On Hiatus: Liminality Troubling the Clocks of Modernity

On Hiatus

Liminality Troubling the Clocks of Modernity

Suzi Asa 11650559

Master of Arts and Culture

Graduate School of Humanities Cultural Analysis (Research)

Master’s Thesis

Supervisor: Dr. Joost de Bloois Second Reader: Dr. Barbara Titus

15.06.2019

On Hiatus

Liminality Troubling the Clocks of Modernity

- Does that come to pass? – No, it doesn’t. - Something comes, however. - In waiting that stops and leaves all coming behind.

Table of Contents

Introduction 5

1. A Leakage in the Room 15

1.1 Marking Time of Its Own 16

1.2 Problematic of Spatializing Time 22 1.3 Liminal Time as a Form of Duration 25

2. Listening to An Aperture 30

2.1 Recording of the Voice 32

2.2 Temporalization of the Voice 37

2.3 Split in the Voice 41

3. The Interval of Nothingness 47

3.1 Punctuality of the Instant 52

3.3 Rhythm as a Non-Modern Settlement 61

Conclusion 64

Acknowledgements 68

Works Cited 69

Introduction:

Is there a way to mark time that can shift us to the unmappable areas of description? How to enlarge/zoom in to those interstitial realms, that can take us into a world of typologies of weird dimensions? If such a device (a sort of kaleidoscope that troubles time?) would exist, other kinds of potentialities might emerge/spawn than those that serve to singular determinist time of capitalism/colonialism/militarism. Temporalities that leak through the cracks might freely enact their own coordinates, in their own times, in those spaces that are seemingly made out of void. They might let us tune in to other nuances that were once out of reach. What if we already have those interstitial realms amidst liminal experiences? In this world, experiences like growing up (never growing “down”) makes one to move towards progressive stairways of times of capitalism synchronized only to a Future.

But growing up harbor the most ambivalent experiences (like in times of infancy when one is in-between crawling and walking) that no clock of capitalism has a pointer that might point to those liminal moments. So, what if growing “up” while growing “down”, growing towards not only to a Future but growing diffractively, demands one to trouble time, trouble life and death?

Interstitial realms are in nature reside in liminal zones that are often described as unclassifiable and ambiguous. Liminality provides no firm time/space that can be understood in quantifiable terms. Thinking the notion of liminality takes one to welcome indeterminacies braided in time that are attuned to unstable temporalities. The clock of an in between, or of the limen, does not point at a single position, marking one time at a time. Then, what is the metric of an in-between? How to measure those gaps among aggregations? Once one is courageous enough to look through the cracks, perhaps the infinite plentitude of liminal temporalities speaks for itself. Irrationality embedded in such liminal moments have often encouraged social scientists to provide ‘solutions’ to those crisis situations.

First developed by Arnold van Gennep, in social anthropology, liminality captures in-between situations and conditions characterized by the dislocation of established structures, the reversal of hierarchies, and uncertainty about the continuity of tradition and future outcomes (Horvath et al. 2). Liminality was intimately connected with ideas of social cohesion, as part of the then emerging “process approach”. According to this approach,

liminality occurs as a temporary phase in one’s lifetime, when one enters into a delicate, uncertain state. This is a state that resides in between stages of crucial experiences like ‘passing’ from childhood to adulthood.Following van Gennep, Turner placed processual structure of ‘rites of passage’ at the core of anthropology, hence, at the core of human experience. Turner considered the sequential order of a rite of passage, the structure of lived experience, as underlying structure of what happens when somebody is “at the limit” (Ritual

Process 95). For instance, as rites that are considered the most typical, the rites

of initiation, exemplify how an initiand go through a series of crucial experiences to accomplish maturity to become an adult (Szakolczai, Breaking

Boundaries 17). Such transition to adulthood “accomplished” only if one

undergoes a separation by leaving something behind, for instance, when “dying” as a child. This is a concern comes from anthropological structuralism and a philosophical tradition that is “hooked on belief in predetermined orderings” (Horvath et al. 190). As opposed to many social scientists treating crisis situations as disturbances and pathologies, Thomassen, Horvath and Wydra considered liminality as a powerful tool of analysis to understand transformations in contemporary world. In their introduction the authors highlight how guiding paradigms of most political and sociological research are quite limited because they bypass people’s need to make sense of voids of meaning and challenges cultural environment (Horvath et al. 2). The idea that ‘rites of passage’, structured in a sequential order, supposes ways in which to successfully “complete” one’s passage

experience in a particular time/space, to pass on to the other rite. Rethinking the passage experiences in a temporality that goes beyond the succession of a single rite/stage is one crucial aspect of this thesis. By avoiding from a neat classification of liminal experiences, this thesis, hopefully, will enable rethinking liminal times as durations that do not require stabilizing repairs/rational restorations of order.

In the chapter “Liminality and Experience: Structuring Transitory Situations and Transformative Events” Szakolczai mentions how Dilthey and Nietzsche tried to focus on personal lived experience in an attempt to move beyond the fixity of the subject and the reduction of experience to objectivity but how they never managed to capture the exact nature of the structure of experience (Breaking Boundaries 16). According to Szakolczai, Turner “solved” these problems by proposing the sequential and processual order of a rite of passage, as the structure of lived experience, following this idea: the child has died, but only to reborn as an adult (Breaking Boundaries 18). How come a personal processual journey with liminal moment(s) of one’s own, betwixt two structured orders, can be considered as matter of one and only sequential order? How come it is considered sequential when the messy, ambiguous and untimely nature of liminal moments might leak towards other times, create other temporalities with no single pointing position? Once a sequential order is established, an idea of time that is attuned to a succession of discrete moments is also presupposed. This presupposition is closely tied with progressivist notion of time. Progressivist notion of time is made out of

successive moments, replacing one another in a linear, sequential order. Liminal periods were considered as an engine of these orderly flowing timelines, as part of rites. Another important attempt of this thesis is to explore liminality outside of this sequential order. As Bernhard Giesen argues, sociology of ambivalence aims to ‘cover’ ambiguity by considering liminal moments as “indispensable elements of order” (62). Then perhaps another interesting question to dwell on is who actually speaks for/from liminality. In general, in which/whose frames liminal is heard?

Liminoid, spawn from the liminal, develops outside that framework of ritual passage. According to Victor Turner, it no longer refers to the collectively agreed upon rituals at the core of society, but rather as individualized searches for excitement at the (spatial and temporal) fringes of the social (Thomassen 186). Thomassen further generates this concept and coins another one: Limivoid. Limivoid refers to a void of experiential substance or transformative potential, a jump into nothingness, as a sort of a play with void. In an attempt to characterize politics of modernity, Thomassen highlights the way in which is dealt with limits, and the limitless yet skips to elaborate on void (169). Liminal, transforming first into liminoid and then to limivoid, is starting to free from its initial firm position. In this thesis the concept of liminality, hopefully will be freed even more from structural ways of thinking, from rites that has beginning and ending points and from a spatial position where it is considered as a temporary “phase” for the sake of “completing” a single rite. Three different objects of my analysis of

this thesis enact different ways of exploring what an in-between state can offer. In this thesis I will be using an understanding of time that is not bounded by any single markers and using the time of liminality is in nature durational. Following mostly Bergson’s and Derrida’s ideas on time, this thesis offers to rethink how to trouble the progressivist notion of time by liminality in temporal terms. In her book Thinking in Time: An Introduction to

Henri Bergson Suzanne Guerlac analyzes works of Henri Bergson and she

describes how duration, as comprising multiplicity at its core, is a concept that Bergson radically differentiates from the understanding of space (Guerlac 60). Similarly, in his work Speech and Phenomena Jacques Derrida argues that the space is “in” time, it is time’s pure leaving itself, but the externality of/as space does not overtake time (86). Spatial presuppositions of Western thought overrides liminal temporalities spawn in time. In fact, those liminal moments, in between states of nothingness, does not offer absence but rather present agential resources of indeterminacy which might radically change how we treat time.

I ask how my objects shake time, including the cohesively framed liminal time to its core, and how they produce collective imaginaries that open up different understandings of the liminal. Each of my objects involve a certain kind of presence, entangled in the present. They situate the viewer/reader/listener in different forms of present-ness, in differing 0s, and show that there is an internal paradox within this present-ness. Liminal periods position individuals into a time that is considered neither present nor

past. This makes liminality an issue of temporality (more than spatiality) as much as an issue of ontology. Ontologically speaking one can never be fully present (not absent) when this much of uncertainty takes over everything. Szakolczai mentions that the delicate, malleable and uncertain (perhaps fragile) states of liminality alters the very core of one’s being (Breaking

Boundaries 18). This is where an ontological presence and a temporal present

tie together: If one is not fully present in a present time but also not absent in a time that is passed, how can one ever be actually present in times of capitalism, in a progressivist notion of time?

Derrida asserts how non self-belonging, non-presence, and non-now must be understood as “having a constitutive value” of living present (7). Throughout my chapters, this entwined state of presence and non-presence will be touched upon in relation to liminal temporalities. In the chapter ‘Paradox of the Present’ in his book The Scent of Time, Byung-Chul Han argues how there is no in-between anymore in contemporary world, since there are only two conditions left: nothing and the present (49). In lives that are synchronized to the times of capitalism, not much is allowed to oscillate in-between. Han further emphasizes the potentialities of liminal temporalities by mentioning how human life is “impoverished when all forms of in-between are removed from it” (49).

In this thesis, I explore how to rethink the concept of liminality in an understanding of time that is continually escaping from itself and never flow progressively towards a Future. This will be a Bergsonian understanding of

time that contests with times of capitalism/colonialism/militarism; it privileges time over space, quality over quantity, multiplicity over singularity and indeterminacy over progress. Drawing on from three objects with different mediums, I propose to reframe the concept of liminality by resisting to quantifiable, singular and progressive ways of marking time.

Here by Richard McGuire:

Richard McGuire’s graphic work/novel/text Here uses inset panels to oscillate between various moments in time within a single space. The complex temporality in a corner of this single room offers many avenues of interpretation for the reader, attacks to linear/teleological ideas of time and undo/disturb legibility. Each page is itself a dated panel with further differently dated panels overlapping each other, revealing the layers of a corner. As Thierry Groensteen describes in his book Comics and Narration in usual narratives, multi frame in comic art become an instrument for converting space into time, into duration (359). Following Bergson, in my analysis, I will try to focus on the concept of duration and use it as a tool to understand duration of time in Here that is constantly in flux outside of the spatial borders of the room.

I am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier:

Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room demonstrates Lucier’s own recorded voice speaking in single a room. For fifteen generations of his taped speech, each previous recording becomes what is then recorded in the same

space. The voice belongs to Lucier “himself”, but after a while, the sound of the room, “itself”, displaces his words. He began this process by reading a short personal statement about this recording process. In his text he mentions how the recording will pick up the resonance of the room and feed it back, amplifying and articulating it through the sound of his own speaking voice. He also explains his desire to smooth out any irregularities that his recorded speech might have. What other types of beings spawn when we start measuring those ir-regularities of speech? What is left not measured? What is left (not) strengthened out/smooth out? As he speaks, his voice in its sound sculpts the room it traverses. We hear a present without presence. Lucier’s voice stretches beyond its own peril. His recordings are like a very long tone shifting between raw (noise) and cooked (sound), perhaps wavering somewhere in between, somewhere liminal. Drawing on from Dolar and Derrida, how non-presence irreducibly constitute one’s own voice will be discussed.

0 – now ruler by Cevdet Erek:

Rulers are the tools to measure fixed identities, concrete buildings or finite materials. They are made to measure space and hence an apparatus that is part of a spatial imagination. Every time they measure things, they (re) situate and (re) fix their positions within spaces. Cevdet Erek’s 0-now ruler is not meant to measure things within spaces but rather shakes the idea of measuring in a singular/determinate time and space. His work addresses

how time opens up interstices between two different types of imagination: temporal and spatial. Instead of being ruling rulers that discipline time and space, his rulers ask one to draw immeasurable moments in time. Bülent Tanju describes his rulers as perverted and oblique ones that paw at the cracks (59). Erek identifies his rulers as ‘timeline makers’ (“Rulers and Rhythm Studies”). In fact, this act of making/marking time becomes apparent specifically in this ruler since it proposes a metric between 0 and now, supposedly to measure a liminal zone. What does to measure time do to the ideas of now/non-now using a ruler (a spatial measurement device)? Specifically, can such a ruler ever record liminal temporalities that scatter outside of the time of modernity?

In the light of these three objects, each chapter targets a particular set of arguments, threaded through one another, which traverse along the ways to suspend linear notion of marking time by rethinking the concept of liminality. The three chapters thus focus on attacking progressive understandings of marking time and the idea of unalloyed presence by proposing liminality as a concept that continually opens up cracks in deterministic/singular ways of treating time. Non-linear frames in Here enacts durational ways of treating liminal times. Continually re-recorded voice in I am Sitting in a Room spawn temporal leakages that discerns gaps between the subject of the voice and the recordings. Lastly, 0-now ruler provide non-modern ways to treat time by collapsing the objective ways of measurement since it is irreducibly constituted by non-now.

The first chapter concentrates on multiplicity in time that provides different ways of marking time as discerned in Richard McGuire’s work Here. Departing from this visual object, I want to uncover how it destructs a notion of time that no longer treats time as singular, determinate and quantifiable. Drawing on Barad’s ideas on undoing pervasive conceptions of temporality that take progress as inevitable, and the past as something that has passed, this chapter specifically about un-doing ideas of progress (“Troubling Times” 57). Our ways of structuring time and making it meaningful are strongly related to how we think about temporality and space. Anchored at Henri Bergson’s assertion on duration, which he considers as a concept that is “immeasurable and unquantifiable continuous flow/passage (or becoming) of time”, I will be exploring the ways to expand the concept of liminality from Turner’s and Gennep’s. The static space (corner of the room) and the multiple temporalities in Here will be my main focus in understanding the relationship between time/space and anything in-between.

Moving on from breaking out the narratives of progress, second chapter will be exploring how the medium of recording discerns a hiatus, replete with ambiguity, in which other temporal rhythms with their own narrative forms are fructified. The second chapter focuses on the piece I am

Sitting in a Room in an attempt to explore the role of ambiguity (perhaps also

the void/nothingness) in the recorded voice, in which each successive recording destructs the one before it. This chapter proposes an analysis on how the end of the linear constitution of the world does not result in loss

since (ambiguous) temporal intervals spawn “new forms of being and perceiving” (Byung-Chul Han, 51). The role of the recording medium will also be discussed in relation to what it enacts in liminal temporalities. I ask how time could be sounded and whether temporalization is a movement of differentiation. Drawing on the ideas of multiplicity of time for Serres, Barad and Bergson I propose to continue rethinking about liminality in terms of time by looking closely to an idea of non-presence braided in the ‘ghostly’ voice of Lucier.

The third and the last chapter was triggered by this question when I first encountered with Erek’s 0-now ruler: What if there exists a passageway of a space, which does not aim to connect but opening up a void? The idea of multiplicity of time and experience shakes the idea of objective measurement within the understanding of what it means to (not) measure. Having investigated the concepts like duration and non-presence in relation to liminality, in this chapter Erek’s 0-now ruler will be providing ways (through a concrete device) to welcome liminal temporalities. Erek often works in/through spaces where passages/passageways do not have to serve a function to connect two distinct zones, but rather open up possibilities of ambiguous breadths of void in space. In his works liminal temporalities do not function to bridge different spaces. In cultural measures Western thought tend to spatialize time (Guerlac 65). But Erek’s playful subversion of the orders of time through his ruler(s), give access to rhythms that pulse as deviant forces against singular/deterministic understandings of time. This

chapter will explore the collapse of objective measurement where time, as plenitude, becomes heterogenous, informal and multifaceted (Heathfield, 98).

Chapter 1:

A LEAKAGE IN THE ROOM

Here, by Richard McGuire, offer a story that is full of holes, that appear

as indeterminacies in a single corner of a room. Instead of offering a staid reinforcement of linear progression of historicist time, the space in Here seemingly stay static while the narrative is continually leak away from a firm understanding of linear time. Aesthetic tension is not created by a linearly progressing story line but by the superimposition and compression of moments. Deriving from the Greek word peras (limit), Szakolczai investigates

per derivatives and mentions how linguists emphasize that the original

meaning of limit implied a concrete spatial sequence, rather than a temporal one (Breaking Boundaries 19). Durational liminality contests the idea of a sort of liminality that is bounded by spatiality. Here offers ways for thinking time in its pure multiplicity, asynchrony and instability.

Thinking the time of history as a continuity on a calendrical timeline would be a mistake since it is “intercalated by discontinuous events” (Foucault Power/Knowledge 49) or as Serres says “turbulences” (Genesis 110). The mundane events/banal occurrences happening in the panels of Here are marked by specific dates; yet Here oppose fixity of the visual image in a fixed time since the narrative in Here flow in a non-linear manner. Asynchronous

and multiple connections between image and time in Here make me wonder about the agential capacities of each visual as well as their enabling and disabling conditions together.

1.1 Making Time of its Own:

In Here not only the panels enter into a dialogue with each other but also the changing temporalities. Events in the panels establish a non-linear relationship among non-adjacent pages, therefore, times. In her article Sticky

Images: The Foreshortening of Time in an Art of Duration Mieke Bal argues

against a historical perspective that presuppose time as a continuum that can be divided into successive orderings and the dominating assumption of images unfold in space, texts in time (62). Bal proposes that images can evoke and represent time as well, the past, the future or two or moments simultaneously (63). There exists very little text in Here, therefore, one spends

more time in reading an image, than text. Even though images take space

(both a mental space and a physical space) so does text too. This makes it impossible to measure text only by its processing time or image by its ontological mode of existence. Disrupted time in Here does not fix the images in their stillness; rather images make their own time that is not fixed to the dates that they are framed into.

Fig. 1 Here Richard McGuire

Here starts with this question of woman in figure 1: “Hımm… Now

why did I come in here again?” Time panels in Here let the reader glimpse anterior states of certain images, in collaboration with their present. As exemplified in figure 1, panels also let the characters of the book flow in this same asynchrony. Throughout the book, themes of forgetting and remembrance appear in certain phrases or dialogues. In Here, forgetting and remembrance are closely tied with how time is inhabited. Drawing from an idea of past that coexists with the present, figure 1, posits an image that cannot be broken down to separate times to its constituent parts. Uncoupling past and present is not easy even with the stated dates on left corners. Bergson’s thoughts on time inform Deleuze’s philosophy concerning time’s

operation in film through the crystal–image. According to Deleuze, in the crystal-image, the simultaneous existence of past and present is exemplified visually through the medium of cinema (69). This idea of entanglement of times refers to the indiscernibility of the actual and a virtual image. For Deleuze, the coalescence of the actual and a virtual image, just like real/imaginary or past/present, are not produced in the head, but has objective characteristics, which are by nature double (69). The illusion of dejàvu or ‘paramnesia’ is exemplified by Bergson to make this point perceptible in real life (Guerlac 129). They are often defined as the phenomena of finding a particular place/time familiar, already having been there or feeling those feelings exactly like before. According to Bergson, this is the simultaneous existence of the past and present; moments of actual experience unrolled in time as it duplicates itself along with a virtual existence, a mirror image (Deleuze 79). Here starts off by presenting the indiscernibility of the real and the imaginary, of the present and past, just like Deleuze have sought to explore the commingling of actual and virtual image. The woman’s feelings of forgetting in figure 1, signals a remembrance since she asks: “why did I come in here again?” The image’s dual role of being past and present, still present and already past, open us another kind of time that is not yet actualized. Regarding this state of being not-yet-actualized, Deleuze argues that virtual image is in accordance with the actual present, of which it is the past, and as pure virtuality it does not have to be actualized (Time Image 80). Yet, the virtual is ‘real’ but not in ‘reality’ that is why virtual is not simply

‘waiting to be actualized’. What is not-yet-actualized is often considered as important characteristics of ambiguous states. Times that are situated in-between; the liminal phases of societies are often controlled or constrained by modernity (Thomassen 11). Those liminal times, times that are not-yet-actualized therefore ambiguous, abstain establishing a firm separation between past and present. In those states, past freely coexist with the present because of the ambivalent nature of liminal times. In Here, observing this coexistence become possible in most of the pages like figure 1. This entanglement (yet not unification) becomes crucial in understanding what spawns from the emergence of liminality. This new liminal time holds us in its interior and the reader moves through it. In his book Time Image, Deleuze argues, this is how we operate in time in general because if the image was not already past at the same time, present time would never pass on (79). The image of the past in present is liminal and has a function of signaling infinite virtualities.

Fig. 2 Here Richard McGuire

In figure two, men replacing the wallpapers signal a certain kind of change. The change of the wallpapers might be related to a change of the householders or to a change in aesthetic choice of the residents. While the man on the left scrapes off the wallpaper, the man on the right installs a new one on the current one. These two different mundane actions depicted in the panels stretches beyond their own time (their own time is stated as 1960 and 1949 on the left corner of the panels). Both men touch onto other times through their action of changing the material layers of the walls of the room. They both involve in an everyday action that discern/conceal the layers of the walls of the room. Each and every layer of wallpaper belongs to different times in which they were covering the walls. Not all those times are stated (textually) in the book but the images have the potential to reveal the multiplicity in time. Yet, images not only reveal multiple temporalities, but they are also making their own time by signaling a material change. In the fourth book of the Physics, Aristotle argues that time is not change itself, but it is related to change since it cannot exist apart from change (43). Once we perceive that we have changed in our mind, we tend to perceive the passage of time. As Ursula Coope puts it “we take it for granted that there can be no change without time” (38). Aristotle illustrates this ordinary judgment by exploring the now. According to him, if the now were not different but one and the same, there would be no time, and in the same way if the now is different but is not noticed to be different, what is in between does not seem

to be any time (43). In other words, between the difference that is noticed/perceived and the now that is lived, there lie time(s). The different layers of wallpapers accumulated onto each other are physical manifestations of the residues of changing times. Regarding the relation between urban palimpsests and memory Andreas Huyssen explores how after the fall of the Berlin Wall the void discerned by the wall worked as an archive of an “invisible history, with memories of architecture both built and unbuilt” (58). Wall-paper, as a material, both functions to layer and inherently is a layer. This dual nature of wallpapers immerses them with multiple temporalities; they inevitably discern different layers of time. Old lady in the middle of the page saying: “The older I get the less I know” signals another kind of change, a biological one: aging. Aging in time, and changing in time, does not fit into a. understanding of now that is singular. In Here, the dated panels (which can be considered as the now of those panels) making time that are multiple and constantly changing. This change does not imply a progressive change. Walter Benjamin has described progressivist notion of time as ‘homogenous and empty time’ and he emphasizes the importance of making a critique initially on the concept of progress itself (395). In the coming chapters the impossibility of punctuating a now will be elaborated more. For now, let us highlight how the progressivist notion of time serve to the times of modernity. Barad have argued that the times of capitalism/colonialism/ militarism are attuned to a progression/succession of discrete moments where each moment is understood to be the thinnest slice of time as if they

are measurable units (“Troubling Times” 60) Images are the very agents in

Here that make time their medium. No single moment (corresponding to a

single visual) in Here, repeat the one before it. The moments in Here, in this particular corner of the room, are not the thinnest slice of time since the past is never a past that has passed. Each visual makes their own unique times irreducibly to its dated panel. This act of making time fructifies a different understanding of time than progressivist notion of time which propose making a singular, quantifiable and determinate calendrical timelines.

In her work “Women’s Time” Julia Kristeva described historical time as a sort of time that declares time as “departure, progression and arrival”, always unfolding with the idea of “advancement and development” (17). The progressivist notion of time take progress as inevitable to be able to move. Hence, it is always about movement rather than stagnation/stillness. This movement always flow in space and take space. This makes the problematic of linear historical time indissociable from space. Kristeva has quoted Joyce saying “Father’s time, mother’s species” to explain how one think more of the space when generating and forming the human species than of time (15). In her article “Time Frames: Graphic Narrative and Historiography in Richard Mcguire’s Here” Moncion suggests that what holds together the overlapping panels in Here is the unity of space (204). As opposed to her, I believe an idea of duration, that is beyond the dated times, binds the panels. Those multiple temporalities that are spawn from reading of the images in Here are no longer linked with irreducibly to space, the static corner of the room. The sort of time

that is in between, that is liminal, resides outside of spatial borders of the room since it cannot stay static (as the room) but constantly change. I will further analyze how/why it is important to reframe liminality in terms of time instead of space in this coming section.

1.2 Problematic of Spatializing Time:

The time that is emerged in Here, the liminal time, is different than a progressivist time that universalizes/equalizes the conception of time for everyone. The liminal time do not synchronize with a single clock. Daniel Wildcat, criticizes the Western linear view of history:

In the mind’s eye of “progressive” thinking “civilized” folks, there are no savannas, forests, canyons, mountains to be respected in building this road called “progress”; nor are there peoples living in these ecosystems that account for much-except as materials or resources for the road builders (433).

It is clear that progressive thinking evades the “rhythm” of all those landscapes that have their own time. Wildcat further argues that for indigenous people the experiential continuum of history has spatial boundaries with time understood as space mediated, therefore, we must think of time in spatial terms (434). However, one must think of the relationship between progressivist thinking of time and space by initially understanding the underlying factors of the conventional concept of time. Western thought of progressivist notion of time has strong roots in thinking time as space,

unlike Wildcat proposes. In his book The Darker Side of Western Modernity Walter Mignolo asserts how in the name of modernity the colonization of space comes before than the colonization of time (112). Management and control of the space initiates the colonization of time and this is possible only by spatializing time. The idea of space with clear distinctions, the spatial framework that we fall, contributes to make a conceptual separation between past and present. This separation aids quantifying time and make homogenous and identical clocks for everyone. The conventional concept of time does not welcome heterogeneity, including the indigenous clocks, because it takes its power from an idea of space that has become a homogenous medium. The homogeneous time is synchronous with the times of capitalism/militarism/colonialism.

Guerlac explores how Bergson attacks on the spatial presuppositions of Western thought concerning space at the heart of the project of quantification/scientism (58). Western thought’s excessive reliance on quantification underlies Bergson’s argumentations in most of his works. As Guerlac clarifies, the difference between quantity and quality come into being in the difference between space and time (60). According to Bergson, thinking time without spatializing it is crucial because what Western thought is in habit of calling “time” is really the equivalent of space (Guerlac, 63). In relation to this tendency of equalizing time and space, Bergson highlights the importance of “thinking quality without quantifying it” and this task is only possible by “thinking time without space/spatial concerns” (Guerlac 60).

Throughout his work Time and Free Will, Bergson breaks away from equalizing time and space by proposing to think about the temporality of duration. How can durational thinking abstain from establishing progressivist notion of time that serves to the project of quantification of Western thought? Once one is willing to give up hir conceptual separation of past and present, the notion of duration blooms and offers a different narrative development than of past-present-future. Bergson explains duration in terms of what it is within us whilst what it is not:

What is duration within us? A qualitative multiplicity, which bears no relation to number; an organic development which is nevertheless not a growing quantity; a pure heterogeneity in the heart of which there are no distinct qualities. In short, the moments of internal duration are not exterior to one another (Time and Free Will 226).

This notion of duration involves a concept of time that is radically independent of the concept of number, therefore space, and rather offers a qualitative experience that is heterogeneous. Durational thinking allows one to think in terms of process. Bergson argues how the Real Duration depends upon the passage (or becoming) of time (Guerlac, 80). Following this argumentation on Real Duration, instead of focusing on the unity of space in

Here I ask what form duration takes when suspending the notion of space in

which the narrative develops in this work. As I have argued earlier, the liminal time that is emerging in Here, leaks outside of spatial borders of the room. This leakage let the reader engage in a durational experience in which

thinking time without spatializing it or thinking quality without quantifying it becomes possible. By such reading experience one can resist to the Western ways of colonizing time/space.

1.3 Liminal Time as a form of Duration:

At this point of my analysis, it should be said that liminality defined essentially as a spatial concept initially by Van Gennep. The concrete thresholds such as portals, doorways or border zones were representing the spatial/geographical progressing in getting through ritual passage. When theorizing liminality, placing spatial progressing at the core of the argumentation exemplifies how progressivist notion of time is closely tied with spatial concerns. After Van Gennep, both Turner and recently Thomassen, contributed in enlarging and specifying further spatial dimensions of liminality (Thomassen, 91). Reducing liminal temporalities, the times of asynchrony, to space is an attempt to quantify its qualitative dimensions. Thomassen further argues that one should not put this into any mathematical model. However, for him, it does seem meaningful to suggest that there are “degrees of liminality” and the degree depends on the extent to which liminal experience can be weighed against persisting structures (“The Uses and Meanings” 18). Theorizing liminality by presupposing an imagined scope of a coverage area/space where the experience of liminality nestles, ultimately serves to the Western progressivist time. Rethinking liminality as a temporal concept dissolve ‘degrees’ of liminality or the ‘weights’ of liminal

experiences and prioritizes its qualitative nature. A passage experience might be incorporated in a time that one wishes not to come to pass, or to a time of desires and dreams, or perhaps to an imagined time. In such immeasurable times liminal moments disobey fixing to a single point in space. Just like those times of inner affective states, duration is also a time that is immeasurable and in a perpetual mode of becoming. Thus, liminality might be considered as a durational concept and as a form of duration. In his work “Thought of Duration” Adrian Heathfield argues that duration deals in the confusion of temporal distinctions between past, present and future by resisting time’s spatialization in cultural measure but more importantly by drawing the spectator into the thick braids of paradoxical times (97). Similarly, in Here, durational aesthetics give access to passage experiences that goes beyond the spatial borders of the corner of this room. Moving from one panel to another, one can never reside in a single time/space, which eventually leads one to feel a sense of warping of time/space. In Here the interstices of ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life are making their own time, beyond the static corner of the room. Space no longer becomes a constant while time changes. This prompts to think multitemporality or in Bergsonian terms multiplicity independent of space. This is another crucial task of my analysis because it will hopefully allow rethinking liminality in terms of time; reconsider it as a durational concept.

Bergson argues that the difference between duration and time lies in the division between internal and external (Guerlac 97). He further argues

that in space, simultaneities, without succeeding one another, distinguish themselves from one another that make a reciprocal exteriority without succession (Guerlac 97). In other words, one no longer exists in space, when the other appears. However, the simultaneous panels in Here do not succeed one another nor distinguish themselves from each other. They all coexist; one panel endures while the other appears to one’s eye. Thinking multitemporality independent of space becomes possible through Here because it does not present experiences of characters in a ‘conventional’ space (a simple living room). In ‘conventional’ spaces the concept of time relies upon only to adequate descriptions of the external world (Guerlac 59). Rather the space in Here unfolds a passage to inner phenomena, to internal states. Characters manifest their dreams, memories or desires. Many of those states discern instances that melt into one another through changing panels. This liminal way of experiencing space/time in Here not only attacks to the progressive understanding of marking time but also gives access to think about liminality as duration, as a lived/experienced time that is qualitative, vascular and complex.

What is usually called “time” and the conception of space delimits thinking about actual experience. To think time without spatializing it one must understand the multiplicity of ‘lived time’ that is only accessible through inner states, immediate and qualitative experience (Guerlac, 59). Bergson have argued how much the qualitative, inner experience is neglected while the outer (objective) experience is prioritized by mechanistic

psychologies (Guerlac 60). According to Bergson, actual experience occurs at the cusp, where inside and outside meet (Guerlac, 59). Cusp both refers to a point of transition and to curves that meet and are tangent. When mentioning a point of transition between two states, using a word like cusp again signals the concept of liminality and the historicity of rites. The word cusp has a boundary nature, just like the words: “margin” or “limen”. All types of rites as having the processual form of passage involve three phases: separation, transition and incorporation (Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid” 56). The first phase, separation, represents the detachment of the subjects from their previous social statuses, which involves moving away from usual routines. In the second phase, transition, those subjects pass through a period of ambiguity, a sort of social limbo, until they return to a new, stable position. This position is arrived in the third phase: incorporation. Passage rites are often considered as irreversible, fixed phases that progress into a single Future, suggesting an understanding of time that can be represented as a linear line (Turner, “Liminal to Liminoid” 57). When liminality is only considered as a phase, that has a beginning and ending, it loses its own liminal meaning in itself since it is quantified in a spatial horizon. This is a similar tendency with measuring time in a spatial horizon.

In her book How Soon Is Now? Carolyn Dinshaw exemplifies the states of sorrow and sleep when explaining how our lived sense of time can differ from the measured time of successive linear intervals (9). In figure three, the asynchrony of the sleepers depicted as broken/incomplete panels shakes the

idea of time as a line but discerns experience. In figure 3, man in the panel of 1990, depicted as saying: “I took a nap and when I woke up I didn’t know where I was.” This is another depicted moment of forgetting/remembrance whilst reader moves in and out of different time panels. Conglomeration of certain figures that might/might not involve in actions related to sleeping (a night-walker, a sleeping man, a man talking about taking a nap and two hugging figures) are constituted of different times. Panels zoom in/out through different manifestations of states of sleep. Some panels are pieces that are cut from a whole wider motion/state. These pieces are never complemented by further panels. They are rather left incomplete to be slipped along in an endless timeline of moments.

In this chapter, I have aimed to generate a theoretical frame for liminality that treats time as multiple/indeterminate while troubling the idea of progressing. In progressivist notion of time each successive moment precedes the one before it while liminal times welcome moving amidst ambiguity. Ambiguity makes them leak outside spatial borders/space. By this way, they are durational and can be considered as a form of duration. Instead of thinking liminality in a spatial horizon or inside the dual categorization of temporal/spatial liminality, I have offered to rethink liminality as a form of duration. Theorizing mostly from Bergson’s ideas on time, I have explored what can be the characteristics of liminal times. In liminal times past coexists with present. Since they are about a time that resides in between, they tend to be constant reminders of not-yet-actualized times. Liminality signals a sort of change that is not progressive but rather amorphous, in a perpetual mode of becoming. Narrating liminality-as-time is in nature peculiar. As I have analysed through various examples from Here, liminal narrative discerns inner phenomena/internal states in a much more vivid manner than of historical/linear narrative. This makes liminal times qualitative and strongly attached to subjective internal states. Any attempts to quantify the concept of liminality is a continuation of the Western project of quantification.

Chapter 2:

LISTENING TO AN APERTURE

of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

Sound shakes an idea of presence particularly well comparing other mediums. Alvin Lucier’s work I am Sitting in a Room reveals sounds that are always there but rarely heard. It exploits the resonant frequencies of whatever room it is set. Through a process of iterative feedback, it amplifies those frequencies until the sound that remains becomes very difficult to be interpreted as speech. Recycling sounds back into a room through a recording machine enables Lucier’s voice to constantly reproduce itself. This reproduction changes the original recorded voice drastically. Voice creates a fractured self, a literal break that is in essence liminal. One can never really coincide with oneself fully even when speaking. In her work Elsewhere, within

Here Minh-ha considers (re) recorded voice as a loss of subjectivity and asks:

“What if what one hears as “true,” “authentic,” “personal” is nothing other than a ghostly projection, a dis-embodied sound of a body in love with its own sound?” (78). How does Lucier’s voice stretches beyond its peril? Hearing one’s voice makes a limit audible within the self. It discerns a strange roar coming from within; roar of the non-self within the self. Since the voice comes from an aperture it is inevitably about a liminal zone. It is an aperture

both of a physical one: mouth and a metaphorical one: self. This liminal aperture will be elaborated more in detail further in this chapter.

Let us first explore the role of the recording medium and how the work of Lucier enables us to continue thinking liminality in terms of time simply because of its medium. In his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter Friedrich Kittler states that to record sound sequences of speech “literature has to arrest them in a system of 26 letters, thereby categorically excluding all noise sequences” (3). In their book The Exploit Gallaway and Thacker emphasize how they worry about the imaginary, supplemental alphabets starting with letter twenty-seven referring to rigid semantic zone of informatic networks (159). The relationship between voice and the recording is important to dwell on more to understand what is it that the audience actually listens in Lucier’s work. Does audience listen the result of a sort of creative control? Or is it the result of an inhuman emanation? Above all, what is presented when the human voice arrives at the resonant frequencies of the borders of a room?

2.1 Recording of the Voice:

In his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music Jacques Attali describes the invention of recording as an intention to preserve the representation, “a protector of the preceding mode of organization” (89). He further explains the Western technology’s transition from representation to repetition and how biology replaces mechanics (89). This mode of power implied by repetition results in forgetting of the represented foundation, it anonymizes the original.

In Lucier’s work he never gets fully anonymized even after fifteen generations of recordings. Some form of organicity endures throughout the whole work. How come the recording power, the metallic shimmer melting in the repetitive voice/text, cannot dilutes/mask Lucier himself? What differs Lucier’s work from what Attali calls as “artificially created pseudoevents” that accompany the emplacement of repetitive society?

In “Typewriter Ribbon” Derrida demonstrates two kinds of forces: event and repetition. He asks: “Will we be able to think, what is called thinking, at one and the same time, both what is happening (we call that an event) and the calculable programming of an automatic repetition (we call that a machine) (Without Alibi 72)? Here, for Derrida the idea of event refers to the force of the organic living being that is singular, self-moving and spontaneous. It is singular because it seems to be it only affects nothing but itself. As the living being affects itself, in turn, the affect gets “inscribed” by the living being as well. This idea, leads Derrida to form the force of an inorganic, machine-like matter. What he calls machine refers to an inorganic machine that repeats and remembers, it is a machine of memory. The automaticity of the machine is different than the spontaneity of the living being, event. In the book Jacques Derrida: Key Concepts, the author of the chapter “Auto-Affection” Leonard Lawlor describes how for Derrida these two forces appear to be antonymic, incompatible and yet inseparable (136). Unlike Husserl’s traditional form of thinking that separates and opposes such forces, Derrida offers a new zone of contact for the organic and the inorganic.

He describes their coming together as an “impossible event therefore the only possible event” and this new figure of an event-machine gives up “neither the event nor the machine, to subordinate neither one to the other, never to reduce one to the other” (Without Alibi 74). In Lucier’s work some form of machinality (repetition of the recordings) intervenes in a performative event (Lucier’s speaking). This event cannot happen without the recording machine. Rather it happens through the recording medium. Lucier’s initial speaking act carries the characteristics of how Derrida describes the organic: spontaneous, intentional, free and irreplaceable (Without Alibi 74). In Speech and Phenomena Derrida also problematizes the ‘originality’ of speech. What Lucier is doing is precisely what Derrida is arguing. In Lucier’s work as soon as noise/sound/voice becomes speech, it is bound to be inscribed in a system. This system (perhaps the system of language) makes the sound no longer spontaneous and free. By the time his speech becomes a replaceable, calculable and repetitive act, the impossible event comes about, and the figure of an event-machine irrupts the present singularity of Lucier. Lawlor describes how the logic of forces of event and repetition also disturbs the idea of autonomy since it is contaminated with the machinic repeatability of heteronomy, making the moral subject resemble animals (136). The most obvious effect of machinic repeatability is on Lucier’s stutter. In his work In

the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art Seth Kim Cohen argues that

a stutter turns the music of speech into “a mechanical grind” makes the listener aware of the “usually ignored flow from syllable to syllable, word to

word, phrase to phrase” (189). Cohen further argues that the process in Lucier’s work still unfolds without a stutter, exemplifying another version of I

am Sitting in a Room, taking place in a radio studio in 2005, in which Lucier’s

work is delivered without a stutter, without any speech irregularities (190). Theorizing from Derrida’s understanding of event and machine, in 1969 version of I am Sitting in a Room, stuttering intervals can be thought as liminal moments (manifesting temporal liminality) that come about both intentionally and unintentionally. This in-between position of the stutter, in between event and machine, differentiates this version drastically. Even though the demonstration of a physical fact, the erosion of sonic quality of meaning, might unfold same in any kind of version, focusing on his stutter herald other kinds of thinking. In his book Essays Critical and Clinical Gilles Deleuze explores different voice intonations like stuttering in the works of authors like Beckett in the chapter “He Stuttered”. Deleuze asks whether it is possible to make language stutter without confusing it with speech (Clinical 108). Lucier’s speech is a particular kind of speech that actualizes, in Deleuze’s terms a sort of bifurcation, when he stutters, which is a characteristic that is proper to language. According to Deleuze, placing language in a state of disequilibrium and making it bifurcate exceeds the possibilities of speech (Clinical 109). Here the grammar of disequilibrium emerges from a creation of syntax that gives birth to a foreign language within language when one stutters. This birth occurs within a crack, in a liminal temporality in Lucier’s work. This liminal aperture becomes audible

by the constant reproduction of his voice. Every time Lucier stutters, not only his saying becomes doing, but also his doing gives birth to other kinds of sayings in different temporalities. In Lucier’s work Lucier stutters precisely when manifesting the words: semblance, rhythm and smooth out. He stretches the sounds of ‘s’ and ‘r’. His stutter, caused by an organic reason (and came about from a living being), has also an in inorganic effect in this work. His stutter repeats a past unintentionally while heading towards a future, most probably, intentionally. According to Derrida, intentionality forecloses the machine when performativity excludes any machine-like technicity (Without Alibi 74). This intentional exclusion of intentionality itself is disturbed when machine and performative event come together, in moments like recording of a stutter. Stuttering moments are moments of repetition as well as differentiation. They disturb the progressive notion of time that is assumed to be only flowing forward to a Future progressively, in a fixed pace. In nature, they stretch in time while they also stretch the time. Stutters constantly capture the past while producing the future because of toggling between what has already been said and what is likely to be said next. The endurance of the stutter in all fifteen recordings creates a haunting presence of a past bounding to return in every recording. In his book Specters

of Marx Derrida explores how living individual is “inhabited and invaded by

its own specter” which would mean that self-presence is haunted and haunting (166). Similar to a recording machine, for a stuttering person, past is more than what has just been stored but it is always ready to come back.

Stutters usually assumed as speech irregularities that corrupt sonic and semantic aspects of language. Aiming to smooth out his stutter, in his text Lucier highlights how this work is “not a demonstration of a physical fact” but about smoothing out his speech irregularities. The text in Lucier’s work signals the instruction of the work, forms its content and captures those time lapses when Lucier, himself stutters. Unlike Lucier’s attempt, instead of smoothing out his stated irregularity, the recording medium elevates his impediment. Starting from the very first recording, his stutter becomes the rhythm in the piece, and disturbs unalloyed reproductions of his voice in the future for good. Stuttering not only disturbs the smoothness in repetitive recordings but also adds organicity, irregularity of a living being, to drone versions of the voice of Lucier. According to Attali, the only possible challenge to repetitive power, which has become the capitalist mode of production of meaning, lies in the route of a breach in social repetition and the control of noisemaking (132). He further explains how this is actually the conquest of right to make a noise, which is fundamentally the right to compost one’s life (132). For Attali life is full of noise and by listening to noise one can better understand the politics of the orderings of the noise. Noise has been always listened by the ones who are in power. Still, one can stand against the centralized political control of noise, not only by making noise but also by making noise that does not synchronized to a future that treats time as a progressive mechanism that only moves forward. The times of repetitive power ignores a time that leaks away from itself, liminal times that are in

nature, unstable. Throughout the piece of Lucier, even though stutter becomes indistinguishable as it is canceled out in the process, it still breaches regular speech therefore linear understanding of time. Attali argues that the absence of meaning is the necessary condition for the legitimacy of a technocracy’s power (112). As Derrida explains for the case of the event-machine, similarly, stutter also interrupts a possible future and surprises foreseeability in the most liminal ways. It becomes a residual piece of a living being that resists the liquidation of meaning in the whole process of seemingly smoothing out of speech.

2.2 Temporalization of the Voice:

In the chapter “The Metaphysics of the Voice” Dolar defines voice as an elusive entity since vibrations of air vanish as soon as they are produced, presenting a pure passing, which is not something that could be fixed or something that one could hold on to (36). Lucier’s work stands against elusive qualities of the voice not only because it has been recorded. Certain qualities of Lucier’s work shows how voice moves in time in different ways. Apart from his stutter that transcends the singular/progressivist notion of time, reverberations also bring out alternate characteristics to the voice as they distance from their original source. Audible distancing occurs but does not result in vanishing of the voice, rather instill a sense of timelessness. Drawing from the logic of the two forces of event and repetition for Derrida, Lawlor describes how the present singularity of the idea of “I think” is contaminated

with repetition coming from a past that one cannot remember and heading toward a future that one no longer predicts (136). No one single “I”, “think” in a present singularity with a singular and unalloyed presence. Voice is a medium that discerns the multiplicity in time in which no one single time surpass the other. Specifically, in Lucier’s work, fifteen different generations of his speaking voice show how the origin of the voice is never a singular and an actual origin as it crumbles and stretches in time. According to Lacan, voice seems to endow the subject with a counterpart, its “missing half”, a “supplement”, which enables being to hold on to a presence (Dolar 36). Lacan’s subject is described as an empty and negative entity without the voice as its foundation/substance. Inside a phonological operation how does the voice offer a “substance”, a relationship to presence, if the subject is considered as absent entity? What lies in between the voice and its subject? The space between a subject and itself is a liminal space since it always signals a crack between ‘non-I’ and an ‘I’. The impossibility of accessing to an unalloyed self without passing through a ‘non-self’ will be discussed in relation to theorizations of ‘auto-affection’ for Derrida and Dolar. This is an important part of this analysis because liminality is a concept that is irreducibly constituted by a vacuum that is not empty. It welcomes a non-now in the non-now and accordingly a non-self in the self.

Drawing from Derrida, Dolar criticizes the way the entire phonological enterprise had been seen because he thought there was a prejudice at the core of certain theories about the voice. Voice seems to be giving a direct access to

an unalloyed presence of the subject. Pure presence seems to be equalized to the natural material of language, which is assumed to be the voice (Dolar 37). These assumptions put voice to a privileged position where it is considered purely self-transparent with a pure auto-affection quality. The idea of voice being the key to the present and to an unalloyed interiority are important assumptions to be able to understand why it is thought that the essence of the voice lies in the affection. Arguing against Husserl’s ideas on auto-affection, Derrida explains how fundamentally auto-affection is hetero-affection (Lawlor 130). According to Husserl, my experience of myself is immediate; my own self is given to me in a presentation (Lawlor 131). All other experiences between other and I are mediated because the non-presence/absence of the other remains no matter what I do. Derrida, in contrast, thinks that even in self-experience we may find non-presence and mediation. Husserl’s approach makes ‘hearing-oneself-speak’ a unique type of auto-affection since it is both absolutely universal and absolutely singular operation. Because it seems like in the phonological operation, the signified produces itself without any substance of expression from outside but only from within, and this causes the whole operation to remain in close proximity to the one expressing (Speech and Phenomena 78). Our internal monologues seem to be a singular process with an unmediated, direct contact of a non-material self through the very same non-non-material self. Derrida explains how it is presented as an absolutely universal operation since even in the absence of the speaker, auto-affection seems to be repeatable, transmissible and objective

operation (Speech and Phenomena 79). This machinic view of the phonological operation privileges spatial accounts rather than temporal ones. According to Derrida, what makes hearing-oneself-speak seem to be a pure auto-affection is “nothing other than the absolute reduction of space in general” (Speech and

Phenomena 79). This is again an important point in this analysis since this

apparent absolute reduction of space makes one (signifier) seems to be “diaphanous”. In his work, Lucier, demonstrates how both signifier (Lucier as the origin of the voice) and the signified (multiple recordings) are nothing but opaque/thick. The fact that the audience is never able to exclude impurity from the voice presents the opaqueness of his voice. Gradual increase in metallic shimmer that melts into his stutter makes his voice even more layered. The layered form of Lucier’s work makes it speak from multiple time intervals. As Lawlor describes, the phonic forms are able to function as referring to something that is still to come, something of non-presence which turns the voice into an opaque murmur (135). The layered form of the voice as an opaque murmur is liminal since it never detaches from a passed that is passed. Derrida argues that what distinguishes the originality of speech from every other milieu of signification is that it is purely temporal (Speech and

Phenomena 83). Phonic forms do not belong to a single now; they scatter

beyond right now. In Lucier’s work voice points towards a temporality, towards a direction that is moving towards a future, which is constantly being collapsed. Past produce a strange, perhaps haunting, presence. It’s constantly referring back to itself, and recording itself, which is caused by

both a physical, and a temporal process, to the point in which it collapses on itself. The more complex but equally oscillating signal captures on itself in terms of temporality to constantly produce another one. Similar to Here, Lucier’s work is demonstrated in a space in which different layers overlap with each other. In Here, the frames overlap each other and in Lucier’s work, recordings conglomerate. Both demonstrate conglomeration of different temporalities through different mediums. This affects our perception of time rather than our perception of space. In other words, voice offers a “substance”, a relationship to presence to an absent entity inside a phonological operation through an understanding of time that is different than progressivist notion of time. The times of modernity discerns a compulsion to shrink the present and make it lose all the duration within. When attempted to think about time, Serres proposes to rethink time as multiplicity instead of unified moments, seconds, instants, beginnings or endings and highlights letting multiplicity waft along without arresting it through a unity (6). In liminal times the present is always braided into pastness and futureness so that the present is itself always hangs in time. When Lucier’s recordings reduced to the spatial dimensions of the room, they are reduced to a single origin of the voice, of Lucier, arrested inside one room. Thinking in spatial terms arrests time to a unity, which will never fully encompass the wholeness of Lucier’s work. When Derrida argues that all experience is fundamentally temporal, he emphasizes how temporalization is a movement of differentiation because of present being in a process of

division (Lawlor 131). If the present is fundamentally composed of a gap that can never be closed what lies in this void? Let us further discuss the characteristics of the “opaque murmur” voice, and what resides inside the rifts of the “thick” voice in this coming section.

2.3 Split in the Voice:

Gradual differentiation in the repetitive recorded voice of Lucier, makes his voice different than a reflective (perhaps echoing) voice in a room. Dolar further deepens what can auto-affection mean by comparing this characteristic with re-flection. According to Dolar, an auto-affection is a pure immediacy that lacks a screen and this rudimentary form attached to the voice can be considered as a narcissistic view (39). While re-flection, in nature, demands bouncing back from an external surface, like a screen, it seems that the voice does not need this. As explained earlier, the characteristic of immediacy that is attached to the voice makes the signified and the signifier “diaphanous”. In the work of Lucier the room (space) where reverberations occur becomes an external surface that does change the voice and does not result in reproduction of the same sound. Voice(s) have no one master that controls them. Recordings detach from Lucier’s original voice more and more by the end of the fifteenth generation of his taped speech. Voice(s) that are reflected in this room are not the same as their origin anymore. For this reason, in Lucier’s work, voice(s) cannot be considered as reflectors/echoes.

As explained earlier, Dolar finds auto-affection that is attached to the voice as a rudimentary form of narcissism because it presents a deceptive self-transparency that assumes voice always and already referring” or “self-reflective” (39). He exemplifies how this narcissism crumbles and how the illusion of auto-affection discerns by,

The moment there is a surface which returns the voice, the voice acquires an autonomy of its own and enters the dimension of the other; it becomes a deferred voice (40).

Voice(s) in Lucier’s work does not lose their meanings by being repeatedly recorded but they gain other meanings by becoming deferred voice(s). This differentiation, thus the transformation of the original voice, occurs due to a division. This split starts by Lucier’s dissociation from his own voice even though the voice still belongs to him. It is still him that is heard but not his voice in its original form. The split of the voice from its body is a crucial moment for this analysis since it touches on an idea of a scission or rupture. Throughout his analysis Dolar uses the words gap, break, void or rupture quite often. In this chapter, he highlights the Lacanian and Derridean account of the impossibility of auto-affection by reminding the reader of the presence of the intractable voice of the other, voice one could not control (41). In Lucier’s work layers of successive generations of the same sound discerns this very zone between the origin of the voice and it’s resonated other versions. Recordings reflect the intractable voice of the other(s) filtered from the origin of the voice. Taking a closer look to the meanings of the disembodied voice

might guide us towards rethinking liminality since disembodiment discerns a gap between the origin of the voice and its recorded other versions. According to Dolar voice conceals an inaudible object voice that disrupts both the presence of the present and its proximity to an unalloyed interiority (42). This inaudible object was described as the intractable voice of the other previously. Dolar presents the Lacanian account that considers the object as an interior obstacle to self-presence. Lacan’s object embodies the impossibility of attaining auto-affection since it introduces a rupture in the middle of full presence (Dolar 42). In the work of Lucier, this rupture lies at the recordings; in the gradual process of Lucier’s voice transforming into a drone-like-one. Gallaway and Thacker mentions the influential book of Norbert Wiener,

Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine to

explore how human, animal and mechanical systems are united in their ability to handle input/sensor and output/effector data via the role of feedback (55). Feedback implied a degree of self-reflexivity, resulting in a sort of control in selection from a set of variables. In the gradual process of transformation of Lucier’s voice what is selected to stay on? What is eliminated in the very act of selection/choice among the “noise”?

The gradual disembodiment process in Lucier’s work cannot be directly translatable into the “death” of Lucier. This gradual transition rather presents a new mode appearing as a liminal state in-between presence and absence. The origin of the voice of Lucier is present until it becomes something else, something unrecognizable. Lucier’s body never truly