Repetition of Repetition: exegesis [2012]

"The molecular lines make fluxes of deterritorialization shoot between the segments, fluxes which no longer belong to one or to the other, but which constitute an asymmetrical becoming of the two".[1]

Repetition of Repetition is a return to Bergson’s second way of knowing or pure movement/duration. I took a simple approach where my tools were mainly repetitions and a continuous alterity as a by-product, caused by the multitude of different lengths of repetitions, and in accordance with the structure of “…none of them do begin or end; they all dove-tail into one another”.[2] I explore therefore a continuous multiplicity and vertical temporality – the movement becomes the piece – and the notion of “time out of joint” thus described by Deleuze:

“It is as though time had abandoned all possible mnemic content…” … “It is as though it had unrolled, straightened itself and assumed the ultimate shape of the labyrinth, the straight-line labyrinth which is, as Borges says, “invisible, incessant”. Time empty and out of joint…”[3]

Furthermore, I render the continuous alterity in a subtle manner through myriad repetitions of different sizes. Each 'voice’ has its unique length which, through repetitions both global and local, enters into continuously different relationships with the other 'voices’. Even the conductor is ‘out of joint’ with the rest: his repetitive cycle is of a unique length as well. This forms the obscured repetition. In this manner I anticipate to repeat difference and to approach change itself, to 'verticalize’ time so that each element is present at all times, a “synthesis of the ‘before’, ‘during’, and the ‘after’”[4], but at the same time continuously different – a ‘unilateralization’ of sameness and difference. By this I hope to isolate movement itself and capture the singular(ity) object, the everted object. And by obscuring repetition I isolate repetition itself and bring about the structure of non-identity. This means that repetition is no longer bound by the requirements of representation because “what is repeated is no longer identity but a repetition that already harbours difference within itself”[5] and therefore the difference established:

“…is not a difference between past, present, and future understood as the difference between an originary ‘first instance’ and its successive repetitions  (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd … ) in accordance with a relation of succession in representation, but rather a difference between the repetition that only repeats ‘once and for all’ and the repetition that repeats an infinity of times for every time”.[6]

Moreover, the cooperation between the myriad-repetition structure, choice of materials and dynamics – whose resonances, on and between these three levels, dove-tail into, and fold, each other – forms a coupling between distinction and obscurity, as well as clarity and confusion, in terms of whole / part relation. If the whole is clear the parts become confused and if the parts are distinct the whole becomes obscure.

“Either we say that the apperception of the whole noise is clear but confused (not distinct) because the component little perceptions are themselves not clear but obscure; or we say that the little perceptions are themselves distinct and obscure (not clear): distinct because they grasp differential relations and singularities; obscure because they are not yet “distinguished”, not yet differenciated”.[7]

In this regard, there are, simultaneously, gases, fluids and solids (albeit distanced) while a double-natured ungrounded phenomenon is established, whose events (and natures) are synchronous.