Mont Analogue 1
THEATRE OF THOUGHT
November 2009

Inner Vector: Views From No-where
Now-here

The theatre of thought poses a challenge. Can the
stage address the event that takes place in ab-
sence of an event: the event of thought? Can the
theatre’s by-now familiar aspect, which makes
of its chrono-topical devices – as processes of spa-
tialization and temporalization of its signs – a
material-creation-of-concepts, also include the
possibility that this creation is conceptualised
against the event?
If philosophy is the praxis of thought, theatre
is no diferent insofar as it is capable of activating
both a sensibility and a sensuality of senses. At-
tending a performance means entering in-touch,
having an experience of the ‘sense’ of the per-
formance that is inseparable from its tactile, sensual
verifcation. Theatre of Thought places itself in
open challenge with this modality of thought in ac-
tion, activating a torsion that displaces the com-
prehension of reality and the imaginary of-stage.
Roman Jakobson has many times pointed out
that philosophers and linguists can never understand
the nature of language without observing cases in
which we are deprived of the latter (or cases in
which there is an alteration); and, at the same time,
that physicians cannot work with linguistic path-
ologies until they have a clear notion of the nature
and essence of language. This is a crucial point:
an epoché on the whole system of beliefs that guar-
antee us certainty about what theatre is, and
which posits a crisis in language. A crisis, though,
that may be an efective instrument.
We propose this possibility: the text as a
mental stage.
Can this internal vector be understood as a
catastrophic strategy connected to a presence-
absence alteration that indicates a linguistic erosio
or the creation of new languages? Or even as a
reservoir of language as residue? What is the fate
of unsaid (or almost said) words, and of the
scriptural bodies (the transcriptions) that stand in
for them? And what are the remainders? Or rathe
is it necessary to come to terms with the notion
of an (un)translatable text?
We are not dealing with questions that precipi-
tate language into the territory of nonsense, but
which raise if anything a radical issue: what is
representation? What does what we see (or what
we don’t see) refer to?

  

 
Gaze Turned Inwards: the Blind Spot
Scopic Functions

During a boat trip, Jacques Lacan recounts that his
gaze was suddenly attracted by something shiny.
Drawing closer he understands that the source of
his curiosity is a sardine tin. This banal experience
throws him into total anxiety. For two reasons.
The frst has to do with the gaze of the Other. This
l ight-point in the sea is essential ly a gaze, something
that looks at him, that frames him: ‘in the scopic
feld the gaze is external, I am looked at, i.e., I am
framed. ’ The subject does not coincide any longer
with the ‘geometric point’ which allows perspective
on things. Instead the subject lives the disorienting
experience of being in some way ‘objectifed’ by
another gaze, reduced to an object that makes a
mark in the feld of the visible. Lacan feels literally
out of place. The second reason for that sense
of inadequacy is that the gaze exercised by the
sardine tin is a blind gaze, a gaze that does not see
anything. The gaze-point that attracts and by
which one feels observed does not see anything,
does not see us. It is an absent ghostly gaze. A black
hole. Total mass. The problem is not whose gaze
it might be but the fact that the gaze does not be-
long to anyone. Here we have the question of the
schism between eye and gaze: an eye that looks
does not always correspond to a gaze. Let’s think
of butterfies that present the phenomenon of
‘eyes,’ of marks that simulate a threatening eye pre
sent on the back of the wings on the feathers of
some birds, a phenomenon investigated by Roger
Callois in various analyses of his. Are we not
perhaps dealing with a gaze without an eye? This
example encountered in nature confronts us
with what Lacan defnes: marking function. That
is it signals to us the pre-existence to sight of
that-which-is-to-be-seen. The gaze does not be-
long either to the subject who sees or to the
subject (either fesh and blood, or a transcendenta
eye like that of God) by which one is seen. We
are dealing with a marking function that, automated
by the eye, is identifed with the gaze. The gaze
is a sort of indefnable object. Desire is fxed on
this ‘hole’ absent-from-the-beginning, elusive: the
Real. It is specifcally the absence of sense, the
missing, which puts in motion all the possible attri-
butions of sense that we apply to reality itself.
What is, then, this display that lives in the feld of
appearances and assumes fascinating forms?
What is therefore this object?

 

  
Nobody Ever Saw the Language:
the Birth of the Spectator

Who is nobody? The same blind spot that traverses
vision? Language? Is it possible to have a repre-
sentation of language? Nobody, an intended absence
that concerns us. We are in the feld that Lacan
defnes as the seeing function, which is to say a func-
tion of organisation and bordering of the Real,
rather than an encounter with the Real. The gaze
as an iner t object devoid of meaning, an object
out of place: not an eye attributable to some kind
of subject. The question to put to ourselves is
then: what frames the scenic space by means of the
composition of objects, materials, colours, figures,
presences when it attracts us?
The object observed by our eyes is an empty
container that undergoes an act and returns an
image, analogously to what happens with a person
that I fix in my eyes: the other that returns the
action makes itself a border that I can’t be sure to
understand, meaning it becomes a centre of
interest hidden to consciousness ‘un-subjectable
and un-objectified.’ It is actually the apparition as
stupendous as it is monstrous of the sublime, of an
uninterpretable void that becomes for a moment
visible in its invisibility. The gaze holds contempora-
neously the maximum of subjectivity, the desire
of a subject that marks the real, and the maximum
of de-subjectification, my gaze in a certain way
does not belong to me, it dispossesses me of my
own desire, I can find it in reality in the shape
of the Other.
The framing function or the nobody of language
concerns the relationship with the problem of the
visual representability of the subject. In the sense
that the framing function does not provide a repre-
sentation of the subject so much as a represen-
tation of the limits of its possible representation.
Here the state of being in the frame unveils its
more radical character. The marking function shows
the subject (the spectator) as consigned to the
gaze of the Other, to a gaze that comes from out-
side and subverts the classic idea of subject as
artifice of representation. The space beyond repre-
sentation has as its premise the fact that the
perspective point of the gaze is located outside
the subject. It is not the subject that looks but the
Other that looks at the subject. The Real not as
centre excluded from the world of representation
– das Ding as ‘reality outside of meaning’ – but
as encounter. It is no longer the perception of the
user that apprehends the image, but the scene,
its objective consistency, that in going beyond the
limit of the frame is catapulted to the external.
The internal overturns itself in a material torsion
towards the open.

In Trans: the Paradox of Representation in
the Language-in-Between

× Theatre of Thought is measured by the possi-
bility of a theatre based not on representation but
on encounter. It brings to light the possible gra-
dations of the absence of the word, the principles
of breaching that-which-is-to-happen.
× Theatre as transcription: the alterations of the
relationships of transitivity, the relation absence /
presence as emergence (a coming into presence),
the relation absence / presence as disappearance
(the dissolving of perception), putting forward
the possibility of a performance-in-form-of-a-book
or of a-book-in-form-of-a-performance. It con-
figures a space of the trans, trans implying in-
between (a translation of the Greek word metaxú,
composed of metá – in the middle, between, and
sún – with, together with, unitedly). It denotes the
space of relations, a between-space which desig-
nates neither one thing nor the other, but indicates
the state of being in the middle, of the ‘dash’ that
makes divisions, that puts logically antithetical con-
cepts in relation. Theatre as a space that indicates
a line of demarcation, but also a place of contra-
diction: visible and invisible, inside and outside, pre-
sence and absence.
× The paradox of the four cardinal points:
theatre, event, language, thought.
So that there be something like the theatre it is
necessary that there be something like an event
understood as an occurrence in a physical-
temporal space in the presence of spectators. If
theatre is language, and thought is representation,
the event is an intentional act that occurs in the
consciousness of the subject. This is by nature irre-
ducible, incapable of being exhausted in a form,
unsayable.
Can we say that the event is a materialisation
of an intentional act?
And if so, in what way then do we place the
event in relation to representation if it is already in
itself an act of representation?
The darkness opens wide. I am called to wit-
ness the degrees of that void. The stage is there
like every other abyss. Abyss against abyss: the
pupil-circle-infinite encounters the surface. That
magnetic field of interchangeable poles gener-
ates attraction and repulsion, the affirmation and
negation which is the origin of a space. A space
not as physical breadth but in the figure of the
gaze from which the single elements take life from
a reflection, the reflection of the I. Or better still,
the object-image sustained by the mental light
that the gaze, this time, will return to look at as an
I spectator. To look is to cause to disappear into
the gravity of the pupil, which like a vortex now
swallows the object-world so as to generate the
phenomenon.

The four cardinal points of our paradox – theatre,
event, language, thought – build a basic crystalline
form. The possible relations between these points
form thirty-six crystals that correspond to the
twenty-six letters of the alphabet and the numbers
from zero to nine. This growth advances through
the symmetrical operations of inversion, reflection,
and clockwise rotation around axes. Every crystal
thus stands for a ‘logical figure’ of affirmation or
negation:

Theatre is event, event is language, language is
thought, thought is theatre.

Theatre is not event, event is not language, language
is not thought, thought is not theatre.

The logical figure endlessly expands in an infinite
contraction. A fall in which each letter becomes
active in a perpetual multiplication of logical rela-
tions that empty out the semantic frame. This
crystal proposition opens a void that exposes
language to the infinite.
The fall into language happened so long ago.
A place where ‘night’ is evoked by turning on a
light and illuminating everything, as if beyond the
space of this illumination everything else was to
be lost in darkness. I know the night is not endless,
but when it’s as cold as this it’s hard to remember.
Except this isn’t a real night. It’s like I’m looking
with somebody else’s eyes, the eyes of someone
whose vision has started to fail, has been failing for
a long time. Silence here is full of language, like
a tale told by the dead, or like the living languages
leaning towards each other.

Theatre is event, event is language, language is
thought, thought is theatre.

Thought is not event, event is not language, lan-
guage is not theatre, theatre is not event. Theatre
is language, language is event, event is thought,
thought is theatre. Theatre is language, language
is thought, thought is event, event is language.
Theatre is event, event is language, language is
thought, thought is theatre. Thought is not event,

Concept by Snejanka Mihaylova.
Designed by and edited with
Phil Baber (Cannon Magazine)
Editorial text written by
Piersandra Di Matteo and
Snejanka Mihaylova
Translated from the Italian by Lyndy Baker and edited by Joe Kelleher
Printed by Drukkerij Raddraaier, Amsterdam
Published by Critique and Humanism, Sofia.

Towards the Event Horizon:

Overwhelmed by gravity, time
and matter collapse into black
holes, all surfaces folding
inward and contracting to an
abysmal point.

There have been reliable indi-
cations observed that double
stars, eclipsing one another
in a continual present/absent
exchange, form their binary
configurations through an orbit
about a common absence
– a void intersection of attrac-
tion and repulsion.

We can observe a black hole
from two planes – the inside
and the outside, the latter
being the only one that is ex-
perimentally verifiable. From
here, we see (or don’t see)
an event horizon where time
and matter cease to exist.
A horizon we are continually
crossing but never meet.
No light reaches us, nothing
happens. The closer we
observe, the less we perceive,
time eventually falling away
into a speculative arena known
as the interior vector. Objects
are caught and pulled inex-
orably toward this central sin-
gularity and take off toward
the infinite nowhere.


Scientists tell us that at the
centre of every galaxy is a
black hole of a mass equivalent
to millions or even billions of
times the solar mass, (precise-
ly half of the mass of the whole
galaxy). Such a phenomenon
would indicate that black holes
are not just a terrifying
expression of the catastrophic
event, but that they exercise
a precise function for the
gravitational equilibrium of the
Universe.

‘If a black hole has trapped
stars, clouds or galaxies, does
it keep a memory of its forma-
tion?’ It was once believed that
the light emitted at the fringes
of an event horizon does not
contain any characteristic that
might reveal that which has
been swallowed by the black
hole. In July 2004, Hawking
disproved this hypothesis.
The information contained in
a black hole is not lost forever,
but will be restored to the
universe in a ‘complex form’
not transmitted through
the typical channels of commu-
nication and thus evading
the prism of our usual language.
It is as if the horizon of black
holes were ‘a fluctuating mosaic
similar to a fabric from whose
pitted weave quantities of
light find ways out. The black
hole seems therefore to pos-
sess transparencies on its
surface that allow the informa-
tion enclosed within to con-
tinue to exist.’

  
 

Another enigmatic aspect of
crystals is their symmetry of
shape. Each facet has, through
various folds and reflections,
an opposing facet elsewhere
– a polar negation extended
and defined through the space-
in-between.

Reflected, inverted, rotated;
folding through and around
axes and centrepoints – two-,
three-, four-, sixfold. Crystals
are constructed through a
limited number of symmetrical
procedures, most crystals
containing a combination of
these fundamental operations.
A cubic crystal not only has
planes and fourfold axes, but
also twofold axes through
all edges, a set of threefold
axes through the corners, and
a centre of symmetry in the
middle.

From these basic elements
there are thirty-two possible
symmetry combinations,
and proceeding from this limi-
ted set, an infinity of possible
shapes.

The Mental Stage

Thomas stayed in his room to read. He was sitting with his hands joined over his brow, his thumbs pressing against his hairline, so deep in concentra- tion that he did not make a move when anyone opened the door. Those who came in thought he was pretending to read, seeing that the book was always open to the same page. He was reading. He was reading with unsurpassable meticulousness and attention. In relation to every symbol, he was in the position of the male praying mantis about to be devoured by the female. They looked at each other. The words, coming forth from the book which was taking on the power of life and death, exercised a gentle and peaceful attraction over the glance which played over them. Each of them, like a half-closed eye, admitted the excessively keen glance which in other circumstances it would not have tolerated. And so Thomas slipped to- ward these corridors, approaching them defence- lessly until the moment he was perceived by the very quick of the word. Even this was not fearful, but rather an almost pleasant moment he would have wished to prolong. The reader contemplated this little spark of life joyfully, not doubting that he had awakened it. It was with pleasure that he saw himself in this eye looking at him. The pleasure in fact became very great. It became so great, so pitiless that he bore in with a sort of terror, and in the intolerable moment when he had stood for- ward without receiving from his interlocutor any sign of complicity, he perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word as if by a living being, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were in that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like a procession of angels opening out into the infnite to the very eye of the absolute. Rather than withdraw from a text whose defences were so strong, he pitted all his strength in the will to seize it, obstinately refusing to withdraw his glance and still thinking himself a profound reader, even when the words were already taking hold of him and beginning to read him. He was seized, kneaded by intelligible hands, bitten by a vital tooth; he entered with his l iving body into the anonymous shapes of words, giving his substance to them, establishing their relationships, ofering his being to the word ‘be. ’ For hours he remained motion- less, with, from time to time, the word ‘eyes’ in place of his eyes: he was inert, captivated and un- veiled. And even later when, having abandoned himself and, contemplating his book, he recognised himself with disgust in the form of the text he was reading, he retained the thought that (while, perched upon his shoulders, the word He and the word I were beginning their carnage) there remained within his person which was already deprived of its senses obscure words, disembodied souls and angels of words, which were exploring him deeply. The frst time he perceived this presence, it was night. By a light which came down through the shutters and divided the bed in two he saw that the room was totally empty, so incapable of containing a single object that it was painful to the eye. The book was rotting on the table. There was no one walking in the room. His solitude was complete. And yet, sure as he was that there was no one in the room and even in the world, he was just as sure that someone was there, occupying his slumber, approaching him intimately, all around him and with- in him. On a naïve impulse he sat up and sought to penetrate the night, trying with his hand to make light. But he was like a blind man who, hearing a noise, might run to light his lamp: nothing could make it possible for him to seize this presence in any shape or form. He was locked in combat with something inaccessible, foreign, something of which he could say: that doesn’t exist … and which never theless fl led him with terror as he sensed it wandering about in the region of his solitude. Having stayed up all night and all day with this be- ing, as he tried to rest he was suddenly made aware that a second had replaced the frst, just as inaccessible and just as obscure, and yet diferent. It was a modulation of that which did not exist, a diferent mode of being absent, another void in which he was coming to life. Now it was defnitely true, someone was coming near him, standing not nowhere and everywhere, but a few feet away, invisible and certain. By an impulse which nothing might stop, and which nothing might quicken, a power with which he could not accept contact was coming to meet him. He wanted to fee. He threw himself into the corridor. Gasping and almost beside himself, he had taken only a few steps when he recognised the inevitable progress of the be- ing coming toward him. He went back into the room. He barricaded the door. He waited, his back to the wall. But neither minutes nor hours put an end to his waiting. He felt ever closer to an ever more monstrous absence which took an infnite time to meet. He felt it closer to him every instant and kept ahead of it by an infnitely small but irre- ducible splinter of duration. He saw it, a horrifying being which was already pressing against him in space and, existing outside time, remained infnitely distant. Such unbearable waiting and anguish that they separated him from himself. A sort of Thomas left his body and went before the lurking threat. His eyes tried to look not in space but in duration, and in a point in time which did not yet exist. His hands sought to touch an impalpable and unreal body. It was such a painful efort that this thing which was moving away from him and trying to draw him along as it went seemed the same to him as that which was approaching unspeakably. He fell to the ground. He felt he was covered in impu- rities. Each par t of his body endured an agony. His head was forced to touch the evil, his lungs to breathe it in. There he was on the foor, writhing, reentering himself and then leaving again. He crawled sluggishly, hardly diferent from the serpent he would have wished to become in order to believe in the venom he felt in his mouth. He stuck his head under the bed, in a corner full of dust, resting among the rejectamenta as if in a refreshing place where he felt he belonged more properly than in himself. It was in this state that he felt him- self bitten or struck, he could not tell which, by what seemed to him to be a word, but resembled rather a giant rat, an all-powerful beast with piercing eyes and pure teeth. Seeing it a few inches from his face, he could not escape the desire to devour it, to bring it into the deepest possible intimacy with himself. He threw himself on it and digging his fngernails into its entrails, sought to make it his own. The end of the night came. The light which shone through the shutters went out. But the struggle with the horrible beast, which had ultimately shown itself possessed of in- comparable dignity and splendour, continued for an immeasurable time. This struggle was terri- ble for the being lying on the ground grinding his teeth, twisting his face, tearing out his eyes to force the beast inside; he would have seemed a madman, had he resembled a man at all. It was almost beautiful for this dark angel covered with red hair, whose eyes sparkled. One moment, the one thought he had triumphed and, with uncontainable nausea, saw the word which soiled him, slipping down inside him. The next moment, the other was devouring him in turn, dragging him out of the hole he had come from, then tossing him back, a hard, emptied body. Each time, Thomas was thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing as his nightmare and the explanation of his nightmare. He found that he was ever more empty, ever heavier; he no longer moved without infnite fatigue. His body, after so many struggles, became entirely opaque, and to those who looked at it, it gave the peaceful impres- sion of sleep, though it had not ceased to be awake.

Towards a Crystal Language: From turbid veins of molten rock or murky pools of solu- tion, crystals silently form in the dark of time into some- thing with seemingly un- impeachable defnition and clarity. The immutable rigidity of their outer shape – the straight l ines and sharp corners, the plannar sur faces that obey the laws of rational indices, the symmetries that are mirrored through axes and centrepoints – arises from internal struc- tures built upon point systems and space lattices: particles stacked and arranged in precise ways to form solid intramural pat terns that repeat over and over in al l directions in space. Despite their apparent formal per fection, crystals are rid- dled with faults – splits, rents, ruptures – and it is these imperfections that allow for their growth: a breach in the sur face of a crystal nucleus forms an edge on to which molecules can readily add. At the ‘centre’ of a crystal , then, is a chasm, an abysmal zero. Growth advances in- defnitely around this disloca- tion l ike hands of a clock metering out the geological ages. As with the fracturing mono- l iths of Stonehenge or the Pyramids of Egypt we are in a world of crude and primitive structures, whose enigmatic and uncertain impressions open out onto the unstable terrains of the unknown. Light rushes up the magni fying lens of an electron microscope and through the ‘crystal l ine lens’ of the eye where it is swal - lowed by the pupil (old French pupille or Latin pupilla, dimin- utive of pupa – ‘dol l ’; so named from the tiny refected images visible in the eye). And in so obser ving a crys- tal ’s structure, we descend beyond our everyday scale of being. The familiar language of centimetres and millimetres dissolves into that of nanometres and ångströms, and, as we pass through the helical corridors described by the screw dislocation, frac- tures sti l l fur ther into incalcu- lables, unti l at its basis we fnd the void, the vacancy, around which it has formed. Light that reaches us through a crystal has been refracted and polarised. I f we mark a cross on a sheet of paper and place on it a calcite crystal , a second cross will appear, equally sharp and clear. I f the crystal is rotated, one of the images rotates with it , apparent ly or- biting the other: one quite ordinar y, the other qui te ext ra- ordinary. The extraordinary image appears above its counterpart; closer to us, yet more remote from the ‘actual ’ mark it is a representation of. Light , an agent of mat ter, here displaces matter, profering an hallucinogenic alternative.