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/1/ - Setting the terms
Background - the term itself invokes at least two meanings: one temporal, the other spatial. In the former, one’s background is indicative of history ancient (a family’s background) and more recent (a background check). In the latter it is purely functional (what is behind the subject supporting it) or more vaguely visual (in terms of scenery).
In the temporal and spatial senses the two prongs are both divided into proximity near and far. Furthermore, these proximities are codified, albeit less directly, in terms of organic and inorganic: the hard-edged backgrounds on the one hand and on the other the soft curves of environmental scenery.
The softness or hardness of is of course not completely reliant on the creator of the subject/object, whether nature or human hand, but is also necessitated by the measurement of spatial distance. One last broad point to finish figuring the range of our discussion: the bounded and the unbounded and their relation of magnitude to the subject and object.
Large backgrounds, whether photographed, painted, sketched, et cetera, allow a subject (here we are continuing to use subject in the ontological sense and not the more direct artistic sense) to scale or be scaled. The tiny human figure reiterates for us the sublimity of the colossal mountain, the abysmal ravine and so forth. Conversely, the small background redoubles the frame of the picture to emphasize the centrality of the subject - think of the prototypical senior class photo - the vined swing set, the tacky furniture.
/2/ - Distinction fusion
The above statements do not exclude any possibility for third terms or terms of mediation. Taking Žižek’s theoretical thread that he discusses in The Ticklish Subject and The Parallax View, the terms of subject and object are permanently skewed by the errancy of one another’s existence. Žižek states that the relation of subject and object can be thought of in the other meaning of those words, simply that the object objects and the subject is subject to the object. Reversing the common primacy of the subject, Žižek argues that the object as such upsets the attempted functioning of the subject (The Parallax View, p. 17). The relation between subject and object is always mediated so that (here Žižek gives the scientific notion of parallax a philosophical twist) the change of perception in the viewing subject also causes an ontological change in the object.
To bring in the background, let us approach the same issue from a different theoretical perpsective - a Deleuzian one. In Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi addresses the common problem of relating the individual to society, of the relation between form and content and the battles of structuralism and post-structuralism. Massumi points out that while foundationalist approaches have been heavily criticized, particularly by deconstructionists, swathes of postmodern theory relying on deconstruction, such as queer theory, still discuss a structural periphery by maintaining the centrality of certain forms such as normativity (p. 68-69). Massumi goes on to argue that one must think the concept of relation as such, that there must not simply be a relation of two things, in our case subject and object, but a very being of relation qua relation (p. 70).
Massumi takes the concept of a soccer game as an example. Clearly, in terms of any sport, the rules did not come into existence before the game despite the fact that the game is obviously bound by them. The field, both literally in terms of sports and in philosophical terms, is what the game prior to being a game, as proto-game, and the formalized game have in common. Massumi goes on to say that the field is polarized by attractors (the goals) and that the ball is the catalyst- it makes the field the field (p. 72-73).
What brings us back to Žižek’s use of parallax is that Massumi says that the ball is part subject and that the players are part object. The ball objects to the subject, the player, through its “actionability.” The ball demands the kick from the player and therefore the kick is not an expression of the subject but of the object (p. 74). In Massumi’s definition, the field seems to be the functional background, one that supports the subject and not the more grandiose background of scenery. However, as we have noted, the field encroaches on the subject even though it does not threaten to swallow it in its sublime weight (even though the field is usually seem from afar - the distant camera or spectator seat.)
To explain this a photographic detour is proper.
/3/ - The Camera before or after or between modernisms
Marlena Donohue, an online arts writer, gives the following description of photography:
“In its modern and post-modern incarnations, photography has had to sort out its two functions. The modern function (the Cartier Bresson, Alvarez Bravo, Robert Frank camp) says the photo records life, reveals a priori formal, emotional or existential truths that are inherent in real time, the viewing of which pleases, moves or improves us.”
The post-modern function recognizes that in our information age photography is a fictive medium able to create realities the viewing of which poses complex questions about how we think, how we ascribe meaning, how we define the real and how we inculcate norms and collective signs (enter folks like John Baldessari, Jeff Wall, Cindy Sherman)” (link).
This introduction serves as a figuring of the field before discussing the photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia. DiCorcia purposefully blends the ’staged’ and the ‘natural’ taking everyday subjects and placing them in highly designed settings, facilitating a kind of surpa-naturalness. In an interview with Josefina Ayerza, diCorcia points out that there is a humor to his photography, not that they are funny per se, in the choice of their subjects, but that the very idea of representation, staged or not, is fundamentally humorous.
To bring us back to our initial terms which set us on the current trajectory, when choosing a photographic scene one is not simply going to pick the scenery for itself, or the subject for itself, but for the interplay between the two, of the event itself. Depending on whether we are following more Platonic traditions and listening specifically to Badiou, taking the fact that the Event is something that can never be photographed, or the more Deleuzian route, exemplified above by Massumi, in that movement itself is an event, then diCorcia’s photos seem to fall somewhere in between. diCorcia has, in the past, set up a scene and waited for passerbys to come and become subjects. In another on-line piece by diCorcia, his photographs are said to capture the non-event, the moment that does not purport to be a moment.
diCorcia’s photographs re-edify the use of background as scenery, as simply visual buttress to the subject’s movement which, due to the very nature of the camera, is frozen and mortified. The article goes on to describe diCorcia’s role as photographer as one of voluntary passivity but, in actuality, doesn’t his role equate to an activity similar to that of the soccer player, where, more than a passivity, it is that diCorcia is demanded to act by the actionability of the moving subject. However, whereas in the game the ball was the catalyst, in this case, the very scene or field itself is. Once the fabricated scene is encroached upon by the happenstance movements of the wandering subject, diCorcia is impelled to capture them. diCorcia’s quasi-setting can be equated to the soccer ball as quasi-object - both are tainted by subjectivity while remaining deceptively inert.
/4/ - Change of scenery
A certain amount of paranoia would certainly be alleviated if backgrounds remained dead, but they do not. The close background, is one of immediate utility whereas the more distance form, that of natural scenery, is of possible utility, of resources to be eventually plundered. What separates the two, despite their proximity, is their deadness.
As k-Punk has pointed out here, Nigel Cooke’s paintings exhibit a kind of ontological rot, a crumbling scene of meaning in which nature and the unclear remnants of something. Cooke is less concerned with the specifics of what he is painting and more attentive to shifting quickly between styles as its paints it. The entropic state of Cooke’s work, the whole scene as a kind of energy death, denies the splitting of the subject and the object as well as the organic from the inorganic. While everything is bound, carefully rendered, at the same time the entire scene is bled together by a kind of dystopian disregard.
In Cooke’s work, as well as the work of the Duncan Weller the background is graffited and written upon in a way that highlights the unnaturalness of the any attempt to move across the backdrop. This discrepancy is indicative of the fundamental divide between subject and structure. As Žižek points out in his introduction to Adrian Johnston’s Time Driven, there is a fundamental Kantian divide in the subject as well as the subject from its background. In a broader sense, Kant’s divide speaks to the experience of modernity, that one is fundamentally alienated from the outside world.
The dominant technique in traditional animation, as well as its appearance, speaks to the odd imposition of the subject over the background. The Multiplane camera, a device used by several groups but most notably by Walt Disney, used several glass planes on which cels could be placed and the images would be super imposed. In addition, the various layers could be moved at different speeds in a process called, interestingly enough, parallax scrolling. Isolating one layer from another gives one an odd feeling in which the background in the animation appears more real then the moving figures themselves.
/5/ - The Subject as stain
Lacan’s definition of the subject, as that which resists symbolization, as the very crack in the symbolic, is well known. But in a more contextualized way, the subject is the substance which resistants forms of (traditional) ideological identifications ie labels, the subject emerges at the point which these identifications falls short. Now, as Žižek points out in the documentary which bears his name, the new form of ideology is not to fall into a externally implemented category, but the more vague and seemingly personal function of ‘I’m not just X I am in fact a warm human being who enjoys simple things et cetera.’
Or, in Kantian terms, Žižek points out the Kant was not simply in error (as some have alleged) when he stated that the subject was both noumenal (unaffected by external forces) and phenomenal (accessible and effected by external forces) but did so purposefully. In Tarrying with the Negative Žižek writes: “Kant is compelled to define the I of transcendental apperception as neither phenomenal nor noumenal because of the paradox of auto-affection; if I were given to myself phenomenally, as an object of experience, I would simultaneously have to be given to myself noumenally” (p. 16).
Žižek goes on to argue that Hegel takes Kant’s logic to its end by defining the subjective ultimately as the pure negativity in between the phenomenal and the noumenal, the ‘night of the world (p. 21). In the current feverish post-modernism, or post-post-modernism, we are labored to accept the meaningless of our position as such (in terms of ‘differing view’ et cetera) but we are lo to abandon all meaningful substance connected to our being. The background, whether spatial or temporal, seems to be the ground which we refuse to surrender.
Alex Gonzalez’s work, more than showing the object as a stain, shows the primacy of the background over the subject. While graphical work such as Cooke’s plays on the artificiality of the subject, through stylistic means, Gonzalez’s photographs, like the one above, deny the assumption of focus on the subject and/or the organic. Whereas one could see this simply as another example of the subject as stain, as the subject as that which cannot be arrested symbolically, one could also see the blur as an insertion of distance, as a quantitative shift and not a qualitative one, instead of exposing the ’subject as out-of-joint’ or as a break in the symbolic, the use of the blur as distance, questions more broadly the need to have the subject (in the philosophical sense) be the subject (in the sense of the photograph’s setup.)
The wonderfully agonizing effect of the photograph above is its dismissal of the background as the last moor for the subject, as the final object which gives the subject its ontological status. Ultimately it is a kind of defamilairization, the photographic background, instead of being either passed through as passive or reconstructed as a kind of stage, the background becomes a threat instead of a possible vessel for history to support ontogenetic development. Backgrounds start to become the danger of a kind of being-there (Da Sein) which appears more and more distinct from the human subject which has lost all horizon.
/1/ - At Century’s turn
The very concept of the turn of the century, whether rendered in English or the French fin de siècle, is tethered to one particular time: the shift from the 19th to the 20th century. This temporal lurch appears more drastic then any other because of the technological advances of the time, advents that seem impossible to imagine being without in the current epoch - the radio, telephone, airplane, and the harnessing of electricity.
In contrast to this tectonic of clockwork, it is odd to consider how the passage from the 20th to the 21th century was barely felt. If anything, the eve of the century bottled all its excitement in the knot of anxiety surrounding Y2K. The possibility of the failure of technology seemed, while utterly ridiculous, also banal and quotidian.
Perhaps there is a kind of wide scale technological death-wish here. In the opening pages of The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell tells us that “there is no off switch to the technological.” The telephone expertly embodies this anxiety - it is the constant demand, as Ronell argues, that never leaves us; we are always ready to answer the call, to accept some form of debt.
But before engaging telecommunications too quickly, there is a concern to be raised: how has science, through its deterritorialization lost its very sense of invention, of novelty, of an irruption in knowledge itself?
/2/ - Materialization of movement
It would be difficult not to characterize the contemporary era in terms of a simultaneous fullness and emptiness, of pure excess but an excess of empty shells. What is the interplay between these elements? Let us make the wager that it can be found in the notion of process, or, technological transparency.
Why should we discuss a certain fascination with the sphere? The creation of massive globes (Richardson’s Weather Factory, Reclus’ inside out sphere, Mappariums et cetera) in conjunction with certain geological theories in the realm of pseudo-science (such as hollow earth) suggests a fascination with the materiality of the immaterial. One example is the temporalization of space such as “the great map of mankind”. Fashioned during Victorian times, this world map depicted non-Western countries not in spatial terms but more fundamentally in terms of time. This meant that the ‘less devolved countries’ were seen less as different cultures and more as located in various pasts of western culture.
In addition, theories such as phrenology, physiogomy, and craniometry attempted to materialize differences and, in particular, racial differences. What links these attempts at objective science to the shift from the 19th to the 20th century is their role in the search, as Alain Badiou puts it in his text The Century, for the new man. The errancy of the Fascist, the Nazi, and of all eugenicists was the possibility of a Promethean/utopian project. While Badiou points out how this was the wrong project, it was more noble than today’s science where there are no projects to be pursued but only problems to be solved.
While so many technologies birthed at the turn of the century seemed to eliminate space, they were, in fact, a greater affront to time. Despite the radicalness of such inventions, a certain amount of spatiality was respected. The phone was trapped in place at its desk or booth, small towns grew to service the needs of endless veins of locomotives, and the television and radio gave full rooms of families the injunction to ‘gather ’round.’ Again we have the sphere - the place which moves yet remains.
Perhaps that was the frightening aspect of Tesla’s experiments in Colorado Springs,the lack of wires, the moveability of science which surpassed magic. And to return to the aforementioned Promethean nature, doesn’t the very holding onto there being a place of the gods, keep technology bound to space?
/3/ - The Fifth element or Invention’s plane
While there are countless theories which have been superseded by scientific evidence, several hang about our imaginations. Here I am thinking of aether, and in particular the luminiferous one. The luminiferous aether was the posited medium which, in theory, allowed for the transmission of light. The concept that light could pass through the nothingness of space did not seem to be a possibility at the time. Aether, in a more general sense, was also the fifth element, the air of the god’s ‘clear sky,’ or as the embodiment of quintessence, the non-material material, life itself.
Here Paul Virilio’s almost poetic text Open Sky is of the utmost relevance. The book begins: “The blue sky above us is the optical layer of the atmosphere, the great lens of the terrestrial globe, its brilliant retina. From ultra-marine, beyond the sea, to ultra-sky, the horizon divides opacity from transparency” (p.1). In a kind of reversal, Virilio goes on to argue that in the current time, contrary to the previous century, we have given time its own sense of matter; time has become the only sense of space.
Another venue to examine the relation of the material and the immaterial during the turn of the century is the awkward co- inhabitation of science and mysticism. Would it be completely ridiculous to find a connection between the rise of spiritualism, the belief that god and spirits can be directly communicated with, and the birth of the telephone?
To bring up an example I have used before - Hegel, discussing physiogomy in The Phenomenology of the Spirit, makes the odd statement that ‘the spirit is a bone,’ suggesting the coincidence of opposites in materiality and immateriality. As Zizek argues in The Sublime Object of Ideology, this coincidence has to do with the bone, and in particular the skull, embodying the very failure of being a subject, the subject’s deadness (p. 208). Spirit and materiality are seen through the act of ‘looking awry’ or through Zizek’s amended definition of parallax.
At the same time, the century seemed bent on the concept of the performance as sham, the grift, as well as the belief in magic as magic. This brings us to the film The Prestige.
/4/- The Secret or the Pledge, the Turn and the Prestige
While k-Punk has, some time ago, discussed The Prestige in terms of the secret, the most important aspect is of course found in the film’s end. The final lesson of the film is that we, in our current epoch, wish to believe the infallibility of science which, in a sense, divides science from the notion of invention itself. Without giving too much away, the film’s final point concerns our willingness to completely disregard magic and accept the logical explanation. But the important caveat here is that our viewing the film with a certain amount of dismissal of magic brings with it a view of technology - that it can no longer accomplish novelty - that it is only, in the current era, capable of slow, incremental changes, or as Badiou put it, fixes to a problem and not projects. How can we better explain how the appearance of novelty, of the Event, functions in the field of science?
For Badiou, science is one of four fields in which new truths emerge. The following is an extended passage from Being and Event:
“When Galileo announced the principle of inertia, he was still separated from the truth of the new physics by all the chance encounters that are named in subjects such as Descartes or Newton. How could he, with the names he fabricated and displaced (because they were at hand — ‘movement’, ‘equal proportion’, etc.), have supposed the veracity of his principle for the situation to-come that was the establishment of modern science; that is, the supplementation of his situation with the indiscernible and unfinishable part that one has to name ‘rational physics’?” (p. 401).
The question that Badiou is asking, in his own terms, is how does one move from the indiscernible, from the obscure object of invention, to the undecidable, to the point where one must decide to act in regards to the truth of one’s discovery. Something is knowable in the situation, through some procedure (in the case of the above story calculation based on gravitational discrepancies) that connects what is known to the truth of the situation which is must be forced (Badiou borrows the term of forcing from the Mathematician Paul Cohen) into the situation.
To bring this to the category of invention, one need only take a brief look at the writings of Brian Massumi. In Parables for the Virtual, he writes: “a true invention is an object that precedes its utility [...] with invention, the perceptual direction of travel between the poles of necessity and utility, between the intelligence and instrumentality, possibility and reason, is reversed” (p. 96). An invention “precedes and produces its own possibility” (p. 96).
/5/ - The call, the ring of the phone
Taking another note of Massumi’s - invention- and, in particular, the process, is always analog (p. 147). Wasn’t the turn of the century about the revolt of process, of our rejection of process? The intimacies of process seem to fall close to the dreams of the project- the details of process instill in us the very impossibility of the project.
So where does this leave us: what is the state of invention? Near the end of his well known text Simulacra and Simulation, in the chapter Value’s Last Tango, Baudrillard suggests that all that we have is the foolish hope that the very territory where the transreal and the transfinite exist disappears. This is all we have if we wish for a kind of return to meaning, a return to value in a time of an excess of information.
Returning to Ronell’s Telephone Book, the notion of the call, and in particular the call to act, is paramount. Ronell works through Heidegger’s embarrassing Spiegel interview, relating it to his philosophical works. In particular Ronell discusses Being-guilty in relation to being-there. She argues that the call, which is both beyond and over one (p. 33) when answered makes one guilty (p. 37). To want to answer the call, one must already be in the state of being-guilty, one must be willing to, in a more literal sense, accept the charges.
Ronell makes clear that this being guilty has to do with a simultaneous over-proximity and great distance from the Other as such. Bashing ‘paranoid’ theorists of technology such as Virilio, De Landa, Zizek and Ronell, Jerry Flieger asserts that hypervisibility and technology are not capable of erasing human existence as it has been. Flieger states that the anxiety over technology is simply another example of ‘paranoid knowledge,’ of looking too awry at reality (Is Oedipus Online?, p. 88).
The greater threat, it seems, is not the human mind and body at the altar of cybernetics, but the very concept of technology as a threat to itself. It is not frightening how humanity and technology, how flesh and circuitry, will be melded, but how such a thought displaces the place of invention itself. The risk is science becoming primarily a technique of extension, instead of one of knowledge’s explosion.
/1/ - Exaltation of the Ordinary
What is so terribly strange about the musical film? Musicals, on one level or another, seem to sensationalize the mundane (to borrow a phrase from a friend), they galvanize the sad pointless tidbits of existence. Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg goes even beyond this in that instead of having musical numbers weaved into the narrative, the entire narrative is musical, every single piece of dialog is sung. Whereas musical numbers tend to appear to highlight a particular event or feeling, the sing song quality to every moment in Umbrellas suggests a celebration of the very attempt at normalcy, of the necessity of formalization, the need, despite potential tragedy and disaster, to keep the world at a proper distance.
The truly odd and amazing accomplishment of the film is that it refuses to explode in a typically tragic event - every step that would allow, and even demand, a kind of horrible occurrence is muted, the characters refuse to raise it to the level of the tragic proper. Yet, at the same time, Umbrellas is nowhere close to being a comedy - if anything the film is tragic in that it never reaches the heights to allow a tragic fall, it’s fall is from itself, from it’s own inability to elevate itself. In a sense Umbrellas is tragic in the same way Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is romantic - it is the circling of the frame of its given genre which gives it it’s power, the magic of the motions devoid of the common ‘material results.’
This elevation is mirrored in the very formal frames of the film itself. In the opening shot we see Cherbourg in the distance and then we move upwards and then look down as the rain starts (seemingly falling right from our point of view) as people begin to pass by. If one watches closely the scene tends to alternate between people with umbrellas and those without - most of those with presumably being female whereas most if not all the males are walking bikes (let it be known that the gentleman of the story, Guy, bikes to meet Geneviève who works at an umbrella shop) only in the last few seconds does an umbrella user and a bicyclist pass by one another ever so briefly. The crane shot is repeated near the end of the film, where after Geneviève and Guy see each other for the last time we ascend awkward backwards into darkness. The very shot itself echoes the larger feel of the film - a kind of ‘calculated charm’ as the reviewer Johnathan Rosenbaum puts it.
Is the formality of love then a kind of required misery - as shown in the character of Roland Cassard? Geneviève’s mother points out that he is a real man who ‘has lived and suffered’ (and, in fact, Demy’s previous film Lola, focused on the Cassard’s disastrous relationship.) This point seems to be raised any time a character emphasizes anyone of the particular bon jours or au demains in the film - the devastatingly casual just seethes under every surface. The last point to be made here as just as Guy and Geneviève lay in bed to have their one and only night together we get three shots of places they had stood previously and kissed. The places are doorways and hallways (a similarly odd technique is used when Cassard is describing his failed romance with Lola - the camera cuts away to an empty stair case and we get a long unbroken shot of the shops that stand at the top of it) again speaking to the feeling of simply ‘going through the motions’ in that they literally progressed to that point (Guy’s bed, that particular point in space) as well as following the ‘next step’ in a relationship - that of sexual intimacy.
/2/ - The absence of Dance
If the music of Umbrellas is a performance, something that is purposefully staged and set apart from the rest of the narrative, it should be no surprise then that the film is also devoid of one of the musical staples - the dance. Maybe dance has become too casual, the cerebral weight of it has dimmed a bit, it’s sunken into a crassness, in Marla Singer’s terms via Fight Club “A condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip one on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night. Then, you throw it away… the condom, I mean, not the stranger.” Alain Badiou’s spectacular text “Dance as a metaphor for thought” in his collection Handbook of Inaesthetics, argues for a relatively complex look at dance as a form of art. In a proper Nietzschean fashion, Badiou places dance as a kind of pure becoming, the art of ‘the body before the body’ the art of innocence. If one follows Badiou in this way, if dance is the ‘wheel which turns itself’ as well as a thought ‘before it is named’ than where do the massive displays of Busby Berkeley sit with us?
Berkeley’s extravagant and geometrically determined displays, have, in the eyes of many cinematic scholars, spoken to a kind of underhanded socialism, a proto-communism akin to the writings of John Steinbeck, where during the great depression the socialist/communist temptation was at its strongest. Badiou argues that, in regards to dance, that the music doesn’t necessarily support the dance, as the common perception might be, but instead that music marks the silence of the body. In other words, the music simply contrasts the nameless, silence of the dancing body, the music covers over the intense silence of the innocence of the dancing form.
Badiou makes an important distinction which is pivotal for our discussion here, a difference between theater and dance. Whereas dance completely disregards time in the wake of space, theater is utterly considered with time, the structure of the narrative. (Isn’t tragedy proper, as we’ve mentioned, always possible only through bad timing, the missed opportunity, the tragic miscommunication?) Badiou goes on to quote the poet Mallarme who states that dance is ‘a poem set free of any scribe’s apparatus’ and also that the ‘dancer does not dance’ simply because the dance is subtracts form itself, it is utterly formless. Badiou beautifully explains Mallarme’s statement in a passage that I will quote at length here:
“the ‘true’ dancer must never appear to know the dance that she dances. Her knowledge (which is technical, immense, and painfully acquired) is traversed, as null, by the pure emergence of her gesture. ‘The dancer does not dance’ means that what one sees is at no point the realization of a preexisting knowledge, even though knowledge is, through and through, its matter or support. The dancer is the miraculous forgetting of her own knowledge of dance. She does not execute the dance, but is this restrained intensity that manifests the gesture’s indecesion. In truth, the dancer abolishes every known dance because she disposes of her body as if it were invented. So that the spectacle of dance is the body subtracted from every knowledge of a body, the body as disclosure” (p. 66).
If music can be said to cover over the horrible silence of existence, (here is the safety of love, the comfort of its twoness) then dance is about the very invention that love brings, that which emerges as the very feeling of emergence itself - that which creates despite the familiar framework which love exists in. Here is the oddness of Badiou’s ’scene of two’, the twoness that defines love. But first let us move outwards to a larger kind of formalization dealt with by the musical genre, that of economic difference.
/3/ - Class and Love
In the aforementioned Rosenbaum review of Umbrellas, there is a very interesting observation:
“The name of the Esso station is Escale Cherbourgeoise; this means literally “Cherbourgian Stopover,” but if we consider that escalader means “to scale or to climb” and escalier means “stairway,” we can read traces of a buried pun: “a bourgeois step up.” Guy has become comfortably middle-class, Genevieve has become upper-class, and the class difference between them seems even more unbridgeable than it was before. And as for the Esso sign that gave me so much trouble, what better indication could there be of the Americanization of small-town France, a simple fact of everyday life that this movie treats like any other? Product placement or not, it has the ring of absolute truth.”
It seems almost unnecessary to mention how pivotal class difference plays into the role of the musical though at times it may seem secondary to familial/racial difference a la West Side Story. The notion of class difference in the musical can be seen in at least two major ways - in the literal level with My Fair Lady and as the dominant metaphorical undercurrent in The Wizard of Oz. In My Fair Lady, the pompous linguist Henry Higgins shows that he can raise a poor flower girl with a Cockney accent to the status of the belle of the ball. The ending of the film and the play differ in that Eliza, the flower girl, leaves Henry and does not return to him originally but in several versions, including the film version pictured above, Eliza and Henry seem to reconcile. The original ending is important to maintain and it places the work alongside Dickens’ Great Expectations.
In both works it is the very failure of the lower class characters (Pip and Eliza) to become ‘great’ or ‘upper class’ that makes them praise worthy. (Here we have Mladen Dolar’s argument apropos Althusser, and contra Butler, that the subject emerges not through interpellation but it’s very failure. The unique qualities of a person emerge at the point they fail to become a particular kind of person, or embody an occupation, role etc.)
In the musical film The Wizard of Oz the themes of class are submerged and do to some changes from the book to the film are almost erases altogether. The largest issue here being the change from Dorothy having silver shoes (supposedly representing the virtues of silver coinage) to ruby read (to appear more brilliant in contrast to the yellow brick road). Many folks have commented on how the text represents the crisis of the gold standard (oz standing for ounce) and how economic depression had hurt the farmer (the scarecrow, unable to think his way out) the worker (the tinman, dehumanized, without a heart) and the average naive folk (Dorothy, just trying to find her way home). Both historians and economists have argued that Dorothy attempts to take silver down the path of gold (the slippers down the yellow brick road) to get silver coinage to help the poor and, at the same time, to show the fradulent meaninglessness of paper money (the emerald city and the Wizard).
The strange feeling of the music in The Wizard of Oz seems to have that familiar effect of covering over the horrible. In a similar fashion the dancing in the film seems so stilted and robotic that in the wake of their situation it all seems to painful - it’s a film about all those caught in between the horrid industrials of the East and West. How do we bring this all back to love? The role of class in the musical illustrates the danger of love falling too far into the greater realm of society. Although all our existence is inherently social (looking at Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Freud etc.) there remains a severe danger for love to fall too far outside, to become an outside looking in. My thoughts on this have been expressed thoroughly here. Let’s begin our descent into the morass of love and the musical.
/4/ - Amorous procedures as dance numbers
In his difficult but breathtaking text Metapolitics
Probably the most beautiful notion of love that Badiou discusses is that it is an ‘investigation about the sharing of the universe’, it is a questioning of a shared disjunction. That is why love is never about ‘how is it that we are here together’ but more importantly ‘how is the universe how it is with us together, what does our twoness (which is a One but never a one without disjunction, disagreement) say about the world?’ Whereas in the psychoanalytic realm love is a sort of retroactive construction to give consistency to our desire, Badiou’s definition is an infinite striving towards an impossible consistency, an understanding of the world through the long march of love.
So what about the musical? The theater, as Badiou notes in The Handbook of Inaesthetics, is an amalgamation that is the ‘positive opposite of dance.’ Whereas dance is about subtraction, the theater (the musical here) is all about excess. Someone must of said love is a dance - while the motions are so familiar and rehearsed, every formation of love appears from out of nowhere, descends either clumsily or angelically from the void. The theater, the musical then, is about this gesture of unique singularity (the approach, the encounter of chance) being caught in the mess of the world - we compensate for its potential loss with music, we fear for the larger monsters that may claim us (economics, distance, time etc) but then why does the musical so often seem so happy, so unfettered by the gloom of potential impossibility? Isn’t this what Badiou means when he says dance is not an art but the very possibility of art embodied? The body, in dance, exhibits an ‘exact vertigo’ as he puts it, completely free but free because of its intense restraint. Isn’t this the same in the encounter, in that moment where all seems possible when the glance is exchanged, the other examined from far, isn’t it necessary that we proceed with caution, that we act as if we know nothing of the possibilities?
/5/ - To end incompletely
So let us return to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. If the film is a kind of self abortive tragedy (in that its great fall is its very own inability to achieve that height which to fall from) then does it really exhibit the excess of the theater that Badiou so lavishly illustrates? The film seems to celebrate not just the frame of romance, the sing song quality of polite conversation, the motions of living, but more the tension between the weight of the world and the strange and intense possibility that arises from our own hope and resolve. Because the film refuses to show us the proper beginning of Guy and Geneviève’s relationship as well as a definitive end (of sorts) we should take the film to be romantic in its very attempt at trying to be romantic. While the motions of dating (or how ever you wish to call the escalation of intimacy) can be trying and tired, the point is that the mode of transit is purposeful indirect, intentionally askew and sideways.
Neither the chance of the initial encounter nor the potential infinite and shared interpretation of the world can be encapsulated by the frame of formality, but they are insistently pointed towards, suggested and outlined through such frames. On one level, perhaps, it stops us from getting too carried way but on the other hand, it allows to speculate and it highlights our own romantic and wonderfully foolish inclinations every time we shake or shatter that framework. The formality, whether or not it is as colorful as it is in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, ultimately serves as the ground from which to divide ourselves in the start of the dance which leads us to the flurry of the musical, the theater.
The formalization of love stands as the island which allows us to tip ever so precariously towards the impossibility of the encounter which allows the potential labor of love on the one hand, and towards the endless two headed dive towards the future on the other.
/1/ - Graphic novel or comic book?
The idea of a field like comic book studies (which is a not really established field within another not really established field - Popular Culture Studies) might appear pretty laughable even to non-academics, or more serious lit folks who thumb their noses at comics in general. Comics, for many, are still viewed as a children’s medium despite the fact that comics have grown up with their readers - becoming more and more adult over time. They have not, as far as their self professed aim, been ‘for kids’ specifically since the end of the Silver age in comics (roughly the early 70s) one of the events signaling this shift being the death of Spiderman’s girlfriend (for a time) Gwen Stacy (also see women in refrigerators - which criticizes comics for using the death of women as major plot points).
This ‘growing up’ of sorts could also be seen in part due to another reason the end of the golden started to happen in ‘54 with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent by Dr Frederic Wertham. Most of Wertham’s claims are the kind that today would be leveled against video games, save his accusations that comics were advocating homosexuality (Batman was clearly fucking Robin) and supposedly Wonder Woman was causing lesbianism (his evidence for this was her independence and her golden lasso of course).
The decline of the serial and the rise of the trade paperback has most likely attributed to this as well - the difference between comic books and graphic novels is similar to the supposed difference between HBO and TV - it looks better, its more expensive and it is more explicit. But, after all, there is still the perception that comics/graphic novels are ‘low art’ simply because of their association with less skilled art and/or as being geared towards a less intelligent audience. Bill Waterson of Calvin and Hobbes fame had this to say about the artistic division and comics:
At times it seems the very sequential nature of graphic novels/comic books proves deeply destructive in terms of their being recognized as art, why? That will be addressed in a bit, but more on comics as a medium/art form. There have been some events in the world of comics in the last few decades to eschew some of the more negative views of them. For instance, Art Spigelman’s Maus which won a special Pulitzer prize, Allen Moore’s The Watchmen which won a Hugo award.
Because of the superhero renaissance staring in the last 10 years or so with films like X1-X3, Blade trilogy, Spiderman films, The Crow series, Batman Begins, Superman Returns, American Splendor, Ghost World, Art School Confidential, A History of Violence, Road to Perdition, V for Vendetta, Constantine, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tank Girl, Men in Black, The Shadow, The Rocketeer, Hell boy and several other, comics have experienced a somewhat renewed spotlight upon them. But what the transformation of comic to film makes clear is the peculiar difference of graphic novels.
/2/ - Interspatiality
The wealth of the graphic novel lies in the very strangeness of drawing, something I discussed in a previous entry. To summarize the point quickly - Badiou points out how in drawing the whiteness of the page is both a ‘closed totality’, in which the lines are contained and, at the same time, the background only becomes such once the lines are drawn. The act of drawing that both cuts into and creates background can similarly be seen in terms of the comic as a medium. While comics/graphic novels can be viewed as simply an illustrated story I think such a view leaves out the specific effect that illustrations create, when combined with the written word.
While there are many excellent examples of this, I believe that Craig Thompson’s graphic novel Blankets does an exceptional job of taking advantage of said attribute. In many scenes/pages, Thompson plays heavily with the panel borders and within the panels to mix the characters with their surroundings. Charles Burns uses similar techniques in his novel Black hole. There is an interesting tradition of the subject and it’s relation to a given background that Žižek discusses in his forward to Adrian Johnston’s amazing text Time Driven. In the forward Žižek notes how with the Mona Lisa how the figure seems to not fit with her dark, almost gothic surroundings. Žižek compares this to the cheesy effect in older films where a screen is projected behind the actors while they are in a car, in a train etc. [This kind of disjointed landscape effect is taken to the extreme in the film Airplane! when the Captain is driving to the airport the screen changes from passing trees to various anachronistic battles, impossible settings etc.]
Žižek argues that this effect represents the peculiarity of modernity, where, through Kant’s ‘transcendental turn’, the subject no longer ‘fits’ into the world, the entire being of the subject becomes an excess, an protuberant object, a spot on the fabric of reality. As Žižek writes in his article “The Thing from Inner Space”: “Jacques Lacan Defines Art itself with regard to the Thing: in his Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, he claims that art as such is always organized around the central Void of the impossible-real Thing - a statement which, perhaps, should be read as a variation on Rilke’s old thesis that “Beauty is the last veil that covers the Horrible.”
To bring the discussion back to the realm of the graphic novel, doesn’t the explanation of the Joker’s madness in that it is explained as a ’super sanity’ as being too in touch with reality. And wasn’t that one of the better insights of Freud during the Victorian era? The fact that those with mental illnesses were not less human but all too human?
/3/ - Betrayal of the eye
If the peak of modernism was about the disjunctive (non)relation between the subject and it’s background, then what does the graphic novel speak to, how does drawing as a form of art connect to a certain kind of psychology? The key to the graphic novel is not just what is left ‘outside of the frame’ but in that it highlights what is left out when one goes from one frame to the next. Instead of being just the slowness of the eye, as it would be in cinema, the graphic novel uses the lack of movement as a border itself, it is a series of snapshots which refuses to be placed at the ‘appropriate’ speed of the eye.
We can take this argument a bit further, and into somewhat strange terrain, by taking a look at serial killing, naturalism and representation. In her text Pretend we’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture, Annalee Newitz discusses how naturalism, and in particular Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, presupposes the American obsession with serial killings (one should immediately question the boundary between impressionism and naturalism in literature). Newitz argues that what is at stake in naturalism is an anxiety of contextualization and, more importantly, the problem of how to place oneself in relation to the text. Newitz discusses Walter Benjamin’s well known “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and notes his statement regarding how the reproducibility of film and photograph, inherently lend themselves to a decontexualizing effect. [A quick side note and swerve back to the realm of comics - one should think of the character Mojo and how well he disgustingly embodies Benjamin's nightmare as a partially mechanical alien who utilizes 'mystical powers' to control entire populations with the media.]
While Newitz goes on to mention Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, she does not say anything of it besides the fact that it points out the American obsession with murderers. Something to note which can bring us back to the discussion of comics, is not only the rejection of the film on the level that it refused to look for meaning (an attack also famously leveled against Gus van Saint’s Elephant) but that structurally and stylistically the film was unbearable to watch. Stone’s film contains many times the standard amount of cuts and switches between at least a dozen kinds of film, color filters, kinds of cameras etc. The point here is that the very ‘ease’ of mechanical reproduction can serve to undermine the concept of ‘magic’ that Benjamin suggests - it can purposefully disrupt the seamless flow of media.
To return to Newitz’s note on lost context, and to swerve back to graphic novels, one could take a look at Daniel Clowes Art School Confidential and the film of the same name. While the short comic was Clowes’ brief comment on the art school he attended, the film combines such experiences with a fairly odd murder story. What’s most amusing about the film’s end is that the main character, though talented, only became recognized as an artist after he framed himself as a serial killer and in addition a police officer posing as an artist was praised as an artist. Instead of Newitz’s accidentally lost context we have a purely functional and intentionally mistaken context.
/4/ - Drives and time’s strangeness
What this can lead to, to bring up psychoanalysis once again, is the tension that existed throughout Freud’s work between the id and the unconsciousness. This tension is particularly apparent when one looks at how Freud was unable to articulate the issue of Trieb or Drive. As I have mentioned in other posts, drive is different from desire in that while desire fixes itself on a particular object in order to consume it, drive obtains no pleasure from the particular qualities of the object it consumes but gains pleasure from the very act of consuming itself. It is, as Lacan puts it, the pleasure of the full mouth. Freud initially states that drive is found somewhere between the body and the mind, but later seems to place drive as emitting from the ’seething cauldron of the id’ as Adrian Johnston puts it. Ever later on, Freud seems to mesh unconscious and id together when discussing drive.
To bring this to our concern of interspace, one need only look at the issue regarding the unconscious itself. The unconscious can be viewed as a an entity upon which consciousness is built, as a kind of positive entity in and of itself, or the unconscious can be seen as a far less articulated entity, as not even a place or being in itself, but something that exists by way of the failure of the conscious mind. This confusion results in part from Freud’s treatment of the death drive as, at times, just another one of the drives and, at other times, as a privileged form of drive. [On top of this, at least in some of Freud's texts, when one should translate the word as drive it is translated as instinct.] As Adrian Johnston points out, drive is somewhere between being in the realm of the biological, of instinct, of the ’seething cauldron of the id’ and, on a totally differently level, as something beyond the body, the soma, that is, to borrow a phrase from Laplanche, ‘caught in the web of signifiers.’ So what does it mean to say that the drive is both concerned with biological time (the stupid time of repetition, the beating heart, the persistence of organisms) and at the same time taking into account historical temporality, the concept of progress.
In order to veer this discussion back to the graphic novel, it is worth mentioning a thinker who seemed quite apt at understanding the stupid repetition of the everyday as well as meaningful, historical time - Blaise Pascal. In regards to the first point, Pascal knew very well about the artificiality of belief and that if one acted like one believed (in the form of prayer for instance) then one would believe. On the second point I refer to a long quote from Pascal that serves as an introduction to Johnston’s aforementioned text. I’m going to quote the first third of the passage:
“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts.”
The quote seems to have an obvious message, one that’s cliché even: “Carpe diem!” or seize the day (or more accurately gather the day!). It seems that the phrase is taken too often to enjoy short term pleasures, or chemical emotions, but more accurately, and to follow Pascal, it should be seen as more about the importance of making one’s mark, this is why he highlights the pain of the present. Now this can easily go wrong, one can (to act as an obsessional in Lacanian parlance) forever put off action because the present becomes only fodder for the future, but it’s important to see the potentially of the present on the present.
/5/ - The boxed dialog life
I think that this is the importance of interspace in the graphic novel - it is not a distanced stance, of the grand author or big Other but instead the completely contextualized stance where the very production of the narrative becomes part of that narrative. Again, not in a postmodern metafiction kind of way (a la Calvino’s steam pouring across the page etc) but through the very details of the story as disjunct, the very tension between biological time (my reading eye, by pulsating heart over the page) and historical time (the meaning and progression of the narrative itself).
To bring things full circle, or sort of, at least back to Blankets, in the closing pages the book’s protagonist (Craig) leaves his house, walking slowly in the snowy cold. He mentions the importance of making a mark, no matter how temporary. But before he speaks to this point, as he first steps out into the cold, he makes note of the small cloud of vapor escaping is mouth as it vanishes into the night. And just before this Craig points out how at times, when we wake from a dream, we feel like a ghost, and that it is only ritual and the measurements of time (holidays, the seasons) which remind us of change, that biological time.
To return to the graphic at the beginning of this piece, that of Ghost World, (and to nod at several works which have noted it’s existentialism) when Enid leaves on her bus to nowhere, what we are left with is not the horrible nihilism that everything is meaningless but something more troubling, something that demands a sense of responsibility. I think the feeling is captured in the very brief lyrics of Pedro the Lion’s song Rejoice:
Wouldn’t it be so wonderful
if everything were meaningless.
But everything is so meaningful,
and most everything turns to shit.
Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice
rejoice, rejoice, rejoice
It’s not simply that we can give up, it’s that there is some process which causes us to give up, that there is reason not to surrender so immediately. The interspace of the graphic novel highlights the collision of the temporal register of the biological and the historical, the realm of necessity and that of glory, and the crossover of the urgent moment, where we can celebrate the urgency of being able to live, to know that we are the machine by which one frame moves to the next.
/1/ - What has art been?
Nigel Cooke’s Morning is Broken
Following Alain Badiou (as per usual) I stand by the fact that art remains one of the fields of truth (the others being science, politics and love). This is not to simply drudge up the old relation of truth and beauty nor I’m I suggesting that art has a relation to one truth.
Badiou rejects these interrelated ideas outright. He criticizes the Platonic notion that art serves as a sad echo to the Truth (the blazing sun outside the cave’s lip). Badiou points out how this explains the Greek obsession with the exercise of mimesis, the imitation of literary forms. Badiou goes on to say how this didactic treatment of art leads to an assumption that philosophy’s job is to lord over art deciding its worth as a mirror of truth.
On the other extreme there is the romantic notion of art, that it is the vehicle for truth. However, Badiou is optimistic that “between didactic banishment and romantic glorification” there is some peace between art and philosophy (Handbook of Inaesthetics, p. 3). This peace is set in terms of the third scheme, what he calls the symbolic scheme, that of art as catharsis.
Badiou closes his little history by pointing out that the avant-garde tried to (unsuccessfully) destroy modernism. The avant-garde combined the two aforementioned problematic views of art - the didactic and the romantic.
If there is to be a third way, a diagonal to cut across this opposition, Badiou argues that one must acknowledge the state of the world of art today. This world, much like the political world, is trapped in an oscillation between two extremes - that of the world of bodies (the search for pleasures, the celebration of the body) and that of the idealistic/theological subject/world of art. The world is all a war of enjoyment versus sacrifice. The “contemporary responsibility of artistic creation” is to search for this third way. For Badiou something must happen (an Event) in which artists, recognizing the trace of such an event, dedicate themselves to creating a new form of art, a new immanent infinity.
/2/ - Music and drawing
If the goal is a kind of immanent infinity, a new form in art, how is this possible in Badiou’s terms? One problem is that Badiou’s focus when he discusses art tends to be on prose and poetry and spends precious time on other things. One issue that comes up because of this is the fact that Badiou discusses the subjective paradigm of art as a solitary one. When discussing music, Badiou’s only example of an event in the musical world is that of Arnold Schoenberg’s invention of atonality. Is politics necessarily the only field of truth that is social? Does art need to be individual? There seems to be some crossover particularly when it comes to art collectives. Art collectives are often political and by their very definition eschew an individualistic approach to art.
Laibach
There is a lingering feeling, however, that political art, if such a thing is possible, is a lesser form of art. There is some phantom of impurity when a group such as the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst or New Slovenian Art) and in particular, its musical branch Laibach. Laibach utilizes intentionally over the top fascist imagery in order to rile people up in order to highlight political complacency. NSK has also, interestingly, made it’s claim as a micronation and issues passports and stamps. The issue here, to return to Badiou’s theories of art, is the relationship between art and place. In the most recent issue of Lacanian Ink, Badiou has a short article entitled “Drawing” in which he discusses the (non)relation of place and art.
In his article Badiou defines contemporary art as that of description without place. Drawing, however, posses a more complicated problem in comparison to other forms of art because of its fragility. He writes:
“In one sense, the paper exists, as a material support, as a closed totality; and the marks, or the lines, do not exist by themselves: they have to compose something inside the paper. But in an other and more crucial sense, the paper as a background does not exist, because it is created as such, as an open surface, by the marks” (p. 44).
The play of existence and inexistence
For anyone one who is interested in the arts involving ‘mechanical reproduction’ such as photography or cinema, this should raise a warning bell. As far as I know, Badiou has remained silent on photography and his comments on film have been less then forgiving.
/3/ - Impure Cinema?
Badiou and his sometime friend sometime adversary Jacques Rancière seem to agree that cinema is the most impure of the arts. For Badiou, as he argues in “The False Movements of Cinema”, film is about what is cut out of what is seen and it is predominantly that of the have seen (p. 78, Handbook of Inaesthetics). Cinema is the art that operates upon the other arts, it implies all of the other arts within it. If there is a uniqueness to film it is how its subtractive nature works with the the other forms of art. The relationship, for Badiou, ultimately decides that film is the great impurifier. It clears the way for other impurities.
In his Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art, Badiou suggests that all art must begin with impurity but that it must slowly shape itself, following the trace of the event, in to order to create a singular truth that has universal appeal.
However, as Rancière points out, cinema is far more capable of surprise then many other forms of art, and it being marked a mass art, is not necessarily damning. However, if Badiou is adamant that art must be abstract, is it only the surprising new form it takes that can be didactic? Does art, as soon as it’s combined with the political, lose any possibility as an artistic singularity, as something which offers a new form in art?
Here cinema steps in as an interesting form because, as Badiou himself states, it is a kind of formless form that constantly reinvents itself because it is defined by the cut, the edit, the not seen or the have seen which is always the object of reminiscence.
Élie During in her article “How much Truth can Art bear?” points out that Badiou’s inaesthetics isn’t a new form of art in and of itself but more like a slogan. During criticizes, by way of Rancière, Badiou’s hold of modernism, claiming that he hangs on to a ‘twisted kind’ of modernism. Because of this During argues that Badiou’s insistence on art finding a new form has more to do with his view of how philosophy should relate to art and less to do with the form of art itself.
A commodified kiss?
Jean-Luc Godard’s film Pierrot le fou is an interesting film to discuss here. Rancière writes: “When in Pierrot le fou, 1965, a film without a clear political message, Belmondo played on the word ’scandal’ and the ‘freedom’ that the Scandal girdle supposedly offered women, the context of a Marxist critique of commodification, of pop art derision at consumerism and of a feminist denunciation of women’s false ‘liberation’, was enough to foster a dialectical reading of the joke and the whole story.”
In many ways Rancière’s comment reflects Badiou’s comment about the aforementioned tension between disappearing and appearing and highlight a strain that is unique to cinema. Goddard is known for the following quote “Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.” The unacknowledged bit to this quote is that the very speed of film, looked at in terms of Paul Virilio’s dromology (or logic of speed) is not so much that cinema is ‘more true’ in terms of quantity, but that film is true because of its speed, because its very speed is what gives it its ‘truthfulness’.
/4/ - Film’s fragility
The failing heartbeat
SPOILER WARNING
In an amalgam of form and content, Alfonso Cuarón Orozco’s Children of Men embodies this tense fragility well. The film centers around the idea that in the near future all women become completely infertile and most of the world has descended into chaos or become a police state. In Britain, illegal immigrants are detained and treated as animals and the rich live in isolated comfort. The film follows Theodore (Clive Owen) who finds himself, due to an old flame (Julianne Moore) responsible for the only pregnant woman on the planet.
The film is incredibly intense and in particular, several scenes near the end of the film are harrowing as Kee, the first mother in eighteen years, tries to protect her baby as she is pulled into a war zone. As the British army lays siege to the ghetto of illegal immigrants what is missing on screen (Kee’s child) and what is unknown to the viewer (the fate of the child) crystallize into the fragile tension of appearing and disappearing.
Film’s status as the great impurifier should be read along with Badiou’s discussion of drawing.
The difficulty in discussing film, as Badiou himself points out, is that it always is and is not at the same time. While drawing re-edifies the background with its marks, filling the blank page at once but at the same time ‘pushing’ it to form a background - film questions the unreality of the filmed (staged) ‘reality’ - in other words the film utilizes the non-filmic world to create a world which is an imperfect screen of that reformed world.
Children of Men is a film about the possible goal of human genercity in a world which fear of immigrants has gone to obscene limits. The film is not ‘about’ any of these components per se, but is about the idea of a possible future amongst the impossible (an idea should be taken to mean a world without place, a place without place). The ship of the Human project (a pseudo mythical think tank/group trying to save humanity) named Tomorrow embodies this idea.
Despite the impurities of cinema, if impurities are really what they are, it remains, as Rancière says, the most democratic of the arts. The apparent paradox here is the fact that film utilizes the cut, the edit, the limitation. But what is important here is to take this cut, following Žižek’s reading of St Paul’s radical universality, as a universal cut. It is not the universality where nothing is at state, but the push for universality that bursts through the rotting roots of our fetid failures.
The master of morbid fecundity
Like the ethics of noir, the difficulties of being embedded in the failed world should not entice us, to borrow a phrase from Badiou, to drink the alcohol of nihilism, but instead press upon us importance of responsibility. At the beginning of Edgar Allen Poe’s Tell Tale Heart there is the following quote from Longfellow:
“Art is long and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.”
The beating of the hideous heart, of the first infant/last hope, insures the fragility of film but of its mass appeal.
/1/ - Bob Žižek?
In their article “Play Fuckin’ Loud: Žižek versus the Left” Rex Butler and Scott Stephens discuss a moment in Martin Scorsese’s documentary about Bob Dylan called No Direction Home:
“One of the events the film depicts is Dylan’s now famous concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966, during which he turns to his backing band after crises of “Judas!” from one of the aggrieved folk purists in the audience and says simply: “Play fuckin’ loud”. The offended fans are then shown denouncing Dylan while they leave during the show. And, in truth, it is excruciating to watch the attempts by various groups at the time to appropriate Dylan – from his ex-lover Joan Baez to the announcer at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival who exhorts the crowd with “Take him, he’s yours!” Instead, against the idea that he was a simple protest singer who sang about topical issues, Dylan has always insisted that all of his songs were protest songs. Against any identifiable genre of music, he argues for the moral necessity to keep on breaking with his audience in order to take them outside the usual expectations of what a “folk” song is, of what a “protest” song could be.”
Dylan, 1966
Dylan’s actions here, in psychoanalytic terms, puts him in the place of the analyst in that, the thing to do is to question the very demand of the Other (audience) - Why is it that you ask that I serve this particular function for you? Or put another way:
“the agent (analyst) reduces himself to the void, which provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire.” (from “Lacan’s Four Discourses” - Žižek)
Butler and Stevens compare this moment to a statement in Astra Taylor’s documentary Žižek! where Žižek says that his real fear is not to be ignored but to be accepted. Why? As is evident in the film, many of Žižek’s self described admirers describe him in various stupid ways like ‘the Elvis of Cultural Theory’ and the New Yorker refers to him as a ‘Marx Brother’ and so on. On top of this, as Žižek points out, many post-structuralist thinkers try to paint him and his cohort (Zupancic, Dolar, etc) as part of a ‘power discourse’ that has some kind of obscene control over the academy which, as he points out, is a completely ridiculous notion. The point here, as Žižek notes near the end of the film, is that this kind of popular acceptance of him functions, in many ways, as a strategy not to take him seriously.
Some have seen Žižek’s attacks upon the left, as well as his refusal to put forth a political program, as detrimental to the left as such. In the case of Dylan’s ‘66 concert, what can we make of the cries of Judas? Is it only or mostly a matter of expectation (ie - Dylan is supposed to be a folk singer) or how much of it is that the content of a protest song (protest) is inherently attached to its prescribed form (folk music)?
/2/ - Form/Content
Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in his text Meditations on Quixote argues that one cannot maintain the simple ancient poetic separation of form and content where the content is deposited in the form like honey in the comb. Form is, in one sense, the trajectory of the content in that, according to Ortega, the only form to express that particular content. There is a sort of frustrating (?) co-dependent arising going on, to borrow from Buddhism.
This is not to say that form is meaningless (it is no, form does play in important part in contributing to the ‘flair’ of works of art. In his article “Is There a Proper Way to Remake a Hitchcock film?” Zizek points out that it is not so much that the narrative that is important to the quality of the story (Shakespeare is an excellent example) but how the story is presented. There is an old guitar teacher bit of wisdom here that fits ‘It is not what you play but how you play it.’ Isn’t Jimi Hendrix the ultimate example here, of personal style (content) painting over content (or creating it)?
Another immortal…
But what, in music, is form and what is content? Genre (musically) and theme(lyrically) seem to go with form whereas (personal) style (musically) and narrative/imagery in the lyrics makes up the content. Now, it seems the best music is that which the line between content and form is obfuscated, not directly (in the case of formulaic music) but, to return to co-dependent arising, when content seems to build its form just in front of its own force of creation.
/3/ - Responsibility
In the article “The Subject of Art” it is clear that Badiou attributes quite a bit of importance to the question of art. Art is about the creation of a “new subjective paradigm” and as Peter Hallward makes clear in his book Badiou: A Subject to Truth art is, as Badiou portrays it, mostly a individualistic endeavor (which seems very problematic particularly in regards to musical creation).
But at the same time a question should be raised as to what is the concrete responsibility of artists.
The best example of this is the well known story in which Picasso was handing out photographs of his masterpiece Guernica in occupied Paris when a Nazi soldier asked him ‘Did you do this?’ and Picasso responded ‘No, you did!’ Isn’t there a kind of artistic responsibility especially when there is something like the bombing of Guernica? But then, as Picasso’s style makes clear (or unclear?) he didn’t feel the need for clarity simply for the necessity.
The Result of Franco
To bring this back to our initial discussion Dylan’s/Žižek’s actions could, in one way, be viewed as a kind of refusal of responsibility, as a kind of stepping back from the spotlight. We could argue that Žižek is always doing the work of psychoanalytic politics by pointing to constitutive lack in all places that he occupies. We can see similar acts by Dylan such as on the record Another Side of Bob Dylan and in particular the song “My Back Pages” which mocks his earlier idealism. One of the verses goes:
“In a soldiers stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that Id become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My existence led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.”
It is here, along with Yannis Stavrakakis and his book Lacan & the Political, that again we can point out the important difference between post-modernist/post-structuralist notions of the political and that of post-Marxists such as Badiou and Žižek - the difference is that the former says that recognition/respect of difference/otherness is enough whereas for the latter the important factor is the subject of lack, the idea that ‘the social does not exist.’
At the risk of obnoxiousness, I’d like to end by reading the above refrain from Dylan’s song (”Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”) in the same vein as Freud’s Wo es war, soll Ich Werden - Where it was, I shall come into being. Not in the classical Freudian sense, that a healthy ‘perfected ego’ will replace my fragmented self but that I will break through that fantasmatic identity and identify with the sinthome - the very impossibility of my own being.
Last week PBS’s show American Experience ran an episode on the Donner Party. The Forlorn Hope, the fifteen who set out from the party trapped in the snow storm, as it is well known, eventually resorted to cannibalism. When they butchered the dead for eating, the survivors made sure to label the wrapped packages of meat with the names of their previous “owners” so that no one would have to eat their own kin. Why does this seem so strange? While preferring to eat a stranger as opposed to a family member is not weird in and of itself, assuming you are already in a place where it is required to eat someone, there is something almost unsettling about such a conscious decision in a situation we would like to declare completely and utterly inhuman. One of the party members, Joseph Breen wrote in his journal ”Friday, February the 26th. Hungry times in camp. Mrs. Murphy said she thought she would commence on Milt and eat him. I don’t think she has done so yet. It is distressing.” Why is this interjection of formality so disturbing?
This kind of strange rule is played with in the South Park episode “Cartman’s Mom is Still a Dirty Slut” in which several of the characters caught in a snow storm resort to cannibalism after only four hours without food and are criticized for resorting a little too quickly. The song played when the characters are freed from the snow storm is “Ava Maria” referencing the film Alive: The Miracle of the Andes which is about the Andes flight disaster in which the survivors ate their dead teammates to stay alive.
In the Andes flight disaster the survivors too made a formal choice - they decided before hand not to eat any of each other’s kin out of respect for each other.
[Incidentally one of South Park's creators Trey Parker, is responsible for the film Cannibal! The Musical which plays with the story of Alferd Packer who ate his fellow travelers after becoming hopelessly lost in Colorado. The University of Colorado at Boulder dedicated a statue to Parker and one of the grills there is named Alferd E. Packer Memorial Grill with its slogan being "Have a friend for lunch!"]
Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa
Maybe these formal choices seem so amazingly awkward (and hence funny?) because we cannot imagine the situation of cannibalism without being in it. The painter Theodore Gericault became obsessed with trying to accurately represent the misery, murder, (and cannibalism) in his painting The Raft of the Medusa spending night after night in morgues, trying to build wood and wax replicas, starving himself etc. He endlessly tried to capture the moment but ended up dismissing the work after the fact. Interestingly survival cannibalism at sea in the 1880s and perhaps before was referred to as the custom of the sea. As long as the survivors had drawn lots they would not be prosecuted for eating their shipmates.
So isn’t this division itself a large part of humor? As Zupancic discusses comedy is about the short circuit between the symbolic mask of a person and the vulgar ordinariness of everyday life so that they are interchangeable. Isn’t this why cannibalism can be funny? In cannibalism they very banal act of eating is elevated into the most weighty symbolic act whereas the sanctity of life is reduced to names on butcher paper and the drawing of lots.
On the other hand isn’t what is funny equally horrifying? Gericault’s inability to recreate the raft of the Medusa should be viewed then as the very inability of art itself to represent. This gap, this failure of representation, speaks to the very horrid realness of ‘reality’ that the symbolic fails to grasp.
This is discussed somewhat by Slavoj Žižek in response to the rise of holocaust comedies, Benigni’s Life is Beautiful in particular. In “LAUGH YOURSELF TO DEATH! the new wave of Holocaust comedies” Žižek writes:
“When, in a holocaust comedy, the laughter stops, when the comic rendering of the resourceful persistence of life reaches its end, we thus get either pathetic dignity or nausea. This nausea marks the self-cancellation of the comedy: it emerges when the hero persists to the end in his survivalist stance. That is to say, both comedy and tragedy involve a kind of immortality, albeit the opposite ones. In the tragic predicament, the hero forfeits his terrestrial life for the Thing, so that his very defeat is his triumph, conferring onto him the sublime dignity, while the comedy is the triumph of the indestructible life - not of the sublime immortality of the tragic hero, but of the very vulgar, opportunistic, terrestrial life.”
So then this is why the formalism of cannibalism can make us uncomfortable, because the formal decision in that situation speaks to the alienating nature of law, that it is necessary but perhaps impractical, and at the same time speaks to the old game of speaking to our inward ‘beastial’ tendencies. It is a very precarious balance, this amount of formalism.
The Gate at Dachau
The tragic formal such as the message at the gates of several concentration camps “Arbeit macht frei!” (Work will set you free!) is tragic in its assertion in the face of the camp’s production of misery.
The comedic formal then, and to bring us back to cannibalism, is best exemplified in The Simpsons episode “Fear of Flying” where Homer, in his usual stupidity, tries to help Marge get over her fear by showing her the aforementioned film Alive - here is the comedic play on the film’s end:
“Homer: Now Marge, “Dear Abby” says seeing films about air travel can
calm your fears. Ooh! Here are some upbeat titles: “Hero”,
“Fearless”…”Alive!”
[at home, Marge watches them]
Man 1: No thanks to the plane, many of us are still…
Everyone: Alive!
Man 2: [through full mouth] We certainly are. [chews]
Man 3: Pass me another hunk of copilot.”
-The Simpsons [2F08] “Fear of Flying”
The final point is a Lacanian/Kantian one (by way of Zupancic) - that jouissance is at the very basis of the ethical, to show the enjoyment in eating each other does not completely betray the ethical but it does show that there is a certain amount of distance, a certain amount of formality but not too much, not so much that we perform the ‘Himmler trick’ where we place the responsibility on a big Other, on a obscure sense of duty.
So eat up!
