Non-Sleeper Agents

The greater the want of space, the more dangerous the thoughts.

—Handke, Kaspar

It was, for all intents and purposes, a paranoid’s dream come true. All hooked up to video cameras and audio monitors that someone else controlled through the connect-the-dots wires that crisscrossed my legs, torso, face, and head. If I scratched a part of my body, they could see me. If I coughed, a dis-embodied voice through the speaker asked me if I needed a glass of water. I wondered (although not aloud) if they could read my mind and see and hear my dreams. I would have to be very careful about not dreaming anything that would either embarrass me or else give away my best writing material. Before bedding down for what I was certain would be a sleepless night in the Sleep Disorders Center (it makes sense, doesn’t it?), I had checked myself in what I was convinced was a one-way window disguised to look like a mirror (what a mirror looks like, I still don’t know). There I beheld a visitor from the future, and it was me. In the next room someone was watching or certainly listening at a very high volume to the TV “reality” show Survivor, naturally making me wonder whether only one of us would wake up early the next morning and get to return to our real life. The woman who hooked me up was herself a sleep apnea sufferer, so the whole affair had the feeling of a rehab center or a prison where you were being inducted and monitored by a lifer.

I know that I dreamed that night, and it was unlike me not to remember what I dreamed. It must have been my mirror image doing the dreaming. And since he was from the future, he must have gotten his wires crossed. Either that or he erased dream-memory by writing over my dreams with thoughts and images that have not yet come to (my) mind. I thought of Major (Col-legiate Assessor) Kovalyov in Gogol’s dream fantasia “The Nose” (Nos in Russian, an inversion of the Russian word for dream, which is son) and his separatist anatomical part, which he calls “a usurping self beyond my con-trol.”¹ I had adapted and staged this story twice in New York, rehearsing

it once in my very small studio apartment so that the actors, who had to make entrances from the hallway, became accustomed to “the want of space”

and the dangerous thoughts this can engender as a mode of performance.

It was all as plain as the nose on my dream, to coin a phrase on the order of Lautréa mont’s surrealist “chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table.”² (There are no “chance encounters” for me as regards umbrellas.) Every dream image is a rehearsal for another dream.

My human sleep monitor told me that she would enter the room quietly while I slept and reattach whatever parts came unglued from me, or, as she put it, “if your eye falls out or your leg falls off.” No wonder my mind turned to thoughts of Gogol’s panicked Major and his quest to get his imperious nose to return to his face. Maybe the tie-in to Survivor (a show I do not watch given my fear of jungles and aversion to confrontation) was that whoever retained the most body parts got to walk out of the room the next morning, or limp out, depending upon which parts had gone missing. Or maybe they were rat-ing us on the vividness of our dreams. If so, my use of dreams as research for my writing put me at a definite disadvantage, since, as I’ve said, I was saving my best material for the books to be written by the then future me.

It is odd how things come together in the mind. As I bang out these words and sentences on a keyboard I think of my recently hospitalized son all hooked up to wires and monitors and of the photo he sent me electronically on which he wrote, “I am a computer.” Or maybe what he should have writ-ten (as I was reading his image on an actual computer screen), after Magritte, was “I am not a computer,” in the same way that I might have said to my mir-ror image at the Sleep Disorders Center “I am not the future me.” Of course, my son is in some biological sense the future me. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that I had anxiously dreamed up the image of myself covered with plug-in external wiring in a closely monitored facsimile clean room as an act of sympathetic magic to hasten the release into the world of a healthy, mobile, wireless version of my son.

What if my sleep monitor was assigned to go from room to room and from dream to dream collecting body parts, like Coppelius in Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816; I have left this title untranslated, because it is more frightening to me in German), who steals the eyes of children who cannot or will not sleep? “I will come into your room quietly if your eye falls out,”

my sleep monitor said. Coppelius was said to have fed the eyes he stole from sleepless children to his own children, who lived on the moon. Maybe my monitor needed my body parts to build the future me who is still beyond my wildest dreams of there being a future in which I am not only living but living on the moon in which the future is inscribed.

The prologue to Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” (1909) begins, “We have been up all night. . . ,” and the manifesto proper exalts “feverish sleeplessness”

over “pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber.”³ This, my near-future me rechristens “The Insomniac Manifesto,” of which I soon became a co-signer.

Non-Sleeper Agents 149

“The minute man ‘knows,’ he sleeps,” Lev Shestov wrote, and Foreman (the pre- or future-man?) took this to mean that as soon as you think you know, or fall back upon what you know, you are asleep. But here, we might say, there is an instantaneous, invisible passage—another form of overwriting—

that says I cannot sleep because I do not know, I cannot know. Cannot know what?—that I am not sleeping or that I am sleepwalking? Wittgenstein won-dered if the sleepwalker does not think, can he be said to remember? (LPP, December 2, 1946).⁴ If not, can the sleepwalker dream? Can the insomniac?

What does it mean to say, “I cannot sleep”?

My fantasy, though, was not about the father but of the son. In Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg (1913; rev. 1922), Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, a dilettante in all things including political revolution, lives upstairs in the house owned by his father, conservative senator Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov.

The son has hazily compacted with a revolutionary cell to assassinate his father by concealing a bomb in a sardine tin (the thought-object) inside his father’s desk drawer. The son is invaded by bodyless thoughts that devoid of memory nevertheless coalesce into a perspicuous (surveyable) mental state:

And there were swarms of thoughts thinking themselves; and it was not he thinking, but thoughts thinking themselves—something was being thought, was being sketched, was arising. And it leaped in the heart, bored inside the brain. It was rising above the sardine tin, it had crawled out of the sardine tin into him. He had hidden the sardine tin, it seems, in his desk, and had leaped out of the accursed house.⁵ Wittgenstein believed that “a main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words.—Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable [also translated as “perspicuous”]

representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’ . . . It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a ‘Weltanshauung’?)” (PI §122).⁶ But what does this surveyable representation look like—a field or a fable, a chair or a table?

Orgon or not-Orgon . . . that is the question? How can Nikolai make so much of what he remembers so little? How did this shut-in, this bomb in a can un-house thought and yet become embodied? “Is there then no mind, but only a body?” asks Wittgenstein. “Answer: The word ‘mind’ has meaning, i.e., it has a use in our language; but saying this doesn’t yet say what kind of use we make of it” (BB §12). Is the mind in the sense of a surveyable, perspicuous mentality impossible to see except as an implausible object, like Gogol’s giant “Nose,” that is, as (if in) a dream (son)?

“Here,” says Oswald Hanfling, “is another substantive in search of a cor-responding object: the substantive ‘mind,’ we may feel, would be meaningless if there was no such object. But this is not so: the word has meaning—a use—

in the language; only it is not that of standing for a kind of object [unlike, say,

“brain”].”⁷ The Ableukhovs engage in a conversation that begins and ends with a materialized sensation in the would-be bomber son that interferes with and replaces his father’s future dematerialization by the bomb:

Having been deprived of his body, he nonetheless felt his body: the invisible center, which had formerly been consciousness, seemed to have a semblance of what it had been. Logic had turned into bones, and syllogisms were wrapped all around the sinews. The contents of logic were now covered with flesh. Thus the “I” again presented its corporeal image, although it was not body. And that which had exploded was revealed an alien “I”. . . .

“Oh! Oh! What then is ‘I am’?”

“A zero.”

“And zero?”

“A bomb.”

Nikolai Apollonovich understood that he himself was a bomb.

And he burst with a boom.⁸

Bely compels the protagonistic “I” that so troubled Wittgenstein to enter into a zero sum language-game with itself, in which solipsism (in the form of a thought-object) effectively blows itself up. The contents are kept under pres-sure inside a sardine tin, like an agoraphobe inside her smaller-than-life-size but form-fitting house, in which the world exceeds thought’s limit. The “I”

(or “he himself”) is the “boom” and the room, the site of rupture, wired to go off as if in a dream (a son). “The appendix bursts,” says Kaspar. “The grenade bursts. If the appendix couldn’t burst, you couldn’t say: the grenade bursts.”⁹ And with that thought, my son’s appendix did not simply rupture—it burst, while he was waiting in a hospital to be seen.

It pains me to say that I may again have been playing the role of the men-tally disordered adventurer Baron von Münchhausen of story and syndrome, who, among other things, was said to have traveled to the moon. Did I travel to the dark side of the moon to fetch my son a new kidney or liver, or was I too busy affixing dots with electrodes to my own head, face, and body like so many children’s eyes? My son wants to be an actor. “Me first,” a voice inside me says. But does this mean me instead of you or me in advance of you (the avant-gardist as solipsist), and are “instead” and “advance” of him protective or selfish stances to assume? Is this the future me speaking, the me I viewed in the mirror at the very center of sleep disorders? The doppelganger or extra me may in fact be an encryption according to Wittgenstein’s proposition, “It is a property of affirmation that it can be conceived as double denial” (TLP

§6.231), wherein no extra space is needed to take place.

But then how could I say what the world is if the realm of ideas has no neighbour?¹⁰

Non-Sleeper Agents 151 When my son was young and playing with a ball in the street, it invari-ably rolled into my then pre-agoraphobic neighbor’s yard. She would dress him down and confiscate the ball, which thereafter went to live in her house never to be seen again. In the object’s disappearance was invisibly inscribed an agoraphobic rehearsal of self-retrieval and confiscation of externality. For my neighbor, space and time soon enough became objects themselves, could no longer be processed as process. The object of disappearance has left her self-absorbed. “The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world” (TLP §5.632). What better definition could there be of (an)

“agoraphobe,” whose asymmetry has become an apparent symptom and sign of my own imagining? In the avowal “I am an agoraphobe,” “the ‘I’ can never get away from the consciousness it (allegedly independently) attributes to itself or judges itself to possess.”¹¹ If pathology can be said to decide, the agoraphobe is living not just with but inside her decision. Therein lies Wittgenstein’s portrait of consciousness’s (including body consciousness’s) self-contestation: “A man’s thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view” (PI, part 2, §xi). This self-contestation underscores the stan-dard picture of the agoraphobe that is based upon nothing so much as her not being seen. The agoraphobe invokes the claim of hiddenness in thought-space, of the (extreme limit-condition of) private language that, as it is not being heard, does not enter into the public realm in which language-games are played. Can there be a picture of secluded thought? Her physical seclu-sion makes the agoraphobe physically yet invisibly confessed, but beyond that she is another figure of our not-knowing. She is also a figure of my own self-contesting claim to uniqueness, singularity and solitude, phobia and solipsism, of my mental complaint, that which I would not do because I cannot do it (i.e., my incapacity). The agoraphobe inhabits a world of self-delusion, her strategy succeeding only in her failure to exceed its limits in the way that it publicly shows itself (failure) as something (not) to be seen.

Self-absorption has robbed the agoraphobe of the possibility of neigh-borliness, but then even the notion of an agoraphobic neighbor sounds implausible yet inescapable, as in E. M. Cioran’s assessment that “there is nothing else in the world more odious than the neighbor. To know that he/

she is so close to us stifles us and turns our days into hell.”¹² Cioran’s own insomnia, linked by his own admission to thanatophobia, positions him in a constant, waking state of extreme watchfulness: “The human being is noth-ing but a benoth-ing who keeps watch/is awake and insomnia is nothnoth-ing but a punishment for the state of wakefulness.” The alternative to wakefulness, one assumes, is loss of consciousness, death. Emmanuel Levinas viewed philoso-phy as being a call to “infinite responsibility, to an untiring wakefulness, to a total insomnia.”¹³ But here, of course, “wakefulness” means two different things, as a word so often does in Wittgenstein, whose proposition, “It is a property of affirmation that it can be conceived as double denial” captures

what the philosopher Cioran effectively did with Levinas’s positive thought.

Insomnia for Levinas makes hiding in oneself impossible, owing to the open-ing of consciousness by continual wakefulness. And yet to be insomniac is to be isolated (and in some sense hidden) from others like the agoraphobe, like the obsessive-compulsive (and like the intellectual in Cioran’s opinion), constantly “spinning the wheels of the brain.”¹⁴

Wittgenstein’s philosophy and obsessive-compulsive disorder pass each other somewhere in their shared, self-tormenting wakeful state. Here “What bloody man is that?” is a question for the self, wearing incapacity’s abject dis-guise, maybe that of a ghost returned from the death of dreams, the sleepless state. The interrupted lives of others, like that of my agoraphobic neighbor, are tried on for size, the mind hoping all the while for the perfect fit between performance and the condition it assumes, between the condition and the performance it assumes.

Anne Dufourmantelle writes that “philosophy was born with anxiety, with questioning, with insomnia. It takes upon itself the ills of the world, and thus it cannot sleep.”¹⁵ Willis Regier adds, “This is executive philosophy, whose duty it is to convert worry into analysis.” It is a short and logical step from this combined thought construction to obsessive thought, as Regier further notes: “The insomniac is bound to think about insomnia, and about what it does to thinking. In the wink of an eye, insomnia slips from thought to obsession, from earnest doubt to pitiless masochism and misanthropy.”

This again invokes Wittgenstein’s theory of private experience, which is not known because it cannot be seen and yet can be imagined as something that we don’t know. We cannot know everything, but we cannot not know every-thing either. Even incapacity has (must have?) its limits, but is it more or less solipsistic to say so?¹⁶

Could there be a more obsessive thought than “I am an agoraphobe” or a more compulsive practice than that of agoraphobia? Is agoraphobia the surrender of understanding in the breaking off of communication with the world at large, or is it more of an opting out of the language-game that operates according to common assumptions? Is agoraphobia a search for a form of communication with which only she must contend—render conten-tious and misunderstood? The agoraphobe is the spatial working out of the grammatical figure of thought thinking itself. She has reduced herself to the language of space, of spatial thinking (I cannot imagine what she does with her time). She is linguistically solipsistic, an aphorism; she is the resolution of a proposition, the possibility of living in only one possible way among all of the other possible ways, which defines compulsion in terms of the self. She is anti-polysemic, polysemy incapacitated.

I include here a reminder that I wrote to myself concerning storage and spoilage: “To prevent mold, limit the surface area of any food stored in a jar or container; do not scrape food along sides of jar; store leftovers in the smallest possible container.” Does the agoraphobe view herself as being the

Non-Sleeper Agents 153 remainder, the last of something, like the protagonist of Markson’s aphoristic novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988), who is or thinks she is the last person left on earth? Markson’s novel skillfully achieves what Wittgenstein’s own writing does, which is to “expound the nature and limits of language in terms of its structure; [showing that] the limits of language could be made evident and did not have to be stated explicitly.” (We never discover whether or not Kate is the last person on earth, since that is really not the point.)¹⁷ The novel takes its epigraph from Kierkegaard: “What an extraordinary change takes place . . . when for the first time the fact that everything depends upon how a thing is thought first enters the consciousness, when, in consequence, thought in its absoluteness replaces an apparent reality.”¹⁸ What is agoraphobia, if not thought in its absoluteness? How often, like Markson’s protagonist in her post-apocalyptic tale of catastrophe and abandonment, does an agoraphobe dream of burning down her house, like the insomniac who dreams (without sleeping) of suicide? Cioran believed that the idea of suicide, which visited

Im Dokument Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior (Seite 162-200)