Light Cue 23

One can take . . . all the themes that have been privileged until now by deconstructive strategy: that is, presence, consciousness, sign, theme, thesis, etc. One cannot imagine oneself alive renouncing all consciousness, all presence, all ethics of language: and yet this is precisely what must be deconstructed. One must try to think what it is that makes us unable to “do without.” Thus, on the one hand, the very menacing character of deconstruction. But, at the same time, it does not threaten anything because it is not a question of destroying what there is to deconstruct. Although phantasmatic, the threat is not, however, imaginary, and this explains the affective charge, the terrorized violence of the resentment and reactions against “deconstruction.” Negotiation operates in the very place of threat, where one must with vigilance venture as far as possible into what appears threatening and at the same time maintain a minimum of security – and also an internal security not to be carried away by this threat. This, too, is negotiation.
An essential aspect of negotiation is that it is always different, differential, not only from one individual to another, from one situation to another, but even for the same individual, from one moment to the next. There is no general law, there is no general rule of negotiation. Negotiation is different at every moment, from one context to the next. There are only contexts, and this is why deconstructive negotiation cannot produce general rules, “methods.” It must be adjusted to each case, to each moment without, however, the conclusion being a relativism or empiricism. This is the difficulty. That there is something like an absolute rule of negotiation that can only be adjusted to political, historical situations.
-Jacques Derrida, Negotiations

I was trying to understand the idea of simultaneity and totally failed until I realized that simultaneity does not exist temporally, but rather is an experiential moment. A popular current in music these days is the “Mash-Up” but the Mash-Up is really nothing new. In fact it is a simple evolution of what the Hip-Hop scratch DJ does. It is what early House music did. Take two otherwise unrelated pieces of music and interweave them into a new sonic experience. It is this characteristic of newness that really grabbed me. The two cease being two and become one. And in that moment of synthesis, simultaneity ceases and experience is born.

John Cage‘s Indeterminacy is a classic example of simultaneity. Yet it is a single experience of word and noise colliding in a wholly new experience. Joseph Albers was famous for his ideas surrounding color theory. He made explicit the point that colors are relational, rather than operating as a fixed system. If that is true of pigments, it is doubly true of light.

It is possible to make a common lightbulb appear blue, now green, now pink simply by altering the context in which we find this bulb. The color of light is not inherent, but rather relational. When creating a composition based upon multiple colors it is an inherent act of negotiation. The one impacting the other, each altering the fundamentals of the other. No single color can remain on its own. They are both relationally and contextually defined. The color experience, then, is an instance of simultaneity that is not simultaneity, but rather a mash-up experience.

By playing with the tensions inherent to color in the medium of light it is possible to make a figure appear at once beautiful and ugly. By defining a subject through the use of color on the one hand and contextually defining it as the opposite of that color. In a similar way one can make a distant subject more prominent than a near subject thus unsettling the notion of physical space upon a stage.

Opera is an extreme experience in simultaneity. One has music and dance and song and sculpture and light and shadow and fabric and yet no one of these elements can be successfully extracted from the whole. Rather the experience is a relational system whereby every element feeds into and both defines and negates every other aspect of the experience. The humming chorus in Madama Butterfly is a long section of an opera that is about a light cue. Yet by decentering the Subject, Butterfly, and placing her as static and passive observer, one falls even further into the thrall of the subject. In essence, she is most present when she is absent. Which in a way is the point of the opera, that she only exists as symbol, and dies the moment she becomes woman. The “Other” can only exist as a symbol, and must be denied dimensionality.

This moment does not give us any answers, nor any definitive insights into the nature of our heroine. It does however ask an important question. What is the tension inherent in the Subject? A Subject can not exist without a context whereby there are Objects. Thus, the Subject, whole within its own subjective experience, must also always already exist as Object to another. Butterfly, made Object by Pinkerton, is made Subject once again by the rising sun. And the negotiation continues.