Praying and Playing to the Beat of a Child’s MetronomePatricia Ticineto CloughPhotography by Karen Gregory

Abstract: Written to retrace the affects of childhood experience expressed in the themes that inform my scholarship—unconscious desire, affect, bodies, sexuality, race, politics, and media/biotechnologies, what follows focuses on belief, trauma and the rhythm of family violence in the repeating beating of punishment, prayer, music and the poetic. The work of remembering has been informed by revisiting the place where I grew up, walking the same streets I walked as a little girl, attempting to capture in photographs what I saw and could not see then. But remembering remains incomplete; it does not put an end to the repeating beating, thereby necessitating an experimentalwriting style that allows for the breaks in memory, while making apparent the irrational cutting between childhood experiences and scholarship.i

i I have visited Corona New York, where I grew up, a number of times and continue to do so. I usually have been accompaniedon my trips, the last time by Karen Gregory who produced a set of photographs some few of which are shown above. Her method and mine in working together is something we hope to write about but for now I can say that my method is an affective one drawing on free associations, quickly written down before deep self reflection or editing.

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Key words: bodily affect, childhood belief, praying, music

He stood beside me. We were praying. I remember we were praying aloud, his fingers resting on the back of the pew just in front of ours. We bent our knees and sinking down, side by side, into red leather cushions,we knelt.

I remember his fingers on the back of the pew.

Kneel down. Bend over. I remember his fingers placed inside me. Our father who art inside me. I remember. Well, not exactly. Still, I can hear, oh so clearlythe organ music swelling.

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Some years later, as a Roman Catholic nun, I will sing that same hymn over and over again,as a musical ejaculation:

My soul doth magnify the lord.My spirit rejoices in god my savior. My soul doth magnify the lord. My spirit, my spirit My spirit rejoices. ii

Ejaculations, that is what they are called,short prayers to be said over and over again, all day long.

“Pray unceasingly,” says Saint Paul.

ii These words are taken from the “Magnificat,” a prayer first sung by the Virgin Mary announcing to her cousin Elizabeth that she, Mary, had been chosen to be the mother of the Son of God. Also called the Canticle of Mary, the “Magnificat” appears in the Gospel of Luke (1:46-55).

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The philosophers are writing again about Saint Paul. iii The philosophers who refuse the one and only one. Instead, they insist on “the inconsistent multiplicity,” out of which “a consistent multiplicity” comes to be—as the accounted for. iv

It is the counting that names what can not be but be represented.

One, two, and three, one, two, and three.

One Two Three

The metronome is wound tight and its swing arm set free.

He pushes his hand against my drawn up leg, bent at the knee, and I learn right then to pray incessantly.

Rhythmicity catching the pleasure inside the pain with the piano accompanying me.

Only the counted can be represented and notbe. Like my memories

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Of my father who made a living as an accountantproviding well enough for my mother, my sister and me.

I can see his fingers. I can see them at the adding machine. I can see his fingers, my eyes fixed on them. Moving quickly and then slowing, Over and across, up and down. The wedding band, by chance, hits and there is quick tick of sound like the metal bit catching leather on the way down to flesh.

The nuns had stopped requiring the novices to use the switch, a whip with medal bits on the edge of leather bands. But there were some switches to be found in the closet on a high up shelf. In early morninglight, before going to chapel, some novicesused to make use of the switch. In the steady rhythm of leather hitting, metal finds the flesh releasing spirit buried deep within. My spirit rejoices in God my savior. My soul magnifies the lord.

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In the 13th century, self-flagellation stillwas praised. As part of the daily ritual of nuns, whipping was considered another way of communicating with and becoming closer to God. The act was often done nakedalone or with others, making a theatre for God but maybe not God alone. By the 15th century, the Spanish Inquisition had declared self-flagellation to be pagan, heresy, idolatrous in the flagellant’s identification with the crucified body of Christ. And by the Enlightenment, whipping was thought a matter of nature opposed to reason. The nun’s obsession with whipping, then, was to be explained in terms of her repressed sexual desires and this re-interpretation provided a bridge sending the nun convulsing, in ecstasy, as if possessed, from the religious authorities to those of the medical sciences, from matters of sanctity to those of sanity.

As Michel Foucault would argue, in the church’s transfer of power to medicine, thecounter-pastoral acts of flagellation, mysticism, and convulsion were reevaluated and came to be understood as climactic actions of the nervous system, symptomatic of hysterical epilepsy v

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treated unto exhaustion in the work of Charcot and leaving traces in the case of Anna O.

Oh Anna Oh

The philosophers are writing again of spirituality, a spirituality not so much opposed to the flesh, but a spirituality opposed to religion as faith is opposed to belief. Jean-Luc Nancy writes: “While belief sets down or assumes a sameness of the other with which it identifies itself and in which it takes solace (he is good, he will save me), faith lets itself be addressed by a disconcerting appeal throughthe other,” thrown into a listening that wedo not know ourselves. vi

But should we not hear those who cannot speak

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but who do make sounds mixed with a violence unbearable:the bombs and flames and crashing planes, bodies, and buildings to the ground,earth quaking, spitting blame, shame and pain?

What is this? Sounds of pain that the philosophers claim return us to a religion that is not spirituality, a belief that is not faith? The philosophers are hearing sound for which they do not yet have a musical taste.Their taste is for a secularism installed with the beats of an unmarked Western Christianity

One, two and three, one, two and three.

My soul doth magnify the lord My spirit rejoices in God my SaviorFor He that is mighty hath done great things for me, And holy is His Name.Holy is his name. His name is wholly holy.

Of this secularism that is an unmarked Western Christianity, Gil Anidjar writes,

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offering a gloss on Foucault’s treatment ofsex, “What might it mean today to be for oragainst religion, the way Christianity proposed to make its followers into adversaries for or against the body, the way it made them love some bodies and detest others, as if free from the body and later from religion?” vii Western Christianity freed itself from religion as it produced a secular critique of religion that, at the same time, made a religious other in the ‘Orient’: Islam as a religiousfanaticism incapable of self critique.

And Christianity forgot itself and it forgave itself.

I remember. I remember. I remember. I do.

vii Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Autumn 2006), p. 61.

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He didn’t want to be an accountant he once told me. It was something else he wanted tobe. What was it? Some thing more frivolous; ah yes. A tug boat captain, he had said, but I wasn’t sure he wasn’t teasing me and I decided he meant he had wanted to write poetry. I never quite knew whether he was teasing me or ridiculing me. And I still search for what poetry there might be in the counting. In the beating of minutespassing as I stood in the corner where I had been sent,

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and would not be set free until I could read the time on the face of the clock near my parents bed. This is how he punished me.

The clock was enclosed in a dome of glass, a miniature cathedral, an airless space of time, held still for me a horrid glimpse of eternity.

I had been left there. My face awash in salty tears and fears that I would never learn to read the clock’s face. Its hands moving from one Roman numeral to the next, it said nothing to me. But there was a pendulum hung with delicate wiring between the golden columns that held up theclock with its indecipherable face. The pendulum’s mechanical movement, turning one way and then, back again, made time flee. I was amazed and terrified, ecstatic, convulsive, possessed.His meanness made some sort of penitent outof me, one needing to be set free of the sins thatmade a swarm of demons hurl me into the corner of that place,

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the bedroom.

I am the penitent repeating the beating like Mary Magdala, who, Nancy tells us, “becomes the saint par excellence because she holds to this point,” the point of abandonment, “where the touch of sense is identical to its retreat,” where “she givesherself up to a presence that is only a departing, to a glory that is only a darkness, to a scent that is only a coldness.” Beaten. It calms her for a while, until the panic and the unbearably wild sensation repeats.viii

Repeats the beating like the backbeat sounding at the birth of rock-and-roll and resonant too in the autobiographies of the early rock and rollers, who, John Mowitt tells us, hadit hard coming from the country to the urban setting.

viii Nancy, p. 43.

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Bo Diddly got beaten but finds a backbeat to beat back. And Chuck Berry too—his mother’s whipping giving a rhythm in black and blue. And it is not merely that the stories are true but a fantasy too that makes of sound, music. ix

ix I am drawing on the rich and movingaccount of rock-and-roll by John Mowitt in his Percussion: drumming, beating, striking (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). I am also drawing on years of conversations withAnahid Kassabian who has argued for the importance of sound in relationship to the following discussion of sexuality and fantasy also appearing in her work on listening and ubiquitous music See, Hearing Film - Tracking Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music (New York:Routledge, 2001).

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Offering a psychoanalytic reading of these autobiographic stories, Mowitt reminds us that sexuality, should we say religion or Western Christianity too, breaks into the body, is beaten into skin made flesh. No matter whether there is actual beating, there is an accounting of the beats repeating, a counting that is sex, as the mother and the father, the father, the father, the father become the stuff of fantasy through which all reality is made real.

Really? Really, “reality does not absolutely come before nor does fantasy necessarily come after, even though there is some sense in which there is indeed a delay between them” Reality, fantasy, reality, fantasy.

An afterwardness that upsets the easy reading of the clock face of time,so that what seems to be a prior unnamable incident

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comes through the unconscious reserve as sexuality, perceived by the subject as a break in perceived as an inner foreign body which breaks out from within the subject. Breaking in, beaten in and through Backbeating to you. x

x I am following Mowitt in drawing on a number of texts by Freud along with those of Didier Anzieu’s The Skin Ego, Trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’s“Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,“ in Formations of Fantasy Eds. Victor Burgin and Cora Kaplan. (London: Metheun, 1986) and Jean Laplanche’s Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, Trans. by Jeffrey Mehlman, (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970).

iii I am thinking among others of Giorgio Agamben’s The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Trans. by

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I remember, oh so well. Well, not exactly. And the breaking in that is the fantasy breaking out in reality, Mowitt goes on to tell us, is not so much derived from what was seen, but

Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), Jacques Derrida’s “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” in Veils, Helene Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) pp.49-92 and finally and earlier, Gilles Deleuze’s “Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos” in Essays Critical and Clinical, Trans. Michael A. Greco (Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1997)

iv I am gesturing here to Alain Baidou’s philosophical discourse.

v I am drawing on Niklaus Largier’s In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal,Trans. Graham Harman. (New York: Zone Books, 2007) and Michel Foucault’s Abnormal Lectures At the College De France, 1974-1975. Trans. Graham Burchell (New York:Picador, 1999). In referring to acts

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more from what was heard. Snapping fingers and clapping hands,the organ music swelling, and the sounding of the piano accompanying me.

I remember the beating repeating of sexuality, of Western Christianity. But not simply Western Christianity. Knotted through the backbeat is vodou and the call of the drumming to the dancers

of flagellation, mysticism, and convulsion as counter-pastoral, Foucault is pointing to the challenge these acts posed to the church’s pastoral role as the source of its power.

vi I am drawing these thoughts and words from Jean-Luc Nancy’s Noli me tangere On the Raising of the Body, Trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 10.

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to dance in ecstasy, in a frenzy as beings possessed.

The repeating backbeat of rock-and-roll resonates a people’s resistance to the shattering impact of slavery.Dispossession realized in slavery, countered by possession in vodou, xi a spirituality that nonetheless would be accused of primitiveness. An exorcism is called forth, and the displacement of drumming with the disciplining of the metronome. xii

The metronome sat on the piano just beside the sheets of music in front ofme. It beat out instruction to my fingers as I practiced. Adagio, andante, allegro, vivace. Sound and mood shifts.Lento, grave, mysterioso.

I felt the piano feeling, feeling for me, feelings that resisted the rigors of technicality.So the metronome often seemed to be accusing me of an infidelity. One, two and three. One, two and three.

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One Two Three.

xi Again I am drawing on Mowitt and conversation with Kassabian concerningMowitt’s text, where he reviews the debates about the relationship of the backbeat, rock-and-roll and questions of race. While it has been argued thatrock-and-roll is neither essentially black nor white, African nor North American, Mowitt shifts the debate to suggest a percussive genealogy; for him, rock-and-roll is “an idiom formedat the frontier that rather like a scar, arose as whites and non-whites collided with each other on, or bumpedeach other off, a social playing fieldthat was, and remains, far from level.” (27). Mowitt also points to Joan Dayan’s discussion of vodou in Haiti, History and the Gods (California: University of California Press, 1995) where she argues that vodou practices do not always go back to Africa but “rather…were responses to the

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The metronome, first patented in 1812, was meant to be used by musicians in order to maintain a constant tempo while practicing.Beats beating by the minute perfectly, exactly. But great musicians always have

institution of slavery, to its peculiar brand of sensuous domination,” thus reconstituting “the shadowy and powerful magical gods of Africa as everyday responses to the white master’s arbitrary power.” (36). It is Dayan’s comment I have paraphrased above: “The dispossessionaccomplished by slavery became the model for possession in vodou: for making a man not into a thing but intoa spirit” (36). Remembering that Christianity was the ground upon whichvodou was elaborated in relationship to slavery, I want to underscore the knotted resonances here among beating,sexuality, psyche, spirit, vodou and Christianity and to point to Mowitt’s instruction: “possession might be understood to bear not on the loss of control, but on the sense (indeed, theoverwhelming sense) that one is, even at one’s limits, but at a moment in a rush of restricted possibilities that

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been wary about the mathematical regularityof the metronome. Not only has there been doubt that human beings actually can keep themselves exactlyin time with the metronome’s beating but there has been the fast turning of this human insufficiency into a capacity for thesublime. The sublimity of music, in Kantianterms, is in the disjuncture of apprehension and comprehension,in the disjuncture of a purely mathematicaland nonhuman number with no limit and an embodied aesthetic number whose limit is subjective apprehension itself.

constitute the social at any given time. Ecstasy is thus not about surrender. It is about the disorienting recognition of one’s dependence on a relationship, on a field of relations, that an identity manages poorly, if at all.” (85)

xii I don’t mean to imply a direct relationship between vodou and the invention of the metronome. I am rather inspired to play with Mowitt’s use of metronome to describe the backbeat as the “metronome” of a band of musicians.

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For the human, the sublime comes with the giving way to, the falling back intoincomprehension. xiii

But we might open our ears, as Eugene Thacker proposes we do, to black metal sound or electronic noise. Their swarming pulse let to push the Kantian sublime a bit and the psychoanalytic too. Rethink the relationship of number and sound to swarming, that capacity of demons to be heard before being seen, if ever seen. An incorporality that is a materiality unbodied noise, which has neither origin nor end. Swaths of sound between and across notes,a metronomic monstrosity, hundreds of them beating in dead time.

xiii I am drawing my argument about the Kantian sublime and what follows from Eugene Thacker’s discussion of swarming and demonic power in “Pulse Demons, Swarm and Algorithm,” in Culture Machine.

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I heard and felt it that night the affect of demons that night, when he first took all comprehension away. That night he took and looked away.And left me trembling with a repeating beating,the rhythm of shame and pain.

Turning into word impressions typing themselves onto the page. Here and now to be spoken. I am moving still, nearer to you, carrying the stain of evil,the power of evil to create anew.

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