“The Time of That Other Interpretation”: Gesture, Symptom, and Rilke’sThe Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Abstract

Giorgio Agamben opens his lapidary essay “Notes on Gesture” with a striking claim: “By the end of the nineteenth century the gestures of the Western bourgeoisie were irretrievably lost.” A little later we are presented with the consequences: An era that has lost its gestures is, for that very reason, obsessed with them; for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every gesture becomes a fate. And the more the ease of these gestures was lost under the influence of invisible powers, the more life became indecipherable. It is at this stage that the bourgeoisie—which, only a few decades earlier, had still been firmly in possession of its symbols—falls a victim to interiority and entrusts itself to psychology.1These words point to a paradox: how are we to acknowledge the loss of our gestures if they were never ours to possess?One way to answer this question may be to turn to the thinker who moves silently at the margins of Agamben’s essay. For it is the loss of the aura that shadows his argument. There, too, the reader is called on to witness something that took place before he or she arrived on the scene. As our gestures become apparent to us when we have lost them, so what Walter Benjamin calls the aura arrives in the guise of its demise. One of a number of figures for transience in his work (the dialectical image, allegory, and “now time [Jetztzeit]” are others), the aura appears only insofar as its referent disappears.Such a conjecture may seem at odds with the most famous definition of the aura, which aligns the singularity of the work with its spatiotemporal location, although soon it will become clear that these apparently conflicting dimensions intertwine. “In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence—and nothing else—that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject. . . . The here and now of the original underlies the concept of its authenticity.”2 The aura’s authority rests on that immediate point where space intersects with time: the present. But if the technology of reproduction has revolutionized the perception of the artwork as thoroughly as Benjamin believes, one of its by-products is that the aura, like the present that ostensibly serves as its foundation, becomes a cipher of loss. This has a number of implications, perhaps the most important being that since it is impossible to say what has been lost, any reanimation of the aura, any purported retrieval of what has vanished, is compromised from the start. To oppose the auratic object, “the object in its veil,” as Benjamin puts it in his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, to the object divested of aura—or to pit the authentic artwork against its reproduction—is therefore to neglect the dialectical condition of the aura’s emergence.3 As Samuel Weber notes, “The ‘decline’ or ‘fall’—der Verfall—of the aura is not something that simply befalls it from without. The aura is from the start marked by an irreducible element of taking leave, of departure, of separation.”4 If the aura is an indispensable property of the artwork—that dimension of art that makes it art—its loss compromises the artwork from within. Taking leave of itself, the artwork now appears divided in or against itself. The reproduction reveals what is most essential to the artwork, but only by divesting the artwork of it. What the artwork is becomes inseparable from what it has lost. Subsequent to its double, the original comes into being, paradoxically, at the point when it is effaced.Not only does the artwork’s actual constitution (its ontology) change; the mechanisms of reproduction alter the relation between the artwork and tradition, too: The technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualises that which is reproduced. These two processes lead to a massive upheaval in the domain of objects handed down from the past—a shattering of tradition which is the reverse side of the present crisis and renewal of humanity. (WA, 254)The reproduction disenchants the auratic object, yet the latter survives as a kind of revenant of itself. Dispossessed of its proper place in history, it acquires a spectral character no longer subject to “homogenous, empty time.”5 The significance of the artwork could formerly be transferred across the continuum, bequeathed between one generation and another. Now what is essential to it can be grasped only as that which expires as it arrives—as a rupture in the line, a disjunction in time.For Benjamin, the loss of the aura nevertheless marks a moment of crisis in addition to the potential for renewal. Can the same be said of gesture? According to Agamben, to lose gesture is to succumb to interiority. This is in need of some augmentation. The loss of gesture, I suggest, discloses an insufficiency in the subject where interiority is revealed to be riven by exteriority, such that the origin of action—the will or intention—is dissociated from its end. Agamben argues that the loss of gesture becomes a mark of fate, a “transmutation into a destiny.”6 If that is the case, it seems so only of a mark of a certain kind. Throughout this article I suggest that when the gesture departs, the symptom arrives. Where the gesture was, the symptom shall be.One might, at any rate, expect actions to be comprehensible only in light of their attribution to agents. For one can scarcely conceive of an action in the absence of the individual who enacts it. But the text at the center of these considerations, Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, gives the lie to the claim. That work strips actions from agents; moments or modes of enactment are represented without being represented as someone’s. The two axes that define the loss of the aura—the dissolution of authenticity and the break in transmission—are inflected there: actions no longer originate in autonomous subjects; and they are performed in the absence of determinate ends._________Benjamin’s essay on the age of technological reproducibility can be thought of as an effort to describe, if not quite to define, a transformation of the relation between the subject and (his or her) actions. The essay reminds its reader at the start that Karl Marx “arranged his investigations [of the capitalist mode of production] in such a way that they had prognostic value” (WA, 251), and the same holds true for Benjamin’s approach. More than an object for analysis, film provides the paradigm for the change; film is at once a (if not the) medium through which the transformation is recorded and a means to bring it about.Watch Benjamin watching the movement of the hand. Between the hand and the cigarette lighter a series of potentially infinite threshold stages intervenes. A particular virtue of the camera is that it can bring those occluded moments to light, leaving in the dark the “prison world” formerly thought to be real. But film not only fixates our otherwise distracted attention into heightened awareness of the transience of an act; it discloses what remains disguised to us while we act. Neither an agent nor an object, there is a hidden background which is not—indeed, cannot be—of the same order as the act itself. Our attention is turned to the imperceptible thresholds at the heart of the perceptible world. The “split second when a person actually takes a step” is lost to sight but not to the camera’s eye. These intervals, then, are something like the enabling conditions of an action—the irreducible movement of a moment’s detachment from itself, its divergence, differentiation, and division against itself—that always accompany, but cannot be discerned from, either the origin of the action or the end enacted.Insofar as film makes legible a clandestine region of movements, disclosing “quite unknown aspects within them,” it reveals a temporal fundament to physical life, just as psychoanalysis disinterred a hidden domain of psychic life by scrutinizing its symptomatic expressions. But for all the analogy’s explanatory promise, the “optical unconscious” also begs a question. Rosalind Krauss formulates it this way: True, the camera with its more powerful and even dispassionate eye can stand for the psychoanalyst, and the hitherto unseen visual data can operate as a parallel to those slips of tongue or pen, those parapraxes through which the patient’s unconscious surfaces into view. But what can we speak of in the visual field that will be an analogue of the “unconscious” itself, a structure that presupposes first a sentient being within which it operates, and second a structure that only makes sense insofar as it is in conflict with that being’s consciousness? Can the optical field—the world of visual phenomena: clouds, sea, sky, forest—have an unconscious?7Although Krauss adroitly avoids answering the question she poses, an affirmative reply might nevertheless be risked. If “the world of visual phenomena” can be said to possess an unconscious, this is because the optical unconscious as described by Benjamin and the Es (id) as imagined by Sigmund Freud are bound together through a paradox. In aspiring to bring the unconscious to light, psychoanalysis finds itself thwarted by the sheer recalcitrance of its ultimate object of concern to inquiry. We have seen how reluctant the aura is to cede its alterity to ontic determination; the unconscious is no less resistant. We “approach the id with analogies: we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations,” Freud writes in 1933.Freud’s passing riposte to Kant is sharp: the unconscious refuses to submit to the rule of existence. The id is nothing, no thing, and nowhere.9 One can hope to lay hold of it with an analogy, as though it were a thing like any other, but such it is not. Analogies are bound to fall short. When Freud absolves the id of spatiotemporal determination, this is nevertheless not simply to put its existence at risk. The id’s relation to language is thereby put into question. For if there is no “what” to the id, there would seem to be nothing to be said about it. The same applies to the optical unconscious; what we are given to see unfolds in time, although that it unfolds cannot be grasped as an object of knowledge on time. To speak of the id or the optical unconscious requires a surrogate speech: a language that avows the nonexistence of its object.Another way to say this (now deploying a different analogy) is that the loss of gesture calls on us to think the dimension of occurrence that, as elusive as it is ever present, is tantamount to an imperceptible domain lying alongside the “optical field.” That domain, to which The Notebooks will direct our attention, can be inferred, even if the nature of its existence cannot be known. A flux within, beneath, beyond phenomena (accuracy is impossible here), it assumes no intelligible form. It is at once the ultimate object of knowledge and the condition under which knowledge is ruined. Incessantly dividing itself from itself, it does not last long enough to obtain a discrete identity. Although we may never know what it represents—it may, say, be called an interval, a break, or a threshold—it is as near to our actions as we are to them. The fact that it exists may appear to us through an apparatus such as a camera, but its effects may be visible in other ways too—as in the motion of bodies that act as if without agency or intention._________Agamben identifies a “generalized catastrophe of the gestural sphere,” drawing on Jean-Martin Charcot’s Leçons du mardi: He sets off—with his body bent forward and with his lower limbs rigidly and entirely adhering one to the other—by leaning on the tip of his toes. His feet then begin to slide on the ground somehow, and he proceeds through some sort of swift tremor. . . . When the patient hurls himself forward in such a way, it seems as if he might fall forward any minute; in any case, it is practically impossible for him to stop all by himself and often he needs to throw himself on an object nearby. He looks like an automaton that is being propelled by a spring: there is nothing in these rigid, jerky, and convulsive movements that resembles the nimbleness of the gait.10It would be hard to miss the cinematic quality of Charcot’s description of his patient’s movements, the image of the febrile body appearing not on the screen but vividly projected for the mind’s eye. Here we are presented with the corporeal manifestation of the insight the optical unconscious provides. The body dramatizes the disjunction in continuity that the camera exposed. No sooner does Charcot’s patient perform an action than it becomes undone. These actions seem to belong to no one. “An automaton . . . propelled by a spring,” his movements are uncanny not so much for their unpredictability or intermittency—their “uncontrollable jerkings and shudderings”—but for the fact that they appear to have separated themselves from their origin.11 A gap has insinuated itself between the body’s expressive potential and the man’s agency. What inhabits the place where the origin—the autonomous subject—was is a ghost in the machine, an invisible puppeteer, perhaps nothing at all.One task of psychoanalysis is to convert such movements into symptoms, and much will rest on whether the body’s cryptic messages can be translated into transparent language. But whether the translator is equal to the task may in the end be less significant than what the task reveals—that the contiguity between the body and the mind is not guaranteed. Symptoms vie for legibility, each suggestive of a chasm between the two, a fascinating trace of an event that happened, as it were, behind the ego’s back. The symptom, in other words, betrays a rupture in the apparent continuity of conscious experience. While psychoanalysis provides extraordinarily potent resources to explain their appearance, there are other ways to account for the break. Just such a possibility is contained in Marx’s elaboration of the worker’s loss of agency in Capital.Benjamin has already forged a link from Freud to Marx. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” he writes: “Technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by film. In film, perception conditioned by shock was established as a formal principle. What determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of reception in the film.”12 Where others might discern two contrasting rhythms, Benjamin discovers their hidden consonance. Material production and perception are isomorphic: Marx had good reason to stress the great fluidity of the connection between segments in manual labour. This connection appears to the factory worker on an assembly line in an independent, objectified form. The article being assembled comes within the worker’s range of action independently of his volition, and moves away from him just as arbitrarily. . . . In working with machines, workers learn to coordinate “their own movements with the uniformly constant movements of an automaton.” (MB, 328)Closely following Marx’s diagnosis of the estrangement of the subject’s powers into the objects on which his or her survival depends, Benjamin’s observations rapidly ramify when his attention veers toward Edgar Allan Poe’s “Man of the Crowd.” The pedestrians in that story, he writes, “act as if they had adapted themselves to machines and could express themselves only automatically” (MB, 329). Apart from providing compelling evidence of the subjection of the “human sensorium” to the machine, the “uniformity that Poe wants to impose on the crowd—uniformities of attire and behaviour, but also a uniformity of facial expression” hints at something that should otherwise have remained concealed: a kind of surplus signification within capitalism itself.We need hardly remind ourselves that Marx returns again and again to the ways in which the essential nature of capitalism is disguised. Readers of his extraordinary analysis of the commodity form are unlikely to forget that the commodity comes to conceal the labor power, and the social reality, that brings it into being. The shallow allure of commodities, those “products of the human brain [that] appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own,” reposes on the illusion of their value, on that virtual supplement which exceeds their material form.13 While commodities are deceptive, they are not uniquely so. As David McNally points out: “Many of [capitalism’s] effects can be touched and measured. But the circuits through which capital moves are abstracted ones; we are left to observe things and persons . . . while the elusive power that grows and multiplies through their deployment remains unseen, uncomprehended.”14 Marx is everywhere alert to how things and persons are subject to and deformed by the vicissitudes of such power. In the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” of 1844, alienated labor is already endowed with destructive potential: “Estranged labour . . . turns man’s species-being—both nature and his intellectual species-powers—into a being alien to him and a means of his individual existence. It estranges man from his own body, from nature as it exists outside him, from his spiritual essence [Wesen], his human essence.”15 In Capital he returns to the enigmatic relationship between the production of surplus value and the body. The worker, Marx writes there, is converted into a “crippled monstrosity”: “The individual himself is divided up, and transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation, thus realizing the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which presents man as a mere fragment of his own body.”16Behind Benjamin’s analysis Marx’s fragmentary bodies continue to stir. Those bodies, however, are not only to be found in factories.Moments such as these evoke the extent to which Benjamin’s essay holds out the promise of a new style of reading, one capable of bringing to light the excess of capitalism—precisely that surplus force, consigned to the dark, which cannot be reduced to a structural description of the movement of capital or understood through an analysis of actual commodities—by attending to the signifying motions of the body. “In capitalist society it is capital that is independent and personalised, while the living individual is dependent and depersonalised,” Marx and Friedrich Engels write in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.17 For Benjamin, too, the autonomy of the commodity is mirrored inversely in the automated body: All these modes of conduct share a concealed characteristic: the figures presented show us how the mechanism to which gamblers entrust themselves seizes them body and soul, so that even in their private sphere, and no matter how agitated they may be, they are capable only of reflex actions. They behave like the pedestrians in Poe’s story. They live their lives as automatons and resemble Bergson’s fictitious characters who have completely liquidated their memories. (MB, 330)Benjamin may well have added Charcot’s patients to his list. All these figures have a characteristic in common: they perform, but they do not perform acts of will. Their behavior, all the more suggestive for its monotony, shares “the qualities inherent in the activity of a wage slave in a factory”—“futility, emptiness, an inability to complete something” (MB, 330). Their “reflex actions,” existing only for the present, neither bear on the future nor translate into memories of the past. Yet if they are signs of privation—of the loss of autonomy or coherence the body once possessed—they also hold a certain potential.18In the two essays considered above, Benjamin offers a dynamic portrait of this ambivalence. As the loss of the aura clears a space for the optical unconscious to occupy, so the loss of gesture coincides with the appearance of the symptom. Symptoms demonstrate that the body is never adequately inscribed within the orders to which it is subjected. For those who, like Charcot, are drawn to observe them, the dramatic conflict between the individual and the forces housed within their body can be enthralling.19 But what if the symptom were to become less an occasion for treatment, an aberration opposed to a norm, than a recourse to contest the symbolic order?The symptom may harbor the power to ruin the apparent solidity of what is given—the so-called real world—no less than the apparently autonomous ego at the center of it. The following pages suggest that symptoms, in contesting every effort to read them transparently, attest to a nonsignifying dimension at the core of language. A number of texts could have been called on to orient my discussion. Rilke’s novel appeals not least for its susceptibility to psychoanalytic or Marxist interpretation. Where such readings run the risk of subordinating the text to the theory they serve, the following investigation takes a more circuitous path. This is not merely because a reading of symptoms comes in turn to require a symptomatic style of reading. Perhaps no novel is more riven by the conceptual quandaries associated with the loss of gesture than Rilke’s. If theory can grasp its object only once it is posited (i.e., only on condition that the object is there), and render its symptoms legible only after it has supplied an adequate measure of causality to explain their appearance, The Notebooks discloses to theory a troubling indeterminacy at its heart._________“The days of telling stories, really telling them must have been before my time,” Malte remarks, as if in acknowledgment of the anachronism of his existence.20 Called on to account for himself at the moment of self-dissolution, it comes too late to make a difference: “All our insights come after the fact; they draw a line under an account, and that is all. On the very next page a quite different account begins, with no balance carried forward” (TN, 113). Apart from describing a crisis, The Notebooks dramatizes one. What follows draws on passages from the first half of the text, all of which register the body’s exposure to language. That exposure is contingent on loss, and the effort to account for it—to write it into being—will strain Malte’s powers to the breaking point.The crisis is perhaps best introduced with Rilke’s book on Rodin. There a characteristically modernist aesthetic of sculptural or figurative coherence is set against the threat of encroaching dissolution: In the same way that someone who spends a long time looking for a lost object becomes ever more perplexed, distracted, and hurried, creating disorder and destruction all around him, a pile of things he has pulled from their proper place, as if he wished to force them to search with him—so have the gestures of humanity which can no longer find their meaning grown more impatient, more nervous, more rapid and hurried. And all the questions of existence that one has rummaged through lie strewn about. But their movements have also grown more hesitant. They no longer have the athletic and decisive directness with which people of former times reached for things. They no longer resemble those movements preserved in ancient works of art, gestures in which the point of departure and the point of conclusion were what alone counted. Between these two simple moments countless transitions have inserted themselves and it has become apparent that the life of people today transpires in precisely these in-between states, their acting and their inability to act.21Gestures, then, no longer draw clear lines. In Rilke’s description (which might be considered a prefiguration of Agamben’s) the traditional (or empiricist) concept of agency—in which individuals, acting on motives, are bound to the things they do—dissolves in two distinct but related ways.22 First, an action is deprived of an end. What remains of its “decisive directness” is disarray, no more than a “pile of things.” Once the end has been eliminated, the means through which the end would otherwise have been achieved vanishes too. What is left of the trajectory between the intention and the outcome—of the line between “the point of departure and the point of conclusion”—are so many “in-between states.” At once hesitant and hurried, gestures radiate within, rather than across, the thresholds between “acting and [the] inability to act.” Rodin’s task, as presented by Rilke, is to restrain rather than release those states, lest his sculptures acquire an excess that would overwhelm their immediacy. “Nothing necessary is lacking,” Rilke writes of those sculptures. “One stands before them as before something whole.”23The effect of Rilke’s discovery of the destructive power harbored within Rodin’s sculpture on The Notebooks can hardly be overestimated.24 Indeed, Rodin’s art crystallizes an aesthetic principle that informs Rilke’s work as a whole: “Nature is all motion, and an art that wished to give a faithful and conscientious interpretation of life could not make rest, that did not exist, its ideal.”25 In a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé of 1903, Rilke renders his ideal more explicitly: Somehow I too must manage to make things; written, not plastic things,—realities that proceed from handwork. Somehow I too must discover the smallest basic element, the cell of my art, the tangible medium of presentation for everything, irrespective of subject matter. . . . I would have work that would always be successful because it would begin with the attainable and small and yet from the beginning would be in the great.26The interest in disclosing “the tangible medium of presentation for everything” has much in common with Benjamin’s meditation on the intrication of the optical unconscious and the visual field. But Rilke’s letter could also be read in tandem with Virginia Woolf’s famous appeal to her contemporaries: “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.”27 Both Rilke and Woolf envision an abstraction of the fragment in flux from the static whole, the invisible medium from visible matter. Woolf, for her part, sought to offer a new conception of literature by freeing it of subservience to the function of mimetic representation. A new “apparatus” was required, one capable not only of illuminating the “dark places of psychology” but of capturing the transience of life.28 Malte’s writing is also a medium of this kind. The task is to learn how to see. “I am learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into me; nor do the impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is a place within me [ein Inneres] of which I knew nothing. Now all things tend that way. I do not know what happens there.”29The issue at hand is not to learn to see what is there.30 It is rather a matter of perceiving what lies alongside or to the side of things—not things as such, visualized in the mind’s eye, but what exceeds discrete phenomena or articulated appearances. Malte is drawn to the forgotten ground that precedes the apprehension of things—the medium that brings things to light as things. Such an apprenticeship could be understood as a prerequisite for accomplishing a mode of writing powerful enough to transfigure seeing into reading, not unlike the kind of writing to which Joseph Conrad aspired: “By the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel . . . before all, to make you see.”31 For Malte, however, it is not a question of documenting the multiple ways in which consciousness acts on the world. Learning to see demands something far more peculiar. His notes are haunted less by the unfulfillable prospect of reconciling mind and matter (by the impossibility, to put it another way, of an aesthetic justification of the world), than by the promise of discovering the mysterious link between them. Tantamount to a pure medium that has nothing to do with the ego, it is unthinkable save as a deferred ideal: “Yes, he knew that he was now withdrawing from everything in the world, not merely human beings. One more moment, and everything would lose its meaning, and this table and the cup and the chair he was clinging to would become unintelligible, alien and heavy. So he sat there, waiting for it to happen.”32_________Meanwhile, one pressing challenge facing the reader of The Notebooks is how to explain the relationship between the text’s form and the desire for dissolution that informs it. Does its structure mirror the topography of Malte’s consciousness? Some critics, such as Andreas Huyssen, think so: In every case the imaginary unity of the body surface is disrupted: from his glance at the rash on the baby’s forehead on the first page to his close-up perceptions of the Salpetrière patients’ eyes, legs, throats, hands, Malte does not see holistically. Rather he perceives fragments, and this bodily fragmentation causes his anxieties, anxieties of bodily organs growing out of bounds, exploding inside the body, swelling the body beyond recognition and altering or destroying its surface unity.33The notes are no doubt no less fragmented than the fragmented bodies they describe. But that tells us more about the bodies than about the conditions under which the inscription of so much disjecta membra occurs. One searching question Malte addresses to himself echoes this uncertainty