For as long as I can remember I’ve associated representation with death. Between the picture and the word, and at their divergence in the image and the symbol, it’s always seemed to me that the word, the symbol, is a special case. As if the blackening of the fingers in the photograph above came from printer’s ink.
As if words were a desperate attempt to pick traces of life from an empty shell after the mollusc, or whatever creature once occupied it, had been sucked out, your tongue finds white mother of pearl.
As if it were more hopeless, then, than the image in your mind or memory, or the picture formed by the hollow, licked clean of muscle, smooth of viscera, in your imagination, the voice echoes with signs and the words scrape husks against each other, seedless, in a Qlipphoth, in a death rattle.
The ear of the listener is like that shell.
The mouth of the speaker is like the husk.
In the archive, which, of course, doesn’t echo, what’s been recorded lies intestate, in dry black lines, on its white slab, out cold. The written word, undead, in an undeath that is not opposed to death, has had this association with the morgue. Whatever voice it elicits or image it calls up in the chambers of the body, in the brain’s camera, with whatever internal representation I’ve provided it, in the cavity it’s formed or found (in the cavity of the ‘I’), it has insisted in its symbolic structure and the emptiness of its ritual.
There’s been no outside to its virtual or actual representation, only the return of the same, the monstrous reality of which the written word is one instance. If it has been a special case, it has made itself an example of, not an exception to, the impossibility of a beyond to representation that the simulation has, that bounds the sensorium and its logic of sense, in the impassibility of life in death.
