Chasing Shadows: tactics for being led astray
Emma Cocker 2007
Senior Lecturer Nottingham Trent University
The repetition of another’s actions is an ambiguous gesture that operates at the interstice between homage and critique; where it is performed as a method of both sabotage and recuperation. Such performative duplication can be viewed as a form of intentional and involuntary mimesis; where another’s actions might become the focus of ironic imitation or of enamoured obsession, a space for meaningful inhabitation or a mask that can be borrowed for empty acting-out. Present in the coquettish mirroring of a lover’s touch during games of seduction, it is also the tactic conjured during any meticulous reconstruction through which to recapture the past or search for missing clues. It describes the inconspicuous temptation by which one might fall irrevocably in with the wrong crowd; yet is also the marker of the most tentative apprenticeships. Alternatively, it emerges during moments of boredom or banality as a form of escape or immersion; a means of distraction for whiling away lost hours.
The act of following another can also be witnessed as a strategic process within artistic practice, where it can be understood as a mimetic form of performance through which to attempt to be led astray or to become lost. It presents a method of relinquishing or giving over responsibility for one’s own actions; where the itinerary of another is borrowed as a device for wilful disorientation; as a catalyst for a game of chance or as the impetus for ludic wandering.[1] Reflecting upon the connections between surrealist and contemporary practice as a point of conceptual departure, my intent is to propose a paradigm of both compulsive and critical mimesis; where the nature of repetition within the act of following might be seen as the embodiment of existential alienation or psychosis, whilst also as a form of performative resistance or role-play.
In situating the historical context for the practice of following another, it is perhaps necessary to return to the Surrealist notion of errance; a form ofautomatic drifting or wandering that emerged in the early 1920s, through which to relinquish rational or predetermined methods of spatial navigation, and create the conditions of abandonment or disorientation.[2] Akin to other Surrealist forms of psychic automatism, the practice of errance encouraged the capriciousness of chance and the random interventions of the irrational; in an attempt to puncture the surface of what was consciously ‘seen’ or experienced, and to allow dreamlike revelations or a sense of the marvellous to emerge in the cracks and fissures between.[3] Though errance was essentially a transitory and performative gesture, it is inscribed or documented as part of the narrative structure underpinning novels such as Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1924-26), Philippe Soupault’s Last Nights in Paris (1929)or André Breton’s Nadja (1928). Within these Surrealist texts, the notion of following can be identified as a specific type of errance, where the path of another operates as the borrowed instructions or ‘set of rules’ through which to momentarily abandon one’s own direction and become wilfully (albeit momentarily) misled.[4] At times, these narratives describe strange or irrational pursuits that often necessitatea relationship, however fragile, between a follower and a person followed; where the protagonist frequently retraces the steps of a female character, whose function might be to act as a siren or guide leading the pursuer into dark or unknown territory. In the semi-autobiographical prose romance, Nadja (1928), André Breton textually reiterates his brief and unpredictable affair with a woman whom he had met on the streets of Paris, and who seemed at first to be the embodiment of ‘the wandering soul’: the perfect emblem of his own desire to escape the rational.[5] Breton was fascinated initially by Nadja’s submission to chance. Her physical and mental wanderings appeared to embody a kind of automatism, which Breton traced as though she were a planchette scoring the surface of the city with her own form of psychic inscription.[6]
In turn Breton’s own actions have subsequently been followed by practices which have also adopted the practice of ‘following’ another,[7] not least in the work of artist Sophie Calle whose project Suite vénitienne can be understood as pertinent inheritor of Surrealist practice, since it shares significant formal and conceptual links with the text, Nadja. Whilst in other work Calle can be seen to abandon responsibility for her actions by submitting to another’s instruction or will, it is in this project that a sustained mimetic practice emerges from the action of following in another’s footsteps.[8] Suite vénitienne began with a chance encounter when Calle was introduced to a man (Henri B.) whom she had previously followed. During the course of their conversation Henri B. disclosed that he was planning to take a trip to Venice; a journey that Calle decided to then follow.[9] Calle proposed to track the initially unwitting Henri B., thereby declaring him the subject of her relentless gaze and camera lens. She thus borrows or hijacks his itinerary as a means for pleasurable disorientation, for the “pleasure of following”,[10] echoing the manner in which Breton inhabited Nadja’s footsteps. Both Breton and Calle appropriate or repeat the actions of chosen individuals who appear to function less as ‘real people’ than as phantoms; ghostly beacons that are followed in search of more elusive fantasies.
Whilst they offer phenomenologically different and inversely gendered experiences for their respective reader or viewer, André Breton’s Nadja and Sophie Calle’s Suite vénitienne share a fascinating range of formal properties and conceptual parallels. Both offer a close literary account of their wandering pursuits, where diaristic text and documentary image interweave in order to authenticate the claims made or to act as witness; where “inevitably, as a narrative begins to flow, ‘the place’ becomes ‘the place where’”.[11] Breton and Calle not only follow another’s itinerary, but also often return to “wander back over the routes”[12] undertaken within the preceding narrative, retracing their own steps and photographing the ‘sites’ as evidence.[13] Personal preoccupations and emotive concerns determine the locations that are represented within their narrative, such as to constitute a form of ‘anti-guide book’ that maps or repeats the trajectory of their respective relationships.[14] A close formal analysis of the two practices might in fact point to the notion of ‘legacy’ as a form of repetition and return, where the repeated gesture is one of both continuity and critique. Calle’s practice undoubtedly echoes that of Breton, yet its reverberations might yet be capable of reversing or overturning the more accepted 'master' narratives of its earlier manifestation.[15] So too, Jean Baudrillard’s essay, published in the artists’ book Suite vénitienne/Please follow me (1988), presents a critical position from which to return to Breton’s Nadja, in order that other theoretical models and perspectives in relation to the act of following might be drawn.[16]
In his text ‘Please follow me’, Jean Baudrillard argues that the repetition or following of another is an act of both seduction and disappearance; where the individual’s original objective is (willingly) distracted or erased at the insistence of the double.[17] To follow is thus to rob another of their itinerary; it presents a form of existential kidnap where the other’s pathway is usurped or stolen as a guise through which to play out realities other than one’s own. However the notion of the double offers a dual threat. The act of repetition harbours the mirrored possibility of reciprocal theft, where the process of following – that is the possession or inhabitation of another’s imprint - has the capacity to be overturned or reversed. Baudrillard suggests, in fact, that the more violent moments within acts of following are:
… those where the followed person, seized by a sudden inspiration … turns around, making an about-face like a cornered beast. The system reverses itself immediately, and the follower becomes the followed […] shadowing implies this surprise. The possibility of reversal is necessary to it. One must follow in order to be followed.[18]
Within all acts of following there exists a peculiar tension, described by art historian Tom McDonough as the “libidinal tangle in which pursuer and pursued los(e) their clear polarities”,[19] and threaten to become indistinguishable. Roles can be switched and joker cards played: ‘acts of following’ bleed into ‘acts of being led’, where the person followed is transformed and appears to be self-consciously leading the unwitting follower whose own identity becomes increasingly disturbed. It is this threat of reciprocity that Calle acknowledges as a “dread (that) is taking hold of me: he recognized me, he’s following me, he knows”.[20] Later when she has been discovered by Henri B., she remarks on how “he’s hiding his surprise, his desire to be master of the situation, as if, in fact, I had been the unconscious victim of his game, his itineraries, his schedules”.[21] It is as if, in fact, he had known all along. Less a vessel to be filled by the parasitic intentions of the follower - akin to the surrealist ‘found object’- the person followed might assert a psychological hold or hex that beckons to be obeyed.[22] The act of following or inhabiting another’s footprint might then give way to the feeling of one’s own space becoming inhabited by the gestures of the other; for in the end the act of possession is a reciprocal gesture where one might as easily become possessed.[23] Mimicry of another is thus transformed into an eerie and involuntary ventriloquism. Calle is seen to be “lost … in the other’s traces”,[24] whilst Breton articulates the feeling of haunting when he asks:
Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I ‘haunt’ … Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.[25]
The tracing of another’s tread could then appear fueled by the fatalistic or spectral desire “to escape from the outline of the self”: the longing to absolve all responsibility for the self in the shape of the other. Following implies a chameleon act of disappearance: it demands the abandonment of form in favour of a mode of invisibility or formlessness. The follower becomes a corporeal echo akin to the Surrealist cast shadow. They become a kind of detached, autonomous ‘ghosting’ that is no longer existentially or indexically anchored to the original referent, merely held by some unwritten contractual bind. Denis Hollier describes this phenomenon within Surrealism as the transformation of the shadow from index into icon where: “Shifting from causality to resemblance, from metonymy to metaphor, these doubles, in addition to being the effect of their cause, merge with it in order to resemble a third thing.”[26] So too, the follower occupies the space of the ‘third thing’ or chimera, for in becoming the shadow they momentarily inhabit a hybrid zone that has properties of both themselves and the subject followed. Operating in this liminal mode of existence, by following another the boundaries between self and other, and those between the body and the environment become blurred or cancelled out, duplication renders reality according to the eerie logic of double vision.[27] The process of mimicry or ‘becoming another’ thus affects a crisis of ‘distinction’ or differentiation; a categorical slur or disturbance at the boundaries of form and of classification. Camouflage is a desire to ‘blend into the background’: it is a form of existential osmosis.[28] In his analysis of animal mimicry in Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,[29] philosopher Roger Caillois reflects on how the motive for mimesis and camouflage might be understood as being analogous to a form of possession or schizophrenia where:
To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them … It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar.[30]
The act of following another can be viewed as a “slackening of the contours of its (one’s) integrity”.[31] The gesture of mimesis results, not from a desire for survival, but from a “peculiarly psychotic yielding to the call of ‘space’”.[32] Caillois proposes a model of involuntary deliquescence or psychosis, where the act of repetition inherent in mimesis gestures a catastrophic blow for the individual resulting in a form of ‘convulsive possession’. However, the disruptive pulse of repetition is also at playwithin Caillois’ own analysis, operating a gesture of return or refusal that serves to disturb or unravel his original assertions about mimicry, and making it possible to recuperate a more critical interpretation of the act of following or mimesis. In his later writing in Man, Play and Games (1958), Caillois in fact refutes his earlier analysis of mimicry, redeeming or redefining it as a strategic method of ludus; as a category of play alongside agôn (competition), alea (chance), and ilinx (vertigo).[33] Separated in the realm of play (and perhaps by extension in the space of a practice) the individual might appear as an abstracted and mythologised reflection whose existence serves only the broader narrative or game within which they exist, where the “double … enjoys a coherence and a unity that the self lacks”.[34] For according to Caillois, play operates according to its own rules and logic, for:
the game’s domain is … a restricted, closed, protected universe: a pure space. The confused and intricate laws of ordinary life are replaced, in this fixed space and for this given time, by precise, arbitrary, unexceptionable rules that must be accepted as such and that govern the correct playing of the game.[35]
In play as in practice, the act of repetition remains a ludic force, for as long as the rules of this space are maintained; where the mimetic act of following another is entered into critically as much as compulsively. No longer an involuntary form of repetition, the desire to “escape … and become another",[36] is recast as a performative spectacle where, “it consists in the actor fascinating the spectator, while avoiding an error that might lead the spectator to break the spell … which for a given time he is asked to believe in as more real than reality itself.”[37] Both Nadja and Suite vénitienne are in fact marked by the properties of such a game, an artificial structure or framework that might indeed adhere to Caillois’ rules of mimicry or simulation as a form of play. However, their ‘spell’ centres upon the tension or gap between the pursuer and the person pursued, which must be protected in order to prevent the game returning to the domain of causal logic and becoming a teleological quest of the purely amorous kind. Baudrillard reflects on this wilful deferral when he says:
This game, as any other game, has its basic rule: Nothing was to happen, not one event that might establish any contact or a relationship between them. This is the price of seduction. The secret must not be broken, at the risk of the story’s falling into banality.[38]
There is a resistance on the part of both Calle and Breton to fix their experience in the flesh, to slip the game and break the rules. Encounters are too true claims Baudrillard, for in such acts ‘reality’ seeps back and corrupts the space of the game.[39] The spell is broken and play must then end. Breton is seen to desperately regret his sexual liaison with Nadja, as for him it marked the end of his game.[40] He laments, “Can it be that this desperate pursuit comes to an end here?”[41] Calle shares this sentiment when she says:
Finding him may throw everything into confusion, may precipitate the end … I’m afraid of meeting up with him: I’m afraid that the encounter might be commonplace.[42]
In this game, the pursuit of the other must remain forever unfulfilled. For not only does the act of following in the practice of Breton and Calle, describe the mimicry or repetition of another’s actions; but it also presents a site of reiterated role-play where the process of the search or quest is itself subject to a form of mimesis or simulation. Within Nadja and Suite vénitienne the gesture of following another is emptied of its meaningful intent and occupied as the repeated structure of a game: a model of eternal and endless pursuit where the indeterminate or latent potential of the action is privileged and preserved above the finality of closure. It offers a form of wilfully irresolvable or infinitely unproductive repetition; where the pursuit is forever thwarted or strategically fails, or where the process itself is valued above the object of its endeavour. Released from its teleological bonds and causal intent, the process of following another is opened out as a space of conceptual experimentation and testing out: a form of ethical possession through which to repeatedly inhabit alternative roles and possibilities beyond the parameters of one’s everyday reality. The double-step at play in the two practices is not only the means by which Breton and Calle might momentarily escape the rational or predictable logic of the habitual. Their actions also serve to liberate or release the act of following itself from its deterministic anchor enabling it to be re-inhabited or reanimated as a ludic strategy of Sisyphean replay or resistance.
Through Roger Caillois’ writing and ‘repeated’ reading of mimicry it becomes possible to propose a model of ludic repetition from which to explore the act of following as a site of perpetual oscillation or double meaning; where the repeated gesture can be interpreted both as a form of psychological deliquescence, and yet also as a strategic method that performs to specific ‘rules’. By exploring the conceptual echoes between Breton’s Nadja and Calle’s Suite vénitienne, the notion of repetition can be positioned within a paradigm of both criticality and compulsion; where the desire to be led astray evident in following another can be articulated as a mimetic form of both playful inhabitation or of involuntary and reciprocal possession.
[2] The practice of errance was strategically adopted in 1924 when André Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Morise and Roger Vitrac set off on foot from Blois (a town chosen randomly) and wandered haphazardly for several days. This particular example may however have been preceded by Le Voyage Magique of 1923, in which the same four protagonists undertook a series of journeys to places picked at random. See Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding (eds.), A Book of Surrealist Games, (Shambhala Redstone Editions, Boston and London, 1995), p.162.
[3]See Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding (eds.), A Book of Surrealist Games, 1995, for a comprehensive account of a range of Surrealist games, strategies and procedures.
[4]The idea of wilfully inhabiting another’s ‘reality’ can also be seen at play within the practice of automatic writing such as in André Breton and Paul Eluard’s The Immaculate Conception, (1930), where “instead of assuming a passive or ‘receptive’ frame of mind, one can with practice assume an active mental state not one’s own. Given this mental set - for instance, that of a delirious mental “illness” – one attempts to write from within it.” (Brotchie and Gooding, 1995, p.22). Tom McDonough notes how the term ‘depaysément’ is often found in early Situationist writings on the dérive, where he suggests, it means ‘taken out of one’s element’ or ‘misled’. See Thomas F. McDonough, ‘Situationist space’, October Vol. 67 (Winter, 1994), p.73.
[5]For further writing and research in relation to Breton’s text, Nadja, see for example Margaret Cohen, ‘Qui suis-je? Nadja’s haunting subject’ in Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, (University of California Press, 1993); Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, (MIT Press, 1993); Briony Fer, ‘Surrealism, myth and psychoanalysis’, in David Batchelor, Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars, (Yale University Press, 1993) and Ian Walker, ‘Nadja – A voluntary banality?’ in A City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and documentary photography in interwar Paris, (Manchester, 2002).
[6]Sometimes referred to as an ‘indicator’ or ‘pointer’, a planchette is a device used during a séance as a tool of inscription through which spirit voices communicate through a form of automatic writing.
[7] For example, Vito Acconci’s, Following Piece (1969); Tacita Dean’s, Disappearance at Sea I and II (1996 and 1997) and Teignmouth Electron (1999) where she initiates a filmic following in the footsteps of amateur yachtsman Donald Crowhurst’s fated sea journey; Heather and Ivan Morison’s, Chinese Arboretum (2003/4) where they follow the guidance of tree fanatics in search of rare specimens; or Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie's A Hypertext Journal which retraces the steps of Johnson and Boswell's eighteenth-century tour of Scotland.
[8]Prior to Suite vénitienne, Calle had already followed strangers on the street for months. Later projects also involved following instructions such as ‘Where are the angels?’ (1984), in which she asks a stranger for instructions or a clue to follow. See Yve-Alain Bois, 2006, ‘Paper Tigress’, October, Vol.116, Spring 2006, p.35 for full account of this project.
[9]Suite vénitienne was initiated in 1980. It was originally exhibited in 1983 as a presentation text, 55 black and white photographs, 23 texts and 3 maps of variable dimensions; with a subsequent artists’ book collaboration published in 1988, where Calle’s texts and images were brought into dialogue with the text ‘Please follow me’ by Jean Baudrillard, which establishes a particular interpretative context through which to consider the work. This paper is based on the 1988 publication, Suite Vénitienne/ Please follow me, trans. Dany Barash and Danny Hatfield, (Bay Press, Seattle, 1988).
[10]Calle, 1988, p.2.
[11]Ian Walker, ‘Nadja – A voluntary banality?’, 2002, p.55. Walker is referring to Breton’s Nadja. However Jean Baudrillard echoes this idea when he writes that in Calle’s practice the image comes to represent the idea that, “Here, at this time, at that place, in that light, there was someone’. Baudrillard, ‘Please follow me’ in Suite Vénitienne, 1988, p.78. Both Nadja and Suite Vénitienne, present textual accounts that are ‘authenticated’ through the use of photographs and other documentary devices such as the central autobiographical references; the inclusion of the names of real people and locations which precisely situate the work in a real city; and the diary format which in both cases rejects any superfluous account in favor of a more clinical style of writing.
[12]Calle, 1988, p.5.
[13]Calle takes photographs of the sites visited, whilst Breton wanted “to provide a photographic image of them taken at the special angle from which I myself had looked at them”. André Breton, Nadja, (1928), trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, London, 1999), pp.151-2.
[14]Ian Walker claims that in Breton’s text, “Sites are not chosen because they are the sites ‘one must see’; rather they are included because of what happened in these places … A private city has been created within the public space, occupying the same space, but differently, more intensely”, (Walker, 2002, p.53). A precedent might be found in La Carte du Tendre, which made an appearance in the first volume of Madeleine de Scudery’s novel Clelie (1654), and used the metaphor of a journey to chart the possible trajectories of a love affair. Tom McDonough makes the connection between La Carte du Tendre and the Situationists’ The Naked City. See Thomas F. McDonough, ‘Situationist space’, October Vol. 67 (Winter, 1994), p.60. A connection between Surrealism and La Carte du Tendre is also made by Ian Walker, in ‘Nadja - A Voluntary Banality?’ where he suggests that, “The physical geography of Paris is replaced by an affective topography, superimposing a sort of carte du tendre over the actual city. Or, to project forward, Nadja can be seen as an exemplification of ‘psychogeography’”, (Walker, 2002, p.53)
[15]This could be viewed as the attempt to reverse or resist the conventions of a practice that has been notable for its problematic relationship to women, who remain typically absent within accounts or are represented in the form of the prostitute. For wider cultural accounts of a female presence within the practice of flanerie see Janet Wolf, ‘The Invisible flaneuse: women and the literature of modernity’, Theory, Culture and Society, II-III, 1985, pp.37-46; Alex Hughes, ‘The City and the female autograph’ in Michael Sheringham (ed) Parisian Fields, pp.115-132; and Anke Gleber, The Art of Taking a Walk, (Princeton University Press, 1999), especially Part Four: ‘Female Flanerie’, pp.171-213.
[16]It would seem as though Baudrillard’s text itself also ‘follows’ the Surrealist sentiment of Breton’s example, not least in the final line which conjures the image of a “swooning woman” (Baudrillard, 1988, p.86.), a gesture that might be seen to echo the point of closure in Nadja, when Breton states, “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all” See André Breton, Nadja (1928), trans. Richard Howard, (Penguin Books, London, 1999), p.160)
[17] For Rosalind Krauss the gesture of copying, or doubling performs a destructive blow, which “produces the formal rhythm of spacing- the two-step that banishes the unitary condition of the moment, that creates within the moment an experience of fission …The double is the simulacrum, the second, the representative of the original. It comes after the first, and in this following, it can only exist as a figure, or image. But in being seen in conjunction with the original, the double destroys the pure singularity of the first.” See Rosalind Krauss, ‘The photographic conditions of Surrealism’, October, Vol.19 (Winter, 1981), p.25.
[18]Baudrillard, 1988, p.81.
[19]Tom McDonough, ‘The Crimes of the flaneur’, October, Vol.102, (Fall 2002), p.107. McDonough is in fact drawing connections between Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969) and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Man of the Crowd. Poe’s tale follows one man’s irrational pursuit of a stranger, of an unknown man, “whose physiognomy, glimpsed for a split second, has entranced him” and for whom “curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion”. McDonough goes on to cite Michel Butor’s assertion that they are, “at bottom identical. The second places his steps in the footprints of the first who remains unaware of him, although the former is without knowing it the initiator, the guide of the second”, Michel Butor, Histoire extraordinaire: Essai sur un rêve de Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1961) p.33, cited in McDonough, 2002, p.106.
[20]Calle, 1988, p.9.
[21]Calle, 1998, p.50.
[22] Hal Foster suggests “the surrealist object selects the subject: he is always already marked by it”. Foster, Compulsive Beauty, (MIT Press, 1993), p.236.
[23] Jan Verwoert asserts that to appropriate a temporal occurrence or ‘event’ is different to the appropriation of a ‘dead object’, for here the ‘borrowed’ thing it is invoked rather than possessed. Verwoert goes on to cite Jacques Derrida’s, Spectres of Marx (1994), where he speaks of the inevitable reciprocity of possession: “Is not to possess a spectre to be possessed by it, possessed period? To capture it, is that not to be captivated by it?” See Jan Verwoert, Apropos Appropriation, Why stealing Images Today feels Different Today, Tate Triennial 2006, http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/triennial/essay-apropos.shtm
[24]Baudrillard, 1988, p.78.
[25]Breton, 1928/1999, pp.11-12.
[26]Denis Hollier, ‘Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don't Cast Shadows’, October Vol. 69 (Summer, 1994), p.118. Hollier disrupts the reading of the cast shadow as “the very exemplar of a non-displaceable sign: rigorously contemporary with the object it doubles, it is simultaneous, non-detachable” (Hollier, 1994, p.114), with a form of shadowing that emerges in certain photographic and surrealist representations where the shadow appears as a separate, disembodied manifestation. He describes the moment as one of both liberation and horror as the “cast shadow gains iconic autonomy; it is separated and liberated from the object that causes it”, and “enters the realm of ambiguity and survives its cause”, (Hollier, 1994, p.118).
[27]The notion of the shadowy ‘third thing’ that haunts or inhabits another, recalls Guy de Maupassant’s, L’Horla, (1887), a tale which describes the haunting and subsequent descent into madness of its central character, who experiences a feeling of possession: “I am lost. Somebody possesses my soul and governs it. Somebody orders all my actions, all my movements, all my thoughts. I am no longer anything in myself, nothing except an enslaved and terrified spectator of all the things I do”.
[28]For Georges Bataille, the collapse of self or deliquescence is indicative of the condition of informe or formlessness, an operation that functions to breakdown the boundaries of form and effect classificatory slippage. See George Bataille’s original entry for formlessness in ‘Critical Dictionary’ trans. D. Faccini, October, Vol. 60 (1992), pp.25-31, or in Encyclopedia Acephalica, (Atlas Press, London, 1995), p.51-52. First appeared as Dictionnaire Critique in 1929 and 1930, and constituted a separate section of the magazine, Documents.
[29]Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, trans. John Shepley, October, Vol.31, (Winter, 1984), p.30. Originally published in Minotaure, Vol.7, 1935. Caillois presents an account of various contemporary theoretical explanations for animal mimicry and a host of examples from the natural world, before presenting a case against the idea of mimesis as an adaptive method of survival.
[30]Caillois, 1984, p.30. There is perhaps an interesting connection to Frederick Jameson’s analysis of the schizophrenic moment arising through the postmodern condition of mimesis inherent in the act of appropriation, which results in a collapsing, not of space, but of time, that prevents the individual from being able to ‘make sense’ of themselves in the temporal continuum, where order or organisation is lost in favour of a perpetual present.
[31] Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, (MIT Press, 1994), p.155.
[32]Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 1994, p.155.
[33]In a footnote to Man, Play and Games, Caillois states that his earlier study “treats the problem with a perspective that today seems fantastic to me. Indeed I no longer view mimetism as a disturbance of space perception and a tendency to return to the inanimate, but rather, as herein proposed, as the insect equivalent to games of simulation”. See, Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, (1958) trans. Meyer Barash, (University of Illinois Press, 2001) pp.177-8. However, it is interesting that the ‘disturbance of space perception’ persists in the form of games within other categories of play that demonstrate the desire for the sense of psychological deliquescence and loss of self or alternatively a disruption of a moral order. This ‘promise’ of disruption is specifically at play in the processes of both mimicry and ilinx, where both practices emerge from a form of carnivalesque or ritualism. In all forms of play there is also the risk of ‘corruption’ that might threaten to blur the boundaries between the game and ‘real life’ and return play to its chaotic and primal origins.
[34] Ilana Shiloh, Paul Auster and Postmodern Quest: on the Road to Nowhere, (New York, Peter Lang, 2002), p.42.
[35]Caillois, 1958/2001, p.6-7.
[36]Caillois, 1958/2001, p.19.
[37]Caillois, 1958/2001, p.23.
[38]Baudrillard, 1988, p.78.
[39] Baudrillard asserts, “The encounter is always too true, too excessive, indiscreet … Quite different is the secret (and following someone is equivalent to the secret in the space of a city”, 1988, p.84.
[40]Mark Polizzotti describes, as a footnote, the erasure or ‘stylistic amendment’ that took place in 1963 when Breton revisited the manuscript and removed the reference to the night he and Nadja spent together in Saint-Germaine, in the Introduction to Nadja, 1928/1999, p.xxii.
[41]Breton, 1928/1999, p.108.
[42]Calle, 1988, p.16.
University of Chester,