M/M (Paris): Just Like an Ant Walking on the Edge of the Visible

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M/M (Paris) Just Like an Ant Walking on the Edge of the Visible

THE D R AWI N G CENTER

M/M (Paris) Just Like an Ant Walking on the Edge of the Visible

November 21, 2008 – February 5, 2009

D R AW I N G R O O M

Curated by João Ribas

DR AW ING PAPERS 8 3

Text by Jo達o Ribas

Abécédaire

Gulliver, walking among the five hundred rooms of the grand academy of Lagado, happens upon three professors in busy consultation on improvements to be made to their native language. Among the proposals—the forgoing of catenatives and participles received—is the abolition of the use of words entirely, hazardous as they are to both health and brevity. “Every word we speak is, in some degree, a diminution of our lungs by corrosion; and consequently contributes to the shortening of our lives.” The breath lost in speech, the very breathlessness of speaking, invites the eventual decay of what has been said; speech is, after all, merely expiration. But the breath lost in speech also invites the decay of the one who has spoken, the one who will expire.

The sages of Lagado came upon an expedient answer: “since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about them such things as were necessary to express the particular business they are to discourse on.” The Lagadians would thus express themselves through things rather than words, so “that if a man’s business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him.”

Like peddlers, they would “lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help each other resume their burdens, and take their leave.”

In this comically absurd nominalism one hears the echo of the Greek origin of metaphor, which means to transport or transfer, as in the transfer of the meaning of one word to another, the two semantically linked by a logic of resemblance. True to poetic resonance, in modern Greek, mass transit vehicles are called metaphorai—one takes a ‘metaphor’ to get someplace.

This trope of resemblance dates as far as the conversation between Socrates, Hermogenes, and the titular character in Plato’s Cratylus.

In the text, Socrates suggests that the sounds of language may be imitative, and thus represent the world, such that, for example, the definition of the word ‘man’ is evident in its construction: anthropos:

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“looks up at what he sees, or anathron ha opope.” As with words so with letters: ‘r’—Mallarme’s beloved guttural, and which for Socrates designated ‘dynamism’—was once known as the canina litera, or the canine letter. To the 16th century typographer Geoffroy Tory, an angry dog, before he bites, “indeed seems to be saying ‘R’.”

The same could of course be said of the written sign, of the mimeticism of writing. For Tory, the letter ‘O’ “must be pronounced with a breath and sound that come out of the rounded mouth, as the figure and drawing show.” Thomist metaphysics, for one, saw in nature a script of the divine—and thus the converse could also be true. Or take the modern example of French writer Paul Claudel’s ideogram: in the word corps (body) he sees the ‘c’ as “the mouth breathing in and swallowing, o all the round organs, r the rising and falling liquids, p the body properly speaking with head (or arms), s the piping system of breathing.”

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When looking over the papers of his secretary, Goethe noticed an interesting variety of errors occurred when the former took dictation.

Most were due to unfamiliarity with certain words, as in a confusion of complicated or specific terms, and thus quite understandable.

A few were more curious. Frequently, on mishearing or misapprehending a proper name, the secretary would substitute another in its place. The answer is, to us, obvious: it turns out to have been the name of his beloved.

The unconscious manifests itself through such a repertoire of tropes: ellipsis, periphrasis, catachresis, etc. In analytic discourse, it is of course not really the subject that speaks; it is rather the function of metaphor and metonymy within the subject’s utterance that rhetorically tells. In other words, what is actually said is always something more than what the words mean. The unconscious itself then speaks—or better, represses—precisely in this fissure between intention and action.

Freud’s first mention of such phenomena of ‘lapsus’ in speech, writing, or action, what he called ‘Fehlleistung’ or ‘faulty action’, and which we have come to know as ‘parapraxes,’ or the Freudian slip, appears in a letter to his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fleiss in 1898.

In it, Freud declares to have ‘grasped a little thing I have long suspected,’ namely the way a name can come to be forgotten, a forgetting motivated by repression, and so substituted by another, but quite telling, one in its stead. It should thus not seem strange that perhaps in learning to speak we are also in fact learning what not to say, that is, what we are being reminded to forget or omit.

Omission, in a mere manner of speaking, is perhaps constitutive— what is left out, or elided, can in fact reveal, as symptom, if you will, the structure of what is manifest—of what appears. This is in fact the strict meaning of ‘appearance’: that which announces itself, but does not appear or show itself, except through something that does appear, as say the symptoms of a disease as opposed to its cause. Thus the acte manqué can act as a literal pointing towards, but towards a presence that is found precisely in its absence.

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The Library of Babel, in containing every possible combinatorial sequence of letters, punctuation, and spaces—most of it nonsense— must therefore also contain every coherent book ever written, and of course every book that could ever come to be written. Moreover, within this logic, it would also contain every permutation and differing version of every one of those same books. As Borges writes: …the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels’ autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.

The totality of such knowledge—which, it must be noted, is eventually finite—is however, already in excess. It is possible, after all, to conceive of a universal library consisting of only two books, one containing a single dot, the other a dash. As Quine proposes: Persistent repetition and alternation of the two is sufficient, we well know, for spelling out any and every truth. The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters.

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An aporia: the grammatical, semantic, orthographical, or syntactical constraints of a language, without which attempts at meaningful sentences, propositions, or utterances would fail, in fact enact entropy within it. Through structure a sense may be delineated, but only as unstable and infinitely unpredictable, so that from order paradoxically arises a kind of entropic signification, one that defies its own defining constraints. What is the act of reading then? An imposition of order? Or a paranoiac rejection of this incessant sliding? Lacan asks us to “consider the flight of a bee”: A bee goes from flower to flower to gather nectar. What you discover is that, at the tip of its feet, the bee transports pollen from one flower onto the pistil of another flower. That is what you read in the flight of the bee. In the flight of a bird that flies close to the ground—you call that a flight, but in reality it is a group at a certain level—you read that there is going to be a storm. But do they read? Does the bee read that it serves a function in the reproduction of phanerogamic plants? Does the bird read the portent of fortune, as people used to say—in other words, the tempest? That is the whole question. It cannot be ruled out, after all, that a swallow reads the tempest, but it is not terribly certain either.

So how do we—swallows to ourselves—read our own tempests? Can we read our inconsistencies, interruptions, slippages, and remainders?

This dramatization of analytic discourse, of learning how to read the circuit of the unconscious, is staged in the overdetermined symbolism of Max Klinger’s glove. In a series of etchings from 1881, known as Paraphrases about the Finding of a Glove, the leitmotif of a glove belonging to a woman (an hirondelle de nuit?) whose face we never see is used as a recurring symbol. In reaching to pick up the glove she has dropped early in the narrative, the protagonist of the story lets his hat—the requisite bourgeois male accoutrement and a symbol of repressed desire—fall to the ground, thereby placing the two symbols in clear relation. How can we not read such scenes staged for us, if not through our own desire not to know?

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It was standard practice for 19th-century printers to substitute the letter ‘x’ for any letter of type missing or short in the typesetting of a text for printing. “X is rather the most superabundant letter in the cases, or at least was so in the old times—long enough to render the substitution in question an habitual thing with printers” (Edgar Allan Poe). This practice gives rise to a typographical ‘demon’ in Poe’s own X-ing a paragrab, revolving around two rival editors in the fictional town of Nopolis, one with a penchant for the letter ‘O’, and his rival, who steals every exemplar of that letter from the typesetters case. As a result, the printer, in the proper manner, replaces each instance of the letter, and thus the following text appears in the The Tea-Pot, the local newspaper: Sx hx, Jxhn! hxw nxw? Txld yxu sx, yxu knxw. Dxn’t crxw, anxther time, befxre yxu’re xut xf the wxxds! Dxes yxur mxther knxw yxu’re xut? Xh, nx, nx!- sx gx hxme at xnce, nxw, Jxhn, tx yxur xdixus xld wxxds xf Cxncxrd! Gx hxme tx yxur wxxds, xld xwl,- gx! Yxu wxn’t?

Xh, pxh, pxh, Jxhn, dxn’t dx sx! Yxu’ve gxt tx gx, yxu knxw, sx gx at xnce, and dxn’t gx slxw; fxr nxbxdy xwns yxu here, yxu knxw. Xh, Jxhn, Jxhn, Jxhn, if yxu dxn’t gx yxu’re nx hxmx- nx! Yxu’re xnly a fxwl, an xwl; a cxw, a sxw; a dxll, a pxll; a pxxr xld gxxd-fxrnxthing-tx-nxbxdy, lxg, dxg, hxg, xr frxg, cxme xut xf a Cxncxrd bxg.

Cxxl, nxw- cxxl! Dx be cxxl, yxu fxxl! Nxne xf yxur crxwing, xld cxck!

Dxn’t frxwn sx- dxn’t! Dxn’t hxllx, nxr hxwl, nxr grxwl, nxr bxw-wxwwxw! Gxxd Lxrd, Jxhn, hxw yxu dx lxxk! Txld yxu sx, yxu knxw,- but stxp rxlling yxur gxxse xf an xld pxll abxut sx, and gx and drxwn yxur sxrrxws in a bxwl!

The text, to the population of Nopolis, seemed a “mystical and cabalistical article,” convinced as they were in their paranoiac reading that “some diabolical treason lay concealed in the hieroglyphics.”

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An apocryphal story dating from the 17th century attributes the invention of ypsilon to Pythagoras. The Littera Pythagorae was given a function both as letter and sign in script, such that its orthographical nature manifested an architectonic and allegorical signified—‘Y’‚ as the tree, the forked path, Christ on the cross... From the Latin Anthology: Littera Pythagorae, discrimine secta bicorni, Humanae vitae speciem praeferre videtur

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Walking in the woods near Lake Silvaplana in the Engadine region of Switzerland, Nietzsche came upon a towering, pyramidal rock which seemed to him “6000 feet beyond man and time.� Here, he later claimed, the doctrine of the eternal return first came to him, and thus so did the voice of Zarathustra.

Eight years later, Nietzsche collapsed in Turin. It is said he saw a coach-driver beating his horse across a piazza, ran to throw his arms around it, and collapsed in tears. Hospitalized, he proceeded to write a series of letters to close friends which he signed as Dionysus: siamo contenti? son dio, ho fatto questa caricatura ...Are you well? I am God, this farce is my creation.

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BOARD OF DIRECTORS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Frances Beatty Adler Co-Chairman

Sponsored by

Eric C. Rudin Co-Chairman Dita Amory

Major support is provided by

Melva Bucksbaum

Akbank Art Center, Istanbul, Turkey and

Suzanne Cochran

The Grand Marnier Foundation

Anita F. Contini Frances Dittmer

Additional funding is provided by members

Bruce W. Ferguson

of the Drawing Room, a patron circle founded

Barry M. Fox

to support innovative exhibitions presented in

Stacey Goergen

The Drawing Center’s project gallery:

Michael Lynne*

Laura Jacobs Blankfein

Iris Z. Marden

Devon Dikeou

George Negroponte

Mr. and Mrs. Henry R. Kravis

Lisa Pevaroff-Cohn

Jill Lear

Elizabeth Rohatyn*

Judith Levinson Oppenheimer

Jane Dresner Sadaka

Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation

Allen Lee Sessoms

Elizabeth R. Miller and James G. Dinan

Jeanne C. Thayer*

The Speyer Family Foundation, Inc.

Barbara Toll

Louisa Stude Sarofim

Candace Worth

Deborah F. Stiles Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee

Brett Littman Executive Director

Elizabeth Tops and Arnie Lizan John C. Whitehead

*Emeriti

Isabel Stainow Wilcox Special thanks to Alexandra Lunn and Art + Commerce.

E D WA R D H A L L A M T U C K P U B L I C AT I O N P R O G R A M

This is number 83 of the Drawing Papers, a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and public programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing.

Jonathan T. D. Neil Executive Editor Joanna Berman Ahlberg Managing Editor Designed by Peter J. Ahlberg / AHL & COMPANY This book is set in Adobe Garamond Pro and Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk.

It was printed by BookMobile in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Drawing Papers 82 Matt Mullican: A Drawing Translates the Way of Thinking Drawing Papers 81 Greta Magnusson Grossman: Furniture and Lighting Drawing Papers 80 Kathleen Henderson: What if I Could Draw a Bird that Could Change the World?

Drawing Papers 79 Rirkrit Tiravanija: Demonstration Drawings Drawing Papers 77 Frederick Kiesler: Co-Realities Drawing Papers 73 Alan Saret: Gang Drawings Drawing Papers 61 Eva Hesse: Circles & Grids Drawing Papers 57 Persistent Vestiges: Drawing from the American-Vietnam War Drawing Papers 52 Nasreen Mohamedi: Lines among Lines Drawing Papers 51 3 x Abstraction: Homage to Agnes Martin Drawing Papers 49 Richard Tuttle: Manifesto Drawing Papers 40 Mark Lombardi: Global Networks Drawing Papers 29 Ellsworth Kelly: A Conversation Drawing Papers 14 Henri Michaux: Emergences/Resurgences

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