Jan Op de Beeck
Montage, rupture, phantom, crisis.

With ordeal more print by Veva Leye & Jelle Martens

– Is it true that you want to say something about the eyes?

– Perhaps, but not necessarily.

– What’s fascinating about the eyes is that they possess a double negative space: set within the opaque white of the eye lies the iris, the coloured, characterful image, within which the pupil, a black opening, sucks the delicate waves of colour inwards – Sauron from The Lord of the Rings as an eye, a black abyss or crevice that ceaselessly swallows or spews forth flames, is the horror-like shadow side of the world’s most dazzling, sublime eyes. In the white space or interstice of the montage, the fascination draws us in, only to keep us out all the more radically.

– At the same time, we are lead in, yet remain in our dimension of speechlessness and dazzlement, without a compass.

– Rather, we are interpellated, inserted, absorbed without being able to take in the whole picture. We are bound within our own dissolution. But how else might we orient ourselves, at least as a start, than by heeding the call of that enigmatic gesture, the twilight curve of the nose, the wide-open, scorching expanse, the shot-through envelopment of a space in a pencil drawing, the floating, chiselled form of a heterogeneous swarm of words, an asymmetrical gaze or a lingering, singing voice – at least: in art. Beyond that, not always able to delve deeper into what has gripped us, one can sometimes do nothing but evade one’s murderer, or at least for the time being.

– A beginning, laboured and strained, yet unimaginably light when, in the face of the object of fascination, as if before a promise of Presence and rapture, one does not maintain a respectful or devout distance – as in the realm of consumption or power – but when, by reaching towards death at the heart of the fascination, by allowing death to come passively into the writing, the object continues to be rewritten, and the fascination is reduced to a groundlessness that keeps disappearing, beyond presence or absence, ‘unreal’, as Maurice Blanchot writes. In montage, the elements bathe in that which both enchants and attracts, whilst also corroding, emptying and disillusioning, by continuing to hold one spellbound by the impossible. Immanent critique.

– Yet a ‘critique’ that does not belong to itself, that refuses to solidify and remains poetry, without adopting a fixed position; which, according to its etymology, does not judge but does distinguish, even though every distinction, every dissociation-association, is at least an analysis in which a kind of judgement plays a part. Moreover, a position or judgement can crystallise at any moment, which sometimes happens too often and at other times too rarely – too rarely does an articulated, resonant sharpness emerge, a decisive interpretation with its own critical adherence.

– In ‘Parole de fragment’, Blanchot writes about René Char’s almost separate ‘sentences’: ‘interrupted by a blank space, isolated and dissociated to such an extent that one cannot move from one to the other except by a leap and by becoming aware of a difficult interval; yet, in their plurality, they carry the meaning of an arrangement which they entrust to a future of speech. An arrangement of a new kind, which will not be that of harmony, concord or reconciliation, but which will accept disjunction or divergence as the infinite centre from which, through speech, a relationship must be established: an arrangement that does not compose, but juxtaposes; that is to say, it leaves the terms that come into relation separate from one another, respecting and preserving this exteriority and this distance as the principle – always already destituted – of all meaning.’ The blank, or the other night, is the site of the leap of inspiration that draws the elements together and keeps them apart, that redistributes them internally anew and scatters them differently. The impatient, carefree movement of desire – a movement that is both psychic and sensual – touches the integrity of the work, breathing life into it by disruptively surrendering it to the reaching out towards death. Death, the blindness in writing or reading, can, however, only be brought into play in the very act of writing or reading itself. Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur is gripped by a strange intimacy, a passive and nocturnal imaginary, a terrifying objectality, wandering alone amongst us: ‘Soon the night seemed to him darker, more terrifying than any other night, as if it had truly sprung from a wound in thought that no longer thought, from thought that, ironically, had been chosen as an object by something other than thought. That was the night itself. Images that formed its darkness overwhelmed him. (…) A deadly fear gripped his heart. All around his body, he knew, his thinking - merged with the night - kept watch. (…) He was locked in battle with something inaccessible, something strange, something of which he could say: that does not exist, but which nevertheless filled him with fear and which he felt wandering through the realm of his solitude.’ In art, responsibility is often taken on in this way – not through a desire to act, to install, to ‘work’, to care, but by surrendering oneself, quite unexpectedly. This results not only, in fits and starts and through all manner of subtle shifts in psychic modalities, in a minimal crisis, a minimal approach to the separating and self-separating from an impossible Real – which is fantasmatically swathed. It also ploughs its way through the ‘entire’ space of the Other, undertaking, as it were, the ‘total’ journey, because it keeps the crisis open time and again whilst also inscribing it – a crisis brought about by the quest, the writing or the act of creation itself: ‘Every quest is a crisis. What is sought is nothing other than the turn of the quest that gives rise to the crisis: the critical turn.’ (Blanchot) To allow oneself to be haunted by that which eludes the search – or life itself, when such a search was not yet a factor – and which thus repeatedly breaks, divides, reinitiates and refreshes the quest.

– That is endless semiosis, inexhaustibly decentred, crossed out centre, the familiar and reassuring conception of the world as a theatre of colourful differences; death is also the source of youth. Let us leave the literary space and its abstract subject – a space that belongs to everyone in its boundless possibilities and accommodation – and enter, for example, a grubby study exuding nervous tension, where, much to one’s annoyance, the cleaner has not returned a dusted-off little sculpture to exactly the same spot. Or a deadlocked conflict in a geopolitical or romantic relationship, in which everyone seems condemned to nothing but repeating and displaying the same actions and refrains. And nothing is, in its appearance, more colourfully diverse and yet, time and again, more of the same - of the same modality and thus not truly Different - than capitalism: nowhere is the living difference more of an illusion, and is the movement of desire, time and again, more servilely at the service of the monotony of the death drive – a jouissance beyond the pleasure principle, an inert, unyielding, cloying force that fixates, repeats itself, that ‘always returns to the same place’, a non-place. The finite subject, marked by mud and anxiety, is evoked in its nocturnal objectality by Lacan’s phrase: ‘interrogate the anxious one of the blank page; he will tell you who is the turd of his fantasy.’ All of this amounts to questioning the contemporary potential power of desire – a desire that differentiates, complicates, moves and shifts, that constitutes the development of thought, and that stands in stark contrast to the monotony of the jouissance of the death drive – desire breathes new life into us. The capitalist condition, however, means that our desire is hijacked and substituted. Because, says Lacan, in capitalism the Other – and thus castration and lack – is rejected, because there is no passage via the signifiers of the Other, the capitalist subject is not situated via the enigma of its desire. Esther Faye: ‘Desire is in effect reduced to demand. As Colette Soler has argued, capitalism had no interest in the truth of the subject’s desire and the singular jouissance that desire aims at. Rather, its sole interest lies in managing the jouissance of the capitalist subject by feeding the pseudo-desire it creates with ‘lathouse’ objects that render the subject anonymous to itself.’ Lacan’s complex neologism ‘lathouse’ is summarised by Žižek as ‘consumerist object-gadgets that captivate the libido with the promise of delivering excessive pleasure, but which actually reproduce only the lack itself’ – today these are smartphones, smartwatches, apps, home and car technology, games and social media; in short, the commodities of techno-capitalism, but also, as Faye points out, ‘life experiences’ that are consumed.

– That same finite subject, steeped in the contemporary condition, sits at a desk, writing, reading or watching. It is usually not free – certainly not from the contingencies of its life – and what it does and says is often not innocent, though it bears no conventional guilt for this – but it can take responsibility for it. Žižek makes a critical distinction between two modes of desire. There is the desire that is (still) supported by the fantasy, which implies a relative repetition. But that desire is at the same time a defence against the gaping – and the Real jouissance – of the Other’s desire. Lacan’s ‘traversée du fantasme’, ‘going through’ the fantasy, amounts to a feminisation that assumes the lack and the jouissance – i.e. allows the symbolic Other to be affected, which perforates the Other, antagonises it, renders it a ‘pas-tout’/‘not-all’, inconsistent. The desire coordinated by the fantasy, which time and again joyfully believes in one thing or another as substantial and sets out towards it, ideologically masks the antagonisms and a core of the Real - which is impossible to symbolise - of inconsistent desire. Beyond the phantasy, at the very heart of desire, we are confronted with something that has ‘failed’ and continues to go awry: a faltering, a rupture, a gap that has not been able to disappear and continues to impose itself with blinding intensity.

– Perhaps the relationship between Blanchot and Žižek can be reconsidered through an interpretation of Hegel’s ‘night of the world’, to which both positions are partly rooted: ‘Man is this night, this empty nothingness that contains everything in its simplicity – a wealth of an infinite number of representations, images, none of which come precisely to mind – or which are not present. This night, the innermost essence of nature, which exists here – the pure self – in phantasmagorical representations, is a complete night; here a bloodied head flashes past – there a deathly pale figure, only to vanish just as swiftly. – One sees this night when one looks people in the eyes – in a night that becomes terrifying.’ Frank Vande Veire describes Žižek’s frequent interpretations of this passage as ambiguous, and finds this one the most subtle: in the movement by which the subject withdraws from the world into the night ‘of its non-being’, the representations are fragmented by the violence of the signifier, and the subject attaches itself excessively to certain elements, namely to the opaque, enigmatic dimension of the signifier, which survives in the subject in an uncanny manner as haunting remnants. And conversely, does Blanchot perhaps come closer – not so much in the focus of his theorising as in his writing – to Žižek’s inconsistent desire of the Other, by surrendering himself to an Outside that ceaselessly breaks language and scatters meanings as they seld? On the other hand, Blanchot does not explicitly bring social antagonisms into the same space.

– Pushing desire to its limits, causing the fantasy to show cracks and allowing the Real and anxiety to seep through (just as, through a sublime feature of the beloved, the Real, ugly, overwhelming proximity of a parent can intrude), yet in which the fantasy continues to function as the protective ‘watchful word’ (Blanchot), differs from a situation and mode in which the lack ceases to be lacking. When the lack, and the Lacanian Real object a in that place (the a that normally falls out of experience and, as both lacking and fantasmatically structured, fuels desire), ceases to be lacking, the traumatic Real bursts into the field of the Other – in which the subject lives – and the fantasy is pierced or can no longer maintain its function. Nor, it seems, should the inconsistent desire of the Other (Žižek) be confused – as Alenka Zupančič appears to write regarding Badiou’s événement (event) – with this same ‘constellation that presents itself as a closure of the symbolic field of metonymical shifting, of (potentially) endless movement of possibilities, which relies on a constitutive lack. It implies an absolute ‘too much’ which, however, is not quantitative but qualitative. (…) If this rift suddenly comes to be lacking, or if it suddenly appears as something (in this world), this constitutes an absolute ‘too muchness’ that bends the symbolic space and threatens to oust the subject from it.’ The affect associated with this lack that stops lacking is anxiety.

– Montage involves the unexpected juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, each of which latently carries and instills its own strange-intimate fantasy that underpins ‘worldviews’, and with it a particular way of jouissance. The découpage and white space – the absence of the stable, meaningful word, a gaping void in which the phantasy takes root – mean that the fantasmatic constellations, normally latent and thus ideological, now well up to the surface in an intensified form and come into conflict with one another. They have no room for one another, they push aside each other’s self-evidence, clash, and cause each other to shatter. They function as each other’s excessive addition, each other’s weighing surplus – which one can ignore as ‘that is none of my concern’, or engage with by rethinking the elements. The montage invites us to work: the labour of the imagination.

– Jacq Firmin Vogelaar argues that montage without political consciousness is just as reactionary. That is true, but political consciousness plays a secondary role – in the événement, the primary ‘cause’ of the labour of the imagination, to borrow from Lacan, is an over-present Real that just doesn’t work, that falters, that is rupture and chasm – which seizes me blindly. Critique begins here with crisis, a critical condition, with what separates me from myself, becoming a stranger to myself – a state that initially overwhelms me, leaving me unable to distinguish anything.

– Perhaps no one has written about the shifts in psychic modalities with greater decisiveness and subtlety than Blanchot. They alternate, shift, or intertwine, become entangled, or a part splits off and asserts itself. They disguise themselves, wearing masks: narcissistic euphoria imagines itself to be powerful autonomy; a fresh act turns out to be symptomatic repetition; experienced failure conceals a Real that runs counter to everything that has hitherto been defining.

Jan Op de Beeck is an artist and writer, and a member of the editorial board of the artists’ magazine De Spijtige Herder.

Bibliography

• Maurice Blanchot, Thomas de duistere, Hölderlin, Amsterdam, 1950, 1996.
• Maurice Blanchot, ‘De blik van Orpheus’, in: (Bart Cassiman, Greet Ramael, Frank Vande Veire, red.) Het sublieme gemis. Over het geheugen van de verbeelding, Ludion, Antwerpen, 1955, 1993.
• Maurice Blanchot, ‘Parler, ce n’est pas voir’, in: L’Entretien infini, Gallimard, Parijs, 1969.
• Esther Faye, ‘Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel. Ou pire: the discourse of capitalism’, in: S: Journal of the circle for Lacanian ideology critique #10 & 11, 2017-18.
• Jacques Lacan, L’angoisse, 1962-63, document de travail.
• Frank Vande Veire, Tussen blinde fascinatie en vrijheid. Het mensbeeld van Slavoj Žižek, Vantilt, Nijmegen, 2015.
• Jacq Firmin Vogelaar, Konfrontaties. Kritieken en commentaren, SUN, Nijmegen, 1974.
• Slavoj Žižek, The sublime object of ideology, Verso, London/New York, 1989.
• Slavoj Žižek, The year of dreaming dangerously, Verso, London/New York, 2012.
• Alenka Zupančič, ‘Enthusiasm, anxiety and the event’, in: Parallax #4, 2005.