peter nesteruk (home page: contents and index)
Killing Time
At the washing away of the blood there is found the
exposed edge of an ancient stone half-buried in the flesh of society.
Killing time (all permanence seeks to reach beyond the
limitations of the temporary, seeks the death of temporality). If the search
for eternity kills time, then this route of escape also always leads back to
the rebirth of time. Yet as temporality only resides in the human, the death of
temporality requires (at least in a figural sense) a human death. At the
furthermost extreme, then, we find that the killing of time, the sacrifice at
the gate of eternity, is also the time of killing. At the very worst we behold
the sacrifice of a human at the behest of the superhuman and the renewal it
oversees. The bright dawn heralding the birth of a new time must pass through
the red sunrise of the blood sacrifice: the killing fields of the 'Year Zero'
in
In a
space set-aside, time is used to escape time. To escape time, to make time.
To escape time, to escape its morality; morality, the
price of the foundation of a new morality...
Time is only made at a price; the appeal to an eternal
guarantee comes only at a cost; for to escape time involves a sacrifice...
Empty now, the incision on the smooth slab of the
altar, the waiting hollow.
To the crux of ritual: the sacrificial relation. A
spider weaving a web of inter-connections; a close-spun web of exchanges
consisting of an investment of energy, a putting aside of units of time, fresh
(actual) time or stored time (commodities, gifts, services), ranging in length
and intensity from the merest flicker of a eye, to the offering or displaying
of possessions, to the shedding of blood, to privation, the wound as contract:
a sacrifice. This it is that gives access to eternity (place of the Law, font
of renewal).
Transactions embodied and disembodied; legal and felt;
written in emotion (affect).
Mis-en-abime of the transcendental appeal; holy sequence: ritual (framing) sacrifice
(connecting to) eternity... whether performed (enacted) or merely the place of
appeal; the place 'outside time' where sacrificial relations take place, the
place the price paid calls up or calls upon for recognition - for always a
favour is required. A guarantee not issuing forth from the temporal realm.
Access denied (identity is at fault). Access confirmed
(identity verified). All rituals amount to the same thing...
In the space of ritual, a sacrifice must take place
which opens a portal onto eternity (be it the universals of reason, residing in
propositions beyond axiom, in transhistorical
essentialism, in 'eternal truths', or in the heavenly realm promised to the
faithful, the afterlife). Function: to confirm a community of identity; a world
view or the founding of a world, to cement an existing order or lay its
foundations, to push transgression beyond the horizon (or to make a horizon out
of transgression) to set 'once and for all' the happy confluence of horizon and
community. It is part of the work of ritual that the self achieves suture with
its proper universe; communion is confirmed, bought, paid for, offered in
exchange for... - whatever constitutes
the price of identity, the going-rate on the social seal that is recognition.
Of course such portals are not real; it is just that
we believe utterly in their efficacy, and cling with desperate and ingenious
tenacity to their role in our foundation. (And how utterly we rely on these
invisible foundations, the strongest yet imagined: the strongest are those
imagined - lost in the clouds of the imagination they are unassailable...)
The only true test of ritual; of its efficacy, its
depth, its penetration into the psyche: Is there a link to eternity? Or is it
only the coming time, the future immediate, that is shored-up against the
attrition of social entropy? If the trace of eternity survives as a wish even
in this relation, then its centrality in profounder rituals is also finally
governed by the mood of the subjunctive (that which we need, we desire, but
that which may not of necessity exist). From this side (and there is no other side) all eternity is the rhetoric
of eternity. Whence this dependency upon such an impossible link, such a
manifestly unbuildable bridge, what guarantee is sought? What is the nature of
the price that is demanded for this connection, what is it that is exchanged
for such a guarantee? And if there is no real guarantee... then we are
satisfied with its symbol, the sacrifice, the price paid, which after all
remains (now transformed into pure sign) to perform its function. Remains in
place (in the place) of this function... an imaginary connection, like all
community, communication... like all signs whose home is finally in the head...
the fiction (words, image) that acts as a foundation, a springboard for social
existence... final support for a cultural form... In this respect a sign must function as
bridge, portal and guarantee. But signs are empty disembodied things, less than
things even, mere cyphers; blood is required to
bolster their resolve, to underwrite their claims.
If one reads the signs, spells out the words,
deciphers the names upon these claims...
(And not only these names; those too present at the
founding of nations, the movement of peoples... human history; the history of
civilisation, at once the history of the meat-grinder and its renunciation).
Always there are more names. More names, more figures,
figures on a ground, figures marking absences, calling to another, naming out
loud, (apostrophe; naming the listeners,
the call to the present thought the offices of the absent); a direct (vocative)
appeal, roll-call of the missing (a wake-up call to the living); the evocation
of the absent ones, the dead (a prosopopoeia).
Figures of eternity, reaching out to those beyond - figures of absence; figures
on a ground; figures in the ground - marks left upon the ground. Figuring the
remains.
What remains?
Something always is left over, left behind, forgotten. What remains?
None the eye can discern. Nothing to forget (nothing to remember). Grass soon
will grow over the disturbed earth.
Does all rituality carry a trace of this aspect of
history? A trace consisting of its forgetting? The active forgetting of the
blood freshly-washed from the hands; the long-term forgetting of a society that
regards itself as civilised: civilised until reminded of its uncivilised origin
- then step back and be wary, watch, least it revert back to atavistic form.
Reserved; yet still capable of moving one, of turning
viewer into witness, and witness into participant: the rise of semi-autonomous
art under capitalism. Art also enjoins the rubric of ritual; we enter the realm
of art as ritual. Here also there is a space set aside, set apart - a lesser
cost, an investment of time the only requirement (but as we have seen the
sacrifice of time lies at the root of all ritual exchange: things, the products
of time; the life of the other, their time). The only sacrifices present here
are bloodless, the only sacrifices shown are the symbolic sacrifices in the
image, the only actual sacrifice, that of time, by the viewer, pays the price
of participation. Time spent; the oblique measure.
Art as rituality civilised; art as the civilising
ritual. Art as antidote. A lightning rod for the wary, a safety-rail for the
civilised; the only requirement is an investment of time and the voluntary
interaction (imaginary but still affective) of the artwork with the body. Art:
the civilised way of killing time.
The civilised alternative to the blood ritual of the
killing time is the violence of the symbol. We are not concerned here with the
violence of the sign's pretence to stand in for something else; rather it is
the ability of the sign to adapt itself readily to the role of whipping boy, to
present itself both as thing (to be manipulated in an act of mimesis) and as
not-thing (offering the possibility of the denial of the violence proffered).
This violence consists of the purely symbolic violence we experience everywhere
in our culture, from recorded images to everyday speech. Somewhere mid-way
between are the speech acts; a less civilised form, as scapegoating
is often found to hide behind freedom of speech where the violence of the
speech act as word blurs into action. Symbol is transubstantiated into verbal
assault and contrasted against more 'harmless' symbolic acts (because unwitnessed by the one of the objects/participants). As
found in private jokes, or in a reactive defence by the powerless. A mode of
self definition... against others. Yet even this purely symbolic (even private)
mode of differentiation has its price. No casting of the negative without a
reminder in the mirror, a remainder in the well of the self; the pure spring
always retains a trace of its cleansing, purification leaves a mark which
itself is not pure. Always a streak of poison remains.
The sacrifice of the sacrifice made for an identity
constructed as an agonistic relation lies in the negated other lining the
borders of the self.
The drop of blood, warm red pearl, left enthroned on
the stainless white coverlet of the soul.
Copyright 2004 Peter Nesteruk
(Written on 10th anniversary of the
attempted genocide of the Tutsis, which was to herald the birth of a Hutu
nation, in