In December 1986, I was at Avignon railway station, and the weather was mild. Following various sentimental complications too tedious to relate, I absolutely had – at least so I thought – to get the express train back to Paris. I was unaware that a strike movement had just started across the entire French railway network. Thus, the operational succession of sexual relations, adventure and weariness was suddenly shattered. I spent two hours, sitting on a bench, facing the deserted railway landscape. Express rail coaches stood immobile on the sidings. You’d have thought they’d been there for years, and had never even gone anywhere. They were just there, motionless. Information was passed in hushed tones from one traveller to the next; the mood was one of resignation, of uncertainty. It could have been war, or the end of the Western world.
Several more direct witnesses to the ‘events of ’68’ later told me that it was a wonderful time, when people talked to each other in the streets, and anything seemed possible; I’m happy to believe them. Others simply point out that the trains stopped running, that there was a petrol shortage; I have no difficulty agreeing. In all these eye-witness accounts I detect a common feature: magically, for a few days, a gigantic and oppressive machine stopped spinning. There was a hesitation, an uncertainty; a suspension occurred, a certain calm spread across the country. Of course, later on, the social machine started spinning again, even faster, even more ruthless than before (and May ’68 only served to break the few moral rules that still hampered the voracity of that machine’s operation). Still, there was a moment of pause, hesitation; a moment of metaphysical uncertainty.
It’s undoubtedly for the same reasons that, once the first moment of annoyance is overcome, the public’s reaction to a sudden shutdown of the information transmission networks is far from being absolutely negative. We can observe the phenomenon each time a computer reservation system breaks down (this is quite common): once the inconvenience has been admitted, and especially as soon as the employees decide to use their phones, what manifests itself among users is actually a secret joy; it’s as if fate were giving them an opportunity to take a sly revenge on technology. In the same way, if you want to realize what the public thinks, deep down, about the architecture in which it is made to live, you just have to observe its reactions when the decision is taken to blow up one of the residential low-rise blocks built in the suburbs in the sixties: it’s a moment of very pure and very violent joy, analogous to the intoxicating feeling of unexpectedly being set free. The spirit that inhabits these places is evil, inhuman, hostile; it’s that of an exhausting, cruel, constantly accelerating piece of machinery; basically, everyone feels this, and desires the machine’s destruction.
Literature can cope with everything, it can accommodate everything, it rummages through the garbage, it licks the wounds of misfortune. A paradoxical poetry, of anguish and oppression, has thus arisen amid the hypermarkets and office buildings. This poetry isn’t cheerful; it can’t be. Modern poetry is no more meant to build a hypothetical ‘house of Being’ than modern architecture is intended to build habitable places; this would be a very different task from that of increasing the number of infrastructures for the circulation and processing of information. As a residual product of impermanence, information is as different from meaning as plasma is from crystal; a society that has reached a plateau of overheating doesn’t necessarily implode, but it does turn out to be incapable of producing meaning, as all of its energy is monopolized by the description in terms of information of its random variations. We can all, however, produce in ourselves a kind of cold revolution, by stepping for a moment outside the flow of information and advertising. It’s very easy to do so; indeed, it’s never been as easy as it is today to adopt an aesthetic position in relation to the world: you just need to step aside. And this step itself, in the last instance, is unnecessary. You just need to take some time out; turn off the radio, unplug the television; stop buying stuff, stop wanting to buy stuff. You just need to stop participating, to stop knowing; to temporarily suspend all mental activity. You literally just need to stay still for a few seconds.
Notes
1 1. The area to the immediate west of Paris, dominated by tall office blocks and the huge hollow cube of the Arche de la Défense.
2 2. Ernest Hemingway used several brands of typewriter, including the 1926 Underwood Standard Portable on which he probably wrote A Moveable Feast. (He actually seems to have preferred the Royal Quiet Deluxe.)
3 3. Pif, the dog in the cartoon strip of this name, featured (from 1948) in the French Communist daily L’Humanité.
4 4. This is an affluent small town in the eastern suburbs of Paris.
4 Staring into the distance: in praise of silent cinema
Human beings speak; sometimes they don’t speak. When they are threatened, they contract, their gaze darts around in search of something; in despair, they withdraw, curl up into a centre of anguish. When they are happy, their breathing slows down; they exist at a more spacious rhythm. In the history of the world there have been two arts (painting, sculpture) that have attempted to synthesize human experience by means of frozen representations – of arrested movements. They have sometimes chosen to arrest the movement at its most gentle point of equilibrium (at its point of eternity): all those Virgins with Child. They have sometimes chosen to freeze the action at its point of greatest tension, its most intense expressiveness – as in the Baroque, of course; but so many of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings also evoke a frozen explosion. They have developed over several millennia; they have also sometimes been able to produce works that are finished, in the sense of their most secret ambition: that of stopping time.
In the history of the world there has been one art whose object was the study of movement. This art was able to develop over a period of about thirty years. Between 1925 and 1930 it produced a few shots, in a few films (I am thinking especially of Murnau, Eisenstein, Dreyer) which justified its existence as art; then it was gone, apparently forever.
Jackdaws emit signs of alert and mutual recognition; up to sixty of these signs have been listed. Jackdaws remain an exception: taken as a whole, the world operates in terrible silence; it expresses its essence through form and movement. The wind blows through the grass (Eisenstein); a tear trickles down a face (Dreyer). Silent cinema saw an immense space open before it: it was not just an investigation of human feelings; not just a survey of the movements of the world; its deepest ambition was to constitute an inquiry into the conditions of perception. The distinction between figure and ground constitutes the basis of our representations; but also, more mysteriously, between figure and movement, between form and its process of generation, our mind seeks its way in the world – hence this almost hypnotic sensation that overwhelms us when we are faced by a fixed form generated by a perpetual movement, like the stationary ripples on the surface of a pond.
What remained of it after 1930? Some traces, especially in the works of filmmakers who had started to work in the era of the silent film (the death of Kurosawa will be more than the death of a single man); a few moments in experimental films, scientific documentaries, even serial productions (Australia, released a few years ago, is one example). These moments are easy to recognize: all speech is impossible; music itself becomes a bit kitschy, a bit heavy, a bit vulgar. We become pure perception; the world appears, in its immanence. We are very happy, oddly happy. Falling in love can also have this kind of effect.
5 Interview with Jean-Yves Jouannais and Christophe Duchâtelet
J-YJ and CD: In what way do the several works of which you are the author, from the essay on Lovecraft to your latest novel Whatever, via Rester vivant [Staying alive] and the collection of poems La Poursuite du bonheur [The Pursuit of Happiness] constitute an oeuvre?1 What is the unity or the main obsession that guides it?
MH: Above all, I think, the intuition that the universe is based on separation, suffering and evil; the decision to describe this state of affairs, and perhaps to move beyond it. The question of the means – literary or not – is second. The initial act is the radical