What Philosophy Wants From Images 9780226513058, 9780226513195, 9780226513225

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
1. The Memory of Cinema
2. The Queer Attractions of Perceptual Belief
3. A Virtual Presence in Space
4. Harun Farocki’s Liberated Consciousness
5. The Force of Small Gestures
Epilogue: Welcome to This Situation
Index

Citation preview

What Philosophy Wants from Images

What Philosophy Wants from Images

D. N. Rodowick The University of Chicago Press :: Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-51305-8 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-51319-5 (paper) isbn-13: 978-0-226-51322-5 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226513225.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rodowick, David Norman, author. Title: What philosophy wants from images / D. N. Rodowick. Description: Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes index. Identifiers: lccn 2017015713 | isbn 9780226513058 (cloth: alk. paper) | isbn 9780226513195 (pbk.: alk. paper) | isbn 9780226513225 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Motion pictures—Social aspects. Classification: lcc pn1995 .r6195 2017 | ddc 302.23/43—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017015713 This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Sarah, as she takes her first steps into the wild . . .

Contents Preface 1 2 3 4 5

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The Memory of Cinema The Queer Attractions of Perceptual Belief A Virtual Presence in Space Harun Farocki’s Liberated Consciousness The Force of Small Gestures Epilogue: Welcome to This Situation

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Index

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Preface No one was more surprised than I by the appearance of this book, which came into the world like an unexpected child, though no less loved for that. And indeed the unanticipated pleasure of this book was echoed by other significant changes in my life and career over the past eight years. Finishing books is almost as great a pleasure as writing them. However, after The Virtual Life of Film was published in 2007, I was completely preoccupied with the manuscript that would become Elegy for Theory and Philosophy’s Artful Conversation, which had been in development on tracks parallel to Virtual Life. The last things on my mind then were digital images or digital culture. Yet I was suddenly the recipient of many gracious invitations to speak on those very topics on which I felt my imagination had been completely exhausted, or at least overrun with new philosophical preoccupations. This period also coincided with my tenure in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. Among my greatest pleasures there was the close daily contact with artists and the teaching of studio art, which reinvigorated and deepened my interest in contemporary art. Another welcome consequence of teaching in an art department was the unexpected return of my own

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creative practice, which after some early successes had lain dormant for several decades. However, the most important sparks for the series of unexpected events out of which this book would emerge took place first at the Harvard Film Archive and in contact with moving image work that would completely reorient my thinking about digital images. One strongly suggested argument in The Virtual Life of Film is that moving images created from processes of digital capture and especially digital synthesis are unable to express duration with the same phenomenological intensity as analog film. (So curious that now one must now specify “film” as analog.) While not saying so directly, this was nonetheless an expression of my doubt that what Gilles Deleuze called direct time-images could be expressed with digital means. Philosophical arguments did not prove me wrong, however, but rather creative ones. Indeed, there were three exemplary works, each with a central place in this book, that unleashed in me a new critical passion for the moving image in contemporary art and, as importantly, entirely reoriented my thinking and erased my doubts about the potential power of “digital time-images.” A new critical passion for art is one thing that philosophy wants from images. The first work was Ernie Gehr’s Glider (2001), projected as part of a program devoted to his past and current works at the Harvard Film Archive in February 2008. As I relate in the fifth chapter of this book, in watching Glider I was overwhelmed with the idea that this work expressed with its own sensory and immanent means the world of “pure perception” in the universal movements of image, energy, and force, as portrayed philosophically in Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory. Just a year later, and also at the Harvard Film Archive, I encountered Ken Jacobs’s Capitalism: Child Labor (2006) and other, newer digital works. If Glider captures something like a world-time of matter, movement, and light, Capitalism: Child Labor offers a critical interrogation of deep historical time by generating new modalities of movement, time, and perception out of archival materials that make us newly aware of the converging genealogies of photography and computation in relation to the history of the exploitation of labor. The third work was Victor Burgin’s Hôtel Berlin, which opened at the Gallery Campagne Première in Berlin in September 2009. Hôtel Berlin taught me about paradoxical expressions of movement and stillness in digital moving image work, and yet more importantly unlocked for me two of the principal intuitions from which this book emerged. One has to do with how the fading memory of film, and the multiple histories of cinema, have become the material for future forms and concepts

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in contemporary moving image works. One might say, after Stanley Cavell, that new media of art are emerging here that profoundly test our criteria for what counts as a “moving image,” and so provoke what I call a naming crisis that contests our confidence in knowing what these new images are and how they are meaningful for us. Here the memory of cinema, and the disappearance of a certain experience of cinema, demand a new imagination of what movement, time, and history might mean. There are other artists and other works that could and should be named here, and you will encounter many of them in the pages to come. But I leave off for the moment in saying that what philosophy also wants from images in the context of contemporary art is critical attention to the conceptual reciprocity between thought-in-images and thought-about-images. This book has taken a serpentine path marked by many detours and digressions before finally achieving its current form. My thoughts about the memory of cinema in contemporary art emerged at first in fragments that unfolded one out of the other in a series of talks and lectures. The first stages of my thinking were inspired by a symposium entitled “From the Reel to the Virtual” organized by Mark B. Hansen at Duke University in 2009. These thoughts were reworked, redeveloped, and refined in subsequent years in talks given at the University of Minnesota, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, the University of Stirling, the University of Copenhagen, and the Facultad de Comunicación, Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona. Further development of the ideas and arguments that would eventually form the basis for chapter 1 occurred through lectures given at a symposium entitled “The Material and the Code: Disciplinary Crossing on Cinema and New Media,” organized by the late and much missed Miriam Hansen at the University of Chicago; the conference “Film Futures” at the Norwegian National Library in Oslo; “New Screen Ecologies,” the Third Nomadikon Meeting at the Bergen Center for Visual Culture at the University of Bergen; the Instituto de Filosofia da Linguagem, New University of Lisbon; the ARTHEMIS International Conference on Moving Images Studies: History(ies), Method(s), Discipline(s), at Concordia University, Montréal; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles; in giving the Lois Walters Coker Lecture at Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina; and in a keynote lecture at the conference “Diversifying Digital Media,” Hongik University, Seoul. My deepest thanks go out to the organizers and participants of these events, and also my apologies for not thanking all of you here individually.

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My second chapter, on questions of photography and belief in the contrasting yet related arguments of Christian Metz and Stanley Cavell, was first presented as a lecture at Queen Mary, University of London, in fall 2015. I thank Steven Eastwood for our long friendship and for the invitation to speak there to such an engaged and critical audience. Versions of chapter 3 developed across a series of lectures and talks inspired by Victor Burgin’s recent digital work, whose locations included the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie during a fellowship at Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar; the University of Chicago Mass Culture Workshop; Cooper Union School of Art; the Humanities Lecture Series at Amherst College, Amherst; the Getty Institute–sponsored conference “Sculpture and Photography: The Art Object in Reproduction” at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown; and at “Sensational Humanities,” the Sesquicentennial Conference of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Earlier or alternate versions of this chapter have been published as “A Virtual Presence in Space” in Photography and Sculpture: The Art Object in Reproduction (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2017), edited by Sarah Hamill and Megan Luke, and as “The Unnameable (In Three Movements)” in Victor Burgin: Projective (Geneva: Éditions de Mamco [Musée d’art moderne et contemporain], 2014), edited by David Campany. I thank these publishers for their kind permission to reuse and rework this material. My chapter on Harun Farocki arose from an invitation by Don McMahon at Artforum to write a short appreciation after Harun’s untimely passing in summer 2014. I also wish to thank the editors at Artforum for their permission to fold that short text into this book, and for their extensive feedback. My deeper interest in the work of Harun Farocki arose from working closely with Harun and Antje Ehemann on the first exhibition I supervised as director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, The Image in Question: War—Media—Art (2010), an expanded version of which became the extraordinary show, “Serious Games: Krieg—Medien—Kunst” at the Mathildenhöhe Institut in Darmstadt, Germany. My thoughts on Farocki’s media work were further expanded and developed in a keynote lecture for SOCINE, the Brazilian Society for Cinema and Audiovisual Studies at Campinas, Brazil, in October 2015, and at the LUX/Central St. Martins MRes Public Lecture in London in November 2015. Mattias Rajmann at Farocki Filmproduction generously supplied preview copies of the work I discuss in chapter 4. I would also like to express here my enormous debt to friends who have worked on Farocki far longer than I, and whose

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thoughts and scholarship have profoundly influenced my own work, including Nora Alter, Christa Blumlinger, Thomas Elsaesser, and Volker Pantenberg. My deepest and warmest thanks, however, are reserved for both Antje Ehemann, whose friendship and support were instrumental for this research, and for Harun’s daughters, Anna and Lara Faroqhi. Versions of chapter 5 were presented at the colloquium “Etrangeté Technologique” at the Université Paris Diderot-Paris 7, at the conference “Cinematic Thinking Outside Itself” at Cambridge University, at the symposium “Indefinite Visions” at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Free University of Berlin’s Cinepoetics workshop, and at Boston University. An earlier and much shorter version of this chapter was published as “The Force of Small Gestures” in Indefinite Visions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), edited by Martine Beugnet and Allan Cameron. I am grateful to Edinburgh University Press for their kind permission to reproduce this material. I am also grateful to Matthias Müller for supplying images from Meteor and to Victor Burgin for his image of the installation plan of A Place to Read at Campagne Première. Many other friends and colleagues contributed to this book through their engaged and engaging conversations including Emmanuelle André, Greg Beal, Brooke Belisle, Raymond Bellour, Martine Beugnet, Dominique Bluher, Giuliana Bruno, Katarina Burin, Allan Cameron, David Campany, Jimena Canales, Tom Conley, Alexander Galloway, Sarah Hamill, Mark B. Hansen, Miriam Hansen, Bruce Jenkins, Homay King, Nina Koidl, Martin Lefebvre, Malcolm Le Grice, George Lellis, Megan Luke, Richard Misek, Laura Mulvey, Tim Murray, Francette Pacteau, Walid Ra’ad, Karen Redrobe, Eivind Røssaak, Matt Saunders, Maureen Turim, and finally Henning Weidemann at Campagne Première Berlin, whose infectious enthusiasm for ideas and art provoked and sustained my thinking during the long gestation period for this book. I also want to express my deepest gratitude to the graduate students in two of my seminars at the University of Chicago—“Cinema and Experience” and “Deleuze and the Image”—whose infectious conversation recharged and renewed my thinking about Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno, Gilles Deleuze, and other writers central to this book’s arguments. Throughout the review and publication process, I have been expertly guided with both humor and rigor by Susan Bielstein, executive editor at University of Chicago Press. I also want to thank my anonymous readers for University of Chicago Press for their helpful and detailed suggestions, and for their openness to and appreciation for the very personal voice of this book.

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My final and deepest thanks are reserved for the artists who both inspired this book and generously supported my research by sharing their work, especially Ernie Gehr, Ken Jacobs, Harun Farocki, and Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller. The greatest debt is owed to my long friendship with Victor Burgin, whose theoretical and creative practices have continually produced new critical and creative models for what philosophy wants from images, and vice versa.

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The Memory of Cinema I begin with a confession—always a good way of getting a reader’s attention. On completing The Virtual Life of Film in 2007, I felt myself at something of an impasse. Indeed, even the completed book is marked by uncertainty. In examining philosophically the disappearance of film in the transition to digital capture and synthesis, the book offers three different perspectives or frameworks for investigation: in part 1 the experience of theatrical cinema on digital screens remains relatively unchanged; in part 2 an entire experience of time and duration shifts and disappears. The perspective of part 3 is more difficult to encapsulate except to say that perhaps it is too early to tell whether the cinematic medium has or will be completely transformed by digital technologies. From our current historical situation, our memory of what moving images were or could be, in fact will be, remains continually in flux. This book is thus inspired by a question that remains incompletely answered. As a philosopher or a critic, what could the cinema mean to me today? In The Virtual Life of Film, perhaps I was too much attached to my nostalgic memory of the experience of theatrical film, and a deep, contemplative immersion in the time of the image? In any case, my work on Stanley Cavell had led to a conviction—still present within me—that for at least

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one hundred years moving images have provided the occasion and the conceptual framework for thinking through some of our most fundamental human dilemmas, both ethical and ontological, about questions of meaning and experience, of fantasy and belief, and of our knowledge of the world and of other minds. For a long time, as works of art cinema held a certain power for these philosophical questions of deep interest. But perhaps now it has faded, disappeared, and fragmented into new and highly differentiated series of screens and media types, and so has lost its philosophical hold on us. Our ontological questioning and curiosity has perhaps drifted to other media and forms of art. I remember distinctly a conversation with Alexander Galloway some years ago at the Museum of Modern Art, where he chastised me, quite justly, for failing to confront this impasse. Algorithmic thought, digitally simulated or transformed images, and computer-mediated communications are without doubt our most powerful contemporary sites of ontological fascination and exploration. The cinema, or a certain idea of cinema, no longer has the same phenomenological hold on us. A new philosophy—perhaps even influenced by Cavell—should turn not to cinema but rather to social networks, computer gaming, and the digital arts. Or, as I wrote in Virtual Life, “those of us whose subjectivity was forged in a cinematic culture . . . may not be capable either perceptually, psychologically, or philosophically of evaluating this experience. It is not our ontology. We seek a new generation of philosophers.”1 Had I thrown in the towel here? Much as I still love going to the cinema, I was not likely to write now on the latest Pixar film or digital superhero blockbuster. But Alex’s challenge raised me from my dogmatic slumbers, and further conversations with Laura Mulvey about Jeff Wall and other new photographic works made me realize that I did have or was developing a new site of philosophical fascination, which now finds expression in the chapters of this book. Theatrical cinema, or what Paolo Cherchi Usai calls the Model image of cinema, has been fading from our phenomenological experience for a very long time.2 Perhaps the most powerful point of disruption was the explosive growth of home video since the mid-1980s. Anyone 1. D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 181. 2. See Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age (London: British Film Institute, 2001). In coming chapters of this book, the Model image of theatrical cinema will give way conceptually to the Image as digital event, or an expression of the virtual as an entity, in Deleuze’s repeated phrase (inspired by Proust), that is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.”

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born since 1980 lives in a world whose perceptual defaults are primarily videographic and electronic or digital, and has a relationship to time and screens with increasing expectations of interactivity, control, and the possibility of communication; in other words, through images time and information are now encountered in fundamentally new ways. In the same time frame, however, the contemporary art world has exhibited an ever increasing and variegate fascination with the cinema; or, better, what I will call a certain memory of cinema. As I already noted in Virtual Life, sometimes this fascination expresses itself in the desire to work with or interrogate a specifically filmic duration, as in the work of Sharon Lockhart or de Rijke and de Rooij, or to return, as does Tacita Dean, to the now increasingly scarce chemical materials of 35, 16, or even Super 8mm film in order to reassert through “archaic” media the perceptual powers of the analog with respect to the digital. Other times, our collective memory of theatrical cinema is incorporated or appropriated into new temporal and spatial contexts as in the very different practices of Douglas Gordon, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, or Christian Marclay. Indeed, a major genre of moving image practice in contemporary art has been characterized by Hal Foster as the “archival impulse.”3 There can also be a complex engagement with cinema as a site of tension in the intersection between history, memory, and fantasy as in Pierre Huyghe’s extraordinary work, Third Memory (2000), which involves John Wojtowicz’s restaging, retelling, and counter-narration to the story that inspired Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975). In many of these cases, the material or medium of the artwork becomes what Victor Burgin calls “the remembered film.”4 This is a peculiar kind of time-image where what appears on the screen is overlaid or underwritten with a certain kind of virtuality: the memory of an experience, or the repetitive attempt to reinvoke, regain, or hold on to a perceptual experience that is already lost. A principal material of contemporary art—and it is a rich and varied one—is the ever-fading memory of cinema: a vast archive of cultural experience, elliptical and discontinuous fragments of memory-images, which become an ever more powerful source of phantasmatic resurrection and re-creation because they can no longer be invoked directly. 3. See “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22. This archival impulse is powerfully connected to what I will soon call a “naming crisis” in contemporary art, whose origins are connected genealogically and conceptually to Rosalind Krauss’s influential discussions of postmodernism and sculpture in an expanded field. I will examine these ideas more deeply in chap. 3. 4. See Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004).

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At the same time, these works produce what I call a future memory of cinema—an anticipatory power but also an interrogative one that investigates not only what the image has been, and can be no longer, but what it is becoming. These works challenge both the history of cinema and our memory of the history of cinema in complex ways. They engage the spectator, I believe, in a complex temporal experience where prior concepts of image, space, movement, and time are no longer adequate, and new concepts, not quite yet nameable or expressible, must be created. My working idea is that the moving image in contemporary art, in all its complex varieties, is producing a new kind of virtuality or timeimage in terms of how it presents what I call a “naming crisis” around questions of movement, image, time, and history. This crisis is generated out of an undecidability that vacillates between the questions of how to place such artworks within the past genealogy of moving images (hence their sometimes nostalgic or elegiac element), and the difficulty of grasping their anticipatory force as the harbinger of future relationships to the image. In the first part of The Virtual Life of Film, I sketch out seven overlapping and sometimes contradictory concepts of the virtual that are often evoked in our experience of cinema. Briefly, these can be characterized as: 1) making the “virtual” synonymous with digital coding; 2) the virtual considered in terms of the ontological uncertainty of any “medium,” including film; 3) the idea that film is essentially a temporal and therefore “immaterial” art form; 4) in relation to how the problem of notationality is described in Nelson Goodman’s distinction between autographic and allographic arts; 5) in relation to Christian Metz’s important distinction between code and text; 6) in terms of the inevitable effects of decay and obsolescence in analog media; and, finally, 7) in relation to Metz’s important psychoanalytic and phenomenological definition of the experience of the imaginary signifier as the hallucinatory projection of an absent referent in space together with the ineluctable slipping away of images in time. Together, these criteria suggest that the inherent virtuality of the image is a fundamental condition of the experience of cinema, where the ontological insecurity of film as an aesthetic object and aesthetic experience is posed as a spatial uncertainty, a temporal instability, and a conceptual undecidability. I can now add yet another sense of the virtual, expressed in this curious and multiform fascination with the remembered film, where the fading memory of cinema becomes the material for future forms and concepts of moving image works. In other words, as a material or medium of art, the remembered film plunges us into a collective, cultural

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memory of cinema to project an anticipatory image or idea capable of provoking the creation of new forms and new concepts. I believe that the remembered film can be characterized with good reason as a kind of time-image, and as a peculiar form of indexicality that points back not to past existences in space and time, but rather past experiences that hover uncertainly between our subjective and objective experience of images today. Indeed, one of the principal objectives of this book is to investigate the peculiar powers of “photographic” belief, whose presumed causal powers point toward not past worlds but rather toward states of memory whether real or imagined. As I will explain in the next chapter, the queer powers of photographic belief inspire in us a feeling of or desire for certainty that is nonetheless infused with fantasy. But this might also be a force of the past that can be recovered for the future. For me, this is a way of creating a new path out of one of the principal themes of The Virtual Life of Film, which is to understand more clearly why in contemporary film study so many scholars are interested anew in the problem of indexicality and in the period of so-called classical film theory. There are two possible lines that I try to explore more deeply in The Virtual Life of Film that now open out to the fading/ future memory of cinema. One is oriented toward the past in that the disappearance of indexicality in digital synthesis, and the waning of indexicality in digital capture, make us ever more attentive to the fading of the causal and analogical forces that fueled our phenomenological experience of photography and film. This is a frankly nostalgic and elegiac account of what has been lost without being fully aware of the how or when of its passing. The other line has to do with the way in which classical film theory expresses a profound disorientation, not only because of the newness of the perceptual experience of moving images, but also because as images or art they were conceptually unfamiliar—the philosophy of art or aesthetics had no appropriate name for them. As Walter Benjamin was most keenly aware, 150 years of aesthetics and the philosophy of art were placed in doubt conceptually by the appearance of film and photography, such that the guiding question was no longer “Is photography art?” but rather “Has photography changed our entire conception of art or what counts as aesthetic experience?” The fact that so much inventive effort, and for such a long time, has been given to producing synthetic images with perfect photographic credibility means that we are not quite prepared to confront the future shock they may express. I think we feel a “modernist” disorientation with respect to the emerging ontology of digital arts and communication (they constitute part of

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our modernity), one that is analogous to the experience of classical film theorists. And like them, we try to reorient ourselves through theory or philosophy. (This is a recurrent theme in my Elegy for Theory.) And there is one last paradox to confront. All analogical presentations—photography, film, recorded sound—are historical in the sense that they are temporal and spatial transcriptions of past existences in time and in space. Every photograph begins as a document before it becomes something else (and it can become many other kinds of things). But in addition, the phenomenological experience of this historical power is itself “becoming history” in the sense that it is no longer available to us in the same ways. My current thesis is that one of the main avenues of exploration in contemporary art is to create new concepts for thinking the history of cinema as a medium, and to attune viewers to problems of history, memory, and the image in new ways, ways which in fact shift our given concepts of media of art. In other words, as the previous kinds of indexical powers of analogical cinema fade or dissipate, contemporary art is seeking out new strategies for restoring or expressing a sense of history through the image and, in doing so, to create new definitions and concepts of image, medium, and perhaps of history. One thing that philosophy wants from images, then, is to renew itself conceptually through deep engagement with novel forms of aesthetic experience. A difficulty is confronted here where our past experience of the image or, rather, our uncertain memory of that experience, blocks or filters our sensitivity to potential future powers of the image. A persistent rhetorical and conceptual gesture of The Virtual Life of Film was to return continually to the problem of time and how temporality is lived and experienced through the media we collectively create and inhabit. As Gilles Deleuze understood so profoundly, our present is composed of multiple and discontinuous versions of the past that persist in every passing present, and every passing present is composed from a present of the past and a present of the future. There is an important historical lesson here for trying to understand screen culture today. The history of cinema suffered a long time from seeing all of history as cinema: Plato’s cave was a cinema, every optical toy anticipated cinema, television was another kind of cinema. In point of fact, the open and variable medium of moving images has been limited by thinking of it as one “thing.” However, every genre or medium of art is continuously innovative, remaking itself by repurposing its concepts toward new uses or contexts, or providing the material for new conceptualizations leading to new

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media of art. Media archaeology also teaches that screened images have multiple and discontinuous histories, and not all lead inevitably to the Model image, as Paolo Cherchi Usai might put it, of theatrical cinema. At the same time, this Model image may block conceptual understanding of emergent forms and automatisms; in other words, one’s comprehension of an emergent future may be blocked or masked by the persistence of a past image. I still love Lev Manovich’s story about the digital dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (1993) as images that had to be degraded because they were too real—or hyperreal—they did not look like filmic or analogical images and so were not perceived to be “realistic.”5 Here a future image clothes itself in the past. These images are allegories of a future we do not wish to see and so we render them as a past image. We try to maintain a sense that our present ontology is photographic, when in fact we have already been overtaken by a future that we think is still ahead of us. Spielberg’s dinosaurs anticipate a future world that has already emerged in the present, but they do so as ghosts of the past. As I write in Virtual Life, the perceptual power of photography and film is therefore recognized only retroactively as a disappearing, vanished, or lost world; we are drawn to digital and interactive screens as a will to grasp a future that is always running ahead of us and pulling us forward in its slipstream. Our disappointment in ever knowing the world or others now becomes the perpetual disappointment of attaining the more perfect (future) knowledge of computers and computer communications, whose technological evolution always seems to run ahead of the perceptual and cognitive capacity to manipulate them for our own ends. It is the failure to arrive at what always comes ahead. In this respect, I have become more and more fascinated with how contemporary art examines and interrogates these historical ironies and paradoxes, or even expresses something like a new historical consciousness of images, both deeply aware of their complex relation to the past, but also confronting us with a naming crisis, of presenting us with works—apparently photographic, apparently moving—that also 5. See Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 202. I might now modify this statement in the following way. In theatrical cinema and on digital screens of all kinds, the hyperreal is the new definition of the real. In other words, our perceptual defaults have now shifted to a standard defined by ultrahigh resolutions of digital synthesis. The memory of photography is becoming ever more distant. One allegorical expression of this situation is that in Jurassic World (2015) the corporation is no longer content to resurrect past animals but is driven to create new and monstrous hybrids—ever more spectacular, violent, and destructive.

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undermine and challenge our confidence in knowing what these images are, or what they are becoming—as images and in movement, and in relation to time, history, and memory. The time has come, then, to consider works of contemporary moving image practice that project new images of time, memory, and history. One of the most striking examples of the affective powers of the memory of cinema is, I believe, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller’s Meteor (2011, 35mm or HD loop, 15m). Like many of Müller and Girardet’s works, both individually and collectively, Meteor is constructed from images extracted from cinema’s history; in this case, sequences appropriated from science fiction films of the 1950s and 1960s as well as images of boyhood from other American and European films of the period. The work begins in a prologue whose first five images are: in extreme close-up, a boy screams, faints, and falls off-screen; an astronaut floating in a spacecraft touches his chest and illuminates a light there; a light falls on the face of a small boy peering from behind the rails of domestic stairs; another boy is drowning in a lake; a blackand-white image of a boy’s foot collapsing a balloon that looks like a planet. And then the second half of the prologue begins with a match cut to the image of a yellow moon followed by stars, a blue planet, a meteor crossing the night sky; then images of boys sleeping in bed, a light shining in their eyes, followed by an astronaut shining a light from above, a flash as if an exploding star, and ending with a boy uneasy in bed. Music plays an important role in the work, as well as a beautifully spoken text, a kind of poetic fairy tale, voiced in John Smith’s wonderful baritone. A theme from Puccini’s one-act opera Suor Angelica arises beneath this second series of images, as well as Smith’s voice-over that intones: “Home. Hole. Drown. Down. Low. Light. Bright. Bread. Bed. Boy.” And indeed this parallel series of word and image fragments expresses in condensed form the clusters of images and affects that will soon unfold. The poetic patterning of images in Meteor emphasizes a world that emerges between sleeping and awakening where imagination and perception have not yet fully released themselves to consciousness or yielded to reality testing in the external world. The figured boys presented seriatim anchor a chain of images that alternate between scenes of wonder and anxiety. This is a journey of desire but also a painful passage into individuation and independence, or a birthing if you will, toward a world of exploration no longer constrained by home, bedroom, and an endless night sky framed by windows. The title of the work suggests impending disaster but also the awe of an unexplored universe with desert worlds,

FIGURE 1

The opening of Meteor (Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller). Courtesy of the artists.

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exploding planets, alien movements, and an endlessly expansive sky full of pleasures and dangers. Relations between words and images are especially important in this work, though in a figural way in which the poetic narration voiced by Smith seems to insinuate itself into the image series, hollowing it out before it coalesces again into new constellations of pictures and language. Indeed, the need both to acquire language and the anxiety of losing oneself in language is a recurring motif in the film. The narration is organized around three “fairy tales”: a tale of bread and parental desertion; of the broken looking glass; and of the slipperiness of language.6 These tales are open and incomplete, however, as if recurrent evocations of anonymous memories that emerge and recede in the flow of images. Their protagonist is an unnamed boy or boys, and in fact it is unclear if there are really three tales or whether the third loops around the first as if threaded into or out of it. In any case, each text seems to float in proximity to certain image constellations but never in a synchronous way. In this work, relations of word to image and image to word are powerfully interconnected but only in ways that are displaced, indirect, and oblique. In the tale of desertion, the boy is lost because the breadcrumbs he has dropped to guide his way home are eaten by crows and ravens. In compensation the crows teach the boy their language: “Some words were like the knots of snakes that stuck out their heads in all directions. Others floated like particles around him and collided with each other like meteors. Some even formed sentences and were swishing around when suddenly some swirling clouds of cosmic dust fell out of heaven and landed on earth as nothing else but solid pieces of silver.” In this tale, the only one with a happy ending, language becomes wealth. In the second tale breadcrumbs and pieces of silver are replaced by shattered glass. In turn, the looking glass makes visible all that is bad and sad in the world. And the farther the boy wanders the more slippery the glass becomes until it falls to earth and shatters into millions of splinters. These motes of glass are potentially blinding, but as in the end of all three tales, they also seem to “fall” from the images and to organize themselves into words: “See. Rock. Breath. Death. Ash. Crumb. Eye. Home. Hole. Moon. Swoon. Swarm. Room. Rule. Cruel. Crow. Curse. Cure.” 6. In fact, that narration is adapted from two tales from the brothers Grimm, “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Star Money,” and one from Hans Christian Andersen, “The Snow Queen” (Christoph Girardet in correspondence with the author).

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The last tale loops back as if inserting itself into the middle of the first. To return home seems to mean finally grasping and fixing a single sign: “Unravel that one word and you shall be free of fear.” Yet, whether crumbs, silver, or shards of glass, the unnamed boy can never rearrange the elements into the single word he seeks. The crows and ravens have consumed everything and then “formed themselves into a swarm of letters that fluttered around him and created words of all kinds. Some words were like the knots of snakes that stuck out their heads in all directions. Some glistened fiercely like white rays of light, and others fell into an abyss. . . . He decided to wait until the stars lit up the ground.” At this point, the image of a boy’s foot and ball returns, though this time the ball is red and magically inflates rather than collapses. This image is followed by one of a fallen astronaut whose body shrinks and disappears into his spacesuit; and then Smith’s voice concludes: “Dream. Drown. Stain. Star. Rock. Rocket. Home. Hole. Hell. Heaven. Haven. Deep. Dust. Desert. Crumb. Currents. Cure. Curse. Cause. Effect.” With this last word a rocket is launched, burning into the night and unleashing the final chain of images: pastel orbs and moons; tiny lights streaming through space; spacecraft floating past glowing planets and into the void, which though they look like toys propel the imagination into the future no less for that; an astronaut floating against blackness who finally stands on his craft and confronts a fiery red planet; an exploding world; an awed young face reflected in light and peering through train windows; paper torn and strewn from a train; hurtling asteroids; a world of clouds and mist; landing on a desert world; a lost boy looking to the sky. As in most fairy tales, the desire for individuation and agency comes at a price whose poignant expression in this series is framed by Puccini’s aria “Senza Mamma” from Suor Angelica, which infuses the final five minutes of the work with a desperate and futile longing for an impossible return to family and home. “Senza mamma, o bimbo / tu sei morto!” One might describe the effect of this powerful work as “uncanny,” and indeed many works that evoke for me the future/fading memory of cinema in contemporary art project a similarly unsettling sensation. In the humanities, one routinely thinks of the uncanny in relation to Freud’s 1919 essay on that topic, and our models of memory are similarly Freudian and psychoanalytic. In this context, memory is formulated as a topological concept in which there lies behind or beneath a present image something apprehended, felt, yet unobservable. The uncanny is a sensation that seems to hover between the seen and the unseen as if a repressed force camouflaged or hidden within or behind

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the image as an unshakable yet inaccessible core of meaning. This overlay of the seen and unseen is maintained, of course, by repression in the psychoanalytic sense; in other words, the uncanny is considered as the timeless force of the unconscious in the image, present but illegible. But other accounts are possible. I am thinking in particular of Henri Bergson’s 1908 essay “Memory of the Present and False Recognition,” which among other things discusses the phenomenon of paramnesia or déjà vu.7 Here uncanny perception and affect does not come from repression but rather from a more intensely felt relation between memory and perception, past and present, the virtual and the actual. In this situation, the image does not cloak, veil, or repress. Rather, it dynamically focalizes and amplifies the surging of past memory in present perception. The image provokes a force of memory that is so intensely felt that it is expressed as if coming from an anterior future: “I have arrived at a future I have already lived or seen.” In these situations, the force of the virtual as the force of memory has become so active in the present that it leaps ahead of present perception, infusing it with other times where non-chronological layers of the past intersect with not-yet-arrived potentialities of the future. However, works like Meteor are created not only from the virtual force of memory but also with the historical matter of images, and in this respect the relation between the virtual and the actual must be mapped onto the relation between memory and material as a point of exchange between our lived interiority, our bodily presence in the external world, and our subjective life in a social and collective memory-world. The Freudian uncanny is an internal relation, an experience of a self in relation to its own unconscious perceptions as if in a closed loop set in motion by an external trigger. But what if such sensations were considered as neither repressed nor unconscious? Or even perhaps as the experience of a complex relationship with time that accompanies our actions in space, and our reception of images external to us, as a play of forces in which we are continually embedded both externally and internally? Gilles Deleuze refers to this structure of experience sometimes as “sensation” and sometimes as an apprehension or intuition of the powers of the hors cadre or “out-of-field.” (I will examine the photographic out-of-field more deeply in the next chapter and discuss sensation more fully in the penultimate chapter of this book.) Early on in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze describes the out-of-field as that which 7. Published in Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920), 134–85.

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is neither seen nor understood but is nevertheless perfectly present. As a primary experience of the movement-image in its deepest sense, one might think of relations defined by the interiority and exteriority of the frame as a passage or oscillation between two dimensions. In one sense, the frame may yield to and define another space present on screen, as when the camera pans, tilts, or tracks, or when shots are displaced and reconnected along lines of continuous action ordered by the logic of continuity editing. But the frame may also give us an experience of time, indeed the deepest intuition of time as a force of the virtual or as a reservoir of pure difference and potentiality. “In one case,” Deleuze writes, “the out-of-field designates that which exists elsewhere, to one side or around; in the other case, the out-of-field testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot even be said to exist, but rather to ‘insist’ or ‘subsist,’ a more radical Elsewhere, outside of homogenous space and time.”8 The out-of-field is not simply off-screen nor is it in any way a negation or a repression. Rather it refers to dimensions that belong simultaneously to the present image as actualized space but that also fall “between” images as unrealized and unforeseen potentiality. There is no longer a line of continuous action unfolding across images, but rather each image is defined in terms of series where each displacement in the chain can swerve or derail the current line of development, or produce unexpected and unpredictable variations in or of it. On one side, then, the image gives us exteriority or extensiveness in space and,  on the other, the anteriority of time as creative evolution, the pure form of time as change or Becoming. What is outside of space yet immanent to it is the anteriority of time to space; that is, virtuality, becoming, the fact of returning for that which differs. Virtuality, or difference in itself as force, defines time as the Outside in the hors cadre. This force opens a line of variation in any image, sign, idea, or concept that attempts to express it. Call this line of variation the future memory of cinema that emerges from newly creative orderings of its past in works like Meteor. I confess that I feel a deeply personal relationship with Meteor. When I first saw this work, I exclaimed to the friends who showed it to me that I feared that Girardet and Müller had tapped directly into my own childhood unconscious. But such psychoanalytic explanations do not reclaim the vital experience of memory. The virtual force of memory is at once individual and collective, and experienced as affective intensity arising 8. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17.

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from living memory within several time zones. The source material for the work comes from a time in the history of cinema when I was eight to ten years old, meaning also that at the time of their release I was about the same age as the boys figured in the films. When I first saw Meteor, I was able to identify most of the source material from memory, even if I had not seen many of the films for more than forty years. But this is less important than the fact that there is a profound aesthetic refashioning of this material that amplifies this affective relation to memory, which is related to and indeed reorganizes our collective memory of cinema (as well as shards and fragments of other cultural memories) as a kind of arc across time, or even a collapsing of present and past in memory as if passing a charge across the negative and positive poles of a battery, one of which represents the not-quite-disappeared past and the other a still emerging and unfulfilled future. This is not literally an experience of déjà vu, of course, but rather the intensity of an experience in which one is at once thrown back into the past yet projected forward into the future. For me, the work evokes both the anxiety of being propelled back to childhood and the exhilaration of re-experiencing a cinematographic memory, as if in a newly formed future, long past but made fully present and actual again in aesthetically organized fragments. This is one of the intensive powers of the out-of-field. Such intensive and emotional experiences fuel irrational feelings of augury. And in this respect we must plunge deeper into history to recover a key text for comprehending Meteor’s figural force—Walter Benjamin’s 1933 text “The Doctrine of the Similar,” unpublished in his lifetime. If Meteor is indeed an exemplary instance of the future/fading memory of cinema, no justice would be done to it by considering it only as an imaginative amalgamation of images, speech, and music. The work asks to be read in a certain way, and indeed Benjamin’s prophetic text is concerned with our powers of reading, though reading here is considered in a radically expansive sense. It is no longer only the recovery of communicative sense from graphic marks but rather the ability to apprehend and interpret dynamically changing patterns of relations in otherwise discrete and differentiated phenomenon, and to detect similarities between things that may only obliquely correspond to one another in terms of form or sense. Benjamin terms this the “mimetic faculty,” or the capacity for drawing similarities between otherwise unlike things through the apprehension of relations of “non-sensuous similarity” (unsinnliche Ähnlichkeit). Play is a powerful instance of this faculty, where the child plays not only at being an engineer or an astronaut, but also at becoming a train or a rocket as if in a domain where thought and

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things become exchangeable and reversible. Other examples include the ancient prophetic powers of astrology, horoscopes, and the reading of entrails, or, more contemporary to Benjamin’s time, the interest in reading personality from graphology. In each case, the mimetic faculty calls upon our capacity to make sense of things (rationally or not) that are otherwise dissimilar in form or sense. And this is not the translation of one kind of sign by another, but the perception or recovery of new patterns of culturally significant meaning from constellations of signs otherwise unrelated by form or causality. Benjamin begins his brief text in noting that the mimetic faculty is a sense marked by history. “In the course of centuries,” Benjamin writes, “the mimetic power, and with it the gift of mimetic perception, have disappeared from certain fields—perhaps in order to flow into others.”9 I emphasize this idea to wonder whether the intensive affect of works like Meteor might be the new aesthetic training ground for the mimetic faculty. If, as I have insisted over many years, art always runs ahead of philosophy, perhaps, then, the mimetic faculty is another interpretive tool for releasing oneself from a past image in order to embrace fully an anticipatory one; in other words, for grasping conceptually forces of memory and becoming in contemporary art and other domains. Cinema is an art of movement and time whose sense is grasped only with difficulty as a spatial image or in a static frame. In similar terms, Benjamin stresses the fragility of mimetic perception in its temporal complexity and fluidity. “The perception of similarity is in every case bound to a flashing up,” Benjamin insists. “It flits past, can possibly be one again, but cannot really be held fast as can other perceptions. It offers itself to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars. The perception of similarities thus seems to be bound to a moment in time. It is like the addition of a third element—the astrologer—to the conjunction of two stars; it must be grasped in an instant. Otherwise the astrologer is cheated of his reward, despite the sharpness of his observational tools” (“DS,” 695–96). If one prefers philosophy to astrology, one must account conceptually for the interpretive activity that perceives similarities and draws out the otherwise reticent traces that run between and across juxtaposed signs of different types. This is a matter of reading, and in the present instance, of reconnecting Meteor’s different domains of sense: the al9. “Doctrine of the Similar,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927– 1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 695; hereafter cited in text as “DS.”

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literative grouping of words; the interested recovery and recombination of images from our collective archival memory of cinema’s past; the construction of open narratives that resist closure within themselves, and are related to yet irresolvable to any of the image series to which they are juxtaposed. But it is also a matter of a new form of writing, where sense is composed or created rather than translated or received. For example, Benjamin characterizes constellations of stars, graphological forms, and picture puzzles as related kinds of Schriftbild. Prosaically, the word can be translated as typeface, font, or “form of writing.” But Benjamin surely means something more powerful and poetic—an image-writing or even écriture, hybrid and combinatory forms of which the rebus is only the simplest example. Here the mimetic faculty apprehends dynamic systems of oblique relations connecting the spoken and the written, the written and the seen, and the seen and the heard in whatever combinations from whatever expressive materials. In other works, I have called this form of writing “the figural.”10 Nonsensuous similarity exerts its effects in all reading and indeed opens itself to the strange ambiguity of the word “reading.” The potential of sense here, or better, the creation of new meaning, relies not on translating one kind of sign to another but rather in actively reading out of semiotic patterns of separation and difference whole new orders of sense, which are fragile, fleeting, emerging out of time and disappearing back into it. Reading here becomes, in all its difficulty, a form of divination. To account for Meteor as Schriftbild or image-writing is to discover in its ever-mobile combinations of image clusters, spoken words, and music new constellations of sense that are continually being drawn into unconventional orbits and flung out again into new semiotic chains—“breadcrumbs” and “shards of glass” becoming meteors and rockets; flocking crows and ravens becoming fluidly mutating words and figures. Such reading, and such writing, is not the unlocking or discovery of hidden sense that presumably precedes the composed signs but is rather a recognition of the emergence of the new and the so-far unnamed that is newly actualized in acts of writing and reading—the future of cinema emerging from its fading memory. The example of Meteor is one compelling instance of the memory of cinema and of the time-image in contemporary moving image practice. A very different though no less powerful example is Ken Jacobs’s Capitalism: Child Labor (2006, HD video, 14m). This is a fully and 10. See my Reading the Figural; or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

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unabashedly digital work that is thoroughly cognizant of its multiple historical roots in earlier analogical forms. It is also the harbinger of a future life of images that expresses its futurity by rewriting the deep past of the image with all its beauty and violence. Like its partner work, Capitalism: Slavery (2006, HD, 3:10), the raw material of Capitalism: Child Labor is a stereopticon slide from the turn of the last century—in this case, an image of the “great Spinning Room” in the Olympian Cotton Mills in Columbia, South Carolina, taken in 1903. Whether the image was originally made as a celebration of industry or as a record of exploitative child labor is unknown, though one of Jacobs’s objectives is certainly to rewrite another kind of history out of this image. The original slide itself is carefully composed to maximize an impression of stereoscopic depth with rows of spindles whose horizontal lines are echoed by vertical supporting columns receding to the same vanishing point in the depth of the far background of the cavernous room. Grouped mostly in the foreground and on the right-hand side of the frame are nine figures: six young boys and three adult overseers. There is little doubt that Capitalism: Child Labor should be characterized as a moving image work, and yet from the first seconds of play it is clear that all normative concepts of movement, and most criteria of what counts as a “movie,” are being questioned. As if proactively responding to the naming crisis inspired by related digital practices, Jacobs describes this and other works as “paracinema”—outlier works on the margins of what one usually thinks of as film or cinema that often resurrect and reimagine archaic or forgotten mechanisms and technologies of image-making. Even conventions of frame size are challenged as the work conforms to the tall rectangle of a stereopticon slide rather than more conventional Academy or widescreen aspect ratios. In my reading, the spatial and rhythmic composition of Capitalism: Child Labor includes a brief prologue and five movements or phases. Although lasting only about ten seconds, the prologue lays out the general composition of the stereopticon image as well as the primary formal and perceptual structures of repetition and variation in the work. Jacobs’s stereographic work produces new varieties of images that seem to both hesitate and oscillate between stillness and movement, flatness and depth, through an effect that Jacobs calls “eternalism.” In one of the best essays written on Jacobs’s digital work, Brooke Belisle explains that Jacobs creates “eternalisms” by arranging images, interspersed with black frames, in carefully prescribed patterns along the horizontal timeline of film-editing software. With jump cuts

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operating at microintervals, and simulating a shutter by interleaving black frames, this process creates flicker effects that cross spatial and temporal depth to produce wavering illusions of three-dimensionality and of movement. It invokes the thaumatrope’s trick of merging distinct images into apparent superimposition, and it simulates stereoscopic projection through the rapid alteration between two related vantage points. Flickering two perspectives of the same moment produces a hybrid between still and moving image, and a depth that, in Jacobs’s words, “seems constantly caught in the act of being generated out of flat elements.”11

Under ideal projection conditions, Jacobs’s eternalisms produce not only profound effects of stereoscopic depth but also quite extraordinary transformations in our conventional sense of time and duration as structured by images in movement. One might also think of this form of time perception as a new variation in our sense of “stillness.” As Belisle writes, the eternalism effect produces a “paradox of singular multiplicity and dynamic stasis in terms of cinematic duration, suggesting motion that, impossibly, does not seem to repeat or progress, always beginning to happen. Jacobs calls this ‘the appearance of transfixed continuous motion (a going without going anywhere).’ It pictures a moment that constantly passes and therefore does not pass, thereby allegorizing the paradox of the present as a now that is constantly disappearing and yet always obtains.”12 Jacobs’s eternalisms seem literally to produce intervals of time where the future memory of cinema struggles to emerge from its fading double in oscillating or vibrating time-figures, whose most appropriate philosophical analog might be Benjamin’s concept of dialectics at a standstill. The pulsing of Jacobs’s stereographic images indeed produces effects of aggressive repetition, and of images that vibrate in the present without giving way to a linear duration or an enduring past. But these pulsating stereographs also produce new variations in rhythm and time whose fundamental structural unit is the twinned spatial images of the 11. Brooke Belisle, “Depth Readings: Ken Jacobs’s Digital, Stereographic Films,” Cinema Journal 53:2 (Winter 2014): 11–12. The interior citation is from Jacobs’s patent, “Eternalism, a Method for Creating an Appearance of Sustained Three-Dimensional Motion-Direction of Unlimited Duration, Using a Finite Number of Pictures”; US Patent 7,030,902 B2, filed January 22, 2002, and issued April 18, 2006. 12. Belisle, “Depth Readings,” 12. The interior citation is again from the text of Jacobs’s eternalism patent.

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stereopticon slide, now ordered temporally by a very small interval of difference between otherwise nearly identical images. In the course of the work, this genetic element is opened out, unfolded, and expanded into rigorous rhythmic and spatial constellations of increasing structural complexity. In what I call the first compositional phase of Capitalism: Child Labor, the rapid vibrations of the prologue give way to a slower oscillation in which the alternating images seem to repeatedly shift left. Despite this effect, the viewer is able to take in the entire space of the image and factory floor as an unbroken composition. This is what I will call the baseline image as presented in the original slide. Two minutes into the work, the leftward oscillation reverses direction: the spatial genetic core has now been augmented by a directional variation. At three minutes twenty seconds, the image is suddenly stilled, marking the transition to a second compositional phase that lasts approximately three minutes. In phase 2, Jacobs systematically investigates the baseline image through a kind of analytic deconstruction where fourteen precise segments of the original image are extracted and enlarged. These “inserts” oscillate with the baseline image as compositional doublets that in the course of phase 2 rotate into and out of different quadrants of the baseline composition. Content of the inserts includes enlarged segments of the foreground, middle ground, and background of the baseline image as well as medium and close framings of the boys and overseers. Details in the inserts are almost always placed to encourage comparison with their original location in the baseline image. In a rhyming effect with phase 1, halfway through phase 2 the direction of the oscillations shifts from left to right. Phase 3 introduces new and more complex patterned variations. For example, two different inserts may alternate rapidly in a quadrant of the baseline image as doublets. These doublets alternate side-by-side and then are placed in different quadrants: alternation between the upper left and lower right of the baseline, then middle ground and upper right, lower left and upper left, and so forth. At about seven minutes the pattern of variation changes. A detail of the boys from the lower right of the baseline now fills the entire frame and alternates with the same image at a smaller scale overlaid on the upper left quadrant of the baseline. This pattern with different inserts continues through the end of phase 3 with one exception—halfway through, a striking triplet emerges comprised of a close-up of a boy pulling a spindle, followed by an extreme close-up of the same image, which in turn is displaced as an insert over the baseline. The effect of this extraordinary triplet alternation is to mimic the action of repetitive pulling as a mark of alienated

FIGURE 2

Capitalism: Child Labor. Baseline image plus nine elements from phase 2.

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labor. It also introduces new terms of variation that will be further developed in phase 4. A subtle mark of the beginning of phase 4 is the disappearance of the baseline image. Rhythm will now be structured as repeating triplet figures. Each element of the triplets is comprised of enlarged details of the baseline reproduced at varying scales, and indeed these details are familiar to us as the inserts we have previously seen. Moreover, as the phase develops, each new triplet retains one element from the series that immediately precedes it. As the phase unfolds, quartet figures with rapidly alternating elements emerge, and then even quintet figures, which begin to produce vertiginous movements that appear as something like a counterclockwise rotation of the image. The last phase of Capitalism: Child Labor is introduced by a return to the rapid pulsing of single images now organized as an expanding series: a doublet yields to a triplet, then quartet and quintet figures; as in the previous phase, each new series repeats an element or elements from the one that precedes it. The work then concludes with each of the fourteen inserts presented in turn as pulsing dimensional images. At this moment, perhaps you feel that my formal descriptions of Capitalism: Child Labor or Meteor have themselves become dizzying and unfocused? I hope this is not the case. For if I am right that works like these and others addressed in this book such as Victor Burgin’s Hôtel Berlin, Harun Farocki’s Serious Games series, or Ernie Gehr’s Glider are profoundly testing our criteria for what counts as a “moving image” and so provoke a naming crisis, then perhaps the best response is to give precise accounts of their formal operations. Since at least Reading the Figural, I have been arguing that art runs ahead of philosophy. And if this is the case, then what philosophy wants from images is the projection of new ideas, concepts, and criteria not yet precisely formulated by philosophy itself. To know how our senses of movement, time, memory, and history are being transformed and remapped in contemporary moving image practice might well require precisely charting the vertiginous movements of Images that plunge into the historical archive for materials whose innovative reordering yields new and disorienting variations of time. By what rights and with what criteria are such works called “moving images,” when the nature of their movements and the structuring of their images are so different from our Model image of film or video? In this context, I think it is important to look at Jacobs’s digital work as reflexive examinations of history and time in the production of a new kind of image. Jacobs’s work raises for us the problem of time and how

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we live and experience temporality through the media we collectively create and inhabit. In Capitalism: Child Labor, this is a time fractured through discontinuous series of images showing our present relation to the image as composed, as I put it earlier, of multiple and discontinuous versions of the past that persist in every passing present, and where every passing present is also composed from a present of the past and a present of the future. Call this a digital time-image, where Capitalism: Child Labor releases a present of the future from a past image, unlocking new forms of digital temporality. In this manner, Capitalism: Child Labor reconsiders photography and film in a genealogical frame, producing a moving electronic image that probes its history along two divergent lines rejoined, though as discontinuous series, within the work itself. These two genealogical lines, both crossing and diverging from one another, reference in complex ways the intersecting histories of photography and programmable computing through Jacobs’s interest in producing a new kind of work rooted in the archaic technologies of the stereopticon slide and the programmable loom. The analogical image is reprogrammed in this work to present another way of considering history as well as possible genealogies of the virtual image. But there is more. Jacobs adds to this aesthetic and technological history its often deflected or repressed connection to exploitation and the misery of extracted surplus value. In this way, Capitalism: Child Labor aims to replace the imperialistic or colonialized gaze of a certain mode of photography—which possesses this labor through a fixed image of it—with a newly aggressive and disorienting, interrogative temporality. The stereopticon slide is a mass-produced image of the world that offers through the illusion of dimensionality an ideal of realism based on perceptual immersion and immediacy. Alternatively, through a particular form of digital montage, Jacobs produces a new analytic of the image—decomposing and recomposing; extracting and doubling the frame by putting into motion the not-quite-twinned images of the stereopticon; extracting from simple difference multiple sets of discontinuous series; producing new varieties of depth and movement, related to, yet quite unlike, those of film. In so doing, Jacobs turns a potentially nostalgic or elegiac relation to past images into not only an investigation of the genealogy passing through digital and analog presentations, but also a creative destruction that transforms the ontology of the image, unleashing new potentials within it, and new relations with it. Paradoxically, out of the waning of indexicality (a transformation of the photographic image through the erosion of its particular

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historical and ontological powers) this work, and other recent works by Jacobs, Girardet and Müller, Victor Burgin, Harun Farocki, and others, attempt to project a new historical perception, of, in, or through images. Capitalism: Child Labor therefore presents a number of disorienting and disquieting ironies and paradoxes, both perceptual and historical, that lead to the following questions: How now to characterize the genre of “moving images,” and whether such a work quietly rests under this concept, or whether one should lay claim, with Jacobs, to new concepts of movement, image, time, and history? And, finally, how to incorporate and reprogram a past image to give expression to a future image, which still seeks its name as well as its politics? These are questions to which I will continue to return in the coming chapters of this book. But before addressing these questions in depth through close encounters with exemplary contemporary moving image works, I want to look more closely at what I call the queer structure of perceptual belief. What philosophy wants from images here is a response, both ethical and epistemological, to the dilemmas of skepticism raised by the changing ontologies of screened worlds.

2

The Queer Attractions of Perceptual Belief In his “Lecture on Ethics,” prepared for delivery at Cambridge University sometime between September 1929 and December 1930 though unpublished in his lifetime, Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that final and conclusive agreements on such ordinary yet powerful human experiences of ethics, aesthetics, or belief cannot be hoped for. But this does not mean that experiences like belief are incommunicable or incomprehensible; hence Wittgenstein’s long fascination with intermediate and impure cases as occasions for investigating these experiences philosophically, though often indirectly. In this way, Wittgenstein presents by example two philosophical procedures central to his later philosophy: the examination of intermediate cases and the description of similarities and differences across patterns of family resemblance.1 Disagreements on judgments of ethics, aesthetics, or belief present cases where humanity expresses its urge to run up against the limits of language. Wittgenstein often 1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, “A Lecture on Ethics,” Philosophical Review 74:1 (January 1965): 5. I treat these questions at greater length in my essay “Of Which We Cannot Speak: Philosophy and the Humanities,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung, Heft 2 (Autumn 2011): 9–22, and in my book, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

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described these misfires of meaning as “queer”; strange and unsettling, certainly, but also as challenging unexamined convictions about identity and understanding. (In this respect, Wittgenstein might productively be enlisted into recent and fascinating critical debates about “queer epistemology.”) The failure to find an adequate concept or expression may indeed lead to silence, but such naming crises are also just as likely to produce in series a variety of different statements or forms of expression, all of which fail to convey these experiences adequately to oneself or to others but which nonetheless bring forth the blurred outlines of the experience in repeated attempts to convey it, like lines in a sketch that create the impression of a picture or idea as compelling as it is incomplete. There are thus no pure or final cases but only intermediate ones. However, the assembly of related intermediate cases and perspicuous grammatical investigation may make apparent a latent image that nowhere lies in the expressions themselves but rather emerges in patterns of similarity and difference perceived among or between the expressions so produced. Consider these images or features expressions, then. But what we want to communicate, convey, apprehend, or understand lies nowhere in the image but rather is only graspable in a pattern of relationships that is itself neither pictured nor expressed yet becomes “visible,” as it were, if only in an intuited way. Wittgenstein’s “Lecture on Ethics” offers by example procedures for developing or drawing out these pictures through language in a process of comparing a number of more or less synonymous expressions that struggle to assess the defining characteristics of ethics. Though each expression differs slightly from the others, it is nonetheless possible to assemble patterns of difference and commonality in ways similar to the construction of a composite photograph. The effect thus produced is neither a consensual definition of ethics nor a complete and final understanding of the concept. Rather, as Wittgenstein might put it later on, definitions and concepts of ethics are deployed in a variety of language games in order to produce a pattern of family resemblances where different but overlapping conceptual senses can be “seen” and apprehended. In this chapter, I want to bring together two powerful thinkers who are rarely discussed on the same page: Christian Metz and Stanley Cavell. Roughly contemporary and equally influential in promoting strong though competing versions of academic film studies, Metz and Cavell appear to approach the cinema as if from two different worlds. Ever the semiologist (although a semiology tempered by phenomenology),

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Metz seeks to ground questions of meaning, belief, and perceptual experience in psychology or, rather, psychoanalysis. This, of course, was the project of his hugely influential essay “The Imaginary Signifier.” Though no less interested in psychoanalysis, Cavell approaches similar problems and experiences as a philosopher influenced by the later Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin’s investigations of ordinary language, though again in ways tempered by phenomenology. Metz works as a semiologist or film theorist and Cavell as a philosopher. Still, these two influential thinkers are linked through their common interest in investigating the relation between ontology and belief, and especially the perceptual character of expressions of ontology and belief. Both Metz and Cavell depict this problem as a nearly universal experience where evidence of the senses and of cognitive experience come into conflict with one another in the paradoxical structure of belief. This paradoxical structure is “queer” in a specific sense. Odd or strange, no doubt, and perhaps even perverse. But it is also a peculiar kind of perception where present experience and past memory oscillate in an ungraspable image where, as I suggested in the last chapter, belief inspires a desire for certainty in knowing and naming that is nevertheless infused with fantasy and contradiction. To more closely examine the experience of memory—whether the memory of cinema in new media of art or the world-memory of Benjamin’s Schriftbild—is a way of disentangling knowledge from belief so as to reaffirm the creative capacity of images and the affective power of memory in relation to the image. As I will further argue later in this chapter, the truth of the image, if there is one, resides in its uncertainty, contingency, and becoming. Here the paradoxical conditions of perceptual belief may be read as a striking counterpart to Benjamin’s doctrine of the similar. Consider, then, two of the most well-known statements in their respective oeuvres. In 1975, in “The Imaginary Signifier” Metz reconsiders Octave Mannoni’s depiction of the paradoxical logic of fetishism as the prototype of belief, especially with respect to photography and cinematographic images. Ten years later in his essay “Photography and Fetish,” Metz condenses his account. “Because it attempts to disavow the evidence of the senses,” Metz argues, “the fetish is evidence that this evidence has indeed been recorded (like a tape stored in the memory). The fetish is not inaugurated because the child still believes its mother has a penis ( = order of the imaginary), for if it still believed it completely, as ‘before,’ it would no longer need the fetish. It is inaugurated because the child now ‘knows very well’ that its mother has no penis. In other words, the fetish not only has disavowal value, but also knowl-

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edge value.”2 Here a perceptual event is permanently imprinted as a past perceptual experience that hovers uncertainly beneath present perceptual knowledge in ways that make indiscernible the borders between reality and fantasy, knowledge and denial. In both essays, Metz repeats and expands Mannoni’s propositional expression of this belief: “Je sais bien . . . mais quand même”—I know very well, but even so. In the opening pages of The World Viewed, first published in 1971 and then in an expanded edition in 1979, Cavell presents another version of the paradox of perceptual belief in photography and cinema: “A photograph does not present us with ‘likenesses’ of things; it presents us, we want to say, with the things themselves. But wanting to say that may well make us ontologically restless.”3 Similar to Metz’s characterization, Cavell observes that in looking at photographs, even though we know that a likeness is a representation we want to say that the image also confronts us with worldly existence. We experience something like certainty, but ironically, it is an uncertain certainty. We are restless, and again our perception vacillates in a space between knowledge and belief. This rotation of belief around assertions of knowledge and denial, reality and fantasy, is a common thread running through Metz and Cavell’s writings on photography and film. Another fascinating family resemblance between Metz and Cavell is their common tendency to approach a problem indirectly—to circle a question probing for original points of entry and then to proceed through loops and digressions. Not uncharacteristically of Metz’s writing, his brilliantly argued “Photography and Fetish” struggles to stay on topic. To begin my examination of the family resemblance between Metz and Cavell’s accounts of perceptual belief I will concentrate on Metz’s later essay, for here it is clear that fetishism is not the primary trigger for his curiosity but rather what I am calling the “queer” structure of photographic belief. In 1985, Metz’s commitment to psychoanalysis seems strong yet more distant than in the writing of ten years earlier. In this essay, discus2. Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (Fall 1985): 73; hereafter cited in text as “PF.” Metz’s essay was published in several French versions as well: “L’image comme objet: Cinéma, photo, fétiche,” CinémaAction 50 (1989): 168–75; and “Photo, fétiche,” Pour la photographie, tome 2, ed. Ciro Bruni and Michel Colin (Sammeron, G.E.R.M.S. et Revue d’esthétique photographique, 1990). I thank Martin Lefebvre for confirming that there are only minor variations across these three texts. In this essay, I will work primarily with the original English text. Metz’s influential text “The Imaginary Signifier” was first published in French in Communications 23 (1975): 3–55 and rapidly translated into English and published in Screen 16:2 (1975): 14–76. 3. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enl. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 17; hereafter cited in text as WV.

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sion of the fetish and fetishism in psychoanalytic terms is treated more skeptically and contextualized through references to anthropology and myth. If Metz’s principal concern is how photography and film raise perceptually paradoxical questions of belief, or rather treat belief as a paradoxical relationship to the world, then the fetish here becomes itself a “fetish”—a token, charm, or talisman. Working in semiology and structuralism, whose residual positivism requires grounding in cultural and social convention, Metz needs a figure attached to psychology as much as to a logic or concept of belief. (Inter alia, this is why his approach is theoretical and not philosophical. I will return to this observation in my conclusion.) Metz seems disinclined here to take for granted the continuing power of psychological fetishism, nor does he assert as strongly that the logic of fetishism informs structures of cinematographic belief. Indeed, one of the principal arguments of the essay is that for a number of formal and perceptual reasons, cinema is a less powerful analog to fetishism than photography. (Could the image in movement be a counterweight to fetishistic structures of belief or a path to their overcoming?) In his conclusion, Metz emphasizes that, like Freud, his argument is an “interpretation” of fetishism, an application and displacement of its possible meanings from one domain, psychology, to another, aesthetics. Moreover, Metz expresses dissatisfaction with the concept in both its Freudian and Lacanian versions because of its androcentrism, among other reasons. Nonetheless, the value of the concept is its potential for activation and production of new knowledge in another field, that of film theory, by testing the powers and limits of its analogical application in other domains. In the wake of Metz’s canonic essay “The Imaginary Signifier,” one of the most striking conclusions of “Photography and Fetish,” then, is that psychological fetishism is not a strong model for characterizing perceptual belief in the cinema. In like manner, while acknowledging the important affinities between photography and cinema, even more than Cavell Metz wants to make them ontologically distinct, and one criterion for that distinction is their closeness to or distance from the logic of fetishism. And in a final turn, perhaps fetishism is not the main point at all. Again, here in many ways it functions as a heuristic for exploring the deeper and paradoxical character of perceptual belief in relation to our claims about the existence of the image as a world or in its presentations of the world. The point I am trying to make here is that for Metz the interest in the concept of fetishism is less the basis for a theory than the drawing of a

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picture where fetishism yields a concept or itself becomes a new figure of logic. Metz places this figure in a moving metonymic chain whose effect is to shake loose its moorings in psychology, anthropology, and ethnology in order to clarify the peculiar perceptual situations in which photography and film place us. And these situations must be examined by establishing logical criteria rather than grounding perceptual experience in potentially universalizing psychological causes or structures. Herein lies another point of common interest in Metz and Cavell. Both assert that photography and film produce a powerful conviction of the real that is nonetheless counterbalanced by an ineluctable sense of unreality, and so much so that the dividing line between reality and unreality becomes indiscernible. Both work in their own ways and from their own perspectives to understand a perceptual vertigo produced by these images where knowledge and belief, reality and unreality, rotate into and out of one another more or less undecidably. For Cavell, the key term in this process is automatism; for Metz, indexicality. Yet there is another point of agreement here. Metz argues that the powers of indexicality derive from the photographic act or “the mode of production itself, the principle of the taking” (“PF,” 82). Whatever level of force of belief one attributes to the image, its testament to existence is bound to its automatic capacity to record, preserve, and transmit a relation of contiguity and connection to the world. For Metz, there is an interesting seam to the powers of photography and film in this respect. In virtue of its silence, its stasis, and its demotic character, photography “remains closer to the pure index, stubbornly pointing to the print of what was, but no longer is” (“PF,” 83). Below, as it were, all their other qualities or characteristics, photographs document and preserve. At the same time, we are on ground familiar to all readers of “The Imaginary Signifier.” Both the photographic image and the cinematographic image inhabit a curious temporality of presence and absence. In photography, this temporality is expressed as the disturbing co-presence of a past existence in time with a present image in space. However, even if photography lives genetically in cinematography, Metz argues that it is transformed ontologically by projected movement. (This is the basis of yet another family resemblance to Cavell.) Despite all the documentary power that may reside within it in virtue of photography’s documentary powers, in its standard uses film transforms photographic processes in powerfully fictionalizing and creative ways. In other words, film creates new existence, new worlds, as much as or more than preserving past worlds. In a kind of Aufhebung, film infuses photography with a new imaginary (and one where the imagi-

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nary logic of the fetish resides only unhappily). Through its unfolding in time and its capacity to absorb and put into play additional narrative and perceptual elements, its power of disconnecting, reconnecting, and recontextualizing images, Metz observes that in cinematography the indexical power of photography frequently serves, paradoxically, as a realist warrant for the unreal; in other words, it gives the imaginary or the unreal what might be called an unreasonable capacity to convince. (In chapter 4, I will show how Harun Farocki examines critically and analytically this paradoxical power of images through his practice of dissociative montage.) Therefore, photography and film must be distinguished not only by the presence of automated movement but also by their respective powers of temporal expression and stillness. Metz argues that even if cinema includes photography, cinema absorbs and transforms the still image in the creation of “a second movement, an ideal one, made out of successive and different immobilities. Movement and plurality imply time, as opposed to the timelessness of photography which is comparable to the timelessness of the unconscious and of memory” (“PF,” 83). The historical time of the photograph is transformed by a regulated serialized movement into the projection of an ideal time, perhaps even a utopic, heterocosmic time, though Metz does not quite put it this way. Nevertheless, in contrast to the transcriptive and preservative time of photography, film presents “a stream of temporality where nothing can be kept, nothing stopped” (“PF,” 83). For Metz this capacity works against the power of the fetish. By extension, it may also undermine or overturn the fixity of belief in anticipation of new knowledge. Is this an argument for the creative capacity of time? The qualities of immobility and silence, Metz also observes, are shared by photography and death. There is an authority to the photograph that testifies equally to nonexistence and existence, or rather, to the existence of nonexistence. In their respective acts of “taking” or registration, photographic duration is qualitatively distinct from cinematographic duration—they “expose” time differently. Metz characterizes the photographic act as the transport of the object into another kind of time: “the snapshot, like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time— unlike cinema which replaces the object, after the act of appropriation, in an unfolding time similar to that of life” (“PF,” 84). The realism of cinematic projection, if there is one, is to enfold the viewer in the flow of time—a full and heterogeneous duration coterminous with the durée in which the viewer actually lives.

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Photographic time seems other to this living durée. In Metz’s language, there is something almost existentially murderous about photography. Taking a snapshot is depicted as a violent gesture of cutting inside the referent, as if lifting some segment of its body outside of the flow of time. The cut removes and preserves, but in the form of nonexistence. The form of my body has slipped into the past, and as Roland Barthes often insisted, the time of photography thus presents a future anterior where a slipping into nonexistence becomes the future that confronts us all. By the same token the fact of this temporality informs photography and film as forms of memory. “The two modes of perpetuation are very different in their effects, and nearly opposed,” Metz asserts. “Film gives back to the dead a semblance of life, a fragile semblance but one immediately strengthened by the wishful thinking of the viewer. Photography, on the contrary, by virtue of the objective suggestions of its signifier (stillness, again) maintains the memory of the dead as being dead” (“PF,” 84). And in a rather subtle though no less astounding statement, Metz asserts that film does not found itself on photography, but rather destroys the power and action of photography by energizing it, infusing stillness with ineluctable movement. Automated movement is reanimation. The reanimating character of automated movement is equally expressed in how the space off-frame or out of frame (hors cadre is the French term) is read differently in photography and film. In both cases the edges or borders of the frame function less to organize a composition than to enact a displacement, where the logic of fetishism acts as a basis of comparison. The primal scene of castration fantasy displaces knowledge of empirical perception (the missing penis) by, as Metz puts it, stopping the look on a less threatening image, which nonetheless stands next to it. Here again there is a paradoxical perception where nonexistence and existence are simultaneously presented and asserted without the acknowledgement of contradiction while nonetheless incurring an uncanny affect. Space off-frame is anxious. It anticipates certain knowledge yet also delays it—it polarizes perception as if a slight rotation of perspective would reveal something one does not want to see, or say. The remarkable expressive logic of fetishism thus combines a double and contradictory function. As metaphor it incites and encourages—it provides a veiling substitute or protective replacement buffering the subject against the acknowledgment of loss and nonexistence. Functioning metonymically it stands beside or is connected to the danger it is supposed to ward off. The fetish is a conduit to unhappy knowledge even while we ask it to ward off the danger sleeping next to it. And

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as it protects it also attests to an involuntary belief, “the warding off of bad luck or the ordinary, permanent anxiety which sleeps (or suddenly wakes up) inside each of us” (“PF,” 86). Here again fetishism marks a contrast between the time of photography and that of film. Conventionally speaking (because in both cases there are many unconventional expressions), the frame functions to distinguish photographic and cinematographic belief. In film, the space implied out of frame may always in principle be returned to the world in frame. Unseen space is not ontologically distinct from that world but rather contiguous with it—it may appear, or appear again, through camera movement or editing; the diegetic presence of a character out of frame may be asserted by the off-screen presence of their voice in frame. As Metz puts it, The off-frame is taken into the evolutions and scansions of the temporal flow: it is off-frame, but not off-film. . . . The character who is off-frame in a photograph, however, will never come into the frame, will never be heard—again a death, another form of death. The spectator has no empirical knowledge of the contents of the off-frame, but at the same time cannot help imagining some off-frame, hallucinating it, dreaming the shape of this emptiness. It is a projective off-frame (that of the cinema is more introjective), an immaterial, “subtle” one, with no remaining print. “Excluded,” to use Dubois’s term, excluded once and for all. Yet nevertheless present, striking, properly fascinating (or hypnotic—insisting on its status as excluded by the force of its absence inside the rectangle of paper, which reminds us of the feeling of lack in the Freudian theory of the fetish. (“PF,” 86–87)4

If Metz’s analogy between photography and fetishism holds, then the photographic frame suspends perception between two incommensurable dimensions of existence and nonexistence, knowledge and belief. 4. Metz is relying on two important points of reference here. One is Philippe Dubois’s fascinating book, L’acte photographique (Paris and Brussels: Nathan and Labor, 1983). The other is Pascal Bonitzer’s work on off-frame space, especially his essay “Le hors-champ subtil,” Cahiers du cinéma 311 (May 1980). Here Bonitzer makes a distinction between the filmic frame-off, which implies a space filled (étouffé) with potential for further revealed and revealing images, and the photographic frame-off, whose implied unseen space is more reticent or subtle. These arguments are, of course, deeply related to Deleuze’s discussion of the hors cadre presented in the last chapter.

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Here the violence of the photographic act returns in Metz’s argument. Metz characterizes the instant of photographic capture, the click of the shutter, as an act figuring castration—a singular and definitive cutting that “marks the place of an irreversible absence, a place from which the look has been averted forever. The photograph itself, the ‘in-frame,’ the abducted part-space, the place of presence and fullness—although undermined and haunted by the feeling of its exterior, of its borderlines, which are the past, the left, the lost: the far away even if very close by, as in Walter Benjamin’s conception of the ‘aura’—the photograph, inexhaustible reserve of strength and anxiety, shares, as we see, many properties of the fetish (as object), if not directly of fetishism (as activity)” (“PF,” 87). Like the fetish, photography is grounded in a peculiar act of apperception—a more or less permanent instance wherein the polarizing affect of frame and off-frame, seen and unseen, presence and absence, belief and knowledge, desire and anxiety—are caught in an instant of infinite repetition. Alternatively, film plays with or on these affects by putting them into movement, temporalizing them in narrative scenarios  of series and differentiation. As Metz puts it, film enacts the possibility of playing with fetishism, while the photograph itself is more capable of actually becoming a fetish. Film makes drama out of fetishistic repetitiveness, fictionalizes it as it were. With its complex formal and narrative play on the out-of-frame, cinema toys with the combination of desire and fear, pleasure and terror, evoked by fetishistic belief. “The moving camera caresses the space,” Metz writes, “and the whole of cinematic fetishism consists in the constant and teasing displacement of the cutting line which separates the seen from the unseen. But this game has no end. Things are too unstable and there are too many of them on the screen. It is not simple—although still possible, of course, depending on the character of each spectator—to stop and isolate one of these objects, to make it able to work as a fetish” (“PF,” 88).5 There is thus something like a turn of magic in projected movement, 5. New technologies of presentation, especially digital presentation, have dramatically transformed the terms in which stillness and movement or cinephilia and fetishism are spoken about. One of the most interesting accounts is Laura Mulvey’s thoughtprovoking book, Death 24x a Second (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), especially her concluding chapters on the possessive and the pensive spectator. Raymond Bellour has been our most brilliant observer of these shifts and transformations of spectatorship with respect to photography, cinema, and video in an electronic and digital age. See his recently translated collection of essays, Between-the-Images (Zurich and Dijon: JRP | Ringier and Les presses du réel, 2012). Like Bellour, I believe that new practices of contemporary moving image art are deeply engaged in these questions.

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a point that Cavell also makes, and Metz presents this idea as a classical theme in film theory. Invoking again Octave Mannoni’s condensation of the expression of fetishistic belief and denial, “I know very well, but even so . . . ,” Metz insists again on the uncanny strangeness of both photographic and cinematographic belief. On one hand, the spectator is never “fooled” by an image, knowing with certainty what a representation is and never confounding an image with what it is an image of. “But even so . . . ,” and here knowledge rotates into belief. To enjoy the fiction and partake of its pleasures or, in the case of photography, to maintain belief in past existence (and perhaps to ward off knowledge of the passing of existence), the viewer must displace or transform this knowledge. Metz concludes here, having glossed Mannoni’s argument at length in “The Imaginary Signifier.” Still, as I have tried to argue, his essay on “Photography and Fetish” suggests many interesting new points of departure from earlier work. In particular, it is important to insist that what I have characterized as perceptual belief is not a form of illusion nor should it be diagnosed as fantasy. Rather, it is another form of knowledge that has both ethical and philosophical force. This is where a comparison with Cavell becomes both apt and illustrative, and perhaps deepens our understanding of these two important thinkers despite their superficial differences. One might say that Metz’s arguments present a diagnosis or symptomology of the fetishistic character of perceptual belief. Cavell targets a similar condition and experience of perceptual belief in his ontological and ethical investigations of the logic of skepticism. Where Freud is the protagonist (or antagonist) of Metz’s argument, Cavell implicitly targets Descartes as the foil for his investigations of the skeptical character of belief in photography or cinematography. Descartes is the antagonist in this story for several reasons. Cartesianism places epistemology as the centerpiece of philosophy, and in so doing makes perception the guarantor of knowledge about the world. At the same time, Descartes knows that human perception is limited and therefore unreliable. One last dilemma must be added to this linking of acts of perceiving to the quest for certainty in knowledge: existence. In Descartes’s Meditations, the instability of knowing is linked to possible failures of perception and judgment that are at once outward and inward directed. Sitting alone before the fire in his study Descartes is lulled into wondering, as we all sometimes are, whether he is awake or dreaming, or to suddenly fearing that the frontiers between these two states are indiscernible or indistinguishable. What makes such thoughts all the more disturbing is

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that doubts about the existence of the world lead inexorably to doubts about the reliability of the self and its anchoring in a stable, perceptible, and knowable world, as well as about the power of any transcendental authority to assure the universal coherence and meaningfulness of the world. In a strong sense, one could portray Descartes as the founding author of the experience of modernity in its doubled aspect: presenting the self as divided from the world by its capacities for perception and thought, and thus wishing for the self to master both itself and the world, and all the objects in it, by assuring their existence through criteria of certain knowledge. Skepticism is another aspect or dimension of modernity in that the desire for certainty is a response to a perceived precariousness of one’s relation to the world, as if a sudden and unexpected dislocation of the subject from the object of knowledge. The unacknowledged symptom of skepticism, what Cavell sometimes calls the truth of skepticism, is suppressing recognition that it produces the situation it is supposed to overcome. (This would be another point of contrast and comparison with the logic of fetishism.) In diverse moments of writing, Cavell describes this condition as the difficulty of making ourselves present to the world, and the world present to us. In its response to skepticism, epistemology creates a new and potentially disquieting situation that Cavell pictures as seeing ourselves as outside the world as a whole. (And here one might also entertain comparisons with Metz’s discussions of voyeurism.) The self is thus constrained to relate to the world as if ontologically distinct from it. Moreover, since perception is optically unreliable, the self or mind is made distinct from the body, even if the only way of relating to the world is through the frame or window of perception, as if from an immaterial and partial perspective looking out at different aspects of external objects. In this situation, the character of the subject and the character of the world are both transformed. The world is fashioned here as what Cavell  calls a “generic object,” in contrast, perhaps, to the fetish as a partial object; that is, as something that epistemology can treat in its generality as indistinguishable from all the singular and particular things within the world, or alternatively, where singular things serve pars pro toto as tokens of the world as a knowable object. In its need to know the world as a complete object, skepticism expresses an anxiety that Cavell presents in The Claim of Reason as “a sense of powerlessness to know the world, or to act upon it; I think it is also working in the existentialist’s (or, say, Santayana’s) sense of the precariousness and

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arbitrariness of existence, the utter contingency in the fact that things are as they are.”6 In this context, Cavell’s early definition of cinema as a succession of automatic world projections, which I discuss at length in The Virtual Life of Film, also suggests a program of philosophical investigation that links the temporality of modernism to the “movement” or transformative power of the image. Succession indicates types and degrees of depicted motion, of course, both within the frame and across continuous or discontinuous series at various scales. Yet this criterion should also be broadened to include the complex temporalities of the image in its states and phases of becoming. Automatic designates those aspects of the image that are self-producing independent of a human hand, as well as the absence of people and things so produced on the screen. Call this the inhuman dimension or power of screened worlds, which may also be characterized as the passive intentional power of cinematographic expression. World then leads to ontological investigations of the worlds and subjects so made and the interpenetrating qualities of reality and fantasy experienced through institutional conditions of viewing and response. And finally, projection signals the phenomenological conditions of viewing, as if at a remove or distance from the world, as well as the force of analogy in movement and time between the screened world and the pro-filmic world thus transcribed and projected. Movement, time, and becoming are all complexly linked here, in ways expressive of the unsettled and unsettling force of fantasy and reality (of fantasies of reality, or the reality of fantasy in relations to screened worlds), as well as the passing or becoming of ontological situations thus projected. In the first phase of Cavell’s film philosophy, the problem of ontology does not wish just to account for the existence of the projected world and perception as screened. Rather, Cavell wants to ask: what are the conditions of my current existence that lead me to desire to see and to experience the world in just this way, as projected and screened? Why does just this kind of picturing of the world hold me? What are the sources of its attraction or attractiveness? These questions are ethical, and express a philosophical desire as much as a psychological one. Cinema itself responds to this question by offering another regime of belief, not necessarily as an escape into fantasy but rather by offering a condition or situation wherein we might understand more clearly how our views of or on reality are burdened by fantasy. This is neither an escape 6. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 236.

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into or out of fantasy, as if somehow our thoughts, perceptions, and expressions could be disconnected from our desires. The screened world is a perfect emblem of skepticism, as I have already pointed out in The Virtual Life of Film, but it also opens to view a range of options for relief from skepticism. And not by bolstering our knowledge of things, not by documenting our certainty of the world either present or past, but by opening to question dilemmas of belief or disbelief framed by a mode of existence that desires these kinds of pictures of the world; or alternatively, by examining the forms of our responsiveness to a world that wants us to experience it as or through projected moving pictures. Cavell’s version of ontology is transformational. When Cavell asks in a 1978 essay, what becomes of things (or people) on film?, he wants us to comprehend the world viewed as projected on the screen as a space of transformation, or if you will, becoming. Cavell calls this force of becoming on screen and as image “photogenesis.” These transformations do not only count for objects recorded and transformed to the screen but also for the subjects included there. In his first accounts leading up to Pursuits of Happiness, these subjects are ethical exemplars responding to skeptical belief, usually in comic ways; or in fact finding such belief to be comic rather than tragic. The figures of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, or Cary Grant are especially important in this context, not to mention the great actresses of remarriage comedy. Becoming on the screen is a species of (self) transformation, meaning that it is both automatic or subject to certain automatisms of recording, transcription, narration, and genre, and also that it projects reflexively a picture of self responding to pressures of transformation. (Cavell often refers to this process as the ascendency of actor over character in the cinema.) Ontology in Cavell’s sense is therefore not about an attained existence for either objects or persons, which film is then capable of recording, representing, or preserving, nor is it about the preservation or projection of the world as a generic object. The temporal structure of screened worlds, and the ethical stakes for the picture of subjectivity so projected, are more complex. To understand the concept of ontology as expressing film’s relation to reality, and thus fantasy, Cavell asks us to investigate the reality of this relation through moving images as images that move us. Take for example Cavell’s discussion of the comedy of Buster Keaton in “What Becomes of Things on Film?” Cavell frames his response to Keaton through Heidegger’s characterization of the worldhood of the world announcing itself to us, not as a revelation to the subject but rather through the obstinacy of things, which in opposing us expose the

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limitations of our acts, knowledge, and preoccupations in our encounters and struggles with material objects. The resistance of the world to our actions and will not only circumscribes us as subjects—if we are willing, it also opens us sensuously to so far unrecognized textures and capacities of the world, and to our contingent relationships to it as a space of accidents, accidents which are also unforeseen possibilities. In slapstick comedy, every mischance is a gift and an opportunity for evasion. That this occurs in the time and movements of cinema, Cavell explains, says something about the human capacity for sight, or for sensuous awareness generally, something we might express as our condemnation to project, to inhabit, a world that goes essentially beyond the delivery of our senses. . . . I understand Buster Keaton, say in The General, to exemplify an acceptance of the enormity of this realization of human limitation, denying neither the abyss that at any time may open before our plans, nor the possibility, despite that open possibility, of living honorably, with good if resigned spirits, and with eternal hope. His capacity for love does not avoid this knowledge, but lives in full view of it. Is he dashing? He is something rarer; he is undashable. He incorporates both the necessity of wariness in an uncertain world, and also the necessary limits of human awareness; gaze as we may, there is always something behind our backs, room for doubt.7

These comments are not a defense of stoicism. The personae of Keaton or Chaplin do not ask that the obstinacy of fate and the world be gracefully accepted but rather show that human beings are resourcefully capable of pursuing happiness in spite of these limitations. The comic responses of Keaton or Chaplin to the world’s contingency and obstinacy are extraordinary manifestations of what any ordinary human being is capable of. Cavell calls this a willingness to care, or to be attentive to the depth of a human capacity for inventiveness and improvisation in seeking out newly imagined alternatives. Here the link between reality and fantasy in the screened image is especially important. Or rather, it may be characteristic of the automatisms of the screened image that every transcription of the world is also 7. Stanley Cavell, “What Becomes of Things on Film?” in Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 3; hereafter cited in text as “WB.”

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expressive of a desired stance toward the world—the world as we want to see it or desire it to be. The real and the imaginary are not opposed here as genres of cinematographic expression. Rather, they continually flow into and out of one another in the temporality of the projected image and our responses to it. Cavell calls this an alternation between the indicative and subjunctive tenses, or unmarked juxtapositions of reality with some unresolved opposition to reality. In “What Becomes of Things on Film?,” Cavell evokes photogenesis to describe the image’s peculiar quality of becoming, which is also expressive of “the power of film to materialize and to satisfy (hence to dematerialize and to thwart) human wishes that escape the satisfaction of the world as it stands; as perhaps it will ever, or can ever, in fact stand” (“WB,” 6). To speak of ontology here is to address not only or not simply a fact of film, as Cavell might put it, but also to focus on a genetic capacity of the image that needs to be interpreted or evaluated in terms of its qualities of attraction. At various moments in this period of his writing, Cavell asserts that film is a moving image of skepticism. To answer the question, what becomes of things and people on film?, means comprehending all the variety and complexity of what “movement” means here, in ways that are analogous to Metz’s comments on the transformations of stillness by movement in cinematography. Cinematographic images are certainly found to be moving, that is, as inspiring affect or emotion. But they are also unsettling; they make us ontologically unquiet. If film is a moving image of skepticism, it does not so much confirm our subjectivity (as modern for example) as shake our belief that we know the basis of our conviction in reality. This unsettling of belief is similar to Metz’s account of fetishism and its varying manifestations in relation to photography and cinema, though Cavell is pushing here in other directions in that in his account movement is also ethically transformational. In cutting conviction loose from its moorings, the subject is made vulnerable to pressures of uncertainty, doubt, and self-questioning, and thus open to the possibility of change. And finally, movement is also historical: the passage of skepticism into art or cinema from the everyday, or of philosophy into a mode or machine of presentation, may also mean that modernity is changing the terms of its existence, as I already argued in part 2 of The Virtual Life of Film. (Here one passes, perhaps, from an experience of modernity to nostalgia for it, or what Cavell calls losing one’s natural relation to art or film.) The concept of photogenesis plays an interesting role in the first phase of Cavell’s thought. For Cavell, photogenesis names one of the

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principal powers or automatisms of cinematographic presentations, where the transcription and projection of screened worlds enact transformations whose violence is commensurate with the force of becoming immanent to thought and things on film. The concept of photogenesis is complexly linked here to cinema’s specific institutional presentation of the skeptical dilemma. For example, in the foreword to the enlarged edition of The World Viewed, Cavell writes that objects projected on the film screen are inherently reflexive or self-referential, meaning first that one is led to wonder about their physical origins in past times and spaces, but also that the quality of their presence on the screen indicates their ineluctable absence. This situation is an emblem of skepticism in that all we need to convince ourselves of the presence of the world is a projected image wherein the world is screened and we are screened from it, as if viewing it from a distance. Belief in the causal presence of objects on the screen, and our surrender of responsibility for that world to film’s automatic transcriptions and projections of it, is one of the satisfactions of skepticism. But the anguish of skepticism is also produced from this situation in two ways, both of which signify a withdrawal or diminution of human agency and autonomy. In viewing this succession of automatic world projections, we are absolved from responsibility for producing views of the world, since another automatic or automatizing (nonhuman) entity has brought them into being. Cavell’s characterization of the expressive powers of the image is not a realism, or not only a realism in a limited sense. The reality of the condition of cinematic viewing, according to Cavell, is ineluctably marked by fantasy, and in turn fantasy is one of the most powerful components of our experience of reality through cinema. This experience is neither the illusion of reality nor the reality-effect so thoroughly studied by contemporary film theory. Rather, it relates to Cavell’s close connection of the skeptical dilemma to the experience of modernity in cinematic viewing. There is a powerful reality expressed in this situation since it is the philosophical background of our daily cultural life in modernity— the experience of cinema is a component of that life and also an expression of it. But the reality of this experience is also permeated by fantasy (of belief or conviction, of a world accessible only through the senses, of a past preserved against time, of a self withdrawn into privacy) as a force of attraction inseparable from our lived reality. In philosophy, this situation is not to be negated, overcome, or deconstructed, but rather acknowledged and evaluated. The challenge of ontological investigation is not to alter our conditions of knowing but rather our conditions of

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valuing and living. The photographic and cinematic arts have a special role to play here because they embody and replicate the structure of skepticism, and also because they so powerfully inspire a hesitancy or equivocation with respect to skepticism’s powers of conviction, which according to Cavell is inherent in the structure of skepticism itself. In other words, photography both elicits a certain regime of belief and also destabilizes it. This assertion and destabilization of belief is, again, beautifully expressed in Cavell’s statement in The World Viewed, that “A photograph does not present us with ‘likenesses’ of things; it presents us, we want to say, with the things themselves. But wanting to say that may well make us ontologically restless” (WV, 17). Here Cavell wants to describe the powers of photogenesis simultaneously to affirm belief and inspire doubt, to attract us to the image as confirming the existence of the world through its powers of automatic analogical causation, and, at the same time, to enact a fantasy of the world’s presence through its absent existence. This is another way of asserting that the automatic transcription and projection of the world hovers uncertainly between indicative and subjunctive tenses or moods, or a co-present belief of past existence in time and of a world preserved, and the present projection of a world transformed. We misrecognize photography’s hold on us if we gravitate too urgently to one pole or the other. Rather, the truth of the image, if there is one, resides in its uncertainty, contingency, and becoming. Cavell’s concept of automatism is therefore not meant to describe, or not only to describe, the fact of mechanical reproduction; it also wants to account for the powers of attraction or fantasy in relation to images so produced in ways both human and inhuman. Automatism thus manifests a specific kind of desire—the wish to view the world unseen and as if by a self hidden behind perception—and this world must be taken to be the world in its totality. This is the modern philosophical wish of skepticism, whose desire for the world as a completely knowable object places it just beyond the reach of our knowing, and so produces a situation where our natural mode of perception is viewing as an invisible and anonymous observer. Here, Cavell explains, “We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self” (WV, 102). This is a precise description of the perceptual and epistemological situation of skepticism, which seems to want to make the self distinct from perception. In the cinema, this perception appears to be produced independently of the self as an automatic instrumentality. The skeptical attitude thus engenders a peculiar internal division where the mind can only assure

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itself of the possibility of knowledge by treating its own perception as a separate mechanism that intervenes between itself and the world. At the same time, this mode projects an external division separating self from world, whose only points of contact can take place through acts of viewing. Perception thus becomes both a structure of separation between subject and object, mind and world, and also the only pathway through which mind and world can communicate. In thrall of skepticism, Cavell suggests, the only way of establishing connection with the world is through viewing it or having views of it. To wish to view the world itself—as it was in the past or is in the present past—as a complete causally produced object is therefore to wish for the condition of viewing as such, but in the passive form of an automatic and instrumentalized perception. In turn, to wish for the condition of viewing as such is to desire a sure connection to the world but also to hold at bay, unseen and unacknowledged, recognition that this desire is a fantasy of anonymity, privacy, and power over the world. In theatrical cinema, the deepest irony of this situation is that the condition of collective viewing and of shared experience might reinforce the desire for the privacy and anonymity of skepticism. (Perhaps the contemporary proliferation of home viewing and personal data screens might likewise reinforce and expand exponentially an isolation where one’s only recourse for connecting to the world or to others is through the image and from behind screens. In this ontology we are not alone together, but rather together alone.) Alternatively, philosophical investigation and criticism might be able to release the hold of this fantasy or to let us see beyond it the attractions of sociality and a shared mode of existence waiting to be acknowledged. In this instance, what philosophy wants from images is release from isolation into new forms of collective belief and existence. Cavell and Metz both offer explanations of the attractions and paradoxes of perceptual belief, but from distinctly different perspectives: on one hand, a psychoanalytically grounded semiology; on the other, a philosophical ethics. In this respect, perhaps the comparison of Cavell and Metz from the standpoint of ontology is unjust. Ever the semiologist, Metz examines photography and film as socialized units of meaning or reading where, in his later essay “Photography and Fetishism,” fetishism becomes more a heuristic model than a psychological explanation. Cavell gives a philosophical account of this experience, where in a number of essays the ontology of photography and film are read as emblematic of the problem of skepticism and its overcoming. Nevertheless, their common interest in the problematic nature of belief links Metz and Cavell’s argument across a number of common themes

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that present opportunities for comparison and contrast of their two perspectives: the transformative powers of movement and projection; the existential force of indexicality or causality in analogical transcription; the association of photography with the domestic or private and family life—what Metz calls “the presumed real” (“PF,” 82)—and film with collective reception and an imaginary referent; the curious alternation of presence and absence in space and in time articulated in different ways by photography and cinematography; and finally and most importantly, the critical investigation of the co-constitutive and indiscernible vacillation between reality and fantasy, or the real and the imaginary, in perceptual belief. The two perspectives might be compared by calling upon our own ordinary cultural experience as viewers, and I would guess that many readers would find much to recommend in both accounts. However, I want to conclude here with some observations on method or critical practice inspired by the juxtaposition of Metz and Cavell as they examine respectively the queer claims that photographic or cinematographic perceptual belief make on us. In Elegy for Theory, I suggest that the problem of the history of film theory be considered not as fixed and successive periods or as conceptual schemes overturning and replacing one another, but rather as overlapping and intersecting genres of discourse full of retentions, returns, and unexpected extensions as well as ellipses and omissions. Nevertheless, the emergence or unfolding of discursive genres, one out of the other, occurs neither progressively nor continuously but rather in series of disruptions and discontinuities that mark real differences, each of which involves turnings and remappings of concepts of theory. (One might make the same observations with respect to our understanding of media of art and their own historical transformations.) In this respect, when examined genealogically, “theory” can only be presented as what Wittgenstein calls an intermediate case. There is a virtual life of theory no less powerful or elusive than that of film or the moving image. We will never settle on a satisfactory definition of theory, even though one of the attractions of theory may be to demand just this satisfaction from us. I have suggested throughout this essay that Metz’s approach is theoretical and that Cavell’s is philosophical. Perhaps the moment has finally arrived, then, to state clearly that despite the two fields’ jagged and irregular borders, philosophy is not theory. Philosophy may overlap with and link to many problems of theory, yet my comparison of Metz and Cavell also suggests that it remains distinct from theory as a practice.

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One way to characterize theory might be as an activity wherein experience is converted into thought, and so made expressible and communicable to others. Along these lines one might also say that theory is outward directed while philosophy is inward directed. Theory’s primary activity is explanation. Theories designate or refer to an object, which they hope to describe completely and whose effects they wish to account for or explain. In its generality, this definition counts as much for the criticism of art as it does for investigations of the natural world. Alternatively, in turning to art and other forms of human inventiveness, philosophy expresses knowledge of our selves and our relations with others. Art provokes in philosophy self-referring inquiries and evaluations of our ways of being and styles of existence. Here interpretation and evaluation are always turning one over the other as mutually amplifying activities. This is why I have referred to philosophy as “artful conversation.”8 The style of philosophical expression is ontological and moral or ethical, more than it is epistemological. And in turn, philosophy is a practice of styling the self and of projecting a world, no matter how unattainable, where that self might find new expression. Here the two forms of explanation might indeed present themselves as two different worlds. Film theories are “about” film—they take or even construct films as objects of knowledge. They propose explanatory concepts—for example, Metz’s appeal to fetishism as a heuristic concept—to examine what film is (and these concepts will give us many competing definitions) and to explain its logics and effects. Here one presumes the empirical existence and history of the object and its effects, and the activities of theory are dependent on our sense of this object, whether aesthetic or psychological. Alternatively, philosophy turns to film to examine and clarify problems and concepts that are of concern to philosophy. Paradoxically, this means that a (film) philosophy is not necessarily a part of film studies; rather, it belongs to philosophy alone. Philosophy explains nothing “about” film. However, it might have a lot to say about why and how film and the arts matter to us, why we value them, and how we try to make sense of ourselves and the world with and through them, for example, through attentiveness to the queerness of perceptual belief. It may even want to examine “theories” of film to test their conditions of sense. 8. See Rodowick, Philosophy’s Artful Conversation. My arguments about the distinctiveness of philosophy with respect to theory are summarized in the concluding section, pp. 294–307.

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If a philosophical reading returns to film or literary studies some fact or insight regarding the nature or history of the medium and its meanings and effects, it is in the form of a gift. Here philosophy overlaps with or contributes to theory, perhaps, but it does not become, for all that, a theory of film or art or literature. Perhaps we should reserve for theory epistemological inquiries into the nature of things, matters, and causes? Theory would be epistemological and empirical, then, in diverse and open senses of the concept. And here Christian Metz is one of the greatest exemplars of the practice of theory in the postwar period. Still, there is a point where philosophy and theory touch or find a common join: where in examining an object we also evaluate the conditions and styles of knowing, limits as well as possibilities, that confront us in efforts, successful or not, toward knowing. For Cavell, this critical capacity defines the difficulty of philosophy as well as its particular strength, which Cavell himself characterizes as receiving “inspiration for taking thought from the very conditions that oppose thought, as if the will to thought were as imperative as the will to health and to freedom.”9 The possibility of thinking or, better, critical thinking, should also be a potential pursuit of happiness. And happily, both Stanley Cavell and Christian Metz provide us with powerful directions whereby we may investigate how moving images move us, and move us to thought. 9. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 42.

3

A Virtual Presence in Space . . . it’s all about psychical space. That’s all my work was ever about. —Victor Burgin1

The Improbability of the Visual. Questioning Roland

Barthes’s assertion that every photograph is a certificate of presence, Ackbar Abbas notes that there is also an affinity between photography and disappearance. “Disappearance, too,” he offers, “is more a matter of presence rather than absence, of superimposition rather than erasure.”2 How then to figure or express the presence of disappearance, and how to comprehend the affinity between photography and disappearance? Abbas’s observations recall my arguments in the last chapter about the queer structure of photographic belief and its rotation or oscillation between past and present, belief and doubt, reality and fantasy. Here I want to pursue these arguments on new terrain where questions are raised on the nature 1. John Roberts, “Interview with Victor Burgin,” in The Impossible Document: Photography and Conceptual Art in Britain 1966–1976, ed. John Roberts (London: Camerawork, 1997), 102–3. 2. M. Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 106. I was led to this source by Peter Wollen’s essay surveying Burgin’s career, “Barthes, Hitchcock, Burgin,” in Paris Manhattan: Writings on Art (London: Verso, 2004), 219–34.

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of the medium and the senses of photography by digital means in contemporary art. The multiple disappearings of photography and new variations of time and the image are powerful features of our digital age. And if photography has now become Image in a new sense, this means that the presence of disappearing cannot be given in representation, at least as ordinarily understood. If photography has an affinity with disappearance, it would be less in making past presence visible than in making perceptibly (or at least mentally) present something that hovers between presence and absence, the subjective and the objective, the actual and the virtual, spatial presence and temporal absenting. This mixing and reversibility of terms is not limited to the history of photography and the digital image. In her canonic essay of 1979, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” Rosalind Krauss comments in similar ways on the “disappearance” of sculpture as a term of criticism relevant to the intensely variable and differentiated practices of figures like Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Mary Miss, and many others in the mid-to-late sixties. Krauss undermines appeals to medium specificity and, implicitly, philosophical or art historical categories anchored to criteria of self-sameness, to argue that “sculpture is rather only one term on the periphery of a field in which there are other, differently structured possibilities.”3 Hence her provocative appeal to using Klein sets to model open terms of structure in which various practices of “sculpture” (is it time yet to place the term under erasure?) are suspended between categories like site, landscape, architecture, and their interconnected simple and complex negations. Twenty-six years later, George Baker extends this argument in noting that “everywhere one looks today in the world of contemporary art, the photographic object seems to be an object in crisis, or at least in severe transformation.”4 This situation, however, is driven less by technology—for example, the displacement of analogical by digital media—than by deep cultural and conceptual transformations of our understanding of media and practices as well as their artistic and cultural uses. “Sculpture” and “photography” have not disappeared as practices, of course. Rather, recognition of the open variability of these practices encourages critics to position them less as work in a medium

3. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 38; hereafter cited in text as “SEF.” 4. George Baker, “Photography’s Expanded Field,” October 114 (Fall 2005): 121; hereafter cited in text as “PEF.”

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than as the presentation of “theoretical objects,” whose sense varies relative to different conceptual perspectives. (This gesture is not unlike Metz’s or Cavell’s treatment of photographic uncertainty and its conditioning of variable regimes of belief.) In his turn, Baker thus evokes the method of Klein sets to suspend “photography” between terms of stasis, narrative, projection, print, the “still film” and the “film still,” and their interconnected simple and complex negations. Paraphrasing page 136 of Krauss’s original essay, Baker concludes that “[photography] is no longer the privileged middle term between two things that it isn’t. [Photography] is rather only one term on the periphery of a field in which there are other, differently structured possibilities.” That this is a cultural as opposed to merely aesthetic field is something that certain recent attempts to recuperate object-bound notions of medium-specificity seem in potential danger of forgetting. For such was one of the great lessons of Krauss’s expanded field: not that modernist mediumspecificity would simply dissipate into the pluralist state of anything goes, but rather that such mediums would quite precisely expand, marking out a strategic movement whereby both art and world, or art and the larger cultural field, would stand in new, formerly unimaginable relations to one another. (“PEF,” 136)

One of the many salutary effects of this position (perhaps unevenly learned since medium-specificity arguments seem to refuse to go away) is to emphasize the production of the new—not just new objects but new concepts of criticism generated as open series in thoughtful confrontation with these provocative theoretical objects. Needless to say, Krauss and Baker are each responding here to their own “naming crises” in singular and fascinating ways. I will not appeal here to new variations of Klein groups and semiotic squares. Rather, I only want to note that neither Krauss’s nor Baker’s diagrams identify conceptual overlaps between photography and sculpture. Now, thinking in terms of presence and absence, actual and virtual, space and time, superimposition and erasure, leads intuitively to many examples of sculptural expression that evoke or challenge standing concepts of photography as well as sculpture. I am thinking in particular here of Robert Morris’s Mirrored Cubes from 1965. Historically, and despite all postmodernist protestations, photography and sculpture are still often considered as two distinct regimes of visibility: the former as a representation deployed in two dimensions and limited by a frame,

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a transcription of past presence in space and time now given to perception as an absence; the latter, a presentation in three dimensions, occupying space materially and volumetrically in direct confrontation with vision at variable distances. Of course, as I have never tired of insisting in my work on the figural, all such oppositions and definitions of medium sustained by criteria of identity are destined to come to grief.5 Krauss was among the earliest critics to assert this fact in noting that the condition of (post)modernism in sculpture is defined by ontological absence. The conclusion in her canonic essay is that “within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium—sculpture—but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium—photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself—might be used. . . . [It] is obvious that the logic of the space of postmodernist practice is no longer organized around the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or, for that matter, the perception of material. It is organized instead through the universe of terms that are felt to be in opposition within a cultural situation” (“SEF,” 42). Baker reprises this argument, again substituting “photography” for “sculpture”: “If the photographic object seems in crisis today, it might now mean that we are entering a period not when the medium has come to an end, nor where the expanded field has simply collapsed under its own dispersal, but rather that the terms involved only now become more complex, the need to map their effects more necessary, because these effects are both less obvious and self-evident” (“PEF,” 138). One might consider Morris’s Mirrored Cubes in exactly this way, except for the fact that their volumetric presence does not present an opaque surface, but rather optically virtual images nearly indistinguishable from their immediate surroundings. These reflections are not transparencies but rather reproductions of the situational space of the objects wrapped around the visible five sides of the cubes. The cubes will inevitably reproduce the physical characteristics of their environments with the automatic precision of photography, although without the characteristic of permanent transcription. Moreover, as each of the five sides of the cubes are squares of equal size and proportion, these surfaces might be imagined as frames capturing space in two dimensions and, optically speaking, their depth illusion is not dissimilar from 5. See esp. my Reading the Figural; or, Philosophy after the New Media (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 30–44, and The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25–73.

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Robert Morris, Mirrored Cubes (1965). © 2017 Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS),

New York.

that of straight photography; or, even better, from that of “live” viewing from a real-time video feed. (A proximate sculptural video work, Yoko Ono’s Sky TV [1966], comes immediately to mind.) Is it too much to think of Morris’s Mirrored Cubes as unstable involutions hovering between the conditions of sculpture and photography, or even video? Following Krauss, many critical accounts of contemporary reconfigurations of sculpture or photography are considered less as transformations of media than as conceptual objects. Indeed, my special interest in asking the question, what does philosophy want from images?, is to think about how creative expression challenges philosophy as an art of the concept. In juxtaposing sculpture and photography one could talk about problems of medium, of presence and absence, of comparisons of spatial, temporal, and linguistic expression. However, the singular problem that the Mirrored Cubes presents to me has to do with the relation of vision and spatial distance to an object disappearing into a virtual location, where relations between presence and absence, actual and virtual, become indiscernible. Here I want to turn to another example, which might be considered an inversion of the mirror works of Robert Morris or Robert Smithson.

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(And as I have already suggested, one might further extend this discussion to the complex relations between sculpture, architecture, and video. The work of Bruce Nauman in the late sixties presents many obvious examples.) I am thinking here of Victor Burgin’s situational aesthetics of the late sixties and early seventies and, in particular, of an early conceptual work entitled Photopath. Early in his career Burgin was associated with conceptual art, owing especially to his inclusion in the pathbreaking 1969 exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, and his apparent proximity to process-oriented minimalist art, on one hand, and the analytical linguistic approaches of Art & Language and related artists on the other. Yet, one way of understanding Burgin’s difficult relation with post-minimalism is to consider the trajectory of his practice as less conceptual art than an art of the concept. Considering Burgin’s past association with photographic practices, and now principally with digital capture and synthesis, the main issue here is not a reducing of media or medium but a questioning or interrogation of the concept of medium in works that hold perception in an interstitial space between stillness and movement, image and text, or better yet, the visible and the expressible. Indeed, one hesitates to call Burgin’s work photography, sculpture, or even video art, for Burgin is not a “visual” artist, at least not in terms of our ordinary sense of the visual. This is my first point of attraction to Burgin’s practice. Drawing from conceptual resources in the philosophical work of Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, much of my own work in the last twenty years has aimed at dismantling the concept of the visual and replacing it with the more open concept of the figural. However, I have more recently come to understand how my work on the figural was guided by the problem of discourse, and therefore how terms for criteria of expression in creative practice must be shifted. The relation between photography and sculpture redirects this problem in new and interesting ways. My intent in comparing Morris’s work from the mid-sixties and Burgin’s work of the late sixties is to ask the question, across sculpture and photography, what is a virtual Image?, though in asking this question, our concept of the virtual, and of the image, may be transformed. The paradox of Burgin’s philosophical art might also be understood as questioning the location of the visible in ways commensurate with, say, Deleuze’s account of the intricate and complex foldings, involutions, and stratifications of le visible and l’énonçable, or what I translate

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as the visible and the expressible, in his marvelous book, Foucault.6 Here the self-evidence of visuality and discourse dissolve into complex intercalations of the expressive and the visible in different dimensions of space: correlative space, which associates what can be said with what can be seen or observed; complementary space, which establishes relations between discursive and non-discursive spaces as the institutional basis of power or value; and collateral space, where enunciation is defined by specific mutations of plastic space and linguistic reference, or figure and text. In a strong sense, both visuality and discourse lose their substance and identity here and enter into a variety of impure multistable composites. One might say, then, that for Deleuze there is neither visuality nor discourse, image or enunciation, but rather only expression, whether objective or subjective, or even as something that passes between the objective and subjective. Deleuze’s mapping of the instability of relations between perception and objects, linguistic designation and spatial reference or reproduction, and institutional context resonates with conceptual art in terms of what Burgin called in the late sixties “situational aesthetics.” Conceptualism’s concern with the dematerialization of the art object had two important consequences. One veered toward institutional critique in the aim of producing works that were inseparable from their exhibition spaces and which were themselves non-reproducible as objects of commodity exchange. The other was an interest in art’s capacity to produce singular phenomenological events. The de-realization of self-sufficient objects thus aimed at another form of “realization”: to bring perception closer to thought and thought’s attention to acts of perception as something inescapably both interior and exterior, singular and collective, personal and social. Here the most radical version of conceptualism retreats from or hesitates before the visual, whether in the form of drawings produced from instruction sets or the subordination of text to image in the theoretical practice of Art & Language. My philosophical attraction to Burgin’s work goes deeper, however. Throughout his long and productive career, Burgin has challenged the visual not by rebalancing the relation of image to text but rather by investigating the relation between sense and Image as components of a practice, which in every instance turns us from perception to thought. Photopath (1967–69) and other early works demonstrate the first 6. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

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Victor Burgin, Photopath (1967–69), installation view. Courtesy of the artist.

variations of Burgin’s interest in an art of the concept. The components of this practice include, first, the proposal of a set or sets of conditions within which certain concepts can be demonstrated; in turn, these genetic conditions frame the design of aesthetic systems, which may or may not result in standing works. The genetic element for Photopath is an instruction card that reads:

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A path along the floor, of proportions 1 × 21 units, photographed. Photographs printed to actual size of objects and prints attached to the floor so that images are perfectly congruent with their objects.

What kind of work is produced by these conditions, or this conditioning? One fascinating result of Photopath is its reduction of the relation of an image to its referent to the smallest possible unit of difference in ways that curiously recall Morris’s Mirrored Cubes. Like analog photography, the work is in principle infinitely reproducible—though not primarily by the transcriptive automatisms of photographic recording and printing, but rather by the symbolic means of linguistic instruction. (Is this an anticipation of the disconnection and variability of outputs to inputs characteristic of digital expression?) Moreover, the constitutive images of the photopaths only function as units of selection subordinate to the environmental forms they reproduce, such that, as Peter Osborne observes, the indexicality of the photographic image is transformed as a sign of perceptual indifference.7 Unlike photographic printing, the work produced (if it is produced) is infinitely variable. The result is, again, like Morris’s cubes, to produce works that take on the surface features of their different environments. (In 2011 Photopath was installed for the first time as a color work in the atrium of the Art Institute of Chicago for an exhibition entitled Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964–1977. When the work was de-installed, it was discovered that the action of sunlight from the atrium had produced a geometrically precise imprint of the work on the gallery floor. The photographed surface had become the material support for a new image. Had sculpture become photography?) One might also ask: What is the medium of this work? While the instruction card might be displayed in a catalog, the work is attached to the ground like, paradoxically, a sculptural object. Laid over the floor, it even produces a minimal sense of volume. This is curious reversal. Where the eye usually locates informative labels, it now finds a linguistic work, displayed as if an image; where one usually locates a sculptural work, the foot finds a trajectory, itself almost but not quite indistinguishable from the environment on which it is overlaid. The instructions themselves are composed in a passive descriptive style. They neither require, command, nor even encourage. Syntactically, they are 7. See Osborne’s essay, “Everywhere, or Not At All: Victor Burgin and Conceptual Art,” in Relocating: Victor Burgin, ed. Catsou Roberts (Bristol: Arnolfini, 2002), 62–75.

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temporally ambiguous. The words do not request a future where Photopath imagines fulfillment of an aesthetic contract. The instructions can also be read as a retroactive description of a “photographic” work displayed in the past, a linguistic report of past accomplishment, or as an account of present work that the text might accompany. Moreover, the work becomes a path—the photopath itself no less than the instruction set that generates it—but a path toward what? Not a physical trajectory but a mental one, leading to the apprehension of a “conceptual object,” which is as difficultly located in space (physical or mental, interior or exterior) as it is in time (there and then, here and now, or in some indefinite future). The “object” of perception here is neither produced from reading the printed instruction set nor from viewing the exhibited work. Burgin’s situational aesthetics thus aims to provoke or produce “events,” intentionally formed partly in actual and exterior space, and partly in mental, interior space, yet neither clearly resolvable to one or the other. These are incorporeal objects even if they are no doubt experienced in singular physical and institutional circumstances. One might even say that the “work” itself only exists virtually, as if hovering between complementary space (institutional specificity of the installed environment), collateral space (spatial fulfillment of the instructional contract, or not), and a correlative space that situates the viewer mentally and conceptually in potential acts of perception, thought, and memory. Do these aesthetic situations produce an “image,” even if it is one that sits uncomfortably in terms of the visual? Is the Image a visual concept or a concept of the visual? All the power and complexity of Deleuze’s various conceptualizations of the Image, no less than Burgin’s situational works, suggest other dimensions of thought. The power of the Image in relation to thought leads toward questions of time, movement, memory, and change—the production of the new—and not the slow thickening of a fixed duration or the congealing and deployment of signs or objects in space. Here other forces present themselves producing events, percepts, or non-spatial perception, thus turning, as Deleuze might put it in Difference and Repetition, an image of thought toward a thought without image. To construct an Image or release a percept is to produce a gap or dislocation in perception—an interstice or irrational connection—and in fact all the potential of the Image lies in the interstitial or the in-between: the disjunctive conjunction as an Idea, event, or incorporeal series. In other words, the Image in a Deleuzian sense cannot occupy space and therefore cannot become an object of vision or visuality. Morris’s Mirrored Cubes also gestures in this direction by capturing perception and spatial orientation in a hesitation

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or vacillation between forms deployed in space and their optically virtual re-presentation. The real accomplishment of Burgin’s situational aesthetics, then, was not so much to de-realize the art object but rather finally to make of art an Image in this sense. This has always been a key component of Burgin’s practice of the concept. I have also spoken of percepts. Just as one might want to displace the visual with the Image, it is important to follow Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy? in distinguishing the percept from perception. To produce a concept in art is not to transmit an Idea in a material, and, in fact, in art neither percepts nor affects are embodied in an expressive material. To even call percepts or affects “signs” would require a special concept of signification. As I have explained in other contexts, to have an Idea is to express thought through particular constructions, combinations, or linkages—what Deleuze calls signs. Composed material may give expression to percepts and affects; or, further, percepts may endure (how to make a verb of “event”? Let us say “eventuate”) in a composed material as expression, but they are never one with it. They exist as if in another dimension, perhaps one of time, duration, and change instead of space; yet this dimension is part and parcel of the act of creation. The percept is not immaterial, then, but again, incorporeal—it is of the nature of an Event or Idea, and not of a substance; or in Deleuze’s formula after Proust, it is “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.”8 Such arguments are extremely important for me, and for specific reasons. As I recounted in the first chapter of this book, I have been blocked for a long time by my sense that digital expression, say digital cinema, could not express duration and series of time with the same intensity as analogical expression. This is one of the fundamental dilemmas, though I hope a productive one at least, of The Virtual Life of Film. What I failed to fully comprehend, perhaps, was that the time-image is not a sign except in the sense of an Event or an incorporeal. Are the digital arts not capable of inciting percepts, expressing series, producing events, or composing Ideas; in short, creating and experimenting? To move to a new series in the virtual life of film, one must reexamine the status of the Event in contemporary art, especially the digital events produced through the “moving” image in contemporary art. In

8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 156.

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this context, Victor Burgin has produced one of our most exemplary practices. The Memory of Cinema. My intent in juxtaposing Morris’s mirrored cubes

with Burgin’s photopaths is to trace a genealogy of conceptualizations of the virtual image from sculpture to photography, where both terms should be placed under erasure. Here the optically virtual images of the Mirrored Cubes are transformed into the incorporeal objects of Burgin’s conceptual work. This critical dialogue between sculpture and photography raises fascinating and complex questions in two areas: one on the nature of video and projected image installations; the other on the disappearance of photography into processes of digital capture and synthesis. Victor Burgin’s Hôtel Berlin (2009) investigates these questions in fascinating ways. In a discussion of the opening of the work at the gallery Campagne Première in Berlin, I was struck by how a very sophisticated critic felt compelled habitually to refer to this work as a “film.” Documentation for the work refers to it as a “projected image/text loop.” Not a film, movie, or video, not even a “moving image” work, but rather a flat description signaling a slippage or discrepancy—an incomplete nomination, or a process or work that eludes further description in the current conceptual context. Two observations help us understand the naming crisis sustained in this deceptively simple work. First, the source materials are highresolution digitally captured still images, “documentation” perhaps of the spaces they capture, which are then digitally “reconstructed” to restore or augment the monumentality of the space. Second, the images presented do not move, but rather are animated algorithmically to give the appearance of movement. There is no recorded movement here, but rather a digital production of “false movement,” as it were. Though meant to suggest a connection to Deleuze’s powers of the false, perhaps this is a misleading characterization? One might think of Burgin’s approach to animation here as the inverse of Jacobs’s. Both are concerned with creating movement out of stillness, though with very different results, and both are challenging habitual terms for differentiating movement from stillness. Only in this sense could these animation strategies be considered as “falsifying.” This slippage or discrepancy generates overlapping and interfering series of questions: Is this a photographic work or a moving image work? What is a photograph in this context, and what does it mean to

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say that the image moves? Is this a document or a painting? Where does history end, and where does memory start? Burgin’s recent works are also almost always staged as these kinds of encounters, dialogues, critical engagements, even reveries organized around built spaces, often depopulated or in ruins. The space engaged by Hôtel Berlin, however, itself expresses a peculiar temporality or point of transition, which is particularly appropriate to the current state of the virtual life of film. This is the Tempelhof Airport in Berlin. In a commission given to Ernst Sagebiel by Albert Speer in 1934, the monumental Fascist architecture of the new Tempelhof terminal was meant to be a symbol of Hitler’s projected world capital, “Germania.” Once among the largest buildings in the world, ironically it was never completed and rests incomplete today. Therefore, Tempelhof persists as a specific site of history: an incomplete monument; a matrix of European political history, including the Berlin airlift; and a glamorous backdrop for political and entertainment celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder, Gary Cooper, Marilyn Monroe, and Romy Schneider, among many others. Among other amenities, Tempelhof featured a luxury hotel, which undoubtedly welcomed many of these luminaries. There is another reference to film history, important to this work. When Soviet troops arrived in April 1945, they discovered networks of tunnels and subbasements protected by blast doors. Using explosive charges to blow open the doors, they unwittingly ignited a vast archive of film that the Wehrmacht had stored there. As reported in Der Spiegel, “The valuable celluloid burned for days, and the walls have remained blackened to this day.”9 Many of these areas are still flooded and condemned. Finally, like many of Burgin’s works, Hôtel Berlin offers a specific kind of encounter between text and image, but an oblique and figural encounter. Text and image are always connected and related, but in some space outside of the image and at a tangent to it. Never a commentary, the text brings out relations not visible in the image, while the image overlays or permeates the text with memory like a particle cloud of meanings that does not quite resolve into a stable picture. (Perhaps this is another variation of Benjamin’s Schriftbild in contemporary art?) The texts themselves are not “citations,” but rather memory-images of film—reworked descriptions of uncertain accuracy but with powerful psychic charges. Sometimes one recalls easily the source from our 9. Cited in gallery documentation for Hôtel Berlin, Campagne Première, September 19–November 14, 2009, Berlin, Germany, n.p.

FIGURE 5

Stills from Hôtel Berlin.

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collective memory of cinema and the arts; other times the historical references to cinema, architecture, and visual culture are obscure. In Hôtel Berlin these sources included recovered memories of hotels in film such as Last Year in Marienbad, Vertigo, or The Passenger, the letters and memoirs of Eric Mendelsohn, an architectural influence and mentor to Sagebiel filtered through the narrative voice of “Mister X,” the hero of a graphic novel of architectural utopia and dystopia, and, finally, Burgin’s architectural memories of immigration and security areas of contemporary world airports. In any case, Burgin’s method is always to pass through a rigorously researched history in order to produce something like a recombinant memory-image—in the texts, in the visual images, and in the text-image relation. Burgin is drawn to Tempelhof, then, as a kind of fluctuating memoryimage: an incomplete monument to a violent past, aspiring to a new yet unachieved political history; an archive of ruined images and a site for day-dreaming and fantasy about Hollywood’s golden age. Through a series of strategic juxtapositions and aesthetic transformations of the image, Burgin here constructs a provocative and unstable site of reflection on the virtual life of film. In contrast to Ken Jacobs’s perceptually aggressive historical investigation in Capitalism: Child Labor, Burgin’s no less penetrating work produces something like a meditative temporality: an investigation of what the image has been and what it is becoming through a sort of quiet and ambiguous unraveling of intersecting strands of associations of history and fantasy crossing the frame. The Remembered Film. The memory of cinema has haunted Victor Bur-

gin’s work for a long time, no less than the force and medium of memory itself. The movement out of conceptualism toward photographic practice, text-image experimentation or other hybrid scripto-visual forms, and finally digital video was fueled by Burgin’s realization of a specific dilemma. “The instruction cards,” Burgin explains, . . . left me with the problem of whether the “work” was in the instruction or its realization. If it were in the realization, then I was sent back to the physical object. But the instructions alone were incomplete if they referred to something not present. The following instruction, although it still called for material objects (albeit non-specific) suggested that a solution to my problem might lie in an act of memory: Two units co-exist in time. Spatial separation is such that units may not simultaneously be directly perceived. Units isomorphic to degree that encounter

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with second is likely to evoke recollection of first. I subsequently produced “sculptures” that consisted of nothing more than a set of recursive sentences directing the reader’s attention to immediate perceptions and memories.10

This approach to spatial design is also characteristic of many of Burgin’s recent installations where related photographic and textual presentations are physically separated from associated projections, Voyage to Italy (2006) and A Place to Read (2010) being two apposite examples. An act of memory. Burgin’s multiple and intersecting references in various works to Wilhelm Jensen’s 1902 novel Gradiva, on the one hand, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), on the other, are as important here as his lifelong fascination with psychoanalytic theory. One need only think of projects like Gradiva (1982), The Bridge (1984), Venise (1993), Voyage to Italy, and Hôtel Berlin (2009), as well as other works where the memory of cinema plays a significant role, such as Family Romance (1989), Listen to Britain (2002), or Solito Posto (2008). That Jensen’s Gradiva as well as Freud’s psychoanalytic readings of that story lie in the deep structure of Vertigo is also no doubt significant. In many of these works, the remembered film functions as a genetic element where the figural force of memory disarticulates the installed components, such that the experience of the work does not lie in any one element—whether textual, acoustical, photographic, videographic, or now 3-D computer modeling—but rather hovers between them in mobile acts of perception and memory. In ways similar to the earlier conceptual projects, there is a virtualization of perception and memory where the sense of the work appears in its silences, ellipses, interstices, gaps, and dislocations like the dream-work or the psychoanalytic structure of fantasy. Listen to Britain is exemplary in this regard. Listen to Britain is a project about disappearance and deferral, of the impossible yet ineluctable desire to recover absent or lost time, whose measure can often be the films we have seen, or thought we have seen; in any case, films recalled as screen memories or memory fragments. Accepting a commission from the Arnolfini arts center in Bristol, Burgin made Listen to Britain after returning to England from a thirteen-year sojourn in the United States, and in the traumatic wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade towers in New York. In Components of a Practice,

10. Victor Burgin, Components of a Practice (Milan: Skira Editore, 2008), 16.

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Burgin recalls the psychological effects of traveling to Bristol from London in this historical context: Looking out at some of the most pleasant countryside in England, I recalled Listen to Britain, a 20-minute “short” produced by the Crown Film Unit in 1942—when the British Isles seemed imminently at risk of invasion, and which begins with a similarly pastoral scene. My recollection of this short film in turn led me to think of a short sequence from another film made two years later, in 1944, which again exiles war beyond the frame of an essentially rural idyll. A young woman in a light summer dress climbs a path onto the downs above Canterbury. Emerging from a stand of trees she is suddenly confronted with a view of the Cathedral. The camera frames her entranced face in close-up as she seems to hear ancient sounds on the wind: jingling harnesses, pipes and lutes. She turns her head swiftly left and right, as if looking for the source of the sounds. The young woman on the downs experiences the unexpected return of an image from a common national history and hears sounds from a shared past that haunts the hill. On the train to Bristol I experienced the involuntary recall of her image, and others, from a shared history of British cinema. I had a particularly clear memory of the Kent countryside that surrounds the hill on which the woman stands. But it was the memory of something I had not seen in reality. (131)

In Burgin’s Listen to Britain, this experience of involuntary memory and association functions creatively like the originary scene of fantasy or, better perhaps, the primary articulation of a force of memory revised secondarily into an artistic expression. I am pushing the comparison of Burgin’s later moving image practice to the dream-work, fantasy, and the repetitive and recursive character of unconscious memory to bring out my deep feeling about the uncanny affect and fascination of this project in ways that are not usually recognized. What is the medium of Listen to Britain? Like Hôtel Berlin, I have not said that this work is a film or a video. And if it is a moving image work, our standing concepts of both movement and image must be revised. Or better, one should recognize that Listen to Britain raises these questions in ways that may lead a thoughtful viewer to new concepts of movement and image. Listen to Britain is a work of the remembered film, but it is also about how the force of memory disarticulates image and sound, text

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and image, thus producing constructions that Burgin characterizes as “uncinematic.”11 The meanings of the uncinematic are variable and attentive to the specific situation of work installed in a gallery. Uncinematic works disarticulate our relation to duration, which is another reason why they are not “films.” In the cinema, spectators are bathed in collective darkness, and viewing duration is structured by uninterrupted linear time delimited in prearranged sessions. In the light of the gallery, viewing is contingent from multiple perspectives. One enters and leaves the viewing space at will independently of the presentation time of the work, and one might be alone or in a group, silent or in conversation. More importantly, the presentation of the work neither determines nor necessarily coincides with the time of reception. These two durations remain distinct and disjunct. “Most works made for the gallery,” Burgin explains, “are therefore designed . . . with a seamless transition between the first and last frames of the material. The non-coincidence of the duration of the projected material and the time of viewing suggests that the elements that comprise the work should be equally weighted and autonomously significant.” And in turn, “A specific requirement of the voice-over text . . . is that it be written so that any sentence may occupy the position of ‘first’ sentence, just as any image may be the first image.”12 Uncinematic works are thus characterized by repetition, recursion, and nonlinearity, where components of the work enjoy a certain autonomy and leveling of value. Like dream-work or fantasy, no single component is considered to be more important than another, and each element functions independently and contingently as a potential launching point for perhaps unanticipated associative chains. The looping structure of audiovisual works designed for the gallery are thus analogous to psychical mechanisms such as deferred action, leading to retrospective and oblique associative readings of presented elements. The uncinematic is here connected directly to the event of the remembered film. “The spacing of isolated autonomous elements in an ‘uncinematic’ work,” Burgin continues, “allows the possibility that viewers may see what is present to perception not only through the recollection of previous ele11. See Burgin’s essay “Interactive Cinema and the Uncinematic,” in Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema, ed. Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, and Simon Rothöler (Vienna: SYNEMA, Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, 2012). 12. “A Perspective on Digital Light” (unpublished lecture, Royal College of Art, 2011), 3. See also Homay King, “Beyond Repetition: Victor Burgin’s Loops,” Virtual Memory: Time-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 100–124.

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ments of the work but also through their own memories and fantasies. The psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire characterize the reiterative fractional chains that form fantasies and daydreams as ‘short sequences, most often fragmentary, circular and repetitive.’ Projection works composed for the specificity of the gallery setting typically take the form of ‘fragmentary, circular and repetitive’ short sequences.”13 Uncinematic forms and the event of the remembered film thus situate viewers in a space and time falling between an external collective reality and an internal subjective one, as if occupying what Henri Bergson calls in Creative Mind an “intermediate image.”14 In the present context, I call this the digital event. Listen to Britain exemplifies this circular and disarticulated configuration. Any point of entry is as good as another, though where one begins viewing may significantly alter the experience of the piece as a whole. Nonetheless, Listen to Britain manifests a strong compositional structure that divides the work into twelve segments and four distinct parts. In turn, each of the parts is introduced by the following repeated pattern or ritornello: in a moving shot captured from Powell and Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale, the girl, Alison, looking from left to right; then, a black-and-white digital panorama, perhaps from the hill above Canterbury. Both segments are black and white, and both are silent, which already suggests a complex pattern of associations and displacements.15 The close-up of the girl listening is arguably the most narratively significant shot in A Canterbury Tale. The prologue of the film begins with a quote from Chaucer’s text in old English and is followed by a filmic evocation of past Canterbury pilgrims reprising Chaucer’s characters. A Canterbury Tale is a narrative concerned with both the perpetuation and inevitable disruption of history, memory, and tradition. This problem is expressed through the ambiguous character of Thomas Colpeper, 13. “A Perspective on Digital Light,” 4. The interior citation is from Jean Laplanche and Serge Leclaire, “The Unconscious: A Psychoanalytic Study,” Yale French Studies 48 (1972) 162–63. 14. In his essay “Philosophical Intuition,” Bergson writes of the image moyenne or intermediate image that it is “an image which is almost matter in that it still allows itself to be seen, and almost mind in that it no longer allows itself to be touched” (Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison [New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1992], 118). I will return to this concept in chap. 5. 15. In Components of a Practice, Burgin also explains that “the panorama is cut up and inserted into the video in four 90-degree sections, separated from each other by other material in the video. These appear, at first viewing, to be simple repetitions; in some respects they are, but as they are not identical they are ‘different repetitions’ ” (94).

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the magistrate and gentleman farmer who serves as the local guardian of history and, significantly, morals. The figure of Colpeper is complex, yet sympathetically portrayed, as someone determined to preserve the continuity of a certain idea of Englishness defined by simple village life against all the ravages of war, urbanism, and modernity. What Alison hears on the downs, as if the horses, pipes, and laughter of the earlier prologue, is the English cultural past. Whether these sounds come from within her, or are carried on the wind as if a ghost haunting the hills, is uncertain and irrelevant. But the film does depict this moment as an urban working girl regaining continuity with ancient identity and tradition, no matter how ephemeral. It bears saying that the downs are haunted by another past, Alison’s past, where she spent thirteen perfect days on holiday in a caravan with her fiancé, now believed lost in action. I said there are two segments that punctuate the four parts of the work, and they are moving images though our conventional sense of what movement is, and how we are moved, is questioned here. I observed that both segments are silent and both are without color, but there the obvious similarities end. Captured from Powell and Pressburger’s film, the close-up of the listening girl re-presents recorded movement, while the following panorama produces “false” movement or, rather, another variety of movement. Like the digital panoramas and travelings of Hôtel Berlin, it is an algorithmic animation of a sequence of still shots stitched seamlessly together through digital synthesis. Digital panoramas are key components of Burgin’s later work, as we have already seen, and the linking of the two segments here indicates that questions are being raised about the status now of movement and stillness, of what photography is or has been, of what “movies” were or could now be. In Listen to Britain, all such associations are as oblique as they are compelling. As the girl pivots her head, the cut to the panorama might be read as a “subjective” shot. However, the digital panorama is too level and too smooth, and as deliberative as the girl’s movements are brisk and confused. There is associative similarity here but not continuity—these are related but discontinuous spaces. More important, with the uncanniness of all digital “movements” these panoramas are not physical movements at all but rather the algorithmic turning of the dimensionless eye of a disembodied observer positioned at the center of a virtual sphere. It is almost as if two different orders of sight and memory are passing one into the other, as if from the analog to the digital. Is it too much to say that the history of a medium or media is

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Still from Listen to Britain.

disrupted here? In each of their repetitions, it is as if these two segments raise recurrently a question to viewers about the nature of perception and memory. We can no longer hear what the girl hears; this historical connection is lost and can only be retrieved virtually through memory, if at all. And like the girl, in this “movie” we can no longer see from where the camera sees, but must project our sight and attention in new and different ways. (Shot in the studio, the close-up of the girl in A Canterbury Tale is also disjoined and lifted out of the physical space of the rest of the landscape. It takes place as if in another scene, or at another place.) There are four possible variations on what comes next, depending on when one enters the work. But let’s begin with a series of six shots, captured on digital video apparently on the pilgrim’s road on the hill above Canterbury where so many of the central scenes of A Canterbury Tale take place. From this point forward in Burgin’s newer work, movement captured from the physical world or from recorded source material will become more and more rare, and digital capture, synthesis, and algorithmic animation will become more and more prominent. In contrast to the ritornello, these five shots are in vivid digital color: an extreme long shot on sunny fields framed by trees in the foreground that shadow a forest path; a closer shot of the countryside from a new angle; a close-up of white wildflowers that figure in the previous shot;

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a tight shot of red wild corn poppies emerging from a field of oats; a longer shot of the same field. Several features link these five shots. A breeze blows through them rustling the leaves and flowers, in contrast to the uncanny stillness of the panorama; the bright yellow of fields and grass is also a recurrent element in each shot, recalling obliquely the history of plein air painting, perhaps something like Monet’s 1873 Les Coquelicots. Finally, the editing follows the rhythm of music, in contrast to the ritornello of silent listening and still movement. Like the moving image of the girl listening, this musical theme is also lifted digitally from A Canterbury Tale. One prominent occurrence of this theme is under the original sequence leading up to the girl listening on the hill. The music thus evokes, nostalgically perhaps, a past lost to memory that flows under the present images whose intense colors suggest another kind of unreality, perhaps the new emergence of a digital utopia. Do the visual elements refer to the lost utopian landscape of the film? Through the musical theme, does the past film reappear in the present landscape? Can past and present be made perceptible in one another? The five shots of this segment rhyme with the five parts of the work, as if reproducing in miniature the total Image of Listen to Britain. The ritornello, however, introduces a new displacement. A series of crossfades offer the following text on a black background: “American servicemen / in the village / cannot find / local girls / who will go out with them / At night / the Glue Man / emerges from the shadows / pours glue on a girl’s hair / then disappears.” There are now ten “shots,” or rather phrases, for like the panorama the passage from one phrase to another is digitally animated, providing its own form of sequence or movement through displacement and replacement. And here too the phrases pass in rhythm to music—this time a passage from Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960). The text produces another kind of image—a descriptive précis of the film we don’t see, the presence of another disappearance, the remembered film. And the sung voice brings another text, a heard text in composite with read phrases that pass as if a sequence of unseen images. Oberon sings of the sleeping Tytania in five musical phrases that now take up in displacement the five shots of the Kent countryside: “There sleeps Tytania, sometime of the night, / Lull’d in these flowers, with dances, dances / and delight / And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes / And make her full of hateful fantasies.” (Does the figure of Colpeper/The Glue Man slip behind that of Oberon here as a suspicious imp of the summer night?) Presence and absence, appearing and disappearing, seeing and hearing, and silence and sound pass into and out of one another, producing a kind of Image more vir-

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tual than actual because it cannot be presented by any one element alone of the work’s composition. This Image is all the more powerful because it is never fully present and continually fading or disappearing. Again, the silent, two-phrase ritornello. And then a digitally recorded image of the present-day Kent countryside that might be a new angle on the second image of the earlier five-shot sequence, but this time the fields and woods are darkened by threatening clouds. And there is sound, again digitally captured and abridged from A Canterbury Tale—a conversation on the downs, late in the film, between Alison and Colpeper, who have met there by chance, whose first line, in fact, corresponds to the image we see, an image imagined but not shown in the actual scene, but here present: Alis o n: Do you see that clump of trees? I spent thirteen perfect days there in a caravan. Co lpeper: Your caravan? Alis o n: It belongs to me now. Co lpeper: And the owner? Alis o n: Is there such a thing as a soul? He must be here somewhere. He loved this hill so much. Co lpeper: I love it too. May I ask, were you engaged? Alis o n: Three years. Co lpeper: Long time. Alis o n: His father was the trouble. Co lpeper: Did you ever meet each other? Alis o n: Oh yes. We didn’t dislike each other. They were a very good family. He thought his son should marry someone better than a shop girl. Co lpeper: Good family. Shop girl. Rather dilapidated phrases for wartime. Alis o n: Not for Geoffrey’s father. It would have taken an earthquake. Co lpeper: We’re having one.16

16. Burgin also explains that the digital panorama “may be understood as a view from the interior of that now empty space of past pleasure, but it may also be understood in other ways—for example as a place where the sinister ‘Glue Man’ may lurk. It is perhaps only through repetition that the dialogue from the film—heard in abridged form on the soundtrack of my video, over a view from the spot where the scene in the film took place—may come to be associated with the panorama, or the panorama may be associated with the sequence of intertitles in the video that refer to the Glue Man. The work is structured so that each turn of the spiral of reprise will ‘thicken’ the semantic

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With music playing underneath, this dialogue now recalls, or perhaps serves as a new iteration or displacement of, the precedent phrases from Britten’s opera. At the same time, it is not so important to recapitulate the unseen film here. (Perhaps it is not present, or only imperfectly present, in your own virtual archive of remembered films?) What these phrases and music from A Canterbury Tale do evoke associatively is a shared concern with Burgin’s Listen to Britain: the virtual force of memory in an image or a landscape; the impossible task of return, and of preserving continuity against the contingent and disruptive passage of time and history, personal and collective; the fragmentation of tradition and the dislocation of identity. And enough material has now been assembled to understand that here the remembered film is also the nodal point of a broader and more complex arrangement of fragments, discontinuous but seeking out novel associative patterns, that produce a new memory of British cultural identity, no matter how fragile, in the present context of a globalized economy and cross-border migrations that continually erode and reconfigure that identity: Powell and Pressburger, Humphrey Jennings, Benjamin Britten, Chaucer, or Shakespeare, each embedded in yet discontinuous with the other. The ritornello. And then speech and landscape pass back into descriptive text, as if taken from a screenplay. Recalling the earlier précis, yet different from it, this segment too passes before us not as words scanned on a page but as a sequence of, say, linguistic images linked by cross-fades, except this time the theme music from the five-shot phrase of the Kent countryside also returns: Landscape Girl crosses frame walking uphill Dissolve to view downhill Long-shot Girl walking towards camera Dissolve to woods Girl approaching camera texture of the piece through a process of layering of knowledges and associations.” See Components of a Practice, 94.

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Girl stops Looks out of frame Cut View of distant cathedral Cut Close-up of girl listening all around her

This textual sequence may be thought of as something like the primal scene of Listen to Britain. It corresponds more or less exactly to the scene in A Canterbury Tale from which the first segment of the ritornello is lifted, though without “image” or the cinematographic image’s qualities of movement in physical space. A more or less exact analog of five shots from A Canterbury Tale, this text cannot recapture or replace the film, but it does produce another kind of Image. The segment ends with a fade-to-black; the ritornello recurs . . . with a close-up of a girl, looking from left to right, as if seeking out an unseen image that cannot possibly be present in her current time and landscape. But what kind of Image is it? The looping composition of Listen to Britain produces a continuous transferal and transformation of movement in qualitative displacements: from analog to digital, from image to text, text to music, music to image, and so forth until all combinations are exhausted. Like Hôtel Berlin (and recalling even the much earlier Photopath), this incommensurable juxtaposition of incompatible spaces, series, or components makes them the site of instability and contravention—the curious and multiform fascination with the remembered film, where the fading memory of cinema becomes the material for future forms and concepts of aesthetic experience. In other words, as a material or medium of art, the remembered film plunges into a collective, cultural memory of cinema to project an anticipatory image or idea capable of provoking the creation of new forms and new concepts. I believe that the remembered film can be characterized with good reason as a kind of time-image, and as a peculiar form of indexicality that points back not to past existences in space and time, but rather past experiences that hover uncertainly between our subjective and objective encounters with images today. Burgin has his own name for such constructions—the sequenceimage—which functions as the expression of a kind of cinematic heterotopia that hovers behind, beneath, or just beyond the frame: “not the ‘off screen space’ eloquently theorized in the past,” Burgin writes in The Remembered Film, “but a space formed from all the many places of

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transition between cinema and other images in and of everyday life.”17 This is a virtual space comprised from networks of interacting, overlapping, and interfering series of images, fragments, and discourses. As the sequence-image invokes the remembered-film, it presents not a syntagm, or perhaps even a seme or image in the conventional sense but rather, Burgin continues, “in its random juxtapositions of diverse elements across unrelated spatial and temporal locations, our everyday encounter with the environment of the media is the formal analog of such ‘interior’ processes as inner speech and involuntary association. These tend away from the causal linear progressions of secondary process thought towards the extremity of the dream—which, Freud emphasizes, is to be understood not as a unitary narrative but as a fragmentary rebus” (RF, 14). An act of memory, no doubt, but also a rebus without a solution. I conclude, then, with a more recent work by Burgin, A Place to Read, created in 2010 to commemorate Istanbul’s selection as a European Capital of Culture. With its entirely digital and utopic reconstruction of the Taslik Kahve, a coffeehouse built by Sedad Hakki Eldem in the middle of the last century (now itself fragmented and physically displaced), and its dramatic virtual orbit above and around the rooftop and forward transit toward its entrance, its acceleration of light and time, A Place to Read entirely displaces the indexical and transcriptive space-time of analog representation with digital synthesis, producing new senses of time and history and novel ways of apprehending the presence of disappearing. One variation of the installed work separates the computer-generated projection in a space separated from a sequence of texts in an adjoining room, which themselves might be taken for “text pictures” familiar from the earlier practice of Art & Language. One question I would like to raise, and it would count for a great many examples of contemporary art, is to what extent projected image installations might count as sculptures, whose components would include the physical devices of playback and projection and screens or monitors, as well as the architectural design of the installed spaces where these works are located. The title of the work, A Place to Read, refers to Burgin’s digital reconstruction of the Taslik Kahve, which was displaced in the late eighties by a hotel and parking lot. But the “place to read” is also the architectural site of the installation itself, with its divided rooms and walls that ask us to sequence 17. The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 10; hereafter cited in text as RF.

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Stills from A Place to Read with installation plan. Courtesy of the artist.

and combine, in the virtual space of memory, the narrative presented as a series of sixteen texts presented in one space with the animated projections in the other. And there is one last architectural and potentially sculptural component to take account of. The mathematical and conceptual underpinnings of the optically virtual images produced in Morris’s mirrors are related genealogically to the algorithmic procedures of

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computer-aided design with which Burgin builds and animates his latest projection works. Passing from the virtual landscapes of the Taslik Kahve to the physical spaces of the installation shuffles and mixes in new and interesting ways Krauss and Baker’s guiding terms: sculpturesite-landscape-architecture-photography-stillness-movement-narrativenonnarrative, as well as presence and absence or actual and virtual. Krauss’s original Klein groups placed sculpture into relation with architecture and landscape; Baker’s later Klein groups place photography in relation to narrative and stasis in combinations that ask for contrast with cinematic components of stillness, movement, and projection. The philosophical investigation of conceptual intersections between sculpture and photography might then ask us to imagine where these terms might combine and separate dynamically in individual works, especially those involving moving image projections. A Place to Read offers many fascinating questions raised by the juxtaposition of sculpture and photography in their variable and evolving expanded fields. The work also presents a provocative site for asking again my question, what is a virtual Image? Burgin’s architectural dislocation of contiguous sites of reading—one textual and poetic, the other a digital construction and projection—produces its own kind of sequence-image. Considered as such, works like Photopath or A Place to Read are not resolvable to a sign or an image in the ordinary sense, nor can we locate and anchor a memory that would fix the sense of this sequence-image. The sequence-image presents not a filled space and a linear time, nor even recorded movement in space as an elapsed duration in time. Rather, it is an Image in another sense—neither cinema, nor television, nor video, nor even sculpture, painting, or photography.18 And from Photopath to A Place to Read, Burgin’s long and complex body of work makes present the disappearance of photography in the digital image leading to the creation of a virtual Image, a new power of

18. For instance, Burgin observes that “In everyday life the video image is associated mainly with television. The projected image is associated mainly with cinema. A large image on a gallery wall is associated with painting or photography. I think of my video works as situated in a space where associations to such institutions and practices overlap. I am particularly interested in the space between the still and the moving image, which is why there are passages in these works that call on the type of attention normally reserved for paintings. For example, the images may appear to be static although in fact they are not” (Victor Burgin: Una exposición [Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2001], 71). I might also add that from a certain perspective these works may take on aspects of sculptural expression, or not, and this hesitancy in perception is one of the most powerful characteristics of an art of the Image.

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memory and thought, “real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” In producing percepts and affects through digital events there occurs a naming crisis not only for the components of art (what is called movement, time, space, or image?) but also for the experience of art. In encountering an Image such as I have described it here, we do not become spectators, rather we make or enter into assemblages and produce new series out of art. The Image as Event or incorporeal force produces a fold or series of folds within the work, which opens onto an Outside, an audiovisual archive that is both collective and singular, shared and unique, as if in two constantly interacting temporal forces that operate at different rhythms: that which slows and stratifies, reifies, spatializes, and forms; and that which becomes in the creation of the unforeseen, the undetermined, and the proliferation of creative lines of flight across and out of the Image. Burgin’s own productive memory-series cannot resolve or contain our own singular and delirious mnemonic flights generated through, across, and outside of the Image. Art’s relation to thought, then, lies not in the substance of images, but in the logic of their combination and enchainment, an assemblage generated by an encounter within the Image of an Outside that cracks it from within and opens onto new territories: the possibility of a thought without image. “Rien d’autre qu’un peu de vraie relation avec le dehors, un peu de réalité réelle,” write Deleuze and Guattari in L’Anti-Oedipe.19 No doubt every artistic image produces an image of thought, a physical tracing and expression of thought given sensual form, no matter how incoherent or inelegant. However, while the aesthetic sign may imply a precise concept, it is nonetheless entirely affective and incorporeal. The artist’s Idea is not necessarily the philosopher’s. But Images not only trace thoughts and produce affects; they may also provoke thinking and create new powers of thinking. In so doing, we are thrown from sensuous to abstract thought, from an image of thought to a thought without image—this is the domain of philosophy. And in moving from one to the other, art may inspire philosophy to give form to new concepts. 19. L’Anti-Oedipe (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977), 400.

4

Harun Farocki’s Liberated Consciousness On behalf of what cannot be exchanged, art must through its form bring the T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory exchangeable to critical self-consciousness.

It was a warm summer night in Berlin and the unthinkable happened—we ran out of beer. The occasion was an informal dinner to introduce Harun Farocki and Antje Ehmann to friends who run the gallery Campagne Première. It is a testament to Harun’s generosity and grace, and to his belief that no significant moment go unrecorded, that he allowed me to make a short film on the spot, Harun, who only drinks beer, has a glass of wine (2011). Harun also believed that history runs in rhythms that are as uneven as they are contingent and unpredictable. How could we know, then, that he would be lost to us precisely three years later on July 30, 2014? This sense of history’s rhythms as suspended between reifying and liberating forces connects Farocki’s thought in images to some of Critical Theory’s most compelling concepts. In a still powerful essay on photography published in 1927, the great German critic Siegfried Kracauer writes of photography and film’s potentials for unlocking a liberated consciousness. A liberated consciousness would understand, express, and make visible the provisional status of all given configurations. The phrase that

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Kracauer uses is “freigesetzten Bewußtsein.”1 Idiomatically, freigesetzt means “released”; etymologically, the placement of Gesetz in the phrase points toward the concept of law, whether natural or social. From what should the image release consciousness, then? Kracauer suggests many possibilities: from the material silence of brute nature and history’s claim to a total image of the past, or from the reification of all social relations into capitalism’s impenetrable monograms. In any case, the bet that Kracauer makes on photography and film is itself released, like a dice throw, from their potential for reintroducing an image of time and change to the world. The republication of Kracauer’s essays of the 1920s in a collection called The Mass Ornament (1963), as well as the German translation of his 1960 book, Theory of Film, had a profound impact on the Oberhausen generation in Germany, a loose grouping of postwar filmmakers to which Harun Farocki did and did not belong. I am not asserting any direct influence here. But I do think that one way of characterizing his political commitment, and his restless experimentation with media and form, can be best understood in reference to Kracauer’s materialist and sensory aesthetics. (Later, I will also argue that Farocki’s global practice is exemplary of what Adorno imagined as an “emancipated cinema.”) Indeed, Kracauer conceives of social space as a construction that presents ciphers of power whose constitutive forces are given full and immanent visibility, yet remain unrecognized, unacknowledged, or unseen. It takes a liberated consciousness to interpret and criticize these ciphered images by breaking them open, reassembling them, and placing them in unfamiliar contexts. Moving image media are novel instruments for creatively executing these liberatory actions. In a globally networked world where every individual is potentially a citizen-reporter, these powers have been radically augmented. And for similar reasons, neoliberal forces seek to edit and filter them. These are strange days for trying to release critical consciousness into our media-soaked environments. Farocki was uniquely yet uncertainly placed in the so-called New German Cinema for a number of reasons. This made him something of an extraterritorial figure in ways that may account for the originality of his perspective on form and history. Farocki was Berlin-based rather than working out of Frankfurt, Hamburg, or Munich. Moreover, the auteur cinema of fiction was never his ambition. His greater commitments 1. “Die Photographie,” Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 37; in The Mass Ornament, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 51.

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were to a restless engagement with political and formal experimentation that owed more to filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièlle Huillet. In a career spanning nearly fifty years, Farocki made more than one hundred works in whatever genre or format, short or long, that fit his political and creative purposes, including video and gallery or museum installations. From a very early point in his career, Farocki considered his own artistic configurations to be open and provisional. He restlessly disassembled “completed” work, disconnecting audiovisual fragments, sounds, and images, and recycling and remixing them into ever-renewable combinations. Before the rapid advent of digital media, and even before video, Farocki worked from the principle that every work was open to further revision and recontextualization. This was not simply an aesthetic strategy. The fact that no seam or connecting link was permanent meant that reification was a dynamic, unstable, and incomplete process. Nothing that was done couldn’t be undone and reconfigured—for Farocki this was as much an ethic and a vision of history as it was a creative commitment. Farocki observed, reported, critiqued, analyzed, and deconstructed, sometimes in his own voice and other times strategically deploying the voice of others in a free indirect relation. It is tempting to say that Farocki worked in the genre of the essay film, though this might be too small and vague a category to contain the inventive breadth of his moving image works, which cannot be considered straightforwardly documentary in any restrictive sense. Each one of his major works—and there are many—emerges as if in search of a new hybridity where fiction and nonfiction, the imaginary and the real, the invisible and visible, suppressed and conspicuous forces combine and recombine in always startling combinations. The simplest and truest thing one can say about his work is that he spent a life engaged in the critique of images by and through images. Indeed, he was a master of building arguments from appropriated images and situations—often from surveillance cameras, amateur video, automated drones, aerial photography, computer displays, and so forth—and then weaving them into his own footage to bring forward unseen and unexpected correspondences. Some examples include Leben—BRD (How to Live in the German Federal Republic, 1990), which explores instruction as a means of social control by building its images from training simulations, and Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen (I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts, 2000), which compares surveillance technologies and imaging in prisons and grocery stores. Videogramme einer Revolution (Videograms of a Revolution, 1992), Farocki

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and Andrej Ujica’s account of the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaus¸escu, is a tour de force of this genre. In every one of his works, Farocki asks us to pose again the question, what is an Image?, or, better, what is a human image? Moreover, much of his mature work examines in fascinating ways the proliferation of nonhuman perspectives and spaces in our image environment, and, in each case, Farocki asks us to reconsider how every image provokes both an intelligence and ethics of seeing. These concerns are often reflected in his titles, for example, Etwas wird sichtbare (1982) (Before Your Eyes— Vietnam; the German title is literally “something becomes visible”), or An Image (Ein Bild) from 1983, which documents and critiques all the phases of construction involved in creating the “natural” beauty of a centerfold model. Perhaps the best way to account for the power and originality of Farocki’s liberatory ethics of seeing is to return to three of his bestknown works: Nichtlöschbares Feuer (Inextinguishable Fire, 1968), an ethical interrogation of Dow Chemical’s production of napalm during the Vietnam War; Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Images of the World and the Inscription of War, 1988), an essay on not seeing or acting on what is perfectly visible, in this case the German death camps recorded by US aerial photography during World War II; and Ernste Spiele (Serious Games, 2010), a four-part video installation examining how the US military uses technologies of simulation and gaming. Produced at twenty-year intervals, with many equally important works appearing in between, I consider these three projects as representing different phases of Farocki’s critical life in images. Throughout his long and varied career, Farocki was attracted to locations where the expression of power/knowledge takes place without obvious censorship or camouflage—corporate headquarters, laboratories, factories, archives, military training sites, shopping malls—whose banality and anonymity belie their social force. That these locations were sometimes documented and sometimes re-created in his works does not detract from their expressive force in the context of Farocki’s films and videos. Farocki understood the paradox that power is a relation of force that is not hidden yet also not visible. Visibility does not equal intelligibility or understanding, and documenting the sites where napalm was researched and manufactured does not alone unveil the material and ideological structures that sustain the process. These questions are raised in the opening of Inextinguishable Fire where, in direct address, Farocki asks us, the viewers: How can I make visible what you do not

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The opening of Inextinguishable Fire.

wish to see? And by the same reasoning, Farocki knows that the sight of flesh burned by napalm will only make us close our eyes to the pictures, to the memory of the pictures, and then to the facts that sustain the process of manufactured destruction. Moreover, it is not enough to report on the process; one must also present the structures of belief and selfjustification that sustain the process. In a gesture of personal commitment, Farocki ends the sequence by extinguishing a cigarette on his own arm, and doing so in full knowledge that no image can fully encompass or express the destructive capacity of the mass production of napalm.

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Farocki’s creative imagination was often guided by the polyvalent significance of the concept of Verbund, which can mean “combination” in an ordinary constructive sense but also refers to corporate cartels as networks of dominance whose interconnecting and mutually reinforcing links are suppressed or hidden. Combination also suggests montage or construction (as well as de-montage or deconstruction), but of a special kind where access to truth may be expressed only through a displaced relation to the untrue. In Farocki’s works, montage became a practice of dissociation and recombination where images can be recycled into new works, thus forming ever more elaborate networks of interconnected elements that acquire new meanings in new contexts. Construction can disjoin elements that we are used to thinking of as invariably connected and also bring back into relation facts that camouflage themselves by suppressing their interdependence. In this manner, Inextinguishable Fire is organized through a process of repeating, varying, and reconnecting disjunct parts of an absent whole. Perhaps influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke, the film presents “models” of understanding, each one incomplete and fragmentary in itself, yet which together assemble a new picture of capitalism’s self-justifications for imperialism and destruction. The film is not documentary but analytical—it does not show the actual offices and laboratories of Dow Chemical (what would be the point?) but rather interpretive re-stagings of corporate cynical reason. At the same time, the film communicates many facts: that napalm sticks to the flesh and burns at 3,000 degrees Celsius; that Dow’s main offices are located in Midland, Michigan; that corporate research relies less on secrecy than on a strategic compartmentalization of knowledge, and so forth. As important, the film presents corporate organizational strategies and ideologies as complexly intertwined discourses. There are two repeated camera movements in the second and third sections of the film that track back from a secretary in the Dow offices and then reframe on a window looking into a conference room, the glass doubling the screen. In the first iteration, a manager informs a lead researcher that they have received a large order from the State Department. The researcher replies, “You know I don’t approve of war, but since we started the war in Vietnam, I’ll do anything within my power to end it quickly.” This section is entitled “Sticky Humanism” (Der angeklebte Humanism u$). It binds the ideology of ending war by producing ever more destructive means for executing war to the stages of inventing and producing napalm.

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The repeated section is called “Intensified Division of Labor.” The manager speaks to the secretary, repeating and extending the earlier self-justifications though this time adding that he is not defending the war, but napalm saves lives. (Of course, it only “saves” lives by destroying many others.) He continues: “The State Department has given us millions of dollars for the further development of napalm. Parts of the public, as well as some of our employees, don’t understand this. A chemical corporation is like a set of building blocks. We let each worker have one block to work on. Then we put the blocks together to make whatever our clients request. Each employee is given a discrete task, the better to preserve secrecy.” This is also a repeated theme from the film’s earlier sections, and its ethical ironies are complex. A corporation is an impersonal entity. No individual employee of the corporation need share the ethical stance of the corporate body, but only fulfill specific isolated functions within it. And if this is not enough, the individual tasks are compartmentalized, the better to withhold the true nature of the whole. Corporations have their own forms of dissociative montage. At the beginning of the section entitled “Model II,” a placard states that scientists and researchers feel like mere observers of the war because intensified division of labor hides their contributions to the total process. Each section of the film concludes with television news images of napalm use in Vietnam being watched by the fictional scientists, and in each repetition the characters seem to gain greater awareness of their individual responsibility. Yet this is not a conclusion, and Inextinguishable Fire does not give its viewers an easy resting point but rather a series of open questions for ethical self-examination. Many destructive products are also useful products; the resignation of one or a few contributors will do nothing to stop the total process. Perhaps all one can do is to follow out systematically the questions: who benefits, and who is harmed? Moreover, elements can be reassembled in many different ways from different interpretive schemes. In the final section of the film, an actor embodies three different roles—a worker, a student, an engineer—each a factory employee with different reasons for stealing one component a day in hope of rebuilding a complete image of the disconnected assembly process. The worker is hoping to assemble a complete vacuum cleaner for his wife; the student is hoping to prove that the factory is actually producing submachine guns. But the engineer has a different perspective, where the many parts can be reassembled into a variety of different wholes, or where the finished product can be repurposed and thus achieve new utility. A vacuum cleaner can become

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a weapon, and a submachine gun a useful household gadget. Engineers, workers, students—we are all responsible. Perhaps our most urgent and useful task is to restore or remap the broken links in new ways. Images of the World and the Inscription of War pushed Farocki’s strategies of dissociative and recombinatory montage to new levels of complexity. The primary theme of the film is to question why the Allies remained willfully blind to the existence of the Nazi death camps despite massive documentation by aerial photography undertaken during American and British bombing raids. This unwitting documentation of the camps remained dormant in archives until, inspired by the American television miniseries, Holocaust (1978), two CIA analysts working on their own time recovered, analyzed, and labeled significant structures in the images. Within and across this line of inquiry are woven other histories and their representations: Albrecht Meydenbauer’s invention of scale measurement photography; the replacement of skilled metal press hand work by mass automation during World War II; Marc Garanger’s collection of identification photographs of unveiled Algerian women; other forms of documentation of the camps, including Alfred Kantor’s drawings, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler’s witnessing, and photos taken by SS officers. At first the links between these stories seem unclear. What does the invention of scale measurement photography or images of unveiled Algerian women have to do with documentation of the Shoah? These meditations are interrupted then return recursively around other repeating motifs: the wave-channel laboratory in Hannover; a makeup session for a Dior model; a life drawing class; an automated drawing machine; the creation of composite photos of faces; a Lufthansa flight simulator; analysts examining surveillance photos; robot car assembly; a computer counting points on a die; a remotecontrolled video camera traveling through a scale model town; and various technologies of surveillance and automatic facial recognition. Across this space of recursive dissociation and recombination, composed with all the complexity of a Bach fugue, points of attraction gradually form around key ideas—the replacement of hand and eye by automation and machine vision; witnessing and recording from life at a human scale in tension with the inhuman perspectives of scale measurement at a distance, automated aerial photography, and electronic surveillance and mapping. In each case there is either a withdrawal of human sight and agency or a transformation or mechanization of the body that renders it as a thing. These ideas are less directly asserted than implied in the image constellations that emerge across the film’s logic of repetition and variation. Nonetheless, I have always felt that there

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Image series from Images of the World and the Inscription of War.

are two “intruders” that disturb these series—the Dior model and the wave-channel laboratory. Perhaps the Dior model is there to show how chemistry and techniques of the hand can work in tandem to enhance artfully a face? Or to sculpt the eye as a thing to be seen or as an object of consumerist self-absorption, rather than an active organ of vision? (Indeed one of the minor themes of the film has to do with the variability of the face as masked or unveiled, or as reconstructed and reproduced from image elements.) In contrast, the wave machines produce a technological simulation of nature, reproducing nature’s forces (wave mechanics) in ways that become available to data recording, quantification, and mathematical modeling. This is how science approaches the task of presenting to perception and analysis the unseen world that surrounds us and through which we move—an ambient environment or second nature that is taken for granted. Perhaps, too, these images present an allegory of history that is tightly woven into the compositional logic of the film. The waves are cycles of forward movement that also return—always different yet always the same—in a play of forces entirely mediated by technology. The laboratory experiments in wave mechanics thus become fitting bookends for a film whose larger theme is how visual technologies blind us to historical data. More is not always better. The history of the

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nonhuman vision of automated technologies of image-making and data collection by military and state surveillance apparatuses is marked by a peculiar form of tunnel vision that remains blind to significant, even threatening, historical information. Attentive readers of Farocki’s film will understand that the many ironies of this data blindness are not restricted to the state’s vision and data machines. And here Farocki offers nothing less than a new philosophy of the Image. An image contains everywhere and on the surface all the information it will ever convey; nothing is suppressed or invisible. However, while every image presents a space of total visibility, every observer confronts the image from a perspective of limited intelligibility. Interested observers never perceive every data point that the image offers—information emerges or recedes according to the external perspectives and contexts from which images are perceived and interpreted, and these contexts are continually appearing and disappearing in entirely contingent ways. What is wanted here is a better comprehension of how the intelligible is distinct from the sensible. The radical multiplication of images, documents, and data neither adds to nor subtracts from the human ability or inability to derive sense from them. Images have no ethics, only interpretations of images, and these are inherently incomplete, contested, and contradictory. Where is war inscribed in images? Everywhere the world is. : : : The moment has arrived to consider in deeper ways the novelty of Farocki’s philosophy and practice of the Image. Writing on Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze remarks that an artist never begins by confronting a blank canvas. Rather, this apparently empty space is already clogged with clichés that fog our visual field and determine our modalities of seeing. (I take up this question again in the next chapter.) In like manner, Farocki’s lifelong objective, and the question that drives all of his work, is how to give form and expression to a critical Image out of the vast flux of reproduced images and images of reproduction that one encounters in daily life. This is a question of style and the organization of forms and, above all, a question of construction. But it is also a matter of presenting the technologies of sighting in which we are all envisioned and produced as images and, in turn, to invent new techniques for the critical interrogation of images. It turns out that Adorno, who only late in life reached a more subtle and dialectical understanding of the cinematographic image, is one of our most sensitive writers on this problem. Up until the period of the

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composition of his Aesthetic Theory (1961–69) and the short but significant text, “Transparencies on Film,” Adorno believed that film was incapable of constructing an Image in this sense, and thus of achieving the aesthetic autonomy of critical art. Through the immanence of their practice the Oberhausen generation knew better, and they were able to teach the old master a few new tricks of dialectical thinking. No less than Farocki, Adorno was deeply hostile to the Model image of Hollywood cinema in its relation to mass production and distribution as well as its demonic force of repetitive perception and behavior training in the arts of consumerism. Later, Adorno balanced his ideological criticisms of cinema with subtler aesthetic investigations. In “Transparencies on Film,” a text from 1966, Adorno allows that film may achieve aesthetic autonomy, and thus something like a sensory resistance to capitalist culture, if one can make of images a form of writing or, in Adorno’s words, an écriture.2 The most curious turn in Adorno’s late essay on New German Cinema is his acknowledgment that filmic construction might exemplify what is potentially most critical in autonomous art. In his earlier philosophy, film was considered to be irredeemably representational in the sense of ineluctably retransmitting a fallen world. But at this late moment, it seems that a critical Image might appear dialectically by passing through what, in the “Culture Industry” chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno considered as the most reified and technologically mediated and homogenous form of sensory experience—the cinema. The utopian possibility of an “emancipated cinema,” as Adorno calls it in “Transparencies on Film,” is that the imagination of new forms of social and collective experience might be released through montage constructions that fracture and reassemble the images of the social whole routinely given us. This is another way of anticipating Kracauer’s liberated consciousness. 2. In Cinema and Experience, Miriam Hansen notes that Adorno’s concept of writing is adopted from the French art dealer and art historian Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who characterizes écriture as the nonobjective and indirect language of the modern arts. “Écriture is a sign of the temporality and history congealed in it,” Hansen writes, “ ‘seismographic’ in its registration of subcutaneous, mimetic impulses and tremors of distant catastrophes. Yet, because this writing is veiled and not immediately readable, it assumes a ‘broken-off, hieroglyphic character’ (as in the drawings of Paul Klee)” (Cinema and Experience [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012], 226). This description would also apply to the form of écriture achieved by Girardet and Müller in Meteor. I will soon return to this concept of construction as hieroglyph. I would also like to express here my immense debt to Hansen’s work on Adorno in Cinema and Experience and elsewhere.

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The turn to cinema also offers new terms for understanding why the criterion of autonomy is so deeply embedded in Adorno’s demand for critical art. In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant defines aesthetic autonomy as the form of the artwork’s purposeful purposelessness, or a purpose without directed ends or aims (Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck).3 Under this directive, aesthetic experience is lifted out of any consideration of need, desire, or instrumental use; in other words, the work of art establishes a mode of existence as absolute freedom distinct from the demands of commonplace life. It is also the case that aesthetic experience so defined is singular and isolated and thus abstracted from collective and social life—its mode of exchange is solitude. The dilemma of modernity, however, is that the penetration of the commodity form into nearly all terms of existence and exchange has endowed aesthetic experience universally with a singular purposiveness: to be bought and sold, to seduce and entertain, to reduce experience to habit, and to impose these conditions uniformly throughout the social whole. Modern art responded to this situation through abstraction, absolute construction, and complexity of technique—these are some of art’s ways of resisting exchanging value by changing the terms of representation. However, Adorno believes that modern art faces a dilemma unknown in Kant’s era. The demand for autonomy is made ever more difficult by two factors. First, art has become increasingly dependent on technologies whose history of production and consumption is concomitant with that of capital. This is especially true of the new media arts of film, photography, and electronic music. And for similar reasons, sensory experience is almost unavoidably absorbed into the social, although in the alienated form of reification. The solitary subject of Kant’s analytic of the beautiful has now become a homogenous and alienated collective, and all experience has been transformed as the externality of things. The contemporary formal and ethical demand of autonomy is to restore the critical capacities of both the work and the viewer by changing the terms of their autonomy and renewing their capacities for registering and undergoing positive change. For modern art to achieve this critical capacity means challenging reification on two fronts. The grip of technology on technique must be loosened to achieve new styles of expression and montage construction. And then perhaps new forms 3. See “Analytic of the Beautiful” in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially §10.

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of collective life might be envisioned by passing through just those domains of experience where life seems most alienated. The logic of Adorno’s demand for aesthetic autonomy, especially in Aesthetic Theory, is difficult, yet it might signal new directions for understanding the anticipatory time of contemporary art, which has been a constant theme of this book in its aim to understand what philosophy wants from images. Here Adorno suggests that art does not become autonomous by separating itself from alienated forms or existing independently from them, but rather by passing directly through them. “Artworks extend the realm of human domination to the extreme,” Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory, not literally, though, but rather by the strength of the establishment of a sphere existing for itself, which just through its posited immanence divides itself from real domination and thus negates the heteronomy of domination.  .  .  . The necessity of art cannot be propounded more scientifico but rather only insofar as a work, by the power of its internal unity, gives evidence of being thus-and-only-thus, as if it absolutely must exist and cannot possibly be thought away. This being-in-itself to which artworks are devoted is not the imitation of something real but rather the anticipation of a being-in-itself that does not yet exist, of an unknown that—by way of the subject—is self-determining. Artworks say that something exists in itself, without predicating anything about it.4

In other words, what Adorno calls genuine art is future-oriented, though without supplying positive advice or direction concerning how movement into the future might be achieved. In his 1961 essay on musique informelle, Adorno characterizes this anticipation of a still unknown critical autonomy as perpetuating something like the ever-present possibility of a break in time and history as what cannot be foreseen or fully imagined in the present moment. Autonomous art therefore expresses the real and concrete possibility that characterizes every artistic utopia: to make things of which we do not know what they are.5 Similar arguments appear in Aesthetic Theory, where Adorno argues that art probes

4. Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 77; hereafter cited as AT. 5. See Adorno’s essay “Vers une musique informelle,” Quasi una Fantasia (London: Verso, 1992), 269–322.

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after truth in the evanescent and the fragile. “In each genuine work of art something appears that does not yet exist,” Adorno asserts. “The appearance of the nonexistent as if it existed motivates the question as to the truth of art. By its form alone art promises what is not; it registers objectively, however refractedly, the claim that because the nonexistent appears it must indeed be possible” (AT, 82). The stakes here are very close to what I have been calling the naming crisis in contemporary art in its inventive quest for new orders of time, memory, and history. And in similar terms, Adorno characterizes musique informelle as experimental, unpredictable, contingent, and incomplete. These are open works whose sense is reticent and enigmatic, yet still connected, if only obliquely, to the social real. Adorno sometimes refers to them as “hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost” (AT, 124), and indeed the model of the hieroglyph is an apt characterization of the kinds of filmic construction that Adorno imagines in “Transparencies on Film.” The sense of these forms is paradoxical. Think of them as audiovisual constructions whose forms are mimetic and which demand interpretation while acknowledging the futility of pinning images to any stable or final signification. (In the next chapter, I will discuss Deleuze’s concept of mimesis in terms of “aesthetic analogy.” Both Deleuze’s and Adorno’s arguments here connect back to Benjamin’s concept of mimesis as nonsensuous similarity in interesting ways.) Indeed, technologically mediated forms are automatically mimetic—they convey directly the ciphered truth of alienation through the intensity of their reification and its technological manifestation. These mimetic forces can be broken apart and reconfigured, however. The hieroglyph can be thought of as a special kind of writing that combines distinct elements that are at once depictive, phonetic, and determinative. Nevertheless, it must be said that a number of obstacles, both spatial and temporal, bar the way to transforming normative forms of the image for an emancipated cinema. The Model image or standardized image is a sign, a sensory construction, but without the expressive conditions that demand active free interpretation; rather, the image is entirely characterized by demonic forces of repetition. Here repetition is first conceived in the form of commodity circulation in which every image is structured by exchange value, and, concomitantly, modalities of seeing are produced as acts of consumption. This is partially what Adorno is trying to counter in writing of the autonomy, or lack of it, in aesthetic construction. When art conforms to the logic of commodities it has no terms of existence other than those of commodities, nor does it admit to other forms of exchange. Rather than thinking

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of autonomy in terms of self-identity or a complete and total Form, autonomy here becomes an ethical and existential criterion for expressing art’s resistance to and independence from the commodity form and its terms of exchange value. The achievement of autonomous expression thus requires new forms of reciprocity and interactivity that are both individual and collective. Under the standard model, the fabrication of images and modalities of spectatorship are both reduced to the forms of commodity exchange—the image is only the infinitely replicated structure of reification and consumption. There is an intimate link, then, between cinematic forms and the economic and cultural logic of capital, but this link also offers opportunities for dialectical critique. Adorno observes in “Transparencies” that “that which is irreducible about the objects in film is itself a mark of society, prior to the aesthetic realization of an intention. By virtue of this relationship to the object, the aesthetics of film is inherently concerned with society. There can be no aesthetics of the cinema, not even a purely technological one, which would not include the sociology of the cinema.”6 In this view, the social erupts in film with greater force than in other non-reproductive media; indeed, the social is fully present in the material of film itself. In like terms, film models behavior through the constitution of a collective “We.” In the culture industry these models are homogenous and hegemonic. Here the aesthetic and social forces in film converge to synchronize perception and behavior with standardized behavioral norms. For these reasons Adorno asserts that “The liberated film would have to wrest its a priori collectivity from the mechanisms of unconscious and irrational influence and enlist this collectivity in the service of emancipatory intentions” (“TF,” 183–84). In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno also credits the visual arts with appealing to a social collectivity by speaking through “the How of apperception. Their We is simply the sensorium according to its historical condition pursued to the point that breaks the relation to representational objectivity that was modified by virtue of the development of its language of form” (AT, 168). The reproductive visual arts appeal to a plural beholder by saying, “Behold! [Seht einmal].” This look is outward directed, both to the world itself and to that domain of historically structured experience that is the image-world. But the collective appeal to the “How of apperception” is equally important. To the extent that apperception requires a critical 6. “Transparencies on Film,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Verso, 2008), 182; hereafter cited in text as “TF.”

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and self-reflective consciousness, this We must also be engaged in ongoing acts of willed interpretation, of making meaning from signs, and, as importantly, in understanding how the powers and limits of current technologies for seeing and modalities of vision might indeed constrain the possibilities for making new sense through images. Achieving autonomy in aesthetic construction is also an achievement of independence in critical reading. The collective can only attain the possibility of a willed critical reading by releasing art from the dominance of the commodity and its forms of infernal repetition. However, the demand for autonomy and critical interpretation through film is also dissipated by another force of repetition—the image is taken as a copy or a re-presentation of the world marked by qualities of immediacy and presence. Adorno’s particular understanding of the dialectical interpenetration of these two forms of repetition accounts for his long resistance to Kracauer and Benjamin’s commitment to the potentially redemptive powers of photography and film. For an image to achieve the autonomy characteristic of an artwork in Adorno’s sense, it must be entirely present as construction. Otherwise said, the artwork must interrupt the forms of perceptual experience sustained by demonic repetition by introducing difference and discontinuity into aesthetic form and reception—images must become writing, or that special form of writing that Adorno calls écriture. The given immediacy of the world in perception as repetition is one quality hindering the transformation of the cinematographic image into aesthetic writing in Adorno’s sense. The other is the overwhelming presence of represented objects in their immediacy. (In effect, these two qualities, immediacy and presence, account for the naturalization of images as emblems of capital.) In Adorno’s view, the significance given to the immediate presence of objects in film militates against the formation of aesthetically autonomous techniques—the signs are too present to be ordered in discontinuity and to inflect perception with difference. The problem with the artistic development of film so far is that the representational character of photographic processes has placed a higher intrinsic interest on the significance of the object as something foreign to subjectivity—the exteriority of things predominates over the interiority of subjective experience. And for this reason, no matter how much it abstracts and deforms its represented objects, the photographic basis of film does not permit absolute construction; meaning, it cannot achieve aesthetic autonomy. It is also the case that such images are self-interpreting—they permit no other message than one that states that reification is universal and that the world is how it is. Adorno calls this the automatic self-reproduction

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of the status quo in its established forms as an expression of domination. Nevertheless, owing to its absorption of social relations, perhaps some idea of the emancipated film can pass through the social and the subjective to give new sense to images? In a significant shift from earlier views, Adorno asserts in “Transparencies” that new forms of critique in film are possible because of the image’s ineluctable relation with capital. Cinema completely absorbs within its forms the logic of capital, but it can only present this logic as ciphered images. Call this a disguised sociology. The problem then becomes one of how to understand these ciphers dialectically. What forms of negation might give the image pause, as it were, by interrupting repetition with difference in order to liberate new modalities of social seeing and to imagine new forms of collective life? How can the language of form be released from its relation to representational objectivity? From what must the emancipated film free itself? To be sure, one factor is the reproductive logic of capital and consumerism and another is an uncritical dependence on technology, which has itself evolved according to the demands of capital and mass production. Equally important, however, is the need for images to distance themselves from the presence and immediacy of empirical reality to become expressive in ways that remap relations between the objective and subjective, between the world and perception or perception and imagination. Indeed, perception must become apperception, or a form of seeing engaged by a critical self-consciousness freed from its anchor in immediate perceptual experience and the ineluctable temporal flow of projected images. In becoming newly legible as writing, the image now calls for reading. This is where Adorno’s deeply held critique of representation yields a new sense of what images could be. As Miriam Hansen astutely observed, Adorno conceived of Images as fundamentally nonrepresentational; meaning, that they are neither limited to the visual register nor fixed in space and time. (Recall here my account in chapter 1 of Benjamin’s ideas concerning nonsensuous similarity and the mimetic faculty. One might also imagine Adorno’s critical Images as akin to Bergson’s “intermediate image”: neither wholly exterior or interior, matter or mind, but rather something that floats or fluctuates between these two dimensions. I will return to this idea in the next chapter.) Or, as Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory, “Artworks are images as apparition, as appearance, and not as copy [Abbild]” (AT, 83).7 It is significant that Adorno imports this 7. Miriam Hansen’s account of these passages in Aesthetic Theory differs in important ways from mine. In particular, she gives a compelling account of Adorno’s discus-

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term from French or English. In either case, “apparition” indicates a becoming, emission, or appearing, perhaps the coming to sight of something previously unseen or unknown, that emerges from its own terms of immanence. To think of the Image as a fluctuating and momentary appearing recalls Adorno’s insistence on the anticipatory powers of critical art as something “that flashes up, vanishes, yet cannot be read for its meaning” (AT, 81). What does not yet exist can appear suddenly and unpredictably in art. Art, however, cannot hold this fragile light in a stable image or give it self-identical form. Yet the non-existing can be mediated through and between disconnected fragments of the existent assembled into montage clusters. These fragments are particular kinds of images— documents or world-pictures, if you will—where the social is already embedded through reification. Wanted then is a new form of montage, which takes up these fragments and recombines them into critical Images that are analytical, but which also offer to experience new temporalities as expressions of change, the new, the unforeseen, the not-yet—in other words, as I have written of Kracauer and Farocki, the Image aims at sensitizing subjects to the uneven rhythms of history and the possibilities of an open relationship to the future. Adorno likens the Image as apparition to Benjamin’s dialectical images, themselves constructed from eccentric forms of citation and literary montage, whose fluctuating existence persists in the register of Bergson’s temps durée. Flashing up suddenly and momentarily, these ephemeral dialectical images are only accessible to an unconscious and involuntary apperception; they elude intentional observation. Yet in giving them duration—as Deleuze would say, drawing percepts from perception—art perhaps makes them critically legible. For these reasons, Adorno argues that art is nevertheless the truth of society insofar as in its most authentic products the irrationality of the rational world is expressed. In art, denunciation and anticipation are syncopated. If apparition illuminates and touches, the image is the paradoxical effort to transfix this most evanescent instant. Pertinent here is Benjamin’s formulation of dialectic at a standstill, which he developed in the context of his conception of a dialectical image. If, as images, artworks are the persistence of the transient, they are concentrated in appearance as something momentary. sion of “the beauty of nature” in relation to “art beauty” and how it informs his sense of the image. See Cinema and Experience, 229–36.

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To experience art means to become conscious of its immanent process as an instant at a standstill. (AT, 84)

Here the Image expresses difference rather than repetition, or even a perception of the force of the virtual in what is actual; in other words, the Image as Event. The point here is that this transient aesthetic experience does not persist in an image in its spatial presence and temporal immediacy; rather, it is produced as an Image in the intervals of fragmented and discontinuous unfoldings in ways that recall Victor Burgin’s sequence-image. However, for Adorno to speak of images as apparition also suggests enlivening them with an internal and subjective life that recedes from the external and objective world of images without absolutely disconnecting from that world. To become a form of writing, film must turn toward inner life while reconceiving itself in nonrepresentational terms, where “nonrepresentational” means turning away from a mimesis of objects conveyed as immediate appearance. Art must unlock in objects other mimetic powers where the subjective infiltrates the objective with its own forms of temporality and language. For Adorno, the aesthetics of film owes less to its technological character than to a subjective mode of experience that is, like film, temporal in character, and which filters and reorganizes the outer world of things through the inner world of subjective mental life. In “Transparencies on Film,” Adorno suggests that the aesthetics of film will do better to base itself on a subjective mode of experience which film resembles and which constitutes its artistic character. A person, who, after a year in the city, spends a few weeks in the mountains abstaining from all work, may unexpectedly experience colorful images of landscapes consolingly coming over him or her in dreams or daydreams. These images do not merge into one another in a continuous flow, but are rather set off against each other in the course of their appearance, much like the magic lantern slides of our childhood. It is in the discontinuity of that movement that the images of the interior monologue resemble the phenomenon of writing: the latter similarly moving before our eyes while fixed in its discrete signs. (“TF,” 180)

Painting and music both appeal to an external world for their basic materials as visible and acoustic matter. But the material of film is also analogous to the movement of mental images that flow beneath exter-

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nally directed perception. For a consciousness newly released from the standardized time of work and the overstimulated sensorium of urban life, these inner experiences appear as a discontinuous flow of distinct, autonomous fragments, whose sequence and combination are released from the structure of standardized time. Moreover, this experience is felt as something like a liberation of internal life. Adorno seems to imagine these fragments as semes fixed in discrete signs and set into discontinuous movement. Indeed, the German title of Adorno’s essay, “Filmtransparente,” suggests poetically both the succession of lantern slides and the serial deployment of photograms on the filmstrip. The primary sense of Transparente as banners carried in political demonstrations connects this potential of film to political protest. Writing in a more ordinary sense is another model for this aesthetic difference. In the novel, Adorno argues, a narration is abstracted from living persons in their presence and immediacy through its expression as symbolic language and spatial typography. Again, presence is displaced and immediacy dissolved into the flow of discontinuous signs. In writing, there is an irrecoverable disjunction between the representation and its empirical counterpart—form is released from the world as objective appearance. This is not an argument for the superiority of the novel nor does Adorno favor adopting novelistic fictional forms into film. As I suggested above, Adorno obviously values a certain “documentary” power of the cinematographic image, but this is not an indexical power, or an indication of past existence in space and time, but rather the sociological fact of the image as a ciphered figure of a life damaged by capitalism. To achieve style in film means reconsidering the difference between nonfiction and fiction. For nonfiction does not give us the real objectively nor is the experience of fiction only subjective and imaginary. In this manner, Adorno concludes that “Film is faced with the dilemma of finding a procedure which neither lapses into commercial craft [Kunstgewerbe] nor slips into a mere documentary mode. The obvious answer today, as forty years ago, is that of montage which does not interfere with things but rather arranges them in a constellation akin to that of writing” (“TF,” 182–83; translation modified). In this last statement Adorno is perhaps judging more kindly his old friend and mentor, Siegfried Kracauer. At the same time, Adorno offers only a few, and more or less vague, criteria for qualifying montage as considered in “Transparencies.” Clearly, the discontinuity of écriture is a necessary condition not only for the production of an autonomous construction, but also for the floating apperception of a subjective experience of images disconnected from the standard model. With its dis-

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jointed signs and gapped perception, the autonomous cinematographic work is marked by discontinuities through which thought and imagination are guided in singular and unpredictable ways. As Deleuze might say, here filmic construction is organized through a differential logic of the interval where an Image appears in and through the interstices separating shots and segments. This is another way of characterizing the Event of contemporary moving image art, and indeed I have already presented some powerful strategies in the work of Girardet and Müller, Ken Jacobs, Victor Burgin, Harun Farocki, and other artists discussed in this book. What Adorno suggests, but does not manage to say directly, is that time must be introduced into the flow of images in new ways. Replacing causality with contingency might be one strategy. Adorno himself suggests that one possibility for counteracting the natural immediacy of the cinematographic image would be the use of a form of improvisation that “surrenders itself to unguided chance.” On the same page he discusses the qualitative advantage of working in comparatively awkward, “unprofessional,” and improvisational ways, writing that “works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental have a liberating quality” (“TF,” 179). Adorno also argues for the power of hybridity—the interaction of film with other media to create heterogeneous forms of expression. In any case, as Miriam Hansen has observed, in all of these examples Adorno is asking artists (and critics) to confront the Model image analytically through the exercise of determinate negation. As Hansen puts it, “Dialectic, via determinate negation, ‘discloses each image as writing,’ teaching us ‘to read from its features that admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth.’ ”8 This concept of montage shifts the question of meaning from the spatial relation of image to referent to the logical relation of the interval or interstice as an immanent relation of difference, thus producing a kind of disjunctive synthesis of difference and heterogeneity that must be read as much as seen. In Hansen’s view, the exercise of determinate negation through open montage clusters is what gives filmic hieroglyphs their critical force. Yet this force must also be applied as a transformation of experience. No direct causality is implied here. Another characteristic of the critical Image and its autonomy is its reticence, its openness, and its lack of 8. Cinema and Experience, 224–25. The interior citation is from Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 18.

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finality. Critical self-consciousness will find new terms of existence only by being released from the hold of representation as repetition. And the power of releasing the subject from the hold of representation is to offer it into the same realm of freedom that autonomous art claims for itself. There is interchange between work and viewer, but not exchange, leading to the phrase that opens this chapter: “On behalf of what cannot be exchanged, art must through its form bring the exchangeable to critical self-consciousness” (AT, 83). I have spoken of the reticence of critical art. In similar ways, Farocki’s work can often (though not always) be coolly observational and withdrawn. It does not insist but rather lets itself be discovered. In works like Images of the World, Farocki’s signature appears not in a voice or a particular style of filming but rather through the form and complexity of his montage practice. Like many of Farocki’s films and videos, Images of the World is assembled through montage clusters or constellations—call them hieroglyphs in Adorno’s or Hansen’s sense— that subsequently dissolve and recombine to suggest new terms of comparison and contrast. But it is rarely the case that Farocki interprets these images for viewers or even suggests terms leading toward a final reading. The combinatory logic of the work is very precise, yet Farocki’s open montage constellations are also reticent in their precision. They are careful not to unveil, or to reveal too quickly, what they intend. And in this respect, they follow implicitly Adorno’s desire for filmic constructions that yield neither to the belief that an image of the world is self-interpreting through its presumed transparency and immediacy, or that montage can rewrite the sense of the world. As Adorno insists in “Transparencies,” “it seems illusory to claim that through the renunciation of all meaning, especially the cinematically inherent renunciation of psychology, meaning will emerge from the reproduced material itself. It may be, however, that the entire issue is rendered obsolete by the insight that the refusal to interpret, to add subjective ingredients, is in itself a subjective act and as such a priori significant. The individual subject who remains silent speaks not less but more through silence than when speaking aloud” (“TF,” 183). To produce a new writing in images, Adorno demands that acts of reading and interpretation be encouraged by the rearrangement and recontextualization of images in a process that transforms images into signs. The sign of aesthetic organization is style and the formal character of image-writing; what requires interpretation or, perhaps better, continual reinterpretation, is the ciphered social life of things. Reinterpreting the ciphered social life of objects through the discontinuous assem-

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bly of image and sounds into novel constellations and concepts might also be the best way of characterizing Farocki’s critical life in images. However, it must be said that Farocki’s image-work expands Adorno’s criteria for autonomy in interesting ways. Here Farocki’s strategies of dissociative and recombinatory montage achieve a form of writing unimagined by Adorno. Each work achieves something like an autonomy of form or style, but no work is itself completely formally autonomous. At any moment one completed construction can be disassembled and its parts reconfigured into a new construction. The concluding lesson of Inextinguishable Fire thus foreshadows a key principle of Farocki’s later work—a vacuum cleaner can become a submachine gun. : : : Alexander Kluge was always Miriam Hansen’s ideal for the critical and utopian aspirations of cinema. Yet I am also arguing here that a deep engagement with the variety of Farocki’s work retroactively gives force and clarity to the style of emancipated cinema that Adorno was trying to imagine, and perhaps better so than Adorno’s work itself. Indeed Hansen’s inventory of Kluge’s aesthetic strategies can be just as productively applied, and in diverse and original ways, to Farocki’s media work: the citational use of preexisting images (call this the recycling and reorganization of clichés); complex construction through intellectualaffective montage clusters; the use of professional and nonprofessional performers, as well as improvisational modes of performance; and the foregrounding of questions of temporality and history as expressed in the differential speeds and rhythms of montage constellations. My claim here is that Farocki’s work was an ongoing and open-ended experimentation of what a critical writing in images could look like under different media conditions, both historically and formally, especially in relation to what I have been calling his strategies of dissociative and recombinatory montage. And in the last decades of his career this experimentation was carried forward in deeply original ways. In Inextinguishable Fire, Farocki wants to bring the technological reproduction of mass destruction home—to America, to Germany, to the singular body of an arm burned with a cigarette. In Images of the World, the ignored, overlooked, or misread documentation of the technology of genocide in World War II is brought into the present and made newly visible through its reinscription and analysis in film. In Serious Games history catches up to the present—the interval that separates the planners of destruction from its execution has become only spatial,

FIGURE 10

Images from Serious Games I–IV.

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not temporal. But that spatial interval is marked more by the computer interface than any geographical distance, and the digital interface is yet another image that cloaks, blinds, and wards off more than it reveals or makes intelligible on the ground. Serious Games is a video installation that consists of four parts; except for Games II: Three Dead, each projection includes two contiguous images. The material for this work was gathered from army training facilities at Twentynine Palms, California, and at a facility whose aim is to help returning soldiers recover from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by reliving their originating trauma in virtual reality simulations. The key question here is how to understand simulation as a newly central variant in Farocki’s philosophy of the Image, and as an expansion of his audiovisual writing through recombinatory montage. This later work also suggests new and imaginative ways for understanding Adorno’s demand for making the objective pass through the subjective in filmic writing, which may also now be remapped as a complicated system of exchange between the actual and the virtual. That the four parts of Serious Games may be installed separately or in a variety of different configurations suggests new strategies of spatial montage that divide perception across multiple screens combinable in various ways. Here Farocki interrogates how the apprehension of images via multiple screens or windows has become our current perceptual default. Nevertheless, there is a logic to following out the parts in their numerical sequence. Games I: Watson Is Down documents soldiers in a virtual training exercise guiding a simulated armored vehicle with keyboard and mouse through a topologically accurate re-creation of rural Afghanistan in a 3-D game space. The instructor introduces controlled contingency into this space in the form of traps and threats selected from a variety of menu options—IEDs, unexploded ordnance, enemy agents with explosive vests, and so on. Games II: Three Dead moves the action to the Marine Corps Training Grounds in Twentynine Palms, and into a full-scale physical simulacrum of an Afghani village or a small town in Iraq, including three hundred “extras”; here soldiers in full combat gear interact with “real” people. With their clean surfaces and geometrical lines, architecturally the town’s structures look less like movie sets than physical re-creations of the digital models. (Actually, they are created from repurposed shipping containers.) Because the soldiers are more familiar with digital terrain than with actual settings, perhaps the transition into the real must be softened by means of this curiously hybrid cityscape. However, the real never becomes actual in Serious Games— the digital tank gunner, Watson, can always be resurrected; the three

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dead in Games II are not shown on screen, and, in any case, this is only another form of simulated mortality. The uncontrollable and violent space of post-9/11 Afghanistan is held at a distance, outside the field of vision or experience, yet returns forcefully in Games III: Immersion (2009) in another kind of (nonvisible) image—traumatic memory. Considered together in whatever sequence, the four parts of Serious Games reveal fascinating similarities and differences in the treatment of space, image, and point of view, and in how the virtual and the real are brought into juxtaposition. For example, Three Dead begins and ends with sensational (though clichéd) video game sequences—first, helicopters descending on a small town in the desert, and then ending with a dramatic (virtual) camera movement through a street in the simulated town. In fact, each of the chapters of Serious Games begins and ends with simulated images. Games IV: A Sun with No Shadow (2010) functions as a summary of the whole, though given again as a fragmented image that condenses and focuses points of contrast and comparison across the three other parts. The game-space point of view in Watson Is Down is that of a detached observer, who controls movements of the armored vehicle in digital space, yet hovers visually above it as if attached to a fixed yet invisible guideline. This is less a singular or subjective point of view than an individual’s point of insertion into a larger and more complex machinic arrangement in which the solder is only one of many intersecting and replaceable parts. Three Dead places the body into a physical place of war gaming. The camera’s viewpoint is detached and observational, which brings forward the strange simulacral qualities of staged action and constructed spaces. The focus of Immersion is not on the simulated world but on the virtual space of traumatic memory. Immersion’s participants wear head-mounted displays, whose ostensible function is to turn their perception inward in order to bring forward suppressed and damaging memories. In each case the historical Real, present or past, is not visible in the image. Yet in Immersion it is visualizable in the return of memory in disturbed actions on the body. Paradoxically, in the final sequence of the video the event of the soldier’s trauma is never presented in the digital world he experiences. We can only access that event through the voice in his recounting of it, and in the confused and unsettled movements of the simulacral space as he throws around his agitated digital gaze. Whether he is looking for or warding off the traumatic event is not clear. And the absence of the event is redoubled ironically, for in fact we are watching an actor simulate reactions to a simulation. From photography to digital simulation, Farocki shows how the ac-

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tion space of the image has undergone a radical change in terms of knowledge and belief, of knowing and what we believe we know. The automated bombardment photographs of World War II aim to preserve a record of past destruction in a flood of singular images—snapshots of sequential time, like film—in which all the information that the image can ever reveal is fully present in it. The future of the image is that of the discovery of new kinds of intelligibility, which lay dormant until new wills to knowledge and new frames of reference bring its data forward. The transition from the photographic record to real-time 3-D digital modeling transforms and amplifies the stakes of the historical game. Serious Games’s soldiers are training to interact with real spaces through their simulations. The multiple points of view in Watson Is Down reveal the computer-generated interface as an environment of interactive control where instructor and soldiers may be adversaries but the rules are fixed and determinable, as if to make the future predictable and manageable. However, whether these men and women are present as soldiers on the ground or absent as controllers of drones or other remote controlled devices, unpredictable injury and death are constant risks. This is why the simulacrum creates an interactive space—war games on the screen or in actuality—where the imminent threat of death or injury is present everywhere in the re-created space, as if lying dormant in every pixel or in every simulation, actual or virtual. Yet, the simulacrum is also the expression of the impossible wish for total control. Programmers want to make every contingency predictable and manageable—another way of holding injury and death at a distance in or through an image. The Real, however, cannot be contained in an image. A liberated consciousness would understand that it may only be apprehended as a play of contingent and unpredictable forces. In the passage from Games I to Games III, the past has already disturbed the experience of time. It cannot return to the image, except as virtual action linked to the inscription of trauma on the body. While traumatic past time inhabits the body, virtually, at every moment, it cannot be returned to the present as a perceptible image, even a virtual one. A Sun with No Shadow recombines elements of Serious Games’s previous chapters to foreground the fact that the new images created in preparation for war are similar to those used for evaluating and treating the effects of war. But these latter images are paradoxical. Unlike the training games, which insist on real-time topographical accuracy, no shadows are cast in the digitally re-created locations of traumatic events summoned in the virtual reality goggles of potential PTSD patients. Obviously, less money is spent on treating soldiers than on training them.

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But as I remarked above, the originating traumatic events never manage to find their place in these simulacra—they are radically other to the system of command and control. They have no place there, for there is nothing that can be presented as an image—memory and the experience of the Real are not commensurate with control simulacra except indirectly as the action of memory translated onto the surface of the body. If they are lucky, the soldiers will learn how to manage the Real once they are unencumbered by these digital machines, but they will not, for all that, become capable of experiencing a liberated consciousness. We are perhaps luckier. Harun Farocki has constructed other image machines for us, which exemplify Adorno’s demand for a modernism forged in “the Rimbaudian postulate of an art of the most advanced consciousness, an art in which the most advanced and differentiated technical procedures are saturated with the most advanced and differentiated experiences. But these forces, being social, are critical” (AT, 33). This phrase is an apposite description of Farocki’s conception of a critique of images through images. And if we are willing to look—not just at an image but in and through the network of forces that produce, disconnect, and recombine images as they are encountered today, and which in turn want to program current possibilities for vision and memory—we might have a chance at experiencing a liberated consciousness through Farocki’s vision machines.

5

The Force of Small Gestures When visible sensation confronts the invisible force that conditions it, sensation releases force as something that might destroy it, or become its ally or Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sensation friend. With the cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image which becomes world.

I begin with two quotes from Gilles Deleuze, including one from his book on Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation. Nothing is further from painting than cameraworks. Yet one way of justifying images as painterly is to understand the spectrum of possibilities for altering space with the hand, especially if the results are textural and haptic. Call this turning figures into figurability, where producing effects of blotching, blurring, smearing, smudging, and torquing makes zones of indiscernibility emerge through and across lines, movements, volumes, and colors, which gain therein new intensive variations. These variations are not wholly random; rather, they are contingent actions shaped by a compositional Idea or, in Deleuze’s parlance, a diagram. I will come back to this. My main inspiration here is that there is a powerful link between certain strategies of contemporary nonfigurative painting and related processes in experimental film and video. In neither case am I referring to pure

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abstraction. Rather, I am interested in the spectrum of questions and problems raised by Deleuze’s account of sensation. Speaking from a personal perspective, the logic of sensation defines the singular point where my philosophical commitments to a vitalist materialism influenced by Bergson and Deleuze intersect most intimately with my own creative moving image practice, and with the work of contemporary artists to whom I feel most closely allied. Many years of acculturation have led us to believe that the Model image in film or video is meant to be in clear focus from foreground to background with the frame line fixed along a stable horizontal line and at the average height of the human eye, that sound is inseparable from image, and that recorded motion and sound are continuous as if corresponding to an equally idealized arrow of homogenous and linear time. The aim of these conventions is not to reproduce the world as humanly seen but rather as we believe it to be experienced. In other words, the lure of the Model image is to convince us that through the image we see the world as it is in itself. For Kant, this attitude, whatever its origins, expresses one of the greatest illusions that limit or cloud human reason. Thus the aim of the first Critique is to show how human perception and experience are shaped by our inner faculties. As knowledge of the thing-in-itself is foreclosed to us as finite creatures, philosophy can only perfect human knowledge of the world by fully accounting for the powers and limits of our inner mechanisms for constructing experience. Similar perspectives are also the source of many fascinating and no doubt erroneous pictures of the human mind in relation to cinematographic expression. Hugo Münsterberg’s Psychology of the Photoplay (1916) is perhaps the best example of early writing on film that projects a picture of inner faculties of attention, memory, imagination, and emotion into film’s formal means of expression, as if the mind could contemplate its own internal structure through its projection on the screen. Films are products of human thought and invention, so why wouldn’t we create a machine for picturing the world as the projected image of our own internal resources for registering the world and making it meaningful? Neo-Kantian par excellence, Münsterberg believed that as we watch screened images we also watch ourselves actively shaping our perceptual experience of the world. Within this machine there are powers of reflexive perception equal to our own acts of consciousness. One might imagine other ways of bringing Kant into contact with problems of perception, knowledge, and the film camera. Perhaps, as Dziga Vertov or Jean Epstein believed, the film camera is a perfected me-

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chanical brain and a prosthetic device that amplifies our faculties rather than simply reproducing them? In this case, critical consciousness arises from displaying in as complete a form as possible the a priori “faculties” or components shaping the camera’s own translation of the world into varieties of perceptual experience. In a film like Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Vertov’s reflexivity differs from Münsterberg’s as the creation and projection of a global inventory of all the mechanisms that can be brought into play for recording and reconstructing an image of the world, all the while testing their powers and limits. In this context, Edward Branigan’s question, what is a camera?, predominates over André Bazin’s question, what is cinema? It is as if the kino-eye is also fully exploring and making an inventory of the structure of the kino-mind: lenses and perspective; variable control of frame rates, focus, and shutter speed; the frame line positioned and repositioned from all possible axes and distances; and even the inner mechanisms of the camera itself with its interlocking mechanism of gears, shutter, and Geneva drive. I believe a third perspective is possible and desirable. (Indeed, more might be imagined.) I have depicted Münsterberg and Vertov as modified Kantians who imagine that machines for reproducing and interpreting the world, and which thereby shape human perceptual experience, are themselves simulacra of our inner powers and their limits. Like Kant, these thinkers are testing the limitations of human sensory experience in hope of progressively improving human capacities for knowing the world. However, whether conceived as a projection of inner capacities or as a more perfect extension of human perceptual and interpretive powers, once invented the camera seems to become a static object, fixed in its basic aims and elements. Media archaeology has shown convincingly that this is not so. Whatever elements, technological or not, that make up moving image media at any given time are highly dynamic, both adding and subtracting resources of technology, technique, and form in novel and unpredictable ways; in other words, artistic media are invariably open and incomplete. Considering the apparatus of camera and projection as dynamic and malleable makes of it less a simulacrum of our brains than a machinic virus or bacterium evolving in a symbiotic relationship with human desire and imagination. Nevertheless, as has often been noted, the historical norms governing the evolution of cameras and their uses have been constrained by a regulative idea of the Model image as limited by the horizon of ordinary human perceptual experience. My point here is that dominant cultural contexts for imagining what

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cameras are limit our sense of what cameras do. (And one might say the same for the compositional traditions and automatisms of any art.) Moreover, if one wants to take the chance of thinking of cameras as something like philosophy machines, what other domains of perceptual experience remain to be uncovered or discovered? Small format consumer devices exemplify the hold of the Model image in developed societies. I am thinking in particular of a possible genealogy that passes into and through Super 8 and Polaroid cameras to HandyCams and other forms of consumer video, Flip cameras and GoPro cameras, and finally to smartphones and tablets. In spite of the intense technological inventiveness that goes into manufacturing these devices, and all of the innovations arising from new processes of digital capture, the fundamental automatisms underlying the structure of this normative image have remained remarkably stable. Even the GoPro camera, which is attached to bodies undergoing extreme velocities and movements and is meant to vary the axis of vision as radically as possible, is limited to a small set of variables—fixed focal length and effective shutter speeds set for maximum clarity, depth of field, and image stability; naturalistic color rendering and normative white balance; continuity of movements in a single duration; synchronization of sound to image—all of which are meant to record the dynamic vision of human bodies traveling through space. In other words, while GoPros are designed to record extreme human vision, the human body remains the anchor and limit of all they are expected to do, and, more important, the image is limited to natural perception though pushed to extreme limits. Understood in this way, the camera is a device constrained by a limited number of automatisms, which in turn shape the image in terms of baseline ideals of clarity, stability, and continuity, indeed as an image of perceptual experience as continuous and anchored in the human body. An idealized version of the human eye is the measure of all things. The baked-in automatisms of consumer formats are meant to make of the world an image. But this is a normative image, a limitation of perception that is illustrative and narrative. Or, as Deleuze might say, this is a figurative image from which one must release a Figure, that is, a perceptual image from which one must release sensation. This has been one of the principal aims of my own creative practice. Take for example a short work from my “walking series,” Waterloo, shot in London in 2012. Just under four minutes long, the work captures in real time a thoroughly mundane location and situation—two circular trajectories through an underground passageway connecting

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the London Imax theater to Waterloo station.1 The time of the work is the time of the walk. Using an iPhone on a hand-manipulated monopod, I follow a figurative line drawn by the electrical conduit running along the top of the tunnel walls. Of course, this is not what one sees in the image. Waterloo is recorded in a single take though using a capture rate of one frame per second. As I move through the space, focus, exposure, and effective shutter speed are allowed to float. The initial images begin as almost abstract color fields that are blurred, textured, and fluid, passing in pastels of yellow-green, watery lime, light and dark blue, and fuchsia with blue blotches, before resolving into a new series of volumes that emerge as if roughly extracted from the electrical conduit: jagged tubular shapes expand, contract, and torque while dissolving and reshaping themselves unpredictably against the varying and textured color fields. These tonalities emerge in response to the shifts in color temperature and luminance produced by the tunnel’s sources of artificial illumination. The sound is captured in real time along with these images—distant traffic, rumblings, footsteps, drunken laughter, and snippets of animated conversation. The off-screen presence of realtime synchronized audio is an important temporal marker, for the staccato succession of (only) apparently still images are shaped by a duration every bit as real as the sound. No device is more familiar than the smartphone, which captures daily millions of normatively documentary images, both still and in movement, whether intimate or collective, or domestic and catastrophic, through the physical and computational automatisms of natural perception baked into the designs of lenses and recording programs. But what I seek experimentally is to push these automatisms past their limits, though not with the goal of achieving pure abstraction. Rather, despite the painterly and conceptual character of my process, these works are meant to be understood as documents responding to specific environments, actions, situations, movements, trajectories, and durations. In fact, I believe there is no power or interest in abstraction in film and video that is not based on their capacity as recording—or if you will, documentary—media. Everything presented in Waterloo is data drawn from the actual environment—volumes, movements, surfaces, light intensities, color temperatures. This is the prosaic world in which we situate ourselves but it is not the world of so-called natural perception. Rather, it is the domain of sensation that lies beneath, over, or inside 1. Waterloo and other of my video works may be viewed online at https://vimeo .com/dnrodowick/.

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quotidian vision as if in another dimension of intensive qualitative experience masked by habitual perception. Even if all of these normative automatisms have evolved technologically to produce a particular kind of image and world belief, and even if these mechanisms shape the a priori limits of the perceptual phenomena recorded and projected by cinematographic means, many different varieties of sensory experience might still be imagined. Consider situations, then, where no shutter and claw control the passage of the film strip through a camera, or where images are recorded at intermittent intervals, or that no lens is used, or that space is rendered through anamorphic effects rather than linear perspective, or where the frame line is released by random movements of hand or body. Experimental filmmakers have spoken of these strategies for many decades, and in this respect texts like Stan Brakhage’s Metaphors on Vision and Hollis Frampton’s Circles of Confusion remain powerful manifestos. Moreover, even Brakhage was keenly aware that these devices are aimed less at abstraction than at shifting our terms of belief for how the world is experienced. Perhaps all experimental films are documentaries in this sense. Works like Michael Snow’s La région centrale (1971), Ernie Gehr’s Glider (2001), Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s Leviathan (2012), or Leighton Pierce’s White Ash (2015), and even the prelude to Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1961) ask that we readjust our terms for engaging with the world as visual experience. However, they are no less for that engagements with the world. When did we come to believe that phenomenologies of the blotch, the blur, the smear, and of wild rotations of space or disjoined intervals of time and stuttering lines of sound were less valid than those of clarity, stability, and continuity? Or why do we not value instead what I would like to call asubjective or even inhuman perception? What kinds of worlds and experiences are these? : : : The time has come to speak more fully of the matter of sensation. The universe, in fact, is full of inhuman images. This is the great lesson of Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory. Bergson’s philosophy is meant to be a reversal or overcoming of Kantianism. Kant’s position aims at drawing the perimeter of our interiority in terms of how it frames and filters the outer world. In mapping a path alternative to both realism and idealism, Bergson’s picture of vitalist intuition and la durée depicts a world where relations between exteriority and interiority are fluid

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and part of a single material continuum, though an endlessly varying one. Human perception, however, is only one very small segment of this continuum—a microcosmic point within a regime of universal variation of constant self-differing movement without centers or horizons, or a small window onto a cosmos of fluid matter and radiating energy mutually interacting at all scales and on all points of contact in a creatively evolving open Whole. Bergson calls this the “present Image,” or a world of universal variation where matter is the whole aggregate of images. Deleuze calls this the plane of immanence and describes it as the “exposition of a world where IMAGE = MOVEMENT.”2 Later works, such as What Is Philosophy?, characterize this domain as chaotic or rather as a chaosmos. Chaos is not disorder but rather a regime of ceaselessly varying in-formal relations. Chaos is only the enemy of Form when time and change are subtracted from it. Alternatively, one of the aims of artistic construction is to give consistency to chaos, thereby drawing sensation from it. In Bergson’s (and Deleuze’s) view, matter is luminous in the sense that it is a fundamental appearing. All that can be perceived or described in it is always there. This is no simple empiricism, however. From the point of view of human consciousness, this replete state of the Image is virtual to the extent that the body and its needs place limits on what actually can be apprehended in matter. As I already explained in Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, Bergson argues that matter and image are continuous with, yet distinct from, human perception. While Bergson accepts that perception is subjective—a human picturing of matter, movement, and time—this distinction is one of degree, not kind. Human sight is materially restricted to radiation propagated at wavelengths from 390 to 700 nm; hearing is limited to frequencies of 16 to 20,000 Hz. In both cases the body is only an information exchange acting and reacting to the propagation of energy, matter, and movement that passes through or across it. An image is nothing more than this propagation where the body serves both as screen, filter, and relay. One may speak, then, as if there were two “systems” of images: one that is bodily and filtered by physiological limits and human needs, and one that is universal and immanent in matter (the Image as plane of immanence). Here there is neither transcendence nor externality, and no substantial division between mind and body, but only a qualitative and self-organizing process of self-differentiation in a ceaseless state of becoming. The plane of im2. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 58.

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manence is thus the expression of a radical empiricism whose other name is chaos. And here one might give a first definition of sensation as the apprehension of forces acting on and through the body and nervous system. Coextensive with the domain of perception that organizes the perceptible world into a geometry of rational and instrumental forms is the pre-rational domain of sensation—of felt intensities, energies, movements, forces, and becomings, whose temporalities and rhythms both coincide with and overflow bodily limits. What would it mean to speak of an art of sensation as distinct from one of perception or of reflexive perceptual experience? The human body, eye, and nervous system would need to adapt themselves to new procedures of relay, transformation, translation, and retransmission that respond to the intuition that all matter is fluid and luminous, and that the human body is only another set of systems multiply connected, internally and externally, to this field of forces. An art of sensation also embraces contingency and becoming in a process that makes of the hand and body of the artist, and the techne¯ of brush or camera, an energetic relay that translates matter and light into an Image or Figure, rather  than duplicating natural perception or projecting interior experience. Among many possible examples, I am thinking here of Ernie Gehr’s formidable Glider (2001, DV, 37m). Without detracting from the formal beauty and inventiveness of this work, in my view one of its many powerful consequences is to open viewers to the universe of experience depicted by Bergson’s Matter and Memory. In documentation for the New York Film Festival in 2001, Gehr described his work as “a voyage into [a] pictorial space-world that seems to be governed by extra-terrestrial optical and gravitational laws.”3 Glider is organized into approximately eleven segments of roughly equal length; each segment is continuous and forms a unique duration without cuts. Glider begins with a movement that resembles a camera trajectory above flowing waves, but already there are cues that these images depart from ordinary perceptual experience. The apparent camera movement is uncannily smooth and steady as if unhindered by human motor imperfections. Moreover, as 3. See Yoel Meranda, “Structural Films: Meditation through Simple Forms” at http://www.waysofseeing.org/struct.html. I want to express my gratitude here for Ernie Gehr’s friendship and especially for the loan of his work. Seeing Glider for the first time at the Harvard Film Archive in 2008 was one of my principal inspirations for returning to creative work. I would also like to note here that I have decided not to illustrate these arguments with frame grabs as all illustration would be pointless without the quality of movement. A Blu-ray version is planned for release in the near future.

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further segments appear, one feels less that the apparatus is moving than that the captured images are themselves revolving or rotating under it. And in fact this uncanny smoothness and regularity of motion is in constant tension with the twisting, torquing, and fluidity of matter. Depth relations are uncommonly flat, and the initial images of water appear as if projected onto the inner surface of a torus. The fluidity of waves is textured in a way that makes them seem more like liquefied matter. While this is an uncommonly strange world, it is not an unfamiliar one. One recognizes sea, land, and sky, then buildings, and people or vehicles in movement, birds in flight. However, all of these elements are flattened onto a single plane, which appears to be neither precisely onedimensional nor two-dimensional but rather fluctuates between these dimensions, not unlike the moving images transmitted by the optics of camera obscuras. Neither abstraction nor figuration dominates; rather, it is as if perceptual experience has been opened onto an inhuman dimension where force, matter, energy, and light interact dynamically and with perfect indifference to human needs and interests. As one segment replaces another, variations in direction of rotation are introduced. And as I have already suggested, this rotation of surfaces takes place as if within the inner or outer surface of a tube or torus, rather than on a globe or a ground. Sometimes, one can only ascertain with difficulty whether these rotations are on a horizontal or vertical axis; indeed, they seem to occur as if from any direction imagined from within the interior of a sphere. Surfaces twist, blur, and spiral, and matter flows down, up, and across, or collapses toward a center— gravity and horizon cannot hold or direct the flow of matter and light. In this situation, Glider’s lateral, spiraling, and rotational movements present space as if being continually bent or folded by the direction of otherwise unseen forces. The flow of matter is translated into light, and vice versa, in a perceptual space without stable horizons; or, rather, the horizon continually turns on an axis, which itself rotates independently of a ground. One profound effect of these dynamic forms is to present water, land, and air as flowing indiscernibly one into the other, or as being leveled onto a single plane or dimension wherein each expresses variable intensities of matter, energy, light, tonality, and force. It is less important to speak of the technical mechanisms that achieve these effects than to account for their sensory impact. Gehr accomplishes in Glider, I believe, something analogous to what Deleuze describes in The Logic of Sensation as the achievements of Cézanne or of Francis Bacon. The logic of sensation is not a replacement for natural perception; one is not separable from the other in human terms. The pre-rational

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sensory experience of intensive forms, movements, and colors is neither better nor more “real” than perceptual experience; rather, it is only the expressive acknowledgment of a sensory domain otherwise obscured by habit, doxa, and cliché, where one might achieve the intuition of a more intensive world of becoming and ceaseless self-differentiation. As I will discuss in the conclusion to this chapter, this is where the moving image might serve in achieving something similar to what Bergson calls “philosophical intuition.” This is where art becomes a friend to philosophy. The logic of sensation is part and parcel of our world as lived. One might say that sensation is immanent to our perceptual experience as force is immanent to matter. Through sensation, a world is created and I encounter another world as if another dimension hovering beneath or behind ordinary perceptual experience. Sensation might seem to emerge from chaotic or obscured images, whorls of colors and flowing forms as in Glider and La région centrale, or in paintings like Bacon’s Jet of Water (1988). Indeed, this is often the case, but such images are not purely formal and abstract. In Deleuze’s view, all the plastic arts, no matter how abstract, must deal with the figurative world, and all are anchored in the world as lived. For example, in an argument that also reappears in the cinema books, Deleuze asserts that there is no such thing as a blank canvas waiting to receive creative marks. Modern painting is already populated with clichés that proliferate across the virgin surface even before the painter begins to work. The painter must find a way into and through a canvas already infested virtually with clichés—standard, normative, and banal images, but also modes and habits of seeing where the world has come to look like “bad cinema,” and to be experienced as such. Bacon’s own attraction to photography and cinema (the films of Sergei Eisenstein are a noted influence) acknowledges that this imageworld is our world as lived, both within and without. Whatever figures are produced on the canvas must not recoil from or ignore this image-world but pass directly through it. In addition, Bacon relates that photography is not simply a figuration of what one sees, it is what and how modern man sees—only photographs, that is, clichés or snapshots produced under the regulative ideals of “natural perception” and the reproducibility of forms. Modern vision has become photographic vision, and our modalities of seeing must be transformed no less than the image itself. In the logic of sensation, this is a question of passing from the figurative to the Figure. Brush or camera: both acts of creation must turn reproduction into expression. In this respect, the moving image faces the same problem as painting: how to extract a figural Image by

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moving beyond figurative reproduction and narration, and how to produce resemblance through non-imitative or reproductive means. (The connection to Benjamin’s arguments concerning nonsensuous similarity and the mimetic faculty should be evident here.) In Deleuze’s account, resemblance in the Figure appears analogically through the action of force in and on the Image, and in their temporal becoming these actions are guided by a “diagram.” Perhaps the problem for both painting and cinema is how to see time and force differently, and to release the figural force of sensation in the image. Here Deleuze reprises Paul Klee’s maxim on the problem of creation: “.  .  .  non pas rendre le visible, mais rendre visible.”4 Any translation would be inexact, but the sense of the statement is this: rather than paint the visible world, make visible another world. This other world is the domain of sensation, and perhaps sensation is another name for the movement-image as plane of immanence? Here Logic of Sensation anticipates the cinema books in asking what constitutes movement in relation to an Image? Or how does movement subsist in an Image as force? One should not imagine the cinematographic movement-image here, or what Deleuze calls the indirect image of time translated as succession in space. Movement considered as force is rather an expression of a direct or pure time-image where becoming disfigures space and opens us to the perception of change. In broaching these questions, art makes common cause with philosophy. Rather than reproducing forms, the aim of art is to capture forces, and not only as energy, light, or movement but also through the force of time as change and as the agent of anticipatory forces that are becoming but not yet arrived. I have said that sensation is immanent to perceptual experience as force is immanent to matter. In passing from the figurative to the Figure, what one “sees ‘moving’ ” in the image is not form but force; or better, what one sees is the moving action of forces that make form yield to a Figure. Force is not perceptible in itself but movements are, and movement relates to force as those dimensions and effects of force that are capable of being captured by and rendered as and in images. Movement is immanent to the image both as a unique force that encompasses the duration of the whole, and as the multiplicity of compositional elements 4. Cited in Francis Bacon: Logique de la Sensation (Paris: Éditions de la Différance, 1984; repr., Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), 39. See also Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 48. I will usually refer to Smith’s excellent translation; hereafter cited in text as LS. Whenever I alter the translation, the page reference from the 2002 French edition will appear in italics.

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that are decomposable and re-composable as formed series within the image under action of this force. In other words, there is both a duration of the image imagined as an open whole, and series of time rendered through the heterogeneous and uneven intensive rhythms of the picture’s constitutive elements—marks, lines, volumes, intervals, light intensities, objects and colors, and so forth. There is a time of the Figure, and time of the intensive series that flow through and across it. Intensive series define domains or orders of sensation. What Deleuze calls the Figure in Bacon’s paintings might be thought of as the dominant central image—the torqued or twisted body on a chair or at a wash basin; a jet of water spurting from right to left in the frame; the blurred, spiraled, and spiky mass of Landscape (1978)—but this would be inexact. The Figure must not be separated from other dimensions and aspects of the image, though it might be thought of as the focal point where form yields to force and conveys the intensity of force to the body and nervous system. Deleuze writes of three fundamental elements in Bacon’s paintings as domains or orders of sensation: the material structure, the Figure, and the contour. I do not want to strike equivalencies between Bacon and Gehr here, but interesting analogies are possible. The material structure is the supporting armature of an expressive image. Deleuze suggests that the structure serves as a virtual mirror to the extent that instrumental deformations in the image find themselves immediately transferred into the Figure. In Glider the projection of forms onto the rotational torus serves in this way as the underlying dynamic architecture of the work. The contour is comprised of curving lines and marks that frame the Figure and/or flow around it and connect it to other pictorial elements as a kind of permeable outline or border. Again, in Glider the contours are shaped by the underlying structure as water, sky, and land are bent, curved, and made to flow in the image as if projected from varying directions onto the interior of a virtual sphere. And here the Figure of Glider is perhaps more complex and more intense than what might usually be achieved in painting. The Figure here is the accumulated series of forms—people, cars, buildings, beach, sky, ocean—that are being continually compressed, deformed, twisted, blurred, and shaped by the dynamic action of the underlying structure of movement and transformation. There are series of time expressed by the individuated intensive transformations taking place within each of the separate segments along the lines of the contour, and there is the time of the whole of the work whose accumulated duration coalesces moment by moment into the Figure called Glider. In one of its dimensions, sensation appears as effects of decompo-

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sition and recomposition in forms, objects, and bodies—an often unpredictable action on the surface of things. In Deleuze’s account, this translation of force into movement through or in an image takes place through actions of deformation. Deformation is not abstraction. Rather, deformation expresses actions on a body that subordinate movement to force and abstraction to the Figure. Deformation requires a discernible “figure” as the target or background of figural action. Here again, Deleuze is insisting on something like a non-reproductive mimesis. The blurring, smudging, twisting, and partial erasure of a figure, then, “does not give birth to an abstract form, nor does it combine sensible forms dynamically; on the contrary, it turns this zone [the Figure] into a zone of indiscernibility that is common to several forms, irreducible to any of them; and the lines of force it creates escape every form through their very clarity, through their deforming precision” (LS, 50). The otherwise insensible clarity of force is unveiled in its deforming actions on a figure. Deforming actions emerge where forms and force meet in the expressive materials of art. At this point of intersection, force produces zones of indiscernibility common to several forms without resolving them or reducing them one to the other. Moreover, the lines of force that pass through these materials are irreducible to any form. Bacon’s blurs and smudges are “in-formal” marks, no more or less than Waterloo’s dynamic and fluid color zones and fields and its dispersed and reconfigured lines. These are zones of passage marking intervals in series of decomposed and recomposed elements of figures; each series traces lines of force acting on bodies, forms, and intensities while passing indiscernibly into other compositional zones. What Deleuze calls the Figure, or what I have been referring to in recent chapters as an Image, emerges in these zones of indiscernibility that relate differentiated series of compositional elements without making of any one of them its tangible and unique sign. There is nothing to be seen in the Image but differentiation and relationality produced through, as Deleuze writes, “a deformed and deforming movement that at every moment transfers the real image onto the body in order to constitute the Figure” (mouvement difformément difforme, qui reporte à chaque instant l’image réelle sur le corps pour constituer la Figure [LS, 18, 26]). Here sensation flows not from a unique form or figure but rather from the multiplicity of compositional elements and traces of actions—lines, curves, colors, random or accidental marks, blurs and erasures—that populate the picture plane as lines of becoming. Force relates to movement and not form—it does not contain or express sensation as much as trace its capacities of variability, fluidity, and pliability, its vis elastica as

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Deleuze puts it. Nor does movement explain levels of sensation and the passage between them; rather levels of sensation explain what subsists in movement. It is curious that Deleuze writes of deformed and deforming movements, on the one hand, and resemblance or analogy, on the other. Indeed, analogy seems to have a special relation to sensation as another name for non-reproductive mimesis. (Perhaps it would be better to think of analogy as a producing mimesis.) The logic of sensation makes the world of force appear in the varied movements of matter, and, no matter how distorted, the Figure that appears is neither abstract beyond recognition nor so recognizable that it serves as a token or a copy of some external referent. The Figure hovers between abstraction and cliché—neither absolute difference nor degraded repetition. Deleuze’s characterization of non-imitative mimesis as a new kind of semblance seems counterintuitive on the face of it; in actuality, it is a novel theory of representation. Resemblance in Deleuze’s view is produced by creation through analogy—the translation of one world of sensory experience by and into another aesthetic world. (Imagine something like the atmospheric space organized by live acoustical instruments, whose waveforms are transcribed analogically into electrical impulses by a microphone and then written, again analogically, onto the space of a receptive surface.) Whether we are considering painting or cinema, the technical process or apparatus of creation no longer functions as a subtractive filter reproducing or replicating semblances through formal procedures of composition; in other words, the image is not produced by sets of coded transformations. Rather, creation through analogy aims to produce an open and variable modulation of sensory elements within a given duration. Modulation must act as a continuously variable mold whose operations are guided neither by the norms of realism nor by the conceptual or spiritual aims of pure abstraction. Required here is a new model of mimetic actions. Deleuze thus distinguishes between two kinds of resemblance. Resemblance is productive when relations between elements of a thing pass directly between elements of a second thing, which thus becomes the reproduced image of the first. (The conventional example is the capture of light by camera and film stock as a function of “straight” photography.) This form of analogy is figurative and favors the copy. Resemblance is produced, however, when it emerges suddenly and unpredictably as the disruptive and deforming outcome of non-imitative means, which Deleuze calls “moyens non ressemblants” (LS, 94; 109). There is neither replication nor abstraction but rather something like translation across

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two dimensions, which are neither digital in the computational sense nor analogical in any simple or direct sense. Here resemblance is not produced symbolically, that is, as series of transformations governed by conventional codes; rather, resemblance is produced “sensually” out of a new intuition of the actions of force in and on matter. Analogy is not only a relation between spaces or identities making one thing like another; it is also the expression of change and modulation in time through decomposed and recomposed series. Aesthetic analogy is at once non-figurative and non-codified—there is neither primary resemblance nor pre-given code. Or as Deleuze might put it, the logic of sensation is not that of a rule or a code but rather the sense of a diagram. The diagram is less a code, formula, or structure than contingency shaped by time or duration. A Figure or Image so produced is open and variable, but it is not chaotic and disorganized. Rather, one might say that it has sense and consistency or, perhaps, that it is in-formed by an Idea. The shape of this Idea, its forms or styles of becoming, is given in the diagram. The diagram is virtual and ideational. Think of it as a kind of conceptual modulator—the unseen but everpresent Idea informing the compositional process as a kind of open architecture. Unlike a code it cannot be given in advance (although it might be apprehended and understood retroactively); rather, it arises in and shapes a singular and immanent process of becoming. And if creation through analogy is capable of producing Figures that are at once non-figurative and non-codified, this is because the direction and contours of the diagram are shaped moment to moment by reactions to chance operations. Throughout Logic of Sensation, Deleuze suggests that the formative powers of the diagram are less a matter of the head than the hand (less optic than haptic), and less a matter of enacting intention than improvising with contingency. In Bacon’s process this often means disordering forms by quickly wiping or partially effacing them, splattering paint on the canvas, or reacting to and building new lines and forms from random traces and marks. These often involuntary and always improvisational manual operations use chance procedures to break open the geometry and tonality of figures, thus freeing lines and colors for modulation in previously unforeseen ways. As Deleuze describes the process, one has to start rapidly making free marks in the interior of the image in order to destroy a nascent figuration and to give a chance to the Figure, which Deleuze calls “the improbable itself” (LS, 76). These marks are nonrepresentational because they depend on contingent or accidental actions that add nothing to the figure—they concern improvised ges-

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tures of the hand, not the formative powers of the eye; intuition not concept. Their only value is having been used and reused by the hand, which begins to extract an Image from the nascent cliché with its illustrative and narrational qualities. To comprehend how the figural powers of the diagram relate to accident and improvisation requires an important distinction between probability and chance. Probabilities refer to actions, events, or phenomena that are virtual and contingent, yet whose occurrence can be rationally predicted (just as scientific laws are predictive of future behaviors under given conditions). Chance designates a nonscientific and not-yet-aesthetic type of choice or action without probability, where improvised manual marks or gestures are both guided by and respond to accident. Chance is performative. It is inseparable from the possibility of its use—chance manipulated in contrast to conceived, observed, or imagined probabilities—and in each creative action, choice through chance is non-pictorial or a-pictorial. It becomes pictorial and is integrated into the expressive act to the extent that it consists of manual actions that moment-by-moment reorient the whole visual composition by extracting the improbable Figure from the (virtual) set of figurative probabilities. Chance only occurs or becomes meaningful through manipulation, making aesthetic choices and putting them into action improvisationally in response to contingent and contextual situations. This is how Deleuze reimagines the creative process. Figurative givens as clichés swarm about the artist, internally and externally. The artist must dive into and pass through them probabilistically. He enters actively into this space precisely because he believes he knows what he wants to do. But what saves the artist is not really knowing how to achieve his idea, not knowing how to accomplish it. The problem of expression, then, is not to initiate the creative act because the artist is already present and acting in the time of creation. Rather, the problem is to exit from probability into chance: to free myself from what I think I have set out to do; to release myself from the image or figure I have in my head. Free manual marks and improvised actions provide this chance. They do not offer certainty, which expresses a maximum of probability, for free manual marks can fail and ruin the image. But there is a chance that they will function to extract a Figure from the visual whole. One cannot completely eliminate this first figuration or pre-given and possibly clichéd idea—the image always retains something of this initial gesture. But through procedures guided by chance, a probable visual grouping (first figuration) is disorganized and deformed by free manual

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gestures which, when reinserted into the whole, are going to produce a second figuration in the improbably emergent Figure. In passing from the first to the second figuration, a deformed and deforming semblance emerges, but only through means that are at once accidental and nonfigurative. This process of becoming defines the aesthetic analogy. The powers of the diagram and the problem of analogy and resemblance connect here to what Deleuze calls, after Bacon, “matters of fact.” I have always found this claim elusive. And to understand it, one has to ask: if it is neither a copy of the external world nor the abstract symbolic projection of an internal and spiritual world, what does resemblance in the image resemble? There is, of course, the fact of the Image itself, its process of becoming, and the retroactive intuition of that process. Structural film and process art offer many familiar examples of this idea. But Deleuze and Bacon want to suggest something deeper than a critical and reflexive attention to the material formation of an image. The role of the diagram here is to make the unforeseen happen by organizing chance and shaping the unfolding of contingent actions. Chance actions are executed, and one considers the emerging picture, which is still as much virtual as actual, as if one were diagramming a yet incomplete process. In turn one sees inside this diagram the implantation of the possibility of all sorts of facts and contingent future actions. The diagram is generative of and generated out of a set of virtual possibilities, newly imagined or intuited. It is unformed potentiality leading (if it does not fail) to new forms. The function of the diagram is thus “to suggest” or to offer, as Wittgenstein might say in the Tractatus, “possibilities of fact.” Free manual marks trace possibilities of fact but do not yet constitute a pictorial fact. They become pictorial facts through their integration into a pictorial whole or Figure. Improvised manual gestures shake up and break apart the normative optical organization of space. The hand achieves a new independence that now serves other forces, making marks or traces that no longer depend on will, intention, or directed sight. Through the action of these marks, the visual whole is no longer guided by optical norms, thus gifting to the eye other powers and aims of perception that are no longer figurative, and which are witness to the intrusion of another world that throbs and pulsates within and beyond the world of ordinary vision. The rational geometry of forms becomes chaotic, and the experience of sensation surges forth as if another dimension now intuited “behind” natural perception, as it were. The diagram is accident, chaos and catastrophe, but also the germ of order and rhythm—it opens new domains of sensation.

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: : : Turning to another example may clarify these arguments. Plato’s Phaedrus (HD video, 68m, 2015–16) is the second iteration of a series of works that I call “philosopher walks,” or more formally, peripatetikos, after the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece. Like my earlier “walking works,” such as Waterloo, the peripatetikos explore formal processes of digital capture as performative gestures in response to specific environments, actions, situations, movements, trajectories, and durations—in this case, specific sites of walking and thinking evoked in the history of philosophy. In these works with hand-manipulated devices, improvisational reactions to discovered environments and performative movements of the hand are guided by a dual vision—first, of the unaided eye responding to light environments and, second, to the screen of the device used as a digital palette. Holding the camera away from body and eye means that gestures are partially “blind.” Call this walking as Idea, then, though a kind of visual walking where the hand is disconnected from the eye. The material for Plato’s Phaedrus was shot in Athens on July 3, 2015, just a few days before the Greek referendum on the European Union’s economic reform package. The scene of Phaedrus is one of the best-known imaginary itineraries in the history of philosophy. Reputed to almost never leave the city, Socrates accompanies Phaedrus on a stroll outside the southern gates near the temple of Zeus and along the river Ilissus, discoursing on love and beauty in relation to perception, thought, and form. Plato’s dramatic setting is precise enough that commentators like Léon Robin have produced maps of possible trajectories that may be overlaid with the topography of modern Athens even though most of the Ilissus has been canalized and covered over with concrete for many years.5 Guided especially by R. E. Wycherley’s “The Scene of Plato’s Phaidros,” Google Maps and Google Earth imaging indicated that the imagined trajectory of Socrates and Phaedrus past the House of Morychos through the southwest gates of ancient Athens along the Ilissus, and toward the spring of Kallirrhóe¯ and the shrine to Pan, could be made easily. However, facts on the ground taught me an important lesson on the

5. See Phèdre, translated with introduction by Léon Robin, Platon oeuvres complètes, vol. 4, pt. 3 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1933). Another important background text in preparing for Plato’s Phaedrus was R. E. Wycherley’s “The Scene of Plato’s ‘Phaidros,’ ” Phoenix 17: 2 (Summer 1963): 88–98.

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difference between ideal Forms and empirical history. The grounds of the Temple of Olympian Zeus are about ten meters above the area where Socrates and Phaedrus could have left the ancient city gates, which now exists as a well-kept archaeological park. The park seemed a good location for a philosophical walk. However, there was no access from the raised southern walls of the Olympieion to the park, and the park itself was fenced and closed to visitors. In addition, the area along the part of the Ilissus that is above ground and accessible is overgrown and littered with trash, including the spring and the still discernible shrine of Pan. This is a shame, since the area would make for a lovely small park and a natural extension of the archaeological park. It was very hot and there were no cicadas as referenced in the dialogue’s myth of Urania and Calliope, though I did hear an accommodating Eurasian magpie. Although initially despairing, I decided to make the rails of the enclosed park and the raucous sounds of central Athens part of my work as a sign of the inaccessibility of the past and the foreclosure of philosophy. In the course of shooting, I acquired elements for four versions of the Phaedrus walk, which were assembled into three parts or series for the final work. Each walking series follows the same trajectory from below the Olympieion walls, south along the park down the Athanasiou Diakou (where the Ilissus now flows underground) to a path that turns east along the exposed bed of the ancient river. Along the path I pause at an oriental plane-tree where one can easily imagine Socrates and Phaedrus resting and talking. The path then turns around toward the back of the beautiful little church of Aghia Fotini next to the overgrown site of the spring and shrine. The initial trajectories occur mostly at eye level, and on arrival at the spring each includes a “palinode” as the camera is raised tentatively toward the sky in a backward traveling shot that concludes where one enters the path from the Athanasiou Diakou. (This is the basis of the manual diagram in Plato’s Phaedrus, as I will explain in a moment.) The folded trajectory, earth and sky, is a gesture toward Socrates’s speech on the divine nature of love and the imperceptible nature of wisdom. Each iteration of the Phaedrus walk is a self-contained sequence, though with very different rates of image capture, rhythmic movements, and screen duration. In this manner, each part of the work takes place as the sensory investigation of a given trajectory in space under different temporal and formal conditions, which in turn produce varying planes and dimensions of sensation relating to focus, exposure, shutter speed, color tonalities and densities, depth relations, shapes and figures, and varieties of movement. What Deleuze would call the “manual diagram”

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takes place in the tension between the planned trajectory (with its unforeseen limits and obstacles) and improvised and accidental movements and actions. Here the presence and absence of the body as the vehicle of actions becomes a site of contingency and “error” as much as intention. Or, in other words, through the manual diagram, intended artistic actions are undermined, broadened, and varied through contingent or randomized movements along the predetermined path. The path is the probable, but sensation emerges in the accidental. Diagrammatic operations in Plato’s Phaedrus are shaped and give shape at the intersection of an Idea (the given spatial trajectory of the walk and its temporal duration) and the execution of the Idea in a series of performative gestures guided by chance and accident. On one hand, the diagram is a continuous line that serves as a baseline or “structure” for three of the four parts of the work, which can be understood as independent series of decomposed and recomposed movements. Each walk begins with the camera held independently from the eye and floating about a meter off the ground while moving laterally along the fence enclosing the archaeological park. It then turns and moves forward onto the path along the Ilissus, with resting points at the plane-tree and at the spring and shrine to Pan. After pausing at the spring, the palinode works back along the trail as a reverse tracking shot, where the camera struggles to lift itself above the ground and to aim for the sky and the sun through irregular movements of rising and falling, before returning to the foot of the trail where the camera, always bounded by the downward force of gravity, struggles to rise and to lose its anchors in earthly material to reach toward the purity of light. This structuring baseline is inspired by a number of philosophical concepts and dramatic features that are adapted indirectly and informally from the Phaedrus. This is a yet deeper form of creation from analogy. Drawing freely on Plato’s dialogue, I pull out several major threads of Plato’s “mythologies” as voiced by Socrates and reweave them into a new conceptual structure imagined as the passage from disordered perception toward ideal Forms or, perhaps, as the effort of earthbound vision to pass through and above the visual confusion of material life toward a purer, more conceptual sight. In this Plato’s Phaedrus loosely echoes the four-part scheme of the dialogue—the presentation of Lysias’s sophistic speech on the lover, Socrates’s “possessed” discourse on eros and divine madness, the palinode, and the discourse on writing—as well as Socrates’s description of four types of love and madness. The myth of the cicadas’ song as an ode to philosophy is another point of reference, as well as the theme of nature as a Diony-

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sian force lifting Socrates out of his rational self into a state of ecstatic possession. More important here is to exemplify how the structuring line of the diagram (geographic and gestural as much as philosophical and conceptual) is altered, deformed, and derailed by chance procedures of the hand and contingent facts of location that continually undermine the optical organization of natural perception (whether in the intentional eye of the maker controlling the frame or in the disturbed regulative parameters of lens and automatic recording mechanisms). Like many of my works, during the recording of each walk automatisms of focus, shutter speed, and white balance are left to float and struggle with rapidly changing and often unpredictable shooting conditions. In other words, improvisational and accidental actions of the hand are continually deforming and destabilizing the colors, spaces, and compositions that the lens and recording algorithms struggle to capture under norms of the Model image. In part 1 of Phaedrus, entitled “The Dark Horse,” the material is captured with direct sound and in real time, that is, at a capture rate of thirty frames per second.6 However, along the course of the walk, the camera is continually and rapidly shaken and rotated within an arc limited to approximately 180 degrees (or more imprecisely, by the rotational capacity of my wrist). A telephoto lens is used, thus flattening space and pulling a more abstractive capacity from the figurative images in the “natural” world. An important factor here is that contingent and improvisational actions of the hand, though shaped by the diagram, completely erode the intentions of eye and lens. (In fact, many viewers do not read the images as a continuous take in real time, but rather mistake them for time-lapse images.) Part 2, “Love and Counter-Love,” follows the same trajectory using a “normal” lens and direct sound, though now the capture rate is set at one frame per second. The effects are similar to those of Waterloo. The displacement of one picture by another, always in movement though nonetheless giving the impression of stillness, reveals a number of figural deformations: intense and saturated colors become rarified and washed out, or vice versa; objects float into and out of sharp focus; solid volumes, like the bars of the enclosure (which are barely ascertainable in part 1), bend, twist, dissolve at their edges, and re-form again. Here the hand might be steadier, but it has not fully given itself back to intention. Eye and hand remain disconnected, and new contingent factors are 6. This section of the work may be viewed online at https://vimeo.com/134098597.

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introduced by the inability of recording algorithms to maintain focus, exposure, “correct” color rendering, and stable shutter speed. In principle, the same space is recorded again and along the same given spatial and durational trajectory but under different temporal conditions that produce quite different figural effects of decomposition and recomposition. This is why direct sound is important to the first two parts of the work—it is the temporal index of the time of the walk, a measure of its exact duration and a baseline against which to absorb and assess the new temporal rhythms produced in the images. It is also the marker for a vital yet unseen space off-screen—not only the recording body but also the space of present history and of the city with its economic and political difficulties, so alien to Plato’s vision of the ideal republic, the Arcadian image of the spring, and the walk along the Ilissus. Where parts 1 and 2 are of approximately equal length (about eight or nine minutes), part 3, “A Song for Urania and Calliope,” introduces new vectors of time and movement. The manual diagram remains the same, of course, but the elapsed time of the series is elongated (thirtyfour minutes). The rhythm of the sequence is much slower and unfolds in unsettling ways. Now the spatial environment of the walk is finally produced with more or less full clarity. Direct sound has disappeared in favor of an immersive and complex polyrhythm of cicadas in honor of Socrates’s myth referenced in the title. Because this sequence is recorded in extreme slow motion with a telephoto lens, depth relations are flattened, and yet the lateral movements produce an almost hallucinatory space with heightened dimensionality. Another striking effect of this tactic is that, along the path and during the palinode, the camera appears to float above or beyond the body, as if craning up into the densely foliated trees and empty sky before slowly descending, or rising and falling as if tethered to a balloon rather than being manipulated by hand and arm. With its extended duration and unhurried rhythm, part 3 presents a time of meditation or contemplation where viewers might retroactively apprehend the manual diagram that is shaping space and releasing sensation in the previous series. Sensation is experienced here as wild intensive beauty but also as a relaxed or floating attention. I have said that each part of Plato’s Phaedrus may be considered as an independent series. Though guided diagrammatically by the Idea of the work, each series asserts its independence through its particular rhythms and effects of decomposition in the spatial and temporal field of the recorded location. Moreover, the series organize and express, each with its own complex rhythms, different orders of sensation. These orders unfold at the intersection where free manual actions vary

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along the walking gestural baseline and where the whole of the emerging Figure or Image is shaped by variable temporal parameters. These three “movements” are both individuated and inseparable, and each expresses a different manner of sensate composition: vibration, whose rising and falling intensity implies differences of constitutive levels; enfolding, where sensations resonate energetically between neighboring bodies, figures, surfaces, or actions; and, finally, movements of withdrawal, division, or distension where “sensations draw apart, release themselves, but so as now to be brought together by the light, the air, or the void that sinks between them or into them, like a wedge that is at once so light and so dense that it extends in every direction as the distance grows, and forms a bloc that no longer needs a support. Vibrating sensation—coupling sensation—opening or splitting, hollowing out sensation.”7 In What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari characterize these qualities as varieties of the “composés de sensation” (168; 159). While “composite” or “compound” are perfectly correct translations, these terms lose something of the action of something being actively composed, constructed, or created. Sensation occurs and is received on a plane different from that of mechanisms, structures, or finalities. It is not composed from parts and connections, but rather in ascending and descending movements, dilating and contracting rhythms and forms, reversible passages between rarefied and saturated colors, expanding and contracting time scales, flattening or extending depth relations, demoted relations between form and depth. Sensation is energy or excitation itself as a ceaseless becoming that is nonetheless composed in aggregating and disaggregating actions, both coalescing and dissolving. But this becoming has no departure or return, and it falls between actions and reactions, neither fully anchored in the one nor exhausted by the other. It cannot be absorbed into the forms or surfaces across which it resonates or radiates. The intuition of composed sensation relates no doubt to an intuition of the Image as a “matter of fact” or, indeed, of new facts about chaotic matter. However, the question of the pictorial fact, of its accomplishment and processes, remains unevenly answered. Deleuze says that the fact is “what has taken place or becomes in place” (LS, 6). The work must assert its independent existence as something necessary. Its sense

7. What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994),168; hereafter cited in text as WP. Originally published as Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1991). Page numbers from the French publication are given in italics.

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derives neither from the figure, because there is no model external to itself to copy, nor from a narration for which it would serve as formal support and temporal condition. The diagram, then, is not a preconceived “structure” to be unfolded in or through the work (hence the independence of these movies from the nomination of structural films). Rather, as Idea it serves the apprehension of a becoming and an intuition immanent to each of the series and the whole of the work. The diagram is only the possibility of fact while the whole Image, the complete body of the work, makes present a very particular fact—the Figure or Image as completed series, which have exhausted their possibilities of expression. The pictorial fact, then, is the apprehension of a necessity of order both across and within series, an order that gives to chaos the clarity and duration of intuited sensation. The fact is the apprehension of forms as indissolubly caught up in a single and unique Figure. Chaos is sensation unformed in the aesthetic material, but, through the diagram, what this material comes to express is a body, not as a represented object, but rather as a vital sensory body experiencing sensation as the deforming actions of force in, on, or through it. The Figure or Image of Plato’s Phaedrus is the body of the work emerging in its successive modulations along the diagrammatic line. The walk(s) have now been completed. And each one ends, and so must begin again, as if blocked by the human predicament of a perceptual incapacity to grasp the conceptual purity of the Forms. (Analogously, there is also the difficulty of perceiving the fluidity and intensity of sensation resonating or vibrating within and across forms.) By this logic, part 4 of Plato’s Phaedrus both breaks the series and completes them in a new order. Indeed “The Forms” is the title of this culminating series. In Phaedrus, the Republic, and other late works, Plato portrays the human need and capability, but also incapacity, for grasping the Forms as a matter of pure perception as a question of repetition and memory, and of regaining a sensation or experience that one has long forgotten or become blind to. In this respect, repetitions across the individuated and completed series of Plato’s Phaedrus are inspired by Plato’s account of metempsychosis, where the soul is depicted as a charioteer reining two winged horses: one guided by reflection and drawn upward toward light and nobility; the other ruled by passion and pulling down toward darkness and baseness. The soul that perceives the greater part of intangible and immaterial Being in its celestial journeys comes ever closer to reason in its reincarnations. This is also the basis of Plato’s account of beauty and eros, where through the perception of earthly beauty one recalls, as if a distant memory masked by the density

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of terrestrial matter, the ideal Forms. The lover must transcend the desire for possession and dominance and learn how to apprehend beauty as an “erotic” attraction, which although drawn to earthly and corporeal forms, seeks a transcendental and immaterial vision. The power of conceptual thought, then, derives from past reminiscences of celestial Being and, after three thousand cycles of incarnation, a life devoted to meditation on the Forms grows wings and becomes a philosopher. The love drawn by beauty thus passes in stages from the material to the immaterial, the terrestrial to the celestial, and from earthly form to immaterial light. And in each instance perception is guided by a process of memory as repetition, and recovery or reconstitution, of a forgotten intensive experience. The ending of each series acknowledges this difficulty in the struggle to reach the pure light of the sun, sensation without form or color, through the intervening density of color and form comprised of dense layers of branches and leaves, themselves reacting to the unpredictable force of wind currents, and recorded through the manual difficulty of reaching for the sky, with its own contingent hesitancy and fatigue. Here part 4 reconsiders the organization of the prior series. However, its diagrammatic organization is vertical and volumetric rather than horizontal and directional. Time functions differently here, and the meaning of the “digital” shifts dramatically as the hand yields control to algorithmic manipulation of the series. There is no “progress” in time through movement in space but only the experience of a densely layered present emerging out of stacked and distended rhythms. Only the final gesture of the preceding series is repeated here and, recapitulating the soon completed whole of the work, it is repeated four times as superimposed layers. The base layer is comprised of a three-minute section at the end of part 3, already in extreme slow motion, that is digitally retimed to occupy about twelve minutes of screen time. Moreover, color is subtracted to enhance and reconfigure the forms within the image, and tonalities are reversed as if in a negative image. About a minute into the sequence, a color version of the same series retimed for nine minutes’ duration is stacked on the base layer; one minute after that, a six-minute series is layered over the second; and, one minute after that, a four-minute series. After nine minutes the layers recede one by one, beginning with the fourth layer. This is the new diagram, though it functions algorithmically and topologically rather than as the actions of accident and contingency. Inspired by the coded mathematical schemes sometimes found in Plato’s dialogues, the durations and opacity of the four layers are governed by ratios of 1 to 4: each slow motion layer is timed

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to be 25% shorter than the one before it; each layer is set to a value of 25% opacity.8 Sensation is experienced differently here as are time and rhythm. Despite the mathematical diagramming of the sequence, a sense of visual chaos is returned to the final series, though a chaos presented as the intuition of multiple sensory dimensions, the same yet different, both fluid and dynamic, disordering the rational geometry of natural forms and regaining for sight the spatial and temporal heterogeneity and thickness of material and duration—in other words, sensation. : : : We are close now to comprehending fully the logic and time of sensation. Shaped by the diagram, chance and improvisation release the force of the virtual in the actually emerging images. These marks and traces are irrational, involuntary, accidental, free, contingent. As a-signifying marks, they do not represent, illustrate, or narrate. They are marks of sensation or, rather, indistinct or unfocused and chaotic sensations. And they are manual acts made without the intentions of the eye, as if the hand assumed its independence to serve other forces by tracing marks that no longer depend on an intentional will or sight, whether external or internal. These almost blind manual marks express the intrusion of another world within the visual world of figuration. They partially subtract from the image the regulative and normative optical organization baked into lenses and cameras that makes the image figurative in advance. The artist’s hand intervenes here to shake up its dependence on the eye and to break the normative optical organization. This, in fact, is a new perspective for considering the “digital” in the digital event. The diagram is never an optical effect, then, but rather an unconstrained manual power—a frenetic zone where the hand is no longer guided by the eye. It imposes on sight another will that presents itself as chance, accident, and automatism, or in near involuntary actions as in the sensational gestures of Jackson Pollock’s all-over line. The world of so-called natural perception is swept and cleared by the forces of an agitated life that Deleuze says is closer to chaos or catastrophe as the deepest sense of movement or movements on the plane of immanence. This is a dramatic claim. Without quite signaling the fact, Deleuze is most likely referring to René Thom’s catastrophe theory, which is 8. See, e.g., Julian Baggini, “Plato’s Stave: Academic Cracks Philosopher’s Musical Code,” on the website of The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jun/ 29/plato-mathematical-musical-code.

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an important contribution to the mathematical modeling of so-called chaotic or nonlinear physical processes. The standard account of nonlinear change models the behavior of phenomena where large-scale sudden and unpredictable transformations occur as the result of very small changes in initial conditions. Catastrophe theory addresses special cases of probability where, when modeled in a larger parameter space, tipping or bifurcation points can be described as well-defined qualitative geometrical structures. In other words, one might say that they are “diagrammable,” or that whatever equilibrium is achieved in the system is apprehendable through a generative pattern. Imagine the character of resemblance in Deleuze’s argument as guided by a similar shaping of time and change in the image, as in Glider’s projection of moving shapes onto the interior or exterior of a rotating virtual sphere, or in Plato’s Phaedrus, deforming actions along the gestural baseline. But the instance of the diagram shows that this is time of a special sort. From one perspective it seems haphazard, unformed and unplanned, chaotic. But at the same time, it is also generative—it does violence to the figurative givens but also opens new domains of sensory experience. The diagram is a point of virtual transition that terminates the preparatory work and initiates the creative act where the collapse of visual coordinates makes possible new pictorial experience. And it must draw this experience out of sensation. Sensation is ephemeral and indistinct; it lacks duration and clarity. Construction, for its part, is abstract. The diagram is the expression of an operation that organizes a fluid geometry of the sensible, which in turn endows sensation with rhythm and intensity. Therefore, the function of the diagram is simultaneously to make geometry concrete or felt and to give to sensation duration and clarity. In this respect, the diagram is something like a presupposition or preconceptual “structure.” It is the underlying scheme or architecture, the Idea that produces consistency in the image without unifying or fully stabilizing it. It gives shape to becoming or emergence but in open and variable ways. This is not to say that the diagram anticipates the completion of the work or constitutes it as a whole. The diagram is localized and forms its geometry in the intervals between planes, forms, color modulations, marks, strokes, and movements as indiscernible transitions between terms or elements in a series. But it also produces effects that overflow these geometries. Whatever elements come before the lens, or find themselves present within the frame, interact not only with the parameters of capture (frame rate, focus, color balance, etc.) but also with the contour of the diagram, which gives the image its Idea, and which, interacting with the components of sensation, pro-

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duces intensive variations in the image. The diagram shapes the series as well as their relative intensities and differential relations. Through apprehending the diagram, the Idea or concept of the work becomes perceptible and intelligible; its conceptual architecture becomes form and expression evolving in a given time sequence. The diagram does not pass from one form or element to another. Rather, the passage between figures and elements occurs in intensive series, and the series or figural whole constitutes the aesthetic analogy. There comes here not another form but rather entirely different relations that engender in the whole a Figure where the diagram introduces another time into the becoming-Image. The diagram expresses change by imposing a zone of objective indiscernibility or indetermination between two or more forms or elements of which one isn’t-any-longer and the other not-yet. From the figurative to the Figure, the diagram initiates and gives shape to the processes of deformation, temporal passage, becoming, and change, which are passing into and through the Image, and which in turn give it singularity and intensity. The diagram lends coherence to sensation by focusing and channeling its forces and by rhythmically organizing its temporality. To organize in series is to pass from one domain, set, or distinct element to another. Within the frame and duration of an image, one easily imagines these elements and relations as formal: from one color value to another, from flat to deep space, from distinct line to rough blur, from legible to deformed forms, from rest and continuity to complex rhythm, and so on. But these “horizontal” relations are also dynamically related to “volumetric” transformations where the eye and hand of the maker serve as relays passing sensation into the image and making of it a Figure and, in turn, producing and conveying sensation in the experience of looking. A discontinuous and complex play of forces is transmitted from world, to Image, to receptive looking that creates a new sensorium in which the separation of object from subject (whether conceived in relation to the artist or in relation to the viewer) becomes meaningless. Sensation, in Deleuze’s argument, has a face turned toward the subject (nervous system, vital movement, instinct) and a face turned toward the object (fact, place, event, duration). Or, rather, sensation has no facets at all. Sensation is two indivisible things as an immanent being-in-theworld: at one and the same time, I become in the sensation, and something happens through sensation. Whether artist or beholder, the same body gives and receives, and is object and subject. This passage is the grand act of image-making and it responds in philosophy to the problem of a pure logic: to pass from the possibility

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of fact to fact. The diagram is only the possibility of fact while the whole Image, the complete body of the work, makes present a very particular fact—the pictorial fact as completed series, which have exhausted their possibilities for further change. What one calls the pictorial “fact” is first those multiple forms that are taken up indissolubly in the same unique Figure and grasped in a kind of serpentine as so many serial accidents that emerge one from the other like the unfolding of a Jacob’s ladder, retroactively achieving a kind of necessity. This criterion is not dissimilar from Adorno’s demand in his Aesthetic Theory that critical art posit its own terms of absolute immanence. And therefore, write Deleuze and Guattari, “the work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself” (WP, 164). All figurative or narrative relations disappear in favor of a “matter of fact,” a properly pictorial ligature that represents or narrates nothing except for its own movement and becoming where it coagulates elements of arbitrary appearance into a uniquely continuous stream and an intensive expressive space. : : : “Perhaps the peculiarity of art,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “is to pass through the finite in order to rediscover, to restore the infinite” (WP, 197). This provocative statement is yet another way of asking the question: What does philosophy want from the Image? Elsewhere the two philosophers argue that art struggles with chaos in order “to bring forth a vision that illuminates for an instant, a Sensation” (WP, 204, 192). Art struggles with chaos to make it sensory and to make force visible in matter. It composes chaos to constitute a world neither foreseen nor preconceived—a chaosmos. Yet chaos is a dangerous ally for art and for aesthetic experience because art needs chaos as a force of disorganization and new organization that continually shatters clichés and sets new ideas in motion before they settle again on frozen earth, becoming indistinguishable from its monotone colors. In his deeply provocative lecture “Philosophical Intuition,” Bergson, rebuking Kant, writes of a particular paradox of normative perception: it cannot release itself from time nor grasp anything else than change and becoming. Yet we exist within swarms of clichés and have developed habits of seeing and vision machines to reinforce those habits that dilute or camouflage this experience. At the end of his lecture, Bergson doubts that art will ever give us the satisfaction of a philosophical intuition that apprehends all things sub specie durationis. However, the point of Bergson’s lecture is to depict fully the closeness of Image to

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the intuition of the vital and deep time of duration. But there are only two means for capturing this intuition and making it real for us. It can be expressed in concepts, but the more artificial and doctrinal the concepts, the more time is reified and spatialized, forcing it into artificial geometries and causalities. Alternatively, the Image that arises in philosophical intuition flows out of and back into la durée in singular and non-generalizable instances. (Recall here Adorno’s depiction of image as apparition.) This Image is neither wholly physical nor wholly mental. Rather, Bergson characterizes it as a mediating image, “an image that is almost matter in that it still allows itself to be seen, and almost mind in that it no longer allows itself to be touched—a phantom which haunts us while we turn about the doctrine and to which we must go in order to obtain the decisive signal, the indication of the attitude to take and of the point from which to look.”9 On multiple occasions, Deleuze relates that Cézanne wanted a faithful or truthful representation, but indeed one even more faithful to the world of sensory experience than a copy. Here Deleuze’s concept of “resemblance” or creation through analogy aims at a new activity: to give an entirely intuitive interpretation of real objects. Think of this as a reorientation of perception through sensation, a way of obtaining the decisive signal toward the attitude to take and the point from which to look. This is all the more necessary since ordinarily we work very hard to shield ourselves from this experience. Deleuze is fond of a passage from D. H. Lawrence that projects an image of people sheltering themselves under an umbrella on whose underside they draw the firmament and write their opinions. “But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella,” Deleuze counters, “they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent” (WP, 203). These visions are intolerable, however. Commentators fill the rent with opinions, and imitators camouflage it with derivative designs. Other artists are thus needed to damage again the fabric of cliché and opinion, to widen the tears, and thus to restore to the history of experience this incommunicable strangeness that can no longer be seen or sensed. Perhaps philosophy does not know what it wants from the Image, hence Bergson’s hesitation. But what the Image can offer philosophy is the intuition that unless there is the risk of contact with chaos, there is 9. “Philosophical Intuition,” The Creative Mind (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), 118; hereafter cited in text as “PI.” See also “L’Intuition philosophique,” in Oeuvres: Henri Bergson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), 1359.

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no real thought—that is, no real inventive thought. Sensation is where the Image brings thought into contact with chaos and the plane of immanence with all its varieties of intensive becoming. Following Henri Michaux, Deleuze thus contrasts “current ideas” or doxa with “vital ideas.” But here one must ask: what makes an idea vital? In my reading the vital Idea is something very close to what Bergson calls philosophical intuition as those particular acts of thought where a concept’s abstractions are dissolved and enlivened by contact with la durée and the deforming actions that bring sensation out of matter. Bergson characterizes this intermediate space as an image, which is at once external and internal, material and mental, though no less real for that. Yet where Bergson speaks of duration, Deleuze turns more toward chaos or the plane of immanence in its deepest sense, which I have similarly characterized as the Bergsonian regime of universal variation. In this context, Deleuze writes of Ideas as transitional zones between images and abstractions. Ideas can be linked or connected like images, and ordered and directed abstractly like concepts in a conventional logical sense. From here one might imagine a special status for the philosophical Idea as Image and in philosophy’s special relationship to art. Deleuze says that for philosophy to arrive at a concept, one must quickly get past both associated images and ordered abstractions to “arrive as quickly as possible at mental objects determinable as real beings” (WP, 207). Ideas aim at new concepts by crossing chaos with a secant plane to produce proximity zones and zones of indiscernibility, which are no longer associated simply by imaginative projection or actualized and ordered by the claims of reason. Actual without being real, virtual without being abstract: we arrive here at genuine conceptual blocs, where, as Deleuze and Guattari explain, “A concept is a set of inseparable variations that is produced or constructed on a plane of immanence insofar as the latter crosscuts the chaotic variability and gives it consistency (reality). A concept is therefore a chaoid state par excellence; it refers back to a chaos rendered consistent, become Thought, mental chaosmos. And what would thinking be if it did not constantly confront chaos?” (WP, 208). Here is where a link should be made between (aesthetic) diagram and (philosophical) Idea. Deleuze and Guattari assert that the “I” of the philosopher is “not only the ‘I conceive’ of the brain as philosophy, it is also the ‘I feel’ [ je sens] of the brain as art. Sensation is no less brain than concept” (WP, 211, 199). For philosophy to create it must also “feel” or risk contact with chaotic sensation—it must become other through sensation. Philosophical intuition is that interface or liminal

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zone where sensation and concept meet and exchange forces. To return to the question of aesthetic construction, one might say that the diagram is to art as Ideas are to philosophy. Sensation is la durée rendered sensible, sensory, or perceptible—it is sensation made percept with its own felt rhythms, intensities, and temporalities. And by the same token, there is no philosophical intuition separable from the force of sensation. Here is where Bergson misses the mark entirely in thinking the relation between art and philosophy. Intuition and sensation are inseparably linked—they are locked in a lover’s embrace as well as lovers’ conflicts. In becoming-other through sensation, the philosopher is also brought into contact with a nonhuman world—nonhuman perception and nonhuman thought on the plane of immanence in its deepest sense. Perhaps this is a reconciliation with all that exceeds and overflows human experience. This is another way of thinking about the Image as a “matter of fact.” Recall that in What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari insist on the special relation of art to percepts and philosophy to concepts, and speak of the Image as blocs of sensation composed from percepts and affects. Percepts are not perceptions, however; they are independent of the psychological or bodily states of those who experience them. Nor are affects feelings or emotions, for they overflow the will and receptive capacity of those who experience them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings that exceed lived experience and are a world unto themselves. They persist in the absence of human subjects because when the subject is caught up in stone, paint, image, or language, it becomes itself a composite of percepts and affects. The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else—it exists in itself—and to experience art is to become in sensation. Recall also that in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Deleuze follows Bergson in characterizing the subject as a special Image, only one image among others, “special” because it absorbs, refracts, frames, contracts, forms, and preserves the energies and forces acting on its receptive surfaces. In this the living being is a whole analogous to the whole of the universe, but “not because it is a microcosm as closed as the whole is assumed to be, but, on the contrary, because it is open upon a world, and the world, the universe, is itself the Open. ‘Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.’ ”10 I have already noted Bergson’s observation that we cannot escape the 10. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 10. The interior citation is from Bergson’s Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 16.

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sensory and contemplative experiences of life sub specie durationis, for this is Life itself, and we have no other. But we are also humanly disposed to shelter ourselves beneath Lawrence’s umbrella, to succumb to habit and doxa; in short, to reify our consciousness of time and change to facilitate our habitual actions in the world. Here doxa, like science, turns its back on movement or only considers change as succession of immobile states. The world experienced habitually through our senses and consciousness is no more than a shadow of itself, cold as death. We live here in a repetitive present, and living from instant to instant consider the past as terminated and memory as little more than an aid given to mind by matter. Consider yourself, then, in a heterogeneous present that is dense and elastic, “which we can stretch indefinitely backward by pushing the screen which masks us from ourselves further and further away; let us grasp afresh the external world as it really is, not superficially, in the present, but in depth, with the immediate past crowding upon it and imprinting upon it its impetus; let us in a word become accustomed to see all things sub specie durationis: immediately in our galvanized perception what is taut becomes relaxed, what is dormant awakens, what is dead comes to life again” (“PI,” 128–29). This is Bergson’s recommendation for returning to us vital ideas. I repeat again that sensation is immanent to our perceptual experience as force is immanent to matter. Sensation is that plane of experience that establishes dynamically multiple points of contact and reciprocal interaction between life and Life, which exposes us to the deepest forces of time and change as inhuman becomings that nonetheless restore something of our humanity to us. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that Plotinus defined all things as “contemplations” where humans, animals, plants, earth, and rocks endure on the same plane of immanence. “These are not Ideas that we contemplate through concepts,” they insist, “but the elements of matter we contemplate through sensation” (WP, 212). In another passage, they describe affects as the nonhuman becomings of humanity and percepts as the nonhuman landscapes of nature. This again is the greatest lesson of Cézanne’s landscapes, no less perhaps than Ernie Gehr’s images of matter in movement: “We are not in the world, we become with the world, we become in contemplating the world. One becomes universe. Becomes animal, vegetal, molecular, becoming zero” (WP, 169, 160). This is the purest definition of the percept in its sensational actions: to give to perception those otherwise imperceptible forces that populate the world, acting through us as affections, and enabling us to become-other. And what does the subject become here in its fleshy contacts with sensation? No longer simple flesh,

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perhaps, but rather a composition with the nonhuman forces of the cosmos, “of man’s nonhuman becomings, and of the ambiguous house that exchanges and adjusts them, makes them whirl around like winds. Flesh is only the developer which disappears in what it develops: the compound of sensation” (WP, 183). Art is sensation, nothing but sensation given and received. Bergson writes that intuition involves many degrees and variations of intensity, and philosophy in turn many levels of vital depth, “but the mind once brought back to real duration will already be alive with intuitive life and its knowledge of things will already be philosophy” (“PI,” 127). In these lines, Bergson challenges us to comprehend the continuous and dynamic line that runs between intuition and philosophy, Image and Concept. If we can find a medium in which to hold on to these two dimensions of experience, not to reconcile them but to let them flow one into the other, our acts of perception, intuition, and thinking may be brought back to a real duration whose vital life and knowledge of things has always been philosophy. Instead of discontinuous moments replacing one another in an infinitely divisible time, we will apprehend the ceaseless becoming and variation of qualitative time. Sensation is in intimate contact with the body, as if it were a permeable surface where sensation and thought communicate in the apprehension of “one identical change which keeps ever lengthening as in a melody where everything is becoming but where the becoming, being itself substantial, has no need of support. No more inert states, no more dead things; nothing but the mobility of which the stability of life is made. A vision of this kind, where reality appears as continuous and indivisible, is on the road which leads to philosophical intuition” (“PI,”127). And pace Bergson, the multiple arts of sensation can guide us to this road. This is what philosophy wants from art.

Epilogue: Welcome to This Situation There is an often-told tale of an ancient Chinese painter who became so entranced with his own skill and artfulness that he walked into his depicted landscape and disappeared. Is this sense of an Image so outlandish or paradoxical? Why do we choose only to think of images as something deployed on stretched canvas, contained within a frame and mounted on a wall, or projected on a screen? If Images are more broadly conceived as blocks of sensations, percepts, and affects, why not consider them as Events; that is, as spatial and temporal matrices where receptive bodies might be absorbed into situations where they become indistinguishable from the aesthetic sensations they undergo? The deepest experience of sensation is one where the limits between my body and matter or energy become permeable and indiscernible. Or perhaps where I am caught up in actions, movements, sounds, and energies where I am no longer “I,” a subject considering an object at a distance, but rather disappear into sensations of which I have become an active part? Consider the Image, then, as performative situations where my singular experience is reduced, broken down, reconfigured, and redeployed in a space where the border between lived experience and aesthetic experience becomes undecidable. Imagine a building, then, with four large rooms arranged around an expansive interior courtyard—not a

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theater of memory but a theater of experience. Flooded with natural light, the columns and balustrades of this open and welcoming space suggest the Italian Renaissance. There is a sense of time here. You are not alone but rather part of a contingent society, gathered together by chance and circumstance, drawn to this event or these events at just this moment in time. You are in common situation, in company, in the present. There are five spaces there, as if five potentialities, simultaneously coexisting. There is no given trajectory, no clearly marked path. Only chance will activate these potentialities—a random choice for one and not the other, in this order and not that one—and bring them into focus as experiences. I begin. There is rhythmic singing in the courtyard, echoing across its broad expanse and up into the air, which reaches three stories toward the iron and glass atrium roof. The courtyard is slightly sunken. There are bodies there. Some are sitting on short flights of stairs or on the ledge surrounding the sunken space, watching and listening; some are in movement. There are those that wander across and through the courtyard, but others that remain there, slowly—they are two women. Those that remain slowly and sing are hardly distinguishable in dress and appearance from those who watch or walk, listening, but the latter are visitors or “spectators” and the former are performers. The two performers are drawn to the ground as if their movements are slightly slowed by a gravity greater than normally experienced. Their rhythmic singing and movement are the only signs that they are not visitors. They are creating a situation in which the visitors play a part; thus the visitors become, whether wittingly or not, performers. Who is a visitor and who is a performer? A friend cuts across the court diagonally. I hesitate, fearing she will disturb the performance. But I am mistaken. She has entered the situation and become part of it—she is becoming-performer—and then departs. I hear men’s and women’s voices in a cappella song emanating from a darkened room. I enter cautiously, staying close to the door, yet I am completely entranced by the singing. Nearly without sight, I concentrate on the music, its hypnotic rhythms, its energy, and its joyfulness. I experience time in a new way. A new sensation: I am not blind, but only learning how to see after learning how to listen. As my eyes adjust, dim forms—bodies—slowly emerge. I move more confidently into the space—I am one of this group of bodies, part of their society. Someone

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who I cannot really see (is it a man or a woman, visitor or performer?) gently guides me to a better place. By her voice, I know that the person now singing next to me is a woman, a trained performer. My eyes adjust, like a very slow fade from black. I discern bodies swaying gently and rhythmically to song in the half-light. Are they visitors or performers? My question is again mistaken. We are all part of the same situation. In this light (or lack of it), our differences are hardly discernible—we are all performers. I am learning to listen, and learning to see. Exit this room and enter another, with the joyful a cappella blending with the gentle rhythm of the two women singing in the courtyard. The second room is also dark and silent, but my eyes are newly adjusted to this light (or lack of it). I am seeing differently and enter into the new situation with greater confidence. There are bodies here too, some standing and some lying on the ground—visitors and performers. But what are the performers doing? They are silent and barely discernible, yet discernible enough to walk among them without fear. They are lying on the ground together, moving gently. Are they making love or playing at making love? I move past the courtyard to the next room. The minor shock of my eyes slowly adjusting to daylight is softened by the singing that rises into the atrium. The third room is perfectly illuminated; or rather, there is light, and the interior resembles an empty museum. There is a small crowd of people talking, and again I question. Some are conversing intently and with concentration, and something in their intensity and in their deliberate movement suggests that they are more than visitors. (Is there such a thing as a trained conversationalist?) Curiosity pushes me to peek into some communicating yet apparently unused space. I still inhabit uncertainty: am I in a museum, or a theater, or even an anyspace-whatever? Where do I mark the fluctuating boundaries (waxing and waning in space and in time, disappearing and returning) of the situation or the event? When exactly is the event? Is it happening? Is it happening now? Have I missed it, and will it return? I turn my attention back to the room. A small crowd has gathered around a girl with black hair, maybe eleven or twelve years old, and speaking with a British accent. She is clearly a performer. She is in fact “Annlee,” now “incorporated” as she puts it. Here she is embodied and exists in time where before she was just an “image.” She is an Image of a different sort now. Her movements are slow and deliberate with delicate gestures. Sometimes she turns her head and raises her eyes to the ceiling; then she returns her gaze to the visitors, often looking directly at one of them. She speaks thoughtfully about her place here, in a museum, in

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the contemporary art world. She questions. She addresses some of us directly. The thoughtfulness of some of the responses leads me to ask: is she or he a performer? But again, in this situation we are all becomingperformers. We are all floating in a continuum that flows from pure improvisation to planned response. Annlee asks me if I prefer to be too busy, or not busy enough? I answer, too busy, for I like my work, including what I am doing right now. “Interesting.” She seems as uncertain and curious about her role in this situation as the visitors. Yet she is a scripted character—her questions are about how she became a scripted character, an art work, and how she was transported into this situation where, among other talents, she quotes Heidegger fluently: “Thus we ask now, even if the old rootedness is being lost in this age, may not a new ground and foundation be created then, a foundation and ground, out of which humans, nature, and all their works can flourish in a new way, even in the technological age.” She wants to know the sense of this thought about thinking, which she encountered randomly, just as we happen upon her by chance. She questions, and exits. I make my way to the fourth space. A handful of performers are distributed on all four sides of the room so that they cannot be observed in a single view—they must by heard as well as seen, sometimes heard without being seen. A performer may enter or exit unpredictably at any time, as if a visitor. Like all the other performers, they wear ordinary street clothes, and are hardly distinguishable from visitors except for the fact that their movements are slowed, deliberate. In this way, ordinary movements of the body slip indiscernibly into dance. It is as if they exist in another dimension only very slightly out of phase with the present, yet still communicating with it. Are they ahead of us or behind us? This is a utopian space. Atopos. (What else could philosophy want from an Image?) “Welcome to this situation,” they say together slowly in a kind of Sprechgesang, and then breathe out. They begin to converse, and each conversation begins with something like a thesis. “In 1981, somebody says, the question of gay culture is not so useful. I’d rather mean culture in a large sense, a culture that invents new ways of relating, new types of values, new modes of behavior. . . .” Or later, in another situation: “In 1984, somebody says, the value system of individualization contains within itself the seeds of a new ethics. Ethics based on duties towards oneself.” And then a friendly debate begins. Subjects may and do change across situations, but each takes on a major concern of the day, perhaps even a philosophical problem.

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I am struck by the idea that these situations are performative models for what Jürgen Habermas calls ideal speech situations, or better, discourse ethics. The topics are serious, though sometimes treated with humor. Each situation values an individual’s actions of expressing and managing his or her own standpoint, indeed of thoughtfully shifting, revising, or transforming it with the dialectical support of others. Each performer uses whatever language most comfortably suits his or her own need for expression at the time—German or English, of course, but also the languages of citation, of speaking through others or for oneself, of appeals to theory or not, of humor and seriousness. The open questions here are how to manage disagreement and how to make of it an artful conversation in which self-awareness and change become possible. I understand this performative art to be ethical in the same way that Michel Foucault spoke of care of the self. Indeed, the situations I experienced all turn around the problem of an art or aesthetics of existence; that is, finding within oneself the power of crafting new identities, new values, new modes of behavior, or even new sexualities in response to larger homogenizing social and cultural forces with which the individual is in conflict. How can one form new communities that value disagreement, communities that value their own contingency and their context dependency, and which exist and thrive without the need for complete consensus? Here ethical inquiry necessarily precedes political thought and action. I am learning how to listen and to speak with others, and to enjoy my active place in the social and aesthetic Image they have created. In between the situations, the performers change position, as if in a game of musical chairs. And if one stays for enough time, one discovers that the general sequencing of situations and performances can move from room to room. For example, you might encounter the lovers together in full view on the floor of the atrium; only later will they retire to their darkened space. It is unclear if there is a full and repeatable cycle of events and situations. More likely, I think, there are loops and epicycles, differences generated from repetition as in the early compositions of Steve Reich, which seem to influence the sounds and rhythms encountered here. I stand at the edge of the atrium, leaning on a balustrade, turned inward, lost in thought. Suddenly, the singer-dancers burst from their darkened space into the courtyard, into the light. They fill the space with performance, drawing the viewers into a ring around them. A randomly distributed order of visitors is now drawn into a shaped collectivity, enchanted, brought together as a single group in focused attention. But

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after a certain time, the performers disperse to the edges of the courtyard and disappear into the crowd as it were. The performers are once again blending with the viewers from whom they are only distinguished by their softly singing voices. I begin to understand what kind of Image this is, that this work, or combination of works, entails a sequence of no particular order leading to artful conversation, and conversation about conversation or, at least, that this is one way of thinking about the order of things. There are new sensations, passages between dark and light, silence and sound. There are dyads, rhythmically patterned groups, and social collectivities shaped in various ways, emerging and disappearing into one another. There is articulate sound and rhythm, then song with rhythmic movement, conversation with an individual “art work,” and the artful organization of ideal speech situations in groups. And there are conversations, openly or in silence, about what it means to inhabit a body and to think about being in a body among others who have claims on your attention, your actions, and your care. And more: what it means to belong to a collective, a society, and what it means to leave one society to enter another. And then it begins again, only a bit differently.1 1. This text is a phenomenological report of my experiences at two Tino Sehgal performances that took place at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin on July 27 and August 6, 2015.

Index Note: Page numbers in italic refer to figures. Abbas, Ackbar, 46 Adorno, Theodor, 75; on aesthetic autonomy, 84– 85, 87, 90, 93–94, 97; on apperception, 89–90; on art as apparition, 91–93; on critical art, 92, 131; on écriture, 90, 94; on emancipated cinema, 76, 85, 91, 97; on hieroglyphs, 88, 95, 96; on modern art, 86, 102; on montage, 86–87, 92, 94, 95, 96; on musique informelle, 87–88. See also specific works aesthetic analogy, 88, 116–17, 119, 130, 132 aesthetic experience, 5–6, 52, 55–56, 86, 138 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno), 84–85, 87–88, 89, 91, 131 analog technologies: obsolescence of, 4, 5–6; perceptual powers of, 3, 7; representation of time

in, 56, 71; transition to digital, 1, 47, 65, 70 analogy. See aesthetic analogy anticipatory force, 4–5, 15, 70, 87, 92, 113 Anti-Oedipe, L’ (Deleuze/ Guattari), 74 archival impulse, use of term, 3 Art & Language, 51, 52, 71 aura (concept), 33 Austin, J. L., 26 automatism, 7, 29, 36, 37, 38–40, 41, 106–8, 123 autonomous art, 87–89 Bacon, Francis, 84, 111, 114 Baker, George, 47–48 Barthes, Roland, 31, 46 Bazin, André, 105 Belisle, Brooke, 17–18 Bellour, Raymond, 33n5 Benjamin, Walter: on aura, 33; on dialectical images, 92; on mimetic faculty, 14–16, 113; on Schriftbild, 16, 26, 58

INDEX

Bergson, Henri, 12, 64, 91, 92, 108– 9, 112, 131–36. See also specific works Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Farocki film). See Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Farocki film) Brakhage, Stan, 108 Branigan, Edward, 105 Brecht, Bertolt, 80 Britten, Benjamin, 67 Burgin, Victor, 3, 21, 22–23, 51–66, 93, 95. See also Hôtel Berlin (Burgin film); Listen to Britain (Burgin film); Photopath (Burgin installation) Campagne Première (gallery), 75 Canterbury Tale, A (Powell/Pressburger film), 64–65, 66–70, 69 Capitalism: Child Labor (Jacobs film), 16–23, 20, 60; 22; stillness/ movement oscillations in, 17–21; on temporality, 21–22 Capitalism: Slavery (Jacobs film), 17 Castaing-Taylor, Lucien, 108 catastrophe theory, 128–29 Cavell, Stanley, 1–2; on automatism, 29, 36, 37, 41; definition of cinema, 36; film philosophic thought of, 25–26, 36–43, 45; on ontology, 36–37, 39, 41–42; on photogenesis, 37, 39–40, 41; on perceptual belief in photography, 27, 28, 33–34, 42–43; on real in photography/film, 29; on skepticism, 35–36, 39–42. See also specific works Ceaus¸escu, Nicolae, 77–78 chance, 95, 117–19, 122, 123, 128, 138 chaos and sensation, 109–10, 112, 119, 126, 128, 131, 133–34 Chaplin, Charlie, 37 cinema: as emblem of skepticism, 37, 39–40, 42; future memory of, 4, 5, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 70; memory

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of, 1, 3–5, 8, 15–17, 26, 57–61; Model image of, 2, 7, 85, 88, 95, 104, 105–6, 123; ontology of, 2, 4, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 36–37, 39; and perceptual experience, 104; perceptual power of, 3, 7; sociology of, 89; as world projections, 36. See also film; moving images Cinema 1 (Deleuze), 12–13, 103, 134 Circles of Confusion (Frampton), 108 Claim of Reason, The (Cavell), 35–36 classical film theory, 5, 33–34, 40, 43–45 commodity exchange, 52, 86, 88–89, 90 Components of a Practice (Burgin), 61–62 concentration camps, 82 conceptualism, 51–52 Coquelicots, Les (Monet painting), 67 Critical Theory, 75 Critique of the Power of Judgment (Kant), 86 Dean, Tacita, 3 déjà vu, 12, 14 Deleuze, Gilles, 51, 56, 74; on chaos, 128–29; on diagram, 103, 113, 117, 121–22, 125–26, 133; on Figure, 106, 113–19, 124–26, 130–31; on Ideas, 133; on Image, 55–56, 113; on matters of fact, 119, 125, 131; on mimesis, 88; on natural perception, 128; on out-of-field, 12–13; on plane of immanence, 109, 113, 135; on present/past, 6; on resemblance, 113, 116–17, 132; on sensation, 12, 103, 104, 106, 114, 117, 125, 130, 131. See also specific works Derrida, Jacques, 51 Descartes, René, 34–35 diagram: and chance, 117–19, 122, 123, 128; as compositional Idea, 103; defined, 117; and fact, 131; manual, 121–22, 124; organization

145

INDEX

of, 127–28; and resemblance, 113, 119; and sensation, 125–26, 129– 31, 133–34; and temporality, 130 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno), 84–85 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze), 55 digital event, use of term, 64, 128 digital panoramas, 65–66, 68n16 digital technologies: indexicality, disappearance of, 5, 22–23, 71; normative image in, 106; ontology in, 2, 6–7; representation of time in, 56, 71; 3-D modeling, 101; transition to, 1, 47, 65, 70; and virtual, 4, 73–74 “Doctrine of the Similar, The” (Benjamin), 14 Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet film), 3 Dog Star Man (Brakhage film), 108 Dow Chemical, 78, 80 écriture, 90, 94 Ehmann, Antje, 75 Eisenstein, Sergei, 112 Eldem, Sedad Hakki, 71 emancipated cinema, use of term, 76, 85, 88, 91, 97 epistemology, 34, 35, 41, 45 Epstein, Jean, 104–5 Ernste Spiele (Farocki video installation). See Serious Games (Farocki video installation) Etwas wird sichtbare (Farocki film), 78 Event, 56–57, 74, 93, 95, 137 expression: cinematographic, 36, 39– 40, 70, 104, 113–14; images as, 25, 51; new forms of, 86–87, 92, 95; objective/subjective, 52; of ontology, 26, 44; and perception, 56, 73n18; and probability/chance, 118; sculptural, 48, 73n18 exteriority/interiority, 13, 90, 108–9 fantasy, 36–39 Farocki, Harun, 21, 22–23, 30, 75–

84, 95; on image, 77–78, 84, 97; influences, 76–77; montage, use of, 80, 81–82, 96–97, 99; on Verbund, 80. See also specific works fetishism, 26, 27–29, 31–32, 33, 34 figural (concept), 16, 51, 112–13 Figure, 106, 113–17. See also Image film: disappearance of, 1–2, 7, 67; as moving image of skepticism, 39; and non-figurative painting, 103– 4; temporality in, 30–31. See also cinema; moving images; specific films film theory. See classical film theory Foster, Hal, 3 Foucault (Deleuze), 51–52 Foucault, Michel, 51, 141 Frampton, Hollis, 108 Frances Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze), 103, 111, 113, 117 freigesetzten Bewußtsein, use of term, 75–76 Freud, Sigmund, 11 future memory. See under memory Galloway, Alexander, 2 Garanger, Marc, 82 Gehr, Ernie, 21, 108, 110–12. See also Glider (Gehr film) Girardet, Christoph, 3, 8, 13, 22–23, 95. See also Meteor (Girardet/ Müller film) Glider (Gehr film), 21, 108, 110–12, 114, 129 Godard, Jean-Luc, 76–77 Goodman, Nelson, 4 Gordon, Douglas, 3 Gradiva (Jensen), 61 Grant, Cary, 37 Guattari, Félix, 56, 74, 125, 131, 133, 135 Habermas, Jürgen, 141 Hansen, Miriam, 91, 95, 97 Harun, who only drinks beer, has a glass of wine (Rodowick video), 75

146

INDEX

Heidegger, Martin, 37–38 hieroglyphs, 88, 95, 96 Hitchcock, Alfred, 61 Hitler, Adolf, 58 Holocaust (television miniseries), 82 home video, 2–3 hors cadre. See out-of-field Hôtel Berlin (Burgin film), 21, 57–61, 59, 65, 70 Huillet, Danièlle, 76–77 Huyghe, Pierre, 3 Ich glaubte Gefangene zu sehen (Farocki film), 77 Image: as apparition, 92; and artful conversation, 142; critical, 84, 85, 95–96; and diagram, 131; as Event, 2n2, 56–57, 74, 93, 137; in film, 85; and intuition, 131–32; as a matter of fact, 125, 134; philosophy of, 84, 99, 132–33; present, 109; as sensation, 134; virtual, 51, 67–68, 73–74, 109; and visual, 55–56. See also Figure Image, An (Farocki film), 78 Images of the World and the Inscription of War (Farocki film), 78, 82–84, 83, 96, 97 “Imaginary Signifier, The” (Metz), 26, 28, 34 indexicality: disappearance of, 5, 6, 22–23, 71; transformation of, 54; use of term, 29 Inextinguishable Fire (Farocki film), 78–82, 79, 97 Jacobs, Ken, 16–23, 60, 95. See also Capitalism: Child Labor (Jacobs film) Jensen, Wilhelm, 61 Jet of Water (Bacon painting), 112 Jurassic Park (Spielberg film), 7 Kant, Immanuel, 86, 104, 131 Kantor, Alfred, 82 Keaton, Buster, 37–38

Klee, Paul, 113 Klein sets, 47–48, 73 Kluge, Alexander, 97 Kracauer, Siegfried, 75, 85, 94 Krauss, Rosalind, 47, 48, 49, 73 Landscape (Bacon painting), 114 Laplanche, Jean, 64 Lawrence, D. H., 132 Leben—BRD (Farocki film), 77 Leclaire, Serge, 64 “Lecture on Ethics, A” (Wittgenstein), 24–25 Lehrstücke (Brecht), 80 Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor/Paravel film), 108 liberated consciousness, 75–76 Listen to Britain (Burgin film), 61–66, 66, 70 Live in Your Head (exhibition), 51 Lockhart, Sharon, 3 Logic of Sensation, The (Deleuze). See Frances Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze) Lumet, Sidney, 3 Lyotard, Jean-François, 51 Mannoni, Octave, 26–27, 34 Manovich, Lev, 7 Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov film), 105 Marclay, Christian, 3 Marker, Chris, 76–77 Mass Ornament, The (Kracauer), 76 Matter and Memory (Bergson), 108– 9, 110 media archaeology, 7, 105 Meditations (Descartes), 34 memory: of cinema, 1, 3–5, 8, 15–17, 26, 57–61; collective, 14; force of, 12, 13–14, 15, 62–63, 69; future/ fading, of cinema, 4, 5, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 70; and perception, 12, 26, 66, 127; timelessness of, 30– 31; traumatic, 100; world-, 26 Mendelsohn, Eric, 60

147

INDEX

Metaphors on Vision (Brakhage), 108 Meteor (Girardet/Müller film), 8–14, 9; narration in, 8, 10, 11; opening scenes, 8–10; out-of-field, use of, 12–13, 14; source materials of, 14; as uncanny, 11–12; writing form in, 15–16 Metz, Christian: on code/text, 4; on fetishism, 26, 27–29, 32, 33; on indexicality, 29; on perceptual belief in photography/film, 27–28, 33–34, 42–43; on photographic frame, 32–33; on real in photography/film, 29; as semiologist, 25–26; on temporality in photography/film, 30–31; theory practice of, 45. See also specific works Meydenbauer, Albrecht, 82 Michaux, Henri, 133 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Britten opera), 67 mimesis (concept), 88, 93 mimetic faculty, 14–15, 113 Mirrored Cubes (Morris sculpture), 48–50, 50, 54, 55–56 Miss, Mary, 47 Model image of cinema, 2, 7, 85, 88, 95, 104, 105–6, 123 Monet, Claude, 67 montage, 80–82, 85, 86–87, 92, 94, 95, 96–97, 99 Morris, Robert, 47, 48–50, 54, 55–56 movement/stillness, 17–18, 30–31, 39, 51, 57, 65, 73, 123 moving images: characterizations of, 1, 17, 21, 23, 62, 65, 73, 105; as conceptual framework, 1–2; in contemporary art, 3, 4–5, 8, 16, 21, 23, 33n5, 56, 95, 112–13; as innovative, 6–7, 76; and skepticism, 39. See also film Müller, Matthias, 3, 8, 13, 22–23, 95. See also Meteor (Girardet/Müller film) Mulvey, Laura, 2, 33n5

Münsterberg, Hugo, 104, 105 musique informelle, 87–88 naming crisis in contemporary art, 3n3, 4, 7, 17, 21, 25, 48, 57, 74, 88 napalm, 78–81 natural perception, use of term, 107, 112, 119, 128 Nauman, Bruce, 51 New German Cinema, 76–77, 85 Nichtlöschbares Feuer (Farocki film). See Inextinguishable Fire (Farocki film) Oberhausen generation, 76, 85 Ono, Yoko, 50 ontology: and belief, 26; of cinema, 2, 4, 22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 36–37, 39; of photography, 7, 22–23, 27, 28, 41–42; in postmodernist sculpture, 49 Osborne, Peter, 54 oscillation, 13, 17–18, 19, 26, 46 out-of-field, use of term, 12–13, 14, 31 paracinema, use of term, 17 paramnesia, 12 Paravel, Verena, 108 percepts, 55–56, 134, 135 perceptual belief: and fetishism, 27– 29, 34; paradox of, 27, 42–43; queer structure of, 5, 7, 23, 26, 43, 44, 46 performative art, 138–42 phenomenology, 2, 4, 5–6, 25–26, 52 “Philosophical Intuition” (Bergson), 131–33, 136 photogenesis (concept), 37, 39–40, 41 photographic belief. See perceptual belief photography: disappearance of, 46–48, 57, 73–74; frame, 32–33; memory of, 7n5; ontology of, 7, 22–23, 27, 28, 41–42; perceptual

INDEX

photography (continued) power of, 3, 7, 41; and sculpture, 73; temporality in, 30–31 “Photography and Fetish” (Metz), 26, 34 Photopath (Burgin installation), 51– 55, 53 Pierce, Leighton, 108 Place to Read, A (Burgin projection), 61, 71–73, 72 plane of immanence, use of term, 109–10, 113, 133 Plato’s Phaedrus (Rodowick video), 120–27, 129 Pollock, Jackson, 128 Powell, Michael, 64, 65, 69. See also Canterbury Tale, A (Powell/ Pressburger film) Pressburger, Emeric, 64, 65, 69. See also Canterbury Tale, A (Powell/ Pressburger film) projection, 30, 36–37, 39–41, 42–43, 64, 71–73, 105 Psychology of the Photoplay, The (Münsterberg), 104 Puccini, Giacomo, 8, 11 Pursuits of Happiness (Cavell), 37 Région centrale, La (Snow film), 108, 112 Reich, Steve, 141 Remembered Film, The (Burgin), 70–71 repression, 12 resemblance, 113, 116–17, 119, 132 Rijke, Jeroen de, 3 Robin, Léon, 120 Rooij, Willem de, 3 Sagebiel, Ernst, 58, 60 “Scene of Plato’s Phaidros, The” (Wycherley), 120–21 Schriftbild, 16, 26, 58 sculpture: disappearance of, 47–48; and photography, 73; postmodernist, 49

148

“Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (Krauss), 47 Seghal, Tino, 142 sensation: and chaos, 109–10, 112, 119, 126, 128, 133–34; defined, 110; and diagram, 129–31; domains of, 114–16, 119, 121; and force, 103, 113–16; logic of, 104, 111–12, 116, 117, 128; orders of, 124–26; and perception, 106, 107–8, 124, 132, 134–36; and subject/object, 130 sequence-image, 71, 73, 93 Serious Games (Farocki video installation), 21, 78, 97–102, 98 Serra, Richard, 47 situational aesthetics, use of term, 52, 55–56 skepticism: cinema as emblem of, 37, 39–42; internal/external divisions in, 41–42; logic of, 34; truth of, 35–36 Sky TV (Ono video), 50 smartphone cameras, 106–8 Smith, John, 8, 10 Smithson, Robert, 47, 50 Snow, Michael, 108, 112 Speer, Albert, 58 Spiegel, Der (news magazine), 58 Spielberg, Steven, 7 stillness/movement, 17–18, 30–31, 39, 51, 57, 65, 73, 123 Straub, Jean-Marie, 76–77 succession, 36, 40, 113 Suor Angelica (Puccini opera), 8, 11 Taslik Kahve (coffeehouse), 71 Tempelhof Airport (Berlin), 58–60 temps durée, 92, 108–9 Theory of Film (Kracauer), 76 Third Memory (Huyghe), 3 time/temporality, 3; and diagram, 130; in digital vs. analog expression, 56, 71; experience of in media, 6, 21–22; in photography/film, 30– 31; of presence/absence, 29

INDEX

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 119 “Transparencies on Film” (Adorno), 88–89, 91, 93–94 Ujica, Andrej, 77–78 uncanny (concept), 11–12 uncinematic, use of term, 62–64 Usai, Paolo Cherchi, 2, 7 Vertigo (Hitchcock film), 61 Vertov, Dziga, 104–5 Videogramme einer Revolution (Farocki/Ujica film), 77–78 virtual (concept), 51; and digital technologies, 4, 73–74; as experience of cinema, 4; and sequence-image, 73; and space, 52

149

Voyage to Italy (Burgin projection), 61 Vrba, Rudolf, 82 Wall, Jeff, 2 Waterloo (Rodowick video), 106–8, 115 Wetzler, Alfred, 82 “What Becomes of Things on Film” (Cavell), 37–39 What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze/ Guattari), 56, 109, 125, 134 White Ash (Pierce film), 108 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 24–25, 26, 43, 119 World Viewed, The (Cavell), 27, 40, 41 Wycherley, R. E., 120