Stuttering, breaking language’s autonomous clarity, in Deleuze’s model is consumed within the past. When poetry understands language it moves its ‘infinitely varied line’ into a state of continuation, a continuation whose only journey is into the past. Language is a crowd however. When the man speaks in The Body Artist he speaks as a crowd in which the broken words, the facts of Lauren and Rey’s past life; things no-one could know, stand divided off from everything, not of any line or flux of variations, but as clusters of voices held upon the mediation of a tape, the only proof of their existence.

He spills a glass upon the floor:

‘His future is not under construction. It is already there, susceptible to entry.

She had it on tape.

She did not want to believe this was the case. It was her future too. It is her future too.’ 9

So certain a declaration of the course of time suggests that the evanescence of moments has been superseded, remade into a vision of things that is total, a monad that covers everything that will and has been. In the suggestion of such a shift in direction is the demonstration of why no change has taken place. Held on the tape, neither her words, nor her dead husbands, nor even the man’s himself, but all three, make language cluster as it’s recording is perfectly performed in the artwork made by Lauren, and described by a journalist and old friend in the penultimate chapter. Mariella Chapman, the journalist in question describes it:

‘His words amount to a monologue without a context. Verbs and pronouns scatter in the air and then something startling happens. The body jumps into another level. In a series of electro-convulsive motions, the body flails out of control, whipping and spinning appallingly … It is a seizure that apparently flies the man out of one reality and into another.’ 10

It is too obvious to talk of mediation as a robbing of identity. It is also wrong. The voice on the tape becomes the voice in the performance, becomes the ‘series of electro-convulsive motions’. Mediation is serial of necessity, but it is not a series of becomings, but a series of perfect events, the voice; the voice; the movement, all of which speak of the same thing, all of which are the multiple happenings of something whose perfection is only temporary. Recorded in the media, on tape; kept in forms that could last through history, still they will not participate with it. The form of this resistance is scarcely expressed in The Body Artist, which may be what finally separates it from the majesty of Underworld, but it is made known in the passages that speak of the fragility of the man who speaks of all times, who ‘had no protective surface.’:

‘He was alone and unable to improvise, make himself up.’ 11

The delicacy of evanescent moments is in the frozen hold they have over all the ways in which they are registered. The intimacy of The Body Artist is so closed in that that registration can only be on the smallest level, a man, a performance, a review. In Underworld it is as large as the historicizing act that it fights back against.

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