PAYS DE TENDRE: /S/OMETHING-ELSE

“To live the abolition of time, to live this movement, rapid as ‘lightning,’ by which two instants, infinitely separated, come (little by little although immediately) to encounter each other, joining like two presences that, through the metamorphosis of desire, could identify each other, is to travel the entire extent of the reality of time, and by traveling it, to experience time as space and empty space, that is to say, free of the events that always ordinarily fill it. Pure time, without events, moving vacancy, agitated distance, interior space in the process of becoming, where the ecstasies of time spread out in fascinating simultaneity -- what is all that, then? It is the very time of narrative, the time that is not outside (hors) time, but that is experienced as actually outside (dehors), in space, that imaginary space where art finds and arranges its resources.”* Maurice Blanchot

PRECIS / SKATING ON THIN ICE - Within the swirling narrative of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu may be found the mysterious, sinuous figure of the proverbial Figure 8 (figura serpentina), a sign for/of Infinity and Eternity, at once, or Ourobouros biting (off) his/her own tail. Yet this sign is also the sign of the printed page, of memory (with its inversions, dissociations, dislocations, and falsifications), and of ‘landscape’ in its most archaic sense, the latter most especially when it comes to reside in the literary imagination, leaving behind its impress, so to speak, or its trace. If the Figure 8 represents the simultaneous presentation of both the recto and verso of Time (always capitalized in Proust to signify ideal time), various works of art (music, architecture, cinema, and literature) carry within them this self-same duplicity; that is, the exceptional work of art as icon (passage to somewhere else) carries the signature of both an inner and an outer time. Actual things are transposed in such works to simulacra or virtual ‘landscapes’ (a virtual ‘nature’) situated as a work of art in time, but also moving ‘in and out of time’ by way of inflection, allusion, and metaphor. It is this virtual ‘nature’ that is, in fact, irrepressible -- despite all claims otherwise by types of formal expression and experimentation (forms of avant-garde reduction) that claim to eliminate anything whatsoever not specific to its own purpose, anything extraneous, or anything intertextual. Such formalist assaults on convention indulge in the game of reduction, seriality, and abstraction for reasons specific to their own agenda, first and foremost, temporally reclaiming a suspect ground (their own self-proclaimed autonomy) but actually remaining nonetheless within the charmed, topological space (knot) of figural representation. As such, subsequent appropriations of such figural and gestural forms of expression carry with them (below deck, so to speak), everything left behind. That which was left behind, in turn, is the cause of the haunting of form -- of its famous instability and transitivity -- or the reason why it is all but impossible to escape the return gaze of that which calls from within both things (which are, in fact, complexes or constellations) and representations (which are, after all, forms of lost time). Academic arguments regarding ‘authenticity’ notwithstanding, the call of that which haunts form is the transposed call of that which haunts nature. It is Rousseau whom we should thank for this insight (even if he did not have it as such). Such a concept of nature, however, is further complicated by the attendant fact that such a ‘nature’ has actually nothing at all to do with what passes as the so-called natural world. Instead, what is prefigured in the Figure 8 is also prefigured in the haunting of form. This something that stands behind the haunting of both time and form is, ineluctably, the open secret that subjectivity and its vicissitudes (its modalities) carries within it a call that remains always outside of time and beyond the physical coordinates of what passes for the Real.(1)

I. Le Temps Perdu and the Figure 8

Merci Buttercups - “For the buttercups grew past numbering, in this spot which they had chosen for their games among the grass, standing singly, in couples, in whole companies, yellow as the yolk of eggs, and glowing with an added luster, I felt, because, being powerless to consummate with my palate the pleasure which the sight of them never failed to give, I would let it accumulate as my eyes ranged over their golden expanse, until it became potent enough to produce an effect of absolute, purposeless beauty; and so it had been from my earliest childhood, when from the tow-path I had stretched out my arms towards them before I could even properly spell their charming name -- a name fit for the Prince in some fairy-tale -- immigrants, perhaps, from Asia centuries ago, but naturalised now for ever in the village, satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine and the water’s edge, faithful to their little glimpse of the railway-station, yet keeping nonetheless like some of our old paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the golden East.”(2) --Marcel Proust

Perhaps it is Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (published serially between 1913-1927) that stands as the seminal event (rupture and turning point) in modern literature, not Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), opening a view onto the exceptional landscapes of emotion (a territory written into things and nearly synonymous with paysages moralises, moral landscapes, dating to ‘whenever’) present in works of the imagination with a synchronic, historical ‘nature’ traceable through Proust to another past, a past that must include, in any survey or mapping of such things, both present-day (present-past) manifestations, such as Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (2002) and past-past encounters, such as (and in no particular order), Thoreau’s Walden (1854), not to mention his ‘walks’, which, in turn, cues Herder’s ‘walks’ (in Critical Forests, 1769), leading back (in the spiraling path of reflection) to Rousseau’s ‘walks’ (Reveries, 1782) and ‘idylls’ (Confessions, 1782), which seem to answer (echo) the call of Madeleine de Scudéry’s 17th-century rhetorical promenade through Versailles (La Promenade de Versailles, 1669), and implicating by associative magic innumerable voyages literary and otherwise, here and there, moral and sentimental, metaphorical and merely affected.

Proust’s famous recollections of Combray (a mythicized provincial town based on Illiers, a ‘moveable’ landscape insofar as he placed it in the shifting, unstable place of his febrile imagination, his own carte de tendre), the dual tracts, the frequent walks along Swann’s Way and Guermantes Way, the extraordinary description of “useless beauty” in the passage on buttercups in the latter, are profoundly in-born(e), reloading certain aspects of the nature of topographical (topological) novels and essays, a vague genre that owes as much to Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) as to the Romantics, yet accessing something more delicate and tremulous (even morose) than places expropriated for purely polemical, formalistic, or moralistic reasons.

It is Cavell’s Senses of Walden (1972) that unpacks the intensely anarchic spirit, the proverbial fire-power of Thoreau’s Walden, in that Thoreau has been misappropriated and misread so many times, coming to rest (at last, pathetically) in epigraphs affixed to sentimental natural scenes in all manner of popular media such as Sierra Club calendars, hapless greeting cards, and super-saturated collections of specular, ‘naturalistic’ photography (for example, Eliot Porter), proving (as Cavell’s phenomenological project is disposed to prove) that any possible reading of Walden automatically links backwards and forwards, in time and out of time, to the ultimate ‘ground’ for such ‘nature’ writings, to the internal landscape of the proverbial Figure 8, a figure traced in the mind’s eye on the ice of a frozen Walden Pond (skating on thin ice, then) in the form of Thoreau plumbing its depths, in winter, seeking its true depth (versus its rumored, legendary depth) not so much to debunk myths as to stage something else, a something else that also resides in Walden’s nine bean rows (folded into and echoing within Yeats’ equally misappropriated “Lake Isle of Innisfree”), notably a something else that appears to have a marvelous contingency (actual and factual ‘ground’) that prefigures a second ‘ground’, the place where nature melds with culture and disposes of the last antagonisms associated with the metaphysical rupture between things and ideas.(3)

With Proust’s journey through an already past 19th-century France, through its vanishing modes of self-representation, the passage “Place-Names: The Name” within “Swann’s Way” (1913) is nothing short of sensational. With its enraptured description of the Alleé des Acacias in the Bois de Boulogne, wrapped in the spiraling tendrils of Proust’s prose, the mysterious and affective twists and turns of a completely synthetical landscape (a zoological and botanic ‘parade-ground’) are transposed into an allegorical landscape, its purpose, should such “purposeless beauty” have one, coming to rest (an uneasy rest) in the simple statement, by Proust, that, anyway, “It was Mme Swann whom I wished to see, and I waited for her to go past” (p. 453).

Curious, then, Proust’s self-proclaimed admiration for Stendhal, an author famous for describing landscape in the most perfunctory and impatient manner (see his summary statements regarding the landscape ‘above’ Lake Como, boyhood home of “our hero” Fabrizio), or Proust’s literary recollection that his sole purpose in wanting to visit Parma was based on his being enamored of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1838), a state of agitation ever-present in Proust’s own novel that includes a remarkable description of his anticipation of an Easter trip to Venice and Florence, ending with his becoming so distraught at its prospects, that the family doctor orders the trip canceled, given the impressionable youth’s chronically inflamed nervous state. “I had to be put to bed with a fever so persistent that the doctor declared not only that a visit to Florence and Venice was absolutely out of the question, but that, even when I had completely recovered, I must for at least a year give up all idea of travelling and be kept from anything that was liable to excite me” (p. 427). Needless to say, it is the impending sense of excitation, for cities fused in his mind’s eye with the works of Fra Angelico, Giotto, Giorgione, and Titian, works he has most often ‘met’ in the pages of affected prose associated with the aesthetics movement (the Art for Art’s Sake crowd), that brought on the collapse. This anticipatory exaltation oscillated between simultaneous, dual aspirations (and apprehensions), to visit both the seaside fastnesses of Norman-Gothic Balbec (in Normandy), a singular gothic-Romantic destination (where he imagines falling prey to the call of brooding, wild nature), and Tuscany’s effeminate “city of lilies” (Florence), or La Serenissima (Venice), where he could already see that “the Ponte Vecchio was heaped high with an abundance of hyacinths and anemones, and that the spring sunshine was already tinging the waters of the Grand Canal with so dusky an azure, with emeralds so splendid, that when they washed against the foot of a Titian painting they could vie with it in the richness of their coloring” (p. 425). Balbec, beckoning with its “wild race of fisherman for whom no more than their whales had there been any Middle Ages” (p. 418), stoked Proust’s desire for “storms at sea and for Norman Gothic” (p. 420), for placing himself at “the shores of Hell”, while sunny visions of Italy’s art-soaked ‘shores’ stoked the other side of his nature. Brought on by actual weather, what transpired outside his window, these alternating states delimit the dialectical struggle underway within his soul. Here, as in poetic language par excellence, very real weather invokes internal weather, as the imagination extracts from natural phenomenon its corollary in psychic phenomenon. Julien Gracq’s gothic-surrealist novel Château d’Argol (1938) inhabits this very same ‘landscape’.

And yet the most prosaic of things could prompt in Proust such rapturous outbursts, sending him into a tailspin, including a turn through the pages of a Baedeker or the time-tables of trains leaving Paris: “And for all that the motive force of my exaltation was in longing for aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even more to it than books on aesthetics, and, more again than the guide-books, the railway time-tables” (p. 424). It was, on the other hand, his appetite for a type of disembodied Time (“imaginary Time”, p. 426), the irreal space of literature and art, which sent him invariably off the deep end. For yet a third seduction is interpolated between his dueling desires for antithetically placed places (the wild Atlantic / the serene Mediterranean), this third figure being the operatic siren of the day, ‘Berma’. After floating back and forth between visions of Normandy and Italy, Proust returns to amplify upon his unrequited passion for ‘Berma’, “the sublime artist whose genius Bergotte had proclaimed” (p. 427). His parents will not let him attend the opera, should it incite another episode of nervous exhaustion. Frustratingly, Proust has never actually heard ‘Berma’ sing (and what happens when he finally does is another story). Yet it is the florid pages of ‘Bergotte’ that has attuned him to this wonder, as such writings are also responsible for various and sundry passions he has indulged solely (firstly) in the pages of books. Indeed, bored with the Champs-Elyseés, where he would go in the custody of his nanny Françoise, he admits, “If only Bergotte had described the place in one of his books, I should no doubt have longed to get to know it, like so many things else of which a simulacrum had first found its way into my imagination” (p. 427).

Is the excitable Proust, reigned in repeatedly on doctor’s orders, the model for Nick Cave’s faux-neurotic, burnt-romantic alter ego (musical persona), the variable and volatile anti-hero (anti-heroes) who inhabits the twisted lyrics of his literary songbook? From the earliest post-punk Cave, to the goth Cave, to the more recent, lyrical, yet always neurotic Cave of The Boatman’s Call (1997), No More Shall We Part (2001), and Nocturama (2003), landscape as cartography of nerve and blood reigns supreme, the protagonists of this musical terrain wandering to and fro, following the high, sometimes sonorous, sometimes dissonant arc of the electric violin or skulking along with the low, keel-like thrust of the electric bass, ploughing ahead, never the less, through the visionary, allusive sea of places and place-names, affectations and disaffections, avowals and disavowals, gloom-laden cathedrals and sunny gardens, city streets and haunted waste-places, through saturnine voyages and descents into madness, and, always returning (with hallucinatory precision) ‘home’, where the unhappy wife is yet again rearranging the furniture, or the children are lost below fifteen feet of pure white snow, or the nurse prohibits going out while administering the necessary medication.

II. Synaesthetic Voyages

And if musical signatures (sonorities and dissonances) evoke landscapes, against the higher avocation of all musical formalisms, whose fault is it? Proust expends much ink detailing the awe-inspiring effect of one short musical phrase that captivates Swann in his path to falling in love with Odette (“Swann in Love”), a path that is inaugurated in his very first visit to the Verdurins’ salon, a phrase carried by the violin and echoed by the piano in “the andante of Vinteuil’s sonata for piano and violin” (p. 231). “And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the delicate line of the violin-part, slender and commanding, he had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning to surge upward in plashing waves of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet restless, like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight” (p. 227). This musical phrase returns, interminably, haunting Swann, and undergoing an alchemical fusion with his soul, informing the transformation from miserable rake to happy cuckold that Proust draws out over the course of 109 pages.

If it is romantic expression that is to be blamed here (and yet Chopin has fallen out of favor, already, in the more fashionable salons), it is musical formalism (‘atonality’) and serialism that will attempt to wipe the slate clean in the early 20th century, as it tried (again), to the same effect (that is, its own marginalization), in the form of minimalism in the late 20th century. Proust and Cocteau’s fondness for the proto-serialist compositions of Satie’s (1866-1925) musique d’ameublement (furniture music), in the late 1910s and early 1920s, notwithstanding, it was the twin forces of Stravinsky’s (1882-1971) tonal extravagances, especially with the Ballets Russes (and in particular The Rite of Spring, 1913), and Webern’s (1883-1945) transparent and precise reductions that took music by storm in the early years of musical formalism, Stravinsky avoiding so-called atonality altogether until very late (1951). These at-first expressive innovations and deconstructions (de-centerings / shifts in emphasis), inaugurated with the Second Vienna School (Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern), arrived well after the exquisite post-Romantic indulgences of Mahler (1860-1911), tonalities shot through with dissonance, had waned. Yet who is to blame for the persistence of accidental or intentional mimetic properties in music (the appearance of transposed natural forms) is also a question that resonates wildly on the frontiers of all investigations into musical form and musical ontology (Jankélévitch especially) insofar as formalism is often merely a reaction by the so-called avant-garde to the dull thud of spent forms hitting the ground.

“Who is to blame?” is, of course, a ridiculous question to ask when it amounts to asking the equally ridiculous question “Why is there not nothing?” Schoenberg, in fact, reloaded tonal (expressive) qualities early (actually never quite giving them up), while Webern never looked back and is reckoned the progenitor of mid-to-late 20th-century serialism. The gathering storm  oof atonal music, a vigorous assault on the leftover conventions of 19th-century composition, was, after all, a storm. It came and went, leaving behind a landscape refreshed and a musical landscape reborn, a multivalent landscape that bloomed in unexpected and variegated fashion. Indeed, Satie’s 1917 ballet “Parade” (with Cocteau and Picasso on board, produced by Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes) provided a most peculiar touchstone for the extreme measures taken, then, to demolish decorum and set in motion a Dada-inspired musical revolution. What hides within such experiments is not so much the elimination of the figurative and tropic gestures of classical tonality (And what exactly carries landscape into music?) but a stripping away of certain affective qualities to, in the fashion of the times, perform a type of psychoanalytic purge (shock therapy or surgery) on the perceived knotted and tangled mass of half-unconscious mechanisms buried within musical expression. To this end, not unlike the mixed legacies of the Dadaists and Surrealists, musical expression came to include ironical forms of mechanistic (and chance) encounters with purely contingent forces, a very early danse mécanique. This passage included a type of musique noir, an Expressionist phase (an updated danse macabre), that brought forward various hauntings within music that typically pass in the night. Perhaps it was aleatory music that took up the last traces of the latter, while total serialism (by mid-century) came to express a new quest to produce music that referred only to itself, to the reduced site of the twelve-tone structure left behind by Schoenberg.

Regarding The Rite of Spring, Joan Acocella wrote in The New Yorker (May 7, 2001): "The score of 'The Rite [of Spring]' survived, but the ballet, after nine performances in 1913, was never given again. People remembered it almost with fear. Jacques Rivière wrote that it analyzed human beings down to 'germ layers, zones, circles, placentas.' (Nijinsky said the same thing: 'It is the life of the stones and the trees. There are no human beings in it.') It was hideous, Rivière said, and stupendous: it 'alters the very source of all our aesthetic judgments'" (pp. 94-97). This would seem to confirm that at that time (1913) the idea of Pascal’s (le génie français) discours naturel was very, very much alive. This red thread running through more or less all of Pascal’s writings on the nature of subjectivity is dealt with in Louis Marin’s extraordinary essay "On the Sublime, Infinity, Je Ne Sais Quoi", in A New History of French Literature, edited by Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Fast forward, then, to June 6, 2004 and the last episode (“All Due Respect”) of the next to last season for HBO’s smash hit series The Sopranos. Yet first get modestly intoxicated (I recommend the blood-red wine, Merlot) and listen to Van Morrison’s strange musical voyage What’s Wrong With This Picture (2003). First of all, and obviously, there is no picture anywhere on or in the CD. It is a rhetorical question, pure provocation, as the music here is not only a heartfelt tribute to rhythm-and-blues, jazz, and funk,  Morrison’s very own ‘wilderness’ (to which he returns often), but also a massive swipe at the arrogance of rock-and-roll and pop. The critics have lined up to carp that Morrison carps too often about the perceived misfortunes of his own fame. Indeed, amidst the exuberant refrains of this musical tsunami are sarcastic and utterly nasty things aimed at the celebrity-obsessed world of popular music. But that is hardly the point. Morrison is pointing to the ‘wilderness’ again, musically that is, while sounding the old battle cry of emotionally charged, and topologically inflected, pure musical form. The lyrics hardly matter.

Forward to June 6, then, and The Sopranos. Gliding in and out of the one-hour program is Van Morrison’s 1970 song “Glad Tidings”, “And we’ll send you glad tidings from New York / Open up your eyes so you may see / Ask you not to read between the lines / Hope that you will come in right on time …”(4) As Tony Soprano roams in his personal, hellish version of gloaming (looking terribly disheveled) -- that is, dealing with the fallout of onrushing gang warfare -- Morrison’s song appears and disappears, returning at the end with the credits. The rival Brooklyn mobsters, seeking revenge for various heinous crimes perpetrated by the Soprano-led gang, is arrested en masse at the end of this year’s installments in a serial, rancid and sordid tale. Needless to say, the HBO appropriation of this song is totally absurd yet also weirdly apropos of the moment -- Tony Soprano’s reprieve. Morrison’s song is famously without any precise content. It is a mesmeric bit of lyrical nothingness, a peculiar formalist work referring only to itself (its own repressed significance). Folded into an episode of The Sopranos it takes on a quite different nature, mirroring a very different landscape. It recalls (if memory does not desert me) the last episode of The Prisoner (1967-68), where the Marseillaise-charged Beatles tune “All You Need is Love” (1967) is woven into the closing scene of the prisoner (‘Number 6’) escaping through a kaleidoscopic tunnel to freedom. In the case of the appropriation of Van Morrison’s song, we have both the vulgar theft of something formerly extraordinary for extraordinarily banal purposes (intentionally banal purposes). The song registers in this context only by suppressing various aspects of its singular nature. Yet it worked marvelously as a signature gesture rounding out the intent of the concluding episode of this arguably brilliant (if not deranged) series. In a word, it delivered what Morrison’s wholly vague song always withheld. Morrison’s song announced the imminent arrival, “Glad Tidings”, of an unnamed surprise. Used here, it is tied to the delivery of the finale, the reprieve. That is, the song and the producers wiped clean the slate for Tony Soprano, giving him a new lease on life, and the series a new season (a new chance) in which to re-complicate life for the mobsters idolized in the looking-glass of the tele-visual spectacle. Never fear, the bloodbath will return next season.

Yet someone at HBO is doing some serious research insofar as the conflation of this one song with this one episode is truly stunning. We will know that this is in fact the case, when and if Gillian Welch shows up covering the credits for HBO’s latest smash hit series Dead Wood, a grisly and pornographic vision of the Wild West that owes more to Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) than anyone at HBO would probably like to admit. That said, one has to wonder if Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) had any influence on the stereotyped, stylized personae of the weirdest of the weird mobsters in The Sopranos. The post-modern disease, endless semiosis, goes on. HBO is merely more adroit than the hapless networks at mining its artistic potential. Reality television is one thing, Irreal television is another.

It is the art of appropriation that feeds these noir-ish series and much of contemporary cinema. Whereas it is Tarantino’s films that seem to shout most loudly “Here is cinematic formalism”, Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier (for example) are ultimately after something else, even if both seem to owe something to the art films of Andy Warhol. These latter two filmmakers are genre-bending auteurs, as one might also say of Tarantino. What distinguishes Jarmusch and von Trier, however, from Tarantino and faux auteurs is the fact that the faux auteur is complicit in the production of spectacle not as anti-spectacle but as art, which is part and parcel of the spectacle of the post-modern condition (abject nihilism). That said, the cinematic works of Jarmusch, von Trier, and others (Greenaway, Wenders, and Kaurismäki) reside in an entirely different landscape. This other landscape is a landscape of affects, versus effects. It has been said that the effect produces the affect. Yet it is also possible to go directly to the land of affects (pays de tendre), as Proust does with The Remembrance of Things Past, and as certain forms of musical expression do by transcending the mere obsession with syntactical games (syntactical operations without metaphorical affects). Curiously, it is Philip Glass’ score for Martin Scorsese’s Kundun (1997) that violates Glass’ own serial and minimalist principles (as von Trier often violates the principles of Dogma, his own minimalist manifesto), principles that were no doubt set aside because a film score is first and foremost an affective landscape.

We arrive ‘home’, then, where no doubt the nurse has our medication ready and the furniture has been rearranged again. This ‘home’, to which we are always returning anyway (just as the ‘home’ in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, 1972), has little if anything to do with anything prosaic, anything nominally singular, or anything vaguely resembling a physical or literal geography. It represents, instead, the vast, irrepressible, intertextual, and intersubjective ‘nature’ of things-not-in-themselves (things held in tension, things cantilevering into and through time, contra Kant), things suspended in representational milieux, and a type of associative (poetical) magic which is embedded within the lacerating, gestural qualities of both figurative art and certain kinds of abstract art, most especially Abstract Expressionism, which, in turn, is why the reductive ravages of 1960s Minimalism was primarily a reaction to/against the expressive language of the latter.

“Don’t it gratify when you see it materialize / Right in front of your eyes / That surprise / La, la, la, la … / And they’ll lay you down low and easy”

Here, then, finally, returns the Figure 8, the topological knot and moebius strip inhabiting all of Van Morrison’s music, a figure that circles (twists) back upon itself seemingly prefiguring the arrival of something else, the annunciation of Self to itself.(5) And if this self-annunciation oddly registers with Lévinas’ attempts to prefigure the annunciation of the always absent ‘Other’, make no mistake, it is because in the folds of Time (various times) this ‘Other’ arrives through its very own annunciation at the gates of the self as that nominal ‘self’ dissolves into something else. Lévinas’ musings in this regard dovetail with Derrida’s musings on the death of the subject (the death of the subject as object, as singular thing). In Van Morrison’s music, throughout nearly the entire output of his musical career, he is always at the edge of the world (of things) looking both backwards and forwards (simultaneously) at himself, announcing himself. The magisterial, archaic sweep of “Ancient Highway” (1995) is exactly of this ‘nature’. It is for this reason that the anticipatory nature of his best (and his most gnomic) work signals the self as mirror, a return to Lacan’s Mirror Stage (if you wish), but only in the sense that the self that announces itself resides beyond the mirror in a landscape of affective forms and figures, in a pays de tendre that is buried at the very foot (foundation) of the world, in the Imaginary, that realm which Lacan needlessly pillories (as phantasmatic) and which psychoanalysis in general has grossly misunderstood (grossly disfigured).(6) It is the Imaginary (the origin of the virtual) that subtends all possible chords, a geometry of another kind which resides outside of formalist expression but which is accessed by formalist expression, even the most reductive forms of formalist expression, whether or not such expressions admit to this fundamental mystery or not. Therefore, the irreducible pays de tendre, situated ‘below’ everything else, is also (and always) the something else prefigured in everything else, an ‘above’, ‘beyond’, and ‘over there’.

Gavin Keeney (Summer Solstice - 06/21/04)
Re-edited 10/16/04

ENDNOTES

*Maurice Blanchot, “The Experience of Proust” (pp. 11-24), The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 13
1 - “The invisible gives relief to the visible as one gives a title and a fief [territory] -- in order to ennoble. From this the first paradox of perspective must be considered before every painting: the visible increases in direct proportion to the invisible. The more the invisible is increased, the more the visible is deepened.” Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 5. In La Croisée du visible (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1991) Marion circles and re-circles the phenomenal qualities associated with the haunting (or return gaze) of certain exceptional works of art, privileging painting, which he concludes constitute the “stigmata of the invisible”. It is probably not a coincidence, then, that Marion’s concept of iconicity privileges what Lacan denotes as a dangerous ‘psychic’ knot where the Real might irrupt -- a knot at the intersection of the Symbolic and the Imaginary axes of his system. This leads toward a strange convergence of the two nominally antithetical systems. Marion utilizes the concept of the gaze of the icon to illustrate how two gazes meet, how one calls to the other, and the other responds, whereas Lacan sees in the parallel figure of his system -- the intersection of two subjective structures -- the threat of rupture within subjectivity itself. The two points of view are not so far apart in the sense of what is lost. In both cases, what is lost also represents a significant gain for subjectivity insofar as what is gained is an expanded horizon (an expanded time) for Being. This encounter is an encounter with the Sublime (what Marion renames saturated phenomenon). Going further, in Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), first published as Etant donné: Essai d’une phénoménology de la donation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), Marion unveils, while not quite exposing, what is ultimately at stake in the call and response he describes regarding saturated phenomenon. Namely, buried in the notes, one finds the following extract from Rousseau’s Emile (1762), “Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal and celestial voice … If [this guide] speaks to all hearts, then why are there so few of them who hear it? Well, this is because it speaks to us in nature’s language, which everything has made us forget … It no longer speaks to us. It no longer responds to us. And after such a long contempt for it, to recall it costs as much as banishing it did” (italics added, p. 373). Rousseau does not mean to say (as Marion does not mean to say) that nature is a language per se. What Rousseau does say (write) is that ‘nature’ is a language utilized by our “immortal” conscience to speak to us -- it calls to us for this very purpose, and it haunts us nonetheless when we have ceased listening for it. Utilizing Lacan’s triadic structure for subjectivity (the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real), imagine three overlapping circles in which the lozenge formed by the intersection, and the central point (the ‘I’, the self), represent subjectivity. Superimposing all three circles (assuming, in an abstract manner, that they are the same size), one arrives at a singular image of cosmogonic ‘nature’ (‘cosmogonic eros’, the World, and the /S/elf, ipseity and alterity dissolved in a synthetic, perhaps originary unity). It is this ‘nature’ that ultimately haunts subjectivity. Dissolving the circumference of the circle, then, one arrives at /S/ome-thing Else, a something else (synthesis and singular mark of the Absolute) that signifies everything else. There appears, in this last image (a mere speck floating in boundless space) an almost Vedic image of timeless (universal) homogeneity, canceling temporal heterogeneity perhaps (within its call), and it is for this reason that any investigation of literatures tracing the Figure 8 (New England Transcendentalism, German Romanticism, Symbolism, and Expressionism) must also take into account encounters with Vedic and/or vedic-derived literatures. Meyrink, for exampple, has been called a ‘buddhist’. While Tagore, more or less a symbolist, has also remained more or less inassimilable, because his lyrical works inhabit a visionary field irreducible to any recognizable contingent terrain, various and sundry artistic and literary adventures assembled under the rubric ‘Symbolism’ (inclusive of Rilke, but perhaps more tellingly Alexandr Blok) trace the self-same call by way of so-called Orphism, a peculiar version of the call reaching back (figuratively) to the echoing shores of Asia Minor. In ‘sailing to Byzantium’, with Yeats, what else is one doing but returning, as it were, to the outer edges of Europe, plunging into a seemingly archaic world to offset the perceived loss of depth in the overly-intellectualized and de-natured Symbolic of ‘the West’. If in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky one finds Spirit invariably represented as falling rain (Mirror), or flowing water (Stalker and Nostalghia), it is in part due to the necessity of outfoxing the Soviet censors, while also proving (categorically and cinematically) that ‘nature’ indeed speaks a mostly sublime language through inference and affect versus a lingua franca (patois) of mere material (empirical) facts and figures. If nature speaks of Spirit, it speaks (reflects) the human spirit; thus the present-day obsession with radical contingency (the human condition per se).  Jacques-Alain Miller, official keeper of the Lacanian flame, admits, in laying out the present-day coordinates of the Imaginary/Symbolic analytic, that although the Other (the “plus one”, the absent Father, and/or the all-purpose dybbuk of Lacanian psychoanalytical theory) does not exist, its place (“The Names-of-the-Father”) in the structure of subjectivity is nonetheless required. In the postmodern landscape (contemporary “civilization”), of which the US (or that which Miller denotes as “United Symptoms”) is the exemplar, the Other that does not exist is deployed, instead, horizontally and takes up residence in postmodern subjectivity as the everyday spectacle of symptoms covering this Absence. He claims, therefore, that in the present era the Imaginary and the Symbolic have moved much closer together than, say, since Freud and the Victorian era (which only ended with the end of WWI). These symptoms are essentially formerly forbidden pleasures, and, collectively, signal an elective landscape of self-consciously constructed neuroses. In bidding the postmodern subject to enjoy his/her symptoms, Lacan (and Miller) are endorsing the substitution of semblants of the Other for its previously, wholly spectral ‘nature’, in other words to fill in this absence with whatever titillating something you might have at hand. See James Mellard’s review of Almanac of Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic Stories after Freud and Lacan, edited by Ruth Golan, Gabriel Dahan, Shlomo Lieber, and Rivka Warshawsky (Tel Aviv: Groupe Israelienne de l'Ecole Européene, 1998), in Style (1998). The above gloss of the postmodern miasma is derived from Mellard’s review, which privileges the contribution of Jacques-Alain Miller to the Almanac, since, and after all, Miller is the heir apparent to the Lacanian school of post-Freudian mischief. It is no doubt instructive that Slovenian-Lacanian magus Slavoj Zizek has, since 1998, considerably altered his tune regarding the pleasurable nature of the collective neurosis surrounding the loss of the figure of the Other (the Figure 8), resituating within his own analytic the spectral something else (“plus one”) previously denoted as the Universal. See Note 6, below.
2 - Marcel Proust, “Swann’s Way”, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1, Pléiade edition, trans. C K Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1982), p. 183. Proust’s 4,000+-page novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, in its various incarnations, has been taken up by various interpretive communities for various reasons, not the least of which is its exemplary deployment of various forms of time and various forms of space. See: George Poulet, L’espace proustien (Paris: Gallimard, 1982); Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); Antoine Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989); Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972); Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970); Julia Kristeva, Le temps sensible: Proust et l'expérience littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venire (Paris: Gallimard, 1959); and Samuel Beckett, Proust (London: Chatto & Windus, 1931). The definitive edition of A la recherche du temps perdu appeared in 1954, published by Gallimard. This edition is the foundation for the three-volume English translation published in 1982 by Vintage.
3 - Perhaps immediately in front of, so to speak, but on the way to ‘wilderness’ is the neo-classical fête (and fête champêtre), a theatrical and musical romp (often with fireworks) usually staged just off-stage, as such things were staged at Versailles in the so-called ‘wildernesses’ constructed by Le Nôtre, areas enclosed by treillage and/or tall hedges and used for temporal amusements of court. These places at Versailles, in turn, are answered by a very different ‘wilderness’ in the anti-Cartesian, ‘English-style’ gardens and estates that members of the enlightened aristocracy in France built in the run up to the Revolution. The most famous, Ermenonville, where Rousseau spent his last days, has been left to more or less rot in the ensuing years, while the baroque gardens of the French-style have been beautifully maintained and/or restored over the centuries. The oddest of these mnemonic ‘wildernesses’, however, is the Desert de Retz, not far from Versailles, a type of intentionally deranged landscape (the word ‘desert’ referring to a place set aside) composed of irregular masses of vegetation and faux ruins and follies, one of which (the monstrous, ‘de-capitated’ column) served as the residence for the eccentric aristocratic owner, Monsieur de Monville, a place frequented (later) by the Surrealists, when it was a double ruin, and a place recently (in the 1990s) cleaned up and ‘restored’. Roland Joffe’s film Vatel (2000), a cinematic-culinary feast, is exquisite for its depictions of the era of the Sun King, as it is for its depictions of the fêtes held in the gardens of noble estates. This film was shot (in part) at Chantilly, André Le Nôtre’s self-proclaimed ‘favorite project’. Regarding the ‘nature’ implicit and ‘explicit’ to Versailles, see Allen S. Weiss’ Mirrors of Infinity (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995).
4 - Van Morrison, “Glad Tidings” (Caledonia Soul Music/ WB Music Corp, 1970). See the author’s “Time-Traveling with Van Morrison” @ http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/ancient_highway.html ...
5 - Regarding the ‘Figure 8’, as deployed herein, the number 8 is usually seen to be a metonym (if not symbol or icon, even) for Infinity (the concept of Infinity being a particularly potent example, cited often, of an encounter within thought with the Sublime). It is Gustav Meyrink’s genre-busting, nominally Expressionist novel The White Dominican (1921) that reveals a secret regarding this figure insofar as that novel seems to do one thing while doing another. Anyway, what Meyrink discloses, in the course of his somewhat bizarre story, is that at some level or someplace (a place which he ‘properly’ leaves to the imagination of the reader to provide), the figure of Infinity and the figure of Eternity become one and the same figure. And yet the place where this insight finally unfolds is the rooftop of the protagonist’s ancestral house, a house that is progressively closed off (lower floors abandoned) as successive generations come to live there. Needless to say, the lower storeys of this house are haunted by the shades of his ancestors. And there are dueling landscapes here, one which he visits in his dreams and the other in which he lives and toils, playing out his fate (following the tugs and pulls of Meyrink, the puppet-master).
6 - Lacan’s obsession with the moebius strip seems to signal a riddle wrapped within an enigma; namely, that somewhere from within the twists and turns of his own Freudian-derived system echoes of an irresolvable conundrum are to be heard. It is this conundrum that, arguably, is taken up by the late Lacanians, Slavoj Zizek included, and the mischievous forms of cultural criticism generated utilizing Lacan’s triadic system based on the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real (the “Borromean knot of subjectivity”). Of the latter, suffice to say, the real Real is represented as something that can only be approached through a type of breakdown in the consciousness of the subject (the ego), as it is never actually experienced except as rupture. The approach of irruptions of the Real, then, take on phantasmatic qualities as these impending episodes are dealt with in the Imaginary, or re-situated, after the fact, in the Symbolic. The Symbolic seems to be roughly equivalent, in Lacanian exegesis, with the so-called world; that is, the world as a structured system of mutually agreed upon (communally established) forms (discourses) that provide a nominal residence for personal and collective identity. Julia Kristeva’s Lacanian-inspired work, most especially Histoires d’amour (1983), reaches back to pre-modern forms of subjectivity (embedded in literary and allegorical literatures) to trace forward the emergent lines of modern subjectivity, placing particular emphasis on the transformational and lyrical gestures found within the wildly indeterminate landscapes of medieval romances. Zizek’s hyper-charged critiques of contemporary culture use film and other masked (and mass) symptoms of the present-day collective psychosis to illustrate the manner in which both phantasmatic (neurotic and imaginary) works of high and low art and abstract (empty) gestures of academic formalisms spread throughout the representational structure of ‘the world’ to both divert and channel our abject alienation with things and our willful, voracious despoliation of the very ‘ground beneath our feet’; that is, how it comes to pass that we disfigure the speculative ontological ground marking the site of our Being and transpose it into the unreal and surreal ground of the spectral ‘the Big Other’, ‘the Real’ and ‘the Symbolic’ as complex (and by implication convert a possible ground to a ‘nature’ that is, after all, a very thin filmic membrane stretched taut over an existential void, or the traumatic relationship modern subjectivity has formed with the Imaginary). It is, however, his political writing (alongside that of Alain Badiou) that parts way with merely describing the spectacle (the symptoms, which he suggests we ‘enjoy’) and prescribes something else. For Zizek, this something else is not a sublime aesthetics (as one might say was the ultimate goal of post-structuralism) but a rapprochement with aspects of the discredited Absolute (Synthesis), a ‘medieval’ romance of the Rose (if not the Grail), if there ever was one, and yet, with Zizek (and Badiou), a quest for Truth in an age when The Big Lie has found purchase in nearly every form of contingent expression.

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Last Rites: “M. de Lemarck distinguished between nature and life. In his eyes, nature was stone and ash, a granite tomb, death. Life came into play only as a strange and singularly productive accident, a prolonged struggle with here or there more or less balance or success, but always finally defeated in the end; cold motionlessness reigned afterwards as before.” --Charles Sainte-Beuve, Volupté (1834), cited in Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu”, Grey Room 03 (Spring 2001), p. 30 (note 12) / “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.” --J.H. 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)

“Milieu and Anti-Milieu”, http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/milieu.html