Monday, April 21, 2014

Revision of Previous Instruction (5)

I was mistaken to think that a purely spatial orientation would suffice.

 If we see our Mystory, separated into the 3 (or so) discourses of the popcycle, the logo, and reflections on wabi-sabi as a film, then what I have decided to do is to create "another narrative," an impossible narrative through the pictures I am going to both take and select. My image-texts, derived from fragmented elements of my Mystorywill now be re-arranged to suggest one "day in the life" of Jake. Scenes from the everyday. However, some of these images will be constructed in the present, some will be taken from the past; some I will take myself, some I will take from others. This "one day" approach, beginning with "Let there be light" and ending with "Bedtime is immanent" will allow me to "produce time." The images still won't "move" in an illusion of cinematic continuity, but they will create a sense of the day's activities, which cannot be a day because some of these images have been created in a different state! Akerman writes, "I want people to feel the time it takes, which is not the time it really takes" (196).

 I am going to put into practice the role of the possessive spectator, who "commits an act of violence against the cohesion of a story, the aesthetic integrity that holds it together and the vision of its creator" (Cinematics 207).

 This may at first seem to contradict our instruction to "receive as a mystic," but I have received from my Mystory receptive and suggestive phrases. I must now re-assemble them into an "affective unity or common thread of feeling or being" (93).

The "impossibility"/surreality of this image sequence/day narrative will be increased by the narrative's suggestion that a woman came to me in a box.

Mix and Stir --Final Instruction for Recipe

In the previous classes, I have lamented that I do not have access to my popcycle's archive (aside from The Mask). Today, I furthermore was continuously frustrated by the lack of useful images in my Mystory,even as my own instructions have led me to realize I must take a picture.

After much reflection, frustration, and a little dread and anxiety, I have figured out how to connect the present and the past in a transferential relationship, both the past of the creation of the Mystory as well as the fundamental scenes and elements that structure and gather my life into a coherent pattern.

My mistake was to focus on the Mystory as an archive of pictures and images that represent my past. My final instruction is not to try and duplicate images in the Mystory (or, necessarily, in the film The Mask), but rather to isolate a fragment of the micro-narratives in my Entertainment, Family, and Community Discourses (let's say, 10 fragments) that I hit me in a punctive manner. They might only be a few words (or one word!), they may be a complete sentence or an image/description of an object that I mention.

Either way, my task will be to isolated fragments of the micro-narrative, as if it were a film still ripped out of the overall context of the narrative. Like my previous instruction from Cindy Sherman, we will sense that the images belong to a narrative, but will not be able to place them (perhaps I won't even be able to place them after awhile!).

I will estrange the language of the Mystory and then look at the world for how that 'partial object', that fragment, may show up in my present life to create a connection between the two scenes and the two times. In a sense, I will be looking for the photographic "objective correlative" to the fragment of narrative I select from the Mystory. The fragment will not be "interpreted," but used to write with my present world.

This concrete strategy corresponds well with the demands of the theory slot. The project allows me to construct a montage of elements that both attract and repulse. That is, I will recognize some resonance between the fragment of my past and the photograph of my present, but the goal will be for the photograph to express something the fragment cannot, an excess, the objet a. And vice versa. Even when attempting to produce a scene from my Entertainment discourse, I will inevitably not "be in the picture" (as Lacan says)  because I am in a different context. "I" am never really in the picture since, as one theorist in Cinematics points out, the "I" of the picture is already dead.

I do not think it necessary to produce actual "moving" images, since the movement of film is ultimately an illusion of it anyway. I think that the tension created between the fragment of the narrative, which recalls the "fuller" scene and the photograph as objective correlative will set off a movement of imagination and understanding (to use Kant's categories in the 3rd critique).






World --Mystory and Gainesville--Instruction 4

In the Mystory itself, we "felted" the Family and Entertainment discourses. In theory, we could have used any of these discourses to create a felt, in which one discourse became expressive of the other. One of my initial complaints of the Mystory was that I felt like I had to dive into my past when all I really wanted to do was live in the present.

And yet, as we all do, I have still been living in the past, present, and future this entire semester. I've "involuntarily" remembered my past many times because I have been trying to tell my girlfriend about my past my life, so she can understand where I'm coming from. When we were composing the Mystory, we were just instructed to allow (especially Family) memories to come to us, without asking why. Perhaps now we need to think about what triggered those memories. What might be something in our present that triggers part of the popcycle from our past, and then how does one make that visible? This may allow us to discern what aspects of our popcycle continue to structure the unconscious.

In order to do this, we may take direction from Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills. Since I am in a completely different time and place, I will try and re-stage moments/scenes from my Mystory. Not necessarily "literally" since they cannot be repeated, but try and find an object, element, or gesture that repeats in my present. The scenes that I take pictures of should create an uncanny connection for me to my past. I should try and figure out how to (re)construct (and stage-- like Jeff Wall) in a figurative manner how my past still corresponds with and influences my present.

That is, we look at the Mystory (which is both us and not us) and say: What is that for me (now)? The gap between then and now might be the gap of the unconscious.

My bandmate Lance took this and wrote on FB: "I call this one 'Blue Jake'"


Device (Analogy, Theory)--Instruction 3

If the phenomenon of 'transference' creates an epiphantic connection between the present and the past, the clearest instruction for me is the necessity to take/generate new images in the present in order to link my present to my past. Transference creates a kind of "suture," but it is a discontinuous suture. That is, as I wrote in another one of my other posts, we do not want the suture created by film, which is an illusion of continuous time and motion, but a constructed continuity between two times and/or places that do not seem directly connected. Because if we really take the idea seriously that primal scenes from our pasts affect how we find ourselves in the present, then my task is to make this relation visible and to create an affect. It will not be on the level of story continuity that the images in my montage will coalesce, but at the level of mood: "

The phenomenon of transference is embodied in various concepts that arise in Cinematics, The "meaning" of this connection will not be "readable" but "intuitable" Whether we gather this instruction from the famous "Capa" image from La Jette which "in itself carries the condensed implication of a whole action, starting, happening and finishing at one virtual point in time" or Victor Burgin's more extended definition of "sequence image" : 
The elements that constitute the sequence-image, mainly perceptions and recollections, emerge successively but not teleologically. The order in which they appear is insignificant (as ina  rebus) and they present a configuration--lexical, sporadic -- that is more 'object' than narrative [. . .] the sequence image as such is neither daydream nor delusion. It is a fact--a transitory state of percepts of a 'present-moment' seized in their association with past affects and meanings. (203) 
Hence, circling back to Julien (and to a certain extent, Lacan's idea of the circulation of the drive around partial objects), my project will not lead to some "final image" that encompasses or synthesizes all of the others, but rather every element must be taken as part of the (w)hole that I am trying to form. Nor will my project form a narrative, but an "object" and objet @.  

Theoretical Principle (Lacan) -- Instruction 2

The theoretical principle that will guide my project is the partial object, the objet a. Photography will allow us to write with these objects.  While the objet a is not a specific object, it can be recognized as the excess significance (or attraction?) that accrues to an object or scene in a photograph. It is Barthes punctum, the "surplus" value, exchange value, commodity value of an image. The values or lifestyles associated with a scene or object.

As Lacan writes, "the objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze" (105).

The key for me will be able to place myself in the correct position to see how I am fixed by the gaze.


Metaphysical Principle (Julien) -- Instruction 1

My first instruction will be a metaphysical principle that shows up in all three texts in addition to being the fundamental dimension of the Electrate apparatus: attraction/repulsion. This is the principle behind the montage (which is the device I draw from the Cinematic text -- more in another post), a non-dialectical tension. That is, the point will not be to allow all components of my project into one unified, synthesized image (like the wide image), but for the images to endlessly circulate and play off one another. Although there will be a sequence (elaborated in another post), the sequence will not be linearly progressive. The attraction/repulsion will create a kind of magnetic field:





Or a yin/yang symbol:


Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Surreally Standing-In

If it is true that we need images that conduct between our present and past moments, then it seems clear that we are going to have to take a picture in the present that somehow recalls our past interpellation into the popcycle. Rather than try and re-create a moment from our memory, we can attempt to reproduce a shot from a film like Cindy Sherman. This film still is not from a particular film, but it gives us an uncanny feeling that it is from a film. It is this kind of surreal, uncanny, quality of not-being-able-to quite place it that we should strive for in our own image experiments.

Cindy Sherman--Untitled Film Still
We get this same instruction from Lacan, about the libido/drive being a surrealist montage. Maybe we do not literally have to copy the style of the surrealist montage, but we should take into account the surreal feeling (unheimlich) of recognizing something but not quite being able to place it. Sherman's photographs recall a kind of noir aesthetic, atmosphere, and mood, but the scene does not provide enough information for us to contextualize it within a narrative. In this way, Sherman creates a fragment that resists interpretation in the context of a particular film. We do not know the meaning, but we can identify in her face and posture a feeling and mood -- perhaps one of dread.

Jeff Wall creates a similar surreal feeling of not-quite-recognition. An image that looks "real" but some little detail or element is off and we sense that what is occurring in the image is an impossible perspective/event to capture without the work of further construction.

Jeff Wall--Milk
The picture to the right, for instance, looks plausible, but we would never be able to see the milk coming out of the container without photography. It makes it look like rushing water or a kind of sculpture. This is a kind of freezing of time, suggesting movement and stasis at the same time. Sculptural and yet potentially filmic.


Sllllloooooowwwwww Dooooowwwwwnnnnnn

A major instruction from the Cinematic book that I see is that we have to use the technologies at our disposal to slow down film in order to isolate a gesture or a fragment. For Constance Penley, this is where we find the "filmic." If our project is ultimately photographic, but our analogy is cinema/film, then perhaps Penley hits the nail on the head when she contrasts photography's 'self containment' to the film still:

Film is not in this instance [of Barthes reading of the ‘film still’] reduced to photography because the still has nothing in common with the self-containment of the photograph. It is no more than a fragment which contains the trace of the film experienced as an animated flow; it is here, however, that we can find the ‘filmic’” (118). 

These "fragments" can be related to Lacan's notion of the partial object. We then must take these fragments, shorn against our ruins so to speak, and (re)assemble them into a Felt. These fragments/segments, writes Blake Stimson, must be "sutured back together again into an affective unity or common thread of feeling or being" (93). 

But we don't want the full suture offered by film. The suture we want is not between two present "nows" but between the present moment and the past -- this is the suture of transference that we want to create. Not the illusion of continuous time. 

 In this sense, maybe we should think of our experiment as a photographic essay in Stimson's sense: 

“The photographic essay is thus a form that holds onto the opening up of time, the ‘spatialized duration’ given by the experiments of Muybridge and Marey. It draws its meaning from the back and forth interrelation of discrete images that is eliminated when those images are sutured together in film” (98). 

We want a kind of spatialization (which Prezi and the blog allows for) that produces time, that makes us "feel time." As Chantal Akerman puts it, "“I don’t want it to look REAL I don’t want it to look NATURAL but I want people to FEEL the time it takes which is not the time it really takes” (196). 

Only through a slowing down of film (or a slowing down of our lives) can be isolate these gestures, these frames, these fragments. 


 

Monday, April 7, 2014

The Unreadable Image

In one of my emails, I pointed out the necessity of understanding psychoanalytic interpretation in a special, non-hermeneutic sense:

"Hermeneutics is oriented toward meaning; in contrast, what Lacan calls interpretation 

"is directed not so much at the meaning as toward reducing the non-meaning of the signifiers, so that we may rediscover the determinants of the subject’s entire behavior” (212). 

That is, what signifiers are we subjected to despite ourselves? My signifier? The spotlight. The meaning of the spotlight is important, but the spotlight as image is irreducible. Here are some more useful quotes from Lacan that I think indicates how psychoanalyticinterpretation operates: 

Interpretation is not open to any meaning [. . .] The fact that I have said that the effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud’s own term, of non-sense, does not mean that interpretation is in itself nonsense [. . .] [interpretation] has the effect of bringing out an irreducible signifier [. . .] What is there is rich and complex, when it is a question of the unconscious of the subject, and intended to bring out irreducible, non-sensical—composed of non-meanings—signifying elements” (250)

"In so far as the primary signifier is pure non-sense, it becomes the bearer of the infinitization of the value of the subject, not open to all meanings but abolishing them all which is different. This explains why I have been unable to deal with the relation of alienation without introducing the word freedom. What, in effect, grounds, in the meaning and radical non-meaning of the subject, the function of freedom, is strictly speaking this signifier that kills all meaning” (252)." 

Thierry de Duve's essay confirms this instruction. Photography resists "reading" in the hermeneutic sense because "“a point is not subject to any description, nor is it able to generate a narration. Language fails to operate in front of the point-pointed space of the photography”; rather,  photography is traumatic in its spatio-temporal form" (57). Photography, as we said, is silent and this is why we might need some captions in a similar fashion to the photographic essay. 

For de Duve, there is a continuous push-pull between melancholy and mania in the photograph. On a pre-symbolic level, our dealing with the photograph oscillates between these two attitudes/affects: "the photography puts the beholder in contact with the world, through a paradoxical object which, because of its indexical nature, belongs to the realm of uncoded things, and in the sphere of codifed signs" (60). This paradoxical object must be held in tension, in "counterpoint" if you will, disallowing any Hegelian synthesis (dialectical resolution). 




Blind Spot

For Lacan, we are the blind spot, the stain, the mark, the tattoo, that which is outside the image. Such a theoretical understanding is confirmed in the film book, as many essays address the "outside" of the frame.

"It may be what the photograph does not show, what cannot be seen, that truly constitutes the optical unconscious" (Gunning 23).

"We expect clarity to be a function of change. We expect to be able to decipher the (nearly) static image [. . .] it only reveals our blind spot, our inability comprehensively to see or understand a given image" (Tarantino 35-36).
Blind Spot

In order to combat this "blind spot" this "outside the picture" we might look to the model of the photographic essay and provide captions: “In a picture-story, the captions should invest the pictures with a verbal context, and should illuminate whatever relevant thing it may have been beyond the power of the camera to reach” (Cartier-Bresson 46).

Maybe it would be appropriate to think of the "blind spot" in the sense given to "driving." The pun is satisfying: while we are "driving" toward something, we always have a blind spot. We endlessly move in and out of lanes, maybe never reaching our goal. As we move, as we are "driving" our blind spot shifts. The blind spot is not just one thing, but keeps moving away, like the objet @.


The Image as Transference

In my posts on Lacan, I pointed out that we need to create a transferential relationship between the image and us (the receivers of the Mystory) or perhaps even "us" as a collective EmerAgency. Several theorists in the cinematic instruct us toward this type of relationship as well. Ulmer has claimed that the transference is something similar to Benjamin's dialectical image and other such tropes. To add to this, we have Deleuze's "crystal image," coming out of his work with Bergson, duration and his Cinema books and Victor Burgin's notion of the "sequence image." Both reflect an image that sets off a transferential relationship.

"The image, no longer relying on an internal movement to represent time instead produces time through tis relations to other images" (Orlow 181). This is in reference to La Jetee: "La Jetee photographs-as-film incorporate both the flow of time as a present which always passes (cinema) as well as a past which is being preserved (photography)" (182).

Alternately, we can look at how Gaensheimer puts it: "a synthesis of the passign actual iamge of the present and preserved image of the past" (77). He cites Deleuze: ""the crystal always lives at the limit; it is itself the vanishing limit between the immediate past, which is already no longer, and the immediate future, whis is not yet. . .[. . .] it is a mobile mirror which endless reflects perception in recollection" (77).

Victor Burgin calls this a "sequence image": "mainly perceptions and recollections emerge successively  but not teleologically. . .a transitory state of percepts of a 'present moment' seized in their association with past affects and meanings" (203).

All of these describe the transferential relation of the past and present coinciding.

I can't help but recall Lacan's passage (involuntarily, almost automatically): "In short, the point of gaze always participates in the ambiguity of the jewel" (96).



From Homunculus to Lamella

If the Theory spot is supposed to tell us the metaphysics, the how the world is, then it is necessary to address the status of the 'subject' in psychoanalysis. We are told, variously, that the subject is a "split subject," that the subject is a "subject-with-holes," that the subject is a stain, a spot, a knot, an irreducible kernel of non-sense, that nonetheless enacts a force. The subject is not: transparent self-consciousness who represents a world view, mind/body split, a subject fully in control (the unconscious surprises us). Lacan gives an excellent image of these two types of subjects.

1.) The Homunculus: "I will pinpoint the function fo the Cartesian cogito by the term monster or homunculus. . .whenever one has wished to account for inanity or psychological discordance by the present, inside man, of the celebrated little fellow who governs him, who is the driver, the point of synthesis we now say. The function of this little fellow was already denounced by pre-Socratic thought" (141). 



The homunculus is the idea of the "soul" separate from the body or the mark. In contrast to the homunculus. 

2.) The Lamella: "The lamella is something extra flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something--I will tell you shortly why--that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings,  -- because it survives any deivison, any scissiparous intervention. And it can run around." (197)

Because we have sexed reproduction, the objet a are the libido's "representatives" (its ambassadors) -- "And ti is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents. The objets a are merely its representatives, its figures.  The breast--as equivocal, as an element characteristic of the mammiferous organization, the placenta for example--certainly represents a part of himself that the individual loses at birth, and which may serve to symbolize the most profound lost object" (198). 

Ulmer reads this as the metaphysical principle that our "organs," our sense organs, are OUT THERE IN THE WORLD. As he humorously put it recently, "My trailer is in Tallahassee, but my scrotum is in Tennessee" (Ulmer, Facebook). 

We are connected to the lamella (and by extension our partial objects) via our drives, the drive that circulates around the objet @. 

Instruction: Find part of ourselves externally in the lamella

A Lamella roof is "used to cover wide, open areas with no supporting members (domes). 

A Lamella roof is "used to cover wide, open areas with no supporting members (domes)


"Lamella" is also used in mycology (Mushrooms): "a papery rip beneath a mushroom cap.




All of these images are incredibly suggestive of the structure of the lamella. The Lamella has a "rim," as we can clearly see in the mushroom lamella. There are, furthermore, Lamella of the lower eyelid, which further links Lacan's use of it to the "opening and closing" of the unconscious, like the opening and closing of a camera shutter.




Transference

In Freud's psychoanalysis, "transference" is the name given to the process by which a past relation is created in the present between the analysand and the analyst. Interestingly, this "identification" also happens with 'part objects', as in the famous "Dora" case, where Dora identifies Freud with a family figure because, at least according to Freud, they both smoke cigars. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, transference also allows us to see how the Other/Gaze is constituted. When we address the analyst, we are addressing what we think is the analyst's desire, which reveals basically how the Other's desire is structuring our own. Realizing that we are this 'blind spot' that blocks our desire from flowing, from circulating (to use some D&G rhetoric) allows for an epiphany. As Greg Ulmer has pointed out several times in our course, this epiphantic moment where the present and past merge is figure not only in psychoanalytic transference, but also in Benjamin's "dialectical image" and Joyce's "epiphany."

Lacan writes,

"If it is merely at the level of the desire of the Other, is there not something here that must appear to him to be an obstacle to his fading, which is a point at which his desire can never be recognized? This obstacle is never lifted, nor ever to be lifted, for analytic experience shows us that it is in seeing a whole chain come into play at the level of the desire of the Other that the subject's desire is constituted"

That is, in analytic experience, and at least if we reduce the possible engagement to the Symbolic register (signifiers) we cannot structure our desire except in the Other's terms (in its significations). The power of the image, at least according to Ulmer, is that photography can allow us to "write with the world" to "write with partial objects." That is, whereas last time we used google image (which is in some sense still in the "symbolic") if we take our own picture, we should be able to write with the world, to create a punctum which goes "beyond" the studium (Barthes).

It is not enough just to recognize one's interpellation. We don't have to use the other's signifiers. We are not "subject to" the wide image in the same way that we are subjected to the signifiers of analytic speech. Photography may open us to another way to structure our desire: a desire that is particular to ourselves. A way to write with the objet @. The objet @ are potentially infinite, no longer merely corresponding to the ones identified by Lacan.

The instruction is to Create a transferential relation to the world, that is, find a way to Felt present/past. Take a picture that involuntarily reminds you of something in your past. 

Lacan writes that the transference "closure of the unconscious" but paradoxically, it is only this moment of closure (this recognition, this identification, this affective tie, this punctum) that allows "interpretation" (which we must remember is not oriented toward "meaning" but toward the knot, toward the stain, toward the spot -- the irreducible signifier, the objet @) to begin to take place. Lacan writes,

"The contraction of [the transference's] function, which causes it to be apprehended as the point of impact of the force of interpretation by the very fact that, in relation to the unconscious, it is a moment of closure--this is why we must treat it is as what it is, namely, a knot [. . .] it is a knot and it prompts us to account for it" (131).

It is the "tie" that allows for interpretation and punctuation of the signifier that gathers, that we are "subjected" to. It is not to be "dissolved" through pointing out the transference's "illusory" character because, like ideology, it doesn't really help to point out that it is "imaginary." As Althusser understands ideology: it is an imaginary relation to a real condition of existence. It has an effect on the subject. The Other's gaze has force.

Drive as "Surrealist Montage"

Lacan writes, "if there is anything resembling a drive it is a montage [. . .] the montage of the drive is a montage which, first, is presented as having neither head nor tail--in the sense in which one speaks of montage in a surrealist collage [. . .] I think that the resulting image would show the working of a dynamo connected to a gas-tap, a peacock's feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman who is just lying there looking beautiful."

While the image to my left is not exactly the image Lacan imagines, it is the same kind of surrealist collage. Part-objects, ripped out of their context, clash and merge, attract and repulse, to give us a sense of something. It has no "head nor tail" in the sense that it is not teleologically headed toward a particular goal it hopes to achieve (or does achieve). Rather, the part objects endlessly circulate in our minds, as we try and merge these images together. They will never arrive at their "aim," but rather circulate around the rims.

Instruction: Create a surrealist montage from 'part objects' of our Mystory images. Perhaps rather than thinking the Felt as one popcycle section "expressing" another, we should merely think of them as part objects attracting and repulsing, endlessly circulating as our mind's tries to fix them into a meaning (but can't -- we will never arrive. The image is irreducible). 

The Gaze


For Lacan, our position is not the one looking. Rather, we are the ones being looked at. It does not matter if we are actually surveilled 24/7 by cameras or private detectives. Following Sartre (but departing from his concrete example), "The gaze that I encounter--you can find this in Sartre's own writing--is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other" (84).

Offering his own example, Lacan refers to a fishing expedition: "It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, inf act, were supposed to supply. . .You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see you!" 

But Lacan insists that it does see him: "it was looking at me, all the same. It was looking at me at the level of the point of light , the point at which everything that looks at me is situated--and I am not speaking metaphorically" (95).

He interprets: "it is rather it that grasps me, solicits me at every moment, and makes of the landscape something other than a landscape, something other than what I have called the picture"

Instruction: Notice what the 'gaze' is telling us and be willing to be "surprised" by the world. To be fixed in its gaze. It seems like this object, this little glimmer of light, this is the 'wide image' -- that which is no longer a "picture" but a figure, the objet @.

The Stain

http://vanessaattia.wordpress.com/felt/
It is fortuitous that Vanessa's Felt, which I used as a model for my Mystory, contains a major Lacanian figure: "the stain." "The stain" is our position in a picture. Instead of being a self-conscious, transparent, Cartesian subject, we should see ourselves as the blind spot, that which cannot be seen. Lacan contrasts this with the idea that we are a subject which is able to represent our Weltanschauung or philosophy. This would be a conscious exploration of our position. Instead, we are positioned by the invisible interpellation within the field of the gaze (explored in another post).

Instruction: Recognize our position as the blind spot, as somehow outside the frame of the picture: "if I am anything in the picture, it is always int he form of the screen, whcih I earlier called the stain, the spot" (97).


Thursday, February 27, 2014

Causality and Explanation

In my first course with Dr. Ulmer, we were trying to invent an ontology of the accident as opposed to substance. One of the instructions and ideas that I will never forget is that we aren't in the business of explaining the accident, but rather that the accident EXPLAINS US (not just as individuals, but as a collective society). This is with the logic of psychoanalysis -- the externalization of a string of signifiers shows us to which signifiers we are subjected to (how our unconscious is structured/organized). So, in this case, we were not thinking about explaining history, nature, or anything external in terms of causality or tendency.

In the history section, Julien claims that Westerners too had an intuition of shi: "Montesqui, has an intuition of shi, as what he calls a 'general cause' or a 'trend'" (214). Going along with what Jake Greene said in the band presentation, we don't want a "general" cause and we are not looking for a concept or myth that would explain events. Instead, I would argue in contrast we have to look at the external world to understand ourselves and, particularly, to understand our own agency.

Greg said something very suggestive last night: We are all our own prime movers.

This directs me to Julien's more explicit philosophical claims on causality. Because we in the West were concerned with being, we posited a substance which meant that we had to explain change: hence, agency. The challenge for China is that they have to explain being or, relative stability. According to Julien, the Chinese explain that through positing nature, history (remember, although the Chinese are not speculative, they tend to be systematic) as a closed, auto-regulative system that functions through alternation.

We are looking for what Michel Serres calls a "quasi-cause," a catalyst, a parasite. A 'cause' in the sense of object cause of our desire (we will get into this more with Lacan).

Instruction: We are not trying to explain Chinese metaphysics or Western Metaphysics or Electrate Metaphysics, because to explain them would be to locate causality in either abstract concepts, agents, and causes or internal processes of auto-regulative systems. We have to look at Electrate Metaphysics as emerging from the co-agency (quasi-agency/quasi-cause) of human beings sending their desires out into the world and getting them back in return. 

The world intimates. 

I think this instruction is close to a Chinese poetics, but instead of trying to capture the internal "spirit" or "breath of life," we want to capture the relation between the senses, desire, and the world. I recognize I might be jumping the gun or important other attempts at electrate rhetoric/metaphysics from other seminars, but I think that this is in some ways the only alternative to these literate systems of explanation. Not to eliminate cause, but to think about cause differently. Lacan will help a lot with this task.

Lists, Gestures, and Moods

In the Mystory I created, I intuited one possible instruction: create lists of moments when a word is used. In my experiment, I did this with the word "light." The difference is that in my experiment I was not necessarily thinking this in term of a state of mind, but rather linguistic cliches.

Lists were apparently a crucial aspect of Chinese poetics. According to Julien, the lists of particular configurations and gestures would suggest that "it is as if the Chinese using the lists would have no need to derive a more abstract concept fro any theory over and above what they themselves instinctively and actively feel to be the pertinence of shi through the cases listed" (112).

Ulmer has alluded several times to the Chinese way of explaining how to play a lute, so I figured that would be a good place to look for an instruction. First, positions are explained, then a sketch showing the position of the fingers, but opposite that sketch is a pose of an animal or landscape "corresponding in each case to the particular example of fingering." Finally a short poem, "positioned beneath this second sketch and facing the explanation, renders allegorical the state of mind suited to the posture or landscape depicted" (110).


This link between the external gesture and the internal state of mind I think is a crucial point for us. Julien suggests that these positions in movement "for us" require a "cinematographic" technique. Series of shi are like cross sections from continuous movement. They "represent not just any random slice of movement, but those that most fully exploit the powers of this dynamism and that are the most potentially effective" (114). What matters is this overall movement that can be grasped "at once" (Moment against Now if we are using the terms of Avatar Emergency).

I think this points toward a useful instruction because I found myself enacting this very process: what screenshot from my popular film had the potential to convey the dynamism in the scene. The dynamism for shi is grasping the overall "movement," but I'm not sure that we are looking for the movement, so much as the tiny detail (the punctum). The screenshot can be punctive and potentially powerful because we cannot see these minute facial gestures or details when we watch cinema. Slowing down frame by frame allows us to see the force (and perhaps the "invisible") meaning behind even the most banal gestures in a film. People have used this technique in courts as well in order to find "microexpressions" that might reveal someone is lying on the stand. We will look at this from within an aesthetic perspective rather than a legal one.

The instruction:  Use a screenshot, not necessarily from a movie, that shows the lines of force of the gesture/movement in that scene. The gesture and movement may seem insignificant, but through slowing down and isolating a "cross section" we can find those moments between the "visible and the invisible"

Additional Possible instruction: This may be obvious, but instead of using these still images to illustrate narrative, they will be "felted" like we did in the Mystory, layered on top of one another.

Another Relation to Place and Space


While it may seem obvious that "landscape" is different from mapmaking, I think that the contrast between Western mapmaking, which tries to represent space in its accuracy, and Chinese landscape painting points to a key instruction. In this sense, I think that the electrate instruction is closer to the Chinese conception of "place" rather than "thing," as Ulmer lays it out in his Two Epistemologies diagram. In Heuretics, Ulmer also speaks of two different ways of considering place: Greek topos and Greek chora. "Chora" has an element of memory there rather than simply an attempt at representing the space for navigational purposes. Topos can be understood as space in the abstract: landmarks are noted, roads, etc. but the mood of the area is left to the traveler to experience him or herself once they arrive. Topos is literate because it desires a "true" representation; chora shows that within any given space, there are many places saturated with history.

Julien writes that space (and he does space rather than place) "an hence any landscape, was also conceived by the Chinese as a perpetual setup which puts to work the original vitality of nature" (93). Landscapes are like the world in "miniature" and so distance actually serves to connect the microcosm and the macrocosm. Julien cites Zong Bing, "a three-inch long vertical stroke is the equivalent of a height of a thousand paces; ink spread horizontally over a few feet gives body to a distance of a hundred leagues" (95).

Julien explicitly distinguishes between the map and the landscape: "for a map reduces scale merely for practical ends, whereas the process of reduction undertaken in painting has a richly symbolic purpose" such that it is "closer to writing," particularly "the series of hexagrams that were sufficient to account for the whole mystery of becoming" (96).

Such perception is an aesthetic perception. While Julien argues that the Chinese were looking to the "vital breath of nature," we are less concerned with what might be called "nature" (to be explored in another post). Our target is the internet. So how do we form a landscape from the internet?

Julien once again contrasts cartography and landscape painting (associated with 'geomancy'): "Unlike the cartographic reduction of space, which is proportioned in a pedestrian manner, the aesthetic perception strives to apprehend space, whether pictorial or poetic through the tension expressed by its life lines" (103-104).

As mentioned in my previous post, Julien also makes analogies between the landscape and the human body. Even though the landscapes themselves lack human beings in their representational capacity, landscapes are conceived of in terms of human posture (100-101). Julien concludes:

"The painter must be inspired, must possess a particularly sensitive consciousness, so that he can 'unite in spirit' with this landscape and, by exposing himself to it and communicating with it, grasp in a stroke how the whole scene functions in its powerfully general and delicately detailed way" (101).

I think we can derive an instruction from this:  We have to find the lifelines of the internet. We are not seeking to represent the internet through data visualization, but finding the lines of force that connect memory, place, and the body. Create a microcosmic landscape of the internet. 

Greek Concepts vs. the Principles of Shi

Julien argues that Shi does not operate like Greek concepts. We obviously want to pay attention to this difference, since Greek concept formation (as definition, classification) is a major characteristic of Western Literacy. For the Chinese, Shi operates "through networks of affinities, one constantly implying the other through allusion" which "frequently convey their meaning through the interplay of parallelisms and correlations made possible by their infinitely rich evocatory powers" (77).

Such an understanding is similar to Ulmer's articulations of the "anti-definition" and "haiku logic," but here the context is Chinese calligraphy. Instead of defining terms and then building upon them, words (and images) are played off one another. As Julien writes further on, Shi is a particular effect of this energy tension, "each element composing the configuration of the ideogram must either attract or repel another" (78). 


The language of "attraction-repulsion" should give us a clue that this is an instruction. If indeed electracy operates on the polarity of attraction-repulsion rather than true-false (literacy) or right-wrong (religion), then the instruction is: 

Every item in our experiment should create relations of tension through the ways in which they attract and repel each other. 

We see this logic happening in the Mystory. Although an overlying pattern emerges, there is still tension within the individual components. In my Mystory, for instance, I showed the attraction and repulsion of "light" as a notion of truth (the phenomena, to "bring to light") and "light" as parody and performance -- to make light of. "Light" isn't a concept here, but a signifier that through pun logic already contains internal tensions in meaning. We will continue having to trace out these tensions. 


Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Frustration with the meaning of "Contrast"

In his introduction to Part II, Ulmer has already told us what spot in the CATTt Julien will play for us as we continue the project: the Contrast. As Ulmer constantly reminds us, we are not "against" the contrast, but the contrast still shows us what we are not doing. In Heuretics, Ulmer's contrast is Descartes, who is the conceptual personae that embodies a certain logic/metaphysics that Ulmer uses as what he is not doing. He is not doing mind/body split, he is not doing the correspondence theory of truth, he is not doing the scientific method, etc. etc.

Ulmer says in the introduction to Part II that Julien presents us with a literate metaphysics, regardless of whether we think in terms of Western or Eastern. However, given Ulmer's own propensity to draw heavily on Eastern sources in Internet Invention as relays, there are moments in the text where Julien seems to be describing (as closely as possible) the kind of logic/metaphysics Ulmer wants us to invent, a process that he seems to have already started in his earlier work. When Ulmer says we need an image metaphysics, does this mean that the metaphysics must be created in the form of image rather than commentary/theory? That is, is it possible to describe the image metaphysics in alphabetic writing?

Furthermore, Julien himself sometimes seems to contradict previous claims about the nature of Chinese logic. In the landscape chapter, he describes the shi as a taking in of the totality, all at once, at a glance. To me, this seems very "panoramic," but Julien insists that Western logic is panoramic. He writes:
Chinese reasoning, in contrast, seems to weave along horizontally, from one case to the next, via bridges and bifurcations, each case eventually leading to the next and merging into it. In contrast to Western logic which is panoramic, Chinese logic is like that of a possible journey in stages that are linked together. The field of thought is not defined and contained a priori; it just unfolds progressively. (124)
Ok, so we can already detect slightly different rhetoric here than Ulmer. We get the word "weave," which is more like a text than a felt, so we might see oureslves as not doing text. Furthermore, there seems to be some kind of linearity implied (unfolding progressively). The image metaphysics we are developing does not unfold progressively, which is still a literate temporality.

Julien Instructions (Contrast 1)

When I first started reading Julien, which was when we were working on the Mystory, I kept think about how the Mystory may be following the Chinese logic of discerning an overall pattern before it could be fully described (after the end of our career). The problem, however, with comparing the Mystory to the configuration of "propensities" is that, at least according to Julien, the Chinese are concerned with grasping the totality first and then filling in the details. Grasping the general "contours" of a scene is a way of grasping its telos or purpose. There is an emphasis on a kind of "necessity" that has little room for chance or arbitrariness. The military strategist must grasp the entire situation and already believe that he has won before acting. 

This is, in some ways, a non-experimental attitude. In the Mystory, we act without knowing where we are going to go, working from individual details to invent (and discover) the pattern as it emerges. We are neither strategic or tactical in MIchel de Certeau's sense. We do not want to create distance for the sake of grasping the whole "at a glance" (even if this might approach an 'image logic' or 'flash reason'). The totality is not what allows us to see the connection between the macrocosm and the microcosm, but the little detail, Barthes punctum. A little signifier that doesn't "mean" anything, but that gathers and organizes our lives into a pattern. We do not seek the objective situation "out there" and thus adapt and conform to it, but we dwell in an extimate (see Lacan) relation with the world. The outside is inside and the inside is outside. "Shi"  is more like discerning a force that transcends the human being, to which the human should follow in order to be in harmony with the world. 

The point that really brought this home for me was Julien's exploration of landscape painting. Julien, I assume following certain Chinese scholars, evokes a certain conception of the body: 

"Once again a comparison with the human body proves revealing. Regardless of a man's posture whether he is standing upright, walking, sitting, or lying down, each part of his body, down to the smallest joint, will be in harmony with that posture. To push this analogy to its limit--as Chinese critics lvoe to do--rocks are like the skeleton of the mountain, forests are its clothes, grass its hair, waterways its arteries and veins, the clouds its airs, mists its complexion, and temples, belvederes, bridges, and hamlets its jewels" (100)

This allows us to discern our contrast. We must go from totality to partial objects. Psychoanalysis will teach us the way of the partial object, the partial body. The body not as a mirror stage reflection, but as partial zones. These partial objects correspond not to an overall structure, a one to one analogy between the world and the body, but correspond to the senses:  Breast, Mouth, Anus, Gaze. 

We are not a unity that can be grasped as an overall structural configuration, but gathered by partial objects, these experiences of the senses which are linked with our desire. Demand always misses desire. 

Introduction to Extimacy

Inside is outside and outside is inside. 

Inside is outside and outside is inside. 

INSIDE is OUTSIDE and OUTSIDE is INSIDE. 

CORRESPONDENCE!