All techniques meant to unleash forces are techniques of disappearance.

—Paul Virilio

Black box recovered from some unspecified disaster, the massive case opens to reveal the textures of decay and age. Yellowed newspaper, rusty honeycombing, fog-colored cerement enveloping a pale book. On the book's cover, a burned-in title: Agrippa: A Book of the Dead. Within it, page after page printed with cryptic letters.

TGTGG
CCATA
AATAT
TACGA
GTTTG

These are the combinatory possibilities of genetic codes, as re-coded by scientists. The pages are singed at their edges; more fragments of old newspaper are interspersed. And at intervals, engravings by New York artist Dennis Ashbaugh reproduce the commercial subjects of a previous generation, subjects that will later acquire a fuller meaning: a telephone ad (“Tell Daddy we miss him”), a diagram for the assembly of a pistol, an advertised magnesium gun “for nighttime photography.” Black patches like burns smudge these images. With exposure to light the images gradually fade; the black patches reveal themselves to be the rhythmic chains of the DNA molecule as captured in microphotography. Embedded in the last pages of the book is a computer disk containing a text by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson. When activated, it runs once; then a built-in computer virus destroys the text, leaving a blank disk.

No matter, for now, what the evanescent content of that disk may be. Its specific content is less important than the fact of its disappearance. In a jibe at the art world's commercialism, publisher Kevin Begos, Jr., suggested to Ashbaugh that “what we should do is put out an art book on computer that vanishes.” Ashbaugh took him seriously, took him further; Gibson was enlisted shortly after. For all its complex resonances as an object, then, Agrippa is based on this one idea: a book disappears.

The idea has precedents. Maurice Blanchot's essay on “The Absence of the Book” argues from writerly experience that a work always becomes something other than what it is intended to be—what it is intended to be being, of course, a book. But the book (icon of law, presence, textual-cultural wholeness) is always betrayed by what Blanchot calls “the disaster.” This disaster has to do with the necessary falling short of a work's concept at the same time that an unexpected otherness beyond the work is evoked. A book never realizes its desired full presence; its realization occurs only and paradoxically through absence—“the prior deterioration of the book, the game of dissidence it plays with reference to the space in which it is inscribed; the preliminary dying of the book.”¹ In the end the original concept, and even the very idea of “concept” must be exploded, Blanchot argues, citing Mallarmé's curious statement that “there is no explosion but a book.”

Mallarmé also said that “the world exists in order to be put into a book.” And he made this book—Le Livre—the ongoing preoccupation and project of his last twenty years, a project which came to nothing. Le Livre never appeared; its absence may have been the very point of it. The book's nonappearance is linked to the disappearance of the world, a crucial component of Mallarmé's art—so Sartre argues.

Meaning is a second silence deep within silence; it is the negation of the world's status as a thing. This ever unspoken meaning, which would disappear if one ever attempted to speak it … is quite simply the absence of certain objects. What is involved here is not the mere absence of a particular being but a “resonant disappearance.”²

Sartre is here quoting Mallarmé's “disparition vibratoire,” which was for him the condition of any possible meaning or truth. Speaking of his own writing, Mallarmé said that “whatever truth emerged in the process did so with the loss of an impression which, after flaring up for a brief instant, burned itself out.”³

Kevin Begos has acknowledged the influence of both Mallarmé's book and Blanchot's “Absence of the Book.” One more book was needed to catalyze Agrippa, however—an old photograph album discovered by Gibson on a trip back to his home town of Wytheville, Virginia. His computerized text reproduces its commercial title page:

The print is dim, scrawled over with something indecipherable. The opening words of Gibson's text describe the opening of the album:

I hesitated
before untying the bow
that bound the book together
A Kodak album of time-harmed
black construction paper

These words describing a hesitation themselves hesitate before they begin scrolling past. Then, one by one, the old photographs are rendered in words, each with its caption—though these captions are sometimes indecipherable, their obscurity described along with the rest of the book's “time-harmed” textures. This electronic book, book of the future, evokes through its words the ghost of antiquated pages.

That this ghostly book is a photo album means that it is already a book of the dead. In the photographs a whole world of people and objects is depicted in intense specificity: shadows cast over the brim of straw hats, grass that needs cutting, electric wires strung over street intersections. Yet all these things fall into a Mallarméan absence. Viewing a photograph, Roland Barthes says, “I shudder … over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.”⁴ The black box of the camera is a temporal mechanism; Gibson speaks of the fall of the shutter as dividing time.

The description of the album's discovery is followed by the recollection of an earlier discovery by Gibson: As a boy he opened a drawer to find another mechanism of disappearance, his father's pistol. He took it out of the drawer and it unexpectedly discharged; when he dropped it, it went off again. Beyond the biographical fact, there may be a link here to another pair of explosions half a world away: Gibson's father worked on the Manhattan Project. Another possible disappearance of the world is adumbrated, not literary but literal; the singed, disastrous look of the black box's contents takes on a new significance. This “relic from the future,” as Begos has called it, replicates a typical pattern of nuclear-war fiction. Relic of a past event which is yet to take place in the future, the nuclear narrative is transmitted backward to us in the present, which is that future's past. The paradoxes shuttle and blur into “time no more,” as announced by the angel of the apocalypse; and that “no more” is echoed in the last resonances of a disappearing world.

The men who moved the world closer to disappearance have, most of them, themselves disappeared; Gibson's father died when his son was six. To the degree that Agrippa is a memoir of Gibson's father, its irreversible passing is like his life, or any life. We can reread a human life only in memory. We can, of course, write of a human life, write “in memory of.” When we do, we inhabit a paradoxical space, according to Jacques Derrida:

[D]oes the expression “in memory of” mean that the name is “in” our memory—supposedly a living capacity to recall images or signs from the past, etc.? Or that the name is in itself, out there somewhere, like a sign or symbol, a monument, epitaph, stele or tomb, a memorandum, aide-mémoire, a memento, an exterior auxiliary set up “in memory of”? Both, no doubt; and here lies the ambiguity of memory, the contamination which troubles us, troubles memory and the meaning of “memory.”⁵

Following a distinction in Hegel, Derrida suggests that there are two kinds of memory: mechanical memorization (Gedächtnis), associated with writing, and interiorized recollection (Erinnerung), associated with mourning. For Derrida, these are at odds with each other: “[T]he inscription of memory [is] an effacement of interiorizing recollection, of the ‘living remembrancing.’”⁶ Or, as Paul de Man puts it, art “materially inscribes, and thus forever forgets, its ideal content.”⁷ But the process can be reversed: writing that disappears can make another kind of memory appear. This is an unforgetting, in Heidegger's terms—the return from Lethe—aletheia or truth, a version akin to Mallarmé's truth. To lose the text commemorating a loss is not, then, to redouble loss; it is to move away from the loss that is always inherent in memory's textual mechanism. It is once again to take into one's keeping the memory that is interiorized recollection.

What I have just said may give the impression that Gibson's text is exclusively past-bound, father-oriented, in one way or another an act of mourning. This is not so. At a certain point in the album, and in his own book, the photographed small-town streets which are his father's memories fuse with Gibson's own memories. He then detaches himself from those past streets, remembers the process of forgetting them. By way of the draft board office on the town's main street, Gibson recalls his one-way trip to the Canadian border; when he crosses that border, time is divided as if by a shutter. He describes the unfamiliar feel, the texture, of his first days in Toronto. Finally, a leap into an even stranger future, so remote from these that it might be a scene from one of Gibson's own novels. In a Far Eastern city, a typhoon speeds “horizontal rain” at the speaker's face. Yet this destructive future elicits neither mourning nor fear. In the last words to scroll by, the speaker is “laughing in the mechanism.”

What mechanism? The word “mechanism” is repeated at intervals in Agrippa, and the idea is implicit throughout it.

• —The camera is a mechanism for dividing time.
• —The gun, when it discharges, enforces in the silence that follows an “awareness of the mechanism.”
• —Behind the gun, the bomb—and a mechanism extending beyond the bomb casing to the Manhattan Project and the forces that produced it.
• —On a still night in Wytheville, the boy can hear the clicking as traffic lights change a block away, and this too is described as an awareness of the mechanism. How far away does the mechanism extend?
• —The photograph album is referred to as a mechanism; any book is a mechanism.
• —Language is a mechanism; for Jacques Lacan, it is the mechanism we are born into, the set of the structuring principles of our lives.
• —An affinity between chains of signifiers and chromosomal chains. If we are born into the mechanism of language, we are born out of a genetic mechanism—out of which we cannot move, for it composes us.
• —The mechanisms of our genes and our nervous systems, insofar as they are mechanisms, are linked to those of the computer in a cybernetic field.

When the disk has run its course, everything in the text—book, camera, gun, explosion, father, town, time, memory—is encrypted into a mechanized code much like that on Ashbaugh's pages, before it contorts and vanishes. Always, and in all its versions, the mechanism is involved with absence and its ultimate end is disappearance.

That disappearance is apocalyptic: I am using the word not only in its sense of overwhelming destruction, but also in its original Greek sense of revelation. The last book of the Bible has forever linked destruction with revelation—as Blanchot does, as Mallarmé does. Moreover, it does so repeatedly through a book. The Book of the Apocalypse describes the opening of a book; that opening, seal by seal, unleashes a series of terrible endings. The Last Judgment is initiated when the Book of the Dead is opened. And finally the sky disappears “as a scroll when it is rolled together.” Microcosmic apocalypse, Agrippa too is destroyed by being opened, its images fading, its text scrolling past us into irreversible emptiness. But if there can be no rereading, the reading we have finished may not be finished with us. After the final destruction of heaven and earth in the Bible a new heaven and earth come to pass; and something like this comes to pass in reading, even if what is read can never be read again. Blanchot has said that writing is “the opaque, empty opening into that which is when there is no more world, when there is no world yet.”⁸ He hovers here between “no more” and “not yet,” between loss and potential: the emptiness is apocalyptic, in both its senses. Through the necessary destruction of the text (all texts), something comes to pass. Though the question of what comes to pass is ultimately beyond us, the question of how it comes to pass is not.

A book, says Blanchot, is “a ruse by which writing goes towards the absence of the book.”⁹ The ruse in Agrippa, as in other books, has to do with framing. The final disappearance of Agrippa takes place within multiple frames, some literal, some literary: the black box, the corroded coffin in which the shrouded book is laid; the book's cover and title; the time-bound pages of newspaper, commercial images, genetic codes; the embedded disk of magnetic code; the code of language; rhythm and recurrence—all that I have articulated of what this work articulates, and more. All of these are mechanisms which, rightly combined, explode into revelation, the immanence of something beyond. But in the revelation of what lies between or beyond these framing elements, they are annihilated. For what is apprehended is exactly what is other than these separate elements, a sum that exceeds these parts. We move toward the famous conclusion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus—a tautology that is saved from the “intense inane” by being itself framed, the product of a certain process in time. At the end of the process that is Agrippa we are left not merely with emptiness, but with our awareness of that process both in and beyond the mechanism. Knowing that there has been a process in time, the blank page (as in Isak Dinesen's tale) may be the most eloquent text. “The most beautiful and perfect book in the world,” says Ulises Carrión, “is a book with only blank pages, in the same way that the most complete language is that which lies beyond all that the words of man can say.”¹⁰ In the very act of disappearing, then, Agrippa makes something appear.

Notes

1. Maurice Blanchot, “The Absence of the Book,” in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, ed. P. Adams Sitney, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY, 1981), 151.

2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness, trans. Ernest Sturm (University Park, PA, 1988), 140.

3. Letter from Mallarmé to Eugène Lefébvre, 17 May 1867, in Stéphane Mallarmé: Correspondence, 1862-1871, ed. Henri Mondor (Paris, 1959), 245-46.

4. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1981), 96.

5. Jacques Derrida, Mémoires: For Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, and Eduardo Cadava (New York, 1986), 50.

6. Ibid., 56.

7. Paul de Man, “Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1982): 773; cited in Derrida, Mémoires, 67.

8. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE, 1982), 33.

9. Blanchot, “Absence of the Book,” 147.

10. Ulises Carrión, quoted in Artists' Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, ed. Joan Lyons and Gibbs M. Smith (Rochester, 1985), 38.

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Special thanks to Veronica Hollinger and Sasha Sergejewski.