Ο Ρολάν Μπαρτ από το Ρολάν Μπαρτ, ΡΟΛΑΝ ΜΠΑΡΤ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΡΟΛΑΝ ΜΠΑΡΤ, εκδόσεις ΡΑΠΠΑ.

Roland Barthes

It is a fact that over the last few years a certain change has taken place (or is taking place) in our conception of language and, consequently, of the literary work which owes at least its phenomenal existence to this same language. The change is clearly connected with the current development of (amongst other disciplines) linguistics, anthropology, Marxism and psychoanalysis (the term 'connection' is used here in a deliberately neutral way: one does not decide a determination, be it multiple and dialectical). What is new and which affects the idea of the work comes not necessarily from the internal recasting of each of these disciplines, but rather from their encounter in relation to an object which traditionally is the province of none of them. It is indeed as though the interdisciplinarity which is today held up as a prime value in research cannot be accomplished by the simple confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down -- perhaps even violently, via the jolts of fashion -- in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation. The mutation in which the idea of the work seems to be gripped must not, however, be over-estimated: it is more in the nature of an epistemological slide than of a real break. The break, as is frequently stressed, is seen to have taken place in the last century with the appearance of Marxism and Freudianism; since then there has been no further break, so that in a way it can be said that for the last hundred years we have been living in repetition. What History, our History, allows us today is merely to slide, to vary, to exceed, to repudiate. Just as Einsteinian science demands that the relativity of the frames of reference be included in the object studied, so the combined action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralism demands, in literature, the relativization of the relations of writer, reader and observer (critic). Over against the traditional notion of the work, for long -- and still -- conceived of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now the requirement of a new object, obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories. That object is the Text. I know the word is fashionable (I am myself often led to use it) and therefore regarded by some with suspicion, but that is exactly why I should like to remind myself of the principal propositions at the intersection of which I see the Text as standing. The word 'proposition' is to be understood more in a grammatical than in a logical sense: the following are not argumentations but enunciations, 'touches', approaches that consent to remain metaphorical. Here then are these propositions; they concern method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading and pleasure.

1. The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed. It would be futile to try to separate out materially works from texts. In particular, the tendency must be avoided to say that the work is classic, the text avant-garde; it is not a question of drawing up a crude honours list in the name of modernity and declaring certain literary productions 'in' and others 'out' by virtue of their chronological situation: there may be 'text' in a very ancient work, while many products of contemporary literature are in no way texts. The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological field. The opposition may recall (without at all reproducing term for term) Lacan's distinction between 'reality' and 'the real': the one is displayed, the other demonstrated; likewise, the work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according to certain rules (or against certain rules); the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse (or rather, it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself as text); the Text is not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginary tail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced only in an activity of production. It follows that the Text cannot stop (for example on a library shelf); its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular, it can cut across the work, several works).

2. In the same way, the Text does not stop at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres. What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of the old classifications. How do you classify a writer like Georges Bataille? Novelist, poet, essayist, economist, philosopher, mystic? The answer is so difficult that the literary manuals generally prefer to forget about Bataille who, in fact, wrote texts, perhaps continuously one single text. If the Text poses problems of classification (which is furthermore one of its 'social functions), this is because it always involves a certain experience of limits (to take up an expression from Philippe Sollers). Thibaudet used already to talk -- but in a very restricted sense -- of limit-works (such as Chateaubriand's Vie de Rancé, which does indeed come through to us today as a 'text'); the Text is that which goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation (rationality, readability, etc.). Nor is this a rhetorical idea, resorted to for some 'heroic' effect: the Text tries to place itself very exactly behind the limit of the doxa (is not general opinion -- constitutive of our democratic societies and powerfully aided by mass communications -- defined by its limits, the energy with which it excludes, its censorship?). Taking the word literally, it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical.

3. The Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign. The work closes on a signified. There are two modes of signification which can be attributed to this signified: either it is claimed to be evident and the work is then the object of a literal science, of philology, or else it is considered to be secret, ultimate, something to be sought out, and the work then falls under the scope of a hermeneutics, of an interpretation (Marxist, psychoanalytic, thematic, etc.); in short, the work itself functions as a general sign and it is normal that it should represent an institutional category of the civilization of the Sign. The Text, on the contrary, practises the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory; its field is that of the signifier and the signifier must not be conceived of as 'the first stage of meaning', its material vestibule, but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferred action. Similarly, the infinity of the signifier refers not to some idea of the ineffable (the unnameable signified) but to that of a playing; the generation of the perpetual signifier (after the fashion of a perpetual calendar) in the field of the text (better, of which the text is the field) is realized not according to an organic progress of maturation or a hermeneutic course of deepening investigation, but, rather, according to a serial movement of disconnections, overlappings, variations. The logic regulating the Text is not comprehensive (define 'what the work means') but metonymic; the activity of associations, contiguities, carryings-over coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy (lacking it, man would die); the work in the best of cases -- is moderately symbolic (its symbolic runs out, comes to a halt); the Text is radically symbolic: a work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature is a text. Thus is the Text restored to language; like language, it is structured but off-centred, without closure (note, in reply to the contemptuous suspicion of the 'fashionable' sometimes directed at structuralism, that the epistemological privilege currently accorded to language stems precisely from the discovery there of a paradoxical idea of structure: a system with neither close nor centre).

4. The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it .has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric). The reader of the Text may be compared to someone at a loose end (someone slackened off from any imaginary); this passably empty subject strolls -- it is what happened to the author of these lines, then it was that he had a vivid idea of the Text -- on the side of a valley, a oued flowing down below (oued is there to bear witness to a certain feeling of unfamiliarity); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children's voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are half identifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique, founds the stroll in a difference repeatable only as difference. So the Text: it can be it only in its difference (which does not mean its individuality), its reading is semelfactive (this rendering illusory any inductive-deductive science of texts -- no 'grammar' of the text) and nevertheless woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the 'sources', the 'influences' of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas. The work has nothing disturbing for any monistic philosophy (we know that there are opposing examples of these); for such a philosophy, plural is the Evil. Against the work, therefore, the text could well take as its motto the words of the man possessed by demons (Mark 5: 9): 'My name is Legion: for we are many.' The plural of demoniacal texture which opposes text to work can bring with it fundamental changes in reading, and precisely in areas where monologism appears to be the Law: certain of the 'texts' of Holy Scripture traditionally recuperated by theological monism (historical or anagogical) will perhaps offer themselves to a diffraction of meanings (finally, that is to say, to a materialist reading), while the Marxist interpretation of works, so far resolutely monistic, will be able to materialize itself more by pluralizing itself (if, however, the Marxist 'institutions' allow it).

5. The work is caught up in a process of filiation. Are postulated: a determination of the work by the world (by race, then by History), a consecution of works amongst themselves, and a conformity of the work to the author. The author is reputed the father and the owner of his work: literary science therefore teaches respect for the manuscript and the author's declared intentions, while society asserts the legality of the relation of author to work (the 'droit d'auteur' or 'copyright', in fact of recent date since it was only really legalized at the time of the French Revolution). As for the Text, it reads without the inscription of the Father. Here again, the metaphor of the Text separates from that of the work: the latter refers to the image of an organism which grows by vital expansion, by 'development' (a word which is significantly ambiguous, at once biological and rhetorical); the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory systematic (an image, moreover, close to current biological conceptions of the living being). Hence no vital 'respect' is due to the Text: it can be broken (which is just what the Middle Ages did with two nevertheless authoritative texts -- Holy Scripture and Aristotle); it can be read without the guarantee of its father, the restitution of the inter-text paradoxically abolishing any legacy. It is not that the Author may not 'come back' in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a 'guest'. If he is a novelist, he is inscribed in the novel like one of his characters, figured in the carpet; no longer privileged, paternal, aletheological, his inscription is ludic. He becomes, as it were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to his work; there is a reversion of the work on to the life (and no longer the contrary); it is the work of Proust, of Genet which allows their lives to be read as a text. The word 'bio-graphy' re-acquires a strong, etymological sense, at the same time as the sincerity of the enunciation -- veritable 'cross" borne by literary morality -- becomes a false problem: the I which writes the text, it too, is never more than a paper-I.

6. The work is normally the object of a consumption; no demagogy is intended here in referring to the so-called consumer culture but it has to be recognized that today it is the 'quality' of the work (which supposes finally an appreciation of 'taste') and not the operation of" reading itself which can differentiate between books: structurally, there is no difference between 'cultured reading and casual reading in trains. The Text (if only by its frequent 'unreadability) decants the work (the work permitting) from its consumption and gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice. This means that the Text requires that one try to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading, in no way by intensifying the projection of the reader into the work but by joining them in a single signifying practice. The distance separating reading from writing is historical. In the times of the greatest social division (before the setting up of democratic cultures), reading and writing were equally privileges of class. Rhetoric, the great literary code of those times, taught one to write (even if what was then normally produced were speeches, not texts). Significantly, the coming of democracy reversed the word of command: what the (secondary) School prides itself on is teaching to read (well) and no longer to write (consciousness of the deficiency is becoming fashionable again today: the teacher is called upon to teach pupils to express themselves', which is a little like replacing a form of repression by a misconception). In fact, reading, in the sense of consuming, is far from playing with the text. 'Playing' must be understood here in all its polysemy: the text itself plays (like a door, like a machine with 'play') and the reader plays twice over, playing the Text as one plays a game, looking for a practice which re-produces it, but, in order that that practice not be reduced to a passive, inner mimesis (the Text is precisely that which resists such a reduction), also playing the Text in the musical sense of the term. The history of music (as a practice, not as an 'art') does indeed parallel that of the Text fairly closely: there was a period when practising amateurs were numerous (at least within the confines of a certain class) and 'playing' and 'listening' formed a scarcely differentiated activity; then two roles appeared in succession, first that of the performer, the interpreter to whom the bourgeois public (though still itself able to play a little -- the whole history of ) the piano) delegated its playing, then that of the (passive) amateur, who listens to music without being able to play (the gramophone record takes the place of the piano). We know that today post-serial music has radically altered the role of the 'interpreter', who is called on to be in some sort the co-author of the score, completing it rather than giving it 'expression'. The Text is very much a score of this new kind: it asks of the reader a practical collaboration. Which is an important change, for who executes the work? (Mallarmé posed the question, wanting the audience to produce the book). Nowadays only the critic executes the work (accepting the play on words). The reduction of reading to a consumption is clearly responsible for the Boredom' experienced by many in the face of the modern ('unreadable') text, the avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means that one cannot produce the text, open it out, set it going.

7. This leads us to pose (to propose) a final approach to the Text, that of pleasure. I do not know whether there has ever been a hedonistic aesthetics (eudaemonist philosophies are themselves rare). Certainly there exists a pleasure of the work (of certain works); I can delight in reading and re-reading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, even -- why not? -- Alexandre Dumas. But this pleasure, no matter how keen and even when free from all prejudice, remains in part (unless by some exceptional critical effort) a pleasure of consumption; for if I can read these authors, I also know that I cannot re-write them (that it is impossible today to write 'like that') and this knowledge, depressing enough, suffices to cut me off from the production of these works, in the very moment their remoteness establishes my modernity (is not to be modern to know clearly what cannot be started over again?) As for the Text, it is bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation. Order of the signifier, the Text participates in its own way in a social utopia; before History (supposing the latter does not opt for barbarism), the Text achieves, if not the transparence of social relations, that at least of language relations: the Text is that space where no language has a hold over any other, where languages circulate (keeping the circular sense of the term).

These few propositions, inevitably, do not constitute the articulations of a Theory of the Text and this is not simply the result of the failings of the person here presenting them (who in many respects has anyway done no more than pick up what is being developed round about him). It stems from the fact that a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfied by a metalinguistic exposition: the destruction of meta-language, or at least (since it may be necessary provisionally to resort to meta-language) its calling into doubt, is part of the theory itself: the discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

1971

Translation Copyright 1977, Stephen Heath

ΣΤΕΛΑ ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΑΚΗ , "Η Φαντασμαγορία της Ταυτότητας", 2008 (σχετικά με το έργο του Ν. Κεσσανλή)

Η Φαντασμαγορία της Ταυτότητας
ΣΤΕΛΑ ΑΝΑΣΤΑΣΑΚΗ
11.15.2008

«Δύο στοιχεία συνθέτουν τη σκιά: ένα υλικό και ένα πνευματικό. Υλικό είναι το σκιασμένο σώμα. Πνευματικό είναι το φως. Φως και σώμα γεννούν τη σκιά.»
Leonardo da Vinci. «Το φως και η σκιά». Trattato della pittura

Σε ορισμένες περιπτώσεις τα σώματα έχουν τη δυνατότητα να κάνουν ν’ αναδυθεί από μέσα τους ένα επίπλαστο αντίγραφο του εαυτού τους, ασαφές και άπιαστο. Η μυστηριώδης σκιά, που προκάλεσε το θαυμασμό και απασχόλησε τον άνθρωπο από τη στιγμή που άρχισε ν’ αναρωτιέται για τη φύση των πραγμάτων, αποτελεί το βασικό συστατικό της Φαντασμαγορίας της Ταυτότητας, έργο ενός Έλληνα καλλιτέχνη, του Νίκου Κεσσανλή.

Πρόκειται για έναν από τους σημαντικότερους Έλληνες καλλιτέχνες που συνέβαλλε καθοριστικά στην ανανέωση του εικαστικού λόγου στην ελληνική τέχνη. Σε όλη τη διάρκεια της ζωής του δεν έπαψε να αναζητάει νέους τρόπους έκφρασης, στοιχείο που φαίνεται στο διαρκή πειραματισμό και την έντονη κινητικότητά του τόσο ανάμεσα σε πόλεις και χώρες, όσο και στα μέσα έκφρασης που χρησιμοποίησε στην εικαστική του δημιουργία. Οι Φαντασμαγορίες της Ταυτότητας, έργο της περιόδου 1963-65, παρουσιάστηκαν το 1965 σε Βερολίνο (gallery Katz), Ρώμη (gallery Dell’ Obelisco) και Παρίσι (Μπιενάλε Νέων ,gallery Lacloche), και το 1970 αναδρομικά στο Μιλάνο (gallery Appolinaire) στην έκθεση «Pitturificio Italiano».

Τι είναι όμως εκείνο που συνθέτει τη Φαντασμαγορία της Ταυτότητας; Ο καμβάς, αντικαθίσταται από μια υφασμάτινη λευκή οθόνη που φτάνει από το ταβάνι μέχρι το πάτωμα, ενώ τη θέση των πινέλων και των χρωμάτων παίρνουν οι προβολείς. Είδωλα, σκιές και φάσματα που προβάλλονται πάνω σε μια διάφανη οθόνη, σταθεροποιούνται πάνω σε ευαισθητοποιημένο πανί και εκτυπώνονται σε φυσικό μέγεθος. Σιγά σιγά το μυαλό μας ανακαλεί μνήμες από το θέατρο σκιών και τον Καραγκιόζη της λαϊκής παράδοσης.

Πρόκειται για μια σειρά σκιαγραφήσεων, συνδυασμό της φωτογραφίας και του θεάτρου σκιών. Πάνω σε ευαισθητοποιημένο ημιδιάφανο πανί, προβάλουν πρόσωπα που ποζάρουν κάτω από το φως των προβολέων· οι στάσεις οι χειρονομίες και οι φόρμες που σκιαγραφούνται πάνω στο πανί φωτογραφίζονται από τον καλλιτέχνη, που διαφοροποιώντας τις φωτιστικές εντάσεις, πετυχαίνει μια ατελείωτη κλίμακα από σκιές, επι-θέσεις, αλλοιώσεις των περιγραμμάτων, όπως επίσης αποχρώσεων και διαβαθμίσεων άσπρου και μαύρου[1]. Οι ανθρώπινες μορφές υπό το πρίσμα της σκιάς προσλαμβάνουν μια νέα οπτική διάσταση, εξαϋλωμένη, σχεδόν μεταφυσική, ενώ συγχρόνως διατηρούν τα στοιχεία της ταυτότητας τους. «Οι άνθρωποι πέρα από τις επιμέρους παραμορφώσεις τους, διατηρούν μέσα από χιλιάδες αόρατες λεπτομέρειες την οργανική συνοχή της προσωπικότητάς τους· ένα νευρικό τικ, μια ρυτίδα, μια κύρτωση του σώματος, η διαδικασία μιας χειρονομίας, τόσα μικρά τίποτα σας προδίδουν, αποκαλύπτοντας την ταυτότητά σας»[2].

Οι αρχαίοι Έλληνες πίστευαν πως όταν εγκαταλείπουμε τον κόσμο, επιζούμε ως σκιές μεταξύ σκιών. Η σκιά, ως απουσία φωτός, πολλές φορές, στη λαϊκή μας γλώσσα συνδέθηκε με την απουσία και το θάνατο: «το βασίλειο των σκιών», «η σκιά του θανάτου», στο σημείο που ο φόβος μπροστά στο θάνατο να ταυτίζεται με το φόβο μπροστά στη σκιά. Στα πλαίσια εκλογίκευσης και εξορκισμού αυτού του φόβου η λαϊκή παράδοση δημιούργησε το θέατρο σκιών.

Οι ρίζες του θεάτρου σκιών τοποθετούνται στην Κίνα, όπου ο αυτοκράτορας Wu-Di (2ος αι. π. Χ.), βρήκε παρηγοριά για το χαμό της ευνοημένης του, στην εφεύρεση του θεάτρου σκιών. Το θέατρο σκιών σ’ αυτή την περίπτωση χρησιμοποιήθηκε για να πραγματοποιήσει μια πανανθρώπινη επιθυμία, αυτήν της επαναφοράς ενός νεκρού προσώπου στον κόσμο των ζώντων.
Το θέατρο σκιών έχει ως αφετηρία ένα κόσμο που ενώ έχει την δική του δυναμική, μια δυναμική ψευδαισθησιακή, παρουσιάζεται ως πραγματικότητα. Προτείνει ένα κόσμο παιχνιδιού, που μας επιτρέπει να επιστρέψουμε, μετά το τέλος της παράστασης, στο δικό μας ασφαλή κόσμο. Η ψυχαγωγική χρήση ενός φαινομένου που τρομοκρατεί τον άνθρωπο, έδωσε στο θέατρο σκιών την εκπληκτική εκείνη δύναμη της υποβολής, από τη Δύση ως τη μακρινή Ανατολή[3].

Τα στοιχεία που συνθέτουν την πρακτική του θεάτρου σκιών, είναι καταρχάς μια οθόνη, μια επιφάνεια στην οποία συνυπάρχει, το φως και η σκιά. Η οθόνη αυτή που παρεμβάλλεται μεταξύ των παιχτών και των θεατών, δεσμεύει την προσοχή και λειτουργεί σαν ένα φωτεινό παράθυρο, μια είσοδο σ’ ένα κόσμο μαγικό. Η θεατρική αυτή σκηνή, είναι διάφεγγη, λουσμένη από ένα δυνατό φως που προβάλλεται πίσω από το πανί και αρκεί μονάχα μια κίνηση της μαριονέτας για να ξεκινήσει η αφήγηση και…

«Αρχή του παραμυθιού, καλησπέρα σας…».

Πάνω στη φωτεινή οθόνη ο παίχτης ακουμπάει και κινεί μαριονέτες, φιγούρες επίπεδες, ειδικά κατασκευασμένες γι′ αυτό το σκοπό, που η διαπερατότητα που επιτρέπουν στο φως των προβολέων ποικίλει, ενώ στην οθόνη εμφανίζεται μια σκιά. Ο χειριστής δίνει ζωή στην προβαλλόμενη σκιά της κούκλας, την κουνάει και την κάνει να μιλάει.

Ωστόσο, η τεχνική του θεάτρου σκιών, πήρε άλλη μορφή στη Δύση και άλλη στην Ανατολή, αντανακλώντας τις διαφορές στην κοινωνική και ιδεολογική τους πρακτική. Το κύριο στοιχείο που διαφοροποιεί τα ποικίλα θέατρα σκιών -πέρα από την καθαρά εικαστική διαφοροποίηση στις φιγούρες και τη θεματολογία- εντοπίζεται στο εξής: στην Ανατολή, δεν ενοχλεί να φαίνεται από το κοινό ο χειριστής της κούκλας, ενώ στη Δύση το να είναι φανερός, φαίνεται να καταστρέφει την ψευδαίσθηση του θεάματος. Στο ανατολικό τμήμα, η δημιουργία της ψευδαίσθησης είναι δυνατή· δεν αντιλαμβάνονται το χειριστή σαν ξένο που εισβάλει στον κόσμο του φανταστικού, αλλά σαν κάποιον που υπηρετεί τον κόσμο αυτό και συμβάλλει στη τελετή εμφάνισής του. Σε αντίθεση με την ανατολή, ο μεσογειακός στοχασμός τείνει να αποχωρίσει το δημιουργό από το δημιούργημά του. Ο δημιουργός είναι ένα ον που κρύβεται πίσω από την αδιαφάνεια του δημιουργήματός του, ενώ αντιθέτως στην ανατολή, δεν υπάρχει περιθώριο που να χωρίζει το δημιουργό από το δημιούργημά του. Το ορατό ή μη του χειριστή του θεάτρου σκιών στους ασιατικούς και μεσογειακούς πολιτισμούς αντανακλά τις βαθιά ριζωμένες αρχέγονες δοξασίες των λαών που το χρησιμοποίησαν. Παράλληλα φαίνεται να αντλεί το υλικό του μέσα από τη ρεαλιστική παρατήρηση της καθημερινότητας, άλλοτε τη μιμείται και άλλοτε προσπαθεί να εξορκίσει και να εκλογικεύσει τα υπερβατικά της χαρακτηριστικά.

Σ’ αυτά τα πλαίσια η υιοθέτηση της σκιάς σαν φιγούρα -στοιχείο που στη λαϊκή παράδοση συνδέεται με τον κόσμο των σκιών και κατ’ επέκταση του θανάτου- τείνει να λειτουργήσει συνδετικά ανάμεσα στους δύο κόσμους πραγματικό-φανταστικό, γνωστό-άγνωστο. Ωστόσο σε αντίθεση με τον πραγματικό κόσμο, στο φανταστικό κόσμο του θεάτρου τον έλεγχο της μορφής τον έχει ο χειριστής της κούκλας που ανάλογα με την επιθυμία του μπορεί να την υποτάξει ή να την απελευθερώσει. Είναι ο κύριος των ‘σημείων’• δίνει ζωή στη μαριονέτα, η οποία σ’ αυτό το πλαίσιο εκπροσωπεί το ανθρώπινο, και εξαρτάται από τον άνθρωπο που την κινεί· γίνεται φορέας της προσδοκίας ελέγχου της ανθρώπινης ζωής, απαλλαγμένης από τη μοιρολατρία και την πίστη σε μια ανώτερη δύναμη που συντονίζει το ρυθμό της ζωής.

Με ανάλογο τρόπο ο Νίκος Κεσσανλής χρησιμοποιεί τις τεχνικές και τα μέσα του θεάτρου σκιών, δημιουργώντας μια διάσταση όπου το υπερβατικό στοιχείο κυριαρχεί. Η συμπαγής ανθρώπινη μορφή απουσιάζει από το έργο του, ενώ τη θέση της έχει πάρει η φευγαλέα και αέρινη σιλουέτα της σκιάς, που μας μεταφέρει σε μια άλλη παραμυθιακή διάσταση.

Πιστός στη μεσογειακή πρακτική, απομακρύνεται από το δημιούργημά του και δεν αφήνει να αποκαλυφθεί κανένα στοιχείο της δικής του παρουσίας στη φωτεινή σκηνή. Ωστόσο δυο στοιχεία διαφοροποιούν το έργο του από το θέατρο σκιών, δίνοντας διαφορετικές προεκτάσεις και συμβολισμούς.

Το πρώτο είναι ότι οι φιγούρες του Νίκου, σφριγηλές και τρισδιάστατες σφύζουν από ζωή. Τα μοντέλα του Νίκου, πρόσωπα «ζώντα», κινούνται μόνα τους και παίρνουν πρωτοβουλίες καθιστώντας τη δική του παρέμβαση περιττή. Σ’ αυτό το σημείο ο καλλιτέχνης ενεργεί αντίστροφα, σκηνοθετώντας ένα ιδιόμορφο θέατρο σκιών. Αντί να χρησιμοποιήσει «άψυχες» μαριονέτες (μιμήσεις της ανθρώπινης μορφής) και να τους δώσει ζωή με κίνηση και λόγο, χρησιμοποιεί πραγματικούς ανθρώπους, και ενεργώντας αντίστροφα αποκαλύπτει την άυλη και βουβή πλευρά της ύπαρξής τους. Δίνει μ’ αυτό τον τρόπο ένα εισιτήριο για ένα ταξίδι εσωτερικό, αναζήτηση της άλλης πλευράς της ταυτότητας, μια πρόταση ενδοσκόπησης.

Το δεύτερο στοιχείο, προκύπτει πάλι από την επιλογή των ζωντανών μοντέλων. Η σκιά που ρίχνει ένας άνθρωπος, δεν είναι στατική αλλά ούτε και απολύτως επίπεδη (σε σύγκριση πάντα με τη σκιά που ρίχνει μια μαριονέτα). Οι διαφορετικές φωτεινές πηγές που χρησιμοποιεί ο Νίκος, σε συνδυασμό με το γεγονός ότι τα μοντέλα του δεν κολλάνε πάνω στη διάφανη οθόνη, επιτρέπει την εμφάνιση παραπάνω από μίας σκιάς στην ίδια μορφή. Μ’ αυτό τον τρόπο, δεν ακυρώνει την τρίτη τους διάσταση, επιβεβαιώνοντας το γεγονός ότι οι μορφές του έχουν όγκο και ζωή. Ο άνθρωπος όμως δεν είναι μόνο σώμα, είναι και ψυχή και πνεύμα. Ο καλλιτέχνης, άνθρωπος ευαίσθητος, έχει αντιληφθεί την αλλαγή που συντελείται με γοργούς ρυθμούς και τείνει να καταστήσει τον άνθρωπο όν απρόσωπο, μηχανικό.

«Επιταχυνόμενοι ρυθμοί, φωτιστικές επιθετικότητες, φώτα κυκλοφορίας, πόλεις που φλέγονται τις νύχτες από το όργιο της φωτεινής διαφήμισης, όλ’ αυτά αποτελούν το σύγχρονο τοπίο των πόλεων.

Χιλιάδες εικόνες βομβαρδίζουν το μάτι του ανθρώπου, σήματα που το οδηγούν, που το μεταμορφώνουν και το προκαθορίζουν.

Ο άνθρωπος είναι μόνο ένα μάτι, που δέχεται το χείμαρρο των εικόνων και σινιάλων που τον διατάσσουν.

Ο άνθρωπος της πόλης κοιτάζεται μέσα σ’ αυτόν τον καθρέφτη και μοιάζει σα μια μαριονέτα προγραμματισμένη. Βλέπει να υφίσταται τη θέληση της θεάς Τεχνολογίας, που τα ανεξιχνίαστα κυκλώματά της μεταμορφώνουν αυτή τη μαριονέτα.»[4].

Σε μια κοινωνία βιομηχανική, που οι άνθρωποι θυμίζουν χειραγωγούμενες μαριονέτες, ο καλλιτέχνης θα χρησιμοποιήσει τα μηχανικά μέσα, θα υιοθετήσει τη χρήση τους για να μεταδώσει το δικό του μήνυμα. Λειτουργεί σαν καθρέφτης και συνάμα σαν πομπός που προβάλλοντας τον κοινωνικό του προβληματισμό μέσα από το έργο του, θα κάνει τη δική του προσπάθεια να προκαλέσει τις ευαίσθητες χορδές του κοινού του. Με τις φαντασμαγορίες της ταυτότητας ο Κεσσανλής μας προκαλεί να δοκιμάσουμε ένα διαφορετικό τρόπο θέασης της πραγματικότητας, φαντασμαγορικό, και να αναζητήσουμε τη δική μας μοναδική και ιδιαίτερη ταυτότητα, που η καθημερινότητα τείνει να μηδενίσει, προτείνοντας ένα συμβολικό αντιστάθμισμα μέσα από το θέατρο σκιών.

Μέσα από τις φαντασμαγορίες της ταυτότητας ο Κεσσανλής μας μεταφέρει στο μαγικό κόσμο της σκιάς, παρουσιάζοντάς μας τη δική του μεταφυσική οπτική της πραγματικότητας. Με τη μεταφορά της μαγική οθόνης του θεάτρου σκιών στην καθημερινότητα, και με οδηγό τον ίδιο, γινόμαστε μύστες μιας άλλης πραγματικότητας, αέρινες υπάρξεις που κατοικούν σε μαγικά λυχνάρια, δέσμιοι σπηλαίου, σκιές ονείρων…

1. Restany, P., Nikos,εκδ. Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 1988, σελ. 26

2. Restany P., ‘Les fantasmagories de l’ identité Nikos’, Katz (Βερολίνο), Dell’ Obelisco(Ρώμη), Lacloche (Παρίσι), Ιούλιος 1965

3. Ως Ανατολή, θα ορίσουμε τις περιοχές της Ανατολικής Ασίας, Κίνα, Ταιβάν, Ταϊλάνδη, Ινδονησία, Ινδίες, ενώ ως Δύση θα εννοήσουμε την Περσία και τις ισλαμικές χώρες της μεσογείου, καθώς και την Ελλάδα.

4. Δανιήλ, Η ζωγραφική πράξη και σκέψη, Αίθουσα τέχνης Δεσμός, Αθήνα, 1973, σελ. 36

Βιβλιογραφία

Αδαμοπούλου, Α., Ελληνική Μεταπολεμική Τέχνη, Εικαστικές παρεμβάσεις στο χώρο, University Studio Press, Θεσσαλονίκη, 2000
Casati, R., Η ανακάλυψη της σκιάς, μτφ. Κούρκουλος, Ν., εκδ. Εικοστού Πρώτου, Αθήνα, 2004
Δαμιανάκος, Στ., Θέατρο Σκιών: Παράδοση και Νεωτερικότητα, εκδ. Πλέθρον, Λαϊκός Πολιτισμός/ Τοπικές Κοινωνίες, Αθήνα, 1986
Δανιήλ, Η ζωγραφική πράξη και σκέψη, Αίθουσα τέχνης Δεσμός, Αθήνα ,1973
Καμπουρίδης ,Χ., Ο Πλατωνισμός ενός Βαρβάρου, Δημοτική Πινακοθήκη Θεσσαλονίκης, Δήμος Θεσσαλονίκης, Θεσσαλονίκη, 1988
Καρκαγιάννη- Καραμπέλια, Β., Νίκος, ΖΜ Σύγχρονη Εποχή Πανσέληνος, Θεσσαλονίκη, Μάρτιος, 1977
Restany, P., Nikos, εκδ. Καστανιώτη, Αθήνα, 1988
Τζιρτζιλάκης Γ. ‘Νίκος Κεσσανλής’, Κατάλογος Αναδρομικής Έκθεσης, Οργανισμός πολιτιστικής Πρωτεύουσας της Ευρώπης, (Θεσσαλονίκη, Ελλάδα), Μακεδονικό Μουσείο Σύγχρονης Τέχνης Θεσσαλονίκη, Οκτώβριος -Νοέμβριος 1997,ΟΠΠΕΘ, 1997

Slavoj Zizek, "Beckett with Lacan"

Slavoj Zizek, Beckett with Lacan

part1

One can understand James Joyce, with all the obscenities that permeate his writings, as the ultimate Catholic author, “the greatest visionary of the dark underground of Catholicism, an underground embodying a pure transgression, but one which is nevertheless a profoundly Catholic transgression.” [1] Catholicism is legalistic, and, as Paul knew it so well, the Law generates its own transgression; consequently, the staging of the obscene underground of the Law, the travesty of the Black Mass (or, in Joyce’s case, the elevation of Here Comes Everybody into Christ who has to die in order to be reborn as the eternal Life-Goddess, from Molly Bloom to Anna Livia Plurabelle), is the supreme Catholic act.
This achievement of Joyce simultaneously signals his limit, the limit which pushed Beckett to break with him. If there ever was a kenotic writer, the writer of the utter self-emptying of subjectivity, of its reduction to a minimal difference, it is Beckett. We touch the Lacanian Real when we subtract from a symbolic field all the wealth of its differences, reducing it to a minimum of antagonism. Lacan gets sometimes seduced by the rhizomatic wealth of language beyond (or, rather, beneath) the formal structure that sustains it. It is in this sense that, in the last decade of his teaching, he deployed the notion of lalangue (sometimes simply translated as “llanguage”) which stands for language as the space of illicit pleasures that defy any normativity: the chaotic multitude of homonymies, word-plays, “irregular” metaphoric links and resonances… Productive as this notion is, one should be aware of its limitations. Many commentators have noted that Lacan’s last great literary reading, that of Joyce to whom his late seminar (XXIII: Le sinthome) [2] is dedicated, is not at the level of his previous great readings (Hamlet, Antigone, Claudel’s Coufontaine-trilogy). There is effectively something fake in Lacan’s fascination with late Joyce, with Finnegan’s Wake as the latest version of the literary Gesamtkunstwerk with its endless wealth of lalangue in which not only the gap between singular languages, but the very gap between linguistic meaning and jouissance seems overcome and the rhizome-like jouis-sense (enjoyment-in-meaning: enjoy-meant) proliferates in all directions. The true counterpart to Joyce is, of course, Samuel Becket: after his early period in which he more or less wrote some variations on Joyce, the “true” Becket constituted himself through a true ethical act, a CUT, a rejection of the Joycean wealth of enjoy-meant, and the ascetic turn towards a “minimal difference,” towards a minimalization, “subtraction,” of the narrative content and of language itself (this line is most clearly discernible in his masterpiece, the trilogy Molloy – Malone Dies – L’innomable). Beckett is effectively the literary counterpart of Anton Webern: both are authors of extreme modernist minimalism, of subtracting a minimal difference from the wealth of material.
Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (first published in French in 1955 as Nouvelles et texts pour rien) is the fourth term which supplements the trilogy Molloy – Malone Dies – The Unnamable – Beckett himself referred to Texts as “the grisly afterbirth of L’innomable,” the “attempt to get out of the attitude of disintegration /of the trilogy/ but it failed.” [3] The obvious link is that the first line of the first text (“Suddenly, no, at last, long last, I couldn’t any more”) echoes the famous last line of The Unnamable (“you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”), a true Kantian imperative, a paraphrase of Kant’s Du kannst, denn du sollst (“You can, because you must.”). The voice of conscience tells me “you must go on,” I reply, referring to my weakness, “I can’t go on,” but as a Kantian, I know this excuse doesn’t count, so I nonetheless decide that “I’ll go on,” doing the impossible.
Since, for Beckett, what “must go on” is ultimately writing itself, the Lacanian version of the last line of The Unnamable is something that ne cesse pas a s’ecrire, that doesn’t cease writing itself – a necessity, the first term in the logical square which also comprises impossibility (that which ne cesse pas a ne pas s’ecrire, doesn’t cease not writing itself), possibility (that which cesse a s’ecrire, ceases to write itself), and contingency (that which cesse a ne pas s’ecrire, ceases not writing itself). It is crucial to note here the clear distinction between possibility and contingency: while possibility is the opposite of necessity, contingency is the opposite of impossibility. In Badiou’s terms of the attitudes towards a Truth-Event, necessity stands for the fidelity to Truth, impossibility for a situation with no truth, possibility for the possibility of a truth-procedure to exhaust its potentials and to stop, and contingency for the beginning of a new truth-procedure.
So what do Texts for Nothing register, a possibility or a contingency? A possibility, definitely – a possibility to “cease writing,” to betray fidelity, to cease going on. The failure of Texts is thus good news: Texts are failed betrayals, failed attempts to get rid of the ethical injunction. They are a comical supplement to the great triad – an opportunist’s attempt to squeeze out of the call of duty, somehow like Kierkegaard’s “sickness unto death,” where a mortal human being attempts to escape immortality, its unbearable ethical burden/injunction. In this sense, Texts are an optimistic work – their message is that one cannot but “go on” as an immortal bodiless drive, as a subject without subjectivity: “No, no souls, or bodies, or birth, or life, or death, you’ve got to go on without any of that junk”…
Jonathan Boulter thus got it right – on condition that we strictly distinguish between subject and subjectivity. The whole of the trilogy can be read as a gradual getting rid of subjectivity, a gradual reduction of subjectivity to the minimum of a subject without subjectivity – a subject which is no longer a person, whose objective correlative is no longer a body (organism), but only a partial object (organ), a subject of DRIVE which is Freud’s name for immortal persistence, “going on.” Such a subject is a living dead – still alive, going on, persisting, but dead (deprived of body) – undead. Texts are a comical attempt to resubjectivize this subject – among other things, to provide him with a body, to travel back the road from Cheshire cat’s smile to its full body. Boulter is right to correct Alvarez who claimed that Texts are written in the same “breathless, bodiless style” as The Unnamable :

“One of the things the reader notices about Texts from its outset is that the body (of the narrator/narrated) has made an uncanny return from its near obliteration in The Unnamable : the narrator of The Unnamable is disembodied (it may be that “he” is merely a brain in an urn). At the very least, the issue of subjectivity is a complex one in the trilogy because the relation between voice (of narrator) and body (of narrator) is continually called into question. We may in fact argue that the trilogy in toto is about the dismantling of the physical body: in Molloy, the body is ambulatory but weakening; in Malone Dies the body is on its last legs, immobile and dying; in The Unnamable the physical body may in fact have ceased to be an issue as the narrator floats between personalities and subject positions. All of which is to indicate that in Texts, the body has made /…/ an unexpected comeback.”(333-334)

The subject without subjectivity, this “living dead,” is also timeless – when we reach this point, “time has turned into space and there will be no more time till I get out of here” (note how Beckett repeats here Wagner’s precise formula of the sacred space of the Grail’s castle from Parsifal “time become here space,” which Claude Lévi-Strauss quotes as the most succinct definition of myth). The subject we thus reach, a subject without subjectivity, is a subject which

“cannot maintain with any certainty that the experiences he describes are in fact his own; we have a narrating subject who cannot discern if his voice is his own; we have a subject who cannot tell if he has a body; and most crucially, we have a subject who has no sense of personal history, no memory. We have, in short, a subject whose ontology denies the viability of mourning and trauma, yet who seems to display the viability of mourning and trauma.”(337)

Is this subject deprived of all substantial content not the subject as such, at its most radical, the Cartesian cogito? Boulter’s idea is that, for Freud, trauma presupposes a subject to whom it happens and who then tries to narrativize it, to come to terms with it, in the process of mourning. In the case of the Beckettian narrator, on the contrary,

“there is no hope of establishing a link between his own present condition and the trauma that is its precondition. Instead of having a story seemingly given to him unawares – as in the case of the victim of trauma who cannot recognize his past as his own – the Beckettian narrator can only hope (without hope /…/) for a story that will reconnect his present atemporal /…/ condition to his past.”(341)

This is the division of the subject at its most radical: the subject is reduced to $ (the barred subject), even its innermost self-experience is taken from it. This is how one should understand Lacan’s claim that the subject is always “decentered” - his point is not that my subjective experience is regulated by objective unconscious mechanisms that are decentered with regard to my self-experience and, as such, beyond my control (a point asserted by every materialist), but, rather, something much more unsettling: I am deprived of even my most intimate subjective experience, the way things “really seem to me,” that of the fundamental fantasy that constitutes and guarantees the core of my being, since I can never consciously experience it and assume it. One should counter Boulter’s question “To what extent do trauma and mourning require a subject?”(337) with a more radical one: to what extent does (the very emergence of) a subject require trauma and mourning? [4] The primordial trauma, the trauma constitutive of the subject, is the very gap that bars the subject from ITS OWN “inner life.”
Scenes From a Happy Life. This inner and constitutive link between trauma and subject is the topic of what is undoubtedly Beckett’s late masterpiece: Not I, a twenty-minute dramatic monologue written in 1972, an exercise in theatric minimalism: there are no “persons” here, intersubjectivity is reduced to its most elementary skeleton, that of the speaker (who is not a person, but a partial object, a faceless MOUTH speaking) and AUDITOR, a witness of the monologue who says nothing throughout the play (all the Auditor does is that, in “a gesture of helpless compassion”(Beckett), he four times repeats the gesture of simple sideways raising of arms from sides and their falling back. (When asked if the Auditor is Death or a guardian angel, Beckett shrugged his shoulders, lifted his arms and let them fall to his sides, leaving the ambiguity intact – repeating the very gesture of the Auditor.) Beckett himself pointed to the similarities between Not I and The Unnamable with its clamoring voice longing for silence, circular narrative and concern about avoiding the first person pronoun: “I shall not say I again, ever again”. Along these lines, one could agree with Vivian Mercier’s suggestion that, gender aside, Not I is a kind of dramatization of The Unnamable - one should only add that, in Not I, we get the talking partial coupled/supplemented with a minimal figure of the big Other. – Here, then, is the text of this piece in its entirety:

Stage in darkness but for MOUTH, upstage audience right, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face in shadow. Invisible microphone. AUDITOR, downstage audience left, tall standing figure, sex undeterminable, enveloped from head to foot in loose black djellaba, with hood, fully faintly lit, standing on invisible podium about 4 feet high shown by attitude alone to be facing diagonally across stage intent on MOUTH, dead still throughout but for four brief movements where indicated. As house lights down MOUTH`S voice unintelligible behind curtain. House lights out. Voice continues unintelligible behind curtain, l0 seconds. With rise of curtain ad-libbing from text as required leading when curtain fully up and attention sufficient into:

MOUTH: … out … into this world … this world … tiny little thing … before its time … in a godfor– … what? … girl? … yes … tiny little girl … into this … out into this … before her time … godforsaken hole called … called … no matter … parents unknown … unheard of … he having vanished … thin air … no sooner buttoned up his breeches … she similarly … eight months later … almost to the tick … so no love … spared that … no love such as normally vented on the … speechless infant … in the home … no … nor indeed for that matter any of any kind … no love of any kind … at any subsequent stage … so typical affair … nothing of any note till coming up to sixty when– … what? … seventy? … good God! … coming up to seventy … wandering in a field … looking aimlessly for cowslips … to make a ball … a few steps then stop … stare into space … then on … a few more … stop and stare again … so on … drifting around … when suddenly … gradually … all went out … all that early April morning light … and she found herself in the–– … what? … who? … no! … she! … (Pause and movement 1) … found herself in the dark … and if not exactly … insentient … insentient … for she could still hear the buzzing … so-called … in the ears … and a ray of light came and went … came and went … such as the moon might cast … drifting … in and out of cloud … but so dulled … feeling … feeling so dulled … she did not know … what position she was in … imagine! … what position she was in! … whether standing … or sitting … but the brain– … what? … kneeling? … yes … whether standing … or sitting … or kneeling … but the brain– … what? … lying? … yes … whether standing … or sitting … or kneeling … or lying … but the brain still … still … in a way … for her first thought was … oh long after … sudden flash … brought up as she had been to believe … with the other waifs … in a merciful … (Brief laugh) … God … (Good laugh) … first thought was … oh long after … sudden flash … she was being punished … for her sins … a number of which then … further proof if proof were needed … flashed through her mind … one after another … then dismissed as foolish … oh long after … this thought dismissed … as she suddenly realized … gradually realized … she was not suffering … imagine! … not suffering! … indeed could not remember … off-hand … when she had suffered less … unless of course she was … meant to be suffering … ha! … thought to be suffering … just as the odd time … in her life … when clearly intended to be having pleasure … she was in fact … having none … not the slightest … in which case of course … that notion of punishment … for some sin or other … or for the lot … or no particular reason … for its own sake … thing she understood perfectly … that notion of punishment … which had first occurred to her … brought up as she had been to believe … with the other waifs … in a merciful … (Brief laugh) … God … (Good laugh) … first occurred to her … then dismissed … as foolish … was perhaps not so foolish … after all … so on … all that … vain reasonings … till another thought … oh long after … sudden flash … very foolish really but– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all the time buzzing … so-called … in the ears … though of course actually … not in the ears at all … in the skull … dull roar in the skull … and all the time this ray or beam … like moonbeam … but probably not … certainly not … always the same spot … now bright … now shrouded … but always the same spot … as no moon could … no … no moon … just all part of the same wish to … torment … though actually in point of fact … not in the least … not a twinge … so far … ha! … so far … this other thought then … oh long after … sudden flash … very foolish really but so like her … in a way … that she might do well to … groan … on and off … writhe she could not … as if in actual agony … but could not … could not bring herself … some flaw in her make-up … incapable of deceit … or the machine … more likely the machine … so disconnected … never got the message … or powerless to respond … like numbed … couldn’t make the sound … not any sound … no sound of any kind … no screaming for help for example … should she feel so inclined … scream … (Screams) … then listen … (Silence) … scream again … (Screams again) … then listen again … (Silence) … no … spared that … all silent as the grave … no part– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all silent but for the buzzing … so-called … no part of her moving … that she could feel … just the eyelids … presumably … on and off … shut out the light … reflex they call it … no feeling of any kind … but the lids … even best of times … who feels them? … opening … shutting … all that moisture … but the brain still … still sufficiently … oh very much so! … at this stage … in control … under control … to question even this … for on that April morning … so it reasoned … that April morning … she fixing with her eye … a distant bell … as she hastened towards it … fixing it with her eye … lest it elude her … had not all gone out … all that light … of itself … without any … any … on her part … so on … so on it reasoned … vain questionings … and all dead still … sweet silent as the grave … when suddenly … gradually … she realizes– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all dead still but for the buzzing … when suddenly she realized … words were– … what? … who? … no! … she! … (Pause and movement 2) … realized … words were coming … imagine! … words were coming … a voice she did not recognize at first so long since it had sounded … then finally had to admit … could be none other … than her own … certain vowel sounds … she had never heard … elsewhere … so that people would stare … the rare occasions … once or twice a year … always winter some strange reason … stare at her uncomprehending … and now this stream … steady stream … she who had never … on the contrary … practically speechless … all her days … how she survived! … even shopping … out shopping … busy shopping centre … supermart … just hand in the list … with the bag … old black shopping bag … then stand there waiting … any length of time … middle of the throng … motionless … staring into space … mouth half open as usual … till it was back in her hand … the bag back in her hand … then pay and go … not as much as good-bye … how she survived! … and now this stream … not catching the half of it … not the quarter … no idea … what she was saying … imagine! … no idea what she was saying! … till she began trying to … delude herself … it was not hers at all … not her voice at all … and no doubt would have … vital she should … was on the point … after long efforts … when suddenly she felt … gradually she felt … her lips moving … imagine! … her lips moving! … as of course till then she had not … and not alone the lips … the cheeks … the jaws … the whole face … all those– … what? … the tongue? … yes … the tongue in the mouth … all those contortions without which … no speech possible … and yet in the ordinary way … not felt at all … so intent one is … on what one is saying … the whole being … hanging on its words … so that not only she had … had she … not only had she … to give up … admit hers alone … her voice alone … but this other awful thought … oh long after … sudden flash … even more awful if possible … that feeling was coming back … imagine! … feeling coming back! … starting at the top … then working down … the whole machine … but no … spared that … the mouth alone … so far … ha! … so far … then thinking … oh long after … sudden flash … it can’t go on … all this … all that … steady stream … straining to hear … make some-thing of it … and her own thoughts … make something of them … all– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all the time the buzzing … so-called … all that together … imagine! … whole body like gone … just the mouth … lips … cheeks … jaws … never– … what? … tongue? … yes … lips … cheeks … jaws … tongue … never still a second … mouth on fire … stream of words … in her ear … practically in her ear … not catching the half … not the quarter … no idea what she’s saying … imagine! … no idea what she’s saying! … and can’t stop … no stopping it … she who but a moment before … but a moment! … could not make a sound … no sound of any kind … now can’t stop … imagine! … can’t stop the stream … and the whole brain begging … something begging in the brain … begging the mouth to stop … pause a moment … if only for a moment … and no response … as if it hadn’t heard … or couldn’t … couldn’t pause a second … like maddened … all that together … straining to hear … piece it together … and the brain … raving away on its own … trying to make sense of it … or make it stop … or in the past … dragging up the past … flashes from all over … walks mostly … walking all her days … day after day … a few steps then stop … stare into space … then on … a few more … stop and stare again … so on … drifting around … day after day … or that time she cried … the one time she could remember … since she was a baby … must have cried as a baby … perhaps not … not essential to life … just the birth cry to get her going … breathing … then no more till this … old hag already … sitting staring at her hand … where was it? … Croker’s Acres … one evening on the way home … home! … a little mound in Croker’s Acres … dusk … sitting staring at her hand … there in her lap … palm upward … suddenly saw it wet … the palm … tears presumably … hers presumably … no one else for miles … no sound … just the tears … sat and watched them dry … all over in a second … or grabbing at straw … the brain … flickering away on its own … quick grab and on … nothing there … on to the next … bad as the voice … worse … as little sense … all that together … can’t– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all the time the buzzing … dull roar like falls … and the beam … flickering on and off … starting to move around … like moonbeam but not … all part of the same … keep an eye on that too … corner of the eye … all that together … can’t go on … God is love … she’ll be purged … back in the field … morning sun … April … sink face down in the grass … nothing but the larks … so on … grabbing at the straw … straining to hear … the odd word … make some sense of it … whole body like gone … just the mouth … like maddened … and can’t stop … no stopping it … something she– … something she had to– … what? … who? … no! … she! … (Pause and movement 3) … something she had to– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all the time the buzzing … dull roar … in the skull … and the beam … ferreting around … painless … so far … ha! … so far … then thinking … oh long after … sudden flash … perhaps something she had to … had to … tell … could that be it? … something she had to … tell … tiny little thing … before its time … godforsaken hole … no love … spared that … speechless all her days … practically speechless … how she survived! … that time in court … what had she to say for herself … guilty or not guilty … stand up woman … speak up woman … stood there staring into space … mouth half open as usual … waiting to be led away … glad of the hand on her arm … now this … some-thing she had to tell … could that be it? … something that would tell … how it was … how she– … what? … had been? … yes … something that would tell how it had been … how she had lived … lived on and on … guilty or not … on and on … to be sixty … something she– … what? … seventy? … good God! … on and on to be seventy … something she didn’t know herself … wouldn’t know if she heard … then forgiven … God is love … tender mercies … new every morning … back in the field … April morning … face in the grass … nothing but the larks … pick it up there … get on with it from there … another few– … what? … not that? … nothing to do with that? … nothing she could tell? … all right … nothing she could tell … try something else … think of something else … oh long after … sudden flash … not that either … all right … something else again … so on … hit on it in the end … think everything keep on long enough … then forgiven … back in the– … what? … not that either? … nothing to do with that either? … nothing she could think? … all right … nothing she could tell … nothing she could think … nothing she– … what? … who? … no! … she! … (Pause and movement 4) … tiny little thing … out before its time … godforsaken hole … no love … spared that … speechless all her days … practically speechless … even to herself … never out loud … but not completely … sometimes sudden urge … once or twice a year … always winter some strange reason … the long evenings … hours of darkness … sudden urge to … tell … then rush out stop the first she saw … nearest lavatory … start pouring it out … steady stream … mad stuff … half the vowels wrong … no one could follow … till she saw the stare she was getting … then die of shame … crawl back in … once or twice a year … always winter some strange reason … long hours of darkness … now this … this … quicker and quicker … the words … the brain … flickering away like mad … quick grab and on … nothing there … on somewhere else … try somewhere else … all the time something begging … something in her begging … begging it all to stop … unanswered … prayer unanswered … or unheard … too faint … so on … keep on … trying … not knowing what … what she was trying … what to try … whole body like gone … just the mouth … like maddened … so on … keep– … what? … the buzzing? … yes … all the time the buzzing … dull roar like falls … in the skull … and the beam … poking around … painless … so far … ha! … so far … all that … keep on … not knowing what … what she was– … what? … who? … no! … she! … SHE! … (Pause) … what she was trying … what to try … no matter … keep on … (Curtain starts down) … hit on it in the end … then back … God is love … tender mercies … new every morning … back in the field … April morning … face in the grass … nothing but the larks … pick it up–

Curtain fully down. House dark. Voice continues behind curtain, unintelligible, 10 seconds, ceases as house lights up.

[1] Thomas J.J. Altizer, The Contemporary Jesus, London: SCM Press 1998, p. 101.

[2] See Le seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XXIII: Le sinthome, Paris: Editions du Seuil 2005.

[3] Jonathan Boulter, “Does Mourning Require a Subject?”, in Modern Fiction Studies 50-2 (Summer 2004), p. 332. Numbers in brackets refer to pages in this volume.

[4] Judith Butler developed this point in detail, especially in her The Psychic Life of Power.

Beckett with Lacan - part 2

Beckett with Lacan
Slavoj Zizek

part2
Beckettology, of course, did its job in discovering the empirical sources of the play’s imagery. Beckett himself provided the clue for the “old hag,” but also emphasized the ultimate irrelevance of this reference: “I knew that woman in Ireland. I knew who she was – not ‘she’ specifically, one single woman, but there were so many of those old crones, stumbling down the lanes, in the ditches, besides the hedgerows.” But, replying the queries, Beckett said: “I no more know where she is or why thus than she does. All I know is in the text. ‘She’ is purely a stage entity, part of a stage image and purveyor of a stage text. The rest is Ibsen.” As to the reduction of the body of the speaker to a partial organ (mouth), in a letter from 30 April 1974, Beckett gave a hint that the visual image of this mouth was “suggested by Caravaggio’s Decollation of St John in Valetta Cathedral.” As to the figure of the Auditor, it was inspired by the image of a djellaba-clad “intense listener” seen from a café in Tunis (Beckett was in North Africa from February to March 1972). James Knowlson conjectured that this “figure coalesced with [Beckett’s] sharp memories of the Caravaggio painting,” which shows “an old woman standing to Salome’s left. She observes the decapitation with horror, covering her ears rather than her eyes” (a gesture that Beckett added in the 1978 Paris production).
Much more interesting are Beckett’s own uncertainties and oscillation with regard to the Auditor (who is generally played by a male, although the sex is not specified in the text): when Beckett came to be involved in staging the play, he found that he was unable to place the Auditor in a stage position that pleased him, and consequently allowed the character to be omitted from those productions. However, he chose not to cut the character from the published script, and left the decision whether or not to use the character in a production at the discretion of individual producers. He wrote to two American directors in 1986: “He is very difficult to stage (light - position) and may well be of more harm than good. For me the play needs him but I can do without him. I have never seen him function effectively.” In the 1978 Paris production he did reinstate the character but from then on abandoned the image, concluding that it was perhaps “an error of the creative imagination”… From the Lacanian perspective, it is easy to locate the source of this trouble: the Auditor gives body to the big Other, the Third, the ideal Addressee-Witness, the place of Truth which receives and thereby authentificates the speaker’s message. The problem is how to visualize/materialize this structural place as a figure on the imaginary of the stage: while every play (or even speech) needs it, but every concrete figuration is by definition inadequate, i.e., it cannot ever “function effectively” on stage.
The basic constellation of the play is thus the dialogue between the subject and the big Other, where the couple is reduced to its barest minimum: the Other is a silent impotent witness which fails in its effort to serve as the medium of the Truth of what is said, and the speaking subject itself is deprived of its dignified status of “person” and reduced to a partial object. And, consequently, since meaning is generated only by means of the detour of the speaker’s word through a consistent big Other, the speech itself ultimately functions at a pre-semantic level, as a series of explosions of libidinal intensities. At the premiere in Lincoln Center, the Mouth was played by Jessica Tandy, the mother from Hitchcock’s The Birds. Debating the piece with her, Beckett demanded that it should “work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect,” and advised Tandy to consider the mouth “an organ of emission, without intellect.” [5]
Where does this bring us with regard to the standard postmodern critique of dialogue, which emphasizes its origin in Plato, where there is always the one who knows (even if only that he knows nothing), questioning the other (who pretends to know) to admit he knows nothing. There is thus always a basic asymmetry in a dialogue – and does this asymmetry not break out openly in late Plato’s dialogues, where we are no longer dealing with Socratic irony, but with one person talking all the time, with his partner merely interrupting him from time to time with “So it is, by Zeus!”, “How cannot it be so?”, etc. It is easy for a postmodern deconstructionist to show the violent streak even in Habermas’s theory of communicative action which stresses the symmetry of the partners in a dialogue: this symmetry is grounded in the respect of all parts for the rules of rational argumentation, and are these rules really as neutral as they claim to be? Once we accept this and bring it to its radical conclusion – the rejection of the very notion of “objective truth” as oppressive, as an instrument of domination -, the post-modern path to what Lyotard called le differend is open: in an authentic dialogue, there is no pressure to reach a final reconciliation or accord, but merely to reconcile ourselves with the irreducible difference of perspectives which cannot be subordinated to any encompassing universality. Or, as Rorty put it: the fundamental right of each of us is the right to tell his/her/their own story of life-experience, especially of pain, humiliation and suffering. But, again, it is clear that people not only speak from different perspectives, but that these differences are grounded in different positions of power and domination: what does the right to free dialogue mean when, if I approach certain topics, I risk everything, up to my life? Or, even worse, when my complaints are not even rejected, but dismissed with a cynical smile? The Left-liberal position is here that one should especially emphasize the voices which are usually not heard, which are ignored, oppressed or even prohibited within the predominant field – sexual and religious minorities, etc. But is this not all too abstract-formal? The true problem is: how are we to create conditions for a truly egalitarian dialogue? Is this really possible to do in a “dialogic”/respectful way, or is some kind of counter-violence needed? Furthermore, is the notion of (not naively “objective,” but) universal truth really by definition a tool of oppression and domination? Say, in the Germany of 1940, the Jewish story of their suffering was not simply an oppressed minority view to be heard, but a complaint whose truth was in a way universal, i.e., which rendered visible what was wrong in the entire social situation.
Is there a way out of this conundrum? What about the dialogic scene of the psychoanalytic session, which weirdly inverts the coordinates of the late-Platonic dialogue? As in the latter case, here also one (the patient) talks almost all the time, while the other only occasionally interrupts him with an intervention which is more of a diacritical order, asserting the proper scansion of what was told. And, as we know from the Freudian theory, the analyst is here not the one who already knows the truth and just wisely leads the patient to discover it himself/herself: the analyst precisely doesn’t know it, his knowledge is the illusion of transference which had to fall at the end of the treatment.
1 + 3. And is it not that, with regard to this dynamic of the psychoanalytic process, Beckett’s play can be said to start where the analytic process ends: the big Other is no longer “supposed to know” anything, there is no transference, and, consequently, “subjective destitution” already took place. But does this mean that, since we are already at the end, there is no inner dynamic, no radical shift, possible anymore – which would nicely account for the appearance of the circular movement in this (and other) Beckett’s play(s)? A closer look at the content of the play’s narrative, of what is told in this 20 minutes long monologue, seems to confirm this diagnostic: the Mouth utters at a ferocious pace a logorrhoea of fragmented, jumbled sentences which obliquely tells the story of a woman of about seventy who, having been abandoned by her parents after a premature birth, has lived a loveless, mechanical existence and who appears to have suffered an unspecified traumatic experience. The woman has been virtually mute since childhood apart from occasional winter outbursts part of one of which comprises the text we hear, in which she relates four incidents from her life: lying face down in the grass on a field in April; standing in a supermarket; sitting on a “mound in Croker’s Acre” (a real place in Ireland near Leopardstown racecourse); and “that time at court.” Each of the last three incidents somehow relates to the repressed first “scene” which has been likened to an epiphany - whatever happened to her in that field in April was the trigger for her to start talking. Her initial reaction to this paralyzing event is to assume she is being punished by God; strangely, however, this punishment involves no suffering - she feels no pain, as in life she felt no pleasure. She cannot think why she might be being punished but accepts that God does not need a “particular reason” for what He does. She thinks she has something to tell though she doesn’t know what but believes if she goes over the events of her life for long enough she will stumble upon that thing for which she needs to seek forgiveness; however, a kind of abstract non-linguistic continued buzzing in her skull always intervenes whenever she gets too close to the core of her traumatic experience.
The first axiom of interpreting this piece is not to reduce it to its superficial cyclical nature (endless repetitions and variations of the same fragments, unable to focus on the heart of the matter), imitating the confused mumbling of the “old hag” too senile to get to the point: a close reading makes it clear that, just before the play’s end, there IS a crucial break, a decision, a shift in the mode of subjectivity. This shift is signaled by a crucial detail: in the last (fifth) moment of pause, the Auditor DOESN’T intervene with his mute gesture – his “helpless compassion” lost its ground. Here are all five moments of pause:

(1) “all that early April morning light … and she found herself in the–– … what? … who? … no! … she! …” (Pause and movement 1.)
(2) “the buzzing? … yes … all dead still but for the buzzing … when suddenly she realized … words were– … what? … who? … no! … she! …” (Pause and movement 2.)
(3) “something she– … something she had to– … what? … who? … no! … she! …” (Pause and movement 3)
(4) “all right … nothing she could tell … nothing she could think … nothing she– … what? … who? … no! … she! …” (Pause and movement 4)
(5) “keep on … not knowing what … what she was– … what? … who? … no! … she! … SHE! … [Pause.] … what she was trying … what to try … no matter … keep on …” (Curtain starts down)

Note the three crucial changes here: (1) the standard, always identical, series of words which precedes the pause with the Auditor’s movement of helpless compassion (“… what? … who? … no! … she! …”) is here supplemented by a repeated capitalized ”SHE”; (2) the pause is without the Auditor’s movement; (3) it is not followed by the same kind of confused rumbling as in the previous four cases, but by the variation of the paradigmatic Beckettian ethical motto of perseverance (“no matter … keep on”). Consequently, the key to the entire piece is provided by the way we read this shift: does it signal a simple (or not so simple) gesture by means of which the speaker (Mouth) finally fully assumes her subjectivity, asserts herself as SHE (or, rather, as I), overcoming the blockage indicated by the buzzing in her head? In other words, insofar as the play’s title comes from the Mouth’s repeated insistence that the events she describes or alludes to did not happen to her (and that therefore she cannot assumer them in first person singular), does the fifth pause indicate the negation of the plays’s title, the transformation of “not I” into “I”? Or is there a convincing alternative to this traditional-humanist reading which so obviously runs counter the entire spirit of Beckett’s universe? Yes – on condition that we also radically abandon the predominant cliché about Beckett as the author of the “theatre of the absurd,” preaching the abandonment of every metaphysical Sense (Godot will never arrive), the resignation to the endless circular self-reproduction of meaningless rituals (the nonsense rhymes in Waiting for Godot).
This, of course, in no way implies that we should counter the “theatre of the absurd” reading of Beckett with its no less simplified up-beat mirror-image; perhaps, a parallel with “Der Laienmann”, the song that concludes Schubert’s Winterreise, may be of some help here. “Der Laienmann” displays a tension between form and message. Its message appears to be utter despair of the abandoned lover who finally lost all hope, even the very ability to mourn and despair, and identifies with the man on the street automaticaly playing his music-machine. However, as many perspicuous commentators have noticed, this last song can also be read as the sign of forthcoming redemption: while all other songs present the hero’s inward brooding, here, for the first time, the hero turns outwards and establishes a minimal contact, an emphatic identification, with another human being, although this identification is with another desperate loser who even lost his ability to mourn and is reduced to performing blind mechanic gestures. Does something similar not take place with the final shift of Not I? At the level of content, this shift can be read as the ultimate failure both of the speaker (Mouth) and of the big Other (Auditor): when the Mouth loses even the minimal thread of the content and is reduced to the minimalist injunction that the meaningless bubble must go on (“keep on … not knowing what”), the Auditor despairs and renounces even the empty gesture of helpless compassion. There is, however, the opposite reading that imposes itself at the level of FORM: the Mouth emerges as a pure (form of) subject, deprived of all substantial content (depth of “personality”), and, pending on this reduction, the Other is also de-psychologized, reduced to an empty receiver, deprived of all affective content (“compassion,” etc.). To play with Malevitch’s terms, we reach the zero-level of communication – the subtitle of the play’s finale could have been “white noise on the black background of immobile silence”…
In what, then, does this shift consist? We should approach it via its counterpart, the traumatic X around which the Mouth’s logorrhea circulates. So what happened to “her” on the field in April? Was the traumatic experience she underwent there a brutal rape? When asked about, Beckett unambiguously rejected such a reading: “How could you think of such a thing! No, no, not at all – it wasn’t that at all.” We should not take this statement as a tongue-in-cheek admission, but literally – that fateful April, while “wandering in a field … looking aimlessly for cowslips,” the woman suffered some kind of collapse, possibly even her death – definitely not a real-life event, but an unbearably-intense “inner experience” close to what C.S.Lewis’ described in his Surprised by Joy [6] as the moment of his religious choice. What makes this description so irresistibly delicious is the author’s matter-of-fact “English” skeptical style, far from the usual pathetic narratives of the mystical rapture - Lewis refers to the experience as the “odd thing”; he mentions its common location - “I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus.” - the qualifications like “in a sense,” “what now appears,” “or, if you like,” “you could argue that… but I am more inclined to think…,” “perhaps,” “I rather disliked the feeling”):

“The odd thing was that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. In a sense. I was going up Headington Hill on the top of a bus. Without words and (I think) almost without images, a fact about myself was somehow presented to me. I became aware that I was holding something at bay, or shutting something out. Or, if you like, that I was wearing some stiff clothing, like corsets, or even a suit of armor, as if I were a lobster. I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise was attached to either, though I knew that to open the door or to take off the corset meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say, ‘I chose,’ yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think this came nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, ‘I am what I do.’ Then came the repercussion on the imaginative level. I felt as if I were a man of snow at long last beginning to melt. The melting was starting in my back - drip-drip and presently trickle-trickle. I rather disliked the feeling.”

In a way, everything is here: the decision is purely formal, ultimately a decision to decide, without a clear awareness of WHAT the subject decides about; it is non-psychological act, unemotional, with no motives, desires or fears; it is incalculable, not the outcome of strategic argumentation; it is a totally free act, although one couldn’t do it otherwise. It is only AFTERWARDS that this pure act is “subjectivized,” translated into a (rather unpleasant) psychological experience. From the Lacanian standpoint, there is only one aspect which is potentially problematic in Lewis’ formulation: the traumatic Event (encounter of the Real, exposure to the “minimal difference”) has nothing to do with the mystical suspension of ties which bind us to ordinary reality, with attaining the bliss of radical indifference in which life or death and other worldly distinctions no longer matter, in which subject and object, thought and act, fully coincide. To put it in mystical terms, the Lacanian act is rather the exact opposite of this “return to innocence”: the Original Sin itself, the abyssal DISTURBANCE of the primeval Peace, the primordial “pathological” Choice of the unconditional attachment to some singular object (like falling in love with a singular person which, thereafter, matters to us more than everything else). And does something like THIS not take place on the grass in Not I? The sinful character of the trauma is indicated by the fact that the speaker feels punished by God). What then happens in the final shift of the play is that the speaker ACCEPTS the trauma in its meaninglessness, ceases to search for its meaning, restores its extra-symbolic dignity, as it were, thereby getting rid of the entire topic of sin and punishment. This is why the Auditor no longer reacts with the gesture of impotent compassion: there is no longer despair in the Mouth’s voice, the standard Beckettian formula of the drive’s persistence in asserted (“no matter… keep on”), God is only now truly love – not the loved or loving one, but Love itself, that which makes things going. Even after all content is lost, at this point of absolute reduction, the Galilean conclusion imposes itself: eppur si muove.
This, however, in no way means that the trauma is finally subjectivized, that the speaker is now no longer “not I” but “SHE,” a full subject finally able to assume her Word. Something much more uncanny happens here: the Mouth is only now fully destituted as subject - at the moment of the fifth pause, the subject who speaks fully assumes its identity with Mouth as a partial object. What happens here is structurally similar to one of the most disturbing TV episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “The Glass Eye” (the opening episode of the third year). Jessica Tandy (again – the very actress who was the original Mouth!) plays here a lone woman who falls for a handsome ventriloquist, Max Collodi (a reference to the author of Pinocchio); when she gathers the courage to approach him alone in his quarters, she declares her love for him and steps forward to embrace him, only to find that she is holding in her hands a wooden dummy’s head; after she withdraws in horror, the “dummy” stands up and pulls off its mask, and we see the face of a sad older dwarf who start to jump desperately on the table, asking the woman to go away… the ventriloquist is in fact the dummy, while the hideous dummy is the actual ventriloquist. Is this not the perfect rendering of an “organ without bodies”? It is the detachable “dead” organ, the partial object, which is effectively alive, and whose dead puppet the “real” person is: the “real” person is merely alive, a survival machine, a “human animal,” while the apparently “dead” supplement is the focus of excessive Life.

[5] In the 2000 filmed production, directed by Neil Jordan, we see Julianne Moore come into view, sit down and then the light hit her mouth – this makes us aware that a young woman as opposed to an “old hag” is portraying the protagonist.

[6] C.S.Lewis, Surprised by Joy, London: Fontana Books 1977, p. 174-175.
LACANIAN INK

James Heartfield, "Postmodernism and the ‘Death of the Subject’".

James Heartfield 2002

Postmodernism and the ‘Death of the Subject’

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Source: Abstracted from The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained, Sheffield Hallam UP, 2002 and reproduced with the permission of the author.

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In the 1960s and 1970s a number of different thinkers started to question the validity of the human Subject. Their ideas were ‘ahead’ of their time. A variety of different theories arose out of the philosophy called ‘phenomenology’ and the sociological outlook influenced by the linguistic theory ‘structuralism’. Together, these ideas coalesced into an outlook popularised as postmodernism. The origin of these ideas is mostly French, but postmodernism caught a mood amongst academics, and more broadly amongst opinion-formers, and the culturati to quickly gain a currency in intellectual life in the 1980s and 1990s. By the end of the Millennium the new papal encyclical found John Paul II embracing postmodern despair rather than giving a message of hope. Noting that postmodern ‘nihilism has been justified in a sense by the terrible experience of evil which has marked our age’, the pope asserts that ‘such a dramatic experience has ensured the collapse of rationalist optimism, which viewed history as the triumphant progress of reason, the source of all happiness and freedom’.^[1] His Holiness warns against ‘a certain positivist cast of mind’ which ‘continues to nurture the illusion that, thanks to scientific and technical progress, man and woman may live as a demiurge, single-handedly and completely taking charge of their destiny’.

The Pope is echoing the judgement of the postmodernists. It was Jean-François Lyotard who best summed up the assessment of the modern age and its overriding ideologies. ‘I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse ... making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working Subject, or the creation of wealth.’^[2] Rejecting these defining narrative structures of modernity, Lyotard announced the post-modern age in the following way: ‘I define postmodernism as incredulity towards metanarratives.’ ^[3] As is now well-known, postmodernism was defined as a time when we could do away with the ideologies upon which we had relied, as so many tall tales, designed to make the listener happy and satisfied, but with no greater significance. Socialism, the free market, Christianity, the nuclear family, scientific progress were ‘exposed’ as so many bedtime stories told to lull us children into sleep.

It was not immediately clear that the implications of the theory called first ‘post-structuralism’ and later postmodernism were hostile to subjectivity. Indeed the opposite appeared to be the case. The postmodernists were first and foremost charged with an excessive subjectivity that jeopardised objectivity. To scientists and conservatives the hallmark of these new ideas was their scepticism towards a singular objective truth. The charge of relativism was made against postmodernists.^[4] In a celebrated assault on the postmodernists, scientists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont wrote: ‘A second target of our book is epistemic relativism, that modern science is nothing more than a “myth,” a “narration” or a “social construction.”’ To their critics it seemed as if subjective predilection had been elevated over objective fact in this new outlook. Moral philosopher Alain Finkielkraut parodies the postmodern reprobate as saying ‘Let me do what I want myself!’. Finkielkraut continues: ‘No transcendent or traditional authority, and not even a plain majoritarian one, can shape the preferences of your postmodern man or regulate his behaviour’.^[5] The shortcoming of the postmodernists, then, was that they resisted all authority, in a riot of subjective preference. The critics pointed to the promiscuous way that the postmodernists deconstructed each and every scientific and moral certainty as if these were no more than big stories, meta or grand narratives. But according to the postmodernists, such metanarratives tended to eradicate differences, imposing a lifeless uniformity. Where metanarratives reduced complexity to self-sameness, the method of deconstruction restored the fundamental difference of things.^[6] To the natural scientists and conservatives, such a singular elevation of difference suggested a thoroughgoing subjectivism, in which objectivity was sacrificed to personal subjective responses.

But the deconstruction was not only directed outward towards the objective world, as the critics feared. The very promiscuity of the postmodern deconstruction of all grand narratives meant that the grandest of all narratives, that of the Subject itself, would not remain untouched. Jacques Derrida, for example, insists that difference is so primordial that it cannot be kept outside of the Subject, but must call into question the Subject itself:

‘What differs? Who differs? What is différance?....if we accepted this form of the question, in its meaning and its syntax (“What is? “Who is?” “What is that?”), we would have to conclude that différance has been derived, has happened, is to be mastered and governed on the basis of the point of a present being as a Subject a who.’^[7]

Derrida’s style is wilfully demanding. (In Of Grammatology he insists that his intention is ‘to make enigmatic ... the very words with which we designate what is closest to us’.^[8]) But allowing for his specialised vocabulary, the meaning is clear enough. It is not that there are differences between Subjects, he is saying. That much would simply be a pluralistic outlook: ‘different strokes for different folks’. But that does not go far enough for Derrida. If we were just talking about differences between people, then we would have already assumed the existence of these unitary Subjects prior to difference. And then difference would only be a predicate of these previously existing Subjects. But for Derrida, difference, or différance, comes before the Subject. To ask what or who differs assumes the prior existence of Subjects who differ. Derrida is insisting on the priority of difference over the Subject. The implication is that the Subject, too, cannot be assumed to be a unitary whole without difference, but rather, must in turn, itself be deconstructed.

In Of Grammatology, Derrida makes it clear that his deconstruction of the claims of objectivity go hand in hand with the deconstruction of subjectivity.^[9] Just as claims to objective truth are a narrative that must be dispelled, so too is subjectivity a myth. In his book Of Spirit, he goes one step further in rejecting subjectivity. The book is a discussion of the philosopher and Nazi Martin Heidegger. In it Derrida indicates that Heidegger’s appeal to the Spirit of the West is a perverse outcome of the rational Subject of Enlightenment thinking. Derrida goes on to criticise ‘opposition to racism, totalitarianism, to Nazism, to fascism’ that is undertaken ‘in the name of the spirit, and even of the freedom of (the) spirit, in the name of an axiomatic — for example, that of democracy or “human rights” — which directly or not comes back to this metaphysics of Subjectivity.’^[10] Here, the narratives of freedom and democracy are being criticised because they imply the emancipation of a Subject (in this case a people). In Derrida’s eyes, that appeal to the ‘metaphysics of Subjectivity’ puts them on a par with fascism, because fascism, as represented here by Martin Heidegger, also appeals to a Subject, the Spirit of the West.

The turn of Derrida’s argument is surprising. How readily he associates democracy and fascism! And that the common strand should be their shared commitment to subjectivity. It is tempting to think that Derrida is simply making an unduly formal abstraction, while carried away with a complex argument. Perhaps on some plane one could say that fascism and democracy are the same since both are political forms of organisation. In such a case it would simply be a rather forced parallel, like the insight that Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein all have moustaches. But Derrida means more than this. The common bond between fascism and democracy is not incidental, but a fatal flaw; and the specific bond that Derrida alights upon is subjectivity. Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, another philosopher, influenced by Derrida, makes the point more forcefully, when he writes that ‘Fascism is a humanism’:

‘in that it rests on a determination of humanitas, which is, in its eyes, more powerful, ie, more effective, that any other. The Subject of absolute self-creation, even if it transcends all the determinations of the modern Subject in an immediately natural position (the particularity of race), brings together and concretises these same determinations and sets itself up as the Subject, absolutely speaking.’^[11]

Lacoue-Labarthe makes explicit the meaning of the deconstruction of the metaphysics of the Subject. Self-creation, once a virtue, is here seen as fascistic. Humanism is a fascism, because humanism puts man at the centre, makes man’s activity the substance of history. The initial reaction against the poststructuralist thinkers was to protest at their extreme subjectivism and consequent dismissal of ‘objective truth’. But what that criticism missed was that the Subject was also the target of deconstruction, perhaps especially so. Implicit in this double movement is the possibility that Subject and object are not opposed, but mutually supporting terms. If the singular objective ground is called into question, then so too is the singular and unified Subject. And, perhaps more importantly, the degradation of the Subject destroys the basis of a sustained investigation of the objective. In prosaic terms, if we cannot be sure of the investigator, there can be no investigation.

‘Ideology interpellates individuals as Subjects’, Louis Althusser.^[12]

Louis Althusser was a theoretician of the French Communist Party in the sixties and seventies as well as a lecturer at the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure with Foucault and Derrida. Like them he was concerned to dislodge the Subject from its exalted status. In the essay ‘Ideological state apparatuses’ of 1970 Althusser argues that ‘ideology has the function of “constituting” concrete individuals as subjects’.^[13] He means that the Subject is an effect of the ideology, not the other way around. Ordinary thinking would have it that persons — Subjects — have ideas, or perhaps more cynically that an ideology is crafted to deceive these Subjects about their true conditions. But Althusser goes further than that. He is saying that ideology does not only deceive you into thinking things like ‘this war is a just war’, or ‘wealthy people worked hard to get where they are’. Althusser argues that even the idea of oneself as a Subject, author of your own destiny, is an illusion fostered by ideology.

Althusser’s argument exemplifies the thinking that sees the Subject as socially bounded. In other words the Subject does not exist before society. Society is not a contract between fully formed Subjects. Rather the Subject owes its existence entirely to the social order. Furthermore, once the Subject is seen as the contingent effect of society, then subjectivity is revealed as partial rather than universal. Those that society deigns to ennoble as ‘Subjects’ turn out to be a narrow and particular caste of individuals, exclusive of other sections, such as the lower classes, women, non-Europeans, and others. Like the insight that the Subject is historically bounded, the view that the Subject is socially limited is unquestionably true. What is at issue is the conclusions to be drawn from that insight. Does it follow that since the Subject is a product of society that it is merely illusory, or that the Subject ought to be subordinate to society? Does it follow from the exclusion of some sections from the rights and status of subjectivity, that those grapes are sour, and that subjectivity itself should be abolished?

Althusser recalls ‘in Marxism and Marxist theory I discovered a system of thought which acknowledged the primacy of the bodily activity and labour’. ‘I at last discovered the primacy of the body and the hand as the agent of the transformation of all matter’.^[14] ‘I later took from it my description of history as a process without a subject’.^[15] For Althusser, then, Marx suggested a more or less biological process, of bodily activity. This would indeed be a process without a subject. But to make Marx the cloak of the historical process with no subject, Marx had to be tailored to fit. Unfortunately, Marx’s writing is imbued with a sense of the historical Subject, albeit one that is in the process of formation. Moreover, the fashion in Marxist circles at the time, heavily influenced by the official Marxist policy of the ‘Communist’ Soviet Union in the East, was too emphasise the ‘humanist’ Marx.

Althusser rightly intuited that the stress upon Marx’s humanism from official Soviet ideologues was shaped by the political imperatives of the Russian state. In particular the Soviet policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ sought to win time for Russia to build up its economy, and make friends amongst the Western intelligentsia, as a buffer to criticism. As a member of a party with fraternal links to the Soviet Union, Althusser had to frame his criticisms cautiously and in the judicious language of philosophical disagreement. With a note of sarcasm he wrote, ‘I wonder even whether socialist humanism is not such a reassuring and attractive theme that it will allow a dialogue between Communists and Social-Democrats, or even a wider exchange with those “men of good will” who are opposed to war and poverty. Today’, he continued ironically, ‘even the high road of Humanism seems to lead to socialism’.^[16]

And then, as a reprimand to the humanists, Althusser adds, ‘In fact the objective of the revolutionary struggle has always been the end of exploitation and hence the liberation of man, but, as Marx foresaw, in its historical phase, this struggle had to take the form of a struggle between classes’. ^[17] Althusser is arguing that for Marx, a humanism that embraces all humanity is a myth that only succeeds in papering over the urgent differences between classes, exploiters and exploited:

‘He [Marx] drove the philosophical categories of the Subject...etc from all the domains in which they had reigned supreme. Not only from political economy (rejection of the myth of homo economicus, that is of the individual with definite faculties and needs as the Subject of the classical economy); not just from history (rejection of social atomism and ethico-political idealism); not just from ethics (rejection of the Kantian ethical idea); but also from philosophy itself: for Marx’s materialism excludes the empiricism of the Subject (and its inverse: the transcendental Subject).’^[18]

Althusser finds in Marx a rejection of the ‘bourgeois’ Subject of economics, and liberal ethics. He rightly understands that it was Marx who explained that a humanism that pretended that Moneybags and Rent-roll were on the same plane as the wage-slave was a lie designed to cover up those differences. But Althusser puts more on Marx than he ought to bear. Marx criticised the bourgeois Subject for its limitations. He did not aim to abolish the historical Subject altogether. In particular Althusser’s characterisation ‘Marx’s theoretical anti-humanism’^[19] is misplaced. As Althusser sees it Marx ‘replaced the old couple individuals/human essence in the theory of history by new’ and suitably impersonal ‘concepts (forces of production, relations of production, etc.)’.^[20] However Marx’s theoretical terminology was not intended to blot out the human agency, but to highlight the barriers to its full realisation. But then Althusser’s knowledge of Marxism, despite his reputation, was to say the least, sketchy, as he acknowledged in his memoirs.^[21] In fact Althusser’s underlying inspiration in the battle against the Subject was drawn from his contemporaries, in spite, not because of, the Marxist idiom he adopted.^[22]

Althusser’s account of ideological Subject formation is far from common sense. He is saying that the creation of the Subject is one of repression, not liberation. The example he gives in ‘Ideological state apparatuses’ is of a policeman, hailing ‘Hey You’, and so creating a ‘You’, to which, the passer-by answers, accepting the ascribed status. Identification here becomes a repressive act, rather than the recognition of a free Subject. Perversely, the very terms of Subjective recognition in Althusser’s account are an imposition from outside, that impose a given identity rather than liberating the Subject of the policeman’s address. The account of Subject formation as repression has been widely taken up. Michel Foucault gives an alarming historical telling of the formation of modern Subjects in his books The Birth of the Clinic and Discipline and Punish. There modern institutions from the prison, through the schools and the hospitals are all involved in the disciplining of bodies through techniques of surveillance and interview. The all-pervasive gaze of these new authorities transfixes the individual, making him a Subject with guilt and conscience.

In her book The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Judith Butler develops the ‘paradoxical’ account of ‘subjection’. ‘If, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject’, she writes, ‘power imposes itself on us, and weakened by its force, we come to internalise or accept its terms’. ‘Power, that first appears as external, pressed upon the subject, pressing the subject into subordination, assumes a psychic form that constitutes the subject’s self-identity.’ It is the internalisation of the ‘discourse’ of power that creates the Subject. ‘Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse’,^[23] leading Foucault to talk of the ‘discursive production of the subject’.^[24] In Butler’s telling the terrible burden of subjectivity seems more or less established until she checks herself to ask ‘how can it be that the subject, taken to be the condition for and instrument of agency, is at the same time the effect of subordination, understood as the deprivation of agency?’.^[25] How indeed?

The first answer is that the theory depends upon a play on words. The word ‘subject’ has two, related, meanings. It can mean the active party, the subject in the sentence, ‘He threw the ball’, which is related to the wider meaning of the rights-bearing Subject, who is a free agent. Otherwise, subject can be a verb meaning to impose, as in ‘I subject him to torture’. Or subject can be the noun for those under the King’s rule.^[26] All these different meanings are connected. The word comes from the latin jacere, to throw or cast, and its meaning was widened to mean ‘exercise power over’.^[27] The shifting meaning of Subject in Butler’s play on words, though, has its origin in social changes.^[28] Where few people exercised power, that power was for most, the experience of subjugation — hence (the Crown’s) subjects, ie, recipients of the exercise of power. The historical subjection of the sovereign power to democratic control gives us the more contemporary meaning of Subject as master of his own destiny. The modern meaning carries the older meaning within it, in the sense that the word still means something like subjugate, but now with the implication of a mastery over circumstances rather than people.^[29] But this lingering trace of the older meaning is a foothold for Butler.

The reversal of meanings whereby Subject formation becomes enslavement rather than liberation begins with the critique not of subjectification, but of objectification. Specifically, it was feminist thinkers who first showed how ideological representations of women could serve to render them as ‘objects of the male gaze’.^[30] In ‘slasher’ films, for example, camera shots made the audience ‘both voyeur and aggressor’.^[31] For Susanne Kappeler pornography ‘shows one and only one constant element of representational content: the woman-object. But there is another constant factor: the male-subject, producer and consumer of representation ... the viewer plays the imaginary hero in relation to the woman-"object"’.^[32] Here the objectification of woman divides the pornographic worldview into male subjects and female objects. The question arises, is objectification a necessary consequence of subjectification? Kappeler writes, ‘The woman objectified implies a subject, a hero of her degradation.’^[33] Is the opposite also implied, that a Subject, a hero, implies objectification and degradation? If that were true then the entire project of subjective freedom is called into question. All subjectivity would be compromised as complicit in the degradation of others. Conversely, the critique of objectification would seem to imply that women demand to be treated as Subjects in their own right, though not all have seen it that way.

Maeve Cooke writes, for example, that ‘feminists have rejected the ideal of autonomy’ that defines the Subject.^[34] Judith Butler takes a similar view. ‘Do the exclusionary practices that ground feminist theory in a notion of “women” as subject paradoxically undercut feminist goals...?’, she asks.^[35] In this reading, women’s liberation is an ‘exclusionary practice’ because it implies a Subject, women, of liberation, excluding the possibility of a non-subjectively grounded feminism. ‘What sense does it make to extend representation to Subjects who are constructed through the exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the Subject?...The identity of the feminist subject ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics.’^[36] Butler means that a movement that sees women as Subjects reproduces the basic structure of the society that it is challenging. Feminism for Butler advances a critique of the Subject per se, not simply a reformist demand for the extension of the ‘normative requirements of the Subject’ to encompass women. The implication is clear: it is not the male monopoly over the rights of the Subject that is at fault, but the very ‘ideal of autonomy’ itself. Women in adapting the mantle of Subject, conform to these unspoken, normative requirements. At this point one has to wonder whether Butler is carried away with her own dialectical skills. What began as a criticism of the monopoly over freedom exercised by men has turned, paradoxically, into a criticism of freedom as such.

Seeing the individual as an effect of social forces, and an illusory one at that, Althusser completed the account of history as a process without a Subject. Althusser’s prioritisation of society over the Subject has its own particularities, but it also has antecedents in much sociology. The view that the individual is socialised into given roles was already part of the canon of Western sociology.^[37] Indeed it is an idea that goes back to the anti-Enlightenment reaction that sought to emphasise the priority of the social whole over individual rights. ‘Man’, wrote the arch-reactionary Joseph De Maistre, nearly two centuries before Althusser, ‘is sociable in his essence’. Conservatives, more than radicals, are associated with the argument of the priority of the social over the individual. So the Hegelian political philosopher TH Green would write dismissively of ‘the delusion of natural right’ in which ‘the Individual, it is thought, [has] a right, not derived from society’.^[38]

There is a kind of elan to the critique of Subjectivity. It moves tentatively first, like a child testing out some new profanity. But finding that there is little resistance it rushes forward, pushing at an open door. It is as if someone worked up the courage to say ‘The Subject has no clothes!’ and suddenly his nakedness is revealed. Such sudden shifts encourage the criticism. The assault on the Subject takes on the character of a revolt, like storming the Winter Palace. Those that demur are reactionary old fuddy-duddies. Quite quickly the fugitive outlook of yesterday becomes the establishment viewpoint of today. Postmodernism is now an intrinsic part of the syllabus throughout the humanities. Even the pope has gone pomo.

There is of course, a price to pay, and a heavy one. The theoretical degradation of the Subject is closer to reality than a naive reassertion of natural rights could be. But it is also an accomplice to the present. Whilst the first stirrings represented some considerable labour, groping towards something that was far from clear, the work today is just too easy. No sooner is a proposition made than it can be deconstructed. The question of whether the project of deconstruction is the right one is more and more difficult to ask. What is the degradation of the Subject in fact, and ought theory to be an accomplice to it? Thinking ought to pay attention to the world, but it does not necessarily have to celebrate the defeats of the human spirit.

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Footnotes

1. Reason and Faith

2. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: University Press, 1989, pXXIV

3. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: University Press, 1989, pXXIV

4. Intellectual Impostures, London: Profile, 1999.

5. The Undoing of Thought, London: The Claridge Press, 1988, p116

6. Jacques Derrida indicates the intrinsic nature of difference with his own concept of différance indicating not only differentiation, but also the deferment of the moment of closure that is definition, and hence the perpetual play of difference. ‘Différance is the nonfull, nonsimple, structured and differentiating origin of differences.’ A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1991, p64

7. Jacques Derrida, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1991, p65. My thanks to Kenan Malik for pointing this passage out.

8. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1991, pix

9. Of Grammatology, Maryland: John Hopkins UP, 1997, p16

10. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, Chicago: University Press, 1991, p40

11. Quoted in Luc Ferry and Alain Renault Heidegger and Modernity, Chicago: University Press, 1990 p2. I have missed out a second parenthesis, a sideswipe at Stalinism, no doubt deserved, but not to our purpose.

12. ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Slavoj Zizek (ed), Mapping

Ideology, London: Verso, 1994, p128

13. ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Slavoj Zizek (ed), Mapping

Ideology, London: Verso, 1994, p129

14. The Future Lasts a Long Time, London: Vintage, 1994, p215

15. The Future Lasts a Long Time, London: Vintage, 1994, p218. Althusser’s italics.

16. For Marx, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p221

17. For Marx, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p221

18. For Marx, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p228. Althusser’s italics.

19. For Marx, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p229. Althusser’s italics.

20. For Marx, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969, p229.

21. ‘I became obsessed with the terrifying thought that these texts would expose me completely to the public at large as I really was, namely a trickster and a deceiver ... who knew almost nothing about ... Marx ... I had only seriously studied Book I of Capital in 1964’ The Future Lasts a Long Time, London: Vintage, 1994, p148

22. The Future Lasts a Long Time, London: Vintage, 1994, ‘I had read Heidegger’s Letter to Jean Beaufret on Humanism, which influenced my arguments concerning theoretical antihumanism in Marx.’ P176. ‘The letter on humanism’, in which Heidegger denounces Jean-Paul Sartre’s humanism is reproduced in the Basic Writings.

23. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: University Press, 1997, p2-3

24. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: University Press, 1997,p5

25. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford: University Press, 1997,p10

26. The British Labour MP Tony Wright makes this play on words in the title of his book Citizens or Subjects without even realising what he is doing.

27. Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed CT Onions, Oxford: University Press, 1985

28. English philosopher TH Green suggests that the different meanings are national. ‘English writers commonly call that the subject of a right that Germans would call the object.’ , Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and other writings, Cambridge: University Press, 1986, p180

29. The word ‘sovereignty’ carries a similar history, where the original exercise of sovereignty was restricted to the Prince, its universalisation suggests to some, like Tony Wright in his Citizens or Subjects, that the sovereign power of the elected assembly is simply despotism to the nth power.

30. Beatrix Campbell and Anna Coote A, Sweet Freedom, p227

31. Vincent, Sally, The New Statesman, 19 December 1980

32. ‘Pornography: The Representation of Power’ in Catherine Itzin (ed), Pornography: Women, violence and civil liberties, a radical new view, p93

33. ‘Pornography: The Representation of Power’ in Catherine Itzin (ed), Pornography: Women, violence and civil liberties, a radical new view, p93

34. Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, Edited by Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, London Routledge, 1999, p260

35. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, London, 1990, p5

36. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, London, 1990, p5-6

37. see Burkart Holzner, ‘The Construction of Social Actors: An essay on social identities’, in T Luckmann (ed) Phenomenology and Sociology, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978, p291-310, for example.

38. TH Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation and other writings, Cambridge: University Press, 1986, p79