The Cut //

I haven't written on the blog last week, I tried writing and interacting on the Google Doc instead for the past two weeks and I much preferred its non-linearity, anonymity, and collectivity – but I also like the challenges writing a blog post allows me to push through.

Here are some of my notes, as well as collected thoughts from the two last weeks, which reorganizing here has been really helpful to process some of it :

[                     ,                  '                                      .                         '       
                 
.                            ,                     ,                                  .

              .                  :                   ,               '                                          .]

“notational instead of notation”(Ronald)

We've had the same collaborator in our writing practice. Reich's music is one of the only ways to get me writing. He is helping me write these words right at this moment. Music as touch, music as facilitator. Like each note/sound every word/idea is being continually repeated but slightly altered until it is completely different and it is somewhere/something else (yet it alway is somewhere/something else) propelled by a rhythm that seems to address the unthinkable – through the cut, interstice.

Not unlike NourbeSe Philip Zong! which was very powerful to read out loud in this context.

Here are some notes I took while listening to Reich's piece last week:

“seamless transition from one state to another through constant subtle shifts – FELT MORE THAN HEARD sense of always moving always SOMETHING ELSE always aways away way and towards movement becoming devenir unfolding UNFOLDING infinite directions continual reshaping of matter fleeting away from itself, becoming is felt, palpable but yet always fleeting [engulfed in it yet we don't have access to it – Blanchot about the everyday] but all within same rhythm sense of repetition to propel, bouncing on one sound to another, cut is always in tension just like walking walking without knowing how or where, but with something else, with other body parts than my legs, or someone else, embodiment of writing makes it felt ACTIVATES MY BODY gives me force I might feel I don't have shared energy from IN BETWEEN things and IN BETWEEN sound and even IN BETWEEN silence, nowhere where it would be possible to stop, always unfolding //// I N BEWTEEN/// I N INTERVALS/// I N INTERSCTICE, IN always pointing OUT, le dehors qui se/me/la/le/nous/vous disperse et rapproche simultanément.”

“Rhythm as cut opening up infinite possibilities of relations.” (Ronald)

Interstice between sub(/ob)jectivities – learning to listen to these interstices.

//

For Moten the break is a modality of black performance.

For NourbeSe Philip, “To understand the Caribbean one needs to understand it and the entire New World as a site of massive interruptions.” (200). Break/rupture is synonymous with The Caribbean. Rupture as cut, cut as wound (and language as cut, wound).

For Mackay, the cut is“ “broken” claim to connection” (34).

Not concerned with return to origin, nor with fixed concept of identity = cut not as division, but as continual making and remaking (like NourbeSe undoing language). The cut as action, touch, connection, reorienting, transforming over and over and over and over and over in a non-linear way (or multi-linear?). Fugitive connections.

I also re-read chapter 7 of Gilles Deleuze's Cinéma 2: L'Image-Temps in which he writes about the cut in l'image-temps (sorry, I only have this book in French):

“Ce qui compte, c'est au contraire l'interstice entre les images, entre deux images: un espacement qui fait que chaque image s'arrache au vide et y retombe. [...] Il ne s'agit plus de suivre une chaîne d'images, même par-dessus des vides, mais de sortir de la chaîne ou de l'association. [...] C'est la méthode du ENTRE, “entre deux images”, qui conjure tout le cinéma de l'Un. C'est la méthode du ET=est. Entre deux actions, entre deux affections, entre deux perceptions, entre deux images visuelles, entre deux images sonores, entre le sonore et le visuelle: faire voir l'indiscernable, c'est-à-dire la frontière. [...] Le tout se confond alors avec ce que Blanhot appelle la force de “dispersion du Dehors” ou “le vertige de l'espacement”: ce vide qui n'est plus une part motrice de l'image, et qu'elle franchirait pour continuer mais qui est la mise en question radicale de l'image (tout comme il y a un silence qui n'est plus la part motrice ou la respiration d'un discours, mais sa mise en question radicale).” (p. 234).

(You can download the book in French here: https://monoskop.org/images/8/85/Deleuze_Gilles_Cinema_2_L_Image-temps.pdf)

The cut is a radical questioning of the image.

Le dé/réenchainement d'images sur des coupures non-commensurables et irrationnelles. Frontières, disjonctions. L'impensée au coeur de la pensée. “la naissance du visible qui se dérobe encore à la vue”, “affecter le visible d'un trouble fondamental” (262).

//

PORT OF MEMORY by Kamal Aljafari

Memory as something that can be activated – as cut triggering action, as membrane in between outside and inside. Deleuze again:

“Car la mémoire n'est certe plus la faculté d'avoir des souvenirs: elle est la membrane qui, sur les modes les plus divers (continuité, mais aussi discontinuité, enveloppement, etc.), fait correspondre les nappes de passé et les couches de réalité, les unes émanant d'un dedans toujours déjà là, les autres advenant d'un dehors toujours à venir, toutes deux rongeant le présent qui n'est plus que leur rencontre.” (269)