Rethinking Art and Visual Culture: The Poetics of Opacity [1 ed.] 9783030461751, 9783030461768

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: The Devotion to Transparency Versus Virtues of Opacity
Opacity as an Aesthetic
Politicized Visibilities
Glissant and the Value of Opacity
Chapter 2: On the Concept of Opacity in Art and Theory
Art and Illegibility
Opacity in Criticism
Noise
The Aesthetic and Philosophical Significance of Low Definition
Cinema Between Clarity and Opacity
Transparency and Opacity in Post-classical Film Theory, Philosophy, and Visual Culture
Chapter 3: Boundaries of Discernibility: Ernie Gehr
Chapter 4: Archival Ghosts, or the Elsewhere of the Image: John Akomfrah
Chapter 5: The Shape of the Secret: Matt Saunders
Chapter 6: And Dark Within: David Lynch
Chapter 7: A Hermeneutics of the Black Site: Trevor Paglen
Chapter 8: Faceless, Nameless: Zach Blas
Chapter 9: Sublime Static: Low
Afterword
Index

Citation preview

Rethinking Art and Visual Culture The Poetics of Opacity Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad

Rethinking Art and Visual Culture

Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad

Rethinking Art and Visual Culture The Poetics of Opacity

Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad Information Science & Media Studies University of Bergen Bergen, Norway

ISBN 978-3-030-46175-1    ISBN 978-3-030-46176-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46176-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Michael Heath / Alamy Stock Photo Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

The seeds of this book were planted during my stewardship of the Nomadikon project “New Ecologies of the Image,” and more particularly my study of cinematic form and ethics that became the monograph Film and the Ethical Imagination (Palgrave, 2016). I express my gratitude to the Trond Mohn Foundation (formerly the Bergen Research Foundation) for generously providing the grant with which to establish the Nomadikon Center for Visual Culture. I also thank the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Department of Information Science and Media Studies for their continued support of my research. I owe a big debt to professor Arild Fetveit, whose spirited invitation back in the fall of 2012 to join his immensely stimulating project “The Power of the Precarious Aesthetic” occasioned my initial encounter with the topic of opacity in the visual arts. In the spring of 2015 this project, sponsored by the Independent Research Fund of Denmark, facilitated a full semester’s worth of research for this book. Throughout our series of memorable research seminars between 2012 and 2015, I learned a lot from fellow project members Kjetil Rødje, Susanne Østby Sæther, Erika Balsom, and Antonio Somaini. I furthermore send my most heartfelt thanks to the Fulbright Program Norway for kindly providing me with a grant for a visiting professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2017–2018. Many thanks to professor Mark Sandberg and the Department of Film and Media for being such gracious hosts; my family and I really had the best of times while in Berkeley. Another big thanks is due Ksenia Fedorova, for inviting me to give a talk about my book at the University of California, Davis, in October 2017, as well as for insightful feedback. Many thanks also to Kristopher Fallon and v

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Colin Milburn for their astute remarks at the same event. Snippets of this manuscript have been presented as papers at various conferences over the last few years; these are too many to list here but I am very thankful for all the questions and comments received from other participants. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their thorough, engaging, and productive advice, which undoubtedly improved the manuscript, as well as Julia Brockley and Emily Wood at Palgrave, with whom it has been an absolute joy to work. Finally, I thank my wonderful family Stephanie, Sunniva, Sebastian, and Joanna for every single day we spend together. A section from Chap. 3 has been previously published in an altered form as “The Aesthetic Imaginary and the Case of Ernie Gehr,” in Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries, eds. Lene Johannessen and Mark Ledbetter, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018. Reprinted with permission from the editors. Bergen, March 5, 2020

Asbjørn Skarsvåg Grønstad

Contents

1 Introduction: The Devotion to Transparency Versus Virtues of Opacity  1 2 On the Concept of Opacity in Art and Theory 21 3 Boundaries of Discernibility: Ernie Gehr 53 4 Archival Ghosts, or the Elsewhere of the Image: John Akomfrah 77 5 The Shape of the Secret: Matt Saunders103 6 And Dark Within: David Lynch117 7 A Hermeneutics of the Black Site: Trevor Paglen135 8 Faceless, Nameless: Zach Blas153 9 Sublime Static: Low171 Afterword185 Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 9.1

Screengrab The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah) Frame from Passageworks (Matt Saunders) Screengrab from Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch) Photo from Limit Telephotography project (Trevor Paglen) Photo from Facial Weaponization Suite (Zach Blas) Photo from Double Negative (Low)

99 108 123 137 155 178

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Devotion to Transparency Versus Virtues of Opacity

The aim of this book is to explain the aesthetic and political affordances, functions, and affects of a range of artistic expressions that are marked by illegibility or semi-legibility. Rethinking Art and Visual Culture: The Poetics of Opacity provides answers to the following questions: what are the epistemological, ethical, and cultural values of indeterminate, blurry, distorted, degraded, indefinite, or indistinct works of art? What might such broken or informationally compromised representations or post-­ representations have in common? What would be some of the key instances of a poetics of opacity? What are their place and purpose in the firmament of aesthetic history? How do precarious forms of art address or reflect problems of knowledge, mediation, information, and data? While examples of opaque images and sounds abound in our audiovisual culture, this is the first book to map out a coherent theory of indistinct art. It is also, moreover, the first attempt to consider work by artists as diverse as Ernie Gehr, John Akomfrah, David Lynch, Matt Saunders, Trevor Paglen, Zach Blas, and Low together and in the context of a poetics of opacity. The research aims to intervene in current debates around regimes of visibility and surveillance by showing how indistinct aesthetics may offer a critique of the positivist impulse informing these regimes. This book is both a contribution to the field of media theory and a rigorous engagement with, and critique of, what I propose to name a politics of transparency. Encompassing photography, film, video, television, and music, the study is also a multidisciplinary intervention that spans the © The Author(s) 2020 A. S. Grønstad, Rethinking Art and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46176-8_1

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fields of visual culture, cinema and television, and sound studies. Its fundamental objective is to determine the artistic, ethical, and epistemological values of materially compromised forms of art, advancing a notion of opacity as a corrective to the political and social investment in an increasingly belligerent brand of positivism. The observation upon which the study is premised is this: visual culture and its multifarious objects and operations orbit around a set of tacit presuppositions. These assumptions and beliefs are, for instance, that the image be completely legible, that in principle anything can be visualized, that our screens will always grow incrementally brighter, and that vision and light are phenomena that are intrinsically good. From mainstream cinema’s historical predilection for unobtrusive staging to porn’s axiomatic appropriation of maximum visibility, the medium of film has favored what could be seen as a poetics of transparency. From a technological point of view, the history of the image is the story of ever more sophisticated machines for the production of sharpness.1 A dream of optimal transparency seems to drive both the image industries and the expectations of the consumer-viewer. In this deification of high definition, what has gone largely unnoticed in the various critical engagements with images and the visual world is the place of the seeming adversary of vision that nevertheless constitutes its inextricable counterpart. Some images are not bright and shiny. Some images are not easy on the eyes. Some images are not transparent. Some images are not presented for maximum visibility. Some images are not immediately codifiable. Such objects cause representational problems. They are an affront to hermeneutic efficacy. Co-existing with all the flawless images that populate our various screens, this complementary image ecology is rife with objects and practices that gravitate toward various forms of what some would see as visual imperfection. Found across a heterogeneity of contemporary audiovisual media and genres—photography, documentary, fiction films, television news, music, the social web—this aesthetic is easily recognizable 1  Consider, for example, the exalted reports from the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2013, a fair that hailed the latest improvements in high-resolution technology that were unveiled during the event. The LA Times praised the new 4K TV set for reproducing “stunningly good pictures on very large screens” with “an amazing level of detail and brightness.” See Jon Healey, “CES 2013: Sharp Shows Off Super-Sharp 8K TV, Waits for Content,” The LA Times, January 10, 2013, http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tnces-sharp-8k-tv-20130110,0,5741879.story, accessed February 21, 2014. Digital culture’s penchant for pellucidity, it appears, defines the state of the art in image technology and production.

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through its reliance on a set of recurring properties: fuzzy graphics, motion blurs, out-of-focus or grainy images, discolorations, wobbly cameras, elliptical editing, intrusion of “noise” either from the environment or the recording apparatus itself, technical glitches, and material decay (nitrate film). This aesthetics of illegibility, along with its philosophical implications, constitutes the core of this book. We do not yet have an art history of the ruined or opaque image, and while that history is beyond the grasp of this project, I want to scrutinize forms and examples that might merit inclusion in such a history. But more important than references to particular works, for this undertaking, are the kinds of epistemological and ethical matters that pertain to indecipherable visualities. My assumption is that a critique not of visibility per se but of the qualities of sharpness and of clarity as an unproblematically teleological desire needs to be undertaken from within the field of media theory. This book aims to examine a selection of images (and, in one instance, sounds) that are dense and even sometimes impenetrable. Thus, its subject matter and empirical reach extend to artworks that are damaged and materially compromised, broken—in short, artworks that are steeped in opacity. On the fringes of the paradigm of transparency, then, there is another style of audiovisual representation that increasingly has come to the fore in contemporary media culture. To provide an incisive account of this style is the overriding concern of this book. To that end, the analysis is divided up into a preliminary chapter, dedicated to an expansive examination of opacity as a concept both in media theory and in artistic practice, and seven case studies. These chapters zero in on a quite diverse body of work that in one way or another manifests or thematizes the subject of opacity: the experimental films of the American avant-garde practitioner Ernie Gehr (and, to a lesser extent, those of Bill Morrison), the essay films and installations of the British artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah, the hybrid projects of the American artist Matt Saunders, one singular episode from the television work of the American director David Lynch, the photographic interventions of the American artist Trevor Paglen, the facial masks of the American artist and writer Zach Blas, and, finally, the experiment with static and noise by the minimalist and so-called slowcore Minnesota ensemble Low. These works are evidently a mere selection from a much larger pool of possible cases, some of which are cited throughout this book. While as aesthetic effect or technique opacity extends across many different media and genres, the

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proclivity for employing it in a sustained manner seems higher in the experimental arts. The current range of cases is thus a reflection of this state of affairs. My choice of material is by no means haphazard and has developed organically as the research progressed. In chronological terms, works by Ernie Gehr and John Akomfrah constitute the kernel of the research, but my awareness of, and interest in, the projects of Trevor Paglen and Zach Blas with regard to the opaque informed my approach from an early stage. The heterogeneity of the cases is at least in part engineered, as what I was after was a mix of perhaps less widely known and maybe even unexpected works, on the one hand, and, on the other, more obvious and “canonical” examples. Likewise intentional was the gamut of aesthetic forms, from cinema and video to photography, television, and album covers. In this introductory part, I lay bare the premises for the study. Two observations are paramount in this regard. One is the awareness that contemporary culture is doused in a pervasive yet largely unquestioned faith in the preeminence of transparency, of total illumination. The other is the discovery of a vital yet mostly uncharted propensity for non-transparency, for lack of clarity in both a material and a conceptual sense, in works of art across the various disciplines. Tying these observations together, the chapter places the notion of opaque art in the context of a precarious aesthetics, the inscription of vulnerability into the formal affordances of the work itself. Acknowledging that an interrogation of ostensibly unchallengeable qualities such as transparency and clarity might represent a provocation, the chapter proposes an argument for the ethical and political values of a poetics of opacity. Important interlocutors in this chapter are Édouard Glissant, Emmanuel Levinas, Judith Butler, and Jonathan Crary. The ambition of Chap. 2, On the Concept of Opacity in Art and Theory, is to survey an array of works that in various ways adopt (partial) illegibility as a poetic device and, more substantially, to chart the critical genealogies of the present attempt at theorizing opacity. Identifying a possible origin for the thesis that the photographic/filmic image is essentially opaque in the anti-mimetic criticism of early film theorists such as Ricciotto Canudo, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, and Rudolf Arnheim, the chapter connects their ideas with the theoretical writings of later, post-classical thinkers such as Jean-Paul Fargier, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Jean-François Lyotard, Louis Marin, Paul Virilio, and Trinh Minh-ha. These two historically circumscribed streams of thought are then linked to more ongoing debates about indistinct art, blurry images, low definition,

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and visual noise in a compendium of theorists, from Hito Steyerl and Laura U. Marks to J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Martine Beugnet, Arild Fetveit, Erika Balsom, Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting, and Christine Ross. The chapter is intended as a compressed history of ideas around the notions of what I have elsewhere termed amimetic art as well as the transparency-­opacity spectrum.2 Especially significant for this discussion is the theory of the constitutive thickness of the image, the hypothesis that the transparency of the image is an illusion because the figurations captured on it are akin to a kind of semiotic crust whose inevitable presence always makes the content of the image generative rather than reflective. What kind of document, if any, is an image that exists, precariously one might say, on the fringes of the discernible? This is the question that the next chapter tries to resolve. The subject of opaque art readily invokes matters of mediality, and this is the point of departure for Chap. 3, Boundaries of Discernibility. Here, I examine the strange and optically regenerative practices by which materially impaired images exploit their own opacity to attain a new modality of existing as a visual artifact. In order to do this, I turn toward American avant-garde cinema, in particular works by Bill Morrison and Ernie Gehr. With reference to Kazimir Malevich’s notion of “cinema as such,” the chapter argues that the use of indefinite or decaying images in films like Decasia, Dawson City: Frozen Time, Abracadabra, and the Auto-Collider series may be considered spectral in the sense suggested by Aby Warburg and Giorgio Agamben. The bulk of the chapter however is committed to an analysis of Gehr’s work and the materialization throughout his oeuvre of a poetics of opacity. The claim is put forth that this work has produced a set of recurring stylistic and thematic concerns that together come to constitute a particular aesthetic imaginary. An artist whose work spans half a century of filmmaking, Gehr has consistently been drawn toward problems involving, among other things, the materiality of the medium, visual opacity, the perception of space, urban sites, and the apparitional. Gehr’s aesthetic—equally entrancing and mystifying, rigorous yet sensual, constricting yet invigorating—embodies, the chapter claims, a post-representational mode of image-making that in existential terms is generative rather than reflective. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of the imaginary as “games of

2  See Asbjørn Grønstad, Transfiguration: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008.

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mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection,”3 the chapter shows how the aesthetic imaginary in Gehr’s cinema is perhaps most prominently figured in the phenomenon that Jacques Derrida calls phantomality.4 Examining how Gehr’s films enact a process of spatial defamiliarization, the article also ties this preoccupation with spectrality to an older art historical tradition in which the image and the ghost keep close company. Ernie Gehr’s spectral re-animation of scraps of old silent films produces a form of opacity organized around the figure of the ruin. His filmmaking practice thus inscribes itself into a longer and deeply melancholic artistic tradition which foregrounds the poetic intensity of the fragment and of various states of degeneration. In Chap. 4, Archival Ghosts, or, the Elsewhere of the Image, we will see that in the work of the British filmmaker artist, filmmaker, and collagist John Akomfrah the trope of the ruin takes on a new guise, which is that of intertextuality. In a historical context, the intertextual fragment embodies another manifestation of the aesthetics of decay, of the ruin as an object of philosophical contemplation. In a work like The Nine Muses (2010), the ruin is no longer a natural or constructed object such as a skull, a crumbling staircase, or an abandoned power station but the splinters of key literary and cultural texts. For the Ghana-born Akomfrah, a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective (1982–1998) and director of the seminal Handsworth Songs (1986), the cultural archive is neither a static nor transparent compilation of artefacts but an epistemic resource that may be galvanized aesthetically to envision a different future. Across an oeuvre that (at the time of writing) contains more than thirty projects, Akomfrah has consistently and imaginatively mined a particular theme as well as deployed a particular method: on the level of narrative, the multifariousness of Black diasporic experience, and on the level of form, the complexities of various systems of mediation and representation. An essential component of his practice, I suggest, is an aesthetics of opacity, frequently connected with (although not exclusive to) the intertext understood—in an allegorical sense—as a ruin (his first feature length film Testament (1988) begins with Zbigniew 3   Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” [1972], trans. Melissa McMahon and Charles J. Stivale, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, 170–192. 4  Antoine de Baecque & Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse, 37.1–2 (2015): 26.

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Herbert’s evocative quotation that “[i]f we lose the ruins, nothing will be left”). Migration, displacement (geographic, social, and psychic), and the reclamation of cultural memory in a postcolonial, globalized era are issues that occupy a decisive place in Akomfrah’s works. But this subject matter is filtered through an emphatically dense and at times impenetrable transaesthetic collage founded upon the principle of the intertextual ruin and its productive opacity. The remolding of the cultural archive is something Akomfrah shares with many of his contemporaries, notable among them the American, Berlin-based painter, photographer, and film and video artist Matt Saunders. In Chap. 5, The Shape of the Secret, I situate his 2010 installation Passageworks within the context of an art of opacity, showing how the work in its stratified materiality recalls both Gehr’s poetics of spectrality and Akomfrah’s fascination with transtextuality and its archival accent. Like that of Gehr, Saunders’s art seeks to transcend the boundaries of the filmic, both in a technical-material, representational, and cultural sense. His work probes the interstitial space between, on the one hand, painting and drawing, and on the other, photography and film. Because he creates a negative by hand, either drawing or painting onto Mylar, he eschews the component habitually considered essential to photography—the camera, with its viewfinder, lens, and shutter (although the process does rely upon other elements of the technical apparatus such as photographic paper, an enlarger, and a darkroom). The images that emerge from this practice, as the examples from Passageworks reveal, are hybrid forms that are neither fully figurative and photographic nor entirely painterly and abstract. What they contribute is a kind of mongrel visuality. Likewise, representationally they hover between the recognizable and the indecipherable. At the same time, a composition such as Passageworks also broadens the scope of cinema’s cultural memory, in that it reintroduces films, characters, actors, places, and plots mostly forgotten, imbuing these with a poignant spectral power. Claiming that the opacity in Saunders’s films allegorizes these objects that exist on the cultural periphery, the chapter goes on to contextualize this filmmaking practice with reference to a poetics of the secret, as well as to Janet Harbord’s notion of ex-centric cinema and Ropars-­ Wuilleumier’s concept of cinécriture. The subject of spectrality resurfaces again in Chap. 6, And Dark Within, which shifts the focus from experimental cinema to what might be termed avant-garde television. Approaching the phenomenon of opacity from not only a graphic but also a narrative point of view, the chapter

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considers the eight installment of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), an episode in which “clarity is besides the point,” as one critic has noted.5 In order to make sense of this unusual work, I re-appropriate Anthony Vidler’s concept of warped space to show how Lynch’s aesthetic affordances not only rekindle the cultural anxieties and psychological torment suffusing modernist architecture but also radiate another form of opacity. Like Inland Empire before it (2006), The Return’s episode 8— with its ashen, spidery ghosts, deranged woodsman, and its murky, gray hues—yields forth images onto which issues of spatial warping, architectural uncanniness, ecological fears, and interpretive impenetrability all coalesce. The critical reception of the episode has suggested that its thematic backbone is nothing less than the origin of evil in the world, epitomized by the image of the mushroom cloud from the first nuclear test site in White Sands, New Mexico. Discharged on July 16, 1945, the operation known under the John Donne-inspired code name of “Trinity” ushered in the atomic age. The chapter explores the idea that the episode’s graphic and narrative opacities conjure a haunted and menacing universe and set up a compositional structure that is at once an origin story and an extinction narrative. In the work of artists such as John Akomfrah and Zach Blas, the poetics of opacity stays close to the ends Glissant envisions for this particular medium of expression, which is to operate as a bulwark against epistemic attempts to reduce the complexity and fundamental unknowability of experience. But the opaque image can also serve to further other objectives. Blurry photographs, for example, can serve as an index of a conspicuous absence, as a reminder that potentially significant information is being intentionally withheld from us. One such use of opacity is realized through the projects of the artist and researcher Trevor Paglen. Focusing on stealthy military operations and test sites—remote desert installations in the southwest or a classified spacecraft orbiting the Earth—Paglen produces photographs across substantial distances. The contribution of these often illegible images thus lies in the way in which they gesture toward not only the existence of barely visible objects but, maybe more importantly, the intended act of keeping something out of view in the first place. Chapter 7, A Hermeneutics of the Black Site, closely examines some of 5  Corey Atad, “Last Night’s Terrifying Twin Peaks Will Be Remembered as One of the Best Episodes of Television Ever,” Esquire, June 26, 2017, http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a55877/twin-peaks-part-8-recap/, accessed December 21, 2017.

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Paglen’s projects. His blurry photographs, I argue, enact a certain redistribution of the sensible, in that they debunk the increasingly untenable fiction of the transparency of the public sphere. Here, the poetics of opacity is engaged in the process not of showing seeing but of showing non-­ seeing, or the attempt itself to curtail the right to look. Perhaps more plainly than in the work of Gehr and Akomfrah, the indistinct image in Paglen inscribes itself into the perceptual sensorium we call aesthetics; it demonstrates that opacity is not the threatening Other of artistic communication but, on the contrary, an epistemologically rejuvenating possibility that is of the aesthetic, not something that swallows it up. So far the poetics of opacity has for the most part been located in various screen media. But the phenomenologically indistinct is not exclusively a feature of cinema, video, television, or contemporary art—or of sound and writing—but appears in the extra-textual world, too. A fairly pervasive site for displays of opacity is the face. From the niqab and the burqa to Anonymous’s Guy Fawkes disguises, Antifa’s black mask, and the KKK hoods, the veiling of the human face represents a culturally diverse practice that has confidentiality as its aim and opacity as its method. Chapter 8, Faceless, Nameless, analyzes the facemasks made by the artist Zach Blas in his Facial Weaponization Suite (2011–2014) in the context of a poetics of opacity as an instrument of political resistance. In the chapter, I approach Blas’s projects as a reaction to the increasing dominance of biopolitical forms of governmentality. Resembling a new ocular regime, these forms encompass measures such as the application of biometric technology for visas and international travel, the extensive deployment of surveillance cameras in metropolitan clusters, individualized consumer marketing, and social media applications for facial authentication. The transecting interests of the state, the military, and commercial enterprises are mobilizing to transparenticize the face. A project like Facial Weaponization Suite, the chapter contends, opposes the practice of biometric facial recognition by producing so-called collective masks. From the amassed facial data of several participants the work generates opaque masks that modern facial recognition technology is unable to read. In conclusion, the argument finds that the various processes of defacement—in effect, a poetics of opacity—enable new ethical relations to emerge, relations that contradict the disembodiment and objectification that are the outcome of biometric technologies. In the book’s last chapter, Sublime Static, I widen the scope of the poetics of opacity to include sound. Turning to the 2018 release of Double

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Negative, the Minnesota slowcore band Low’s 12th album, the chapter considers the sonic radicalism of the record in the context of its historical moment. I argue that the record’s profound use of distortion and noise epitomizes the musicians’ attempt to capture and respond to the intensifying pollution of the social sphere by the incessant chatter of social media, the ubiquity of false information, and the deafening blare of polarized politics. The chapter discusses the album’s relation to noise aesthetics in general and to philosopher Michel Serres’s notion of the parasite in particular, presenting the central argument that Low with Double Negative harnesses an acoustics of opacity as a device through which to rethink the meaning of mediality and communication for the contemporary moment. In the book’s Afterword, I summarize the vital insights concerning opacity as a concept in art, criticism, and theory.

Opacity as an Aesthetic Etymologically, the term opacity surfaces in the mid-sixteenth century with the content “darkness of meaning” and “obscurity,” which in turn derives from the French opacité, from the Latin opacitatem (nominative opacitas), meaning “shade” or “shadiness,” again from opacus, “shaded” or “dark.” Opacity as the state of being “impervious to light” was first recorded in the 1630s. As a word, it thus seems closely aligned with opticality. While I shall highlight the material aspect of opacity throughout, I will also deploy it in a more conceptual sense, denoting that which is epistemologically indeterminate. In the domain of artistic expression, opacity cuts across a wide range of genres and modes, from experimental works such as Decasia, The Decay of Fiction, and To Lavoisier, Who Died in the Reign of Terror (Michael Snow 1991) to commercial movies such as those of the Dogme movement, certain segments in Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah (2007), to amateur footage posted on YouTube and, finally, documentaries like Rouge Parole (Elyes Baccar 2011), to name a few casual examples. Before moving on, let me briefly dwell on an additional context for this study. What appears salient for a consideration of the boundaries of discernibility is the notion of a precarious aesthetic, which, I suggest, intersects powerfully with the concept of opacity. Whatever qualities one would like to attribute to images that have been damaged and impaired, a preliminary issue that needs to be addressed is the existence of precariousness. Morrison’s Decasia, for instance, is as a case in point. What I mean by this

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is that the film, through its splendid procession of decaying images, dramatizes the interplay between material and perceptual forms of vulnerability, between object and vision.6 What is opaque and difficult to discern may generate a sense of the precarious. But in recent intellectual discussions the concept of a precarious aesthetic is perhaps most immediately evocative of Judith Butler’s reflections on the problem of how to deal with “a sudden and unprecedented vulnerability,” as she puts it in Precarious Life.7 The backdrop against which her intervention is set is the catastrophe of 9/11 and the invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since then there have been more precipitous and unprecedented vulnerabilities to negotiate, most crucially the twin threats of the financial and environmental crises. One could probably be forgiven for thinking that the perceived difficulties within the field of aesthetics cannot but be obliterated by these more urgent and ubiquitous predicaments. I do not want to suggest otherwise here, but I do want to remain for a little while with Butler’s emphasis on vulnerability as perhaps a key condition of life in the twenty-first century. For some time now, aesthetic experience has been a contested site.8 This is yet another context for the concept of the precarious. Paying too much attention to the aesthetic dimension has long been regarded as somewhat suspect, politically. First, the aesthetic fell victim to the scientification of the humanities, thereafter, to the remarkable intellectual and institutional force of cultural studies in its manifold guises, postcolonialism, and various sociological readings of art and culture. While the former 6  Hal Foster has written about the art of the first decade of the twenty-first century in terms of the precarious. According to his account, much of the art made under the sign of the precarious—Jon Kessler’s The Palace at 4 a.m. (2005), Paul Chan’s series The 7 Lights (2005–2007), Mark Wallinger’s State Britain (2007), and Isa Genzken’s Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007), to name a few—sidesteps modernist practices of negation, suggesting instead the almost inverse effort to embrace the formlessness of the times. See Hal Foster, “Precarious,” Artforum, 48.4 (2009): 207–209. 7  Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso, 2004, 42. The term has also more recently been invoked by both Nicolas Bourriaud and Hal Foster. See Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant: No. 17, New York: Sternberg Press, 2009; and Hal Foster, “Precarious,” Artforum, 48.4 (2009): 207–209. 8  A few decades ago the idea of aesthetic beauty became so beleaguered that prominent defenses were published by authors such as Wendy Steiner and Elaine Scarry. See, for instance, Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in the Age of Fundamentalism, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995, Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, and Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

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sought to map and thoroughly explain every single feature of the aesthetic object, in the process rooting out the inherent enigma of the aesthetic that Adorno among others asserted as an indispensable element of aesthetic ontology, the latter more or less systematically privileged politicized and often formulaic analyses of the art object, readings that often tended to either overlook or brutalize the formal properties of the work. The pairing of the terms “precarious” and “aesthetic” is thus not as capricious as it may seem at first. We could say that there are two basic senses of the precarious aesthetic, the material and the conceptual (or the explicit and the implicit). The material sense designates various forms of what one could understand as impaired or imperfect images. The second sense is more abstract and would imply something that is quite close to a state of semiotic or hermeneutic opacity. The two senses also appear intuitively related, and they straddle the distinctions between different forms of opacity. Furthermore, phenomena identifiable as instantiations of a precarious aesthetic may possess a particular force, or power, and this force might be locatable precisely in their very precariousness. Etymologically, “precarious,” from the Latin precārius, was a legal term first registered in the 1640s and close in meaning to “prayer.” It denoted a favor asked of someone more powerful than the one doing the asking. A little later the meaning of the word shifted toward the sense of “risky,” “uncertain,” “perilous,” “unstable” and subject to chance. Within the art world, examples of a precarious aesthetic might be Hollis Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971), in which a series of photos showing mundane places and objects like bathroom stalls and moldering pasta are placed on a slow-burning hot plate gradually to incinerate before our eyes the moment after we have heard a description of the photo. A film that underscores the difference between language and image, it also simultaneously lays bare the seemingly inherent link between particular varieties of a precarious aesthetic and the iconoclastic impulse. A more recent case is Israeli visual artist Keren Cytter’s image of a burning turntable. As some of the case studies below will reveal, there are intimate affiliations between materially indistinct forms and social and existential conditions of vulnerability and precariousness.

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Politicized Visibilities Interrogating the supposedly unchallengeable merits of luminescence is a fraught proposition. Clarity, transparency, brightness—these qualities appear so obviously laudable, so central to our innermost conception of how reality fundamentally works, that contesting them risks coming across as counterintuitive or even heretical. Transparency, Nicole Simek writes, has become so widespread an ideal, valued and invoked by diverse constituencies in so many sectors of contemporary life across the globe (from government to business to education), that its moral authority often appears obvious. Though deploying it to different ends, neoliberal, liberal, and leftist discourses all frequently take transparency, or disclosure, to be a key principle of good governance and social relations.9

One could also object that, although interrelated in ways that I will try to unravel below, socially and psychically deleterious kind of aggressive illumination constitutes an issue altogether different from the aesthetics of opacity that is the subject of this book. Yet, I am going to insist that the two are related. Art that foregrounds a lack of clarity, both in a material and a narrative sense, may make us more aware of the limits of sight, its epistemological limits specifically. Artworks that embrace opacity as a poetic technique also index another way of being in the world, and they engender a different form of affect. In many cases, the aesthetics of opacity will also be embroiled in complex questions concerning temporality, technology, and mediation. Defenses of structures of opacity on ethical grounds are thus not the only context for reappraising the value and function of opacity. My objective here is not only to map out the different conceptual sites that the opaque image might inhabit but also to suggest how they could be connected. When our imagination is stimulated by an absence of certainty, we are presented with richer opportunities for exercising our ethical sensibilities. Indefinite images also index the constructedness of the finished image, reminding us that clarity need not equal candor and the definite or definitive need not imply natural inevitability. When cognition is stirred by something that is only half there or barely there, it might be akin to a kind of trigger effect that is a notable quality of the opaque image. We could perhaps call this “the blow-up theory” of indistinct visual forms, after 9

 Nicole Simek, “Stubborn Shadows,” symploke, 23.1–2 (2015): 363–373; 363.

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Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film that derives so much of its intellectual energy from the tantalizing epistemological promise of the pixel. Finally, the indefinite image may be helpful in exposing and critiquing the vaguely positivist fetishization of visual sharpness in contemporary culture. As a critical topos, opacity extends then far beyond the sphere of rarefied works of art. In September 2016, the journal Critical Studies published a themed issue on the subject of visibility/invisibility, stating in their editorial that their intention was in part to consider “the value of remaining, precisely, invisible, of keeping off the radar, of staying underground, for radical activism, artistic performance, and alternative politics?”10 The project comes across as an explicit challenge to a whole tradition of thought that presupposes that the expansion of the perceptible is politically and aesthetically desirable, a position foregrounded, for instance, by Jacques Rancière’s notion of dissensus, the particular process through which whatever has been suppressed by regimes of political consensus comes into view. I have, in a different context, described dissensus as: the force that enables new relations to emerge and that thus facilitates the transformation, redistribution and reconfiguration of sense experience in any given social entity. In this conception, politics is inevitably an aesthetic modality, in that it can result in new ways of seeing, sensing and experiencing the world. Inversely, art is inherently political, not because it sometimes is explicitly ‘committed’ to a certain agenda, but because it can expose, confront and oppose habitual beliefs and doxa through novel dispositions of the sensible.11

The question is, would not an emphasis on the value of remaining invisible be starkly at odds with the function that processes of dissensus would seem to fulfill? Leaving aside, at least for now, the assumption that invisibility also represents a particular distribution or reconfiguration of the sensible, I want to begin by drawing attention to operations of visibility that are less benign and that are not so much about issues of representation and the reorganization of perception as about totalizing panoptic regimes in cahoots with political ideologies that promote dehumanization. 10  Editorial, “(in)visibility,” Critical Studies, vol. 2, September 2016, http://www.criticalstudies.org.uk/uploads/2/6/0/7/26079602/critical_studies_v2d_-_editorial.pdf, accessed October 26, 2016. 11  Asbjørn Grønstad, Film and the Ethical Imagination, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 85.

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In the late 1990s, a space consortium with Russian and European partners made plans to manufacture a type of satellites, stationed at an altitude of 1700  kilometers, which would be equipped with reflectors to beam sunlight back to earth. These mirror satellites, the program proposed, would be able to illuminate vast areas with a degree of brightness almost 100 times more powerful than moonlight. Confronting intense opposition from scientists, environmentalists, and humanitarian groups, the plan never materialized. In his book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), Jonathan Crary sees this venture as one egregious manifestation of what he terms “a contemporary imaginary in which a state of permanent illumination is inseparable from the non-stop operation of global exchange and circulation.”12 Historicizing this imaginary, Crary discusses both Jeremy Bentham’s notorious structure in which prison space was flooded with light to optimize observability as well as the feeling of being continuously monitored and the introduction of urban street lights in the late nineteenth century in order both to ward off potential threats lurking in the shadows and, no less importantly, to extend the timeframe for consumers. The satellite enterprise alluded to above is essentially an intensification of this ominous politics of luminosity, or, in Crary’s terms, the “institutional intolerance of whatever obscures or prevents an instrumentalized and unending condition of visibility […] [a]n illuminated 24/7 world without shadows is the final capitalist mirage of post-history, of the exorcism of the otherness that is the motor of historical change.”13 Since this imaginary works to destabilize a set of vital distinctions (between light and dark, day and night, work and rest), sleep—perhaps the only remaining uncommodified area of human life—is fast becoming its next casualty. A 24/7 world is one that flattens subjectivity and unhinges our relationship with temporality, making the past seem shallow and inconsequential. According to the Hannah Arendt of The Human Condition (1958), which Crary explicitly invokes in his own text, the cultivation of the self into a singular being entails privacy and an abstention from the bright lights of public life.14 When further describing this 24/7 world in which everything is illuminated, Crary intriguingly adopts a very Rancièrean term. For Crary, what we could call the 24/7 imaginary denotes “a zone of insensibility [my emphasis], of amnesia, of what defeats the possibility of  Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso, 2013, 5.  Ibid., 9. 14  Ibid., 21. 12 13

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experience.”15 On this reading, then, visibility is no longer considered affirmatively, as a bringing into view of the previously marginalized, the overlooked, or the suppressed, but becomes itself an instrument of repression in its eradication of difference, experience, and memory. A state of perpetual and belligerent illumination advances what Teresa Brennan has called bioderegulation, the unfavorable effects that nonstop labor, consumerism and technological connectivity have on the human body in all its precariousness.16

Glissant and the Value of Opacity But the rule of visibility also has other repercussions. Particularly among certain postcolonial thinkers and artists, the lucidity of official histories and narratives is duplicitous, misrepresenting specific cultural experiences through processes of abstraction and reduction. In the work of Cuban installation artist Reynier Leyva Novo, for instance, opacity is deployed as a deliberate aesthetic strategy in order to highlight the omissions of history. Novo’s works, according to Guillermina De Ferrari, “reverse the process of erasure and political appropriation common to historical discourse in Cuba by appealing to rhetorical strategies that both imbue history with life and obscure it in one single gesture.”17 The writer most closely associated with the philosophy of opacity is the Martinican critic, poet, and novelist Édouard Glissant, who, in his Poetics of Relation (1990; English translation 1997), pondered the nature of ethical relationships through that concept. In one of the articles in his book, simply entitled “Transparency and Opacity,” Glissant holds that transparency “no longer seems like the bottom of the mirror in which Western humanity reflected the world in its own image.” Instead, he writes, “[t]here is opacity now at the bottom of the mirror, a whole alluvium deposited by populations.”18

 Ibid., 17.  Teresa Brennan, Globalization and its Terrors: Daily Life in the West, London: Routledge, 2003, 19–22. 17  Guillermina De Ferrari, “Opacity and Sensation in Reynier Leyva Novo’s Historical Installations,” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, 22, 2015, https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/opacity-and-sensation-in-reynier-leyva-novos-historical-installations/, accessed October 28, 2016. 18  Édouard Glissant, “Transparency and Opacity,” in The Poetics of Relation [1990], trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, 111. Glissant’s work occa15 16

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This observation might prompt us to ask, why might clarity be a problem or, more fundamentally, what is clarity? Etymologically, clarity involves light, brightness, and its meaning is more or less interchangeable with that of transparency. For one thing, clarity—in a material sense—can be misleading, even perfidious. A statement perfectly formed and unambiguously articulated can still be a lie, which is an example that acutely challenges the supposed isomorphism of clarity and truth. This awareness is basically a variation of the adage that appearances can be deceptive. But there are also other, and perhaps better, reasons to distrust the rhetoric of transparency, in particular with respect to visual objects. An image, regardless of what it shows, performs an act of sedimentation, a process not unlike that of the accumulated alluvium that Glissant refers to. The image is generative, not reflective, and it can never be really transparent in the first place. Even when we have no trouble recognizing the object inside its frame, the image has a constitutive thickness—both material and semiotic—that cancels out any claim to transparency. In his classic essay “The Unattainable Text,” Raymond Bellour suggests that the film image is located “half-way between the semi-transparency of written titles and dialogue and the more or less complete opacity of music and noise.”19 Any image, whether vivid or fuzzy, is the product of a particular technology and of a particular act of mediation; that we have been taught, for instance, by Hollywood cinema, to ignore this medial interference and look straight through it onto the object of the image does not mean that it has somehow left behind its technological-­ representational baggage. But a key reason why opacity might be preferable to clarity, for Glissant, has to do with ethics. His critique of the notion of transparency arises from the acknowledgment that the colonial structures of social and economic domination in the Caribbean and elsewhere had been naturalized to such an extent that they had in fact become indiscernible. This state of affairs required a novel methodology of resistance, an imaginative counter-­ strategy, which Glissant found in what he referred to as the “stubborn shadows,”20 modes of writing, often poetic in style, that privilege both an sioned a special issue on the subject of opacity from the journal InVisible Culture in the spring of 2015. 19  Raymond Bellour, “The Unattainable Text,” Screen, 16.3 (1975): 15–27; 24. 20  Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J.  Michael Dash, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989, 4.

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expressive opacity and an opacity of expression. This method did not favor opacity for its own sake, but was an antidote to the discursive regimes of transparency. A problem with transparency is that it constitutes a politics of representation that entails a modification of the identity of the other so as to be amenable to Western models. A kind of otherness that is autonomous, unbounded, and ultimately untranslatable is not sufficiently palatable for dominant mainstream culture. Alterity needs to be made acceptable, which in practice means it must somehow symbolically kowtow to discursive expectations, an alteration the consequence of which is a depreciation of the specificity of the other. Using transparency as an instrument, mainstream culture’s encounters with alterity habitually convert cultural difference into sameness. This process can probably only be opposed by insisting on the irreducibility of the other’s identity, hence Glissant’s endorsement of opacity. There are also other philosophers who have approached the challenges that alterity presents in ways not too dissimilar from that of Glissant. In To Be Two (1998), for instance, Luce Irigaray frames the relation between the subject and its other in a manner that resembles the theory of opacity, even though she does not use that word: Looking at the other, respecting the invisible in him, opens a black or blinding void in the universe. Beginning from this limit, inappropriable by my gaze, the world is recreated… We can remain together if you do not become entirely perceptible to me, if part of you stays in the night.21

Moreover, the structure of the relations accentuated in his theory clearly recalls the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, although Glissant makes no mention of the continental thinker in his own work. In Totality and Infinity, for example, Levinas famously understands ethics as “this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other.”22 The statement implies a troublesome tension between, on the one hand, the stability and intactness of the self and, on the other, the opaque identity of the Other. The process of essentializing the other seems to be a precondition for the preservation of the unity of the self. Reducing the other’s particularity is in a certain sense the collateral damage that this process 21  Luce Irigaray, To Be Two, trans. Monique Rhodes & Marco F. Cocito-Monoc, New York: Routledge, 2001, 8. 22  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority [1961], trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2001, 43.

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inflicts on the arbitration of intersubjectivity. The dilemma is this: to know the other requires transparency. But the effect of transparency is always necessarily filtered through one’s subjectivity, and the substantive content of the transparent originates in what is already known by the self. Using this knowledge in the transaction with the other—and here the other could be a text or a phenomenon just as well as a person or a group—the self cannot help but translate the otherness of the other into the idiolect of the known. This process establishes a certain kind of connection and makes the other “readable,” but it also diminishes the particularity of the other’s identity. Levinas did not write much on aesthetics, but in an early, provocative article he touches upon something that might help connect his deeply idiosyncratic philosophy of ethics to the realm of art and possibly even opacity. In “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948), he understands the aesthetic encounter as a “violent freezing of relations rather than an opening towards ethics.”23 As opposed to real life, the work of art is existentially constrained in the sense that it is circumscribed. No matter how unruly it otherwise might be, the work is a bounded entity that possesses finality and ontological discreteness. It is this state of being finished and complete that, for Levinas, introduces a problematic element of stasis into the world of the work, a sense of equilibrium and stillness that compromises its ethical potential. Moreover, Levinas seems to suggest that the image also has the power to bewitch and ensnare its viewers, which is a more pervasive and well-known indictment of artistic works in general. If our encounter with the artwork promises both seduction and definiteness, it can hardly be a catalyst for ethical experience. But Levinas’s rather glum view of aesthetics in this article might be offset by his later concepts of complete and incomplete art, in which the latter notion may be able to transcend this perceived and prohibitive fixity of the work. Among the examples he offers of incomplete art, there is the work of the Algerian painter Jean-Michel Atlan, also a member of the CoBrA group, of the French sculptor and painter Sacha Sosno, and of the French painter Charles Lapicque. I will assume that the family resemblance between the concept of incomplete art and opaque images is evident enough.

 Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow,” 165.

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CHAPTER 2

On the Concept of Opacity in Art and Theory

As we have seen above, the value of opacity may be limned across several domains. Sometimes its impact is such that it makes us question hegemonic narratives; here, the effect of opacity is starkly political, as in the work of Novo and others. On other occasions, the opaque image serves to stimulate our imagination, in that the quality of indistinctness forces us imaginatively to fill in what is indiscernible or missing. In those cases the value of opacity is cognitive. Above all, however, because it protects not only privacy but also the irreducibility of the subject, the significance of opacity involves an ethical dimension. Broken art refracts a sense of the inherent precariousness of our lives and helps cultivate an ethical relation to the world and its persistent otherness. In this, too, visual opacity establishes a bond with the notion of the precarious. Material and sensory imperfections suggest susceptibility, the state of being vulnerable to outside forces, to incompleteness, or to ephemerality. But what exactly is the poetics of opacity? Below I will try to make a few distinctions that hopefully serve to provide an overview of its conceptual reach, after which I will turn toward a discussion of artistic traditions and critical/theoretical genealogies as these pertain to the matter at hand. When is an image or sound opaque, and what forms of opacity exist in our audiovisual cultures? What kinds of cultural meaning attach to opaque images? While there may be other ways of organizing this particular field of visual culture, I propose in what follows to delineate four different senses of an aesthetics of opacity. The first comprises images that in some © The Author(s) 2020 A. S. Grønstad, Rethinking Art and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46176-8_2

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way or other have been materially damaged, either deliberately through imaginative manipulation or organically through exposure to the relentless forces of time and environment. The latter process is described in William Gaddis’s first novel The Recognitions (1955) as inherent vice, deficiencies that have evolved over time in works of art.1 Exposure to the implacable labor of time may eat away at not only the work’s fleshy substance but also its semantics; signs and meanings that intertextually accrue to the work throughout its life span may cumulatively inscribe a new content that shrouds what was there before, making the work ambiguous, messy, and perhaps polyphonic. That, too, is a form of opacity. A second form of opacity pertains to artistic works whose properties are deliberately inscrutable, informationally sparse, or contentless. Model instances in this vein would be the white paintings of Robert Rauschenberg (1951) and John Cage’s 4.33 (1952), but, as Craig Dworkin has shown, a distinct aesthetic ecology exists in art, literature, and music of works that are blank or erased.2 Sometimes images are also subject to external forces other than the erosion of time or the intentional actions of the artist. This third sense of an aesthetics of opacity involves visual representations that have been vandalized and exposed to acts of iconoclasm, the results of which might be partial illegibility.3 But an aesthetics of opacity is not limited to the material or textural dimension of the image. In order to deal with the  William Gaddis, The Recognitions, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955, 949.  See Craig Dworkin’s Reading the Illegible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003, and No Medium, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013. 3  Examples of the iconoclastic gesture in art are surely legion. One powerful example is the exhibition Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949–1962, shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago between February and June 2013 and featuring works by artists such as Gustav Metzger, Kazuo Shiraga, Alberto Burri, Lee Bontecou, and John Latham. Another and quite different example are the so-called building cuts of Gordon Matta-Clark, in which the artist made sculptural installations out of derelict houses by cleaving them in two with a chainsaw. Although its context is obviously dissimilar, the vandalization of artworks represents another instance of iconoclasm in the field of aesthetics. For further reading, see Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution, London: Reaktion Books, 1997; Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Karlsruhe: ZKM MIT Press, 2002; W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005 (particularly chapter 6, “Offending Images”); and James Noyes, The Politics of Iconoclasm: Religion, Violence and the Culture of Image-Breaking in Christianity and Islam, London: I. B. Tauris, 2013. Art and iconoclasm is too comprehensive a subject to be considered in the 1 2

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phenomenon in a more substantial way, one that is not unhelpfully narrowed down to a question of image physiology alone, we need also to consider what I will refer to as narrative forms of opacity. These are cases in which the indecipherability of the work is shaped not by strictly material forces but more broadly by the deployment of various formal or stylistic figurations. A case in point are films that, in the words of Jeffrey Sconce, are “either formally challenging or potentially objectionable in terms of content,” often in the service of ends that are ultimately political.4

Art and Illegibility While this study explores only a few select in-depth cases, examples of an aesthetics of opacity are legion across the visual culture of (post)modernity. For photographically based media, the technical causes of indistinct imagery are many: decomposing film stock, lens flares, motion blur, light leaks, unfocused lenses, scratched emulsion, post-production manipulation, filming through spatial obstructions, and darkening the frame, to name some. The genre of experimental cinema has historically been a fertile field for testing the creative potential of medial obscurity. In Andy Warhol’s Poor Little Rich Girl (1965), according to one critic the film with “the shallowest depth of field of any movie ever made”5—we get a protracted out-of-focus close-up of what might be Edie Sedgwick’s face, possibly an error on the director’s part or set off by a defective lens. More recently, Cory Arcangel’s looping and soundless video work Untitled (After Lucifer) (2006) gradually compresses the Beatles’s legendary 1964 Ed Sullivan performance so as to make the recording progressively illegible. Another, quite different visual culture object is repurposed in Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin’s Lossless #2 (2008), which subjects Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s ageless Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) to a process of digital disruption that threatens the decipherability of the image. The digital technique of datamoshing is utilized in Nicolas Provost’s video projection Long Live the New Flesh (2009), which mutates found footage from horror movies. Compression and other forms of digital context of this study, and for reasons of space and focus I have decided to explore here the other senses of an aesthetics of opacity. 4  Jeffrey Sconce, “Indecipherable Films: Teaching Gummo,” Cinema Journal, 47.1 (Fall 2007): 112–115; 112. 5  J. Hoberman, “Always On,” Film Comment, 50.5 (2014), 62–66; 64.

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kneading proliferate in the visual art practices of the twenty-first century, seen, for instance, in the work of the American artist Takeshi Murata (Monster Movie, 2005), the German photographer Thomas Ruff (JPEGS, 2009), the Kuwaiti-born filmmaker Basma Alsharif (Home Movies Gaza, 2013), the aforementioned American multimedia artist Cory Arcangel (On Compression/Lakes, 2014), and scores of others. But the poetics of opacity also materializes in other ways. Consider Gustav Metzger’s sculptural installation Historic Photographs at the New Museum in 2011, which deliberately and physically obstructs our access to a series of iconic photographs. Consider also Janet Hamlin’s Sketching Guantanamo (2013), a book of drawings from the military base where the artist was a witness to the courtroom proceedings. Prohibiting photography from the military trails at Guantanamo, US government officials would occasionally demand that the sketches be deliberately smudged, thus creating yet another kind of opacity. Other cases abound. In Lindsay Seers’s mysterious film installation Nowhere Less Now (2012), a sense of opacity overwhelms the dense work both narratively and materially. Alexandre Larose’s gauzy, oneiric brouillard—passage # 14 (2014)—showing the filmmaker walking down a shoreline path—generates a hazy, impressionistic, and vaguely preternatural image from multiple superimpositions on a roll of 35 mm film. Rabih Mroué’s performance-lecture at Documenta 13, The Pixelated Revolution (2012), displays footage from the Syrian revolution while Mroué addresses the images, videos, and text projected behind him. Noting an aesthetic correspondence between the images of violence captured on mobile phones and the Dogme 95 manifesto, Mroué creates a grid in order to analyze the wealth of visual data, magnifying images until they bleed into abstraction. An aesthetics of opacity is not restricted to the media of film, video, and digital art alone. Both literature and sound media might produce moments of illegibility as a poetic device. Even the art of album sleeves has its significant contributions, seen, for instance, in Pink Floyd’s Obscured by Clouds (1972), whose cover features an out-of-focus film still of a person in a tree or in the washed-out image for Boards of Canada’s The Campfire Headphase (2005). R.E.M.’s iconic kudzu weeds on the cover of Murmur (1983), while optically sharp, also invites associations to abstruseness through its juxtaposition of the enigmatic vines and the album’s expressive title. It is also worth pointing out that, empirically, the connection between art and opacity extends far beyond the realms of degraded celluloid and low-­ definition digital image files. Admittedly, there appears to be a powerful

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identification in contemporary film and media theory between the concept (non-transparent or unclear images) and the particular case (specific instances of materially debased analogue or digital images). By force of its prominence in the art sphere and, no less importantly, the critical conversations generated around it, the latter material needs further consideration. Hence, I will examine some of the key positions in this field before delving deeper into the concept of aesthetic opacity and what it might entail.

Opacity in Criticism A touchstone for the emergent critical literature on low-definition and indistinct images is the German filmmaker, artist, and writer Hito Steyerl’s essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” published in e-flux in November 2009. Steyerl identifies the eponymous object as a binary numeric entity, usually a ripped AVI or JPG, a frequently copied file whose decline is caused by infinite acts of transmission, by digital wear and tear. The poor image is “a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.”6 Yet, it could be that these forms of visual mutilation, vastly unalike though they are, might provide us with an entry point through which to consider the precarious imaging practices of experimental artists like Bill Morrison, Peter Delpeut, Pat O’Neill, and Ernie Gehr (the latter of whom I will return to in more detail in subsequent chapters). That point is the fetish of transparency. Resolution and sharpness, as Steyerl points out, are the most valued image properties; there is a sense in which a high-resolution image looks more “mimetic” than its low-resolution counterpart. Intriguingly, Steyerl—referencing Juan García Espinosa’s Third Cinema Manifesto “For an Imperfect Cinema”—links the ambitions toward ever greater resolution (and thus transparency) to what she describes as “the neoliberal radicalization of the concept of culture as commodity” and to “the commercialization of cinema, its dispersion into multiplexes, and the marginalization of independent filmmaking.”7

6  Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-flux, 11 (2009), http://www.e-flux. com/journal/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/. 7  Ibid.

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What is particularly noteworthy about the connection Steyerl makes is the unmistakable politicization of a feature, or condition, conventionally thought to be technological or formal in nature. Clarity or transparency is bound up with commodified culture; for Espinosa, for instance, so-called “technically and artistically masterful” cinema tends to be even reactionary.8 Critics like Steyerl and Espinosa posit a fascinating bifurcation in which markedly dissimilar political, cultural, and even ethical values are being ascribed to what are essentially different aesthetic properties. What is routinely perceived as a matter of technological enhancement might in fact better be understood as a divergence on the level of form that in turn may index a different ethical content. In the electronics business, for example, the technological and the formal frequently seem conflated, as the media admiration for the 4K TV unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas would seem to confirm. This correlation between an aesthetics of opacity and ethics is also more than hinted at in Bill Nichols’s theory of axiographics. What he refers to as “the accidental gaze”—whose stylistic parameters are informed by elements such as blurry focus, erratic cinematography, dire sound, and volatile framing—gets specifically linked to an “ethics of curiosity.”9 The affirmative relation between ethics and visual deficiencies is thus something that has been perceived independently by widely different theorists; even Adorno, in a rare film-related essay, argues that artefacts which “have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality.”10 I shall return to the question of ethics and opaque form below.

Noise One telling and frequently invoked metaphor for both the materiality and the effect of fuzzy images is that of noise. Often felt to be an annoyance, noise can also proffer the pleasure of transgression and non-conformity, as

8  Juan García Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” trans. Julianne Burton, Jump Cut, 20 (1979): 24–26. The essay was originally written in 1969 and its first appearance in English translation was in 1971. 9  Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, 83. 10  Theodor W. Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, New German Critique, 24–25 (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982): 199–205; 199.

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some scholars have pointed out.11 In the standard information theory of someone like Claude Shannon, noise is the enemy of efficient data transmission, an unwelcome disruption of the signal sent between two stations in a technical system. But the possibility of the signal or message being subject to interference is always there, because, if we follow Michel Serres’s argument, noise is the “transcendental” background that precedes the construction of the system.12 According to Goddard, Halligan, and Hegarty, noise constitutes its own logic of operation: what any system necessarily excludes as noise are all the levels of organization above and below it that include its own conditions of possibility, hence the informational account of noise as a lack of organization being a state of fundamental distortion. Noise is indeed static or interference but not that of an unorganized chaos so much as patterns of organization alien to the norms of a specific system—that which Serres refers to as ‘the parasite.’ (3)

Noise, furthermore, can be more than the material interference with an informational signal. Considered in not just a technical but in a wider social sense, noise can also evolve into a discrete aesthetic genre, as with noise rock, for example. At an early point in their history, established musical genres such as jazz, punk, and electronica were sometimes perceived as noise too. In certain contexts, foreign languages might also be regarded as noise; one time, while working on a text in a coffee shop somewhere in the Bay Area, I was face timing with my mother back in Norway when an older woman approached me and irately told me to stop talking. I was speaking in a low voice, and I had already observed that people were chatting on their phones almost daily in this particular café, so the only explanation I could think of for her resentfulness was that I was using a language she did not understand and thus experienced as noise. Critics like Goddard, Halligan, and Hegarty allow that noise aesthetics can also be textual and visual, and the study of noise as applicable to other media has been undertaken by among others Arild Fetveit. In his article “Medium-Specific Noise,” Fetveit draws on musicology (John Cage, Brian Eno) and communication theory (Shannon, Abraham Moles) to make a case for the conceptual validity of the titular term. Approaching 11  Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan, and Paul Hegarty, “Introduction,” Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise, eds. Michael Goddard, Benjamin Halligan, and Paul Hegarty, London: Continuum, 2012, 1. 12  Serres as paraphrased by Goddard, Halligan, and Hegarty, 3.

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the phenomenon of noise from a comparative angle, he defines medium-­ specific noise as an aesthetic that deliberately utilizes “noises associated with particular media… as expressive devices.”13 Rather than eliminating such noise, the practitioners of this aesthetic harness it to achieve artistic ends. “In the service of this aesthetic,” Fetveit argues, “technologies are developed to enhance and artificially produce such medium-specific noises and malfunctions.”14 In fleshing out his theory, Fetveit also reaches back historically to consider favorable approaches to noise, such as that of Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, who deemed noise not as a disruption but as “inharmonious sound.”15

The Aesthetic and Philosophical Significance of Low Definition Until around 2016 the critical preoccupation with low-definition or debased images was rather sporadic. A more concerted effort materialized with the symposium in June 2016 on “Indefinite Visions” at London’s Whitechapel Gallery.16 Organized by Allan Cameron and Richard Misek, the event was committed to a persistent examination of the subject of illegible images and later resulted in an anthology with the same title. In one of the articles featured in this book, Erika Balsom provides an incisive account of the widespread resistance to high definition—to cinema’s 13  Arild Fetveit, “Medium-Specific Noise,” in Thinking Media Aesthetics, ed. Liv Hausken, London: Peter Lang, 2013, 189–215; 189. 14  Ibid. 15  Ibid., 192. The literature on noise, from Michel Serres to Joseph Klett and Alison Gerber, is too vast to review here. For the purposes of this study, critical appraisals of the mutually constitutive relation between signal and noise are less significant than the knowledge that material defects might be productively exploited to accomplish aesthetic effects that have philosophical implications. See Michel Serres, Le Parasite, Paris: Grasset, 1980, and Joseph Klett and Alison Gerber, “The Meaning of Indeterminacy: Noise Music as Performance,” in Cultural Sociology, 8.3 (2014): 275–290. 16   See the following website, http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/indefinitevisions/, accessed October 10, 2017. At the time of writing, the journal NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies issued a call for papers on a similar theme for an edition to be published in 2018. “For this special section in NECSUS,” the guest editors Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini write, “we call for contributions that analyse the current cultural meanings and the various aesthetic, economic, epistemological, and political implications of high and low definition and resolution in a wide variety of visual and audiovisual media.” See https://necsus-ejms.org/necsus-spring-2018_resolution/, accessed October 13, 2017.

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capacity to reproduce a faithful image of the external world—in significant enclaves of classical film theory. Influential theorists such as Ricciotto Canudo, Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac, Abel Gance, and Rudolf Arnheim questioned the medium’s propensity for visual transparency, fearing that the mimetic precision of machine vision would curtail film’s eligibility as a form of art.17 From the point of view of film philosophy, pictorial exactitude thus became something to be resisted. As Lucy Bowditch has shown, similar if possibly less severe sentiments were not uncommon among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theoreticians of photography such as Elizabeth Eastlake, Julia Margaret Cameron, Peter Henry Emerson, Frederick Evans, Maurice Maeterlinck, and Alfred Stieglitz, who all in different ways championed what Bowditch refers to as the “partially invisible image.”18 The quandary for these critics is imitation. Photography’s facility for indiscriminate replication of whatever is in front of the lens contravenes the expressive and the subjective aspects that, even throughout Realism, were viewed as intrinsic to artistic practice. Charles Baudelaire’s indictment of copying in his famous Salon essay opposes it to imagination,19 a stance resurfacing half a century later in Canudo’s essay “The Birth of the Sixth Art” (1911). Cinema, he writes, is “not yet an art, because it lacks the freedom of choice peculiar to plastic interpretation, conditioned as it is to being the copy of a subject, the condition that prevents photography from becoming an art.”20 As already alluded to, other film theorists of the time shared Canudo’s conviction. Gance dreamed of an allegorical form of cinema, Dulac favored suggestiveness over the mimetic, and Epstein 17  Erika Balsom, “100 Years of Low Definition,” in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, eds. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron & Arild Fetveit, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, 74. 18  Lucy Bowditch, “The Power of Partial Invisibility: Reframing Positions on 19th and Early 20th Century Photography,” in Invisibility in Visual and Material Culture, eds. Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes, forthcoming from Bloomsbury, 2018. For other studies of photographic practices that gravitate toward alternatives to full mimetic visibility, see Shawn Michelle Smith, At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen, Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, and Ernst Van Alphen, Failed Images: Photography and Its CounterPractices, London: Valiz, 2018. 19  Charles Baudelaire, Salon de 1859: texte de la Revue française, Paris: H.  Champion, 2006. See also Timothy Raser, Baudelaire and Photography: Finding the Painter of Modern Life, Cambridge: Legenda, 2015. 20  Ricciotto Canudo, “The Birth of the Sixth Art” [1911], Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 13 (1980): 3–7; 5.

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­ aintained that film could not be reduced to mere imitation.21 His somem what elusive notion of photogénie names just this medium-specific property that enables film to transcend the aesthetic dead end of the copy. In what ways, then, could a “hot” medium like cinema, with its montage, grand scale, and striking iconicity, overcome the limitations of its own attributes to become an art form on par with music, poetry, and painting?22 One answer would be that it needs to cool down, and anything that diminishes its mimetic authority and leaves more to be completed by the viewer might go some way in accomplishing this. Sharpness had to be rejected as an aesthetic norm. In the ideas of the film theorists of the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s, then, there is a notable privileging of techniques that advance opacity, although that particular term might not have been frequently used at the time. Stylistic effects such as superimposition (in Viktor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage, 1921) and multiple exposures (in Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher, 1928) compromise the transparency of the photographic image and open up a space for expressive subjectivity. Low-definition practices also underscore the mediated status of the image, effectively sabotaging the endeavor to give us direct and unmediated access to an extra-representational signified, evidently a misguided ambition in the first place. For Canudo, and also for Arnheim— who observes that film is already fundamentally different from the real due to its framing, two-dimensionality, and lack of color (but who also acknowledges the significance of low-definition elements such as blurry focus and superimposition)—low definition serves four different functions: it channels subjective experience, attests artistic intentionality,

 See Balsom, 78.  In his epochal Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan makes a conceptual (and highly relative and contextual) distinction between media loaded with sensory data, like photography, film, and radio (high definition or hot media), and media poorer in such information, like cartoons and television (low definition or cool media). The latter requires more audience participation because they are less informationally saturated than hot media. As Balsom points out, drawing upon Francesco Casetti’s work, McLuhan appears indebted to the theories of Epstein and Béla Balázs. Importantly, it is film’s constituent iconicity that makes it a hot medium. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, and Balsom, 76. For a consideration of hot and cool media in the context of contemporary image technologies, particularly the resurgence of 3D, see Francesco Casetti and Antonio Somaini, “The Conflict Between High Definition and Low Definition in Contemporary Cinema,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 19.4 (2013): 415–422. 21 22

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captures a sense of cinematic specificity, and thwarts mimeticism.23 Above all, low-definition practices as conceived by Canudo, Epstein, Arnheim, and others protect the autonomy of cinema from both physical reality and from the other arts.24 In contemporary visual culture low-definition images are, Balsom argues, less associated with medium specificity and more with circulation (when images travel across platforms and networks, digital compression causes lower definition).25 She notes that, ironically, “markers of mediation become signifiers of immediacy, taken to be more direct and true than the promised transparency of high definition.”26 While in the 1920s low definition produced authenticity effects related to the prevailing of human consciousness over the operations of technology,27 today low definition produces authenticity effects related to the absence of staging in the referential universe. This shift notwithstanding, the study of the historically variable meanings of low definition—whether linked to notions of artistic autonomy, medium specificity, authenticity, or dissemination—has focused mainly on technological-materialist issues. Indispensable as this research has been for a better understanding of the nature of low definition, it has largely shied away from examining the wider cultural, philosophical, psychological, and phenomenological ramifications of opacity as a unique form of visual communication. One notable exception is Laura Marks’s essay “Loving a Disappearing Image,” which relates the “diminished visibility” of some experimental films and videos from the 1990s to the experience of illness, loss of corporeal coherence, and death.28 Some contributions hint at possible interpretations of the aesthetic affordances of low and high definition, which are left unpursued, as when Balsom submits that a high-definition image  Balsom, 83–84.  Ibid., 81. 25  Ibid., 84. 26  Ibid., 85. 27  One of Theodor Adorno’s remarks on the phonograph provides just one example of the philosophical valorization of low definition (and its association with authenticity) in the era of classical film theory. “As the recordings become more perfect in terms of plasticity and volume,” he writes, “the subtlety of color and the authenticity of vocal sound declines as if the singer were being distanced more and more from the apparatus.” See Theodor W.  Adorno, “The Curves of the Needle,” trans. Thomas Y.  Levin, October, 55 (Winter 1990): 48–55; 48. 28  Laura Marks, “Loving a Disappearing Image,” in Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002, 91–112; 91. 23 24

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potentially could lay bare “an illusory transparency deemed to be ideological and, at the limit, unethical.”29 What I would like to propose here is that the chiefly materialist appreciation of low definition be supplemented by work that subsumes it under a more general theory of opacity. What I mean by this is that, first, low-definition and degraded images should be considered as just one species—albeit an especially significant one—in a larger ecology of non-transparent visualities and, second, the cultural meanings of such an ecology need to be investigated in greater depth. What might images that pose a perceptual challenge tell us about things like representation and mediation? Can opaque images speak to us of different epistemologies? What is the affective charge of opacity? What ethical vistas do opaque images help open up? On what terms is the relation between transparency and opacity in art being negotiated? How has film and media theory after Canudo, Epstein, and Arnheim dealt with this relation?

Cinema Between Clarity and Opacity As technologies, media and art forms, photography, and film have often been considered a perceptual prosthetic, an enhancement of natural vision, the phenomenological possibilities of which seem endless. Unsurprisingly, and as hinted at above, a cult of visibility has accrued to these media, evident, for example, in the didactic preference for optimally transparent staging and lighting practices in the Hollywood and porn industries, as well as in Jean-Louis Comolli’s influential notion of the “frenzy of the visible.”30 But, as Martine Beugnet has pointed out, the processes of filmic mediation need not ensure “more accurate” forms of perception. “[F]or all its photographic objectivity,” Beugnet writes, “cinematographic vision allows for the indefinite to surface.”31 Relying on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s critique of Descartes’s conception of knowledge and on Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s conjoining of artistic creation and sensory perception, Beugnet makes the case that Leibniz’s notion of “clear  Balsom, 85.  Jean-Louis Comolli, “Machines of the Visible,” in The Cinematic Apparatus, eds. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980, 122. 31  Martine Beugnet, “Introduction,” in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, eds. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron & Arild Fetveit, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, 2. See also Martine Beugnet, L’attrait du flou, Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2017. 29 30

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but confused” to describe other kinds of knowledge formations than that permitted by rational-scientific models is also applicable to the cinematic apparatus.32 Leibniz’s own example, when it comes to a clear but confused perception, is the roar of the sea. We can hear and identify the sound while at the same time being unable to perceive it as originating in any one particular wave. The constitutive indeterminacy of a world in constant flux means that perception is always piecemeal and partial. Since consciousness itself is subject to the temporal process and its inevitable transmutations, it, too, hovers between the temporary stabilizations of form and interstitial amorphousness. Baumgarten, who was influenced by Leibniz’s philosophy,33 suggested that art has a special affinity for the indistinct and the indeterminate. Cinema, with its power to capture both simultaneity and duration, is especially positioned to produce images that are clear yet indistinct. For example, an image generated by the cinematographic process might be empirically clear even if we fail to identify the referent. Vice versa, we may easily identify the referent of a given image without being able to discern all the different components that collectively make up this referent. But film is not only a medium of mimetic capture; it is also a medium of formal effects that work to modify and amend our experience of the events recorded. In the silent era, techniques such as superimposition, filters, internal defocusing, and the manipulation of speed served to amplify the “confusion of details,” while the appearance of sound subsequently marginalized such practices. To support efficient communication and storytelling, a lexicon of aesthetic norms that reinforced optimal clarity became dominant. The advent of electronic and digital media technologies, in turn, has likely inspired the suppression of the indefinite, whose negative associations to the defective and nonsensical have lingered on. Moreover, the often smaller screen of digital media promotes a form of viewing which absorbs the full image at one go, allowing less opportunity for scanning it for information not immediately available. Add to that the material difference between the capriciousness of the analogue image and the smooth flatness of the digital,34 and one can see why the latter may  Ibid.  Eric Watkins, “On the Necessity and Nature of Simples: Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, and the Pre-Critical Kant, in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy Volume 3, eds. Daniel Garber and Steven Nadler, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006, 261–314. 34  As among others Stephen Prince has pointed out, celluloid film has malleable grain that may cause a decrease in sharpness despite film having higher resolution. Balsom makes a use32 33

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seem less amenable to a philosophy of the “clear but confused” (but as we shall see, the relation between digital technology and opacity is more complex than that). In the evolution of visual technologies, progress means improved readability, and high definition is the norm: though we have arguably never known a broader range of possibilities in moving image capture and treatment, today’s mainstream aesthetic of the moving image privileges that which is controlled, stable and instantly ‘readable…’ the creative exploration of cinema’s ability to convey reality’s inherent instability and confusion tends to be safely grounded in narrative or generic rationales (which include the incorporation of obscured, shaky, blurred images as a token of authenticity) or attached to clearly signposted sensational effects.35

One of the reasons why perfect clarity does not necessarily constitute an unproblematic ideal is that it leaves no room for the imagination, for the creative activities of the viewer. Citing as examples thinkers from Leonardo Da Vinci to Gaston Bachelard and Ernst Gombrich, Beugnet argues that the semi-legible and incomplete image serves an important function as inducement to the imagination.36

Transparency and Opacity in Post-classical Film Theory, Philosophy, and Visual Culture After classical film theory’s appraisal of low definition and of other aesthetic devices mobilized to rupture mimeticism—but before the endeavors of Steyerl and others to analyze low-fi images in the digital era—theorists and practitioners alike grappled with the notion of transparency as a political and sometimes philosophical problem. Once the ontological specificity and artistic integrity of film were secured, critics became increasingly consumed with dissecting cinema as an institution and a dispositif. I will not ful distinction between resolution and definition, in which the former is tied to quantitative measures (the number of pixels in an image) and the latter to qualitative variables such as the perception of clarity relative to a given norm. For instance, an indistinct image with low definition might still be presented in high resolution. See Stephen Prince, Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012, 85, and Balsom, 74. 35  Beugnet, 6. 36  Ibid., 7.

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pretend to be able to cover the breadth of the work that either directly or tangentially engages with questions of transparency in the period between classical film theory and the digital era (which is also the era that sees the emergence of film studies as an academic discipline); my more modest aim here is rather to gesture toward a smaller cache of hopefully revealing examples. In a certain sense, much of the so-called apparatus theory so dominant in the 1970s revolved around the ways in which cinema as a medium and praxis negotiated our access to the real. Whether their primary inflection was Marxist, psychoanalytic, or feminist, theorizations of the film image in the tradition from the British journal Screen often presuppose an underlying dimension of opacity in filmic representations. One case in point is Jean-Paul Fargier’s statement that the ideology cinema proffers is simply the impression of reality. “There is nothing on the screen,” Fargier claims, “only reflections and shadows, and yet the first idea that the audience gets is that reality is there, as it really is.”37 Fargier’s overall concern in this article is the relation between cinema and politics and how film might serve the proletarian cause. Intriguingly, and in a turn that clearly predates the now critical commonplace—in the wake of Gilles Deleuze’s film philosophy—of cinema as a mode of thought, Fargier suggests that film could have not only an ideological function but a theoretical one as well (my emphasis). On this account, “theoretical practice” (a term Fargier borrows from Althusser) in fact represents the way out of ideology.38 It is in the context of this discussion that the notion of transparency appears. Claiming that the spectators disavow the presence of the screen (“it opens like a window, it ‘is’ transparent”), Fargier argues that the resultant chimera denotes “the very substance of the specific ideology secreted by cinema.”39 In Fargier’s view, film history has hardly produced any theory films, but he mentions the work of Eisenstein and Vertov as examples, although with the caveat that their films are theoretical “in part only.”40 But film’s conceptual relationship with representation, history, and visuality was an abiding concern for some of the film artists of the time, notably the Vertov-influenced Jean-Luc Godard. In the work of Guy Debord, moreover, the principles of filmmaking itself were profoundly challenged, as  Jean-Paul Fargier, “Parenthesis or Indirect Route,” Screen, 12.2 (1971): 131–144; 136.  Ibid., 140. 39  Ibid., 137. 40  Ibid., 141. 37 38

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they also were in Espinosa’s manifesto and in the films of Glauber Rocha and Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas at the time. Espinosa in particular articulates adroitly the complicity of form and technology in the construction of socio-political realities. “It is impossible,” he maintains, “to question a given reality without questioning the particular genre you select or inherit to depict that reality.”41 This consciousness of the image as inscription—as projection rather than reflection—arguably became more pronounced with the Screen theory of the 1970s. The conceptualization of the film image as generative, and as engraving, was further elaborated by post-structuralist theorists such as Marie-­ Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier. One of the most ambitious attempts to flesh out a theory of film on the basis of a recognition of the opaque thickness of the image was her Le Texte divisé (1981).42 The second part of the book committed to a close reading of Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1975), the first half usefully appropriates aspects of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and the linguistic theory of Émile Benveniste in order to replace the Saussurean notion of the sign with that of text or writing or, more accurately, the special kind of writing known as cinécriture. Also indebted to Eisenstein’s comparison of montage to the Japanese ideogram, Ropars focuses on the filmic act of enunciation, on the process of writing images, and Derrida’s concepts of difference and espacement enable her to pursue this project. From the point of view of this theory, the fundamental method of film is assemblage, and meaning requires acts of juxtaposition, or, in other words, a type of editing that generates both stability and disruption. With cinécriture, Peter Brunette points out, meaning “is a product of the textual process itself, rather than a process of translation of a previous signified through a collection of individually signifying words or images.”43 It is not that writing cannot also be merely reflective, but rather 41  Quoted in Julianne Burton, ed., The Social Documentary in Latin America, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990, 69. 42  For one of the comparatively few engagements with Le Texte divisé in Anglo-American film studies, see D. N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. For work in a similar vein on filmic writing and mimesis, see Peter Brunette and David Wills, Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989; Miriam Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique 56 (1992): 43–73; and Tom Conley, Film Hieroglyphs, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 43  Peter Brunette, “Toward a Deconstructive Theory of Film,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 19.1 (1986): 55–71; 67.

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that particular forms of cinematic writing (those similar to pictographic or hieroglyphic scripts) promote the generative function of aesthetic expression. But what, exactly, does that entail? If we recall Emile Benveniste’s theory of enunciation, in which the sign is linked to naming and identification and discourse to message and enunciation, we might realize that there is a crucial difference between, on the one hand, the pre-existing entities (words, images) available to us in a given cultural and historical context and, on the other, their unique and highly specific linkage—or, if one prefers, assemblage.44 Before activated as discourse or enunciation, these entities are reflective to the degree that they correspond to the phenomena to which they have been attached by convention (and sometimes by iconicity). But once they are being articulated in a given medium, say, verbal language, photography, or film, an expressive thickness accrues, rendering them opaque, conceptually if not always materially.45 For the paradigm of the hieroglyph so central, in various ways, to the ideas of Ropars, Derrida, and Eisenstein, the notion of the figural or figurality occupies a special position. What does it mean when, for Ropars, the hieroglyph is both figural and conceptual? And how is the relationship between figurality and opacity being regulated? In order to elucidate these questions, it might be worthwhile to turn to two thinkers whose work is roughly contemporaneous with that of Fargier, Ropars, and other “screen theorists,” namely Louis Marin, Jean-François Lyotard. The former’s work is complex and spans several different phases, but more or less consistent throughout is his concern with figuration. Starting out as a theoretician of language, Marin later came to be preoccupied with images and visuality in a way not too dissimilar from that of the German Bildwissenschaft tradition (although to my knowledge his work was never lumped in with that research). Around 1980, Marin refined his theory of semiotics by identifying two senses of representation, one revolving around the act of substitution (where a sign comes to take the place of an absent sign, creating a presence effect) and the other implying a process of intensification (where that which is brought into view is a kind of repetition). For Marin, in the words of Agnès Guiderdoni, representation has “a double power: 44  Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Miami: University of Miami Press, 1971. 45  To see how Ropars explores the difference between filmic and literary textuality, as well as what she terms “the effect of language becoming opaque” in close readings of Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais 1959) and L’arrêt de mort (Maurice Blanchot 1948), see MarieClaire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Film Reader of the Text,” Diacritics, 15.1 (1985): 16–30; 28.

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one that makes something present in our imagination, and another that constitutes its own legitimate and authorized subject.”46 Both these aspects are at play in any given representation and “the tension between them determines the signifying depth of the work.”47 The theory is also applicable to any kind of aesthetic medium; Marin himself saw it as a kind of methodology or analytical approach to a wide variety of art forms, from literature, theatre, and performance to landscapes, cities, maps, and architecture. Informed by this constant tension between transitivity and reflexivity, in which the latter is tied to the concept of the opaque, Marin’s method involves four different phases of analysis. The first stage acknowledges the importance of ekphrasis, assuming that images cannot be separated from textuality, from language. Any image, therefore, is already a hybrid object. The second phase concerns description and how to find a gateway into the visual representation. The third step emphasizes the singularity and uniqueness of the aesthetic work, shunning interpretive procedures that might be reductive. Finally, the fourth stage of analysis tries to capture or engage with the theoretical discourse produced by the work in question. For Marin, works of art do not just present “meaning;” they are also capable of theory, albeit in a medium or form obviously different from philosophical language. What is referred to as “the theoretical construct”—the theoretical knowledge to be had from our interaction with artistic images—is according to Guiderdoni located “mainly in the opacity of representation, where it ‘exhibits’ itself as representing something and designates the conditions of its existence and the key to accessing its meaning.”48 Recall Fargier’s emphasis on film’s “theoretical function” here, which seems close to Marin’s “theoretical construct.” Significantly, for Marin visuality is not only what we see but is rather linked to his conceptions of spatiality (he frequently uses spatial terms like “gap,” “hinge,” “threshold,” “liminality,” and “edge” in his analyses) and of figurability. In what Guiderdoni refers to as Marin’s “paradoxical model,” the word is a sign marking a presence “but without any visible relation with what it represents,” whereas the thing (res) is the sign marking an absence “with a 46  Agnès Guiderdoni, “Louis Marin’s theories of representation: between text and image, from visuality to figurability,” in Modern French Visual Theory: A Critical Reader, eds. Nigel Saint and Andy Stafford, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, 127–144; 132. 47  Ibid. 48  Ibid., 138.

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v­ isible relation with what it represents.”49 Strangely, then, in this model visibility relates to absence, while invisibility relates to presence. Notable is also Marin’s use of the term figurability, which is not so much a theoretical concept as a process or a “modality of actualization” (like virtuality and potentiality), which denotes the way in which an image can be derived from a text as well as how a text can emerge from an image.50 Figurality, of course, also features prominently in Lyotard’s early work, where, as Martin Jay has shown, it is tied to opacity. Engaging with the titular terms of Lyotard’s 1971 book, Jay considers that the first one, discourse, indicates transparency and “the domination of textuality over perception” and “conceptual representation over prereflexive presentation.”51 Discourse is in the realm of logic and symbols and implies acts of communication in which “the materiality of the signifiers is forgotten.”52 The second term, figurality, is on the other hand that which “injects opacity” into the domain of discourse.53 Careful to point out that figurality is not the opposite of discourse, Jay describes its effect as a transgression of “the limits of the knowable and the communicable, preventing the recuperation of the incommensurable into one systematic order.”54 Does this account sound familiar? The nature of the relations that Jay specifies resonates, I think, both with Glissant’s poetics and Levinas’s unorthodox emplacement of ethics before philosophy. But Lyotard’s reflections also complicate the conceptual terrain covered above. As we have seen, for Benveniste and his followers discourse belongs to the generative register, pitted against the reflective capacities of the sign. With Lyotard, discourse is situated in the realm of transparency and symbols, whereas figurality denotes the irruption of opacity. So how do we reconcile these positions? As a matter of fact, the tension between discourse and figurality serves further to refine the theories of cinécriture advanced by Ropars and others. The opposition between the mimeticism of the sign and the ­generativity  Ibid., 140.  Ibid., 141; 142. 51  Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 564. 52  Ibid. 53  Ibid. 54  Ibid. In a later interview, Lyotard himself discusses the discursive principle of readability and the figural principle of unreadability; see Jean-François Lyotard, “Interview with Georges Van Den Abbeele,” trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Diacritics, 14.3 (1984): 16–21; 17. 49 50

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of discourse is too crude to be sustainable, as it fails to discriminate sufficiently between imitative and creative uses of discourse. Therefore, what is needed is a descriptive tool that will facilitate just such a distinction, and here is where the notion of figurality comes in. Etymologically, the term figure conceived in a philosophical sense derives from the Latin figura (from the Greek skhema), implying lines and shapes. In the late fourteenth century, the word acquired the meaning of the visible form or appearance of a person or object. While especially in its verb form the term is also historically linked to representation, the importance of the inventive function of the line (for instance, in producing new space) and of the process of molding something should not pass unnoticed. The next step in the examination of opacity would then be to bridge the gap between this undeniably abstract analysis and more particularized materializations of figural processes. But film as a medium and institution has historically worked against figurality. Feature films as well as documentaries have been obsessed with transparency, and this fixation has left little room for the kind of figurality considered by philosophers such as Marin and Lyotard. The amelioration of visibility in modern technological media and science has a palpably positivist foundation that, surprisingly, is scarcely highlighted even in the writings of the “apparatus” theorists of the 1970s. A rare exception is Trinh Minh-ha’s critique of orthodox documentary cinema in her essay “Documentary Is/Not a Name” (1990). Concerned with the conflation of truth with fact and meaning, she argues that non-­ fiction filmmaking is always manipulative by nature and that its sanctioned techniques—the long take, shooting in real time, handheld camera, wide-­ angle shots (which by convention are regarded as more neutral than montage and close-ups)—court invisibility as a condition for their rendering of meaning as truth. In filming, for example, any deviation from the standard 24 frames per second is perceived as overt manipulation and hence spurious.55 More unobtrusive forms of manipulation, on the other hand, will come across as truth to the undiscerning viewer because they conceal the activity of mediation. The below passage is worth quoting at length, as it emphasizes the degree to which, in mainstream practices, film technology and form are rigged to enhance the politics of visibility and positivism even as they go to great lengths to mask the source or cause of this visibility:

 Trinh Minh-ha, “Documentary Is/Not a Name,” October 52 (Spring 1990): 76–98; 86.

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The real world: so real that the Real becomes the one basic referent—pure, concrete, fixed, visible, all-too-visible. The result is the advent of a whole aesthetic of objectivity and the development of comprehensive technologies of truth capable of promoting what is right and what is wrong in the world an, by extension, what is ‘honest’ and what is ‘manipulative’ in documentary. This involves an extensive and relentless pursuit of naturalism across the elements of cinematic technology. Indispensable to this cinema of the authentic image and spoken word are, for example, the directional microphone (localizing and restricting in its process of selecting sound for purposes of decipherability) and the Nagra portable tape-recorder (unrivaled for its maximally faithful ability to document.56

Trinh Minh-ha’s advocacy of greater reflexivity in the attempt to capture what she terms “reality on the move” is not too far removed from the concepts of Fargier and Marin (respectively, “theoretical function” and “theoretical construct”).57 Unfortunately, she avers, the relationship between theory and practice too easily get “caught in the net of a positivist thinking” whose driving force is the yearning for totalizing answers.58 Her main worry is that, in the absence of medial (self)-reflexivity, the gap between the image and the real gets erased. Reifying the idea of the social in documentary practice, for instance, and exalting it as “an ideal of transparency”59 risks just such a troublesome identification of reality with that particular form of representation that is determined by the politics of transparency. Trinh Minh-ha’s apprehension of the corrosive effects of a too credulous investment in transparent mediation resurfaces with even darker undertones in Paul Virilio’s analysis of contemporary visuality. Implicitly sharing Crary’s pessimistic view of repressive forms of illumination, Virilio—in his third conversation with Sylvère Lotringer, the founder of Semiotext(e)—considers a phenomenon that he calls “the optically correct.”60 According to Virilio, the visual arts have largely failed appropriately to represent or engage with the problems of the twentieth century. He maintains that we now confront “the reconstruction of the phenomenology of perception according to the machine” and that—in part thanks  Ibid., 80.  Ibid., 89. 58  Ibid., 78. 59  Ibid., 85. 60  Sylvère Lotringer & Paul Virilio, The Accident of Art, trans. Michael Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), 2005, 61. 56 57

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to this failure of the visual arts—we “are moving from a civilization of the image to a civilization of optics.”61 In an ocular regime defined by what he calls “a newspeak of the eyes,” we have more reason than ever before to remain cautious about the rhetoric of transparency and the enshrinement of technologies of exponential brightness. A civilization of optics could readily be one in which machine vision, more than the work of individual and autonomous image-makers, regulates our ecologies of representation. The unbridled ascension of modes of visualization that render transparency an existentially inescapable condition could, as Crary, Virilio, and others have suggested, be injurious both ethically, politically, and even epistemologically. That there is a distinction between realms of clarity, say between optical and rational/moral, and that the former does not automatically translate into the latter, is an idea somewhat infrequently voiced, but Jay is one critic who has made this point. In his analysis of the use of the blur as a philosophical metaphor, he points out that there are limits to our visual perspicacity and that the existence of a given focus is predicated upon the exclusion of something else.62 While philosophy traditionally has valued lucidity, Jay observes that modern or contemporary approaches have embraced “vagueness and fuzzy logic” in order to talk about “modes of reasoning that escape the imperative to work with crisply defined categories and firm conceptual boundaries.”63 Vagueness, it would come to seem, “can produce a kind of clarity all of its own.”64 The reasons for this are twofold. The first is that truth is not that straightforwardly isolable. In some pragmatist philosophy, vagueness has been considered an asset, given that the truth of a phenomenon exists along a spectrum between 0 and 1.65 Second, it is hardly feasible to maintain the same focus, the same level of clarity, in even contiguous spaces of an image or, by extension, of an experience, event, or discourse. To illustrate this, Jay brings up the not uncommon methodological conundrum in literary analysis of keeping the materiality of the  Ibid., 72.  Martin Jay, “Genres of Blur,” in Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty, eds. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron & Arild Fetveit, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, 90–102; 91. Jay refers to a couple of striking questions posed by the nineteenth-century British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron: “‘what is focus’” and “‘who has a right to say what focus is the legitimate focus’?” In Jay, 93. 63  Ibid., 95–96. 64  Ibid., 99. 65  Ibid., 96. 61 62

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text and its potentially unbounded contextuality in equally sharp focus at the same time.66 The idea that vagueness need not be inimical to knowledge can also be found along other avenues of media theory. John Durham Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds (2015), for instance, nurtures the possibility that vagueness may have some epistemological purchase.67 Any analysis of the relation between transparency and opacity should also problematize the technological teleology that informs the optical regime that Virilio finds so alarming. Advances in technology and their socio-cultural context are indissoluble; the former do not have any special authority independently of their wider political ecology. That the machine is social before it is technical is a verity well understood by another theorist associated with the “apparatus school.” Comolli, in the same article that introduces the concept “frenzy of the visible,” argues that “technological perfectibility” is not an autonomous motor in the development of cinema and that historical change depends upon what one, drawing on Cornelius Castoriadis, could call a social imaginary:68 the historical variation of cinematic techniques, their appearance-­ disappearance, their phases of convergence, their periods of dominance and decline seem to me to depend not on a rational-linear order of technological perfectibility or an autonomous instance of scientific ‘progress,’ but much rather on the offsettings, adjustments, arrangements carried out by a social configuration in order to represent itself, that is, at once to grasp itself, identify itself and itself produce itself in its representations.69

On Comolli’s reading, social imaginaries and media technologies lock into a mutually constitutive relation in which the technological is not a free agent but a material resource in service of whatever forms cultural desire takes at any given historical moment. More urgent than the shifting empirical properties of high-definition screens themselves, then, is a critical appraisal of the kind of cultural psychology to which these properties are made to respond.

 Ibid., 97.  John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. 68  Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, 123. 69  Comolli, 121. 66 67

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When it comes to high and low definition—transparency and opacity— that psychology has tended to play itself out as a longing for a direct and unmediated access to the referent of the image. With the onslaught in the 2010s of virtual reality systems like Oculus Rift, this longing seems to have intensified. In the field of new media, the dynamics of transparency and opacity has famously been translated into that of immediacy and hypermediacy. In their now classic book Remediation (1999), J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin allege that painting, photography, and VR aim “to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation.”70 With reference to Clement Greenberg, Bolter and Grusin suggest that what they call the “paradigm of transparency” was culturally central until modernism, after which the preoccupation with the artwork’s materiality and surface and with the act of mediation signaled a turn toward hypermediacy, or opacity.71 While immediacy is the effect that arises from the erasure or suppression of mediality, hypermediacy implies its persistent and return. Some of the examples that Bolter and Grusin invoke are the films about media and mediation that emerged in the mid-­1990s, such as Natural Born Killers (Oliver Stone 1994) and The Pillow Book (Peter Greenaway 1996), which are found to introduce “a moderate degree of hypermediacy and self-acknowledgement.”72 In this narrative, transparency and opacity are cast as undulating forces. Hypermediacy, Bolter and Grusin maintain, “always reemerges in every era, no matter how rigorously technologies of transparency may try to exclude it.”73 But a problem with this account is that the empirical cases to which the qualities of either immediacy or hypermediacy get attributed appear a little intuitive. The wild profusion of optical formats in Natural Born Killers (Super 8, 16 mm, 35 mm, Polaroids, Beta videotape, color, black and white, slow motion, flash cuts, animation)—indicative, surely, of the possibilities of an emergent digital cinema—is contrasted with the supposedly cleaner style of classical Hollywood films of the analog era. The trouble with this comparison is that invisible editing, while working to veil the process of suture, is no less a system of mediation than Stone’s poetics of excess. All cinematic images, the philosopher Berys Gaut reminds us, 70   J.  David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999, 11. 71  Ibid., 38. 72  Ibid., 154. 73  Ibid., 84.

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are opaque.74 Some images and films are better than others at hiding their marks of mediation, but that does not necessarily make them conceptually different. The distinction between immediacy and hypermediacy is therefore exaggerated at best. Experience sans mediation—the dream of the virtual reality devotees—is an ill-conceived notion in the first place, since mediation precedes experience. As John Durham Peters shows in The Marvelous Clouds (2015), the world we inhabit is already mediated by all sorts of phenomena.75 The kind of immediacy, or transparency, that Bolter and Grusin consider could thus be said to be illusory to begin with. A potentially more fruitful way of treating the connection between mediality and transparency may be found in the work of some of the proponents of German Bildwissenschaft. Gottfried Boehm’s notion of “iconic difference,” for instance, is an attempt at describing the properties and mechanisms that make images ontologically distinctive from whatever they may represent in the external world. On Boehm’s image theory, rather than their similarity to the real, it is the tensions inherent in images that generate their meaning. The imaginary that exists in the image is fundamentally different from the real.76 Boehm has also talked about iconic difference as a quality that “has to do with historically and anthropologically transformed differences between a continuum—ground, surface—and what is shown inside this continuum.” Such a difference, he continues, is “constituted by elements—for example, signs, objects, figures or figurations—and has to do with contrasts.”77 In its insistence on the differential aspect of the content of the image, Boehm’s term comes close to the idea of the constitutive opacity of all culturally manufactured signs. But where in this scenario does transparency factor in? One possible clue might be provided by Hans Belting’s analysis of the relationship between image, medium, and the imagination: The image always has a mental quality, the medium always a material one, even if they both form a single entity in our perception. The presence of the 74  Berys Gaut, A Philosophy of Cinematic Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 97. 75  John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. 76  Gottfried Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn erzeugen: Die Macht des Zeigens, Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2007. 77  Gottfried Boehm as quoted in What is an Image? Eds. James Elkins and Maja Naef, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011, 36–37.

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image, however, entails a deception, for the image is not present the same way its medium is present. It needs the act of animation by which our imagination draws it from its medium. In the process, the opaque medium becomes the transparent conduit for its image. The ambiguity of presence and absence extends even to the medium in which the image is born, for in reality it is not the medium but the spectator who engenders the image within his or her self78

According to this proposition, the medium seems to belong to the sphere of opacity and materiality, and the image to that of transparency and immateriality. The medium is matter, the image is imagination. But the phrase “the opaque medium becomes the transparent conduit for its image” is confusing. Taken at face value it seems to suggest, at best, that the processual dimension of mediation is such that the medium evolves from a state of opacity to one of transparency thanks to the image it incarnates. But what Belting also says here is that the existence of the image is contingent upon an act of corporeal reception and realization by the viewer. Useful and inescapable as the distinction between medium and image is, it is difficult to see how one can have a medium without any specific content. The technological apparatus and the syntax of cinematic construction (such as analytical editing) are clearly indispensable to the medium of film, but so are the images that this apparatus spawns. The relation between medium and image thus seems more reciprocal and intimate than Belting’s theory would have us believe. If I were to speculate what Belting has in mind when he claims that the medium becomes a “transparent conduit for its image,” it is that the force of mimesis, understood as an aesthetic para-convention, is so powerfully present that it completely overwhelms and suppresses the mediality of the medium. The iconicity of the image (and here we have to grant that we are talking about a culturally and historically determined type of image, rather than the Image) makes the medium invisible, in a process that is quite similar to Bolter and Grusin’s notion of immediacy. The idea that the medium is closer than the image to a state of opacity makes some sense, particularly in the context of low-definition images, where challenges to transparency typically are caused by irruptions of the medial, such as putrefying celluloid or the digital corrosion of the jpeg file. 78  Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, trans. Thomas Dunlap, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, 20.

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But neither the immediacy-hypermediacy dialectic nor Belting’s conceptualization of the medium-image-body troika is able to provide anything more than a partial account of opacity. What needs to be further addressed is the presence of opacity in the seemingly transparent image and the degree to which the act of cinécriture is always generative rather than reflective. The introduction of empirically new aesthetic figurations into the world comes with an element of the opaque (in a conceptual if not in a material sense), as these figurations do not have any pre-existing and correspondent equivalents “out there.” My previously referenced notion of the amimetic represents one way of comprehending the nature of the process that figurativity enables; producing images is not about replicating signs that already exist, not even when the images in question are entangled in iconicity (as in forms of realism), but rather about the subjective enunciation of a certain expressive and rhetorical content. A theory of the amimetic might appear to be a post-representational position but could perhaps better be described as a stance that is generally skeptical of the claim that art is primarily representational in the first place. If the discussion about transparency and opacity in the aesthetic realms were merely a question of ontology, it would hardly have a wider purchase. But, to which the allusion to among other things Crary’s critique of the contemporary imaginary of “permanent illumination” attests, the discussion also matters on a broader cultural and even political level. Mimetic transparency and amimetic opacity come with different sets of values. For example, in his work from the mid-1990s, Tom Cohen conveys a relatively early acknowledgment of the possible collusion of mimeticism in the sphere of reading and interpretation with a conservative politics. “How much has a mimetic bias,” he asks in the beginning of his study, “to the traditions of interpretation constituted a conservative politics of its own… ?”79 One of Cohen’s concerns is the backlash against textualist approaches in the wake of post-structuralism and the concurrent ascendancy of orientations such as new historicism, cultural studies, and identity politics, which he considers “regressive” in its embrace of the “mimetic ideology that determines the arguments that support traditionalist humanism.”80 Cohen, who brings up the notion of post-humanism in his critique, avers that mimetic theories of reading commodify humanism and stifle “figural 79  Tom Cohen, Anti-Mimesis from Plato to Hitchcock, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 1. 80  Ibid., 2.

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logic,”81 an idiom which I take to mean the materiality of the text and its potential opacity. One of the points I want to argue here is that low-definition and other variants of opaque images function like tropes, in that they make visible, and italicize, the inherent opacity of all images. But despite the numerous studies that over the last few decades have sought to emphasize less naïve conceptualizations of the visual and its relation to the world, the positivistic trust in mimetic clarity is resilient. There thus appears to be a gap between technophile desire and much academic criticism with respect to the mimetic. In the introduction to the book Precarious Visualities (2008), Christine Ross addresses the “crisis of perceptual faith in images” and suggests that it is “our link to images” that has become “more and more precarious.”82 This link has come under scrutiny and has been tested by the work of several critics of visual culture and of adjacent fields. Following on from the work on the act of looking and the gaze in the film theory of the 1970s, art historians and visual culture scholars in the 1980s and onward provided accounts that historicized visual experience and that, again in the words of Ross, were “critical of models of vision that position the viewing subject in terms of unity, unhistoricized universalism, pure consciousness, and pure opticality.”83 A key contribution among these studies is Michael Leja’s Looking Askance (2004), which addresses the growing skepticism about seeing that emerged in the early twentieth century.84 Norman Bryson’s Vision and Painting (1983) refined our understanding of the gaze and its historical and cultural inflections, and Jonathan Crary in studies such as Techniques of the Observer (1990) and Suspensions of Perception (2000) examined how vision and perception were constituted through an intricate ensemble of discourses from philosophy, science, aesthetics, and other fields.85 Furthermore, feminist critics like Laura  Ibid., 262.  Christine Ross, “Introduction: The Precarious Visualities of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture,” Precarious Visualities: New Perspectives on Identification in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, eds. Olivier Asselin, Johanne Lamoureux & Christine Ross, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008, 6. 83  Ibid., 4. 84  Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 85  See Norman Bryson, Vison and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983; Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: October Books, 1990; and Jonathan Crary, 81 82

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Mulvey, Griselda Pollock, Teresa de Lauretis, Kaja Silverman, Rey Chow, and bell hooks contributed all in their diverse ways imperative insights to the research on the interrelations of vision, gender, and representation. What unites these otherwise disparate projects is their shared assumption that vision is not a disinterested biological phenomenon but rather something governed by culture, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. The analysis of images is worth little if we fail to take into account the always culturally situated practices of looking, so the work of the above theoreticians constitutes a not insignificant part of the intellectual background for the study of the transparency-opacity dynamics. Other critics have focused on an additional aspect of the visual that potentially negates the transparency of the image, which is its embodied and capricious nature. The corporal turn that began in the 1990s gravitated toward elements that destabilized the coherence of both the subject and the image, such as performativity, alterability and change, illness and finitude, biotechnological subjectivity, and failures of identification. Some of these aspects are found in the aesthetic practices of artists like Stelarc, Orlan, Cindy Sherman, David Wojnarowicz, Mariko Mori, Félix González-Torres, and Derek Jarman. The critical reorientation that this artistic and theoretical work represents recognizes the indispensable context of both embodiment and the boundedness and imperfections of vision. This is a context that further undermines the claims of an untroubled, positivist mimeticism. Accepting the reality of the fallibility of vision leads to a set of aesthetic practices that produce what Ross calls “precarious attachments:” 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 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 surveillance devices—to the gaze of new figures of authority, unanticipated Others: all these aesthetic strategies,

Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

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which are examined here, concern a spectator whose seeing activity is being embodied through precarious attachments.86

On Ross’s reading, the notion of the precarious has several key properties, one of which is explicitly linked to a disturbance of vision. Some of the practices of contemporary visual culture incite a type of perceptual activity that “lacks in security, certainty, and optimality.”87 Most of the artworks that I ponder below exhibit this disposition, from Gehr’s ghostly films and videos to Akomfrah’s layered essay films and Paglen’s subversive landscape photography. In the context of an aesthetics of uncertainty,88 the experience of insufficient visibility can be further amplified by other facets of the precarious, such as what Ross sees as forms of duplicity as well as a break with the frontality of the image.89 These properties, while not unconnected, are less pertinent for the current theorization of opacity. But the property of “critical and aesthetic distance,” the fourth and final one that Ross identifies as intrinsic to a concept of precarious art, resonates forcefully with, for instance, the reflections on the notion of the amimetic referred to earlier. Building on Jacques Rancière’s argument, pursued in Aesthetics and Its Discontents (2009),90 that contemporary art since the 1980s (and relational art in particular) has favored consensus over dissention, Ross maintains that difference is essential to aesthetics.91 Both Rancière and Ross seem to envisage difference in the aesthetic field as a rhetorical resource, firmly linked to the articulation of “opposition,  Ross, 7.  Ibid., 9. 88  The allusion to Janet Wolff’s work is intended. In her The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, she considers among other things the ethical import of artistic strategies of indirection and obliqueness. See Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 89  With the concept of duplicity Ross has in mind the double status of the photograph, analyzed by Jean-Marie Schaeffer, as simultaneously both imprint and “image analogically related to human vision.” See Ross, 10–11. See also Jean-Marie Schaeffer, L’image précaire: Du dispositif photographique, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1987. A break with frontality involves some kind of aesthetically induced agitation of the coherence and self-sufficiency of the image, a failure of the flat, vertical screen to unify the subject staring at the surface, so that this subject may become aware of the multiple tacit relations that exist between the image and its outside and beyond. 90  Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steve Corcoran, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2009. The book is an English translation of Jacques Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique, Paris: Galilée, 2004. 91  Ross, 12. 86 87

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­ olemics, [and] contradiction.”92 If the differentiality of art is diminished, p they argue, this will lessen its political charge. A foreclosure of art’s alterity might also impede its capacity to invent alternative visions; as Ross remarks, “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.”93 What is clear, however, is that there are two different categories of difference at work here. The rhetorical energy of aesthetic utterances, the critical acumen that may enable political persuasiveness, forms a prominent part of their innate differentiality. But the possibility of voicing critical opposition hinges crucially on another category of difference, which is that of form. In order to be rhetorically different, works of art have to be formally different. This is the meaning of Espinosa’s insight, referred to above, that you cannot challenge a given reality “without questioning the particular genre you select or inherit to depict that reality.” While neither Rancière nor Ross might be too interested in the difference between these two uses of the concept of aesthetic difference, the latter reveals how it is important when she gives the declining fortunes of difference a specific content. It is the durability of realism in mainstream cinema and new media, she holds, that represents the main obstacle to a flourishing of aesthetic difference. New technologies tend to consolidate the business of suture, achieving effects of “smoothness and continuity” through a set of morphing techniques increasingly in use since the 1990s. Rather than defying or contesting visual transparency, new media, in Ross’s view, “uses the interface to service realism, providing a sense of reality as devoid of gaps, contradictions, tensions, fantasy interruptions, or noise.”94 Indebted to the screen theory of the 1970s, this perspective also anticipates Hagi Kenaan’s conceptualization of the screen and the contemporary gaze published a few years later. In her The Ethics of Visuality (2013), Kenaan is deeply worried by what she perceives as a leveling of the screen. Flat, frontal, and homogenous, the screen makes everything available to us all the time. It erases all sense of temporal and spatial distance. The screen has become a space where “all points of view take on identical form” and where there is only one singular perspective, “without texture, no

 Ibid.  Ibid. 94  Ibid., 13. 92 93

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dimensions of contact, no back or side, without shaded areas, cracks, tears.”95 What Kenaan calls “the rule of the frontal” is essentially the technological refinement of the belief in the transparent screen. This is a screen molded on the paradigm of advertising, defined, as Kenaan sees it, by “instantaneity, availability, superficiality, [and] forgetability.”96 Throughout her argument she establishes an explicit link between frontality and ethics, or rather its absence. The politics of transparency, of the frontal, causes an infection in contemporary visuality that alienates us from ethical experience. Nothing if not a dire predicament, this state of affairs is due to this screen’s clouding of different levels of reality as well as its deletion of depth, time, and invisibility. The screen, Kenaan claims, “is the contents it presents.”97 This could also serve as a description of the effects of transparency—the eradication of contexts and of all signs of mediation. Ultimately, the model of transparency precludes or at the very least severely restricts the freedom of looking. The implication for visual culture is an impending reductionism, which Kenaan conveys in the following manner: the homogeneity that the current condition imposes on the eye while making the eye forget its own inherent resources: its freedom and concomitant responsibility, its ability to be involved, its constant involvement, its ability to be critical, to be intimate, to sense shame, to refuse. Not to mention the possibility of not looking, of looking back, of looking beyond.98

Part of the problem with transparent images is that they leave too little for the gaze to latch on to. The gaze needs some resistance, some friction, or else it just bounces off the screen, back to its owner. The transparent image might make us react, but reaction is not enough. We need images that prompt reflection, that force us to think, and think critically and deeply. In the final instance, the relation between transparency and opacity in the visual field comes down to a question of epistemic value; the former might provide information but only the latter offers new knowledge.

95  Hagi Kenaan, The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze, London: I. B. Tauris, 2013, xvi; xvii. 96  Ibid., xviii; xvi. For a study of commodified visuality, see Peter Szendy, The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images, trans. Jan Plug, New  York: Fordham University Press, 2019. 97  Ibid., xvii. 98  Ibid., xviii.

CHAPTER 3

Boundaries of Discernibility: Ernie Gehr

At the same as the future of celluloid-based filmmaking was becoming ever more precarious, a new generation of experimentalists (for instance, Ben Rivers, Rosa Barba, Tacita Dean, and Luke Fowler) explored the specificity of the cinematic apparatus, often underscoring its discrete material components. Moreover, the volatile conditions of the analog image have been subjected to close scrutiny by artists such as Bill Morrison, Pat O’ Neill, and Ernie Gehr. That questions concerning the nature of the medium should resurface in artistic works in the age of the post-cinematic is hardly surprising;1 as John Guillory has pointed out, “[t]he full 1  There is now a bulging literature about the past and future of cinema studies. See, for instance, Dudley Andrew, “The ‘Three Ages’ of Cinema Studies and the Age to Come,” PMLA, 115.3: (2000), 341–351; Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age, London: BFI, 2001; Dixon, Wheeler Winston (2001); Jon Lewis, ed., The End of Cinema as We Know It, New York: New York University Press, 2001; Lisa Cartwright, “Film and the Digital in Visual Studies: Film Studies in the Era of Convergence,” Journal of Visual Culture, 1.1 (2002): 7–23; Jonathan Rosenbaum & Adrian Martin, eds, Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of world Cinephilia, London: BFI, 2003; Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005; Christian Keathley, Cinephilia and History, or the Wind in the Trees, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006; Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S.  Study of Film, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007; Peter Matthews, “The End of an Era: A Cinephile’s Lament,” Sight and Sound, 17.10 (2007): 16–19; D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007; Lee Grieveson & Haidee Wasson, eds, Inventing Film Studies, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008; Asbjørn Grønstad, “‘No One Goes to the

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significance of the medium as such is always difficult to see in advance of remediation, as with the remediation of writing by print or painting by photography.”2 As historically contingent materialities are on the wane, we may, as film theorists or film philosophers, gain a better vantage point from which to pose certain problems of mediality, first among them, in this context, the one of opacity.3 In this chapter, I examine the strange and optically regenerative practices by which materially impaired images exploit their own opacity to attain a new modality of existing as a visual artifact. If we think about Francesco Casetti’s classification in The Lumière Galaxy (2015) of the cinema into three major forms—cinemas of dispersion, adhesion, and awareness, respectively—the type of films discussed below might fall into the latter camp. A cinema of awareness, Casetti argues, “lowers its level of sensory appeal as a critical stance.”4 Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002), a film made up of found archival footage in different stages of erosion, fixates on the moment when the image is about to turn unreadable. A hymn to decomposing celluloid, Decasia materializes the effects of fading vision while also at the same time, perhaps inadvertently, aestheticizing the forces of decay. We glimpse, among many other things and objects, parachutes descending from a broken sky, a pugilist boxing into empty space, and ethereal camel figures ambling across a surreal desert. Morrison’s repurposing of film in various phases of dissolution represents, I will argue, a particular kind of precarious aesthetics capable of producing new affective

Movies Anymore:’ Cinema and Visual Studies in the Digital Era,” Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media, 30 (Fall 2008): 5–16; Gertrud Koch, “Carnivore or Chameleon: The Fate of Cinema Studies,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Summer 2009), 918–928; and Dudley Andrew, “The Core and Flow of Film Studies,” Critical Inquiry, 35 (Summer 2009), 879–915. 2  John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry, 36, Winter 2010, 346. 3  The research for this chapter was undertaken under the aegis of the project “The Power of the Precarious Aesthetic” (2013–2015) directed by Arild Fetveit in the Department of Media, Cognition and Communication at the University of Copenhagen. Parts of it have been presented as papers given at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Chicago in March 2013 and at the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Prague in June 2013. I am grateful for all comments from my colleagues in the project and other attendees. 4  Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words For the Cinema to Come, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, 11.

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registers while also conveying in rather explicit terms what Paolo Cherchi Usai sees as our “deluded” desire for permanence.5 Looking at images that are damaged, barely readable, or otherwise opaque in the most literal sense seems to be a felicitous enough starting point for what is mostly a theoretical study of the rhetoric of opacity. All images are, in various ways and to different degrees, immersed in opacity, but I will argue that we have yet to acknowledge the full extent of this impenetrability, this dormant murkiness. The broken materiality of decomposing images also holds a particular purchase as an aesthetic address that may enable a different form of affective experience. Decasia is a found footage film, in execution and sensibility not so dissimilar from Peter Delpeut’s collage work Lyrical Nitrate (1991). Director Bill Morrison, a former student of the experimental animator Robert Breer, culled the material from the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections—as well as the Library of Congress, The Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House, and the Cinematheque Suisse. His moldy assemblage borrowed from travelogues, melodramas, newsreels, the final work became a sixty-seven-minute black-and-white montage piece. While some parts of the eroding film stock was processed and altered by computers (for every original frame, two or three frames were step printed, effectively slowing down the images), there was no attempt artificially to speed up the process of decay itself. Of the several hundred reference prints Morrison scrutinized, ranging in time from 1914 to 1954, only two films have as far as I know hitherto been properly identified: The Last Egyptian (J. Farrell MacDonald 1914, written, produced, and based on a novel by L. Frank Baum) and Truthful Tulliver (William Hart, 1916). Not much has been said about this cinema of decay, at least that I have come across, and it represents a type of visual degradation that is of its own order, in the sense that this is in some way about temporality’s own iconoclasm. This makes films like Decasia, Lyrical Nitrate, and The Decay of Fiction different from other instances of damaged images in modern visual culture, such as the veritable attacks carried out on the picture plane in gestural abstraction, where the artists turned the destruction of the image into a

5  Paolo Cherchi Usai, P.  C., The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age, London: BFI, 2001, 129.

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purposeful mode of aesthetic expression;6 they are also of an order different from those images discussed by Hito Steyerl. But her consideration of “the poor image”—of optic imperfection from a technical-aesthetic point of view—also prompts some reflections that extend to the films of Morrison and others. One is that the technological hierarchy of good versus bad image quality (in short, transparency and opacity) can be fundamentally misleading when talking about the cultural and epistemological value of images. We would do better to refigure the terms of the debate according to the specificity of different aesthetic constellations. Another is that poor images—degenerating, abstruse, and almost illegible—make visible the more conceptual and transcendental conditions of opacity that might be ontologically constitutive of the image in the first place. The rich and dense patina of “visual noise” that consumes the poor image is thus construable as a kind of decrepit allegory; one critic, in fact, has proposed that the decayed footage of Morrison’s film functions as “medium and metaphor” and that his works “elegize the avant-garde tradition even as they make the case for its continued relevance.”7 A film like Decasia also gestures toward what Kazimir Malevich termed “cinema as such.” In his essays from the mid-1920s, Malevich showed that he had high hopes for the new art form. “One would expect the cinema,” he writes, “to overturn the whole of imitative culture, and, of course, it will be overthrown when abstractionists with their new flash of consciousness get into the cinema.”8 This remark, evidently, encapsulates the time-honored conflict between mimetic and abstract art, between what Malevich referred to as “imitative” cinema and “cinema as such.” The teleological destiny of film as a medium seems to be the latter; as Schambelan notes in her review of Decasia, “[a]ll film, if left to its own devices, will eventually become cinema as such.”9 With its cornucopia of decontextualized segments from so many films— as well as with its obvious linguistic nod to Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940)—Decasia is however not necessarily wholly non-narrative and abstract. It certainly does not conform to anything even remotely resembling the stylistic and narrative transparency of most conventional 6  See Paul Schimmel, Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void 1949–1962, Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art/Skira Rizzoli, 2012. 7  Elizabeth Schambelan, “Bill Morrison,” Artforum 42.9 (2004): 210. 8  Kazimir Malevich, “The Artist and Cinema,” Essays on Art, 235. 9  Schambelan.

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filmmaking, but in its very opacity it still murmurs its fragile tales populated by ephemeral protagonists and spectral apparitions, the film perhaps a phantom double of Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema (1998). This sense of a work which transmutes its own opacity into a meditation on film is also affirmed by the director’s own comments about the process of making it: I was seeking out instances of decay set against a narrative backdrop, for example, of valiant struggle, or thwarted love, or birth, or submersion, or rescue, or one of the other themes I was trying to interweave. And never complete decay: I was always seeking out instances where the image was still putting up a struggle, fighting off the inexorability of its demise but not yet having succumbed. And things could get very frustrating. Sometimes I’d come upon instances of spectacular decay but the underlying image was of no particular interest. Worse was when there was a great evocative image but no decay.10

The sad, scary, and enigmatic beauty of Decasia may thus hint at a narrative, but one materialized in rather than through its form. There is nothing at all eccentric or unusual about this narrative, which concerns the subject of obsolescence, the archive, and the precarious state of cultural memory. According to Morrison, he wanted the spectator “to feel an aching sense that time was passing and that it was too beautiful to hold on to.”11 The moment and circumstance of the film’s release also suggest an oblique relation to what Hal Foster, drawing on Thomas Hirschhorn, has described as precarious art. The gestation of Decasia harks back to The Europaischer Musikkmonat’s commissioning of Michael Gordon (of Bang on a Can), described as Morrison’s “acoustic twin,” to compose a symphony to be performed by the Basel Sinfonietta in November 2001.12 The Ridge Theatre company in New York (with whom Morrison worked) was then asked to provide a visual accompaniment; the theme of decay was Morrison’s own proposal. The two artists worked separately for the most part, Gordon on his decaying symphony, Morrison in the archives. In November 2001 the work premiered as an intermedial performance in Basel, the film cut to Gordon’s atonal and rather minimalist score,  Lawrence Weschler, “Sublime Decay,” New York Times, December 22, 2002.  Dave Heaton, “Portrait of Decay: Bill Morrison on Decasia,” Erasing Clouds, 13 (2003), http://www.erasingclouds.com/02april.html, accessed on June 12, 2013. 12  Weschler. 10 11

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­ erformed by a fifty-five-piece orchestra while slides of visual decay were p being projected. It was the live recording of this performance that became the soundtrack for the film. During the show, however, a frame got stuck in the projector, setting the image ablaze to smolder in real time. Evincing a temporal contiguity with the events of 9/11, the premiere of Decasia, with its eruptive glitches, further imbues the film with a sense of material and existential vulnerability. What Hal Foster has termed the “mimesis of the precarious” does not characterize Morrison’s project,13 one salient difference being that Decasia infuses the effects of the precarious into its very materiality, in the process creating a work that is anything but formless. If we are to understand the nature of this aesthetic, we might, in the final instance, be well advised to look beyond both Steyerl’s notion of the poor image and Foster’s accentuation of the formlessness of precarious art. One of the most immediate impressions one forms when watching Decasia is that the warped figurations of the film’s images invoke a sense of the ghostly, an effect Morrison’s work shares with some of experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr’s recent videos, something I will return to below. For the Aby Warburg of the unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–1928), compiled around the same time as Malevich’s essays on “cinema as such,” images contain pagan energies which linger on through their posthumous lives as phantasms waiting to be summoned. This explains Warburg’s idea of art history as a story of ghosts and of the art historian as necromancer. These reflections later get developed by Giorgio Agamben, who writes that [t]he images that constitute our memory tend incessantly to rigidify into specters in the course of their (collective and individual) historical transmission: the task is hence to bring them back to life. Images are alive, but because they are made of time and memory their life is always already Nachleben, after-life; it is always already threatened and in the process of taking on a spectral form.14

For Agamben, cinema is neither a technology nor an aesthetics or a material medium, but rather a method or praxis charged with releasing the image from its “spectral destiny.”15 Cinema is that process which brings  Hal Foster, “Precarious,” Artforum, 48.4 (2009); 207–209.  Giorgio Agamben, “Nymphs,” Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, eds. Jacques Khalip & Robert Mitchell, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, 66. 15  Ibid. 13 14

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life to images, which unleashes their unlived histories. A film like Decasia— which so eloquently foregrounds its own opacity—could be seen to embody that Warburgian potentiality. That images are organic things made of chemicals, and time is also borne out by Morrison’s later film Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016). Based on the unearthing in 1978 of 553 reels of nitrate films from the 1910s and 1920s, Dawson City centers on processes of decay and the instability of the film medium while at the same time providing a narrative about the titular city from its late nineteenth-century origin as a gold rush boom town. The features and newsreels, believed to be lost forever, were found at the bottom of a derelict swimming pool, preserved by the refrigerate Yukon temperatures. When in 1978 the reels were brought out into the sweltering summer heat, the sudden meteorological change caused the emulsion to melt in places, an effect archivists refer to as “the Dawson flutter.” Subject to the forces of impermanence, as was also the makeshift Dawson City, the salvaged albeit damaged nitrate reels have, through Morrison’s work, in a sense been freed from their own spectral destiny, accruing new historical and cultural meanings not in spite of but because of their opacity. A similarly fecund convergence of opacity and spectrality occurs in the work of Ernie Gehr, another American experimental filmmaker of a slightly older generation than Morrison. In the remainder of this chapter I want, first, to consider the materialization of opacity in some of his films and videos and, then, to contextualize his use of vitiated images with reference to the notion of an aesthetic imaginary, of which the spectral forms an especially expressive element. Gehr’s oeuvre represents a beguiling case, as does his philosophical remarks on film as a medium. David Schwartz has noted how, in Gehr’s projects, “every element of the cinematic apparatus is called into question and becomes a source of artistic energy.”16 This ceaselessly inquiring stance is also intact in his program notes for a 1971 show: [F]ilm is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a

16  David Schwartz, “Ernie Gehr at the Turn of the Century,” in Serene Intensity: The Films of Ernie Gehr, New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 2009, 3.

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variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space17

That film is not really representational, counter-intuitive as the claim may at first seem, is an observation that I have explored at length elsewhere.18 In my book Transfigurations (2008) I propose the term amimetic to describe an ontological condition at odds with the principle of transparency that routinely informs much film criticism and theory. Gehr’s work in film and video supports and accentuates this claim that film is not a representation but a real thing, and his stylistic mobilization of visually imperfect and indistinct imagery could be considered a first acknowledgment of the inherent opacity of all images. Decades before it became commonplace to talk about film as a form of thought, moreover,19 Gehr demonstrates the capacity of his chosen medium to perform the work of philosophy. In his analysis of the pulsating Serene Velocity (1970), Gehr’s most widely known film to date, Noël Carroll picks up on precisely this aspect, asserting that the film represents “a celluloid counterpart to a philosophical thought experiment designed to advance the conceptual point that an essential feature of film is movement.”20 Gehr’s method, or technique, entails to a significant extent a reworking of the film image through a set of optical and chemical processes: arithmetical editing, zooms, superimpositions, abstractive lenses, re-photography, reversed or slowed down motion, rack focusing, and swish panning. As Tom Gunning sees it, these techniques are more than just stylistic trademarks. Rather, they function as “basic structuring devices, whose effects on the image and the viewer are interrogated by the film.”21 The result comes close to Gehr’s own encapsulation of the essence of filmicity quoted above. We have no choice but 17  Ernie Gehr, “Program Notes,” in Serene Intensity: The Films of Ernie Gehr, New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 2009, 17. 18  See Asbjørn Grønstad, Transfigurations: Violence, Death and Masculinity in American Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. 19  See, for instance, Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989, 168; and Éric Alliez, “Midday, Midnight: The Emergence of Cine-Thinking,” trans. Patricia Dailey, The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000, 293. 20  Noël Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64.1 (2006): 173–185; 182. 21  Tom Gunning, “Placing the Films of Ernie Gehr,” in Serene Intensity: The Films of Ernie Gehr, New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 2009, 11.

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to focus on these devices, Gunning writes, because “we can not [sic] simply see through them to something else… For most filmmakers and film viewers film has become something one simply looks through in order to get at either a dramatic story or documentary evidence.”22 Gunning’s description of Gehr’s practice is in fact the poetics of opacity in a nutshell, a poetics configured by processes of “deautomatization.” His are images that need figuring out. In Reverberation (1969) the image we look at is just barely discernible. In History (1970), Gehr places a piece of black fabric in front of a lens-less movie camera. A light is used to illuminate the textile, and what we see is nothing but swirls of dye from color film and grains of black and white. In Field (1970) the image shows something that is elusive at best, and in the aforementioned Serene Velocity, “seeing is stretched to the breaking point between contradictory poles of stillness and motion, flatness and depth, abstraction and representation,” to borrow Gunning’s words again.23 Gehr’s work seems consistently preoccupied with an analysis of the phenomenon of visual opacity, and it is perhaps symptomatic of this enduring inclination that one of his early films is called Transparency (1970). But how, one wonders, does this marked fascination with the materiality of film and the limits of human perception, with apparatical self-­ referentiality and an almost sensual form of structuralist rigor, compute with the evidentiary potential of the image, what André Bazin once called “the irrational power of the photograph?”24 When we are confronted with an aesthetic practice that allows us actually to see the image as image and not as a transparent window into some kind of diegetic environment, by what parameters do we appraise the reality and the value of that at which we are looking? What is the currency of the image, epistemologically speaking? What kind of document, if any, is an image that exists, precariously one might say, on the fringes of the discernible? One answer could be that such images are a reminder that the relative uncommunicativeness which surrounds them is as a matter of fact not too foreign to other, less obviously opaque images either. Consider, for instance, Raymond Bellour’s argument that filmic images are what he calls “unattainable,”25 impossible  Ibid.  Gunning, 9. 24  André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema 1, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 14 25  Raymond Bellour, “The Unattainable Text,” Screen, 16.3 (1975): 19–27. 22 23

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to paraphrase, quote, or ultimately decode (and the insertion of video clips in electronic articles or the pausing of an image played back on a DVD or Blue-Ray, among other things, do not really change anything, since this is merely a matter of transferring the image between different technological platforms). When we look at any perfectly lucid, graphically un-impaired image, do we necessarily always know what we see? Another answer might be that, because these “uncertain images,” to use Dudley Andrew’s phrase,26 engender rather than represent a world, their status as signifying objects have been altered. They are not fictions one step removed from the spectator’s reality but exist in fact within the same experiential horizon. Yet another answer is that Gehr’s distorted, disorienting, and occasionally hypnotic aesthetics of constraint invokes a sense of the spectral. How could it not, with its intangible figures, ethereal mood, deformed urban spaces, and characteristic omission of human presence in the shot. Gehr’s life and work have also often been shrouded in a veil of enigmas. Consider, for instance, his “oblique autobiography,” his well-known reservations with regard to sharing personal information, and the resolutely anti-psychological and abstract style of his films and videos. An artist more interested in capturing the delicate changes of objects and spaces than in showing characters and action, Gehr’s body of work has typically been described as “oblique” and “mysterious.” These attributes also pertain to some of his most recent video works—for instance, Abracadabra (2009), Auto-Collider XV and Auto-Collider XVI (2011), and Work in Progress (2012), which seem on some level to be conceptualizations of the relation between the ghostly and the opaque. Gehr, who has taught a course on phantasmagoria at Harvard University, has ever since early films like Morning (1968), Transparency (1969), and Serene Velocity (1970) betrayed a rare sensitivity to the texture of surfaces, the modulations of light, the play of color, and the importance of scale. More often than not, his art seems poised on the edge of the visible world. Yet, the impenetrability of Gehr’s images also tends to generate a sense of the apparitional, in that his formal obfuscations of mundane spaces (say, a busy urban street) bring out an almost otherworldly presence. For example, in Abracadabra—a digital reconfiguration of four early silent films reminiscent of the stereoscope loop—Gehr assembles semi-transparent images of boys playing outside a  Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 13.

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department store, which he effortlessly transmutes into cinematic ghosts. In Work in Progress, he exploits the elusiveness of the video surface in reconstituting an informationally dense urban street as a spectral tableau. Of Essex Street Marked (2004), the critic J. Hoberman has even used the term “ghosts” about the presence of elderly shoppers at the eponymous marked.27 Thus, even on the very margin of legibility, or maybe because of it, Gehr’s images appear capable of conjuring phantasmagoric spaces. But, as we have seen, he is not the only artist to forge a connection between spectrality and the opaque; a similar association is inarguably at work in Decasia and The Decay of Fiction. While likewise invested in matters of temporality, Gehr’s cinema is more about duration and continuity than the instant and the fragment. The artist himself has referred to his method in terms of a “meditative ecstasy,”28 a strangely incongruous juxtaposition that nevertheless captures the formal uniqueness of his work. According to some of the rather scant criticism that has grown up around his filmography, this meditative propensity, in part inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen’s intensities of tonal dissonance, enabled Gehr to create “a completely new visual look for the New American Cinema.”29 In Wheeler Dixon’s view, many contemporary examples of a precarious aesthetic, from MTV to various DIY and YouTube practices, are indebted to the 1960s avant-garde cinema of which Gehr was a crucial part. Ultimately, the filmmaker’s gravitation toward forms of ghostly opacity might be conceived as a search for what Emerson called “the manifold meaning of every sensuous fact.”30 Whether translucent or muddy, shiny as the 4K TV or indeterminate as decaying celluloid, images are incisions into the flow of life, to borrow Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska’s expression,31 that have a certain thickness to them, an all-too-­ often unacknowledged density. It is this material density that makes art 27   J.  Hoberman, “Metro Pictures: J.  Hoberman on Ernie Gehr,” Artforum, 43.6 (2005): 41. 28  Filmmakers’ Cooperative, Filmmakers’ Cooperative Catalogue, no. 6, New  York: New American Cinema Group, 1975, 198. 29  Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997, 66. 30  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” Essays, 1844. In P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 200. 31  Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012, 75.

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fundamentally different from other genres of representation; the kind of imaginary that works of art articulate is not predominantly social, cultural, or political, but aesthetic. The accrual of texture that defines visual art militates against the idea that it is a reflection of something external. To paraphrase Gehr’s statement—film is not artifice, not an imitation, but a real thing. To clarify what I mean by a specifically aesthetic imaginary, consider George Wesley Bellow’s celebrated painting Forty-Two Kids (1907). In the picture, the water that the eponymous children are preparing to swim in is a sickly, blackish green. Mostly poor immigrants from the Lower East Side, they appear happily unaware of the extreme pollution in the East River. At the time this painting was made, the waste from six million people was channeled directly into the water, along with dead animals and industrial debris. The city’s authorities were baffled that its inhabitants would endure these reprehensible conditions without objection, but the desire to live in the city outweighed the concern for fundamental sanitary issues. As Nicholas Mirzoeff points out, the image of the city got in the way of its material, physical realities, causing a distorted view of one’s immediate environment through an anaestheticization of the senses.32 Bellows, a classmate of Edward Hopper, specialized in urban scenes, depictions of early twentieth-century New  York street life rendered in bold and gritty strokes that emphasized the textural and the haptic. Forty-­ Two Kids could be seen in the context of his “urban studies,” which, if taken together, form a stylistically coherent vision of city space. Negating anesthesia, Bellow’s work produces an example of just such an aesthetic imaginary alluded to above.33 In what follows, I want to explore the concept further through an engagement not with Bellows’s urban studies but rather with those of Ernie Gehr. Imaginaries now proliferate in our scholarly literature, and the term already has a conceptually stratified history. For Jean-Paul Sartre, who, it  Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World, London: Penguin, 2015.  I have previously written about the concept of an aesthetic imaginary, albeit without providing a precise definition. See Asbjørn Grønstad, “Here is a Picture of No Country: The Image between Fiction and Politics in Eric Baudelaire’s Lost Letters to Max,” in Socioaesthetics: Ambience—Imaginary, eds. Anders Michelsen & Frederik Tygstrup, Leiden: Brill, 2015. In a different essay, I also link the idea of the aesthetic imaginary to a kind of non-media-specific space of creativity. See Asbjørn Grønstad, “Refigurations of Walden: Notes on Contagious Mediation,” in Literature in Contemporary Media Culture, eds. Sarah J. Paulson & Anders Skare Malvik, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016. 32 33

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could be argued, is the progenitor of the modern understanding of the word, the imaginary is intimately linked to and possibly even co-constitutive of human freedom.34 Unlike perception, which is always necessarily deficient and restricted, the faculty that is our imagination is boundless. On this account, moreover, the powers and substance of cognition and imagination organize the world for us, an assumption the ramifications of which were probed further by Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory. Here, the imaginary comes to form part of a triad that also includes the order of the real and of the symbolic.35 Lacan’s concern is the construction of the subject’s identity, a process for which the role of the imaginary is crucial. In what is referred to as the mirror stage, the individual perceives itself as a coherent and discrete subject, but this is an act of misrecognition. Louis Althusser’s interpretation of ideology as “an imaginary relation to real relations” in turn draws its inspiration from Lacan’s work.36 Theories such as those of Lacan and Althusser quickly found their way into film theory, throughout the 1970s a burgeoning field that to a large extent defined the emergence of film studies as a new academic discipline. The imprint of Lacanian and Althusserian models of thought in this domain was perhaps most explicit in the work of Christian Metz, whose influential book Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier states that what defines cinema is “not the imaginary that it may happen to represent” but rather “the imaginary that it is from the start.”37 The cinema experience is founded on this strange paradox, that the objects that flicker before us on the screen, no matter how vivid, are not really there. But their absence is precisely what makes cinema as a medium of expression possible in the first place. Metz’s ideas about the cinematic apparatus and the spectator position—and the privileged place of the imaginary in them—were 34  Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination [1940], London: Routledge, 2004. 35  See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1977. 36  Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, introd. Frederic Jameson, trans. Ben Brewster, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm, accessed March 29, 2017. 37  Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster & Alfred Guzzetti, London, Macmillan, 1982, 44.

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momentous in much screen philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s. Inestimable as the Lacanian, Althusserian, and Metzian influences on cinema studies were, however, their intellectual framework came under attack as the climates of theory shifted in the 1990s and onward. This is a well-known story that does not need to be repeated here.38 More urgent for the current discussion is the reappraisal of Lacan’s and Althusser’s imaginary as “a category of reflection” that is “incapable of producing anything new or socially unmarked.”39 This is in contradistinction to the generative potential that the imaginary may also possess. The backdrop for this distinction between mirroring and propagative functions of the imaginary is the American Studies collection The Imaginary and Its Worlds (2013), whose point of departure is globalization and the turn toward transnational studies and the conceptual challenges posed by the notion of the imaginary for this research.40 Taking their cue from the idea of a radical imagination suggested by, among others, David Graeber, Anthony Bogues, and Robin G. Kelley, the editors Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar, and Johannes Voelz comprehend the imaginary as “the political act of thinking into existence alternative worlds that have not yet been granted social sanctioning or recognition” (vii). Yet, the imaginary is not detachable from the real. As a matter of fact, it is that which mediates the real, thus also contributing to its modeling. For Bieger, Saldívar, and Voelz, imaginaries serve two different purposes, in that they are “generative processes that bring forth what does not yet have a social correlative,” but their function is also “to fix, delimit, and reproduce collectively organized subjectivity.”41 While Lacan’s and Althusser’s grasp of the concept pertains to the latter function, that of the Greek-French philosopher and social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis envisions a more creative role for the imaginary. In his book 38  See, for instance, Noël Carroll and David Bordwell, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. 39  Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar & Johannes Voelz, “The Imaginary and Its Worlds,” The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn, eds. Laura Bieger, Ramón Saldívar & Johannes Voelz, Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013, xiv. 40  Bieger, Saldivar & Voelz, vii. 41  Ibid., xi.

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The Imaginary Institution of Society, published in French at the apex of Lacanian inflected Screen Theory in 1975, Castoriadis ties the notion of the imaginary unequivocally to figurality: [t]he Imaginary of which I am speaking is not an image of. It is the unceasing and essentially undetermined (social-historical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a question of something. What we call ‘reality’ and ‘rationality’ are its works.42

It is not difficult to see the appeal of such a conceptualization of the imaginary for the sphere of artistic expression. Where the work of Charles Taylor on the imaginary appears to consider images and narratives as mere by-products of ideas first articulated in philosophy,43 Castoriadis’s imaginary shows a clear affinity with the poetic realm. As Bieger, Saldívar, and Voelz point out, Taylor’s understanding of the imaginary, on the other hand—openly indebted as it is to Benedict Anderson’s prominent Imagined Communities (1983)44—is “derivative” in its implication that philosophy precedes art and fiction, as it were. The ongoing bifurcation of the imaginary as an intellectual construct persists into post-millennial theorizing, with a horde of different avatars, from Paul Giles’s transatlantic imaginary (2002) to Marguerite La Caze’s analytic imaginary (2002), Michele Le Doeuff’s philosophical imaginary (2003), Anneke Smelik’s scientific imaginary (2010), Ann V.  Murphy’s philosophical imaginary (in relation to violence) (2012), Ramón Saldívar’s transnational imaginary (2012), Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman’s concentrationary imaginary, and, finally, Ranjan Ghosh’s aesthetic

42  Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society [1975], trans. Kathleen Blamey, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, 3. 43  Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 44  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1983.

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imaginary (2015).45 The latter’s term, delineated as “entangled figurations,”46 appeared the same year as my own, but I suspect they are less related than their identical titles would imply.47 While my reading of the aesthetic imaginary is sympathetic to Castoriadis’s generativist account, it also connects with other and perhaps less mainstream sources. In a passage from the posthumous Figures of the Thinkable, published in French in 1999, Castoriadis again mentions the significance of artistic creation (presumably figures, forms, and images) for the imaginary: I talk about the imaginary because the history of humanity is the history of the human imaginary and its works (oeuvres). And I talk about the history and works of the radical imaginary, which appears as soon as there is any human collectivity. It is the instituting social imaginary that creates institutions in general (the institutions as form) as well as the particular institutions of each specific society, and the radical imagination of the singular human being48

The emphasis on the generative rather than reflective capacity of the concept notwithstanding, what is perhaps somewhat underappreciated here, and even more so in Taylor’s construal of the imaginary, is a sense of the 45  Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary, Durham: Duke University Press, 2002; Marguerite La Caze, The Analytic Imaginary, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002; Michele Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, London: Continuum, 2003; Anneke Smelik, ed., The Scientific Imaginary in Visual Culture, Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2010; Ann V. Murphy, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012; Ramón Saldívar, “Imagining Cultures: The Transnational Imaginary in Postrace America,” Journal of Transnational American Studies, 4.2 (2012): 3–22; Griselda Pollock & Max Silverman, eds., Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance, London: I.  B. Tauris, 2014 and Griselda Pollock & Max Silverman, eds., Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Terror in Popular Culture, London: I. B. Tauris, 2015; and Ranjan Ghosh, “The Figure that Robert Frost’s Poetics Make: Singularity and Sanskrit Poetic Theory,” in Singularity and Transnational Poetics, ed., Birgit Kaiser, London: Routledge, 2015, 134–154. Even though it was published a little earlier, one might also add Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. 46  Ghosh, 134. 47  The essay that contains the phrase “aesthetic imaginary” (see no. 2 above) was first given as a paper at the conference “What Images Do” at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in March 2014. 48  Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007, 123.

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materiality and mediality of that which produces the imaginary. There is, in the literature briefly alluded to above, a recurrence of terms such as narrative, fiction, forms, images, and figures, but none of these are specific to any particular medium. While I shall insist on the irreducibility of the aesthetic, and of aesthetic experience, I will likewise insist on the irreducibility of any given art form—both phenomenologically, epistemologically, and psychically. The work of Ernie Gehr eminently illustrates the mode of operation of a medium-specific aesthetic imaginary. But if I am determined to highlight the effect of mediality on the imaginary, why not call my constellation the filmic imaginary or the cinematic imaginary? To answer this question in depth would likely require a separate book; suffice it here to say that the aesthetic is always present and operative in all the different artistic media, so that the specifically filmic already embodies an aesthetic imaginary. It is also not entirely clear to me if something like the aesthetic can actually exist without any tangible empirical instantiations. When we talk about the aesthetic, we usually talk about a particular medial configuration anyway, be it a novel, a musical composition, a photograph, or a film. Besides, a filmic and a cinematic imaginary have already been elaborated by, respectively, Anthony Vidler (1993) and Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (2003).49 However we frame the relationship between the medium-specific, on the one hand, and, on the other, the aesthetic as a general category, it is hardly controversial to suggest that the concept of the aesthetic seems constitutionally disinclined toward any blunting of the senses. Unlike the anaesthetization that may result from any given social imaginary, art is supposed to stimulate the senses. Although the idea of an aesthetic imaginary is complex and layered, phenomenologically speaking it must be something that reconfigures our perception of the external world, something that provides content that is experientially different from the realms of the non-aesthetic. Elsewhere I have argued that work capable of producing such content might be imbued with “the power to steal back the real from the obfuscations of ideology and politics.”50 A case in point is Eric Baudelaire’s essay film Lost Letters to Max (2014), which renders the partially recognized state of Abkhazia by the Black Sea as a specifically filmic and autonomous 49  See Anthony Vidler, “The Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary,” Assemblage, 21 (1993): 44–59; and Jeffrey Shaw & Peter Weibel, eds., Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 50  Grønstad, “Here is a Picture of No Country,” 127.

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space unconcerned with the dictates of geopolitical classification.51 The film concisely captures the significance of space for our readings of the aesthetic imaginary. But, in turning toward Gehr’s work, there are three thinkers that I would like to claim are particularly relevant for my interpretation of the aesthetic imaginary. The first is Gilles Deleuze, who contemplates the imaginary in a text from the early 1970s. According to Deleuze, what defines the imaginary are “games of mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection, always in the mode of the double.”52 This reading of the term chimes well with the nature of the process of aesthetic transformation that goes on both in Bellows’s paintings, in Baudelaire’s documentary, and obviously in numerous other artistic works in which spatiality is a vital matter. Deleuze’s observation aligns the imaginary more firmly with the domain of aesthetics and also encapsulates the strange sense of a barely appreciable defamiliarization that sometimes accompanies the conversion of lived geographical places into artistic images. Underscoring concepts such as “mirroring,” “duplication,” “identification,” “projection,” and, not the least, “the double,” Deleuze assembles a vocabulary that hints at the potential uncanniness at play in the aesthetic depiction of real spaces. The second thinker is the French philosopher, sociologist, and occasional filmmaker Edgar Morin, who in 1956 published the important but (until its belated English translation in 2005) somewhat overlooked book The Cinema, or the Imaginary Man. Morin’s perspectives in this philosophically rich study enable us to build a bridge between the imaginary and the medium-specific properties of cinema. In a section that also comprises a quotation by François Ricci, Morin deploys the term imaginary in quite an unconventional way: “The psyche of the cinema not only elaborates our perception of the real, it also secretes the imaginary. Veritable robot of the imaginary, the cinema ‘imagines for me, imagines in my place and at the same time outside me, with an imagination that is more intense and precise’.”53 According to Morin, the cinema, or its psyche—whatever that is—functions to “secrete” the imaginary (one suspects that the term  Grønstad, “Refigurations,” 213.   Gilles Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” [1972], trans. Melissa McMahon and Charles J. Stivale, in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, 170–192. 53  Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man [1956], trans. Lorraine Mortimer, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, 202. Morin here quotes from François 51 52

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might be a pun on “the secret”); it is, so to speak, a machine that does the imagining for us. It is also, due to the particular qualities of its apparatus, a medium that sustains a curiously complex relation both with the imaginary and the real. As Morin holds, [t]he image is the strict reflection of reality, and its objectivity is contradictory to imaginary extravagance. But at the very same time, this reflection is a ‘double.’ The image is already imbued with subjective powers that displace it, deform it, project it into fantasy and dream. The imaginary enchants the image because the image is already a potential sorcerer. The imaginary proliferates on the image like its own natural cancer. It crystallizes and deploys human needs, but always in images.54

This duality of the cinematic image as at once objective/referential and subjective/generative also preoccupies the third tinker I would like to bring into this discussion. In his famous and extensively cited essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” André Bazin considers the mechanics of photography—which constitutes the material base of cinema—in terms of a process of conversion, or what he calls a “transference of reality from the thing to its reproduction.”55 This procedure is not strictly mimetic, because the capture of slices of reality by the cinematographic apparatus unavoidably transforms them into something else. The key to making sense of this duality, or dialectics, is neither narrative nor fiction or even image, but space. Cinema is a medium that unceasingly renders external space into aesthetic space, an operation that exemplifies Winfried Fluck’s observation that in order to acquire meaning “physical space has to become mental or, more precisely, imaginary space.”56 Fluck furthermore notes the salience of space as “a host for the transfer process through which an object is constituted as aesthetic object.” Daniel Ammeter’s film location documentary about Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 art film classic Blow-Up is a clever demonstration of this process of Ricci, “Le Cinéma entre l’imagination et la realité,” Revue Internationale de Filmologie, 1.2 (1947): 162. 54  Edgar Morin quoted and translated by Constance Penley, The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, 11. 55  André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Volume 1 [1967], trans. Hugh Gray, introd. Jean Renoir, new introd. Dudley Andrew, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, 14. 56  Winfried Fluck, “Imaginary Space; Or, Space as Aesthetic Object,” Space in America, eds. Klaus Benesch & Kerstin Schmidt, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005, 25–40; 25.

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transference. Juxtaposing images from that film with the corresponding London locations forty-five years later, sometimes within the same frame, Ammeter’s project—although temporally non-synchronized—manages to impart a sense of the phenomenological effect of the aesthetic imaginary on real locations. The insights of Deleuze, Morin, and Bazin form a productive context, I want to argue, for a study of the work of Ernie Gehr and its secretion of an aesthetic imaginary. One of the eleven visionary avant-garde artists that P. Adams Sitney considered worthy successors to Emerson’s poetics (along with luminaries like Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Hollis Frampton),57 Gehr has created a body of work that spans half a century of filmmaking. Initially associated with the Structural Film movement of the 1960s and 1970s, known among other things for its foregrounding of form over content, Gehr’s films and video works have over the years disclosed a particular interest in a set of recurring themes, sometimes interlinked and sometimes not: the materiality of the medium, the circumvention of the human figure, visual opacity, the field of vision, the perception of space, urban sites, and the apparitional. Running through his oeuvre is also a pronounced anti-psychological mood that, buttressed by the filmmaker’s taciturn demeanor, has contributed to an impression of Gehr’s cinema as oblique and enigmatic. But he is also an artist who continuously challenges the limits of his chosen medium and who, in the words of Gunning, “reinvents” the practices of the avant-garde.58 Gehr’s aesthetic—equally entrancing and mystifying, rigorous yet sensual, constricting yet invigorating—embodies a post-representational mode of image-making that in existential terms is generative rather than reflective. Gehr’s films and video works, as hinted at above, largely bear out his philosophical remarks concerning film’s status as not an imitation but a “real thing.” It could be argued that this shift, which ultimately is an ontological one, makes the medium of cinema even spookier than it already is. There is a certain sense of safety in representation as a phenomenological modality. That something is of the order of imitation means that it is somehow contained, that it is something that exists solely in an enclosed world. If we start to consider aesthetic artifacts like paintings and movies 57  See P.  Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 58  Tom Gunning, “Placing the Films of Ernie Gehr,” in Serene Intensity: The Films of Ernie Gehr, New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 1999, 5.

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as things, albeit pretty weird and special things, they get endowed with a form of agency that they would not otherwise have and that seems tapped into the province of the uncanny. Gehr’s penchant for graphically compromised, opaque, or repurposed images—as well as his fascination with the phantasmagorical—further accentuates this sense of the preternatural. As already noted, Gehr has been famously reluctant to share autobiographical details, but the story has it that he took up filmmaking more or less by chance. One night he stumbled into the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque on 42nd street in Manhattan in order to escape a nasty torrent. The film he watched was either Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night (1958) or Dog Star Man (1962). From the very beginning he seemed as attentive to the cinematic environment—the projector’s light rays moving through dust and smoke, the sharpness of the light outside after emerging from a screening—as in the films themselves. From Ken Jacobs, one of the directors at the pivotally important Millennium Film Workshop, Gehr borrowed an 8 mm camera and then went on to release eight films between 1968 and 1970 that quickly established his reputation beside contemporaries like George Landow, Paul Sharits, and the aforementioned Hollis Frampton. Working with blurry, rephotographed images, pure film grain, old found footage, and documentary material, Gehr the autodidact would fashion a largely unprecedented filmic terrain. His fundamental distrust of the medium’s capacity for emotional manipulation might in part explain the relative absence of the human figure in his films and the attendant appeal of space and architecture. But it would be incorrect to assume that Gehr is chiefly a severe formalist. His work is driven by a desire to investigate the infinite experiential richness of light and space, and the camera functions as an instrument through which locations may be meditated upon visually. His films, Gunning notes, make available “an almost encyclopedic range of spatial experiments in which the camera creates, investigates, or records a space, particularly through a series of compositional and, even more, mobile perspectives.”59 (7). The pulsating aesthetic of Serene Velocity (1970)—the most famous of his early films and a work that was named “culturally significant” by the Library of Congress in 2001 and included in the National Film Registry—serves as a telling example of such an experiment. Made on location in a corridor at what is now Binghamton University (then Harpur College), the work was shot one frame at a time and projected at sixteen frames per second. Embracing a parametric  Gunning, 7.

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approach,60 the filmmaker placed the camera on a tripod and selected four different exposures to be alternated for every frame in series of four. When a cycle was finished, Gehr modified the setting of the zoom lens. The effect, Noël Carroll has observed, is that the lens moves forward and backward “like the slide on a trombone.”61 In his later works, Gehr would increasingly move his studies of spatiality from interior to exterior settings, prompting Gunning to anoint him as the greatest chronicler of the city street.62 But Gehr’s projects are not city symphonies in the tradition of, say, Walter Ruttmann or Dziga Vertov, which monitor the various activities and goings-on that define life in the city. Rather, Gehr’s films are mostly preoccupied with the street itself, with crossings, transits, passages, and junctions. In Still (1969) the subject is Lexington Avenue in New York, in Eureka (1974) San Francisco’s Market Street at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in Signal—Germany on the Air (1985) a nondescript intersection in West Berlin. Side/Walk/ Shuttle (1992), which Sitney praises as “the most inventive reformulation of the world from a moving platform,”63 was shot clandestinely on a 16 mm Bolex camera in an outdoor glass elevator at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. What all these works have in common is, first, that they appropriate the cityscape as autobiography (Gehr was born to German Jewish émigrés, he lived in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s and in San Francisco in the 1990s, where he taught at the San Francisco Art Institute and at Berkeley). Second, they challenge or even reject the rhetoric of transparency. Our environment, the materials of film, the image, the process of mediation—all of these phenomena or activities have a certain density. They are all to some degree steeped in impenetrability. In his early films in particular, Gehr would literalize the problem of vision and the ongoing struggle with opacity, as the aforementioned films Reverberation (1969), History (1970), and Field (1970) demonstrate. These are films in which, as Gunning puts it, “seeing is stretched to the breaking point.”64 In a sense, the mechanical aspects of filmmaking are brought as much to the foreground as the things before the camera. Zooms, parametric editing, 60  For an introduction to parametric cinema, see David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, 274–310. 61  Noël Carroll, “Philosophizing Through the Moving Image: The Case of Serene Velocity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64.1 (2006): 173–185; 182. 62  Gunning, 8. 63  Sitney, 200. 64  Gunning, 9.

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superimposition, re-photography, decelerated projection, rack focusing, and swish panning, to name a few of the technical means through which Gehr would achieve his optical transformation of space, are aesthetic operations that come between the viewer and the profilmic space. They are, in a way, an aesthetic imaginary. Gehr’s poetics is thus one that repudiates the popular view shared by filmmakers and audiences alike that film is just a transparent window that regulates our access to a particular narrative content or to some form of documentary evidence. This insight comes at a cost, since Gehr seems all too aware, to cite Gunning, that “no act of representation ever makes anything present again.”65 Over the years Gehr’s filmmaking has grown less abstract, but the sensuous cornucopia of the urban environment is an abiding concern, and the emphasis on documenting its subtle changes remains. After the transition to digital video in 2004, Gehr’s work seems to have become even more ethereal, possibly as an effect of the feral plasticity of the medium. Films such as Abracadabra (2009), Auto-Collider XV and Auto-Collider XVI (2011), and Work in Progress (2012) divulge the same sensitivity to aesthetic materiality that characterizes his earlier pieces—the delicate modulations of light, the fluctuations of color, the treatment of the texture and granularity of the image—but they also exploit their own opacity to suggest the appearance of something otherworldly. In Abracadabra, for instance, Gehr digitally reprocesses four early semi-transparent silent films showing, among other objects, young boys at play outside a department store, a docking ship, some girls dancing, and a train ride. Looping, layering, and bisecting the images, the film bursts with kaleidoscopic color and the strangest movements. At one point the image splits in two, with one side turning into a mirrored reflection of the other. Conjuring the proto-­ cinematic effect of the stereoscope, the two parts enact a kind of kinetic dance. Such is the effect of estrangement in this film that the people on the screen not only look like ghosts, we feel their ghostly presence as well. In Work in Progress, Gehr makes use of the intangible quality of the video surface to recompose a busy and empirically dense urban street as what I in a previous essay have called a “spectral tableau.”66 Furthermore, in a work called Photographic Phantoms (2013), Gehr assembles hundreds of  Ibid., 15.  Asbjørn Grønstad, “Impaired Images and the Boundaries of Discernibility,” in Theorizing Images, eds. Žarko Paić & Krešimir Purgar, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, 242. 65 66

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amateur photographs from the 1890s to the 1930s, the result of years combing through pictures at photo fairs and flea markets around the world. Abundantly present in his artistic output, then, the notion of phantomality—a term I borrow from Jacques Derrida67—may be seen to constitute a semantic frame for the projection of the aesthetic imaginary in Gehr’s cinema. This preoccupation with spectrality is not casual or subsidiary but connects Gehr’s work to an older art historical tradition—as we have already seen—in which the image and the ghost keep close company. We remember that for Warburg images possess a vitality preserved in their subsequent lives; they are, in fact, dormant phantasms waiting to reappear at some point in the future. Cinema might be considered the great re-­ animator authorized to release the unlived histories of the photographic image. Discussing what he sees as “the thoroughly spectral structure of the cinematic image,” Derrida makes the speculative yet intriguing observation that film “needed to be invented to fulfill a certain desire for relation to ghosts.”68 To conclude, the aesthetic imaginary may have several incarnations—and at any rate, it is a concept still very much in the making, its undecidability being one of its epistemological strengths—here, my intention has merely been to suggest that the twin operations in Gehr’s work of spatial defamiliarization and spectralization constitute one possible manifestation of the aesthetic imaginary.

67  Antoine de Baecque & Thierry Jousse, “Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse, 37.1–2 (2015): 26. 68  de Baecque & Jousse, 26; 29.

CHAPTER 4

Archival Ghosts, or the Elsewhere of the Image: John Akomfrah

Ernie Gehr’s spectral re-animation of scraps of old silent films produces a form of opacity organized around the figure of the ruin. His filmmaking practice thus inscribes itself into a longer and deeply melancholic artistic tradition which foregrounds the poetic intensity of the fragment and of various states of degeneration. In the field of art history, the ruin has its own intellectual history. Until the seventeenth century, as Dylan Trigg has shown in his study of art and decay, the ruin was mostly “an ornamental motif,” but in the work of painters such as Salvator Rosa it was turned into “a legitimate object of contemplation.”1 In his Democritus in Meditation (1650), the eponymous pre-Socratic philosopher is immersed in moody thought amidst the shortcomings of nature—skulls, bones, a dead eagle, and fallen rocks. In this tradition, what Trigg refers to as “the aesthetic consideration of decay” becomes a memento mori.2 Later, during Romanticism and as artificial ruins appeared in European gardens, the ruin came to suggest transcendental longing. In Caspar David Friedrich’s The Polar Sea (1823–1824), for instance, the ruin functions allegorically. Later, with Huysmans, Baudelaire, and the Symbolists the ruin was linked to a sense of decadence and considered affirmatively. In Baudelaire, Trigg holds, “decay as something expressive of a particular mood becomes an 1  Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia and the Absence of Reason, New York: Peter Lang, 2006, 104. For more on the subject of the ruin, see André Habib, L’attrait de la ruine, Crisnée: Éditions Yellow Now, 2011. 2  Ibid.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. S. Grønstad, Rethinking Art and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46176-8_4

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object to be celebrated as an inherent part of the fragmentation of consciousness and existence.”3 While the thematic accent of an aesthetics of the ruin may vary across art history, its critical investment in temporality and its organic processes persist. I would like to argue that the specifically cinematic ruin, seen, for example, in the art of Gehr, is an object that emits opacity. In this chapter, we will see that in the work of British filmmaker John Akomfrah the trope of the ruin takes on a new guise, which is that of intertextuality. In a historical context, then, the intertextual fragment embodies another manifestation of the aesthetics of decay, of the ruin as an object of philosophical contemplation. In a work like The Nine Muses (2010), the ruin is no longer a natural or constructed object such as a skull, a crumbling staircase, or an abandoned power station, but the splinters of key literary and cultural texts. For the Ghana-born Akomfrah, a founding member of the Black Audio Film Collective (1982–1998) and director of the seminal Handsworth Songs (1986), the cultural archive is neither a static nor transparent compilation of artefacts but an epistemic resource that may be galvanized aesthetically to envision a different future. While working on Handsworth Songs, Akomfrah had relied upon material from the archives that documented immigration to Britain from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Years after the film had been completed the artist felt there was unfinished business with regard to these collections. He wanted, in his own words, “to see if we could help these images migrate from that world [of social problems] into another one where they start to speak for themselves.”4 In a language that recalls some of the ideas concerning the life of images found in Warburg and Agamben, Akomfrah notes that the archive exists both as a warehouse of official memory and as a phantom “of other kinds of memories that weren’t taken up.”5 The fruits of these reflections were, first, the single-screen installation Mnemosyne (2010), a gallery work commissioned by the BBC (in cooperation with the Arts Council England) that assembles archival images, new footage filmed in Liverpool and Alaska, ambient music, poetry, and Greek mythology into a new and evocative constellation of fragments. The next iteration of this project was the essay film or experimental documentary The Nine Muses (also 2010), which features the same heterogeneous cine-topography of images, sounds, and text. A  Ibid., 111.  Kieron Corless, “One From the Heart,” Sight and Sound, 22.2 (2012): 45. 5  Ibid. 3 4

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third installment of this piecemeal work, finally, was the exhibition bearing the Derridean title of Hauntologies, shown at the Carroll/Fletcher gallery in London in the fall of 2012. Migration, displacement (geographic, social, and psychic), and the reclamation of cultural memory in a postcolonial, globalized era are issues that occupy a decisive place in these artworks. But their subject matter is filtered through an emphatically dense and at times impenetrable transaesthetic collage founded upon the principle of the intertextual ruin and its luxuriant opacity. The matrix of this assemblage is the titular figure, the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine muses. A sister of Cronus and Oceanus, Mnemosyne gave birth to Clio (history), Urania (astronomy), Calliope (epic poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Thalia (comedy), Euterpe (music), Polyhymnia (hymns), Terpsichore (dance), and Erato (love). Mnemosyne accumulates the memory of everything, even of that which is yet to come, and she has also gained the knowledge of sources. But in Greek mythology memory is also crucially bound up with a dialectics of seeing and blindness, to which the story of the androgynous seer Tiresias attests. Happening upon the goddess Athena bathing, Tiresias was blinded, yet also endowed with the gift of clairvoyance. The prophet’s literal blindness occasions a more allegorical way of seeing, an introspective gaze of imagination and memory. According to the literary theorist Mikhail Iampolski, “[i]t is the vey darkness of memory that allows visual images to come loose from their contexts, forming new combinations, superimposing themselves on each other or finding hidden similarities.”6 This sentence could almost be a description of the artistic praxis which informs The Nine Muses, at least if we think in terms of not only “visual images” but aesthetic fragments more generally. The thick texture of allusions that make up the discursive fabric of the film encompasses, among other sources, the Bible, Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, T.  S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Schubert, Arvo Pärt, and Leontyne Price. These references blend with archival images documenting aspects of migratory experience, such as the arrival of Caribbean workers, dancing teenagers, and factory labor. Alongside this material Akomfrah also interposes segments showing a wintery landscape, scenes shot in Alaska that serve to

6  Mikhail Iampolski, The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 3.

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amplify the sense of alienation and destitution so common to the experience of migration. Across an oeuvre that (at the time of writing) contains more than thirty projects, Akomfrah has consistently and imaginatively mined a particular theme as well as deployed a particular method: on the level of narrative, the multifariousness of black diasporic experience, and on the level of form, the complexities of various systems of mediation and representation. An essential component of his practice, I suggest, is an aesthetics of opacity, frequently connected with (although not exclusive to) the intertext understood—in an allegorical sense—as a ruin (his first feature length film Testament (1988) begins with Zbigniew Herbert’s evocative quotation that “[i]f we lose the ruins, nothing will be left”). The racial tensions that erupted into a riot in the Handsworth district of Birmingham in September 1985 is the subject of Akomfrah’s breakthrough work Handsworth Songs. In the 1990s, he made a series of 16 mm films and videos about prominent individuals and phenomena from recent history: Who Needs a Heart (1991) portrays the British Black Panthers, Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993) focuses on the titular civil rights activist, The Last Angel of History (1996) explores Afrofuturism, Dr. Martin Luther King: Days of Hope (1998) documents the life of the minister and movement leader, Goldie: When Saturn Returns (1998) depicts the life of the English drum and bass innovator, and The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong (1999) chronicles the career of the fabled musician and performer. In 2013, Akomfrah released The Stuart Hall Project, his perspicacious tribute to the seminal cultural studies icon, and in the years to follow he made a string of mostly multi-channel works delving into historical events that have been perhaps less culturally visible than the subjects portrayed previously. Tropikos (2015), one of the few single-channel videos from this period, is an opulent costume drama, set in the sixteenth century and filmed in Plymouth and the Tamar Valley, that reenacts the encounters of the English with the African “other” through colonization and the slave trade. That same year’s three-channel installation Vertigo Sea ruminates on the historical importance of the oceans and considers as one of its topics the role of colonization and slavery. The two-channel video installation Auto da Fé (2016), likewise a period piece, charts a number of historical migrations caused by religious oppression from the last four centuries, from the escape of the Sephardic Jews from Brazil to Barbados in 1654 to the contemporary flights from Mosul, Iraq. In the three-channel video installation Precarity (2017) the subject matter is the inscrutable jazz musician Charles Joseph

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“Buddy” Bolden, of whose work no recordings have persisted. Finally, the three-channel installation Mimesis: African Soldier (2018) narrates the story of the millions of undocumented Africans who served as soldiers and workers on the European and African continents during the First World War. This most recent work exhibits many of the stylistic traits honed and repeated over three decades: the synthesis of archival footage and newly filmed material, non-chronological presentation, a profuse intertextuality, the use of multiple screens and the resulting erosion of narrative focus, and the density of the soundscape. These formal attributes could be seen as Akomfrah’s practical response to his own interrogation of the politics of representation that informs mainstream filmmaking. In their statement on black independent cinema, the Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC) problematizes the ways in which identity is being configured audiovisually and proposes the following points of engagement. The first is to analyze how the predominantly white cinema structures “racist ideas and images of black people” as “self-evident truths.”7 The second is to create a space for the discussion of the relevance of independent cinema aesthetics for black filmmakers. Opening up the realm of filmmaking to anyone interested as well as eliminating the distinction between audiences and producers is the third aim of the BAFC’s statement. Key to understanding their project, however, is unquestionably their keen sense of the layers and mechanisms of representation; not content with simply revealing distortions of black experience in cinema, the collective wants to understand the symbolic and institutional processes that produce the “apparent transparency” and “realism” of such representations.8 This sensitivity to representational conventions and codes found ample expression in BAFC’s first projects, the slide-tape texts Expeditions 1: Signs of Empire (1983) and Expeditions 2: Images of Nationality (1984), as well as in Handsworth Songs. What the collective saw through was how the media coverage of the riots embodied a circular kind of logic in that, in the words of Stoffel Debuysere, “events are explained as symptoms and are given meaning by way of

7  John Akomfrah, “Black Independent Filmmaking: A Statement by the Black Audio Film Collective,” Black Camera, 6.2 (2015): 58–60, 58. 8  Ibid, 59.

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interpretations that are always already there.”9 Debuysere argues that Akomfrah’s film, as an antidote to this impasse, makes use of the ambiguity that is at the heart of cinema: contrary to the dominant modes of fiction film, which tend to attest to what is given as ‘real’ by conforming to the stereotypes of the social imaginary, or the traditional documentary forms, which are attached to the search for certainty of knowledge, the film takes apart the multiple meanings of images, captured through the lenses of the BBC and other news-reel units, and repositions them in an indeterminate space that exists in the gaps between the real and the fictional, the historical and allegorical.10

Galvanized both by the 1981 London race riots and by the influence of powerful intellectual orientations such as cultural studies (Stuart Hall), semiotics, psychoanalysis (Louis Althusser), and feminism, the anti-­ essentialist stance of the BAFC precipitated a new type of cinema, one that retained the documentary tradition’s penchant for social critique but in a decidedly experimental language. Unconfined by the rule of narrative, and often melancholic, this type of filmmaking represented a breach with the politics of negation that defined many of the modernist cinemas of the preceding decades. As critics have pointed out, the plethora of materials and modes that co-exist in Akomfrah’s films, “critique, dreams, aesthetics, and politics,” does not aspire to undermine audience pleasure the way that the tradition of negative aesthetics does.11 Rather than adhering to the methods of modernist film, Akomfrah interrogates “the convergence between race and the language and history of cinema.”12 In acting as “image-takers,” the participants in the Black Audio Film Collective were what Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar term “inaugurators of a cinecultural practice.”13 Their work mined and rearranged the 9  Stoffel Debuysere, “Signs of Struggle, Songs of Sorrow: Notes on the Politics of Uncertainty in the Films of John Akomfrah,” Black Camera, 6.2 (2015): 61–75; 69. 10  Ibid., 70. 11  See Asbjørn Grønstad, Screening the Unwatchable: Spaces of Negation in Post-millennial Art Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 12  David Marriott, “Bastard Allegories: Black British Independent Cinema,” Black Camera 7.1 (2015): 179–198; 180. 13  See Holly Corfield Carr, “John Akomfrah,” Frieze, March 18, 2016, https://frieze. com/article/john-akomfrah, accessed March 4, 2019; Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. “Preface,” The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective, eds. Kodwo Eshun & Anjalika Sagar, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007, 13.

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colonial archive in order to find alternative stories of the past, stories that could play a vital role in shaping more productive futures.14 This kind of media archeological practice is ultimately another way of conducting epistemic work, of unearthing historical knowledge buried by the intervening decades under the thick strata of authorized narratives. The turn toward the archive, of which Akomfrah’s film is but one example, is compelled by what Hal Foster terms an “archival impulse,” distinguished by an interest in “obscure traces” more than in “absolute origins” as well as by a readiness to connect with the past.15 What is at stake for this kind of artistic research is the question of the trustworthiness of the archive and whether it possesses “unsullied, unmediated” truth.16 One of the formal techniques at work in The Nine Muses to engage critically with the archive is the absence of a narrative voice. As the filmmaker himself explains it, “[i]f you remove one of the key structuring devices from archival images, they suddenly allow themselves to be reinserted back into other narratives with which you can ask new questions.”17 But Akomfrah’s project is not just or perhaps even principally about giving shape to histories suppressed or forgotten by history. What also comes across in his work is a delicate awareness of the byzantine networks of events and causes that comprise any historical narrative. The director’s suggestive phrase “what happens in one afternoon has decades in it,” offered when discussing the 1980s race riots in the UK, illustrates this idea that any given historical event contains within itself a multitude of preceding events.18 Such an understanding of temporality, and of history, lends itself well to the notion of transtextuality that I have advanced elsewhere and that I argue is a significant part of Akomfrah’s poetics.19 Marriott uses the idea of “filiation” to explain the nature of the relation between Akomfrah’s 14  Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar. “Preface,” The Ghosts of Songs: The Film Art of the Black Audio Film Collective, eds. Kodwo Eshun & Anjalika Sagar, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007, 13. 15  Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October, 110 (Fall 2004): 5; 21. 16  Power, 62. 17  Ibid. 18  Ibid. 19  In previous work I have tried to approach the particular aesthetics at work in The Nine Muses through the intertwined concepts of reappropriation, transtextuality, and opacity. See Asbjørn Grønstad, “John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses and the Ethics of Memory,” in Exploring Text, Media, and Memory, eds. Lars Sætre, Patrizia Lombardo & Sara Tanderup, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2017, 93–113. See also Grønstad, Film and the Ethical Imagination.

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work and the sources quoted therein. The “grammar” of black independent cinema in the UK, he argues, is “interwoven entirely with citations, references, echoes, specters, from a vast array of cultural references, antecedent and contemporary.”20 Thus, the transtextual image provides a space in which memory/history and potentiality/futurity converge. A form of referentiality that not only quotes an older text but which also anticipates its later possible quotation by texts that do not yet exist, the transtextual is profoundly embroiled in a process of ceaseless becoming. The archival image, which in a film like The Nine Muses enacts such a transtextual optics, could be understood, as I have formerly put it, “as an unfinished inscription, a unit of meaning stabilized only temporarily, and that always awaits its own future reappropriation.”21 Co-existing inside the same work, the practices of transtextuality and reappropriation—vigorously aesthetic in nature—are also figurations of opacity. For one thing, to approach the institution of the archive in the manner of The Nine Muses suggests that the documents therein were never all that transparent in the first place. Moreover, by sidestepping the suturing device of the clarifying voice-over—and not to mention by being inserted into fluidly heterogeneous assemblages—the already muddy images retrieved from the mute archive become even denser. Finally, if these images are perennially “unfinished,” they attain an additional state of temporally induced (in contradistinction to the spatial forms of opacity discussed in connection with low definition) opacity that will never be overcome. The recontextualized archival footage, the uncommunicativeness of the landscape and of the recurring Rückenfigur, and the nomadic literary allusions together generate a cinematic expression that gives aesthetic substance to the Glissantian notion of opacity. The Caribbean thinker’s work is a particularly pertinent intellectual context for Akomfrah’s film, given its examination of diasporic subjectivity and postcolonial lives. As we have seen above, opacity elicits a positive value in Glissant’s philosophy, as it ensures the individual’s ontological and phenomenological irreducibility. Transparency, on the other hand, incites recognizability and sameness, qualities that enable reductionism. With this structure in mind, it is not surprising that the concept of opacity has been adopted especially by diasporic artists. Anjalika Sagar, of The Otolith Group, has explicitly cited

 Marriott, 196.  Grønstad, “John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses,” 105.

20 21

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Glissant and framed opacity in terms of “the right to a singularity.”22 The ensemble’s Nervus Rerum (2008), a film about the Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, shuns the documentary style of dramatic realism in rendering the camp as an unequivocally bewildering space, literary quotations from Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet and Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love supplanting voice-over commentary and eyewitness testimony. Nervus Rerum, as T.  J. Demos observes, exudes “an obscurity that frustrates knowledge and that assigns to the represented a source of inknowability that is also… a sign of potentiality.”23 But for Glissant, opacity is not identified with obscurity as much as with the integrity of otherness. In both Nervus Rerum and The Nine Muses the opaque never poses an obstacle for establishing a relationship with the Other but functions instead as a catalyst for a space of intersubjective experience. The “ethical and aesthetic dedication to opacity” that Demos sees as intrinsic to the art of the Otolith Group also extends to Akomfrah’s artistic practice. In The Nine Muses, the stylistic devices of reappropriation and transtextuality stimulate what I elsewhere have called “opacity effects.”24 Both the archival footage and the transtextual allusions constitute shards of meaning that appear to us as ruins, albeit symbolic rather than material. In a later work, the three-screen installation The Airport (2016), the figure of the ruin re-emerges more overtly. A derelict terminal near Athens, Greece, is the setting for a somewhat bizarre assemblage; a spacesuit-clad gentleman, a lounging chimpanzee, and ghostlike travelers hanging around waiting for flights that are delayed interminably. Plants and weeds stretch out purposelessly across the tarmac. Some people walk by, and there is even an open bar in the departure hall, but no planes ever take off or arrive. The general mood is one of inertia and paralysis. The Airport cleverly subverts the notion of the terminal as a “non-place.”25 If such spaces are defined by transience, Akomfrah’s spectral airport is in a sense the opposite of a non-place. His characters can neither check out nor leave. They are stuck inside the abandoned aviational ruins forever. What they occupy is therefore not so much a non-place as a non-time.

22  Quoted in T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis, Durham: Duke University Press, 2013, 155. 23  Demos, 145. 24  Grønstad, “John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses,” 110. 25  Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, London: Verso, 1995.

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The Airport can easily be seen as a homage to two giants of late modernism in the cinema: Theo Angelopoulos and Stanley Kubrick. In fact, if the former has any descendants among contemporary filmmakers, Akomfrah might be one of the foremost candidates. Not only do his projects evince a prominent stylistic affinity with the cinema of Angelopoulos— consider, for instance, Akomfrah’s interest in landscape, in the long take, and in continuous movement between the characters, the camera, and topographical space—but there is also a set of thematic resonances aligning the work of the two directors. Matters of history, memory, temporality, mythology, and migration loom large in Akomfrah’s multi-layered poetics. In Tropikos, another project from 2016, he examines Britain’s role in the slave trade, and in the diptych Auto Da Fé, from the same year, he contemplates the nature of migration through the conceptual lens of religious persecution. Honing in on eight different historical case studies, from the little-known story of the Sephardic Jews who escaped from Catholic Brazil to Barbados in 1654 to contemporary migrations from places such as Mali and Mosul, Akomfrah imaginatively explores the nature of the state of displacement. I also want to consider another Angelopoulian influence on Akomfrah’s aesthetic, one that involves a certain disruption of the coherence of spatio-temporal vectors. The mutability of time appears to be a central preoccupation for both filmmakers, and in The Airport, characters from different historical eras encounter one another within the same diegetic space. As we know, this kind of erratic or impossible space reappears in Angelopoulos’s cinema, for instance, in Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) and Eternity and a Day (1998), constituting a formal figure that marks the intrusion of an unsettling irregularity into the temporal architecture of the narrative. Is it possible that this figure could offer us a theoretical tool with which better to grasp the nature of complexly organic conceptions of temporal and historical relationality? What exactly is going on in these erratic spaces? Does time get truncated or contracted? Is it the particularity of the connection between two historically distinct events that gets thus spatialized? What I would like to explore in the following is a set of largely philosophical phrases or propositions, articulated by the two filmmakers in question, that point toward a vital opacity at the heart of the experience of time. The key utterance is Akomfrah’s notion of “the elsewhere of the image,” which I in a different context describe as “a kind of potentiality or latency that lies dormant

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inside and that awaits a future reception or use.”26 But this also seems related to a different statement that the British director has made, namely the one cited above that “what happens in one afternoon has decades in it.”27 In addition, there is Angelopoulos’s evocative remark, which he made during an on-stage interview preceding a screening of The Beekeeper in 2005, that “[e]verything that has existed will always exist.”28 Are these propositions somehow correlated? Might the films help illuminate the confounding quality of the statements? Finally, I would also like to suggest that the anomalous time images in the cinemas of Angelopoulos and Akomfrah might productively be tied to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s idea of potentiality. When we think of his work we often think of the copiously considered Homo Sacer series and terms such as the state of exception, but Agamben is also deeply preoccupied with questions concerning the archive, the paradigm, methodology, and a certain idiosyncratic understanding of the Foucauldian dispositif. In his The Signature of All Things (2009), tellingly subtitled On Method, Agamben ponders the possibility that there are unrealized—that is, essentially unlived—experiences that obliquely help give form to each inhabited moment: it is above all the unexperienced, rather than just the experienced, that gives shape and consistency to the fabric of psychic personality and historical tradition and ensures their continuity and consistency. And it does so in the form of the phantasms, desires, and obsessive drives that ceaselessly push at the threshold of consciousness (whether individual or collective).29

In the text “Nymphs,” as we recall, Agamben suggests that cinema may not primarily be about technology or even aesthetics but constitutes rather a method for freeing images from what he calls their “spectral destiny.”30 26  Asbjørn Grønstad, Film and the Ethical Imagination, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 196. 27  Nina Power, “Counter-Media, Migration, Poetry: Interview with John Akomfrah,” Film Quarterly, 65.2 (2011): 61. 28  Asbjørn Grønstad, “‘Nothing Ever Ends:’ Angelopoulos and the Image of Duration,” in The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos, eds. Angelos Koutsourakis & Mark Steven, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015, LEGG TIL! 29  Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method, Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2009, 101. 30  Giorgio Agamben, “Nymphs,” Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, eds. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011, 66.

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It is not a coincidence that this distinct perspective and these terms, cohering around the incorporeal, evoke the work of Aby Warburg. In the mid-­1970s, Agamben spent a year at the Warburg Institute Library in London, and his way of thinking about potentiality seems explicitly informed by the notion of Nachleben with which Warburg is preoccupied in his Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–1928). As we have already seen in the chapter on Ernie Gehr, for Warburg images contain pagan energies preserved as ghosts waiting to be re-awakened at a later time. Thus, for Agamben, repetition—another vital term in his philosophy—comes to mean not a reoccurrence of the same but rather “the possibility of what was.”31 One could perhaps say that in Agamben’s use of the concept, repetition loses its mimetic quality to acquire a creative dimension. This Warburg-inflected philosophy of potentiality has proven fertile outside its own domain and has quite recently spilled over into the field of screen studies, significantly informing Janet Harbord’s study Ex-Centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology (2016) as well as Henrik Gustafsson’s and my own collection Agamben and Cinema: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image (2014). Harbord develops a theory of what she calls the “unlived history of cinema” firmly grounded in Agamben’s philosophy.32 Also taking her cue from Foucault’s observation that the logic by which a given system operates is divulged as much by what it excludes as what it contains,33 Harbord states that ex-centric cinema is the name given to “the matter around the cinema that we have,” denoting a kind of invisible dispositif to be located “not only in the margins and ephemera of cinema, but in the direct light of the everyday as a negative form.”34 On this view, unrealized possibilities have a tangible effect on the real by indirectly giving shape to lived experience. For Harbord, ex-centric cinema, an example of which would be the ­incomplete 31  Giorgio Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films,” Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Thomas McDonough, trans. Brian Holmes, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 316. 32  Janet Harbord, Ex-Centric Cinema: Giorgio Agamben and Film Archaeology, New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. 1. 33  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966; 1970], London: Routledge, 2005. There is in fact a passage in this book reminiscent of Agamben’s notion of potentiality, when toward the end Foucault writes that “at any given instant, the structure proper to individual experience finds a certain number of possible choices (and of excluded possibilities) in the systems of the society,” 415. 34  Harbord, 2; 5.

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film, represents a methodology in its own right.35Another example of this “phenomenology of potentiality” that she provides is the register of patent law that indexes a given history of yet-to-be-realized ideas.36 Harbord’s study contests a set of rather durable binaries, for instance, those between past and present, actuality and potentiality, recording and transmitting, and the cinema and other media. But despite the breadth of its philosophical ambition, the notion of an unlived history of cinema—I would like to claim—does not have to delimit itself to the area that Harbord identifies as “the matter around the cinema that we have.” Where she is concerned with an ex-centric cinema, my interest lies not so much in the matter around cinema as the matter inside it, the potentiality of the already captured and the already framed image. Perhaps we could call this, with Akomfrah, the elsewhere of the image. The film image, or scene, embodies at least three dimensions at once, all to do with temporality. There is, first of all, the moment of our viewing the image, as well as its specific placement within the architecture of the film as a whole. But the image is also the unique material outcome of manifold and complex past processes on the levels of production, imagination, history, aesthetics, to name a few. Even when invisible or unnoticed, these processes are still in a certain way a part of the image that we see. Akomfrah’s observation that “what happens in one afternoon has decades in it” could thus also apply to the relation between an image and what we might call its etiology. Finally, the film image always awaits its future use. When watched by a viewer, the image bleeds into the consciousness of that viewer, who might use it toward ends that could never have been predicted by its makers. The image therefore embodies a semantic surplus, or potentiality, a signifying dimension that is both there and not there in the period of its gestation or original use. In its recontextualization of the archival footage of postwar immigration, The Nine Muses offers us an illustrative instance of this mechanism. This approach to cinematic archaeology, informed in no small part by what I have elsewhere referred to as “a poetics of recombination,”37 might be considered in light of Warburg’s philosophy of spectrality as well as Agamben’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the work of repetition. One might here also recall Mark Fisher’s characterization of Handsworth Songs  Harbord, 14, 4.  Ibid., 3. 37  Asbjørn Grønstad, Film and the Ethical Imagination, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 195. 35 36

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as “a study of hauntology, of the specter of race itself” as well as David Marriott’s description of Akomfrah’s films as “ghost archives,” assemblages “whose readability or rationality do not always follow the rules of narration, but serve a more spectral effect.”38 This is how Akomfrah explains his own methodology: “I’m a born bricoleur. I love the way that things that are otherwise discrete and self-contained start to suggest things once they are forced into a dialogue with something else.”39 In enabling the archival image’s escape from its historically defined and culturally policed meanings, the filmmaker releases, so to speak, the “pagan energies” latent within it. One could be forgiven for thinking that the aesthetic effort that goes into bringing out this potentiality of the image is about making something absent present, about (finally) realizing its unfulfilled psychic and epistemological promise. Even if the art historian acts like a necromancer, which Warburg imagined, the resuscitated image is itself always on the brink of slipping away. That images are spun from “time and memory,” which Agamben asserts in “Nymphs,”40 is presumably a contention that would resonate with filmmakers such as Angelopoulos and Akomfrah. But if that is the case, the image hardly ever attains a state of existential stability. Tantalizingly out of reach, it is either a ghost, a revived ghost, or a presence on its way to becoming a ghost. Perhaps, then, we need to refine our conceptualization of “the elsewhere of the image,” to propose that the image is in fact the elsewhere. The overwhelming immediacy of much mainstream cinema might obfuscate this thesis, but it might become clearer if we pause to examine a specific scene that would seem to foreground this possibly constitutive unobtainability of the image. Much has already been made critically of the kitschy painting that hangs in the protagonist’s oppressive hotel room in Barton Fink (Joel Coen, 1991). A vital component of the room, the picture shows a woman on a beach with her back to the viewer, staring out toward the ocean, her right arm raised to her forehead, the waves crashing against the shoreline. The man in the room, an author (John Turturro) hired by a Hollywood studio to write a screenplay, is enthralled by the image, gazing at it frequently. The e­ xistence 38   Mark Fisher, “What is Hauntology?”, Film Quarterly, 66.1 (2012): 16–24; 24, Marriott, 189. 39  Lisson Gallery, “John Akomfrah,” http://www.lissongallery.com/exhibitions/johnakomfrah, accessed February 15, 2017. 40  Agamben, “Nymphs,” 66.

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of this painting seems narratively incongruous in a film that centers on, among other things, the writing process, the high art/popular culture divide, the common man, fascism, and slavery, as well as violent crime. What is this particular image doing in the film? While a palpable enough symbol of escape—the pristine blue sky and wide sea a stark contrast to the writer’s confined, damp, and gloomy quarters—the painting also serves to literalize that elusive location that is “the elsewhere of the image.” The image is that which is not here. For the writer chained to his desk, struggling with creative blockage, the painting is the only doorway onto the outside world, but its interpellative force also blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality in his mind. Later in the film, after a fire in the hotel, the writer absconds to the beach, where he happens to run into a woman who looks just like the sunbathing rückensfigur in the image on the wall in his room. Having disconfirmed the writer’s question if she is in the pictures, she strikes the exact same pose as the woman in the painting. In a way, the writer has ended up inside his treasured image, only now it is no longer an image but an intrinsic part of the diegetic flow of the film’s narrative. The experiential chasm between these two iterations of the rückensfigur illustrates, I want to maintain, the fundamental unattainability of the image, engulfed as it is in its own “elsewhere.” One could perhaps say that Barton Fink, through its bracketing of the painting, even captures or makes visible this very unattainability. The image is there to be watched, scrutinized, desired, and pined for, yet it can never be fully possessed, and we, the viewers, can never get to or reach the elsewhere that it so invitingly and alluringly presents to us. But there is another and less apparent interpretation of the notion of the elsewhere of the image, one that reunites the overt spatiality of the term with a sense of the temporal. For could it be that we are misguided to consider the elsewhere as always and necessarily tied to a topos, a given place? What if the elsewhere could also refer to a past or future point of time, a figuration of a historical as much as a geographical strata? Such a theoretical move would allow us to discover conceptual similarities between (1) Angelopoulos’s cinema of duration (recall the voice-over from The Dust of Time: “I returned to where I let the story slip into the past. Losing its clarity under the dust of time, and then, unexpectedly, at some moment, it returns, like a dream. Nothing ever ends”), (2) Akomfrah’s thesis that any event that occurs in history already comprises multiple other events, and finally (3) Warburg and Agamben’s emphasis on the powers of potentiality that reside within the image.

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With its finely wrought transtextual weave, Akomfrah’s work epitomizes what Glissant and the Antillean writers call épaisseur, the expressive density or thickness of which opacity is made and which might operate as an instrument of resistance. But pronouncements concerning the subversive promise of opacity are easy enough to make. How more precisely, Simek wonders, does this form of resistance work, and why would one choose opacity over other avenues of dissent? Is opacity even beneficial in a political context or is it, conversely, a barrier in the struggle against global capitalism and neo-imperialism?41 In order to address these questions, Simek turns to Glissant’s colleague Patrick Chamoiseau’s notion of a “poetic approach.” Writing in the mid-1990s, Chamoiseau notes that a rationality that is fundamentally economic in nature has usurped other domains of existence and foisted its own logic of operation upon them. A result of this situation, for Chamoiseau, is that the poetic dimension that is also a part of political life has been abandoned, one consequence of which is that the craft of interpretation withers away. Without it, all information and facts become subject to a narrowly economic process of contextualization. The poetic approach, which is to be sharply differentiated from mere writing, is constitutionally immune to economic rationality, and for Chamoiseau, Glissant, and other Antillean intellectuals it is crucial that it be re-introduced into social and political discourses. The poetic is of course also that communicative modality capable of gestating thickness, opacity.42 As long as we refrain from essentializing or fetishizing opacity, it can be productively harnessed toward political objectives. The “dizzying effect” that opacity may have, Simek points out, “impels us to engage.”43 Opacity can stimulate reading because it is indivisible from interpretation. That is, interpretation of a text or a phenomenon denotes a process the outcome of which is uncertain in advance of the activity. Unlike description, interpretation does not just reiterate or paraphrase something already known but brings new ideas, however infinitesimal, into the world. Without opacity, there would be no need for interpretation in the first place. While the poetic approach, as Simek remarks,44 might elicit demurrals from social scientists concerned that the equivocality of the aesthetic and the  Simek, 367.  Ibid., 367–368. 43  Ibid., 369. 44  Ibid., 368. 41 42

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e­ lusiveness of the ethical prove inadequate in the face of political challenges, it could also have a more demonstrable social and epistemic application. Although a bit long-winded, the following quotation from Simek is worth paying attention to: As an impetus to open-ended interpretation, opacity counters the impulses animating both colonialist reductions of the other to transparent, knowable object, and contemporary neoliberal, technocratic applications of transparency. If colonialist hermeneutics at least assume there is an object to be known (even if that object is easily interpreted), the eager turn to transparency today as a solution fit for all sorts of problems seems to stem in large part, as a number of critics have observed, from a desire to evacuate interpretation entirely. As Clare Birchall puts it, transparency ‘is presented as a technical, rather than a political settlement,’ a solution that promises to restore trust by obviating the need for other modes of disclosure, notably ‘narrative-interpretive forms of disclosure’ tainted as less perfect and moral (2014, 77). Transparent governance, in the eyes of many international agencies operating in development, is seen, as [Aradhana] Sharma similarly notes, ‘not as an exercise in power, but as apolitical administration, which can be improved through expert restructuring’ (2013, 309). Such approaches tend to take transparency as an end in itself, coterminous with the desired governance results, rather than a means, a technique that can be put to different uses—in short, such approaches fail to see transparency as a technique that becomes intelligible and operable only within a context that must be read.45

In the picture that is being painted here, participation in hermeneutic practices is seen as the adversary of an ideal of transparency defined in terms of a reductive techno-administrative rationality. Politics, because it presupposes meaning and knowledge, requires engagement with hermeneutic activities like reading and interpretation. The poetic approach that Chamoiseau promotes is therefore more enmeshed in the political than we think it is. For this reason, questioning the worthwhileness of reading could be injurious to the health of political processes. But, as Simek is quick to address, if the poetic approach that opacity facilitates is to have a political effect, the specific forms it takes matters.46 In short, opacity needs to be made operational through suitable aesthetic approaches. An insistence on absolute unknowability and irreducibility is quite forbidding and  Ibid., 370.  Ibid.

45 46

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may inhibit both the possibility of and desire for hermeneutic commitment. One ought to keep in mind that opacity is not the obverse of transparency; it is not the nothing to transparency’s something, but it is a negation of transparency in an absolutist sense. That an image is opaque does not mean that it does not have a content, that it resists interpretation, or that we cannot make sense of it. But it does mean that it possesses what Simek calls “a stubborn density,” a recalcitrant texture that necessitates further analysis and contemplation.47 If we are to comprehend the rarely disputed sovereignty of the transparent, of optimal clarity, we could go back to Enlightenment thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham, who linked transparency to the management of representative government. Visibility ensures that the few who govern are held accountable to those governed by them. Closely aligned with the notion of rational thought, transparency in this tradition was practically methodological in nature, as it instituted a condition of possibility for a praxis of governance based on rules and regulations that were predictable and reproducible. The function of transparency in bolstering democratic structures lent it a lasting moral credibility, yet what complicates the presumed preeminence of transparency in an historical as much as a contemporary perspective is its complicity with a politics of surveillance. As we recall, this attribute of transparency is what troubles Jonathan Crary when he discusses the terror of a “world without shadows.” As Simek puts it, “state actors throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also sought to ‘make the many visible to the few,’ to control and shape the behavior of large masses of people through various surveillance techniques and practices of knowing, often in the name of rational thought and enlightened progress.”48 The naturalization of transparency as self-evidently moral and secrecy as inherently objectionable has been confronted and critiqued by among others Clare Birchall, who recommends that we rethink and disconnect these entrenched associations.49 For Glissant, opacity is no less than a project of resistance, a set of strategies that may be mobilized in specific socio-political situations. I have in a previous chapter provided an account of Glissant’s position—in  Ibid., 372.  Simek, 365. 49  Clare Birchall, “Transparency, Interrupted: Secrets of the Left,” Theory, Culture & Society, 28.7–8 (2011): 60–84; 66. 47 48

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particular with reference to Levinas’s take on alterity—but to augment Birchall’s argument, it might be felicitous to revisit some of the ideas from Poetics of Relation. The main quarrel Glissant has with transparency is that it underwrites Western models of universality, a legacy from the Enlightenment. The epistemic forms engendered by this system were possessive in the sense that they sought to gather evidence and data that could be put to colonialist ends. Inevitably, the process of understanding itself relied on reductionism. “In order to understand and thus accept you,” Glissant writes, “I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.”50 Confronted with difference, transparency provides a self-absorbed optics that reflects back the universalist assumptions of the onlooker. The knowledge about the Other is deployed to maintain imperial domination. As a condition for a pragmatist-rationalist episteme built on a deliberate reductionism, transparency in fact slides into the concept of visuality itself as it has been theorized by Nicholas Mirzoeff. In his monograph The Right to Look (2011), the visual culture scholar is preoccupied with the colonialist underpinnings of the Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle’s term visuality. Analyzing three historical manifestations of visuality—the plantation, imperialism, and the military-industrial complex— Mirzoeff argues that in each of these constellations power is naturalized through techniques of classification, separation, and aestheticization.51 This kind of despotic visuality/transparency provokes counter-strategies, what Mirzoeff calls “the right to look,” whereas for Glissant the method of resistance is precisely opacity. Intriguingly, opacity may be considered as a medium in itself, one that, according to Patrick Crowley, “resists the light of (Western) understanding in order to preserve diversity and advance exchanges based not upon hierarchy but upon networks that abolish the primacy of any one center of understanding.”52 In the context of Akomfrah’s work, the notion of opacity might be understood in at least three ways. First, the grievances that animated the BAFC’s critique of the politics of representation back in the early 1980s concerned the reductionist portrayals but also the relative invisibility of  Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190.  See Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. 52  Patrick Crowley, “Édouard Glissant: Resistace and Opacité,” Romance Studies, 24.2 (2006): 105–115; 107. 50 51

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black experience in film production. From this point of view, Akomfrah’s work is to some extent about surmounting a particular kind of non-­ productive opacity. The conventional genre of social documentary, with its colonialist provenance as well as favoring of what David Marriott terms “sociological tropes of transparency, immediacy, authority, and authenticity,” was ill equipped to confront this epistemic challenge.53 Second, the archives so vital to Akomfrah’s projects are of course themselves steeped in opacity, a discursive silence broken by the filmic resuscitation of the inarticulate archival fragment. Third, and most importantly, the different yet interlocked techniques of reappropriation and transtextuality generate, along with some other stylistic features that I will consider below, a conceptual form of opacity as an overall poetics in Akomfrah’s work. In bringing this chapter to a close, I want to argue that this poetics—besides the persistence across the filmography of the intertextual ruin—develops two different metaphors of opacity: the dorsal and the oceanic. I have discussed the former above. Suffice it here to say that there is ample critical evidence to suggest that this particular art historical motif may be taken to connote denseness and ambiguity. For George Banu, for instance, the rückenfigur represents uncertainty.54 The way in which the figure has been viewed as separate from his or her environment, and as a double for the viewer, has been noted by Jeroen Verbeeck, who points out that the device lets us “experience the scene” from the figure’s vantage point.55 But the rückenfigur also serves to block our sightline, refusing us visual information. It is difficult not to read the back turned against the spectator in the fashion Akomfrah prefers as a demonstrative gesture, especially when it is repeated with slightly different variations across scenes and works. The dorsal subject introduces a stubborn impenetrability, an incommunicative presence that might seem to compromise the epistemological value of the scenes in which it is featured. But it also acts as a catalyst, an opacity that potentially is capable of eliciting an imaginative response from the viewer. The motif instantly ties Akomfrah’s films to an art historical tradition. For the viewer well versed in the history of documentary cinema it might also, as Scott Birdwise has observed, reference a scene in Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister’s short Listen to  Marriott, 191.  George Banu, L’Homme de pos: Peinture, Théatre, Paris: Adam Biro, 2001, 13–17. 55  Jeroen Verbeeck, “L’Homme de dos: The Politics of the Rear-view Figure in the Films of John Akomfrah,” Black Camera, 6.2 (2015): 154–161; 161. 53 54

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Britain (1942), in which some civilian-soldiers stare intently toward the horizon, scanning it for evidence of enemy troops rather than savoring the sunset.56 Once such a relation with aesthetic precursors has been established, one could, as a next step, impute the possibility that the purposeful deployment of the rückenfigur in Akomfrah’s work signifies a clean slate, a symbolic turning away from certain histories of filmmaking. In an article on the connections between the digital and the diasporic, the director himself considers the implications of the discursive shackles, firstly, of a specific legacy of black art and, secondly, of the hegemonic technological and semantic history of cinema for a productive engagement with the politics of representation. What he calls “the tyranny of propriety” meant that in order to achieve eminence, “black art needed to mimic, emulate and reflect the conditions of excellence of black music” (the spiritual and later on jazz).57 A transtextually stratified work such as The Nine Muses, brimming with samples from the white western canon, could perhaps be construed as one way of abandoning the oppressive weight of this legacy. But in the same essay, Akomfrah also indicts the cinematic apparatus for its racially biased materiality, ranging from the absence on the African continent of laboratories for processing film to the virtual invisibility of black people in Jean-Luc Godard’s epochal Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988–1998). Celluloid film, Akomfrah contends, “had a political economy that many of the eulogists or fetishes for it now seem not to take into account, that inside the technology was inscribed a kind of power system that pretty much mirrored the power relationships outside.”58 Here he seems to imply that analog film is a racially compromised medium and that digital cinema holds a utopian promise not only for future filmmaking but for historiography as well. What he calls digitopia is the potential latent within post-chemical film for deconstructing analog cinema’s truth regimes and for producing “new modes, new relations, [and] new systems.”59 Alluding to the biopolitical entanglements of early cinema (in which travelogues 56  Scott Birdwise, “Digipoetics and Biopoetics: Poetry and Image in Humphrey Jennings and John Akomfrah ‘After’ Brexit,” Paper presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Seattle, March 2019. 57  John Akomfrah, “Digitopia and the spectres of diaspora,” Journal of Media Practice, 11.1 (2010): 21–29; 22. 58  John Akomfrah, “John Akomfrah in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari,” in Thea Ballard & Dana Kopel, John Akomfrah: Signs of Empire, New  York: New Museum, 2018, 108–113; 112. 59  Akomfrah, “Digitopia,” 24–25.

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represented the black body as an object of “squeamish disquiet”), Akomfrah envisions a new film history that does not begin with Georges Méliès but with Jeremy Bentham. A history of cinema with no mention of giants like Godard, he asserts, would “still be just as legitimate,” for the reason that “the questions this new history would raise would be just as pertinent and just a real.”60 In this context, the resolute posture of Akomfrah’s rückenfigur accrues meaning as a quiet disruption of institutional hierarchies of representation. The solitary wanderer is the artist turning their back on ossified ways of seeing, gazing into an unfamiliar future (Fig. 4.1). Practically devoid of content, the rückenfigur is a silent surface that screens out what we most want to see—the human face, the site of identity, and interaction. The pose occasions a semiotic blockage. Likewise, the sea as conventionally rendered in the cinema is a surface underneath which exist entire ecosystems often unavailable to the viewer.61 Throughout his work, Akomfrah often gravitates toward the oceanic, an aesthetic attraction that might bespeak an interest in opaque matter. Some of his mid-to-­ late twenty-tens works, notably Vertigo Sea and Mimesis: African Soldier, draw on texts and incidents from the cultural history of the ocean to address burning contemporary issues such as the refugee crisis. In the latter project, we see images of soldiers ambling on the beach looking for their homeland, photographs, and other objects submerged in the water. In this work, the ocean is suggestively portrayed as an intrinsic part of Western imperialism and the slave trade. The memories of the soldiers, Osei Bonsu remarks, “have become faded, deformed, abstracted as the existential threat of the ocean rises.”62 The timeliness of Akomfrah’s vision is no less pronounced in Vertigo Sea, a three-channel installation one of whose nine intertitles reads “Oblique Tales on the Aquatic Sublime.” First shown by Okwui Enwezor in his “All the World’s Futures” exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, Vertigo Sea mixes footage from the BBC’s Natural History Unit with new scenes shot on the Faroe Islands, on the Isle of Skye, and on Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago. This  Ibid., 28.  There are obviously exceptions, from the work of Jacques Cousteau to Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton, 2003) and Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel, 2012). 62  Osei Bonsu, “John Akomfrah Commemorates the Colonial Soldiers Who Fought for a Cause that Was not Theirs,” Frieze, January 22, 2019, https://frieze.com/article/johnakomfrah-commemorates-colonial-soldiers-who-fought-cause-was-not-theirs, accessed March 4, 2019. 60 61

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Fig. 4.1  Screengrab The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah)

material is accompanied by the voice of a Mediterranean refugee. True to Akomfrah’s method, this “subdued cinepaean to the ocean” covers a lot of ground both thematically and textually. Migrations, executions, the looming environmental disaster, the slave trade, nuclear testing, and the whaling industry are all parts of this work, which also features transtextual references to the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797), a freed African slave, abolitionist, and naval explorer; Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1891); Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851); Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927); Heathcote Williams’s Whale Nation (1988); and, unattributed, Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea is History” (1980). Ranging historically-geographically from fifteenth-­ century Newfoundland to 1970s South Asia, Vertigo Sea has been described as “metahistory” and as “a dense, philosophical meditation on

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eco-poetics and the posthuman condition.”63 The ocean is seen as a repository and a grave, a site of oblivion, and beneath the surface home to innumerous narratives of violence and death that will never be known.64 The “oceanic feeling”—or, to use the director’s own phrase, “oceanic ontologies”—that Vertigo Sea so vividly embodies is thus a complex phenomenon; entwined within its scope are the genealogies of globalization, stories of homelessness, lost identities, canonical literature, specters of colonialism, and environmental transformation.65 But the ocean in Vertigo Sea is also the emblem of an immense opacity. When in January 1987 Salman Rushdie reacted dismissively to Handsworth Songs in The Guardian,66 his misgivings targeted what he perceived to be the film’s obliqueness. Coming to its defense, Stuart Hall emphasized the strenuous labor on part of Akomfrah and the BAFC to search for a new expressive modality in which to convey the type of experience that was their subject matter. In the more than three decades since the release of Handsworth Songs, it has become increasingly evident that this obliqueness constitutes an intrinsic part of Akomfrah’s approach, one that aligns his projects with the aesthetics of uncertainty discussed by Janet Wolff above.67 Regardless of whether this uncertainty comes in the shape of intertextual slivers, recombined archival images, or visual tropes such as the rückenfigur and the ocean, its central mechanism could perhaps be captured by Agamben’s paraphrase of Paul Valéry: some forms of cinema 63  Erik Morse, “The Oceanic Ecologies of John Akomfrah,” ArtReview, January-February 2016, https://artreview.com/features/jan_feb_2016_feature_john_akomfrah/, accessed March 4, 2019. 64  “The more I looked,” Akomfrah says in an interview about Vertigo Sea, “the more a pattern emerged—political prisoners of Chilean solidarity dumped at sea; the FNL fighters in Algeria taken by the French and dumped at sea; the Zong massacre, where hundreds of African slaves were dumped at sea.” See Hannah Ellis-Petersen, “Interview: John Akomfrah,” The Guardian, January 7, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/ jan/07/john-akomfrah-vertical-sea-arnolfini-bristol-lisson-gallery-london-migration, accessed March 27, 2019. 65  I borrow this Freudian term from Erika Balsom’s book An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea, New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster, 2018; for “oceanic ontologies,” see Morse. 66  See Salman Rushdie, Stuart Hall & Darcus Howe, “The Handsworth Songs Letters,” in Writing Black Britain 1948–1998: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. James Procter, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 261–264. 67  Critics have noted the appearance of uncertainty in Akomfrah’s films. See, for instance, Debuysere, who underscores the way in which images get decoupled from “old chains of signification,” in the process testing the belief that the image contains a particular “wholesomeness” (68).

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enact “a prolonged hesitation between image and meaning […] a power of stoppage that works on the image itself, that pulls it away from the narrative power to exhibit it as such.”68 The image thus liberated might just be what the filmmaker has in mind when he talks about its inscrutable “elsewhere.”

68  Giorgio Agamben, “Difference and Repetition: On Guy Debord’s Films” [1995], Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough, Cambridge: MA: The MIT Press, 2002, 317. Here I would like to point out that Scott Birdwise was the first to note the pertinence of Agamben’s quotation for an understanding of Akomfrah’s films.

CHAPTER 5

The Shape of the Secret: Matt Saunders

The remolding of the cultural archive is something Akomfrah shares with many of his contemporaries, notable among them the American, Berlin-­ based painter, photographer, and film and video artist Matt Saunders. In this chapter, I want to situate his 2010 installation Passageworks within the context of an art of opacity, showing how the work in its stratified materiality recalls both Gehr’s poetics of spectrality and Akomfrah’s fascination with transtextuality and its archival accent. A professor in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, Saunders is a multimedia artist whose transaesthetic oeuvre is anchored in painting but who works in a variety of media, including photography, prints, film, video, animation, and installation. While boasting a highly idiosyncratic approach to image-making, Saunders’s practice exhibits some affinities with an orientation within contemporary art that has been described by some in terms of “‘minor’” forms in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense. The archive from which artists like Saunders are free to draw is colossal: over a century’s worth of cinema, roughly six decades of broadcast television, and four decades of video experimentation. A textual resource unprecedented in scope, this archive constitutes, as critic Bruce Jenkins sees it, “an aesthetic Tower of Babel, a veritable polyglot mash-up of appropriations, citations, and homage.”1 One strain within this archival, 1  Bruce Jenkins, “Matt Saunders’s Secret-Flix,” in Matt Saunders, Parallel Plot [2010], Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago/The University of Chicago Press, 2013, 114–127; 115.

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database-­enhanced poetics is the intertextual efforts of countless bricoleurs. Another, perhaps less dominant, strain is the preoccupation with the materiality of the archival contents and with objects that may have faded from the cultural consciousness of the contemporary moment. As Tom Gunning notes, film artists of the latter lineage were primarily powered neither by conceptualism nor by addressing personal issues but by a common resistance to the hegemony of Structural Film.2 In Jenkins’s view, Saunders’s work sits close to the generation of avant-garde filmmakers that Gunning considers. Before the invention of photographic cameras, one of the most widespread methods for reproducing images was the cliché verre, whereby figures were painted, drawn, or etched onto a transparent surface (glass, thin paper, and, later, film), whose image was then printed on a light sensitive paper in some kind of darkroom. A fusion of painting/drawing and photography, the cliché verre was first taken up by early nineteenth-century French painters, of whom Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot is perhaps the best known. In some of his work, Saunders revives what is essentially a transmedial tradition, producing handmade photographs by drawing the negative of found positives whose original negative was absent. His drawing is then contact-printed to make a new image. Initially using black ink on Mylar (a brand name for a BoPET polyester film), which yielded too expectable results, Saunders then started applying silver ink and oil on both sides of the Mylar film, a technique that causes a more unforeseeable transfer of the image. As interviewer Josiah McElheny writes, these drawings are not really contact prints “because the actual act of printing them” generates a level of “physical instability.”3 One effect of this process is that the image comes across as “aged, deteriorated, transformed.”4 Bearing a superficial resemblance to the practice of painting from photographs associated with artists such as Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans, Saunders’s images conversely occasion the production of a photograph from a drawing. Stirred by cinema from the Weimar period as well as work by Andy Warhol and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Saunders maneuvered his 2  Tom Gunning, “Towards a Minor Cinema: Fonoroff, Herwitz, Ahwesh, Lapore, Klahr and Solomon,” Motion Picture, 3.1–2 (1989–1990): 2. 3  Matt Saunders, Parallel Plot [2010], Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago/The University of Chicago Press, 2013, 99. 4  Ibid.

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image-making practice toward film and digital video. On the basis of short fragments from some of his favorite movies, he made hundreds of drawings that were subsequently scanned, resulting in a form of animation that Jenkins considers a case of “minor cinema.”5 Relying on a technique known as rotoscoping (applied, for instance, by Richard Linklater for his Waking Life (2001)), Saunders manually sketches over live-action footage, frame by frame, after which the drawings are transferred to digital video. Every other image in this process is scanned in negative. What we see on screen are twitchy, blotched shapes, often illegible or semi-legible, always emerging and melting to a throbbing kind of rhythm. For the three-­ channel looped video installation Passageworks (2010), Saunders re-­ appropriates footage from widely disparate historical sources. The first film in the triptych is Bulgarian director Zlatan Dudo’s Kuhle Wampe (1932), co-written by Bertolt Brecht, a drama about a working-class family evicted from their home and living in a camp for the unemployed on the outskirts of Berlin. Playing the lead actress in this Great Depression–set narrative is the later German television star Hertha Thiele, known for her participation in a few provocative stage plays and films during the Weimar era, notably features with a pronounced lesbian-themed subtext such as Mädchen in Uniform (Leontine Sagan, 1931) and Anna and Elizabeth (Frank Wisbar, 1933). Perceived as a destabilizing performer by the Nazis, she was barred from the national film industry and by 1937 had relocated to Switzerland. Decades later, in the 1970s, she became a familiar face on East German television, also attaining some measure of cult status after being approached by Western feminists interested in her first film Mädchen in Uniform. Thiele also features in one of the other two films, which are longer and more layered, albeit shown on smaller screens. While the images in the first video display people on bicycles traversing Berlin’s blue-collar neighborhoods looking for work, those in the second film center on Thiele herself, presented in medium close-up with her tie and short coiffure. Her character in Kuhle Wampe is Annie, the only member of her family with a job. In Saunders’s segment, we see her looking at her off-screen brother, who is one of the bicyclists from the first film. This part of Passageworks includes a reference to another Annie, as seen in the late silent comedy drama People on Sunday (Robert Siodmak & Edgar G. Ulmer, 1930), also set in Berlin and based on a screenplay by Billy Wilder. The segment also 5

 Jenkins, 118.

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incorporates material plucked from other branches of the audiovisual archive. Bookending the shots of the two Annies are two reprocessed excerpts from the British TV spy series Danger Man (1960–1967), as well two shots from Aki Kaurismäki’s film Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatiana (1994). In the first of these shots, Tatiana is seen in a hotel room watching her inebriated lover, while in the second, a close-up, she relieves him of his cigarette. The action here imitates a scene from Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey’s Trash (1970) in which the naked junkie played by Joe Dallesandro falls asleep. The third film in Saunders’s tripartite structure returns us to Tatiana and her hand removing the cigarette, although this time the image has turned more impalpable, giving way to a brief close-up shot of Danish-­ born actress Asta Nielsen as she appears in a scene from Hamlet (Svend Gade & Heinz Schall, 1921). Three mutations of this configuration ensue, each one starting with Tatiana’s hands and the cigarette, producing toward the end of these repetitions a somewhat sharper image of Nielsen before the screen goes dark. Like the two other films, this segment, while even more abstract graphically, shows in the words of Jenkins “remarkable variability in the legibility of the imagery,” a material capriciousness in no small part due to the fluctuations of positive and negative.6 Noting the influence of Abstract Expressionism and also of Roy Lichtenstein on Saunders’s work, Jenkins rightly claims that “more evident in these abstractions is his affection for the numerous forms of visual degradation suffered over the course of time by celluloid cinema.”7 The filmmaker himself refers to this state of decomposition as “the nebula of corrosion,” the temporal consequences of materiality’s organic qualities, qualities that are explored in a similar fashion in some of Ernie Gehr’s work, as we have seen above. Like that of Gehr, Saunders’s art seeks to transcend the boundaries of the filmic, both in a technical-material, representational, and cultural sense. His work probes the interstitial space between, on the one hand, painting and drawing, and on the other, photography and film. Because he creates a negative by hand, either drawing or painting onto Mylar, he eschews the component habitually considered essential to photography— the camera, with its viewfinder, lens, and shutter (although the process does rely upon other elements of the technical apparatus such as 6 7

 Jenkins, 120.  Ibid.

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photographic paper, an enlarger, and a darkroom). The images that emerge from this practice, as the examples from Passageworks described above reveal, are hybrid forms that are neither fully figurative and photographic nor entirely painterly and abstract. What they contribute is a kind of mongrel visuality. Likewise, representationally they hover between the recognizable and the indecipherable. At the same time, a composition such as Passageworks also broadens the scope of cinema’s cultural memory, in that it reintroduces films, characters, actors, places, and plots mostly forgotten, imbuing these with a poignant spectral power. The art of the ruin, of the fragment—no less than in the work of Gehr and Akomfrah— informs Saunders’s transmedial approach. This observation is supported by the title of the triad, which appears to allude openly to Walter Benjamin’s renowned Passagenwerk, his monumental study of the Parisian arcades, begun in 1927 and left unfinished at the time of his death in 1940. The translators of The Arcades Project state that Benjamin’s aim was to write an Urgeschichte, a historiography not of key events and people but of the “‘refuse’” and “‘detritus’” of the past.8 Consisting of hundreds of notes, sketches, and citations, Benjamin’s opus was one of fragments and “secret affinities,” a palimpsestic text in which the wealth of literary and philosophical quotations comes to overwhelm the montage approach favored by Benjamin (Fig. 5.1).9 Both the urban and the architectural history of Benjamin’s Passagenwerk and the film history of Saunders’s Passageworks come close to Harbord’s idea of an ex-centric cinema, discussed in the chapter on Akomfrah above. For Harbord, the Benjaminian notion of secret affinities appears intrinsic to such a cinema, which remains invisible “until its negative form is cast as a set of objects, networks, practices and iterations.”10 The compass of an ex-centric cinema is not only “the margins and ephemera” but also “the everyday as a negative form, as space as yet uncast.”11 Saunders’s attraction to the objects at the fringes of cinematic history has been noted and documented by several critics. Saunders, a writer for Artforum points out, “is drawn to the out-of-date: démodé interiors, expired publicity stills, and 8  Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, “Translators’ Foreword,” in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, ix. 9  Ibid., x. 10  Harbord, 1. 11  Ibid.

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Fig. 5.1  Frame from Passageworks (Matt Saunders)

stars whose moments have passed, if they had a moment to begin with.”12 The artist’s material is “obscure” in more than one sense, Jenkins notes, in that it “not only emanates from fairly arcane sources” but also in that it is “visually distressed and systematically drained of representational detail.”13 In a way, the opacity in Saunders’s films allegorizes objects that exist on the cultural periphery: people, artifacts, and texts forgotten by the public and left out of social memory. The pictorially indistinct is thus more than a purely sensuous effect. It emulates the miasma of history, calling attention to that which is in fact there even though neglected and unseen. In this, Saunders’s practice produces objects that are shrouded in a furtive sensibility, that have one foot in the domain of the secret. As we shall see in Chap. 7, the notion of the secret is infused with significance in the sphere of art because it represents “the ideal aesthetic object.”14 By their very nature, the unfamiliar and the strange challenge intellectual evaluation. Turning away from the epistemological, the secret “opens the way for a purely aesthetic response.”15  Lisa Turvey, “On Matt Saunders,” Artforum, 45.6 (2007): 278–279; 278.  Jenkins, 124. 14  Clare Birchall, “Aesthetics of the Secret,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/ Politics, 83 (2014): 25–46; 29. 15  Ibid. 12 13

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The secret as a critical term has already been invoked in discussions of Saunders’s idiosyncratic work. For instance, in describing Passageworks, Jenkins borrows the moniker secret-flix from underground filmmaker Jack Smith to explain Saunders’s interest in the esoteric, “the forgotten, the abject, [and] the critically disdained.”16 Closely linked to the appearance of trash and camp as particular aesthetic styles, Smith shaped a cinematic practice that today would easily be recognized as ecological, relying as it did on the use of obsolete film stock, outfits culled from thrift stores, improvised performances, and often non-professional actors. It is not improbable that Saunders’s gravitation toward actresses long since faded from public view is influenced by Smith’s own fondness for performers such as the Latin American Maria Montez, star of several Hollywood B movies, and Judy Canova, a once popular comedian and radio personality. In Jenkins’s estimation, what these actresses share with someone like Hertha Thiele are gestures and movements that tend toward “contest[ing] the representational transparency of conventional cinema.”17 Another case from Saunders’s works is his Borneo (Rose Hobart) series (2013–2014), in which he hand-paints a negative from a frame out of surrealist Joseph Cornell’s groundbreaking found-footage film Rose Hobart (1936), which, in turn, compiles shots featuring the eponymous actress from George Melford’s adventure movie East of Borneo (1931). Appearing in over forty Hollywood features throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Hobart’s career was prematurely cut short after she refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1949. In Borneo (Rose Hobart) # 5 (2013), Saunders resurrects the star from Melford’s B movie, crafting what is effectively a portrait painting that shows Hobart opening a curtain that is saturated with rich blues and purples, the right side of her face completely in the dark, and with a ghostlike figure surfacing behind her. The effect of Saunders’s image is reminiscent of that created by the scene with the kids outside the department store in Gehr’s Abracadabra and also of other passages from his films, as well as from Morrison’s Decasia and Dawson City: Frozen Time (2017). What these works articulate, I would like to suggest, is a peculiar form of spectral historicity, an apparitional poetics that, somewhat ironically, draws upon the affordances of an emphatically organic materiality to cause an experience of the otherworldly. The persistence of matter reignites memory. This is not just any  Jenkins, 125.  Ibid., 123.

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matter; the materials involved engender a distinctly intermedial sensation. Saunders calls some of his experiments “[b]lind dates between material and film.”18 A wealthy array of physical ingredients and substances furnishes these encounters, from oil paint, powdered granite, and casein on polyester to silver ink, colored ink with black, India ink, toner from a laser print, toner soaked in solvent, colored dye on plastic, inversion of black ink on plastic, and digital color.19 “[M]obilizing a medium through the misuse of its materials” is how Saunders himself describes the process: We do let materials stand in for medium more than we like to admit—and I think this is a thread worth grasping. Materials may be freer to move to wander. They can be moved, miscast, and misused. They don’t simply exist but have functions, as images, as appropriations. There is always a fabric that holds them and qualities that bind them, yet off their own turf they fall into a different light. It seems to me that the future of medium is increasingly bound to mobility.20

This sense of flexibility does not merely pertain to the drift of materials between media but also to the liquid state of the image itself and the notion that its seizure can only be temporary. Seen from this perspective, opacity gathers relevance beyond the realm of spatial configurations; the passing of time also beclouds our experiences, memories, and images. Implicated in the poetics of opacity are thus also the temporal dimension and its vicissitudes. Some critics have described the characters appearing in—or, perhaps, rather through—Saunders’s images, be they Hertha Thiele, Rose Hobart, or others, as “figures emerging as if captured in a murky limbo between photography and painting.”21 The imbrication of different materials and media that defines Saunders’s practice, I would like to point out, may serve as a practical illustration of the more theoretical argument that I make in Chap. 2 about the inherent non-transparency of the image. We recall that Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier’s concept of cinécriture in Le Texte divisé—images as a form of writing—prompts a rethinking of the 18  Matt Saunders, “Thread, Pixel, Grain,” in The Medium in the Post-Medium Condition, eds. Isabelle Graw & Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016, 171–183; 175. 19  Ibid, 176–182. 20  Ibid., 174. 21  Vivian Sky Rehberg, “Matt Saunders,” Frieze, June 6, 2015, https://frieze.com/article/matt-saunders, accessed April 9, 2019.

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once prevailing position that the incorporeal image projected onto a flat surface was like a window into a world that just happened to be there. But the filmic frame is not a conduit to a particular representation; it is the space of the figural, the space of writing understood as a generative rather than a reflective act. The assemblage of signs that goes into creating an image or a series of images is the process of figurality, of poetic inscription, and it is this process that brings about the kind of semiotic sedimentation that I have previously referred to in terms of “an expressive thickness.”22 All images are fabricated in one way or another. They have their own form of density that is simultaneously material and conceptual. Saunders’s work highlights the representational viscosity that renders all filmic figurations opaque in some way, albeit in varying degrees. It is as if his stratified images, suspended in their hybrid visuality, soil the transparent window that on Fargier’s reading constitutes the real ideology of the screen. Opaque images like those in Passageworks and the Borneo (Rose Hobart) series also obstruct the rule of the frontal, if we might recall Kenaan’s term discussed in Chap. 2. “On the screen,” she contends, “the depth dimension of the visual, the time of the visual, the invisible or the visual’s Other, are annulled.”23 The productive work that graphic occlusion achieves in these instances is the reinstatement of the qualities Kenaan is concerned about—the depth (both material and hermeneutic) of any given visual representation, the historical (and temporal) residues at work in the image, and the alterity of the overlooked and forgotten. The transfiguration of the actresses Thiele and Hobart in Saunders’s works establishes a relation with the historical, it brings cultural figures back from oblivion, and it performs these functions through materiality’s own “thick description.” A striking feature across Saunders’s work is his interest in actors; often actors who were once celebrities, as we have seen. In addition to Thiele, Nielsen, and Hobart, others who make an appearance in his body of work include Margit Carstensen, Winfried Glatzeder, Heidemarie Wenzel, Hanna Schygulla, and Matti Pellonpää. In his inventive treatment of the image of these actors, Saunders does not promulgate a construction of the actor as a larger-than-life figure, as a star transcending all the characters they have played. Rather, Saunders has stated that he purposely “conflate[s] a life with a career,” so that Schygulla, for instance, is portrayed “as a string of her roles, not her appearances at awards ceremonies, dinners, on  Insert page no. when known.  Kenaan, xvii.

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the street.”24 This curiosity about a composite persona, a subject who is neither the actual person nor the star or the character, reproduces in a way the medial undecidability that feeds into the artist’s material practices. This aesthetics is one that conflates both media (painting and photography/film) and performance (the multiple characters embodied by these actors) to birth a distinctive expressiveness. It is tempting to read this hovering between states of illegibility and legibility, and of concealment and display, as an attempt to visualize a condition of secrecy. To invoke Birchall’s claim that the secret epitomizes the supreme aesthetic object because it can elicit a reaction unblemished by acts of cognition, we might say that Saunders’s spectral post-celebrities allude to such a condition. His 16 mm dual-screen installation Double Matti (2006) might serve to elucidate this thesis further. Applying ink on Mylar, Saunders drew more than a thousand pictures of Finnish actor Matti Pellonpää as he appears in Aki Kaurismäki’s feature film Ariel (1988). On the screen to the left, the actor is shown sleeping in a segment that is slow and indistinct, whereas on the screen to the right, which is faster, Pellonpää is awake. Critic Lisa Turvey offers a concise consideration of the way in which the installation conveys a dialectics of surface and depth, transparency and opacity, and identity and performance: One feels him to be a knowable entity even as-and perhaps because-his features slide in and out of legibility. The artist is drawn, here and elsewhere, to those filmic instants in which actors betray the self behind the character, which may account for the appeal of Fassbinder and Warhol, as well as for the frequency of sleeping subjects. In representing these hiccups, and emphasizing such slippage materially, Saunders succeeds in conveying something of the personality of those who are, by vocation, impersonators.25

What is conveyed here however is not so much any unknown information about the actors, but rather their abiding unknowability, their secretive state, which is given a material form. The secret, Birchall claims, aligns with “the visible, presentable, or audible” and “tests […] its very limits.”26 Once a secret is revealed, it is no longer a secret. But if the secret as a concept is framed differently, as not principally a hermeneutics but rather a 24  Matt Saunders, in Freeway Balconies, ed. Collier Schorr, Berlin: Deutsche Guggenheim, 2008, 31. 25  Lisa Turvey, “On Matt Saunders,” Artforum, 45.6 (2007): 278–279. 26  Birchall, 29.

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poetics, our dealings with it will revolve less around informational content and more around sensation and affect. Due to its opaque fabric and insistent materiality, Saunders’s art—not unlike that of Gehr—is particularly amenable to organizing the secret as something eminently perceptible. Images that are grainy, blurry, out-of-focus, fuzzy, or otherwise indistinct generally lower the information value of a given work, which again invites a phenomenological modality informed by the spectral and the secret. It is doubtlessly no accident that the archive holds a special allure for aestheticians of opacity such as Gehr, Akomfrah, and Saunders (not to mention Godard, whose output is not considered here but whose rendering of the opaque would warrant a separate study). While the archive is evidently the province of specialists and scholars, it can then also sustain other kinds of inquiries. That artistic practices may in themselves constitute research is not a new idea, and some of the work of these three filmmakers might fruitfully be regarded as a form of experimental research. Barry Mauer has maintained that the twentieth-century avant-garde has contributed to the expansion of research methods by utilizing media heuristically as instruments of intellectual scrutiny. The most recognized historical example of such aesthetics-driven research, Mauer argues, is André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto (1924), which considers how then new techniques of “writing” such as cut-ups and automatic writing may generate insights of an epistemological nature that are otherwise unattainable.27 Inspired by Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills series (1977–1980), Mauer introduces an approach to visual research in order to see how one can obtain knowledge about media objects while at the same time acquiring self-knowledge. A challenge to the position that interrogations of visual objects and experience have to be rendered as “alphabetic text” to count as research, Mauer’s method reveals a family resemblance to a range of similar phenomena, from Mike Dibb and John Berger’s BBC television series Ways of Seeing (1971) to the video essay genre and indeed the projects of Saunders, Akomfrah, and Gehr. But why does one need to bring up the question of method in the context of the arts of opacity in general and the notion of the secret in particular? As Marquard Smith reminds us, the term “research” comes from the Old French word recercer, which means both to search and to search 27  Barry J. Mauer, “The Epistemology of Cindy Sherman: A Research Method for Media and Cultural Studies,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 38.1 (2005): 93–113; 93.

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again. To do research requires that we look for something carefully.28 When Saunders revisits the cache of images of old and (at best) half-­ remembered actresses, he is compelled to look at them with care. Above all, he seems keenly attuned to the sheer physicality of the object, both the pre-filmic actor and her cinematic engraving, as well as to the aesthetic possibilities of decomposing and reconstituting this object. Take the image of Hertha Thiele from the German black-and-white feature Frau Lehmann’s Daughters (Carl Heinz Wolff, 1932), Hertha Thiele (Frau Lehmann’s Daughters) #1 (2008), a silver gelatin print on fiber-based paper. The face of the actress is mostly a grayish smear, the shape of her head resembling an ice cream cone about to melt away. This compound materiality contributes, as we have seen, to the image’s graphic opacity, but the quality of being indistinct in turn heightens our awareness of its material provenance. This is equally valid for other works in Saunders’s oeuvre. For example, in the Ratlos/Indomitable series from his solo exhibition Poems of Our Climate (Marian Goodman Gallery, London, 2018), the artist pairs a series of large-scale etchings printed on the front and back of each copper plate.29 The images quote another somewhat recondite cultural object, Alexander Kluge’s fictional character and circus owner Leni Peickert. One characteristic of Saunders’s image-making practice that has gone largely unremarked is his extraction of fragments from larger works and his subsequent and almost talismanic re-assemblage of these fragments. The unsung actresses are pried loose from their material, narrative, and historical contexts to become something else, something much stranger. In a way, Saunders treats them as secrets; the Latin etymology of the term, secernere, means “to set apart” and “to divide.” The separation of Thiele, Nielsen, Hobart, and others from their past medial setting implies an act of cutting into the dense weave of archived aesthetics to spotlight a certain feature or inaugurate a new motif. As an artistic approach, the work of cutting, synthesizing, and obfuscating constitutes a particular mode of inquiry that I will argue is not too distant from the methods of much humanities and social science research. Sean Cubitt has argued that what he names anecdotal evidence represents a “viable” and “vital” alternative to 28  Marquard Smith, “Theses on the Philosophy of History: The Work of Research in the Age of Digital Searchability and Distributability,” Journal of Visual Culture, 12.3 (2013), 375–403. 29  The exhibition borrows its name from Wallace Stevens’s eponymous poem from 1942.

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the methodologies of the hard sciences, contending that it is, in fact, “our least superficial mode of inquiry.”30 An anecdotal approach to knowledge production implies a thorough examination of the individual case, in all its specificity, whether the case in question is some kind of text, or an object, phenomenon, situation, or concept. The interrogation of the inimitable case must however take place against some contextual horizon, and it also needs to have “depth of revelation and breadth of motives.”31 Anecdotal evidence is wholly commensurate with hermeneutics as a method; it is, in fact, one of its fundamental forms. Hence, despite the privileged position of the particular case—say, a novel, a film, or a philosophical concept—the anecdotal method is not just concerned with describing its case as accurately as possible. It also uses the specific instance as a heuristic upon which more abstract phenomena and pronouncements might be built. According to Cubitt, media studies should be especially invested in this approach, since “anecdotal interpretation begins not at the level of meanings but at the prior level of mediations—the materials, energies, and connections comprising the event.”32 A project such as Passageworks exemplifies just such an investigation of the materiality of the process of mediation, foregrounding its chemical instabilities and aesthetic malleability. As Saunders’s drawn negatives are blown up, so in a sense is the opacity always virtually embedded within the act of medial transmission. A poetics of opacity is thus in the service of a larger epistemic assignment that addresses the thickness of our experience. Cubitt cogently explains the nature of this assignment in this lengthy excerpt: The insistent materialism of the anecdotal method drags us over and over back to the grit of actuality. In this it has several virtues lacking in other social science and humanities methods. The anecdotal method makes it impossible to ignore the excluded and the effects of exclusion. It forces us to confront the materiality of people, things, and events, and therefore makes us understand that in any event the human cannot be separated from the technical, physical, or organic environments. In this regard anecdotalism is an ecological approach and in that sense is anti-humanist. At the same time, whenever the anecdote is recounted by a human the humanity of that 30  Sean Cubitt, “Anecdotal Evidence,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Spring 2013, https://necsus-ejms.org/portfolio/spring-2013-the-green-issue/, accessed May 29, 2019. 31  Ibid. 32  Ibid.

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individual comes under the microscope, in all its diffuse porousness. The anecdote makes us understand the multiple contexts operating in a text or event, a technology or a technique, and in their observation; a process in which it confronts the specific instance in which suffering occurs, happiness is sacrificed, satisfaction dulled, wit blunted. It makes us face up to the cost of a general Good and in that sense can regenerate our ideas of what we might mean by the commons.33

More so than transparency, opacity directs our attention toward the materiality of any given representation and, no less importantly, toward the materiality of relations, whether of a social, political, or ecological order. Works such as those of Saunders and of the other artists considered above certainly embody an anecdotal mode of inquiry, but that is not all; they are also in a way doubly anti-positivist in that they not only favor specificity over typicality but also in that they deform their content, thus putting a certain amount of phenomenological pressure on straightforward legibility. Passagenwerk and similar artworks underline what Giovanna Fossati terms “the archival life” of media, their unavoidable recording of the traces of their own mutability through time.34

 Ibid.  Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 33 34

CHAPTER 6

And Dark Within: David Lynch

In the cinema of both Ernie Gehr and John Akomfrah, graphic space is configured so as to produce opacity effects. As we have seen, a sense of spectrality and of the uncanny looms over both Abracadabra, to take just one example from the former’s oeuvre, and The Nine Muses. If we fast-­ forward to the work of Trevor Paglen and Zach Blas, which I will consider in subsequent chapters, we will see that similar conjunctions of the opaque and the ghostly reoccur, for example, in Paglen’s They Watch the Moon (2010) and Blas’s Facial Weaponization Suite (2011–2014). While I do not in any way suggest that the poetics of opacity is ineluctably interwoven with the spectral, the correlation is at least enticing enough to be worthy of further pursuit. An elucidating ideational context for the spatial figurations considered here is the notion of warped space as developed by Anthony Vidler. After the Enlightenment fantasy of a transparent, rational space came Romanticism’s conception of the terrifying sublime and modernism’s alienating megalopolises and distorted points of view. Modernity, Vidler holds, encouraged an architecture and art whose spatial forms became associated with “[f]ear, anxiety, estrangement, and their psychological counterparts, anxiety neuroses and phobias.”1 Artistically, the shattering of the laws of Renaissance perspective found expression in what Vidler calls “warpings of the normal,” an expressive feature of a range of the—isms pervasive in the first half of the twentieth century—cubism, 1  Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000, 1.

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dadaism, futurism, expressionism, and surrealism.2 The splintering of the unified body, unhospitable urban architecture, nightmarish disorientation—these were some of the characteristics of the spatial aesthetics of modernism. For Vidler, the psychological underpinnings of this aesthetic are key. Warped space may be grasped as “a metaphor that includes all the varieties of such forcing [psychological experience forcing aesthetic expressions], the attempt, however vain, to permeate the formal with the psychological.”3 From around the turn of the twentieth century, space came to replace style as the pivot of research in art history, just as approaches influenced by psychology were flourishing: Robert Vischer’s advancement of the notion of Einfühlung and aesthetic sympathy, developed further by the influential philosopher Theodor Lipps; Gottfried Semper’s anthropologically informed theory of the four elements of architecture; August Schmarsow’s concept of Körperempfindung; and Sigfried Giedion’s canonical history of architectural space published as Space, Time and Architecture in 1941, to name a few. The rise of spatial ideas filtered through the prism of psychology roughly coincided with the various deformations of the avant-garde movements and with an escalating sense of existential anxiety articulated, for instance, in the work of Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. The space of the image is not the same kind of space with which Vidler and the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophers alluded to above are preoccupied. Architectural space obviously belongs to our shared three-dimensional world, whereas photographic and filmic space— as well as the space of painting and drawing—is two-dimensional and one step removed from the empirical reality of buildings, monuments, and landscapes. The concept of opacity as it is explored here is primarily tied to the innumerable disruptions of the image plane, but there is no reason why it could not also pertain to possible fractures and fissures in the space “behind” the image space; that is, referential space, or even psychological space. A striking contemporary instantiation of “warped space,” I would like to suggest, is found in some of the work of David Lynch, particularly his Inland Empire (2006), as well as episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). Although remaining firmly within the domain of two-dimensional “representational” space, Lynch’s images, I contend, not only rekindle the cultural anxieties and psychological torment suffusing many of the 2 3

 Ibid.  Ibid., 2.

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modernist movements but also radiate another form of opacity that is sharply dissimilar to those previously discussed. Inland Empire and episode 8, “Gotta Light,” inscribe opacity differently; they are works upon which issues of spatial warping, architectural uncanniness, psychic agony, and interpretive impenetrability all coalesce. Even if they on the whole do not share the quality of being graphically indistinct, like low-definition photographs or films, Lynch’s visual compositions nonetheless generate their own obfuscations, which I propose to name, for reasons that will be made clearer below, narrative opacity. Instantly canonized as perhaps the greatest moment in television history—at least aesthetically—the eight installment of Twin Peaks: The Return, which aired on June 25, 2017, is essentially an hour of uncompromising avant-garde cinema. One critic calls the work “horrifyingly beautiful, thought-provoking and thought-annihilating,”4 while another holds that “[t]here’s nothing to point to in the history of television that helps describe exactly what this episode attempts.”5 In terms of storytelling, it has been suggested, “clarity is beside the point, and perhaps impossible.”6 The critical reception of the episode has however gravitated toward the proposition that its thematic backbone is nothing less than the origin of evil in the world, epitomized by the image of the mushroom cloud from the first nuclear test site in White Sands, New Mexico. Discharged on July 16, 1945, mere weeks before Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, the operation known under the John Donne-inspired code name of “Trinity” ushered in the atomic age. In Lynch’s episode, the scene is accompanied by a segment from Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) and displays the same murky and gray hues that also mark other parts of this chapter of the series. One critic notes that the episode is “dusky” and “dim,” and hence “appropriate for

4  Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Eight Episode of Twin Peaks: The Return Is Horrifyingly Beautiful,” Vulture, June 26, 2017, http://www.vulture.com/2017/06/twin-peaks-thereturn-part-8-atom-bomb-flashback.html, accessed December 21, 2017. 5  Noel Murray, “Twin Peaks Season 3, Episode 8: White Light White Heat,” New York Times, June 26, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/arts/television/twinpeaks-season-3-episode-8-recap.html, accessed December 21, 2017. 6  Corey Atad, “Last Night’s Terrifying Twin Peaks Will Be Remembered as One of the Best Episodes of Television Ever,” Esquire, June 26, 2017, http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a55877/twin-peaks-part-8-recap/, accessed December 21, 2017.

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a story about spiritual darkness,” although, he adds, “some things were hard to make out.”7 In what follows, I would like to use the “Gotta Light” episode to help me think through the notion of opacity from a fresh angle. My aims in this chapter are both to find out what the term narrative opacity might mean and to probe into the tangled interrelations of phenomena such as warped spaces (graphic as well as narrative), opacity, spectrality, and ecological precariousness. A guiding hypothesis, in this context, is that the fruits of opacity are the televisual enunciation of realities and materialities beyond our immediate perceptibility. The nebulousness of Lynch’s cosmology challenges the total absorption of experience by empirical observation and accentuates a state of epistemological unknowability. As some critics have observed, the Lynchian image is “often on the verge of disappearing, or becoming blurred and losing any fixed form.”8 The “dusky” and “dim” features of the episode, in other words, allegorize a condition of bewilderment, in which there are secrets, puzzles, and unknown or unformed knowledge to grapple with. This kind of opaque poetics is less indebted to Glissantian ethics and more aligned with a kind of epistemic mysticism, but what it nonetheless shares with the forms of opacity found in Gehr, Akomfrah, and Saunders is the resistance to the claims of a hollow positivism. Much of this book’s discussion of opacity and broken art has thus far engaged with the graphic dimension, the image, and its surface. But do these material phenomena—the blur, tainted emulsion, the lens flare, the out-of-focus—translate into a narrative register? The most immediate equivalence is perhaps the form of elision that is often part of the compositional fabric in art cinema. When Janet Bergstrom considers the role of opacity in the cinema of Claire Denis, for example, it appears that she is mostly talking about the director’s deployment of ellipsis as an aesthetic technique.9 Furthermore, in one of the most influential treatises on narrative theory and cinema, David Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film (1985), the existence of gaps and of ambiguity is seen as a significant 7  Jeff Jensen, “Twin Peaks recap: The Return Part 8,” Entertainment, June 26, 2017, http://ew.com/recap/twin-peaks-season-3-episode-8/, accessed December 21, 2017. 8  Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses [2010], New York: Routledge, 2015, 163. 9  Janet Bergstrom, “Opacity in the Films of Claire Denis,” in French Civilization and its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, eds. Tyler Stovall and Georges van den Abbeele, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003, 69–101.

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component of art cinema narration.10 The notion of narrative opacity, then, seems close in meaning to the ellipsis, understood as a narrational device. But in neo-formalist vocabularies, the elliptical assumes a role that is principally functional, in that it denotes not so much the lack of knowledge as the absence of information, information that—prior to the process of narration—was already part of the hypothetical diegetic world. In this narratological ecosystem, the ellipsis designates the information that has not been selected for inclusion in the film’s syuzhet, to stick with Bordwellian terminology. But in principle it might have been. The idea of narrative opacity that I want to explore here is a somewhat different beast. For one thing, it is not redactive; diegetic information is not withheld for the purpose of creating curiosity, bewilderment, or frustration. The presence of opacity in a narrative like Inland Empire or the “Gotta Light” episode does not index what is missing from the known but rather that which belongs to the unknown or the only vaguely known. As Martha Nochimson has argued, Lynch’s cinema, especially after Lost Highway (1997), is turned toward an experience of “beyondness” that is indebted to the Vedic tradition.11 What is narratively opaque in this filmic universe is that which seeps through the diegesis from this other sphere. Some would call it mysticism. But narrative opacity is also when, as in “Gotta Light,” the progression of the story is overwhelmed or immobilized by the graphic qualities of the work. This I shall return to below. The anecdote of how Lynch, after starting out as a painter, took up filmmaking is itself tinged with opacity. Appointed to produce a moving painting, what the filmmaker refers to as “a sculptured screen,” Lynch experimented with a second-hand Bolex camera that took single frames. Not realizing that the take-up spool was cracked, he had inadvertently created a work that, in his own words, was “one continuous blur.”12 The description would not be entirely out of place when addressing the almost five-minute-long scene in “Gotta Light” that shows the detonation of the first nuclear bomb in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico early in the morning of July 16, 1945. Digitally reconceived, Lynch’s depiction departs perspectivally from the original test footage, available to watch on 10  David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, 210; 212. 11  Martha B. Nochimson, David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highay to Inland Empire, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013, xiv. 12  David Lynch interviewed in Justus Nieland, David Lynch, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012, 169.

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YouTube, in which the camera is positioned a couple of miles away from the site. The “Gotta Light” shot offers a considerably more intimate view of the blast, imitating, as Monique Rooney has suggested, a drone-eye point of view as it approaches “the fermenting heart” of the atomic cloud.13 About two minutes in, after a beginning that has the image drenched in near darkness, followed by a long pan-in on the expanding mushroom cloud, the next three minutes of screen time take us inside the explosion. During this lengthy segment, conventional mimetic space yields to a procession of lambent, pulsating orange and brown hues, white noise, flickering particles, indecipherable shapes, psychedelic formations of smoke, a disorienting blackness violently interrupted by fire and flames, and figurations always emerging from and receding back into formlessness. Wholly singular in the history of television, the sequence is reminiscent of abstract cinema, certainly closer to the work of someone like Hans Richter, Peter Kubelka, or the Ernie Gehr of Reverberation, History, and Field than to anything else shown on Showtime, Netflix, or HBO (Fig. 6.1). In the remainder of this chapter, I want to approach Lynch’s poetics of opacity with an eye both to its material components and to its conceptual compass. My guiding hypothesis is that the “Gotta Light” episode in particular and The Return in general stage its occasionally dazzling weirdness not as an end in itself but as a way of articulating, or at least alluding to, interconnections and linkages that elude more conventional and transparent fictions. More specifically, I shall argue that the textual fabric of Lynch’s televisual space provides a nexus onto which a set of disparate yet stealthily affiliated phenomena converge: environmental vulnerability, existential uncertainty, transformative materiality, metaphysics, and technologies of mediation. My reading of the episode will aim to show that Lynch’s orchestration of this space embodies the knowledge that environments can be media too.14 By the time that Twin Peaks: The Return premiered on Showtime on May 21, 2017, its creator was of course already associated with a certain aptitude for opaqueness. From his early short animated film Six Men 13  Monique Rooney, “Air-object: on air media and David Lynch’s ‘Gotta Light?’ (Twin Peaks: The Return, 2017)” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 16.2 (2018): 123–143; 132. 14  John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

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Fig. 6.1  Screengrab from Twin Peaks: The Return (David Lynch)

Getting Sick (1966) through Eraserhead (1977) and the first run of Twin Peaks on ABC (1990–1991) to his later features such as Mulholland Drive (2001) and the aforementioned Inland Empire, Lynch has nurtured a style of narration that sometimes leans toward the perplexing and the impenetrable. This propensity is something that the expansive scholarly literature around his work has also picked up on, as evidenced by titles such as Todd McGowan’s Impossible David Lynch (2007), Eric G. Wilson’s Strange World of David Lynch (2007), Greg Olson’s David Lynch: Beautiful Dark (2008), Martha Nochimson’s David Lynch Swerves: Uncertainty from Lost Highway to Inland Empire (2013), Dennis Lim’s David Lynch: The Man from Another Place (2015), and the artist’s own book for the exhibition of the same name, David Lynch: Between Two Worlds (2015). When, after a twenty-five-year hiatus, Twin Peaks returned in the spring of 2017 with both veteran and new cast members, it redoubled the original show’s trademark secretiveness. Featuring multiple plot lines and with parts of the action taking place not just in the eponymous town but also in Las Vegas, New Mexico, Philadelphia, and South Dakota, The Return’s narrative is too convoluted to recount in any economic fashion here. Then again, a detailed synopsis is not especially pertinent to the

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subject of my analysis. The overarching storyline involves Special Agent Dale Cooper’s return to Twin Peaks, after being possessed by an evil twin and after his paranormal metamorphosis into insurance guy Dougie Jones. When Cooper finally wakes up from his trance-like stupor to become himself again in the show’s sixteenth and antepenultimate episode, his mission is no longer to unravel the mystery of Laura Palmer’s murder but rather to thwart its occurrence. The “Gotta Light” episode takes place roughly halfway through the series and begins with Cooper’s doppelganger driving down the highway at night with his double-crossing associate Ray Monroe, who after a dispute over withheld information ends up shooting Cooper in the chest. So far the chapter plays like a noir narrative. With Cooper dead on the ground, however, the action shifts into a supernatural register. Emerging from a copse of trees are the Woodsmen, a cluster of bearded and ragged phantoms, reminiscent of the frontiersmen of the American West, who, after performing some kind of ritual, start digging into Cooper’s body and his gunshot wounds. From his flesh they exhume an orb with the face of Killer BOB, the evil spirit from the Black Lodge who possessed the character of Leland Palmer in the first seasons. Being a witness to the whole spectacle, Ray splits from the specters to make a call to someone named Jeffries. Lynch then cuts to The Roadhouse in Twin Peaks, where the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails (lead by Trent Reznor, who worked with Lynch on Lost Highway (1997)) is shown performing their song “She’s Gone Away” from their 2016 EP Not the Actual Events. Containing lyrics like “You dig in places till your fingers bleed/Spread the infection, where you spill your seed,” the song seems thematically cohesive with the main scenes that sandwich it. After cutting back to the resuscitated Cooper, now cleansed of his evil spirit, the episode launches into its centerpiece, the atomic blast taking place just before dawn on July 16 at Jornada del Muerto/White Sands as part of the Manhattan Project. Through the use of Penderecki’s dirge, memorably used in The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), The People Under the Stairs (Wes Craven, 1991), Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), and Lynch’s own Wild at Heart (1990) and Inland Empire, Lynch infuses the sequence with a sense of despondency that negates the military-industrial triumphalism of the historical event. When the lengthy sequence of the explosion eventually fades, we are outside a creepy convenience store/gas station, perhaps not entirely dissimilar from ersatz towns like Survival City in Nevada that were built close to the atomic test sites in the postwar years. Engulfed by smoke, the

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building is suddenly surrounded by Woodsmen, possibly of the same kind we saw earlier (in the original seasons of Twin Peaks, a character named the Woodsman was among the beings from the Black Lodge that used to gather above a convenience store), or alternatively ghosts from people who perished in the detonation. Implausible as it may seem, from this point on the episode only gets weirder. The so-called experiment secretes an orb with the face of BOB.  In what is conceivably the famous White Lodge, a colossal citadel towering above an ultraviolet sea, Señorita Dido sits on a sofa listening to a gramophone player, a huge black alarm bell with electrodes some feet away from her. The black-and-white scene is evocative of a silent movie atmosphere. Next the Giant enters the parlor. He listens to the sound and the leaves to go upstairs to an old movie theatre, in which he watches the Trinity explosion, as well as images of the Woodsmen and the BOB orb. Pausing the display, the Giant starts to levitate, his mouth emitting golden morsels one of which is an orb with the face of Laura Palmer. Señorita Dido has now also entered the auditorium and receives the orb. She kisses it and sends it upward through a peculiar tube system, which shoots it out onto the screen, now showing an image of the globe. In the episode’s final section the date is August 5, 1956. Hatching from one of the dappled eggs shown earlier is a mutant creature, part beetle and part toad. We then see a young couple walking home after a date from a local joint that exhibits a conspicuous resemblance to the gas station/ convenience store besieged by the Woodsmen. From there Lynch cuts back to the desert at night and the Woodsman (played by the noted Abraham Lincoln impersonator Robert Broski), who staggers out in front of a car, grimy-faced and unkempt, asking the driver for a light in a voice that sounds both gruff and radioactive. A tense and insistent buzzing sound accompanies the scene. Lured toward a local radio station, perhaps by his electrified being responding to its signal, the Woodsman kills the receptionist and takes charge of the control booth. Into the microphone he recites the following words: “This is the water and this is the well/ Drink full and descend/The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within.” He endlessly repeats these lines with slight intonational alterations, and as these eerily incantatory sounds are relayed over the airwaves, listeners—a waitress, a mechanic, and the teenage girl from the date—are subject to narcoleptic spells. It is also during this dark recitation that the mutant organism from the previous scene appears in the girl’s room and

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crawls into her open mouth. The episode concludes with the Woodman leaving the KPJK radio station to the distant sound of a shrieking horse. From a narrative point of view, opacity envelops virtually the entire episode. Most of the events shown can hardly be said to belong to any recognizable mimetic universe, and even one that does, the explosion, is rendered in a formally experimental manner that departs substantially from representational verisimilitude (the other exceptions are the drive in the beginning, the music performance, and the date). The kind of opacity encountered here, one suspects, cannot be alleviated by filling in informational gaps or by providing alternative narrative perspectives. It appears that inscrutability is the very point of the narration. But just as the artful deployment of opacity in the preceding cases that I have discussed can be linked with a particular critical/ethical position, be it the indictment of a colonializing positivism or the preservation of alterity, so can the forms of opacity in “Gotta Light,” narrative as well as graphic, be analytically tied to other issues; in my reading of the show, I want to suggest that the aesthetic architecture of the episode in question adumbrates ecocritical and techno-environmental problems from which a host of biopolitical anxieties arise. While it may be true that Twin Peaks: The Return is “the most avantgarde piece of mainstream television since the show’s initial run,” its unfettered experimentalism is not solipsistic but engages, however obliquely, with some of the most urgent issues of our day.15 That Lynch’s cosmology teems with narrative opacity is underscored not only by the account of “Gotta Light” episode above but also by the extent to which the series has triggered the fan base’s appetite for speculation and riddle-solving.16 More often than not the audience has to decipher practically everything they see, their attempted descriptions coming across as much as interpretations as summaries. Some critics have contended that the level of formal experimentation seen in that episode even amounts to a transformation of the space of television. “The almost universal viewer reaction of astonishment to Part 8,” Donato Totaro writes, “is an indication that Lynch was indeed testing the ‘limits’ of visual 15  Dan Martin, “Twin Peaks Recap: Episode Eight—The Most Mind-Melting, Majestic Outing Yet,” The Guardian, June 26, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-andradio/2017/jun/26/twin-peaks-recap-episode-eight-the-most-mind-melting-majesticouting-yet, accessed December 11, 2017. 16  See, for instance, Jake Pitre, “Fan Reactions to The Leftovers and Twin Peaks: The Return,” Transformative Works and Cultures, 26 (2018), https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/1300/1570, accessed July 17, 2019.

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representation.”17 While the presence of opaque form in Lynch’s work is a pretty uncontroversial observation, what has received much less attention, however, is the curious co-existence of metaphysics and materiality in this fictional world. On the one hand, the diegesis of The Return swarms with supernatural entities, like the ashen, spidery apparitions, the orbs, and the garmonbozia—”the fear and sorrow of human kind,” the rotten corn related to black fire—consumed by Bob and other monsters from the Black Lodge.18 Like in the work of Gehr and Saunders referred to above, the Lynchian universe is one replete with spectral beings. On the other hand, the show flaunts an obsession with technology, evident not only in the epochal atomic blast but also in the prominent place given to figurations of electricity. “Throughout The Return,” Monique Rooney writes, “are images and sounds of electrical buzzing or sparking, telegraph lines crisscrossing the sky, lightning striking the earth, power outlets awaiting connection.” These spectacles, Rooney claims, “represent the telecommunications infrastructure of our time. Such aural and visual manifestations of an electrified, ever-humming atmosphere are trademark Lynch.”19 In addition, the show features a rich array of modern communication technologies and devices, from digital screens and GPS to radio, television, mobile phones, Skype, email, and text messaging. Episode 8, for example, starts with Evil Cooper deactivating several tracking devices with his phone and ends with the profoundly spooky and hypnotic poem recited by the Woodsman and broadcast over the airwaves to detrimental effect. On Rooney’s interpretation of the sequence, the Woodsman’s transmittal “creates a suggestive link between technologies of atomic destruction, the mainstream media’s dissemination of news since 1945 and the digital-era climate of the contemporary period.”20 The organic synthesis of the supernatural and the technological in Lynch’s art constitutes, I would like to point out, an inimitable aesthetic imaginary with the creative power to 17  Donato Totaro, “Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 8: The Western, Science-Fiction and the BIG BOmB,” Offscreen, 21.11–12 (2017), https://offscreen.com/view/twin-peaks-thereturn-part-8-the-western-science-fiction-and-big-bomb, accessed July 15, 2019. 18  The appearance of specters and the suggestion that certain sites might be haunted makes diegetic sense in the context of the displacement of Native American tribes in eastern Washington State as the Manhattan Project commenced plutonium production in the area. 19  Monique Rooney, “Air-object: on air media and David Lynch’s ‘Gotta Light?’ (Twin Peaks: The Return, 2017)” New Review of Film and Television Studies, 16.2 (2018): 123–143; 136. 20  Ibid.

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organize two modes of opacity: the nebulous province of specters and the irreducible thickness of the media object.21 The poetics of opacity represents a crucial element of the strangeness that so unfailingly has come to define Lynch’s art. This strangeness is in a sense a stylistically heightened manifestation of the defamiliarizing effect inherent in the moving image as a medium. Likening film’s capacity for worldmaking to that of Anthropocene humanity’s transformation of nature, Jennifer Fay sees cinema as emblematic of “the aesthetic practice of the Anthropocene.”22 Embedded in her theory is also a reference to phantomality. Drawing on the work of Maxim Gorky, she points out that the early silents were perceived as “ghostly animations” that “revive[d] supernatural experience.”23 A consequence of the industrial revolution, the monochromatic images of early cinema succeeded in making the familiar strange, infusing the medium with a sense of the uncanny. If the history of our media revolves fundamentally around “the productive possibility of capturing what exists,” as Durham Peters has put it,24 we might say that the indefinite and shapeless existence of supernatural energy is part of what cinema, video, and television historically have tried to capture.25 It is important to note that this cinema understood thus is not predominantly a realist medium but a generator of artificial worlds. For Fay, the medium’s relationship with artifice is not just a result of its inclination to produce fictional stories but also extends to the very texture of film’s scenographic affordances. Especially with the rise in the 1920s of sizeable indoor studios such as the UFA city outside Berlin, cinema became an art of simulation and fakery, its architecture increasingly composed of disposable structures and phony environments. According to Fay, there is a “philosophical” relation between what she refers to as “the histories, temporalities, and aesthetics of human-driven climate change and the politics, environmentalism, and ethics of cinema.”26 The manufacture of artificial worlds is 21  For my conceptualization of the aesthetic imaginary, see Asbjørn Grønstad, “The Aesthetic Imaginary and the Case of Ernie Gehr,” in Emerging Aesthetic Imaginaries, eds. Lene Johannessen & Mark Ledbetter, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018, 3–15. 22  Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene, New  York: Oxford University Press, 2018, 4. 23  Ibid., 3. 24  Durham Peters, 11. 25  This point chimes with Agamben’s reflections on the spectral dimension of cinema as noted in the chapter on Ernie Gehr above. 26  Fay, 5.

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something that the practice of filmmaking shares with the anthropocene condition. Cinema also produces abnormal weather (one of Fay’s examples is Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) and natural disasters (the latter of which has occasioned a genre of its own), “willed and wanted milieu[s],” as Fay calls it.27 An instructive case for the way in which anthropogenic ecologies are a matter of intentional design are the mock towns built by the Atomic Energy Commission after the Second World War in places like Nevada. The nuclear test film became practically a genre onto its own, showing sets meticulously modeled on the quintessential American small town being blown up in order to analyze the effect of atomic power on the surroundings. One of the official test films is Operation Cue (1955), made by the Federal Civil Defense Administration and narrated in part by reporter June Collin. Featuring regular and “enhanced” residences, mannequins, canned food, gas tanks, power lines, and transformers, the fifteen-minute-­ long documentary unveils the detonation of a thirty-kiloton bomb as seen by a group of journalists and military and civil defense observers from “Media Hill” a couple of miles away. Panning 180 degrees away from the hill, the camera captures the iconic image of a mushroom cloud, followed by a montage of the impact the blast has on buildings and radio towers. Using slow motion and high-speed cinematography as well as an overly dramatic music score, the sequence attains an almost fictional quality, in the process aestheticizing the experiment. The point of the exercise and ensuing spectacle is to test the endurance of everyday objects as they are exposed to radiation. As the male voice-over remarks, “[r]ows of mannequins were set up in the open, facing the blast. Each item of clothing and each color had been carefully selected to give much needed survival information.” Only twenty-four  hours later were the observers permitted to survey the test site and the damage the blast had wrought; they note that “enhanced” houses were in better shape than regular ones and that gas tanks were intact. What the film fails to mention is that the original bomb failed and a second one had to be set off, the latter generating a radioactive cloud that stretched across and polluted a vast area from Utah to Colorado and the Great Plains. As Fay writes, “the results were themselves altered or stage-managed to downplay the devastation of even this smaller bomb to reinforce the Civil Defense’s script of nuclear preparedness (the necessity of bomb shelters, good housekeeping, and an alertness to the news) and  Ibid., 4.

27

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the fiction of nuclear survival.”28 From the beginning, then, and long before Lynch’s astounding re-imagining of the Trinity blast, the footage of nuclear culture was already subject to aesthetic management. A key difference between the depiction of the blast in, respectively, The Return, Operation Cue, and the original takes of the actual Trinity footage, is that the televisual fantasy roams into the explosion itself. By contrast, Operation Cue instantly cuts to the objects crushed by its force. As for the Trinity footage, the camera lingers a little while on the immediate aftermath of the detonation, giving some screen time to the billowing smoke that arises. Enthrallingly, the sliding into non-figurative shapes in Lynch’s segment reiterates the unrepresentability associated with atomic eruption. About this particular form of opacity Akira Lippit has stated the following: There can be no authentic photography of atomic war because the bombings were themselves a form of total photography that exceeded the economies of representation, testing the very visibility of the visual. Only a negative photography is possible in the atomic arena, a skiagraphy, a shadow photography, the shadow of photography. By positing the spectator within the frames of an annihilating image, an image of annihilation, but also the annihilation of images, no one survives, nothing remains.29

In Lynch’s treatment of the blast the aesthetic imaginary supplants realism, but it is a replacement that accepts the unshowability of the event, favoring the optically indefinite over an impossible verisimilitude. In this, The Return departs from the history of nuclear cinema which, as Fay points out, has not only documented the blasts but rendered them as “aesthetic experiences” that in the process convert “the chaos of the fallout into comprehensible narratives” and prepare audiences “to survive or endure the culture of nuclearism.”30 While the “Gotta Light” episode certainly counts as an aesthetic experience, it is hardly in the business of recounting a “comprehensible” narrative. In fact, the viewer has reason to suspect that the show does the exact opposite, relaying an impenetrable story that is concerned not with survival but with extinction.

 Ibid., 62.   Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, 81. CHECK PAGE NO. 30  Fay, 17. 28 29

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Approached as figure or metaphor, then, the opacity of Lynch’s aesthetic world could be found to index a future condition of diminished semiosis, a deterioration of expressive capability in the context of an emergent, deleterious eschatology. The Trinity detonation in the summer of 1945 has been seen by among others the geologist Jan Zalasiewicz as the event to instigate the era of the Anthropocene. In “Gotta Light,” the explosion does not only occupy a textually prominent position, but it also signifies the discharge of evil into the world. Like other works in Lynch’s catalogue, moreover, Twin Peaks: The Return is stylistically close to film noir, a genre whose “negative environments” and “attachments to bad living,” according to Fay, mark it as an “extinction narrative.”31 Noir as a historical genre and a particular style suggests opacity in its very name. Its preference for the dark is often graphically inscribed through the films’ abundant shadows and nocturnal city streets. The genre also embodies narrative opacity; consider, for instance, the perplexing plot structure of The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). With its warped spaces, horrid acts of violence, murky hues, and nods to film noir, is the “Gotta Light” episode, then, an extinction narrative, an addition from a perhaps unpredicted source to what one might see as anthropocene televisuality? In this installment the show comes close, but I would propose nonetheless that the episode should not be reduced to a statement regarding nuclear apocalypticism. Lynch’s reliance on graphic and narrative forms of opacity is a material expression of the primary uncertainty that defines his cosmology. There is an argument in the scholarship around Lynch’s cinema, associated first and foremost with Martha Nochimson’s work, that physics rather than philosophy, psychology, or literature informs the modeling of the films’ fictional worlds. An investment in a principle of boundlessness—an enduring pursuit for philosophy and art from Lucretius through William Blake and Edgar Allan Poe—is key here. Claiming that consciousness represents the director’s chief interest, Nochimson argues that Lynch sees both mind and matter as infinite—and infinitely malleable—entities and that this boundlessness is integral to reality. On her view, Lynch’s films demonstrate “the figurative uses of the uncertain principle of modern physics.”32 His is a cinema that “has never been realistic in a reductionist sense; it has always sought the real through the poetic, utilizing images in metaphoric ways to speak of what metaphors speak of: those liminal and  Ibid., 18.  Nochimson, 162.

31 32

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complex aspects of our lives that cannot be directly named.”33 If we subscribe to this interpretation of poetic expressivity, the mode itself—poetics—is one which keeps close company with the indefinite and the opaque. As Nochimson frames the discussion, the object of poetic enunciation is the unutterability of “liminal” experience. Such experience is necessarily unavailable to conventionally mimetic representational practices but may presumably be invoked by various modes of post-representational inscriptions, of which opaque aesthetics constitutes one possibility. When one critic claims that Lynch’s imagining of the nuclear detonation is indebted to Willem de Kooning’s musings on the transformative qualities of atomic light, the observation supports a reading of the scene as an example of televisual opacity.34 If the graphic and narrative obfuscations of “Gotta Light” nurture the uncertainty and boundlessness certain critics see as central to Lynch’s art, could it be that the transparent image occasions a blockage of that sphere of “beyondness” with which this filmmaker tries to engage? In other words, can a fixed image of complete optical clarity, even a moving one, produce a sense of the alternative realities, the parallel worlds—exterior as well as interior—seen as possibilities by the Vedic tradition and modern physics alike? Note that this is not an argument against the potential ambiguity of the transparent image or its semantic richness or even its occasional abstruseness. The issue is neither the multiplicity of meaning generated by visual expressions nor poststructuralist undecidability, but rather the question of the existence of other realms of existence and consciousness and their aesthetic communicability. To elucidate this point, let me quote Mark Cousin’s description of Inland Empire, a film that, he writes, “doesn’t move its people and world on so much as bolt annexes, parallel worlds, onto them. It’s a film of tumours, rumours, humours, outgrowths from a constant centre.”35 His comment would not have been out of place if it had been made about Twin Peaks: The Return. What lies beneath is by definition unknown, and opacity as an artistic approach can be one way of calling attention to this unfamiliarity. Cousin’s statement may align with Élie Faure’s concept of cineplastics, which denotes the material malleability of cinema as a medium. In his work on Lynch, Justus

 Ibid., 160.  Totaro. 35  Mark Cousins, “Still Life with Attitude,” Sight and Sound, 23.3 (2013): 17. 33 34

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Nieland underscores the director’s fascination with plastic and pinpoints the material’s “capacity for infinite transformation.”36 In an earlier work I introduced the idea of contagious mediation to account for patterns of intertextual and transmedial influence as well as for the ways in which media restructure our sense apparatus.37 Bringing this chapter to a close, I want to use this concept to reiterate what I find to be a vital interpretive frame for making sense of Lynch’s world as it appears to us in the “Gotta Light” episode. The prominent role that uncertainty and mysticism play in the Lynchian oeuvre has been aptly documented by previous scholarship, and my identification of a process of narrative opacity builds further upon this foundation.38 In the eighth chapter of The Return the centerpiece is a protracted sequence whose graphic qualities are reminiscent of the experimental forms of filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Ernie Gehr. Its subject matter is nothing less than the instigation of the Anthropocene epoch and the materialization of evil and its release into the world. There is thus a robust correlation between, on the one hand, the nature of the visual texture of the sequence—bolstered by the “sonic thickness” of the fifty-two instruments performing Penderecki’s Threnody—and, on the other, the theme of virulent malice being discharged into the atmosphere.39 Studied through Lynch’s prism, one discerns that acts of mediation are embroiled in the toxification of the environment. As Rooney points out, [w]ind rushes through Douglas-firs, electric-lit air buzzes and crackles and a nuclear mushroom cloud blasts the atmosphere. While it visually and aurally represents air in its most elemental forms (as wind, breath), The Return also simulates an atmosphere that has been contaminated and weaponised.40

Drawing on Peter Sloterdijk’s notion that in the post-nuclear age the environment rather than the body constitutes the target of terrorism and 36  Justus Nieland, David Lynch, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012, 5. Faure’s essay on cineplastics can be found in the posthumous publication Fonction du Cinema, Paris: Mediations, 1953. 37  Asbjørn Grønstad, “Refigurations of Walden: Notes on Contagious Mediation,” in Literature in Contemporary Media Culture, eds. Sarah J. Paulson & Anders Skare Malvik, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016, 207–222. 38  See, for instance, contributions by Nochimson, Wilson, and McGowan. 39  Rooney, 132. 40  Ibid., 125.

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warfare, Rooney makes the argument that the air, the atmosphere, and human breath are also media channels in their own right and that The Return emphasizes various ways of activating these “indivisible” means of communication.41 There is of course the event of radiation, the attention given to electrical devices, the foreboding message relayed by the Woodsman, and the accentuation of respiratory transmissions in the form of (mostly female) breathing, gasps, and cries (the show ends with a scream). Contagiousness as a prime trope also surfaces in the spoiled corn that becomes garmonbozia, in the Nine Inch Nails song that includes words about “spread[ing] the infection,” and in the vast intertextual tapestry of the series as a whole (of particular relevance in these contexts are the many references to the 1950s science-fiction films about nuclear pollution, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)). The view propounded by Durham Peters, that media are infrastructural systems that comprise both the technological and the ecological spheres, gives further credence to the idea that Lynch’s work embodies the phenomenon of contagious mediation, the ultimate source of which remains resistant to transparent representation.

 Ibid., 140; 124.

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CHAPTER 7

A Hermeneutics of the Black Site: Trevor Paglen

The ersatz towns erected in places like Nevada and New Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s have been seen as the origin of the “black world” of covert military installations and operations, secret sites, and geographical spaces beyond the law.1 Documenting this clandestine ecosystem entails the adoption of yet another form of opacity. Where in Lynch opacity suggests “beyondness,” as we have seen, the opaque image can also work to further other objectives. Blurry photographs, for example, can serve as an index of a conspicuous absence, as a reminder that potentially significant information is being intentionally withheld from us. So, even if it certainly matters who is in charge of the visible—since, as Sean Cubitt points out, it “alters the constitutive grounds of sensing, knowing, and relating to one another and to the world”2—visibility can also be manipulated from within and galvanized to accomplish ends that thwart the repressive visuality of the governing few, to remain with the terminology Simek and Mirzoeff introduce. One such use of opacity is realized through the projects of the artist and visual researcher Trevor Paglen. Focusing on stealthy military operations and test sites—remote desert installations in the southwest or a classified spacecraft orbiting the Earth—Paglen produces photographs across substantial distances. These images capture a type of objects that 1  Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World, New York: New American Library, 2009, 95. 2  Sean Cubitt, The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014, 3.

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appear quite low on visibility and decipherable informational content. Looking at them, we do not know exactly what we are seeing. It was when Paglen, a geographer, started to chart the growth of prisons in California and the Southwest that he became aware of massive lacunae in the Nevada desert. The aerial and satellite images he studied lead him to consider the presence of empty spots on official maps. At a time when the entire surface of the world has long since been scrupulously mapped, the sheer existence of these black sites was conspicuous. They did however cohere with a range of other phenomena that form intrinsic components of the black world: secret military operations and aircrafts, shadow budgets, extraordinary renditions and so-called ghost prisoners, and gratuitous surveillance. Noting the dearth of serious research on black sites, Paglen endeavored to produce a book that would reveal “how the United States has become dependent on spaces created through secrecy, spaces that lie outside the rule of law, outside the Constitution, outside the democratic ideal of equal rights, transparent government, and informed consent.”3 But the science of geography teaches us that things do not disappear just because they are beyond our perceptual reach; everything that happens takes place in a given topography. As Paglen helpfully points out, what the map’s blank parts index are not only the absence of information but also the fact of the secret.4 Paglen’s work, then, constitutes another and possibly paradoxical form of opacity, one that applies pictorial indistinctness to alert the viewer to missing or, more accurately, withheld knowledge. In this attempt to picture the confidential installations in the Nevada Basin, for example, Paglen employs telescopes with focal lengths of 1300 to 7000 mm, a practice he terms limit telephotography, a cousin of astrophotography. The distance from the objects and the flattening of perspective that results from this technique give the images an abstract quality, intensified by the shimmering heat and the particles of dust from the atmosphere. The nondescript sites photographed are already low on informational value, however, so Paglen’s images, one could argue, are mostly performative in nature. The control towers, terminals, and vehicles that the captions allude to are, at best, on the threshold of perceptibility. Invoking Nicholas Mirzoeff’s phrase “the right to look” as a performance of citizenship, Henrik Gustafsson considers that “the politics of producing the photographs 3 4

 Paglen, Blank Spots, 16.  Ibid., 17.

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outweighs the significance of whatever information they contain.”5 Since the black world is hardly subject to conventional representational practice, it can only be approached through strategies of indirection, or “an aesthetics of counter-transparency,” as Gustafsson names it (Fig. 7.1).6 In another project, The Other Night Sky, Paglen employs a methodology he calls minoritarian empiricism. This is a visual research venture that attempts to photograph and keep track of classified satellites with the help of a global network of amateur astronomers. The data that this network harvests with their telescopes and binoculars are shared online and feature information on locations and trajectories. For his exploration of black sites Paglen sometimes photographs from as far away as forty-two miles, using professional telephoto lenses that create nebulous and hazy images. Inadequate as evidence, the photos are exhibited in art galleries, their value more aesthetic than indexical. But, as one critic has noted, “[t]he

Fig. 7.1  Photo from Limit Telephotography project (Trevor Paglen) 5  Henrik Gustafsson, “Foresight, Hindsight and State Secrecy in the American West: The Geopolitical Aesthetics of Trevor Paglen,” Journal of Visual Culture, 12.1 (2013): 156. 6  Ibid.

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political efficacy of his photographs does not emerge from cognitive disclosure but from affective perturbation, that is, from revealing without enlightening.”7 The contribution of these opaque images, like those of the limit telephotography project, thus lies in the way in which they gesture toward not only the existence of barely visible objects but, maybe more importantly, the intended act of keeping something out of view in the first place. Somewhat ironically, this is a form of opacity that renders tangible a gap of information in the public sphere. In the information age, not all information is designed for public consumption, a circumstance also borne out by endeavors such as WikiLeaks. In its destabilization of the assumed symbiosis of knowledge and vision so essential to the history of positivist epistemology, Paglen’s post-­ representational photographic practice might be an example of precarious art. As Philipp Jeandrée states, the invisible or barely visible is not simply the result of topographic, technological and legal restrictions but just as much an aesthetic or even ethical choice in order to express political concerns and skepticism regarding the revelatory use of (journalistic) images and the suggestive relation between seeing and knowing.8

It is possible that one could consider this particular kind of unintelligibility as a tropological opacity, in that it helps signify the tenuousness of truth in an era of clandestine operations, the rule of the frontal, and the balkanization of the public sphere. As Jeandrée sees it, Paglen’s aesthetics of opacity is fundamentally the inverse of Robert Hariman’s and John Lucaites’s photojournalistic enterprise to construct a visual public sphere. Citing Jodi Dean’s notions of technoculture and communicative capitalism, Jeandrée argues that the entire concept of a public sphere is “an ideological fallacy that seeks to erase the antagonism necessary for politics.”9 Paglen’s blurry photographs enact a certain redistribution of the sensible, in that they debunk the increasingly untenable fiction of the transparency 7  Philipp Jeandrée “The Limits of the Visible: The Politics of Contingency in the Photographic Work of Trevor Paglen,” Critical Studies, 2 (2016), http://www.criticalstudies.org.uk/uploads/2/6/0/7/26079602/jeandree_csv2.pdf, accessed December 13, 2016. 8  Ibid. 9  Ibid. See also Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002, as well as her “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics,” Cultural Politics, 1.1 (2005): 51–74.

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of the public sphere. Here, the aesthetics of opacity is engaged in the process not of showing seeing, to invoke W. J. T. Mitchell’s term,10 but of showing non-seeing, or the attempt itself to curtail the right to look. Perhaps more plainly than in the work of Gehr and Akomfrah, the indistinct image in Paglen inscribes itself into the perceptual sensorium we call aesthetics; it demonstrates that opacity is not the threatening Other of artistic communication but, on the contrary, an epistemologically rejuvenating possibility that is of the aesthetic, not something that swallows it up. What I would like to discuss in the remainder of this chapter is the part that an art of opacity might play in drawing attention to contemporary practices of secrecy that are politically and legally problematic. Paglen’s work fulfills this role in an illustrative way and could, I shall maintain, be considered in the context of a functional opacity, of a pragmatic phenomenology of the indistinct. Dismissing notions that his work is about exposing classified information, and also that he traffics in ambiguity for its own sake, Paglen instead seems to insist that the images he produces affirm not only the existence of undisclosed activities and objects but also the material diffusion of these phenomena across other domains.11 In other words, Paglen’s project lends expressive force to elements whose interconnections tend to remain indiscernible to the public. If the pictures of secret military installations fail to document anything in a conventional sense of the word, they nonetheless capture evidence. This kind of evidence obviously has less to do with the legal sphere than with the slightly post-­ phenomenological conception of the term found, for instance, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s reflections on cinema. In his writing on Abbas Kiarostami, Nancy introduces an affirmational ethics that stresses the capacity of the film image to bring out the “realness” or “presentness” of the fragment of the world caught by the camera.12 Perhaps predictably, “evidence” understood in this sense raises the question of epistemology; to say that 10  W.  J. T.  Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture, 1.2 (2002): 165–181. 11  Lauren Cornell, “Trevor Paglen in Conversation with Lauren Cornell”, in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Lauren Cornell & Ed Halter, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015, 255. 12  See, for example, Jean-Luc Nancy, “On Evidence: Life and Nothing More, by Abbas Kiarostami,” trans. Verena Andermatt Conley, Discourse, 21.1 (1999): 77–88; and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Evidence of Film: Abbas Kiarostami, Brussels: Yves Gevaert Éditeur, 2001. See also Josef Früchtl, “The Evidence of Film and the Presence of the World: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Cinematic Ontology,” Critical Studies, 32 (2010): 193–201.

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s­omething exists, but without saying exactly what it is that exists, what kind of knowledge is that? Is not the palpable lack of specificity at odds with any sort of epistemological value? It depends. If we take a processual view of knowledge, the blurry or indefinite image institutes a first movement toward an awareness that something indeed exists, an awareness that might evolve into more substantive forms of knowledge at a later stage. When above I use the term “pragmatic” to describe Paglen’s indistinct photographs, I understand his work as a case of what might be termed deictic visuality, images that point or gesture toward something without necessarily specifying what it is. The act itself of directing the viewer’s attention and producing awareness is the key objective of such images. While the applicability of deixis to photographic and filmic images has been taken up and summarily rejected by previous theorists, most notably Christian Metz,13 I would still contend that the capture and exhibition of a photographic image are pregnant with an emphatic sense of gesturing toward the physical presence of some object. Deixis comes from the Greek deiktos, meaning “capable of proof,” which again has emerged from deiknunai, meaning “to show.” If one takes a broader theoretical (as opposed to narrowly linguistic) perspective, the concept of visual deixis may in fact prove to be illuminating, and especially in cases where the clarity of the object is compromised by various formal-technological instabilities that create opacity within the frame. While the iconic and symbolic value of barely readable images might be scarce, to invoke C.  S. Peirce’s terminology, their indexical purchase is actually intact. When André Bazin makes the case that the photographic image is existentially linked to the object or “the being of the model,” as he puts it, the process of transference is equally operative for images that are “fuzzy, distorted, or discolored” as for sharp and transparent ones.14 The indexical usefulness of opaque images is thus to a certain extent tied to their deictic role as pointers, as a form of connective tissue that puts a public into contact with classified objects that might be of relevance to that same public. As mentioned above, Paglen’s photographic practice is entangled in a process in which sensible matter gets redistributed or reconfigured. 13  Christian Metz, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film, trans. & introd. Cormac Deane, afterword by Dana Polan, New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 14  André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Volume 1, trans. Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 14.

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Exercising his right to look, Paglen tries to extract whatever knowledge he can from a closed system. In his now classic text, Rancière explains his concept of the distribution of the sensible thus: the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution.15

To paraphrase, Rancière’s concern is how space, time, and action are configured or constituted in a number of ways—socially, culturally, economically, aesthetically, and politically—to enable access and participation in a common sphere. The infrastructure of the sensible as a continuously ongoing process is something that at once defines that which is shared by all and what is given only to some. This dialectics of inclusion and exclusion makes spatiality a particularly privileged concept, as it represents not only one of the categories (alongside time and activity) that Rancière mentions but also the very structure of his theory. The notion of the distribution of the sensible, one might argue, is impossible to grasp without recourse to a spatial perspective; in fact, the idea of distribution itself requires a logic that is fundamentally spatial. When I propose that Paglen’s project on Limit Telephotography can be understood as a redistribution of the sensible, it can however be tied not only to Rancière’s philosophy but also to the artist’s own notion of experimental photography. Drawing on among other sources Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer” (1934) and Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1974; English trans. 1991), Paglen notes how the production of cultural artifacts and texts is also at the same time a spatial practice. Artistic endeavors and intellectual inquires generate new spaces of experience. In the aforementioned essay, Paglen points out, Benjamin makes a distinction between artworks that articulate a political content and those that come to occupy a political position. Benjamin’s relational approach implies that, in the 15  Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics [2000], trans. Gabriel Rockhill, New York: Continuum, 2004, 12.

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words of Paglen, “the task of transformative cultural production [is] to reconfigure the relations and apparatus of cultural production, to reinvent the ‘infrastructure’ of feeling in ways designed to maximize human freedom.”16 For Benjamin, artists and other cultural laborers ultimately need to occupy the political field and thus go beyond mere critique. In a way, this is precisely what Paglen’s various projects do. His presence near confidential spaces, the capture of tail numbers on aircrafts, and the exhibition of classified terms and phrases in the ongoing Code Names project constitute practices on the threshold of legality, practices over which he has received death threats.17 Such interventions are examples of what Brian Massumi has named the occurrent arts,18 which are relational and event-oriented practices that construct political spaces. The gainfully intrusive optics of the Limit Telephotography project chips away at the furtive infrastructure of the Terror State conglomerate: the Department of Homeland Security, the NSA, CIA, FBI, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), and other institutions responsible for secret laws, drone programs, cyber warfare, extralegal renditions, unlimited detention, and “the retroactive ‘legalization’ of classified programs that were clearly illegal when they began.”19 Opacity is a key component in the attempt to occupy and reconfigure what is essentially a politico-epistemological space, first, because it functions efficiently as a perceptual primer and, second, because its very form emulates and thus foregrounds the knowledge gap that these secret spaces themselves produce and which is also fundamental to their mode of operation. There is a conceptual (and quite possibly also phenomenological) affinity between the secret, invisibility, and opaque materiality. They share in common the attribute of being informationally underwhelming, as well as the tantalizing sense of containing something more. The secret, the 16  Trevor Paglen, “Experimental Geography: From Cultural Production to the Production of Space,” in Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism, eds. Nato Thompson, Brooklyn: Melville House, 2009. 17  Julian Stallabrass, “Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: A Conversation with Trevor Paglen,” October, 138 (2011): 3–14; 14. 18  Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event: Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Notably, the concept of semblance (Schein) is also used in Benjamin’s work to denote the aura of something beautiful. 19  Trevor Paglen, “Turnkey Tyranny: Surveillance and the Terror State,” Creative Time, June 25, 2013, http://creativetimereports.org/2013/06/25/surveillance-and-the-construction-of-a-terror-state/, accessed October 30, 2019.

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opaque, the invisible—these concepts also pose a formidable challenge to photography as a medium and aesthetic. To photograph an object within “the complex fabric” of external reality, to borrow Bazin’s words, is one thing; to photograph a social situation is something different entirely.20 Yet even more difficult is it to photograph systems, although, as Rebecca Solnit points out, one can at least visualize their consequences.21 Photographic representations of military violence are a case in point. But Paglen’s practice of opacity seems more intent on rendering what little it can of the system itself. As an explorative practice, experimental geography institutes its own spaces, but in Paglen’s work it is also attuned to the multiplicative propensity of the black site. Classified installations are spatially contagious. The activities going on there require additional sites of operation. In other words, the expansion of the black site, both geographically and socially, produces a long chain of environmental consequence and effects that interfere with the lives of citizens unaware of the content of such sites. The Air Force’s Nellis Range Complex in Southern Nevada is one example. With its 3.1-million acres, it extends across an area the size of Switzerland. It is where the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and later the Air Force Special Projects Office developed the stealth military program and its manufacture of airplanes less vulnerable to radar systems. Initially a scientific idea, the project then became a computer program. Secret factories were built. A classified airbase materialized along with classified squadrons. At a certain point the project traversed the perimeters of the Nellis Range, its activities altering the chemical structure of the air and infecting the bodies of some of the workers close to the site.22 In the late 1980s, a group of about 160 Lockheed employees were suffering from headaches, nausea, forgetfulness, and in some instances cancer. Water and air pollution was endemic to the area. In investigating these environmental crimes and pushing for legal action, organizations and individuals such as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Jonathan Turley, a professor at Washington State University who was head of the Environmental Crimes Project, brushed up against a discouraging obstacle: the chemicals that the sick workers had  Bazin, “Ontology,” 15.  Rebecca Solnit, “The Visibility Wars,” in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the TwentyFirst Century, eds. Lauren Cornell & Ed Halter, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015, 243–254; 248. 22  Trevor Paglen, “Goatsucker: Toward a Spatial Theory of State Secrecy,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28 (2010): 759–771; 765–766. 20 21

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been exposed to were top-secret, meaning that they technically did not exist. “The legal contradiction,” Paglen writes, “was resolved by the judge’s ruling that the space of stealth was fundamentally incompatible with the legal system.”23 Thus, the black world had impinged upon yet another social domain. Essentially, the legal system was forced to adopt to the nature of the stealth program. What Peter Galison terms “the classified universe” is in all likelihood vaster than anyone would have imagined. One estimate is that it could be up to ten times larger than the open materials sent to the nation’s libraries.24 If, as Max Weber famously asserted, secrecy is bureaucracy’s method for accruing power,25 the redistribution of the sensible is an endeavor vitally invested in the advancement of both epistemology and politics. The contradictions of state secrecy—factories and airplanes are not actually invisible but have to exist somewhere in geographical space—are if not directly exposed then certainly alluded to in Paglen’s photographic practice. Its blurry quality notwithstanding, this is an ethically fecund practice that demonstrates the act of cutting well. In their theorization of photography and mediation, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska use this phrase to promote a poetics and ethics of mediation indebted, among others, to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Karen Barad. The cornerstone of the theory of the cut is that life unfolds as a process of continuous mediation. In order to make sense of the ceaseless flow of matter out of which reality is made, we need structure that can turn this raw matter into form. Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy (1994) argue that the domains of philosophy, science, and art provide such structures. On their view, these large-scale epistemological modalities represent the Chaoids, the three daughters of chaos (presumably undifferentiated matter) that offer “forms of thought or creation” that “cut through the chaos in different ways.”26 Artistic practices are symbolic incisions into the flow of matter, but they are also more than that. According to Kember and Zylinska, cutting as an aesthetic act is a gesture full of

 Ibid., 768.  Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry, 31 (2004): 229–243; 231. 25  Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology [1922], ed. Guenther Roth & Claus Wittich, trans. Ephraim Fischoff, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. 26  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? [1991], trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, London: Verso, 1994. 23 24

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vitality, capable of new meanings and even “life-making.”27 Photography not only stores life forms, it also generates them. “[T]he practice of cutting,” Kember and Zylinska contend, “is crucial not just to our being in and relating to the world, but also to our becoming-with-the-world, as well as becoming-different-from-the-world.”28 However, when it comes to specifying what it is that distinguishes an ethical cut from any other cut, they have less to say, except that to cut well entails not “los[ing] sight of the horizon of duration or foreclose on the creative possibility of life enabled by this horizon.”29 There are evidently many ways in which to appraise the preconditions of an ethical cut. It seems reasonable, for example, to expect such a cut to be perceptive, judicious, inventive, revelatory, challenging, surprising, and committed, although maybe not necessarily all at once. A photographic image that brings into view, into the world, traces of matter that power has resolved to conceal from it, is a good candidate for an ethical cut. The Limit Telephotography project epitomizes what Kember and Zylinska call mediation as a vital process; Paglen’s images in effect mediate between a world that is not supposed to exist officially and the world that has to suffer its consequences. Bridging these two worlds is an achievement of the photographic cut, which, in Bazinian terms, causes a transfer of the real that imbues the object with a “disturbing presence.”30 Such is the force of the index. But the question that is still left open, perhaps surprisingly, is that of the documentary value of the image. Paglen’s own remarks on the matter betray a lingering skepticism, one that has haunted photography before. In his conversation with Julian Stallabrass, Paglen remains doubtful of visual media’s evidentiary potential, especially in a legal context. Citing the Rodney King footage and the Abu Ghraib photos as examples, he points out that the images were not able to disclose “systemic torture and abuse as political policy.”31 Even the WikiLeaks recording of the Apache helicopter killing civilians in Iraq, which Stallabrass brings up, likely fails to be adequately documentary in a judicial sense. There are certain limits to what even the best visual documents can reveal. This skepticism echoes Siegfried Kracauer’s derisive remarks about photographic reportage, as 27  Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012, 72. 28  Ibid., 75. 29  Ibid., 82. 30  Bazin, “Ontology,” 14. 31  Stallabrass, 11.

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well as Berthold Brecht’s claim that the reality of factory life could not be represented by photography.32 If the documentary authority of the photograph is less secure than we have tended to believe, could it be that the occasional graphic opacity of the image really is a metonym for a deeper murkiness that, in its nature, is not just optical but epistemological and even existential? The photographic image courts uncertainty when its sensuous content does not translate into comprehensibility, when it reveals too little, or when the relations into which it is enmeshed are occluded. Even at its crispiest, the photograph falls short of representing the depth of its object, much less the unseen operations that produce the situations and objects depicted. Despite this semiotic poverty, the photographic image can however still be documentary, albeit on its own terms. Paglen’s own approach subscribes to a certain dialectics, in that his images make truth claims that are also, in the same instant, being contradicted. The deictic gesture of the indistinct image scans as an assertion; “there is something here, and that something is a secret military facility.” Yet due to the compromised legibility of the image, the object captured could in principle be something entirely different. The point is to alert the viewer to the very possibility that the assertion might be correct, in which case the image is made to point beyond itself, to the invisible forces, the “system,” that manages this particular distribution of the sensible. As Jeandrée has suggested, Paglen’s blurry photos work as prompts, they make us aware of this “invisible world of great political impact and urgency beyond our familiar field of vision.”33 But this methodology also comes to enact a fascinating paradox. One the one hand, the apparatus mobilized to produce these pretty opaque images, images that occasionally border on or cross over into abstraction,34 is painstakingly empirical in nature. The Other Night Sky, his satellite project, employs a wealth of data on location, timing, and trajectories harvested by hobby astronomers, and high-resolution lenses and telescope cameras are part of his equipment. On the other hand, all this careful preparation, sophisticated technology, and arithmetic data result in rather indefinite 32  Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoare, London: Verso, 1998, 32; and Berthold Brecht, “The Three Penny Trial: A Sociological Experiment” [1931], in German Essays on Film, eds. Richard W. McCormick and Allison Guenther-Pal, London: Continuum, 2004, 111–132; 117. 33  See Jeandréee. 34  In interviews Paglen has talked about the influence of abstract painting on his work. See, for instance, Cornell, “Trevor Paglen in Conversation,” 258.

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images that are inadequate as evidence and barely passable as semiotic artifacts. As scholars of visual culture have pointed out, mechanical and electronic media such as photography, film, video, and television carry with them “the legacy” of a nineteenth-century positivist paradigm.35 Walead Beshty, among others, writes that the attraction of transparency for the modern world was evident in “the desire to capture the minutiae of movement (cinema), to turn objects into surface (photography), to see inside (x-ray).”36 But as Paglen’s practice demonstrates, even the most steadfast empiricism cannot guarantee hard, unambiguous knowledge. Yielding semi-abstract, nebulous results, Paglen’s photographs could be conceptualized as both evidence and critique of the cultural equation of knowledge with positivism. The system of abstract relations that is politics, that is ideology, seems impervious to the kind of documentary compulsion that animates photography-based media. In works such as Chemical and Biological Weapons Proving Ground, Dugway, UT (distance: 42 miles) (2006), Open Hangar, Cactus Flats, NY (distance: 18 miles) (2007), and The Fence (Lake Kickapoo, Texas) (2010), the object is largely indecipherable as an indexical reproduction. The images resemble, more than any recognizably photographic precursor, the art of a Barnett Newman or a Mark Rothko. Paglen’s self-described post-representational practice may divert our attention to the sheer materiality of the photos and to the institutions of secrecy that are their main interest, but the efficacy of their indefiniteness is perhaps more metaphorical than political in nature. On their own, the images speak to the struggle for truth in a culture of secrecy. Supplemented by the captions, which name the time and space of their capture, the photos become grounded; no longer just allegorical, they insert themselves more confidently into the sphere of the political. In a reversal of sorts of the established relationship between the indexicality of the photographic image and the symbolic nature of verbal language, the image becomes arbitrary while the linguistic sign purports to document empirical facts. By now we might be in a better position than at the start of this chapter to address the concept of a hermeneutics of the black site. How do we 35  Marita Sturken & Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, 2nd edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 355. 36  Walead Beshty, as quoted in Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodern: Tate Triennial, London: Tate, 2009, 54.

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interpret the unknown? What understanding might emerge from that which offers up very little information? What meanings can be ascribed to the barely sensible? What nourishes the gaze that inspects the dark? In principle, all interpretive activity is motored by a desire to attain more or better knowledge of a particular thing, phenomenon, or idea. The degree of opacity in which that thing is enveloped evidently fluctuates a great deal. In a way, all the works considered in this book constitute black sites, epistemologically speaking. They are, all in their own ways, obstinate, unyielding objects that for a number of reasons sabotage the effortless transparency of more conventional visual representation. But the military installations and satellites that Paglen photographs suggest a normalization of the black site, of the clandestine, that is arguably unprecedented. Some critics entertain the possibility that the public sphere and its open information are fast becoming “the exception to the norm of secrecy.”37 Even if this assumption is only partially correct, the ideal of a free and unrestrictive public sphere appears increasingly utopian. A rising number of activities of both a military, political, and economic nature are cloaked in secrecy. In a US context, the history of this accelerating black world dates back to United States v. Reynolds, the momentous 1953 Supreme Court case that granted legal protection to the so-called state secrets privilege. The case created a precedent that enabled later administrations to elide litigations concerning classified documents and covert operations. United States v. Reynolds in effect laid the groundwork for more unconstrained presidential powers that in the post-9/11 political landscape have involved measures such as extraordinary rendition, pervasive surveillance, drone wars, and an expansion of a military infrastructure of classified facilities as well as of “black budget.” The growth of a secret state in recent decades has likely been abetted by a certain obsequiousness on part of the judicial and congressional branches vis-à-vis the executive branch, exacerbating the health of democratic institutions already mired in a host of other problems. If the black world is in the process of quietly expanding, as both Galison and Paglen imply, it could very well be that the hermeneutic enterprise needs a new methodology. Investigating only those phenomena that are freely accessible to us will yield mere fragments of a larger and more complex truth. Paglen’s approach to the hermeneutics of the black site is useful in that it emulates what Gustafsson terms the “spectral geography” of  See Jeandrée.

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the black world, construing “optical aberrations” as a kind of documentation unto itself.38 But in a way the black site subverts the very premise of any hermeneutics. It represents, as Gustafsson also suggests, a deracination of the flagpoles of the Enlightenment—rationality, transparency, progress, and democracy. Seen in this light, the diegetic universe we encounter in episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return, discussed in the previous chapter, is a manifestation of this “shadow image” or “negative double” of those Enlightenment values.39 In the Limit Telephotography project, this world can only be vaguely alluded to, although this is a vagueness that in no way diminishes the rhetorical heft of the images. What I earlier named the deictic gesture of the photographs enables a form of revelation that betrays what John Roberts understands as photography’s “immanent powers of violation.”40 By this, he means that the medium’s penchant for pointing at its object is an intervention that may cause “the ruination of [its] self-identity” as well as “the denaturalization” of its mode of appearance.41 In poking into the secrecy that enshrouds the black site (rather than into its empirical components, which remain unavailable), opacity itself is mobilized as a hermeneutical method. In the chapter above on Saunders’s work I referenced Birchall’s ideas concerning the notion of the secret as the ultimate aesthetic object. Invoking the projects of Paglen as well as Jill Magid, Birchall argues that they supplant a “hermeneutics of the secret” with an “aesthetics of the secret.”42 A consequence of this proposed transformation is that the significance of disclosure, interpretation, and meaning decreases, while the value of encounter, affect, and sensuous experience increases. Birchall creates a diagram in order to display the various possible relations that can exist between secrecy, knowledge, and aesthetics, which she calls (a) the known known, (b) the unknown known, (c) the known unknown, and (d) the unknown unknown. The first of these categories denotes the province of aesthetic expression and reception. While any given artistic enunciation is, in principle, semantically inexhaustible, even the most arcane, abstract, or inaccessible work gives us something to perceive, that is, something sensible in one way or the other. But there is still room for the secret in the  Gustafsson, “Foresight,” 158.  Ibid., 159. 40  John Roberts, Photography and its Violations, New  York: Columbia University Press, 2014, 1. 41  Ibid. 42  Birchall, “Aesthetics,” 29. 38 39

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“known known” because artworks tend to suppress something even as they show us something else. The second grouping, the unknown known, refers to things that were once observable but have since been forgotten or lost. Birchall mentions as examples the exhibitions Invisible: Art About the Unseen, mounted at the Hayward Gallery in London, and Gallery of Lost Art (both 2012), a Tate-curated online exhibition, both of which featured Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953). In aesthetics, the unknown known also comprises works of art that have been damaged, suppressed, stolen, misplaced, rejected, or works whose very nature is ephemeral. Paglen’s and Magid’s projects belong primarily to the third category, the known unknown, which is the realm of the open secret.43 A key contribution of their endeavors is a certain insistence on the materiality of the secret. For Paglen, the secret is not an abstract entity but a network of “physical, legal, social, cultural, [and] economic institutions.”44 The photographer’s deictic poetics, as I have shown above, invites a rethinking of hermeneutics. For Birchall, this implies a movement away from the content of the secret to what she sees as “an affective response to form.”45 In a way, this line of thinking recalls the tenets of various philosophies of presence; to put it a little bluntly—form, encounter, and affect replace content, interpretation, and meaning.46 Lastly, the unknown unknown designates a more constant kind of secrecy, one in which the secret is not a momentary state of un-knowing but rather a durable quality that is “absolute” and “unconditional.”47 In the charts above, Paglen’s work might be situated in the panel the known unknown, as Birchall observes, but I would argue that it also bleeds into the unknown unknown. If our becoming cognizant of these clandestine installations is an effect of the photographer’s images, they simultaneously serve to remind us of the possibility that other such sites probably 43  There are four different modes of the known unknown: secrets of which we are aware but whose content remains unavailable; secrets “everybody” knows yet they cannot be verified; secrets that receive little or no attention once they actually get revealed; and finally secrets that are known but stop shy of an appropriate means of articulation. See Birchall, 33–34. 44  Trevor Paglen, “Art as Evidence,” Transmediale, January 30, 2014, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, www.youtube.com/watch?vSDxue3jGAug, accessed November 12, 2019. 45  Birchall, 34. 46  See, for example, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004; and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Evidence of Film. 47  Birchall, 44.

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exist. Just because not even a blurry, urgently out-of-focus photo can be obtained to document their reality does not mean that there are not in fact many more sites, spaces, and phenomena of the black world out there. There is thus a shadow of the unknown unknown hanging over Paglen’s photos. Their hazy yet torpidly inquisitive gaze promulgates an ethics of intrusion, a political-epistemological perseverance that aims to incite an alternative hermeneutics built, perhaps paradoxically, on a foundation of opacity. Earlier we have seen that Akomfrah’s work attains a level of opacity that chimes with Glissant’s philosophy of alterity, in that his poetics becomes a bulwark against epistemic attempts to reduce the complexity and fundamental unknowability of experience. Paglen’s aesthetics of opacity is of a different kind; where Glissant in a sense worries about too much representation, Paglen’s hermeneutics of the black site implies not only that there is too little but that this insufficiency itself needs to be given a form.

CHAPTER 8

Faceless, Nameless: Zach Blas

In the research for this book, the aesthetics of opacity has for the most part been located in various screen media. But the phenomenologically indistinct is not exclusively a feature of cinema, video, television, or contemporary art—or of sound and writing—but appears in the extra-textual world, too. A fairly pervasive site for displays of opacity is the face. From the niqab and the burqa to Anonymous’s Guy Fawkes disguises, Antifa’s black mask, and the KKK hoods, the veiling of the human face represents a culturally diverse practice that has confidentiality as its aim and opacity as its method.1 During the events in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, the New  York City Police Department revived an 1845 law that prohibits masked assemblies in public spaces. Some of the jailed Occupy protesters, furthermore, had to agree to iris scans, their biometric data thus being harvested even though they had not been convicted of or charged with any crime. What was all this anxiety on part of the state about? The artist and writer Zach Blas relates it to what he dubs “‘global face culture,’” explained as “obsessive and paranoid impulses to know, capture, calculate, categorize, and standardize human faces.”2 Something akin to a new 1  For the significance of concealment for such movements, see, for instance, B. ‘Butch’ Mendoza, Antifa Book of Practical Disguise#RESIST, Steel Springs Press, 2015; for a visual representation of Anonymous, see also Anthony Tafuro, Anonymous Million Masks, Brooklyn: Powerhouse Books, 2018. See also Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, New York: Verso, 2015. 2  Zach Blas, “Escaping the Face: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Facial Weaponization Suite,” NMC: Journal of the New Media Caucus, 9.2 (2013), http://median.newmediacau-

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­ cular regime, this rapidly escalating culture encompasses measures such o as the application of biometric technology for visas and international travel, the extensive deployment of surveillance cameras in metropolitan clusters, individualized consumer marketing, and social media applications for facial authentication. These technologies, Blas suggests, transform our conception of the face. While there is certainly some merit to the idea that the human face was reinvented by that emblematic machine of late modernity, the cinema, it has also been considered unique and untranslatable.3 In the age of operative forms of visuality, however, the face has been turned into “a mode of governance, a quantitative code, template, and standardized form of measure and management.”4 In short, the transecting interests of the state, the military, and commercial enterprises are mobilizing to transparenticize the face. Attempts by protestors and other groups to respond to and oppose this biopolitical governmentality are numerous, and in the post-Arab spring climate of resistance issues of free speech, rights to assembly, visibility, and representation blend into one another. In December 2012, for example, 40,000 masked activists marched through cities in Chiapas under the auspices of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. In the art world, too, efforts have been made to address this new optical world order, and Blas himself has contributed work informed by a principle of critical opacity. His Facial Weaponization Suite (2011–2014) opposes the practice of biometric facial recognition by producing so-called collective masks. From the amassed facial data of several participants the work generates opaque masks that modern facial recognition technology is unable to read. This aesthetics of illegibility in effect performs Chamoiseau’s aspiration for a poetic approach somehow capable of political intervention, as the art project sutures its technique powerfully to pressing problems involving race, sexuality, and immigration. Fag Face, one of the masks that has received particular attention, has been assembled from the biometric information of the faces of homosexual men, as a riposte to scientific studies that connect the identification of sexual orientation to facial recognition technologies. Another mask contends with legislation passed in France in 2010 banning the use of face-covering outfits, such as the niqab, in public cus.org/caa-conference-edition-2013/escaping-the-face-biometric-facial-recognition-andthe-facial-weaponization-suite/, accessed December 8, 2017. 3  See Noa Steimatsky, The Face on Film, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 4  Ibid.

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spaces. Blas’s mask, one could infer, interrogates the legitimacy of urging what might be seen as a strident form of visibility. Yet another mask engages with the notion of blackness, providing a discursive site upon which three different topics converge: the predilection for the color black in activist aesthetics, the symbolic function of black as that which eclipses information (as in redacted documents), and the failure of biometric equipment to sense dark skin (Fig. 8.1). The practices both in and beyond the art of concealment, secrecy, and defacement have previously been considered as a kind of negative aesthetics, notably in the work of Michael Taussig.5 In his art making as well as in his writing, Blas explores the broader ethico-political ramifications of conscripting opacity as a medium of resistance: one can claim that political desires abound in protest today that stress tactics of escaping forms of recognition-control by abandoning, devisualizing, and defacing the face, becoming faceless through masking actions that mutate

Fig. 8.1  Photo from Facial Weaponization Suite (Zach Blas) 5  See Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

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the face into something else entirely. Importantly, while acts of defacement are about a certain kind of political refusal and imperceptibility, they are equally concerned with hypervisible collective transformation […] As the face becomes a site of ever increasing control and governance, new ethical relations to the face are emerging that embrace defacement and escape, not necessarily mutual recognition but collective transformation that is both anarchic and commonizing. Today, the mask is the most popular implementation of defacement, a celebration of refusal and transformation.6

Here, Blas seems to suggest that the various processes of defacement—in effect, an aesthetics of opacity—enable “new ethical relations” to emerge, relations that contradict the disembodiment and objectification that are the outcome of biometric technologies. A work such as Facial Weaponization Suite, I would argue, indicates that the phenomenologically indistinct is ultimately preferable to the reductiveness of the “identity-­ industrial complex,” in which identity is downgraded to data and capitalized.7 It is not only that biometrics unscrupulously oversimplifies the corporeal complexity of the individual but also that it, as Shoshana Amielle Magnet has pointed out, exhibits a built-in prejudice, evident, for instance, in the system’s frequent inability to scan the hands of Asian women.8 In the aforementioned project Facial Weaponization Suite, Blas intervenes in the debate about biometric methods of identification by constructing a series of amorphous masks drawn from the facial information of a number of subjects. As a result of this process, the masks—which allude to questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and nationalism— cannot be perceived as human faces by facial recognition technologies. Reminiscent of the ways in which various social movements deploy masks as a form of political communication, Blas’s works could be seen both as a critique of the reduction of the human to data and as an embrace of an ethics of non-transparency. Taking Blas’s project as its point of departure, this chapter argues that the political methodologies of defacement evident in the work of Blas and others represent yet another instantiation of a poetics of opacity, one that speaks directly to some of the current  Blas, “Escaping the Face.”  Simone Browne, “Digital Epidermalization: Race, Identity, and Biometrics,” Critical Sociology, 36.1 (2010): 133. 8  Shoshana Amielle Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011, 2. 6 7

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challenges facing global migration and values associated with cosmopolitanism. Glissant’s work on cultural difference, colonialism, history, and geography is helpful also in this context, as it produces an understanding of ethical relationships based on his model of opacity. Glissant’s philosophy rejects essentialism and universality and focuses instead on particularity and diversity. His position on ethics revolves around the recognition that opacity, for the non-Western subject, functions as a defense mechanism against the objectifying gaze of the other. Clarity is always on the side of colonial power, but history can never be transparent, and the problem with clarity is that it inevitably translates (and thus diminishes) the difference of the other into an already known cache of knowledge. To insist on opacity is then to resist the process of reducing the other to some pseudo-­ universal category. What the concept of opacity fundamentally contests is the assumption that one has a right to understand the other. Glissant instead advocates an intersubjective, participatory, and intuitive form of understanding capable of grasping its own limitations. After discussing Glissant’s philosophy, the chapter turns to consider both how the notion of opacity might fruitfully inform a rethinking of the value of transparency in contemporary media culture and how artists might use a poetics of opacity as a tool of political resistance. As we have seen in a previous chapter, in the work of Glissant and some of his Antillean colleagues, opacity as a theoretical concept is closely aligned with a method of thick description known as épaisseur and with what Patrick Chamoiseau terms “the poetic approach.” This method, or stance, is at least potentially capable of functioning as a tool of political resistance against the encroachment of neo-imperialism and global capitalism. Chamoiseau’s support of this approach, while evidently rooted in the postcolonial tradition, also speaks to broader contemporary issues that have arisen with the emergence of what Clare Birchall calls the “datatariat,” understood as “a ‘class’ encouraged to make use of and be used as data; a mass connected through data access, production, accumulation, and exploitation.”9 “For the datatariat,” Birchall claims, data constitute “the prime currency, vector, commodity, lifeblood.”10 The poetic approach, to Chamoiseau, is a way of mobilizing against a myopic economic logic and the management of life by data. “We’re facing a ­rationality 9  Clare Birchall, “Aesthetics of the Secret,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/ Politics, 83 (2014): 25–46; 26. 10  Ibid.

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that has forgotten about the poetic,” Chamoiseau complains, “[w]hat Glissant and I have tried to do in most of our work is to reinstate the forgotten, poetic dimension of the political… that which organizes the city of men and allows peoples to come into their own.”11 We might consider the poetic as a particular vernacular within whose remit the thickness of experience is conveyed. The Caribbean philosophers’ use of the term épaisseur certainly evokes the ethnographic concept of thick description, associated with Gilbert Ryle and popularized by Clifford Geertz, who in a key text on the subject defines the objective of anthropology as “the enlargement of the universe of human discourse.”12 Here, I would like to suggest that épaisseur as both a hermeneutic and communicative practice would seem to complement the deployment of opacity in Glissant’s and Chamoiseau’s thinking. In the context of their work, opacity is not principally about uncommunicativeness or the deliberate withholding or vitiation of information. It is, rather, an approach, an attitude—and possibly even an aesthetics—that seeks to safeguard a subject or a phenomenon against the threat of reducibility. On this view, unknowability is preferable to essentialism. The migration of the concept of opacity from a postcolonial to a neoliberal setting has provided an opportunity for reexamining its critical potential. For contemporary technocratic cultures, transparency appears to be so much of an ideal that not only open-endedness and ambiguity but even the practices of reading and interpretation themselves have become disagreeable to the system. There is also a sense in which the neoliberal governance of populations by transparency is perceived as apolitical management, thus dubiously muddling the boundary between politics and administration. In this scenario, the purview of opacity extends beyond the protection of the irreducibility of the colonial subject to encompass every individual confronted with new regimes of monitoring, surveillance, and observability or with what I above have termed the “ominous politics of luminosity.”13 In 24/7, to return again to Crary’s book, he discusses these regimes in terms of their “institutional intolerance of whatever obscures or prevents an instrumentalized and unending condition of 11  Patrick Chamoiseau as quoted and translated by Nicole Simek, “Stubborn Shadows,” symploke, 23.1–2 (2015): 363–373; 367. 12  Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973, 14. 13  See page X above.

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visibility.”14 On Crary’s reading, we recall, neoliberal politics wages a war against what he calls “the otherness that is the motor of historical change.”15 Such a dismal diagnosis implies that transparency can be an oppressive force, suggesting as its unsurprising antithesis opacity. But, as Nicole Simek has argued, to endow the concept with a uniquely transgressive power would be a mistake; in this matter, too, the point is perhaps not so much what opacity really is as how it materializes.16 There is not necessarily anything intrinsically seditious or progressive about, for instance, opaque images. We are likewise wrong to assume that opacity can only mean total impenetrability. Wisely, Simek ties the notion of the opaque to reading as a political act, to the possibilities for discernment that reading provides. This is how Simek encourages us to consider the notion of opacity: the idea of a stubborn density, of something layered, something partially penetrable but with a mind of its own, seems to me a more productive way of thinking about opacity, a more productive way of harnessing its power of critique its ability to shift assumptions and feelings so that new modes of relating, new criteria of evaluation can be developed.17

For Simek, reading as a cultural practice represents exposure to “conflict and ambiguity as a facet of social interaction,” whereas non-reading entails “a faith in the evacuation of conflict and opacity altogether through technical means.”18 The basic conflict drawn up here seems to be the one between the transparency of big data and the complexity of hermeneutic interpretation. Several contemporary painters, photographers, filmmakers, and media artists participate in aesthetic practices that all in different ways confront and critique the “thin description” of the datatariat. In what follows, I want to draw attention to the work of the aforementioned Blas as well as to that of Adam Harvey, Leo Selvaggio, and Sterling Crispin, who share a common interest in the construction of anti-facial recognition masks. Used in CCTV cameras throughout urban spaces, in subways and airports, in drones, as well as for automatic number plate detection, facial  Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, London: Verso, 2013, 9.  Ibid. 16  Simek, 372. 17  Ibid. 18  Ibid. 14 15

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recognition technology facilitates the algorithmic identification of faces. It is also found in Facebook’s photo-tagging service. The thing about this kind of technology is that its mechanisms remain invisible. Algorithmic operations compute data at an astonishing speed, rendering the phenomena unobservable and thereby, as Patricia de Vries has noted, “ungraspable.”19 The relationship between the subject and technologies for data capture is oddly asymmetrical. On the one hand, facial recognition devices gather and stockpile biopolitical information about the individual; on the other, these technologies are themselves phenomenologically unavailable to us. This imbalance generates a particular form of unease concerning the integrity of the self in the face of data capture technologies. The datafied, information-driven regime of which facial recognition tools are a symptom could be seen as one materialization of what Gilles Deleuze calls societies of control, embodied by the corporation and replacing what Michel Foucault terms disciplinary societies, embodied by institutions like the school, the factory, and the prison. In his “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Deleuze works through a set of oppositions that differentiate the former from the latter. Where disciplinary societies are marked by enclosures, machines, numbers, products, and labor, societies of control are defined by dispersion, computers, code, services, and debt. But most pertinent to the current issue, Deleuze’s societies of control turn individuals into “masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’.”20 In short, societies of control essentially commodify identity and reduce subjectivity to data.21 For some critics and artists, resisting the new control regimes entails imaginative acts of concealment and escape. The process of making visible that undergirds data capture technology motivates various methods of disappearance as well as enactments of invisibility. Adam Harvey’s project CV Dazzle (2010) makes use of computer vision camouflage inspired by the so-called dazzle painting applied to World War I warships to dodge surveillance systems. The object is not to hide but rather to baffle the 19   Patricia de Vries, “Dazzles, Decoys, and Deities: The Janus Face of Anti-Facial Recognition Masks,” Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, 8.1 (2017): 72–86. 20  Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, 59: 1992, 3–7; 5. 21  For a comprehensive study of the colonization of contemporary life by economical models under neoliberalism, see Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. See also Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, London: Profile Books, 2019.

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software so that it fails to read a face. In his CV Dazzle Workshop, Harvey invites the patrons to design and try out their own maquillage and hairstyles, resulting in the manufacture of a kind of negative face. A different aesthetics informs the masks created by Leo Selvaggio for his URME project (2014), which lets users wear a 3D-printed hard resin prosthetic of the artist’s face so that whenever they are exposed to facial recognition software their face gets identified as that of Selvaggio himself, thus concealing their own identities from the cameras. Sterling Crispin’s Data-Masks series (2013–2015) crafts face masks from reverse engineering facial detection algorithms. The human-like visages that form the basis of the 3D-printed masks are generated by the operations of the algorithms, and the artist has described these masks as “animistic deities brought out of the algorithmic-­ spirit-­world of the machine.”22 Crispin’s aim is to make tangible the procedures of a technological other that reads us and configures our identity according to its own parameters.23 His Data-Masks undertaking inverts the relationship alluded to above between facial recognition systems and the individual, in that the masks make visible certain components of the “invisible power structures” that govern the technology while at the same time hiding the identity of the person who wears them.24 A similar intention characterizes the work of Blas, which could be understood as his response to the possible threat facial recognition technologies pose with regard to reproducing the odious pseudoscientific practices of the nineteenth century. Like Crispin, Blas is committed to visualizing how data capture systems scan human faces and to thwarting their computation by manufacturing face masks that are unreadable to the technology. The masks that comprise his Facial Weaponization Suite are nebulous objects devised to safeguard the self against the perils of informatics visibility and total quantification, which both are phenomena that crush alterity and reduce the self to mere data.25 A series of community workshops geared toward LGBT groups and other minorities also form part of the Facial Weaponization Suite project, and the activist underpinnings of all these works are clear enough. The masks are made in order to be worn by protesters occasionally taking part 22  Sterling Crispin, “Data-Masks (Series),” http://sterlingcrispin.com/data-masks.html, accessed October 9, 2018. 23  Ibid. 24  Ibid. 25  de Vries, 75, 78.

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in acts of civil disobedience. In this, artists like Blas, Crispin, Selvaggio, and Harvey inscribe themselves into a larger iconoclastic tradition of dissenters like the Zapatistas, Anonymous, and Pussy Riot. The masks are one instantiation of what de Vries calls “sociotechnical imaginaries,” which we might comprehend as critical and creative interpolations, performances, or mediations that reconfigure the fraught territory between emergent technologies and the social sphere.26 They partake in what Alexander Galloway sees as “the politicization of absence- and presence-­ oriented themes such as invisibility, opacity, and anonymity, or the relationship between identification and legibility, or the tactics of nonexistence and disappearance.”27 What seems at stake for artists-activists like Blas is nothing less than the political-legal state as well as the ontological status of the human itself, which as a result of smart technologies, artificial intelligence, and robotics have arrived at a point of existential crisis. While de Vries is ultimately skeptical of projects like Data-Masks and Facial Weaponization Suite, claiming that the artists merely replicate the fallacious binary logic of human and machine that they wanted to suspend, the masks nonetheless enact a form of identity revision that challenges the classificatory regimes of technological rationality and neoliberal capitalism. Ethnicity, race, and gender get largely obfuscated by the wearing of these masks, which represent a mode of unidentifiability and unrecognizability that chimes with Glissant’s and Chamoiseau’s belief in opacity as an instrument of political and existential emancipation. What I also want to suggest is that the performance of opacity that the face masks of Blas, Selvaggio, Harvey, and Crispin enable could also be seen as an expression of a cosmopolitan ethics. The emphasis on global citizenship that threads through philosophies of cosmopolitanism from Diogenes of Sinope and St. Paul to the Immanuel Kant of Perpetual Peace (1795) and onto modern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Kwame Anthony Appiah presupposes a universal morality and equality that in order to work has to be, in a metaphorical sense, faceless. But the larger point that I would like to make here involves a different facet of the notion of cosmopolitanism, one that surfaces in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and, later, in that of Paul Gilroy. As I have shown elsewhere, Levinas’s ethics—grounded in the irreducibility and vulnerability of the  de Vries, 73.  Alexander Galloway, “Black Box Black Bloc,” in Critical Digital Studies: A Reader, eds. Arthur Kroker & Marilouise Kroker, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, 224. 26 27

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Other and the demands that this makes on the subject—shares a close affinity with Glissant’s poetics of opacity.28 For both Levinas and Glissant, in our encounter with the Other, her alterity needs to be preserved; for the latter, as we have seen, this becomes possible through techniques of opacity and thick description. In his text “The Planet,” Paul Gilroy argues that exposure to Otherness is essential to the task of fostering the value of diversity. For him, a commitment to cosmopolitanism thus entails a “methodical cultivation of a degree of estrangement from one’s own culture and history.”29 The simultaneous spectacle and opacity of the face masks visualize at once the alterity and universality of the self; in the words of Appiah, they are “universality plus difference.”30 In the remainder of this chapter I want to examine more closely how the staging of opacity through the use of facemasks disrupts both the principles of neoliberal governance and the intransigent subscription to the techniques of datafication that tends to accompany it. But in order to grasp the wider context for this disruption, it is apposite first to assess the nature of the philosophy of devaluation that undergirds neoliberal doctrine. As Wendy Brown has compellingly argued, neoliberalism is something more than just a particular rationale for conducting economic affairs, routinely associated with deregulation, privatization, free markets, tax reduction, and cuts in welfare. In addition, and far more ominously, it also represents “a normative order of reason” that “configures all aspects of existence in economic terms.”31 This order, which in its fundamental mode of operation resembles a Foucauldian regime, poses a threat to the conditions of democracy itself, which is an overarching concern in Brown’s research. When “all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics,” she writes, the political essence of the democratic is evacuated and supplanted by an economic one.32 One telling indication of this shift, for Brown, is Obama’s State of the Union speech in January 2013, in which the president in no uncertain terms conveyed 28   See Asbjørn Grønstad, Film and the Ethical Imagination, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 200. 29  Paul Gilroy, “The Planet,” After Empire: Multiculture or Postcolonial Melancholia, London: Routledge, 2004, 75. 30  Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Education for Global Citizenship,” Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 107.1 (2008): 83–99. 31  Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2015, 10; 17. 32  Ibid., 10.

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that the primary aim of his administration was economic growth and that democratic ideals such as liberty and equality were simply means toward the attainment of that objective. The repercussions of such a transference of power from the political to the economic are potentially severe. At stake is the sheer capacity to imagine a specific content for democratic institutions in the future. For all its plasticity and historically variable appearances, what epitomizes neoliberalism is its anti-Keynesianism and its construal of the individual and the state on the model of the corporation. Like the firm, the individual is seen as a project to be managed for the optimalization of capital value. What Koray Caliskan and Michel Callon term “economization” have momentous consequences for present-day democracies.33 As delineated by Brown, these are rising inequality (documented in research by Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, Amartya Sen, Robert Reich, and others); monetization of sectors considered to be external to the logic of the Market, such as education and health care; corporatization of the state; and, finally, global financial volatility. Whether intended or not, the ideology of reduction that vitally informs the neoliberal regime is anathema to realizing the possibilities of the human, which, in the words of Brown, are attainable “not through” but “beyond” the realm of the economic. An ideological order founded on the omnipotence of the economic has no use for any notion of the social,34 but it requires a particular kind of governance, one that subscribes to the same totalitarian imaginary problematized by Crary as well as to the “soft power” intrinsic to Deleuze’s societies of control. Central to this managerial logic are the tangled techniques of transparency, quantification, and datafication, practices designed to root out forces of complexity and uncertainty; in short, anything that might pose a threat to and undermine the depthlessness of neoliberalism’s economic regime. As a classificatory enterprise, the computationally enabled detection of faces utilized in CCTV and other surveillance systems, as well as in a range of social media and smartphone applications, constitutes just such a practice of quantitative measurement, devised to translate particularity into pre-existing taxonomies. While critics have been 33  Koray Caliskan and Michel Callon, “Economization, Part 1: Shifting Attention from the Economy Towards Processes of Economization,” Economy and Society, 38.3 (2009): 369–398. 34  See Wendy Brown, “The Big Picture: Defending Society,” Public Books, October 10, 2017, https://www.publicbooks.org/the-big-picture-defending-society/, accessed January 17, 2019.

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quick to point out the similarity of such systems of biopolitical cataloguing to the disgraced science of physiognomy,35 the fact remains that some computational technologies (e.g., Affectiva) for facial detection have adopted the historically contingent constellation of basic emotions originally put forward by Charles Darwin.36 But the concern over facial recognition systems goes deeper, one problem being that the technology is grounded in a set of presuppositions that have proven dubious, if not untenable. The digital coding of both facial identity and emotion is fraught with equivocality, but the latter is particularly tentative because uncertainties exist already on a semantic, pre-computational level and, not the least, because the coded image is ill equipped to register the temporal dimension of the human face as an expressive medium. As communication scholars Thomas Bjørnsten and Mette-Marie Sørensen point out, technologies such as Affectiva rely on a model which presumes that emotions are “traceable as fixed points in the face,” not “socially contingent and relational.”37 The human face is subject to the variabilities of a continuous temporal unfolding, and hence its expressive qualities cannot be adequately captured by inert images. Even leaving aside the questionable assumption that the site of emotion is the face rather than the body, the implicit premise underlying facial recognition technology that the face possesses an invariable, static identity seems rather infelicitous. Although the body is an entity from which various data can be extracted effortlessly, this does not mean that the body is isomorphic with these data.38 Besides duration, another aspect of the face not easily acquirable for automated detection systems is its cultural sculpting. For the Deleuze and

35  See, for instance, Joseph Pugliese, Biometrics: Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics, New York: Routledge, 2010, and Shoshana Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Consult also Zach Blas, “Informatic Opacity,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, 9 (2014), http://www.joaap. org/issue9/zachblas.htm, accessed January 21, 2019. 36  Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals [1872], Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. 37  Thomas Bøgevald Bjørnsten and Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen, “Uncertainties of Facial Emotion Recognition Technologies and the Automation of Emotional Labour,” Digital Creativity, 28.4 (2017): 297–307; 299. 38  For another illuminating study of the biopolitical management of the individual and its rendering of people into categories, see also Jenny Edkins, Missing: Persons and Politics, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011.

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Guattari of A Thousand Plateaus, the face is nothing if not political,39 and in his magisterial work on the twin histories of the face and the mask, art historian Hans Belting contends that the face “is just as much the expression that we give it as it is the result of evolution.”40 Through this expressivity, fueled in part by paint, make-up, tattoos, glasses, piercings, veils, and various surgical procedures, the face becomes something malleable, an unfinished project. For Belting, the mask and its attendant cultural histories also form part of the history of the face, which in turn trails the anthropological history of media.41 Seen in this context, the different masks that Blas, Crispin, Selvaggio, and Harvey engineer etch themselves into a long tradition of regarding the mask as an intrinsic part of the concept of the face, a proxy or facsimile that gradually became a disguise. But then again, in relation to the subject’s interiority, the face is always also a mask. What is more, the obsession with facial modification through biomedical techniques is revealing of the extent to which the face is a cultural object defined by plasticity rather than just a biological entity with fixed features easily scanned by facial detection systems.42 From the Facial Action Coding Systems developed by Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen in the late 1970s to the Affdex apps, the method of managing the human face as an unvarying image composed of distinctive segments and points brushes up against a number of problems, then. Not only is the face subject to the changes that inevitably occur in durative conditions—and not only are the emotions that manifest themselves through it far from straightforwardly interpretable—but it is also powerfully shaped by cultural affects that are too convoluted for machine-based analysis. But even this is not the whole story. An image is never completely isomorphic with the pre-photographic object, no matter how high the resolution. A face, Agamben writes, is the site of a profound openness.43 39  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone Press, 1987. See also Jenny Edkins, Face Politics, London: Routledge 2015, and Heather Laine Talley, Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance, New York: New York University Press, 2014. 40  Hans Belting, Face and Mask: A Double History, trans. Thomas S.  Hansen & Abby J. Hansen, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017, 3. 41  Ibid., 6; 1. 42   Heather Laine Talley, Saving Face: Disfigurement and the Politics of Appearance, New York: New York University Press, 2014. 43  Giorgio Agamben, “The Face,” Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti & Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000, 98.

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In a way, it is a representation even before it is being represented in any given medium. But when this site becomes an image, if anything its complexity deepens. As Paul Coates observes, the filmic face is self-referential; it becomes “a surface haunted by intimations of concealment, interiority and exteriority.”44 Such a surface forms a zone of indetermination. However, this is not how the modern, digital image has come to be seen. On the contrary, as the editors of a special issue of the journal Digital Creativity hold, “discursive and practical employments of images today can very often be seen as affirming and reaffirming certainty via marked returns to emphasizing high resolution, sharpness, clarity and realistic representation.”45 But as easily manipulable digital images proliferate, so does their liability. The apparent surge in technologically enhanced clarity is offset by a correlated intensification of murky images, which introduce a certain level of “representational undecidability.”46 These “uncertain images,” which is the term the aforementioned editors use to describe current forms of opacity, shape visual culture on many levels: they influence the production of knowledge, institute themselves into various power relations, reshuffle ethical values, and function as arbiters in all kinds of socially and politically precarious contexts. The human face is also a specimen of the uncertain image. Its emotional content never fully available to linguistic paraphrase, as Béla Balázs notes in Visible Man, the face likewise resists the computational measurements of Affdex and similar systems.47 “We do not gain any useful interpretation of the actual face,” Bjørnsten and Sørensen state, “but rather the result of an algorithmic idea of mapped features that align with metrics optimized for efficient calculations.”48 But if the face is already touched by an untranslatable inscrutability, are not the contestatory masks of Blas, Crispin, Harvey, Selvaggio, and others redundant or even gratuitous? Here, I want to argue that the masks might not only be tasked with preventing identification, but that another purpose is to trouble the flagrant reductionism inherent in facial recognition systems. The kind of reading this technology promulgates is shallow and based on correspondences of  Paul Coates, Screening the Face, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 2.  Ulrik Ekman, Daniela Agostinho, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup & Kristin Veel, “The Uncertainty of the Uncertain Image,” Digital Creativity, 28.4 (2017): 255–264; 255. 46  Ibid. 47  Béla Balázs, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film, ed. Erica Carter, trans. Rodney Livingstone, New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. 48  Bjørnsten & Sørensen, 306. 44 45

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an exterior nature. It records and registers surface information; data that not only capture a mere fraction of the subject’s identity but which could also potentially be misleading when it comes to suggesting or relaying information of a more inferential kind. In short, facial detection practices generate information without knowledge. Such systems betray a faith in the transparency of data so blind that it ironically threatens to stifle their informational value. The reliance on analogical correspondences, on matching identities, breeds only repetition, the dull reoccurrence of the same. Works like Data-Masks, CV Dazzle, Facial Weaponization Suite, and the URME project, in contradistinction, seem related to what Janet Wolff has called the aesthetics of uncertainty, art whose deliberate or unintentional opacities massage our imagination in productive ways.49 Pondering the function and meanings of the masks that Blas, Crispin, and the others manufacture, I was reminded of the existence of other masks; more specifically, my own. It was my oldest daughter who made them for me. The first one was my Snapchat avatar. She thought my account looked a little slipshod without one, so she constructed a face for me. There was some resemblance there. She got my hairstyle just about right, although the color was a tad darker. Against the square, yellow, and punctured Snapchat background, my new face stared back at me with vivid yet ultimately expressionless blue eyes. She was eleven or twelve at the time, and I thought she did a great job. For Christmas a year or two later, she gave me a new face, this time an analog one. It was a mask made of clay, a sturdy and fairly heavy object the crafting of which seemed to have required a certain level of effort and care. I noticed right away that the color of the hair and the eyebrows was almost exactly the same as that of my Snapchat avatar. My ceramic lips were a bright burgundy, my somewhat protruding eyes a severe blue. If a particular look could be extrapolated from my handcrafted countenance, I would say it was one of minor worry. Delighted to receive a present that was not, say, a tie, but instead something so endearingly homespun, I still wondered what to do with it. So I brought it to my office. I tried wearing it, my new face, but it was not quite compatible, size-wise. If it were to replace my old face, I would look chronically concerned. Being a solid, tree-dimensional object, my new mask occasioned a meditation upon the relationship between, on the one hand, opacity and, on the other, the density and tactility of things. Unlike screen images, the  Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

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mask is not a surface. It has a certain volume. There is a force of resistance embedded within its materiality. If I wore it in real life, it would serve as a disguise; an unchanging, motionless, uncommunicative face, a frozen grimace negating all transparency. Although entirely different media, there is a peculiar equivalence between ceramic masks and photography. Both embalm the face. Both represent stasis. Belting talks about this relationship in the context of technological history: Instead of creating faces that are reproducible in the photograph with an immediacy and mechanical precision never before achieved (apparently without the intervention of the human eye), modern technology was ultimately just creating masks. As a result, the nearly obsessive invention of new image media (beginning with film) from the turn of the twentieth century on was triggered by a flight from the mask. The hope was to banish the inert mask from the moving picture. Photography had shown something that was no longer a face, but in the next moment had already become a memory in life. The so-called live image (the concept is deceptive) competed with life in the gap that photography had left behind.50

If one were to follow Belting’s argument, photography—including identificatory images—is a creator of masks. As a stasis-inducing technology, photography is naturally incapable of capturing the flow of time, the power of duration without which experience and being become impossible.51 When biopolitical governance is converting the face into “a quantitative code, template, and standardized form of measure,”52 what is being refashioned is something that in a way is already a mask. In light of such image philosophical considerations, the masks of the artists referred to above might be found to disguise something that is itself a disguise. What, then, is their real purpose? I want to suggest, first of all, that even though these artistic objects and, say, a passport photo could all conceptually be regarded as masks, they vastly differ in terms of usage. While the sole value of the latter lies in its referential and identificational function, the former’s shapeless features grant its wearer at least temporary anonymity. Put differently,  Belting, 205.  For a vivid example of the dynamics of cinematic duration and faciality, consider Abbas Kiarostami’s 2008 film Shirin, as well as my reading of it. See Asbjørn Grønstad, “Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin and the Aesthetics of Ethical Intimacy, Film Criticism, 37.2 (2012): 22–37. 52  Blas, “Escaping.” 50 51

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the photograph as a biopolitical mask arrests identity, while the facemasks release it. Secondly, the artificial masks must be understood, I would like to contend, in the context both of play and playfulness as well as of resistance and revolt. There is a hint of the carnivalesque in Selvaggio’s URME project and in Crispin’s Data-Masks, for instance, a desire to overturn social expectations about the locus of agency and the nature of the face. This ludic dimension suggests a kinship with Chamoiseau’s “poetic approach,” or épaisseur, the thickness of a heterogeneous experience of the world in which relations are always liquid and shifting.

CHAPTER 9

Sublime Static: Low

The art of masquerade explored in the previous chapter is a technique that essentially turns the face into noise. In this closing chapter, I assay a different case of aestheticized faciality, but this time with the added twist of connecting the visual with the acoustic. In Chap. 2, I noted how noise habitually is mobilized as a metaphor to describe indefinite images. While in the context of communication studies noise is seen as the unwelcome interruption of a signal, in other contexts—for instance musicology or aesthetic theory—it is regarded as an expressive device in its own right. This study has been preoccupied with the epistemologically and ethically productive uses of different kinds of visual noise. In a sense, opacity in the visual arts entails the attempt of the image to subvert its own fixity. In bringing this book to a close, I want to float the hypothesis that maybe we need to reflect a little on auditory opacity in order fully to appreciate the functions of blurry or otherwise indistinct images. I intend, in other words, to introduce a comparative perspective of sorts, not so much to present a simple analogy as to flag up the possible limits of visual opacity. If a vital purpose of the perceptually opaque is to provoke, to bewilder, and to produce a sense of cognitively fertile turmoil, the state of containment upon which the image is contingent might lessen such effects (and moving images are not much different in this respect, as they, too, are subject to the restraints of the frame). Sound, on the other hand, is dispersive, unbounded. Since anatomically we remain unequipped with the equivalent of eyelids, Christoph Cox points out, we are “forever and © The Author(s) 2020 A. S. Grønstad, Rethinking Art and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46176-8_9

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inescapably bathed in sound, immersed in it in a way that we are not immersed in a world of visible objects.”1 Sound invites a particular entanglement, which, in the case of noise, entails an encounter with opacity that conceivably is more sensorially intense than that with opaque images. In the remainder of this chapter I consider the interrelation between optical and aural modes of opacity by analyzing the hybrid aesthetics of the music album. More specifically, I shall focus on a record that addresses issues similar to some of those dealt with in the previous chapter, in particular the transformation of the face into a mask. That album, Low’s Double Negative (2018), also captures a politically pungent moment in the culture and may furthermore be read as a response to the accelerating blare of social media. My argument is that Low adopts opacity as a poetic device in the service of a particular kind of socio-aesthetic bildung. As a young child, I immersed myself in literature, cinema, and music. Album covers in particular had me transfixed.2 What fueled my interest in the form was not its iconic purchase but rather its impenetrability. Much as I admired their graphic qualities, and as much as I gained aesthetic pleasure from scrutinizing them, the covers of, say, Wish You Were Here (Pink Floyd, 1975) or Murmur (R.E.M., 1983)—which I listened to for the first time when I was five and thirteen, respectively—seemed uncommunicative or almost mischievously enigmatic. If we stop to think about it, this penchant for the ambiguous and the cryptic pertains not just to individual covers but quite possibly to the form as a whole (while there are evidently exceptions). In this, the genre—and I will purely for the sake of simplicity refer to album covers as a genre, although I do not really think they constitute one—is different from other visual forms with which they share an obvious resemblance, such as the movie poster. The latter typically features its star or stars or alternatively a key scene or motif from the film, and it rarely trades in the kind of abstruseness that often trails the music album sleeve. Starting from this observation, I would first like to suggest that the record cover is defined by some sort of dialectical tension between the music and its graphic elements or between the sound and the image. Second, I shall contend that the rhetorical figure that best encapsulates 1  Christoph Cox, “Sonic Thought,” in Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017, 99–110; 99. 2  Years later this interest resulted in an academic publication. See Coverscaping: Discovering Album Aesthetics, eds. Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2010.

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this tension is that of opacity. Third, I want to delve into the epistemological ramifications of this conceptual basis by examining more closely the work of the American indie-rock band Low, in particular their aforementioned 2018 release Double Negative, an uncompromisingly experimental work teeming with brutal noise and sublime static. Below I discuss the album’s graphic and sonic affordances in terms of a poetics of opacity. I also consider the band’s extensive catalogue to ask what kind of narrative might be discernible from the evolution of its album covers, both alone and in conjunction with the music. When Double Negative was released on Sub Pop on September 14, 2018, it was hailed as “a dystopian masterpiece” and as “a scowling and shell-shocked response to Trump’s America.”3 Sharing its title with albums by the American prog-rock and jazz band The Muffins (2004) and the London punk band The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Anything (2018)—as well as artist Michael Heizer’s work of land art near Overton, Nevada (1969)—the record was generally seen as “a disquieting document of our time,” to borrow the words of another reviewer.4 This was not just due to its unusually abrasive textures but also because it promoted “nuance and uncertainty” in times characterized by a disheartening scarcity of both.5 Produced by BJ Burton, who also helmed Low’s previous album Ones and Sixes (2015), as well as Bon Iver’s explorative 22, a Million (2016), Double Negative was the culmination of some boldly innovative shows the band had performed at venues such as Amsterdam’s Westerkerk and London’s Union Chapel. The sonic experiments heard on the record are not the result of finished songs being processed or tweaked retrospectively, but are rather the product of a compositional evolution in which sketches and drafts by the band were further developed by Burton in Justin Vernon’s studio April Base in Wisconsin. The band is no stranger to the use of electronic textures, which goes back almost twenty years, to their breakthrough album Secret Name (1999). A greater presence than ever before on Ones and Sixes, electronics and noise assume such a prominent role on Double Negative that the 3  Gareth James, Album Review, Clash Magazine, September 13, 2018, https://www. clashmusic.com/reviews/low-double-negative, accessed November 26, 2019, and Rich Juzwiak, Album Review, Pitchfork, September 14, 2018, https://pitchfork.com/reviews/ albums/low-double-negative/, accessed November 26, 2019. 4  William Doyle, Album Review, The Quietus, September 28, 2018, https://thequietus. com/articles/25383-low-double-negative-review, accessed November 26, 2019. 5  Ibid.

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project easily inscribes itself into an aesthetic tradition comprising artists such as the English industrial music innovators Throbbing Gristle, the Irish noise rockers My Bloody Valentine, the Radiohead of Kid A (2000), the Canadian Walter Benjamin-quoting glitch-and post-rock artist Tim Hecker, the American avant-garde composer William Basinski, the Canadian experimental music collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor, the German multimedia artist Thomas Köner, and the Norwegian ambient music project Deathprod, just to name a few. Widely reviewed, the album has invited a plethora of colorful descriptions. The noise is “jarring,” yet also somehow “‘purifying’ of the band’s essence.”6 For some, it is “harrowing and transportive” all at once.7 On “Quorum,” the opening track, the sound supposedly emulates that of “being run over by square tires with snow chains.”8 Surging waves of static will have us “triple-­ checking [our] speakers,” writes the reviewer for Record Collector.9 The gist of the album’s reception is that the music is aggressive and the terms used to unpack it are accordingly violent. “Noise slurps and laps away at melodies with a diseased tongue,” concludes one critic.10 The melody is deliberately “[mangled],” claims another.11 Descriptors such as “damaged,” “disfigured,”12 “warped,” “decay,” “oblique,” “contorted,” “visceral,”13 “dissonance,” “distortion,”14 “degradation,”15

6  Steven Johnson, Album Review, Music OMH, September 14, 2018, https://www.musicomh.com/reviews/albums/low-double-negative, accessed November 26, 2019. 7  Ian Mathers, Album Review, Dusted, September 17, 2018, https://dustedmagazine. tumblr.com/post/178180890404/low-double-negative-sub-pop, accessed November 26, 2019. 8  See Juzwiak. 9  Mike Goldsmith, Album Review, Record Collector, 483 (2018), https://recordcollectormag.com/reviews/double-negative, accessed November 26, 2019. 10  See Juzwiak. 11  See James. 12  See Johnson. 13  See Juzwiak. 14  Spyros Stasis, “For Their 25th Anniversary Low Produce a Work of Unreal Quality in Double Negative,” PopMatters, September 11, 2018, https://www.popmatters.com/lowdouble-negative-review-2595077858.html, accessed November 26, 2019. 15  Michael Cyrs, Album Review, The 405, September 18, 2018, https://www.thefourohfive.com/music/review/review-low-maintain-their-icy-creativity-on-the-often-brilliantdouble-negative-153, accessed November 26, 2019.

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“disorienting,”16 and “alien” proliferate among the reviewers.17 To sample one of the more concise attempts to convey the flavor of the music, I would like to quote William Doyle’s piece for The Quietus: Every instrument has been abstracted almost beyond recognition, and all sounds are in messy conflict with each other. Extremities are stretched out, oscillating between claustrophobic rumble and gleaming beauty. The drop-­ outs and clicks of the album’s most intense moments are littered with cracks that let light shine through.18

In terms of acoustic audacity, then, Double Negative has rightly been saluted as a groundbreaking piece of artistic expression, arriving at a time when expectations for radical aesthetic innovation perhaps were not the highest (after all, this is the age of both sampling and the eternal reissue).19 One theme that reappears across the reviews of this album is its perceived connection to the zeitgeist. The ecological crisis, economic austerity, the rise of right-wing populist movements in the West, the chaos of the Trump administration, and a sense of general despondency—these socio-­ political circumstances shape the music, critics contend, and the corrosive sonic tapestry of the album has been largely seen as the band’s timely response to them.20 Another interpretive frame that was mobilized by some commentators is that the music’s confrontational experimentalism addressed the interminable clamor of contemporary social media. For some, Double Negative speaks to the “overstimulated” self, or the state of being ceaselessly inundated with information.21 “If ever an album was built to make a mockery of the stream once and tweet era,” one reviewer opines, “it was this.”22 The music is too intense and overwhelming to focus on anything else. A too easy interpretation of the album would be that it offers an aesthetics of decay for a decaying world. The noise, as one 16  Fraser MacIntyre, Album Review, The Skinny, September 13, 2018, https://www.theskinny.co.uk/music/reviews/albums/low-double-negative, accessed November 26, 2019. 17  Mark Deming, Album Review, AllMusic, September 14, 2018, https://www.allmusic. com/album/double-negative-mw0003197435, accessed November 2019. 18  See Doyle. 19  For more on this, consider Mark Fisher’s observation that after the turn of the millennium the ability of electronic music to be innovative and generate new sounds dried up. See Fisher, “Hauntology,” 16. 20  See, for instance, Beaumont-Thomas. 21  See MacIntyre. 22  See James.

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critic claims, “no longer underpins the song—it is the song.”23 While it does not seem unlikely that the record does in fact make sense as a rejoinder to a geopolitical moment fraught with dystopian overtones, the observation posits a relationship between work and context that is too simple, or mechanical. A work such as Double Negative is fundamentally generative rather than mimetic. The album might have noise “coming out of its wounds,” but we should understand this noise not as an effort to represent the havoc out “there,” in the world, but rather as a creative force that serves other and eminently post-representational functions.24 Noise speaks the language of opacity. It is not at all random; on the contrary, this is aesthetically processed noise, which, evidently, begs the question if perhaps we should call it something else. As signposted by its title, Double Negative is a kind of protest music, albeit markedly different from, say, Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” (1963), Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1970), Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” (1973), or Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” (1992). It is also possible to argue that Low’s aesthetic project was an adversarial one right from the start. With its drone minimalism and methodical patience—traits that would become instantly illustrative of the band’s poetics—their first album I Could Live in Hope was released on the Vernon Yard label in the middle of the grunge era, in February 1994, less than two months prior to the death of Kurt Cobain.25 While probably indebted stylistically to the early sound of the Canadian band the Cowboy Junkies (whose debut Whites Off Earth Now!! was released by the Latent label in the fall of 1986)—this is my own conjecture, by the way—the austere, reverent slowness exhibited on that record was light years away from the popular music of its time and pushed the envelope of what rock and roll could be. It was as if their aesthetic of subtraction was informed by a line from the record’s third track “Cut;” “get[s] rid of things that don’t matter.” Even the cryptic and mostly monosyllabic song titles adhere to a minimalist persuasion: “Words,”

 See Goldsmith  See Juzwiak. 25  I Could Live in Hope is of course seen as one of the albums that were key in ushering in the so-called “slowcore” genre of alternative rock, which comprise artists such as Codeine, Red House Painters, Bedhead, and Blue Tile Lounge. The members of Low appear to disapprove of this moniker and I refrain from using the concept here. 23 24

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“Fear,” “Slide,” “Sea,” and “Rope,” to name a few.26 By the time they get to Double Negative, almost a quarter century after I Could Live in Hope, the words are frequently difficult to discern, due to the heavily processed vocal and the churning noise by which it is enfolded. The verbal content of “Tempest,” for instance, is practically impossible to make out; maybe as listeners we are supposed to think that the message is just too excruciating to be properly enunciated. There are however clues in the lyrics that substantiate the impression that Double Negative is a protest record. “Quorum,” the opening track, seems to hint at the 2016 US presidential election and the defects of the electoral college system. The third song, “Fly,” possibly alludes to the detrimental effects that the echo chambers of social media have on the sustainability of democratic institutions while also revolving around a desire to escape a state of permanent conflict. References to war also show up elsewhere, as in “Always trying to work it out.” The lyrics occasionally appear to evoke the ecological crisis, as on the final track, which begins with the couplet “Before it falls into total disarray/ You’ll have to learn to live a different way.” Among the reviewers, the line most readily quoted, understandably enough, is from the song “Dancing and Fire;” “It’s not the end, it’s just the end of hope.” Maybe, with Double Negative, Low is no longer able to live in hope. In what follows, I want to make a series of suggestions regarding the relationship between sound and image as well as between narrative and opacity. Throughout, my principal preoccupation will be the notion of texture, which I take to be fundamentally important in approaching what we may call a poetics of noise. First, I shall entertain two propositions involving the album cover that may appear incongruous. What if we think about the record sleeve not in terms of a supplement to the music, nor in terms of a marketization of it, but rather as a site of textual denseness, muteness, or even alterity? What if the cover image, at least in some cases, is non-representational vis-à-vis the “content” of the record, a.k.a. the music inside? The album covers of Low are quite instructive in this regard. I Could Live in Hope features a young child in the left bottom half of the image doing his homework. The rest of the cover is a nondescript 26  This penchant for very short titles continuous on later albums as well. Long Division (1995) features “Violence,” “Shame,” “Turn,” and “Stay;” The Curtain Hits the Cast (1996) has “Laugh,” “Lust,” and “Dark;” Secret Name (1999) contains “Soon,” “Immune,” and “Home;” and Things We Lost in the Fire (2001) includes “July,” “Embrace,” “Whore,” and “Closer.”

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brown-beige spread. On the cover of Long Division we are shown the loneliest light bulb anybody has ever seen. Foregrounded on the sleeve for The Curtain Hits the Cast is an equally forlorn snare drum placed against opulent yet murky drapes that, had they been red, would seem kind of Lynchian. Secret Name displays a bouquet of what appears to be asters, while Things We Lost in the Fire shows a naval map. Trust, one of the few Low covers with a human presence, exhibits a lone arm stretched downwards against a deep red background. A drawing of what looks to be huge clouds of billowing smoke rising from a lake adorns the cover of The Great Destroyer. Drums and Guns is just a white surface with some grey smudges, with the title printed in red letters below the band name. The cover of C’Mon, with its silhouetted drummer and shadowy lower third, recalls The Curtain Hits the Cast. The Jeff Tweedy-produced The Invisible Way features a painting (or, possibly, drawing) in the style of early twentieth-­ century modernism by the Duluth artist Ryan Lemahieu. Appearing on the cover of Ones and Sixes is a leafless, lonely tree against a gray setting. Finally, the cover of Double Negative contains what at first sight is a strange and not immediately identifiable object against a light pink background (more on that one a little later). Pretty consistent across this body of work is a graphic sensibility that shares the asceticism associated with Low’s songs. The figurations are often simple and somber, accentuating single objects—a tree, an arm, a drum—that are if not completely decontextualized than at least situated in a spatial environment that we recognize as desolate and spartan. While there is a certain continuity of image and sound in terms of minimalism, the album covers are mostly enigmatic and opaque, and it would certainly be a stretch to see them as a visual transcription of the style of music emerging from the grooves of the record. In

Fig. 9.1  Photo from Double Negative (Low)

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a way, the covers come across as almost demonstrably incommunicative (Fig. 9.1). What I am getting at here is that even before we encounter the squalls of noise on the record, we are immersed in a particular kind of opacity. Note that this is not tantamount to unintelligibility. Opacity does not imply the absence of meaning, or semiosis, it is in itself a form of signifying practice, more a veiling than an erasure of meaning. This brings me to my second proposition, which is that album covers—in spite of their non-­ supplementarity and intractable uncommunicativeness—might be considered as a form of skeletal narration. In his work on album covers, Robert J. Belton goes against the tradition inherited from G. E. Lessing that holds that still images can only depict things and not actions because they exist only in space and not in time. Using The Beatles’s Abbey Road (1969) and Genesis’s Nursery Cryme (1971) as examples, Belton asserts that record covers can in fact engender a narrative content as what he refers to as “emergent properties of various types of intertextual relationships.”27 Drawing on Barthesian theories of the open and interconnected text, Belton makes an embryonic yet promising attempt to consider record sleeves as the source of a narrative process. I would like to take the opportunity here briefly to elaborate upon this thesis by introducing the idea of a successive assemblage. Would it be possible to decipher a story from an analytical appraisal of all the album covers of a particular band or artist? If so, what kind of narrative would emerge from this sequential constellation? Would studying the evolution of covers across an artistic oeuvre shed new light on the overarching aesthetics of the artist in question? To sum up, what I propose here is that we may profitably consider an album cover as a relational object, as a hermeneutic node in a larger assemblage that spans the complete discography of the artist, and, for that matter, other components of their visual cache such as music videos, band photographs, and documentaries. In some—or maybe most—cases, the graphic heterogeneity of any given artist may seem bewildering; take, for example, The Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan. In other cases, say, some of the bands associated with the 4AD label (like Cocteau Twins, Pixies), the pictorial design might be quite consistent across albums. But viewing 27  Robert J. Belton, “The Narrative Potential of Album Covers,” Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: An International Journal, 2.2 (2015), http://journalonarts.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/SVACij_Vol2_No2-2015-Belton-The-narrative-potential_CS02. pdf, accessed December 6, 2019.

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album covers in this way, relationally, does not of course mean that their images become any less opaque. As for the case of Low, their covers appear to fall into the latter category, as hinted at earlier. The cryptic yet often elegant simplicity that embodies Low’s album art is very much in evidence on Double Negative. Designed by British artist Peter Liversidge, who was also responsible for the artwork on their previous album Ones and Sixes, the cover features what looks like a piece of wood with two holes in it, painted black against a soft, pinkish background. Neither the name of the band nor the title of the record appear anywhere in the image. If studied closely, one may detect tiny fissures on the object’s top horizontal edge, and its bottom edge is clearly uneven, as if it has been clumsily detached from a larger object. When I purchased my vinyl copy of the album back when it was released in September 2018, I did not understand what I was looking at. Perhaps perversely, I quickly accepted this lacuna—it was not like the shock of the music itself did not give you enough to think about—and it was only some time later when I was doing research for a book chapter on the album that I learned more about this rather enigmatic item. As an artist, Liversidge is among other things known for playing around with the notion of creativity, as well as for his “proposals.” For years his exhibitions have consisted of written proposals for artworks, objects, performances, and happenings, only some of which have materialized. Back in 2009, for instance, Liversidge mounted an exhibition named The Thrill of It All at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh (I have been unable to ascertain whether the title is an intertexual reference to the opening track on Roxy Music’s fourth album Country Life (1974), but I suppose it very well could be). As part of the process, he wrote 160 so-called Proposals to Richard and Florence Ingleby; Proposal No. 15, for example, asked to have all the Inglebys’ furniture moved to the gallery, Proposal No. 4 simply stated “to come and visit from time to time,” whereas Proposal No. 87 demanded that Liversidge drive all available rental cars in Edinburgh to Glasgow. Proposal No. 106 is probably the prototype for the tree figure that ended up on the cover of Ones and Sixes. This is the fully realized A Pair of Winter Drawings (2010), a depiction of bare trees (not unlike those on the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s sixth album Bare Trees (1972) applying black masking tape on paper. But as critic Lauren Dyer Amazeen writes, “proposals not actualized hold just as

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much importance as those that are, for they remain to be acted upon in the imagination of each viewer.”28 A collaborative artist in more ways than one, Liversidge a few years later had school children from East London make their own artworks on the theme of protest. The project became the exhibition Notes on Protesting shown at the Whitechapel Gallery between March and June of 2015. It was around this time, in 2013 to be exact, that Liversidge came to work with Low, creating the stage design and projection backdrop for the band’s shows at the Royal Festival Hall and at the Barbican Centre. Since then he has also collaborated with the Canadian band The High Plains for their album Cinderland (Kranky, 2017) and with the Portland minimalist duo David Allred and Peter Broderick for their record Find the Ways (Erased Tapes, 2017). The Whitechapel show featured slogans printed on cardboard or textiles such as “Give money to the poor,” “Clean up after you,” “Make the city calm,” and “Less trucks and cars. More chocolate bars!” As a conceptual artist, Liversidge thus has a history of generating activist or protest works, an interest that likewise flourishes on Double Negative. What its cover image shows, or at least could show, is a shattered panel from a pump organ’s foot bellows. It has also been suggested that the small holes represent two negative spaces. If so, it would be a consolidation of the album’s title, which references the syntactical phenomenon in which two forms of negation are included within the same sentence structure, as in “I cannot find my keys nowhere” or “He ain’t never told no lies.” In linguistics a double negative is considered a form of colloquial speech, if not incorrect per se than certainly a case of poor and/or confusing use of grammar. Some critics, like the reviewer for The Guardian, has interpreted the title as a knowing, self-conscious witticism on part of the band, implying that the album “[doubles] down” on the melancholy moroseness for which they have become famous.29 The choice of the pedal makes a little more sense when we know that Liversidge is in fact also a collector of objects that look like faces, be they carpets, stones, or pieces of cardboard. For the cover of Double Negative, he originally wanted to use a different object, and when he poses for a picture by a fan, it becomes clear what the thing on the cover is actually supposed to be—a means of disguise. The strange and mute device that garnishes the cover is thus a  Lauren Dyer Amazeen, “Peter Liversidge,” Artforum 48.10 (Summer 2010): 365.  See Beaumont-Thomas.

28 29

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mask, which in turn is a kind of face. But what does it mean, in the context that I have established for the album, that the first thing we see is a piece of camouflage? One direction we could go in is to explore the conceptual ramifications of the idea that the album cover is itself a mask, a screen, or masquerade, one that conceals certain things even as it reveals other things. This makes a lot of sense, since, after all, the meaning of the term that music lovers and vinyl devotee use so casually is both to protect and to hide.30 But in what remains of this talk I am more interested in Double Negative specifically and in the cover’s interaction with the sound of the album and with the themes of opacity and protest. The function of a mask is precisely to be non-transparent. It produces a form of semiotic “noise.” In an era like ours, marked as it is by geopolitical instability, civic unrest, mass demonstrations, arguments over the niqab and the burka, the rise of activist groups like Anonymous, intensified surveillance, and cutting-edge facial recognition technologies, the face has become a culturally and politically contested site, so much so that a singular aesthetic tradition—discussed in the previous chapter—has recently emerged as a response to current debates about faciality. As we have seen in Chap. 8, artists such as Crispin, Selvaggio, Harvey, and Blas have developed a variety of masks intended to jam the work of technologies of facial recognition. I want to suggest that it is into this tradition Liversidge’s image for Low inserts itself. The chunk of the foot bellows that we see on the cover of Double Negative is a highly abstracted face, a mask of noise that disrupts our reading of the image. In this sense, the cover matches the dissonance of the music, except that the album’s acoustics is confrontational, whereas the image is almost soothing in its graphic modesty. There is another connection between the sound and the image. The pre-photographic object, if it is indeed a pedal from a pump organ, is wrecked. A broken instrument seems an appropriate index for the aural environment on Double Negative, which to a certain extent is defined by distortion and noise. This aesthetic could have more than just one single purpose or implication. It may address the escalating chaos out there in 30  The meaning of the former, protection, is made abundantly clear to anyone who has had the misfortune of sorting out the mess after a lively all-night party where dozens of vinyl records were played without being put back into their respective covers. Christian Marclay’s Record Without a Cover (1985), which is exactly what the title says it is, explores what happens when the damage done to the coverless vinyl through transportation, storing, and playing becomes part of the work itself.

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the world, as many of the reviewers have picked up on. It may be aimed at the listener as a gesture of provocation—in which case it could be seen as a work of transgressive art—punishing the audience for being such capricious and easily distracted subjects in the era of music streaming and social media. The noise could furthermore be intended as a foil to the undeniable moments of piercing beauty that the album still contains. It could also simply represent experimentation for its own sake. These explanations, or hypotheses, might all be relevant frames of interpretation. But I also want to introduce one additional argument, which is that the album— and by “album” I mean both the aural, the visual, and the textual components considered as an indivisible whole—thematizes its own materiality, a critical act that serves to galvanize the opacity that is intrinsic to the artistic expression. The music, just like the album cover, is ultimately impenetrable. The modernist vanguard of the early twentieth century considered what they called “noise-sound” an unequivocally welcome development. This “revolution in music,” which they compared to the clatter of industrialization, was the subject of the painter Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noise, popularly known as The Futurist Manifesto.31 Written in Milan as a letter to his composer and musicologist friend Balilla Pratella on March 11, 1913, this was a text that argued that the tradition of classical music was obsolescent and boring—the concert halls are referred to as “hospitals for anemic sounds”—and that above everything the future of music was noise:32 Let’s walk together through a great modern capital, with the ear more attentive than the eye, and we will vary the pleasures of our sensibilities by distinguishing among the gurglings of water, air and gas inside metallic pipes, the rumblings and rattlings of engines breathing with obvious animal spirits, the rising and falling of pistons, the stridency of mechanical saws, the loud jumping of trolleys on their rails, the snapping of whips, the whipping of flags. We will have fun imagining our orchestration of department stores’ sliding doors, the hubbub of the crowds, the different roars of railroad stations, iron foundries, textile mills, printing houses, power plants and subways.33

31  Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noise (Futurist manifesto, 1913), trans. Robert Filliou, New York: Something Else Press, 1967, 5. 32  Ibid., 6. 33  Ibid., 7.

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The Manifesto embraces a hungry vitalism characteristic of its time. Noise, Russolo claims, “has the power to bring us back to life.”34 The “‘joys of noise’,” as Marie Thompson puts it, quoting the composer Henry Cowell, have been one of the dominant themes of twentieth-and twenty-first-­ century aesthetics from the typical (albeit problematic) lineage of ‘noise’ that is drawn through the Futurists, Varese, musique concrète, Cage, Dada, Fluxus, industrial music, drone, free jazz, Japanese noise music and glitch, to circuit bending, record scratching and the popular use of gain, distortion and feedback in guitar playing.35 (28)

Drawing on Michel Serres’s work on the idea of the parasite, Thompson adopts a counterview of noise that contests its status as “unwanted, undesirable or damaging sound” to regard it, instead, as an affective energy with the capacity to be imaginative rather than destructive.36 In line with Serres, Thompson argues that “the noise-parasite induces a modification within the system,” which makes it a productive agent.37 Seen from this philosophical perspective, the currents of noise on Double Negative denote what Bernd Herzogenrath calls sonic thinking.38 In the final instance, this might be what Low is about in this phase of their career, subverting the hegemony of the visual sense as the primary site of reflection, which is the lesson Hans Jonas imparts in his “The Nobility of Sight” (1954). Noise, Stephen Kennedy contends, offers an “evasive mobility” that “resists the fixing of the gaze that is characteristic of visual methods.”39 Low’s embrace of a poetics of opacity, I want finally to conclude, should be seen as a contribution to such a sonic thinking, faultlessly committed to the political potential of Russolo’s noise-sound.

 Ibid., 9.  Marie Thompson, “Productive Parasites: Thinking of Noise as Affect,” Cultural Studies Review, 18.3 (2012): 13–35; 28. 36  Ibid., 13. 37  Ibid., 18. 38  Bernd Herzogenrath, ed., Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach, New York: Bloomsbury, 2017. 39  Stephen Kennedy, Future Sounds: The Temporality of Noise, New  York: Bloomsbury, 2018, 1. 34 35



Afterword

When I first began thinking about the notion of opacity, it was against the horizon of precarious art. At the time, this was a rather unspecified, openended concept onto which several and likely disparate tracks of thought converged: the hunch that certain (roughly) contemporary works were more invested than others in addressing states of urgent political and social precarity; the perception that the concern with formal issues had become somewhat suspect; as well as art’s inherent vulnerability with regard to public neglect and the power of ephemerality and forgetfulness. Pondering the precarious in turn led me to the subject of opacity, which upon closer scrutiny yielded a link back to my earlier attempt at rereading mimetic theories in the field of film theory.1 In that work, I introduce the notion of the amimetic as a philosophical tool with which to argue against the view that the film mage—even in its most realistic guise—is a transparent reflection of a world beyond the screen. The image—dense, textured, crusty, and impermeable—is of a different order. When materially damaged, as in the work of artists such as Bill Morrison and Ernie Gehr, this density is rendered more conceptually available, more explicit. An image that threatens to fall apart conveys its status as “written forth,” as intentionally produced, better than a seamless image. As Sophie Ristelhueber puts it, “[w]hen an object is broken, it is seen better. It seems undressed.”2 In a 1 2

 See my Transfigurations, in particular chapters 1 and 2.  Sophie Ristelhueber, Operations, London: Thames & Hudson, 2009.

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certain sense, therefore, opaque images act as a figure for the constitutive opacity of all artistically manufactured images. These reflections, however, were simply the point of departure for further inquiries. What I have desired to know more about is what one might call the axiology of opaque aesthetics. What kind of knowledge does an art of opacity produce? Does it have a special affinity with ethics? Although opaque in widely different ways, do such artworks have something in common? How do we critically appraise a poetics marinated in opacity? What are some of the key examples of this tradition (if we can call it that)? Curious to trace the theoretical genealogies of the concept of opacity, I devote a full chapter to a discussion of a range of critics, from Canudo to Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marin, Lyotard, Hito Steyerl, Beugnet, and many others. A dominant interpretation of the various cases of opacity in the corpus that follows is that they can be found to interrogate the largely undisputed cultural valorization of transparency. I address the problems pertaining to a rigid adherence to transparent mediation by invoking the work of Glissant (in the realm of ethics) and Crary (in the domain of politics) especially. What I call an aesthetics of illegibility is discussed in a series of analyses of selected works by Gehr, Akomfrah, Saunders, Lynch, Paglen, Blas, and Low, all of which gravitate in one way or the other toward a reckoning with neo-positivist models. Opacity in the cinema of Gehr and Morrison is tied to the filmmakers’ ongoing examination of materiality and communicability, while in the work of Akomfrah opacity is located in the intertextual fragment understood as a particular kind of ruin. What I call the mongrel visuality of Saunders’s Passageworks reveals a form of opacity that may be understood as a graphic embodiment of the abstract notion of the secret. To show that opacity also has a narrative dimension is the aim of my analysis of an episode of Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. The last three case studies explore works that are more openly political in their orientation and composition. In my engagement with Paglen’s photographic practice, I argue that the production of opacity mainly serves to draw our attention to other and more culturally urgent opacities. The next chapter reads the artistic design of facemasks as an expression of political resistance to the proliferation of biometric technologies. In the final chapter, I ask if the presence of the frame works to domesticate the “visual noise” inside it and if media of sound are perhaps better equipped both to produce and to maintain a poetics of opacity that is more uncompromisingly transgressive.

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There are evidently many styles of opacity, and this book does not claim to be nowhere near exhaustive in its mapping of an aesthetics of illegibility. Not only are the artworks that warrant inclusion in such a project countless, but the theoretical perspectives that I nurture throughout could both be deepened and supplemented. Since I have aimed at a certain degree of comprehensiveness, several avenues of analysis are left insufficiently explored. I am confident that much remains to be said about the different ideas and concepts with which I have wrestled. The book is called Rethinking Art and Visual Culture because I insist that taking into account the relative lack of transparency in aesthetic communication represents a vital transition in our conceptualization of the materiality of image, sound, and text. We are acutely conditioned to take transparency for granted and to think about it as an ideal, something that can be tirelessly refined, and so bringing into focus the notion of the opaque requires a reorientation— both sensory and thematic—that may strike us as taxing, objectionable, or even counter-intuitive. Consider, then, this book as a preliminary broaching of the subject, one that leaves plenty of room for further investigation. In conclusion, I would like to submit three topics in particular that are in need of more sustained work. The first is the critique of visibility. Over the different chapters in this book I frequently tie opacity to neo-positivism, claiming that the former is an index of opposition to the latter. But the bulk of my analysis is committed to charting an ontology, if you will, of visual opacity, one centered by a range of case studies, and as a result my treatment of the topic of visibility/clarity/luminosity is not as extensive as I would have liked. In an era of ever more aggressive surveillance going deeper into visibility as an ideological regime is certainly an urgent matter. Secondly, my interpretation of the poetics of opacity is necessarily informed by the formal specificities of the cases with which I have engaged. Future studies that concentrate on different empirical materials are thus indispensable in order to flesh out this embryonic poetics of opacity presented here. Thirdly, while I have considered a wealth of critical sources to provide a rough outline of an intellectual history of the opaque image, this narrative is still incomplete, and more work needs to be done with respect to augmenting the present sources, pointing out latent connections between different conceptions of opacity, and recontextualizing whatever significance that I have been able to glean from the theories consulted. My hope is that this book might serve as a reference point and inspiration for ambitious future endeavors in this field.

Index1

A Abstract Expressionism, 106 Accidental gaze, 26 Acoustic, connecting with the visual, 171–184 Actors, image-making in Saunders’ work, 111–116 Aesthetic imaginary, 5–6, 59–60, 64, 72–76 Aesthetics of decay, 175–176 image-making of actors, 111–116 precarious, 10–12 of the secret, 149–150 ‘showing non-seeing,’ 138–139 Aesthetic sympathy, 117–118 Affdex apps, 166–167 Affirmational ethics, 139–140 Agamben, Giorgio, 58–59, 86–89, 166–167 Air Force Special Projects Office, 142–144

Akomfrah, John, 3–4, 6–9, 77–101, 103–104, 150–151 Album covers, 172–173, 179–182 Algorithms, 159–161 Althusser, Louis, 64–66 Amimetic, 59–61 art, 4–5 opacity, 46–48 Anecdotalism, 115–116 Angelopoulos, Theo, 86–87 The Anthropocene, 128–130 Anthropocene televisuality, 131 Apocalypticism, 131 ‘Apparatus theory,’ 34–35 Arcangel, Cory, 23–24 Archival ghosts, 77–101 Arendt, Hannah, 15–16 Art album covers, 172–173, 179–182 illegibility, 23–25 opacity in, 4–5, 23–25 Artistic practice, opacity in, 3–4

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 A. S. Grønstad, Rethinking Art and Visual Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46176-8

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INDEX

Atomic energy, 129–131 Axiographics, 26 B Balázs, Béla, 30n22, 167 Balsom, Erika, 28–32 Banu, George, 96–98 Barad, Karen, 144–145 Baron, Rebecca, 23–24 Baudelaire, Charles, 29–30, 70 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 32–33 Bazin, André, 61–62, 71–72, 140–146 Bellour, Raymond, 17, 61–62 Bellows, George Wesley, 64, 70 Belting, Hans, 45–46, 165–166, 168–169 Belton, Robert J., 179–180 Benjamin, Walter, 106–108, 141–142 Bentham, Jeremy, 96–98 Benveniste, Émile, 36–37, 39–40 Bergson, Henri, 144–145 Bergstrom, Janet, 120–122 Beshty, Walead, 147 Beugnet, Martine, 32–33 ‘Beyondness,’ 120–121, 132–133, 135–136 Big data, 159 See also The datatariat Bildung, 171–172 Bioderegulation, 15–16 Biometric technologies, 153–170 Biopolitical governmentality, 154–156 Birchall, Clare, 94, 111–112, 149–150, 157–158 Birdwise, Scott, 96–98 Bjørnsten, Thomas, 164–165, 167–168 Black art, 96–98 Black Audio Film Collective, 77–101 Black diasporic experience, 6–7

Black sites, 135–151 Blas, Zach, 3–4, 8–9, 117–118, 153–157, 162–163, 168 Boehm, Gottfried, 45 Bolden, Charles Joseph 'Buddy, 80–81 Bolter, J. David, 44–45 Bonsu, Osei, 98–100 Bordwell, David, 120–122 Boundaries of discernibility, 53–76 Bowditch, Lucy, 28–29 Brakhage, Fran, 73–74 Brecht, Berthold, 145–146 Brennan, Teresa, 15–16 Breton, André, 113–114 Brown, Wendy, 163–164 Butler, Judith, 10–11 C Cage, John, 21–23 Caliskan, Koray, 163–164 Callon, Michel, 163–164 Cameron, Allan, 28–32 Canova, Judy, 109 Canudo, Ricciotto, 28–31 Carlyle, Thomas, 94–95 Casetti, Francesco, 54–55 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 43–45, 65–68 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 92–94, 157–158 Cinécriture, 36–37, 39–40, 46–48 Cinema ‘as such,’ 5–6, 56 of awareness, 54–55 boundaries of discernibility, 53–76 Gehr, Ernie, 72 ‘imitative,’ 56 low definition, 29–32 Lynch, David, 120–121 mimetic capture, 33–34 Cinematographic vision, 32–34 Cineplastics, 132–133 Citizenship, 136–137

 INDEX 

Clarity, and opacity, 32–34 ‘Clear but confused’ perception, 32–34 Cliché verre, 104–105 Cognitive effects, opacity, 21–23 Cohen, Tom, 47–48 Communicative capitalism, 138–139 Comolli, Jean-Loui, 32–33 Concentrationary imaginary, 67–68 Contagious mediation, 133–134 Cornell, Joseph, 109 Cousin, Mark, 132–133 Cowill, Henry, 183–184 Cox, Christoph, 171–172 Crary, Jonathan, 15–16, 41–42, 94, 158–159, 164–165 Crispin, Sterling, 159–163, 168 Cubitt, Sean, 114–116 Cultural memory, 57–58 Cultural production, 141–142 D Data capture technology, 160–161 See also Biometric technologies The datatariat, 157–161 ‘Dawson flutter,’ 59 de Vries, Patricia, 159–162 Dean, Jodi, 138–139 Debord, Guy, 35–36 Debuysere, Stoffel, 81–82 Decay, aesthetics of, 175–176 Decomposing images, 55–56 Defacement, 155–156 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 142–144 Deictic visuality, 140 Deiktos, 140 Deleuze, Gilles, 70, 159–160, 164–166 Delpeut, Peter, 55–56 Denis, Claire, 120–122

191

Depth dimension, 51–52, 110–111 Deren, Maya, 23–24 Derrida, Jacques, 36–37, 76 Discernibility, boundaries of, 5–6, 53–76 Disciplinary societies, 159–160 Dissensus, 14 Distribution of the sensible, 140–141, 144–145 Doyle, William, 173–175 Dudo, Slatan, 104–105 Duras, Marguerite, 36–37 Dworkin, Craig, 21–23 E ‘Economization,’ 163–164 Einfühlung, 117–118 Ekman, Paul, 166–167 The elsewhere of the image, 86–87, 89–91 The Enlightenment, 148–149 Enunciation, 36–37 Épaisseur, 92, 157–158 Equiano, Olaudah, 98–100 Ethics of curiosity, 26 opacity and art, 21–23 politicized visibilities, 13–14 transparency and opacity, 16–19 Ex-centric cinema, 7, 88–89, 107–108 Experimentalists, 53–54 Extinction narratives, 131 F Face masks, 153–170 Faces, opacity in, 9, 153–154 Facial Action Coding Systems, 166–167 Facial authentication technology, 153–170

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INDEX

Fargier, Jean-Paul, 34–36, 38–39, 110–111 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, 104 Faure, Élie, 132–133 Fay, Jennifer, 128–130 Feminism, and gaze, 48–49 Fetveit, Arild, 27–28 Figural/figurality, 37–43, 65–66, 110–111 Film theory, 28–31, 34–52, 64–65 Foster, Hal, 57–59, 82–83 Foucault, Michel, 159–160 Frampton, Holly, 12 Free speech, 154–156 ‘Frenzy of the visible,’ 32–33 Friedrich, Caspar David, 77–78 Friesen, Wallace, 166–168 The Futurist Manifesto, 183–184 G Gaddis, William, 21–23 Galison, Peter, 144–145 Galloway, Alexander, 161–162 Gaut, Berys, 44–45 Gaze accidental, 26 Black sites, 147–148 film theory, 48–49 gender, 48–49 screen theory, 52 Geertz, Clifford, 157–158 Gehr, Ernie, 3–7, 59–61, 72–78, 106–107 Gender, and gaze, 48–49 Genet, Jean, 84–85 Giedion, Sigfried, 117–118 Gilroy, Paul, 162–163 Glissant, Édouard, 16–19, 84–85, 94–95, 150–151, 157–158, 162–163 Global citizenship, 162–163

Global face culture, 153–154 Godard, Jean-Luc, 35–36, 56–57 Goodwin, Douglas, 23–24 Gordon, Michael, 57–59 Gorky, Maxim, 128–130 Greenberg, Clement, 44–45 Grusin, Richard, 44–45 Guattari, Félix, 144–145, 165–166 Guillory, John, 53–54 Gunning, Tom, 59–61, 74–75, 103–104 Gustafsson, Henrik, 136–137, 148–149 H Hall, Stuart, 100–101 Hamlin, Janet, 24 Hammid, Alexander, 23–24 Harbord, Janet, 88–90, 107–108 Hariman, Robert, 138–139 Harvey, Adam, 159–163 Hermeneutics of the Black site, 147–148 Hermeneutics of the secret, 149–150 Herzogenrath, Bernd, 184 High definition, 31–32 Hobart, Rose, 109 Hoberman, J., 62–63 Hypermediacy, 44–45 I ‘Iconic difference,’ 45 Illegibility aesthetics of, 3 aim of this book, 1–3 art, 23–25 Image-making, of actors, 111–116 Images, as writing, 110–111 See also Cinécriture Immediacy, 44–45

 INDEX 

Indexical purchase, 140 Interstitial space in art, 106–107 Intertextuality, 6–7 Irigaray, Luce, 18 J Jacobs, Ken, 73–74 Jay, Martin, 38–40, 42–43 Jeandrée, Philipp, 138, 146–147 Jenkins, Bruce, 103–106, 108, 109 Jonas, Hans, 184 K Kant, Immanuel, 162–163 Kaurismäki, Aki, 104–106 Kember, Sarah, 144–145 Kenaan, Hagi, 51–52, 110–111 Kennedy, Stephen, 184 Kooning, Willem de, 131–133 Kubrick, Stanley, 86 L Lacan, Jacques, 64–66 Larose, Alexandre, 24 Lefebvre, Henri, 141–142 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 32–33 Lessing, G. E., 179–180 Levinas, Emmanuel, 18–19, 162–163 Lichtenstein, Roy, 106 Liminal experience, 131–133 Limit telephotography, 136–137, 140–141, 144–145, 148–149 Lippit, Akira, 130 Lipps, Theodor, 117–118 Literature, opacity, 24–25 Liversidge, Peter, 180–181 Low (rock band), 171–181 Low definition, 28–32 Lucaites, John, 138–139

193

Lynch, David, 3–4, 7–8, 118–134 Lyotard, Jean-François, 38–40 M Malevich, Kazimir, 5–6, 56 Marin, Louis, 37–38 Masquerade, 153–170 Massumi, Brian, 141–142 Mauer, Barry, 113–114 McElheny, Josiah, 104 Media theory, 1–4 Mediality, 5–6 effect on the imaginary, 68–70 Méliès, Georges, 96–98 ‘Metahistory,’ 98–100 Metz, Christian, 64–65, 140 Metzger, Gustav, 24 Migration, 79–80, 98–100 ‘Mimesis of the precarious,’ 58 Mimetic capture, 33–34 Mimeticism, 47–48, 131–133 Minh-ha, Trinh, 40–42 ‘Minor cinema,’ 104–105 Minoritarian empiricism, 137–138 Mirror satellites, 15–16 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 64, 94–95, 136–137 Misek, Richard, 28–32 Mitchell, W. J. T., 138–139 Montez, Maria, 109 Morin, Edgar, 70–71 Morrison, Bill, 5–6, 53–76 Mroué, Rabih, 24 Music, connecting the visual with the acoustic, 171–184 Mylar film, 104 N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 139–140 Narrative opacity, 118–122

194 

INDEX

Narrative process, 179–180 The nebula of corrosion, 106 Neoliberalism, 163–165 Nichols, Bill, 26 Nieland, Justus, 132–133 Nochimson, Martha, 120–121, 131–133 Noise aesthetics of, 26–28 ‘clear but confused' perception,’ 32–33 connecting the visual with the acoustic, 171–184 opacity in, 9–10, 24–25 poetics of, 177–184 ‘Noise-sound,’ 183–184 Novo, Reynier Leyva, 16–17 Nuclear power, 129–131 O ‘Oblique autobiography,’ Gehr, 62–63 Occupy protests, 153–154 Occurrent arts, 141–142 ‘Oceanic ontologies,’ 98–100 Opacity as an aesthetic, 10–12 affective experiences, 55–56 aim of this book, 1–3 allegorization, 107–108 in art and theory, 4–5, 21–23 in artistic practice, 3–4 Black sites, 135, 136, 138–140, 142, 143, 146, 148, 149, 151 cinematographic vision, 32–34 in criticism, 25–26 disruptions of the image plane, 118–119 faces, 9, 153–154 materiality, 114–116 in media theory, 3–4 spectrality, 59–60

and transparency, 84–85, 158–159 unshowability, 130–131 value of, 16–19 visual culture, 34–52 Opaque images, 8–9 Opaque thickness, 36–37 Optimalization of capital value, 163–164 The Other, 18–19 P Paglen, Trevor, 3–4, 8–9, 117–118, 135–151 Peirce, C. S., 140 Pellonpää, Matti, 111–112 Pessoa, Fernando, 84–85 Peters, John Durham, 44–45, 128–130, 133–134 Phantasmagoria, 62–63 Phantomality, 76, 128–130 Philosophical imaginary, 67–68 Photography art and illegibility, 23–25 Black sites, 141–144 clarity and opacity, 32–34 cliché verre, 104–105 irrational power of, 61–62 low definition, 29–32 Paglen, Trevor, 135–151 ‘Poetic approach,’ 92–94, 157–158 Poetics of noise, 177–184 Political effects, opacity, 21–23 Politicized visibilities, 13–16 ‘Poor image,’ 58 Positivism, 147 Postcolonialism, 11–12, 16–17 Post-modernity, 23–25 Poststructuralism, 36–37 Potentiality of the image, 86–91 Precarious aesthetic, 10–12 ‘Precarious attachments,’ 49–51

 INDEX 

Precariousness, 10–11 Protest, through music, 172–177 Provost, Nicholas, 23–24 R Race, Akomfrah's film-­ making, 77–101 Racial bias, 96–98 Rancière, Jacques, 14, 49–51, 140–141 Rauschenberg, Robert, 21–23 Reappropriation, 83–85 Reflexivity, 40–42 Research, in Saunders’ work, 113–114 Roberts, John, 148–149 Rooney, Monique, 128–130, 133 Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, 36–40, 110–111 Rosa, Salvator, 77–78 Ross, Christine, 49–51 Rotoscoping, 104–105 Rückensfigur, 90–91, 96–101 Rushdie, Salman, 100–101 Russolo, Luigi, 183–184 S Sagar, Anjalika, 84–85 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 64–65 Saunders, Matt, 3–4, 7, 103–116 Schmarsow, August, 117–118 Schygulla, Hanna, 111–112 Scientification of the humanities, 11–12 Scientific imaginary, 67–68 Screen media, 153–154 Screen theorists, 37–38 Screen theory gaze, 52 leveling of, 51–52 spectator position, 65–66

195

Secrecy culture of, 147 distribution of the sensible, 144–145 knowledge and aesthetics, 149–150 Saunders’ work, 112–113 Secret-flix, 109 Seers, Lindsay, 24 Self-reflexivity, 40–42 Selvaggio, Leo, 159–163 Semi-legibility, 1 Semper, George, 117–118 Serres, Michel, 26–28, 184 Shannon, Claude, 26–28 Sherman, Cindy, 113–114 ‘Showing non-seeing,’ 138–139 Simek, Nicole, 13, 92–94, 158–159 Sloterdijk, Peter, 133–134 Smith, Jack, 109 Smith, Marquard, 113–114 Social imaginary, 43–45 Societies of control, 159–160 Sonic thinking, 184 Sørensen, Mette-Marie, 164–165, 167–168 Sound ‘clear but confused’ perception, 32–33 connecting the visual with the acoustic, 171–184 noise aesthetics, 26–28 ‘noise-sound,’ 183–184 opacity in, 9–10, 24–25 poetics of noise, 177–184 Spectator position, 65–66 Spectral historicity, 109–111 Spectrality, 7, 59–60, 76, 89–90 Stallabrass, Julian, 145–146 Steyerl, Hiro, 25–26, 58 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 63–64 Structural Film movement, 72 Surrealist Manifesto, 113–114

196 

INDEX

T Taussig, Michael, 155–156 Taylor, Charles, 66–69 Technoculture, 138–139 Texture, poetics of noise, 177–184 Thiele, Hertha, 104–106, 113–115 Thompson, Marie, 183–184 Transatlantic imaginary, 67–68 Transnational imaginary, 67–68 Transparency clarity, 32–34 and opacity, 16–19, 84–85, 158–159 politicized visibilities, 13–16 visual culture, 1–3, 34–52 Transtextuality, 83–85, 92, 96–100 Trigg, Dylan, 77–78 Turvey, Lisa, 111–112 U Universality of the self, 162–163 Unshowability, 130–131 V Vagueness, 42–43 Valéry, Paul, 100–101

Verbeeck, Jeroen, 96–98 Vidler, Anthony, 117–119 Virilio, Paul, 41–42 Vischer, Robert, 117–118 Visibilities, politicized nature, 13–16 Visual culture assumptions and beliefs, 1–3 poetics of opacity, 21–23 purpose of this book, 1–3 transparency and opacity, 34–52 Visuality, 94–95 W Warburg, Aby, 58–59, 87–90 Warhol, Andy, 23–24 Warped space, 117–119 Weber, Max, 144–145 Wilder, Billy, 105–106 Wolff, Janet, 100–101, 168 Writing, see Cinécriture; Images, as writing Z Zylinska, Joanna, 144–145