Àngels Miralda Tena
‘Reanimated Cadaver: The Mask and the Dialectical Image’
Talk given at panel “Zombie Aesthetics,” Association of Art Historians 40th Annual Bookfair and Conferece, Royal College of Art, London.
April 10, 2014
The mask described in Werner Hamacher’s The End of Art with The Mask1 is the tie between persona, work, and time. The mask is an object that reveals life while obscuring it. The mask hides the shining appearance, the face of the persona, as it allows the actor to bring the theatre to life. The mask is irony, because it acts dialectically. It obscures and reveals. The mask remains as it is because it remains an object, regardless of its movement, its personality.
The mask is a contract, an unsigned contract. It is at once the slave and the master. It contains no free will – and persona will do as she likes with it – and yet, persona is bound by the mask by a great responsibility to preserve it and to act out its course – a set course. We are bound contractually to the mask as we are to the dead. Or, as Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project2, “At any given time, the living see themselves in the midday of history. They are obliged to prepare a banquet for the past. The historian is the herald who invites the dead to the table.” The dead live among us, in a segment of history that is carried along endlessly, on an uncertain path through time, that is carried on by the mask, by the generations of actors, and the dead they are yet to become. We are mutually contracted to keep on the course through time.
On the Subject, according to Hegel. Paragraph 32. Phenomenology of Spirit.
“for it is only because the concrete does divide itself, and make itself into something non-actual, that it is self-moving. The activity of dissolution is the power and work of the Understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power. The circle that remains self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together, is an immediate relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom – this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure ‘I’.
Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject, which by giving determinateness an existence in its own element supersedes abstract immediacy, i.e. the immediacy which barely is, and thus is authentic substance: that being or immediacy whose mediation is not outside of it but which is this mediation itself.”3
These connections between life, dismemberment, magic, and the Subject are why I cannot avoid thinking of Hegel when speaking of zombies. Death is the structure of an entire philosophy, the constitution of the subject, and a theory of art. Just like a zombie who is born in his own death, such is the art that Hegel frames in his Lectures on Aesthetics.4 Such is the subject, that individuation carved out of the abstract that destroys itself in its own making, described in the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. We should also note here, that in certain readings of Hegel, the subject is not closed completely upon death, but instead, is then taken up as subject to interpretation, just as Judith Butler structures her analysis in Subjects of Desire. “Although Hegel is often categorized as the philosopher of totality, of systematic completeness and self-sufficient autonomy, it is not clear that the metaphysical totality he defends is a finite system.”5 This reading of Hegel, as a work that can be re-worked, is of course applicable to the history of art, and its own histories of interpretation. If we move beyond, to Catherine Malabou’s readings of plasticity in Hegel, we find that his work becomes an encounter rather than an Absolute, a work infinitely malleable. We know, in Art Historical discourse, that each epoch creates its own history, and that the death of art refers only to the death of a certain thinking of art, and so is art in general, like the zombie, stuck between the limits of life and death? As the contemporary shifts and fluctuates in time, is art a cannibalistic mechanism that moves forward only by consuming its own kind in an interminable death drive? In other words, have we moved beyond the abstract generalization of art into an art that recognizes itself as already dead but lives in the flesh regardless, an uncanny, an art without time, focus, or direction; a dispersion of disparate bodies communicating in a void of subjectivity.
What does this mean for the new involved in the contemporary? That it contains within it a cannibalistic impulse and self-destructive suicidal core? Each new attempts to historicize its predecessors, to leave them in irrelevance, obliterate them, to stake a claim in the contemporary, in order to make room for the new in the limited spaces of temporary exhibitions and current visibility. Yet, the possibility of resuscitation, and of renewal from the old, to become the new, keeps the works alive in a state between the living and the dead. The new is able at once to move away from the past while keeping it relevant, leaving the past in a state of suspended life, a reinterpretation of its original, a copy, or a form.
Art, for Hegel, no longer exists as art, as it did in the past. “Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place.”6
Before beginning the analysis of several texts I wanted to return briefly to the origins of zombi. The concept arises out of the conditions of slavery. In Haiti, slaves brought from Africa were condemned to a lifetime without freedom, without control over their own bodies. Death was the only way to claim control over the body but practices in voodoo religion warned of the possibility of becoming zombi.7 The zombie was destined to an eternal life as a slavehand, with no possibility of reaching the moment of rest in death, the after-life journey back to leafy Africa where no master obliged the slave to serve and there was no sugarcane to cut endlessly. The zombie returns to life as only an animal8 body, death has already cut his spirit away from its vehicle and so he returns to an immortal9 condition of slavery. Of course, this immortality is cursed by the inaccessibility of freedom. Freedom, in this case, is the utopic condition of the finalized subject according to Hegel and later Marx who will bring it to the revolution of class structure.10
The connection between art and voodoo is apparent in theoretical writings. Art is described by Blanchot as a sort of ‘black magic’ extenuating from its relationship to the function of the cadaver. “Through a methodical technique, [magic] induces things to awaken as reflection and consciousness to thicken into a thing…. Thus, behind things, the soul of each thing obeys the spells now possessed by the ecstatic man who has abandoned himself to the “universe.” The paradox of magic is certainly obvious: it claims to be initiative and free domination, whereas in order to create itself, it accepts the reign of passivity, that reign in which there are no ends. But its intention remains instructive: what it wants is to act on the world (manoeuver it), beginning with being which precedes the world, the eternal this-side where action is impossible. This is why it would rather turn toward the strangeness of the cadaver, and its only serious name is black magic.”11 The cadaver is the link between this world and the beyond, it is the point in-between. Just like the zombie who lives between life and death, the cadaver is a cross between worlds. The cadaver still contains life within it as long as it remains recognizable. The cadaver is the same in kind as zombie, but different by degree. And if the cadaver is used as mask, doesn’t it resemble the zombie? The corpse drawn up by exterior forces, used in a show of physical purposes, put to use, arisen, clawed.
I am interested here, in the way in which death does come to the subject/zombie. He loses his spirit, but the body remains in the world, in a state of constant aggravation, turmoil, exposure to time and the elements. He belongs to the uncanny – this place between. He reflects a world beyond while remaining trapped in this one. Hell for zombie, is here on earth. It is the possibility of being trapped in a world in which no possibility for spontaneity, escape, or freedom is possible, but rather, the animated corpse is subject to constant abuses from the Other.
The subject maintains himself in death. As Hegel writes: “the individual self is not the mere vacuity of disappearance, but preserves itself in this very nothingness, holds to itself and is the sole and only reality.” And Hamacher builds the argument: “When the self preserves itself in this nothingness as the ruined gods and the corroded thoughts of substance, when it preserves itself as its own disappearance, then it ‘holds to itself’ only by ‘holding to’ its death, and ‘holds to’ its death only by being death’s force, ‘the negative force,’ itself. The self is its own Lethe.”12
The Other is connected to Death in that the subject finds his own limits through the confrontation with the other. As in Levinas, who says that “To meet the Other is to have the idea of Infinity.”13 The mask also functions as a sort of self-canibilizing aspect in that the self is able to play with the mask (attached to himself) as he would play with an Other.14 The mask creates a distance between the subject and himself. This is why Art can only reflect on itself when it is already dead, in order to reflect on itself, to recognize itself as Art, it must create a mask of itself, to distance, and create an Otherness from the same.
The way in which Bataille will describe the work of Hegel in his essay “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” is that of a negative and death obsessed drive. Death structures life. This reminded me of the rare disorder called Cotard’s syndrome in which the patient believes himself to be dead. Also known as ‘walking corpse syndrome,’ it compels the afflicted to believe that they have already died and inhabit another reality. One account of a Scottish patient suffering from this disease described his thoughts after his mother moved him to South Africa to receive treatment. He believed that the heat confirmed his suspicion that he was dead because only Hell could be so hot.15
Art in general, like the patient, walks through life believing itself to be dead, since Hegel art has been pronounced dead multiple times, and it would be difficult to refute that certain conditions of art are not eliminated. But could this condition explain the uncertainty in which art finds itself in the contemporary? The overall acceptance that anything can be art as long as it is posited as such, and the readiness to make ‘art-like’ things without agenda?
Or, should we put this in terms of a theory of art with its lineage descending from Hegel’s aesthetics, and characterized by how Bataille described Hegel’s attitude to death? He writes, “Beyond the slightest doubt, for Hegel, the fact that he was still alive was simply an aggravation.”16 Might not the new be made only in anticipation of its own death, yearning for its own demolition? The very act of creation of the art object then mirrors the birth of the subject in that it predicts and leads straight towards its own death, as in Daniel Buren’s proposition in ‘The Function of the Studio.’ “The work thus falls victim to a mortal paradox from which it cannot escape, since its purpose implies a progressive removal from its own reality, from its origin.”17
The Death of Art for Arthur Danto is a reflection on a Hegelian death but brought into contemporary terms. The death of art does not mean that art in general has died, but rather that a certain schematism of the work of art has been exhausted and moved on to something else. What he meant had “come to an end was that narrative but not the subject of the narrative.”18 Hans Belting also spoke of narratives within the history of art in his book The Image before the Era of Art. In the same way, Belting takes on the schematism in which art is created to argue that the icon existed in a different conception of art, from which that had moved on, and from which we move on still. In fact, Belting stated that contemporary art has moved on further and “manifests an awareness of a history of art but no longer carries it forward.”19
In this construction of art as following successive stages, Art is related to Hegel’s Bildungsroman who wanders about through successive stages towards the knowledge of who he is.20 In response to criticism against his theory of the end of art Danto responds: “In the first place, people raised the question of how it was possible to proclaim the end of art and then begin a career of art criticism: it seemed that if the historical claim were true, the practice would shortly become impossible for want of a subject. But of course I had in no sense claimed that art was going to stop being made! A great deal of art has been made since the end of art, just as, in Hans Belting’s historical vision, a great deal of art had been made before the era of art.”21
For Danto and Belting, Art is formed within a contemporary consciousness but belongs to epochs which can be dated, there are certain artistic styles or concerns that govern the stages of Art History. In this recognition the mask can play with time, with other times, and with its own time. But the pantheon of Art is always a Cenotaph.22 An empty Tomb.
Time is irrelevant to the zombie. Time is only the present, a history can only be reduced to the marks left evident on the zombie’s body. There is an aesthetic of rubbish and tatters, marks and scars, of a body desecrated. The zombie has lost all consciousness in the excess of loss – spirit removed from body. He stumbles around blindly, he cannot see, he cannot observe, even feeding off of flesh does not stop the need to proceed in a trance. He finds no satisfaction in action, it is forced upon him, he is forced to walk forwards, but he is at a standstill. He has forgotten everything, he lives in the depths of oblivion which destroys narrative, it is the product of the trance, the black magic, he is immortal because he has left the individual, he is part of the abstraction, the substance. Death produces the stopping of time and the stopping of history, the immortality of the zombie produces its uncertain temporal state and its eternal stumbling gait. It is where truth and consciousness intersect. It is where the individual and the universal meet. The impossibility of knowledge of consciousness reacts with the limit of itself and exists only in its own extinction – oblivion. Memory becomes forgetting and all consciousness, all thought, becomes the greatest knowledge of all, a total void in which all is contained and in which nothing surfaces to attention. Oblivion. Even a collapse is meaningless in the stride of the Zombi. It can even be considered integral to the structure of his gait. The immortality of zombie makes nuances in his path anathema.
Walter Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image is relevant as Art History reaches the moment where it reflects its entire past in the instant. The contemporary contains the memory of all past occurrences and compresses them in a constellation of attention in the present moment. History lives together in a splash of containment of actual material.
“It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural [bildlich]. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical – that is, not archaic – images. The image that is read – which is to say, the image in the now of its recognisability – bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.”23 The contemporary is founded on a zombie structure of time in which history disconnects only to form an integral part of time. Time compresses and releases, and the subject gives over to the universal. The integral part of history in the contemporary is thus that of the mask – it is the peeled product of the end of narrative which gives itself, once again, to be restructured in the constellation of time.
The mask is composed of a dialectical image maintained by the subject behind it. Therefore, it is not the dialectics of Hegel which are used but rather a dialectics of chance into an irrelevant conclusion which merely contains itself in the present moment. Rather than a synthesis, we receive one more malleable historical stage (or mask). Death however, is not to be seen in the negative. Hegel sees death as the only possible moment of pure happiness. Death is “an event without terror, without the pain of devastation, but instead, remarkably – because for the frist and last time, for the only time – as happiness.” This is why Hamacher claims that “art savours its death” and “is happy.”24 In light of this, and the metaphor of art as zombie, I wish to posit the notion of the contemporary as a state of freedom. The zombie is of course, trapped in a state between life and death, he is constantly at the limit of both. This means that there is the possibility of happiness at each moment due to the structure of his relation with life and death in an abstract constellation.
Furthermore, it is only through the actions of the persona using the mask of history that the dead are revived — Art is an obligation, an obligation and a responsibility of preserving the dead. The mask is a contract that we never signed, we were born into it. But the mask here serves as a connection to the possibility of happiness for the living, who creates his own death mask, his own persona, his own finality.
Art in general cannot die. The abstraction of Art is part of the substance which allows all time within it and does not move. Because art in general is Bataille’s fruit fly that cannot die, it is immortal, it is zombie. It is a being without time. It is not “a” subject, but is rather carried by subject and expressed by individualities in time. But it is built up on its own corpses – the individualities of the past which lie dormant.
The bodies that carry the new art forward, that keep it heaving towards the future are those of living artists. It is not the zombie body that brings time forward, but living ingenuity, the production of the new. Zombie bodies produce no time, they stand in timelessness. The production of the new must bring forth notions of the past while converting it to contemporary terms. This is why Zizek pronounced that even after centuries of anti-Hegelianism “Hegel’s century will be the 21st.”25 It is this malleable fluctuation of time which becomes at each moment, becoming. The living body is the material from which art can take new directions. The bodies of the artist and spectator are at once subjects and objects in the sphere of art which masks everything. The body of the artist must function by using the mask of art.
By covering himself and becoming… artist. The self plays with the mask.26 He must transform the mask only through a performance. Whether the performance is public, or private as in the creation of the work, the mask of art with all of its fragmented images torn together into an ‘idea of art,’ the mask allows the artist to claim the present, by putting to rest that which is past.
So like the generations of dead who followed the contract, who gave their bodies over to the mask, the Mask allows the artist to come into being. The mask is always a death mask because it is the suspension of movement, the suspension of time, and according to Hamacher “When the self plays with the mask, it plays with its own death, with a death mask.”27
“Likewise art in its lethal conclusion: in its disappearance art ex-poses itself as its end, its own end, and ‘preserves’ itself and can only ‘preserve’ itself because it takes hold of itself as disappearance.”28
Must we wear the mask?
Notes:
1. Werner Hamacher, “(The End of Art with the Mask)” 105-130
2. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA. 1999.
3. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface. Section 32.
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectures_on_Aesthetics
5. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire, pg. 13
6. From Danto’s ‘Hegel’s End-of art thesis. Orig. from Lectures on Aesthetics. 1828.
7. http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/12/13/250844800/zoinks-tracing-the-history-of-zombie-from-haiti-to-the-cdc
8. Here we should note the importance of animal and individuality in Bataille and Derrida.
9. Again, here immortality is tied to the animal in the analogy made by Bataille in “Hegel, Death and Sacrifice” of the recurrent flies which die but remain the same each year, they do not have individuality. While the scientist may be able to pick one out of the group he does it for himself and not for the flies. They don’t recognize individuality.
10. In Marx, Hegel, etc… subject finds itself in dissolution, utopia comes after revolution of the masses.
11. Maurice Blanchot, “Two versions of the imaginary” (pg. 87-88)
12. Werner Hamacher, “(The End of Art with the Mask)” pp. 120
13. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Totalité et Infini’, Martinus Nijhoff, La Haye, 1991, p. 22.
14. “The play of the self with the mask is the form – yet a form no longer determinable by anything else, not even thoroughly determinable by its ‘self,’ by its form, and which is thus the transform – in which the self plays with itself as though with another, with another as itself, and thus the ‘form’ of the absolutizing and dispatch of the persona itself.” Werner Hamacher, “(The End of Art with the Mask)” pp. 116
15. Method in Madness: Case Studies in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry
16. Georges Bataille, “Hegel Death and Sacrifice”
17. Daniel Buren, “The Function of the Studio” From Mary Jane Jacobs, The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 2010. Pp 158
18. Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ. 1995. (pg. 4)
19. ibid. (pg. 5)
20. ibid.
21. ibid. (pg. 25)
22. Werner Hamacher, “(The End of Art with the Mask)” pp. 120
23. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA. 1999. [N3, 1] (pp. 463)
24. Werner Hamacher, “(The End of Art with the Mask)” pp. 121
25. Rory Jeffs, “The Future of the Future: Koyre, Kojeve, and Malabou Speculate on Hegelian Time”, Parrhesia, No. 15. 2012. (pp. 35-53)
26. Werner Hamacher, “(The End of Art with the Mask)” pp. 114
27. ibid. (pg. 120)
28. ibid. (pg. 120-21)