Space
in a Time of Pandemic and Madness
Norman
Simms
« ung abysme de
science »
In
Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel,
the father giant hopes to create a school syllabus that will turn his offspring
into “an abyss of science.”[1] By
science is meant, of course,
knowledge, the knowledge that comes from books and is therefore already known
and memorable. But what about ung abyss? It is a steep, deep hole in the ground, the
sea or the sky, and those who stand on the brink become dizzy, suffer a
terrible vertigo which makes them feel like they are about to fall in, leap in
driven by an intolerable fascination, or be pushed over the edge by some
external force. This plunge into the dark unknowing place of non-being, descent
or ascent into the empty heavens where all is empty and meaningless, our sense
of space, the outer reaches of the cosmos—into a black hole.
So, that evening, he was sunk in
an exhausted torpor….He had no thought of anything. He felt the void growing,
growing from moment to moment. He tried not to see the abyss that drew him to
its brink: and in spite of himself he leaned over and his eyes gazed into the
depths of the night, In the void, chaos was stirring, and faint sounds came
from the darkness. Agony filled him: a shiver ran down his spine: his skin
tingled: he clutched the table so as not to fall, Convulsively he awaited
nameless things, a miracle, a God…[2]
This
is what is called a mise en abyme:[3] into the regress of a person holding a
mirror showing a man holding a mirror showing the mirror ad infinitum, being thrust back further and
further into the trauma of all beginnings; or the opening up of Russian matryoshka dolls, one inside the other,
smaller and smaller, until there is no space left, consciousness having swallowed
itself. Some writers have written, too, of an abyss of abysses, filled with
overwhelming knowledge, downwards or upwards, each mis en abyme contradicting the other, cancelling it out, and then
leaving no room for awareness—an epistemological crisis. Beyond the aporia, the
place where logic gives out, paradigms fail and the blind spot at the centre of
perception and memory is swallowed up by its own abject silence.
Space
no longer exists. Time vanishes. This is the point of all difference,
otherness, and new beginnings. Before there were words or images, recognizable
sensations or phantoms of self, there is nothing: prehistory, an Urwelt (original world) of primary trauma—
We are, so to speak, placed in a
labyrinth out of which we cannot any longer find the thread that leads us back:
and perhaps we should not even find it. Thus, we tie together the thread of
history, where the thread of our own memory breaks, and live, where our own
existence fades away, in the existence of a prehistoric world [Vorwelt].[4]
Nothing
makes sense any more, normalcy disintegrates and a great cloud of unknowing
covers all.[5]
New knowledge is made, not out in the environing world of institutions and
authority, but in the interior landscape of the mind reconfiguring itself,
slowly, gradually and agonizingly. Old things attract but cannot be deciphered
or categorized. The world becomes unheimlich,
uncanny; or bizarre, grotesque and unsettling.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…[6]
These
times of crisis and trauma come to individuals and to nations, sometimes more
than once in a lifetime, and they do not always come into awareness with the shock
of recognition as they do with revolutions, civil wars and world wars, as well
as with natural disasters, epidemics and climatic shifts. As in Freudian dream
analysis and tracing back the origins of everyday tics and malapropos, so with
rabbinical midrash and Talmudic exegesis in a focusing in on contradictions,
misplaced words and orthographical peculiarities; and so, too, in Aby Warburg’s
mapping the growth and development in repeated pathos-laden formulae in works
of art, where hidden and suddenly revealed glimpses of freedom and consolation
break into the static images of academic convention::
The profound
yearning for human freedom develops within the scholar through an awareness,
rarely found in art historians, of the conditioning faculty of the “dark
side”—in short, his consciousness of walking on the edge of the abyss. That is
why Warburg’s discourse is so stirring, with its complex weave of science and
magic and the relative independence of form from a subject, who in turn is
decentered from the traditional territories of inner nature.[7]
Where Warburg saw the Nachleben (afterlife) of these powerful
triggers of mental energy (engrammes), Freud started to see something more
dynamic: Nachträglichkeit.[8] As he traced back the repeated and
reconfigured memories in the so-called Wolfman, Freud developed an idea that
subsequent traumatic shocks not only could be seen to transform earlier moments
of fear, humiliation and suffering, but the later dreams, phobias and
resistances became part of a new pattern of unconscious energy breaking through
the surface of awareness. But before
Freud came Karl Philipp Moritz’s Anton
Reiser: A Psychological Novel.[9]
The human mind, for Moritz, was
no longer an atemporal substance with universal features; it was a singular
constellation of ideas which an individual had acquired over time. To study the
mind, it was therefore necessary to follow simultaneously two paths of inquiry:
to attend to the behavioural oddities and idiosyncrasies that characterizes a
specific human being, and to make legible these features by tracing them back
through time to the moment of their formation.[10]
That
moment in time, that place in the dark abyss of the mind was not unique to an
eccentric individual, but shared with an historical group whose cultural
traumas were shaped over thousands of generations.
Today
we are again standing on the edge of the abyss, where the maelstrom of
stupidity swirls, the whirlwind of pandemic sucks us in and the tourbillon of tyranny threatens
everything we thought we knew and the reality that seemed secure.
[1] William N. West, “Encircling
Knowledge” Renaissance Quarterly 68:4
(2015) 1327-1340.
[2] Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe, trans. Gilbert Cannan. (New
York: The Modern Library, 1938. Original French in 10 volumes 1904-1912.) Vol. I, p. 252.
[3] Marcus Smith, Into the Abyss: A Study of the Mise en
Abyme. Ph.D. thesis. London Metropolitan University 2016.
[4] Andeas Gailus, “A Case of
Individuality: Karl Phlipp Moritz and the Magazine for Empirical Psychology” New German Critique 79 (2000) 67-105.
[5] Anonymous, The Cloude of Unknowyng, second half of the fourteenth century.
[6] W.B.
Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1919).
[7] Franco Bernabei, “Jan
Biaŀostocki, Formalism, and Iconology” Artibus
et Historiae, 11:22 (1990) 11.
[8] Allesandra Campo, Nachträglichkeit:
Il contributo della psicoanalisi alla definizione di una filosofia del
processo. Università degli Studi di Roma Tre: Tesi di dottorato un
Filosofia e Teoria delle Scienze Umane, 2014/2015.
[9] Karl Philipp Moritz, Anton
Reiser: Psychological Novel. Trans. Ritchie Robertson. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1997. Original German, 1782-1783.
[10] Andreas Gailus,
“A Case of Individuality: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Magazine for Empirical
Psychology” New German Critique (79)
(2000) 410.
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