C L O S E R

C L O S E R

When you watch Ian Curtis dance on BBC 2 on 15 September 1979 to the song
'She's Lost Control', an index seems to take place, an interruption of the
order of the sign itself. A suicide rush marks definitively the subscripts
of English consciousness at that time, at that time of night, in the
September of 1979. It is easy to find this rush magnetic, as if an
ahistorical sadness spreads across and won't be beaten away, and is
unbeatable not because it wants to be but because it lends testamentary
whimper to something unbearable: I.C. is here overloaded by social forces
that go beyond him and peak as 'pop' inscriptive vectors that won't be
controlled. An internal shakiness of language and its relation to rhythm
takes hold, a fragility of relation which art itself doesn't seem able to
transmit or, worse still, is constitutively called up to occlude. The
signscape is still trying to catch up with I.C.. We had to close our eyes.



The holy anger of his dancing and sound is almost impossible to film, again
and again the colonial feed cuts away as if what I. C. remarks is the
unbearableness of explication. Slicing through the social etiquette of form
(his beautiful Elvis voice is as coarse as doomsday), a kind of
pornographic bios is marked, as if explication couldn't get more explicit
than this. Sheer falling, with only the relapse of a 'band' to back him up
on no real archive at all (anthropos is gone, this guy is gone; she's lost
control), what guts here is autocide as the almost most inevitable nudity
of sound recording: historical eavesdrop of the proleptic anterior (it is
difficult to remember a face more denuded and scratched with silent
infinity than this; is his face a white stone? or an index?)

However much Curtis is contained and endorsed by 'the band', whose rhythmic
hold is regular and formal, as is his singing and movement, the shakiness
of language and precision is somehow turned into not just what Samuel
Beckett's Three Dialogues calls an 'estheticised automatism', but into an
occasion and momentum of fragility (it's as if Curtis falls straight
through the song and out of the bottom, only held up by the trauma of form
for a while, and then allowed to go). Whilst the dancing is ecstatically
robotic even as it is humanely arrhythmic, it is also beyond automated by
dint of this: however mediated the performance is now by YouTube or Vevo,
originally it had no screen and so manages to penetrate what now archives
it: the flesh does not have a screen in the same way a work of art does.

I'm probably talking about a particular moment of ancestral static and
torque in the performance, brief but not a punctum, which also moves
through that, as if the screen that now records it were shaken by some
mnemonic bump on the local archive of the English as haunted and now
limited import and export. When Tom Cohen writes later on of a grand mal
d'archive hosting and guiding the cultural scene from without, he not only
malgrammaticises a reference (to Jacques Derrida's Mal d'Archive) but with
'grand mal' names as if consciously Curtis' feeling draft, his so-called
'epilepsy' (it may be interesting to note that Tony Soprano has the same
condition). At this crest in English consciousness (I was three years old)
something is about to happen to suicide. Suicide is about to become
exchange. When Curtis shakes and judders and loses control, and it happens
to happen here at the crucial moment off camera, it is not just that
language shakes (so much is familiar as the tradition of the traditionality
of recent wave of avant British poetry) but that the relation to language
shakes, as if it will break off, and it does, deeply inscribing the archive
of an era with an out-of-control; arrhythmia that cannot be socketed back.

*

The screen itself clinches it. In a recent text called 'The Writing
Screen', Bernard Stiegler writes of the closeness to the point of identity
of inscription and the screen, and of the 'neganthropos, that is, this
being that, as Heidegger said, we ourselves are, and a being that, as we
ourselves, as the gathering of the beings that we are, as being-together,
is caught within entropy, in such a way that we ourselves, as the real
projectors of all these screens and on all these screens, as was said and
shown by Jean-Luc Godard, this neganthropic being that we ourselves are'.
Curtis doesn't sing with the band, who he is with as a friend, but he
records a historical rendition and litigation over it, a soul graffiti made
out of invisible tears and torn at the edge, with exorbitant distress
(life). The voice has at least three stages of accompaniment: furrowing in
with unseen tears towards the end, hopefully grating over at the start, and
giving up in tantric laughable despair at the end. At least three voices
and at least three silences, as if you were also listening to something
that can't and won't hear or be heard, an elemental danced autochresis that
falls straight through the adjusted tenderness of an auscultation. This
relation to rhythm and words (numbed down, inaudible, drowned out by the
resonance of the voice itself) is not critical or just softly pliable (he
is giving in) but totally of the order of an anthropocenic bump-series,
like the mini black stratographic mountains on the Unknown Pleasures
sleeve. (The bumps on the lined black stave erupt and bubble, earth
yearning itself out into the coarseness of a scream too exact to be
rendered by anything more than surround sound. The band carry if you like
the sociability of the song, the song as social set that can be replayed
and survive, and Curtis as eye of the rain cloud develops a kind of
divinely asocial and unclear spasm; it's scary, and the camera keeps
blanking it out for our sake and then coming back quickly for more.)

(What dawns too quickly is it's not just the death drive anymore. Something
else is happening. Something worse.)

Even the most sophisticated poem in the world now is a screen which a human
being dancing like this is not. Let's say that Curtis is to some extent a
ragdoll Antigone, this name that means nothing and everything in this
context. Curtis is, like Antigone, and like Justine in Melancholia, just a
person. He was one of the guys. Nobody saw it coming because of this. But
'nobody saw it coming' is also a socially ominous phrase. Every time a
member of New Order says something to the effect of 'nobody saw it coming',
what are they actually not seeing coming? What was it that nobody saw
coming in the resistance to form, the virtual signing off on form and
rhythm, that Ian Curtis was and is? Nobody saw it coming: the phrase is
insanely colloquial. Nobody saw it coming and nobody knew what was
happening. Something, which is socially unbearable and beyond any social co-
opting in, is seen coming here and colloquialised as what 'nobody saw
coming'. If the transition from Joy Division to New Order, from suicide to
suicide-exchange, from punk to disco, is a key one, it's because it leaves
a scar that won't be healed over. In all mentioned cases someone will try.
In Melancholia she is called Claire; in Antigone she is called Ismene; in
Manchester he is called Bernard Sumners. All three attempt to socialise the
being who is, more accurately, not beyond the social at all but so far gone
into it that they act like the denotaton referred to at the heart of
Antigone, the strangest of all, the more uncanny than the uncanny, and the
most monstrous. One can perhaps only truly see this denotaton in the
performance of 'Transmission' on the same night, where there is a glitch-
asterisk and baroque-abyss at the moment where Curtis allows his body to
mark a kind of pre-hieroglyphic interruption with the first drum break (at
2.07).

At this moment he is telluric in the way Benjamin describes in the Goethe
essay, or in the way the poeticised acts in Benjamin's account of
Hölderlin, the Gedichtete which dislocates and precedes any prosodic
screening and performance, loosening it away from itself. A new order kicks
in; not, for all its impossibility, any determinate rhythm (disco) but
something else: a live transmission. Someone will always try to bring it
back but it cannot come back because it is already deep into the earth.
Ismene and Claire will go to their sisters and offer the continuance of
company even in the very worst, for example in Melancholia where there is a
cutting out of the conditions of life of the species-being possibly for
good. This too can be socialised, they seem to say, and life is not worth
the name if this absolute tragedy cannot. Absolute extinction, even so, can
be shared out. But the irony is that the denotaton is closer than we think
(Closer) and more monstrous, socially channelled as basic breath, and any
amount of joy that still exceeds it also now plummets through the void left
over. In Melancholia it is Justine and not Claire who eventually builds the
last known trace of the oikos, the little wigwam of branches for Claire and
her son. It is not that Curtis-Antigone-Justine are beyond the social or
even asocial, but that they are so terribly gone inside the historical wave
that they can now choose to be either tender or not. If anything, they will
front as tender and come back to centre stage. But what they mean, as
index, in order for anything now to perhaps survive at all, is something
worse than life and death.