Collective actions
Victor Tupitsyn. TIME SIGNATURE
1. Lapta of the mind
On June 17, 1995, Andrei Monastyrsky and Sabine Hänsgen came to visit us in Essen-Werden, at the guest house of the Museum Folkwang, where Rita [Margarita Tupitsyn] was curating an exhibition called Glaube, Hoffnung-Anpassung: Soviet Art, 1928-1945. Both had visited us at the guest house last year, so finding the way was not difficult. After getting into our car, we decided to visit Villa Hügel, which once belonged to the Krupp family and was converted into a museum space. Ten minutes later we were there. Inside, there was an exhibition of Chinese religious sculpture and artifacts, unearthed from the ground during recent archaeological excavations. The degree of their preservation aroused suspicion, however: apparently, the restorers overdid it somewhat, giving preference to external perfection at the cost of the loss of aura. One remembers Shakespeare’s lines about Alexander the Great: “He, before whom the whole world lay in dust, sticks out like a plug in the crack,” the very words that emphasize the idea of the “gap” between beauty and authenticity, which in turn justifies the pathos of restoration work, be it the restoration of objects of material culture or the restoration of mental constructs (eidetic restoration, as Edmund Husserl would say if he were the same age as me).
While I was looking at the exhibition’s objects, the idea of forgery as a metahistorical inevitability, as an optical illusion, inspired at the perceptual level by a change in orientation on the time axis, came to my mind. We are talking about the possibility of not only positive time, but also time with a minus sign. An example of this is a pendulum clock: positive seconds move in one direction, negative seconds in the other. Now, if you can imagine a kind of super-pendulum, then on this “swing of time” the world can travel for a period of several thousand years. That is, so many thousands of years there, and the same number of years back. But what does “back” mean? After all, regardless of the orientation of the pendulum, time does not cease to be “additive”, does not stop accumulating, metastasizing. Negative time is nonsense, any sane person will say. But this is precisely the root of the problem. Delirium is a concept through which adherents of identitarian logic mark a non-standard vision of the world, which, in turn, is associated with a non-standard vision of time. Hierarchization of the mental subject leads to the emergence of at least two criteria that determine the duration of Existence. This dichotomy, which undermines the belief in the homogeneity of chronocentrism, is explained by the fact that the vision of time is the prerogative of the optical unconscious, while its registration and calculation, is in charge of the Super-Ego, which constructs a model of time in its own image and likeness; i.e. according to the linear additive principle. From the point of view of unconscious optics, it is not time that is mobile, but the perception of time, the perception of its signature (i.e., sign).[1] The Chinese artifacts I viewed in Villa Hügel seemed to be fakes due to the bifurcation of chronological reference points: the unconscious diopter, designed to visualize the signature of time, did not find a common language with “being-toward-death;”[2] with mental vision, preoccupied with the accounting of birth and death. Therefore, it is possible that what was seen at the exhibition was simply an image of a long-forgotten past that happened, if not the other day, then, at worst, in 1991. Moreover, at the very moment when the pendulum of the world clock finally reached its apogee, and the time signature changed to its opposite. Mental shock, even if it took place, soon turned out to be leveled by the blueness of historical self-awareness. In a word, everything went on as usual, without noticing the fundamental metamorphosis of Existence—the change in the sign of time. Thus, things made several years ago have acquired a monstrous age in the sense that it would take exactly this period of time for the “pendulum” to swing back. One way or another, an innocent product, made in Hong Kong or on Canal Street in New York City, at the very beginning of the 1990s, and having no a priori claims to being six thousand years old, acquires antiquity, and it is not for us, laymen, to blame artifacts for being inauthentic when its author is a time signature.
In all likelihood, “soul jumps” (as I call time pendulums) are not something unique. Most likely, there are quite a lot of them, and they interfere with each other. Each of them is immanent in a certain structure of the unconscious, within the framework of which one or another time cycle occurs (scrolls). [3] According to Emmanuel Levinas, “Time is the breath of the spirit.” [4] There can be as many spirits as possible, showering us with their breath. And since breathing is impossible without alternating beetween inhalation and exhalation, this confirms not only the presence of two modes of temporality, but also the idea of polyphonic (schizoid) time. In a word, schizo-time, flooding our chaosmos, continuously changes orientation. Postmodern chronology’s dependence on recurrence, coupled with its schizo signature, is what regulates our inner life, which begins to resemble a walk through a Museum: from the Egyptian hall to the Renaissance, from the Chinese to Pollock, and the New York School, etc. No one is anymore able to make distinguish between “occipital vision” and staring, between forgery and authenticity.
The return of time [5] is also involved in linguistics. The negativity of the symbolic function, expressed in the abolition of the previous signified, at the moment of the constitution of a new meaning, presupposes (in semiosis in general, and in the sign in particular) the presence of memory; the memory of “primordial” repression. But if so, then semiosis cannot help but “observe the clock”: it must have either a memory of time or the time of memory. This means that on the clock face of discourse and narration, the clock hands can move in both directions. Diachrony and synchrony hypostatize the two-valued nature of chronocentrism: the leapfrog of pluses and minuses, linearity and disjunctions, repetitions and reversions, “originality” and plagiarism—evidence that the “jumping ropes of the soul” are not a privilege, not the lot of the elite, but common place.
I became aware of the “jumping ropes of the soul” thanks to a simple mathematical calculation. Two dates—1991 and 2002—are read the same in both directions. The distance between them is only 11 years: the period is insignificant in the sense that we are, in principle, able to survive each of these temporary milestones. This, however, does not happen often: once every thousand years. [6] It is curious that both dates are divisible by the number 11, which itself is an inversion. The quotient of dividing the first of the mentioned dates by 11 (1991: 11 = 181) also turns out to be an inversion, which allows us to rely on the special role of the number/year 1991. The phenomenon of negative and positive time doubles, located in close proximity to each other, suggests an association with a pendulum. Moreover, precisely at that point (in the “turnover” phase) that is close to the apogee. It was at this very moment, I think, that the return of chronos occurred, which gave rise to our distrust in existence [7] (guard, inauthenticity!). In other words, being a symptom of mistrust and suspicion, a counterfeit is “just” a gap between the original and the original, between China+ and China-.
2. The squinting of feelings
The bifurcation of time also affected our excursion to Villa Hügel. Immediately after viewing the exhibition, Andrei and Sabina wanted to carry out a performance, for which everything had been prepared in advance. Yet in the light of the concept of “chronological reversals” proposed here, the very concept of “advance” does not seem so obvious. We positioned ourselves up the hill near the bronze statue of a horse, which Andrei instructed Rita to climb. This horse+, which, with its bronze croup, caused discomfort to Rita’s crotch, “overrided” in scale a miniature the Chinese toy horse- that Andrei bought in the Villa Hügel’s souvenir shop for his daughter Masha.
To continue with the performance, Andrei stuck baby’s pacifiers, decorated with dinosaurs, into his and my mouth. Dinosaurs as decoration hinted at the existence of other pendulums, a different pace of time against the background of which our human history is just a dog waltz in comparison with a Beethoven symphony. The pacifier is a metaphor of immersion into childhood. Or, what amounts to the same thing, in senility, in order to avoid the shock associated with seeing negative time: a state that is difficult to verbalize. The squinting of feelings—that's how it can be defined.
Without taking the pacifier out of my mouth (despite the ever-increasing volume of saliva, which I didn’t want to swallow because of the pacifier’s vile plastic taste), I began to pull the spool of rope (handed to me by Andrei) that was tied on one end to the head of the horse+ on which Rita was still sitting while pronouncing and writing down the names of her favorite women artists a piece of paper. The other end of the rope—according to Sabina’s concept (she all this time was videotaping the performance, while Andrei with the pacifier still in his mouth, was taking pictures with a photo camera)—was to be pulled as far as possible in the direction of the villa. The spool was unwinding with great difficulty so I only managed to reach the end of the field with it. At the moment when the spool jammed, I managed to find the other end of the rope, with which I moved even further away from the horse+ and its rider—Rita. Realizing that the action was not yet over, I began, generally for no reason, to twist the rope with the spool (pendulum) from the middle, as children do when they play jump rope. The difference is that these were the “leaps of the soul,” the swings of time that were discussed at the beginning. The swing of the horizontal (axis of diachrony) culminated in the acquisition of “surplus value” in the form of a vertical dimension (axis of synchrony). The chain of sign constancy on the time scale turned out to be open. At the end of the performance, Andrei put all his props in a cardboard box and pinned a postcard with a view of the Villa Hügel to its cover.
As is known, the interpretation of an action is problematic at the moment of its implementation: performative time is incompatible with interpretive time, which is mainly realized as compensation; as a posteriori filling of the verbal vacuum that arises during the unfolding of events. Consequently, in accordance with the law of chronological additivity, the moment of interpretation follows the time of experience. As for this text, on the contrary, the interpretation anticipates the event, which in turn, turns out to be a figure of interpretation of the previous speech act. So, thanks to the pendulum of time, the subordination order that underlies the difference between performative and interpretative fields, between Praxis and Logos, and therefore between Dasein and Sein.
[1] The optics of the Unconscious gravitate towards one single form of objectivity - to what Lacan designated as objet petit “a” (the other as an object of desire). This latter, if it is an object, is not in a philosophical sense, but in a psychopathological sense, bordering on nonsense. The psychopathology of unconscious objectification (and, in particular, de-objectification) is fraught with the fact that the object of desire becomes desire itself - the desire to desire; objet petit “a” is taken out of brackets, ending up (with equal success) both at the beginning and at the end of a time interval, comparable to the amplitude of desire.
[2] Martin Heidegger's term. Translated into Russian, this means “being-towards-death” or “being-towards-death”.
[3] The number of such structures is very significant in individualized linguistic regions; in vast speech bodies, it is apparently insignificant due to the clichéd nature of the communal unconscious.
[4] See the publication of the conversation between B. Lichtenberg-Ettinger and Emmanuel Levinas translated by Viktor Mazin in the St. Petersburg magazine “Cabinet” (Appendix # 3, 1995).
[5] While Hegel reproached time for the annihilation of the past (the additive model of temporal negation), Nietzsche spoke of its postponement (the paradigm of eternal return).
[6] Next time it will be between the year 2992 and 3003.
[7] This refers to the aspect of existence associated with the routine of the “direct” experience of being in time.