Screen resistances: Derrida with Mallarmé

Literary acceptability of the screen

The screen also concerns literature. Yet precisely because it has nothing to do with literature's stewardship, with its poetics of genres, with its rhetorical resources, the screen constitutes an essential horizon and intermedial interface for it. If we leave behind the repertoire of means, the technique of literature, and consider what it mobilizes in the imagination of both the creator and the reader, the question of tipping over into fiction immediately arises. From the text, of the text becomes a world; in the text, of the description accommodates scenes; in the scene, of the word orders the tableau. And reciprocally, in the imagination, a painting, a scene, a world have prepared, preceded the text.

In this shift, the screen constitutes a key piece, both of access, from the textual mechanics, to the device and, within the device, of regulation of the visible and the invisible, of what the text will formalize as the fullness of a content, or on the contrary deconstruct as white, as a blind spot.

But are we still in literature when we model the fictional worlds it produces in terms of the screen? How acceptable is literature itself (as practice and as institution, as creative instance and as critical instance) vis-à-vis the screen? Is this a hermeneutical overstep that literature cannot forgive, a betrayal of the very principles of its representation (i.e., both what it represents and what it accepts as represented)? It's not a question of thinking literature away from all textuality, from the screen, but of driving textuality to its abolition in the device that underpins and overhangs its verbalization. And thereby place the abolition of textuality at the heart of literature.

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If such a hermeneutical gesture takes on a certain acuity today, it's because it's not simply a matter of method, or of taking a hermeneutical or critical stance. The change in civilization we are experiencing is inexorably pushing the textual mechanics of literature towards the bygone world. This mechanism is becoming a point of social tension (we no longer know how to read or write) that extends far beyond academic circles, and at the same time an object of exacerbated fascination (we've never read or written so much). To think of literature as a powerful machinery of screens deriving its power from the screens it arranges at the limit of its imaginary tilting, and from the screens it brings into play in the devices it imagines, is to think of literature from this new world that might seem to deny it, but also from the very principle of a mimesis whose history goes back a long way.

The aim here is to follow this theoretical and somewhat profane effort at deterritorialization twice: in Mallarmé's writing project first, which paradoxically outlines and creates the conditions of possibility for cinematic invention; in Derrida's project second, which, at the frontier of literature and philosophy, re-enacts the Mallarméan revolution to pair, in the ultimate effort of deconstruction, the textual play of dissemination with the scenic device of drama, pantomime, and its infrastructure, the screen of representation.

What is the double séance?

In the draft of the Livre edited by Jacques Scherer, we read:

"identity of the
place and sheet
of the session and the volume¹".

The theater seat and the writing sheet, the performance session and the volume the reader reads are one and the same. They constitute what Mallarmé calls a "double séance": every séance is double, textual and theatrical, a way for the poet to stand on both shores simultaneously, in the civilization of the text and that of the image, or more exactly for each at the limit of the other, a vertiginous limit that is that of the imaginary tilt.

Derrida takes up this concept of the double séance. In La Dissémination, "the double séance" first consisted, literally, in two seminar sessions in February and March 1969². His object, on the other hand, is the identification of the square and the sheet, of reading and spectacle. Finally, Derrida's starting point is a text by Mallarmé, "Mimique", placed in a corner in the exemplar distributed at the seminar, entering another text by Plato, which extends the first part of the volume entitled "Plato's Pharmacy". Making Mallarmé work with Plato is a double séance, and initiates a mode of creation that was to become Derrida's trademark: what we might call the double-column device. Writing two discourses simultaneously in two parallel columns, developing two heterogeneous yet consonant, linked thoughts. The device would culminate most spectacularly in Glas(1974).

The double session works against the screen. It makes it possible to always bring the tipping of the textual sequence towards the screen's system of visibility back to that which precedes this tipping, to that origin of representation from which it comes to defer. Mallarmé can thus, while indicating the revolution to come, wisely operate from the obscurity of his verb a retreat to the silence of reading, to the luxury of rhyme and verse.

The screen according to Derrida

Derrida for his part, constructing his entire book as a meta-textual device whose machinery resolutely breaks with all the architectural principles of rhetoric, nevertheless always returns to the frame of reference of writing, which will guarantee him institutional support and recognition. The first time he mentions the screen, it's as an element of syntax:

we'll have further to flesh out this absence of event, the visible and configured imminence of its non-place [...], in the syntax of the curtain, the screen, the veil³.

Mallarmé described the radiance of the theater chandelier spreading its light in anticipation of the performance. Nothing happens, and just now the event that will be represented will only be a simulacrum. No real event will take place, and at the same time everything is perfectly configured for the non-place that the show will be. The "syntax of the screen" reduces the interface of the semiological shift induced by the screen (the shift into representation as if it were the event) to a syntax, in other words, to a textual organization. On stage, the curtain, screen and veil designate the limits of the performance space, limits in space (between stage and backstage, between stage and parterre) but also borders, semiological divisions between modes of representation (textual and visual, narrative and sensitive...).

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The Derridean screen remains on the side of writing:

the reflective screen never captures anything but writing, non-stop, indefinitely, and renvoi confines us to the element of renvoi⁴.

We never move on to the visual stability of the image's reflection device; as a result, the textual equivalent of reflection is the endlessly repeated trajectory of the "renvoi", the indefinite reformulation of the disseminated event. Dissemination thus appears as a means of accounting for the new world (the saturation of trajectories in the moving image) while appearing to return to the old ("que de l'écriture").

The textual equivalent of reflection is the endlessly repeated trajectory of the "renvoi", the indefinite reformulation of the disseminated event.

The screen then becomes hymen, the feminine membrane, the subversive surface of jouissance, and at the same time the institutional sanction of marriage, a bond articulated to the law:

A masked, impalpable and insubstantial gap, interposed, entremis, the entre of the hymen is reflected in the screen without penetrating it⁵.

Derrida comments here, still in Divagations, "L'Action restreinte⁶". Mallarmé's work continues to revolve around multiple formulations of the absence or postponement of the event. The virtualization, the dissemination of the event manifests itself in this superimposition of images of écart and renvoi: gap signified by the interposing hymen, dissemination stands in the way of insemination, resisting penetration and postponing jouissance; as for the hymen itself, gap masked, it evades palpation, it is "unsubstantial", an idea of hymen even more than a physiological membrane ; écart réfléchi finally, the event that doesn't happen, the suspension of the event, the indefinite repetition of a before- or after-event, always refer to something else. We thus remain in the gap, i.e. in the semiotic play of a differential system. We don't penetrate the screen, i.e., there's no tearing, no touching, none of the movements of affect of the flesh whose sensibility is aroused.

The screen will return more insistently in the last part of La Dissémination, which is an account of a novel by Sollers entitled Nombres. In it, Sollers obsessively revolves around the stage set-up and its fourth wall. Before Nombres, Sollers was already writing in Drame :

Here's how he does it: he appeals to a simple possibility of image, to an earlier word isolated in this non-localizable country which is at the same time what he sees, thinks, has seen or dreamed, could have thought or seen, etc., country without limit[s] and yet available, making screen⁷.

"Screening" is taken here in a sort of deliberately counter-intuitive way. The expression generally assumes that what screens intercepts the image, hides something, opposes visibility with an obstacle. Here, however, we are literally talking about creating a screen in the modern sense of a screen that holds images. The unlocatable country is the imagination, compared here to a surface on which all possible images are projected and displayed. The screen, then, is an image possibility: it is not the image itself, and allows us to remain below it. It closes in a "screen-making" that is its acceptable function since the text, even if here it is diverted towards the dissemination of possible worlds.

Later on, juxtaposing without warning an extract from "Crayonné au théâtre" (OC II 184) and another from Drame, Derrida will evoke Mallarmé's "l'écran de feuillets imprimés⁸", which he passes off as Sollers: Derrida's screen always and inexorably reduces visual tilting to the textuality of an infrastructure; it is the ultra-contemporary alibi for the old institutional background of the old culture. Through the screen, this culture resists.

The temporal aporia of "Mimique"

Derrida locates the wavering point between this textual resistance of the screen and its tipping into visual modernity in "Mimique". From November 1886 to July 1887, Mallarmé wrote a dramatic column for La Revue indépendante, the symbolists' tribune. This column was later rearranged to become the "Crayonné au théâtre" section of Divagations in 1897. "Mimique" constitutes the final part of the first of the "Notes sur le théâtre", which appeared in La Revue indépendante in November 1886.

It is therefore first and foremost a note of circumstance, prompted by the republication of Pierrot assassin de sa femme, a pantomime by Mallarmé's cousin Paul Margueritte⁹. In "Mimique", Mallarmé superimposes his experience of reading the libretto onto that of the pantomime performance itself in the theater: two chronotopes, then¹⁰, between which the text installs a laps, a vague, uncertain glide from one to the other. Yet this double experience of reception (reading and performance) is characterized first and foremost as an experience of silence:

Silence, the only luxury after rhymes, an orchestra doing no more with its gold, its frills of thought and evening, than detailing their meaning on a par with a slain ode and which it's up to the poet, aroused by a challenge, to translate! Silence in the afternoons of music; I find it, with contentment, too, before the always unpublished reappearance of Pierrot or the poignant and elegant mime Paul Margueritte¹¹.

The two sentences evoke two silences, the conjunction of which constitutes a double séance: silence as a climax, first, of the poem's text, which ends after the rhyme sequence and gives way to the orchestra; then a silence that in fact comes before, the silence in the theater that precedes the performance.

The ode is the sung poem: when the singing stops, the music takes over to "detail the meaning" of what has just been said. This music therefore comes after the "ode tue"; it re-edits it, as it were, by transposing it. Between the ode and the music, Mallarmé relishes the brief intervals of silence: this rare silence, charged with poetic and dramatic intensity, is the "only luxury after rhymes".

In the same way, Paul Margueritte's performance on the theater stage is an experience of silence¹². It too is caught in an in-between, between the libretto text, which must be translated into mimicry, and the performance itself. This is why the Mime's appearance is always already a reappearance: the text preceded it.

So, at music afternoons, there's an ode that falls silent and a fleeting silence that follows it, a silence that sets it and an ode that follows it; and similarly at the Mime performance, a text that falls silent and a mimic that follows it, a mimic that plays itself and a text that describes it. The composition of the ode, writes Mallarmé, amounts for the poet to translating this silence: succeeding the ode tue, silence is brought back to the original silence, to the poetic principle of the ode.

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This logical contradiction is reflected in the pantomime: "la réapparition inédite" is simultaneously of Pierrot, the fictional character, and Paul Margueritte, the libretto's author and the show's actor. "Inédite" indicates that this is the first time, yet refers to the edition, which is a re-edition. Logically, the appearance cannot be both a re-appearance and unpublished. Before it, the libretto constitutes the support for the performance, to which the latter alludes; the text it translates into the stage; the word it converts into silence. But at the same time, after it, the booklet contains the interpretation of the performance, the words that the spectator will be able to render from the Mime's mimics.

Silence is the interface of this before and after, allowing text and performance, appearance and reappearance, discursivity of speech and overcoming, abolition of discursivity to coincide.

Pantomime between poetics and aesthetics¹³

From silence as a general characterization of the theatrical experience, and upstream of poetic production, Mallarmé then moves on to the specific generic characterization of pantomime:

Such as this Pierrot assassin de sa femme composed and written by himself, a mute soliloquy that, all along to his soul holds and face and gestures the white ghost like a page not yet written. A whirlwind of naïve or new reasons emanates, which it would be nice to grasp with certainty: the aesthetics of the genre located closer to principles than any! Nothing in this region of caprice thwarts the direct simplifying instinct...¹⁴

Pierrot's speech is a "mute soliloquy", he has no one to address, he is pure interiority, without subject or character. "White ghost", his whiteness destitutes him as a figure, deprives him of the characterization of the mask. This second destitution, after that of speech, turns the actor into a virgin, neutral, sensitive surface on which to imprint the reflection of expressions, the trace of emotions that must be transcribed, translated¹⁵.

From this blank-page-like face, "a whirlwind of naive or new reasons emanates". Why is Pierrot there, what is he doing, what has he done, what is he going to do? Naïve questions to which the performance won't provide an assured answer: we're never sure we've interpreted the pantomime's mimicry correctly. Mimicry doesn't signify a character's reasons; from mimicry emanate reasons. Emanation leaves the poetic, structural regime of the figure for the aesthetic, indexical regime of the ghost. This is why Mallarmé switches from the pantomime genre proper, with its rules of composition, to the "aesthetics of the genre" and its effects, what he calls the emanation of reasons. Yet the pantomime genre is "situated closer to principles than any": pantomime takes us back to the very principles of all poetic art, since, on the face of the mime, the spectator can grasp at its origin, at the root of its elaboration, the expression.

The interpretation of reasons, and more generally the hermeneutics of representation, is a "region of caprice": indeed, it seems to be the province of the spectator's imagination, who will choose to assign meaning to the mime's gestures, as if he himself were elaborating the fiction afresh. For his part, the mime, in order to be understood, stylizes, schematizes and simplifies. And so the "direct simplifying instinct" of the spectator and the mime, the poetic gesture and its reception and interpretation, overlap and merge. Here we come to the essential logical contradiction: if I place myself as close as possible to the principle of poetic creation, where the mime creates the gesture, I find myself at the same time in the translation, the effect, the reading, where the spectator interprets the gesture. To create the mimic is to interpret the libretto; but to interpret the mimic presupposes placing oneself at the principle of its creation.

Fiction as milieu

Such is the lapse, whose dash triggers the stage formulation:

Here - "the scene illustrates only the idea, not an actual action, in a hymen (from which the Dream proceeds), vicious but sacred, between desire and fulfillment, perpetration and its recollection: here anticipating, there recollecting, in the future, in the past, under a false appearance of present. This is the Mime, whose game is limited to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice: it sets up, thus, a pure medium of fiction¹⁶".

"Voici - la scène" and "Tel opère le Mime" open a new sequence in the text: from index, reflection, emanation, we move on to the scene but, rather than its representation (which remains allusive), to the presentation, the monstration of its principle. "Vicious but sacred hymen": Colombine has vitiated her hymen through adultery. But Pierrot above all vitiates it by murder, tickling the soles of her feet until, from the spasms of his laughter, death ensues. And death comes through pleasure, which restores the sacredness of the hymen. But, although it defines the drama, the action, the hymen does not in itself constitute the object of the scene, since the show begins on the return from Columbine's funeral, with Pierrot chasing the drunken mortician away to be left alone to dream about what he has done: the dream thus constitutes the essence of the pantomime, a dream that proceeds from Pierrot's vicious but sacred hymen.

The scene consists of Pierrot's dream. It does not represent his actual action, but the idea he has of it. Pierrot, in his dream, relives his crime and mimes it: the dream proceeds from the hymen; the hymen constitutes both its reason and its unfolding.

The scene consists of Pierrot's dream.

This is what Mallarmé calls the "false appearance of the present": the moment of the scene is at once one of recollection and projection ("ici devançant, là remémorant"), it represents a future (Colombine's crime to come) and it represents a past (the memory of the moment that preceded the crime), and through this layering of temporalities it dissolves the presence of the present. Not only does the mime only hint at the action he's miming, because he's speechless and what he's playing can only be guessed at, never formulated, never stated, but above all, the mime plays both the subject and the object of the action, Pierrot and Colombine, a "she" and a "you" reduced to the same person, symmetrically providing and experiencing the spasm of tickling. Pierre Margueritte places them on opposite sides of an impossible mirror, around which his pantomime organizes a constant reversion. Mallarmé sees this mirror, this mirror that the fundamentally allusive nature of pantomime cannot break, as the symbol of the fictional screen, i.e., of the mimetic gap. In this sense, the Mime "installs a medium, pure, of fiction": the very device of all fiction, in its theoretical purity, is manifested on stage by the perpetual allusion of the Mime, which does not formulate the event, but designates on stage, through its play, the boundary between the event and its representation.

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Here again, the Mime recapitulates, as it were, the foundation, the age-old principle of mimesis. But in so doing, it cancels it out. There is no fiction here, but a milieu of fiction, i.e. the exacerbated highlighting of a device that could produce all sorts of fictions but fails to implement the event of fiction for good, always stopping "at a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice¹⁷". The crime resolves itself, or dissolves into tickling, into an unassignable, unobjectifiable spasm, at once given and suffered, repeating what will have been, what would have been the spouses' enjoyment and perpetrating, as it were, for laughs, the horrible negation of what it repeats.

Between reading and play, the Mallarmean screen

Mallarmé then introduces an additional level into the representational device, that of reading:

Less than a thousand lines, the role, who reads it, immediately understands the rules as if placed before a trestle, their humble custodian. Surprise, accompanying the artifice of a notation of feelings by phrases point professed - that, in the only case, perhaps, with authenticity, between the leaves and the gaze reigns a silence still, condition and delight of the reading¹⁸.

"The role" first has the appearance of a subject, only to become retrospectively an object complement; "who reads it" first has the appearance of a relative subordination (the role who), but turns out to command the whole sentence (he who reads the role¹⁹). The subject/object relationship is reversed retrospectively, i.e. by passing the sentence through the mirror of a retrospective mirror. The metaphor of the mirror, which in the previous sentence represented the unrepresentable fusion of Pierrot and Columbine in the Mime's single body, is thus echoed in this syntactic play, which identifies the screen of the mirror²⁰ with the semiotic bar separating subject from object, constituting the barred subject as object.

The object is the Mime's role, "less than a thousand lines": not the detail of the thousand lines of the role's text, but the role's position, the role as an essential piece in a performance device. In other words, this reading is a borderline reading, a conversion of reading into performance. It's not a question of reading lines, but of reading the reduction of these lines to the function of the Mime, to the role. Strictly speaking, then, this reading is no longer a reading at all: this point is extremely important, as it is not taken into account by Derrida, who interprets "Mimique" as the quintessence of the play of textual différance. Even if radical, the deconstruction of the textuality of the text allows the textual paradigm to be maintained as an exclusive paradigm.

Or it is because the reader of Pierrot assassin de sa femme reads, not a text, but precisely a mimic, the mimic of a role, i.e. he restores in imagination, through reading, the "perpetual allusion" in which the spectacle consists, a spectacle without discourse, without text, which Mallarmé can write that the reader is "as if placed before a trestle", the trestle of the theatrical stage. This imaginative restitution by the reader is no different from the imaginative restitution to which the pantomime spectator is invited. Here again, Mallarmé posits a difference in the level of representation (the reading of the text, then the performance of the role) to cancel out this difference: "right away", the one who reads the role "understands the rules": right away, that is, without waiting for the performance; the text is already the performance; there is no anteriority of the text over the performance.

The reader is the humble repository of pantomime rules. Why? It's not a matter of some special knowledge he holds, but of a delightful experience, the experience of silence while reading. Silence is what cancels out the difference between text and performance, what reduces the artifice of Pierrot's notated words to a mere glance at his mimicry. The "phrases points proférées" inscribed on the "feuillets" (Mallarmé had Paul Margueritte's manuscript in his hands, even before the performance) correspond to the "perpetual allusion" produced by pantomime on stage: in one case as in the other it's crossed-out text, crossed out by the screen of representation.

The reversal of this end of text consists in grasping, in the very artifice of a text that serves as a support for representation even though the words in it are not intended to be spoken, the authenticity of the silence constitutive of all representation. This reversal manifests itself as "surprise": we are surprised that a silence still reigns "between the leaves and the gaze", between reading and representation: this silence is the screen, which is interposed between two levels of the implementation of the device, but which at the same time identifies these two levels and cancels out their difference.

"Mimique" ends with silence, just as it began with it. But silence has changed its nature: "the only luxury after the rhymes", the latent time during which the poet translates the "ode tue", silence was first identified with the blank on the page, then with the blank of the "page not yet written". Henceforth, silence cancels the page, it is deferred "between the leaves and the gaze", it marks the frontier and the shift between the old mimetic economy of textual representation and the new, virtual and scopic economy of what Mallarmé still calls "reading". Through this silence is accomplished, in its full dimension of device, what I have called the Mallarméan laps.

Notes