Some Notes on Desire and Repetition in Moving Image, Part 3

On Repetition

by Tim Steer
Quad by Samual Beckett, 1981

When I write point… as I write the word point…look at “point”…as I type p… you don’t know what point point will emerge. Only through time in the after-moment do you recognise the word. We don’t register this process, the only time we might notice it is when learning a new language, hearing partial words, partial meanings as they begin to unfold in an unintelligible stream of background. But this is the state we’re in all the time. There is no point at which meaning comes to presence; it is never fully present to itself.

Repetition splits an image or object in two. It fulfils it and fulfils it (this is why it functions so well with the structure of desire). Repeating something produces a copy of a thing, but it also produces the original. Repetition produces the thing itself. A things repeatability in language or symbolic system ensures its existence. Repetition ensures the possibility of a thing.

A single utterance or provisional fragment can never be wholly unique because its very expression in language allows it to repeat and it is doubled as soon as it appears. Derrida writes in Dissemination, “what it is is not what it is, identical and identical to itself, unique, unless it adds to itself the possibility of being repeated as such. And its identity is hollowed out by that addition” (1875). So, the very condition for its existence or transmission is its repeatability or symbolic existence. If it is totally unique, it can never be represented and it lives outside a symbolic register. This is the way we read any work; to have a unique, singular existence, a work would have to be unrepeatable. But to do this means it ceases to exist. Or, as Benjamin writes, a picture that could not be named “would cease to be one and would therefore enter into the realm of the mark as such; but this is something that we cannot imagine” (86). It is an abhorrent mark that cannot be symbolized or represented. It exists outside our system like a trauma that can’t get assimilated or processed. A things repeatability ensures its existence, but it is also its death.

Repetition sits at these two positions. It’s production and death. Movement and blockage.

Freud derived his theory of the death instinct from repetition phenomena; repetition compulsion proposes no possibility of pleasure, it lies “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, it is the manifestation of an attribute shared by all organic matter, the expression of inertia in organic life, the drive towards death (30). Repetition as the attempt to return things to inanimate matter and therefore stasis, death.

Good Boy Bad Boy, 1985. Bruce Nauman. Video on 2 monitors

http://ubu.com/film/nauman_gooda.html & http://ubu.com/film/nauman_goodb.html.

What repetition? Exhaustion. Something repeated, emptied out, exhausted. It’s about getting it out the way. It all goes. The dissolution of the subject and a rupture for something to be inserted or seen. A structure close to the infinite and nothingness. Not the repetition of a thing but the repetition of the operation.

“You must go on. I can’t go on. You must go on. I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any – until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it’s done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.) It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don’t know, I’ll never know: in the silence you don’t know. You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on” (Beckett, 414)

Repetition in Beckett names nothingness. His prose is about names and nothingness through the emptying function of repetition. It is language that names the possible. The possible here is possible because of repetition. Names and nothingness are possible through repetition.


Tim Steer is a curator and writer based in London. He is Associate Director of Seventeen and a co-founder of Opening Times. 


References

Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. New York: Random House, 1958.

Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings: 1913-1926, Volume 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Derrida, Jacques. “Dissemination.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. Vincent B. Leitch, Willaim E. Cain, Laurie Finke, Barbara Johnson, John McGowan, Jeffrey J. Williams. London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1830-76.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. London: W. W. Norton & Company Ltd, 1961.

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