Uncertainty

 

Where Félix begins to doubt what he calls a “working back” towards a deliberate origin… perhaps forms also come into being in the passage itself, without having been fully conceived in advance. To seek behind every form a first intention is to suppose that it already existed, complete, before its appearance…

Félix’s Journal

I wonder whether, like so  others, I have not, from the very beginning, made a fairly ordinary mistake, the mistake of seeking behind things the will that supposedly produced them, as though every form must necessarily have been preceded by an intention of the same form, only clearer, purer, still invisible but already complete, and as though my task therefore consisted in working my way back from the traces towards that first intention, from the drawing towards the person who supposedly drew it, from the character towards the person who supposedly conceived it, from the strangeness of a hat that is too large, a coat floating around a body, a face that is missing or withdraws from view, towards a decision whose moment need only be recovered for everything, at last, to fall back into place… Yet today I am no longer certain that things happened in this way, or rather — for I must now beware of that habit I still have of replacing one certainty too quickly with another — I am no longer certain that they can ever happen entirely in this way.

I was recently reading a few pages by Maurice Blanchot and was stopped by a sentence I had probably encountered before… without its having remained anchored in my memory. Because, I know, there are sentences that wait for something, within us or around us, to make them visible… or readable… and this something speaks of the most assured work, the one before which everything seems to attest to mastery, to the force of a beginning, and the philosopher adds that it can nevertheless suddenly appear to us as a “work suddenly become invisible again”, as though what we had before our eyes ceased for an instant to be there, or revealed that perhaps it had never been there in the way we thought, and it is this word, again, perhaps even more than the invisibility itself, that has not ceased returning before my eyes ever since, because it does not merely say that something disappears, but suggests that visibility itself may have been a passage, a provisional state between two obscurities, and that a work, far from being simply what comes to take its place at the end of a process, solidly established in its existence as a manufactured object, might be that which appears for a moment, gathers itself together, becomes graspable, then withdraws once more without the paper ceasing to be covered with lines, the stone ceasing to occupy its volume, or the sentences ceasing to remain inscribed upon the page.

I am beginning, then, to understand why some of my questions become increasingly difficult to ask as I go on, for I wanted to know who had done this, what he had intended to do, why this particular line was there, why that head seemed too small beneath that enormous hat, why that mouth was missing, whether one should see in it a decision or a clumsiness, a deliberate gesture or an accident, and I once thought that these questions opened an inquiry, whereas now I wonder whether some of them did not close it before it had even begun, by forcing me too soon to choose between answers that may be opposed only in the way we tell ourselves afterwards what happened, as though the draughtsman must necessarily have known or not known, intended or failed, projected or undergone, whereas a hand may very well not have made a mistake without thereby having decided, in the clear and prior sense of the word, what it was doing.

This possibility now seems considerable to me, precisely because it abolishes neither will, nor work, nor knowledge, nor skill; one must indeed hold the pencil, move the pen, take up a line again, choose to prolong it or interrupt it, one must act, but perhaps the act does not remain enclosed within the thought that precedes it, perhaps in the very course of its accomplishment it produces something that this thought did not yet contain and that the person acting will discover only afterwards, sometimes immediately, sometimes much later, sometimes never, so that the drawing, if I may put it this way, begins to precede its own design, not because it becomes independent of the person tracing it, but because it brings forth something the design had not foreseen, after which what has just appeared in turn modifies the design, which then acts upon the next drawing, and from that point onwards it becomes increasingly difficult to determine what, within this circulation, could truly be said to come first.