Allocution

1

Even the most studiously factual account of the past survives nothing but the future it could not predict.[1] Were this survival to give the present moment more than a nod of obedient self-justification, it might risk revealing the significance of the loss that inspires every desire to remember. This loss that animates memory and history evokes not merely a by-gone yet mentally retrievable element from the depository of time. It indicates quite on the contrary a structural and therefore causal mechanism of time itself.

Neither memory nor history persists without the images wittingly or unwittingly created to distill the indeterminate vagaries of lived experience. These vagaries however fail to foist on experience a uniform indeterminacy. The image never abides the cultivated fantasy of a wild but unified chaos proudly elevated into civil order.[2] Experience registers by image what can enter and pass through the chronicle of a life, whether individual or collective, whether by reverie or documentation, but in the same stroke expels what that chronicle cannot absorb.[3]

The incoherent element in experience therefore lives not outside, naively independent of the coherent image but operates at the center of the image’s inner logic. In this sense, any image of the past, like any image as such, is already a defense against its own beyond. That is, the image defends against its very condition of possibility.

2

The image produced in time produces in its wake a hole in the fabric of reality commensurate with what the image seizes on to depict.[4] This hole, which irreconcilably divides the portrait and the portrayed, opens a vacuum that liberates reality from a self-identical fate and delivers lived experience to the polysemy of the interpretable. But the liberatory freedom to interpret, despite its declared independence from the tyranny of its object, submits the shyly gloating interpreter to a master of another order.

For the meaning attributed to any image derives from the retroactively specifiable array of vantage points refused by the singularity of the image. This differential system into which the interpreter projects the image provides the archive of absent alternatives on which the image comes to depend for its identity. The archive, as system, itself forms an image that gives to an interpreter the de jure guarantee of producible meaning. It licenses the interpreter with a right of inspection, a power to select and analyze, and a pleasure to undress a meaning.

This archive, whose virtual repertory forms the reputed weight of history or burden of memory – in a word, the context – organizes the production of an active meaning but does not activate the time of that meaning’s production.[5]

3

In other words, every image does more than obsequiously bear out the authority of the system that certifies its interpretive license.The dynamism of the image springs from the transferential field of the archive that guarantees de facto nothing but a lapse. In its irresistible failure to reclaim the living existence of the past, the image as proxy consecrates its object as absent, as missing, as lost and thereby mobilizes the desire to recover it. This desire unfurls a time punctuated by images that fail and fail again, each of which produces a hole that calls for the production of another image. The past thus lives on in perpetual and productive absentia to the precise extent that the image does not capture it. For the trace of the living persists in the lapse where the image never imagines itself. An image gained is an image lost until the impossible condition that gives birth to it rises to the surface to reveal the obstacle to which its coherence owes an indispensable debt.

Where lived experience depends on the image, if only as an extended daydream, the routine passage of time elides the gap underlying the image that propels lived experience forward. Involuntary memory, by stark contrast, abruptly reopens the elision by intervening in a quotidian moment. Whether it is felt as a joyous or disturbing repetition, the memory interrupts the present moment with the hole that supports its guiding pedestrian image.[6] The trace of a lost existence that is irretrievably withheld in and by the image comes urgently to the fore in a reverse time lapse.[7] Memory that is otherwise encountered as a willfully retrieved experience gives way to an implosion of time itself.[8] The present moment is blown open by a second image, both familiar and uninterpretable, such that the moment of memory is encountered as the hole of this other image, that is, the image as hole.

If the optogram of a dead hare requires the tender, private explanations of a docent, it is because the image is already hors champ, out-of-frame.[9] In the Renaissance triumph of perspective, all lines converge at a vanishing point. But what vanishes is not the element receding at the horizon so much as it is an eye precisely inscribed in the scene as missing. The lines meet in the depth of field but mark the point of a void on the surface in the very opposite direction. The image therefore cannot be a mental tattoo etched in the eye for the edification of the homunculus within us all.[10] The image is primarily not even mental, neither perceptual nor internal, but a projection coming back to the onlooker from the archive’s future.

4

The domain of the image is a transferential field that draws out time and drives the present to anticipate the future and retroactively form the past.[11] No one measures the value of the past, or the future for that matter, except from the unbudgeable position of the present. Thanks to the image, however, the present is already absent from itself.[12] In order to distinguish the present moment from its fleeting passage and bring into focus the sensuous duration of time that one enjoys and endures as lived experience, the present must be synchronized with itself.[13] The simplest act of figure drawing aligns the time of observation with the time of pictorial production. The decisive moment in photography transforms chronos (empty time) into kairos (the fulfillment of time) by synchronizing the stance of the photographer with a picture hidden within time.[14]

When one temporality is made to trace, direct, punctuate, or otherwise complement another, the synchronized ensemble generates the very intervals across which time can develop. From this synchresis, a burgeoning empathy between subject and object can emerge that, at its most vital, yields an irreducible and variable flux of becoming within a heterogeneous time.[15] When we are told it is the secret to happiness, this flow holds out the hope of a chronic pleasure that will unify, stabilize, and domesticate the vagaries, excesses, and internal short-circuits of enjoyment and fix the sensorium in the experiential moment. In psychoanalytic parlance, the name for this regulatory mechanism, or pleasure principle, that keeps one firmly rooted in the reality at hand is the phantasm or fantasy.[16]

Inside this flow, however, the distinguishable encounter with art magnifies appearance as such and therefore its distance from reality, whether that reality is virtual or actual. The work of art overlaps with the absence in the present but endeavors to stretch open that absence in time. Time-based art poses a special problem for synchronization, if the audience can’t clap along. Beyond the time architecture of cinema, one enters an open video art gallery always at the wrong moment. Imagine the transmission of an artwork from Mars to Earth and an eager docent ready on this end to interpret and send back a statement.[17] We know the dilemma whenever the skype connection breaks. But in the case of art, we are not just waiting here, nor are they, whoever sent the artwork, over there. This hypersynchronized interval is precisely the moment of art.

5

The first lesson we have to learn from contemporary art is that every image is already appropriated. That is, the image is intrinsically taken out of context. Neither the factual nor the semiotic can ultimately claim eminent domain to restore its inherently lost integrity. Context is nothing more than the name for the structural hole in the image, whose very emptiness contains the living substance of its beholder.

If art is to play any radical role in mobilizing “historical memory” beyond the misleading oxymoron the phrase embodies, it must depart from even the most provocative gesture of recontextualization. For the brilliant prank of détournement quickly decays into sales talk. The recontextualization it achieves produces the very récupération that the rebel pins on his enemies. The art of appropriation is best precisely where it fails to recontextualize. The past does not need to be reinterpreted. The past needs to be blown open, or revealed as already agape, in order to give the status of reality to the specific indeterminacy and multiplicity underlying the historical and experiential present. If art is capable of resynchronizing the past with itself, it must be in the name of this flow of canceled experience.

One glimpses the breaking point of the present moment not in a summary image that captures the fulfillment of a time or the triumph of a will but when the hole within the present moment suddenly overlaps with the hole in the image of the past. If the imaginative act of the artist is to galvanize the irrevocable imagination to which the image is an unceasing testament, the act must draw out a stake from the densely textured emptiness of the hole and adorn the image that it repeats and thereby inflects with the beauty of this originary feature. The viewer is thus asked to take a walk on the backside of fantasy.[18] If art is to distinguish itself from and within the image, it will do so only by allying its project with the invisible, inaudible, and inarticulate element – in short, the senselessness – that is both the root and product of the image. Art and its reception will then pursue the paradoxical imperative of an “involuntary history.”

Peter Freund 2017

Notes:

1  The apparently incorrect verb form in this sentence should be forgiven for forming the correct conceptual nuance.

2  Constructivist and perceptualist alike share the premise of a uniform a priori indeterminacy that is, mythology notwithstanding, retroactively unified as “nature,” “noise,” “chaos,” etc. The notion of “multiplicity” in Bergson and later in Deleuze endeavors to capture this irreducible quality of an indeterminate substrate.

3  “Perhaps the special achievement of shock defense may be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at the cost of the integrity of its contents. This would be a peak achievement of the intellect; it would turn the incident into a moment that has been lived (Erlebnis)” (Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”).

4  “()Hole complex attests to the confusion between solid and void. Every activity happening on the solid part increases the degree of convolution and entanglement on the holey side of the composition...” (Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials).

5  For Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. For Henri Bergson, the leftover of what memory cannot grasp is its burden.

6  The olfactory and other sensory triggers in the Proustian moment implies that the image cannot strictly be limited to the visual.

7  The past as lost object reminds us that the so-called withdrawn or withheld character of the speculative object in contemporary philosophy (OOO) appears to have no way to account for the dynamism of its beloved remainder.

8  The Proustian mémoire involontaire stresses the expansive, erotic dimension of this implosion that in traumatic memory stresses its erasive dimension.

9  A blended reference to Wilhelm Kühne, Joseph Beuys, and Rabih Mroué.

10  When ruminating on “mental imagery,” psychologists who aspire to philosophical rigor challenge the little master running the picture show inside, the humunculus. In psychoanalytic terms, this homunculus is the ego.

11  The triangulation at the heart of the Rorschach effect should not be underestimated. The subject faces the inkblot, the archive, and the solicitous prompter.

12  To grasp this absence, we need only consult the failed ambition of killing time. Such a death wish gives but vain hope to the prospect of warding off this absence. Even the so-called “couch potato,” allegedly stabilized before the television, yields a gap that inspires the consumption of another empty substance: popcorn.

13  The Bergsonian durée conflates the irreducible with the unmediated. The synthesis requires the production of an image of time that can transcend the discrete moments that make up succession. Just as the external course of serially juxtaposed pictures cannot explain the cinematic effect of a motion picture, so too the unfolding of lived experience cannot be reduced to the concatenation of discrete images that traverse time. Nonetheless the intensity of the unfolding present moment expresses the image par excellence. Translated into its spatial or extensive constituents, lived experience synthesizes the sensible image: pictures, words, sounds, smells, tastes, and so forth that become invisible, silent, proximate, vibrant and indifferent in the coalescence of the intensive present moment.

14  Further examples abound: The listener snaps her fingers to the pulse of the music, while choreography grafts movement onto the time of music. In the so-called “mirror stage” of psychoanalytic lore, the mirroring image that launches the human subject synchronizes the mimicry of the reflective doppelgänger and the ongoing drive to overcome its difference. The horological impulse is less chronometric than imagistic: In function, the clock first and foremost presents a motion picture of the diurnal passage. In prosody, rhyme and meter fold back on themselves the linear flow of words in order to synchronize language with itself.

15  Synchresis, a neologism coined by Michel Chion that merges the ideas of synthesis and synchronism, refers to the ensemble or montage effect of coupling moving image and sound. The use of the term here suggests an inclusive but broader application.

16  Fantasy presents the very condition of possibility for the factual.

17  I thank James Denison for an inspired variation of the anecdote.

18  While a distinction between psychoanalytic and artistic practice should be rigorously upheld, a distinct resonance can be found here. In describing the “traversal of fantasy” (aka “crossing of the phantasm”), which marks the end of analysis in Lacanian practice, Jacques-Alain Miller beautifully states: “...if Lacan talks about the ‘crossing of the fantasm,’ it is in order not to talk about the ‘lifting or disappearance of the fantasm.’ In the case of the fantasm, the question is rather, mostly, to see what is behind, which is difficult, because there is nothing behind. Nonetheless, this is a nothing that can take various guises, and the crossing of the fantasm amounts to taking a walk on the side of those nothings. There is nothing better, even for one’s health, than to take a walk on the side of nothing, but I should also confess that nothing forces one to do so.” (“Two Clinical Dimensions: Symptom and Fantasm” in The Symptom 11 [Spring 2011].)

Peter Freund

Source: https://www.peterfreund.art/writings-1