Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture 0773533907, 978-0773533905

Table of contents :
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Introduction: The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture......Page 14
Introduction......Page 28
1 Self-Portraits......Page 32
2 Ending Myths and the Catholic Outing of Andy Warhol......Page 111
3 The Persistence of Spectatorship: The Racialized and Ethnicized Gaze......Page 131
4 “Are We Still in the Game?”: David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ......Page 147
Introduction......Page 162
5 What the Body Remembers: Rebecca Belmore’s Memorial to Missing Women......Page 166
6 The Threshold of an Interface: Ilya Kabakov's Looking up, Reading the Words (1997)......Page 191
7 The Star and the Prisoner: The Spectacle and Surveillance of the Self on the Web......Page 209
Introduction......Page 238
8 Hallucination as Ideology in Cinema......Page 240
Introduction......Page 256
9 Media Image, Public Space, and the Body: Around Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Alien Staff......Page 260
10 Mediating Place-Identity: Notes on Mathias Woo's A Very Good City......Page 275
Introduction......Page 292
11 Janine Antoni's Lick and Lather: Eroticism as Identity Subversion......Page 294
12 Televisual Flesh: The Body, the Screen, the Subject......Page 313
13 Real Time, Lived Time: A R Art, Perception, and the Possibility of the Event......Page 339
Introduction......Page 364
14 The Descent of the Image......Page 366
15 Resemblance and Identification: The Paradox of Gary Schneider's Genetic Self-Portrait......Page 391
16 Variations on Genetic Insignificant: Metaphors of the (Non)Code......Page 402
Author Bios......Page 428
A......Page 432
B......Page 433
C......Page 434
D......Page 435
E......Page 436
G......Page 437
H......Page 438
I......Page 439
L......Page 440
M......Page 441
O......Page 443
P......Page 444
R......Page 445
S......Page 446
T......Page 447
V......Page 448
Z......Page 449

Citation preview

precarious visualities

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prec arious visualities New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture

Edited by Olivier Asselin Johanne Lamoureux Christine Ross

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2008 isbn 978-0-7735-3385-1 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-3390-5 (paper) Legal deposit second quarter 2008 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program ( bpidp ) for our publishing activities.

library and archives canada c ata loguing in publ ic ation Precarious visualities : new perspectives on identification in contemporary art and visual culture / edited by Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux, Christine Ross. Includes index. isbn 978-0-7735-3385-1 (bnd) isbn 978-0-7735-3390-5 (pbk) 1. Identity (Psychology) in art. 2. Identity (Psychology) in mass media. 3. Arts, Modern – 20th century. 4. Arts, Modern – 21st century. I. Asselin, Olivier II. Lamoureux, Johanne III. Ross, Christine, 1958–

nx 460.p 74 2008 700.9’049 c 2008-900280-6

Set in 11/14 Minion Pro with FF Meta+ Book design/typesetting by Garet Markvoort/zijn digital

contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture 3 Christine Ross

pa r t o n e : “Am I Still in the Picture?”: The Unsettling of Identification Introduction

7

 Self-Portraits 2 Raymond Bellour 2 Ending Myths and the Catholic Outing of Andy Warhol Johanne Lamoureux 3 The Persistence of Spectatorship: The Racialized and Ethnicized Gaze Monika Kin Gagnon

00

20

4 “Are We Still in the Game?”: David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ Beate Ochsner

36

pa r t t w o : Interfaces of (In)Visibility Introduction

5

5 What the Body Remembers: Rebecca Belmore’s Memorial to Missing Women Claudette Lauzon

55

6 The Threshold of an Interface: Ilya Kabakov’s Looking up, Reading the Words (997) 80 David Tomas 7 The Star and the Prisoner: The Spectacle and Surveillance of the Self on the Web 98 Olivier Asselin

pa r t t h r e e : The Staging of Hallucination (of Hallucination) Introduction

227

8 Hallucination as Ideology in Cinema Slavoj Žižek

229

pa r t f o u r : Para-Siting Visuality Introduction

245

9 Media Image, Public Space, and the Body: Around Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Alien Staff 249 Marie Fraser 0 Mediating Place-Identity: Notes on Mathias Woo’s A Very Good City Alice Ming Wai Jim

vi

contents

264

pa r t f i v e : The Polysensorialized Screen Introduction

28

 Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather: Eroticism as Identity Subversion Julie Lavigne

283

2 Televisual Flesh: The Body, the Screen, the Subject Amelia Jones

302

3 Real Time, Lived Time: ar Art, Perception, and the Possibility of the Event 328 Christine Ross

pa r t s i x : The Generating Image Introduction

353

4 The Descent of the Image 355 Éric Michaud 5 Resemblance and Identification: The Paradox of Gary Schneider’s Genetic Self-Portrait Hélène Samson

380

6 Variations on Genetic Insignificant: Metaphors of the (Non)Code 39 Thierry Bardini

Author Bios 47 Index

42

contents

vii

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acknowledgments

As can be expected, many thanks are due for the production of this book. A first version of some of the chapters (those of Thierry Bardini, Marie Fraser, Monika Kin Gagnon, Éric Michaud, Beate Ochsner, Julie Lavigne, Hélène Samson, and David Tomas) were presented, most of them in French, at La nouvelle sphère intermédiatique iii : Pratiques médiatiques de la manipulation identitaire, in collaboration with the Centre de recherche sur l’intermédialité (cri). On that occasion, we received the financial support of the Aid to Research Workshops and Conferences in Canada from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (sshrc ), and we greatly benefited from the extraordinary organizational skills of Karine Martinez, event coordinator at the cri , and from the stimulating welcome we found at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, where the event was held. We would also like to acknowledge the financial support that we received from the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture (fqrsc ), the Faculté des arts et des sciences from the Université de Montréal, and the James McGill Chair in Contemporary Art History at McGill University. But most important, we wish to express our gratitude to those who have made it possible for Precarious Visualities to unfold and become an actual object to hold, read, and think about. We thank all the authors who contributed a chapter to this project; our editors, Jonathan Crago, Joan McGilvray, and Joanne Richardson; the translators, Ron Ross, Timothy Barnard, Nils F. Scott, Eduardo Ralickas, and Stephanie Fox;

together with our research assistant Dominic Bouchard and Sylvain Lafleur, whose vigilant work made our task a lot easier. We are grateful to the artists, art galleries, and foundations for allowing us to include illustrations and to the Éditions de la Différence for their permission to translate and publish Raymond Bellour’s chapter. Olivier Asselin Johanne Lamoureux Christine Ross

x acknowledgments

precarious visualities

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Introduction: The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture christine ross

Since its emergence in the field of art history in the 980s, visuality – a notion that refers to the visible condition of art, to the fact that art is, partially at least, a matter of vision (in its production, exhibition, circulation, and reception) – has been key to the decentring of both the artist and the viewing subject in its relation to the image. Vision came to be systematically understood as an act conditioned by culture, social class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and geography. The fruitfulness of poststructuralist art historical research in this area of study is clearly noticeable in its manifold assessment of alternative modes of representation that counter the predominance of the perspectival system in Western art to criticize approaches that tend to essentialize the subject (by situating the artist or the viewer outside of language and ideology) or that turn perspective into a foundationalist signifying system (by defining it as an unproblematic mode of representation of the world, structurally similar to human vision). Such models have been shown to reformulate what art historian Hubert Damisch has identified as costruzione legittima’s positing of the viewpoint as the counterpart of the vanishing point.¹ Svetlana Alpers’ examination of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch art, for example, has demonstrated how the latter’s descriptive mode substantially differs from the perspectivaloriented narrative mode of Italian Renaissance art.² Norman Bryson has also questioned the perspectival understanding of space, notably in his study of the pictorial production of Vermeer. He highlighted how the gaze can be superseded by the glance – a mode of viewing that

acknowledges the binocularity, mobility, and embodiment of the viewer by the markings of the surface that disrupt the depth structure of the painting.³ Again on the question of the gaze, Georges Didi-Huberman has shown in his study on Minimalism that the artwork per se functions as a gaze that shatters the central positioning of the subject of knowledge.⁴ In the field of feminist art history and visual culture studies, especially in the work of Laura Mulvey, Griselda Pollock, Teresa de Lauretis, Elizabeth Grosz, Kaja Silverman, bell hooks, and Rey Chow, visuality was disclosed in its relation to gender, sexuality, and race.⁵ All these studies have been critical of models of vision that position the viewing subject in terms of unity, unhistoricized universalism, pure consciousness, and pure opticality (I follow here Sebastian Zeidler’s definition of modern opticality as initially developed by Wölfflin: “the pure opticality of the ‘world seen’ – a world that does not exist except as unified optically by a disembodied subject”).⁶ As Martin Jay has maintained in his Downcast Eyes (993), this critique was at the core of French modern thought, which has consistently condemned the occulocentrism of Western philosophy, in as much as it was central to “the retreat of the visual” in conceptual art.⁷ To this, we must also add the work of art historian Jonathan Crary and his investigation of the regimes of vision from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.⁸ Crary has convincingly shown not only how the understanding, representation, and practice of perception change historically but also how they are shaped through a complex interplay of discourses, including philosophy, science, social sciences, popular culture, and art. To this assessment of the poststructuralist shaping of visuality studies should also be appended the critique of identity politics, which confirmed itself in the 980s. During this period and still today, visuality in art and media has been fundamentally shaped by the growing awareness that gender, race, and sexuality are intrinsic to representation, recognition, and reception. The emergence of identity politics in the late 960s, as a set of political actions that aims to improve the rights of members of a group because of a real or alleged shared identity, corresponds, as political theorist Sonia Kruks has argued, to a “demand for recognition on the basis of the very grounds on which recognition has previously been denied: it is qua women, qua blacks, qua lesbians that groups demand recognition. The demand is not for inclusion

4 introduction

within the fold of ‘universal humankind’ but for ‘respect for oneself as different.’”⁹ From a visuality studies perspective, concern about generalizing claims of shared identity, which fail to account for the divergence of meaning given to specific experiences by the individuals of the group and for the multiple identities of these individuals, has been raised by several artists and feminist cultural/visual studies scholars, including Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Rey Chow, and Amelia Jones. The field of art has notably been increasingly occupied by the need to complicate processes of representation and recognition so that they may render what philosopher Judith Butler has called the performativity of the subject – both its identification with social norms in processes of socialization and identity’s “openness to resignification and recontextualization,” when identification makes room for disidentification.¹⁰ Emphasizing the possibility of perpetual selfresignification, a conception according to which identity is understood more as a process of becoming than as what one is, artists as different as Cindy Sherman, Ugo Rondinone, and Mariko Mori, for example, have produced significant photographic series of self-portraits that show the self to be in constant metamorphosis, which propels the self towards fictional constructs. Cyborg-artists like Orlan and Stelarc have explored various biotechnologies (plastic surgery and robotics/prosthetics) to literally transform the body in its flesh, nervous, muscular, or genetic constituency. Generally speaking, the postmodernist perspective, according to which identities are both discursively constructed and potentially contested, has played a major role in this reconceptualizion of identity as “a fluid process in which ‘self’ and environment are constantly interacting.”¹¹ In the last decade, however, visuality studies have gone through a subtle, albeit significant, bodily turn – one that revolves around embodied notions of finiteness, identification failure, interface, polysensoriality, and informational and bio-technology as well as code. Although maintaining the poststructuralist critique of representation as a transparent medium and its correlate attentiveness to vision as a culturally mediated practice, these studies and art practices have focused on new psychosomatic functions of the image. As such, they have surmounted the aniconic temptation of Minimalism and conceptual art while remaining critical of opticality.

Christine Ross 5

Key to this bodily turn is the integration of finitude – fallibility and mortality – in the definition of identity, subjectivity, vision, and visuality in ways that show the limits of the “fluidity” perspective described above. This, we believe, articulates a crucial shift in visuality, in that it has reintroduced experience, agency, and the inseparability of finiteness and openness in the subject’s shaping of visual realms and interpretation of images. In the field of contemporary art, the works of Hannah Wilke, Jo Spence, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Derek Jarman, David Wojnarowicz, and AA Bronson, among others, have been reassessed to explore this sense of finitude through representations of illness (notably aids and cancer) and death that trigger affects of mourning, remembrance, and loss in the viewer. The writings of literary historian Elizabeth Bronfen and philosopher Christine Battersby examine how notions of birth and mortality shape the definition and representation of female subjectivity. More specifically related to visuality studies, art historian Michael Leja, in his study of early twentieth-century American art and mass culture, explains how seeing became a distrusted activity in an era in which the visible world was increasingly confirming itself in its spectacular dimension, as a confusing mixture of fantasy and reality, appearance and truth. This scepticism about seeing, about the possibility of gaining access to truth through vision, was compensated by what Leja has called “looking askance” – both “a way of looking and a way of thinking about looking,” a self-conscious visual practice that could maximize visual acuity and sharpen “mental faculties for critical analysis and interpretation.”¹² Paul Virilio’s examination of the twentiethcentury development of machines of vision not only supports Leja’s findings on the crisis of perceptual faith in images but also discloses how the optical technologies, which still seemed to guarantee, for the early-twentieth-century observer, an access to visual truth, have gradually made our link to images more and more precarious.¹³ These studies should not be dissociated from the blooming development of new media research, notably the writings of art historian Olivier Grau, visual studies specialist Anne Friedberg, philosopher Mark Hansen, and media artists and theoreticians Lev Manovich and Peter Weibel, which has set into play a reiterated concern with the spatial positioning of the user in virtual reality, the enhancement or reduction of the

6 introduction

user’s experience of vr , his or her partial blindness as to what occurs outside the immersing environment and the concomitant loss of criticality, and his or her immobility in front of the screen. Art historian Caroline A. Jones has also just proposed a polysensorial reading of mixed reality art as a counterpart to Greenbergian formalist opticality grounded in the specialized use of vision. This interest in contemporary art’s questioning of the pure visuality of the aesthetic experience has also been central to Mieke Bal’s study of baroque vision as what resists the mind/body, form/matter, line/colour separation.¹⁴ All these studies, including Leja’s, articulate a shift towards the examination of the viewer/user’s bodily experience of the visible world, of the “finiteness and fallibility”¹⁵ of vision, and of the ways in which visual experience is perturbed (impoverished or heightened) by art, technology, and visual culture. To speak, as the title of the book indicates, about “precarious visualities” is to ratify this bodily turn – a turn that addresses the agency, yet finiteness and fallibility, of vision, together with its interrelatedness with other senses. It is, more specifically, to seek to investigate new directions in the field of visuality studies – to concentrate on innovative aesthetic strategies that complexify the perceptual experience of the spectator in contemporary art (especially time-based art) and visual culture. Has this specific field of inquiry generated new interrogations, new approaches, new sensibilities? If so, which art and media productions are significantly contributing to these major developments? How and why do experiments in visuality affect the spectator-artwork relational property of the aesthetic experience? Key to this inventive directionality is the notion of precariousness. To look at an image that prevents the stabilization of identification, identity, and place; to perceive a representation that keeps oscillating between visibility and invisibility; to experience screens that blur the distinction between the viewer’s sense of self as “self” and the represented “other”; to be interpellated as a spectator by screen-images that have ceased (even virtually) to mirror, resemble, or refer in that their power lies exclusively in their simulating, hallucinating, or generating function; to relate to an image that entails a perturbation of sight through the contradictory valorization of other senses; to be exposed – as a spectacle and through surveil-

Christine Ross 7

lance devices – to the gaze of new figures of authority, unanticipated Others: all these aesthetic strategies, which are examined here, concern a spectator whose seeing activity is being embodied through precarious attachments. They underlie the distribution of this book’s chapters under the following six rubrics, which designate some of the most pivotal post-990s visualities in contemporary art, art history, and visual culture: () the unsettling of identification, (2) the deployment of the image-viewer interface as a threshold of (in)visibility, (3) the staging of hallucination (of hallucinations), (4) the reimagining of place through the aesthetics of doubling, (5) the polysensorialized screen, and (6) the generating image. To better understand the visualities covered by these rubrics, I propose here to briefly discuss their main attributes: failed identification, interrelatedness, doubleness, and difference. These are central to the bodily turn I am trying to describe here. Precariousness – and this is its first trait – is an unsettling of vision that occurs at the viewer-image interface, a quality addressed to the viewer that troubles the full visual access to the image (and beyond, to the reality to which it refers). The revaluation of identification plays a major role in this precariousness. In her Identification Papers (995), an examination of the crucial role of identification in viewing processes, critical theorist Diana Fuss has shown how the sheer impossibility of detaching identity from identification, especially in a period in which identification is said to have prevalence over identity (an assessment shared by sociologist Michel Maffesoli),¹⁶ the identity of the represented subject or of the perceiving spectator is already made out of oscillations between nonidentity and disidentification.¹⁷ This question is key to the opening text of Precarious Visions, Raymond Bellour’s discussion of the aesthetics of self-portraiture in video art as a practice occupied from the start by the impossibility of articulating a fixed sense of self because of the multiple identifications that shape and reshape it. Johanne Lamoureux’s analysis of Andy Warhol’s Last Supper paintings of 986 also makes manifest how the self-portrait can sometimes set into play a thick mixture of identification, disidentification, and overidentification that cannot be easily untangled. Once the spectator is understood in these terms, as in Monika Kin Gagnon’s study of film spectatorship, it is the precarious perceptual experience of the viewer

8 introduction

that becomes manifest. Diana Fuss’s questions on filmic identification formulate quite well the texture of that experience: Accordingly, any politics of identity needs to come to terms with the complicated and meaningful ways that identity is continually compromised, imperiled, one might even say embarrassed by identification. For example, how might it change our understanding of the political, of the very nature and significance of the social tie, to know that every identity claim (“I am not another”) is based upon an identification (“I desire to be another”)? How might it change our understanding of identity if we were finally to take seriously the poststructuralist notion that our most impassioned identifications may incorporate nonidentity within them and that our most fervent disidentifications may already harbor the very identity they seek to deny?¹⁸ To put it differently, self-portraiture, or the viewing of film, may set into play unexpected intermediate couplings between observation and projection, acknowledgment and denial, fantasy and reality, self and other. It may also prevent the identification process, as argued by Beate Ochsner in her analysis of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. Contemporary art practices, and visual culture in general, can be seen as exacerbating these psychic processes. Such is the precariousness of visuality in contemporary art and, more generally, in contemporary visual culture: a setting into play of a range of aesthetic strategies that solicit from the spectator a perception that lacks in security, certainty, and opticality. Vision here comes to appear insufficient or is contradicted by other sensorial registers, but it is also meant to be somewhat augmented by new functions of the image screen. Indeed, in the texts comprising this anthology, if precariousness is to be considered as an aesthetic strategy at all, it is precisely because it has a productive side to it: what perception lacks in opticality it gains in complexity, and mostly interrelatedness – between senses (e.g., the visual and the haptic, as described by Julie Lavigne in her analysis of Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather and by Amelia Jones in her

Christine Ross 9

examination of video art and Carolee Schneemann’s films); between what lies within and what lies without a work (as carefully mapped out in Claudette Lauzon’s analysis of Rebecca Belmore’s The Named and the Unnamed exhibition and David Tomas’s discussion of Ilya Kabakov’s Looking up); between the fictional and the physical (Éric Michaud’s discussion of the generating function of the image); between body, screen, and place (as suggested by Marie Fraser’s and Alice Ming Wai Jim’s discussion of place-identities); between bodies (the two or more users wearing Mathieu Briand’s ubiq headsets examined by Christine Ross); between identification and disidentification (especially in the self-portraits investigated by Raymond Bellour, Olivier Asselin, Julie Lavigne, Hélène Samson, and Johanne Lamoureux); and between art and science (Thierry Bardini’s study of the metaphoric deployment of the genetic code in molecular biology). These interrelations – the second attribute of the bodily turn of visuality studies – are meant to break with what must be called the frontality of the image; that is, what Anne Friedberg has designated as the viewer’s positioning “in front of (vorstellen) a perpendicular frame.”¹⁹ Theorized by Alberti in his 435 De pictura and still prevalent today in our daily experience of the computer screen, the picture has been, is, predominantly “imagined as a flat vertical surface between the artist (and viewer) and the scene depicted.”²⁰ Precariousness in contemporary visual culture means, contrarily, that the spectator cannot be stabilized by the frontal deployment of the image: by perturbing opticality, it asks of the spectator that s/he not be a mere viewer, that s/he circulate between and around the work to conjoin the inside with the outside, make connections without resolutions, understand the doubleness of specific aesthetic situations, and acknowledge the changing functions of the image in the age of informational and biotechnologies. As philosopher and aesthetics theoretician Jean-Marie Schaeffer has argued in his L’image précaire: Du dispositif photographique (987), a book that has inspired this anthology, precariousness – and this brings us to its third attribute – entails a form of duplicity. With the term “precariousness,” Schaeffer wanted to describe the complex status of the pre-digital photographic image: the fact that it corresponds both to an imprint of the represented object and an image analogically related to human vision. The precariousness of a photograph lies specifically in its

10 i n t r o d u c t i o n

double status – one that is difficult to reconcile – as imprint and analogy. Some of the texts in Precarious Visualities refer specifically to the sorely reconcilable doubleness of the visualities of specific video art and film works, not so much as a characteristic of the image as an aesthetic or interpretative strategy: Marie Fraser speaks of the co-presence of the body and image in Krzysztof Wodiczko’s public place interventions; Alice Ming Wai Jim of double mediation between screen and language, movement and locality in Mathias Woo’s video; Amelia Jones of the video flesh-screen; Monika Kin Gagnon of the double consciousness of the film spectator; Slavoj Žižek of the film image as a hallucination of a hallucination; Johanne Lamoureux of the identification of identification; Beate Ochsner of the confusing overlapping of fiction over fiction in David Cronenberg’s cinematography; David Tomas of the viewer’s fluctuation between seeing and non-seeing under Kabakov’s huge antenna. Again, but as a move beyond Schaeffer’s localization of precariousness in the image, it is the image-viewer interface that is set into play here to articulate a tension, for the viewer, between two experiences. This tension is a productive one in that it carries the aesthetics or, sometimes, the criticality of the artwork. By “precariousness” we therefore do not necessarily refer to the ephemerality of an artwork or the fragility of its materiality, although this might well be a reinforcing element of precarious difference (let us think here of Antoni’s transient chocolate and soap self-portraits discussed by Julie Lavigne, or the in situ performances of Belmore and Wodiczko examined by Claudette Lauzon and Marie Fraser, even the personal webcams described by Olivier Asselin, bound to disappear one day in the ethereal space of the web). Nor do we especially allude to the contingency of the objects of contemporary art. Art historian Martha Buskirk has already shown how authorship, medium, materiality, and originality have become pivotal contingent objects in contemporary artworks and have come to redefine practices and understandings of preservation, copyright, medium specificity, work, and documentation differentiation as well as attributions of authorship.²¹ Contingency certainly troubles the physical, conceptual, and economic integrity of the artwork but does not necessarily entail a questioning of visuality or a rupture with the frontal deployment of art. By the precariousness of visuality – and this is what ties together the works

Christine Ross 11

examined in Precarious Visualities – we refer to a perceptual operation; that is, to the ways in which the image or the interface of an artwork interpellates the spectator into an “effective” perceptual perturbation. This book should then also be seen as an occasion to raise the possibility of aesthetic difference in the field of contemporary art, within a logic of precariousness. The possibility of critical or aesthetic difference, the fourth and final property of precariousness, is not without a contradiction for, as Schaeffer has argued in his L’image précaire: Du dispositif photographique (987), precariousness is, by definition, a state that signals both the difficulty to reconcile and the difficulty to separate two dimensions, realms, or experiences. In Malaise dans l’esthétique (2004), philosopher Jacques Rancière provides a rich reading of aesthetic difference that helps to situate the link this book seeks to establish between criticality and precariousness. He concludes Malaise’s elaborate discussion on the ethical turn of art – the gradual yet affirmed substitution of aesthetics by ethics in the field of contemporary art since the 980s – by denouncing its dissolution of “difference” (opposition, polemics, contradiction, dissention). The predominance of ethics, notably in relational art practices that replace dissensus by consensus or works that reduce art to the victimized act of witnessing irrepresentable catastrophes, has meant the weakening of the political impact of aesthetics, whose productivity relies on its differential status. Indeed, the waning of aesthetic difference is a form of denegation not only of social and cultural difference but also of art’s ability to provide futurity. As Rancière observes, the emergence of aesthetics (as a regime of identification of art) in the late eighteenth century entails the rupture of the triad – mimesis, whose laws defined a regulated relation between poesis (as a way of doing) and aesthesis (as a way of being sensible) – that guaranteed the order of fine arts. It occurs through two concomitant operations: a fundamental depreciation of the representational regime – namely, the traditional functions of religious illustration and decoration – and a relocalization of art in the separate sphere of the museum. Difference is thus an intrinsic dimension of aesthetics. Relocalization has been crucial to the development of modern art for, as Peter Bürger has already observed, it conferred upon art a certain degree of autonomy and the related possibility of being radically different from (i.e., critical of) a society of which it had

12 i n t r o d u c t i o n

partially ceased to be a part.²² Twentieth-century art has been repeatedly mobilized by this possibility, belief, or utopia. Yet difference today, in an era of presentism in which notions of progress, emancipation, and productive utopia are increasingly contested, appears less likely to be achievable. The persistence of realism in mainstream cinema is not without consolidating this assessment. The depreciation of differential aesthetics can noticeably be seen in the morphing techniques of cinema developed since the 990s, a procedure that consolidates the realistic functioning of the screen. As observed by Lev Manovich, in contrast to the “copy-and-paste” aesthetics of twentiethcentury avant-garde cinema, the dominant new media images are increasingly characterized by smoothness and continuity as though the imperative was now to blend elements together and erase rather than accentuate boundaries: “All these examples – smooth composites, morphing, uninterrupted navigation in games – have one thing in common: where old media relied on montage, new media substitutes the aesthetics of continuity.”²³ Hence, while new media has the technology to problematize in a fundamental way the mirror-andwindow logic of representation, it uses the interface to service realism, providing a sense of reality as devoid of gaps, contradictions, tensions, fantasy interruptions, or noise. Highly critical of such developments, Manovich advocates the return to an aesthetics of montage that welcomes the semantic clashing of different worlds on the screen. Interestingly, for Rancière also, a form of oppositional discourse remains conceivable but only inasmuch as its precariousness is acknowledged and set into play: To exit today’s ethical configuration, to restore difference to the inventions of politics and art, this also means to challenge the phantasm of their purity by restoring their character of a cut which is always ambiguous, precarious and litigious. This presupposes indissolubly that we subtract them from any form of time theology, from any thought of original trauma or upcoming salvation.²⁴ The above passage makes clear a crucial observation: if art is to be differential at all, this restoration can only come about with the

Christine Ross 13

acknowledgment of the precariousness of artistic difference. Here lies another fundamental productivity of precariousness – its rupture with time teleology – but also a warning: if it does regroup a set of aesthetic strategies, it is never an “emancipating solution” in itself. The productivity of precariousness of difference is precisely what Marie Fraser and Claudette Lauzon disclose in their reading of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s and Rebecca Belmore’s work. Their performances and installations are critical of the foreigner’s or the sex-worker’s exclusion from the public sphere only inasmuch as they successfully transpose the contradictory status of the excluded – oscillating between the representational and the physical (for Wodiczko) and between visibility and invisibility (for Belmore) – into the perceptual experience of the viewer. As such, in their attempt to give a face to the faceless, in ways that disrupt their media representation as elements of threat, they convey what Butler, inspired by the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, has called “the precariousness of life,” if only so that “some keener sense of the value of life, all life, take hold.”²⁵ Similarly, when the users of Mathieu Briand’s viewing headsets can only adequately perceive the space in which they circulate if and when they are worn by at least two users, they are introduced to a form of interdependency in which autonomy of the self is perhaps lost but where the precariousness of life is experienced as what “begins with the precariousness of the Other.” As argued by David Tomas, this effect also governs Kabakov’s Looking up’s critique of immersive, closed interfaces. Indeed, such a critique occurs through the viewer’s visual apprehension of the work as s/he oscillates between seeing and nonseeing, the very perceptual oscillation that will open up the spectator/ image interface to the moving environment beyond. Precarious Visualities cannot be separated from Rancière’s plea for (“ambiguous, precarious and litigious”) dissensus. It pushes his observation one step further to meet two objectives: first, to examine the ways in which precariousness has increasingly become constitutive of the spectator interpellation in the realm of contemporary art; and second, to claim that such precariousness may well articulate a site of critical difference.

14 i n t r o d u c t i o n

Notes  Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 995). 2 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 983). 3 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 983). 4 Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 992). 5 See especially Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 6, 3 (975): 6–8; Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 988); Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 987); Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (London and New York: Routledge, 995); bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Toronto: Between the Lines, 992); and Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 993). 6 Sebastian Zeidler, introduction to Carl Einstein, Critical Dictionary: “Nightingale” The Etchings of Hercules Seghers, trans. Charles W. Haxthausen, October 07 (Winter 2004): 52. 7 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 993). On “the retreat of the visual,” see Benjamin Buchloh, “From the Aesthetic of Administration to Institutional Critique,” in L’art conceptuel, une perspective (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 989), 4. 8 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 990) and Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 999). 9 Sonia Kruks, Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 200), 85. 0 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 99), 40.  Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Ian Grant, Kieran Kelly, New Media: A Critical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 67 and 249.

Christine Ross 15

2 Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art From Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), . 3 Paul Virilio, La machine de vision: Essai sur les nouvelles techniques de représentation (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 988), 38. 4 Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 200). On the return of the baroque in contemporary visual culture, see also Nicolas Goyer and Walter Moser, eds., Résurgences baroques: Les trajectories d’un parcours transculturel (Brussels: La Lettre Volée, 200). 5 Leja, Looking Askance, 2. 6 Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Societies, trans. Don Smith (London: Sage Publications, 996). 7 Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 995), –2. 8 Ibid. 9 Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 2006), 78–9. 20 Ibid., 28. 2 Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 2003). 22 Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2004), 6–7. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 984). 23 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 200), 42–3. 24 Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, 73 (my translation). 25 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York and London: Verso, 2004), xviii.

16

introduction

part one “Am I Still in the Picture?”: The Unsettling of Identification

Introduction

In an essay (translated here for the first time in English) that has been pivotal to the understanding of the history of electronic arts, Raymond Bellour shows how video art’s specific contribution to the realm of moving images lies in its unique deployment of the self-portrait. With video, argues Bellour, the image becomes a site of representation and interpellation of the self – but a self whose identity is more a question or an open-ended project than a definition or a clear determination. The relevance of this text to precarious visuality is indisputable: it discloses a visual writing of the “I” that explores the low-resolution of the image, electronic processing, and the “continuous” presence of the electronic image in order to represent the self of the artist not as a temporal closure (as is the case with autobiography) but as a “totality without an end, where nothing can be given in advance.” The self-portrait – as explored notably in the work of Vito Acconci, Bill Viola, Thierry Kuntzel, John Downey, Jacques-Louis and Danièle Nyst, Marcel Odenbach, and Jean-Luc Godard – video art per se, thus proposes identity as an irresolvable absence to oneself, constantly reopened by multiple processes of identification and disidentification. Also complicating the notion of the self-portrait, Johanne Lamoureux’s chapter on Andy Warhol’s last paintings, the Last Supper series (986), investigates the mythographic construction of the self as “saint.” Mythography is not without complexifying the identification process

as it implies a form of identification of the self with an other, inasmuch as the latter leads to the construction of personal myth. Such an operation has more to do with identifications of identifications, or overidentifications, than simply with disidentification. Here, we come back to the practice of the self-portrait, but as a mythography. Lamoureux’s main claim is that the Christian dimension of Warhol’s work pertains not so much to the content of the work as it does to an aesthetic strategy of affiliation with the writer Jean Genet and a process the purpose of which is to camouflage a homoerotic subtext. Her argumentation proceeds through a historiographic reading of his work, its reception, and Genet’s writings – namely, Notre-Dame-des-fleurs (944), a book highly relevant to the understanding of another Warhol work, which sets into play (as does Genet’s Notre-Dame) a strategy of inverting the figures of the criminal and the saint: The Thirteen Most Famous Men (964). Crucial here is the intercrossing of layers of identification processes, which cannot be separated from displacement and myth-making, working as a form of palimpsest for homoerotic desire. What Bellour and Lamoureux say about the represented subject within the image is in many ways a premise for Monika Kin Gagnon’s understanding of the spectator in front of the filmic image. Outlining film studies’ different approaches to the “ethnicized” spectator (a term initially proposed by Rey Chow in her examination of how films construct ethnic spectators and thus reaffirm racial difference), her chapter is occupied by the doubleness of spectator-screen image identification as it has been theorized in scholarship engaged with questions of gender, race, and sexual orientation. Although dissensus characterizes 980s film studies’ views on the agency of the spectator (as a “resisting spectator” or an “oppositional gaze,” for example), this model has been gradually complexified by approaches attending to the viewer’s double, multiple, volatile identifications/disidentifications with the image, whereby the spectator can only be said to be partially constructed by the image. And yet – and this brings us to the fourth and last text of this section – the thickness of identification and even the possibility of identification is never guaranteed. In this regard, Beate Ochsner’s examination of David Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ (999) is an operative counterpart to Gagnon’s and Lamoureux’s discussion in that it raises the possibility

18 p a r t o n e

of non-identification, the experiencing of images that prevent the spectator’s negotiation with the image because of its simulation or reversedmirror status and because of the constant articulation of boundary blurring between levels of fiction. The film stages a virtual reality game played by different characters but then proceeds to blur layers of virtuality as the game known as eXistenZ switches into another game: transCendenZ. Of special interest here for Precarious Visualities is the growing undecidability of the image’s reality – both for the players of the virtual games in the film (best formulated by one of the protagonists who cries out: “Are we in the game?”) and, because of the growing uncertainty as to the shifting moment when representation becomes simulation (an image without origins, a copy of a copy), for the viewers of the film. The heuristics of this simulation effect lie in the film’s requirement: one can only come to understand the shift from representation to simulation by literally being lost in it. A simulation is not to be seen in its frontal display but, rather, inhabited through a loss of points of reference.

“Am I Still in the Picture?": The Unsettling of Identification 19

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1 Self-Portraits r ay m o n d b e l l o u r Translated from the French by Ron Ross

There is something vertiginous in the video image, in its rationale, in its very being. How can one not see, in the myriad dots that make up its field, a welter of ideas, drawing in those seeking to recognize themselves in the image and tending to take a lateral course, to join at least some of the dots together? By what it invites us to conceive and allows us to represent, the video image is one of the keenest manifestations of thought, of its jumps and disorderliness. Through thought as image, it gives us an image of thought, vibrant and unstable. In Thierry Kuntzel’s Still, a tiny square at the bottom of the solid blue frame swarms with an indeterminate number of dots; it constantly grows and retracts, disappears and reappears. The few, unsteady, barely recognizable motifs that gradually emerge – the clearest one becomes a landing, a door opening – seem to be programmed by the on-again/ off-again miniature frame, pulsating and quivering, an image within the image. It is this little square that I would like to keep in mind and to which I would like to draw the reader’s attention while I attempt to trace the trajectory that video seems to have made possible. Fiction

Some books are magnetic, by their fluctuation in relation to and through the image, maintaining between words and images a vibration that may well prefigure that of the small blue square. They swarm with

Fig. 1.1

Francis Bacon, Four

Studies for a Self-Portrait, 1967, oil on canvas, 91.5 cm x 33 cm. Carlo Ponti Collection.

meaning, move, as if beyond themselves, become testaments. Stendhal’s La Vie de Henri Brulard is, to my mind, one such book.¹ At fifty-two, as we know, Stendhal was seeking a way to say “I.” He writes: “I should really find it very hard to say what I have been and what I am.”² With his characteristic insight, he senses here a problem of his time. He also knows that he is taking the phenomenon to the extreme, and he worries, he tells the reader, about this “appalling quantity of I’s and me’s! ... the appalling difficulty of all those I’s and me’s.”³ One could always tell one’s story (especially pseudonymously) in the third person. “But then how could one describe one’s hidden emotions?”⁴ Thus is Stendhal’s autobiographical obsession made manifest: he would like to recover the original truth from moments of experience. He senses a fragile, though precious, assurance of identity that haunts and eludes him. Images appear within, before his inner eye. He says, “I can still see the scene,”⁵ “suddenly, I see myself,” and so on. The power of the images quickens the desire to write, which in turn helps bring them out. He points out that the limpid clarity of the scenes, to which he comes back again and again, often has no relation to the explanations and interpretations that he must give them. For the image, powerful though it be, does not say enough: “It’s nothing but a picture.”⁶ Yet Stendhal is so fascinated with the intrinsic value of these scenes that he trusts neither himself nor any second-hand account – memories, reconstructed or retold, embellished by others or by cultural references – that might come between his visions and the book that springs from them. He also reminds us, as an expert, that, to make sense of himself, there will be no question of “lapsing into fiction.”⁷ He will not take his mirror along some highway to produce material for an illusion.⁸ For here, on two separate occasions, he writes, “the theme is so much greater than the teller.”⁹ He prefers to take a lateral course that would allow him to “paint truly.” How then does he proceed? He fills his text with images. Pen-and-ink drawings that become loci of fixation, though breaking points as well, points of dispersion that allow his imagination to travel as they sketch out the outline of an autobiography. There are 67 drawings in Henri Brulard, all integrated into the text. Stendhal sometimes adds (explanatory) captions, and nearly always writes, abundantly so, in the drawing itself, specifying locations, places,

r aymond bellour

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trajectories, points of view. He situates himself as well, as H or Moi, the subject that writes and sees, stays still and moves. The following examples are fairly representative of his various modes of composition (all that guided my choice of scenes was a preference for a serial effect).¹⁰ Example . “A year or two before this journey, near the Pont-de-Claix on the Claix side at point A, I had caught a brief glimpse of her white skin two inches above the knee as she was getting out of our covered carriage. Whenever I thought of her it was with ardent desire.”¹¹ (He speaks here of his aunt Camille Poncet.) Example 2. Example 2, again. The blackboard scene is repeated in greater detail: “When I stepped before the committee, my bashfulness grew more intense, I got muddled looking at these gentlemen sitting beside the blackboard.”¹² Example 2, a third time. The scene is repeated again, and the motif changes scale (itself repeated three times, with minor differences; I’ve chosen the second instance). It is a series (and even a two-story series). There are several of the kind in Henri Brulard, in various modes. One of the few times Stendhal figures himself. The narrative comments (in a natural shift from the captions to the body of the text): “I was at the blackboard, H, and M. Dupuy being in his huge sky-blue arm-chair, at D.”¹³ Example 3. Stendhal evokes his thoroughly idealized infatuation for a young actress, Mlle Kubly, seen at the theatre: “One morning, walking by myself at the far end of the avenue of tall chestnuts in the Jardin de Ville and, as usual, thinking about her, I caught sight of her at the other end of the garden, near the wall of the Intendance, coming towards the terrace. I nearly felt faint, and at last I took flight, running along by the railing, by the line marked F, as if the devil were carrying me; she was, I think, at K’ and I was fortunate enough not to be seen by her.”¹⁴ Example 4. Stendhal crosses the St Bernard Pass with troops of Napoleon’s army. Example 5. The scene takes place in M. Le Roy’s workshop, where a landscape becomes for Stendhal “the ideal of happiness” (“There, three women almost or quite naked were gaily bathing.”)¹⁵ On the next page, the hero comes on the scene (and brings in the reader).

24

Self-Portraits

Fig. 1.2 (top left) Bridge. – Drac. Fig. 1.3 (bottom left)

M. Mathematics classroom. – D.M. Dupuy, 5 feet 8 inches tall,

with his big walking stick, in his immense armchair. – M. His favourites, the aristocratic pupils. – H. Myself, pining to be summoned to the blackboard and hiding so as not to be summoned to it, dying of fear and timidity. – H. My bench. [Staircase, a death-trap, without iron railings. – College courtyard. – Art classroom.] Fig. 1.4 (top right) A. Blackboard. – B. Examiners. – E. Crowd of schoolchildren, 60 or 80, and bystanders. – H. Me. Fig. 1.5 (bottom right)

[A. Slate.]

Fig. 1.6 (top left) [Hôtel de la Préfecture. – Railing. – Railing. – Rue Montorge. – Terrace consisting of 15 to 20 superb chestnuts. – I was at H, I saw her at K.] Fig. 1.7 (bottom left)

H. Me. – B. Village of Bard. – ccc . Canons firing at lll . – xx . Horses

fallen off the path lll faintly marked along the edge of the precipice. – P. Precipice at an angle of 95° or 80°, 30 or 40 feet deep. – P. Other precipices, 70° or 60°, and an infinite amount of brushwood. I can still see the bastion ccc , that's all that is left of my fright. When I was at H I could see neither dead nor wounded, only horses at X. My own horse which was frisking and whose bridle I held with two fingers only, according to the rule, caused me much bother. Fig. 1.8 (top right) [Staircase of the Teisseires' house. – Mr. Le Roy's study. – Place Grenette. – Screen. – M. Le Roy. – Window with a curtain on its lower half. – Charming landscape hung on the wall at a height of six feet. – H. Me, drawing my eyes in red pencil.] Fig. 1.9 (bottom right)

[M. Le Roy's landscape. – Sky. – Greenery. – Admirable greenery.

– Water. – Girls tucking up their skirts, or young goddesses. – A. Great trees, the kind I love.]

These images, which I grab from the text and throw almost haphazardly together here, have a significant effect on the reading, should we pause to consider it. Indeed, they pause one’s reading themselves, or suspend it, drawing between the text and the space they occupy on the page as many fault lines as are etched in their schematic diagrams, in their enigmatic connections, and, should we look closely, in the text itself. The narrative Stendhal is attempting to write is less a narrative of his life than of his quest for a truth or, more precisely, for the authenticity of his life, split between the images of the past on which it is based and the time of writing in which he attempts to (re)incorporate them. This is the divide the drawings are meant to bridge, and this the divide they widen all the more, producing a vertiginous sense of distance, of interruption. In this, Stendhal enlightens us on something essential. If he isn’t really narrating his life but is, rather, trying to catch up with it, it is because he would like to catch up with himself at the very moment in which he is writing, assailed by images, as if in a dream. It is indeed of the imaging¹⁶ connected with any grasp of oneself that Stendhal speaks; that, literally, is what he is staging. In an article in which he picks up on previous arguments in order to better define the power of this interruption of “images in autobiographical text,” Louis Marin effectively shows how Stendhal, in the Saint-Bernard episode (here my fourth example), exhausts himself in a process in which the image that comes up can always stand in for another, one that represents “reality.” In particular, Marin points out how the danger of real death (baptism by fire), the subject of the narrative at that point, is transformed into the fatal danger imagination poses to truth by interposing false images, and how this second danger is materially inscribed in the manuscript with “brief graphical hiatuses” – blanks, that stand as so many withdrawals: “It is the lack of reality for oneself, and with this lack, that of the self where ‘I’ conceive it ... Hence, in this written text, in this place and this moment, which he writes here and now, this fragmentation of signs that draws out from the page the formless space of what Beyle calls a picture.”¹⁷ I can hardly do justice, even briefly, to the serpentine analyses leading, through two paintings once glimpsed and fantasized about, towards the image of an impossible gaze addressed to a mother in a memoryimage that re-stages the very interruption from which all others seem to spring – the premature death of a mother who was passionately r aymond bellour

27

loved. Similarly, it would take a long time to show how the autobiographical project is transfixed by two impossible propositions of which one can have neither recollection nor an exact conception: I was born; I died. Yet, one must point out how everything in this process contributes to transforming autobiography (“dying to itself,” says Marin) into autothanatography (he said in his book, “autobiothanato-graphie”).¹⁸ By which one must understand a presentiment of actual death underlyng the writing, the death of the subject to himself in the experience of this writing, and the deficiency of a then-burgeoning literary genre, failing to be the narrative it could be. This movement – and this is its strength – affects both the general arrangement of Stendhal’s project and every moment of its progress, in the development of the text as in the lines of the diagrams, and in the gap between the two that makes it oscillate from the one to the other. For it is precisely the lacuna in a text consumed by the image that leads Stendhal to the images, at once more real and more virtual, of the Henri Brulard drawings. The moment one recognizes and admires in this unique book a cornerstone in the archaeology of the visible-readable, the drawings can present themselves in one of two ways. One could, like Marin, view them as “operators of the image’s transformation into a sign,” figuring the passage from “image to writing, from the visible to the readable,” and allowing us to identify, with extraordinary precision, the point of visuality, at once an illumination and an obstacle, that lies at the foundation of modern writing and subjectivity. One may also, by simply reversing the approach, and at the risk of seeming more virtual, see in these drawings a process that has, from the time Stendhal first conceived them, ceaselessly transformed the readable into the visible, and recognize in them, in their way of setting the text adrift, a harbinger of the sudden appearances and mutations of the image function. From photography to cinema, from film to video, up to our own time’s thoroughly contemporary confusion between images and between image and writing, the process invites us to revisit one of its originating moments. One might say that Stendhal’s work, by its condensation of narrative elements, can serve as a matrix to fiction. What is Stendhal doing as he layers these strata between words and images, going from the fixed image to the assorted postures that animate it? He forges a graded trajectory through the mental image. He

28 Self-Portraits

discovers a space that falls between Freud’s screen memory and Sartre’s L’Imaginaire. He is a kind of proto-Proust but more primitive for he latches on to his drawings to get at the truth of his sensations instead of transforming the surfacing images into writing. Because of this, he wants to see, even if it is through writing and for writing; he writes to see, and this obstinacy of the figure, if one dwells on it, seems to open up three directions. One is first struck by the fact that this desire to objectify and visualize the decisive moments in one’s life coincides, historically, with the advent of photography (Stendhal began Henri Brulard in 835, when Daguerre and Talbot were conducting their first experiments). It is as if drawing were competing with a photograph that might have occurred, virtual speaking. But this desire is also a desire for movement. In this, Stendhal prefigures cinema, like others before him and around him, but with the unique characteristic of being precisely at the juncture of film and photography, to the extent that each of the scenes he attempts to grasp can be said to be simultaneously fixed and moving. For what is he doing, but constantly going from one shot to another? Whether through sequences of drawings that vary in scale (the school episode, Le Roy’s workshop) or in the movements represented by letters, arrows, dotted lines – all are trajectories that imply (subtle and, especially, virtual) changes of distance, angle, point of view. The narrative fosters this virtuality, urges us to actualize it: it opens up an intermediate space between a series of snapshots and film-editing, a relationship that becomes articulated around the invention of cinema at the end of the century and that has worked upon the twin histories of film and photography ever since. This virtual movement that Stendhal “glimpses” even has the paradoxical characteristic of becoming more and more “real” as photography and cinema come closer together and nearer our time: on the one hand, photography, tending evermore towards movement – through assemblage, text, series, sequences, the book, the system, a distinctive movement gained upon its basic immobility; on the other hand, cinema, variously haunted by a desire to stop, to shed its superfluity of movement, its plenitude and continuity, which have been and always will be its prerogative – such that this off-beat counter-movement has become one of modern cinema’s most distinguishing traits.

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We can take it further. In our constant mental shifts from the images to the textual coaching, almost physically tracing the inner trajectories towards the drawings, we have the illusion of entering an image that is neither still nor moving but broken down. A series of states. As if this were already the perfect response that cinema, consumed by video, finally gave, via Godard, to images’ new-found speed. But the images that Stendhal proposes, verging on “betweenimages,”¹⁹ and the additional images that we can project in them, are also of interest in that they prefigure the missing, or lacking, image – l’image en moins. These are not merely analogue images. The drawing that supports them is not. It was the means available to Stendhal at the time for rendering a basic impression, one he comes back to several times: his visions are often “like a fresco of which large pieces have fallen away.”²⁰ These images in which the image is lacking are thus much closer to the processed images produced in video, which sheds the film-image’s plenitude in an entirely different way than would photography. It brings them closer to mental images or at least to the possibility of mimicking the latter, as Stendhal would seem to be doing with sketches that track the channels of memory. They verge on images one can write as well as draw, with a camera transformed into a brush of light or with a graphics pallet or computer. We have seen how Henri Brulard is a thoroughly mixed experience of word and image, even generating undecidable relationships between the two. The language constantly refers to the image: first, by the letter’s inscription within the drawing, in which it fully participates; and then, within the text, by the author’s constant engagement with the mix of figures whose fictional unity he quarries, in view of a new and different space. Here too, Stendhal’s projection is closer to video (or to film captured on video) than to the film-image to the extent that video, freely bringing words into the image, enlarges upon the general writerly inclination that it owes to its direct, fly-on-the-wall image quality. It realizes the indistinct dream of the pen-camera, film’s soul-searching as filmmaker, and of self-portraiture, especially, such as I imagine it: “the audio-video recording of the twists and turns and slow or frantic unfolding of our imaginary universe, confession-cinema, trials, revelation, message, psychoanalysis, apprehension, a machine for reading the words and images of our personal landscape.”²¹

30

Self-Portraits

Taking Stock

The subject that concerns me has the particularity of having just gained some traction in the world of cinema, where it has appeared through the somewhat explicit adaptation of the findings of a protean literary tradition to the filmic situation. The genre, or rather the field it attempts to delineate (for now, let’s call it autobiography), is sufficiently uncertain to be constantly bordering other genres and thus touches the essence of the act of writing. One notes that literary theory has taken a lively new interest in these issues just when they are being intensely explored in film, prompting a flood of new questions. The desire to define a comparable development in video, one almost organically linked to the emergence of the new medium, requires that we engage in a somewhat peculiar unravelling: video brings us back to cinema, which in turns leads back to literature, with which video may very well have a privileged rapport. In the last ten years then, the ever more weighty and subtle issue of the relationships between film and literature has been enriched by yet another challenge: with the usual disjunction between theory, history, and practice (films and their criticism), we have begun to talk of subjective cinema and of autobiography.²² The list of filmmakers appearing, in one form or another, in the first critical appraisals, retrospectives, and programs is a long one: ranging from Maria Koleva and Raymond Depardon to Welles and Fellini, and including Boris Lehman, Jonas Mekas, Chantal Akerman, Chris Marker, Jim McBride, and Joseph Morder. Chosen categories in this diverse group definitely show literature to be providing the framework that brings their works together. The vague, though insistent idea that emerges is intimacy, the personal, the private. It seems to be warranted by the notion of writing, as evinced in the circular expression: l’écriture du Je au cinéma (or “writing as I in cinema”). It implies two ideas, two intersecting, though distinct modes of operation. The first concerns filmmakers’ choice of keeping close to the subject of themselves, of telling the story of their life, of using their own experience to articulate the question, “who am I?”, with varying degrees of explicitness and all its attendant consequences. The second concerns the private nature – itself quite changeable – of the conditions of production

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and shooting. It often ensures this promotion of the intimate (though not always so, as Fellini attests); inversely, the intimacy of the shooting does not guarantee intimacy of subject matter (though between the two stances a connection invariably leads by degrees from subjective intimacy to objective intimacy). Such is the necessarily vague background from which autobiography emerges. The vagueness is quite evident on the final page of L’Écriture du Je au cinéma: in one column is a bibliography of autobiography (reminding us that the week of screenings and the symposium held in Brussels in 986 was entitled “cinéma et autobiographie”), and in the other is its filmography. But here the word “autobiography” disappears, giving way to an array of substitute words, themselves ordered into six categories: () self-portraits, (2) portraits of friends, (3) family portraits/letters, (4) travel diaries, (5) private news/diaries/confessions/childhood, and (6) reminiscences/filmmakers’ journals. In a highly nuanced contribution, which (given the author’s personality) represents the legitimization of autobiography in film, Philippe Lejeune has taken it upon himself to put things somewhat in order, or at least to shed some light on the disorder.²³ He begins by observing the “elasticity” of the concept of autobiography in literature, defined in the nineteenth century in two quite different ways. In one case, it concerns the story a person tells of his or her life (with the autobiographical pact this assumes). In the other, autobiography defines any text (and not just a narrative) that reveals an author’s intention, whether secret or avowed, of sharing his or her own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Which points, as much or even more than to the characteristics of a writerly endeavour, to an evolution in reading habits that places all the emphasis on the author’s person, attributes to the work ancillary productions little considered until then (letters, diaries, etc.), and participates in the general movement towards subjectivization that developed during the nineteenth century; it would be more appropriate, then, to speak of an autobiographical space. Besides the difficulty of defining the word in a literary context is the particular vagueness, adds Lejeune, produced when one shifts the word from literature to cinema; one may even wonder whether it is entirely legitimate to do so. Two positions then confront each other, one already a little dated, purely theoretical, individual, and pessimistic – that of American poetician Elisabeth

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Bruss; the other, now attracting film buffs who are both passionately and matter-of-factly seeking to promote the new genre, without too great a concern for definitions, along with a few specialists (I am the one enlisting them in the group) seeking finer-grained understanding. Elisabeth Bruss’s arguments against the existence and even the possibility of autobiography in cinema provides an invaluable framework for defining and discussing these questions. In her view, three parameters define traditional literary biography: truth-value, committing the author to speak truthfully, both in terms of verifiable sources and sincerity of intent; act-value, recognizing in the author a subject responsible for actions meant to portray his/her own character; and identityvalue, which ties author, narrator, and protagonist to the same person. Film, says Bruss, conflicts with these three attributes. Even if cinema has managed to establish a distinction between fiction and reality, a film intending to tell the “true” story remains divided between two positions: directly recording the event or recreating the event; it must choose “between staging ‘the truth’ or recording it directly.”²⁴ By nature, the image is destined either to be too real or not real enough, it is torn, even in its constituent elements, between documentary truth and fiction. It can swing from one to the other at any moment. Such a difficulty is unknown to language, which has no direct connection with reality and has a variety of resources at its disposal for conceiving “true” stories. Language also has conventional devices for rendering certain emotions, certain inflections (doubt, hesitation, scruple). These resources are absent in filmic language. The image will have as hard a time declaring its “sincerity” as demonstrating its truth. The act-value in literary autobiography encounters two different problems, the first being the division of labour. Whereas the written work (nearly always) assumes a single source, film generally implies a distribution of jobs: a film auteur is never quite the same thing as an author; cinema brings about a transformation in the very nature of “authority.” The second and more decisive problem is that of expression, which we encounter from the opposite direction: how does one mark a particular image not only with sincerity, but with a point of view, with subjectivity. Film must have recourse to excessive markers (of which the “subjective camera” is the classic example); it is always

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divided between description and expression: marks of expressivity, which are an author’s prerogative, actually hinder the quality of reality the author seeks to impart to the story. Finally, identity-value is lacking in cinema. While, in literary text, the speaking “I” fuses almost naturally with the “I” spoken of, in cinema, the divide between the seeing and the seen is unbridgeable. Raw presence and utter absence forbid the imperceptible passage, nearly independent of time and place, that allows the subject of language, indistinctly writer, narrator, character (and, in the end, reader) to merge into a fuzzy unity. Language, Bruss reminds us, is neither pristine objectivity nor pure subjectivity. In cinema, the one ends where the other begins. Thus, one could sum up her argument with the phrase, la subjectivité disparaît devant l’objectif – subjectivity vanishes before the lens.²⁵ To this severe, and apparently unequivocal, position, Lejeune opposes a very pragmatic argument. He points out how much Elisabeth Bruss underestimated the existence of a cinema with which she was largely unfamiliar and which had developed considerably since she wrote her text. He shows how voice-over, used frequently and sometimes abundantly, allows one to retrieve some of language’s benefits. He points out how the use of photographs, also quite frequent, can help the filmmaker deal with the difficulty of evoking the past. He evokes the troubling, unprecedented nature of the screening sessions filmmakers have taken to attending, in which they must, in a very intimate context, present the audience with an autobiography from which, when the lights come up, they seem suddenly to emerge, different but the same. Summoning a number of examples, Lejeune shifts, as he puts it, from “problems of vocabulary” to “the reality of a new genre,” from which he renders all the currency, diversity, and intensity. But we sense his (intentional) hesitation regarding terminology and a return, in the end, to questions from which he began: in his conclusion, he treads carefully between ciné-Moi and autobiographie, subtly placing the burden of this new genre on the second term, always his domain (and, by the same token, delighting in the new prize). In the end, however, Lejeune doesn’t respond to Bruss, whose general outlook he nevertheless takes pains to recall: she is concerned with the gradual disappearance, in culture and thus in contemporary society, of

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the image of the Self, long-signalled by traditional literary autobiography and especially called into question with the advent of mass media. Her tone isn’t alarmist. She is interrogating, philosophically weighing the pros and the cons in the developments she observes. Lejeune’s thoroughly empirical approach does not answer such tersely, though strongly expressed, concerns. In a word, he tells us, cinema was first silent, then learned to speak, and may now be learning how to say “I,” in its own way. Everything is in the manner. Elizabeth Bruss isn’t really saying that it cannot say “I.” She only says that this “I,” through the problems it encounters in the saying, does not say “I” in the same way and that this supposes a different notion of “I,” of Self, or of the subject. Three choices present themselves: () either the new works Lejeune mentions substantially change the question of devices and modes of utterance that Bruss puts forward; or (2) the question that concerns her and the way in which she articulates it remain fundamentally irrelevant to his approach; or (3) he didn’t want to deal with the issue in the context of this essay. There is certainly some truth in the first point: new works have cropped up, and Elisabeth Bruss was unfamiliar with many of even the earliest examples. But that does not demolish the crux of an argument with which Lejeune appears to be rather in agreement. Such that, notwithstanding discrepencies in word, tone, and attitude, the line between the two grows rather fine: the one declares autobiography to be impossible in cinema, the other sees it flourish there but also suggests that it thus becomes quite different from itself, though he doesn’t so much as hint at what such a transformation might (or might not) contribute to contemporary subjectivity. His comments on Raymond Depardon’s Les années déclic are a case in point. He underlines the effectiveness of the procedure employed: alternating between a close-up of Depardon addressing spectators to talk about his life and a screen showing first some shots to which Depardon steps up to point out certain motifs, followed by excerpts from several of his films. One shot in particular catches Lejeune’s attention, one of the first that the teenage filmmaker produced with his hobbyist’s camera: we see his legs framed in a high-angle shot, climbing up and down a stairway. “A long take that is doubly autobiographical: from head to foot, and, in its citation, from present to past.” But he leaves out two things. The shot is very strange, forced, its point of view – an

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actual pov shot – inconsistent; at first glance, one doubts (at least I doubted) that the body one is looking at belongs to the one who’s speaking; and the impression of strangeness lingers even when one becomes convinced of it. Moreover, the existence of this prior gaze, as such, a raw, straightforward interpolation, significantly changes the nature of the autobiographical act: answering the clash of bodies is a temporal divide. The nature of the pact is itself strange, if one thinks about it: on the one hand, it is more direct and more “real” than a written narrative could ever be, with that face staring at you and saying, “I am me, and that used to be me”; on the other hand, this former self never seems to really join the self who’s speaking to us. Moreover, even if one observes an ordered return to beginnings (from birth), and though snippets of personal life surface here and there, the retrospective movement is focused on one dimension of the author’s life: his vocation as photographer and filmmaker. The theme is central, naturally, as would be the telling of a writer’s vocation. But here it lags behind the (approximately complete) image of oneself that someone who has chosen to tell his life story is generally seeking to grasp. This may be due to the nature of Depardon’s commission for the Rencontres d’Arles. Or to his discretion. But this discretion must itself be examined. I think that the discrepancy is largely due to the fact that the truth here put into play is almost entirely determined by techniques (photography, film) that are bringing about a profound transformation of the autobiographical subject. The cinematic apparatus has its part to play, though its inevitably divisive effects are tempered by the voice guiding us. Photographs, on the contrary, speed the transformation: they fragment the body of the film into discrete stops, little snapshot deaths: they turn the photographer, and the filmmaker who becomes one through them, into an obscured, intermittent subject. This precariousness of a subject turned over to the image, and especially to photography (paradoxically cinematic autobiography’s indispensable ally), is exacerbated as soon as the narrative form, its only stable point of reference, disappears. This is manifest in the films of Robert Frank. In Conversations in Vermont, the most clearly autobiographical of his films, in which Frank speaks with his son of their shared past through a collection of photos, the bifurcation is extreme. His

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presence on the screen explodes in gestures and words; he constructs a kind of hallucinated present in which handfuls of photos and contact sheets figure as so many fragmented moments of the past, springing up to phantasmagorically shadow the impulses of the moment, its materiality, its space, and its time. The highly accentuated contrast between the erratic, hyper-sensitive motion and the stability of certain shots or framed moments heightens the tension between photo and film; all the more so in that the contrast has as much impact on the becalmed reality of the present as it does on the fragmented time of past images. The meeting of the two media becomes the basis for the constitution and dissolution of the filmmaker-photographer, telling his/her story through film after having first done so, of necessity more enigmatically, through photographs. The best example of the impact of photography on the formation of an autobiographical subject in cinema may be Alain Jaubert’s little film La Flèche du temps. What appears on screen, for five long minutes, are photos, lots of photos, strung together from birth to the moment of shooting. The soundtrack resonates with historical echoes of the years traversed (the war, May ’68, etc.). An “I” does appear, though it is composed of a myriad faces, the first having little to do with the last: identity (nearly) nil. Whichever way we turn, it seems hard to capture the features of a subject that’s searching for itself. Take Brakhage, Morder, Cocteau, Fellini. To varying extremes, together with Depardon and Frank, they compose a spectrum of postures, outline an impossible autobiography. Brakhage, following Maya Deren, invents an immense power of saying “I” in the American avant-garde. But what is this “I” that speaks to us, without so much as a word (or, practically, a sound), gathering over the years one of the most impressive collections of images in the history of cinema, instigating an uninterrupted transmutation between the image’s charge of reality and its expressive value, obtained through every possible device, modulation of speed, fusion, and distortion? As we know, he filmed his wife, the birth of his children, his house, his family life, put himself on screen in his natural and spiritual environment, and included documentary and cultural images in some of his films. But never has the treatment of autobiographical space prompted

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such a dispersion of autobiography as narrative (or even as testimony), such a volatilization of the pact of recognition that it implies with the reader-spectator. We are clearly dealing with something else. Curiously, not going as far as Depardon, yet going beyond him as well (in Les années déclic, for there are other Depardons), Joseph Morder’s great endeavour nearly instigates as thorough a destruction as Brakhage, even if it is diametrically opposed to his movement. On the one hand, to put it briefly, there is the diary, born, like almost all personal diaries, of boredom, crisis, unexpressed desire, and finally becoming a real journal, kept methodically for years on Super 8 (and because Morder displays it, at least in fragments, it is a distant relative to André Gide’s Journal, one of the first diaries to be published in its author’s lifetime, a practice that has since become quite common). On the other hand, there are films that are spawned from diaries like pseudopods (Mémoires d’un Juif tropical, for instance): they have that rare quality of being at once autobiographies (though partially so, devoted to a particular problem, life fragment, or moment, even when childhood features prominently) and deliberate, perverse attempts at autobiography’s destruction. One can see it collapse, structurally and dynamically undermined by fiction, the overflowing, logical slippage towards fiction, with its traps, divisions, and equivocations, worlds away from any prescribable truth. Fiction becomes the only place in which to learn, to understand, what “true” stories can tell. Finally, seemingly at the other end of the spectrum, though in fact quite close, lies the “real cinema” by great “auteurs,” undermined from within by the dreamt-of autobiography. Le Testament d’Orphée is such a creature. Heir to a prior fiction (Orphée), which it incorporates, inhabited by the physical presence of the author, now a character in the fable he is constructing, wholly engaged, as he says in the prologue, on his own behalf but without seeking to summon up and chronicle his life via any retrospective narrative that might refer in the least to its concrete reality (for, rather than tell of his life, he would prescribe the conditions of his death, and so make the work appear to be the condition of a resurrection): such is Le Testament, an autobiography pretransfigured into a parable of poetic and cinematic creation, with its settings, its images, its symbols, and its gods.

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And Fellini, of course. One of the greatest builders of the paradox of Self, along with Pessoa, Pound, Michaux, and a few others (including Pasolini, his alter ego in an archaic and mythic Italy). With his usual finesse, in the famous screen-test sequence in 8½, he has a friend of the producer speaking with Mastroianni and quoting lines that Stendhal wrote during his travels in Italy. “The solitary ego that feeds upon itself ends up strangled by a great cry or a great laugh.” But he goes on, unconcerned with ambiguities of the “I” and the Self or their connection with a reality that might have been his own. In an endeavour irreducible to any tale of origin, and yet haunted by it, Fellini builds the ever more precise and lavish circles of an autobiography without ties, free of any concern for truth or identity. It is simply dreamt, or re-dreamt, confirming the admirable process by which every film can perfect an illusion-machine whose very nature makes such a paradox possible: “I have invented myself entirely: a childhood, a personality, longings, dreams, and memories, all in order to enable me to tell them.”²⁶ If one had to provide an emblematic image of autobiography in film (I intentionally switch from the grandest of spectacular cinema to an intimate film of the avant-garde), it would have to be Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia. A camera peers steadily at us; a series of thirteen photographs come to rest, one after another, on the lens; a voice explains the circumstances of the shot and tells the story represented by and recalled from the photograph: fragments of a discontinuous past stretching over a lifetime. What’s remarkable about the photos is that each of them slowly, relentlessly burns to ash, which then crumbles and scatters around the lens – that watches us all the more fixedly – while the voice attempts to conjure the drama of which they were a part. Nostalgia, or autobiography consumed, condemned to retreat before the violence of the cinematic apparatus, the power of the negative undermining it. And cinema, reduced to ash under photography’s impossible-impassive eye. How may I explain the vague feeling that cinema, or at least a whole swath of cinema, has entered an “autobiographical space,” just as literature had done nearly two centuries previously? How to assess the state of the “I” in cinema? One could begin to clear things up a little, I think,

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by distinguishing two major (and often confused) ways of dealing with subjective experience. The first is autobiography: if its conventional definition is to retain at least a modicum of substance, one is obliged to observe that, in film, it has become fragmentary, limited, dissociated, uncertain – haunted by the overarching forms of dissociation that arise from the travesties of fiction. The other – its definition often becoming really dubious precisely when it refers to an experience that, though autobiographical in nature, is also its opposite – is the self-portrait. Such a reflection could shed some light on that swath of cinema; but that isn’t really my purpose. More particularly, one could more accurately assess the transformations that video has introduced into the space it now shares to some extent with film by virtue of its more direct involvement in a certain tradition of literary experience. The Self-Portrait

I borrow the idea of self-portraiture from Michel Beaujour’s fine book, Miroirs d’encre.²⁷ He uses this word, which hardly satisfies him, to delimit a distinct genre, or at least a mode of discourse, that is irreducible to the painted self-portrait, even if it shares a general framework with the latter;²⁸ and it is profoundly different from autobiography, if one accepts the negative definition given it by Philippe Lejeune in his comments on Montaigne’s Essays. Self-portraiture differs from autobiography first by the absence of any sustained narrative. Narration is subordinate to the logical deployment of an improvised assemblage of elements sorted into an array of what one may term “thematic” headings. Self-portraiture is thus nearer to analogy, metaphor, and the poetic than it is to narrative: it “attempts to cohere via a system of referrals, repetitions, superimpositions, and correspondences between equivalent and interchangeable elements, such that it is principally manifest through discontinuity, anachronistic juxtaposition, montage.” Where autobiography is defined by temporal closure, self-portraiture appears as an infinite totality, where nothing is given in advance, since its author announces, “I will not tell you what I have done, but I will tell you who I am.” The self-portraitist starts from a question that evinces an absence to oneself, and to which anything

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may eventually answer; where the autobiographer is constrained to a limited plenitude that ties him to the course of a particular life, the self-portraitist goes directly from dearth to excess, without knowing exactly where she is going or what he is doing. But this totality, this tidal swell of everything and anything, in bits, in fragments, this method that each seeks to invent and employ to contain their memories and fantasies, this dialectic of memory and imagination, is not arbitrary or haphazard; rather, Beaujour tells us – and this is the central idea of his book – it is a variation on the procedures of classical rhetoric, turned to other purposes than the art of persuasion. From Saint Augustin (its point of origin) to Montaigne (its real birthplace) and Leiris (its perfection in the Modern era), the structure and rationale of the self-portrait evolves through the works of such diverse writings as those of Jérôme Cardan, Nietzsche, Jacques Borel, Barrès, Rousseau, Roger Laporte, Malraux, and Butor. One may briefly define the self-portrait by its five major characteristics: First, the self-portrait is born of idleness, of withdrawal, it is “the sign of writing’s culpability in a culture where all is not well in rhetoric.” To writing as action, intervention, and dialogue, it opposes writing as inaction, digression, and monologue. It is a solitary flight of rhetoric, whose heritage it subverts. Second, the subject in self-portraiture is of an encyclopedic nature. It traverses (literally and figuratively) the “places,” or loci, of which culture and thus the self-portrait itself are made up. It is heir to the Medieval Speculum and to all the topoi of rhethorical mnemotechnics. These topoi consist of a set of loci through which images pass. The locus is permanent, the images come and go. Self-portraiture, which restricts the social effect of rhetorical mnemotechnics to private space, is first “an imaginary stroll along a system of loci, storehouses of memoryimages.”²⁹ Third, the self-portraitist is the hero of the book posited as absolute in a quest for memory and self. The book thus becomes at once utopian (though without closure), corporeal (transforming the writer’s body into a glorious body by treating the body of work in which it participates), and sepulchral – a tomb the writer constructs so as to know and

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transfigure death. Exemplary models are Socrates and Christ, captured in the moment of their death. Fourth, the self-portrait, governed by that which is most personal, thus becomes the book of the impersonal. It transforms the particular into the general, oscillates between anthropology and thanatography. It is akin to spiritual exercises and to religious meditations, of which the Cartesian Meditations are the secular counterpart. But self-portraiture is ensured neither by God nor by one’s own thought. Not quite and yet more than the Cartesian cogito, it hangs in the tension between I think and I am: it is “a Cogito of disjointed moments.” Fifth, and finally, the self-portrait is “transhistorical.” From the moment it appears, on the ruins of oral culture, it remains an unfailing demand and sign of the culture of typography and libraries. It varies even as it repeats and reproduces itself, though its history, from the Renaissance onward, closely follows the fluctuations of the evolving modern subject. One of the problems of this scholarly and somewhat vertiginous study resides in recognizing these fluctuations while articulating the constitutive elements of a consistent model. Without a doubt, selfportraiture develops with absolute clarity during the Renaissance, goes into decline through the long stretch of neoclassicism, and begins to make an uneven comeback in the late eighteenth century. It then intersects somewhat with autobiography (which, according to Lejeune, begins its development at this time) and becomes one element in the vague though powerful notion of autobiographical space. From the moment any work is enlightened from within, as it were, by this “new sign of value,” which Lacan identified so judiciously in what he called the “little papers” – les petits papiers: letters, diaries, notebooks, etc.³⁰ – it acquires the dual status given it by romantic-positivist criticism and then by modern criticism. It first becomes the mirror of a life that one can recompose, even if the author hasn’t done so, and thus swings towards autobiography (biography is the genre that answered the critics’ obsession); the work also becomes the organic and automatic expression of a subjectivity that is always more or less in search of its own nature, even if it manifests the power of the impersonal, of literature as such (in the sense given by Valéry and Blanchot). One could

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even say that, from a certain point in time, and obviously to varying degrees, there has been a self-portrait in every work, and that it is upon this basis that writers have by degrees approached the self-portrait as a work. Which introduces a new fluctuation, to the extent that either an entire oeuvre explicitly shifts towards self-portraiture (Leiris and Roger Laporte are such relatively rare cases) or that a single work (or two, or three), but an essential work, attests to the importance for the writer of this formal rapport with oneself (Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur solitaire, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, Malraux’s Le Miroir des Limbes, and Barthes’ Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, and so on).³¹ Rationale

The concerns of this book can obviously contribute to the interpretative analyses likely to be made of subjective cinema and autobiography. It is clear that, where autobiography in cinema is lacking, fractured, transformed, where, for all the reasons that we’ve seen, it foils and consumes itself, it is largely to the benefit of a process that, directly or indirectly, reactivates the literary self-portrait (even if its transposition to film obviously changes many things). The poetic treatment of autobiographical material in Brakhage, his organization of the material and spiritual elements of his universe through a series of figures that he assembles in a process of shock and derivation seemingly governed by analogical principles, all this comprises a kind of self-portrait (even if the term only half applies, due to the subject’s obviously elliptical nature). At the other extreme, the same process is at work in the partial, semi-fictional, and superimposed autobiographies that Fellini constructs (in a kind of reverse archaeology, piling up layers that the critic-cum-archaeologist must excavate in his stead, as in Fellini, Roma). In this perspective, Nostalgia presents an autobiography consumed and reduced to a minimalist self-portrait, to a negative trace, to ash. For reasons that must now be defined, it is video, video art, that would seem to come closest to the transformation of rhetorical tradition in the modern space of subjectivity. But one must understand “video” to be set off in quotes. This is a special situation that will have prevailed only for the limited time in which the two image regimes

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face off – “Cain and Abel, Cinema and Video,” Godard would say – each influencing and displacing the other until, eventually, one way or another, they become one. There are at least five reasons why video seems more suited to selfportraiture than film. None of these reasons is in itself absolute, yet together they contribute to changing the overall configuration, like the passage from quantity to quality in physics. The first is the constant presence of the image, instantaneously and continually there, like reality’s ceaseless double. Bill Viola explained how, whenever he sets out to work, the image is already present: “It’s humming, it’s going.” The recording merely becomes a second decision, originating from an immersion in “real time,” forming a kind of second body.³² Here is a situation that brings us much closer to language than does film. One should certainly not push the analogy too far or have it say what it hardly intends to say; yet the images one chooses are nonetheless formed upon a constant base that is one of the subtlest equivalents to that verbal foundation upon which all our captivating phrases are formed. The second reason derives closely from the first: in authoring video, one can more easily introduce one’s body directly into the image. One simply enters a pre-existing frame, an image that can record as long as desired or as the length of tape allows. It is easier to have private access to one’s own image, to connect with the intimacy of one’s own gaze: this often gives the image a quality of being, a presence-absence that is hard to reproduce elsewhere. Finally, the camera-gaze seems more natural on video. Even the most austere or intimist video art is referred, directly or not, to the apparatus of television, as evinced in the conditions of both recording and consumer reception. Clearly, a gaze directed at the camera in a film continues to be felt (somewhat) like a transgression, an extreme transition, while the same gesture seems natural, almost expected, on video (despite all the overlap increasingly blurring the difference). The third reason rests with the video image itself, which one can process and transform much more easily, both while recording (if only slightly, and quite privately) and in post-production (Thierry Kuntzel has produced gripping effects from the combination of the two stages,

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treating the light in black and white during the shoot in view of further processing afterwards). By its nature, then, the video image can more directly translate one’s visual impressions (as if more direct than perception itself), motions of the body (as if beyond its surface), and processes of thought (as if beyond its rationalizations). These qualities, which would seem to allow the video image to transform any analogical reproduction, compensate for much of the tension that Elisabeth Bruss identifies between the expression of subjectivity and the objectivization of reality. Since the image is less strictly dependent on documentary truth (what Pascal Bonitzer calls the film image’s “grain of reality”), it won’t be as compelled a priori to disburden itself of it in order to render the subject’s expressive, and excessive, intention (as in the great experimental films, like those of Brakhage or Mekas). The transgression connected with any personal vision is paradoxically more supple and more natural in video than it is in film because the image is by nature more artificial. Here, too, one can express the difference in terms of apparatus: film remains the place where every image is one of a kind, unique, even if there are an infinite number of them; television is the place where one image can always be substituted for another. Such are the conditions that both prescribe and authorize the image in video art to be all the more singular. We have seen how the self-portrait transforms the givens of classical rhetoric through a general process of subjectivization, distortion, and digression. In particular, it transforms the system of topics, the encyclopedic and dialectic topoi that govern the operation of memory and invention, the generative relationships between ground and image. If, in our contemporary world, the “mass media” fulfill the positive functions once provided by classical rhetoric,³³ if television, especially, now has the global function of regulating invention and memory, the self-portrait naturally becomes the most subjective expression of video art’s specific resistance to television (“contre, tout contre”).³⁴ With the universalization of television (of both its content and its apparatus), the self-portrait embodies the need for a reversal at once utopian and catastrophic: it is the form and the force by which a lone individual reinvents the tentacular and restrictive forms of the universal within the framework of his or her own life. If “self-portrait’s original sin” is to

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“pervert the acts of exchange, communication, and persuasion, while also denouncing this perversion,”³⁵ then such, indeed, is the fourth reason lending self-portraiture its rationale. Fifth, and finally, it seems clear that the coupling of the electronic image and computerized systems is in the process of establishing (via videodisks and databases) a kind of absolute and ultimate version of the artificial memory that classical rhetoric had patiently developed. All the conditions seem to be in place to give rise, on the frontier between video art and the “new images” that will likely take its place, to a new and yet ancient form of the self-portrait. It had first developed in the wake of the shock wave triggered by the introduction of the printed book; we now see it come into its own among the arts of the image as they gain both in universality and in singularity, saturating in some sense every possible vector of individuation, or of what one should still perhaps call subjectivity. Trajectories

“Ego” is one of the words Jean-Paul Fargier proposes to Paik in his Arche de Nam June; Paik answers: “It’s our biggest problem, it’s Stendhal’s problem.” Video inherits the problem from film and endows it with a terrible lightness and a new weight. As soon as a body is transformed, its form lightening, nearly vanishing altogether, the question “who am I?” makes a dual comeback: a few months ago, while waiting for the train in the subway, the “Tube,” one could read the question as it captioned the development of a character who changed before our eyes. In it, one eventually recognized a great transformer par excellence, Salvador Dali in person. Paik knew all this, he who first detached the body from its envelope. But he preferred to leave the question hanging, to remain aloof, elliptical, and ethereal. He appeared in his tapes so as to engage in some pure performance actions; he composed these with friends; through them, mingling among them, he stages himself, as in Allen and Allan’s Complaint, where he drags his microphone across a rock, interviews Ginsberg and Kaprow, and affords a laugh when Kaprow walks on water (it’s so easy with video). All this in voice-over, or in short cutaway shots, to show that he is there and that he knows what it is all about (including the fact that anyone can take themselves

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for Christ), but especially to avoid giving in to the weight of that gargantuan problem to which he gives the name “Stendhal.” Jean-André Fieschi, Vito Acconci, Thierry Kuntzel, Juan Downey, Jacques-Louis Nyst, Marcel Odenbach, Bill Viola. The first question regarding the trajectory that I trace through a collection of works concerns their choice. They appeared to me, each in itself, but especially together, the one related to the other, to be especially representative of an indeterminate though powerful genre, of which they define the various postures, in various cultural spaces. Which is not to say – far from it – that they stand alone. Nor that other works have not contributed to enriching a field, which, by definition, is impossible to enclose (and which I don’t pretend to have fully covered). In the United States, in addition to Downey, Acconci, and Viola, one could easily add the names of Joan Jonas, Pier Marton, Doug Hall (not to mention Joan Logue who, after years of exploring portraiture, intends to turn to herself and indeed to engage the self-portrait). In Germany (and in Austria), where the tradition of performance has determined many choices since the beginning of video art, the works of Ulrike Rosenbach, Klaus von Bruch, Rebecca Horn, Valie Export, and, more recently, Gerd Belz would easily join those of Marcel Odenbach. In Canada, the work of Colin Campbell, despite his increasingly forthright inclination towards fiction, would also contribute to such a perspective. In Japan, Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa, with their admirable Video Letter, invent both a “real” exchange of letters and a subtle, minimal, and troubling self-portrait à deux. Obviously, all this adds up to many pieces of work, to which we can add the partial, though significant, gestures that help accentuate the general sense of video art’s natural tendency towards self-portraiture (I am thinking in particular of intense moments of text or/and image in Gary Hill’s work: for instance, in his two last installations, Crux and In Situ, and his last tape, Incidence of Catastrophe, which together compose a fantastic reprise of the crucified body become language-body and television-body). The seven works I selected for discussion (representing four countries, or five, counting the Chilean connection in Downey’s work) hale from different horizons, and the form self-portraiture takes in their work varies considerably. Fieschi’s and Acconci’s endeavours, for instance, are relatively similar in their adoption of a homogeneous

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form that developed over a period several years: thus, Fieschi’s Les Nouveaux Mystères de New York, shot between 976 and 98, and a series of tapes Acconci produced between 97 and 977 may both be considered self-portraits. With Nyst, Viola, and Oldenbach, on the other hand, an entire production evolves and shifts towards a more global yet more tenuous form of the self-portrait that is difficult to isolate in any particular tape. One must further distinguish between the two making up the first group. For the moment, Les Nouveaux Mystères remains a unique production in the development of Fieschi’s work. First a film critic, then a director of films on art and of television programs on cinema and theatre, Fieschi may, thanks to this experiment, one day become a new kind of filmmaker. Acconci, first a poet, then a “performer” and independent filmmaker, conceived an impressive number of tapes in a few short years; among them, The Red Tapes, nearly a complete self-portrait in itself, stands as a masterpiece, and a pause after which Acconci drops video (until when?) in favour of sculpture, installation, and environmental works. As for the second group, Nyst shot a few films before turning to video; Odenbach, who began with performance, pursues a career in painting and drawing alongside his video and installations; Downey had long been a filmmaker specializing in anthropological documentaries before taking up video; Viola, considered perhaps the foremost video artist, devoted himself exclusively to the medium from the start; and Thierry Kuntzel took an unexpected route, from film theory to video via a quick jaunt through conceptual art. These works haven’t all had the same degree of exposure (at least in France). Those of Kuntzel, Fieschi, and Viola have been described and commented upon to some extent; less so those of Odenbach and Nyst; Acconci and Downey are practically unknown in France. In any case, I couldn’t count on the reader’s familiarity with their work (and have therefore included some bibliographic references). This is the second issue with which I have had to deal. A third difficulty resides in the relationship between the singularity of the work and the generality in which it participates. No form, in its particular instances, deviates as much from its model as self-portraiture. But while each work fulfills the contract in its particular way, they all conform to a global conception that helps bring them together.

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For these three reasons, then, I was caught between two difficult choices: () either engage in the description of each work, if only to present it, and point out what leads it to the self-portrait or (2) give only secondary attention to the works themselves and go straight to the subject, to the articulated positions and cultural forms that lend coherence to video self-portraiture. Either approach seemed unworkable to me; I therefore shuttled between the two, convinced that one could not really avoid the difficulty in a chapter of this type. Self-portraiture presents the added difficulty that any distinction in levels of discourse appears spurious since its vocation of being everything, interlaced and disorderly (as in Montaigne and Leiris), can only mix them up. The strength of self-portraiture in video, as in its written form, lies, says Fieschi, in knowing how to hold on to “the trace of things at the moment when they occurred.” First Movement

In the beginning is the body. The visible body. Yet also a kind of inner body, whose impetus the work translates and of which the visible body is an emanation. Both are made possible through a roaming, available body. The body Blanchot calls désœuvré, “idle” or “abandoned.” To begin with, there’s Jean-André Fieschi’s somewhat magical camera, oft described by Fieschi and others: his paluche.³⁶ Held in hand rather than against the eye, it frees a body unknown to itself: “What I saw in the frame was not what my own human eyes saw, but what was seen by the eye at my fingertips, producing a very strange bifurcation of the image, the curious impression of not being before the image, but being traversed by it.”³⁷ This first impression is due to the fact that handling the paluche dismantles all the determining codes that have governed the construction of the image since the invention of cinema, and it does so quite naturally; that is, without having to make an effort or produce an effect. The impression becomes clearer when the body of the one filming appears in the image (the insert of the dilated eye, for instance, or the hand writing in “Enfances, une,” or the first, lengthy shot of the third episode in the Nouveaux mystères de New York – “La fée des images” – where Fieschi films himself in a close shot, advancing down a street that streams by; he would not appear to be filming

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since we never see the camera, but we can tell from the tension in his body, walking while framing itself, that he’s got the paluche in hand). The peculiar doubling that reveals the filmmaker’s body at work as already inscribed in the flow of what’s filmed produces a dissolution of the mirror effect that invariably arises in some sense when one passes from one side of the camera to the other. Without it, says Fieschi, there would be no image. The dividing line between the one who sees and the one who sees himself is thus not really crossed – that would be impossible – but disjointed, dispersed, disintegrated. Like the tension between expression and description that so preoccupied Elisabeth Bruss, it gives way to the impulse of a manifold vision that proceeds from no assured master-eye, because the eye is everywhere, at every point of a body that refracts the outside (the “real”) that it experiences and in which it is itself immersed. Such a process is possible because light is “alive,” because the created image appears at once natural and supernatural: it changes with the extraordinary sensibility of a tube as likely to capture very low intensities as to produce high contrasts. Before any thought or any calculation, light becomes an instinct of the body. Snug within the image, this body films “on impulse,” in the open; it accepts the discovery of the oncoming image, and itself becomes a returning image. Fieschi has told the whole story well enough, several times. It arises from disillusionment and a growing scepticism regarding the state of sound and image, of film in the era of mass communications and television. Then comes his utter astonishment before the object, the possibility of an image (“I had a kind of flash. Suddenly imagining a thousand possible films”). Then begins a physical and technical learning process, the baby steps of experimentation (“how to move while filming, how to eat while filming, how to write while filming”). Finally, in a single afternoon, the machine-man and the child reborn in him shoot four sequence-length shots that become, virtually unaltered, four of the six first shots of a work still unknown to him: a celluloid toddler who falls from a waggon into a stairwell; a manuscript text in a notebook, written by his companion of the moment,

Fig. 1.10 (facing page) (Enfances, une), 1977

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Jean-André Fieschi, Les Nouveaux Mystères de New York

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surrounded by photos, stills from silent films, images of women’s suffering; the “speaking shadow,” or bouche d’ombre, an insert after some whirling shots, where Fieschi, paluche in one hand, microphone in the other, films and reads a fragment of text in one breath, on Freud, Caligari, Vienna, and sleepwalkers; a house caught by chance while making adjustments in his window and in which he sees the house from Nosferatu. He shows these shots to Claude Ollier, who by chance was passing by that afternoon and whom he films at once, to listen to him talk about it with him, thus producing the seventh shot for his tape. Of the four sequences, Fieschi would later say: “I had the impression that they sprang up naturally, and from the body.” Though quite different, Acconci’s work resonates with similar intensity. Except for The Red Tapes, the thirty-three tapes he shoots between 97 and 974 (seventeen in 972 alone) are practically all constructed along the same pattern: a single, usually fixed frame, subject to very slight movement.³⁸ Acconci is nearly always represented in these tapes: from the back, face forward, sitting, standing, lying down, alone or with someone, facing a monitor or projection screen, somewhat fragmentary, once even reduced to a detail (his gaping mouth). He’s sometimes silent, or murmuring, though he’s usually speaking to an imaginary woman or directly to the spectator. The text is generally focused on the situation, the (physical) action, the current arrangement, though it sometimes extends towards the autobiographical or refers to times, places, events, contexts. The black-and-white image is always uniformly grey, sad, soiled. The tapes are repetitive and are all very long in relation to what’s going on; their length generally seems predetermined by the actual length of the tape – twenty, thirty, or sixty minutes. Nothing is edited. Everything is in real time, in closed circuit. Rosalind Krauss’s well-known text, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” was based in part on two of his tapes:³⁹ Centers, in which Acconci endeavours to keep his finger pointed towards the centre of the image, and Recording Studio from Air Time, in which, conversing with his own image, Acconci turns the monitor into a pure mirror. He is rooted in the eternal present of a time closed upon itself, without reciprocity or reflexivity or access to anything but reflections of his own image, echoes of his own voice. He is the hero or exemplary victim

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of the (Lacanian) imagination. Touched then, to its very core, video would seem to be a purely psychological medium, while painting and film are spared such capture by the materiality of their apparatus. The argument is a strong one, and it touches on something profound in the works that Krauss deals with, especially those of Acconci. Still, there is something forced in it as well. Could we not perhaps say that video’s material apparatus touches the imaginary structure underlying the cinematic apparatus, veiled by other, archaic and secondary identifications and by the illusions of differed time? One might also reconsider what Krauss dismisses too quickly: the finger pointing to the centre of the screen is also pointing to another, to the spectator; and the reflection of himself that Acconci contemplates is also the vehicle for a discourse addressed to a woman. Another, exterior, and symbolic instance, then, supports this imaginary position and exaggerated narcissism as it seeks to situate and get a handle on itself. Take Home Movies. Acconci, facing a slide show, has his back to us: he projects images of his work, and thus again of himself, of his performances, which are often excessive, aggressive, violently sexualized. We don’t know whom he’s addressing: an imaginary audience, as in the kind of cultural demonstration one finds in museums, or us, the lookers-on. Then suddenly, he leans over to the left to whisper something to a woman, establishing a relationship in which these images of him take on a completely different meaning, until he gets up and takes his third position, placing himself next to the image projected on the wall, while continuing his dual monologue. Here (as in many of his other tapes, particularly due to the impact of the text, in Pryings for instance), narcissism, first brought to a point of flat and incandescent neutrality, is reversed. The insistent, often furious materiality of the body contributes to the effect, lending an archaic dimension to an imaginary posture that aims for symbolic import. All this movement, carried forward through hours and hours of tapes over five years, becomes powerfully and clearly concentrated in The Red Tapes, where the prior narcissism is transformed: they compose Vito Acconci’s true self-portrait. The first shot shows him face on, blindfolded: only if he fails to know himself does Narcissus, beside himself, become the echo of the indescribable totality that informs him without his becoming visible either to himself or to anyone else. The self-

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portrait, says Beaujour, is less narcissistic than it is Persephonean (thus does the myth of Narcissus figure in the middle of the “Perséphone” chapter in Leiris’s Biffures); but this is also why, “if Narcissus writes, his writing is that of the self-portrait.”⁴⁰ Self-portraiture’s inky mirror is what eschews solipsistic, speechless narcissism: triumph over death through writing and resurrection. I’ll come back to this tape. But we can’t pass up this occasion to immediately show Narcissus falling into the water, the image multiplying (through the effects of digital feedback), obliterating itself in the deanamorphosized death’s head from Holbein’s The Ambassadors, such that, springing up in its right place, double among the doubles strewn along this trajectory of mirrors (in order of appearance: a museum director, a seller of mirrors, an artist, a guide, a historian of feminist art, an art historian) – though more thoroughly inscribed, divided, doctored, multiplied than any of them – is the artist’s image-body as transformed by video. Such is the beginning of Juan Downey’s The Looking Glass: an ambling ramble on mirror effects and the gazing-eye in art and culture; a vertiginously poised (fragment of) self-portrait in which the image of the one handling it flows into the mass of signs that he’s recalling to himself.⁴¹ His voice is a thread guiding us through the other voices, his body becomes a master of the baroque ceremonies attending these appearances-disappearances. Four of them, among other more elliptical ones, follow. First, Versailles’ hall of mirrors, “La Galerie des Glaces”: the face is caught in a video strip that isolates the eye or the bottom of the face, a light beats through the masks, and snow replaces the isolated body fragment. Second, the Balzar, in Paris, where Barthes, says the commentary, had his last supper before getting run over by a truck: the occasion of a doubling in the mirror-image, between the real body and its reflection, though staggered and projected, reverberating with an intense light, supported by dialogue reconstructed from a passage in Fragments d’un discours amoureux: “But I never look like that. / How do you know? ... You are the only one who can’t see yourself, except as an image ... I like to see my own eye. / For your own body you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.” Third, the Prado, with the narrator telling how, during the summer of 962, he went to the Prado every day to see Velasquez’ The Maids of Honor and would

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have an erotic experience, almost an orgasm (“I could feel my body disappearing behind the Infanta’s bright silky torso: my skin becoming brown ochre and painterly-textured”).⁴² The affect then propagates, from painting to painting, from place to place, as led by a repeated sequence in which the narrator-artist strikes with his hands to control the movement of elements. Fourth, the epilogue: Narcissus falls into the water and dies a second time; it’s the self-portraitist’s dilated eye that’s given the initial treatment, as if the fascinated gaze recoiled into itself to translate the impossibility of seeing and of seeing oneself. It is truly by drowning Narcissus in oneself that the self-portrait is constructed. So it is with the video-body. In Marcel Odenbach, again, we see an idle body, though differently, prey to an indescribable expectation.⁴³ Early on and for a long time, performance lends space, and images, to this body in search of itself; the images, emanating from a body that exists only through them, can, in the videotapes and installations (often linked), become in fact embodied. Such is the equilibrium this work maintains, as few others do, as it combines the demands of a market (an abundant, polished production, each work thoroughly finished, as if complete in itself) and the vagaries of personal impulse (the tapes borrow from each other, add up incrementally, enlarging the circle of a personal production that remains whole even in its dispersion). To view and imagine itself, the fragmented body awaits the visual form and the points of reference that will allow it not to come together in an imaginary unity but, rather, to appear within the image as a shimmering reflection. Two major postures affect this body: () wandering, ambulation, idleness, and tinkering (bricolage) and (2) the gaze that crouches within in order to spring out. Not exactly to set things in order but to make possible, visible, the exactness of disorder, an attitude at once firm and aleatory. Ensuring an interplay between the two postures is what I have elsewhere called forme-bandeau, or “strip form”⁴⁴ – a division of the space of the frame such that several shots come into play simultaneously and as many off-screen fields are created. The body, tinkering and tinkered, obsessed with its child’s play, its little stones, its puzzles, its rattles, and all these fallen fragments from who knows what combination of auto-eroticism and fetishism become transitional

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objects, ensuring passage between play and reality: the instinctivenarcissistic body thus opens to the encyclopedia of the world, becomes its mirror, its Speculum. The Nysts – Jacques-Louis and Danièle (as one may speak of “the Straubs”) – take a very similar approach in their work, but here the equilibrium between the elements is reversed. The body, at least Nyst’s own, is whole, even if it combines the affected nonchalance of a tv game-show host and the worried distraction of a lone wanderer. Yet, this body is literally disseminated and set on an infinite search with respect to itself, to the extent that it follows the lines interconnecting a number of objects and words – objects that seem both very private and yet charged with an intense fictional power, and words that attach (and detach) themselves from them, drifting according to their own logic, functioning as kernels of fictions: kernels so substantial they would also figure as objects if the practice of language did not require it to distinguish between words and things. Under such conditions is the image born, itself programmed by other images: the image the Nysts are searching for and that titles their recent tape (L’image, 987), anchored between reflection and fiction. Thus does a work come about that is “altogether simple and poetic, autobiographical perhaps, in the sense that it circulates a world (a history) whose central motivation (its origin, its end) remains a mystery.”⁴⁵ How could one better express what makes the Nysts’ work a self-portrait (and better still, that strange entity, never fully identified before, the self-portrait of a couple)? Finally, there are what I would call the apparatus-bodies: Thierry Kuntzel and Bill Viola. Why label them as such? Previous descriptions aleady expressed the ineluctable transformations of the bodies at work into video-writing devices. But we make out something else. With Kuntzel, this something has to do with the dual body his images invent and, through it, with the capacity for integrating and transforming the cinematic apparatus into video-writing. Kuntzel only appears twice in these tapes and says little or nothing about himself. Nearly all shot with a paluche in an extremely intimate and bare setting (upon which his short texts comment),⁴⁶ they outline a self-portrait that verges on self-effacement and the impersonal. In short, a Mallarmean perspective. But the two videotapes we see him in are enough to inscribe (from the body proper, so to speak) the dual image-body I am talking about

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Fig. 1.11

Thierry Kuntzel, 1–5: Nostos i , 1979; 6–8: Time Smoking a Picture, 1980.

and around which all his work revolves. First, there is the perforated and scattered body constantly being reborn and vanishing in Nostos I (his first tape), like a pure body of affect; then there is the “real” body of Time Smoking a Picture, caught in the play of a double screen and inverted sweep, of variations of light and hue, which, in a single setting (his studio-apartment), simulate an afternoon and evening in real time, when the day’s out and the sun goes down. This essentially idle body takes us into unbearable depths of the pure time that consumes the image (differently than in Nostalgia), the time, too, in which the hero (as already in Nostos I ) smokes his cigarette.⁴⁷ As for Viola, to whom I would prefer to come back later, his work generally gives one the feeling of somewhat mysterious correspondences. He has a unique way of making himself a subject while maintaining a real distance. The personal situations in which he chooses so concretely to appear are like stations in a comprehensive exploration of a medium to which he has devoted himself exclusively from the moment he picked up a camera – to the point that one has a hard time situating the subjective dimension whose compelling presence one senses nonetheless, as if a poetics were inventing its rules by adopting the phases of a new form of passion. Viola opens self-portraiture to a singular regime, at once ancient and very new, one that would be inconceivable without a belief in the cathartic virtues of technology, in its capacity to bestow a kind of visible rationale upon the most singular excesses of individuation and the irrational. Second Movement

What is striking in these self-portraits is the little autobiography they contain. Nor do they develop any consistent, chronological narrative, even in fragmentary form. It is striking, too, that all that refers to the past, to childhood, which usually accompanies a return to oneself and the search for identity, is so poorly situated and altogether indeterminate in these tapes. And some works are utterly devoid of the reference points without which the literary self-portrait, however different from autobiography, would hardly be conceivable. Nothing, then, in Viola’s work refers in the least to a time prior to the filming itself. Nor is there any reference to childhood whatsoever. And

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hardly any more in Odenbach, whose entire body of work, haunted by childhood, clearly develops, under the aegis of bricolage, as a transposition of child’s play. I can only recall one such reference to a child, very real but entirely fictional: played by an “actor,” who falls asleep on the piano in As if Memories Could Deceive Me, he then wakes, the dream over, changed into the body of Odenbach. A mysterious microexcess of fiction, echoing an excess of discretion, or simply the difficulty of recognizing oneself in images as soon as one has to figure oneself as other. That is why the handling of objects usually shows only the hands: one passes more freely from the adult body to the idea of childhood. With Nyst, in Hyaloïde, where childhood knocks so insistently at the window, it is fiction that turns it around, allegorizes it: Danièle and Jacques-Louis Nyst, in person, recall shared childhood memories (reconstructed nevertheless) but through the alibi of their characters (Thérésa and Codca). There is one “real” element – a photo of Danièle Nyst as a child eventually coupled with a little pink shovel to form a tableau of childhood fantasy (“a photograph,” says Codca, “accompanied by a legend that keeps me alive”) – whose situation is highly revealing. As Dubois remarked in his comments on the tape, nothing says this photograph is in fact one of Danièle Nyst.⁴⁸ Nor, I would add, of Thérésa (it isn’t said, though it can be inferred, as the word “photo-graphie” is twice printed on the Thérésa-Danièle shot). Whereas we don’t doubt for a moment that the photo of the woman that opens Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes is really a photograph of Barthes’ mother (as is that of La Chambre claire, hidden from us). Here, critical commentary must point it out: it sets in words that which must remain implicit, such that the image preserves its impact as a private image in the eyes of the one who, while making it public, wants to continue to feel its secret power, all the better to be released from it. Similarly, in Les nouveaux mystères de New York, the childhood that one senses so strongly in the first shots and that pervades “L’Île de la Vierge” (the second episode, mostly shot in Corsica) remains undecidable in the tape itself: nothing indicates either time or place. Fieschi says nothing about it in his text for Art Présent⁴⁹ (just the word “Corsica,” which appears in a short edited excerpt from the manuscript). It takes an outside contribution – an interview with Fargier – for the childhood scene to be clearly recognized as such, localized. This is

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probably why Fieschi has always wanted to be present at his screenings (a practice that surprised Lejeune with Marcel Hanoun and Joseph Morder), providing references himself, but extrinsically. These nuances only have interest with regard to what they teach us about the encounter between the author (and thus the spectator) and his images, and the Image. Thus Kuntzel (whose self-effacement is extreme), in the original project for Nostos II (first meant to be a videotape), tied the appearance of his childhood photos to shots of his own face, then shifted them to another scenography – Nostos ii as installation – in which he no longer appears (but in which the practised eye recognizes the same setting as that in Time Smoking a Picture.) The reference can sometimes be more explicit. At the beginning of The Red Tapes, in the middle of the big theatre, in one of the grey intervals in which the image withdraws to give way to the text, a voice murmurs these words, as if to settle an essential contract, the demise of the autobiographical pact in the self-portrait: “Like everybody else he had his story. Born in the Bronx, of Italian descent. Mother living, father dead. I stood, shaking my head in front of my grand-father’s front porch that summer. Yes, like everyone else I carried my novel within me. I put everything I had into my novel. It was bursting at the seams, from the first page to the last. I could not get at what I had. I couldn’t read the writing, even when it was on the wall. I had to close my eyes and listen. Listen. Don’t you hear it? Listen. Something’s taking over me, something’s taking over me.” And the biography fades into the margins of this mythic, illegible novel being renegotiated as themes, forms, obsessions, itineraries, networks. In one short tape, the self-portrait seems to veer towards autobiography. Juan Downey produced The Motherland a little after the death of his mother (to whom, by means of a caption, he had already related his tape on Bach). He went back home to Santiago. We see a house, and on the screen the words, “I lived in this house for 2 years.” We see a woman sitting, the mother, a fiction of the mother. Near her, like a familiar statue, an angel gives her a wing fragment that she sucks. Again, on the screen: “I was born in this bed.” The mother is lying on the bed; she spreads her legs and, assisted by an angel, gives birth to a goose. Later, the angel appears at the window, extends an arm towards the mother, gives her a crucifix that was hidden under his clothes. Later

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still, the angel is lying on the dining-room table covered in wounds, which the mother cauterizes in a pagan ritual: he has become Christ, assisted by the Virgin. In the between times, among these shots of the Christ-angel, an image presents a man whose face is concealed by a big earthenware plate decorated with the head of demon or god. He reveals himself: it is Juan Downey, the masked author, passing back from autobiography to self-portrait via the myth of origin and its avatars. But there is a second exit: the fable is interrupted from one segment to the next by the abrupt appearance of sequences of current events (the television set located in the home identifies their source [the angel turns the knobs, the goose watches]) – military parades, Pinochet hugging junta commanders. This is the second method by which autobiography favours poetic purpose over narrative: by providing memory with places, loci in which to arrange images. Third Movement

What then are these loci, these topoi, which the subject of selfportraiture is led to traverse in a movement that prompts it to grasp at all that seems to be a sign of itself, without ever attaining the certainty of identity? To what places does the self-portraitist bring this body, so visibly impulsive yet so enigmatic that one recognizes in the image both the affect imprinted on the image and the words (sometimes) accompanying it? The fundamental mnemotechnic metaphor in rhetorical tradition turns places into tablets and images into a kind of writing.⁵⁰ One may see here the origin not only of the book to come but of the imaging apparatus in photo-film-video, where video has the privilege of producing an image that is both constantly present and renewable since (in recording and in editing) one image can always be substituted for another. Following the thread leading from ancient tablets to the magic writing pad, and from the magic writing pad to the unconscious, Thierry Kuntzel saw in “filmic apparatus” the truest realization of what Freud sought to show: a material and mental space between “filmprojection” and “film-emulsion” founded on the mnemonic trace, its disappearance and remanence, its effacement and reinscription.⁵¹ The desire, the need to represent this space, is what led him towards video,

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towards what is likely the most abstract body of work in video art. This self-portrait in-negative has three poles, three loci: elements of the image apparatus conceived both as theatre of visual operations and as memory of past images; the body, which is its support; and the book, which both anticipates and reproduces the properties of the apparatus. He leafs endlessly through pages in Nostos i ; he returns, in Nostos II , where, he leafs through himself alone (like the Mallarmean book, he takes place), on one screen, then two, then three, and finally on all nine, effectively reproducing the image of himself as a book of images. There were places, then, in classical rhetoric, loci that were meant to accommodate images in order to memorize them. Such loci were usually buildings (house, palace, basilisk, cathedral, theatre), cities, or sometimes human bodies, that one traced over in one’s mind, using natural memory to construct an artificial one. Loci were of two major types: () “real” or cumulative places, meant to sustain and organize the process of memory following an architectural model (recall that no real distinction existed at the time between individual memory and collective, or encyclopedic, memory); and (2) “analytic” places, built of sequences of logical operations meant to assist in the dialectics of invention. The latter, in rhetoric’s very long history, were often reduced to the content with which these operations were meant to deal. Also, from the very beginning, connections and combinations existed between the two types. One could very roughly represent the topoi of both memory and invention as formal containers that can accommodate a culture’s cumulative knowledge, the commonplaces of society, along with the particulars of personal memory. Such, in a word, is the pattern that self-portraiture adopts, reproduces, and turns to its own purposes. To repeat: “Self-portraiture would first be an imaginary stroll along a system of loci, storehouses of memory-images.”⁵² The memory image is composite; it unfolds on several levels, following associative links that tend either to constitute these levels, as so many autonomous strata or identifiable loci, or to pass from one to the other in an unpredictable and constant movement. The path leading from memory to invention is circular, the circles doubling up and inscribing themselves into each other, without coinciding; their progression isn’t progress so much as it is a controlled drift. Informed by its subject’s image-hauntings, including even the forms objectified

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through cultural prefabrication, self-portraiture builds upon its own self-revolutions, offering the one who orchestrates the play a detached representation of his or her virtual being, while emphasizing everything that helps it along, all the components of the apparatus, the instruments of invention. This circulation from one locus to another, through the images that sustain them, is what makes self-portraits so similar to each other, relative to all the genres they exclude: it is also what makes them so perfectly singular, impervious to reduction and, among themselves, to comparison. Juan Downey’s The Looking Glass begins with the following shots: pure digital feedback, with no image; the same feedback accompanying three motifs from The Maids of Honor (the man at the back, the infanta, the female dwarf); the Narcissus sequence with the interpolated death’s head from The Ambassadors, ending with a movement that leads from Narcissus drowned to the naked child playing on the rocky beach where the scene takes place — a title appears: “mirrors Presented By”; and the series of six presenters, each marked by a particular video effect (revolving image, fragmentation, etc.). Several loci or themes emerge: the video-apparatus; painting; the museum; the mirror; mythology; and the locus of childhood, seemingly divided between the commonplace of psychoanalysis connected with the mirror child on one side, and, on the other, the plain body of the child at play, prior to all other loci, the very place itself. To explore this child-space in Downey, we must tie this image with the one from The Motherland, already mentioned: the real birthplace and childhood home, which is immediately overtaken by myth (goose-child, Christ-angel), one of the driving themes in Downey’s poetics. One doesn’t look over a self-portrait, one wanders through it. More than anyone else, Downey transforms this wandering into vertigo – a baroque vertigo already at work in the long (incomplete) series of films and tapes brought together under the title Video Trans America. But it reaches an extreme in the The Thinking Eye series (of which The Looking Glass was the first instalment, with four of the planned thirteen completed). Why this prearrangement, which might never be carried through? Because the self-portrait may need to imagine a totality, of an encyclopedic and exuberant nature, to temper the actual, intimate,

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and profound exuberance that runs through each tape, constantly at play from one place to another, assigning baffled spectators the two antagonistic positions the speaker projects: all-seeing God, source and effect of every gaze; and his tortured, Christ-like embodiment. “Culture as an Instrument of Active Thought”: such is the subtitle given to this “Thinking Eye” (stolen from Klee). Cultural topoi, culled from art history, semiotics, communications systems, mythology and “mythologies” (in Barthes’ sense), deliriously following (through quotation and other devices) the magnetized needle that shuttles them between various poles, all under the purview of a paranoid-narcissistic eye: the eye that would be Juan Downey’s, did he not know that the eye was as much (or more) the object of thought as (than) the agent of its own and had it not, by dint of trying to see itself, long-since become impersonal. Marcel Odenbach’s encyclopedic approach follows a similar pattern in a minor key. His sure but light-footed vertigo is a perverse version of Austro-German (Musilian) irony, which one could oppose to the logical, South-American baroque of a Borges or a Ruiz. Consider the two sequences devoted to Versailles in The Looking Glass and in the video-installation Dans la vision périphérique du témoin. In the first, Downey, leading the game, shot from the front and clapping his hands, delves into the endless shimmering hall of mirrors, multiplying shots, and proliferating doubles. In the second, Odenbach uses strip form to divide the space leading to the hall of mirrors while jogging along the Tuileries, his back turned to us; he then mixes past and present by parading an array of historical and contemporary figures, their backs to the camera, through the strip (which reveals a part of the decor that had been hidden in the previous shot). Four major loci of culture are conveyed in Odenbach’s images, each of which provides discrete possibilities for citation and reprise (he now admits to taking a liking to reconstructing his own citations): painting (where Goya is the reigning master); architecture (which leads him from Versailles to neo-baroque German chateaux, from the old to the new); photography, as encyclopedia of the world (he makes little use of it); film (Hitchcock, first of all, and De Palma, picking up from

Fig. 1.12 (facing page)

Juan Downey, The Looking Glass, 1982.

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him, relying on both of them to construct his machinery of the gaze, but also any movie to speak of, from current events to Westerns, from war movies to skin flicks). And then tv, with its singular capacity for reproducing all the other founts of culture, including cinema, which was already reproducing them. But it is through music that Odenbach best expresses his taste for cultural patchwork; the more pliable medium can be treated either with the images from which it originates or in its own right (see the beginning of Vorurteile, its Hollywoodian score and big Brazilian sound). It is through this polymorphic material that history becomes his space, German history in particular – romanticism, Nazism, terrorism. With all this, Odenbach often mixes images of everyday life, whether produced for a particular project or gathered over the years (an informal diary from which he draws as from a personal data bank). And, in the elliptical fashion I’ve described, the body serves as a junction between these two universes of composite images. With an instinctive flexibility – it is Odenbach’s most distinct quality, his artistic quality – he practises an art of admixture that ensures in each work and from one piece to another a constant traffic between these three levels. Manifest, on the one hand, is an acute awareness of formal dispositions and, on the other, a surrender to sensations to emotion. Thus does the most sinuous rhetoric fashion an exemplary self-portrait, too subtle ever to have us believe the portrait to be that of too real a subject. A concoction that would bear everything about oneself: that is what Vito Acconci strives for in a single, 40-minute black-and-white tape that crowns four years’ accumulation of sketches, even while immediately becoming disillusioned with the imaginary unity of this self and effecting such a complete dislocation that the first utterances suggest he’s taking himself at face value. I ... I have a statement to make. Yes, I want to say something for myself. For me, there’s no room for feelings. I’ve entered another

Fig. 1.13 (facing page)

Marcel Odenbach, 1–2: Als könnte es auch mir an den Kragen

gehen, 1983; 3, 5: Der Widerspruch der Erinerrungen, 1982; 4, 6–9: Vorurteile, 1984; 10: Dans la vision périphérique du témoin, 1987.

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room. For now, I have the room for form. No, no, cut, cut, cut, cut ... Right, right. Begin again. Begin again. Let’s say ... let’s say that the revolution had failed. Okay. The revolution had failed. Everybody. Long live the Revolution – Long live the Revolution! No, no, cut. Okay. Ready. Start here. Start here. That’s him – that’s Acconci. But you know that, of course you know that. So it doesn’t matter whether or not you look at him straight in the eye, it doesn’t matter when or where I turn his head. These words are uttered over a close-up of Acconci, who is blindfolded, and come just before the few autobiographical phrases quoted previously. Then the dislocation begins. It touches the body in different settings, animated by ceaseless, furious, and sometimes fragmentary movement, disconcertingly lodging itself into the image, as if a stranger to it. But it is especially through voice (his voice or voices) that this body sporadically enters another space, a plurality of fragmented spaces. A constant recitation and outpouring of text, proffered in blocks of varied length, matched either to image-sets or to bands of uniform grey that separate and individualize them at regular intervals. Two major principles organize this extensive material. One is the plurality of tones (neutral voices, cries, whispers, etc.) and of speakers (“I,” “they”) – a plurality that generates a series of fictions. Triggered and released, floating in vaguely defined spaces, they range from lovers’ confessions to news bulletins, from private melodrama to science fiction, from the present to the past, from actual to virtual, circulating in general uncertainty through an array of character paradigms. The other principle is the distribution of series, lists, programs, enumerations, and paradigms of varied nature and extent (note that the second principle overlaps the first). Image and text rarely match but sometimes do so forcefully. The text consists of proper nouns (of people, geographic places, etc.), numbers, letters, colours, temperature readings, conjugations, verb forms, common nouns, even onomatopoeia. Images consist

Fig. 1.14 (facing page)

Vito Acconci, The Red Tapes, 1976–1977.

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rather of objects: car ads, playing cards, maps, photos (of people, of landscapes), small objects (figurines, both animal and human, buttons, washers, marbles, puzzle pieces). The sequence detailing a number of these small objects exemplifies the interlacing that takes place and what it underlies. Each set is affected by the text of one or more letters, and the camera’s movement from one series to another plays out an essential, imaginary alphabet in which Acconci’s voice proposes the statement: “Pull myself together.” But a second voice intervenes (its voice transformed to a whisper), itemizing a fictional geography that is then transformed into real geography: places and states of the us , soon resonating with historical and political connotations. Throughout The Red Tapes, Acconci explores variations on the locus of the United States (in much the same way that Odenbach did with Germany): furiously, from every angle – history, geography, great figures, literature, film, mythologies. America becomes a cultural parade in seven acts, and the tape an erratic, disintegrated, existential version of Michel Butor’s Mobile. And, lest we forget, the Red Tapes fragment spewing forth a tv program. And the ego, searching for itself with a thirst for recognition, disappearing, in its own eyes, in the mass of interconnected loci through which it is programmed, points of dispersion that endlessly compose and recompose the imaginary mass of his tortured body. There are more focused ways of reflecting on oneself. In Fieschi, two major loci – childhood and cinema – spawn others (women, psychoanalysis, which spawn others still, and so on). In Les Nouveaux Mystères de New York, deployed in its very title, something unique is produced between childhood and film: a return to cinema’s own childhood, to silent film, serials, the age of open, innocent images, still new. But, as Fieschi explains with wonderful precision, this return was such because, as early as in his own late childhood and then in adolescence, he experienced movies as “a search for prior images,” of the bodies and landscapes of his native Corsica, “perhaps,” he adds, “even for the origin of images.”⁵³ The enveloping concern obviously resides in this heartbeat between childhood and film, which the paluche transforms into a trembling of the body, a shimmer of black and white, and attempts to put its finger-cum-eye on that improbable moment when the image perches still on the threshold of hallucination. That is what

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he is attempting to grasp in supreme moments of the cinematic gaze, the anticipation and response of his dilated eye and its concentrated mix of wonderment and terror. Fieschi cites these moments, even as he seeks by his own means to reproduce them. Thus the famous exchange of looks between Nosferatu and Nina in Murnau’s film, by which the vampire answers the woman’s somnambulist premonition in a purely imaginary space. And Vampyr’s errant, nonassignable gaze, which in the end adopts the only possible point of view: the point of view of one long-dead, of Death itself, conjuring the space of childhood terrors. Dreyer’s voice, heard over the third sequence (a trajectory over film stills and text) tells of the work’s debt to cinema, to which it returns so as to progress, by way of culture’s “nostalgic appropriation of Paradise,” towards archaic childhood. Such a rapport with cinema as locus of oneself is a wholly European, German, and especially French (or Belgian) affair. We can see it in condensed form in Kuntzel. From Nostos I to Nostos II , one witnesses the reinscription into the video-body of one of the most cruel delineations of the mix of pleasure and destruction attached to the imaginative capacities of cinematic apparatus: Max Ophuls’ Letter from an Unknown Woman. In the video, the hero – Kuntzel himself, decomposed and recomposed – stands near the window of the running train, like the romantic couple in the fairground train of Ophuls’ film. In the installation, the film’s soundtrack functions directly as cultural double and as vehicle for the fiction. The film begins with the heroine starting the letter that announces her coming death, and it ends (almost) with the death that interrupts the letter, thus becoming the realization of that death. This beginning and this end of the letter, and its exacerbated romanticism, coincides with the unfolding of the nine tapes; the score also serves to punctuate the film, delimiting four acts in which certain motifs are reinscribed in a kind of revisitation. Thanks to the paluche and the images circulating between the nine screens, the video actualizes the effects of unconscious memory, or the “magic writing pad” effect, of the cinematic-apparatus (for this purpose, Kuntzel used a misconfigured camera, which, at the slightest movement, doubled every captured form with a smoky white trace, producing an embodied reflection of the process of memory). The strongest moment, along with the treatment of the book already discussed, comes with the long

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sequence in which family and childhood photos stream endlessly through a window frame that itself seems like a memory-screen: they accumulate, one atop another, from one monitor to the next, forming a dual mass, each image eventually becoming the ghost of the next. Another film, and again a photograph, but this time one taken from the film itself, serves as a starting point for Hyaloïde and hastens the appearance of the childhood photo. It’s the photograph of Lucy Holwood, Jonathan Harker’s fiancée, whom Van Helsing is observing in Terence Fisher’s Horror of Dracula, the first major remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu. In the Nysts’ work (in which other films play a similar role – as Poltergeist does in his Thérésa Plane) things are fundamentally different: they are watching the movie on television, which, as in Odenbach, becomes cinema’s provider, just as it serves the intense encounter that dominates with Fieschi and Kuntzel; it reappropriates its central and natural function in the formation of video self-portraiture. As mentioned previously, the Nysts’ work is much more open, playful, freely exploring a variety of places that proliferate with a kind of enthusiasm that recalls the shuffling of levels we observed in Downey, though the process is more intimate, as in Odenbach, and still more explicit. To hint at its operation at a particularly interesting level, one may bring attention to the series of words strung through the images (inscribing and writing themselves into the image) around the idea of writing. They become points of direct anchorage and reference in a video informed by a taste for speech and plays of language; they also testify, on a lighter note, to self-portraiture’s attachment to the kind of jumbled series that vaguely recall the encyclopedic taxonomies of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Here then, not counting the words that reappear twice on different images, is a dizzying play of associative games haunted by the rhetorical figures crowded around the twin mainstays of metaphor and metonymy: écho graphie, vidéo graphie, hagio graphie, photo graphie, ortho graphie, choré graphie, mécano graphie, calli graphie, caco graphie, crypto graphie, icono graphie, historio graphie, radio graphie, hydro graphie, mono graphie, cristallo graphie, micro graphie.

Fig. 1.15 (facing page)

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Danièle and Jacques-Louis Nyst, Hyaloïde, 1985.

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Thierry Kuntzel, 1–6: Nostos ii (installation), 1984; 7–8: Nostos i , 1979.

One will have noticed the extent to which most of these endeavours are infused with photography: childhood photos, with Kuntzel and Nyst; film stills, with Nyst and Fieschi; photos from the world encyclopedia, with Odenbach and Acconci. The photograph suspends time, reduces film to a still, and the videotape to its basic element. Whatever it represents, it is the exemplary image, at once document, trace, and enigma. It testifies at once to the world’s dispersion and to the division of time. It is by definition the first image (both historically and materially); all the more naturally does it become the last, the remainder of a global apparatus that it figures, by bringing about a reduction that also testifies to its capacity for inscribing separation and death. This is manifest in Bill Viola’s videotape The Space between the Teeth. A section of space, a seated man, Viola himself. He looks at us for a time, then suddenly screams. Several times. The camera backs up, revealing an interminable corridor. It finally stops. The man cries out; and each scream, at regular intervals, triggers the camera’s halting, though dizzying, advance, until it is close enough to capture the space between the man’s teeth. After each advance, the camera recoils into the corridor, positioning itself closer and closer to the man. But each scream, on the conclusion of each advance, after the camera has come up against the man’s teeth, introduces a slight disjunction, like a rhythmic hiccup, composed first of one or two blank images. The more we approach the man, the greater the disjunction. A setting quickly appears within this sporadically widening space: a kitchen, a little breakfast table. Soon, the time devoted to each of the two spaces is reversed, as each shot from the camera in the hall, now up against the face, becomes very short, while in the kitchen, time passes, Viola comes and goes, a faucet drips. The shot persists. We go back to the hallway: the camera is back in its original position, at the end of the hall; but the image is now black and white, slightly tilted against a matte, nondescript colour background. We hear a scream, the camera zooms out, the image of the hallway collapses: it’s a Polaroid, tiny, that falls into the sea. The shot persists until a wave picks up the image and carries it to the left, off-screen. What can be said of this dizzying strategy? The predominant and persistent impression is that the entire tape is suddenly reduced to a photograph, glimpsed for the time of a scream – as if an instant summed it up, then disappeared. The photograph thus has a truth function: the

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vanity of the image. But if we reflect a little more about the interconnection of the two series, we note that, with each scream, the camera goes further into the body, frames an elliptical moment and then, in its place, reveals a scene that seems to appear from between the teeth. This latter scene, first so brief it is almost photographic, gradually settles in and finally becomes more real than the other (which it is already by what it represents). The photograph’s abrupt irruption is a call to order: the real is not on the side we think; it is in the interstice, between the teeth, in the darkroom of the body from which the photograph falls. Fourth Movement

The Reflecting Pool opens with a man coming out of the forest and standing at the edge of a pool. He faces the camera and we see his reflection on the water. Suddenly, he jumps up and his body freezes in mid-air. The reflection has vanished. In the pool, over time, little by little, a world of sundry movements comes to life. The initial reflection of the body reappears, replicates itself, moves about. As viewers scratch their heads to figure out how this connects with the suspended body, they see that it has vanished while they weren’t looking (or that is the impression people usually have). Again, what can we deduce from such a strategy? In the first place, Viola’s work is inspired by a passion for the fixed image or, rather, for a certain fixity in the image: it is an invitation to reflect on what happens with a moving image when, like Viola (one might call up any number of examples), one no longer considers it as such. Let’s call such an awareness “photographic.” We then see that such effects are rooted in the body, in the author’s own body. They instantly take us beyond narcissism: in The Space between the Teeth, by transcending the image of the manifest body with an irruption from the inner body; in The Reflecting Pool, by variously separating the body from its reflection. We also observe that each of these tapes corresponds to a type of place (even if both are loci of experience, for the image as for the body): the one perfectly closed, the other open and outdoors. Finally, Viola clearly demands a particular attention of the viewer, both when things go (too) fast and when they go (too) slowly.

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If one asks Viola why he presents himself as an actor-subject in a significant number of his tapes (roughly in two-fifths of his works, excluding his installations, where he appears less frequently), he answers, like Marcel Odenbach (or Kuntzel, Fieschi, and others), that it is a way of preserving the intimacy required for the filming experience and, more generally, for the personal and creative experience as a whole. Increasingly, aided by access to cutting-edge equipment (as that from Sony, in Japan, for Hatsu Yume), and especially by demonstrating (like Godard) an ever-greater unity of production, he has tended to eliminate intermediaries in the various stages of his work. He works increasingly alone (with his wife and partner, Kira Perov). He says: “The work comes from a very personal place for me and it’s always a matter of keeping it as close as possible to that source.” Also: “there is no difference between what I’m doing and what a writer does.” And also: “We create this thing that exists outside of ourselves: the text.”⁵⁴ Outside oneself but based on oneself: such, precisely, is the interstice in which Viola constructs his singular self-portraits. On examining these various manifestations, one notices that they are located at the crossroads of two great axes. The body is the vehicle for exploring the possibilities of the medium; it is an apparatus-body (the four superimposed bodies in Olfaction, the distorting water-dropmirror in Migration, the pigeons’ slow-motion flight in response to the sound waves emanating from the dish Viola lets fall on Washington Square in Truth through Mass Individuation, etc.). The body is also (and these two aspects often go together) the locus of a trial of which he explores the stages, as in yet another ritual transformation of the Stations of the Cross. Its strongest statement is in Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, in both its video and installation versions, both developed from the experience of going three days and three nights without sleeping: in the video, we’re in a room in which phases are delimited by bodily movements and variations in light from two windows; in the installation, on a monitor facing the hot seat reserved for the spectator (who participates directly in the sound), Viola appears, dishevelled and hit on the back at regular intervals. Here, the apparatus is the locus of torment and of an experience; it is also the instrument of education and the means for a resurrection. It provides the rule, the consensual

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discipline that enables the business of living. The gaze is its practice, the world its theatre, perception its mode of passage, and memory its condition. Such are the ways of invention. Viola’s self-portrait has the peculiarity that its engagement with memory refers strictly to itself, producing an eternal present in the process of being constituted. Recall Space between the Teeth, where the camera, advancing through the hallway and into the mouth, passes through a series of positions to which it reverts in decreasing order, then starts over again, and so on. Take Return. Viola in a garden, in the distance, a bell and a hammer in hand. He strikes once, twice, a third time, advancing a few metres each time. On the fourth strike, he steps backs in a kind of jump to position 3 and then jumps in the same way to position 4. The process is repeated up to the tenth bell (if I’ve counted right). Each time, Viola goes through all the stations up to the third then finds himself back at the one from which he struck the bell. He’s now in close-up. The camera moves back and discovers a huge barn. Viola enters; in a long shot again. The whole process is repeated up to the eighteenth chime of the bell (we’ve long since lost count of prior positions, through which the body seems to scrupulously regress nonetheless, especially since the second part of this movement is now only visible through the barn door). We then only see his white sweatshirt in close-up. He goes backward again, now swept up in a truly dizzying movement, but this time the rhythm is slower, and again, at each station, we hear the striking of the bell. Thus can memory refer to its own operation, the trace of an eternal present. In this work, where nothing is autobiographical, by its very construction, everything becomes so. And yet, one senses no selfindulgence, nor an excessive confinement (as in Roger Laporte’s literary self-portrait, La Veille, constantly brought back to the production of its writing). A phenomenal and infinitely rich world is given us in the singular mode of an exacerbated awareness of the physical and mental conditions implied by its grasp and apperception. Hence the significance, to my eyes, of this striking title: Chott-el Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat). Viola only appears in one very lengthy shot, in which a point, practically invisible on the horizon, advances towards the spectator but remains too distant to be identified. Of whom, then, is this tape composing the portrait? Of the desert, obviously. But of the

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eye perceiving it as well. A portrait “in light and heat” – that is, in the material components that model the image for the telephoto lens, which is substituting for the eye here and capturing a reality constantly on the verge of a mirage. The tape thus becomes the enigmatic portrait of one who lives and relives the desert experience thanks to the technological possibilities of equipment whose function he clearly involves. Thus does his self-portrait emerge. To the question “who am I?” he can only answer, I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like. He is none other than the immensity before our eyes, and the singularity of the experience of it, the Stations, the loci of experience, which the one living them explores by bringing more and more images into play. We could take a census that would give us a kind of table of archetypes, between Jungian psychoanalysis and Vico’s sensory topoi of the imagination, in which Barthes saw a forerunner of critique thématique and Bachelardian criticism.⁵⁵ Though the universals of the imagination so dear to Vico, and which Viola discovers in his own way, are here shadowed by an internal reflection on the technology that allows them to be expressed and by a general immersion in a scientific universe. One could simply list them, starting with the loci of nature, which are also loci of solitude – desert, mountain, forest, plain, garden, stretch of water, and so on. These are followed by all the places of confinement, the flip side of the experience of solitude – corridor, room, cell, any bare room punctuated with windows to ground the vision machine. At their juncture lie the intermediary spaces, inhabited, populous even – streets, halls, roads, squares, and so on – though always imbued by that same quality of solitude, largely due to a complete absence of language in Viola’s work to date, which is essentially reduced to an audio environment (having an extraordinary presence). Finally, there are also the loci of culture, manifest as much in the titles and written commentaries to his videotapes and installations as in what they show (discreetly accompanying a body of work that never makes explicit use of citation): far eastern cultures, primitive societies, rituals, poets, mystics, scientific references, and finally – because even his work isn’t immune either to everyday life or to America – television. One could classify and order all of this into opposing dualities of varying magnitude, proliferating and overlapping in a circular logic: nature/culture, closed/open, death/ life, shadow/light, animate/inanimate, visible/invisible, mobile/station-

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ary, slowed down/accelerated, human/animal, human-animal/vegetalmineral. Such are the loci, at once material and abstract, through which the image-bearing bodies pass, bodies that become loci themselves: Viola himself, then his wife (once only, but memorably, in Moonblood), other men and women, children (on two powerful occasions, in Silent Life and Songs of Innocence), and lots of animals. But what exactly does self-portraiture mean without autobiography? Three temporal modes successively take effect and overlap in the Viola experience: “real time,” shared between the time of his perception as such and that of the camera that shadows it and focuses its image onto the monitor (“the camera’s always on, there’s always an image”); the time of recording, which effects a selection in this continuous time; and the time of final editing, which seeks to create the illusion that the second time possessed the continuity of the first. Yet there is a fourth time, of which we know nothing but whose presence we sense, and which alone explains the uneasiness that emanates from these works. This time traverses the three others down to the time of perception, of which it takes hold, and opens up another, personal, time below it, unknown and faceless, that sweeps through the spectre of past life, such that everything seems to have been “already seen.” If each of the tapes is informed by processes of memory, such that images appearing therein seem to be screen-memories spawned from each other, it’s because these images serve as screens for images of which nothing is told to us. Images that Viola intends neither to share the existence of nor even to reveal that he’s sharing it with himself. Hence the strange vibration that runs through this eternal present, constantly on the verge of self-destruction, this time perpetually refound because it admits of no time lost. As such, this mode is more tragic than it is nostalgic. At the level of image-apparatus itself, Viola differs from Kuntzel, to whom he is otherwise so close in the development of corporeal memory. That, I think, is what makes the central section of I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like so moving. For the first time, Viola shows himself at home, alone, at work, during one of those all-night sessions so conducive to private self-reflection. The four other parts of this long video on animality made human (at eighty-nine minutes, it is the longest) are sort of drawn in by the convergence of motifs streaming by, mostly on the mini-monitor on his work table. We are in an illusion of real

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Bill Viola, 1–2: The Reflecting Pool, 1977–79; 3–4: Reasons for Knocking

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Fig. 1.18

9: Chott-el Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat), 1979; 10: The Semi-

Circular Canals, 1975; 11–12: Ancient of Days, 1979–81; 13–16: I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, 1986.

time, almost autobiographical, if it weren’t for the life that isn’t told but shown, raw and transcendent. Through the very banal actions Viola performs – reading, drinking, eating, strolling – two series of events come to light. On the one hand, the contraction, substitution, fusion of representations by which (as in The Reflecting Pool) real time enters a dimension of condensed, magical time, ultra-time. On the other, a shimmering flow of the strange images of his disseminated body that appear everywhere – in a faucet, in a globe, in a water drop fallen on the table, in the plate of fish he’s eating. We see him filming in the dilated eye of the owl in a shot that serves as a transition from the second part of the tape to this one: “The color of the pupil is black. It is on this black that you see your self-image when you try to look closely into your own eye, or into the eye of another.”⁵⁶ But this “I” that sees itself in its own gaze, in eyes of animals, or in surrounding objects, this “I” knows neither who it is nor what it looks like. This thickness that one calls “oneself” owes its reality to the organic depth of the life in which it participates and to the technology capable of (re)producing its complexity and, thus, of including it as a body aware and as image-body. Viola borrows his title, which could serve as self-portraiture’s austere motto, from the Rig Veda. But, more than to his ancestral culture, a heritage he likes to invoke, it seems to me that, through these new states of the Self that spring from modern science and in particular from new modes of production of the image, Viola is initiating a return to the very origins of the self-portrait in Western tradition, as Beaujour retraced it. He shares the preoccupations of the Speculum mundi, of medieval and Renaissance theatres of memory (he entitled one of his most beautiful installations The Theater of Memory). Apart from Montaigne, and the interiorization attached to oneself, as dispersed and impersonal as one might conceive oneself to be, I also see his work in connection with Bacon and his “method,” with Loyola and his Spiritual Exercises, or even with Descartes’ Meditations, which he attempts to reformulate in a contemporary way, with contemporary means, from a context created by the individuation of the Modern Self. With the difference that the ascetic reasoning of the philosopher’s meditations, as of the saint’s exercises, are immersed a priori in the body of the sensory world in which the technological operations that make it visible participate. The one I assume myself to be abides in an immersion in which

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words fail in the telling. The absence of language is fundamental, such that one compensates for it by replacing “I write” by an equivalent “I videograph” (like Kuntzel again, even if the assumptions are different). “The self-portrait stages the tension and dialectic between ‘I think’ and ‘I write,’ for the Cartesian cogito does not answer the questions: ‘who am I?,’ ‘What do I know?’”⁵⁷ This indeed is the tension at work in Viola, on the backdrop of an involving relationship between techno-science and the Natural Self on which it is based. This simultaneously logical and mystical (almost alchemical) link with nature is partly what makes this a romantic work, still innervated by the fantasy (discreet yet profound) of an artistic utopia – le poète ... est chargé de l’humanité, des animaux même.⁵⁸ It is the condition on which technology can take God’s place to help form a new subjectivity: between its suspension and dissemination in an art of the dérive – drifting or digression – (self-portraiture being one of its forms), and its solidification-dissolution in the cold rhetorical practices of communication: With the integration of images and video into the domain of computer logic, we are beginning the task of mapping the conceptual structures of our brain onto the technology. Today, development of self must precede development of the technology or we will go nowhere – there will be condominiums in data space (it has already begun with cable tv).⁵⁹ Yet this self, ideal and idealized, wishing in a sense to regain its status prior to the great crisis of the Renaissance (in other words before rhetoric definitely lost its hegemony), cannot in the least be said to ignore the austere logic of the crisis from which it was born. The crisis endures, too, as if unchanged, in particular through the self-portrait, which is one of its signs, despite the transformations it has undergone, and whatever transcendence or transmutation with which one might invest it. In the haunting quiet of his California home, Bill Viola at work becomes that image of himself that he projected in his representation of John of the Cross. He has entered his cell; there he hears the rumblings of the world, the voices of his mind. And like the saint whispering the Cantos de la noche oscura to himself and to God, Viola enters the The Night

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of Sense (title of the third part of his tape) and tells himself: “I do not know what it is I am like.” And he turns this mandatory passage of selfportraiture into an interrogation addressed to all of creation. Opening

Even if they don’t formulate it as such, the works we have traversed all pose the question “who am I?” They answer it by making the sometimes barely glimpsed “I” a scattered being of excess, drift, and play, the visible medium for an anonymity that provides access both to a grasp of the world and to the forces of personal angst. Here are subjects drawn from their most intimate selves to a new form of “thinking from the outside,” within the limits and possibilities of image and sound. As Elisabeth Bruss pointed out, the difficulties encountered in cinema with the demands of the autobiographical pact show that the medium can “lay bare a more radical mystery beyond the limits of self-awareness”; “[it] can,” she explains, “take identity beyond what one consciousness can grasp, beyond even what the unaided human consciousness can encompass.”⁶⁰ We have seen what the mutation and proliferation of techniques engenders, through video and everything that it involves: the impossible autobiography is explicitly transformed into self-portraits of a new kind, unfolding with a substantiality, consistency, and logic for which cinema offers no real equivalent. In closing, if I dwell on Godard, it is because, approaching the issue from the opposite side, he envelops it and gives it a dimension that it lacks: the self-portrait propelled by video into the heart of fiction. Fiction with Godard has always served as decor, for show; it harbours a threefold desire – for myth, for instruction, and for the encyclopedic. A desire that has become progressively more divided with the ever more blatant eruption of one who unexpectedly asks “who am I?” The question implies a revisitation. We see it, for instance, in the way Godard emerges from a favourable portrait given him in Cinéma, Cinémas (on the occasion of the release of Soigne ta droite), in one of the most reflexive sequences in his work, which he doubles with a playful self-reflection and steers towards self-portraiture.⁶¹ What is at stake in that scene in Les carabiniers where the two heroes come back with a suitcase full of postcards, which they take as a kind of ratification of

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the realities they depict? Nothing less than the (illusory) possession of the world and its projection as representation. The postcard is indisputably a locus of memory: all images parade through it, by class and category, as in encyclopedias, files, thesauruses. Together they compose a mirror of the world. Godard slips into their orbit, following the same soundtrack, replacing certain (black-and-white) scenes of the film with (colour) series arranged according to his personal imagery, thus distributing images of the world, of cinema, and of himself as agent of these images. Thus distributed, image by image, in a thoroughly unpredictable and light-hearted concatenation of postcards and photos, his own image invites us to define this movement through an exploration of his previous work. Documentary traverses fiction here, constructs and runs through it in a very peculiar way. On the one hand, cinema returns to itself with an intensity never seen before, such that the work presents itself as a reprise, pastiche, parody, and a homage to its entire history – culminating in Godard’s long-held project of a history of film, now produced for Canal Plus.⁶² On the other hand, a keen eye is cast on the world, engaging a passionate enumeration of commonplaces and cultural loci. This gaze is wild, spontaneous, anarchic, disorderly, like the upward stream of film that is its backbone. But it is nonetheless obsessive, systematic, methodological. Very close, globally, to what Vigo had called “a documented point of view.”⁶³ It is the way an “I” declares itself without actually doing so, yet also the way it veers towards the impersonal: an empty place through which all the voices pass and speak. For a little more than a decade, Godard has been composing, recomposing, and generally novelizing Barthes’ Mythologies and Système de la mode; through the fictions that animate his characters, he draws up a portrait – un état des lieux – of the contemporary world. These characters have body, voice, fragments of destiny, preserving their singularity and, thus, the fiction, the myth. But they are also woven of citations, voices already formed, aggregates of codes, agglomerations of discourse; fiction reels back and forth between scrap heap and encyclopedia, navigates between the pleasures of enumeration and those of copying. It fragments on its way from Rabelais and Don Quixote to Bouvard and Pécuchet, drifting from the Little Red Book to mail-order catalogue.

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During this period, Godard rarely appears in his own work (though he surrounds it with discourse and allows himself a few strong moments, as in the voice-overs in Vivre sa vie and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle). He remains masked behind as many proxies as there are bodies, voices, characters. The precarious balance is broken during his protest period – a break that translates essentially into a confrontation with video and television. It takes two paths: one the rhetoric of persuasion, the other a promotion of the intimate and of private paraphernalia. They emerge with Ici et ailleurs and Numéro deux, pattern-setting films of transition, and then begin to model and modulate all his work, especially from the moment it initiates a return to and through fiction – its third major phase. The rhetoric of persuasion develops and rationalizes the logic of the lesson: provocative, conversational, and ingestive lessons in the work of the first period (and in all his “fictions”); the iron-clad (though everironic) lessons of the protest period. When the pan-political utopia breaks down, what emerges is utopian, at once public and private, and finds its natural venue in television. The lesson is no longer addressed either to privileged partners in the exchange of fiction or to the dreamtof masses in the protest films: its target is an assumed, imagined audience. The attempt to persuade here rests on the construction of a critical rhetoric conceived as a search for truth, based on the singularity of a single point of utterance: one person’s voice, speech, and (often) body – Godard himself, the auteur-interviewer-reader-improviser-speaker. This private rhetoric counters the “monstrous” rhetoric of mass media; but it presents itself as utopian nevertheless, at the level of communication, seeking with image-words to do the work classical rhetoric once attributed to discourse in a social world whose coherence it partly provided. Godard’s rhetoric, contradictory within itself (its singularity and its strength), postulates the world’s renewal based on the personal dialogue that one subject seeks to establish with others. Thus, his meanderings have sought to touch children in particular. In the last ten years, in the wake of this movement, Godard has generated a set of what one may call occasional pieces (petits papiers) to accompany his films: project prefaces for Sauve qui peut (la vie) and Je vous salue Marie, a postcript to Passion, Lettre à Freddy Buache,

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Changer l’image (in Le Changement), Soft and Hard, an interview with Woody Allen, fragments of the “Godard Special” in Cinéma, Cinémas, and so on. These micro-works (which can be long) have several things in common. Whether addressed to the Centre du cinéma or produced for tv stations, French or foreign, they all have a public existence; in this they have a lot in common with the two big television series and fully participate, in their way, in a rhetoric of persuasion. But the subject matter and the confiding tone lend them an intimate dimension. These works seem to lean towards autobiography as nearly all of them portray moments of a life. They never try to endorse the pact, however, even as they touch on the contingencies of everyday life; they focus instead on creative work, the production setting, the processes of invention. They don’t tell, they show and demonstrate; they have an absolute sense of presence, regardless of any nostalgic content (for cinema of the past, for instance). The way Godard shows himself, at work (often amid his very machines), what he says, what we see, what we feel, everything indicates that these works were shot very freely, by someone in full possession of his own tools, with the freedom to do as he would – à son gré, as Mallarmé said of vers libre. Finally, the work in the making (sometimes the one being discussed) is often referenced as writing, as text: it attempts to engage a confrontation between writing and the sound-image, sentencing the former to death and attempting to endow the latter with new life, constantly endeavouring, also, to substitute the one for the other, to exchange their qualities, to mesh the one with the other. Quite naturally, as soon as they need to, these works continue the process of merging word with image, partly put into effect through the possibility (after Ici et ailleurs and Numéro deux) of treating the screen as a page for writing, of establishing a kind of literal screen-writing (again, like television, though in competition with it). All these public-private pieces, back-to-back with the major privatepublic television series, form a very new body of work in the filmmaker’s apparently fiction-based production. Obviously, fiction is only half the story. Proposed on television, conceived from the expressive possibilities of video, and often very intimate in nature, these works in fact draw his entire oeuvre, past and current, towards its most distinctive trait: representing thematic focal points, increasingly intertwined into a network that accommodates all the loci of artistic production – paint-

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1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Fig. 1.19

Jean-Luc Godard, 1–2: Numéro deux, 1975; 3: Passion, 1981; 4: Lettre à Freddy

Buache, 1982; 5: Prénom Carmen, 1982; 6: Soigne ta droite, 1987; 7–8: Scénario du film Passion, 1982.

ing, music, film, and so on – contributing to the making of the work, even as it comes together. One figure becomes essential in this process: the body, whether manifest as voice or as the body per se. It is ubiquitous throughout the occasional pieces and intimist work. The body, real, factual, everyday, with a familiarity characteristic of tv or of home movies, but suddenly, also, the body dramatized to the extreme, prey to creative anguish, experiencing its specific fiction, its daily sacrifice, the crucifixion of image and sound. One obviously thinks of Scénario du film Passion, where the body figures as such before the white screen-page to be revisited in the film. Or of the lesser-known episode, Changer l’image, which prefigures the Scénario arrangement, but where, in addition, a second real Godard alternates with the first, scourged live on the screen for having failed to fulfill his vocation of being humanity’s harbinger of new images and new sounds. In the last few years, the same momentum has led Godard to make significant screen appearances in several of his movies (Prénom Carmen, King Lear, Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de cinéma, Soigne ta droite). And he transposes himself more directly than ever in the impossible mise en scène of such variously crucified beings as the Dutronc-Paul-Godard of Sauve qui peut (la vie), the Léaud-Gaspard of Grandeur et décadence, and Jerzy of the so well-titled Passion. Thus, woven through the Christ-body, are ever more organic and closer ties between his peculiar fictions and the intimist variations of his creative life. What emerges from all this is that this work, more fragmented and diffuse with every film, seems to be produced from the tension between two underlying and opposing forces (which don’t really correspond to the two categories of which they consist – the “great films” and “the rest” – despite the distinction one tends to make). At one extreme, the development of matrices of fiction likely to respond to the world from a documentary point of view by following the logic of an array of loci; at the other, a stubborn search for oneself as real body and abstract focal point in which, by a system of analogies and metaphors, places and matrices are composed. It is in fact strangely difficult in this work to locate the self-portrait that we sense so vividly. It would be easy to place it all in the mass of

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“occasional pieces,” without which, indeed, it would hardly be visible. As I suggested concerning literary works – whose movement Godard’s production is one of the first, perhaps the first, to fully translate to film – we could say that self-portraiture resides latently within it. But that isn’t enough. Both for the truth of the work itself and for its theoretical ramifications, it is much more interesting to see how effort is manifestly expended, not to create a particular, localizable, and detachable selfportrait, as per Beaujour’s descriptions, but to point the way towards the self-portrait. Which is to say that the dimension of self-portraiture unfolds globally, like a kind of constitutive layer, an inner movement, ensuring traffic between two major opposing principles: () a rhetoric of instruction, (re)founding the world (as in Rossellini) and (2) a desire for myth and fiction (as in good old movies). The important thing, here, is that such a movement would not have been possible without the encounter, in the body of cinema as in that of the filmmaker dedicated to embodying it, between the two modes given us by video: () television, the only place that can now directly articulate the utopian vision that has long been the prerogative of the Book, which aims, by default, as Barthes put it, for “the transparency of social relations,”⁶⁴ and (2) video as such, which is, so to speak, the locus for working out a new avenue towards the search for self, which now transpires through an indistinguishable and global amalgam of words and images. In this, Godard responds with great precision to McLuhan, as does Viola on his own wave-length. But Godard is also responding to Stendhal, who anticipated him a century earlier by approaching the question of self via images when words alone fail. Godard announces – and this may be the crucial point – that the time has come when certain distinctions, and therefore certain representations, have become problematic. After Henri Brulard, in which he attempts to grasp the fleeting truth of the Self, Stendhal writes La Chartreuse, in which the Self is transposed to the novelist’s lie, to myth and fiction. He even manages to fully express his love for Italy, which he had failed to properly capture in his travel writings.⁶⁵ Today, Godard’s response to Stendhal is to say there is no longer a discrepancy but only imperceptible and reversible passages between myth, narrative, and the autobiography of the Self, the self-portrait. This implies that there is no longer any (really) simple past, no real life to tell, no “I,”

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Fig. 1.20

Jean-Luc Godard, Scénario du film Passion, 1982

no truly identifiable “Self.” Egotism is no longer the stuff of memory but the indelible mark of a perpetual and suspended present, in which, through image-words, before and after, inner and the outer bring to the surface a depth once constituted by the contrasting effects of different verbal modes. Everything is now played out as an intermediate vision, an inter-media language. 988

Notes  These comments on Henri Brulard were published in a first version entitled “L’entre-vu,” Photographies 4 (April 984): n.p. I have since read Louis Marin’s remarkable book, La voix excommuniée (Paris: Galilée,

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2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

 2

3 4 5 6

98), in which he comments at length on Stendhal’s text as well as his study, “Images dans le texte autobiographique: Sur le chapitre xliv de La Vie de Henri Brulard” (in Saggi e richerche di letteratura francese, vol. 23 [Milan: Feltrinelli], 984). Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard, trans. Jean Stewart and B.C.J.G. Knight (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 958), 2. He adds: “My consolation for the impertinence of so many I’s and me’s, is that I suppose plenty of quite ordinary people in this nineteenth century do so as well. By 880, we will be inundated with Memoirs and I, with all my I’s and me’s, will just be like everybody else.” Original French sources for citations from Henry Brulard are to be found in: Stendhal, Oeuvres Intimes, ed. Henri Martineau (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 955), at the following pages (in order of appearance): 4, 6, 323, 2, 47, 6, 394, 373, 02; the drawings appear on the following pages of the Pléiade edition: 5, 202, 203, 273, 23, 386, 4, 42. Stendhal, Life, 3, 4. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 39. Ibid., 328. His famous definition of the novel in Le Rouge et le Noir (Paris: Gallimard, “La Pléiade,” 952), 557. Stendhal, Life, 0; and “the tale is too great for the teller,” 346. In the following, unless otherwise stated, the drawings themselves, along with their respective captions, are taken from Stewart and Knight’s English translation (in sequence) at pages 0, 77, 240, 86, 339, 23, 24. [Trans.] Stendhal, Life, 0. The translation of this quote, and of the caption to the accompanying illustration, is my own as neither the illustration nor the accompanying text (footnotes in the original) appears in the Stewart and Knight translation; for the original text and illustration, see Oeuvres intimes, 203. [Trans.] Stendhal, Life, 239. Ibid., 86. Ibid., 24. To be understood, perhaps, in both an active sense (of rendering into an image) and a sense of manifest appearance; the translation, here, of Raymond Bellour’s neologism imaginéité. [Trans.]

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7 Louis Marin, “Images dans le texte autobiographique,” in Louis Marin, L’écriture de soi: Ignace de Loyola, Montaigne, Stendhal, Roland Barthes, (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 999), 204–7. 8 Ibid., 204. 9 “Entre-images” is Raymond Bellour’s coinage and it is not really explained here, but it is the title and (loose) umbrella concept for the collection of his writings in which this essay appeared: L’Entre-images: Photo, cinéma, vidéo (Paris: La Différence, 990). The entre-images is a “(virtual) space” of passage between still and moving images, between “photographic analogy and that which transforms it.” It is tied to video and video art, as the point of historical, technological, and artistic confluence between the legacy of mechanical reproduction – photography and cinema – and the emergence of the electronic and computed image. It is also predicated on a dual movement: the first, a return to the question of painting and pictorial representation; the second, a closer connection between image and literature – voice and utterance, the creative act, the indeterminacy of the art work, its reflexive capacity – and language, to the extent that words become embodied in the images. It is a manifold, physical, and mental place. Rather than elaborate a theory of the concept, Bellour tells us, he intends to “articulate an experience, as it has gradually developed, from the moment where it had become clear that video and everything it involved had ushered in another time of the image” (L’Entre-images, 0–3). [Trans.] 9 Stendhal, Life, 90. 20 Alexandre Astruc, “L’avenir du cinéma,” La Nef (948), quoted in Pierre Lherminier, ed., L’Art du cinéma (Paris: Seghers, 960), 597. 2 Specifically: – The Anthology Films Archives program, Autobiographical/Diaristic Experience in Cinema, New York, June 979 (reproduced in Revue belge du cinéma 9 [Spring 987]: 8). – Elisabeth Bruss’s essay, “Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney, 296–320 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 980) (translated in French as: “L’autobiographie au cinéma: La subjectivité devant l’objectif,” in Poétique 56 [November 983]: 46–82. – The second edition of “Cinéma et Littérature,” organized by Françoise Calvez and Dominique Païni at the Valence crac , from 30 October to 4 November 984, and entitled Lettres, Confessions, Journaux intimes. – Revue belge du cinéma: Boris Lehman, un cinéma de l’autobiographie 3 (fall 985).

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22

23 24 25 26

27

28

– A show from Frédéric Mitterrand’s tv series “Étoiles et Toiles,” Le cinéma à la première personne, or Ciné-Je, with a section by Philippe Venault on “private diaries” (Journaux intimes), October 985. – An international symposium organized by Adolphe Nysenholc for the closing of Semaine du Cinéma et de l’Autobiographie at Université libre de Bruxelles,  March 986, followed by a publication in Revue belge du cinéma: L’Écriture du Je au cinéma 9 (spring 987). – And let’s not forget that, for the last ten years, Dominique Noguez has written several times of the notion of “subjective cinema” (Le Cinéma autrement, coll. 0/8 [Paris: uge , 977]), which he then developed in connection with the “American underground” (Une renaissance du cinéma [Paris: Klincksieck, 985]). Contrary to the editors of Revue belge du cinéma, no. 9, I will not include in this list the very good article by Jean-Pierre Chartier, “Les films à la première personne et l’illusion de réalité au cinéma,” Revue du cinéma 4 (January 947): 32–4; indeed, it is solely concerned with films of fiction in the subjective voice and not with films in which filmmakers truly express in “the first person.” “Cinéma et autobiographie: Problèmes de vocabulaire,” in Revue belge du cinéma: L’Écriture du Je au cinéma 9 (spring 987), 7–3. All subsequent quotes from P. Lejeune refer to this text, pp. 7–2. Bruss, “Eye for I,” 302. Note that the dual sense of objectif in French – “objective” and “lens” – underlies the subjective/objective polarity. [Trans.] Quoted in Bruss, “Eye for I,” 39. Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre: Rhétorique de l’autoportrait (Paris: Éditions du Seuil [Collection Poétique], 980). All the following quotes, unless indicated otherwise, are taken from the first chapter: “Autoportrait et Autobiographie.” I take this opportunity to say that the only work I know of that is devoted to self-portraiture in video refers to the painted self-portrait: Helmut Friedel’s “Video Narcissus: The New Self-Portrait,” in Video by Artists 2, ed. Elke Town, 3–24 (Toronto: Art Metropole, 986). Likewise, a comprehensive treatment would have to go through the intermediate form of the photographic self-portrait (cf. L’Autoportrait à l’âge de la photographie, peintres et photographes en dialogue avec leur propre image [Catalogue of the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, 985]; and Jean-François Chevrier and Jean Sagne, “L’autoportrait comme mise en scène,” Photographies 5 [984]: 46–82). Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, 0.

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29 Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 966), 742. 30 Let’s clarify a few points: – Michel Beaujour is not concerned with the implicit development of the self-portrait in the nineteenth century, which is understandable since his vision is primarily transhistorical. He does not include La Vie de Henri Brulard among self-portraits and does not even discuss it. Doubtless the autobiographical intention is all too obvious, if one does not pause at the effect of the drawings. – Philippe Lejeune starts with the word “autobiography” and remains faithful to it, even if he makes it more pliable. He dates the beginning of the genre to the late eighteenth century. He uses the term “self-portrait” when it suits him, either off-hand or to adjust his response (but without drawing much significance from the matter) to Beaujour’s criticism of him (concerning Leiris, in Moi aussi [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 986], 9–20) or to point out and describe a particular work (Sartre’s Carnets de la drôle de guerre as opposed to his Mots, an autobiography examined in Le Pacte autobiographique [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 975]). – Louis Marin, as we’ve seen, resolves the question in his own way. He speaks of autobiothanatographie to characterize the autobiography’s death as it plays out in Henri Brulard, largely due to the drawings. His perspective is very close to that of Beaujour, though he doesn’t use the word “self-portrait.” 3 Raymond Bellour, “An Interview with Bill Viola,” October 34 (fall 985): 00. Similarly, Gary Hill says: “I think I was becoming obsessed with the electronic hum. It was like a synapse with the rest of the world” (“‘A Manner of Speaking’: An Interview with Gary Hill by Lucinda Furlong,” Afterimage 0, 8 [983]: 9–0). 32 In the “Aide-mémoire” (or mnemonic check-list) to his Ancienne Rhétorique, Barthes recalled how much the “mass media” ensured the degraded survival of Aristotelianism and rhetoric (Communications 6 [970]: 223). 33 Jean-Paul Fargier, “La vidéo contre (tout contre) la télévision,” Catalogue de la re Manifestation internationale de vidéo, Montbéliard, 6–2 December 982. 34 Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, 4. 35 Jean-André Fieschi, “Point de vue sur un troisième œil,” Le Monde n.d.; “Les nouveaux mystères de New York,” Art Présent 6–7 (978): n.d. AnneMarie Duguet, Vidéo, la mémoire au poing (Paris: Hachette, 98), 65–74. 36 “Jean-André Fieschi et Les nouveaux mystères de New York,” in the television show Vidéo-Babil, with Raymond Bellour and Philippe Venault, France Culture, 0 April 983. The following quotes are taken from this

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37

38

39 40

4

42 43

44

45

46 47 48 49 50

interview and from the one with Jean-Paul Fargier, “Rencontre avec un Corse des Carpathes,” Cahiers du cinéma 30 (April 980): 29–34. Madeleine Grynsztejn has compiled the best bio-biblio-filmo-videography for Acconci in Vito Acconci: Domestic Trappings, La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California, 987. Only twenty-five of his tapes were found by organizers preparing an exhibition at the Whitney Museum (Video Self-Portraits, 989). Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October  (Spring 976): 5–64, reprinted in John Hanhardt, ed. Video Culture (Rochester, ny: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 986). Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, 6. On Juan Downey, the best selection is from the exhibition catalogue, Festival Downey: Video porque Te Ve (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones Visuala Galeria, 987). Cited in Raymond Bellour, Eye for I: Video Self-Portraits, translated by Lynne Kirby, with a preface by John G Hanhardt (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 989), 28. On Marcel Odenbach, see the catalogue Dans la vision périphérique du témoin, Centre Georges-Pompidou, 986. I owe this translation of the “forme-bandeau” concept to Lynne Kirby (Raymond Bellour, Eye for I, 2.), who borrowed it, in turn, from David Jacobson and Bérénice Reynaud’s translation of Raymond Bellour, “The Form My Gaze Goes Through,” Afterimage, November 988, 4–6. Philippe Dubois, “Les aventuriers de l’image perdue,” IIe Semaine internationale de vidéo (Geneva: Saint-Gervais, 987), 58. See also, “La boîte magique,” in Hyaloïde, ed. Danièle and Jacques-Louis Nyst (Crisnée, Belgium: Yellow Now, 986) (includes the text of the videotape and one still per shot). For Thierry Kuntzel’s (brief) texts on his tapes and installations, see Raymond Bellour and Anne-Marie Duguet, eds., Communications: Vidéo 48 (988): 49–52. Raymond Bellour, “Thierry Kuntzel et le retour de l’écriture,” Cahiers du Cinéma 32 (March 98): 40–50. Dubois, “La boîte magique,” 47. “Les nouveaux mystères de New York,” Art Présent 6–7 (978): n.p. Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, 87. On the “grounds and images” – les fonds et les images – see pp. 86–8, 93–7, 7–8. Thierry Kuntzel, “Le défilement,” Revue d’esthétique, Cinéma: Théories, Lectures (Paris: Klincksieck, 973); “A Note upon the Filmic Apparatus,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies . 3 (973): 266–7.

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5 Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, 0. 52 Interview by Jean-Paul Fargier, “Rencontre avec un Corse des Carpates,” Cahiers du cinéma, 32. 53 From the author’s interview with Viola, published in October 34 (fall 985): 04. One may usefully compare this with what Bruce Nauman has said: “The work isn’t autobiographical. It isn’t really about me. While I was doing it, it was mostly with images of myself but almost every image is either upside down or the head doesn’t show at all or it’s only the back. So it was only important to have an image of a human figure, even if I was using myself at the time. A little bit later, when I started using other people, it was easier if there was a face, because it was an actor, an actor being someone who is not anyone” (“Keep Taking It Apart: A Conversation with Bruce Nauman,” by Chris Dercon, Parkett 0 [986]: 56, published in part in Anne-Marie Duguet, Vidéo: La mémoire au poing). On Viola, see also: “L’espace à pleines dents” (follow-up to the previous interview with Bill Viola, by Raymond Bellour), in Cahiers du cinéma: Où va la vidéo? 4 (986): 64–73; Anne-Marie Duguet, “Les vidéos de Bill Viola, une poétique de l’espace-temps,” Parachute 45 (December 986–February 987): 0–5 (French), 50–3 (English). And see the three catalogues: arc , Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 983–84; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, ed. Barbara London, 987; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, ed. Marilyn Zeitlin, 988. 54 Roland Barthes, “L’ancienne rhétorique,” Communications 6 (970): 209. 55 Excerpt from Viola’s text written for the videodisc of I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like (986), cited in Raymond Bellour, Eye for I, 46. 56 Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre, 9. 57 “Humanity, and even the animals, are [the poet’s] burden” (Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete, ed. and trans. Wyatt Mason [New York: Modern Library Edition, 2002], 368). 58 Bill Viola, “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?” Video 80, 5 (fall 982): 40– (and in French, in Communications: Vidéo 48 [982]: 7–2, 73). Online Portable Document Format (pdf) version from The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, mit Press, 2003, available at http://www.cybergrain.com/remediality/viola.pdf, pp. 2, 4. 59 Bruss, “Eye for I,” 38, 39. 60 The episode was produced by Pierre-Oscar Lévy. 6 All this must obviously be taken up again with respect to the two existing episodes of Histoire(s) du cinéma.

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62 Jean Vigo’s commentary on his own 930 film A propos de Nice: “Documentaire social ou plus exactement, un point de vue documenté.” [Trans.] 63 “La transparence des rapports sociaux.” English translation from Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 986), 64. [Trans.] 64 Roland Barthes, “On échoue toujours à parler de ce qu’on aime,” Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 984). [“One always fails in speaking of what one loves,” Rustle of Language, 304.]

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2 Ending Myths and the Catholic Outing of Andy Warhol* johanne l a moureux

Shortly after Andy Warhol’s unexpected death during the spring of 987, Vanity Fair magazine acknowledged the event with a short article by John Richardson: the article was illustrated with a photograph of the artist’s studio taken by Evelyn Hofner in the days following Warhol’s demise; the image showed, on the back wall of the room, a large painting inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (fig. 2.). The photograph played on the commonplace motif of the deserted studio dominated by the last painting and orphaned progeny of the artist. In the twentieth century, the paradigm for this topos was most famously embodied by the photograph of Mondrian’s last New York studio, wherein, enthroned on its easel in a corner, Boogie Woogie stands like an interrupted promise. A sure indication of how efficient a topos is can be found either in the relative invisibility of its predictable nature to those who encounter it or in the fact that its predictability never seems to diminish its affective impact on a given public. Thus, reading Vanity Fair in the Spring of 987, theologian and art historian Jane Daggett Dillenberger experienced a moment of epiphany, which, ten years later, brought her to write a strange monograph entitled The Religious Art of Andy Warhol. While discussing Richardson’s article and its consideration of lesserknown aspects of Warhol’s life (such as his ethnic origins and his religious education), in the monograph’s introduction Dillenberger insists on the effect the photograph initially had on her: “The photograph was transfixing for me.”¹ And transfixed, indeed, she was. For the author

Fig. 2.1

Evelyn Hofer,

Andy Warhol's Studio, photograph, 1987. Courtesy of the artist, New York

seems to have had eyes only for The Last Supper and to have neglected all other elements in the uninhabited but rather busy studio: the other paintings on the lateral walls and the kitsch sculptural group of The Last Supper, which speaks more about Warhol’s steady interest in popular and commercial imagery than it does about his concerns for religious iconography. Dillenberger is also oblivious to the workout equipment that will turn out to be quite significant for Warhol’s elaboration of a Christ-like persona – a persona more openly involved with his fantasy of ideal incarnation and embodiment than with his faith or devotion. In this chapter, I intend to undo the Catholic instrumentalization of Warhol’s last work by setting the series of The Last Supper in the context of Warhol’s never-ending self-fashioning, an operation wherein religion indeed has a function, but one that does not necessarily refer to his faith and spirituality. I attempt this in three moments: a rebuttal of Dillenberger’s interpretation of Warhol’s work as the most important religious corpus of American art; a demonstration and interpretation of the marginal yet significant role religious motifs played in the initial framing of Warhol’s persona from the very onset of his recognition as a Pop icon in the early sixties; and an exploration of the cultural and gay subtext that informs the religious metaphors surrounding the artist.

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What is at stake here concerns the necessity of undoing the romantic and heroic endings that art history still seems to crave. Assessing the quantitative importance of Warhol’s series around The Last Supper (there are more than one hundred large paintings, drawings, and silkscreen prints), Dillenberger instils around the dead artist the familiar myth of “the last work,” with all the interpretive overkill that this topos has been commanding in the tradition of art history since the early nineteenth century.² Such a project, of course, entails a near dismissal of the contingencies that brought Warhol to address Leonardo’s fresco; namely, a commission by his friend and art dealer Alexander Ilonas for the opening of his Milanese gallery located in the vicinity of the piazza Santa Maria Della Grazia, which is famous for its church, where Leonardo’s original fresco had been painted and was then under restoration. The commission culminated in an exhibition of twenty-seven silkscreen canvases quoting The Last Supper: the show opened one month to the date before Warhol’s death, at the age of fiftyeight, following minor surgery. Dillenberger writes: “The Last Supper series appear to be Warhol’s last series, and perhaps his largest. It is also ... arguably his greatest series. Further, The Last Supper paintings are the largest series of religious art by any American artist.” Not afraid of tautology, she adds: “I am using the term religious art to refer to art with religious themes – in this case Christian themes. All Christian imagery and symbolism comes to us weighted with roots in Judaic and other ancient religious sources, and Warhol, as a Byzantine Catholic, was heir to this Christian vocabulary.”³ Dillenberger then proceeds to reconstruct Warhol’s religious path through art: she includes in the operation the commercial Christmas card designs he did for Tiffany in the 950s as well as his depictions of the cross motif in 982 (with no mention that, in that context, the cross was part of a series of emblematic objects that included dollar bills, revolvers, hammers, and sickles). It can be quite a challenge to search for religious content in Warhol’s art of the 960s and 970s, but the author attempts to do so by recuperating the theme of death, which has been familiar to Warholian critics since the publication of Thomas Crow’s influential essay.⁴ Under Dillenberger’s scrutiny, the electric chairs are read in the allegorical tradition of the memento mori, and the skulls are seen as reminders of the crucifixion (given the meaning of Golgotha, the place of the skull).

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Of course, one could set aside these statements as candid extrapolations coming from an art historian blinded by her theological perspective. Yet Dillenberger is not the first author to invest The Last Supper series with an agenda for transcendence. In his biography of Warhol, David Bourdon mentions that many members of the artist’s “first circle” tended to interpret the fact that the Last Supper series had been Warhol’s last project as a sure sign that he knew he was about to leave them for “a superior level.”⁵ Moreover, the image of Warhol as a closeted Catholic was not invented by Dillenberger. It soared in a spectacular fashion as early as the commemorative ceremony held for the artist on  April 987 at St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Illustrated with a Warhol silkscreen (Raphael I – $6.99, 985) based on Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, the program for the event included a hagiographic post-scriptum entitled “A Lesser Known Element in the Portrait of Andy Warhol”: Five hundred homeless and hungry New Yorkers will assemble on Easter Day at the Church of Heavenly Rest, on Fifth Avenue at 90th Street. They will be served a delicious meal, and they will be treated as honoured guests by some eighty volunteers. They will also be saddened by the absence of one who with dedicated regularity greeted them on Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. Andy poured coffee, served food and help clean up. More than that he was a true friend to these friendless. He loved the nameless New Yorkers and they loved him back. We will pause to remember Andy this Easter, confident that he will be feasting with us at a Heavenly Banquet because he had heard another Homeless Person who said: “I was hungry and you gave me food ... Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers and sister, you did to me.”⁶ During the same office, John Richardson gave an edifying eulogy about the real Warhol: Besides celebrating Andy Warhol as the quintessential artist of his time and place – the artist who held the most revealing mirror up to his generation – I’d like to recall a side of his

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character that he hid from all but his closest friends: his spiritual side. Those of you who knew him in circumstances that were the antithesis of spiritual may be surprised that such a side existed. But existed it did, and it’s the key to the artist’s psyche. Never forget that Andy was born into a fervently Catholic family and brought up in the fervently Catholic Ruska Dolina, the Ruthenian section of Pittsburgh. As a youth, he was withdrawn and reclusive, devout and celibate; and beneath the disingenuous public mask that is how he at the heart remained. Thanks largely to the example of his adored mother, Julia, Andy never lost the habit of going to Mass more often than was obligatory. As fellow parishioners will remember, he made a point of dropping in on his local church, St Vincent Ferrer, several days a week until shortly before he died ... The knowledge of this secret piety inevitably changes our perception of an artist who fooled the world into believing that his only obsessions were money, fame, glamour, and that he was cool to the point of callousness. Never take Andy at face value. The callous observer was in fact a recording angel. And Andy’s detachment – the distance he established between the world and himself – was above all a matter of innocence and art. Isn’t an artist usually obliged to step back from things? In his impregnable innocence and humility Andy struck me as yurodstvo – one of those saintly simpletons who haunt Russian fiction and Slavic villages.⁷ Of course, I am not at all interested in refuting the thesis of Warhol’s piety or charitable work. His diaries are filled with allusions to his faith, and the décor of his apartment, especially the bedside, was punctuated with various devotional objects. The priest of the parish in which Warhol went to church confirmed Richardson’s claims regarding Warhol’s church attendance and specified that the artist never went to confession or communion. Photographs exist of Warhol feeding the homeless, and it is perhaps worth noting that the artist began to work on The Last Supper series a few weeks after his first volunteer experience at the Church of Heavenly Rest. And it so happened in the context of the late 980s, with the worries of a raging aids crisis, that as some militants were “outing” gay

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celebrities considered closeted, Warhol, who had never been militant or closeted about his homosexuality, was suddenly “outed” and tagged with a Catholic label. (The introduction to the catalogue of his first retrospective at the moma in 989 concludes with the puzzling statement that Warhol’s “camouflage cannot conceal a celestially cool and catholic art.”)⁸ Now we are told that this label defines the work he produced. The operation raises two problems. The first has to do with the way the artist’s spirituality is not so much mentioned by his newly found hagiographers as it is revealed: the true Warhol has been unmasked at last, in extremis, and for good since revelation is supposed always to bring out the ultimate and definite meaning in any scheme of things. (And once more, in this perspective, the last painting serves to lift all uncertainty, to bring closure through clarity of meaning and to cancel a lifetime of Warhol’s ambiguous performances about elusive and unstable artistic identity.) The second problem is that such a revelation is nearsighted, literalist, and amnesic: readers familiar with the early critical reception of Warhol can only be perplexed by Warhol’s posthumous redemption from himself, from his superficiality, love of money, fame, and other materialist ailments. For to them there can be no revelation: Warhol’s artistic identity, from the early sixties on, has been carefully staged under the aegis of religious metaphors (and in this sense his work can be termed “Catholic,” if we mean by this a certain cultural relation to image-making that remains to be defined in its interaction with Warhol’s production). I hope to show that these metaphors, when they first appeared in Warhol’s critical reception, functioned as a strategy of implicit affiliation with the gay sexuality of Jean Genet’s literary underworld. They should not be taken at face value (as a token of spirituality), and they should be recalled when regarding Warhol’s later work with religious motifs, to which the artist has brought some of the very connotations already embedded in his earlier sanctification. As soon as Warhol becomes a major protagonist of the emerging Pop movement, he is set apart from his colleagues: he attracts more attention than his works, and the cult of his awkward persona appears to have preceded the artist’s invention of his own trademark look and idiosyncratic stance – the detached, candid, and monosyllabic figure that mirrors the objective quality of his iconography and technique. In a 964 interview (twenty-three years before Richardson’s comparison

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of the artist with the saintly fool of Russian literature), Warhol’s first art dealer, Ivan Karp, already promoted him by saying: “he is a saint.”⁹ Strangely, the expression will be reiterated the following year in the title of an Artforum article: “Saint Andy: Some Notes on an Artist Who, for a Younger Generation, Can Do No Wrong.”¹⁰ While Warhol undergoes a fall from grace and critics denounce his compromises with respect to the “business of art” in the 970s, Barbara Rose maintains the saintly metaphor, comparing his image to that of Mary Magdalene, the “holy whore of art history.”¹¹ In this early canonization of Warhol, one should also take into account the way photographers contributed to fashioning the artist’s persona: there was the haloed head or hieratic silhouette produced by Robert Mapplethorpe and Helmut Newton’s sculptural gisant. But the most spectacular photograph in that vein was probably taken due to Richard Avedon, who, a few months after Warhol had been shot, proposed a close-up of the artist’s abdominal scars – an intricate pattern to which Warhol referred as his Dior dress¹² and that also evokes a profane Ostentatio vulnerum, the showing of the wounds, in the Christian motif of The Man of Sorrows. In the era of Jesus Christ Superstar, the tongue-in-cheek sanctification of Andy Warhol simply adds a layer to that upon which a large part of his artwork of the 960s centres: the star (actress, singer, commodity, even a building like the Empire State) is a secular saint, bravely walking through his or her media martyrdom as though experiencing the modern and debased modality of glory (that would be fame) and proposing in the same breath a new model for imitatio. It has often been noted that Warhol depicted celebrities after they had gone through a trauma or tragedy: Marilyn Monroe the day after her suicide, Liz Taylor after her brush with death at the time of Cleopatra, or Jackie Kennedy after the assassination of J.F.K. Many of these images (not just the obvious Gold Marilyn) toy with the device of the icon, a regime of images to which Warhol was exposed throughout his religious education and his attendance at St John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church of Pittsburgh.¹³ All of his images seek to merge the banal ubiquity of press photography and the mediated presence of the religious icon, which are both imbued with the same objectivity. For as anthropologist JeanClaude Schmitt observes, the icon, like dreams, was “considered objec-

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tive, impossible to doubt because of divine origin, insofar as every icon seems acheropoietic”;¹⁴ that is, not made by a human hand or, I might add, made by the man whose hysterical desire was to be a machine.¹⁵ But there is more that should be brought to bear in any consideration of Warhol’s last works. The Last Supper series has to be addressed not only in relation to Warhol’s faith or personal circumstances at the end of the 980s but also in the context of that decade’s fashionable art trends; one must acknowledge that more than twenty years of religious displacements and condensations were already layering the artist’s mythography by the time he was commissioned by Alexander Ilonas to engage with Leonardo’s fresco. Ilonas probably presented that project to Warhol because he knew that the artist, by then more popular and more respected in Europe than he was in the United States, had been engaged for years in quoting works of art in his paintings. After decades of appropriating mass media imagery and press photography, Warhol had come to be part of the carefully marketed return to painting, which was characterized by quotations from earlier styles and motifs and overtly displayed in the canvases of German neo-expressionist painters or in those of the artists of the Italian transavantgarde: he had begun to quote art and particularly details from Renaissance paintings from Piero della Francesca, Paolo Ucello, and Leonardo da Vinci (whereas the European painters rather favoured the early styles of the twentiethcentury avant-garde). Warhol’s extensive work on The Last Supper series was probably motivated by the fact that these pictures had a sitespecific finality, or at least an event-specific dimension, since they were to be shown across the very piazza from where the original was located: there would be a Warhol/Leonardo neighbouring that must have been stimulating to the American artist, given the critical cold shoulder that he was then receiving at home. The series also suggests that Warhol was implicitly renouncing his identity as a saint to rekindle a mediation of artistic identity familiar to many painters before him: the alter Christus. A few works realized in parallel to The Last Supper series seem indeed to use Leonardo’s Christ in that well-established tradition. In Ten Punching Balls, an installation done in collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat and imbued with a racial subtext, Warhol prints Leonardo’s Christ motif in black on ten white punching balls to which the younger artist adds his graf-

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Fig. 2.2

Andy Warhol

(1928–87), Be Somebody with a Body (Detail of the Last Supper). ca. 1985–86, 60 cm x 60 cm. © The Andy Warhol Foundation, Inc./Art Resource, ny. Courtesy of the artist and sodrac .

fiti. Wayne Koestenbaum considers this work as Warhol’s reaction to the virulent criticism expressed towards his production of the 980s: it associates the artist with the victimization of Christ in a sort of reinterpretation of the Christ tied to the column for the flagellation.¹⁶ In Be a Somebody with a Body (fig. 2.2) the same Christ motif reappears, this time juxtaposed with the drawn figure of a bodybuilder whose resemblance to the young Warhol has been noted by Dillenberger.¹⁷ When Warhol began working on The Last Supper series, he also resumed physical training (as is indicated by the three work-out machines visible in the posthumous photograph of his studio) as he decided to reinvent his own body, to try to have a good body.¹⁸ Ten Punching Balls and Be Somebody with a Body both combine the figure of Christ and an allusion to bodybuilding and physical training. Especially in Be Somebody with a Body, there is a striking chiasmic construction between the juxtaposed representation of a God assuming human form and the haloed athlete looking “like a god.” That should suffice to indicate that there is more than spirituality to Warhol’s use of Christian imagery and to his alter Christus persona, a fact that points towards Warhol’s engagement with his own problematic incarnation. When considering The Last Supper series Warhol’s biographers are all keen to point to the possible grounds for the artist’s identification with the scene: these basically revolve around homosexuality and Fac-

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tory life. Whereas Dillenberger mentions Leonardo’s homosexuality and the speculations among biblical scholars concerning a homosexual relationship between Christ and Saint John,¹⁹ Koestenbaum writes more convincingly of the homoerotic subtext of The Last Supper series when he defines the pictures as “paranoid portraits of Factory behaviour, in which Warhol as Christ is surrounded by disciples and a lurking betrayer (Valerie Solanas, and other non-violent defectors).” Koestenbaum further delves into the connotations attached to many of the variations introduced by Warhol throughout the series: the Pink Last Supper, the above-mentioned juxtaposition of Christ and bodybuilder in Be Somebody with a Body or, in The Big C, the juxtaposition of Christ and the repeated motif of a blue motorcycle, “an homage to Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, the definitive gay ode to the motorcycle.”²⁰ Warhol was familiar with this kind of gay subtext and had made use of it throughout his career (from his early adaptation of the comic strip Nancy, 960, to his later portraiture of Reigning Queens, 985). As he charged his works with such double-entendres, he also proved eager to stress his ties to a gay pantheon of artists and writers (despite his avoidance of any militant conduct around gay issues): his early fascination (and near harassment) of Truman Capote; his need of approval from Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who avoided him because they considered him “effeminate”;²¹ his allusions to Marcel Proust’s novel in A la recherche du shoe perdu. Among this list of gay cultural icons, one of the more important was Jean Genet. The relationship between Warhol and Genet is more or less confined to the latter’s impact in the conception of the former’s 964 Thirteen Most Wanted Men (fig. 2.3), another “site-specific” commission evoking an all-male group of thirteen,²² and an intervention that I consider absolutely central to the understanding of the Last Supper series. The Genet factor in the 964 series was long neglected probably because it was obliterated by an apparently more probable “source”: the 923 self-depiction of Marcel Duchamp as a criminal in Wanted. Under a large titled, “Wanted,” printed in orange-red, two small photographs show the artist in frontal and profile views; he plays the part of a public enemy. The “poster” lists Duchamp’s aliases, ending with Rrose Sélavy, and offers a 2000 reward for his capture. Warhol certainly knew that work. He had bought a multiple from a recent edition of Duchamp’s

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Fig. 2.3

Andy Warhol

(1928–87), Thirteen Most Wanted Men, 1964. Installed at the New York State Pavilion, New York World's Fair, 1964. Silkscreen ink on masonite. 25 Panels, each 120 cm x 120 cm. © The Andy Warhol Foundation, Inc./Art Resource, ny. Courtesy of the artist and sodrac .

Boîte-en-valise (94–42) wherein a reduced version of it was included, among other miniatured quotes from the Duchampian oeuvre, and he had attended the opening of Duchamp’s 963 retrospective at the Museum of Pasadena, which had chosen Wanted for its own poster. Yet if Duchamp’s precedent provides an interesting angle by which to approach the Most Wanted series, it does not help us to account for the glorification of the criminal that permeates Warhol’s work; moreover, since it is a self-portrait of sorts, Duchamp’s Wanted is also devoid of that particular coupling of the saint and the criminal that figures in Genet’s early work. Warhol knew Genet’s novels. We should not be surprised. Genet’s American recognition began nearly two decades after his first success in France and occurred simultaneously with Warhol’s rise to fame. (In 963, both Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers and Sartre’s Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr first appeared in the United States. The following year, Genet was even featured in one of Playboy magazine’s famous interviews.) Warhol, the very man who claimed “I don’t read, I just look at pictures,”²³ tells Gene Swenson in a 963 interview: “When you read Genet, you get all hot, and that makes people say it is not art. The

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thing I like about it is that it makes you forget about style and that sort of thing: style isn’t really important.”²⁴ Warhol’s statement occurs after he has just expressed his desire to start working on a pornographic series and to move away from his previous work associated with death. Nevertheless, this curious assessment of style in Genet remains surprising, even if Warhol clearly formulates it as a pragmatic effect (“it makes you forget about style”) and not as an intrinsic neglect or indifference towards style. It is an important nuance, given the sophisticated rhythm and luxuriant prose of Genet’s novels. And it should also be noted that Warhol’s view of the French author, while disregarding form for the titillation of content, resonates with Sartre’s conception of Genet’s early literature as a kind of masturbatory prose. But beyond the homoerotic or “pornographic” angle, Genet and Warhol share other aesthetic and even philosophical principles: a taste for a hybrid concoction of high art and popular culture, and a cultivation of both banality and glory combined with a paradoxical affirmation of human equivalence. Warhol’s aphorism that “everybody should be like everybody”²⁵ somehow echoes the description of an uncanny encounter on a train penned in the 950s by a more militant and ascetic Genet: Something that appeared rotten was about to gangrene entirely my former vision of the world. When one day, on a train, looking at the traveler seated in front of me, I had the revelation that any man is worth any other, I did not suspect ... that this knowledge would bring such a methodical disintegration. Behind what was visible of this man, or further, further and at the same time sadly and miraculously nearer ... I discovered, in the gaze that came against mine and that I experienced as a shock, a sort of universal identity of man.²⁶ Moreover, Warhol, like Genet, soon excelled in his flipping-over of the banal and the spectacular, the famous and the infamous, and, especially, the saint and the criminal. Edmund White thus comments on the title of Sartre’s essay on Genet and his understanding of such a reversal:

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The saintliness of Genet (something that Genet himself halfbelieved in) was rejected by the atheist Sartre, who was making an allusion to Saint Genesius, the third-century Roman patron saint of actors, or concocting a Marxist interpretation of the Catholic concept. Although Sartre wanted to show that Genet was as rigorous in his pursuit of evil as a saint in his pursuit of good, nevertheless Sartre was impatient with mysticism in all its forms.²⁷ The ambiguity of the saint label, kept in the translation of Sartre’s title, significantly enlightens the nearly synchronous sanctification of Saint Andy (saint patron of stars?). Finally, Genet himself, in the opening lines of Our Lady of the Flowers, introduces the highly desired figure of the criminal displayed in a vertiginous front-page ubiquity: Weidmann appeared before you in a five o’clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a wounded pilot fallen into the rye one September day like the day when the world came to know the name of Our Lady of the Flowers. His handsome face, multiplied by the presses, swept down upon Paris and all of France, to the depths of the most out-of-the-way villages, in castles and cabins, revealing to the mirthless bourgeois that their daily lives are grazed by enchanting murderers, cunningly elevated to their sleep, which they will cross by some back stairway that had abetted them by not creaking. Beneath his picture burst the dawn of his crimes: murder one, murder two, murder three, up to six, bespeaking his secret glory and preparing his future glory.²⁸ Religious criminality, homoerotic desire, and mechanical reproductions and seriality are also at work in Warhol’s Thirteen Most Wanted Men series, a project that predates the press’s invention of Saint Andy by a few months. The history of Warhol’s only public commission is wellknown and I will only briefly recapitulate it. Architect Philip Johnston invited Andy Warhol and other artists to contribute a painting for the New York State Pavilion he had just designed for the 964 New York World’s Fair. Warhol chose to exhibit blown-up photographs of thir-

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teen men “wanted” by the FBI ; the work was refused, perhaps due to the intervention of the state governor, and various interpretations exist as to the reason why. Warhol first reacted to the censorship by proposing to replace the wanted men with photographs of Robert Moses (the fair’s president), but Johnston immediately vetoed Warhol’s envisaged response and the artist resolved instead to re-cover his installation with silver paint and leave it in that state for the duration of the fair. This canonical narrative of the Thirteen Most Wanted Men episode does not quite convey the complex circumstances of the commission or the subtlety of Warhol’s site-specific considerations for the series. The 964 New York World’s Fair was not one of the great universal fairs of the past two centuries but, rather, a large commercial affair produced without the official seal of approval of the European bureau of expositions universelles. It included very few international pavilions, many pavilions of American states, and even more commercial ones (for Coca-Cola, Ford, General Electric, etc.). For his New York State pavilion, Philip Johnston had selected several artists associated with the trendy Pop Art movement. Due to the prevalent commercialism of the fair, the large collages of Rosenquist or Rauschenberg must have appeared lost in advertisement, drowned in an environment of logos, and thus deprived of the pugnacity they could muster when shown in the white cube of the gallery space. Warhol’s decision to avoid his usual iconography of brand names or press photography indeed signals a fine perception of what could be an efficient insertion in such a commercial context. Given the controversy around Robert Moses’ dictatorial management of the fair – the press had nicknamed him the Fair Fuhrer – choosing images from police archives rather than in the files of press agencies constitutes a gesture attuned to context or at least, in typical Warhol fashion, to the media representation of the fair context. It also implied a reversal of law and desire – a reversal made all the more obvious in the double-entendre of the adjective “wanted.” But Warhol’s preoccupation with site also involved the more immediate surrounding of his planned intervention. The Thirteen Most Wanted Men series was meant to hang on the façade of the circular auditorium of the pavilion, where landscape movies unfolded on a high-tech 360degree screen. Warhol appropriated images from the apparatus of the police to ornate a building praising absolute vision: the panopticon

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of surveillance turned spectacular at last. Warhol cannot have been indifferent to this specific location since, at the time, he was already very much engaged in film. His first movies, such as Kiss, captured a single action filmed at sixteen frames per second, thereby decelerating the action in a way that rendered the medium visible. The artist used a similar strategy – and to the same effect – in the Thirteen Most Wanted Men series: he selected smaller images than usual and blew them up to a scale unprecedented in his work, making the texture of the photograph inescapable. Warhol’s object of desire, his “wanted men,” were thus metamorphosed into stars. They grace the exterior of a cinema as if their stern blown-up faces were meant to replace the tall names of the famous on a marquee. They blur the boundaries of fame and infamy, and if Warhol refuses them the gold background of a Marilyn, he does shroud them under the rather glamorous anonymity of a silver screen. The silver coat thus paradoxically functions as an index of the censorship encountered and as a new Warholian signature, one quite relevant since the artist had then begun to toy with the idea of abandoning painting for film, the silkscreen for the silver screen. It is a paradoxical and yet typically Warholian signature in that it functions as a gesture of recognizable authority (the silver marking, the monochrome as an empty and dysfunctional mirror) even if it basically stands out as an act of self-erasure – Warhol’s first instance of what Wayne Koestenbaum, in regard to the artist’s later production, sees as an inclination for disappearing acts.²⁹ Of course, the series was related to the tradition of anthropometric photography, or the procedure called bertillonnage after its inventor Alphonse Bertillon, but it also undeniably dialogued with Warhol’s then recent discovery of the possibilities offered by photo booth documents. He had already begun to use these as the initial step for his portraits, notably in his composite portrait of Ethel Scull (963). This is also the case in a self-portrait in which he posed frontally with a tough mien while wearing a black T-shirt and sporting an unsmiling face, as in a mug shot. All these parameters of the series (the mug shot, the means of mechanical reproduction, the desirability of the outlawed, the reversal of law and desire, and even the photo booth) are unmistakably present in Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. There is the glorious introduction of the serial killer Weidmann in the first pages of the novel,

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but further along we discover that the incarcerated protagonist fantasizes in front of photographs of criminals that he has glued with soft bread behind the cardboard that lists the prison’s rules: the “monsters” of his fantasy are always precisely described, and the prisoner revels in this anthropometric accuracy. There is even an episode between two transvestites, in which a photo booth image undergoes a homoerotic transubstantiation: “Divine has introduced Our Lady to her. Some days later, showed her, decent girl that she was, a little ‘photomatic’ photo of the murderer. Mimosa takes the photo, puts it on her outstretched tongue, and swallows it. ‘I simply adore that Our Lady of yours. I’m communioning her.’”³⁰ Genet’s transformation of the Photomaton of a criminal into holy host is in line with his regular embezzlement of the religious realm, and Edmund White has commented upon the mythological drive behind such an operation: Perhaps every life requires a powerful but ambiguous (even empty) symbol around which it can revolve. The secularization of society and the decline of classical learning have not eliminated the appetite for such symbols, only their availability. The absence of a common symbolic language has meant that writers have had to turn their own lives into myth. Marcel Proust revealed that even the least adventurous life can be rendered mythological. The difference, however, is that in a personal mythology the events do not come already glowing with a nimbus but must be haloed by the writer usually through repetition, insistence and elevated language. Emphasis and recurrence turn motive into a leitmotif. In the end, Proust’s Charlus is as tragic as Job or Oedipus and the madeleine as mysterious as the Host.³¹ Warhol could as easily choose to invest over-charged symbols like the host, symbols charged to the point of becoming generic (guns, crosses, skulls, dollar bills) as he could coin his own personal madeleine or Campbell’s soup cans. And if he avoided “elevated language” (even elected not to recognize it in Genet’s prose), he did in fact “halo” his found motifs with procedures similar to those enumerated by White: all-over repetition, seriality, and trademark features (silkscreen,

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dissociation of colour and image pattern, etc.). But, of course, Warhol’s interest for the motif of the Last Supper renders the religious, and particularly the theme of communion, unavoidable as it rekindles his long-standing puns and plays around religion, his transgressive embezzlement of holiness, which got its first serious impetus when he discovered Genet. The Last Supper series could be about Factory meals, lurking betrayal, homoerotic sexuality, but there is no denying that it could also refer to the invention of communion and transubstantiation – an unexpected twist on the embodiment and metamorphosis of gods, a form of miraculous promotion of ordinary matter into godly incarnation that priests, art historians, and artists like Warhol are known to perform quite regularly in order to produce holy hosts and other fetishes. Moreover, the series represents the evening, if not the very moment, when Christ is said to take leave of his disciples and to prepare the stage for his disappearance. Warhol’s untimely death after the opening of his Last Supper exhibition in Milan has made commentators irrationally transform the series into some kind of prophetic utterance, meaningfully aligned with a long list of Warhol’s disappearances and vanishing acts: his hidden face on Duane Hanson’s portrait of him, his selferasure into the blank mirror of Thirteen Most Wanted Men’s silver screen, his Invisible Sculpture (985) or Camouflage Self-Portrait (986). But in that process, another, more important if less mythological, dimension of invisibility goes unmentioned: Warhol’s appropriation of Leonardo’s fresco confronts him with a work of art that has been, from the start – that is, shortly after its completion in 498 – almost impossible to see due to the saltpetre on the wall and to Leonardo’s unusual technique. Warhol’s commission to play with The Last Supper coincided with the restoration of a fresco that had become ubiquitous in reproduction while the original kept depriving visitors of visual plenitude. Warhol acknowledged this clearly as he worked from a photograph of a kitsch sculptural version of Leonardo’s scene (quite noticeable in the photograph of his studio). He thus introduced a popular and commercial mediation between his prints and the elevated language of art and spirituality that is now said to have determined his work. The last word on this matter could be left to Kynaston McShine, who writes:

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At the time of [Warhol’s] death, in February 987, many projects and commissions, some art and some not, were under way; the activity was what it had always been. Given the mythologizing of Warhol, there has been speculation about which was the last painting or drawing he was working on. It is salutary that the question may never be answered. Perhaps the sentimental would like to believe that it was a Last Supper, but it could as easily have been Moonwalk, one of the prints from a series on the history of American television.³² Leaving the question open, we could at least observe that, in the history of American television, the moonwalk, like Leonardo’s Last Supper prior to its restoration, constitutes something of a ghost-image. It translates a historical moment into an episode of distant and tenuous contact, and it stands as a document of exceptionally poor visual quality, equating history with a locus of precarious visuality that, as such, seems to have stimulated Warhol’s fascination for disappearing acts and vanishing performances – a fascination that runs from his obliteration of Thirteen Most Wanted Men to his Invisible Sculpture to the Camouflage Last Supper (986).

Notes * A first version of this paper was presented for Éric Michaud’s seminar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris). It was part of a threelecture series on “Fictions de la Chair” that I gave there as guest professor in May 2002. I wish to thank my research assistant on this project, Marilou Saint Pierre, and Eduardo Ralickas for his revision of my English prose.  Jane Daggett Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol (New York: Continuum, 998), 0. 2 Johanne Lamoureux, “L’invention du dernier tableau: Un topos romantique,” Intermédialités 3, “mettre en scène,” ed. Jean-Marc Larue, forthcoming (Fall 2009). 3 Dillenberger, Religious Art of Andy Warhol, 0–. 4 Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” Art in America 75, 5 (987): 28–36.

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5 David Bourdon, Andy Warhol (Paris: Plon, 990), 47. 6 Reverend C. Hugh Hildesley, Program for the Memorial Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral,  April 988, reprinted in Dillenberger, Religious Art of Andy Warhol, 6. 7 John Richardson, “Eulogy for Andy Warhol,” reprinted in Dillenberger, Religious Art of Andy Warhol, 3–4 (emphasis added). 8 Kynaston McShine, “Introduction,” in Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 989), 23. 9 Jack Kroll, “Saint Andrew,” Newsweek, 7 December 964, 00–3. 0 Philip Leider, “Saint Andy: Some Notes on an Artist Who, for a Younger Generation, Can Do No Wrong,” Artforum 3, 5 (965): 26–8.  Barbara Rose, “In Andy Warhol’s Aluminium Foil, We All Have Been Reflected,” New York Magazine, 2 May 97, 56. 2 Leticia Kent, “Andy Warhol: I Thought Everyone Was Kidding,” Village Voice, 2 September 986, 37–8. 3 Dillenberger includes a telling photograph of the painted decor of the church in Religious Art of Andy Warhol, 8. 4 Jean-Claude Schmitt, Le corps des images: Essais sur la culture visuelle du Moyen Age (Paris: Gallimard, 200), 76–7 (my translation). 5 Jean-François Lyotard, “Esquisse d’une économique de l’hyperréalisme,” in Des Dispositifs Pulsionnels, 05–3 (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 973). On the libidinal economy of Warhol’s desire to be a machine, see pp. 08–2. According to Lacan, the hysteric is characterized as someone who seeks a master over whom he or she reigns (2). 6 Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol (New York: Viking Penguin, 200), 204–5. 7 Dillenberger, Religious Art of Andy Warhol, 88–9. 8 Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, 205–7. 9 Dillenberger, Religious Art of Andy Warhol, 95. Leonardo’s fresco is not the most relevant example to bring up the possibility of such a homosexual relationship since the composition clearly splits Christ and John, contrary to what is described of the scene in the Gospel of Saint John, the text from which this interpretation derives. 20 Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, 97–8. 2 Ibid., 59. 22 It is worth noting that, despite the title of the installation and its contemporary filmic pendant, Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys, Warhol referred to his World Fair intervention as the Ten Most Wanted Men.

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23 Andy Warhol, “Warhol in His Own Words,” in Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, organised by Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 989), 463. 24 Gene R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Part I (Interviews),” Art News 62, 2 (963): 6. 25 Ibid., 26. 26 Jean Genet, Le secret de Rembrandt suivi de ce qui est resté d’un Rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés bien réguliers et foutu aux chiottes (Paris: Gallimard, 995), 42–4 (my translation). 27 Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 993), 377 (emphasis added). 28 Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman, introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Grove Press, 963), 6. 29 Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol, 97. 30 Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, 24. 3 White, Genet, 7 (emphasis in the original). 32 McShine, Andy Warhol, 23. Moonwalk is reproduced in this catalogue as plate 459 on page 398.

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3 The Persistence of Spectatorship: The Racialized and Ethnicized Gaze monik a kin gagnon

As Laura Mulvey’s landmark essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” continues to endure as the point of reference for feminist discussions of film spectatorship, so Manthia Diawara’s “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance” arguably occupies a similar position for thinking about black spectatorship and, more generally, racialized spectatorship.¹ Yet, as Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane caution in their introduction to “The Spectatrix” special issue of Camera Obscura in 989, it is important “to avoid an overly linear account of the development of feminist interest in the female spectator,”² a forced linearity that might overlook significant contributions to and influences on this theorizing of the spectator. And perhaps this also holds for tracing interest in the racialized spectator. As recognition of the need to broaden those identity categories and differences ensued in the late 970s, the abstract subject of Mulvey’s psychoanalytic approach opened out onto discussions about the spectator’s agency, the historical status of the viewer, to audiences as antidotes to the abstraction, and to generalizations of theorization as well as to the reductive essentialism of those (initially gendered) identity categories being instantiated. The contributions of cultural studies approaches in the 980s had also opened looking relations to broader social and cultural fields of engagement, as Stuart Hall’s paradigm for a communication circuit suggested a constitutive subject, paving the way for consideration of the broader contexts within which spectatorship takes place as well as considerations of audience reception.³ In 200, Anna Everett’s histori-

cal account of critical black journalism in the United States in Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 909–949 identified black spectatorship avant la lettre in the critical reception of the 95 Birth of a Nation. The landmark first feature-length film continues to divide critics and scholars, some of whom ignore the overtly racist characters and storyline that heroicizes the southern Ku Klux Klan.⁴ As broadly acknowledged, W.E.B Dubois’ 903 concept of “double consciousness” had already staked a complex relation between African American identities and acts of seeing; Jane Gaines points out that Dubois’ double consciousness “is all about looking relations.”⁵ Heeding Bergstrom and Doane’s caution, the limitations of overly linear (and chronological) accounts of raced spectatorship become apparent when one recognizes more than one century of critical formulation involving the intersections of race, identity, and spectatorship. The ongoing engagement with and theorizing of spectatorship for thinking through racialized identities and identifications is, alone, evidence of its continuing usefulness. If Mulvey used Freudian and Lacanian theory to analyze looking and the gaze, more recent theorists, such as Everett and Gaines, insist on more broadly relational approaches that situate spectatorship within socio-historical and cultural frames of reference. As these authors and others now argue, the problematics and tensions of race and racialized spectatorship have been around since the very inception of cinema, and recent historical projects are now retrieving and reconstructing the specificity of film-going, filmviewing, and film audiences for analysis.⁶ If the aim of Bergstrom and Doane’s introductory paper was to delineate a history of the intellectual feminist trajectory of spectatorship between 975 and 989, this chapter more modestly attends to the persistence and usefulness of spectatorship for theorizing about racialized identities and attempts to underline how the concept of spectatorship continues to effectively illuminate and recuperate a broad range of practices across a retroactive time period. This examination emerges from my research on Walt Disney’s racialized cultural representations, wherein the concept of spectatorship offers one way of considering the dominant whiteness of Disney’s representations, its reception by non-white child audiences, and the pedagogical workings of film representations in relation to identification and subject formation. I use spectatorship to animate the discur-

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sive layerings of Disney’s Mulan (998), a film that startlingly mirrors Rey Chow’s analysis of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (987), with the juxtapositions of Chinese tradition and modernity being at the core of her arguments. As I suggest, this situates Mulan as a “junior,” or “juvenile,” introduction to a China trapped in the past and grossly outdated in its gender politics.⁷ In a similar manner, in its structure, Disney’s Pocahontas (994) operates as a juvenile version of “discovery” narratives, with which an adult “discovery” film such as Ridley Scott’s 492: Conquest of Paradise (992) may easily be compared. Yet, more important than such discursive analyses is determining how young viewers of colour and young Native viewers saw these films, and how ethnographic anecdotes (such as Chow’s viewing with her mother, and Miles Morrisseau’s description of watching Pocahontas with his daughter) were powerful catalysts for their analytic reflection.⁸ This chapter outlines the initial conceptual alterations that developed to activate relations between film spectatorship and racialized or ethnicized identities in order to trace a theoretical arc from its initial grounding in essentialized identities, through recurrent (auto)ethnographic manifestations as prompts for reconceptualization, and, finally, to racialized spectatorship’s current expansion into social and cultural frames of analysis. From resisting and oppositional spectatorship to the more recent reconstructive and perverse spectatorship one can see the functionality of looking structures and the specificity of cinematic representation as well as the need to consider them within social frameworks that account for how racialization occurs in expanded social fields.⁹ The engagement with spectatorship in film studies finds its earliest formation in the work of French film theorist Christian Metz and with feminist theorists, beginning in the 970s with Laura Mulvey, who was followed by Kaja Silverman, E. Ann Kaplan, Teresa de Lauretis, and Mary Ann Doane.¹⁰ Metz foreground cinema as a set of physical processes and mechanisms that structured viewer interpretation and that, indeed, effectively inculcated the viewer into particular ideologies through form and structure (this was called “apparatus theory”). This dramatically set forth the idea that cinema was not merely an image on a screen (or a text to be read) but, rather, a complex engagement

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developed by the highly constructed screen image and its formation of subject positions for spectators. Laura Mulvey’s 975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” proposed that the point of view of classical Hollywood film narratives was repeatedly masculine, with women being valued for their to-be-looked-at-ness. Pleasures in cinematic viewing were those associated with the active male gaze, while woman was constructed as passive object. Ensuing feminist work would respond to Mulvey’s absent woman spectator in a variety of ways, including de Lauretis’s notion of the “double identification” of female spectators and Judith Mayne’s inscriptions of lesbian spectatorship into patriarchal looking relations, which opened up a space for the consideration of renegade modes of looking that had not been considered by earlier theorizing.¹¹ Gaines and Mayne introduced questions regarding the privileging of white spectatorship in these accounts, and they made gestures towards the specificity of female black spectatorship.¹² Manthia Diawara’s 988 essay, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance” (originally published in French and translated into English in 993), was the first of a number of examinations by black scholars that undertook the problematic of specifically black spectatorship. He stated that, while debates on spectatorship using Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure” as a point of departure had, by 988, begun to consider issues of sexuality as well as those of gender, prevailing approaches remained largely colourblind and were still unable to significantly engage with questions of race. Through a close analysis of a sequence from D.W. Griffith’s 95 classic The Birth of a Nation (the scene is the “Gus Chase,” which involves the pursuit of a young white girl by a “black” man), Diawara suggests that “components of ‘difference’ among elements of race, gender, and sexuality give rise to different readings of the same material. Specifically, as an African film scholar based in the North American context, I am interested in the way that Afro-American spectators may, at times, constitute a particular case of what I call resisting spectatorship.”¹³ Diawara argues that black spectators are situated in a paradoxical position and must consequently disrupt Griffith’s narrative at multiple points throughout the film by creating “ruptures” that permit the refusal of the overt racism of characters and storylines. Tracing other instances from dominant cinema,

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such as Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hours, Diawara concludes that The Birth of a Nation ultimately “situates Black characters primarily for the pleasure of White spectators (male or female).”¹⁴ Diawara’s “resisting spectator” finds resonance in the writings of bell hooks, who later elaborated her notion of an “oppositional gaze” to describe the space of agency and site of resistance available to colonized blacks. According to hooks: “Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositional.”¹⁵ She further describes how black spectators engage with white representations of blackness in critical ways, wherein visual pleasure comes to be about “contestation and confrontation” and where “cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation.”¹⁶ In a similar manner, in her analysis of Pretty Woman, D. Soyini Madison ascribes Dubois’ notion of “double consciousness” to the black female spectator, who must, as in hooks’s analysis, contend with the centrality of white femininity in dominant representations. Whereas Diawara argues for the refusal of overt racism through resistant viewing, Madison elaborates several operations that occur through a “triple lens” of black feminist spectatorship. This lens consists of () the (mostly unsuccessful) transcendence or suspension of racial difference through normalizing the effect of white characters and plots; (2) crossing () through a critical act of “double consciousness” that refuses the evacuation of race (whether race is overtly present or not); and, (3) establishing an “oppositional gaze” that, like hooks’s, sees how patriarchy and racism not only undermine women of colour but also simultaneously degrade and elevate white women.¹⁷ Using a multi-method approach that includes a textual and discourse analysis as well as interviews with film viewers, Jacqueline Bobo studies black women’s responses to The Color Purple (985), a contribution that represents the impact of ethnographic methodologies introduced by cultural studies on the psychoanalytic textual analyses of film. This intersection of methods in Bobo’s research bore fascinating contradictory outcomes, bringing attention to the complexity of the film viewer’s identificatory responses. Like Diawara and hooks, she identifies black audiences as the subjects and focus of her research. Bobo compares Alice Walker’s original 982 novel and its contribution to a black women’s emancipatory literature with Steven Spielberg’s mainstream film

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adaptation. Underlying the changes Spielberg made in translating the book to film was his view that “race was not [the book’s] predominant feature”;¹⁸ rather, he envisioned The Color Purple as being analogous to Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, to which references are sprinkled throughout his film. Bobo documents Spielberg’s substantial deviation from Walker’s text, notably its dramatic shift in focus from the two black women to the abusive male protagonist. The principal focus of Bobo’s own analysis is her interviews with black women viewers and her attempt to contend with their largely positive responses to the film. She concludes: The preoccupations and concerns of Black women activists and writers resonate with the lives of many Black women. As such, the issues they addressed can be seen as constituting a reservoir of background knowledge that Black women used as a discursive strategy for meaning construction of the film The Color Purple. This does not mean that the women who engaged positively with the film were aware of this heritage of Black women’s activism. It means that the issues that these women considered to be important were pervasive ones in Black women’s lives; thus, the women could be interpellated, or hailed, by a creative work in which these elements were present.¹⁹ The aforementioned essays productively challenge the implicit assumptions of a body of film theory on spectatorship and the “gaze” by introducing black subjectivity, whether of its spectators and audiences or as an (absent) element of film texts. In attributing a specificity to black spectators as an identity category, however, Diawara, hooks, Madison, and Bobo also limit the identity formations of these very viewers in a manner that is reductive to and definitive of their race alone, and they assume the integrity of the black spectator as a discrete and coherent subject. As Diawara himself concedes in an afternote to the English republication of his essay in 993, his analysis relies on the notion of a black “essentialism” – something that had been quickly pointed out by his colleagues and critics.²⁰ Black spectatorship, in the form of “resisting” or “oppositional” viewing, thereby becomes somewhat programmatic, a response that is uniform and homogenous. Although this

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produces certain theoretical limitations, it is worth recognizing the political implications and strategic impact of undertaking research that constructs and values a black audience and spectators in their specificity – spectators who had not been considered by prevailing research and who had been left marginalized, subsumed, or undeveloped. I refer to the paradoxical implication of essentialism as the conundrum of cultural identity politics, or the Other conundrum.²¹ Implicitly aligned with many media studies and independent media practices of cultural race politics in the 980s and early 990s (these essays were written within this period), critiques of dominant white representation and the absence of people of colour were often undergirded by a desire for the rehabilitation of the image and for the valuing of self-representations by people of colour and their roles as image-makers. Allow people of colour to make representations of people of colour, the argument goes, and these will be images that will redress misrepresentation, that will be beneficial and desirable for racialized audiences and their communities.²² While this reductive essentialism produces recognizable theoretical difficulties, the operative presumption implicit within these essays involves the spectator’s racialized identification with screen images; in other words, fixed (black) identities produce particular, oppositional identifications. While Diawara and Bobo draw on informal and formal ethnographic approaches, another point of departure in developing spectatorship analysis comes from autoethnographic perspectives; this is also evident in hooks, for instance, who draws on her own cinema-going experiences as a point of departure for broader analyses. Examples abound of autoethnographic accounts of cinema-going and the complicated identifications created by racialized and racist images and socially complex viewing contexts. In 952, the Martiniquan psychoanalyst, Frantz Fanon, wrote of watching Tarzan in a Parisian film theatre and engaging in a distinctive process of (dis)identification precisely because of this French viewing context. In Black Skin, White Masks, he writes: “I cannot go to a film without seeing myself. I wait for me. In the interval, just before the film starts, I wait for me. The people in the theatre are watching me, examining me, waiting for me. A Negro groom is going to appear. My heart makes my head swim.”²³ Edward Said speaks of watching Tarzan films in Egypt as a young boy.²⁴ And, in a chap-

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ter entitled “How I Became a Savage: Seeing Anthropology,” Fatimah Tobing Rony explores her own complicated viewing of King Kong as a Sumatran woman. Identifying with the Indonesian islanders in the film, she writes: “I am watching myself being pictured as a Savage. I am the Bride of [King] Kong.”²⁵ Her sense of “becoming a savage,” as she watches the film, hints at the processes of identity formation in relation to the screen image. For Rony, this terrain of the spectatorship of people of colour is like seeing with a “third eye”: “In conventional terms, the third eye refers to the experience one has when, during an argument with one’s lover, for example, one has the feeling that a third eye has floated out of one’s body and is observing the altercation with the dispassionate air of a zoologist examining a specimen.”²⁶ Rony thus draws explicitly from African American writer Dubois’ description of double consciousness, in which he so clearly articulates the complicated formulation of black identity in the United States as a tension between dominant racist cultural definitions of blackness and the black subject’s own self-knowledge: it is, insidiously, the incorporation of the oppressor’s racist vision into one’s self identity, one’s very vision of self. According to Dubois: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world – a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.²⁷ For Hamid Naficy, the autobiographical research position (or what I refer to as autoethnography)²⁸ has epistemological implications as he seeks to undertake a “context-driven theorization of cross-cultural cinema” based upon his first experiences in Iranian movie houses, wherein he attempts to address the problematics of power that accompany cross-cultural encounters and the social contexts of consumption. As Naficy writes: “I am using [autobiography] as a searchlight to

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illuminate not only the essential interiority and multiple subjectivity of film spectatorship but also its undeniable but undertheorized social and collective dimensions, especially when films cross national and cultural boundaries.”²⁹ Resisting and oppositional forms of spectatorship occur, and he refers to them as “haggling,” or as counterinterpellations, with the image, which occur for a variety of reasons: the disruptive atmosphere in the film theatres that he vividly describes; the live translations of foreign dialogue, inter- and subtitles during the screening; and, following the 979 Iranian revolution, the space of the theatre as safe meeting places for political activists. Naficy elaborates a cross-cultural dimension to film viewing, an international dimension that underlines the complexity of the identifications that can occur, depending on context. By speaking from a specifically Iranian social context, he also implicitly raises questions about the viability of intercultural generalizations for non-white spectatorship, as does Rony’s later work. These essays ask whether those socially specific models and theorizations of black spectatorship, particularly Dubois’ notion of double consciousness, can be so easily expanded to include nonblack spectators’ experiences of viewing. Such questions make evident the difficulties and challenges of not essentializing racialized identity groups as well as of not conflating the distinctiveness of historical and actual racialization. Another attempt to theorize a specificity for non-white spectatorship in relation to the body of feminist film criticism initiated by Mulvey is Rey Chow’s “Seeing Modern China: Toward a Theory of Ethnic Spectatorship.” I address this essay in great detail in order to consider the intergenerational differences that she theorizes between her Chinese mother and herself as well as the discursive dimensions she introduces (beyond cinematic structures alone). Chow’s analysis of the “ethnicized” spectator and its attendant framework for cultural representation enables a complex insight into identity as a process, and it introduces “ethnicity” and “ethnicizing” rather than “race” as key categories and processes of identification.³⁰ Like Rony, she develops a sense of how films may “construct” an ethnic spectator through the process of viewing and, thereby, of how film viewing participates in reinforcing difference as it pervades numerous discourses and different spheres of cultural production.

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Chow’s point of departure is the effort to understand her mother’s unsettling comment regarding Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor: “It is remarkable that a foreign devil should be able to make a film like this about China. I’d say, he did a good job!”³¹ Chow proceeds to reconcile her mother’s positive comments on the film with those of her academic friends who had criticized it for its prevailing Orientalism. In this regard, Chow’s initial ruminations can be likened somewhat to those of Bobo, who similarly attempted to reconcile her own ideological critiques of The Color Purple, a film that she found objectionable, to the positive feedback she received from black female respondents. For Chow, the seeming contradiction of these positive views – on the part of her mother and Bobo’s black spectators – are an indication of how, “much like the female spectator, the ethnic spectator occupies an impossible space that almost predetermines its dismissal from a theoretical reading that is intent on exposing the ‘ideologically suspect’ technicalities of production only.” “In such a reading,” she continues, “my mother’s response could only be written off as ‘unsophisticated,’ ‘simplistic,’ or ‘manipulated.’”³² Yet she notes how her mother’s referring to Bertolucci as a “foreign devil” inscribes a comprehension of the distance between Chinese culture and the West, a vast gulf (or rupture?) that she demonstrates to be reinforced across the “prevalent academic attitudes revolving around the study of ‘China’”³³ in the West. Using the springboard of Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure,” as well as essays by Silverman and de Lauretis, Chow outlines how the combination of Mulvey’s critique of ideology as a falsehood with de Lauretis’s problematizing of the female spectator as simultaneously interpellated by and rejecting the screen image (therein becoming the locus of a double identification) is crucial to understanding spectatorship as a “performative” practice, or, in de Lauretis’s words, of seeing “spectatorship as a site of productive relations.”³⁴ Chow expands de Lauretis’s arguments to develop a concept of the “ethnicized” spectator who is not simply Diawara’s pre-given black spectator but, more particularly, is a spectator with an “ethnicized” subjectivity that has been produced, in part, by the textual effects of the film. In de Lauretis’s words, “spectators are not, as it were, either in the film text or simply outside the film text; rather, we might say, they intersect the film as they are intersected by cinema.”³⁵ In Chow’s view, the ethnicized spectator’s viewing

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process is thereby not simply based on essentialized notions of identity but, rather, acknowledges the recognition of “Chineseness” as “already part of the process of cross-cultural interpellation that is at work in the larger realm of modern history.”³⁶ Chow initially engages The Last Emperor textually by expanding Mulvey’s notion of “image-as-woman” to describe an “image-as-feminized space” in which the film’s protagonist, the puppet emperor Pu Yi (and, by symbolic extension, imperial China), may be similarly understood as feminized and eroticized in a variety of ways by Bertolucci’s direction. Chow then builds on this initial reading to produce “a polemics of cross-cultural inquiry” to engage the implications of this feminization and to see how such representations are encountered by members of that culture. Chow ultimately reads into her mother’s response a successful “suturing” of the Western Chinese spectator, in the sense of her recognizing Pu Yi as both signifying “Chinese” history (“Yes, that’s me, that’s Chinese!”) and being crossed by an identification with the feminizing, structuring, dominant “gaze” of the film. The history of China and the non-West in general, Chow suggests, is increasingly divided into “classical/primitive and modern” stages. The consequences for modern non-Western subjects is that their relation to things Chinese is repeatedly constituted through a sense of loss of both tradition and history. Chow describes how this subject’s interpellation with representations of a “‘China’ that never was,” but that effectively carries residues of “China” or “Chineseness,” is not merely an emotional nostalgia but, rather, a recognition of, and “last residue of a protest against that inevitable ‘dismemberment’ brought about by the imperialistic violence of Westernization.”³⁷ Chow subsequently turns to sinology and China studies in the West to foreground how the temporal displacement of “China” to an ancient tradition pointedly marks the “impossibility” of the ethnicized spectator’s position. In these fields of study, Chow identifies a Western preoccupation with premodern tradition, which is to say, a fixation on a China characterized as one that existed before Westernization: How to strive for authentic originariness, when the history of China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is inundated with disruptive contacts with the West? Where could authentic

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origins possibly come from? In other words, what is “Chinese”? The concentration on China as “tradition” is an understandable way out, for as an idea, tradition offers the comfort precisely of adequacy, self-sufficiency, and continuity. It is supported, outside academia, by antique collecting, museums, restaurants, tourism, and the pastime of chinoiserie, all of which confirm the existence of a Chinese tradition.³⁸ This fixation on authenticity in China studies, an orientation duplicated by Bertolucci, creates a Westernized Chinese subject trapped between this “tradition” and “modernity.” These subjects are aware that “it is precisely the notion of a still-intact tradition to which they cannot cling,” yet modern Chinese people are cast as “impure,” as too Westernized in relation to this idealized past, and, as spectators, they are caught between “the sinologist’s ‘gaze’ and ‘images’ of China that are sewn on the screen of international culture.”³⁹ To identify positively with the latter, however, as Chow describes in the contrast between her mother’s and her friends’ responses, is to succumb to the ideologically problematic dominating white gaze of the former. The impossibility of Chow’s ethnic viewers’ position – one in fact produced as an effect of the film text – is that these people are left with few other points of identification and are thus spectators that are repeatedly displaced and in constant movement between identifications. Two more recent engagements and adaptations of the concept of spectatorship demonstrate the complex productivity at work in such oscillating identifications and viewing processes. Jacqueline Najuma Stewart’s social and cultural analysis of a film exhibition in Chicago in the early 900s – Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity – complicates any limited notion of black spectatorship and recasts it as “reconstructive spectatorship.” This reconceptualization, she writes, “seeks to account for the range of ways in which Black viewers attempted to reconstitute and assert themselves in relation to the cinema’s racist social and textual operations.”⁴⁰ These included classical film’s narrative integration as well as racially segregated theatres of the early twentieth century, which forced black film-goers to continually be aware of their black identities and racialized social status. Also placing an emphasis on a historically specific moment of film viewing

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and racially segregated space, Eve Oishi concludes “Visual Perversions: Race, Sex, and Cinematic Pleasure” with a description of her Japanese American father viewing anti-Japanese films in a us internment camp during the Second World War: “The psychological damage wrought by this experience was necessarily tied to the physical context of viewing: the public space of a theater, in the forced isolation and racial segregation of an internment camp, in the presence of both his friends and his parents.”⁴¹ In a similar vein, Kent Ono underlines the constitutive role of cinema in the production of counter histories through his study of films and videos about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the Second World War: “I suggest that cinema interweaves particular versions of history together with local memories in order to authenticate new versions of history. As a result, spectators participate dynamically in the history-making process that films effect while also participating in the history out of which films are made.”⁴² In this, Ono brings attention to the dynamic process of viewing, its social relations and its implication for community and history formation. The remarkable confluence of race theory and allusions to film in Dubois’ original metaphor of double consciousness and his emphasis on the role of vision in the construction of a racialized subjectivity has been remarked upon by Jane Gaines: “Suddenly, one of the foundational statements in race theory appears as film theory, addressing the question of the execution of power through the trajectory of the eye.”⁴³ She also notes the proximity of feminist theory to Dubois’ statement but indicates the need to distinguish between the two; this might occur through a more sustained elaboration of the social dimension of looking relations, a de-emphasis on “looking” and a focus, instead, on “relations.” As in Chow’s analyses, the relational dimension that Dubois emphasizes offers a destabilizing quality that his fraught sense of doubling seems to further amplify. His is not a simply resistant or oppositional gaze but, rather, one that moves between various possible versions of subjecthood. While there are attendant risks of essentialism in constructing a resistant viewer who must contend with the paradoxes of spectator positioning, these risks may be politically expedient. The clarity of metaphor in double consciousness that Dubois brilliantly captured in 903 may not require a significant alteration in order to address the relational spectatorships of racialized subjects today.

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Notes  Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 6, 3 (975): 6–8; Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara, 2–20 (New York: Routledge, 993). Originally published as “Le spectateur noir face au cinéma dominant: Tours et détours de l’identification,” in CinemAction 46 (988): 93–0. 2 Janet Bergstrom and Mary Ann Doane, “The Female Spectator: Contexts and Directions,” Camera Obscura 20– (989): 6. 3 Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 972–79, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis (London: Hutchinson, 980). 4 Anna Everett, Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 909–949 (Durham, nc : Duke University Press, 200), 90. 5 Jane M. Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 200), 2. 6 See Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) (thanks to Haidee Wasson for bringing this book to my attention); and Eve Oishi, “Visual Perversions: Race, Sex, and Cinematic Pleasure,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3, 3 (2006): 64–74. 7 Monika Kin Gagnon. “Race-ing Disney: Race and Culture in the Disney Universe” (P hD diss., Simon Fraser University, 998). 8 Rey Chow, “Seeing Modern China: Toward a Theory of Ethnic Spectatorship,” in Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 99); Miles Morrisseau, “Disney’s Disgrace,” Aboriginal Voices 2/3 (995): 6–7. 9 “Resisting spectatorship” is found in Diawara, “Black Spectatorship”; “oppositional spectatorship” is found in bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Toronto: Between the Lines, 992); “reconstructing spectatorship” is found in Stewart, Migrating to the Movies; and “perverse spectatorship” is found in Oishi, “Visual Perversions.” 0 Christian Metz, “The Imaginary Signifier,” Screen 6, 2 (975): 4–76, and Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 974); Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”; Kaja Silverman, “Masochism and Subjectivity,” Framework 2 (980): 2–9 (later elaborated in The Subject of Semiotics [New York: Oxford University Press, 983]); E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film:

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

2

3 4 5 6 7

8

9 20

2 22

23 24

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Both Sides of the Camera (New York: Methuen, 983); Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 984); Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 987). Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (New York: Routledge, 993). It is also worth noting that Mulvey herself revisited her own essay in light of these critiques. See Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 946),” Framework 5–7 (98): 2–5. See Jane M. Gaines, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory,” Cultural Critique 4 (986): 59–79; and Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship, 67–8. Diawara, Black American Cinema, 22 (emphasis added). Ibid., 25. hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze,” 6. Ibid., 7, 26. D. Soyini Madison, “Pretty Woman through the Triple Lens of Black Feminist Spectatorship,” in From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells, 224– 35 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 995). Jacqueline Bobo, “Reading through the Text: The Black Woman as Audience,” in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 993), 279. See also Bobo’s Black Women as Cultural Readers (New York: Columbia University Press, 995). Ibid., 285. Diawara cites Cheryl Butler, “The Colour Purple Controversy: Black Woman Spectatorship,” in Wide Angle 3, 3/4 (99): 62–9, as indicative of this critique. Monika Kin Gagnon, Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (Vancouver/Kamloops: Arsenal Pulp Press/Artspeak/kag , 2000). Ella Shohat and Robert Stam are especially adept at outlining the politics and limitations of strategies in visual and cultural representation by people of colour and Aboriginal media artists. See Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 994). Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 967), 40. Edward Said, “Jungle Calling: On Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 327–36 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

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25 Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham: Duke University Press, 996), 3. 26 Ibid., 4. 27 W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (Mineola, ny: Dover Publications, 994 [903]), 2. 28 Catherine Russell’s extended account of the term is most useful here as the personal dimension of autobiography is recognized as intersecting with social formations and historical processes, becoming (auto)ethnographic. See her Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, nc : Duke University Press, 999), 275–34. 29 Hamid Naficy, “Theorizing ‘Third-World’ Film Spectatorship,” Wide Angle 8, 4 (996): 3–4. 30 Keya Ganguly similarly uses “ethnic spectatorship” in her ethnography, although with only cursory mention of Rey Chow. See “The Dialectics of Ethnic Spectatorship,” in States of Exception: Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 200). 3 Rey Chow, “Seeing Modern China: Toward a Theory of Ethnic Spectatorship,” in Woman and Chinese Modernity (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 99), 24. 32 Ibid., 24. 33 Ibid., 27. 34 de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 5 (emphasis added). 35 Ibid., 44. 36 Chow, “Seeing Modern China,” 25. 37 Ibid., 27. 38 Ibid., 28. 39 Ibid., 29. 40 Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 94. 4 Oishi, “Visual Perversions,” 670. 42 Kent Ono, “Remembering Spectators: Mediations on Japanese American Cinema,” in Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism, ed. Darrell Hamamoto and Sandra Liu (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 29. 43 Gaines, Fire and Desire, 2.

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4 “Are We Still in the Game?”: David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ b e at e o c h s n e r

Today, technological progress has shown to what extent there is no longer a distinction in the body between what is organic and what isn’t, between inside and outside, normality and monstrosity, identity and alterity. The reorganization of the real body and the reconfiguration of self-image have, today, turned the body into a sort of instrument, a kind of joystick in a virtual game whose name, eXistenZ, promises existence, which is to say, being, presence, and historicity. But eXistenZ isn’t just a game, it’s an opening or interlude for attaining (rising up) to a higher level of fun leading directly to transcendence, to (or in) transCendenZ, the name of the other game – the game of the other. In keeping with the theme of this book, my task here is to examine how various contemporary media practices function as recurring attempts to thwart the subject’s identification process through images and that of the body’s through technology. In the work of the major Canadian body-horror filmmaker David Cronenberg (b. 943), people constantly find themselves caught in various transformation processes, to the point where it seems completely natural. These constant mutations prevent the existence of a fixed image; rather, they give rise to a series of similar and interdependent images that are, nevertheless, without a source. Clearly, we are in the virtual age, the age of simulation and of the impossibility of stable identity. The son of a piano teacher and a journalist, David Cronenberg made three short films while studying literature at the University of Toronto. After graduation, he shot his first experimental feature film,

Crimes of the Future, in 970. In the early 970s, he shot nine tv films for Canadian television as well as episodes for various television series. He became a cult film director among fans of gore and horror films in the late 980s with films such as Shivers, Rabid, and Chromosome 3. His fame increased with Videodrome (983), which was followed by Dead Zone (983) and The Fly (986). From this latter film to Crash (996), by way of Videodrome and Dead Ringers (988), to Naked Lunch (992) (an adaptation of an “unfilmable” novel by William Burroughs), eXistenZ (999), or Spider (2002) (a film that deals with schizophrenia), Cronenberg tries to show how people are transformed through the use or appearance of information technology and virtual images.¹ In The Fly, viewers watch the transformation of the lead character, Seth Brundle, into a brundlefly, a slow transformation from a beforehand, a sort of initial identity, to an afterwards, his new identity as a fly, which takes over. In Dead Ringers, on the other hand, the dual personality resides in a single person, leading us to questions about an individual’s true personality. These twins, to whom Cronenberg has given male and female names (Elliot and Beverly), thereby open up the question of the mechanisms of identification and differentiation on two levels: personality and sexuality. At what point does one gain (or lose) one’s most profound identity? Or, put another way, has such a fixed and profound identity ever existed? eXistenZ is less concerned with bodily metamorphoses than with imaginary ones, that is to say, with images: in an age of virtual games, we celebrate the uncontrollable inflation of (re)produced images. The countless playful possibilities for the visual “substantialism” of a subject run an extremely high risk of gutting the very notion of the latter under the weight of serial and serialized images simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, similar and different. In this way, the instability of digital images without a known source makes the construction of any reliable identity impossible. Synopsis of the Film

Games are even more fun when they appear more real than reality, explains the worrisome Allegra Geller, programmer and goddess of virtual games. Her new game, called eXistenZ, goes well beyond the

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narrow limits of PlayStation or Nintendo: this inspired game uses both biological knowledge and new information technology. In order to “plug in,” players have to install on their bodies a kind of outlet in the shape of an anus called a bioport, located in the lower back and directly connected to the spinal cord. The console, or gamepod, resembles a human organ (a kidney) with nipples; when you touch it, it begins to convulse and emit bizarre sounds. This meta-flesh, which we learn in the course of the film is a kind of degenerate animal created by the union of amphibian eggs and synthetic dna, functions as the raw material of the console. In fact, the game is an entire organism, complete with a central nervous system, a spinal cord, and muscles; it is thus vulnerable, like any other organic system. Through its ombicord, the game is plugged directly into the player’s body through the bioport, with their nervous system serving as the game’s energy source. Tweaking the nipples of the console starts the game, whereupon the player or players are immersed in a virtual world more real than nature itself. During the secret demonstration of this new game at its worldpremiere launch, in the presence of its designer Allegra Geller, our own position as a viewer is split in two: the players’ “regression” to a state of semi-moroseness at the beginning of the game calls to mind the bodily (and mental) behaviour of the film viewer as described by Jean-Louis Baudry. Like Christian Metz, Baudry uses psychoanalytic theory to describe film as having a magical basis. For Baudry, cinema is an apparatus that brings about a state of voluntary regression – a state that is present in the history of all media and visual devices.² And we shouldn’t forget that the players are connected to each other by means of an ombicord, a reference to the viewers chained in Plato’s cave. At the same time, they are umbilically connected to the gamepod of Allegra, the mother, who is in the process of downloading the new game. Before the game can even begin, however, a young fanatic – an anti-eXistenZialist – tries to kill her: “Death to eXistenZ! Death to the demoness Allegra Geller!”³ With the help of a young security guard, Ted Pikul, Allegra manages at the last moment to escape. As soon as she reaches safety, the young game designer thinks only of her gamepod, which she imagines was damaged in her flight. The only way to tell is to play the game with a friend. Unfortunately, Ted, a

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sceptic, does not have a bioport. But her friend Gas, who works in a gas station, knows how to install bioports – illegally, of course. While Ted is receiving his bioport, Allegra takes a walk outside. Unless we’re mistaken, we’re still within filmic reality, aren’t we? And yet Allegra is examining reality in a strange manner, as though she were testing its quality. Her discussion with Gas had already been a little strange. Before she returns to the gas station, a sudden movement catches her attention: a small animal, a sort of mutated, two-headed salamander is sitting on the gas pump: an imaginary monster, we might think. Unfortunately, not only is Ted’s new bioport illegal but Gas turns out to be a traitor to the game, so that when they try to plug Ted in the gamepod explodes. Ted kills Gas, and Allegra suggests they go see Kiri Vinokur, another friend, the only person capable of saving the gamepod’s life. After a seemingly complicated operation, Allegra and Ted are finally able to immerse themselves in the virtual world of eXistenZ. At first, they’re able to differentiate between the game (virtual reality) and reality (the program): on this first level of eXistenZ, (are we really on the first level of the game?), Allegra laconically remarks that she still has to put a lot of work into perfecting the virtual characters in order to make them more real. But why do the murder attempts continue in the game? Indecision begins, and the difference between (filmic) reality and imagination (the game within the film) becomes increasingly tenuous before vanishing altogether: “Are we still in the game?” The hero of a contemporary novel by the French author Claude Ollier, Fuzzy Sets, runs up against the same problem: “Am I still in the book?”⁴ The reader fares no better: “Are you in the book?”⁵ The title, Fuzzy Sets, already suggests that the book, the hero, and the reader are no more than “fuzzy sets,” a technical term used in sociology, computer science, and cognitive theory to indicate quantitative systems without defined boundaries. The difference between inside and outside the system “book” is thus no longer distinguishable as the boundaries of systems exist only through the constant repetition and redefinition of concepts such as the subject, identity, or stability. What is at stake here is clearly less a metaphorical replacement than a perpetual metonymic shift of concepts and their boundaries. As we see below, primary identification

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(that of the mirror) requires metaphorical resemblance to the human form, while secondary identification (such as the identification found in the cinema) needs only a metonymy of the human body. The ego is represented there only in the form of an imaginary signifier. The viewers of eXistenZ (the audience at the launch, the testers, and us) feel the same uncertainty towards a weakening reference system in which more and more tiny faults and small cracks appear: little holes in reality, says Allegra, herself amazed that a game can influence reality. What is happening is not a (mere) penetration but, rather, a sort of osmotic interpenetration, not just mixing reality and virtuality but also contaminating our system of identity. At the beginning of the game, Allegra and Ted find themselves in a store. Ted says something that surprises him, and Allegra explains the phenomenon to him: “It’s your character who said it.” To arrive at the second level, they are advised by D’Arcy Nadar (a clear reference to Darth Vader) to download their new identities via miniaturized gamepods. “Do you feel anything yet?” In the Chinese restaurant that has been recommended to the pair, Ted interrupts the game and he and Allegra find themselves back at Kiri Vinokur’s place: “I’m not sure. I’m not sure here, where we are, is real at all. This feels like a game to me.” A little later, Ted begins to feel his new identity coming on and abandons himself to it. Are we still in the game or have we already moved beyond it? Virtuality seems to have taken over, and neither Allegra nor Ted knows any longer where they are. Apparently, after having interrupted the game, the two protagonists have returned to the film’s diegetic reality, but, at the same time, the corpse of a character in the game is at their side. Allegra’s pithy explanation: it is only a latent image caused by the serialization of virtual images. The narrative construction of identity in ipseity consists precisely in serializing images: our understanding of one character depends on the following character (whom we no longer see because we have changed worlds). The connection between one character and another appears to be contingent, but once the next character appears it becomes retroactively necessary. This does not prevent even greater uncertainty: “I think we’re still inside the game. I think your pod’s out there somewhere ... This pod, it’s not the real one.” Is this true? After killing Kiri Vinokur, Allegra maintains: “He was only

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a game character.” Ted still hesitates: “What if we are not in the game anymore?” Allegra: “If we are not then you just killed someone real.” In the course of the game, Allegra realizes that Ted, in fact, is her real enemy, and she kills him: “Have I won?” The image dissolves and we find ourselves somewhere else, similar to the beginning of the film. This is when we discover that Ted and Allegra are only testers of the new game transCendenZ, invented by the PilgrImage company. After all the players have “returned,” they talk about their experience. Suddenly, Allegra and Ted kill the company officials, using almost exactly the same words as the young fanatic at the beginning of the film: “Death to PilgrImage. Death to transCendenZ.” Have we arrived in reality? Perhaps, and yet uncertainty returns when the young security guard asks them anxiously: “Tell me the truth. Are we still in the game?” The Impossibility of Identification, or the Multiplication of the “I”

In his famous article “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” Jacques Lacan explains that the act of seeing its own image immediately rebounds on the child in a series of gestures in which it playfully experiences the relationship of the image’s movements to its reflected environment. The child holds its slightly inclined position before the mirror and, in order to hold it, brings back an instantaneous and almost photographic quality of the image. The “I” hastens into a primordial form before becoming objectivized in the dialectic of identification with the other and before language returns it (the child) to the universality of its function as a subject: an ideal I situates the ego, before its social determination, in fiction. This form is given to it like a Gestalt, a constitutive exteriority. The process described by Lacan bears a strong resemblance to the game Fort/da described by Freud, which symbolizes the disappearance and reappearance of the mother. In eXistenZ, the unifying function of the (sort of) mother is carried out by the gamepod (recall that it has nipples), with which its designer Allegra Geller is not the only one to have an umbilical relationship. Freud’s example employs a binary structure, a binary quality that plays on presence and absence, the two key moments in Christian

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Metz’s film theory. In The Imaginary Signifier, Metz demonstrates the possibilities that the cinematic apparatus offers for identification, concluding that film is like a mirror, with a single and yet essential difference: although everything can be projected, just like it can in Lacan’s mirror, there is one thing, a single thing, that can never be reflected – the body of the viewer. And yet the formation of the ego (primary identification) makes it absolutely necessary that the child see itself as an other, and beside an other, someone similar who guarantees that the child is first. In the cinema, however, the reflection of one’s own body has disappeared. It is therefore presumed that that the primitive nondifferentiation of the ego and the non-ego has been overcome, so that the viewers are able to construct a world of objects without having to see themselves as objects. Because film viewers can not identify with their own objectified bodies, other forms can interact with it. But what are these forms, really? For Metz, viewers identify with the gaze of the camera and projector or, more generally, with the lead characters, with the goal of becoming a hero themselves (secondary identification). How does all this apply to eXistenZ? First of all, viewers are obliged to distinguish between the film’s two levels, that of “filmic reality” and that of the virtual world of games. At first, we know practically nothing about the two main characters, Allegra and Ted. They only truly begin to exist on their training ground (the game), and they act according to a system of trial and error in order to embody (and fulfill) their new identities. As the game progresses, viewers realize that the film’s playful levels are multiplying almost like an epidemic and witness a kind of mise en abîme in which not only the game (or rather the games) but also the possibility of differentiating between filmic reality and playful virtuality are engulfed: the separation between outside the screen, outside the game, and even outside the I is deferred. Identities (playful or not) are open to choosing and are downloadable: they have become pure potentialities. The identification system in eXistenZ is fairly complex. First of all, the film reproduces not only identification mechanisms but also their cinema-game system: generally speaking, we play games to take on another role or identity, to be more heroic, better looking, more courageous, and so on. In eXistenZ the players remain the same physi-

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cally and mentally, and, at least until the first level of the game, they still know what they are playing. Moreover, it is not really them who have left their “bodily reality” in order to disguise themselves (in the etymological sense of changing their identity); rather, another reality – eXistenZ, another existence – has, through the gamepod and the bioport, introduced itself directly into their bodies. This slow transformation of reality is the preferred version of the game designer Allegra, who seems to match perfectly Otto Fenichel’s symbolic equation for describing the consummating act of identification: “to look at = to devour [with the eyes].”⁶ This “penetration” of another “being” makes it absolutely impossible to distinguish between inside and outside.⁷ As Gilles Deleuze points out, these are two interdependent moments, one constituting the other. The “rules of the game” and the splitting of the cinematic identification system (I refer here of course to the game’s demonstration at the beginning of the film) are effaced, and, in eXistenZ, suture is the same as fissure, as Jacques Derrida would say. From eXistenZ to transCendenZ

In Cronenberg’s films, the structure of the ego and the other, the boundary between the various spaces of identity, is not a given; it has become something negotiable, manoeuvrable and manipulable beyond a fixed binary structure. eXistenZ is not only a game, it leads us directly to transcendence, to a game called transCendenZ. Let us try to clarify the philosophical importance of these two concepts. Metaphysics identifies subjectivity and substantiality (thought as permanent identity). We are thus dealing with essential determinations of the subject of metaphysics: permanence and identity. Kant, in Critique of Pure Reason, calls permanence as the essential determination of this subjectivity-substance into question and replaces the substantial permanence of matter with an ideal permanence: transcendental permanence. The movement from eXistenZ to transCendenZ introduces a transcendental subject instead of a subjectivity-substance. Thus, in Kantian philosophy, the subject changes status: it used to be substantial, it becomes transcendental. While the transcendental subject does not exist, prop-

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erly speaking, it nevertheless retains permanence: it was real (existent) in substance and becomes conceptual and logical in the transcendental subject. The subject is now the ultimate condition for possible experience and of any object of experience in general: it must necessarily accompany all my representations. What this means, among other things, is that as a condition of the possibility of experience it is not experienced – just like the substantial subject, moreover. What about its identity? Does the transcendental subject make it possible to answer fully the question “who?” To the question whether the transcendental subject made it possible to imagine a concrete and singular identity, Kant himself replied no: the transcendental subject is a formal identity and, thus, empty – or emptied, as, for Baudry, it is in the case of the sensorial-motor-mental regression of the film viewer.⁸ A sort of emptying in order to, in the case of eXistenZ, download other, new identities? Obviously, however, we must not confuse the formal identity of the transcendental subject with a person’s identity.⁹ The person or personality may change, even from top to bottom; however, it remains that the formal identity of the transcendental I, precisely because it is formal (i.e., empty) makes it possible to preserve an identity for the person despite her/his changing over time, as Nietzsche, among other people, described. Nietzsche went so far as to pluralize subjectivities under the appearance of the unity of the ego: “The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general?”¹⁰ Thus when Allegra explains the novelty of her game, she emphasizes the fact that it uses each player’s individual memory to (re)create their own history. According to Montaigne, we are led to believe that a person’s history, when told, enables us to answer the question of her identity, which is a narrative identity. Such a conception of identity was developed by Paul Ricoeur in his book Time and Narrative. In Latin, there are two words for identity, idem and ipse; on the one hand, the repetitive identity of the same, of sameness (idem), and, on the other, the identity under construction (ipse). The former, in English, is the identity of the same, while the latter is the identity of the self. Narrative

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identity shifts between one and the other, from the identity of the same, which is nothing other than substantial identity, to the identity of the self, or what we recognize as ourselves through the story of our own lives. Ipseity thus makes it possible to conceive of identity as involving mutation and change within the unity and coherence of a life story. Nevertheless, we should realize that narrative identity makes it possible to conceive of a subject, but a still incomplete or at least difficult to constitute subject, perhaps even a subject that is only virtual. We have thus succeeded in circumscribing a transcendental subject with a formal, that is to say empty, identity, which must be filled by a life story in order to provide a personal subject. eXistenZ provides us with a choice between several different stories; they are, however, all identical. The construction of identity requires sameness, or ipseity, and, at the same time, it demands the presence of the other: the I can only be constructed by taking into account the other’s difference, the difference of an alter ego. And, like any process involving identity (a mimetic process), the construction of identity seeks out not only difference but, at the same time, resemblance (the third concept to refer, for example, to the relations between subjects of the same species). There must, therefore, be difference at the same time as there is resemblance in order to see the other and the same in oneself. All this in order to be able to say, in the end: I recognize myself. This I-other recognizes itself as itself.¹¹ Allegra, goddess of computer games, sees a similar paradox at the root of our recognition of reality, declaring that, although it is absurd, the impression of reality increases when you insert things to show how unreal and impossible the scene is. In order to say this, you must nevertheless be capable of differentiating between the two dimensions. In eXistenZ (the film), this is clearly not the case. In the beginning, the boundary between reality and virtuality and between the various identities appears to be still intact: the players appear to realize they are playing, they recognize new identities within themselves – even if this can trouble them, especially in the case of Ted Pikul. This distinction fades the further one gets into the game. Ted starts feeling less and less certain: “I feel a little less connected from my real life. Kind of losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? There is an element of psychosis involved here.” The ending, however, appears to

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reveal the system: we are all just players, testers of another game called transCendenZ. But because the shooting at the beginning repeats itself, with the only difference being that different people are involved – this time Allegra and Ted kill the game’s inventors – doubt takes hold once again. The young security guard expresses the hope (and anxiety) of all the others: “Tell me the truth. Are we still in the game?” Which truth? Virtual Reality: Simulacra and Simulation

“We can define modernity by the power of the simulacrum,” Deleuze states. Now, to simulate something means, for example, that someone simulates an illness she doesn’t have: simulation involves absence, even if certain symptoms of the illness are present. Simulation thus calls into question the difference between true and false, real and imaginary. Virtual images can no longer refer back to their originals; they no longer offer us security or support. What provokes their isolation and exile is not their technological reproducibility (Walter Benjmain) but, rather, the fact that they have no original image, only preceding and subsequent images. Each image, even the first digital image, is already a double of itself, an unreal component of a whole series of independent creations. Before eXistenZ, Cronenberg had made other films whose topic is simulation: Videodrome and, in Naked Lunch, the indiscernible movements between reality and virtuality, or the different zones (Interzone, Annexia). Clearly, the filmic substratum itself (primary identification, the regression of the viewer, secondary identifications) makes possible the construction of multiple realities from eXistenZ to transCendenZ, invented by Nourish, the person who feeds the game. The characters accept virtual images as though they were factual; they no longer distinguish between an outside source (digital images) and an inside source (mental images): “It’s not a just image, it’s just an image!” eXistenZ appears to be the quintessence of previous journeys: in this film, the game not only breaks with reality to replace it with another but also calls into question our system of recognition and differentiation. Even as it breaks loose from so-called reality, the game creates uncertainty around the status of a preceding reality at its source. eXistenZ is a

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mental game, operating on the basis of an organic material: the images of eXistenZ (and especially those of transCendenZ) are superimposed on all the other images. Reality has thus become indiscernible from virtuality. There is no difference, and even if the images indicate that we have moved from one world to another, we have lost our bearings. In addition, the interface is no longer non-organic, it is made of living matter that, in the game, fuses with the players’ bodies. In a bazaar, Allegra and Ted discover sort of miniaturized gamepods. They plug themselves in and the mini-gamepods disappear into their bodies. Ted is sceptical, while Allegra understands that this represents an opportunity to reach (or transcend) a higher level of the game, a sort of metaeXistenZ. Are we still in the game? We must point out that Cronenberg is not a pessimistic critic of new media. In the end, he persuades us that nothing is true and yet, at the same time, that nothing is false. As Serge Grünberg remarks, a spiritual moment, a sort of mirror stage in which the body, confronted with itself, most often with its double, capitulates in the face of the strangeness of this reflection. To the extent that the situations Cronenberg describes are always pathological, we find ourselves at an inverted mirror stage: the ego disintegrates in the face of the reflection (the virtual takes over from reality).¹² According to Baudrillard, we have already entered the realm of simulation simulacra: “based on information, the model, cybernetic play. Their aim is maximum operationality, hyperreality, total control.”¹³ eXistenZ and transCendenZ provide us with a model of reality that is no longer in the mimetic domain: it is no longer simply a question of the almost perfect imitation of reality; now, different generations of images are identical. We are no longer in the realm of science fiction, we have entered another order, for which our imagination is unable to account: “There is no real and no imaginary except at a certain distance. What happens when this distance, even the one separating the real from the imaginary, begins to disappear and to be absorbed by the model alone?”¹⁴ Or should we say: in favour only of a new, even more real, game? Because, as Baudrillard relates,

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from one order of simulacra to the next, we are witnessing the reduction and absorption of this distance, of this separation which permits a space for ideal or critical projection. It is at a maximum in utopias, where a transcendent world, a radically different universe, is portrayed. It is diminished considerably in sf : sf only being, most often, an extravagant projection of, but qualitatively not different from, the real world of production.¹⁵ The old kinds of games are no longer transcendent or a projection, they “no longer constitute an imaginary domain with reference to the real; they are, themselves, an apprehension of the real, and thus leave no room for any fictional extrapolation – they are immanent, and therefore leave no room for any kind of transcendentalism.”¹⁶ In a world dominated by the reality principle, the imaginary was reality’s alibi. Today, reality has become the alibi of the model in a world governed by the principle of simulation: “paradoxically, it is the real which has become our true utopia – but a utopia that is no longer a possibility, a utopia we can do no more than dream about, like a lost object.”¹⁷ Cronenberg’s lure: he acts as though this imaginary transcendence and, as a result, reality still exists. But in the end we learn that we have been caught up in the structures of the game transCendenZ. The game has reached the highest level, that of the imaginary, of transcendence. eXistenZ could have led us one last time to transcendence; in this game the boundary between reality and game was still perceptible. transCendenZ took away any possibility of another world: everything has already been discovered, everything has already been programmed and, thus, as Friedrich A. Kittler remarks, is true. There is no more outside, no more inside, there is no parallel world, or dual world, or even possible world, neither possible nor impossible, neither real nor unreal. It is hyper-real, and that’s something completely different. We are always already in the other world, which is no longer an other, without mirror or projection or utopia capable of reflecting it. Simulation is insuperable, impassable, obscure, without exteriority: “we can no longer move ‘through the mirror’ to the other side, as we could during the golden age of transcendence.”¹⁸ The question at the end – Tell me the truth, are we still in the game? – is clearly not the right question.

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Notes  In 2005, Cronenberg released A History of Violence, an adaptation of a novel by John Wagner. His next film, Eastern Promises, was in postproduction at the time of writing this chapter. 2 See Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” in Apparatus, trans. Jean Andrews and Bertrand Augst, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 4–62 (New York: Tanam Press, 980). 3 The young man is carrying a very strange gun, an incongruous element that could have alerted us at this early stage that, at this initial stage of (filmic) reality, something is not right. 4 Claude Ollier, Fuzzy Sets (Paris: pol , 997), 9. 5 Ibid., 23. 6 Quoted by Anne Friedberg, “A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification,” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London: Routledge, 990), 39. Friedberg is referring to Otto Fenichel’s article “The Scoptophilic Instinct and Identification,” in The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel (New York: Norton, 953), 373–97. 7 In Kathryn Bigelow’s film Strange Days (995), the memory and experience of an other (or of oneself), recorded on a computer disk, directly influences the viewer’s brain. 8 Baudry, “The Apparatus.” 9 “Hence the identity of the consciousness of myself in different times is only a formal condition of my thoughts and their coherence, but does not prove at all the numerical identity of myself as subject. In this subject – regardless of the logical identity of the I – there may, after all, have occurred such variation as does not permit us to retain [the claim to] its identity, although we may still go on to accord to this subject the homonymous I. For in any different state of the subject, even the state of its conversion [to another], this I would still always preserve the thought of the preceding subject and thus could also pass it on to the subsequent one.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 996), 397. 0 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 967), 270.  Identification, according to Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, is a process both heteropathic (meaning that the subject identifies with an other) and idiopathic (meaning that the other identifies with the subject). See, for example, Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse

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2 3 4 5 6 7 8

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(Paris: puf, 997) and Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origines du fantasme (Paris: Hachette, 998). Serge Grünberg, David Cronenberg (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2000), 78. Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Science Fiction,” trans. Arthur B. Evans, Science Fiction Studies 55 (November 98): n.p. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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part two Interfaces of (In)Visibility

Introduction

Part 2 is as much about explorations of aesthetic strategies that represent subjects through a dialogue between visibility and invisibility as it is about strategies that solicit the spectator in a perceptual experience in which representation itself is structured through in/visibility. A similar concern mobilizes these explorations: the attempt to create image-viewer interfaces that immerse the spectator in the work while always ensuring its attachment to what exists outside the work – a city, a landscape, a historical event, an unexpected Other’s gaze, all of which are mutable realities. The viewer-work interface takes its precariousness and raison d’être from the spectator’s connection with such noncontainable “live” realities, the sheer impossibility to see it “all,” what philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has designated as the waning of the modern presupposition “that the world could be possessed as an object, as a panorama or a scene that was entirely visible for an ideal or absolute spectator.”¹ The works examined here break with this presupposition to expose us to a world as “a milieu in which we find ourselves, and which we can only apprehend from the inside. We are in a world, not in front of it.” From the start, Claudette Lauzon’s examination of Canadian Aboriginal artist Rebecca Belmore’s The Named and the Unnamed (2002), an exhibition conceived as a memorial to the sex trade workers (predominantly Aboriginal) who have disappeared from the City of Vancouver in the past two decades, raises the question of visibility:

the problem attached to making visible these women whose expected destiny is “to vanish without a trace.” This question underlies the exhibition and Belmore’s strategy of making the violated women visible but only as a ghostly presence. The spectator’s parcours thus oscillates between seeing and not seeing so as to be confronted with the reality of the in/visibility of these women. The exhibition provides the binding context to enable a constant association between the works and the ongoing history of First Nations people in Canada. As made manifest in David Tomas’s chapter, the threshold of (in)visibility through which the viewer is asked to observe Ilya Kabakov’s sculpture, Looking up: Reading the Words (997), creates a special form of interface in which the viewer is immersed in an environment that is, however (as is the case with Belmore’s The Named and the Unnamed) open to the moving physical outside. The sculpture, installed in a park, consists of a thirteen-metres steel mast supporting a metal antenna that is to be looked at by a spectator who is lying down on the ground in a position that allows him or her to read the words shaped by the wires of the antenna. A crucial aspect of the spectator’s experience is that the words tend to dissolve “against the background of the sky,” thus creating a constant tension between the act of seeing and the act of non-seeing. The work acquires a screen status that prevents the closure of the immersive experience by integrating the changing clouds, the apparent movement of the sky, and the actual movement of the planet through space. Closing Part 2, Olivier Asselin’s chapter elaborates on the notion of screen interface brought in by Tomas’s discussion of Kabakov’s work. It does this by offering a psychoanalytic reading of the phenomenon of the personal webcam that emerged in the mid-990s, focusing specifically on the viewer-image and webcamed-image relationship enabled by the World Wide Web interface. Presenting “real time” views of personal sites of the lives of specific individuals through the intermediary of cameras hooked to one or several computers, Asselin argues that the personal webcam is a site both of narcissism and exhibitionism, of self-surveillance and spectacle, where what matters, as in Foucault’s description of Bentham’s Panopticon, is not to be seen in real time (which in fact never occurs with webcams) but, rather, the sheer possibility of being seen anytime, anywhere. But to be seen by whom? Who

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is this all-seeing being? As the chapter makes clear, the all-seeing is not on the side of the viewer for whom the webcam is a site of potential yet never achieved hypervisibility; rather, it is more on the side of the Other, but an other that the webcam economy of (in)visibility forces us to significantly redefine.

Notes  Jean-Luc Nancy, “The End of the World,” Cosmograms, ed. Melik Ohanian and Jean-Christophe Royoux (New York: Lukas and Sternberg, 2004), 77.

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5 What the Body Remembers: Rebecca Belmore’s Memorial to Missing Women* cl audet te l auzon

Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call her if they don’t know her name? Although she has claim, she is not claimed. Toni Morrison, Beloved¹ Creating in the presence of the absent makes me a witness. Rebecca Belmore, Artist statement²

Rebecca Belmore’s Vigil appears to proceed according to the conventions associated with public ceremonies of remembrance. At a nondescript urban intersection, the performance begins with a ritualistic cleansing of the sidewalk, followed by the lighting of candles, the distribution of red roses, and the calling out of names. But this is not any street corner, and Vigil is not a customary vigil. The names that Belmore calls out – cries out, actually, with a palpable sense of anguish – are inscribed on her arms in thick black ink, scarring her skin like hastily made tattoos. After each name is called, Belmore drags a rose across her mouth, stripping off the petals and leaves and spitting them vehemently onto the ground. The performance is riveting, almost painful to watch, and offers none of the emotional relief that one might expect from a candlelit vigil. Indeed, even the candles fail to cooperate: the wind is strong, and efforts to keep them lit become as repetitive, laborious, and seemingly futile as the calling of names and the

Fig. 5.1

Rebecca Belmore, Vigil, 2002. Courtesy of the artist and Morris and Helen Belkin

Art Gallery, University of British Columbia.

shredding of flowers. The failure, or refusal, to achieve a sense of resolution becomes even more acute when Belmore dons a long red dress, removes her pants, and begins nailing the dress to a nearby wood pole. With great strain, she proceeds to rip the dress from the pole, nailing and ripping until the dress is nothing but scattered shards of red fabric clinging to the pole and littering the sidewalk. The performance ends without fanfare as Belmore replaces her pants and leans, exhausted, against a parked pickup truck. A long, awkward pause prefaces a slight bow to signal the end of the performance. The fifty-minute Vigil, performed in 2002 at the intersection of Gore Street and Cordova Street in a Vancouver neighbourhood known as the Downtown Eastside, was commissioned by the Full Circle in Talking Stick Aboriginal Arts Festival and was filmed for inclusion in Belmore’s multimedia exhibition The Named and the Unnamed.³ The

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performance, and the exhibition in its entirety, was conceived by the artist as a memorial to the sixty-plus women – all street-level sex trade workers and predominantly Aboriginal – who have disappeared from that neighbourhood in the past two decades. Since the mid-980s, concerned residents have been asking authorities to investigate these disappearances, and after several years of reluctance on the part of Vancouver’s police department and city council, a formal investigation was eventually launched in 999. In 2002, charges were laid against rural pig farmer Robert Pickton, whose property became the site of a massive search and media spectacle.⁴ But if one arrest promises to solve the mystery of dozens of disappearances, it does not shed light on the extent to which these disappearances derived from policies of containment and disposal that rendered Vancouver’s sex workers invisible long before they began to disappear. To begin to understand this process, I propose, requires a deconstruction of the discursive constitution of sex workers as always already absent presences – invisible but for (and due to) their hypervisibility as objects of a simultaneously fascinated and horrified normative gaze. In this chapter, I treat Rebecca Belmore’s The Named and the Unnamed as a project that endeavours neither to resolve nor to transcend this apparent paradox. Recognizing that presence and absence form a tangled web that vanquishes, and vanishes, those who are coded as hypervisible, the exhibition does not contrive to literally re-member or re-materialize the disappeared women of Vancouver; rather, Belmore’s work engages with absent presence in the indicative world by making absence present in the representational field. In her practice, I identify an interventionist strategy of memorialization that explores the questions raised by the uneasy relationship between presence and absence and that, in the process, raises new questions about what the body can and cannot remember. These concerns are not new to Belmore, much of whose career has engaged in invocations and reworkings of (often marginalized) memories through the body. A salient example is her 992 Mawu-chehitoowin (A Gathering of People for Any Purpose), exhibited in 992 at the National Gallery of Canada’s first major exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal art entitled Land Spirit Power. The installation, a circle of well-worn chairs belonging to female residents of the Anishinabe First

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Nation reserve, with which Belmore is affiliated, invited visitors to sit in the chairs and listen, through microphones, to stories told by their owners.⁵ Disrupting the voyeuristic gaze fuelling conventional modalities of museological representation, the installation instead offered a synaesthetic experience wherein everyday objects stood in as indexical evocations of absent bodies in a tactile and aural encounter with their audience – an encounter intended to destabilize static and stereotypical misconceptions of Aboriginal identity. Belmore’s art practice has also engaged her own body as a site on which to inscribe the memories of others; she has, as curator Charlotte Townsend-Gault remarks, “made her body the surrogate for others’ suffering.”⁶ An early work, Exhibit 67B, was performed in 988 to support the Lubicon Cree Nation’s boycott of The Spirit Sings at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, a controversial exhibition of Aboriginal culture organized in conjunction with the 988 Calgary Winter Olympics.⁷ In sub-Arctic temperatures, Belmore installed herself along the route of the Olympic torchbearer, wrapped in blankets and framed by a mock museum display case – both an ironically “living artifact”⁸ and a scathingly embodied indictment of the treatment of Canada’s First Peoples in museological and government policy.⁹ In 2000, Belmore once again acted as a surrogate for suffering in Bury My Heart, a twenty-eightminute performance that anticipated the aesthetic and ethical treatment of The Named and the Unnamed. Wearing a long white dress, the artist smeared a white chair with blood and mud, pausing periodically to wash her hands and feet to the strains of a violin solo in a performance that bore symbolic witness to the three hundred Oglala Sioux who were massacred by the United States Army at Wounded Knee in 890.¹⁰ Belmore’s performances, from Exhibit 67B in 988 to Vigil in 2002, resonate less with what has been disparagingly described as “victim” art than with what performance theorist Peggy Phelan theorizes as “ordeal art” – art practice that treats the performer’s body as a metonymic vehicle for the conveyance not of painful experience itself but, rather, of “the apparently nonreciprocal experience of pain.” Ordeal art, Phelan explains, uses the body to convey the knowledge that the silenced, dead, or otherwise absent body cannot be re-constituted, remembered, or re-presented. “It begins,” she writes, “with the knowledge

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of its own failure.”¹¹ It is this failure to re-present absent violated bodies that is activated and mobilized in Belmore’s performances, which instead insist on employing the artist’s body, and that of the viewer, as sites of inscription and intervention – as stages upon which the task of memory shifts from deferred admonition to corporeal endeavour. Feminist body art, it has been suggested, expresses first and foremost a “refusal to vanish.”¹² Rebecca Belmore adds further dimensions to this dictum: as an Aboriginal woman artist whose practice often revolves around interrogations of the discursive and structural violence inflicted upon First Peoples in North America, Belmore’s work negotiates and contests multiple layers of vanishing, from the nineteenthcentury “Vanishing Indian” paradigm, which prophesied the extinction of Native races on the continent but was derived from policies intended to ensure the inevitability of its prediction,¹³ to current levels of violence against Aboriginal women and the impunity with which these crimes appear to be committed.¹⁴ But Belmore also resists spectacularizing the body as a locus for overidentification with the trauma of others; instead, her aesthetic strategy is to trouble both the structures of invisibility and the constructions of hypervisibility, which collaborate to constitute certain subjects as already absent presences. Her work, to borrow from sociologist Avery Gordon’s discussion of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, “articulates presence as the tangled exchange of noisy silences and seething absences.”¹⁵ This tangled exchange, continues Gordon, is “haunting” – a metaphor that aptly describes The Named and the Unnamed, a haunted and haunting exhibition that fills the exhibition space with subjects whose presence can only be revealed in the acknowledgement of their bodily absence. The late twentieth-century emergence of identity politics led to an ensuing debate in feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist scholarship over the politics of visibility as a representational strategy. Identity politics responded to the perception that the marginalized subject, rendered “other” by post-Enlightenment humanist discourses that implicitly position the universal subject as a white, heterosexual, bourgeois male, is constituted, in Gayatri Spivak’s words, as “the Self’s shadow.”¹⁶ The Other consequently vanishes in the eyes of the humanist subject through a process that Avery Gordon refers to as the “hysterical blind-

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ness”¹⁷ of normative subject formation. A major project of feminist scholarship has been to identify the extent to which “woman” is “doubly in shadow”¹⁸ by virtue of what Teresa de Lauretis terms her unrepresentability as a “subject of desire or of signification.”¹⁹ A corollary and somewhat paradoxical concern has been the overexposure of women in the representational sphere, an overexposure that led, in the 980s, to a move away from representations of the female body in feminist art practice – representations that were deemed not only to proffer an essentializing celebration of the category “woman” but also to reinforce the dominant positioning of women as objects of the “male gaze.”²⁰ This poststructuralist turn in feminist theory and practice has motivated Peggy Phelan, among others, to advocate what might be understood as a politics of invisibility, predicated on the understanding that “visibility is a trap.”²¹ Phelan argues that the assumption of a corollary relationship between visibility and power that galvanized identity politics of the 980s and early 990s constituted a failure to recognize the “serious limitations to visual representation as a political goal.”²² As Phelan quips, “If representational visibility equals power, then almostnaked young white women should be running Western culture.”²³ Therein lies the paradox of what has been described as women’s cultural positioning as “inherently oxymoronic”:²⁴ both over- and invisible. This paradox is well articulated by de Lauretis in her 987 Technologies of Gender, in which she notes that, since femininity exists only as representation, “woman is unrepresentable except as representation.”²⁵ However, I would suggest – and indeed de Lauretis’s analysis seems to infer – that, in certain instances, the relationship between the spectacular Other and the invisible Other is simultaneously paradoxical and causative. Hypervisibility, in other words, both entails and engenders hyper-invisibility. Like an overexposed photograph that leaves only a ghostly trace of its surface content, the overexposed body of the Other is constituted in normative discourse as a ghostly (non)presence. As Avery Gordon suggests, it is the perceived obscenity of the Other’s hypervisibility that serves as “a persistent alibi for the mechanisms that render one un-visible.”²⁶ In the context of poststructuralist theorizations of lack and excess in the representational field, this argument constitutes an interesting line of speculation, one that has been amply pursued in the work of Derridean deconstruction.²⁷ But when the context

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shifts radically to the lives of women who literally vanish, the ghosting of excessive bodies takes on material consequence. Indeed, as I argue, the disappearance of women as “subjects of desire” in discourse is inextricably linked to the disappearance of actual women in the material world. As Elizabeth Grosz has recently argued, discourse simultaneously manifests and dissimulates itself in the everyday. In her defence of deconstruction against claims that it depoliticizes feminist, class, and postcolonial analysis, Grosz explores the relationship between the violence of discourse and the physical violence inflicted on the bodies of the “others” that are constructed through that discourse. Grosz argues that “everyday violence ... is itself the violent consequence of an entire order whose very foundation is inscriptive, differential, and thus violent.”²⁸ Exposing the relationship between discursive and everyday violence is and must accordingly be “the heart of a deconstructive endeavour.”²⁹ To trace the discursive processes that render excessive bodies invisible, it will be useful to first identify the historical frameworks through which the prostitute has been positioned as a spectacularly overexposed body. In her 994 Volatile Bodies, Grosz explores Western culture’s Cartesian positioning of women as “somehow more biological, more corporeal, and more natural than men.”³⁰ Mobilizing Mary Douglas’s concept of the “dirty” body and Julia Kristeva’s theorization of the abject,³¹ Grosz argues that the female body is always already marked as the site of “leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow, as viscosity, entrapping, secreting ... a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order.”³² Following Douglas and Kristeva, Grosz identifies the maternal body as the model exemplar of the abject uncontainability of feminine corporeality. But the prostitute’s body has also been framed, historically and ideologically, as a locus of inherently uncontainable and dangerously contaminable abjection. At least since the nineteenth century the prostitute has, as Sander Gilman has noted, been “perceived as the embodiment of sexuality and of all that is associated with sexuality, disease as well as passion,”³³ and the perception of the prostitute as a locus of libidinal permissiveness, transgression, and contamination continues to prevail in contemporary discourse, particularly that surrounding the spread of hiv/aids .³⁴

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The nineteenth century also witnessed a convergence in representations of the “contagious” prostitute and the “deviant” black body, a convergence enabled by the conceptualization of the “primitive” as what Gilman refers to as “an icon for deviant sexuality in general.”³⁵ This conflation of the black body with the prostitute’s body was manifested in colonial Canada as a conflation of Aboriginal women and prostitution. The trope of the “squalid and immoral squaw,”³⁶ which contributed to rationalizations of the containment of Aboriginal peoples onto reserves, also prevails. In her study of the 995 rape and murder of Aboriginal sex trade worker Pamela George in Regina, Saskatchewan, Sherene Razack argues that “bodies that engage in prostitution and the spaces of prostitution are racialized ... regardless of the actual race of the prostitute.”³⁷ Furthermore, Razack finds that, when they encounter violence, Aboriginal women are perceived to have simply gotten “what they deserved.”³⁸ The historical construction of non-normative female bodies as sites of contamination and containment has been usefully theorized by Margrit Shildrick through the deployment of the trope of the “monstrous body.” For Shildrick, monstrous bodies – women (particularly pregnant women), racialized others, and the sick or disabled – pose a risk to “the normative construct of the self’s clean and proper body,” a risk that is constituted by “the failure of the monstrous body to observe a material and metaphorical cordon sanitaire, its failure to wholly occupy the place of the other.”³⁹ The strength of this normative standard, however, “is so powerful that our society is constrained to go to extraordinary lengths to perpetuate a clear distinction between what is considered normal and acceptable, and what is abnormal and intolerable” – and between what is “clean and proper” and what is “dangerously contagious.”⁴⁰ The dangerously monstrous body is, furthermore, a spectacular body. For Walter Benjamin, the spectacular nature of the prostitute in modernity is linked to her troubling presence as both seller and commodity. The prostitute, according to Benjamin, provokes fascination and horror as she dangerously crosses and recrosses the subject/object binary border.⁴¹ What Benjamin does not address is the danger posed to the dangerously spectacular body. As Mary Russo observes in The Female Grotesque, “making a spectacle out of oneself” has always been

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a “specifically feminine danger.” Anyone, she adds, “any woman, could make a spectacle out of herself if she was not careful.”⁴² While Russo’s project is to explore how feminist artists perform the spectacle of femininity in order to divest it of the power of objectification (“To put on femininity with a vengeance suggests the power of taking it off”),⁴³ she also acknowledges the risks associated with the spectacularization of the female body in the “everyday indicative world,” where “women and their bodies, certain bodies, in certain public spaces, in certain public framings, are always already transgressive – dangerous, and in danger.”⁴⁴ If racialization and the perception of over-sexualization contribute to the construction of street-level sex workers as monstrous others, so, too, do the spaces they occupy. Indeed, Russo’s observation alludes to the circuitous double bind that constitutes the prostitute as dangerous at least partly by virtue of the “dangerous” or “degenerate” space she occupies – a space that itself puts her in danger. In her 993 Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler also acknowledges that certain bodies, in certain places, don’t matter: “The abject designates ... precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject.”⁴⁵ The inner-city zone of presumed uninhabitability (such as Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside),⁴⁶ which Razack describes as a “racialized space, the zone in which all that is not respectable is contained,”⁴⁷ thus becomes a space that facilitates the constitution of the prostitute as a spectacularly monstrous and contagious body whose containment is both rationalized and assured by the discourses of transience and disposal – discourses that are deeply imbricated in the processes that render hypervisible bodies invisible. John Lowman, a sociologist who has spent the past decade documenting and analyzing crime rates among prostitutes in Vancouver, has coined the term “discourse of disposal” to characterize “ongoing attempts of politicians, police, and residents’ groups to ‘get rid’ of street prostitution from residential areas.”⁴⁸ Lowman traces the discourse of disposal in Vancouver to the mid-980s, when gentrification of the urban core, spurred by an influx of resources related to Expo ’86, saw the emergence of a series of residents’ groups formed specifically

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to eliminate street prostitution.⁴⁹ Vancouver police responded with a concerted effort to relocate street-level prostitution from Vancouver’s West End to its current concentrated location in the Downtown Eastside, which Lowman describes as a context that is an “unregulated and mostly unmonitored” area of “poorly lit back alleys.”⁵⁰ Significantly, Lowman adds, “this discourse of disposal has formed an important part of the ideological context in which male violence against women is played out,”⁵¹ exacerbated by the de facto criminalization of sex work. While the act of prostitution is not considered a crime in Canada under the 984 prostitution law, public solicitation is a criminal offence, as is the operation of a “bawdy house.”⁵² Consequently, street-level sex workers find themselves in an adversarial relationship with police forces, a relationship that alienates them from the potential service protection of the police while making them more vulnerable to predators, who perceive them as easy targets. Lowman’s conclusion that the discourse of disposal, aggravated by the quasi-criminalization of prostitution, helps to perpetuate physical violence against street workers is corroborated by statistics that indicate a sharp increase in murders of Vancouver street prostitutes in the 980s. According to a study conducted for Justice Canada in 996, at least fifty women identified as prostitutes were murdered in Vancouver between 982 and 994 – a number that does not include missing persons who were later identified as murder victims.⁵³ The perception among prostitutes’ rights organizations that police consistently fail to protect sex workers from assault and murder – and are equally consistent in their reluctance to investigate assaults, murders, and disappearances – are by no means unique to Vancouver. Indeed, a similar rash of disappearances in San Diego in the early 990s led to the charge that police officers involved in the investigation had referred to the disappearances as cases of “No Humans Involved” – a code-phrase that has since been recuperated by activists battling what they perceive to be police negligence in investigating crimes against sex workers across North America.⁵⁴ The discourse of disposal feeds into the discourse of transience in a mutually perpetuating cycle wherein sex trade workers, coded as itinerant, are coerced into constant dislocation, which is then deployed to depict them as itinerant. The perception, mobilized by Vancouver

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authorities in their initial reluctance to investigate the disappearances, that street-level prostitutes live itinerant lifestyles and are thus more likely to disappear,⁵⁵ also circulated in media coverage of the disappearances. In a 999 Globe and Mail article, for instance, journalist Jane Armstrong prefaces an otherwise sympathetic report with the following characterization: “They lived the transient lifestyle of the hard-core underclass ... Compared with most of the population, a prostitute’s life is unpredictable ... she can be hard to find.”⁵⁶ By constructing a scenario wherein certain women, in certain settings, conducting certain types of business and leading certain types of lifestyles, seem inherently prone to vanishing without a trace, the discourse of transience can function to render the abrupt disappearances of even an unusually high number of women in a short period of time somehow inevitable. Itinerant and disposable, contagious and containable, hypervisible and unremarkedly absent – such are the paradigms through which the prostitute-as-body-as-other is constituted on the streets of Vancouver. Indeed, so powerful is the extent to which discursive violence manifests itself in, while dissimulating itself from, everyday violence, that criminologist Beverley Pitman has argued that the serial killer functions, in the media’s fascination with the multi-million-dollar crime scene investigation, as “largely – though by no means entirely – a figure of displacement” that detracts attention from the violence legitimated and perpetuated by the expulsion of street-level prostitutes from Vancouver’s gentrifying public spaces.⁵⁷ Rebecca Belmore’s The Named and the Unnamed, which reflects on the questions posed by the emergence of identity politics and debates over representational strategies, moves these questions from the realm of critical theory to the material world, where the over-visible are rendered literally invisible. In Vigil, a performance of hypervisibility that bears witness to absence, Belmore enacts what Amelia Jones identifies as “embodied subjectivity” – a performance of subjectivity that “places the body/self within the realm of the aesthetic as a political domain.”⁵⁸ Commanding both space and attention with the movement of her body and the strength of her voice, her own body marked by race, gender, and the “degenerate” space which she occupies and reinvests with new meaning, Belmore performs the spectacular body “with a vengeance,”

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in order to underline and undermine the dangers associated with overexposure. But this performance of embodied subjectivity is also mediated through the red dress, which acts as both metonymy and metaphor for nonreciprocal – and unrepresentable – pain. As in the 2000 Bury My Heart, the red dress in Vigil functions as a site of physical trauma; as Townsend-Gault suggests, the nailing and tearing of fabric at Vigil’s climax is at once a “phenomenology of stuff under stress” and a metaphorical re-enactment of trauma.⁵⁹ The dress, heavily burdened with associations – of the abject menstruating woman, of the red tent in which menstruating women were sequestered in the Biblical epoch, of the red dress of Jezebel and the scarlet woman – is, in this performance, associated with both the stain of shame that marks the prostitute body as contagiously abject and, conversely, with the stain of traumatic death. The red dress of Vigil proposes itself as a stand-in for traumatic suffering – the nailing and tearing painfully evoking the presumed dismemberment of the sex workers whose scattered remains were found on the Pickton farm – in a way that also echoes contemporary feminist art practice, which employs the dress as a metaphor for the female body. The dress, “a densely coded system of signification that transmits psychological, sexual and cultural messages,”⁶⁰ has been incorporated as a means of evacuating the female body from representation in order to destabilize the scopic drive of the male gaze and, thus, assert what Renee Baert describes as “the widespread refusal ... to evacuate the category of the subject.”⁶¹ But without discounting the efficacy that erasure of the body through the surrogacy of cloth no doubt potentializes, it is clear that Belmore’s ethical preoccupations are more ambivalent. For Belmore, the retrieval of subjectivity involves a refusal to evacuate her own marked, excessive, sexualized, racialized body. The dress, though certainly a metaphorical site of traumatic pain, envelops the body of the artist, thus visually articulating a fundamental lacuna in Phelan’s theory – that disappearance in some circumstances is not a strategy but, rather, an always imminent, and immanent, danger. Belmore’s is a body that refuses to vanish from a space in which women’s bodies are expected to vanish without a trace. Using her own skin, and the metaphorical skin of the red dress, as surfaces on which to reinscribe

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the traumas inflicted on Vancouver’s missing women, the artist insists upon mapping the inevitable traces of ghostly presence. This is not to suggest that Rebecca Belmore rejects tout court the politics of invisibility as advocated by Phelan. If Vigil signals a refusal to vanish, its manifestation as video installation challenges the extent to which the already-vanished can be re-presented. In The Named and the Unnamed, the filmed performance is projected on an eight-bynine-foot screen in an otherwise empty room, endlessly looping, as if, Townsend-Gault suggests, to convey the endless “re-enactment which characterizes trauma.”⁶² The screen is punctured with red lights that echo the candles lit during the performance but that also obscure the screen, disrupting our vision, and, perhaps, our desire for unmediated access to the trauma that is invoked. This disruption, which problematizes Russo and Schneider’s argument in favour of the spectacularization of the already spectacular body, resonates with Phelan’s suggestion that, in “the suspension of the female body between the polarities of presence and absence ... the ‘woman’ can exist only between these categories.”⁶³ It is in this liminal space, continues Phelan, that the female subject appears to “haunt the images we believe in.”⁶⁴ As an exercise in activist memorial practice that disrupts the caesura of presence and absence, Belmore’s work also operates, in its insistence on effecting embodied encounters with these doubly absent subjects, in the realm of what French poet and Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo describes as “deep memory.” Whereas “common memory” consists of that which the mind is able to rationalize, order, and render intelligible, deep memory exists in its own atemporal and non-narratable domain.⁶⁵ Belmore’s performance instrumentalizes what art historian Jill Bennett considers visual culture’s unique capacity to generate critical empathetic responses to the suffering of others by invoking the affective realm of deep memory, in which the un-representability of traumatic experience is recognized, but in which the potential for rupturing the boundaries that foreclose self-other relations is also realized. To convey this rupture, Bennett suggests, is to convey “that memory continues to be felt as a wound rather than seen as contained other.”⁶⁶ It is along this trajectory that Belmore’s installation work aligns itself with what Andreas Huyssen terms “memory sculpture” and, in

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Fig. 5.2

Rebecca Belmore, blood on the snow, 2002. Installation photograph. Courtesy of

the artist and Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia.

so doing, transfers the work of remembering from artist to viewer. In contemporary art practice, Huyssen identifies the emergence of sculptural projects that “perform a kind of memory work that activates body, space, and temporality, matter and imagination, presence and absence in a complex relationship with their beholder.”⁶⁷ These works, which occupy not the public spaces of monuments and memorials but the more intimate spaces of the museum or gallery, address individuals at a corporeal level, even though the human body is often “just as absent and elusive as it would be in any memory of the past.”⁶⁸ blood on the snow is one such aesthetic engagement that invites a corporeal sort of memory work while rendering the human body an elusive trace. The installation, which covers a four-hundred-square-foot area of the exhibition space, consists of a white feather duvet spread across the floor whose flat expanse is interrupted only at its centre, where it rises

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in the form of a high-backed chair. Disarmingly simple, even minimalist in appearance, this chair refuses – unlike the well-worn seats that populate Mawu-che-hitoowin – to offer up its story easily. However, as Townsend-Gault notes, Belmore’s taut aesthetic bears no relation to a minimalism premised on the renunciation of referentiality: her work does not attempt to “expunge the references of forms and materials to anything beyond themselves.”⁶⁹ Instead, the installations that make up The Named and the Unnamed, which seem to reflect and amplify the vastness of the gallery’s spaces, use the modernist white cubes almost as if to derail their intended purpose, to haunt them with the ghosts of lost stories and absent bodies. blood on the snow, though aesthetically minimalist, employs the now familiar trope of the empty chair to alert us to its function as a memorial.⁷⁰ And indeed, like the chair itself, whose back is stained with blood-red paint, the installation is saturated with references to both historical and contemporary acts of violence. The work’s title, most pointedly, alludes to the 890 Sioux massacre at Wounded Knee, after which the bodies of three hundred victims lay in a field of snow for three days before being buried in mass graves.⁷¹ Viewers familiar with Belmore’s performance-installation The Indian Factory (2000), which addresses the suspicious deaths of at least three Aboriginal men in the 990s, all of whom froze to death in an icy field on the outskirts of Saskatoon, will also draw visual connections between the circumstances of those deaths and the installation’s lone distressed figure in a field of snow-white fabric.⁷² In the context of The Named and the Unnamed, these instances of violent death begin to expose a troubling and seemingly perpetual continuum of violence against First Peoples that culminates in the murders of dozens of Aboriginal women on the streets of Vancouver. And, in this context, the bloody defilement of the pure white field of blood on the snow begins to operate as a disconcerting blurring of distinctions between the abject and the unmarked, between hypervisibility and invisibility. If, as Townsend-Gault suggests, the work’s “white, soft quilting – inviting and comforting – reads as purity violated” by the “corruption of power and bad faith,”⁷³ it can and should also be read as an unsettling evocation of the prostitute’s monstrously abject body – a body that, framed as seeping, contagious, and itself corrupt, is both dangerous and in danger – an evocation that, however, employs

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Fig. 5.3

Rebecca Belmore, State of Grace, 2002. Installation photograph. Courtesy of the

artist and Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia.

the chair as a substitute for absent bodies in a way that thwarts any desire to gain access to a putative identification with the position of victimization. The photo-based installation State of Grace is a four-by-five-foot inkjet-on-paper rendering of a woman swathed in white linen that offers a life-sized portrait of dream-like tranquility. This portrait, however, is disrupted by the ambiguity of both the subject and its rendering. Though the woman’s profile and body posture suggest peaceful repose, this reading is deeply unsettled by the placement of the photograph. Upon entering the exhibition space, the viewer crosses the almost processional length of the room to arrive at the installation, positioned horizontally and low on the wall as though to hint at a funereal arrangement. Is the woman depicted in State of Grace in a state of slumber or lying in state (a luxury not afforded to the missing women

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whose scattered remains were found on a farm)? The installation forestalls easy conclusions, offering instead an ambiguous portrait of the liminal space between life and death, presence and absence. The ambiguities of presence and absence are further foregrounded by the surface treatment of the work itself. The ostensibly indexical capacity of photography to provide unmediated access to the photographic subject is here distorted by a series of vertical gashes that have been cut through the paper – gashes that function both to emphasize the ambiguity between peaceful sleep and violent death, and to allow the air currents that waft gently through the room to animate the portrait, as if literally animating the ghosts that haunt it. The gashes, like the light bulbs that disrupt the projection of Vigil, also function to defer overidentification with the image in a way that resonates with Kaja Silverman’s conceptualization of “heteropathic” memory work. Silverman coins the term “heteropathic memory” to dissociate representations that occlude acknowledgment of mediation from strategies that appeal to the spectator “to identify at a distance with bodily coordinates which are both culturally devalued and markedly divergent from his or her own.”⁷⁴ Rebecca Belmore’s large-scale installations provide aesthetic articulation of this strategy. Evoking the absence of bodies in a way that troubles the circumstances of their absence, they ideally provoke in the viewer an empathetically unsettling experience that, while deferring the possibility of overidentification with absent bodies, also engages the viewer’s own bodily coordinates in an affective performance of memory work. Whereas blood on the snow and State of Grace are installations that seem to float ephemerally in the white stillness of the spaces in which they are exhibited, The Great Water manifests a gravitational pull that evokes even more strongly the spectre that haunts The Named and the Unnamed. An overturned canoe shrouded in waves of black canvas, the installation reminds us, as Townsend-Gault suggests, that “the idea of Canada is constructed, amongst a few other things, by the history and cultural allusions of the canoe.”⁷⁵ But if the canoe has been a convenient trope for a construction of Canadian identity based on the myth of wilderness explored and charted by bushwhacking Europeans, The Great Water overturns (literally) the canoe upon which this myth rests and (metaphorically) the wilderness narrative itself – exposing a sup-

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pressed narrative of conquest, expulsion, and attempted eradication of the Aboriginal occupants of the land whose very presence threatened a myth dependent on their absence.⁷⁶ But like much of Belmore’s work, The Great Water discourages any one single reading. The heavy black canvas also recalls the black veils of grieving women as well as the heavy sheets that blanket corpses at crime scenes. Yet whereas the veil and the crime scene sheet are both intended to conceal a body’s trauma, the heavy black treatment of this installation both conceals and reveals. If the shape of the beached canoe connotes that of a prone and lifeless body, the black canvas works, much like the crime scene sheet, as a foreclosure on the desire to see and, thus, to identify with, the trauma of violent death, thus underscoring the heavy burden of visibility for those who are over-exposed. But The Great Water is also disturbingly revealing. To picture the gaping mouth of a leaking, overturned canoe is also to conjure the exposed vagina, the orifice of the female body that, as the source of birth, is the site most associated with abjection. In this evocation of the spectacularly abject, Belmore signals once again the dangers to which the body coded as dangerous is subjected. The Great Water further compels the viewer to partake in the enactment of fascination and horror that puts “dangerous” bodies in danger. The space between the installation and the walls that surround it is uncomfortably narrow, such that when the viewer passes through to the exit, she is forced to step gingerly around the installation as if avoiding, perhaps, a spill of blood on a sidewalk. This haptic experience of the work thus compels one also to contemplate Shildrick’s notion that “the normative construct of the self’s clean and proper body is under constant threat, on the one hand from the potential of internal leakage and loss of form, and on the other, from the circulation of all those dangerous bodies – of women, of racial others, of the sick, of the monstrous – who both occupy the place of the other and serve to define by difference the self’s own parameters.”⁷⁷ The installation, which involves the viewer in a metaphorical, but also tactile, encounter with the “leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid” of abjectness,⁷⁸ invokes the absent abject body through the body of the viewer, thus conveying the threatening permeability of the border between self and other and the permeability, too, of the boundary that

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separates traumatic experience in the past from the viewer’s capacity to perceive or “feel” it in the present. If, as I have argued, Rebecca Belmore’s ethical concern is to render invisibility visible by invoking the troubled ghosts of absent bodies, the aesthetic strategy employed to perform this haunting is one that engages the viewer in an experience that facilitates a form of affective, rather than visual, connection. In The Named and the Unnamed, this affective experience is registered on a number of levels. Using her own body as a site of inscription for the traumas inflicted upon street-level sex workers, and using large-scale installations as loci for mediating the presence of absent bodies, the artist bears witness by rendering presence as an intangible trace. And it is this tracing, or “ghosting,” manifested in and around the installations, that compels the audience “to identify at a distance with bodily coordinates” of missing women – women whose bodies must, nevertheless, remain elusive. By creating a space in which the ghosts of missing women haunt our bodies and our consciences, the exhibition hovers on the threshold between absence and presence to remind us that in the material world, where the overvisible are rendered literally invisible, visibility and invisibility are equally treacherous traps. In works that evoke the spectacular abjectification of sex workers while lingering on their absence, the exhibition makes no effort to re-present their “unrepresentability.” Instead, Belmore mediates memory by making manifest the traces of absence – torn dress, blood-stained linen, black shroud, roll call of the vanquished – traces that engage the viewer’s own body in an affective process of memory work that cannot, however, escape the incommensurability of trauma.

Notes * I am indebted to Christine Ross for comments on several drafts of this paper, and to participants of the Politics of Cultural Memory conference hosted by MIRIAD at the Manchester Metropolitan University in 2004 for suggestions and feedback. I also gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Social

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Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Centre de recherche sur l’intermédialité in Montreal.  Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage, 997), 274. 2 Rebecca Belmore, “Artist statement” (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery), http://www.belkin-gallery.ubc.ca/belmore/ artist_info.htm. 3 The exhibition, curated by Scott Watson and Charlotte Townsend-Gault, premiered in Vancouver, BC , in 2002 and traveled widely. See Rebecca Belmore: The Named and the Unnamed, an exhibition catalogue with essays by Townsend-Gault and James Luna (Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2003). 4 The DNA of thirty-one missing women was found on the property of Robert William Pickton of Port Coquitlam, BC , who has been charged with twenty-six counts of first-degree murder and is currently (as of May 2007) on trial for six of those indictments. 5 See Diana Nemiroff, Robert Houle, and Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Land Spirit Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada, exh. cat. (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 992). 6 Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “Have We Ever Been Good?” in Rebecca Belmore, 28. 7 The Spirit Sings caused considerable controversy for its association with Shell Canada – a company that had been awarded drilling rights on land claimed by the Lubicon Lake Cree Nation – and for the exhibition’s exclusion of contemporary art, which critics felt perpetuated anachronistic assumptions regarding Aboriginal culture. 8 Allan J. Ryan, The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art (Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 999), 47. 9 See Ryan, Trickster Shift, 45–7. 0 See Robin Laurence, “Racing against History: The Art of Rebecca Belmore,” Border Crossings 2, 3 (2002): 42–8.  Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York and London: Routledge, 993), 52. 2 See Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 997), 6. 3 Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 992), 22–4. 4 In 2004, Amnesty International reported that approximately five hundred Aboriginal women, some but not most of whom were sex trade workers,

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5

6

7 8 9 20

2 22 23

went missing that year alone. The report also suggested that Aboriginal women in Canada suffer a disproportionately high incidence of violence. See Amnesty International, “Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Discrimination and Violence against Indigenous Women in Canada,” ai Index: amr 20/00/2004, 4 October 2004 . Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 997), 200. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 988), 280. For Spivak (and others), “the asymmetrical obliteration of the trace of the Other in its precarious Subject-ivity” (28) is a central project of colonial and neocolonial discourse. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 7. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 288. Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 987), 20 (emphasis in original). Artist and theorist Mary Kelly, who has played a pivotal role in the espousal of anti-essentialist feminist practice, argued in 982 that “when the image of the woman is used in a work of art, that is, when her body or person is given as signifier, it becomes extremely problematic.” See Paul Smith, “No Essential Femininity: A Conversation between Mary Kelly and Paul Smith,” Parachute 26 (982): 32. The 990s, however, saw a reconsideration of the evacuation of the female body in performance and representation, and questions as to whether such strategies actually foreclose on the potential of the body to mediate female subjectivity and agency. In her 998 Body Art/Performing the Subject, Amelia Jones launches a spirited defence of performative body art of the 970s in which she argues that body art, far from reifying the objectification of women, “opens up the vicissitudes of subject/object relations within art discourse; in its refusal to confirm anything other than the absence of the body/self, body art refuses to ‘prove’ presence.” See Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 998), 36. Phelan, Unmarked, 6. Ibid. Ibid., 0.

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Schneider, Explicit Body in Performance, 22. de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 20. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 6 (emphasis in original). For Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, see Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 998 [976]). Elizabeth Grosz, “The Time of Violence: Deconstruction and Value,” in Violence and the Body: Race, Gender, and the State, ed. Arturo J. Aldamo (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 38. Ibid., 39. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 994), 4 (emphasis in original). See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 980); and Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 982). Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 203. Sander Gilman, “The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality,” in Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly N. Pinder (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 26. In her key text examining contemporary stigmas associated with prostitution, Gail Pheterson notes that, in several studies of global hiv infection trajectories, sex workers are erroneously held responsible for aids outbreaks and, thus, implicitly represented as “symbols of disease”; as a further consequence, they are subjected to “an increase in forced medical testing, incarceration, harassment by police, denial of human rights, and murder.” See Gail Pheterson, The Prostitution Prism (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 996), 33–4. See also Ivan Wolffers, “Violence, Repression, and Other Health Threats: Sex Workers at Risk,” Research for Sex Work (Amsterdam) 4 (June 200): –2, available online at . Wolffers adds that, when the discourse of risk in discussions of hiv/aids and prostitution is limited to the threat of infection, other risks associated with the working conditions of street-level prostitutes are ignored. Gilman, “The Hottentot and the Prostitute,” 2. Radhika Mohanran links this convergence to post-Enlightenment humanist thought, which produced a discourse whereby “the indigene functions as the body and the Caucasian as the mind.” See Radhika Mohanran, Black Body: Women,

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36

37

38

39 40 4

42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 5

Colonialism and Space (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 999), 6. See Sandra Carter, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 997), 6. Carter notes that the ambivalence of this trope is reflected in the contradictory representation of the “pure,” almost invariably light-skinned, “Indian princess.” Sherene H. Razack, “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George,” in Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, ed. Sherene H. Razack (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), 55. Ibid., 3. In 995, George was brutally raped and murdered outside of Regina by two middle-class white male university students. Prior to sentencing, the judge instructed the jury to bear in mind that George was a prostitute. Both were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison. Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London and Thousand Oaks, ca : Sage, 2002), 7, 73–4. Ibid., 68. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 973), 7. Cited in Schneider, Explicit Body in Performance, 24. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York and London: Routledge, 994), 53 (emphasis in original). Ibid., 70. Ibid., 60. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 993), 3. The flurry of media attention associated with the arrest of Robert William Pickton has tended overwhelmingly to portray the Downtown Eastside – arguably the poorest neighbourhood in Canada – as a site of destitution and dereliction. Razack, “Gendered Racial Violence,” 93. John Lowman, “Violence and the Outlaw Status of (Street) Prostitutes in Canada,” Violence against Women 6, 9 (2000): 988. Ibid., ,004. Ibid., 994. Ibid., ,004.

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52 Furthermore, Lowman adds, police in Vancouver refuse to issue escort service licences to applicants with convictions for solicitation, and hotel owners are regularly prosecuted for operating bawdy houses – factors that make prostitutes more likely to service their clients in cars, rendering them more vulnerable to assault (,006). 53 John Lowman and Laura Fraser, Violence against Persons Who Prostitute: The Experience in British Columbia, Technical Report tr 996-4e (Ottawa: Department of Justice of Canada, 996). 54 See Carla Kirkwood, “mwi – Many Women Involved,” in Critical Condition: Women on the Edge of Violence, ed. Amy Scholder (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 993), 7. 55 In 998, by which time twenty-two women had disappeared from the Downtown Eastside since 995, family members and prostitution-rights advocates began campaigning city officials to offer a reward for information. The campaign, which was predicated on the fact that in the same year two 00,000 rewards had been posted for information related to house robberies in suburban Vancouver, was initially rejected by the Vancouver Police Department, which responded that “many street-involved women do not have close family ties and may deliberately go ‘missing’ for any number of reasons,” and by Vancouver mayor Philip Owens, who expressed a disinclination to “fund a location service for prostitutes.” In April 999 the mayor relented, and a 00,000 reward was posted. See Bob Stall, “Mayor to Propose Skid-Row Reward,” Vancouver Province, 25 April 999. 56 Jane Armstrong, “Missing Prostitutes: 23; Arrests: 0,” Globe and Mail, 5 April 999, A . 57 Beverley A. Pitman, “Re-Mediating the Spaces of Reality Television: America’s Most Wanted and the Case of Vancouver’s Missing Women,” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 8. 58 Amelia Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 998), 3. 59 Townsend-Gault, “Have We Ever Been Good?” 28. 60 Nina Felshin, “Clothing as Subject,” Art Bulletin 54,  (995): 20. 6 Renee Baert, “Three Dresses, Tailored to the Times,” in Material Matters: The Art and Culture of Contemporary Textiles, ed. Ingrid Bachmann and Ruth Scheuing (Toronto: yyz Books, 998), 79. 62 Townsend-Gault, “Have We Ever Been Good?,” 9. 63 Phelan, Unmarked, 54 (emphasis in original). 64 Ibid., 6.

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65 Charlotte Delbo, Days and Memory, trans. Rosette Lamont (Evanston, il : Northwestern University Press, 987). 66 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 4. 67 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), . 68 Ibid. 69 Townsend-Gault, “Have We Ever Been Good?” 0. 70 Two salient but vastly different examples are Karen Finley’s The Vacant Chair (993), an installation of two chairs designed as an aids memorial for friends of the performance artist, and the Field of Empty Chairs at the Oklahoma City National Memorial, consisting of 68 empty chairs to represent the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing of 995. For a brief discussion of both projects, see Erika Doss, “Death, Art, and Memory in the Public Sphere,” Mortality 7,  (2002): 63–82. 7 Townsend-Gault, “Have We Ever Been Good?” 8. 72 While the circumstances leading to the deaths are still contested, it is widely believed that many were victims of what are now known as “starlight cruises” – a term that refers to the unofficial and unacknowledged police policy, in Saskatoon and elsewhere, of dropping off “unruly” detainees well outside city limits, often in the sub-zero temperatures of the Canadian Prairie winter night, and leaving them there to walk back to the city. For a brief discussion of the topic and Belmore’s intervention, see Lori Blondeau and Lynne Bell, “On The Fightin’ Side of Me: Lori Blondeau and Lynne Bell in Conversation with Rebecca Belmore,” fuse Magazine 28,  (2005): 25–33. 73 Townsend-Gault, “Have We Ever Been Good?” 35, 49. 74 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (London and New York: Routledge, 996), 85 (emphasis added). 75 Townsend-Gault, “Have We Ever Been Good?” 35. 76 For a cogent analysis of the ways in which colonial representations of Canada constructed a mythical landscape devoid of Aboriginal presence, see Jonathan Bordo, “Jack Pine – Or the Erasure of the Aboriginal Presence from the Landscape,” Journal of Canadian Studies 27, 4 (992–93): 98–28. 77 Shildrick, Embodying the Monster, 7. 78 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 203.

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6 The Threshold of an Interface: Ilya Kabakov’s Looking up, Reading the Words (1997) d av i d t o m a s

The Russian-born New York-based artist Ilya Kabakov (b. 933) designed a permanent installation entitled Looking up, Reading the Words as his contribution for the Skulptur Projekte in Münster, Germany, in 997. The installation consists of a steel mast thirteen metres in height, culminating in a bridge-like structure that supports twenty-two metal antennae deployed in the shape of an oval. These antennae provide the means of securing a series of letters that form German words. A translation of the German message accompanied the artist’s statement, which was published in Contemporary Sculpture: Projects in Münster 997. My Dear One! When you are lying in the grass, with your head thrown back, there is no one around you, and only the sound of the wind can be heard and you look up into the open sky – there, up above, is the blue sky and the clouds floating by – perhaps this is the very best thing that you have ever done or seen in your life.¹ The intentions behind the installation were also elaborated in Kabakov’s statement. It was designed to look like “a radio antenna that gives and receives signals.”² The artist was interested in mimicking this type of artifact because “the radio antenna is sort of a synonym, a symbol of our technical civilization, of its interminable ‘progress.’” He also noted: “This is a means for conveying ‘information’ to the entire earth and in turn receiving it from everywhere, information the volume of which increases with each year, and which, as everyone knows, increases the

Fig. 6.1

Ilya Kabakov,

Looking up, Reading the Words, Skulptur Projekte in Münster, Germany, 1997.

sum of all human potential.” However, his use of this symbol was, as he concluded, invested with irony and pathos since the installation “consists precisely in disconnecting ourselves from the wind of civilization, remaining alone with ourselves and with nature, hearing the sound of a different wind.” And the fact that this symbol of communication – an antenna – strays from its usual function, that it ceases to be an instrument for that communication, and on the contrary, becomes only a prop, a frame for simple human words – in this the antenna can also be read as a unique symbol, in part a protest although it is uttered in this ironic, playful form.³

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Hence, on the one hand, the installation highlights, as Kabakov suggests, the duplicitous functions of mass communications technologies in the sense that it renders visible the juncture between a fixed local transmitter/receiver and the ubiquitous, invisible, and ephemeral space of pan-global and pan-human communication, as though each body was nothing more than a local manifestation of every-body. On the other hand, the installation provides the spectator with the means of escaping from the monotony of the everyday by directing his/her gaze and thoughts in the direction of the sky, clouds, and beyond towards the infinite and the invisible. The Radio Antenna as Symbolic Communications Object

A radio antenna is not out of place in a sculpture park’s quasi-natural setting, especially if it is situated on a hill, as this one is. However, the impact of Kabakov’s radio antenna on a viewer, who, seeking it out in the context of an outdoor exhibition, suddenly comes upon it, can be strangely overwhelming and disconcerting when one realizes that this is not a simple technical object but an installation.⁴ The tower’s transducive function of transmitting information or converting and bringing into electromagnetic range what lies beyond the scope of the human senses is clearly subverted by the medium – wire letters – chosen for the broadcast of a specific message. Instead of operating on the basis of the invisible radio wave transmission of information through the atmosphere, the antenna’s message is permanently and visibly fixed in the air so as to appear to be subtly etched against the sky. As described by Kabakov: “The entire ‘salt’ of the installation is achieved by the thickness of the lines which form the letters and the entire written text.” The thickness of these lines (the wire is 3mm in diameter) is such that against the background of the sky at a distance of 3m from the ground they create the effect of a unique twinkling: “I see – I don’t see” (a similar effect emerges when looking at a spider’s web stretched across branches in the forest). That is, given a certain effort of vision, we can read the written text, but without this effort, it could seem that it doesn’t exist at all. The text seems to

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Fig. 6.2

Ilya Kabakov,

Looking up, Reading the Words, 1997.

appear before our eyes and then dissolve against the background of the sky. But it is precisely this twinkling as we try to make out the text that coincides with the ambiguity of the meaning of this text, which can also be perceived as a vision, a mirage arising before us.⁵ As Kabakov notes, the message’s physical orientation intentionally directs the spectator’s gaze towards the sky – a space that also serves as the medium for the invisible and ubiquitous propagation of radio transmission. However, the letters actually function as a visual trap to lure, by their ambiguous presence, spectators into a position that is no longer bound to the technical and functional requirements that are at the origins of the radio antenna’s form. A spectator is placed in a spatial

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Fig. 6.3

Ilya Kabakov,

Looking up, Reading the Words, 1997.

and cosmic position that does not lead to an engagement with the world of mass communications; instead, it serves as a point of rendezvous with an intangible, mystic experience. This experience is not mediated by complex technology nor is it cloaked in invisible forces. It is rooted in the everyday and the common place, in the power that words have to redefine the world, and in the possibility of sublime contentment that one might attain through the contemplation of certain natural views. Finally, there is the psychological impact of the hidden origins of the message suspended between the radio antennae. The message is phatic in nature, and its placement between earth and sky and its orientation downwards suggest a cosmic origin. Kabakov proposed the following interpretation of this effect, given the installation’s intended

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communications function: “Always, whenever we look up at the sky, we involuntarily have a presentiment, unconsciously we anticipate some sort of ‘communication’ from there, it seems that ‘something’ will be addressed directly to me, that a personal contact might be established specifically with me.”⁶ He went on to insist on the ambiguous physical conditions that were necessary to establish the communications link and trigger the intangible sense of presence behind the words: But this is precisely what seems to be happening to my unbelieving eyes. In some strange way, an enormous screen of an antenna has received this “information” and is passing it on to me, for me, as I stand below, having raised my head up. But, I would like to repeat once again, this effect of the strangeness and unexpectedness of the address emerges only when one’s consciousness and eyes are not entirely certain that they have actually discerned something at a great height against the background of the sky and white clouds. “Screen” is a key word in the English translation of Kabakov’s statement. The presence of this word points to another innovative aspect of the installation that goes beyond the conventional parameters of projected screen-based images. Installation as Interface

Kabakov distinguished between two types of installation in a 99/97 conversation between himself, Margarita Tupitsyn, and Victor Tupitsyn. One was based on a collection of objects that combined together to form a larger object, and the other was based on a rejection of the object as model and principal reference. Instead, this other form functioned as a principal agent of spatial transformation. Kabakov noted that his interests circulated around this second type of installation because, in his words, it “transforms the room down to the smallest detail, so that it is reconstructed, painted over, and so on.” Through this transformation, “all the parameters of the space are re-created anew; a cosmos of sorts is brought to life.”⁷

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Kabakov’s materially oriented, physically encompassing approach to installation extends to Looking up, Reading the Words, even though, at first sight, this monumental object seems to belong to his first category of installation because of its combination of wire-based text and nonfunctional radio transmitter. Moreover, the structure’s subject, scale, and status as transmitter of a collective message point to a possible socialist realist inspiration and kinship – a reading that also places it in the first category. However, a paradoxical relationship to an imaginary technical origin and culture coupled with its highly personalized message ensures that it escapes from being overwhelmed by this affiliation; instead, a kinship to Kabakov’s second category is asserted through its ability to generate an encompassing, then “cosmic,” recoding of the site’s/spectator’s spatial parameters. For the transformative power of this artifact lies in the perceptual and physiological effects that the spectator experiences and the spatial conversion that is induced through them. These effects ultimately draw attention back to the peculiar function of the interface in this work. Initially, Kabakov’s use of the word “screen” appears to be conventional, for he notes that it is the screen of the antenna that “receives” the information – that receives the letters that constitute the elements of its message. However, its use also points beyond the sense of receiving and rendering visible: the installation is a physical structure that embodies a measured yet permeable threshold of visibility. Given the height of the antenna, the letters are limited to a precise size so that they can function at the desired threshold of visibility. Inversely, given the diameter of the letters, the installation can be no higher or lower than thirteen metres in order to suspend the message in that ambiguous space between the readily visible and the invisible. The screen therefore functions as an unusual kind of interface between a sender and receiver. Although the screen of words serves as the focal point for a message that is conceived in relation to the sky and clouds on the one hand, and to the earth and a human being on the other hand, its optical threshold is unstable and permeable. While the mind can move beyond the threshold of written words and along the cosmic trajectory plotted by the message, the eye, snared, oscillates through the screen’s interface and threshold of visibility. It is in this sense that the word “screen” leads one to an elusively

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materialist definition of the interface while promoting a distinctly virtual experience. In general terms, an interface is defined as a surface that forms a “common boundary between two regions.” It can also be defined as a “place, or piece of equipment, where interaction occurs between two systems, processes, etc.”⁸ In recent years the concept of the interface has emerged as a key, if sometimes contested, term in relation to the design of an adequate and often transparent human-computer basis for interaction. In this context, it is often conceived as a metaphorical tool for the conception and development of more efficient ways to tailor computer-based communication to the needs and limitations of the human organism. In such cases, the metaphor might be a “desktop,” suggesting that a computer screen can be treated as an office-based work environment. Or it might be conceived as a “theatre,” suggesting, in contrast, that the human organism is part of a fictive environment designed to operate as a common context for representational actions.⁹ Desktop metaphors are commonly used for the design of work-based graphic interfaces on a computer screen. The theatre metaphor finds its most potent application in the case of computer-based virtual three-dimensional environments. In both cases, however, the machine environment that is domesticated through the application of these metaphors is that of the computer/software complex. As such, these metaphors do not seem to apply to installations like Looking up, Reading the Words because they do not depend on sophisticated graphical interfaces to negotiate human interaction with a complex and strange machine system/software program that operates behind a cathode-ray tube (crt) or a liquid-crystal display (lcd) screen. Moreover, although Looking up, Reading the Words mimics the form of a complex technical object, it has not appropriated its function, and thus it exists outside of the complex technical system and culture of mass communications equipment. Kabakov’s installation is all surface and representation, and the degree of interactivity is governed by the human body’s passage through a park and a viewer’s capacity to position him/herself in relation to the message and to understand it. However, there is a sense in which the concept of an interface, as used in relation to advanced computing environments, applies to this installation, both in terms of

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its design and its intended and actual effects on a spectator. In order to engage with this aspect of the work, one has to turn to another, more refined, definition of an interface as meeting place between different environments or systems. In contrast to definitions that have been tailored to human/computer interaction, Herbert A. Simon, the American social scientist and pioneer in artificial intelligence, behavioural theory, and artifact design, has advanced a more general and radical definition of the interface that can be applied to any human artifact, including computers. Simon proposes that a human artifact can be conceived “as a meeting point – an ‘interface’ in today’s terms – between an ‘inner’ environment, the substance and organization of the artifact itself, and an ‘outer’ environment, the surroundings in which it operates.” Simon notes that if “the inner environment is appropriate to the outer environment, or vice versa, the artifact will serve its intended purpose.”¹⁰ Simon admits that the definition covers both human and non-human things, including living things, but suggests that there are a number of advantages in adopting this viewpoint, especially in the case of adaptive systems like biological organisms. The first concerns the prediction of behaviour, in the cases of adaptive or artificial systems, “from knowledge of the system’s goals and its outer environment, with only minimal assumptions about the inner environment,” assuming that different inner environments can accomplish “identical or similar goals in identical or similar outer environments.”¹¹ The second concerns an advantage from the viewpoint of the inner environment. “In very many cases,” Simon points out, “whether a particular system will achieve a particular goal or adaptation depends on only a few characteristics of the outer environment and not at all on the detail of that environment.” He goes on: Biologists are familiar with this property of adaptive systems under the label of homeostasis. It is an important property of most good designs, whether biological or artifactual. In one way or another the designer insulates the inner system from the environment, so that an invariant relation is maintained between inner system and goal, independent of variations over a wide range in most parameters that characterize the outer environment.¹²

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From the viewpoint of design, Simon argues that one might be able “to combine the two sets of advantages ... that derive from factoring an adaptive system into goals, outer environment, and inner environment”: We might hope to be able to characterize the main properties of the system and its behavior without elaborating the detail of either the outer or inner environments. We might look toward a science of the artificial that would depend on the relative simplicity of the interface as its primary source of abstraction and generality.¹³ Thus, Simon concludes: “Description of an artifice in terms of its organization and functioning – its interface between inner and outer environments – is a major objective of invention and design activity.”¹⁴ Although these comments apply to biological systems and artificial systems that operate on the basis of physical processes, they can also apply to symbolic systems of the kind that Kabakov’s radio antenna represents. Looking up, Reading the Words takes the form of a radio antenna. However, from a technical viewpoint it does not function like one; instead, it mimics a form in order to establish a point of reference for the construction of a metaphorical space that is created through the addition of a written message that points elsewhere – to “the blue sky and the clouds floating by.” Moreover, the size of the message’s individual letters’ physical diameters are calculated to lure a spectator into position under the words/screen so that he or she can complete the communications system in a cybernetic sense. In this larger system, the spectator functions as the inner environment of an expanded perceptual system in which the screen operates as an interface with an outer environment that is represented by the sky and clouds. The system is therefore open in the sense that neither environment is insulated from the other and both clouds/spectators are subject to change/replacement. Since the whole installation pivots on the design of a message that serves as an interface between sky/spectator, the message/interface functions as the installation’s “primary source of abstraction and generality.”

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Fig. 6.4

Ilya Kabakov, Looking up, Reading the Words, 1997.

Looking up, Reading the Words’ Psycho-Social Impact

In his catalogue statement, Kabakov points to Looking up, Reading the Words’ ideal horizontal conditions of reception. However, when one lies on the ground and looks up at a cloudy summer sky one’s senses can be tricked, through an elementary optical effect, to transmit information that suggests that the earth is rapidly turning rather than the clouds moving by. This perceptual effect tends to destabilize the spectator and to open the way to a momentary sense of cosmic ambiguity and uncertainty. The doubt cultivated in its wake goes beyond the ambiguity and uncertainty generated by the threshold of visibility that conditions one’s reception of Kabakov’s message. For, suddenly, it is the globe’s movement through space that seems to become the measure of its diameter and of its presence in the cosmos When lying down under the radio antenna one can sense one’s own singularity and insignificance as one contemplates the infinite and the invisible that might lie beyond the reach of the eyes. Faced with the

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immensity of the cosmos and the invisible cloak of electromagnetically encoded information that envelops the earth, it is perhaps not surprising that one’s body should feel vulnerable. Nor is it particularly surprising that the fine focus of the letters constituting the antenna’s message should appear to be subtly suspended in an indeterminate space between earth and sky. Nor, finally, should it surprise one that the message should appear to be addressed to each and every body that finds itself positioned in this subtle imaging system’s focus, as if each body were the sole object and subject of the message. After all, we are not dealing with a real radio antenna, but, rather, with a simulation that has been crafted in such a way as to serve as the medium for the public and private display of a single ever-present message. In this simulation, the spectator remains unsure of whether the experience of receiving the message takes place on the inside or outside of the interface formed by the suspended letters. Although one’s eyes have become the means of grafting one’s consciousness onto the “twinkling” letters, it is the act of reading that provides the means to penetrate through the interface and beyond in order that one’s consciousness might touch the ethereal presence of the infinite by way of the letters’ virtual conduit. This act also highlights another paradox generated by Kabakov’s installation. Installation as Virtual Image Surround

The hypothesis that the tower proposes concerns the virtualization of an outer environment. Once one is caught in the cosmic trajectory of its optical axis, the outer world cannot be precisely identified not only because of the thrust of the tower’s message but also because of the ambiguous representational status of the letters that forces one to concentrate on their threshold of visibility. For precious moments, one’s consciousness is projected well beyond measures of objectivity and subjectivity as the concrete limits of one’s imagination are abolished. As one is transported towards an infinite cosmos that seems to exist beyond the measure of the eye but not of words, the installation’s environment suffers a depletion of its significance. It is this depletion that points to a fundamental transformation in its representational status from concrete to virtual.

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In 968, Ivan Sutherland, a pioneering computer graphics programmer, published a seminal paper entitled “A Head-Mounted ThreeDimensional Display,’ in which he described an imaging system whose objective was “to surround the user with displayed three-dimensional information.”¹⁵ As he pointed out in the opening line of the article: “The fundamental idea behind the three-dimensional display is to present the user with a perspective image which changes as he moves.”¹⁶ Sutherland argues that, since the images on an observer’s retina are two-dimensional in nature, it is possible to create an illusion of three-dimensions by similarly projecting two-dimensional images on the retina. Although, at this early stage in the development of this technology, the question of stereoscopic vision was not critical, the objective was to ultimately produce a perfect illusion that changed as the observer moved.¹⁷ In an earlier article, entitled “The Ultimate Display,” Sutherland describes this imaging technology’s ideal effect: “The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal.”¹⁸ Sutherland envisages an environment that is based on the confluence of matter/image, where, however, the latter is able to subvert and usurp the former’s material effects. But, as the word “display” suggests, this world is simply the product of a new and sophisticated system of three-dimensional representation that is capable of completely immersing a spectator in an artificial world to the extent of tricking a human organism’s senses with direct physiological consequences. The revolutionary implications of this new type of display are succinctly captured in two phrases that media artist and interaction designer Scott Fisher uses in a 990 article during the course of offering a brief historical overview of the development of personal simulation and telepresence environments: “the audience is now almost immersed in an image surround” and “the idea of sitting inside an image.”¹⁹ Each of the phrases encapsulates a key principle of the visual information economies that researchers like Fisher were developing in the wake of Sutherland’s groundbreaking work. The phrases also capture a sense of the transparent reality effect of the major threshold in the history of

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Western representation that the new display systems represented/produced: not only were the senses tricked in such a way that the observer could feel surrounded by, or immersed in, an image, but there was also the possibility of physiological consequences. Such an experience was rendered possible through the presence of a transparent interface between the human body’s senses, optical imaging devices, and tracking and computing technologies. Sutherland’s initial proposal and Fisher’s reformulation are significant for two reasons: first, they point to the absolute realism of the environment envisaged; second, they point to the fact that the display could replace reality to the extent of directly effecting the body’s physiology. Looking up, Reading the Words meets both these criteria. It transforms a given environment into a synthetic one by creating a situation that places a spectator in a kind of “image surround” whose focal point is the threshold of visibility negotiated by the letters of the radio antenna’s message. Once a spectator is interfaced with the letters, all else becomes peripheral vision. The result brings one back to Kabakov’s comments on the kinds of installations he was interested in producing. These installations “re-create anew” the “parameters of the space” in the sense of producing elaborate three-dimensional image surrounds. However, the specific effects of Looking up, Reading the Words place it in a curious subcategory of this type of installation because the transformation triggered is of the order of an optical mutation that renders the real perceptually ethereal as opposed to the representation perceptually real. Most of Kabakov’s major installations are designed to immerse a viewer in an elaborate artificial environment. In this sense, they operate on the basis of a trompe l’œil logic that is also present in virtual immersive environments. However, their attachment to the real world creates a different kind of trompe l’œil. In contrast to the technical and optical sophistication of the visual effects produced by virtual reality technology, the “magic” and “ritualistic” transformations of Kabakov’s installations are rooted in the materiality of the real world (wood and metal, objects, paint, etc.).²⁰ We know that we are in an installation, even if we lose sight of its context (gallery, museum). As in the case of a trompe l’œil painting (with its picture frame placed on a wall, set in a room), an installation’s illusionism is also measured against a con-

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crete physical frame and context. However, the space that is its measure is extra-ordinary in its symbolic potential. Kabakov appears to have founded his practice on this singularity for, as he has noted in relation to his own work, “Today as never before, we are witnessing an opposition not between art and life, but between sacral and secular spaces”: Installation is the intersection of this opposition, which, once again, has become relevant. Whether or not a connection to life is intended, installation aspires to three-dimensionality – threedimensionality in the sacralized space of the temple that is the museum. For me, the status of the location chosen for installation is of the utmost importance.²¹ In reply to Victor Tupitsyn’s retort “The Address of the ‘Church,’” Kabakov stated: Yes, its address, its prestige, and also the names and the rank of the priests. Prestige is extremely important! Not because it raises the status of your artworks, but because of the status of power – the power of the sacrament. On several occasions, I have had a choice of sites, and I could always see that what matters is not the quality, the lighting, or the amount of space but, above all, the status of the space where the installation could be constructed. This shows that installation is a doubling of the sacrament. It’s like a din that gradually increases in volume. Today, the space of the museum is a place where the Holy Spirit dwells; it is a new church where sacred relics and wonder-working objects are kept. That is why, when viewers (the parishioners) come to the museum and enter an installation filled with trash, dirt, and old rags, they still realize that they are in a temple. And in a temple, no one notices trash, even if it’s there in abundance. We see only the glittering opulence, the gold and the diamonds. He then concludes with the following observation: “This is a doubling that takes place in our consciousness. The ritual is doubled because the installation, placed inside the museum, contains within itself its own ritual spaces and magical sites.”²²

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But what happens when the physical frame and context are removed or eclipsed? Sutherland’s proposition for a new type of immersive synthetic environment and its postulated physiological effects are based on the total optical dissolution of a material context. This is why immersive environments are both bewitching and disorienting. Looking up, Reading the Words is in some ways less radical but more subtle in its optical effects since it accepts that its frame of reference should be the natural, although artificially groomed, park in which the Münster Skulptur Projekte is staged. (In this sense, it is more ambiguous than most of Kabakov’s enclosed room- or apartment-sized installations, which are obvious fictions in a museum context.) In doing so, it also accepts this world’s laws and conventions, from the rules of gravity to its formal reference to an existing technical artifact. But its raison d’être is nevertheless rooted in another world (the art world) whose epistemology is subject to different and often contradictory standards and practices. From this viewpoint, the installation shares common strategies of simultaneous spatio-temporal/cultural disjunctions with Kabakov’s other installations. However, in those installations the spectator is introduced into a world whose atmosphere is limpid with nostalgic and voyeuristic references to a distant and lost Soviet reality that has been stripped of its original heroic and utopian avant-gardist references. Looking up, Reading the Words is not presented with a painted or wallpapered backdrop. It contains no references to an obsolete regime. The installation is well camouflaged: it seems to be in the right place. However, its message gives it away: it is an installation that aspires to cosmic totality. While accepting its place in one world, it draws its disjunctive logic from another. It is thus perverse – and possibly a good deal more perverse than Kabakov’s museum-bound installations – because it situates the viewer at the cross-roads of two worlds: a real world and a fictional world, where the dream, of course, is to submit the material world to the dictates of psychological and cosmic spaces and influences. Looking up, Reading the Words introduces us to another way to define an interface in relation to computer-generated images for this simple, open structure effectively transforms reality by creating a situation in which the body finds itself in another and equally effective kind of “image surround.” In doing so it points to the existence of a more

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extensive culture of the virtual and a more subtle connection between it and an information culture. It also points to the role that artworks in general might have in research on the culture and constitution of the kinds of virtual worlds that are too often explored only in terms of new computing technologies. Finally, it also raises the possibility of a more profound understanding of the nature and constitution of the kind of communications universe in which these new technologies are developed and used.

Notes  Kabakov statement in Contemporary Sculpture: Projects in Münster 997, ed. Klaus Bußmann, Kasper König, Florian Matzner (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 997), 235. 2 Ibid., 235. 3 Ibid., 237. 4 Iwona Blazwick, “Going to Heaven,” in Ilya Kabakov, ed. Boris Groys, David A. Ross, Iwona Blazwick, 82–9 (London: Phaidon, 998). The sense of defamiliarization extends to the experience that a spectator has of the work in the absence of being able to understand the radio antenna’s message because of the language (German) in which it is encoded. The antenna’s message is translated in the catalogue, which serves as the guide to the exhibition as a whole. 5 Kabakov, Contemporary Sculpture, 235–6. 6 Ibid., 236. 7 Ilya Kabakov, Margarita Tupitsyn, Victor Tupitsyn, “Conversation about Installation,” Art Journal 58, 4 (999): 63. The original conversation took place in 99 in connection with the Dislocations exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It was published, after being updated in 997, in 999. 8 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, 7th ed., ed. J.B. Sykes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 982). The definition proposed by The Concise Oxford Dictionary encompasses the use of the terms in the case of humancomputer interface design. 9 For a discussion of various definitions of the human-computer interface and associated problems with its use in this context, see Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theatre (Reading, ma : Addison-Wesley, 993), chap. . Laurel’s arguments about the limitations of current definitions of the inter-

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0  2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9

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2 22

face are answered by another definition that was proposed by Herbert A. Simon in his seminal book The Sciences of the Artificial, and it is this definition that I adopt in the case of Looking up, Reading the Words. My reasons for doing so will become apparent in the course of my discussion of this work and its relation to the concept of a threshold of vision. Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 3rd. ed. (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 996), 6. Ibid., 8. Ibid. Ibid., 9. Ibid. Ivan E. Sutherland, ‘A Head-Mounted Three-Dimensional Display,’ 968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, Proceedings of the afips Conference 33 (968): 757. Ibid. Ibid., Sutherland argues that, for example: “Although stereo presentation is important to the three-dimensional illusion, it is less important than the change that takes place in the image when the observer moves his head. The image presented by the three-dimensional display must change in exactly the way that the image of a real object would change for similar motions of the user’s head.” Ivan E. Sutherland, “The Ultimate Display,” Proceedings of the ifip Congress 2 (965): 508. Scott S. Fisher, “Virtual Interface Environments,” in The Art of HumanComputer Interface Design, ed. Brenda Laurel (Reading, ma : AddisonWesley, 990), 425 (emphases added). Kabakov has discussed the ritualistic aspects of installation art and its relationship to his own works with Margarita Tupitsyn and Victor Tupitsyn in “Conversation about Installation.” Kabakov, “Conversation about Installation,” 66–7. Ibid., 67.

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7 The Star and the Prisoner: The Spectacle and Surveillance of the Self on the Web olivier a sselin Translated from the French by Timothy Barnard

Autobiography, self-portraiture, auto-fiction are in fashion. Selfrepresentation flourishes in the so-called fine arts, in literature and contemporary art in particular, but also, more than ever, in so-called popular or amateur practices.¹ Narratives and images of the self circulate in both public and private spaces, in books, newspapers and magazines, on radio and television but also on the internet, with the growth in personal web pages. Over the past decade another form of selfrepresentation has appeared on the Net, radically transforming if not revealing the underlying structure of the genre: the personal webcam. Since their appearance in the mid-990s, the number of these amateur webcam sites has grown spectacularly, first in the United States and then throughout Europe and now around the world. The number of portals, circles, top-ten lists, and discussion forums devoted to them has grown. and, today, a record number of people are visiting them. Some especially popular sites are visited by thousands of people per week, sometimes even by several million per year.² Needless to say, this phenomenon has given rise to considerable commentary. The internet, first of all, with its usual keeness in writing its own history, quickly became interested in personal webcams, and an entire discourse – often technical and rarely analytical – took shape on certain specialized sites, in circles and on portals, in discussion forums and electronic magazines, and so on. Mainstream media (newspapers, magazines, and television in particular) also became interested

in them, devoting numerous stories to them, which, nevertheless, cast the phenomenon as a perverse curiosity. Strangely, however, academic discourse has shown little interest in the personal webcam site. Although this object of study, at the crossroads of a number of media and technologies, of various arts and genres, of fine arts and popular art, might have interested quite a few disciplines – such as communication studies, media studies, cultural studies, literary studies, art history and cinema studies – scholars have been relatively silent on the topic of personal webcams. Much has been said about them in general studies, but in the end few articles and only one book have been devoted to them.³ In the end, the most fruitful interpretation of webcams may very well be found in the writings on the related phenomenon of television reality shows. These, in contrast, have greatly inspired academics, perhaps because television is still more familiar to them than the Web, or perhaps because the phenomenal success of these shows seems to make the task of examining them critically more urgent. Live 24/7 (the Apparatus)

Using cameras connected to one or more computers, personal webcams show a person’s main living spaces, the various rooms of her home, her workspace, indeed her whole life itself, live, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Many use only one camera, usually installed in the workroom where the computer is kept or in the living room. But some sites have more than a dozen cameras, showing most of the rooms in the home and even several views of the same room: the kitchen, the dining room, the bedroom and, sometimes but not very often, the bathroom. The site can also show, symmetrically, the workspace (when it is set apart) and even the car, as if to assure us that nothing has been left out. The camera’s position can vary. Sometimes it is set up to give a highangle view, like a surveillance camera, and at others a low-angle view, but generally it is at eye level. Whether attached to the computer or to the desk, to the television or something else in front of the couch, the camera often provides medium shots, medium close-ups, and even close-ups. In a few rare cases the camera can move, either because it is

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Jennifer Ringley, Saturday, 18 December 1999. © jkr . Courtesy of the artist and CriticalControl.

operated by a remote – allowing it to pan horizontally and vertically and to zoom in and out – or because it is hooked up to a laptop computer or is itself wireless.⁴ The images recorded and transmitted by webcams are indeed live and in real time, but only to a certain degree. Generally, the images are frozen. They are automatically and regularly refreshed at a rate that can vary from site to site, from every five seconds to a minute. Often a counter indicates how much time remains until the image is refreshed again.⁵ Strictly speaking, then, these images are not in real time, nor are they exactly in slow or fast motion. They fragment time, regularly stopping and fixing it. And this is why they are often deceptive: a few images per minute do not give the same impression of reality as do twenty-four or thirty images per second, to which cinema, video, and television have accustomed us. Nor, strictly speaking, are these images live: they are live for a second and delayed most of the time, like photographs, which, when the shutter closes, become “detached” from their referent (to use Barthes’ terminology). Here, the “this is” of the live is always immediately carried away by the “this has been” of photography. What makes it live, here, is only the immediate reception of the images at the very same time (or almost) as they are recorded and their frequent refreshing. The real time of webcams is thus riddled with ellipses, and their live quality is always already past. But these images

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are no less real and live as a result. Perhaps, on the contrary, they reveal the gaps in any live image in real time and the impossibility of achieving complete presence.⁶ Most sites, in addition to their live webcams, have set up an archive (“webcam archive,” “webcam history,” etc.) that presents, in chronological order, the most recent images taken by the webcam or a selection of those images (“the last ten pics”) over a period of time, ranging from twenty-four hours to a year. Images are thus not only taken and broadcast; they are also recorded and preserved for varying and often undefined lengths of time. This supplementary archive shifts even more radically the site’s genre from live images to photo album. But it perhaps also reveals that the experience of live broadcasts always already contains the melancholy proper to past images and relics. Whether they are accompanied by this archive or not, live images and, in particular, live webcam images evoke the inexorable passing of time. Death prowls about them.⁷ Life, Online⁸ (the Autobiographical Pact)

Some sites are devoted entirely to webcams. In most cases, however, webcams are a part of personal web pages that contain other autobiographical information. Apart from the home page, the site often contains a page introducing the person, and this can take various forms: a résumé; a brief autobiography in the first or third person; a written self-portrait that describes the person’s likes and dislikes, interests, pastimes, preferred bands, favourite books and recipes, and so on.⁹ Sometimes the person’s general mood is summed up in a single word or by an emoticon or smiley face.¹⁰ Many sites also have a diary, called variously a “diary,” “journal,” “log,” “blog,” and so on, in which the author describes his or her activities, thoughts, mood of the day, or a piece of poetry or literature. Some people write in these diaries every day, but most do so irregularly. These diaries are usually archived, and some sites have already accumulated more than a decade’s worth of confessions.¹¹ Often the site will also include one or more photo albums, usually called “galleries” or “archives,” mostly with family photos – pictures of themselves, their family, friends, favourite animals, and major and

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Jennifer Ringley, Saturday, 20 January 2001. © jkr . Courtesy of the artist and CriticalControl.

minor events in their lives such as birthdays, graduations, parties, and trips – each one carefully titled, dated, and filed chronologically. Some galleries also show some of the author’s more “artistic” photographs: not friends and family but landscapes, objects, and the like in more daring compositions, or reproductions of some of the author’s paintings or drawings. Sometimes the photograph is accompanied by a longer description or the daily diary entry is accompanied by a photograph (a “daily pic,” an “image a day”) or other information. In cases such as these, the diary and the photo album meet, becoming a sort of scrap book, a blend of genres and a collage of material that provides a highly heterogeneous image of the self.¹² Because they are live and instantaneous, webcam images belong to the self-portrait genre. But because they are regularly refreshed and then often archived chronologically and linked to the diary, they belong to the genre of autobiography. Their ultimate referent – largely imaginary – is perhaps not so much the body, the subject’s physical appearance, as it is the history of the subject, its psychological continuity. And their temporality is perhaps less that of presentness, the exceptional action or the event, than it is that of duration, of repeated gestures and the everyday, of the relentless and irreversible passing of time. Webcams

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often express the fantasy of showing or seeing everything and, especially, of preserving everything. Paradoxically, however, even if they take the form of a complete autobiography, an absolute confession, webcams tell us very little about the subject they supposedly present. Viewers observe these people in the privacy of their home, they follow them every day over a long period of time, but, in the end, they do not really know them. They will always remain opaque. We might think that this opacity tells us something only about the limits of the visible and the image, which can show the body, in its entirety and at all times, but not the psyche, at least not directly (if such a thing is possible). Reading the diary that often accompanies webcams undoubtedly gives us additional information about the subject, about her seemingly most private thoughts and moods, but it does not really dissipate this feeling of uncanniness. The diaries are generally just as banal as the images: the events they report are everyday and the thoughts conventional. Perhaps this is because the subjects do not reveal themselves there any more than they do before the webcam and because interiority remains not only invisible but also unspeakable, or at least unsaid. Perhaps the subjects know nothing about themselves; everything remains unconscious, even repressed, like after a trauma. Or the subject in question no longer has any interiority, or conscience, or unconscious, or secret, or inhibition; and public space has succeeded in conquering private space in its entirety. Peep Show (Voyeurism and Exhibitionism)

It would be easy to chalk up the webcam phenomenon to individual pathology, to some sort of perversion. But it is clear that webcams do not function identically for the author and the viewer, even if their roles can be reversed. From the viewer’s point of view, webcams undoubtedly encourage a kind of voyeurism. This may seem paradoxical, because, in general, these sites reveal nothing. Unlike pornographic sites, which seem to reveal everything, webcam sites show nothing, or very little. Even when they give access to the bedroom or bathroom, which is not often the case, nudity and sexuality are rare. Most of the time, the cam-

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eras film deserted interior spaces. And when, on occasion, someone appears, or two people, it is an exceptional event. In general, everything on webcam sites is banal. The places all look the same; they look like thousands of other middle-class places in North America, Europe, or elsewhere in the world. Interiors are always clean and spare; they look new and without history. They are unostentatiously furnished, always in the same modern, simple, and functional style made popular by Ikea. And they are practically undecorated: here, paintings and posters, bookcases and books are rare. The people too are like everyone else. Men or women, they are in their twenties or thirties, sometimes their forties, neither attractive nor ugly. Single or in couples or families, they are middle class, reasonably well-off and educated; some of them have been to university. They are still students or already professionals – in the field of technology or media, for example. Their actions are always the same; they are the actions most people like them carry out every day: they work on their computer, they eat, they watch television, they sleep, and so on. It seems that their lives are completely ordinary and uneventful, without joyous or unfortunate events. They are lives outside history, without past or future. They repeat themselves each day and seem destined to continue repeating themselves ad vitam aeternam – and ad nauseam. Nevertheless, these images are a source of constant fascination. Some of their fans spend hours contemplating this complete banality, returning faithfully every evening as if to catch up with a close friend. But it is not quite right to say that these images reveal nothing, that nothing happens in them, that they repeat the same thing over and over. In fact, the same thing is never repeated from one day to the next, at least not exactly the same thing. The place remains the same but is always slightly different: the light has changed, a piece of furniture has been moved, several objects have changed place, others have appeared, and so on. The people are never identical either: they are dressed differently with different hairstyles; their features, expression, and mood can vary. As can their actions and gestures: those they repeat are repeated differently and others are carried out that had never been carried out before. They sit in a different place, they look elsewhere, they work longer, they entertain friends, they sleep poorly, they sleep in, and so on. In the extremely stable setting of these bourgeois interiors and lives, all these

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tiny differences become true events, like the complications, reversals, and solutions of a never-ending story. This is why these images are full of suspense, even more so because they are both live and regularly fixed and slowly refreshed. Despite appearances, viewers never know what is going to happen. They seek out differences, novelties, and signs like detectives, and they always find enough to hope more important ones will come along. For the viewer is waiting for something else, without knowing, or wanting to know, exactly what. This something else remains vague, and, as a result, it is always imminent and yet never arrives. What trauma is the viewer trying to replay and thereby cast off? What is the obscure object of desire and fear? The primal scene, separation, castration? It remains unnameable and unrepresentable. Webcam sites thus maintain a voyeurism in its pure state – an objectless gaze. That said, the curiosity around webcams, like the pleasure that accompanies them, is undoubtedly of a sexual nature. These sites are not pornographic, at least not merely so. Sometimes it turns out that an amateur webcam site is a professional pornography site or gradually becomes one. But most webcam sites deny they are pornographic; they even claim for themselves a kind of chastity. Many home pages contain a notice stating clearly that the site is not sexual in nature and even that there is a complete lack of nudity within, encouraging stray visitors to go elsewhere, often kindly providing a link to sites better able to meet their desires.¹³ However, if these sites are not truly pornographic, they are no less, say, erotic. Not so much because of what they do or do not reveal but because of the way in which they do or do not reveal. Sexuality, here, is omnipresent: forever hoped for, forever suggested – by a skimpy or tight-fitting piece of clothing, by underwear, by a fleeting glimpse of nudity, and so on. But rarely is it explicit. It is usually hidden, distant, or fleeting. And the way it is staged, recorded, and disseminated makes it even more inaccessible to the gaze: the lighting is dim, the framing too wide or close, the resolution always a little grainy, the images frozen. This method of capturing images is also dialectical: it takes us right up close, into the most private space, but it turns aside, constantly distancing or delaying by slowing down time or at the very least regularly suspending it. Here, sexuality is neither repressed, as it is in neu-

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roses, nor foreclosed, as it is in psychoses; rather, it is denied, as it is in perversions. This is where the paradox of these sites, their seeming anachronism, is to be found: in an age of widespread revelation, in which everything is said and shown, they take up a courtly or puritan eroticism that sexualizes distance and veiling – in short, the obstacle. Unless they reveal the very functionning of pornography itself, which, like all contemporary images and discourses about sex, whether scientific, artistic, or media-based, may be the ultimate means of controlling, or at least exorcising, sexuality.¹⁴ As for these sites’ authors, the question is a complicated one. It must be said from the outside that there is little money to be made from webcams. Some sites charge money or have paid sections, reserved for members, which provide access to more complete and more intimate material, such as the bedroom camera, certain photograph archives, or the author’s complete diary. Some sites, at the height of their success, are undoubtedly fairly profitable. But most of these sites are probably not money-makers. And, as if money were seen here in a bad light, they all claim to be not for profit, that their meagre income serves to maintain the site. Whether or not this is the case, whether this disinterest is real or only affected, it demonstrates, if not the spirit of these sites, at least the conditions of their success. They are looked on favourably because their authors are amateurs, or appear to be. In any event, most personal webcam sites are free. It would be easy to conclude that webcams are an expression of their authors’ narcissism and even of a degree of exhibitionism. Without a doubt, one must have a certain regard for oneself to create a personal web page; webcam one’s entire home twenty-four hours a day; let one’s diary be read and one’s family photographs be seen; record, archive, and publish one’s actions and gestures, one’s least thought, one’s changing moods, one’s entire life, in public space. It is as though this life, as insignificant as it may be, as ordinary and common as it may seem, were singular and even exceptional and should have value for others and, indeed, for everyone, today and tomorrow, as though it were as worthy of being known as any other, more than any other, more even than that of the most famous people.

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Webcam subjects undeniably enjoy revealing themselves, seeing themselves and being seen by the greatest number of people possible. Strangely, however, the number of visitors sometimes seems less important than the number of cameras, as though the essential thing were less actual recognition than potential visibility, less the real gaze of others than the possibility of the Other’s gaze. For these authors must know that most of their images, while always visible, are rarely seen. These sites may thus reveal a pure state of exhibitionism: an object without a gaze. They also reveal a kind of narcissism, a secondary narcissism as Freud would say, one characterized by a libidinal de-investment from objects and an over-investment in the ego. This regression may be pathological (for psychoanalysis, narcissism is found in various kinds of psychosis) but it is not necessarily strictly individual; undoubtedly, it has a social dimension. We might think that webcams reproduce sexual stereotypes by feeding male voyeurism and female narcissism or exhibitionism. In fact, webcams confuse traditional gender constructions, though without ever radically calling them into question. It is difficult to get an exact idea of who their viewers are (they are probably mostly male), but these sites’ authors are both men and women, perhaps in equal measure.¹⁵ And because, unlike more commercial sites, webcam sites are self-representational – the subject and object, author and character, and artist and artistic subject are one and the same – the roles are doubly complicated: here, the subject of the image is just as often the male body as it is the female, and producing the image, using the technology, seems to be the responsibility of women as often as it is of men. It is possible to take the view that webcams thereby call received gender roles into question: here, men become the object of the gaze and women take control of their own image. But the reality is less straightforward: clearly, taking control of production is not enough on its own to tear down a stereotype. Sometimes, webcams clearly offer new images of women – and of men – but often they convey traditional images. In fact, many girlcams reveal a complete interiorization of the male gaze.¹⁶ It is possible to see in the webcam phenomenon another expression of contemporary narcissism, one of the perverse effects of modern individualism. Modernity is undeniably a wide-ranging process of subjectiv-

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ization of the world, which places the subject at the source and end of all practices. An entire culture has developed in the process, with various ideals and projects, what Charles Taylor, following Lionel Trilling, has called the “ideal of authenticity.”¹⁷ With this ideal of authenticity, new political forms arise; in particular, “the politics of recognition,” which associates self-realization with a recognition of identity, not only legal recognition (equal rights) but also social recognition (equal respect).¹⁸ This subjectivization is obviously quite complicated, both encouraged and restricted, by another process, one just as decisive, if not more so – rationalization and, in particular, the extension of so-called “instrumental” reason, with the growth of science, technology, and, above all, the market economy. While this individualism and this rationalization are generally seen as some of modernity’s greatest accomplishments, they have also had some perverse effects. Early on, they brought about secularization, a retreat from the divine and a certain disenchantment with the world and with life.¹⁹ Later, they brought about the dissolution of traditional, family, community, and social bonds; a degree of political disengagement; a withdrawal into the self and a move towards the private sphere, narcissism, hedonism, and so on.²⁰ Webcams express a kind of disenchantment: it is probably because their subjects’ lives seem bereft of meaning that they want to valorize it. Webcams may also manifest a lack of social or political involvement. Unlike many other internet users, webcam authors, like their viewers, often seem to be apolitical. But this is true of most people today. It is also possible, however, that this is a vague expression of a desire for a different kind of society – one that is more direct and that contains a greater amount of dialogue. In any event, webcams undoubtedly manifest a kind of narcissism, a true fetishism of the self. That’s Entertainment (the Society of the Spectacle)

It is tempting to see in webcams, in their viewers’ voyeurism and their authors’ narcissism and exhibitionism, a new form of the society of the spectacle, as described by Guy Debord and his disciples. These sites’ authors and viewers seem to have completely interiorized the logic of television and, more generally, of all electronic media, according to

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which (to borrow George Berkeley’s term) esse est percipi, “to be is to be perceived,” which means, today, to be publicized, broadcast, and seen. It is clear that the people being webcammed share a certain pride in the dissemination of these images of the self in the public sphere. They seem to want to make themselves known, to be recognized and even famous. Their models and heroes are not their parents, of course, nor the authorities, nor even political, economic, cultural, scientific, or sports figures of the day but, rather, media personalities and celebrities: pop stars, movie and television stars, magazine covergirls and boys, magazine and advertising images, even porn stars. Such models are visible in the commentaries that often punctuate these sites, in blogs for example, where the author’s taste in these matters is always proudly displayed. They are also sometimes visible in the appearance of the people being filmed, in their clothing and body language. And they can also be seen in the very images the webcams transmit, which can sometimes seem to be quoting other, more familiar images. Even when these sites offer no service in particular – as we have seen, most of their authors reject any notion that they have pecuniary goals – they always have a self-promotional dimension: one of their goals is to make their authors known (as they are, of course) to a broad audience. First of all, most sites are in English, even those in non-Englishspeaking countries (these are often entirely in English or at least offer an English version). Second, the form and content of the sites are often modelled on those of commercial sites and advertising.²¹ In addition, it appears that the number of visits to the site is an important measure of success for the authors themselves; this number is often proudly displayed on the site. Some sites encourage us to vote for them on various toplists such as WebCam World’s “Top 00 WebCams.” Finally, several sites carefully document media coverage of their activities, especially when they are filmed for television, as though establishing one’s reputation can only be done through the dominant mass media and the considerable increase in the audience pool it brings with it.²² Thus, despite the realist aesthetic these sites have and claim for themselves, the fascination they exert on their authors and viewers alike perhaps demonstrates less a taste for reality, for the documentation of reality as it is, than it does a desire for fiction, a desire to fictionalize

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everyday life in order to make it, if not the same as dominant images and narratives, then as visible and valorized as the life of a star, even in its banality. From this perspective, that of a critical analysis of the society of the spectacle, the webcam phenomenon is clearly linked to that of television reality shows. Some people even claim that certain tv reality shows, such as Big Brother, were inspired by webcams and represent television’s response to the success of these sites. The relationship between the two phenomena, however, is more complex than that. Making private life public was a major trend in television as early as the 980s, long before the arrival of webcams, at least in the form of talk shows involving “ordinary people” telling their life story or confessing.²³ It is true that publicizing private life through the surveillance of private space is more specific to webcams and that this transformation of the home into a tv studio may very well have inspired, as much as this is possible, the transformation of tv studios into homes. At the same time, however, webcams themselves illustrate the attraction of television. Because this medium is truly hegemonic, it is probable that the desire to be filmed at every moment of the day is also a desire to “be on tv.” And webcams are certainly the most accessible way of doing so, or of enabling one to behave as though one were on tv. The people attracted to webcams, like those involved in television reality shows – both participants and viewers – all dream a little about becoming a celebrity.²⁴ That said, we must also recall that this desire to become a celebrity is not merely narcissistic. It is also social. Television, webcams, and the entire entertainment industry are seen by participants and viewers as the fast track to social mobility that would otherwise be, if not inaccessible, at least much more difficult.²⁵ We clearly live in a culture of narcissism, but this culture is constantly threatened by depression. In modern society, the cult of the self is always confronted with the cult of performance. It could always be overturned in the “fatigue of being oneself” described by Alain Ehrenberg.²⁶ The World Watches the World (Total Surveillance)

One could well see in webcams a new means of total surveillance characteristic of the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault. In

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academia, Foucault’s hypothesis has become a veritable doxa, used as a template to read every kind of social phenomenon. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault maintains, against Debord, that we do not live in a society of the spectacle but, rather, in a society of surveillance, whose emblem is Bentham’s panopticon.²⁷ As is now well known, the cells in this ideal prison are laid out in a circular building around a central tower, from which a guard can constantly see the prisoners without being seen.²⁸ With his characteristic anxiety, Paul Virilio clearly endorses Foucault’s thesis and sees in new technology, and in webcams in particular, the logical conclusion of surveillance. Indeed, the arrival of electronic eavesdropping in the mid-twentieth century and, more recently, of video technology provided surveillance with powerful new tools. The connection of these technologies to computer systems, and then that of closed circuits to the internet, has taken surveillance to new heights. As they became perfected, these technologies became more accessible. Their use is no longer restricted to police, judicial, or business security: they have entered the home. Surveillance is no longer limited to public space or workspace; it has openly entered private space. And it is no longer reserved for use by some secret power but is available to everyone. As Virilio has remarked, “This in the end is the great future of televised surveillance. What was, and still is, the prerogative of the military-police complex is gradually becoming a part of everyone’s lives, which naturally has its advantages but which also carries risks because of its ubiquity and instantaneousness.”²⁹ In short, we think we are stars, but we’re really only prisoners. Many people, however, contest this monolithic reading, and for various reasons. According to some commentators, webcam technology is poorly suited to surveillance.³⁰ Surveillance requires live images, but webcams offer only fixed images, whose transmission is always delayed. They refresh the image far too slowly. Despite appearances, webcams are thus, in Nicolas Thély’s words, “a poor surveillance tool.”³¹ This essentially technological argument, however, has its limitations. First of all, ellipses are not excluded in traditional televised surveillance; sometimes they are even necessary in order to perfect the panopticon view: by automatically alternating the views on the monitors, it sacrifices temporal continuity in order to maximize the amount of

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space covered. Above all, it must be stated that the difference between webcam technology and video surveillance technology is less a difference of kind than it is a difference of degree: after all, refreshing an image is a form of scanning, however it is transmitted, and the principal difference is the frequency of the refreshing or scanning. And this difference is probably due to the current technical limitations to broadcasting images on the internet and not to the intentions of users and manufacturers. The technological horizon of webcams is undoubtedly the same as is that of video surveillance: the transmission of quality images in real time and, especially, live. It is not at all surprising that many webcam sites boast that they refresh their images more frequently than others or that some sites even offer more quickly refreshed images to subscribers. Overall, the rate at which images are refreshed is constantly improving. For structural rather than technological reasons, others do not see webcams as being part of the logic of surveillance. To start with, webcams invert the whole economy of surveillance: while the panopticon foresaw one person watching over the largest possible number of prisoners, webcams aim for the largest number of people watching a single prisoner. Next, here the prisoners are voluntary and the power relation is also inverted: the person being watched is responsible for the system and ultimately has control over it, determining the number of cameras, where they are placed, their perspective and framing, the rate at which they are refreshed, the hours during which they function, the mise en scène, and so on. One might even go so far as to say that the people watching are themselves being watched: they are awaited and solicited everywhere on these sites, their visits are recorded and even numbered, and so on. And the relationship established between the two parties has perhaps less to do with domination (vertical and one-directional, in whichever direction) as it does with communication (horizontal and, potentially at least, reversible). These images are intended not for some private control room but, rather, for the public sphere or, at least, a public network, in which each node is both centre and periphery, a place of broadcast and reception. Finally, we must always keep in mind that there is not a lot here to watch. The people being filmed do nothing illegal and rarely do they do anything at all immoral; they are actually quite docile and proper.³²

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These aspects of webcam sites do not, however, contradict the panopticon hypothesis, in fact quite the contrary. For the panopticon itself is not simply a hierarchical system. At first sight, it submits all the prisoners to the central gaze of a single man. But we must not forget that the system works not because the prisoners are watched over at all times but, rather, because they know they can be. The panopticon is founded on the notion that power is not exercised directly, by the prison authorities, but indirectly, by the inmates themselves, on themselves – “automatically,” as Foucault remarks.³³ In addition, Foucault does not limit surveillance to the panopticon and the institutions traditionally associated with power. He sees it in a wide variety of practices that, at first sight, have nothing to do with domination or even restraint. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault already points out the role of examination in the disciplinary society’s surveillance system.³⁴ In The History of Sexuality, he returns at length to the central role of confession in Western societies as a ritual of truth and the individualization process and, especially, as a means by which subjects are subordinated to power. “The confession has spread its effects far and wide. It plays a part in justice, medicine, education, family relationships and love relations, in the most ordinary affairs of everyday life, and in the most solemn rites,” Foucault remarks.³⁵ And today, he continues, “the obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface; that if it fails to do so, this is because a constraint holds it in place, the violence of a power weighs it down, and it can finally be articulated only at the price of a kind of liberation.”³⁶ From this perspective, the seemingly most private and free practices, such as the analysis of the self in philosophy and autobiography in literature, could very well be a part of the general system of surveillance; and more so if, precisely, they appear to be completely autonomous. Long seen as one of the privileged ways to learn and practise a Christian life, the confession has not lost its central role in a secular society. It has become medical, with the growth of psychology and psychoanalysis, which attach special importance to what the patient says, in both the diagnosis and cure. Recently, confession has become a media

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phenomenon, most notably with the development of “confessional television” – and in webcams. Webcams are thus clearly a part of surveillance, that is to say of selfsurveillance. The important thing is not so much that the subject be seen but that he or she be visible at all times and above all that he or she be aware of this visibility. From this perspective, setting up a surveillance system like this by the subject him- or herself reveals the terrible hold of the super ego, or the habitus, on the subject, the interiorization or incorporation of parental or social imperatives, taboos, and, especially, norms. The subject of the webcam is constantly anticipating the gaze of the Other, or of the Father. No wonder his or her life is so normal.³⁷ Big Mother (the Technological Umbilical Cord)

This desire to be seen, known, or watched, however, is not simply narcissistic, nor for that matter is it culpable. The subjects of webcams say this themselves: “I keep JenniCam alive not because I want or need to be watched, but because I simply don’t mind being watched”; “frankly, most of the time I forget that the camera is there,” Jennifer Ringley writes. Another remarks: “The first month or so I had the cam up, I’d make sure I coverd [sic] up when I got out of bed, and made sure my hair was brushed and what not. Any more, I couldn’t care less ... I feel better about myself now that I’ve invited all to witness my quirks.”³⁸ In a recent book on television reality shows, Serge Tisseron formulates a psychoanalytical hypothesis that may have a bearing on the present discussion. As Tisseron remarks,³⁹ most participants in reality shows want to be famous, naturally, but many have stated that they want most of all for their parents to be proud of them, their mother in particular. This ambition to be famous reveals a desire to be loved by both one’s real mother and a symbolic mother. Psychoanalysis has often expounded on the privileged relationship between the child of either sex and his or her mother, on the physical proximity with the mother’s body itself and their imaginary oneness, which the father (or a “third party”) breaks apart with his laws and taboos. With its traditional sexism, psychoanalysis has long seen the formation of the self and the subject’s entrance into a symbolic order

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Jennifer Ringley, Saturday, 22 January 2001. © jkr . Courtesy of the artist and CriticalControl.

– language, the economy, society – in short his or her “civilizing,” as depending on the rejection of the mother’s body and the acceptance of the father’s law. Obviously, however, the mother also has her law. She is not only nurse and lover, as patriarchal tradition has it, she is also demanding: she gives, but she demands something in return. In short, she has a desire that is also already social. In particular, the mother often dreams about the child or, at least, the child imagines that she is dreaming about him or her and that the dream is magnificent.⁴⁰ Under this law, the child is thus divided between the exaltation of the self and the fear of disappointing, between the desire to please the mother and the anxiety of being abandoned by her. As Tisseron remarks, “children grow up today in families in which the father’s prestige has diminished while the mother’s continues to grow. The fear of punishment has been partially replaced by the anxiety of being abandoned.”⁴¹ The causes of this reformulation of the Oedipus complex are many: transformation of the family, the redefinition of sex and gender roles, the increased number of choices and responsibilities, changes in the labour market, the growth in media and advertising, and so on. It is likely that the desire to please the mother and that the anxiety of being abandoned by her play a central role in the fascination of web-

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cams, as they do for that of tv reality shows. In the exhibitionism and voyeurism at play here, which, as we have seen, are practically vacuous, the important thing is not the subject or object of the gaze but, rather, the gaze itself, the bond created through it. And it is of crucial importance that this bond be visual, live, and on-line. Because, as it is imagined, this bond is not essentially one of communication (not much is exchanged here) or of power (not much is controlled here) but of contact, an almost physical contact, like that of the umbilical cord. This gaze is a nurturing and loving one. We’d like it to be everywhere, forever, in every space and time, at home and at work, twenty-four hours a day, but we are always afraid it will end. This is why some people can remain glued to the screen or the camera, to the television or the computer, fearing it will go out, especially in the evening, when we all must return to our essential solitude. It is an oral pleasure and a separation anxiety. In his book L’individu incertain,⁴² Alain Ehrenberg foresaw with remarkable intuition these transformations in the use of technology. Discussing the changes in French television in the 980s and 990s, he noted the movement from an escapist brand of television to one of reality, from a pedagogical form of television (having to do with truth), or simply one of entertainment (having to do with pleasure), to a form of television that is, above all, confessional (having to do with authenticity), from a one-directional television to a two-way or even multidirectional television that involves a degree of interactivity or suggests, at the very least, in the staging of a dialogue or a confession involving “ordinary people,” that the roles of the actor and the viewer are reversible. In short, this is a movement from a television of the father to a television of the brother, as a French television host describes it. To a television of the mother, we might also say. The ideal model for webcams, as for this kind of television, is probably the “relational terminal” that, rather than instructing or entertaining, creates relationships between people, not so much in order to make them communicate in the public sphere, like an assembly in an agora, as to make them commune with one another in a broadened intimacy, as wide as the public sphere itself, like a family united in the home or children in their mother’s lap.

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This is probably why, on webcam sites, dialogue is less important than the possibility of dialogue, communication less important than the mere establishment of a line of communication. All these sites, obviously, are interactive. Visitors can choose a page, a specific view. They can sometimes make the camera move (if it’s a robot cam) or even turn a light on or off in the home where the webcam is located.⁴³ But in the end, these sites are not that dialogical. Their authors encourage certain kinds of exchange, but they are very limited. Webcams usually function one way only: viewers see the authors, but the authors rarely see the viewers, who mostly remain anonymous. Some sites have a chat room, which makes it possible for the site’s author to converse live with visitors, in audio or audio-visual form, or in a forum open to all. But most limit themselves to providing an e-mail address. And some confess that they don’t even reply diligently to their mail.⁴⁴ This is probably why these sites prefer the establishement of a line of electronic communication, which can sometimes include sound but is usually visual in nature: the line is live, it establishes an almost physical contact, whose medium is not language but the voice and, most of all, the gaze in their corporeity.⁴⁵ That said, contact is both desired and feared. Obviously, the authors of these sites do not wish to see their viewers, to really get to know them, or, much less, to meet them. This is why they never give their exact address. Virtual contact is preferred to real contact, or, more precisely, strictly audio-visual contact is preferred to physical contact. Webcams thereby confer proximity without the inconveniences of promiscuity, love without sex, attachment without responsibility, the umbilical cord with no social bond.⁴⁶ Notes  See, for example: Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 996 [976]); Régine Robin, Le Golem de l’écriture: De l’autofiction au Cybersoi (Montreal: xyz , 997); and Nicolas Bourriaud, Formes de vie: L’art moderne et l’invention de soi (Paris: Denoël, 999). 2 See, for example, the following sites: www.nerdman.com, www.stvlive.com and www.khanjal.com. See also: www.anacam.com,

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www.camathone.com, www.cutecouples.com, and what remains of the most famous site in the genre, Jennifer Ringley’s www.arttech.ab.ca/ pbrown/jenni/jenni.html. See, in particular: Brooke A. Knight, “Watch Me! Webcams and the Public Exposure of Private Lives,” Art Journal 59, 4 (2000): 2–5; and Nicolas Thély, Vu à la webcam (essai sur la web-intimité) (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2002). There are numerous publications on the question of identity on the web. See, for example, Sherry Turkle’s classic work, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 995); and Willilam J. Mitchell’s Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 2003). Sometimes, the subject looks at the camera. Convention does not require the actors to pretend they are unaware of the camera, as is the case in fiction films; rather, looking at the camera is allowed and even encouraged, at least to a certain extent, because this shows that what is happening is authentic. It must be said, however, that while subjects never hesitate to look at the camera, they usually ignore it. For long periods of time, the camera sees without being seen. Sometimes, an image appears that is not refreshed. Webcam authors often leave a fixed image when the camera or computer is turned off, sometimes leading to confusion. Usually, however, it is clearly indicated when the camera is off-line. In addition, the concepts of real time and live are complicated here because different views of the same place are often juxtaposed on the same page. Because images are rarely refreshed at the same time, these views are not in synch; some are ahead of others. In this way, time is not only cut up, halted, and fixed, it is also disorganized. And viewers must not only fill in the gaps between images, they must also mentally recreate the sequence of events and the continuity of time. It is certainly surprising but above all symptomatic that webcam technology, like photography and the cinema in the beginning, has been associated with ghosts and phantoms. Many webcam sites document live, twenty-four hours per day, deserted but seemingly haunted places in the hope of catching sight of a ghost. The WebcamSearch directory even has a “Ghost Cams” category, with sites that carry out constant surveillance of old country homes, abandoned houses, deserted hospitals, and so on. See http://www.webcamsearch.com/links/Ghost_Cams. This was the subtitle of Jennifer Ringley’s site. Krizsa, for example, gives a “one-line bio,” a long list of interests in alphabetical order, and a list of her equipment (http://www.krizsa.com). Mo

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gives “random facts” about herself and her “likes and dislikes” (http:// www.geocities.com/southbeach/canal/5667), a little like Barthes in Barthes par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 975), 20–. For example: “current mood: frustrated” or “Alan is currently: spirited” (with an emoticon). On the keeping of computer or internet diaries, see Philippe Lejeune, “Cher écran ...” Journal personnel, ordinateur, Internet (Paris: Seuil, 2000). Some particularly elaborate sites add clips or sound and video files to the texts and fixed images. Most sites also have a faq s page, where the author answers the most frequent questions, such as “Who are you?” “Why are you doing this?” and “What kind of equipment do you use?” They also give a list of suggested links to the sites of other individuals, for example, or to webcam directories. Even Jennifer Ringley states that “this site is not pornography. Yes, it contains nudity from time to time. Real life contains nudity. Yes, it contains sexual material from time to time. Real life contains sexual material. However, this is not a site about nudity and sexual material. It is a site about real life.” Quoted by Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi, “Navigating the Image of Woman Online,” Kairos 2, 2 (997), http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/2.2/coverweb/invited/kb3.html. On the topic of voyeurism in contemporary culture, see, for example, Clay Calvert, Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture (Boulder, co : Westview, 2000). Some commentators claim that there are more girlcams than boycams. See, for example, Brooke A. Knight, “Watch Me! Webcams and the Public Exposure of Private Lives,” Art Journal 59, 4 (2000): 22. As Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi have written about Jennifer Ringley: “The addressed and invoked audience for Jennifer’s site is male, a creation of an image by a woman for a man. Jennifer’s site represents a complex dialectic between woman as subject and woman as object, woman as both consumer and consumed, and woman as a ‘performer’ of femininity through her interaction with ‘woman’ as object of desire, a positioning that privileges the presence of women online as objects first, subjects second. As Ringley’s site suggests, women attempting to reimage themselves often have little encouragement from mass culture to produce resistance discourse and often are positioned as both complicit with and resistant to their traditional subject position as an object of desire.” See Blair and Takayoshi, “Navigating the Image of Woman Online,” Kairos, http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/2.2/coverweb/invited/kb3. html. See also Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi, eds., Feminist Cyber-

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scapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces (Norwood, nj : Ablex Press, 999). The ideal of authenticity “accords crucial moral importance to a kind of contact with myself, with my own inner nature, which it sees as in danger of being lost, partly through the pressures toward outward conformity, but also because in taking an instrumental stance toward myself, I may have lost the capacity to listen to this inner voice. It greatly increases the importance of this self-contact by introducing the principle of originality: each of our voices has something unique to say.” See Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Concord, on : Anansi, 99), 29. See also Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 982 [972]); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: the Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, ma : Harvard University Press, 989); and Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 992). See Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutman, 25–73 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 994). On modern disenchantment, see Max Weber’s classic work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. Anthony Giddens (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). See also Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 985); and Luc Ferry, L’Homme-Dieu ou le sens de la vie (Paris: Grasset, 996). On withdrawing into oneself and contemporary narcissism and hedonism, see: Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 976); Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism (New York: Norton, 992 [978]); Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 99 [980]); Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: Norton, 985); Gilles Lipovetski, L’ère du vide: Essai sur l’individualisme contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 989); and Gilles Lipovetski, Le crépuscule du devoir: L’éthique indolore des nouveaux temps démocratiques (Paris: Gallimard, 992). One site even has a section for fans (http://www.cutecouple.com). It is important to note here that, under the dominant model of the star, another model is visible on many of these sites. It is unobtrusive, no doubt, but it is surely there – that of the artist. It is possible that the artist, with the star, has become one of the privileged figures of modern identity. Webcams, as we have seen, like many individuals’ web pages, are often

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related to other genres – such as the diary, the self-portrait, the poetry collection and the photo gallery – which are not a part of the mass media but, rather, of literature and the arts. And, generally speaking, the authors of these pages place special emphasis on their sites’ design, not like an advertising agency seeking a high level of visibility in the short term but, rather, like an artist whose concern is “purely” aesthetic. The people on webcam sites, like those of many personal web pages, see themselves less as in the process of becoming stars and more as budding writers and artists whose whole life, whose every idea and feeling and every action, even the most ordinary, acquires, through the magic of art, worth and moral value, if not aesthetic value. (Though it could also be a way of giving a cultural veneer to promotional activities.) 23 On this topic, see the essential work by Alain Ehrenberg, L’individu incertain (Paris: Hachette, 995), on drugs and television in contemporary France. 24 In his book on tv reality shows, L’empire du loft (Paris: La Dispute, 2002), François Jost demonstrates how these programs, despite their apparent realism, recycle not only the authenticating forms of the talk shows and reality shows of the previous decade but also the fictional model of sitcoms (70). Some of these shows greatly resemble leading us sitcoms, such as Friends, for example, with its montage of young people’s discussions about love, friendship, and social relations. Even their decor is undoubtedly “directly inspired by the construction of places of socialization in television fiction” (8), such as the couch in Friends or the bathroom in Ally McBeal. The success of these shows is perhaps due to this way of revisiting commonplaces of identity formation. This overlapping of genres, of truth and fiction, clearly reveals how television works: it invents, not ex nihilo, but by constantly adapting and rewriting its own successes. Above all, however, it reveals the dominant role of fiction in everyday life. Psychoanalysis and sociology had already insisted on the importance of identification with the other and with the image in the formation of the ego, and with mimicry in the construction of the ethos and even the hexis of social agents. These analyses of television, like those of webcams, reveal, if this were necessary, the importance of media images in the construction of contemporary identity. On television reality shows, see, of the many publications on the topic: James Friedman, ed., Reality Squared: Televisual Discourse on the Real (Piscataway, nj : Rutgers University Press, 2002); Olivier Razac, L’écran et le zoo. Spectacle et domestication des expositions coloniales à Loft Story (Paris: Denoël, 2002); Dolan Cummings, ed., Reality tv: How Real Is Real? (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002);

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Mark Andrejevic, Reality tv: The Work of Being Watched (Lanham, md : Rowman and Littlefield, 2003); Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen, Shooting People: Adventures in Reality tv (London: Verso, 2003); and Karen Balkin, ed., Reality tv (At Issue) (Farmington Hills, mi : Greenhaven Press, 2004). On the importance of entertainment in contemporary culture, see, for example, Neal Gabler, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 999). 25 Celebrity does seem to promise an instant improvement in one’s living conditions, riches, respect and love from others (economic and symbolic capital, Bourdieu would say), and, as a result, self-esteem and even happiness. And it is difficult not to understand that, despite the capitalist ethic (“if you want to you can”) and all the success stories off of which it feeds, social mobility is undoubtedly not that great today, and it is more often descending rather than ascending. Many people have thus been offended at the ethic some of these television reality shows promote – especially Big Brother and its numerous progeny, such as Il Gran Fratello, El Gran Hermano, Loft Story, and Occupation Double – which rewards not a particular skill, not work, but only a specific temperament (one lucky enough to please the viewer) and a little perseverance. (These people prefer other shows, such as Starmaker, Star Academy, and American Idol, because they at least require some talent and a little work.) It is as if television suddenly broke with the Protestant ethic, which values individual initiative and work, in favour of a Jansenist ethic (minus the austerity, of course) founded on charm or fate, on God’s arbitrary will (in this case, on the whims of the producers and viewers). But it must be understood that, for most people, contemporary society is little more than a televised game: if social status seems no longer to be based on birth as it was under monarchies, it is still not clearly tied to merit. Chance seems still to play a major role, as do, especially (today more than ever), power plays, which are all the more pernicious for often being denied. 26 Alain Ehrenberg, La fatigue d’être soi (Paris: Odile Jacob, 998). 27 Recall that Foucault, in his analysis of the transformation of the prison between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, discovered that the practices and institutions that make up the modern judicial system seek less to punish through exemplary sentences than to train using a wide range of disciplinary practices within a surveillance system. Foucault found the prison model at work in other institutions – the barracks, the school, the hospital, the factory – leading him to apply his hypotheses to the entire “social body.”

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28 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Random House, 977 [975]), 200. 29 Paul Virilio, “Oeil pour oeil, ou le krach des images,” Le Monde diplomatique (March 998), 26–7 (http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/998/03/ virilio /043). See also Paul Virilio, “Un monde surpexposé: Fin de l’histoire ou fin de la géographie?” Le Monde diplomatique (August 997), 7 (http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/997/08/virilio /8948); “Le règne de la délation optique,” Le Monde diplomatique (August 998), 20 (http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/998/08/virilio /082); and “Télésurveillance globale,” Le Monde diplomatique (August 999): 4–5 (http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/999/08/virilio /2332). 30 See in particular Nicolas Thély, Vu à la webcam (essai sur la web-intimité) (Paris: Les presses du réel, 2002), 83–92. 3 Ibid., 90–. Thély remarks that the webcam, in its present form, is not in Real Player but in Push, a technology that creates a computer file whose name does not change; only the content is regularly updated. 32 Nicolas Thély writes that “personal webcams, for their part, do not share this logic of voluntary confinement but rather that of self-filming.” People being webcammed simply want “to obtain images of themselves in their daily lives.” Ibid., 95–6. 33 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 20. 34 Ibid. See, in particular, pages 84–94. On confessions and examinations, see pages 37–42 and 225–9. 35 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 980 [976]), 59. 36 Foucault continues: “One has to be completely taken in by this internal ruse of confession in order to attribute a fundamental role to censorship, to taboos regarding speaking and thinking; one has to have an inverted image of power to believe that all these voices which have spoken so long in our civilization – repeating the formidable injunction to tell what one is and what one does, what one recollects and what one has forgotten, what one is thinking and what one thinks he is not thinking – are speaking to us of freedom. An immense labor to which the West has submitted generations in order to produce – while other forms of work ensured the accumulation of capital – men’s subjection: their constitution as subjects in both senses of the word” (ibid., 60). Thus, for Foucault, “power” is no longer a centralized agent, the prerogative of a limited group of individuals or a government or class (as it is for Marxists) but, rather, an ensemble of forces that circulate throughout the entire social fabric. In addition,

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power is rarely a repressive agent, operating by means of obligations and taboos, according to the model of the law, but often an ensemble of forces that incite, that use various corporeal techniques and apparatuses of knowledge, according to the model of the norm. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault takes up this distinction again but gives it a different name. Morality, a range of values and rules of conduct, can be exercised in two ways: according to a code, a “behavioural code,” imposed from without on the individual or according to an ethic, a “form of subjectivation” created from within, within the self and by the self. These forms of subjectivation, which have been privileged in modernity, are often seen as forms of submission or subjection, all the more effective because they are insidious. There, power operates merely through the subject’s acting upon itself. For a different perspective on surveillance, see John E. McGrath, Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Quoted in B.A. Knight, “Watch Me!” Art Journal 59, 4 (2000): 2. Serge Tisseron, L’intimité surexposée (Paris: Ramsay, 200). This dream is undoubtedly connected to what Freud called the ego ideal, as opposed to the ideal of the ego. The ego ideal is “the model that the child, grown up, will look for behind him, in nostalgic reminiscence about the all-powerful in whom he can no longer believe.” “On the contrary, the ideal of the ego is constructed by the child before him: he projects himself into a figure of identification and expects that it will give him, if not the lost omnipotence, a relative power to be conquered, tentatively identified as the power of the father.” Ibid., 05. Ibid., back cover. Ehrenberg, L’individu incertain (Paris: Hachette, 995). Several sites offer these options, such as Anabella (“You can pan, tilt and zoom my free, streaming, robotic cam”) (http://www.geocities.com/ Heartland/9507/cam.html) or Drive Me Insane (where the visitor can turn the lights on and off, ring the doorbell, etc.) (http://www.drivemeinsane.com). One webcam host even admits that she never answers her e-mail (http://www.anacam.com). Even though the technology makes this easily possible, very few webcams include sound. Is this because sound is more private than the image – too private? Obviously, however, television and the internet embody this relational mode in a highly imperfect manner. Television is direct and very public,

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but it is not dialogical enough to be relational – here relations are for the most part carried out through intermediaries, by broadcasters, producers, directors, the technical crew, and so on – and this is why television is now often linked to the telephone and the internet. The internet, for its part, is more private, but it is not yet direct enough or, for that matter, unified enough to be a true public terminal: virtual communities are rarely simultaneous and remain highly fragmented, which is why webcams are always most popular when television and other more mainstream media express interest in them. One might imagine that, with media convergence, that of television and the internet especially, this ideal of a broadened and simultaneous intimacy will be closer to being achieved. But it is difficult to predict the form this terminal will take if it will have to satisfy both the affective interest of the actors and viewers and the economic interest of the producers, broadcasters, and advertisers.

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part three The Staging of Hallucination (of Hallucination)

Introduction

Slavoj Žižek’s chapter confronts Nazi cinema with Hollywood cinema – Veit Harlan’s melodramatic Opfergang (944) with Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (200) – to discuss how they both sustain specific ideological political orders. His underlying question, however, is the following: what type of cinematography enables a critical viewer? Defining the filmic image as a site of deployment of the desire to fulfill primordial fantasies, Žižek is attentive to the ways in which censorship is exercised in both regimes to erase or simply veil this deployment. Crucial here is how the staging of hallucination, when the representation of primordial fantasies is left uncensored, can allow the spectator to identify hallucination as a genuine part of a greater hallucination: the film per se as a fantasy, supported by a specific ideological order. The viewer-filmic image interface is one in which the critical gaze is thus made potentially active but only inasmuch as the image can disclose itself not merely as a hallucination but as a hallucination of a hallucination. Vision has to be perturbed, distorted, within the film to enable the spectator’s critical view of the film – a film that also turns out to be confirmed as a hallucination. One cannot “see” (in Jean-Luc Nancy’s sense of seeing as the modern belief in the human’s ability to perceive something in its wholeness) the hallucinatory status of the screen image, but the latter can be cinematographically implied.

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8 Hallucination as Ideology in Cinema s l av o j z˘ i z˘ e k

Schubert in Stalingrad

So much has already been written about the battle for Stalingrad, this battle is invested with so many fantasies and symbolic meanings – when the German troops reached the Western bank of the Volga, the “apolitical” Franz Lehar himself, the author of The Merry Widow, Hitler’s favourite operetta, quickly composed “Das Wolgalied,” celebrating this achievement. Let us just recall the two main “as if” scenarios: if the Germans were to break through to the east of the Volga and to the Caucasus oil fields, the Soviet Union would collapse and Germany would have won the war; if Erich von Manheim’s deft manoeuvres were not to prevent the collapse of the entire German front after the defeat of the 6th Army in the Stalingrad Kessel, the Red Army would have rolled into Central Europe in 943, defeating Germany before the Allied invasion in Normandy, so that the whole of the continental Europe would have been Communist. So, perhaps, the time has come to cast a reflexive glance on the main types of the Stalingrad narratives. There is, first, the standard German narrative: the tragedy of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary German soldiers who found themselves trapped in a foreign land, parts of a meaningless expedition thousands of kilometres from their homes, suffering carnage and winter chill, ruthlessly exploited by their leaders for some obscure strategic goals. Such a tragic experience is, of course, the prisoner of false immediacy; it can only emerge if one does not ask some elementary questions: what

the hell were they doing in a foreign country? And what about the suffering they themselves inflicted on the Russian population while they were still winning? Then there is, of course, the official Soviet narrative: the “sacred” battle for the defence of the fatherland, in which common soldiers showed breathtaking courage. Here, also, (at least) two details disturb this picture. The Soviet reports to the military headquarters continuously refer to the mysterious “lack of coordination between artillery and infantry” – a euphemism for the fact that the Soviet artillery bombed its own men, which signals the Soviet Union’s horrifying indifference towards the loss of its own soldiers’ lives. An even more interesting detail is the extraordinary popularity that snipers enjoyed in the Soviet media: snipers were Stakhanovite workers transposed onto the battlefield; their fame reflects the Stalinist turn from egalitarianism to competition and the praise of individual achievements. Finally, the predominant Anglo-Saxon approach (exemplified by the bestsellers of William Craig and Anthony Beever) combines the objective military account with the realistic depiction of the horror of the soldiers’ daily lives: while each side is “fairly” attributed its quota of military successes and failures (with a strange symmetry – on both sides, the sagacious generals were fighting not only the enemy but also the incompetence of their supreme commander, Hitler or Stalin), the basic mode is that of awe at the unspeakable suffering and the superhuman endurance of the soldiers on both sides. So how does Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Duel: Enemy at the Gates (200) stand with regard to these three narratives? It belongs to neither of them: while appropriating the Soviet sniper myth (its hero is Wassily Zaitsev, the most famous Stalingrad sniper), this myth is co-opted into standard Hollywood ideology. Two features of the film are crucial here: first, its ultimate reduction of the gigantic battle to the conflict of two individuals testing their will and patience: all the collective scenes are just a preparation for the duel that takes place in the abstract space of the abandoned ruins of the no-man’s-land between the two front lines. Second, Zaitsev is involved in a love affair with a woman-sniper, an American girl who joined the Russians to take revenge on the Germans for killing her family. We thus get the production of a couple, the second key ingredient of Hollywood ideology. The ultimate irony

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of the film is not so much that it borrowed what was clearly a Soviet propaganda fabrication (there is, in the original Soviet and German reports from the front, no mention whatsoever of a duel between Zaitsev and the top German sniper) but, rather, the fact that this borrowing resulted in the “hollywoodization” of the story. The most expensive European film of all time (dm 200 million), destined to assert Europe against Hollywood, marks the ideological defeat of the former, its subordination to Hollywood. No wonder, then, that the film is really bad: the critics at the Berlin festival were right to tear it apart. To learn something about the Stalingrad ideology, let us, therefore, turn to a totally different form of art: Hans Hotter’s outstanding 942 recording of Schubert’s Winterreise (now available in the 200 box of ten cd s with historical recordings of Schubert’s Lieder). Let us risk an intentionally anachronistic reading: it is easy to imagine German officers and soldiers listening to this recording in the Stalingrad trenches in the cold winter of 942–43. Does the topic of Winterreise not evoke a unique consonance with the historical moment? Was not the whole campaign to Stalingrad a gigantic Winterreise, in which each German soldier can say for himself the very first lines of the cycle: “I came here a stranger, / As a stranger I depart”? Do the following lines not render their basic experience: “Now the world is so gloomy, / The road shrouded in snow.” Here we have the endless meaningless march: “It burns under both my feet, / Even though I walk on ice and snow.” The dream of returning home in the spring: “I dreamed of many-coloured flowers.” The nervous waiting for the post: “From the highroad a posthorn sounds. / Why do you leap so high, my heart?” The shock of the morning artillery attack, with its “fiery red flames.” Utterly exhausted, the soldiers are refused even the solace of death: “Oh, merciless inn, you turn me away?” What can one do in such a desperate situation but go on, with heroic persistence, closing one’s ears to the complaint of the heart, assuming the heavy burden of fate in a world deserted by Gods? “Complaining is for fools. / Happy through the world along / Facing wind and weather!” The obvious counter-argument is that all this is merely a superficial parallel: even if there is an echo of the atmosphere and emotions, they are in each case embedded in an entirely different context. In Schubert, the narrator wanders around in winter because his beloved

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has dropped him, while the German soldiers were on their way to Stalingrad because of Hitler’s military plans. However, it is precisely in this Verschiebung that the elementary ideological operation consists: the way for a German soldier to be able to endure his situation was to avoid the reference to concrete social circumstances that would become visible through reflection (what the hell were they doing in Russia? what destruction did they bring to this country? what about killing the Jews?) and, instead, to indulge in the Romantic bemoaning of one’s miserable fate, as if the large historical catastrophe merely materializes the trauma of a rejected lover. Is this not the supreme proof of the emotional abstraction, of Hegel’s idea that emotions are abstract, an escape from the concrete network accessible only to thinking? The Double Sacrifice

And one is tempted to go even a step further: in our reading of the Winterreise, we did not just link Schubert to a contingent later historical catastrophe, we did not just try to imagine how this song-cycle resonated with the embattled German soldiers in Stalingrad. What if the link to this catastrophe enables us to read what was wrong in the Schubertian Romantic position itself? What if the position of the Romantic tragic hero, narcissistically focused on his own suffering and despair, elevating them into a source of perverted pleasure, is already in itself a fake one, an ideological screen masking the true trauma of the larger historical reality? One should thus accomplish the properly Hegelian gesture of projecting the split between the authentic original and its later reading coloured by contingent circumstances back into the authentic original itself: what at first appears to be the secondary distortion, a reading twisted by contingent external circumstances, tells us something about what the authentic original itself not only represses but also functions to repress. This is the reason why the true “masterpieces” of Veit Harlan, the Nazi director, are not his overtly political films but, rather, his “apolitical” melodramas, produced between 942 and 944, especially Opfergang (944), undoubtedly Harlan’s masterpiece. Here is the outline of the story: Upon returning home from a trip to the Far East around 900, Albrecht (Carl Raddatz), a Hamburg high-society adventurer, marries his

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Veit Harlan, Opfergang, 1944. Source: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung.

cold, blond, beautiful cousin Octavia (Irene von Meyendorff) and then gets fatally attracted to Aels, a rich Scandinavian living in a nearby villa (Christina Soederbaum). Aels is full of life energy, she likes to ride horses, to swim and shoot a bow, and she has a child from a previous relationship. But she is mysteriously ill, the shadow of death hangs on her. Although Octavia has one outburst of paranoiac curiosity, she tolerates her husband’s passion for Aels with a saint’s patience. Towards the film’s end, both Aels and Albrecht are infected by typhus; they are both lying in their beds, Albrecht in a hospital, Aels at home, thinking of each other. Due to her weakness, Aels is unable to fight off the disease; the only thing that keeps her alive is the regular appearance of Albrecht on the path in front of her window, where he stops his horse for a minute and waves to her. Once Albrecht is also confined to his hospital bed and thus unable to perform this life-saving ritual, Octavia learns about it from the doctor who takes care of both Albrecht and

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Aels. She takes it upon herself to perform the ritual for a couple of days, thus prolonging Aels’s life: each day, dressed up as Albert, she rides a horse past Aels’s villa, stops at the usual place, and waves to her. When the doctor tells Albrecht of Octavia’s sacrifice, he discovers his full love of her. What then follows is the ultimate fantasmatic scene: first we see Albrecht lying in his bed, looking in the right direction, his inner voice saying: “Aels, I have to do something that will hurt you very much.” Then follows the cut to Aels lying in her bed, looking left, as though they are having a kind of extrasensory communication. She answers him: “I know it all. But where are you, my love? Are you disappearing?” Cut to the shot of the view from her room to the path beyond the wooden fence, on which she sees Albrecht-Octavia on a horse and then no one. What follows is the supremely condensed shot/counter-shot: on the right side of the screen, we get the close-up of the dying Aels and, on the left side, the American shot of Albrecht, these two appearances communicating. Albrecht tells Aels the big secret, which is that he really loves Octavia and that he is here to bid her farewell. After Aels wishes him the best luck in his marriage, Albrecht’s image disappears, so that we see just a slightly blurred image of Aels, who appears as an island of light on the right side of the screen, surrounded by blue darkness. This image gradually becomes more and more blurred. She dies. In the ensuing last scene of the film, Albrecht and Octavia ride alongside each other on the sea coast, observing the red rose on the sand moved by the waves, which stand for the dead Aels, who is identified with the immense sea. The opposition of the two women, Octavia and Aels, is more complex than it may appear: each of them stands for a certain kind of death (and life). Octavia stands for the aetheric-anemic life of social conventions, up to her ultimate saintly sacrifice for her husband; in this sense, she stands for death, for the stifling of the impulse to fully live one’s life beyond social conventions. However, precisely as such, she is the survivor, in contrast to Aels, who stands for a different death: not the death of pallid, saintly convention but the death that comes with living out one’s passions without constraints. It is as if there is something lethal about being so fully immersed in life: no wonder that Aels is, from the very beginning, presented as someone over whom the shadow of death lurks. This death is not simply the end of life but the immersion into the

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Veit Harlan, Opfergang, 1944. Source: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung.

eternally returning pulsation of Life itself, symbolized by the waves of the sea: in her death, Aels is transfigured into the cosmic, impersonal life substance. The structure is that of a double sacrifice. At one level, Aels stands for the untamed wilderness of the life energy that has to be sacrificed so that the “normal” couple of Albrecht and Octavia can be reconstituted: the last shot of the film is of the red rose being moved by the waves that lap the sand, which is the index of the Third Thing – sacrificed untamed female sexuality (and it is as though part of this sexual energy passed into Octavia, who – for the first time in the film – is now also seen riding). At another level, of course, the sacrifice is that of Octavia, who accomplishes the supreme act of sustaining, through her masquerade, the illusion of her husband’s fidelity to his mistress, which keeps the latter alive. This is the supreme “male chauvinist” fantasy: that of the mistress and wife both sacrificing themselves for each other, the wife accepting the husband’s passion for the mistress and the mis-

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tress erasing herself to enable the reunion of the husband and the wife. The wife wins her husband back precisely by accepting his illegitimate passion for another woman and by even taking upon herself his desire, by acting as him in order to help her. This fantasy finds its ultimate expression in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier in the words of the Marschallin, which open the final trio: “I chose to love him in the right way, so that I would love even his love for another!” Hallucination within Hallucination

Paradoxically, if Harlan is to be believed in his autobiography (Im Schatten meiner Filme), the source for this finale is none other than Goebbels himself. In Rudolf Binding’s story, upon which Opfergang is based, it is the husband (Albrecht) who dies, and Aels becomes “Joie,” a vivacious English girl with no pre-existing mortal illness. Both Albrecht and Joie also suffer from typhus. However, in this story, only Albrecht dies, and, in the last moment of his life, he tells Octavia that Joie’s only pleasure, which allowed her to cling to life, was his regular daily appearance in front of her villa. It is after Albrecht’s death that Octavia continues to perform this ritual, dressed up as Albrecht: these four days are crucial for Joie’s recovery. When Joie recovers, the doctor tells her that Albrecht died four days ago; shocked, Joie says that she saw Albrecht each evening performing his ritual. While the doctor dismisses this as a hallucination, Joie suddenly understands what has happened. Goebbels opposed this ending, evoking the demoralizing influence such a story about adultery, in which the husband dies, might have upon the thousands of soldiers on the front who would see the film. In response to this criticism, Harlan turned Joie into Aels and made her fatally sick, so that it is she, not the husband, who dies. This, of course, totally changes the meaning of Octavia’s “sacrifice,” which involved impersonating Albrecht for his mistress’s gaze. In the former story, Octavia’s sacrifice is a pure gesture of respect for her husband’s love, not a witty manoeuvre destined to regain that love. In this precise sense, the final film “pathologizes” Octavia’s sacrificial gesture, reducing a pure “disinterested” ethical act to a “pathological” feminine subterfuge.

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A more detailed analysis would have to link Opfergang to Immensee, shot in the same year, in which Soederbaum plays a woman divided between two men: she is passionately in love with a young composer who, although he returns her love, leaves her to pursue his career abroad; left alone, she marries an ordinary man who is also deeply in love with her. After a couple of years, the composer returns for summer holidays and asks her to join him in the big city; her husband loves her so much that, upon sensing her unhappiness in marriage, he gives her the freedom to leave him for the composer. This gesture of unconditional devotion wins her over: she rediscovers her love for her husband and stays with him, painfully learning that he is the stronger of the two. The trick, of course, is that the very freedom of choice her husband gives her makes the choice a forced one, putting her under unbearable ethical pressure: while it is easy to leave a violently jealous husband, it is much more difficult to leave the husband who gives you the freedom to leave him: this freedom involves the absolute coercion to freely make the right choice. The husband is thus strictly equivalent to Octavia in Opfergang: the angelic being of unconditional devotion whose acceptance of his/her partner’s love for another wins him/her back. When, after long years, her husband dies, her great love, now a worldrenowned composer, returns to her town for a concert: even now, she rejects his offer. Although she continues to love him, she remains faithful to her dead husband. The parallel with the literary tradition of the ethical gesture of renunciation that persists even when the obstacle is no longer there (from Princesse de Clèves to The Portrait Of a Lady) cannot but strike the eye: to put it in somewhat ironic terms, the heroine of Immensee is a kind of “portrait of a Nazi Lady.” The falsity of this fantasy can be discerned by a more detailed analysis of the scene of Aels’s death in Opfergang: what, exactly, is “fantasy” and what is the (diegetic) “reality” in it? At one level, of course, Albrecht’s appearance to the dying Aels is her hallucination. It has to happen for a reason that is more paradoxical than it may appear: so that she can die. Without the caring but sobering message that Albrecht really loves his wife, Aels would have been condemned to live forever as a kind of contemporary Wagnerian hero unable to find release in death; in a paradigmatic feminine fantasy, the awareness that her dis-

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appearance will render possible the constitution of a Perfect Couple, she gracefully withdraws from life, erasing herself from the picture. At a different level, however, one should simultaneously claim that this entire shot (i.e., Aels and Albrecht), is Albrecht’s hallucination, so that we already pass from (diegetic) reality to hallucination when we pass from Albrecht in his hospital bed to Aels in her bed: “Aels in her bed hallucinating Albrecht” is in its entirety Albrecht’s own hallucination, enabling him to rescue his marriage by fantasizing Aels’s forgiving withdrawal from his life after he tells her the bitter truth. The two fantasies are thus interwoven in a kind of spatial warp, and this impossible fantasy of the double sacrifice provides the only solution to the male problem of being divided between a loving wife and a loving mistress: it provides the formula for getting out of the deadlock without betraying anyone. Endorsing a Lie

The ultimate lesson of this intricate staging is that the bitter truth (marriage will survive, Aels has to accept her death) can only be formulated in the guise of a hallucination within a hallucination. And here enters the fact that Veit Harlan was the Nazi director, author of the two key propaganda classics, The Jew Süss (940) and Kolberg (945). Does the same formal feature associated with Opfergang not hold also for Nazi ideology? In which the truth can appear only as the hallucination within the hallucination, as the way the Nazi subject hallucinates the Jews hallucinating their anti-German plot? No wonder that Harlan’s prewar “apolitical” masterpiece, Die verwehten Spuren (938), the variation on the “lady who vanishes” motif, also focuses on the ambiguous status of hallucination. What makes Harlan’s film so interesting is its difference from the standard “lady vanishes” story, which also served as a model for Hitchcock’s Lady Vanishes (from 939) as well as for Cornell Woolrich’s The Phantom Lady (filmed by Robert Siodmak in 942). Interestingly, all of them were made in the same period, and the model for all of them is an event that allegedly occurred during the Paris world exhibition in 867, when a Canadian mother and daughter visited Paris. Feeling tired, the mother went to the hotel room, while the daughter stayed out. When she returned to the hotel, not only had

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her mother disappeared but everyone denied her existence: what had been the mother’s room was now an empty room in which workers were repairing the walls. The hotel personnel remembered only the daughter; the ship and hotel registers showed only her name. After a desperate search, authorities disclosed the truth to the daughter: the mother had died of plague, and, in order to avoid mass panic, they had to deny her existence. While in all other versions (including the original story itself), our – the spectator’s or reader’s – perspective is limited to that of the young girl, Harlan’s version strangely opts for disclosing the secret of the mother’s disappearance (plague) immediately, so that the spectator knows the truth all the time and there is no enigma: the question is only when and how the daughter will learn the truth. Why did he do it? Perhaps, in order to accentuate the obvious Oedipal background of the story: the imposition of the paternal Law erases from the picture the obscene, sick, excessive mother, it cuts the daughter’s link with her, her “passionate attachment” to her, and thus enables her to enter the “normal” heterosexual relationship. After the mother, this Mozartean “Queen of the Night,” returns to her hotel, the daughter goes out and engages in some heavily charged flirting with Dr Moreau, whom they met earlier at a street parade. Then, in one of the film’s most effective scenes, the shots of the couple-to-be making a date across the hotel balcony and then going to a wild party on the crowded street interchange with shots of the dying mother, her distorted face full of sweat, desperately shouting her daughter’s name (“Serafine!”). It is as though access to the male partner is to be paid for by the mother’s death. And, effectively, when Serafine accepts the doctor’s invitation to go out with him, we cut to the mother’s cry of “Serafine!” as though she were admonishing her daughter for her transgression, for abandoning her. The second difference between Harlan’s film and the others concerns the ending. When Serafine learns the truth, the prefect of the Paris police asks her to make the ultimate citizen’s sacrifice: since rumours about her mother have already started to circulate, he implores her to sign the document confirming the lie, stating freely that she came to Paris alone, without her mother. After she does this, she and Dr Moreau stay alone in the hospital room, confessing their love to each other now that the mother has been officially erased from the picture. (This exces-

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sive sticking to the lie for the benefit of society points towards Harlan’s authoritarian Nazi credentials.) The path is thus clear: in order to be fully integrated into the symbolic space of mature relations, the girl has to endorse publicly the lie upon which the social order is based, erasing the maternal threat from the picture. The film is almost subversive in its admission of how public order has to rest upon a lie. Therein resides the link and, at the same time, the difference between the Nazi cinema universe and Hollywood: the former stages the fundamental fantasy that sustains the existing ideologico-political order much more directly than does the latter. However, this very radicality produces an almost subversive effect: the cracks in the ideological edifice are rendered much more visible in Nazi cinema than they are in Hollywood cinema. And this censorship of its own underlying fantasy remains fully operative even in today’s Hollywood. Censorship Today

In today’s global multicultural establishment, curators are like artistic cannibals, cutting off, preparing, and consuming the flesh of the artists’ work. It thus seems quite appropriate that, in Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (200), Hannibal Lecter is now a curator in Florence. Unfortunately, Hannibal is one of the leading contenders for the worst film of the year. After seeing it, one can only ask wistfully about the whereabouts of the notorious Hollywood kulturindustrie with its flawless rules regarding the emotional manipulation of the viewer. With regard to the film’s climactic scene (in which Hannibal opens up the skull of his enemy, the drugged fbi agent, cuts out a piece of his brain, toasts it with truffles, and offers a bite to the unfortunate agent himself), one is tempted to surmise that, perhaps, the authors of the film were submitted to such a procedure by the real Hannibal, who cut from their brains the part that regulates artistic creativity. The only mildly interesting figure in the film is the Italian inspector, Giancarlo Giannini, who tries to track down Hannibal. He is a strange but moving personification of a tired, resigned European decadence. It is, nonetheless, precisely the utter failure of the film that solicits us to ask two more general questions concerning censorship in cinema. In the good old times of the Hayes Code censorship, the proverbial

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Hollywood procedure was to change the sad ending of the literary or dramatic source of the film into the obligatory upbeat happy ending. With Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, the circle is in a way closed: it is Thomas Harris’s novel, Hannibal, that ends with Hannibal Lecter and the fbi agent Clarice Sterling living together as a couple in Buenos Aires, while the film censored this ending, opting for a more acceptable one. When Ridley Scott agreed to direct Hannibal, he immediately approached Harris: “The ending was a very touchy question, so the first thing I did was call Tom Harris. I said I didn’t quite believe it. Suddenly it was this quantum leap from this character I thought was incorruptible and unchangeable. It couldn’t be. Those qualities were the thing that made her the most fascinating to Hannibal. If she’d have said yes to him, he’d have killed her” (quoted in “The Passions of Julianne Moore,” Vanity Fair, March 200). What, then, is so inadmissible in this “most bizarre happy ending in the history of popular fiction”? Is it really just psychology, just the fact that “this resolution is completely out of character for Clarice”? The correct answer is rather the opposite one: in Hannibal, we are served a direct realization of what Freud called the “fundamental fantasy”: the subject’s innermost scene of desire, which cannot be directly admitted. Of course Hannibal is an object of intense libidinal investment, of a true passionate attachment. In The Silence of the Lambs, we (and, in the couple of Hannibal and Clarice, Clarice stands for this “we,” the common spectator, the point of identification) love him, he is an absolute charmer. Hannibal fails precisely because, at the novel’s end, it directly realizes this fantasy, which must remain implicit. The result is thus “psychologically unconvincing” not because it is a fake but because it gets too close to our fantasmatic kernel. For a girl to be devoured by the charming-devilish paternal figure, is this not the ultimate happy ending? The mother of all happy endings, as they would have put it in Iraq? In a closer analysis, it would also be interesting to follow the transformations of the Hannibal figure in the three novels and films. In The Red Dragon (98), the first Hannibal Lecter novel (and Michael Mann’s Manhunter [986], the first and still the best Hannibal film), Hannibal is a pure asubjective monster, a machine with which no empathy is possible. The big shift then occurs with The Silence of the Lambs, the novel

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and, especially, the film: Anthony Hopkins’ much celebrated (and definitely overrated) performance ultimately humanizes Hannibal, transforming the cold, apathetic killing machine into a charming genius of Evil. Consequently, the relationship between Hannibal and Clarice in Lambs is changed into that of an intense interpersonal exchange: Hannibal helps her (in catching the serial killer “Buffalo Bill”), and what he wants in return is for her to tell him her innermost traumatic fantasies (to which the title “silence of the lambs” refers). How not to recall here Jacques Lacan’s ironic allusion to Heidegger, when he defines what the analyst does to his patient: “Mange ton Dasein!” “Eat your beingthere!” In Lambs, Lecter is thus cannibalistic not only in his relationship to his victims but also – and perhaps even more so – in his relationship to Clarice: instead of eating her flesh, he “eats her Dasein,” savouring the very fantasmatic kernel of her being, her innermost fundamental fantasies. The quid pro quo proposed by Hannibal to Clarice is, therefore: “I’ll help you if you let me eat your Dasein.” Finally, in Hannibal, we pass from the exchange of fantasies to the direct realization of the fantasy itself – the aspect censored in the film, in which the initial emotional link is inverted. It is not Clarice who is fatally attracted to Hannibal, it is Hannibal himself who “stretches his hand back,” asserting his love for Clarice by cutting off his palm. (At the film’s very end, when we already hear the police sirens approaching the house, Clarice handcuffs Hannibal to herself to prevent his escape; instead of cutting her palm off in order to be able to run away, he cuts off his own, giving her the proverbial pound of flesh as the ultimate proof of love.) There is, however, another aspect of censorship that is fully asserted in Hannibal. Let us turn briefly to a totally different film, Stalker (979): if this film is Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece, this is above all because of the direct physical impact of its texture. The landscape of the Zone is a postindustrial wasteland with wild vegetation growing over abandoned factories, concrete tunnels, and railroads full of stale water and wild overgrowth in which wander stray cats and dogs. Nature and industrial civilization are here again overlapping, but this time through a common decay: civilization in decay is in the process of again being reclaimed, not by idealized harmonious Nature, but by nature in decomposition. The ultimate Tarkovskian landscape is that of

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a river or pool close to some forest, full of the debris of human artifice (old concrete blocks or pieces of rotten metal). The actors’ faces themselves, especially Stalker’s, are unique in their blend of ordinary ruggedness, small wounds, dark or white spots, and other signs of decay, as though they had all been exposed to some poisonous chemical or radioactive substance as well as themselves irradiating a fundamental naive goodness and trust. Although censorship in the ussr was no less stringent than censorship under the infamous Hayes Code, it nonetheless allowed a movie so bleak in its visual material that it would never have passed the latter’s test. Recall, as an example of Hollywood material censorship, Bette Davis’s representation of a woman dying from cancer in Dark Victory (939): upper-middle class surroundings, painless death. The process is deprived of its material inertia and transubstantiated into an ethereal reality free of bad smells and tastes. It was the same with slums – recall Goldwyn’s famous quip when a reviewer complained that the slums in one of his films looked too nice, without any real dirt: “They better look nice, since they cost us so much!” The Hayes Office censorship was extremely sensitive as to this point: when slums were depicted, it explicitly demanded that the set be constructed so that it did not evoke real dirt and bad smells. Thus, at the most elementary level of the sensuous materiality of the real, censorship in Hollywood much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union. And, in spite of all its physical horror and disgust, this dimension of the material inertia is also thoroughly censored in Hannibal, which takes place in prototypical postcard environs, be it the centre of Florence or the suburbs of Washington: Hannibal may be eating the brain, but this brain really does not smell. Therein resides the ultimate lesson of this failed film: that, in spite of the opposite misleading impressions, Hollywood censorship is as well and as alive as ever!

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part four Para-Siting Visuality

Introduction

In “One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity” (2004), an examination of site-specific art and artistic representations of the role of place in identity formation, art historian Miwon Kwon proposed a major rereading of site-specificity by emphasizing the double task of de-essentializing site and recognizing the importance of a “network of unanchored flows” in which the attachment of the self to place would become irrelevant: Despite the proliferation of discursive sites and “fictional” selves, the phantom of a site as an actual place remains, and our psychic, habitual attachments to places regularly return as they continue to inform our sense of identity. And this persistent, perhaps secret, adherence to the actuality of places (in memory, in longing) is not necessarily a lack of theoretical sophistication but a means for survival ... The advocacy of the continuous mobilization of self- and place-identities as ... polymorphous “critical” plays on fixed generalities and stereotypes, in the end may be a delusional alibi for short attention spans, re-enforcing the ideology of the new – a temporary antidote for the anxiety of boredom ... [T]he paradigm of nomadic selves and sites may be a glamorization of the trickster ethos that is in fact a reprisal of the ideology of “freedom of choice” – the choice to forget, the

choice to reinvent ... the choice to belong anywhere, everywhere, and nowhere. This choice, of course, does not belong to everyone equally.¹ Kwon’s is a critical reminder of the socioeconomic constraints that shape the self, without which there would indeed be no self at all, and an acknowledgment of how much, despite the desire for mobilization, the desire and need for spatial stability persist in contemporary life. Part 4 addresses the visualities that come about in art practices occupied by what should be called precarious place-identities, occurring in the tension between flow and locality, movement and finiteness, detachment and attachment. Marie Fraser’s chapter on Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Alien Staff (992– 94), which discusses the performance’s strategy of double presence – the co-presence of the physical body and the represented body – to explain how the work (the encounter, in an urban space, of a spectator and a foreigner holding a pilgrim stick headed by a small video monitor transmitting the foreigner’s electronic portrait) succeeds in breaking with stereotypical media representations of the “other.” It is the corporeal presence of the performer – namely, his or her witnessing voice (textured with silences and hesitations) – that effectively complicates the univocal deployment of the visual image. Precariousness is precisely there in the voice’s doing and undoing of the accuracy of the image, in the midst of a public space, by which the identity it conveys “appears at the same time as it erases itself.” It is the aesthetic strategy by which the viewer is asked to reflect upon another form of precariousness: the lack of place for the wandering exiled. Alice Ming Wai Jim’s examination of a video work by Hong Kong artist Mathias Woo brings us again to the aesthetic strategy of voice articulated in relation to place, one best conceptualized by the environmental psychological concept of place-identity. Here, however, the foreigner is the artist himself, for whom the city has become an unknown place. He is not sharing a public space with the viewer (we are dealing here with represented places) but still sets into play a double mediation between screen and language. Woo’s A Very Good City (998) is but one remarkable example of video self-portraits from Hong Kong preoccupied with the accelerated development of the city before and after the

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handover of the former British colony to China in 997. Woo’s work, argues Jim, must be seen as an attempt to provide a sense of belonging, which, however, cannot be reduced to a single place-identity. As the visual transmission shows him wandering in the city, the global city par excellence, a city of mobile subjectivities and increased tourism, the image is increasingly countered by the trilingual layering of voices speaking in different local languages, which convey a specificity to Hong Kong culture. Yet, this locality is not singular. As in Wodiczko’s Alien Staff, precariousness is precisely a means to disrupt any pure optical apprehension of the work.

Notes  Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 56–7.

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9 Media Image, Public Space, and the Body: Around Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Alien Staff * m arie fr a ser Translated from the French by Timothy Barnard

Our childhood anthologies used to contain the fable of the old man who, on his deathbed, fooled his sons into believing that there was treasure buried in the vineyard. They would only have to dig. They dug, but found no treasure. When autumn came, however, the vineyard bore fruit like no other in the whole land. They then perceived that their father had passed on a valuable piece of experience: the blessing lies in hard work and not in gold. Walter Benjamin¹

In an incisive and rarely quoted article, Walter Benjamin recounts this legendary story, an ancient tale explaining how to become rich, to introduce his thesis that modernity brought about a loss of experience. As it is described in this brief excerpt, experience assumes a tradition that is shared and taken up in the spoken word passed on from generation to generation. With modernity, Benjamin relates, the knowledge this old man wants to leave to his children before his death is radically transformed by the use of technology. The transmission of knowledge no longer resides in the transmission of experience or the sharing of a tradition found in oral narratives, tales, fables, or legends from a distant past. Technology has taken over from this form of transmission, but in so doing it has “impoverished” experience. If we were to take this idea a step further, making it skip ahead in history, we might conclude that today the media, in Western society at least, occupy and carry out the function of transmitting the knowledge that gave stories told aloud their value, meaning, and authority.

My goal here is not to expand on Benjamin’s concept of the decline, or rather the “poverty,” of experience, which coincides with the fragmentation of narrative (as several passages in his article quite strikingly demonstrate) but, rather, to discuss some of the questions raised by the transformation of our relation to the image and to reality, which Benjamin’s text also suggests. Alien Staff, by the Polish-born artist Krzysztof Wodiczko (b. 943), enables us to examine the modern revelation of the image and the media in order to discuss this transformation from the point of view of contemporary communications technologies. Alien Staff, the basis of several performances in the streets of various cities in Europe and the United States, enables us to critically re-evaluate the way media images operate in light of the concepts of representation and identity as reformulated through the alien’s experience. This re-evaluation, carried out in the field of media representation, is based on the presence of the body manipulating the staff in public space. By confronting media images with the direct reality of the alien carrying the staff, the inability of the image and technology to absorb and encompass the body reveals their internal contradictions. When we think of representing foreigners in order to express their experiences and representations, this inability on the part of the image has political implications that have an impact on the question of identity. Between 992 and 994, Krzysztof Wodiczko made a series of instruments designed to give voice to immigrants. Six prototypes of his Alien Staff exist. First tested in Barcelona in 992, it was later used in New York, Paris, Marseille, Lyon, and Stockholm. The staff has the appearance of a sophisticated piece of technology. Equipped with a mini video monitor and loudspeakers, it was designed to gather, record, and transmit the memory of the persons using it: to collect the scattered and distant past they carry with them as they hold the object. The alien’s comments are recorded and, once he or she is in the city, transmitted on the object’s screen. In the cylinder that, since the initial experiments in Barcelona, forms the central section of the instrument, documents and relics belonging to its user are stored, constituting, in a sense, their memory: immigration papers, photographs, and various other objects. Located at eye level, the very small screen gives the impression of an unfinished image, in which the face spills well beyond the frame. You have to get close to grasp the image on the screen and to understand its

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Fig. 9.1

Krzysztof Wodiczko,

Alien Staff, early model (on the left) and two other models, 1992. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York.

relation to the user. This need to approach the object tends metaphorically to reduce the distance between people in the city, which is the same distance that separates us from immigrants. People are drawn to the staff’s unusual appearance: its symbolic or even archaic form reminds us of the staff of the pilgrim or even the prophet and other walkers, nomads, and migrants of legend. With all its symbolism and lyricism, this analogy with the alien is interesting in how it brings out the idea that a prophet crosses more than just borders: he also travels through identities and reveals the truths hidden within them. In both this project and the earlier series of vehicles that Wodiczko created for homeless people, we can see the traces of a technological Utopia. The function of the staff, Wodiczko explains, is to enable aliens to enter public space even if this space is that of a community con-

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Fig. 9.2

Krzysztof Wodiczko,

Alien Staff, drawing, 1992. Courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York.

demned to live in the heart of the city without having a place within it or the status of citizen, with all its political, economic, and legal implications. Using technology for media purposes should enable this migrant community to enter both the public sphere and the space of communications, representation, and legitimation. But the question here is not one of justifying technology; on the contrary, Wodiczko uses it like many other contemporary artists, as a Utopia that will expose tensions and develop like a paradox.² The Paradox of Technology

While Krzysztof Wodiczko seeks to exploit the potential and effects of communication as a way of giving voice to aliens, he also opposes the

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Fig. 9.3

Krzysztof Wodiczko, Alien Staff, Barcelona, Spain, June 1992. Courtesy of Galerie

Lelong, New York.

goals and impact of technology and media on the body, identity, and memory. The anachronistic aspect of the staff – in which, in Benjamin’s terms, the ancient and the new meet and the metaphorical figure of the prophet enters into contradiction with the space of his representation – buttresses this short-circuiting of technology. Wodiczko extends this paradox even further when he states that his use of technology aims to give greater credibility to aliens and to their history as exiles. It is as though we in the West today needed to create media images of the body in order to make it more real and credible than reality.³ It is as though the public space of communication had become, with modernity, communication itself. The use of the Alien Staff resists the effects of such a Utopia, however, because, by giving the real body access to public space – understood here as the realm of speech, social and political representation, and identity formation – the object itself largely surpasses the boundaries of media space.

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By serving as a relay and medium for the body, Alien Staff emphasizes the transition to modern communication technologies, whose seeds Walter Benjamin had recognized in his article “Experience and Poverty.” The body reveals itself on a screen. Technology takes up memory and identity but without being able to do so completely, entirely, as the use of the staff reveals. The image is always out of kilter with the living presence of the alien in real space and time. This lack of synchronization between the body and its representation is an indication of the inadequacy of the image with regard to expressing the alien’s experience. On both the spatial and temporal levels, it reveals the limits to the media’s recreation of reality, identity, and memory. The staff thus encourages us to be sensitive to distance as much as to nearness, to dissimilarities as much as to resemblance. Several commentators have remarked that it takes some time to recognize the image and to link it to the person carrying the staff. Nor does the depiction of the body, literally squeezed into the frame, operate completely within the paradigm of communication: we see only a part of the face, not the face in its entirety. More than a duplication or a representation, this incorrect and faulty relation between the body and the image calls to mind the figure of the double, which employs both resemblance and dissimilarity. As an alternative to the frame and space of representation, founded, as they have been in the history of mimesis, upon unified concepts of equivalence between image and identity, Homi K. Bhabha, in The Location of Culture, proposes a strategy of the double: Each time the encounter with identity occurs at the point at which something exceeds the frame of the image, it eludes the eye, evacuates the self as site of identity and autonomy and – most important – leaves a resistant trace, a stain of the subject, a sign of resistance ... In place of the symbolic consciousness that gives the sign of identity its integrity and unity, its depth, we are faced with a dimension of doubling; a spatialization of the subject ... The figure of the double ... cannot be contained within the analogical sign of resemblance.⁴ The link Bhabha makes with the theory of mimesis contests both the unity and the fixity of the image and identity. With Alien Staff, the dual

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presence of the real body and the body on the screen leads us onto the complex and shifting ground of the identity of the exile. It operates on two levels simultaneously: the question of identity arises the moment the presence of the body in real space calls into question the frame and space of the representation. The “doubling” Bhabha speaks of as a sign of resistance makes it possible to propose a rapprochement with a critical and crucial position whenever we pose the question of identity: in a media culture, these spaces are seen as linked in a way that reinforces the credibility of the image at the expense of the spoken word. Here, the presence of the alien hinders the “integrity” and “unity” of the image. Rather than giving us a unified and complete representation, the dual presence disturbs the mimetic and referential nature of the recorded image. While the use of the staff reveals the fragmentary nature of its media, it does so to counter the effects of communication in order to avoid, precisely, constructing standardized social, cultural, racial, or even sexual representations. We are thus faced with two realities, or, rather, with two levels of reality, which collide and conflict: a closed reality (the confinement of the body in the image because, by definition, the medium used creates a closed world) and an open reality (the concrete presence of the alien and his or her encounter with other people in public spaces and with whom he or she can, once again, speak). Alien Staff brings out the fact that these two spaces, the image and the body, are at once separated and contiguous: in short, they are twofold. By locating the alien in the interval between them, it makes it possible to show that linking these two spaces creates preconceived, standardized, and ideological representations. The particular way the image is projected onto a small screen also involves a use of the medium that does not abolish or appropriate distance. By recording the image and voice of the immigrant, Wodiczko finds himself accentuating this disjunction and benefiting from the critical and subversive function of such a distance. By employing the image and the body in contiguous but non-analogous and non-analogue spaces, the staff short-circuits not media images themselves (unless it brings media images back to the level of mediation without media effects, which would be an interesting hypothesis) so much as the fact that media images have more truth value than experience. Television, it would appear, is somehow more credible than concrete experience.

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The presence of the staff-carrying alien in real space and time makes clear and denounces the inability of media images to depict the experience of the exile and his or her memory. Following Bhabha, we might say that, if identity eludes the image because its presence there is always disjointed, then the image, in return, fails to convey this identity. In this sense, it may be worthwhile to point out that, initially, Wodiczko did not plan on the staff being used to open up a space of encounter and dialogue between people in public space. But it is this opening that enables us to see how the gap between the image and identity acts not only in terms of space, as Bhabha proposes, but also in terms of time. The already-recorded stories are not only transmitted through the loudspeakers, they are also commented on and transformed live, in real time, as the encounters and discussions progress. Wodiczko has said that he preferred to communicate solely by means of the transmission of recorded sounds and images. His staff was conceived of as an instrument for communication within a media logic; by limiting speech, he hoped to reveal how the media alienated immigrants.⁵ After his initial experiments, however, this changed. In response to repeated requests from those using the staff, Wodiczko modified the initial project and staff. The staff and, most of all, its use in busy public places had in a sense resisted this alienation by establishing a space of encounter and exchange in which the stories were not only transmitted by images but also recounted live and, thereby, transmitted once again by word of mouth. The staff thus left the space of information and opened a space of speech through dialogue and discussion. Shock, or the Betrayal of the Medium

Wodiczko’s staff thus became an “interface” between the person carrying it and the people going about their business in the city. It created a setting for communication, but it must be understood that this communication, like the staff itself, invites us to engage in it not only in the modern sense of information but also in the older sense of an oral tradition. This is because the staff creates a place for exchanges based on speaking in real space, as we have just seen. Thanks to the staff’s strange and archaic aspect, connections are made between strangers in ordinarily anonymous urban spaces. From the outset, the tight fram-

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ing of the bearer’s face (which is already anxious to exit the frame), the small size of the screen, and the sound muffled by the surrounding urban environment impose a connection. One has to get close to the screen in order to recognize the face as that of the person carrying the staff and to hear his or her voice. The staff functions as a relay but also tends to stay in the background. The image loses its force as a medium, and the staff finds itself re-activating certain forms of orality whose loss with the advent of modernity in the West was taken up by Benjamin in “Experience and Poverty” and again in his later text on Nikolai Leskov. “One meets fewer and fewer people,” Benjamin writes in both essays, “who know how to tell a tale properly.”⁶ It is not only because of its shape that the staff has often been compared to that of the prophet of legend but also because it contains so many scattered and distant stories and histories, transported and transmitted around the world, as though it were the bearer of a message. On the other hand, this connection with oral tradition and the figure of the messenger is not carried out on the common ground of ancient stories or myths. The immigrant is not the bearer of a message of truth or a promise of a better future, like a prophet or the father in the fable Benjamin discusses in “Experience and Poverty” but, rather, of his or her own past, which bears no symbolic charge. We are thus faced with the most advanced technology of the moment, to use Adorno’s expression, encountering the archaic staff being carried by an immigrant through the city and cities. This metaphorical reference to the messianic prophet is particularly interesting when viewed alongside the modern conception of communication, which Benjamin discusses at several points in his essay on the storyteller.⁷ The live presence of the body, the gesture of carrying an object, and the narrative form of the bearer’s speech re-activate ancient modes of narration and mediation in a manner opposite to that of what we have come to understand as information. To tell people about yourself is, Benjamin reminds us, a form of engagement with others because the gestures needed to do so necessarily involve witnesses and listeners. Despite the utopian and even liberatory aspect of the technology at the root of Wodiczko’s project, his staff was used in the public domain with the intention of posing obstacles to its media. The fact that it is aliens who appropriate communications technologies in order to tell

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their stories and depict themselves also calls into question the presumption that the media represent the truth – the presumption of their “naturalness,” to adopt Roland Barthes’ term.⁸ Such resistance opens up a political reading that makes it possible, on the one hand, to jam or even call into question the effects of communication by turning them back on themselves and, on the other, to inquire about modern Western society’s relationship with the image. It is even more fascinating to examine this interference now that it is upsetting the adage “the medium is the message.”⁹ This modern paradigm, in which reality is to be found in the image and in which the growth in media images of reality alters our relationship to the world and experience, was also acknowledged by Benjamin in his two famous texts on photography and the cinema, at a time when the work of art was entering the age of its technological reproducibility.¹⁰ The alien’s story, or the mere ability to tell it, fragment and shortcircuit its media – which takes their effectiveness and power from the fact that they are unified and give a complete, real, and instantaneous image of the world. Here, identity appears at the same time as it withdraws. On the one hand, the “content,” marked by the suffering and fear recounted by the exiled alien,¹¹ is so strong that we are forced to ask ourselves if Wodiczko’s technology can fully absorb it. The image seems incomplete, fragmentary, and poses the need for the spoken word and a living presence in order to express such an experience. On the other hand, the image overflows the frame and the moment of perception; it has a materiality that reintroduces duration: the slowness of the individual’s speech, the hesitations in her voice, the work of memory restrained by what has been forgotten. The stories are also constantly transformed and commented on by the alien in real time; in a sense, her voice is superimposed on the pre-recorded sound track. As Benjamin explains in his article on the storyteller, orality always implies the transformation and accumulation of layers of stories, in opposition to information’s uniform and unequivocal discourse and its instantaneous time. If we were to reverse the terms of this proposition, however, we might say that presence also depends on media images, or even that the images and the stories told by the alien directly are already an initial form of

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this mediation. The alien’s dual presence would explain this fragmentation: the body’s real presence disarms the media without destroying it, without obliterating it, which is the same as saying that it disarms the information paradigm without, however, destroying mediation. In its contiguous relationship with the real body, the media image reveals the ruin of everything upon which the credibility of representation and the paradigm of technology rest: identity, memory, authority, legitimation. In other words, it is as though it reveals the fact that the medium and, thus, the media and technology construct identity and today have the authority of the thing represented, the subject. The discontinuity between the image technology gives us and what is said by the alien directly cannot be explained merely by the gap in time; in reality, this discontinuity seeks to sap the credibility, if not the authority, of technology in a way that enables the alien to reappropriate his or her image and, simultaneously, to take her/his place in the media and public spaces. This place is both that of the space of representation and that of speech. The thwarting of the modern paradigm of information by mediation is itself at the source of the technological paradigm discussed above. However, if we attempt to explain this paradox without completely resolving it, while at the same time following Benjamin’s thesis, we could say that technology returns here to what it had brushed off a century or so ago: the space of the voice, orality. Beyond a technological Utopia that leads us straight to this paradox, therefore, Krzysztof Wodiczko poses with this work a fine problem by enabling a form of “counter-society” to represent itself in the public domain. He uses media images to shake off the principles of modern communication and to allow the alien to recount and comment on his or her own story directly. The position of the alien, deprived of identity in public space, is that, precisely, of a double loss – of a relationship with his or her country and of contact with other individuals. The alien is thus perceived and shaped in contrast to the citizen, a problem with which Alien Staff deals in depth. The staff enables its bearer to locate him or herself in public space, where identities and social and legal inclusion are formed and constructed, and where the democratic project was born. In other words, it enables the alien to confront these two spaces – the public space and media space – by situating them in

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relation to each other.¹² The tension between the image and the real body makes it possible to reconsider them from the alien’s perspective, as fragmented and heterogeneous spaces, no longer fixed and unified, and in which the alien is seen as an intruder, caught in the middle of something without being able to take part in it. The staff restores not only the alien’s right to speak but also gives him or her access to the public communications sphere. From another point of view, this project is also the sign of ambivalence. We don’t know where this public communications space is located, as though it, too, were caught up in the interstices between image and body. We might think that the concept of media space is problematic today precisely because it is identical to public space.¹³ It is not by chance that Benjamin, in his remarks on the loss of the storyteller’s narrative tradition, saw in it the end of the community. By eluding and resisting the operations of the image, the presence of the body in Wodiczko’s project demonstrates that media space is fragmentary and ideologically constructed, that it is consummated in an atemporal and atopical manner, and that it is also a form of control and isolation. Communication and telecommunications give the illusion of an instantaneous space and time: an unreal, un-present time in which experience and our concrete connection with the world are done away with. The bearer of the staff reverses these effects, so to speak, because the media image becomes something within a concrete experience, an experience that the image alone cannot express. Alien Staff thereby reinscribes an intersubjective process within the very heart of the city. By contrasting media space and real space, the image and the body, Krzysztof Wodiczko reminds us that public space is the basis of communication and that, unlike media space, it rests on the sharing of speech and experience, from one individual to another. If we apply this paradigm of exchange to the concept of community, something that does not necessarily follow either in tradition or in modern thought, as the philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy have demonstrated,¹⁴ the idea of a migrant and ephemeral community would be based on the relations between individuals and the singularity of their voices rather than on the sharing of a speech held in common. It would function as an opening rather than as part of the process of being assimilated into a shared, closed, and unified world.

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Notes

* This chapter was written in the course of doctoral studies funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (sshrc ) and the Fonds pour la formation de chercheurs et l’aide à la recherche (fcar ).  Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” (933), in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 928–933, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 999), 73. 2 Traces of this Utopia can be found in Wodiczko’s writings and comments. See his remarks in Instruments, Projeccions, Vehicles (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 992), 297–3. The first prototype in Barcelona is discussed in Art public, art critique: Textes, propos et documents (Paris: École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 995), 204–6; and the development of the other models is discussed in Christiane Paul, “The Prophet’s Prosthesis: An Interview with Krzysztof Wodiczko,” Sculpture 8, 4 (999): 30–7. It should be emphasized that the project’s initial goal was not to critique media images of the body and experience. On the contrary, the appropriation of technology by aliens was seen as ideological and liberating, enabling them to speak in the public sphere, from which they are politically and legally excluded. Krzysztof Wodiczko conceived of Alien Staff as a way of giving immigrants access to a sophisticated technology in order to appropriate the space of communication, not to reveal the limitations and internal contradictions of this space, as was the case when it was used. The only space in which Wodiczko seems prepared to question media images is in his desire to show the media’s role in alienation. When the staff was first tried out in Barcelona, the voice of the person carrying it was heard only in the form of pre-recorded comments. Wodiczko thus wanted to show that the media transmit preconceived and standardized images of immigrants. The people using the staff wanted to free themselves from this constraint and demanded that Wodiczko modify his original project to enable them to enter into discussions with people in public space and real time. 3 Users of Alien Staff were critical of this view of information technology and Wodiczko modified his initial project as a result. Comments by users after their experience showed to what extent media images are insufficient for revealing the complexity of their experience and stories of exile. Many commentators on Wodiczko’s work have failed to see this technological paradox, discussing the project only from the perspective of his own remarks.

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4 Homi K. Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Postcolonial Prerogative,” in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 994), 49–50 (emphasis in original). 5 Wishing to interact with people in public space in order to describe their relics, stories, and images directly, the people who carried the staff transformed the project in order to create exchanges between individuals, thus making it coincide with a political definition of public space and the community. It is as though the initial project proved to be alienating for its users because, following the early experiments in Barcelona, the five other models were designed in closer collaboration with users. 6 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 935–938, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 43. Apart from this passage, which recurs twice (“The Storyteller,” 5–6; “Experience and Poverty,” 73), and expresses this loss of a heritage transmitted by word of mouth down through the generations, there are in these two texts, which were published three years apart, numerous similarities that a lack of space prevents me from exploring here. The most striking is undoubtedly the almost identical thesis, formulated in the initial pages of each essay, that becomes central to the discussion of fragmented stories in “The Storyteller” in particular. According to this thesis, the loss of experience can be seen to begin with the First World War, when soldiers were unable to recount their wartime experiences. Nevertheless, despite the overlap between these two texts, Benjamin arrives at different conclusions in each of them – conclusions that may even be contradictory. 7 Ibid. See in particular sections 6 and 7, 47–8. 8 See Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 977 [964]), 32–52. 9 This was Marshall McLuhan’s famous thesis in The Medium Is the Message (New York: Random House, 967). 0 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 93–934, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, 507–30; Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (second version), in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 935–938, trans. Edmond Jephcott and Harry Zohn, 0–33.  See the very touching stories of Jadwiga Przybylak and Ambroise Wolking, Patricia Piredda, Abdelkader N’Dali, Nour-Eddine Elkhargui, Carmen Ynfante, Lili, Keya Saad, Hamed Sow, Adul So, and Marianne Tarazi

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transcribed in the “Vidéo-portraits” section of Krzysztof Wodiczko: Art public, art critique, 220–33. 2 On this topic, see Mark James Léger, “Xenology and Identity in Critical Public Art: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Immigrant Instruments,” Parachute 88 (Fall 997): 4–2. 3 In the 980s and 990s numerous studies on media culture and politics analyzed the question of television as a new public sphere. For a critical discussion of these theoretical approaches, see in particular John Corner, Critical Ideas in Television Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 999); and Peter Dahlgren, Television and the Public Sphere: Citizenship, Democracy and the Media (London/New Delhi: sage , 995). 4 See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 993); and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 99).

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10 Mediating Place-Identity: Notes on Mathias Woo’s A Very Good City* alice ming wai jim

Over the last decade, contemporary art in Hong Kong, informed by travel(ing) theory, the special administrative region’s ambiguous (post) colonial-national-global connections and its inimitable set of historical and cultural situations, has been preoccupied with the themes of mobility, transition, and location in its representations of the city. This fixation, or, rather, the urgency of its mediation in not only artistic but also cultural, economic, and political arenas is inextricably linked to an ongoing elaboration of a Hong Kong identity. But assertions of “who we are” are often intimately related to suppositions of “where we are,” an idea captured in the environmental psychological concept of placeidentity.¹ Indeed, as cultural geographers are keen to emphasize, many of the social categories of identity routinely investigated in the humanities and social sciences are intimately bound to notions of place and highly spatialized language, with words such as “mapping,” “locating,” and “situating,” now commonplace in postmodern discourse. In the case of Hong Kong, its cartographic history and spatial designations have shaped the city’s place-identity from the very beginning. Geography and its attendant spatial metaphors have been at the heart of discourses on Hong Kong throughout its colonial and modern histories and into its recent periods of transition and decolonization: “a barren rock on the periphery of the Chinese empire,” “a meeting point between East and West,” “a space of transit,” “the last democratic enclave,” “one big Chinatown.” These, added to the latest batch of spatial metaphors describing contemporary Hong Kong, from Compact City and Mall

City to Disney City and Asia’s World City, has undoubtedly made the articulation of not only place-identity but also an identity politics of place a difficult task. This chapter examines how media art in Hong Kong has contributed to the discussion on place-identity. Specifically, it considers a videographic work that complicates the interrelated notions of mobility and location, self-determination and representation, which have emerged as problematic yet central concepts in the formation of place-bound identities. Present-day meanings attributed to place-identity, abounding in local idiosyncrasies and cultural forms, are wide-ranging and complex as both everyday discourses and theoretical discussions attempt to simultaneously acknowledge the modern displacements of contemporary subjectivity and attend to its located nature. As David Harvey observes, “the elaboration of place-bound identities has become more rather than less important in a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange, movement and communication.”² Through advanced technologies, global tourism, and place marketing, processes of globalization have fashioned the valorization of mobile subjectivity and increased the proliferation of non-places, or spaces of transit, while, at the same time, leading to a renewed obsession with place. Yet these developments have fundamentally not only exacerbated problematic oppositional relationships between notions of migrancy and dwelling but have also led to the confusion or conflation of fluid models of interpretation with the movement of physical bodies.³ As Caren Kaplan puts it, we are not “all rootless, existentially adrift, and limitlessly mobile” but neither are we all “at home, fixed into neat identities, enjoying stable similarities.”⁴ These critical debates, paralleling developments in theorizations of identity that integrate notions of process, fluidity, flexibility, and performativity, have led to the reconstruction of human geographies alongside the spatial turn of cultural theory in recent years.⁵ Current formulations of place-identity stress the need to move beyond definitions of place-identity “predicated on the belief that a particular site/place exists with its identity-giving or identifying properties always and already prior to what new cultural forms might be introduced to it or emerge from it.”⁶ Further, caution is directed against an oppositional politics that either valorizes the nomadic condition and its associated non-places or celebrates the comforts of home as strate-

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gies or sites of resistance without considering the interactions between the two types of place discourses. Ultimately, discussions on placeidentity have finally started to shift from conventional understandings of place as predetermined, static, bounded, homogeneous, and autonomous to the idea that place and identity are both contested, fluid, and uncertain terrains, constituted mutually and by flows, movement, and power relations. Moreover, as Pile and Thrift point out, “subjectivity and place cannot be separated without foreclosing an understanding of the located subject and the agency and identity of place.”⁷ The situation of Hong Kong can be said to be deeply embedded within these discursive shifts. To fully grasp the context from which its recent art is mediating place-identity, however, several specificities concerning Hong Kong’s recent history and its corollary cultural condition(ing) must be considered. Inarguably, the prevailing critical narrative for Hong Kong cultural studies over the last decade has been that proposed by cultural critic Ackbar Abbas in his book Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance published in 997. According to Abbas, the twelve-and-a-half-year transition period building up to the handover of the former British colony to China in 997 gave rise to a particular “politics of disappearance” in Hong Kong. Attributing Hong Kong’s supposed lack of identity to its status as “not so much a place as a space of transit,” the author links the rapidity of Hong Kong’s onehundred-fifty-year transformation from port city to colony-in-transition to global city, to the denigration of local history and the right to self-determination and territorialization in favour of migratory models conducive to economic mobility.⁸ Caught between the tensions of a “floating” identity and the need to reconstruct something more definite under conditions of political uncertainty, the panic efforts to search for identity and reclaim the past before, during, and immediately after the handover were for many based on a fear of the imminent subjective effacement of Hong Kong. Over time, the discourse of disappearance had, it seemed, considerably undermined structures of place-identity formation for the region. In an attempt to reframe the situation, Abbas elaborates on the appearance of Hong Kong culture during this period as “posited on the imminence of its disappearance”: disappearance, in the Abbasian sense, “does not imply nonappearance, absence, or lack of presence” but

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is “more a question of misrecognition, of recognizing a thing as something else.”⁹ Taking this “pathology of presence” as a starting point, the author discusses in his book how history, (self)representation, and urban identity “dis-appear” through the overabundance of clichéd images vis-à-vis far fewer examples of Hong Kong film, architecture, and literature that are able to use “disappearance to deal with disappearance” in a way that productively leads to a problematization of the visual.¹⁰ On the postulation that images of Hong Kong tell little about the city directly, Abbas supports the production of what he calls “city-images”. These refer to indirect representations – fugitive traces of the city that seep into the imagescape and infect it – that are capable of alluding to histories and aspects of the city that would otherwise remain “out of sight.”¹¹ However, the question remains: How can we understand the negotiations between obvious references to conditions of mobile subjectivity and articulations of place that are, evidently, both “in site” and “in sight”; that is, both directly represented and recognizable in Hong Kong contemporary art? “Is there a way,” as M. Christine Boyer asks, “for us to define ourselves and the space in which we dwell when the city is increasingly referenced as a space of disappearance, a space of the future but not of the present, a space of anxiety and loss?”¹² Furthermore: does Hong Kong, so designated as a space of transit, become a revised, anthropologically dictated narrative that excels in histories about disappearance but lacks the initiative to reflect on the past to envision the future? In light of the persisting disappearance thesis, what are the implications of these lingering pre- and post-997 sensibilities for representations of the city by media artists in Hong Kong? Given the relatively substantial amount of critical writing on Hong Kong identity and urban space in the fields of cultural studies, cinema, architecture, and urban studies, particularly since the handover, the little attention given to the concept of place-identity as it relates specifically to contemporary art produced in the region is surprising. This chapter aims to contribute to this project by examining how Mathias Woo’s video, A Very Good City, exhibited a year after the handover, attempts to re-present the city from the standpoint of being aware of its “disappearance” but, at the same time, to question and break with this idea. It proposes to understand the work as carrying out a “double

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mediation,” which art historian Miwon Kwon suggests is a way of “finding a terrain between mobilization and specificity.”¹³ While Kwon’s reference to this double mediation is in the context of site-specific art practice, I extend it to also constitute a means to approach the materiality of the electronic image itself. My intention here is to explore how this double mediation may be productive as an aesthetic strategy of resistance, one that problematizes not only the discourse of disappearance as it relates to Hong Kong but also place-identity. In their use of video, respective configurations of differential mobility, and redress of the particularities of place and local specificity, works such as Woo’s oscillate between the articulation of a spatial hermeneutics that allows for a re-cognition of the city and an activation of the cityscape through the mobilization of cultural knowledges not readily accommodated by the discourse of disappearance. Experimenting with mobile senses of place, they activate a space of mediation between linguistic, imagistic, and mnemonic fields in which place-identity can be reproduced by viewers as they come into contact with the work of art. In this space, the specificity of a place – its identity, to follow geographer Doreen Massey – is “always formed by the juxtaposition and co-presence there of particular sets of social interrelations, and by the effects which that juxtaposition and co-presence produce.”¹⁴ Busing around A Very Good City to tell a story about a city is just about telling its facts. to tell a story about a city visually may just be telling its pace. to tell a story about a city is just about telling the lines in it. to tell a story about a story may just be telling lines and lines. Mathias Yan Wai Woo

In A Very Good City (998), Mathias Yan Wai Woo (b. 968) takes us on an eighty-minute video tour of Hong Kong one year after its reunification with China as a special administrative region (sar ).¹⁵ Filmed day and night, for the most part from the perspective of a front-seat passenger on public transportation, the video traces three main routes: the first is along a bus line on the Kowloon side, which the artist as

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a young boy travelled daily to commute to school; the second follows buses whose routes form a loop around the whole of Hong Kong; and the third follows the tram line that runs from one end of Hong Kong Island to the other (see fig. 0.). However, as viewers are transported visually through the congested streets of Hong Kong, its busy underground passages, and even its airspace from the window of a plane, they eventually come to the realization that there is no destination at which to arrive: they are simply in transit. This video, edited in a nonlinear fashion, may be considered as what I call a “spatial portrait,” a space of representation in which social experiences and relations are reconstructed and negotiated. Rather than tell a story about a particular place per se, the video narrates a story about an ongoing search for place-identity, which, according to urban theorist Kevin Lynch, “is closely linked to personal identity. ‘I am here’ supports ‘I am.’”¹⁶ The search for place-identity in Woo’s video begins with two questions prompted by A Theory of Good City Form, Lynch’s classic reader on urban planning: “What makes a good city? Is Hong Kong a good city?” and the rejoinder, quoting one of American architect Louis I. Kahn’s well-known aphorisms: “The city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small boy as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life.”¹⁷ As the tape unfolds, we hear a monologue narrated in Cantonese by a woman who makes the only guest appearance in the video. To classical music, the deadpan voice-over recounts the trials and tribulations of “growing up in a city like Hong Kong” from age six onwards in a series of nonchronological, playful sketches.¹⁸ The narration is accompanied by what appear as Chinese and English subtitles but which are actually separate texts in themselves since their meanings do not correspond with those expressed in the voice-over. While the English subtitles relay a slightly reworked version of T.S. Eliot’s dramatic monologue “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” – a poem about twentieth-century urban alienation – the Chinese text excerpts from the spoken narration, but not exactly and on a lengthy delay, as though trying to recapture memories from only a few minutes ago. Visually, the commutes gradually speed up to the point where the scenes become one big blur of motion. It is not until the very end that the video slows down, with the frame shifting to a

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Fig. 10.1

Stills from Mathias Yan Wai Woo, A Very Good City, video, 1998. Courtesy of the artist.

side window looking out onto scenes of container terminals along the waterfront, while the voice-over gives way to a long circular response in the biographical present to the questions posed at the beginning. The video, however, seems to actually narrate two stories, if not more. The first story is about a search for identity from the point of view “of those whose history is actually traced in the setting,” for whom the city is a crucial element in the relations of production governing their lives.¹⁹ The second, and not unrelated, is a story of disappearance from what could be designated as the tourist’s point of view. According to sociologist Lui Chi Wai, with the sar government’s 997 and subsequent policy addresses targeting tourism as a key strategy in establishing Hong Kong as “Asia’s World City” (as the promotional campaign’s tagline goes), “touristic modes of staging, theming, visualization and experiences have become central to urban life” in Hong Kong; residents “have not only had to present their living space and culture as tourism resources but they are also encouraged to see and consume them from a tourist point of view.”²⁰ Indeed, there are obvious signs that the conditioning of residents and visitors alike as tourists has surpassed the mere direction of the cultural imaginary to include the physical reorganization of the built environment. In addition to the current city-wide touristification of Hong Kong’s urban space through various campaigns, government plans to promote the city as a tourist destination since the handover include the development of a new cruise terminal in the harbour, a multipurpose stadium, a Disneyland theme park, and a new forty-hectare integrated arts, cultural, and entertainment venue on the West Kowloon waterfront.²¹ Initially, it would seem that the conflation of tourist and resident impressions – or the internalization of the “tourist gaze,” to use sociologist John Urry’s term for the organized ocular experiences in which the tourism industry specializes – is showcased rather uncritically in Woo’s video.²² Here the tourist gaze, in which the quintessential deportment is on a tour bus, is treated to the effects of fleeting surface impressions of flashy “exotic” neon signs, vehicular forms, and scenes upon scenes of endless movement and the sense of being “out of place.” But, given the video’s lack of awe-generating monuments, the banal pictures of everyday commuting, and the autobiographical insideness that only arises out of being in a place over time, is this sense of displacement

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the fulfilling cultural experience desired by the tourist and promoted by the tourism industry? Certainly the sites seen indicate a reply in the negative. With the exception of the sequences showing the super-fast pace of Hong Kong street life, there is a general lack of the obligatory “exotic” local attractions that would make site seekers feel as if they were in an entirely different place; rather, the video seems simply to exemplify how, as Michel de Certeau writes, “the moving about that the city multiplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place.”²³ For the artist, Hong Kong’s lack of a sense of place, however, has more to do with poor city planning than de Certeau’s practice of everyday life. Underlying the videographic project is a critique of the disorienting effects of the city’s urban planning, in particular, the failure of the cityscape to enable its inhabitants to develop a sense of place-identity. For Woo, there is no evidence in the architectural landscape that the “past” is an essential element of the present, hence, following Lynch, its inability to create a sense of place, familiarity, or social cohesion.²⁴ The sightseeing afforded in the video is thus not so much about pleasuring the tourist gaze as it is about the illegibility of the cityscape, which (in Lynch’s sense) denies the affectivity of sites seen or traversed and, by extension, the forming of any sense of place-belongingness, which is the necessary basis for place-identity. Lynch’s ideas on the legibility and the imageability of cities, however, first laid out in the 960s, did not fully anticipate the fascination with images that would be displayed by the present society of the spectacle. Indeed, a closer consideration of the sites of transit shown in the video would reveal that its images depict not so much a lack of places as they do people moving through a terrain of non-places: roads, highways, Hong Kong’s international airport. This representation of Hong Kong as “essentially a destination of human circulation” acknowledges the narrative of disappearance insofar as it is a space of transit in which the scenes of its inhabitants rushing to and fro constitute one of the many ersatz touristic images of sites seen/sightseeing.²⁵ As Abbas argues, Hong Kong’s hyper-legibility and instant recognition through touristic images has, in effect, made the city invisible as opposed to not legible.²⁶ The numerous commonplace scenes of non-places speak to the interchangeability of today’s global cities, many of whose features are rep-

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licated over and over, not only within the city but also across the five continents. The physical disappearance of these aspects and their connections to existing social relations and flows, brought about by the increased circulation of images across the globe and the serialization of place that compete over the city’s imagistic space, is precisely what Woo’s video laments as it travels through more desolate parts of Hong Kong, where new districts can be seen to monotonously repeat the structures of the city centre. This critique, which holds that processes of globalization are eradicating aspects of cultural diversity and local specificity, is not surprising given the artist’s vocal appeals in past years for governments to “stop destroying street life [small shops, markets] and replacing them with malls and warehouse-like structures.”²⁷ In the final minutes of the video, the tone becomes depressed and melancholic as the spoken narration bemoans the failure of Hong Kong’s cityscape to facilitate a sense of attachment: “Living in this imaging era, we don’t need words to record a city. I just took out a camera ... and recorded whatever I felt, then edited and re-arranged them. When I looked at those pictures, I felt pessimistic and sad, perhaps because seeing the scenery and places of Hong Kong I once liked disappearing and being demolished, I felt I had no power to change it.” Hence a nostalgic sense of longing for something that once was is created precisely because the video’s representational images of the city cannot fully provide a spatial portrait to resolve the question of place-identity. And yet, in the midst of competing multiple narratives (disappearance, invisible city, city as spectacle, global city, tourist city), there is an overwhelmingly personal concern to express difference alongside of longing in its search for place-identity that keeps the video from being simply a story about disappearance. For example, in spite of appearances, the frantic travelogue we are privy to constitutes movements of commuting as much as it does movements of global tourism. Evoking issues of differential mobility (fare for the tram costs less than that for the bus, which is less than taking the subway, which is of course less than air travel), this complicates the ways in which mobile subjectivity is often conferred to all in Hong Kong, with little consideration for the uneven power relations involved in the flows and movement of different social groups. However, it is the video’s disjunctive narration of the place-identity quest and its activation of the cityscape through language that most

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expands the mode of address based on longing to include place-belongingness. Providing a critical socio-linguistic dimension to the urban environment represented, a key feature of A Very Good City is its trilingualism. The video uses the three most commonly heard languages in Hong Kong: Cantonese (the dominant language in Hong Kong), English (the other “official” language of Hong Kong, a legacy of the British colonial presence and lingua franca of globalization), and Putonghua (the official language of governance in China, with which Hong Kong is now reunited). The Chinese “subtitles,” at times placed as colophons to the right or left of the screening reading vertically, are also notably in complex characters, the written form that has been retained in Hong Kong as opposed to the simplified form that has been used in China since 950. These various linguistic forms are indicative of the various layers of the cultural formation of Hong Kong and, in themselves, draw circles around the people who can communicate, in one form or another, through them. Thus, if understood as a way of mapping a terrain of place-belonging through language, the appearance of all three languages in their various forms in Woo’s video is significant with regard to the work’s search for place-identity. For instance, the video’s use of predominantly Cantonese, notably for the personal oral accounts of growing up in Hong Kong, can be taken as an assertion of a “local” identity that is independent of both China and Britain, as, so to speak, a strategy of resistance to linguistic (re)territorializations. It may even be considered a “local” articulation, albeit from a highly personal perspective, of Hong Kong history, which, until recently, has been either mostly written in English from a British colonial perspective or (particularly since the mid-990s) represented by accounts written within a nationalist framework and published in Mainland China.²⁸ While local history was deliberately ignored in formal (colonialist) education, the status of Cantonese has been compared to that of a “banned language”: though there has never been an official constraint on its usage, the language itself is not taught in Hong Kong’s educational system.²⁹ Yet, to confer an exaggerated agency upon the predominant use of Cantonese in the video would be to assume that structures of governance could not find expression in “local” languages or that Chinese-language accounts published in Hong Kong are somehow more free of subjective claims.

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Thus, to complicate the use of any one language as a sole marker of difference, the voice-over, which begins in Cantonese, is joined towards the end of the video by a male voice that speaks the same phrases in unison with the female voice but in Putonghua. Throughout, barely perceptible in the background, is a female English speaker’s recitation of the lines from “Prufrock.” The constant layering of the three languages and the use of textual sources from without might be better understood to indicate an awareness of the changing sense of the local as always already a translation. It attests not only to the undeniable impact of cross-cultural influences and exchanges and of other historical narratives co-existent with that of disappearance in the formation of identity in and of the city but it also acknowledges that Hong Kong Cantonese is itself a hybrid language, which, when spoken, frequently includes English and Putonghua words and phrases. This strains the viewer’s power of translation and underscores the connection between the (in)ability to grasp the meaning of language and one’s sense of place-belongingness at a given time. As the pedantic flow of the voice-over contrasts with the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of the subtitles, which defy any logical continuity between what is heard and what is read, it is the sights and sounds of the languages, as opposed to their possibly obscure(d) meanings, that come to modulate the video’s visual narrative. Significantly, how much the different forms of the languages are understood is not as important as how they are used to tell multiple stories about the city’s place-identity. The juxtaposition and co-presence of different languages, voices, and cadences create a multi-track rhythm that contributes to shaping the space of the streets and roads that flash by, changing the character of that space and showing that the very words we use, the language that we speak, the accent in which we speak it, and the ideas upon which we expound have an effect on the space(s) about us. Together, these aesthetic strategies put into motion an oscillation “between the use of a narratively motivated setting and the activation of the setting itself as an autonomous discourse,” which film theorist Paul Willemen has pointed out is often characteristic of the avant-garde narrative in cinematic works.³⁰ This operation enables a reading of the discourse of disappearance within the cityscape itself, which allows the

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narrative linguistic traces of memory and their, quite literal, imprints on the surface of the image to interact with the accompanying reading of history, identity, and place as pending effacement. It is in this double mediation, between screen and language, incessant movement and local articulations, that a space is provided for the viewer/artist/inhabitant to become aware of place as “formed [in part] out of the particular set of social relations which interact at a particular location” and to rethink its identity in multiple.³¹ Unlike the “gap or hysteresis between the city and its representations,” which Abbas proposes is created in the politics of disappearance, this space of double mediation moves away from a simulacral splitting of the city, emerging instead from within the relational contingencies of place-identity.³² Yet with the voice-over in Cantonese raising the question “Is Hong Kong a Good City?” and the images of incongruous built forms crisscrossed by structures of mobility signalling neither arrival nor destination, the setting/city in the video is not an easy space for either viewer or artist to inhabit. Troubled by a post-997 anxiety that is transmitted through both the imagistic and linguistic fields at play, Woo’s work reveals the predicament central to communicating the complexity of urban identities. Because of its overriding expression of longing – a longing in transition – it ultimately succeeds neither in imag(in)ing a place-identity nor in securing a sense of place-belongingness. Instead, it serves to reveal the intricate overlays of a changing sense of the local (through language, autobiographical insideness), the historical specificities of transition (decolonization, disappearance, renationalization), and current developments in the global formation (the production of non-places and tourist cities), all of which come together to constitute the conditions of the contemporary subject’s stressful relationship to place, imagined or otherwise. If disappearance is about the misrecognition of culture in Hong Kong, Woo’s work complicates the place-identity of Hong Kong by evoking different senses of it – senses that are, in themselves, as constantly mobile and changing as are the location, person, and culture to which they are attached. In the end, Woo’s A Very Good City constitutes neither a celebratory exercise of Hong Kong’s place-identity as disjunctive and incessantly mobile nor a mourning of its limits or determinations, both subjective and geographical; rather, by thinking them together, it suggests a strat-

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egy of double mediation that breaks with the paradigmatic representation of Hong Kong as either a product of mobile deterritorialization or a place enclosed in its own fetishized specificity. In the process, it also implies that mediating place-identity is as much about negotiating both imagescapes and cultural landscapes as it is about exposing the fiction of its autonomy. In its search for place-identity, the dominant perception of Hong Kong as a space of transit is exposed, and the discourse of disappearance as the only valid means of viewing the city is challenged. Underlying the different aesthetic strategies deployed is a re-evaluation of the simple “method of re-appearance,” wherein a resuscitation of place is undertaken without critically examining the terms and conditions that resulted in its disappearance in the first place.³³ Cliché city images and historical narratives of Hong Kong are problematized to prevent narrative closure as well as to maintain urban experience as an ongoing process of interacting relations rather than as something that can be categorically fixed through historicization. Woo’s work, however, not only questions these ways of imag(in)ing the city but it also attempts to rethink place-identity, particularly as a constant negotiation between the tourist’s point of view and local articulations. As such, it calls attention to the imperative of a combined mediation between differential mobilities and specificities of the local not only in light of the ramifications of hypermobility as a social condition affecting a politics of location for the contemporary subject but also in light of how these ramifications affect the specific context of Hong Kong. With the sar government’s current priming and place-marketing of Hong Kong as a tourist city, the steady transformation of Hong Kong’s urban space through the industries of spectacle will of course only intensify. This, along with the pressures of renationalization, will no doubt encourage and increase ongoing efforts to articulate “urban authenticity” – a unified, singular, and marketable sense of place and identity of the “local” for Hong Kong, despite perceptions to the contrary and the difficulties of affirming local differences. However, as works such as Woo’s exemplify, this critical project will not be without its challenges, both conceptual and political, as, to different ends, image-makers from the visual arts to the tourist industry attempt to (re)construct a place-identity for Hong Kong. Given this context, the pros and cons of the problematics explored in contemporary media art practice form a critical path

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towards selfhood, changing senses of place, and avant-garde art practice in Hong Kong and, ultimately, work towards not only opening up new ways of re-imag(in)ing Hong Kong but also offering new inflections of theoretical priorities concerning place-identities in contemporary society.

Notes * This chapter is excerpted from a longer text published in Positions: East Asia Critique 2, 3 (2004): 733–58.  John Dixon and Kevin Durrheim, “Displacing Place-Identity: A Discursive Approach to Locating Self and Other,” British Journal of Social Psychology 39 (2000): 27. 2 David Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again: Reflections on the Condition of Postmodernity,” Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson, and Lisa Tickner (New York: Routledge, 993), 4. 3 Miwon Kwon, “The Wrong Place,” Art Journal 59,  (Spring 2000): 33. 4 Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 996), 26. 5 See, for example, Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 989). 6 Miwon Kwon, “One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 57. 7 Steven Pile and Nigel Thrift, “Conclusions: Spacing and the Subject,” in Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, ed. Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 995), 380. 8 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 997), 4–5. 9 Ibid., 7. In his formulation, Abbas draws from Walter Benjamin’s oftquoted phrase: “Anything about which one knows that one soon will not have it around becomes an image.” 0 Ibid., 7–8.  Ackbar Abbas, “Building, Dwelling, Drifting: Migrancy and the Limits of Architecture. Building Hong Kong: From Migrancy to Disappearance,” Postcolonial Studies , 2 (998): 87; Abbas, “City-Identity/City-Image,”

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2 3 4 5

6 7

8

9

20

2

200, unpublished manuscript, 4; see also Abbas, “Identity Crisis,” Domus 839 (July/August 200): 55. M. Christine Boyer, CyberCities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 996), 242. Kwon, “One Place after Another,” 58. Kwon draws this formulation from Kenneth Frampton. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 994), 68–9. Woo (b. 968) studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and the University of Hong Kong. In 989, he joined the experimental arts collective, Zuni Icosahedron, and since then has worked as a cultural organizer, artist, and stage director of multimedia productions. He has directed a number of Zuni performance productions, including The Four Grand Inventions (999), 200: Hong Kong Odyssey (2000), and The Life and Times of Louis I. Kahn (200). In addition to taking an active role in arts and cultural policy development in Hong Kong, Woo writes regularly on the arts, architecture, media, and politics for various newspapers and magazines. His videos include S/Z and The Perverted City of Children. The text that opens this section is the artist’s description of his last video, A Very Good City. Since its release, the video has been widely screened in numerous local and international exhibitions and festivals. Kevin Lynch, A Theory of Good City Form (Cambridge, ma , and London: mit Press, 98), 32. Ibid., ; Louis I. Kahn, quoted in John Lobell, Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn (Boulder, ca , and Shambhala: Random House, 979), 44. Kahn tried to design buildings to be places that would not only nurture the creative community of the persons who used them but also constitute a means to oppose the erasure of the past. The lines of the voice-over narration are from a small anecdotal book entitled The Children’s Perverted Garden of Delight, published in Chinese by the artist in 996. Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press/British Film Institute, 994), 56. Lui Chi Wai, “The Rise of Hong Kong as a Tourist City: Tourism Development and the Transformation of Urban Space,” paper presented at the Fourth International Postgraduate Symposium on Hong Kong Culture and Society, University of Hong Kong (3–5 December 200), 3–4. “Tourism: New Challenges, New Directions,” Hong Kong: Asia’s World City Factsheet, hksarg , May 200.

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22 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 990). 23 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 984), 03. 24 Lynch, Theory of Good City Form, 47; and from conversations with the artist. 25 Ronald Skeldon, “Emigration from Hong Kong,” in Emigration from Hong Kong, ed. Ron Skeldon (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 995), 5. 26 Abbas, Hong Kong, 7–3. 27 Matthias Woo, quoted in “What Anwar, Marina Mahathir and others read this year,” Asia Week, 25 December 998. 28 See Wong Wang Chi, 歴史的沉重 從香港看中國大陸的香港史論述 Li shi de chen zhong: Cong Xianggang kan zhongguo da lu de Xianggang shi lun shu [The Burden of History: A Hong Kong Perspective of the Mainland Discourse of Hong Kong History] (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2000), –69. 29 Gisela Bruche-Schulz, “‘Fuzzy’ Chinese: The Status of Cantonese in Hong Kong,” Journal of Pragmatics 27 (997): 307, 309. 30 Willemen, Looks and Frictions, 56. 3 Massey, Space, Place, and Gender, 68. 32 Abbas, Hong Kong, 7. 33 Leung Ping Kwan, 香港文化 Xianggang wen hua [Hong Kong Culture] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Centre, 995), 35.

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part five The Polysensorialized Screen

Introduction

Polysensoriality mainly refers to artworks that are attentive to the ways in which an image ceases to work merely at the level of vision. Questioning formalist opticality (the understanding of the image as a purely optical reality to be apprehended by an eye detached from the other senses), the chapters in this section propose to show how the artwork’s interpellation of the spectator through touch, vision and smell, touch and vision, or surrogate vision can enrich aesthetic experience. The section opens with Julie Lavigne’s examination of Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather (993–94), which shows a polysensoriality that involves smell and touch. It insists on the intersubjectivity between self-portrait busts (made out of chocolate and soap) and the spectator. The sculptures, shaped by casts and subsequently licked and lathered by the artist, carry the traces of the artist’s body, and the ephemerality of the material is made manifest by the partial decay (to be both seen and smelled) to which the works are submitted each time they are exhibited. Set on pedestals at the height of the viewer, conveying marks of intimacy, the self-portraits, argues Lavigne, favour an erotic identification from the spectator, following Georges Bataille’s view of eroticism as a state of attraction-repulsion, a dissolution of selves. The impropriety, ephemerality, and beyond-opticality of the works are the most determining components of the installation’s visuality.

Closely related to Lavigne’s investigation of polysensoriality, Amelia Jones’s “Televisual Flesh” brings us to the video screen and the selfportrait deployment of bodies through electronic textures. Also involving touch, it bridges Bellour’s, Fraser’s, and Lavigne’s chapters by positing that images can be a source of haptic vision. Focusing on the video work of Paul McCarthy, Lynda Benglis, Hannah Wilke, Vito Acconci, Mona Hatoum, and Gillian Wearing as well as the film work of Carolee Schneemann, chapter 2 expands on previous studies of the video screen (pertaining to the electronic interface as a blurring of skin and screen, and the haptic dimension of the screen) to argue that the video artists “perform their embodiment as resolutely technologized.” The screen/flesh is thus defined as a site of reversibility between the visible and tangible so as to problematize the spectator’s view of the body as a distinct “other.” Visuality is made precarious precisely because of its inclusion of touch, which disrupts the frontal deployment of the image as it raises the impossible question: where does the screen start and the flesh end? Christine Ross’s analysis of Mathieu Briand’s ubiq , a Mental Odyssey (2006) shows how the perception of the virtual reality (vr ) user can be enriched by opening his or her experience of time and space to the changeable perceptions of another user. A set of wireless headsets – viewing devices with built-in video cameras and video monitors placed at eye level – ubiq allows for the interactivity between users, which is fundamentally perceptual. When visitors press a hand-held button, they can exchange the image on their screen, which means that the simple act of looking out is complicated by the constant (usually unnoticeable) passage from the direct seeing of the immediate environment to the seeing of other parts of the environment through the “eyes” of another user. To perceive here is to be both blind to and in contact with an other through sight and aurality; it is to see and to hear one’s environment through changing perspectives, which are not necessarily “mine,” although they are often felt as such. The interface again brings us to a form of precariousness (here a literal dispossession) of seeing but only to make vision more complex by relating it to, even substituting it for, the other’s vision.

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11 Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather: Eroticism as Identity Subversion j u l i e l av i g n e Translated from the French by Eduardo Ralickas

Eroticism, as it is usually understood, is a depiction of a sexual nature that is deemed acceptable by a given society. However, such a distinctive definition of eroticism seems to be compromised by the concept of pornography, which, at least over the last fifteen years, is increasingly thought to circumscribe the same semantic space.¹ This confirms that the concept of eroticism is highly subjective as it depends on a moral judgment, which, by virtue of its very existence, makes the theoretical use of the former concept unstable. Nevertheless, my investigation into the notion of eroticism is motivated by just such theoretical instabilities and shifts in horizons of expectation with regard to representations of sexuality. I base my reflections on a work that does not seem to correspond to the conventional criteria for determining erotic art. In fact, Janine Antoni’s installation work Lick and Lather (993–94) does not make use of any explicitly sexual forms of representation. However, Antoni’s work does stage an effective discourse of a sexual nature, albeit one that differs from our standard notions of eroticism. I contend that this installation draws on a more complex notion of eroticism – one akin to the definition put forth by writer and multidisciplinary theorist Georges Bataille. Thus, Lick and Lather directly addresses themes related to transgression, singular intersubjectivity (the state of continuity, in Bataille’s terms), and a sensible and perceptive dynamic that oscillates between attraction and repulsion. I maintain that the work’s

particular treatment of these themes, which are at the heart of Bataille’s eroticism, allows us to consider not only the notion of eroticism itself in a new light but also several other notions linked to contemporary forms of subjectivity. Before I begin my analysis of Lick and Lather, a few facts about the artist are in order. Janine Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas, in 964. She now resides and works in New York. Over the past twenty years, Antoni has received international critical acclaim; in fact, several articles on her work have been published in various American and international art magazines (e.g., Flash Art, Sculpture, Frieze, Art in America, Art News, Women’s Art Magazine, and Lacanian Ink). Early on in her career, and consistently throughout the years, she mounted several solo exhibitions in New York (at the Sandra Gering Gallery, the Luhring Augustine, the moma , and the Whitney Museum of American Art), London (at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery and the Institute of International Visual Arts), Santa Fe (at Site Santa Fe), Sweden (at the Andres Tornberg and the Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall), and also in Glasgow (at the Centre for Contemporary Arts). She took part in numerous group exhibitions, such as the Venice Biennale of 993; Self/ Made, Self/Conscious with Bruce Nauman (994); Bad Girls, organized by the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (994); PerForms, with Jana Sterbak and Charles Ray (995); Open Ends: Minimalism and After at the moma (2000); Moving Pictures (2002) and Family Pictures (2007) at the Guggenheim Museum; and Into Me/Out of Me at the ps  Contemporary Art Center at the moma in 2006. Finally, it bears mentioning that some of her works figure in the famous and controversial Saatchi collection in London.² First shown at the Venice Biennale, the Lick and Lather installation was subsequently exhibited during Antoni’s second solo showing at the Sandra Gering Gallery. The work is comprised of fourteen cast busts of the artist that strongly resemble classical statuary. The fourteen busts are aligned in two rows and placed on cylindrical pedestals, thereby elevating them to the artist’s exact height. The overall effect is reminiscent of sculpture galleries that display likenesses of famous men, such as those housed in the Pantheon in Paris or, more commonly, in the entrance halls of certain schools or institutions. In this light, Antoni has remarked in an interview with Laura Cottingham that nineteenth-

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Fig. 11.1

Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather, 1993. Seven soap and seven chocolate self-

portrait busts. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

century neoclassical sculpture inspired her to create Lick and Lather.³ However, Antoni’s piece differs from – and even counteracts – the norms of neoclassical statuary in that it makes use of non-conventional subject matter, materials, and techniques. In fact, Lick and Lather displays the busts of women. More precisely, it stages a multiplication of the artist’s self-portrait; that is, it is made up of fourteen reproductions of more or less the same bust. To begin with,

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there are fourteen identical casts: seven are made out of chocolate, the others out of soap. It goes without saying that neither chocolate nor soap figure among the list of noble materials used in classical sculpture. Consequently, the act of presenting chocolate and soap busts consists in making an amusing yet transgressive and ironic gesture. The irony is especially manifested in the soap busts since soap mimics many of the characteristics of marble, and this mimicry defers the moment when the spectator will become conscious of the real nature of the sculpture. By displaying the chocolate busts on one side and the soap busts on the other, the artist evinces a clear-cut opposition between both types of material used in the work. From this strong, formal opposition arises another, symbolic duality, which relies on the fact that one is dealing here with the representation of human figures and of their different particularities. Thus, this formal aspect confers upon Lick and Lather a political dimension. The work could, in fact, be analyzed in terms of the relationships between blacks and whites. In this respect, one could note the opposition of stereotypes related to skin colour; the obsession with hygiene in white-dominated societies, particularly in the United States; the hunger that plagues developing countries; or even, more generally, the social inequity that distinguishes black populations from white ones.⁴ More specifically, the work evokes the delicate bond between Africans and cocoa plantations in the Antilles, the heart of the slave trade in the eighteenth century. One must not overlook the fact that the artist is originally from the Bahamas; therefore, she may well be very concerned with postcolonial relations. The process of making Lick and Lather also broaches such themes. In effect, the work is not made from a single cast as slight differences can be seen in each bust. Thus, the real artistic act does not commence until after the busts have been cast. Indeed, it is only after having made a mould of her body that Antoni intervenes at the level of form: in the case of the chocolate busts, the artist licks her self-portraits in order to change their appearance; in the case of the soap busts, she lathers them. Lick and Lather thus depends on the transformation of commonplace gestures – such as eating and washing – into artistic and political ones. Moreover, let it be noted that, in order to change the appearance of her self-portraits, Antoni strains her body. Although licking chocolate and washing are usually pleasurable activities, the excess required for

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the desired result in this case transforms them into physically draining efforts. In this context, the excessive washing of the artist’s epidermis and the ingestion of massive amounts of chocolate are akin to a type of performance art that is generally associated with feminist body art from the 970s. The likes of Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, Gina Pane, and, to a certain extent, Orlan spring to mind. However, the fact that Antoni exhibits her art in the form of a sculptural installation as opposed to a performance per se differentiates her practice from that of her predecessors. Nevertheless, the work remains performative. According to body art specialist Amelia Jones, regardless of whether a work is performed in the privacy of a studio or in public, if it implicates the artist’s body, that “body/self,” “with all of its apparent racial, sexual, gender, class, and other apparent or unconscious identifications,” it is a form of body art.⁵ Furthermore, for body art works to possess the subversive reach that Jones attributes to them, they must offer a representation of the body that transgresses the norm (i.e., the body as white, heterosexual, middle-class, and male, which corresponds to the category “artist” in Western culture). Lick and Lather effectively presents a body that distances itself from the generic, almost normative category of the artist. First, by creating self-representations, Antoni displays certain characteristics of her female body. She also strays from the norm by using chocolate to represent herself in half of the likenesses as a woman of colour. Furthermore, as stated above, the reference to cocoa evokes the reality – historical yet nonetheless tragic – of the slave trade. In sum, not only does she stage the representation of her femininity but she also brings into focus a part of the history of her country of birth (of her cultural roots) – that is, slavery on the cocoa plantations – thereby distancing herself from the norm of the white male artist who is welloff and free. It would be possible to interpret this shift as a desire on her part to transgress normative notions of the figure of the artist. What it is important to remember here is that this implication of the artist’s body in the work places the spectator in the position of enacting an encounter. Of course, it could be said that all spectators who behold works of art partake in an encounter of sorts; what differs in this case is that one is engaged in a type of encounter that is more directly intersubjective. According to Jones:

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Body art practices solicit rather than distance the spectator, drawing her or him into the work of art as an intersubjective exchange; these practices also elicit pleasures ... interpreted here as having potentially radical effects on the subject as it comes to mean within artistic production and reception. Body art ... insists upon subjectivities and identities (gendered, raced, classed, sexed, and otherwise) as absolutely central components of any cultural practice.⁶ To return to Lick and Lather, it is clear that one cannot speak of intersubjectivity as directly as one can when referring to performances held in front of a live audience. Here, the encounter is mediated by objects – the busts – which are imprints of a subject. The fact that these busts are the end product of an indexical process – that is, that they function as indexes, which, according to Charles S. Peirce’s definition, are traces of the objects to which they refer – allows one to pass from the object to the artist without further ado.⁷ Less direct than live performances, perhaps, the encounter with these busts is not without its effects on the public. Thus, by virtue of the performative gestures at the work’s origin (moulding one’s bust and transforming its appearance by washing and licking) as well as the traces of manual and oral intervention that can be seen on its surface, the viewer’s impression of being in contact with the artist is greatly enhanced. Moreover, such traces also imply particles of saliva and dirt stemming from the artist’s body. In this manner, the spectator is confronted with the artist’s intimate life – an intimacy that lacks decorum or that, within the cultural context of an art biennale or gallery, is even improper. Whether spectators are repulsed or attracted by this private contact with the residues of Antoni’s body, they will certainly feel addressed by it. In this light, even if intersubjectivity is here mediated by objects, it is nonetheless intense and intimidating. Moreover, it is at play between the spectator and the work, as it was previously between the artist and the work and, in an absolute measure, between the black busts and the white ones, which sustain a relation that could be interpreted as inter-racial. Let it be noted that Amelia Jones grounds her concept of intersubjectivity on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Contrary to other contemporary theorists who deal with intersubjectivity (such

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Fig. 11.2

Janine Antoni, Lick and Lather, 1993. Two self-portrait busts: one chocolate, one

soap. Two pedestals, 24" x 16" x 13". Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York.

as Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan), Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the corporeal and physical nature of intersubjectivity (as opposed to its visual aspects), thereby theorizing the relation to the other in terms of imbrication rather than opposition. In this way, the relation between self and other is reciprocal insofar as one is always already self and other at once.⁸ Thus, Jones considers that the locus of the inscription of identity is the body, which simultaneously sees and is seen, perceives and is perceived, touches and is touched. In other words, the body is always subject and object. According to Jones’s account, for MerleauPonty intersubjectivity ought to be considered “as dramatically intercorporeal: as embodied as well as contingent.”⁹ Let us return to the intersubjective encounter that Lick and Lather stages. For many, it takes place under the sign of ambivalence. It does not simply imply a pleasing or displeasing form of contact but, rather, a

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to-and-fro relation between two poles. On the one hand, the spectator could be visually seduced by the faces of the artist that appear on the least altered busts as much as he or she might feel repulsed by those that appear on the more deformed busts. On the other hand, he or she could be attracted by the smell of the soap and chocolate; he or she might empathize with the idea of tasting chocolate, feeling the softness of the soap, or taking a bath. However, given its primary function as sculpture, the busts – particularly those made out of chocolate – can simultaneously bring about a feeling of disgust since the materials degrade over time and since the chocolate has been partially consumed and bears traces of saliva. Indeed, the strong odour of mature chocolate can produce repulsion. Thus, the work does not sustain the same sensorial latitude at the moment of its conception as it does at the moment of its exhibition. As well, the soap busts bearing the traces of dirt, the artist’s dead cells, can fuel a certain aversion. Ultimately, one can imagine a spectator who is as much amused as disgusted by the ironic concept of first making self-representations in chocolate and soap and then eating and washing them. But above all, as the practice of body art implies, the work comprises in itself a relation between one and the other. The title is telling in this respect. Lick and Lather first of all provides insight into the process involved in sculpting the work. However, the present tense and imperative voice also strongly solicit the viewer to imitate the gestures of the artist. It is therefore not surprising that a woman was held in custody at the Venice Biennale after having bitten a morsel out of three of the seven chocolate noses. As art critic Georges Melrod has remarked, “Her trespass was but the logical result of Antoni’s strategy: rather than coercing or lecturing you, she seduces you into intimate dialogue with her artwork, daring you to empathize with her obsessive activities.”¹⁰ In sum, the work becomes the site of a meeting, a locus of intersubjectivity that is the linking factor, as per this event, between identification and desire. We are dealing with a relation to the other that takes shape under the aegis of identification since, for Freud, imitation stems from a relation to the other that is akin to identification. Indeed, let it be noted that primary identification can be characterized “as a mimetic relation, and not an object relation, to others.”¹¹ Moreover, I believe that Lick

290 Janine Antoni's Lick and Lather

and Lather favours, by virtue of its modes of display, the spectator’s identification with the artist by means of the busts. It is therefore quite telling that Antoni has exhibited her busts on pedestals, thereby elevating them to her height. Obviously, she thereby makes a pastiche of traditional museological methods of displaying neoclassical sculptures. Nevertheless, Antoni’s exhibition strategy forces us to apprehend the busts as a face-to-face encounter that forecloses both their glorification as well as our grasp of them. As well, the anthropomorphic scale of the busts does not allow for their objectification, as would be the case with miniature or giant ones. It is therefore justified to conclude that the work constitutes a fertile ground for identifications with the artist. In other respects, insofar as the spectators of Lick and Lather imitate the gestures of the artist, they are also compelled to lick and lather the busts – that is, to caress the other. Such gestures denote an intimate relation that stems more from a desire for the other – to possess the other – than from the desire to be the other. In fact, it would be more accurate to claim that, in order to possess the other, one must first be the other since it is impossible to obtain direct access to otherness as a cultural interdict prohibits this. In other words, the artist acts as an agent who allows the spectators to have access to the busts. As is made evident by the Venice Biennale incident, the spectators cannot, of their own power, execute the gesture solicited by the work. In this scheme, the spectator must first identify with the artist (the subject) in order to approach his or her ends: to lick or caress the other as well as to taste the chocolate and feel the smoothness of the soap on his or her skin. This brings us to postulate that the cultural convention prohibiting tactile contact with the work confers upon Lick and Lather an erotic component. Identification allows one virtually to transgress the cultural interdict and thus, according to Bataille, to engage in an erotic type of relationship. The very fact that Lick and Lather elicits an ambivalent feeling of repulsion and attraction supports a hypothesis in favour of transgression. Eroticism, according to Bataille, is necessarily comprised of the transgression of an interdict, which is ultimately linked either to death or sexuality and is made manifest by a feeling of fear or disgust (in relation to rot, filth, or the aging of foods, for instance). Fascination and desire are the motors of such transgression. In fact, the notion of inter-

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diction, which differentiates humans from animals,¹² constitutes a set of rules whereby the energy required for labour is preserved. According to Bataille, prohibition thus affects the two most devastating moments with respect to the loss of energy: death and sexuality.¹³ Thus, from reproduction to the sacred orgy, all forms of sexuality are necessarily organized in terms of prohibition. As well, death by murder, sacrifice, and war are forbidden. And even if religion occasionally suspends the sway of prohibitions, albeit without annulling them altogether, interdictions remain; they make their presence felt by means of a certain vertigo that arises when they are transgressed. This is the source of eroticism, according to Bataille.¹⁴ Prohibition sides with the realm of rules, order, the profane world, work, and production; transgression sides with disorder, with the sacred world, with festivities, and thus with energy expenditure. In fact, if “whatever is the subject of a prohibition is basically sacred,” prohibition “forbid[s] the transgression,” whereas “fascination compels it.”¹⁵ In this scheme, “nausea, disgust or repugnance”¹⁶ are the signs of prohibition; it is fascination that entices us to overstep the boundaries in order to transgress the interdict and, by the same token, to generate eroticism. I would like to open up a crucial parenthesis concerning the concept of interdiction in the contemporary context. According to certain theorists, such as Alain Ehrenberg¹⁷ and Slavoj Žižek,¹⁸ contemporary society is undergoing a decline with respect to the interdict – a decline in paternal authority. Thus, the interdiction of sexuality countenanced by Bataille would no longer be operative. In the Ticklish Subject, Žižek contends that the consequence of the decline of the Oedipal law is the creation of a norm that does not compel the subject to repress its desires with respect to prohibition but, much to the contrary, to always enjoy (jouir). Žižek writes: “the paradigmatic mode of subjectivity is no longer the subject integrated into the paternal Law through symbolic castration, but the polymorphous perverse subject following the superego injunction to enjoy.”¹⁹ Jouissance is, in the final analysis, the new norm that controls human sexuality. Precisely, Lick and Lather plays with this new norm, but its game does not entirely reinforce Žižek’s vision since it preserves, after all, the notion of interdiction. By means of the title’s explicit invitation to obtain pleasure from (with?) the other by licking and caressing her, Antoni’s work corroborates, at first glance,

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the command to enjoy. However, it is only later that it becomes clear that such a command cannot freely be followed: on the one hand, there is a cultural interdict prohibiting viewers from touching the work, and, on the other, there is a certain disgust with respect to both the matter and the form of the work. Both instances simultaneously impede yet strongly invite us to comply. In sum, notwithstanding the fact that the new cultural norm commands us to feel gratification, the latter does not imply the dissolution of all interdictions, and it certainly does not guarantee that one will obtain the pleasures sought. Moreover, for Bataille, the interdict is conceived in a general manner as the element that distinguishes animal sexuality from human sexuality. Since we are not returning to a kind of animal sexuality with this new form, Bataille’s notion of interdiction constitutes conclusively a more fundamental basis than the Law of the Father as conceived by Žižek. What’s more, Žižek grants such an imposing place to the Law of the Father – that source from which all interdiction springs – in the theory he developed in previous publications that it is difficult to believe in its total disappearance. More particularly, in The Plague of Fantasies Žižek speaks of desire in terms of a drive that would be caught in the snare of an interdiction that pushes one to refuse jouissance (castration, according to Lacan). Fantasy would thus function as a screen that separates desire from the drive,²⁰ and, by traversing the fantasy, the subject would place itself in a position of authentic intersubjective encounter: when do I actually encounter the Other “beyond the wall of language,” in the real of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not even when I learn her values, dreams, and so on, but only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail (a compulsive gesture, an excessive facial expression, a tic) which signals the intensity of a real of jouissance.²¹ Here, we are very close to Bataille’s definition of eroticism: we are at once within the dynamics of interdiction and transgression and in the presence of an intersubjectivity that is exceptionally profound and that is also inherent to eroticism, as we will see in a moment. Moreover, the crossing of fantasy is also echoed in a very particular way by Lick and

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Lather. The work arises out of an act of deforming – which we could qualify as compulsive – the busts made out of the artist’s very imprint; Lick and Lather can thus be likened to an attack on form that is destined to shatter the fantasy of a standard human form that is in a position of self-control (which is what the basic form resulting from Antoni’s body moulding incarnates). Moreover, the disgust occasioned by the work’s materiality and form feeds this hypothesis of a crossing of fantasy as well as of the situation of interdiction inherent in Bataille’s eroticism. Obviously, there is a difference between the cultural interdiction of touching works of art and the profound interdiction of sexuality. Nevertheless, Lick and Lather plays with the concept of interdiction. In fact, it is the interdict itself that renders the desire to lick the busts more intense. Equally, licking and caressing another person are acts that stem from the sphere of sexuality. This is the reason why Lick and Lather effectively constitutes an erotic work. However, the fact that one must identify with the artist in order to be able to feel desire for her complicates and enriches the typical erotic relation according to a Bataillian scheme. For in Bataille’s notion of eroticism women are usually cast as victims or as objects of desire; it is this passive role that allows men to transgress the interdict. But it also renders transgression possible for men because it transgresses the interdict first, thus functioning as a tool of transgression. On this subject, Bataille writes: The lover strips the beloved of her identity no less than the blood-stained priest his human or animal victim. The woman in the hands of her assailant is despoiled of her being. With her modesty she loses the firm barrier that once separated her from others and made her i[m]penetrable. She is brusquely laid open to the violence of the sexual urges set loose in the organs of reproduction; she is laid open to the impersonal violence that overwhelms her from without.²² Bataille is a thinker who belongs to his time: “L’Érotisme” was written in 957, and, what’s more, Bataille was far from being the most progressive intellectual in matters relating to the rights of women. This is why it is imperative to update his theory. However, Bataille

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is unavoidable when it comes to broaching the question of eroticism because this notion plays a central role in both his theoretical writings and his fiction – and because he conceptualizes eroticism in such an innovative and profound manner. In fact, if one were to forget the traditional gender roles perpetuated by Bataille, as well as his explicit hetero-normativity, his writings propose a very promising conception of eroticism. Thus, in an erotic relation, two beings dispossess their individuality, their identities, in order to open themselves up to one another, one after the other, in a process of identification. This state of continuity, according to Bataille’s terminology, consists in an intimate relationship that pushes intersubjectivity to a paroxysmal point – to a sort of “pure” intersubjectivity that becomes almost inter-objective. Bataille explains this state of continuity as follows: as early as a human being’s conception, he or she becomes an individual who stands alone, and “[b]etween one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity.”²³ The individual thus seeks a profound encounter with the other – of whom he safeguards a delightful memory – and in whom this firm barrier of being evaporates in a moment of continuity. Ultimately, eroticism constitutes a path towards continuity. Does Lick and Lather offer us such an experience? Obviously, a work of art cannot afford the same intensity as a real erotic relation, and it is certainly not of the same kind. However, a work of art can broach or even tend towards such a relation, which is characterized by openness and engagement. Moreover, erotic experience demands an engagement on the part of both parties. Thus, the spectator must implicate himself or herself in the relation proposed by the work – a fact that remains arbitrary or uncertain. Nevertheless, Lick and Lather does offer us some insights into possible engagements. First of all, the work deploys multiple ruses to solicit the corporeal engagement of the spectator. In fact, by virtue of its dimensions (i.e., the spatial trajectory required to see the work as a whole), the installation compels the spectator to implicate his or her body. Additionally, because the busts are made of chocolate and soap, Lick and Lather offers a polysensorial perception, soliciting sight as well as other, more engaging, senses such as smell, taste, and touch. As well, the spectator is confronted with the excessive intimacy of Antoni, which evokes sentiments of attraction and repul-

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sion. Finally, by creating a fertile ground for identification, as I have postulated above, Antoni’s work solicits an engagement on the part of the spectator. Moreover, Lick and Lather evinces a certain openness – or, at least, a process whereby the corporeal identity of the artist is made fragile – which can be compared to the openness of one individual to another that is constitutive of Bataillian eroticism. Indeed, the multiplication of the busts also suggests a multiplication of bodily identities, and it indicates a certain precariousness with respect to the uniqueness of being. As well, the alteration of the contours of the busts – thus, a possible mobility of the contours of identity, of the body/self – also shows us a certain openness in that firm barrier of being. However, this conception concerning multiple and changing identities corresponds more to contemporary conceptions of identity. Notably, Lick and Lather replays various elements relative to the construction of identity as defined by the feminist theorist Judith Butler. Let it briefly be recalled here that, for Butler, identity is multiple and in constant construction. In fact, according to Butler, gender identity is performative: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.”²⁴ In other words, gender identity is an effect of its expressions.²⁵ There is no female identity; rather, it is in performing womanhood – in expressing it by speech and acts – that gender identity is constructed. But identity is obviously not constructed arbitrarily. The construction of gender is made, according to Butler, by a constant repetition of identifications with the norm, which is often an unconscious process. If, for Butler, there is a repetition of identification, this is because identification always fails as it is impossible completely to identify with a norm. In fact, Antoni’s fourteen busts could be interpreted as various attempts to conform with a normative state of affairs or even as a way of distancing oneself from the norm even more. This reading is enhanced by the fact that the gesture required to vary the differing forms of the busts – in other words, to change the bodily image at stake here – is of a performative order. By proposing such an aspect of identity in its real, shape-shifting form rather than in its illusorily stable and fixed form, Lick and Lather offers to its spectators, as well as to Antoni, a sign of openness. By associating this process of making being itself vulnerable

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to the seductive and sexual aspects of the work, one conceives the work as erotic. The fact that Lick and Lather solicits empathy and identification on the part of the spectator (and, consequently, pushes him or her to identify with the process of rendering the fixity of identity vulnerable within a sexual context) demonstrates a veritable intersubjective encounter, which is also an erotic encounter. However, the fact that half of the busts are black and the other half white makes the situation more complex. We are dealing here with the same person reproduced fourteen times with different skin colours: thus, in seven cases, Antoni identifies with the actual colour of her skin, and in seven cases she does not, preferring to represent herself in the skin of another. It seems that such a strategy begs for an interpretation in which Antoni identifies with the other – the other alongside whom Antoni grew up. Thus, Lick and Lather would propose a conception of identity and subjectivity that is comparable to a series of identifications with the other as opposed to an apparent stability of the body/self,²⁶ to paraphrase Amelia Jones. Here, identity is yet more unstable; it may even become a non-identity. To return to Butler’s theory, it is virtually impossible not to equate a person’s sex with his or her gender and with his or her sexual orientation and, by extrapolation, to equate his or her skin colour with his or her racial identity. Subjectivity is thus submitted to the strong pressures of power and is in danger of becoming (for Butler in the wake of Foucault) culturally unintelligible: which to say that it is in danger of being deprived of a social existence. Such intelligibility, which compels us to identify with the characteristics of our sex or race, does not impede Antoni from representing herself simultaneously as black and white. Thus, through Lick and Lather, Antoni contends that it is possible to be at once self and other and that one can claim for oneself an identity that does not conform to one’s sex or race. Moreover, by multiplying diverging self-portraits, she stakes her claims on an “agency” of subjectivity that is more radical (or more naïve) than Butler would have it as “agency,” then, is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition. If the rules governing signification not only restrict, but enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, i.e., new possibilities for gender that

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contest the rigid codes of hierarchical binarisms, then it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible.²⁷ It is thus by virtue of the repetition of the norm, with minute variations, that it becomes possible to change that very norm. A subversion of sexual or racial identity as categorical as that displayed in Lick and Lather constitutes in itself a transgression of the interdict. Much as Judith Butler does with the image of the drag queen, Antoni depicts the traits of a black woman with the aim of destabilizing and subverting the system that controls identity. Indeed, if the act of representing oneself in the skin of the other, or the act of identifying with the other, contravenes the social norm – which is, let it be stated, still in place – Antoni’s work transgresses a form of interdiction and thus deploys itself as an erotics. It is precisely in this sense that one could also speak of a disidentification with the norm as an erotic element. It is here that Lick and Lather can bridge Bataille’s eroticism and Butler’s theory in an extremely fruitful way. This transgression, which, in Butler’s terms, can exist by virtue of repetition and parody (as is the case with the drag queen), is the unique form of “agency” upon which Lick and Lather draws; it is in itself an act of subversion, or eroticism, and the site upon which the stakes of a greater subjectivity are played out. In sum, given its use of materials and techniques that are improper for art, Lick and Lather presents a transgressive climate from the start. As well, the performative self-portrait of this woman artist in black and white exposes, while contesting, the norm of the artist as a white, free, well-off, heterosexual male. These basic-level transgressions are not erotic in themselves and stem, moreover, from strategies of provocation that are quite common in contemporary art. Nevertheless, they support, by means of this structure of infraction, a series of other elements that underpin the phenomenon of eroticism. First, the fact that the work broaches the question of sexuality by means of the performative gesture of caressing and licking the other indicates that there is an erotic potential as, in Bataille, sexuality is structured by certain interdictions the very evocation of which implies a transgression. As well, even if the norms change and their purpose

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is to halt or order the sexual act, Lick and Lather transgresses them. By inviting the spectator to lick and caress the different busts, and, by the same token, encouraging him or her to breach a basic cultural rule aimed at prohibiting bodily contact with works of art, Antoni’s installation places its viewers in a situation of transgression. And it eroticizes this relation. Also, the performative nature of Antoni’s work, which recalls body art, places the viewer in a position of intersubjectivity. The intimacy of the resulting encounter with the artist, as well as with the busts, takes place under the sign of intimidation and provokes a complex feeling in the viewer – one that is akin to eroticism. A singular intersubjectivity that is neither completely pleasurable nor completely unpleasurable takes form, thereby recasting the parameters of the transgressed interdict and confirming the erotic nature of Lick and Lather. Finally, by multiplying and parodying her own corporeal selfidentity, Antoni reclaims a transgressive subjectivity that exceeds the scope allowed by Judith Butler’s theories. It is in this sense that the work becomes profoundly erotic. Put otherwise, given the artist’s transgressive identification, Lick and Lather achieves the goals of eroticism; namely, to shake the stability of a person’s identity. The work literally transgresses the power (the norm) that compels one to follow the standardized path of fixed and stabilized identity expressed in equating sex with gender and with sexual orientation or of equating skin colour with racial identity. Thus, the work demonstrates that eroticism as well as body art and the parodying of identity are forms of subversion that offer a greater subjectivity. Notes  By the term “pornography” I mean any explicit representation of benign sexual acts (i.e., between two consenting adults), be they heterosexual, homosexual, or sadomasochistic, excluding, among others, child pornography. For a more complete and well-argued definition of benign sexuality, see Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance, 267–39 (New York and London: Routledge, 984).

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2 For the most part, this information is taken from Judith Tannenbaum, PerForms: Janine Antoni, Charles Ray, Jana Sterbak, (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 995). 3 Janine Antoni in Laura Cottingham, “Janine Antoni: Biting Sums Up My Relationship to Art History,” Flash Art (international ed.) 26, 7 (993): 04. 4 I would like to thank Sherry Simon for her extremely pertinent comments concerning the symbolic and political opposition of the materials used by the artist. 5 Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 998), 3, 8–9. Although she is referring mainly to the art of the 970s, Jones does make use of this notion in a more general way when she applies it to the art of the 990s, which is related to it. 6 Ibid., 3. 7 See Philippe Dubois, “L’ombre, le miroir, l’index: À l’origine de la peinture – la photo, la vidéo,” Parachute 26 (Spring 982): 7. 8 Amelia Jones, Body Art, 40. 9 Ibid., 4. 0 Georges Melrod, “Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather,” Sculpture, 3, 3 (994): 9.  Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Freudian Subject, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press, 988), 77. See also Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 953–74), 8:90–5. 2 Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo [translation of L’Érotisme] (New York: Walker and Company, 962), 29. 3 Ibid., 6. 4 Ibid., 63. 5 Ibid., 68. 6 Ibid., 57. 7 Alain Ehrenberg, La fatigue d’être soi: Dépression et société (Paris: Odile Jacob, 998). 8 Slavoj ŽiŽek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 999). 9 Ibid., 248. 20 Slavoj ŽiŽek, The Plague of Fantasies (London, New York: Verso, 997), 32. 2 Ibid., 49. 22 Bataille, Death and Sensuality, 90–.

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23 Ibid., 2. 24 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 990), 25. 25 Ibid., 32. 26 Such a conception of identity is even more explicit in the theory of feminist writer Diana Fuss than it is in Butler’s writings. Fuss contends that identification is, in its most simple expression, a detour through the other whereby the self is defined. She claims, in reference to Mikkel BorchJacobsen, that there is “an equivalency of subjectivity and identification: the subject is identification; the I is another.” See Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York, London: Routledge, 995), 2–3. 27 Butler, Gender Trouble, 45 (emphasis in original).

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12 Televisual Flesh: The Body, the Screen, the Subject* a melia jones

Soon everyone will be able to have a small, inexpensive film projector that plays ... on a tv screen. [This is] the electrical implosion. Marshall McLuhan¹ Today the scene and the mirror no longer exist; instead, there is a screen and network. In place of the reflexive transcendence of mirror and scene, there is a nonreflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold – the smooth operational surface of communication. The simple presence of the television changes the rest of the habitat into a kind of archaic envelope, a vestige of human relations whose very survival remains perplexing ... The real itself appears as a large useless body. Jean Baudrillard²

If film is the quintessential medium of the modern era, as many film theorists would have it, then it is easy to assume that television and its related media of video and digital video epitomize the cultural relations of postmodernism – as Baudrillard suggests in the above epigraph. This chapter takes a less oppositional view, however, seeing the televisual as itself videographic and cinematic, and exploring the postmodern embodiments it sets into play as it fabricates and negotiates new kinds of subjects. I begin by dwelling on several artists’ video projects from around 970 and then go on to examine the ways in which televi-

Fig. 12.1

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McCarthy, Press, 1973. Performance/video tape, Los Angeles, ca . Courtesy of the artist and McCarthy Studio.

sual embodiment is constituted through specific screen experimentations that complicate, displace, and, in many cases, work to dissolve the body/technology, self/other, artist/spectator, vision/touch divides. The video screen presents bodies through an electronic (or, as McLuhan puts it, “electric”) texture. The skin, the video screen: two surfaces that on first glance seem quintessentially two-dimensional but, on reflection, imply the depth of a new kind of embodiment particular to the post-960 period. I want to start with two single-channel video works from what we might call the classic period of video art, the late 960s (the hand-held video camera having been introduced to artists such as Nam June Paik in the mid-960s) to the mid-970s: first, Paul McCarthy’s Press (he made this in two versions, in 972 and 974, respectively) and, second, Lynda Benglis’s On Screen (972). As McCarthy himself described Press, “I pressed my face and upper torso against a sheet of glass with saliva acting as a lubricant against the glass – when viewing the tape, I appear to be inside the monitor pressing against the screen.”³ Smashing his flesh against the glass, he appears to press himself against the video screen, which appears both to imprison him and to deliver him up to our vision. While the screen refuses to allow McCarthy to escape, and thus to some extent seems to divide him from us, because of the coextensivity of its surface with McCarthy’s flesh, it also embodies McCarthy as we experience him obnoxiously and somewhat threateningly forcing himself into “our” space of vision and embodiment.

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In Lynda Benglis’s black-and-white video, On Screen, first we see fuzz, the televisual signifier for the absence of signal, then a black screen. The camera backs up slightly, and we see that it is filming a video monitor or television. Loud ambient sound breaks in, accompanying Benglis’s own head as she makes a series of faces and sounds on the screen. But suddenly, she gets up and leaves, and we realize that the image we thought was on the videotaped monitor was actually on “our” monitor. Throughout the next seven minutes, we see a series of telescoping images of Benglis, going through the same sequence of faces and sounds, and periodically rupturing our belief in the level of image we are seeing as she gets up and moves and/or turns her image off or lets herself get out of focus, until, in the end, we realize we are watching two (or three?) televisual screens embedded in the monitor hovering in our space. Nothing is simple and there is no clearly differentiated “real” from which the image of Benglis emerges to imply a pre-representational state of full, knowable (or knowing) embodiment. Experiencing this McLuhanesque “electrical implosion,” we begin to feel that we ourselves might be at any moment “turned off” as part of an even larger televisual transmission, framed by a monitor we weren’t aware of until now. Most of all, Press and On Screen produce McCarthy and Benglis as functions of videographic representation, as bodies produced through (and apparently coextensive with) a screen, which thus takes on threedimensionality as a kind of body. While McCarthy plays this dynamic out by stressing the flatness through which the screen manifests his body to us, exaggeratedly splaying himself against a pane of glass set before the camera, Benglis’s body, stuttered in layers of flesh, becomes the plunging interior depths of the otherwise apparently flat surface of the televisual screen.⁴ Analyzing the subjective effects of works such as these, I construct an argument here about the specificity of the televisual, in particular, as manipulated and explored by visual artists. I am interested in its capacity, so astutely recognized by artists such as McCarthy and Benglis, to convey embodied subjects to us in a manner that potentially ruptures any sense we might have that our act of viewing coheres us as discrete and even transcendent origins of vision and knowledge, with those we view on the screen as comfortably other. Such works, then, evoke the

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haptic opticality discussed earlier – a kind of tactile and synaesthetic seeing that, as Laura Marks notes, is linked ontologically to video as a medium because of its degraded image quality (the slightly pocked texture of the televisual screen surface or the dispersed fuzz of projected video), which parallels the “diminished visibility” of contemporary experimental films.⁵ The artifice of video as a medium, its tendency to exaggerate rather than to veil the simulacral aspect of our bodily experience in late capitalism (the capacity of such imaging practices to reveal, as Baudrillard notes above, the “real itself” as “a large useless body”), is linked to the culture of simulation anxiously analyzed and often bemoaned by conservatives and Marxist thinkers alike. Against the grain of such reactions, I want to argue here that, while televisuality, like other new media, does definitively put the lie to the fantasy of a knowable “material” body pre-existing representation and anchored in the “real,” simulation does not necessarily entail a horrific disembodiment and/or commodification. As Dore Bowen has recently put it, we now understand the relations of spectacle and “lived experience” in different terms from those articulated by theorists in the 960s into the 980s: The spectacle has metastasized. No longer defined entirely by the dialectic of alienation/lived experience (as in Debord’s description), it is marked by its apparitional flow that operates in and around the index, the local, and the focal, thus producing forms that are an amalgamation of analogue and digital or that reflect on the analogue through digital means. This characteristic is what I call “digital liquefaction.” The relationship between the image and the viewer’s subjective experience no longer appears to be oppositional; rather, the mutability struggled for by an earlier generation of artists emerges as the condition of the image.⁶ Expanding on this concept of mutability and non-oppositional relationship between representation and embodiment, I argue that the artists whose work I discuss in this chapter announce and perform their embodiment as resolutely technologized, but as technologized in such a way that the televisual screen is embodied while their flesh takes its texture and materiality from that of the televisual monitor, its depth (as

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noted) from the profundity suggested by the puncture-wound opening of the monitor in the dark space of the room or gallery (even if the lights are on, televisual luminosity wins out over any ambient glow). (I leave aside here the screen of video projection, which became more common in the 980s and following.)⁷ In his 936 essay “Work of Art,” Walter Benjamin asserts, with characteristic prescience, that the technique of reproduction, in “substitut[ing] a plurality of copies for a unique existence,” permits the image to “meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation” and, in so doing, “reactivates the object reproduced.”⁸ While Benjamin’s argument focuses on the idea of the object being activated through this exchange, I stress that the viewer and the subject within the televisual image are also potentially activated in complex relation to one another. Extending Benjamin’s insight in this way, I address here video works exploring aspects of embodiment and subjectivity using the televisual screen. By “televisual” I refer to any work that exploits the intimate texture of the video, television, or computer monitor – its skin-like grain – to convey aspects of embodiment to viewers in galleries and other official art world settings or at home. I also want to indicate that the small screen of the televisual image can operate as a kind of corporealizing hole, an opening back into the three-dimensionality of lived flesh thought to have been (in Platonic theories of representation) left behind by the very act of reproductive image-making. I am also rejecting the tendency in discussions of new media or new communications technologies to insist, as robotic artist Stelarc would put it, upon the obsolescence of the body, its replacement with the pure information of televisual screens (and, more recently, with the specifically digital codes activated on these screens).⁹ I explore new media, or televisual, bodies here for their capacity to activate rather than to suppress the object or subject reproduced – just as Benjamin imagined images made from reproductive (for him, largely photographic) technologies had the potential to do. In this argument I claim allegiance with techno-theorists such as Katherine Hayles, who has noted that bodies “can never be made of information alone, no matter which side of the computer screen they are on.”¹⁰ The insistence on embodiment and my own interest in the potential of the televisual screen to open out

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and enhance complex relations of intersubjective engagement will also enable the second part of my argument, which has to do specifically with the way in which artists have explored, flaunted, and otherwise called into question the otherness of some kinds of bodies through representations of flesh on, or, more accurately, as televisual screens. Artists who press their different colours, shapes, and sizes of flesh into the televisual screen invite relations of projection and identification that can produce a new kind of viewing subject who (in the argument of Kaja Silverman) “struggles to see the otherness of the desired self, and the familiarity of the despised other ... to recognize him- or herself ... within those others to whom he or she would otherwise respond with revulsion and avoidance.”¹¹ As Silverman suggests, then, the “activation” that Benjamin recognized in its nascent form in 936 has the potential to change human relations and human subjectivity profoundly. It is crucial to stress that, while I am arguing that certain modes of self-imaging and certain technologies of representation may encourage such changes, there is never a guarantee of this potential for change gaining its full effect. In order for this activation to bear the fruit of a new schema of self-other relations – in order for it to break down traditional oppositional structures of subjectivity stemming from and reinforcing racially, sexually, and class-determined hierarchies – hard work must be done. Moving beyond outmoded avant-gardist models of critically distanced reading, we must learn to engage with televisual bodies in ways that encourage rather than suppress this potential for activation, grasping our own objectivity and otherness while embracing the subjectivity of the other. Avant-gardist models of reading, based on the theories of Bertolt Brecht and other radical Marxist thinkers from the early to midtwentieth century, were extremely productive when introduced in the 970s and 980s in debates about visual culture.¹² But at this point, given the pressures of late-capitalist, global economic, and informational structures, they may have outlived their usefulness inasmuch as they tend to be based on modernist models of signification and value – models that, I have argued, no longer have explanatory weight in defining the ways in which we engage and make meaning from the information that invades us from every angle. As anyone under the age of sixty

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from an industrialized nation knows from his or her experience living and working in the fully networked and televised environment of the so-called First World, new technologies of visualization require new modes of interpretation and engagement. That is what I am calling for here, inspired by the possibilities offered by televisual spectatorship. The pressing importance of a theory of televisual flesh is clear. A rapidly growing number of people in the world spend more time negotiating televisual bodies and texts than they do out on the streets or in other public spaces engaging breathing, space-taking human bodies with multi-sensual simultaneity. We engage others through televisuality a good deal of the time. Hence, engaging with the televisual through a theoretical model that specifically puts forth a politics of viewing, as I am attempting to do here, is a crucial project. Ultimately, my goal will be to establish a way of beginning to understand how we relate to the televisual screen and the bodies it conveys, produces, and solicits. A set of pressing questions bears down on this inquiry: How do we constitute ourselves in relation to these bodies? How do they engage us? How do we experience our own flesh in relation to televisual flesh? The Screen/The Chiasmus

Benglis’s and McCarthy’s signature single-channel video works immediately to open up questions of subject formation as it takes place specifically in relation to technologies of representation. Jacques Lacan’s notion of the screen, articulated in his 964 essay “What Is a Picture?” and which I introduce in chapter 2 of Self-Image,¹³ offers another kind of opening, this one pertinent to understanding the domain of subjectification. “Screen” is a crucial term in Lacan’s model, describing how subjects reciprocally define and negotiate one another in the visible. It is the screen – the site where gaze meets subject of representation – that is the “locus of mediation,” where the human subject “maps himself in the imaginary capture” of the gaze. The subject is always already photographed in the purview of the gaze and is always, thus, both subject and object of a kind of looking. The image in general is itself a screen, the site where subject and object, self and other, intertwine to produce intersubjective meaning.¹⁴

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But, more specifically, as Dore Bowen describes the effects of the media screen, “the screen is what reveals or, when unaddressed, obscures the relation between memories perceived, those imagined, and third, mediated memories.”¹⁵ The screen is less a site of unity, then, than a site of potential disruption and displacement, marking intersubjectivity and identification as complex processes that are never resolved but that point to the dependence of our sense of self on those we “see” (or otherwise experience) – on our “others” – and, as Bowen suggests, on our memory as we negotiate these images and bodies around us. In the self-display that constitutes our enactment of what we call our “individuality,” the subject, Lacan argues, “gives of himself, or receives from the other, something that is like a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off skin” – the screen.¹⁶ The screen defines the alienating process through which we perform ourselves simultaneously as subjects and objects of looking; the televisual image can thus be viewed as a screen across and through which complex processes of identification and projection take place in an ongoing dynamic of subject formation or subjectification. Lacan’s model is suspicious, but largely maintains the oppositional logic, of modernist conceptions of the subject (even if, in Lacan’s model, this subject is also implicated in the “other” against whom he opposes himself). Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological model of subjectivity, developed in dialogue with Lacan, is less oppositional and more explicitly insists on embodiment.¹⁷ In Lacan’s theory, the subject conveys herself to the work via a “thrown-off skin” or a screen; the fully dimensional flesh of the subject is thus reduced to a limp husk, a simulacral, empty shell pointing to but not sustaining embodiment. For Merleau-Ponty, we relate to the world through a vision that is resolutely embodied and open to the “flesh of the visible.” The embodied subject is thus “a being of depths” but also “a presentation of a certain absence” whose flesh both directs her into the world as a seeing subject and consigns her to being seen: “my body is at once phenomenal body [sentient body] and objective body [sensible body].”¹⁸ Acknowledging this simultaneity of being both embodied subject and embodied object, both seer and visible, the subject could become radically transformed in a manner consistent with the shift towards a

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post-Cartesian or posthuman subjectivity not characterized by its staging in opposition to a defeated or objectified other (or, as in Lacan’s case, an other who is not strictly oppositional but still articulated dialectically in relation to the self). Via Merleau-Ponty’s resolute insistence on embodiment and the reciprocity between subject and object, flesh and the world, the screen could thus be viewed not as a border separating self from other, or as a purely two-dimensional “thrown-off skin,” but as a deep site of interchange where self and other recognize their profound reciprocity and even simultaneity, or the fact that there is no “present” subject (or signifier, or referent) but only subjects (signifiers/referents) who take on constantly mutating shapes and meanings in relation to one another in an ongoing series of communicational and representational exchanges across and through various modes of screen/flesh. Through Merleau-Ponty’s model of subjectification, the screen, then, is a chiasmus, whereby in a relation of reversibility the visible and tangible (those we see and ourselves as felt) produce “an intercorporeal being,” through a kind of multisensorial engagement that points to a synaesthetic subject-of-vision who activates a haptic opticality vis-à-vis the images, objects, and people she engages. This reversibility defines the flesh as “capable of weaving relations between bodies that ... will not only enlarge, but will pass definitively beyond the circle of the visible.”¹⁹ Beyond the circle of the visible, subjects are fleshed and fully enmeshed in each other. Cinematic versus Televisual versus Computer Bodies

Televisuality has its own specific – we might say, drawing on MerleauPonty’s insight, “post-visual” – way of playing out these relations. It is a post-Second World War medium but one intimately related to cinema as well as, more distantly, to analogue photography; looking forward, televisuality also informs the structures and functioning of the computer screen. In her 994 book Window Shopping, Anne Friedberg theorizes the differences and continuities between a modern and a postmodern subjectivity, which she situates in relation to urban space but also in relation to structures of representation and commodification as well as the

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media of film and television. Here, she notes that “the gradual shift into postmodernity is marked ... by the increased centrality of the mobilized and virtual gaze as a fundamental feature of everyday life.”²⁰ I differ from Friedberg in the extent to which the terms she uses to identify the postmodern relations of subjectivity are still, I would argue, largely modernist in their logic. That is, while the subject is transformed by new modes of urbanism and representational structures, Friedberg’s postmodern subject is still defined in relation to a gaze, which presupposes a subject at the “centre” of a one-way trajectory of vision-asknowing (even if the subject is newly “mobilized,” as she argues). The basic structures of vision she deploys do not call forth the other senses – for a haptic opticality – as Sobchack’s and Marks’s models provide; nor do they evoke or allow for the messy vicissitudes of desire that Copjec’s model insists upon. These crucial aspects of contemporary experience, I argue, are evoked by many of the self-imaging projects discussed here and are key to the profound shifts in subjectivity I am tracing. Still, Friedberg’s arguments are extremely useful in their focus on embodied experience, technologies of representation, and the spaces of capitalism and late capitalism. Friedberg thus argues that the shift away from modernist models of “panoptic” knowledge (i.e., perspectival systems positioning the viewer centrally and coherently as potentially possessing the capability of seeing and knowing all) generates “different – more fluid – forms of subjectivity.” This shift, she argues, which is only fully secured in the postmodern period, is intimately linked to the burgeoning of consumer capitalism (including the development of social spaces such as the department store) and to the new kinds of vision introduced by photography and, later, cinema. The effects of the dazzling consumer spaces of the department store, where “the shopper is dialectically both the observer and the observed, the transported and confined, the dioramic and the panoptic subject,” are paralleled by the seductive, dreamlike effects of cinematic spectatorship.²¹ As film theorists from Christian Metz to Friedberg have argued, commercial cinema situates the viewer in a dark space, her body activated primarily in terms of psychological identification either with the apparatus itself (the camera/the projector) or with the character(s) within its narrative. As Friedberg argues, the viewer of cinema is thus

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immobile but has a mobile gaze. Citing the work of Gilles Deleuze, she notes that the viewer of cinema in its traditional – or classical Hollywood – form (i.e., developed in the 90s and 920s, as projected in a public theatre and structured by heavily overdetermined codes of narrative and character development), watching the film with this mobile virtual gaze, experiences the film screen as “the cerebral membrane where immediate and direct confrontations take place between the past and the future.”²² Cinema seduces through deep psychic mechanisms, suturing us psychologically into its world; cinema takes us, Friedberg argues, out of our bodies (she cites Sean Cubitt’s statement that “film offers to take us out of ourselves and to provide us with a new imaginary identity for the evening”).²³ As suggested, Friedberg’s model still presumes relations of viewing that are fundamentally modernist, predicated on a split between the representation and the real, as replicated by the gap between the viewer and the viewed proposed by perspectival models of vision developed in the post-Renaissance period (the gap that deeply informed the development of Western painting, and of photography and cinema). This model is predicated on the notion of a disembodied (panoptic) gaze. And yet, as Laura Marks insists, the psychic connections with the film text explored by Metz, Deleuze, and Friedberg, built on identification or desire, still entail embodiment: That vision should have ceased to be understood as a form of contact and instead become disembodied and adequated with knowledge itself is a function of European post-Enlightenment rationality. But an ancient and intercultural undercurrent of haptic visuality continues to inform an understanding of vision as embodied and material ... Spectatorship defined this way is less a matter of aligning oneself with an all-powerful gaze or perish, and more a matter of trying on various viewing positions, not untraumatically but not entirely destructively.²⁴ For Marks, as noted, this haptic visuality is evoked in particular kinds of experimental film and video texts, informed by an “intercultural” sensibility. Or, I would argue, by a strongly feminist one. Feminist theorists from Harmony Hammond (a lesbian artist who writes

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about art) to Luce Irigaray have described women’s relationship to the world as one that is resolutely haptic.²⁵ For Irigaray, woman “‘touches herself’ all the time ... for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact.” The woman’s experience is conditioned by a sense of nearness that is “so pronounced that it makes all discrimination of identity, and thus all forms of property, impossible.” It is the touching of the two labia (the two lips) that opens the woman “into a ceaseless exchange of herself with the other.”²⁶ Irigaray’s concept, as boldly essentializing as it is, brings us felicitously back to Marks’s idea of haptic opticality as encouraging the subject who experiences the cinematic work to open herself profoundly to otherness: “By engaging with an object in a haptic way, I come to the surface of myself ... losing myself in the intensified relation with an other that cannot be known.”²⁷ It is crucial for Marks that this kind of engagement challenges the perspectival model of the “gaze” that has underlaid both filmmaking (through its links to the history of artmaking and photography, themselves based on Renaissance models of perspective) and film theory. In this way, haptic opticality produces and/or reinforces new modes of subjectivity that refute the oppositional logic of modernism. The Video/Televisual Screen Body

Hannah Wilke’s single-channel video work, Gestures (974), produces her face as an effect of the televisual, providing a powerful counterexample to Fuses. As I have noted elsewhere, in Gestures Wilke “manipulates her face into sexually suggestive orifices – mobile rings of flesh – and denaturalizes its role as screen on which identity is written.”²⁸ No longer the readable surface upon which individual identity is apparently written, the face in Wilke’s Gestures is articulated in relation to the video camera and, ultimately, the video screen. When viewed close up, the face/screen (for they are one and the same) collapse into the graininess we expect from human flesh and televisuality. Opening her mouth, she seems to open the screen in a disconcerting way; it is as though we could reach in and down her throat (which instantiates the depth of the video screen). The dense, textured surface of the televisual screen (of Wilke’s flesh) is seemingly open but only as a black hole with

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uncertain depth, not as a site of triumphal visual penetration; rather, the eye penetrates, but there is no seizure there: it forges in only to wander, losing itself in the depths of the hole/flesh/screen. While in my initial reading of the piece I argued that “the face (with its mouth/cunt) looks at us with a dead stare and we look back, feeling our complicity in its objectification,”²⁹ I would now equivocate this reading, which shifts substantially if we rethink the piece in terms of televisuality. While we may be voyeurs to a certain extent, this relation is not stable; we are not fixed in this position as we would likely be in the cinematic relation (in Friedberg’s terms, an immobilized body with a mobilized gaze). Using the close-up, a primary mode of televisual representation, Wilke produces a face that is a screen, and we relate to this screen (unlike the huge, over-there screen of film projection) as both a window into a world (into a subject) and a tangible object within reach in the intimate space of the gallery, at home, or wherever we may be viewing the piece. It is in this sense that the televisual delivers bodies and subjects, through the tangible texture of its intimate screen – collapsing the very distance through which, paradoxically, the cinematic imaginary signifier does its suturing work. By collapsing distance (so Wilke tells us) the televisual screen denies any simple process of fetishization. For fetishization relies on the shocked recognition – and then, moments later, the disavowal – of difference (and distance). The televisual relation does not allow for the initial recognition to occur and so the disavowal is forever delayed. Without fetishization – the capacity to produce Wilke’s body out there as other, as an object whose thereness precisely works to palliate our own sense of lack over here – Wilke’s penetrable body as much as becomes our own. Televisuality – the viewing of the artist’s self-image on a television monitor, in this case – takes place through the presentation of a body on a diffused screen (which can be approached so closely it all but dissolves into its components, whether the grain of conventional television or the pixels of digital video). The screen, embedded in a monitor, is an object, rather than an array of light, and it allows for “a modicum of mobility”³⁰ on the part of the spectator as well as for a viewing body that is also engaged in the activities around the screen. The viewing body of Wilke’s televisual body is nonetheless taken away from the

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security of the immobilized perspectival gaze of conventional painting, photography, and film. The viewing body is opened, via a relation of haptic opticality, to the otherness of the bodies it engages as well as to representation as the flesh of the world. Photographic versus Televisual Bodies

It is in this sense that the televisual, as a new mode of embodiment, can be seen to construct a radically new relation of subject and object that is not clearly oppositional and so, by extension, has the potential to introduce a new kind of subject into the world. I have argued that this subject differs from the film subject in specific ways; how does it differ from that produced in still photography? As I have discussed earlier, photographs are rendered through the logic of Renaissance perspective; the camera developed with great precision out of this logic, and its images are thus determined through it. However, the photograph can sustain a great deal of intimacy with the viewer. But the photograph has a static two-dimensionality, lending it (in the words of Lacan) a “belong to me” aspect that reinforces rather than mitigates its tendency to fetishize.³¹ As Silverman has argued, expanding on Lacan’s insight, the “belong to me” aspect of representation, which I connect with particular force to the still photograph, encourages a kind of “corporeal colonization,” re-enacting the violent misrecognition (méconnaissance) characterizing the logic of fetishism.³² It is precisely the “belong to me” aspect built into the Western representational traditions leading up to photography that many artists experimenting with video in the early to mid-970s subverted in elaborate video installation works that make use not only of the thing-ness of the video monitor but also of its televisual quality of conveying and engaging flesh. In Vito Acconci’s Command Performance (974), for example, two video monitors radically dislocate two different subjects – the artist and the viewer – from the kind of apparent transparency of ownership of self or image or self-image promised by static photographs. As I have argued, the video itself, with its conflation of grainy screen and porous skin, already troubles the perspectival distance necessary to the fetishistic relation; Acconci further complicates this relation by situating the video monitor in a dislocating structure of view-

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Fig. 12.2

Vito

Acconci, Command Performance, 1974. Video Installation. Dimensions approximately 11' x 6' x 35'. Courtesy Acconci Studio, New York

ing. One monitor sits on the floor playing an image of Acconci lying down and seen from above; he talks, sings, and otherwise engages the visitor in an “I/you” relation (“You look so huge out there”). The visitor is urged to sit in front of the monitor on a spotlit stool or rug (“Come on baby, move, move into the spotlight”); she will probably not realize that, as she does so, her image is being broadcast in instant feedback to a second monitor positioned behind her. Command Performance, then, explicitly shatters the one-to-one relation in conventional representation, whereby a viewer can pretend to establish herself in a momentary position of power by standing, a fully coherent subject of viewing, at the apex of the perspectival cone from which the picture is projected (was captured). In Acconci’s piece, when taking this position the viewer becomes – as though in a direct enactment of Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmus and Lacan’s reversible screen – both a seen body and seeing flesh. She becomes flesh of the world (of the second video monitor) even as she establishes herself as viewing subject. Acconci’s voice exaggerates this effect: he produces the viewer through speech (and thus as other) but simultaneously produces the viewer as dominant (“You’ll be grand out there ... big in the spotlight ... grander than I could ever be”). The viewer is simultaneously othered as “you” (as object of Acconci’s speech and as image on the second monitor) and spotlit as the primary, or dominant, subject of the piece (a rela-

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tion that is disingenuous since it is Acconci, the author, who will always have the last word here). Acconci plays with and disrupts the structures through which representations promise to deliver the subject depicted therein as well as the putative origin or author of the piece – the structures through which representations offer themselves up to the viewer via an ideologically codified perspectival, self/other relation. In spite of the projective ambiguities fostered in the interpretive relation by still photographs, explored so eloquently by Roland Barthes through his notion of the “punctum”³³ and extended in my arguments about still photographic self-imaging projects,³⁴ because of its conventional reliance on the camera as a mode of “revealing” and “freezing” an aspect of the world, the photograph’s overarching tendency is to maintain a measure of distance between the viewer and its rather elliptically rendered and opaque world. The photograph in general, then, still compels a relationship of voyeurism that relies on conventional Western perspective and the dynamic of fetishism, even if it can mitigate this relation through its potential initiation of an exchange of viewing, activating (via the punctum) spectatorial desire. This is not, of course, to say that copious photographs haven’t already effectively challenged this structure by soliciting projections or interpretive acts of political engagement rather than suppressing them (see, for example, the disorienting photographs taken by Soviet avant-garde photographers such as Alexander Rodchenko in the 920s). My point is merely that the technological structure of photography proposes and springs from a relation of fetishism. As Paul Virilio sums up this tendency of photography: “in fulfillment of Descartes’ hopes, [photography] had been largely an art in which the ‘mind’ dominating the machine interpreted the results in the fine tradition of instrumental reason.”³⁵ I am arguing polemically here that, while, of course, it also developed out of the camera-based technologies of photography and film, televisuality, in contrast, ends up offering the possibility of opening this system by dispersing (conveying) bodies. In doing so it at least threatens to collapse the difference between viewer and the bodies he or she views. It is this collapse that Acconci so brilliantly stages (even as he equivocates it with his aggression towards the viewer/participant) in Command Performance. Acconci insists that we engage with him in a

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chiasmic exchange even as he makes total fusion productively impossible (total fusion being, of course, the relation that late capitalism promises through its endless circulation of commodities, which, presented in advertising, promise to obliterate our separateness and fuse us to their desirable perfection). Virilio has explored this dynamic in relation to what he calls the “paradoxical logic and paradoxical presence of long-distance telepresence,” a logic that specifically refutes Cartesianism’s projection of the “gaze of the West” not only as dominant and potentially all-knowing but also as predicated on its radical difference from the other worlds it conquers. As Virilio argues, in this regime dominated by telepresence, the material referent (or perhaps our belief in it) no longer exists; the regime of telepresence is constituted by a death of the gaze as it was previously understood – as a unified point of logic or reason from which all can be comprehended and known. With televisual (or, as he specifies it, digital) optics, “the industrialization of the non-gaze (a kind of seeing that isn’t seeing, a sightless vision)” is inaugurated.³⁶ Here lies the politics of my argument: the need to intervene in this system – precisely to circumvent this “industrialization” of this new kind of “non-gaze” – is acute. Without intervention, without wilful acts of reading through which we engage rather than distance ourselves from the bodies in/on the televisual screens many of us view for much of the day, the sightless (or, more accurately, non-punctal) vision of televisuality will be (as it already clearly has been, for the most part) co-opted by the racist, classist, and sexist forces of capitalism. To this end, I insist that we mustn’t simply bemoan the fact that bodies can no longer be understood or believed to be “present” as they were fantasized as being in the early modern and modern periods (with, of course, shifts, conflicts, and transformations along the way) or the fact that the real no longer exists. It is a mistake to insist, as is so often now done, on attempting to maintain the belief in presence or a fixed referent that anchors every representation in the face of all evidence to the contrary. These previous conceptions of embodiment and “reality” are gone, for better or for worse (the rise of fundamentalism confirms their loss by illustrating with stark clarity the human tendency to attempt to replace them with something transcendent). Certainly those oppressed by such beliefs – and even some of those (like McCarthy and Acconci)

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who, as self-identified straight, white, middle-class men, have presumably not been oppressed by it to the same degree – have to see some potential in its demise: that is part of my argument. In a historical sense televisuality might be understood as signalling the collapse not only of Cartesianism but also of the visual politics of domination that both motivated and gained from the structure of absolute difference posited by the Cartesian self-other relation. By producing flesh, commodified or not, that meshes with the televisual screen to solicit new relations of viewing and understanding, televisual artists’ projects might be seen as breaking out of the tendency within the extended Cartesianism of modernity and portions of postmodernity to subsume flesh, via the televisual screen, into commodity relations (consider, for example, most of network television or pay-for-porn sites on the Internet). Strange Bodies: Collapsing the Self/Other Distinction in Televisual Images

In concluding, I want to examine two works from the last decade that activate the potential of the televisual screen to mesh with the flesh of the other rather than to dangle it in the visual field as a possessible object. These works still engage the video monitor or screen as an object in space, albeit in a radically changed form. One of the most striking pieces to explore this meshing is Mona Hatoum’s Corps Étranger (“Strange Body,” or “Foreign Body,” 994).³⁷ For Corps Étranger, Hatoum sent an anthroscopic video camera across her body and into every orifice, transgressing bodily boundaries, while an ultrasound machine taped the body’s sounds (heartbeat, breathing, etc.). The final piece presents the sound and video from this exploration, the latter on a circular screen embedded in the floor at the visitor’s feet – a screen on which we step and that we engage in physical space. The image uncomfortably but also erotically traces the continuity of the interior and exterior surfaces of the body as flesh, moving seamlessly from arm to head, to throat, through intestines, anus, and vaginal canal. As Christine Ross has pointed out, Corps Étranger produces a confusion “between skin and screen” that not only maintains the cleavage between viewer and viewed (the “foreigner” or “foreign

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Fig. 12.3

Mona Hatoum,

Corps Étranger (view inside installation), 1994. Paris, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. © Photo

cnac /mnam Dist. rmn . © Philippe Migeat. Courtesy of the artist and White Cube, London.

body” explored through the video image) but also manifests the instability of this cleavage, casting doubt on the permanence of the “correct distance” required to view the other (to project her as fetish or object of desire). As Ross notes, the viewer becomes engaged in the meeting of surfaces (which I would play out as: her body, via her feet, meshed with Hatoum’s; her skin meshed with Hatoum’s skin as screen).³⁸ Two subjects not only meet, they become confused; the screen is not a divider but a site of the reciprocal exchange of flesh. Yet it is important to note, as I have elsewhere, that Hatoum’s body/ self is also about another kind of otherness. Hatoum’s subject (the body/self enacted within the broader discourse about her work) is that of a diasporic Palestinian woman living in Britain: she is neither fully “English” nor fully “Palestinian” (itself a national designation without an official nation to anchor it) but is always slightly or radically other to both. By delving into the interior of this flesh (which would, strictly

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Fig. 12.4

Gillian

Wearing, Prelude, 2000. Black-and-white video projection with sound. Four minutes. Edition of 5 + 2 Aps. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

speaking, be identified as black within the context of English culture), Hatoum ironicizes the idea that identity is knowable through apparently visible cues of racial background or origin.³⁹ The interior of her body is no more “revealing” than is the ambiguously toned flesh of the exterior. As we stand on or around this opened-up flesh, we become extremely aware of our own embodiment, which we experience as contingent on Hatoum’s. In this way, our “identity” – whatever that may be and however it might in the most fleeting way seem identifiable to us – is enacted in a resolutely reciprocal (not oppositional) exchange of flesh. As the inside is continuous with the outside flesh, so my flesh is continuous with the televisual flesh that pours forth beneath me: I feel myself sucked into this body in a painful literalization of the chiasmus. In Gillian Wearing’s Prelude, a single-channel video projection premiered in 2000, a young woman alcoholic named Lindsey is depicted in a grainy, haunting, black-and-white, slow-motion loop.⁴⁰ Filmed for Wearing’s previous project Drunks, Lindsey died before that project was completed; Wearing held on to the footage, presenting it here with the voice-over narration of Lindsey’s twin sister. Projected in slow motion, Lindsey’s face makes a bobbing motion, her eyes lose focus, and her face has the slightly puffy, unhealthy look of a heavy drinker. Her sister’s voice, lamenting in the heart-rending sing-song of a person who is deeply grieving, speaks of the unutterable loss suffered by a twin

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at the other twin’s demise. “I would kill myself,” she notes, but “I don’t have death in me.” Viewers of the video are mapped televisually, an effect heightened by the doubling of subjectivity through the voice-over; that is, we are not distanced from Lindsey and her sister but, rather, are pressed into the screen via an immersive audio-visual experience. Once again, the grain of the screen seems to enact the flesh of Lindsey rather than to portray it per se (and the audio element emphasizes this immersive enactment). Our fall into this screen/body mimics the twins’ loss of distance from each other. Also, Wearing’s layering of Lindsey’s body and the voice of her sister seems to duplicate the absence of separation that apparently characterizes twins; they virtually become the same subject, collapsed into one narrative of a lost body and lost life (and yet her sister’s struggle is precisely to build, for the first time, a boundary between them so that she can keep living). We might empathize with Lindsey or be repulsed by the self-destructiveness of the alcoholic (the flagrant disregard for the boundaries between life and death evinced by one who drowns her flesh in poison), especially as Lindsey’s downward spiral is described by her sister. And yet, with her flash of smile repeating, through the loop, over and over again, Lindsey “lives” on as televisual flesh, grasping us and pulling us into her radical difference (as a homeless alcoholic as well as an evidently feeling and enfleshed subject). Through such specific and pointed openings of televisual flesh artists seem to grasp not only the capacity I have traced here for televisuality both to represent and to enact flesh but also its potential to exacerbate what Katherine Hayles calls the shift from a model of signification based on presence and absence (the basis, again, of Renaissance to modern models of meaning and existence) to one based on pattern and randomness⁴¹ – a shift that profoundly undermines Cartesianism and its assignments of privilege to the idea of a normative subject as aligned with European-us hetero-masculinity. Pressing the flesh into the screen, artists such as Hatoum and Wearing use the televisual to produce a new kind of subject. This subject is both dramatic in its otherness and flamboyant in its insistence on engaging us (sucking us in). We can’t remain outside Hatoum’s body, even if we want to. We can’t view Lindsey as comfortably other to our voyeuristic self because her

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sister reminds us that every person is embedded deeply in, and enacted in relation to, those around her. Returning to Silverman’s ethics of viewing, I want to end by noting that, if we can allow or encourage ourselves to be open to the fact that we are founded on lack (our flesh is the flesh of the world, continuously defined and experienced in relation to everyone around us) rather than attempting to veil this fact by projecting our fear outward onto the field of the other, we can, indeed, reorganize the way we experience subjectivity. Accepting our otherness (the fact that we are ultimately enfleshed objects as well as subjects, at every moment), we can, in Silverman’s words, “recognize [ourselves] precisely within those others to whom [we] would otherwise respond with revulsion and avoidance” (such as Lindsey, drunk and almost dead; or Hatoum in her sucking voracious otherness).⁴² Such a recognition, ironically, would provide us with a new kind of power. Accepting our powerlessness to determine who we are, in the last instance we would be paradoxically empowered to see (and feel) the other for the first time in her or his embodied richness. So much, I argue, these artists are opening the door for us to see (and feel) – perhaps, for some of us, for the first time.

Notes * This chapter was, in a much abbreviated form, first published as “Televisual Flesh: Activating Otherness in New Media Art,” in Parachute, “Écrans numériques/Digital Screens,” a special issue edited by Olivier Asselin, 3 (2004). A version similar to this is included as chapter 4, “Cinematic Self Imaging and the New Televisual Body,” in my book Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (New York and London: Routledge Press, 2006).  Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, ma and London: mit Press, 996 [964]), 284. 2 Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, trans. John Johnston, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 983), 26–7, 29. I make use of Baudrillard’s rich

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descriptions while rejecting his rather histrionic nihilism, as evident in comments such as: “With the television image – the television being the ultimate and perfect object for this new era – our own body and the whole surrounding universe become a control screen” (27). This description is from Paul McCarthy (London: Phaidon, 996), 39. I discuss Press in relation to McCarthy’s body art work in “Paul McCarthy’s Inside Out Body and the Desublimation of Masculinity,” in Paul McCarthy, ed. Dan Cameron and Lisa Phillips (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000), 26–7. It will be obvious that, in exploring televisuality, my emphasis is on its spatial rather than its temporal aspects. A number of important texts have explored the temporal characteristics of video and digital video. See, in particular, Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 2004), 236–49. Hansen expands on, and to some extent critiques, Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of cinematic temporality in Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 986), in order to “update” Henri Bergson’s theories of “affective embodiment” in relation to new media (see Hansen, New Philosophy, 268–7). See also Pam Lee’s interesting exploration of temporality and contemporary art in Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 960s (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 2005). She links what she views as an obsession with temporality in 960s art to the cultural accelerations due to the rise of computer technology, and she links this to video art (xii–xiii). Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 9. Dore Bowen, “Imagine There’s No Image (It’s Easy if You Try): Appropriation in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” in A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 945, ed. Amelia Jones (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2006), 544. This essay brilliantly reconceptualizes the spectacle in terms more apposite to the current situation, taking into account advances in digital technologies. The works discussed in this chapter, largely from the 970s, were designed to be transmitted over a televisual monitor, sometimes within larger installations, other times as single-channel works. Projected video, most often used in installations, becomes more common from the 980s onward. Chapter 6 in Jones, Self/Image, which deals specifically with the work of Pipilotti Rist, addresses this later permutation of video and its effects.

Televisual Flesh

8 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 968 [936]), 22. 9 See Stelarc’s website, in particular the section on “Obsolete Body,” http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/obsolete/obsolete.html. I discuss these claims at length in chapter five of Jones, Self/Image. 0 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 999), 246.  Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York and London: Routledge, 996), 70. 2 See, for example, Griselda Pollock’s exposition of the uses of Brechtian theory for feminism, “Screening the Seventies: Sexuality and Representation in Feminist Practice – A Brechtian Perspective,” in her book Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, 55–99 (London and New York: Routledge, 988). Pollock’s essay exemplifies the ways in which British theorists made use of Brechtian and other Marxist avant-gardist theories in the articles on film and art published in journals such as Screen and Block in the 970s and following. 3 Jones, Self/Image. 4 See Lacan, “What Is a Picture?” (964), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 98), 07. 5 Bowen, “Imagine There’s No Image,” 55. 6 Ibid. 7 For a discussion of the interrelated development of Lacan’s and MerleauPonty’s models (as well as the gender theory of Simone de Beauvoir), see Amelia Jones, “Postmodernism, Subjectivity, and Body,” in Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 998), chap. . 8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Intertwining – The Chiasm,” in The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 968 [964]), 35. 9 Ibid., 43, 44. I introduced the concepts of synaesthesia and haptic opticality, via the work of Vivian Sobchack and Laura Marks, in the prologue. 20 Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 994), 4.

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2 Ibid., 5, 20. See Metz’s Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 986 [977]). 22 Ibid., 29, citing Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 986), 25. 23 Friedberg, Window Shopping, 38; Cubitt, Timeshift, 3 (emphasis in original). 24 Marks, Touch, xiii, 76. 25 Harmony Hammond argues that “the masturbatory feeling of organic blending, of a heightened erotic sense, appears frequently in womancentered art. The feeling of touching oneself is directly connected to women’s art-making ... A sense of touch is necessary. For art. For revolution. For life.” See Hammond, “A Sense of Touch,” in her book Wrappings: Essays on Feminism, Art, and the Martial Arts (New York: Mussmann Bruce Publishers, 984), 80, 84. Irigaray theorizes the haptic as feminine in much of her work. See, especially, “The Fecundity of the Caress,” in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 984), 85–27; and “This Sex Which Is Not One,” and “When Our Lips Speak Together,” in This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 985 [977]), 23–33, 205–8. 26 Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One,” 24, 3. 27 Marks, Touch, 9. 28 From my extended discussion of Wilke’s work in “The Rhetoric of the Pose: Hannah Wilke and the Radical Narcissism of Feminist Body Art,” in my book Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 998), 68. 29 Ibid. 30 This is Friedberg citing the differences between television and cinema. See Friedberg, Window Shopping, 36. 3 Lacan, “Anamorphosis,” Four Fundamental Concepts, 8. See also Christian Metz on photography, fetishism, and death and fetishism in “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (Fall 985): 8–90. 32 Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, 69. 33 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 98), see 42, 27. 34 Jones, Self/Image, chap. 2. 35 Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (988), trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 996), 22.

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36 Ibid., 28, 63, 6, 73. 37 I discuss this work in a different context in Jones, Body Art/Performing the Subject, 228–9; parts of my description here are taken from this earlier discussion. 38 Christine Ross, “To Touch the Other: A Story of Corpo-Electronic Surfaces,” Public 3 (996): 58, 60. 39 At the same time, it is worth noting that her otherness to English culture is invisible in the piece as her flesh is not particularly dark or otherwise marked as obviously “not English.” 40 This piece is the least “object-like” of all the works discussed here; but it stages an interesting version of the chiasmic relation and so is worth discussing in the context of this chapter, although formally it is closer to some of Pipilotti Rist’s works. 4 See N. Katherine Hayles, “Virtual Bodies and Electronic Signifiers,” October 66 (Fall 993), 69–9. 42 Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, 70.

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13 Real Time, Lived Time: ar Art, Perception, and the Possibility of the Event christine ross

Since the early 990s, the progressive authentication of augmented reality (ar ) over virtual reality (vr ) in a variety of domains (medicine, military training, education, communication, transportation, tourism, art, to name the most obvious) has set about a significant reinforcement of real time as a key temporality of our epoch. Perception in real time is an indispensable prerogative of any ar design – and I adopt here Ronald Azuma et al.’s definition of ar as a system that “supplements the realworld with virtual (computer-generated) objects that appear to coexist in the same space as the realworld”¹ – if it is to adequately do what it is set out to do: to compensate for the restrictions of vr , notably the isolation of the virtually immersed user from his or her actual environment. Consider the following: an ar medical application that entails the projection of a scanned image of an organ over a patient’s body to upgrade the view of that body during surgery; an automobile environment in which an ar system of visualization (supported by a Global Positioning System) gives the driver the possibility of seeing the outside world through cartographic information projected on the semi-transparent visor of a helmet; or the more mundane uses of communication and music technologies in the street (the mobile phone, the walkman, the iPod, electronic billboards) that add digital data to the user’s environment. In all cases there is no combined view of virtual and real objects just as there is no live interactivity between a user and his or her surroundings if not in real time.² The computers that pro-

cess information about a specific space, person, body, or object must be able to both read the information quasi-instantaneously as it comes in and return the results to the users rapidly enough so that the interaction between the user and the virtual/real environment “appears to be instantaneous.”³ This temporal deployment does not emerge in a cultural void but, rather, in a contemporaneity in which live broadcast tv, surveillance systems, and communication over the internet have shaped an expectation of real time immediacy. The tracking systems that compose augmented reality have integrated not only a variety of surveillance technologies but, more important, the rhetorics of “live” tv, internet connection, and webcam culture as a quintessential perceptual path to virtual/real alignment. One of the important ramifications of this consolidation of liveliness is its establishment as a modality of truth. As art historian Thomas Y. Levin has recently shown, to experience an image or a communication in real time is to be part of a system of representation whose claim to truth relies not on the “impoverished spatial rhetoric of photo-chemical indexicality” but on the “thoroughly contemporary, and equally semiotically ‘motivated’ rhetoric of temporal indexicality,” in which the truth of an image, of a connection, is “supposedly ‘guaranteed’ by the fact that it is happening in so-called ‘real-time.’”⁴ The impact of such a rhetorics cannot be underestimated as the efficacy of the “live” is to implement perception, cognition, and communication as real time enactments, as enactments enabled by real time. It tends to attach these to the immediate. For literary critic Fredric Jameson, this predominance of immediacy has operated not so much as the narrowing down as the end of temporality, “a dramatic and alarming shrinkage of existential time and the reduction to a present that hardly qualifies as such any longer, given the virtual effacement of that past and future that can alone define a present in the first place.”⁵ Real time situatedness, as a perceptual paradigm, only reinforces the hypothesis brought forth by historian François Hartog, according to which today’s prevailing regime of historicity is presentism: the withdrawal into the present, the turning of the present or, even more so, immediacy, into an absolute value, whose absoluteness now means a significant disconnection from the past (perceived as lost) and the

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future (perceived as increasingly uncertain). In such a regime, it is in fact the possibility of history that seems to be on the threshold of being lost. What interests me here, however, is another hypothesis, one that doesn’t so much invalidate as complicate Jameson’s and Hartog’s insights. I want to propose that real time, in certain conditions, is in fact productive of a specific form of temporality, one that might at first appear contradictory to real time but that is in fact generated from within that very standpoint. Such is the temporality of delay. This paradoxical temporality is particularly manifest in artistic ar applications invested in the creation of time as an impediment corresponding to the “quasi”-instantaneity of information processing, to the gap between the virtual and the real, between perception and the object-to-be-perceived. Delay, the time for a signal to go from a sender to a receiver, the duration that prevents the clean combination of the virtual and the real, is exposed as intrinsic to real time and is aesthetically explored as such. I believe this exploration to be decisive in an era of the pervasiveness of temporal indexicality, where systems of communication operate through the reinforcement of immediacy as a claim to truth. Real time becomes in these works an instance of the incapacitation, insufficiency, and fallibility of perception – that is, it becomes a site in which perception is seen as not all, as not whole, as a modality of distortion. Here lies, I argue, the creativeness of aesthetic delay in real time: through perceptual incapacitation, it broadens immediacy, discloses the indivisibility of time and perception while refusing to allow the latter to be isolated from other forms of mental processes; it even introduces a sense of futurity when least expected, in ways that sharply nuance the presentist regime of historicity. These experiments fundamentally complicate not only ar as a “perceptual” paradigm but also real time as the indicator par excellence of the death of temporality and reduced presentism. To better introduce the raison d’être of delay (indeed: why delay? how delay?) it is therefore imperative to briefly emphasize that ar artistic investigations exemplify a specific art and science convergence. The exploration of delay exploits a meeting point between art and science: ar scientists may be searching for the faultless overlap of the real

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and the virtual, but they are fully aware that this objective is far from being reached and that, “while promising, Augmented Reality is barely at the demonstration phase today.”⁶ Important technical obstacles, which have to do mostly with registration, still need to be overcome in order to meet the virtual/real alignment. Delay is thus a genuine part of ar systems, for both scientists and artists. Moreover, the so-called problem of delay pertains to the scientific understanding of ar as a perceptual paradigm. As specified by computer scientist Jim Vallino, ar systems add computer-generated information to a user’s sensory perception, generating a composite view for a user: “It is a combination of the real scene viewed by the user and a virtual scene generated by the computer that augments the scene with additional information.” In all applications, “the augmented reality presented to the user enhances that person’s performance in and perception of the world. The ultimate goal is to create a system such that the user can not tell the difference between the real world and the virtual augmentation of it. To the user of this ultimate system it would appear that he is looking at a single real scene.”⁷ This perceptual motivation is reiterated by Azuma, who specifies that, “fundamentally, Augmented Reality is about augmentation of human perception: supplying information not ordinarily detectable by human senses.”⁸ This goal carries several technical challenges – namely, the remaining imperative to perfect tracking systems, calibration, image/sound resolution, and graphic rendering instruments. This has been from the start, this is, the field of (and the impetus behind) ar research. Technical predicaments have meant both a recognition of and an attempt to rectify system delay. Both Azuma and Vallino insist that this delay problem is a perceptual one, the main reason being that “the human visual system is very good at detecting even small misregistrations, because of the resolution of the fovea and the sensitivity of the human visual system to differences. Errors of just a few pixels are noticeable.”⁹ Indeed, according to Azuma, “The total system delay makes the virtual objects appear to ‘lag behind’ their real counterparts as the user moves around. The result is that in most Augmented Reality systems, the virtual objects appear to ‘swim around’ the real objects, instead of staying registered with them.”¹⁰ As for Vallino, again on the matter of delay:

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Our visual system is very sensitive to visual errors which in this case would be the perception that the virtual object is not stationary in the real scene or is incorrectly positioned. Misregistrations of even a pixel can be detected under the right conditions. The second cause of misregistration is time delays in the system ... a minimum cycle time of 0. seconds is needed for acceptable real-time performance. If there are delays in calculating the camera position or the correct alignment of the graphics camera then the augmented objects will tend to lag behind motions in the real scene. The system design should minimize the delays to keep overall system delay within the requirements for real-time performance.¹¹ In short, technologically speaking, ar has a specific real time dimension that is inseparable from a variety of delaying processes that are fundamentally (though not exclusively) perceptual. This explains why artists working with ar technology and exploring its “lagging behind” component are also engaged in the investigation of perception, a fact related to the awareness that delay, in ar , is first and foremost a human (mis)registration phenomenon. In the artworks I investigate here – namely, the works of Mathieu Briand, Ann Veronica Janssens, Olafur Eliasson, and the Wooster Group – this inseparability is projected to bring the lagging of perception (or, more accurately, perception as a form of lagging) to the forefront of the aesthetic experience. Such experiments are not beyond reconceptualizing ar as a mere perceptual paradigm: indeed, as the artworks create a distance between perception and the environment, as they split perception between machine and user or simply between users, the perception of the user/viewer is (and here I borrow Jonathan Crary’s terminology, which refers to the failures of attention in the modern subject) somewhat suspended and, as such, temporalized.¹² Concomitantly, the perception of the spectator/user is required to adjust to these deployed technological delays, in which it never ceases to participate, setting into play the inseparable mental processes that shape conscious and unconscious cognition. This intermediality (what Katherine Hayles more accurately calls “intermediation”)¹³ complicates the picture set out in the writings of philosopher Mark Hansen, who, in his explanation of the “newness” of new

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media, much too easily reduces perception to an isolable phenomenon governed by a “habit-driven, associational logic,” which preperceptual processes must and will remedy so as to enlarge the instant constructed by contemporary computing technologies.¹⁴ In other words, both media and the body are at play here, as well as the pre-, the post-, and the in vivo of perception, within a larger media-mind-brain-bodyworld nexus. As Blast Theory artist Matt Adams affirms when discussing the group’s online and street-chase game Can You See Me Now? (200–), in which “real” runners circulating in a delimited urban territory are tracked by satellites and appear next to avatars created by computer players, the diverse delays that come about in the live game – the time it takes for the runners to actually connect with the internet and the time gap that separates the moment when an avatar is caught and the runner’s official announcement of his or her catch – are elaborated as a necessary part of the user’s experience.¹⁵ But let us push this acknowledgment a bit further. For, in numerous artists’ and critics’ descriptions of ar art experiences, it is the notion of event that systematically surfaces to explain the raison d’être of the delay occurring in real time. This association finds one of its most limpid descriptions in a statement by Christian Moeller, a German California-based architect working in the field of interactive light and sound installations. Moeller maintains that the whole point of ar investigations, as made explicit in his The Sound of the Growing Grass microphone installation (99), “a willfully unrealistic attempt ... to hear the sound of grass blades growing,” is not to literally hear grass growing but, rather, to create what he calls an “event” of sensation: Whereas advertising attempts the impossible goal of “communication,” our goal for the moving image at the architectural scale is the creation of event. In this way, the event is a time and place for which sensation itself is the content of the composition ... The idea of listening to grass grow is a bit naïve, but deliberately so and needless to say, the project didn’t literally work. Part of the beauty in the approach was the consistent and conscientious undertaking of something that was known in advance to be unachievable. In this, the important point was not really even

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knowing what the actual goal was, but following this road there might be a moment along the way that would provide an interesting surprise. For me, as for many before me, the open pursuit of the event is the only way we can find out something new, can learn to see in new ways, to hear in new ways, and to build cities in new ways.¹⁶ This statement about the event-ness of ar experiments allows me to specify my own claim: not only is perceptual delay an expansion of real time but it seems, indeed, to be tied to the creation of events insofar as we understand events as a form of unpredictable and unanticipated change or discontinuity, what Moeller calls “an interesting surprise,” “something new,” the act of learning to see and hear in “new ways.” This correlating aesthetics – so powerfully developed in ar applications – temporalizes perception by holding up immediacy in real time, removes the goal of perfect virtual/real alignment to devise a spacetime in which an unexpected change might happen. As such, it must be seen as contributing to a regime of historicity that privileges the immediate present – but only if we understand the latter as constitutive of a form of lagging and as an undirected search for the possibility of a different future. In its progressive spread into daily life, ar-delayed real time does not end temporality nor does it suspend history but, rather, it affects and discloses our epoch’s articulation of the present and the future as inseparable from deferment. In 984, in his pivotal L’espace critique, urbanist Paul Virilio maintained that the exhaustion of time was mostly an effect of the expansion of technologies of communication. Since the implementation of television, he argues, it is not so much space that absorbs time as time itself – the instantaneous time of electronic transmission – that erodes the temporality of delay. For Virilio, the predominance of speed and instantaneity over delay could only be highly problematic for it tolled the death knell of perspectival viewpoint and the sense of criticality that this viewpoint made possible.¹⁷ I want to contend here that, despite (and indeed because of) the neartyranny of real time, delay as a perceptual rift has in fact not vanished at all and that, in fact, it plays a vital part in the formation of contemporary temporality – one that I hope to elucidate in my examination of what I consider to be momentous manifestations of augmented reality.

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Fig. 13.1

Mathieu Briand, ubïq : A Mental Odyssey, Installation view at “Sensorium:

Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art,” mit List Visual Arts Center, Boston, usa . Courtesy Galerie Maisonneuve, Paris.

Mathieu Briand and the Othering of Perception

Equipped with a battery-powered audio-video helmet – a head-mounted display (hdm) device composed of a built-in video camera on top and a visor located in front of the eyes that doubles as a small screen – the visitor of Mathieu Briand’s (b. 972) SyS*05.ReE*03/ SE*/MoE*2 (2002), or ubїq : A Mental Odyssey (2006–) (fig. 3.) circulates “hesitantly” in the exhibition space seeing his or her environment through the visor but also, after clicking on a button attached to a hand-held device that activates the swapping of views with other participants, private views of other helmeted visitors circulating elsewhere in the same space at the same time.¹⁸ Most vehemently in ubїq in its mit List Visual Arts Center version of 2006, real time is a condition of possibility for altered perception in a space of self and other, in which private views become

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public and are replaced by another’s view. The system is only operative if two, three, or four users are engaged in the process, here and now, so as to allow perceptual substitution. This is why Briand – who stipulates that the experience of real time is the main stake of his work – prefers the phrase “lived time” to that of “real time”: “if no one is there, there is no image. The exhibition was conceived like this so that the visitor is always at the heart of a work and no longer just facing an icon ... Personally, I try to conceive works within which the visitor becomes a receiver-emitter, systems that don’t lead the viewer to a truth or a response, but rather lead to the self, to introspection.”¹⁹ ubїq only exists when experienced, and this experience requires users (as opposed to a single user) and affects perceptions. What is the significance of this “lived time,” I want to ask here, not only with respect to augmented reality research in general but also with respect to the productivity of real time and, in light of ubїq ’s insistence, not so much with respect to perception as with respect to altered perception via the other? To address this point, it is crucial that one distinguishes the ubїq experience from what it is supposed to be, theoretically speaking. Many critics have pointed out how it does not technically achieve what it is supposed to achieve: an exchange of viewpoints in real time. In his review of the piece, Shan Nys Dambrot, for example, concludes that the promise of exchange “falls somewhat flat” and is in fact denied by an experience that is “in both aesthetic and conceptual terms, rather less than memorable,” mainly because of the “low-res viewing screens and a near total lack of colour, sound, object or image of interest in the surroundings.”²⁰ The substitution of views is indeed far from consistent. This is so for many reasons, which have to do both with technology and psychology. First, on the technological side, the helmets are heavy; their inflexible material and standardness prevent them from fitting the head of the user; the screen is often too low in relation to the eyes; the image resolution is poor; the battery span of the helmets is short (officially ten minutes but verging more towards five), a temporal factor that doesn’t give the user enough time to understand the full possibilities of the machine. All of these technical factors delay intelligible interaction not only between the user and the environment but also between users. They delay the real time situation of the performance and the perceptual ability to see clearly any view whatsoever.

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I want to argue, however, that these technical difficulties are not problems to be denied for the sake of a not-yet achieved but foreseeable ability to see through the other’s view but, rather, a genuine part of the work. To be perceptually perturbed is to be in an ar situation in which, as a user, you are continually asked – because of the experimental state of the technology – to adjust to different perspectives. Psychologically, this adaptive experience is corroborated by the difficulty of clearly distinguishing one’s view from the other’s view when these are produced through hdm s equipped with a transparent/opaque screen. This double screen, which works on an emission-or-transmission, glass-or-display logic, is, moreover, so close to the eyes that it prevents any form of distancing that would allow the user to distinguish his or her view from the other’s. In other words, although users control the channel mechanism that lets them switch views, the viewing activity activates a cognitive confusion between mine and yours. This is not a failed experience in relation to what should be happening – communication, vision without noise, the seeing of the other’s view, the pure rapture of the other’s mental images, a bond between two, three, or four users. One can of course define ubїq that way, but nothing in the work forces us to do so; in fact, everything plays with imperfections to favour perceptual (mostly visual) gaps, laggings, confusions, and challenges. Perception is exposed as it is set out to be, at least from a cognitive psychological frame of reference: a mental embodied activity that responds “to something “given” by taking it ... in one interpretative manner or another,” whose products are both conscious and unconscious, whose state cannot be clearly detached from any pre-perceptual or post-perceptual state, and whose complexity pertains to the double fact that it is not a mere registration of sensorial stimuli and that it cannot be carried out by a single process but requires a set of bottom-up and top-down processes, including (but not restricted to) sensation, affection, emotion, attention, and memory.²¹ In other words, and I follow here the findings provided by cognitive psychologists Edward E. Smith and Stephen M. Kosslyn, the installation ensures that “sophisticated cognitive processes begin to work on this material almost immediately, producing the brain’s interpretation of the external world as incoming stimuli are analyzed, and existing knowledge,” beliefs, expectations, and goals guide these dynamic processes.²²

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To put it differently, the uniqueness of ubїq lies in the fact that the work focuses on perceptual activity – staging it, challenging it, activating it, complicating it, delaying it, making the viewer aware of it, giving him or her the possibility of being exposed to other views (although never really knowing for sure whose views they are) and having his or her views appropriated by others, providing the chance to detheologize them – in short, making real time (or, more precisely, “live time”) a condition of the possibility of complex perception, whose concretization is only made possible because perception is de facto a complex set of transactions. The latter might, in turn, be a condition of possibility of event-ness or, more precisely, novelty. This is Briand’s thrust, for sure, when he declares that, in his work, “our usual sense references are perturbed, but it is this destabilization that allows us to discover new things. This is the emission/reception that I’m talking about.”²³ And when he declares that he wants “to branch out into alternative connections in the brain,” thus enabling the user to “apprehend the world differently through new perceptions and dive into the inframince.”²⁴ In this, ubїq is indeed a mental Odyssey, but one whose event-ness is not easily graspable – although newness is hoped for, such an outcome is, by definition, unpredictable. It is a mental odyssey, which is quite symptomatic of many augmented reality artworks. For example, the perceptual pieces of Veronica Janssens and Olafur Eliasson partakes of Briand’s project in their attempt to challenge perception with real time environments. Although these are not, strictly speaking, ar works (they have no virtual component), they do in effect augment the perception of space through light and fog. A brief examination of these works helps both to detach ar from the specific technology of the virtual and to highlight the desire for the event in ar artistic investigations of delayed perception. It also helps to disclose the fact that, in these specific investigations, perturbed perception is proposed as a condition of possibility of event-ness; it even partakes of event-ness. Real Time Perception and the Event

It is never quite clear in these works whether perturbed perception is the event or whether it allows for the event. In fact, the works do not establish the necessity of this distinction. For sure, however, per-

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Fig. 13.2

Ann Veronica Janssens, Jamaïcan's Colors for Melle Léone, 2003. Artificial

fog; natural light; red, green, and yellow filters. Four rooms full of coloured artificial fog. Courtesy Ann Veronica Janssens and Galerie Micheline Szwajcer.

turbation is activated and it does entail a form of discontinuity. This is radically manifest in the work of British Brussels-based artist Ann Veronica Janssens (b. 956), who has produced a series of fog installations since the late 990s – namely, Blue, Red and Yellow (200), a pavilion demarcated by glass walls tinted by transparent coloured films and filled with fog; and Jamaïcan’s Colors for Melle Léone (2003) (fig. 3.2), four rooms composed of natural light, coloured filters, and fog. Entering the room, standing still because of his or her inability to see through the cloud-like mass and, then, progressively circulating in the mutable coloured clouds, the visitor experiences blindness, space disorientation, and architectural dematerialization. As the perception of architecture is fluidified, the fog persists in preventing any clearly delimited representation of the environment. Such experiences, as observed by cultural theorist Mieke Bal, make the spectator conscious of how much perception is both an embodiment and a

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temporality.²⁵ Blinded or dazzled, forced to abandon him- or herself to slow perception, immersed in coloured vapour and buffered sound, the visitor’s perceptual activity – its destabilization, temporality, and adaptability – is pivotal to the work: it is through this activity that colour gains both in materiality and visibility. Significantly, in her refined and very detailed description of her experience of a light-and-fog installation made by Janssens for the Centro Cultural de Bélem in Lisbon in 998, Bal brings in the notion of the event to name the phenomenology at work here: After a while, ever so slowly it seemed – but time was arrested as much as sound – vague lines came through. The event of their coming to visibility was just that: an event, occurring in time. The change in the space consisted of a gradual, partial receding of the absolute opacity of the white that surrounded me and that stuck to my skin, challenging my sense of my own boundaries. Because when this receding took place I became aware of my own dissolution. Thus, the after-effect of the event retrospectively turned the initial experience into an unsettling one, which it had not been until then. Here, another event happened, a deeply narrative one in that it had the retroversive capacity to change the state of what, before, I would have called “my mind” ... The accession to the visibility of the lines was also the emergence through the limitless cloud, of the ceiling, plinths and corners of the room. An emergence barely identifiable; fragile, in permanent danger of annihilation. Only now could I begin to see – helped by the knowledge that it was likely – that I was indeed in a room.²⁶ The event, what Bal refers to as the slow yet never settled “coming to visibility” of a room, is described here as a discontinuity that occurs not out there in the space or in front of me, as something to be observed from a detached position, but both in the spectator’s perception and in the space of the room. The combination of light and fog destabilizes perception; most notably, it delays it in relation to a space that cannot, in real time, be perceived immediately. The event is both subjective and objective. This form of phenomenology, in which visitors become aware of the corporeality, the temporality and spacing, of their percep-

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tion, is precisely what is activated in the work of Scandinavian artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 967). In Seeing Yourself Seeing (200), for example, the installation of a pane of glass to which vertical strips of mirror have been attached at regular intervals so that the pane may both reflect the viewer and make it possible to see through the work, bring in – specifically because of its interval structure, a Duchampian delay in glass – the possibility of seeing oneself in the act of seeing. Closer to Janssens’s mist rooms, Eliasson’s The Weather Project (2003), made for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, consists of a gigantic semicircular sun made of hundreds of yellow mono-frequency lamps – a glowing disk suspended from a mirrored ceiling – inserted in an environment of drifting patches of fog to create a microclimate of a sun in moving clouds. The space was doubled by the mirrors, which not only created the top half of the sun but also enlarged the space vertically, whereas the fog refracted the light in ways that blurred the boundary between the space and its reflection. The mirrored ceiling also allowed viewers to see themselves surrounded by other visitors and, more important, immersed, somewhat dissolved, because of the monumentality of the installation, in the “spectacle” of this fabricated landscape. As pointed out by art historian James Meyer, this phenomenology is clearly different from minimalism and the institutional critique of the 960s, 970s, and 980s. It partakes, as Bal has argued with regard to Janssens’s installations, of an event: Something unexpected happens to spectators of The Weather Project. We lie down – and lose ourselves, become part of, indeed become, the spectacle before us. The phenomenological practices of the ’60s and ’70s, to which Eliasson’s work is sometimes compared, prized an active spectator – one who could “see” and, in seeing, make informed decisions. But The Weather Project delivers a mass audience that cannot fail to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the installation itself: The museum is not so much “revealed” as transformed into a destination, an event.²⁷ What is this event, here, if not, as in Janssens’s work, the transformation of a space into a complex seeing activity – in which participants see each other seeing and whose seeing is all about the sublime experience of being overwhelmed. Representation – the framing of an

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image as distinct, the reference to an outside, the arrest of a view in time – doesn’t occur. Perturbed perception in real time is first and foremost a delay, but it is also, concomitantly, a form of blurring, a loss of reference, an unexhausted duration, a corporeality, and this is what (following Meyer’s description) makes the event possible. It is not by itself the event (space is there in its materiality, shaping the experience as much as my perception of it), but it enables it, privatizes it, seems to prepare and to wait for it (although events can never be anticipated or prepared). These works help us to be more precise about Briand’s work: the emphasis is on perturbed perception not only as a quasievent in itself but also as a condition of the possibility of an event that will be (if it is at all) singular to each spectator. Briand himself speaks of “introspection.” The Wooster Group’s Hamlet

To reiterate the hypothesis I have been examining here: not only is perceived and perceptual delay an expansion of real time experience but it seems, indeed, to be tied to the desire to create events, insofar as we understand events as a form of unpredictable and unanticipated change or discontinuity. This aesthetics of delay must be seen as contributing to a regime of historicity that privileges the present but only if it is constitutive of a form of lagging, only if it is not presented or represented. So a pivotal question remains: how deeply significant is ar art’s reiterated insistence on event-ness? In other words, how does it partake of a regime of historicity based on the valorization of the present, of immediacy? The Wooster Group’s Hamlet (2006–07) (fig. 3.3), because of its archaeological dimension, brings us to these queries by disclosing how the aesthetics of perceptual delay is not only a strategy to extend immediacy within immediacy but also a specific deployment of the relationship between past, present, and future. It shows delay in its historical ramifications, as inherent to today’s sense of futurity. Directed by Elizabeth Lecompte, the play is a delay of delays that “augments” Shakespeare’s Hamlet not merely by overlaying different video, film, and on-stage interpretations of the play but also by deploying a continuous interaction between the stage actors and the filmic interpretation, structured by constant slits. The interaction is one in which

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Fig. 13.3

Hamlet, The Wooster Group. Pictured: Scott Shephered. © Paula Court.

actors in the actual play perform their roles by mimicking the actors on film, but through a mimicking that entails minute delays in their gestures in relation to the film. To be more precise, real time enables the deployment of identities defined as imitation processes that repeatedly fail – and here I refer to Judith Butler’s conception of identity as a reiterated imitation of social categories by which the subject always affirms his or her subjectivity by imitating an ideal (insofar as the latter is what can never be reached).²⁸ In this way, the actors embody Hamlet’s own psychological state – doubt, hesitation, the inability to decide whether one will or will not revenge the assassinated father, decision as delay. By extension, as I hope to show, the interactions inscribe lagging into a regime of historicity. In this regime, real time is the temporal reference from which to conceive the co-articulation of the past, the present, and the future. And yet, the grip of immediacy is somewhat relaxed to make room for a future as the delayed perspective from which the present event might be acknowledged as having occurred or having not occurred. To be blunt: the significance of event-ness lies in the fact that

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it exists (and perhaps only exists, if one is to follow Alain Badiou) in delay. This is Hamlet’s drama. The stage has, as its back wall, a giant screen projecting a specific theatrofilm: the filmed Broadway performance of Richard Burton’s portrayal of Hamlet. Produced through the technique of Electrovision – a technology invented in the late 960s to facilitate the shooting and recording of live performances from multiple camera angles (here seventeen) according to the logic of the “instant movie” – it was directed by John Gielgud in 964 and retransmitted for only a few days in two thousand cinemas throughout the United States. The Wooster Group reconstructed Hamlet from fragments of the film, proceeded archaeologically to reconstitute the play from a film conceived as a ruin – not only as an aged version but also as a digitally re-edited one from which sections have been erased and jump cuts intensified, and whose verse lines, spoken freely in the 964 play, are now delivered according to the original poetic metre. The film is also submitted to live editing, notably fast forwarding processes. Hamlet (played by Scott Shepherd) first enters the stage, gradually followed by the other players, in near-perfect synchronization with their film double – not only with the movements of the actors but also with the technical movements of the film (i.e., jump cuts, acceleration, erasure), which are made manifest by bodily hiccups in the real actors. Equipped with earphones and microphones, sometimes addressing themselves directly to the control room, regularly surveying the control monitor located on the side of the stage, they act, or, more precisely, embody what they attempt to imitate. They will even, at one point, speak the recorded voices of the film actors. What this film/stage/video overlaying enables is a continual “live” confrontation between past and present, in which past and present not only exist in relation to each other but also affect each other’s meaning, to become increasingly blurred as they both enter a process of decline and corrosion. The 964 version sets in but undergoes an increasing process of deterioration due to a panoply of editing processes: parts of it are simply un-rendered; these are shortly replaced by other filmic archives, only to have the theatrofilm resurface again more damaged than before; this is continuously juxtaposed to the real time video recording of the play and to the live performance of actors who keep sending us back to the giant screen in their reiterated failed mimicking;

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finally, as affairs degenerate in the kingdom of Denmark, the film in its materiality appears “to be eaten up by rot.”²⁹ In other words, the overlay speaks of decline and the mutations of subjects and civilizations in relation to each other, whose other layer – the audience, the city outside of the theatre, the here-and-now, the future – is America itself. It discloses how Hamlet’s doubt, his growing desire for revenge, and his murders of Polonius, Ophelia, Gertrude, and Laertes (involuntary or indirect, fundamentally unpredictable in contrast to the killing of Claudius) are events precisely because of their surprise quality, their unexpectedness, to be acknowledged afterwards, in the delay of time. The originality of this ar play lies in its thinking of event-ness as a delay process in the historical sense: the past and the present are deployed as catastrophic and death-ridden, but the future from which the event-ness of intertwined murders is affirmed deploys itself as a temporality that is not necessarily condemned to the repetition of that past. Its creativity lies in its deferment qualities, in its deferment of immediate present-ness. In his study of the intimate link between perception, event, and time, philosopher Krzysztof Pomian has shown that each discreet unity of lived time “correspond[s] to a change perceived by the spectator in his surroundings ... a discontinuity in relation to the moment immediately preceding it, the result of the appearance and disappearance of something or the rearrangement of surrounding elements, in short the emergence of a new figure that detaches itself from the ground of the déjà-vu.”³⁰ In short, an event consists of the unique change that the spectator perceives in his or her environment. It is not that it presupposes a spectator (its existence is not merely subjective) but that, to be perceived, a change must be perceptible, it must be “produced in a space open to sight, inside a horizon, and in a slice of time coextensive to the presence of the spectator.”³¹ It is precisely because of this dependency on a perception that is always, by definition, incomplete (perception is selective, the whole of an environment can never be fully perceived) that history – as a discipline – has been gradually transformed, in modernity, into a social science. In its attempt to establish methodologies that would allow the historian to identify the invisible forces that structure events, the French school of the Annales has been key to this discarding of the event from history and to the related devaluation of perception. Especially in the work of Ernest Labrousse, if events are to

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be considered it is not in their uniqueness but as elements of a series that “reveal the conjectural variations of the relations between social classes whose conflict remains constant in the studied period.”³² The past ceases to be described narratively as though it were perceived. The historian moves from the visible towards the invisible forces that determine them: the history of an event needs another one to give meaning to the first. Fernand Braudel’s longue durée, most significantly, discloses the invariance in which the event ceases to be a perceived change in an environment but the communality of which can be attached to other events in a structure that will only become a discontinuity if it makes room for a new structure in a moment called revolution.³³ Significant to our discussion, however, is the fact that some contemporary historians have articulated a certain return not to eventful history but, rather, to events as “revealers of realities otherwise inaccessible.”³⁴ This entails a revaluation of perception. This particular revaluation has become quite manifest in the philosophical work of Mark Hansen. In his pivotal study, New Philosophy for New Media (2002), in which he addresses the question of the “new” in relation to media – what makes new media new? – Hansen posits that the revolutionary impact of digitization lies in its production of images that break with the tradition of the image “as a fixed and objective viewpoint on ‘reality’ – whether it be theorized as frame, window, or mirror –” to adopt the crucial function of an interface, whose content, due to its “almost complete flexibility and addressibility, its numerical basis, and its constitutive ‘virtuality,’”³⁵ ceases to be materially linked with the frame. The self-differing condition of media implies that the digital image does not pre-exist as an independent reality in relation to the spectator but, rather, becomes a process that is “irreducibly bound up with the activity of the body,” a body that in fact gives form to and frames information to create images that, in turn, activate an affective supplement to the act of perceiving images.³⁶ Relevant to our discussion on how some artistic explorations of ar proceed to delay the perception of real time within real time situations, not only as a mechanism of expansion of immediacy but also as a modality by which expansion might open to an unpredictable event, Hansen posits that, in certain new media artworks, the “now” of perception is expanded by the preperceptual (namely, affectivity) as the body invests and in-forms the

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media image. This chance enlargement relies completely on affectivity, which, once solicited by the media image, allows the body “to experience itself as ‘more than itself’ and thus to deploy its sensorimotor power to create the unpredictable, the experimental, the new.”³⁷ Hansen’s insight into new media’s ability to expand the problematic instant of contemporary computing technologies is right, but his devaluation of perception, which is concomitant with his celebration of affectivity as a modality of temporal newness, is highly problematic, for at least three reasons. First, his approach leans so heavily on the creativity of the proto/preperceptual body that it remains blind to the actual transactions that mobilize the intermediation at play in the examined artworks. As literary theorist Katherine Hayles has already convincingly pointed out, intermediation, the “complex transactions” between bodies and images, between different forms of media, between “systems of representations, particularly language and code, as well as ... between modes of representation, particularly analog and digital,” means that creativity cannot merely emerge from the body, even if the latter is believed to find its correlate in the media image.³⁸ Second, in the current field of cognitive science and neuroscience, a variety of interconnected mental processes are now believed to bring about our construction of temporal experience. As pointed out by William Friedman, it is this interconnectedness that allows us “to step outside the ‘now,’ the endless succession of stimuli, and to build elaborate models of time, of the fluctuations of nature, the past, the present, and future, near time and far time, even the fictitious time of novels and plays.”³⁹ Interconnectedness – affirmed by the connectionist method of modelling cognitive abilities, which emphasizes the close relationship, indeed the anatomical connectivity, interactivity, interdependence, multidirectionality, feedback, and neural networking of mental processing – is fundamental in that it makes it impossible to separate creative processes from habitual processes. In short, it may in fact not make sense “to consider a single computation or algorithm in isolation [as Hansen does when he establishes the priority of affectivity over perception] because computations are carried out by systems of interacting subsystems.”⁴⁰ Finally, and this is where the limits of his approach help to identify the need to further our understanding of the event in real time

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situatedness, Hansen’s discussion leaves out the whole question of the temporal modalities by which the new can indeed be acknowledged as the new, the event as an event. For the new – the enlarged now – never simply emerges as new; as is made manifest by the film/video/stage/ audience delayed overlay of the Wooster Group’s Hamlet, it is only known to be an event in time, in history, in the future. As such, it is inseparable from delay. To begin to understand this inseparability, one must be attentive to two other philosophers whose work has also proceeded to revalue the relation between time and perception in relation to the advent of the event. I am speaking here of the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou. In the words of Nancy, event-ness takes its importance from the fact that it “can only be a matter of surprise, can only take thinking by surprise ... The event surprises or else it is not an event.”⁴¹ In other words, the event can only be something that happens unexpectedly, without anticipation, without waiting, a present without presence, coming about as it happens: It can also be formulated like this: what is awaited is never the event; it is the advent, the result; it is what happens. At the end of nine months, one expects the birth, but that it takes place is what is structurally unexpected in this waiting. Or more precisely, the un-awaited – and the unawaitable – is not “the fact that” this takes place ... It is not “the fact that”; it is the that itself of the “that it happens” or “that there is.” Or even better, it is the “it happens” as distinct from all that precedes it and from everything according to which it is codetermined. It is the pure present of “it happens” – and the surprise has to do with the present as such, in the presence of the present insofar as it happens.⁴² The event is thus what moves away from caused time, represented time, and time as succession, as it leads also to a specific conception of the future in its relation to the present: it is time “as such,” as the unexpected arrival, the “interruption of the process,” a unique spacing of time, what ar architect Christian Moeller has named “an interesting surprise.”⁴³ Alain Badiou, in Being and Event and Logiques des mondes, pushes this reflection on the temporal nature of the event by postulat-

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ing that the latter – which he sees as occurring in the realms of politics, science, love, and art – only gets its confirmation later in time. When something completely new comes about, it is a group’s loyalty to and belief in the event after it has occurred that establishes the reality of that event together with its paradigm-breaking change effect.⁴⁴ In light of these specifications, the ar artworks I have been examining here can be seen as contributing to the renewed interest in the event as a specific moulder of history, in which futurity is not detachable from delayed perception in real time, a renewal that manifests itself in the strong revalorization of perception. Favouring augmented perception, one that is submitted to destabilization more than to the critical disclosure of the ideology structuring events, as was the case with the key aesthetic explorations of the 960s, 970s, and 980s (namely, in minimalism, conceptual art, performance and video art), they propel perception both as an event and as the condition of the possibility of events. Real time delay, however, as made palpable in the work of the Wooster Group, is more than the potentiality of event-ness. Indeed, it says something about our epoch’s co-articulation of past, present, and future. Contrary to Hartog’s claim, the future might not simply be an anticipated catastrophism that keeps bringing us back to the immanence of the present but, rather, the very temporal standpoint from which events are confirmed or infirmed, making possible – while never guaranteeing – a different future. A futurity is at work here, certainly not modernity’s deployment of the future as progress, but one that is valued mostly as a lagging operation from which to look back and continue, a perceptual delay mechanism explored, as it is, in real time. Notes  Ronald Azuma, Yohan Baillot, Reinhold Behringer, Steven Feiner, Simon Julier, and Blair MacIntyre, “Recent Advances in Augmented Reality,” ieee Computer Graphics and Applications, 2, 6 (200): 34–47, http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/cga200. 2 For a detailed description of ar applications, especially in the field of surgery, see J.P. Mellor, Enhanced Reality Visualization in a Surgical Environment, ai Technical Report no. 544, mit (January 995). 3 www.conferzone.com/resources/glossaryqr.html.

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4 Thomas Y. Levin, “Rhetoric of Temporal Index,” ctrl [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Karlsruhe, Germany, and Cambridge, ma : zkm and mit Press, 2002), 592. 5 Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29, 4 (2003): 708. 6 Ronald Azuma, http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/azuma_ar.html. 7 Jim Vallino, http://www.se.rit.edu/~jrv/research/ar/. 8 Azuma, http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/azuma_ar.html. 9 Ibid. 0 Ibid.  Jim Vallino, http://www.se.rit.edu/~jrv/research/ar/. 2 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 999). 3 N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 7. 4 Mark B.N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 2004), 8. 5 Interview between Matt Adams and the author, 5 November 2006. 6 Christian Moeller, “Introduction,” in A Time and Place: Christian Moeller, Media Architecture, 99–2003 (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2004), n.p. 7 Paul Virilio, L’espace critique (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 984), 37 (my translation). 8 Gregory Volk, “Back to the Bosphorous,” Art in America 90, 3 (2002): 45. 9 Mathieu Briand, in Evelyne Jouanno, “Mathieu Briand: Hacking Contemporary Reality,” trans. Rosemary McKisack, Flash Art 37, 238 (2004): 5. 20 Shana Nys Dambrot, “Mathieu Briand: ubїq : A Mental Odyssey, Redcat,” Modern Painters 66 (July/August 2006): . 2 Daniel C. Dennett, “Seeing Is Believing – Or Is It?” in Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the Philosophy of Perception, ed. Alva Noë and Evan Thompson (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 2002), 483. 22 Edward E. Smith and Stephen M. Kosslyn, Cognitive Psychology: Mind and Brain (Upper Saddle River, nj : Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), 50. 23 Briand, in Jouanno, “Mathieu Briand,” 6. 24 Ibid., 5–6. 25 Mieke Bal, “Ann Veronica Janssens, Light in Life’s Lab,” in Ann Veronica Janssens: A Different Image in Each Eye (Brussels: La Lettre Volée/Espace 25 Nord/Laurent Jacob, 999), 89–02.

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26 Ibid., 89–90. 27 James Meyer, “No More Scale: The Experience of Size in Contemporary Sculpture,” Artforum 42, 0 (2004): 222. 28 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 990), 40. Gendered identity “requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established.” 29 Maïa Bouteillet, “Le Wooster Group met Shakespeare en boucle,” Libération.fr, November 2006, http://www.liberation.fr/culture/2655.fr.php (my translation). 30 Krzysztof Pomian, L’ordre du temps (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 984), 7. All quotations my translation. 3 Ibid., 8. 32 Ibid., 5. 33 Ibid., 33. 34 Ibid., 35. See, for example, E. Le Roy Ladurie, Le carnaval de Romans (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 979); and Zemon Davis, Natalie Zemon Davis, JeanClaude Carrière, and Daniel Vigne, Le retour de Martin Guerre (Paris: Laffont, 982). 35 Hansen, New Philosophy, 8. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid, 7. 38 Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, 7 and 33. 39 William Friedman, About Time: Inventing the Fourth Dimension (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 990), 7. 40 Kevin N. Ochsner and Stephen M. Kosslyn, “The Cognitive Neuroscience Approach,” in Cognitive Science, ed. Benjamin Martin Bly and David E. Rumelhart (London: Academic Press, 999), 324. 4 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Surprise of the Event,” in Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press, 2000), 65–7. 42 Ibid., 67. 43 Ibid., 72. For Christian Moeller, see note 2. 44 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum International, 2006); and Badiou, L’être et l’événement, tome 2, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006).

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part six The Generating Image

Introduction

Part 6 concentrates on the generating function of the image – its ability to form the self, its genetic representation of the self, and the performative use of the metaphor in scientific descriptions of the genetic code. The visualities set into play here fundamentally break with the mimetic functioning of art to rethink the power of the image in the context of the modern development of genetics and molecular biology. The first chapter, Éric Michaud’s “The Descent of the Image,” proposes a transhistorical reading of the generating/generative function of the image – the manipulation of iconic signs to modify human descent through the reproduction of an ideal – to show how it has been, at least in its Western development, a long propaedeutics to contemporary genetic manipulations. This history finds its apotheosis in the beginnings of Nazi racial medicine, where art is endowed with the task of transmitting the (neoclassical) ideal to an entire people, a practice that has its origin in the story of Genesis, in which Jacob’s ewes were reported to have conceived according to the images to which they had been exposed – a metaphor for the founding of the Jewish people. In this history, the traditional gendering of the aesthetic experience as relating a male viewer (as bearer of the look) to images of women (as objects of the look) is radically reversed: it is through the woman’s gaze that the generating faculties of the image can come into effect.

Hélène Samson’s “Resemblance and Identification” picks up the image at the contemporary end of Michaud’s spectrum: for now it is the photographic image of the genetic traces of the artist that is presented to the viewer under the form of an unrecognizable self-portrait. In Gary Schneider’s Genetic Self-Portrait (997-98), the viewer is now confronted with a self-portrait whose resemblance function is evidently dead and whose generating dimension is manifest yet illegible for most spectators. Composed of black-and-white photographs of microscopic views of bodily specimens made in collaboration with scientists who prepared the specimens of chromosomes, genes, and cellular structures out of blood and skin samples taken from the body of the artist, Schneider’s Genetic Self-Portrait is examined by Samson as a site of the questioning of self-portraiture. Closing the anthology, Thierry Bardini’s chapter addresses the genetic code as an image but departs from the realm of art to discuss its performativity in the science of molecular biology. Approaching the central notion of “genetic code” from a semiotic perspective, he investigates the use of this notion as a metaphor – a figure of speech, an image, as it where, in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity – in science. His main claim is that metaphors must be understood and approached in their performativity and not simply applauded or disavowed, perceived as carriers of truth or non-scientific falsity. So the main questions become: What does the metaphor “genetic code” do in scientific discourse? How is it an operational fiction? Its impact is huge for it is on the basis of this metaphor that most of the dna basic sequence has been labelled “junk dna .” The precarious visuality conveyed by this specific metaphor lies precisely in the predominant distrust that scientists have of their own uses of metaphors and in Bardini’s questioning of the unequivocal understanding of what constitutes dna as a coding system.

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14 The Descent of the Image éric michaud Translated from the French by Nils F. Schott and Eduardo Ralickas

What role do painted or sculpted images play in human reproduction? Put this way, the question seems to be concerned more with the history of embryology and reproduction than with the history of art. Yet such an interrogation appears central to Western art and its history if we take into consideration the extent to which theories of art, from the Hellenistic period up to the nineteenth century, have accorded importance to the notion of an “ideal of beauty” capable of guiding the human species to its total perfection – towards its “physical and moral perfection,” as the men of the eighteenth century would have said. In this way the fabrication of images, by which the West has never ceased to redefine its own humanity, has constituted the most remarkable of propaedeutics to modern biotechnology. I began to formulate this hypothesis while I was working on National Socialism, no doubt because that regime offers the historian a unique and captivating example. In particular, I am referring here to two attempts, made simultaneously by the Nazis, to transform the German people both in its genetic memory, by way of a massive application of artificial insemination, and in its nervous memory, by way of the fabrication of images picturing an “ideal Germanic body.” In one case as well as in the other, it was the body that was targeted – be it directly in its flesh or indirectly through its image. For a dozen years, during which the Nazis’ racial medicine was still inoperative insofar as the biogenetic fabrication of “the new man” was concerned, it was, in fact, art that was in charge of gaining a hold on the German people in its

entirety precisely through the mediation of its imaginary, according to a very old breeding technique, already mentioned in Genesis, to which I will return below. Some caricatures from the nineteenth century elucidate my point. That century delighted in ridiculing the oldest of popular beliefs on procreation; but, at the same time, the laws of heredity were still subject to the most fantastic speculations in scientific theory. The first of these images is a caricature by Cham published in Le Charivari on 6 April 877. It shows a guard pushing back a woman and dissuading her from visiting the Impressionists’ exhibition. The caption reads: “Madame! that wouldn’t be prudent! You’d better leave [Retirez-vous!]” This caricature accompanied the review of the Impressionists’ exhibition penned by critic Louis Leroy, who fortunately made its meaning more explicit. He condemned Cézanne for his “too exclusive love of yellow [jaune]” and warned the public: “If you visit the exhibition with a woman in a certain condition, quickly pass by Monsieur Cézanne’s portrait of a man; that head the colour of inside-out boots, of so strange an aspect, could impress (itself on) her too vividly and cause jaundice [fièvre jaune] in her fruit before its entry into this world.”¹ A quick search among those of Cézanne’s paintings that were exhibited in 877 leads to the portrait of Victor Chocquet Seated (876–77), whose yellow colour corresponds rather well to its qualification by Leroy. The term “to impress” (impressionner) used by Leroy was surely motivated by the word “Impressionism,” which he had coined three years earlier; the latter had finally been generally adopted to designate what others had more simply named “the new painting.” But this term also invoked the popular belief in the power of “maternal impressions” over the foetus; in this case, it denoted the production of children who physically resembled strong visual impressions to which the mother had been exposed during pregnancy. And, finally, for the reader who recalled Leroy’s famous 874 article dedicated to the first exhibition of the Impressionists, this term could also evoke the idea of a defeat in the normal process of artistic creation – that is, both the failure and the unfinished state of the work conceived. Standing in front of one of Monet’s paintings, Impression. Sunrise [Impression. Soleil levant], an academic painter (Leroy’s imaginary companion during his visit to the exhibition) exclaims: “Impression, why, of course. I also thought that,

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since I am impressed, there must be some impression therein ... and what liberty, what ease in the facture! Wallpaper in its embryonic state is still more complete [plus fait] than that seascape!”² Yet, in 877, Leroy reached a turning point in the employment of the metaphor: from the effects of a regression forced onto the beholder by Monet’s painting, which he compared to “wallpaper in its embryonic state,” he moved to the probable effects a painting by Cézanne might have – not at all on the unfortunate female visitor but on the embryo or foetus she carried. Put differently, by using the organic metaphor, this 877 caricature and text displace the burden of the faithful imitation of the visible from the artist to the beholder. Indeed, the task of imitation no longer pertains to the painter who was deemed to be utterly incapable of imitation but, rather, to the (female) beholder, who has already, by nature, taken on a reproductive role. The metaphor thus sketches the conjunction of two distinct regimes of reproduction: the former is purely organic, natural, and regular; while the latter, pertaining to art, or techne, superimposes itself on the former, whose regularity it thereby alters. Here, the mother’s impregnation by means of the painting overlays, as it were, her natural pregnancy (caused with the aid of the biological father); the result of such a state of affairs runs the risk of generating, if not literally a monster, then at least a singular being marked by the yellow seal of the painting. The picture, in transmitting the painter’s anomaly, promotes him to the rank of spiritual father. The relation of resemblance thus displaces itself. Corrupted profoundly as it was by the imagination of the painter who imposed himself between the model and the canvas, this relation resurges – but this time intact – between the painting and the child to come, thanks to the imaginative power with which common opinion had always credited pregnant women. In the end, if, in such an ideological apparatus, the artist threatened the regular order of biological reproduction, then it was because his imagination obstructed the pure transmission of the Same by endowing his “fruit” – the work – with the likeness (ressemblance) of his all too singular passion for yellow. Furthermore, while tradition attributed the generation of monsters to the imaginative power of pregnant women, the woman in question here appears, on the contrary, as sin-

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gularly deprived of an “imagination” of her own since she is believed to reproduce, without any alteration, the colour that had “impressed” her and impressed itself upon her. A few years earlier, Zola called this famous imagination “temperament”; Baudelaire, before him, had referred to it as “the queen of the faculties.” To this “temperament,” which, for him, signalled the singularity of a painting, Zola opposed automatically produced images: “If temperament did not exist, all paintings would necessarily have to be simple photographs.”³ Approached this way, it seems that, by a very curious ruse of reason, Leroy thinks the woman’s reproductive activity against tradition, as an activity of the photographic sort, devoid of art because devoid of imagination. And it was therefore both with and without surprise that I recently discovered, in the Journal of the American Medical Association from the 890s, the debates American medical scholars were engaged in concerning what they called “the photographic effect.” By this term, they designated the resemblance between a child and the object seen by its mother during pregnancy, thereby comparing the mother’s womb to the photographer’s darkroom, and the coming child to a print. As far as Cham’s caricature is concerned, it did indeed have some antecedents in the nineteenth century, but those did not have artistic images intervene in the hereditary transmission of singular traits. The great uncertainty that governed scientific theories of procreation, often hardly distinct from popular beliefs, was equally ridiculed in England. In 832, the London publisher Lewis Marks engraved an anonymous print entitled A Chip of the Old Block, which depicts the hereditary transmission of a wooden leg. A midwife presents a new-born to a father, who is obviously thrilled to recognize the incontestable sign of his paternity. The caption reads: “My gracious! here’s a likeness, – why it’s Daddy all over, bless its little soul.” Four years later, Honoré Daumier submitted to the Charivari (8 November 836) a caricature founded on theories of impregnation by sight: “Honey, honey! [Bobonne, bobonne!] you might beget me a monster like that, so don’t look at it so much!” A misshapen dwarf, who is already the father of a little monster in his image, pulls on his wife’s cuff in order to turn her attention away from a superb orangutan. The belief that natural images could perturb the process of biological conception was very old indeed. In the first book

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Fig. 14.1

Guiard des

Moulins, Jacob accroissant son troupeau, Bible historiale, France, Paris,

xv e siècle, fol. 32v, bnf Richelieu, Manuscrits Français 9.

of his Gynaecology, the physician Soranus of Ephesus, for example, insisted, as early as the first century ad : “What is one to say concerning the fact that various states of the soul also produce certain changes in the mould of the fetus? For instance, some women, seeing monkeys during intercourse, have borne children resembling monkeys.”⁴ Based on such findings, I sought to establish the genealogy of these representations and beliefs. I was very quickly led to the original proof underpinning almost all of the later versions of this generation myth: namely, the narrative in Genesis that recounts how the patriarch Jacob formed his flock of ewes. But this story is actually told twice in very different ways, different to the point that the version given in chapter 30 of Genesis (v. 25–43) has often seemed incompatible with the one that immediately follows it (at Genesis 3:–3), such that numerous Jewish and Christian interpretations of this story felt justified in retaining only one or the other. The narrative is as follows: Jacob has been in the service of Laban, his maternal uncle, for fourteen years. First, he has served him for seven years in order to marry Rachel, his youngest daughter, but Laban cheats him by giving him Leah, his oldest daughter. Jacob thus has to work for

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seven more years in order to marry the one he loves.⁵ After Rachel has given birth to Joseph, Jacob wanted to return to Canaan, the land of his fathers. At this point, Laban pretends to reward Jacob, who had so skilfully increased Laban’s wealth: “name any wages you want from me,” Laban says to Jacob, “and I will pay.” But Jacob, who hopes finally to work for his own “household,” responds: You need not pay me anything outright. If you do this one thing for me, I will again pasture and tend your flock: Go through your entire flock today and remove from it every animal among the sheep that is dark-colored, and every one among the goats that is spotted or speckled; they alone shall be my wages. And next time, when you check these wages, let your own view of my honesty be used as an argument against me: any goat in my possession that is not speckled or spotted, or any sheep that is not dark-colored, got there by theft!⁶ The proposed deal seems to be to Laban’s clear advantage: in Mesopotamia as in Palestine, flocks of small livestock were usually made up of white sheep and black or brown goats, all other colours being quite rare. Thus, Laban promptly accepts: “Very well ... let it be as you say.” Whereupon Laban immediately sets aside the black and spotted lambs, as well as the spotted goats, and gives them over to his sons, who put a three days’ journey on foot between these and the rest of the flock, which was being tended by Jacob. It is at this point in the story that Jacob’s artifice comes in to play: Jacob then got fresh shoots of poplar, and of almond and plane, and peeled white stripes in them, laying bare the white of the shoots. The rods that he had peeled he set up in front of the flocks in troughs – the water receptacles that the flocks came to drink from. Since they mated as they came to drink, the goats mated thus by the rods, and so the goats brought forth streaked, speckled, and spotted young. The ewes, on the other hand, Jacob kept apart and made these animals face the streaked and the fully dark-colored animals of Laban. Thus he produced special flocks for himself, which he did not put with Laban’s flocks. Moreover,

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when the sturdier animals were mating, Jacob would place the rods in the troughs in full view of the animals, so that they mated by the rods; but with the feebler animals he would not place them there. And so the feeble ones went to Laban and the sturdy ones to Jacob. Thus the man grew exceedingly prosperous, and came to own large flocks, maidservants and manservants, camels and asses.⁷ The device employed by Jacob to constitute his flock is thus composed of three sequences, each of which nonetheless puts to work the same principle concerning the transmission to the foetus of the mother’s visual impressions. The first sequence (v. 37–9) describes a rather straightforward optico-biological apparatus: Jacob partially strips the bark off the branches of three different trees and places the resulting “spotted” rods in the watering troughs where the ewes with solidcoloured coats come to drink when they are in heat. At the moment in which they are mounted by the males, these ewes can thus glimpse, on the surface of the water, the reflection of the rams that mount them, who are also solid-coloured. However, the rams’ specular image is modified by the “spotted” branches placed in the water. In this way, the ewes, perceiving the image of “spotted” rams at the instant of conception, give birth to spotted lambs. I borrow the unambiguous exegesis of these verses, which one could almost call “technical” rather than literal, not from rabbinic literature but from the Hebrew Questions on Genesis penned by Jerome in the fourth century. In a second sequence (v. 40), which often appears obscure, Jacob uses the “spotted” lambs thus obtained much in the way that he had used the branches in the first sequence. He brings the animals together and places them at the head of the flock: the sight of these spotted animals acts on those at the back of the herd like the branches had acted on the drinking ewes in the first sequence. Mediaeval illustrations of this narrative usually draw on the first two sequences, which they superimpose by placing the variegated sticks not in, but in front of, the troughs, as does, for example, the fifteenth-century illuminator of the Bible historiale de Guiard des Moulins.⁸ The third sequence (v. 4–2) describes the way in which Jacob uses this technique only at certain times of the year since the stronger ewes

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are said to be in heat in the summer, while the weaker ones are in heat in the autumn. By making use of the first procedure only during the summer, he obtains strong, spotted animals; thus, only the weak, solidcoloured ones will be returned to Laban.⁹ But immediately after the precise presentation of these breeding techniques (deriving from the sphere of human know-how and ingenuity), the ensuing chapter of Genesis, which informs the reader of Laban’s bad faith, gives a completely different – this time properly miraculous – version of how Jacob’s flock was formed: So Jacob sent for Rachel and Leah to meet him in the field where his flock was and he said to them, “I have noticed that your father’s manner toward me is not the same as in the past; but the God of my father had been with me. You know that I have put all my effort into serving your father. Yet your father has cheated me, and has changed my wages time and again. But God would not allow him to do me harm. If he should state, ‘Speckled animals shall be your wages,’ then the whole flock would drop speckled ones; and if he should announce, ‘Streaked animals shall be your wages,’ then the whole flock would drop streaked ones. Thus has God reclaimed your father’s livestock and given it to me. Once, at the mating time of the flocks, I suddenly saw in a dream that the he-goats in the flock, as they mated, were streaked, speckled, and mottled. And in the dream an angel of God called to me, ‘Jacob!’ ‘At once!’ I answered. He said, ‘Note well that all the he-goats in the flock, as they mate, are streaked, speckled, and mottled – for I too have noted all the things that Laban has been doing to you, I the God who appeared to you in Bethel, where you anointed a stele and made a vow to me. Up, then, leave this land and return to the land of your birth.’”¹⁰ The dream or vision about which Jacob now tells his two wives most certainly enters into tension with the narrative of Genesis 30: did Jacob form his flock by means of his own manipulation or thanks to the benevolent intervention of the Lord? Did he simply channel natural powers with the aid of magical techniques, or is the conception of spotted animals of divine, supernatural, miraculous origin?

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Jacob’s remarkable optico-biological apparatus presented in Genesis 30 certainly recalls the breeding techniques used at the time throughout the Mediterranean basin. But it is surprising that so many nineteenthcentury German scholarly exegetes could still attest that such practices were being employed by their contemporaries. How does one explain that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the very learned S.R. Driver, professor at Oxford, affirms that “the physiological principle implied [in Jacob’s device] is well-established.”¹¹ There is, no doubt, a profound reason for the permanence of this universal, immemorial, and vital belief. The myth of procreation according to the image is among those myths that afford the possibility of an intervention – be it human or divine – in the chain of generation to be left intact. In this way, the future can remain open or undetermined – a necessary condition for the exercise of liberty. Are the spotted animals a natural fruit, though modified by Jacob’s knowledge, as Genesis 30 affirms, or are they the miraculous fruit of a divine intervention, as Genesis 3 claims? Some recent Torah research¹² points to the fact that the five books in question are not the constantly reworked sum of successive documents written between Salomon’s reign in the tenth century bc and the beginning of the period of exile in the sixth century bc but, rather, the result of a much later compromise¹³ between multiple oral traditions and theological options. In the period of crisis that follows the fall of Jerusalem and the beginning of exile, the decision to constitute a written “Law,” an “Instruction” (Torah) that would be common to all despite the dispersion of exile, would thus have necessitated a much more synchronic composition of the books from the sixth century bc onwards; it would have required as well the insertion of commentaries that would have allowed the achievement of, if not a coherent text, then at least a “harmonization” of multiple sources. Thus, we ought to read the two successive versions of the story of Jacob’s ewes as complementary and not as conflicting, much in the same way as the conflicting contents of a dream must be interpreted, according to Freud, not in the exclusive mode of an either/or but in the conjunctive mode of a both/and: Jacob’s ewes are both of natural and divine origin. But if this double narrative is of any real importance, it is of course due to the conflicting interpretations that, in the Jewish as

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Fig. 14.2

Vincentius

Bellovacensis, Jacob accroissant son troupeau, Speculum historiale (translation Jean de Vignay), France, Paris, xv e siècle, fol. 47, bnf Richelieu, Manuscrits Français 50.

well as in the Christian tradition, inflect its signification in one direction or another. Beyond any question pertaining to breeding techniques or zootechnics, this story very soon becomes the crux of debates with respect to the nature and process of human procreation, which debates are in each instance shadowed by “national” and religious conflicts. Because the moment at which Jacob, father of Israel’s twelve tribes, forms his flock immediately follows the birth of Joseph, and because God shortly thereafter changes Jacob’s name to Israel (Genesis 32:28), all the rabbinic commentaries identify the conception and birth of Jacob’s ewes with the foundation of his own “household,” that is to say, with nothing less than the foundation of Israel. The separation of the ewes from Laban’s flock, together with and at the same time as the separation of the two women, establishes Jacob’s house. There is more: she whom Jacob loves and who would give him Joseph, his favourite son, does she not bear the name Rachel, meaning ewe in Hebrew? Another fifteenthcentury illumination,¹⁴ Jacob accroissant son troupeau [Jacob Increas-

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ing His Flock] from the Speculum historiale of Vincentius Bellovacensis, shows how much this rapprochement between the conception of ewes drinking the “mirror image” prepared by Jacob (as Jerome puts it) and his own children has been admitted by everyone, Jews and Christians, for a very long time. By way of a remarkable temporal contraction, this illumination shows Jacob surrounded by his two wives Rachel and Leah and their twelve children as they observe the ewes drinking from three troughs at the bottom of which branches from three different trees are placed. Even if the roof and walls of the poor shack do not seem all too solid yet, the enclosure that surrounds them testifies to the fact that “the house of Jacob” already forms a distinct unity. This symbolic interpretation of the story of Jacob as a narrative of foundation is no doubt very old, but it is difficult to date. It was to become the source of very vivid tensions in Midrashic literature: Was Israel born from a ruse and a cheat or from magical practices,¹⁵ later forbidden by Mosaic Law? Did Jacob really cheat Laban or did he have the right to use this device to appropriate for himself a part of Laban’s flock, as Laban’s sons accused him of doing? With respect to the question as to whether one is dealing here with a human device or with a divine miracle, one thing is certain: for the Talmud as well as for the most powerful currents of the Jewish tradition – be they mystical or not – Jacob’s ewes are fertilized by the image of the branches thanks to Jacob’s manipulations and to God’s intervention, simultaneously. In the first century ad , Philo of Alexandria’s allegorical approach to the matter teaches one how to detach the spiritual from the carnal in order to “lead one to perfection.” In his De Somniis, Philo “the Greek” gives a Platonic and religious reading of the narrative by effacing every trace of the biological engendering of Jacob’s ewes in favour of an exclusively spiritual conception, thereby transmuting bodies into signs, and signs into concepts: And having been addressed by name [Jacob] pays attention, endeavouring to note precisely the signs which appeared: and the signs are the couplings and breedings of thoughts [logoi] in the guise of animals; for we read: “He lifted up his eyes and saw the he-goats and the rams mounting upon the sheep and the goats” ... Having therefore opened the hitherto closed eye of the

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understanding, Jacob saw the perfect thoughts [concepts] which correspond to he-goats and rams brought to the sharpest edge both for the diminishing of sins and the increase of all that we ought to do, – saw how they mount the sheep and the goats, that is to say the souls that are still young and tender, just fresh and in the very prime and flower of youth, – saw that they do so, not in the pursuit of irrational pleasure, but using the invisible seed of the doctrines of sound sense.¹⁶ In this splendid allegory, in which the Stoic’s logos spermatikos substitutes itself for yhwh ’s Word, the seminal reasons, or logoi, are the male semen, pure concepts fecundating virgin souls. Yet it is on the basis of this very split between the literal and the figurative sense borrowed from Philo that the first Church Fathers would construct the thesis of the Verus Israel,¹⁷ thereby continuing the work of Paul, which is centred entirely on the distinction between an earthly Israel and an authentic, spiritual Israel beginning with Christ. If, until that moment, the narrative of Jacob’s flock was assimilated by Jewish tradition with the aim of accounting for the foundation of Israel, the story would henceforth serve to figure the foundation of the Church of Christ. Justin Martyr ponders, in the Dialog with Trypho: Who then, Jews or Christians, are the legitimate heirs to the priesthood? “We Christians,” Justin Martyr explains to the stunned Jew Trypho, “we, who have been quarried out from the bowels of Christ, are the true Israelitic race,” because “there are two seeds of Judah, and two races, as there are two houses of Jacob: the one begotten by blood and flesh, the other by faith and the Spirit.”¹⁸ In the writings of the first Greek Fathers, the literal meaning is the biological sense, the only heritage that the Jews may legitimately claim for themselves, attached to the letter as they are to the blood. Here, then, the tension that manifests itself between the two successive narratives of Genesis is brought to its point of rupture: not only do the biological and the spiritual no longer coincide, but they oppose one another in a battle for the priesthood where spirit, incarnate in Christ and his Church, triumphs over the flesh, shut up in the literalism of the Synagogue. The two narratives of the generation of Jacob’s ewes have become the narratives of the generation two rival “peoples” and religions.

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In contradistinction to patristic literature, which usually develops the Paulinian split between the spirit and the flesh in order to legitimate the Church of Christ, the rabbinic commentaries and, later, those of the mystical Kabbala of the Middle Ages, continue to make an effort to reconcile the two versions of the narrative of Jacob without ever wresting away the “biological” from the spiritual, or conception from the concept. The Genesis Rabbah, an important Midrash compiled in the fifth and sixth centuries, which includes numerous ancient Jewish as well as Greek sources, cites, for instance, Rabbi Hoshaya, who, like Origen, taught at Ceasarea in the third century. Genesis Rabbah simply juxtaposes the natural motif of generation and the motif that produces resemblances: “This is what the patriarch Jacob did: He set the rods in the watering-troughs. When an animal came to drink, it saw the rod and started back, and the male copulated with it, after which it bore [young marked] like that rod. Rabbi Hoshaya said: The water turned to semen within them, so that they merely required the image of the young.”¹⁹ This is how the seminal image comes about: without identifying itself with the generative semen of the male, the image is that “liquid mirror” (as Jerome will say), which, once absorbed, becomes semen added to actual semen for the sole purpose of transmitting a relation of resemblance. The similarity between patristic and rabbinic readings is remarkable here: natural generation is divine, while the production of resemblances is the fruit of human activity or industry. In his commentary on Genesis 30, Jerome insists on the ewes’ “twofold desire”: “they were eagerly drinking and being mounted by the male animals” – quenching their thirst at the same time as their sexual desire – so that “they might conceive such kind of offspring they were viewing in the mirror of the waters.”²⁰ Thus, the satisfaction of this twofold desire produces resemblance; it sustains the “accident” of the matter at the same time as procreation takes place. In order for conception to be accomplished in the image of the branches (v. 4: ut in earum contemplatione conciperent), the absorption of the water, which consists in the absorption of the image, must be accompanied, Jerome says, by “the most intense heat of sexual pleasure.” Later, while commenting on v. 39, Jerome specifies further that he translates as “in the very heat of the coitus” (in ipso calore coïtus)²¹ what the Hebrew calls ieamena: “I

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cannot express the force of the Hebrew word except by circumlocution. For ieamena strictly speaking refers to the last moment of passion in sexual intercourse, when the whole body is convulsed and the final moment for pleasure in the deed is near.”²² Conception according to the image thus implies, for Jerome, the passionate absorption of an image that brings about a desire and satisfies it: to drink the mirror of the water is to copulate with the image. Now Rashi, in the eleventh century, largely inflects Rabbi Hoshaya’s statement: “The [female] animal would see the sticks and be startled backwards whereupon the male would couple with her and she would give birth to something similar. R. Hoshaya says: The water [miraculously] became sperm in their wombs and they did not require a male.”²³ The consumption of the water here becomes the absorption of a fully seminal image, which not only transmits resemblance but also substitutes itself for the semen of the male. Such that on Rashi’s reading, Jacob’s device takes on a powerful theurgic character; man’s knowledge of nature collaborates with divine power in the production of a miracle – namely, fecundation without there being a need for the male. The formation of this seminal image in rabbinic literature – an image that sometimes transmits life itself, sometimes only resemblance, and sometimes both – certainly owes much to the constant exchanges of the Jewish world with the medical, philosophical, and literary traditions inherited from the Hellenistic world. And it would no doubt be more accurate to say that the seminal image forms itself at the intersection of the Jewish, Christian, and “pagan” worlds, where the cult of images allegedly capable of spiritually producing the new man develops – images capable, that is, of inseminating the soul of the faithful with the Holy Ghost they contain. While the role played by material images in human procreation becomes ever more prominent, the reference to Jacob’s ewes acquires paradigmatic value in the Jewish as well as in the Christian texts. But what does the narrative of Jacob’s ewes tell us if not that the image is seminal, possesses a power of formation, provided that it functions as an object of desire – the object of much expectation and hope, of a thirst of the body and of the spirit? That is why the one whose attention it is able to capture is always fundamentally female. Such a state of affairs is the exact opposite of a certain doxa in gender studies, accord-

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ing to which the attention directed at images is necessarily inhabited by a masculine, possessive, conquering, and dominating impulse.²⁴ The Zohar states clearly: “[A]s is written: They were in heat when they came to drink ... (Va-yehamnah) [in the feminine] ... But look at what is written: ... (Va-yehemu) [in the masculine], They were in heat[!] However, they are all female.”²⁵ And the Kabbalist Moses Cordovero clarifies the nature of the sexed relation that animates and structures the position of whoever drinks the image even further: “It is true that among the inferior forces [the angels] there are males and females, the former spill out, the latter receive ... but now that they come to drink [thus to receive] they are all female.”²⁶ It is not, in fact, because an image is “desirable” and desired that it acquires a “female” status; this status, on the contrary, is the necessary and sufficient condition for it to be seminal, that is to say, for it to open up in the beholder an availability and an openness to that which comes to pass. The Aethiopica or Theagenes and Caricles, a drama written by Heliodorus in the fourth century and long forgotten, found new favour all across Europe from the end of the sixteenth century onward. In it, we see Persina, wife of Hydaspes and Queen of Ethiopia, explain to her daughter Caricles – daughter, that is, of black parents – the reasons for the whiteness of her skin: The greatest of all our Goddes, are the Sunne, and Bacchus: The noblest nexte to these, are Perseus, Andromeda, and Memnon after them. Those, who have by succession edified, and finished the Kinges palace, have portraited there many thinges that they did, as for the dwelling houses, and Galleries, they have set diverse Images, and noble actes of theirs in them: but all the bedde chambers are garnished with pictures, containinge the love of Perseus, and Andromeda, in one of them. After Hidaspes had bene married to mee tenne yeeres, and wee had never a childe, we happened to rest after dinner in the summer, for that wee were heavy a sleepe, at which time your father had to do with mee, swearing that by a dreame hee was commaunded so to do, and I by and by perceived my selfe with childe. All the time after untill I was delivered, was kepte holy, and sacrifices of thankes giving were offered to the Goddes, for that the king hoped to have one

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nowe to succeede him in his kingdome. But thou werte borne white, which couler is strange amonge the Aethiopians: I knewe the reason, because I looked upon the picture of Andromeda naked, while my husband had to do with me (for then he first brought her from the rocke, had by mishappe ingendered presently a thing like to her).²⁷ And when, later, the king, despite all testimony, continues to doubt his paternity in the face of a daughter so white, an old sage responds to him: “if you desire to bee fully satisfied herein, and be made to beleeve without denial, the picture is at hand, looke up on Andromeda, who is as wel expressed in the maide, as in the picture without any difference.”²⁸ Very few illustrations of this famous novel are known. I have chosen two that Elizabeth McGrath has published.²⁹ One is a painting by Karel van Mander iii , Persina and Hydaspes Embracing, c. 638, Kassel Gemäldegalerie, which depicts, with a certain sense of shame, the moment of Caricles’s conception. While she is being “embraced” by Hydaspes, who is lustfully looking at her, Persina has her eyes fixed on the painting representing the white Andromeda. The carnal act itself is evoked only allusively by the sword that pierces through the white headdress on the left of the painting. The other example is an engraving by Jean Picart illustrating a French translation published in 635, Jean Picart, after Crispin de Passe ii , The Recognition of Caricles, Paris, 635. This time, what is shown is the moment of “Caricles’s recognition” by her father Hydaspes: the old sage, raising his arms to the heavens to make them his witness, finally convinces the king of his paternity by presenting him the painting of Andromeda, the model for his daughter Caricles, seen on the right. These rare of depictions of a device that is mythical, symbolic, and ideological all at the same time manifest in remarkable fashion the impossibility of rendering the mimetic operation itself visible for they either confront the parents with the image, thereby disclosing their ignorance with respect to the mimetic operation that has taken place, or they confront the child with the image that conditions her existence, thereby exhibiting a forced recognition of what has taken place – that is, an uncontrolled mimetology. Put differently, these illustrations either show the “before” or “after” of conception, but they cannot expose the mimetic operation itself because this

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operation is of a “spiritual” nature that cannot be captured, save in the order of language. Within the Hellenistic eugenic tradition, the same shift towards a new position concerning females is to be observed. Galen, for instance, writes that nature, in the act of generation, works like an artist; moreover, he adds that “the sperm is in its kind like an artist, much like Phidias.”³⁰ But this is where the parallel ends, since Galen adds that Praxiteles and Phidias had to resign themselves to forming the outside of matter, incapable as they are of penetrating it, while nature forms, nourishes, and increases matter not only on the outside but also by penetrating it in its totality. But elsewhere Galen relates an anecdote that merges the work of nature with that of art and, in the same movement, considerably upsets Aristotle’s conception of generation, in which “the male provides both the form and the source of movement while the female provides the body, i.e. the matter”:³¹ I have learned from an old narrative that one of the greats of this world, who was not beautiful but wanted to have a beautiful child, had a handsome young man different from himself painted on a wooden board and, when he united himself with his wife, he told her to look at the figure of the painting. She looked intensively and, so to speak, put all of her heart into it; and she brought into this world a baby that did not resemble the one who engendered it, but the painted figure; that is no doubt because her faculty of seeing, by its very nature and not by I don’t know which particles, transmitted the traits of the painted image.³² Though the image actualizes here what Phidias could not, merging with nature to work matter in its entirety, inside and out, it does not do so by itself: it is by means of her faculty of seeing that the woman appropriates the traits of the painting, Galen affirms, thereby vigorously opposing himself to Epicurean theories of vision as reported by Lucretius (De natura rerum, iv), which stipulated that all bodies emanate corpuscules or simulacra that touch the eye. In having the image painted himself and in orienting the attention of his wife to the object of his choice, the husband certainly claims to master her imagination by delegating to the seminal image a part of his own formative force.

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But the woman by no means resigns to transmitting passively to her offspring traits that, carried by corpuscules or eidolon, came to her from the image; her phantasia is neither the simple “movement taking place as a result of sense-perception,” as defined by Aristotle,³³ nor is it what it was for the Stoics – a simple representation, “stamped, imprinted and pressed seal-fashion [by an object].”³⁴ Female phantasia in these narratives becomes an active and formative faculty, rather close to the Romantics’ “productive imagination.” And it is in this that the woman becomes an artist: by means of her phantasia, she appropriates an existing form; she conjugates natural production and the production of art, that art whose idea, Aristotle affirmed, resides in the spirit of the artist. Therefore, a redistribution of the symbolically sexed functions of artistic “creation” is also formulated in these narratives. At the same moment in which Heliodorus’s novel finds new favour in the West, nascent or renascent eugenics begin to multiply the positive rules that all couples who seek to engender beautiful progeny must respect. For instance, the astonishing Giambattista della Porta advises, after having drawn upon the stock narrative replete with the usual anecdotes, that sculpted or painted effigies of Cupid, Adonis, and Ganymede ought to be hung in sight of women, for “during the game of love,” these will impress themselves onto them, thereby ravishing their minds and compelling them to conceive in their image. The advice of Della Porta’s Natural Magick is not given in vain: And I know by experience, that this course will take good effect; for after I had counselled many to use it, there was a woman, who had a great desire to be the mother of a fair Son, that heard of it, and put it in practise; for she procured a white boy carved of marble, well proportioned every way; and him she had always before her eyes: for such a Son it was that she much desired. And when she lay with her Husband, and likewise afterwar [sic], when she was with child, still she would look upon that image, and her eyes and heart were continually fixed upon it: whereby it came to passe, that when her breeding time was expired, she brought forth a Son very like in all points, to that marble image, but especially in colour, being as pale and as white, as if he had been very marble indeed. And thus the truth of this experiment was

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manifestly proved. Many other women have put the like course in practise, and their skill hath not failed them.³⁵ Della Porta nonetheless concludes with some warnings and technical advice aimed at avoiding the procreation of monsters. It is thus clear that, in examining this monstrous production and in speculating about the role of images in procreation, the seventeenth century begins once more to think that a certain regulation of desire by means of the image could also lead to a progressive amelioration of the human species. For it is at the very beginning of the seventeenth century that generation according to the image becomes a possible system for the production of better descendants; moreover, such a system is also thought of at this time in normative terms whose control ought to be delegated to the state. In Tommaso Campanella’s Utopia entitled The City of the Sun, the inhabitants of an ideal city master, as did Jacob, “[m]ethods employing magic ... to induce these creatures [i.e., domestic animals] to breed in the presence of paintings of horses, bulls, or sheep.” Moreover, they also have at their disposal the means to improve their own species: “Nor may they have intercourse until they have completely digested their food and have said their prayers. There are fine statues of illustrious men that the women gaze upon.” In the City of the Sun, Campanella explains, “Only the pictures and statues of great men survive, and these the shapely women devoted to the perpetuation of the race gaze upon to improve their offspring.”³⁶ The same care to ameliorate the “human race” by means of practices drawn from those of breeders resurfaces in the middle of the next century. But while Campanella could freely dispose of the laws governing his ideal city, the physician Vandermonde now appeals to the legislator in order to have him apply the precepts that he had published in his Essay on the Way to Perfect the Human Species. While “our bodies,” he writes, “do not have all the perfection of which they are susceptible,” we can still find that perfection prefigured in the works of the “great sculptors,” for “these great masters of art have copied nature, not as it shows itself in most instances, but as it should be.” Also, without “getting away from the original imprint,” it is now “up to us to wake nature up, and to pick up on her work by perfecting the form of individuals.” And since we know how to perfect animals, we can also, “by uniting

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all our rules ... beautify humans [in the same way in which] an able sculptor can make the model of beautiful nature come out of a block of marble.”³⁷ Exactly ten years later, Lessing reaffirms the properly political and social necessity for the state to control the production of images so that mothers could fabricate a beautiful nation. In the second chapter of his Laocoön, he observes that, in the Greek city, civil authorities “did not deem it beneath their dignity to force the artist to remain in his proper sphere.” He recalls the law of the Thebans, which “commanded idealization in art and threatened digression toward ugliness with punishment.” This law, he explains, was not instituted, as some claim, against untalented artists but, rather, against “that unworthy artistic device through which a likeness is obtained by exaggerating the ugly parts of the original – in a word, the caricature.” We are wrong to laugh, Lessing continues, when we learn that, among the ancients, even the arts were subject to civil law as the “ultimate goal of the arts is pleasure, and this pleasure is not indispensable. Hence it may be for the lawmaker to determine what kind of pleasure and how much of each kind he will permit.” Lessing adds: The plastic arts in particular – aside from the inevitable influence they exert on the character of a nation – have an effect that demands close supervision by the law. If beautiful men created [erzeugt] beautiful statues, these statues in turn affected the men, and thus the state owed thanks also to beautiful statues for beautiful men. (With us [Bei uns] the highly susceptible imagination of mothers seems to express itself only in producing monsters.)³⁸ It is striking that many commentaries on this famous passage never consider it in relation to the appeal to the legislator that precedes it but, rather, focus on the allusion that Lessing makes to the “adulterous fancy” of the mothers of Alexander the Great, Scipio, or Augustus, who “all dreamed during pregnancy that they had relations with a serpent.”³⁹ It is nonetheless with Lessing that the chiasm of art and procreation affirms itself more strongly than ever as a demand that is simultaneously aesthetic, moral, and political. The concern here is

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less to “preserve the male role in reproduction and creativity,” as Susan Gustafson argues, than to define the conditions for a control of procreation by means of the state control of art. At the same time as it becomes political, the narrative of the myth of generation according to the image thus rediscovers once more its Greek origins and makes itself Promethean. “It is impossible to assign boundaries for the most perfect being in nature,” the author of the Mégalanthropogénésie writes in 803; “man can one day become ... a new Prometheus.”⁴⁰ Here, the secularization of Providence actualizes itself in the name of Progress, such that the salvation of eternal life, once obtained by means of christomimesis, the imitation of Christ, is substituted by humanity’s progressive march towards its “physical and moral perfection,” guided by the imitation of an ideal image. Soon Shelley, in his Prometheus Unbound, brings together and conjugates the imitation and the overcoming of nature, the desiring and absorbing look (regard), and the transformation of the human species: And human hands first mimicked and then mocked, With moulded limbs more lovely than its own, The human form, till marble grew divine; And mothers, gazing, drank the love men see Reflected in their race, behold, and perish.⁴¹ The more the image of the human as abandoned between the Fall and Redemption effaces itself, the more the image of an unfinished being forms itself, of a being whose gestation must be brought to its normal end by artificial means. This conception culminates in Louis Bolk’s,⁴² Freud’s, or Geza Roheim’s representation of the human: that of a fundamentally premature being – a being whose incompletion leaves the field open for the formative force of the image we desire.⁴³ Notes  Louis Leroy, Le Charivari, 6 April 877, quoted by M. Hoog, L’univers de Cézanne (Paris: Scrépel, 97), 0. 2 Louis Leroy, “L’exposition des impressionnistes,” Le Charivari, 25 April 874 (emphasis added).

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3 Emile Zola, “Mon Salon,” in Ecrits sur l’art, ed. Jean-Pierre Leduc-Adine (Paris: Gallimard, 99 [866]), 07–8. 4 Soranus of Ephesus, Soranus’ Gynecology, trans. Owsei Temkin, Nicholson J. Eastman, Ludwig Edelstein, and Alan F. Guttmacher (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 956), 37–8. 5 Concerning the rather disadvantageous conditions of the contract accepted by Jacob with respect to the Code of Hammurabi (which stipulated the obligations and salaries of the shepherd), see Roland de Vaux, The Early History of Israel, trans. David Smith (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 978), 254–5, and n45–9. 6 Genesis, 30:25–34, The Anchor Bible: Genesis, intro., trans. and notes by E.A. Speiser (New York: Doubleday and Company, 964), 234. 7 Genesis, 30:37–43, The Anchor Bible: Genesis, 235. See also Chumash with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Rashi’s Commentary, trans. and annotated by A.M. Silbermann and M. Rosenbaum (Jerusalem: The Silbermann Family and Routledge, 934), 45–6. 8 Jacob accroissant son troupeau, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, call number Français 9, fol. 32v, http://gallica.bnf.fr/. 9 See Gerhard von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, trans. John H. Marks (London: scm Press, 96), 297, who ascertains that verse 40 is “rather obscure.” Franz Delitzsch, Neuer Commentar über die Genesis (Leipzig: Dörffling und Franke, 887), 392, clearly explains verse 40 and cites Varro, Pliny, and Luther in order to account for the animals’ difference in strength based on whether they were conceived in the summer or in the autumn. 0 Genesis, 3:4–3, The Anchor Bible: Genesis, 240–.  S.R. Driver, The Book of Genesis, 6th ed. (London: Methuen and Co., 907 [904]), 279n. 2 See, in French, Thomas Römer, Introduction à l’Ancien Testament (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2004); T. Römer, “L’exégèse et l’air du temps,” Theolib 6 (200), http://www.theolib.com/zeitgeist.html; as well as the introduction and notes to the new ecumenical French translation of the Bible: Le Pentateuque: Les cinq livres de la Loi, ed. O. Artus, J. Briend, J.-M. Carrière, et al. (Paris: Éditions du Cerf et Société biblique française, 2003). 3 Concerning this pericope, see Esther Eshel, “Hermeneutical Approaches to Genesis in the Dead See Scrolls,” in The Book of Genesis in Jewish and Oriental Christian Interpretation, ed. J. Friedman and L. van Rompay (Louvain: Peeters, 997), –3.

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4 Vincentius Bellovacensis, Speculum historiale, trans. Jean de Vignay (Paris: Bibliothèque National de France, fifteenth century), call number: bnf Richelieu Manuscrits Français 50, http://gallica.bnf.fr/. 5 See Jan Fokkelman, Narrative Art in Genesis (Sheffield: jsot Press, 998), 48. Fokkelman thus speaks of a “white magic” used by Jacob against Laban (whose name signifies “white” in Hebrew) by means of both the poplar shoots (libneh in Hebrew) and his act of laying bare (laban) the white underneath the surface of the branches. 6 Philo of Alexandria, De somniis, i, secs. 97–200, trans. F.H. Colson and G.H. Whitaker (London/New York: William Heinemann/G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 934), 5:403 (emphases added). 7 Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: Étude sur les relations entre Chrétiens et Juifs dans l’Empire romain (Paris: de Boccard, 964). 8 Justin Martyr [00–65], “Dialogue avec le juif Tryphon,” Œuvres complètes, intro. J.D. Dubois, trans. G. Archambault and L. Pautigny, revised by E. Gauché, notes by G. Barthélémy (Paris: Bibliothèque Migne, 994), secs. 34–5, 306–9. See in English: http://earlychristianwritings.com/text/ justinmartyr-dialoguetrypho.html (emphasis added). 9 Midrash Rabbah, 73:0, in Midrash Rabbah, trans. H. Freedman and Maurice Simon, vol. 2, Genesis (London: Soncino Press, 939), 674 (emphasis added). 20 Saint Jerome’s Hebrew Questions on Genesis, trans., intro., and commentary by C.T.R. Hayward (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 995), 67 (emphasis added). 2 The Latin translation by Jerome (the Vulgate) of Genesis 30:39 is as follows: “factumque est ut in ipso calore coitus oves intuerentur virgas et parerent maculosa et varia et diverso colore respersa.” 22 Saint Jerome’s Hebrew Questions on Genesis, 68: “Now where in this place is written that they might conceive by means of the rods, it has in the Hebrew ieamena: I cannot express the force of the Hebrew word except by circumlocution. For ieamena strictly speaking refers to the last moment of passion in sexual intercourse, when the whole body is convulsed and the final moment for pleasure in the deed is near.” Sometimes rendered by the verb “to conceive,” sometimes by “being in heat” (the Darby Bible writes: “And the flock was ardent before the rods”), the Hebrew term yacham signifies, ultimately, both meanings – the meaning of “to conceive” being more or less metaphorical. 23 Chumash, Haphtaroth and Rashi’s Commentary, 45. See http://www.tachash.org/mesudah/b07r.htmlfn8.

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24 See, for instance, Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 984 [975]); Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator,” Screen 23, 3–4 (982): 78–88, reprinted in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theories and Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 99); David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 989). 25 Zohar, Va-Yetse, 6b, in The Zohar, Pritzker ed., trans. and commentary by Daniel C. Matt (Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press, 2004), 2:403n674 (emphases in original). 26 Moïse Cordovero, Or Yaqar [Precious Light], quoted by Charles Mopsick in Le Zohar (Lagrasse: Verdier, 984), 2:389n88. 27 Heliodorus, An Aethiopian History, trans. Thomas Underdowne, intro. by Charles Whibley (New York: ams Press, 967 [587]), book 4, 07–8. 28 Ibid., book 0, 270–. 29 Elizabeth McGrath, “The Black Andromeda,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (992): –8, http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00754390%28992%2955%3C %3atba%3E 2.0.CO %3B 2-6. 30 Galen, “On the Natural Faculties,” 2:3, in Galen: On the Natural Faculties, trans. Arthur John Brock (London/New York: Heinemann/G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 96), 27–3. 3 Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium, vol. , chap. 20, 729b, in Aristotle’s De Partibus Animalium i and De Generatione Animalium i (with Passages from ii . –3), trans. D.M. Balme (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 972), 5. 32 Galen, Theriaca ad Pisonem, chap. , in Galeni Opera Omnia, ed. C.G. Kühn (Leipzig: Cnobloch, 82–33), 4:253–4. 33 Aristotle, De Anima, vol. 3, chap. 3, 428b, in Aristotle’s De Anima, Books ii and iii (with Certain Passages from Book i), trans. D.W. Hamlyn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 968), 56. 34 Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, 7:50, trans. R.D. Hicks (Cambridge, ma /London: Harvard University Press/Heinemann, 979), 2:59. 35 Giambattista della Porta, Magiae Naturalis [Naples, 558], book 2, chap. 20, “How It May Be Wrought, that Women Should Bring Forth Fair and Beautiful Children,” in Natural Magick, ed. Derek J. Price (New York: Basic Books, 957 [London, 658]), 53–4. 36 Tommaso Campanella, La città del Sole, in The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, trans. Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley, ca : University of California Press, 98 [602]), 85, 55, and 07.

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37 Charles-Augustin Vandermonde, Essai sur la manière de perfectionner l’espèce humaine (Paris: Vincent, 756), xvii (Préface), 23, 00, and 55. 38 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick, Library of Liberal Arts (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 962 [766]), chap. 2, 2–7 (emphasis added). Translation modified. 39 Ibid., 4. See, in this respect, W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 986); Freedberg, Power of Images; Susan Gustafson, “Beautiful Statues, Beautiful Men: The Abjection of Feminine Imagination in Lessing’s Laokoon,” pmla 08, 5 (993): 083–97. 40 Robert le Jeune, Essai sur la Mégalanthropogénésie , 2nd ed. (Paris: Le Normant, 803), :85: “Il est impossible d’assigner des bornes à l’être le plus perfectible de la nature; l’homme peut devenir un jour, par la Mégalanthropogénésie, un nouveau Prométhée.” (It is impossible to ascribe limits to the most perfectible being in nature; man can one day become, by means of Megalanthropogenesis, a new Prometheus.) 4 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts, act , scene 4, lines 80–4, in Shelley: Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, 2nd ed. corrected by G.M. Matthews (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 988 [820]), 238. 42 Louis Bolk, “La genèse de l’homme,” trans. Jean-Claude Keppy, introduction by Georges Lapassade, Arguments, 4ème année, no. 8, (2ème trimestre 960 [926]): –3. 43 See Jacques Lacan, “Le stade du miroir”: “That a Gestalt should be capable of formative effects in the organism is attested by a piece of biological experimentation that is itself so alien to the idea of psychical causality that it cannot bring itself to formulate its results in these terms. It nevertheless recognizes that it is a necessary condition for the maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon that it should see another member of its species, of either sex; so sufficient in itself is this condition that the desired effect may be obtained merely by placing the individual [pigeon] within reach of the field of reflection of a mirror.” Such facts, Lacan adds, “are inscribed in an order of homeomorphic identification that would itself fall within the larger question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenic.” See Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 200 [936]), 3–4.

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15 Resemblance and Identification: The Paradox of Gary Schneider’s Genetic Self-Portrait hélène sa mson Translated from the French by Timothy Barnard

Gary Schneider is one of a growing number of artists taking up the theme of genetics in portrait photography.¹ His Genetic Self-Portrait (997–98) has been shown at the National Gallery of Canada as part of an exhibition of artists’ portraits.² In this chapter, I attempt to show how this portrait destabilizes its genre and how it illustrates some of the questions raised by genetic identity, keeping in mind that any portrait is a representation of individuality and that the means of this representation have changed in the movement from painting to photography.³ Gary Schneider was born in 954 in South Africa and emigrated to the United States in the late 970s. Initially, he was known for his excellent photographic printing skills. Following work in film and performance art, his first works to receive critical acclaim were portraits in which masterly plays of chiaroscuro lighting hampered our reading of the subject’s face.⁴ In 990, he used glass plate negatives to produce a series of business cards showing anonymous female faces in very large format. During this period, Schneider was exploring the photogram, using the theme of his own hands in particular. In one series, each photogram bore the name of a departed friend: a sort of memento mori taking as its basis the fact that the hand, a strong symbol of individuality, also suggests the sense of touch. For Schneider, the portrait is a way of thinking about privacy and personal identity. In his portraitbook John in Sixteen Parts (997), the model’s face is cut up into sixteen pieces, which the reader observes while flipping through the book. This scattered portrait poses questions about physiognomic detail and

Fig. 15.1

Gary Schneider, Chromosome, (detail) 1997,

microphotography/platinotype, 37 x 17 cm (from Gary Schneider, Genetic Self-Portrait), Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 1999, n.p. © Gary Schneider. Courtesy of the artist.

the construction of identity. Genetic Self-Portrait, which was commissioned by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art⁵ on the theme of the human genome and created in close collaboration with scientists, is made up of fifty-five black-and-white photographs. Schneider took blood and skin samples from his own body, from which a geneticist prepared specimens of chromosomes, genes, and cell structures to be observed under a microscope and then photographed. All the photographs in the work are of Schneider. As a self-portrait, he thus presents his own chromosonic chart: the series of forty-six chromosomes shown in pairs in twenty-two images, with the exception of the sex chromosomes, which are framed individually. The portrait also shows cytoplasmic structures and various traces of the dna molecule, including the

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Fig. 15.2

Gary Schneider,

Sperm, 1997, microphotography/platinotype, 20 x 16 cm (from Gary Schneider, Genetic Self-Portrait), Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 1999, n.p. © Gary Schneider. Courtesy of the artist.

image of the biochemical information in a gene, known as an autoradiogram. Among the other elements of the portrait are an X-ray of the teeth, the back of the eye, a drop of dried blood, and a spermatozoid, in addition to visible hereditary signs such as the iris, ears, and palms of the hands, each image measuring approximately one square metre. It is worth noting that the images of the ears and hands are hydrothermographs, produced by the warmth and moisture of the skin in direct contact with the film. By replacing the face with the genetic profile, Schneider’s portrait creates a paradox, which I discuss below and which can be overcome by the rhetoric of the images. For the entire aesthetic quality of Schneider’s portrait is suggestive of the cosmic dimension of the human being and makes it possible to assimilate the novelty of genetics to an already existing conception of the self. His self-portrait is a part of our adaptation to the phenomenon of genetic identity.

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The Presuppositions of Portraiture: Resemblance and Identification

The concepts of resemblance and identification are essential to understanding the portrait as a way of representing identity. Resemblance is an inherent quality of representation whose general problem consists in explaining how an artist creates a representation out of his or her relation to the model and how the observer interprets this representation. In this triad, the portrait can be understood as a mediation of the experience of the self. It is a part of the dialectic between depicting the self and experiencing the self. Portraits reveal one or more individual features – the body, the face, or any other means of identification – at the same time as they enable the observer to confer upon the person depicted a form of existence in time, an autonomous existence proper to her/him beyond the image. This conception of the portrait is similar to that of narrative identity: the dialectic of the idem (identity as sameness) and the ipse (identity as selfhood) explained by Paul Ricoeur in his hermeneutic of the self.⁶ But how can the portrait, like a narrative text, evoke the temporal continuity of the individual depicted? For the traditional portrait, through the stability of the pose and the neutrality of the facial expression, tends to extract the individual from the unfolding of time. In the photographic portrait, which is the heir to painting, the photographed object, as an immobilization of reality, even impedes the unfolding of time. As Danièle Méaux remarks, “the person photographed appears to be outside any process of change.”⁷ Nevertheless, despite this arresting of the person photographed, a kind of temporal continuity of the subject is produced, one that depends upon the observer’s interpretation. The concept of the “hermeneutic circle” suggests that interpretation is always carried out within an alreadyconstituted range of meanings, in particular that of the generic tradition to which the image belongs. Thus any observer, faced with an image associated with the portrait genre by virtue of its title or form, presupposes a set of rules, principal among them being that of resemblance. “That is what the portrait is all about,” Jean-Luc Nancy remarks.⁸ This concept of the “presupposed” is suggestive of Hans Georg Gadamer’s discussion of the internal demands of classical portraiture.⁹ In the presence of the model, resemblance demonstrates the similitude between the real face and its representation. On the other hand, in the absence

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of the model – the usual circumstance in which portraits are viewed – resemblance is an a priori circumstance of interpretation and leads the viewer to use similitude to tie the representation and the absent individual. This similitude between two non-simultaneous figures confers the object with temporal continuity. In other words, the presupposition of resemblance brings duration to bear by activating our memory. The observer thus conceives of an original individual: a temporal being defined according to the features given in the portrait. In the case of photography, this a priori of an original referent is reinforced by the medium’s indexical nature. Photography, in the senses of Barthes’ “that-has-been,” attests to the existence of the model in a time before the taking of the photograph and works with the presupposition of resemblance to situate the subject in the unfolding of time. In addition, a portrait always involves a form of identification. This is naturally performed with the face, but in the past few decades dna has become a new index for identifying individuals. It is more reliable than any other bodily indication, and criminal investigations make great use of dna profiles to solve crimes, particularly those of a sexual nature.¹⁰ Nevertheless, the dna molecule, despite all its concrete applications in medicine and criminology, is not a true phenomenon: not only is it invisible to the naked eye, but only a sophisticated theoretical and technological system can apprehend and manage it. Individuals cannot verify for themselves the authenticity of the genetic sample said to represent them or control the way this sample is used. Genetics therefore gives rise to a means of identification that threatens the phenomenal integrity of the person and carries with it a possible alienation of the self. The Paradox of the Genetic Portrait

The principal idea behind Gary Schneider’s Genetic Self-Portrait is to replace the face with the genetic profile. The theoretical nature of the genetic profile should discredit the use of this means of identification in the portrait genre because there is no possible similitude between a person and his or her dna . To the non-specialist, biochemical notations have only a generic meaning. The dna autoradiogram does not make it possible to construct a phenomenal identity. Neverthe-

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less, viewers of Schneider’s photographs are led back to the portrait’s conventional schema: first of all by the title, Genetic Self-Portrait, and then by the way the images are ordered. Schneider’s sequence of photographs begins with the hand: this self-referential sign, which recurs throughout art history, adequately replaces the face and thus serves to situate the interpretation of the images within the traditional meaning of the portrait. The dna autoradiogram follows these imprints of the hands. In this way, by means of visual contiguity, a theoretical question – the biochemical make-up of a molecule – is associated with individual identity.¹¹ This association is maintained throughout Genetic SelfPortrait, with the result that our interpretation of the other pieces in the work is marked by a contradictory tension between the presupposition of resemblance and genetic identification. On the one hand, the work presents a new referent for identification, despite this referent’s inability to suggest resemblance, while, on the other hand, genetic discourse establishes itself rationally as a means of identification, even as it involves an alienation of the self. In other words, this work, by presenting itself as a portrait, and in substituting the gene for the face, carries out a twofold “problematizing”: that of the portrait tradition and that of individual identity. It calls the portrait tradition into question because the presupposition of resemblance finds no confirmation here, while it confronts individuals with a scientific identity completely foreign to their own experience of themselves. From a pragmatic point of view, this genetic self-portrait replicates the psychological dynamic of the “double bind,” according to which a paradoxical injunction dictates that all decisions bring about a negative consequence. It thus presents a break, either by abandoning the paradigm of the traditional portrait or by the loss of the phenomenal integrity of the self. Because neither of these solutions can be contemplated, however, an alternative presents itself to viewers in their secondary reading of the images. In this work, which consists in “configuring” scientific images, Schneider makes it possible to overcome, to a certain extent, the paradox of resemblance and genetic identification. One of the peculiarities of Schneider’s images is the suggestiveness of their forms.¹² Their vague iconic quality feeds our imagination. For example, the details of the palms of the hands and the auricle of the ear suggest astronomical constellations – the heavenly canopy and nebula. In the same vein,

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Fig. 15.3

Gary Schneider,

Ear, 1997, photogram/silver gelatin print, 91.4 x 73.7 cm (from Gary Schneider, Genetic Self-Portrait), Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 1999, n.p. © Gary Schneider. Courtesy of the artist.

Schneider’s images often seek out the motif of “glimmering” suggested by the bright points on the chromosomes. In this way, in an extreme close-up of chromosomes, Schneider heightens the luminosity of the telomeres. This glimmering figure expanding throughout the entire space and that of the nebula refer to the great theme of the cosmos and the origin of organic life, as Bachelard argues in his L’Air et les songes: Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement.¹³ Nietzsche, in his second Untimely Meditations, compares the nebula to a protective cloud, a “vaporous region of the unhistorical ... within which alone life can germinate.”¹⁴ There could be no better description of the vitalist nature of this figure and its calming power because astronomical constellations are, as Lynne Tillman points out, psychic envelopes.¹⁵ In other words, these images of the “heavenly canopy” and the “nebula” activate on the psychic level “schema of containment” – containment in a world/containment of a world – correlated in the process of the symbolization of the self to the feelings of belonging and possession. Similarly, the glim-

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Fig. 15.4

Gary Schneider,

Hand, 1997, photogram/ silver gelatin print, 90 x 78 cm (from Gary Schneider, Genetic Self-Portrait), Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 1999, n.p. © Gary Schneider. Courtesy of the artist.

mer, becoming diffuse in space, activates “transformation schema” – movements and sensations that make it possible to experience the physical boundaries of the body – correlated to the sense of alterity. In this way, the scientific meaning of the photographs – genetic identity – and their “aesthetic” power are conducive to the inclusion of the viewer in the immeasurable sequence of generations. In the same way, a secondary reading of such scientific photographs enables the viewer to assimilate these, at the very least, unusual images at first sight.¹⁶ For example, the shot of the back of the eye, which shows the optic nerve surrounded by blood vessels, suggests a nocturnal landscape of the full moon behind the branches of a tree; the spermatozoid photographed with a nano-microscope takes on a plant-like appearance reminiscent of Blossfeldt’s famous plates; and the image of the drop of dried blood suggests a geographic formation or mineral substance. As for the karyotype chromosomes, with their shapes similar to the head, the eyes, the members, and certain bodily postures, they take

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on an anthropoid quality, while the seriation of pairs of chromosomes suggests hereditary transmission. The small striated columns, which correspond to the dna’s sequence of amino acids, suggest a personal biological code. The graphic and repetitive notations of the autoradiogram, a primal code of life, are similar to mathematics. In the context of portraiture, such schemata¹⁷ symbolize an individual essence, a transcendence. In this way, through reference to the “déjà vu,” to an archive of primordial images, Schneider’s genetic self-portrait reintroduces resemblance. The rhetoric of the images makes the resolution of the initial tension possible through their propensity to bring out the viewer’s full imagination and memory process. In Schneider’s Genetic Self-Portrait, the meaning depicted makes it possible to assimilate a new theoretical aspect of identity to a pre-existing or even immemorial belief. This is a strategy of cultural adaptation to the incongruity of genetic identification. Schneider’s images let us believe that the human being is governed by universal laws, in particular the biological laws that regulate the transmission of genes. This very postulate legitimates scientific research. His self-portrait thus radicalizes a fundamental aspect of modern culture – the privileged status of scientific discourse around identity.¹⁸

Notes  For a discussion of these artists’ work, see Suzanne Anker and Dorothy Nelkin, The Molecular Gaze: Art in the Genetic Age (Cold Spring Harbor, ny: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004). 2 Gary Schneider, Genetic Self-Portrait, a photograph album published in conjunction with the exhibitions “Out of Sight: Imaging/Imagining Science” (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 998), “Photoworks 900–999” (Lisbon: Culturgest, 999), and “Reflections on the Artist: Self-Portraits and Portraits of Artists” (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 999). Texts by Ann Thomas, Lori Pauli, Bettyann Holtzmann Kelves, and Gary Schneider (Syracuse, ny: Light Work, 999). 3 Hélène Samson, “L’histoire du portrait et la formation de l’identité moderne” (ma thesis, Université de Montréal, 999).

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4 For a discussion of Gary Schneider’s photography, see Deborah Martin Kao, Gary Schneider Portraits (New Haven/Cambridge: Yale University Press/Harvard University Art Museum, 2004). 5 For a discussion of the exhibition, see Barbara Pollack, “The Genetic Aesthetics,” Arts News 99, 4 (2000): 34–7. 6 Paul Ricoeur, “L’identité narrative,” Esprit 7–8 (July/August 988): 295– 34; Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 992). 7 Danièle Méaux, La photographie et le temps: Le déroulement temporel dans l’image photographique (Aix en Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 997), 99–2. 8 Jean-Luc Nancy, Le regard du portrait (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 37. 9 Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 988 [960]). 0 See Simon A. Cole, Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).  Following Nelson Goodman’s theory of conventionalism found in Language of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett, 976), we might think that the dna image, through repeated association, will eventually become an individual feature as familiar as a social insurance number or postal code. This penetration of a new, scientific sign of identity into popular culture is, precisely, one of the issues raised by the genetic portrait. 2 It should be noted that Schneider’s images are practically without interest to geneticists, who work with images obtained with microscopes in order to bring out as clearly as possible the data required for theory. This distinction between Schneider’s images and those used in research is the same as that found in astronomy, where a distinction is made between scientific images, which scientists share among themselves, and the “pretty pictures” taken for amateur astronomy magazines. For a discussion of this distinction, see James Elkins, The Domain of Images (Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press, 999), 0. 3 Gaston Bachelard, L’air et les songes: Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement (Paris: José Corti, 943). 4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 997), 63–4. 5 Lynne Tillman, “Counting Light: Photographs by Gary Schneider,” Aperture 76 (Fall 2004): 34–4. 6 This interpretation of Schneider’s Genetic Self-Portrait can also be found in Kao, Gary Schneider Portraits.

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7 The term “schemata” is taken from James Elkins’s classification system in Domain of Images, 23, and it designates the category of graphic notations and diagrams of any kind. 8 I develop this hypothesis at greater length in “Du portrait photographique à la fin du xx e siècle: Retour sur le portrait d’identité” (P hD diss., Université de Montréal, 2006).

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16 Variations on Genetic Insignificance: Metaphors of the (Non)Code thierry bardini Translated from the French by Stephanie Fox

DNA is a crystalloid; it’s particularly sensitive to electromagnetic radiation. Which means it’s also an antenna. That’s why our friend Dantzik’s metaphors are nothing but writer’s metaphors, Liber Mundi, the power of the Word: we agree on all that. But what we have to grasp is that our brains are to the book what the cortex of the Zorn twins is to the world meganet. This new metaphor of the network and the antenna indicates that the next biosocial revolution is under way.¹

In this chapter, I examine the history of molecular biology and its central notion of “genetic code” from a semiotic perspective. By contrasting different semiotic perspectives, I contemplate a variety of constituent pseudo-evidences in current discourse on the destiny of the human race, at the dawn of wide scale technical and cultural transformations made possible by the manifest possibility of human cloning in the relative short term. From these pseudo-evidences, the tropes “genetic code” and its “decrypting” appear fundamental to me. These pseudo-evidences appear the most obvious today in cyborg fantasies and delusions stemming from nasa circa 96 and updated by the post-constructivist discourse of Donna J. Haraway’s disciples: “Cyborgs do not stay still. Already in the past few decades that they have existed, they have mutated, in fact and fiction, into second-order entities like genomic and electronic databases and the other denizens of the zone called cyberspace.”² The cyborg is. Or, as Katherine Hayles says, “We became post-human.”³ As though saying it were enough to bring it into being, “in fact as in fiction.” But by what logic? By the good old logic of “domination” in the “division of being into subjec-

tive and objective, into human spirituality and the concrete, mechanical nonhuman?”⁴ By the logic of appropriating the ultimate means of production? By the logic of ultimate intermediality, which sees humans as (inter)medium? If we can indeed hypothesize about the essential intermediality of humans in this day and age, it is thanks to the existence of a milieu of exchange, of an interface for all the categories that have been imagined up until now through a framework of inevitable dichotomies. Inversely, such an interface, such a medium, allows us to imagine equivalences, translations – in short, trans-formations between these spheres. These transformations can be understood as “identity manipulation” inasmuch as they fundamentally question the human species. However, these manipulations must also be put back in their place in the vaster framework of anthropogenesis in evolution for, as Sloterdijk says: The most spectacular hold of the mechanistic over the subjective looks promising in genetic technology. Genetic technology draws on a wide range of preconceptions, vulnerable to artificial manipulation. To this is attached the more or less fantastic idea that we could, in the short term, “make whole men.” In such fantasies, the primitive biologisms compete with humanisms and with helpless theologisms, and not an ounce of understanding of the conditions of anthropogenesis in evolution is discernable among those who hold such opinions.⁵ But if the cyborg can (or will be able to) be “in fact as in fiction” – which in the end rings of “on earth as in heaven” and calls for a serious amen – it is because there are passages between these worlds, repertoires, experiences, and practices. Here, I endeavour to describe one of these passages through the “symbolic” form of the metaphor of “genetic code.” History of the Genetic Code

In the first part of this chapter, I establish the historic links between the founding tropes of molecular biology and the conceptual repertoire of cybernetics, in particular Shannon and Weaver’s information theory.⁶ I 392 Variations on Genetic Insignificance

begin by clearing up a misunderstanding: cybernetics did not directly influence nascent molecular biology, or at least not in the beginning, and certainly not in such a way that molecular biology became simply an application of cybernetic theories. “It was vacuous in the extreme and positively inane,” said Max Delbrück, the one biologist ever invited to the famous Macy Foundation meetings that gave rise to cybernetics and who went on to argue that “genetics did not, and at that time could not, enter into it at all.”⁷ In spite of the weakness of a history told through this sort of “founding fathers narrative,” the first influence on the nascent field of molecular biology might have come from Erwin Schrödinger’s reflections in What Is Life?⁸ Most historians, such as Heims⁹ and Kay,¹⁰ agree that we can find the conceptual origins of molecular biology in the theories and intuitions of (quantum) physics. Even if Schrödinger had imagined the existence of a “Morse-like code script” for heredity back in 944, the related notions of “information,” “program,” “alphabet,” “message,” and “text” were not used by the first molecular biologists before 955. However, the central notion of code was used in scientific and cultural contexts during the period immediately following the war, which militated for such a convergence in the short term. Indeed, the information vocabulary is evident in the notion of transcription as early as molecular biology’s founding text, in Crick and Watson’s famous article announcing their structural model of dna : “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribonucleic acid (dna). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest ... It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”¹¹ Regarding this latter and falsely enigmatic sentence, Watson recounts in his book that Crick “wanted to develop our note to draw out all biological implications, but finally he decided in favor of brevity.”¹² The “central dogma” summarizes the principal credo of molecular biology at its origins. It postulates that: Once “information” has passed into protein, it cannot get out again. In more details, the transfer of information from a nucleic acid to nucleic acid, or from a nucleic acid to protein may be possible, but the transfer from protein to protein, or from protein thierry bardini

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to nucleic acid is impossible. Information means here the precise determination of a sequence, either of bases in the nucleic acid or of amino acid residues in the protein.¹³ The central dogma was the cause of a shift in meaning of the notion of information, a shift that proved to be fertile for the future of the discipline: In a single masterly stroke Crick encapsulated the ideology and experimental mandate of molecular genetics: genetic information, qua dna , was both the origin and the universal agent of all life (proteins) ... But these biosemiotics entailed a deconstruction. In order to privilege nucleic acids as the sole source of biological information, this transformation had to tacitly subvert information from its scientific definition ... the still-unbroken genetic code governed that metaphoric process of information transfer. Whether the latest decoding attempts had any validity, “only time will show,” Crick concluded.¹⁴ The central dogma took its final form between 958 and 96, with the discovery of the operon model (by Monod, Jacob, and Wolf’s team at the Pasteur Institute) and the international collaboration that led to the discovery of the messenger rna (mrna). Beginning at the summer symposium held at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, researchers began to doubt their previous belief that the whole dna might code for protein synthesis. Inversely, the operon model assumed a separation of the gene into “operator” and “operon”: the operon is a unit of genetic expression that includes the structural genes and the elements that control their expression, whereas the operator is a dna sequence to which a protein affixes itself and thereby negatively regulates the expression of a gene (repressor). It was a first step towards differentiating the gene’s operation, which subsequently led to the elaboration of a textual metaphor for the central dogma. In turn, the textual model built on the beginning of the “cracking the genetic code” during that same year (96) by Marshall W. Nirenberg and J. Heinrich Matthaei at the National Institute of Health (nih) in Bethesda, Maryland. F. Crick concluded his discourse when he

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Fig. 16.1

Table of genetic code

First position (5’)

Second position T C

A

G

Third position (3’)

U

Phe Phe Leu Leu

Ser Ser Ser Ser

Tyr Tyr STOP STOP

Cys Cys STOP Trp

U C A G

C

Leu Leu Leu Leu

Pro Pro Pro Pro

His His Gin Gin

Arg Arg Arg Arg

U C A G

A

Ile Ile Ile Met

Thr Thr Thr Thr

Asn Asn Lys Lys

Ser Ser Arg Arg

U C A G

G

Val Val Val Val

Ala Ala Ala Ala

Asp Asp Glu Glu

Gly Gly Gly Gly

U C A G

Abbreviations: U Uracile C Cytosine A Adenine G Guanine

Ala Arg Asn Asp Gln Glu

Alanine Arginine Asparagine Aspartic Acid Glutamine Glutamic Acid

Gly His Ile Leu Met Phe

Glycine Histidine Isoleucine Leucine Methionine Phenylalanine

Pro Ser Thr Trp Tyr Val

Proline Serine Threonine Thryptophan Tyrosine Valine

received his Nobel Prize the following year: “We are coming to the end of an era in molecular biology. If the dna structure was the end of the beginning, the discovery of Nirenberg and Matthaei is the beginning of the end.”¹⁵ Eventually completed in 966, the code was characterized by the following specificities:

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Encoder

Sender Message

Channel Signal

Decoder Signal

Receiver Message

Noise Source Fig. 16.2

Claude Shannon's elementary schema, 1949

• The base unit of code (or “word”) on the mrna chain is the codon, composed of three nucleotides. • The code is degenerate: many “words” signify the same thing. • The code is universal: it is identical for every living being (from which stems the metaphor of the book of life). Even if the textual metaphor of genetic code has at its core the notion of genetic information, it is also understood in a metaphorical fashion. In fact, the links between early molecular biology and cybernetics ought to be seen from their concurrent use of the notion of information, understood in fundamentally different, if not opposed, ways. For cybernetics and information theory, which were both synthesized in 948, information is a statistical quantity: the information that a given symbol carries is in relation to the probability of its occurrence in a message and not to any signification associated with the symbol itself. As Warren Weaver summarizes in his famous article in Scientific American, “The word information is in relation not so much with what you say as with what you could say.”¹⁶ In short, there is no semantic dimension included in this theory’s notion of information. One must note in this schema that a signal, which results from an encoded message, is transmitted by a channel or medium to a receiver that decodes it at its destination, uncovering the initial message. Encoding is thus the translation of a message into a signal; the message is defined as any discrete or continuous sequence of distributed, measurable events in time; the signal is an ordered modulation of the medium (carrier). Thus, in this theoretical framework, the “code” is the principle (the set of rules) that allows a sequence of discrete events to be

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transformed into a modulation (an ordered movement) of the medium. This ordered movement appears as a determined group of variations of the medium (i.e., as the transmission of differences). Information is the measure of the channel’s capacity, a probabilistic measure of choice between alternatives. After his rereading of linguistics in light of information theory (and particularly the version of British theorist Colin Cherry), Roman Jakobson’s contribution brought the synthesis of a “verbal,” or “textual,” genetic code full circle. This convergence effectively materialized during a televised debate (Vivre et parler) in September 967, when Jakobson participated in a discussion with Claude Lévi-Strauss and biologists François Jacob and Philippe L’Héritier. Despite the reluctance of Lévi-Strauss and L’Héritier, Jakobson affirmed here that, since the first time I encountered the linguistic terms in the literature of the biologists, I said to myself: one must check whether this is simply fashionable talk, a metaphoric usage, or whether there is here something exceedingly profound. I must say that biologists’ talk is totally legitimate from a linguistic view point [sic] and that one could go much further. What do the system of molecular biology and the linguistic system have in common? Primarily it is this: that it is perhaps a most extraordinary thing and most important – it is the same architecture, these are the same principles of construction, a fully hierarchical principle.¹⁷ Hence Jakobson ruled out the possibility of a metaphoric usage of linguistic referents in molecular biology – with the help of an architectural metaphor! Furthermore, a few years later, the rare researchers who had attempted to carry out a strict application of information theory to molecular biology and to heredity mechanisms came to less enthusiastic conclusions, as is shown by this citation from one of them, Henry Quastler, who was also a regular guest at the Macy meetings: Information theory is very strong on the negative side, i.e. in demonstrating what cannot be done; on the positive side its application to the study of living things has not produced

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many results so far; it has not led to the discovery of new facts, nor has its application to known facts been tested in critical experiments. To date, a definitive and valid judgment of the value of information theory in biology is not possible.¹⁸ Some years later, at the same time as the code was being triumphantly cracked (hence the linguistic metaphor), another researcher came to a similar conclusion: “Workers have been aware of information theory and have made qualitative use of its concepts. No explicit, and especially no quantitative use of information theory has, however, been made in practice.”¹⁹ We are drawn to the conclusion, as is Lily Kay, that the use of information theory notions, and particularly that of “genetic code,” ought to be metaphoric. However, if, according to information theory, “genetic code” is only a metaphoric code, this doesn’t mean that it can only be considered as such, despite Lily Kay’s opposition. Even if molecular biology has metaphorically used the notion of “code” according to information theory, information theory doesn’t have a monopoly on the definition of the concept of code; at the very most it can claim to have such a monopoly in the telecommunication systems engineering context. Finally, Lily Kay attributes too much credit to the universal aims of cybernetics.²⁰ That is, at least, the argument Richard Lewontin makes in his critical review of Kay’s work: While claiming that we cannot really dispense with metaphors, she herself tries to do so by repeatedly saying that the dna triplet-amino acid relation is merely a correlation. But that is surely wrong. dna and amino acid sequences are not simply correlated; they are connected by a causal mechanism. And in the causal pathway, the dna sequence appears before the amino acid sequence. A good deal of discussion in the book is devoted to showing why the metaphors of “code,” “language,” and “information” can be so misleading if taken as isomorphic with the phenomena of molecular genetics. This is especially a problem if these nonbiological notions are taken in their modern analytic and scientific contexts. If “information” is

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the information of Shannon-Weaver information measures; if “language” is what Jakobson, Chomsky, and other linguists take it to be, if “code” is what the Enigma machine was meant to create; then as Kay so clearly shows, we are badly misled by applying these measures to dna . But, as she says, “code,” “language,” and “information” are themselves metaphors, terms appropriated by science and technology and given special content for special purposes.²¹ In his book entitled La logique du vivant: Une histoire de l’hérédité, François Jacob also concedes this point. While insisting on the fact that “biology today is interested in the algorithms of the living world,” Jacob concludes by saying that “science is unavoidably trapped in its own system of explanation. Today, the world is messages, codes and information. Tomorrow, which new direction will dismantle our objects in order to recompose them in a new space?”²² Here, Jacob puts his finger on the contingency of scientific explanations vis-à-vis the encompassing rhetorical framework and, more precisely, on the structuring role that certain concepts take on in “the current climate.” As Lily Kay so eloquently puts it, “the genetic code is ‘a period piece,’ a manifestation of the emergence of the information age.”²³ For Lewontin just as for Jacob, the nut of the problem is found in the metaphor’s mode of reference, which is to say in the relations it authorizes between the signifier and the signified: “genetic code is like a language: even if both are produced by accident, as soon as they are established, the relations between ‘signified’ and ‘signifier’ cannot be changed.”²⁴ However, Jacob seems to adopt a much more radical position than Lewontin when he states that “once a system of relations is established, these relations cannot be modified without risking the loss of all existing meaning, of scrambling what is already considered a message.”²⁵ In fact, Jacob seems to hesitate between two alternatives: () reference is absolute, and all questioning of it destroys it completely; and (2) reference is relative, and questioning it appears simply as a source of noise that “scrambles” meaning. This second alternative seems quite fruitful to me inasmuch it introduces dynamism into the explanation (something that the first alterna-

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tive entirely lacks). Opting for a closed mode of reference effectively leads us to consider a code as static in function, analogous to that of a dead language (which is to say, a language that is no longer spoken). Inversely, insisting on “scrambling” doesn’t prohibit us from thinking of a different order; a new mode of reference can emerge from the noise. In a living language, the meaning of words changes with their use. To forget this fact leads us to congeal reference by institutional conventions, where the word becomes the thing, the map becomes the territory. The descriptive concept thus becomes ontological. It is in this sense that recent poststructuralist analyses of molecular biology’s history abound, focusing on the question of conceptual and/or discursive representation’s ability to perform. For example, Lily Kay believes that choosing a particular conceptual representation confers upon it the capacity to enable and to constrain certain thoughts and actions.²⁶ Richard Doyle describes this same type of phenomenon, which he calls “rhetorical software”: “Rhetorical software” marks my attempts to foreground the relational and material interactions that make possible the emergence of scientific statements. While highlighting the textuality of scientific practices, the term avoids a textual determinism: as any user of software knows, software is usable only within a network of hardware and – this is frequently overlooked – “wetware.” The “rhetorical” side of this double formulation is an attempt to mark out what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the “fantastic” production of scientific statements, the inventive and imaginative taming of matter. Crucial to Deleuze and Guattari’s claim is that it is only through such a disciplining that matter is actualized, brought onto the plane of reference. Theirs is thus a relational account of matter and language, and it is this notion of the relations between such “framing” and the actualization of scientific practices that I seek to mark out with “rhetorical software”.²⁷ To return to the question of the metaphor, it seems that the central question is the metaphor’s mode of reference. Insisting on the limits of

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the metaphor doesn’t tell us much about its ability to perform: staying with a simple renunciation of the metaphor in a positivist epistemological framework certainly doesn’t allow us to ask the question about its metaphoric performativity, to understand what it actually does. For this, we must develop another epistemology of metaphoric reference, to which I now turn.

Reference Modes of the Metaphor

Here, I start from this specific instance of the use of the metaphor in molecular biology to come back to the ever-current debate about the use of metaphors in science. By contrasting different perspectives of the metaphor and of its role in scientific discourse, I intend to show that the metaphoric network of the “book of life” in molecular biology constructs a scientific and philosophic truth against the illusion of first or literal reference. In so doing, I am not looking to summarize theories on the scientific use of the metaphor but, rather, and more simply, to give a basic explanation of a contemporary perspective, one that escapes the aporia of the metaphor’s “truth” and “limits.” As historians Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer have shown, the birth of experimental science in the seventeenth century was accompanied by the invention of the “virtual witness” in literary technologies, which entailed a genuine overhaul of prose for scientific means. The first prohibition of the metaphor came within this framework as it was considered an emblematic figure of “flowery style”: Another technique for showing modesty was Boyle’s professedly “naked style of writing.” He would eschew a “florid” style of writing; his object was to write “rather in a philosophical than a rhetorical strain.” This plain, ascetic, unadorned (yet convoluted) style was identified as functional. It served to display, once more, the philosopher’s dedication to community service rather than to his personal reputation. Moreover, the “florid” style to be avoided was a hindrance to the clear provision of virtual witness: it was, Boyle said, like painting “the eye-glasses of a telescope.”²⁸

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As Shapin and Schaffer remark, this position had already been well described by previous researchers, as is shown in the following passage written in 932: The linguistic views of seventeenth-century scientists were characterized by a suspicion of language arising out of its association with the old science, which seemed to depend more upon words than upon nature, and out of a feeling that all instituted language tended to obscure rather than to describe realities. Linguistic defects were discovered in the imperfect meanings given to words, in the many meanings ascribed to a single word, in the figurative use of words, in the multiplication of words through synonyms, and in the number of irregularities and inconsistencies of grammatical rules ... what stylistic standards could naturally develop out of this conception of language? Certainly none other than those which almost invariably appear whenever the scientists touch upon style. There should be little figurative language, especially metaphors, which falsely describe actions and things. There should be no verbal superfluity, but rather an economy of words sufficient to match exactly the phenomena. Words should be the plainest possible.²⁹ Despite this “ban,” certain metaphors have a thick skin and defy even those who prohibit them. Hence the postmodern convergence (i.e., post-Second World War) of techno-scientific and metaphysical knowledge in molecular biology and computer science focused on a return of modernity’s mechanical metaphors. The modern metaphors of manand-machine and, more generally, of the “artificial creature” (golem and other proto-cyborgs) came back into fashion in the postmodern age thanks to the vocabulary of cybernetics. It is particularly in the field of artificial intelligence (ai) and in genetic engineering (on the applied side) that this convergence is most evident, in an effort to redefine the boundaries between human, animal, and machine. This convergence translated into the appearance of the trope of the living as a cybernetic machine, with partial metaphors around the poles of brain/computer versus body/meat. However, it is important to avoid using metaphors

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even while discussing them, as is demonstrated by the following reactions of Allen Newell: Metaphor is a particularly disarming way of arriving at truth. It invites the listener to find within the metaphor those aspects that apply, leaving the rest as the false residual, necessary to the essence of the metaphor. And since within the metaphor is always, by linguistic turn, within the listener, the invitation is to find within oneself some truth that fits ... It is clearly wrong to treat science as metaphor, for the more metaphorical, the less scientific.³⁰ The philosophers of science have often debated the proper place of the metaphor (and of models) in modern and postmodern scientific practice. After Max Black’s founding work,³¹ the debates have principally focused on the heuristic character of the metaphor in the production of scientific theory as well as on the “limits” of analogy (as is evidenced by the rumours surrounding the “Sokal affair”). Some, such as Richard Boyd,³² insist on the utilitarian character of the metaphor, which operates as a catachresis whenever it allows a semantic register to be created by importing the vocabulary from an already established field into a new field. But the catachresis also signifies the abusive use of the word over and above its usual meaning. In this sense, it constitutes one of the elementary mechanisms of all tropes. The use of metaphor in science again poses the question of the connections between different dichotomies, such as literary/scientific, literal/figurative, individual/collective. All of these dichotomies illustrate particular aspects of the creation problematic, translated through a logic of discovery and its exhibition. As for me, I begin from the principle that the metaphor is located at the interface between these dichotomies rather than on one side or the other of the oppositions they incarnate. Hence, the metaphor is located between science and literature, between literal and figurative meaning, between individual and collective creation. It thus defines the strategic site for studying their articulation, their crossing points. In this sense, I agree with Paul Ricoeur’s reflection on the metaphor:

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A new problematic emerges ... it isn’t concerned with the metaphor’s form as a discursive figure focused on the word, nor even on its meaning as the introduction of new semantic relevance, but rather on the metaphoric statement’s power as reference to “re-describe” reality ... Metaphor is thus presented as a discursive strategy that, by preserving and developing the creative power of language, preserves and develops the heuristic power deployed by fiction.³³ Finally, the rejection of these dichotomies leads me, like Paul Ricoeur, to question the use of metaphor as a discursive strategy, from the perspective of its modes of reference: The suspension of reference ... is the negative condition necessary to untangling a more fundamental mode of reference ... the very way in which metaphoric meaning is constituted offers the key to splitting the reference ... the meaning of a metaphoric statement is invoked by one’s failure to interpret the statement literally ... the auto-destruction of meaning under the blow of semantic impertinence is but the inverse of an innovation of meaning applied to the whole statement ... metaphoric interpretation, in raising questions about a new semantic pertinence on the ruins of literal meaning, also invokes a new referential aim, in favor of abolishing reference that corresponds to literal interpretation of the statement.³⁴ This logic of the (referential) use of metaphor also leads me to trace the footsteps of Lakoff and Johnson, from an experimental perspective: the heuristic power of fiction to which Ricoeur alludes involves not only a semantic connection through an abstract understanding of a play on words but also a pragmatic connection to a field of experience, between thought and action. This latter dichotomy leads me to view (scientific) metaphor as an operational fiction, a process opened to the experience and production of the world in and through discourse. As Lakoff and Johnson say, “Things in the world do play a role in constraining our conceptual system. But they play this role only through our experience of them.”³⁵

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All in all, this view of the pragmatic side to the “genetic code” metaphor leads me to stress the following: • This metaphor’s meaning in molecular biology is built on the destruction of the literal meaning that information theory provides and its formal definition of the notion of code. • This destruction of the first reference reintroduces semantics and the transformations that this allows: “genetic code” thus becomes the set of rules governing the conservation and transformation of genetic specificity in protein synthesis. • The second reference reopens the discursive field to a heuristics of transmission and communication, of the genotype. • This heuristics opens a new field of practice and experience for the new discipline and, thus, allows a new world to be constructed. The genetic code metaphor in the conceptual repertoire of the molecular biology of the 950s and 960s thus appears at the heart of a discursive and disciplinary device that – at the interface between founding (literal) cybernetic theories and common (figurative) sense – enables the production of an experimental world. In return, this enabling constructs its own referent: Information – as meaning and commodity – came to signify the privileged status of dna as “master molecule.” Emptied of its technical content, it actually became a metaphor of metaphor, a signification without a referent. This, however, did not diminish its scientific and cultural potency.³⁶ So contrary to what Kay says here, the genetic code metaphor is not without a referent, even if it may be considered as the metaphor of metaphor. This implies (more explicitly for my taste) a second referent, which is not its own if we are to believe Ricoeur. On the other hand, the metaphor’s specificity is its particular way of closing, while at the same time opening, the reference loop of the quasi-magical, pre-scientific meaning of the founding fiction of the word: it is from this perspective that one may interpret its systematic location in the metaphoric net-

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work of the “secret to the book of life,” with its hermetic resonance of ultimate, original revelation. In the alliance between these two terms, we find once again what Gilbert Simondon calls primitive mediation, before its “division” (dephasage) into technicity and religiosity.³⁷ Non-Coding or Junk dna : A Semiotic Perspective on the Genetic Code Metaphor

Here, in this final section and in order to concretize the theoretic argument about the truth-value of the metaphor, I propose to return to a perspective linked to the “book of life” metaphor. I suggest doing so by developing a semiotic perspective of the non-coding part of dna that is in line with the previous theory of metaphoric modes of reference. In fact, I intend to test the hypothesis that a mode of reference is opened by the metaphor by examining one of its limits, what Newell describes as the “false residual.” If the hypothesis of an open mode of reference can withstand such a test, then the false residue claim could thus appear as a potential second wind for the genetic code metaphor. Since 977, molecular biologists have discovered that human genes, like those of all eukaryotes (higher organisms), can be interrupted with non-coding sequences (or “introns”) for protein synthesis. With the limits of knowledge at that time, this non-functional part was quickly dubbed “junk dna .”³⁸ At the time of this discovery, the primary reference of the “genetic code” metaphor was so well – even if “erroneously” – established that it wasn’t questioned: dna is the medium for the transmission of an individual’s genotype, the way in which the dna bases are organized is a message in digital code that constitutes the individual’s “genetic memory.” Yet, as we now know, thanks to the cracking of the genome, 97 percent to 99 percent of the base sequences of higher organisms’ dna do not signify anything for protein synthesis. Does this mean that these sequences “mean nothing” in the framework of the code metaphor? In the remainder of this chapter, I attempt to respond to this question by contemplating the status of the non-code vis-à-vis the code metaphor, in turn considering it in light of the semiotic approaches

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of Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, and Jean-Pierre Faye. The choice of these three different semiotic perspectives on the genetic code metaphor come, in each case, from the coupling of a specific semiotic perspective with contemporary theory on junk dna . The standard reply to the question about the possible function or meaning of non-coding dna registers in a neo-Darwinian, evolutionist perspective that integrates quite well with the general economy of the “book of life” metaphoric network. Thus dna is itself often compared to a book, such as on the Human Genome Project website, where it is compared to “200 Manhattan telephone books” (of one thousand pages each), which, we are told, it would take twenty-six years to read. In this metaphor’s framework, junk dna is seen as the set of numbers that is no longer in service (and this for all the possible numbers that have ever been since time immemorial!). But the metaphor is much wider and richer than this simple analogy implies. More generally, the orthodox perspective inherited from the central dogma continues to consider that, if certain parts of dna do not code for protein synthesis, it is because they have no function at all, that they are nothing more than the “vestiges of ancient information.”³⁹ In fact, this first characterization of junk as fossilized information adheres to the most direct perspective of the original application of information theory. In this framework, single nucleotide mutation (snm) is not only at the origin of evolution but also at the origin of these non-functional vestiges: it is the source of noise. The linked trope appears regularly in the discourse on junk: “Biolinguists are trying to find a method for picking up the core three percent from the biochemical background noise and they are trying to spot the words without having to worry about what those words say.”⁴⁰ It is possible to view this perspective with Umberto Eco’s code theory,⁴¹ which takes up the original model of information theory and improves it to introduce the s-code notion and to characterize the “genetic code” as a (c) type s-code (for structural code), “a receiver’s set of behavioral responses.” Eco is thus closer to Jakobson’s initial structuralist aim. Eco extends the information theory’s concept of “code” to four types of phenomena:

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Noise Source Message in source code

Encoding

Signal

=

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=

Message in genetic

mrna

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dna sequence

Message in receiver code =

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Message in Phenotype Amino Acid Sequence

Genetic Noise: Mutation Fig. 16.3

Genetic code equivalence

a) a group of signals governed by internal combinatory laws, which he calls a syntaxic system; b) a group of states that are taken for a set of notions about these states and that can become a set of communicable content, which he calls a semantic system; c) a group of possible behavioural responses on the part of the addressee, which I am tempted to call a pragmatic system; and d) a rule that groups certain elements of system (a) with certain elements of system (b) or (c). By regarding genetic code as a type (c) s-code, Eco thus considers the sequence of amino acids (in the cytoplasm) as a group of behavioural responses available to the addressee. But the dna messenger can just as easily appear as a modulation of the heredity medium: the transcription of dna into rna by excising the non-coding parts (junk) and the permutation of T bases (Thymine) into U (Uracil) causes the signal to emerge through a type of modulation that may be qualified as digital (discrete). In this sense, Eco disregards the fact that one can character-

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ize genetic code as a code in the full sense of the term (d), which is to say as a rule that groups the syntaxic system of transcription (a) to the pragmatic system (c) of translation of the mrna codons into amino acid sequences. However, it seems to me that this perspective has the distinct disadvantage of closing the mode of reference of the genetic code metaphor on its first reference: in metaphorically comparing dna to the medium of heredity, this perspective winds up considering dna as nothing but this medium. In other words, the description allowed by the metaphor becomes ontological. A second semiotic perspective will now allow me to reopen the genetic code’s metaphoric mode of reference by avoiding the transformation of the first reference into ontology. Indeed, if I pursue the semiotic description of dna , I can just as well characterize junk from the group of insignificant details as carriers of a real effect, as analyzed by Roland Barthes. From this view, the noncoding parts of dna appear as “the irreducible residue of functional analysis”: in other words, they appear as what resists the single meaning of dna vis-à-vis an encoding function that is oriented towards protein synthesis. Their presence only confirms the orthodox account, both mechanistic and materialist, of standard molecular biology. As Barthes shows for text analysis, the presence of such details that are insignificant to the narration has no other effect than to render the narration more realistic: Semiotically, the “concrete detail” is constituted by the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier; the signified is expelled from the sign and with it, of course, the possibility for developing the form of the signified, which is to say in fact the narrative structure itself ... that is what one could call the referential illusion; this illusion’s truth is the following: stripped of the realist claim in the name of signified denotation, the “real” returns as signified connotation ... it is the category of “the real” (and not its contingent contents) that is thus signified; put otherwise, the very lack of the signified becomes the very signifier of realism: it produces un effet de réel (a real effect), which is the foundation of a plausible yet unspoken truth that shapes the esthetic of modern works.⁴²

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In this sense, the non-coding parts of dna resist an ontological equation of dna to the hereditary medium, a resistance that, as Barthes says, “confirms the wide, mythic opposition of real-life experience and of the intelligible.”⁴³ Related to the semiotic view previously presented, such a perspective has the merit of recalling that the genetic code metaphor, in its primary mode of reference, consists of a story that is only more realistic insofar as a real part – of dna – seems to escape it. Including details in the story that are insignificant to the narration thus paradoxically renders the story more realistic: thinking of non-coding sequences as noise makes a more realistic metaphor of a code that could organize dna in terms of protein synthesis. dna thus appears principally – and not uniquely – as the medium of heredity. But once we concede this effet de réel, we must then consider the effet de récit (the story’s effect). If insignificant details make the narration more “realistic,” their meaning can also produce the real. In this inversion, I am following the flow described by Jean-Pierre Faye, from his Le récit hunique⁴⁴ up to Le langage meurtrier,⁴⁵ from the “sending off” of the former: Without exception, these texts are the response to someone (who is missing), to a request or circumstance (that one doesn’t see). But at the same time, the texts respond to each other. By putting them together, one aims only to allow that a certain face be seen, which, much like an impressionist painter, the texts themselves have drawn: a particular narration to the second degree. This narration can only see itself from a sidelong glance. And if one observes it too closely? The face of the narration gets blurred, no doubt because it is laughing. Because this face is the drawing of a precise and perilous function that never stops moving.⁴⁶ To the elliptic formulation of the latter: Almost without his knowledge or perhaps even absentmindedly, Malby introduced when discussing the Hun people’s sudden emergence onto the historical scene, what would from then on be called the story effect: certain stories, he claims, have

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changed the face or the shape of nations. The real history has been transformed by the way stories have been recounted and re-counted. To bring back the story is also to give the power of rapport: of making links and of their measure.⁴⁷ The former encodes both my story’s thesis and its map as so many replies to a missing person (someone who is not there, an absent listener), like a receiver who is in search of a sender or, rather, who might have learned to do without (a kind of modern weaning). The latter recapitulates them into a compact formula in which everything is in italics. Placed here in an incessant backwards pivot, they finally allow my story to tilt into a second mode of reference not abstractly declared but, instead, directly told. All this for a face that can only see itself from a sideways glance and, what’s more, one that is laughing. This, with the same sense of humour as the blind librarian from Buenos Aires, who provided me with a belated epigraph: More than once I shouted to the walls that it was impossible to decipher such a text. Imperceptibly, the concrete enigma that preoccupied me tormented me less than the generic enigma that is constituted by a sentence written by a god. “What sort of sentence,” I asked myself, “could express absolute intelligence?” I realized that even in human languages there is no proposition that does not suppose the entire universe.⁴⁸ The story of genetic code destroys the cybernetic metaphor’s literal reference, while preserving it as the bootstrap program of an original story. Of this origin, this bootstrap, nothing remains but an endlessly reiterated command: reboot! From the central dogma of a one-way encoding, already there, there remains nothing more than the evermaintained possibility of (another) code in the code, an over-code, a meta-code, a supra-code, and so on. But the most orthodox developments of the original dogma have already taken back the inversion, while, admittedly, preserving what is essential to the dogma: its material function. Did Richard Dawkins not receive approval from the highest dogmatic authority, Sir Francis Crick himself, when he suggested (back

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in 976) that we think of junk as “selfish,” following Samuel Butler’s famous aphorism: “the chicken is merely the means for the egg to make other eggs”? Others have not been so conservative, and, since 994, many functions have indeed been imagined or demonstrated for non-coding dna . These functions appear in the metaphoric network of the “genetic code” and they invite us to give it a “second wind.” The code metaphor’s second reference loop can strengthen itself in the framework of a semiotic construct that re-presents junk dna in the shape of another code, for the moment indecipherable, which can be summed up as follows: what if dna were a multiplex medium, able to drive (or to transmit) both messages of protein synthesis and other messages? This polyfunctionality, or multimodality, allows us to imagine another language, or even “other worlds,” with which dna could put us in contact. In the era of the intermedial computer (the World Wide Web, etc.), this spun-out metaphor introduces meaning to the field of telecommunications, communication across time and distance, and even, why not – the quantum multiverse. Johnjoe McFadden’s most recent thesis exemplifies just this, updating Schrödinger’s original reference by returning to the quantum intuition (McFadden’s first chapter is entitled “What Is Life?” as is Schrödinger’s book): The quantum Zeno effect would no longer be able to nail the sequence to a classical reality, allowing the gene to descend into the quantum world. Thereafter, the gene would have continued its drift within the quantum multiverse ... of gene sequences ... a significant portion of the genomes of all organisms may ... be capable of this kind of quantum sequence drift ... perhaps as much as ninety percent of our own dna may be junk sequences. This will be invisible to the cell’s quantum-measuring devices, allowing their mutational events to drift unnoticed into the quantum realm.⁴⁹ In response to an email in which I asked him about the origin of this notion of junk as a group of dna sequences capable of quantum drift, McFadden laconically replied, “I’m afraid this is entirely (uninformed) speculation. My thesis is that dna may drift into the quantum world

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whenever it becomes sufficiently isolated from the environment. Junk dna seems to be the most likely to be isolated.” Jeremy Narby, in his work entitled The Cosmic Serpent: dna and the Origins of Knowledge, presents yet another hypothesis and imagines – with the help of a powerful Amazonian psychotropic cocktail – that “the global network of dna-based life emits ultra-weak radio waves ... as the aperiodic crystal of dna is shaped like two entwined serpents, two ribbons, a twisted ladder, a cord, or a vine, we see in our trances serpents, ladders, cord, vines, spirals, crystals, and so on.”⁵⁰ Narby insists on the fact that even the name junk dna is symptomatic of what he calls “cowboy science,” characterized by its capacity to minimize the unknown. For lack of space, I must be satisfied here with brief allusions to these intuitions, hypotheses, and theories constructed on an open mode of reference to the genetic code metaphor. They will be the subject of future publications. I end simply by stating that it is obviously futile to ask if Narby or McFadden are “right.” Surely, some will decide to ridicule them by accusing them of being science fiction authors. As for me, I think we may say, without falling into the illusion of reference, that they are surely no more right or wrong a priori than are those who see some “code” or another in dna . I will even bet that somewhere in their fictions are hidden the seeds of tomorrow’s scientific knowledge. Conclusion

If the genetic code is a catachresis, the proper name of a process that is open and iterative (and potentially infinite, a semiosis), it’s thanks to the isomorphism of the word, which allows the hybridization (the pathways and intersections) between super-specialized bodies of knowledge (molecular biology, computer science, linguistics, quantum physics, etc.) that are but so many infinite quests. I wager here that (narrative) semiotics will allow us to describe and to make explicit the motives of these quests, the shapes of these stories. But more than a simple heuristic bet, I think we must see in the metaphoric operation of the construction of these discourses a first step towards the definition of new practices and the experience of the new worlds that they help to produce. The genetic code metaphor’s open

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mode of reference thus appears as a semiotic system whose referent evolves in time with the boundaries of specialized bodies of knowledge (at times on the edge). As Hermann Hesse notes in the epigraph of his wonderful work, Magister Ludi, “There is nothing that so escapes verbal representation and yet that is so necessary to put before people’s eyes than certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor plausible, but who, by the very fact that pious and conscientious men treat them almost as if they existed, get closer to being and to the possibility of being born.”⁵¹

Notes  Maurice G. Dantec, Babylon Babies (Paris: Gallimard, 999), 535; Maurice G. Dantec, Babylon Babies, trans. Noura Wedell (New York: Semiotext, 2006), 694. 2 Donna J. Haraway, “Cyborgs and Symbionts: Living Together in the New World Order,” in Cyborg Handbook, ed. Chris Hables Gray (London: Routledge, 995), xix. 3 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post-Human (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 999). 4 Peter Sloterdijk, La domestication de l’être (my translation) (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2000), 82. 5 Ibid., 84. 6 Claude Shannon, “The Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 28, 4 (949): 656–75; and Warren Weaver, “The Mathematics of Communication,” Scientific American 8,  (949): –5. 7 Max Delbrück, cited in Steve J. Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, ma : mit Press, 99), 95. 8 Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (Cambridge, uk : Cambridge University Press, 944). 9 Heims, Cybernetics Group, 96. 0 Lily E. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press, 2000), 29.  Francis H. Crick and James D. Watson, “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” Nature, 25 April 953. 2 James D. Watson, La double hélice (Paris: Hachette, 984), 224.

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3 4 5 6 7 8

9 20 2

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

3 32

33 34 35

Crick, cited in Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? 74. Ibid., 74–5. Ibid., 27 Weaver, “Mathematics of Communication.” Roman Jakobson, cited in Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? 309. Henry Quastler, “The Status of Information Theory in Biology,” in Symposium on Information Theory in Biology, ed. Hubert P. Yockey (New York: Pergamon Press, 956), cited in Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? 26. Martynas Ycas, cited in Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? 26. Geof Bowker, “How to Be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 943– 970,” Social Studies of Science 23 (993): 07–27. Richard C. Lewontin, “Molecular Biology: In the Beginning Was the Word,” a review of Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code, by Lily E. Kay, Science 29, 5507 (2000): 263–4. François Jacob, La logique du vivant: Une histoire de l’hérédité (Paris: Gallimard, 970), 32. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? 2. Jacob, La logique du vivant, 327. Ibid. Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? Richard Doyle, On beyond Living (Stanford, ca : Stanford University Press, 997), 6–7. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Léviathan et la pompe à air (Paris: La Découverte, 993), 66. Richard Foster Jones, cited in Shapin and Schaffer, Léviathan et la pompe à air, 327–8. Allen Newell, “Metaphors for Mind, Theories of Mind: Should the Humanities Mind?” in The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines, ed. J.J. Sheehan and M. Sosna (Berkeley, ca : California University Press, 99), 60. Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 962). Richard Boyd, “Metaphor and Theory Change: What Is ‘Metaphor’ a Metaphor for?” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. A. Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 979), 356–408. Paul Ricoeur, La métaphore vive (Paris: Seuil, 975), 0 (my translation). Ibid., 288–9. Georges Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 980), 54.

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36 Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life? 27. 37 Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 958). 38 Science 263 (994): 608. 39 Werner R. Loewenstein, The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication and the Foundations of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 999), 93. 40 New York Times, 99. 4 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 976). 42 Roland Barthes, “L’effet de réel,” Communications  (968): 88 (my translation). 43 Ibid., 87. 44 Jean-Pierre Faye, Le récit hunique (Paris: Seuil, 967). 45 Jean-Pierre Faye, Le langage meutrier (Paris: Hermann, 996). 46 Faye, Le récit hunique, 7 (my translation). 47 Faye, Le langage meurtrier, 2 (my translation). 48 Jorge Luis Borges, “L’écriture de Dieu” in L’Aleph, tome I des oeuvres complètes (Paris: la Pléiade, Gallimard, 949), 33. 49 John Joe McFadden, Quantum Evolution: The New Science of Life (New York: Norton, 2000), 268. 50 Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent: dna and the Origins of Knowledge (New York: Putnam, 998), 6. 5 Hermann Hesse, Le jeu des perles de verre (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 955).

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author bios

olivier asselin is associate professor in the Department of Art History and Film Studies at the Université de Montréal. He has written articles and monographs on contemporary art (Le flâneur et l’allégorie: Essai sur la photographie de Charles Gagnon; Dédales: Parcours de l’œuvre de Roland Poulin) and co-edited two special issues of Parachute on “Autofictions” (2002) and “Digital Screens” (2004). He is also a filmmaker, having directed La liberté d’une statue (990), Le siège de l’âme (997), The Last Days of Paris (2007), and Un capitalisme sentimental (2008). thierry bardini , a sociologist, is associate professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, where he codirects the Workshop on Radical Empiricism (with Brian Massumi). In 2000, he published Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford University Press). He is currently finishing his second manuscript, entitled Junkware: The Disaffected Subject (www.junkware.net). raymond bellour is emeritus director of research at the Centre national de recherche scientifique in Paris. He is the editor of Henri Michaux in the Pléiade (3 vols. Gallimard, 998–2004). Related publications include: L’Entre Images (La Différence, 990, 2002) and L’Entre Images 2 (pol , 999). He is a regular contributor to the film journal Trafic.

marie fraser is assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She received her P hD in art history from l’Université de Montréal in 2005. Guest curator of the tenth edition of the Mois de la Photo in Montréal in 2007, she organized over thirty exhibitions under the theme Explorations narratives (Replaying Narrative). She was also the editor and main writer of the publication Mois de la Photo à Montréal, 2007, one of the first major studies on narrativity in contemporary photography and new media. She has recently published “Les jeux narratifs des remakes de Pierre Huyghe” in Intermédialités (spring 2007). monika kin gagnon is associate professor in communication studies at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2000) and, with Toronto video artist Richard Fung and eleven other artists, 3 Conversations about Art and Cultural Race Politics (2002) (translated in 2006 as Territoires et trajectoires: 4 dialogues sur l’art et les constructions raciales, culturelles et identitaires). Her current research, “Archiving R69,” concerns exploring cultural memory, film, and archives in collaboration with her late artist father – research that she has termed “Posthumous Cinema.” alice ming wai jim is assistant professor of contemporary art in the Department of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal. Recent publications include “Devil’s Advocate: Amy Cheung” (Star Fairy: Hong Kong in Venice, Venice Biennale, 2007) and “Thoughts on the Meaning of Return: hkg >