1. Network

Although it is always better to experience stupidity in company, and easier to bear it, for days I have been refusing friends' invitations to view Paris from the Eiffel Tower, ignoring the advice of the guidebooks which inform me in detail about the significance of the Tower. Doubtless, if one trusts guidebooks, the Tower is important. I had known its existence was important, but believed, naively as it turns out, that it existed only so that the heroes of Basara's stories could chase each other around it and jump from its top, which is certainly more than enough to make any building one of the more important ones in the world, let alone this one. However, the guidebooks I look at do not mention Basara at all. For the time being, I think self-assuredly. And instead of informing all the tourists of the world about the only thing they should inform them about when they inform them about the Tower, instead of telling them something about the special relationship Flyn has with Eiffel, they, the guidebooks, explain how this heap of iron which probably no eye would wish to have in its scope supposedly heralded the city of the future, New York, for example, a metropolis of glass and steel, with mirror-buildings which reflect each other, in which passers-by are reflected, in which they exchange glances and smiles, seducing each other with images mirrored in glass. The Tower, therefore, heralded a city inhabited only by images and their reflections, a city which produces and multiplies images, a city in which only images are bought and sold, in which only images live -- a city which becomes image.

It is not only guidebooks, however; every good history of the theory of the gaze reminds us of the significance which the Eiffel Tower "as locus of architectural experiments in the 20th century" had in establishing "a hitherto unknown visual experience", which offered to the gaze the city as an image. The city which now becomes image is organized like an Impressionist painting, as movement of light of different intensity, as flickering of coloured points on a flat surface which, depending on the time of day, produces always new shapes, unstable and mobile, shapes which touch and shift, never, however, establishing the difference between foreground and background. Everything is foregrounded, therefore everything is in the background (provided you are looking from a "good" spot, and, in this case, the Tower is such a spot), thus suspending the field of vision organized according to the principles of "Cartesian perspectivism". Eiffel's construction announced the vanishing of a city which had "depth", a center and a periphery. Furthermore, the city also loses its materiality, or, more precisely, its substantiality, it becomes a smooth plane of light on which it is impossible to discern details, anything individual, framed, formed, stable; a glittering surface which offers to the eye a city consisting only of a succession of lights of greater and smaller intensity. The eye can finally gaze into the light without fear of injury, because the city has vanished into the light; the city has become light... Paris, the city of light...

I think how today the heralded city of the future has immersed itself into darkness instead of light, thus probably again heralding the city of the future (maybe Paris actually always lives in announcements of the future, which then happens somewhere else, in New York, mostly). From the Eiffel Tower, the gaze today, as before, sees a moving plane of light, but that plane is now only a fragment of the whole city which cannot any longer be seen in its entirety from any privileged position. The only way to see the entire city at a glance today is to make use of the cartographers' work -- Paris is whole only on the map of the Parisian metro, on which numerous multi-coloured lines intersect, tied into a net. The city has become a colourful net. I presume that Descartes would find his way in present-day Paris much more easily than he did in unstable and fluid Amsterdam, because you exist in a net-city only if you have a highly developed inclination, nearly a passion, for geometric images. This means that in a net-city you exist only if you exactly determine the point you are at, if you then just as precisely determine the relationship between that point and those closest to it, if you then perceive what are the lines which connect these points, and in what relationship the very lines find themselves. Each of these relationships delineates a geometric body, from a triangle you enter a square, from the square a heptagon, if there is such a geometric image, and there is, because I am looking at it right now. Without a clear perception of the relations between points and lines you are lost, you do not know where you are.

Of course, just as in Descartes's Treatise on Method, a clear perception of these relations must be preceded by a procedure of "self-grounding" of the one who is perceiving, which in this case means that you must discover the line on which you "are", from which you always depart towards other lines, and to which you always return after being on other lines. In a net-city you are grounded only after a clear and positive perception of the colour of your line. The line becomes yours, the line becomes my own, making me a "self" because it is the only thing which saves me from being lost, which puts me in a safe place, which gives me a foundation. My line is brown; the brown line, that is me. I am calm only when I see that some other line, to which I may have crossed for a moment, joins my line, the brown line, the most beautiful line in this whole swarm of lines, because it is the only one which will bring me closer to myself and take me home. On all other lines, I am far from myself. All other lines threaten me, with their colours and their names which name the unknown: for example, the red line, Bobigny, I am not there, nor am I on the green one, Balard, I am also not on the black line, Berault, nor on the blue one, I am especially missing on the blue line, Bois de Boulogne. Every line has, apart from its colour, also a name. Paris, a network of signifiers...

Evidently, everybody already knows that the city has become a network of signifiers. First of all, maybe, the postcard vendors. Most postcards show precisely the Paris metro, on a white or black background, something like Paris by day and by night, I suppose (later, I saw the metro on a yellow background: Paris in the sunshine, perhaps?). In a gift shop near the Louvre I discover that postcards of not only the Eiffel Tower, but also of the Beaubourg are placed together with those of the Moulin Rouge in the nineteenth century, under the common heading -- "view from the past". The city of the future is looking at me from the past, the city of the future is already a memory. If you wish a memento of the present city of the future, buy a postcard of the Paris metro. Because the city is a metro. Not only do the postcard vendors know this, so do the homeless of Paris. They no longer live under the bridges on the Seine, why should they, after all, live in postcards of the past (past cards, it says on them). They live in the city, in those spaces where the city is now doing its city thing -- in the metro. I think, hypocritically, that maybe they had it better in the city of the past, in the open: in the light, near the water, and, now quite maliciously: in the fresh air. Then I see that they were led into the subterranean darkness by the wish to live where everybody else does, to live in the centre of the city, at the point where it's happening, on one of the trajectories with a multitude of points.

2. I, Mostly Outside the Network

I say to Dejan, who always helpfully puts me on my line, who patiently and accommodatingly plugs me into the network each time when I, through total inability to connect points into lines and lines into geometric images, fall out of it (he and the brown line thus suddenly become the conditions of my possibility), I say to him that I do not believe that the homeless who move through the metro make love any more like the old, river-dwelling ones, did, that I do not believe that it is feasible for them, there, in front of all of us, I ask him whether this means that in the city of the future nobody will make love any more or whether it will have to be done under the scrutiny of thousands of eyes, pretending that they cannot see you, and I already start choosing a point at which, in case I find myself in such a future, I would work at love (faire l'amour); naturally, I choose the brown line, and a point called Stalingrad, I like the name, it promises me a great battle and a grand victory. I interrupt my fantasies, abruptly, when I see Dejan's startled gaze watching me. I immediately decide to hide from him my suspicion that apart from the metro, above the metro, there is something else that is lit and which also, like the metro, can be called a city. I fear that he could doubt the good health of my mind, I am afraid that he could leave me there, on an alien line, unaccommodated, completely lost in the future, and then I see, and it is I who am now startled, that I do not have to tell him any of this, I see that he knows it all and has known it long before I did, because he has turned on his camera, he is shooting the metro, he is shooting the city with all its future monuments, with all its posters, announcements, maps, graffiti, trains. He is also shooting the citizens of this city, and this, my amazement knows no end, does not appear strange to anybody, nobody is bothered by being looked at, nobody, evidently, feels unease that an unknown person is recording their conversations, people smile into the camera, imagine themselves as monuments in someone's history, they are used to being filmed by those who have come from the past to the green line, to the tourist centre of the future, built, naturally, underground, and marked with the name of Les Halles.

We abandon the people of the future who inhabit the colourful transversal lines, we ascend the steps which take us straight into the past. The city of light, the past city, rises before us in fragments, we watch enlarged postcards, the Louvre, Beaubourg, Notre Dame, Sorbonne, Opera... I inform Dejan that he can stop shooting now, that there is no sense in filming postcards, that it would be simpler if we just bought some, if we determine that we actually want to see again what we are looking at now. Naturally, he did not pay even a moment's attention to what I was saying, which was, after all, quite senseless, and which as such, as senseless, succeeded in "giving meaning" to my unmodern eye, which still believes that the time of seeing and the time of enjoying what is seen must coincide. These are evidently two different economies of pleasure. Sunk into the visual field, I give my eye to all the images which can happen to it (I constantly cry, "look at that, look at that"), I enjoy the visual field and the watching now, in the moment of seeing. Dejan has one eye closed, with the other eye, through the lens, he looks only at what is in front of the camera, he sees only a fraction of the visual field which we are in, he does not see all that I see because he does not want to shoot all that can be seen, he wants to "select" the visual field, and, later, to enjoy these chosen fragments, this digest edition of the visual field -- the greatest hits of my visual field. As he is looking only at what is in front of the lens, he asks me to inform him about the things he cannot see, "tell me where to point the camera, I cannot see everything, you can see better, tell me what to shoot.". Shooting what he cannot see, he enjoys the fact that he will enjoy it in the future, when he shall see what he is looking at now. Now, he is enjoying his future enjoyment which will enjoy my present seeing, what I see now and what I can see now only; I see everything for the first time, always only once. There are no reruns. What I have seen, I have seen, there is only then/now, only when I watched, and what I saw then/now I shall never see again, because each seeing is a premiere. Everything that appears in the visual field appears at that inconceivable "point" of time which is now, which I cannot "catch", about which, now, I do not know anything, which I shall learn only in the future, when this now will already have happened. Because Now is happening, I am given over to a succession of Nows, a succession of events. And as I cannot foresee now, because I cannot foresee what is and what is happening, all that is happening to me, the unforeseen happens. Events happen, but it is never known when they will happen, or what will happen to them. That is, after all, the nature of events. "Something is happening", that is the "formula of not governing oneself" (that is why I cannot find my line and plug into the network). An event always signals the inability to "possess and control that which is", that which is happening. For those who are unable, who do not possess and control, the sequences of moments are "shaped" in such a way that a high level of chance is accepted. What comes after the now, and not necessarily linked to it, the events which will happen in some future now, remain open, unrepresentable, ineffable, surprising. This does not mean that in this "structure" of time there is no future, it means that the future exists as destination, not as determination, as an indeterminate destination, as chance, as blank, and, of course, as the risk of the happening of a "pure event", that "negation without remainder", the risk of the happening of a disaster which it will not be possible to give sense to from any future, because it will abolish all futures, because it will happen as the happening of catastrophe.

And, just as it is impossible now to hear words which were said before, just as it is impossible to enjoy the enjoyment which has already happened as enjoyment, it is even less possible to enjoy enjoyment which has not yet happened, because where did this idea of future enjoyment come from if the future is precisely the lack of "destiny ", of determination, if the future is the possibility of the total absence of enjoyment. I do not exist except in the present, and there is no enjoyment but that of what is now, of what is present. It would seem to me that the event and enjoyment of the event must be simultaneous, that the enjoyment cannot come after the happening of the event, when the event has already disappeared into non-existence.

3. He, in the Network

However, it would seem that I am wrong. Because, unlike me, or, which is the same, unlike my body gliding through the visual field enjoying those moments in which order appears for an instant in a thought of the body/eye only to disappear immediately, unlike me who see now what I am watching, enjoying the seen at the moment when I am seeing it, Dejan shoots the visual field in which we find ourselves, he does not see what he is watching now, and what I am seeing now. For this "exchange" between moments of time to be possible, in order to be able to move the present into some "afterwards", the now which has yet to happen after the now in which it is happening must be absolutely certain, certain as if it had already happened; that is why Dejan is constantly checking his camera, constantly worrying about the light, constantly asking, "Will it turn out well?", he wants absolute certainty that what is happening now is yet to happen precisely in the way in which it is happening now. I assure him that "it" will "turn out" best if he stops shooting, if he looks at the visual field without the camera, because then his visual field will "turn out" just as he sees it. That, of course, is another superfluous remark. Because it is not a matter of seeing now what you are looking at, it is a matter of not seeing now what you are looking at, of seeing the observed later, in the future, of knowing precisely what it is that you will see in the future, of knowing what the future will look like. And that future will look exactly like my present, which will have long since passed at the moment of his future; we are simultaneously in two different times, his future is my past. His future will be such as he shoots it now, because that is precisely what he is doing: he is recording future incidents now, not events, he is setting the present aside in reserve, in order to make the future out of it (I notice that I have become concerned for the quality of his recording, I want him to have a nice future), but a future, however, about which he already has complete information. Complete information means neutralization of the unforeseeable and the unknown, decrease of risk, control of the process, knowledge of what comes "after". And "what is already known cannot, in principle, be experienced as an event". Because an event cannot be "made", as he is trying to do, events cannot be shot and edited. An event is unpredictable, it appears by chance, it is conditioned by "perception which is absolutely surprised by what it is perceiving", it is conditioned by encounters which take place beyond every horizon of predictability, unexpected because of their total impossibility. In his future, which is taking place before my very eyes, in my present, there are no events, nothing unpredictable, no impossible encounters, no "absolute surprises". The absence of events, however, is the only way to master time. How else would it be possible to control time than in the way he is doing it, by completely subordinating the present to the future and placing it there, thus depriving the present of its privileged position? Only then, and under this condition of placing the present in the future, will "the future be completely predetermined and the present itself will stop opening into some insecure and accidental 'afters'". Each "after" is certain, because it has already happened. What comes after now has already happened, before now.

The gap which thus appears between two "times", the time of recording and the time of playback, is insignificant in principle, and does not disturb the synchronous structure of time organized and controlled in this way. The recording functions like money here. Like money, the recording is nothing but time put into reserve in order to become available at some future point. Naturally, this time in reserve is the only "real time". In other words, "real time" is only that moment in which the time preserved by the recording is "realized". However, even though the temporal shift between the time of recording and the time of playback does not, in principle, affect "real time", the greater the shift is, the greater the possibility of something unforeseen happening, something that was not factored in, something that could escape control and thus spoil the future, make it surprising. And that is why, as soon as we arrive home on the brown transversal line, Dejan checks on the screen what he has just recorded: because controllers leave nothing uncontrolled. More precisely: even now, he is now looking at what he has recorded, he still does not allow the past present which he has preserved for the future to become actual for him. Not looking at what he has recorded, he looks at the recording itself, checking the quality of the future, wanting to be sure that it's "turned out well". Before my eyes, his enjoyment multiplies. Sitting in front of the screen, calmed by the favourable outcome of the recording of what is yet to happen to him, he enjoys his good forecast, he enjoys the fact that he is yet to have enjoyment when the recorded future once becomes his reality, and then, continuing the production of enjoyment, he enjoys that he will enjoy when he enjoys that which he has already enjoyed. His enjoyment suddenly produces something unexpected, unforeseen, self-mediating, enjoyment produces a "surplus value" of enjoyment, pure enjoyment, enjoyment in enjoying, which is precisely now happening to him, and about which he, as is always the case with events, still knows nothing, and about which he will also never know anything, because it is the "surplus" of the present which has not been recorded for the future, as the future, from which it can only be learned.

I, on the other hand, probably like all unmodern people, do not look at the screen, because what is going on there is my past, now already totally predictable. I look at what is happening to him and at what escapes him at the very moment of happening. I enjoy his enjoyment, I take his enjoyment for myself. It is not exchange, it is not a gift, it is not ordinary theft. My present acquires the shape of his enjoyment. My present is his present which escapes him. I am stealing his time.

4. They, in the Network, Outside the Network

Weeks later, in the centre of the city, at the point where the green and brown lines intersect, I stop to buy for Dejan a postcard of the only thing which he did not succeed in shooting -- the whole city, a plan of the metro. That is when I discover that postcard of sunny Paris, the metro on a yellow background. I explain to the saleswoman that I also need something more romantic, for example, sunset in Paris, Paris at dusk, Paris at dawn, I ask her whether she has a plan of the metro on an orange background, or, best of all, on a pink one. She mistakenly concludes that I am joking, smiles at me. Failing to grasp what is funny about my deadly serious search for kitsch, I do not smile back, turn my eyes to two women who stand beside me, completely covered by heavy (that is the way I see them) black veils. I wonder whether for them, living behind those black veils, the difference between night and day in Paris, which I am so strenuously trying to establish, has any meaning. My feministically motivated sadness because of their hiddenness from the gazes of others suddenly changes to happiness when I realize that the veil gives them the possibility of observing while unseen. I envy them, though for one instant only, because they can look improperly long at anything they wish, because they always know who is looking at them, because nobody knows who they are looking at. My happiness lasts until I realize that there, in the semi-darkness of the corridor linking the transversal lines, in the darkness of the black which conceals them, they are buying sunglasses with black lenses. They do not talk, I do not know whether they smile, I do not even know whether they are watching me. I, however, watch them, improperly, for very long, I stare at them, I look at them as they are paying for the black glasses for eyes which are already behind black, I look at them as they go to a corner, as they shelter one another while they lift the veils from their faces in order to put on the glasses, and, finally, as in this complete darkness, with two blacknesses before their eyes, they leave towards their own transversal line, free of the visible, without a visual field. They have perfected the strategy of the "recorded future", I suppose that they think it is not important to see "afterwards" what you are looking at now, but not to look at all, in order never to see anything at all. That is the only way in which nothing can befall them, no events, no encounters, no absolute surprises. Nothing unforeseen. They live in what comes after the "pure event", in a life after the cataclysm, in a catastrophe which goes on permanently. Without windows, monads on the transversal.

I give up the search for the pink metro, I give up on the metro, I will walk through Paris, even if I have to walk constantly through the past. I will send Dejan a postcard of the Eiffel Tower, it is not unromantic, either, and it is certainly kitsch.

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