Billy Pilgrim commits suicide; radicalises time

Photo by Katie Spence

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All the moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.”

Imagine a very small bit of radioactive substance in a Geiger counter. In the course of an hour, a single atom of this radioactive miscellany either will or will not decay. If it does, the counter will detect the ionisation and a mechanism will relay movement so that a hammer smashes a flask of poison. If it doesn’t, no change will be detected and the flask of poison will remain intact.

Imagine that the radioactive miscellany, the Geiger counter and the poison are all securely arranged in a box with a cat. At the end of the hour, the cat will either be dead or alive, depending on whether an atom has decayed and a flask has shattered.

According to the early 20th Century Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, a system only transforms from a superposition of states, simultaneously one and the other, to a single state, either one or the other, when the act of observation takes place. So according to the interpretation, before the lid of the box is removed, the cat is both alive and dead. Imagine a cat smeared across parallel planes of dead and not-dead; trapped in some vibration until our gaze pulls it into stasis. After the lid comes off, you will look inside and the cat is either alive or dead. Your engagement returns smeared cat back to stable cat.

Now imagine that you have a gun to your head. The gun is rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. When the trigger is pulled, the particle is measured. If the particle spins in a clockwise motion, the gun will fire. If it is spinning anticlockwise, the gun will not fire.

You sit in a chair and pull the trigger. The gun does not fire. You continue to pull the trigger for eternity and the gun never fires. You continue to live. If you travel back in time to the beginning of the experiment, you pull the trigger and the gun discharges. You are dead. In the first case you lived and in the second you died. Every time you pull the trigger the world splits and the two possibilities occur side-by-side. Every time you pull the trigger, the chance of surviving decreases by half but never reaches a non-zero number. There will always be a small subset of unlikely worlds in which you survive. A conscious ability to observe your own creaturely sensation – in other words, to feel your own pleasure – may have ceased in the first gunfire, but you have achieved a state of quantum immortality by committing quantum suicide.

These two thought experiments, the cat and the gun, are variants of the same paradox. Schrödinger’s Cat interrogates a popular interpretation of quantum activity that runs the risk of separating experienced reality from hypothetical mechanics. The quantum suicide paradox explores the potential non-conscious selves existing across infinite universes. In the sense that dead-undead states in the second experiment are versions of the observant self, this quantum suicide model imagines Schrödinger’s paradox from the perspective of the cat.

Both experiments radicalise the time of death. We might say that we are constantly moving towards the event of our death and therefore we are always in an intimate relation with being dead. Yet this idea supposes that we are travelling on a timeline with some anticipated horizon as a limit. The rim of our experience is death and time is tugging us along. A dead-alive paradox in this idea is a fantasy. In the two thought experiments, alive and dead are two textural qualities in a complex field of potentials.

In Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim is able to experience events in his life – including his birth and his death – simultaneously and non-linearly. I’ll avoid the use of the phrase ‘time-travel’ here (though it is used in the novel) for two reasons. Firstly, when Billy moves through different temporal zones, his material body stays in the present, albeit in a kind of dumb, anaesthetic state. It is his consciousness and his memory of experience that moves. Secondly, the words ‘time-travel’ imply that any radical temporal movements occur on a stable x-axis, as Vonnegut writes, like beads on a string. To anchor Billy in the present and imagine that his extratemporal experiences are simply back-and-forth deviations to hallucinogenic other-times mean that we are stuck in a simple, unimaginative geometry.

If we must represent Billy’s time-experience spatially, let’s imagine it as fractal, or vortical, the texture of toffee as it cools from syrup to brittle. Constant difference and unending self-sameness. To map it would be to map a bowl of porridge. All experience is remembered, all memories are constant, all time is in flux, all chaos is sensual, all moments are stretched across spastic durations. If you want to talk about a centre of a now-time, the real Billy Pilgrim in the centre of his living, you have to first find the centre of a milkshake, a wormhole, a clusterbomb in the split-seconds after detonation. Find the centre of a melody, a toothache, a pile of shavings from a wood-carving.

Critics of Slaughterhouse 5 have said that Billy Pilgrim reveals a deeply cynical and nihilistic fatalism in Vonnegut. Billy is seen as a pin-up for every passive non-feeler who has let himself be dragged through the pathological hostilities of modern trauma; the histories of war and holocaust, the banalities of family, the stupid failures of lives and love. Yet what these criticisms assume is that Billy’s experience of loose time, his conscious, sensate, simultaneous memories, represents a passive or disengaged surrender. It assumes that Billy somehow gives up what is known as ‘free will’ in order to move across the textures of time. And yet this idea of ‘free will’ protected by Vonnegut critics falls down at the slightest nudge. Billy Pilgrim was sent to Germany as an eighteen-year-old small-towner, spirited out to the wintry dregs of an inconceivable war. This was the experience of Vonnegut, and the very fact of his service shatters whatever triumphant myths there are about the absolute free will of the individual, carving out his own fate against any odds.

The Tralfamadorians tell Billy that the Earth is the only place in the universe that practices the myth of free will, which relies on the same simple geometry of a straight line. Each moment is a bead on a string and at each moment our experience of time is the experience of choice. Every choice contributes to our sense of final becoming, a catalogue of what we chose and avoided, what we achieved and what we failed to overcome. If all time is all time, as it is to Billy, it is not how we compose our lives in each moment; it is how we negotiate the total sum of all moments. In this sense, an idea of ‘free will’ might become more an idea of attentive encounter with the entirely non-Euclidean shape of experience. The first atomic swerve that produced the smallest something, the slight swoon or dip into another, the intimacy of touch and closeness, the activity of collision.

At every sentence of Slaughterhouse 5, Billy Pilgrim is alive and dead, at war and in his marital bed, on Tralfamadore and in Ilium, New York, a cat and not-a-cat. Every potential Billy lives out each wonderful desire and failure. So it goes.

The essay as

An essay of mine (based on a conference paper given at The Art of the Real in Newcastle, May 2008) has been published here at TEXT.

Corncob malfunction: Chaplin as clown, parasite, static

Teddie Adorno and Charlie Chaplin meet at a party in Malibu in the mid-1940s. Standing next to each other, they are parodies of themselves. Both in auto-exile, neither belongs to the hologrammatic fantasy of California. They are each always other.

Adorno is introduced to an actor, recently returned from war, whose missing hand has been replaced with an iron claw. As soon as the actor turns away, Chaplin, standing centre stage, mimics Adorno’s split-second expression of abject shock, that one frame in a moving image that contains the recoiling and guilt of recoiling, compensating and guilt of compensating, as the claw is sighted and the handshake ritual glitches. Chaplin captures the expression—barely a glint—and apes it. It is both an exact resemblance and a gross exaggeration, copy and caricature.

Years later, Adorno remembers this encounter in celebration of Chaplin’s 75th birthday: “All the laughter he brings about is so near to cruelty;” says Adorno, “solely in such proximity to cruelty does it find its legitimation and its element of the salvational.” Such cautious reverence is significant. Elsewhere, Adorno superimposes laughter and cruelty as a key moment of ‘culture industry’:  “[A] laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all dedicated to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everything else. Their harmony is a caricature of solidarity.”

What separates Chaplin, and perhaps what earns him this reverence, is his unknowableness, his elusive playfulness, his suggestiveness. He is not merely a producer of cultural capital, in the sense that he is not an actor or filmmaker by way of trade or profession. He is an incessant performer. His off-screen performativity is his social mode, and each banal act of clowning, each momentary update, complicates a sense of his ‘true’ self, so that the very notion of a true self might finally collapse. Chaplin is Chaplin is Chaplin. He is beyond schizophrenia and towards compulsive multiplication.

In Modern Times, Chaplin’s frequently sampled other, the Tramp, negotiates the pathological shittiness of Depression-era capitalism. The factories, when still running, are Fordist panopticons. Some workers are revolting, others are having nervous breakdowns, the majority are ground to automatons. Beautiful waif-girls are stealing bread and bananas. Cops are herding riff-raff. Gaols bloom with Commies and misfits. The rich waft past like rakish ghosts. Chaplin’s Tramp moves through the scenes as an odd composite: despite his earnest Protestant work ethic and his infallible ‘goodness,’ he is exceptionally naughty and is constantly being carted away by police. He corrupts the micromanaged body-economics of the factory assembly line by failing to cope with the repetition of bolt-wrenching. When the system corrupts Chaplin begins to dance, a truly non-profitable economy of movement for the productive industrial capitalist.

It is too simple to say that in Modern Times the Tramp performs a perfect allegory for the human spirit under threat from modernity. Indeed, it is too simple to say ‘human spirit,’ and it is certainly too simple to say that capitalism operates outside the human in order that it might threaten some organic essence. It is certainly a seductive temptation, to pit the Tramp against the superstructure and to hope that the human prevails and the machine is corrupted sufficiently. Yet it might be more interesting to imagine the Tramp—rather than exemplifying the human or standing-in for a human whole—as a composite or hybrid that operates on a plane beyond representation. In other words, Chaplin as performer becomes the Tramp as a series of cinematic images, not singular but many. His body is a collection of film grains, and the composition of the Tramp as a celluloid object has three resonances. Firstly, the material of his body as it changes through space, that is, his mime and slapstick, shape and form. Secondly, its reproduction in light. Thirdly, the relationship between the body’s movement, its cinematic image and technological processes that produces it. The Tramp is as human as the camera lens that images him, orders his composition in frames. His ego is no longer a psychological or even emotional continuum.

Walter Benjamin was excited by the implications of the cinematic body in respect to contemporary audiences (that is, contemporary in the 1930s), proposing a model of ‘innervation,’ with Chaplin as a key example. Innervation here refers to the affective flow of the on-screen body’s movement-images to the perceiving audience, so that the experience of perception simulates (and stimulates) the sensation of ‘being alongside,’ attuned with, the movement capabilities of the new cinematic technologies. So the engagement with the filmed body excites a kind of electrodynamic response in the nervous system of the perceiving body. Sensations of dissonance, acceleration, cuts and swerves.  “In its jerky and technologically mediated movements,” says Nieland, “Chaplin’s Tramp promised, as it modeled, a kind of being best suited to modernity’s public world: distracted and forgetful, dislocated and improvisational, aimless and instantaneous, at home in modernity’s mechanical world of things.” Benjamin, continues Nieland, goes even further, suggesting that Chaplin’s “anarchic personality exploded bourgeois models of personality; its “negative expressionism” set him drifting from the demands of bourgeois sociality – moral propriety, consistency of character, domestication.”

Yet there is now another danger: in setting up a loose analogue between human and machine, we approach another simple model, in which the human is not imagined in opposition to the machine, but in terms of self-similarity or psychological identification.

So, while still playing with a notion of self-sameness but complicating it, here is another idea: the parasite. In French, ‘parasite’ has three meanings. Two are shared in English, that is, the parasite as biological organism and the parasite as a relationship of social dependence. The third meaning in French is what we call, in English, static. So the parasite, as Serres suggests, might refer to any productive interference in a transmission. The parasite-as-interference model suggests any meaning transfer that is complicated, deviated, changed or added to by interloping static. In this sense, the parasite is neither wholly guest nor host, and in fact, the guest/host dialectic has no distinction in French, where both subjects of a parasitic relation are known by the same word, hôte. Rather, the parasite is the creative, corruptive, potential-filled agent of change, differentiation, agitation. The parasite doesn’t destroy the system it interferes with, but nudges it, plays with it, improvises its structural organisations. When we watch Modern Times we can imagine that Chaplin’s Tramp parasitically engages with industrial capitalism while industrial capitalism parasitically engages with the Tramp. The interference is two-way or many-ways. Subject/object structures collapse. “What is essential,” says Serres, “is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the representation nor its hall of mirrored reflections, but the system of relations.”

In this model, the difference produces the thing. Chaplin’s Tramp is a play of differences: if we can say that the Tramp is a character, then the character is known as a complex of minimum differences. Each movement of the body, facial expression and deviation from what is expected, framed in long and short shots, allow Chaplin’s Tramp to interfere as a mode of existence. The humour of Chaplin is in the resonances of differences and sameness, the ability to play on what is banal and fantastic, expected and unexpected, closeness and distance, intimacy and alienation. This is clowning, among other things. We laugh because play of difference is key to experience: fluctuation, attraction and repulsion, atomic collision, the pleasures of opposition, synaethesia, hyphens, the burlesque. Each making the other. Interference might have political mobility if we imagine the parasite as an organised cell of activism. Interference might imply a radical approach to clock time, where clock time operates at the unit of onward production. In this sense, interference might be anti-progress, where progress is accumulation of systemised time-units in an economy of productivity. As a parasitic relation, the Tramp works these differences. The sensation of the world and of being in the world. Tea gurgling in the gut, twisted hankie up the nostril of the boss, coffee poured through the cavity of a roast chook.

It feels appropriate to end with another snippet of Adorno’s strange and lovely birthday dedication. The reverie of comparison here is almost incomprehensible – Adorno moves from synaethesia to total eccentricity, and yet in a movement that feels entirely appropriate, fucking with the smoothness of metaphor. He writes:

The one who comes walking is Chaplin, who brushes against the world like a slow meteor even where he seems to be at rest; the imaginary landscape that he brings along is the meteors’ aura, which gathers here in the quiet noise of the village into transparent peace, while he strolls on with the cane and that so become him.

Suspended in the sky like so much venison: moving towards a body without organs in Henry Miller’s Sexus

I will go directly to her home, ring the bell, and walk in. Here I am, take me – or stab me to death. Stab the heart, stab the brain, stab the lungs, the kidneys, the viscera, the eyes the ears. If only one organ be left alive you are doomed – doomed to be mine forever, in this world and the next and all the worlds to come. I am a desperado of love, a scalper, a slayer. I’m insatiable. I eat hair, dirty wax, dry blood clots, anything and everything you call yours. Show me your father, with his kites, his race horses, his free passes for the opera: I will eat them all, swallow them alive. Where is the chair you sit in, where is your favourite comb, your toothbrush, your nail file? Trot them out that I may devour them at one gulp. You have a sister more beautiful than yourself, you say. Show her to me – I want to lick the flesh from her bones.

Deleuze and Guattari, in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, speak of a ‘body without organs’. A phrase on loan from Artaud, the body without organs refers to a limit, never reached but always desired, at which all things in flow (that is, all matter and all energy of all bodies) would flow freely into each other, without distinction. The body without organs is described as a set of practices or a collection of intensities, rather than a notion or concept. It is an exercise in continual experimentation, a site of production, distribution, crossing, passing, slipping, becoming and unbecoming, decaying and failing. “The body is now nothing more than a set of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels,” write Deleuze and Guattari. The body is circumstantial matter, dying at once as living, shedding and shrivelling and bloating.

In imagining the body without organs, we can begin to surrender the idea of the organism, a whole bounded by an identity and a destiny. We can surrender the notion of the psychoanalytical inner-spirit. We can even surrender freedom, because we recognise that freedom is unconstrained flow in the same way that capitalism is unconstrained flow. What is left is desire. “Desire is revolutionary.”

At the beginning of Sexus, Henry Miller falls in love with Mara, a woman soon to be renamed Mona – rather inexplicably – and elsewhere called Hildred or Sabina. In Miller’s life, this woman was June, born Judith, his second wife. Throughout Miller’s writing, she is not only nominally schizophrenic but is slippery, variable and painfully unknowable as an object of desire. She is seductive. She is a series of surfaces, a cinematic image, a pathogen. When Miller meets her, he is so sickened by seduction that he renounces ownership of his body. Any romantic notion of the heart as the central organ of love is abandoned. The heart, yes, but only if the heart is seized from the ribcage, torn from its ventricles and then butchered. The heart, but only if the heart is one organ amongst every organ: the kidney and liver, spleen and gallbladder, brain and eyes. Love is disembowelment, love is taxidermy. Total ownership: I love you, therefore I need you to embalm me, marinate me, swaddle me, push me through cheesecloth and collect my curds.

Miller’s self-mutilation moves towards the body without organs. By refusing himself a functional or autonomous body, he becomes a discordant collection of intensities. He is no longer skeleton and muscle, nervous system and blood. He is now just sex-thought and misery, desire and bitterness. He is the memory of a body, patched together with the meagre sustenance of discarded proteins, shed from his lover: ear wax, dead skin, dried follicles and clots. This is true dependence. This is what we mean when we tell someone we need them. This is what happens when give ourselves up, unconditionally, irreversibly, with the full thrust of our surrender.

Miller’s renouncement occurs at the beginning of Sexus, and so we can imagine that for the rest of the book, he is sniffing around the limits of this non-bodily threshold. Fucking, eating and sleeping are intermittent occasions of intense sensation. Here and there, Miller is fed plates of pickled herrings and black rye bread, honey and figs, sweet brandy, cold sausages and hunks of cheese. The meals appear and then disappear. Sex, too, appears and disappears. For all the indefatigable rock-hard-prickness, there lacks a definable consciousness to Miller’s sexuality. And yet, it is not unproblematic. Miller’s synecdochic refrain of cunt-as-woman reeks of classically misogynistic objectification.  Elsewhere, the woman as an unpredictable and terrifying force of seduction reminds us of the abject feminine so over-represented as a cultural archetype and so feared by men.

In every sexual encounter, Henry brings his lover – whoever she may be – to climax at least once, often three or four times. Afterwards, the postcoital euphoria inevitably descends into hungry, hysterical demands for more: “Where do you live?” asks one lover, Elsie, after their first encounter. “Where can I see you alone? Write me tomorrow … tell me where to meet you. I want a fuck everyday … do you hear? Don’t come yet, please. I want it last forever.” It’s easy to get weary of Miller’s interminable sex, his non-committal and flukey ability to push lovers right up to the edge of their sanity. But there is something attractive, at least in terms of language, of his ability write deftly both the absurdity and the banality of sex. Take for example, the paragraph that follows a chance liaison with the wife of a friend:

I had a strange taste in my mouth, of fish glue and Chanel 976½. My cock looked like a bruised rubber hose; it hung between my legs, extended an inch or two beyond its normal length and swollen beyond recognition. When I got into the street I felt weak in the knees. I went to the drug store and swallowed a couple of malted milks. A royal bit of fucking, I thought to myself.

Deleuze and Guattari talk about the “nonstratified, unformed, intense matter” of the body without organs. “The matrix of intensity,” they say, is “intensity = 0”. Zero here is not a quantifiable nothing; it is simply energy, neither positive nor negative. Kinetic energy. Movement. A composition of intensities. The paradox of Miller’s sexuality is that his model of the body without organs is fundamentally impotent. In dis-possessing his organs, in unclaiming bodily autonomy, Miller is merely a collection of senses, each transmitting and transmitted across the membranes of his clumsy protein-hybrid. His love for Mona is an electric current, a feedback loop. It literally holds him together, yet it is corrosive, liable to drop out or skip, unsustainable. He is both masochist and sadist and fulfils neither role particularly well. At the end of the book, Miller becomes a dog. It is both a hallucination and the final transformation of his body without organs. Love has made him delirious, and poverty – a kind of chronic poverty of the body – has made him useless as a man. His only chance of survival is metamorphosis, a becoming-animal, the transformation to skulking mangy cur.

This bodily poverty is of course corollary to a broader poverty experienced by Miller in the solidification and acceleration of industrial capitalism. Food, sex and art have been absorbed into a cultural economy, and Miller is, in every sense of the word, indebted. In the following section from Sexus, Miller returns to New York after a picnic with his first wife and their child. He is on a train, watching as the city-grid starts to appear ahead:

Mr. and Mrs. Megalopolitan with their offspring. Hobbled and fettered. Suspended in the sky like so much venison. A pair of every kind hanging by the hocks. At one end of the line starvation; at the other end, bankruptcy. Between stations the pawnbroker, with three golden balls to signify the triune God of birth, buggery and blight. Happy days. … Every now and then the doors open and shut: freshes batches of meat for the slaughterhouse. Little scraps of conversation, like the twittering of tit-mice. Who would think that the chubby little youngster beside you will in ten or fifteen years be shitting his brains out with fright on a foreign field? All day long you make innocent little gadgets; at night you sit in a dark hall and watch phantoms move across a silver screen. Maybe the realest moments you know are when you sit alone in the toilet and make caca. That doesn’t cost anything or commit you in any way. Not like eating or fucking, or making works of art. You leave the toilet and you step into the big shithouse. Whatever you touch is shitty. Even when it’s wrapped in cellophane the smell is still there. Caca! The philosopher’s stone of the industrial age. Death and transfiguration – into shit! The department store life – with flimsy silks on one counter and bombs on the other counter. No matter what interpretation you put on it, every thought, every deed, is cash-registered. You’re fucked from the moment you draw your first breath. One grand international business machine corporation. Logistics, as they say.

“All writing is PIG SHIT,” says Artaud, and Deleuze elaborates: “that is to say, every fixed or written word is decomposed into noise, alimentary, and excremental bits.” Language, as waste matter, as intensities passed through the body. Composed and decomposed. To shit, to speak. Language as excrement is language as process, rather than language as a device or act of expression. A process that, as Deleuze and Guattari say, “ploughs the crap out of being and its language.” Continuing, D and G suggest that

The only literature is that which places an explosive device in its package, fabricating a counterfeit currency causing the superego and its form of expression to explode, as well as the market value of its form and content.

Certainly, Miller’s writing ploughs the crap out of being and its language. For Miller, the excremental experience is peaceful and productive. Time alone, passing waste, acknowledging the organic processes of energy transformation. Shitting is not just a quotidian pleasure; it is a consciously non-capitalised act, a counterfeit currency. The material exchange of shitting produces no profits. It is a form of self-gifting. For Miller, an oppositional engagement – we might say, in the form of “immaculate defecation”– with capitalised flow is the only possible engagement. He is a failure as a capitalist (not least for his decision to become a writer).

Shitting is the last point of active contact, the threshold from which all connections pass through a final connection. The rectum as event horizon. All nutritious encounters that the body has experienced are archived in this process, even if only momentarily. For the body without organs, shitting is the seasonal practice of surrendering jetsam overboard.  Miller’s model of the body is a bounty of rot: the gassy and the stinky, the sex-funk and the sweat-drip. His language is a scalpel, an agent of fermentation, colonic irrigation, purge and squeeze.