The MS (Emis?) Found On Charlotte Street

Jodi Dean, I Cite: Why an alias?

Mark B. Kaplan, Charlotte Street: Well, the assumed name is an imprimatur. I am rather a costive perfectionist when it comes to writing and would be reluctant to put my name to much that appears on the blog. The Proper Name is often the ego’s little representative and can therefore brook no disagreement. And the censorship exercised by one’s own name is what the pseudonym gets round.

But isn’t anonymity also one of the definitive pleasures of writing? The 'I' on the page discloses no age, gender etc. All those things which, by our speech, 'place' us within a system of social differences have been shed. To write is to escape these markers and confront one another perhaps more equally.

The name Kaplan, as you’ll probably know comes from North by Northwest. It’s an empty name, a decoy name, which is mistakenly attached to a real individual, Roger O. Thornhill. Thornhill, however, somehow answers the challenge of this Name. It’s a Symbolic contrivance that enters his soul and opens up the space for a certain freedom. (The Zed lodged in his own name represents the possibility for this space).

Thornhill thus ultimately welcomes being uncoupled from his name, his Fatal primal baptism is replaced by a baptism of Chance.

Alphonse Van Worden: The inaugural posts of charlotte street in May 2004 were two short references to Prague's two great 20th century Jewish authors of the fantastic. One nods to Gregor Samsa, the other to the uncanny adulterous consummation between the alchemical Emperor Rudolph II (as a rosebush) and his Jewish mistress (as a sprig of Rosemary),  lovers seperated by political and social boundaries who entwine by night in these surrogate forms under the Prague bridge which spans the Vlatava, connecting the Old Town with its Jewish quarter on one bank to the hilltop Castle and St. Vitus on the other. These stories involve the uncanny as a dialectic of radical estrangement and infinite intimacy, an almost Ovidian rift and coalesence, one of the more frequently recurring motifs/motives of Charlotte Street.

(And it seemed to me 'Charlotte-Street' the name is a phantom bridge connecting Perutz' and Kafka's Prague to Mark B. Kaplan's London.)

In posts of the last few months C-S traces our culture's growing incapacity to produce/perceive the sort of gnostic element of things upon which that uncanny/fantastic relies, which enacts the fabulous creation and healing of rifts, the impossible communion made possible through self-estrangement. But still C-S frequently reminds the reader that this estrangement of the uncanny, which is also the estrangement of one kind of theory C-S practises, while always posing the threat of utter irrecuperable alienation, remains at least potentially a romance of transformation.

There appear to be several implications for a) theory and b) political praxis. How hopeful/optimistic a project is this? Is it possible to travel back and forth across Charlotte-Street? (Or, is it possible not to?)

Mark B. Kaplan: These posts may have been ‘inaugural’ but they were not consciously signposting the direction the blog would take. It’s only in writing the blog that a number of pre-occupations have been revealed to me as mine. Perhaps blogs often begin by accident, but then their subsequent shape assumes a kind of necessity, their necessity attested to precisely by the fact that they arrive unbidden. A manifesto might well have foreclosed these revelations.

Years ago, as a technical writing exercise, I composed a series of sonnets, conforming exactly to the set form. This was done over a number of weeks. At the end of the exercise I was intrigued to find the same stubborn themes surfacing repeatedly. This was a kind of side-effect of following the technical exercise, yet this side-effect eclipsed in importance the exercise itself. The form of the sonnet was something foreign, indifferent to my concerns, but precisely on that account returned me to those concerns.

Now, the first post that you mention was a ‘translation’ of a Czech poem, rendered into literal English for me by a native speaker. Naturally, we read this image of the neglected rosemary sprig as pregnant with a human meaning, and when we do this an Ovidian transmigration has already taken place: a metaphor traps a human affect or thought in a form apparently foreign to it. Your story about the Emperor and his Jewish mistress ‘translated’ out of themselves, forced into the detour of another nature in order to pursue their passion is for me the story of metaphor itself. Just as the lovers can only pursue and sustain their passion through the ‘estrangement’ into another form, one can only be true to the integrity of certain kinds of experience or thought through the ‘estrangement’ of the figurative. One thing must be gloved in the body of another in order to maintain itself in its truth, and this ‘detour’ is the only route possible.

The relation between estrangement and communion, or strangeness and familiarity, is to me intimate to thinking itself. It used to be a kind of first principle, no? Familiarity is always the vehicle of concealment. Things are concealed ‘precisely on account of their familiarity’ (Wittgenstein). And it is because something is familiar that it escapes our cognition. The basic philosophical task is, therefore, one of ‘making strange’. What had been padlocked in familiarity is – through estrangement - thereby unconcealed, and its shape made known, even if this shape will initially confront us as contrived or unnatural. In other words, this unconcealment of truth is uncanny.

You’re right to detect in Charlotte Street a certain pessimistic intuition, a sense that in our culture, the capacities for radical estrangement are withering, but I’d rather not try and unravel these lines of thought here. Perhaps in these less familiar surroundings of the long Sunday, the curtainless windows open to the South, the level lawns and gravelled paths, but with certain jackdaw eyes peeping through the bushes, some of us might explore such questions.

AvW: The most persistent theme on Charlotte Street over the past few months has been this search for the barrier, (or permeable membrane?) between that which is properly human and that which may appear so, or may be made to mimic or represent the human, but isn’t. On the side of Charlotte Street that remains in Prague, this subject is haunted by the golem. Its robotic, obligatory actions on command and its semi-orphanhood are in Freudian or Lacanian terms neatly allied: the golem is the  creature of a magically productive Man, (virtually) the Law himself,  and to the Name of the Father within the ‘psyche’ of the golem, motherless, and therefore with no distant memory of a lost real, there is no competition. (That pacifying stone in his mouth is undoubtedly a mockery of a nipple.) If that is we can speak of the psyche of the golem. (Which, whether we can or not, we do obsessively, in fiction in any case.)

I am put in mind by Charlotte Street of two novels, one, is Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee, which like Charlotte Street exists simultaneously in Prague and London. In it, the tale of Edward Kelley’s journey to Prague and creation of the homunculus alternates with the 20th century story of an Englishman who moves into an inherited house in East London formerly occupied by the alchemist John Dee and undergoes a psychological crisis in which he begins to suspect he himself is a golem, the creature of a loveless, technico-magical inception and birth designed solely by a stern father, and that this is at the root of his emotional alienation. The other is A Case of Curiosities, by Alan Kurzweil, in which the protégé of a lumière inventor and artisan in 18th century France abandons his beloved mentor in the mistaken belief that he has witnessed the Philosophe murder his own jealously guarded daughter, a musician, when in fact he has only seen his mentor destroy, in a fit of rage, the keyboard playing automaton he has been keeping secret even from his apprentice in the course of perfecting her/it.

On the London side of Charlotte Street, the shop windows are full of eerie plastic toys resembling homunculi, which appear at I Cite, with which little girls are expected to play/train at mothering.

Can you sketch the outline of the inhuman, nonhuman and faux-human emerging on the Prague side of Charlotte Street? And what the transformation undergone is looking like as ‘it’ crosses the street to the London side?

Mark B. Kaplan: Your question reminded me of another Czech writer, Karel Capek who, I seem to recall, coined the word ‘robot’. Perhaps your question might be re-perceived through the Golem/ Robot distinction.

In my mind, Golems belong on what you call the Prague side: they are wounded and incomplete creatures, dimly aware that they lack something, driven or haunted by that lack. They experience life as a traumatic intrusion, an unwelcome excitation of the serenity of mere being, and they are slightly baffled by their own existence – the existence into which their pliable clay has been thrown. As such these creatures retain the force of the negative.

The robot, by contrast, and this is what is scary about the robot and the robotic is that they ‘lack the negative’. The robot is nothing more than the command it implements, a terrifying mechanical imperative, it knows no sadness, no lack.

More speculatively, the Golem is uncanny and offers us an image of origin. The robot, by contrast, embodies an anxiety as to what might happen: the empty positivity of what would be a post-humanity.

In my version of the tale, the Golem is formed from dust like Adam. Like Adam, Golem was an inert mass, until God/ the Rabbi breathed life into him. To animate the Golem one inscribes the word ‘Emet’ (Truth) on its forehead or places the Shem (paper inscribed with the unutterable name of God) in its mouth. I think in some versions there is stone in its mouth.

The trope is that through language we imbue the pre-linguistic mute being with life. At the same time, with the stone or the unpronounceable name, it’s as ifsome remnant of what is irreducible to language some unit of silence, must underwrite its existence. Remove the unit and it dies. The Golem is a kind of uneasy compromise of different substances. I think ‘golem’ might actually translate as ‘imperfect substance’. But this parody of a human subject is surely, then, the very image of the subject’s formation.

There is a sense in which the birth of the subject is set in motion from without. The Word of the adult ‘visits’ the child with a perturbing intimation of a universe of meaning beyond it. To use a now familiar distinction, the child senses that there is significance without grasping what. The wound of desire (the desire to interpret) is opened. Also opened up is a new temporality, a time of the not-yet as opposed to the immediate time of the body. There is henceforth always a split between existence and its significance; the one can never quite catch up with the other.

This now pretty familiar quasi-Lacanian story is perhaps another Golem tale. Again, we have the alien rush of significance into the purely inert or self-identical. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it’s a story that Zizek finds in Hegel, who describes Greek actors as like ‘vitalised statues’ and more famously depicts those uncanny Egyptian statues that emit a curious sound when touched by the rising sun:

“Especially remarkable are those colossal statues of Memnon which, resting in themselves, motionless, the arms glued to the body, the feet firmly fixed together, numb, stiff and lifeless, are set up facing the sun in order to await its rays to touch them and give them soul and sound.”

So you get the brief illusion of substance fleetingly awakened by spirit. This, for Hegel, signals a definite stage of historical subjectivity: Unable to draw animation from within, ‘[the Egyptians] require for it light from without’. The hub of subjectivity is located elsewhere, the expressive soul enters from outside.

Now Zizek suggests somewhere that what fascinates in such examples is the representation of the birth of subjectivity as such. He adds that the noise emitted by the Egyptian statue at dawn is precisely the voice-as- voice as pure demand before being filled with any positive content, pregnant with a plaintive will-to-speak.

This mysterious sound magically resonating from within an inanimate object is the best metaphor for the birth of subjectivity, for subjectivity in its proto-ontological status. Subjectivity is here reduced to a spectral voice, a voice in which resonates not the self-presence of a living subject, but the void of its absence.

It is this absence, or something like it, which I hear in the dolls and golems of ‘Prague’.

‘Charlotte Street’ is indeed both London and Prague, both a place of residence and a virtual place. The place name, as in Proust, carves out a space in the writer’s imagination – a kind of cordon within which certain imaginary beings, desires, possibilities reside. I’ve visited Prague only once, and this visit wasn’t enough to dispel the little nimbus around it, even if the big corporate chains now firmly established. Not all the crooked alchemical lanes are gone. And on my first night, by accident, I stumbled into a semi-concealed tavern that was a little pocket of old Prague. No bar as such, only a single beer pump; long wooden benches and bare wooden floors. In halting phrase book Czech, I managed to order some bread, butter and cooked fish (carp?). In this moment, the name, Prague, seemed to coincide exactly with the thing. This is of course was a fantasy, but one that Prague seemed more than able to accommodate.