Doors of Misperception
A proposition is completely logically analyzed if its grammar is made clear—in no matter what idiom.
—Wittgenstein (PR §1) The fear, as I analyze it in retrospect, was of being overwhelmed, of disintegrating under a pressure of reality greater than a mind, accustomed to living most of the time in a cosy world of symbols, could possibly bear.
—Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
A Certain Scenic Single-Mindedness
It’s a winter’s night. A man rides across Lake Constance without sparing his horse. When he arrives on the other side, his friends congratulate him profusely, saying: “What a surprise! How did you ever make it! The ice is no more than an inch thick!” The rider hesitates briefly, then drops off his horse. He is instantly dead.
—Handke, The Ride Across Lake Constance
Like Borges’s short story in which a map is drawn to the actual size and scale of the territory being mapped, Handke’s ice matches the hole it covers, the dysfunction, allowing for the performance of the not-knowingness of inca-pacity, the mind performing what it does not yet see.1 “How have you made it this far?” my psychiatrist asks, the answer being by not knowing the thinness of the ice my incapacity has been negotiating. Her question, though, was an ice-breaker, and I fell through, embracing performance as pathology.
A smooth white surface can reflect things: But what, then, if we made a mistake and that which appeared to be reflected in such a surface
were really behind it and seen through it? Would the surface then be white and transparent? Even then what we saw would not cor-respond to something coloured and transparent. (RC §236)
One wonders whether Wittgenstein thought this while sitting, as he pre-ferred, in the first row at the movies, closest to the white screen. His invocation of the error or misperception of transparency in relation to the screen can-not help but evoke the dreaming mind (as does Lake Constance), although Wittgenstein’s rejection of Freudian symbolism means that we must look for the meaning of the behind-ness of surface not in depth but in a sort of self-sameness. “We could paint semi-darkness in semi-darkness. And the ‘right lighting’ of a picture could be semi-darkness. (Stage scene painting)” (RC
§235). What Wittgenstein has in mind is a certain scenic single-mindedness, an overlay of im/possibility whose parameters so coincide with what it alleg-edly is, as to be almost invisible outside itself, its self-regard, and the rules of its language-game. This only appears as (i.e., to be) representation, but is not, does not double so much as it affirms, the way the Ghost’s presence can only be authenticated not by body armor but by Hamlet’s belief. Appearance is not inherently accurate (“We might say, the colour of the ghost is that which I must mix on the palette in order to paint it accurately. But how do we deter-mine what the accurate picture is?” [RC §233]); nor is it real as psychology in some sense imagines. “We can,” says Wittgenstein, “speak of appearance alone, or we can connect appearance with appearance” (RC §232). The best place to hide a white door is in a white wall.
“Are You Dreaming or Are You Speaking?” Lake Constance’s “section of a room that is even larger than the large stage” asks the reader, whose mind is already considering a multi-point perspective scenic solution.2 But what Handke’s opening stage direction wants the reader’s illusionistically expe-rienced and jaundiced eye to consider is how im/possibility is contracted in the mind and our incapacity is a mental experience we cannot logically get beyond. “A wall covered by a brownish-green tapestry with a barely percep-tible pattern” makes it difficult if not impossible to see where the tapestry ends and the wall begins (and vice versa), compounded by the addition of two tapestry doors that may either belong to the overall tapestry pattern or to another unseen pattern entirely. The floor rug’s color matches the tapestry and the dropcloths covering most of the room’s furnishings are “extremely white,” a sign of ghostly masquerade, apparitional seeing that need not be believed to be seen. Similarly upholstered fauteuils (open-armed chairs) and footrests openly conspire in their complementariness, although one of the three chairs stands alone to make us see the object only in relation to itself.
“To the right of the table, a few steps away, stands a small bar, not covered, with several bottles whose forms indicate their respective contents.” Here the mind removes the comma (,) separating “bar” and “not,” revealing (“bar not”) the new, more transparent or behind-the-screen possibility of a bar
Doors of Misperception 91
“not being covered with several bottles whose forms indicate their respective contents,” meaning: (1) the bar, not (or no longer) being covered with bottles, is now free to reveal itself in some other, alternative way; (2) the bar is cov-ered with several bottles but these bottles no longer reveal their contents, so that the bottles themselves take on an air of mystery in terms of what they constitute, how they are constituted, as if but not in a dream (the performa-tive “as if” enabling actual doing and seeing, but also seeming).
In Dial “M” for Murder (1954), Hitchcock pushes a table bar up against the far wall across from where his camera would necessarily have been positioned.
He later reverses this shot, with the same bottles on the same table now occu-pying the foot of the frame nearest to the unseen camera. This is easily done by removing the wall that had been behind the table to allow for the camera’s presence, and it is the camera’s presence, more specifically, the filmic inter-vention on a stage play, that is self-consciously being performed. Hitchcock’s camera placement in relation to the table with the bottles opens up a space of viewership inside the room that makes the recorded play appear to be “live,”
albeit in filmic terms. This impossible viewing position marks the appearance of the space of not-knowing in the midst of being made conscious of what one already really knows about how films are made. What the eye now sees is the bar not, the thing that not-knowing looks like to the mind that is fooling itself.
The “bar not” uncovers the “not covered either” in Handke’s ensuing stage direction, “behind the newspaper table not covered either, with a few bulky magazines,” the “few” aligning with the “several” bottles while asking the begged question how many more/less is “few” than “several”? Three, perhaps, like the aforementioned chairs designated as fauteuils owing to their unevenness, their ghosting of physical impossibility, the “bodies [that] are first and always other—just as others are first and always bodies” (PR §1). “Milk is not opaque because it is white—as if white were something opaque,” Witt-genstein asserts, but neither is it transparent, which is not necessarily to say that it cannot relate to transparent things (RC §242). “Novices must learn to skim over [milky] matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment,” wrote Nabokov (in his novel Transparent Things), and by doing so they overlook the possibility of transparency. Nabokov, who questioned whether we can ever know the nature of thought, possessed a mind that color-sounded written letters. Specifically “the ivory-backed hand mirror of O takes care of the whites,” evoking the back side of both the hand and the mirror, two doubtful signs of representation in Wittgenstein and Handke.3
The spatially evocative proximity of Handke’s “two pictures on the wall concealed behind white sheets” further cites/sights the misalignment of rep-resentation/reproduction, as in the case of “To be generally able to name a colour, is not the same as being able to copy it exactly” (RC §256). Inexact-ness projects upon the three-paneled Japanese screen in which only one of three is “open and visible to the audience” like the aforementioned one-of-three open-armed chair (or, in my case, the one-in-one-of-three open wall mirrored
wall cabinet that meaningfully distorts, unbalances vision). The screen blends into the color of the wall behind it, making the idea and experience of behind-ness opaque, as it is in The Cherry Orchard, which is said to be white and fosters an opaque mentality unable to confront the very reality it represents (i.e., the cherry orchard’s loss). “All that the eye can rationalize is white,”
the mind cannot hear itself think.4 Realism’s delusional metaphor stops at two (i.e., comparison), unlike Handke’s Coleridgean language that stops (points at) one of three, inviting the mind to attend to non-representational, non-reproducible thirdness, or what Foreman calls “unbalancing acts.”5 Handke’s stage directions’ italicizing the impossibility of objects being differ-ently placed onstage than where they are and differdiffer-ently placed than onstage (“Everything appears as though rooted to the spot”) encourages the mind to read the appearance of representational inevitability as a question, not an assertion. The object can only stand (in) for itself.
The question Handke’s scenography asks ghosts Wittgenstein’s “What must our visual picture be like if it is to show us a transparent medium” (RC §175)?
Color is not what it represents. Black is not darkness, even though darkness
“can be depicted as black” (RC §156). Since Wittgenstein and Handke regard simile and metaphor as disputable facts, their writing effectively bares its own devices. Handke’s stage directions play the role of the Wittgensteinian inter-locutor, questioning the writer’s continued use of his devices even as these devices confess their own and the writer’s incapacity. They ask “questions” in quotation marks, as if to say, “in light of this question, here is my text.”
“After the curtain has opened, two portieres to the right and to the left of the proscenium are revealed, as portieres to a chambre séparée.” A portiere is a curtain hanging placed over a door or a doorless entry to a room (i.e., a wall hanging, similar in function to a tapestry, as opposed to a hung door), although it may also refer to a doorkeeper. Handke’s portieres stand in a mise-en-abyme relationship to the stage curtain’s dis/appearance, its physi-cal mock-up of doubt in the face of scenic representational certainty. The relationship between the portieres and the chambre séparée (private room, often a bedroom) reveals no secret meaning in and of itself, although it may suggest secret knowledge, a cultic, symbolic form, like theater that is not an actual world that just is.
On a fauteuil beside the table, his legs on the appropriate footstool, sits emiljannings, his eyes closed. He is quite fat . . . He seems cos-tumed although only hints of a costume are visible . . . He is heavily made-up, the eyebrows are painted. On the right hand, whose nails are lacquered black, he wears several large rings. He has not moved since the curtain opened.
These cinematic actor names are just placeholders for the self-named actors in future productions who “are and play themselves at one and the same time.”6
Doors of Misperception 93 They stand in for themselves, so to speak, calling the question of onstage in/appropriateness. The “appropriateness” of the footstool upon which Jan-nings rests his legs is interrogated by the “inappropriateness” of the black lacquer that has been applied to the fingers of his right hand, marking out the extremities (articulated as “foot” and “hand”) that such designations as
“appropriate” and “inappropriate” define (definition itself being an extreme language-game that Wittgenstein, like Handke, mostly refuses to play). An unnamed woman “walks from object to object and takes off the dropcloths, except those on the paintings and on the statue. Although she moves fairly slowly, her work is proceeding quite rapidly.” We can only reconcile ourselves with/to time within the performance space of a self-interrogating language-game which is but is not in/appropriate. Stage actions are inherently pictorial renderings of transparent representational possibility that must pass through impossibility—for example, simultaneous quickness and slowness—to artic-ulate a thickened sense of what can/not be. But even simultaneity participates in the language-game of comparison, even if it leaves little time for it.
Jannings begins by clearing his throat and saying “As I said” twice and “A bad moment” once, as if meaning to invoke the parameters of theatrical per-formance—presentness and repetition—by means of a performance behavior that articulates meaning as affect, as in Wittgenstein’s example, “I feel dis-comfort and know the cause” (LC §16). Although Jannings has not asked a question, an answer comes from “Someone behind the screen,” another cinema actor manqué named Heinrich George. George answers Jannings’s unasked question with the twice-articulated interrogative “Why?”7 Thus, an answer pertinent to indeterminate cause and affect (Jannings’s unvoiced, “I feel discomfort and don’t know the cause”) is followed by a question that speaks to cause and effect (George’s unspoken “I ask the question because I believe in its relationship to answer—cause and effect.”). Whereupon Jan-nings’s hand and George’s foot fall asleep, playing their (anatomical) parts at a lecture delivered by Wittgenstein (who is boring himself) on the possible meanings of “cause.” But as they do so, they (the hand and foot) are already dreaming of what else George could have meant by asking “Why?” twice (i.e., the incantatory interrogative of performance). The dreaming voice of the speaker (again, Wittgenstein in the interrogative mode of performance) intones:
There is a “Why?” to aesthetic discomfort, not a “cause” to it. The expression of discomfort takes the form of a criticism and not “My mind is not at rest” or something. It might take the form of looking at a picture and saying: “What’s wrong with it?” (LC §19)
“It” takes in wrongness by referring to the picture and to the performance behavior it (the picture) in turn takes in. Accurate representation is both a philosophical and an aesthetic anomaly, begging the questions “what” and
“why,” except as the kind of empty shows of abstract curiosity and concern that an actor reflexively performs. This is how “it” works. Jannings’s sleeping hand is revealed when he is unable to hold onto a cigar box and George’s sleeping foot when he attempts to come to Jannings’s aid.
jannings points at the cigar box. george misunderstands the ges-ture and looks as if there were something to see on the box. jannings agrees to the misunderstanding and now points as if he really wanted to point out something. That blue sky you see on the label, my dear fellow, it really exists there.8
Wittgenstein believed that although phenomenology does not exist, phenom-enological problems do (RC §248), and Handke’s blue-sky label appears to be restating the familiar phenomenological problem of the inauthenticity (the blue-skying) of the image in relation to the object it depicts. Handke is, of course, citing Magritte’s La trahison des images (1928–29), in which the legend “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” is inscribed under a picture of a pipe on a blue-sky background. But Handke and Wittgenstein’s interest is less Magritte’s surface paradox than in the question, troubled by the image’s inter-vention, of what makes language appear to be either transparent or opaque.
Wittgenstein asserted, “One can imagine a use for paradoxical sentences in a logical exercise. But ‘This statement is false’ [or ‘true’] cannot be used to make a self-referential statement about which we can raise the unanswerable question of whether it is true or false.”9 Furthermore, for Wittgenstein “the indeterminateness of the concept of color” (RC §17) is tied up with the prob-lem of comparison as it relates to physical and mental reflection:
Compare with: “In a picture in which a piece of paper gets its light-ness from the blue sky, the sky is lighter than the white paper. And yet in another sense blue is the darker and white the lighter colour (Goethe). On the palette white is the lightest colour.” (RC §2)
Perception is often a matter of mental error, specifically an error of judg-ment, as in “How does someone judge which is his right and which is his left hand? . . . How do I know that this colour is blue? . . . somewhere I must begin with not-doubting. . . . it is part of judging” (OC §150). Per-haps because he cannot bear witness against himself in the language-game of thought-thinking-itself, Wittgenstein fails to say that judging (and not-doubting) is also a language-game in that there is no universally agreed-upon objective criterion to determine the reality (truth being a subset of real-ity) or truth (reality being of a lower moral order than truth) of what we see. The mind’s judgment as to which is the right hand and which the left becomes clouded when the possibility of identical twins, each twin having one right hand and one left, presents itself in Handke’s play. Each twin wears
Doors of Misperception 95 gloves that she hands to another (i.e., not the other), the action defined by the verb “hands” subverting the entire category of hands as a noun that, unlike a verb, can be possessed by an adjective.10 Do I err in judgment reading motiveless gloving up as disingenuously concealing incapacity? Well-man writes, “Glove has no catastrophe,” but to be fair, this proposition is manipulated by the word-making capacity of this sentence’s multi-fingered but specific authorial intelligence (“Fingers are not idle in the mind”), which is not my own. For me, “thought’s glove” will not “stay, quiet, where you drop her.”11
The circularity of his gloved thought is redrawn by Handke at the drop of two hats, one belonging to each twin, which are tossed from character to character as if they cannot imagine “hat” except as a figure of play in a language-game that goes, “Me hat, it has three corners / Three corners has me hat / And if it hadn’t three corners / It would not be me hat”—a round that is recited earlier in the play. The oddness of “three corners” occurring three times and the “hat” occurring three times but not the same three times, speaks to the inexactness or oddness of the synthesis imagined in the mind on the order of “reality” as (a) “three-cornered hat.” The imagined four-handed possession of the imagined three-cornered hat (the twins repeatedly convey objects in multiples of “two,” meaning that “four-cornered,” as the words suggest, would be more logical) can only be expressed in the form of a language-game that on the surface is only understood by those who are playing it. “Everything is working well,” Handke’s stage directions say, but say to whom?12 Certainly not to the characters, not even to the odd twins in whose hands, in whose doubled right- and left-handedness the correction of judgment as being not necessarily real or true, the hat and gloves were initially grasped. (After the twins run into the wings, one of the other unseen two “toss[es] the hats as if they were gloves, letting the gloves sail through the air as if they were hats. One hears them crashing like [the] suitcases”—
that is, like the suitcases with which the twins first entered, and from which
that is, like the suitcases with which the twins first entered, and from which