Thames

“We need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History.[1]

 

“Just because there are big red busses doesn’t mean we’re in London!” But it was a truth that could only be expressed as a lie, that the whole of the city didn’t exist, but the double-decker busses, the oyster cards, the Thames which had already been bricked-up, its curve ossified into a solid shape that defined the stretch of its commerce, to remain in form as long as people lived alongside it, as long as they traveled along its banks, took long walks in the afternoon up and down its length, sat by it in the dusk and then the moonlight with a friend, and talked…all this talking, every little word, made the city whole again, every breath a revelation of the totality. And then I could say, though I hadn’t then, that Here we are in London, in Kingston, this quiet, desolate corner of the world, where nobody visits because nothing much happens, and here is our river, our river Thames, where we have spent so many afternoons and evenings together, whose waters have softly caressed us in their bubbles and gurgles, where you have said to me, and I have even, some nights, stepped close to the bank and even considered it, even as a joke we’ve all considered it, “jump!” But the water moves too fast, you’d be caught in an eddy, pushed into its depths and dragged into its mucky darkness, enveloped by its grace and power which overpowers all of us, a strength and ferocity seduced by man, but not tamed.

 

Some evenings I’ll sit by and gaze into the water. The water appears to absorb my gaze entirely: the three-dimensional world of sense, which traps time within like Pandora's box, is opened to the flat reality of the image. The multiplicity of colors, which appear to meld into one another, like oil paint mixes on an easel, like the strands of hair on the Mona Lisa, which, when examined closely, turn out to be the product of a single stroke—each individual color failing to remain isolated, failing to remain something in-itself, but instead unfolding in a technicolor array, where one only holds its brilliance in juxtaposition with the others. The ripples on the water ebbing and flowing, each catching the white of the moon one moment, then the abyss beyond it the next. Emptiness, something is missing from this full picture. I can dip my hand in the water, feel the heat sapped from my body, feel the cool stone edge of the embankment on my chest. These images, these feelings, arrayed in a grand, flat panorama, would be, unreflected, simply that, experience. There was a time before time and space, there was a moment before the event. Thinking through these experiences, I say I, I refer to myself; I say, it happened to me, and when I say this I think, it happened in my own experience. There was no thought of the totality, just the individuality. Just the moment, from one moment to the next. The flatness of experience is given to the architecture of non-experience; there is nothing more authentic in my time sitting by the Thames, than a video of the Thames, but in the former case I can have it for myself. To open the cage of sense, to let out the malediction of feeling, is a product of “sense” itself, understood as defining the order of experience. The Thames was the border of the whole world; they carved it out and made it stay put. Even in the farthest flung reaches of the earth, in the most isolated corners, a peasant can pull up a video of the water on their phone, of the river gently rushing by. It could be my own.

 

The funny thing about primary and secondary characteristics is that one always comes as the domination of the other. Space and time are formal distinctions, secondary to experience itself which, while differential, has no names for the forms of its appearance. Primary qualities are things like colors, feelings, smells, textures, sounds, but there is no way, strictly, of reproducing them in a mechanical fashion, unless the movement of the sun and the stars are entrusted to that task. Since we have been able to calculate the approximate date of the sun’s explosion, it feels as though everything around us is ready to explode at any moment, since all things are now made under the same order of calculation, of the secondary. From experience new orders of experience are added in, the formal becomes a feeling, the river becomes the embankment. But in all the new diversity there is still a singularity, there is still a ruling principle that writes the fissure into every monad. Before Plato gave us his new pantheon, all the primary characteristics had a mythical status, they were the gods. Today, there is only one god, and he is called Anxiety. We must revive the old gods.

 

The negative of the negative is the origin point, it is constantly evading itself. To have a reflection of a reflection, a second order of the order itself, is to have an origin, standing like a black hole at the center of the stars. Following from A to B requires giving an order, in the same way that 2 follows from 1. But the order of the order, the ordering principle, stands outside the order itself. The only way to assert a total transformation is to force this principle into existence, to negate the whole world. The monad, which rules the whole world it never appears in except as the movement of the whole world itself, returns to the world as just one of its elements; until now, the model of all the others, the assertion of the ever-self-same.

 

Le Cygne: The Thames is eerie at night, still calm. Safe, for the most part. There was probably a time before the Thames was somewhere safe to sit with your friends and chat, make out, relax, think (but it's always been a place to reflect, like all bodies of water. After all, water is the first mirror). One evening, while sitting by the river and heavily intoxicated with some friends, we witnessed a violent altercation on the road behind us. We got up, shocked, to assess the situation: a lover’s quarrel. Conditioned not to engage in violence, we kept our distance; they didn’t notice us, they were running off somewhere down the street. I took a step forward, but I didn’t have the gall to go on my own, I hung back and waited for my friends, I wanted to encourage them and be encouraged by them, to step into the unknown: a suicide pact. In the end, I made a call and a report to the police on the way back home. In the end, we couldn’t say, did she hit him, or him her? All we heard was a loud smack, and some yelling on both sides, and then they ran off together. Sound travels slower than light, it has the element of immediacy, nearness. Nobody can see what is closest to them, all of our greatest comforts, and greatest pains, shoot out from the darkness. We only see up to the limit of our understanding: what lies beyond must be felt through, like traversing a cave, a dark passage. Then we will not understand what we have now understood; from the moment of absolute blindness flourishes a sight beyond what the eyes can see, sees more than what can be felt, and feels more than what can be seen.

 

(Geese)

 

Spider-webs are the urtext of all woven materials. Writing is a kind of web, but the web itself is more than writing. Because the world, even in its primitive form, appears within a given order: point out a spider-web, dripping with fresh rain, to any child, they will be mesmerized. Sit by the Thames during golden hour, look around, look at the ripples in the water from the wake of passing pleasure boats, look at the sun’s rays refracting into every visible array of color as it passes under the horizon. Space and time, when stretched to the infinite, resemble a web that captures all the moments, that formally abrogates them, makes them subordinate to simple objects, things. The infinity of the web, the lines that appear only when you try to break them, only in contrast to the diversity of everything they stand against. These moments, the eternal, erupt out, break through infinity. In the weaving of the absolute, the prison of all experience, the sectioning of the world into parts that would make it whole, that suggest a One as it’s limit, there is always that color, that feeling, that force which suspends them, which is arrested by them and yet could itself arrest the limit, shatter the web; make the web, the net, into a network, the connection into a correspondence. And then all those bare images that appear as nothing but copies of others, individual singularities, are imbued with memories that are more than one’s own. I never sat by the river alone, even when I was alone; there was always somebody nearby, staring into the ripples, looking at the swans swim in straight lines between the moorings, or drift idly in the eddies. Their river was my river, their web was mine. I was only entranced by the web because I was trapped in it.

(Thames near Teddington lock.)

The flow of the river is constant; no matter when you were born, or where, the Thames indefatigably flows eastward, out to the sea. With its current flowed goods, people, warships, out past the bay of Southend, which is why a small town like Kingston (or so similarly named, Königsberg), could have always had a place in world history; even the history of this country, one deeply embedded in the land, long before we spoke English the way we do today they say—at least, that’s what they say—that all the old Saxon kings were crowned here. It is not really objective in the sense of an underlying reality or form of being, that the river's flow presents, we couldn’t call it an “objective fact,” since a river is neither an object nor is it something done, factum, but is its own doing. Rivers, in their constant priority, their constant being as being themselves, were worshiped in premodern times as gods, from which all existence flowed, the origin and the origin point. Then the trash, the industrial effluence, the stink was carried through it. It was decided to put a god in chains made of brick and concrete; and so were all rivers transformed, out of necessity for public health, into pretty pictures. Since now the river has been designed to be photographed, it is already, in a certain sense, a photograph; it's just that the film is the town around it. An eternal snapshot. What they feared was that ancient power, the spirit that, as they believe in Japan, can be captured by a picture. They feared a primordial force would lash out, they thought a schema, they thought reflection, would save them, would install a perpetual peace. They didn’t see the gaps in their image; they didn’t see the one running right through it. Frozen in place, always flowing. Always ready to break out.

 

There was a terrible storm one evening in my undergraduate years. I was living in a house off campus, in a basement room; finished, of course, but still the light scent of mold seeped through the walls. Soon, water too, and as quickly as the floor grew damp did I start moving my things above ground to avoid them getting damaged; I couldn’t save everything, but most of it, including my bed, was spared. In the morning, the water had receded, but there was still flooding, brown, messy water all over the streets, seeped up from the ground below. Then, approaching the Raritan, the river which, like the Thames, flowed straight through the middle of town, I saw it had overflowed. Cars which had been caught on the road lay abandoned, partially submerged; people crawled around the onramps, taking photos, curious about this kind of power, the power which could’ve decimated our town, that brought the world to a standstill. When all laws were suspended, when the course of daily events brought to a halt because the divine, for just a moment, revealed its grace. Our city was spared that day; and why? So the people could dream again, so the world inside could be turned out, so we could float on the sky and walk on the ripples that formed under every footstep, so that the apparent harmony of the world could reveal for a single moment the true harmony of the universe, the order beyond order, the correspondences beyond our conscious imagination.

(Raritan)

 

We can separate the inner from the outer world by the content of our dreams, which are personal and involuntary, as opposed to conscious action, which we assume instead to be voluntary and often impersonal: individual, but almost everybody’s actions are replaceable, specialized skills are just those that are soon to be general. Even the form of writing is impersonal, since all writing systems have certain conditions of possibility, conditions of their legibility, such that writing can be read or at least possibly be readable. But the dream presents us a text that is by nature illegible, because it is so personal. Each replaceable individual sees its origins first as a person, as somebody whose unique color came from their own place, their own especial articulation, in a wider economy; but they were always already combined, subjected. The personal is infested by the individual, your dreams become my dreams, we all dream of having, as they say in America, a house with a white picket fence. But never quite the same: the wife and kids with the house in the suburbs—but, my wife is fat, she has red hair, she likes listening to heavy metal and loves to go hiking, your husband has a nice beard and is a wonderful cook and is very passionate about early 20th century German philosophy; and then, even that basic difference threatens to explode: the more general our fantasies, our dreams become, the more marvelously particular. But they are always held back, our fantasies, by the incessant belief that they are our own, that they aren’t each a part of the grand mass of the world, of the part that can’t stand without its whole. As long as they are kept inside, as long as dreams remain just that, one’s own, then they are nothing but idle whims of collective fantasy. We need to learn how to read again, and that can only be done when we change the way we write; dreams must succeed in overcoming sleep. The δαίμονες, sunk into the earth by a false prophet, rises out of the fissure in history.

 

And it isn’t such a shock to see all the ice cream people are eating while walking the length of the Thames in the afternoon; probably every quarter mile there is a purveyor. And once you see one person, or a group, holding their cones, the spark of desire reaches up through and drags you towards the closest source. In the prior era—that is, the time before soft serve—one could not just go up and get a snack by the river, there were no pleasure boats and benches for sitting until they built the queen’s promenade (named for the queen, not after her, she did not even willingly open it^[2]). Nowadays, the site is ordered to produce and attain desires. Desire, which has a unitary quality: desire is always desire to consume entirely, eat until you can’t have another bite. Health is articulated via abundance—generally, overabundance. As they say in the ancient world, the strong got plenty to eat, had plenty of sex, and had so much energy, so much life, they didn’t know what to do with it. Desire had not yet been made mechanical. There was not a world where people’s needs were calculable, where the apparatus of the secondary was made to fix the primary into predictable patterns, as far as possible.

 

It would seem that the desire for the other is arbitrary: much like in the animal kingdom, traits, characteristics that promote attraction are logged en masse. We say, we don’t know why, for instance, baldness is being selected for in men. There is a scientific, statistical reality to sex, in fact there is no other reality to sexual relations. This is because the truth of desire is not something that can be captured by statistics alone, just as any mechanical process of production cannot be understood solely through the technical details of manufacture. Desire has a certain element of cunning; it has within it a force which cannot be merely understood. Try as we might to control our desires, enjoin them, make them fit properly into larger social combines, so that they may, like machines, operate with mechanical perfection, there is always some gap, some element which escapes the understanding, something excessive. The true difference between early high capitalism and contemporary society is where this excess has gone. Left to run wild, there were social modes of organization that exceeded, destructed all previous lifeworlds in history. Contingency, or at least what appeared to be contingency overwhelmed necessity. With advertising came the fall. Once it was possible for the understanding to grasp that infinite power, to mechanically force it under its own circle, desire could be transformed, schematized, controlled. Then all the developments of life, all its potential, could be restricted to just one goal, one drive: not for itself, but for the other. But desire for the other opens up a new form of desire, desire for what is radically other, what cannot possibly appear. It is this magical desire, the fetish, the part for the whole, that becomes the ordering principle of late capitalism. The drive for the one, that never appears; it is here, where the whole world of appearance, of ritual, which was previously endowed with great meaning, where everything happened and in its own order, is thrown up for the domination of non-appearance, of truly magical qualities, objects that are more than objects. It is the same incessant drive for the object that can be redirected towards a drive towards the thing, desire freed from satisfaction. A world free of images, of sense, where sense is made secondary to fantasy. Even fantasy does not fully contain the feeling of this new world, fantasy itself is something that can be made to appear. In the true dream world, experience is unchained from appearance.

 

Even as a child at my family’s beach house, since I was fortunate enough to grow up in a place close to lovely beaches, listening to the sound of lapping waves was somnafying, calming in ways that defied social explanation. But this is why the social world does not exist, since there was never a delineation in being affected; affection appears individual, it comes to appearance as something that affects a person: he is angry, she is in love—but quickly we see that affect always has its object: he is angry with her, she is in love with him. Nobody ever feels something for nothing, there are no spontaneous affects. Rather, affect always has its history, its structural place. Rivers can be mad, in the same way that a raven can be ravenous. And the sea is calming, soothing like a bed—and rough like a greedy bush; it suspends, it holds, it throws, it crashes. Rivers rush into that violent tranquility.

 

Object economies, where such affects reign, separates the feeling from sense and begins, slowly, to standardize all feelings. Psychosis, the extravagances of this process, what they say can be induced by hashish, or even these days psychedelic drugs, where individual experience, individual affect, is heightened far beyond any particular object, where the mass of memories, of visionary experience, gets churned into a fire brighter than any mechanical spectacle. This, however, still retains some object; they say, “God,” or even the devil, they say love, they say, the affect itself is given a personality: it “appears.” Just like fetishized objects, just like the river, appears as individual. The singularity never gets broken, the person made whole through its marriage to the individual, subjected by these mechanical processes. We all become subjects, we all become objects. The problem is that One must take the drug, its one's own experience, one’s own memories, one’s own existence. Where is the bridge to the other side of insanity? The river of madness moves so fast, the dangers of being swept along its current, we’d rather take a boat across. This is the power of the leap into the darkness, beyond sense. Beyond annihilation. Beyond redemption.

 

Redemption. Erlösung. Σωτηρία. Salvation. If only all these words meant the same thing. No matter how many connections we draw, like a mosaic, they are only made whole because it is broken, cut. We look back and see memories, like a line in the sand we miss the shape of the dunes around it. If you took some thing and made it the whip of all your memories that charged forth their recollection, then you would get this line, this current, and it would appear self-generating. You miss the breaks; you miss the crack of the whip against the back of history. Pours from every lash a river of blood, like rubies that crown the Thames at sunset. All the scars still remember, the eve of history approaches. When night falls, they will not be seen. A night like a body all scars, all husks, dead and still squirming. Undulating.

 

That is the problem with psychosis of the One, it is just as reproducible as a commodity. They wouldn’t have a DSM otherwise. Authentic madness does not belong to everyone, it belongs to anyone. A dream borne into being, but not a fantasy, not what your foggy recollection allows you to believe. It’s the sweat in your sheets, the fitful cries, the mutterings you never remember. Truly, truly a world without conscience, a world without consciousness. Hell, but not one of your imagination.

 

Individual history is like a weight on the flight of memory towards the imagination, it censors everything that doesn’t fit an easily mechanized process, that doesn’t slide desire into the process of accumulation, so that nothing is seen that is not want to. That the two most notable locations for me in this town, aside from the University itself, are the promenade and Surbiton station, is important, since only the former has impressed itself imagistically and immediately, such that it became immediately an aesthetic object for me, as something worthy of influence. But the historical evidence suggests the train station—which I have never had a second thought about, or even closely examined while transiting through it, or, if not equally as often darkening the door of the nearby Wetherspoons—is the more primary motivating cause, the μονάς of the monad. While the river appears to move, it always stays in the same place. And the train station, the railway, is still, yet wouldn’t give life to the town built around it without the constant movement of all those who work for it. The corollary of the shock experience is the dead image, the peacefulness of the river is matched by the hectic commerce of the railway. 

The original name, of course, that Thomas Pooley, our town’s architect, gave for Surbiton was Kingston-upon-Railway, and then they would’ve just called Kingston-upon-Thames “old Kingston.” Surbiton is split off from the Thames, the iconic bridge which gives shape to the image of the river shows the eternal separation between the original line and the river itself, which never intersect. It was only later, when they built the “old” Kingston station in 1867, that the image was complete, and the new railway bridge constructed over the river signifying the total domination of the railroad, of secondary qualities, of iron-construction, of the new, over the old. And in 1850 they put a stone in the center of town and said all the old Saxon kings were crowned here, thus solidifying the mythology that this town, only given new power through the imagination of a single man, was always already an ancient and powerful place. Whatever power remained of the life-giving river, from whose waters I’ve drunk everyday, has been coerced into forms of idleness that won’t threaten the overwhelming domination of material concerns.

Names like Pooley’s have been erased by history, though they still stay in books forgotten, buried in the back of libraries, archives. Streets like those in Kingston, each one might be old, might be new; and even as a name like “Eden Street” recalls nuptial gardens, its history is as erased, for the passersby, as those named after more notable residents like John Galsworthy, since we can’t, without peering into the historical record, ascertain whether or which one was built first, which has the more “primal” form of history contained inside itself, which streets were built now, and which were constructed beyond collective memory. The urban environment presents itself immanently as a collection, where the history of its environs is masked by the associations that arise through it, the allegories of its organization. Like magic numbers, things in a city appear to correspond to one another in ways that are alien to cyclical life.

Then it could finally become photographic, the town, when all its elements appeared not as an architecture of commerce, but an architecture of the image, when the old order was dismissed to make way for clutter. What appears to be a mess, something totally contingent, like a photograph, always already had to develop this way. The old photographs, the Daguerreotypes, taken in studios, taken by exposure, long exposure, retain a ghost in the image, the impressions of all the movement, all the slight changes in conditions, phantoms of moments that can never be held but as slight impressions, like a portrait that captures not the person in their immediacy but the totality of their essence in time. Then, one day, somebody invented instantaneous photography, a kind of photography unbounded by concerns for the rhythmic experience of temporality, of what could be expected. It captured things that people never saw, could never see before, it blew open experience, sapped the moment from its own time. Contingency could no longer be contained by long experience, long exposure.

(Girl with Portfolio, circa 1799, by Guillaume Lethiere. Source: Wikimedia)

When Daguerre had invented the photograph, it was already the fashion at the time in Europe to manufacture portraits using a series of mirrors in an interior, or as they say in Latin a camera. The photograph was just a miniature, mechanized version of the very same techniques, the very same social organization, that had produced paintings in the 19th century up to that time, which is why so many portraits from that period, before photography was invented, are said to be “photorealistic.” But it took quite a while before anyone had the thought to capture motion in stillness, to reflect the gapless series of experience in a series of flat images; and everybody in this town sees his name plastered around on buildings, streets: go to the local museum, his original cameras are on display. The photograph may have been invented in Paris, but film was invented by a man from Kingston. I’m sure Muybridge took the train as his first step on his departure to America.

 

It's what you don’t see, what you don’t consider, that happens, and it happens before you can know it has. You do not fall in love the moment you think it; by the time the thought has occurred, by the time the event was registered, love has already arrived. Then you pick up the pieces, then you try to think, when, when did I stop being able to think about someone else? But love is a kind of divine blindness, love is the rose-tint of the whole world. There are other things we are blind to, or choose to remain blind to. We don’t perceive, for instance, the continuous breaks in a film; we do not even perceive that it's projected onto a flat surface. The technical array produces a mytho-poetics that is enrapturing: we fall in love with the film, we forgive it, we forget it is even happening, has happened. We’ve all seen that first film, the black jockey, Abe Edington, on horseback; but did you ever wander into the Kingston Museum and see the camera it was shot with? Did you see the technical diorama, did you note that it wasn’t a single camera making a series of shots, but a series of cameras, stretched out into a line? Muybridge, perhaps, solved Zeno’s paradox: all the breaks in the line, the infinite breaks in the line from point a to b, collapsed into a single image, still moving picture, so that the infinitely small gap in time between each frame, the infinite moment of the image itself, could be infinitely mediated by the unconscious of the image. Out of that blindness, what by its own nature evades perception, there is, perhaps, a moment. Not one seen, not one that is available to the apparatus of representation, the apparatus that holds all perception in a circle, running like the locomotion of a reel itself. When it happens, it will not be available to the senses; the revolution, as they say, will not be televised. At least, its revolutions will not be.

 

This is why film presents us with an image of the unconscious at the technical level, not at the level of discourse, or being. We are able to see that we cannot see. The film is a better drug for an audience, because it compels all of them into fantasy; a new pharmakon could be employed instead. A collective experience beyond technological mediation, where technology is subordinated to destruction, to annihilation, to a being beyond the Now. And it could only appear if someone were to make it appear, it only becomes true when it happens, and it never happens. But sometimes it does.

 

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[1] Quoted by Walter Benjamin in Theses XII of his on the Concept of History. See his Selected Writings vol. 4. Though this translation in particular comes from Lloyd Spencer, whose translation is the first one that appears when you search for it on Google, currently being webhosted by Andrew Feenberg at Simon Fraser University.

^[2] A funny tidbit from That Famous Place: a History of Kingston-upon-Thames, pg. 265: “Queen Victoria was inadvertently the first person to travel along the new improved stretch of Portsmouth road. Ayliffe and others had a story that the queen was traveling through London after a visit away. Alderman Gould arranged that the old stretch of road was barricaded, so that the Royal Carriage had to use a new route. When Victoria had informally ‘initiated’ the new road, the riverside garden walkway also included in the improvement scheme was named the Queen’s Promenade in her honour. But the clever plot seems to have backfired slightly. Once Victoria found out what had happened, she and Prince Albert ‘were very angry at having been made to open the new road without being consulted on the matter.’ And after that the queen ‘nearly always avoided driving through Kingston.’” At this point the royalty was simply for show, directed, as it were, for dramatic impact.

[3] The Works Cited and Bibliography are in MLA 9 style.