Fragments and Lies

Abstract

This article considers the formal and critical consequences of organizing an aesthetic corpus around the philosophical concept of the fragment via a reading of Aryan Kaganof’s “Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers” (1994). This experimental video sets spoken accounts from the perspective of the likes of Ted Bundy and Charles Manson alongside grainy, ambiguous imagery. Instead of thematic meditations on violence, the monologues circle around quasi-nostalgic reflections on the past and the nature of identity. The film frustrates any language of formal analysis that would rely on accounting for what is present in the film, instead proposing a sympathy with poststructuralism’s efforts at displacing the metaphysics of appearance. Violence is not what resides ready-made within the work, nor is it reducible to the realm of the visible or the audible, but is an unstable process bound up with the act of reading itself. The fragment as a formal problem holds out the abstract, general notion of a break in ways that compel a rethinking of violence as something impersonal, rhythmic, and grammatical.

Species of division, first proposal of a difference: “fragment” as distinct from “segment”.

Segment, from the Latin secare, to cut, suggests the division or subdivision of some X, implies a part of a whole that is bounded by a border or line, whether real or imaginary, and, in this division, this notion of some strip, piece, or part carved up (dissected; fractionated), further suggests how those parts remain sworn and bound to the whole unified thing from which they were originally, and also at some distinct and isolatable moment, cut off and which they now, in their present form of being a segment, remain a segment of X, a part of X, or a subsection or subdivision of X, where X may be a circle or a population but X may also be a bowel. It is fitting that Eisenstein, the great stylist of the cut, admonished: “With such organically thought-out and photographed parts of one large significant and general conception, these must be segments of some whole, and by no means with stray, strolling études” [1] (p. 92). Any segment holds out the seductive lure of every ideology of recombination, unity, totality (entireness, fullness, thoroughness, flawlessness, inclusion, completion, perfection: what balm these words; I swoon).

A fragment is an entirely different thing. From frangere, to break, as in bread or glass—but also a neck or a skull or a heart—but also to breach (as in to breach a contract (broken contracts themselves being what can break necks or skulls or hearts)), passing or violently fleeing, the fragment involves a mutilation, a broken piece of an undiscoverable something; a remnant; a scrap; a fracture; shares the root frag- with fragilis, fragile, with what is easily breakable, even solicits or tempts its own destruction by wearing a tremulous breakability on, as it were, its surface—on, as it were, its skin. In the entry “Fragile, Frail, Brittle” in Crabb’s English Synonyms (1816, rev. 1916), what is most subject to fragmentation is what is also subject to finitude: “Man, corporeally considered, is a fragile creature, his frame is composed of fragile materials; mentally considered, he is a fragile creature, for he is liable to every sort of frailty” [2] (p. 367). A fragment is a part broken away without recourse to a prior whole, and this broken piece contains within itself the dimension of what is broken or liable to break, what is incomplete or vulnerable to incompletion, what is interrupted and devastated in every effort at continuity. Fragment is thus neither whole nor is it part nor is it neither whole nor part in relation to whole or part or to wholeness or to partibility. (Must wholes exist?—You need to understand that entire lives have been waylaid by this question.) For while a segment is acted upon by the cut, the fragment contains within itself the dimension of already being broken without making recourse to origin; or, rather, the fragment is broken from an always imaginary and impossible to recover origin. As Hans-Jost Frey writes in his exemplary study Interruptions,

Understanding the fragment would mean: giving it meaning. The fragment has meaning when it can be brought into a context within which it fulfills a task. But the fragment is what it is precisely because there is no context for it. No whole can accommodate it. The breaking point of the fragment is the edge of meaning. Thus the fragment seems to be hostile to meaning and resists understanding. All the attempts to explain it turn it into something it is not and end up in contradiction with their own aim. To the extent that they succeed, they disavow the fragmentariness of the fragment and treat it as a whole or as part of a whole, because this is the only way to bring what is incomplete into context. Understanding the fragment means: understanding its incompleteness. Ref. [3] (p. 25)

If the break that marks the fragment constitutes something painful, the source of that pain is not rediscoverable or understandable; the pain is born out in the ontology of the incomplete, fractured, fragile, frail fragment. Any fragment bears each fragment’s mutilation, which is to say the general form of mutilatability as such.

Second proposal of a difference: those thinkers and artists who hold to the unity-cut logic of the segment against those who bond themselves to the more radical episteme of the fragment, one that is also intimate with, say, a larger theoretical or formal affection for the particular, the contingent, and the distinct (e.g., Barthes’s work on the punctum or Foucault’s desire in Discipline and Punish for a “history of detail”). But in suggesting that some dwell in the fragmentary, I am not just once more writing modernism. Such a designation would itself be an instance of segmentary logic: the imagination of a possible strict division, the isolation of one part (genre, style, impulse, drive) from some co-posited unified historical whole.

• Segment: Plato.
• Fragment: Nietzsche.
• Segment: Hegel.
• Fragment: Deleuze.
• Segment: Henry James.
• Fragment: Dada.
• Segment: Griffith.
• Fragment: Godard.
• In the end, I suspect that these are fairly uncontroversial assignments.

The underground filmmaker (& novelist, poet, performance artist, visual artist, anti-artist, curator/founder/editor of non-linear decolonial arts journal herri, &c.) Aryan Kaganof belongs squarely to the latter group, his prolific experiments in form constituting a sustained engagement with the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of the fragment. Kaganof was born in South Africa but fled to Amsterdam when he was nineteen to escape conscription into the Apartheid army; in his early years, he made films under the name Ian Kerkhof. His work is influenced by Debord, Bataille, Rilke, and Burroughs (all practitioners of fragmentality); by pornography and by extreme performance art; by Blixa Bargeld and Matthew Barney and Ron Athey; by Kenneth Anger and Marguerite Duras and Kathy Acker; and as much by contemporary South African jazz musicians and poets as by the British avant-garde filmmaker Peter Whitehead. This assemblage of interlocutors is mutually concerned with the transformative possibilities of radical aesthetics, each working through, mutatis mutandis by medium, the expressive dimensions of modes of bodily and formal strain, discomfort, disintegration, degradation, and extremity. Consider the titles of a few of Kaganof’s many films, which betray, despite his stylistic heterogeneity, an enduring conceptual interest in aesthetic and political force: Nice to Meet You, Please Don’t Rape Me! (1995), a satirical musical about violence in South Africa—one ad for the film reads “From the Country that Gave You Apartheid, Now the World’s First Rape Musical”; Beyond Ultra-Violence: Uneasy Listening by Merzbow (1998), a documentary about the experimental Japanese noise musician Masami Akita, whose otological excesses have also appeared as scores for several of Kaganof’s films; and the Bataille-citing and bodily-fluid gushing The Dead Man 2: Return of the Dead Man (1994). Kaganof has worked in numerous media formats, often experimenting with then-novel methods, for example shooting on digital video before blowing it up to 35 mm. He is best known outside of underground circles for one such experiment: SMS Sugar Man, a 2007 narrative film shot entirely on Sony Ericsson W900i camera phones (eight of them, to be precise). Kaganof insisted this was the first full-length feature film made entirely on a mobile phone, which it well might be—or, if not the absolute first, having been shot in 2005–2006, it is close to the first.

Kaganof’s navigation of the possibilities of the fragment take the form of constant restatements or reappropriations or accumulations of perversities bound to non-hierarchical broken bits (of image, sound, typography, text). He thereby produces schemas of enumeration that paradoxically destroy the eidos of enumeration, which is itself a relation based on hierarchization (counting up, counting over). Kaganof insists on the centrality of this fractured dimension of his work, writing in a twenty-four-point manifesto (which itself contains points that subdivide, disturbing the count—“I didn’t want a manifesto about RE:MIXING. I wanted a manifesto that was itself RE:MIXED” [4]) that “the atomic unit of the RE:MIX is not the shot, but the fragment—which is a clump, a volatile conglomerate. Granular, dense, and stuck together” [4] (n. 20). Fragments already contain multiples (those volatile conglomerates) and (thus) the fragmentation of any one fragment merely generates more fragments (or, as Kaganof words it in the same note, “Division of this fragment occurs only to produce still another irreducible cohesion”). The RE:MIX is not a process of synthesis or integration, but a placing within range of each other these disparate differences, “a practice of diluting, or haemorrhaging the subject in a fragmented, particled sound/vision language diffracted to emptiness” [4] (n. 21). Collocation does not amplify (note 17 advises that the RE:MIX “has the fundamental characteristic of a denial of development”); rather, it drains. Nor does it drain down to nothingness (note 12: “In the RE:MIX, what is abolished is not meaning, but any notion of finality”)—it just drains as open, unending process.

The privileged atom of Kaganof’s film work is a two-to-six-minute-long mutilated piece of film marked by a kind of violence, not one that explicitly takes place in the otherwise unbroken image, but a force bound up with the fragment as its formal condition of possibility. In the language of the well-known distinction that opens Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus between the arborescent and the rhizomatic, Kaganof’s investment in the fragment as volatile conglomerates, as clumps, recalls the beginningless, endless, foundationless, and conjunctive logic of the rhizome, the famous “and … and … and …” [5] (p. 109) that extends in every, any, and all possible directions at once. The present article considers the formal and critical consequences of organizing one’s aesthetic corpus around the fragile piece of the fragment through a reading of Kaganof’s 1994 film 10 Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers, a work that is decomposed as much as it is composed. In its remnant dimension, the fragment as a formal problem holds out the abstract, general notion of a break in ways that compel a rethinking of the ethics of violence and force that concerns so many of Kaganof’s films on a representational level.

10 Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers is, in some ways, exactly what it claims to be—except insofar as the title lies (more on that below). The film is organized around the multiple, unstable rhythms of fragmentation and interruption, the positive cadence of wrecked, degraded things—broken bones, bodies, genitals, histories, voices, lives, spirits, worlds. It opens with an acousmatic voice intoning a poem: “In the beginning was the mountain, Then the cloud, Then the radar station, Then the helicopter, Then the cancer, Then the cell phone…”—a seeming cosmology of ascending Thing in place of Word except to the extent that Word will always appear first precisely as naming. This fundamental dilemma, known to so many philosophers, finds a particularly fine formulation in Frey: “Language can begin and end, but it cannot, beginning, say the beginning and, ending, say the end” [3] (p. 24).

Fragment One immediately splits the audio and the image track. The sound is of the real voice of serial killer Ed Kemper (also known as “The Co-Ed Killer”) over a grainy, blue-tinted image of a man in profile—abstracted in a cinematic frame which thereby constitutes a purely aesthetic cell, later materialized and de-metaphorized when the camera rotates 180 degrees to reveal the offscreen gate of a literal carceral cell—smoking a cigarette, breathing, never speaking, staring into the middle distance, his body rendered less an object of fascination than a proximate canvas for the display of disrupted, high contrast, expressionistic light. The opening lines of this first fragment abdicate the privilege of speaking monologically; the pronoun “I” is first posited in a state of pronounced refusal. “Well, I’m not an expert, I’m not an authority”, intones the unseen voice, “I’m someone who has been a murderer for almost 20 years. One victim let me back in the car; I locked myself out. She opened the door for me. My gun was under the seat. What in the hell am I doing telling you that? Am I looking… Am I a masochist? Am I looking to be tormented further?” The static grain of the archival recording periodically drops out, making clear that both image and soundtrack have been and will be subjected to editing, to gaps and omissions, to durational interruptions and plastic recombinations—to being cut up. The camera periodically moves behind the visible body, obscuring the subject’s face entirely, calling attention to the capacities of light to sculpt the head in novel ways, to render head’s roundness line, to rupture the sagittal plane, to work over the expressivity of the face, to sculpt flesh into new forms or to empty it out, to produce blankness. Not unlike Deleuze’s account of Francis Bacon’s violence—not as one consumed with representation (“spectacles of horror, Crucifixions, prostheses and mutilations, monsters”) but as one “involved only with color and line: the violence of a sensation (and not of a representation), a static or potential violence, a violence of reaction and expression” [6] (p. xxix)—the capacity of light is shown here as what has the potential to give the body otherwise: in other words, what enacts a force that distends a form, reconfigures it differently.

“I knew I was going to kill her”, begins the ending of Fragment/Monologue One. Over a high-pitched background drone, the recorded voice continues: “I came out of her vagina. I came out of my mother. And in a rage I went right back in. For seven years, she said, I haven’t had sex with a man because of you, my murderous son. This was one of our arguments. I cut off her head and I humiliated her corpse”—and then the screen sharply cuts to a saturated dark red monochrome expanse and “Murder Avenue” from the 1993 album Till Death Do Us Part by the Geto Boys (Monologue Two). Kaganof’s transitions between fragments—sudden, unprovoked, abrupt, disruptive, violently contractive, unnervingly slack—render a wholly myoclonic style. The durations of the fragments are asymmetrical and fail to follow any logic of acceleration or expansion: the first is five and a half minutes long; the second, two minutes; the third, just shy of four minutes, the fourth is six and a half minutes, et&c.

The third fragment features a black male speaker, his body nearly invisible in long shot in the far left corner of a dank space, as he recites from memory the litany/chapter entitled “The Generations of America” from J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), itself a deeply experimental work of fragments: a mix of real and fictional names in an unfolding listing of shootings—all language reduced to Name, “and”, and “shot”; “shot” supplanting the Biblical “begat”. In his clipped preacher’s cadence, which rises to the crest of a guttural bluesy exhalations, the voice begins at Ballard’s beginning: “These are the generations of America. Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy. And Ethel M. Kennedy shot Judith Birnbaum. And Judith Birnbaum shot Elizabeth Bochnak. And Elizabeth Bochnak shot Andrew Witwer. And Andrew Witwer shot John Burlingham […]”. Like the title which lies (still more on that below: this question of truth and lie will be deferred), the listing falsifies, or is in error, or is misremembered; in Kaganof’s film, the voice, which also stutters, hesitates, and pauses in between the clauses, omits names, gets the assignations wrong: it cuts from Judith Birnbaum to John Burlingham. It fragments, as it were, Ballard’s fragment: spirit of the law, if not the letter.

Fragment Four sets grainy and degraded home movie footage to Roberta Lannes’ short story, “Goodbye, Dark Love”, a farewell to the abuses of a lover who has shot himself: as the meat of the decaying film fades, we hear of the post-mortem hillside that it is all “hair and skin and blood and flesh and him and him and him”. Fragment Five presents an actor reading Charles Manson’s meditations on freedom, the text taken from the transcript of a phone interview between Steve Alexander and an incarcerated Manson published in 1970 in the underground newspaper Tuesday’s Child, while Fragment Six turns to a recorded dialogue between Ted Bundy and James Dobson on the dangers of pornography, recorded the day before Bundy’s execution, and set to the image of Kaganof masturbating while double exposures project pornographic images onto his body (so he is screen and surface, cause and effect of his own arousal). Fragment Seven returns to a Ballard text with a voice recounting an anal sex scene from Crash (1973). Over a mostly black screen with flashes of indeterminate pink, representation assimilated to tone, the nervous spasms of the cut-up textual body resemble nothing so much as (re)opened wounds, like bits, perhaps, of skin turned inside out. After returning to the dark crimson of the Geto Boys, the eighth monologue sets a grainily whispered diary entry from Henry Rollins over imagery of the distance put in place by a male figure stalking a woman, violence always about to arrive without arrival. Fragment Nine consists of a 1979 voice recording of Kenneth Bianchi (one of the two Hillside Stranglers) over a long shot of a body, face covered, bound with ropes to a chair—each mode of violence opening up a formal modification in the arrangement of limbs. Fragment Ten returns to the earlier performance of Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, return functioning to notate a series of possible differences: the speaking subject now facing forward (different from canted), in the center of the screen (different from at its border), in close-up (different from long shot), now exhausted, a bit broken and choked up as he wails the monologue directly to the camera, until an off-screen voice commands “Stop”, and so the fifty-minute film does. (Frey: “The irony of this discourse is that it is not possible to comment on breaking off. What breaks off justifiably has ended. The discourse that is able to say why it breaks off is not fragmentary. […] The break does not announce its coming, and afterward it is too late to say anything more” [3] (p. 72)).

Those are the monologues that comprise Kaganof’s Ten Monologues from the Lives of the Serial Killers. But the title of this film, as I wrote above, lies. Or, rather, there is a curious carelessness with or imprecision to its choice of words. Monologos means “speaking alone, speaking singly” (from monos: single, singular, one, alone, only; logos, of course: word). Several of the fragments, however, involve multiple speakers. Furthermore, despite the titular insistence, not every mode of speech, whether monological or dialogical, is associated with a serial killer. But once the monologue is no longer the definitive mark of each fragment, then the epigraphical poetic voice droning “In the beginning” should properly count towards the final tally; or, if the title seems to hold out the promise of unique or singular monologues, then the two repeated sections should count as two, not four, units of monological discourse. So, the film either contains eight monologues or twelve, but it does not contain ten. Fragment logic, respecting neither part nor whole, is unbothered by this kind of disjuncture: where the fragment begins and ends is precisely not a question one asks of the fragment. How many is a segmentary question through and through. Truth and lies: also segmentary concerns.

The monologues promised in the title, we might say, appear in the opening credits, under the sign of the title, only to disappear, to erase themselves with each non-monological, non-serial killing performance. The film more generally comprises many such forms of erasure, fading, retreat. Each narrative focuses on some dimension of the past, bearing out a nostalgia for what is lost and gone. What has passed on in the film is multiple: bodies, now corpses; corpses, now decayed; unity, now fragmented; the past, now obliterated; but also more ephemeral things, like memory (as in Kenneth Bianchi’s unnerving monotone: “This one I killed; this one I don’t know about; I remember that cunt”). In the midst of this text of disappearances, visual and sonic form also trouble their own presence, constantly retreating into illegible images and the failure of speech to manifest as something seeable. And, of course, each fragment in turn passes—each is there insofar as it comes to not be there, is there provisionally because it will have to be replaced with yet another scrap of image and sound. If development is the segmentary regime par excellence (of which the supreme model is arborescent growth, model for so many aesthetic forms), fragmentation is always a matter of conjunction, collocation, assemblage—accumulation (cumulus: heap; as in trash, corpses, things).

How to read these disappearances, these disruptions to form, this dimension of where things are not in the text? As I have written about extensively and in different ways in The Forms of the Affects (2014) and Life-Destroying Diagrams (2022), radical formalism offers an alternative to the metaphysical sedimentations inherited by and still governing much visual and critical theory. Such a non-metaphysical formalism troubles, disturbs, and fragments the foundational film-theoretical concept of mise-en-scène as fundamentally a logic of presence and thus enables a different mode of reading a work like Kaganof’s, which so frustrates any version of analysis that would rely on accounting for what is present in the film.

When Derrida aimed to “shake metaphysics”, one of his central targets was the displacement of a fundamental conception of presence as the center and foundation of Western philosophical thought. This is no simple matter, of course: “There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics”, he admonishes, for there is “not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” [7] (pp. 280–281). One of the most pernicious effects—or most durable metaphors—of the determination of being as presence, Derrida argued, was that the history of all philosophy had become a photology, “a history of, or treatise on, light” [7] (p. 27). This emphasis on the seeable and the visible has produced formalisms (neo- and otherwise) in film and visual theory that, even when they claim not to, turn ultimately on discourses of presence. They are therefore ill-equipped to read the ephemeral traces, non-appearances, self-erasures, and violent disappearances that structure Kaganof’s destructured film. In order to interrupt formal analysis as photology, in my earlier work on affectivity and form, The Forms of the Affects, I inserted the sign of negation into the building block of cinematic analysis with a little n. Formal analysis after presence required reading for what I called the grammatically incorrect/impossible “mise-n’en-scène” [8] (pp. 45–46). The phrase is useful less for what it represents than for the possibilities it sets loose. Mise-n’en-scene suggests that in addition to reading for what is put-into-the-scene, one must also read for all of its permutations: what is not put into the scene; what is put into the non-scene; and what is not enough put into the scene. A genealogy of non-unities written by an attention to mise-n’en-scène is a fitting anti-narrative for Kaganof’s fragments about disappearances. Reading for form after the critique of metaphysics requires beginning with the premise evident across all of my work—that form has a force, that it is not reducible to any duality between form and content, that it is not to be put to work for the processes (cognitive, affective, phenomenological) of spectators. Taking seriously a form organized around form’s waning and absence, for its traces and formlessness, suggests that violence in a film such as Kaganof’s is not in the text, in what is visible, audible, speakable or comprehensible, but is an unstable process bound up with the act of reading for its formal charge. Mise-n’en-scene suggests a critical practice that reads with the fragmentation of the fragment without attempting to piece the fragment back together—or, rather, tarries with the fragment, without attempting to turn any fragment into a segment.

Although I disagree strongly with his opening four words, Frey’s meditation entitled “Readability of the Fragment” presents the general dilemma of interpretation and the fragment:

The fragment is unreadable: it has not been read when one takes notice of what is there nor can one read more than what is there. The fragment is fragmentary because it says less than it should. Something is not there, and this lack must be read as well. This is why it is not possible to talk about the fragment without also talking about what is not there. In the face of the fragment a basic methodological rule for rigor in speaking about texts fails: the rule that what is said must be corroborated by the text, must stand its test. The fragmentary nature of the fragment can only ever be experienced by getting beyond its breaking point”. Ref. [3] (pp. 48–49)

The necessary correction to this passage is that the fragment is nothing but readable precisely because something is not there, and it is this lack that compels a generative, abyssal grappling with form that is always, and interminably, beyond itself—never final, never closed, what can only, infinitely, compel further reading. A fragment is not only a formal problem, but germane to the very problem of form. “What does it mean to linger with the formal languages of any given text?”, I write in Life-Destroying Diagrams, “This requires close reading, the digressions, deferrals, and inefficient detours of interminable interpretation” [9] (p. 23). The fragment, in other words, is not the limit of reading, but the site where the demand to read is infinitely, dynamically activated.

Is there a possible way for the title of Kaganof’s film not to be lying? Let us make the effort at a formal redemption if not a truth. If we emphasize the logos of monologos, we are back to a metaphysical privileging of presence, and of the imagined immediacies of speech. Any analytical mode that takes the title at its (spoken) word and looks for the presence of what is in the scene will ultimately reduce the work to an articulation of its themes and fall for the metaphysical lure of logos’ purported bond to self-presence, immediacy, or what is as a pure conveyance of meaning. Put another way, let us engage in a thought experiment and see what kind of critical possibilities are opened up if, instead, we begin with the premise that presence and speech are not where we want to focus our critical energies, despite the fact that the film announces, demands, solicits the centrality of precisely this attention.

Must the title of Kaganof’s film lie? There is a tradition of the theatrical monologue in which a person is made to declare or put on trial their own attributes, such that it might be the case that the speaker plays the parts of multiple advocates and of a judge. This forced declaration of attributes might be more what is at stake in this work. In the classical requirements for the monologue, the speaker must not be the poet; the speaker must address himself in the form of self-prompting (we see this in Fragment One, posed as a series of questions and provocations to Kemper from himself); and, crucially, the speaker must address his soliloquy to a silent interlocutor. Indeed, the non-response of the listener is what makes for the non-dialogical dimension of the monological. On the one hand, if the other is the spectator, then we should recall Christian Metz’s oft-quoted claim about the difference between the theater and the cinema—that the actor is always present at the spectator’s absence, and the spectator’s eventual presence requires the actor’s corresponding absence—in which case every film, on some level, on this level, would be monological. If, on the other hand, the silent interlocutor is within the text, then we might at least consider whether there are formal manifestations of this necessary silence, this non-optional non-responsiveness.

The form of dead response suggests a different intertextual doublet for Kaganof’s monological mode, something more akin to Beckett’s A Piece of Monologue (1977–1979), which begins: “Birth was the death of him. Again. Words are few. Dying too. Birth was the death of him. Ghastly grinning ever since” [10] (p. 263). Speaker, the single protagonist of Beckett’s short play, insists that this matter is the alpha and omega of what matters: “Never but the one matter. The dead and gone. The dying and the going” [10] (p. 268). The non-response of the other is not only the formal requirement of the monologue, it is also the refusal of a response that Speaker names and performs for some absent him. In other words, “the dying and the going” speaks without response but also in the wake of a non-response, defers response, and declares the impossibility of response.

This same form is at stake in one of the fragmented fragments in Kaganof’s film, which is to say one of the two that are doubled (or halved: fragmentation logic does not obey mathematical dicta), and the one that concludes the film: the formula of deferral from Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition—“X shot Y and Y shot Z and Z shot A and A shot B”, and so forth. (Only, to be added here is the important notation that alphabetic order in the general form I have just written solicits the possibility of a progression or narrative, the temptation of abecedarial succession being co-opted by a logic of order). The listing of names and chains of murderers and the murdered in The Atrocity Exhibition produces only the most local, minimally linked fragments: the barest mark of violence outside of any possible succession, accumulation (of meaning or sense), or narrative (of history or nation). The formalization of this inventory of corpse-makers and corpse-becomings reduces the meaning of any one name to the rhythm of repetition; to the violence of the formula; to all manner of impersonal, even a wholly grammatical violence. The speaking man in the film speaks alone and says everything but “I”. He says every name except the name attached to his “I”. Indeed, the only possible formal place that “I” could occupy would have been as first mover, the opening name, the only name not subsequently done violence to, but a name that does violence by virtue of appearing in this list and yet still being able to speak. In other words, to have said “I” would have been to have accused the self, to have condemned the self. Monologue form would be isomorphic to ethical complicity, if not horror. The litany as written (read, voiced) becomes eulogy, becomes cadence, becomes death, count becomes—what, exactly? Just the generation (as in what is generative) of the visual text itself so that the duration of the formula can exert its pressure on the text. Thus, the title lies a third time, not only in relation to number/count and not only in relation to the falsely monological, but because speech is not what speaks here: the film is more akin to a series of formologues, that which deploys form and the formula, makes present the force of the formal.

Although the entire film involves stories about the past, marked by forms of obsession, repetition, and rumination, the explicit chain of names in the Atrocity Exhibition fragments takes this broader logic and literalizes, or radicalizes, it. The voiced deferral puts on display the form of the deaths of others. If this is unrecognizable in its mode of address, if the semiotics of the death count become pure cadence and rhythm to which no response is possible or adequate (the truest sense of the monological), this is not the case of form obliterating sense, but of deferral functioning as the impossible assimilation of these deaths. It is thus the form of deferral through the fecundity of fragment accumulation that enacts the double sense of Ballard’s use of the word “generation”: what is made to go on, and what has already, definitively, passed on. That double sense cannot be in the text—it is neither present, nor bound up with presence—it is, rather, what the scene defers and what is constituted by this form of deferral, this disappearance without reference to what at any point appeared.

Ballard’s chain, as Kaganof stages it, involves a mutual deferral of origin and end. The rhythm of the formula repeats until the arbitrary, contingent, and off-screen, which is to say external to the monological, voice declares “Stop”—deferring any final or last victim. No eschatology for fragments. And, likewise, the rhythm of repetition brackets any notion of the origin that might begin and thus promise coherence to such a list through its linking of algebraic terms. Not least because Ballard starts with 1968 and Sirhan Sirhan, he leaves, at minimum, before the list the assassination of John F. Kennedy; 1968 arrives too late, which suggests that it is not the beginning in the sense of an origin at all. As if refuting the founding text of metaphysics in which Aristotle proposes the kinoumenon kinei, the unchanging, primary substance of the Unmoved Mover, Kaganof’s film defers not only a telos for the list, it also refuses the fantasy of the Unshot Shooter who would ground or center the listed fragments. This mathematical transitivity is founded on grammatical transitivity, and the mise-en-abîme of transitivities extends so long as another voice has not yet declared “Stop” at a definitive but arbitrary point in order to produce a limit to this expanded field of relations.

Kaganof’s Atrocity Exhibition-performing fragments are built on ruins; they are constituted around the devastation of origin or end. If one were only to analyze the presence of what is “in the scene”, including the presence of the speaker—the body, the voice, the dripping water, the dankness of the space—it would merely be to reassert the primacy of a vocal and visual presence, a photology, a photophilia, a logophilia. If, instead, reading takes seriously fragmentation and the formula, then it is transitivity as such that exerts force in this cinematic shard. No image in the film, least of all this part of it, contains explicit acts of violence—rather, the juxtaposition of word and image formalizes violence through the navigation of multiple forms in the film: forms of listing, of referral, of deferral, of transitivity, of conjunction, of grammatical proximity, of vocal modulation, of rhythmic prolongation and acceleration, of fragments of space, of varying levels of light, and a hundred other as-yet mentioned as-yet unthought things. At the end of Kaganof’s film, violence involves a formal suspension of origin and end, unconceals the force of deferral such that it is impossible to say that it is ever there in the film at all.

If the fragment includes within itself its break—bearing its fragility (as weight; as burden), bearing its condition of breakability as its very condition of possibility—then the fragment is not reducible to any formalist logic organized around simple presence (simplistically: the content of the discrete fragment). Mise-n’en-scene suggests these are not monologues, but formalogues; but if formologue still holds too tightly to the logos (as Derrida warns, it is not a question of just willing away the language of metaphysics), then perhaps yet another revolution in the title of Kaganof’s film is called for in order to make it not lie or to lie differently. Perhaps better to imagine 10 Formalgias from the Lives of the Serial Killers, recalling that algos, as in nostalgia, really means a mode of aching pain. For it is a multiplicity of form in deferred broken pieces and not pieces of flesh or the past that most suffer here, that bear out a chain of transitive suffering in, but more importantly as, the film.

It is—

Lies all—

These are—

No less violent for that.