/And you accept them with despair
these things that you do not want.
But your soul seeks, weeps for other things;
the praise of the Demos and the Sophists,
the hard-won and inestimable ‘Bravo!’;
the Agora, the Theater, and the Laurels.
How will Artaxerxes give you them,
How will you find them in the satrapy;
and what kind of life, without them, will you live.
- Cavafy/
A hampered figure as it emerges from the distance, a figure becoming recognisable for wearing a single shoe, is a recurring symbolic unit transmitted along the Hellenic mycelium threading across western culture, a pinch of Attic salt sprinkled over distinct folk traditions. In narrative, the loss of a shoe has significance, and therefore history. The more the image is looked for, the more examples of it are discovered. Motifs are the tethering posts of narrative from which lines of invention and elaboration are played out and returned to. How should such an image, beyond its function as a formal device, be understood? Certainly, there is a formal error of approach inherent to the collating of examples of a particular motif which causes loss of specific meaning from each narrative, and which ends in the reductive expropriations of structuralism. On the other hand, there also appears in such collections a vanishing point which once passed through causes the assembled examples to talk to each other, as they coalesce into a new narrative in the late style.
Although Thucydides attempted to ascribe a rational motive to the one-shoed Plataean army, the true register of monosandalism is allegorical and context bound. The signification of one-shoedness is not fixed but as a general rule it shows a prophesied or retroactively assigned constraint imposed by the fates upon the forward movement of a protagonist (as with Jason) and constitutes an interruptive ‘challenge’ of character within the terrain of the quest (as with Cinderella), but it also suggests the marking out of one who is appointed by some /always already/ circumstance to undertake an extraordinary task - the hero already has, and will always have, one foot in the other world, and one sandal in this. The proper function of all familiar motifs in narrative is absolute particularisation; it is through such devices that the problematic of this individual is presented as both separate and belonging.
The hero, the agent, the subject, the indivdual catalyst, is /realised/ by his traversal of his terrain, and he is /characterised/ in his traversal of his times. He has one foot in the other country, he has left his shoe in the old times. He is an alien presence in the new circumstance even as it crystallises around him, whatever begins with him begins as contrary to his desire. The one who happens to actualise the new conditions, bringing the world into the world, is pure contingency, a seed from another tree, and belongs inextricably, paradoxically, to the old world to which he eternally seeks return. The damaged foot, the lost shoe, dramatises the simultaneous groundedness and groundlessness of his position, as he finds himself impeded and constrained even as he is set in motion at the level of his connection to his country. Where we are attached, where we are bound, that is where we shall be torn up. He is extracted by the roots from his country. He is unhomed. From the ground and into time, from the times and into dust.
It is necessary that the hero should ‘be partly strong and partly brittle’ (Daniel 2:42), that an aspect of his strength should be his fall, that he be sheered away from, and therefore enact the loss of, the world of which he is the ultimate product and final herald, ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone/Stand in the desart’. The hero, Achilles, also doth bestride the narrow world, and yet like the Rhodian Colossus, severed at the knees, Achilles is fatally weakened in his radicality, in his rootedness, at the point of his connection, his motivation, his cause, his movement, his war. He is undone at the level of his particularisation, which is his weakness. He is broken off to be blown away like chaff from the threshing floor and yet also remains a mountain that fills the whole earth.
The hubris of the hero consists of a presumption of his either being truth, or possessing truth. He acts as if his actions are his to take, he speaks as if his words are his to utter. Similarly, the political radical presumes his rootedness in reality, his radicality lies precisely in the certainty of his becoming distinct from what he opposes by means of his actions and words. The radical roots himself in reality by separating himself from falsity and error. In other words, the radical presumes a rootedness within reality that is distinct from his actual interpellated rootedness. He does not ask if the acts and words by which he distinguishes between truth and error, reality and falsity, domination and revolution, he does not ask if what he says and what he does, is contrariwise, perverse, ambivalent. He does not ask as if to Jesus, ‘Master, is it I?’ The modern anarchist, constituted declaratively, and by naive commitment (ideal-ego), does not achieve even the sophistication of the awareness of Judas, and thereby cannot countenance the tragic double bind that Judas presents, /Master, am I a dispositif?/
The contaminated figure of the radical, little suspecting he is already an apparatus, appears in the world as a sort of Titan, a primoridial giant emerging amongst proliferating Olympian deities, but cursed with a fixed and unambiguous, simplistic and ultimately insufficient, message brought out from a world now submerged. Or, again, the rootedness of the radical resembles that of the vanquished product, the automaton Talos, who was animated around a single vein running from his neck to his ankle and fortified by a single bronze nail. Just as the elemental Titans, and their chthonic dependents (Gorgons, Erinyes etc), were constituted around singular passions, found themselves suddenly vulnerable to the cool caprices, false allegiances, double bluffs, swerving meanings and treacherous surfaces that distinguishes the time of the Olympian gods, so the radical is fatally compromised at the level of his one-sidedness, his simplistic chthonic/automaton message. Both the Titan and the radical are metabolised at a discursive level that their constituted awareness cannot recognise or respond to. The primitive idea that an individual /is/ what he declares himself to be, the hero, the champion, articulating the magic inherent in the naive presumption of nominative autonomy, ‘I am a communist’, ‘I am a marxist’, is fated to vanquishment, humiliation and banishment by the forces that set it in motion, monosandalled. The hero, no matter how he twists and turns on the hook of himself, is food and drink to both laughing gods and recuperating institutions.
In reality we are never what we declare ourselves to be, nor are we what we commit ourselves to, but as Sartre observed, we are condemned not to exceed the interplay (that is the sum) of all the reflected traces of our presence as perceived by others (the sunlight thrown back from ‘smashed human bone’). In each and every instance, it is always, whatever you say I am, that is what I am. Collected together, the simple declarative messages of radicals, titans and automatons function as components of the complexity enjoyed by both gods and marketplaces. By weaving a multi-stranded world from an infinity of single threads, the gods discover ambivalence, transience, and games.
The separation between the order of the titans and the order of the Olympian gods is better understood by imagining a return to the earlier, pre-irony, state. What would the world of the imaginary, a world without signs, be like? Only the approach to it can be known and this is illustrated in Karen Blixen’s play for marionettes, /Sandhedens hævn/, translated as /The Curse of Truth/. A witch curses the members of a household so that every lie told within it will become true: the poor woman who pretends to the rich man that she loves him, does fall in love with him; the braggart becomes the hero; the hypocrites become virtuous; the miser loses his money. We might observe that such a return, as from Racine to Corneille, could be summed up from the /The Curse of Truth/: a crust of dried bread feeds better than all the contents of a cookery book.
The Gods did not destroy the titans, although they force departure from the world of elemental messages where words and meanings are inseparable (cf the univocity of being after John Duns Scotus, notwithstanding the processive immanence of deleuze), but instead put them to work in the dark factory of Tartarus . The radical or chthonic message is incorporated and converted into an ideological tool - the revolutionary is deployed by /the party of real domination/ as the minotaur was kept in Daedalus’s labyrinth, a regulatory apparatus within the regime of Minos. And just as the chthonic Medusa could not anticipate, comprehend nor respond to the mirrored shield of Athena raised by the winged sandalled Perseus, so the revolutionary cannot anticipate nor prevent his recuperation and conversion into a representation, a fetish, an interpellated /realising/ dispositif, by the forces he assumes he was set in motion to oppose.
The question that could not be set to the Titans but may still be asked of the revolutionaries, appearing as they do, subsequent to the Olympian age of fatal irony, without in anyway inheriting or sublating it, is whether it is preferable to try and anticipate and thereby incorporate the social (that is recuperating) component of their own message back into their project - the introjected ego-ideal of self-reflexivity - or whether it is better to perfect and defend a given positional one-sidedness, as one might willingly assume the character of a Judas or Iago in a play, in the full knowledge that the Machiavellian substance brought into the world by such functionaries will be metabolised (woven as one strand amongst many), relativised and constrained by and within the totality of social process. The question thereby sets ‘what is to be done?’ as a recursive and constantly recurring problematic - in cybernetics it is the question of variety at its fullest amplitude (a sur-requisite variety) where an attained senescent, post-optimality indicates the possibility of a heuristic within ‘what is to be done?’ as either the quietist /abstiens toi/ of dupontism (after Tolstoy) or the endlessly proliferating accelerating stress path and tinkering-patching (bricolaging) of Kafka’s mole creature.
In practice the solution to the problem of anticipatory counter-recuperation (shall we recourse to negating the negation, or to Betty Boo Doing the Do) is necessarily always messy and leading to an endless regress: to what measure are social forces present in self-critique (cf Lady of Shaghai)? At what point do perfected self-separating radical gestures become finally cut off from, and insignificant to, the symbolic order (as in Fassbinder’s Third Generation)? There is no finality here, only endless mutation and recycling of available materials. As a get out, we might then effect a return to the problematic of what is rooted in what, by setting the question in terms of the originally presented image as if scripted by Švankmajer: ‘is there a distinction to be made between the lost shoe and injured ankle? Perhaps, I reply airily. But that is a distinction made within and by the story itself, I add vaguely.’
The limping variation of monosandalism probably signifies the capacity to attain knowledge by other means than expeditionary force - the lame figure cannot keep up with others, but in his thoughts, he flies ahead of them. His knowledge is post-hubristic, he is the only one able to recognise things as they really are in the midst of the event, and is marked, and is chosen, and is charged, in his wounded wandering, to bring the absolute particularity of his knowing out of the past, so as to emerge from the wilderness at the edge of town, burdened by the obscure irrevocability of all that has already happened.
/The music stopped and I stood still,
And found myself outside the Hill,
Left alone against my will,
To go now limping as before,
And never hear of that country more!/
The one shoed figure moves, as does the rolling Moran, across a post-tragic terrain, moving as if from the terrain before the story, of the pre-story, and emerging archetypically /into/ as an organising function, a familiarisation device, of /this/ story. The one-shoe infects the present community with what went before, the significance of their living is suddenly knocked from their hands, and is relocated chthonically, inaccessibly, into the order of all that escapes them. For those who are always about to make things new the assigned fate is reversion to the picking up of broken pieces, a rediscovery in the hurricane of the midden at their heart.
/Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
― Ballard/
Self-imposed constraint as a way to self-knowledge, by diet, by study, by exercise is the only means available to the individual to create itself as a form not wholly determined by exterior forces. And yet, it is through these acts of self-delimitation and our struggle to be ‘my self’, as set against everything else, that we also become, paradoxically, the beasts of burden for fads and gimmicks, and then acutely susceptible to niche cultural and political advertising.
Such is the nature of the dating app and by extension, all the proprietorial softwares through which we must reach out, our reaching through branch-form algorithmic yes/no sorting processes, to facilitate and mediate encounters with ‘like-minded’ or rather, similarly limping others. There are so many one-shoes transmitting their loss, their wounds as advertisements, as grounds for community.
Self-advertising in an anonymous and infinitely expanding virtual space that both replicates the job application format and encourages an insular tendency towards the ruminative state now termed, narcissism of small difference. We convert ourselves, as a last throw of the dice, into living advertising images set within a corporate medium in the hope that we might counter the growing tendency of our isolation, and escape the otherwise inevitable entropic fate we have otherwise identified for ourselves - we emerge perpetually at the edge of the lives of others to sell them our wares.
Rumination and misgivings, the ambivalent form of consciousness ascribed to the one who is fated always to have one foot in either camp, impedes the chance for success of his own project - that which was already difficult becomes near impossible where the protagonist inflicts his own Achilles heel. To begin from an assumption of the loaded nature of the environment in which one must appear is to dwell in defeat from the start - it is, in effect, a swipe left against one’s own self-interest.
And yet, it is also the case that monosandaled consciousness is predicated upon a commitment to the dating app ideal of the One, and collectively upon the gathering of The Ones, who will redeem it, and for this reason, nobody else will do. To lose a shoe in the endeavour undertaken, as with Cinderella, is a sign of the self’s absolute commitment. It is precisely because the project constituted on an assumption of /Kin/ only limps, that it might also arrive.
Clearly, this is not the manner by which real relations are constituted, community is not a consequence of likemindedness and shared interest. The members of any electively constituted group do not really wish to be members of it, except in the sense there is nothing else but commodified niche similarities - people who read that, also read this. The group is already in error, and they do not want to meet each other. And yet, there persists the possibility, even where it is given that that the gathering is a category type error, and its members wrongly brought together, that either fire or liver might be plucked from its hampered form. Each is aware, are we aware, of the vortex of self, being both whirlpool and the debris it has trapped - and if they are reduced to advertising in this manner, then might they not also dress such humiliation as an exercise in neg-advertising (as the very detournment of lop-shoedness)?
/I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim. I take it that the final destination of the 20th century, and the best we can hope for in the circumstances, is the attainment of a moral and just psychopathology.
- Ballard/
And so, at the end, we encounter the lame exemplar, and cultural bottleneck, Oedipus, the limping king. Another threshold is crossed as Oedipus re-emerges into the blithe world of autonomous and self-presenting relations, he is not wounded and burdened by the gods but by men, by history. Oedipus is the first subject of history, implicated, compromised, impelled - made by and a maker of consequences. Oedipus sets, for the first time, the general problem of agency traversing history, of retroactive re-orientation of relations following the otherwise unexplained emergence of new forms out of the endless rupture of events (Nachträglichkeit). If Laius had not... if Jocasta had not... if the shepherd had not... if Polybus and Merope had not... if Oedipus had not... if the Sphinx had not... if Tiresias had not... if Apollo had not... if the Oracle had not. And there are multiple chances, at every crossroads, there is always the option to back down, to not take the path to be taken, but every action is re-doubled so its significance is not lost - redundancy is the core of Oedipus Rex.
The elaborate mnemonic orality of Oedipus is also the plotting of any magic trick - it must begin with the end and lays a path of selective and baffling unlikelihood back through the desert, back into the past, screening out noise and chance, filtering alternative causal influences, and making history, so that when the story is turned right side up, when it is retold, from beginning to end, it becomes its own illustration, replete with multivalent redundancies and retroactive investments (as in the law of requisite variety), a mise en abyme, of what could not be otherwise.
The wounded infant re-emerges from the past, interrupting the present as a bearer of latent knowledge of things to come, and Oedipus has traversed a terrain of recursive contingency (between the statistically possible and the state of materialised actuality) and realised, perhaps conforming to Murphy’s Law, and in accord with Sherlock Holmes major thesis, the least likely as most involving. Everything /must/ go wrong. Implicating involvement, as a vector of reality, transfers itself homologously across the magisteria: /And I get bleach on my T-shirt/.
The means of knowing, as alluded above, becomes the object of knowing through its perturbing effect, and is transformed again as exit and entrance, as presence and trace. If we are to recognise our own monosandaled project in this (‘a moral and just psychopathology’) wherein, as Baudrillard observes somewhere, disablement is suddenly disclosed in the rupture of present circumstances as the furthest evolutionary (i.e. lamarckian) point, a threshold embodied and crossed from nature into history, and integrated immediately into the mechanism of social metabolisation, then we must also recognise the constraints placed upon our actions as agents of the past, from the past (our resembling most, the demonic approach /within/ The Mezzotint). Say I am Oedipus, say I am emerging from the desert into the ruptured terrain of the present (memory is waking as the old french song has it), say I must say what only I can say.
My burden, this pin, these binding strips, insignificant but massified as the mountain where I was to be exposed. This affliction is not what I choose to bring out of the desert, I also wish to avoid the message I am carrying, but the burden of it is intrusive, a compulsive tick, and overwhelming. I want to bring good things, make a positive and hopeful contribution, but I also know both the desire to resolve, and the content of all possible resolutions, is already ideology. I am set in motion, and not by my own volition. I recognise like everyone else that the idea we can divert our fate is another name for, another moment in, the expropriating process.
There is nothing available to say, not sadness, not terror, not pain; there is nothing to articulate from the left wall of minimal existence, than what fixes us all to the negative way. The atrocity exhibition, the wound parade, is in reality all we are, it is all that we have left to communicate (a tolstoyan peasant grinning and rummaging in a sack). It is midnight, and like Cinderella, we must traverse once more the terrain between the statistically possible and the present state of materialised actuality. We must bring out the burden of the message that we carry with us across the difficult terrain. Is it /the/ message, or just /a/ message, not even our message, not even something belonging to us but a message that has attached to us like a leech in the fenland that we must wade across?
Is it a sealed but empty envelope? A message without information, a message without content, a messageless message? We bring it out from the desert, the fen, the forest, the depths, the mountains, the place of desolation and as we are about to deliver it, it is nothing, there is nothing there. There is nothing to say. That’s laconic. For two hundred years, the bourgeoisie have brought us their good news/bad news. For two hundred years they have broadcast their news, brought us their message, they have discovered the technical response to the disaster they caused by the technical response to the previous disaster they caused. They have perfected the development of the one hand, the simultaneous arrival of problem and solution, plague and remedy, famine and glut, repression and emancipation. But the world is exhausted by its own news. The threefold message consisting problem, argument and solution is ideology. It is also not a message.
The messenger will bring news that is not only unwanted but entirely immaterial. The news is not of what comes next but of the end of what is passing. It is never news from nowhere, not news of dawning utopia nor of the conditions of possibility for communism. All the products of the passing world, including the forms assumed in fantasises of exit and overthrow, will die with the old order. All the ideas, and not just the ruling ideas, are the ideas of the ruling class. One of the features of the message that is brought out from the past is that it is not in itself fatal, nor even telling in a direct sense. It is not realised prophesy. But rather, it is one of the autumn leaves that has fallen but it happens to be the one that did not decay. The past’s message is not carried out like an urgent and necessary burden by the little people fleeing in their big cars with volcano or flood at their heels, but is conveyed as an inconsequential scrap of banality carried by long striding titans. The hero brings out the message at the greatest cost to himself, but the message is extraneous - that is what history is, a library of fragments recording incomprehensible feats separated forever from their meaning. The hero’s message is a shell added to the midden, a pebble to the cairn, another forkful to the steaming dungheap.
What would you say of your encounter with the sublime, that is of your surviving the loss of the world that has produced you, if recourse to theory was the very worst that you could say of it? Even the most inspired of your words, inadequate anyway, would soon be lost irretrievably, lost even as you draw them out from yourself into the world, and even as they are drawn from the world into yourself. What would the message of your encounter express but its redundancy, its severing from what it was rooted to, its failure to persist, the sense of its paper melting away, its ink blurring, the evaporation of its meaning as a puddle in the road. What is the message but a message about the impossibility of the message, a mark of a mark, a record of what is not recorded. The translation of Wang Wei’s poem, /Sitting Alone on an Autumn Night/, ends with the lines: ‘To eliminate decrepitude / Study the Absolute.’ It’s an exit made for us, like Django dragging his coffin, because our own heroism consists in turning to face the gathering uselessness that confronts us. What is pataphysics but the study of the absolute particular released as the reproductive senescence, the accreting bric-à-bracking, of things? I’m not joking you. And when I see your status is /online/ and there is no hailing, no acknowledging ahoys, between us, it is like we have become ghosts, reaching out from separate looping stone-tapes, and holding hands.
/You have never been in love
Until you've seen the sunlight thrown
Over smashed human bones/
There must be no more solutions to the problems caused by solutions, changes set in motion by changes. There must be messagelessness. There are no answers, neither reform nor revolution, there is no way out, no way forward and no way back. It is over. We are at the end. We have achieved message immunity. We no longer receive. We have lost our slipper. The one hand has lost its mitten. We limp out of the distance with a scrap of paper, we can’t read what is written on it. We are the antagonist of the change we want to see in the world. We are the crisis of capital, but not in a redemptive sense. We are at the entrance not the exit, perhaps one day others will emerge in our ruins as peasants in the Middle Ages worked amongst the whirling density of remnants from classical antiquity, without reference to, comprehension of, what went before. We are the crisis of capital, where capital expands itself forever from the crisis of us.
/He dreamed of ambassadorial limousines crashing into jack-knifing butane tankers, of taxis filled with celebrating children colliding head-on below the bright display windows of deserted supermarkets. He dreamed of alienated brothers and sisters, by chance meeting each other on collision courses on the access roads of petrochemical plants, their unconscious incest made explicit in this colliding metal, in the heamorrhages of their brain tissue flowering beneath the aluminized compression chambers and reactions vessels./
Note: I forced myself to complete the writing of this by listening to /Zuckerzeit/ on continuous loop - it is thoughts as sugar rush (and of course, as always, completely untrue). A companion can be found here: https://thetheologicalturn.blogspot.com/2021/02/saturnine-and-fugitive.html
