Vanishing Acts
Roberto Tejada
A
mulets that share a secret kinship in the history of light and language, with words
like glimmer or destello sparks of intensity fade; splinters of duration evanesce. In a
double life conjured by these vocables—[mm], [ll]—a zone of repetition glows at the origin, so making vision contingent at the material level of the letter, and all things abrupt
ease into intermittency. There, claims to singularity are never less than overstatement, and
resemblance comes into view out of joint with experience. These words remind us that in
the developmental account, attributes of cataclysm and bliss reside not in the portentous
totality, but in the unassuming detail. In a glimmer or destello is marked the ethics of
attention required to tell narratives of sight and sound in transformation. Discrete words
provide a partial view, but even as we link subject to predicate—“I surface”—the self
remains at best a proposition, a reason we ascribe belatedly to a sequence of effects.
Nietzsche famously cautioned against the “habits of grammar” in which “I” am the cause
of my thoughts. But it was also, by contrast, the spell of words that enabled him precisely to submit in parables a rejoinder to all those laws that set into motion the overarching
systems. Today, under the pervasive audiovisual domains of high-speed communication,
and in the psychopharmacology of everyday life, and by the flattened contours that make
of a singular life another sociological statistic, there emerges the power of storytelling—
in parables and other forms of living speech, as sights of embodiment with narrative consequence. They provide us with scripts of action so we can navigate the intangible space
of so much unprocessed information.
There’s a story—“a true story” meant to join light and subjectivity—that tells of an
encounter with a “family of fisherman in a small port” on the coast of Brittany. Recalling
his days as a budding writer in search of authentic experience (“something practical, something physical”), a youthful Jacques has thrown himself into the hard labor of fishing and
into the “danger and excitement” of the open sea, even as a death marks the present tense
of the story’s telling. Petit-Jean, the real-life protagonist of the parable, has since succumbed to “tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that
social class . . .” But in the time that frames the story, on a day buoyant with sun and promise, in one of those frail crafts used for fishing, Petit-Jean, effusive and very much alive,
turns to Jacques and then to a sardine can he glimpses afloat in the water, reflecting rays
of sunlight. “You see that can? Do you see it?” He points to the object as he deridingly
snickers, “Well, it doesn’t see you.” The narrator fails to see what is so amusing, perhaps
because the scene submits a vision, independent of any particular body or volition: a visibility divergent from—or foreign to—human seeing; it swells into the picture as quickly as
it recedes . . . and that ebb marks a constitutive rift. A glimmer prompts the necessary forethought for the storyteller to understand that “I was rather out of place in the picture.”
To be in surplus of a scene is to be simultaneously attached to the setting and estranged
from it. Looking back at a scene from his youth, Jacques Lacan viewed such excess as a
English Language Notes 50.1 Spring / Summer 2012
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English Language Notes 50.1 (2) Spring / Summer 2012
value, as that which makes something accessible to experience out of a general diminishing. The sun sparkle from a tiny metal shell—the stress point that Petit-Jean signaled to
mean the cycle of community production and nameless consumption—allowed the psychoanalyst a glimmer into that unremarked violence at the picture’s margin that gives surface reality a neutral semblance. A conflict underpins the misrecognition in the story, its
incommensurability of viewpoint poised at an interface that determines inclusion in, or
exclusion from, categories greater than the individual: an ethics. The glimmer from the sardine can—that which is outside the field of vision that makes me see myself seeing
myself—so dislocates me from my surroundings as to resist too easy allocations of meaning. A person in the variability of place: Roger Caillois provided grounds to the claim that,
insofar as I can assimilate into my surroundings, there is a decline in my feelings of personal attributes. To the degree that I generalize space, the more distinct become my feelings of mental and somatic sovereignty. The fate of indulging in fantasy may so lead to
such mimetic incorporation of the animate in the inanimate, and vice versa, as for me to
reconfigure the possibilities of my environs. It led the poet Wallace Stevens—that “listener in the snow” in the frosty spaces of concept—to perceive “Nothing that is not there and
the nothing that is.”
In the ether of global finance capital and its promise of an audiovisual “second life,” there
has been a privileging of artwork that, in one form or another, pretends to articulate the fractures of our social distribution. It looks to the present political economy, the predicament of
urban hyper-development, the effects of industrialism on the environment, and the contradictions of our cultural institutions. For a privileged sector of producers who traffic in the
wishful thinking of a public for art-world occasions of display, it is art that enjoys no small
measure of indemnity. But there is a shadow line of image-making that so sees itself seeing itself as to be rendered “out of the picture” in some versions of contemporary poetry.
This art enlivens objects with energies at the intersections of a self and its social stress
points. It values a poetics of knowledge obtained in hidden spaces, or in the vicissitudes of
language and other media, as the grounds for public culture. It makes palpable a selfhood—
if only for a lapse in time—that can modify the perception of an onlooker, alter the awareness of a situation, or reframe the view to a familiar place. To this end, poetics is no longer
seen as extraordinary, but as an incremental engagement with one’s immediate circumstance. This kind of enactment seeks tonal ranges that speak to a social imaginary in arguments that apply pressure to image and cadence alike. It explores the potential of sight to
convey internal striving as commensurate with the onrush of history. Like storytelling, it
seeks rapport with a future listener to re-enchant the “communicability of experience” with
rhetorical tension and critical timing. It is suspicious of realisms that, in light of that which
is most intimate and furtive, would limit our faculty to alter the order of things. It returns as
that which is repressed in contemporary art, the disavowed underbelly that reinforces the
art world institution.
Roberto Tejada
7
Little triumph with a mirror, breath, or handprint . . . humble habitats of ghosted flesh as on
the threshold of speech . . . viscous secretions, as well voluptuous. In this work, sex in abjection emerges as life enhancing: perverse enactments, the compulsion to repeat, and the
spell of partial objects give shape to political emotions of a present, even as they belie the
cover story of an alleged global citizenship. These scenes assume no less the particular language of materiality and gesture, like the structure of a sentence that is in perfect keeping
with its content. Artworks, inasmuch as they are propositions, locate a circumstance in the
world, make claims about it, and offer alternate arguments. Statements reflect an energy
and outline in excess of subject matter. Something in the artwork is exhausted neither by
its enunciation nor by its form of address. Walter Benjamin called this the “expressionless,”
irreducible to content, sustaining the difference between surface effect and essence so as to
prevent the conflation of essence with truth. There is no mystery other than the meanings a
self attributes to the situational world where, under a dimming glow, symbolic actions have
a stake in escaping the instrumental life.
There is a rip in the web of meaning that artworks cast and draw. But owing to that gash—
the fear and desire in light of seeing and knowing—carefulness of thought or gesture
emboldens and persuades. The limberness of what we call poetry untangles the strict partitions of subject and object, of self and other, with the kind of intuitive leaps that only
metaphor makes plausible. These moments of poetic elucidation cannot be generalized, nor
are they easily earned, nor is it possible to isolate them without jeopardizing the architecture specific to lyric intimacy. The quality of light and subjectivity that is a provisional glimmer reminds us, as did Marx, that the world can be readily stripped of its halo. When “all
that is solid melts into air” and we are made to see the “real conditions” of our lives, the
ethical self seeks reflection in settings of experimentation that cover a ground if only as a
temporary residence. The transience may quicken us to substitute the vanishing with so
many constituent parts, reanimated. Even as they are deprived of a halo, even as they are
released from fixity and essence, some works are not without the radiance of a convenient
forgetting. They are visual equivalents of the hypothetical enunciation—“what if” or “as
though”—when we comprehend that in any quest-account the amulet found “is really a
refinding.” This art exacts an unhurried measure, inasmuch as speed for speed’s sake endangers the sensual opportunity of the world and, everyday—because so beckoning—its recurring custody. It encompasses speculative objects and symbolic acts that bind us together in
mindfulness, around which we congregate, and over which we’re inclined to argue . . . and
then we vanish.
Roberto Tejada
Southern Methodist University
NOTES
[. . . [The “habits of grammar. . . .” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy
of the Future, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Baltimore, Maryland, Penguin Books, 1973, p. 28 . . . “I was rather
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out of place in the picture . . .” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
(Seminar XI), trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1978, pp. 95–96) . . . “Nothing
that is not there and the nothing that is. . . .” Wallace Stevens, “The Snowman,” Collected Poems, New
York, Knopf, 1954, p. 10 . . . The “communicability of experience . . .” Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,”
in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, New York, Schocken Books, p 86 . . .“All that
is solid . . .” Karl Marx, “Communist Manifesto” (1888) in Marshal Berman, All That is Solid Melts into
Air, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1982. p. 95 . . . The “expressionless . . .” Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s
Elective Affinities”,” in Selected Writings, 1913–1926, trans. Stanley Corngold, Cambridge, Massachusetts,
Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 350 . . . “The object finding is really a refinding . . .” Sigmund Freud,
trans. A. A. Brill, New York, E. P. Dutton & Company, 1962, p. 79.] . . .]