square white world

subject matter

An actor who stakes her life on the squeak she makes with her gumboots, playing Rosalind in As You Like It, rubbing one rubber gumboot against the other: a very human privilege, and a privilege amongst humans. Squeak, squeak. It has even more weight than the sound of her voice, but when her voice comes it’s like it has been infected with the sound, making something else sound in her speech than the well-formed words. Giving another sense, and, de-structuring the existing or pre-existing one.

The resonance is first on another surface than the stage, an ideational surface, perhaps, ideal surface of the actor’s finding something out, which she is reporting on, all speech onstage having something of the nature of indirect speech. The words consist in a participation, participate in the script, and counter-actualise it, in Deleuze’s terms, without contradicting it. The deformation enacted is not of purpose, necessarily, of what one purposes to say. Rather it removes something which it does not replace. This removal is not to the heights, a withdrawal, or retraction; neither is it to the depths, a regression or subduction.

The removal may be said to be of the whole, for the sake of consistency. Not that saying so would be in order to be consistent, but that what is left is the play of parts which form a consistency. The sense of a whole withdraws durationally, is reserved for the subjective power of an indeterminate duration. Then again, it’s not as if we hold off from telling you the whole story until an end is reached, with which the story was, had been, was always going to be self-identical, in a sort of retroaction devised to make, or give the impression of, everything falling into place.

In each playing his part, it’s more the case of an internal cohesion of conflicting elements. The conflicts are great but effortless; and the conflicts are diminutive, at the vanishing point: because the withdrawal or removal of the whole, reserving it to a subjective duration that is indeterminate, is for the sake of indeterminacy and consistency. The body, for Bergson, is a centre of indeterminacy. It too has a centre of reception, where what is being reported on is given time for an action which is as yet not fully determined; we can say, when it is, it will be actualised. And, for Bergson, such an action that is as yet indeterminate is also a sensation, the act of sensation.

Sensation acts or interacts in and with the world at large, does not provide representation of it, or give information to us, in the way of what it is like. No likeness, action: and we have set up the surface of the stage to be a field for the grossly indeterminate. We have deemed it to have the consistency of indivisible movement, going from one thing to another without regard for the different frames or structures of reference being trespassed on: structure has been left behind. Is left behind at the first step. That is, the thing structuring the world is removed for the play of parts, where there is great division, clashes of what we may call conscience; and yet the movement is indivisible: so we go from world to world as easily as going from part to part (the reason for taking out the whole, or, and, taking it for being simply one more part: now one part less). In fact, we go from subject to object and back again.

The play of movements is reflected at smaller and smaller scales, degrees of difference, all the way down to the most minute. At the level of the vibrationary squeak, a particle is emitted. If we imagine it in wave form and blow it up enormously, we can see the peaks as well as the great troughs, which at this level are of worlds colliding. The overall, duration, is what enables the one and the other, by consenting to the formation of a single surface, having the singular consistency to comprehend, so hold in contemplation, the great play of the world with the fraction of a vestigial sound or gesture, glance, grimace. Structures clanging against and destroying each other. Then, no more than gumboots rubbing, as small as a mouse, singing.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

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subjective powers

The digital surface is socially invested, given the power to produce subjects. The subjects we ought to want to be: that is, according to the narrative. It is a narrative of progress, yet it precedes the subjects of, shall we say, speculation, in a speculative data economy.

Those subjects who we ought to want to be and become are the trading pieces. And therefore, trade in pieces, pieces of a psycho-graphology or psycho-grammatology, like parts of speech, the swapmeet we earlier mentioned, where we don’t feel a thing, feel nothing like the insertion of the psyche, or the psychic body, the human one, into the social story, because these parts, and here the paranoia, are inserted into us. Or, better said, into the psyche. So there has been a previous paring down of it, the body-psyche, or body’s mind, if you like, a breaking down and a building up again, from borrowed parts. This is why changing the narrative is the same business: because it is in the same business.

The paranoia breaks out when we feel a part of us take over the role we had hitherto supposed to be ours. As in drunk-texting, the words escape; and with certain drugs, we notice, senses deranged, that they are serial, the senses, from their being put out of order, out of, that is, the social order. We might just as well say, the narrative order. The essence of tragedy: personally to feel so ordered, by, what we can further call, social destiny or narrative necessity. Of course, it’s a comedy to everybody.

In classic tragedy, madness ensues. And we see this fairly regularly, the patch-up jobs, the motley of the general social roles, see, it is comical! Called in by friends, we assist in changing the narrative, so that you or I can get back up again, face the void.

Why void? Well, isn’t that the feeling? The feeling of starting again, and the fear. Like having nothing inside.

We return to a beginning actor, but in taking back possession of ourselves, normally proceed like the selfish one. We fall back on, often disingenuously, sometimes with real terror, what we know. The strangest thing can occur when we are the donors of our own body-parts. They become the opposite of ghost limbs. We become the ghosts.

It is said to be perfectly normal for our psychic well-being to view the space below the stage, the surface, as already full of the lives we are in fact living. But that is the past. We have reversed the order. It is not as full bodies we step out on to the void; it is as voids we step out on to the fullness of who we were.

What help is it to be considering subjective powers in the nightmare or mania we are living of living as introjected subject matter, part-consumables, grammatical egos? For a start, of the latter we can say we see the attraction, since to be part of digital discourse is reassuring, gratifying even, to think we have symbolic entity; this is what analysis does: as symbols of ourselves we can carry on… but it is only by granting such symbols as being outside us that we can do this.

That is, enter the void: the stage direction given not by the void but to the void. Here it comes now, extending its surface under us, at a point we can choose. It is a point in the now.

What is happening is the choice of the minima we go on with: What does a risking actor do? Joaquin Phoenix for some reason comes to mind, perhaps as an example because we can see the results on the plane of their registration, as compositional elements of the screen. He twitches. Or his grimace is nonsensical, out of place, and that’s how we can tell it’s part of the character. From the smallest gesture, we have said, with Kirkkopelto, a world.

Or it is in an angle of his body we see it flash blade-like. A light comes out of his eyes and illuminates the planes of his face. And it is a compulsion, from an inner compulsion, that he acts so in small bits and pieces, the minima of subjectivities; yet we cannot go so far as to call it inner or inward because pure expression, outside, a part of speech that makes absolutely no sense, but here is the pain in the yelp of a dog, a cur, that signifies a world, a world where such a yelp, scream, can be made. Such a world is not produced, not the product of the scream, but suffuses the surface: is the event we have noted, then the impersonal affect, then… the whole subject in its subjective duration, in its subjective duration so whole: a subjective power we have reserved for the indeterminate duration of the reported on, on, not a surface of registration, but receptive centre, the centre of a hearing of indeterminate duration.

The pruning off of perception, selection, all the way to active election, choosing what happens as it does; undoing it, giving it a power that is internal to a receptive centre, is not the expression that reaches out, of a metaphysical impression, but the expression of a psychic minimum in which the subject subsists, comes about or revolves; the revolution itself, of a past pressing up against the present, producing affects without antecedents: all the surface’s roles. The stage’s. This revolution is the saying, the telling, we need to be hearing, is not the story, the warning, the moral lesson, the past, but pushes, has the means to, against the future. Opens it, a crack.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

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subjective powers

What is he afraid of, the beginning actor? We have attributed to him and to her a fear akin to losing control of your own stuff. That, once it’s out there, on the surface, for all to see, even if there’s noone there to see it, it is no longer his and hers. Beyond his and hers, that action is more or less raised by the lines of exaggeration and artifice.

In the state of exaggeration, that action, it stands in relief from the surface, in a queasy way. The state of artifice… a beginning actor might rightly fear he will be found out for showing himself in a good light. Producing the standardised pout or stance, which on him is vaguely ridiculous. And we’ve said about this that what is happening is the action being cut from the body, which acts, by the blade, the line, of the surface, or stage, on which it features, which receives it, on which its report is made, as any body’s. What is personal, now impersonal; action to event: and this, because of its little bit of outside, itself subject, subjectivated, or having its own life, apart from the erstwhile host, donor or sacrifice.

Another sort of fear perhaps is more realistic: of putting the inside outside. Now there’s no retreat. Another sort of exaggeration: commit thyself, we say to the beginning actor; and she puts it all out there, tits and all. Or he is the striding cock strutting across the play area. Another sort of artifice, then, of the most realistic kind: the body as its own prosthetic. …but it is exactly by the body a beginning actor, having committed an action to the stage, is not protected. What’s inside is now outside. And we’ve suggested it now like a birth, an afterbirth, or an excrement, has to make its way on its own.

In Minus Theatre, the group I led for some years, we praised commitment. But we had a saying about that first decision, which the whole practice focused on, perhaps unduly: There are no bad decisions that you can make. But you can get better at making them.

In exaggeration and artifice some comfort lies, a comfortable zone of the indiscernability of one’s artifice to others, or one’s (exaggerated) forthrightness. Yet a beginning actor finds herself out. Or fools himself. And so commences the process of becoming a selfish actor.

What does the surface have that there’s no retreat from it? That whatever I have decided to ‘commit’ to it is unretractable. Is a commitment. Yes, we can see here the fear of the institution of the stage, the theatre, performance, to which a beginning actor feels himself having to make a commitment. But beyond that, it’s more obvious: fear of not being praised; fear one is no good. One is bad. It hasn’t quite sunk in that one is not what one does, that the gesture, the noise, motion one elicited from oneself, being out there, is no longer one’s own. And should a beginning actor be so informed?

Should we say to her, that glance you made to me full of the hope of being recognised, was it part of the action? Cut it. The line is not yours, it’s the character’s. Those guts you left out on the stage, leave them for the stagemanager to pick up; yes. I recognise they’re still attached. Cut it.

What’s out is out. There’s no going back now. That arm you waved with, that heart that beat, yes, I know that if I prick it it will bleed, with your blood. And yet, no, no. I am not in judgement. This is how we console ourselves standing on the outside, standing, as it is said, off.

Fear of being judged precedes the fear whatever we do will produce that judgement. And don’t these two things go together? Fear of losing what one had inside, one’s precious life, one’s precious death; fear that comes when it is outside. Fear that comes too early and fear that comes too late.

Committing to the surface of psychoanalysis used to be the fear of many creative people, lest the engines of creativity are disassembled on the surface, and, when brought back together never work the same way again. Not so much the fear of having one’s dirty little secret outed as of seeing it for oneself, for itself: that this is all I am, because it is all I ever was: my work is the working out of the most trivial complex! and common!

It is strange given the ubiquity of the digital surface it does not occasion a similar fear. … And there, on it we are productive of our performances, showing through our engagement our will to humanity, our good will. And what wonderful sense we can make when we try! How witty! … and how good we can look when we are properly made up.

Attachment anxiety is given new meaning by an inability to separate ourselves from those actions on the surface. Separation anxiety is given new meaning by our capacity for attachment to the slightest gestures of our digital personae. Commitment anxiety has the meaning it has from attachment to those personae. Like an analyst, it interrogates us, the surface; like an analyst whose analysis goes all the way to the psychic source: an engine we proudly display in the exploded view.

Do we inform ourselves of so being analyzed? When it is in the company of friends we are swapping parts? As if it was entailed by our interconnectivity that it resemble a giant psychic swap-meet.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

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subjective powers

If we examine the impulse to dig deep, we find we are always looking for the truth down there, hoping it is a unique truth, not, at least, expecting it is not. And if we search the heights it is for the reasons of finding common understanding, the good thing we expect others to recognise, at least, hoping they will. God is dead, for example: we shout it at the marketplace.

On the stage, the situation is reversed. The hubbub over personal truth is laughable: it is because it’s not unique to us that we play it. As for a good thing that anybody is able to recognise in common with the others, well, there are only personal truths. There are in fact persona, the subjects we have been talking about.

A further reversal occurs: the one who holds her truth to belong to her alone, or who holds his values to be unique and defends them; or, she who attacks because she alone knows what it is inside her; is tragic. This comedy is what we all have in common. A chaos of impulses: each one reassigning its polarity to its opposite: there is no principle guiding it.

Yet, there is something guiding it, maintaining its narrative disorder in the case of comedy, and the order of its narrative in the case of tragedy. It has been thought that it is narrative alone, the stories that we tell ourselves. First there’s the story that I tell myself that I believe; then the story in which we all recognise ourselves, the story of the Fool (the fool who fools herself, the thief who steals from her own pocket, the trickster who is tricked himself by her own disguise, the one whose identity’s indeterminate). The stories, it is said, are necessary. Is it that? or is it the telling that is necessary?

Stories are how we make sense of the world, but this is exactly the reversal we have seen: the story that I tell myself is nonsense; yet it is that nonsense we all have in common. How do we progress in our collective insanity? tragically, but heroically, on our own? comically, but communally, democratically? In other words, what are the general orders given in our stories? This was the necessity we earlier talked of, to tell the stories necessary for the time, the necessity theatre was about. To give it, in Werner Herzog’s words, adequate images. Because in the current sense we have made of the world we recognise a tragic order, an order of necessity and of irreversibility, to which changing the narrative will make not the slightest difference.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

If you would like to help it come to pass, and show your support for what I’m up to, please sponsor it: become a patron, here.

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subjective powers

The funny thing is, we know what the stakes are, yet we do nothing. A sort of collective catatonia has descended. The funnier thing is with the restrictions on freedom of movement imposed globally, in the time of pandemic, that it is given mandate, for the sake of health. The higher principle comes from the depths of sickening, dying bodies.

We elect, select, for this higher principle and it governs our decisions. That is, in the strongest way possible it determines the perception of reality on which we act. And that is in the nature of power, to create reality. In staying home and keeping safe, in taking measures to protect others, maintaining distance, blocking the transmission of aerosols, in suppressing the emission of Covid-Delta particles and of bodily particulates, we are not repressed, we are expressing the reality.

It is in reality that the risk lies that keeps us from doing anything. And in ourselves what is happening? There is a distinct reduction of subjective powers.

And what are these again, as we have enumerated them? Well, the first is impotence exactly, as it applies to a surface which does not effect action. The second is reduction such that a choice is made, a living choice, since it implies an internal relation which has its own life: at its simplest, it is the choice to step out onto the void, void because that is the only support the surface, or stage, has. And we are immediately mistaken to think of ourselves as being upheld by anything else, either of our own resources, like, for example, self-determination, identity, and so on, or of an institutional… perhaps architecture is the best word, meaning to identify the surface with a pre-existing structure, a symbolic one or a discursive one, like, for instance, a stage in the institutional architecture of a theatre.

The third we named as the condition for the other two: that we are always on a complete surface insofar as time is concerned and insofar as it is of indeterminate duration. The report made on it, since it is a centre of reception, will always be complete. In a beautiful phrase of Bergson’s, “the past presses up against the present and draws from it a new form, incommensurable with its antecedents.”

The time, this indeterminate duration we are talking about, is complete not when the action is complete. The subjective power of not effecting action restricts action to movement; movement mobilises the surface: movement confers on the surface the mobility that time has in going past, in passing. It is the mobility we do it for: and now the best word for this is change.

A fourth dimension was added when we said that perception cut off from action, and the impotence of the surface to act on what is outside itself, in the shape of change or pure mobility was in contemplation of itself—and this led to knowledge as a subjective power. Knowledge such as we have described it cannot lead to its institutional enactment, or re-enactment, to its being represented by or in an institution. Out of it cannot follow self-knowledge, because it is always moving that self-knowledge forward to a new form, incommensurable with its antecedents. So that from the shape of change or pure mobility, mobility without consequences, in action, and so on, in contemplation of itself, it follows that the self-contemplation is of that form. A new form. And so, a new form of knowledge.

Can we make then of this a higher principle? No, it can never ascend to the heights, and descends from them only to find itself in immanence, on an immanent and mobile and durational surface. Can we say then that this concerns embodied knowledge and involves actual experience, including the experience of the sickening and dying body? No, because it undoes them. In fact, it is a politics without principle.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

If you would like to help it come to pass, and show your support for what I’m up to, please sponsor it: become a patron, here.

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subjective powers

We have a tendency to view election, selection, as of the heights or to the heights, to look to the heights and raise up to them the good, the worthy, the right, electing-selecting for what rightfully belongs, and working to pull down what does not. But isn’t there a counter-tendency, from the depths? Isn’t there, while that belonging to the heights is democratically or communally distributed, as strong an impulse, an impulse we usually assign individually, to look, with Nietzsche, into the abyss, into the depths? Into the body, the guts and bowels? that we might call a cloacal tendency?

Once we recognise that our tendency is to look for leadership, at times even accepting our enslavement, and that the other, coming from my body, is one of survival because it sees death and for health because it sees sickness and against enslavement because it sees liberty, isn’t the struggle for a balance between the two, which has its end in justice? Doesn’t the impulse to be ruled and to … well, we can easily see what the counter impulse is: it’s to have extended to me a hand, to be in reach of the ruler’s eyes, and to be recognised by her. Once the impulse and its counter are recognised, don’t we want to work to balance them? don’t we work and work for their balance, for the justice to come that is their balance and balances them?

Or it is the staging of a bodily insurrection we struggle for, which is the meaning commonly attributed to political activity, activism and political action: the political demand for the low to be recognised; whether it’s the lower or working classes or those cut out of the system of the distribution of wealth. The workers have their bodily association to labour, the lower classes to dirt and squalor; the deprived and those of reduced means, the poor, relate to a swarm, a herd, a statistic, like you would apply to animals, either counting them in farms, or making a count to calculate the days of their extinction. There is the closest relation to death here down below. Not because it is an experiential reality but because it is a bodily one.

A state of bodily subjection; death a state to which the body is subject: and dying, when taken to be the condition of life, the condition imposed by its generation, because what fucks dies, that is, death when it is raised up, as we might do on a stage, is defanged. All that remains is the body. It does not go through a minimisation on stage. Neither is it the artificiality of what dies onstage not actually dying that effects this new condition we could call death’s embodiment; nor is it by being exaggerated, in the famous death-throes, the one last spasm and death-rattle given all you’ve got: it is not all that dancing leading us from death to the body. And this is not a return trip: we don’t cop out by going back to the body from death. We don’t cheat death from the onstage death. The termination of life when it is enacted in what we have already claimed to be the indeterminate duration of the time of being reported on is undone. Complete, it is opened out to the operations of the surface.

So if we do a show about the poor, is it like showing poor animals onstage, good enough to undo either the states of animals or of, let’s say, minorities? Does representation alter their condition? the condition of their embodiment? No. Whence the staging of a bodily insurrection.

If we look to the erotic minorities of the LGBTIQ+ we see clear bodily connection and with it the link to the profound, the base, even, on which all experience is contingent. So, yes, political recognition is necessary. Yet, then the counter-impulse gives up to the first impulse all that is in it base and low, and, bodily based, basic. It looks to the heights for, if not redemption, recognition, the flash of recognition as the carriage passes by we catch in the leader’s eye: she has seen us. And by standing on this platform of our queerness, the good thing, the truth, the proper and the right, has seen us as we really are. Because that is how we are so staged.

The spread of Covid-19 has become a similar political principle so that it has entirely left the dying and sickening bodies behind. Both dying and sickening bodies alike. Neither can appear on this platform except through what represents them because what occupies this platform is the good, the proper, the truth and the right. And there has been no inversion of levels, of the sub- for the super-structure. The issue being made one of infrastructure is simple obfuscation: a question of management, managing the numbers, governing the nations, ruling the populations, while economies roll on…

How can I possibly say that? Isn’t it exactly political recognition of the sickening and dying that has led to an unprecedented roll-out of politically waged methods to stop more getting sick and decrease the numbers dying? Isn’t this exactly the expression of political will? And can’t this be seen by the sacrifices economies have made, by political imposition? And can’t it in the massive debts governments have taken on to pay for that exercise of political will to stop the sickening and the dying?

Then the struggle goes on to hear from the sick, from the dying. And it too stages a bodily insurrection, is a struggle from the depths. Is a true counter-tendency to the truth. Because it must not be thought it is the truth that is fighting to be heard, true stories and individual testimonies. No it is another sort of intimacy being fought for, beyond that human intimacy of communication: it is always animal, its pain is yelps. Or the screams said to be heard from trees through a certain specialised technical apparatus of listening, and hearing.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

If you would like to receive these posts, as they are written, as letters addressed to you, please send me your email address.

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…”five questions Laurie Anderson had shared with [Sam Anderson], “a sort of test that she uses to figure out whether a piece that she’s working on is good or not. And she said she thinks about this every single creative project, every single medium, whether it’s a song or a painting or some kind of talking sculpture …

‘Is it complicated enough?

‘Is it simple enough?

‘Is it crazy enough?

‘Is it beautiful enough?

‘And finally, Is it stupid enough?’

“And I thought that was kind of a great criteria for proceeding with life, with whatever you are doing.”

— from here, bigness and formatting added

I recommend David G. Hughes’s interview with Camille Paglia from an online magazine I will be reading more of … when I’ve finished the Cristi Puiu interview… Electric Ghost is here

subjective powers

We have trespassed on the divide between static genesis and dynamic, but what is dynamic here is not action. In choosing for an action we are choosing for something cut off from consequence. In choosing to step out onto the void, a beginning actor, fearing the institution, steps right into a place where he has no agency. He is divested of it… and we have to ask what plays in the theatres of bureaucracy and in government institutions? Is it really capital that dehumanises? or the impersonal operations of the law?

And by dehumanisation we mean that it is directed to human being as a stage or surface bereft of humans. What other creatures are welcome there? because it is there that we form political and legal subjects. We might look again at the question that seemed to crop up out of nowhere: What is happening in the time of being reported on?

Subjection there, in the Castle or the Trial, as these are appropriated to the understanding of the Kafkaesque, consists of having to make a report. And in current symbolic regimes, having to produce the data of which one is the datum. To report for oneself on oneself: the subject, however, as it is understood, is already spoken for in these apparati of power.

What is truly Kafkaesque is the impotence before the infliction of the law, the nonsensical nature of the task of the confession. Or of giving any account in these circumstances, and claiming it for oneself, as one’s right to speak. One’s right to being (fairly) represented.

Then, isn’t the demand the subjection, of having to produce the goods? knowing that the only story to be told is the one that plays. That will play before the judge or in the council chambers. It has been known for some time that the right of the individual is stitched on like a star or triangle, for which she has, for her sins, to join with in submitting her identity. Winning it no less! Celebrating the win.

The individual is there like the selfish actor, claiming her victory over the stage, while underneath, a void. What happens in the time of being reported on can be like this. Or like that other movement, that, having trespassed on the divide between static and dynamic genesis, by which a subject outstrips its fate. Does not cheat it. But in her decisiveness, having already taken her decision, is all reason. And with what is reasonable we are not butting up against those negative qualities associated with the Kafkaesque, our submission to the law of the father and the Law, in our impotence, our anorexic feebleness, our erotic failure, but grow closer to Kafka.

We choose for the movement that is reason, that for us is reasonable because it shifts the ground. Mobilises the surface. And possesses the nobility of claiming the irrationality of that choice for our own reason. Claiming this time is giving our report, like the ape in Kafka, to the academy, representative of both science and reason: that is, knowledge and history.

And yet, we recently spoke of knowledge from Bergson’s perspective. Here, perception serves action; it does not serve knowledge. Perception selects for that which serves action, in pursuing our interests, needs and the demands of our bodies.

Perception is in the world and in the matters of the world from which we make our selection. The selection does not grant us knowledge, but singles out that which we pursue. And should we pause in our pursuit, constructing from it the gateway where we must choose, we don’t have the freedom of our choice. As in Kafka, there is only one door meant for us. We have this block of duration. A freedom of contemplation, from which, knowledge, as being what plays before us.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

If you would like to receive these posts, as they are written, as letters addressed to you, please send me your email address.

subjective powers

That the stage removes consequence from our actions looks to be anything but a subjective power. It suggests a restriction on our powers to act, freely to act, since on its surface we lose agency and can cause nothing to happen. Throw in the knowledge the audience have of the story and the fact our lines are scripted and our actions circumscribed by the necessities of a given narrative, why should an actor risk anything? least of all what is most personal to her, intensities which are singular to her. Shouldn’t an actor do it for the money? or, failing that, ego-gratification? And so, whether good or bad, resemble the selfish actor, who takes the stage, taking the stage by the force of his personal charisma, technical accomplishment and enormous charm?

Yet, this limitation engages a power that is limitless, if it is chosen for, entailing the power to resist fate and to exceed it. The lesson of the surface is that actions do not lead to outcomes: there is no necessity for dying to result in death, for murder to lead to punishment, penance, or there being any victim. Without this necessity fate loses meaning. And, yet, surely Oedipus, of anyone, had no choice?

The mistake is to confuse acting freely with choice, freedom with the ability to choose. This is made clearer by the scripted work, where there is no doubt, even in Hamlet, of what will come to pass. The range of expression an actor has to choose from in speaking those lines, What a piece of work is a man…, doesn’t even approach what she can do with the character. He can resist, and call up the famous indecision, To be or not…, or decide, having already made his decision and, by the decisiveness of the decision already taken, having outstripped fate. In the moment where it thinks it can catch up with him, he is already miles ahead, has exceeded the girding round-about of this little life.

In the unscripted work, say, in the one improvised, there is no less a script, a familiar story, often a family story, if we are to invoke Oedipus. And this is particularly the case when we take seriously the claims to depth made by the one who deeply feels the trauma inflicted on him, even when she only does in the moment that these feelings arise. It has to have happened.

Better if she held a script, with the words, …or not, and read out the question. The lesson of the surface is the power of our woundedness to lead us can be outstripped by another, stronger. We might there empower our wound, let it bleed out the words. And then ask, is that all?

The lesson is both that no outcome is a necessary one and none is more ignoble than the one that has to happen. So, yes, we say a subjective power. And look to be free of an eternity—that is a determinate duration—of subjection by taking the more noble course of making an indifferent necessity our own: power of the subject.

Suzanne Guerlac, in her excellent book on him, writes that for Bergson perception is for action. Perception therefore selects inputs for the sake of outputs. The brain’s role in this is to coordinate sensory inputs with energetic outputs. Perception selects from the sensory field on this basis, limiting the inputs of what passes directly on to the nervous system, which, according to its complexity, either engages a hesitation, a delay, for example in cases of ambiguous sensory data, or reacts, for example, in fight or flight, at once.

The contrast here is not between two different sorts of information, information representing a situation where it is appropriate to sing a song on the one hand and to throw a punch on the other, or between knowledge and instinct, such that fight or flight is somehow the latter, and the knowledge gained through adequate training and coaching is supposed to provide the former. For Bergson, says Guerlac, the brain is not a centre of representations or a catchment for images experience and education have inculcated. Perception serves action. Still, along with the seeming autonomous selection by perception and production by the brain and nervous system of energetic outputs there is the option of suspending the action. This contains, for Bergson, the kernel of freedom.

What is happening in the time of being reported on? This is the time given hearing, in a single sitting, albeit one of indeterminate duration, in a block of duration. What is happening in the time of being reported on? Everything. And nothing.

All our worst fears, all our dreams, transpire in this time. Because the time of being reported on is our time with others. Our worst fear is that they are thinking or speaking badly of us. And Eleanor Roosevelt’s quip does not work: that if we are worried about what other people are thinking of us, we should realise how seldom they do. Or Oscar Wilde’s, There is only one thing worse than being talked about behind one’s back. That’s not being. Our dreams are of being loved; and our fears are of being destroyed by the opinions of others, in the time of being reported on, in others’ reports. Also the dream of social media.

And yet, in the selection of perception we have affirmed a subjective power linked to freedom. And yet, the suspension of consequence in following on from action has been a lesson of the surface. And yet, the suspension of perception is that which an action no longer follows by necessity. Yet is in the time of being reported on, then comes about as a time of pure contemplation. So that—and this is what all the stories are talking about, why we should change them and the lesson of the surface how we can—from selection, to the suspension of action, to contemplation, knowledge is created. The block of duration, that the time of being reported on is, is the subjective power of knowledge.

…

note: source references available on request–these will be part of the book, if it should come to pass.

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