Snaps, Clicks, Ticks, Tocks: Temporality and Fingertips

Figure 1: Michael Clumptsy as Richard II in the Classic Stage
Company’s production of Richard II, New York City, Fall 2007.
Photo by Joan Marcus.

Arguably, each cell of our bodies is a corporeal clock, marking the passage of time. Heartbeats tick away the seconds. The stomach and bowels ring in the hours. Wrinkles record the years. Eyelids blink. Teeth fall out. Hair grows, thins, vanishes. These corporeal clocks qualitatively mark time’s seemingly constant flow, but our attempts to measure time presume a quantifiability that many, if not most, temporal encounters deny. Quantifying necessitates counting – ticking off the seconds, hours, and years – and the act of counting lands us on yet another corporeal site of temporal interfacing: our ten fingers. However, while counting on our fingers may systematically mark the passage of time, I argue that our digits also hold the potential to powerfully disrupt our perception of time’s forward motion, catapulting us into a propitious moment of “unbound time,” a moment that Jean-Luc Nancy identifies as the “pure and absolute disruption of time’s continuous and apparently endless flow” (qtd. in Lukacher x). Examples of such moments may include mythical events, such as the second that God invested Man with his own divinity, as envisioned and depicted by Michelangelo’s iconic painting. But the moment of unbound time might also be incited by something as unexceptional as a camera’s shudder click, or by an experience as universal, yet extraordinary, as an orgasm. Nancy’s flashes of unbound time do not merely freeze the forward flow of time, but suggest a radically different experience of temporality altogether.

Such potent moments of absolute temporal disruption suspend an awareness of time’s forward flow as one’s perception of time as forward-moving is permeated, opened up, and turned inside out. They simultaneously revive a cognitive awareness of one’s body – which is lost in daily, habitual actions – for the body is also permeated, opened up, and turned inside out. I argue that the finger is a tip on which our tempo-realities are both charted and disrupted, and contend that canonical works of Western art, literature and philosophy demonstrate that the finger is a conduit for temporal experiences which challenge the conventional, Western perception of linear time. This essay looks to Christian iconography, including Michelangelo’s The Birth of Man, Shakespeare’s Richard II, and Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida for examples of artistic and philosophical bouts of wrestling with temporal aporias, for each finds a propitious disruption on the fingertip.

A well-trodden arena in the conceptual history of temporality is the cyclical/linear schism. The advent of Christianity ushered in the shift in public time from pagan and cyclical to messianic and linear. However, Ulrich Baer points to another dyad of temporal theories, which she traces to ancient Greece: the philosophical frameworks of Hericlitus and Democritus. Hericlitus’ notion of time as an unstoppable, forward-flowing river is entrenched in Western conceptions of linear temporality, but Domocritus’ metaphor more closely resembles the experiences of unbound time that Nancy describes. Domocritus cites time not as a linear, coherent, incessant flow, but more like isolated events. He conceives of the world as a vast rainfall and sees events as occurring when two or more raindrops cling together (Baer 4). We can employ Hericlitus’ and Democritus’ conceptual approaches to imagine Nancy’s propitious moment of unbound time not as a frozen moment in the Hericlitean river, but as an explosive liberation from it. This moment is a peek from Democritus’ perspective, which sees linear, coherent temporality as a construction, assembling a start-to-finish narrative from “a swirl of atoms in a void” (Baer 5).

In his ruminations on the libidinal and temporality, Time-Fetishes: The Secret of Eternal Recurrence, Ned Lukacher suggests that the secret of eternal recurrence is Western philosophy’s and literature’s ta orgia, the secret “orgy box,” which only initiates can access (28). Lukacher does set linear time in opposition to cyclical, but speaks of the ta orgia initiation in Democritean terms, with the orgasm as his guiding metaphor. He claims that the doctrine of eternal recurrence, resisting the tyranny of messianic time, is the catalyst for virtually every poetic and philosophical effort to measure time’s mystery, and that artists and philosophers who have been initiated into the cult of the secret orgy box have done so with a crafted experience of unbound time. Lukacher traces figures from Ovid to Derrida, urging that their “fetish-like affirmations” of words and images for the aporia of time lead them to the ta orgia repeatedly. Some canonical examples, such as those discussed later in this essay, locate their time-fetishes on the finger. Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Barthes – all have access to this erogenous zone, for each has created, with visual or verbal images of the finger, a time-fetish that ruminates on an experience of orgasmic temporal liberation.

A Democritean moment of unbound time does not only induce an alternate perception of temporality that transcends cyclical/linear bifurcations, but also induces an alternate perception of corporeality, one that exceeds self/other bifurcations. In fact, it is the finger’s performative abilities and fetishistic properties (Lukacher 6)[1] that subvert its function as a corporeal marker of time’s passage and render it an instrument of temporal disruption. Fingers are performative instruments that, like eyes (as in the penetrating gaze) and mouths (as in the voice), work to dissolve the permeable membranes between inner/self and outer/other, extending bodies beyond their fictitious borders into the enigmatic “subtle beyond.” Roland Barthes refers to the “subtle beyond” as the space outside the frame of a photograph, specifically an erotic photograph. The image launches the viewer’s desire into this fraught space, beyond what the photograph permits us to see (59). The beyond is subtle because the photograph’s edge is not discreet; the image bleeds past it as the viewer’s desire is launched past its boundaries.

Similarly, the manipulations of the fingers direct us to the subtle beyond that flows between our indiscreet bodies. The finger becomes a conduit for unbound time by eeking the body out of its borders and inducing a perception of bodies as unbound, a perception that must be sublimated in order for perfunctory habits to develop. This refreshed awareness means that we see the finger anew, as a magic wand, an instrument of love, death, and divinity. This marvelous perspective must be suppressed as necessary habits develop, for example, dialing a telephone, typing on a keyboard, or handling utensils. Habitual action develops in excess of a certain cognitive awareness: an awareness of the finger’s power, once elevated above its myriad habitual functions. Although fingers are extremely perfunctory, however, that quality only enhances their libidinal potential, inherent intelligence, and power.

As my fingers flow across a keyboard, I am reminded of sociologist Paul Connerton’s writing about typing in How Societies Remember. Connerton’s work explicates the phenomenology of observing, marking, measuring, keeping, escaping, and otherwise coping with the aporia of time, to use Lukacher’s phrasing. To know how to type is to allow the movements to flow involuntarily, in excess of cognitive awareness. The loss of awareness requisite in acquiring habits thus prompts us to “revise our notion of ‘understand[ing],’” and of knowledge in general, in order to consider how the body understands and knows. For, as Connerton argues, “[w]e know where the letters are on the typewriter as we know where one of our limbs is,” or, we might add, where one of our digits is (95). Connerton asserts that cultivated bodily habits amount to much more than technical abilities, and are certainly more than neutral, archival expressions. Instead, he suggests, they are “affective dispositions” fueled by desire for the pleasurable (93). In other words, habits are determined by their pleasure-bearing potential. But perhaps, as philosopher Gilles Deleuze writes, desire for the pleasurable – which is the ultimate sign of the will to live, according to Freud’s pleasure principle – is made possible by the very flow of habitual action. Deleuze reverses Connerton’s Freudian assertion that habit follows pleasure to claim that habit, or a passion of repetition, not only precedes the pleasure principle but renders it possible (Deleuze 97).

Deleuze argues that drives – such as the drive of desire which becomes the pleasure principle – “are nothing more than bound expectations.” He illustrates this notion by tracing the reproductive synthesis by which an animal forms an eye for itself: “The eye binds light, it is itself bound by light.” The difference of the formed eye or seeing subject emerges from the repetition of “luminous excitations […] on a privileged surface of its body” (96, 97). But what if Deleuze were to trace the reproductive synthesis by which an animal forms fingers for itself? From what excitations would the dexterous subject emerge? What do fingers bind, and by what are fingers bound? Fingers are not bound by tactile sensation alone, for that binding belongs to the entire skin and nervous system. Fingers are instead bound to and by grasp-ability. The repeated production of dexterous excitations on a privileged surface of the body allows the new difference of the digits, or the manipulating subject, to emerge. Once the manipulating subject is formed, culturally significant perceptions of knowledge and subjectivity also manifest themselves. Consider that to grasp something, to put one’s finger on it, is to know it and to own it. Thus fingers are also bound to power over self and non-self, and subsequently to the very conceptions of where the border between self and non-self is erected and maintained.

Fingers act on objects, leaving a trace, while bringing the outside world into our porous bodies: pushing and pulling, feeding and eating, throwing and catching, sending and receiving. Of all the culturally-bound, signifying gestures that fingers are able to produce,[2] the singular gesture of pointing holds a plethora of signifying options. Quite aptly, the extended index finger is prevalent in Christian iconography, for it can direct, appoint, reference, assign, accuse, select and/or condemn. Each contextually contingent meaning nevertheless reinforces the finger’s performative function and fetishistic property as that which extends beyond the regions of the body (Lukacher 6). The lines indicated by a pointing finger run parallel between the divided Western religious attitudes concerning time’s durational and cyclical properties – never mind a consideration of time as random, isolated events. This pagan/Christian temporal tension is illustrated by a few iconic Christian images of God’s index finger - converging in the distant vanishing point, that defining point of perspective pinpointed by the painter’s extended thumb.

Lukacher suggests that a rendering of Yggdrasill, “The Mundane Tree” or world tree encircled by a serpent eating its own tail “may be in the West one of the very last images of Neoplatonic cosmology” (30).[3] This is, Lukacher argues, the “last snapshot of a European paganism unfettered by Christianity” (33) - before the fingerless serpent straightens out to slither from the Nordic ash tree and up Eden’s apple tree, before eternal recurrence is supplanted by eternal salvation. Once Eve fingers the apple (her first bite of which must be the originary moment of unbound time) and God subsequently orders her and Adam out of Eden (index finger proverbially extended), the transition is made from pagan, circular time to a Christian “apocalyptic conception of the world’s evolution from creation to destruction” (Gurevich 94). The transition may be traced through the serpent’s morphology from circle to line, from cyclical to linear, from encircling the world tree to ushering mankind out of the garden.

In the Edenic myth, original sin hinges on a dexterous string of grasping, eating, offering, and pointing. The finger’s ability to open the body into the subtle beyond - and subsequently to penetrate other bodies - is crucial to each manual event. It is precisely this space beyond and between fingertips that defines Michelangelo’s quintessential image of secular humanism, The Birth of Man. The palpable distance between God’s and Man’s fingertips, compounded by the concerted distance between their gazes, suggests that the distance necessary for ocular perspective is also a criterion for dexterous perspective. The slight yet critical space between God’s finger and Man’s finger on the apex of the Sistine Chapel is pregnant with the promise of a propitious tempo-corporeal disruption. The space holds apart, conjoins, references and is referenced by the two iconic, pointing fingers.

While Michelangelo’s time-fetish visually depicts a moment of unbound time suspended in the near-touch, another Renaissance artist, William Shakespeare, fashions his time-fetish with verbal images of the finger. Shakespeare is one of Lukacher’s featured initiates into the ta orgia, and perhaps the chief offender of fetish-like affirmations of words for the aporia of time. Lukacher dubs him a member of Bacchus’ libidinal lineage for all of his lusty attempts to slow time’s flow with the language of love. But Shakespeare’s access to the orgy box with his time-fetishes means he not only attempts to slow time’s flow in order to revel in love and power, but to create those utter disruptions of time. One of Shakespeare’s less-often performed History plays, Richard II, includes a most elegant example of one such propitious disruption, which Richard encounters on his fingertips. Brutally dethroned and eternally sentenced to a prison cell, Richard’s finger ticks away the seconds of his epic confinement and simultaneously soothes his despair by wiping away the very tears that his finger’s ticking provokes. Richard laments,

My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch
Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears. (V,v, ll. 51-54)

In the fall of 2006, I saw the Classic Stage Company’s production of Richard II in New York City. During this soliloquy, the actor playing Richard, Michael Clumptsy, transformed his fingers into performative instruments. Clumptsy fell to his knees and crossed his left arm over the right at the elbows. Left forearm parallel to the floor, he pointed his index finger to create the dial’s point, which ticked upwards, clockwise, from nine o’clock to 12 o’clock, as he rhythmically spit out the words in time with his ticking finger. Once the dial’s point reached 12 o’clock, it found his weeping eyes, and Clumptsy’s rigidly pointed finger softened to wipe away his tears.

Shakespeare conflates the two meanings of “watch” in these lines, both of which evoke a desire for control over an Other. Originally meaning “wakefulness/vigil” in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, “watch” came to simultaneously denote both a potentially hostile surveillance and a small timepiece (Oxford English Dictionary). The layered implications of manipulation begin to unfurl and place the finger at the crux of Richard’s desperate lament. As most evident in the Foucauldean gaze, control is a crucial, quite libidinal, element of visuality as well as dexterity. Recall the control over self and non-self inherent in the manipulating subject. The control proffered by knowledge – grasping something or someone, gazing upon her and thus knowing her – is, as Shakespeare understands, very seductive, and not just figuratively. But, ironically, neither Richard’s grasping nor gazing affords him any control, for his watch is kept over his own, slow death. At the center of the scene, amidst the tears and sighs and screams, is Richard’s desperate desire for the erotic control afforded by watches: “My thoughts are minutes, and with sights they jar / Their watches unto mine eyes.” Ironically, his impotent watch over the ticking clock is the only control he has over his fate – to watch time pass.

The watches of Richard’s eyes keep vigil over his incarceration but cannot mark the minutes of his thoughts. This requires a second hand, a pointing finger, like the dial’s point, to tick away the seconds, and sighs to signal the hours. Richard’s fingers mark the time that is wasting him but also wipe away the tears, performing their dual performative functions of violence and love. They ensure that the Hericlitean river keeps flowing as the clock keeps ticking. But simultaneously, his fingers, in their cleansing ritual, provide a propitious moment that allows Richard to experience an emotional moment of unbound time. It is useful here to recall Deleuze’s stance on the relationship between desire and watches, or gazes; that is, the relationship between desire and the emergence of the seeing subject. The passion of repetition forms the seeing subject; habit makes pleasure possible. Richard’s eyes fail to give Richard pleasure in their miserable vigil. They do not provide him erotic control of surveillance, for he is keeping watch over his own death, but are only watching because of the pleasure still achieved therein. Richard still has the will to live, to give himself pleasure by comforting himself, by wiping away his tears: ameliorating the torture and futilely seeking the pleasurable in his desperate resistance against his own fate. In other words, Shakespeare constructs a scene of the divided and aporetic enterprise of coping with temporality here, and locates the struggle on Richard’s fingertip. As the watches of his eyes see the second hand ticking, and weep because of it, they are soothed by the very fingers that wield destruction.

If Richard is attuned to his fingers’ connection to sight and touch, how does he consider the dial’s point in reference to aurality? How do his fingers, like mouths and ears, permeate the fictitiously discrete boundaries between inner and outer in this propitious moment of unbound time? Richard’s soliloquy about becoming “Time’s numb’ring clock” is prompted by music: “Music do I hear. / Ha – ha! Keep time! How sour sweet music is / When time is broke” (41-43). The out-of-time music that “mads” Richard is compounded by his own moans and oppressive heartbeat - the “clamorous groans which strike upon my heart, / Which is the bell. So sighs, tears, and groans, / Show minutes, times, and hours” (56-59). Richard attunes himself to the moans and shouts that animate what his pointing finger “shows,” each torturous sensation felt in his multi-sensorial, corporeal marking of time. But it is the music that Richard cannot tolerate as he waits for death, yet what his iambic pentameter – or musical heartbeat – ironically captures: “This MUsic MADS me: LET it SOUND no MORE” (61).

In his examination of Shakespeare’s “war with time,” Lukacher contends that the sonnets’ passing reflections on eternal return reveal Shakespeare’s preoccupation with slowing the process by which time devours all things, consuming us “insofar as we consume ourselves” (61). The poet spends his life fending off “‘time’s thievish progress to eternity’” (Sonnet #77) through a “certain perfection of language” (61), in a race to give love fame faster than time wastes life (#100). However, Shakespeare’s perfection of language may be more akin to an alignment, a harmony, of language with corporeal clocks, reminders of time’s thievish progress, which can be heard in the heartbeat or drummed on the desk: duh DUM duh DUM duh DUM duh DUM duh DUM.

Music, sighs, groans and his own clamorous heartbeat tick away Richard’s minutes and hours to tortuously prolong death while simultaneously forecasting its imminence. Conversely, theorist Roland Barthes finds the sounds which signal death the only tolerable aspect of death. Camera Lucida, Barthes’ exegesis on the death inherent in photography, once again locates a moment of unbound time on the fingertip. The moment in which the photograph is snapped, when Barthes libidinally and fearfully leaps from the Hericlitean river, is not governed by the photographer’s gaze but by his dexterity. The camera’s click, “the metallic shifting of plates,” breaks through “the mortiferous layer of the Pose” to trigger Barthes’ desire (15). In contrast to Richard, “the sound of the camera” is the only thing that Barthes can tolerate, the only thing he likes, that is familiar to him, in death - and it is death which Barthes is seeking in the photograph taken of him (15). Sounds of time (bells, clocks, watches) are not sad to Barthes, unlike the sounds of time that signal Richard’s demise. But the sound of time particularly seductive to Barthes is the camera’s click. It is Barthes’ time-fetish, a catalyst for the pure disruption of time’s flow, and Barthes’ fetish-like affirmation of this sound for the aporia of time earns him a nomination for initiation into the ta orgia. As his awareness of his self is suddenly elevated to a hyper-consciousness (Baer would say he is split into self and witness), his perception of time is undone. He is murdered, yet simultaneously aroused.

It is not the photographer’s eye that enacts Barthes’ moment of unbound time, but the photographer’s penetrating digit, the instrument that presses the death/desire trigger. Barthes explains that, for him, “the Photographer’s organ is not his eye (which terrifies me) but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of the lens […] I love these mechanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way, as if, in the Photograph, they were the very thing – and the only thing – to which my desire clings” (15). The music does not mad him. Cameras are Barthes’ watches, “clocks for seeing,” and their sounds counteract the Death promised with each photograph. The photographer’s finger employs an inside-out and an outside-in performativity - a tactile, visual and aural performativity in one minute motion – the pressing of the trigger that causes death but whose sound provokes libidinal life.

Why might the unassuming, perfunctory finger command such a notable spotlight in artistic and philosophical attempts to cope with time’s aporia? Perhaps it is through counting that fingers most directly, yet often imperceptibly, exceed their physiology to otherwise inform our daily encounters with public time. Certainly their central role in developing body knowledge in habitual action indicates their tremendous knowledge and understanding, in a Connertonian sense. But the body’s dexterous experiences transcend functionality to also bear figuratively on culturally significant (and culturally specific) perceptions. The finger extends the body subtly beyond the body in order to manipulate others’ and one’s own enigmatic position in the Hericlitean river, thereby inciting an alternate experience of temporality and corporeality.

Since every cell in our bodies is a corporeal clock, the two disruptions are umbilically linked. We are indeed Time’s numbr’ing clock. The finger is a tip on which – or a conduit through which – our tempo-realities are both charted and disrupted. By dissolving the fictitious borders of temporal structure and of our discreet bodies, the finger’s penetrating manipulations induce moments of alternate temporal and corporeal perception. The fingers not only enact a propitious moment that seems to briefly freeze the Hericlitean river, but propose a radically different experience of time altogether, one that it is more akin to Democritean raindrops (Baer 4). This Democritean mood is one we enter, suggests Baer, with “the digital image-engineer’s fingers on the keyboard” (86), a habit paradoxically devoid of and inductive of awareness. Thus to grasp the ta orgia is not to temporarily catapult oneself out of the flow of time, but to grasp that the flow cannot be grasped – for it will slip through one’s fingers – but can be experienced only in the snap, tick and tock.

Notes