dédoublement

Re the below link to Alvin Lucier's 'I am Sitting in a Room':

It came up in relation to 'Igitur' - the idea of consciousness doubling itself. Or even a room doubling itself in consciousness. Or consciousness of consciousness redoubling in a room.

I recall mentioning (in our session, amidst the cling-wrapped furniture - another redoubling? or another act of a room calling consciousness to itself?) Paul de Man's take on Baudelaire's essay on comedy in this context. For Baudelaire (in 'The Essence of Laughter'), comedy needs two men to happen: one to trip, and the second to see him trip and laugh. But (he adds), there is a special race of man who can both trip and watch the trip: a member of this race can embody both, he can double himself. This is the blessing - or curse - of the philosopher or poet.

De Man (in 'The Rhetoric of Temporality'), glossing this 'doubling' or dédoublement, notes that once you're doubled you can no longer be unitary, 'pure' or 'authentic'. Your experience from here on in is a self-conscious one of your own inauthenticity, which you can only repeat, or redouble, at more and more conscious levels, and 'to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic'. He continues:

'The moment the innocence of authenticity of our sense of being in the world is put into question, a far from harmless process gets underway. It may start as a casual bit of play with a stray loose end of the fabric, but before long the entire texture of the self is unravelled and comes apart.'

 All this - still - in relation to falling:  to the original trip, to the Biblical l fall into self-awareness, and ultimately, simply to gravity, and the grave. 

This is all very pertinent to 'Igitur'. The whole piece is a descent. It's also all about doubling, and unravelling. But the unravelling never attains its end in the purity of death-as-absolution or death-as-simple-nothingness. Rather, we get this endless regress of redoubling - very like in Lucier's piece.