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| EVE'S DROPPING 3 |
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From Eavesdropping/Eve's Dropping
(.....)1
1 The title "Eavesdropping/Eve's Dropping" would refer on one level to eavesdropping, the act of listening in on a conversation in secret, where voices are heard but one cannot safely attach an identity to the voice or even be sure of how many people are speaking. In addition, the voices at play in this essay are eavesdropping in on a conversation between Derrida and Fried, or at least, they believe they are listening in on this conversation, even while doubting whether such a conversation is taking place, unsure of the identity of the relation between Fried and Derrida. Through "Eve's dropping" we wish to at once make the eavesdropper aware of the possibility of mishearing voices, of the ambiguity of language, drawing attention to the materiality of language, while also drawing attention to physical matter, to droppings and the Fall, a fall into a state of physical existence that absorption tries to escape. Absorption would be an attempt to escape the Fall marked and embraced within this essay's reference to Eve's dropping, to waste, to everyday physical experience. We realize, however, that the arguments and meanings produced through "Eavesdropping/Eve's Dropping" far exceed what is laid out here and are beyond our ability to watch over or police.
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-I thought the work of art threatens the ontological status of the beholder and Michael was out to protect the beholder, to master the painting's voiding gaze that empties his presence, marking his demise, leading him to his ruin, to ruins.
-Whose ontological status is at stake? The beholder's or the work's? Who(se) is at risk? Is this another hunting and haunting scene of Diana and Acteon? Who bears the guilt of the gaze? The seer or the seen? Doesn't this whole scene reek of an attempt to preserve an already lost purity, an impossible authenticity whose loss has always already been inscribed by the Fall? Isn't Fried describing the Fall?
-I am not sure that I can answer any of your questions. I would, however, suggest that the relation between painting and beholder is not a simple matter concerning the ruin of the one or the other, but a scene of doubling, a ruining of the one, a doubled ruin, at least two ruins, both the painting and the beholder. Everything and everyone is ruined, and Fried seems to direct everything towards delaying this inevitable ruin. He is the director behind this theatrical production. Everything comes back to him. He re-members.
-Yes, Fried seems to have a desire to render everything back to painting. Everything for him returns to painting, but in Absorption and Theatricality, in a revealing and revelatory gesture, the truth is rendered back to Diderot, the art critic who has been wronged by art history, and, through this gesture, back to Fried, the art critic who has been wronged by art history. Fried is out for justice, out to justify art criticism.
And yet, in Courbet's Realism, everything isn't rendered back to Baudelaire, the art critic, even though it could. Baudelaire is in the wrong for having committed Courbet's art to mere Realism, saying that Courbet neglected the role of Imagination in art, condemning Courbet to the school of Realism, and cordoning Courbet off from further inquiry. Yet, Baudelaire had it right. Allegory, as Baudelaire describes it, was Courbet's project, as Fried describes it. Baudelaire and Courbet were just blind to this. Fried restores this sight, rendering insight back to Courbet, bringing to light Courbet's allegorical project. Everything is restored and everything comes back to Fried. It is all about the return, the hunt or the haunt, a return of the dead, of the repressed, and how you make the argument return, how to make a return on the argument, how the investment pays. Fried re-members everything, sends the paintings back to their rightful owners, buying stock in the whole corporeal enterprise, an enterprise in which there is a great return to Fried for this speculative, specular project mobilized and made mobile by the hermeneutic circle, even if his account seems a bit over-drawn.
-But it is precisely a question of being overdrawn, of the temporality of Being, of trying to fix the beholder's gaze, correcting the reader's gaze, of medusalizing the beholder, placing the beholder in a trance, and inducing a catatonic state that is laid out in Diderot. How does one make the beholder stay put? The paradoxical answer is that you make the beholder take notice by denying that she is there. This is the 'Supreme Fiction:' the denial of the beholder's existence, an existence that is intimately tied to the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld. They are not made to be sniffed, to be touched, to be tasted, to be listened to. They are made to be beheld.
-Derrida turns to Diderot in his account of blindness, as well as to Baudelaire, and perhaps we could bring Fried and Derrida together, while also pushing them apart, if we remain blind to Fried's argument for the moment and turn our attention towards blindness.
Blindness would seem to be a common ground for Derrida and Fried. Fried even says as much, but I see this similarity as spelling out an important difference between the two of them, a difference that could be focused around the type of body assumed by their accounts of blindness. For Fried, blindness is another theme directed towards an ideality of absorption, while for Derrida blindness is another mark of the body's finitude, another repressed margin that reveals the ordering of Western philosophy. This all could be related to a differing conception of the role of vision in Merleau-Ponty, a reading that may be tied to differing conceptions of the body.
Fried is not concerned with the body, or, rather, he is all too concerned. Fried dreams of a body that is physically fit. It does not suffer. Blindness is another absorptive state that is tied to the fullness of this body's experience, an athletic body bounding through and bound into Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology, a body that Fried seems to aspire to. This body is masculine, virile, and erect. It stands up and gazes knowingly at the world. Its experience of the world is that of a continuity. It is full, filling, and fulfilling. Fried re-members everything, returning everything to an all consuming corporeal experience of the world.
Derrida, on the other hand, is consumed by the body, a body that is consumed by disease. The body is crippled, blind, paralytic, a body that Fried wishes to forget, but that Derrida insists upon, a body that is un-sound. It limps. It is limp, weak. It is always in a process of decay. Blindness is something that befalls us, a blindness to our own aging, a memory of our own experience that does not remember, but only re-members through a process of mourning and loss, a loss of memory, a body only as a memory, never re-membered, always a re-presentation of an unpresentable body. The eye and the body need prosthetics: glasses, microscopes, telescopes. These prosthetics would, at one moment, suggest an extension of the body, while at the same moment, they bear witness to an extinction of the body, the body as a relic. This would loosely gather together blindness, ruin, and mourning, a language of the tear, which is both a fluidic mark of the body's permeability, its lack of permanence, and also a tear, a rip, Riss, within our very existence, an existence marked by tears and re-marked on through tears. Thus, Derrida remembers and re-members the body. That is to say, Derrida tries to remember the body, its mortality, but this remembering is always marked by a gap, the gap produced in the hyphenation of re-membering. This would be a different re-membering from that at play in Fried. It would be an acknowledgment of ruin, of the inability to put the body back together, a body that is always scarred, always falling apart.
This brings me to another point of convergence/divergence in this vertiginous, virtual encounter between Derrida and Fried that is always on the verge of taking place. This is tied to the role of vision in their work. While they both question the privileged status of vision within the West, Fried merely prioritizes making over seeing, seeing the bet of art historians and raising the stakes around making. Derrida, however, privileges blindness only momentarily in order to put into question the oppositions structuring the eye. Here Derrida turns to Merleau-Ponty, pointing to Merleau-Ponty's positing of an absolute invisible that would displace the opposition between the visible and the invisible, while being the very basis for such an opposition. There emerges from Derrida's reading an inability to keep blindness and seeing separate, which leads him to suggest that the eye is not about sight, but tears. Both the blind and those who have sight can shed tears, tears that may also be tied to memory, mourning, and the body, to the experience of ruin, a ruin that is experience. This would be a displacement of the role of vision that does not occur in Fried's account of painting and beholder, as well as an insistence on an experience that is not structured around the fullness of the body, but a body-in-pieces, in ruins.
-These differences may also be tied to the role of difference and the other in the writings of Fried and Derrida, but here I will have to be a little more hypothetical than you. I would suggest that what would be ordering our conversation is a difference between the ear and the eye. The eye would be about the 'I,' the subject, part of a monocular system perpetuating an illusion of wholeness, an Imaginary dyad, a tradition of the eye/'I' that would move through Kant, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, while the ear would be aligned with the other, with a fragmentary existence cut across by the Symbolic, by having subjectivity determined by and through an other. Nietzsche will have already suggested the importance of the ear in his philosophy, that his books would only be understood by those who could properly hear them, a notion of the ear of the other developed further by Derrida in not only addressing Nietzsche's use of the ear, but also through incorporating a language of the ear into his philosophy. This division between eye/'I' and ear/other would appear to structure a number of myths, most notably that of Narcissus and Echo, as well as those of Odysseus, Perseus, and Orpheus. For Derrida, everything is directed toward the ear of the other, hearing the call of the other, having this call shatter the illusory deception of the gaze that desires, a gaze of blindness, blind to its self, as with Narcissus, deaf to the difference that is the voice of the other, the difference of Echo's repetitions.
At another level, I would suggest that the eye is about confrontation or exclusion, while the ear is about an opening up to community, an attempt to accommodate the foreignness of the other, a foreignness that reverberates along the tympanum of the ear, shaking the very bones of the self. There are any number of confrontational eyes, all sorts of evil eyes, stare downs, looks that kill, the gaze of Medusa. The ear 'hears/heres you.' Says there you are. Message received. It allows for communication. From the testimony of those who have experienced both blindness and deafness, losing one's hearing cuts one off more from community. The ear is also tied to our sense of balance, maintaining our equilibrium, like Justice, who blindfolded, keeps the scales in balance. While light is faster than sound, the eye locks the seer in one direction, whereas the ear can hear objects behind and to the side of the head, so that we often hear a thing before we see it. The ear would in some cases, like that of bats, be able to 'see' better than the eye.
-Yet I would be careful about setting up too strict an opposition between the ear and the eye. The ear may fall victim to seductive voices like your Sirens and I fear that we, like Odysseus, would risk destruction, being led astray if we fall prey to your voice for too long.
-Yes, I am not suggesting a strict opposition between eye and ear. They are both senses that have ranges, senses that are more sensitive in other animals, and by speaking only of vision and hearing we do not take into account the other senses of smell, taste, and touch. All I have wanted to suggest is that for Derrida there is a play of the ear that may be gathered about the other. This play of the ear involves a structure of difference to which the eye/'I' may be indifferent, and which may fall onto deaf ears in Fried's case, a case that is still, in a way, a story of the eye/'I.'
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