INFINITY DOUBLED / DOUBLE-BLACK CAT

“Somewhere and nowhere in every Derridean topography is a secret place, a crypt whose coordinates cannot be plotted. This place exceeds any ordinary topographical placement.”(1)  --J. Hillis Miller

I. GRAINS OF SAND

“To think of one thing, one must first think of something else.”(2)  --Jean-Luc Godard

The above remark, made en passant within Godard’s Eloge de l’amour (2001), opens a chiasmus within thought itself (or within experience), depending on how one reads this remark (and into what context one inserts/translates it, after appropriation or expropriation).

In one sense, this ‘something else’ (as above) registers as the quantum within thought (the emergent mark of Infinity doubled), suggesting the near and far, age-old(e) conundrum regarding a priori concepts and mere things. Yet knowing Godard’s frame of mind, it is unlikely that this ‘something’ is something merely abstract. More likely it is a signal gesture toward a very different ontological ground than that ontological (onto-theological?) ground marked by rupture denoted in the (elective?) ‘originary’ nature of abstract thought; thought productive, after the fact (after facticity), of two worlds -- the exemplary and the fallen (the celestial and the sublunary), things sui generis and things sub species aeternitatis.

And yet, apropos of Godard’s on-going project (a radical anti-ontological project?), this ‘quelque chose’ (flashing as signpost, repeatedly, throughout the mesmeric, disjointed trajectory of Eloge de l’amour) is indeed a signature event (signaling a chiasmus/ chaosmos, or the apparent divergence of two lines of thought which agree secretly to meet elsewhere). Notably, Eloge tears open within its nominally dialectical structure -- within its nominally self-reflective meditation on ‘history’ and ‘no history’, and therefore borrowed or stolen histories (and cooked histories, personal or otherwise) -- a war between two worlds (pictured, perhaps, by the sumptuous black-and-white sequences and the concluding garish, color sequences). In a manner of speaking (in a Mannerist manner of speaking), this chiasmus signals the sign of the doubling of Infinity, insofar as to think of one thing one must first break it off (away from) the whole (Infinity). This process within thought itself constitutes a sublunary (anamorphic?) mathesis (A = Infinity - A) as the human condition itself (the human-anamorphic stain). If ‘A’ is the thing broken away from, taken from a theoretical whole (Infinity), what, then, is Infinity doubled? Might it not represent a reserve function within thought (the ‘troubled’ mark of philosophical aesthetics after Modernism?) that conserves the whole throughout the course of the questionable surgical operation itself?

The doubling of Infinity is intimately (and, therefore, infinitely) involved with a form of thought that mostly eludes us today (as post-humanist subjects); a form of thought within thought itself that permits the world to be read in a grain of sand. If this form of thought is formulated as analogical (or anagogical), then it leads back to the mnemonic terrain of Godard’s elegy, to the locus of memory and to the locus of the philosophical hermeneutic buried within the (anti)ontological ground of his film (and perhaps his films, given that with figures of Godard’s stature the works proceed from the alchemical furnace of the Imaginary and most often represent a whole, while each portion might be the functional equivalent of the proverbial grain of sand). Yet to reload the idea of Romantic genius is hardly the point, while to reload the idea of Eternity is the point. Is not the hour-glass, then, also a possible figure of the Figure 8 (the sign of Infinity). And, are there not two hour-glasses (two types of time) buried in all things? And do not grains of sand placed in a furnace produce bits of glass, Murano glass even? And do not bits of glass constitute a mirror?

The rational-poetic concept of Mathesis Universalis echoes down the centuries within the doubling of Infinity (after Pascal and after Descartes, des cartes après Descartes). The figure of double Infinity, in fact, cannot register within thought without the spectral nature of thought arriving ‘home’ (as it does within Kant’s immortal critiques) to find thought itself crossing the space of thought itself (a shadow crossing the hypothetical void within abstract, pure reason). Thus Heidegger’s ‘thinking about thinking’? Thus, too, Jean-Luc Marion’s third (final?) phenomenological reduction (after Husserl’s reduction ‘to things’, and after Heidegger’s reduction ‘to being’ and its shadowy moods) revealing the authentically haunted ‘nature’ of saturated phenomenon (or ‘pure’ events).

II. THE ORIGIN OF THE MUSES

"The dark day and the bright day, the two realms of space, turn by their own wisdom." --Rig Veda [Book VI, Hymn IX]

Within the shadowy spaces of my own memory of things (and places), I find myself often returning to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta (set in the Pentland Hills, south of Edinburgh, and set rhetorically in contradistinction to Edinburgh, the so-called ‘Athens of the North’) where in both real time and in dreams I have often detected the sign of Infinity doubled. It was my first visit there (in 1991) that ostensibly set this process in motion, given that it was March and the garden was ‘asleep’, and yet such gardens are the stuff of which dreams are made. Notwithstanding my stroll through the groves and idylls of this ‘garden-architectural conundrum’, noting the spare nature of the structure of the garden in winter (and sculptural things wrapped in plastic), it soon dawned on me (through other means, meaning reflection … or ‘anamnesis’ …) that ‘here’ (or ‘there’) is (was), in fact, an exquisite corpse of sorts (a concrete poem-garden on ice) that spoke the language nonetheless of two seemingly distinct times (i.e., ‘now’ and ‘then’). Its life was suspended, then (March 1991), while within the farmhouse its life went forward and up the chimney so to speak (for it was there before a peat fire, talking to Ian Finlay, that I first understood what was at stake). On the mantle was the runic inscription: “Hives through leaves / Bees through waves”. Thus began new-old synaesthetic voyages into architectural (architectonic and topological) rhetoric …

It was my return visit (in October 1993) that proved the first visit was not entirely mis-taken, and that initial insights into the synaesthetic nature of Little Sparta (glimpses of an essentially haunted garden and of its rhetorical ‘nature’) were pro-visional. This time the garden was alive and afire beneath glorious, blue and white (be-clouded) October skies. Shadows played with the sculptural assemblages, the grotto dedicated to Aeneas and Dido lay buried beneath the multi-colored moor-grass hillock near the shimmmmering Lockan Eck, and the Caspar David Friedrich pyramid behind the Temple of Philemon and Baucis (with its machine-gun toting Saint-Just) dissolved into the camera obscura of mental vision, telescoping into a nether region captured (in part) in the lens of my ancient Kodak Retina camera (mailed to me weeks earlier by my father) as proto-scenic, blurred image (a postcard from the edge of things-nowhere). And yet this was after a very long and winding inter-textual voyage to ‘France’, and a very long analytical-exegetical excursion into Finlay’s 1987 Un jardin révolutionnaire (a critique later published in Word & Image), the project Finlay suggested I ‘study’ that March day (March 15th!) while watching the peat fire smolder and not drinking tea. (He offered tea and then forgot to make it.) Indeed, Little Sparta (formerly Stony Path) was/is half smokescreen, half (startling) revelation. What Finlay had accomplished there over two and one-half decades was to disclose the presence of saturated phenomena within garden-architectural discourse, a feat accomplished through the concretization of such principles through things. Within Little Sparta (writ discretely and discreetly), half knowingly, I detected the conceptual sign of Infinity doubled, or that which I half understood then (as now).

For years in-between other things and afterwards (after many words, written and spoken … after letters back and forth, to/from Ian Finlay … the Finlay half now ‘donated’ to Dumbarton Oaks) I would often literally dream of standing within this garden, usually near Lochan Eck (the small ‘sea’ carved out of the moor in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and named for his then-young son). In these recurring dreams I stood puzzled by the writing of these mnemonic signs (transfixed before the analogical/anagogical matrix that the garden represented). The dreams connoted confusion (the inability to read the garden), and over the years it was to this garden that I would return (within writing about architecture and landscape). It was also to this garden that I would ‘return’ when I built gardens, a return that was as much a voyage away from this garden -- insofar as an idyll (a Virgilian oasis), Little Sparta was also a place one must always-already leave.

III . MIRROR-WRITING

“The Sublime lies buried in things and concepts, always already bursting through the shimmering screen of (mis)representations (the lying mirror) left, right and center. Therefore, topological thought is not for everyone, especially those too lame to stroll (saunter) through dark landscapes of bewilderment and becoming.” --Dr. Prof. Ing. I. M. Avenarius, Bons mots (London: Sub-Verso Press, 2005)

Perhaps it is in present-day documentary film (and ‘mockumentary’ film?) that we see the mark of mirror-writing writ cinematically. Such films as The Ister (2004) suggest that certain forms of topological thought are best transcribed into arts that embody the dual (and dueling) senses of time found in most works of art that transcend mere discursive and/or aesthetic boundaries.

Perhaps here, too, is the origin of Leonardo da Vinci’s mirror-writing (quite literally), and the doubly-inflected ‘nature’ of the off-the-map Mona Lisa, a painting well-known to elicit and prompt the most far-fetching ruminations, Pater’s well-known, neo-cyrenaic ruminations foremost in this lineage of reflections on what is at stake in topologically-inflected works of art and literature (and architecture-plus-architectural-criticism).
	
In photography the issue of inversions, elisions, and irruptions (of the so-called Real Real thing) occur both in the space and frame of the photographic image, insofar as they (photographs) are, according to Vilem Flusser, the first post-industrial artifact, and within photographic criticism, insofar (pace Flusser) there is nothing more critically necessary than a criticism of photography as first and foremost a mechanistic undertaking (productive of ideologies and attendant forms of amnesia built into the apparatus of the camera). It is the criticism of photography today -- and this registers most powerfully within the trajectory of Susan Sontag’s recent re-working of (riffs on) themes from her seminal writings on the production of images of war and suffering -- that signals a topological field within photographic imagery by way of the inversions and implosions associated with what an image does (and who does ‘it’), a similar issue faced now within the explosion of documentary filmmaking circa 2004.

In photography the inverted and blurred image suggests an elective desire to lose one’s senses (bearings) within the topological field of insensate things and within the folds of ‘imagology’ (Milan Kundera’s term for the Baudrillardian state of vacuousness within a culture saturated with simulations -- aesthetic, anti-aesthetic and otherwise). Yet Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) has generated a sub-literature of its own (a criticism of criticism) primarily focused on what moves within ‘documentary’ works such as Salgado’s and/or Magnum-style voyages (from Cartier-Bresson to Josef Koudelka) to the ends of the earth in search of traces of civilizations and cultures either on the brink or over the brink of something ominous (something disturbing). This something disturbing is almost always the (question) mark of the ‘immodern” (immanence brushing up against transcendence), noted most often, and in passing, as the ghosts of pre-modernity ensnared in the on-racing throes of modernity and post-modernity. It is the post-modern photography of Ruff and Struth (the doubting Thomases?), both a product of the Becher’s ‘documentary’ school of photography in Düsseldorf), that brings forward the ineluctable élan of blurred photography (and, in a recent joint Ruff/Houellebecq project, the pornographic potential), after the fact, given that this blurred condition is emblematic of things provocatively ‘out-of-focus’ or things gone awry (for heuristic purposes?). It was the appearance of bits of Ruff’s work in the Summer 2001 MoMA exhibition “Mies in Berlin” (including the blurred image of the rebuilt Barcelona Pavilion on the cover of the exhibition ‘catalogue’) that troubled many (including arch-modernist critic Hal Foster) while simultaneously re-loading certain aspects of Mies’ seminal work suppressed by MoMA over the years, foremost here the erasing of landscape in the archived drawings and the doubled idealizations of the Barr/Johnson project in presenting architectural high modernism in the form of the International Style. Ruff presented beautiful (seductive/ doctored) images of details of Mies’ buildings in a section of the exhibition denoting the re-aestheticizing of Mies’ work then underway in multiple settings (inclusive of the parallel/simultaneous exhibition “Mies in America” at the Whitney).

Mirror-writing is possibly most forcefully addressed in Derrida’s maddeningly circular, elisional writing, and most precisely (and self-reverentially?) in his magisterial essay on Artaud, “To Unsense the Subjectile” (in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud). This latter essay addresses (and undresses) what is effectively (and phenomenally) sometimes clawing and sometimes mewing at the other side of the mirror, a something-or-other pictured in Artaud’s thought as an assault on the subjectile (base/substrate) of painting and drawing (especially Van Gogh’s painting and Artaud’s drawing). This self-same lacerating otherness is brought ‘home’ and delicately teased forth in Jean-Luc Marion’s tentative conclusion to his post-phenomenological trilogy (Reduction and Givenness, Being Given, and In Excess) as the mark of what calls from within experience, through things (and in time), a reduction and burning of apparent metaphysical forms of thought to the ground, and the re-introduction of the pure event (saturated phenomena) by way of a re-visitation (and re-writing) of Kant’s idea of the aesthetic idea (what Marion notes is wrongly ascribed the quality of so-called ‘poor phenomena’, or phenomena ‘poor’ in intuition). Marion takes this near-zero-degree condition and ‘turns’ it on its proverbial head in the form of an evocation of phenomena saturated with intuition (a form of sublime aesthetic experience and radical immanence, bracketing, as always, anything transcendental). Mirror-writing, then, appears as topological thought itself.

IV. PHILOSOPHICAL AESTHETICS

”In a dream I rescued a half-starved, emaciated cat and nursed it back to health. It was a double-long, black cat with a patch of flame-orange on its side. It was as if two black cats had been spliced together with an odd bit of a third, orange cat thrown in for good measure. The orange patch reminded me of a semi-wild tomcat I adopted long ago, a cat that arrived out of nowhere and, later, vanished. He used to sit on the mantle of the fireplace like a Staffordshire china cat. Once restored to health, the stretch-limo style cat was velvety-black, wildly elegant and incredibly beautiful.” Note to my Self (07/17/04)
7/04)
And yet gardens are not quite the issue (although what lies buried within gardens most certainly is). As all ontological (and anti-ontological) arguments proceed from a concept of rupture (and it is this admission that makes Raimund Abraham’s architectural work so astonishing), this arguably ‘metaphysical’ terrain also encompasses and/or inscribes (and re-inscribes) a seemingly archaic territory that is configured (as above) in the faux mathematical formulae of discursive (re-cursive, hermeneutic) systems. To see (or think) one thing requires an ontological breach with everything else (while preserving within the archive of thought, as Derrida preserved, the cryptic sign/cipher of that self-same ‘everything else’ as surplus, Zizek’s ‘indivisible remainder’). To read the world in a grain of sand, therefore, is not merely a stretching of things to the limits (a stretching of things that invariably annoys rationalists and pragmatists); it is, without doubt, the doubling of things.

A possible-impossible Mathesis Universalis is (necessarily) a mythical thing, and yet it exists as a possible-impossible figure of speech and thought within discursive orders. It is, however, only ever found in the Imaginary (and science will never find it as long as science is mired in the ‘autistic’, formalistic silence that ‘science’ specializes in). It is one’s relationship to this Imaginary that determines whether this mythic-thing is Real or Imaginary. As Real it is doubly real (Real-Real, or Irreal). As Imaginary it resides on the proverbial other side of the mirror, and, as an object of circular, often-obscure desire (including discursive desire), IT will remain locked away (as such) until Thought Itself finds the breach in the so-called ‘wall’ of conceptual operations (systematic repressions) that pass as analytical thought, passing through the mirror and into the sign (landscape) of Infinity Doubled (notably the ‘Time’ delineated topologically within the seductive twists and turns of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past) -- the gaze returned.

Therefore, at the tale-end (tail-end) of Eloge de l’amour Godard throws his Brechtian signposts into overdrive, concluding with the ultra-gnomic gesture “Nothing was said”, a proverbial question mark, and a gesture borrowed ‘here’ and ‘now’ (‘now’, the ineluctable mark of the proto-Romantic trope Erlebnis?) to conclude these remarks on Infinity doubled (the sigilistic ‘double-black cat’ denoting the irreal world of dreams, waking and otherwise). For it is in the very nature of things that this sign (the Figure 8 doubled) silences the discursive machinery of thought (the wounds/tears of thought). And it is often by way of sublime scare tactics that such a sign is (re)buried (re-secreted) within so-called things (and systems), whereas what is most Real are things-plus, things plus the echoing gaps between all things (milieux and anti-milieux). The apparent lying mirror of (mis)representations is the all-purpose sign of such scare tactics. In the post-cultural demi-monde of therapeutic and anamorphic projections, subjectivity is spectral (a dybbuk). Such scare tactics are legion (in cinema, literature, art, religion, politics, etcetera), while it is within these self-same, self-inflicted or institutionalized marks of the broken nature of signs (the very idea of the symbol as half the story) that the Way Out appears.

Today, in various disciplines (discourses and/or discursive territories) the Sublime (the double-black cat), once again, approaches (as always) on cat’s paws. This something else (bracketed or reduced within games that name or games that merely circle other games, including architectural games as part and parcel of Wittgensteinian language games) is the figure of the repressed, a figure that prefigures a return of a something otherwise known as philosophical aesthetics (the Figure 8 doubled?). Thus, as Gustav Meyrink disclosed (and concealed), in his faux-expressionist novel The White Dominican, in some possible-impossible synthetical ‘place’ (the Imaginary?), or in some possible-impossible ‘time’ (the Future ‘Now’), Eternity and Infinity are, paradoxically, one and the same thing.  

GK (08/12/04)

POSTSCR(Y)PT

While what passes above (‘there’) may appear below (‘here’) as playing with oneself, it is in the nature of such topological forms of reflection that one finds the marvelous -- the sort of marvelous that passes in the night, under the folds of darkness, a type of mirror-writing. It is self-criticism itself that might restore the subject to health, so to speak, after having plunged far and away, looking for that sprig (tuft) of herb at the bottom of the ‘sea’.

It is categorical that what passes above (mere words) is easily demolished by other words, critical or otherwise. As such, the author admits that playing with oneself may strike the passing reader (perhaps pleasingly) as mere self-indulgence under the cover of scholarship. That said, the author also wishes to point out that playing with oneself is not the same thing as playing with one’s Self.

Finally, then, the author dedicates this essay to that Self which eludes all self-expression and lies in wait (in ambush) for wayfaring souls almost everywhere and nowhere. (3245 words)

This essay is part and parcel of the author’s Anti-Anti-Theory Trilogy: 1/ “Letter to Paolo Bartoloni”; 2/ “Letter to No One”; 3/ “Infinity Doubled: Double-Black Cat” …

The Anti-Anti-Theory Trilogy - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/looking_awry3.html

ENDNOTES

1 - J. Hillis. Miller, Topographies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 296, cited in Paivi Kymäläinen, “Topologies of Becoming: Deferred Presence in Writing”, Space & Culture, Vol 6, No. 3 (August 2003), p. 245 (epigraph)
2 - Jean-Luc Godard, Eloge de l’amour (2001) - This quotation is a paraphrase of a motif that reoccurs throughout Godard’s film.