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:

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. 

 

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).