渋谷の妄想症

there are invisible holes in the city's interweaving fabric of perpetual motion and static structures. passageways and corridors and ticket gates give way suddenly onto open space where no single direction exerts a dominant pull--bodies rush and flow and pause, waiting to be joined to continue journeys back into the dense landscape of urban dreamscape. there is a kind of paranoia here, or a delusion, but perhaps more appropriately a kind of haunting. things are present, but made partial, incomplete, a binary relation fractured by something missing.

before me, as I wait too, an inaudible narrator appears, seeming at first to also be waiting, but I realize he is speaking to us all, but without being heard--his voice is absent, and there is only his gesture. His hands mark out some occult terrain, or illustrate some instructions. he occupies a space that is empty, suddenly. people who inadvertently pause nearby readjust themselves beyond some invisible perimeter, or simply hurry through. they have a legible purpose: to meet someone here (a group of three girls bow to one another and move off-screen), to meet someone elsewhere (a woman runs from right to left), to receive or transmit information to someone who is not present (a man holds a cell phone to his ear). around us all is white noise, the massive screens benignly illuminating the Shibuya intersection with their looped sequences of light and sound--even this non-sense is legitimated with commercial purpose. capitalism talks to us of fetish objects made real through labor and money.

the man speaks to no one that can be seen by the camera, by me, this entranced observer. my own purpose is suspended as i strain to see what it is not there, hear what i cannot. i realize i am filming this to discover some explanation, to understand what possesses this man even as he possesses this self-created zone of impossibility. his is an uncanny counterpoint to tokyo's impossible consumer architectures that flow and hum with a fantastic energy we inhabit with our bodies and imaginations. this zone before my camera is an interruption. it exists, yet those of us around the man refuse to make it real by including it in the space of the ordinary. this "ordinary" is also fantastic, one which allows us to mask over what is not present. the ordinary is a tentative membrane that has meaning because it fuses together with other things we believe exist and have knotted together with skeins of meaning. we hold this weird manifestation apart, each of us calculating the distance necessary to prevent our own inclusion in this haunted space that bespeaks dislocation, disassembly of meaning, absence and abnormality.

it is a space of doubled impossibility: invisible visibility. to rephrase Avery Gordon, we each utter: "i see [you/you] are not there." this scene is ghostly, but the man is so alive and in being so he exhumes the absence all around him (and our own absences too--who are we not with? who cannot hear us? who can we not speak to?). he is alive with his own language--the motion of his lips in silent speech, the accompanying choreography of his hands, the slow turning from side to side as if seeking to broadcast or acknowledge the fullness of his audience, or perhaps single out a specific recipient. but where is this absent other? the man is a talkative representative of what is missing. none of us want to become the counterpart to his speech: representative of that missing figure, the receiver, the listener, the patiently unseen, that ghostly, impossibly other being that is so apparently present.

i am unsettled as he turns and his eyes meet mine. but it is only the briefest contact. new detours emerge. people devise new lines of motion in response to this uncanny place that has occurred where before the space was understood and comprehensible, full of coherent communications. the city is upended momentarily, its territoriality dislocated by the immateriality of ghosts. beyond what i can see and my own sense of visibility--my own frail empirical truths--all is incomplete. all is ghostly. all these people will disappear. no-one can hear. i am not seeing you. you are here.