RC: Why ÎNDĂRĂT?

CD: Not only why, but where, when, and (with) whom?

RC: There is a form of ÎNDĂRĂT in this dialogue structure, as in when it’s spoken vs. when it’s read, a synchrony and a diachrony at work. Well, not spoken per se, but not quite written either, somewhere between langue and parole, the epistolary form has kind of been abolished by technology. Another thing that stays behind everywhere except in pastiche.

CD: ÎNDĂRĂT means a monstrous backtrack through what we fear the most. It’s applied hauntology if you will. If ghosts are said to arrive from the past and appear in the present, then this implies a reversal of the flow of time. Backtracking, retracing one’s steps, and deciding to go backwards instead of forwards can be considered akin to becoming ghostly. One of the only Romanian films I know of to feature such a ghostly becoming is Mircea Daneliuc’s Această Lehamite / Fed Up (1994). One of the main storylines involves a spectre’s backtracking journey. We find out in the very first scene that she died in a car crash somewhere on a road where cars seem to fall uphill – an apparent inversion of the laws of physics. It’s (supposedly) a real phenomenon which happens in Romania at Întorsura Buzăului. If you leave your car without pulling the parking brake it will slowly roll uphill. Thus, ÎNDĂRĂT signals the actualisation of the unnatural, the fact that a certain threshold of reasonability is left in the rearview mirror, where things may appear closer than they are. Daneliuc utilises it as a metaphor for the state of the country back then. But backtracking is not only a symptom of a world turned on its head, but its main driving force. Are we not experiencing this right now?

RC: Backtracking is indeed monstrous and inherently ghostly as it can only occur among traces and ruins, the physical marks of that which is no longer. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Retribution (2006) examines this, looking at abandoned residential projects on the outskirts of Tokyo, half-finished buildings forever stuck between the not-yet and the no-longer, between soon and not-ever, inhabited by ghosts that are both spiteful and melancholic. In the film, even a gaze towards these buildings becomes an act of cruel and deliberate abandonment by the living. Even the very first shot you come to realise represents a past act that nobody wants to claim. Or does someone claim it?

CD: Derelict buildings fascinate us because their in-between state engages with the idea of deconstructing, or returning matter to the state it was before any human intervention. This is exactly why linear temporality is an obstacle one needs to overcome to partake. Forwards and backwards are human constructs (awaiting deconstruction). Accepting the domineering force, for example, that which propels Benjamin’s Angelus Novus in a certain direction (away from the catastrophe of creation) means a loss of agency. Husserl states that one cannot simply glance directly (unmediated) at one’s own eyes or the back of one’s neck. For both a mirror would be necessary. Backtracking is a way to engage with the un-engageable, by way of speculation – which conveniently enough comes from the Latin specula, meaning mirror. So, in a way, ÎNDĂRĂT means to elicit the virtual to see not necessarily what we know to have been, but also what might be. (Future tense to describe the past – this is the core of the issue.) To answer your question, I think we must simultaneously claim it and let it go.

RC: Your use of deconstruction isn’t Derridian, but Heideggerian. His concept of ‘destruktion’, by which the past reveals something fundamental about Being. Yet this speculation often proves to be deeply disconcerting and disorienting. I remember (looking ÎNDĂRĂT) that a long time ago a friend told me that shutting one’s eyes does not approximate blindness; the blind see the way you see what is behind you. Trying to ‘visualize’ this proved to be a nauseating exercise, a sensorial contact with the absolute absence of that which is present. In this way, ÎNDĂRĂT does not describe an ontic behindness but the ontological relation to it. It opens the question of Being: Why is there something (behind me) instead of nothing?

CD: One cannot be certain that there always is something behind you. This is the beauty of it, this is also the main problem: an epistemological blind spot. This is why backtracking is so important. Perseus (Kracauer reminds us) uses the mirrored surface of his shield to be able to deliver a decisive blow to his enemy. Virtuality (what may or may not be behind you) cannot be directly accessed, but it can be represented. How do the inverted items from Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020) arrive in the past? Did the construction workers of the Odessa Opera building simply not notice that some of the materials had bullet holes in them? Causality, when travelling backwards through time, becomes spooky. In that, it relies on ghosts or indeed spooks (from unknown interdimensional agencies, trying their best to preserve a sense of forward momentum). A cold time war, if you will. One can imagine an assemblage of sorts handling all manner of (forward) logical issues. One can imagine causal logic itself as a patchwork, prone to tearing. Remember that, in that film, there is a war concerning the ‘correct’ direction that time is flowing. Looking ÎNDĂRĂT makes us agents in this time war. But does this mean that we are betraying our side?

RC: To betray means to have already taken a side. We are indeed thrown into ‘correct’, linear and causal time, squeezed among the marching masses mercilessly going forward. Here, defecting can be an act of faith or love, a transgression only by the norms of those who construct and enforce this order, which are no gods of mine. Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s ghosts want to be seen and recognized. Similarly, Derrida’s work on hauntology starts from the question of justice, you can’t have justice unless you are just to that which is no longer and that which is not yet. Recounting an experience on LSD, Agamben remembers how the only thing that could “raise an objection” to the beauty and unity of the world is the issue of justice and remembers how the waves and the stars kept asking “Are you just, are you just?” I believe the same question echoes in every tick of the clock. Both betrayal and compliance ultimately provide an answer.

CD: Waves and stars tend towards a blissful ambivalence when it comes to human matters, but this is not to say that such interrogations aren’t useful (even those self-generated and ascribed to the material world). This dialogue in itself is useful because it puts both of us in a clash state, and since each of us is several, there is already quite a crowd. A state by which forward momentum is potentially derailed. New possibilities arise from clashes. The weirder the better. Debord would call what we’re doing here détournement, and then light up another cig. Smoke spirals would turn the room into a Uzumaki-like dreamscape. Next to us, in the same dive bar, Max Cohen and Lenny Meyer discuss the invisible patterns that govern the stock market, ancient texts, sunflower seeds, nature and hence reality. Just across the block, above a neighbouring convenience store, the long-lost Phillip Jeffreys manages to infiltrate a meeting of the spirits from The Black Lodge. The Man From Another Place and his merry gang are agents in this time war. They’re backtracking. Why else would they talk and move in reverse? In ancient Greece, Archimedes has his eureka moment. Almost two millennia later, in a NY apartment, Euclid spits out a seemingly random 216-digit number. If you think about it, both of these accounts are fictitious. Time blurs any possible demarcation between what supposedly really is and what is made up. (Deep time obliterates perception entirely.) This is why when patterns and correlations emerge they create an eerie feeling. Strange attractors seeking other strange attractors. And since what we collectively call reality is rickety, to say the least, this dream we inhabit makes us want to look for an escape. But there is no such thing. All we can do is ride the (onward moving) wave for as long as it’s possible. And, if we’re lucky enough, try to see, with the right pair of eyes, the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally breaks and rolls back, ÎNDĂRĂT. Is that too bleak?

RC: I don’t find it bleak as much as I find it necessary. But I find that the break line is not singular but multiple and fractal, recursively folding under itself as it reemerges and progresses. As another ghostly pattern surfaces, the question that emerges is when will it crack under its own multiplicity, or will it ever? I do very much agree that reality synchronically and history diachronically are very much fictions we’re living inside, collectively agreed hallucinations deriving their authority and legitimacy from their past iterations, looking to the past as an ever-thickening strand binding them together in their presumed unity and homogeneity. The question then becomes, do our own fictions reinforce it or do they subvert it from within, adding weight on the fault lines and worming into the load-bearing columns? There is also a risk of becoming too attached to these old, remixed and pastiched forms. In PKD’s Time out of Joint, Ragle Gumm despite his exceptional talent at identifying patterns, cannot figure out the artificial and constructed nature of the late 50s American suburbia, which I argue is not his failing but the failing of reality to be something else than all it’s ever been, recent yet eternal, empty and ghostly yet saturated and impenetrable. To keep with the aquatic analogy, I remember Foucault’s face of a man drawn in the sand at the sea’s edge, waiting for a wave to erase it. Will the currents we’re riding take us to that shore?

CD: I hope it will. Through an ocean of time, to the shores of Lemuria and beyond. Because backtracking never ceases.