised, appearing as an intratextual stylistic device. Thanks to this, Sorokin’s texts maintain their distance from popular literature and offer the possibility of what has been described by Roland Barthes as plaisir de texte. This possibility does not entirely eliminate a “normal”, i.e. a referential reading of Sorokin’s text, evoking in the reader a delicious horror which is, as is wellknown, an unequivocal sign of popular literature. In this manner, Sorokin offers two competing ways of reading, a referential and a non-referential one, or, which is the same, a popular and an elitistmodernistic one, without predetermining the reader’s choice. As a matter of fact, it is the indefiniteness and indissolubility of this choice, that is to say the continuing tension between these two con-

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flicting ways of reading, which forms the basic inner conflict of Sorokin’s prose, a conflict that is not solved in the end by some kind of synthesis or catharsis. On the contrary, this conflict manifests itself on all the levels of Sorokin’s text, including that of ideology. In Roman he also defines the hero’s relationship to himself and to Russia, so that both the subjectivity of the hero and Russia acquire a double reading. In the first place, it is possible to show that the novel Roman from the first to the last page can perfectly be read in a traditionally psychological key: as a complete and consistent story about how the hero, Roman, is looking for and ultimately succeeds in finding himself. Roman leaves the city and goes to live in the country to acquire inner freedom and to discover himself. This zone of inner freedom Roman explicitly associates with the image of the Russian countryside. This becomes clearly apparent from the dialogue between Roman and Zoya, his former love, when she also strived for freedom, impetuously throwing herself into horse-riding and other country pleasures, but who in time, becoming disappointed with Russia, decided to emigrate to the West, because she became bored with her own country (as a result of which she turned out to be the only one who escaped the blow on the head with the axe at the end of the novel). Roman, on the other hand, emigrates to Russia, to the interior of the country. Zoya, however, is almost the only doleful exception against a generally cheerful background. All the other characters in the novel (except doctor Klyugin, about whom we will talk later on) continuously assure themselves and others that in Russia a Russian human being feels himself so free, easy and comfortable as he could never feel himself to be in the West. Such assertions, and the descriptions which confirm them, exclamations as ‘Perfect! Wonderful’, speeches and toasts in praise of life in the countryside, Russian natural beauty and the Russian people, delight in Russian food et cetera, forms a significant part of the text of the novel. In its characters, Roman himself included, this sense of freedom through direct contact with nature (fishing, hunting, mowing, pick-nicking, taking part in the life of the peasants, all of which is considered to belong

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to natural life) is particularly strong. This contact with nature invariably brings the characters to a state of blissful ecstasy. Nature functions here as an unconditional value and as the only source of freedom and happiness. Sorokin accentuates the fundamental themes of the nineteenth-century Russian novel: the salutary union of nature and freedom, the turning away from civilisation, simplification, going back to the sources, et cetera. And it is obvious that we have to deal here with a more fundamental aspect of Russian literature than the usual division in Westerners and Slavophiles, not to mention the other less important ideological subdivisions. The opposition between natural freedom and servility as regards the conditions of civilisation has a long tradition in European culture and is symbolised in modern times in the first place by the name of Rousseau. For Rousseau, Nature functions as the bearer of the good, civilisation as the bearer of evil. By Nature he understands “natural man” who lives in the heart of everyone: the contemplation of external nature has in the first place the pedagogical function of resuscitating natural freedom and natural good which have been buried in the hearts of men by the conditions of civilisation. It is this pedagogy which is practised by the Russian novel as Sorokin understands it. The traditional Rousseau theme is in this case, however, connected with the complementary and very important theme of Russia. The opposition between nature and civilisation is understood at the same time as the opposition between Russia and the West, and Russian literature is, of course, on the side of Russia. There is nothing new here, however. The German romantics already used the opposition between the natural and the artificial to describe the opposition Germany/France, natural being on the side of Germany, although the entire conception had been borrowed from the Frenchman Rousseau. Russian literature transfers the same opposition to the opposition Russia/the West, Russifying Rousseau and placing Germany under the ‘artificial’ West, after having borrowed from the German romantics their rhetorical device. It is not by chance that Roman goes to live in the country, in Russian nature, renouncing the written, codified, artificial law which he served as a lawyer. 3 To ironise written law and legal proceedings is

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a frequent device in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. The written, artificial law, a man-made creation, is opposed to inner freedom, granted by nature, life itself. Freedom cannot be determined by written, legal rights. Natural life itself is a zone of freedom. For that reason, Russia, as the incarnation of the natural, is synonymous with real freedom, as it does not have formal, written, legal freedom. Russian literature, as Sorokin understands it, proclaims life itself, freed from all external restraints, as the highest value. The inner freedom of a Russian lies deeper than all the external freedom of western people, because freedom is another name for life. And this inner freedom is completely realised when man and nature, life, are fused and not when man is separated from life, as it happens within the system of legal rights, which isolates the individual and forms the basis of “city life”, considered “slavish” by Roman. At the same time, the search for natural freedom within the space of the Russian novel runs against certain restrictions imposed on the individual by collective life, God and good, which in the Russian novel are considered the highest values: freedom, in the sense of the triumph of evil, i.e. natural freedom directed against nature itself, is excluded owing to the clear dominance of good. This dominance of good over evil in the Russian classical novel is guaranteed not only ideologically but in the first place by its narrative structure. In the traditional novel, evil occurs always as an episode, i.e. as an element of the plot structure and in this way inevitably moves the story further, having a ‘constructive function’ in this context. The teleology of the novel’s narration is in itself a safeguard for the good, as in its movement ahead it reduces evil to a “moment”. Each narrative is inevitably dialectical: evil is destined to serve the good, i.e. the continuation of the narrative. In the first part of the novel, the lawyer Roman could not completely free himself from the law and the power of convention. After having left the city, i.e. the power of the legal law, Roman did not arrive in the countryside, in nature and freedom, but in the space of the Russian novel, in the power of literary convention. In other words, Roman simply moved from one text into another, from the vault of laws of the Russian empire into the no less imperial Russian

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novel, i.e. into the territorial jurisdiction of the no less conventional laws of literary narration. The aspiration of nature to self-reproduction, i.e. to the triumph of good over evil, postulated in the Russian novel, is merely the ideological effect of the aspiration of the novel itself to self-continuation, self-composition, reproduction of its own descriptions, its own rhetoric, its own narrative schemes. This mechanism of the neutralisation of evil as the ultimate possibility of freedom through its functioning in the teleologically organised novelistic narration is continuously demonstrated by Sorokin in the first part of his novel. We can find many examples of it. From time to time the hero thinks that nature and God are indifferent to his fate and to the fate of people in general; these thoughts, however, inevitably lead to a still greater belief and the change of his fate for the better. Characteristic in this respect is the episode in the church, when Roman at first diverts his attention from the church service, in order to give himself up to inner doubt: “The deacon read, and Roman became more and more absorbed in his sorrow, his eyes indifferently travelling over the faces... ‘How unsteady and treacherous is everything in this world of human feelings’, he thought, ‘there is nothing to rely on, there is nothing in which you can believe without being deceived later on...’” et cetera. This drifting away from the church service has, however, the advantage that Roman for the first time sees his future wife, Tatyana, who appears to be the image of real belief. The rhetoric of moral internal monologue, which clearly refers to Tolstoy, is rather often used by Sorokin without any direct motivation of the plot, as, for instance, in the scene of the marriage of Roman and Tatyana, in which Roman again is overcome by nihilistic thoughts: “They sing, not understanding what and why they are singing. But why is it so gentle, so innocent? Or, perhaps, they know everything?... But their incomprehension and innocence do not make it easier for me!” Soon after, however, he accepts the world: “This was the light of hope... To hope, hope, that everything which is going on is right – that is left to us!” et cetera. Thus the considerations about earthly vanity in the sense of Schopenhauer leads the hero every time to the good in the sense of Tolstoy.

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Sorokin does not forget Dostoyevsky: Tatyana’s foster-father makes Roman play Russian roulette with him. It seems as if the heroes are directly exposed to death, but, in the end, nobody is killed; everyone is satisfied, affected even – and Roman and Tatyana receive the blessing. Even the central episode in the first part of the novel in which Roman, inspired by noble feelings, fights a wolf, but discovers in himself a wolfish element, mixing his blood with that of the wolf and registering nature’s indifference to his fate, ends with the fact that Roman finds himself in Tatyana’s house, which leads to the marriage of the heroes. And Roman is treated by doctor Klyugin who – the only one of the novel’s heroes – straightly proclaims “nihilistic” views. Klyugin partly stands outside the general “Russian idyll” (already suggested by his name, clearly derived from the German word “klug”– clever). But even the radically “nihilistic” speeches, wellknown to the reader of Russian nineteenth-century literature, do not place Klyugin outside the domain of the novel’s “good”: Klyugin is an excellent doctor, would not harm a fly, et cetera. In this way the freedom of nature is continuously obstructed in the “Russian novel” by the teleology of the good. For Roman to discover freedom in himself, he should leave the space of the Russian novel, free himself of the laws of “realistic” literary description and narration. This liberation is realised by the hero, to all appearances, in the second part of the novel. From the moment that Roman raises the axe in order to destroy the villagers “undialectically”, he begins to withdraw himself more and more from the control of the traditional Russian novel. The descriptions of nature and of the inner state of the hero disappear from the text; there is no attempt any longer to psychological motivation nor to reconstruction of relations of cause and effect. The text of the novel changes more and more into a merely external recording of what happens and as a result loses its conventional literalness. Nature’s freedom is demonstrated by the possibility to understand it and to reconstruct its internal laws, by its pure processionality and operationality. In this respect, it is typical that the de-teleologization of freedom in the second part of the novel refers back to the same episodes as the teleologization in the first

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part: in the second part everything turns out to be realised which remained blocked-up in the first part. For the killing of the inhabitants of the novel’s space, Roman uses an axe, given to him as a present for his marriage by Klyugin, and on which is written: “Swing – and strike!” Klyugin, by the way, does not only preach nihilism, (with which the “axe of the people’s war” and Raskolnikov’s axe are associated), but argues about libido and thanatos, presenting in this way the key to the understanding of the ritual of the killing as erotic. Tatyana accompanies the hero, ringing the little bell, which had also been given as a wedding present, by the village idiot who, as could be expected, represents the wild, irrational and destructive side of Orthodoxy. Many other scenes of the first part allude to the end of the novel: the description of the murder of Tatyana’s parents, the hunting scene, 4 the scene of the fight with the wolf, et cetera. Moreover, the first part of the novel suggests the interpretation of the religious-erotic ritual performed by Roman in the second part as the equivalent of the wedding-night: after the long ritual of the wedding, in which the ecstasy of the “good” reaches an unbearable degree of collective hysterics, there was nothing else the heroes could do than kill everybody and die themselves, in order to reach communion in love. The operations performed by Roman on the body of Tatyana are also clearly erotic. Besides, Roman has an orgasm only after he has removed all the “others”, Tatyana included, and finally desecrates the church to escape the eyes of God. Nevertheless, highly important for a possible psychological interpretation of the transition to the second part of the novel can be considered a short scene in which Roman requires from Tatyana an absolute faith in freedom and Tatyana answers positively. Sorokin demonstrates here what could have happened if Onegin, without any regard for the conventions of society, had married Tatyana. They would have been a pair of “natural-born killers”, who would have gone further on the path of the abolition of conventions – until the complete extermination of all the representatives of these conventions. The traditional Rousseau-like aspiration of the Russian novel to freedom and nature is realised in the extreme, in the form of

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absolute terror. Roman becomes a serial killer who definitively frees his inner, natural freedom from the gaze, description and understanding of others. The hero, who realises this freedom in himself, completely emancipates himself from the author, from the narration, from the laws of the literary text as such. Not for nothing is the hero called Roman: the inner intention of the novel is realised exclusively in the hero himself, leaving no place for the external, for description. Roman stops being text and becomes life. If Bakhtin describes the poetics of Dostoyevsky’s novels as being orientated to the equality of author and hero, Sorokin stages, to all appearances, the definitive victory of the author over the hero: the hero destroys everything that can be described – and finally himself as the object of description. The novel ends with the death of the hero, as the hero before his death succeeds in destroying everything in the space of the novel that still could be described and narrated. Sorokin’s Roman can, therefore, be read as the definitive victory of nature and freedom in Russia – over the text, the law and the West, something which the nineteenth-century Russian novel could not achieve. Besides, the literary radicalisation of natural freedom outside the boundaries of the usual social conventions had already been realised rather conclusively by Marquis de Sade in the context of French Enlightenment. In their elaborate philosophical deliberations the libertines of De Sade draws conclusions from Rousseau’s demand to follow unconditionally the voice of nature with which Rousseau himself probably would not agree. Moreover, however, De Sade is in his turn extremely didactic and subjects the description of erotic orgies to a strict ritual. The reductional registering of pure procession, or pure ritualism, by means of which in the second part of Sorokin’s novel nature apparently demonstrates its absolute freedom, stylistically directly refers to De Sade. Moreover, as Roland Barthes rightly remarks, De Sade’s erotic rituals are themselves organised as language: by means of various operations of fragmentation, these rituals realize the articulation of bodies, transforming these bodies into elements of language.5 The religious-erotic ritual, described by Sorokin, also consists of the fragmentation of bodies and of the introduction of a new system of combinations which pla-

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ces the fragments of these bodies in new relations to each other, now not subjected to natural, organic logic, but to the syntax of a new language, by means of which Roman formulates his messages to God and the world: Roman places the intestines of his victims in the church, puts stones on the intestines, heads on the stones, etc. In this manner, natural freedom again turns out to be completely subjected to the syntax of language. Even Roman’s last death spasms are described by reduced subject-predicate constructions which, among other things, refer to texts by Sergey Tretyakov. In the moment just before his death when freedom reaches its greatest intensity, Roman subjects himself totally to the fundamental laws of the functioning of language. The emigration from the idyllic Rousseauistic Russian village to the domain of pure desire or the pure religious-erotic subconscious turns out to be just as illusory as the earlier move from the city to the village. Again, the hero does not find inner freedom, but only moves from text into text, from language into language. From this point of view, the scenes of mass destruction in the second part of the novel begin to look different. We do not see here the self-liberation of the hero but, rather, the destruction of the signifieds of the novel, with the aim to leave only the signifiers. When all the referents of the novel have died, only its text remains. The orgy of destruction and self-destruction staged by Sorokin does not signify in this case the victory of natural freedom over the laws of the text but, on the contrary, the definitive victory of the text over its natural referents and its own organic meaning. In one of his articles on Rousseau, devoted to the deconstruction of the Rousseauistic myth about Nature, Paul de Man writes that the description of the fragmentation and mutilation of the human body, which we often encounter in literature, serves as a metaphor for the fragmentation and mutilation of the text itself.6 This fragmentation of the text occurs as a result of censoring, quotation and other manipulations of the text, which disclose the disorganisation, the “machinelike” character of every text. In this way, the ritual of “dismemberment” described by Sorokin, can be understood as the metaphor of textuality. Characteristically, Sorokin’s novel begins with the

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description of Roman’s grave in the village graveyard which, in its turn, reminds one of De Man’s famous discussions of the transformation of the body into the text of the epitaph in which the graveyard also plays a role. 7 So then, Sorokin’s hero dies, looking for inner freedom but not finding it. The only thing he is capable of turns out to be emigration from one text to another or, in other words, from under the power of one syntax, writing, law into the power of another one. The death of the hero, however, in this case also means the death of the author. Not for nothing is the hero called Roman. With his death dies the genre of the novel, and also the author-novelist. The author and the hero of the novel, as has been rightly noted by Bakhtin in his time, are connected in one chain. The author has power over language only in so far as he uses language to describe the freedom of the hero outside language. If it turns out that the hero does not have such a freedom, as he cannot free himself from the power of language, together with him the author also loses his freedom: he changes into a passive medium of language structures and the selfdevelopment of the text. But this also means that the death of the hero coincides with the death of the author, so that both receive a joint epitaph from contemporary post-structuralist literary theory. At first sight it would seem as if Sorokin, by his text, confirms this diagnosis. But when we take a closer look, it turns out that although the author of the novel dies, this dead author is not Sorokin himself, but his double, a fake figure, a literary mask, alter-ego, specially predestined to be shot down. The point is that the entire novel is, as it were, written on the account of another or, to be more correct, on the account of others. The worn-out and at the same time recognisable stylistics of the novel unmistakably show that the author is not Sorokin, but some other, who completely seriously writes a Russian novel. It is this other who turns out to be the dead author – and who, for that matter, has appeared as such from the very beginning, not being able to write a live, sincere, not banal but original, authentic and not worn-out author’s language. The citational, pseudonymic, “personage”-like character of Sorokin’s prose is, however, not indicative of reduction and death, but of the survival

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of the author, who hides himself behind his masks-doubles that he sacrifices to his hero. Sorokin belongs to the literary-artistic movement which arose in the beginning of the 70s within the context of Moscow unofficial art, i.e., the art practised outside the official Soviet cultural institutions, and which is generally called Moscow conceptualism.8 This term refers back to the Western, in the first place Anglo-American variant of artistic conceptualism, represented, for instance, by the works of the groups “Art and Language” or Joseph Kosuth. Within the context of the art of the sixties and seventies, the American conceptualists very consistently enforced the principle of ascesis in art, radically excluding all references to the world of visual temptations. By placing the text instead of the picture in the space of the work of art, Western conceptualism demonstrated its radical opposition against the commercial mass culture of its time. However, the basic features of conceptualism at the same time turned out to be closely related to some central aspects of official Soviet mass aesthetics, which also understood art as an illustration to particular political-theoretical propositions. The asceticism of Western conceptualism and its utopian-pedagogical pathos could also be easily recognised by the Soviet spectator and reader, especially if he was familiar with the theory and aesthetics of the Russian avantgarde. In the first place, however, Western conceptualism won the Soviet spectator over by the spirit of contemporary bureaucracy which permeated its artistic practice. The works of the conceptualists remind us of the documentation of big companies and public institutions. Moreover, the conceptualist takes up an emphatically external, programmatically disinterested position as regards his own work. In its complete opposition to the traditional modernist orientation towards self-expression, this programmatical distance from its own art calls to mind the contemporary bureaucrat who controls the property of other people and for that purpose enforces laws not formulated and passed by him. The utterly bureaucratic Soviet society of the Brezhnev period, which excluded from its very beginning any form of self-expression, be it artistic or political, can therefore be considered an excel-

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lent example of conceptual art. The Moscow conceptualists looked at the matter exactly in this way. Hence their specific strategy, which is difficult to describe in terms used for the Western artistic movements. The Moscow conceptualists did not see in their work a utopic alternative to the mass culture that surrounded them, as was the case in American conceptualism, but a reflection in response to the functioning of Soviet mass culture, i.e. a culture that functions within the space of an already realised utopia. For that reason, the minimalist-conceptualist devices were not used in Moscow in the seventies for the construction of an autonomous work of art, as was the case with the founding fathers of conceptualism, but for the reconstruction of devices which had already been applied for the building of an autonomous socialist society in one country. In this way, Moscow conceptualism aesthetically reacted at the pedagogical and bureaucratic doctrines of Soviet culture and at its being dominated by the ideological text. Accordingly, Moscow conceptualism also changed the character of the texts used in the space of the work of art. Whereas the American conceptualists in the first place lean on the great academic Anglo-American philosophical tradition of logical positivism, the Moscow conceptualists use texts of daily life, ideological, bureaucratic texts and literary texts that have become a part of Soviet mass consciousness as, for instance, texts by Pushkin, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And Moscow literary conceptualism treats the texts they use in the same way as contemporary art works do with visual “ready mades”. It does not identify itself with these texts, but quotes them as symptoms of the culture within which it exists, and which it nevertheless is able to analyse from an external position. The analogy between the bureaucratic and conceptualist work with texts led to the integration of an enormous mass of textual material in the practice of Moscow conceptualism: this resulted in an essential change in the understanding of the text itself, which played a decisive role in the development of the literary branch of Moscow conceptualism. The fact is, that within the space of quotation the text, if presented as a great mass, as it were, entirely loses its meaning – it simply becomes an ornament, an arabesque, a décor. This radical de-

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semantisation of the text goes much further than that which could have been reached by the traditional avant-gardistic devices of the destruction of the semantic unity of the text in the literary space of the book. And besides: the conceptualist de-semantisation of the text does not wholly require its deformation, estrangement, the introduction of semantic changes in its own structure, et cetera. The most trivial, ordinary text immediately loses its meaning if it is – without any changes being made – in its entirety taken up in the space of quotation. In this space it simply changes into écriture, according to Derrida’s terminology. At the same time, we cannot consider this change as a case of deconstruction, as it is not a matter here of the dissolving of the original text in an endless game of différences: the text remains complete and can also be read as such, i.e. with its ordinary meaning maintained. As a result the reader’s consciousness begins to waver permanently between two incompatible ways of reading the text: on the one hand the text is considered a readymade, a purely visual phenomenon, an ornament deprived of any semantics, on the other hand, however, this text can be read as a fully comprehensible utterance with a definite meaning which can easily be reconstructed. This oscillation of the receiving consciousness between, in conventional terms, the positions of the spectator and the reader, which originated within the space of the conceptual painting, made such a deep impression on some authors in the seventies that they felt obliged to look for a comparable effect on the basis of purely literary devices. The influence of the conceptualist artistic practice on literature is, therefore, in the first place the result of a specific use of the text as part of this practice. It is not a coincidence that the bestknown representatives of Moscow literary conceptualism, Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinstein and Vladimir Sorokin, began their careers as artists or were closely connected with artistic circles. Not only did Sorokin begin as an artist (in which he resembles his hero Roman), but during a number of years he earned his living as a designer of books, just as the founder-fathers of Moscow conceptualism, Ilya Kabakov and Eric Bulatov, whose artistic practice played a decisive role in the forming of Sorokin’s literary method.

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In a certain sense, literary conceptualism can be defined as the design of the text. Being employed in book-design makes one look at the text in the first place as a sign, which the designer fashions and models, without paying much attention to its meaning, just as computer software processes large parts of texts independently from their semantics. This external, ready-made work with texts makes it possible to use much larger parts of texts by “others” than in usual literary quotation. Moreover, the conceptualist text-designer is, just as Bakhtin’s “author”, not interested in the revival of the quotation, in the logo-centric return to its authentic “voice”, in the creation of polyphone, inter-textual play or a grotesque body, which ought to bring to life the dead text. The text-designer is much more interested in demonstrating the text as a dead text, as an absolutely passive, non-organic sign-mass, which could be subjected to all kinds of manipulation, cuttings, changes, transferrings from one space into another, et cetera, without taking into account its so-called “meaning”, just as it happens with computer text design and book design. It is, by the way, not a matter here of a senseless “text corpse”: this expression presupposes that once, in its beginning, the text lived and only died at a later stage, after having consented to subject itself to various pathologist experiments. On the contrary, the conceptualist work with a text demonstrates its originally “dead”, purely non-organic sign character. The author-conceptualist succeeds in demonstrating this sign character because he makes his text anonymous or, if you will, pseudonymous. The conceptualist artists and authors themselves call this quality of their texts “personageness”. And indeed, their texts are written as it were on behalf of another person, or of a certain personage, as texts by others with recognisable, other stylistics. In this process, the author sacrifices his own soul, his individuality, the originality and inner life of his text, without waiting for contemporary literary theory declaring the author dead. At first sight this sacrifice seems to be unnecessary, as the traditional author has long been already declared deconstructed, the text a dead play with signs. But no sacrifice is, of course, in vain.

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The economics of the sacrifice have been analysed in detail in the theories of symbolic exchange from Marcel Mauss to Derrida, including those of Georges Bataille, which were applied to literature.9 As is well-known, Bataille interpreted the aesthetics of sacrifice as excess and the rejection of success. These aesthetics were employed by the modernist poète maudit as a means to acquire the lost aristocratic “sovereignty”, which, in any case symbolically, placed the contemporary author on the level of the sovereign aristocrat of the past. However, what in the past was the aristocrat is today evidently the bureaucrat. Whereas the author usually restricts himself, in order to write “with his heart’s blood”, i.e. acts as a proletarian who makes a certain product, investing his labour, that means time of his life in it, the bureaucrat, or text designer, at whose disposal this hand-made product is placed, freely and sovereignly handles it, driving the text from one place to another, fragmentising it, quoting it or just forbidding it, et cetera. Explicitly rejecting his authorship and stylistically attributing his own text to “another”, the author acquires in this manner the possibility to place himself, at least symbolically, on the level of the bureaucrat and handles his own text as it were from the outside, i.e. sovereignly. Within the context of the Soviet culture of that epoch, the corresponding strategies were made much easier by the fact that there was a sharp opposition between the official mass culture and the samizdat, handmade books of unofficial culture. The device of the ready-made which is employed in contemporary art, consists in the artist’s individual appropriation of the products of artistic massand series-production. The practice of the device of the ready-made in literature is usually complicated by the fact that literature in modern times only exists in printed form, i.e. the mass production of books. In the Russian samizdat of the sixties and seventies, on the contrary, the book functioned as a unique manuscript, or as an individual object, after the manner of a medieval hand-written text. It was precisely this form of samizdat-manuscript that for the Moscow conceptualist authors played the role of quotation space, supplying the place of the conceptual painting.

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At first sight, the direct transposition of this device from the samizdat into printed literature seems to be impossible. But at the same time also in its printed existence literature maintains its unique space of quotation: the library. There are no libraries identical to each other, although in each one books are collected which have been printed in editions. One can say that Sorokin’s texts represent such unique personal libraries, in which in one book texts are collected which belong, as might be expected, to different libraries – in the censured Soviet situation particularly, such texts were not able to co-exist in the same space, in one library. In this way, Moscow conceptualism refrained from the opposition against the bureaucratically neutral, purely external and repressive, official text operations by means of the creation of its own, unique, authentic and individual language, apparently not subjected to such a bureaucratic operation, as was required by the modernist utopias of “high and pure literature”. Instead of that, the conceptualist author voluntarily sacrifices his individuality and by means of this sacrifice succeeds in raising himself symbolically to the bureaucratic level of power, which permits him to oppose the strategies of the bureaucratic text manipulation with his own manipulating strategies. When we consider the text of Roman from the point of view of these strategies, one can say that Sorokin combines the typical synthetic text of a Russian novel, which has passed the Soviet stylistically-ideological censure, with a fragment of just as conventional “modernist prose”, which by the same censorship is eliminated from the repertoire of possible variants of literary writing. Two of these text fragments are sewn together, one can say, with white threads, which it would be naïve to consider as the manifestation of the psychology of the hero. It turns out to be that in this second interpretation the absolute natural freedom of the hero appears there, where we find purely external, a-semantic and non-organic, bureaucratic manipulations with texts understood as “dead” sign masses. It now becomes clear how Sorokin remains alive after the death of his double, i.e. the honest, authentic author, who tries to describe the freedom of the hero. Sorokin remains alive as the author-bureau-

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crat, the censor or the text designer, who manipulates his text from the outside, from the other side of its contents, from the other side of its referentiality. Such a freedom of the author-bureaucrat as regards his text does not require the freedom of the hero. It does not presuppose natural freedom, nor the protection of natural human rights. With his novel Roman Sorokin gives all that is natural to nature, i.e. to death. The other author dies, he who believed in natural freedom. And, basically, this is not the Russian but the Western author: Rousseau, De Sade. It is the Frenchman who, brought up with Roman and Romanesque culture, believes in the Romantic tradition of individual freedom and for that reason writes novels. On the other hand, it is the Russian “intelligent”, the subject of the dynasty of the Romanovs, who goes deep into the interior of Russia to look for natural freedom and the Third Rome. Such a Roman, of course, as a result gives up the ghost, but this does not completely discourage the Russian writer. The Russian author, having grown up with the power of bureaucracy and censorship, i.e. with the spectacle of an unrestrictedly free and at the same time meaningless-mechanical manipulation of texts, believes in another, secret, i.e. bureaucratic freedom and finds there his true freedom. Sorokin’s novel Roman is, just as many other texts of Russian conceptualism, an attempt to create a new poetics of bureaucracy instead of a poetics of nature and to discover in bureaucratic arbitrariness the opportunity for a new freedom of the author after his death in language. The secret of this new freedom is the rejection of sincerity (i.e. the rejection of self-denunciation, of self-revelation in language, which threatens death) and the decision to write from the dead doubles who are not threatened by anything. Russian subjectivity discovers here the Russian bureaucracy as a new utopia and a new idyll, inaccessible for the naïve consciousness of the Roman, Romanesque West. In retrospect, one can say that the poet Fyodor Tyutchev again turns out to be right when he observes that Russia is a region which is unknowable, i.e. a region of real freedom. But now he turns out to be right as a Russian bureaucrat which, in the first place, he was, and not as a lover of Russian nature.

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No te s 1

Vladimir Sorokin, Roman. Moskva 1994.

2

For a discussion of Sorokin’s early texts see Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism. Russian Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Princeton 1991. 3

The prototype for Sorokin was, probably, Kandinsky, who also gave up a career in the legal profession to look for real Russian art; this led him, as a matter of fact, to München. 4

Roman’s precious relations and friends drink a toast after the hunt: “To the field!” The same toast is proposed by the cannibals in Sorokin’s early story “The opening of the season”. 5

Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola. Paris 1971, p. 8 f.

6

Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading. Princeton 1979, p. 296-297.

7

Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York 1984, p. 7 7 ff. 8

Boris Groys, Moscow Romantic Conceptualism. Paris 1979.

9

Georges Bataille, La littérature et le mal. Paris 1957.

SUBJECTIVITY AS A BASIC PRESUPPOSITION OF MODERNITY IN MUSIC Albrecht von Massow

In both philosophy and in the other human sciences the terms “subject” and “subjectivity” present us with such a ramified field of meanings that an attempt to find a basic, underlying meaning from which all the others could somehow be derived, would seem to be an almost impossible task. And this task would be made even more difficult by the fact that, quite apart from their technical uses, these terms have entered into the everyday language and have acquired there even further meanings. How can we assign a particular aspect of meaning to a statement, when there are so many, and in particular so many incompatible, meanings to choose from? If we are going to use these terms to try to understand certain historical developments in modern music, we cannot leave them unexamined; it will be necessary to come to some agreement concerning the various meanings. In the following we will first ask which meaning of the term “subject” should be regarded as basic in our inquiry; and secondly,

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we will ask how it should be or should not be related to specific questions of modernity in music. The word “subject” comes from the Latin “subicere” which means “to subdue”, “to underlay”, “to attribute”; but it is also translatable as “to take as a basis”. Formulated in its most general terms, however, it means “to posit something as something”. It thus implies a relation of something to itself and something other, i.e. a positer and something posited by it. It says nothing, however, about how this positing is performed or carried out whether by physical force or by concepts, whether in the form of ideals, passions or calculated feelings, whether consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively, voluntarily or involuntarily, in a group or by an individual or in any other manner. Precisely because only the bare fact, namely the positing of something as something, is given a general formulation by this term, it has been used as a name for different forms of relations involving a self and something other in various historical contexts. It says nothing about the specific nature of this relation involving the self and something other, and in its general meaning could be used to name any kind of self-and-other relationship whether assumed for an ant or a human. In its nominal form as a perfect-passive it implicitly retains an active and present meaning: to see something posited as something implies someone or something that is doing the positing and someone or something that represents it as posited in himself or itself. But this can also take place in a person, for example, in that someone posits something for him or herself. The nominal form can be found in various modern languages and has been for centuries a widely used and frequently debated term, especially in the human sciences. It may seem irrelevant or at least of minor importance in our inquiry into the meaning of the term “subject” to begin with a short consideration of its phonetic characteristics. Although, many of the problems associated with the different uses may already in fact begin at this level. The action designated by the verb “icere” – whatever it might be – stands in strong contrast to the rigid nominal form in the

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term “subject”. In its phonic character it shares a feature with other word forms such as “fact”, “act”, “object”, “artefact”, “construct”, “product” etc., all of which, because of their phonetic closure due to the short end syllable with its two dry consonants marking them off sharply from the next word, suggest, also in a figurative sense, that something clearly defined is meant and available in the form of a grammatical object. Specifically in the word “subject” the “c” and “t” freeze the dynamic of the vowel “e” so that little remains of the phonetic sound of “icere”, whose overhanging meter and round vowel sound seen to be rhythmically and melodically much closer to the action which it denotes. One has the impression that in many uses of the term “subject” it tends to be understood as a category for something already completed, constant, and thus from a historical and systematic point of view as something completed and specifically at our disposal; but not as a basic category for an action or performance of some kind. Moreover, the perfect passive form seems to imply a temporal localization. Because of its Latin origin, which in the context of modern languages suggests a certain scientific character, and its phonetic make up, there is a strong danger that by its very linguistic-phonetic form it will be turned into a kind of epistemological object, and be treated in this form like other objects. This tendency, however, overlooks the fact that the term “subject” is the nominal form of a general term signifying any kind of relationship of something to itself and to something other; and as such, actually constitutes the enabling condition of making something an object in the first place. Thus, in the use of such terms as “fact”, “act”, “object”, “artefact”, “construct”, or “product”, it is already implicitly assumed, and at the latest appears when the question is raised: whose past, present or future action is being named, or by whom and in what way is this action represented? To see oneself or another simply as an object is thus also designated by an action word, namely “obicere”. Here we again meet the problem of defining the notion of objectivity. Frequently enough it is thought to name something which is independent of the subject. But here the question is the same: whose action is being expressed by the

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verbal noun “obicere”, if it is not that of a subject. With this verb every act of perception is understood as an action, no matter whether it is active or passive, conscious or unconscious. A further area of inquiry lies in the meaning of subject as “something taken as a basis”, which is a frequent translation of “subiectum”. This meaning recalls all those uses in which something is thought to have a value as an argumentative or concrete basis for something, such as a statement of reasons or a solid fundament for some kind of structure. There the possibility exists of regarding something as a presupposition or basis upon which something else is made possible. This notion of subject can also lead to the idea that the subject, which is thought to be something existing apart for itself, is different from its object, i.e. the action of the subject. In this way something is spatially and temporally distinguished and objectified without considering in this particular case whether this separation is empirically possible. The perfect passive form of “subiectum” with its translations into various modern languages as “Subjekt” in German or “subject” in English has had a varied history of manifold uses. One could make the argument as has frequently been done that this word is constantly acquiring new meanings that are simply different from and unrelated to one another. Or one could also argue that because of its unspecified universality, the various uses are always based on the same fundamental meaning. A decision in this question is necessary if we are ever to find a criterion which will make it possible to reflect on the numerous uses of this term and its derivatives in writings on philosophical, sociological, psychological and musical matters. Before we can find for the modern or any other age a valid concept of the subject with respect to certain modes of action, we will have to decide first of all, whether such a systematic and historical definition is compatible with its basic meaning. Martin Heidegger’s lecture “The Age of the World Picture”, first held in 1938, offers some help in this regard because of its discussion of the concept of the subject as a systematic and historical presupposition of modernity. Heidegger sees the essence of the modern age in the fact that, “what is, in its entirety (das Seiende im Ganzen),

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(…) is now taken in such a way that it first has being only to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and produces it”. 1 And Heidegger further characterizes modern man in that he “has become a subject”: What is decisive is not that man frees himself from previous obligations, but that the very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes subject. 2

In contrast to this development, Heidegger sees the essential character of the ancient and medieval ages in the fact that entities as such (das Seiende) are conceived as that which is present from out of itself and not first of all through the fact “that man first looks upon it, in terms of a representation that has the character of subjective perception.” And here man is further characterized as the “one who apprehends [Der Vernehmer] that which is” .3 For the Middle Ages... that which is, is the ens creatum, that which is created by the personal creator-God as the highest cause. Here, to be in Being means to belong within a specific rank of the order of what has been created – a rank appointed from the beginning – and as thus caused, to correspond to the cause of creation (analogia entis)... But never does the Being of that which is consist here in the fact that it is placed in the realm of man’s knowing and of his disposal, and that it is in being only in this way. The modern interpretation of that which is, is even further from the interpretation characteristic of the Greeks... That which is does not come into being at all through the fact that man first looks upon it, in the sense of a representing that has the character of subjective perception. 4

A systematic distinction is made here between what is (das Seiende), as that which has being only to the extent that it is represented and produced by man, and what is as something lying before from out of itself (von sich her Vorliegendes). Heidegger attributes the former conception to the world picture of modern age, and the latter to

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Ancient and Medieval times, in which as he says, the world is not interpreted as world picture. 5 He goes so far as to say that the ancient and medieval worlds could not have had world pictures, whereas it is only in the form of such a picture that modern man defines himself as the scene, according to whose conditions anything can appear: In distinction from the Greek apprehending, modern representing, whose meaning the word repraesentatio first brings to its earliest expression, intends something quite different. Here to represent [vor-stellen] means to bring what is present over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm. Whenever this happens, man “gets into the picture”. Therewith man sets himself up as the setting in which whatever is must henceforth set itself forth, must present itself, i.e. be a picture. There begins that way of being human which means the realm of human capability as a domain given over to measuring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole. 6

As a result of this Heidegger distinguishes between the meaning and use of latin word “subiectum” and its derivative “subject”. For Heidegger “subiectum” is a name for all that is, including man, understood as something taken as a basis (ein Zugrundegelegtes), something lying before from out of itself (ein von sich her Vorliegendes), which could be illustrated according to the medieval notion as a basis given by God, “ens creatum” and thus designated by the perfect passive form of the verb “subicere”. We must understand this word “subiectum”, however, as the translation of the Greek “hypokeimenon”. The word names that-which-lies-before, which as ground, gathers everything onto itself. This metaphysical meaning of the concept of subject has first of all no special relationship to man and none at all to the I. 7

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Subjectivity in Music For up to Descartes, and also still with his metaphysics, that which is, insofar as it is a particular being, a particular subiectum (hypokeimenon), is something lying before from out of itself, which as such, simultaneously lies at the foundation of its own fixed qualities and changing circumstances. 8

As opposed to this Heidegger argues that with the translation of this perfect passive form into German an active meaning dominates: man, who now represents entities as such in a way that he determines, makes himself the relational center of all that is. This, of course, does not mean that it has become a completely different concept. Rather, Heidegger wants to differentiate a more general meaning of the notion from a special case of its use, which he does by writing it uncapitalized - for the ancient concept not grounded in human representation – and capitalized – for the modern concept grounded in human representation. The special case that Heidegger has in mind is that of a special being i.e. the human being, in whose consciousness the totality of entities is represented as a world picture, but who at the same time obtains certainty about the world because he imposes the conditions under which it (i.e. the world) is represented. Indeed all that is displays itself in the form of this particular being itself. One could also relate this back to the concept of God implied in the “ens creatum”, only now in the sense that God only sees himself through man. How does it happen that that which is displays itself in a pronounced manner as Subiectum, and that as a consequence the subjective achieves dominance? 9 That the world becomes picture is one and the same event of man’s becoming a subject in the midst of that which is...10 However, when man becomes the primary and only real “Subiectum”, that means: Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its

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Albrecht von Massow Being... Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such.11 The “Subiectum”, the fundamental certainty, is the beingrepresented-together-with – made secure at any time – of representing man together with the entity represented, whether something human or non-human, i.e., together with the objective... Only because in the fundamental certainty... necessarily represented-together-with..., only for this reason can and must man be transformed into an exceptional being, into a subject which, regarding to that which truly i.e., certainly) is, which is primary, has permanence among all Subiecta. 12

In connection with Heidegger’s further claim that for the modern age that which is, in its entirety,... has being and only has being13 to the extent that it is represented by man, we must consider several consequences and pose several questions. First, when that which is, in its entirety, means for Heidegger everything that exists, it would be in this case only a solipsistic product of man.14 Is there in his view nothing that is, which is not represented by man? Second, if according to the ancient conception, on the other hand, that which is, is not in the first place something having being in that it is represented by man, then it would already be given as something lying before from out of itself, but not represented by him. How is then the nature of the relation of man to entities constituted around him? Third, if we understand ancient man in this sense as not having an interest or faculty of representing something as something, then he would not at all have had the ability of inventing something and thus would be closed off to the possibilities of technology and art. Would we then have to limit to modern times man’s ability to create something in the form of implements or pictures or reproductions of pictures ? An affirmative answer to the first question whether Heidegger’s concept of being characterizes modern times in a solipsistic manner seems to find confirmation in the following more sharply formulated statement from a work written a few years later: The word of

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Nietzsche: “God is dead” which takes up the train of thought from the previous essay and expands it: All that is, is now either what is real [das Wirkliche], as the object or what is effective [Das Wirkende], as the objectifying... Objectifying, in representing, in setting before, delivers up the object to the “ego cogito.”15

This statement conflicts with the formulation in which Heidegger characterizes this objectification (Vergegenständlichung) as a “representing” (Vorstellen) – in another passage as identical to thinking as “ego cogito”16 – which seeks to “bring what is present (das Vorhandene) before oneself as something standing over against it” (Entgegenstehendes).17 With this formulation it is possible to distinguish what is from the form in which it is thought as “something over against”. That which is present (das Vorhandene) could then be understood as something that indeed is (exists), but not – or not yet – made into an object, i.e. not represented or, in other words, not perceived. Thus we would have to distinguish between the form in which it exists, without being represented by man from the form in which it is represented and so appears to him. Furthermore we must also ask when something is perceived as something, whether this perception, which has already been called “thinking” in its broadest sense, is only to be understood as something active, as Heidegger seems to suggest by his derivation of the word “cogitare” from the compound “co-agitare”,18 or whether it can also be understood as something passive. The second question follows from this, namely: To what extent do the ancient and modern eras differ in their relation to what is. For Heidegger ancient man understood all that is as something coming to appearance, but not under conditions imposed upon it by the one to whom it appears; whereas for modern man all that is, is only something that can be represented, and indeed only under the conditions imposed by the one who is doing the representing. All subjectivism is impossible in Greek sophism, for them man can never be Subiectum; he cannot become

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Albrecht von Massow Subiectum because here Being is presencing and truth unconcealment. In unconcealment fantasia comes to pass: the cominginto-appearance, as a particular something, of that which presences – for man, who himself presences toward what appears. Man as the representing subject, however, “f an tasizes” i.e., he moves in imaginatio, in that his representing imagines, pictures forth, whatever is, as the objective, into the world as picture. 19 Within modern metaphysics it is Leibniz who first thinks the subiectum as ens percipiens et appetens [the perceptive and appetitive being]. He is the first to think clearly – the vis-character of the ens – the volitional essence of the being of whatever is. 20 Every relation to something – willing, taking a point of view, being sensible of [something] – is already representing... 21

That which is as that which presences (Anwesendes) is also meant here in the sense of “hypokaimenon” understood as that which is in itself, i.e. with or without man and regardless of whether it is represented or not. Man, on the other hand, as part of that which is, first becomes a “Subiectum” or “Subject” when he explicitly thematizes himself as a “volitional being” (Willenswesen) and posits himself as the relational middle of that which is. Man’s designation as “ens percipiens et appetens”, i.e. as a volitional being, seems to characterize the modern way of representing. The reverse consequence of this, however, means defining subjectivity by means of man’s volitional essence, i.e. his “willing”. As any kind of relation to something it would be, nevertheless, reduced to its active component and in this way historized as a specific feature of modernity. Is the passivity or the involuntary action of “that which presences – for man, who himself presences toward what appears” not a relation of a self to something other; is it at all an act of a subject? Whose manner of acting is it then? Already the formulation which Heidegger uses to

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characterize that which is as “something lying before”22 implies a perceiving subject and would have to be completed by the phrase “something lying before me or someone else”. This is also true for that which is represented, which Heidegger calls something present (das Vorhandene).23 In the German words “Vorliegen, Vorhanden and Vorstellen” (lying before, present at hand, and representing) the German prefix “vor” implies the position of a subject in all three, even though two of them, namely “Vorliegen” and “Vorhanden” are used specifically to refer to objects. The “vor” can have a spatial sense, as in the case of “vorhanden” (present at hand), or a temporal sense: something already existing even though no one perceives it. But already to determine it in this way is to make use of the subject’s temporal form of intuition. This says nothing about what something is beyond this determination, no more than it says that it exists beyond it. But what is seen as something that appears, as opposed to something that does not appear, and is thus capable of becoming an object, has always been and not first in modern times determined by the character and position of the subject. The “vor” implicates the subject as the primary determinant of the relation to and among entities. The distinction between “liegen” (lying) and “stellen” (presenting), which Heidegger makes in his definition of the subject is, on the other hand, less important than the distinction between the active and passive forms of this relation; as a translation for the verb “icere” both words point in any case to an action – whether in a passive or active sense of production or reproduction, and thus cannot be reduced to one form, namely the active form, but rather both forms of the subject. But, if the distinction between entities as perceived and entities as not perceived is only possible when there exists a relation of something to itself and to something other, then a third question must be raised as to whether the latter does not already occur as an objectification in the form of a picture of the world. The underlying condition and conditionality of perception determines in any case how something can be produced or reproduced as an object. This was also true with respect to the ancient notion. But in both formulations that Heidegger uses to describe entities – the ancient Greek

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notion of something as “lying-before-out-of-itself” (ein von sich her Vorliegendes)24 and the modern notion as “something present-athand” which is related to “the one representing it” 25 – the question arises: how and to whom does this something lie before out of itself, and how and to whom is this something present-at-hand represented? In both cases we are dealing with the underlying conditions and conditionality, beginning with the nature of the sense organs, position and perspective of someone to whom something lies before or by whom something is represented as present-at-hand. Presupposed in this question of what something will appear as, and how it will appear to them is clearly that they are first of all capable of the double relationship to themselves and to something other. And only this can be directly derived from the basic meaning of “subicere” and, so understood, be applied to every mode of human behavior, not just beginning in modern times, and thus should not be restricted to this historical period. But at the same time the fact of the self-andother relation determines how something will appear to someone, because the human modes of the self-and-other relation are not just somehow determined, but rather determined in a specific way, namely in spatial and temporal forms. The how of entities is not equivalent to the how of their being perceived. Our relation to entities has always been via pictures, and not just beginning in modern times. Thus the attempt to restrict the concept of subjectivity to something specifically belonging to the modern age results in unsolvable and untenable contradictions. It appears that the notion of the subject put forth by Heidegger has indeed been able to point out some essential features of modernity, but only to the extent that he has also ignored some essential features of the concept of subject: its entire range of passive, unintentional, reactive, permissive and suffering behaviour. What Heidegger means with his asserting that the defining feature of the modern age is the “transformation of man into the subject” might be more cautiously called simply a thematization of subjectivity in its radical modern character as the power of control (Verfügungsgewalt) in all of its far-reaching forms: individual, collective, technological and ideological. This thematization can be

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understood as arising out of the difference between two fundamentally different points of view: on the one hand the view that being and existence, nature and God are given to us just as we perceive or believe them to be; and, on the other hand, the view that all of the underlying conditions of our knowledge and beliefs are constituted solely by the subject. The subject exists empirically in both cases, and in both cases there are pictures of the world; but only in the second case does the subject thematize the manner of its own existence and the underlying conditions for its respective picture of the world. Thus what constitutes the defining feature of modernity is not so much that “man sets himself up as the scene”, 26 as Heidegger says; but rather that he thematizes himself as the scene under whose conditions he constitutes his own picture of the world. In several places Heidegger formulates his thoughts in such a way that this aspect stands in the foreground; and what at first appears to be a difference in nuance in fact points to something fundamentally different when he argues, for example, that in ancient and medieval times “the metaphysical meaning of the concept of subject has initially no special pronounced relationship to man and none at all to the I”,27 and then goes on to ask: “How does it happen at all that that which is displays itself in a pronounced manner as Subiectum and that as a consequence the subjective achieves dominance?”28 In this formulation the essence of modern man does not appear as a transformation into a subject but rather as the fact that man thematizes himself as a subject, which thus distinguishes him from other subjects that cannot do this. Although this interpretation may not lie in Heidegger’s original intent, here he nevertheless seems to acknowledge the inconsistencies resulting from his initial historical delimitation of the notion of subject. In any case, in the formulation just quoted, the essential feature of modernity does not lie in the existence of a new subject but rather in its thematization, that is to say in “representations of man who represents himself along with the objects he represents”.29 Through this faculty, representations of a natural or social order can become conscious representations, which means that they are in some manner dependent on the respective subject that represents them, and can thus be super-

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seded or replaced by the subject with other representations. This however, does not mean that the subject now becomes the “measure and determinant” (Maß- und Vollzugsraum)30 for everything that is, but rather that it determines that portion of entities in the world which – conforming to its own forms and features – belong to what Heidegger labels as its “realm of control or disposition” (Verfügungsbereich).31 From here we can, in turn, distinguish the general forms from the individual forms of the subjects power of control (Verfügungsgewalt). The general forms are not those which are frequently thought of as constituting an objectivity that is independent of the subject, but are rather to be thought of as a mode of being and perception that subjects share among themselves, whereas the individual forms are those that subjects do not share. The concept of the object must always be implicitly accompanied by the question “How and for whom is it an object, and for whose understanding or purposes?” It thus always implies a subject and this in turn necessitates the inquiry into the mental, i.e. the natural and social conditions and conditionalities of the subject. For it cannot perceive anything for which it has no forms of intuition. This is not to say that the subject makes the things that it perceives, but only that it makes the perceptions and interpretations of these perceptions. Here we must distinguish between things-inthemselves, which exist beyond all forms of perception; and objects, which are precisely what appears by means of certain forms in perception. The forms of this perception, time and space, and their interpretations in terms of cause, effect, coherence, comparability, difference etc., are all dependent on the subject insofar as it chooses, from the manifold of everything given to it, what it can or wants to perceive. Thus, the production of objects, such as artworks, only makes explicit in a conscious or unconscious way the selectivity of the subject; which, at the same time, also implicitly determines the reproduction of objects, such as those in nature. All of this, however, does not mean that the subject-object distinction has been abolished or become superfluous. Rather the

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subject-object distinction indicates the form – as exemplified by space and time – in which things can appear to the subject, and the subject can appear to itself. If we were to make an empirical distinction here, according to which the subject somehow already existed in itself and could make arbitrary use of the forms of intuition, the question would arise: in what form it could already exist outside of them that is, in what form this “subicere” could be an acting, if not within a spatial-temporal framework. And a further question would also have to be answered with respect to time and space as to how they could be used to put something into relations, if this action – be it perceptive or productive – were not that of a subject. The subject-object relation cannot be conceived in the form of two separate components somehow standing opposite to each other. The question whether the subject-in-self exists is a question that is as impossible to answer as the question whether things-in-themselves exist. For this reason the subject-object relation cannot be historically or systematically objectified in terms of a gradually changing relation of two separate components which represent specific phases of human development or specific forms of human action, since it already in principle forms the basis of any such actions or phases of development. Why then is it important to have a fundamentally determined concept of the subject, if, as we have just seen, this concept cannot be made concrete in specific terms relating to the modern age or to another historical period? Precisely in order to show that the basic meaning of this concept, in spite of the above or other comparable attempts at explication, cannot get us very far in understanding specific phases or activities of the subject, so that these, as a specific feature of modernity, can only be established and explicated in the particular fundamental way the subject thematizes itself. The passages quoted from Heidegger are already an expression of this thematization. It relates to everything that in any kind of perception of natural entities in the form of an objectification occurs as a conscious or unconscious action, and in the production of aesthetic objects appears as the power of control intended in a strategically effective way. In phi-

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losophical terms, the formulation “to posit something (or oneself) as something” emphasizes with the word “as” the appearance-character of the object, which in any case is what makes them possible as objects. Regardless of whether they are natural or aesthetic objects; although, only in the latter case is this appearance character disclosed as a signifying or productive action of the subject. The general nature of this faculty, namely its ability to posit something as something, regardless of what is directed toward, already contains the possibility of moving from an strictly epistemological to an aesthetic point of view, i.e. in the case where the subject by means of its own productive ability does not just perceive something already existing as its object, but rather produces something as its object that does not yet exist. This potential, which lies within the arbitrary power of the subject to realize, however raises the further question as to how this productive faculty will be applied, i.e. in general or in individual form of intuition or production. This consciousness of the arbitrary power of the subject, or at least its conspicuous and strategically effective application, is the source of modernity’s productive impulse; and, in its most extreme form perhaps, it can be seen in modern music, whose material content consists in the dissolution of material norms and conventional forms as a basis for communication. In this process the subject is thematized as the underlying and enabling condition for the formation of every object. Evidence for the subject’s activity is not only provided by its own enactment of a dissolution of norms, however, but also in its acceptance of them, although the latter is not as apparent, and thus for the most part, not conscious. How does the thematization of the subject appear, from a music history point of view, as a dissolution of norms in the specific modern forms of a technological and ideological power of control (Verfügungsgewalt)? Or, to put the question differently: How can we use it to explain in its radical consequences this characteristic feature for the development of modern music – that is, its innovation by means of the rejection of norms rather than, as in earlier music, innovation through a transformation of norms?

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Norms in traditional music are themselves based on a presupposed norm – namely, that music is composed as something coherent and with the intention of being communicated. This is also true for language and body gestures – namely, that in their sensuous form as a sequence of sounds, symbols etc., they also presuppose a coherent context of meanings or significations (Bedeutungszusammenhang). This basic presupposition, by means of the corresponding possibilities of analogy, has often determined the composition and reception of melodic forms, such as phrases, motives and themes, in that their component parts can mutually become objects in the construction of a coherent whole. They can just as well, however, be formed into objects of a non-coherent whole, of a non-communication; and, in such constructions, this positing of something as something without coherence, the subject stands out even more clearly as the positing agent. Because, it is precisely here in the renouncement of an essential form of communication, i.e. coherence, that the subject acts in a manner that is conspicuously individual and arbitrary. This is the motivation, for example, behind some of the more extreme practices in musical composition, such as the introduction of random operation, which is not, as it is sometimes thought to be in connection with some tendencies of newer music after 1950, a demonstration of its status as an art-form which is independent of the subject.32 For even in the replacement of predictability through unpredictability, the latter does not become independent of the subject. Unpredictability is a perception which exists in a tension with predictability in as much as it is a partial or total negation of the latter; in terms of composition or reception it originates solely in the consciousness of the subject, in which this tension is produced or experienced. Its prerequisite, however, consists in being able to bring something – in this case something predictable and unpredictable – into a relation to one another. It is probably not in the interest of the bird that flies by accidentally to be accidental. The unpredictable in relation to the predictable appears solely in the subject, which is what makes it possible in the first place to distinguish two events in terms of predictability and unpredictability. To perceive something unpredictable as an object in the

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active sense of the word “obicere” is always made possible by a subject, which, in turn, only actively or passively appears in this or some other act by which it makes and uses itself or something else as an object, so that the distinction between the two prefixes of the verb “icere”, “sub-” and “ob-” are in any case indicative of a unity in difference. Thus, neither here nor in any other case, is it a question of separating the subject from the object but rather distinguishing general from individual spatial-temporal forms in respect of both subject and object. Positing something (or oneself) as something can always happen in the same or similar way in general and more or less predictable forms, when the same or similar are regarded a formal means of communication used for the purpose of establishing norms; or it can always happen in a different way in individual and unpredictable forms. The production or reproduction of things that are the same, similar, combinable to other things, is customarily the dominant formal means of establishing meaning and coherence. It can perceive or produce objects with common attributes in general forms (as in conventional music), and thus grasp them in the form of inter-subjectively recognized concepts or conventional forms. The possibility of establishing norms, and the reliability of correspondences as a basis of communication and even the possibility of a basic trust in the world as such is based on it; provided of course, that it is regarded as a value. Seen formally, sense or meaning lies in the making of sense (Sinnstiftung) by means of combination and repetition. We should realize that this has been the basis for the creation of musical forms from the very beginning in order then to grasp what it means when these principles are abandoned by modern music. Musical tone systems are of the traditional elements which historically have undergone many changes, but have nevertheless maintained their intention to be a universally binding form in the 20th century as well. The option of creating them or of giving them up shows that they lie solely in the power of the subject. For among the infinite possibilities in the realm of the acoustic, the classification of tones in terms of identity or similarity, or the use of repetition constitute only a few possibilities among many. From all the pos-

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sible frequencies, choosing specific segments which have the same or similar qualities – i.e., the harmonic color of a voice or instrument, or a uniform pitch classification – is a decision made by the subject for one particular possibility in the creation of material, whose content thus reflects the subjects interest in endowing something with sense by means of making combinations, finding similarities, using repetition and maintaining reliability for the purpose of communication. Why this is felt to be creative of meaning or sense can only be understood as something subjective; presumably it is rooted in a deep existential fear caused by the appearance of natural and social catastrophes, or simply the fear of the unpredictability of things in general. Thus different decisions and valuations result, accordingly, in different materials. One can try to perceive the individual in objects in individual subjective forms, or try to produce the individual itself as an object (as in contemporary music), for which there are no concepts for conventional forms or, in any case, no generally accepted forms. It is in the direction of this option that music has moved in the 20th century, although it remains doubtful whether it can ever be completely realized, since any presentation of something within any kind of framework produces a form of universality. Obviously, however, the awareness of this option has produced such a limitless desire on the part of the subject to experiment with its possibilities – i.e., with the materials that were formally thought to be outside of its options – that the resulting expansion of technological possibilities has created a dynamic of innovation that is specifically modern. The thematization of the subject as subject can be implicitly found in places where the power of control manifests itself in the form of a feeling or knowing of responsibility, regardless of whether in addition to this it has also been explicitly communicated or not as a gesture on the level of esthetical content. For what period of social, ideological and technological development should the concept of modernity under the aspect of a thematization of the subject be applied, and to which cultural sphere? For this determination it is not decisive to establish when certain criteria are first met, i.e. when certain developments first appear – in some parts of Europe this was already the case since the 16th or 17th

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century –, but rather when these criteria attain a broad technological and ideological influence. For example, it was not the invention of the printing press in the 16th century, but rather the industrially organized distribution of the printed word in the 18th century that made it possible that thoughts and ideas could attain widespread influence through the medium of newspapers. Modernity technologically and ideologically first enters into history, so to speak, not as a fact but rather as factor, and it is thus in many respects more sensible to place its beginning in the middle of the 18th century. And following this logic, it is at the latest in the 20th century no longer limited to Europe. The question is whether in other cultures modernity can appear differently and whether the same criteria apply to it. In Europe the criterion of modernity that has gained ever increasing influence is chiefly that of a scientific enlightenment based on rational foundations, social and political emancipation and the rise of a critical consciousness. These features have left their marks on the theoretical foundations of philosophy and politics in the 18th century – for instance in the writings of Denis Diderot or Immanuel Kant, or in the analysis and critique of capitalism in the 19th century by Karl Marx, or in the psychology of Sigmund Freud at the end of the 19th century and in the sociology of Max Weber or Theodor Adorno in the 20th century, and finally – outside of the sciences – in the general consciousness where they are frequently present or noticeable to the extent that these criteria are adopted or rejected. These criteria have parallels to changes in musical works of art both on the level of content and on the level of material development, even if this is often not readily apparent. Parallels to the liberation of the individual as an expression of social emancipation can be found in the works of Carl Philip Emanuel Bach (who, in addition, was a personal friend of Diderot) or the work of Ludwig von Beethoven. Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen has been shown to represent a direct reaction to the economic enlightenment and the analysis and critique of capitalism in the 19th century. The monodramas of Arnold Schönberg and the operas of Alban Berg stand in an atmospheric and reflective relation to the psychological interpretation of society at the end of the 19th century.

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And, in so far as this development as a process of changing values was the cause of considerable irritation, they have a parallel in the corresponding changes in the material basis of music, such as the gradual individualization of musical genres and forms, the extension of harmonic tonality through chromaticizing up to its complete dissolution, the emancipation of dissonance, the emancipation of individual forms of coherence, the liberation of the dynamic as an arbitrary moment, the dissolution of time measurement and, after 1950, the tendency toward the dissolution of norms in general. The developments of modern music can be illustrated in the following examples of selected works beginning from the middle of the 18th century. Musical examples These examples have, on the one hand, the disadvantage that they cannot show the many intermediate stages of musical development; and thus cannot take into consideration the fact that modern music, like other cultural phenomena, does not appear suddenly, but as the result of many smaller transitions. On the other hand, this selected presentation of music over a long period of time clearly indicates the accelerated pace of musical development. The difference in compositional structure in respect to essential elements of syntax, such as the conduct of voice, harmonic and metric cadence, linear progression, regular meter, phrase formation etc., between Bach and the masses of Giralomo Cavazzoni 200 years earlier, for example, are not nearly as great as the differences between Bach and the works of pointillistic music written 200 years later. We can of course find some less traditional structures already in Bach, such as in the Organ Fantasy in G-minor (BWV 542) but nothing of the subsequent radical developments of modern music. There is, however, a phenomenon that can be found in both earlier and later music that can be judged according to similar criteria – namely, the phenomenon of the special or exceptional case. In contrast to earlier practices, however, the radical tendencies of modern music have made the exceptional case the rule; and the rule, in turn, with respect to its relation to the rest of music as a whole now becomes the exception.

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Continuing innovations from the middle of the 18th century – primarily from C.Ph.E. Bach, Beethoven begins to emancipate dynamic range, i.e. the intensity of sound (symbolized, for example, by p, f, mp, ff, stf) from its ties to a metrical emphasis (metrischer Schwerpunkt) or phrase dependent on strong or light beats (rising and lowering of voice), (Hebungen und Senkungen). In actual performance this may already have been possible in the framework of conventional syntax, although it can hardly be proven on the basis of available musical texts. So that the question must be raised: why has so little come down to us? The answer is probably because symbolic notation of the dynamic was unnecessary as long as the music was performed within the framework of an implicitly understood syntax, and thus it first became necessary when it went beyond this implicit understanding. With the developments of modern music exceptions such as this no longer occur within the framework of a conventional syntax, but are opposed in general to syntax in a conventional sense. In Stockhausen’s piano piece, a work of pointillistic music, just about every tone has its own dynamic indication, which makes it difficult or impossible to comprehend it as belonging to a coherent sequence of notes. Furthermore, there is a deteleologisizing of the harmonic which takes place in the course of the 19th century that goes beyond the harmonic ambiguity that was possible within the framework of the various tonalities of previous music. In pointillistic music there is no melodic or harmonic progression. The permanent and, in many cases, extreme change of position (Wechsel der Lage) between high and low, the lack of metric, a constant change of articulation, all contribute to the avoidance of a linear conduct of parts (Stimmführung). The traditional material basis, i.e. the scales which are the basis and starting point for the conventional formation of melody, is here no longer of importance. Forms of articulation that appear in traditional phrase formation in analogy to speech inflection, such as the continuity of position, internal progression, rising and lowering, intonation and rhythm, have also been fragmented or dissolved in pointillistic music. And with the possibilities offered by electronic music after 1950, even the material basis which is still operative for this piano piece, i.e. the selection of the same or similar

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pitches from regular frequencies, has also been abandoned for the sake of an arbitrary choice from the entire spectrum of regular and irregular frequencies that can be changed with every tone or group of tones. In the abandonment of these musical norms, however, we can see the fundamental role played by the subject: in the creation of these individual musical forms the subject is thematizing itself as that under whose conditions or conditionality it is decided in what form something can at all appear as a general (i.e. typical) or individual form. In the general forms, i.e. the musical norms as such, this ability to decide is not as apparent, although it is also determined by it. In this enumeration of norm-dissolving developments in modern music we can see at the same time the double face of the modern power of control (Verfügungsgewalt). For in a way all of these innovations carry in themselves what they negate. Often enough there is a balance between the tendency to abolish norms, on the one hand, and the attempt to reconstitute or even to create new norms, on the other. The greatest possible refrainment from the power of control is an emphatic show of it, for example, in the already mentioned practice of random operation. Modernity is deeply split. The already existing conflict between individual and society has reached a new order of magnitude. Modernity’s technological and ideological power of control serves both collective and individual goals; but this, rather than demonstrating a common interest between them, more often brings about their irreconcilable opposition: Certainly the modern age has, a consequence of the liberation of man, introduced subjectivism and individualism. But it remains just as certain that no age before this one has produced an comparable objectivism and that in no age before this has the non-individual in the form of the collective, some to acceptance as having such value. Essential here is the necessary interplay between subjectivism and objectivism. 33

This interplay appears on different levels in music. One example of it can be seen in the relation between aesthetic appearance and the pre-

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compositional organization in serial pointillistic music after 1950. Never to such an extent before this time has music exhibited such an extreme concept of norms that appear to be completely arbitrary and unconnected to any traditionally handed down forms; but rarely before this period has the pre-compositional structure of music been based on a more socially recognized set of norms – namely, mathematical-scientific principles. Modernity has given birth to an never-equaled potential in individual and collective modes of behavior, through which the impression has been won that the same technological and ideological power of control – whether seen from its aesthetic, scientific or medical point of view that makes so much in our society calculable and manageable; at the same time, because it also makes possible the realization of an unlimited diversity of interests, prevents many things in society from being calculable and manageable. This is the reason for modernity’s aversion to itself and at the same time the form and problem of its thematization in terms of the subject.

No te s 1

Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture”, in: The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York 1977), pp. 129-130. In the following slight modifications have been made in the translations for the purpose of clarity. 2

Ibid., p.128.

3

Ibid., p. 131.

4

Ibid., p.130.

5

The clearest expression of this historizing of the subject can be found in the following: “But man can, as he thinks ahead, ponder this: Being subject as humanity has not always been the sole possibility

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belonging to the essence of historical man, which is always beginning in a primal way, nor will it always be.” (Ibid., p. 153). 6

Ibid., p 130. Heidegger sees the mathematical character of knowledge in modern science as a clear indication of this: “This objectifying of whatever is, is accomplished in a setting before, a representing, that aims at bringing each particular being before it in such a way that man who calculated can be sure, and that means be certain, of that being” (Ibid., p. 127); The expressions “world picture of the modern age” and “modern world picture” both mean the same thing and both assume something that could never have been assumed before – namely, a medieval and an ancient world picture. The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age” (Ibid., p 130). 7

Ibid., p. 128.

8

Ibid., p. 148.

9

Ibid., p. 142.

10

Ibid., p. 132.

11

Ibid., p. 128.

12

Ibid., p. 150.

13

Ibid., p. 129 f.

14

The following statement seems to point in this direction: “Man has become a Subiectum” (Ibid., p 151), if we can understand what is meant by the upper case spelling of “Subiectum” in such a way that it traces back everything that is (ens creatum) to the activity of man; just as the lower case spelling of “subiectum” traced everything back to the activity of God (creator).

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15

Martin Heidegger: “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is dead’”, in: The Question concerning Technology and other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York 1977), p. 100 16

Ibid., p. 149.

17

Ibid., p. 131.

18

Ibid., p. 150; and p. 100ff.

19

Ibid., p. 147.

20

Ibid., p. 90.

21

Ibid., p. 108.

22

Ibid., p. 128.

23

Ibid,. p. 131.

24

Ibid., p. 148.

25

Ibid., p. 131.

26

Ibid,. p. 130.

27

Ibid., p. 128 (my emphasis).

28

Ibid., p. 147-148 (my emphasis).

29

Ibid., p. 150.

30

Ibid., p. 132.

31

Ibid., p. 130.

32

H.-Kl. Metzger, for example, writes in his article “The Unknown in Music, an Essay on the Compositions of Giancinto Scelsi”: “It would

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be tempting, in spite of their incommensurability at least in their attitudes, to compare the work of two of the most important living composers who have been both inspired by Buddhism… Both have in common that they don’t put much stock in themselves, in their own ego, as an artistically inclined subject expressing itself… Whereas Cage, however, maintaining a strict experimental stance even there where he generates completely determined structures, eliminating the contingency of the empirical subject in an empirical manner by means of a cleverly conceived experimental arrangement which, although set u p by the subject, nevertheless eliminates its own intrusion into the process of its excecution and its influence and even its control over the result; the composing subject of Scelsi’s work is listening, so to speak, for the ‘sound in itself’… in, as it were, not completely earthly, and certainly not empirically describable contemplation, thus with a ‘third ear’, makes itself, so to speak, into its medium…” In: Giacinto Scelsi (MUSIK-KONZEPTE, Heft 31), ed. H.-Kl. Metzger and R. Riehn, München 1983, p. 18). 33

Heidegger, The Time of the World Picture, p. 128.

NEW SUBJECTIVITY IN CINEMA THE VERTIGO OF STRANGE DAYS

Patricia Pisters

Ernie, do you realize what we’re doing in this picture? The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. At one moment we play this note and get this reaction, and then we play that chord and they react that way. And someday we won’t even have to make a movie – there’ll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we’ll just press different buttons and they’ll go “oooh” and “aaah” and we’ll frighten them, and make them laugh. Won’t that be wonderful? (Spoto 1984: 440)

These words are from Alfred Hitchcock, expressed to scriptwriter Ernst Lehman during the preparation of his film North by Northwest (1959). Of course one could see this remark as one of Hitch’s many practical jokes. Then Hitchcock’s words seem to be far removed from common views on cinema. Traditionally cinema has often been seen as a voyeuristic medium in which there is always a distance

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(which is absent in direct brain-stimulation) between the screen and its viewers. Distance and difference then is very important for the construction of subjectivity, both for the characters on screen and for the spectator before the screen. In film theory the concept of the subject is constituted by scopophilic desire, often defined in psychoanalytic terms. How is the subject (on-screen) represented in terms of sexual difference? What is the subject’s object of desire (who is looking and who is being-looked-at)? And what does this mean for the spectator (the subject off-screen)? How, by mechanisms of identification, is the spectator ideologically positioned? Also Hitchcock’s films have often been classified as voyeuristic and misogynistic (man being the subject, woman being the object of the look and desire). And if we consider Hitchcock as the ultimate classic director, who displays at the maximum structures of the voyeuristic gaze as has been demonstrated by many psychanalytic accounts of his work, Hitchcock’s remark is a mere symptomatic fantasy or joke about being able to do without representations. Slavoj Zizek, one of contemporary’s most interesting Lacanian critics of Hitchcock’s work explains Hitchcock’s words in this way. However, looking at contemporary developments in virtual reality, the fantasy of direct brain stimulation is not so farfetched anymore. Since the eighties there are also numerous science fiction films that play with these ideas. In science, neurobiological researches also discover more and more how the brain functions as a complex network that is influenced by stimulation (both directly through sensors and indirectly through the senses). 1 And as Gilles Deleuze has demonstrated, Hitchcock is not only the most perfect and last of classic directors, he is also the first of modern filmmakers.2 So what happens to the subject if we take Hitch’s remark as visionary, anticipating developments in technology, science and philosophy? According to Deleuze, Hitchcock is the one who introduces the mental relation in the image, in this way implicating the spectator not (only) by identification with a look of a subject on-screen, but by establishing a network of relations of which the spectator is an active participant on its own terms. Hitchcock’s films open the possibility for direct time-images in which the subject is not so much constituted

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by the look or the gaze of the other, but through mental relations and temporal structures: not the “Eye’s I”, but the “Mind’s Eye/I”.3 In respect to the subject, contemporary cinema gives more rise to questions like: What is the subject anyway? How should we define desire? And if we speak about spectators, can we still speak of identification as the dominant way of obtaining spectatorial pleasure? According to Deleuze, film theory today should not borrow from psychoanalysis or linguistics, which longtime has been the case. If there is any domain to look for principles that can give any new insights, Deleuze argues, it is in the biology of the brain. This scientific discipline has at least the advantage of not giving any ready-made concepts that can be applied or adapted to cinema. At the same time neurobiology has a great richness and complexity to offer in making new arrangements and creating new thoughts.4 What would such a cerebral principles (which is not the same as intellectual, the brain is also emotional) then mean for the concept of the subject? The hypothesis of this article is that cinema of the nineties demonstrates clearly that Hitchcock has indeed been visionary and that for understanding contemporary cinema, and for understanding concepts of the subject, identity, and desire it is not so much (not only) the model of the eye and representation, but a rhizomatic model of the brain and the functioning of memory and time that can provide new insights.5 First I will indicate how Hitchcock’s films can be related to both the model of the eye and the model of the brain, which emphasizes once more his crucial position in film history at the threshold of modern times. I will also try to demonstrate how both ways of seeing Hitchcock’s work belong to different philosophical traditions that have implications for the understanding of the concept of the subject. Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) is probably the film that balances most between classic and modern, or, in Deleuzian terms, between the movement-image and the time-image. I will look more closely at this film, hoping to clarify further the differences between the two approaches that I will distinguish. To conclude I will concentrate on cinema of the nineties, arguing that a film like Katherine Bigelow’s Strange Days demonstrates clearly that

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Hitchcock’s fantasy is gaining importace, both as a cinematographic question under investigation and as a scientificly plausible fact. Even though the film may not be considered as such a masterpiece as Vertigo (yet), Strange Days does take up explicicitly certain issues that are virtually present in Hitchcock’s work. Bigelow’s film makes clear that contemporary cinema raises new questions around the relation between images, mental relations and time that also ask for new ways of thinking the subject. The Hitchcockian “Subject”: Guilty by Jouissance or Confused in Time? In order to clarify what the psychoanalytic model of the eye and the rhizomatic model of the brain entail, I will first look at three remarks about Hitchcock made by both Slavoj Zizek and Gilles Deleuze; it will make their different positions evident. First of all, both Zizek and Deleuze refer to Rohmer and Chabrol’s study on the Master of Suspense (1979). Both recognize the importance of that work and refer to the Catholic interpretation of this study. But here comes the first big difference: Zizek sees the Catholicism of Hitchcock as a more profound idea of Jansenism, which is according to him indeed very Hitchcockian. This boils down to the observation that all human subjects are sinful, and for that reason their salvation cannot depend on themselves as persons; it can only come from an outside, from God, who has decided in advance who will be saved and who will be damned (Zizek 1992: 212/213). Deleuze, on the other hand, precisely rejects the Catholic (and by implication Jansenist) dimension of Rohmer and Chabrol’s analysis: there is no need to make Hitchcock a Catholic metaphysician. On the contrary, Deleuze argues, Hitchcock has a very sound conception of theoretical and practical relations, which have nothing to do with a guilty subject or a terrible and impossible God (Deleuze 1986: 202). A second point that is raised by both Zizek and Deleuze is Hitchcock’s own metaphor of his films as “tapissery”. Zizek sees this in connection to the impossible Gaze, again the God’s Eye view, that

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has caught the subject on the screen in its web of pre-destination. This subject on screen (the character) represents the subject off screen (the spectator). The spectator can identify with the character’s look and at the same time feel his guilt and fear for the Gaze of God or the Real, as Zizek calls this impossible entity; the spectator can never identify with the God’s view, the Gaze (Zizek 1992: 254). So, according to Zizek, the cinema of Hitchcock gives an ultimate representation of how subjects outside cinema experience the world: the represented subjects are under the same constraints as the spectators in their own life. Deleuze, however, sees the tapissery as a network of relations, carefully set up by Hitchcock, in order to implicate the viewer in the (mental) actions. It is not a matter of the look and the eye. If there is an eye in Hitchcock, Deleuze says, it is the mind’s eye (Deleuze 1995: 54). The spectator is not looking for representations of his own life, but is participating in the game of relations that are set up by Hitchcock. A third and final difference in approach between Zizek and Deleuze concerns Hitchcock’s just quoted remark about influencing directly the brains. It was already alluded to that, in expressing his wish to reach spectators directly, without mediation, Zizek emphasizes the symptomatic aspect of Hitchcock’s fantasy: according to Zizek it is this urge to function without representation which constitutes the psychotic core in Hitchcock’s universe. In “reality” there is always representation as a kind of “umbilical cord” between Hitchcock and the public, between the subjects on screen and the subjects off screen (Zizek 1992: 241). Clearly, seeing the image as a representation, which is common in film theory and goes back to Plato, Descartes and (in a different way) Kant in philosophy, has implications for the notion of the subject. In representation, as subject off-screen constitutes his or her identity by identifying with subjects on screen, taking them as models for their own subjectivity. Again it is obvious that Deleuze has a completely different philosophy. Going back to Spinoza and Bergson, Deleuze does not believe in the all encompassing force of the concept of representation, and hence the concept of identification as a means of modelling subjec-

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tivity. According to Deleuze the brain, both an intellectual and emotional entity and functioning parallel (not hierarchical) to the body, can give more insights about how we perceive ourselves as subject. So for Deleuze, Hitchcock’s remark about the electrodes in the brains are not symptomatic in leaving out the most important, but a philosophical reflection about how images work, what the direct effects of images in themselves are. So without even taking the electrodes in the brains literally, it indicates that it might be useful to think about images in terms of effects and affects that are set in motion by a complex interplay between body and brain, perception and memory. Before continuing with Hitchcock, let’s first have a closer look at the concept of the subject in relation to desire in both models, the psychoanalytic and (what I will call) the rhizomatic model. First the psychoanalytic subject. In early psychoanalysis, both according to Freud and to Lacan, desire is based on lack, the absence of an originary and Imaginary wholeness which is lost as soon as the subject enters society, the Symbolic order. The subject marked by this lack, desires an object to refind original wholeness, which is always impossible. Needless to say that sexual difference is the crucial difference in this respect (lack is based on castration-anxiety, feared by the male subject). Feminist film theory has elaborately demonstrated how the subject, mostly male, takes the woman as its object of desire, appropriating or fetishizing her, at the cost of women’s status as a subject. The gaze is often seen as an all knowing entity, often assigned to the male patriarchal subject, sometimes as a more abstract notion of the others as such, but in any case close to the Descartian “Eye/I”. The look on the other hand is related to the embodied subject in the diegetic world. It is less powerful, although according to Kaja Silverman in her latest work The Threshold of the Visible World (1996) the look is the only possible resistance against the gaze. Zizek however, and with him some feminist psychoanalysts, put the gaze not in the powerful position of the Symbolic order but in what Lacan calls the Real. 6 In his later work, Lacan puts more and more emphasis on the concept of the Real. The subject is not so

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much haunted by the Imaginary and the desire of the lost object of desire, but the subject is haunted by the Real. The Real is that what the subject cannot understand, cannot see and cannot be represented in the Symbolic, but nevertheless imposes its traces on the subject; it is a third term that goes beyond the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Zizek relates the Gaze to the Real, and has therefore a different interpretation of the Gaze than Silverman who locates the gaze still in culture (the presence of others as such). The Gaze, according to Zizek is not an instrument of mastery and control but on the contrary, it is that what the subject never can know. It can be defined in several ways: the amorphe, the raw, skinless flesh, God, ultimately Death. Sexual difference is still crucial, woman being closer to the Real than Man (and therefore being impossible subjects: woman is a symptom of man, according to Lacan and Zizek). The Real is the “night of the world”, the absolute negativity, void and lack, which is at the basis of the subect. So desire is still based on lack and absence, but it has now become a transcendental notion. And because the subject cannot know the Real, it defines its desire as the desire of the other (the subject desires what it thinks the other desires, in the illusion of thinking that the other possesses the jouissance of the Real). The Lacanian/Hitchcockian subject according to Zizek is a guilty subject, always already guilty of wanting enjoyment, jouissance, which finds its impossible origin in the Real (we see here what Zizek meant by Jansenism based upon guilt and God). It may come as no surprise that the Lacanian/Hitchcockian subject, according to Zizek is a fundamental Kantian (even more than Descartian) subject. The Real is comparable to “Das-Ding-an-Sich”, the transcendental notion that forms the subject, but which it cannot know. If we look at Hitchcock’s film, in a Zizekian/Lacanian inspired analysis we could say that the hero of Rear Window (1954) represents still an early Lacan, tied to the Symbolic order that sometimes is ruptured by symptoms of the Imaginary order, but is mostly in control, having an overview.7 But more and more the stain of the Real has entered the Hitchcockian image. The plane in North by Northwest (1959), the hand with a knife in Psycho (1960), the birds

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in The Birds (1962), are according to Zizek not perceived simply as part of diegetic reality: “it is, rather, experienced as a kind of stain which from outside, – more precisely: from an intermediate space between diegetic reality and our ‘true’ reality – it invades the diegetic reality.” (Zizek 1992: 236). This is precisely the Real that stains the Symbolic and therefore not only threatens the subjects on the screen, but also the spectators sense of security: his or her position of safe distance, bridged by the eye, is all of a sudden, threatened by something out of control. In short the Lacanian subject, which according to Zizek is a Hitchcockian subject, is philosophically subjected to an a-historical transcendental principle that is always mediated by representations (the umbilical cord). Its guilty (Jansenist) desire is based on a fundamental lack, that is not so much to be related to the Imaginary, but to the impossible and horrible Real which imposes its Gaze like a dangerous imprisoning web (the tapissery according to Zizek). In a Deleuzian rhizomatic philosophy Hitchcock’s universe presents us a completely different image of the subject. Desire, first of all, is still an important notion but, according to Deleuze it is not based on lack and the absence of an original perfect but impossible whole or dangerous void-like negativity. Desire is also never related to an object (that obscure object of desire);8 rather desire is a fundamental wish to live and to preserve life by connecting with and relating to those things/persons that give us joy, e.g. that increase our power to act. This doesn’t mean that there is no sadness, or hatred or fear, but these are all reaction to this fundamental drive to preserve life (what is bad for us inspires sadness, and other sad passions). Joy should not be confused with jouissance, the Lacanian enjoyment, which as I explained, is a guilty pleasure related to fearful death and the negativity of the Real. Deleuze is in this respect very much influenced by Spinoza. Spinoza called the striving to persistence conatus. According to Spinoza, joy is related to the power to form adequate thoughts and to act. 9 To be active is to enjoy life, to be joyful is to desire connections that have relations to affirmative powers, not to the negative ones as “prescribed” by psychoanalysis. The subject is not by definition a guilty subject, controlled by a

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transcendental notion; of course the subject can do bad things and become guilty. This also does not mean that the subject controls everything, because in Spinozian/Deleuzian terms, the self is or can be confused by the immanent forces of time. The subject in this perspective is not so much challenged by the Real, or God as an external force, or Das-Ding-an-Sich, but rather by time and memory. Genevieve Lloyd explains in her work on Spinoza how this influences the idea of the subject, or the self: The Spinozistic self is both the idea of an actually existing body, moving into a future, and the idea of all that has been retained of that body’s past. The mind struggles to make itself a unity – a well-functioning temporal as well as spatial whole. In the context of this view of the self as a constant effort to articulate itself, and to maintain itself in being amidst the wider wholes on which it depends, borders become unstable (Lloyd 1996: 96/97).

This description of the Spinozistic self demonstrates clearly how the subject changes in time, how it becomes in time and therefore can not always be the same. Deleuze is very Spinozian (and Bergsonian) when he talks about concepts of becoming in time and duration, and the instability of selfhood. In his cinema book The Time-Image, Deleuze takes Spinoza’s idea of “we don’t know what a body can do” as one of the starting points of modern cinema. In any case according to Deleuze, the subject is not a fixed and transcendentally controlled entity, but an immanent singular body whose borders of selfhood and subjectivity are challenged in time and by time. The determination and insecurity that time brings to the subject is not the negative limit of desire and knowledge, but precisely that what brings about on-going movements of thought: the gaps in our knowledge are needed to continue living and thinking. Looking at Hitchcock then, Deleuze sees the hero of Rear Window not as someone possessing the (Symbolic) gaze, but as someone who, forced to immobility by his accident, becomes a seer (not just a voyeur), somebody who starts making mental relations (mental

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relations start when the action – temporarily – stops and the subject opens up to time). And where Zizek sees the Real introduced into the Hitchcockian universe (the knife, the birds, the plane), Deleuze precisely stresses the fact that these “things” are not coming from a beyond. On the contrary, they have a natural relation with other aspects of the image. The birds must be ordinary birds, the plane is an ordinary plane, the key in Dial M for Murder (1954) is an ordinary key; it belongs to the world of the image, it becomes a sign (a relational indication) when it doesn’t fit the lock. Deleuze distinguishes different signs (marks and symbols) that form together the network of what Deleuze calls the mental-image or the relation-image that puzzle the subject on-screen as well as the subject of-screen, but not always in the same way: Hitchcock plays with all minds in different ways. In short, Deleuze sees Hitchcock universe as a network of relations (the tapissery). There is no a-priori guilt (no Catholicism or Jansenism), only an attempt to reason and to establish adequate relations which could improve life and increase the power to act. The subject’s desire is not based on negativity and lack (and hence not primarily based on sexual difference and castration), but is a positive desire to make connections. The image is not seen as a representation, an umbilical cord, but as a thought provoking encounter. One could state that Hitchcock’s work, balancing itself between traditional and modern views on cinema and on the subject, allows two different readings, related to two different philosophical traditions: the Descartian/Kantian/Lacanian tradition which is represented by Zizek, and the Spinozian/Bergsonian tradition elaborated by Deleuze. These different visions lead to very different interpretations of subjectivity. Vertigo: The Abyss of the Real and the Crystal of Time Hitchcock’s most dazzling picture in respect to psychoanalytic and temporal identity is Vertigo. In order to clarify the two different approaches that I just have outlined, I will elaborate on this film, before getting finally to the even stranger days of the nineties. The story of Vertigo takes place in San Francisco where John “Scottie” Ferguson

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(James Stewart) leaves the police force because of his acrophobia. An old college buddy Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) comes to ask him to shadow his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) who believes she is possessed by the spirit of her great-grandmother Carlotta Valdes. Scottie follows Madeleine, falls in love with her but cannot protect her from committing suicide by jumping from a bell tower. Obsessed with the dead woman, he meets a woman, Judy, who strongly resembles Madeleine and whom Scottie transforms into Madeleine. Before Scottie finds out, we learn that Judy actually is Madeleine. As Elster’s mistress she helped to cover his wife’s murder (it was the strangled Mrs. Elster who “jumped” from the tower). When Scottie finds out that he has been deceived by the most perfect of all women, he takes Judy/Madeleine to the tower again and there she really falls from the tower and dies. If we look at Vertigo in a psychoanalytic way, obviously a lot of feminist criticism comes to mind. As is indicated before, in early psychoanalytic critiques Hitchcock’s male protagonists are seen as sadistic bearers of the gaze, trying to appropriate their object of desire, the woman. Clearly, the scene in which Scottie sees Madeleine for the first time, which takes place in a restaurant, could be read in this way: he (the male subject) looks at his object of desire (the woman). Their first “encounter” is loaded with sexual tension. During the first half of the film he tries to safe her from a strange “possession” and tries to make her his (“I have you, I have you”, Scottie exclaims at some point). When he does not succeed in keeping her, he is obsessed by bringing his ideal object back to life, at the cost of female subjectivity: Judy first becomes Madeleine and then dies (punished for her “guilty” femaleness). Identification, a prime indicator for spectatorial pleasure and subject positioning is extremely hard for a female audience, unless by masochism, transvestitism, narcissism or bisexuality (all psychoanalytic terms that do not create a powerful subject). Other feminist psychoanalytic positions present a more complex structure of male and female subject positions. Tania Modleski, for instance, demonstrates that, although women are explicitly “designed” by Hitchcock, Vertigo is not that one-dimensional as is

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often thought in first instance (Modleski 1988: 87-100). The male protagonist does not just master the “guilty” female subject/object, but he also identifies with her. In Vertigo Scotties identifies with Madeleine (who identifies with Carlotta Valdez). According to Modleski, woman thus becomes the identification for all of the film’s spectators as well. Modleski places her arguments in a Freudian framework, and demonstrates how masculinity is unable to control femininity (she calls femininity “the unconsciousness of patriarchy”). Zizek would argue differently but nevertheless close to Modleski that both men and women, on-screen and off-screen are under the constraints of the Real (but women are closer to it than man, hence their enigmatic and at the same time scary nature). In this light, Scotties acrophobia could be seen as the fear for an encounter with the Real. In Everything you always wanted to know about Hitchcock but were afraid to ask Lacan, Zizek states that Scottie indeed has such frightening encounters, especially in his nightmare in which he sees his own decapitated head transfixed, while the “world” around it is moving very fast. This is the Gaze of the Thing (of the Real), which is the most frightening encounter one can have. Scottie becomes mad after this dream. But when he recovers he starts searching his desired but frightening object again. Whatever the differences may be in a psychoanalytic explanation of the film, the questions are always centered around subject positioning and identification strategies. More and more it is seen that non of the subjects in the film is in control, either because there is an overall identification with the fragile and yet threatening feminine position, or because of a (common) encounter with the Real. Now what happens when we consider the image not as a representation but as an expression of mental relations. What happens when we consider the dimension of time, that is clearly present in Vertigo? What happens to the subject on screen? And what to the spectators? Deleuze stated already that Hitchcock brings the spectator in an active relation to the film. This remark becomes more clear when we consider Hitchcock’s answer to the question why he revealed so early in Vertigo that Judy actually is Madeleine:

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Though Stewart isn’t aware of it yet, the viewers already know that Judy isn’t just a girl who looks like Madeleine, but that she is Madeleine! Everyone around me was against this change [in respect to the original novel. P.P.]; they all felt that the revelation should be saved for the end of the picture. I put myself in the place of a child whose mother is telling him a story. Where there’s a pause in her narration, the child always says, “What comes next, Mommy?” Well, I felt that the second part of the novel was written as if nothing came next, whereas in my formula, the little boy, knowing, that Madeleine and Judy are the same person, would then ask, “And Stewart doesn’t know it, does he? What will he do when he finds out?” (Hitchcock in Modleski 1988: 100)

Modleski reads this quote as indicative for the power of the mother/woman and the female point of view that undermines the male positions in Hitchcock even though she is always punished for that. I would say that Hitchcock’s strategy undermines processes of identification (the viewer does not identify with Stewart/Scottie because (s)he knows more). Instead, Hitchcock gives the spectator a special place. Knowing more than the protagonist, a different kind of relation and subjectivity is aimed at. As I will try to demonstrate this has everything to do with the experience of time. As Deleuze makes clear in The Movement-Image and The Time-Image cinema is Bergsonian in its conceptualization of time. Bergson’s major thesis about time is as follows: The past co-exists with the present that it has been; the past is preserved in itself, as past in general (non-chronological); at each moment time splits itself into present and past, present that passes and past which is preserved. (...) The only subjectivity is in time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way around. That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox. Time is not the interior in us, but just the

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As one of the films that shows how we inhabit time, Deleuze mentions Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Jean-Pierre Esquenazi in his work Une Idée du Cinema (1990: 134-172) demonstrates what Deleuze means with that remark. According to Esquenazi the first meeting in the restaurant is a “primitive scene” in that it contains everything that will follow. In Vertigo there are three women: Carlotta, Madeleine and Judy. These three women are the same, but they don’t inhabit the same time. It is up to Scottie to distinguish between the different levels of time, which is sometimes impossible because they conflate. Scottie is confused by experiencing several layers of time (the virtuality of the past, the actuality of the present) at the same moment. In a detailed and beautiful analysis Esquenazi demonstrates how Madeleine’s face in profile, in the restaurant scene, is a crystal-image (one of the ways of directly expressing time, according to Deleuze): it is at the same time virtual (mental) and actual (before our eyes). It is very well possible to relate Scottie’s look to Madeleine’s profile, and hence to identify with Scottie, as psychoanalytic readings have done. But in doing so one fails to notice that the relation between the two looks is not a classic shot/counter-shot, imposing the male look at the female body (face). Before Madeleine enters the bar, Scottie has turned his back, he even looks in the same direction as Madeleine and cannot see her in the same way as we, the spectators see her breathtaking profile. Which makes that we have to conclude that the image of Madeleine is actually presented to the spectator, but is a virtual image to Scottie. In this first profile the different layers of time germinate. Also the doubling of Madeleine in the mirror, when she leaves the restaurant, is a first indication for the temporal doubling that will follow. The fact that the spectator does not see what the character sees, imposes the question: from which point of view is the story told? The confusion, and at the same time beauty of this scene is due to the fact that this question becomes difficult to answer. We can un-

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derstand now when Deleuze says that a camera-consciousness starts to make mental connections in time: The camera is no longer content sometimes to follow the character’s movement, sometimes itself to undertake movements of which they are merely the object, but in every case it subordinates descriptions of a space to the functions of thought. This is not a simple distinction between the subjective and the objective, the real and the imaginary, it is on the contrary their indiscernibility which will endow the camera with a rich array of functions (...) Hitchcock’s premonition will come true: a camera-consciousness which would no longer be defined by the movements it is able to follow or make, but by the mental connections it is able to enter into. (Deleuze 1989: 23)

If we now think again about the scene where Scottie sees Madeleine for the first time, it becomes clear how in the profile of Madeleine the actual and the virtual conflate. From this crystal-image Madeleine will multiply (Carlotta, Madeleine, Judy), occupying each time a different layer in time. Following Madeleine/Carlotta, Scottie starts to wander and wonder. Deleuze stresses the importance of Scottie’s real (ordinary) vertigo: it does not so much have a Symbolic meaning (although in terms of style it is an important returning structure), nor does it relate to any concepts like the Real (or the Big Void) as was said before. Rather, Scottie’s inability to climb stairs puts him in a state of contemplation. It is useful to remind here of some of the characteristics that Deleuze establishes for the time-image: instead of performing actors, characters become more like wanderers, confused by the experience of time. The fact that Scottie is obsessed with time, especially with the past, is stressed from the beginning of the film. After the opening sequence in which we witness Scottie’s vertigo when he clings to a rooftop gutter, the film starts in the apartment of his former fiancé Midge (Barbara Bell Gedes) to whom he could not commit. It is striking to note how in their conversation Scottie tends to end each question with the word “Remember?” 10

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Moreover both Scottie and Madeleine are wanderers, physically restless and spiritually rootless. In that capacity they become visionary, capable of seeing the crystals of time. They even decide to wander off together and go to a forest. Here Madeleine gets again possessed by the ghost of Charlotte. When they stop before a cross section of an ancient tree, the rings marked at key times of history from the birth of Christ to the twentieth century, she says while indicating the span of an earlier century: “Somewhere in here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you, you took no notice.” Who is speaking here? Madeleine or Carlotta? In this scene we can see how Scottie is fascinated by the virtuality of Carlotta in Madeleine, just like later he will be absorbed by the virtuality of Madeleine in Judy. Jean-Pierre Esquenazi gives a much more elaborate analysis of the crystal-image in Vertigo. I will here try to draw some conclusions for the concept of the subject in such an image. As I said earlier, the concept of time makes the notion of selfhood and the subject unstable: one could say, like Tania Modleski, that all identification boils down to the woman, which makes the male subject position unstable. But in a Spinozian/Deleuzian perspective of time, there is not so much to identify with: both Scottie and Madeleine loose their identity, are confused about their identity; they live in the past and the present at the same time. The notion of the subject is obscured by a desire to connect with virtual worlds of the past. And the spectator is a third term, sometimes consciously addressed by the camera, sometimes presented with a point of view of one of the protagonists, but clearly part of the network of relations, other than just by identification. The spectator starts wondering and wandering on his own (bodily and mental) terms. To conclude about Hitchcock one can say that it is possible, as Slavoj Zizek has shown, to conclude from his work, and especially from Vertigo, that the subject can be seen as a concept that depends on the transcendental notion of the Real. The subject’s fundamental guilty desire is then ultimately based on this nothingness of the impossible Real. When Scottie sees his own decapitated head in his dream, he has a maddening encounter with the Real, embodied by the ideal but lethal Woman Madeleine. The spectator constitutes him

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or herself as a subject by identifying with the character(s) on the screen, feeling the same constraints (of the Real or otherwise) as the protagonists. Like the protagonist, the subject off-screen can however never identify with the Gaze of the Real, which is non-representative. The Eye and the unrepresentative Gaze are important concepts for understanding subjectivity in a psychoanalytical way in which sexual difference plays an important role. However, according to Deleuze, Hitchcock saturates the representing movement-image by introducing mental-relations into the image. In this reading we get a very different perspective on the subject. The spectator is no longer invited to identify, but to think and make connections between the different images. It is now the model of the brain, the rhizomatic mental connections that it can make and the way it thinks time, that are important. In this way one could even argue that the whole second half of the film, after Scottie’s nightmare and Midge’s fruitless visit to the mental hospital where Scottie is being threatened, takes place in Scottie’s head (we never see him leaving the hospital, we never see Midge back again). The sense of self is still important, but is confused, loosened and made more flexible. Because Scottie loses literally the ground under his feet, the space of the look (his vertigo), he opens up to time and to mental relations. The credit sequence of Vertigo demonstrates already very clearly that we here have to do with the Mind’s Eye: Saul Bas’s lead plays beautifully with this basic idea of the eye becoming a mind’s eye (we enter in spiraling movements Kim Novak’s eye), with all its vertiginous implications.11 In view of the importance of this vertigo, and the importance of time as has been demonstrated before, I would argue to see Hitchcock’s film as a dazzling entrance into modern times and a new conception of the subject. This seems to be all the more justified if we try to understand contemporary cinema. Strange Days, which is a film that has apparently nothing to do with Hitchcock’s masterpiece, appears to be indebted to Vertigo and takes the conceptual implications of the mental- and time image to a further level.

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Strange Days: Brain Stimulation and a Bergsonian Ethics of Time Katherine Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) has regularly been compared to Michael Powel’s Peeping Tom (1960), which is an ultimate film about cinematic representation, the look and psychoanalysis. And although some points of comparison can be relevant, I would say that it makes more sense to relate Strange Days to Vertigo.12 I will try to explain why. On first sight Strange Days is very different from Vertigo, and I would certainly not classify the film as a remake. It has its own original power. There are however a few similar concerns, which I will point out. Bigelow’s film is set in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve of the year 2000. Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) stalks the streets of this chaotic jungle-like city. Lenny deals in “clips”, digital recordings of real-life experiences to give people safe thrills. He does not deal in “blackjacks” (recordings of death) but when a friend is brutally murdered, Lenny gets involved in a dark world of power and paranoia. He tries to protect his exgirlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis), with whom he is still very much in love and whom he tries to win back. She however doesn’t want to see him. He gets assistance from his friend Mace (Angela Bassett), who is a single mother and works as a bodyguard for rich business men. After a lot of struggle Mace and Lenny make it to the twenty first century. It is interesting to compare the opening scenes of Vertigo and Strange Days. In both films the opening images start with an eye followed by a chase on a rooftop. In Vertigo it is still up to the viewer to relate the eye of the lead to the mind’s eye: one can easily forget this because the film is apparently a classic picture, inviting the spectator in first instance to identify with James Stewart by representing him first objectively when he climbs up the stairs, and then giving the subjective point of view of his vertigo when he has fallen and clings to the gutter. Subjective and objective points of view are carefully displayed to make sure with whom the spectator should identify. Only gradually the problem of time emerges in the image. The ambiguity of the film lies in the fact that the time layers are cen-

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tered around a psychoanalytic theme of sexual difference. Hence the two possible readings of the film. In Strange Days the spectator is immediately confronted with what seems a “subjective point of view”. The only problem is that we don’t know who is the subject in this scene: there is nobody to identify with, so the spectator is immediately drawn into the image without any distance: “we” are sitting at the back of a car, “we” run for a hold-up in an Asian restaurant and on the run for the police “we” end up at a rooftop where we have to jump but miss the next roof. Just before “we” drop dead, the secret of the point of view is revealed: we have been looking at (drown into) a re-playable tape, a so called SQUID, that directly connects the brain to this experience. 13 What is also implied is that this could be anyone’s brainwave. Immediately this raises the question “What happens than to the sense of self if we can connect to anyone’s memory or experience?” In a nearby futuristic context Strange Days plays with the idea of direct brain stimulation and what this could mean for human beings. One can argue about the degree of success of this experiment, but I will not go into that discussion. 14 Rather I would like to look at how the film relates to questions of subjectivity and desire and to questions of time. If direct brain stimulation would be possible (as is clear by now on a philosophical level this is not new and scientifically this is more and more plausible) the question of time and memory becomes more and more relevant. In contemporary cinema time and memory in relation to subjectivity and selfhood is a frequent theme. Think of the role of memory in films like Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990) and Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995).15 In Blade Runner memories are no longer conditions of authentic selfhood because they can be implanted. In Total Recall the past is equally not guaranteed to be personal and for an “authentic” memory of a lovely vacation on Mars it is sufficient to connect to a brainwave machine. In Twelve Monkeys the hero lives at the same time in the past, present and future. It is impossible to become more Bergsonian in thinking time. There are several references to Vertigo

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in Twelve Monkeys, the film is literally shown in a theatre where the protagonists are hiding. And when the heroine dyes her hair blond, how can we not think of Madeleine, the woman from the past in the present?16 It is striking though that all these contemporary films that deal explicitly with time are set in the future.17 Maybe this is to keep the problem of time at a distance, as if it does not really concern us now and is only an entertaining fantasy. But at the same time the preoccupation with time and memory indicates that it concerns us now more than ever. In Deleuzian terms it is possible to say that even traditional action-images are infused with the problem of time. Although Strange Days is presented as science fiction as well, it speaks about a very near future. And the scientific tool that it presents is not that farfetched either. It is inconceivable only on one crucial point, namely that it is very improbable to recall memories of other persons. This indicates again the importance of time for the concept of selfhood.18 But let us first have a look at how Strange Days plays with the personal memories. Like Scottie, Lenny Nero in Strange Days is an ex-police officer who after quitting his job becomes obsessed with a woman from the past: by replaying the tapes of his experiences in the past with his girlfriend at that time, Faith, he keeps on going back to the past. What was virtual (enclosed in the actual image) in Vertigo is made actual, presented as a memory-image in Strange Days. As Bergson has demonstrated in Matière et Mémoire (1993), there is a profound relation between memory, body and perception. Every perception is related to a certain memory, which makes it possible for the body to move and to act. We are simultaneously childhood, adolescence, old age and maturity. At every moment in the present we have to jump between these different regions of non-chronological time in which we live (Bergson in Deleuze 1989: 98/99). Somebody who lives in pure presence, reacting immediately to every excitement of the body, is impulsive, not able to react properly. But on the other hand it is also possible to give too much preference to memory and memoryimages; such person Bergson calls a dreamer. Between these two extremes Bergson places a memory that is willing to follow the

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demands of the present moment, but that can resist irrelevant demands (Bergson 1993: 170). If we consider Strange Days now from a Bergsonian perspective of time, we can see that Lenny’s addiction to his own memories makes him unable to act, in a similar way (though in a totally different context) that Scottie was unable to act in Vertigo. The fact that Lenny can recall his memories whenever he wants by plugging in his brains, makes it only worse. The memorized women in both films are unable to break the spell of the past, Judy in Vertigo because she consents in becoming Madeleine again, and Faith because Lenny cannot see (because of his all too vivid recollection-images) that she has become somebody different than she was in another layer of time. The only person in Strange Days who seems to have a sound balance between past and present, between mind and body is Mace. Placed in a Bergsonian perspective, her remark to Lenny that memories are designed to fade away, is very relevant. Memories are necessary and link up automatically with perceptions, but they should not always be actualized. They should only be recalled in so far as necessary for the present moment. Therefore it is significant that Mace’s memories do not come from a SQUID, but are recalled by a present situation of her body. Her first memory is actually presented as a flashback when she remembers how she met Lenny (this is what Deleuze calls the movementimage’s way of actualizing the past). It is also Mace who forces Lenny to search his own memory to get some crucial information about his murdered friend. Just before she was killed she came to Lenny to warn him about something and to give him an important tape; as it turns out this SQUID contains some crucial evidence exposing a racistic murder. Because of its importance this will also be the only SQUID that Mace agrees seeing/experiencing. The other recollection Mace has is more a direct presentation of a crystal-image which encloses time virtually in an actual image. It happens when Mace looks at her son who is not aware of his mother looking at him. But in the relation between the image of the boy and Mace’s look, the mind’s eye brings in time: when the boy was little, how one day he

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will be big.... So in spite of the film’s high degree of action-images, in terms of the role of memories, Strange Days presents us interesting hypotheses about time and memory. Related to this the film also asks questions about the sense of self. As I already indicated, the fact that the SQUID-experiences are subjective point of views, does not give the spectator many assurances about whose point of view it is and hence he or she is drawn into the image. Robert Montgomery’s experiment Lady in the Lake (1946), a film purely shot in a subjective point of view, has demonstrated already that just a subjective point of view does not increase the experience of identification in the spectator. Maybe this is because each person conceives the self in the brain as more persons as well. Look for instance at Jorge Luis Borges’ famous story “Borges and I” in which he sees himself as a private “I” and a public “Borges”, without being able to distinguish always between the two (Borges in Hofstadter and Dennet 1982). In a similar way in her flashback Mace sees herself as “a third person”, as somebody else. What Strange Days adds to this is not only that identification does not work by purely subjective camera movement, but also that the sense of self becomes very unstable, when we can experience anybody’s memory. This can provide new possibilities, once the concept of desire is seen as a Spinozian/Deleuzian wish to make multiple connections (creating Bodies without Organs, as Deleuze would say) but it also has dangerous sides. We see in the film Lenny presenting himself as a new kind of psychiatrist: “I am your shrink, your priest, I am the magic man, the Santa Claus of the soul.” The combination of shrink/priest and magic man/Santa Claus of the soul is interesting in the sense that again a transition is indicated. The shrink/priest seen as the traditional psychoanalyst, forgiving the subject its guilty enjoyment has become the magic man/Santa Claus of the soul, who has a very different way to “cure”, namely by stimulating new connections, knowing that desire is an affirmative and creative element in the subject. 19 But if one thinks of the horrible rape scene (in which Strange days is indeed close but not completely similar to Peeping Tom) or the racial murder, there is still enough to feel guilty about (the danger of micro-

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fascism, internal in ourselves, is always present, according to Deleuze).20 At the same time Strange Days expresses very clearly the wish for more flexible (nomadic) visions on concepts of the self and desire, necessary to survive in a jungle-like world. Compared to Vertigo the subject is also no longer able to concentrate on a personal obsession: there are many, many ways in which the subject relates to the world – of which questions of race and ethnicity, though not very much developed here, are important ones. The self/subject is no longer dependent on the supposed desire of the other (although the other remains important for connections), desire is no longer only connected to sexual difference only (“we have to liberate desire” and “a thousand tiny sexes” – that can be on every part of the body – are famous words from Deleuze and Guattari). The spectator cannot confirm his or her identity any longer by identifying with subjects on-screen, but has to negotiate between the images presented to his mind and the memories induced by the own body. Body, brain and perception work together to establish a sense of self in each point of time, that differs according to the demands of specific situations. Strange Days presents an ethics of Bergsonian memory; it also takes scientific possibilities one step further in asking us what would happen if we can induce other persons’ memories. It would only be then, when our own sense of time is not ours anymore, when our memories are exchangeable or for sale, that the subject would become a really strange concept. Maybe this mental shock is necessary to change our ideas about the selfsame subject. But as long as time is the confusing and flexible element in our sense of self, we can still say after having been moved by characters on the screen “I liked the film, it confused me, it made me think, it made me want to cry and dance.” But since the vertigo at the beginning of Strange Days remains as dazzling as the vertigos in Hitchcock’s film, we can be certain that in time, just like Vertigo, Strange Days will remain asking us questions about our relations to others and our sense of self.

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No te s 1

One of the first films about direct brain stimulation is Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (1983). Further on in this article I will discuss some other “brain-related” films, especially Katherine Bigelow’s Strange Days. For scientific experiments and researches see for instance Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett (eds.), The Mind’s I (1981) and the work of Oliver Sacks (1985). 2

Gilles Deleuze, “On the Movement-Image”, in Negotations (1995: 55). When Deleuze talks about modern cinema, he means the cinema that comes into existence after World War II. Deleuze doesn’t make the difference between modern and postmodern cinema. That this classification is indeed a problematic one is demonstrated by Anne Friedberg in her book Window Shopping – Cinema and the postmodern (1993). 3

In his cinema books Cinema I: The Movement-Image (1986) and Cinema II: The Time-Image (1989) Gilles Deleuze distinguishes movement-images from time-images. In the movement-image time is represented indirectly through montage, in the time-image time is demonstrated within the image itself. Deleuze’s conception of movement and time is highly inspired by Henri Bergson. 4

Gilles Deleuze, “On the Time-Image”, in Negotiations (1995: 60). It should also be noted that Deleuze’s preference for the brain as model for principles joins his rhizomatic way of thinking (the brain is one big rhizomatic network; see note 5). Seen from an interdisciplinary point of view, it is quite logic that science “throws its shadow” (as Deleuze and Guattari put it) on other domains like art and philosophy. 5

The term rhizome is introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to describe the way we are thinking. In biology a rhizome is an underground system of branches that form roots and leafy shoot, just beneath and just above the ground. The rhizome is different from the old metaphor of the ‘tree of knowledge’, with its unique original root and branches that bifurcate in binary splittings. Rhizomatic thinking

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allows for the combination of heterogeneous elements that form a network that you can enter at any point. Like grass, it grows in between things. Although many people think in arborescent (and hierarchical) structures, Deleuze states that we have grass in our heads. See A Thousand Plateaus (1992: 3-25). 6

Some recent feminist work has also considered the concept of the Real. See for instance Joan Copjec’s Read my Desire (1994) and Parveen Adams, The Emptiness of the Image (1996). 7

In The Complete Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Harris and Lasky 1976 & 1993: 166) Rear Window is described as follows: “Hitchcock has always been the voyeur, his camera the Peeping Tom, the audience’s eyes. With Rear Window he exploited our weakness for wanting to know our neighbor’s business.” Jeff (James Stewart) is a news-photographer who has been confined to a wheelchair by a broken leg. He finds he can best pass his time by watching the behavior of his neighbors in the courtyard. He becomes fascinated by one particular window until he slowly realizes that the man across the way has murdered his wife. Jeff’s fiancé Lisa (grace Kelly) becomes interested in the case as well. When the murderer finds out he’s being spied on he comes to Jeff’s apartment. 8

In the film That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), Louis Buñuel presents an image of desire, related to an object that can very well be analyzed psychoanalytically. Mathieu, the protagonist (the subject) desires Concha, the woman-as-object, played by two very different actresses. One could say they represent the virgin and the whore, or one could say they are interchangeable (Matthieu never sees the difference) because they merely represent the object that has to fill the fundamental lack in the subject of which a desire is born. Buñuel also provides highly symbolic images, such as the final image in which a woman in a shop window is sewing a bloody gown (a metaphor for the fetishistic ‘covering up’ of the wound; the window shop referring to the commodity aspects of objects of desire). The notion of subject is in this way very much related to the notion of object, and desire based on lack, can never completely be fulfilled by the object of desire.

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However, one could in the first place wonder if Buñuel is not joking, giving us these images in order to bring them to the fulfillment of their cliché-aspects: it is all too obvious and therefore reaches a different dimension. Therefore Buñuel, like Hitchcock can also be read differently. According to Deleuze, Buñuel’s choise of two actresses playing one person, is again related to a mental image related to time, they are situated in different layers of time: “It is as if Buñuel’s naturalist cosmology, based on the cycle and succession of cycles, gives way to a plurality of simultaneous worlds; to a simultaneity of presents in different worlds. These are not subjective (imaginary) points of view in one and the same world, but one and the same event in different objective worlds, all implicated in the event, inexplicable universe.” (Gilles Deleuze 1989: 103). 9

According to Spinoza, the role of imagination is to think also of what might be good for others. To be joyful also means wanting joy for others (which can mean very different things than for the self; Spinoza does belief that every person has an essence). 10

11

See Donald Spoto’s The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (1992: 279).

Spoto describes the credit scene as follows: “Vertigo opens to the strains of Herrmann’s haunting prelude, as the camera draws in to a close-up of a woman’s face, moving from her lips to her eyes as she glances anxiously from left to right. The face is oddly characterless, and the camera moves to a tight shot of the right eye. Then Saul Bass’s psychedelic patterns – prophetic of popular designs to come in the 1960s – emerge as the camera seems to enter the woman’s pupil. (...) During the credits, the screen is gradually filled with multi colored spirals of red, purple, blue, lavender, aqua, green, indigo, puce, gold, red, yellow, and, finally, a blazing red as the shapes fade back into the pupil. The image is more than an innovative and arresting design suggesting the dizziness of vertigo: it is the basic image in which the entire structure and design of the picture are based. The winding staircase of the bell tower at the mission, the twists and turns of the cemetery walk, the spiraling dark hair in the portrait of Carlotta Valdes (and, in imitation of that, Madeleine’s and Judy’s hair); the spiraling downward journey of the two cars on San Francisco’s hilly, vertiginous streets, the

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rings of the tree in the forest, the camera encircling Judy during the letter-writing scene – all these swirling motions create and sustain the hallucinatory, dreamlike effect of the film, the condition of vertigo with which Scottie is afflicted.” (Spoto 1992: 275) 12

In my PhD From Eye to Brain – Gilles Deleuze: Refiguring the Subject in Film Theory I argue that while Peeping Tom demonstrates the ultimate connection between the traditional cinematographic apparatus, voyeurism and psychoanalysis (Michael Powel first wanted to make a film about Freud, but since John Huston took up that idea just a bit earlier, Powel instead decided to make “a film about a man who kills the women he films”). By comparing the opening sequence of Peeping Tom, Vertigo and Strange Days I demonstrate, while Vertigo as a borderline film can still be seen as ambiguous in its voyeuristic implications, Strange Days goes beyond voyeurism (or maybe one could say it shows its ultimate implications, thereby presenting it critically) because the distance between who is looking and what is seen is literally abolished: what happens over there also happens to us; we experience it. For more information about Katherine Bigelow, a conceptual underground artist in the seventies but now one of the few women directing big films in Hollywood, I refer to my article (in Dutch) “Balanceren op de rand van de Wet” (1996: 12-15). Other films Bigelow directed are The Loveless (1982), Near Dark (1987), Blue Steel (1990) and Point Break (1991). 13

SQUID is an acronym for Supersonducting Quantum Inference Device. It is a device actually used in neurobiological research (see Bec 1997 and neuroscientist Michael Persinger in a documentary about the plausibility of the experiments in Strange Days, VPRO-laat, 1995). However SQUIDS can certainly also be seen as a metaphor for the way we live through movies (see the press-book of the film, p. 6). In the original treatment of the film, written by James Cameron (writer and director of Terminator I and II, Aliens, The Abyss and Titanic) comments upon the opening scene as follows: “We realize: this is not some ride-along verité video. WE ARE ONE OF THESE GUYS. Real honest-to-God point of view, with no cuts, no music. This is not film, it is human experience.” (Cameron 1995: 2)

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Many consider the first film that played with this thought, Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm as showing better the possible consequences of such experiments. I don’t agree with that critique. This film does indeed demonstrate the dangers of overdose, but so does Strange Days. The difference lies in the context. In Brainstorm the experiments take place in a laboratory, scientific context, whereas in Strange Days Squids have become a more common (though illegal) use. Other, mostly male critics, find it appalling that Bigelow makes such a, in their eyes, traditional masculine voyeuristic film. A striking example of this critique was given in BBC’s Late Review when the film was released in Britain. Since Bigelow is very critical about “voyeurism” and subverts its traditional representation, I again do not share this critique. Besides the film is about much more than “voyeurism”; it explicitly talks about racial tensions and has a black female protagonist (Angela Bassett), which is not common in Hollywood cinema. See also Jaon Smith’s article “Speaking Up for Corpses” (1996). 15

See also Anke Burger’s “Strange Memories” (1996).

16

Twelve Monkeys is based on Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). In this film there is a reference to the forest scene in Vertigo; here the “tr ee of time” is situated in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The scriptwriters David and Janet Peoples might also have seen Marker’s other film about time and the loss of identity Sans Soleil. In this film Marker also “follows” Scottie and Madeleine, wondering about their relation to time. 17

One can add to this list the Back to the Future series and the Terminator films of James Cameron. As non science-fiction film that deals with the confusion of different layers of time, Francis Ford Coppola’s Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) should be mentioned. 18

In another recent action film with a science fiction twist, John Woo’s Face Off (1997), the two protagonist literally swap faces. For the eye they can take each other’s place. The only way to find out “who is who” is by recalling a memory and by blood tissue typing. Both criteria of subjectivity are non visible entities. Again the eye is no longer trustworthy.

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19

“I sell experiences, all kind of experiences. Sexual experiences are just part of it. You put on the ‘trodes’ and you get to know what it feels like to ride with a gang, or get in a bar-fight, or walk around in drag, or do a thousand-dollar-night call girl, or some shanky teenage hooker or a west Hollywood boy hustler, what ever you want...” (Cameron 1995: preface). Lenny also gives a squid to a friend without legs, which makes him experience running along the beach again. 20

In a psychoanalytic way of thinking micro-fascism emerges when there are no more “Big Others”. So the problem is an external one, depending on the concept of the other, who has to be differentiated in order to stick to the notion of identity.

Bibliography

Adams, Parveen 1996 The Emptiness of the Image. Psychoanalysis and Sexual Difference, London and New York. Bec, Loius 1997 “SQUIDS”, in: Technomorphica. Amsterdam. Bergson, Henri 1993 Matière et Mémoire. Essai sur la Relation du Corps à l’Esprit, Paris (orig. publ. 1896). Burger, Anke 1996 “Strange Memories, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days une ‘Erinnerung’ in Science Fiction”, Blimp – Film Magazine, no. 34.

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Cameron, James 1995 Strange Days, London (a.o.). Chabrol, Claude; Eric Rohmer 1979 Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, New York. (orig. publ. 1957). Copjec, Joan 1994 Read my Desire – Lacan against the Historicists, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Deleuze, Gilles 1986 Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, London (orig. publ. 1983). 1989 Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, London (orig. publ. 1985). 1996 Negotiations, trans. by Martin Joughin, New York (orig. publ. 1990). Deleuze, Gilles; Félix Guattari 1992 A Thousand Plateaus – Capitalism & Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi, London (orig. publ. 1980). Dennet, Daniel; Douglas Hofstadter (eds.) 1982 The Mind’s I – Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, London (a.o.). Esquenazi, Jean-Pierre 1991 Image-Mouvement & Image-Temps – Une Idée du Cinema, Paris (PhD-thesis). Friedberg, Anne 1993 Window Shopping – Cinema and the Postmodern, Berkeley. Lloyd, Genevieve 1996 Spinoza and the Ethics, London and New York.

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Modleski, Tania 1988 The Woman who Knew too Much – Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, New York and London. Pisters, Patricia 1996 “Balanceren op de Rand van de Wet – Strange Days”, Skrien, Tijdschrift voor Film en Televisie, no. 207. 1998 From Eye to Brain – Gilles Deleuze: Refiguring the Subject in Film Theory, Amsterdam (PhD-thesis). Sacks, Oliver 1985 The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, London. Silverman, Kaja 1996 The threshold of the Visible World, London and New York. Smith, Joan 1996 “Speaking Up for Corpses”, in: Screen Violence, ed. b y Karl French, London. Spoto, Donald 1984 The Dark Side of Genius – The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, New York. 1992 The Art of Alfred Hitchcock – Fifty Years of his Motion Pictures, New York. Zizek, Slavoj (ed.) 1992 Everything you always wanted to know about Lacan, but where afraid to ask Hitchcock, London and New York.

Film ography Vertigo (1958) Dir: Alfred Hitchcock; Prod: Alfred Hitchcock; Sc: Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor (based on the novel D’Entre les Morts by Pierre Boileau

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and Thomas Narcejan; Dir.Ph: Robert Burks; Ed: George Tomasini; Sound: Sam Comer, Frank McKelvey; Music: Bernard Herrmann; Cast: James Stewart, Kim Novak, Barbara Bel Geddes, Tom Helmore, a.o. Strange Days (1995) Dir: Katherine Bigelow; Prod: James Cameron; Sc: James Cameron and Jay Cocks, based on a story by Cameron; Dir.Ph: Matthew Leonetti; Ed: Howard Smith; Sound: Gary Rydstrom; Music: Graeme Revell; Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Michael Wincott, a.o.

IT TAKES THREE TO EPISTEMOLOGY Saskia Kersenboom

palum telitenum pakum paruppum ivai nalum kalantunakku nan taruven kolancey tunka karimukattut tumaniye niyenakku cankattamil munru ta. (Auvaiyar, XII Cent.) Milk, clear honey, coarse sugar and porridge — these, all four in a mixture, I give to you, O pure Ruby, whose elephant head is striking because of its swaying decorated trunk; You, in return, must give to me the Academic Tamil that is threefold. “ If you want to understand what a science is, you should look at

what the practitioners of it do”, remarked Geertz (Clifford & Marcus 1986: 262). What actually is it that we do, today, we as Anthropologists? Fourteen years ago, in 1984, James Clifford approached this question from the “starting point of a crisis in Anthropology”

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(1986: vii). Intensive discussions confronted ten scholars involved in textual criticism and cultural theory with what they considered the “heart” of “ethnographic enterprise”, that is, the making of ethnographic texts (1986: 264-5). Today, I want to continue that discussion and bring into the dialogue a partner that has harassed me almost all my life: the oral tradition of the Tamils of South India. This dialogue on epistemology, on coherence in Anthropology as a discipline, and, on exploring new possibilities in the representation of knowledge, has to be a dialogue that is mediated by me as an interlocutor for very practical reasons. However, I hope that my words will not remain the only medium nor the last. The problem “Milk, clear honey, coarse sugar and porridge” how do these four, whether mixed or not, relate to the crisis in Anthropology? A thorough “translation of culture” is necessary to bring out the relevance of these lines for our discussion. In Writing Culture, The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), the collection of essays that appeared two years later, Talal Asad wonders how the notion of culture, and as a result the notion of cultural translation, was transformed from the processes of learning and social heredity into the notion of a text (1986: 141). In the case of palum telitenum, pakum, paruppam ivai... we are confronted with the traditional beginning of the processes of learning Tamil and its heritage that a child has to go through. This stanza seems a distinct text and word by word translation into English is therefore a legitimate form. A literal translation, however, makes no sense to us. In fact, the insistence to reflect on these lines seriously may even cause uneasiness and impatience among you. Unfortunately, there is no escape: these four lines, composed by the Tamil poetess Auvaiyar in the twelfth century are to stay the central meeting ground of this dialogue. On closer scrutiny serious problems appear, even on the level of language, although this is a field where normally we feel fairly at home. In particular, what does it mean: cankattamil munrum, “the academic Tamil that is threefold”? In his critique of Gellner’s “Concepts and Society”, Asad

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agrees that “language functions in a variety of ways” and that these ways “are of course part of what every competent ethnographer tries to grasp before he can attempt an adequate translation into his own language” (1986: 146). So, in our case, Tamil says about itself that it is cankam and that it is munrum “three”. Obviously Asad is right in warning us that languages are not equal. How does a “strong language” like English accommodate such self-definition of a “weaker language” like Tamil. Its claim that it is made up not only out of words (iyal) but also out of sounds (icai) and images (natakam) triples our problem of cultural translation. The demand of sound can be overcome by resuscitating prosody, set to melody and rhythm. This act takes us already one step away from what Stephen Tyler diagnoses as the textual strategies that underlie the language of science. According to him this type of language serves the purpose of adequate description as a representation of the world. At the same time science also needs language of communicative adequacy that enables consensus in the comunitas of scientists. All its strategies — as method — depend therefore on a prior and critical disjunction of language and world. In the end, this is the cause of its crisis, because the language of science can not reconcile the competing demands of representation and communication (1986: 123). The last demand that Tamil makes, namely language as image (natakam) is extra-ordinary and takes us ever further away from our linguistic common ground. Earlier we assumed that language functions in a variety of ways; what if language does not rest content to refer only to an object as a mental image but demands to perform that image as well? In that case language is not only speech that is uttered and heard: it transforms into a praxis of gesture and mimetic behaviour. Thus it becomes clear that Tamil handles the world, conveys information and constitutes experience in a way that is totally different from English. Asad employs Luria’s term “synpraxic speech” in order to bring out the fact that, while in the field, the process of translation, the grasping that precedes verbalisation, comes with learning to live a new mode of life not by learning about another mode of life (1986: 159). This synpraxic road is the itinerary that cultural translation has to make into its own praxis in order to complete its mission. Tamil

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has assigned that synpraxic method to the realm of language, defining itself as threefold: word, sound and image, or, in short as Muttamil. Cankattamil munrum, as we translated earlier: the academic Tamil that is threefold. A translation that is obviously too easy. How come Academic? In terms of Western scholarship the term Academic naturally evokes the highest “symbolic capital”, the most desirable knowledge of possible knowledges. Therefore cankam is generally translated as “academy” and Tamil scholarship claims three such “academies”. In the context of Tamil, cankam occurs first in the poetry of Appar (7th Cent.) (Kersenboom, 1995: 6-7). It refers to a learned body responsible for and critically controlling the bardic output of early Tamil poets. Legends hold that the first Cankam hosted gods and sages, 4.449 poets took part in the course of 4.440 years; the second Cankam lasted 3.700 years and included 3.700 poets. Both cankams submerged in the sea, but the normative works Tolkappiyam and part of Akattiyam remain from that period. The legendary third Cankam lasted for 1.850 years under 49 kings, its 449 poets were presided by Nakkirar. The bardic poetry of Love (akam) and Fame (puram) is assigned to this Cankam. Historical records mention that a Dravida Sangha was held in 470 A.D. in the town of Madurai (Zvelebil, 1973: 45-7); they seem to provide a solid base to the tradition of Tamil Academies in the eyes of Western scholarship. However, this solid base certainly reveals a phenomenon “canka” but it does not justify a translation into “academy”. When applying the insight gained from synpraxic speech to a cultural translation of palum telitenum... in terms of the demand of natakam “image” most words lend themselves willingly to a mimetic translation. Milk, for instance can be demonstrated quite easily, either by its cause: the cow, or its process: milking, or its product: flowing milk. Likewise cause or effect translations bring out the communicative potential of these four lines. However, when we arrive at the term cankattamil we have to halt and think very deeply. How should we portray cankam?: as a lasting structure, perhaps as the huge temple in Madurai?; as normative body, a gathering? But, as a gathering of who, of the auctores, the poets? Then, how does a poet look, what does he do?;

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or, perhaps of the lectores, the experts, to speak in terms of Bourdieu? (Bourdieu, 1990: 94-5). Again, who are the experts: Brahmins, wearing the sacred thread?, senior poets who are well-versed in the threefold Tamil? Or, is Cankam a centre of the authority: the kings, perhaps? comfortably seated, wearing tall crowns or protecting their subjects by means of their long arms?; or the gods? who do not blink, nor sweat, or occasionally may have more arms, several heads or a third eye? Cultural translation is not easy. Epistemology Argued from a structural-functionalist point of view, our problematic term cankam fills a meaningful slot within the larger context of the Tamil stanza. To my understanding this slot is the slot of “desired knowledge”; that type of “desired knowledge” that comes with an entire culture, rooted in language as a synpraxic ground. As Asad remarks “The knowledge that Third World languages deploy more easily is not sought by Western societies in quite the same way, or for the same reason”(1986:158). To translate cankattamil properly it seems that we have to descend into the imagery that portrays such acclaimed knowledge. The desire for knowledge draws us to the Academia, but whereto or to what is the Tamil poet drawn? Tradition tells us that cankams were held in Madurai. No architectural structure remains from that period, nor do we have any records of such large structures; probably cankams were indeed gatherings. The critical authority of these gatherings is contested: legends show that men and gods struggle for dominance, for the final authority to award the supreme symbol of desired knowledge.1 Its image, the golden lotus, porramarai, is the image that I would like to suggest as an adequate cultural translation of the term Cankattamil. In terms of symbolic capital we have now entered a realm that shares the force of Western epistemology. What does a golden lotus “mean” on its own terms when assessed from this angle, and, what contrasts does it reveal when confronted with the kind of epistemology that underlies the textual criticism and cultural theory discussed in 1984?

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The tamarai, “lotus”, is a widely spread image both diachronically and synchronically. All layers of documented Tamil history assign an important place to this symbol, whereas synchronically the lotus is so omnipresent that even Jesus finds himself supported by a lotus, positioned in such a away that those who visit the Church can circumambulate the statue. The content of this highly popular form evokes the principle of growth, of transformation, of cyclic return and thereby eternal presence. As a structure, the seed of the plant is pure potentiality, as a process the stem struggles from the dark, fertile mud through the life-giving water as it grows with determination to reach the daylight. The unfolding petals show great sensitivity, intelligence and colourful diversification in exploring their surrounding: after dawn when the sun rises, they open in full inviting bees to come and secure the continuation of their species in double sided transaction; at dusk they collect themselves into a closed bud allowing the entire plant its necessary rest. The imagery seems infinite: structure, process and environment double, triple, multiply ad infinitum. Epistemology seen in these terms is organic, flexible and pragmatic, moreover it rejuvenates itself again and again with the sprouting of each flower. The “golden lotus”, the porramarai, secures this underlying principle beyond decay: gold is to stay illustrious and fresh, and so is the poetry that receives this kind of recognition. Even today the golden lotus adorns the sacred tank of the temple in Madurai. Theory as a theory of knowledge, occupies a deep layer in Western Science similar to the seed of the lotus-in-bloom. Paul Rabinow traces the fascination with epistemology to seventeenth century Europe. It triumphed in the nineteenth century due to the claims of German professors in philosophy who crowned their discipline to the queen of sciences, her special expertise being universal problems and the ability to provide a sure foundation for all knowledge (1986: 235). When comparing “theory” with the “golden lotus”, we wonder: how does theory look? To visualise “theory” will be difficult since its realm is the mind; it works, represents and judges internally (1986: 235). In short, theory is an idea and has no form. What does theory of knowledge inspire? Quoting Rorty, Rabinow diagnoses the

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desire for knowledge as a desire for constraint — a desire to find “foundations” to which one might cling, frameworks beyond which one must not stray, objects which impose themselves, representations which cannot be gainsaid. In this way, modern professional philosophy represents the “triumph of the quest for certainty over the quest for reason” (1986: 234). We examined the fillers of the functional slot that puzzled us in the stanza palum telitenum... : the “golden lotus” and the “theory” as to their form, imagery and critical mass, now, let us compare the two also on the level of their relationship to the experiential world. The examination of representations about “reality” and “the knowing subject” ultimately yields knowledge, bestowing “meaning” on both; moreover this “meaning” is, as Rabinow says, a knowledge that is supposed to be universal (1986: 235). Interpretations and meanings that transcend space and time probably result from those textual strategies that depend on “a prior and critical disjunction of the world”, described earlier by Tyler. In Tamil terms the examination of these representations is performed in terms of an intimate relationship between the two, that is, “reality” and “the knowing subject”. This relationship is coined as porul. Porul covers a variety of possible meanings, like “meaning (of a word)”; “property, wealth”; “thing, substance”; “truth, reality, verity”; “gold”; “a child” and, “fruit of action”. Porul seems to be fully embedded in the experiential world both quantitatively and qualitatively; it refers to ideas as well as to objects, it relates cause and effect as concrete realities. In short not only does porul accommodate “meaning” in our sense of “concept”, it refers to and at the same time is the object of reference. It can even become the object it refers to as a fruit of methodical action. Clifford asserts that “writing has been reduced to method” in Anthropology (1986: 2); in response, Tamil asserts that “synpraxic speech” should occupy this place of honour. Method Between the second century B.C. and the third century A.D. Tamil formalised its grammar, the Tolkappiyam “the old poem”. Three

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chapters describe the inscription of sound, the formation of utterances and the relationship between language and the existential world. This relationship is a genetic one, and skilful use of its potential transforms “ordinary” language (kotum tamil “bent, crooked, unchiselled” Tamil) into an instrument of metaphysics (cem tamil “auspicious, red” Tamil). Cankattamil is such auspicious Tamil, thus it constitutes a method for integrating mankind and the universe. This is a double sided interaction that is visualised in three categories of reference. Together they form the subject matter of porul: mutal “first”, karu “seed, embryo, creation” and uri “peel, skin”. This theory of knowledge takes very concrete forms. Mutal reveals itself as the framework of space and time. Tolkappiyam outlines the Tamil world as a well knit structure, concretely present in the form of five landscapes. The inner world of love and the outer spectrum of fame bestow on these landscapes detailed horizons of recognition. The processes of Time are intimately related to the subcategories listed under space. Both share a triple dimension: three spaces (of gods, men and “dark forces”) and three times (of past, present and cyclic potentialis) integrate physics and metaphysics as structuring structures and processes that human life has to deal with. Life comes in the garb of karu, the characteristic regional features of the five landscapes: all that is born to live and die there functions as shared environment and shared frame of reference. “Meaning” in this context is highly articulate, concrete and interrelated. “Theory” is deeply rooted in these situational contexts; it does not emerge in the form of “foundational insights into knowledge” or as “universal validities” but it appears as uri “peel”, “skin”, as “embodied perspective” within these known contexts of time, space and creation. 2 Uri resembles the old position of theory as “looking while taking part in the spectacle”. No observer experiences or acts in two “skins” at the same time, or without skin for that matter, similarly, in the words of Clifford, “no one reads from a neutral or final, position” (1986: 18). The Tamil universe is, in a way, deeply and very consciously, phenomenological. Human action, cultures, traditions, form samples of situated, synpraxic speech, they are produced continuously and in doing so all perspectives interact, clash, collaborate, exchange and

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change; in short, “they never hold still to have their portraits made” (1986: 10). The methodical relationship between “reality” and “the knowing subject” is first and foremost organic, inter-subjective between sender and receiver and therefore naturally flexible. Its subjectivity is guided by application. “Meaning” as the “fruit of action” or as “child” cannot be expressed more eloquently. Subjectivity as embodied perspective is chiselled into cultural coherence through the praxis of language as three: as word, as sound and as image. The quadrilateral of Anthropology seems to reappear in the form of a triangle of praxis, with the subject right in the middle. Its coherence emerges fully from speech, from the interiorised practices that are practised by subjective speakers in a flexible praxis of communication.

WORD SOUND WORD-----------------.----------------SOUND

SUBJECT

IMAGE IMAGE

Figure 1 Synpraxis

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A rich storehouse of Western models comes now to mind, such as langue (the grammatical structures of language), parole (its dynamic moment of application in speech), and langage (as the communicative environment of culture and society set in multi-sensory interactions). The threefold Tamil begins to reveal its theoretical scope and thrust only now: the language of words, the language of sounds and the language of images speak each a language of different types of knowledge. The simultaneous application of these different types of knowledge safeguard coherence, and integrate the subject into his or her surrounding. Words, as we saw cater to “meaning” in the conceptual sense, sound demands training of the human body, while imagery reveals great familiarity with the lived-in-world. The Tamil iyal, icai, natakam seem to correspond in a natural way to the knowledge of logic, of the body, and of imagination. Word, sound and image, chisel prepositional knowledge, practical knowledge and knowledge of familiarity. It is a skilfully concerted effort of the speaking subject. This is a praxis not only of discursive thought, but of discursive action as well. Rabinow points out that reasoning cannot be equated by logic. Quoting Hacking (Language, Truth and Reason, 1982) he puts it this way “Logic is fine in its own domain, but that domain is a limited one”. Logic is the preservation of truth, while reasoning is a style of reasoning that creates the possibility for truth and falsehood (1986: 237). Basically reasoning is a praxis that is public and social, combining prepositional, practical and familiar modes. Its synergy occurs in the double sided interaction of communication.

It takes three to Epistomology

Inscription proposition Logos Langue mutal-space structure iyal WORD

utterance practice body parole mutal-time process icai SOUND

cognition perspective uri SUBJECT

IMAGE IMAGE natakam natakam environment

environment karu-creation langage imagination familiarity communication

Figure 2 Synergy3

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Representation Translation of cultures, warns Asad, was not always so much in evidence (1986:141). His plea to transform a language in order to translate the coherence of the original, has taken now unforeseen forms (1986: 157). The pushing beyond the limits of one’s habitual usage has revealed a richer life of language and of language potential that force us not only to stretch our medium of representation but to reconsider our horizons, to adjust our methodology of research, reflection and representation. Language as synpraxic speech encompasses prepositional knowledge, practical knowledge and knowledge of familiarity; it allows the explicit verbalised knowledge we embraced so tightly as well as the implicit, tacit knowledge we have scorned, ignored or reduced to “raw data”. It offers all three a vehicle for self-expression and lucid articulation. The study of human society and culture through the methodology of word, sound and image, generates an understanding that is richer, more coherent and integrative. It situates the subject who forms the object of study, in his or her own phenomenological field of emergence and forces us by the very dynamism of its data that demand these three “inroads of cognition” to empathy and “reasoning with”. This approach is truly dialogical, as Rabinow remarks in terms of Marilyn Strathern, the guiding value of experimental ethnographic writing is “the effort is to create a relation with the Other” (1986: 255). Today, by the turn of this millennium, experimental ethnography is offered new possibilities that were not foreseen fourteen years ago. The advent of multimedia has brought about a mode of writing that can express in one concerted effort the forces of word, sound and image, of prepositional knowledge, practical knowledge and knowledge of familiarity. It recognises poetic dimensions in ethnography that are not, as Clifford assures us, “limited to romantic or modernist subjectivism: it can be historical precise, objective” (1986: 26). Persistent models, transmitted and transformed over centuries by oral traditions are revealing now their potential of coherent articulation of culture, society and interaction.4 Dialogue and authority of interpretation have entered a new phase of experiment through the

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possibilities of interactivity in multimedia design.5 Clifford bases accepted anthropological authority on two textual legs: an experiential “I was there” element as unique authority, and, its very “suppression” in the text as scientific authority (1986: 244). Interactive multimedia texts unsettle this balance. The data of sound and image make experiential authority much less unique and allow the “reader-become-user” room for first hand doubt and for different interpretations. The demand for interactivity forces authority to open up data to the user from the point of view of their applications: how do the data work and to what purpose in communicative exchange? New forms of writing, polyphony, heteroglossia advocated in Writing Culture have arrived at the doorstep of anthropology. They demand a response, an interaction with the world and a new transaction with its inhabitants. Communication in performance as representation (Kersenboom, 1986: 78-86) opens new possibilities to senders and receivers. Its validity is determined by double sided interaction: “milk, honey, sugar and porridge — these all four in a mixture I give you; you in return, O pure Ruby, must give to me Cankattamil that is threefold.” Word, sound, image I offer YOU; YOU give ME the Anthropology that is three.

No te s 1

Legends hold that the poet-expert Nakkirar stood up against the god Shiva in his capacity of critic of Tamil poetry. Shiva appeared at the assembly, pleased with a poem on the goddess that he himself had composed. The imagery was quite standard and poetic language average. Shiva, however, was proud of his image of bees mistaking the

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hair of the goddess for a fragrant blossom. Nakkirar refused to give Shiva the award of the golden lotus, maintaining that this poem was pure flattery and quite unrealistic: hair smells unless it is well washed, oiled and perfumed, no bee would seek long hair in its natural state. Shiva rose in anger, threatened Nakkirar urging him to reverse his decision. Nakkirar however, quickly jumped in the pond for a narrow escape as Shiva opened his third eye, trying to burn down the self-willed expert. Nakkirar’s pragmatism and wisdom brought Shiva back to his senses and made him bless the poet for good judgement and integrity. 2

Chapter 3, “World” in Word, Sound, Image, The life of the Tamil text, p. 41-82 deals with the problem of porul in great detail and length. Subject matter, dynamics and implications of perspective are discussed from various theoretical angles. The interactive CD Bhairavi Varnam that accompanies the monograph offers the perspective of the female solo performer of the poem “Mohamana”. Its setting in the world is demonstrated by the CD-i file Content-Space-Text-World. 3

The coherence of structure, process, environment is inspired by the circle of interrelations in the Integral Management of Change as a tool for Business Consultancy (van Duren en van Manen, 1992). 4

Earlier multimedia publications were designed by me on the basis of indigenous models, still extant in the oral tradition of the Tamils. The interactive CD Bhairavi Varnam (1995) is based on the principles of col “utterance” and analysed into ceyyul “form” and porul “ c o n tent”. Form is dealt with as prayoga, that is, the graded training in the curricula of threefold: iyal “Tamil language and texts”, icai “K ar natic music (vocal and lute vina)” and natakam “dance (bharata natyam)”. I underwent this training myself in India for a period of more than twenty years until today. The Menu “Content” is based on the categories of triloka “three worlds” and trikala “three tenses in Time”. The meta-structure for both Form and Content is determined b y the dimensions “Space” and “Time”. The CD-ROM Devadasi Murai, Remembering Devadasis was coproduced with the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts

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(IGNCA) in New Delhi. Its design is based on the ritual procedures of temple worship, termed arcana. These procedures traverse ritual space and time, and the offerings that are performed mark their intersection. The procedures for daily ritual (nityaracan) and (naimittikarcana) festival ritual were elicited from temple manuals, intensive fieldwork and participation in several South Indian temples. 5

Interactive multimedia have been received with great enthusiasm in India. The first demonstration of the CD-i Bhairavi Varnam during the music season in Madras met with great acclaim, discussions, interviews and publicity in the media. Several titles have appeared on a great variety of subjects: religious texts, epical drama, music, dance, poetry. Recently the IGNCA released its CD-ROM Gita Govinda, one of the great poems on Krishna that has spread over entire India in all regional languages, musical and drama styles since the twelfth century. The Multimedia team of the Cultural Informatics group seeks to intensify cultural learning and awareness through these applications of word, sound and image.

Bibliography Bourdieu, P. 1990 In Other Words. Oxford. Clifford, J. and G. Marcus 1986 Writing Culture, The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley. Duren, A.J. van en M. van Manen 1992 Integraal veranderingsmanagement. Van Gorkum. Kersenboom, S.C, 1995 Word, Sound, Image, The Life of the Tamil Text. Oxford, with CD-i Bhairavi Varnam. Eindhoven.

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“Anthropology as Performance”, Etnofoor 2. CD-ROM Devadasi Murai, Remembering Devadasis. New Delhi.

Zvelebil, K.V. 1973 The Smile of Murugan, On Tamil Literature of South India. Leiden.