Off Centre.

11 We find ourselves confronted by two closely related notions of what it might mean for something to be “ex-centric”: a notion of directionality which implies that the eccentric is to be thought not as something which is simply “outside,” but rather as something that is the result of a movement “from” an assumed centre, away from there, but also – and this is the second aspect – a notion of connectedness which will always tie the eccentric, however loosely, to this assumed centre as the place where it comes from, which formed it and possibly motivated its very movement away, right up to the possibility that the eccentric may even be a thing put together from materials provided at the very centre from which it seeks to distance itself.

12 At the same time, eccentricity would cease to be a “personality,” it would not even be a specific position or location. It would be a movement, a technique by which those practicing the art of eccentricity would be continually moving away, out of an assumed centre, to seek for an outside position (Schabert’s one foot off the ground) while never completely relinquishing the centre altogether as a point of origin and reference (Schabert’s second foot on the ground). It would be a technique designed to investigate and question the centre while striving away from it, a radically sceptical technique which would seek not only to question the centre but to do so from a position which cannot itself be fixed as a firm point (after all, such a firm point would simply set up an opposition of centre and periphery, centre and opposition, norm and deviance).

13 Eccentricity would then be a technique building on a continual tension, a continual negotiation between the “centre” and a position of eccentricity specifically created for this negotiation. This is not just some kind of place on the periphery, as Juri Lotman would have it, but rather a positionality which is being brought forth in a continual and specific process of “ex-centering” performances and utterances. If these techniques are moving towards a point “outside” a given system (the sex-gender system, a literary genre or textual practice, a philosophical tradition, etc.), try to imagine such a location in the act of writing, this ultimate point “outside” would no longer be a place within the universe of signs and meanings, the Semisophere in Lotman’s terms, the Symbolic in Lacan’s, but an intuited location and mode of being, a place of longing in which the demands or all systems of signification could finally be shrugged off. A place, indeed, which many of Schabert’s foot-off-the-ground texts seem to strain for, in nature, in death, in conditions of oblivion, while never quite reaching it.

14 If, then, the concept of eccentricity were pushed beyond the notion of a character trait towards eccentricity as a technique of thought and artistic creation which makes it possible for individuals to position themselves vis-à-vis a centre, then eccentricity would not in fact be in need of eccentrics. Rather, it would be a technique that would be potentially available to anyone with a desire to try and imagine a state of indifference in relation to the centre of signification, a position which is neither affirmative nor oppositional and which both assumes a centre and seeks to leave it behind. However, this is a game which first of all requires a desire, maybe even an urgent desire for eccentricity, a need to reject not only the centre but also other available sub-centres along the periphery. And it is a risky game as it builds on the continual performance of a deviance which does not have the consolations of being “at home” in a new centre made up of other possibly stigmatized and marginalized but at least identifiable identities. “Eccentrics” would then be people for whom the techniques of eccentricity form a key component in their being in the world: they would be especially adept at manipulating systems of signification in a manner not designed to establish an oppositional “identity” but rather to create an eccentric position, not completely detached from the centre, but looking back on it with irony, refusal, non-recognition, indifference. Scouting the Terrain

15 When searching for a prominent example for the investigation of eccentricity as a technique, there could be no better place to start with than with Edith Sitwell, a writer who is herself rarely absent from lists of eccentrics due to her extravagant self-stylizations, but who very rarely is given a chance to be heard with her own words, her own literary interventions in the field of eccentricity. Her The English Eccentrics (1933), written in the early 1930s against a background of the continual growth of totalitarian movements and regimes all over Europe, is a work which is today seen as one of the early studies on eccentrics (it is a narrated list of eccentrics). However, it is also itself a work saturated with the techniques of eccentricity, one of the more sustained and complete versions of the mode. English Eccentrics begins by positioning itself within the tradition of melancholy, a version of spleen which has been perceived since the early modern period as a condition of decenteredness and homelessness. Investigating the lives and doings of eccentrics, it is claimed, is itself a cure for melancholy: it is, however, a cure which Sitwell explicitly sets out to find not at the centre but in the “Dustheaps” (17) of culture:

We may find some cure for Melancholy in the contemplation of this, or in the reason given by some scientists for distinguishing Man from Beast. ‘Man’s anatomical pre-eminence,’ we are told, ‘Mainly consists in degree rather than in kind, the differences are not absolute. His brain is larger and more complex, and his teeth resemble those of animals in number and pattern, but are smaller, and form a continuous series, and, in some cases, differ in the order of succession.’ We have, indeed, many causes for pride and congratulation, and amongst these is the new and friendly interest that is shown between nations. ‘Richard L. Garner,’ (again I quote from Herr Schwidetzky) ‘went to the Congo in order to observe gorillas and chimpanzees in their natural surroundings, and to investigate their language. He took a wire cage with him, which he set up in the jungle and from which he watched the apes.’ Unfortunately, the wire cage, chosen for its practical invisibility to imaginative and idealistic minds, always exists during these experiments. ‘Garner, however, tried to teach human words to a little chimpanzee. The position of the lips for the word Mamma was correctly imitated, but no sound came.’ This is interesting, because a recent psycho-analyst had claimed that the reason for the present state of unrest in Europe is that every man wishes to be the only son of a widow. We can see, therefore, that if imbued with a few of the doctrines and speeches of civilization, the innocent, pastoral, and backward nations of the Apes will become as advanced, as ‘civilized’, as the rest of us. Who knows that they may not even come to construct cannon? To go further in our search for some antidote against melancholy, we may seek in our dust-heap for some rigid, and even splendid, attitude of Death, some exaggeration of the attitudes common to Life. This attitude, rigidity, protest, or explanation, has been called eccentricity by those whose bones are too pliant. Bur these mummies cast shadows that do not lie in their proper geometrical proportions, and from these distortions dusty laughter may arise. […] This eccentricity, this rigidity, takes many forms. It may even, indeed, be the Ordinary carried to a high degree of pictorial perfection, as in the case I am about to relate. On the 26th of May, 1788, Mary Clark […] was delivered of a child […] it seems that this interesting infant was ‘full grown, and seemed in perfect health. Her limbs were plump, fine and well proportioned, and she moved them with apparent agility. It appeared to the doctors that her head presented a curious appearance, but this did not trouble them much, for the child behaved in the usual manner, and it was not until the evidence of its death became undeniable, at the age of five days, that these gentlemen discovered that there was not the least indication of either cerebrum, cerebellum, or any medullary substance whatever.’ Mr. Kirby, from whose pages I have culled this story, and who seems to have been one of those happy persons who never look about them, but who, when confronted with an indubitable fact, are astonished very easily, concludes with this pregnant sentence: ‘Among the inferences deduced by Dr. Heysham from this extraordinary confirmation, but advanced with modest diffidence, is this: that the living principle, the nerves of the trunk and extremities, sensation and motion, may exist independent of the brain.’ This is the supreme case of Ordinariness, carried to such a high degree of perfection that it becomes eccentricity. Again, any dumb but pregnant comment on life, if expressed by only one gesture, and that of sufficient contortion, becomes eccentricity. Thus, Miss Beswick, who belongs to the former order of eccentrics, did not resemble the child who was born without brains, whose supreme ordinariness and resemblance to other human beings was proved by the fact that it did not know that is was alive. […]. (19-22)