Jasper Johns, Green Target, 1958
In abeyance to the limits of analogy confronted in Performance Art in particular, it might help to begin with a consideration of the problems found in extension with a very old story:
Once there was a prince who dedicated his life to the study of archery. He practiced and practiced until he was confident he was the most excellent archer that ever lived.
One day, on his way from having won a contest, he came upon a round target painted on a tree—dead center in the middle of the target with a single arrow. “Nice shot,” he thought and kept going.
Not much farther along, he came across another perfect bullseye, and then another, and then another. The Prince became increasingly perturbed with each bullseye. Whom could this master be?
After a while, the Prince came to a town. Seeing a young boy with a bow and arrow making his way through the square, the Prince called out, “You, boy, take me to whoever made those perfect shots I came across in the woods.”
“That’s me,” the young boy said.
The Prince was incredulous. “You? But you are just a boy! How could one so young shoot so well?”
The boy looked at him as if he were crazy. “What do you mean?” he asked. “I shoot an arrow at a tree, and wherever the arrow hits, I paint a bullseye.”
Consider what a Humean reading of our story clarifies: the Prince cannot conceive of how the bullseyes are produced unless something changes in terms of “what happened” and in his memory of how he accounts for their production. These two events, or rather this one event with two aspects, can appear as discrete instances if seen from one direction, or they can appear as one continuous movement that appears as two instances. These transversals occur at different rates and depths, may appear stationary or fleeting, but nevertheless comprise the entirety of how the real is ultimately conceived on the surface and, more to the point, how it is preserved as a work of art. How the transversal participates in creating dualisms, on the other hand, is an altogether different matter that relates to a crucial idea: that the passive agent is productive insofar as it was a part of a refrain or a chain of significations. It was not enough to simply serve a surface of inscription, after all. One had to activate the infinitive if being in order to activate even the appearance of materiality that is a basis for memory, sense…all of it. But why could such transversals not be apprehended by symmetrical relations? Because, as Deleuze tells us, such symmetries are produced by them and not the other way around. The dualisms that appear in this context are then symptoms, and not causes, of the situation:
“Every Spatio-temporal dynamism is accompanied by the emergence of an elementary consciousness which itself traces directions, doubles movements, and migrations, and is born on the threshold of the condensed singularities of the body or object whose consciousness it is. It is not enough to say that consciousness is consciousness of something: it is the double of this something, and everything is consciousness because it possesses a double, even if it is far off and very foreign. Repetition is everywhere, as much in what is actualized as in its actualization.”
What this means is this: that thing you are looking at? The words on this page? The coffee cup? They are not just an image. They are a hybridization of an image (that is always somewhat partial and virtual and potential) and the actual thing that is matter. All elements in this hybridization are perfectly real, even the virtual ones. It is duration that is in question as well as the repetition of traversals defined not by the generalized interval that repeats but rather by the surfaces at play upon it of which repetitions appear both superficially (in terms of the work of art) and as affects that are part of a continuum of everyday things: of matter on a plane of consistency. This plane happens first, before the elementary consciousness that is so very useful to us in accordance with our memory that in turn informs us what of the myriad durations in play we will compose into sense data and what we will summarily repeat.
Likewise, we would not say ‘within’ a transversal; the entirety of a transversal is composed of extensive qualities, of a surface to which we can only ever access a part on time, that is to say, in the chronotope of what we perceive as being simultaneous in relation to our interests. This is not a question of the apprehension of objects as it is was for the early empiricists, as we have seen, nor does it avail itself of the theory of primary and secondary qualities that sought to preserve the status of the ideal within the creation of sense as a series of analytic composites. No ontological signification occurs except to say, as Bergson does that there is to matter something more than but not something different from that which is given, and given in terms of transversals that are bound up in a process of deterritorializing and reterritorializing in a refrain that consists of oscillations between varying expressions of states. The transversal, then, requires an economy of the experience of time by which, in the production of sense, a territorial refrain is composed out of everyday affects: and from such sort of lexicon is created from which ontological suppositions can be assembled…but only temporarily or in relation to specific problems.
Moreover, what must change at an intense level that supersedes motion, changes through repetition. A secret repetition, as it were, specific in every instance to what is produced and in which explain nothing but in which we participate: not repeatedly in discrete iterations of some “concept” or image, but in one, long continuous movement that takes on different aspects within specific fields of content and enunciation both found within specific durations.
***
So what of Memory?
First,let’s dispense with a superficial understanding of what is possible by the notion of a contemporary art as “timely”, replacing it with contemporaneity as a problem. Contemporaneity, Deleuze informs us in his 1968 work Difference and Repetition, is one of three paradoxes (contemporaneity, co-existence, and pre-existence) that, along with the past, collectively produce the experience of time’s passing. In Deleuze’s conception, all three paradoxes co-occur as potential limits of our experience; it is a mistake to confuse the pure, general, a priori element of all time with the durations that comprise our experience of time or even with time itself. As for the past, “We cannot say that it was. It no longer exists, it does not exist, but it insists, it consists, it is. It insists that with the former present, it consists with the new or present present. It is the in-itself of time as the final ground of the passage of time. In this sense it forms a pure, general, a priori element of all time.”
Similarly, Henri Bergson claims that time impedes our experiencing all moments at once, and it is the nature of these paradoxes (these limits), and not time itself, that we commonly describe when considering our experience of time as it appears in our memory. This is the distinction Deleuze makes between Chronos (movement subordinated to time, into figures or condition intervals of time as one finds in the work of Acconci and Oppenheim) and Aeon (or time subordinated to continuous movement, as is found in the work of Terry Fox). It is also the distinction between rhythm, which is the milieu of the refrain, and meter, which is a territorialization of refrains that explore potentialities related to the actualized situation. Durational time, then, or the application of duration that Deleuze refers to as repetition, “is thus in essence symbolic, spiritual, and inter-subjective or monadological.” and repetition’s monadological (or univocal) status cannot be apprehended in terms of analogical or symmetrical resemblances or representations. It can, however, be actualized by the asymmetrical movements of transversals of which we are a part that comprises the refrain. The challenge for the artist is that part of this actualization is the result of a passive synthesis. It does not color the process of signification at all, much like a true-bypass guitar pedal will not color the signal from the pickup to the amplifier. Nevertheless, this potential switch in the chain of signification changes everything about how we relate to the virtualities involved in the production of the real, even if they are non-discursive.
NOTES
- See Hume, David, Treatise on Human Nature, Part 3, Section XIV, On the Idea of Necessary Connection: Oxford University Press, “Having thus explained the manner, in which we reason beyond our immediate impressions, and conclude that such particular causes must have such particular effects; we must now return upon our footsteps to examine that question, which [Sect. 2.] first occurred to us, and which we dropt in our way, viz. What is our idea of necessity, when we say that two objects are necessarily connected together. Upon this head I repeat what I have often had occasion to observe, that as we have no idea, that is not derived from an impression, we must find some impression, that gives rise to this idea of necessity, if we assert we have really such an idea. In order to this I consider, in what objects necessity is commonly supposed to lie; and finding that it is always ascribed to causes and effects, I turn my eye to two objects supposed to be placed in that relation; and examine them in all the situations, of which they are susceptible. I immediately perceive, that they are contiguous in time and place, and that the object we call cause precedes the other we call effect. In no one instance can I go any farther, nor is it possible for me to discover any third relation betwixt these objects. I therefore enlarge my view to comprehend several instances; where I find like objects always existing in like relations of contiguity and succession. At first sight this seems to serve but little to my purpose. The reflection on several instances only repeats the same objects; and therefore can never give rise to a new idea. But upon farther enquiry I find, that the repetition is not in every particular the same, but produces a new impression, and by that means the idea, which I at present examine.(pg 155)
- Deleuze, DR,(pg 220)
- Deleuze, DR, (pg 82.)
- Deleuze, DR, (pg 106.)