Videology

1 2 VIDEOLOGY LOUIS ARMAND 3 PRAGUE 2015 Litteraria Pragensia Books www.litterariapragensia.com Copyright © Louis Armand, 2015 Published 2015 by Univerzita Karlova v Praze Filozofická Fakulta Litteraria Pragensia Books Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory, DALC Náměstí Jana Palacha 2 116 38 Praha 1, Czech Republic All rights reserved. This book is copyright under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the copyright holders. Requests to publish work from this book should be directed to the publishers. 4 The research & publication of this book have been supported from the ‘Program rozvoje vědních oblastí na Univerzitě Karlově,’ no. 9: ‘Literature & Art in Intercultural Relationships,’ subproject: ‘Transformations of Cultural Histories of Anglophone Countries: Identities, Periods, Canons.’ Cataloguing in Publication Data VIDEOLOGY, by Louis Armand. —1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-80-7308-589-6 1. Visual Culture. 2. Cultural Theory. 3. Film Studies. I. Armand, Louis. II. Title Printed in the Czech Republic by PB Tisk Cover, typeset & design © lazarus Cover images: stills from the Zapruder film (22 November 1963) and JeanLuc Godard’s Les Trois Desastres (2014) and Made in USA (1966). Jean-Luc Godard, Ciné-tracts (1968) VIDEOLOGY Prelude: Ghosts in the Machine NOTES ON NAM JUNE PAIK 19 Pornentropia LYNCH | ATKINS | LOUBOUTIN 25 Lugubrious Complexity BRAXTON | SOLLERS | BARTHES | SMITHSON 43 No Thought but in “Things” FROM PROJECTIVE VERSE TO HYPERGRAPHY 55 Slaves of Reason ROBOTS | REPLICANTS | GOLEMS 68 Exterminate All Rational Thought FROM NAKED LUNCH TO CONSUMED 86 5 In Suspense of the Real CRONENBERG | GILLIAM | LYNCH 101 Subversive Cinema FROM WATERS TO CARAX 130 Fade to Black FILM NOIR & THE FATALITY OF GENRE 6 163 The Time of Resurrection GODARD & THE AESTHETIC UNCONSCIOUS 195 Modernité Cinématographique MAKAVEJEV & THE POETICS OF REVOLUTION 224 All that’s Solid Melts into Weird COOVER | THOMPSON | GARCIA | CHAFFEE 243 An Imploding Neutron Star FROM NEUROMANCER TO BLENDER 265 VIDEOLOGY 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 PRELUDE GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE I believe on the contrary that the future belongs to ghosts, and that modern image technology, cinema, telecommunications, etc., are only increasing the power of ghosts. —Jacques Derrida, Ghost Dance In his June 1964 “Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimental Television, 1963,” published in the New York Fluxus newspaper Fluxus CC Five Three, Nam June Paik claimed, “My experimental TV is the first ART(?) in which the ‘perfect crime’ is possible…”1 Thirty years later, Jean Baudrillard entitled his major statement on the “murder of reality,” Le crime parfait (1995) – in it he writes, “the radical illusion is that of the original crime, by which the world is altered from the beginning, and is never identical to itself, never real. The world exists only through this definitive illusion which is that of the play of appearances – the very site of the unceasing disappearance of all meaning and all finality. And this is not merely metaphysical: in the physical order, too, from its origin – whatever that may be – the 1 Videa ‘N’ Videology: Nam June Paik (1959-1973), ed. Judson Rosebush (Syracuse, NY: Everson Museum of Art & Galeria Bonino, NY: 1974). 19 From Videa ‘n’ Videology: Nam June Paik (1959-1973) 20 world has been forever appearing and disappearing.”2 For Baudrillard, reality isn’t murdered by illusion, since it’s the illusion of the real that is the first victim of the panoptical, televisual, indeed pornographic cult of veracity, of global self-verisimilitude, that today everywhere makes this absence felt by its insistences to the contrary. “Our culture of meaning,” Baudrillard insists, “is collapsing beneath the excess of meaning, the culture of reality collapsing beneath the excess of reality, the information culture collapsing beneath the excess of information…”3 Paik’s gesture was to subtract the personality of the artist from this image feedback system, whose perturbation – by means of a reversed diode – reduces the metaphysics of the new videology to the form of something like Maxwell’s demon: a mechanical glitch in the Cosmological Entropy System which, in the absence of any other subjectivity, produces indeterminacy, or what Baudrillard refers to as “clues” to the (determinate) world’s “nonexistence.” For the “ART(?)” of the perfect crime – to say nothing, to leave no trace – doesn’t constitute a concealment (absolute or even partial), but rather the unconcealment of its 2 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996) 8. 3 Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 17. Nam June Paik, “McLuhan Caged,” from Machine Show, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1968) own impossibility. For it aspires to be nothing other than an “alibi” for a world whose disappearance behind the recurrent image of its disappearing is precisely what cannot be presented. This is what Paik calls the indeterminacy of the image, which is no longer an image of anything as such, but an ex-tasis (“I AM ALWAYS WHAT I AM NOT. I AM ALWAYS NOT, WHAT I AM”). Paik’s 1965 Black and White Scrambled Television in this sense marks something like a de-evolution of media verisimilitude, harking back to the experimental, precommercial television of the ’20s – a gesture in tandem with the post-McLuhanesque rage against the TV (as the apotheosis of corporate capitalism) by other ’60s and ’70s video artists like Wolf Vostell, the Vasulkas, the Ant Farm collective (Doug Hall, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Judy Procter), Bruce Nauman, Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, and later ’80s guerrilla activists like Paper Tiger Television and Martha Rosler. What’s singular about Paik’s early manipulations, however, is their ambivalent materiality: it’s not the socalled content that serves as the object of a détournement, but the armature of the “image” itself – which is to say, a certain technicity (“trace” or “glitch” as feedback operations in the further production of disillusionment (“the perpetual unsatisfaction is the perpetual evolution. it is the main merit of my experimental 21 Nam June Paik, Sacred & Profane (1993) TV”)). In an essay entitled “Norbert Wiener and Marshall McLuhan” (1967), Paik wrote: 22 McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message” also existed implicitly in the science of communication since the 1940s. Norbert Wiener wrote that the information, in which a message was sent, plays the same role as the information, in which a message is not sent. It sounds almost Cagean... Cage might say, “a notation, with which music is playable, plays the same role as the notation, with which music is not playable.” By manipulating sync pulses and distorted found TV broadcast/propaganda images with electromagnetic coils (as in Nixon (1965-2002)), as well as live feed and videoreplay in performance pieces like Concerto for TV, Cello and Videotapes (with Charlotte Moorman (1971)), Paik’s interventions extend the idea of video and television from the visible/perceptual into the realm of the constitutive ambivalence of image technologies broadly speaking: from instrument of passive spectacularism to interactive Nam June Paik, Three Eggs (1975-1982) site of aesthetic/counter-critique.4 Paik’s 1984 distributed performance piece, Good Morning, Mr Orwell (between Paris and New York) – anticipating later cybernetic work like Stelarc’s Ping Body (1998) and (via the addon concept of a “Video Common Market”) user-driven web platforms like YouTube – pointed to the materially diffused character of “panoptical” image technologies as the stuff of a détournement. By foregrounding the materiality of the video image, Paik (who described TV as “physical music”) refused the supposed metaphysical turn identified by Rosalind Kraus in her essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” (1976), in which the critic produced a series of vacant, pleonastic statements about video art as a “mirror-reflection” of “absolute feedback… bracketing out the subject”: the reason, she claims, that it “seems inappropriate to speak of a physical medium in relation to video.” 4 With the caveat that Paik’s own work inevitably feeds in turn into the art market spectacularism of ’70s postmodernity. 23 24 The supposition that a kind of ectoplasm might be at work here calls to mind Derrida’s succinct dissection of narcissistic spectrology during a brief cameo appearance “as himself” in Ken McMullin’s 1983 film, Ghost Dance, where he discusses cinema as “an art of ghosts” and “psychoanalysis plus cinema” as “the science of ghosts.” The very materiality of the medium is permeated by, its reality is constituted by, the recurrence of its own simulacrum – a perpetual feedback that in turn forms the subject of one of Paik’s most illustrative works, Three Eggs (1975-1982): a CCTV triptych in which a chicken egg is filmed by a video camera and its image transmitted live to a neighbouring monitor (egg number 2), beside which is another monitor in place of whose screen is another (actual) egg (egg number 3) – a tableau that could easily have been entitled The Chicken and the Simulacrum (with a wink to the pigeon gonad in Lacan’s “Mirror Stage”). Between the materiality of the image and the ideology of perception, and vice versa: the margin of entropy, noise, irreducibility, ambiviolence (as Joyce said).5 Entropy as motive force, noise as contentless information, irreducibility as the perpetual non-normalisable element, ambiviolence as counter-reduction: each pointing to what, in the one crucial moment of his 1979 “Report on Knowledge,” Lyotard identified with the existence of the unpresentable – which, as the title of his book specified, is not some thing but a “condition” (a technicity).6 In Paik’s pre-formulation (via Douglas Davis): Man = Media = Selection (an evolutionary mechanism). Thus, by declensions: “Video, Videa, Vidiot, Videology.”7 Prague, December 2015 5 Cf. Charlotte Moorman with Chroma Key Glasses in Paik’s “Experiment” (with Jackie Chassen)(1971) at New York’s Net-TV Workshop. 6 Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Minuit, 1979). 7 Nam June Paik, “Binghamton Letter,” 8 January 1972. David Lynch, Nudes & Smoke (1984) PORNENTROPIA LYNCH | ATKINS | LOUBOUTIN The photograph: the brothel-without-walls… —Marshall McLuhan 1. “Film,” David Lynch says, “is really like voyeurism. You sit there in the safety of the theatre, and seeing is such a powerful thing. And we want to see secret things, we really want to see them. New things. It drives you nuts, you know! And the more new and secret they are, the more you want to see them.”1 The object mimes being in possession of a secret that the eye searches to see but is never able to attain. A body, genitals, a mask, a pair of shoes. Each functions not as the index of a hidden desire but as the (proffered) flesh of the image itself – the image through which, and by means of which, we seek to apprehend the secret it seemingly contains the way a mirror contains a reflection. Cinema, photography, are here irreducible to the commonplace “pornography” of that which merely 1 David Lynch, Lynch on Lynch, ed. Chris Rodley (London: Faber, 2005) 145. 25 Atkins, The Teratologists; Lynch, Nudes & Smoke; Ruff, Bond Girl 26 explicates or merely depicts – even if what is depicted ultimately remains an enigma. Indeed, despite much assertion to the contrary, there is very nearly nothing enigmatic about Lynch’s work itself: it conceals no “secret message,” no enveloped “content,” no revelatory “schema,” but is comprised almost wholly of surfaces, formal textures, découpage. Lynch’s work is structurally lucid in the way Thomas Ruff’s photo manipulations may be called structural, or De Chirico’s paintings, or the novels of Robbe-Grillet. Like dreams, they articulate rather than “depict”; or, in spite of what they “depict.” Their logic is the already deconstructive logic of a de-piction. With the exception of the 1992 Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, this is perhaps nowhere more explicit than in Lynch’s 2006 film Inland Empire, with its fragmentary, collage-like narrative, its recursive image-hysteria and its relentless “foreignness” (in the manner of a type of Alice through the Looking Glass). Inland Empire is a type of visual prosthesis of itself and of Lynch’s oeuvre as a whole.2 Shifting between the Hollywood studio setting of Mulholland Drive and post-communist urban-industrial Łódź in central Poland, the texture of the second half of Inland Empire recalls the disquieting work of photographer Marc Atkins, whose 1998 series The Teratologists, and 2 Its cast alone is a pot-pourri of earlier films: Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Laura Harring, Naomi Watts. Lynch, Nudes & Smoke; Atkins, Equivalents 2001 series Equivalents, both echo and anticipate Lynch. Atkins’s “shadowed portraits” evoke a mode of seeing whose objects stand for, and thereby symbolise, an absence which, at the same time, they seek to disavow. A body or a room translated into the “previously unseen activity” of the camera, the dark place behind the eye, the “escaped frames from a film.”3 These objects are the “Teratologists” that inhabit the technics of the photographic image the way the “Mystery Man” in Lost Highway inhabits the “continuity” of Lynch’s cinematography – as a type of prosthetic agent directing the way we see. The Teratologists, Atkins says, are “creators of uncertainty and desire. Within a dark room, a place of memory, a curtain momentarily blows open. The glance of light from beyond the window exposes the previously unseen activity of the room: sculptural forms, shadowed portraits, escaped frames from a film…” 2. In Equivalents, Atkins – working between abandoned factory locations in London and, as Lynch later would, Łódź – creates interior parallel worlds, images within images, lost, obscured or reconstituted, their contours bleeding, visually over-saturated, into a “de-pictive” space or “depictive” time that has no other location than the image. 3 Marc Atkins, The Teratologists (London: Panoptika, 1998). 27 Atkins, from Equivalents The image of the flash obliterates the identity of the model. An auto-portrait of the photographer whose face is held close to an illuminated lightbulb (this motif repeats elsewhere) lies on the floor. (The illusion here of a staged reflexivity, that we must come to recognise that the image of the camera is no more the spectre in the photograph than this “double” exposure is in the camera…) … A torn photograph of a woman’s face nailed to a brick wall above a heavily eroded sign: “AMONIAK.” One half of the face is entirely in shadow, the other half over-exposed. The shadow of the nail falls across the sign, cancelling it out: a cancelled sign, an anti-portrait…4 28 But where Lynch enlists his setting to the relentless hysteria that drives Inland Empire, Atkins explores an entirely different sense of “menace” which stems not from the dissociative proliferation of “parallel realities,” but from an invasive entropy. The light that unexpectedly exposes the “action” within the room is, in fact, a kind of rigor mortis whereby the image, as Atkins says, is held. The visible assumes its cadaverous form. If The Teratolists invites the spectator to envisage a crime-in-progress, or a crime-about-to-happen, Equivalents evokes crime-scenes after the fact, forensic photography, missing persons bureaus, the placards and portraits of the “disappeared” 4 Louis Armand, “Equivalence Relation,” Interstice (London: Panoptika, 2002). Atkins, Equivalents; Joel-Peter Witkin, Testicle Stretch with Possibility of Crushed Face (1999) worn by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires (or anywhere that “disappearance” isn’t a metaphor but a general condition). With their neo-noir, colour-saturated aesthetic of motel rooms and venetian-blind chiaroscuro, Equivalents’ images-within-images create a topology of implied or implicated space in lieu of “presences.” The image is withheld. If Teratologists reads like a writ of habeas corpus, Equivalents rests (or rather unrests) on the false adage that in order for there to be a crime, there has to be a corpse. Where Teratologists gives the impression of having been recorded (staged) in a single studio, Equivalents distributes its locations globally: London, Łódź, Berlin, Paris, New York, Stuttgart, Cambridge. In a recent series published in VLAK magazine, entitled Journey through a City, Atkins extends this conceit in a series of locational shots that, at first glance, appear entirely bereft of life. These images no longer evoke crime scenes in which a photograph-within-a-photograph standsin for the missing body, rather they suggest themselves as parts of some larger body: not a body-in-place, but a body of dis-place-ment (a psychogeography in celluloid stitched together with surgical twine – the “teratology” of this abnormal anatomy). Again, as in Equivalents, the “locations” are dis-placed: London, Warsaw, Paris, Munich, Katowice, Bratislava, but this time the aesthetic resonance is less neo- than proto-noir, strongly suggestive of tarnished daguerreotype, or early photogravure, but predominantly 29 Atkins, Journey through a City 30 urban: the remains of habitations after all human life has disappeared, perhaps. The word “exposure” looms large here, evoking the mortuary timescale of Daguerre’s Paris or Fenton’s Crimea, along with Joel-Peter Witkin’s postmortem assemblages, in which the entire dynamic of the image spirals out of a type of internal entropy: the high visibility of these images seems born out of a paradoxical (it seems) cannibalisation of presence. Journey through a City, with its deep-focus black and white (the very opposite of Lynch: think Citizen Cain meets Louis-Ferdinand Céline), embodies a contradiction that the spectator cannot help but experience from the very first: the exquisite detail captured by Atkins’ lens digitally overlaid by “tarnish”: traces, if you like, not simply of an implied body (absent) in (or from) “place,” but a time-body. Where Equivalents employed a form of montage to produce its effect, Journey through a City draws upon a “base materialism” which is both of the medium and ALSO a simulation of itself. “Through images as cracks in the superstructure,” Atkins writes, “I will suggest to you more than you immediately see.”5 Where Lynch’s work makes explicit appeal to the pornographic image as mannerist “fetish,” and exploits that level of desire (and disconcertion) in his viewers, Atkins puts on view the necrophiliac impulse that ultimately underwrites all such appeal: the object of desire, unattainable as it may be in conventional wisdom, is always mortified, or rather a mortification: a mortification, so to say, of desire itself. This adds to the implied meaning of “equivalents” in Atkins’ work – echoing, for example, the equivalence in 5 Marc Atkins, “Journey through a City,” VLAK 5 (2015): 282. Warhol achieved in juxtaposition between the “Death and Disaster” series and the “Marilyns” – exposing the capacity of entropy to surround itself with light (like Warhol, Atkins’ work might also be read as a “critique” of commodity death, if it weren’t also much more than that – entropy, after all, is impervious to critique, the real difficulty is understanding its omnipresence as possibility and as the limit of the possible: time and the irreversibility of time… the held image). In short, Atkins works at the limits of representability – as all good artists must – but in his case, the question is not simply one of acceding to or resisting one or another mimetic ideology, but of examining what gives rise to the impulse to “represent,” so to speak, or equally what makes it (“representation”) impossible: why it is that the history of photography is not so much the history of an illusion, but of an “unrealisable desire” (the only kind, in any case). 3. Just as pathology implies the idea of the normal, so the “uncanny” implies a habitude, and a habituation – yet these terms are in no sense opposable. The mark of the perverse is not a descent into aberration, but the obsessive, domineering work of correction; of discipline; of normalisation, and hypernormalisation, in the service of an ideal object. The sexualised logic of taboo and transgression venerates order and derives its pleasure principally from it; but order in a ritualistic, stylised and austere form which masks its own ridiculousness. Just as, in the economy of the pornographic image, what is on view is not some obscure object of desire but precisely its conventionality, its generic rationalism, its fetishisation by way of a type of “autistic cult” of signs. Lynch, Women & Machines; Couch Series 31 32 But what does it mean to speak of a pornographic image, if by pornographic we mean an image which merely depicts; an image whose form is laid bare to expose a forbidden “content” and is in fact nothing more than a veil of insubstantial signs superimposed upon the thing itself (the pornographic idée fixe)? There is obviously no point in naming or attempting to catalogue what this thing is: it will always ultimately escape us, however banal it may be made to appear; knowing that this fascination with anatomical detail conveys nothing but a pseudo-physiology, whose eroticisation is fugitively metaphysical. If such a thing as the pornographic image exists, it could only be an “image” whose form, whose very technicity, lays bare the “cause of desire in which the subject disappears”6 – annihilated, as Jean Baudrillard says, by transparency.7 Not a transparency which allows us “to see with clarity,” but which puts on view the very operations of seeing, in the conjunction of porneīa and graphē: the libidinal economy of visible signs. This eroticisation of seeing is first and foremost technological. The “object” is not some thing we perceive by means of a picture or image – as though films, photographs or “mental concepts” are mere instruments – it, the object, is rather an imaginary prosthesis. Just as we might say the ego is a prosthesis of the unconscious. Which is to say, of a certain “libido” whose operations take form at the level of a fantasised real – as a type of “videodrome.”8 Such a view calls to mind Bazin’s wellknown observation that “the quarrel over realism in art stems from a misunderstanding, from a confusion between the aesthetic and the psychological”9 – a misunderstanding exacerbated by the production of images by mechanical and “automatic means.” Photography accedes to the pornographic at that instant in which it is no longer seen as a mere depiction of, or even substitute for, the so-called real, but as its expropriation – its 6 Jaques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966) 10. Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996) 7. 8 David Cronenberg, Videodrome, 1983. 9 André Bazin, What is Cinema, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) 12. 7 4. A camera. Lights and smoke. A body defined by increments. Mouth, legs, breasts, eyes blacked-out like the eyes in a crime scene photograph. A warp of the lens, a blurred movement, a smear. Exposures multiply, overlaid with shadows. A décor in weird chiaroscuro, building the oppressive density of an image. In 1994, Lynch produced a colour photo series entitled “Nudes and Smoke,” one of several projects that extend Lynch’s preoccupations beyond the confines of cinema, followed by other series organised along similar themes such as the 2008 “Couch Series” and “Women and Machines” (2013). These photographs, highly textured, explore the paradoxical obscurity and clarity of smoke 10 Bazin, What is Cinema, 14. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (New York: Zone Books, 1995). 11 Lynch, from Nudes & Smoke de-piction within the operations of the visual – a “transference of reality,” as Bazin says, leading him to observe that the “photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it… it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.”10 It is not for nothing that Marx had earlier defined the logic of the commodity in similar terms, or that Guy Debord will have synthesised these two views in his dialectical ontology of the spectacle.11 Nor that in each case the expropriatory function (of the photographic image, of the commodity, of spectacle) will have come to be equated with that of the fetish. 33 Lynch, from Inland Empire; from Nudes and Smoke 34 captured on film, and its capacity to transform bodies and objects into compositions of surface and depth, both spatially and temporally. The figure of the nude is redistributed as a quality of the medium as such, rather than of the pictorial “object.” The body is rendered as a locus of intensities, shadow and exposure, doubled in the framing and arrangement of the image’s “décor,” and by the infinitely complex topologies of smoke. In short, “Nudes and Smoke” achieves nothing less than a photographic articulation of its supposed subject. The words “nude” and “smoke” could just as easily stand for the texture of the image as image – not as terms designating exterior objects, but as a poetics of light, aperture, celluloid, retina; the whole complex of technical operations by which we come to perceive an image and not (or not simply) a verisimilitude of objects fixed on a type of screen. Nor just to perceive, but ultimately to be visually aroused, through that curious and disquieting conjunction of apprehension and apprehensiveness: the eye’s desire to possess and consume, and the evanescent, fleeting, yet fixed, overwhelming and threatening aspect of that desire itself made manifest before us. The “image” for Lynch is this whole pornographic drama of desire played-out, as it were, in the theatre of the eye. “A dream of strange desires wrapped inside a mystery story.”12 The framework of the image becomes a stage in which the object functions primarily as a type of prop: the aim here is not depiction in any straightforward sense, but rather an embodiment. The pictorial object, the “model,” 12 Lynch’s description of Blue Velvet (1986) in Lynch on Lynch, ed. Chris Rodley (London: Faber, 2005) 138. is here the prosthesis of the explicitly photographic body. Its objecthood is expropriated (de-picted) to the fetish economy of the image as image.13 But if we choose to entertain the idea that Lynch’s work, his photography and also his films, participates in this perhaps eccentric notion of pornography, then it is easy to see the danger implicit in the many attempts to view Lynch (in Blue Velvet, 1986; Lost Highway, 1997; Mulholland Drive, 2001), as more or less illustrating a psychoanalytical orthodoxy. 5. Myth, Roland Barthes once wrote, “is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits to myth, there are no ‘substantial’ ones.”14 It is for this reason, Barthes continues, that anything at all may be a myth. Myth is realisable not in the things themselves, but as a potentiality to signify; which is to say, discourse. And this potentiality is both medium-bound and generalisable, as a formal condition. Even if we attribute a certain formlessness to media per se: the necessary degree of formlessness of situations in flux, of evolutionary pathways. Myth, discourse, evolve, just as technology and neuroses evolve. It is for this reason, too, that myth stands at the horizon wherever a future comes into view, as an expressible idea. But the future, naked of fantasy and hypothesis, has no content, only potentialities, or rather probabilities. It is the formalisation of ideas that conveys “content.” The medium – as what Barthes calls a semiological system – not only constitutes the message, but inaugurates it. “There is no point identifying the world,” says Baudrillard. “We cannot even identify our own faces, since mirrors impair their symmetry. To see our own face as it is would be madness, since we would no longer have any mystery for ourselves and would, therefore, be 13 We are in fact confronted here with a kind of revelation that the fetish is not a sign that masks a “lack” since, in any case, a lack is always symbolic. Rather, it masks the “absence” of a lack (the fetish is only castrative, to borrow the Freudean term, in the absence of castration). The fetish’s ritualisation of desire displaces and reifies into situations the very logic of the mask, by which the image assumes what we might call a persona. 14 Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Vintage, 2000) 109. 35 Lynch and Louboutin, from Fetish 36 annihilated by transparency. Might it not be said that man has evolved into a form such that his face remains invisible to him and he becomes definitively unidentifiable, not only in the mystery of his face, but in any of his desires?”15 How to see with clarity that, after all, it is the mirror that is the face of the world? And on the other side of the mirror: no things, but forms of transparency, radiating into myth. The error is in believing that anything here is no longer. Nothing evolves into a form; evolution is form. Formalisation – the desire for system – is simply the restitution of a primal objecthood, the reification of myth into cliché and archetype by way of inversion (the message is the medium). The desire for identification, “to see our own face,” becomes the horror of “transparency.” Defending our “selves” from madness, we cling to mystery. And from mystery to necessity, “evolving” towards a definitive state of unidentifiability. Which indeed bears all the hallmarks of the pathological, not because it implies that the sole defence against a type of madness is to relinquish the idea of reality, 15 Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime 7. My italics. Lynch and Louboutin, from Fetish but because it insists upon an idea of the normal. What we are confronted with here is this invocation of a redemptive perverse. That in the face of “reality’s” dissolution, or of some empirical limit of our knowing anything about it, a condition of the “normal” can nevertheless be reconstituted through the dogmatic? hysterical? assertion of its impossibility. Veiled in signs, the real becomes that unknowable thing that sends forth its avatars in the guise of a “system of objects.” But objects which have always already disappeared. We live, says Baudrillard, on the basis of an unreality. Reality “itself” does not take place. But having said so, one presumes to know the difference, or that there is a difference; that there was a point of access to the real which preceded this disappearance behind the symbolic. Unless it is the contrary, that the real everywhere makes itself into appearance wherever depiction fails. 6. In March 2007, Lynch commissioned well-known couturier Christian Louboutin to design some shoes for an exhibition he was curating for the Cartier Foundation. In 37 Lynch & Louboutin, Fetish 38 return, Louboutin proposed a collaboration with Lynch for a second exhibition, for which he planned to create a series of extreme fetish shoes which Lynch would then photograph. The resulting installation, entitled simply Fetish, opened 3 October in Paris, in Pierre Passebon’s Galerie du Passage, near the Palais Royal. The exhibition comprised five limited edition pairs of shoes and signed photographs of the shoes modelled by two nude dancers from the Crazy Horse cabaret (“Nouka” and “Baby”). While Lynch’s photographs for the Fetish exhibition have been compared to the work of, among others, Guy Bourdin and Francis Bacon, they retain a particularly Lynchian quality, though only in part due to the familiar vocabulary of constricted space, color-saturation and lighting (“a décor populated with shadows”). If in many of Lynch’s films the moving image often appears weighted down to the point of immobility, the tableaux in Fetish exhibit a weirdly ethereal kinetics. Kinetic not solely by virtue of the similitude of effect (the movement of the camera, the distortions of a warped, unfocused lens, the use of multiple exposure and stop-motion), but through the disjunction between the agitated visuality of the images and the rigid constraint David Cronenberg, Videodrome; Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (The Archers), publicity still for Red Shoes imposed by the eponymous fetish as both object and idea. Louboutin’s shoes (10 inch stilettos, Siamese heels, spikes on the instep, etc.) by themselves represent a type of functional enigma – recalling Meret Oppenheim’s “Ma Gouvernante” (1936) and “La Couple” (1956), in which the aesthetics of rigid constraint and bodily distortion are allegorically condensed into the sculptural transfiguration of the “shoes” themselves. Like Oppenheim’s “sculptures,” the forms of bondage implied by Louboutin’s shoes are no longer those of a body subjected to a sort of sadomasochistic discipline, but rather those of a fixation. Like Moira Shearer’s red ballet shoes in The Archers’s 1948 film. We witness the accession of the thing to the status of autonomous object – mysteriously acting on its own behalf, and not only acting but subjecting us to its “will.” In Red Shoes, Shearer’s character is, as it were, traversed by a type of alien ego: her shoes dance her. Her own actions become intransitive, as though some demon in the shoes had come to inhabit her against her will, exposing the horror of a mind trapped, imprisoned or in bondage, doll-like within a body, a situation or environment which acts for it, like a secret, irrational, external intelligence. In Lynch’s photographs, this logic of the fetish as both object and agent is transferred onto the images themselves. Louboutin’s shoes become merely conventional signifiers of a fetish genre, for which the naked bodies of “Nouka” and “Baby” serve as compositional props. The images summon forth a paradox, between an excess of conventionality and excess as such, evoking a kind of vertigo. There is something in these images that recalls Roquentin’s moment of epiphany in La nausée16 – the eye’s disquietude, its mortification, its uncharacteristic inertia, brought to the verge of something that contradicts and overwhelms it. Something that renders the eye naked. 7. “I like to remember things my own way… Not necessarily the way they happened.” In Lost Highway, the eye that sees is constantly under threat of its gaze being returned 16 Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938). 39 by some externalised agency: images on a video tape, the Mystery Man’s camera, the feedback loop of telephones, intercoms, interior architectures, parallel worlds, doubles, reflections, reality gaps. Inertia, entropy, static blur the division between memory and “what happens.” There are ghosts in the cinematic machine: the eye becomes the prosthesis of an inverted desire to see, an automaton into which it is absorbed by way of an unrelenting enervation. Early in the film we “see” – at the end of a long tracking shot – Fred Madison kneeling beside the naked, bloodied corpse of his wife, Renée. We “see” his silent scream. Something splitting apart. The footage is from a video tape – one of a series of three – that has mysteriously turned up on the doorstep of the Madison house. According to the script: On the tape is the same night-time interior of the house, accompanied by the DRONING SOUND. The camera moves eerily down the hall toward the bedroom, sliding at a high angle. The camera turns slowly into the bedroom – looking down. 40 BLOOD is splattered over the floor, bed, walls. The camera drifts. THE DEAD BODY OF RENEE lies on the floor at the foot of the bed. She is badly mutilated. Fred is hovering over her on the tape, ON HIS KNEES, A HORRIFIED, UNBELIEVING EXPRESSION ON HIS FACE. On the tape, Fred turns away from Renee – his hands raised, dripping blood – her blood. His movements are almost mechanical, constricted, as he strains strangely upwards seemingly against his will, as if feeling some enormous pressure. He looks directly at the camera, his face a ghastly grimace, contorted, just before the taped image goes to snow. The video image remains opaque, almost impenetrable, as though what is being presented has nothing whatsoever to do with the two figures in the frame. The camera’s point of view, high up near the ceiling, creates a type of anamorphosis which seemingly distorts what we see at the same time as it “reveals” the geometry of how we see. The nakedness of the corpse becomes the “sign” of a more deadening nakedness: the mortification of the eye exposed Helmut-Newton, David Lynch & Isabella Rosselini (1992) to its own interior illusionism. The image is no longer simply that of a naked object, but also of the rigidifying fixation of the eye’s “desire to see more” – from Elysium to basso inferno. If the brief video footage of Fred beside Renée’s corpse suggests an allegory of Madison’s divided personality, it is also a kind of allegory of this division of seeing, in which the image stands as an immoveable blind-spot that we encounter only by indirection – a topology of dislocated affect. And yet it is solely by means of this blind that we see. Nothing, no “truth,” is lost in the medium, as it were. It is not a question of verifying or not verifying that what we see in the video of Fred and Renée’s corpse is what we think it is, or what Fred thinks it is. Like Isabella Rossellini/Dorothy Vallens’s body in Blue Velvet – and the “blue velvet” that acts as its metonym – we are never close to the nakedness it seems to present to us more than at the moment our own seeing enters into 41 the obsessive, violent iteration of the object coupled to its negation: Dorothy’s unnaturally red mouth juxtaposed, in Jeffrey Beaumont’s disturbed memory, with the distorted mask of Frank Booth’s psychosis. Here we see at work the particular violence by which a radical découpage evokes an equally visceral and intellectual sado-masochism; its alienation-effect constituting the spectator (the voyeur) as subjection to – we might say – the desire of the image. The nakedness of the image is always an interstice – something into which the visualisation of desire is constantly projected in a type of pornographic monomania. Within this economy it is the medium itself which is the “fetish” – the invisible deus-ex-machina whose myriad avatars traverse the surface of the eye in an unrelenting equivalence of a de-picted pure object, of an “object which is not an object.”17 But this “object which is not an object” continues, as Baudrillard says, to obsess “by its empty, immaterial presence” while threatening at the same time to materialise its very nothingness.18 This then would be the essence of the pornographic image: that in place of a “subject” there is only subjection; in place of an object there is only this prosthesis of seeing, absorbed into itself in the form, perhaps, of an impossible exchange; the libidinal economy of an eye that desires only what it cannot see. 42 *A version of this article appeared in Marc Atkins, ed. Michel Delville (Collections artistiques de l’Université de Liège, 2015) & in Sonder magazine (September 2015). 17 Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 6. This transcendental weirdness has its echoes, too, in Lynch’s off-screen presence – by way of the David Lynch Foundation for ConsciousnessBased Education and World Peace. One recent example would be the surrealism of the Taufelsberg fiasco and the subsequent efforts of Lynch’s lawyers to remove footage of the event from the internet under section 512(c)(3) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 18 Robert Smithson, A Heap of Language (1966) LUGUBRIOUS COMPLEXITY BRAXTON | SOLLERS | BARTHES | SMITHSON C’est un espace-temps, un son-sens, un écrit-vu-calculénié qui se signifie dans son frayage et, simultanément, signifie ses bords infinis, neuve de l’histoire, rives éparses de l’inconscient. Le vieux Joyce a fait parvenir son Anna Livia jusqu’à l’océan. H, voilà, c’est un peu d’hydrogène pour le monde futur : pas une recherche du temps perdu, une irrigation-vibration de milliers de « temps », chantés, chuchotés, criés, nettement et distinctement, une foule de fugues, j’ai envie de dire le feu du repos, l’en-trop. —Philippe Sollers1 Recorded in February 1969 and released as a double album the following year, Chicago jazzman Anthony Braxton’s debut, For Alto, represented a landmark in the development of free jazz, distinguished by Braxton’s minimalist choice of unaccompanied alto sax with no studio overdubbing. Braxton’s alignment with the contemporary musical avantgarde was clearly signalled by his dedication of one of the album’s tracks to John Cage, whose advocacy of chance compositional procedures and his close association with artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns indicates the kind of aesthetic-critical continuum in which Braxton sought to situate his own work (he would, for example, later record pieces for two pianos, five tubas, four amplified shovels, an orchestra and four slide projectors, even music for four orchestras). Along with Steve Lacy, Ornette Coleman, John Zorn and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Braxton’s early recordings had a decisive impact on the postmodernist wave of 1970s 1 Philippe Sollers, “A propos de l’avant-garde,” Interview with Marc Devade in Peinture, cahiers théoriques 6/7 (Spring 1973). 43 Art Ensemble of Chicago with Anthony Braxton & Frank Lowe (New York, 1975) 44 jazz. The reach of Braxton’s compositions was eclectic, to say the least, embracing both European and AfricanAmerican traditions, incorporating influences from Cage, Stockhausen, Reich, Glass and Webern, alongside Coltrane, Brubeck, Monk and Albert Ayler. It was an approach geared to generating almost universal antipathy from within the contemporary jazz establishment: they didn’t like the style of his music, his hair, his sweater, or the pipe he smoked. He looked more like a philosopher than a musician, a musicologist more than a jazzman. And when at the end of the sixties he moved to Paris, it was perhaps for these same reasons that Braxton attracted the attention of the bête noir of the French intelligentsia – a controversial writer still little known at that time in the English-speaking world, but whose interventions (as editor of the highly influential journal Tel Quel) would soon have a decisive impact on cultural criticism in the US and elsewhere. Philippe Sollers, the writer in question, responded to Braxton’s determined effort at abolishing the artificial distinctions that surrounded musical “genres.” In an interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Gerard Bourgadier in December 1978,2 Sollers identified Braxton’s “subversive encyclopaedism” as the key to his attraction, in particular the breadth of Braxton’s preoccupation with “completely new forms… which pose the problem of a kind of subjectivity that hasn’t existed before.” This, Sollers argued, placed Braxton in a relationship not only with composers such as Stockhausen, but also writers such as Joyce, since Braxton’s experimentations brought to light “other forms of thought” that are both rigorous and highly elaborated without adhering to an epistemology, articulating instead “a violent desire of a BEING THERE” of a body at the moment it expresses itself. A body, as Julia Kristeva will have written, that is also a text. 3 Braxton’s time in Paris happened to overlap with a hiatus in the publication of Sollers’s loose “trilogy” of experimental novels written in the aftermath of the 1968 student uprising – Nombres, Lois and H. The latter, arguably the most radical of the three, was composed during Braxton’s first two Paris sojourns, between 1969 and 1971.4 In September ’69, Braxton recorded This Time with Leo Smith and Leroy Jenkins at the Paris studios of BYG/Actuel: the album’s “imploding categories” were regarded by no less than the Situationists as “the most accurate – most direct, least theoretic – expression of May ’68”5 – a counter-punch to the already banal “spectacle” of capitalist normalisation, as Guy Debord saw it, in which “all that was once directly 2 Published in Tel Quel 80 (Summer, 1979): 10-37. Julia Kristeva, “Novel as Polylogue,” Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. L.S. Roudiez, trans. T. Gora, A. Jardine and L.S. Roudiez (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980) 163: “This heterogeneous object is of course a body that invites me to identify with it [...] and immediately forbids any identification; it is not me, it is a non-me in me, beside me, outside of me, where the me becomes lost. This heterogeneous object is a body, because it is a text.” 4 In 1970 Braxton, perhaps emulating Marcel Duchamp, briefly gave up music upon returning to the US and worked as a chess hustler in New York’s Washington Square Park while living in the apartment of Ornette Coleman. 5 Ben Watson, Honesty is Explosive: Selected Music Journalism, ed. W.C. Bamberger (London: Borgo, 2010) 105 (on Kevin Norton, For Guy Debord (In Nine Events), Barking Hoop BKH001 CD). 3 45 Soller’s notations on Webern for H; Braxton’s notations for improvisers, from Composition #108B (1984) 46 lived has become mere representation.”6 The recording had an important impact on Sollers, too (who at times has aired his affinities with Debord and the Situationists), perhaps even a decisive one with regard to the form his work-inprogress, H, would eventually take. In Sollers’s interview with Houdebine and Bourgadier the question of “influence” somewhat inevitably arises. Bourgadier notes, “re-reading Lois, H, Paradis one can find correspondences between the evolution of your writing and that of free jazz.” To which Sollers’s replies, “C’est ça…” The correspondence Bourgadier has in mind is the effect produced by the absence of punctuation in H (it’s still present in Lois). A comparison is made to Coltrane, whose playing is described by Bourgadier as a “continuous flux, without pause…” before going on to note a direct reference to Braxton in Paradis (which was being serialised in Tel Quel at the time). The idea that an unpunctuated “flow” of text somehow approximates the “flux” of Coltrane’s saxophone solos, or the free form of Braxton’s, is of course trivial – the absence of punctuation in H is only the book’s most obvious characteristic. Sollers himself points to a more syntactical and schematic relationship: the way in which, for example, Braxton’s phrasing represents a certain “immediacy” whereby different modes of repetition are used to produce effects of cumulative intensity and drama, out of which some sort of “code” emerges – an “absolutely 6 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (New York: Zone Books, [1967] 1995). singular code,” as Sollers says – like the emissions of an electro-cardio-encephalogram. It’s no accident, either, that H begins with an invocation to “the machine” (but not to any ordinary machine – for Sollers’s “electro-cardioencephalogram” is a subject machine, a writing machine7: like jazz it produces a “direct interpellation, a DIRECT appeal” to the necessity of dealing with “what can be done symbolically with one’s body” – by means, we might say, of a certain instrumentation). This echoes a view expressed by Roland Barthes in his 1973 review of H, entitled “Over Your Shoulder” – the fourth of six articles he would eventually publish on Sollers’s work.8 “Writing,” Barthes suggests, “(in total contrast here to ‘literature’) is the tension of the body trying to produce language which cannot be situated (it is the dream of a degree zero of discourse).”9 For Barthes, Sollers’s dispensing with punctuation is not a simple mimesis of the modernist cliché of the “stream of consciousness,” rather it marks an insistence upon a non-situated status of language. The text, like the body, is articulated by movements, torsions, tensions, moods, rhythms, cadences – it functions in a kind of symbiosis with its own coming apart. And by consequence, it causes a reading that on the one hand constantly intercedes in itself, constantly adjusts, rectifies itself like homoeostatic device; and on the other, accedes in itself to what Barthes calls “different rhythms of intelligence.”10 Articulated rather than “structured.” It’s not so much that H lacks punctuation, as that what “punctuates” is both intransitive (in the sense of being a textual agency) and in a state of constant genesis. This punctuation or its perceived absence becomes a figure of “comprehending” the text, by experiencing it, rather than directing and pre-empting understanding through merely observing it; it dis-objectifies itself. It’s in this respect that Sollers’s 7 Philippe Sollers, H, trans. Veronika Stankiovanská and David Vichnar (London: Equus, 2014) 56. 8 First published in Critique 318 (November 1973); rpr. in Roland Barthes, Sollers Ecrivain (Paris: Seuil, 1979); English translation by Philip Thody in Writer Sollers (London: Athlone, 1987). 9 Barthes, “Over Your Shoulder,” Writer Sollers, 82. 10 Barthes, “Over Your Shoulder,” 89. 47 48 text most bears comparison to Braxton’s “phrasing,” for example, or what Barthes calls “syntactic movements, scraps of intelligibility, stains of language.” But while Barthes draws a further comparison, to the “calligraphy” of Jackson Pollock – perhaps due to the “all-over” character of Pollock’s drip paintings and Sollers’s “undifferentiated” textual fields – a more convincing analogy might be made to Rauschenberg’s combines or Roberts Smithson’s sites, non-sites, displacements and “monuments.” In any case, the point Barthes seeks to make is that structure, too, is a kind of rhetorical edifice, and that what we call punctuation is a grammatic formalization of what is in fact a generalized poetics. For Sollers, as for Braxton, the punctual is a trope – a mode of articulation: the accumulation, looping, bifurcating, permutation, and “allover” arrangement of phrasing. In contrast to which, “the aim of all structure,” as Barthes puts it, “is to constitute a fiction… a ‘theoretical ghost.’”11 This fiction sustains the composite fiction of “readability,” “comprehension,” “understanding” – whereas in fact, readability is always a matter of potentiality, of the possibility of the text, which must, as it were, be “realised,” just as comprehending and understanding, too, remain first and foremost experiential, which is to say experimental, and not something foreclosed by the promise of a certain “lucidity” simply by way of grammatical rectitude. “Structure,” in this sense, is for Barthes “a little bit like hysteria. If you pay attention to it, it becomes a reality. If you pretend to ignore it, it goes away.” The distinction can be likened to the signifying logic of the Freudian dream work, which is above all “poetic” (metaphor, metonymy), as opposed to literal/symbolic. “There are,” Barthes writes, “in fact two sorts of phenomenon: those which stand up to being looked at (the realm of ‘what is secret’) and those which are produced by being looked at (the realm of ‘what is for show’).”12 The “image” represented by H’s typography is thus a kind of non-image, an image caught in its own genesis as representation: “a whirlwind of language… organised 11 12 Barthes, “Over Your Shoulder,” 89 – my emphasis. Barthes, “Over Your Shoulder,” 89 – my emphasis. into a splendid series of irrelevancies.” Or, to return to Sollers’s metaphor of the electro-cardio-encephalogram, it is “a moving, electrified screen, on which no representation stands out…”13 If H is a type of subject machine this is precisely because it is a machine that produces a generalised objectlessness. (It writes in the intransitive sense Barthes fixes upon in his well-known essay.) It isn’t so much a question of the ontological status of the “text” (viz André Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image, from a decade previous),14 as of its genesis, its articulation – what Donald Judd referred to laconically as “one thing after another” emptied of “rationalism” and resistant to the impulse to organise “what seems on the surface merely an incoherent array of phenomena.”15 Obvious analogies can again be made the work of Rauschenberg, as well as to Duchamp and the sculptor Jean Tingely, whose self-constructing, selfdestroying machines (such as “Homage to New York” [7 March 1960]) seem to parallel Sollers’s sardonic, sarcastic, satirical “machines” in that they “produce” nothing other than their own non-production (they do not contribute work to the maintenance of “the spectacle”). Anti-allegorical, they “communicate” nothing. Or more precisely, they display a radically entropic orientation. Here is Sollers in the opening passage of H: who says hello the machine with its bandy legs its deformed side cata bases its stiff press buttons tonic accents outside the stanza she dreamed tonight that i was throwing a ball very high and very far it’s never gonna stop it lights up passing the hoops meridians arranged rounder when it traverses them and here’s the bomb that tumbles back Twelve pages further we find: my idea of control by spontaneous repression it only takes the state to gobble itself up in the viscera that it be here 13 Barthes, “Over Your Shoulder,” 81; 75. André Bazin, “Ontologie de L’Image Photographique,” Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol 1: Ontologie et langage (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1958). 15 Rosalind Krauss, “The Double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture,” Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977) 245. 14 49 patient at the time triangle of the stacked pyramid the block machine works shit that’s not gonna happen any time soon that we’ll be able to twist our mess acutely ourselves year by year it’s like the return of jesus Sollers’s “idea of control by spontaneous repression” (an echo of the Freudian “return of the [sainted] repressed”), introduces into writing an elemental constraint that does not emanate from an “abstract model through which to depict the organisation of matter.”16 Its subversion of Cartesian “subjectivity” is likewise a subversion of what, to paraphrase Duchamp, we might call “retinal” prose: H is not a vehicle of expression – its syntax interferes with what Barthes calls the hierarchical systems at work in sentenceformation which might otherwise restore the consensual hallucination of “subjective expression” or “communicated sense”17: “force them,” it incites, “to spit the bite on the well-known relations language machine.”18 This is what Barthes means, vis-à-vis Sollers, by “the radical nonexpressivity of textual writing.” Sollers: the shiny negative beginning of the division let’s go the night’ll be long the lights’re going out we break the terror the machinery type you’ll splash about in the bidet they’ve done you in ama ama fuck quod vis the only forbidden thing is to consume the sexual difference raw and without knowing anything smash the glass one touches at the source at the engulfing of the rowers you understand it’s there the contradiction becomes the engine species19 50 Sollers’s “engine species” is what we might call this subject in writing, this constellated ensemble of readymades that Todorov, already in 1966, described as a “pattern of events” as against a “psychology.” (And it is perhaps in this sense, after all, that we should understand Harold Rosenberg’s frequently misconstrued appeal to painting 16 Krauss, “The Double Negative,” 245. That “infinite weaving of narcissisms” – Philippe Sollers, Femmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), loosely quoting from Julia Kristeva’s essay “Novel as Polylogue” (originally published in Tel Quel 57 [1974]). 18 Sollers, H, 106. 19 Sollers, H, 29. 17 51 A page from the manuscript of Lois (1972) [for which we may substitute “writing”] as event, as an inscription of “subjectivity,” as an action.) What we encounter in Sollers’s text, then, is the very contrary of an organisation scheme; instead we are presented with what, in an obvious provocation to Structuralism, could be called an “organisational tropism.” life wraps death death hatches life i’m a picture i’m a rug i’m a machine and the picture of the machine and the machination of the picture20 H is a text that, like Duchamp, like Cage and Rauschenberg, like Braxton, stakes everything, in a manner of speaking, on the severance of “meaning” from the “legitimising claims” both of the ideology of form (art/music/literature) and of a “private self.”21 The “work” represents a nexus of contingencies, significations that, as Merleau-Ponty says, are “parallel in depth.”22 Its readymade “terms” arise tropically from “differences” (Sollers’s “contradictions”) which are “like” machines set into motion, the generators of forms not despite but because of their constitutive entropy. Sollers: if assemblage is fortuitous the exit doesn’t end up the same depending on the context depending on whether the machine-operator is close enough to natural elements depending on whether he’s on the contrary in industrial commercial entanglement… In his 1966 article for Artforum, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Robert Smithson wrote: Questions about form seem as hopelessly inadequate as questions about content. Problems are unnecessary because problems represent values that create the illusion of purpose. The problem of “form vs. content,” for example, leads to illusionistic dialectics that become, at best, formalist reactions against content. Reaction follows action, till finally the artist gets “tired” and settles for a monumental inaction.23 52 Smithson – responding to the new minimalist sculpture being produced at that time by Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Sol Le Witt and Dan Flavin – points to what he calls a “hyper-prosaism” rooted in the materiality of the 20 Sollers, H, 35. Krauss, “The Double Negative,” 226. 22 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) xii. 23 Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Artforum (June 1966): 26. 21 Robert Smithson, Monuments of Passaic (1967) work itself and not in any object or mode of depiction. These “primary structures” throw into heightened contrast the “lugubrious complexity” of Debord’s society of the spectacle, with its all-encompassing “consumer oblivion,” giving rise, for Smithson, to a “new consciousness of the vapid and the dull.” As Warhol had earlier pointed out, the artefacts of consumerism, while designed to convey the message of their own uniqueness, are ostensibly the same thing repeated over and over. This dictum applies to all such artefacts, including literary artefacts, which are no less a product of “spectacularism” than anything else. For Warhol, the response was to pursue an aesthetics and a mode of production not ostensibly the same, but exactly the same (while still incorporating chance deviations, etc.). Smithson’s hyper-prosaism, likewise focused on the hidden, entropic mechanics of the “spectacle,” explored the monumentality of “decay.” Arguing that entropy was the true defining characteristic of modernity, Smithson reversed the conventional notion of “decay” as a deviation from “structure,” advancing the contrary view that entropy is in fact the sole constant generative condition of whatever can be called “form.” The “new monuments,” exemplified for Smithson by the industrial “ruins” of Passaic, New Jersey, are “the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’” because they don’t fall into ruin after they are built, but rather rise into ruin before they are built. Echoes of this deconstructed Romanticism find their way into H, which itself operates as a kind of monument to linguistic entropy. Sollers: to make a corolla for the smoking chimney stifle the screams of the workers the noise of the ovens cisterns milling machines balers turning machines chains trolleys guns hammers all in all a poetic thought bourgeoisie 53 dreaming in acid cut fingers laughter sobbing and the women near the greenhouses stretched-out from the other side of proletarian cloakrooms doubtless excited idle by the boring voices last days of the empire waste of sleep we take the coffee on the background of machines in the shade of young blooming girls along the mountain ranges24 54 For Sollers, the apparent depletion of meaning is likewise refigured in the “hyper-prosaism” of socalled expressive (e.g. novelistic) forms. H “exemplifies” not the decay of meaning, sense, readability, but precisely the contrary – that, as cyberneticists had revealed already in the 1940s, “the information in any fact is in inverse proportion to its probability…” Vast swathes of socalled realism were, in effect, redundant, empty, products of a “spectacular” lugubriosity shoring up its ruin. Like Smithson, Sollers’s “retrieval of obsolescence,”25 so to speak, hinges on an “entropy made visible.” The novelistic “form” becomes a type of “anarchitecture”26 – a compound, in fact, an agglutination at the limits of signifiability, like Roquintin’s pebble on the beach, lathed by an impelling senselessness. Against the oceanic sublime of the Romantics, such “monuments” appear to us as paradoxical incidents – the attestations of a contingent being that is both punctual and radically anachronistic. Nothing, we realise, has been summed up and yet everything remains at stake and in play. It is as if, in the work of Braxton, Sollers, Smithson, what is to be arrived at is not some horizon of recuperated sense, but “merely” the next wavefall. Or as Smithson writes: “Instead of causing us to remember the past like the old monuments, the new monuments seem to cause us to forget the future.” *Presented as a lecture at Birkbeck College, University of London, 22 May 2015. 24 Sollers, H, 127. See Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004) 509. 26 A term used by Gordon Matta-Clarke. 25 Conroy Maddox, Onanistic Typewriter (1940) NO THOUGHT BUT IN “THINGS” FROM PROJECTIVE VERSE TO HYPERGRAPHY 1. Sixty-five years ago now, Charles Olson published his manifesto of spatial poetics, “Projective Verse,” addressed as much to the contemporary scene then as it was to precursors like Mallarmé and Pound, proclaiming itself as: (projectile (percussive (prospective. It famously quotes Robert Creeley: “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT,” which is also to be understood as process or kinetics, as an interrelation of what Olsen calls OBJECTS in a FIELD, whose medium is therefore composition.1 Composition or “recognition” – the terms, for Olsen, become synonymous, and we can understand why, since this mode of composition by field is also a mode of thinking. While Olsen’s starting point is the potential of “breathing,” of a certain breath-formed rhythm, 1 Charles Olson, “Projective Verse” [1950], Poetics of the New American Poetry, eds. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman (New York: Grove, 1973) 152. 55 versus the sort of dogmatic metrics Pound railed against, the key argument in the manifesto centres around a certain typographic consciousness – specifically, the impact of the typewriter upon a general poetics. If Mallarmé’s Un coup de dès signalled the first major acknowledgement in poetry of the potential represented by the printing press and the mass-circulation newspaper (poetry’s belated recognition of what McLuhan termed, in honour of Gutenberg, “typographic man,” the modern human condition), the poem itself was nevertheless composed in manuscript – painstakingly, with directions inserted for the printer, to indicate spacing, font size, italics, etc. Likewise Marinetti’s Parole in Libertà, Khlebinov’s Zaum poems, and (when they weren’t comprised of newspaper cut-ups) Hugo Ball’s Lautgedichte. The novelty for Olsen is the direct role of the typewriter in composition, in part accomplished by the post-War mass-product of cheap portable typewriters which, by removing the intermediate role of the professional typist, transformed the writer’s relationship to the published artefact, producing in turn a notional equivalence between compositing and composition, printing and typing. “The machine,” Olson writes, leads directly… towards projective verse and its consequences. It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of phrases…2 56 Here, in a certain sense, is the emergence of what amounts to a “new media poetics” avant la letter, whose “consequences” encompass not merely the formal technics of composition and the potentialities embodied in a given hardware (here represented by the typewriter), but the poetics of that technicity itself – evinced already in the timeand-motion studies of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and in the “photodynamism” of Anton Bragaglia. It’s perhaps more than coincidental that Olson’s “Projective Verse” was written during the historical moment which saw the birth of modern computing and cybernetics, marked as it is by an attempt 2 Olson, “Projective Verse,” 154. Anton Bragaglia, Typerwriter (1911) to reconcile, in a sense, the futurism of Pound with the condition of what Olson himself termed “postmodern man,” centred upon the integration of body and machine (breath and writing). At stake here is in fact a belated confrontation of language with industrialisation, understood as a process of abstraction and standardisation of interchangeable elements – a process inaugurated with the advent of writing (for Ong it begins with alpha-numerics; for Pound, following the lead of Fenollosa, it begins with the ideogram3). Olsen’s immediate point-of-reference for the typewriter’s regularised spatial notation is the arrangement of notes on the musical stave – such that the relative distribution of type signifies in addition to the conventional semantics, echoing Mallarmé’s meaning of format and Joyce’s “word, letter, paperspace” – suggestive thereby of a general semiotic system, one directly contingent upon the typewriter’s “space precisions.” The musical comparison also implies a certain “instrumentality,” which is not that of a utilitarian regard for language, but of a prosthesis of consciousness. 3 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologising of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982);Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986 [1919]). 57 Or, we might say, prosthetic consciousness. For the typewriter doesn’t merely avail the poet of a set of practical controls over the visual appearance of words on the page; it is, quite literally, a writing machine whose operations, like those of a musical instrument, define an entire logic of composition. Of composition as such. We move from the machine as an instrument for notating breath (or rhythmos4), to a breathing by way of the machine. This “language technology” is, therefore, both a condition and the articulation of a poetics. 2. Early in what has come to be known as The Blue Book (1933-4), Ludwig Wittgenstein poses a series of dilemmas regarding language and technicity, in the form of questions about the locality of thinking. These dilemmas, focused as they are upon problems of situating discourse, provide the foundations for an inquiry into the particular material and signifying conditions that are taken to define consciousness. “It is misleading,” Wittgenstein says, to talk of thinking as of a “mental” activity. We may say that thinking is essentially the activity of operating with signs. This activity is performed by the hand, when we think by writing; by the mouth and larynx, when we think by speaking; and if we think by imagining signs or pictures, I can give you no agent that thinks. If then you say that in such cases the mind thinks, I would only draw your attention to the fact that you are using a metaphor, that here the mind is an agent in a different sense from that in which the hand can be said to be an agent in writing.5 58 The equivalence between “thinking” and “operating with signs” is made more explicit by Wittgenstein in his subsequent demystification of “mind” metaphysics – in which “thought” might be located, outside or beyond the materiality of its own operations, like the Cartesian homunculus. “If again we talk about the locality where thinking takes place,” Wittgenstein suggests, “we have a ρυθμος, cadence or written character. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations (New York: Harper, 1958) 6-7. 4 5 right to say that this locality is the piece of paper on which we write or the mouth which speaks. And if we talk of the head or the brain as the locality of thought, this is using the expression ‘locality of thought’ in a different sense.”6 But between these senses of agency and locality, how do we say that the page or mouth differ from the brain? For it is not simply that Wittgenstein is arguing against the Cartesian idea of a ghost in the machine, as it were, operating the gears and levers of “mental” activity, just as the little voice in the head is supposed, by way of intention or command, to direct the hand that holds the pen that writes on the page (or connects to the typewriter). Rather, it is primarily a matter of how a certain reasoning has obscured the relationship between thinking and operating with signs. To operate with signs, Wittgenstein tells us, has nothing to do with subordinating (or even equating) the material conditions of writing and what “takes place inside the brain,” since thought itself is contingent upon precisely such material conditions and is in fact articulated by them.7 To paraphrase William Carlos Williams: no thought but in “things.” The implications of this line of argument for Olson’s “Projective Verse” are clear enough: the typewriter doesn’t simply represent the movement of thinking/breathing, but is itself the locus of that movement, which is to say the locus of a signifying operation. This in turn gives rise to a number of important questions. One such can be found in the third part of Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge, entitled “The Statement and the Archive,” posed in the following terms: Can the letters of the alphabet written by me haphazardly onto a sheet of paper, as an example of what is not a statement, can the lead characters used for printing books – and one cannot deny their materiality, which has space and volume – can these signs, spread out, visible, manipulable, be reasonably regarded as statements?8 6 Wittgenstein, The Blue Book, 7. What “happens in the brain” is rather an index of these contingencies, constellated as a set of neural events. 8 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse 7 59 By “statement” Foucault means a “function of existence that properly belongs to signs,” which is “neither entirely linguistic, nor exclusively material,” but represent a potential for making sense. “The statement exists… neither in the same way as language… nor in the same way as objects presented to perception…”9 It is on the basis of this appeal to an idea of something which, by its nonobjectivity, may be said to coincide with what Wittgenstein terms a “sign operation” that Foucault then seeks to effect a key distinguish. “When looked at more closely,” Foucault says, “these two examples [the haphazardly written letters and the pieces of movable type] are seen to be not quite superposable”: This pile of printer’s characters, which I can hold in my hand, or the letters marked on the keyboard of a typewriter are not statement: at most they are tools with which one can write statements. On the other hand, what are the letters that I write down haphazardly onto a sheet of paper, just as they come to mind, and to show that they cannot, in their disordered state, constitute a statement? What figure do they form? Are they not a table of letters chosen in a contingent way, the statement of an alphabetical series governed by other laws than those of chance? [Emphasis] 60 A little further along he refigures the problem in relation of the letters printed on the keyboard of a typewriter and the letters A, Z, E, R, T “listed in a typewriting manual,” being “the statement of the alphabetical order adopted by French typewriters.” The latter is considered a statement, while the former isn’t. We may recognise two forms of the problem: in the first, we have a haphazard writing versus a generalised potential for writing; in the second, we have the synecdoche of a typographical organisation (the string A, Z, E, R, T – whose Anglophone equivalent is QWERTY) and that organisation itself (the letters distributed across the entire keyboard). Foucault’s error is to ignore that the keyboard itself on Language, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972 [1969]) 85. 9 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 86. Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dès (1897) is in fact the statement of an organisational complex, with an evolutionary history, in which the distribution of lettered keys is coded to the statistical frequency of individual letters and combinations of letters within a given language, as well as to the physiology of typing. That is to say, the keyboard itself and the operations implied by it, is a statement of an entire semiotics – or, we might say, techno-poetics. In the first example a “pile of printer’s characters” are distinguished from letters “written down haphazardly” on the false assumption the former are at most tools “with which one can write statements.” If Foucault’s “haphazard” writing constitutes a “table of letters chosen in a contingent way,” how is it the case that the “alphabetical series” to which they belong is not also contingently chosen and itself a table, so to speak – or rather a matrix – of possible significations to which it also belongs and whose operations thereby describe a poetics? I am speaking of the fact that both movable type and 61 62 the alphabet as such are metonyms of a series of “social texts” that are technologically, historically, ideologically, situated. To the extent that every writing represents its own potentiality as writing, since every “statement” is also an “enstatement.” Foucault’s “pile of printer’s characters,” like Olson’s typewriter and Mallarmé’s throw of dice, is a language machine because it is also a matrix, just as every one of Foucault’s “statements” is also a prosthesis of language as such. One writes “by hand,” just as one writes “with” a typewriter, or an entire cultural system. Moreover, this matrix is somewhat reminiscent of Schrödinger’s box: to “chose in a contingent way,” as Foucault says, simply means opening the box in order to observe the given state of what it contains, which is thus its statement – a statement which is not an “example” of anything but its own hypothesis, produced by the very act of observation. For if writing, in its broadest array (which is to say, language), constitutes the possibility of a statement, the statement itself is nothing but the enstatement of this possibility. “Language,” Foucault says, “exists only as a system for constructing possible statements”10 and yet this inversion of terms, of “possibility” and “system” belies the ultimately instrumentalist rationale behind Foucault’s thinking: a rationale which is itself internally incoherent by virtue of its unacknowledged appeal to an agency (that which chooses, which writes, which adopts conventions) located in some other dimension outside language. 3. There’s an anecdote related by Jonathan Swift in the Academy of Lagado section of Gulliver’s Travels (published in 1726) which provides an interesting counterpoint to Foucault’s argument, since though its avowed intent is satirical it nevertheless exposes a key aspect of the relationship between language-as-technology and the assumptions of Reason. The anecdote is worth citing at length: The first Professor I saw was in a very large Room, with forty Pupils about him. After Salutation, observing me to look earnestly upon a Frame, which took up the greatest 10 Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 85. part of both the Length and Breadth of the Room, he said perhaps I might wonder to see him employed in a Project for improving speculative Knowledge by practical and mechanical Operations… He then led me to the Frame, about the Sides whereof all his Pupils stood in Ranks. It was twenty Foot Square, placed in the middle of the Room. The Superficies was composed of several bits of Wood, about the bigness of a Dye, but some larger than others. They were all linked together by slender Wires. These bits of Wood were covered on every Square with Paper pasted on them, and on these Papers were written all the Words of their Language, in their several Moods, Tenses, and Declensions, but without any Order. The Professor then desired me to observe, for he was going to set his Engine at Work. The Pupils at his Command took each of them hold of an Iron Handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the Edges of the Frame, and giving them a sudden turn, the whole Disposition of the Words was entirely changed. He then commanded six and thirty of the Lads to read the several Lines softly as they appeared upon the Frame; and where they found three or four Words together that might make part of a Sentence, they dictated to the four remaining Boys who were Scribes. This Work was repeated three or four Times, and at every turn the Engine was so contrived that the Words shifted into new Places, as the Square bits of Wood moved upside down.11 Like Foucault’s “haphazard” writing, Swift’s random-textgenerator is in no way random: the constraints of an entire cultural system are at play, from the logic of its construction as a “word machine,” to the delegation of Reason to it. But what first appears as a satire about technological irrationalism, transpires as a critique of Rationalism as such, and a reversal of the instrumental view of technology as prosthesis of thought in order to expose the programmatic character of Reason itself (by virtue, we might say, of the possibility of satire itself). In short, Swift’s anecdote presents a scenario in which the operations of this “writing machine” determine the “forms of thought,” just as the operations of philosophical discourse determine, so to speak, its object. This machine, of course, is a metaphor for 11 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (London: Wordsworth Edition, 1992 [1726]) III.iv.195f. 63 Bob Cobbing, Are your children safe in the sea (1966) (ear version). 64 the contingent structure of language per se, which by virtue of its probabilistic and permutational nature assumes, at the “level” of discourse, the appearance of a system, while at the “level” of the statement retains the character of being ambivalent or “haphazard” – like Foucault’s A, Z, E, R, T. In the 1950s, while Olson was advancing the theory and praxis of “Projective Verse” in Gloucester, Massachusetts, the Lettrists in Paris were exploring a technique of writing which, somewhat under the influence of Joyce, pursued the atomisation of “words into letters” which are in turn could be substituted haphazardly by signs and symbols (in fact any kind of graphic mark at all), resulting in what they referred to as hypergraphy – a restatement, loosely speaking, of Gödel’s theorem in semiotic terms. In his introduction to Rules of Hypergraphy (2014), Paul Gangloff compares the practice to a type of urban runic graffiti: Imagine we are in a train. The carriage is full of people all talking in a foreign language. Although the sounds of words are very clear, we do not understand their meaning. As the train pulls into Rotterdam Central Station, the group of people leave the train. In a metro, this time in Seoul, a man observes his neighbour covering a page with symbols, in compact rows, with astonishing speed, calmly and with precision from top to bottom, leaving no white spaces in between… Again, in another train, through the window, two people spot signs on panels used to regulate the trains’ circulation… And at some point, in some train, a conductor comes along, and with the laser beam of some black device scans the printed Quick-Recognition code of the tickets. Above the frantic mosaic of the QR code is Bob Cobbing, Are your children safe in the sea (1966) (eye version) written: “quxf bgfk fngo qmf.” … On the concrete walls along the tracks it reads: FGR SERAZ FGR FGR RE! … As the train approaches Brussels, the graffiti covers the walls in a more and more dense succession of letters. At walking distance from Brussels South Station, one can read: “DU JA MA IS VU” on the blue wall of a building that houses the Ligue Braille…12 These cryptic, virological texts advance the idea of a “foreign element” at work in the assimilation of “sign operations” into Foucauldian “statements” wherein writing retains something of the quality of a mirroring agency (in Foucault, the “statement” is always exemplified by a discrete choice, the non-statement by a having been programmed in advance, which is to say, systematised). What hypergraphy demonstrates, as with Swift’s textual machine, is that 12 Rules of Hypergraphy, ed. Paul Gangloff (Nijmegen: Extrapool, 2014) 11. 65 Bill Griffiths, Fragments of A History of the Solar System (1978) 66 every statement is always already translatable into a nonstatement: just as every sign harbours within it an asemic existence, and vice versa. We see this in the hieroglyphic “writing” of Henri Michaux, or in the algorithmic cut-ups of John Cage with their apparently random distribution of type – such as Empty Words (1974). We see it in Duchamp’s “rotoreliefs” and in Burroughs’s “word virus.” We see it in the permutational/typographic “noise” of Bob Cobbing’s “ear” and “eye” versions of Are your children safe in the sea, 1966, just as we see it in the calligrammic arrangements of Bill Griffiths’s Fragments of A History of the Solar System (1978) and Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), in the spatial “deletions” of Daniel Broodthaers’s Un coup de dès n’abolira le hazard (1969) and the techno-hieroglyphic “noise” of Nam June Paik’s Dream TV (1973). The question that recurs here, and which might be said to ultimately define the very idea of a “spatial poetics,” has to do with an implied “location” of contingency. What poses itself in Olson as a typographic (encoding of) identity – rhythmos – becomes for Wittgenstein an operation technicity; what for Foucault is “caught up in Nam June Paik, Dream TV (1973) a logical, grammatical, locutory nexus” becomes for the Lettrists what we might call a literate technology, evoking an open-ended system of substitutability which assumes the status of writing precisely because of the possibility of its not being able to be read: since it is precisely the phenomenon of illegibility, of an experience of the asemic, which guarantees, as it were, the possibility of “making sense” – just as “operating with signs” implies its contrary. It is only on this basis that language escapes the reduction to a metaphysics, of the interjection of “mind” into the signifying equation, while at the same time inscribing subjectivity as a techno-poetic locus. Which is also to say, as a locus of ambivalence, between that which writes and that which is written. *Presented as a lecture at Prva Stran: Conference of Comparative Literature, Trubar Literature House, Ljubljana, 3 December 2015. 67 SLAVES OF REASON ROBOTS | REPLICANTS | GOLEMS 68 In 1950, Alan Turing, often considered the father of modern computing, devised a test for determining a machine’s capacity to exhibit intelligent behaviour. Turing’s avowed purpose, outlined in his paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” was to “consider the question: ‘Can machines think?’” The form of the Turing Test reflects significantly upon this question. In it, an examiner interrogates two unseen test subjects who provide printed responses to a set of questions. On the basis of these responses, the examiner is required to determine which of the test subjects is human and which is machine. While Turing quickly dismissed the notion of thinking machines as “too meaningless to deserve discussion,” he did propose that “intelligence,” at least, could be defined practically as a measure of imitation. That’s to say, if a human is considered intelligent by virtue of being human, then if a machine is capable of exhibiting behaviour that closely imitates that of a human test subject – to the extent it can fool a human examiner – for all intents and purposes the machine ought to be deemed intelligent. Deciding whether or not a machine can think, or even what thinking is, is a different business entirely. In its initial conception, the Turing Test required subjects that weren’t human and machine, but male and female, where it is the interrogator’s job to distinguish their gender. The fact that Turing’s artificial intelligence test is modelled on a gender test is instructive. Among other things, it serves as a reminder that all forms of testing are founded upon a set of hypothetical norms which its results are expected to either conform to or deviate from. The difficulty, as Turing’s paper points out, is in crediting the norm and in defining what sort of expectations should be attached to it, and how such expectations might be objectified. Specifically, at stake here is what we might call the human hypothesis. There is the risk, Turing warns, that machines may “carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does” – to the extent that “machine intelligence” per se might, in fact, be unrecognisable in human terms; it would simply have no analogue. And here’s the dilemma: when we speak of intelligence in the universal, are we not resorting to a type of pathetic fallacy (putting ourselves up there on the big Cinesound screen), the last line of defence of sentimental humanism? The Turing test ultimately tells us less about what “intelligence” is or may be, and more about the assumptions involved in deciding what being human is. To complicate matters, as Turing freely acknowledges, the test itself is one of these assumptions. Evoking a species of “observer paradox,” Turing’s test presents us with an enchanted mirror, in which the image perceived is not so much a reflection as the simulation of what we expect to see. This scenario is adeptly replayed in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), a loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In Blade Runner the Turing Test is transformed into the “VoightKampff test,” a kind of polygraph designed to distinguish “Replicants” from human beings, on the basis of a testsubject’s empathic response to a set of questions. A “Replicant,” in Blade Runner speak, is a type of android, a bio-engineered robot essentially the same in conception as the original robots described in Karel Čapek’s 1923 stage play, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) – which is to say, 69 not so much “machines” as artificial humans, manufactured (or rather grown) from a protoplasm of synthetic organic matter. Context is provided by the film’s opening titles: Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced Robot evolution into the NEXUS phase – a being virtually identical to a human – known as a Replicant. The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. Replicants were used Off-world as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets. After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 6 combat team in an Off-world colony, Replicants were declared illegal on earth – under penalty of death. Special police squads – BLADE RUNNER UNITS – had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicant. This was not called execution. It was called retirement. 70 Glib forms of linguistic sanitation, such as “retirement,” have long been a commonplace of US Defence Department press conferences, and belie an ongoing technicisation of the military-entertainment complex that pretends to separate death (really we mean killing, if not precisely murder) from responsible human agency. Here the alibi is provided by the fact that the “retirees” – NEXUS-6 Replicants – aren’t “real people.” It’s an alibi that’s been tried before: the “enemy” is traditionally bestialised, here they’re robotised (though in the film, as a sign of the times, they’re also made to appear as a troupe of ’80s “Mondo LA” freaks). We’re reminded of the original etymology of Josef Čapek’s coinage of the word robot, as “slave labour.” Robots, accorded the low status of the unenfranchised, are likewise criminalised the moment they trespass upon the “sovereign” human sphere – and though not accorded “life” in its full, human sense, they are freely accorded an extrajudicial “death,” subject to an indiscriminate extermination order, a Vernichtungsbefehl. The Blade Runner Units, whose job it is to implement this order, function like the Kripteia of ancient Sparta – death squads who roamed the countryside, executing “transgressive” slaves. Or like the Ku Klux Klan. Or the Einsatzgruppen. The film opens at Tyrell Corporation headquarters, in a drab, bureaucratic setting in stark contrast to the futuristic cityscape outside its windows. A “Blade Runner” called Holden is about to administer a Voight-Kampff test to a recent employee, Leon Kowalski, suspected of being an escaped Replicant: Holden: You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a... Leon: What one? Holden: What? Leon: What desert? Holden: Doesn’t make any difference what desert... it’s completely hypothetical. Leon: But how come I’d be there? Holden: Maybe you’re fed up, maybe you want to be by yourself... who knows. So you look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you... Leon: A tortoise. What’s that? Holden: Know what a turtle is? Leon: Of course. Holden: Same thing. Leon: I never seen a turtle… But I understand what you mean. Holden: You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back, Leon. Leon: You make up these questions, Mr. Holden, or do they write ‘em down for you? Holden: The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can’t. Not with out your help. But you’re not helping. Leon: Whatya means, I’m not helping? Holden: I mean you’re not helping. Why is that, Leon? Like the Turing test, the Voight-Kampff test begins with a human hypothesis, and not a very persuasive one: that empathy is an innate characteristic that distinguishes humans from non-humans, and is expressed in specific, quantifiable ways. Of course we know this isn’t the case, but the value of such failed hypotheses is that they expose the fundamentally narcissistic character of a process that secretly operates in reverse from its avowed 71 72 purpose, since its real aim is to affirm the humanity or intelligence of the examiner while arbitrarily placing that of the subject in doubt. In the case of the Turing Test, it reduces “intelligence” to a second guess disguised as reasoned judgement; in the case of Voight-Kampff, it reduces humanity to a stereotype – which is to say, to a verbal construct, a type of linguistic automaton, precisely the sort of caricature Turing hypothesises it to be in its simulated “machine” mode. These reductions, as grotesque or ironic as they may appear to us, provide the protocols for a future programming – in other words, they form the basis of a lesson in conformity. For Turing, the very premise of an artificial intelligence test resides in the question: “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?” The very idea of the game presupposes that there will be, because that’s how they’ll subsequently be programmed to behave – just as intelligence testing in general presupposes an educational system geared to producing complementary results: the anticipation itself is the test’s premise and its ineradicable flaw. In short, while the question of intelligence presupposes an autonomous idea – sometimes referred to as “universal intelligence” (we might call it Reason) – at the same time it exposes this idea’s purely definitional character. There is no objective measure of intelligence; like all forms of normativity, there is only an appeal to consensus. This has many implications. Not only might intelligence in its “universal” ramification be something beyond our grasp, so might our own humanity. The assumptions invoked to distinguish humans from machines just as readily expose a secret anxiety that we are, in one manner of speaking or another, already machines. This is hardly a novel proposition: it’s an idea implicit in every myth of creation. In contemporary popular culture, it is a theme most frequently visited in the genre of science fiction, for reasons that aren’t necessarily obvious. In any case, regardless of the degree we are willing to invest in the “science” of such creation narratives, there’s always the available disclaimer of their being purely in the service of “fiction.” In this regard, science fiction is one of the few cultural forms whose unverifiability is almost always treated literally – and this literality is taken as conditional for our imaginative engagement with it; it is in fact a form of insistence, an open scepticism serving to reinforce a faith in our unique “humanity.” Profoundly mythopoietic narratives, like the Old Testament, are meanwhile allowed broad metaphoric and allegorical latitude in asserting their claims of universal truth. A curious anxiety attaches to science fiction, which distinguishes itself from theological narratives of redemption by frequently implying, even in a sublimated way, the future obsolescence of mankind. In the Bible, of course, the universe ends when we do. In his 1989 book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek identifies a recurring trope on which precisely such an anxiety appears to hinge. This is what I call the Blade Runner moment. “The story,” writes Žižek, is usually told from the perspective of a hero who gradually makes the horrifying discovery that all the people around him are not really human beings but some kind of automatons, robots, who only look and act like real human beings; the final point of these stories is of course the hero’s discovery that he himself is also such an automaton and not a real human being.1 In Blade Runner the story centres on the threat of human society being infiltrated by escaped robots who can’t be told apart from us. Robots who might be us. And by declensions, that we might be them – trapped unbeknownst to ourselves in a posthuman future: a future that is in effect nothing but a prosthesis of history, since history itself – as that humanism par excellence, the discourse of Reason – will already have ended, as Fukuyama might say. The major protagonist of Ridley Scott’s film is Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), a formerly retired Blade Runner, reactivated in light of a recently detected group of Replicants who’ve returned to Earth (presented in microcosm by a dystopian Los Angeles circa 2019) with the intention, as we soon discover, of confronting their maker (Eldon Tyrell) because the idea of dying doesn’t suit 1 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) 47. 73 74 them any more than it suits us (only, they’ve got a face and a name to address their complaint to, which is more than can be said for your average skin-job). As in R.U.R., this slaves’ revolt evokes certain Biblical comparisons. It’s the story of Paradise Lost all over again, married to the Return of the Prodigal Son – stories whose moral is nothing if not relative. What remains, however, is the perennial question: Who is master, who is slave? And the question implied but never directly stated in Turing’s test hypothesis: How arbitrary is the distinction?2 One of Deckard’s first tasks in Blade Runner is to visit to the offices of Tyrell Corporation to “put the machine” (i.e. run a Voight-Kampff test) on a new NEXUS prototype. The Tyrell building is a dressed-up future-noir version of the Temple of the Sun at Teotihuacan, in Mexico. Obviously it’s meant to be the House of God. Eldon Tyrell, the corporation’s founder, demands that Deckard first demonstrate the test on his assistant, Rachel, explaining that he wants to see it “work on a person… I want to see a negative before I provide you with a positive.” Rachel doubts Deckard’s motivations: “It seems you feel our work is not a benefit to the public,” she says. Deckard (ventriloquising Plato) replies: “Replicants 2 As the “illegitimate” son Edmund says in King Lear: “Why bastard? Wherefore base? / My mind is as generous and my shape as true, / As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us / With base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base, base?” [I.ii.6-10]. are like any other machine. They’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit, it’s not my problem.” As the test proceeds, the “questions” fall broadly into two categories, dealing with sex and death – primarily killing and eating: “You’re watching a stage play. A banquet is in progress. The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters. The entrée consists of boiled dog…” In a nod to the test’s originally genderised Turing model, Rachel interrupts Deckard at a certain point (“You’re reading a magazine. You come across a full-page nude photo of a girl…”) to demand: “Is this to test whether I’m a Replicant or a lesbian, Mr Deckard?” In Blade Runner, the issue of sexuality is never clear cut. Next to the question of whether or not a machine can be intelligent seems to be posed the question: What does it mean for a machine to experience desire? This is wholly different from the sexualisation of machines, which has a long history. Indeed, the story of “Genesis” in the Old Testament centres upon the invention of a sexual prosthesis, first in the objectification of feminine desire (sin), and secondly in the technologisation of “creation” as reproduction (atonement). Likewise Blade Runner presents female Replicants as dedicated or potential sex-machines, or “pleasure models,” programmed according to an array of gender stereotypes. Robot desire is regarded as pure simulation in the service of human masters – the robots 75 76 themselves are not supposed to experience pleasure; to suggest otherwise would be somehow perverse. When the Replicants express sexual emotions among themselves, there is always the suggestion that this is nothing but simulated transgression – mechanical toys getting up to mischief in their master’s absence. Or else a type of mechanical bestialism, devoid of the sentimentality humans frequently attach to the sex act – the way we might view dogs, or as formerly human slaves were viewed. The question of desire is not limited to sexuality, though sexual objectification is symptomatic of a broader dehumanisation in relationship to desire. Running throughout the film is a sub-plot about colonialism. The inhabitants of Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles are constantly bombarded with animated billboard messages: “A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, the chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure…” It is the function of the Replicants to serve as slave-labour in these colonies, and their status may be likened to that of the “colonial subject.” We’re reminded that one of the features of colonialism is the enforced schizophrenia of assimilation and segregation – in Blade Runner it is the demand to be “more human than human” (which is the Tyrell corporate slogan) while at the same time being denigrated as non-human and denied even basic human aspirations. The master-slave relation that pertains between humans and Replicants inevitably produces a situation in which a “desire” to be human is encouraged, while a strict prohibition is set against its gratification: the Replicant’s “desire” is never permitted to be more than a vestige of the “imitation game.” Which is to say, it is never permitted to be more than a reflection of the Master’s desire. When the Replicants begin to experience the emergence of an autonomous “self-consciousness,” they also experience the emergence an emancipatory desire. It would be easy to view the murder of Eldon Tyrell by the Replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) towards the end of Blade Runner as being occasioned by a “neurotic” desire to become human – as much as by any impulse towards destruction and negative emancipation. Batty, the leader of the group of escaped NEXUS-6 Replicants who Deckard has been tasked to hunt down and “retire,” articulates this desire as a reasoned response to his having been denied a fully-realisable life: Tyrell, we learn, has genetically engineered a terminator gene in the NEXUS-6 series, which limits lifespan to four years. Batty’s desire to become human is supposed therefore to originate in the realisation that, though an intelligent “being,” he isn’t – human. If we accept this view, the ensuing action is driven by a kind of irrational desperation. The desire for the impossible.3 But there’s something more to it, a perversion of the robot “ego” which is intensified by this accelerated “death 3 Consequently we can see how in R.U.R. the figure of the robot actually functions in two ways: in the first instance, as the menial performer of tasks dictated to it by the “human” agents of reason; in the second, as instruments of their own emancipation, but only insofar as this emancipation involves a “becoming human,” that is to say by learning to submit to reason. Emancipation in this way merely serves to reinforce the system of enslavement instituted by the relation to reason itself. This, as dialectics teaches us, is the inescapable dilemma. Volition, autonomy, freedom of the will, is only accorded through an act of submission. Reason, in the abstract, remains master. What this means, of course, is that the figure of the robot must ultimately be regarded as an allegory for the slave within – the ego that is in truth the subject of unconscious forces over which it exerts only an illusory control. But if the robot is reason’s fantasy of the other, reason itself is already the neurotic fantasy of the ego. This, as Freud tells us, is the perversion at the origin of what reason is. 77 78 drive” of the four-year terminator gene. Batty’s murder of Tyrell is ecstatic, the passion of a transcendental suicide. If, as psychoanalysis suggests, “perversion is in the unconscious of the neurotic as phantasy of the Other,”4 then the question of empathy may in fact devolve on a kind of autism: an empathic over-investment in the regard of the Other, in the human, rather than a lack of empathy as such. The formula cogito ergo sum, as the measure of intelligent being, is displaced by the neurotic insistence that, if the Other (the master) thinks of me, then I exist, and my existence transcends my condition. In the words of media theorist McKenzie Wark: “Post human? All too human.” The true purpose of the Voight-Kamppf test, then, is to expose the slave’s dialectical investment in the consciousness of the Master: in reality, the “Replicant’s” affective disorder stems from an over-anxiety to satisfy the desire of the Other, the Master, the interrogator—who has no desire, in fact, other than for the Replicant to fail. Blade Runner ends on a similarly ambiguous note. Like R.U.R., the action resolves into a “sexual” drama between the “Blade Runner” Deckard and the “Replicant” Rachel. In R.U.R. the play ends with Helena and Primus, the only two robots imbued with the ability to reproduce, effectively restaging the Adam and Eve story, going off to found a new 4 Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridon (New York: Norton, 1977) 292-324. race after the robot armies have destroyed all human life on the planet. The implication is clear, that this new race will effectively be indistinguishable from the one it has replaced. It will be, quite literally, the master race all over again. The theme of eugenics remains consistent throughout. In Blade Runner, the “sexual” drama is already inaugurated at the moment of the Voight-Kamppf test Deckard administers to Rachel. This quasi-voyeuristic act enables Deckard to discover that, unbeknownst to herself, Rachel is in fact a Replicant. Rachel, who has been led to believe that she’s human, has even been implanted with memories belonging to Tyrell’s niece. She carries a photograph of her “mother,” who could actually be anyone since she only exists in a photograph. Her immediate response is understandably one of denial, but also shame: how would a human being respond to being told that they’re not really human, that their memories are implants? Which begs the question about the efficacy of any form of “empathic” testing vested in the faith we ourselves, the purportedly human, have in our own humanity – what we might call the affective fallacy. During their first encounter, Rachel pointedly asks Deckard if he’s ever “retired a human by mistake?” Deckard says “no,” but his answer immediately admits an unwelcome thought, that the reason he’s never retired a human by mistake is that there’re no humans left, just as there are no animals in Blade Runner that aren’t manufactured in labs. Indeed, just about everything in 2019 Los Angeles seems to be synthetic, existing on a kind of artificial life-support. It’s just possible that humanity is nothing but propaganda for a status quo; that what we’re seeing is R.U.R.’s “posthuman” future of the robot master race, created in the image of dead gods. When Rachel confronts Deckard in distress after his discovery that she’s a Replicant, his response to her is markedly callous – we might even say, inhumane. Later, after Rachel saves his life by shooting the Replicant Leon, Deckard finds himself conscience-stricken, unable to follow the orders he’s been given to “retire” her. This is the first real sign of Deckard’s “humanity,” precisely at the moment there appears the first glimmer of a suspicion that he himself 79 80 may not be human either. He knows that if he doesn’t “retire” Rachel, someone else will. Through an admixture of repulsion and attraction, the two become sexually involved. Here the question of perversion creeps back in. The taboo of miscegenation hovers in the background. Unlike R.U.R., the future of the two protagonists is entirely uncertain. We are left in medias res with Deckard and Rachel setting out to evade the fate most likely to befall them. A voice-over echoes: “It’s too bad she won’t live! But then again, who does?” The question poses itself: has Deckard learned to transcend himself by way of his humanity, or are his actions driven by a nihilistic admission of the Replicant within? (Not some Cartesian homunculus, as the seat of reason, but rather that autonomous machine-mind we call libido or desire, which always threatens to destabilise our system of thought-controls, our rationalisations.) Like the world of Orwell’s 1984, Ridley Scott’s Los Angeles of the future is a wreck: his Replicants, uncanny doubles of ourselves, appear as agents of perversion, sexual deviants and Oedipal patricides, as if acting out the repressed urges of a collective psyche in lock-down. Humanity, in this imagined future, finds truth only in the enigma of the Replicant he both is and is not. And it is because this enigma is that of a ceaseless struggle that the collective consciousness experiences its limits in it. This is because it poses an ontological question that reaches to the core of humanity’s self-perception as a potentially emancipated being, which it is the role of the Replicant to seek to fulfil as a kind of proxy. In this formulation, the Replicant is nothing less than the return of the repressed, collectively speaking, in whom the possibility of living as if we were the same as our reason, rather than subjected to it, threatens to materialise. This dilemma is central to the genealogy of the robot as critique of the discourse of emancipation. The question isn’t whether or not emancipation is possible without the attribute of becoming human, but what the implied eugenics of this struggle accomplishes with respects to the ideology of reason. While Josef Čapek is credited with introducing the word “robot” into general usage, the concept attached 81 82 to it has a long genealogy – one extending at least as far back to the earliest attempts at providing a philosophical foundation of the State and the origins of philosophy itself as a system of reason – a process already formalised in Plato’s Republic. Here, the State or “ideal polis” is not only accorded a certain rationalism and organised accordingly, but it is programmed, so to speak, according to the operations of reason itself – specifically, through the instruction of philosophy. For Plato, the ideal polis is a dictatorship of Reason. The “history of reason” in this formal sense is thus also the history of a political idea. Reason, as instituted by Plato, is an ideology – an ideology that accords itself precedence over all others. It’s no coincidence that reason subsequently acquires cognates like God and History. Reason becomes the transcendental signified par excellence. The robot is the counterpart to this history of reason. Beginning with Plato, who in the Republic devises a complex system of enslavement to reason, the history of the robot is formalized as the rationalisation of the other. It provided the justification for the literal slavery upon which both democracy and totalitarianism have been based, whether through the institutional practice of slavery itself, the promulgation of race laws, gender and wage slavery, or the diverse forms of slavish consumerism produced by the industrial revolution and – it only seems paradoxical – underwriting the laissez-faire “emancipationism” of postmodernity. The radical idea at the core of R.U.R. is not that emancipation from the injustice of slavery and so on is possible, but quite the contrary: that the very concept of emancipation is a mirage thrown up by the logic of slavery itself.5 This is the dilemma passed down via Hegel and it derives from the separation of thought and life, which is the mode in which the supposed tyranny of reason 5 Slavery is nowhere more achieved than in the myth of emancipation, which is effectively the “abeit macht frei” of Reason. This is because emancipation is only able to represent itself as the admission to a permitted idea. (The surrender to “unreason” is thus tantamount to a surrender to unnatural desires; the technocratic state demands robots who act like human-animals only to the extent their desires can be regulated: regulation is the nature of “reason”.) extends itself into all aspects of consciousness. The robot is not merely a continuation of this idea, but let’s say its apotheosis, since the slavery it represents is already that of a neurotic fantasy, which is of course the fantasy of the species – a fantasy in which reason desires to become its own witness and devotes itself to the production of prostheses of “universal self-consciousness” which, in the last resort, it is prepared to become, even at the cost of its own extinction. Put otherwise, the drama at hand is not a simple allegory of a freeing-of-the-slaves, but rather the emancipation of “reason,” reason enslaved to its own system. This is why, in R.U.R., nothing short of total war is conceivable. In the end, reason must succumb to its own neurotic fantasy. Just as in Marx, for whom the master-slave dialectic posits the dilemma that there is no true emancipation only an ideology of emancipation to which emancipation is itself bound. While emancipation, “presupposes the elimination of power, the abolition of the subject/object distinction,” as Ernesto Laclau has said, “there is no emancipation without oppression, and there is no oppression without the presence of something which is impeded in its free 83 84 development.”6 The result appears to be a vicious circle, the dialectic interminable. All that remains is the fantasy of a projected self-consciousness: the gratification of reason bearing witness to its own end in order to evolve, to continue to evolve, towards singularity. There is a moment in his seminar on cybernetics and consciousness when Jacques Lacan describes a scenario in which all evidence of human life has disappeared from the planet, with the exception of an analogue camera, positioned on a tripod, beside a lake, in which a mountain is reflected. The camera still operates.7 The shutter clicks, there’s a flash, the film winds on. But who’s to say what the camera has “perceived”? And what would it mean to say that this perception in some way attests to the “absence of man”? Perhaps what’s really being played out in R.U.R. and Blade Runner is the after-death fantasy of humanism itself, which despite all evidence to the contrary refuses to give up the ghost. The figure of the robot, of course, is one of humanism’s greatest triumphs. In it, it seeks a material as well as metaphysical transcendence of the limits history has placed upon it. If only to know what happens next. Like every other ego who wants to continue listening-in on the conversation after it’s left the room: the neurotic surveillance system of reason’s afterlife. The great undead, extending its reach into the impossible. By way of a final digression: there is a memorable scene at the end of Ken Russell’s 1975 film Lisztomania, in which Richard Wagner is resurrected and transformed into a Nazi “golem” rampaging through the Jewish ghetto like some archaic monster-machine. In the film, the ghetto and the world at large is saved by a celestial spaceship (a utopian machine) piloted by an angelic Franz Liszt, who blasts this “golem” robot with pipe-organ laser guns. Russell’s kitsch extravaganza is something like a last appeal to a humanism after the fact. A kind of posthumous humanism. Like Wagner’s Auferstehung, the humanist zombie returns 6 Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996) 1. Jacques Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of Consciousness,” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, trans. S. Tomaselli (London: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 47. 7 to preside over the triumph of the machines. And here, as in R.U.R. and Blade Runner, we get an inclining of what that picture of Lacan’s really means, being the mind’s-eye portrait of a sentimental apocalypse machine, signifying nothing, merely, only just merely, the impossible. Between R.U.R. and Blade Runner – Plato’s ideal polis and the Nazi State extermination machinery – the collective fantasy reveals itself as the true automaton. The myth of human “perfectability” tends towards its ideal ambivalence. We’ve come full circle. Perhaps humanity long ago learned to do without itself, if simply in order to go on. Progress of course implies humanity’s final obsolescence in the technological-evolutionary equation. The problem has always been how to get to the future without succumbing to a Blade Runner moment, when we all begin to suspect that we’re really machines, replicants with a nostalgia for our so-called creators – and perhaps always were. But after all, isn’t this, precisely this, the truth of the human condition? No future? *Presented as a lecture at Café Neu Romance: International Robot Performance Festival, National Technical Library, Prague, 30 November 2013. First published in Lola magazine, 2014. 85 EXTERMINATE ALL RATIONAL THOUGHT FROM NAKED LUNCH TO CONSUMED Just remember this – all agents defect and all resisters sell out. That’s the sad truth, Bill. And a writer – a writer lives the sad truth like anyone else. The only difference is – he files a report on it. – Clark Nova, Naked Lunch 86 David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (1991) begins with a knock on the door. “Exterminator!” an affectless voice says. The voice belongs to Bill Lee, doppelganger of William Burroughs, and the scene belongs to the titular story of Burroughs’s 1973 collection, Exterminator!, which has the narrator spraying for roaches in New York tenements. “During the war I worked for A.J. Cohen Exterminators ground floor office dead-end street by the river.” Burroughs discusses the relative merits of the tools of his trade: “Personally,” he writes, “I prefer a pyrethrum job to a fluoride. With the pyrethrum you kill the roaches right there in front of God and the client whereas this starch and fluoride you leave it around and back a few days… They eat it and run around… fat as hawgs.”1 In the film, we see Lee (played by Paul Weller) dusting someone’s kitchen, only to run out of bug 1 William S. Burroughs, Exterminator! (New York: Viking, 1973) 4. powder in the middle of the job. Later he gets home to discover his wife Joan (Judy Davis) shooting up pyrethrum. “It’s a very literary high,” she explains. “It’s a Kafka high. You feel like a bug.” Lee, overcoming initial doubts, accepts her invitation to try some and takes a shot. “I don’t know,” he says, “I think our metabolisms might be very different.” To which Joan replies, “Yours or Kafka’s?” Here commences the metamorphosis of Bill Lee, in a kind of Freudian role-reversal, from pest exterminator to agent of a secret global insect conspiracy, facilitated by exotic drug-induced hallucinations (in addition to bug powder, there’s the “black meat” of the aquatic Brazilian centipede and “Mugwamp jism”) and guided by a talking cockroach-cum-typewriter. Lee himself becomes a kind of mechanical prosthesis of this insect-machine conspiracy to “exterminate all rational thought” centred in the North African “free port” of Interzone, “A haven,” we’re told, “for the mongrel scum of the Earth… an engorged parasite on the underbelly of the West.” The first sign of Lee’s metamorphosis appears when he’s arrested “for possession of a dangerous substance” and taken to police headquarters where he’s introduced to the in-house “bug,” a giant roach kept in a box in a cupboard, which “talks” through a large pink anus concealed beneath its wings, just behind the thorax. The bug identifies itself to Lee as a his “case officer” who has arranged for his arrest in order to make contact and pass on his “instructions… from Control.” The bug informs him that his wife, Joan, is not really his wife, but an “agent of Interzone Incorporated. You must kill her,” the bug insists. “Kill Joan Lee. It must be done soon – this week. And it must be done real tasty.” When Lee expresses his scepticism (“Why would a classy American woman like Joan ever want to work for a two-bit outfit like Interzone Incorporated?”) the bug replies, “But who says Joan Lee is really a woman? In fact, who says she’s human at all?” Later in the film, after Lee has shot Joan in the head attempting to perform their “William Tell routine” – a naked reference to the actual death of Burroughs’s common law wife Joan Vollmer in Mexico City in 1951 – he accepts a “ticket” to Interzone from a creature called Mugwamp, 87 88 another representative of his “Controller,” who also advises him to obtain a Clark Nova portable typewriter for writing reports (“It has mythic resonance”). Ensconced in Interzone, we see Lee at work typing: “REPORT ON THE ASSASSINATION OF JOAN LEE BY UNKNOWN FORCES.” After making contact with a “dealer” called Hans, Lee is taken to a local narcotics factory and introduced to “the black meat” of the giant Brazilian aquatic centipede. Waking from a drugged stupor in his Interzone apartment, Lee discovers that the Clark Novel has metamorphosed into a giant roach, reminiscent of the bug in the New York police station, only now its head is a typewriter. Clark Nova tells him: “I’ve been instructed to reveal to you that you were programmed to shoot your wife, Joan Lee. It was not an act of free will on your part.” This intimation that Lee had in fact been programmed to kill his wife, echoes the sense of unwitting necessity the real-life event on which the incident is based subsequently had for Burroughs in his evolution as a writer: I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death, and to a realisation of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing. I live with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from control. So the death of Joan brought me in contact with the invader, the Ugly Spirit, and manoeuvred me into a lifelong struggle, in which I have had no choice except to write my way out.2 The assassination of Joan becomes the psychological lynchpin of Lee’s “reality principle” and his existential struggle with “unknown forces” played-out in the arena of his metamorphosis as junkie / homosexual / writer (metamorphosis towards an ideal “zero sum” machine – the junkie consumption entropy machine at the core, “metabolism approaching ZERO,”3 which has nothing to “lose” and is ultimately generative of nothing but feedback (meaning words). At the end of the film, as Lee “escapes” Interzone for Annexia (somewhere behind the Iron Curtain) in the company of Joan Frost, his wife’s doppelganger, he’s questioned by border guards in a scene redolent of the full horror of the repetition compulsion in which Lee is caught: “What is the purpose of your visit and what is your profession?” “I write reports. I’m a writer and I intend to write reports on life in Annexia for the citizens of the USA.” “Do you have any proof of what you say? How do we know you are really a writer?” “Well, I have a writing device.” “That’s not good enough. Show us… Write something.” At which point Lee turns to Joan Frost and says, “I guess it’s about time for our William Tell routine” and, in an almost exact re-enactment of his wife’s death, shoots her in the head – to which the border guards respond by saying, “Welcome to Annexia.” Lee’s nightmare somnambulism oscillates between the automatism of actions dictated by “unknown powers” and the writer’s own autonomy of action. Throughout the film, Lee describes a kind of locus of interpassivity – which Slavoj Žižek defines as “the uncanny situation in which one is ‘active’ while transposing onto the Other the 2 William S. Burroughs, Queer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) xxiii. William S. Burroughs, “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” Naked Lunch (New York: Grove, 1959) xvii. 3 89 unbearable passivity of one’s Being.”4 Žižek has in mind a particular relation to the “impossible,” by way of the “retreat of symbolic efficiency” and a submission to the order of simulacra (“Pornography ‘shows it all,’” he says, “is ‘real sex,’ and for that very reason produces a mere simulacrum of sexuality, while the process of seduction consists entirely in the play of appearances, hints and promises, and thereby evokes the elusive domain of the suprasensible sublime Thing.”)5 In Naked Lunch, it’s the pornography of the normalising agents of “reality” that represent what Baudrillard terms “the murder of the real.”6 It isn’t simply that Lee delegates his actions to the realm of “unknown forces,” but that in causing these forces, as it were, to act in his place the simulacral character of the so-called real is brought menacingly into view. Lee’s drug-induced metamorphosis is therefore not a deviation from the world, but a “missed-encounter” by way of a certain disillusionment at the core of his own being (the 4 90 Slavoj Žižek, “Cyberspace, or, How to Traverse the Fantasy in the Age of the Retreat of the Big Other,” Public Culture 10.3 (1998): 484. In a series of essays published in 1998 on the “interpassive subject,” Žižek inverted a commonplace assumption about technology as a “prosthesis of experience” that, in the age of virtual reality and AI, experiences phenomena on our behalf, to posit instead a state of affairs in which it is only ever the Other that experiences: that the human subject is in fact, and from its origin, the prosthesis of a certain technology; a “prosthesis of a prosthesis.” That, in other words, its experience is only ever that of a separation from experience itself. And that its perceived “selfhood” is really the passive agency of a (technological) evolutionary process to which it is a contingent adjunct and which is ambivalent to it. In this sense, the “human hypothesis” is the extension of a technological idea rather than the contrary. Confronted with the prospect of an ongoing “machine metamorphosis” independent of human agency, Žižek’s argument receives renewed validation. From originary technicity to the technological sublime, the immanence of “human obsolescence” has come to stand in place of the escatological view of the “perfectability of man” in the figure of an apocalyptic god. To paraphrase Heidegger, the “essence” of humanity is nothing “human.” Where Fukuyama’s “posthuman future” is really only humanism by other means, Žižek’s “interpassive subject” points to a primordial “simulacrum” at the origin of the “human hypothesis,” whose evolution is in fact the prosthesis of an impossible experience: the becoming-technology of a technological “consciousness,” by way of the simulacrum of a becoming-human. 5 Žižek, “Cyberspace, or, How to Traverse the Fantasy in the Age of the Retreat of the Big Other,” 485. 6 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996). junkie/homosexual/writer is, in the manner of Burroughs’s assessment, the ideal representative of a certain human obsolescence according to Rationality Inc – revealed, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, as the archetypal superfluous element, a proposition that “says nothing”: “if a proposition is NOT NECESSARY it is MEANINGLESS and approaching MEANING ZERO”7). In an essay on Cronenberg, Burroughs and Deleuze, Cengiz Erdem suggests that this “entropy machine” represents the fantasmatic “Control” that maintains and, in effect, organises, Lee’s metamorphosis: As we know from his writings on his routines Burroughs himself was becoming-machine internally, he was incorporating the dualistic and mechanical vision of the world surrounding him, but he thought his body was being attacked by external forces and the space he occupied was being invaded by forces that belonged to an altogether different realm, an external world. In Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch we see Bill Lee becoming a spiritual automaton to keep the Evil Spirit within at bay. The paradox is that the Evil Spirit is itself his own construction which in turn constructs him as a spiritual automaton constructing an external Evil Spirit.8 We are presented with a naked technicity: the mechanical recurrence of the unpresentable – ad infinitum. As Žižek says, in a détournement of Wittgenstein, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one write.”9 In (Cronenberg’s) Naked Lunch it’s the insect-machines who articulate this “unpresentable” if the form of a “return of the repressed”: they represent a kind of symbolic circuit, a recursive feedback apparatus, by means of which the unpresentable (the “unspeakable”) writes. No sooner does Clark Nova inform Lee that he’d been “programmed” to murder his wife, than it (the “writing machine” itself) commences to dictate what Lee should type into his “report”: 7 Burroughs, Naked Lunch, xvii. Cengiz Erdem, “Cronenberg, Burroughs, Deleuze (2) – The Evil Spirit and the Spiritual Automaton,” Senselogi© (2010): http://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/cronenberg-burroughs-deleuze-6/ 9 Žižek, “Cyberspace, or, How to Traverse the Fantasy in the Age of the Retreat of the Big Other,” 511. 8 91 Homosexuality is the best all-round cover an agent ever had. Aw, come on, Bill. Don’t be a pansy! Be forceful. Hurt me. I love it. That is a great sentence. These are words to live by, Bill. I’m glad these words are going into your report. Our new management will be so pleased that you see our point of view. 92 Clark Nova is in effect a kind of superego, maintaining a perverse form of surveillance over Lee that is also a form of interpassive agency, or what we might call an agence provocateur, since its purpose is to produce disturbances in the “fantasy of the real” by which any given configuration of the “normal” might be sustained (– by “exterminating all rational thought,” reason itself is exposed as rationale, which is to say as ideology). Throughout the film the manifest obscenity of this super-ego is put on display. There are the grotesque representation of power in the form of Doctor Benway under the female disguise of the witch Fidela, there are the New York cops Hauser and O’Brien, the simpering seductive giant roach that implores Lee to rub bugpowder on its lips, and Clark Nova’s hysterical threats and entreaties when Lee allows it to be taken hostage by “hostile” agents. But the most obscene presence remains the spectre of “normality” itself, or rather of the castrative normalising machinery of what Nixon called “the silent majority,” to which Lee – as an outlaw (murderer, junkie, homosexual, writer) – is, by implication, continuously at the mercy. Throughout Naked Lunch there are allusions to “Metamorphosis” (Die Verwandlung, published in 1916), Kafka’s allegory of individual alienation and the bourgeois spirit, at the end of which the involuntary protagonist, Gregor Samsa, has not only been reduced to the existential condition of a bug, but is basically done to death by the moral opprobrium of his own family (as a microcosm of “respectable society”), nothing remaining but a sucked-out carapace – as they say, a mere shell of a man.10 In his 1985 book, Queer, Burroughs refigures Kafka’s story as 10 Franz Kafka, “Metamorphosis,” trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, Metamorphosis and Other Stories (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949 [1933]). See also Josef and Karel Čapek’s The Insect Play (1923). a routine, full of darkly comic resonances, about Bobo the transvestite – which Cronenberg inserts into a scene played over the breakfast table between Bill Lee and Yves Cloquet (Julian Sands – “an effete predatory homosexual”11 who it later transpires is in fact a centipede). Cloquet outs Lee as “queer,” to which Lee responds: Queer. A curse. Been in our family for generations. The Lees have always been perverts. I shall never forget the unspeakable horror that froze the lymph in my glands when the baneful word seared my reeling brain – I was a homosexual. I thought of the painted , simpering female impersonators I had seen in a Baltimore nightclub. Could it be possible I was one of those subhuman things? I walked the streets in a daze like a man with a light concussion. I would’ve destroyed myself, but a wise old queen – Bobo, we called her – taught me that I had a duty to live and to bear my burden proudly for all to see. Poor Bobo came to a sticky end. He was riding in the Duc de Ventre’s HispanoSuiza when his falling haemorrhoids blew out of the car and wrapped around the rear wheel. He was completely gutted, leaving an empty shell sitting there on the giraffeskin upholstery. Even the eyes and brain went with a horrible “schlupping” sound. The duke says he will carry that ghastly schlup with him to his mausoleum. 11 Al Weisel, interview with David Cronenberg, Gay Times (May 16, 1992): 35-8. 93 94 Lee’s sublimated homosexuality (homosexuals at the time the film is set – 1953 – were not considered “human”; the medical profession considered them “inverts” or, at best, afflicted by a “disease” of the mind and/or body), alongside his junk addiction, places him squarely within the insect class. His Bobo routine can be read not only as a Kafkaesque reflection on the revenge of the silent majority (who dream of the evisceration of deviants everywhere), but also a putative call to a “class consciousness,” at a time when such an idea in America represented a social impossibility. This potentially revolutionary act – a becoming-conscious of a whole “unconscious” substratum of humanity – is a recurring theme in Burroughs’s writing, along with its systemic neutralisation by way of a panoply of normalising technologies (everything from conventional media – propaganda machines – to electro-chemical mindsterilisation). In an essay entitled “The Limits of Control,” Burroughs evokes the entire array of “Brainwashing, psychotropic drugs, lobotomy and other more subtle forms of psychosurgery”12 employed by the State against the individual in the service of the “culture of permission.” He refers to experimental work by, among others, a certain Dr José Delgado, “who once,” as Burroughs says, “stopped a charging bull by remote control of electrodes in the bull’s brain.”13 This same Delgado, former director of neuropsychiatry at Yale University Medical School and author of Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilised Society (1971), testified in 1974 before the US Congress to the effect that: We need a programme of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. 12 William S. Burroughs, “The Limits of Control,” The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (London: Little, Brown, 1985) 117. 13 Burroughs, “The Limits of Control,” 117. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electrically control the brain. Someday, armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.14 Concerning historical perspective, Delgado was no doubt right, if – as Marx did – we accept that the “individual” is not that organic selfhood it is frequently imagined to be, but a product of the abstracting, standardising and individuating logic of the industrial revolution and its apotheosis by way of the post-war Military Industrial Complex. The “individual” was never alienated by the advent of machine technology, but was rather its ultimate product: a self-portrait of the mechanised ego as commodity, like an insect leering out from behind a rubber mask in an advertisement for yet another lifestyle choice (calls itself human, with all the high sense of dollarised moral purpose that pretends it’s really all those other low forms of the species that’re the “insects” in this little psychodrama, calls them the proletariat, “mongrel scum of the earth,” parasites “on the underbelly of the West”). And so it goes. For Burroughs, Delgado’s rationale is just another (and one of the more visible, but not especially eccentric) symptoms of “the technocratic control apparatus” which “the United States has at its fingertips… techniques which if fully exploited could make Orwell’s 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia.”15 But in the Burroughs-schema, these are merely literalised forms of technocratic control – of the robotisation of humanity. The real apparatus of “psychocivilsation” remains language: “words are still the principal instruments of control. Suggestions are words. Persuasions are words. Orders are words. No control machine so far devised can operate without words…”16 For Burroughs, the arena of control extends to evolution itself, in which recoded biological/ sexual processes (“soft machines”) mirror linguistic processes (“word virus”). In The Electronic Revolution (“quoting an article entitled VIRUS ADAPTIBILITY AND HOST RESISTANCE by G. Belyavin”) Burroughs writes: 14 Recorded in the US Congressional Record 26.118 (February 24, 1974): 4475. 15 Burroughs, “The Limits of Control,” 117. 16 Burroughs, “The Limits of Control,” 117. 95 “It is worth noting that if a virus were to attain a state of wholly benign equilibrium with its host cell it is unlikely that its presence would be readily detected OR THAT IT WOULD NECESSARILY BE RECOGNIZED AS A VIRUS. I suggest that the word is just such a virus. Doktor Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz has put forth an interesting theory as to the origins and history of this word virus. He postulates that the word was a virus of what he calls BIOLOGIC MUTATION effecting the biologic change in its host which was then genetically conveyed.”17 96 This is a recurrent theme in Burroughs and plays through the body of Cronenberg’s filmography, too, in various mutating strands, from Shivers (1975) to A Dangerous Method (2011) in which he addresses the subject hysteria in the framework of psychoanalysis. In a sense, Cronenberg’s treatment of “viral” metamorphosis is always implicitly on the level of language, of signifying codes (symptoms) mapped onto the abyss of the real. In his 2014 debut novel, Consumed, Cronenberg re-visits the thematic terrain of Naked Lunch, which in certain respects is a rewriting of the film centred on the subsidiary characters of Tom and Joan Frost – refigured as a pair of ageing celebrity Parisian philosophers of late capitalist consumerism, Célestine and Aristide Arosteguy (echoes of Sartre and de Beauvoir, Sollers and Kristeva). After a screening of a controversial North Korean film at Cannes, to which she responds with unusual intensity tinged with irrationalism, Célestine becomes convinced that her left breast harbours an insect colony and insists on having it amputated. “We must destroy the insect religion,” she says, waking in the middle of the night, convinced that this alien presence in her body is not only real, but the advance guard of some remote control and command regime sent to invade her consciousness. She publishes an article, “The Judicious Destruction of the Insect Religion,” tagged with keywords like “Weber. Capitalism. Vatican. Luther. Entomology. Sartre. Consumerism. Beckett. North Korea. Apocalypse. Oblivion.” Aristide meanwhile has his hi-tech 17 William S. Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution (Expanded Media, 1970) 5-6. hearing aid reprogrammed (by a pressed vinyl recording of bug-sounds) and is able not only to hear the insects in his wife’s breast communicating (the information chatter of the cyberverse), but finds himself subject to a kind of remote mind-control in which his “reality” begins to diverge between a compulsion to actually consume his wife’s insect body (as a ritualised “mercy killing”) and to perform a type of simulacral dismemberment of it. What transpires is an horrific, possibly fake, crime scene in which Célestine’s real body – or else a 3D-printed body-replica – is hacked to bits and partly ceremonially cannibalised by her husband and two accomplices, while being photographed and videoed in forensic detail for web-distribution. In the end, however, no actual evidence remains except Célestine’s partly eaten left breast, the remainder, possibly, of a voluntary mastectomy. The whole thing feeds a global media event described by one of the novel’s tech-obsessed freelance journalist characters as “some juicy French philosophical sex-killing murder-suicide cannibal thing.” But the more the story is probed, the more it retreats, as in a series of countercathexes, mutating through more and more elaborate narrative situations. While in Burroughs, narrative cohesion is dispersed through the operations of association/ dissociation that his writing itself constitutes (call it a “cutup machine”), Cronenberg – as in his films – maintains at 97 98 all times a simulacrum of conventional narratology, enough at least to seduce the reader with its various shifting pointsof-view, its first- and third-person narration, etc., so that in the presence of at least a vestige of “reason” (of a rationalenough set of motives, explanations, justifications) there is a sense that one’s own rationality has been usurped. As with Bill Lee in Naked Lunch, even when what is happening appears entirely unreasonable, it still maintains a certain appeal to a rationale. “You’re not supposed to be seeing this,” Joan tells him when he finds her shooting up bug powder for the first time. “Well now that I’m seeing it,” he replies, “what is it?” As Baudrillard says, “The question then becomes, not ‘Where does illusion come from?’ but ‘Where does the real come from?’ How is it that there is even a reality effect? That is the real enigma. If the world is real, how is it that it did not become rational long ago?”18 This “perversity” of the rationale in the face of an extermination of all rational thought in the constitution of the “real” itself, is likewise adopted by the Arosteguy’s as the sole possibility of a counter-critique of the all-pervasive commodity/spectacular system, in which “reason” does not merely act at the behest of ideology, but is ideology. “Perverse,” because such a counter-critique represents the impossible: the “reason of unreason.” In the face of the technological sublime, as the dream of reason towards its ultimate materialisation, the “reason of unreason” exposes a certain technological irrationalism: the otherof-the-other that consumes itself in a kind of potlatch of “irrational thought” that thereby feeds back into the system, like Burroughs’s “word virus.” For as Burroughs fully appreciated, the ultimate form of the “word” is not command but détournement – the potential metamorphosis of any and all possible command-structures into noise (the tragic view of history, from Hegel’s P.O.V.), and consequently the metamorphosis of noise into parody. In Consumed, the entire arc of the Arosteguy’s insect conspiracy occurs, or so the unfolding plotline would have us (and the Arosteguys) believe, at the behest of a kidnapped French filmmaker (and former lover, Romme 18 Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 13. Vertegaal) secretly working in North Korea – who has been sending subliminal messages via various technological channels back to Célestine. Though just like her ritualistic murder/suicide, he too may simply be a construct, a “ghost in the machine” or virtual ROM, operated by unknown forces whose motives are nothing if not opaque – an obscene “super-ego,” giving form, so to speak, to a manifestly impossible desire. The “philosophical sublime” is here rendered through a dialectic of unreason – “like some rudimentary automatic nervous system,” as Ballard says vis-à-vis Burroughs, “unable to distinguish even its own identity from the environment around it.”19 The novel ends with the technological dissolution of this sublime as its ultimate horizon: The image of Romme in the Skype window opened its mouth to speak but then unaccountably froze, then stuttered in a disturbing computer-graphics-creation kind of way, then disintegrated in a shower of sparkling pixel flakes. After a pregnant pause the Skype window itself crashed, leaving a momentary square black hole in the middle of the desktop’s swirly cosmic image of the Andromeda Galaxy, the default Mac OS X (Lion iteration) wallpaper…20 In a sense, the desire to reach the “real” Vertegaal represents here a vestigial humanism, traversed by an irrational sentimentality that runs counter to the Arosteguy’s avowed philosophical posture – which is somewhere between neoconceptualism and a hyper-postmodernism: “The only authentic literature of the modern era,” Célestine’s image says in an archival video-interview at the beginning of the novel, “is the owner’s manual… What author of the past century has produced more provocative and poignant writing than that?”21 And if the “technical literature” of the owner’s manual stands in place of The Word, the arbitrary remote presence (Vertigaal in Consumed, Lee’s “Controller” in Naked Lunch) is God – in the counter-intuitive sentimental 19 J.G. Ballard, “Terminal Documents,” review of W. Burroughs, Ambit 27 (1966): 46. 20 David Cronenberg, Consumed (London: Fourth Estate, 2014) 284. 21 Cronenberg, Consumed, 2. 99 sense of that whose absence most powerfully appeals to the disillusioned, “like neural zombies in a house of electronic mirrors, snared and diminished by the images that multiply around them.”22 Or as Baudrillard writes: “On the horizon of simulation, not only has the world disappeared but the very question of its existence can no longer be posed… This is what we do with the problem of the truth or reality of this world: we have resolved it by technical simulation, and by creating a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see.”23 * Presented as a lecture at Café Neu Romance: International Robot Performance Festival, National Technical Library, 26 November 2015. 100 22 Ballard, “Terminal Documents,” 46. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 5. “But this is perhaps the ruse of the world itself. The iconolaters of Byzantium were subtle folk, who claimed to represent God to his greater glory but who, simulating God in images, thereby dissimulated the problem of his existence. Behind each of these images, in fact, God had disappeared. He was not dead; he had disappeared. That is to say, the problem no longer even arose. It was resolved by simulation.” 23 David Lynch, Inland Empire (2006) IN SUSPENSE OF THE REAL CRONENBERG | GILLIAM | LYNCH In his “Dialectics of the Fable” (2000), Alain Badiou discusses a series of films, Cube (1997), The Matrix (1999) and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), as philosophical machines. These are films that, in Badiou’s estimation, both reflect upon and in a sense encapsulate a set of “problems” – what we might call disturbances in the psycho-social fabric of the medium – disturbances that not only point to a crisis, but are themselves critical. Concerned with the status of the “Real,” these films are necessarily both selfreflexive and projective in a way that subverts the “mentally divergent” dualism of illusion and reality (viz the madhouse scene in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995)) by folding the transcendental loop back on itself – from a dialectics of the “fable” to the entropic spiral of the “image”: a force-feedback that produces a breakdown between the fantasy of the Real (as simulacrum) and the simulacral character of the fantasy itself (its filmic bipolarity). “What is a subject who is unable to assure itself,” Badiou asks, “of an objective existence?”1 Cronenberg’s response – the dreamlike looping recursive structure of eXistenz (faint echoes of Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)) – “isn’t assuring,” Badiou argues. 1 Alain Badiou, Cinéma (Paris: Nova, 2010) 315. 101 102 “It seems to point towards a subject of the unconscious, a monstrous, violent, sexual projection of an Ego revealed by the gamelike effacement of objectivity.” This is mirrored in the regressive structure of the film itself, as “pursuit,” “quest,” “escape” through the “wilderness and perils of a world of the seeming…”2 Badiou regards this type of filmmaking as “phenomenological,” to the extent it is concerned with the immanence of a certain reality. Like Cronenberg’s earlier film, Videodrome (1983), eXistenZ is first situated within a recognisably realist framework. This is a regular feature of Cronenberg’s work and, in a way, that of Gilliam’s and David Lynch also (from Brazil (1985) to Inland Empire (2006)). “Ordinary, heterogeneous elements” – such as machines and biology – are frequently the chosen agents by which realist conventions are dismantled by each of these directors, exposing what we might call the ideological structure of cinematic realism (something Lynch especially has made a focal point). It is as though realism itself is turned against the belief that the world is in some sense construed or even fabricated with a mindful purpose – in place of a void. In place of this, we are given a world structured by violent enigmas. In a series of essays on Cronenberg, Burroughs and Deleuze, Cengiz Erdem argues that, “in Cronenberg’s films we see the theme of machines replacing humans in the process of being replaced by the theme of humans connected to machines, or machines as extensions of humans providing them with another realm beyond and yet still within the material world” where the “psychic and the material” recursively feed back into each other: In eXistenZ, for instance, we have seen how the gamepod is plugged into the subject’s spine through a bio-port and becomes an extension of the body. In Naked Lunch the typewriter becomes Lee’s extension. In Burroughs the obsession was still with the machine taking over the body. In Cronenberg’s adaptation of Burroughs the obsession is with body and machine acting upon one another.3 2 3 Badiou, Cinéma, 317. Cengiz Erdem, “Cronenberg, Burroughs, Deleuze (2) – The Evil Spirit and The point is, however, that in Burroughs and Cronenberg it is really a question of the prosthetic character of the body as extension of technology: the body-as-such exists no more than “the machine” exists, or “the mind” exists. In The Perfect Crime, Jean Baudrillard makes the salient observation that “we play with death in technology as other cultures did in sacrifice” (“If I can see the world after the point of my own [fantasmatic/proxy] disappearance, that means I am immortal”).4 Machine-death or, as Freud says, the “death drive” situates that counter-intuitive impulse (existence-as-entropy) that propels the body towards its fantasmatic, technological other, of which it is in fact already the mirror image – this body which is already a simulacrum of its own corporeality. For Baudrillard it isn’t a question, however, of asserting “that the real does or does not exist – a ludicrous proposition which well expresses what that reality means to us: a tautological hallucination… There is merely a movement of the exacerbation of reality towards paroxysm, where it involutes of its own accord and implodes leaving no trace, not even the sign of its end. For the body of the real was never recovered.”5 For Cronenberg, Interzone becomes an allegory of the “spectacle” in its domination of all aspects of social consciousness, which in turn is merely a reification of its unconscious existence. As Debord famously puts it: “For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings – tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behaviour…”6 Hence: The spectator’s alienation from and submission to the contemplated object (which is the outcome of his unthinking activity) works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more readily he recognises his own needs in the images of need proposed by the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The the Spiritual Automaton,” Senselogi© (2010): http://cengizerdem.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/cronenberg-burroughs-deleuze-6/ 4 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996) 39; 38. 5 Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 46. 6 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995) §18. 103 spectacle’s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual’s own actions are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere.7 In an important corollary, which comes to characterise the sense of powerless effected by the spectacular character of even the most fundamental human interactions in many of Cronenberg’s films, Debord notes: “The spectacle is by definition immune to human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Whenever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle re-establishes its rule.”8 This is nowhere more explicit than in Cronenberg’s Videodrome. 104 1. Produced in 1983, Videodrome was described by Andy Warhol as “A Clockwork Orange of the ’80s.” The film stars James Woods as Max Renn (director of a small-time cable network, Civic TV), Debbie Harry as Nicki Brand (a local radio talkback personality with whom he enters into an hallucinatory, sadomasochistic “affair”), and Jack Creley (Professor Brian O’Blivion, a Marshall McLuhan clone). It is in large part an investigation into the ideological coding of reality and of individual behaviour mediated by the omniprescence of TV and video culture, in which the idea of an image is inextricable from that of a signal or command (medium and message). Renn, bored with Civic TV’s regular slate of exploitation and porn, complains that “It’s too soft. There’s something too… soft about it. I’m looking for something that will break through. Something tough.” His tech assistant, Harlan, meanwhile reports that he’s locked onto a pirate satellite broadcast, called Videodrome which features torture and snuff unchangingly played out in a clay-walled dungeon. Videodrome, however, turns out to be a weaponised image-as-signal emanating from a mysterious type of influencing machine that assumes control of Renn’s consciousness, making him into its agent in a secret war 7 8 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, §30. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, §18. David Cronenberg, Videodrome (1983) being played out between O’Blivion’s “Cathode Ray Mission” and its nemesis, Convex’s “Spectacular Optical.” In a key scene, O’Blivion describes the Videodrome programme as the arena of an evolutionary struggle in the production of the “New Flesh,” while for Convex it’s an apparatus of (moral-fundamentalist) social control: in part evoking William Gibson’s “Matrix”; in part, something between Jeremy Bentham panoptical apparatus of psycho-technical discipline and punishment and Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. O’Blivion, Videodrome’s “prophet,” is revealed to be already dead, while maintaining a virtual existence as a VHS archive. O’Blivion’s “death” is recoded as “a refusal to appear except on television”: “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye,” he says during one broadcast. “For that reason, I refuse to appear except on television. O’Blivion is not the name I was born with. It’s my television name. Soon, all of us will have special names, names designed to cause the cathode-ray tube to resonate.” O’Blivion prophesises a future in which existence itself will function as a type of autonomous symptom of TV reality, like his own brain tumour, which he considers not to be the symptom of a disease but rather a new organ of perception: 105 …massive doses of Videodrome signal will ultimately create a new outgrowth of the human brain, which will produce and control hallucination to the point that it will change human reality… The Real will no longer be the beyond of the virtual, or something masked or distorted by the virtual, but an outgrowth of the virtual itself – a hyperreal, in Baudrillard’s words (“Total transformation,” as Nikki Brand tells Renn. “To become the new flesh, you have to kill the old flesh”: “Projecting ourselves,” so Baudrillard says, “into a fictive, random world for which there is no other motive than this violent abreaction to ourselves.”)9 As in Gilliam’s Brazil, it’s not a question of reality being perverted but of perversion as social regulation (the real obscenity in Videodrome is the system of control which propagates itself by way of a viral snuff pornography). In a type of Freudian gesture more explicitly (yet less exactly) examined in Cronenberg’s 2011 film A Dangerous Method, we are made to witness the invasion of the “Real” into the fantasy of regulated desire: the conventional relation between virtuality and reality is not merely inverted, it is abolished. In The Sublime Object of Ideology Žižek writes: When Lacan says that the last support of what we call “reality” is a fantasy, this is definitely not to be understood in the sense of “life is just a dream,” “what we call reality is just an illusion,” and so forth… Such a generalised illusion is impossible… The Lacanian thesis is, on the contrary, that there is always a kernel, a leftover which persists and cannot be reduced to a universal play of illusory mirroring. The difference between Lacan and “naïve realism” is that for Lacan, the only point at which we approach this hard kernel of the Real is indeed the dream. When we awaken into reality after a dream, we usually say to ourselves “it was just a dream,” thereby blinding ourselves to the fact that in our everyday, wakening reality we are nothing but a consciousness of this dream. It was only in the dream that we approached the fantasy-framework which determines our activity, our mode of acting in reality itself.10 106 9 Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 34. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verson, 1989) 47. 10 In Videodrome this simulacral existence is more than simply an extension of the “virtual into the real,” in which the body functions as a complex of symptoms operated by the automaton within: the individual experiences himself to be this alien video-body, which it both materialises in the flesh and – so to speak – cannibalises. This tumorous “outgrowth” is both a reification and the violent abolition of the mind-body dualism, by which consciousness itself presents as the extruded physical body (“the new flesh”) of an autonomous phantasm which in fact programmes it (what Žižek calls the nothing of transcended fantasy). “Fantasy,” as Žižek says, “is a basic scenario filling out the empty space of a fundamental impossibility, a screen masking a void…”11 The object of Renn’s fantasy (Nikki Brand) is shown to be something ultimately alien, originating in some unacknowledged or secret place (not the Videodrome arena/torture chamber, but coded inside the video signal itself, as the very possibility of the “message”). “Fantasy,” Žižek concludes, “conceals the fact that the Other, the symbolic order, is structured around some traumatic impossibility, around something which cannot be symbolised.” We are then left with the question: “What happens with desire after we ‘traverse’ fantasy?” The answer offered by Cronenberg in the culminating scenes of Videodrome when Renn shoots himself in the head (first “on TV,” then “in real life”) is, for Žižek, “ultimately the death drive”: “‘beyond fantasy’ there is no yearning or some kindred sublime phenomenon, ‘beyond fantasy’” we find only this mindless dissolution into the objectified “Real.”12 2. In his 1981 essay, “Simulacra and Simulations,” Baudrillard – who was at pains to distinguish virtuality from Debord’s notion of the “spectacle” (on the basis that the spectacle “still left room open for critical consciousness and demystification” while virtuality (as unconditional realisation) is “irrevocable”13) – outlines the following 11 12 13 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 126. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 123-4. Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 27: “The objects we subject to the full 107 successive phases of the “image” in the genealogy of reality’s disappearance: 1. 2. 3. 4. 108 it it it it it is the reflection of a basic reality masks and perverts a basic reality masks the absence of a basic reality bears no relation to any basic reality whatsoever: is its own pure simulacrum.14 These are the basic evolutionary steps of what Baudrillard terms the hyperreal, in which “we are no longer spectators, but actors in the performance, and actors increasingly integrated into the course of the performance… We are, in fact, beyond all dis-alienation.”15 There is no escape from this “desert of the real.” Unlike the Wachowskis’s The Matrix, with its red pill and blue pill – in which both the reality of the illusion and a fundamental reality behind the illusion are not only in-and-of-themselves real – in Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) there’s no escape: no other constitutive reality upon which the socalled simulacral world is founded and with respect to which a critical consciousness may be maintained (other than as paranoia). Like in the ancient Chinese proverb, it’s simulacra all the way down. In many respects eXistenZ is a reprise of Videodrome, where interactive gaming has taken the place of video. The plot involves three simple elements, which are recombined in varying permutations to produce the film’s action and narrative structure. In this way, Cronenberg’s film borrows from von Neumann and Morgenstern’s seminal Theory of glare of criticism – sex, dreams, work, history, power – have taken their revenge by disappearing, producing, in return, the consoling illusion of truth.” Etc. Baudrillard’s error, however, is to suppose that the hyperreal isn’t already figured in the entry into the symbolic order, as in Lacan, for whom the “Real” is in the place of the transcendental signifier, so that Baudrillard’s order of simulacra (as a mapping of the symbolic onto the (place of) the Real) is in fact a simulacrum of a simulacrum. For Debord, the possibility of a critique resides in the perturbation inherent in language (the symbolic) rather than representing a step outside. Baudrillard’s hyperreal, on the other hand, is in certain respects yet another example of a self-identical present or, equally, the collapse of the Real-as-representation (the referent of the symbolic) into its own dis-appearance. 14 Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Cambridge: Polity, 1988) 170. 15 Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, 27. A game pod being operated on in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) Games and Economic Behaviour, a study of probability, strategy and hypothesis, and from an array of “possible worlds” theories. These three elements are represented by two competing games consol manufacturers – Antenna Research and Cortical Systematics – and an anti-gaming movement of “realists” opposed to its “deformation” of reality. Throughout the film it’s difficult to keep track of which forces are represented by which characters, and as the narrative delves into deeper game-levels the logic dictating actions becomes more dreamlike and “probabilistic” rather than “purposive” in any straightforward sense. The film uses varying strategies of illusionism to entice the viewer, but at the end we – like the film’s protagonists – are left suspended in uncertainty as to what constitutes the “game” and what constitutes “reality,” or whether the real itself is constituted as an extension of the game; that there is, in effect, no escape. Cronenberg advances this point by obscuring from the outset any clear distinction between the organic and the technological, the real and the artificial. Gamers jack into their consoles through “bio ports,” via which the “game pod” is connected by an “UmbyCord” directly with the player’s nervous system. The “pod” operates as a type of prosthetic consciousness; an externalised representation of subjective “agency” or ego. Players’ actions are dictated 109 110 by the characters they play and the situations in which they find themselves rather than autonomously. The game itself is a type of desiring machine, producing a complex of symptoms in which the antagonistic/destructive impulses represented by the film’s three elements (the two competing fantasy systems and the “real”) are coded, distorted, concealed, displaced. It would be easy here to find analogies to Freud’s schema of the id, ego and superego – and the confusion between a neurotic complex (the breakdown in the ego’s relation to the interior drives, or id) and psychosis (the breakdown in its relation to an external reality). With reality virtualised, the two conditions become synonymous, and the only basic reality open to experience is that of the paranoiac. We are left with the dilemma: how is a critical action possible where there is nothing upon which or against which criticism can be directed? What does it mean to be a “realist” within the framework of an all-pervasive virtuality? Of a “reality” that is always provisional, contingent, tactical? Cronenberg appears to suggest that it is rather the compulsively repetitive, permutative cybernetic character of this “virtual reality” – characterised by a certain return of the repressed – that offers the only grounds. A form of criticism as perturbation – the fantasy of the real traversed by disturbances that arise from the incommensurability of the so-called real itself, which is (nothing) but an image. Or as McKenzie Wark writes in Gamer Theory: Ever get the feeling you’re playing some vast and useless game whose goal you don’t know and whose rules you can’t remember? Ever get the fierce desire to quit, to resign, to forfeit, only to discover there’s no umpire, no referee, no regulator to whom you can announce your capitulation? Ever get the vague dread that while you have no choice but to play the game, you can’t win it, can’t know the score, or who keeps it? Ever suspect that you don’t even know who your real opponent might be? … Welcome to gamespace.16 16 McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007) 001. Rosanna Arquette in Crash (2004) 3. Throughout his filmography, Cronenberg’s “cinema of perversion” can be seen to explore the way in which the viewer’s gaze is implicated in that of a film psychology that traverses the limits of the “normal” – exposing the foundations of normality in perversion, rather than presenting the perverse as a deviation from a norm, centred particularly in the relation of the organic body to the invasive “technology” of the virus or machine. In J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel Crash, the automotive “body” and the culture obsessed with it represents a “perversion” which is at once the rule, and its exception. The novel epitomised, according to Simon Sellars, “Ballard’s ‘death of affect’ theories… The media landscape, with its aestheticisation of violence, is the novel’s main character. The car, the first and still most recognisable symbol of mass production, provides the eternal metaphor.” The plot has the “superficiality” and recursive monomania of a porno film: It tells the story of the narrator, “James Ballard,” the “hoodlum scientist” Vaughan, and a supporting cast of curiously one-dimensional characters as they follow their peculiar obsessions along the hyperreal motorways of England. Tuned to police radios, they descend on the 111 scenes of car crashes, depositing their semen and vaginal mucus on torn flesh and twisted metal. Ultimately Vaughan desires ‘a union of semen and engine coolant,’ splattered in world-wide “autogeddon.”17 112 We are confronted with a general psychopathology, in fact, hinging upon a form of barely sublimated mass hysteria (consider the ending of Cronenberg’s 1975 film Shivers for an immediate analogy). Like the serial, obsessive images in Warhol’s disaster series, in which a media-saturated spectatorship is confronted with the banality of its own pornographic fascination with death – a fascination exposed as an obscenity, because otherwise sublimated or objectified onto external agents. In Cronenberg’s 2004 film adaptation, the external agent is the character named Vaughan, a car crash fetishist. Vaughan comes to articulate and even channel the formerly unacknowledged desires of the film’s other characters, principally James Ballard (James Spader) and Dr Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), who are involved in a head-on collision. While the trauma of the crash acts as a catalyst, it is Vaughan who appears as the embodiment of the characters’ unconscious drives – he is both enactor and re-enactor, anticipating and recycling a kind of automotive eroticism: he narrates the characters’ unconscious desires to them, just as he narrates the details of the famous carcrashes he stages for an underground audience. It’s no accident that the word drive evokes an association with Freud’s exploration of the unconscious entanglement of the pleasure principle and death. Driving, for Cronenberg, becomes more than simply a metaphor, it encompasses an entire ontological condition. The car, the auto-mobile, becomes an analogue to the Cartesian interior God, the Ego-operator, whose archaic form is realised in the figure of Vaughan. The supposedly organic drives are given a technological armature; bodies and machines, just as in Descartes, mesh: the desiring subject is wired into an entire system of flows and cataclysmic discontinuities – of which it is conscious in only the mesmerised way of Ballard and 17 Simon Sellars, “Crash (1973),” Ballardian (17 September 2006): www. ballardian.com/biblio-crash his wife Catherine during the opening of the film as they stare down at the freeway from their highrise apartment building (mesmerised in their act of contemplation which becomes, in turn, an act of detached copulation). The scene describes a disconnection and ennui which masks a slumbering libidinal force that only requires the “crash” in order to be awoken (which is to say, the impulse towards death rendered as a state of consciousness). Up until this point the characters’ lives appear to have been dreamlike; the “crash” exposes a potent “hidden reality.” Ballard’s novel, on which the film is based, begins with Vaughan’s death, marking a closed circuit – the other characters, thus aroused from their libidinal ennui, no longer require Vaughan’s deus ex machina – they have learned to become agents of desire in their own right, to “love their symptom,” as Žižek says. Ballard’s prose achieves an almost erotic intensity: Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan’s body she placed a gloved hand to her throat.18 This is a familiar theme in Cronenberg’s films – in which the protagonists usually undergo a transformative journey culminating in some sort of transcendence. The model could easily be Dante, with Vaughan as the Virgil-figure, the guide through Hell and Purgatory. As in Videodrome and Naked Lunch, the journey is already a kind of repetition in which the drama assumes the form of a “return of the repressed.” In Videodrome this is achieved through the 18 J.G. Ballard, Crash (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973) 7. 113 idea of playback, in Naked Lunch through the displacement of the guilty conscience (Joan Lee’s accidental death), in Crash through the dissolution of “event” into “reenactment” and “rehearsal.” The mode is inherently sexual; the driven intensity tending towards exponential. Death, the ultimate “real,” represents something verging upon an erotic sublime, or the kind we encounter in the writings of Georges Bataille: the consummation of the impossible. The automobile, that ubiquitous symbol of “potency” in a consumer society driven by petro-dollars, becomes the locus of all sexual gratification. Desire in Cronenberg is always linked to some sort of otherness: the video screen – some archaic, alien insectform of the unconscious – or machines. As in Freud, the organic life-processes – so-called instincts – are re-figured as a form of overcoded mechanism: a complex assemblage the body is barely able to mask, and which becomes increasingly exposed on its surface: literally, in Crash, in the form of surgical prostheses and tattoos, anticipating a type of “ideal marriage” of body and machine – “the reshaping of the human body,” as Vaughan says, “by modern technology.” Or as Ballard writes: In his vision of a car-crash with the actress, Vaughan was obsessed by many wounds and impacts – by the dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of their two cars meeting head-on in complex collisions endlessly repeated in slow-motion films, by the identical wounds inflicted on their bodies, by the image of windshield glass frosting around her face as she broke its tinted surface like a deathborn Aphrodite, by the compound fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbreak mountings, and above all by the wounds to their genitalia, her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered for ever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine.19 114 4. “Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to be able to go on living.” So says Carl Jung to his former patient, Sabina Spielrein, at the end of Cronenberg’s 19 Ballard, Crash, 8. Michael Fassbender as Jung & Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein in A Dangerous Method (2011) 2011 investigation of hysteria, sexual perversion, freedom, orthodoxy, infidelity and the Oedipalised power-relation at the heart of the emergent psychoanalytic movement (and at the heart of cinema), entitled A Dangerous Method. It’s notable that for his only direct engagement with the Freudian science of the unconscious Cronenberg elected to shoot this film (based on the 1993 book A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein, by John Kerr) as a more or less conventional period drama. Cronenberg exploits the period genre to merge naturalism and a certain mannerism, evident in the costumes, settings and dialogue. In tandem with the logic of psychoanalysis, the film examines the constitution of normality. To this end, the character of the young hysteric, Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) – who is referred to Jung (Michael Fassbender) for treatment by the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud (Viggo Morgensen) – represents a paradoxical figure. Her illness manifests itself in a series of hysterical symptoms that cause her behaviour to depart dramatically from what would be considered ordinary. Spielrein’s aberrant behaviour nevertheless corresponds to a certain type (the actual behaviour of an hysteric) – so that what stands out as most aberrant in the film is achieved precisely by naturalism. 115 116 We can recognise an automatic distinction here with the exaggerated mannerism and general “weirdness” of Naked Lunch. Cronenberg seeks to achieve an effect of dislocation without resorting to a phantasmagoria. Alongside the “dangerous method” of psychoanalysis, it’s as if Cronenberg were seeking to draw our attention to the likewise “dangerous method” of realism itself, behind whose façade all that’s aberrant is normalised. It’s as if the “method acting” Cronenberg requires of his ensemble in this costume theatre is itself a kind of symptom – like the scene in which Spielrein watches herself in the mirror, hands strapped to the bed-head, while Jung whips her with his belt: a mimesis in which the libidinal drama unfolds in kind of entropic loop, perpetually replayed with all the sincerity and intensity the “method” is programmed to avail itself of, and whose climax is merely the glitch, the freeze-frame, before the loop feeds back to begin again. This hysterical image is also an image of distanciation in which libido is never “experienced” but merely performed, costumed, symptomatised – beyond, we are told, is mere anarchism (embodied here in the person of Vincent Cassel) – since it is the illness itself that is “the method.” We encounter this idea repeatedly with regard to the theme of “repression,” which the pervasively sexual character of Freud’s theories facilitates. Jung, the married protestant Swiss doctor, is presented as a figure of rectitude, propriety, and consequently of guilt, anxiety and dishonesty. Spielrein, on the other hand, is presented as a figure of libidinal excess whose sexuality has been channelled, by her disciplinarian father, into a perversion of which she is first ashamed and later through which she finds release: that is, sexual arousal and gratification achieved solely by flagellation, or its metonymic representation (Jung beating the dust out of her coat; her own reflection in a mirror; her father’s hand – which may also be the “dead hand” of a certain realism, the anaesthesia of symbolic depiction, etc.). By all accounts, both Jung and Freud themselves experienced breakdowns, both of which are touched upon in the film. The implication being that “illness” is itself part of the “cure”; that what is normal can only be arrived at by way of “deviation”; and that the cost of accomplishing the former cannot be at the expense of the latter. The suppression of the “abnormal” results only in illness. The implication here is that normality itself is an illness, an (albeit it regularised) hysterical symptom. The only characters in the film who are not outwardly traumatised in this way are Jung’s wife and, ironically enough, Freud. But we see that behind the pragmatic façade of the founder of the psychoanalytic movement there lies a complex set of (indeed) Oedipal anxieties brought to the fore in his conflict with Jung, most clearly during the 1912 meeting of the International Psychoanalytic Association at Munich where Freud goes into a faint (the symbolic castration of the method’s father). Emma Jung, meanwhile, with her impeccable self-control and outward appearance of “normality” is perhaps the most blatant figure of perversion in the film; less a character than a caricature – anaemic, bloodless, as if all life had been drained from her and she is simply going through the motions of being human, like an automaton or a well-mannered zombie without need of special effects. In making this film in this way (his third collaboration with actor Viggo Mortensen, all of them in the naturalist style), Cronenberg seems to be posing a question: Is cinema a psychoanalysis? Or, as in Videodrome and eXistenZ, is it the symptom? Or even the illness? Is cinema the representation of a collective desire which is otherwise unable to formulate itself? Or is it part of the repressive apparatus by which desire is normalised? And the question to which we will return again and again: Is a critical cinema possible – a cinema that is capable of exploiting the illusionistic character of the medium in order to disillusion? And if so, what would that mean? 5. If Badiou regards the work of Cronenberg as a philosophical machine exploring (or posing) violent enigmas, for Žižek the question is of the ontological character of cinema itself, moving from the experience of fantasy as a symptom of the real, or as a support of reality, to the real-as-symptom. This is a question Žižek frequently poses with reference to the work of David Lynch and also Terry Gilliam, whose 1985 117 Terry Gilliam, Brazil (1985) 118 masterpiece, Brazil (co-written with Tom Stoppard), is a kind of fulcrum between Eraserhead (1977) and eXistenZ. In Brazil, Žižek argues, Gilliam depicts “in a disgustingly funny way, a totalitarian society” in which the film’s hero “finds an ambiguous point of escape from everyday reality in his dream.”20 But this escape, Žižek insists, is not one from a true world into a false world, but the contrary, since the totalitarian reality in which Jonathan Pryce’s character (Sam Lowry) is trapped is constructed as a type of bureaucratic illusion. Moreover, “it is only in the dream,” as Lacan also tells us, “that we come close to the real awakening – that is, to the Real of our desire.”21 Here, then, is the distinction between the film’s depiction of a totalitarian image-machine, and the implied totalitarianism of depiction as such: the image that always maintains a “subject-in-suspense-of-the-real,” so to speak. At the other end of the Gilliam spectrum is his 2005 film Tideland, quite possibly the director’s strangest film – probably because it also represents his most sustained engagement with realism. There are no time-travelling dwarfs or viral catastrophes, no grotesque totalitarian bureaucracies, Jabberwockies or Baron Munchausens. The 20 21 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 46. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 47. whole drama revolves around the localised imagination of a young girl played out against a landscape of southern US gothic. The weirdness of this landscape and the imagination that shapes it is so potent as film to the extent that it avoids the contrivance of depiction. The weirdness of Tideland is, so to speak, genuinely weird. Based on Mitch Cullin’s novel of the same name, the third of a Texas trilogy, the film is “about” a pre-adolescent girl (Jeliza-Rose) who spends a summer at an isolated, rundown Texas farmhouse, with only a collection of dolls’ heads for company. The story is in part an examination of the way we use narratives as psychological defence mechanisms: how the fantasy of the “real” segues into the fantasy of the “imaginary.” While the storyline plots an arc of ever-increasing irrationality, this irrationality always somehow remains a reasonable response to the nature of the reality confronted by the characters in the film. Very near the beginning of the film, Jeliza-Rose’s father, Noah (Jeff Bridges), dies of a heroin overdose. Jeliza-Rose treats this as an ordinary state of affairs, he is, after all, a junkie and spends much of his time unconscious. This sets off a series of logical inferences that give much of what follows in the film an almost syllogistic necessity – one thing leads reasonably to another, right up to the taxidermy scene, when Noah is embalmed by their neighbours, and the blowing up of the local nighttrain, the “Monster Shark,” by Dickens, a mentally-retarded man-child with whom JelizaRose embarks on a doomed romance. Tideland is also Gilliam’s most controversial film. Despite winning the jury prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival, it was widely savaged by critics. Entertainment Weekly called it “gruesomely awful.” New York Times critic Anthony Scott described it as “creepy, exploitative, and self-indulgent.” Rotten Tomatoes gave it a critics rating of 4/10, billing it as “disturbing, and mostly unwatchable,” while in contrast noting a 60% audience approval rating. For his part, Cronenberg hailed Tideland as a “poetic horror film” – a quote used to market the film during its theatrical release. Gilliam himself has said he conceived of Tideland as a combination of Alice in Wonderland and Psycho, attracting the response from one critic that 119 Gilliam is a type of diseased Lewis Carroll. The fairy tale element in Tideland, however, is stripped of the fantastical dimensions that characterised Gilliam’s previous film, The Brothers Grimm (also 2005): in returning to low-budget production with Tideland, Gilliam also moved away from the use of special effects as plot-motivation, allowing the tension between fairytale motif and unembellished realism to create a pervasive sense of unease which, in other films, would simply become entertainment. 120 6. Somewhere between Tideland and Brazil lies the axis along which David Lynch has pursued the principle concerns of his film-making from Blue Velvet (1996) onwards. For Lynch, the tension between fairytale motif and unembellished realism most often takes the form of a kind of film noir metaphysics. The “violent enigma” is pared back to a realism that collapses into itself, exposing the armature of its own illusion. This is a structural, not a moral, armature: whatever moral is on offer in Lynch’s films is simply one more element of the illusion itself. No hay banda. Lynch explores this tension regularly in the form of a dialectic of symptom and desire which achieves a kind of apotheosis in films like Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholand Drive (2001) – “a dialectics of overtaking ourselves towards the future,” as Žižek says, “and simultaneously retroactive modification of the past – dialectics by which the error is internal to the truth.”22 There is, to paraphrase an almost invariably misconstrued statement, no outside of the image. Blue Velvet, David Lynch’s savage portrait of middleAmerican gothic, elicited mixed responses from critics following Dune’s box office failure two years previously, but nevertheless earned Lynch his second Academy Award nomination for best director. Earlier work, Eraserhead and The Elephant Man (1980), both shot in black and white, had established the director’s credentials as both an experimentalist and an historical realist. While Elephant Man had garnered Lynch eight Academy Award nominations, Blue Velvet marked an apparent departure for Lynch into new 22 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 69. Dennis Hopper as Frank & Isabella Rossallini as Dorothy Valens: David Lynch, Blue Velvet (1996) territory as a film-maker, characterised by saturated colour, neo-noir atmospherics and surreal plotlines – elements that achieve a particular formalisation in later films like Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Blue Velvet is also the beginning of Lynch’s exploration of “parallel” worlds as both a recurring motif and as a structural logic. Here, the parallel worlds are those of middle-American suburbia (represented by Kyle MacLachlan’s and Laura Dern’s characters, Jeffrey Beaumont and Sandy Williams) and its toxic crime-ridden and violent underside (represented by the character played by Hopper, Frank Booth, a psychotic gangster; and the torch-singer Dorothy Valens, played by Isabella Rossallini, whose signature piece, Wayne and Morris’s “Blue Velvet” (1950), had earlier featured in Kenneth Anger’s 1963 film Scorpio Rising, a portrait of fetishised masculinity). The film is all about taboo and transgression and a kind of collective unconscious of middle-class white America, situated in a 1970s still mired in the cultural fantasies of previous decades. Lynch beautifully satirises a whole array of nostalgias and sentimentalities in the process of exposing the libidinous forces driving the mass fantasy – whose lineaments increasingly resemble a neurotic overcoding of 121 122 the “real” as the film proceeds towards its climax. These are subjects Lynch comes to revisit extensively in his next two films, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) and (the second half of) Lost Highway. Considered both a “prequel” and “sequel” to the Twin Peaks TV series created by Lynch and Mark Frost in 1990, Fire Walk with Me is an elliptical amalgam of clues and subterfuges about the last seven days in the life of Laura Palmer, whose death sets in motion the action of the TV series and constitutes – in the manner of a typical Lynchian motif – its central, unresolved “enigma.” Here Lynch explores a fragmentary and at times “hysterical” stylistic, anticipating the middle “Silencio” sequence in Mulholland Drive and establishing a template for the mood and overall construction of Inland Empire. Kyle MacLachlan (Blue Velvet), re-appears here as FBI special agent Dale Cooper, with Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer playing a type of counterpoint role to Laura Dern’s Sandy Williams character: exposing the sexual underside of the white-bread suburban middle class depicted in the earlier film. Lynch’s “red curtain” motif appears here perhaps for the first time, affecting a sense of thematic déjà vu between Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive which is also reinforced by the sequence with the “Man from Another Place,” echoing the appearance in Mulholland Drive of the mysterious Mister Roque (both played by dwarf actor Michael J. Anderson). Where Mulholland Drive later explores parallel narratives and complimentary dream states, Fire Walk with Me (like Lost Highway) explores the idea of split or multiple personalities, so that the film’s overall dramatic arc might be regarded as an account of Laura Palmer’s fragmenting psyche. The film’s preoccupation with fantasy, dreams and non-rational “logics” centred around a core “mystery,” appears to “resolve” itself around a sublimated libidinal force. As in Blue Velvet, the obscene locus of this force turns out to be the father figure – an incestuous, murderous super-ego. 7. Lost Highway continued Lynch’s exploration of psychoanalytic narrative structures begun in Blue Velvet. If Blue Velvet can be read as an Oedipal fantasy, Lost Highway focuses – to quote Žižek – upon the “enigma of The “mystery man”: David Lynch, Lost Highway (1997) feminine desire” as unobtainable object. Blue Velvet begins with a type of sublimated wish-fulfilment: the symbolic death of the father – in fact, the father’s “paralysis”: he suffers a stroke. But this paralysis is also a typical Freudian “symbolisation” of the erect phallus – the symbolic authority of the father – who has in effect been struck-down in the dream of the son. We need only look to the final scene of the film, with Jeffrey lying on a deckchair in his yard, daydreaming, to realise that the entire intervening drama has in fact taken place solely in his imagination. It is as if he’s simply awakening and continuing his “idyllic” guiltfree suburban existence – his father, who has miraculously recovered, is sharing a drink with the neighbours around a BBQ. His mother, aunt, girlfriend and girlfriend’s mother are all arranged in a type of ideal familial tableau, either on the sitting room couch or in the kitchen. A mechanical robin, symbolising a trite soap-operative brand of “love” perches on the windowsill with a bug in its beak. Like one of those bugs we see at the beginning of the film as the camera descends below ground into the “underworld” of Jeffrey’s unconscious. The supposed triumph of sentiment over the “depth of the human soul” is clearly advertised. The middle American suburban fairytale gets its happy ending, just before the screen goes black. 123 124 If we accept this premise, we can easily understand Blue Velvet’s subplot, concerning Frank Booth (Denis Hopper) and Dorothy Valens, as a transposition of the family drama. Frank, with his tumescent, contorted face – induced by inhaling nitrous oxide – echoes the paralytic face of Jeffrey’s father. Frank is the tyrannical, obscene super-ego in this narrative, who must somehow be overcome. Dorothy, as the victim of Frank’s tyranny and sexual perversity, stands for the mother who must be saved. Jeffrey assumes the role of the gallant hero who wins the affections of the mother and kills the father, while gaining the adoration of the young girl, Sandy Williams, who remains a type of purified mother-surrogate. The typical virgin-and-whore theme is obviously represented here – one that returns in the dualities of both Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive. Its impetus in the film perhaps stems from what Freud identifies as the exploded myth of the mother’s inviolability, when the son discovers his (sainted) mother to be also a sexual object and available, as it were, in a way that is not remarkably different from that of a prostitute. In fact, by assuming the authority of the father, the son will not even have to pay, and can arouse the true desire of the mother (being the submission to his desire) through an act of real or symbolic violence. He strikes her, and immediately she is aroused. In Jeffrey’s re-staging of Frank’s “rape” of Dorothy, it is notable that his efforts at tenderness are rebuked, providing an alibi for the sexual violence that follows – a violence that further demystifies the romance attached to the otherwise unobtainable object of his desire. What is also significant in this respect is Frank’s impotence – reduced to an infantile condition (“baby wants to fuck”), in which he cannot bear to be looked at. The entire narrative, of course, is driven by Jeffrey’s guilt arising from his Oedipal wish and the subsequent attempt to “resolve” this guilt and restore a type of equilibrium. In Lost Highway, the fantastical element of the narrative is organised around a type of “switch” – a device repeated in Mulholland Drive. The parallel story-lines of the film (Fred Madison/Renee and Pete Dayton/Alice) suggest a form of “repression,” whereby in place of a revealed “wish” (Fred’s desire to murder his wife) a second narrative is interposed, as the “symptom” masking this inadmissible wish (Pete’s loveaffair with Alice). Mr Eddie (a.k.a. Dick Laurent), as a type of obscene super-ego, intervenes in this second narrative to force the issue and draw Pete towards a recognition of the “thing” he is unable to remember, the scene of some traumatic incident no-one around him is prepared to name (“The Real,” as Žižek says, “which resists symbolisation: the traumatic point which is always missed but nonetheless always returns although we try… to neutralise it, to integrate it”).23 The climax of the film comes with Fred’s executionstyle murder of Mr Eddie/Dick Laurent and his pursuit by the police (both of which represent the instruments of superegotic power in the film). The first half of the film is set almost entirely in a functionalist, geometric Hollywood villa, whose superrational architecture is deranged by the camera into Chinese boxes of enfolded chiaroscuro and involuted P.O.V. Renee, Fred’s wife (Patricia Arquette), a brunette costumed solely in black, performs her role in an inert, non-reactive way: Fred (Bill Pullman), a sax player, is shown restlessly moving through their geometric labyrinth smoking, watching the street through the window, listening at the intercom. Their domestic non-drama is disturbed by the appearance of a series of video tapes, which in successive stages document the outside, then inside of their house, progressing towards their bedroom, culminating in the scene of Renee’s murder with Fred kneeling on the floor covered in blood surrounded by a dismembered mannequin. The scene echoes an earlier one of Fred blowing a sax solo under strobing stagelights (his performance compared by Žižek to a kind of embodied tumescence) and anticipates Fred’s “migraine” in prison when, under a flickering cell light, his head appears literally to split open and ejaculate the mirrorworld narrative of Pete Dayton. Symptomatically, Fred and Renee’s one effort at sex exposes Fred’s impotence. In his fantasmatic reincarnation as “Pete Dayton,” twenty-something autoworker, “Fred” (re-) encounters his (“dead”) wife in the form of her “double” 23 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 69. 125 126 (or ghost; she appears throughout in white): Alice, a blond porn actress and mistress to mob-boss Laurent who, however, immediately makes herself available to Pete’s inflamed longings. Pete is virile yet partially paralysed (in one leg, which is symbolically rigid the entire time he is in front of the camera – just as the camera, so to speak, is paralysed whenever continuity breaks down). Alice’s white to Renee’s black resolves into a second transitional scene set in the desert, where Alice, naked in the headlights of Pete/Fred’s car, flares into an “overexposed” image of unattainable desire (“you’ll never have me”) and is immediately substituted by the man with the video camera (“The Mystery Man,” the film’s superego). In the first narrative, Fred suspects Renee of conducting an affair with “phallic” father-figure Laurent; this both arouses Fred’s desire to possess her sexually and sublimates this desire in an unconscious wish for her death. In the second narrative the relationship to Laurent is reversed. But this fantasy reversal is equally ineffective: Pete turns back into Fred at precisely the point when Alice tells him he’ll never have her. As in Mulholland Drive, Lynch employs a catalyst figure – in Lost Highway it’s “The Mystery Man” – who represents a type of perturbation at the level of Fred’s consciousness, communicating to him the fact of his repressed desires. That the Mystery Man does so in the form of video images, a mobile phone, and a video camera implies the degree to which desire is always already narrativised, so to speak, even when it can’t be represented as such – something to which Lynch’s film-making appears to address itself more and more. 8. Described as a neo-noir, Mulholland Drive continues Lynch’s exploration of the dialectical structure exploited to such effect in Lost Highway. Although its somewhat “schematic” quality is usually attributed to the first half of the film having begun life as a TV pilot – intended to be the opening instalment of a series – the mirroring effect of the first and second halves of the film is consistent with Lynch’s previous examination of psychoanalytic logics. In Mulholand Drive, the split between the film’s two halves suggests a “split” in the constitution of the film’s Laura Harring becomes “Rita”: David Lynch, Mulholland Drive (2001) “subject”: the agent of protagonist Betty Elm (Naomi Watt) whose conscious life is riven by conflicting and disturbed motivations (most of them nonetheless trite). The dramatic form of the film reflects the tensions between desire and its sublimation, or the wish and its fulfilment. In Mulholand Drive this takes the classic form of the suicidal fantasy, referring to the suicide’s desire to provoke the sympathy or distress of a loved one by virtue of her (“tragic”) death. In Mulholand Drive, the drama hinges upon the discovery of Betty Elm’s/Diane Selwyn’s dead body in a semidetached bungalow complex and the emotional response produced by this in the amnesiac Laura Harring character, “Rita” (named for a poster of Rita Hayworth she sees hanging on a bathroom wall). At which point, we shift from Betty’s fantasy to a retrospective unveiling of her inhabited “reality.” In this reality, all of the elements active within her fantasy appear to be reversed. The logic behind this reversal finds its focus in the “missing” causality – which is Betty’s suicidal wish (to become Rita), symbolised by the empty blue box and the blue key with which it is unlocked. 127 128 The film is set in and around Hollywood, with a focus on the film industry – or “dream factory,” as it’s called – as the ultimate form of “wish-fulfilment.” Betty arrives in Hollywood from a kitsch netherworld of middleclass suburbia reminiscent of Blue Velvet. Her film aspirations are immediately met, but are displaced by the mysterious appearance of Laura Harring’s amnesiac “Rita” – the escaped victim of an attempted “contract hit” on Mulholland Dr. In the parallel narrative, “Rita” becomes Camilla Rhodes, a successful actress who is having an affair with director Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), while Betty (now “Diane Selwyn”) is an unsuccessful aspiring actress involved in a lesbian relationship with Camilla. Out of jealousy, Diane hires a hitman to murder Camilla – the appearance in her apartment of the blue key is the sign that Camilla has been murdered, following which Diane commits suicide. Diane’s/Betty’s fantasy is doubled, like everything else in the film, so that guilt and desire become inter-changeable; the death-wish substitutes for the wish for the death of the loved one, and so on, in a narcissistic spiral. The whole symbolic drama of substitutions, however, comes to rest within the confines of the “blue box” that falls out of Rita’s handbag following the “Silencio” episode and which Betty opens with a strangely geometric blue key: the box is empty, a kind of black hole into which the camera is sucked, precipitating the film’s narrative inversion. The key thus presents itself both as the key to an enigma and the key to nothing, to the entropy behind the image, to the featureless non-place of the Real. While Inland Empire comes chronologically after Mulholland Drive, in many respects it follows more immediately from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me – with which it shares a highly elusive and complex sense of structure, as well as a certain propensity for hysteria. (Grace Zabriski, who appeared in Twin Peaks as the mother of Laura Palmer here returns as the mysterious visitor in the opening scenes of the film, along with Blue Velvet lead Laura Dern.) However, with Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire shares the device of the “film within a film” (in this instance, a film called On High in Blue Tomorrows, which is itself a “remake” of an old German movie called 47, and for which Laura Dern’s Nikki Grace/Sue Blue character is about to audition at the start of the film).24 The film itself was largely shot and set between the Hollywood of Mulholland Drive and Łodz, in Poland, involving a “Polish” sub-plot (seemingly from the film 47 and set in the 1930s), along with a contemporary TV soap opera involving a rabbit family and “the longest-running radio play in history,” Axxon N – which together with the “film within a film” all begin to intersect at a certain point. As in Blue Velvet, the film’s ending suggests that the entire intervening drama has taken place in the main protagonist, Laura Dern’s, imagination. The final scene shows her sitting with Grace Zabriski in the same situation in which the film began. Like Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, there is a sense of migration through or between different levels of subjective fantasy – whose locus is a sublimated trauma located somewhere in the past of Dern’s character, and which in one scene she apparently “confesses” to a Rabbi (a rabbit?): a trauma which has to do, as in Twin Peaks, with childhood sexual abuse. Themes of imprisonment, murder and prostitution proliferate in parallel with a descent through the sexualised glamour of the Hollywood dream factory into a seedy underworld of libidinalised violence. As in so much of Lynch’s work, there is a prevailing sense of psychic dis-equilibrium, of the invasion of socalled “normality” by ever-prevalent and barely disguised forces of madness. *Presented as a series of lectures, “Film & Critical Culture,” Philosophy Faculty, Charles University, Prague, October 2013 – January 2014. 24 Both Naomi Watts and Laura Haring make virtual appearances in Inland Empire as the voices of Jane and Suzie Rabbit. Justin Theroux also appears in typically Lynchian fashion as the Janus-like Devon Berk / Billy Side. 129 Otto Muehl, Oh Sensibility (1970) SUBVERSIVE CINEMA FROM WATERS TO CARAX Nur die perverse Phantasie kann uns noch retten… – “Goethe” / Hellmuth Costard, Besonders wertvoll (1968) 130 In the late 1960s, before the VHS revolution, it still seemed possible to indulge the idea that a neo-avantgarde stance was sufficient to constitute a set of critical assertions about prevailing values. But if the ethnological distinction between culture and art had been challenged by historical movements like Dada, Pop, Fluxus, it was the anti-art represented by TV that posed the greater challenge to selfassertions of the cinema avantgarde’s critical privilege. If, as Guy Debord contended, “the bourgeoisie is the only revolutionary class that ever won,”1 we might similarly propose that in the late ’60s television represented the unique victory of the post-War cultural revolution called the Marshall Plan. Despite what Parker Tyler referred to 1 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (New York: Zone Books, 1995) §87. as (American) Underground Film’s excessive “tolerance,” the cinema avantgarde in this relationship represented a quintessentially conservative force, it’s “subversion” a feedback loop of neo-primitivisms in reply to the fact that cinema itself had (at the hands of the newer medium) long ceased to be a dominant socially-determining and (potentially) transformative force.2 Thirty years further on, what had once constituted the supposed autonomy of film form (as Eisenstein envisaged it) now seemed like an ideological artefact, an object of recuperative nostalgias evoked by the word “cinema.” TV, the apotheosis of the reconstruction of Western consciousness as spectacle, inverted the entire social relation upon which film art had been premised – whose potential as subversion had always vied with its potential as propaganda, which in turn vied with its potential for radical ambivalence. More importantly, film maintained no coherent idea of itself capable of surviving the evolutionary momentum represented first by television, then by video, and ultimately by digitisation. Appearing in tandem with the post-War birth of Pop, the analysis and critique of the electronic media undertaken by the likes of Marshall McLuhan spoke of the “propaganda value” of film’s “simultaneous audio-visual impression,” as a product of its capacity to “standardise thought by supplying the spectator with a readymade visual image before he has time to conjure up an interpretation of his own.” But McLuhan also saw film as having the potential to reverse this process: rather than paralysing the mind, energising it. “It is observable,” he wrote, “that the more illusion and falsehood needed to maintain any given state of affairs, the more tyranny is needed to maintain the illusion and falsehood. Today,” he adds, “the tyrant rules not by 2 As Tyler says: “the hardest thing for a very radical idea to do is to stay very radical. The dialectical movement of history in process tends towards numerous compromises, if only because of the latent inner human contradiction which seems to abide in the most ambitious, world-defying philosophies. Pop Art, with its reliance on photographic processes for its plastic effects, has been very close in spirit to the popular fiction film according to that film’s own ambiguous but deep affinity with the comic strip… Pop art revived the caricature of the common, the making of a potential fine art into the campy sort of sport initiated by the Dadaists in the early twenties.” Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo, 1995 [1969]) 13. 131 club or fist, but disguised as the market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.”3 In the 2005 preface to the re-issue of his seminal (if selective) study, Film as a Subversive Art, Amos Vogel writes: Contemporary America – a late capitalist colossus, owned by large corporations while parading as a democracy and dominated by rabid commercialism and consumerism – is attempting to dominate the world via transnationals, Hollywood cinema and television, the export of American cultural “values,” the Disneyfication of the globe. It is not the dinosaurs and extra-terrestrials that the rest of the world ought to be afraid of, it is the commodification of all spheres of human existence, the seemingly unstoppable commercialisation of human life and society, the growing international blight of the theme parks, the allpervasive malling of the world. Our fate seems to be the homogenisation of culture: an universal levelling down, an anaesthetising, pernicious blandness.4 132 When Film as a Subversive Art was first published in 1974 it announced itself as being about “the subversion of existing values,” declaiming cinema as “the potentially most powerful art of the century.” It regarded film as a Nietzschean assault upon the prevailing status quo. In doing so, it was very much bound up with the spirit of the times, the revolutionary militancy of 1970s America, characterised by the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army. The continuing emergence of a neo-avantgarde carried film along with it in its revolutionary seizure of the concept of art away from the Institutions of Official Culture and its desire to dance upon the Museum’s ruins (documentaries of which were intended, of course, to be hung on its instantly reconstructed walls). In 1974, Vogel’s emphasis was upon film as subversive art. By 2005, the position had changed, at least in tenor: subversive art 3 Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Boston: Beacon, 1967 [1951]) vi. 4 Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: d.a.p. / C.T. Editions, 2005 [1974]) 5. wasn’t enough; film, merely in order to exist, needed to subvert the programme of cultural normalisation by market forces that had made it into a parody of its 1950s self, through the transfiguring mirror of TV (which already by 1960, with one installed in ninety percent of American homes, had become the definitive form of mass culture). As Debord wryly noted, “modern society’s obsession with saving time, whether by means of faster transport or by means of powdered soup, has the positive result that the average American spends three to six hours a day watching television.”5 Accordingly, for Vogel, The space in which the infantalisation of the human race is most clearly revealed is in the monstrous structures of American television. For the first time in history, the most powerful mass medium of a society is entirely controlled and dominated by advertisers and the market, totally driven by commercial imperatives, saturated by ubiquitous commercials that deliver audiences to advertisers (not programmes to audiences), and an even larger spectrum of channels delivering primarily garbage 365 days a year. Thus has the marvellous potential of the medium been betrayed.6 Taking their cue from McLuhan, V. Vale and Andrea Juno, in their introduction to the 1985 Re/Search guide to “Incredibly Strange Films,” clearly identified the role of the subversive filmmaker as having been directed by the evolution of media. “Since the sixties,” they wrote, “film has ceased being a popular creative medium.” While the advent of video in combination with TV was seen to herald an “end” to film art (there would always be exceptions, like Ken Russell and Peter Greenaway in the UK, who both produced important work for the BBC), it also provided unanticipated opportunities for subversive film as a countermeasure to a general trend of normalisation embodied in the culture industry. Whatever its drawbacks, the VHS revolution of the ’80s renewed the sort of possibilities which had opened 5 6 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, §153. Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art, 5. 133 134 to independent “auteurs” in the ’50s by virtue of the easy availability of 16mm film and Bolex cameras, etc. A new generation of portable cameras (Super-8 and, from 1982, video camcorders), cheap editing equipment and mail-order, VHS paved the way for the ’80s renaissance of “No Wave” and “Cinema of Transgression” (Lower East Side New York filmmakers and video artists like Richard Kern, Nick Zedd, Jim Jarmusch, Vincent Gallo, Amos Poe), among others. Continuing into the ’90s with the advent of handheld digicams, this reinvention of cinema from the margin-ofthe-margin tended towards an attitude of ambivalence towards any objectifiable, ideological standpoint (from being a medium of mass commodification to a medium for some form of alternative social transformation or aesthetic counter-revolution), while at the same time exploiting the new technological means of extending the consciousness of the “medium” itself (such as Jean-Luc Godard’s emphatic Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98)). Throughout this period, independent film-makers, including established maverick figures like Godard and Warhol, could now produce and distribute their work direct to an audience potentially anywhere on the globe in ways that had not previously been possible – what Nam June Paik referred to as a “video common market.” As the revolutionary temper of the 1970s ceded to the conservative reaction of the Reaganite/Thatcherite years, the medium also provided a platform for a new style of subversion: what had begun as the B-film on celluloid became the cult film on VHS (and late-night cable), encompassing a wide array of “asocial” and “antisocial” aesthetics, from gore and exploitation to porn, pretty much all of which would have attracted an Xrating under existing schemes for theatrical release. As Michael Weldon writes in The Psychotronic Encyclopaedia of Film, most of these B and No Wave films have until recently “been treated with indifference or contempt” by film historians preoccupied with cinematic art7 and proponents of “film art” and socalled Underground Cinema (“a cast,” in Tyler’s scathing critique, “of brazen 7 Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopaedia of Film (New York: Ballantine, 1983) xii. boasters and self-promoters”8; purveyors of “fetish footage”). These underground filmmakers often sought to entertain by perverting or camping the norms established by the film “industry” and by exploiting the bankruptcy of the institutional avantgarde. Here, the subversive element also derives from a rejection of aesthetic normalisation: the Disneyfication of the planet. Vale and Juno note that most of these films “tested the limits of contemporary (middle class) cultural acceptability,” as well as that of the film art establishment, not simply in terms of morality or aesthetic vision (what Tyler called the “taboo on reality”), but also in terms of “production values” – refusing to “meet ‘standards’ utilised in evaluating direction, acting, dialogue, sets, continuity, technical cinematography, etc.” Most were “overtly ‘lower-class’ or ‘low-brow’ in content and art direction.” However, as Vale and Juno pointed out, “many of these works disdained by the would-be dictators of public opinion are sources of pure enjoyment and delight, despite improbable plots, ‘bad’ acting, or ragged film technique.” What is at issue, they argued, “is the notion of ‘good taste,’ which functions as a filter to block out entire areas of experience judged – and damned – as unworthy of investigation.”9 1. Pink Flamingos (1972), directed by John Waters, achieved for the new wave of “Trash” cinema what Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) achieved for American “underground film” a decade before. By while Flaming Creatures – following an obscenity prosecution for its scenes of flagrant transvestism, hermaphrodism, vampirism and cunnilingual rape – was later eulogised by Susan Sontag as a “rare modern work of art; it is all about joy and innocence,”10 Pink Flamingos achieved cult status 8 In a letter to Charles Henri Ford, qtd in J. Hoberman’s “Introduction” (1994) to Tyler, Underground Film, viii. Hoberman goes on to paraphrase Tyler to the effect that, “Where the old avantgarde was ‘exclusivist,’ the new avantgarde… thrived on publicity and aggressively sought foundation subsidies, even while evincing a desire to infiltrate and overthrow the socalled establishment.” 9 V. Vale and Andrea Juno, “Introduction,” Re/Search #10: Incredibly Strange Films (San Francisco: Re/seach, 1986) 4-6. 10 Susan Sontag, “Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures,” Against Interpreta- 135 John Waters, Pink Flamingos (1972) 136 as – to quote a recent Museum of Modern Art (!) catalogue – “a paragon of bad taste” (Entertainment Weekly called it “shocking, nauseating, hilarious…”). Vogel, who like Jonas Mekas, had high praise for Smith,11 doesn’t so much as mention Waters once in the 336 pages of Film as a Subversive Art (though Russ Meyer gets a brief mention), and the general impression we are given of the period in which Waters began making films is one in which B-films (as the alter-ego of commercial Hollywood) generally do not feature as “subversive art.”12 Perhaps the most astonishing tion (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1966) 226f. 11 “In Flaming Creatures Smith has graced the archaic liberation of new American cinema with graphic and rhythmic power worthy of the best of formal cinema. He has attained for the first time in motion pictures a high level of art which is absolutely lacking in decorum; and a treatment of sex which makes us aware of the restraint of all previous filmmakers.” Jonas Mekas, “Fifth Independent Film Award,” Film Culture 29 (1963): 1. 12 “Subversion” very much in the eye of the beholder. Vogel’s discussion omission is Roger Corman, whose influence on independent production in the US in the ’60s was immeasurable. The artist Robert Smithson, writing in 1968, identified Corman’s style of filmmaking as paradigmatic precisely in its subversion of a studio system that had been “rotting away,” in Peter Biskind’s words, “since the 1940s”13: The films of Roger Corman are structured by an aesthetic atemporality [that] avoids the “organic substances” and life-forcing rationalism that fills so many realistic films with naturalistic meanings. His actors always appear vacant and transparent, more like robots than people – they simply move through a series of settings and places and define where they are by the artifice that surrounds them.14 In an interview with Search & Destroy magazine in 1978, Waters credited his major influences as being precisely the low-budget “underground” exploitation films of the 1960s generally omitted from historical accounts of American “avantgarde” and “experimental” cinema such as Vogel’s – films by Meyer, Herschell Lewis and Mike Kuchar (Waters cites Kuchar’s camp sci-fi Sins of the Fleshapoids [1965] as the reason he first got into filmmaking) – as well as early work by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, like Katzelmacher (1969).15 Pink Flamingos in this sense qualifies as antiestablishmentarian in respect both to Hollywood and the “film art” avantgarde, parodying elements of both. It features drag-queen Divine in the role of trailer-home resident and owner of the eponymous pink garden ornament flamingos, Babs Johnson, a.k.a. “The Filthiest Person Alive.” This hardof “counterculture,” for example, is wrapped up in under three pages (“Woodstock, the Beatles, Zen Buddhism”) and mentions the work of not one single filmmaker (merely quoting Hans Richter to the effect that “contemporary commercial cinema represents nineteenth-century realist art”). Instead we get Shakespeare, Breton, C.S. Lewis, and a still from Jud Yalkut’s Self-Obliteration [1967]). 13 Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex’n’Drugs’n’Rock’n ’Roll Generation saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1998) 20. 14 Robert Smithson, “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art” (1968), Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) 89-90. 15 V. Vale, “John Waters: Pink Flamingos, Manson & the JFK Kill,” Search & Destroy: New Cultural Research 7 (1978): 7. 137 138 earned title is coveted by fellow degenerate Connie Marble (Mink Stole) who, with her husband and partner in crime Raymond (David Lochary), sets about trying to sabotage Johnson through a series of increasingly “filthy” acts, like a couple of comicstrip villains. The film also “stars” Edith Massey as “the Egg Lady,” a role entirely played inside an infant’s playpen, in underwear, in mid-winter, eating softboiled eggs supplied by the “Egg Man” (echoes of John Lennon’s cryptic menace): one of underground American cinema’s singularly most memorable roles. Among its litany of bizarre acts, Pink Flamingos boasts a “talking” arsehole vaguely reminiscent of William Burroughs, rampant gender queering, food “sex” and furniture licking. One particularly provocative subplot involves the abduction of young women who are forcibly impregnated to produce babies that are then retailed on the “philanthropic” adoption market. The film’s epilogue, a sublime essay on the contemporary fetish economy of US consumer capitalism, shows Divine scooping up and eating actual freshly-minted poodle shit. In its very American fashion it is unsurprising that Pink Flamingos has been described as setting a benchmark for the bizarre that has never quite been equalled. Waters shot the film on the meagre budget of $10,000 and it soon became his most iconic work, earning him a national and later international reputation, largely through the emerging underground “midnight movie” scene (a scene initially focused around the Elgin Theatre in New York and largely initiated by the premier of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1970 masterpiece of “western enlightenment,” El Topo, and subsequently institutionalised with The Rocky Horror Picture Show [1975]). Waters’s trash-exploitation style courted immediate controversy by setting out to actively transgress all manner of industry taboos, including unsimulated “sex,” radical nihilism, incest, coprophilia, high camp and extreme weirdness. Several of Waters’s other films also achieved notoriety along similar lines, particularly Female Trouble (1974), Desperate Living (1977) and Polyester (1981); all three likewise staring Divine. Polyester – which shares an almost identical central cast with Pink Flamingos (in addition to Divine, there’s Edith Massey and Mink Stole, who appears in all of Waters’s films) – reprises many of the “themes” of Pink Flamingos while “domesticating” its approach to transgression, from the world of trailer-camp hillbilly weirdness to suburban Middle America. Michael Weldon provides a useful summary: Divine stars as Francine Fishpaw, a housewife whose life is a shambles because of her cheating porno-theatre-owner husband, her glue-sniffing, angel-dusted son, and her wild, pregnant daughter. Her only friend is her retarded ex-maid Edith Massey. She drinks herself into a constant stupor. Her dog commits suicide.16 As distinct from characters in Waters’s earlier movies – who “seemed totally unreal” to many viewers (their “naïve” camp too revealing of how society behaves in private) – the “suburban family” shown in Polyester was, according to Weldon, “all too familiar,” giving the film a critical edge in its anatomisation of Middle America that Pink Flamingos arguably lacked by being too strange, too subversive (an unsubtle mirror held up to Nixon’s “great silent majority”). But this is hardly to suggest that films like Polyester represent anything like a detour into the mainstream, only that their assault upon “taste” is more recognisable, because it more exactly reflects the “bad taste” of the Reaganite mainstream itself. (Waters’s films, however, did shift more towards the “centre ground”: his 1988 film Hairspray went on to become a hit Broadway musical.) Yet in certain respects, films like Pink Flamingos and Polyester, like Warhol’s Chelsea Girls (1966), can be seen as precursors of contemporary reality TV in both its banal and bizarre manifestations. In a sense that isn’t usually attributed to directors such as Waters (Žižek reserves the honour for David Lynch and co.), there’s something in these films – perhaps because of their proximity (as in the work of Ed Wood) to a set of studio models which they sought, however weirdly, to emulate – that is often far more subversive than selfconsciously avantgarde or experimental films which simply rejected the idea of “entertainment” outright. As with 16 Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopaedia of Film, 556. 139 Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970; a benchmark in this respect), here we have precisely that “id monster” of the US military-infotainment complex: the “materialisation of the terrifying,” as Žižek says, the “forbidden domain” of the American psyche. Like elements of No Wave (which, in many respects, his work anticipated), Waters’s films can be seen as part of a continuing dissident tendency within American cinema infused with a kind of “outlaw” culture in drag and operating on the radical fringe of both the film and “culture” industries – especially when measured against those earnest attempts at zeitgeistology paraded by the socalled New Hollywood of Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) (to paraphrase McLuhan: social criticism you can buy). 140 2. While Alejandro Jodorowsky had been courting controversy since the release of his first feature film, Fando y Lis (1967) – which was immediately banned in his adopted Mexico – it was the “acid western,” El Topo (1970), that brought him to wider prominence. Credited with inaugurating the underground “midnight movie” scene in America, El Topo soon came to the attention of John Lennon, who reportedly offered Jodorowsky a million dollars towards the production of his next film, The Holy Mountain, which was initially slated to feature Ringo Starr in the lead role (there were objections to some of the planned scenes) and was released in the US in 1973, after failing to make much of an impression at the Cannes Film Festival (where Marco Ferrari’s comedy La Grande Bouffe was that year’s main attraction). Lennon had also introduced Jodorowsky to Allen Klein, the Beatles’s manager who also managed the Rolling Stones and had interests in fi lm production. Klein immediately bought the distribution rights to Jodorowsky’s backlist. When The Holy Mountain failed at Cannes, his approach was to focus its US release on the growing underground market and, after its premier at New York’s Waverly Theatre, made theatre bookings for the fi lm to be screened during midnight slots on Fridays and Saturdays. The strategy was a success and the fi lm soon attracted a cult following, playing to full houses for its16-month run. Jodorowsky’s relationship with Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Holy Mountain (1973) Klein may well have developed into a collaboration of major significance, at a time when the American film industry (and American society in general) was undergoing a seachange. However, when Klein tried to push Jodorowsky into directing an adaptation of Pauline Réage’s Story of O for the burgeoning porno industry (waving significant financial incentives), Jodorowsky walked out. The resulting recriminations between producer and director meant that both The Holy Mountain and El Topo were not screened again (other than in pirate editions) for over thirty years, until a reconciliation was mediated in 2004. (Klein might easily have been the model for the Lederhosen-attired proprietor of the “Pantheon Bar” – a decadent necropolis of pseudo-visionaries who’ve traded their “quest” for instant celebrity, located at the foot of the eponymous 141 142 Holy Mountain – when he cries out after Jodorowsky’s departing band of “pilgrims” as they turn their backs on his establishment: “You could’ve made history and already we’re forgetting you!”) The Holy Mountain is in certain respects a more visually lavish restatement of many of the themes already present in El Topo. In both films Jodorowsky himself plays the lead role: a kind of spiritual guide, leading us through the desert of the real (or the labyrinth of the “spectacle”) towards enlightenment in the form of “disillusion.” Both films employ an episodic, allegorical structure. If The Holy Mountain represents a more expansive critique of materialism and the savagery and cultishness of New World capitalism, it is also more self-referential and self-critically aware of cinema’s role in the mythopoetics of power. Notably the featuring of bodily mutilation and deformity calls to mind scenes originally cut from Tinto Brass’s 1976 exploration of Nazism’s rampant sexualisation of power, Salon Kitty (with echoes also of Visconti’s The Damned (1969), also starring Ingrid Thulin and Helmut Berger). Jodorowsky employs a broadly “dialectical” structure to contrast and examine the relationship between the illusionistic ideologies of corporate greed, state authoritarianism, psycho-sexual normalisation, and the possibility of attaining a level of consciousness transcending these – employing various shock tactics in order to affect a critical awareness in the audience of their own complicity in this generalised “spectacle” (including the rampant industry in false enlightenment that had grown out of the Flower Power “revolution”). Through the confrontation of the grotesqueries of spectacularism and the disillusionments of the cult of the “real,” Jodorowsky achieves a powerful anti-aesthetic, whose at first apparently mystical allegorical form comes to enact a powerful demysticifaction by way of an autocritique with ends with the director announcing that he and his pilgrim companions are not yet real but only characters “in a movie,” commanding the camera to “pull back” so as to reveal the machinery of the locational shoot atop the “Holy Mountain.” The first half of the film is lushly visual, irreal; while the latter parts of the film adopt a visual austerity and Dušan Makavejev, Sweet Movie (1974) almost documentary “realism” in an effort to undermine any reductive, programmatic interpretation of its “quest” narrative (easy enlightenment for the price of a cinema ticket). In this respect, the film has close affinities to Ken Russell’s 1975 film Tommy, with its miracle cures and gurus of instant self-attainment, from Eric Clapton’s Church of Marilyn Monroe to Tina Turner’s Acid Queen). Jodorowsky famously stated that he was not interested in depicting any kind of “psychedelic” reaffirmation of middle-class counterculture-ISM (he makes an amusing swipe at Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary in the “Pantheon Bar” scene towards the end of the film), but rather a transformative experience – with all the attendant discomfort. “When one creates a psychedelic film,” he insisted, “he need not create a film that shows the vision of a person who has taken a pill; rather, he needs to manufacture the pill.” 3. Yugoslav director Dušan Makavejev, described by Amos Vogel as a “revolutionary Cubist,” came to international attention with his early black and white films, Man is Not a Bird (1965: starring Milena Dravić); Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967: an “unpredictable, ironic, and erotic ‘love story’” centred on a “bizarre affair between a switchboard operator 143 and a rat exterminator”17); and Innocence Unprotected (1968: a collage of the first Serbian sound film, a 1942 melodrama directed by Dragoljub Aleksic; interviews with the film’s surviving participants; and WW2 documentary footage). These films employed classic “neo-realist” and “new wave” tropes alongside the use of found footage and collage, but within a broadly narrative framework. With the realisation of his 1971 film, WR, Mysteries of the Organism (also starring Dravić and half-comprised of a documentary about the inventor of orgone therapy, Wilhelm Reich), Makavejev embarked upon a far more radical type of “political,” “psychosexual” filmmaking with which he is most associated today. About W.R., Vogel writes: Banned in Yugoslavia, hailed at international film festivals, this is unquestionably one of the most important subversive masterpieces of the 1970s: a hilarious, highly erotic, political comedy which quite seriously proposes sex as the ideological imperative for revolution and advances a plea for Erotic Socialism.18 144 The film also included excerpts from the 1946 Soviet film, The Vow, along with an interview with the editor of Screw magazine, a pantomime by Tuli Kupferberg (of The Fugs) “masturbating” a toy M16, and a cameo by Warhol Factory superstar Jackie Curtis. There are also formal references throughout to the work of Sergei Eisenstein. Sweet Movie (1974) belongs to the same period as W.R. and is perhaps the most radical of all Makavejev’s work. His later films, like The Coca-Cola Kid (1985), adopt mostly conventional structures and production values while nevertheless continuing in a satirical-critical vein, though all of Makavejev’s work can be seen as addressed to the relationship of ideology to commodification, particularly of sexuality, as a dialectic of repression and liberation. In WR, Makavejev employed a parallel narrative structure which he further develops in Sweet Movie. In WR the pairing is between a fictional story, set in Yugoslavia and centred on a character played by Dravić who advocates the necessity 17 18 Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art, 140. Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art, 153. of sexual revolution in tandem with political revolution, and a “documentary” about the psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich, whose writings were banned in America and who died in FBI custody in 1957. The narrative of Sweet Movie likewise employs a parallel structure, this time based around two women: the “most virgin” Miss Monde 1984 (a supposed reference to Orwell’s novel) who, via a contest staged by the “Chastity Belt Foundation” (replete with live telecast gynaecological examination) wins the dubious prize of being married to a grotesque, hygieneobsessed milk industry magnate (Mr Dollars) who declares her to be “a purified sanitation system for unchecked waste” (the consummation of their wedding consists of him fastidiously washing her from head to foot with distilled water before pissing on her with his gold-plated cock), before she is dispatched to Paris in a suitcase and then finds herself on a strange odyssey of liberation and exploitation; and Anna Planeta, the pilot of a river barge (named “Survival”) whose prow is decorated with a giant head of Karl Marx and is laden, like some witch’s fairytale house in the woods, with candy (a reference to the “bitter pill” of Revolution and the sugar-coating of consumerist ideology) – Planeta is a seducer and murderer of romantics and innocents (and quite literally of children), “those who starve,” she proclaims at one point, before knifing her “proletarian” French-speaking adorer (“Potemkin”) in a bed of sugar, “know how to make love.” While WR had resulted in Makavejev’s forced exile from Yugoslavia, Sweet Movie was immediately banned in just about every country on the planet or else subjected to heavy censorship. The film is not only explicit and in many places disturbing, but its construction (particularly the use of montage, but also its jarring soundtrack in Russian, Greek, Italian, English) is designed to heighten the effect of psychological and emotional violence, disorientation, and so on. The film famously includes footage of the Katyn Massacre victims being exhumed (Polish officers whose execution by the Red Army during WWII was blamed on the Germans) echoing Makavejev’s use of Nazi newsreel footage in Innocence Unprotected, juxtaposing the blatant ideological/propagandistic ends that the Red 145 146 Army’s staging of a Nazi atrocity with the ambivalence of revolutionary terror and the false consciousness of “libertarian” commodity fetishism. Echoes also of the genre of atrocity documentary that emerged after WW2, such as Mikhail Romm’s Ordinary Fascism (1965), and later found an outgrowth in the exploitation genre. Few critics at the time, however, succeeded in recognising Makavejev’s contextual framework for the Katyn footage, or in making “sense” of its being in the film at all – but then, from a “rational” point-of-view, it would be easy to suggest that very little in Sweet Movie does make sense, since what we’re given – in a parody of the usual Cold War virtues and the various cults of self-realisation (whether egoistic or communal) is a kind of “portrait” of reason perverted by ideology (or rather, Reason exposed as ideology). Carole Laurie, who played the role of “Miss Monde,” reportedly left the set half-way through production in protest against Makavejev’s direction (causing Makavejev to fall back on the device of a parallel narrative as an expedient in order to complete the project). The crisis arose during filming at the Friedrichshof Commune run by artist Otto Muehl, a leading figure and co-founder of Viennese Actionism who was later imprisoned in 1991 for paedophilia and drug offences (elements of which are disconcertingly present in the film, literally in the scenes of Anna Planeta’s child-seducing striptease (“you can fuck, if you think you’re in luck”: they die, of course, like all the other revolutionary “schmucks” who longed to fall on the “field of honour”), and figuratively in pervasive theme of ideology (capitalist or socialist; deathly in either case) as the opiate of the masses). The scenes at the Friedrichshof Commune involved unsimulated coprophilia, vomiting, urination, etc. – frequent elements in Muehl’s early Actionist “happenings” (a number of which – O Tannenbaum and Leda mit dem Schwan (both 1964) being two famous examples – were recorded by filmmaker Kurt Kren) posing questions about the status of what is “real” and what is “performed” – what is a revolutionary action and what is merely a participation in the ritualised consumption of ideology (questions likewise addressed Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain – whose pageant of disillusionment it sometimes resembles – and Ken Russell, Lisztomania (1975) notably also in Peter Greenaway’s 1993 film, Baby of Mâcon, in which reality and simulationism are grotesquely intertwined in the mass on-stage judicial rape (208 times) of a morality play’s central character and the simultaneous “actual” rape of the actress who plays her (Julia Ormond) – all under the impassive gaze of Sacha Vierny’s camera). 4. During the period from 1964 to 1991 Ken Russell completed some 26 feature films, many of them controversial. His best-known films include: Women in Love (1969: for which Glenda Jackson received an Oscar for best actress and Russell received a nomination for Best Director); The Devils (1971: based on Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, with set design by Derek Jarman); and Tommy (1975: an adaptation of The Who’s rock opera of the same name, starring (as in 1975’s Lisztomania) Who-frontman Roger Daltrey, alongside Keith Moon, Pete Townsend, John Entwistle, Elton John, Tina Turner, Eric Clapton, Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margaret and Russell stalwart Oliver Reed). Russell’s film production was frequently grouped around the work of, or personality of, individual authors, artists and composers – such as D.H. Lawrence, Debussy, Liszt, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Elgar, Richard Strauss, Mary Shelley, Isadora Duncan, Henri Gaudier-Breszka and Oscar 147 148 Wilde. Several of these films explicitly address Nazism, in the typical style of all Russell films, which is to say, grotesque parody and high camp. Three films in particular can be seen as related in this way: Lisztomania, towards the end of which Richard Wagner is resurrected as a type of Nazi golem, rampaging through a Jewish ghetto with an electric guitar-cum-machinegun in the company of a troupe of Hitler-saluting Wagnerjugend (and from whom Liszt saves the world, flying down from Heaven in a pipeorgan spaceship to laser-blast this zombie Wagner from the face of the earth); Mahler (1974), in which Liszt’s daughter and Wagner’s wife, Cosima, is portrayed as a Brunhilde in SS uniform who conducts the Jewish Mahler through the rites of Catholic conversion in order that he may gain acceptance by the Viennese establishment; and The Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), in which a troupe of SS men torture a Jew to strains of Richard Strauss’s music (a scene that ostensibly resulted in the film being suppressed by the Strauss estate). Lisztomania, which draws varyingly on the biography of the “randy Hungarian” composer, exploits a typical Russell trope of creative anachronism to present Liszt as a type of pop star, conjoining the “Beatlemania” of the ’60s and “Lisztomania” – a term invented in 1844 by Heinrich Heine to describe Liszt’s celebrity status as a virtuoso concert pianist “idolised by fans and chased all over Europe by mobs of aristocratic groupies”19 (hysterically screaming women were said to mob his solo performances; here, he responds to their adoration by repeatedly drifting into renditions of “chopsticks” by popular demand, for which he earns a zealous young Wagner’s undying contempt). Ringo Starr makes an appearance in the film in the person of the Pope, while Roger Daltrey plays Liszt (he also wrote the lyrics to the Liszt songs: “Liebenstraum” no. 3 is thus turned into the kind of dreary obnoxious repetition of the word “love” which for so much pop music represents the apogee of emotional depth). The film was the first to use Dolby anamorphic sound (on the insistence of producer David 19 Ken Russell, A British Picture: An Autobiography (London: Southbank, 2008 [1989]) 143. Puttnam) and, along with Tommy, helped to revolutionise the entire approach to soundtrack production (it also failed to make a profit, contributing to the industry view of Russell as “unbankable”). A number of the more extravagant sets in Lisztomania also managed to feedback into mainstream pop culture, such as the giant inflatable phallus Mick Jagger rode on-stage during the Rolling Stones’ 1975 concert tour version of “Starfucker” which borrows from a farcical penile amputation nightmare scene in Russell’s film (Daltrey gets to be buckled onto a man-sized prosthesis, ridden by a chorus of five cancan girls, before presenting to a symbolically vaginal guillotine (operated by Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein) – at which point he himself substitutes for the giant phallus in yet another of Russell’s orgies of Freudian phantasmagoria). Russell succeeded in bringing out remarkable performances in his actors, particularly those with whom he developed a close relationship over several projects, such as Glenda Jackson, Oliver Reed, Helen Mirren, but also with more conventional actors such as Richard Chamberlain, Anthony Perkins and Kathleen Turner. He directed films across many genres and frequently produced work that defies categorisation – and also (unsurprisingly) defied box-office success, particularly in America where his films seem to have been almost wilfully misconstrued, with many of them suffering unsympathetic re-editing prior to release. Critic Roger Ebert famously gave one of Russell’s now best regarded films, The Devils, “zero stars.” Russell’s last feature, Whore (1991; starring Teresa Russell, who’d famously appeared as Marilyn Monroe explaining relativity to Albert Einstein in Nicholas Roeg’s Insignificance (1985)), was given an X-rating in the US despite lacking explicit content (unlike 1984’s Crimes of Passion, starring an unlikely Kathleen Turner as “China Blue,” which Whore otherwise resembles in many respects), while theatre chains prudishly refused to advertise the film’s title – resulting in it being re-christened: “If you can’t say it, Just see it.” Russell, whose work (like Jodorowsky’s, Jarman’s and Waters’s) receives no mention at all by the otherwise encyclopaedic Vogel, died in 2011. 149 Derek Jarman, Jubilee (1978) 150 5. Like Ken Russell and Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman came to cinema from a background in the arts – in Jarman’s case, having spent four years studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Along with film he worked in design and video art, particularly the emerging genre of pop music video. He famously designed the stage set for Russell’s The Devils (as well as Savage Messiah (1972) and Russell’s opera production of The Rakes Progress at the 1982 Maggio Musicale festival in Florence). Both as a director and outside cinema, Jarman was heavily involved in gay rights and throughout the ’80s with AIDS awareness. He himself died from an AIDSrelated illness in 1994. Many of Jarman’s films set out to be provocative, challenging the remaining social taboos of the time and exploring countercultures and ideas that lay outside the mainstream film industry in Britain. He engaged explicitly antiestablishment themes around homosexuality, punk, even philosophy – as in the case of his 1983 film Wittgenstein (for which the noted Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton wrote the script) featuring a Martian debating logic à la the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on a blacked-out sound stage with virtually no props. Jarman’s first feature film, Sebastiane (1976), was “about” the martyrdom of St Sebastian, filmed with dialogue entirely in Latin and with an explicitly depicted homoerotic relationships between 4th-century Roman soldiers. Jubilee, Jarman’s second feature (1978), starred Jenny Runacre as Queen Elizabeth I and Richard O’Brien (creator of the Rocky Horror Picture Show) as her court alchemist John Dee, who transports the sixteenth-century monarch four hundred years forward in time to the world of Sex Pistols London. Billed as a “punk movie,” it featured appearances by a number of contemporary musicians, including Wayne County, Toyah Willcox and Adam Ant. Other cameo appearances included The Stilts and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Brian Eno wrote and produced the score. The film was planned to correspond to the silver jubilee of Elizabeth II – also the occasion for the release of the Sex Pistol’s most infamous recording, God Save the Queen. The setting of the film is a kind of post-apocalyptic, allegorical double of late 1970s pre-Thatcherite Britain in the grip of economic and political turmoil. Nihilism and chaos reign (the present Queen Elizabeth II, for example, is shown being killed in a street mugging). The film also draws on “punk” aesthetics in its use of low-definition and grainy colour stock. On its release the film courted controversy less within the main stream than within the emerging “punk industry,” famously prompting fashion designer Vivienne Westwood to denounce Jarman in an “open letter” produced as a T-shirt (“Open T-Shirt to Derek Jarman”) in which she wrote: “I had been to see it once and thought it the most boring and therefore disgusting film I had ever seen…” Along with Malcolm McLaren, Westwood (who together operated the infamous “Sex” boutique at 430 Kings Rd and in 1992 accepted an OBE from the real Queen Elizabeth II) is one of the principle figures identified with the commercialisation of punk while seeking to maintain control over the “authentic” representation of its history. In this way, Jarman’s film is not only a critical comment on the social-political character of Britain at the time of the silver jubilee, deeming the monarchy to be an irrelevance for contemporary life, but also a critical comment upon the commercial machinations behind the emergence of punk itself, and the manufacture and marketing of new pop- 151 counterculture “icons” like the Sex Pistols (what Jarman called “petit bourgeois art students, who a few months ago were David Bowie and Bryan Ferry look-alikes – who’ve read a little art history and adopted some Dadaist typography and bad manners, and who are now in the business of reproducing a fake street credibility”). 152 6. Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover courted controversy during its initial theatrical release by virtue largely of the final scene, in which the titular thief (Michael Gambon) is forced at gunpoint by his wife (Helen Mirren) to eat her lover, who Gambon has brutally murdered and who the cook (Richard Bohringer) has elaborately prepared in the kitchen of his restaurant, which is also the setting for much of the film. Cannibalism, routine sadistic violence, rotting carcasses, etc., are, however, not the principal source of the film’s “disturbing influence” on many of its viewers, rather it is the lush visual setting in which each of these elements is presented that subverts the way the viewer is conventionally orientated (emotionally, intellectually, ethically) towards them – a bold aestheticisation drawing heavily on the convention of the Flemish “still life” and the group paintings of Franz Hals. Michael Nyman’s soundtrack and Sachy Vierny’s cinematography accentuate the highly mannered character of Greenaway’s tableaux, cutting across the grain of the sort of easy moralising sentiments that might attach to the film’s narrative.20 Greenaway brought to this film the same disinterested fascination with “form” that we find at work in the forensics of A Zed and Two Noughts (1985; with its themes of apotemnophilia, depicted against the variable aesthetic backdrop of the Gilbreth’s time-and-motion photo studies and the still lives of the Dutch masters, specifically Vermeer and the well-known forger of his 20 Due to its depiction of nudity and violent themes, the film was given a non-theatrical release in the US to avoid receiving the X-rating usually associated with porn (which speaks volumes about US film censorship). But having said this, there are also aspects of Greenaway’s work that can be directly interpreted as a kind of analysis of precisely the pornographic economy inherent in mass market “aesthetic” commodification (as represented by the Hollywood Dream Factory). Peter Greenaway, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover (1989) works Hans van Meegeren). Cook, Thief borrows standard tropes from the infidelity-revenge genre largely in order to provide opportunities for visual staging, utilising a large cut-away set to allow frequent continuous crabbing shots and extended takes by means of which a lush panorama (evocative of Tinto Brass’s Caligula [1979], also featuring Mirren) is constructed. While other films, like Drowning by Numbers (1988), operated with a macabre sense of comedy in which murder is both de-sensationalised and de-sentimentalised (as a kind of numerical game-function: an elliptical comment, perhaps, on the bureaucratic terror of the Nazi extermination machinery), Cook, Thief examines what Georges Bataille referred to as “sovereign” excess. Even Gambon’s vulgarity in the film is elevated to aesthetic heights that expose something of the nature of those “masterworks” upon which the institution of art (and those of political power) are founded. We are also reminded of Walter Benjamin’s chiding of fascism as an “aestheticisation of power”21 – whose sex-appeal in the film is heightened by Jean-Paul 21 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1995). 153 Gautier’s costuming and Giorgio Locatelli’s food art. All this is in keeping with Greenaway’s tendency towards a certain type of mannerism and staging (often quite literally – as in his 1993 film, Baby of Mâcon, whose theatre-set is highly evocative of Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance (1988), with echoes also of Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982) and Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986)), frequently constructing the “action” of his films around tableaux in which the drama is self-consciously visual. We find this to be already the case in his first feature film, The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), which exploits period drama conventions to similar ends as those achieved via “allusion” in Cook, Thief. At its furthest extreme, this results in the sort of pageantry of Prospero’s Books (1991), but at all times Greenaway is concerned with asking questions about our relationship to the ethical dimension in art and the aesthetic dimension of morality. It’s also for this reason that, beneath all the lushness and apparent excess, it is possible to detect an intellectual austerity in Greenaway’s work that is somewhat at odds with that of Russell, whose work is perhaps less philosophical and more overtly (excessively) satirical in the manner of a latterday Aristophanes. 154 7. Quentin Tarantino once called Miike Takashi – whose films include Thirteen Assassins (2010), Ichi the Killer (2001) and Audition (1999) – “the godfather” of “ultraviolent, get-under-your-skin movies.”22 Born in 1960, Miike is perhaps the most prolific of the Japanese post-New Wave directors, credited with some seventy film and TV productions, and widely regarded as an “extreme auteur” in many senses. His films routinely cross genre boundaries, ranging between serious gore and unbridled parody, in ways that are frequently without parallel in any other contemporary film-maker. His 2001 The Happiness of the Katakuris, for example, was billed as a “horror-musical,” combining elements of The Sound of Music (1965) with Horror Hotel (1960; a.k.a. City of the Dead), while his 2007 Sukiyaki Western Django (produced in English) rerouted 22 “Even Tarantino was Shocked,” Logan Hill interviewing Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino, The Telegraph (12 February 2006). Miike Takashi, Gozu (2003) Sergio Leone’s famous spaghetti western back through its Kurosawa original, Yojimbo (1961), with a cast of gunslinging samurai. Dead or Alive (1999), part one of a series of spectacular “Yakuza” films, was described by one critic as a hybrid (unlikely as it might sound) of Martin Scorcese and John Waters, combining styles drawn from hard-rock music videos, 1970s TV cop dramas and manga. The “Mexican” standoff with which Dead or Alive concludes is a masterclass in comic brinkmanship that evolves from a standard cop/gangster shootout to nuclear Armageddon. Likewise the opening scenes are a stylish commentary on Hong Kong-inflected Hollywood action-drama, punctured by a moment of brilliantly-conceived bathos when, after a hit on a Yakuza boss, the cop character, Jojima (Show Aikawa), visits the crime scene and digs into a pile of undigested noodles (sprayed on the floor from a stomach wound) with a pair of chopsticks, identifying the victim by the kind of sauce (“Su Chi noodles? Must be Chan Feng.”) The intervening hour of film is taken up with a straightfaced parody of stock Japanese family melodrama – if you discount the dog-sex and the prostitute drowned in a paddle-pool full of shit. Gozu (2003), on the other hand, has most often elicited comparisons to the work of David Lynch, although perhaps early Cronenberg or Buñuel might be more apt. The film, 155 156 also known as Yakuza Horror Theatre: Cow’s Head, is less “psychosexual horror” than a surrealist Yakuza road movie which, like Seven Samurai, is built on a foundation of Greek legend, most explicitly the story of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth, but there are a dozen others besides. Its questing, episodic structure is built around the story of a Yakuza sub-boss’s disappearance on his way to being involuntarily “retired” at a kind of Yakuza meat factory (where the tattooed skins of past retirees are meticulously preserved in a cold room), and his subsequent and equally mysterious re-appearance in the form of a young woman, who at the end of the film gives “birth” to him, fully grown. Gozu’s “classicism” puts Miike’s hard-edge weirdness into something of a regularising context: with nauseating big budget productions like Alexander the Great (2004) dominating our historical perspective, the extreme “weirdness” and carnage of the classical source-texts underwriting much of Western culture has been ostensibly nullified or expunged, like the meat section in American supermarkets. It should not, in fact, be especially controversial to suggest that Miike’s cinematic vision, if we can call it that, is ultimately a highly conservative one, if we accept that word in its proper meaning (like Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967)). And this points to one of the central issues surrounding questions of the director’s “auteur” status: Godard in Pierrot le fou (1965) and La Chinoise (1967) come closest to the wholesale abandonment of the cinematic high-mindedness we find in Miike (the abandonment, not the high-mindedness), but Godard’s one-man avantgarde never quite gives it up (the highmindedness, that is). Indeed, the very idea of the “auteur” evokes a type of neo-classicism redolent of archaeology. Which is to say, a certain austerity of vision (early Antonioni verses Jess Franco; the austerity of Winckelmann’s white marble statuary versus historical Greco-Roman blood-and-guts kitsch, etc.). Hawks, Welles, Ford in their various manners were all masters of this. Miike is instead drawn to a type of proto-, Homeric classicism, in which the epic blood-baths of Troy sit side by side with transformations of men into swine, deadly mermaids, descents into the underworld and interminable wanderings. And there is the pervasive element of the grotesque, which is the basis of its humour. In place of the esoteric we find the excessive and outlandish, which are in fact the starting conditions under which the imagination operates when it hasn’t been completely normalised by the pharmaco-entertainment complex or the institutional “avantgarde.” Miike’s own comments about Gozu are typically disarming: “If you were a child and rode on a bike to a place you’ve never been, you’d feel like it’s real but not real. Gozu is like that. You go to a place you’ve never been but you don’t have to make any sense as to why or how you are there.” 8. Released the same year as David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis – in which a significant part of the action also takes place in the back of a stretch limo – Leos Carax’s Holy Motors (2012) traverses a world saturated with the “anaesthetising, pernicious blandness” of Hollywood spectacularism and soap-operatic normalisation. It is less a narrative film, by conventional standards, than an essay in cultural abjection and alienation. Reviewing Holy Motors in The New Yorker, Richard Brody describes the film as “a movie that arises after the end of cinema, a phoenix of a new cinema.”23 Perhaps.24 But it is certainly a “cinema of end times,” in much the same way as Emir Kusturica’s Underground (1995), to which Carax’s film makes more than a passing nod (there is one scene in particular from the third “act” (Monsieur Merde), of migrating populations in the sewers under Paris, which strongly echoes a recurring trope in Kusturica’s film). The central protagonist of Holy Motors is an “actor” (Monsieur Oscar – Carax’s middle name – played by Denis Levant, whose frequent collaborations with Carax began with Boy Meets Girl in 1984). The action takes place over the course of a single day – a veritable Joycean Odyssey played out in 10 acts between departure from one “home” 23 Richard Brody, “Leos Carax’s Astonishing Holy Motors,” The New Yorker (14 October, 2012) 24 The pseudo-controversy, around the “death of cinema”, while it aspires to a certain universalism, will soon doubtless come to resemble what it is: a footnote to the aesthetics of the second industrial revolution. 157 Leos Carax, Holy Motors (2012) 158 and “return” to another, whose “vehicle” is a white stretch limo piloted by the ambiguous Madame Céline (Edith Scob, star of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (1959) – and true to the recursive, multi-referential character of Carax’s film, it end with Céline, having returned to a depot for dozens of similar cars, donning a green mask, so that all that’s left visible of her face are her eyes). None of the action is given any particular rationale, rather it is all presented as part of a abstracted routine, structured around a set of dossiers that Levant’s “character” receives at the beginning of each new “act” – ironically riffing on the theme of Mission Impossible. What the overall mission is, and the nature of its impossibility, is the question to which the “action” most appears to be directed. The film itself begins hors texte, in the form of a prologue: we see a room in a highrise hotel, a man asleep on a bed (Carax, in fact) who is awoken by the sound of a ship setting out to sea: the ship’s horn, the sound of gulls, water, etc. The man listens at the walls to discover where the sounds are coming from, discovers a secret doorway, and with a (phallicly long) ratchet-key that he has somehow grown in place of the middle ringer on his right hand opens it to find himself in a passageway leading to the upstairs balcony of an old cinema in which an audience of sleepers sit in front of the screen. On the screen, a girl is gazing from what appears to be a porthole window. The ship sounds grow louder. A naked child wanders down the aisle, followed by a sinister mastiff stalking along the red carpet in slow-motion. We’re invited, of course, to construe all of this as a kind of dream: the “dream” of the director of the film which begins as the camera moves in on the screen just as the girl in the porthole pull away – as it were (one camera advancing as another camera, in this parallel/mirror world, pulls back) – revealing not a ship but a modernist villa, down whose driveway we see Monsieur Oscar, an elderly industrialist flanked by security, approaching a white stretch limo. As the limo drives off, Monsieur Oscar engages in some innocuous financial talk on the phone and briefly discusses the threat of kidnapping. A dossier on the back seat contains details of the day’s first “appointment.” Monsieur Oscar reads it, then unaccountably takes out a wig and begins brushing it. Moments later he has transformed himself into an old beggar woman. Soon, abandoned by his bodyguards, he is standing on a sidewalk panhandling among passersby, reciting (as in a voiceover) this new character’s tale of misfortune. The inversion of roles could hardly be more precise. This routine is repeated in varying forms throughout the film, leaving the viewer to assume (in place of any straightforward connecting thread) that Monsieur Oscar/ Denis Levant is some kind of “actor,” whose performances however occur in the absence of any audience or camera – other than that, of course, of Carax himself – and that Holy Motors represents something of a genre machine, a comment upon the ungrounded relativity of the film industry we all inhabit, as well as upon the nature of acting in general. “Does an actor without an audience even exist…?” for instance. And: “What is the relationship between the cinema and the world?” “What is performance and what is ‘real’?” etc. Equally it poses the question of what constitutes an actor as such? The perverse subject who requires the real unreality of his experience in order to authenticate/ameliorate the unreal reality of his existence. 159 160 Of one who, in the guise of initiating his own actions, of effecting spontaneous decisions, and so on, is in fact – as the saying goes – conforming to a script, a schedule, a set of performative conventions, etc.: a ”worker in a dream factory.”25 Which is to say, a producer of the spectacle in the form of his own alienation. (As Debord says, “Workers do not produce themselves: they produce a force independent of themselves. The success of this production, that is, the abundance it generates, is experienced by its producers only as an abundance of dispossession.”26) A point brought home sublimely in the third “act” of Carax’s film, where we see Lavant’s “Monsieur Merde” character stalking through Père Lachaise cemetery, in which all of the names on the tombstones have been replaced by web addresses. In this sense, Holy Motors is more than simply an allegory of cinema, it is an examination of how a collective consciousness is constituted (perhaps it is even a manifesto of sorts). Just as the dreamer imagines himself to be the active agent (and simultaneously passive spectator) of his own dream, so too the subject-as-actor imagines himself to be the vehicle of his embodiments, his characterisations, while it is they that constitute the vehicle of “his own” existentiality. (The pun in the title is made clear, here, since in the Greek philosophical tradition an automobile is in fact a kind of “god,” a self-motivating agency, a holy motor, so to speak – like the ego we all mistake ourselves as being centred in). The dilemma, however, is that what we believe to be the dream is really a dream-within-a-dream – or better, a dream disguised as a dream. This play of disguise, permutation, alienation, separation is nowhere more explicit than in the second “act” where Levant, dressed in a motion-capture suit, “performs” a series of choreographed moves – fighting, running, fucking – in a CGI studio (what has been described as a straight male fantasy space). These performances are really a set of physical indexes for a computer algorithm: actions mappable in the way Taylorism mapped and industrialised the human body-as-machine. Lavant’s instructions are 25 26 Denis Lim, “Holy Motors,” Cinema Scope 51 (2012). Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, §30. delivered by a robotised voice, emphasising the sense of his being a “merely human” proxy for some digitally enhanced epireality, whose graphic analogue to Levant’s performance are ironically underwhelming yet appropriately alien (this epireality, product of a cult of simulationism, in turn produces an unreality effect, here exaggerated at precisely the point where the verisimilitude of “reality capture” advertises its possibility in unprecedented ways). By way of counterpoint, the film’s final “act” shows Monsieur Oscar/Lavant being handed a pay packet by Céline (towards whom, in a moment of unbidden and “pathetically” human sentimentality, he demonstrates the awkward emotions of someone who does not expect to actually see her again “tomorrow,” despite her assurances that their daily “routine” will continue as usual) and – exhausted, coughing – returning home to his family in some anonymous outer-Parisian suburb. His family, it turns out, are in fact chimpanzees: the “actor” has indeed returned home, in some vaguely evolutionary sense, and the scene ends with this proto-nuclear family looking out their window at the stars and contemplating a bright future. Holy Motors is notable for having been entirely shot in digital format – by Caroline Charpetier, Godard’s cinematographer in the 1980s. Indeed, much has been implied from Carax’s association with Godard: like Godard, Carax began his career as a critic at Cahiers (in the 1970s) and his earlier work, like Mauvais Sang (1986; starring Juliet Binoche), clearly exhibits the influence of Godard’s mid-career anti-naturalism (Carax himself appeared in the minor role of Edgar in Godard’s 1987 film, King Lear). The film of Godard’s to which Holy Motors is perhaps best compared, however, is Passion (1982), in which the status of cinema, of the “auteur,” of acting, of alienation, of human obsolescence and the obsolescence of the cinematic medium, are all explicitly addressed in the context of a certain impossibility of representation (aesthetic, political, subjective). It is also concerned with a certain technicity, of the status of the image as such, of its technological condition – from cinematograph to video and to its postanalogue condition. Perhaps, in this light, Carax’s film is also a comment on humanity’s own technological condition, or 161 as some critics suppose simply a maudlin reflection on the “end of cinema” in the vein of Godard (one of its “ends” in any case). Or, in a restatement of the Freudian dictum: Where cinema was, ego will be. Such are the evolutionary conceits of what we call consciousness. Holy Motors concludes with Céline returning the limo to its depot: the lights go out, and – in a kind of epilogue to mirror the opening prologue – the cars, left finally to their own devices, begin talking to one another, among other things about their immanent obsolescence. Like celluloid, they represent an anachronism: the conspicuous manifestation of an image in a world in which the power of signs is diffused throughout (or rather as) the fabric of “reality” – not as some ubiquitously visible counterpart, but as the very possibility of seeing. Carax’s narrative is in a sense one of perturbations, in that it “exposes” (if only through its expropriations of genre), the permissive character of this “possibility,” which points rather to an impossibility. As Debord writes, “The modern spectacle… expresses what society can do, but in this expression the permitted is absolutely opposed to the possible.”27 And if the spectacle is the “preservation of unconsciousness,” then is cinema as envisaged here – or even the (im)possibility of cinema (a cinema after the “end of cinema”) – the perturbatory form of its dream? 162 *Presented as a series of lectures, “Film & Critical Culture,” Philosophy Faculty, Charles University, Prague, February – May 2014. 27 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, §25. FADE TO BLACK FILM NOIR & THE FATALITY OF GENRE Dietrich was the femme fatale. Hitler was an homme fatal. If there was a femme fatale there was also the German people who had the same fatality. Thus one could say, that’s how they used lighting. This story is fairly curious. For if one looks deeper into it, one sees that Sternberg, Marlene, like all German intellectuals, fled to America… Sternberg, who was Jewish, met another Jew, who was American. Of European descent. Ben Hecht, a playwright. And it was they who made the prototype for the American crime film. First Sternberg with Underworld and The Docks of New York. Then Scarface, and then Sternberg’s other films. It was German-American Jews who after the existence of Nazism came up with the prototype of gangster films. – Jean-Luc Godard, Filmkritik (February 1977) The advance of fascism’s “black death” across Europe caused forebodings of its collective nightmare to wash up, so to speak, on the shores of the New World in an unforeseen, singular, and yet entirely apt manner, in the fugitive form of a sea-changed German Expressionism. That is to say, as cinema. This “harbinger” of societal doom, however, wasn’t fully diagnosed as such till after the end of the War when, like a self-consuming contagion, it’d already begun its long entropic spiral into genre. By the 163 164 time “film noir” was first coined as a term by Nino Frank in 1946, its formal impetus had mostly been disinfected of “History” and been transmuted into a kind of benign retroviral amnesia with which, (re-) exposed in its turn, European cinema would henceforth become fascinated as with some uncanny ideological doppelganger. In this sense, film noir was the ideal agent of the US’s “Marshall Plan,” eventually evolving from a latent form of culture critique into the systematised form of commodity normalisation. This post-War “wave” of American films that Frank encountered on Parisian cinema screens had first made its appearance across the Atlantic (and across the American continent, coming to bear all the signature traits of Hollywood) earlier in the decade. It resembled in both style and subject matter the American crime and detective fiction already published in France under the “série noire” label while recalling the actuality of the wartime Gestapo state still very much present in the collective consciousness. As with the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma ten years later – who based their “New Wave” aesthetics and theories of the film “auteur” on frequently disregarded Hollywood studio directors such as Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller – Frank recognised the aesthetic power of a style of American film-making which, in the US, was largely considered as part of the B production slate. Pauline Keil famously said of the “auteur” recuperation of noir as “trying to find movie art in the loopholes of commercial production,” condemning – in Richard Brody’s words – the auterists’ praise of film noir as “anti-intellectual nihilism”: trying to give the semblance of intellectual respectability to a preoccupation with mindless, repetitious commercial products – the kind of action movies that the restless, rootless men who wander on Forty-second Street and in the Tenderloin of all our big cities have always preferred just because they could respond to them without thought…1 While many noir films draw upon techniques of German Expressionism – largely due to the influx into Hollywood of 1 Qtd in Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of JeanLuc Godard (New York: Holt, 2008) 215. European directors like Joseph von Sternberg, Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Max Ophuls, Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger before and during WW2 – neither the stylistic traits that contribute to film noir, nor the term itself, were widely recognised at that time. As is typical of such encounters between American and European culture, the “critical” and “aesthetic” merits of the dominant entertainment medium tended to be a retrospective import. The same might be said of the major practitioners of the noir style of fiction on which many of these films are based – writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane – none of whom, at the time, were seriously regarded by the literary establishment (though some, like Chandler, harboured bitter aspirations to being considered “serious writers”). Even within the popular fiction market, hardboiled crime and detective novels remained marginal, alongside other genre fiction like the western, and distinct from such “classic” works in an apparently similar vein, like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories (which incidentally were also committed to film, across the Atlantic, throughout the period encompassing the War – the titular role played by Basil Rathbone). It wasn’t until the publication of Spillane’s first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury, that hardboiled noir fiction hit the top of the bestseller lists in the late ’40s. All three novelists – Hammett, Chandler, Spillane – created central protagonists (all of them “private eyes”) who became instantly recognisable to a growing readership. Hammett’s fictional detective, Sam Spade, was the first to appear, in his 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, set in San Francisco. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe debuted in the short story “The Finger Man” (1934), but is best known from his appearance in Chandler’s first novel The Big Sleep, published in 1939 and set in LA. Mike Hammer, Mickey Spillane’s tough-talking NY shamus, made his entrance in I, the Jury (1947). All three of these novels were subsequently adapted for the big screen: I, the Jury in 1953; The Big Sleep in 1946 (with Humphrey Bogart in the lead); and The Maltese Falcon in 1931, again in 1936, and finally in its “classic” adaptation by John Huston in 1941 (also starring Bogart). 165 166 Although many male leads have been closely associated with film noir – like Alan Ladd and Robert Mitchum – Humphrey Bogart has come to be seen as the most recognisable face of the genre, famously evoking a whole style of American cinematic influence for the French New Wave of Godard and Truffaut in the late ’50s. Though Bogart’s breakthrough came in the 1941 fugitive melodrama High Sierra, it was The Maltese Falcon (released the same year) and Casablanca (which appeared the following) that cemented Bogart’s position and established his trademark hard-boiled “cynical” film persona whose speech and demeanour matched the terse rapid-fire character of noir fiction – just as it matched the new noir vocabulary of the camera: the side-lit close-up, the long take, the foregrounded object bisecting the frame. Each word and gesture, like each shifting of the lens, designed to build tension, a sense of indecision, of separation, and ultimately of deception and betrayal. Reminiscent of Hemingway’s assault on overwritten, adjectival prose, noir is short on metaphysics and restricts its action to the surface of the image. The thinking goes on outside the frame. In this, the style is very “American,” showing rather than telling, and doing so in an increasingly hard-edged vernacular. Likewise the film style becomes increasingly pared down, achieving at its best a sinuous muscularity. This in part also has to do with the contemporary period setting. The present dominates, though recent history – in the form of the Great Depression, Prohibition, the War, McCarthyism – nevertheless determines the mood: which is to say, the frequent sense of moral dislocation, criminalisation and disenfranchisement, articulated not in specific ideological terms (though some noir writers and directors did at times succumb to propagandising), but rather through the depiction of attitudes. From a technical point of view, film noir’s style was as much informed by changing economic circumstances as they were by aesthetic concerns. The unorthodox camera angles and psychological mood-lighting of German Expressionist films translated easily into low-budget production that minimised shooting times, demanded flexibility and required the recycling of studio sets with Mary Astor & Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941) an emphasis on interiors. The early association with black and white, as well as primarily urban settings (with urban themes) sometimes makes it difficult to maintain a clear sense of the noir genre in the 1950s, particularly with the advent of colour. Definitions of noir during this period tend to focus on character types and story lines, the prevalence of cynical opportunism, individual avarice, the figure of the deceiving and manipulative femme fatale disguised as an innocent, and the lusting tormented male protagonist whose ruthless exploitation does not lead to his redemption in the eyes of the audience but merely the recognition that here stands the archetypal loser – and that the loser is potentially “everyman.” 1. Often cited as the inauguration of what Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward in their “Encyclopaedic Reference,” Film Noir, insisted on calling the “American style,”2 The Maltese Falcon is more a transitional piece – a rehearsal for film noir proper. It’s not really the first of its type, but one of the first to combine a number of key elements: 2 Film Noir: An Encyclopaedic Reference to the American Style, eds. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward (New York: Overlook Press, 1979). 167 168 most notably the detective theme, the air of unrelenting manipulation, the almost cynical camera work and frenetic action. Bogart of course. Hammett. A year later another Hammett adaptation was released, The Glass Key, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake (the prototypical noir leading couple which had debuted that same year in This Gun for Hire, anticipating the later pairing of Bogart and Lauren Becall in 1946). The Maltese Falcon is far from Huston’s best film, its action is frenetic and its protagonist’s motives are gratuitous at best, when not downright eccentric. The story itself has a certain foreignness about it, when considered within the context of this most “American” of genres. But this probably has more to do with the scripting than with Huston’s direction as such. It’s also a product of its time. And of Bogart’s acting. In The Big Sleep (1946), where he takes the role of Philip Marlowe, Bogart’s “angular” style makes entering and leaving a room look like a time-check at the Indy 500. On that occasion William Faulkner worked on the script. On The Maltese Falcon Huston himself took the writing credit, though truth be told he can’t have done much actual writing, because the script is taken almost verbatim from the novel, which is simply cut-down to size, preserving all of Hammett’s notorious plot “inadequacies.”3 The casting is also doubtful. Mary Astor as Brigid O’Shaughnessy is unconvincing as an apparently 22-year-old femme fatale. Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo introduces an element of European “camp” that plays weirdly against Sydney Greenstreet’s terribly Westminsterish Kasper Gutman (the Fat Man). In fact, all of Huston’s casting decisions appear designed to reinforce rather than complicate Hammett’s flat-on-thepage stereotypes. The film is, in part, a grotesquerie that seems to reach out towards a certain European-ness, such as that depicted in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1947), set in post-War Vienna (and also starring Peter Lorre, alongside Orson Welles), and of course Fritz Lang’s M: Eine Stadt 3 There is probably no other script like it in the history of noir, and it’s hardly surprising that virtually the whole thing was shot as if it were a play, slavishly devoted to the authorial word. Never again would Hammett, Chandler, or any of the other big names of hard boiled fiction receive even remotely similar treatment. sucht einen Mörder (1931; in which Lorre has the role of a serial child-murder), something which sets it at odds with the mainstream of film noir while nevertheless bearing an enormous influence upon it. Julie Kirgo, perceiving what might be considered the film’s shortcomings as precisely its strengths, writes, The film’s chief assets are its crisp dialogue and the bravura performances of the principles. That these performances are overloaded with mannerisms is inconsequential in a film that depends on emphasis of the superficial for its effect.4 Kirgo also notes that, “While it is certainly true that most films in the noir genre are despairing in nature, the best are realised in such a way that even the most neurotic characters are endowed with a human dimension and allowed a fascinating ambiguity.” In the end, Kirgo diagnoses, The Maltese Falcon itself suffers from its own “contempt,” before inadvertently hitting upon the key noir element: “As Spade deliberately lays out the pros and cons of letting Brigid ‘take the fall,’ he balances his murderous, lying nature” against the notion that “she loves him or maybe he loves her” – though neither idea is for even the faintest fraction of a moment likely (“it all rings false,” as Kirgo says, exposing the purely rhetorical, narcissistic character of what frequently passes for seduction or motive in noir). “The thrill felt at the end of The Maltese Falcon,” she adds, “is not a poignant one; it is something a little uglier. With Huston’s Spade, the viewer is getting a thrill out of sending Brigid over.” This is what Foster Hirsch optimistically glosses as Spade’s “essential integrity.”5 The whole “monochromatic” amoralism of Hammett’s text and Bogart’s/Astor’s delivery puts the audience in the position of a showtrial jury: it’s all just about watching the defendants talk themselves out according to the script, barely keeping up a modicum of pretence, so that you can watch them 4 Julie Kirgo, “The Maltese Falcon,” Film Noir: An Encyclopaedic Reference to the American Style, 181. 5 Foster Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir (New York: Da Capo, 1981) 149. 169 Alan Ladd & Veronica Lake in The Glass Key (1942) hang regardless, from a rope they’ve been made to carry around with them from the start. 170 2. There are worlds of difference between Bogart’s interpretation of Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade character in The Maltese Falcon, and Alan Ladd’s role as Ed Beaumont in The Glass Key (directed by Stuart Heisler a year later). While Huston’s adaptation The Maltese Falcon was heavy on dialogue & mostly restricted to the action of the main characters entering and leaving rooms, Heisler’s adaptation of The Glass Key is a more nuanced rendering, with suspense built around character portrayal and the unfolding of the story on the screen – aided by pulp writer Jonathan Latimer’s script work. Where the similarities lie are in the way both Bogart and Ladd foreground the moral ambivalence of their characters to those around them. But whereas in The Glass Key, loyalty is a commodity that is constantly being tested, in The Maltese Falcon it is merely something to be bought when it isn’t simply being paid lip service. It’s interesting to consider that both films preceded America’s entry into WW2, when ambivalence around questions of “loyalty” was a pressing social concern at the time, with America’s non-aligned stance somewhat personified in the classic noir figure of the opportunist prepared to betray anyone and everyone for his, or more frequently her, personal advantage. It’s in this heightened degree of ambivalence that The Glass Key departs from Hammett’s novel, and from the earlier 1935 adaptation by Frank Tuttle, thereby also presenting itself more as a product of its time, where – despite Bogart’s character acting – The Maltese Falcon comes across more as a throwback to the picaresque detective fictions of Agatha Christie (replete with exotic plotline, cast of eccentrics, and the detective wrapping it all up with a neat explanation at the end, for the benefit of his captive audience). As a remake of The Glass Key, with borrowings from Red Harvest (1929), the Coen Brothers’s Miller’s Crossing (1990) is the more measured interpretation, exploring the opportunities Hammett’s text offers for a deadpan, even maudlin, style in keeping with the overarching absence of irony indicative of noir as a genre (though with Bogart, you’d never know). The metaphor of the “glass key” highlights the precarious nature of the relationships formed in a world of corruption, deceit and political expediency. It also suggests the temperamental fragility of the “king maker,” Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy), whose infatuation with a senator’s daughter, Janet Henry (Veronica Lake) causes him to compromise his sense of judgement and risk both his position of authority in the crime world and the established status quo with the “authorities” that keeps him there. In this sense, the script follows a conventional line: a smalltime Napoleon who develops delusions of grandeur, ready both to make a fool of himself and sacrifice everything in return for being accepted into the Establishment. Of course it doesn’t work out this way, but neither does it turn bad. Heisler’s film has an unsatisfactory “happy ever after ending.” Learning that the senator’s daughter is in love with his own younger righthand man, Ed Beaumont, Madvig gives them his blessing. But this conventional three-way romance is off-set by a homoerotic subtext that runs throughout the film. In this, it shares something in common with The Maltese Falcon – but whereas in that film the homoerotic element is focused on the foppish character of Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), in The 171 172 Glass Key it’s focused on the brutal, sadistic character of the underworld henchman, Jeff (played by noir stalwart William Bendix). Jeff’s relationship with Ed provides an almost psychotic counterpoint to the conventional hetero romance that appears to conclude the film, when Ed and Janet receive Madvig’s blessing. But like Bogart’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, Ladd’s Ed Beaumont appears nothing if not ambivalent towards the deceptive and calculating Janet Henry. Like Spade, Beaumont’s attitude to his female counterpart throughout the film is cynical verging upon frigid. And like Spade, Beaumont is prepared to send Janet to the gallows to get what he wants – which is her father’s confession that it was the senator (and not Madvig) who killed his (own) son. Beaumont says to one of the cops: “I was getting worried – afraid we’d have to hang the girl to get the old man to crack.” The sub-plot, in which the senator’s murdered son has been engaging in a secret affair with Madvig’s sister, points to a certain morbid fatalism in Hammett’s treatment of heterosexual relationships in his novels. As with Brigit O’Shaunnesy’s murder of Clive Thursby in The Maltese Falcon, the death of the senator’s son as well as Madvig’s virtual self-destruction in The Glass Key, points to an utter moral vacancy at the heart of the conventional romance narrative. The soapy resolution at the film’s end can only signal future catastrophe – no good, we are led to understand, can come from sentimental attachments of this or any other kind. All that is left, we might say, is the struggle of a masochistic impulse against a sadistic one, where both at any moment may appear interchangeable, by neither is ever wholly prepared to relent. 3. In an essay published at the end of the nineties, Slavoj Žižek describes “the classic noir femme fatale of the ’40s” as “characterised by direct, outspoken sexual aggressivity, verbal and physical, by direct self-commodification and selfmanipulation. She has ‘the mind of the pimp in the body of a whore.’”6 Žižek’s case-in-point is Barbara Stanwyck’s 6 Slavoj Žižek, “From ‘Passionate Attachments’ to Dis-Identification,” UMBR(a): Identity/Identification 1 (1998): 11. Barbara Stanwyck & Fred McMurray in Double Indemnity (1944) performance in Double Indemnity (directed by Billy Wilder in 1944 and co-written with Raymond Chandler). A new on-screen gender etiquette is signalled from the very first encounter between Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson and Fred McMurray’s Walter Neff in the brazen double-entendres that form their exchange about “speed limits.” In a sense, the entire film is a series of double-entrendres, and we might extrapolate from Žižek to suggest that Stanwyck’s femme fatale is more than simply the prototype of a stock noir “figure” and is instead paradigmatic of what cinema itself had become – just as Double Indemnity is less “about” the story it contains and more a “reflection” on the medium itself (and the old Hollywood syndicate it’d whored itself out to), right down to the (parodic) staging of its own “deathbed confession.” Wilder revisited and gloriously expanded on this otherwise hackneyed device in Sunset Blvd (1950), whose voice-over narration belongs to a corpse, a scriptwriter no less (William Holden), who we first encounter floating facedown in former siren of the silent screen Gloria Swanson’s swimming pool (her butler just happens to be the real-life director Erich von Stroheim) – a device that achieves a very un-ironic apotheosis in Rudolph Maté’s 1950 film, D.O.A. 173 174 It’s arguable that Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd bookend the period in which noir exhibited its greatest creative potential: if Double Indemnity provides both a template and benchmark for the genre as a whole, Sunset Blvd – with its self-reflexive play between Holden’s cool, deadpan persona and Swanston’s gothicised histrionics – inaugurates a distinctly post-noir sensibility, among whose inheritors are the French “New Wave” (from À bout de Soufflé (1960) to the slapstick parodics of Pierrot le fou (1965)) and neo-noir productions like Wim Wenders’s Hammett (1982) and the Coen Brothers’s Barton Fink (1991). Sunset Blvd not only marks a certain apotheosis of noir, but marks precisely the moment at which it solidifies into genre. The film itself relentlessly pursues this revenanceeffect, between the death of the silent era (the “waxworks” in the film) – alluding, among other things, to the genesis of noir with the release of Fritz Lang’s first sound production, M, in 1931 – and the “death” of noir as a subversive form and its subsequent generification (embodied in Holden’s hack screenwriter and Swanston’s cadaverous, delusional femme fatale). The intervening (decisive) incident, of course, is Double Indemnity’s invention of the femme fatale as such (there’s nothing “fatale” about Brigit O’Shaunnesy). If, as Žižek argues, “the subversive character of the noir films is exhibited in the way the texture of the films belies and subverts its explicit narrative line,” it is the figure of the femme fatale that is the effective agent of this subversion (or what Žižek calls the “inherent transgression” of the “patriarchal symbolic universe”). Like cinema itself, as manifested in Sunset Blvd, the femme fatale represents a “male masochist-paranoiac fantasy of the exploitative and sexually insatiable woman.”7 But the question isn’t so much that the “threat” posed by the femme fatale is a sufficiently false one to permit its re-expropriation to this “masculine” fantasy, but that it is in fact foundational for its very operation. Film noir is thus seen as a kind of forensic examination of a ubiquitous fantasmatic dependency: the seduction of the image itself in the normalisation of social relations thrown into crisis by 7 Žižek, “From ‘Passionate Attachments’ to Dis-Identification,” 11-12. the domestic reassigning of gender roles during the Second World War. With the post-War resurgence of commodity capitalism, the femme fatale isn’t simply a commodity, but the commodity, whose seduction is nothing less than the fantasy of consumption itself: of instant gratification, of boundless pleasure, of transgression and redemption within a repaired code of discipline and punishment. Here is the point at which cinema becomes the self-conscious reification of predominantly “American” society as such, commensurate with the advent of the Cold War, TV and the retreat to the suburbs. The banal yet hallucinatory character of everything that transpires in Double Indemnity call’s to mind Goya’s famous etching, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, from Los Caprichos (1797), whose epitaph reads: “Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of arts and the origin of their marvels.” In the figure of the femme fatale the marriage of fantasy and reason produces an ideal dissimulation, for the “art” of the femme fatale, as with the “art” of cinema itself, is not to put reason to sleep, as it were, but to produce – as Deleuze and Guattari say – a too “vigilant and insomniac rationality.”8 A rationality that believes itself to be fully awake, but whose wakefulness is in fact the very fabric of its “slumber.” This fantasy is so complete that it is even capable of experiencing its own re-awakening, the revelation that all along it has in fact been asleep – yet this too is just a dream: just as in the classic noir, the protagonist first sees himself as the master of situations, logically calculating his advantage over the unwitting, and only later “wakes up” to the reality of the situation, that he’s been played for a sucker from the outset. But even as he gets down all the details of his “confession” (and Double Indemnity is narratologically simply that: a single long confession) the protagonist is simply playing the fantasy out on another level – reason comforting itself after the fact, so to speak – since in reality both “he” and “it” are still dreaming: the dream of 8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H.R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977) 122. 175 having “understood at last,” while in fact understanding nothing at all. It is, as Derrida says, not so much a question of Reason having been put to sleep, then, as a “slumber in the form of reason.”9 It’s perhaps no accident that Double Indemnity can be read along these lines. There is something “definitive” in Stanwyck’s portrayal of a woman who talks an infatuated insurance salesman into killing her husband which sets a benchmark for the film noir femme fatale, but also the film language itself, that performs a deconstruction of the very idea of the stereotype to which the genre might otherwise be reduced. Stanwyck’s character with all the ambivalence of a genuine seduction: like a magic screen on which unconscious desires are projected and played back with just enough realism to torment yet constantly evade that “little man” within (like the intuitive “reason” of the film’s “claims adjuster,” played by Edward G. Robinson – a man with no personality to speak of, other than the absence of personality). 176 4. Raymond Chandler’s portrait of Moose Malloy, the oversized slow-witted wheel-on wheel-off gimp in his 1940 novel, Farewell, My Lovely, is the closest thing in Chandler to a full-blown satire of the detective genre’s stock-in-trade Coincidence Man and plot catalyst, the classic deus ex machina who in this case doesn’t just resolve the drama when it gets stuck in a tight spot but actually kicks the whole thing off. The story opens with Marlow standing on a sidewalk looking up at “the jutting neon sign of a second-floor dine and dice emporium called Florian’s” and Moose, out of nowhere, standing more or less along side, looking up at the same sign. “He was a big man but not more than six foot five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck. He was about ten feet away from me. His arms hung loose at his sides and a forgotten cigar smoked behind his enormous fingers.” Moose is looking for his old squeeze, Velma, after seven years in the clink, and he gives Marlowe a down-payment on the spot to find her. After first taking Florian’s apart. His girl used to work there, but no more. The next 250 pages is Marlowe’s curiosity getting the 9 Derrida, Writing and Difference, 252. Dick Powell & Mike Mazurki in Murder, My Sweet (1944) better of him. Farewell, My Lovely – Chandler’s second novel featuring LA private investigator Philippe Marlowe – was adapted for the screen three times: firstly in 1942, under the title The Falcon Takes Over, directed by Irving Reis; then in 1944, by Edward Dmytryk, under the title Murder, My Sweet, with ex-wrestler Mike Mazurki as Malloy and Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe; then in 1975, staring Robert Mitchum, under the book’s original title, directed by Dick Richards. Mitchum also starred in the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep, making him the only film actor to portray Philip Marlowe more than once. Richards’ version of Farewell, My Lovely is also notable for including an early screen appearance by Sylvester Stallone, and it’s probably the only version in which Chandler’s satire isn’t completely lost – which may have something to say about Chandler’s anticipation of the entire neo-noir sensibility. Incidentally, Farewell, My Lovely is also the book Michael Caine’s character is reading on the train to Newcastle early in the 1970s film Get Carter. Chandler’s novel begins with a description of Malloy. It makes a memorable opening: It was a warm day, almost the end of March, and I stood outside the barbershop looking up at the jutting neon sign of a second floor dine and dice emporium called Florian’s. 177 A man was looking up at the sign, too. He was looking at the dusty windows with a sort of ecstatic fixity of expression, like a hunky immigrant catching his first sight of the Statue of Liberty. He was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck. He was about ten feet away from me. His arms hung loose at his sides and a forgotten cigar smoked behind his enormous fingers. 178 It’s Marlowe’s accidental encounter with Moose Malloy that sets the ball rolling and gets Marlowe entangled in a blackmail conspiracy involving corrupt Bay City cops, a dope doctor, a psychic, & a big-name racketeer – introducing the figure of the Private Eye motivated by curiosity and a kind of moral independence diametrically at odds with the kind of mercenary character played by Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. This marks something of an evolution in the genre, from Hammett’s cynical Sam Spade to Chandlers wry but principled Marlow, and later Spillane’s Mike Hammer who is motivated by a strong sense of personal and social justice, rather than money (and, like Malowe in Farewell, My Lovely, every one of Hammer’s cases is inaugurated by a chance encounter or a personal involvement, rather than an over-the-counter transaction, painting the portrait of a kind of gritty urban superhero who, despite everything, isn’t “for sale”). Dmytryk’s decision to cast Powell as Marlowe has been much debated. Powell was best known at the time for his work in musicals and light comedies, a fact that prompted studio execs to demand Dmytryk change the film’s title from Chandler’s original so as not to cause confusion at the box office. For his highly acclaimed 1947 film, Crossfire, Dmytryk cast Mitchum (who’d made his first foray into the noir genre in 1944’s When Strangers Marry, directed by William Castle), and it’s worth considering what type of film Murder, My Sweet might’ve been had Mitchum taken Powell’s role. In 1948 Powell appeared opposite a very ingénue Lizabeth Scott in Andre de Toth’s lame Double Indemnity rip-off, Pitfall, with Powell as the insurance investigator and Scott as the archetypal frail (as far from Stanwyck’s Phyllis Deitrichson as its possible to get without washing up on the other side of the Pacific). Powell, who appeared in several other Hollywood treadmill operations (Cornered, 1945; Johnny O’Clock, 1947; To the Ends of the Earth, 1948) deserves all the credit he gets for being the stiff in the industry’s mortuarisation of a genre which, in the hands of Wilder and Chandler, was never going to tow the line: he’s the future home-viewing entropy man. Endless Powell-clones would thereafter reenact the contract killing Hollywood’s studios performed on noir, gormlessly trying to scam every last dime out of the grieving widow. Nevertheless, despite a number of other casting eccentricities, Murder, My Sweet was well received critically at the time and regarded by some critics as the one film adaptation that comes closest to Chandler’s text (if nothing else; though Castle’s remake is closer, and notably Dmytryk eschews Chandler’s opening for a dull set-piece in the shamus’s sanctum sanctorum). It also established a workable framework for much of the noir and neo-noir film-making that followed, with its push towards industry-standard realism and away from the more stylised psychological terrain of Double Indemnity (more closely associated thereafter with the mannerist approach of Alfred Hitchcock, in films like Notorious (1946; in B/W) and Rear Window (1954; in colour) – as an aside, it’s worth noting that for his 1951 film, Strangers on a Train, Hitchcock worked with both Chandler and Hammett on the script). The element of conspiracy plays a prominent part in Chandler’s novel, and consequently also in Dmytryk’s film.10 Whereas Double Indemnity focused on a conspiracy 10 Unlike Dashiell Hammett, who was imprisoned in 1951 & blacklisted from 1953, Raymond Chandler was never directly involved with HUAC (or only through the associated of his novel, Farewell, My Lovely with Dmytryk’s 1944 adaptation). But Chandler did have a drink problem. He’d given up the booze for health reasons, but during the shooting of The Blue Dahlia he went back on the bottle, believing it was the only way he could gain inspiration to finish the script – which he did, garnering his second Academy Award nomination (after Double Indemnity). He later worked with Hitchcock on Strangers on a Train (1951), which ended acrimoniously. His last completed novel, Playback, was a rewriting of an unproduced screenplay he’d written for Universal Studios and is the only Chandler novel that hasn’t been filmed. In 1955, alcoholic and suffering 179 of individuals against the “system” (represented by the All Pacific Trust insurance company), in Murder, My Sweet we have the conspiracy within the system directed at the individual (in this case, the PI Marlowe, who sticks his nose in where it doesn’t belong). This isn’t the stereotyped kind of “conspiracy” of corrupt politicians and cops aiding and abetting organised crime, as in The Glass Key, but something potentially more sinister and pervasive which, with the progress of the “Red Scare” and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, will give rise to the political conspiracy films of the 1950s, such as The Manchurian Candidate (driven in part by the Cold War propaganda machinery), and eventually, by the time of Nixon’s indictment, to the homegrown paranoia films of the 1970s in which the entire apparatus of government (and not some criminal or external political power) is exposed as conspiring against the American people (take Sidney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975), for example, or Alan Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976)).11 180 4. George Marshall’s production of Raymond Chandler’s sole original screenplay, The Blue Dahlia (1946), featured the third pairing of noir duo Veronica Lake & Alan Ladd, reprising their roles in This Gun for Hire (1942) and The Glass Key (1942). They appeared in a total of seven films together – in three of which they played themselves – and were considered one of Hollywood’s hottest box-office couples at the time. Their success story, however, had an inauspicious beginning when Ladd was cast as the babyfaced killer, Raven, in This Gun for Hire: Ladd was only 5 feet 5 inches tall & the only actress at that time contracted to Paramount who was shorter than him was Lake, whose breakthrough had come a year earlier – she was 4 feet 11½. Their last on-screen performance together was in depression, Chandler attempted suicide. He died in 1959. 11 Edward Dmytryk was himself called before HUAC in 1947, soon after making Crossfire, and became known as part of the “Hollywood Ten,” who were cited for contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions about their communist involvement and sentenced to prison terms. Dmytryk had briefly been a party member in 1945, and after spending several years exiled in the UK he finally agreed to testify (in 1951). Alan Ladd & Veronica Lake, promotional still for The Blue Dahlia (1946) Saigon, a film noir directed by Leslie Fenton in 1948. While Ladd’s career continued to flourish into the ’50s, Lake’s tanked: her last major film was Slattery’s Hurricane in 1949. Between then and 1970 she made only three more, brought down by alcoholism and mental instability. During the filming of The Blue Dahlia – the critical highpoint of Lake’s career – Chandler developed a strong dislike for the lead actress, who he referred to as “Moronica Lake.” (She for her part didn’t know who Chandler was and never read any of his novels, though she’d had herself briefed by a secretary before press interviews and conferences in order to appear in front of the media as being “well-read.”) Bosley Crowther, writing in the New York Times, loudly complained of The Blue Dahlia being one of an “expanding cycle of hard-boiled and cynical films,” though (revealing where the man’s critical faculties really lay) he described Lake as “dangerous and dynamic” and likened her to a “V bomb.” The review ended by saying that “George Marshall has tautly directed from Mr Chandler’s script. The tact of 181 182 all this may be severely questioned, but it does make a brisk, exiting show.”12 Despite all the hype around Lake, by the ’60s the actress was living in a $7-a-night hotel in Manhattan, paying her bills by working in the hotel bar. She died penniless in 1973, age 50. Ladd’s career waited until 1953 to tank. He made his last film in 1964, directed by Edward Dmytryk, playing an ex-Wild West gunslinger. He died the same year, from a chemical reaction of alcohol and downers. He, too, was only ’50. Cast alongside Ladd and Lake in The Blue Dahlia was noir stalwart William Bendix. Bendix’s career was the polar opposite of the film’s stars: his first work was working as a batboy for the New York Yankees, before setting up as a grocer until the Great Depression. His acting career began at the age of 30 thanks to the Federal Theatre Project, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, with his first film appearance in 1942.13 Many of his roles were of blue collar characters, contributing to a perceived working class dimension in many noirs that would later be cited by some critics as signalling the genre’s anti-capitalist inclinations and even communist sympathies. (Bendix himself was a Republican.) The Motion Picture Production Code – also known as the Hays Code – had been defining the film industry’s moral guidelines since 1930, and though it remained in effect until 1968 the Code was increasingly challenged throughout the 1950s, by TV and the growing import of foreign films (which weren’t regulated by the Code). While the Code made no distinction between types of audience or the moral responsibility of the general public, and consequently came in for increasing criticism and non-compliance, the advent of the Cold War nevertheless influenced its continued (selective) application, specifically to neutralise the anticapitalist critique inherent in many noir film. The Code proscribed profanity, nudity, heavy kissing, illegal traffic in drugs, sexual perversion, white slavery, miscegenation, sexual hygiene, childbirth, child nudity, ridicule of the clergy, or wilful offence to any nation, race or creed. It 12 Bosley Crowther, “The Screen in Review,” The New York Times, May 9, 1946. 13 The Glass Key, where Bendix played alongside Lake and Ladd for the first time, was his fifth screen appearance in that year. also regulated the depiction of crime and violence, as well as such things as adultery, which couldn’t be portrayed as either attractive or permissible: all criminal action had to be punished and offset by some “compensating moral value.” With the advent of HUAC and the Hollywood blacklists (beginning in 1947), the Code was implicitly evoked to counter the depiction of industry leaders, bankers and so on as “criminals.” Just as, until 1938, the Code had prevented the production of films with an explicit antiNazi focus. It has been argued that McCarthyism and the Hollywood Blacklists helped reify the sense of unease and increasing paranoia that informs the best film noir and which, in the seventies in particular, when the term film noir first began receiving broad currency in the US, underwrote a resurgence in the genre and the advent of what’s loosely referred to as neo-noir – funnelling the public sense of a pervasive “conspiracy against the people” in the period between the Kennedy assassination and Nixon’s impeachment. The first film to explicitly take on McCarthyism was Storm Centre in 1956, starring another noir screen “goddess,” Bette Davis. 5. The Big Sleep, published in 1939, was Raymond Chandler’s first novel. It was twice adapted for screen – the well-known Howard Hawks version in 1946 and a later version starring Robert Mitchum, Oliver Reed and Joan Collins, directed by Michael Winner in 1978 (which inexplicably shifted the setting from 1930s LA to contemporary London). The ’46 version is notable for the fact of the script having been written by William Faulkner and well-known screenwriters Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman. The writing uncovered some gaps in Chandler’s original plot. One such gap was the unresolved identity of who murdered the Sternwood’s chauffer (or if he killed himself): when Hawks asked Chandler, Chandler replied that he had no idea. Other plot aberrations developed during shooting due to the impact of the Hays Code on Chandler’s original storyline, making the novel’s convoluted plot even more difficult. For example: explicit references to Geiger’s trade in pornographic literature, as well as his homosexuality, had to be tempered; a scene in which 183 Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Becall in The Big Sleep (1946) 184 Carmen Sternwood turns up naked in Marlowe’s bed was replaced with one of her sitting in a chair in Marlowe’s apartment; likewise Carmen’s identity as Regan’s killer, which would have made Marlowe’s love interest (and Carmen’s sister) Vivian – played in definitive fashion by Lauren Becall – an accessory to murder. Reviewing Hawks’s film on its release, Crowther, in his regular New York Times spot, wrote: “The Big Sleep is one of those pictures in which so many cryptic things occur amid so much involved and devious plotting that the mind becomes utterly confused.”14 Time magazine described the film as a “crazy, mystifying, nightmare blur…” Hirsch suggests this is all par for the course: “Propelled by a series of criss-crosses, double-crosses, betrayals, deceptions, noir stories like The Big Sleep deliberately try to be knotted and sinuous.”15 Or possibly just a symptom of the shift, by writers like Chandler and Hammett, away from the neatly 14 Bosley Crowther, “The Screen in Review,” The New York Times, August 24, 1946. 15 Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, 75. resolved plotlines of Christie and Doyle towards characterdriven interpersonal drama – in addition to Chandler’s tendency to construct novels by cannibalising short stories published in magazines like Black Mask. Of Bogart’s performance in The Big Sleep, Chandler said: “Bogart can be tough without a gun. Also, he has a sense of humour that contains that grating undertone of contempt.” Hirsch describes him as having “the face of a man of enormous feeling kept in check… a man with churning insides beneath the still mask… Bogart is the archetypal noir loner. His posture is tensed, hunched; he rarely moves… His means of expression are limited, practically to the point of abstraction, yet he radiates complexity.”16 The suggestion here is that the true arena of action in film noir is a kind on non-action (not inaction, but rather the feint, the disguise, the ruse) where the real drama is played out verbally. Consequently everything can be said to hinge on language. Hirsch interestingly compares Bogart’s exchanges with Becall to the barbed language of Restoration drama, “their mutual verbal slicing is an index,” he suggests, “of sexual attraction,” though an attraction that is strangely ascetic and muscular, in contrast to the “blatant sexuality” of Martha Vickers’s narcotised Carmen.17 Violence, too, is mostly of the sublimated kind. Despite their immediate celebrity as an on-screen couple, Bogart and Becall, who married in 1945, went on to appear in only two more films together, Dark Passage (1947) and John Huston’s 1948 classic, Key Largo. The Big Sleep was shot only a few months after the release of To Have and Have Not (1944; also directed by Hawks), though it didn’t reach the screens until ’46 due to Warner’s efforts to clear its backlog of war films. It was perhaps most notable as a vehicle for the latter film’s two leads, Bogart and Becall. Becall at the time was 19-year’s old to Bogart’s 44. According to Hawks (who had also competed for Becall’s attention), “Bogie fell in love with the character she played, so she had to keep playing it for the rest of her life.” 16 17 Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, 150 Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, 34-5. 185 Ava Gardner & Burt Lancaster in The Killers (1946) 186 6. Of German Jewish origin, director Robert Siodmak emigrated to Hollywood in 1939 to escape Nazism. Of his 23 films – mostly psychological thrillers & crime dramas – several are considered noir classics, beginning with The Killers (1946; remade by Don Siegel in 196418), whose protagonist (“the Swede,” played by Burt Lancaster) is murdered at the start of the film in an act of self-directed fatalistic nihilism, with the events leading up to that point then replayed in multiple point-of-view flashback (and flashbacks within flashbacks) in the form of an insurance investigation. Siodmak’s other notable explorations of the noir genre include Cry of the City (1948), Criss-Cross (1949; also with Lancaster), and The File on Thelma Jordan (1949; starring Barbara Stanwyck). In 1952 he returned to Europe. 18 Notable for starring Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Angie Dickinson and Ronald Reagan in his last on-screen role (and only film appearance as a crook). The Killers is notable, among other things, for representing Lancaster’s screen debut, opposite Ava Gardner and Edmond O’Brien. The Killers was also Gardner’s breakthrough film. Gardner, who later became famous for her relationship with eccentric multimillionaire Howard Hughes and her marriage to Frank Sinatra, also became a close friend of Ernest Hemingway. In 1951 she starred opposite Bogart in The Barefooted Countess. For his part, Lancaster went on to receive an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1960 for Elmer Gantry, and starring in such films as From Here to Eternity (1953; opposite Deborah Kerr), The Unforgiven (1960; opposite Audrey Hepburn), and Frank Perry’s frequently underrated The Swimmer (1966). But it’s his performance in The Killers that is held up by Hirsch as representing the pinnacle of Lancaster’s achievement as an actor: “lying in wait in the shadows of his empty room anticipating the arrival of his executioners with a kind of exaltation, provides one of noir’s great moments.”19 His entire persona is diametrically opposed to that of Bogart, a weak man “seduced by clever, castrating women.” In certain respects, Lancaster is the ideal figure for noir’s post-War metamorphosis, with his “build of a gymnast,” as Hirsch says, “and with his flashy smile and open-faced handsomeness, he has the look of an all-American – a winner. But his noir characters have a powerful urge towards annihilation…” An emblem, in every respect, for the suicide of the American Dream that will so spectacularly unfold between the Eisenhower years and Watergate. The script for The Killers, though credited to Anthony Veiller, was actually the work of John Huston and Richard Brooks (unnamed for contract reasons) and was based (for the first 20 minutes) on a short story by Hemingway (who reportedly admired the result). The opening soundtrack of the film (by Miklós Rózsa) was later re-used for the popular 1951-1959 television series Dragnet and is matched in its intensity by Woody Bredell’s camera work and stark lighting effects, combining to produce an atmosphere of constrictive fatalism. The film earned Rózsa an Academy 19 Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, 164-165. 187 188 Award nomination for Best Music, along with nominations for Best Film Editing (for Arthur Hilton), Best Director (for Siodmak) and, ironically, Best Screenplay (for Anthony Veiller). Though not ambiguous in the vein of The Big Sleep, the structure of The Killers, with its internal convolutions-upon-convolutions, is arguably the film’s central protagonist. The investigators pursuit of the facts behind the Swede’s death (which is really a pursuit of motive) is also a kind of unmasking of cinema itself, as the story’s so-to-speak “objective correlative”: “Swede,” notes Hirsch, “is one of the most elusive of noir’s antiheroes, Kitty [i.e. Kitty Collins, played by Gardner] is one of the genre’s most masked spider women; and the film’s own devious structure, its conflicting points of view, its choppy handling of time, reinforce the enigmatic aura that enshrouds the two main characters.”20 Carl Macek, in a postscript to his entry on The Killers for Silver and Ward’s film noir encyclopaedia, suggests that it’s precisely these characteristics – so perplexing to many critics – that ostensibly preoccupy Siegel’s 1964 remake, as if the later film were really an attempt to finally neutralise the enigma posed by the original, in the way, perhaps, that much of “neo-noir” represents a kind of displaced symptomatology of noir’s own “primal event” (fetishised, mystified, uncomprehended). Siegel’s version dispenses with the trope of the insurance investigator and instead has the killers themselves dig up the Swede’s past, so as to answer the question that puzzles them as much as anyone: the Swede’s apparent indifference to his own death. In a certain sense, this indifference represents an obscenity, commensurate only with the obscenity embodied in the figure of Kitty Collins’s femme fatale – which Siegel’s remake likewise sets out to neutralise, transforming her into a straight-up hustler, a “form without substance,” as Macek says, “another fixture in a world of clichés.”21 20 Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen, 73. Carl Macek, “The Killers,” Film Noir: An Encyclopaedic Reference to the American Style, 154. 21 Robert Mitchum & Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947) 7. James M. Cain’s novel, Build my Gallows High (1946; published under the pseudonym Geoffrey Holmes) was adapted twice for the screen. There was Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 take, with Cain performing uncredited scriptwork – considered by Roger Ebert as one of the greatest of all film noirs – and Taylor Hackford’s 1984 remake, Against All Odds, starring Rachel Ward, Jeff Bridges and James Woods (whose most notable feature seems to have been its soundtrack). There’s a reason, however, for taking at least a cursory look at Against all Odds here, because of the way the film seems to intuit the synergies between Tourner’s classic and Robert Siodmak’s The Killers from 1946. Against all Odds is a kind of synthesis, where Burt Lancaster’s “Swede,” a washed-up heavyweight-turnedcrook meets Robert Mitchum’s private detective on the lam, hiding out in a small town in California, working at a gas station under an assumed identity, trying to build a new life, when the past suddenly reaches into the present and pulls him back. The fatalism in both The Killers and Out of the Past has a suicidal momentum: in The Killers it sets 189 the narrative in train; in Out of the Past it represents the narrative’s ever narrowing line – the road to nowhere. Out of the Past represents the first pairing of Mitchum and Jane Greer (they played alongside each other again, in very different roles, in Don Siegel’s The Big Steal two years later). Mitchum’s acting in Out of the Past is exemplary of the so-called “subjective point of view” of classic noir, something which is emphasised by both the camera work and the plot development. As Lee Horsley writes: We are brought close to the mind of a protagonist whose position vis-à-vis other characters is not fixed. Treacherous confusions of his role and the movement of the protagonist from one role to another constitute key structural elements in noir narrative. The victim might, for example, become the aggressor; the hunter might turn into the hunted or vice versa; the investigator might double as either the victim or the perpetrator. Whereas the traditional mystery story, with its stable triangle of detective, victim and murderer, is reasonably certain to have the detective as the protagonist, noir is a deliberate violation of this convention.22 This brings to mind Žižek’s remarks about the distinction between noir and more traditional crime and detective fiction: 190 It is... totally misleading to locate the difference between the classical and the hard-boiled detective as one of ‘intellectual’ versus “physical” activity... The real break consists in the fact that, existentially, the classical detective is not ‘engaged’ at all... The hard-boiled detective is, on the contrary, ‘involved’ from the very beginning, caught up in the circuit: this involvement defines his very subjective position... The deceitful game of which he has become a part poses a threat to his very identity as a subject. In short, the dialectic of deception in the hard-boiled novel is the dialectic of an active hero caught in a nightmarish game whose real stakes escape him.23 22 Lee Horsley, “Out of the Past, Crime Culture (2002): www.crimeculture.com/Contents/Film%20Noir.html 23 Slavoj Žižek, “Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire,” Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA: October, 1991) 60-63. Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey is precisely this kind of figure, fully caught up in a drama whose machinations escape him: he moves from the role of sardonic private eye, suave seducer, opportunist, fugitive, accessory to murder, stranger in a small-town, and so on. There are echoes of Greek tragedy, with even some of its claims to pathos. But unlike Greek tragedy, this subjective trajectory isn’t mediated by the gods but by the fallible will of the individual, whose unravelling is – as per the genre’s conventions – centred upon the figure of the femme fatale. Greer’s interpretation of this role is subtle and likewise multifaceted. Unlike Stanwyck’s Phyllis Deitrichson, who never appears as anything but calculating, Greer’s Kathie Moffat is more like a mirror in which Jeff Bailey’s desire is reflected back at him, so that a facet of himself becomes visible and assumes a form of agency which previously had been unconscious; while Moffat herself remains entirely an enigma – a type of fata morgana, whose role is to draw men towards their unsuspected fate (and thereby, we might say, to show them who and what they “really are”). Žižek has this to say: What is really menacing about the femme fatale is not that she is fatal for men but that she presents a case of a ‘pure,’ nonpathological subject fully assuming her own fate. When the woman reaches this point, there are only two attitudes left to the man: either he ‘cedes his desire,’ rejects her and regains his imaginary, narcissistic identity (Sam Spade at the end of The Maltese Falcon), or he identifies with the woman as symptom and meets his fate as a suicidal gesture (the act of Robert Mitchum in what is perhaps the crucial film noir, Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past).24 The suicidal gesture at the end of Out of the Past might otherwise be described as the assumption, not of Kathie Moffat’s “fate,” but of Fate itself. One can either turn one’s back on the mirror, or enter more deeply into it: the threat of the mirror is that its image appears to us as autonomous, and that it is we who enact its desires; who desire (helplessly) to be one with it. 24 Žižek, “Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire,” 66. 191 Lizabeth Scott & Humphrey Bogart in Dead Reckoning (1947) 192 8. Dead Reckoning, directed by John Cromwell (1947), represents Bogart’s first screen appearance opposite Lizabeth Scott, who plays the role of the film’s deceptive frail, Coral Chandler. Scott, who also starred in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) and Too Late For Tears (1949), was described in her obituary in The Telegraph (March, 2015) as “the most beautiful face of film noir during the 1940s and 1950s.” This same face was described in Crowther’s New York Times review of Dead Reckoning as “expressionless,” to match Scott’s “awkward and deliberate” movements.25 Crowther may’ve had a point. Seeking to manufacture an element of frison where there wasn’t any, the public relations department at Paramount called her “The Threat”: “She’s the Threat to the Body, the Voice, and the Look” (referring to Marie McDonald, a contemporary model known as “the Body Beautiful”; Frank Sinatra, “the Voice”; and Lauren Becall, “the Look”). 25 Bosley Crowther, “The Screen in Review,” The New York Times, January 23, 1947. But while Scott’s “husky” register became part of her trademark act, she had a wooden ear and couldn’t sing for love or money: the tortuous floorshow scene in Dead Reckoning was not only dubbed but ripped-off wholesale from Becall’s casino act in The Big Sleep (even her beret in the film is a Becall rip-off). By the mid-’40s, though, Scott was a major Hollywood star, achieving top billing ahead of Barbara Stanwyck in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Intriguingly Columbia, who produced Dead Reckoning, originally intended Rita Hayworth for the female lead. Hayworth was busy with Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai and so, after Becall also rejected the script, Scott landed the role opposite Bogart by default. Her appearance in the film, however, cemented her close association with noir and contributed to her effectively being typecast in similar roles for the remainder of her career (as well as aiding in the “typecasting” of the femme fatale role itself). She was later considered to have embodied the ultimate femme fatale in the 1948 film Too Late for Tears, a film described by Ronald Schwartz in Houses of Noir as “relatively ‘unknown and unseen’” and deserving of greater recognition “especially for its storyline, acting and the incredible performance of Lizabeth Scott in the femme fatale role.”26 Her part as Jane Palmer, who murders her present husband (after having also murdered a previous one) “to move out of the ranks of the middle-class poor,” is almost the inverse of Coral Chandler’s entrapped, fatalistic seductress and the apotheosis of the post-War suburban middle class (male) nightmare of the “independent woman.” For his part, Bogart’s performance in Dead Reckoning was widely praised in reviews of the period as the film’s major recommendation (Macek describes Bogart’s rendition of Rip Murdock as creating “a genuine noir hero… a man who is at once the hunted and the hunter.”27 The novelty 26 Ronald Schwartz, Houses of Noir: Dark Visions from Thirteen Film Studios (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013) 138. Originally Scott was also slated by play opposite Robert Mitchum in The Big Steel (1949) but collapsed and went into hysterics on the third day of shooting and was replaced by Jane Greer. 27 Carl Macek, “Dead Reckoning,” Film Noir: An Encyclopaedic Reference to the American Style, 86. 193 194 is that, whereas in The Glass Key Ladd’s character is a demobbed officer in Civvy Street who’s gone on the run in order to clear himself of his wife’s murder, Bogart’s “Rip” Murdoch is a serving US Army Captain and recipient of a Distinguished Service Cross, who’s gone AWOL to unravel a murder conspiracy implicating his best friend (Drake, who himself is murdered) in the death of Lizabeth Scott’s husband (she shot him herself, of course): he represents the triumph of law and order, the just state, and the benevolence of the emergent military-industrial complex. A predictable complaint by critics had to do with the film’s overly complex plotline – hinging on a set-piece romance between Bogart and Scott, with its set-piece ending that performs something of a counterpoint to the Mitchum-Greer deathtrap at the end of Out of the Past (Scott shoots Bogart as they drive away into the night: they crash – Bogart survives but Scott, immaculate in white under a vaseline-soaked lens, dies in hospital). But whereas the structural complexity of films like Out of the Past are symptomatic of a broader social malaise, the complexity of Dead Reckoning stems from the disguise worn (to borrow Althusser’s expression) by the ideological state apparatus itself, personified in the figure of “Rip,” through whom this malaise is, if not cured, at least sublimated. Anticipating the Hollywood propaganda films produced throughout the Korean War, Dead Reckoning signals the accomplished exproporiation of the noir genre to the work of nomalisation as ideological entertainment – and insofar as this mark’s a certain return of noir to its cultural and historical origins, it is here that it assumes its properly classical form. *Presented as a series of lectures, “Film & Critical Culture,” Philosophy Faculty, Charles University, Prague, February – May 2015. THE TIME OF RESURRECTION GODARD & THE AESTHETIC UNCONSCIOUS – Art doesn’t reproduce the visible. It makes visible. – But the aesthetic effect is imaginary. – Yes, but the imaginary doesn’t reflect reality. It’s the reality of the reflection. – Jean-Luc Godard, La Chinoise (1967) 1. In his 1926 manifesto, “Cinema Militans,” Dutch filmmaker Menno ter Braak posed the question: What is “the position and viability of cinema in modern society”?1 By “viability,” he meant as a medium for expressing a condition – a social condition, a subjective condition, a, historical condition – not simply as a medium for mass indoctrination or entertainment (which amount to the same thing). But beyond expressing a condition, what is the viability of cinema as a critical medium? 1 Menno ter Braak, “Cinema Militans,” The Cinema Militans Lectures 1989-1991 (Utrecht: Dutch Film Days Foundation, 1992) 10. 195 196 The filmmaker who has most insistently pursued these questions over the last sixty years, is Jean-Luc Godard. In 1968, at the height of his period of political engagement, Godard stated: “There are two types of militant films, those we call ‘blackboard films’ and those known as Internationale films. The latter are the equivalent of chanting L’internationale during a demonstration, while the others prove certain theories that allow one to apply to reality what has been seen on screen” (La gai savoir). This dichotomy harks back to a debate about cinema that emerged after the Bolshevik Revolution, and whose two central protagonists were Eisenstein (on the side of narrative) and Vertov (on the side of the medium itself); both made radical contributions to film form, in particular the use of montage (in the case of Eisenstein) and superposition (in the case of Vertov). Additionally, Vertov’s cinéma vérité approach to filming had ramifications for the “depiction” of everyday life, as opposed to conventional “realism” in which the imposition of narrative continuity etc. is exposed as constituting an ideological “normalisation.” In a reductive sense, the debate between Eisenstein & Vertov could be boiled down to a commitment to either form or to revolutionary content. When Lenin announced cinema to be “the most important art form,” the doctrine of Socialist Realism soon transfigured it into a propagandistic medium, dogmatic in tone and didactic in intent. Formalism, which would henceforth be the domain of the avant-garde, was ostensibly suppressed as bourgeois decadence and, consequently, it’s arguable that “militant” formalism thereafter serves a double critique: both of the social, subjective and historical conditions of which Braak spoke, but also of the ideological condition of cinema itself. It is for this reason that even in the most overtly hectoringly “political” films by directors like Godard and Guy Debord there is a marked ambivalence towards a doctrinaire “socialist realism.” Part of the dilemma that arises here has to do with the question of the status of the cinematic “medium.” In Lenin’s view, cinema was a tool, an instrument at the service of the revolution, just as it was for the Goebbels and countless other architects of both soft and hard totalitarianism (among which we need to include the major Western “democracies”). The identification of cinema at the service of the revolution with a popular cinema therefore gives rise to a number of dilemmas. While “popular” may easily be opposed to “avant-garde,” in the sense that the latter is often difficult and inaccessible to easy understanding (hence “elitist”), the separation of “popular” in the revolutionary sense from “popular” in the commercial sense is not so clear. As the Portuguese filmmaker Glauber Rocha said in 1971: “Revolutionary art must be magic capable of bewitching man to such a degree that he can no longer stand to live in this absurd reality. Overcoming this reality, Borges wrote some of the most liberating irrealities of our times.”2 Such an emancipatory potential, however, is fraught with disillusionment, since precisely the same acts of “seduction” can be, and have been on an industrial scale, employed in the business precisely of social normalisation and economic enslavement: from Rocha’s “absurd reality” to Jean Baudrillard’s “desert of the real.” This is one reason why, in his more recent films, Godard has made controversial comparisons between the Hollywood “dream factory” and the concentration camps, and between Hollywood and the Nazi Occupation – suggesting that the former represents a type of “holocaust”: the destruction of cinema, as such, and its supplanting by a simulacral automaton. But not only the destruction of cinema, along with its critical potential, but also what Baudrillard goes so far as to call the murder of the real. Godard explicitly relates the systematic global domination of Hollywood to the Soviet mass propaganda machine, Mosfilm, whose purpose – far from expressing or performing a critique of “real conditions of existence” – was to keep the “spectator” at bay in a state of passive contemplation (as Brecht says, “hanging up their brains with their hats in the cloakroom”3), separated from life itself. For Debord, this “spectacularism” represented the highest form of social and individual alienation. 2 Glauber Rocha, “Aesthetic of Dream,” presented as a lecture at Columbia University, New York (1971): www.tempoglauber.com.br/english/ t_esteticasonho.html 3 Bertolt Brecht, “A Dialogue about Acting,” Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill & Wang, 1964) 27. 197 198 In the work of both Godard and Debord, the “popularism” of Hollywood is a product of no less than a systematic colonisation of the collective unconscious. In a sense, the entire project of Debord’s criticism of the “society of the spectacle” stems from the recognition that first cinema, then television, were the major instruments of the postwar Marshall Plan, whose avowed intention was the infrastructural rebuilding of a materially devastated Europe, but whose consequences were (also) an infrasctructural re-acculturation: and that culture was American culture. It’s perhaps for this reason that the militant cinema of this time in Western Europe (particularly France) shares certain characteristics with socalled “Third World” militancy (in Algeria, Palestine & elsewhere), in its focus both as anticolonialist and (in varying respects) anti-totalitarian. And as post-war American entered its own phase of social, economic and ideological normalisation, so too did it heighten existing tensions around race and gender inequality, civil liberties, and so on, producing a generation of militants and filmmakers in reaction to America’s internal “colonisations” and to the totalitarianism operating behind its veneer of democracy – a reaction that largely began in the 1950s but only became visible after the assassination of JFK, America’s entry into the Vietnam War and Watergate. One of the ramifications of US post-war hegemony and the Cold War generally was a theoretical reorientation of the idea of “political” cinema. As Louis Althusser and the theorists associated with Tel Quel argued, all films must be considered “political” because they are always already overdetermined as expressions of prevailing ideologies. This also placed a certain responsibility upon “militant” cinema to be, above all, critical – its responsibility, in the eyes of Godard, was to intervene, interrupt, or otherwise sabotage the “imaginary” economy of the Hollywood model (a “system of appearances produced by a system of appearances,” as Debord says). Godard’s chosen means was montage, which far from simply being an avant-garde frivolity, was regarded by him as a direct means of sabotage against the dominant US “military entertainment complex” in a similar vein to Situationist détournement. As Godard (in what amounts to a ventriloquism of Debord) has argued, “The dominant class creates a world after its own image, but it also creates an image of its world, which it calls a ‘reflection of reality.’”4 In the wake of Structuralism and the development by Christian Metz and others of a “semiology of cinema,” montage – with its radical breaks in narrative continuity – could be regarded not simply as a stylistic device, but as a means of interrupting the very ideological relations of the signifying system, by breaking the apparent unity of the “image” and its socalled referent (the nominally “real”). In addition, montage could be regarded as critical by virtue of the way in which the resulting “interval” provided a space in which to deconstruct the implicit alienation-effect of the “spectacle” – which is to say, its operations of disempowerment upon the “spectator”: firstly by making these operations visible, and secondly by exposing their ideological armature. For Debord, the critical potential of montage represented a mode of consciousness. “Militant cinema” would no longer be an art of perception, but a critical way of thinking. 1. Between 1952 and 1978, Debord produced six films in total, including In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978) and Hurlements en faveur de Sade (1952: a film comprised of an alternating white and black screen, and including a 24-minute silence, but manages to include a “Memorandum for a history of the cinema” which charts an outline from Méliès’s 1902 Voyage dans la lune, via Robert Wiene’s 1920 film, Das Cabinet des Doctor Caligari, René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924), Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1926), Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou (1928) and Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), to Debord’s own film, self-described as “the anti-concept” (cinema history’s endpoint), announcing “there’s no more cinema, cinema’s dead” – a mantra later taken up in earnest by Godard, though its first major proponent was in fact Marcel Duchamp, with his 1926 film Anémic Cinéma.5 4 Qtd in Stoffel Debuysere, “Notes on Militant Cinema (1967-1977),” Diagonal Thoughts (March 2014). 5 “Anémic” being an anagram of “cinéma” points to Duchmap’s implicit (as well as explicit) refusal of “retinal art” and the bloodless “simulation- 199 200 Considering that the entirety of Debord’s film output takes place after his announcement of the “death of cinema,” it is necessary to inquire into the meaning of this “anti-concept” which is nevertheless also a “film,” if in a highly attenuated and unconventional sense. Where for Godard the continuation of filmmaking after the “death of cinema” is an act of indictment and critique of that “death” and the industry that produced and systematised it, for Debord (less modest and unironic even than Godard about his own revolutionary mythology) it is a direct provocation, a kick in the teeth of public taste, a shot fired randomly in the street (and not, we are made to notice, in a boardroom).6 In girum imus nocte begins, ism” of the commercial film industry under its post-WW1 domination by Hollywood. Cf. P. Adams Stanley, Visionary Film: The American AvantGarde 1943-2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 [1974]) 372. 6 As Godard himself came to realise, the politique des auteurs was only the first step in seizing the means of production, not abolishing them: the auteur not as director, but as producer. I will make no concessions to the public in this film… In the frozen mirror of the screen the spectators are not looking at anything that might suggest the respectable citizens of a democracy… This particular public, which has been so totally deprived of freedom and which has tolerated every sort of abuse, deserves less than any other to be treated gently. In pursuing a kind of “shock treatment” against a public that has become complicit in its own subjection to the “spectacle,” Debord makes no distinctions between “propaganda, entertainment, and pseudocritique.” Several of Debord’s published statements are specifically directed at Godard in this respect. In “The Practice of Theory: Cinema and Revolution” (1969), Debord describes Godard’s “political” films from 1968, specifically La gai savoir, as “belatedly plagiarised” (from Hurlements) and as being part of “a long series of pretentious false innovations.”7 Referring to a short film entitled L’amour, Debord attacks Godard for using one of his characters to decry the impossibility of “portray[ing] revolution” because “cinema is the art of illusion.” “The cinema,” Debore insists, “has no more been an ‘art of illusion’ than all the rest of art, which was dead in its entirety long before Godard, who has not even been a modern artist, i.e., someone capable of even the slightest personal originality.” Debord’s polemic rests on the view that Godard is in fact nothing more than “the spectacular manufacturer of a pseudocritique of recuperated art,” one which becomes increasingly rooted in a nostalgia for cinema, characterised by an austere (or possibly moribund) classicism. Debord’s response was to produce La Société du spectacle (1973), his fourth “film,” based largely upon the book of the same name, which had been published in 1967 and became hugely influential in radical leftist and avant-garde circles in the wake of the student protests of May ’68. Debord’s soundtrack for the film, drawing heavily on the earlier text, famously opens with a détournement of Das Kapital: 7 Guy Debord, “The Practice of Theory: Cinema and Revolution,” trans. Tom McDonagh, Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonagh (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002) 187. 201 In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomised images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving. The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation. The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social r elation between people that is mediated by images. Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the goal of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. 202 The film itself is comprised largely of found footage and montage, in which the structure of the “image” plays an integral role in articulating Debord’s critique of spectacularism. The system of alienation or what Debord calls separation and unification (from social immersion in the virtual, to virtuality as social relation: “reality erupts within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real”8) is here desublimated by means of radical juxtaposition and discontinuity, and “critiqued” by means of détournement (whereby the ideological message encoded in the image is internally displaced, perverted and turned back upon itself): thus “spectacle is tautological, for the simple reason that its means and its ends are identical.”9 Debord’s strategy, 8 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (New York: Zone Books, 1995) §8. 9 Debord, Society of the Spectacle, §13. Jean-Luc Godard, Weekend (1967) which becomes Godard’s, is not, ultimately, to reveal hidden truths but to expose the ideological organisation of consciousness itself: to exploit the economy of the “spectacle” (as Marx exploited that of the commodity) in order to envisage its undoing.10 2. Commenting on the objecthood of the image in Godard’s eight-part Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98), Jacques Rancière has written: “In the new aesthetic regime of linkage between visibility and signification, not only has every hierarchy been overthrown so that vulgar objects assume as much importance as the actions and feelings of the characters, but, even more so now, it seems that those best qualified to convey intense feelings are those inanimate objects which feel nothing.”11 Among Rancière’s specific points of 10 In certain respects, Debord’s approach parallel’s that of Marshall McLuhan, whose mantra “the medium is the message” finds an exact articulation here in Debord’s “anti-concept,” in which the “end of cinema” is also the possibility of the deconstruction of the “spectacle.” 11 Jacques Rancière, “Godard, Hitchcock and the Cinematographic Image,” For Ever Godard, eds. Michael Temple, James Williams and Michael Witt (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004) 217-220 – translation modified. 203 reference is a seemingly innocuous “scene” in chapter 4A of Histoire(s): La Contrôle de l’univers (part II: “Introduction à la méthode d’Alfred Hitchcock,” with echoes of Kojève’s 1930s lectures on Hegel) comprising a shot of a glass of milk that Godard had taken from Hitchcock’s Suspicion and (echoes of Plumtree’s Potted Meat in Ulysses)12 “which he then reinserted between the torn wings of the mill in Foreign Correspondent.”13 The accompanying soundtrack, a recording of Hitchcock in which the director discusses his approach to montage, is simultaneously overdubbed by Godard’s own reflections (with echoes of Proust and Bergson) on the significance of Hitchcock’s “method” and is one in a long series of rebukes to Truffaut’s “Let’s imitate Hitchcock” stance of the early ’60s: 204 We have forgotten why Joan Fontaine leans over the edge of a cliff and why Joel McCrea went to Holland. We have forgotten what Montgomery Clift swore to be eternally silent about and why Janet Leigh stops at the Bates Motel and why Teresa Wright is still in love with Uncle Charlie. We forgot what Henry Fonda is not completely guilty of and exactly why the American government hired Ingrid Bergman. But we remember a handbag. But we remember a bus in the desert. But we remember a glass of milk, the blades of a windmill, a hairbrush. But we remember a row of bottles, a pair of glasses, a music score, a clutch of keys. Because through them, and with them, Alfred Hitchcock succeeded where Alexander, Julius Caesar, Hitler, Napoleon failed: he took control of the universe. Echoes, also, of Walter Benjamin’s incomplete thesis on the “dialectical image,” which arguably occupies a central if largely clandestine space in Godard’s private philosophy.14 The “dialectical image” is an enlargement upon Eisenstein’s 12 Joyce playing games with mimēsis: “Manufactured by George Plumtree, 23 Merchants’ quay, Dublin, put up in 4 oz pots, and inserted by Councillor Joseph P. Ninetti, M.P., Rotunda Ward, 19 Hardwicke street, under the obituary notices and anniversaries of diceases.” Ulysses, chapter 17, page 560 of the Gabler edition (1986). 13 Rancière, “Godard, Hitchcock and the Cinematographic Image,” 216. 14 Godard cites Benjamin in a number of films from the 1990s, including Hélas pour moi (1993) and Allemagne année 90 neuf zero (1991), but not concerning the “dialectical image.” development of montage whose genealogy, via Hitchcock, leads directly to Godard’s later conception of the shot/ reverse-shot (which, like his radical interpretation of montage via Debord, has nothing to do with simply arranging pictures in pseudo-dramatic remation, but of putting “two angles,” as Godard says, in tension15). The “dialectical image” isn’t a representation, but a point of accession to an historical dimension, evoking (even in its seeming evanescence, its triviality, its insignificance) all the potency of an archetype. “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present,” Benjamin writes, or what is present its light on the past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. – Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language.16 Godard’s longstanding insistence upon a cinematic materiality is entirely consonant with Benjamin’s assent to “language” here, in its broadest remit – “Les signes parmi nous” (the signs among us),17 as Godard says elsewhere in Histoire(s), quoting Ramuz (and alluding to Bazin’s “ontology of the photographic image”).18 Rancière’s meditation on the status of this object-image or cinemato-graph,19 meanwhile, carries with it – vis-à-vis the détournement and revenance15 “…à côté de…” Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour, Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2005) 16 – translation modified. 16 Walter Benjamin, “Awakening” [N2a,3], The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard: Belknap Press, 1999 – emphasis added) 17 Qtd in Godard, Histoire(s), 4B. 18 André Bazin, “Ontologie de L’Image Photographique,” Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? vol 1: Ontologie et langage (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1958). 19 Rancière’s use of the term “cinematographic image” is opaque, whereas for Godard – who appropriates the use of the term “cinematograph” from Cocteau and Robert Bresson to designate cinema as such – the relationship between the “moving image” and what Derrida calls the “graphic trait,” or at other times simply writing or language, is explicit across almost the entire body of his work. 205 effect of Hitchcock’s “glass of milk, the blades of a windmill” and in addition to all the rest – vaguely Sartrean overtones, evocative of Roquentin’s crisis of recognition when confronted with (1) the lugubrious “base materiality” (to borrow from Bataille) of that most infamous of pebbleson-the-beach (La Nausée), and (2) the materiality of the gaze itself as circumscribed consciousness (L’Être et le néant) – a crisis which is less a “laying bare of the device,” as in Russian Formalist analysis, than a Brechtian refusal of “psychological” interpretation. “Mute objects,” Rancière argues, convey feelings better than expressive faces. But they do it for opposing reasons. First, because they speak better. Signification is better embodied in their reality than in expressive faces, voices and attitudes. They don’t think, they feel nothing, and they are unable to lie. Meanings are written directly on their body. This means that they fulfil the representative function – the matching of demonstration and signification – better than any discourse and gesture… Second, they don’t speak at all; they mean nothing. They are not signs, only things. As a consequence they add to their function as reliable clues a contrary function, that of suspending any kind of decision, action or interpretation.20 206 Rancière’s somewhat cryptic elision of this “thing” – that “better conveys, better speaks, better signifies” and yet which is not a sign – calls to mind what Charles Tesson has called “une machine à montrer l’invisible”21 (evoked or at least implied here by Rancière, as if consisting of a form of neutral techne). That is to say, this primordial “thing,” by virtue of its inertia, expresses more than expression itself; signifies more than signification. Which means, of course, that it is nothing more than a screen onto which a kind of desire is projected: the authenticity of the thing that adheres, in unmediated fashion, to its own “revealed image” – which is to say, the other. And this other is therefore nothing other than consciousness itself in a reified 20 Rancière, “Godard, Hitchcock and the Cinematographic Image,” 220. Charles Tesson, “Une machine à montrer l’invisible,” Cahiers du cinéma 529 (1998): 52-7. 21 Alfred Hitchcock, Suspicion (1941) form: the subject as cinematograph.22 The authenticity of the thing communicates the authenticity of a subjective experience, instates a kind of aura which, in a different time and in another language, is named “pathetic fallacy.” This thing which doesn’t speak and which in a certain sense is invisible, makes visible: it assumes the form, as it were, of a secret agency, transmuting the invisible into an image. This “invisible” element, however, requires nothing of the sort of humanist mysticism that appears at this moment in Rancière’s argument to animate such mute elements: elements most articulate by virtue of their muteness. Encoded “directly upon their bodies” is not some occulted or hidden idea that the spell of perception animates into life. These “things,” in any case, are merely rhetorical, they are figures, tropes, allegorical of a “seeing of seeing,” given in place of what is conventionally understood as perception. 22 Cf. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridon (New York: Norton, 1977). 207 208 For Godard the “object” in montage is never simply an object, not an object-in-advance, but rather (echoes of Duchamp, Debord) a détournement assuming the form of an object. The “dialectics” of montage does not arise from the antithetical relation of things that speak (like Cordelia) out of nothing, but the contrary: the socalled “object” becomes perceptible (comes, in a manner of speaking, into being) by way of montage. That is to say, by way of an “antithetical” reflexivity; of a “juxtaposition of angles.” We begin not with the thing, but “‘Nothing.’ No thing.” In Godard, the trajectory is therefore always away from the desire to show (montrer) and towards the assumption of an “image” by way of montage. And while much of Godard’s work throughout Histoire(s) and up to the more recent Film Socialisme (2010) attempts something along the lines of an historical materialism of the image by way of radical montage, it’s arguably in his experiments with 3D – Les trois désastres (2013) and Adieu au langage (2014) – that a certain impossibility of seeing is most precisely articulated, by way of the socalled “separation shot”: a divergent yet continuous (left-eye/right-eye) shot which – as the radical complement to the superpositions of Histoire(s) – evokes the vertigo of an impossible simultaneity. Separation/superposition: the ambivalence of this reconciled-irreconcilable illustrates better than anything else Godard’s thesis on montage as a juxtaposition of angles and (what might otherwise seem mere allegory) a certain necessity to not see in order to see.23 And, by virtue of this play of simultaneities, we are also presented with a type of paradigm: that when we speak of the assumption of an image we also mean the invention of the thing; that montage does not simply put us in a position of a point-ofview, but rather the contrary, that the possibility of seeing puts us in a position of montage.24 Godard’s pursuit of a cinematographic consciousness is also, as in Benjamin, an evocation of history – not merely the history of cinema, or cinema as history, but the 23 The “singular plurality,” as Nancy says, of the image resides in the irreducibility of this generative abnegation. 24 The assumption of consciousness, i.e. a reflexivity. Jean-Luc Godard, Adieu au langage (2014) cinematographic character of historical consciousness as such. In Adieu au langage, Godard speaks of “the difficulty of fitting flatness into depth.” The illusionistic seduction is always a stepping-away from materiality, from what Clement Greenberg termed “the resistance of medium,” which here Godard seeks to reinstate as an act of criticism – which is also to say (in this case literally), an action of crisis: the eye in crisis must (re)invent for itself a depthlessly contingent mode of seeing and we are returned, for a moment, to the revolutionary potential made apparent (as Debord had pointed out to him) in the work of Méliès and Vertov. As in the famous line from St Paul, cited by Godard in King Lear (1987): “the image will appear in the time of resurrection.” But there’s nothing new, of course, in this relation of criticism and seeing, of return and resurrection. Indeed, a whole metaphorics of consciousness, comprehension, knowing, truth and scepticism, has always been linked – at least since Aristotle – to the paradigm of the visible and the agency of seeing, of reflexivity and re-presentation.25 In the very first sentence of the Metaphysics we find: “All human beings have an inherent striving to see. A sign of this is the 25 Such paradeigmata – as both contiguity and subjacency (fr. Gk. paradeiknumi; “showing side-by-side”) – represent possibilities both consequent upon the structure of montage and conditional upon the technics of the image in general. 209 210 predilection we have for looking, for sense perception.”26 What is perhaps new is the relation of the visual posture to judgement and the unthought, not on epistemological grounds (seeing in order to know), but according to what (to credit Bazin27) we might call an ontology of the aesthetic unconscious. For Rancière, whose starting point is quasi-Aristotelian, the image-object is thus situated between “two forms of suspension: one founded in representation and a properly aesthetic one.” But this distinction between aesthēsis and representation is one that becomes increasingly fragile as Rancière’s critique proceeds. Nevertheless, by evoking this “suspension” of mimēsis, irrespective of its form, Rancière opens a path to considering Godard’s technique (arguably derived from Debord) in terms of what Merleau-Ponty, in his last work, calls chiasm or entwining, since these two forms of suspension are defined as: 1. “the suspension of pathos by action,” which for Rancière still belongs to the logic of representation; 2. “the suspension of action by pathos,” which belongs to the logic of aesthetics. Here the one engenders the other in a tropic and asymmetrical movement. Moreover, this engenderment – by way of a “meaning written directly on the body” and of a body that, unspeaking, “speaks” – implies the absence of any intermezzo. There is no middle-point (no before-after). At the same time, however, there is no causal coincidence that is not already a recursion, a forethrow, a metonymy and a détournement (one that discloses the “theoretical” status of the image-object firstly as a “signifiance in juxtaposition,” and secondly as a prosthesis of what we might call the aesthetic interval of its own immanence).28 26 Aristotle, Metaphysics, I.1.980a1f. Who despite his repudiation of montage, pointed the way to the radical materiality Godard recognised within it: not the latent objecthood of the image, but its immanence. 28 As Derrida writes, concerning the “epistemological” status of citation: “Once inserted into another network, the ‘same’ philosopheme is no longer the same, and besides it never had an identity external to its functioning.” In this sense, the image-object, before disclosing any thing, discloses the rhythmos or trait of a general perturbation – thus, in a sense, soliciting perception, no longer as “aesthetic judgement,” tending towards sublime stasis, but as a crucial ambivalence in the formal status of the perceptory event: the “perceptible,” vested in its very détournement, is what 27 But if the image-object communicates a problem or crisis for Rancière this is primarily because it situates, not so much a “partage du sensible,” but a recursive thingness of the gaze itself, in which a subject is inscribed (a pseudoagency in fact) which has nothing to do with the pathos of expression (of what better conveys, better speaks, better signifies) but is instead a form of primordial tropism: a reflection-effect, chiasmus, a folding-back, a turning (the interval that montage opens in the seamless edifice of an affective mimēsis). It is a tropism, moreover, that operates by virtue of a certain duration – which is to say, of a temporal iteration,29 in which a “consciousness” is, as it were, fixated (the interval of montage as critical vantage).30 Et cetera. Perception here remains “dialogical,” defined by a moment or series of moments of an incisive possibility which (by this perturbation of the representational scene, of the unity of the sign and of mimetic ideology) opens the way to a “critical consciousness” that is also therefore a “theoretical” object.31 makes the image as such possible. See Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” Diacritics 11 (June 1981) 3. 29 Echoes of Sartre’s “ontology of temporality.” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes [New York: Washington Square Press, 1992 (1943)] 187ff.) 30 As Merleau-Ponty writes: “The visible about us seems to rest in itself. It is as though our vision were formed in the heart of the visible, or as though there were between it and us an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand. And yet it is not possible that we blend into it nor that it passes into us, for then vision would vanish at the moment of formation, by disappearance of the seer or of the visible.” (Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 131-2.) 31 But this line of thought involves numerous subsequent difficulties, as Derrida has pointed out in his reading of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy, above all in consideration of the status of what continues to be referred to as an “alter-ego.” This is the moment, as Derrida describes it, of the attempted transformation of “indirect appresentation into direct presentation… which would re-appropriate the alterity of the alter-ego within ‘my Ego’s’ own properness” (Derrida, On Touching, 92). Here we encounter a certain perplexity in the system of thought in which the other, as alter-ego, is nevertheless related to an experiential mode of encountering, and what has elsewhere too often and too easily been described as an inter-subjectivity. It is a perplexity which, in a certain Hegelian, Marxian or FreudianLacanian tradition, has always been implicitly linked to the metaphor of consciousness and to the trope of dialectics. Indeed, its foundation lies in the “antithetical” character of metaphor itself – which is to say, of terms formally opposed in either a symmetrical or asymmetrical equivalence. Nevertheless, the structural supersessions of metaphor – in the form not 211 It is thus the tropism which describes the locus of a reflexivity and which properly deserves the designation of what Rancière, in a reprisal of Freud and Benjamin, calls “the aesthetic unconscious” (since this “Freudian thing” is in fact an agent [of perception], and not the contrary). Rancière’s image-object must consequently be treated not as a “thing-as-such” but as a type of (alter)ego which – in its persistence, its insistence upon our regard – assumes an “image,” and does so in “two opposed yet interconnected ways,” both of which are broadly speaking analytical in the Freudian sense of “condensation” (Verdichtung) and “displacement” (Verschiebung)32: First, it is an agent of condensation. It condenses in one single figure a set of representational relations of causes and effects… Second, it is the agent of dispersion. It sets in motion a secondary logic that both sustains and contradicts 212 of a dialectical synthesis but of a metonymic forethrow (a quasi “extensibility” of tenor and vehicle that is at once recursive and reflexive) – implies a logic of what Lacan comes to term a “missed encounter with the real,” and it is this logic that underwrites everything Lacan subsequently has to say elsewhere about the structure of perception, agency, and the phenomenon of consciousness, and which (anticipated or not) also underwrites Derrida’s own project beginning with the critique of Husserlian phenomenology (see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan [London: The Hogarth Press, 1977] 54). The intimacy and “greatest difference” of metaphor (in what we might call its primordial, Aristotelian definition, within which metonymy and synecdoche are also subsumed) are hence inscribed together in a generalised equivalence across contiguity which is not the same as an “original contemporaneity” between subjects or between the subject and itself, as it were, or between the ego and its alter-egos. As Derrida notes, such a contemporaneity would constitute itself in the same way as what Merleau-Ponty (echoing Freud) calls the “primordial thing” or the “absolute presence of origins” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964] 174; 175). Precisely this type of reduction, however, remains – insofar as it is only affected metaphorically – a tropic one: the “false” coincidence, implied already in Derrida’s critique of Plato, of the image as exact copy and the guise of coincidence – each somehow determining the other’s relationship to it – in the form, for example, of a rhythmic counterpart or antistrophos. Which is also to say, of a “syntax” of recursion, of chiasmus (or, in the language of cinema, of a shot/reverse-shot). Cf. Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session,” Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) 173ff. 32 Cf. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, chapter 1 (E): “The Distinguishing Psychological Characteristics of Dreams,” vol. IV of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (London: Vintage / The Hogarth Press, 2001 [1960]). the first. According to this secondary logic, the passage from one shot to another redistributes the representational relations to another surface, a surface of disconnection.33 If for Rancière an “image” is considered “in effect, a combination of two image-functions” – actualisation or differentiation – for Godard it is a question not of combination but of complementarity; or rather, the immanence of the image to the function of agency and what Jean-Luc Nancy later calls “the sublime union of thought and unthought (the nonrepresented).” But this heterogeneity “is not the object of some knowledge,”34 it instead acquires the ambivalent status of a consciousness (what Derrida terms the “prosthetic supplement that will mark the greatest difference”35), much as in the “flash” of Benjamin’s constellation effect, or Pierre Reverdy’s “reconciliation of two realities that are more or less far apart” (which Godard quotes in both Passion [1982] and King Lear) – and it is on the basis of this complementarity (the doublemimeticality of Hitchcock’s “glass of milk,” e.g.)36 that the “image as such” is not only possible – according to the “indefinite character” of its signifying relations – but that it affects a détournement of the purely retinal schema (of representation) in its movement from the narratological to the heterotechnical form of the cinematic “body.” That is to say, of a certain corporeality which is also in the mode 33 Rancière, “Godard, Hitchcock and the Cinematographic Image,” 221 – emphasis added. 34 Jean-Luc Nancy, Le Discours de la syncope: I. Logodaedalus (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1976) 146. 35 Jacques Derrida, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005 [2000]) 96. In speaking of the heterogeneous relation of thought to the “idea” of the unthought, the question arises – one among many – concerning the logic of an assumption that requires the “essence of thought” to be nothing thinkable. This is not simply a question of what distinguishes the unthought from a merely empirical limit established upon the basis of what can be known or thought under prevailing (technological, epistemological) circumstances – i.e. as a measure of a necessary ignorance that is nevertheless finite and transcendable – but of the relationship of thinking to representability, and of the unthought to a certain “imaginary” status within the representational schema. 36 In fact, the glass of milk is already a citation in advance, as it were, reappearing in Hitchcock’s own later film, Notorious (1946) – also starring Cary Grant. 213 214 of a cognition – objectless as such, imaginary, tropic rather – as the détournement which situates perception in the very apparatus of the “film,” in the rhythmic punctuation and revenance of what is already, in fact, a phenomenon of consciousness37 (“cogito ergo video,” as Godard says in Histoire(s) 1B: Une Histoire seul). Insofar as it is fundamentally problematic then, Rancière’s image-object assumes – in a manner that is not always readily disclosed – what Deleuze terms “a falsified image of the problem itself.”38 This raises a number of questions concerning the status of perception as what Merleau-Ponty calls a “system of configurations”39 and its relation to technology as something other than “systems of formalisation.”40 According to Rancière, Godard’s pursuit of a cinema conscious-of-itself (as a system of citations) draws attention, in the first place, to the stylised “iconic” (or stereotypical) character of the image-object, not in relation to a pure cinematic presence, but in relation to the logic of representability itself (as interrupted immanence or erased transcendence, vis-à-vis Benjamin41), as soon as it enters into an articulated composition. We move, for example, from Hitchcock’s “materialising of mental representations calculated to maximise the affects linked to the causal plot” to Godard’s “aesthetic dream: the dream of ‘free’ presence stripped of the links of discourse, narration, resemblance; stripped, indeed, of any relation to anything else except the pure sensory power that calls it to presence.”42 37 See Jacques Lacan, “A Materialist Definition of the Phenomenon of Consciousness,” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, trans. S. Tomaselli (London: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 43. 38 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001 [1968]) 207. 39 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology” [1945], Sense and Nonsense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia A. Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) 48. 40 Cf. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 41 See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1995) 217-252. 42 Rancière, “Godard, Hitchcock and the Cinematographic Image,” 221-4 – emphasis added. Jean-Luc Godard, Ciné-tracts (1968) This phenomenality of an aesthetic unconscious – “called to presence” by the undisclosed agency of the medium itself, of cinema – falters in its non-relation to “causal plot,” on the one hand, and “discourse, narrative, resemblance,” on the other, at precisely that juncture where we are required to account for the (indiscernibility of the) mechanics of recursion that here allows Rancière to speak of the “object” as a type of free agent or of such a “free” presence in the first place. Godard’s example is, to the contrary, ultimately an objectlessness: montage articulates, is the reflexive condition (not medium) of the “image.” There is no context that is not therefore an effect of montage. There is no gaze that is not the “reflection effect” of montage. There is no antecedent “point of view.” No “free” presence, in other words, not already bound to what Derrida (echoing Blake) calls “limits framing a corpus or what properly belongs to a system,” wherein the “very prospect of such a delineation itself already belongs to a set of conditions that remain to 215 be thought.”43 While this unthought partiality of the present comes, for Rancière, to characterise something between a methodological rationalism and a cinematic paradigm, it is precisely the critique of such a paradigmatic rationalism that Godard pursues most obsessively: via the technics of découpage and, increasingly, the shot/reverse-shot.44 216 3. An entire “system of configurations” inscribes itself at the limits of the perceptible and of the possible – between what Aristotle calls sense-perception and the thing perceived (yet which necessitates no object); a system which mimes the spectral, uncanny revenance of a cognition that is both already and not yet a recognition: thereby assuming an image of consciousness? Or a (self)conscious image? A cinematograph? What would “perception” therefore mean, if not in fact a missed encounter with itself in the form of an illusionary proposition: to perceive or not to perceive?45 To perceive by relinquishing perception, by the illusion of relinquishing. As if, to act upon perception by other means. Etc. As if, to touch upon the real without touching, “in the first place,” the untouchable. And hence, by declension, the invisible, the unrepresentable, the unthinkable? In this (seeming) paradoxical system – in the very anticipation of its object, of some thing, from which “perception” (at the moment it cedes to consciousness; to what Debord and all of the Frankfurt School before him regarded as “critical” consciousness) cuts itself off even as it seeks to lay hold of it (this thing) – what is transacted, if not the error itself of a seeing presented with its own limits? If it is true that “we never cease living in the world of perception, but we go beyond it in critical thought – almost to the point of forgetting the contribution of perception to our idea of truth,”46 is it then necessary to think of perception as something which acts upon its 43 Derrida, “Economimesis,” 3. Découpage (literally “cutting up”) is the breaking-down into scenes or shots and their juxtaposition. See Jean-Luc Godard [Hans Lucas], “Défense et Illustration du Découpage Classique,” Cahiers du Cinéma 15 (September 1952): 28-32. 45 Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text,” 3. 46 Cf. Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” 48. 44 own abnegation, as it were, by supplying criticism with its object? And if “critical thought has broken with the naïve evidence of things,” must a logic of verification necessarily reveal its own unawareness of its “contact with the perceived world,” which is thus “simply there before us, beneath the level of the verified true or false,” like an unconscious?47 “To perceive,” Merleau-Ponty once said, “is to render oneself present to something through the body. All the while the thing keeps its place within the horizon of the world, and the structurisation consists in putting each detail in the perceptual horizons which belong to it. But such formulas are just so many enigmas unless we relate them to the concrete developments which they summarise.”48 For these reasons, the logic of the image-object in Rancière’s formulation is no doubt too economical, too elliptical, and hence (to borrow Derrida’s argument) “like any other formula so isolated and capable of being transmitted out of context, too close to the coded language of a password.” It is a logic that is used to “aggressively circumscribe a domain of discourse” and to “transform what one complacently calls a context.”49 And to this end, Rancière’s preoccupation with the image-object (as synecdoche of the citational event) and its assumption of context belies the cinematic reality that everything outside the frame is also an image, and that whatever is taken to stand in the place of a referent 47 For if perception acts or is acted upon, what can be the meaning of its representation – as something for thought, for consciousness, or for any system of belief or even intuition which, by its very definition, must be closed-off from it? That is to say, cut of from so-called “direct” perception of the things themselves, and for which we might say perception in turn accedes to the status of an object or even of a thing: the embodiment, at least, of some sort of primordial intention. Indeed, it is to suppose, on the part of a meaning of perception, that something like an action will already have taken place, in advance of thought; anticipating it and situating it; simulating it rather, so that it would not be a matter of speaking of the re-presentability of perception to thought, but of the pre-presentation of thought in perception. An action or rather event, therefore – however ambivalent, transitory, indeterminate – in which this very system is in fact vested. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, “An Unpublished Text,” 3. 48 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception,” trans. James M. Edie, The Primacy of Perception, 42 – emphasis added. 49 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 82. 217 218 (“hors-texte”) is already enframed, is already circumscribed according to the recursive structure.50 A certain logic of montage (two shots in sequence are not in succession) stands in place of any assumed “causal” relationship: “shot” and “frame” being terms that operate recursively, metonymically, as agent of a signifying event. In its ideal form, according to Godard, the “sequential” shot is the beginning of both an analysis and a conversation (this “extraordinary exchange of looks, a simple reverse shot” implied in the very structure of the image).51 The entailed “objectifications” of this chiasm are always in a sense discursive – as they are, for instance, in Lacan’s “dialectic of identification” – pointing towards a conception of the critical look or constitutive gaze which is no longer oppositional, in the sense of a subject-object, but trans/actional, vested in what we might call the inter- of subjectivity. In this way, the repetition of images gestures towards an image of repetition – which is also a reflection of how so-called subjectivity is “objectively” constituted. Perception in Godard is always linked to the repetitional basis (the possibility of repetition, resurrection, différance, détournement) of film language, as in Bazin’s “trace du réel,” but exemplified with increasing frequency in Godard’s later films by instances of citation – which is henceforth placed at the centre of his politico-aesthetic understanding of the “image.” This becomes most insistently the case with Godard’s repeated references to the falsification of cinema by virtue of its failure to show Auschwitz after WW2 – as opposed to what (in a sardonic détournement of Adorno) is seen as the impossibility of cinema after Auschwitz (not for any metaphysical or ethical reasons, but because Hollywood’s “occupation” of cinema after the war amounts, for Godard, to a reconstitution of the camps 50 One that does not oppose what Deleuze terms the time-image to the movement-image, but interpolates the one into and with the other according to a metonymic spatio-temporalisation – such that, to paraphrase Foucault, cinema has the power to arrest the temporal within a recess of time, in the space proper to it. (Michel Foucault, “Le langage a l’infiniti,” Tel Quel 15 [1963]: 44.) 51 Jean-Luc Godard, “Montage, Mon Beau Souci,” Jean-Luc Godard, ed. Toby Mussman (New York: Dutton, 1968) 49. Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98) by other means).52 As Gilles Deleuze has written, apropos of Godard and the Nouvelle Vague generally: “Making-false becomes the sign of a new realism, in opposition to the making-true of the old.”53 Making-false equally implies the falsifiability of the primordial, as the horizon of possibility of the image and of its ultimate veracity; of the always supplemental “beyond” of the possible. Under the power of the false, and contrary to Deleuze’s insistence, all images do not thereby become clichés, rather they serve to situate the stereotype of primordiality (of the thing-as-such) as originary repetition, receding beyond the limits of parody or contempt – which is to say, of the representable.54 “The more you appear false like that,” says one of the characters in Jean Eustach’s La Maman et la Putain (cited 52 Jean-Luc Godard, “To the New York Film Critics Circle,” Film Comment (March/April, 1995). 53 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone, 1986 [1983]) 213. 54 As Derrida has elsewhere remarked, the supplement, as the addition of the possible to the stereotype of primordiality, “is added to the essential attribute” of what it is added to, “and from which almost nothing distinguishes it.” Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) 90. 219 220 by Deleuze), “the further you go, the fake is the beyond.”55 Or as Godard says, in defiance of Hollywood’s complacent “humanism” and the type of “pathetic fallacy” purveyed by Spielberg’s dream factory: “errare cinematographicum est.”56 Perception, within the logic of verifiability, thus points towards a set of operations “beyond the possible.”57 The fact of perception, in confrontation with the presentation of its assumed object, will always have invested thought with an impossibility which is simultaneously its ownmost horizon of possibility.58 Perception, therefore – as the anaesthetic movement of consciousness in the assumption of what is called an image (and in the drama which critical reflection causes in its invention, or rather reinvention: consider Godard’s character in King Lear who, plugged into an editing console, re-invents the “image” after its having been lost in a worldwide apocalypse; its “re-invention” immediately leads to its nullification, through the inevitable re-emergence of Hollywood) – renders possible a way of apprehending what will somehow nevertheless always escape it. The imperceptibility of thought (of reason) itself is thus attributed something like a signifying function which in turn frames this “missed encounter with the real” according to the “real” dimension of the image – even if it is nothing more than a “real” haunted by the phantom of reason and the law (of the so-called laws of reason) impossibly poised between a purely symbolic apparatus and its imaginary representation. In distinction to the status of the imageobject in Rancière’s analysis, which assumes the character of something like a symptom, an insistence, the citational event in Godard cannot be understood as an exception within the system of transmission and circulation of signs, but rather as providing the very condition of any critical/ aesthetico-political processes which – whether in the “myth” of Hitchcock or in the documentary “reality” of 55 Deleuze, Cinema 1, 214. Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, trans. and ed. Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo, 1972) 166. 57 Cf. Derrida, On Touching, 66. 58 The “experience of the impossible,” as Derrida says in “For the Love of Lacan,” Journal of European Philosophy 2 (1995-1996). 56 “Shot/reverse-shot”: Jean-Luc Godard, Notre Musique (2005) Palestine (in Notre Musique [2005], for example) – confront us with a certain disappearance of seeing, precisely in the form of their re-appearance. In a lecture on “The Text and the Image” delivered to students in Sarajevo during the European Literature Encounters (which was also attended by Juan Goytisolo and Mahmoud Darwish), and which is interpolated into Notre Musique, Godard impresses upon his audience the sublimated, recursive and citational character of “seeing” in tandem with the ideological character of “History.” His (“decontextualised”) examples are characteristically provocative: one being a photograph of the ruins of Richmond, Virginia, from the American Civil War (Godard’s audience mistakenly, ritualistically almost, contribute a litany of place names – Stalingrad, Hamburg, etc. – embedded in the collective narrative of mass-mechanised destruction); another being a “shot/reverse-shot” showing: (1) the arrival of Jewish settlers in Palestine, and (2) the exodus of the Palestinians from Israel after 1948 (“truth with two faces”). Similarly, in the 1968 film Vent d’est (produced by Godard in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin, under the collective name of the Dziga Vertov Group), a key sequence illustrates this discrepant-complementary function which yokes repetition to the already known in the disclosure of (the idea of) the unknown or the unthought (and the provocation to critical consciousness). The sequence in question operates by way of a series of détournements, in which the members of the film’s crew are seen “lying around discussing whether an image of Stalin should be 221 222 used in the film,” while a voice on the soundtrack states that “just as mass meetings must be analysed in terms of their specific circumstances – who are they for and who are they against – images must be analysed in a similar fashion. The image of Stalin is used by capitalists to represent repression but from a revolutionary point of view it is a repressive image insofar as it prevents a proper analysis of Stalin as a political phenomenon.”59 On a certain level, Godard’s treatment of the image remains faithful to Bazin’s dictum that the cinema is the art of the real, that the technology of cinema provides “a new set of aesthetic possibilities,” and that the film image offers “a new aesthetic dispensation,” as Colin MacCabe puts it60 – while nevertheless, contrary to Bazin’s antimontage theories, vesting the reality of the image directly in the technics of decoupage (the real is cinema). This technologically mediated dispensation rests, for Godard, in the “criticality” of the image – its apparatus, its agency – so that when we speak of montage or the reflexivity of the shot/ reverse-shot in Godard’s films, we are not simply speaking about a dialectics or mirroring, but of a complementarity: a complementarity that only ever appears in the contradictory (or contradictorily coherent) devolutions of “superposition” and “separation” – a crossing and crossing-out of an assumed frame of reference or epistemo-political position, so that (in Merleau-Ponty’s words) “a film is not a sum total of images but a temporal gestalt” in which “modes of thought correspond [in some sense at least] to technical methods.”61 Taken in this way, montage represents a crucial discrepancy within Rancière’s (as well as Bazin’s) ontoepistemological framework. As Derrida says, although in another context: “It doesn’t represent anything that one doesn’t already know, if by that one simply refers to the repetition of a subject in its complement…”62 It’s in this way 59 Colin MacCabe, Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (London: Bloomsbury, 2003) 225. 60 MacCabe, Godard, 243. Cf. André Bazin, “De la politique des auteurs,” Cahiers du cinéma 70 (April 1957): 2-11. 61 Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” 54; 59. 62 Derrida, The Gift of Death, 82. Jean-Luc Godard, Les Trois Desastres (2014) also that the relation between the political and aesthetic is disclosed in Godard’s films, as the circumscription of the unthought as the horizon of possibility of the “image itself” – or what, in Vent d’est, Notre Musique, Histoire(s) and elsewhere, is no longer represented within montage, but rather is situated along its chiasmatic fold: between, so to say, “the impossibility of the possible” and the “possibility of the impossible.”63 223 63 Godard, Notre Musique. MODERNITÉ CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUE * MAKAVEJEV & THE POETICS OF REVOLUTION Rediscovering poetry may become indistinguishable from reinventing revolution… – Situationist International 224 Gorilla Bathes at Noon is the title of a 1993 film by Yugoslav director, Dušan Makavejev, which was conceived four years earlier as a ficto-documentary about the Berlin Wall but was overtaken by historical events. By the time Makavejev was able to begin production in 1991, Gorilla Bathes at Noon had been transformed (in light of Re-unification and in the shadow, so to speak, of the Yugoslav civil war) into a film about a Russian army major, Victor Borisovich (the fictional child of two characters from the Soviet propaganda epic The Fall of Berlin [1949]) who is “deserted” by his unit and left behind in Berlin after the Wall is torn down. The film came two decades after Makavejev’s chief statements about revolution, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), which resulted in his exile from Tito’s Yugoslavia, and Sweet Movie (1974), a film whose provocations resonate today. Each exploits elements of the grotesque to critique both state socialism and the Western free market from what might be described as an ambivalently Marxist position, one not calculated to endear the director to either side. A series of films subsequently made in exile, including The CocaCola Kid (1985) shot in Australia, proceeded to blur the line between imitation, simulation and parody by addressing a critique of monolithic capitalism from within the culturalmythological narrative of commercial cinema. Makavejev’s last full-length production, Hole in the Soul (1994), is a pseudo-biographical documentary examining the post-Cold War transition from ideological divide to commoditised universal and the end of a certain possibility of militant cinema – a transition accompanied by a turn towards a mode of critique driven by a largely retrospective force that hasn’t learnt to reinvent itself. That’s to say, driven by something like a revolutionary nostalgia constantly obliged to grapple with its own fictionality. This crisis of fictionality is the major focal-point of Gorilla Baths at Noon, coupled to Fukuyama’s claim that the end of the Cold War exposed what he calls the end of history. “What we may be witnessing,” Fukuyama wrote in 1989, “is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”1 History and ideology are here transferred from the domain of the real to that of the fantastic – which they’ve always inhabited in any case. But this fantastic element remains troubling for Fukuyama liberal view of the political perfectibility of man and the notion of ideological evolution; a term which, in its proper sense, implies contingency and disjunction, rather then the hegemonic rationale implied by Fukuyama. In Makavejev’s film, the persistence of the Soviet presence after the fall of the Berlin Wall describes a type of historical revenance. An uncanniness to mirror the ideological pseudo-reality of the Cold War propaganda machines which came before it. Whatever naïve belief there might once have been in a critical breakthrough from 1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992) xi. 225 226 the inauthentic character of Cold War virtual-real to some more authentic world of liberated individuality is exposed as simply one more in a seemingly endless chain of rhetorical gestures, like Coca-Cola’s “real thing.” German reunification itself becomes a trope for a newly homogenised pseudoreal – its pseudo character made explicit by the material traces of what it seeks to sublimate or over-code. In this way, the anachronism of the Russian officer’s uniform worn by Makavejev’s protagonist doubles the anachronism represented by the giant statue of Lenin in East Berlin, in what’s now United Nations Square, whose demolition is the dramatic centre-piece of Makavejev’s film. But the anachronism of Lenin’s statue isn’t itself an objective reality but merely the product of changed hegemonic structures at play. A phallus in whose decapitation a psychosexual drama of power is to be played-out; has already been played out. It’s worth keeping in mind, too, that during the shooting of Gorilla Bathes at Noon, large demonstrations were staged both for and against the statue’s demolition. “Hands off History!” the banners proclaimed. It’s of course obvious that the “post-ideological” spectacle of the new German government, enacted in the statue’s demolition, masked a parallel ideological normalisation which has recently come to complete itself in the rehabilitation of this very same monument for exhibition purposes (the repatriation of the Marxist revolution as historical artefact), at the same time as we’re witnessing the demolition of sections of the preserved Berlin Wall, reinvented as a symbol of resistance (I refer to the recent attempts to bulldoze the East Side Gallery, with its iconic mural depicting Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker kissing), to serve the interests not of individual liberty but of the real-estate lobby. We need not look far to see how such a rehabilitation has come to effect criticism itself – a recurrent theme in Makavejev’s work, but nowhere more explicit than in his final works, centred as they are upon the lost force of revolt, dissidence, aesthetic militancy, and the realisation that (as Debord argued already in 1959) “cinema, too, has to be destroyed,” just as the old symbols of revolution must be destroyed. Destroyed and no longer bespoke; no conservation of the exhausted avant-garde forms, like some prudential heritage trust. To evoke a rather old dialectical gesture, what’s here nominally called revolution must be destroyed in order to be reinvented. But this reinvention itself is under contest and also must be reinvented. We’re of course familiar with this as a problem of poetics. Of the socalled poetic-turn. And we’re also familiar, particularly from the work of Godard and Makavejev, that 227 228 what we have so far been calling cinema is synonymous with a certain idea of poetry. This certainly was the view of the radical Dutch film-maker, Menno ter Braak, who in his 1926 “Cinema Militans” manifesto defined cinema as “an eccentric form of poetry: the poetry of the eternal mistake.”2 This anachronism of the “eternal mistake” points us also to a specific understanding of what “destruction” means in the classical tropes of reinvention. In his own “Cinema Militans” lecture of 1989, given before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of that year, Makavejev argues for the need “to dissociate subversion from destruction” as it’s conventionally understood.3 Subversion isn’t understood as a lesser undertaking. Rather, subversion is the trope of an ongoing reinvention, hinged upon the “eternal mistake” that refuses correction. Between Debord and Makavejev, the classic relation of destruction to reinvention is, in a sense, itself subverted, since in the first instance “destruction” is always visited upon aesthetic forms by those forces of normalisation that seek to expropriate and exploit them: subversion is the destruction of this destruction. This isn’t intended as a rhetorical nicety. The revolutionary character of this undertaking is very real. For Makavejev it represents the sole basis for a future of cinema. And this future, we shall see, is very much vested in cinema’s subversive relationship to a certain rationality of its time. It’s this subversion that Alain Badiou, reflecting on Godard, terms “la seconde modernité cinématographique.”4 Like Godard, we’re expected to understand cinematography here as not strictly film, but as a conception of writing, of the graphic trace. Lumière’s cinematograph, Godard reminds us, was a machine for writing with images – a notion echoed in Alexandre Astruc’s well-known phrase camérastylo, the camera-pen. And it’s no accident that Godard, Makavejev and others, proceeding back to Eisenstein’s close engagement with the “physiological palpability”5 2 Menno ter Braak, “Cinema Militans,” The Cinema Militans Lectures 1989-1991 (Utrecht: Dutch Film Days Foundation, 1992) 10. 3 Dušan Makavejev, “You Never Know Who Carries a Frog in His Pocket,” The Cinema Militans Lectures 1989-1991, 58. 4 Alain Badiou, Cinéma (Rais: Nova, 2010) 101. 5 Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, trans. Jay Leda (New York: Meridian, 1949) 6. of James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, should perceive cinema’s modernity as partaking directly in the modernist revolution of the word. Poetic in structure, writerly in form, cinema is upheld here as a universal trope of reinvention, against the generic institutionalisation of a culture industry. Indeed, it was Eisenstein’s contention that cinema encompassed the holistic sense of possibility innate to the arts in general – a possibility caused only to diminish within the institutional framework of official cultures, defining the arts in separation from one another. It was for this reason he rejected the idea of Joyce as a writer of literature and considered him rather as a maker of cinema. And just as Pound insisted upon the vitality of the epic form in an age of diminished possibilities – the epic being, in Pound’s conception, a “poem with history in it” – so too Godard, in a post-Cold War age of likewise perceived diminished possibilities, regards cinema as a “museum of the real” and as “the century’s metaphor.”6 History – the discourse of the real – manifests here not in terms of a realism, but as anachronism, the “eternal error” that situates a cinematic poiēsis always en retard while also being in advance of itself. So that, as Makavejev argues, “the filmic is what, in the film, cannot be represented. The filmic begins only where… metalanguage ceases.”7 Makavejev’s “filmic” and Badiou’s “modernité cinématographique” point in two distinct, though mutually implied, directions. The latter, with its explicit invocation to a modernity, harks back to the modernist revolution of the word as a revolt against “language gone stiff and dead” – what Gertrude Stein called “associative language, used from unthinking habit.”8 Like Joyce, Stein’s poetic announced a refusal to “subordinate all elements to a compositional centre.” Instead patterning “sensation into composition with each letter, syllable and word, each space and line.”9 Likewise, Badiou’s modernité cinématographique is in some 6 Jean-Luc Godard & Youssef Ishaghpour, Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2005) 87. Makavejev, “You Never Know Who Carries a Frog in His Pocket,” 58. 8 Qtd in Ulla E. Dydo, “Introduction,” A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla E. Dydo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993) 2. 9 Dydo, “Introduction,” A Stein Reader, 2. 7 229 230 fundamental sense vested in the poetics of the word, or rather the graphic mark, no longer purely a signifier but rather an image, constitutive of its own reality. And this brings us to Makavejev’s “filmic,” in part an echo of André Bazin’s famous thesis about the ontology of the photographic image. Which is to say, in a cinema that isn’t merely an established set of conventions, it’s the operations of the image, the poetics of the image, and not some external depicted reality that constitutes its meaning. No metalanguage. Presentability is thus in a manner of speaking subverted, but from within, as a condition of the filmic, not as a subordinate state of affairs brought about by the filmic. This would be another sense in which subversion is dissociated from destruction, for Makavejev, since it’s not a question of the filmic destroying presentability, but rather of its exposure of the fictional status of presentability. Just as in Stein and Joyce, the revolution of the word isn’t a destruction of language, but the subversion of a mimetic ideology that conceals its own fictionality and promotes itself as the sole conduit of the real. It’s rather language effecting a material reality, or we might say non-fictionality, for which the mimetic register constitutes a pervasive fantasy – what Debord calls spectacle. In a relatively obscure document, published anonymously in the January 1963 issue (#8) of the Internationale Situationniste,10 entitled “All the King’s Men,” Debord sets out a thesis for the revolutionary potential of poetry. This thesis echoes the Situationist position on cinema, while the two terms – poetry and cinema – may be considered in Debord’s writing as more or less synonymous. Just as Godard regards cinema as something into which “everything can be put,” Debord’s neo-poetism regards poetry as “nothing other than liberated language, language recovering its richness, language which breaks its rigid significations and simultaneously embraces words, music, cries, gestures, painting, mathematics, facts, acts. Poetry,” he argues, “thus depends on the greatest wealth of possibilities in living and changing life…”11 Moreover, 10 11 An issue co-edited by Debord, Alexander Trocchi, Raoul Vaneigem et al. “All the King’s Men,” Situationist International Anthology trans. Ken “poetry must be understood as immediate communication within reality and as real alteration of this reality.” Karel Teige’s 1924 Poetist Manifesto makes the similar assertion that poetism “is, above all, a way of life.”12 Positioned against “tendentious ideological verse with its ‘contents and plot,’” poetism declares itself “not literature.”13 Teige’s poetics is closely identified with “the new cinematography,” as a multifaceted engagement with the full range of contemporary “invention,” from traffic lights to avionics and radio. Like Debord, Teige’s open conception of the poetic is born of a scepticism of aesthetic institutions and a culture industry concerned not with invention but rather the normalisation of cultural commodities. It’s no accident that “All the King’s Men” – one of the very few documents explicitly concerning “poetry” with which Debord’s name is associated – begins with a critique of the relationship between language and institutional authority. “The problem of language,” Debord writes, “is at the heart of all struggles between the forces striving to abolish present alienation and those striving to maintain it.” The revolutionary potential of poetry, for both Teige and Debord, lies precisely in its relation to invention, drawn in part from the ancient meaning of the term poiēsis, to make, to bring into being. For Debord, invention has the additional implication of insubordination. To understand the revolutionary potential of poetry is, on the one hand, to recognise that “words coexist with power” while, at the same time, understanding “the phenomenon of the insubordination of words, their desertion, their open resistance, which is manifest in all modern writing, as a symptom of the general revolutionary crisis of society.” We see in Debord that it’s the condition of language which articulates reality, and not its “contents or plot.” A reality that’s subversive of an informational ideology; a reality at odds with the prevailing power –a power which, as Debord says, forces words “in a manner of speaking… to carry Nabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981) 115. 12 Karel Teige, “Poetism,” trans. Alexandra Büchler, Karel Teige / 19001951: L’enfant terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999) 70. 13 Teige, “Poetism,” 68. 231 232 a pass, determines their place in the production process (where some of them conspicuously work overtime) and gives them their paycheque.” Exceeding these forms of control, poetry “denounces all unilateral ‘communication,’ whether in the old form of art or in the modern form of informationalism,” becoming “more and more… the antimatter of consumer society.”14 Like Fukuyama’s end of history, though not in the sense Fukuyama intended it, power in this equation represents a no future. It’s the closure of invention; the systematic commoditisation of all modes of communication. “Power,” says Debord, “lives off stolen goods. It creates nothing.” And yet it’s this relation to power that gives poetry its critical impetus; an impetus stemming from that ancient quarrel of philosophy and poetry famously evoked by Plato in the Republic, in which the stakes of this confrontation, between poetry and power (the polis), are made immense. The fate of politics, as Badiou notes, is linked by Plato to the fate of poetry – and from this singular gesture of exclusion stems also a certain irrationality in the history of reason, the system of knowledge, and the discourse of power. This well-known sleight of hand by which Plato founds his ideal polis resonates still in our own time. It encompasses on the one hand the institutionalising of art and the domestication of poetry within officially tolerated culture, by which its subversive potential is negated and, on the other hand, the ongoing “falsification of what exists,” as Debord says, by “information.” What stands out in Debord’s argument is that it’s firstly necessary to rediscover poetry in the sphere of “everyday life” separate from what he calls “the inverted remains of the history of poetry, transformed into… poetic monument.” “Rediscovering poetry,” he writes, may in fact become “inseparable from rediscovering revolution”15 since revolution, too, has become domesticated, reduced to a type of monumentalism – like the Berlin Lenin monument in Makavejev’s film. Such are the fetish objects of what Debord calls “the retarded reactionaries of some neoversification.” Debord and Makavejev both call instead for a mode of 14 15 “All the King’s Men,” 114; 115. “All the King’s Men,” 117; 115. Viktor (Svetozar Cvetkovic) & Lenin (Anita Mancic), in Makavejev’s Gorilla Bathes at Noon perversion (as one might say, perversification). In Gorilla Bathes at Noon, a staging of this perverse is given in a scene between the Russian officer Viktor Borisovic and his mistress, who appears to him in a dream as a transgendered Lenin, with beard and leather cap – a Freudian, phantasmagoric doubling of the Lenin monument, exposing the erotic mass fantasy by which the ideological “falsification of what exists” is mediated. This Lenin, in whom the phallic trope of power is slyly perverted, even knits Viktor Borisovic a sock. Later Borisovic will be encouraged to perform a little psychic surgery to remove the bullet lodged in Lenin’s brain; the cause of a terrible migraine – the migraine of history, we might say – that’s only relieved when the monumental head of the statue in United Nations Square is hoisted away by a de-construction crew. Elsewhere in Gorilla Bathes at Noon, a similar criticalperversion is directed at the mythologizing of Stalin, through use of found footage from the propaganda film, The Fall of Berlin, interspliced in “vivid Sovcolor”16 – a film which in turn was based on Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. Makavejev practices a type of Situationist détournement by 16 San Francisco Film Festival 1993, catalogue. 233 234 overdubbing a key scene of The Fall of Berlin with parts of the sound track from Riefenstahl’s film, in which parading SA and SS call out their places of origin as they pass: in the Soviet version it’s the units of the Red Army who do so, parading past the captured Reichstag. In Montage the defeated Germans surrender their standards, which are heaped up in a pile: and it’s at this point Makavejev dubs in Riefenstahl’s text, forecasting the eventual “defeat” and collapse of the Soviet Union in its turn. The mirroring of The Fall of Berlin and the fall of the Berlin Wall – and likewise Soviet state socialism and the fascist aestheticisation of power – produces a potent critique, which Makavejev elsewhere develops in Sweet Movie and W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism. Like Debord, Makavejev’s treatment is occasioned by a certain tropology, or détournement – here, the critical appropriation and transformation of the ideological image and the exposure of its phantasmagoric character. Makavejev doesn’t attempt this simply as an ironic gesture to poke fun at socialism or travesty the pseudo-real of the Cold War era. There are of course risks involved, easily disavowed if we don’t wish to recognise them, capable of either reinforcing or threatening the fabricated reality in which power consists. It’s an adventure which Debord describes as “difficult, dangerous and never guaranteed… almost impossible.”17 And what it defines is nothing less than a revolutionary poetics. In “All the King’s Men” a distinction is established between the “history of poetry” and the “poetry of history” – the former signalling a “running away” from the latter, which is elided with “the history of everyday life and its possible liberation; the history of each individual life and its liberation” versus “spectacular history.” Thus “poetry,” for Debord, “means nothing less than simultaneously and inseparably creating events and their language.”18 This distinction treads a fine line, one which hesitates on the verge of its own fictionality as the depiction of a stateof-affairs, even a state in flux. For just as in the films of Godard and Makavejev, it’s not the mode of representation 17 18 “All the King’s Men,” 115. “All the King’s Men,” 115. that’s at stake, or the real status of its object, but rather its ontological condition. We’re not speaking of poetry about some socalled present-state-of-affairs – a poetry about revolution, dressed up as some form of neo-avant-gardism, overrun by “adolescent guerrilla armies of specialised humanoids” as Burroughs says19 – but a poetics whose constitutive reality is itself a state-of-affairs, one in which the present is encompassed and brought into being against the reifications of a technocratic, pseudo-modernity. Debord insists on this point. Adopting a position opposed to that of the Surrealists, he argues: “It is a matter not of putting poetry at the service of revolution, but rather of putting revolution at the service of poetry” – a distinction, he adds, that “cannot be understood if one clings to the old conception of revolution or of poetry.” Such “old conceptions” are merely the pap of “neoilliterates… created by the modern spectacle.”20 The insubordination of language means that revolution in this sense isn’t programmatic, orientated towards the construction of one or another utopian reality. It’s rather the on-going construction of a fluid critical framework. A mode of articulation that’s at once objectless (it’s instead a generalisable poetics) and constitutive of its own non-fictionality (it creates “events and their language” and so underwrites, rather than depicts, “everyday life”). The consequence of this is encapsulated in Debord’s re-thinking of the “old conceptions” of poetry, as “poetry without poems if necessary”; and leads to the qualification: “poetry necessarily without poems.”21 A formulation which may be figured as a triangulation between three terms: POIĒSIS   R(E)EVOLUTION  PERVERSION 19 William S. Burroughs, The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (New York: Grove, 1971). 20 “All the King’s Men,” 116; 117. 21 “All the King’s Men,” 115. 235 236 This apparent self-negation (the traversed duality of poetics and history) is really a refusal of a certain fictional status, adverting to the fact that whatever, within the institution of literature, etc., can be presented as “poetry” is already a fictionalisation of its revolutionary potential. Just as an institutional avant-garde is a contradiction in terms. Obviously this demands adherence to a conception of poetics that’s not only multifaceted but demanding of the highest stakes. Poetics, as we all know, centres upon the turn, the trope. It’s perhaps for this reason that we can easily elide terms like poiēsis and détournement. However else we may conceive of this sense of a turn, according to whatever orientation, we understand that, in poetics, it describes not a relation to some object (it’s not a mimēsis), but rather a condition of language, irrespective of how we impose upon it. And in this consists its subversive character. Because while the turn avails us of a relation to some hypothetical object, to some futurity, it alone manifests its objectivity. By détourning the process of domestication in language, the poetic transfigures, reinvents. The poetic turn is a type of perpetuum mobile. A revolutionary machine. A cinematograph. A writing-in-motion. Subversion not irrationalism. If by irrational we mean a systematic alienation from linguistic potential; normalisation by abstraction. In Marx’s critique of the industrialisation of labour, the individual is in fact a product of alienation,22 just as, in Debord, a certain type of individualism is the product of the spectacle. For Debord, however, it’s a question of détourning the forces of alienation in order to expose the spectacular character of the socalled real and recover a means of access to unregularised forms of linguistic (and other species of socio-political) potential. A poetic logic posits a means of subverting the informatic character of a “language of the real world,” employed to maintain a type of perceptual status quo. What’s potentially radical in Debord’s thinking is that the logic of as if is always bound to a poetics, that the objecthood of all discourse is at root tropic, and that within the discourse of power itself resides 22 Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (1857-61). the revolutionary potential for its subversion. In Gorilla Bathes at Noon, Makavejev gives us the figure of the actor, who in the final scene holds up his Russian major’s uniform in front of the camera on a coat-hanger. It’s no longer a film actor (Svetozar Cvetkovic) pretending to be a Russian officer, but simply a uniform. And this is what the actor communicates to us, from outside the frame, both directly and by means of his absence from the picture. The obvious anti-naturalism of the preceding film resolves into this theatre of facticity precisely on the basis of something that cannot be presented: the thing itself revealed not simply as an empty sign, but as an empty sign whose emptiness is adverted. This thing itself is of course a species of commodity, whose rationale is bound up with the figure of the actor – a figure of substitution and deferral, of access to desire, of the compulsion to repeat, of the return of a certain repressed – as a form of alienation recycled into objects. The actor performs a type of irrational pragmatism that structures the real into a set of actions that simultaneously emphasise its fictional status so as to bolster the actor-subject’s sense of his own authenticity. And he’s right, since (paradoxically) the actor is precisely a figure, a poetic trope, and in this drama of alienation it’s the figure that constitutes the only kind of non-fictionality. What does this mean? I would like to propose that non-fictionality designates that which is beyond or before any hypothesis; which is outside hypothesis’ reach. Which is to say, that which cannot be represented within the speculative framework of an as if, nor within that of an avant-gardism seeking to lay claim over some future retrospective view of its own history, by asserting some idea of the future. In his sometimes controversial 1974 essay, Theory of the AvantGarde, Peter Bürger warns that “an art no longer distinct from the praxis of life but wholly absorbed in it will lose the capacity to criticise it.”23 While historically avantgardes have harboured socially transformative aspirations – in just the way Debord speaks of acting upon everyday 23 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 50. 237 238 life – the merging of a poetics with a factography of the world at large, by way of a type of axiomatic mimēsis, merely substitutes its own recycled artefacts for the work of invention. An as if that advances itself into the world programmatically. Such an art becomes that paradoxical figure of a guardian of an historical fiction posed in the guise of the new, which has been reduced to a signature obsolescence in perpetuity, being thus the mark of the commodity; whose availability to the projective wish of the consumerised mass mind seeks to neutralise any real subversive potential (other than by way of unselfconscious parody). The Berlin statue of Lenin is a perfect example of this, in the way in which Makavejev exposes the relation of myth to subjective desire: the psychosexual character of Lenin monumentalised is paralleled by the mute monumentality of the figure of Stalin in those scenes from The Fall of Berlin, in which – like Hitler in Leni Riefensthal’s Triumph of the Will – descends from the sky, emerging from a shining silver aeroplane in pristine white uniform, framed monumentally by the camera, his bearing extremely mannered, remaining mute throughout, surrounded by a sea of awe-struck worshippers. The scene is entirely fictional: Stalin never flew to Berlin, let alone on the day of the Reichstag’s capture. Two types of marriage are going on here in the Soviet psyche: one in which Stalin stands as the antithesis of Hitler (and thus Communism of Nazism); the other, more historically orientated, between Stalin and Lenin (one carefully orchestrated by the Kremlin, in which the Father of the Revolution and the Saviour of the Revolution are consubstantiated). This paved the way for a large scale industry in the manufacture of Stalin monuments throughout the Soviet sphere, including the largest of all such monuments, unveiled in Prague in 1955 and measuring 15.5 metres in height – a monstrosity locally referred to as “Stalin and the Bread Line.” At the time it was the largest group statue in Europe. Following Khrushchev’s denunciations the monument was demolished (though only in 1962), with no “end of history” yet in sight. But, as if in confirmation of Fukuyama’s thesis that postmodernism is the masterstroke of capitalism, thirty-four years later an 11- metre tall statue of Michael Jackson was erected in Stalin’s place, as a promotional stunt for Jackson’s European “HIStory” tour. Here, in case we miss Makavejev’s point, revolutionary monumentalism merges seamlessly, by way of unselfconscious parody, with commoditisation. The one doesn’t so much expropriate the other, as to anticipate it, in an anachronistic gesture of a postmodernism before the fact. In The Fall of Berlin, Stalin is already Michael Jackson, pop-icon in whiteface, waving mutely for the cameras and adoring fans. When Khrushchev delivered his famous speech of February 1956, shocking the world with his condemnation and criminalisation of his predecessor, he made pointed reference to the cult of personality for which The Fall of Berlin was primarily a vehicle, and to the film’s abstracted iconography of power redolent of Peter the Great: Let us recall the film, The Fall of Berlin. Here only Stalin acts. He issues orders in a hall in which there are many empty chairs… Where is the military command? Where is the politburo? Where is the government? What are they 239 doing, and with what are they engaged? There is nothing about them in the film. Stalin acts for everybody, he does not reckon with anyone. He asks no one for advice. Everything is shown to the people in this false light? Why? To surround Stalin with glory – contrary to the facts of historical truth.24 240 Even negativised, the myth of power and its monumentalisation – as the mass-reified form of the commodity – is a vehicle of an originary fictionalisation, capable of integrating virtually anything into its “consensual illusion.” History, like the Freudian unconscious, cedes to a timelessness from which a welter of forms are extruded by way of collective and individuated, desire. Nothing, here, is ever decisive – nothing can be declared or held to account that cannot be reinvented (Stalin for Lenin, Khrushchev for Stalin and so on) – not even the “end of History.” Wherever discourse addresses itself to a dogmatic objectification, the logic of the commodity prevails. It’s the form par excellence of an as if upon which those hegemonic structures of social reality devolve. It’s the crisis of the fictional within the dimension of the real. 24 Nikita Khrushchev, “On the Cult of the Personality and its Consequences,” Report to the Twentieth Part Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 25 February 1956. This speech was delivered to a closed session, and though copies leaked almost immediately, the official text was only published in 1989. This is the lesson we’re given. The question remains one of articulation. How are we to distinguish the fictional from the action of a poiēsis; of a (re)invention that eschews the presentation of a given idea but rather seeks, by way of a movement of language, to manifest the conditions for thinking and acting critically? Perhaps this is too much to expect, since the one is always open to simulation by the other. Nevertheless, whatever the expropriative potential vested in the commodity, it still stands in an inverse relation to the potential for invention per se: the capacity to interject into the world elements of the unprecedented. It’s this anachronistic movement, of what doesn’t belong in a given time and is unpresentable within its logical apparatus while nevertheless acting upon and transforming it, that drives history – even beyond the “end of history.” And it’s here that we find ourselves in the realm of the non-fictional. In whatever way the fictive may normalise perturbations in its object-field – the devolution upon “content and plot” (its basic socioeconomic narratives, however arbitrary they may be) – remains directed by an underlying crisis: the crisis of an incommensurability between a world-historical hypothesis and the ideological forms of its realisation. Here the contour of anachronism defines a two-fold relation: towards the poetic, on the one hand, and the commodity, on the other; a relation which is internally traversed by way of a détournement. The first concerns the critical potential of an object as an articulation of poiēsis: the anachronistic character of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), for example, as performing a critique of the institutional logic of art. The second concerns the anachronistic character of the institutional aesthetic object as a form of neo-avant-gardism, which in turn articulates (by virtue of its very appearance and through the accidental agency of self-parody) a critique of its underlying commoditisation, anachronism’s doppelgänger. The commodity is always surrounded by a type of detritus. Just as Berlin in Makavejev’s film is a type of detritus of commoditisation whose temporary locus is the Lenin monument. State Socialism in this respect is no different from Western capitalism. Just as the history of poetry is littered with detritus, monuments to a certain 241 242 permissive megalomania. Permissive in that it beckons investment in the idea of its own timeliness: that we may each be of the moment. (“Coke is Life!” as the advert says. Why not “Poetry is Life!”? It’s the same thing.) And that we can be of the moment, so to speak, eternally. In the pristine looking-glass of the commodity; forever desirable, forever young, like a Warhol silkscreen. (“Coke is Life!” and thus the precursor of every possible future, which is in truth NO FUTURE, since in every possible future Coke will still be Life.) Here we have that reactionary totalism in which the socalled revolutionary and status quo intermingle. And today nothing is more commonplace in poetry than that institutionalised neo-avant-gardism of nostalgic, imitative forms, whose objects loudly proclaim – within the proscribed annexes of the culture industry – their revolutionary status; and they are, of course, but only insofar as they perpetuate the revolving door of “literary” commoditisation. (Debord: “The repetition of dada gestures is simply the repetition of a form of art that attracts university kids and grants a little celebrity to the perpetrators.”) But if poetry is to be revolutionary, it must assume a risk. Above all it must risk itself. (“Poetry without poems if necessary.”) And if we expect to be shown what the non-fictional in language looks like, we must admit to disappointment. A revolutionary poetics has no identifiable model. The very idea of the “model” has had to be reinvented. (“Poetry necessarily without poems.”) Its antecedence is that of a dynamic, one which cannot be reduced to an array of poetic objects; past monuments, Ozymandias-like: aggrandised bits of cultural detritus. Such objects would be merely sites of disavowal, until they, too, are reinvented: no longer monuments, but revolutions. *Presented as a keynote address, “The Real Through Line” Poetry Symposium, RMIT and Monash University, Melbourne, 5 April 2013. ALL THAT’S SOLID MELTS INTO WEIRD COOVER | THOMPSON | GARCIA | CHAFFEE 1. Here’s the first half of the original sleeve notes for sometimes expatriate American writer, Robert Coover’s 1977 novel, The Public Burning: It is the month of June 1953. A new administration has just taken office, headed by former General Dwight E. Eisenhower and his second-in-command, ex-Congressman Richard M. Nixon. They have inherited a country, and a world, fraught with danger and menace, a world in which Uncle Sam’s dream of the American century seems to have gone sour. Only ten years before, the score had been 1,625,000,000 people for the Sons of Light and only 180,000,000 for the Phantom and his Legions of Darkness. And yet, by the beginning of the fifties, the Phantom had a score of 800,000,000 to Uncle Sam’s 540,000,000, with a dubious group of 600,000,000 vacillating in-between. What had gone wrong? Who was responsible? Surely, with 243 both right and might on our side, such a perfidious shift could never have occurred without treason. Up on the fifth floor of the FBI building, Chief Crimebuster of America H. Edgar Hoover is marshalling his formidable forces to ferret out the Enemy Within. And, jumping Jehosophat! he may just have them; maybe not all of them, but two very useful ones. Out of the Lower East Side, he plucks Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Arrested in the summer of 1950, they are tried, found guilty and, on April 5, 1951, “sentenced by the Judge to die—thieves of light to be burned by light—in the electric chair… Then, after the usual series of permissible sophistries, the various delaying moves and light-restoring counter-moves, their fate is at last sealed and it is determined to burn them in New York City’s Times Square on the night of their fourteenth wedding anniversary, Thursday, June 18, 1953.”1 244 May 1, 1994, in his obituary for Nixon2 (“He was a Crook,” published June 16 in Rolling Stone Magazine) Hunter S. Thompson, whose fingerprints are all over Coover’s novel, wrote: “When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, [Nixon] was a smart young man on the rise – a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American Dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President… As long as [he] was politically alive – and he was, all the way to the end – we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard.” According to Thompson, it was Nixon, not the Red Menace, who “broke the heart of the American Dream” – and the Enemy Within was him and everyone around him. Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger – “brutal brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hitman out of the Godfather.” For Thompson, not even the rose-tinted triumph of the Free World, the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Collapse of the Phantom’s Empire could conceal the fact that the American Century had already rotted from within and was now nothing more than a spectacle “finely staged for TV,” as squalid and trumped-up as the eulogies at Nixon’s funeral. Seven years later, whatever optimism Thompson might’ve felt, about 1 2 Robert Coover, The Public Burning (New York: Viking, 1977). Nixon died nine days earlier, on the 22nd of April, 1994. the new millennium washing the dirty hands of the old, was definitively put to rest by the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers, hot on the heels of George W. Bush’s phoney election to the White House. “The Towers are gone now,” Thompson wrote in his September 12 ESPN column, “Fear and Loathing in America”: reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now – with somebody – and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives…3 A year later, speaking in an interview on Australia’s ABC radio, Thompson alerted his audience to what is most prescient in Coover’s satire, where it would now be possible to see 9/11 seamlessly elided with that long American tradition of the Public Burning, in which the Voice of Reason “has been cowed and intimidated by the massive flag-sucking, this patriotic orgy that the White House keeps whipping up. You know,” added Thompson, “if you criticize the President it’s unpatriotic and there’s something wrong with you, you may be a terrorist.” Not as if there was anything coincidental about this state of affairs – where, after all, the flagrant illegitimacy of the President was in full public view. In a section of his ABC interview cut from the broadcast version, Thompson effectively likened 9/11 to the Rosenberg case: “the public version of the news or whatever event,” Thompson says (in reply to a question about whether 9/11 “worked in favour of the Bush administration”), “is never really what happened. And these people, I think, are willing to take this even further… just looking around […] for who had the motive, who had the opportunity, who had the equipment, who had the will… Yeah, these people were looting the treasury and they knew the economy was going into a spiral downward.” In a radio interview with KDNK (Colorado) in January 2003, Thompson – speaking of US foreign policy in the aftermath of 9/11 – went further, saying that “Bush is really the evil one here and it is more 3 proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1250751 245 Nam June Paik, Nixon (1965-2002) 246 than just him. We are the Nazis in this game and I don’t like it. I am embarrassed and I am pissed off. I mean to say something. I think a lot of people in this country agree with me…” adding, with eerie prescience, “we’ll see what happens to me, if I get my head cut off next week – it’s always unknown or bushy-haired strangers who commit suicide right afterwards with no witnesses.” 2. If Thompson’s thinly-veiled “conspiracy theories” (like his “journalism”) deserve to be called fictions, sometimes these play out on the historical register in strange and disturbing ways. And while the business of “fiction” during the normalisation period of the ’80s and ’90s drifted far afield of what writers like Thompson, Coover, Mailer, Kesey and others attempted in the wake of the revelation that the American Dream had become a Slough of Despond (into the voluminously self-infatuated autism of the faintly ironic, painfully sincere apologists for America’s collective narcissism, whose most accomplished practitioners were probably Franzen, Foster Wallace, Lethem) there has been something of a post-9/11 reaction; a renewal, in part, of the incomplete business of Thompson’s Gonzo War on Political Hubris and Criminality, fed through the meatgrinder of American Psycho and James Ellroy’s forensic reports from the Hollywood underbelly of “the Dream.” Among these (a loose grouping that would include the likes of Joshua Cohen, D. Harlan Wilson, Sean Carswell and precursors like Chris Kraus, Harold Jaffe, Lynne Tillman, Dennis Cooper & Kathy Acker) is an ex-reporter who after fifteen years working the Radio Free Europe nightshift published The News Clown,4 a monumental indictment of the Bush administration’s all-out assault on the intelligence of the average American. Thor Garcia, the author in question, shares the first-person identity of his main protagonist, a Bay City reporter covering the city’s crime beat and drawn increasingly into the bizarre realities that constitute the new “normal” post-9/11. The premise is not only that reality has outstripped fiction’s capacity to test disbelief – if not to assuage doubt, collective anxiety, or what have you – but that the “real” has infiltrated the realm of the fictional to such a degree that Baudrillard’s famous assertion that “the Gulf War will not have taken place” is not simply inverted (the “media event” is the “real war”), but outstripped (the “real war” is the one you can’t see, because the “real” is the war). Written between Hunter S. Thompson’s “suicide” in 20055 and the end of the second Bush presidency, The News Clown is a Bildungsroman for those hapless enough to’ve been born during the Nixon administration, weaned under Reagan, and taught the facts of life by Monika Lewinski. Set during the first term of office of one President W.G. Mnung, Garcia’s novel is a swan song for an amnesiac America’s “innocence regained,” afforded by the supposed victory over the communist USSR; a kind of “fear and loathing” in the age of hyperreality where, despite 4 5 Thor Garcia, The News Clown (London: Equus Press, 2011). February 20, 2005. 247 248 “Star Wars” and a significant increase in US satellite launch activity between 2000 and 2003, Secretary of Defence Colin Powell could nevertheless and with a straight face pass off onto the UN Security Council “evidence” of Saddam Hussein’s “Weapons of Mass Destruction” that made the Cuban Missile Crisis aerial pics look like Industrial Light and Magic; an age, too, where grainy videotape footage of Osama Bin Laden, duly authenticated by the CIA and supposedly claiming responsibility for 9/11, could air four days before the 2004 US presidential election, gaining Bush an immediate 6-point lead in opinion polls over his Democrat opponent, Senator John Kerry – encouraging even the least paranoid to consider the possibility (as Deputy CIA Director John E. McLaughlin himself openly remarked at the time) that this crudely designed video’s sole actual purpose was to secure a second term for George W. Bush, the sitting “War President.” There’s an anecdote that Greil Marcus relates about two-thirds the way through his 2006 book about “a nation whose sense of righteousness goes hand in hand with paranoia,” called The Shape of Things to Come: Prophesy and the American Voice. The anecdote centres around David Thomson, author of the novel Suspects, a kind of film noir “alternative history.” Marcus relates how Thomson, addressing an audience of Princeton students born in the ’80s, explained how the beginnings of film noir could be precisely situated not in the 1940s, or 1930s, or even 1920s, but “in the basement of a Dallas police station” on 24 November 1963, two days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, “when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald – when, to make history into genre, a nightclub owner shot and killed the man arrested for the crime.” It was at that moment, according to Thomson, “that all the paranoia and fear that film noir had been prophesying for twenty years, the sense that our lives are not our own, that forces we cannot see or name are ruling our lives and our destinies – it was then that everything that film noir had prophesied in America exploded into real life.”6 6 Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come: Prophesy and the American Voice (Faber: London, 2006) 226. But if film noir exploded into real life in November 1963, by the time of the Apollo moon landings and Nixon’s landslide re-election in ’72 – followed by Watergate, the secret tapes and almost certain impeachment – “real life” had already exploded into farce and, as Hunter S. Thompson never ceased recounting, this farce (as if only to prove the oft-abused Marxian dictum) continued its downward spiral, through the Reagan and Bush years, until it finally exploded onto television screens across the world on September 11, in the form of two Boeings flying into the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan sometime around 8:45a.m. (the moment at which “farce” became the new credulity and “postmodernism” ended). It’s a chapter of American history that both dominates the background and occupies the centre of Garcia’s The News Clown, where Hunter’s “weird” is no longer weird at all, and where Coover’s enemy menace has become the globe’s most diabolical purveyor of travesty: President W.G. Mnung himself – pictured in the chapter entitled “In Our Time: War is Over” standing shirtless on a tank as part of the “War Victory Celebration,” a naked reference to George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln.7 A sheet of early evening sunlight fell across his right side, draping him in golds and amber, his profile outlined against the pink-orange sky. The president beat his chest with his fists and yowled. He stamped his booted feet against the tank armour. A giant banner hung, lights blinking in the virgin dusk: COONSKIN ACCOMPLISHED. The film showed fighter jets screeching overhead, tanks rolling over sand dunes, the dictator’s statue crashing down. The film cut to pictures of thousands of troops waving flags and shouting: “HOO-HAAA! HOO-HAAA!” (112) This is meant to be the crowning moment of the second Bush régime’s post-9/11 invasion spree, finishing the job Bush Senior began back in 1991. History has hardly been kind in its assessments of this particular spectacle, but that hardly matters. As one of Garcia’s stock “news clowns” says: 7 1 May, 2003. 249 I think the President is trying to send a dual-message here. First he’s telling the American people that he is their triumphant warrior-king, and that they can trust him to secure victory over those who would harm us… And secondly, he’s giving fair warning to all the terrorists and non-allied regimes out there – he’s saying, Look out, Buster Brown, because I’m coming after you with my bare hands, in the grand American tradition. The strong, tough American nation that I lead is not in the mood to compromise with anybody, whether you be Islamic fascist terrorist or wineguzzling tolerance-spouting European UN waffler… And I think “COONSKIN ACCOMPLISHED” really declares his resolve, his steel, if you will, and it’s a message the American people are anxious to hear, and the community of foreign nations will want to hear as well… (114-5) The novel then turns its sights on 9/11 itself. The chapter in question, entitled “Hide in ‘Plane’ Sight: Cannibals on the Loose,” begins with Garcia’s protagonist lounging with one of the novel’s legion of freaks and losers (ordinary people, in other words) named Eugene Keeks. “Gene” has a thing for exploitation films, Presidential assassination stories and assassination attempts (Lincoln and Reagan), and conspiracy theories generally: 250 Gene would say: “Everything’s connected.” For example, he said John Hinckley had known the Bush family, and wasn’t it “strange” that no one talked about how George H.W. Bush took over as President after Reagan was shot by Hinckley? … “Everything’s connected. Everything. Or it just happens that way, right? … Just a coincidence?” (120) Thor and Gene watch a VHS of Cannibal Holocaust (a 1980s mockumentary/exploitation horror directed by Ruggero Deodato, originally inspired by Italian media coverage of Red Brigade “terrorism”), with a vodka-addled Thor having his credulity severely tested by the film’s schlock special effects. “It looked real,” he informs us before becoming violently ill. “It is real!” Gene says – yanking Thor’s chain. This is all just a set-up for the novel’s pièce-de-résistance: the conspiracy of the cartoon planes. The episode is worth quoting at length: After I joined Cities News, Gene took it as an excuse to start yanking my chain even harder. “You claim to be a reporter – or are you one of them?” he would egg me on. “You’re one of them! You probably believe what they say. You probably think I’m crazy…” “The hell,” I said. “I don’t believe a word they say.” Once, during the break between Golden Ninja Warrior and Bride of Chucky, I asked him, “So what about the Boeing, Gene. Did it hit the Pentagon on 9/11 or not?” “THERE WERE NO PLANES!” “What?” “EVERY PLANE SEEN ON TV ON 9/11 WAS FAKE! THEY WERE CARTOONS!” “Goddamn it, Gene. Come on, man. I’m seriously asking you about the Boeing here.” “Do you believe everything you see on TV? As long as it looks sort of real and it’s on the news, you believe it?” “Gene, Gene – that’s crazy. No planes? Cartoon planes? What the hell are you talking about? I mean, nobody could… it’s too… it’s too-too much. It’s way on the other side of too-too much.” Gene giggled, sipped vodka, bugged out his eyes. He cackled. “Don’t think they can’t do it? Anything can be faked on TV. Who do you think’s running the TV signal? How do you know the TV wasn’t on tape-delay?” “My God, no planes. That would be the biggest fake-out of all time. The absolute biggest. Kennedy assassination and Bay of Pigs and Oswald be damned.” Gene sipped, cackled. “You’re one of them. YOU ARE! You’re one of them! You believe whatever they say…” “The hell I do.” “It was easy,” said Gene. “They exploded the buildings and then pasted the planes on to the videos. It would only take a few seconds to do that. Then they showed it to the world, and everybody instantly became convinced that aluminum airplanes can knock down steel and concrete towers! JUST LIKE THEY TOLD YOU ON TV! The World Trade Center!” “Goddamn it, Gene. I tell you, that’s monstrous. It’s sinful to even think about.” Gene cackled. “Don’t you know that the only way to beat them is to think as crazy they do? They call it The Big Lie. Ever hear 251 of the Big Lie?” “Goddamn it, Gene.” Gene giggled. “They also call it Hide In Plain Sight. Everything there is to know is right in front of us, right in front of our eyes. They just control us so much we don’t even believe our own eyes.” (122-3) In a review of The News Clown published in nth position (entitled “A Sickness Called America”), Jim Chaffee describes the book as a “coming of age” set not against “an adolescent nation establishing borders or growing through hard times, but rather against a decaying and degenerate nation populated by inbred, narcissistic adolescents long past their second decades”: A tapestry of a post-apocalyptic society whose debtbound, clueless denizens are so anaesthetized from noise, shopping and drugs, prescription or otherwise, that they are unaware the calamity they fear as bogeyman has already overtaken them.8 252 For Chaffee, Garcia’s America is a “third-world intellectual trailer park of violent, superstitious, uneducable functional illiterate turds-in-a-bunch bowl, smoking ruin of an airconditioned nightmare” – more Ferdinand Céline than Henry Miller.9 The dominant tone of the book, however, isn’t anger (as in Céline) but resignation: this is, after all, the echochamber after Fukuyama’s End of History; it’s Hunter S. Thompson on the eternal campaign trail, knowing the beast never truly dies, it just goes on being re-elected. Which, in the Land of the Free, is probably exactly as it should be. But the precursor to whom Chaffee most fully associates Garcia’s comedic, self-deprecating poke in the eye of the national consciousness isn’t HST but Gilbert Sorrentino, specifically the latter’s novel Steelworks set, in Chaffee’s thumbnail overview, in the period “when America began its 8 Jim Chaffee, “A Sickness Called America: Thor Garcia’s The News Clown,” nth position (2012): www.nthposition.com/asickness.php 9 “Less irascible than Céline, it nonetheless portrays a sick society. Sicker than what Céline presents, for certain, but then the world is sicker now than in Céline’s day by any rational measure.” path to global empire, feudal corporate dominance of society and government with a citizenry in indebted servitude, and built a constant war culture around a mythical enemy from which,” he adds, “the US is required as knight-errant to save the world.” While Sorrentino “approaches the portrait locally,” Chaffee argues, “Garcia presents his global study juxtaposing news stories against the quotidian existence” of his eponymous “gatherer.” And while “the news grows more surreal as time elapses and events progress,” it “never becomes more outlandish than what appears literally in the US press on a daily basis.” By shrewdly manoeuvring within the surreality of spectacle news, Garcia steps beyond any purely satirical or even anthropological impetus. At root, there is nothing didactic or even vaguely instructive about The News Clown – like Thompson, Garcia eschews irony (in the common understanding of that word), just as he eschews history’s self-denial as genre. There are no “rules of the game” that can meaningfully be abided by, as Chaffee points out, in a period in which “the CIA began to run drugs into the US as part of national security, beginning with heroin in Vietnam [and continuing] with cocaine from Latin America during the Reagan presidency as a means of supplementing the clandestine income earned by selling weapons to terrorist nations like Iran as a means of funding the war in Nicaragua, legitimate funding for which had been cut off by Congress.” This is the reality in which Garcia’s news clowns operate as propaganda fodder, serving up the kind of tripe that passed for informed reporting in the lead-up to the second Gulf War (Chaffee admonishes his reader to remember Judith Miller, “who filled her New York Times reporting with Bush administration lies”). On the side of investigative journalism reminiscent of Bernstein and Woodard, we are given to recall the fate of Gary Webb, whose attempts to expose the CIA drug-running behind the Iran-Contra affair led to a media smear-campaign that destroyed both his career and his life. Aware that a dirty war is being waged against the so-called “free press,” Garcia’s protagonist responds by effectively “drinking himself to death… living in a worm-infested apartment in the heart of a ghetto.” And 253 here Chaffee makes an important distinction: Thor’s suicidal drinking “isn’t the joyful rebelliousness of HST in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” a book to which The News Clown has sometimes been compared. “Anyone who mistakes this joyless banging of the head… with Thompson’s,” Chaffee insists, “misses the point.” It is, he argues, a form of selfbrutalisation, “bludgeoning consciousness, not enhancing it,” with The News Clown as New World Order parable in which all the Horatio Algers fall flat on their arse and kick themselves lying down, because that’s the only way to move forward in this life. As in the noir template on which all of this is founded, the Hero is really just the biggest loser in the room at any given time. 254 3. In 2014, Chaffee published his own monumental assault on decency, entitled The American Dream (Studies in Mathematical Pornography)10 – an almost 700-page insult of a novel hurled in the face of Norman Rockwell, the Statue of Liberty and James Truslow Adams11 – which Garcia (returning the favour) described in a (spoof) interview as “a horrifying, hilarious, soul-sucking, psychedelic experience of excruciating unforgettable intensity… likely to be the least reassuring thing you will read this decade, perhaps in your lifetime… If you don’t come close to dying during the reading of this book, you’re probably already dead.”12 Garcia, never known for his moderation, went on to take aim at the current purveyors of the “Great American Novel,” with Chaffee perceived as the longoverdue antidote to what was dead already in the hands of Mailer and Bellow (though Greil Marcus makes strenuous claims for the genre being alive and well in the hands of Philip Roth). Garcia’s real target is David Foster Wallace, whose penchant for obsessive detail Garcia sets against 10 Jim Chaffee, The American Dream (Studies in Mathematical Pornography) (London [Canada]: Enigmatic Ink, 2014). 11 Who in 1931 said of the American Dream that “life should be better and fuller and richer for everyone, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement…” Of course. 12 Jakob-Marc Fluhntuster, “interview” with Thor Garcia, “Mathematic Pornography: A Book Where Men go to Die,” Death, Sex, War, God (9 June, 2014). Richard Preston, USA (1958) Chaffee’s pure excess, as one might set Proust against the Marquis de Sade. Like de Sade, The American Dream is something of a godless morality tale, a type of deranged Paul Bunyan, instructing America on a path of “redemption.” That this path should pass both through masochistic domains of mathematical (un)reason and the lowest forms of wilful bodily degradation speaks volumes for Chaffee’s vision of contemporary America. The novel opens in classic realist fashion – somewhere between Dos Passos and Jonathan Lethem – “with a claustrophobic scene involving a pathetic family and a dying mother [‘Jehovah’s most devoted and single-minded witness’]” as if gathered around the deathbed of the “American illusion” (says Garcia). Chaffee’s protagonist, named Whitey Butcher (echoes of 255 Fassbinder),13 stands there “looking one last time at this dying woman racked with cancer” (7): She opened her brown eyes to see me standing there alone beside the bed; offered no smile, not even with her eyes, certainly not in the set of her mouth. The weak voice emitted just above my signal-to-noise ratio and I bent nearer to capture the words. “I tried to wait… to see Armageddon… the resurrection.” 256 Whitey, a Vietnam vet and maths PhD specialising in partial differential equations who out-sizes John Holmes, thence proceeds for the rest of the novel as if tasked with precisely the business of bringing a type of personal Armageddon about: a funereal orgy dedicated to dead Mother America. Soon Whitey is marauding between the New Orleans Latin Quarter and Tulane campus like an avenging Tyrone Slothrop,14 stirred from a flaccid, undirected Oedipalism into a kind of tumescent, nihilistic rage, as if his one wish is both to “degrade” and/or apocalyptically fuck every Mother America surrogate he finds (or rather, it’s them who find him and initiate all the insatiable fucking, he’s really just a catalyst, an apocalyptic agent rather than an agency). Unlike Pynchon’s “rocketman,” though, Whitey’s apotheosis isn’t directed by hidden forces at work in the world: the real conspiracy here is not in the subtle (or not-so-subtle) manipulations of Reason (causality in Slothrop’s case, the very “reason for being” in Whitey’s), but in Reason’s wholesale dissipation. Behind its Norman Rockwell veneer, the leftovers of Nixon’s America is nothing but cheap pornography: pornography, to paraphrase Bataille, in the form of Reason. Whitey’s “progress” thus begins with the realisation of what is in fact his ontological condition, against which the 13 Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Whity (1971) – a savagely genre-deconstructing “Weltschmerz” “sauerkraut western” (it was actually shot in Almería, Spain, on one of Sergio Leone’s sets), described by Slant magazine as the “sickest” film of Fassbinder’s career, which for various reasons was never given theatrical release. “Whity” (played by Günther Kaufmann) is a black slave and illegitimate son of a plantation owner, a Mandingo character ensnared by showgirl/prostitute Hanna (Hanna Schygulla) and ostensibly complicit in his own subjugation. 14 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). “American Dream” (in whatever form it takes) is revealed as collective somnambulism – with all the machinery of a dream-rationalisation at work to prop up its “consensual hallucination”15 – as perverse and involuted ultimately as the mathematical screeds (Lie groups, manifolds, tangent spaces, cohomology, etc., etc.) that digress the narrative of Whitey’s otherwise mundane existence of drug-taking and sex whenever something like a “moral” threatens to be extracted from it. Chaffee wasn’t joking when he subtitled his book Studies in Mathematical Pornography, and there are countless instances in which The American Dream reads like a gonzo porn down-and-out-in-New Orleans version of Sade’s Philosophie dans le Boudoir, oscillating between excesses of “rationalism” and “debauchery” like some sort of topological equation designed to show us how each is in fact a superposition of the other. Nor is Whitey an especially likeable character: the first person narrative is no doubt designed to test the reader’s sensibilities in allowing any identification through the elision of subjectivities. In fact, as Garcia ably notes, Whitey is more than simply figuratively a prick. Unlike Pynchon’s Slothrop, Chaffee makes no attempt to give Whitey “attributes that might make you sympathetic to him.” In this sense, he’s as all-American as can be. “Instead,” notes Garcia, we see this guy smoking hash and babbling about Riemannian manifolds and so forth, but in a totally asshole and condescending way. You have no idea what he’s talking about, but he acts like you should, like, right – you should know exactly what he means as he rambles on about diluting his hash and Cauchy-Riemann equations. It’s a staggering combination of arrogance and madness, but totally lucid. You’re thinking – this guy’s a real prick, come on, man, what’s next… Well, sure enough, without much explanation, the next thing you know he’s drinking and having a threesome with a couple of nymphomaniacs named Lori and Millie. It seems perfectly natural. What doesn’t seem natural is the extent of America’s complicity in Whitey’s acts of degradation – and that is 15 Cf. William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984). 257 258 perhaps the most scandalous element in this book. When Whitey finds his ultimate Mother America surrogate in the figure of Dina, a highly intellectual and perversely sexed woman (significantly she’s an anthropology PhD) who Whitey gradually transforms into a dog (and eventually “sells”), it is as if the true nature of the American Dream has been revealed at last. There is something in Whitey’s “rage” that is so obvious it could easily have been passed over (were this a book by Mailer or Kesey, for example) without remark, except that Chaffee makes it impossible to sublimate. While Chaffee openly courts charges of misogyny (when not inviting accusations of outright misanthropy), there is arguably a far more caustic examination of “America” as genderdysphoric at work here. Whitey’s first sexual encounter in the book puts us on notice: having returned to New Orleans from his mother’s deathbed, Whitey falls in with Lori, who takes him straight from the airport for a night on the town. They wind up, at Lori’s instigation, in a lesbian bar, where Lori picks up Millie, who remarks that Whitey is “pretty” and questions Lori: “You sure he’s a boy?” Lori later riffs on this herself, describing Whitey as “a pretty boy. With a big dick” (23). Whitey, though completely passive at this stage of the novel, is faintly riled at being called a “Nellie,” though is happy to “camouflage” himself by living in a downtown gay neighbourhood off Bourbon Street. The threesome with Millie immediate subverts the conventional gender descriptors: Millie is described as being “flat as a little boy, her dense sprout of pitch-black pubic hair narrowing at the mons… to thread up the middle of her stomach and branch to tufts of black sprouts like anemone scattered around puffy nipples the colour of moles…” (19). In an inversion of the later dominant/submissive role Whitey will play with Dina, here it is Lori who controls the action, directing Whitey in his intercourse with the genderambiguous Millie, who he is finally instructed to sodomise. Before doing so, however, we are given a description of the “luxurious black growth that clamoured vine-like up over her ass and along her spine.” Whitey, who may indeed be suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder – but one characteristic of the whole “nightmare” of post-Nixon USA rather than superficially the Vietnam War16 – appears at this moment to reveal, or even be symptomatic of, a kind of autogynophobia at work in the “American psyche” (insofar, that is, as the novel can be read as “allegorical” of an America at large: Coover’s repugnant “Uncle Sam” transgendered). But Chaffee isn’t interested here in participating in any sort of simplistic ritual “emasculation” of his protagonist (a sophomoric Freudianism of unacknowledged homo-erotic impulses, for example – though this, too, is offered up to the reader visà-vis Whitey’s insistance that he “knows” Millie is really a female while drawing the line at Lori’s suggestion of group sex with a couple of Aussie blokes). Masculinity, for Chaffee, is part and parcel of the novel’s sense of ambivalence (or as Joyce says, ambi-violence): like every other complex manifold, it’s a question of where and how that line is drawn. Rather, what Chaffee is concerned with in probing Whitey’s binary emasculation/hypermasculation is the exposure of a deeper nihilistic impulse: the libidinal “violence” directed at the “Mother America” within. Which inevitably requires us to consider what in fact the nature of this violence is. At a certain point in the book, Whitey’s “sublimation” of his dead mother is matched to Dina’s mythic “transcendence”: by way of the degradations (“cuckold training”) of which Whitey has become the ambiguous agent, Dina is gradually transformed not only into a “dog” but also into a kind of porn “goddess,” “MaDina,” complete with a ménage of avatars (“information ghosts” who inhabit a “deformation retract” in Whitey’s apartment).17 This is all hocus dialectics up to a point. As one of Dina’s avatars explains towards the end of the novel, “Some think of her as Aphrodite, others as Ishtar or Astarte, but it is all the same. She is ascended. Her ordeal is over. She has been transmogrified and transcends mortal concerns” (533). Just as Whitey himself is gradually transformed – into a type of mathematical Priapism (“the biggest dick in the world,” as one of Dina’s avatar’s says. “The great white hope” [563-4]). 16 17 Just one more of the government’s alibis: crazed Vietnam vets. Vague echoes of Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). 259 260 At the end of the book, Dina (who, though immaterial at this point, is referred to as Whitey’s “betrothed”) is renamed “Faith.” Faith, obvious connotations notwithstanding, is thence revealed as the controlling agency of Whitey’s dominant/passive “binary switch.” Whitey, like a parody of Duchamp’s “bachelor machines,” is – despite his constant appeals to mathematical reason – programmed by the algorithm of Faith’s absence (643). In essence, she has become the classic “ideal object” whose surrogates, like Lacan’s petits objets, keep the libidinal circuit spinning out its narratives of displacement and deferral, of satyriasis and insatiety. And it’s at this point that it becomes clear that Whitey himself is really just a type of allegorical subprogramme: a filter in the general psychic apparatus of “America,” corresponding to an impossible desire. The American Dream necessarily ends with a kind of looping back, a topological fold, returning to the oft alluded-to yet constantly elided “trauma” of the Vietnam War: perhaps Whitey, himself a veteran who’d been seriously wounded in action, is really dead – one more “information ghost” fed into the great Dream Machine? We’ll never know. The novel’s irresolution differs from Pynchon’s in Gravity’s Rainbow by its banality: the causality switch hasn’t simply been re-set in the mind/body of the protagonist alone, but in America as a whole – what we might call Whitey’s delirium is symptomatic and becomes increasingly pronounced the more he (as a kind of readerly avatar) tries to cognise it. In the end, Whitey’s mathematical “reasoning” blurs into “schizophrenia” (what Mailer called a “state of unfocused paranoia”) in which everything that appears to be real is in fact a construct and vice versa, world-without-end. At stake here, just as in Garcia’s The News Clown, is the very status of “fictionality.” Both novels taunt the sanctimonious “wailing wall” of newsreel culture with their schlock gender horror and “cartoon planes” – not out of some gratuitous impulse, but from a refusal to ingratiate themselves with an ideology of the “evidentiary real” which is in truth nothing but a simulation anyway. These novels don’t trade in the “plausibility” of genre – as if to say, no matter how whacked-out fiction aspires to be, “real life” is always one-upping it. As Tom Waits remarked at the launch of his 2008 “Glitter and Doom” concert tour, “Leona Helmshey’s dog made $12 million last year. Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio, made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains.”18 We live, after all, in a world in which the benchmark of “reality” is the endlessly recycled histrionics of Fox TV and CNN. But observations of this kind are commonplace, so much so that “fiction” of a certain type has become a refuge, not for the escapists among us, but for the “realists.” (What place is there in literature for an avantgarde when fiction’s most radical task is simply to ameliorate and reassure?) Not so very long ago, writers like Mailer and Roth could seriously imagine their work exercising an influence over the moral consciousness of their own, or ensuing, times (“the submerged wrath of some good American minds,” as Mailer said). But taken all-in-all, the likes of Chaffee and Garcia – as with Coover, too, had he written The Public Burning today19 – are nothing short of “terrorists.” This seems the only available conclusion in a world where “literature,” merely by affirming a state of affairs, would provoke mass hysteria if taken at its word (which is also to say, in the first place, read). From “fiction” we proceed to “history-as-genre,” in which “history” itself has been, as Chaffee says, “replaced by acceptable mythos… with modern communications systems providing impossible forms of social networking in which people live without having to experience reality first hand.”20 It would constitute, therefore, an act of subversion commensurate with Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast,21 to read Chaffee and Garcia in the literalist mode that, in a certain sense, they were intended. 18 Tom Waits, Anti.com (20 May, 2008). Keeping in mind the extraordinary difficulties Coover faced in getting the book published at the time, and keeping it published: as soon as The Public Burning hit the New York Times bestseller list in 1977 Viking pulled it from circulation, without explanation. 20 Jim Chaffee, “Sub-band Coding in the Aether: Information Ghosts & Doctor Franklin’s Dream America by Damien Lincoln Ober,” VLAK 5 (2015): 114. 21 CBS Radio, 30 October, 1938. 19 261 To call either The News Clown or The American Dream a “parody” would thus be to miss the point, since these novels possess, like Thompson’s reporting, a core element of exact sociological realism. Which is also what makes this a writing without obvious redeeming qualities, since the “realism” in question is not the kind that provides a critique from which society, however uncomfortably, can draw a lesson – since it first requires society (this boughtand-sold pornocapitalist America) to renounce itself. Here is the point at which Chaffee comes closest to Dos Passos’s dissections of America as genre,22 and to Roth’s “ecstasy of sanctimony” and “the prosecuting spirit” turned insideout.23 If for Dos Passos “the Bill of Rights is a children’s story, the Constitution a rumour,”24 for Chaffee they are in fact insults spat in the eyes of any self-respecting intelligence. In a recent review of Damien Ober’s novel, Doctor Benjamin Franklin’s Dream America (2015) – another, if less acerbic attack on the “society of the spectacle” – Chaffee zeroes in on the frequently abused “notion of freedom,” a word, he says, that has no well-defined meaning and yet is bandied about with the US push for what it calls Democracy, a form of government that has little to do in practice with freedom. That is clear in the Declaration of Independence, with the famous line, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We need not quibble over the distinctions between liberty and freedom (or the notion of Creator among a group of plutocrats, most especially Jefferson, who were deists, not Christians), but instead focus on the real intent of this statement of mostly aristocratic property owners who were incensed about taxes and more generally the mercantile system run by Great Britain. John Witherspoon says it pretty clearly in the novel at the time of his death: “That’s what we did with The Declaration. It’s a masterpiece, the best slogan 262 22 23 24 John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (1938). Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2000). Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come, 51. ever, the kind you can build eons’ worth of civilization on.” That captures the essence of The Declaration, a slogan, a propaganda piece by plutocrats, a statement of limited scope that applied to a handful of white men.25 The true perversity of Chaffee’s novel is not that such implied degradation of “the notion of freedom” could ever be openly countenanced (of course it has been), but that it represents, in the face of all the flag-sucking protestations to the contrary, what D.H. Lawrence in his day called the “dark suspense” at the bottom of the American soul: that longed-for personal Armageddon which is the secret object of desire of The American Dream. Against the perennial drama of foreboding which has defined American consciousness since the dawn of the Cold War, Chaffee poses an ecstasy of revelation that is fully consumed within itself. Whitey is the archetypal Primitive Man possessed of a Reason undifferentiable from libido: the nation’s “black” soul, so to speak, in white-face, like some sort of return of the repressed. As in Pynchon, Whitey’s mathematical autism is more or less a metonym for the whole rampant military industrial complex in whose grip the memory of what Lincoln called “a nation of free men” was driven to suicide.26 Not the nation, which already had been, but the memory, which after all was nothing but the memory of a dream. This is the unsought-for corollary to that vast body of writing that has treated America as “an experiment in form” on the assumption that it is forever in the process, and ever available to the desires, or reinvention, of making anew. But if America is such an experiment it is because, as Marcus says in the voice of Dos Passos, “it can be unmade at any moment,” since “the language everyone really uses is babble” and “to say even the simplest thing a new language must be found.”27 Mailer famously described America as “the most dialectical of nations” by dint of its inner tyranny: a “tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers 25 Chaffee, “Sub-band Coding in the Aether,” 119. Abraham Lincoln, “As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide” (1838). 27 Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come, 59. 26 263 how far one can go by travelling in a straight line until one is stopped…”28 Which is a fine idea if you believe in the availability of such a landscape, with the cut-and-dried topology of straight lines and concrete objects. But in the complex manifold of contemporary spectacular society, walking the line gets you precisely nowhere – as Hunter S. Thompson time and again demonstrated, and Mailer tacitly acknowledges when he points ahead from the Kennedy assassination to Vietnam, civil rights, campus riots, homegrown radicalism, Watergate and everything that followed: a “dialectical inversion” in which “subliminal political sense” was no longer enough to disentangle the finely spun “dream” that clothed the hidden hand of the corporations, secret services and mafia whose interests the “republic” now existed solely to serve. And while still holding to the belief that the Kennedy assassination had opened “a hairline crack in the American totalitarianism29 of the fifties,” Mailer – anticipating Thompson, was obliged to concede that, in doing so, totalitarianism as it had previously been understood had come to transcend itself into a new manifestation of the American “dream,” with the operative elements “working so well joined together that nobody could begin to point an accusation without wondering if he were irremediably paranoid.” 264 *Presented as a lecture in the Faculty of English, Sydney University, 12 August 2015. First published in Sonder magazine, 2015. 28 Norman Mailer, “The Ninth Presidential Paper – Totalitarianism,” The Presidential Papers (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964) 191ff. 29 “Totalitarianism,” Mailer writes, “came to birth at the moment man turned incapable of facing back into the accumulated wrath and horror of his historic past.” The Presidential Papers, 201. Shu Lea Cheang, I.K.U. (2000) AN IMPLODING NEUTRON STAR FROM NEUROMANCER TO BLENDER “Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…” So the “matrix” – a.k.a. “cyberspace” – makes its first appearance in the 1984 novel Neuromancer, by William Gibson, who borrowed the terms to designate the new datasphere emerging in tandem with ideas about virtual reality and global computer networks. This “matrix” was conceived as a “mass consensual hallucination” (a pun on VR synaesthesia & the fantasy that you can always opt-out of the “virtual” world back to the “real world”): a kind of metaphor machine for producing “a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.”1 In Gibson’s version of the “matrix,” at a certain point the critical mass of accumulated data gives rise to a kind of quantum weirdness, an autonomous evolutionary process towards ever-increasingly ubiquitous forms of AI (artificial 1 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984) 69. 265 Linda Dement, Typhoid Mary (1992) 266 intelligence). Like an imploding neutron star, this process has a certain ineluctable character: it occurs, with the nominal catalyst of human agency at first, more or less all by itself. Like Darwin’s biological materialism, Gibson’s “matrix” evolves with only the illusion of a grand design: AI is depicted in broadly humanistic terms, psychological and sexual, but ultimately its “purpose” is nothing but evolution itself. At the time Neuromancer was publisher the interest in AI had been steered primarily towards robotics and gaming. Gibson’s “matrix” was more of a throwback to the sorts of ideas contemporary with Arthur C. Clark & Stanley Kubrik’s HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey (released all the way back in 1968, before the software revolution that lent to Gibson’s idea a potent realism versus Clark & Kubrik’s cosmo-metaphysics). But even in 1984, the fluid code-world envisaged by Gibson remained hidden from view, somewhere between pure sci-fi & Cold War deniability – GPS was still purely military and the World Wide Web was almost a decade away, let alone all the rest of it. Like the “matrix,” the public face of robotics was broadly humanistic: the problem of general intelligence had always been less about grasping what intelligence is, than in how it could be represented to humans (the curse of Turing endlessly revisited upon the “vanity of man”). In Gibson, a frequent fallback is also gender: elements of the “matrix” marry and give “birth” to more evolved forms; its processes are intersected by libidinous drives as much as by the operations of “higher reason.” The basic premise here is that humanity is a catalyst for the evolution of technical artefacts emerging from a parasitehost relation towards “god-like” autonomy of purpose. “Man” in the service of the machine, but also “man” as technologically coevolving. The machine as the symbiotic means of abstraction from evolutionary (which is also to say, biologic) dependence. As humanity labours under the illusion of evolving itself, it unconsciously becomes that embryonic mass from which an ideal artificial intelligence is to be born, re-enacting its (humanity’s) own creation myth in reverse, becoming God. This is hardly a new idea. The myth of the demiurge, the maker-of-man, and by declensions “man” the maker of golems, robots, Frankensteinian monsters… It’s the ancient dream of a detachable autonomous ego, capable of imbuing inorganic matter with the characteristics of intelligence (or “intelligent design”); a dream which, in a type of Freudian reprise to the aspirations of Reason, has always been accompanied by the perverse fantasy of the rise of the bionic genital. From the very beginning the concept of “mind” has evoked visions of bondage and ideas of subjectification that find a sexualised expression. The procedural logics of rationalism are like ritually entrained fetish scenarios: bodies as virtual hardware, stripped-out and hacked back into the collective gender cortex. If the Golem represents the crude duality of the artificial body in bondage to reason, Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis establishes the aesthetic sublimation of this duality in the figure of the fetish machine. 267 “Fembots in Las Vegas,” The Bionic Woman (1976) 268 1. The first thing we notice about the Golem is the immaculate nature of its conception: a thing of mud and Cabbalistic mumbo codework (the “shem” of the inseminating wordsoul [the kernel] placed in its mouth; the inscription/erasure of “(e)meth” on its forehead [the halting machine]), but still immaculate, of course, motherless. Like dear darling Adam with a gausian blur in place of a navel: the original man-of-clay, the thing-as-such, das ding-an-sich, and its creator – the archetypal Frankenstein, the mad Rabbi, the monotheic ego-machine – GOD by any other name, etc. Or, like sexless Athena, born fully-fledged from the forehead of Pure Reason, armour-clad, a type of vestal-warrior in the cause of the divine calculus. The Golem is all brawn, Athena all brains: but that isn’t the be-all of this particular trope. There are other binaries: the detached autonomous phallus, for example, and the mechanised vagina; the bionic “man of the future” and the “bionic woman” or fembot, something out of pre-feminist antiquity dressed up with futuristic bells and whistles, a sex machine with dodgy thousand-year warranty (like some hydraulic vagina dentata: you get your hard-on and castration anxiety wrapped up in one package, the eternal 2-for-1). Add them together and you end up with that most utopian of all Oedipal mummy-fantasies: intelligence, beauty & an insatiable desire to fuck. The reciprocal figure is rather less flattering, being nothing more efficacious than a mechanised human dildo: that complex bit of sublimated libido we find in Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 symbolist rendition in Der Golem, for example. Or the one we find in Thomas Pynchon’s “rocket man” in Gravity’s Rainbow. Or in the original Frankenstein (a.k.a. A Modern Prometheus). In the hands of Mary Shelley, this man-monster becomes of manifestation of its “creator’s” sexualised guilt: not simply a rampant phallus, but a reviled creature built of offended vulnerabilities; not simply a gravity-defying superman, but the apotheosis of what’s “all too (hu)man.” Or, to paraphrase the Tyrell Corporation motto in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, “More (Hu)man than (Hu)man.” (The [anti-] Oedipal parody of fucking the Creator [in the eye], because hopelessly longing to be fucked by the Creator – not once, but again and again [those Replicants want to be just like “us” after all].) The phallic trajectory of this desire is a constant feature of the Golem myth. At the beginning of Meyrink’s novel, its protagonist Athenasius Pernath finds himself accidentally wearing a stranger’s hat and immediately his entire being rigidifies, becomes trancelike, guided by a convulsive tension, as if he’d been transformed into a kind of mindless prophylactic engorged with libido. This is Pernath’s “channelling” of the eponymous Golem. The French philosopher and sometimes pornographer Georges Bataille evokes a comparable trance-like experience in The Tomb of Louis XXX, where the metaphoric implications of Pernath’s state are made explicit: I […] entered a state of torpor, wherein I suddenly felt myself become an erect penis. The intensity of my conviction rendered it difficult to deny. The previous day I had had the same kind of violent feeling, the feeling that I was a tree and, without being able to oppose the idea, in the darkness, my arms extended themselves as branches. The idea of being — my body, my head — a large hardening penis was so crazy that I felt like laughing. 269 The comical idea even came to me that so hard an erection — the entire body tensed as a hard tail — had no other point than orgasm!2 270 2. The story of Rabbi Loew and the Golem comes to us as a retelling of the immaculate father-son progeniture of the Old Testament – the libratory fantasy of the “man-made-God” as counterpoint to that of the enslaved phallus (as a species of machine, it is imagined the genitals can be controlled, brought under the spell of organised labour, disciplined according to a schedule of productivity: a “beneficial” machine in place of a “hazard” machine). Revisited in the technological context of the Post-Enlightenment, we can recognise in this the conventional narrative of the domination of a disembodied Reason over bodily/collective libido (for which the reproductive function of the genitalia is first and foremost a rationalisation) mediated by this notion of a subservient Golem as, in fact, the archetypal subject. The autopoietic potential of the Golem-machine, to begin to think for itself, nevertheless adverts to a dilemma. Where the escaped Golem represents a nightmare scenario of the machine-as-hazard (a mindless slave revolt – a veritable zombiegeddon of disembodied genitals ranging abroad under an autonomous motive force, running amok, but essentially dumb), Lang’s Metropolis invites the viewer to imagine (quel horreur!) an industrial proletariat in process of seizing the means of production itself, in full awareness of what it is doing: rationalism’s ultimate nightmare. The dominant phallocentrism of this allegory invites still further critique, one whose trajectory describes a forcefeedback from Metropolis to the Wachowskis’s 1999 reworking of Gibson’s “matrix” (with its dangerously sexless, latex fetish-doll character, Trinity as the film’s token female hacker). In the mid ’80s and early ’90s, during that period in which the internet entered popular consciousness but hadn’t yet become the nauseatingly commodified non-space it is now, a new wave of artists and theorists emerged in tandem with Gibson’s fictional explorations of “cyberspace” and effecting a critique of 2 Georges Bataille, Louis XXX, trans. Stuart Kendall (London: Equus, 2014) 67. the predominantly male myth of divine Reason traversing “the human” (which – unmoored by the ever-increasing pervasiveness of “technology” – descends into a kind of paranoiac nihilism reminiscent of entire swathes of science fiction). 3. In 1983 Donna Haraway began writing A Cyborg Manifesto, a rejection of humanist distinctions between animal and machine, and biology and gender. The cyborg, a radical form of “theorized and fabricated” hybridisation of “machine and organism,” harks back to the constellations of Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring machines” as described in their 1972 investigation of “capitalism & schizophrenia,” Anti-Oedipus, and the late ’60s militant anti-fascist feminist performance art of VALIE EXPORT. The cyborg is, in Haraway’s words, “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and paternal capitalism, not to mention state socialism.” 271 272 VALIE EXPORT, Aktionshose:Genitalpanik (1969) Its autonomy, however, serves to render the “paternal” inessential, in a movement that re-inscribes and recodes Old Testament sublimation of the “mother” (as speciesgenerative “machine” – a primal punishment by man’s God, we mustn’t forget, who wasn’t “created” from clay, but from Adam’s superfluous rib: a two-fold prosthesis of man). With its rejection of the paternalistic Oedipal creation myth, Haraway’s cyborg remains the contrary of the traditional Golem figure, that robotised upholder of patriarchal rule (who also happens to be a domestic slave, but like Lenin’s proletariate resolutely retains its dream of masculinisation). The cyborg has no sentimentality for “man’s” creation myth or his fantasmatic reinscription of the family drama of his God. The cyborg, Haraway concludes, does not dream of community on the model of the organic family… The cyborg would not recognise the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.3 Emerging from this intersection of cybernetics, philosophy and gender critique, “Cyberfeminism” was a term first coined in 1991 by Sadie Smith (co-founder with Nick Land of the Cybernetic Culture Research Institute, Warwick, UK) and the Australian artist collective VNS Matrix (comprised of Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia Barratt). In a reply to both Gibson and Haraway, VNS Matrix published a Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, in which they set out the terms of a project for “attack[ing] the patriarchy within… its bases of power: the creation of rules for communication and the exchange of information”: WE ARE THE MODERN CUNT… THE CLITORIS IS A DIRECT LINE TO THE MATRIX… VNS Matrix took issue with Gibson’s hypermasculinised cyberjocks and the “TRANPLANETARY MILITARY INDUSTRIAL DATA ENVIRONMENT” they were shown to 3 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,’ Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991) 150; 151. 273 inhabit, along with the highly caricatured nature of gender and ethnic types in Gibson’s “sprawl” trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive). In a review of VNS Matrix’s 1991 multimedia installation, ALL NEW GEN, code-poet and “netwurker” Mez Breeze wrote: [Gibson’s] novels are essentially revamped detective/thriller novels, which employ weird plot divergences and characters caught up in ‘the matrix’ – a term commonly interchanged for cyberspace. When a Gibson character ‘jacks into’ the matrix, donning obligatory headgear and virtual reality gloves as he does so, the cowboy (for inevitably the hero is mostly male) has to battle a corporate entity and regain his position as an information paragon. He ultimately achieves this aim, albeit in a convoluted fashion, and reinstates his own hero status. This template of the machismo cyberjock completing their own version of the traditional hero’s journey narrative is one that cyberfeminists object to, and combat within their own art practices.4 274 All New Gen, in a parody of typical console games of the time – like Nintendo’s Gameboy – required the player to renounce his/her typical gender affiliation in order to access the gamespace. Logging into All New Gen, the player was first asked: “What is your gender? Male, Female, Neither.” The only right answer was “Neither” – anything else would send you into a loop that ended the game. The game itself was situated within a transgendered vision of the (unmanned) future. Fighting for “data liberation” with “G-Slime” shooting from their clitorises, “cybersluts” and “anarcho cyber-terrorists” were meant to hack into the databanks of Big Daddy Mainframe, “an Oedipal embodiment of the techno-industrial complex, to sow the seeds of a New World Disorder and end the rule of phallic power.”5 Like some mindfucked, post-op Gameboy, All New Gen was populated with comically exotic analogues to the usual gaming stereotypes, including: 4 Mez Breeze, ‘Attack of the Cyberfeminists,’ Switch. Electronic Gender: Art at the Interstice (1997). 5 Claire L. Evans, “‘We Are the Future Cunt’: CyberFeminism in the 90s,” Motherboard (November, 2014). 1. BIG DADDY MAINFRAME – the enemy who must be infiltrated through DATA LIBERATION 2. RENEGADE DNA SLUTS – who are watched over by ORACLE SNATCH. They call themselves PATINA DE PANTIES, DENTATA & THE PRINCESS OF SLIME. They must battle Big Daddy Mainframe and his agents through the contested zone in order to release the : 3. VIRUS OF THE NEW WORLD DISORDER 4. CIRCUIT BOY – a dangerous technobimbo (and one of Big Daddy Mainframe’s agents). The DNA Sluts must disarm him by removing his three dimensional detachable penis, and by doing so, turn it into a cellular phone. 5. A BONDING BOOTH – where G-SLIME (fuel required by the player) is replenished if stocks run low. 275 The game’s motto (echoing William Burroughs) was “BE AWARE THAT THERE IS NO MORAL CODE IN THE ZONE.” 4. VNS Matrix’s vision of transgendered cyberspace finds echoes in the recent evolution of the Anonymous movement. The term “anonymous” is ideally keyed to the tabula rasa implied in All New Gen’s “neither,” in which “hacker” avatars are free to occupy a gender “interstice,” despite the prevailing machismo of “hacker” culture. Writing on the genesis of Anonymous and Lulszec (and with echoes of the case of Private Bradley/Chelsea Manning), Parmy Olson noted this “contradiction” with regard to a seeming prevalence of real-life transgendering among long-term habitués of sites like 4chan: There was not much research on hackers who were trans but plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting the number of transgender people regularly visiting 4chan or taking part in hacker communities was disproportionately high. One reason may have been that as people spent more time in these communities and experimented with “gender bending” online, they could more easily consider changing who they were in the real world. Lines between the online and offline selves could become blurred, and some people in these communities were known to talk about gender as just another thing to “hack on” … If people were already used to customising a machine or code, they might have come to see their own bodies as the next appealing challenge, especially if they already felt uncomfortable with the gender they were born with.6 276 Hacking, as a term for a type of cyborg/sexual insurgency, recodes the MATRIX (“WOMB”) according to the overriding insistence that “Biology is not Destiny.” The “matrix” is trans-sexed in the same way as the body is prosthetically reorganised. And just as the body itself gets reconceived as a prosthesis of the “matrix” (rather than vice-versa), so gender gets conceived “prosthetically” as a distributed network of codes. The trans-hack is always/already reappropriated to the Matrix. Contemporary with VNS Matrix is the work of Australian artist Linda Dement. Dement’s Cyberflesh Girlmonster installation at the 1995 Adelaide Festival developed out of her earlier Typhoid Mary interactive CD (1992) and depicted “bodies that matter” as re-coded in a macabre Frankensteinian comedy of gender panic, refiguring Martha Rosler’s Body Beautiful, Beauty Knows No Pain series (19661972). The artist invited thirty women to “donate” parts of their bodies, which were scanned to create both visual & auditory analogues. From these, conglomerate “bodies” were assembled, animated and made interactive, becoming 6 Parmy Olson, We are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of Lulzsec, Anonymous & the Global Cyber Insurgency (New York: Little, Brown, 2012) chap 6. Linda Dement, Cyberflesh Girlmonster (1995) part of an ongoing morphological process. Dement’s work anticipates the work of Taiwanese artist, Shu Lea Cheang, whose video I.K.U. (2000) refigured Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987) by way of inter-gendered cybersex-avatars roaming Tokyo’s non-spaces like celestial data-gathering sex-algorithms in an Earth-bound proto-social-media space, interfacing with unsuspecting users who experience commodified pleasure while their sexual genome, in a manner of speaking, is harvested. Call it data-rape: only in place of viral algorithms embedded in mass distributed, freely downloadable porn – agents of alienation – here there is promise of transcendental socio-sexual liberation. Cheung produced a reversioning of I.K.U. in a series of 2009 performances entitled U.K.I. (featuring Radíe Manssour and Diana Pornoterrorista), in which the pop futurism of the original is back projected onto a neo-punk post-industrial wasteland of I.T. trash, in which it is the datasphere itself that is, so to speak, fucked and sex/replication is bound to the evidence of technological obsolescence and consumption. This preoccupation is extended in Cheang’s 277 Nina Sellars & Stelarc, Blender (2005) 278 present explorations of viral sex (“AIDS ZERO”) and gender conspiracy (“gen-fluid”) in FLUIDØ. But perhaps one of the most radical and insistent exponents of interactive body-transformation is the performance artist Stelarc. Since the ’80s, Stelarc has explored the possibilities of human cybernetics in a series of dramatic works, from the robotic third-arm prostheses of Evolution and Ping-Body, to the actual surgical implantation of a “third ear” in his left forearm in 1997. His most striking work, however, is a 2005 collaboration with Nina Sellars, entitled Blender. For Blender both artists undertook liposuction operations, using the resultant bio-materials as the substance of an installation piece: 1.6 metres high and “anthropormorphic” in scale and structure. Every few minutes Blender automatically circulated or “blended” these bio-materials via a system of compressed air pumps and a pneumatic actuator. The mixture included 4.6 litres of subcutaneous fat taken from Stelarc’s torso and Nina Sellars’ limbs, zylocain (local anaesthetic), adrenalin, O+ blood, sodium bicarbonate, peripheral nerves, saline solutions and connective tissue. Installed under a single spotlight & swathed in chiaroscuro, Blender was also wired for sound, amplifying, distorting and delaying the audio produced by the blending mechanism itself. The project (which has its contemporary analogue in the Tissue Culture & Art Project of Oran Catts, Ionat Zurr & Guy Ben-Ary) was an inevitable outcome of Stelarc and Sellars’ longstanding fascination with “alternative corporeal architectures” and the blending of contemporary technology with corporeality, dressed-up in the mystique of the divine melodrama of creation (the work itself resembles some sort of cryogenic altarpiece, the sacred relics in process of rebecoming, God by unholy alchemical transmutations about to rise from the dead). Underlying this drama, Blender reprises the dream (or nightmare) of inanimate matter (body waste, effluvia, Gslime) made animate by means not of the Divine Word but of some (diabolical) apparatus injected with code. The vision of God as abomination, the Resurrection as horrorshow. Like growing a brain in a jar, or a foetus, or conjuring a new species from an evolutionary cyberswamp – a “matrix” of mutated cell-structures becoming the 3D-printed armature of a future (malevolent!) artificial intelligence in the form, perhaps, of Megumi Igarashi’s coded vagina invading the internet like some sort of porno-viral space monster and replicating itself endlessly in the flesh. In short, a succubus machine. If the Golem belonged to an allegory of the productive harnessing of the formless, of the ordering of chaos, of creation as work, it also pointed “ahead” to a general evolutionary potential – one far removed from the sublime conception of a transcendental nicety (the everbenevolent “God machine”). Instead there is only the radical materiality of transmissional codes, the reproductive potential of form detached from “evolutionary purpose” – which is also to say, a potential of agency that resembles us only insofar as we remain integrated into its circuit. * Presented as a lecture at Café Neu Romance: International Robot Performance Festival, National Technical Library, Prague, 28 November 2014. First published in VLAK magazine, 2015. 279 280