Understanding the Notion of the “Ruin” in Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind and its Implications for Performing Arts

Understanding the Notion of the “Ruin” in Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind and its Implications for Performing Arts

 

1. Introduction

Perhaps it is inevitable that we turn to the idea of the ‘ruin’ today, living in a world surrounded by the wreckages of the past and present. Empires have collapsed, modernity has left torn ideals, and today’s industrial capitalism pours out newly made ruins every second as we speak, while the media makes their images ubiquitous. Of course, the fascination over ruins is not a new phenomenon. Michael Roth claims that humans have started taking note of the ruins as a result of secularization, during the Renaissance when the awareness of “historical discontinuities and the demise of ancient civilizations raised the status of traces from the past.” In 18th-century Europe, art and literature delved into the melancholic experience of the loss of historical grandeur. They were engulfed by a Ruinenlust(ruin lust), a German term referring to a nostalgic fascination of ruins in artistic, literary, architectural practices that reached its peak in the romantic period. The romanticizing of ancient human accomplishments in decay or indulging in the picturesque architectures covered in ivy became an artistic obsession. 

However, with the advent of the 20th century, the following World Wars, and the domination of industrial capitalism, the notion of the ruin seems to have taken on other aspects that are less romantic. The scale of destruction during the war made it no longer possible for ruins to be aestheticized and it was difficult to escape from the moral implications of such ruins. Along this trajectory, today, the continuous gushing of new ruins in the capitalistic production system—stretching from plastic toys strewn on the beach to crumbling factories in urban landscapes—does not leave time nor room for melancholia. Routines of man-made disasters, best represented by Bhopal or Fukushima, create ruins on a daily basis. Witnessing this turn, numerous philosophers and writers—Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, and Gilles Deleuze, Marc Augé, for example— started to contemplate on the fundamental basis of modern and contemporary ruins, not only in terms of ruins as physical objects but also on its a more conceptual, structural dimension.

Similarly, as its subtitle ‘The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins’ tellingly implies, the notion of the ruin appears as an integral concept for Jacques Derrida in Memoirs of the Blind. It is not a coincidence that Derrida takes interest in the ruin, as some of the ruin’s inherent characteristics are closely connected to his ideas of deconstruction, such as trait and différance. For instance, the ruin has the “ability to include both past and its dilated but crumbling present”, displays an ongoing oscillation of presence and absence, and becomes “a space between being and non-being, a strange instant that displaces us, and that enters us into relation.” Taking note of such temporal and spatial interplay that is inherent in the ruin, this essay attempts to first analyze the characteristics of the ruin in Derrida’s logic, especially in terms of ruins as a ‘movement’ or a ‘condition’ rather than a physical object. The essay will further attempt to investigate the implications of Derrida’s ruin for performing arts, which could be considered as a ruin per se. 

 

2. Ruins in Memoirs of the Blind

There are several dimensions in Derrida’s thoughts about the ruin with regards to drawings, more specifically to self-portraits. First of all, the idea of the ruin can be understood as the inherent lack or absence of something, which makes a drawing never intact by itself.

Yet in all the cases of the self-portrait, only a nonvisible referent in the picture, only an extrinsic clue, will allow an identification. […] the identification remains probable, that is, uncertain, withdrawn from any internal reading, an object of inference and not of perception. An object of culture and not of immediate or natural intuition.

As such, a self-portrait always depends on its title—‘an extrinsic clue, a non-visible referent’—for it to be identified as a self-portrait, otherwise, it could be a drawing of anyone’s face. Another aspect of this deficiency is in the object of the drawing in a self-portrait. Derrida points out that in self-portraits that depict the draftsman drawing something, the spectator can never be certain what the draftsman is drawing; the easiest assumption is that he is creating a drawing of himself drawing himself, but it could easily be an apple or a dog on the paper that we do not see, that we are blind to. In fact, Derrida mentions that drawing in general always needs to be supplemented by an external discourse, such as the title, frame, art history, critique, knowledge, the viewer’s gaze, and so forth. As such, the self-portrait is always in short of delivering itself as an immediate, intuitive, intact whole; it is always missing something and therefore always exists as a ruin to a certain extent. 

Even so, is it only the spectator that experiences this absence in a drawing? Here rises another factor that constitutes a ruin: the transcendental blindness that conditions the act of drawing. On a basic level, a self-portraitist can never see his/her own face and always requires a prosthesis such as a mirror. Contrary to the assumption that the ‘one knows oneself the best,’ Derrida points to the inherent difficulty of any sort of self-perception. His own face remains forever unseen to the draftsman. However, even with the help of the prosthetic element(the mirror), the draftsman is ‘blind’ because “the trait must proceed in the night.” The present is never pure to the portraitist; he is always absent from the present. He has seen himself just a moment ago and  will see himself just the moment after, but he will be blind to himself in the blinking moment he wishes to draw himself on the paper. In other words, one cannot see and draw at the same time. This is what Derrida calls the aperspective of the graphic act, which he points as the first aspect of the transcendental condition of drawing, that is blindness. At the moment a trait is set on a paper, the draftsman enters into a dark tunnel between the past and the future. What enters in this voidness of the present is memory. The draftsman is destined to rely on memory in order to draw himself; memory becomes the origin of drawing rather than visual perception and thus the act of drawing becomes blind. Yet, memory itself is always in a state of decay, in the process of ruination. The moment it is retained, it starts to crumble and fade away. Memory is also always incomplete, or is always a ‘sacrificial matrix of a visible order’ as Baudelaire claims; memories are unconsciously, and instantaneously selected, chosen, and filtered out of what one sees. Because of such eclipsing characteristics of the memory, when the self-portrait inevitably relies on the memory of the draftsman, it becomes a ruin itself. This is why Derrida claims that the ruin does not begin after an intact drawing is born, rather, it is born together with the drawing. 

As soon as the draftsman considers himself, fascinated, fixed on the image, yet disappearing before his own eyes into the abyss, the movement by which he tries desperately to recapture himself is already, in its very present, an act of memory. […] The ruin does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze.

What intensifies this process of decay is the temporal dimension in effect on the model. In every ticking second, the object being drawn—the face in the self-portrait— ages; it is “worn away” and “decomposed” by time. The self-portrait is therefore also blind in the sense that it is incapable of capturing or representing this eclipse. The picture of Dorian Gray, where the picture degenerates in place of the person in reality, is an excellent reverse image of this structural, temporal chasm that exists between the model and the portrait. And such chasm resonates with the dissonant temporality of the ruin, where the past is already ruined in advance, running towards its destined future of ruination at this very moment.

One the one hand, in the above mentioned anamnestic characteristic of the aperspective of the graphic art, the ability to see lends its way to the recollection of the memory and thus leads to blindness. On the other hand, the amnesic aperspective leads to a perhaps more radical or transcendental interpretation of such blindness, resonating with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “it is visibility itself that involves a nonvisibility.” Whilst the anamnestic aperspective describes blindness that stems from recollection and reconstitution, in other words, gathering of other visibles that are just not present at this very moment, the amnesic aperspective refers to an absolute invisibility that is a purely transcendental phenomenon, rather than an alternative, hidden state of the visible. Derrida suggests that “the visible as such would be invisible, not as visibility, the phenomenality or essence of the visible, but as the singular body of the visible itself, right on the visible—so that, by emanation, and as if it were secreting its own medium, the visible would produce blindness.” Derrida’s comparison of such blindness with the ‘punctum caecum,’ or the blind spot in our eyes that enables us to see, can be understood in different ways. For one, it could be understood in bodily terms; there is a constitutive blindness in our body because our body serves as the only point of view and does not allow any other vantage point than the subjective perspective. Another, more Derridian interpretation would be to understand it in terms of différance. To be able to see, certain things need to be “unbeseen”, or effaced. To phrase it in reverse, for anything to be visible, sensible, and recognizable, it has to stand in relation to the invisible others. For the letter “B” to gain its meaning, to become visible, it needs to be put in relation to all of the other invisible alphabets.

To understand the logic of the trait, one must also visit the second aspect of the powerlessness of the eye, or blindness as the transcendental condition of drawing: the eclipse or withdrawal[retrait] of the trait. While the aperspective of the graphic act points to the ‘pathbreaking moment,’ or the moment a trait is about to be traced, the withdrawal of the trait concerns with what happens after a trait is traced. Once the trait is there, the trait is no longer what it is, it disappears because whatever it has delimited starts to appear in its place. When a black line is drawn on a white sheet of paper, you no longer see the black line as it is, you see two white spaces that have appeared. However, none of these delimited spaces belong to the trait; the dividing nor the adjoining of the spaces will actually be visible. Thus, “the trait joins and adjoins only in separating.” This is what Derrida calls the differential inappearance of the trait; in other words, the trait is an operation of differentiation, putting things into relations, but is never visible nor sensible in and of itself. 

With these understandings of the trait, we return to the idea of the ruin. Due to the eclipsing character of the trait from its very origin, Derrida claims that the self-portrait is always a ruin. Most importantly, the ruin is a movement, not a theme. It is the very action that dismantles the totality from the beginning, something that is already in its past in advance, it is a ghost or “a specter of the instant.” 

The ruin is not in front of us; it is neither a spectacle nor a love object. It is experience itself: neither the abandoned yet still monumental fragment of a totality, nor, as Benjamin thought, simply a theme of baroque culture. It is precisely not a theme, for it ruins the theme, the position, the presentation or representation of anything and everything.  […] There is nothing of the totality that is not immediately opened, pierced, or bored through…

Similar to Derrida’s concept of deconstruction, the ruin can be understood as the impossibility of a totality, or the originality that is always immediately ruined through the action of the trait. And from such impossibility rises the melancholy, mourning, or love of the ruin. 

3. Ruins and Performing Arts

If so, how are we to understand the notion of the ruin today? What implications can we derive from Derrida’s thoughts? As briefly mentioned above, the notion of the ruin gained attention over the course of history in different aspects; as a nostalgic admiration and style in the romantic period, as a political, fascist rhetoric during the Second World War, as a reflection on the moral implication of mass destruction after the war, as a critical investigation on modernity in the second half of the 20th century, and so forth. Ruins have been a subject of contemplation in various disciplines, history, urban planning, architecture, visual arts, film, literature, etc. Although the implication of the ruin may stretch to vast areas as such, in this essay I would like to focus on ruins in relation to performing arts. As we have seen above, a clear characteristic of Derrida’s notion of the ruin is that he does not take the ruin as a thematic subject or an existing object like gothic monuments or destroyed streets, but rather a fundamental condition, a structural prerequisite. I would like to suggest that compared to other disciplines of art where the ruin mostly appears as a theme or a content, such transcendental understanding of the ruin resonates deeply with the fundamental characteristic of performing arts itself as a form. Performing arts, because it is essentially an art of fleeting time, is in itself a ruin from its birth. Performing arts and ruins both create their own unique temporality. Both are also a constant working of the memory, or what Derrida calls the “specter of the instant” that engages the audiences in the performative fiction. Lastly, performing arts is a constant struggle between the desire to represent the reality and the futility of such an attempt, which is similar to the effort of the draftsman to capture what is before his eyes. Let’s go through these characteristics of the performing arts as a ruin in further detail. 

Performing arts is an art form based on a unique temporality. On the one hand, as the notable, notorious theater director Jean Genet claims, performing arts invents its own ‘dramatic time’ that exists asynchronously to the conventional, linear time of the reality.

Among other things, the goal of theatre is to take us outside the limits of what is generally referred to as ‘historical’ time but which is really theological. The moment the theatrical event begins, the time which will elapse no longer belongs to any calibrated calendar… […] Even if that time which is called ‘historical’ – does not disappear completely from the spectator’s consciousness, another time, which each spectator lives to the full, then unfolds, and as it has neither beginning nor end… […] the theatrical event being suspended, outside of a historical time, on its own dramatic time…

Similarly, the ruin also creates a disturbance in the linear notion of time. It embodies different temporalities, where “the present is contracted into the simultaneity of past and future.” In other words, it is the remnant of the past and at the same time a reminder of a transient future. The ruin also suggests a time that has no pure origins—everything begins already with ruination—nor a decisive end—everything will continue its process of ruination. As Brian Dillon frames it, the ruin ‘predicts a future in which our present will slump into similar disrepair or fall victim to some unforeseeable calamity.’ On the other hand, performing art is an art of ‘here and now’; the core condition of its existence lies in its ephemerality. Despite the efforts to record theaters or create a score or a notation of dances, in essence, a performing arts work starts to decompose from the moment it unfolds. Only traces of them are left, and as such, performing arts exists as “processes of ruination in and by themselves.” What enhances the experience of this odd temporality in performing arts is the obligation for the spectator to endure it. Unlike paintings or photography, or even film that can be rewound or revisited, a theater audience cannot walk away from the artwork and must for a certain period of time ‘live’ the process of ‘ruination’ in its uniquely temporalized space. 

Closely related to the issue of temporality, both ruins and performing arts engage the spectator into what Derrida calls the “performative fiction,” which requires the action of memory. In a literal sense, because a performing arts work only happens once the way it happened, it can never be captured intact. As discussed before, the ruinous character of the human memory will always turn the experience of watching a performing arts work into a ruin. What will remain in the minds of the spectator is the ‘spectral presence’ of something that cannot be recovered or restored. At the same time, watching a live theater and making a sense of it is also a continuous and simultaneous interplay between recollection of what has passed and anticipation of what will come, while the present always remains blind; something will always be absent from the present experience. Therefore, watching a performing arts work is an experience of a ruin not only after it has been watched but also in the very moment of watching it. Resonating with Derrida’s claim that the ruin already exists from the origin, the ruin in a performing arts work is not a degradation of what was intact in the beginning but is born together with the work the moment it begins.

Lastly, I will look into the (im)possibility of representation without deviating too far from the notion of the ruin, as it is one of the key concerns for both Derrida and contemporary performing arts. When mentioning the draftsman being blind in the very moment of inscription, Derrida seems to hint on the impossibility of a ‘true representation.’ As Carlson and Costello explain, “the more in effort to be representationally faithful to the original (by fixing upon it), the more blindly the inscription proceeds.” The attempt to represent something to its closest reality always leads to its ruination. Taking note of this, and giving the example of Butades who drew without the real model in front of her but only his shade, Derrida also suggests that this is a deviation from the mimetic tradition. His claim that “[…] the origin of drawing and the origin of painting give rise to multiple representations that substitute memory for perception,” implies a different trajectory in art, a trajectory that tackles the virtue of mimesis and true representation. However, it would be too quick to conclude that Derrida claims representation to be impossible. According to him, for anything to gain meaning, it needs to be always differentiable, and at the same time, it needs to be representable, or repeatable. The same holds true for performing arts. Although practitioners and theoreticians of performing arts have attempted to escape from the notion of ‘representation’ for the past half a century—and they may have succeeded in suggesting alternative artistic languages to the Aristotelian, mimetic ways of representation, on a fundamental level, anything on the stage inevitably is a representation of a certain reality, otherwise, it would not be communicable or recognizable for the spectator. In a way, just like trait and ruins, representation is a constant interplay between the conditions of possibility and impossibility, appearance and disappearance, and presence and absence. Perhaps it is in this sense that the Derridean notion of representation differs from a conventional mimetic sense of representation. While the latter attempts to “fossilize the world” and set a certain normative standard of values to be copied, the former is a continuous process of effacing and reconstituting that opens up a space for new meanings and unexplored possibilities. 

4. Conclusion

This essay started off by examining Derrida’s notion of the ruin in Memoirs of the Blind. We have seen that because certain elements are always absent in drawings—especially in self-portraits—and therefore are always to a certain extent ‘ruined’, they always require contextual supplementation such as a title or a frame. Also because drawings inevitably rely on memory, and because the memory is a ruinous trait in itself, drawings are ‘born’ as ruins. The trait of a drawing always gains its meaning through its relations to the invisible others, hence a drawing always stands in the midsts of ruins. In fact, the trait of a drawing itself is a ruin; it exists in ‘differential inappearance,’ vanishing as soon as it separates and adjoins other elements to create meaning. 

Such an understanding of the ruin resonates with the fundamental characteristic of the performing arts, not in terms of its content but in the form itself. Performing arts, just like Derrida’s notion of the ruin, is a living experience of non-linear temporalities that oscillate between the past and the future. It also heavily relies on the participation of the audience through memory, which always gives the experience a ruinous character. Moreover, although for Derrida the attempt to represent something in its true reality always leads to its ruination, it is also a key condition for that entity to gain its meaning. This similar coexistence of possibility and impossibility also resides in representations in performing arts. 

It is important to note the ruinous characteristics in performing arts today because they draw attention to the potentialities that the art form has. First of all, it provides a rare moment of temporal disruption in our daily lives of accelerated and progress-driven temporality. At the same time, it compels us, spectators, to become active agents of creating subjective memory, and simultaneously, conceive an individual imagination of the unknown future. It opens up a space of opaqueness, a space that is neither governed by the optimistic promises of the capitalistic market nor the apocalyptic determinism of science fiction, but rather an amorphous space that oscillates between calamities and possibilities. Quite contrary to Derrida’s comment that Walter Benjamin considered the ruin simply as a theme of baroque culture, Benjamin seems to be acutely aware of such powerful implications of a ruin when he states, “historical materialism must renounce the epic element in history. It blasts the epoch out of the reified ‘continuity of history.’ But it also explodes the homoge­neity of the epoch, interspersing it with ruins—that is, with the present.”

[Reference] 

• Michael Roth, Claire Lyons, Charles Merewether, Irresistible Decay : Ruins Reclaimed, (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1997)
• Julia Hell, Andreas Schönle, “Introduction”, Ruins of Modernity, edited by Julia Hell, Andreas Schönle (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)
• Frances Stonor Saunders, “How ruins reveal our deepest fears and desires”, The Guardian, March 7, 2014.
• Carl Lavery, Richard Gough, “On Ruins and Ruination: Introduction”, Performance Research, Volume 20, Issue 3, 2015
• Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, “Ruin Hermeneutic”, Performance Research, Volume 20, Issue 3, 2015
• Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self- Portrait and Other Ruins, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)
• Maurice Merleau Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968)
• Jack Reynolds, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004)
• Jean Genet, “The strange word ‘urb …’”, Reflections on the theatre, translated by Richard Seaver, (London: Faber and Faber, 1972).
• Brian Dillon, ‘Introduction: A short history of decay’, in Brian Dillon (ed.) Ruins: Documents of contemporary art, (London: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2011)
• Licia Carlso, Peter Costello, Phenomenology and the Arts (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016)
• George Didi-Huberman, ‘‘Visual experience, form and symptom according to Carl Einstein’, trans. C. F. B. Miller, Papers of Surrealism (7), 2007.
• Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: Harvard University Press, 2002)