Time, Art & Eros Time-rebels. Rome, 3 september 2006 By Joke J. Hermsen
`I begin
now to forget; I begin to doubt the fixity of tables, the reality of
here and now¼ And now I ask: who am I? I have been talking of
bernard, neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am
I one and disticnt. There is no division between me and them. As I talked
I felt I am you. This identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome.
(...) Now, obviously
the character in this fragment is looking feverishly for another time,
another consciousness, another way of being. What could that mean? And:
what’s in fact the matter with time, in this time & age? The
more time-saving machines we have developed dring the last 100 years,
the less time we seem to have. The quicker we can go from A to B, the
less time we have left to spend some quiet moments in B. The Western
world has started a race against time, and time itself has become our
greatest ennemy. Time has become something that should be fully controlled,
utilized, made the most of, every tiny minute of it, there really is
no more time to lose, while every lost hour seems to be an assault on
our economy, productivity, even on our identity. Moreover, the traces
time have left on us, should be wiped out immediatly. There is hardly
any respect left for the passage, the expiration of time, for elderness;
young and new have the future. Which ofcourse is good for the economy;
the pharmaceutic and beauty industries make a fortune out of this fear
of time. As if we no longer wish to be remembered of time itself. As
if we no longer relate to our own time, but are controlled completely
by a socio-economic time-regime. What I will try to show here today is that there are at least two-dimensions. The time of society, of lineairity, of history, of economy and law, and a dimension of time which is far more difficult to describe, since it expresses something of our most singular subjectivity. What I will try to do, is in fact nothing more and nothing less then another recherche du temps perdu. That there does exist such an other dimension of time, is easy to prove. Hardly anyone experiences time the same as the other. What seems to be endlessly long for one, can be experienced as quickly over for an other. Let us therefore examine more closely these two layers of time, which correspond, in my view, to two layers of subjectivity. There are
escape-routes from time as the Big Brother of western society. There are of course many more literary examples of the quest of internal time, or of the recherche du temps perdu. Proust ofcourse, as he wrote: `from ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown.' For Proust, writing takes us into the depths of the self, writing is a possibilty to rediscover internal time, the lost time, which is not only the time past, but much more then that. `A moment of the past, did I say? Was it not perhaps very much more; something that, common both to the past and to the present, is much more essential than either of them?' This coming together of past and present, as Genevieve Lloyd points out, is also a coming together of perception and imagination. It allows the mind to imagine what is already present for a moment brief as a flash of lightning - what normally it never apprehends: a fragment of time in the pure state. Turning away from world to self, spiritualizing things by transforming them into their internal non-material equivalents is cenyral to Proust idea of art. Things, as soon as we have perceived them, are transformed intto `something of the same nature as all our preoccupations and sensations of that particular time, with wich, indissolubly, they blend.' It is a defect of realism, Proust suggests, that it severs all links of the present with the past and future by ignoring this double character which is a feature of all our impressions. Since we always live two different times, as we will see later, we are always at the least two in one. I would say that every writer is constantly trying to unblock this internal time-space. Which is no easy job, I can tell you. No eays job, because it demands from us another way of being, another kind of attention, lots of waiting and doing nothing, absolutely nothing and therefore a constant battle with the dominant time-law. No easy job indeed, because this internal time tends to withdrawn itself from our possibility to grasp it, to put it into words, to make it less phantomlike, less ephemere. But yet we see this other time appearing, again and again, in so many works of art, like a ghost wandering through literature and also through contemporaray western philosophy for that matter. I believe there is a connection between this other time-experience and a more philosophical quest for `the other in the I', which is sometimes called the principle of alterity, in the terms of Levinas, or other concepts like for instance the nomad of Deleuze, who doesn't follow the socio-symbolic laws of time, but tries to create his own time-fugative. In the domain of literature we find a lot of such ghostly characters like for instance the mermaid Undine in Ingeborg Bachmanns story Undine geht (1961) or the nameless, female I from her novel Malina (1971). We can also think of the characters in Samuel Beckettes trilogie, Moloy, Malone and the Unnamable from 1959. All these different authors insist upon the undescribable and elusive character of their phantomlike figures. But why is that? What's the use of getting spooky again? I would like to show here today that the philosophical and literary desire to think an ungraspable, indeterminable and unsayable time-dimension within subjectivity is a way to transcend Western obsession with identity, to overcome Western fear for otherness, to rebel against capitalist society and to prepare a way of thinking that permits us to develop the notion of difference and create a much more plurifmorme notion of subjectivity. Due to idealogical crises, we no longer are willing to read blue-prints of a radical other world, where everything whould be better then here. We have somehow become to dissapointed with radical political ideologies in order to be able to be willing to believe another utopian fairy-tale. But this doensn't mean that the desire for change has dissapeared nor that we wish no longer to fight the bourgeois ideology of western society. Only, our struggle has become a more individual one, trying to resist the demands of making monney, claiming our own time, developing a less static notion of subjectivity. It is in fact such highly personal struggles with time, consiousness and subjectivity we witness in many works of literature and art. Since `the borders of my language design the borders of my world', as Ingeborg Bachmann puts it, a change in language could mean a change of the world. The subject is above all a speaking subject, in fact his or her subjectivity is founded in language. But what we are able to say, to express, depends upon the structures of society. If there is no more time left to think, to wait, to do nothing, since everything has to been done quicker and quicker every day, out of this constant fear of loss of effectivity or productivity, this other way of being, is threatened. It becomes more difficult to discover and develop an internal time and from that a possibility to express ourselves. We will start to speak and write and act like anybody else. We will all become the same. Pluriformity, the very basis of humananity, acoording to Hannah Arendt, will dissapear. Therefore it is so important to become time-rebels, to make differences, to make distinctions between a more general structure of time and identity, the things we share with others, and the more hidden structures of our own time and selfhood. In literature
and also in contemporary French philosophy we encounter all kinds of
different attempts to think such a double-bind subjectivity and double-bind
experience of time. The literary characters authors like Virginia Woolf,
or Ingeborg Bachmann or Samuel Beckett invented, their elusiv and indeterminable
character and their poetic, hesitant and murmuring language, could be
read as a first attempt to deconstruct the one-dimensional logic of
western thought on time, which focuses upon identity. These characters
such as Malina, Malone, Molly or Undine manifest themselves as disturbing
factors, while dismantling their false identities, but they remain more
or less ghostly characters, since they are reluctant to create yet a
new identity for themselves. That makes them into wandering, nomadic
creatures, searching for a new subjectivity, without really pronouncing
one. According
to the russian writer and philosopher Lou Andreas- Salomé, eros
and art open up the rich dimension of this hidden underwater world within
every subject. We are, in other words, all mermaids. The land of our
early childhood, have sunken into the deepest layers of our subconsciousness,
has become our hidden Atlantis, as Peter Sloterdijk calls it in his
work Spharen, it’s the land we had to leave in order to grow up.
In this land, the young child wasn’t yet seperated from the other,
because it has not yet developed an I which isolates him or herself
from the surrounding world. It doesn't say `I' and is not yet defined
by the subject-object, I-other, man-woman or any other opposite. Growing
up, this pluralistic and unconscious self will dissapear more and more
under the surface of a conscious identity, it goes so to say like Undine
under water, but will still accompany more or less the subjects existence.
The Nomadic Self can in this perspective be seen as the pre-history
of the speaking subject. And because it is a pre-verbal pre-history,
we can not remember it voluntarily, we can not define it, we can not
tell this story within the ontological framework of our language. But
this doesn't mean that it is gone or lost forever. The literary
examples I have given today express the same need to describe a kind
of double, twofold dimension of time and subjectivity. There is on the
one hand chronological time which accompagnies the clear, conscious
story of our identity, in fact the sum of what Heiddegger calls facticity,
the facts that describe our existence. On the other hand there is this
vague notion of an internal, highly personal time, which accompagnies
the more unconscious and pre-binary story of our subjectivity; it can
not express itself directly, but it undermines, interrrupts or disturbes
the clear, consious story of identity. Therefore it enables us to change,
since it refers to a dimension within subjectivity that is pure possibility,
that has not yet been divided or reduced to the symbolic and ontological
framwork of being. It helps us to remember that we are not autonomous
and closed identities; we are in fact always more then we think we are,
since this other story swimms so to say under the surface of our identity.
We are, in other words, always and also mermaids. What we
shoud not forget in these days of absolute victory of capitalism is
that totalitarian politics are always identity-politics; they tell one
and the same story. Not only of each person's identity but also of that
of the group. They do not permit the idea of a surplus, an uncontrollable,
unique otherness, they do not accept another time-dimension, which is
highly singlar and subjective, they therefore dismmiss the possibility
of a reinterpretation of one's own identity; in doing so they transform
humanity as a principle of change and development into an immobil and
controllable principle. Capitalism wants to make people believe that
all they have to be concerned about is making monney and that they suffer
from a terrible lack of time. The result of that mechanisme is the creation
of slaves, who consider themselves as total adherents of the proclaimed
collectif identity. They do no longer believe they might have a voice,
a time of their own. This voice is burried so deeply, that they can
hardly hear it any more. And then once again: Virginia Woolf. `I begin
now to forget; I have lost in the process that thin hard shell which
cases the soul, which, in youth, shuts one in. And now I ask: who am
I? Am I one and disticnt. There is no division between me and them.
As I talked I felt I am you. This identity we so feverishly cherish,
was overcome. (...)
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