The Witness: Kancheli & Agamben

Sofsky: “Then I’ll have my revenge, then I’ll tell the whole world what happened there – inside there.”

Agamben questions the justification for this survival. Telling is vindication; Sofsky’s revenge is his disclosure – mere persistence becomes a form of defiant resistance against the past.

Yet, this does not explain what is at stake in the act of witnessing. Agamben refers to the etymological derivate of the term ‘witness’: superstes, which designates “a personal who has lived through something, who has experiences an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it.” (P.17 Remnants of Auschwitz)

Architecturally, cultivated monuments suffer from being unable to testify to events except through detached representation. Architecture as an afterthought transpires as an artifice which strives towards closure despite the event itself resisting that determination.

On the other hand, ruins appear to share in Agamben’s definition of the witness in that they outlive the experience and so overcome the allegorical quality of the monument which necessarily delimits itself to representation.

The beginning and the end: the narrative is misleading. Ruins do not end themselves once their ruination is complete. Outright destruction does not annihilate conclusions. Instead, the ruination fragments, causing the possibility of testimony to become compounded.

Likewise: for Agamben, trial engenders a similar sentiment: “The judgements had been passed, the proofs of guilt definitively established…it has taken almost half a century to understand that law did not exhaust the problem, but rather that the very problem was so enormous as to call into question law itself, dragging it to its own ruin.” (P.20)

Is this why Kancheli refuses closure? In his Warzone (though the translation might well be flawed), the presence of the ruin disallows the work to enclose itself. There is a lack of logic in certain passages which reveals a sense of scepticism towards determination. Consequentially, about half way through, the presence of outright lyricism establishes a context which is able to be destroyed by the bizarre, carnivalesque – almost vile – section which follows.

Kancheli fragments these passages, deconstructing their causality in the process. If Kant’s aesthetic ‘delight’ is forsaken in this fragmentation, then the possibility of testimony is gained.

Aesthetic redemption through the ‘experience’ of tragedy, on the other hand, has not survived except for sentimental works of art which linger on (perniciously). Depending on the supposition that history is able to be linearized into pockets of causally bound events, in sacrificing the fragment for the absolute, they submit to what Levinas describes as the “religion of tonality.”

The conjunction between religion and tonality is not unexpected. Redemption is afforded (musically) by resolution, and resolution depends upon the existence of designated musical intervals. Even Henze submits to certain musical motifs which are somewhat a priori in their meaning (i.e. the aestheticization of horror in his 9th Symphony). Testimony would disband were there an absence of convention (atonality) in what constitutes that testimony.

Fundamentally, I see Gorecki (or at least, the Gorecki of the 3rd Symphony) in the same way that monuments confer history upon an indifferent landscape. The construction of a set of formulaic devices enables the impression of memory, testimony and obligation to coincide, if only by dint of an unnatural enforcement. The music is plastic and so reduced to kitsch artifice once a clear division between past, present and future is established.

The question of ‘transcendence’ need not even be thought here. So long as the appearance of narration is present, it is a question which art cannot answer.

The problem is not only of narration, disclosure and enclosure, but of testimony itself. Agamben quotes Levi: “There is another lacuna in every testimony: witnesses are by definition survivors and so all, to some degree, enjoyed a privilege…No one has told the destiny of the common prisoner since it was not materially possible for him to survive.” (P. 33)

Testimony turns out to be a double-bind: on the one hand, survival is understood as a resistance; on the other hand, by way of that survival, the testimony is incomplete. One might think that the imagination furnishes the incomplete testimony in the same way that posthumous manuscripts are finished by way of reconstructing the composer’s mindscape. Yet, this would falter since imagination calls upon the lived past to construct the unlived present, in turn endangering testimony to a fixed present.

Levi speaks of testimony “by proxy”. Agamben writes: “Yet here the value of testimony lies essentially in what it lacks; as it centre it contains something that cannot be borne witness to and that discharges the survivors of authority.” (P. 34) ‘By proxy’ implies reconstruction; the void between testimony and survival remains absolute in Agamben’s sense.

So too for Heidegger: totality can only be grasped by way of an anticipated closure. Yet, the “constant unfinished quality” of Da-sein is not fulfilled by externalized mediation. The proximity of others affords no resolution between presence and absence. “No one can bear witness from the inside of death”, writes Agamben a page later.
What results is a meta-testimony: a testimony concerning the possibility of testimony in the first instance. If the witness is to speak, then language needs to be inverted so that inside-out is undone.

Kancheli does not do away with language. His language is, in fact, one of convention. “To bear witness, it is therefore not enough to bring language to its own non-sense”, writes Agamben rightly. Nor is subversion of convention sufficient to bear witness. Example: ‘convulsive beauty’ undermines itself through oscillating between beauty and convulsion yet never committing to either.

As with Schnittke (particularly in his 4th Symphony) Kancheli’s musical language permits the formulation of thematic motifs but they do not derive from clarity but rather from what Schnittke describes (in the excellent A Schnittke Reader) as “distorted intonational space”.

In the same book, Schnittke speaks of the placelessness of Kancheli’s music. About events, he writes: “They are presented to us not in exhausting fullness, but in ‘dotted’ incompleteness.” Schnittke is right. The work remains incomplete: not even the static ambiguity of the fragment can be conferred upon the final compositions. Instead, the idea of absolute (en)closure is “dragged into its own ruin.”