What is the concept behind your text ‘Where Narrative Stops’?
The point of departure for the text is the following by Chinese artist Chen Tong: “We use literary methods to do art, and artistic methods to do literature. Narrative becomes inevitable, and the conceptual becomes necessary.” The principle idea is that, pace Chen, narrative is not inevitable, even if, like me, you appreciate what Chen is doing and are no respecter of disciplinary distinctions, such as between in this case art and literature, image and text. I put forward a philosophical argument, or almost an argument, but no less persuasive for this ‘almost’, a little philosophical rhetoric, in the form of an image, to say that narrative is not inevitable. And this is sent to various artists to respond to. The curator, Amanda Wilkinson, also selects some works and artists on the basis of how they could be said to respond to the text.
Knowing of my interest in Samuel Beckett (I performed his two ‘Director’s Notebooks’ for Waiting for Godot recently, for a show I curated on that play) Amanda alerted me to Chen Tong and a piece he made which involved constructing an over-sized bicycle – which in China only their most successful sporting ‘export’, a basketball player in the NBA, is tall enough to ride – to which he attached a book case, and in that bookcase placed his own translations of Beckett. And Chen took the bike and books into the Chinese countryside to promote ‘the useless study of Beckett’. The idea of uselessness interests me very much, the necessity of it in order that anything at all be said, and that art need serve no function, political or social, but which does not mean that visual art cannot enable you to see something, another ‘discipline’ for instance, or a book, or a social situation, as if for the first time. And I want to turn around this uselessness and have Chen give our culture back to us. Anyway, I came across the sentences I have just quoted in Leap [an English-language journal of Chinese art theory] and they went on to form the point of departure for ‘Where Narrative Stops’. They are the sub-title of the exhibition and appear on the other side of my text. It turns out that in 2007 Chen set up an art institution in Guangzhou, Librairie Borges Institut d’Art Contemporain, and that this developed out of something he founded years earlier, in 1994, the Librarie Borges, which appears to have been primarily a bookshop devoted to selling and distributing Chinese translations of the literary catalogue of Minuit, the great Paris publishing house which amongst other things was foremost in promoting the so-called ‘new novel’, popularised by Alain Robbe-Grillet, and putting Beckett out there. I asked Chen to send over all the available and remaining texts from this collection and he did so, around 40 of them, almost all by Beckett or Robbe-Grillet. The editions are very fine, each cover of Robbe-Grillet for instance being a page from the manuscript annotated by the author. The institute is an event space and gallery, presenting works which transgress the art/literature line. But why narrative is ‘inevitable’ for that institute... I don’t know, Chen never told me.
‘Where Narrative Stops’ is something like a claim: that narrative is not inevitable, that it must stop in order that something happen. In order that anything at all happen narrative must stop. That an encounter happen necessitates that narrative be brought to a halt, if truth is to take place then narrative must stop. The works in the show are instances of this stopping. Even the novels of Beckett and Robbe-Grillet in Chinese translation, or rather especially these, are examples of this. Or the works are openings in the event of narrative ending or not being there. Or they are prior to narrative, before its imposition or re-ordering. I especially like the videos of Fang Lu in this respect: the useless and ostensibly pointless ‘experiments’ or actions the girl performs lacking any narrative justification or context – but this ‘lack’ is not something absent or missing, on the contrary it is affirmed and the actions carried out are ‘in themselves’ not in need of narrative but are instead invitations to think, especially in light of the title Lovers are Artists. The useless pleasure of sex. Clegg and Guttmann’s piece on syncopation is relevant here also. Syncopation is something that stops narrative. As I was writing the text for the show I came across something with which I very much agree: that the syncope is where narrative stops, and that syncope can be sex. Samuel Ace is his name, a poet. The lesson poetry learns from sex. For Clegg and Guttman the syncope is music. For me too. Sex and music, which have always had an intimate relationship of course. And art, for which the syncope too is often sex. There was not enough sex in this exhibition. In Karilampi’s neon strip, and Lu’s young girl, but that’s all. Oh and in my performance, which I’ll come to in a moment. But if Chen had sent over his translation of Catherine Robbe-Grillet’s L’image then I would have showed the film adaptation of it, by the director Radley Metzger. Brother of Gustav. And I’d have screened it silent and without permission. For me such works you do not ask permission to show, they are impermissible: commercial ‘art porn’ screened silent in a gallery. Those Metzger brothers! And the charge afforded the viewer would have been to see the film as an image of sex and of an encounter with sex rather than as a narrative of a sexual relationship. Then of course the challenge would be the embarrassing one of how to see sex as something that happens without narrative or as a stopping of it.
Can you say something about the relationship between your writing as a philosopher and your work as an artist.
If one of the tasks of philosophy is to say what philosophy is, if it is, then art can say something about philosophy that philosophy ‘by itself’ is blind to. On the other hand, you cannot do philosophy without unfolding the question of what philosophy is, and needs must this entail treading the line between philosophy and what it is not, for instance art, or image, or spatial. I’ve mentioned how artists are invited to respond by my text, a text of philosophy. Well, I am one of the artists. I respond to my text with a performative reading. In this the exhibition is similar to the one Amanda and I did two years ago for Wilkinson, Where Language Stops. There we were interested in the materiality of language, how art can visualise the excess of language beyond its communicative function, and in the materiality of art, which is word, that there is no image without word. In that exhibition too I respond to my own text, called ‘Where Language Stops’, with a performative work. In both cases the philosophical text responded to is itself presented as a work. ‘Where Language Stops’ was printed as the exhibition’s invitation card, an invitation to the artists to participate and to the public to view. And for the current exhibition the text is printed as a poster, called ‘Where Narrative Stops’, and it too performs both invitations. I want to take over the entire space of presentation. This is something that interests me about the great poet Pessoa. He would respond to his own texts with other texts, and after that write an introduction to the text responded to. He even wanted to do his own translations of these. I say ‘he’, but Pessoa did all these things under different names, heteronyms as he called them, where he othered himself in so doing. ‘Himself’: he would say that in doing so he drew out or better threw out all the others in him. Catherine Robbe-Grillet too published under a pseudonym. L’image was authored by ‘Jean de Berg’, and Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote the preface to the book but signed it ‘P.R.’, in homage to Pauline Réage, the pseudonymous author of Story of O. So both writers, husband and wife, swapped sexes. In philosophy too we have instances of authors responding to their own texts under a different name or anonymously, ‘Maurice Florence’ for example, author of a text entitled ‘Michel Foucault’, is in fact Michel Foucault. But the best of these, if only for the title he came up with, is David Hume. Hume published anonymously a review of his book A Treatise of Human Nature because he was unhappy about how it had been received. That review is titled An Abstract of a Late Philosophical Performance, entitled A Treatise of Human Nature, &c. Wherein the chief Argument and Design of that Book, which has met with such Opposition, and has been represented in so terrifying a Light, is farther illustrated and explain’d. ‘An Abstract of a Late Philosophical Performance’! This is 1740.
Whilst I do not respond to my own text under a different name, I do so as if quoting from a book already published, but which is in fact a book ‘to come’, a book being written in the reading of it. That book, to which I give the name The Swerve of Freedom After Spinoza, began as a Contents Page in the form of a poster commissioned by Mihnea Mircan for an exhibition at Stroom Den Haag, but its contents are the chapters of a book of philosophy. Yet each of those chapters is presented within the frame of art: installed in an exhibition, a lecture at an academic institution, a response to another artist’s work. Sometimes it takes the form of an image. The poster for the current exhibition is a page from one of those chapters. And the performance made as a response to that poster is from another of the chapters. In an upside down part of that poster I say certain things about why narrative must stop for Spinoza, and the importance for Beckett of what he calls Spinoza’s ‘1st rule of life’, to write narratively to get the common people interested, even though they’re not in a position to understand what they’re reading. But to read this part of my text you need to stand on your head. It’s not that philosophers turn the world on its head, it’s that they stand on their own heads.
Do you distinguish between philosophy and art, writing and image?
Certainly. There are times when I insist on the distinction, for instance when publishing philosophy as philosophy, although not always. But at the same time this need not mean that such insistence cannot allow you to raise the question of where the distinction between them falls. Recently I published a paper on Deleuze and what he calls the image of thought, drawing out what I maintain is a schism in his work, a problematic which he does not fully resolve, between on the one hand a desire for ‘pure image’, an image without words, which I argue is impossible, and a new image of thought which would do away with hierarchies and structures bequeathed and imposed by the history of thought, which is a dream, evidenced by how Deleuzians end up by repeating the same magnificent images of thought proposed by Deleuze, who is peerless in this respect, rather than invent their own. Although Deleuze (in What is Philosophy?, one of the books in Chinese translation presented here) would say, and I would agree with him, that that task can only be completed by great thinkers, and we are still awaiting that thinker who can out-Deleuze Deleuze in the way that he out-Bergsoned Bergson and Derrida out-Heideggered Heidegger.
But at other times I seek forms in which to present text as image, without losing the cogency or force of what is written. So text both to be looked at and read. Or to be heard and listened to. In Where Language Stops one of the ways I responded to my own text was to do a performative reading, I read out loud from a piece called ‘A Picture of French Literature’, a framed double page text on spacing the word, repeated eleven times, each time differing by a spacing of the text brought about by imposing Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice on it, blanking out the text, making holes in it where the words of Mallarmé’s text happen to fall. When I took down one of those framed folios and read it out loud I performed the spaces in the reading. And for Where Narrative Stops I respond to my own text with another performative reading, and again it is a picture of French literature. The text I read addressed two screened works, Robbe-Grillet’s N. Took the Dice and Beckett’s Quad I+II. These are the two authors featuring in Chen’s Librarie Borges collection installed in the show. Both works are for TV, both show walking, or the step, but in one important regard they’re very different, Robbe-Grillet’s is aleatory and Beckett’s serial. Robbe-Grillet determined the order of scenes by throws of the dice, but at the same time he imposed a narrative on the footage (which in fact comes from an earlier film, Eden and After, where the images have a different order altogether, indeed a serial one). And even though the narrative he superadded speaks against narrative, I edited it out and amplified those passages where the sound of footsteps is to the fore. Around a third of the edited film consists of the step, walking, wandering. I wanted the audience to be affected by the step and how the step is related to the encounter. The footstep replaces the causality that narrative introduces. But the step is not causal it is wandering. It does not necessarily lead to something happening. But it is the condition of something happening.. and not happening.
Beckett’s piece is a machine-like procession of four walkers who move in serialised vectors on a square plane. In Quad I there are two sounds, the sounds of feet shuffling and a percussive pulse. In II there is simply the sound of the feet. But in both cases the footsteps, whether they be of one person or four, make the sound of a solitary walker. When Minuit published Beckett’s 1980s TV works they did so with an accompanying essay by Deleuze, ‘The exhausted’. And it’s partly in opposition to –and agreement with– what Deleuze says in that essay why I use Quad. What television does according to Deleuze is allow Beckett to achieve an image which overcomes the ‘inferiority’ of words, because Beckett found words ‘intolerable’. Deleuze is mistaken. Yes you can spatialise language with image, indeed language is image in that it is spatialised, but there is no such thing as an image without word. There is no hierarchy of image over word or word over image. What I like about Quad is how Beckett achieves space through walking. Deleuze is right, the figures of Quad are carrying out journeys with no object. But Deleuze says that their footsteps are merely for recognition, and that the figures are determined only spatially. But I want to say that that spatial determination is aural as well as visual, achieved with the sound of footsteps. Nothing happens in Quad. Why? Because there is no encounter. An encounter would be the only possibility for an event, but the collision never happens, none of the figures ever encounters another. This is why the sound of the footsteps in both Quad I and II is that of just one walker, even when there are four on stage. Again the syncope, the swerve of freedom as each figure wanders to the left to avoid the oncoming one. In both Beckett and Robbe-Grillet the act of wandering replaces action.
The audience is seated facing the two screens on which these works are projected. The screens are separated, and the audience separated from the screens, by pieces in the exhibition. I arrive on a bicycle in the midst of the audience and without properly alighting from the bike I read a text. The text has four figures: Wanderer, Encounter, Sex, Narrative. Eachof these figures encounters the other figures four times –so four quartets– such that there are eight encounters. Wanderer Sex, Encounter Wanderer, Sex Narrative, Narrative Encounter, Sex Encounter, Wanderer Narrative, Narrative Wanderer, Encounter Sex. And for each of these encounters I write eight lines. And I repeat these encounters and these 8x8s four times, but each time in a different order. So the text is both serial, in that it exhausts certain logical possibilities of the encounters between the figures, and aleatory, in that the encounters and what is ‘said’ in them are disordered. Why a bike? Because I could not bring Chen’s bicycle over from China, because of the way one of Fang’s four videos features a bicycle, because the only voiceover I leave in Robbe-Grillet’s film is that which occurs with the appearance of the bicycle: “narrateur voyeur, message, bicyclette, 2 6 5” – the title of my piece – and because of how Beckett in his Trilogy describes a certain posture on the bike, one which I adopt in my reading – astride it feet on ground arms on handlebars and on my arms my head – as a moral image, one which offends public decency for a people in need of fortitude.
Where does narrative stop?
It is part of the structure of narrative that it stop, and there are two senses in which it does so: aiming for its own resolution and ‘The End’. In this respect narrative is similar to image, in that an image is determined as image not by its content but by its need to be framed. In both cases this involves a paradoxical bringing itself into being by stopping itself. But in order to do this narrative must interpolate a subject. Levinas is right then when he says that narrative is an ontical structure reliant on a correlation between subject and object, one to which the subject must conform. Narrative is whether or not something truly happens for a subject, and it is where something truly happens for a subject, but it is not the truth of what happens. Spinoza thinks it is philosophy’s duty to determine the truth of what happens, or in other words to determine whether an idea agrees with its object or not. This can only happen when narrative stops. The question then becomes whether philosophy can do this without narrative. But there’s always some narrative somewhere in philosophy. At the same time, if philosophy starts where narrative stops then it starts where there is no actual happening of truth. In the poster I quote Ricoeur: narrative stops when the writer sets to work. For with the start of the writer’s work the tense changes, from the future to the conditional. What does this mean? That we are no longer led to what is going to happen or told what should happen, but asked to imagine what could happen. We move from the actual to the possible. With Beckett it is when he reduces the language of narrative by creating space between words or removing what covers over their spacing, with Robbe-Grillet it’s when he interrupts the temporality of narrative by replacing the real with descriptions of it. Narrative stops when the possible starts. And in this art and philosophy are equals, for both art and philosophy are modalities of the possible.
Wilkinson Gallery, London, 9 August 2013