A fleck. A piece of dust. A smudge. Stain, spot, blur. (Listening for the outside: angels, messages and …).1

Fragments

Number 1 ( fragments), 1min 7sec, 2017.

[…] turned air

Simply a sign or trace of a body, a body having disappeared. A body turned air. A remaining trace, a wing parted from a body. ‘Eager for a sight of her, turning back his longing eyes, instantly she slipped away into disappearance’. She falls.⇒

Number 2 (wing), 21sec, 2017.

⇒ ‘And now they were nearing the margin of the upper earth, when he, afraid that she might fail him, eager for sight of her, turned back his longing eyes; and instantly she slipped into the depths. He stretched out his arms, eager to catch her or feel her clasp; but, unhappy one, he clasped nothing but the yielding air’.2

Vagueness

Maybe that’s all it is.

A looking for a sign, or a looking for signs.

A sign that provides an indication of some sense of direction, or a sign that points toward something.

That’s vague, isn’t it?

Too vague.

The question could be posed another way: on vagueness.

It’s a looking for…, to seek. It’s not vagueness. A sign that formed inside of, or through, the indistinct. Not on vagueness, but the indeterminate. And not to seek through it, but to seek it. To seek the indeterminate. And then someone, a voice, says, ‘Do not seek, find’. To find a sign. The sign of the indeterminate. Or, to find signs of…

The voice says, ‘You would not seek me if you had not already found me’.⇒ It is as though what had been found, had been lost from memory, but somehow remained and had been guiding the very desire to seek. To seek is to find what is already known to be found, but shrouded by oblivion, and then to find it seemingly, as though it were somehow, anew. On the contrary, to find is to allow for the indeterminate to announce itself as present and objectless.

⇒ Jacques Lacan quotes Picasso, ‘I do not seek, I find’, in his Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis.3

Adrian Rifkin: ‘In the years of our critique of the artist as a subject of bourgeois “self-possession”, (by the artist Terry Atkinson out of C.B. Macpherson) Picasso’s statement, “I don’t seek, I find”, was held in derision. Re-read via Lacan’s citation of the formula in Seminar XI, and in the wake of the grinding teleologies of research assessment, Lacan’s critique of research, summarised in the phrase, “Freud did not look for the unconscious, he found it”, insists that we are better off with accidental answers rather than over intentioned questions. That is the value of practiced based research’. (Email message, 2 August 2017.)

It happened like this

It happened like this. A listening for something. And there inside of the music being listened to, it materialised as something outside of the music, but within it too. ‘He sat comfortably, listening to a piece of music, a recording, that he had listened to many times. On this occasion, he tried to remember when he first heard it. It comes to him as a vague memory. But he remembers it too as a piece of music that he had heard previously, before the first time, as this was a particular recording, a version. And then, listening this time, on this occasion, listening through the slow-paced prelude, the introduction, he hears a sound of a noise in the recording. The noise, a note out of place, he recognised as a car horn. Reading about the recording, he noted that the performance had taken place in a community hall, a warm day, and windows to the street left open’.⇒ Immediately, the sound is recognised and then unrecognised. The sound of a car horn, sensed through its resonance, its frequency, is pure sound. An index without relation, the marker of an absence. It is not to make of this ‘pure sound’ an ontology, an object of itself, but rather to lessen its objectness, to allow the sound, this sound, to enter into the space of relation, a sound with-, but where the companion, who with-, and where the sound, enter an infinite mutability, an infinite chain of signifiers, to make of it an indeterminacy.

‘When Kant speaks of the matter of sensation, which he opposes to its form, its formation, it is precisely to do with what we cannot calculate’.4

⇒ If the first beginning is Number 1 ( fragments), this beginning, here, is another. And another is maybe that’s all it is. Not another alongside, but one over the other (not overlapping). Another beginning is found in these two scenes as they too go over each other to make something of their conjunction, to produce an aberrant reading, to produce a limit. Or, better still, to think around the idea of the limit. The first scene involves a sound that I hear in the ‘live’ recording of what is thought to be the last ‘live’ recording of John Coltrane on 23 April 1967. It is in the recording of a particular song, My Favorite Things, at the beginning, that I hear the sound of a car horn, distinctly, even if in the distance. This recording by Coltrane is regarded by some as having inferior audio quality. Not only were the sounds from the street outside picked up in the recording, but the ‘acoustics in the room, a converted gym, were impossibly live, a giant echo chamber’. 5 The second scene is taken from John Cage’s Indeterminacy. Those of you who know this work, will know the story I am about to retell. It is the story in which Cage talks about Christian Wolff playing a composition on the piano ‘when the windows were open’, when the noise of the street and harbour interrupt the sound of the music. These two scenes, then, provide both the structure and an opening of a space for the work. The structure is a series of scenes, a series of fragments. The space that opens up, like the open window, is to think sound as a kind of model for thinking, for listening, for causing interruptions, for producing indeterminacy. The outside-sound as a something not known or recognised, something that signals like a warning (or prophecy), something that disrupts, something like a medium at the limit. In the latter sense, this outside-sound as medium, is both disruption and a kind of formation. A formation that sounds the edges of itself.

Surface

A fleck. A piece of dust. A smudge. Stain, spot, blur. On the verge of decipherability, at the same time it pierces like the point of a blade. Its affect, the sharpness of its edge, is in not knowing the cause. Imagine hearing a sound that you cannot place, for which you cannot locate an origin, or a source.⇒

⇒ A note on a cause, meta-.
There are pictures, artefacts, articles of faith, that are all hung on the walls of the apartment. Time has discoloured the walls and the removal of the various articles will undoubtedly leave, not a mark, but the opposite of a mark, the opposite of a shadow. What name can this opposite of a mark/shadow be given? It is a kind of blur. A blur that is the characteristic of this space of a mark that is not a mark, a shadow that is not a shadow. To wilfully misname the space itself as a blur is perhaps to say something about the meaning of the word. To give this not-mark or not-shadow the name blur, is rather to provides definition for blur. It is this space as indistinct, a kind of smudge, a thing made obscure. And time is here too. The time that passes over. No, put it another way. It is a time that passes under, that passes behind, but a passing-under-and-behind that runs along a surface. A passing-under-and-behind that delineates a surface. It runs along the walls, collecting the sub-particles that drift through the air, that occasionally swirl up on the rise and fall of warmth, a breadth, a body. A collecting that provides the structure of the surface. A structure, a surface, interrupted by pictures, artefacts, holiday souvenirs, articles of faith, a crucifix, the Madonna, images and objects around which all significance circulates, which when fallen away leave their presence as an obscuring blur, an appearing and a disappearing, a focus-pulled-in-and-out. Wait. These things that appear to interrupt the surface of a wall, that produce the markers of their absence, these interruptions come to signify, from one to the other, each simultaneously taking and vacating their place, forming and…

‘The text’s [italics mine] semiotic distribution is set out in the following manner: when instinctual rhythm passes through ephemeral but specific theses, meaning is constituted but is then immediately exceeded by what seems outside meaning: materiality, the discontinuity of real objects. The process’ matrix of enunciation is in fact anaphoric since it designates an elsewhere: the chora that generates what signifies. To have access to the process would therefore be to break through any given sign for the subject, and reconstitute the heterogeneous space of its formation. This practice, a continuous passing beyond the limit, which does not close off signifiance [italics mine] into a system but instead assumes the infinity of its process, can only come about when, simultaneously, it assumes the laws of this process: the biological-physiological and social laws which allow, first, for the discovery of their precedents and then for their free realization. That this practice assumes laws implies that it safeguards boundaries, that it seeks out theses, and that in the process of this search it transforms the law, boundaries, and constraints it meets’.6

Fragments (no longer there)

Fragments: a part missing, a thing not there (or no longer there), a thing broken, a particle of…, a wing fragment, a limb, a feather, a splinter-of-glass, a torn letter, a page torn from a book, the snatch of a song, a half-heard conversation, an indecipherable sound, a left-behindpiece- of-clothing, a document, a dream…

Fragments: He says, ‘Impediment, failure, split. In a spoken or written sentence something stumbles’. He continues, it is there that ‘something other demands to be realised – which appears as intentional, of course, but of a strange temporality’. It is an atemporality, yes? Another time? ‘What occurs, what is produced, in this gap, presents itself as the find’.

‘Discontinuity, these splits and breaks, then, might be understood as an other form, not anti-form, more like a-form—in this discontinuity, something that manifests itself as vacillation’.
Can we think of this a-form as a kind of vacillation, as an insistent or radical indecision? To think the fragment into this…Not somehow a something missing, but rather a breaking produced by a not-this, not-that, neither, maybe, this…
And ‘must we place it…against the background of a totality?’
And there is a totality? A one?⇒

⇒ ‘Impediment, failure, split. In a spoken or written sentence something stumbles. Freud is attracted by these phenomena, and it is there that he seeks the unconscious. There, something other demands to be realised – which appears as intentional, of course, but of a strange temporality. What occurs, what is produced, in this gap, is presented as the discovery. It is in this way that the Freudian exploration first encounters what occurs in the unconscious’. [Ce qui se produit – au sens plein du terme « se produire » – dans cette béance, dans cette fêlure, se présente comme la trouvaille…C’est ainsi d’abord que l’exploration freudienne rencontre ce qui se passe dans l’inconscient.]
…
‘Discontinuity, then, is the essential form in which the unconscious first appears to us as a phenomenon—discontinuity, in which something is manifest as a vacillation. Now, if this discontinuity has this absolute, inaugural character, in the development of Freud’s discovery, must we place it—as was later the tendency with analysts—against the background of a totality?’ [La discontinuité, telle est la forme essentielle où nous apparaît d’abord l’inconscient comme phénomène. Dans cette discontinuité quelque chose qui se manifeste comme une vacillation, et ceci nous conduit à nous interroger sur ce qu’il en est de son fond, puisqu’il s’agit d’une discontinuité. Si cette discontinuité a ce caractère absolu – ce que nous semblons lui donner dans le texte du phénomène – ce caractère inaugural dans le chemin de la découverte de Freud, devons-nous lui donner – comme ce fut depuis, la tendance des analystes – le fond en quelque sorte nécessaire d’une appréhension de quelque totalité?]7

Angel 1

The angel=flight, appearing and disappearing.⇒
The angel=blur.
The messenger having already flown.
But there is also always something to come, something more, that exceeds the present. In the stories of angels, the message is prophecy.
Prophecy=signification.⇒
As communication itself.
Prophecy as action, as the act itself, empty.

⇒ ‘“[A]ngels are changeable in form; they appear at one time as males, at another as females; now as spirits; now as angels”. By this remark they clearly stated that angels are incorporeal, and have no permanent bodily form independent of the mind [of him who perceives them], they exist entirely in prophetic vision, and depend on the action of the imaginative power’…‘The bird in its flight is sometimes visible, sometimes withdrawn from our sight; one moment near to us, and in the next far off; and these are exactly the circumstances which we must associate with the idea of angels’.8

Of course, the figure of the angel, of angels, is given different forms that define the characteristic of its principle role as envoy. Recently, Giorgio Agamben has provided a genealogy of the role and status of angelology in relation to the modes and hierarchies of secular government: ‘Perhaps…nothing has had so much been written about it, and with so little perspicacity, as angels. Their image, at the same time beautiful and exhausted, thoughtful and efficient, has so deeply penetrated not on the daily prayers and liturgies of the Occident, its philosophy, literature, painting, and sculpture, but also its day-dreaming, subcultures, and the Kitsch, that even a merely coherent comprehension of the topic seems out of the question. And when, in the twentieth century, the angel forcefully re-emerges in Rilke’s Elegies or Klee’s paintings, in Benjamin’s Theses or in Corbin’s gnosis, his gesture does not appear to us today to be any less enigmatic that that of the seraphims who, in the etoimasia tou thronou of Palaeochristian and Byzantine basilicas, seem to protect in silence the empty throne of glory’. Agamben goes on to argue that angelology ‘finds its proper place in the economy of the divine government of the world, of which angels are ministers’. It is Kafka, according to Agamben, that provides the clearest definition that forges the celestial and secular role of angels: ‘it is precisely this co-substantiality of angels and bureaucrats that the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, Franz Kafka, perceived with visionary precision, presenting his functionaries, messengers and servants as disguised angels’.9

⇒ To split the sign (of prophecy, what is being prophesied), prophecy as pure signifier.

Angel-wing

Angel wing, angel light (a fragment).

From the edge of the window frame, seeing out. No, instead, listening: to what falls outside the frame, to hear the sound of the beating of a wing, to not know it as necessarily that, as each beat cuts silently through the air, and then to see the instant of each beat as a flash of light, ill-formed. And what message is formed in this way? It is unrecognisable. It might smack a surface, flat. It might cut a surface, collapsing nearness and distance. It allows (regrets) the fall into the depth of the…

He says:

‘Where is the back ground? Is it absent? No. Rupture, split, the stroke of the opening makes absence emerge – just as the cry does not stand out against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes the silence emerge as silence’.10

Number 3 (Angel-light), 36sec, 2017.11

1. The beginnings of this work developed out of a seminar series that I have been running over the past few years at Central Saint Martins, for the 4D Pathway, BA Fine Art. Many thanks are due to the students who have participated in the seminars, for bearing with my meandering thinking processes and for their incisive questions.
2. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book X, Orpheus and Eurydice, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984), 69.
3. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1986), 7.
4. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Something like: Communication…Without Communication,’ in The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (London: Polity Press, 1991), 111.
5. Ben Ratliff, Coltrane: The Story of a Sound (London: Faber & Faber, 2007), 113.
6. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 100–01.
7. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, 25.
8. Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed [1190], trans. M. Friedländer (Boston: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1904), 66.
9. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Angels,’ trans. Lorenzo Chiesa, Angelaki 16:3 (2011).
10. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Pycho-analysis, 26.
11. Something starts off, something continues. Something. An approximation. Continuing, as a duration, unfolding….