Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 4 Number 2, July 2003
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Onto-Poetic
Signatures of Mathematical Analogy in Arts and Literature
By
An
Overview
In the pre-modern world the order of
things and meaning were to be drawn from codified narratives (e.g. the Bible).
The Cosmos of Aristotle was a purposeful unity of gods, things and humans. The
Galilean "measure and quantify" weakened the legitimacy of traditional
narratives and separated humans and things. The realm of things, nature or
reality is a neutral universal referent and the task of modern science as well
as arts and literature is to represent its properties.
However, in the course of the 20th century natural sciences
brought into existence new technologies that changed the material condition of
humans and the way humans experience time. In particular, physical sciences have
become inseparable not only from technology but also from the semiotics of
audio-visual and literary cultures. Humans have become co-producers of
quasi-objects that constitute themselves “as world”. In the absence of
legitimating meta-narratives the claim for uniqueness of any particular subject
and object (or an image of such an object or event) becomes secondary. One way
to render this process visible is to project out of the complex cultural flow
the specific instances where mathematical-algorithmic models and relations
inscribing material and virtual exchanges today appear (consciously or
unconsciously) to be the ultimate source of onto-epistemic dynamics (Jaros,
2002). This agenda is shared across a wide range of disciplines, from research
into consciousness and intelligent machines to fine art, theatre and literature.
Clearly, Duchamp already noticed it, at least in concept. Every Konvolut of
Benjamin's Arcades Project may be read as a quasi-empirical database for
researching the origins and advances of this process in the course of the 19th
century. They show that
mathematisation of nature has been extended to that of the mind be it in the
form of inscriptions in the human unconscious. Yet this domination contains a
paradox. The application of analogy e.g. in philosophy or literature does not
work the same way as in mathematics. In the latter, when a relation between two
points is known it is always possible to assign to a third point its counterpart
exactly. In the former, it is only the potentiality of the fourth that analogy
can offer. To make analogy "work" a constitutive
"onto-poetic" step is needed. Repetitions of such steps detach the
"model" or "image" from the original purpose. The model then
acquires a new life of its own; it bursts forth in fresh metaphors legitimised
by their genealogy as "the real". This detachment of models from
representational roles gives rise to openness to re-and-de-composition and to
toy-ness that make them traumatic. Models of, for example, atom, rainbow,
meteor, automaton, radiation, mirror, symmetry, geometry, entropy, quantum
effects, astro-catastrophic singularity, fractals, etc. find many a way into
literature and fine arts. The question of interest here is not whether the
runaway versions of a model of, say, an atom, collapse of stars, or high
altitude bombing are "real" or "true" but what new ways of
ordering thought and reality (material exchanges) they impose.
In the metaphoric use of models the original meaning or reality of the model
and its mathematical rendering is barely noticeable. The model re-emerges - in
its new re-coded e.g. "literary" form and territory of
application. The result is new divisions of space and time that in turn
determine the shape of archetypal icons through which meaning is communicated
and actualised. It is argued here that contemporary art and literature offer
rich examples of this process that has given rise to new forms of creative
expression.
The
purpose of the following section is to establish the role of mathematical
analogy in conceptualisations of artistic expression. It begins with a brief
account of de Duve's study of Duchamp's writings recast so as to rescue his
discovery of the onto-epistemic role of mathematical analogy in fine art from
the quarrels of modernist art criticism. It then outlines Daniel Tiffany's
notion of the "lyric matter" and the link it establishes between
poetry and mathematical-scientific models. Finally, it invokes
archaeological-genealogical methodology of Benjamin's Arcade Project. Benjamin
makes a pioneering effort in his Konvoluts to capture the process of
fragmentation of traditional narratives and concepts under the onslaught of
capitalist modes of production. He makes apparent the motion of such fragments
with re-assigned meanings across boundaries of domains previously thought to be
autonomous (e.g. from science to poetry and art). He shows that the forces
propelling such fragments are not the forces of Hegelian history.
Nor can they be linked to any universal (e.g. Jungian) archetypes and
icons. The "icons" he himself chooses for the subject of his Konvoluts,
the flaneur, Eiffel tower, prostitute, Baudelaire etc. appear temporal, a
montage of citations or images open to re-and de-composition. The irreducible
kernels of such processes of fragmentation, de-composition and migration of
dispossessed fragments of traditional narratives across established boundaries
of territory of application and meaning seem best described as invisible
inscriptions. They take the form of traces of sequential moves - as if via
pseudo-mathematical formulae carved into the unconscious of humans by the
ruthless growth of complexity. Since under
such circumstances images do not "represent" any-body and any-thing,
and since they draw their legitimacy and communicability from the apparent
familiarity and "objectivity" of the techno-scientific procedures that
must have been used to make them, they can only refer to intensities,
velocities, and vectors of (fragmented) motion. They then represent the process
of onto-poetic motion itself, not any individual "frames" (products of
creative acts) of material reality.
The last section is devoted to a brief
"case study" of Sebald's Vertigo and Austerlitz. It is argued there
that many of the features described above may be recovered from these texts.
Duchamp's
Intervention: the Role of Mathematical Analogy in Artistic Expression
Already at the beginning of the 20th
century Duchamp argued that in the absence of coherent traditional narratives
art is merely formal. It only exists "conceptually”.
The essence of the creative act is not the body of the exhibit. Instead,
it lies in the fact that every time one set of rules that constitute novelty is
broken another one is negotiated. That serves to establish the legitimacy of
breaking the first. To bring Duchamp back into the Greenbergian fold De Duve
(1996) argued that Duchamp's objective was chiefly to mount challenge to the
convention of exhibiting works of art. In doing so he opened a new type of
Critique. Yet it is still possible to retain the Kantian vocabulary. The
fundamental question of modern aesthetics - what is the work of art ? - is
retained be it in a novel shape. Instead of showing dematerialisation of art and
its "textuality" Duchamp might be said to have systematically explored
the convention of art representation in order to expose it as a convention.
Duchamp's "debunking" of such "bourgeois ideological
constructs" was carried out by reducing the "artistic debate" to
the Kantian distinction between pure and practical judgements. The point is that
value remains undecided. It remains a mere convention.
De
Duve's book offers another way of seeing Duchamp's objectives.
Having freed himself from "Art Theory" grounded in the abstract
directionality of Universal History, Duchamp wanted to look for a substitute for
the lost source of direction and motion in creative act: what it is that
"drives" eventness today. Duchamp noticed that the key shift in our
experience of time today is linked to a particular form of application of
analogy. de Duve quotes (ibid., p.89) from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason:
"In
philosophy analogies mean something very different from what they mean in
mathematics" where "the equality of two quantitative relations"
is "always constitutive"..."In philosophy ...when three terms are
given I may learn ....only the
relation to a fourth but not the fourth term itself"
Kant
tells us that we cannot know that which belongs to the domain of Practical
Reason and Judgement. However, since this unknowability is known it can still
inform our judgement. In particular, it can lead us to reliable directional
insights to which we can assign an a priori concept. This concept remains a mere
potentiality and consequently any algorithm attached to it is destined to fail
if an attempt is made to implement it (to actualise its law-like content).
Duchamp's interest in mathematics went well beyond the curiosity of an artist or
chess player. Indeed, in his Warning he invokes the "law-like" content
borrowed from the principle of mathematical analogy. de Duve quotes from Warning
(ibid., p.95). "…we shall determine the conditions of the allegorical
appearance of several collisions seeming strictly to succeed each other
according to certain laws, in order to isolate the sign of the accordance
between, on the one hand, this allegorical appearance and, on the other, a
choice of possibilities legitimated by these laws…". De Duve points out
that this "sounds like a mathematical theorem". He recalls a
photograph taken in 1917 of the Urinal. It was an "example of the
allegorical appearance" of it and also the "proof that the title
"Fountain" once had a referent". Hence we are dealing with an
organised series of events. It is as if these allegoric appearances succeed each
other according to a law. What is this "law"? Of course, for de Duve
it is primarily the undetermined nature of Art (as opposed to that of
mathematics). This is the "law" that everyone can be an artist.
Anything that an art institution shows is Art. Since - thanks to e.g.
Greenbergian Critique - Art's meaning is necessarily unstable it always invites
a replacement (by "new" Art). That
way it can indeed retain its critical function whatever "it" is.
The
Duchamp formulation contains a cryptic message that is of no use to de Duve.
However, its deeper meaning becomes visible when he moves on to consider the
practices that were common among the men of influence in the Society of
Independent Artists and the Independents show. The Warning is followed by a note
entitled "Algebraic Comparison" (ibid., p. 99). Since Pythagoras,
aesthetic theories have contained some "mathematical argument". Art
objects came into being according to a "formula". It might have been
the golden section, symmetry operations or Fibonacci's series. Duchamp sets out
to deconstruct this as yet another pillar on which the
"representational" theories of art rest. In his rendering the ratios
are not ratios of numbers but names (concepts)! The ratios are then manipulated
by invoking analogies of such names until it is "demonstrated" that
"the locus of dissent and separation" was "the sign of the
accordance". (ibid., p. 143) Of course, in the eyes of, say, renaissance
artists the legitimacy of the golden section was essentially something given, a
divine inspiration or a gift. Duchamp's new turn is that the "formula"
approach is legitimated by the legitimacy of "mathematics". His note
is therefore first of all the proof that in his view tradition is no longer
available as a serious legitimating force. The play with the meaning of words de
Duve interprets as Duchamp seeking to unravel the random element, the ambiguity
aspect spelled out in the quote about the status of analogy from Kant's
Critique. It confuses the remains of Kantian critical force in the artistic act
today. But the cryptic phraseology used - surely deliberately - by Duchamp may
well point to another more provocative intention. Perhaps, instead of merely
trying to play another of his "jokes" or "tests", Duchamp
the chess player and amateur trickster-mathematician intended the emphasis to
lie on "law". Perhaps he wanted to invoke the intuitive compulsion and
skill we possess in this scientific civilisation of ours that - in the absence of traditional guiding forces - makes us
turn many an encounter into a sequence of approximations by which to measure and
quantify whatever is before us. It is as if we had a mathematical formula even
if the encounter in question is intuitively and theoretically not calculable!
"Duchamp established an aporia of measurement in which organic form is
disciplined into a proto geometry…" and in which "identities are
defined provisionally through various forms of measurement, inscription, or
financial quantification"(Joselit, 1998, 5). More generally, in the absence
of any ontological source (e.g. divine will, Kantian metaphysics) an object or
event "is" only if "it" is capable of initiating just such a
series of steps. Duchamp - consciously or unconsciously - implies that these
sequences of approximations as if implementing a mathematical prescription by
automatically invoking a series of analogies attached to an impulse are the
invisible rails along which contemporary thought travel and collide. They are
the ultimate residual source of motion and ontology.
Models
for Application of Analogy
Processes of measurement and experimentation always
begin with a model. For example, the
study of planetary motion requires a model of the solar system. Such a model
must be "invented", usually in the form of a doodle or a playful
arrangement of thought or things well before a serious attempt could be
conceived of any "theory", not to speak of quantitative evaluation.
Indeed, the first models of the solar system, atom, evolution of the species,
snowflakes, were conceived years before any analytic mathematical apparatus for
implementing them was available. Later the model may lead to an algorithm or mathematical relation (e.g. rotations, elliptic orbits,
light reflection patterns). It comes with basic units of assessment or variables
that carry the signature of the
mathematical method (e.g. position
and momentum coordinates, boundary conditions) and the motion driver (e.g. energy sources and dissipation paths). The
choice of these units carve out the boundaries
of territories (in space and time) within which the model might be useful.
A good example of the way this process has taken
place recently is provided by the changing fortunes of geometry. Until about two
hundred years ago the only "recognised" system of geometry was that of
Euclid. It was no doubt the status of Euclidian geometry as an a priori
conceptual foundation for the calculus and for Newton's formulation of laws of
mechanics that gave Kant the confidence to declare space and time "forms of
perception". However, in the course of the 19th century the work
of Gauss, Lobachevsky, and later Riemann, Hilbert, Einstein and others
challenged this status quo. In
particular, since the publication of Edmund Husserl's Origins of Geometry in
1917, and increasingly in recent years, there have been a growing number of
explicit attempts to articulate the newly discovered degrees of freedom
contained in the generalised concept of spatial organisation. These geometrical
systems are expressible in terms of well defined parameters and clear
foundational assumptions. Contemporary art, design and architecture seek
inspiration in re-assembling such models and the spatial organisations and
shapes they generate. They are then re-assigning them to different contexts in
an attempt to move beyond "exhausted" modernist canons of e.g. minimalism,
constructivism, and other methods that depend on the so called pure or
"ideal forms", i.e. those that are compatible with the Kantian
vocabulary. Analogous developments have taken place in connection with models
generated by theoretical physics. They invoke, for example, the inflationary
model of the universe, ghost particles, fractals, nonlinear response theory,
complexity and risk theories. The computer sciences put forward quantum models
of computation and consciousness (see e.g. Merrell, 1998, for examples from
literary works, and Lynn, 1998 who assembled a collection of such applications
in design and architecture).
Once
the model origin of an image becomes apparent its man-made character, its
post-Kantian notion of finitude of humans, and therefore a certain degree of openness
(to re-designing, for example) emerges as a key quality. More generally, any
such "machinic" product or process necessarily appears re
and de-composable. Since it is not a product of nature or a copy of
something externally given (whose purpose would therefore be constituted
externally to man) it is inviting to consider it outside its original context or
immediate usefulness. Such a "machinic" product is therefore
potentially an instrument of play or simply a "toy". Indeed, in the
absence of transcendental necessity and directionality much of what humans do
outside satisfying their basic needs may be regarded as "toying".
Unlike "natural" products like apples and bananas a product of
the "machinic" age can be "played with". This can be done by
re-positioning the original model and associated properties, by modifying design
parameters, by re and de-composing, particularly by freeing the model from its
original context, i.e. by assigning a new
meaning to it!
In
his brilliant study of "toyness" and of he key role of the concept of
"play" in forging a link between poetry and mathematical sciences
Daniel Tiffany (2000) points out that mechanical dolls as well as meteorological
effects have served as models of corporeality even in the history of physics.
He argues that materiality used in literary studies is too narrow to do
justice to hypotheses and analogies which are generally regarded as milestones
in natural sciences. For example, a (material) body may be "like" a
rainbow. It can then be "read" (ontologically grounded) in terms of
the mechanism of radiation. He pints out that the question "what is
material substance" is not one normally found on the pages of literary
studies. Indeed, the post-Galilean culture has been constructed as if there was
no room for "obscure" phenomena (unless the reference is to something
"unreal" - meaning non-material or as it is now in vogue
"virtual"). For the Establishment dominated by the Newtonian notion of
nature Phenomena are Kantian phenomena, i.e. testable, measurable and
classifiable, out there. Yet it is this imaginary-material domain that is the
permanent feature of modern physics and technology. The realism of modern
physics often rests on vivid analogies. Models such as that of atom (based on
the familiar solar system model) are taken to be "real". Even for most
physicists the models of atoms "are" the reality of atom! The question
is not so much whether atoms or electrons actually "exist". Rather it
is about the ways human discourse (including that of physical and life sciences)
might have been conditioned by the apparent "invisibility" or
ontological "uncertainty" associated with the microworld or with
cosmic dimensions, in the sense of the 19th century rendering of the
scientific method and by the regime of analogy that has been associated with it!
The decline of positivism has been accompanied by the decline of preoccupation
with subject-object divide in favour of concerns with mediation and
re-presentation. Tiffany argues that both theoretical physics and poetry share
the common objective in that they explore "credible im-possibilities".
Tiffany goes on to point out that this might be well captured by Latour's notion
of "iconophilic disposition" of both science and poetry (p.5). Indeed,
he reminds us that already Vico argued about correspondence between scientific
models of corporeality and poetic images. Physics and poetry share iconography
of toy (fetish) models, meteors, natural phenomena like the moon phases,
rainbow, lightning, fire (and processes of automation, strength, size, limit,
dissipation, excess, repetition, symmetry for which a mathematical description
in certain idealised situation is available, e.g. Calabrese, 1992)). No lesser
an authority than Samuel Johnson is quoted to have said (p.17) :
"metaphysics in poetry becomes a branch of physics". T S Elliot called
for "poetry that would incorporate and revise the rationalism of modern
physics" (p.12). For Adorno (p.69) "literature itself in the lyric
mode is a toy medium". The toy is then " a figure of lyric
substance"; and (p.19) we can regard "the lyric automaton in the poem
as the image of material soul as well as an emblem of immateriality".
"If not left to science the materiality of matter (in Vattimo's phrase)
emerges as the 'other' of language… a thing inimical to reflection and
representation, which we overlook even when we mean to confront it, or else
abandon - with a clear conscience - to trauma, or to some 'lifeless' notion of
'pleasure'…". Play, automatons, "relates aesthetics to
mathematics". Walter Benjamin perceives mechanical doll as a "relic of
inscrutable loss". He believes that imitation is not a primary motive for
child's play with their toys. "…
a single rule and rhythm rules over the world of toys: the law of
repetition" which he calls "the soul of toys". Toys are
implicated in compulsive and mechanistic framework of inaccessible trauma",
irremediable loss. The
toy like the monadic image "contains the indistinct abbreviation of the
rest of the world" (p.81). Humans become a "machine" or
quasi-automaton not only because of explicit presence of machinic practices of
working and thinking (of "pseudo-algorithmic" order of words available
to them) but also by "means of body's capacity to incorporate even to the
point of self-destruction the image of another creature". Tiffany offers
the example of Bellmer's dolls based on the story from Hoffmann's Sandman of
Olympia the automaton (the offspring of two men). He invokes the importance of a
mathematical formula: "as in a dream the body can change the centre of gravity of
its images…for example it can place the leg on top of the arm …in order to
make…proofs of analogies, puns, strange anatomical probability
calculations" (p.92). This hybridity
is legitimised by the notion of body governed and ontologically established via
the possibility of a formula, via (the dynamics of) calculation!
Fragmentation,
Archaeology and Genealogy: from minds and things to lines of force and energy
flow
The man-made needs of Galilean civilisation emerge as
products of the separation of man from nature. They carry the signature (inscriptions)
of the machinic pseudo-mathematical process that brought them into existence.
The inscriptions are the traces in our unconscious of algorithms
that control and propel the ("machinic") making of paintings, poems,
make ups, election posters, theme parks. It is for literary and philosophical
archaeology and genealogy to render
them visible, to bring them to the surface and to establish a link between the
icons of fragmented and hybrid making and connecting of today and the icons from
the age of narratives and ideology. Walter Benjamin (1999) in his Arcades
Project made a pioneering attempt to capture the fragmentation of traditional
narratives and the birth of new icons with which to communicate and come to
terms with the material condition of humanity peculiar to the advanced stage of
capitalism. Benjamin chose the 19th century Paris as a place where to
study the genesis of such icons, of personalities and artefacts. His
"archetypes" are no longer the Jungian icons that were thought to
represent the universal substrate of the human unconscious (e.g. the Mother,
Trickster, Spirit, Rebirth archetypes). Instead, the Parisian modernity is
expressed via flaneurs, prostitutes, workers, writers like Baudelaire, buildings
like the Eiffel tower, and of course the arcades. Benjamin's research project
was conceived in the 1920s. It was motivated by an unorthodox mixture of
redemptive Messianism and dialectic objectivism. By the late 1930s, according to
his own programmatic admission, his "Marxist" dialectics is "brought to a
standstill". His focus on "dislodging historical understanding from
the entrapment of the reflective subject" (Hanssen, 2000, 48) leads him (Konvolut
N of the Arcades Project) "to
pursue the question of whether a link exists between the secularisation of time
into space …" which, in his view "…in any case, is hidden in the
world view of the natural sciences" !. He wants to understand "secularisation
of history in Heidegger", and so on. He becomes an archaeologist who
uncovers layer by layer his "buried place". He turned his back on
Theory. In the end redemption does not come in the form of some Ur-utopia but as
endless strings of citations deposited in his "Konvolutes". They are
stitched together along crossing genealogical lines, in a web-like discontinuous
pattern. Instead of the evidence of Necessary Progress, amidst the debris of
overlapping fragments deposited by the marching victorious Capital in its own
path, there lay bare the mechanisms constitutive of passages of thought of late
modernity. Yet the choice of the Konvolut "territories" (men,
buildings, events) -recognisable as they undoubtedly are - could hardly survive
any serious "scientific" methodological challenge (e.g. an objection
that the choice of, say, Baudelaire is "subjective"). There may well
be many other men, women, buildings, events etc. that would have been just as
effective a vehicle for developing the argument in question. But it is no longer
any style or ism, any god, any particular male or female personage but the
pseudo-algorithmic performances and their "genealogies" that are meant
to be rendered visible by the Konvolutes. There they emerge out of a site
(place, thing, specific bodily context) of making and connecting. They are the
processes of fragmented production peculiar to the "age of mechanical
reproduction", of disrupted and re-assigned meanings in communication and
service networks, of the rise and decay of local energies propelling human
bodily and spiritual creativity.
What
in mathematics of a certain class of problems (e.g. the central field motion)
would be described as the geometrical, mechanical, gravitational, entropic,
probabilistic, fractal, quantum etc. model is now re-cast in the terms referring
to what is "being modelled": repetition, difference, detail, fragment,
limit, excess, complexity, distortion, multiplicity, uncertainty. This
conceptual and vocabulary shift has now become standard in popular culture (e.g.
Calabrese, 1992). It deliberately forgets and disowns the challenge posed by the
gap between the original meaning of drivers of mathematical analogy (indeed this
appreciation may require non-trivial knowledge of mathematical methods) and the
experience (practices of living in a technological society) of
"culture" consumed today, in film, poetry, novels, architecture but
also in a shop, school or hospital. At the level of concepts like detail and
excess the distinct properties of a mathematical model vanish. It is then easier
to move across the boundary between the artistic and the scientific, natural and
artificial, image and reality, i.e. across the boundaries of the domains that
were previously thought autonomous.
In the catalogue introducing an exhibition of works of
15 artists called ABRACADABRA (The Tate Gallery, London, Sept. 1999), Nicholas
Serota, Catherine Kinsley, Catherine Grenier and others openly declare that for
them “art is no longer a place to plant their flag but a territory of
exchange”, art that needs to be “animated”. We are used to recognising
“things” by their function to dial, to shift, to turn, i.e. as if according
to a prescription. How do “scientific” analogies “inscribe” the
qualitative analogies that engender “meaning”?
One of the artists explains: “I
have been struck by the omnipresence of analogy in the arts of
representation”. By “apparent symmetries” and "equalities" the
artist invokes the inscription code that sets in motion a “process of
signification”, “evolutionary mutations” and their confrontations with the
“problem of absolute symmetry”.
In
her photographs exhibited in Paris and Prague (I.N.R.I., The Rudolphinum
Gallery, Prague, Spring 2001) Bettina Rheims assembled images of "gospels
in the streets of Paris". These large studio-made photographs picture
beautiful young women and men - indeed fashion-model types with high make ups
and well trimmed bodies - in postures (pretty as well as sick and tortured) and
surroundings resembling the composition of well known paintings of biblical
motives such as resurrection, annunciation, etc. Yet the bodies and faces and
artefacts are not only unmistakably contemporary. They appear as if printed,
made up, and supported by easily recognisable gadgets and laboratory or
hospital-like configuration familiar from advertisements. St. Mary is a
beautiful young model in a high make up, high heel shoes. She sits in a
pastiche-like sub-urban sitting room or garage. It is these faces, postures,
dresses, hands and legs, gadgets and proto-laboratory artefacts, as if fresh out
of some factory for perfection that are the "archetypes" of today.
Each photo comes with a citation from the Bible to make sure the
"correct" anecdote is known since in many cases only a few (old)
mandarins might recognise it. Indeed, the driver (the energy that takes one
through the picture) does not have to come from the biblical reference. It was
the techno-scientific and communicational pseudo-machinic processes that gave
shapes and positions to all those figurines and things and made them analysable
and re-codable. The algorithms of making and positioning are betrayed by the
machine-shaped make ups, by their chemistry, by the electrical wires and the
textures of dresses and walls. These
are the signatures of pseudo-algorithmic inscriptions, the traces that inform a
genealogist hoping to recognise them by comparing them with their
"predecessors", to e.g. what would have been the image of St. Mary in
the nativity scene painted by a renaissance artist. Since Rheims' images do not "represent" any-body and
any-thing, and since they draw their legitimacy and communicability from the
apparent familiarity and "objectivity" of the techno-scientific
procedures that must have been used to make them, they can only refer to
intensities, velocities, and vectors of (fragmented) motion. They then represent
the process of onto-poetic motion itself, not any individual "frames"
(products of creative acts) of material reality. The
result is that such quasi-objects detached as they are from the original model
that inspired and launched them do look unreal no matter how many conventional
artefacts are used to make them (garage, fashion shoes, make ups).
These images radiate trauma - quite like the trauma radiated by dolls and
automatons - not only the biblical trauma of the Cross but mainly of the human
thought space cut open to expose the uncertainty that goes with having to draw
legitimacy out of one's own humanity. This place is no longer a collection of
objects in an abstract space and time masterminded so as to put before the
Kantian consciousness an Enhancing Representation of Life. The event is
constituted by the gesture of the key figure that breaks any attempt to make
Cartesian logical assessment of the scene, the gesture that domesticates all the
artefacts. They are fragments in that they belong to different stratas of
functionality, society and period, some luxurious and healthy and useful, some
cheap and sickly; these hybrid meanings ground the ambiguity of the local order
on which the structure and indeed comprehensibility of these photos depend. No
attempt is made to "design" the place to reflect a notion of its
biblical sacredness, of its "history" or "style", of
scientific (Cartesian) healing etc. be it merely in some "post-modern"
form - the features so proudly displayed in the city anywhere from the Louvre to
La Defence. The humanity of these figurines comes not from the grand narratives
forming the background model of the images but from the creativity of the
onto-poetic moves of the viewer!
Case
Study: Sebald's Vertigo and Austerlitz
On
the back cover of Vertigo, the publisher tells the reader that this is
"Part
fiction, part travelogue,…succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of
memory itself…What would possibly connect Stendhal's unrequited love, the
artistry of Pisanello, a series of murders by a clandestine organisation, a
missing passport, Casanova, the suicide of a dinner companion, stale apple cake,
the Great fire of London, a story by Kafka about doomed huntsman and a closed
down pizzeria in Verona? …."
What
indeed? Sebald appears to have constructed his text as if out of brief, often
only several sentences long blocks, each carefully crafted so as to look almost
self-contained. Their solidity is enhanced by the economy and crafty
down-to-earthiness with which the sentence is composed. It invariably contains a
factual information - such as that 50 000 horses and men were killed at Waterloo
- even though the story line does not require any reference to this place or
battle. Still less is it necessary to provide details about death toll. He
believes that understanding details is a key to grasping the turn of events;
"tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything", (p.156). He
employs almost scientific precision to embellish the passage or building block
of text with concrete names of "archaeological-genealogical"
importance. He inserts photos of tickets, buildings, dresses, schematic
drawings, with dates, numbers and brand marks clearly visible.
He refers to measurable physical properties such as material (mineral)
composition, colour and sound, light (crystalline) reflection, specific acts of
performance, e.g. "..she attempted to ease the tension by proposing an
excursion to the Villa Simonetta, where a widely famed echo would repeat a
pistol shot up to fifty times…" (p.13). Then he moves to another such
passage. The move is implemented with great conviction no matter how big the
jump (in place, time, theme) it involves. The text is built up as if along a
well defined sequence of points (hidden "formula") even though the
judgements themselves often openly deny any possibility of uniqueness (indeed
reality) of what is being described. By frequent references by name to churches,
railway stations, streets, gardens, the reader is led to develop high level of
confidence in the objective knowledge of the narrator. This sequence is
truncated when it runs out of steam, when further pursuit of analogy that
inspired the passage (another texts, physics model of the effect or process of,
say, building or seeing) seems no longer effective, only to initiate a new
sequence.
The
moves, even pragmatic ones such as changing trains, nevertheless do not contain
the level of completeness familiar from traditional novels. Sebald selects only
certain details. Even Kafka with whom Sebald obviously wants to be compared
settles his characters into their cloths and chairs and makes sure we know they
are there. His narrative is simple and depends on common senses recognition of
what people do. There is none of
the "abstract" selectivity of Sebald, none of the factual
("scientific") data, names, etc. arranged into sequential moves as if
following a logical argument. Thus the solidity of Sebald's textual blocks with
all the information about the passage of time and material exchanges and history
nevertheless appears as if embedded in a no man's space.
The
work resembles the late medieval miniatures such as the Book of Hours of
Limbourg brothers. These miniatures fail to live up to even most rudimentary
rules of perspective and observational consistency of shade and colour, relative
sizes of objects and humans. Yet it is generally agreed that they convey a remarkable
sense of reality and solidity. This is achieved by careful attention to detail,
to suppression of any traces of brushwork that might imply subjectivity. At the
same time the detail is carefully selected so that the images are not
"overburdened with reality". This selection process leaves a degree of
openness, incompleteness. The contrast with the careful rendering of detail
gives rise to feeling of a traumatic absence or expectation. Of course, there is
a fundamental difference since a Limbourg picture always "illustrates"
(intellectually belongs to) a well known anecdote. The picture contains, in
addition to the portrait of the anecdote in question, many other signs that
re-confirm its belonging to the Cosmos as a unity of God, men and things, e.g.
the signs of the Zodiac, a constellation of stars with a chorus of angels, etc.
There is no visible Cosmos for Sebald in which to find "place" (Casey,
1998) for his story. Sebald's text then appears as a patchwork cut out of one or
many such established yet by now unidentifiable to the reader narrations. The
uncertain origin and metric of the space in which Sebald's narrative fragments
move, and the position of such building bricks of the text in this space create
a sense of vulnerability, of traumatic openness to re-composition, of
melancholia and expectation of misadventure or perhaps even catastrophe.
By
choosing to refer to his character as K. Sebald initiates a chain reaction
inviting parallels with the misfortunes of famous Kafka's hero. The reader
familiar with the Trial (and the Castle?) can now engage in a sophisticated game
of parallel "pastiche" readings with Kafka's text(s) as an open space
full of virtual admixtures (hints of such admixtures came in the shape of images
- e.g. angels - capable of creating numerous variation of meanings). Sebald
wants the reader to know that for him "experience" is always already a
superposition of events and meanings, invoking a probabilistic rather then
deterministic model originating in the quantum mechanical representation theory
transplanted into literature (like many others, e.g. Merrill, 1998) and other
media via popular science books and now taken for "natural".
"…the more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it
seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way"
(p.212).
The
reader whose education resembled that of Sebald's - that is someone who had been
taught about the importance of visiting Italy and seeing its treasures a la
Goethe's Italian Journeys and Hegelian Kulturgeschichte will recognise and
identify with the otherwise arbitrarily detailed references to places, events
and personalities in the description of the trip in All'estero. He will also
recognise from his own travels to Italy the hero's desires to see Giardino
Giusti soon after arriving at Verona as "his way" of starting a trip
to Verona. It might then be a quite another kind of experience
for such a reader to follow from p.69 another twenty pages of
"accurate" geographical and art historical tour of Verona, Milan and
Venice and again Verona stuffed with intellectual details and to end up with a
reminder of Werfel's gift to dying Kafka. Sebald's is probably the last
generation in which there still are a nontrivial number of those who can indulge
in this way of reading his text. In brief, Sebald's text offers several
different levels of reading and each comes with its peculiar class of
"in-script-ion" in which the "fragments" and the strings
that turn them into a "story" acquire a very different genealogical
meaning and invoke a very different "algorithm". However, whatever the
level of reading the Sebald text reveals the extent to which the process of
fragmentation of experience and dependence on virtual analogy games to
legitimate both the meaning and the flow of storytelling have come to dominate
the means of literary expression. The detail is animated by genealogical
research but the connections are nonlinear even when inscribed by old practices
of intellectual kulturgeschichte. It is born in minds that this is what
Benjamin, Tiffany and Sebald as well as Rheims and the artists of the
ABRACADABRA have in common in spite of their otherwise different backgrounds and
means of expression.
Another
key common aspect is the feeling of spectacle, of hyperreality be it of travel,
city architecture or human encounters. These are also places in the Arcades
Project and Austerlitz where the dependence of the text on techno-scientific
mechanisms and models becomes more visible. Take, for example, the process of
seeing so fundamental to the mode of expression constantly invoking spectacle,
hyperreality and the fleeting and temporal, even the catastrophic. It appears
through mirror reflection, phosphorescence, gas and electricity systems of
lighting, sparks and rays, "transitional" character of colour and
shapes, photography, film and the whole range of time-machines, astro and micro
photography, lenses and improved eyes, transparent materials like glass as a new
structural medium. Austerlitz the adult specialises in monumental architecture
of capitalism. His interest in grand railway stations and fortifications is
highly technical as is Benjamin's interest in the Eiffel tower, applications of
iron and glass, atriums and street lighting, exhibitions, museums and festivals.
Both Benjamin and Sebald dwell at length not only on the description of the
material but particularly on the process of using it and the images used to
describe such processes in art and elsewhere. They both like to consider the
limits of these processes as if they were in a position to know them - as if
there were a formula. In Austerlitz there are maps and descriptions exceeding in
detail and scope many a tourist or technical guidebook. Even the description of
torture in Terezin appears as if factual and following a scientific research.
Yet it must be stressed that neither Benjamin nor Sebald can be compared with
the authors of literary and other works where an explicit description of a
scientific or pseudo-scientific experiment or argument is used to develop a
story or simply as an instrument to hold reader's attention or motivation. The
mathematical or physical model or effect itself only appears indirectly via its
manifestations and in truncated sequences of units of communication. They stand
as it were in the background, behind and yet in the text, as inscriptions to be
felt in between the lines. They create this atmosphere of possibility of order,
of (unfulfilled promise) of organisation far exceeding the visible object and
its features before the viewer. For example, "…he was obeying an impulse
which he himself, to this day, did not really understand, but which was somehow
linked to his early fascination with the idea of network such as that of the
entire railway system.." and a little later "he…found himself in the
grip of dangerous and entirely incomprehensible currents of emotion in the
Parisian railway stations which he said he regarded as places marked by both
blissful happiness and profound misfortune" (p.45).
This reduction of the concept of system to its local selected
manifestations breaks down and decomposes the closure and universality of
scientific models and algorithmic arguments generated by mathematisation of
nature and scatters the fragments across the boundaries of science and
technology and into aesthetic and political domains. The resulting openness is
both promising and traumatic. Just as the Arcades is a patchwork of disparate
fragments arranged into collector's boxes so it Sebald's novel.
The
similarity of the Sebald project and that of Benjamin's can be carried further,
well beyond the comparison of literary and philosophical methodology which is
the main purpose of this paper, and into the realm of their personal life. The
hatred of bourgeois artefacts, the sailor suits for little boys, the rituals of
obedience at home and at school. And the love of the old world of art objects,
rituals of opera and theatre going. All that has collapsed in front of their
eyes and left them with the alienated fascination with the products of
conquering complexity whose language (mathematics) they do not speak. When
Benjamin writes about colour he is informed by Goethe, not Maxwell or Einstein.
Like Goethe he can only "marvel at the knowledge of colours displayed by
scientists" (Goethe, 1980, 8). Sebald's (Austerlitz') interest in artefacts
and systems of thought in general also ends at about 1900!
However,
the similarity between Benjamin and Sebald has interesting limits quite telling
about the gap separating their respective generations. Unlike Benjamin Sebald
does not write about utopia, about ur-history. He does not have an "active
worldview" and strong ideas about how to change this world. His Austerlitz
lives a life of an abstract intellectual until his "awakening". Then
he retires and begins the search for parents but again purely as a personal
obsession. He, and it is not just he the orphan but all of the characters of
Vertigo, are not seen by the reader to make an effort to be a participating
citizen, a whole person with rights and responsibility, in a broader social
context. This man, educated and able, now with a personal stake in the tragic
turns of recent European history, has no thoughts about what can be done for the
future generations, not to speak of justice in general. Things happen and that
is that. Even the Kafkaesque is now broken into fragments loosely held along the
lines of forces whose direction and energy supply come only virtually, via
habitual expectation of "rational manifestations" of order via
repetition, dissipation, translation, symmetry, networking, (de)composition and
(re)assignment, population growth and decline, singularities (shocks), i.e. not
via revolutionary changes informed either by our "will to power" or
our understanding of means of production, division of labour, surplus value and
digital technologies.
References
Benjamin,
W., 1999, The Arcades Project, trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard U.P.
Calabrese,
O., 1992, Neo-baroque: a Sign of the Times.
Princeton: Princeton U.P.
Casey, E., 1998, The
Fate of Place. Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press.
De Duve, T., 1998, Kant
after Duchamp. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Goethe, F., 1980,
Introduction to the Propylaen", in Goethe
on Art, Ed. John Cage. London: Scolar Press.
Hanssen, B., 2000, Walter
Benjamin's Other History. Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Press.
Jaros, M., 2002,
“Machinic Inscriptions of Fragment Objectness” in Analecta
Husserliana LXXVI, 233-246
Joselit, D., 1998, Infinite
Regress. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lynn, G., 1998, Folds,
Bodies and Blobs. In "Books-by-Architects",
Eds. M. Lachowsky and
J. Benzakin. La Lettre Volee: Depot Legal Bibliotheque Royal de Belgique
Bruxelles.
Merrell, F., 1998, Simplicity
and Complexity. Ann Arbor, Univ. of Michigan P.
Tiffany,
D., 2000, Toy Medium. Berkeley: Univ.
of Calif. Press.