The Work of Silence

Those who bear witness: in what does that consist of? Often we are confronted with an artwork that aspires towards silence, as though silence is the only medium capable of bearing witness to immense destruction. The notion of an audible tribute is met with revulsion, we suggest that monumentalizing things is equivalent to rendering them digestible and so sanitized. Adorno’s insistence about the barbarism of poetry resonates on an intuitive and theoretical level.

On a more prosaic level – always the level in which truth reveals itself – silence becomes the means by which we express not only our deepest grief but our everyday pangs of remorse and loss. What does this silence tell us? Firstly, it draws things in to the point whereby they become secret. Often, mourning is an affair we have with something lost until it becomes a dialogue we have with ourselves. At which point communication with the outside world falters and we remain committed to an obsolete grief. There is no entrance for the mourner, no space in which things open up, no clearing. Instead, a tightness framed by the preciousness of whatever has been lost takes precedence. In silence, the possibility of things being warped by intrusion becomes a veritable source of paranoia.

Is silence bearing witness? If so, then to what degree? When we consider an artwork as having the capacity to be exhibited, then it avoids the secrecy of not disclosing what is being testified to. That is how things are when the artwork is stalled, enclosed. The artwork presents itself, not making recourse to what could be a passive form of aggressive resistance since that is how secrecy operates. The problematic aspect of secrecy is that it glides into nostalgia through rendering loss tangible and destruction sacred. Secrecy internalizes time and so fixes it in such a way that it disjoins with the present. Nothing which is secret can really breathe in the present. The world hibernates.

This is the way of the mourner who refuses to contend with his absence. What does he bear witness to? He bears witness to a moment that no longer exists. For him the question of art testifying to destruction is remote if not inaccessible. In that situation, the presence of aestheticizing something which (so far) has been clamped to the thread of inner experience would be degrading in the same way that Adorno’s dictum about post-Holocaust poetry forces us to rethink notions of commemoration and memory. He resists that re-appraisal.

Would it then be the case that encryption becomes the acceptable method for the artist to convey what would be inappropriate were it to be voiced explicitly. DSCH. Again, the harsh conditions under which Shostakovich was compelled to represent himself are often found transposed to the prosaic sphere of paranoid nostalgia. Within the confines of a hermetically sealed enclosure it would disarm the witness bearer and so undermine his capacity to bear witness in the first place to open up to the world of non-allusion. Encryptions point to things that most viewers can decipher. This is how their dynamic works. Allusions are met, their origins discovered; yet, the formal connection between historic moments is never actually mentioned. That is the purpose of the secret in which everyone and everything remains silent.

The Writer of Impotence

During the most emaciated stage of infertility, after some considerable agitation, there often emerges a ‘voice’ in the writer that demands a response. He is not content to let it seethe without recognition. At every stage in its development, the demand for it to be externalized (for that is the way in which thought is ‘realized’ – yes?) intensifies. At the same time, the thought of this voice resolving of its own accord (as though by alchemy) is unimaginable. The origin of the voice has nothing to say, there is no content to be spoken of. Yet, it is a lack which must nevertheless be heard. It is the voice of impotence; in it fertility springs.

The writer often makes a project of his inversion, of inhabiting the area defined by a generalized lack of character. Much of the time we tend to think of an insidious self-pity as being the compulsion to eulogize a lack of production. The writer who makes recourse to dissecting his own inability – he really is abhorrent, right? More sympathetically, we say it is a measure we take in order to fend off the resistance of actual impotence by which a route to re-production might never be found. Thus: a desperate hankering after ‘things’ occurs in which the lack of substance becomes the origin of a new kind of substance – an incipient unsubstance.

We should not be so sympathetic. The impotent writer is, after all, engaged in the act of writing but only through the justification of an ironic gaze. At every stage he is aware of his failure. Yet, all this means is that his capacity for production increases. He thrives on a self-debasement which calls into question his capacity to write. Irony demands that he stands outside of his self in order to sacrifice this lesser annihilation of self esteem for the sake of avoiding an absolute collapse of self. True: he would rather be humiliated in public than face the solitude of a darkened night in which he was finally forced to admit the terrible truth: – I am no longer a writer, far less a worthy one.

But this is not, as is so often clear, how it works out. The opposite is true: periods of decline, an absence of having something to say and infertility are often insufferable for those who can't endure it. As such, the discomfort requires justification by it becoming a spectacle, that is, by it becoming externalized. Here is something from Thomas Ligotti: “There are those who require witness to their doom. Not content with a solitary perdition, they seek an audience worthy of their spectacle – mind to remember the stages of their downfall or perhaps only a mirror to multiply their abject glory.” (The Dreaming in Nortown)

The gravity of literary impotence is not a co-incidence nor is it contingent. Impotence is universal, and so the lack of production is a source of comfort for all who (having being terrified by its depths) are able to muster up a source of inspiration in the failure of others. The reciprocal correspondence grows, each relies on the others failures, the greater the inability to wrestle something of worth from the basement of consciousness, then the greater the ability to outsmart the other in terms of ‘proving’ how little one has produced. In the end, being prolific is measured in terms how little one can produce.

Once this universal quality has been acquired, then it can be exhibited in the same way a shoe is exhibited in order to extract its essential qualities. The work becomes integral by becoming flawed. Let us say that things genuinely were falling by. Imagine it. Imagine what it means for something to fall by. It discards itself without the need to be heard. It is a dream which is forgotten in the morning, the remnant of something infertile which finds an outlet and is then forgotten. Like dirt on the shoe which softens on contact with water before dissolving. This can only ever occur in the absence of a hungry consciousness. Our consciousness – the consciousness which occurs against the background of phenomenological intentionality – imposes a different criterion upon us. Once universality is detected, then silence could never suffice.

Smugness, conceit, an arrogance which has the appearance of humility...here I can no longer reserve my hatred for these impotent writers. True, it is possible to permit a writer the space to navigate a displaced centre without clenching ones fist in malice, but suppose we are obliged to contort a sneer of sympathy for those who compel our attention? The work of impotence has become the exhibit of impotence in the hope of vouchsafing a reaction in the spectator that would otherwise be trod upon were it occurring in anyone but a ‘writer’. Disillusionment and weariness ensue. At its most pernicious level, this extends itself to careerism. Those who fashion out a mendacious sense of self-esteem through the arrogance of humility. To what end do they cease to beg for something beneath themselves? They makes a profession out of luxurious deliberation as though the pathetic was something to be refined. Again, irony at the expense of the actual. It is the final resort in cultivating a sense of style in which style and content have been liquidated.

Drones

The image of the sleeper: no anticipation, no nostalgia. He is able to sleep, but by what means? Time has dispensed with him for the night. A space has opened up in which things can be neutralized. Against this, the image of the insomniac is often framed by a pathological awareness of being-in-time. Fixated by time (and so death), the question of respite emerges. He is aware of something steady, a rhythm ticking into blackness.

Muzak has shown us that when silence has been infused with a false presence, then production can increase. The chatter of work, the banality of action. There, falling beneath the threshold of being. Yet, when our temperament clashes with whatever mood Muzak is endeavouring to force upon us, then the origin of opposition is only heightened. We feel put out, held out, confined by the rigidity of something fixed.

Erik Satie, foreseeing the advent of Muzak, conceived of furniture music (musique d’ameublement) in order to facilitate the evocation of a specific atmosphere. At the inception of Satie’s musique d’ameublement the audience were: “...begged to take no notice of it and to behave during the entr’actes as if the music did not exist. This music...claims to make its contribution to life in the same way as a private conservation, a picture, or the chair on which you may or may not be seated.” (M. Pierre Bertin speaking on March 8th 1920 in the Faubourg St Honoré)

In the same way: death intrudes by inserting a beat in-between the cleft of inhalation and exhalation. No wonder then, that the icon of serenity is the drone in which temporality is dissolved. Temporally, the drone is able to evade the engaging aspect of narrative music by employing a non-linear thread of continuity. John Cage: “Complexity tends to reach a point of neutralization: continuous change results in a certain sameness. It goes in no particular direction. There is no necessary concern with time as a measure of distance from a point in the past to a point in the future...” In identifying the lack of temporal direction in the ambient genre, Cage has diagnosed why the drone is a palliative against the anxiety of movement – it restores the fluidity of non-time.

I’m in the cereal aisle of Waitrose looking at Heat whilst pretending to contemplate brands of bran flakes. Time dissolves and I might as well be Schopenhauer ‘lost’ in aesthetic contemplation. Sometimes this is all that’s left – bran flakes and gossip. Despite the guns on his table, Schopenhauer slept well. The world of Heidegger’s ‘das man’. Idleness. The release of time. The transcendence of banter. Enough of being lost. Remember: Satie sought to accommodate space in such a way that something in the foreground would emerge. This is how it is in Waitrose – what sacrifices do I begin to make when I open Heat magazine? Dignity is the least of my worries. No anticipation, no nostalgia: un-time. The space in which things hang. The question of their resolution evaded. Turning away from but opening up to a space that resists the steadiness of inhalation.

The Aesthetics of Demolition

First there was Restoration, now there’s Demolition, a forthcoming program where we (the viewers) get to vote for a building to be demolished. To the benefit of my ego, I had already predicted such an event some time ago. The possibility of letting things disappear of their own accord would have been impossible. This much is clear. Erosion, so the assumption goes, is a concession to defeat. On the other hand, two waging alternatives transpire: restoration and demolition. Restoration affirms: demolition declines. At the same time, they both strive towards mastery of a particular space. Imagine it: voting for a specific building to be purposely destroyed! What could the motivation be?

In the first place, common sense dictates that a council estate decaying of its own accord is aesthetically unpleasant. There is a demand to seize the situation, to either terminate the process or otherwise divert it. Of course, the fact that we have to resist such a process only emphasises the fact that the process is prior to the conversion and consequently will outlive any such attempt to undermine it. The pleasure we feel in witnessing a staged demolition is because we have taken control of this process. Through annihilating it before it has a chance to dissolve naturally, it is as though we have demonstrated our own immorality by way of plastic explosives. The abrupt cheer heard as the remote charge is pushed is not because the audience is thinking of a prosperous future in which new developments can supplant the former ruin; rather, it is because decay has been denied and so progress has been attainted, even if that progress does make recourse to an act of destruction. The significance of there being this program after the Restoration show is not a coincidence. Demolition – destruction – is the logical conclusion of the heritage industry.

When in Australia last week, I re-visited a Polish friend who restores frames in a Sydney gallery. It is her task to restore 15th Century frames to their original state. A delicate task that has been hampered by the introduction of the spray-can in the 1960’s, she says. Whenever I meet restorers – they seem drawn to me like flies to an electric light – I’m always intrigued by their tenacity to avoid contemplating their own relationship to what it is they are striving against. That double-shadow, dormant in their every sculpted act of resistance, the creaks and fissures of wood-rot, dampness and peeling paper. What happens when restoration becomes impossible? There emerges an impotent impasse in which the actually organic aspect takes over. It’s terrible. The process has been seized by something other than our selves. In such a situation, nothing else remains but reclaiming the process by wilfully destroying the object itself. It may be a form of passive aggression adopting the guise of a conciliatory act, but in truth every smile that is aroused by a demolition is inspired by more than mere spectacle – it is because the organic has been rendered synthetic, inert and dead.

Recovery Position

In the airport, things converge. Psychoanalytic transference has been transferred to spatial transference. Things that have yet to disperse in the moment of them happen are stowed away in the over-head cabin, juggling back and forth as the plane swerves 30,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean. In lieu of any actual reciprocity between moments in time, space itself becomes a medium upon which neglected snarls are unleashed. Physical height – the airplane cabin – entails no release. No overcoming in first class on United Airlines flight 980, that’s for sure. Nothing but plastic glasses and freeze-dried cheesecake are dislodged as the turbulence becomes increasingly more violent. There is a persistence in time even when being ferried through several time zones simultaneously. A mood that lingers despite the absence of ground beneath you. You know what I’m saying?

Grey space. Grey harlots. The lounge. The transit. Soon there comes a time in which jetlag has seized your mind and body to such an extreme degree that resignation is all that remains. You can watch your whole existence dissolve without flinching whilst CNN continues in the background. Fuck it. At least the plastic chairs and baggage reclaim will endure. The mind has deteriorated, everything becomes hyper-sensitive, hyper-prickly. Things jar.

Above all else, character. There is no room to manoeuvre when the character of a space determines the environment. Escape: grey land. The anonymous patch of land that runs from the East to the West. It is the space in which things are buried. It is true: certain landmarks can seduce us into thinking we have returned. When we encroach upon a place, then it rewards us with a dreadful illusion. Remember: a frappuccino is the same in London as it is in Tokyo. It makes us uneasy in both places. Home can be established only through that annihilation of collective character. When it is found there is a bond that flares up like some choked gasp of denied anticipation. There is no better antidote to the desire for redemption – for continuity – that immersing oneself in what is counter-intuitive to one’s tendencies – in the anti-anodyne.