Mrs. M
With every snapshot Mrs. M is taking over the space of the album on her own. On her own but not a space of her own. She is never in a room of her own. Not even in a room, for that matter. She is always outside, borrowing space only to fill it with her presence for a fleeting moment. Like the hermit crabs who borrow their shell-houses from other hermit crabs, only to leave them on the beach some time later and find others they can reside in. Or like Julian of Norwich, the first woman writer of the English language, who ended up borrowig her name from the one she had borrowed a cell from to live in: Saint Julian. Mrs. M is also borrowing space from a certain type of (great) outdoors: not living-room and kindred, but rather water, sand, animals, forests, stones, grass and trees. Mountain and sea. Some passers-by occasionally, but she does not seem to know them. Some houses, she does not enter them. Cut loose the ropes tying her to a claustrophobic domestic universe, venture towards the unknown. A family album of the unfamiliar.
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Hay, wood, hair, barbed wire, electricity cables, grass, wrist, trees, fences, borders, limbs, tree stumps, fingers, waves, hips, pebbles, rocks. Like in the primitive societies of dismembered body parts described by Alphonso Lingis strange alliances entangle arms and rocks, wood and trunk, spine and the infinity column, hips and hay. The earth is carved into dismembered dwellings, truncated homes, arks of limbs and arks of trunks. Philosophy has over the course of history treated earth as a human home, as an open abode for organisms. Like Mrs. M., our thinking reclines on known grounds, we make dwelling holes in the earth to accommodate our human life and our petit healthy reason. Imperceptibly these holes turn into tombs and the whole earth into an "ultra-grave".
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Out of the house, Mrs. M sometimes retains the memory of being in the house. She reclines against the stones on the beach, or in the hay. Her outdoor bed. As Helene Cixous was writing, "she wanders, but lying down". She is lying down as she is writing this text. Molly in Ulysses, confined to her adulterous bed as Mr. Bloom is wandering the city. Wandering without moving: the historical confinement of women and photography.*
Posing against the mineral, Mrs. M's limb is frozen on the rocks in a state of limbo - limbus is a member and border. The limb is a line, the line - a border, what is neither the world to the right nor the world to the left. A limbo as an indefinite region, the line, what is and is not. I is a limb, a border. I is a line. I is one. Space begins with borders, body begins with one. As in Kant the space is created by the symmetry of the body, by the stretching of the limbs to opposite sides. I, 1, M erect as the verticality of the trunk. A limb, a disjointed line, M reclining against the stump.
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The unspectacularity of her pose is not passivity but rather suspension. Leap into the void, before three seconds. Mrs. M is neither in the dramatic moment of Yves Klein, up in the air, nor the tragic one of Ciprian Mureșan, flat on the pavement three seconds after. Mrs. M is still up at the window, uncertain whether she would jump or faint.
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She never leaves the space of the virtual, and her anonimity contributes to this. She is placed in a perpetual bifurcation point: embodying multiple potential (and mutually exclusive) future developments at the same time. It is an embodiment of pure affect, in the process of affecting and being affected that Spinoza was speaking about. The body retains the affections but hasn't yet materialized them in an action, retains the memory of an impingement without the impinging thing.
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In some ways, anonimity is the verb prevailing over the noun. "Who did it" becomes irrelevant in the face of "what was done". It's called passive voice but in fact it is only the most passive of actions, the one which hangs suspended, having rid itself of the burden of the subject: an action in passing.
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An action without an act, a verb without a name. Anonimity as a no-name, but not as post-name, when the name has been lost. Rather a pre-name. The paradise before the "fall into a name" (Cioran). Mrs. M has not lost her name, she never had one and never will, she only has a potential name, which is one and many at the same time. As Deleuze and Guattari wrote at the beginning of A Thousand Plateaus, "each of us was several, and there was already quite a crowd". Mrs. M as a crowd. My name is legion, for we are many. The demon within. Emotion was always feared as demonic, but it is more affect that lurks and not emotion. Affect is the anonymous, hyper-filled field of potential out of which emotion emerges as individual, personal and unique. Affect is an unconfined flux of forces preceding and exceeding the personal. It occupies the vague space in-between, as well as the vague time where things have not yet happened.
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To drown into seas of grains and get lost in mountains of sobs. The eye searching for clarity hits the dot of vagueness. The mind searching a lost memory climbs on the mountain of sobs to survey the great sea of nothingness. A point is hollow inside: to enlarge a point in order to gain more accurate knowledge is to discover the hole at the bottom of dots. To analyze Mrs. M is to find Mrs. Zero. Dots are hollow as nothing is fixed and everything slips out of reach. Identity runs amok as the self is ever more junk. In the middle of every fixation is turbulence, at the core of any identity is anonymity.
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Do points exist? Inviduation, units, dots, identity, self, ego, whatever stands out as one against many, as particular against the undifferentiated, as you on the background of others. The nameless in Lovecraft, the formless in Lispector, the unknowing of Bataille. The slime molds, the amoeba, the swarms, the collective, the indiscernable, imperceptible. The all-engulfing outside is within. The swarm of junk is you. Does I exist? What if we would collectively suffer from Cotard syndrome, a neurological disorder whereby patients stop using the first-person pronoun and claim that they do not exist. "I" referring to itself as "it". Being no-body, zero, an empty dot, collectively. Nobody making a point, no point in being a body.
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Mrs. M has abandoned the I. She lives in the third person, the dream of Beckett, Cioran and contemporary neuroscience.
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How long will the environment resist the attack of I? "Endurance of an organism is a form of patience of the environment" (Isabelle Stengers) Anonymity that resists the attack of names. The amorphous that holds against the tyranny of form. The uncut self versus the escalation of the one. The abstract M opposes the concreteness of a name. A detection that de-tects by moving away. Tailing the unknown to find more un than known. Being the detective of one's own life is to place oneself in the center of absolute futility, to make ennui a life-long obsession. "Invalids of hope, we are still waiting; and life is only the hypostatization of waiting. We wait for everything—even Nothingness—rather than be reduced to an eternal suspension, to a condition of neutral divinity, of a corpse." To be bored of oneself the point that you are bored of your boredom.
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The M-artyr of boredom, the M-ysterious M, the Mater of pessimism, M-atter organic and inorganic, the MaximuM futility, the Mist of anonymity. M as the bodiless head of an unpronounced name. A linguistic beheading, the truncated person as per-son (Gk. to sound through, what comes through “prosopa” - the face, the mask), the interrupted sound through the mask that holds forever unknown the form of what once was name. Like the letter M her body infolds the outdoors and moves repetitively inwards, the hands reaching for each other, limbs reaching for their pairs to form new salutary joints, hand-in-hand articulating imperfect circles, forming broken loops around the legs, the knees, on the lap and belly.
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M as the nasal consonant, the dark tonality of muffled sounds, the suffocated tone of a suffering that is too bored of itself to openly leave the mouth (to leave the mouth in a generous exhalation) and stays buried in the cave of the neck, in that flesh-padded cylinder fated to carry around the burden of the head. M the sound of dull suffering, of muffled passion, of inhibated mourning, of doubt and pleasure. A low noise hitting the cotton-soft walls of curved flesh, a dwindling gust of breath, a grave echo of suspension.
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The anonymous never speak for themselves. In their refusal of the first person there are quite a few decisions to be made, and various languages account for them in different ways. There is a "she" and there is a "he" but there is also a "there is". In French it is called the "il y a", and Levinas constructs his whole argument about the anonimity of existence around it: "il y a" is not passive, it's rather the suspense of Mrs. M. Once upon a time there was a woman..
Once upon a time there was a woman who didn't have a voice, and every now and then it seemed she would start saying something, but she never did. Most of the times it seemed she was happy, but sometimes it looked like she was rather melancholic. It was impossible for her to give herself away in language, so all that was left of it was stuffed into the body, swallowed in and excreted in a material form into a material world which was all too eager in its turn to swallow it in, it was the nonhuman swallowing the human that has excreted itself into the anonymity of the "it".
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What is the relationship between the English word "person" – or the Romanian "persoană" - and the French version which looks and sounds the same but it's actually the complete opposite? "Personne"expands the individualized being of a "person" to the existence of inexistence. Metzinger's being no-one and Cixous's "Prenoms de personne". The name of no-one. Again the name, and the name of the name, the being of the name lies in its texture not in its meaning, the visual and auditive texture of "person" and "personne" is reconciling them, the one which is one and the one which is none are actually one and the same, non-being is attached to being like an invisible thin layer which covers its surface, like the double of the "n" which "personne" adds to "person" seemingly inviting its opposite in when in fact it was there all along.
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Anonymity and melodrama both have a certain relation to being outside of oneself. If in melodrama you throw yourself outside of yourself and stay there, suspended, anonimity is the suspense of refusing in the first place to get yourself in.
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Or, conversely, as being outside in oneself.
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Always an inward movement, fingers curved inside - claws of crisp anxiety, tentacles of timid loneliness. The body infolding the trunk, the stump, the hay, the sand, the photographer, the camera, her reflection in the eye of her observer, the rocks and the pebbles, the sea and the waves. The I capturing the Not-I, the M abducting the Not-M and, hands united, encircling herself as to hold on to the new osmosis with the alien, she freezes each new M for the merry moment of another snapshot.
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A woman, aloof, Mrs M, is reclining against the inorganic making the earth her dwelling place. Her watch is ticking against the time of human, ticking from the future into an impossible present, ticking from the present into an ever changing past. Everything new and nothing new. The limbs of the clock like the myriad hands of Hindu goddess Shiva freeze in an op-art of absolute time.
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Mrs. M is caught in decomposing representation as young Leonora is caught in the house of a millionaire in Max Ophüls's 1949 film noir Caught. As Thomas Metzinger argues we too are caught in the cage of interiority, in the prison of I and its hallucinated world. In a converse thought-movement or rather movement-thought for François Laruelle "the anonymous universal hallucinates individuals". The world-withous-us hallucinated us as we and we hallucinate a world-for-us. We dwell in the hallucination of hallucinations. The first world chases the second world in an gigantic act of predation. The human and global extinction is a world-cannibalism, a catastrophic macrodigestion, a phago-cosmos as the end of one, of I, of any point and perspective.
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22.04.2014
Mrs M originally appeared in
Nu-mi place numai marea, dar si muntele
[I don't like only the sea but also the mountains]
Nicoleta Moise artist book
published by Galeria Posibila, Bucharest
