An Experiment in Temporal Intertextuality
A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. – Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links. The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterises the way we represent things, how we look at matters.
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 122, p. 54-55)
Introduction
The room is flooded with the sound of recorded voices: texts from George Franju’s documentary Le Sang des bêtes, Jean-Luc Godard’s film Made in USA, and my automatic writing experiment are voiced; I am sitting in the room, trimming my long beard with a pair of scissors, then shaving with a razor, and as a last step, cleaning the remaining shaving foam from my cheeks; around me, in orderly fashion, are six rows of A3 sized white panels laid on the grey rubber flooring, a word printed on every panel, an object laid on top of each; basil, shoe, wine, ice, flowers, chicken, fish, underwear: a total of 23 objects and their corresponding names laid out on panels on the floor.
Interjected into the beard shaving operation, the objects are removed one by one from the panels: a tiny sample snipped, stored and sealed in a glass jar; labelled with date, time and name of the object; the jar replaces the object on the panel according to its word; the procedure of beard cutting resumes: for every instance of the gesture of beard trimming, an object is removed and replaced by a jar. The performance lasts 71 minutes: the time needed to completely shave the two-year growth of beard, and to complete the operation of replacing the 23 objects with the corresponding number of jars. By the time the performance ends, only one panel still hosts an object: a 13-inch screen showing Franju’s documentary Sangue des Betes, played over and over.
The purpose of this exploration is to find or invent Wittgenstein’s intermediate links, to set up a language game in which the elements of the work combine in the understanding of the matter.: how we look at and represent things; what language is to us (and us to it); what the temporality of this experimental and experiential process is and how it is perceived.
This experiment therefore embarks upon three areas of investigation, all of which are in intertwined relationships with temporality: the sense of smell (or aroma); text as linguistic sign; changes of the human body (the growth of a beard, in primis). The experiment posits itself in the domain of intermediality through a combination of elements borrowed, reframed, and reshaped, taken from diverse disciplines. It is a piece of performance art, but it is an installation; it is an installation, but it is a documentary; it is a documentary, but it is poetic pièce; it is a poetic pièce, but it is a musical composition; it is a musical composition, but it is choreography; it is choreography, but it is an olfactory experience. All these elements contribute to the work with equal strength and importance.
The first scintilla of this experiment arose in early 2020, when a combination of events led me to try out something never done before: growing a long beard. In between now and then, two other experiments in this research series concerned themselves with defining procedures and methods for observing bodily changes. Thus the present experiment enhances and develops a trajectory of investigation already traced by the previous two: the body’s temporality, the body’s modifications, amplification of the sensuous and the perceptual field.
In this experiment the attention is directed toward language and literature, with a specific interest in the connection between text and the sense of smell: body, text and smell, their temporality, is the lieu of this investigation.
Again in the words of Wittgenstein: ‘to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life’ (Wittgenstein, 19 p. 11); here my investigation is concerned with the ever-mutating lifeform which is language, its ramifications into and shaping of our body, our thinking, our representations of reality. A concern for what is embraced within the investigation is a concern for what is omitted: Wittgensteinian elliptical sentences, what is surmised, what is implied, what is unambiguous and what is not. Every sentence is elliptical; every sentence is potentially a sentence-radical: a representation of representations. (Wittgenstein, 20, 22, p. 13-14). A question of exactness and inexactness arises here: how do we determine the meaning of a proposition, and in which relation does it stand to our ability to comprehend and learn something new? Wittgenstein brings forward Saint Augustine, Confessions XI. 14 ‘quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio’; and he comments that ‘something that one knows when nobody asks one, but no longer knows when one is asked to explain it, is something that has to be called to mind’; Wittgenstein argues that Augustine’s inquiry, our inquiry ‘is therefore a grammatical one’ to shed misunderstanding away ‘misunderstanding concerning the use of words’, by linguistic expressions. (Wittgenstein, 88-90, p. 46-47)
¹ For a more specific discussion on power, body and language and their intertwined interdependencies, see also F.Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, M.Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: the Birth of Prison, E.Canetti’s Crowds and Power, B.Stiegler’s Symbolic Misery, and lastly J.Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power, a corpus of selected writings connected by the subject of power, in the modern-contemporary context.
² ‘What is time then? If nobody asks me, 1 know: but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not’ (translation from Loeb Classical Library online)