So far however there are no actant-places except the other scene and the institution of learning where the old learn from the young and the young learn precious little until suddenly one day they too are old.
We’ll come to that.
Meanwhile, back at the other scene.
Armel works on the idyll. Or rather on the bucolic pastoral as opposed to the rustic.
The invariants found are
1) the place, which becomes no longer Arcadia as in the classical pastoral but simply the anti-town, the hills, the country.
2) the rustic love-song manifest through fixed motifs such as the boastfulness of the shepherd, the burst of anger with invectives the exchange of gifts and the comparisons taken from rustic life to comment the girl’s beauty.
3) an equivocal use of pastoral and agricultural terms for sexual ends.
4) the display of visceral organs overflowing from excess of amorous anguish.
Having laid out the alleys and determined the streets, we have next to treat of the choice of building sites for temples, the forum, and all other public places, with a view to general convenience and utility. If the city is on the sea, we should choose ground close to the harbour as the place where the forum is to be built; but if inland, in the middle of the town. For the temples, the sites for those of the gods under whose particular protection the state is thought to rest and for Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, should be on the very highest point commanding a view of the greater part of the city. Mercury should be in the forum, or, like Isis and Serapis, in the emporium: Apollo and Father Bacchus near the theatre: Hercules at the circus in communities which have no gymnasia nor amphitheatres; Mars outside the city but at the training ground, and so Venus, but at the harbour. It is moreover shown by the Etruscan diviners in treatises on their science that the fanes of Venus, Vulcan, and Mars should be situated outside the walls, in order that the young men and married women may not become habituated in the city to the temptations incident to the worship of Venus, and that buildings may be free from the terror of fires through the religious rites and sacrifices which call the power of Vulcan beyond the walls. As for Mars, when that divinity is enshrined outside the walls, the citizens will never take up arms against each other, and he will defend the city from its enemies and save it from danger in war.
(Portrait of the town and
antitown by Vitruvius)
And if it is written up there by the narrator(s) that the shepherd shall boast in the antitown with mercurial exchange of gifts and display visceral organs then so it shall occur even though the narrator(s) may withdraw at last into the proepigrammed arbitrariness of a vacation, paring their fingernails. At which point the shepherdess’s adoration would necessarily be tempered with a new anguish at the shepherd’s obstinate refusal either to marry her or to live with her in an unpastoral pastiche of marriage (as he puts it, firmly keeping the fane of Venus outside the body politic), an anguish that might veer into jealousy or is it outrage as to what prevents him, given all that adoration given, however, only as a terminal string of symbols or object of exchange in a rewrite derivation where the object is raised to become subject of adoration which has to occur before the passive transformation into a sort of bird flying around the room unable to get out. For although the mise-en-abîme is eternally a mise-en-scène, syndiachronically orgyanised into a spacetimetable of yes your reference I’m coming to that erogenous zone in the sixth hour which is the work of a lifetime enclosed and isolated in a Silling Castle behind great bridgeless canyons, there is no promotion from object to orgyaniser no liberty for the victim of the libertine despite the undoubted fact that within the grammar of that narrative the roles can be interchanged and textasy multiplied until punctually at a fixed hour all the forged orgy ceases. For the deep structure of I am your slave is undoubtedly you will be mine and yet there is no transformational rule in any grammar which explicitly effects this since it is written up there that all deletions, reflexivisations dative movements object-raisings and other transformations be recoverable so that here it is merely a question of conjugality which comes under the lexicon and the morphophonemic rules as for example in please don’t go Armel it’s so nice having breakfast together.
I must go.
But why my love. We’re alone. Christopher has gone, Larissa has gone. You’re going back to an empty flat.
Precisely.
I don’t understand.
You do really.
Perhaps I do. No man can hide a secret even in silence, he will chatter with the dropped parings of his fingernails.
Let’s enjoy it while we can my love, don’t let’s spoil it, it’s beautiful.
But that’s just why it should last why are you so pessimistic?
What were you dreaming just now do you remember?
No, was I asleep?
Yes, you were muttering.
I wish you’d talk to me Armel.
But I do talk to you.
You know what I mean. Yes, we talk, of things, art and literature and God and dreams and beautiful landscapes and we laugh a lot and I’m very happy then. But you never tell me things, real things. You for instance. What do you really want?
My tie, where’s it gone?
There. How long, Armel, how long?
That’s what David said.
Who’s David?
The psalmist. In Paris, where I lived for some time, the telephone is overloaded, and on international calls one tends to get a recorded voice saying Votre demande ne peut aboutir. Veuillez appeler ultérieurement.
And will, somebody, tell me, why, people, let go.
The shot can precede the introduction of the pistol.
I was quoting Cummings. I like him so much better than Christopher’s nature stuff. You opened him up to me Armel and so much else besides and now you don’t recognise him.
I did, but why wave quotation marks. I answered with another quotation.
From what?
I forget. Some essay.
Like all your answers it wasn’t an answer.
Don’t always ask the same question then, Veronica.
I’m sorry.
It’s all right. I’m going now. Sleep well my love, have interesting dreams.
Larissa’s in Paris isn’t she?
No.
Where is she?
I don’t know.
You must know.
Stop pressuring me, I’ve asked you before. I refuse to discuss her with you or you with her.
The adulterer’s cliché. Oh Armel don’t get angry I’m sorry. I can’t stand that terrible glare in your eyes when you get angry you look so different. Forgive me. I just get, very unhappy sometimes I mean I know you made no promises you were quite honest but we didn’t know we’d fall so deeply in love that I, would, really, fall so, deeply, in love oh Armel.
Come my little one, my little girl. There. My beautiful one my Venus. Don’t cry. Aphrodite never cries.
But couldn’t she be happy with you in the orbit of an eye and no reference without? Never let anyone see you see through them therefore
Never let yourself be fully known
Give not your soul unto a woman and yet
There is no fear in love
To adore is to give your soul but: Eurilochus?
Fear is the function of his narrative.
Oh another one who grabbed a balloon and then let go.
These are adagia that function as functions at the level of performance not competence. It is not clear who speaks last, a friend of Veronica’s perhaps or more likely of Larissa’s, the cases being caught up in the eternal quadrangle or, if you prefer it, which this friend clearly does, two deixes that are conjoined, because corresponding to the same axis of contradiction, but not conforming, and equivalent, at the fundamental level, to contradictory terms:
Thus the circulation of values, interpreted as a sequence of transfers of value-objects, can have two courses:
which, in the case of the Russian fairy-t
ales of Propp, can be interpreted: society (d1) experiences alack, the traitor (1) ravishes the king’s daughter (o) and to hide her transfers her elsewhere (d2).
which means: the hero (2) finds somewhere (d2) the king’s daughter (o) and returns her to her parents (d1).
And if the king’s daughter, settling a pillow by her head or throwing off a shawl, and turning toward the window should say That is not it at all, that is not what I meant at all, you can simply disappear, opening a door into another door, working backwards in a wide circular pattern. Or backwards through the same sequences, which is simply regressive, and in a way cheating, since you have given many women a certain peculiar pleasure in frustrating their vulgar desire to know what happens inside you, and that pleasure should not be dropped too brutally, leaving them hungry for it. The two pleasures, the pleasure in your textual act and the curiosity, should be skilfully balanced which is the work of a six-hour nightly timetable.
Do you follow the principle? The principle being that you do not follow the principle you separate yourself from it though you remain goods friends leaving the door open onto other doors that lead to the other place as you drive away into the night watching the luminous coloured hoops dance in the bluish rectangle that reflects the rear before you.
Don’t look back Orpheus don’t look back.
Meanwhile.
Go forth and multiply the multiplicator.
See you later you-narrator.
But who invents Armel? A woman probably, binary to the bone, who sees herself entire and suffers from all the beautifully diagrammatic coherence of a psychosis when all that is signifiable in her is struck with latency as soon as raised to the function of signifier which initiates this raising by its original disappearance. Unless merely asthenia or cyclothymia, there can be no diagnosis since she too does not exist except as reinvestment itself perpetually reinvested letting S represent the subject of discourse and O the Other place and o the object of desire o1 o2 on.
On a point of information may we interrupt
Oh go away with your politics we want to work
No let them speak
Thank you my dear. But you brother you will soon be unable to work if the faculties continue on their present trend
We’re quite happy about it
What faculties, yours?
And who’s we, royal or collective? You little lot here? Caring only about accumulating credits like shopkeepers and acquiring your meaningless little degrees of presence and doctorates of debility to become lacqueys of the bourgeoisie?
Oh not that old playback. We’ll have to earn our livings won’t we like anyone else, whether we like this society or not, and if we want to change it we might as well understand how it functions.
Oh no my friend that way recuperation lies the bourgeois idyll is over you can’t perpetuate it for ever. The revolution is upon us which has been long preparing out of archaic flaws and
Si fa la revoluzione, all by itself.
What’s this guy talking about?
Make love not revolution.
Don’t worry sister we make both.
Is that your point of information? We’ve heard it before thankyou.
And you’ll hear it again with tearbombs on. Meanwhile there’s a General Assembly of staff and students at five in the Karl Marx Amphi to discuss more particular and relevant problems. The reorganisation of the university into a non-segmented and truly revolutionary institution devoted to establishing the truth.
How can an institution be revolutionary?
For it’s the protective segmentation that has enabled everyone, after an honest enough start, to fall back into all the old ruts, the hierarchisation of subjects, the dishing out of ready-made culture and all that shit. Apart from that there’s the related question of the syllabus-reform the students have been loudly demanding for so long.
Which students? You? Who’s you?
The vast majority as you well know.
The loud minority you mean. Everyone knows these General Assemblies are a farce, swayed by a few well versed in crowd rhetoric and ending in chaos, so that the real majority of serious students have ceased to go and the staff knows this and go on exactly as before.
You’ve hit it on the head my friend. If more people like you came to the meetings we might achieve something instead of this criminal apathy.
We’re not apathetic we’re diverting our energies into more useful channels.
Christ what is this class? Isn’t this the literature department? I thought so. Literature is the servant of the bourgeoisie.
Well maybe we are too literary to swallow your clichés.
What the hell is this reactionary culture you’re dishing out to these kids oh my sister?
If you really want to know, textuality as subversion of society.
Words words. Why this flight? Tell us how you go about it that’d be much more to the point.
This is not the place.
No it never is, is it? Hey you with the beard what you studying here come on comrade don’t be afraid I won’t eat you.
The symbolic structure of castration in The Mable Faun and other texts.
Christalmighty the marble faun! and you think it’s with the marble faun whatever shit that is that you’re going to succeed in subverting society? Oh brother.
Pooh! You’re only acting out. Brotherhood’s just another matrix, dismembering the paternal inheritance.
Well said Salvo.
Norman O. Brown you mean. Huh, we’ve read him too you know but he’s on our side, don’t you dismember him into yours.
No well I’ll tell you something out of my own country for believe it or not I care about these things as much as you do but you’re going about it the wrong way. Macte Jovis! we used to say in ancient Rome at a certain festival, kill Jupiter, kill the father, and we still shout ammazzalo! at soccer matches. Keep your violence for those my friend for you too will be fathers and dismembered and ammazzati.
Idiot. Sport is the opium of the people.
Yes Salvo that’s all rhetoric, and rhetoric as you should know was born in Syracuse out of a lawsuit over property, not in order to establish the truth but to persuade people of its verisimilitude.
Ali you’re nuts how can truth be established it’s not an institution?
You’re playing with words, Saroja of the beautiful eyes.
Well don’t you?
My! This is an interesting little nest of bourgeois ideology. Words words words as the saying goes and as the saying goes it went. Are you coming to the G.A. or not?
To hear more words? Why don’t you just blow the place up according to your own principles instead of going through that semblance of democracy that you call General Assemblies?
There follows a test for adjusting your stereophonic equipment. This is the left voice: boom body boom doom. This is the right voice: sham deed ah slam scram. If your equipment is correctly adjusted the sound should be exactly balanced in the centre:
Agitato ma non troppo
The bour-geois i-dyll is o-o-o-ver
Meanwhile the timetable has slipped into the other place, the tale-bearers having on pain of death given birth to other tale-bearers, spokesmen of realities that merely seek to appear true, separating the signifier from the signified the manifest from the latent and the upper from the lower waters of the sky in coitus interruptus with earth as a death-battle with time for a trophy that drops bleeding into the sea to re-emerge, feathered in froth, the treasurer of signifiers behind which the molecules of water escape back into water that reenters into its own depths, retaining it mystery, reflecting at the surface only the sky.
Il court il court le furet
Which way did he go?
Down the hatch, safe
as a jack-in-the-box
Under the expert guidance of the lanky hencheminence grise in smoked glasses
The short plump pasha sultan the assembly dressed in democracy (but the emperor’s a naked imperialist!) heare
r of deep structures below the performance of six hours as summarised in the minutes of the meeting of the permanent committee for the functioning of faculties May 24 at 1400 hours. Questions on the agenda: Statutes and internal organisation. Desegmentation and its consequences. Modification of the linguistics programme. Methods of Grading. Any Other Business.
1. Statutes and interior organisation
Given the importance of the agenda, this promble was postponed. A project of interior organisation will be sent to all colleagues as soon as evolved.
2. Desegmentation and its consequences
After discussion that frequently overflowed the framework of this one point, the permanent committee decided:
1) all sections must provide a regular report of their teaching activities by the end of the first semestre at the latest (unanimously approved).
2) all new projects must be submitted in writing by the same date if they are to be actualised the following September (unanimously approved)
3) the adoption of the following principles:
The Brooke-Rose Omnibus Page 58
