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All Things Thrown and Wonderful, AllMemories Great and
Small1*
ALEX WILKINSON
Abstract And the Lord God made them all. I went to Sunday school
and like lots ofother kids (though far from all) came to an age at
which I simply stopped going.Nothing conscious about it, I dont
think, its just those sets of spaces stoppedbecoming; stopped like
nothing physical can stop, like a car crashing into a wall
andinstead of rebounding being merely consumed in whole. I
(re)member, in my naiveteens (when is this? I do not know. Perhaps
the time of the Iraq war, but maybe thiswas a different car
journey) I once came out with the statement (which was
notparticularly naive especially) I think God exists, how did we
all get here otherwise.Me, my sister that is two years older than
me, my mum and dad, were on the roadfrom Auchmuir Bridge towards
Stirling around Loch Leven, the loch in Fife, Scot-land, on which
Mary Queen of Scots was held on an island. I have an image of
amemory of going there as well. It is thus, however, that I
(re)member the initiationinto a different vision of the universe
and everything. Yet it is a state clearly pleatedbewilderingly. As
an event it exists in what Deleuze and Guattari term a rhizome,a
burrow, with flights of escape which have no beginnings or ends,
mereinitialities and finalities. This is strange. It is not a
polemic, nor does it have anexplicit argument, except perhaps to
ask the question that always dances on apinhead as Bohumil Hrabal
once put it, Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp is thereany escape? I
think I sang All Things Bright and Beautiful at my Grans
funeral,but it might have been something else. We stopped in the
house of the priest andwatched England lose the Cricket World Cup
in 1999; they played in blue. Thatshow I (re)member the year of my
Grans funeral. The church I used to go to burneddown. Arson, I
think.
*****
* I must thank Kathleen Stewart, Allen Shelton and Haruki
Murakami,who while each in this text through fleeting quotations,
provided my routeinto the rhizome and the burrow like no others,
and revealed to me somewings to go on flight with. And, of course,
Derek Sayer, without whom theremay have been no possibility of
routes at all. If I have become-Icarus, it ismy fault. Alex
Wilkinson is a Teaching Fellow in the History Department,
LancasterUniversity. They talk of this in many places. See Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari,Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, (London and New York: Con-tinuum, 2004); Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a MinorLiterature, Dana
Polan trans., (Minneapolis and London: University ofMinnesota
Press, 1986). For Deleuze alone also see Gilles Deleuze, TheFold:
Leibniz and the Baroque, Tom Conley trans. (London: The
AthlonePress, 1993). Bohumil Hrabal, Pirouettes on a Postage
Stamp.
Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. No. 2013DOI:
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Time reversed itself, looped back, collapsed, reordered itself.
The world stretched outendlessly and yet was defined and
limited.
Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart2*
Belonging
I have a bench that belongs to me in the South-West corner of
theCimetire du Montparnasse. Strictly, it appears, like a ghost
fromsome far off imaginary geometry, as the North-East, but I
guessthats just how these things go around some compasses.3
Thebench probably doesnt belong to me, though I have never
once(re)membered someone else sitting there. Anyway belonging is
onlyrarely official, so its mine now.
I sit there about once a week, sometimes more. It is often
rainingin Paris at this time of year, and it seems, when I sit
there, that itrains. So be it. I like to sit in the rain as it
rolls down my glasses,obscuring my vision. Seems to me that this
makes things clearer. Iguess because it is the Cimetire du
Montparnasse and that youare supposed to see things here that it
becomes clearer whenblinded. Lipstick kisses were being rolled off
the sheen of Jean-PaulSartre and Simone de Beauvoirs grave today.
Theyll be replaced. Inthe summer you get that special smell of rain
evaporating off thepavement, one of those few smells that is a
metaphor for itself.4 Thebench is next to the perimeter wall, which
stands at about 7ft.Between the bench and it are probably about
three rows of graves.None of them contain any of the ever-present
dead celebrities thatare listed on the board at the entrances (that
does not includeSusan Sontag for those looking, though. I advise
you to get lostlooking for Brassa, he knows the way). No, it is
something outsidethe graveyard that caught me and that I cannot
catch. It is the backof a shed perhaps ten metres long, which runs
along the top of thewall. It is what you would expect from an old
shed: wooden frameseaten by woodworm, wind and rain (maybe it is
because it is alwaysraining?), windows taped over or simply hanging
broken, slack oneof those weathered faces in Henri Cartier-Bressons
Europeanseries of photographs.5 Speaking of which, I have tried to
photo-graph it, but its no use. Either Im not a good enough
photographer perfectly plausible or it is unphotographable, for
me.
I will continue this habit, I guess, until I leave.6 What else
is thereto do?
* Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart (London: Vintage). Henri
Cartier-Bresson, The Europeans.
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Method
First, I would start with the head. (Of late, I have been
listening toMiles Davis while doing this, the disturbing muted
trumpet solo thatopens Round About Midnight; the lisping fuzziness
of fog com-bined with a sharpness of rebounding reverberating
within thatmute. His constant dialogic shortenings of notes before
melody: I findit works well.) Now, it is important to be careful
with the brains theycan go everywhere, particularly if you like
them in bed. (And I findsomething about the trickiness of this
operation under a cover). Tryand do it quickly, with a pinch and
pull. Unlike pushing a thumbthrough polystyrene, strings will stay
attached like a genealogy. (AskNietzsche.) Your fingers will be
sticky by now, but that is part of thefun. Next the tail. You want
to crack the back, exactly like you mighta humans, but you do not
want to do it quickly.7 Put it on a rack withapplied pressure, legs
in the air until you hear it start to go. It shouldbe like the
stored potential of a ball rolling off the edge. When it doesdrag
your fingers along to the tail and pull with your
thumb-nailunderneath its last vertebrae. For me, this is the most
enjoyablepart, because it is hear here where the method might fail.
All that isleft is to remove the legs and the remaining vertebrae:
an easy job ofskinning. A small tub should take about a record,
just less.
That is how I eat my prawns anyway, maybe you do
somethingdifferent. It is also here, listening to the gasps of
Miles Davis, thatI find most closely the desire the Surrealists had
for walkingthrough Paris at night.8
Le Mans
One summer I committed a murder, perhaps several. It was a
violentone, come to think of it, that involved a constant slashing
in thescorching heat of two days at my friends parents house to the
northof Le Mans. It wasnt a particularly happy time for me, looking
backon it, though it was formative like everything coagulating in
asomething that forms the knitting needles carelessly
protrudingupwards in the space we call the present of the everyday.
Not that Iam making excuses, or finding reasons: I was perfectly
capable ofsuch a violent assault at that time regardless of other
things goingon. Anyhow, something drove my body to spending two
days in thesun, with it beating on my back, pulling ten hour days,
drinking beer,and hacking at the French shutters with a paint brush
and a tub often year varnish, with such relish that I ignored, for
sustainedperiods, the doings of those around me. I became somehow
voided,as if I had the desire to melt into the act, that time and
me wouldrevolve around each other removing my skin, consuming my
bones,
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and leaving only the stench of a rotten corpse to linger in the
brickswithout odour.9 This is how it seems now, anyway.
I was once described when someone was talking about my work asa
Francophone. The person probably intended to say a Francophile,but
I am not sure the usual definition of this would suffice
either;that is, someone interested in the placeness of France, its
society andculture, more than their own. Yet, phonic, could be
taken to be readas drawn to something that is indefinite and
obscure. This is how Iwould describe my relationship with France. I
am drawn mydesiring-machine is thrown (like stray words battered
around abuilding) into drive by two things usually ascribed as
French: therhizome of Paris where I feel like Alice tumbling into
wonderland; andFrench shutters. Thus it is a murder I will always
regret. In this senseI share some feelings with Walter Benjamins
angel of history: Wherea chain of events appears before us, he sees
one single catastrophe,which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it at his feet.The angel would like to stay, awaken the
dead, and make whole whathas been smashed. But a storm is blowing
from Paradise and has gotcaught in his wings; it is so strong that
the angel can no longer closethem.* I have killed what I have
killed (and this was far from my firstmurder): what time that used
to live soaked into the curls of varnishpeeling off the shutters as
they used to have been I have suffocatedlike a face stretched on
the inside of a plastic bag. I was so muchinside the experience
that I can only now hear the screams.
The Even Side of the Street and Balzacs Eyes
Boring is a process of tunnelling through a material; that
itsphoneme is a philosophy of presence is somewhat interesting.
Thisphonemic trope became available to me because I live on a
certainside of the street (left or right depending on how you look
at it probably more often right for me, seeing as I come from north
ofit. Not that this matters, I suppose).10 Perhaps it is better
describedas the even side of the street, the side whose order of
things isassigned by having even numbers. As good as anything I
suppose,though after the first encounter, perfectly irrelevant for
habitude: adifferent cartography becomes enacted.
The closest we get to the physical experience of boring, as
inthrough material happening to us, is at the dentist. Some
peopleare good at going to the dentist, I guess, and some people
are bad.
* Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Michael W. Jennings,
HowardEiland, Gary Smith eds., Selected Writings: Volume 4, part 2,
19381940,(Massachusetts and London: Belknap Press, 2005), 392. See
ref. 7.
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I am one of the bad ones mostly, when I get there at all.
However,the smell of a dentist bores into me by reminding me of
theeventness of the place though no specific event is recalled.
Thereis a dentist at the bottom of my rented room in Paris. I feel
repelledby the desire to press the call button when I walk past.
Anyway, thisis all a prelude to a suggestion of why my teeth hurt
when I seeRodins statue of Balzac, which faces south on the
BoulevardRaspail where it meets the Boulevard Montparnasse. It was
origi-nally bronze but it has entirely melted into an ionised
green.Moreover, the eye sockets have recessed into what is now
darknessregardless of the time of day, and bore into me, or so it
seems. Atnight, the statue is lit up from below by a powerful floor
light.
Fuck off, Balzac. That is what my teeth say every day.
Althoughmaybe it is just because I have written this that I
(re)member it likethis. I forgot to add that he looks right. Chance
geographies can beperilous, splicing the cumulative boredom of a
dialogic landscape.
Timescapes of Paving and Benches
A very clear philosophy of time is available in Paris for anyone
withthe tenacity (and, indeed, the time) to create an inventory of
it. Atone point, somewhere, a decision was reached to stamp new
pavingwith the date of its foundation. Thus I can tell you that the
firststretch of the Boulevard Saint Jacques (in the direction of
the PlacedItalie from Denfert Rochereau) was laid in October of 96,
whilefurther down where St. Jacques becomes Boulevard
AugusteBlanqui, the pavement was laid first in August of 93, then
inAugust of 2000. The stairs down to the four line at Chtelet
wereinset in 1984, at least I think (each step is inscribed with 84
perhaps another code?). Such dates constitute a poetry. Man Rayonce
sent a postcard to Roland Penrose informing him that hisrecent work
had taken him into a playful erotics involving math-ematical
equations. Exquisite! he exclaimed.11* Times arere-membered in by a
vertiginous morass of floating debris that pinthem down. Thus a
walker from Denfert Rochereau, in thisinstance (this is available
throughout Paris), could, with this simplestamp, could have his
feet and forced into something. Or not,perhaps it cuts short, or
maybe they are not seen at all. Not somuch of a decision
though.
On one bench is carved, with fleeting abandon and great
atten-tion, a love heart with two sets of initials inside connected
by a plussign (a mathematics again? Certainly an art). A perfectly
ordinary
* Man Ray, Roland Penrose Archive buried in my boxes somewhere
in theoffice.
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thing, which might strike as cute, tacky, Parisian,
vandalism,trashy, true love, weird, depending on where you stand
and whoyour feet belong to. Above and below, however, the
messagechanges. Above is something indecipherable, below is
somethingonly slightly more legible, though very clear to the eye,
A LA MORT,23/4/09. Perhaps nothing changes, perhaps everything.
Official,though personal, plaques dedicating benches to people who
walkedin certain places have become somewhat of a fashion in the
UK.They have a certain grammar which this scrawled something
doesnot. And then there is the date: is it to the death of their
love? ofthem and written by a third person? are the messages
connected?why the precision? I cant help comparing the exactitude
of the dateon the bench to those on the pavement. An endless,
poignantpotentiality, that in the end you lower your arse to. The
bench wasput there in 1984, by the way.
Hashish OClock
Its 3.30 P.M. That is what struck me most about
Benjaminsrecording of his second experience with hashish. It is an
event thatcrops up in the convolute on the flneur in The Arcades
Project,where he takes the last few lines of this recording and
transcribesthem into a fragment on the flneur. Thus hashish,
convalescenceand time become one long past dream. Yet, it is the
perilousprecision of the world ordered for the kickoff, and its
subsequent(re)membering, that are startling.
The memories are less rich, even though the immersion was less
profound than itwas the previous time. To put this more precisely,
I was less immersed, but moreprofoundly inside it.
Main Features of My Second Impression of Hashish, Written
January 15, 1928, at3.30 P.M.
The experiment was taken relatively seriously, with two of
Ben-jamins friends watching over in case of assistance. In the end,
itwas aestheticised: I uttered the name of Delacroix.*
Granddad
I think I remember him keeling over in 92, or perhaps it was 93.
Iwas only five or six, about the same time I got run over and
* Benjamin, Main Features of My Second Impression of Hashish,
MichaelW. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith eds, Selected
Writings: Volume 2,part 1, 19271930, 8590.
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strangely enough that my first best friend told me of his crush
forthe most popular girl in the class. I can still remember her
name,though if I have an image of her she is trapped in a certain
bubble,perfectly visible but opaque at the same time. I am not sure
you cancall it a crush at that age he was in the year below me.
Whetherit was or not, these events suddenly charge forward and
backward,roll over each other, swing backwards and around and
collapse onmy waking dream state.12 Aside from this I remember only
an imageof a memory of my granddad. I must have been much
younger(much younger than 5!? Yes, it is possible, this has nothing
to dowith years), and he was bathing me. He had a peculiar method
and this may or not may not be factually accurate but what doesthat
matter? of pinching my nose and plunging me backwardsunderwater. I
cant remember whether I had full confidence in himpulling me back
upwards or not. It may not even have been him, butthat is how I see
it.13
My next memory is probably socialised.14 It is of the smell of
apacket of freshly opened Golden Virginia tobacco. I think I
haveprobably stolen this memory off my sister. She is eight years
olderthan me and would have been around 13 or 14 when he died
andthus probably has more legitimate memories than I do. This is
herreason, and occasionally mine, for secretly (from our parents
atleast) smoking occasional cigarettes, which she rolls (I am
hope-less).* Granddad smoked a pipe. It is probably the landscape
offloating stories which rests on me most, like the way the
curlingsmoke from cigarettes eats your skin. Every now and then a
timewill distil this surface smoke giving rise to its odour and
taste, andcolour all that lies around, like a child with crayons
constantlyoutside the lines of a sketch book. These things are
physical too: Iinherit things via such stories. Thus it is that I
have my granddadsmemory. He once moved house, so the story goes, to
the place thenext door which his neighbours were vacating; the same
day in factthat someone would move into their newly vacated house.
Ofcourse, he forgot, came home from work straight into what was
(youcould say) his home, took of his shoes, unfurled his paper, lit
hispipe, and fell asleep. A sight for the new owners and an
accompa-niment to festivity at endless reunions since. I tell the
story too.
I could mention other stories of going in search of my
granddad;how for instance, one night when I was supposed to be
playingbridge in Edinburgh, but ended up instead, glass of wine in
hand,with my foot through my former grandparents attic in
Glenrothes,Fife. My dad nailed the bottom of the broken kitchen
drawer to theceiling, to mend it. I found some objects which I keep
and pretend
* I apologise to my sister for the revelatory nature of this
admission.
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were given to me. Like my granddads application to a post a
St.Andrews University in 1954 (I think he was not successful).
Hetaught history as well: another thing I inherited in narrative.
Icould drink like he could too. He brewed at home, wine that had
areputation for being on the strong side. I found some of this in
theattic as well. In big glass jars (perhaps holding a couple of
litres). Hegot them from a friend of his in the chemistry
department of hisschool in Kirkcaldy (on the wall at the train
station is written thelines from a song I cannot remember the name
of, just the lines: Idont want to go to Idaho / Id rather stay home
in Kirkcaldy.15 It ispronounced Kirk-oddy: you can tell an outsider
from this), oneach of which is plastered a label Sulphuric Acid,
over which mygranddad put a now faded sticky label with simply,
Sloe 70. Thisnow melts holes in me and my walls occasionally in
Lancaster.*
I tried a history quiz, a hundred copies or thereabouts ofwhich
I found in the loft he had written for his high school pupils.I
knew none of the answers. I prefer to say this says somethingabout
the ephemerality of history.
Oh and his name: that is in the middle of me.16
Graft and Wearing
Allen Shelton, in Dreamworlds of Alabama, speaks of the Mark
onthe Spade that his granddad may or may not have made. Thoughthis
is hardly the issue.
My grandmother gave me the spade. She was the gardener; he kept
bees and playedcroquet. The thumb mark could be hers or Henrys, the
black hired hand whoworked for her occasionally. I fantasize it is
my grandfathers. I like to ease mythumb into the space as if I were
resetting a molar deep in someones mouth, placingmy thumb in the
gap like a new tooth filling in the absence with a reverence
ofabsence. The mark is an opening to my dead grandfathers hand. On
the other sideis the callous of my thumb. At the time I could pick
up hot coals that had spilled outfrom the wood stove with my bare
hands.17
I recently had to get a new bag after a long time, another
casualtyof my flneurie in Paris. It was a cloth bag that I
fantasise had beengiven to me in India by a Tibetan I had been
teaching English. Iwasnt much of a teacher, which may or may not
explain his eithergood or bad ability as a pupil. I cant remember
now, it is pleatedwith other things. I was in the stage of life
Haruki Murakami oftenfocuses on in his novels, 1920. That, he
insists, is the big shift inlife. That is how I see it now,
sometime after reading his books,
* Though, I hasten to add, I do no drink it. Allen Shelton,
Dreamworlds of Alabama.
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sometime before as well. The contemporary has a funny
musicalityin that way. At some point between buying the bag, which
had FreeTibet written on it, and wearing it in the dislocation of
Otherspaces than the largely Tibetan dominated town of Dharamsala,
inHimachal Pradesh, it came to be that he had given me the
bag.Folded into this narrative was that this made it, in some ways,
anon-political gesture. For some reason, such a gesture made thebag
abhorrent to me, as if it were generalising my memory. At
least,somehow, this is how I reconstructed it afterwards. I still
feel thepull of this narrative shift, although it may or may not
have beenhow I felt at the time. That shift between 1920 is often a
politicalone, and I came back feeling grumpy about what I felt were
the clearhypocrisies of the world around me and encountering
Marx.
Either way the bag became a gift that I used constantly for
fouryears. My body and it must have become pleated it grafted on
tome, plastically, like a talisman.* I always wear it on my
rightshoulder and until recently, while the inlay once tore and had
to bemended, the cloth outside was fine. In the past month,
duringendless walking around Paris, the bag collapsed, fraying
every-where. It was simply the bags experience of old age and a
familiarbattering. Nowhere was this more evident than on the left
side ofthe reverse, the side which must have brushed my leg
thousands oftimes. My leg had opened up a hole, which consumed me
andswished me round, like mouthwash, before spitting me out. It
costme 18. The left hand side of my new bag has those first bobbles
ofwear, like tears of fatigue rolling down the face of a
marathonrunner.18
Nearness and Farness
Deleuze and Guattari, in a reading from a short story of
Kafkas,suggest that the contiguous village is at the same time so
far awaythat it would be impossible to reach it.19 When I was
young, thatis when I was younger than I am now which many people
wouldstill consider to be young (look at the portrait of the young
Rimbaudat 17, both eyes boring through the lens of the camera, as
if to tellyou he is writing his unpretentiously titled First
Attempt, A shaftof light, the colour / Of wax, played truant / On
her smiling mouth (Iwatched) / And then on her breast a midge on
rose, and will soonbe sleeping with Paul Verlaine. Young, though,
clipped hair inblown-by-the-wind fashion, bow tie off-centre:
exhilarating! Hisyouth was over at 21 after Verlaine shot him in
the wrist in London
* See Yoko Tawada, The Talisman, in Where Europe Begins,
SusanBernofsky trans. (New York, New Directions Publishing, 2002),
9196.
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and he went in to trading in North Africa.* By one of those
petrifyingcoincidences I saw Verlaine watching over a childrens
playgroundsouth in the 13th arrondisement, shortly after I wrote
this fragment.Cigarette in mouth, I exploded him with my camera20),
or at leastyoung in the making-his-way in the world young, 23 that
is, thoughabove the metamorphosis stage of early university, and
definitivelyabove the common conception of the puberty stage
however, Imean really young, perhaps drastically really, maybe 8 to
10, likedescribing a past in terms of shoe sizes, where at one
point youstopped being one size and became another, though the
gapin-between was hardly clear, though perhaps often painful at
thetime. However, around this time, there was a park.
This is being somewhat charitable but now it is even less ofa
park than it was back then, and well, what the hell it was givena
sought of park aura through our usage of it. It stretched a
fullfootball field in length between two houses about 20 metres
away.A full football field! you ask. Well, perhaps an exaggeration,
butit was a full football field to us and even had a clear
concretepath running through the middle for the half way line a
sort ofgauntlet for the OAPs who wandered past before or after
dinner.Either way it was a full football field with more than its
share ofa full football team on it. Needless to say, goals were
scored bythose who could shove each other out of the way, I
imagine. Iimagine, because that is it. Glints of sunlight on a
yellow BoltonWanderers shirt I used to wear pressurise the minutes
of tomor-rows present futured into the past, like a graft gone
wrong, butapart from that there just remains a fuzzy purity any
time I drive(hardly ever a walk) past the park.21 This was in a
village thatperhaps never existed, or at least can no longer be
relayed. I waswalking back from meeting a few old friends about a
year ago inthe pub in this village as it is marked on a map,
probably farfrom sober, but certainly not drunk. All of a sudden I
became aworlding in the atmospherics of the eventness of the place.
Therewas no specific event, just an overall attunement, as
KathleenStewart has recently put it. Take all the photos you want,
thisplace will still not exist, just a bare affect.22
* Arthur Rimbaud, First Attempt, in Selected Poems and Letters,
JeremyHardy and John Sturrock trans., (London: Penguin, 2004), 911.
Seeintroduction by the same translators in this edition for a brief
prcis ofRimbaud and Verlaines intertwined life. Robert Walser,
Microscripts, trans. Susan Bernofsky, (New Directions /Christine
Burgin, New York, 2010). This style I borrowed from Walser.
Kathleen Stewart, Atmospheric attunements, Environment and
Plan-ning D: Society and Space, 29, 2011, 444454.
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Graffiti
Paris is one amorphous canvas whose skin is everywhere
tickledwith tattooed graffiti. I was walking the fifteenth district
arounda month ago and captured, in perfect profile, the
followingphotograph.
Rue des Thermopyles, Paris. Taken, my computer tells me, at
12:35 on05/07/2011. I guess that was me then.
Climbing plant and climbing graffiti hand in hand. It was on
theRue des Thermopyles, a place overcrowded with nothing
thatemerges at the Place Alberto Giacometti, named after the
Frenchsculptor associated with the Surrealist movement. For this I
canthink of no poetry better than the photograph.
My Bedroom and The Great Gatsby
My room that I rent in Paris is 9 m2 (thus 3 3) and is organised
inthe following manner. Opposite the entrance door is a
fold-outsofa-bed. It is a little temperamental: it needs to be
folded out twicebefore it doesnt just rock like a seesaw on a pair
of legs two thirdsof the way down. The technique for doing this
pleated itself on to meafter a week or so, but still differently
repeats itself every time. It
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has a cover that doesnt fit especially well, and got me
thinkingmight not be utilised in future if every morning I had to
put thedamn thing on. However, this pleated itself to me too, and
everydayit sits there, cover on, saying hello to me. In front of it
is a tablestacked of books, and like the bed it has its foibles
pleated on to myskin too (these I will save for another time). To
the right of this isclothes storing place just taller than me
(about 6ft), and about ametre or so wide. It contains an iron,
which I never use (there is noironing board, though this would
probably not be the reason). Imove the table in front of it at
night (it folds down). The table,weighed with books too, is heavy.
On the table I can see the pink,flowery alarm clock I bought for a
pound in a moment of despera-tion about a year ago. It is the only
time-telling device (aside frommy camera and my laptop) that I own
I have no wristwatch ormobile. Somewhere between unconscious and
conscious choices, Iam not sure. To the right of this is a
kitchenette, with a two-rungelectronic hob (no oven), a small
draining board, and a sink.Underneath, a cupboard and a fridge,
each smallish. On the wall ofthe entrance door, the other side of a
reasonably large window witha flowerbox containing roses in which I
sometimes place an incensestick to light, is a toilet and a shower
cubicle. The floor is hexagonaland terracotta red. Next to the
shower is a small hall table on whichmy laptop sleeps. In front of
the door is something made out ofwood that I have no idea what it
is.23
Clearly small, impossibly small perhaps, but regulated in a
kindof Frankfurt kitchen kind of a way. Right down to waste
production.It all goes through the toilet, which flushes, if you
leave the taprunning in the kitchen sink, every thirty seconds:
about. Likesomeone being sucked through the airplane toilet in a
joke by BillyConnolly, the rambling Jobbie Weecher. I bought The
GreatGatsby, in English, in Paris, and for the first time read it.
I alsobought Cousin Bette, by Balzac.* The Great Gatsby makes my
roombigger; Cousin Bette, smaller. Shape changing is an affect of
theordinary too.
Conclusion: My Special Snow Effects
TO RROSE SELAVYAndr Breton has given up writing.(Journal du
Peuple April 1923)
* F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, (London: Penguin,
1994); Honorde Balzac, Cousin Bette, Sylvia Raphael trans.,
(Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1992). The Great Gatsby has
continued to draw me, while CousinBette, I confess, has little
appeal.
12 Alex Wilkinson
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Ive left my effects behind,my special snow effects!24*
This article took me one day and a lifetime to read and write. I
wassuffering from a genuine case of fatigue at the time. In attempt
toget fit and lose some weight (2 years of a PhD had taken a toll),
aswell doing some flneuric research in Paris involving
typicallydaily 1015 mile walks in some direction or other, I had
assaultedmy body. After a few weeks it politely told me to fuck
off. And soI did, at least I thought at the time, when I crawled to
bed. I had hadthis idea for such an article, so it was slightly
frustrating not to beable to write it. Paracetamol was hardly going
to do me much good,so I went to sleep. I woke up feeling not an
awful lot better, butdetermined to write. I started with prawns and
Miles Davis. It turnsout the nutrition I was lacking was memory. I
hadnt eaten enoughof it. While photographing Paris as a flneur,
which is no longerpossible, a dream action, I had been
photographing myself,abstracting and tearing at my skin. This is
not to say that this is anattempt to bolster the selfness of the
self in any fashion. Perhapsthe opposite. Memory is delirium food,
perhaps, but oh sodelicious.25 I am still not sure what all this is
about, but appears tome that to go in search of facts when writing
and critiquing suchhistorical writing (which it is), is to miss the
wood for the trees.26
This is how I see it, I add, and sign here, like Derrida, at the
end ofSignature, Event, Context:
(Remark: the written text of this oral communication was to be
delivered to theAssociation des socits de philosophie de langue
franaise before the meeting. Thatdispatch should thus have been
signed. Which I do, and counterfeit, here. Where?There. J.D.)27
P.S. You have to be of a certain bent for the ordinary event of
thissignature to mean Jacques Derrida. The initials, even for a
theoryhead such as I have been occasionally termed, first recalls
the TVshow Scrubs. Another bit of American trash my dad would
say.Probably right. But it infects and floats, nevertheless.
* Andr Breton, Earthlight, Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogrow
trans.(Copehagen and Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2004), 95. Aside
from minor revisions, and part of the section (re)membering thepark
in my home village of Little Lever under Nearness and
Farnesswritten prior, this holds to be: I started at about 5:30
P.M. and finished justafter 1 A.M. Oddly enough, people were
walking on the roof of my seven-storey apartment block, speaking to
each other. AW, 05/08/2011. Jacques Derrida, Signature, Event,
Context, in Limited Inc, SamuelWeber trans., (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1972), 121.
All Things Thrown and Wonderful 13
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Rue des Vertus, 3rd arrondissement, 30/7/11, 15:16.
Notes
1 Despite its transversal potential, time has had a tendency to
take on atautological totality in historical discourse. I found
myself standing on thedisplay shelf of a shop, seemingly selling a
bewildering, but limited, array ofstock, some time after I took the
photograph. It was as if I had emerged asa ghost in my own haunting
of a place. Even in this relatively banal image,a magic interplay
of the total and partial takes place, between the varioussurfaces
of the glass, the corrugated iron shutters and, say, the orange
toymotorbike seat that is strangling me. I guess and is this, this
this of theguess, not already a gamble? as in the etymology of
guess inthe Low Country gessen, to appraise or take aim at, to
shoot for, a quality a guess at, or of, the embarrassment that I
would wish to declare, to open asa kind of reprieve; in that I am
simply embarrassed, I wish and fear,and then hope for my
embarrassment, for a force of its own, to give over astutter to the
world for the emulsion in the negative, of the image retainedhere,
for you and all, a kind of nudity so very bare, that it bears not
seeingat all, to judge. There is yet another reason why my reading
mightbe incomplete: although I have no intention to illustrate a
new method,I have attempted to produce, often embarrassing myself
in the process,the problems of critical reading. (My emphasis:
souvent en nous yembarrassant.) So said Jacques Derrida, at the
commencement of hispeculiar history (for he says this too, of its
first part: certain significant
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historical moments) of technique and writing, Of Grammatology.
It was aplay on the root of embarrasser, to block, from the Latin
embarrass, forobstacle. There are numerous conceptions of the
becoming of writing inDerrida, but his insistence on the uneasy
friction (and the often heatedconcepts, such as cindres, for this
friction) of its in-between in the spatio-temporal consistency of
(re)beginnings and initiations, is a permanentfeature of what he
means by diffrance. Embarrassment here is not anysimple admittance
of fault and fault lines that have settled in a supposedlyperfect
surface of academic becoming (of the numerous, evident,
errors;grammatical or portentous without rigour). Rather, it
(re)presents a mode ofbeing with the world and for it, to give
forth through a necessary stumblingand tripping; a falling toward
the tomb as Derrida once said. Embarrass-ment can then come to
stand not simply for a felt inadequacy, but a forcefulconception of
what is both hindered and let through in the inscription of apast
always in passing across the distributed surface of a time. To
empha-sise that I wrote this piece in eight hours is not at all an
attempt to indicateany virtuosity, but an attempt to move toward
the wall, the blockage, and letthrough, in the back alley of a
thoroughly modern situ, a meaning thatcannot be hunkered down and
caught in a web of signs responding to apolitical ontology of a
desire to historicise according to any stable notion ofthe
gathered. For our concepts to have any force at all, then, we
mustabsolutely insist on their impossibility, at all moments, to
transport any-thing at all. I thus, in the fragile and temporary
album above, try to situatemyself in-between everything and nothing
to consider the somethings thatthe passing of the past seem to call
forth. I would like to thank Yoke-SumWong and the external reviewer
for their urging to offer this, I hope, slightlymore open leaf for
which the reader can make an entrance into the rabbithole. These
mausolea (endnotes) are zones of magnetism, force fields,
wherehistory contracts itself. Like the rhizome, they offer routes
with trickpassageways into a perilously fragile sculptural monument
to a chancearchive, geologically worn from a catastrophic genesis
of a potential bothvisible and invisible at its moment of
emergence. I thus could not signifi-cantly change the original text
(see endnote v) and rather endeavoured uponthis more conventional
building project, which, as opposed to the incom-plete ruin of the
topos above, provides a kind of graffiti-commentary spraypainting
signatures on to some tattered foundational stones. They serve,
ifnothing else, to preserve the fragility of all writings becoming,
its opennessto chance, accident and experiment, and as a reminder,
if it were stillneeded, to the problem facing historical study:
that is, not the reality of thepast or present as a dialectical
becoming, but the passing of the past and thepast of passing, a
sort of form to something as Benjamin might say between redemption,
becoming, destruction and the sublime. I provide inthese notes,
then, some of my influences which, without, I hope, reducingthe
float of the text itself, provide (partial) access to my desiring
subcon-scious. Where the original footnotes offer a full and
complete reference Ihave not repeated it here. See Michel Foucault,
The Thought of theOutside, in James D. Faubion eds, Essential Works
of Foucault: 19541984,volume 2: Aesthetics, (London: Penguin,
2000), pp. 147169; Death and theLabyrinth: The World of Raymond
Roussel, Charles Ruas trans., (London:Athlone, 1987). For further
on the insertion of the I see Roland Barthes, ALovers Discourse,
Richard Howard (trans.), (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978).For a
comparative to the forgetting of the present, see the forgetting of
death:Franoise Dastur, Death: an essay on finitude, John Llewelyn
(trans.),
All Things Thrown and Wonderful 15
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(London: Athlone, 1996). See also two books encountered
subsequent to thisarticles becoming: Michael Taussig, I Swear I Saw
This: drawings infieldwork notebooks, namely my own (Chicago and
London: Chicago Uni-versity Press, 2011); Paul Farley and Michael
Symmons Roberts, Edgelands,(London: Jonathon Cape, 2011). Together
with Gail Scott (see endnotesvi/ix) they are two works that have
encouraged me of the import of thisenterprise. For the above see
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, GayatriChakravorty Spivak
(trans.) (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1997); Glas,John P. Leavey
and Richard Rand (trans.), (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress,
1987). I would like to express my utmost thanks to the
postgraduatecommunity in the Department of History at Lancaster
University wholistened, sympathetically, to a version of the paper,
and to Derek Sayer,Yoke-Sum Wong, Dariusz Gafijczuk and John
Strachan for their constantsupport in the preparation of my work
over the past four years.
2 Murakami, Sputnik, p. 186.3 For ghostly geometries and other
hauntings see: Avery Gordon,
Ghostly Matters: Haunting the Sociological Imagination
(Minneapolis andLondon: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Susan
Lepselter, WhyRachael Isnt Buried in Her Grave: Ghosts, UFOs and a
Place in the West,in Daniel Rosenberg and Susan Harding eds.,
Histories of the Future(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
Memories contain within themechoes of the future: they are in
league with dreams.
4 For smell and history see Michael Taussig, My Cocaine
Museum(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). It is a museum
where thecontaining white walls of modernity are opened to a
flooding of penetratingmoss, whose mouth organ of pure gestation
speaks in an echoing voice ofan alternate space where the senses
are stored. Neither quite interior, norexterior, it registers a
whole other form of being.
5 This is the first of many errors which (to emphasise) I ask
the readerto sympathetically attune to, like scratches on a record.
They are essentialdivagations to the life-span of the article.
However, this was not intendedto be entirely an exercise in
automatic writing. A considerable part of theexperiment was to
reinitiate the import of form in academic critique.
Byderationalising academic form I hoped to find new ways to
liberate itscritique, particularly its historical and sociological
dimension. I thereforeleft in some of the formal defamations, such
as footnote errors, to give asense of this scatological becoming of
chance and experiment. While simpleformal or grammatical errors
help then in a sensory way, at times theywould hinder the very flow
that was supposed to be released. I decided toalter some of these
where I felt they did not add to the performativity of thehistory
being evoked. Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Europeans, (London:Hayward
Gallery, 1998), p. 17.
6 This sense of the circulation of habitude by repetitivity and
theaccumulation of scattered meanings in weightless distant
silences, is apersistent theme in the characterisations of
Murakami, and perhaps also ahallmark of postmodern literature in
the Western sense. For a slightlydifferent version of this sense
see Jane Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (London:Penguin, 2010), a book
written as a prequel to the life of Jane Eyre. Focusingaround the
first Mrs Rochester, the mad Antoinette whom he married
byarrangement in the Caribbean, the work deconstructs and reverses
themadness onto Rochester, elevating the knowledge system of the
creoleAntoinette in favour of the White Western Male. The madness
of void in JaneEyre, is subtly undermined, the logic of
reincarnation through burning
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destruction (of the house/self) an alternative resolution. In a
further lightemphasising language, see Alain Robbe-Grillet, The
Voyeur, Richard Howard(trans.), (London: One World Classics,
2009).
7 This is a reference to the blackly humorous opening to Michel
Fou-cault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan
Sherdian (trans.),(London: Vintage, 1995).
8 For examples of this drifting see: Andr Breton, Nadja, Mark
Polizotti(trans.), (London: Penguin, 1999); Philippe Soupault, Last
Nights of Paris,William Carlos Williams trans., (Cambridge: Exact
Change, 1992); GailScott, My Paris (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive
Press, 1999).
9 See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
andSchizophrenia II, Brian Massumi trans., (London and New York:
Con-tinuum, 2004), 164184.
10 For the availability of the city as archive, or document in
its fleshiestsense (that is, internally tattooed with spewing
eruptions), see: Steve Pile,Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the
Phantasmagorias of City Life (Sage:London, Thousand Oaks and New
Delhi, 2005); Kimberly Mair, AsAutumn Turns to Winter in Search of
the Archive Without an Address,Journal of Historical Sociology,
24.2, June 2011, 133154. See also WalterBenjamin, The Arcades
Project, Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlintrans., (Cambridge, MA,
and London: Belknap Press, 2002).
11 Man Ray to Roland Penrose, dated 23/8/1948, The Scottish
NationalGallery of Modern Art Archive, Edinburgh, [RPA 707/8]. My
memory, mymemory his words: Ive been working all year since my trip
to Paris andproduced a whole series of paintings based on
mathematical equationsfrom an erotic standpoint very discreet! This
is perhaps a pun by ManRay on the Discrete Mathematics, which deals
with discontinuousnumbers and logic.
12 See the numerous references to the dream caf in Place
Edgar-Quinetin Scotts Paris. There is a petrifying similitude to
the manner in whichboth Scott and I recorded the dissonance of the
Parisian ordering from asimilar location. I lived on the Boulevard
Raspail just on the corner withthe boulevard Edgar-Quinet for three
months, having not encounteredScotts book, yet recounted in a
similar style a considerable number ofsimilar ghosts Scott attempts
to evoke. Similarly W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz,Anthea Bell (trans.),
(London: Penguin, 2001).
13 For a rather different philosophical configuration of the
fact seeRichard Evans, In Defence of History, (London: Granta
Books, 2002). Likethe fact, Evans sees History that is, as a
discipline as a ground with aninterior core stability (soul), which
admits other analytics after a carefulscreening for use-value. Yet,
the simple (de)centering of the title wouldseem to suggest
otherwise. For a radically different conceptualisation seeGeorges
Bataille, The Absence of Myth, in The Absence of Myth: Writingson
Surrealism, Michael Richardson (trans.), (New York and London:
Verso,2006), 48. Bataille offers a suitably anti-Enlightenment
stance to theapproach of Evans.
14 My uncertainty, at the time expressed by an obsession with
prob-ability, is endearingly weak. Of course, all memories are
socialised even ifthey are unique: if we are to believe this
article, at least.
15 Another slight error, it reads here, rather than home. The
song is anold Fife folk song, with no clear author. It tells the
story of the lament ofGeordie Munroes wee lassie who does not want
to move to the West for thenew life.
All Things Thrown and Wonderful 17
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16 For the act of entifying and naming as such has much to do
withhistory. See Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York
and London:Routledge, 1997). Perhaps one of the best examples of a
debate circlingaround this issue is the one drawn out of readings
of the Marquis de Sadeand Isadore Ducasse (Comte de Lautramont).
See Gaston Bachelard,Lautramont, Robert S. Dupree (trans.),
(Dallas: The Dallas Institute Pub-lications, 1986); Pierre
Klossowski, Sade, My Neighbour, Alphonso Lingis(trans.), (Quartet
Books, London, 1992); Maurice Blanchot, Lautramontand Sade,
Michelle and Stuart Kendall (trans.), (Stanford: Stanford
Uni-versity Press, 2004).
17 Shelton, Dreamworlds, p. 15.18 See Gilles Deleuze, Difference
and Repetition, (London and New York:
Continuum, 2004).19 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka:
Toward a Minor Literature,
Dana Polan (trans.), (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986),77. This is different from a sense of
incommensurability, in that a knowingprocess is going on,
haphazardly and across a tempographic dialectic. Thistheme of the
contiguity of representation and re-presentation, that is of
thetopography of obscurity and the romance of clarity, clearly cuts
throughthis entire paper (see the ability to photograph on pp. 2,
9).
20 See Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, in Selected
Writ-ings: Volume 4, part 2, 19381940, (Massachusetts and London:
BelknapPress, 2005), 389400. Here he says the following: What
characterisesrevolutionary classes at their moment of action is the
awareness that theyare about to make the continuum of history
explode. Stphane Moss, incommenting on this essay more widely,
astutely warns us to note only theepistemological function of
images in Benjamins later, particularly in hisphilosophy of
history. It is unclear whether Benjamin chose not to orperhaps
could not make the move taken by Deleuze and Guattari, inwhich
epistemological images are already aesthetic in desiring
production.Moss, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin,
Scholem, BarbaraHarshaw (trans.), (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2009), 69. See alsoAndr Breton, Mad Love, Mary Ann Caws
(trans.), (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1987), for his
fullest exposition of the concepts of con-vulsive beauty and the
fixed-explosive.
21 When I wrote this essay I was (and still am) grappling with
the indicesof teletechnology and desire as drivers for a new
history. For referencehere of what should probably have featured
more prominently in thearticle, see Patricia Clough, Autoaffection:
Unconscious Thought in the Ageof Teletechnology, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
22 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, (Durham and London: Duke
Uni-versity Press, 2007). The work is a gesture not toward a
clarity of answersbut toward the texture of knowing. It is an
assertion for an attunementto the immanence of a literally taken
affect, of body on body, and theintensity of molecular agitation
rendered too abstractly in wide scalecritiques of the contemporary
capitalist condition. Similarly to AveryGordon (see endnote ii),
there is a commitment to the complexity ofexperience, and the hasty
overcoming of quotidian existence. In this senseI see a strong
coalition between the ordinary and ghostly.
23 See Allen Shelton, Dreamworlds of Alabama (Minneapolis:
Universityof Minnesota Press, 2007). This book beautifully renders
materials betweenboth their use-value and their various narrative
contexts.
24 Rrose Selavy was the female pseudonym of Marcel Duchamp.
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25 I was drawn to this image of counter-memory by the
illustration ofFather Time by Dan Beard in Mark Twain, A
Connecticut Yankee at KingArthurs Court (New York: W. W. Norton,
1982). The hero finds himselftransferred to the seeming dystopia of
Arthurian England in the sixthcentury, until he discovers that the
technological prowess of modernAmerica provides him with the tools
to give the impression of a dominatingmagician. Of course, the
apocalypse is just around the corner. Imagereproduced in Timothy A.
Hickman, The Secret Leprosy of Modern Days:Narcotic Addiction and
Cultural Crisis in the United States, 18701920(Amherst: University
of Amherst Press, 2007), p. 6.
26 For experimentation and indeterminacy see Paul Feyerabend,
AgainstMethod (London and New York: Verso, 1993).
27 Derridas, Signature, Event, Context, develops themes that he
willelaborate upon in Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Eric
Prenowitztrans., (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1996). Perhapsthe most important impression (in this words
doubling), is the sense ofDerridas becoming-archive, a feeling he
feels, as projected by his eventfulsignature on to the surface
domiciliation of Freuds museum. See also, byDerrida, Freud and the
Scene of Writing, in Writing and Difference, AlanBass (trans.),
(London: Routledge, 2002), 246291. Rather differently,Robert
Walser, Microscripts, Susan Bernofsky (trans.), (New York:
NewDirections/Christine Burgin, 2010), a collection of stories
Walser wrote ontiny scraps of paper, from stamps to letters, with
an archaic script no morethan a few millimetres in height.
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All Things Thrown and Wonderful 21
2013 John Wiley & Sons LtdJournal of Historical Sociology
Vol. No. 2013