I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

Play Bally

403 Play Bally For the complex of readings that have become the environment of von Uexküll’s corpus it is the notion of the moment in a world of marking or noting that commands these pages as the very translation scene of their words or worlds of difference. Here we restore what Agamben in The Open leaves out of his close paraphrase of the tick passage from the 1933 pamphlet Excursions through the Environments of Animals and Humans (Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen), through which von Uexküll popularized the work that had established his reputation twenty-five years earlier. At the close of his presentation of the tick’s environment or perceptual field as impoverished but secure world, von Uexküll notes that from this one inside view one can derive the basic traits for the construction of environments that would apply to all animals. But there is an additional capacity characterizing the tick, which, von Uexküll promises , “opens up for us a yet wider insight into the environments” (29). The tick is able to wait for indeterminate spans of time for the survival of its species. Then von Uexküll notes that for which Agamben was lying in wait: in the Zoological Institute in Rostock a tick has been kept ticking eighteen years and counting simply by depriving it of nourishment. Agamben lets this reference, which concludes a section of The Open, resonate indefinitely , deprived of its environment in the text, von Uexküll’s introduction of the moment as the smallest possible and most basic span of time during which the world stands still. Stylistically at least, as transition, the tick here is almost Freudian. The eighteen years of the Rostock tick calls up the same number in another setting, namely one-eighteenth of a second, which is how long the moment of man lasts. At this moment a footnote delivers the proof: “The proof of this is provided by cinema. During the screening of 404 Play Bally a strip of film the pictures must leap forward jerkily one after another and then stand still. To show them as sharply as possible the jerky leaping forward must be made invisible with the aid of a filter. The darkening which thus occurs is not perceived by our eyes if the standing still of the picture and its darkening transpire within one one-eighteenth of a second. If more time is taken intolerable flickering ensues.”1 The duration of the moment differs from animal to animal. But however we compute the moment of the tick, it is beyond possible to endure an unchanging environment for eighteen years. At this point Agamben misreads or mistranslates von Uexküll’s assumption that a sleeplike state suspends the tick’s long time, a state to which we humans have recourse, according to von Uexküll whenever we must wait for extended periods of time, but according to Agamben every night when we sleep. That we should sleep, like Ellen West, only to cut the loss of waiting in half indeed loses von Uexküll’s attentiveness to the knowledge in the waiting of animals. What Benjamin referred to as the optical unconscious was opened up through opportunities available in filmmaking and projection, for example , for speeding up and slowing down our perceptual field. Benjamin’s examples might be found summarized in the 1953 Disney film The Living Desert. Just add rainwater and the hatching, crawling, blossoming, and pollinating across the desert surface can be viewed on-screen in no time. But von Uexküll underscores that the opening up of the range of our seeing ego probe, which no longer need stop short before invisibility, extends to the animal environments that whiz by us or just drag along, but which now can be made perceptible to us through their technically possible calibration. That a perceptual environment can be, at least as far as timing goes, another world is what we learned first from animals and psychotics and which, according to von Uexküll, cinema proved. In Martian Time-Slip the autistic boy Manfred, who is growing up schizophrenic, is considered a case for testing new theories from Switzerland about the relative slowness of the psychotic perceptual environment, which registers the normal environment or common world only as unbearable fast-forwarding. Manfred leaps so far ahead that it’s the future—and you only know it’s the future, unmediated by wish fulfillment or fantasy...