RSSby Tom McCarthy
Between Pain and Nothing orig delivered South London Gallery, 2003 and pub in ‘The Milgram Re-enactment: Rod Dickinson’s Re-enactment of Stanley Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ Experiment’, Jan van Eyck Press, Holland, 2004
Interviewing the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas for a 1982 Radio France-Culture series, transcripts of which would later be published under the title Ethics and Infinity, Philippe Nemo kicks off with a simple question: How does one begin thinking? Levinas replies:
It probably begins through traumatisms or gropings to which one does not even know how to give a verbal form: a separation, a violent scene, a sudden consciousness of the monotony of time.[1]
Shocks, he continues, become questions and problems, ‘giving one to think’. Levinas’s diction, his extreme vocabulary – traumatisms, violence, shocks and separations – could be seen as of its age, and even more so coming from the mouth of one who, after leaving Lithuania for France, lost almost all his family to the catastrophe of Nazism. Viewed through a wider lens, though, his answer appears thoroughly traditional, harking back to the very beginnings of Western thought. Both Plutarch and Pausanias describe the Lebedeian oracle to Trophonius, a chasm into which a suppliant, having first drunk from two springs - Lethe (forgetfulness) and Memory - is suddenly jerked. Once there, a blow falls on his skull and he seems to die. An invisible speaker then reveals secrets to him – but no sooner are these secrets uttered than the suppliant loses all sense and understanding. He is eventually returned to the ground above, enthroned on the Chair of Memory and, still dazed, asked to repeat what he has heard.[2] This traumatic ancient procedure, with its violent primal scene and then its slow reiteration, exemplifies the way that, for the Greeks, knowledge and trauma are never far apart.[3] ‘The Gods love us,’ chant the chorus of Aeschulus’s Agammemnon, ‘so they make us suffer.’ Why do they make us suffer? ‘So that thereby we may learn the truth.’[4]
Entering the Yale laboratory of Stanley Milgram in 1961, volunteers were fed a more or less identical proposition, and asked to test it scientifically. ‘We’re trying to find out whether punishment helps people learn,’ the white-coated scientist tells the participants. One of them is designated as the teacher, the other as the learner; this second is enthroned in a modern Chair of Memory in an adjoining room, read a list of paired words by the teacher and then made to reiterate them electronically by correctly indicating, with a button, the second half of each pairing when the first is read to him again. If he gets it wrong, the teacher must administer a shock. After a few shocks of increasing voltage, the learner demands that the experiment be stopped. The scientist tells the teacher to continue. Most do so, despite the learner’s screams and supplications.
Of course, no shocks are really being administered; the ‘learner’ and the ‘scientist’ are both actors, though the ‘teacher’ does not know this. Yet the starting premise holds, in a roundabout way: the experiment is indeed one about pain, knowledge and memory. Its origins lie in the holocaust, the modern era’s great collective trauma – specifically, in the defence repeated countless times at Nuremburg by Hitler’s torturers and executioners: ‘I was only following orders.’ By restaging a situation in which a figure of authority urged normal people to hurt others, Milgram wanted to discover the extent to which obedience will override compassion. Like Aeschulus’s mortals, he, too, hoped to learn the truth through suffering – a suffering if not his own then principally his own people’s (Milgram, like Levinas, was Jewish) displaced into a complex, artificial procedure, one which he repeated hundreds of times over the next five years.
To this day, Milgram retains a maverick status within the world of psychology. His methodology is seen as problematic, its use of deception deeply unethical; it would never get the go-ahead from Yale or its equivalent today. Yet if it sits uncomfortably within the world of science, I want to show that his elaborate construction, with its artificiality, its structures of control and repetition, has a long ancestry in another world, that of the arts – and, in particular, of literature.
’The content of each medium is the previous medium,’ Marshall McLuhan writes.[5] With the Renaissance, the cosmos of Greek tragedy was dug up and reprised: its sense of predeterminism, of humans acting out scripts written by capricious gods who toy with us like wanton boys with flies, of prophecies resistance only makes come true more ineluctably. But there was a self-consciousness about it: in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream we see Greek characters watching theatre, a sort of boxed meta-representation. We get a play within a play in Hamlet too, an only scarcely coded re-enactment of a scene from the real play’s world’s recent history: the prince’s Mousetrap restages Claudius’s poisoning of Hamlet’s father, replaying it in front of Claudius and the whole court, a performance too unbearable for Claudius to watch (he jumps up crying ‘Lights! Lights!’). Hamlet has already been struck, watching the actors perform another boxed Greek drama on the previous day, by the way the artificial, the spectacular, can codify and reproduce the real. By Shakespeare’s later plays, this appreciation of artificiality has grown into an apprehension that the world itself is one big stage, and when our revels end,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.
Prospero adds:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.[6]
Being human, he is saying, means being subject to drawn-out performances, to dreams.
If Shakespeare’s work already oozes a strong sense of the constructedness of everything, of artificial landscapes in which events can be repeated or replayed, then half a century later, in the poetry of Andrew Marvell, this suspicion becomes elevated to the level of dogma. Marvell, as a Puritan, subscribed to the belief that everything, every event, from the major ones right down to the last flutter of each leaf, was prescripted by God. Not only were phenomena enactments of His plan; they were also coded re-enactments of the very processes through which this plan was realised. Watching harvesters at work in meadows which he compares to scenery in a theatre in Upon Appleton House, Marvell perceives a restaging of the Civil War unfolding before his eyes:
The mower now commands the field,
In whose new traverse seemeth wrought
A camp of battle newly fought:
Where, as the meads with hay, the plain
Lies quilted o’er with bodies slain:
The women that with forks it fling
Do represent the pillaging.
Marvell’s harvesters reprise, albeit cryptically (and inadvertently), a violent, primal scene – and in so doing reconstruct the world’s most primal scene, the one of which the Puritans believed the Civil War to have itself been a reprise: the Creation. Marvell writes:
The scene again withdrawing brings
A new and empty face of things,
A levelled space, as smooth and plain
As cloths for Lely -
(a painter: once more the artificial nature of the scene is foregrounded)
- stretched to stain.
The world when first created sure
Was such a table rase and pure.
When the meadow is deliberately flooded near the poem’s end (another re-enactment of a biblical event) the table rase becomes, like Hamlet’s Mousetrap, a ‘mirror’
Where all things gaze themselves, and doubt
If they be in it, or without.
For Marvell, then, the world of events is an artificial one, a stage set built by God – and it is a space of re-enactment. The task of the subject – of the thinking subject – is to discern its patterns and identify his own place within these.
Marvell’s modernist literary descendents have no less a sense of artificiality and repetition. ‘What ever happened that did not occur before?’ asks Winnie, sand-mired heroine of Beckett’s Happy Days:
The sunshade will be there again tomorrow, beside me on this mound, to help me through the day. (Pause. She takes up the mirror). I take up this little glass, I shiver it on a stone – (does so) – I throw it away – (does so far behind her) – it will be in the bag tomorrow, without a scratch, to help me through the day.[8]
Winnie is both right and wrong. She is doubly-right: right about the repetition-loop she is trapped in, right also in a meta-knowing way. Of course the mirror will be there, unscratched, tomorrow: the stage manager will see to that. But then she is wrong in thinking that in performing the same act tomorrow (shivering the mirror on a stone) she will be inhabiting the exact same phenomenological and kinetic instant as she does in shivering it now. Tomorrow’s shivering will be, to some extent, a citation, a quotation, a re-enactment and not just a repetition. Winnie is auto-archiving. So are Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. They may go through the same procedure each day, but their self-consciousness makes each day different from the one before, even if its actions are the same. They even re-enact their recent past, displacing identities, reallocating roles: ‘I’ll do Lucky, you do Pozzo,’ Vladimir tells Estragon as he begins imitating the way they both saw Lucky sagging under the weight of baggage as his master Pozzo cursed him. ‘Curse me!’ Vladimir says; ‘Stronger!’[9] This may be repetition – but it is repetition, as Deleuze would say, of difference.
‘Maybe,’ William Faulkner writes in Absalom! Absalom!,
nothing ever happens once and is finished. Maybe happen is never once but like ripples maybe on water after the pebble sinks, the ripples moving on, spreading, the pool attached by a narrow umbilical water-cord to the next pool which the first pool feeds, has fed, did feed, let this second pool contain a different temperature of water, a different molecularity of having seen, felt, remembered, reflect in a different tone the infinite unchanging sky, it doesn’t matter: that pebble’s watery echo whose fall it did not even see moves across its surface too at the original ripple-pace, to the old ineradicable rhythm.[10]
For Faulkner, what is important is not the first action, the splash, but rather what we might call its ‘event-field’: the ripple-pattern that continues long after the pebble has sunk from view. Of course, one cannot lose sight of the fact that, in order for there to be an event-field of ripples, someone must at some time have dropped a pebble. Whereas for Marvell the hand that drops the pebble is the hand of God (and for the Greeks the hands of various, often conflicting gods – their pools are choppy), the modernists live in a universe from which God has been eradicated, replaced by man and his technology. Conrad writes of a ‘machine’ that ‘knits us in and knits us out’; Burroughs repeatedly quotes Robert Oppenheimer’s line on the occasion of the first nuclear explosion: ‘We are become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.’ Man and technology, man as technology: think of Beckett’s Krapp transferring all his memory to tape, or of Freud’s mechanical conception of our psychic operations, our Traumwerke or dream-works, dream-factories. Think of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, or almost any piece of science-fiction.
It is perhaps no coincidence that it is in the era of industrial mass-production – that is, of mass-repetition (of objects, images, experiences) - that trauma comes into its own as an object of formal study. For both Freud and his more positivist counterparts, trauma is characterised by a propensity for repetition. A traumatic primal scene, Freud tells us in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, will push (for example) a young Viennese wife to repeat compulsively the same obsessive actions (in her case, running into an adjoining room and ringing a bell).[11] For the late twentieth-century psychologists Figley and Van der Kolk, trauma involves first ‘dissociation’, a loss of all sense and understanding similar to that undergone by Trophonius’s suppliants, and then, often, later, obsessive repetition caused by data which has not been processed, knitted into formal memory, hence ‘cleared’.[12] Unlike Freud’s subjects, who each had their own story, many of both Figley’s and Van der Kolk’s had been traumatised by a collective primal scene: the war in Vietnam. They were occupants of a shared event-pattern, a shared set of ripples. Like Prospero’s subjects, they were dreaming together. Although etymologically spurious, it is tempting to draw a link between Traum, dream, and trauma,[13] especially when pondering the giant event-field we call history. It is certainly one Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus would make: for him, history is trauma, ‘a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’
These themes and concerns come to a head, in literature at least, in Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow. Set during the final years of World War Two, the book revolves around the V2 rocket bomb, the first man-made projectile to travel faster than the speed of its own sound.[14] An early passage shows survivors of one of the many V2 attacks on London lined up in rows in a hospital’s ‘Abreaction Ward’. These people were in a cinema when the bomb fell – and like the cinema, a mechanical-spectacular space in which the Hollywood ‘dream factory’’s scenes are shared and repeated, they, too, have become repetition machines, their traumatised minds replaying the moment of the blast again and again. ‘How many times,’ asks Pynchon, ‘before it’s washed away, these iterations that pour out, reliving the blast, afraid to let go…?’ When the repetition-loop eventually gives over, it bequeathes a new type of human subject:
out of each catharsis arise new children, painless, egoless for one pulse of the Between… tablet erased, new writing about to begin, hand and chalk poised in winter gloom over these poor human palimpsests shivering under their government blankets, drugged, drowning in tears and snot of grief so real that it surprises, seems more than their own.
Here are echoes not only of Greek tragedy (catharsis) but also of Marvell, for whom the withdrawing scene of re-enactment brought about ‘a new and empty face of things’, a plain canvas to be painted on, a ‘table rase’. Who will write on Pynchon’s ‘tablet erased’, his ‘human palimpsests’? A Pavlovian psychologist called Pointsman. Pynchon depicts him stalking the ward, lasciviously eyeing his charges:
How Pointsman lusts after them, pretty children. Those drab undershorts of his are full to bursting with need humourlessly, worldly to use their innocence, to write on them new words of himself, his own brown Realpolitik dreams, some psychic prostrate ever in aching love promised, ah hinted but till now… how seductively they lie ranked in their iron bedsteads, their virginal sheets, the darlings so artlessly erotic.
Instead of the world being a clean sheet for God to write human history on, humans have become a clean sheet to be written on by a marauding scientist, Faust with an erection (the gods love us alright). By the novel’s end, the cinema, like Prospero’s stage set, has expanded to take in the whole world. ‘We were always at the movies (weren’t we?)’ Pynchon rhetorically quips.
Faust with an erection: this is Milgram’s scientist. He is a monstrous creation, an almost pantomimish fiend who marks his notepad while his fellow humans writhe in pain, each tick, scream, tick inching his grand project further toward completion. He is a dramatic character, a fiction so convincing that it hoodwinks all those who encounter him - a fiction who encodes the real, just as his lab encodes or reproduces in miniature the entire technologised, power-structured society in which we live. With its prescripted routines and its machinery of control, it embodies what Burroughs calls ‘The Reality Studio’, shorthand for a rigged world run by ‘the Board, the Elite, the Initiates’, who play and replay the reels of the ‘real’ without the ‘marks’, the stooges, being any wiser. ‘When you come to the end of a biologic film just run it back and start over – Nobody knows the difference – Like nobody there before the film’.[15] Burroughs’s universe, like Marvell’s, is prerecorded. Whereas for Marvell, the ‘task’ is to aquiesce with and appreciate the plan, for Burroughs the task is to rumble it: expose it, vandalise it, generally fuck it up. His strategy for achieving this task is a kind of avant-gardist version of Hamlet’s: to confront the power order with aspects of itself - to do this again and again, cutting into its representational event-field randomly - and thereby bring about a kind of breakdown. An exemplary Burroughsian hero, The Intolerable Kid of Nova Express, takes over a news magazine, ‘breaks out all the ugliest pictures in the image bank and put it out on the subliminal,’ cackling: ‘I’ll by God show them how ugly the Ugly American can be!’ Just as Hamlet’s Mousetrap pushes Claudius into jumping up and shouting ‘Lights! Lights!’ – that is, causes a total breakdown of the social and representational order (in this context, as in Milgram’s ‘lab’, these are virtually the same thing) - so does The Intolerable Kid’s intervention: ‘one crisis piles up after another right on schedule,’ Burroughs writes; ‘you can see the marks are wising up. Any minute now fifty million adolescent gooks will hit the street with switch blades.’ As the whole film begins to reek of burning switch, hot with ‘prerecorded heat glare massing Hiroshima’, Burroughs’s avatar, a journalist named I&I, reports:
You could feel it there under your feet the whole structure buckling like a bulkhead about to blow… Any minute now the whole fucking shithouse goes up.
Burroughs’s intentions toward the Reality Studio are simple: blow it up. Implicit within (and instrumental to) this end is a lesser phenomenon: the ‘marks’ ‘wising up’. Another variation on the same subversive battle plan would be simply to get up and leave. ‘One day,’ Burroughs writes in a footnote, the Board’s ‘stale movie was greeted with an unprecedented walkout – “We seen this five times already and not standing still for another twilight of your tired gods.”’[16]
Milgram’s fake laboratory is at once The Intolerable Kid’s – or Hamlet’s - ghastly mirror and a cynically deceptive shithouse. Milgram’s scientist is Prospero, first orchestrating an elaborate masque and then announcing that it was all artificial. He is also Claudius, suddenly cutting the performance short. Or perhaps Milgram himself is Prospero, the ‘scientist’ and ‘learner’ his obedient actor-spirits, the learner doubling as the stage hand who replaces Winnie’s mirror in the pause before each loop kicks in again. Or perhaps Milgram is merely one of Freud’s, Figley’s or Pynchon’s trauma victims, compulsively replaying the same scene over and over again. Then again, perhaps he is God.
Who, then, is Dickinson? And what exactly happened at Glasgow’s Centre For Contemporary Art on February the seventeenth, 2002? Here was Milgram’s coded re-enactment of obedience and power in 1930s Germany itself being re-enacted. Here were actors playing the ‘teachers’, reiterating the unscripted (although archived) words of the original experiment’s ‘marks’ verbatim. Here were other actors playing the actors who played scientist and learner, reiterating verbatim too their scripted, multiply repeated lines, retracing in a loop their old looped movements – and doing it again and again and again (‘The longest evening of my life,’ the Guardian’s art critic moaned – and she only sat through half the performance).[17] Here was Milgram’s artificiality both reproduced and elevated to another level: not only was Dickinson’s laboratory not real, it was also not even properly fake. Nobody was expected to believe in the charade – and, to foreground this, Dickinson had given both the teacher’s and the learner’s rooms glass walls, so we could see the latter operating the machinery of deception, pressing the buttons that transmitted his prerecorded cries. Dickinson was not emulating Milgram: he was emulating the hobby-historical societies that, like Marvell’s mowers, re-enact battles between Roundheads and Cavaliers. In doing this in a gallery, he was co-opting the original experiment into an art tradition stretching back almost a century: that of the ready-made. The experiment became, like Duchamp’s bicycle wheel and toilet, ‘found’ – an event rather than an object, sure, but no less ready-made for that. He was also, McLuhan would point out, framing an old medium within this hybrid, new one: watching an actor simulate screaming in pain while another actor simulated exercising godlike mastery over the first one’s fate, spectators were being shown a reductio ad absurdam of all Shakespearian and Aeschulean tragedy.
Is Dickinson a kind of modern Shakespeare, then, doing to Milgram what the playwright did to historical figures such as Caesar and Anthony, the Richards and the Henrys? Inasmuch as he restaged the action in front of an audience (Milgram’s sessions never had one), perhaps. But essentially, no: where Shakespeare overhauled original material, giving his creative and imaginative powers full reign, Dickinson did not ‘inflect’ his subject matter in any way: he simply had it repeated, word for word, action for action, in real time. His intervention is in this vital respect utterly passive – as passive as Faulkner’s secondary pool which offers up its surface to be rippled by the watery echo of a pebble which it did not even see falling into another pool, a pool to which it (the secondary one), by ‘an umbilical water-cord’, is connected. If Faulkner’s secondary pool provides another space in which to see both the original ripple-pace repeated and the ‘infinite, unchanging sky’ reflected, then what does Dickinson’s offer us? Everything. I want to show that it offers us the possibility of ethics and, in so doing, offers us the very possibility of subjectivity – that is, of being at all.
Whereas humanist thinking holds that, as subjects, we are independent, sovereign, discrete, Milgram and Dickinson both know that we are formed and empowered (and disempowered) within networks, networks of connectedness. Levinas knows this too. In his essay Is Ontology Fundamental? he writes: ‘We exist in a circuit of understanding with reality’; ‘we have one finger caught in the machine’.[18] Because we are connected, we are responsible – and it is this responsibility that constitutes us: in Ethics and Infinity Levinas calls responsibility ‘the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity’. I am responsible
not owing to such or such a guilt which is really mine, or to offenses that I would have committed; but because I am responsible for a total responsibility, which answers for all the others and for all in the others, even for their responsibility.
‘Others’ and ‘the Other’ are important terms throughout Levinas’s work. It is always to an ‘Other’ that I am responsible - one whose utter otherness interrupts my self-possession, dashes it, makes it impossible. In order to explain this strange relation, Levinas introduces notions such as ‘substitution’, being ‘taken hostage’, even ‘persecution’. In encountering the Other, we are emptied of our being, turned inside out, ‘subjected’, as he writes, ‘to an unlimited accusative’, ‘already substituted for others.’ ‘The word I means to be answerable for everything and for everyone.’ Answerable: for Levinas, our relation to the Other is expressed through speech – or, more precisely, through a circuit of responsiveness: ‘The one for whom I am responsible is also the one to whom I have to respond,’ he writes in Transcendence and Height. Due to his alterity, the Other cannot ‘explain’ himself; all he can tell me is ‘Here I am’: ‘Me Voici’.[19] It is to that fact, that invocation, that I am answerable, not to a ‘correct’ response within a closed circuit of meaning. What better mise en scène could Levinas’s rather abstract expression have than the teacher-learner set-up within Milgram’s lab? Connected to the other by a quite literal circuit of responsiveness (the microphone and answer-number lights), the teacher demands, and initially receives, correct answers. Soon, though, this closed system breaks down; the learner stops giving responses to the questions and interrupts the process, invoking the teacher, saying simply: ‘Please stop hurting me’ – effectively, ‘Me voici. Here I am. I’m human. Have compassion.’ As one version of responsiveness breaks down, the teacher is confronted with another, with responsibility. At this point he becomes answerable – not just to the learner but to what both the learner and he have come to represent, the spectral scenes and characters that crowd into the room, taking their places. He is already substituted, and hence subject – a subject par excellence. [20] If the teacher, the ‘real’ teacher, is a perfect Levinasian subject, then when Dickinson comes to re-enact the experiment this subjectivity billows outwards into the audience until we, too, are substituted and subjected. The glass walls, like Marvell’s flooded fields, reflect our faces as we peer into the lit room from the dark gallery, morphing them with those of the performers, inculpating us both visually and ethically within the spectacle. Not only are we implicitly confronted with the question ‘What would you do in this situation?’ Above and beyond that, we are connected: made into new pools across whose surface the same ripple-rhythm passes, connected by new umbilical water-cords to the secondary pool which is connected to the primary one. We are connected to connectedness itself. We, too, become answerable - to all who, substituting those inside the room, ripple in from the past. Levinas, in Enigma and Phenomenon, constrasts the ‘synchronising’ tendencies of rationalist and humanist thinking with what, later, he will call ‘the diachronic ambivalence that makes ethics possible’ and here calls the ‘supreme anachronism’ that subjection to and through the Other brings about. The Other, ‘interrupting order,’ ‘brings up a trace of surprised forgettings’. Here we are back in the territory of Lethe and Memory – a territory testified to in Milgram’s work by the ambivalent presence of an event that does not ‘occur’ as such (the learning experiment) that nonetheless encodes or echoes an absent one that did (the holocaust) and testified to in the present by the diachronic ambivalence, or anachronism, of Dickinson’s re-enactment.
Subjection, being taken hostage, persecution: these are traumatic events. The Greeks knew that trauma is the condition within which knowledge becomes possible, but Levinas shows us that it is also that within which ethics can occur. Subjection of the Ego to the Other brings about ‘a traumatism,’ he writes, ‘a traumatism of responsibility.’ The event-field of trauma is a space of substitution and displacement and encoding – but most of all it is a space of repetition. Repetition may, as the Guardian’s art critic found, be tedious (as Levinas would say, monotonous), and it may, as Beckett’s, Pynchon’s and Aeschulus’s characters all know, be painful, but it is what connects the pools to one another, and connects us too, diachronically or anachronistically, irrationally and ethically – what makes us subjects within history. Blowing up the Reality Studio is not the most radical act, nor is walking out of it: repeating it is. No repetition, no connection; no connection, no ethical relation, hence no subjectivity. If I stop, walk away, have done, forget, I am not connected, not responsible, just not. It is not that there is no alternative – rather that the alternative is Nothing.
For Faulkner, repetition tesified to the ‘infinite unchanging sky’. Levinas also talks of Infinity, as that which enters through the witness, through the act of testimony. Certainly, watching the Milgram Re-enactment, we become witnesses. But what are we witnessing when we watch this faking of a fake tracing surpised forgettings of the real? Not an event, or even an active interpretation of one, but rather a passive, anachronistic invocation of the very act of bearing witness – and an affirmation of our absolute, abject responsibility, to everything and everyone. In an age when right wing antisemites such as David Irving would deny the holocaust ever took place and left wing revisionists such as those at Living Marxism try to discredit news reports of Serbian atrocities in Bosnia, these issues are as vexed as ever. Beckett always understood them. That’s why Vladimir, even as he begins to realise that Godot is not going to arrive and save them from repeating the same gestures day in and day out, beseeches the child-messenger:
Tell him… tell him you saw me and that…that you saw me. You’re sure you saw me, you won’t come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me.
Me voici: here I am. Once the boy has left, he looks at Estragon, who is sleeping, and asks himself:
Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today?
‘At me, too,’ he concludes,
someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, he is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.
Vladimir is expressing a nostalgia for a kind God, or gods, to watch over and take care of him; he is also allowing Beckett to wrily comment on the presence of an audience. But beyond the wryness, he is also acquiescing with and endorsing the collective dream that subjects us all together to a structure of spectacle and repetition, the stuff on which, as Prospero says, we are made.
Dickinson, in all his sly passivity, is doing the same thing. His strategy as an artist is that of Vladimir – not Godot, God, or even Beckett, but of Vladimir. To William Burroughs’s appeal to ‘wise up’, Stephen Daedalus’s to ‘wake up’ from the nightmare that is history, his work softly replies, again and again and again: ‘Let us sleep on’.
[1] Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 1985.
[2] Discussing the oracle to Trophonius in The Greek Myths (1955), Robert Graves finds the ritual echoed and repeated throughout a range of pre- and post-Olympian ceremonies involving mock-death and instruction.
[3] Think of Sophocles’s Oedipus, that most proto-modern of Greek heroes: what what does he set out on but a passage toward knowledge - self-knowledge, knowledge of the past? Out of what does this trajectory, this ‘thinking’ arise? Violence, unspeakable abominations – scenes of incest, patricide, abandonment and infant mutilation (the Greek word trauma means ‘wound’, and Baby Oedipus is named after his stake-pierced feet) – scenes which are slowly groped back after, through one blindness (that of the sightless though all-knowing Tiresias) towards insight (that of Oedipus, who, through Tiresias, comes to learn the dreadful truth) which in turn guarantees (for Oedipus, who, upon learning it, pokes his own eyes out) a lifetime of blind groping.
[4] Aeschylus, Agammemnon, c 500 BC.
[5] Cited by Arjen Mulder in Trancemedia: From Simulation to Emulation, Mediamatic Magazine, Issue 9, 1999.
[6] Shakespeare, The Tempest, c 1611.
[7] Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House, c 1670.
[8] Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, 1961.
[9] Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1952.
[10] William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!, 1936.
[11] Siegmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 1963.
[12] Charles Figley, Strangers at Home: Vietnam Veterans Since the War, 1980; Bessel Van der Kolk, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Psychological and Biological Sequelae, 1984.
[13] The philosopher Simon Critchley, in an essay entitled The Original Traumatism (published in Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity, 1999), considers the slippage within Freud’s work from dream-interpretation, or Traumdeutung, to trauma-interpretation, or Traumadeutung. The essay also deals with issues around repetition, trauma and ethics in the work of Freud and Levinas.
[14] Pynchon writes of ‘a piece of time neatly snipped out … a few feet of film run backwards’ – that is, ‘the blast of the rocket, fallen faster than sound – then growing out of it the roar of its own fall, catching up on what’s already death and burning, a ghost in the sky’. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, 1973.
[15] William S. Burroughs, Nova Express, 1964.
[16] Re-enacting Milgram’s experiment at Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Art, Rod Dickinson made the interesting decision not to let spectators leave the gallery until the performance (which quasi-repeated itself four times) had ended. Some members of the audience tried nonetheless to leave, and were told by gallery staff that they could not do so. Some aquiesced with this order; others insisted on their right to leave.
[17] Guardian article, date (ask Rod)
[18] Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 1996.
[19] Levinas takes the line from Genesis, Book 22, lines 1, 7 and 11, in which it is spoken several times as Abraham prepares to sacrifice his son Isaac. An even better use of the expression can be found in the scene in the Bugs Bunny cartoons in which the hunter poses as Shakespeare’s Juliet in order to lure Bugs Bunny to his death. Re-enacting the balcony scene, the hunter intones Juliet’s line ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’, to which Bugs replies: ‘Here oi yam!’ This exchange perfectly illustrates Levinas’s understanding of the expression: the hunter/Juliet demands an explanation (‘wherefore?’, i.e. ‘why?’) but is told simply ‘Here I am! Me voici’.
[20] The more one looks at it, the more striking do the correspondences between Levinas’s’ thought and Milgram’s experiment become. Levinas writes in Is Ontology Fundamental?: ‘The encounter with the other consists in the fact that despite the extent of my domination of his slavery, I do not possess him. At the very moment when my power to kill realises itself, the other has escaped me.’ This is, of course, exactly what occurs in Milgram: the teacher presses switches indicating voltages which, were they really being applied, would electrocute his learner-neighbour; the learner, meanwhile, remains utterly untouched, beyond the teacher’s reach.