Zigmatics

Documentation can compromise, in some ways, what Bakhtin called the “once-occurrent event of Being.”  It alters our sense of once-occurrence. I won’t say pervert— that makes perversion sound like a bad thing. For better or worse, it can however flatten, rigidify, overly align and distort the Bold Moment; handing over the timespan, blip, and slippery minutes to something outside of it that is too fixed; to an audience that is not as here, in the complexity of the circumstance, able to sweat and fully share in the loss, wager, and gain. And risk— having a stake in things— is essential.

At the same time, we know that record, capture, and documentation can greatly aid in our meaning-making. Necessary for surmisal, reflection, extrapolation, and the whole poetics of being. Even the imagined presumption of infinite repetition gives our silliest actions a weightiness. Just think of the Eternal Return. We can work ourselves into a programme of invisibility, and chase after a form of bare life— this is one possible programme— but for me, it goes against my striving for what D.T. Suzuki called the “unification of expression and experience.” That is, as meaning-making, as Life-Narrativizing, as expressive experience, I’m after something dialogical, communicative, and memorial— even if only unto the Lord, as it were. Just as when Pierre Schaeffer says of music that it is “made to be heard,” zigmatics is for me greatly communicative.

Photography is the classic case. While photography is very often transformative— in aiding and supplementing the eye, in bending social space around it, in desire-production, meaning-making, metaphorizing life-as-tableaux/vision-as-frame— some moments will be over-reduced by the camera. We often want them reduced, to trim the excess circumstance from the final image. But even unintentionally, something escapes— no, most of it escapes.

The unseen, the uncapturable— not in a metaphysical sense but in a common sense— are demoted for their inability to enter the symbolic economy. Likewise, when the photographic dynamic becomes overly dominant, we clearly see how the camera captures, not its object, but the scenario of photography itself. And the non-photographic moment escapes. Can we live with the unlasting? With the once-occurrent? What is the best way to approach Record and Memory?  To spy, even on ourselves.

One method would be the model of fieldwork and fieldnotes, in anthropology. Only fieldwork in the “field” of everyday life, where all the field/object/participant/observer distinctions have caved in on one another in an interesting way. Ideally, we could avoid the indulgences of the “confessional” mode in two ways. One, by a partial dissolving of the subject into the field, but partially enough so that the subject/observer/participant is not, by itself, the object. Two, by a constant struggle towards a truthfulness and an incorporation of other perspectives, where possible. Fieldwork even suggests an aesthetic— an aesthetic in which the slippage between record and event is obvious, and finality is the least of our worries.

Domain and range— mathematical  terms marking a useful distinction, here. The quotidian is used and useful in both ways. The before and the after. As found, the everyday— even in its lowliest form— makes for a domain. The phenomenologically presupposed. The lifeworld. The background. The sociological everyday. What is done. What’s around us. We find the range by envisioning and enacting the possible; by what Lefebvre calls a process of transduction. Is there a measurable, or at least meaningful, distance between the domain and range? That’s the key. There are strategies.

Ben Highmore points out the strategy of making-strange— or more accurately the revelation of the alltäglich already-strangeness— in weird-makers like Freud and the Surrealists. In this, strange-making is a perceptual shift. A seeing of the sleeping weirdness. If I want it to be more— more than perceptual defamiliarization, or a kind of goggles— it must impose on something more common; interrupt. Ideally, we want both. Seen and made. The thing hinges on the marvelous as the unknown or the uncommon. For me, there is in the quotidian a sense of something not necessarily public, but accessible and residual. Something that can be shared among friends.

To insist on the Life-Narrative is to borrow from literature, rhetoric, and myth-making— from the more literal senses of narrative-writing— in order to shape experience; not for retrospective effect, but as it happens or will happen in the first place— and for the same reasons that narrative are nourishing and meaningful in the first place. Put another way: if meaning— the semiological— does not belong solely to language, how are to we borrow meaning-making and meaning-shaping devices from language, from poetics, for crafting the Life-Narrative; for creating things and events?

Turn first to the classics: to Aristotle’s Poetics, to Longinus, to any book on rhetorical tropes, to contemporary pop how-tos on mystery writing— how do I create suspense or marvel or zest or whatever within experience— is this not as essential in daily life as in our fictions? The weekend should be approached like a first novel. The attempt to surpass fiction.

However, in the turn from transcendental to immanent meaning, something changes from the classics to now: what is called in rhetoric, inventio: the subject matter. As Rancière tells me, in the classical narrative— or representative “mimetic regime”— the inventio necessarily dictated the dispositio (the arrangement of actions) as well as the elocutio (the ornamentation, the trope, and so forth). Rancière goes on to tell us that in the aesthetic regime— or what other might call the rise of modernism— the dictates of inventio dissolve. Any inventio is possible in any style or arrangement. The old order is shattered and emphasis shifts to dispositio and, more noticeably, toward elocutio. The zigmatic concern is how we might— we zigmatists— recover the weight of actions, broadly conceived, in the Aristotelian sense, without a return to its attendant order— only in lived rather than written narratives— precisely because it is lived rather recalled or documented.

Zigmatics handles the Life-Narrative in smaller chunks; what De Certeau had even called micronarratives. That is, not over a Life-Span, but over minutes, hours, days, and weeks. Narrativizing on a scale that is readily susceptible to sudden human agency— or best, moments in which boredom and meaninglessness are prevalent and easy to overturn by narrativizing… At the gas station, waiting for the tank to fill… An hour free between classes… Time susceptible to lifegames and microplans.

At this level, actions and their meanings can be shaped using rhetorical tropes. Epizeuxis. Aposiopesis. Metanoia. These can describe actions and objects rather than just turns of language; language is a form of action as well.

With the Life-Narrative, there is a strange merging of the classical Aristotelian model with the modernist model. The Aristotelian model of poetics or narrative is based or structured upon the idea of actions; configurations of action. The modernist model, or more specifically what Rancière would call the “aesthetic regime,”  is based upon the expressivities of the author, for example in Flaubert’s “absolute way of seeing things,” or in a primacy of style, for instance. In the Life-Narrative, the difference between the authoring and the action has collapsed, or greatly blurred. The Life-Narrative has no distinction between the author’s doing and the protagonist’s doing.