A Hitherto Unrecognized Apocalyptic Photographer: The Universe

Auguste Rodin, Rodin on Art, translated from the French of Paul Gsell by Romilly Fedden (New York: Horizon, 1971), 75–76.

Leonard Susskind, “Black Holes and the Information Paradox,” Scientific American 276, no. 4 (April 1997): 55. On gravitational time dilation, see also Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994): “Near a black hole gravitational time dilation is enormous: If the hole weighs 10 times as much as the Sun, then time will flow 6 million times more slowly at 1 centimeter height above the hole’s horizon than far from its horizon; and right at the horizon, the flow of time will be completely stopped” (100).

“Albert Einstein … wrote to a friend, ‘The past, present, and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones.’ Einstein’s startling conclusion stems directly from his special theory of relativity, which denies any absolute, universal significance to the present moment. According to the theory, simultaneity is relative. Two events that occur at the same moment if observed from one reference frame may occur at different moments if viewed from another. Such mismatches make a mockery of any attempt to confer special status on the present moment, for whose ‘now’ does that moment refer to? If you and I were in relative motion, an event that I might judge to be in the as yet undecided future might for you already exist in the fixed past. The most straightforward conclusion is that both past and future are fixed. For this reason, physicists prefer to think of time as laid out in its entirety—a timescape, analogous to a landscape—with all past and future events located there together. It is a notion sometimes referred to as block time. Completely absent from this description of nature is anything that singles out a privileged special moment as the present or any process that would systematically turn future events into present, then past, events. In short, the time of the physicist does not pass or flow” (Paul Davies, “That Mysterious Flow,” Scientific American 287, no. 3 [September 2002]: 41–42).

Dōgen: “An ancient Buddha said: ‘For the time being stand on top of the highest peak.... / For the time being three heads and eight arms. / For the time being an eight- or sixteen-foot body....’ ‘For the time being’ here means time itself is being, and all being is time. A golden sixteen-foot body is time.... ‘Three heads and eight arms’ is time.... Yet an ordinary person who does not understand buddha-dharma may hear the words the time-being this way: ‘For a while I was three heads and eight arms.... Even though the mountains and rivers still exist, I have already passed them.... Those mountains and rivers are as distant from me as heaven is from earth.’ It is not that simple. At the time the mountains were climbed and the rivers crossed, you were present. Time is not separate from you, and as you are present, time does not go away” (“The Time-Being” [Uji], in Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dōgen &leftbracket;New York: Macmillan, 1985&rightbracket;, 76–77).

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Project for a Revolution in New York: A Novel (New York: Grove Press, 1972), 1–3.

If one considers a black hole as a radical closure, then there are two sorts of possible photographs that are specific to it: the freezing and flattening at its gateless gate, the event horizon; and the photographs, shot by no one and no camera, that irrupt in it (by objective chance the unworldly photograph, taken by no camera, that irrupts inside the black hole may show the same image as the “photograph,” also taken by no camera, of the astronaut frozen and flattened at the black hole’s event horizon).

And there is a sort of video that is specific to a radical closure: the video that irrupts in it without being shot by anyone within it. In David Lynch’s Lost Highway, the circumstance that Fred Madison and his wife twice omitted setting the alarm system on the day preceding their reception of the anonymous videotape showing shots of the interior of their house leaves open the possibility that they are dealing with an unlawful entry through the door or window by someone who then took these shots with a camera. The two detectives who come to investigate the case ask Fred to thenceforth activate his alarm system. Therefore we can assume that (unlike in the script, where he again fails to activate the alarm) he did so, and, moreover, since he does not hear the alarm sound, that no unlawful entry took place through any of the entrances of the house, and, consequently, that no camera served to take the new video shots of the inside of the house—the videotape, unworldly, shot by no one, irrupted in the radical closure. Similarly, it is quite possible that the tracking shot of the highway at night, with the yellow broken lines illuminated by the headlights of a moving car, which is first seen in Blue Velvet, 1986, and which accompanies the opening credits sequence and the ending of Lost Highway, 1997, was not filmed for the latter film but irrupted in it from the earlier one. Since the highway of Lost Highway is a cinematic shot from an earlier film rather than a road, it cannot be used to flee somewhere else—unless the person flees his pursuers not farther along the highway but through (his double’s?) irruption into the shot of the highway (that is why, while being unsettled, I am not surprised that when the Mystery Man, standing next to Fred Madison, hands the wounded man on the desert sand a portable pocket television, its monitor shows the Mystery Man handing a portable pocket television while standing next to Madison, that is, as an image).

For example, David Lynch, “Paintings and Drawings,” Touko Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, January 12–27, 1991; and David Lynch: Sala Parpalló – Palau dels Scala, Mayo–Junio 1992, Diputación Provincial de Valencia (Valencia; Sala Parpalló: Edicions Alfons el Magnànim, Institució Valenciana d’Estudis i Investigació).

Here are two examples of the artist as producer: Warhol, who simply turned on the camera and let it shoot what was in front of it until the end of the film roll, or else assigned others to make the films or the silkscreens; and Robbe-Grillet, who produced radical closures in which images that are ostensibly those of others (Magritte, Rauschenberg, etc.) irrupted (in the process introducing singularly unfamiliar elements amid his recurrent imagery).

One did not have to wait for digital technology (with the absence of generation loss it makes possible) to question the veracity and historicity of photographs, their indexical function.

In Francis Bacon’s work, painting foregrounds or at least addresses its being a two-dimensional medium not so much in a self-reflexive manner but through dealing with the flattening of the figure (from the reference frame of an outside observer) at the border of the radical closures he establishes.

Paintings such as Triptych March 1974, where the figure is shown holding a camera next to its face, presumably in the act of taking a photograph, are exceptional in Francis Bacon’s work.

While the figure that is seemingly divided into two at the juncture of the panel in Francis Bacon’s Study from the Human Body, 1981, is not actually dislocated but just represented and viewed from two reference frames, when painting it the painter had to mentally place himself and when looking at it the spectator finds himself paradoxically in two reference frames simultaneously: outside the radical closure, from which he would see the two-dimensional figure, but also inside the radical closure, where he would see the three-dimensional figure.

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 134.

Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 52.

Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, page 88, and, more generally, “The Two Forms of Memory.” Cf.: “There are, we have said, two memories which are profoundly distinct: the one, fixed in the organism, is nothing else but the complete set of intelligently constructed mechanisms which ensure the appropriate reply to the various possible demands. This memory enables us to adapt ourselves to the present situation; through it the actions to which we are subject prolong themselves into reactions that are sometimes accomplished, sometimes merely nascent, but always more or less appropriate. Habit rather than memory, it acts our past experience but does not call up its image. The other is the true memory.... It retains and ranges alongside of each other all our states in the order in which they occur, leaving to each fact its place and, consequently, marking its date, truly moving in the past and not, like the first, in an ever renewed present” (ibid., 150–151).

Ibid., 152.

Ibid.

Henri Bergson: “A human being who should dream his life instead of living it would no doubt thus keep before his eyes at each moment the infinite multitude of the details of his past history. And, conversely, the man who should repudiate this memory with all that it begets would be continually acting his life instead of truly representing it to himself: a conscious automaton, he would follow the lead of useful habits which prolong into an appropriate reaction the stimulation received” (ibid., 155; my italics).

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Continuum, 2005), 76.

Henri Bergson: “Our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present.... Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. Memory, as we have tried to prove [Matter and Memory, chapters 2 and 3], is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant.… The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared—in short, only that which can give useful work” (Creative Evolution, authorized translation by Arthur Mitchell &leftbracket;New York: H. Holt and Company, 1911&rightbracket;, 4–5).

Since “signals and other causal influences cannot travel faster than light, … for a given event E, the set of events that lie on or inside the past light cone of E would also be the set of all events that could send a signal that would have time to reach E and influence it in some way.... Likewise, the set of events that lie on or inside the future light cone of E would also be the set of events that could receive a signal sent out from the position and time of E, so the future light cone contains all the events that could potentially be causally influenced by E. Events which lie neither in the past or future light cone of E cannot influence or be influenced by E in relativity” (Wikipedia’s “Light Cone” entry).

“When British physicist Stephen Hawking … studied the quantum theory of electromagnetism near black holes, he found that black holes actually emit radiation.... How can black holes emit radiation? … The answer lies in quantum uncertainty. All over spacetime the quantum electromagnetic field is undergoing … little negative-energy quantum fluctuations. Normally … the negative-energy photons disappear as quickly as they form. But near the horizon of a black hole, it is possible for such a photon to form outside the hole and cross into it. Once inside, it is actually viable: it is possible to find trajectories for photons inside the horizon that have negative total energy. So such a photon can just stay inside, and that leaves its positive-energy partner outside on its own. It … becomes one of the photons of the Hawking radiation. In this picture, nothing actually crosses the horizon from inside to out. Instead, the negative-energy photon falls in, freeing the positive-energy photon. The net result of this is that the hole loses mass: the negative-energy photon makes a negative contribution to the mass of the hole when it goes in.” Bernard F. Schutz, Gravity from the Ground Up (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 304 (my italics).

This is the case if we consider the black hole part of the universe.

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1998), 327.

Leibniz, Monadology § 66–68.

Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy, 33.

Cf. “Composites” in the revised and expanded edition of my book (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (Sausalito, CA: Post-Apollo Press, 2003; available for download as a PDF file at: www.jalaltoufic.com/downloads.htm ): “The living person is a composite that dissociates in death-as-undeath or during some states of altered consciousness first into separate subunits that are themselves composites, most of them uglier than the original one, then into elements, becoming alien. Each of us is common, not alien, both because each of us is a composite of all the others, even of those who lived erstwhile and who are long dead, and because each of us is part of the composite that constitutes the others. That is why we do not find others or for that matter ourselves alien, and that is why they too do not find us alien. In certain states of altered consciousness, though, we see the dead, people who have become not merely uglier, but alien, and that is because they are no longer composites (the withdrawal of the cathexis of the world).... The double is not the other, but I divested of all others. That is why whenever I encounter him, even in a crowded public place, I feel I am alone with him, alone with the alone; he embodies the divestment from the world. That is why encountering the double is such a desolate experience, and is a premonition of death with its bereavement from others and the rest of the world” (173–174).

In Bacon’s triptych Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants, 1968, the gazes of the left panel’s seated human figure looking right, of the center panel’s recumbent couple, and of the right panel’s seated human figure looking left, although sharply separated by the panels’ frames, are aligned, suggesting that the figures perceive each other or at least are aware of each other. Triptychs or diptychs with figures (other than dancers) whose gazes or gestures are aligned across the various panels suggest a monadic ontology (triptychs and diptychs have in monadic ontology a raison d’être). In the aforementioned Bacon triptych, the left panel’s human figure does not at all perceive the bird-like creature visible to us in the same panel, for the latter is an unworldly entity, thus incompossible with the world expressed by the monad, though allowed by that expressed world’s radical closure. There is intra-action among the monadic figures that enfold the same world; there is no relation between the monadic figure and the unworldly entity that irrupts in a radical closure; and there is interaction between the unworldly entities that irrupt in a radical closure.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed. Bernard Williams; trans. Josefine Nauckhoff; poems trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), no. 166, 135.