Benjamin for Girls

BENJAMIN FOR GIRLS:

CINEMA, SPECTATORSHIP, FASCINATION

Jodi Brooks PhD University of NSW 1997 CERTIFICATE OF ORIGINALITY

I hereby declare that thts subnusston ts my own work and to the best of my knowledge 1t contams no matenals prevtously pubbshed or wntten by another person, nor matertal whlch to a substanbal extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or dtploma at UNSW or any other educabonal msbtubon, except where due acknowledgement 1s made m the theSIS Any contribution made to the research by others, With whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, IS expbc1tly acknowledged in the thesis

I also declare that the mtellectual content of th1s thes~s 1s the product of my own work, except to the extent that llSSistance from others in the project's deSign and -mm~m«~

(Signed)~...... CONTENTS

Acknowledgments n Introduction 1

1. Benjamin's Theory of Film: Hope 16

2. Wide-Eyed: Benjamin and the Image 67

3. The Image, Fascination, and Death: From Melancholy to Love 108

4. The Amorous Spectator: Benjamin's Figure of the Collector and Roseanne 142

5. Female Spectatorship: From Longing to Rage 197

6. Performing Breakdowns: Gendering the Crisis of Experience 248

Conclusion 279

Bibliography 282 11

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis is indebted to many people who have provided invaluable

assistance and support over its long (and repeatedly interrupted) production. I

would like to thank my supervisor, Lesley Stern, who has stood by this project

from the start. Over and above her astute readings and her intellectual generosity,

I would like to thank Lesley for her own inspiring work and also for her friend

ship.

A number of people have commented on drafts of sections of this thesis

and have offered useful suggestions and critical feedback. Linnell Secomb offered

valuable comments on chapter 3 and proof read a number of chapters and was a great friend through the thesis' production. Laleen Jayamanne, Hilary Harris, and

Simon During offered useful comments on chapter 1. I would also like to thank

Cathy Vasseleu for her willingness to be used as a sounding board for much of this material, for valuable discussions, and for late night phone conversations when I was losing the plot. I would also like to thank a number of other people who, through their friendship, support, and generosity, have fed into this project in a number of ways: Denise Robinson, Chris Healy, Karina Paine, Lee Brooks, and Felicity Collins. Finally, I would like to thank Viki Dun who has provided invaluable support in the thesis' final stages and gave me the the motivation to finish it. Viki read the thesis from cover to cover, and her keen editorial eye and her extensive knowledge and love of popular film and television helped both to fine tune the final draft and remind me why I was doing it.

This thesis is for Emily. 1

BENJAMIN FOR GIRLS: CINEMA, SPECTATORSHIP,

FASCINATION

Introduction

Over the last decade the psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory of the 1970's

has been critiqued on a number of grounds and on diverse fronts. This body of

work- now often referred to simply as "gaze theory" (and which perhaps was

never as unified as some of its contemporary characterisations imply) - has been taken to task for its monolithic and somewhat ahistorical account of the cinematic

apparatus. It has been critiqued for its inability to conceive of female spectator

ship - except through the most convoluted means - and for its difficulty in estab lishing the relations between the spectator-subject "effect" produced in a filmic text and the viewing practices of particular audiences. It has been critiqued, in other words, for its overly-determined account of the cinematic apparatus.

Psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory, for all its blind spots, forged a criti cal shift in film theory debates in the 1960's and 1970's. What it placed on centre stage was the figure of the spectator- not the empirical film viewer, but the ways in which film (principally classical narrative cinema) constructs an ideal viewing position by its modes of address. With its attention to the film's solicitation of the viewer through its techniques of enunciation - the ways in which the viewer is caught in and carried along by the film's signifying chain- along with an attention to the cinematic apparatus and the practices of looking it enables and privileges, this body of work and its feminist reworkings and critiques provided a framework through which it was possible to address the ways in which the cultural technol ogy of cinema (or rather a particular cultural technology of cinema) structures 2 and privileges particular economies of meaning and pleasure for the spectator.

Metz's The Imaginary Signifier along with Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narra tive Cinema" provided the key texts in these debates, alongside Baudry's

"Ideological Effects ofthe Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" and Lacan's essay on the mirror stage. 1 If Metz provided an analysis of the structuring of meaning and visual pleasure in cinema (particularly through his concepts of primary and secondary identification), Mulvey introduced the question of sexual difference and gendered spectatorship, arguing that the economy of meaning, vision, and pleasure constructed in classical narrative cinema is one which privileges the male gaze.

Psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory, while putting questions of spectator ship back on the agenda (after their virtual absence from film theory debates since the 1920s and 30s), nevertheless presented a number of impasses. In its analysis of classical narrative cinema, the viewer - aligned with the textual position of the ideal spectator - is seen as essentially passive, with the meanings and pleasures produced being prescribed by both the individual film and by the viewing situation. This essential passivity of the viewer nevertheless was seen as operating differently along lines of gender. If, as Mulvey argued, the structuring of meaning and pleasure in the classical narrative film was around the male gaze and oedipal scenarios, male viewers, it was assumed, would have more ready access to the position of the ideal viewer, and the passivity seen as characterising viewing was

1 See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guz zetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16.2 (Summer 1975), pp.6-18; Jean Louis Baudry, "Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus," in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp.286-298; and Jacques Lacan, "The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I," Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1980), pp.1-7. See also Stephen Heath, "Film and System: Terms of Analysis" Part 1, Screen 16.1 (Spring 1975), pp.7-77 and Part 2, Screen 16.2 (Summer 1975), pp.91-113; 3

compensated for in the fantasy of phallic mastery. The female viewer on the other hand was left in a no-place. Unable to access the film's structuring of meaning

and pleasure except through spectatorial transvestism, the female viewer is seen

as aligned with the image itself. Fallowing the implications of these arguments, the female viewer becomes marked by and defined as passivity twice over: she is

both unable to access the illusory mastery available to the male viewer (through identification with the film's inscribed spectator-subject effect), and she is aligned with that which is seen as not only passive but somehow pacifying - the cinematic image, which, like the figure of the Medusa, is seen as capable of immobilizing those who look upon it.

This conception of the essential passivity of the viewer - either carried along (in the case ofthe male spectator) or deserted (in the case of the female spectator)- has been substantially debated in the film theory ofthe last 10 to 15 years. Feminist film theory has increasingly turned to genres which are seen as problematising the centrality of the male gaze and/or providing a position for the female spectator (for instance Mary Ann Doane's work on female spectatorship and the women's film ofthe 1940's, and Carol Clover's work on the slasher film2).

At the same time,ethnographic audience studies (particularly in cultural studies) have begun to take on a new lease of life. Through the study of specific audiences, much of this ethnographic work has attempted to dislocate the centrality of the "ideal spectator" by examining specific viewing practices and

"uncovering" various "transgressive" readings. Related to this renewal of ethnographic analysis is the rise of fan studies (Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers,

2 See Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire The Woman's Film of the 1940's (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), and Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws· Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). 4

Jackie Stacey's Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship3). The ahistoricism of the psychoanalytic-semiotic model has been questioned in work which focuses on the changing modes of film viewing, brought about by the introduction of cable tv, the domestic use of the vcr, and the rise of the cinema complex (see for instance Anne Friedberg's Window Shopping and Timothy Cor rigan's A Cinema Without Walls4). The recent directions and debates in film his toriography are also important here. The methodological shifts that film history debates have undergone during the last 10 years have challenged not only the ahistoricism of psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory and its privileging of classical

Hollywood for its conceptual framework: this work has also resulted in a change to the object of film history by addressing the different (historical) formations of cinema as a cultural technology. The work of Tom Gunning is central here, along with the work of Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery.5 While the differences between much of this work are often immense, what it shares - in different ways, in different degrees of sophistication and often to different ends - is a move away from the centrality of the figure of the ideal spectator. What characterises this work, whether as its aim or as a side effect, is the dislodging and complication of ideas of the assumed passivity of the viewer, his or her overly determined relation to the ideal spectator, and the ahistoricism of this figure.

3 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers· Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), and Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing Hol lywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

4 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern Condi tion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls Movies and Culture After Vietnam (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).

5 See Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde," Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986), pp.63-70, and Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). 5

While much of this work has generated important shifts in the parameters

and directions of film and mass culture theory, in many instances some of the most problematic terms of psychoanalytic film theory have gone unchecked.

While the assumed passivity of the viewer has been critically rejected, in many instances this has been less through a reexamination of what is meant by passivity than through the uncovering of various "active" reading/viewing practices. As more and more sites of active readings are located, the assumed "passivity" of the

spectator simply becomes more securely a norm, from which exceptions can be found. As has often been pointed out, the strength of much of this recent work on

spectatorship is in its specificity. Rather than attempting to develop another monolithic account of cinema spectatorship, it has addressed particular, his torically and generically specific, spectatorial practices.

In keeping with some of this work, this project likewise takes as its focus specific spectatorial practices - those which have been aligned with the figure of the female spectator. My intent however is to examine and shift the very terms in which these modes of spectatorship have been addressed, and, in the process, to propose other frameworks through which we can understand different spectatorial practices in terms of what they entail and enable.

In this study I turn to the work of Walter Benjamin, using his theory of film reception and representation- and his politico-philosophical project more generally - as both a framework and a departure point for addressing a range of spectatorial practices. The spectatorial practices and relations to the image that I address here are ones which have frequently been seen as the domain of the female spectator - a non-fetishistic fascination with the image, an ambulatory gaze, forms of "cinema love," and an experience of proximity in relation to the image. Benjamin's work has had a long and shifting relation to contemporary

Anglo-American film theory. His essay "The Work of Art in the Age ofMechan- 6 ical Reproduction"6 sits alongside Lacan's "The Mirror Stage" and Mulvey's

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" as contemporary film theory's central and most often-cited texts. In the 1970's, Benjamin's "Work of Art" essay, along with his essay "The Author as Producer"7 and some of his other writings on

Brecht, were key texts in the development of a Brechtian film theory. Over the last ten years however, Benjamin's work has taken on a renewed and dynamic role in contemporary debates around film and mass culture, particularly for studies of spectatorship in its gendered and historically specific forms.

In 1989 New German Critique published an issue on Weimar film theory containing a number of essays which have gone on to play a central role in Ben jaminian film theory, most notably perhaps Miriam Hansen's essay "Benjamin,

Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology."'& In this essay, Hansen positioned the "Work of Art" essay in the context of Benjamin's theory of experience, complicating the earlier and more familiar readings of this essay in Anglo-American film theory (in which Benjamin was seen to be simply positioning film as a non-auratic cultural form) through a detailed analysis of

Benjamin's redemptive reading of film. Focusing on Benjamin's concept ofthe optical unconscious and reading this concept through his work on Proust,

Baudelaire, and his theory of language, Hansen argues that it is through his proposal of the optical unconscious that Benjamin can be seen as suggesting that

6 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (Suffolk: Fontana/Collins, 1982), pp.219-253.

7 Benjamin, "The Author as Producer," Reflections, trans. Edmund Jeph cott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), pp.220-238.

8 Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land ofTechnology,"' New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987), pp.179- 224. See also in this issue: Patrice Petro, "Modernity and Mass Culture in Weimar: Contours of a Discourse on Sexuality in Early Theories of Perception and Representation," pp.l15-146; and Richard W. Allen, "Aesthetic Experience of Modernity: Benjamin, Adorno, and Contemporary Film Theory," pp.225-240. 7

film can overcome the crisis of experience that characterizes modernity (experi

ential poverty and the demise of memorative communication) by enabling a

(redeemed) form of auratic experience. Through its formal procedures, through

the nature of the filmic image, and through the modes of reception it enables, film

can provide a means of giving form to the crisis of experience which underlies

and characterizes modernity and establish new forms of transmissibility in and

through it.

This (re)turn to Benjamin's work- and to the Frankfurt school more

generally - has enabled a radical shift in the ways in which film reception and

representation have been conceived and debated. Benjamin's interest in the

cultural technology of cinema - both its modes of representation and its modes of

reception - lies in the ways in which film intersects with and is implicated in the

structuring of experience in 20th century modernity: the experience of the city

and the rise of the city mass; the shock-like nature and fragmentation of everyday

life; and the relations between filmic reception and representation and the

phantasmagoria of the new which characterizes commodity culture. One of the

central values of Benjamin's work is the way in which he addresses modes of per

ception and reception as historically specific, and in this respect his work has

played a key role in debates about film history and has also enabled a meth

odological shift in film theory debates - a turn away from privileging the textual

analysis of an individual film text to the analysis of particular formations of

cinema and spectatorship. Benjamin's work has also been particularly generative for re-posing ideas of gendered spectatorship. This is certainly in part because of the ways in which he addresses cinema in terms of its place in everyday life, but it is also because Benjamin brings critical attention to what have generally been regarded as marginal modes of reception and experience - particularly forms of visual fascination. While Benjamin certainly doesn't pay much attention toques tions of gender in his analysis of film (or in his theory of experience more 8

generally), the relations to the image and practices of reading that are privileged in his work intersect, in a number of ways, with a relation to the image more

generally credited to the female spectator. Equally importantly, Benjamin's

understanding of filmic representation and reception turns our attention to the temporal aspects of cinema and spectatorship. Indeed this is one of the key values

of his work for this study - through his concept of the optical unconscious which film and photography enable, Benjamin provides a framework to address the temporalities operative in the filmic image and the practices of "reading" it can entail. In this respect, his work brings questions about the memorative practices of cultural forms into debates around film and spectatorship.

The work of Miriam Hansen, Patrice Petro, and more recently, Guiliana

Bruno, has been central to this renewed interest in Benjamin's work.9 These theorists have drawn on Benjamin's work to address particular formations of cinema and their modes of spectatorship, examining the ways in which cinema produces and is implicated in a range of visual and entertainment practices. Each of these theorists develop their readings of particular cinemas through analyses of the ways in which these formations of cinema intersect with other cultural forms and practices, examining cinema's place in- and as- a public sphere. Their studies examine the ways in which modes of spectatorship are shaped not only by the cinematic institution and particular filmic texts, but through the structuring of experience and reception in modernity.

9 The most significant studies here would be Patrice Petro's Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Prin ceton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989); Miriam Hansen's Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); Guiliana Bruno's Streetwalking on a Ruined Map Cultural Theory and the City Films ofElvira Notari (Princeton, New Jersey: Prin ceton University Press, 1993); and for female spectatorship in relation to post modernism debates, Anne Friedberg's Window Shopping. Cinema and the Post modern. 9

This thesis draws strongly on these recent re-readings of Benjamin's work.

Like many of these studies, my interest is in looking at the ways in which cinema

intersects with historical formations and structurings of experience and sub jectivity. Also, as with much of the above mentioned work, my focus is with

questions of gendered spectatorship. Where this project differs is that here I use

Benjamin's work to address one of the female spectator's defining tropes- an

experience of proximity in relation to the image. By drawing on Benjamin's argu

ments about memorative practices, experience, and the image, and the forms of

temporal proximity and distance that they entail, I attempt to both shift the spatial

and narrative focus of psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory and repose ideas of

proximity and fascination in arguments about female spectatorship.

The first half of this thesis looks at Benjamin's theory and "practice" of the

image, focusing on the forms of proximity and distance - both spatial and

temporal- that underlie the various image practices that he addresses (and these

include not only photography and film, but also allegory, the "profane illumi

nation" of Surrealism, and Benjamin's notorious concept of the dialectical image).

The second section turns more directly to particular spectatorial practices and

relations to the image - both spectatorial practices elicited and enabled by particu

lar films or television programs, and spectatorial practices staged or represented

in films and television programs.

At issue in this thesis are the ways in which Benjamin's redemptive read

ing of film and his analysis of the structuring of experience in modernity can be

drawn on for feminist film theory. Firstly, I argue that it is in terms of the temporal aspects of film's modes of representation and reception that Benjamin

argues that film offers a cultural form which can embrace the structuring of expe rience in modernity and offer new forms of memorative communication and nar rativity. Focusing on the place of a viewing/reading practice characterized by

forms of distracted fascination in Benjamin's work on film and commodity cul- 10

ture, I examine the ways in which this aspect of his work provides a framework to

reexamine debates around female spectatorship. By looking at the memorative

practices Benjamin sees as possible through such practices of viewing/reading, I

aim to bring questions of memory and the structuring of experience into debates

around female spectatorship. Secondly, I look at the ways in which Benjamin's

redemptive hopes for film can be critically inflected today in terms of gendered

experience. Taking up his analysis of the commodity fetish and its place in the

structuring of experience in modernity, I examine the ways in which gender and

gendered experience are critically written through by the commodity form. In this

respect my argument goes beyond the claim that the commodity itself is gendered

in terms of its presentation and display. My interest, rather, lies in the ways in

which gendered experience itself can be understood as being infused with, and

structured by, the temporality of the commodity- the new as the always-the-same

- and the dream world of mass culture. It is in the light of this argument that I

examine some of the ways we may want to argue that the crisis of experience -

which lies at the heart of Benjamin's project- must be seen as taking gendered

forms.

This second argument stands as the basis for the second half of the thesis,

where I take up Benjamin's analysis of particular "social types," in particular, the

collector, the ragpicker, and the whore. Benjamin's interest in the social types that

come into being in modernity is in terms of the relations to the commodity and

the dream world of mass culture that they stage. By examining the various "read

ing" practices which characterize these figures I make two conceptual moves: I

look at the ways in which these reading practices provide a framework for recon

ceiving particular spectatorial pratices; and I critically inflect these figures in

terms of gender. Unlike many studies which have turned to the figure of the jlaneur as a framework for addressing the female spectator's ambulatory gaze and the intersections between relations to the image and relations to the commodity, 11

here I focus on some of Benjamin's social types which have received considerably

less attention in recent film theory debates. For instance, I argue that Benjamin's

figure of the collector and his/her memorative practices provides a useful frame

work to address forms of cinema love (or what is more generally known as

cinephilia), both in terms of particular spectatorial practices which are character

ized by the gathering and juxtaposition of filmic or televisual "fragments," and in

terms of films and television programs which can themselves be seen as taking up

the position of the collector through their practices of quotation. The other social

type that I restage in this study is the figure of the whore, who is for Benjamin

both commodity and seller in one. Like Benjamin's whore, the actress-star can

also be seen as both commodity and seller in one. By replacing Benjamin's figure

of the whore with the figure ofthe aging- and discarded- actress in 1950's and

1960's Hollywood film (using films like Sunset Boulevard, Whatever Happened

to Baby Jane?), I examine gendered relations to the image/commodity which are

marked not so much by longing (as we find for instance in the women's film) but

rather by a form of rage. These films, I argue, play out a particular relation to -

and experience of- the commodity fetish and the temporality of the new, a rela tion of frustration.

The thesis is structured, then, around spectatorial practices and relations to the image which have been aligned with - or credited to - the figure of the female

spectator: fascination, wonder, melancholy, love. To these more familiar states, affects, and sentiments associated with female spectatorship, I also add another - rage. Each of these relations to the image is read through specific areas of Ben jamin's work. For instance, cinema love is read through his work on collecting; fascination is read through his work on involuntary memory and his concept of the dialectical image, and rage is read through his analysis of the commodity fet ish.

Rather than turning to the work of filmmakers who have worked directly with some of Benjamin's work- such as Alexander Kluge- or films which 12

directly take up some ofhis key concerns (for instance the films ofUlrike

Ottinger), I have turned to popular films and television programs which elicit,

enable, and/or stage relations to the image in which memorative practices and

forms of fascination are central.

In the first chapter I look at the theory of film Benjamin proposes in the

"Work of Art" essay and place this essay in the context of his theory of experi

ence and his understanding of modernity. Benjamin's theory of experience - by no means a homogeneous project and spread across a diverse range of his writings - provides the critical framework for his politico-philosophical theory of film.

Chapter 1 examines some of the key concepts in his work which, while not

directly related to cinema, have a number of implications for how we understand

Benjamin's arguments about film, tradition, and memorative practices. Drawing on a number of interrelated concerns in Benjamin's work - involuntary memory

(developed through his reading of Proust), the gestus, and his idea of the mimetic faculty - I argue that questions of temporality and memory are central to his theory of film.

The second chapter examines the various practices of the image that Ben jamin addresses, from allegory to his proposal of the dialectical image. Focusing on the place of fascination in Benjamin's critical method, I look at the relations between the different temporal operations found in these practices of the image and film. Chapter 3 examines Benjamin's practices of the image in terms of the economies of fascination and desire that they entail. Looking at the degree to which his work can be contained within a melancholic aesthetic - and what the implications of this may be for feminist readings of his work - I trace the tension around melancholy which characterises his project, arguing that what in fact breaks melancholy in Benjamin's theory of the image is a particular form of proximity, a proximity which institutes a shock and enables a form of memora tive practice. 13

In Chapter 4 I take up Benjamin's work on collecting to address

"amorous" relations to film and television or "cinema love." Here I look at spec

tatorial and textual practices which play with a kind of cultural refuse of cinema

and argue that they can entail some of the memorative practices that Benjamin

locates in collecting. The second section of this chapter extends these debates by

looking at the sitcom Roseanne, a sitcom which involves particular forms of col

lecting in its play with the cultural refuse of popular culture.

Chapter 5 turns to Benjamin's analysis of the commodity to repose debates

around female spectatorship. Drawing from recent work on female spectatorship,

I look at some of the ways in which Benjamin's project offers a reproposal of the

forms of film-viewer relations seen as characterizing female spectatorship. Focus

ing on the aging actress films of the 1950's and 1960's, I argue that these films

narratively and visually stage a particular relation to - and experience of- the

commodity/image through their central characters. Refusing their position as dis

carded commodities, the aging actresses in these films play out gendered experi

ences of the temporality of commodity fetish and its place in the structuring of

experience. The final chapter, chapter 6, continues this analysis of gendered expe

rience and the commodity form, but returns the discussion to the questions raised

in Chapter 1 regarding film, tradition, and transmissibility. Using John Cas

savetes' films Opening Night and Love Streams•and their representations of

women in crisis, I reexamine Benjamin's understanding of the crisis of experience in terms of its gendered forms - in this instance, in terms of the breakdown. This chapter draws on the earlier arguments about temporality and the image in Ben jamin's redemptive reading of film, but explores these issues in terms of perform ance and gesture.

In a sense there are two readings running through this thesis. On the one hand I am addressing particular modes of spectatorship in film and television by reading them through Benjamin's writings (both his writing on film and the place 14 of film in his theory of modernity). On the other hand I am reading Benjamin through these modes of spectatorship and through particular films and television programs. While these two readings are interwoven throughout the thesis it is not my aim to unify them. Rather there is a tension left between them, and this tension is a result of inserting questions of gender into Benjamin's work on film and his theory of experience more generally. While Benjamin's work on film and its reconception of modes of reception certainly has a number of implications for feminist film theory, his is certainly not a feminist project. What his work offers to debates around female spectatorship- and to this project more specifically- is a conceptual framework through which we can repropose forms of film-viewer relations marked by forms of visual fascination. What a feminist reading of Ben- jamin's work can generate is an analysis of the ways in which the crisis of experience takes gendered forms.

As many have argued, Benjamin's theory of film is not a theory ofthe cinema of his time but of a possible cinema. Reading this work now, Benjamin's theory of film reaches both backwards and forwards. His theory of film is written through by the avantgarde film practices of the 1920's and it calls for a future cinema, a possible cinema which lies as a promise in the technology of film.

Nevertheless Benjamin does not ignore the films of his own time. Over and above the references to Soviet film that we find in "Moscow Diary"IO (where Benjamin speaks a disappointment with the films he saw), he refers to many films in the

"Work of Art" essay- Gance's Napoleon and Dreyer's Joan ofArc for instance.

And while some of these films he mentions - such as Napoleon - represent the enemy camp of cinema, this is by no means always the case (as his enthusiasm for

Chaplin makes clear). Clearly we cannot collapse Benjamin's theory of film with cinema as we know it - with the cinema that developed with Hollywood or since.

10 Benjamin, "Moscow Diary," trans. Richard Sieburth, ed. Gary Smith, October 35 (Winter 1985). 15

At the same time though we cannot see it only as the proposal of a possible cinema. What is remarkable about Benjamin's understanding of film - the ways he reads film - is that there are striking connections with a range of film practices and modes of spectatorship and the possibilities that they contain. Indeed I would suggest that by stressing the polemical and propositional nature of Benjamin's theory of film too greatly we can in the end lose one of the most important aspects of his work - the ways in which it provides us with a conceptual frame work to reconceive not only a future cinema but also, and equally importantly, the very terms in which we make sense of (our own) experiences of cinema. 16

Chapter 1

BENJAMIN'S THEORY OF FILM: HOPE

the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition ... And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the con temporary crisis and renewal of mankind. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of cultural heritage. 1

shock's hope

This passage, which appears early on in the "Work of Art" essay, sets the

stage for the revolutionary hope Benjamin locates in film. This hope- on which

he dangerously places his bets- lies in what he calls its "destructive aspect" and in

what this destruction enables. What film destroys and clears away is the tradition

of art, of art as tradition, and in its path film's modes of representation and recep-

tion both constitute and allow for new forms of subject-object relations. Already

in this passage it is clear that for Benjamin film's "positive" aspect is neither the

reverse nor the obverse of its "destructive, cathartic aspect" as we might have

expected, but rather its extension or fulfillment. Film's destructive capacity lies in

its modes of representation and reception which, as Benjamin argues, are based

on the principle of shock. Through its deployment of shock procedures (particu-

1 Benjamin "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Suffolk: Fontana/Collins, 1982), p.223. Hereafter referred to as WOA and page numbers will be given in the text. 17

larly through the principle of montage) and through the forms of reception film

enables, film both provides a critical analysis of the shocks which structure every

day life, and beyond - or rather through - this, it provides the means for new

forms of perception and experience.

This chapter will explore Benjamin's hopes for film, charting his argu ments about the forms of destruction and renewal which film entails. What is at

stake in this dynamic of destruction and renewal, what is destroyed or renewed, destroyed and renewed, is, for Benjamin, experience and its transmissibility. Ben jamin's theory of film is inextricably intertwined with his theory of experience, and in this chapter I will trace the relations between destruction and renewal in terms of their central place in his work on experience, crisis, and modernity. I will address particular aspects of Benjamin's theory of experience in relation to film, television, and spectatorship in each chapter of this thesis. The first chapter, however, will differ from the later chapters in (at least) one significant respect.

Whereas in the later chapters I will be drawing on aspects of his work which, while not directly related to film, offer a framework for rethinking particular issues and debates in film theory (such as his work on collecting for instance), in this chapter I will focus primarily on Benjamin's writing on film.

The dynamic of destruction and renewal that Benjamin identifies in film is located around shock, as that which both characterises experience in modernity and as that which serves as the formal principle and technique of film. Benjamin's proposal of shock experience not only underlies both the forms of destruction and renewal film stages, but also, I would argue, stands as the bridge between destruc tion and renewal - and this can be understood as a move from shock to an idea of awakening.

In focusing on the dynamic of destruction and renewal that film offers, I want to address a number of questions: what are the radical practices of destruc- 18

tion which film would enable? what in fact is being renewed? and what kind of

film practice (if any) could Benjamin's work be seen as proposing? I will address these questions by looking at the spatial and temporal aspects of his theory of

film. The first section- an overview of Benjamin's theory of film in the "Work of

Art" essay - examines the relations between the temporality of film (its principle

of shock) and the temporal structuring of experience in modernity. This first sec tion focuses on some of the central terms of his theory of film, in particular the

concepts of distraction and shock, and looks at the ways in which film, for Ben jamin, can provide an analysis of (and a training in adaptating to) the forms of

shock which structure everday life. The second section focuses on what would

seem to be the more spatial concept of the "optical unconscious"- the "visual

realms" available to and through film and photography which activate new modes

of perception and reading. In this section I will look at the ways in which Ben jamin understands the filmic image (and this will be returned to in greater detail

in chapters 2 and 3 where I examine his understanding of the filmic image more

specifically in relation to his concept of the dialectical image). In the final section ofthe chapter, I will look at the ways in which the optical unconscious must also be seen as entailing a temporal aspect. It is in the relations between the temporal and spatial aspects of the optical unconscious that we can begin to locate the rela tions between destruction and renewal which lie at the heart of Benjamin's theory of film. In this closing section I will examine Benjamin's comments on film acting and gesture, arguing that what underlies Benjamin's proposal of film's opti cal unconscious is a form of temporal charging. It is through this idea of a temporal charging, I will argue, that we can begin to both unravel and pursue

Benjamin's hopes for film and bring them into our own historical moment. ***

Benjamin's proposal of the destructive aspect of film lies at the core of his

"Work of Art" essay. This essay, written in 1935/6 (and in a number of versions) 19

offers Benjamin's most comprehensive account ofhis theory of film, and while

Benjamin certainly also wrote about film elsewhere,2 this essay stands as his most

complete and well known work on film aesthetics and reception.3 "Well known"

does not really convey this essay's status and circulation. Like much of Ben jamin's work, it is readily drawn on for its catchcry quotability, and in Anglo

American film theory and cultural studies it has become such an overly-cited text

- and so weighed down by its canonical status - that outside the sphere of Ben- jamin studies and critical theory, critical discussion of this text can be met with a

kind of bored indifference. And yet despite the claims that it "has been done to

death," the theory of film Benjamin outlines in this essay- whether taken alone or

read in the context of his theory of experience - provides a framework through

which we can begin (again) to repose some of the central problematics of con

temporary film theory. Most significantly for me here, Benjamin's theory of film

provides us with a way of reconceiving ideas of cinema spectatorship. His theory

of film provides a framework through which we can address different types of

spectatorial practices and rethink forms of visual fascination.

The "Work of Art" essay has played a significant role in Anglo-American

film debates for over three decades now. While it was drawn on for a Brechtian

film theory and practice in the 1970's and early 80's, this essay - and Benjamin's

work as a whole - has more recently taken on a renewed importance in film

2 See in particular the discussions of Soviet film in "Moscow Diary," trans. Richard Sieburth, October 35 (Winter 1985), and his comments on film in "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London and New York: Verso, 1983).

3 Benjamin wrote four versions of the "Work of Art" essay. The version translated and published in Illuminations is based on the third version of this essay. 20

theory debates.4 For much of this more recent work, Benjamin's work has pro

vided a framework for addressing the historical formations of modes of spectator

ship, particularly in terms of the continuities and ruptures between preclassical,

classical, and postclassical spectatorship. 5 What his work offers to contemporary

film and mass culture debates is a politico-philosophical analysis of the cultural

technology of cinema in its historical formations, and equally importantly, in its

possibilities. My focus here is not so much in recounting the theory of film Ben

jamin develops in the "Work of Art" essay. This essay has already been

extensively and dynamically read in terms of both its theory of film and its

implications for contemporary film theory, particularly in the work of Miriam

Hansen, Gertrud Koch, Patrice Petro and others. 6 Rather - and following from

their work- I will place Benjamin's theory of film in the context of his theory of

experience and use it as a basis to address the politico-philosophical hopes Ben-

4 Both Martin Walsh and Stephen Heath draw on Benjamin's work in their influential essays on Brechtian-informed film theory and practice. See Martin Walsh, The Brechtian Aspects ofRadical Cinema, ed. Keith M. Griffiths (London: BFI, 1981), and Stephen Heath, "Lessons from Brecht," Screen 15.2 (Summer 1984), pp.103-128.

5 See for instance the work of Tom Gunning on the cinema of attractions, in particular his essay "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator," Art & Text 34 (Spring 1989), pp.31-45; Miriam Hansen's Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (London and Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), and her essay "Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere," Viewing Positions· Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994), pp.134-152; and Anne Friedberg's Window Shopping· Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley and LA: University of California Press, 1993).

6 See Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,"' New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987), pp.179-224; Gertrud Koch "Cosmos in Film: On the Concept of Space in Walter Benjamin's 'Work of Art' Essay," trans. Nancy Nenno, Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994); and Patrice Petro Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Prin ceton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 21

jamin places in film.

The "Work of Art" essay proposes a theory of art developed through an

"analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" (WOA, p.226). According to Benjamin's familiar argument, in the commodity culture of modernity, the aura

-as both an attribute of the work of art and also of natural objects- undergoes a threat which marks its demise. Benjamin's essay focuses on the radically altered and challenged place of art, and with it tradition, as a result of the development of film and photography and the forms of mechanical reproduction they entail. As

Benjamin argues, film, like photography, radically threatens what has historically come to stand for the aura of the traditional work of art - its (claims to) unique ness, authority, and authenticity, and with these, social privilege. If the work of art's authority is based on its singularity- a singularity in place and time, a singularity which does not expend itself- the principle of reproducibility, of a reproducibility which marks itself as independent of an original, claims no such authority. Film and photography both allow for the technical reproducibility of the work of art (its duplication, multiplication and transportation in the form of the copy or reproduction) but also, because the principles of reproduction are the very foundations of filmic and photographic representation, they fundamentally challenge the definition, social status, and function of art through their technical means and as cultural technologies. Through the absence of an original, film and photography preclude the concept of authenticity (which has become bound up with cult value) and can rid themselves of the cultural baggage which it bears.

This of course has implications in terms of reception: the object becomes avail able for a new kind of scrutiny on the part of the spectator. We could say that authority has traded places. No longer the stronghold of the work and maintained by its claims to authenticity, it is now (or potentially), for Benjamin, the posses sion of the collective audience. 22

Benjamin makes it clear that film and photography are not the first forms

of reproduction. The work of art has always been reproducible, and its

reproducibility has traditionally served the work of art's claims to authenticity.

The presence of the copy, such as the forgery, traditionally operated to further

authorise the orginal. 7 Moreover, the copy of the work entered the history of that

work: "the history of the 'Mona Lisa,' for instance, encompasses the kind and

number of its copies made in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries" (WOA, p.245).

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the his torical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardised by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object. (WOA, p.223)

With film and photography we are dealing with a different form of reproduction, a form of reproduction which fundamentally (though not- as his comments on fascist aesthetics make clear- irreconcilably) serves a summons to the concept of authenticity. If reproduction is inherent to film and photography, to speak of the original with these media is inherently problematic if not redundant. With film and photography the concept and aura of the original loses hold.

According to Benjamin's argument, the destruction or clearing away of

"the traditional value of cultural heritage" that mechanical reproduction introduces (via the destruction of the concept of authenticity and the aura - the bases ofthe traditional work of art's authority) allows for both the reactivation ofthe object and the resensitization of the sensory apparatus. These two processes are related, and they stand as the bases of Benjamin's utopian hope for film: the hope that film can enable a form of (collective) innervation, a recharging of the human

7 "The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical - and, of course, not only technical- reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis a vis technical reproduction. II WOA, p.222. 23

sensory apparatus through a radically altered relation to technology. As I will go

on to argue, both these processes- the reactivation of the object and the

resensitization ofthe subject- are integrally tied to and developed through Ben jamin's theory of shock.

Part 1: Film and Modernity

rehearsing shock

The concept of shock is crucial to Benjamin's work on film and to his

work as a whole. Like many theorists of modernity (and drawing on the work of

Georg Sirnrnel), Benjamin argues that modernity is characterised by and written through with shock experience: daily life consists of a sensory bombardment

which both assaults and seduces the subject in work and leisure- both the work

ing body in industrial (and we could add - though in different ways - postindustrial) labour, and the experience of the body in the metropolis. What dis tinguishes and defines modern life is the principle of interruption and interrupt-

ibility which structures and destroys space and time as continuous. As Peter

Osborne has argued, "for Benjamin, unlike what has become the mainstream of the sociological tradition, 'modernity' is no mere name for a chunk of historical time and the social forms that happen to have occupied it. Rather, it designates a temporal structure of experience."8 Modernity is marked by (and understood as) a crisis of experience and an experience of crisis. Caught in a constant and endlessly repeated present, the possibility of either reflecting on experience or articulating it is virtually impossible.

8 Peter Osborne, "Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Ben jamin's Politics of Time," Walter Benjamin's Philosophy Destruction and Expe rience, eds Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London & New York: Rout ledge, 1994), p.83. 24

Benjamin's interest in film, like his interest in Baudelaire, is in terms of

how this temporal structure of experience can be grasped, given form, and inter

rupted. In Baudelaire's lyric poetry Benjamin found the attempt to embrace or

grasp this particular temporal structuring of experience: shock experience or

Chockerlebnis in Baudelaire's work is grasped and given the weight of experience

(Erfahrung).9 And yet while Baudelaire heroically embraced shock experience,

the limitation of Baudelaire for Benjamin is that he embraces shock experience

(and mimetically embodies it in his work) in an attempt to rescue it for the

eternal. In this respect, Benjamin's aim diverged from that of Baudelaire. His aim

- and this is where his hope for film lies - is in the potential fissure that lies within this temporal structure. This fissure would be the possibility of renewal through

destruction, and the production of new forms - or perhaps practices - of experi-

ence.lO

9 The distinction between two forms of experience - Erlebnis and Erfahrung - is central to Benjamin's theory of experience. Erlebnis refers to lived experience - to that which can be allocated to a specific point in place and time. Erfahrung on the other hand refers to a form of experience which is crucially connected to that which is passed on, to tradition and memorative communica tion. For Benjamin's discussion of the Erfahrung/Erlebnis distinction, see "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet In The Era ofHigh Cap italism, pp.117-120. This distinction is also discussed in Lloyd Spencer's notes to "Central Park," New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985) and in Miriam Hansen's introduction to Alexander Kluge's and Oskar Negt's Public Sphere and Experi ence, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel and Assenka Oskiloff (Min neapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.xvii.

10 Giorgio Agamben has pursued such a logic in his book Infancy and His tory, a book which has developed one of the most interesting explorations of Ben jamin's project. Agamben writes: "Standing face to face with one of the great wonders of the world (let us say the patio de los leones in the Alhambra), the overwhelming majority of people have no wish to experience it, preferring instead that the camera should. Of course the point is not to deplore this state of affairs, but to take note of it. For perhaps at the heart ofthis apparently senseless denial there lurks a grain ofwisdom, in which we can glimpse the germinating seed offuture experience. The task which this essay proposes, taking up the legacy of Benjamin's project 'of the coming philosophy', is to prepare the likely ground in which this seed can mature" (my emphasis). Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction ofExperience, trans. Liz Heron (London & New York: Verso, 1993), p.15. I will return to Agamben's work later in this chap ter. 25

Benjamin's claim is that film can give form to the crisis of experience.

Through its principle of fragmentation, film can stage the form and temporality of experience in (and that defines) modernity, and through the distracted attention it requires of the spectator, film enables a form of "alert absent-mindedness" 11 -a form of distracted attention on the part of the spectator that can serve to counter shock. Film would seem to have a peculiar place here. If, as Benjamin argues, film's formal procedures are always already based on the principles of shock, surely film would perpetuate the dislocating shocks of everyday life. But Ben- jamin claims a qualitative difference for the forms and status of shock in film.

Firstly he turns his attention to film's modes of reception: Benjamin argues that film reception provides a means of countering shock, of countering the psychic and physiological assault it can entail. Arguing, like his friend and colleague

Siegfried Kracauer, that film's mode of reception is based in distraction (a form of under- and over-attentiveness), Benjamin claims that this distracted attention operates as a form of buffer - and even more so in that the film is viewed collec tively.l2 Film then, at this level of Benjamin's argument, operates as a kind of training ground to counter the shocks of modern life. In the cinema, one learns to parry shock, to play (with) it. Benjamin addresses this under the category of

"rehearsing" shock:

The film is the art form that is in keeping with the increased threat to his life which modern man has to face. Man's need to expose himself to shock effects is his adjustment to the dangers threaten ing him. The film corresponds to profound changes in the apper ceptive apparatus - changes that are experienced on an individual

11 The German word Zerstreuung (translated as "distraction" in the English translation of the "Work of Art" essay) includes in its meanings absent mindedness.

12 See Kracauer's essay "The Cult of Distraction" in The Mass Ornament· Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA., London: Har vard Univ. Press, 1995). 26

scale by the man in the street in big-city traffic, on a historical scale by every present-day citizen. (WOA, p.252)

If film provides a means of rehearsing shock, of practising countering it, the collective nature ofthis "rehearsal" is also of importance for Benjamin. The

collective reception and parrying of shock enables a collective recognition of the

forms of crisis and alienation which the individual experiences. Moreover it does

so in an almost cathartic way, providing a release or discharge for the audience - a release Benjamin identifies most strongly with laughter.13 "It is inherent in the technique of the film as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert," Benjamin writes (WOA, p.233).

This "expert" status entails or even produces a form of protective distance, a

"critically testing" attitude: 14

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the critical and receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film. The moment these responses become manifest they control each other. (WOA, p.236)

Benjamin's comments on the collective reception of film are perhaps somewhat jarring, particularly when one's experiences of cinema-going can be of fighting for one's reading of the film, of fighting over the film, against and from within this "collective" audience - and often losing. (The chants of "kill the bitch" accompanying Fatal Attraction and the delirious support of Michael Douglas'

13 For an excellent account of Benjamin's hopes for the collective laughter of the cinema audience see Miriam Hansen, "Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney," South Atlantic Quarterly 92.1 (Winter 1993), pp.27-61.

14 While for Benjamin the mass audience is characterised by the desire to bring things closer, there is certainly a form of distance which is established in its place, but one no longer produced from the object and its aura and authority, but rather from the subject and his/her "critically testing" attitude. 27

character "D'Fens" in Falling Down would be exemplary here. In this respect I share some of Adorno's reservations about Benjamin's enthusiasm for the collective laughter of the audience ). 15 However what is of more interest at this point is that Benjamin's comments on the collective audience place it within the context of mimetic adaptation, with film serving as both a training ground to counter shock and as a training in collectivity. What I want to focus on is the status such forms of adaptation have in Benjamin's theory of film. A question, in other words, as to whether he is simply arguing for film as a training ground through which one learns to parry shock and find a site for the release of its side effects

(principally, perhaps, a permanent state of anxiety), or whether he is proposing a more radical hope and function for film - the possibility of resensitizing or remapping the sensory apparatus (what Susan Buck-Morss, following Benjamin, calls a form of "innervation"),16 and the possibility of breaking through empty, repetitive shock experience.

This tension as to the status of mimetic adaptation is particularly apparent when we examine Benjamin's comments on the stimulus shield. Benjamin's claims for the rehearsal of shock in film are tied to his reading of Freud's concept of the stimulus or defense shield as it is proposed in Beyond the Pleasure Princi-

15 See in particular Adorno's letter to Benjamin in response to the "Work of Art" essay (18.3.1936), published in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1980).

16 Benjamin develops this idea of innervation most clearly in the closing section of his essay on Surrealism: "Only when in technology body and image so interpenatrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innerva tion, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary dis charge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto." Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London & New York: Verso, 1992), p.239. 28

ple (1921).17 Freud developed his theory ofthe stimulus shield largely through his work on war trauma, arguing that consciousness' primary role is to serve as a protective or defensive shield to buffer shock. Benjamin's reading of Freud's argu ment was to have an important place in his work on modernity. If shock charac terises everyday life through the constant sensory assaults that bombard the sub ject, these assaults have to be buffered. Benjamin argues that the principle of shock in film provides a training in countering shock and a training of the stimulus shield:

There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by the film. In a film, perception in the form of shocks was estab lished as a formal principle. That which determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of recep tion in the film.1s

In this neurological model, the more stimulus has to be buffered, the more stimulus is required by the subject to register anything at all. So, while the stimulus shield provides a defensive surface, this defensive buffer can also become a kind of armour which desensitizes and more or less innoculates the subject. It is this capacity of the stimulus shield and its "work"- its capacity to (fur ther) desensitize the subject- that becomes of central importance in the closing section of the "Work of Art" essay. The stimulus shield, as that which buffers shock, could be seen as the site upon which the stakes between adaptation and innervation are played out. In her recent analysis of the "Work of Art" essay,

17 See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, trans. from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953-74), vol.l8, ch.3. Freud's work on the stimulus shield and the "mystic writing pad" has played an important role in a number of film theory debates. For another reading of this aspect of Freud's work in relation to film see Thierry Kuntzel, "A Note Upon the Filmic Apparatus," Quarterly Review ofFilm Studies 1.3 (Aug, 1976), pp.267-271.

18 Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire, p.l32 29

"Aesthetics and Anaesthetics," Susan Buck-Morss has argued that the stimulus

shield can result in an anaesthetizing of the subject. 19 Tracing Benjamin's analysis

of fascist aesthetics, Buck-Morss examines the ways in which the stimulus shield

can be seen as a form of mimetic adaptation to the shocks that structure everyday life, and argues that the "goal" of the synaesthetic system becomes one of

"numb[ing]the organism."20 As Buck-Morss further suggests, it is precisely this numbing of the sensory apparatus which, Benjamin argues, can serve as the

ground for fascism and fascist aesthetics. Citing Marinetti's manifesto ("War is beautiful because it irritates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body" WOA p.243), Benjamin closes the "Work of Art" essay by linking sensory alienation,

self-alienation, and fascist aesthetics: "Mankind, which in Homer's time was an

object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-

alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order" (WOA, p.244). Mimetic adaptation is clearly not enough. Benjamin's claims for film extend well beyond adaptation- they lie rather in the concept of innervation, a "resensitizing" of the individual and collective subject. What Benjamin claims for film is that it is precisely through the principle of shock (a shock which tears open the object, refiguring it and making it available for a new kind of scrutiny) that we find the possibility of a resensitizing of the subject, a resensitizing which entails a new form ofpercep- tion and reading - a mimetic apprehension.

Film, then, plays a complex role in the decay of communicable experi ence. The fragmentation of time and movement, the rush of sensory stimuli, the

19 Susan Buck-Morss "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October 62 (Fal11992), pp.3-41. See also Miriam Hansen, "OfMice and Ducks."

20 Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics," p.18. 30

tactile, ballistic nature of film are, in a sense, of a similar order to the forms of

fragmentation characteristic of everyday life - both in terms of labour (the pro

duction process) and leisure (the phantasmagorias of commodity culture). If film's

principle of shock provides the basis for a critical grasp of shock experience, it

does so on a number of grounds. Firstly, it enables a "rehearsing" of shock experi

ence and a "release" of what we could call its side effects: if film exemplifies the

historical shifts in modes of perception in modernity (the bombardment of

sensory stimuli, the fragmentation of movement and time into dislocated

moments) it can also mobilize these modes of perception in such a way that the

spectator can begin to locate him/herself within and against them. Equally impor

tantly here, through its principle of shock, film provides an ideal means for representing marginal (and historically new) forms of experience and perception.

But secondly, and more importantly, film can involve a form of shock which can break through the stimulus shield. As Buck-Morss has put it: "How a film is con

structed, whether it breaks through the numbing shield of consciousness or

merely provides a 'drill' for the strength of its defenses, becomes a matter of cen tral political significance."21 But how are we to understand shock (and its poten tial) then, and what would such a form of shock be here? And equally impor tantly, what would such a film practice look like?

What Benjamin locates in film is the possibility of mimetic innervation, and it is here that his arguments about film's capacity to refigure or reactivate the imaged object and the visual sphere and "resensitize" the subject become sig nificant. While these two "processes" are intimately related, I will for the time being address them separately. The reactivation of the object is enabled at the level of filmic (and photographic) reproduction through the very technology of

21 ibid, p.18. 31

film, which includes for Benjamin the camera, editing procedures, post

production techniques, projection etc. Photographic (and filmic) reproduction

infuses the object itself with a shock- it prises away the shell-like surface of the

object and reconfigures it. This, however, is not simply the stripping away of illu

sion. The shell-like surface produces the effect of a distance, marking the object

as both present and absent. To prise away the shell is to prise apart the aura of

distance and unapproachability- it is to bring the object up close. Process

reproduction, he writes, "can bring out those aspects of the original that are

unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens [ ... ]. And photographic

reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow

motion, can capture images which escape natural vision" (WOA, p.222). The

camera can penetrate through the object, in Benjamin's famous analogy, like a

surgeon opening a body. It strips off the shell-like surface of the object at the

same time reconfiguring the object.

But what precisely does the reactivation of the object enable? As we read through the "Work of Art" essay, it seems that Benjamin is making different claims for this reactivation of the object. On the one hand he claims that "films can be an excellent means of materialistic representation" because "film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man" (WOA, fnll p.249). That is, film provides a means of reversing the hierarchy between technology and the subject. Rather than being subjected to technology (as in everyday life), the viewer - through the technology of reproduction - is granted a critical position in relation to the technologies of production, to the ways in which the technologies of both labour and leisure subject the body to a series of dislocat ing shocks and structure experiences of space and time. On the other hand Ben jamin is also making a larger claim: "the film, on the one hand, extends our com prehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages 32

to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action" (WOA, p.238). This

"immense and unexpected field of action" is unleashed through film's destructive capacity. Whether the activation of this "immense and unexpected field of action" suggests the renewal of experience (Erfahrung) or a new vista in which experi ence will not be required is, as yet, unclear. What we can say is that this unexpected field of action is the fissure in the very fabric of the present, and leads us to Benjamin's complex proposal of the filmic image.

Part 2: Film's Unconscious Optics

For Benjamin, both film and photography can generate what he calls an

"optical unconscious." Benjamin had already proposed the idea of an optical unconscious in his essay "A Small History of Photography" ( 1931). The concept can also be found in Kracauer's essay on photography written a few years prior, and to which Benjamin's use and outline of the concept is clearly indebted.22 In

Benjamin's proposal of an unconscious optics the photographic or filmic image offers unexpected fields of action. Through filmic procedures of framing and editing, alongside the speeding up or slowing down of movement and time and the visual realms produced through the close up and specific lenses, the object is reconfigured and, equally importantly, becomes available to (indeed requires) particular forms of perception. In his essay on photography, Benjamin writes:

Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis ... photography

22 For detailed accounts of Benjamin's concept ofthe optical unconscious in relation to film, see Miriam Hansen, "Of Mice and Ducks"; Hansen's earlier essay, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology"'; and Gertrud Koch, "Cosmos in Film: On the Concept of Space in Walter Benjamin's 'Work of Art' Essay." 33

reveals in this material the physiognomic aspects of visual worlds which dwell in the smallest things, meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible.23

This capacity of the photograph to reveal "the physiognomic aspects of visual worlds which dwell in the smallest things" is also addressed in the "Work of Art" essay. The unconscious optics available to film are not limited to those visual worlds found in the close up, but also include the unconscious optics available through the slowing down and speeding up of movement.

For Benjamin, the optical unconscious reveals aspects of the visual world not available to human perception - both a new perceptual sphere and the renewing of modes of perception lost through the forms of estrangement and alienation characteristic of modernity. 24 The optical unconscious provides us with a heightened access to the material world around us and a new, historically specific form of perception. That which is lived in daily life as an assault on the body and the senses can, in the optical unconscious of film, be slowed down and opened out. What the optical unconscious unveils - and ideally refigures - are the kinds of disorienting relations between subject, object, and image that characterise modernity. The film camera, as Benjamin claimed (drawing on Arnheim) opens up new terrains of action in the everyday world. Though the passage in the "Work of

Art" essay where Benjamin discusses the optical unconscious is long, I will, because of its complexity and importance here, quote it in full:

By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the

23 Benjamin, "A Small History of Photography," One-Way Street, pp.243-4.

24 For Benjamin, the human sensory apparatus is always marked by its his torical moment and is by no means a given. Both the hierarchical relations between the senses and the working or mapping of the senses are always his torically produced. 34

ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. So, too, slow motion not only presents familiar qualities of movement but reveals in them entirely unknown ones "which, far from looking like retarded rapid movements, give the effect of singularly gliding, floating, supernatural motions." Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye - if only because an uncon sciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. (WOA, pp.238-9)

Regardless of whether one's primary interest is film or not, this passage

stands out in the "Work of Art" essay because of its mimetic relation to its object

- the rhythm of the writing takes on the same delirious, vertiginous pace as the phenomenon being described, staging the principle of a cinema of attractions.

Film's destructive capacity is understood as a kind of force, blasting open that which seemed to be contained, familiar. It can provide access to the shocks which assault the body on a daily basis, and most importantly, it does so through a form of shock. But here we confront a problem. While Benjamin's theory of film must be understood as a form of redemptive criticism rather than as an account of the film culture of inter-war Germany, the vertiginous pace ofthis passage would seem to suggest that Benjamin is privileging particular filmic practices. To what extent is Benjamin's proposal of an unconscious optics limited to particular film practices, or more specifically at this point, to a film practice marked by speed, velocity, thrill? The "far-flung ruins" in which film allows us to go travelling sug gest a certain kind of filmic experience. The scene in Griffith's Broken Blossoms when Lilian Gish, hiding from her murderous father, has locked herself in the closet, for instance. As the camera traps us in this space too, the edges of the 35

image start to give way as the father bashes at the door. What blasts this space open, however, is not the literal collapse of the door (which has served as the bor ders to the frame and this space), but the desperate, feverish spinning of Gish as she both retracts from this assault, and through the sheer force of her spinning and

(silent) screaming summons herself against it. As this space and the image itself become more and more marked by despair, it is as ifthe image itself is consumed.

Unable to contain itself, it seems to be swallowed up from its centre. In scenes such as this a series of delirious shocks can consume the spectator. Such scenes certainly demonstrate the kind of vertiginous force and the forms of "travel" that can operate in cinema. What is still to be determined, however, is whether they bring us any closer to locating the critical, and politically urgent, potential Ben- jamin finds in film's unleashing of an optical unconscious.

The optical unconscious would appear to put us in a complicated place. If

Benjamin's "positive" concept of the principle of shock in film is that the forms of physical movement (visual and tactile) that film entails (a physiological economy of thrill) can provide a means of resensitizing the body through stimulating the senses, this would seem to imply that this redeemed shock is dependent upon a form of ballistics, and in so doing, would privilege particular forms of cinema.

We would find ourselves securely within the framework of Tom Gunning's con cept of a cinema of attractions- or more accurately, in the ways in which this work has recently been taken up to privilege particular forms of cinema and modes of spectatorship. Gunning's work on early cinema has played a major role in shifting the parameters and terms of contemporary film theory. 25 His work on early cinema as a cinema of attractions has addressed and theorised a cinema in

25 For a good overview of Gunning's work and its implications for debates on contemporary film and television culture, see Miriam Hansen "Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere." 36

which both the individual films and their modes of presentation differ dramati

cally from the classical Hollywood model. In the cinema of attractions present

ation rather than representation is foregrounded. As Gunning and others have

argued, it is an exhibitionist cinema, where the films and the accompanying

events solicit from and offer to the viewer a range of physiological reactions. (As

Gunning writes in "An Aesthetic of Astonishment," the "basic aesthetic of early

cinema I have called 'the cinema of attractions,' which envisioned cinema as a

series of visual shocks. "26) While Gunning has focused on the forms of wonder

and thrill the "cinema of attractions" offered (in particular the thrill of motion),

we must avoid the tendency to collapse motion with speed, and thrill with action,

as has often been the case with some recent appropriations of this work.27 While

Benjamin's description of the optical unconsious would at first view suggest a

ballistic cinema, we cannot be too eager to define it in these terms (and it is worth

pointing out here that while Gunning's work draws extensively on both Ben- jamin's and Kracauer's writings on cinema, his proposal of the cinema of attrac tions- at least in essays like "An Aesthetic of Astonishment" -is often more

focused on the place of sensory shocks in terms ofmimetic adaptation).

While Benjamin's description of the optical unconscious in the "Work of

Art" essay (or rather in the more well known version of this essay) seems to sug

gest a particular type of cinema, I would argue that if we focus on the complex

26 Tom Gunning "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator," p.33.

27 One instance of such a collapsing of motion with speed and thrill with action would be the recent forum in the "Next Wave" festival (Melbourne, 1995) which focused on the relations between early cinema and contemporary film, video, and interactive games. This forum revolved around Gunning's work in a particularly problematic way, both drawing a relation of equivalence between Gunning's cinema of attractions and contemporary "ballistic" special effects, and reducing his arguments about the cinema of attractions to an equation between attraction and velocity. 37

spatial and temporal articulations of Benjamin's optical unconscious we may find

that the forms of shock he is privileging - and the forms of innervation that they

enable- are not so exclusively dependent on speed and ballistics. Rather, the opti

cal unconscious can generate a form of shock though may not itself be dependent

on what we recognise as shock techniques.

Benjamin's introduction ofthe optical unconscious into his theory of film

certainly complicates our understanding of the forms of destruction and renewal

that he locates in film. Most significantly, it seems to reintroduce a form of

auratic experience- precisely what film is also seen as destroying.28 If film

provides the basis for the possibility of experience (Erfahrung), this is not

opposed to its destructive aspect, rather, it is possible through it. Modernity, as

Benjamin, Kracauer, and others argued, is characterised by shock experience, and through this, by the destruction of tradition and tradition's modes of transmission

(tradition as a form of transmission). If film's principle of shock does away with

"outmoded" tradition - this is its forms of destruction - it also clears the way for

new forms of experience.

The proposal of the optical unconscious that we find in the "Work of Art" essay is in many ways reminiscent of Benjamin's earlier essay on the "destructive

character. "29 This short essay or "portrait," written in 1931 , proposes a different approach to the crisis of experience to that which we find in Benjamin's work on

Proust for instance, or in his article on the storyteller.30 Like the "Work of Art"

28 Hansen has extensively dealt with the relations between the optical unconscious and auratic experience in her essay "Benjamin, Cinema and Experi ence," and I will return to Hansen's argument later in this chapter.

29 Benjamin, "The Destructive Character," Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986). I will deal with this essay in more detail in chapter 4 on collecting and spectatorship.

30 See Benjamin's essays "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov," and "The Image of Proust," both published in Illuminations. 38

essay, his essay on the destructive character places its hopes on destruction.

Whereas in the "Work of Art" essay it is the destruction and demise of the aura

and of what it props up that is defiantly embraced (the "outmoded concepts" of

"creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery"), in his essay on the destructive character, it is the demise of (outmoded) experience itself which is enthusiasti cally heralded.3I The destructive character is the opposite and enemy of the "etui

man," the man of the interior. While the etui-man gathers traces around him both as a buffer against shock and as a means of constituting a site of experience, the destructive character has no need for experience, and "obliterates even the traces of [its] destruction. "32 The destructive character does not mourn the demise of the aura, nor the loss of tradition and of communicable experience, but rejoices in their being cleared away. "The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room; only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred," writes Benjamin.33 The destructive character, like film, "burst[s] this prison-world asunder[ ... ] so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins, we calmly and adventurously go travelling." The form of destruc tion we find here is that of a liberating force which clears away those concepts and structures - and indeed the very spaces - which have lorded it over the sub ject. What, then, is the form of renewal? On the one hand we can say it is the recharging of the sensory apparatus, but crucially connected to this is the form of

31 This passage appears early on in the "Work of Art" essay. The theses that Benjamin proposes here "brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery - concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present almost uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in the Fascist sense. The concepts which are introduced into the theory of art in what follows are completely useless for the purposes of Fascism. They are, on the other hand, useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art" (WOA. p.220).

32 Benjamin, "The Destructive Character," p.302.

33 ibid, p.301. 39

subject-object relations we find ourselves in.

In film Benjamin found the possibility of both destruction and renewal, a

dialectics of destruction. This is without doubt the most complex aspect of his

work on film and one which has been extensively debated. In Hansesn's essay

"Benjamin, Cinema and Experience," for instance, she argues that the "Work of

Art" essay is marked by a tension between an attempt to grasp experience and its

enthusiastic farewell, signalling what has frequently been referred to as Ben-

jamin's ambivalence over the demise of auratic experience. By focusing on the

concept of the optical unconscious, we can begin to unravle the relations between

the destruction of experience and its renewal in Benjamin's theory of film.

clearing ground: space, destruction, renewal

In her essay "OfMice and Ducks," Hansen addresses the central place

played by Mickey Mouse in Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious. The

discussion of the optical unconscious in the earlier version of the "Work of Art"

essay was, as she points out, originally titled "Mickey Maus," and Disney's

favourite creation had a central place in the development of this concept. 34

Clearly developing a proposal of the optical unconcsious under the name of an

animated figure has a number of implications for how we undertand this aspect of

film and photography. If an animated figure can produce and stage an optical

unconscious, the optical unconscious is clearly not dependent on the iconicity of the photographic or filmic image in relation to its referent. Nor is it reducible to the indexical component Benjamin locates in the photographic image ("the spark

of contingency" which would leap forth like Barthes' punctum). As Hansen

34 Benjamin's earlier version of the "Work of Art" essay is published in the Gesammelte Schriften 1.2, pp.435-469. See also Benjamin's fragment on Mickey Mouse (and his fragment on Chaplin) in the Gesammelte Schriften. 40

argues, Benjamin developed his concept of the optical unconscious through the

figure of Mickey Mouse (the Mickey Mouse ofthe early 1930s) because in this

figure he finds the interplay of various forces - of technology and play, of the

utopian promise of technology and its catastrophic reality. If Benjamin's proposal

of the optical unconsious was first developed under the heading of Mickey Maus,

the mouse itself, as Hansen argues, can be seen as a dialectical image. In Ben

jamin's argument, Mickey stages "the utopian possibilities of technology in an age

of technological warfare, "35 embodying "the disjunctive temporalities of human

and natural history."36 This figure, as Hansen points out, is a hybrid figure (in

terms of its gender, in terms of animal/human/motorised figure). Through its

hybridity, we could say, it performs the optical unconscious - the radically

refigured relations between technology, space, and the body.

If Mickey Mouse can be seen as involving the production of an optical

unconscious, and if, as Hansen writes, Mickey operates as a dialectical image, it

is because in this figure we find something like the "mutual penetration of art and

science" that Benjamin writes of in the "Work of Art" essay (WOA, p.238).

Mickey has not simply adapted to technology but has rather absorbed its pos

sibilities (similar, as Hansen points out, to Benjamin's argument about film's

capacity to produce/unveil an "equipment-free aspect of reality"- the optical

unconscious in the later version of the "Work of Art" essay). And Mickey has absorbed it in such a way that this mouse can overcome alienation through a radi cal and subversive relation to, and experience of space, technology, and of the very parameters of "its" body. What Mickey would seem to represent is a

(re)claiming of technology's possibilities, similar to that which Benjamin

35 Hansen, "Of Mice and Ducks," p.54.

36 ibid, p.48. 41

described at the close of his essay on Surrealism and also at the close of "One-

Way Street. "37

It is somewhat frustrating to find Mickey Mouse to be Benjamin's privileged figure. Despite all the "hybridity" this figure supposedly entails (and granted that Mickey - and Disney - has undergone many changes since the

1930s), I would argue that what anchors this hybridity is Mickey as a young boy.

(Hansen seems to accept Benjamin's crediting of Mickey Mouse with a mobile gender- a he/she/it status. I would argue that Mickey's mobile gendering is the mobile gendering frequently credited to the pre-pubescent boy; as soon as Minnie turns up - and Minnie is presumably female - Mickey is male.) While my enthusiasm for this figure as a model of the optical unconscious is limited, it is worth examining Benjamin's use of Mickey in his proposal of the filmic image.

What Benjamin claims for Mickey is a mimetic relation to technology, a relation based in the principles of play, and therefore, we could add, a form of childhood cognition.38 Rather than pursuing Mickey, I would prefer to look at a more contemporary figure in which we can find some of Mickey's features. We could per-

37 In "One-Way Street," written in 1925-6, Benjamin writes: "The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education above all the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations, and therefore mastery, if we are to use this term, of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man." Benjamin, One Way Street, p.1 04.

38 The central place childhood cognition and play have in Benjamin's work will be addressed in chapter 4. For discussions of this aspect of his work, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics ofSeeing, particularly pp. 261-266. As Buck-Morss writes: "What Benjamin found in the child's consciousness, badgered out of existence by bourgeois education and so crucial to redeem (albeit in a new form), was precisely the unsevered connections between perception and action that distinguished revolutionary consciousness in adults" p.263. See also Jeffrey Mehlman, Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), and Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History. 42

haps find a recent version of Mickey (or rather of Benjamin's image of Mickey) in the recent film Mask (dir. Charles Russell, 1994). Here the central character

(Stanley Ipkiss/Jim Carrey), through the assistance of a mask found in New York harbour, transforms from a dorky white male bank clerk into a charismatic super hero "with soul." Whereas Stanley Ipkiss is marked by a kind of arrested pubesence, as "the mask" he is more of a cross between Cab Calloway, a comic book super-hero, and a dweeb. The hybridity of this figure also involves a fantasy racial mobility; as "the mask," Stanley takes on the moves of both James Brown and Cab Calloway. His face, no longer white, is green. Whereas Mickey is an animated figure, our character here - at least in the transformation sequences - is partly computer generated. My interest at this point is with the ways in which we could see this figure as embodying many of the traits that Benjamin praised in

Mickey. Firstly, like Mickey, Stanley Ipkiss/the Mask is a technologised body- as

"the mask" he has absorbed technology in and through a form of play. Secondly, like Mickey, the Mask- while seemingly having nothing- can confront any situa tion with whatever is at hand (as "the mask," Stanley Ipkiss does not kill any characters but rather stuns them through "entertaining" them). When met by the

NY police force, the Mask- in his Cab Calloway-like outfit and James Brown style showmanship- moves through a range of dance and performance styles (and costumes) as the police force finds itself falling in line behind him. The police enter the production, transforming this street corner, and the bonnets of the police cars, into the set for an unexpected musical. And if the members of the police force find themselves to be unsuspecting participants in an elaborate dance routine (their limbs seem to start dancing before they realise what's happening), the space, too, becomes an unsuspecting participant. Through the "complicity" of the props with this form of play, the same set serves to move us from romance to police drama to superhero adventure to musical. 1940s style lamposts (as if 43

designed to be spun around) miraculously appear, and suddenly - and fleetingly -

we are facing the possibility of a stage musical-style production. But does the

optical unconscious have to entail such Fourieresque components?

The question I would like to pose here is whether Mickey (or "the mask")

is the optical unconscious or whether Mickey gets to explore the optical uncon-

scious, and gets to explore the optical unconscious precisely because he is a hybrid figure? Benjamin has found in Mickey both a wish image and the destruc tive character. I would suggest that in many ways the figure of Mickey Mouse

stands not only for the unconscious optics activated in the filmic image but also -

and perhaps more importantly- represents a spectatorial possibility. For if the mouse gets to travel these spaces - these worlds which constantly unravel - and does so in a state of alert absent-mindedness and through a relation to technology which is one of play - then we could say that the mouse has fulfilled many of the hopes that Benjamin has for the film audience. Of course we must say then that

Mickey has two roles, for at least part of his appeal for Benjamin is the collective laughter that he (or, to follow Hansen and Benjamin, "he/she/it") solicits from the audience. But if we turn to the figure itself- this figure that can, as Hansen has argued, afford to do without experience (Mickey shares a number of character istics with the destructive character) -we find that this figure also stages a rela tion to space and to the image in which Benjamin sees great hope. What does the mouse do? In each instant Mickey finds a moment of possibility by fracturing that instant, by loading it, and redirecting it Gust as "the mask" does). If the destruc tive character (and film's destructive aspects) clears away- clearing away myth dressed up as the new (and here we would have to clear away as well the "phoney aura" of the film star)- it produces a site where new forms of subject-object rela tions are possible.

Benjamin conceives revolution as the leap that abruptly suspends it. To the stoppage of time, the "Messianic cessations of happen- 44

ing" (Ill p.263) corresponds the destructive expropriation of space; to the emptying of space, the instant that hovers in empty space. 39

There are two issues that I want to look at here - both how the form of

shock Benjamin locates in film is understood, and what it enables. As we move from Benjamin's claims that film can provide a means of rehearsing the shocks of everyday life to the claim that film can entail a form of shock which can serve as the basis for the renewal of (new forms of) experience, a number of questions must be confronted. Does the optical unconscious (which clearly entails a form of shock) break us through to the possibility of experience by rupturing the stimulus shield, activating the data of involuntary memory? Or does it propose, rather, a sphere where experience is no longer required? Is Benjamin proposing a form of

shock here which will have the force of awakening? By placing Benjamin's con cept of shock more securely within his theory of experience, in particular, in the context of his work on memory, we can begin to reexamine the idea of shock and film, freeing it up from its more familiar associations in Anglo-American film debates with a form of ballistics- a cinema of thrill and speed. While Benjamin's interest in film is certainly in terms of the ways in which its formal procedures and techniques are based in forms of fragmentation and shock, this is not the same as privileging particular film practices. In reexamining the relations between shock and film, I hope to foreground the temporal aspects which are so central to both Benjamin's theory of experience and his theory of film (and indeed what links them), particularly in terms of a practice of charging time. Here, then, I will return to Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious so as to address the forms of temporal charging that it involves. While his concept of unconscious optics

39 Irving Wohlfarth, "No-man's-land: On Walter Benjamin's 'Destructive Character,"' Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p.169. 45

clearly entails a particular proposal of filmic space (as Gertrud Koch has argued in her essay "Cosmos in Film"), this is crucially linked to its temporal components. By looking at the intersections between the optical unconscious and Ben jamin's work on memory- particularly his concept of Eingedenken (as a practice of remembering) - I will argue that it is this charging of time which provides a basis from which we can address both cinematic practices and modes of spec tatorship.

If we look at the temporal aspects of Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious - particularly in terms of its relation to experience - we can unfold some of the complex relations between destruction and renewal. In the section on the optical unconscious in the first version of the "Work of Art" essay Benjamin writes: "Die' amerikanischen Groteskfilme und die Filme Disneys bewirken eine therapeutische Sprengung des Unbewufiten" (American slapstick films and Dis ney films bring about a therapeutic explosion of the unconscious).40 If the optical unconscious "bursts [our] prison-world asunder" it also bursts open the uncon scious. Certainly Benjamin's understanding of the unconscious here- though based on the topology outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle- is not totally equivalent to that which we find in Freudian psychoanalysis. The optical uncon scious entails a form of shock, and it is a form of shock which has much in common with experience in the sense of Erfahrung, which likewise entails this form of liberatory, dislocating experience. When we "calmly and adventurously go travelling" through the unconscious optics available in film, this "travelling" shares a number of similarities with the forms of "travel" associated with

Erfahrung (from the German verbfahren- to travel or ride), and must therefore

40 Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit"(first version), Gesammelte Schriften 1.2, eds Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), p.462 (my translation). 46

also be seen as a form of temporal travel - particularly in terms of the ways in

which it activates memory. The forms of temporal movement Benjamin credits to the optical unconscious are of more significance here than the physical movement of or in the image (though the latter may certainly enable the former). And this, as I will go on to argue, has a number of implications for how we read the "Work of Art" essay, particularly in terms of the type of cinema Benjamin could be seen as proposing in his redemptive critique.

By looking at the temporal and spatial aspects of his proposal of an unconscious optics we can begin to trace the forms of renewal that film's destruc tive aspect can bring about. As Hansen and others have argued, if we position

Benjamin's proposal of an unconscious optics in the context of his theory of expe rience, film would lie at the intersection of two directions in Benjamin's theory of experience - the redemption or renewal of experience (Erfahrung), and its destruction, and the necessity of destruction for construction in Benjamin's project. On the one hand, like Benjamin's figure of the destructive character, film would offer a mode of being where experience (Erfahrung) is no longer required, or at least will be of no help. On the other hand, and at the same time, film seems to offer a possible site for experience, for its transmissibility. Film perhaps, in

Benjamin's redemptive criticism, does both at the same time.

Part 3: Temporal Travel, the Optical Unconscious, and Involuntary Memory

Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. The original task of a genuine revolu tion, therefore, is never merely to 'change the world,' but also- and above all- to 'change time.'41

41 Agamben, "Time and History: Critique of the Instant and the Con tinuum," Infancy and History, p.91. 47

In her essay "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience," Hansen has claimed that Benjamin's proposal of the optical unconscious complicates his argument about film's role and status in the decay of the aura. As Hansen argues, the optical unconscious stages in effect a "discontinuous return of an auratic mode of experi ence through the backdoor of the 'optical unconscious.'"42 Hansen's essay has developed one of the most substantial accounts of Benjamin's theory of film, and her focus on the optical unconscious has played a significant role in shifting the readings of the "Work of Art" essay away from its earlier Brechtian and neo

Fordist interpretations in Anglo-American film theory. "With the optical'uncon scious,'" she writes, "Benjamin readmits dimensions of temporality and historicity into his vision of the cinema, against his own endorsement of it as the medium of presence and tracelessness. "43 What Hansen's essay throws into relief is the pecu liar spatio-temporal opening that the optical unconscious activates. As Hansen argues, "although film as a medium enhances the historical demolition of the aura, its particular form of indexical mediation enables it to lend a physiognomic expression to objects, to make second nature return the look, similar to auratic experience in phenomena of the first. "44 This peculiar return of the gaze through the optical unconscious certainly entails an unsettling - and for Benjamin, poten tially liberatory - shock, and it brings us squarely into his theory of experience.

As I will go on to argue, this "redeemed aura" is best understood in terms of the forms of interruption and charging ofthe present that we find in Benjamin's work on Baudelaire and on Proust's involuntary memory.

42 Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience," p.212.

43 ibid, p.217.

44 ibid, pp.209-210. 48

Benjamin's critical interpretation of Proust's work has a central place in

his theory of experience and his theory of the image.45 Proust's project was an

attempt to reconstitute experience (Erfahrung) through a practice of remembering he calls memo ire involontaire. In his monumental project of bringing forth the

data of involuntary memory, Proust aimed to bring forth the data of lost- or for

Benjamin, missed - experience. The data of involuntary memory is composed of those experiences which are unavailable to conscious remembering, and what is

activated in involuntary memory is, for Proust, the correspondences with a forgotten time. As Benjamin writes in "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," involuntary memory "bears the marks of the situation that gave rise to it. "46 Involuntary memory entails a form of shock - it erupts or splits open the security of the pre sent and the past. The data of involuntary memory fleetingly come into view and send us reeling. As Irving Wohlfarth writes, Proustian involuntary memory

"brings time to a revolutionary halt. "47 What Proust's doctrine of involuntary memory entails is a return of the gaze which confronts the subject with a self which is not only unrecognisable, but also dislocating.

For an experienced event is finite - at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it.48

While Proust's work is pivotal to Benjamin's proposal of involuntary memory, the two projects' practices of remembering differ in a number of sig nificant ways. Benjamin's aim is not to reconstitute a lost past as a moment of plenitude but rather to fleetingly grasp those traces of missed experience which

45 Benjamin published his essay on Proust ("The Image of Proust") in 1929 and was also Proust's German translator. The place of Proust's work in Ben jamin's project will be addressed in more detail in later chapters. 46

47 Irving Wohlfarth, "On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin's Last Reflections," Glyph 3 (1978), p.163.

48 Benjamin, "The Image of Proust," Illuminations, p.204. 49 can be drawn on in the present. As John McCole has argued in his book Walter

Benjamin and the Antinomies ofTradition, Benjamin's translation of Proust's memoire involontaire as unwillkurliches Eingedenken signals a significant difference between their two doctrines of memory. "The term Eingedenken is a coinage" McCole writes, "it suggests a kind of memory that involves both remembrance and mindfulness. "49

There are two crucial elements of Benjamin's involuntary memory that are of importance for us here: firstly, as previously mentioned, the eruption ofthe data of involuntary memory entails a form of shock and secondly, as Benjamin's translation of Proust's terms makes clear, involuntary memory entails a form of attentiveness, a readiness and alertness. Distraction - the form of reception Ben- jamin claims for film -likewise entails a form of alertness, an under- and over attentiveness. Whereas with distraction, or rather with the role of the stimulus shield in buffering distraction, this alertness is a readiness to parry shock, with involuntary memory it is an alertness which remains on guard to grasp the fleet ing correspondences with a forgotten past as they flash into being. "When the past is reflected in the dewy fresh 'instant,' a painful shock pulls it together once more"

Benjamin writes in "The Image of Proust. "50 The form of attentiveness associated with involuntary memory enables the possibility of experience in the sense of

Erfahrung, whereas the attentiveness of distraction ensures that the momentary event will be buffered. Equally importantly, whereas Proust's involuntary

49 John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies a/Tradition (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p.260. McCole further elaborates in a footnote: "The word Eingedenken as such exists as neither noun nor verb in German. It plays on the words gedenken and eingedenk. Gedenken (verb or noun) means 'thinking of something or someone, often in a commemorative or memorial sense; eingedenk (a predicative adjective that governs the genitive case) means to remember something in the sense of 'bearing it in mind"' p.260. For an excellent account of Benjamin's concept of Eingedenken and its place in his theory of experience, see Wohlfarth's essay "On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin's Last Reflections."

so Benjamin, "The Image of Proust," p.213. 50

memory would seem to operate in isolation, with film, these "shocks" are

negotiated in a public forum and also bring us closer to the interweaving of

voluntary and involuntary memory.

If what the optical unconscious unleashes is something similar to the data

of involuntary memory, then it would seem to suggest that we need to redefine

our understanding of the privileged place distraction and mimetic adaptation have in Benjamin's theory of film. It would likewise suggest a complication of Ben- jamin's claim that film- through the compulsory temporality of the apparatus-

precludes the activation of "associative mechanisms" in the spectator. 51 The key

concept of the optical unconscious would seem to free up the compulsory temporality ofthe flow of images seen (even by Benjamin) as so essential to film.

But what is most significant for my argument at this point is the ways in which the optical unconscious enables a charging of perception itself through the com plex temporality it entails.

Benjamin's proposal of an unconscious optics clearly complicates understandings of the temporalities operative in both film and film spectatorship.

The optical unconscious ruptures the security and the intensity of the present moment by marking it "as an unexpected field of action." The forms of defamiliarization of the object that are enabled here would include the forms of defamiliarization brought into play by involuntary memory - a form of remembering (which is never that far from forgetting) which entails the reading of similarities.

51 As Benjamin argues in the "Work of Art" essay: "The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed" (WOA, p.240). I will return to this question as to the status of the compulsory temporality of the cinematic apparatus in Benjamin's thought in chapter 2. 51

What Benjamin suggests about film's optical unconscious can also be

found in a passage in his "Moscow Diary" - not however in one of the passages

on Soviet film that we find in this text, but rather in a passage on painting:

As I was looking at an extraordinarily beautiful Cezanne, it sud denly occured to me that it is even linguistically fallacious to speak of "empathy." It seemed to me that to the extent that one grasps a painting, one does not in any way enter into its space; rather this space thrusts itself forward in various specific spots. It opens up to us in corners and angles in which we believe we can localize cru cial experiences of the past; there is something inextricably famil iar about these spots. 52

The temporality that Benjamin identifies here has much in common with that

which we can draw out from his concept of the optical unconscious in film and

photography, opening up to us "in corners and angles in which we can localize

crucial experiences of the past." What we find here is a peculiar mix of proximity

and distance, both spatial and temporal.

To propose such a reading is clearly to read against Benjamin's more

familiar thesis on film. Certainly in the "Work of Art" essay Benjamin addresses

shock perception and experience in both film and everyday life in terms of bal

listics: for Benjamin the forms of shock which make up everyday life are pro

posed in terms of a rapid, fragmented, and fragmenting sensory onslaught which

assaults the subject. And as both Hansen and Buck-Morss have argued, for Ben jamin it is the forms of shock operative in film aesthetics and reception which can

serve as the basis for innervation. As Hansen writes, for Benjamin, shock can pro

vide "an artificial means of propelling the body into moments ofrecognition,"53

or as Buck-Morss proposes, for Benjamin "technological reproduction gives back

to humanity that capacity for experience which technological production threatens

to take away. "54 And yet this is not to say that the only form this "artificial

52 Benjamin, "Moscow Diary," p.42.

53 Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience," p.211.

54 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics ofSeeing, p.268. 52

means" can take is ballistic in terms of film style or technique. Whether in fact

the forms of innervation Benjamin is hoping for in the cinema - forms of innerva

tion which enable the resensitization of the sensory apparatus and the refiguring

of the object and therefore of subject-object relations- can only take place

through ballistics is, in other words, less certain. While shock itself must be

understood as a kind of dislocating, ballistic assault which displaces the subject

from his/her conscious self, it is less clear that it is dependent upon ballistic

means to be activated.

There are a number of dangers in reading Benjamin's concept of shock too

literally in relation to cinema - both in terms of how we read his work on film in

the context of his theory of experience, and also in terms of how we draw on his

work on film now in our own historical moment. While the idea of shock - and of

shock experience - runs throughout Benjamin's work, it is not always reducible to

this idea of ballistics as rapid sensory assault, the shock of the new. Shock experi

ence and perception certainly entails a form of assault or jolt, and it is something

which unsettles rather than reassures identity and subjectivity- as is evident in

Benjamin's work on Proust's involuntary memory and on Baudelaire's lyric

poetry. If the concepts of mimetic adaptation and mimetic innervation seem, at

first view, to push us towards a cinema practice and mode of spectatorship based

on a certain economy of thrill, speed, and presence, Benjamin's proposal of an

unconscious optics - and its relation to involuntary memory - suggests a rather

different proposal of cinema, though it doesn't preclude an economy of thrill.

What I want to put in to question here is what in fact is recognised as shock expe

rience - a concept and phenomena which in some senses seems highly dated (if there was a moment of shock it seems to have passed, aligned as it is with the his

toric avant garde. Does shock take the same form and have the same status in our

historical moment?). What of the historical shifts between Benjamin's moment

and our own? By placing Benjamin's work on film in the context of his theory of 53

experience, we find a number of unexpected correspondences between the cinema

practices which emerge in Benjamin's redemptive criticism and a range of film-

making practices, including certain trends in feminist filmmaking. As I will go on

to argue in later chapters, we may find, then, that Benjamin's proposal of an

unconscious optics and his theory of film more generally provides us with a

framework to address other economies of shock experience - forms of shock

experience, of the crisis of experience, which are marked by their historical and

gendered specificity.

loading time, gestural hopes

Actually, of a screened behaviour item which is neatly brought out in a certain situation, like a muscle of a body, it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science. To demonstrate the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the film. (WOA, p.238)

This passage from the "Work of Art" essay has a peculiar resonance with a

range of feminist film work of the 1970's and 80's, most notably perhaps with the

early work of Chantal Akerman. In Akerman's early films - Jeanne Dielman, 23

Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and Les Rendezvous D'Anna for instance - we

find a close attention to the gestures of the woman's body. By no means a ballistic

cinema (there is no speed here), these films stage an economy of boredom. But this is not to say that the gestures, the movements, the spaces of these films are not marked by shock experience. In terms of the performing body, familiar gestures, movements, and expressions are presented for a renewed attention. In

Akerman's early films, spaces and actions marked as and by the feminine - spaces and movements more readily figured as vacant of meaning - are brought in to a new kind of visibility: it is not that they are imbued with "drama," but that experi- 54

ences of time are brought in to visibility through them. 55 To re-cite Benjamin:

"Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing

of a person's posture during the fractional second of a stride" (WOA, p.239).

What these films stage is a process of recognition and misrecognition, of remem-

bering and forgetting. Such forms of renewed attention entail both a resensitiza-

tion of the spectator's body, and a refiguring of the imaged body, which is not

only available to new forms of visibility, but renders visible new spatial and

temporal configurations.

Benjamin's comments on film acting provide us with one of the most

evocative accounts of his theory of shock in film. As Benjamin argues, film

acting is crucially written through with shock experience. Firstly in that it is

already composed offragments (ofvarious takes, of"stand-ins," and a separation

of voice and image), but secondly, because for Benjamin film acting entails a

relinquishing of the self because it requires presenting oneself for and before the

apparatus. Film acting itself subjects the body to a form of shock- it prises apart the shell-like surface of the subject, refusing any illusionary unity. There is, one

could say, a certain shock in becoming image. "What matters is that the part is

acted not for the audience but for a mechanical contrivance - in the case of the

sound film, for two ofthem" (WOA, p231). What film offers is the possibility of

55 The script for Jeanne Die/man illustrates the ways in which Akerman's intent is to bring experiences of time in to visibility: "A large, narrow kitchen, with files on the floor ... The repeated vibrations of a refrigerator ... walls yellowy white, covered to a certain height with tiles of brighter white ... modern functional furniture ... Next to the refrigerator at the rear of the room is a stove, to the left on the front of the burners is a kettle ... a glass coffee pot. In the foreground an aluminium sideboard with a drying rack. A metal object falls into a container. To the right, pushed against the wall, a table, in the length, set for breakfast, for four people. Some spots of light on a cup, and on the kitchen towels that are drying on the radiator ... An orderly kitchen. One could say that the repeated vibrations of the refigerator stress the impression of order, give it something inextricable ... The slow emphatic gaze bestowed on the kitchen is like a kind of violation, which is greater than if actual traces of life were to be found." Qtd. in Jane Weinstock!Barbara Bloom, "Amor nel Cor," in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, eds Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp.344-345. 55

relinquishing the mythical security and authority of the autonomous subject - "for

the first time - and this is the effect of the film - man has to operate with his

whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence, there

can be no replica of it" (WOA, p.231 ).

The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello described it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one's own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public. (WOA, pp.232-3)

Benjamin's comments on film acting at first view seem to be more in

keeping with the materialist strands of his theory of film, having more to do with

mimetic adaptation than innervation. And yet what Benjamin's comments on film acting suggest is a complex relation between the destruction of experience and its transmissibility, and a form of renewal: both a renewal of forms of experience and, equally importantly here, of their transmissibility.

Benjamin's interest in Brecht's central concept of the gestus could be seen as a central site through which questions of experience and transmissibility are developed in his work. While Benjamin's interest in the gestus is pivotal to his work on Brecht, it is a concept which also underlies his readings of both other writers (most significantly, Kafka), and various cultural forms (cinema, photography, storytelling, allegory etc). Benjamin's essays on Brecht's epic theatre and poetry played a key role in a number of film theory debates in the

1970's (most notably perhaps in the Screen debates) where it was often drawn on to address and propose a counter cinema, but these essays have received considerably less attention in recent Anglo-American work on Benjamin, in film theory or elsewhere. While we can understand this earlier embrace of the Brecht studies in terms of a particular moment in Marxist film theory, the more recent marginalising of Benjamin's Brecht studies can also mean losing an important ele ment in Benjamin's work which can play a key role in thinking through questions of transmissability and experience. 56

Benjamin's work on Brecht's epic theatre and poetry remains one of the most detailed and complex accounts of Brecht's work and thought. Benjamin found a number of connections between Brecht's epic theatre and his own project, principally in terms of the centrality of interruption, the fragment, and quotation to Brecht's central concept and technique of the gestus. 56 Certainly Brecht's work and friendship played an important role in what is referred to as Benjamin's "mid dle period" (particularly in the Brechtian essay "The Author as Producer"), but the relation between these two thinkers- and the place of Brecht's work in Ben- jamin's - is considerably more complex than can be ascertained simply by looking at Benjamin's work on Brecht. The place of Brecht's work in Benjamin's project can be more adequately addressed by reading the constellations that Benjamin places his work within- particularly, the ways in which he reads two such dif ferent writers as Brecht and Kafka both through and against each other. By focus ing on Benjamin's readings of Brecht and Kafka (alongside his work on storytell ing and the differing practices of memory operative in various cultural forms) we can begin to trace Benjamin's arguments about film, transmissibility, and experi ence in terms of gesture.

For Benjamin, the gestural practice which underlies Kafka's work is understood in terms of the ways in which Kafka "sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to its transmissibility. "57 Gesture in Kafka's work is the site of a forget ting ("I imitated people because I was looking for a way out, and for no other

56 In "Conversations with Brecht" Benjamin draws a connection between Brecht's gestus and his own earlier work on allegory and the Trauerspiel: "Brecht talks about epic theatre, and mentions plays acted by children in which faults of performance, operating as alienation effects, impart epic characteristics to the production. Something similar may occur in third-rate provincial theatre. I men tion the Geneva production of Le Cid where the sight of the king's crown worn crookedly on his head gave me the first inkling of the ideas eventually developed in the Trauerspiel book nine years later." Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Verso, 1983), p.l15.

57 Benjamin, "Max Brod's Book on Kafka," Illuminations, p.147. 57 reason," Benjamin quotes from Kafka). 58 In Kafka's work, gestures are repeated, hollowed out:

The gate to justice is learning. And yet Kafka does not dare attach to this learning the promises which tradition has attached to the study of the Torah. His assistants are sextons who have lost their house of prayer, his students are pupils who have lost the Holy Writ. Now there is nothing to support them on their 'untrammeled, happy journey.'59

But if gestures are the site of a forgetting, it is for this very reason that they are

also, for Kafka, the site on which the forgotten is to be remembered. If we turn to

Benjamin's first essay on Kafka, we find that the capacity of the camera to

refigure movement, space, and the body - and to offer it up for analysis - is articulated in terms of a form of reading, where remembering and forgetting become intricately linked:

The invention of the film and the phonograph came in an age of maximum alienation of men from one another, of unpredictably intervening relationships which have become their only ones. Experiments have proved that a man does not recognise his own walk on the screen or his own voice on the phonograph. The situa tion of the subject in such experiments is Kafka's situation; this is what directs him to learning, where he may encounter fragments of his own existence, fragments that are still within the context ofa role.6o (my emphasis).

The body penetrated by technology is here penetrated by reproduction tech nologies, and it is (potentially) through the latter that the former can be both recognised and overcome. But what is of importance here is the emphasis on this form of learning - of developing a new form of reading. What cinema would hand over then would be the gestural sphere itself, a gestural sphere which is in ruins and which is passed on as traces. In Kafka's work, it is the very alienation of the subject from his/her gestures, voice, and body which "directs him to learning,

58 Benjamin, "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death," Illu minations, p.l25.

59 ibid, p.139.

60 ibid, p.137. 58 where he may encounter fragments of his own existence, fragments that are still

within the context of a role."61 As Carrie Asman has argued, "[f]or Kafka the gesture functioned as a means of physically reconnecting word, image, and action; it is a means of bypassing written and spoken signs by linking expression back to the site of its alienation - the body. "62 But of course Benjamin's interest in Kafka's work (which lasted for over 15 years) is, at least partly, in terms of the failure of

Kafka's project - a failure which is principally to do with the ways Kafka could only grasp (at) the present through tradition, and in the process, could not make this experience ofthe present transmissible.63 At this point we can see where Ben jamin's proposal of cinema would seem to be both close to his positioning of

Kafka, but also diverges from it. In his second essay on Kafka, in which Ben- jamin repositioned his earlier argument, he writes:

Kafka's work presents a sickness of tradition. Wisdom has some times been defined as the epic side of truth. Such a defmition stamps wisdom as inherent in tradition; it is truth in its haggadic consistency.

It is this consistency of truth that has been lost[... ]. Kafka's real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake ofclinging to its transmissability, its haggadic ele ment.64 (my emphasis)

While Kafka hung on to tradition for the sake of transmissibility, and in the process, missed the present, Brecht's gestural practice was preeminently about grasping the present, though at the cost, perhaps, of practices of remembrance.

61 ibid, p.137.

62 Carrie Asman, "Return of the Sign to the Body: Benjamin and Gesture in the Age ofRetheatricalization," Discourse 16.3 (Spring 1994), p.55.

63 For an overview of Benjamin's ongoing interest in Kafka's work and its place in his theory of experience and his understanding of the Messianic, see The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, eds Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

64 Benjamin, "Max Brod's Book on Kafka," p.147. 59

Benjamin's interest in each writer was written through by his interest in the other: his interest in Kafka's work is in terms of (the failure of) its gestural practice as a form ofmemorative communication; his interest in Brecht's gestural practices- considerably closer to Benjamin's figure of the "destructive character"- is in terms ofthe ways in which they take as their starting point the forms of interrupt ion and shock which characterise everyday life. While Brecht's epic theatre worked with the very principle of shock experience (and Brecht often deployed film and posters in his productions) and aimed to rupture the contemplative recep tion associated with the traditional work of art, it is less concerned with memorative communication. In his "Commentaries on Poems by Brecht," the resonances and connections between Benjamin's interest in Brecht's work and his figure of the destructive character emerges clearly:

The world is immensely simplified if we test it, not so much for its enjoyability (edibility), as for its destructibility. Destructibility is the bond that unites in harmony everything that is. The sight of this harmony fills the poet with joy. He is the banqueter with the iron jaws who empties the world's mansion. 65

"[T]he raw material of epic theatre is exclusively the gesture as it occurs today - the gesture either of an action or of the imitation of an action," Benjamin writes in "Studies for a Theory of Epic Theatre."66 The "gesture as it occurs today" would be the gesture which is already written through by interruption, the gesture infused by shock experience. In Brecht's epic theatre, these gestures are to be framed, interrupted, arrested, and made available to scrutiny, and Benjamin drew a connection between this practice of arrest and interruption in the gestus

6s Benjamin, "Commentaries on Poems by Brecht," Understanding Brecht, p.57.

66 Benjamin, "Studies for a Theory of Epic Theatre," Understanding Brecht, p.24. 60

and his concept of the dialectical image. 67 While my focus here is with neither

epic theatre nor with a Brechtian inspired cinema, I would argue that if we are to

address ideas of transmissibility and experience in relation to cinema, Benjamin's

understanding of the gestus must play a key role, precisely because the gestus

stands at the intersection of the central stakes and terms of his theory of experi-

ence - of grasping the temporal structuring of experience and making it trans-

missible; of being outside traditional forms of narrative but entailing new forms of narrativity. Benjamin's interest in the gestus is clearly in terms of the forms of transmissibility that it can entail, and as such connects with his essay on storytell ing and his work on Proust.

In his essay "Notes on Gesture," Agamben argues that modernity entails a crisis of the "gestural sphere"- movements and gestures become fragmented, interrupted, involuntary; their meanings become uncertain and they are abstracted from the body. "In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures seeks to reap propriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that loss," Agamben writes: "An era that has lost its gestures is, for that very reason, obsessed with them; for people who are bereft of all that is natural to them, every gesture becomes a fate. "68 While this passage signals the status of gesture in silent cinema, it is by no means exclusive to it. For Benjamin, this form of delivery, this handing over of ruins, is inherent to film acting - or rather, to the ways in which one presents oneself to the cinematic (or televisual) apparatus. Benjamin, like

Kracauer, frequently returns to the ways in which this crisis of the gestural sphere can be understood in terms of the structuring of everyday life - the principle of

67 See "What is Epic Theatre? [First version]" where Benjamin writes: "The damming of the stream of real life, the moment when its flow comes to a standstill, makes itself felt as reflux: this reflux is astonishment. The dialectic at a standstill is its real object. [ ... ] Epic theatre makes life spurt up high from the bed of time and, for an instant, hover iridescent in empty space. Then it puts it back to bed." Understanding Brecht, p.13.

68 Giorgio Agamben, "Notes on Gesture," Infancy and History, p.137. 61

interruption and repetition which characterises every day life and (many of) its

cultural forms. However this crisis, as both Benjamin and Agamben have

demonstrated, can be charted not only in terms of the loss of the meaning (or con

trol) of gestures, but also in the attempts to both preserve and document gestures,

and in the various practices of reading gestures and expressions (in which we

could also include Benjamin's comments on the development of the

"physiologies" in the feuilleton and his account of the development of detective

fiction as the reading oftraces).69 Benjamin looks at the attempts to halt this

gestural crisis, the attempts to document and hang onto those same gestures,

poses, and expressions which could no longer be guaranteed of either their mean

ing or their status as possessions (as we find, for instance, in Benjamin's discus~

sion of early portrait photography and its props and poses).70 Agamben takes up

these questions of the preservation and/as destruction of the gestural sphere,

extending Benjamin's arguments into a theory of gesture, the image, and cinema

what we could call a gestural theory of film.

Nietzsche is the point where this polar tension in European culture reaches its peak - a tension towards the effacement and loss of the gesture on one hand and, on the other, its transmutation into a destiny. For it is only as a gesture in which potential and action, nature and artifice, contingency and necessity, become indiscernible (in the final analysis, therefore, solely as theatre) that the idea of eternal return makes sense. Thus Spake Zarathustra is

69 See Benjamin's essay "The Paris ofthe Second Empire," Charles Baudelaire.

70 In one of the most beautiful passages in his essay on photogaphy Ben jamin writes: "This was the period of those studios, with their draperies and palm trees, their tapestries and their easels, which occupied so ambiguous a place between execution and representation, between torture chamber and throne room, and to which an early portrait of Kafka bears pathetic witness. There the boy stands, perhaps six years old, dressed up in a humiliatingly tight child's suit over loaded with trimming, in a sort of conservatory landscape. The background is thick with palm fronds. And as if to make these upholstered tropics even stuffier and more oppressive, the subject holds in his left hand an indordinately large broad-brimmed hat, such as Spaniards wear. He would surely be lost in this set ting were it not for the immensely sad eyes, which dominate this landscape predestined for them." "A Small History of Photography," One-Way Street and Other Writings, p.247. 62

the ballet of humanity bereft of its gestures. And when the era became aware of this, then (too late!) began the headlong attempt to regain in extremis those lost gestures. The dance of Isadora and Diaghilev, the novels of Proust, the great Jugendstil poets from Pascoli to Rilke and ultimately - in the most exemplary way - silent cinema, trace the magic circle in which humanity sought, for the last time, to evoke what was slipping through its fingers for ever.7 1

While the gestural practices that Agamben lists here certainly differ in

terms of what we could call their memorative practices and modes of trans

missibility, it is precisely this question of gesture and transmissibility that I want to pursue in this closing section in terms of Benjamin's theory of film and his theory of experience. While Benjamin would not be arguing for the preservation

of gestures in the sense of the production of an archive, he is clearly interested in the ways in which the gestural sphere can both embrace the temporal structuring

of experience in modernity (crisis, interruption) and make it transmissible.

Certainly Benjamin was not alone in his interest in gesture: ideas of ges ture and the gestural were central to the work of many critics, filmmakers, writers, and artists who were working in, or in relation to, the historical avant garde movements of the first few decades of this century.72 From the Trauerspiel study and his work on allegory, through his theory of language (in which the mimetic aspect of language could be seen as its gestural component), and most overtly in his work on Kafka and Brecht, ideas of gesture permeate his work.

Certainly Benjamin deals with gesture directly in his work on Brecht's gestus and in his comments on film acting, but I would also argue that the ways in which he addresses various cultural forms in terms of their relations to both forms of expe rience and its modes of transmission entails a form of gestural reading. As Agam ben writes, reading Deleuze's two volumes on cinema through Benjamin:

71 Agamben, "Notes on Gesture," pp.137-8.

72 For a good overview of the centrality of gesture to the European his torical avant-garde, see Asman, "Return of the Sign to the Body: Benjamin and Gesture in the Age of Retheatricalization." 63

Film images are neither 'timeless postures' (like the forms of the classical world) nor 'static sections' of movement, but 'moving sec tions', images which are themselves in motion, which Deleuze calls 'moving pictures'. We need to extend Deleuze's analysis and show that it has a general bearing on the status of the image within modernity. But this means that the mythical fixity of the image has been broken, and we should not really speak of images here, but of gestures. In fact, every image is animated by an antinomous polarity: on the one hand this is the reification and effacement of a gesture (the imago either as symbol or as the wax mask of the corpse); on the other it maintains the dynamis (as in Muybridge's split-second photographs, or in any photograph of a sporting event). The former corresponds to the memory of whose voluntary recall it takes possession; the latter to the image flashed in the epiphany of involuntary memory. And while the former dwells in magical isolation, the latter always refers beyond itself, towards a whole of which it is part. 73

Agamben posits two forces in the image - on the one hand, what we could call the arrest and erasure of the gesture, on the other, a movement beyond itself -and aligns these with voluntary and involuntary memory respectively. Indeed we could say that the gesture is always written through by two contrary forces: the gesture is presented as framed and enclosed, yet at the same time, as fragment, the gesture gestures towards its own completion. 74 The gesture is both representation and presentation. Agamben draws attention to the ways in which the gesture (and here he is referring to the gesture in film), in referring beyond itself (which can not be reduced in any simple sense to the idea of the situation that gave rise to it), connects to Benjamin's proposal of involuntary memory or unwillkurliches

73 Agamben, "Notes on Gesture," p.139.

74 I have discussed this aspect of the gesture in terms of film in "Con sumed by Cinematic Monstrosity," Art & Text 34 (Spring 1989), pp.79-94. In relation to Benjamin's reading of Brecht's gestus, Asman writes: "Benjamin con sidered this gestural process dialectical because it is simultaneously both sign and action, that is closed and open form. The gesture is closed in as much as it is frag mented or interrupted linear movement, an action which is arrested or brought to a standstill. At the same time the gesture suggests a completed movement or action which it simultaneously interrupts. The gesture oscillates between move ment and frozen sign, between the mimetic and the semiotic, which constitute the two poles of Benjamin's language philosophy. By overstepping word and sign, the gesture returns to the body, the place of its production." Asman, "Return ofthe Sign to the Body," p.49. 64

Eingedenken. Unwillkurliches Eingedenken is a form of memory which is written through by interruption and the fragment, for that which is brought forth through involuntary memory has a flash-like structure: it erupts into and interrupts the present. Benjamin's gestural practice, like unwillkurliches Eingedenken, entails the contraction and convolution of time into an instant which becomes charged.

What Benjamin's attention to the gestic aspects of cinema suggests is the terrain of the mimetic faculty, and a mode of cognition which is closer to childhood cognition.

Language is the highest application of the mimetic faculty: a medium into which the earlier perceptive capabilities for recognis ing the similar had entered without residue, so that it is now lan guage which represents the medium in which objects meet and enter into relationship with each other, no longer directly, as once in the mind of the augur or priest, but in their essences, in their most volatile and delicate substances, even in their aromata. In other words: it is to writing and language that clairvoyance has, over the course of history, yielded its old powers.75

What if, as Benjamin suggests, film offers a form of mimetic apprehen sion, that it is to film that the mimetic faculty - the capacity to read similarities, to read the language of things- has resorted? For we could replace language with film in the above quotation and it would make as much sense in the context of

Benjamin's theory of film. If film involves a form of mimetic apprehension - the producing and reading of similarities - this has fundamental implications for film theory's debates about the nature of the filmic image (one must radically recon figure ideas of its iconic nature), for questions of identification, and also, of course, for the ways in which Benjamin's work has been read for a Brechtian and

Marxist film theory. What would be the form of transmissibility that film offers?

I would suggest that it is, before all else, an experience of time - of the temporal structuring(s) of experience.

75 Benjamin, "Doctrine ofthe Similar," trans. Knut Tarnowski, New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), p.68. 65

The forms of shock which have penetrated- and indeed structured- one's

very movements and gestures are, in film, offered up for scrutiny. However,

rather than being offered as nostalgic reminders or remainders of a lost totality,

they are to be offered up as both ruins and as the basis of new forms of trans

missibility. In this "handing on," it is not a case oflearning gestures (we are not

dealing with mimicry in any simple sense of imitation), but rather a training in

reading. It is important to point out that this does not take us into a cinema where

gesture is given the gravity of tradition and the auratic - such as we may find in

the Kammerspiel.filmen produced by UF A in the early 1930's (the work of

Murnau etc) - but is closer to the gestic, and to the intersections between Brecht

and Kafka. As we look at Benjamin's comments on film acting in relation to the

optical unconscious, we find that the gestic aspects he proposes are crucially

about the temporal structurings of experience.

The gestus, then, could be seen as offering a practice of remembrance

which can both grasp the temporal structuring of experience and make it trans

missable. Perhaps we do not need to look so far for examples of such a cinema. In

Terrence Malick's Badlands for instance, we could find such a gestural practice in the scenes where Kit/Sheen and Holly/Spacek are hiding out in the "badlands" of

Montana (and there would certainly be other scenes in this film that we could

equally mention). The warlands that Sheen's character has devised here are precarious - we know that the highway is only just out of shot. This space is both

familiar and alien. On the one hand it is an impossible space - the presence of a highway held at the borders of the shot, the young couple playing the parts of out laws without managing to occupy these roles, and a scrubland which has become both a warzone and the site of hope. On the other hand this alien space is familarised, as Spacek and Sheen play out the moves not so much of the young married couple, but of the middle-aged couple (Spacek with her hair in rollers, the two negotiating their way around each other in a "bathroom" that is little more 66

than a bowl of water and a mirror in the middle of the bush). This space, the

characters and their gestures are marked by a complex temporality as Spacek's

voice-over drifts across the scene, and it is this complex temporality which both

"bursts" this space apart and unleashes an "immense and unexpected field of

action." In one of the most remarkable sequences in this film we see Sheen in

medium long shot, rehearsing army style moves in thigh-high grass. Sheen's

mimicry of the army moves associated with the Vietnam war - or perhaps moreso, the Vietnam war veteran - is that of a body marked by shock experience. What we find here is the mutual penetration of time, gesture, and technology.

In technology a physis is being organized through which mankind's contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families. One need recall only the experience of velocities by virtue of which mankind is now prepar ing to embark on incalculable journeys into the interior oftime, to encounter there rhythms from which the sick shall draw strength as they did earlier on high mountains or at Southern seas. 76

76 Benjamin, "One-Way Street," p.104. 67

Chapter 2

WIDE-EYED: BENJAMIN AND THE IMAGE

What Benjamin owed to [Stefan] George's school- more than may be superficially gleaned from his writing - is a spellbinding, philosophical gesture that freezed the animate, that monumentality of the momentary, which constitutes one of the decisive tensions of the form of his thought. 1

Fascination, boredom's happier sibling, is a constant presence in Ben- j amin' s work: forms of fascination underlie many of his central concepts - distraction, the aura, the optical unconscious - and are central to the image practices he addresses. Fascination inevitably plays a central part in his theory of modernity and its forms of experience. Fascination is perhaps the central mode of reception and affect in modernity where it is the correlate of the new as the always-the same. It is both the means by which the new as the always-the-same is buffered and the mode in which the new-as-the-always-the-same presents itself (as fetish).

One ofthe attractions of Benjamin's work is that it develops an analysis ofthe forms of fascination central to mass culture and allows a critical role and potential to relations to the image in which a dynamic of fascination is in play. Neither championed nor dismissed, the forms and practices of fascination are critically addressed in terms of their central place in modem experience. Benjamin both gives forms of fascination a critical attention and develops what we could call a

1 Theodor W. Adorno, "Introduction to Benjamin's Schriften," trans. R. Hullot-Kentor, On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Reflections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1991), p.7. 68

critical practice of fascination, and in this respect his work is particularly sugges

tive for rethinking debates around spectatorship and cinematic fascination.

Fascination has rarely been considered the noblest of sentiments or modes

of engagement. When fascination - as a mode of spectatorship and reception - has

been negatively valued in popular and theoretical discourses, it has generally been

allocated to the other, to ideas of the naive audience (whether this be the female

spectator, or a more general idea of the "naive" spectator, defined by race, class,

age, or gender, or indeed historical moment2). Fascination, in other words, has

been seen as the mode of engagement characteristic of the spectator who does not,

or cannot, establish a critical distance between him/herself and the image. In this respect, it is not simply a case of the fascinated spectator being posited as "naive."

Such debates are also about modes of reading and viewing, as the naive spectator is seen as being caught in an unmappable relation of proximity to the image, where the image itself is regarded as both other (in the sense that it induces wonder and fascination) and same (in the sense that the spectator cannot separate him/herself from it and recognize it as a representation). We could say then that there are two ways that fascination is understood in relation to the filmic image: on the one hand, we have the idea of the naive spectator unable to establish or

2 Tom Gunning has addressed some of these issues in relation to the figur ing of early film audiences as being unable to recognise the filmic image as image. Discussing the claims that the audience at the Salon Indien of the Grand Cafe "reared back in their seats, or screamed, or got up and ran from the auditorium" during the screening of Lumiere's Arrivee d'un train, Gunning writes that "[t]he first audiences, according to this myth, were naive, encountering this threatening and rampant image with no defenses, with no tradition by which to understand it. The absolute novelty of the moving image therefore reduced them to a state usually attributed to savages in their primal encounter with the advanced technology of Western colonialists, howling and fleeing in impotent terror before the power of the machine." Gunning's work is particularly valuable in terms of the ways in which he addresses the implications and stakes of these myths of origin both for debates around spectatorship and about film history. "An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator," Art & Text 34 (Spring 1989), pp.31-32. 69

maintain a critical distance from the image (who cannot process the image as

image); on the other hand, we have the idea of the fascinating image- the

Medusa-like image- which can freeze the spectator, holding him or her in a

trance-like state. In both instances the image is seen as having a power (the power

to arrest, to bewitch). The difference perhaps is in their emphasis. In the former,

the image's power doesn't need to be that great for the subject is already seen as

lacking. In the latter, the image is seen as all powerful- it is an alluring, but

dangerous, threat for the viewer. If in the first instance the spectator is somehow

feminized, in the latter, the image itself- as Medusan- is seen as having a castrat

ing potency.

Fascination, then, is associated with a loss of critical distance, with being

enthralled and suspended in an intoxicating delirium. It is not that the forms and

practices of fascination that we find in Benjamin's work do not involve the idea of

enthrallment, thrill, and a form of suspension, but rather that this very idea of

enthrallment - as a kind of arresting and suspension - is reconceived. Equally

importantly, his critical reposing of ideas of fascination is crucially informed by

his work on film and photography, both in terms of his work on film's modes of

reception and representation and in terms of the ways in which he develops his

concept of the dialectical image and its forms of transfixed unrest through both the language of photography and the concept and practice of montage.

If fascination is given a critical value in Benjamin's work, it is in so far as it refuses contemplative distance, and precisely because it involves a form of temporal arrest and suspension. Forms of fascination have a critical role in his theorization of the status of experience in modernity, and in his distinction between different forms of experience- between Erfahrung and Erlebnis. As dis cussed in chapter 1, Erfahrung is associated with tradition and transmissibility, but it is also to do with the idea of danger and risk (both the danger that tradition 70

will not be passed on, and danger to the very parameters of subjectivity).3 These

aspects of the concept Erfahrung are central to Benjamin's use of the term, and the distinction he develops between the two forms of experience. Erlebnis on the

other hand refers to a form of experience more in the sense of a particular event, the short-lived, momentary, fragmentary experience. For Benjamin of course,

such forms of fragmentary experience - of events or occurrences - are

predominant in modernity (where experience is characterised by shock), and the possibility of making sense of or organising these random, fragmentary occur rences is virtually impossible. Clearly fascination would seem to be more readily associated with experience in the sense of Erlebnis (with particular events or occurrences), and in terms of the phantasmagoria of commodity culture it would be closer to Chockerlebnis (shock experience). However, through Benjamin's refiguring of ideas of fascination, forms of fascination, or rather what they can enable, bring us closer to the possibility of experience in the sense of Erfahrung.

As I will go on to argue, Benjamin's interest in fascination, that is, in the practice of fascination, is in the ways in which it can enable a form of innervation. What

Benjamin is clearly interested in here is the ways in which a critical practice of fascination can enable a rupture in (and through) the dream world of mass culture, a form of awakening.

3 The distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis - and in particular the relations between Erfahrung and danger and travel - has been addressed in the work ofMiriam Hansen. See her essay "Of Mice and Ducks: Benjamin and Adorno on Disney," South Atlantic Quarterly 92.1 (Winter 1993), pp. 27-61. As Eduardo Cadava writes, "[for Benjamin as for Freud] what characterizes experi ence in general - experience understood in its strict sense as the traversal of a danger, the passage through a peril- is that it retains no trace of itself: experience experiences itself as the vertigo of memory, as an experience whereby what is experienced is not experienced. For both Freud and Benjamin, consciousness emerges as memory begins to withdraw." "Words ofLight: Theses on the Photography ofHistory," Diacritics 22.3-4 (Fall-Winter 1992), pp.108-9. 71

Fascination can be seen as a form of over- and under-attentiveness, of being beside oneself, and of being gripped by the image (the tropes, as I will dis cuss in chapter 5, of the figure of the female spectator). Benjamin's practice of fascination, however, does not simply entail valuing the undervalued term, of simply reversing a dichotomy. If Benjamin develops a critical practice of fascina tion - and regards forms of fascination as having a radical potential - it is because the forms of under- and over-attentiveness that he locates in fascination, and the forms of arrest it involves, are seen as the means through which the present can be critically grasped and ruptured. Fascination itself, as over- and under- attentiveness, is in this sense reproposed, and as such any reading of the place of fascination in his work must first address the forms or practices of fascination that he is both proposing and revaluing. *** a dialectics of fascination

Benjamin is clearly not simply championing fascination, nor claiming it as a radical political and aesthetic practice. The critical attention he brings to forms of over- and under-attentiveness (for instance the idea of distraction in the "Work of Art" essay) poses quite specific questions for any project which simply tries to reclaim fascination as an end in itself. How can we conceive of fascination critically without it simply being another form of intoxication? How can we propose a dialectics of intoxication (as Benjamin does), and avoid the intoxication with intoxication that he criticised in Surrealism (the surrealists' relation to intoxication being, for Benjamin, one of privileging dream over awakening, and thereby fall ing short of a dialectics of intoxication)?4 How can we propose a critical practice

4 Benjamin's relation to Surrealism, particularly to ideas of intoxication in Surrealism, will be addressed in chapter 4. 72

of cinematic fascination when, in its negative valuing, fascination with the filmic image is is generally associated with the figure of the female spectator mes merised by the image, and when it is championed, fascination with the filmic image tends to be claimed by, and understood in terms of, the male subject of modernity and postmodernity (a subject who is invigorated into action through a confrontation with the gaze of a Medusa-like popular culture)? How can we conceive of cinematic fascination in such a way that does not fall into or reinforce these two models?

In his essay "On Fascination: Walter Benjamin's Images," Ackbar Abbas addresses the centrality of fascination in Benjamin's "practice of the image. "5 As

Abbas points out, Benjamin's work contains many "striking images," and his

"strongest images tend to appear at the most crucial part of his argument." Abbas offers a number of examples from Benjamin's work - "dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth," "boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience"6 - the possible list of such images in Benjamin's work would, of course, be endless. These images which we find throughout his work are like (and some times are) quotations, they startle the reader. "Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out and relieve the stroller of his conviction" Benjamin writes in One-Way Street. 7 This image - planted to shock the reader and which itself leaps out- provides a key to understanding the critical force Benjamin locates in the over- and under-attentiveness of fascination. Benjamin's practice of the image is, for Abbas, a mode of "critical reflection" which he calls "fascina-

5 Ackbar Abbas, "On Fascination: Walter Benjamin's Images," New German Critique 48 (Fall 1989), pp.43-62.

6 ibid, p.46.

7 Benjamin, "One-Way Street," in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London and New York: Verso, 1992), p.95. 73

tion." Benjamin, he writes, "sees in fascination not a will-less affect, not the

response of last resort, but a willingness to be drawn to phenomena that attract

our attention yet do not submit entirely to our understanding. "8

Benjamin's central terms -less concepts than "thought images"- often sig nal and stage forms of fascination in which tensions are held fast. They involve, in Benjamin's terms, forms of transfixed unrest- a form of temporal arrest and activation. As Adorno writes in his introduction to Benjamin's Schriften: "Ben jamin's images do not present invariant archetypes that are to be extracted from history; rather, they shoot together precisely by means of the force ofhistory."9

One could say that Benjamin's work as a whole, the way he sets discourses against each other (particularly historical materialism and theology), privileges transfixed unrest as a central force. For Benjamin, transfixed unrest involves the charged spatialization of time, and his interest in film and photography certainly includes the charged spatializations of time that he finds in these media. Ben jamin's concept of transfixed unrest is central to his form of historical materialism and his theory of experience, and is also an aspect of his work which is particu larly generative for reproposing forms of cinematic fascination. Transfixed unrest is crucial to the form of critical thinking Benjamin proposes, which aims to rup ture the idea of the present as a point in a continuum of progress. Transfixed unrest brings particular forms and understandings of temporality to a standstill

(centrally, of course, the temporality of historicism), but Benjamin, I will argue, is interested not only in this state of arrest but in what is activated or animated at and through this standstill.

8 Abbas, "On Fascination: Walter Benjamin's Images," p.51

9 Adorno, "Introduction to Benjamin's Schriften," p.lO. 74

Abbas' essay addresses the practice of the image in Benjamin's work and

develops an important analysis of the place of fascination in his practices of the

image. His paper poses a number of questions in relation to how we conceive of

and value different modes of engagement, and his analysis of the privileging of

fascination in Benjamin's work obviously poses quite specific questions when

placed in the context of spectatorial practices and film theory, where fascination

is a particularly loaded term. I would like to use his paper as a starting point from

which both the place of fascination in Benjamin's work and the idea of the image that it involves can be further examined, and then extend this analysis to cinema.

What I will suggest is required here is not only a more specific understanding of what we mean by the image in the context of Benjamin's work, but also a reexamination of the place and role of fascination in this work. Forms of fascina tion certainly play a central and critical role in Benjamin's practices of the image as Abbas points out, and Benjamin gives to fascination a critical revaluing. What one must keep in mind, however, is that for Benjamin forms of fascination are the

(critical) means through which something else is possible. What fascination - as a form of under- and over-attentiveness - can enable is precisely the possibility of grasping (at) the (disappearing) image as it flashes into visibility. It involves what we could call the astonishment of involuntary memory.

In Adorno's famous critique of Benjamin's essay "The Paris of the Second

Empire in Baudelaire," he criticised Benjamin for seeming to remain caught in the charmed web of fascination. Charging Benjamin's essay with "lacking mediation," Adorno wrote:

To express it another way: The theological motif of calling things by their names tends to tum into a wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. If one wished to put it very drastically, one could say that 75

your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. That spot is bewitched. Only theory could break the spell.IO

While not wanting to pursue Adorno's criticisms of Benjamin's dialectical method

here, his response to Benjamin's essay provides an avenue to look at exactly

which crossroads we're dealing with here, who gets to travel them, and what's happening at their intersection. "Bewitched spots" and "being wide-eyed" also

suggest a particular form of cinematic experience: in those cinematic experiences

based in a form of longing- in the longing, precisely, to be enthralled- a form of

fascination is certainly at play, a form of fascination which could readily receive

Adorno's charge of being held bewitched and wide-eyed. In examining Ben- jamin's dialectics of fascination, its place in his critical practice and the ways in

which we can draw on these arguments in relation to cinema, we must first turn to

Benjamin's understanding of the image.

Benjamin and the image

While one of the major attractions of Benjamin's work for film theory is his attention and attentiveness to the image, his work suggests rather than defines a critical film theory. What Benjamin's work offers is a way of reconceiving cinematic experience(s) and the dynamics between spectator and image. His theory and practice of the image enables the rethinking of the memorative practices operative through cinema, ideas of visual fascination, and that modem affliction "cinema-love" (which is already in its moment of fading). It is not that the various practices of the image that he addresses can be directly transposed to cinema, to the reading of particular films or to a theory of cinematic spectator-

10 Adorno to Benjamin, 10.11.1938, in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1980), p.129. 76

ship. Rather, Benjamin's practices of the image offer, in different ways, the means of reconceiving modes of spectatorship and the very terms in which spectatorship has been debated, most significantly for me here through the critical attention he brings to the temporalities of reading.

From his early study of the Trauerspiel and baroque allegory and his theory of language, through to his work on Surrealism, Proust, and Baudelaire,

Brecht's gestus, storytelling, collecting, and the Arcades Project, Benjamin's work can be seen as developing a theory of the image, or what Abbas calls a "practice of the image." Benjamin's work is written through with a concern for the image and the imagistic, which play a central role in his theory of experience and the form of historical materialism he develops. This attention to the image is the basis of the image practices he addresses and develops, whether the allegorical image addressed in The Origin of German Tragic Drama and the Baudelaire essays, the profane illumination in the context of Surrealism, or his work on photography and cinema. This attention to the image can also be found in Benjamin's writing itself. His thinking and writing can be regarded as a practice of the image, and as the development of a critical, dialectical optic. His writing is marked by the pro duction of images which flare up, producing dialectical images through the prin ciples of montage. In this respect, we could regard his critical method as a whole as imagistic.

Despite their similar concerns, the different forms of images and image practices in his work cannot be collapsed into one another or seen as equivalent, though they are certainly related. One cannot, for instance, conflate the dialectical image with allegory, though there are a number of points of intersection between them. More importantly for me here, one cannot collapse or equate the various image practices Benjamin addresses with particular filmic or photographic images, even though Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image- around which 77

much of his later work was focussed - is clearly developed through his understanding of photography and film. That the cinematic image and the photographic image cannot be directly equated with Benjamin's concept of the image does not mean they are not crucially related in his thought. My interest here is precisely in the points of connection between these practices of the image, and these connections are primarily around questions of temporality and the image. Film and photography have a privileged place in Benjamin's thinking, not only in terms of the direct attention he gave them in essays like "A Small History of Photography" and "The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduc- tion," but because they are central to his formulation of the concept of the dialectical image and his theory of experience. My focus here will be the relations between photography, film, and Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image, as it is here that temporality - the temporality of reading, and of fascination - is most foregrounded.

Benjamin's concern with the practices of the image is always in terms of the image read, and in this respect any analysis of the practices of the image in his work is also an analysis of relations to the image - of histories of perception, modes of reception, and their valuing. His analysis of various practices of the image includes, in other words, the various relations to the image they entail, the particular "optics" they involve. In his essay "Notes on the 'Dialectical Image'

(How Deconstructive Is It?)," 11 Anselm Haverkamp disputes any too eager equa tion of the dialectical image with the image in the sense of the picture. Charging

Susan Buck-Morss' Dialectics ofSeeing as taking the "image at face value: as something whose evidence can be taken for granted and used as a means of illustration," he argues that her book - as a mapping of the Arcades Project (or

11 Anselm Haverkamp, "Notes on the 'Dialectical Image' (How Deconstructive Is It?)," Diacritics 22.3-4 (Fall-Winter 1992), pp. 70-80. 78

what he calls, somewhat nastily, "her version" of the Arcades Project)- ends up

being a "picture book ofphotographs."12 While Haverkamp's essay is often

marked by a distaste for images themselves (writing about Buck-Morss' book, he

declares that "[t]he reader's relief, after all the labour of translating Benjamin, is

the relief of no longer having to read at all, of just looking," 13 where this "look

ing" is figured as inherently passive), his essay nevertheless foregrounds the cen

trality of reading and the practices of citation in Benjamin's theory of the image,

stressing that "what counts in reading, to be sure, is not the image given, but the

image found."14 While Haverkamp's concern in this essay is neither cinema nor

cinema spectatorship, it is precisely this idea of reading - which is not outside but

central to the optics that Benjamin addresses - that I want to focus on in relation to cinema and cinema spectatorship.

By the image, then, Benjamin is not referring to a representation in the

familiar sense, nor an image in the sense of a material thing - a photograph for

instance (though of course this is not to say that he does not also address particu

lar photographs and films). There are two points that need to be made regarding

Benjamin's practice of the image and its relation and relevance to cinema, or, for that matter, photography. Firstly, the image here cannot be understood in a literal

sense in relation to the photographic image or to the cinematic shot or frame. The

image that interests Benjamin is a flash-like constellation which startles the viewer or reader, and which comes into visibilty or legibility as a sort of shock.

The image is something that is raised. It is characterised by its fleetingness: it cannot be grasped, and this fleetingness is central to the image's temporality. The

12 ibid, p.71.

13 ibid, p.71.

14 ibid, p.77. 79

image, we could say, produces astonishment. As Eduardo Cadava argues, this

flash or shock startles the viewer or reader, producing a sort of momentary blind

ness and illumination. 15 Secondly, and this only seemingly contradicts my wari

ness at any too easy relation of equivalence, both the images we find throughout

Benjamin's work and the practices of the image that he both produces and

addresses, seem strangely cinematic. This is not (necessarily) because they

remind us of certain films or certain shots, but is rather due to their flash-like

appearance, their "framing," their attention to detail, and most importantly, their

temporality. Their "fleetingness" leaves what we could call an after-image. If

these images seem strangely cinematic, it is in their form of, and relation to,

temporality. These images are cinematic in the sense that they produce an inter

ruption and condensation of time spatially (in this respect it is unimportant if we

are talking about the film viewed or the film in memory), and if they load time

and spatialize it, they also load space with a complex temporality. These images

have the density of the gesture, and like the gesture they signal in advance their

own unfolding. They are scriptural, involving a legibility which itself has to come

into legibility, and require a particular optic.

Certainly one of the most attractive and volatile aspects of Benjamin's

work for cinema is the centrality of temporality to his understanding of the image

and its place in his theory of experience, both in terms of the temporal complexity

of the image itself (its spatialization and interruption of time, and the complex temporal unfoldings it can bring about), and the temporal complexity of the rela tions between viewer/reader and image. We can find this temporal complexity and temporal compression in all the practices of the image that Benjamin

addresses. For instance, in the baroque allegory, the allegorist- always melan-

IS Cadava, "Words ofLight." 80

cholic - sees the world in a state of ruin, as dead. The allegorist strips away

appearance through his/her disfiguring gaze and sees the world as corpse, as in a

state of arrest - of petrified unrest. In allegory's principle of catastrophe, the temporality of progress, of linear history, is refused. It is not only that death marks the image, but it marks ideas of the present. In the profane illumination of

Surrealism this temporal complexity is of another order and is found in the rela tion to the outmoded. The outmoded, the transitory, the out of fashion, are seen as

infused with the experience of history (-as-catastrophe) and are mobilised in such

a way that an object's history is unleashed against its after-life with a shock-like force. In the profane illumination of Surrealism, the very idea of the transitory and the eternal is radically refigured. And in the dialectical image we are dealing with a halt in chronological time, a rupture which enables (the thinking of) a radi cally different experience of time, and the temporality of experience. It is in Ben jamin's concept of the dialectical image that we find the temporal complexity and compression which is so central to his work perhaps most clearly articulated, and it is also here that the relations between this temporality - one of transfixed unrest

- and fascination are both most complex in terms of their applicability to cinema, but also most suggestive.

Benjamin's interest in film and photography, and in practices of the image more generally, is in terms of their place in the shifting relations between aesthetics, technology, and experience. The concepts of shock and distraction, for instance, are largely drawn from and developed through his theory of film and the photographic process, and he uses the language of photography to develop his concept of the dialectical image. The relation between the dialectical image and the photographic and cinematic image of the new medias of mechanical reproducibility is, however, complex. There have been a number of excellent studies of the relationship between Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image 81

and photography, most notably, Cadava's essay "Words of Light: Theses on the

Photography of History." While Benjamin certainly develops his concept of the dialectical image more directly through photography than through film, my inter est is in the connections between the dialectical image and cinema, both in terms of representation and reception. For this reason I will first trace the relations between photography and the dialectical image before looking at its connections with - and implications for - understandings of film and spectatorship.

The Photograph and the Dialectical Image

Benjamin repeatedly develops and defines his idea of the dialectical image through an understanding and proposal of the photographic process - the action of the camera's shutter, which in a split-second, infuses the surface of the photographic negative with the traces of an image and a moment; and the devel opment procedure, through which the image is brought into visibility. However, the relation between these two practices of the image (the photograph and the dialectical image) is neither illustrative nor one of equivalence. Benjamin's use of the language of photography is not simply a way of demonstrating the workings and parameters of his concept of the dialectical image, or just of describing the dialectical image through the metaphor of photography. He is at the same time developing a theory of photography, and this is less a case of a simultaneous pro ject than of his seeing these two practices of the image as inextricably inter twined. What interests Benjamin about photography is the temporal complexity of the photograph and the photographic process, and it is in these terms - the rela tions between forms of temporality, experience, and the image - that the photograph and the dialectical image are inextricably bound.

Benjamin's scattered formulations of the dialectical image by no means form a systematic account, nor is the dialectical image definitively distinguished 82

from some of the other practices of the image he deals with - notably allegory - as

Max Pensky has pointed out. 16 Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image is cru-

cially informed by his work on allegory (both the baroque allegory addressed in

the Trauerspiel book, and the modern allegory of Baudelaire), but they are not

equivalent. If allegory blasts apart myth and grasps the present as loss (the loss of

the possibility of a fixity of meaning), the dialectical image both grasps this loss

and attempts to overcome it. Like allegory, the dialectical image ruptures the idea

of chronological time, of time as progress:

It isn't that the past casts its light on the present or the present casts its light on the past: rather, an image is that in which the Then (Das Gewesene) and the Now (Das Jetzt) come into a constellation like a flash of lightning. 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 the Then to the Now is dialectical- not development but image[,] leaping forth (sprunghaft). - Only dialectical images are genuine (i.e. not archaic) images; and the place one happens upon them is language. *Waking* .17

The dialectical image also ruptures the temporality of (habitual) thinking through

a form of startling shock, and refuses the contemplative immersion more charac

teristic of the melancholic allegorist. The dialectical image is the sudden, fleeting,

flash-like image which appears where "thinking reaches a standstill in a constella-

tion." As Benjamin writes in a later entry:

Thinking involves both thoughts in motion and thoughts at rest. When thinking reaches a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions, the dialectical image appears. This image is the caesura in the movement of thought. Its locus is of course not arbitrary. In short, it is to be found wherever the tension between the dialectical oppositions is greatest. The dialectical image is, accordingly, the

16 Pensky discusses the relations between allegory and the dialectical image in his book Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).

17 Benjamin, KN 2a,3, "N [re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Pro gress]," trans. Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth, in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p.49. 83

very object constructed in the materialist presentation of history. It is identical with the historical object; it justifies its being blasted out of the continuum of the historical process.18

If for Benjamin thinking can come to a standstill pregnant with tensions, it is at this standstill that we find transfixed unrest. However, it is also at this standstill that tensions are charged, and produce and are infused by a shock. As Cadava writes: "Benjamin characterizes his position on history and historiography against prevailing ones, and does so by affirming a movement of interruption that suspends the continuum oftime."19 In the dialectical image we are dealing with a halt in chronological time, a rupture which enables (the thinking of) a radically different experience of time and the temporality of experience.

This idea of transfixed unrest, of time-as-unfolding being brought to a standstill, is one of the central connections between the photograph and the dialectical image in Benjamin's work. The photograph marks a moment as past and as anticipating a future, and it infuses the moment with a posthumous shock.

If it interrupts the present, it also ruptures it, producing a spatio-temporal gap at its core. In the photograph we find the importance of the instant (which is cut off from the flow of time with the fastening of the image on the negative and the flash of the shutter). This privileging of the instant also involves a redefinition of the very nature of the instant (for with photographic media we can not only bring into visibility those moments unavailable to the human sensory apparatus - and at the same time capture and eternalise those fleeting moments - but also, through photography's privileging of any instant, we find a redefinition of the idea of the instant itself). These instants moreover, are fragments or details. In the dialectical image, like the photograph, the fragment plays a crucial role, but this is not the

1s ibid, p.67 (Nl Oa,3).

19 Cadava, "Words of Light," p.99. 84

only point of similiarity. The temporal relations between viewer and image are

also important, and it is here that the temporal complexity Benjamin addresses takes on an added significance. The connections between the temporality of the

dialectical image and the photograph include what he calls the historical index

and the "fleetingness" of the image, and these two aspects are certainly related.

The historical index of the dialectical image is the mark of its recog

nizability which leaps forth, and which becomes legible in the Now with which it

is synchronic:

What differentiates images from the "essences" of phenomenology is their historic index ... For the historical index of the images doesn't simply say that they belong to a specific time, it says above all that they only enter into legibility at a specific time. And indeed this "entering into legibility" constitutes a specific critical point of the movement inside them... For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of the Then to the Now is dialectical: not of a temporal, but of an imagistic nature. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical, i.e., not archaic images. The image that is read, that is, the image at the Now of recognizability, bears to the highest degree the stamp of that critical, dangerous impetus that lies at the source of all reading. 2o

The historical index of the photograph is the "spark of contingency, of the Here and Now" which the beholder seeks. And this spark of contingency is also the point at which we confront a form of aura, the vertiginous opening of a temporal distance. What the beholder of the photograph seeks is the anticipated reciprocity ofthe gaze:

No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we, look ing back, may rediscover it. For it is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed

20 Benjamin, "N [re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]," pp.50-51 (N 3,1). 85

by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. 21

For Benjamin, the photograph contains an instant which has anticipated a future, as if the moment of the photograph has focused and drawn into itself so that it can project itself into a future. In this respect, it is not simply a moment past, but a past which signals its anticipated future. The beholder, who tries "to fmd the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently," seeks out those traces, and hence we find a particular economy of loss, for this anticipated future is not equivalent with the present - there is a distance not only between the moment past and the present, but between the present and/as the anticipated future of the moment past, estab lishing a distance within the present itself. "The true picture of the past flits by.

The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again. "22 What one can attempt to hold on to is not the past but a particular form of image, which can be grasped at in its simultaneous coming into visibility and disappearance. In this respect there are a number of differences between Benjamin's understanding of the photograph and that which we find in Barthes' Camera Lucida (though there are certainly also many connections). For Benjamin, what the beholder confonts in the photograph is a particular form of mourning - the attempt to grasp a moment of possibility as it comes into visibility in a moment's past projection of/into a future. The aura of the photograph - its optical unconscious - lies in this anticipated reciprocity of the gaze, the possibility that this "spark of contingency" will leap out. For Barthes, the punctum of the photograph certainly involves or implies an idea of a

21 Benjamin, "A Small History of Photography," One-Way Street, p.243.

22 Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy ofHistory," Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Suffolk: Fontana/Collins, 1982), p.257. 86

(fantasized) return of the gaze, but here what is returned is precisely the viewer's absence.23

For Benjamin, the photograph involves a play of visibility and invisibility, a simultaneous coming into visibility and a passing. It both arrests and ruptures time as a passage or continuum, and in the process, opens it out. The photograph, as a result of the camera technology rather than through any "intent" on the part of the photographer, stages and spatializes the traces of a moment, and what the beholder "seeks out" are those traces. In this respect, we are dealing with an indexical aspect of the photographic image. The indexical component can be con sidered as a form of physiognomy in which time itself is made visible, and does, in a sense, participate in the anticipated reciprocity of the gaze that Benjamin finds in the aura. The indexicality here is complex. If the photograph "stills" a moment in time, indexically tracing it in the image, "searing" it in the subject of the photograph, Benjamin is interested not simply in that moment past but in the relation between that moment, its anticipated future, and the time of viewing. It is not simply that the photograph stills time, but that the viewing of the photograph stills (and haunts) the "present" and its relation to the past, and the very idea of the past. In the form of transfixed unrest which operates through the photograph, and between the photograph and the viewer, an image flashes forth, a fleeting image. This fleetingness is the second major affinity between the photograph and the dialectical image. The fleetingness of the photographic image is not simply to do with the split-second action of the shutters, it is also to do with the way the photograph is viewed or read - with what arises through the photograph. What

23 Miriam Hansen discusses the similarities and differences between Barthes', Benjamin's, and Kracauer's understanding of the photograph in relation to history and death in her essay "'With Skin and Hair': Kracauer's Theory of Film, Marseille, 1940," Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993)- see in particular pp.453-457. 87

arises through the photograph is the fleetingness of the spark of contingency, in

which a moment promises or threatens to flash into visibility (linking, in Ben- jamin's terms, the Then and the Now).

Cadava has developed a magnificent account of the place of photography

in Benjamin's theory of history, and pursues many of these issues in considerably

more detail than I can address here. As he argues, Benjamin's use of the language

of photography claims not only that "the image must be understood as historical,"

but also "the more radical suggestion that history can be conceived as

imagistic. "24 "History breaks down into images, not into stories," Benjamin writes

in "Konvolut N. "25 If the principle of photography is also the principle of the

dialectical image, it is because in both we are dealing with an arresting of move

ment and time, a rupturing of the relations between a past and present, of the very

idea of past and present, and also a particular relation of legibility and illegibility:

what links the dialectical image and the photograph (including the photographic

process) is their forms of temporality. Both the photograph and the dialectical

image involve the spatialization of time - this is their "imagistic nature." They

give time a face. "For Benjamin," writes Cadava, "there can be no history without the Medusa effect - without the capacity to arrest or immobilize historical move ment, to isolate the detail of an event from the continuum of history. [The

Medusan gaze] short-circuits, and thereby suspends, the temporal continuity

between a past and a present. "26 Cadava's essay addresses this complex temporality of the photograph in terms of the forms of visibility and obstacles to

visibility that operate in the photograph and its relation to death and mourning,

24 Cadava, "Words of Light," p.l03.

25 Benjamin, "N [re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory ofProgress]," p.67 (N 11, 4).

26 Cadava, "Words ofLight," p.99. 88

linking - as others have done - Benjamin's work on photography with Barthes'

Camera Lucida. In so doing, he draws out what we could call the scriptural

aspects of Benjamin's photograph, its trace and aura.

While Cadava's paper provides a complex and sophisticated account of

Benjamin's theory of photography and history, he seems to slip between seeing the photograph and the dialectical image as having a relation of affinity and one

of equivalence. Hence he will write, in a paraphrase of Benjamin, that the

"photographic image- like the image in general- is 'dialectics at a standstill."'27 It

is precisely this idea of a standstill, of "transfixed unrest," that I want to reexamine in this chapter in terms of the temporality of - and place of fascination in - this standstill. If the dialectical image is that which fleetingly comes into legibility in/through transfixed unrest, how can the relations between cinema and the dialectical image be conceived? If we are too eager to equate the photograph and the dialectical image in terms of the temporality of this standstill, we run the risk of precluding the possible connections, both explicit and implicit in Ben jamin's work, between film and the dialectical image.

The Dialectical Image and Cinema

The intricate relations Benjamin establishes between his theory of photography and his concept of the dialectical image cannot simply be transferred to the relations between cinema and the dialectical image. To address cinema and cinema spectatorship through the concept of the dialectical image doesn't, at first appearance, get us far. If it is the temporality of the photograph and the photographic process that links photography and the dialectical image in Ben-

27 ibid, p.l 00. 89

jamin's work (and therefore also photography and his philosophy of history),

cinema - which has a different form of temporality (in terms of the flow of

images, the privileging and predominance of narrative, in terms of reception, the

production process, and the screening apparatus) - would seem to be out of the

picture (as it has so often been in the privileging of photography over film. See

for instance Barthes' Camera Lucida and his essay "The Third Meaning"28). But

perhaps the temporality/ies operative in film are not that far from that of the

dialectical image, and by examining Benjamin's idea of transfixed unrest in terms

of the form of reading or reception it involves, it is possible to trace the relations between the dialectical image, photography, and cinema.

In applying Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image to cinema one faces quite specific problems. While cinema is obviously dependent on photography, it does not have the same relations to the arresting of movement and time that we find in the photograph. It involves different forms of temporal com plexity and is based on different modes of reception, of which Benjamin was well aware. Any too easy equation between photography and film here risks simplify ing Benjamin's idea of the image and its place in his theory of experience.

Equally importantly, such an equation risks simplifying Benjamin's complex understanding of photography and cinema, essentializing these media in an argument which, while developing a theory of these (cultural) technologies, does so in a way which is by no means singular and is always both polemical and historically located. In terms of film debates, too eager an equation between film and photography's relation to the dialectical image can, in the end, limit the ways in which his work can be drawn on for theorizing cinema spectatorship.

28 See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Flamingo/Fontana, 1984), and "The Third Meaning: Research Notes on some Eisenstein Stills," in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977). 90

How then do we begin to conceive of the possible relations between film and the dialectical image? If the dialectical image involves a state of transfixed unrest (in the sense that it both stages and is generated by a form of transfixed unrest), and what fleetingly comes into legibility is the tensions and conflict of this transfixed unrest, how can this transfixed unrest be related to cinema? Clearly for Benjamin the dialectical image- as in the case of the photograph- "stalls" the viewer/reader. We could say equally that it interrupts the viewer/reader. If the tensions of a dialectical image only come into legibility at a particular historical moment, then this transfixed unrest involves a tension between different historical moments, between ideas of past and present, and the viewer/reader is also caught in this transfixed unrest.29 Are we dealing then with a transfixing image? an image which can startle the viewer or reader, staging a form of interruption? If so, what is the nature of such a transfixing image? of an image which enthralls, where such enthrallment has a critical potential? How can this be read in relation to cinema and cinema spectatorship? Such a transfixing image cannot simply be understood in terms of an idea of the frame or the shot - though it may operate in or through a frame or a shot, we must say that it is not reducible to the frame or shot, that it exceeds the shot. It could be said that film - the mechanics of film - stages as its very essence that fleetingness of the image so fascinating to Ben- jamin, but this would be too literal a reading. To read it thus would be to read this fleetingness as dependent on chronological time (where the chronological time is

29 Cf. Benjamin's comments on the mimetic faculty and non-sensuous similarity in "Doctrine of the Similar" (1933), written two years after his photography essay. Referring to the perception of similarity in the context of astrology and the horoscope, he writes "[the perception of similarity] offers itself as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars. The perception of similarities thus seems bound to a time-moment (Zeitmoment). It is like the addi tion of a third element, namely the astrologer, to the conjunction of two stars which must be grasped in an instant." "Doctrine ofthe Similar," trans. Knut Tarnowski, New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), p.66. 91

that of the projector), when it is precisely chronological time that this fleetingness

ruptures. The fleetingness of the image is of another order then to the passage of

frames through the projector or images on the screen. What is fleetingly made

visible (and visibility itself is fleeting here) is an image of an (unfulfilled) past in

a (fragmented) present, which is momentarily given form in a constellation. In this respect, the fleetingness of the image has a number of connections with Ben jamin's concept of the optical unconscious, with involuntary memory in the

Proust essay, and with the correspondences in the Baudelaire essays. The

"fleetingness" of the image is to do with the momentary coming into visibility of a tension:

The historical articulation of the past involves recognizing in the past the elements that come together in the constellation of one and the same moment. Historical cognition is possible only in the his torical instant. Cognition at a historical instant is, however, always the cognition of an instant. By contracting into an instant - into a dialectical image- it enters the involuntary memory ofmankind.30

If Benjamin's idea of transfixed unrest is applied directly to cinema a number of problems become apparent - one is either caught in a particular film aesthetic, or film becomes essentialized in such a way that historically, socially, and sexually specific modes of reception become irrelevant. It can be asked, for instance, whether a particular type of cinematic image can generate a form of fascination and transfixed unrest. Or one could question whether it is a case of a par ticular relation to the image, a mode of reading, which entails a form of transfixed unrest and can generate the production of dialectical images. In question is the weight, the balance, to be given to both particular film aesthetics and the tech nological apparatus of film on the one hand, or the cultural technology of cinema

30 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften l, 3, p.l233, qtd. and trans. in Irving Wohlfarth, "On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin's Last Reflections," Glyph 3 (1978), p.l57. 92

and the modes of spectatorship it enables and privileges on the other. Is it that that

which fascinates in cinema is an image (in the simple sense) of transfixed unrest?

Or is fascination itself a form of transfixed unrest in which subject and object are held in a particular form of tension?

Running with the former - where that which fascinates is a sort of frozen tension - one can readily imagine the kinds of film practices that would offer such images of transfixed unrest. Such forms of frozen tension can be found in particular modernist films where a tension is staged between stasis and movement, between photography and film. These films produce a stilling of a chronological, cumulative, unfolding of time through the stretching, interrupting or condensing of time, so that temporality itself is infused by and exerts a pressure. Exemplary here would be films such as Robbe-Grillet's L'Immortelle (The Immortal One) and Resnais' L 'Annee derniere a Marienbad Last Year at Marienbad) (films which

Deleuze has addressed in terms of the time-image31 ), and some of Akerman's early work such as Les Rendezvous D'Anna (Anna's Rendezvous) and Jeanne

Die/man. In these films the passage, compression, and withholding of time is indexically inscribed in the image through framing, mise-en-scene, performance, and editing. Some of the pre-narrative films of the cinema of attractions could also be included here, films which play with the apparatus' capacity to produce and withhold movement, and their later heirs in both avant-garde cinema and popular cinema (particularly melodrama, but also horror and thriller). It is temporality itself which seems to be held in a state of transfixed unrest in these instances. The form of transfixed unrest that we find here is the withholding, stretching and compression of temporality as an unfolding. Temporality is

31 See chapter 5 in Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). 93

inscribed in the image in these films in such a way that the temporality of viewing

undergoes a tension (in the case of Robbe-Grillet, this tension is one where

temporality constantly threatens to come to a standstill, in Akerman - as with

Duras- temporality is infused with an exhaustion and a fatigue). These temporal

operations involve a particular form of indexicality in which the withholding of

time is inscribed in the image, and in the relation between film and spectator. To

read transfixed unrest in relation to cinema in this way certainly provides a way

of addressing the uncanny effect of such moments and, more generally, the

temporal economies in such films which produce something like a spatialization

of time. These moments produce a sort of tension in relation to the expectation of

(temporal) movement: the cinematic image, expected to pass into another, can be

gripped by a tension if it is held in such a way that the instant seems to be

stretched and its resolution is deferred. But this tension is not simply a formal

quality of the image, nor is it simply contained within the image. The spectator too is caught in this tension. In the relation between spectator and screen, the desire to be constantly held in the promise of movement and to be carried in time is willed again at every instant, and the excessive deferral or postponement of this fulfillment can grip the spectator in such a way that he or she comes face to face with the intensity of their own projected desires. What we seem to be dealing with here in this understanding of transfixed unrest is a particular aesthetic, which could in turn be split between a fascination with the image or object rendered inanimate and granted a Medusa-like power (as we find in Robbe-Grillet's The

Immortal One), or, as in some of Akerman's early work, a fascination with both the temporality of exhaustion (boredom and fatigue), and the exhausting of temporality itself- its stretching.

If it is asked, instead, whether it is a particular relation to the image - a mode of reading (one which we could call fascination) - which entails a form of 94

transfixed unrest, we face another set of problems. Here the question is whether fascination itself is a form of transfixed unrest, whereby the spectator is seen as

being gripped by the image in such a way that such states of fascination involve a particular form of temporality (as in cinematic experiences in which one finds oneself enthralled before the screen, held suspended but willing oneself towards the image). In this understanding of the relation between fascination and trans fixed unrest, fascination itself, rather than simply being produced in the con frontation with an image of frozen tension, is itself a form of transfixed unrest in which the relation between subject and object, viewer and image, is radically redefined, each being held in the grip of the other.

Returning to the first conception of fascination and transfixed unrest, it becomes apparent that it has already moved toward this second conception in the way that in the first, the spectator's (projected) desires are both ignited and held suspended. The differences between the two conceptions are primarily in terms of their focus- in the former, the focus is on the object (or image) as the source and means of a volatile tension which can grip the spectator; in the second, the focus is on a different sort of subject-object relation and the ideas of proximity and dis tance (spatial and temporal) this entails. While Benjamin's concept of transfixed unrest (and the form or economy of fascination it entails) can certainly be drawn on to address both particular film aesthetics (such as those which involve the slowing down, stretching, or arresting of time-as-unfolding), and also to address the forms of fascination which may operate in particular modes of reception, these two models do not - as yet - offer the means to address the complex rela tions between Benjamin's theory of film and his concept of the dialectical image.

Nor do they provide a means of examining what the forms of fascination integral to his idea of the dialectical image bring forth. 95

In order to unravel the relations between Benjamin's concept of the dialec tical image and his understanding of film, it is necessary to return again to Ben jamin's idea of transfixed unrest and dialectics at a standstill. Transfixed unrest interrupts the very idea of the present and ruptures it, thereby radically recon figuring relations between (ideas of the) past, present, and future.3 2 In bringing a

Then into the Now, in interrupting the temporality of historicism and unleashing the force of the discarded, transfixed unrest produces a volatile gap rather than

simply rendering inanimate a subject or object. In this respect, time isn't simply brought to a standstill. Rather, through the arresting of time (of ideas of past, pre-

sent, future, and of time as unfolding), conceptions of time are blasted open. If this transfixed unrest is considered as the tension of a kind of still-ing of time, which does not necessarily operate in time (in the sense that it does not have to take a long time), then the relations between this transfixed unrest and the kind of fleeting, flash-like image it brings forth can begin to be rethought. If transfixed unrest is not bound to chronological time, then clearly film - with its constant unfolding of images - does not, in this respect at least, preclude the possibility of dialectical images.

Cinema involontaire

Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image is not only developed through his proposal of photography and his theory of allegory - it also draws on his work

32 As Adorno writes, Benjamin "escaped the antithesis of the eternal and the historical through a micrological technique, a concentration on the most minute, in which historical movement halts and sediments into an image. Thus, one only understands Benjamin correctly when one senses behind every one of his sentences the sudden reversal of utmost movement into something static, indeed into the 'static' idea (Vorstellung) of the movement itself; this reversal is also responsible for the specific essence of his language." Adorno, "Introduction to Benjamin's Schriften," p.l2. 96 on Proust's involuntary memory, and it is the latter, I will argue, that can offer us most for thinking through the relations between the "fleetingness" of the dialectical image and cinema.

As discussed in chapter 1, involuntary memory entails a form of remembering and forgetting. The flash-like fragments which fleetingly come into visibility are, for Benjamin, a form of Eingedenken (remembrance or recollec tion), a form of recollection which, as Irving Wohlfarth has argued, is "the most promising form of remembrance available to the present. "33 If involuntary memory is the "most promising" form of memory for Benjamin at a time when remembering has all but been forgotten, this is because there are no social struc tures which would weave voluntary and involuntary memory, individual and collective memories.34

Benjamin frequently referred to the dialectical image in terms of the images of one's life (or of one's life as a series of images) which, in Western cultures, are thought to flash forth in those moments when one is enveloped by the anticipation of one's own death. These rapid sequences of images, he writes, are similar to the picture flip books of one's childhood (though perhaps no longer our own) which, in their segmentation of time and movement as a series of instants, are close to film. (And one may add that not only are such sequences similar to those we find in the flip book and in other protocinematic devices, but that the images that turn up in moments of danger, those moments when one confronts a

33 Irving Wohlfarth, "On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin's Last Reflections," Glyph 3 (1978), p.156.

34 Cinema - its collective audience, its (potential) place as a form of alter native public sphere - would be one site where individual and collective memories can intertwine. This is not to say of course that all films, or all forms of cinema, offer this. What we can draw from Benjamin's work is a proposal of the ways in which cinema can - and at points has and does - entail a form of trans missibility which critically embraces the structurings of experience in/of modern ity and postmodernity. See Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon (London and Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991) for an excellent account of early cinema as a form of (alternative) public sphere. 97 catastrophe in which one anticipates death, may well be themselves cinematic images - images and scenes from seen but forgotten films, re-edited in memory.)3S What flashes up in moments of danger are, for Benjamin, the images of involuntary memory:

The image of the past that flares up in the now of its recog nizability [im Jetzt seiner Erkennbarkeit] ... resembles the images of one's own past that line up [antreten] at a moment of danger. These images come involuntarily. Historiography in the strict sense is thus an image taken from involuntary memory, an image that suddenly presents itself to the subject of history at the moment of danger ... What occurs to involuntary memory is - and this dis tinguishes it from voluntary memory - never a course of events but solely an image. (Hence "disorder" as the visual space [Bildraum] of involuntary memory). 36

Three important points regarding the images of involuntary memory (or equally, involuntary memory as entailing a particular practice of the image) can be located in this passage. Firstly, there is the connection Benjamin draws between these fleeting images and the experience of danger or catastrophe. These images come forth with a shock-like force, and with a significance which they would not have if they were the product of voluntary memory. Secondly, these images involve a compression of time. In the briefest moment - the moment before an anticipated death and at moments of crisis - an array of images appear with a kind of force. This brief moment is, in other words, loaded - it entails a compression and condensation of time and also its opening out. Equally impor-

35 See also Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov," where he writes: "It is, however, characteristic that not only a man's knowledge of wisdom, but above all his real life- and this is the stuff that stories are made of - first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death. Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end - unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it - suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that author ity which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him."Illuminations, p.94.

36 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 1,3, p.1243 (Frankfurt: Surkhamp, 1974-), trans. and qtd. in Irving Wohlfarth, "On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin's Last Reflections," p.157. 98 tantly, the images themselves are loaded, they are like time-kernels of a (missed) life. The image which flashes into visibility in a moment of danger, which comes involuntarily, contains, for Benjamin, a radical potential. It has a shock-like effect which grips the subject at the same time that it empties the subject. Thirdly, these images are marked by their latency, the belatedness that characterizes the experience of trauma: as "missed" experiences, it is only in their belated return (as image) that these experiences are experienced at all. As Cathy Caruth writes:

"[t]hrough the notion of trauma, [we can resituate history] in our understanding, that is, of precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not."37

Benjamin deals with such loaded temporal encounters explicitly in his essay on Proust, though certainly they can be found in much of his work and they are central to his form of historical materialism. The logic of the encounter runs throughout Proust's Remembrance ofThings Past- it is obsessional, relentless, and highly charged, and the force behind what Benjamin calls Proust's "paralyz- ing, explosive will to happiness. "38 In Proust, the encounter is primarily to do with sensations, sensations which invoke and yield an ambivalent state in the sub ject, a pleasure-pain complex of intoxication and loss. The quest for such encounters is the thread running through Proust's work, as for instance can be found in the Madeleines passage in Remembrance of Things Past:

37 Cathy Caruth, "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of Experience," Yale French Studies 79 (1991), p.182. Caruth addresses this ques tion through a reading of Freud's Moses and Monotheism. As she writes: "[t]he experience of trauma, the fact oflatency, would thus seem to consist, not in the forgetting of a reality that can hence never be known; but in an inherent latency within the experience itself. The historical power of the trauma is not only that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all. [ ... ] For a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence." "Unclaimed Experience," p.187.

38 Benjamin, "The Image of Proust," Illuminations, p.205. 99

mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - this new sensa tion having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.39

Here the sensation - though not the source - comes in a flash the instant the liquid touches the palate. The subject is at once taken over, possessed, transformed and relinquished by this all-encompassing vertigo ("this essence was not in me, it was me"). The source of this "all-powerful joy" however does not appear in an instant: it requires attentiveness, it has to be waited for, and this waiting too is highly charged:

I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting place and attempts to rise, something which has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth; I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed.

Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind.40

And what appears through the activation of involuntary memory is the concealed object, here the memory of Combray where Proust spent part of his childhood. Not Combray as it was experienced but, as Deleuze points out in his book Proust on Signs, Combray "in a form in which it was never experienced, in its 'essence' or its eternity."41 As Hillis-Miller argues, "Combray" rises as an image - a peculiar type of image which is not tied to any particular thing or

39 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Vol. I, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Penguin, 1989), p.48.

40 ibid, p.49.

41 Gilles Deleuze, Proust on Signs (New York: G.Brazillier, 1972), p.12. 100

moment, but arises from a "relation woven by the 'forgetting' of two things. "42

What is recovered is not only what has been lost but what has never been con-

sciously experienced. In Proust's work, this "all-encompassing joy" is not so much to do with the recovery of a lost time, or an experience of the self as plenitude - it is more like a loss of self in the experience of an open, pure, time.

Clearly what is of interest is not so much the discovery of a forgotten - or rather

"missed" - moment, but both the eruption of that moment in the present and the search itself(the activation of involuntary memory, the relinquishment ofthe self), and an attention to the movement of remembrance and forgetting through the body - the movement not so much of the body through time but of time through the body. What we find here is a relation between subject and object (or image) which is charged, where temporal distance and proximity is opened, between the self and another self - unknown, forgotten, possible.

In Benjamin's work on Proust, one does not reclaim a lost part of one's conscious selfthrough the activation of involuntary memory, but is rather gripped and shaken by those images of oneself as another. This activation requires the subject to be in a state of under- and over- attentiveness in which the body is highly charged. The images of involuntary memory arise in moments of being

"beside oneself' - a by no means rare cinematic experience. It is precisely this idea of "being beside oneself' that is of most interest in relation to the practices of the image in Benjamin's work and their applicability to cinema spectatorship, for the over- and under-attentiveness that brings forth involuntary memory is the over- and under-attentiveness of fascination, which is never that far from boredom. If fascination involves a form of forgetfulness - the forgetfulness that allows the experience of awe (and the form of forgetfulness that the cultural tech nology of cinema makes possible)- this forgetfulness is a self-forgetfulness, the

42 J. Hillis-Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), p.11. 101

self-forgetfulness that enables and is generated by involuntary memory. As Ben jamin writes in his autobiographical sketch "A Berlin Chronicle":

Anyone can observe that the duration for which we are exposed to impressions has no bearing on their fate in memory ... It is not, therefore, due to insufficient exposure-time if no image appears on the plate of remembrance. More frequent, perhaps, are the cases when the half-light of habit denies the plate the necessary light for years, until one day from an alien source it flashes up as if from burning magnesium powder ... Nor is this very mysterious, since such moments of sudden illumination are at the same time moments when we are beside ourselves, and while our waking, habitual, everyday self is involved actively or passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in another place and is touched by the shock, as is the little heap of magnesium powder by the flame of the match. It is to this immolation of our deepest self in shock that our memory owes its most indelible images.43

With its privileging of the iconic sign and persistent unfolding of images, cinema would seem to be far removed from the terrain of involuntary memory.

The iconic nature of the cinematic image (its "dead ringer" similarity to its referent) could be seen as constantly adding images to voluntary memory, and thereby- for Benjamin- reducing the scope for the play of the imagination, and the predetermined unfolding of images on the screen would seem to limit or con tain any of the meanderings associated with involuntary memory.44 The flow of

43 Benjamin, "Berlin Chronicle," One-Way Street, pp.342-3.

44 As Benjamin writes in "Some Motifs in Baudelaire": "[t]he perpetual readiness of volitional, discursive memory, encouraged by the technique of mechanical reproduction, reduces the scope for the play of the imagination. The latter may perhaps be defined as an ability to give expression to desires of a spe cial kind, with 'something beautiful' thought of as their fulfillment. Valery has set forth the conditions for this fulfillment: 'We recognize a work of art by the fact that no idea it inspires in us, no mode of behaviours that it suggests we adopt could exhaust it or dispose of it. We may inhale the smell of a flower whose fra grance is agreeable to us for as long as we like; it is impossible for us to rid our selves of the fragrance by which our senses have been aroused, and no recollec tion, no thought, no mode of behaviour can obliterate its effect or release us from the hold it has on us. He who has set himself the task of creating a work of art aims at the same effect.' According to this view, the painting we look at reflects back at us that of which our eyes will never have their fill. What it contains that fulfils the orginal desire would be the very same stuff on which the desire con tinuously feeds. What distinguishes photography from painting is therefore clear, and why there can be no encompassing principle of 'creation' applicable to both: to the eyes that will never have their fill of a painting, photography is rather like food for the hungry or drink for the thirsty." Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era ofHigh Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London and New York: Verso, 102 images (and the predominance of narrative) would seem to bind the spectator to the temporality of the film (of the narrative unfolding on the screen) - basically the idea that watching a film would never allow you the chance to go off on the sort of reveries that Proust does with his soggy pastries (or, for that matter,

Barthes' reveries on the photograph), as the film wouldn't "wait" for you while you went off on such travels. Neither of these aspects offi1m, neither the "dead ringer" aspect of the cinematic image nor the temporality of the apparatus, would seem to preclude the possibility of an activation of involuntary memory. As I have argued, Benjamin is drawn to indexical aspects of the cinematic and photographic image, bringing his theory of film and photography into the terrain of the mimetic faculty and the reading of similarities. While Benjamin is perhaps not always consistent in his articulation of the indexical nature of the cinematic image, he certainly provides us with a framework to argue that both in terms of the production process (shooting, editing, and projection) and in terms of spec tatorship, the cinematic image entails forms of indexicality which can link it to the field and workings of involuntary memory.45 On the one hand we could say that Benjamin finds something structurally similar to involuntary memory in film itself, both in terms of his concept of the optical unconscious and through his privileging of montage. On the other hand, we can argue that cinema can entail modes of spectatorship and relations to the image which can activate a form of

1989), pp.146-147. I will return to Benjamin's argument here in the next chapter.

45 Miriam Hansen has addressed Benjamin's reading of photographic rep resentation in terms of the indexical and the iconic (or similarity and sameness) in her essay "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience," and discusses the ways in which he seems to abandon the distinction in the "Work of Art" essay, thereby "collaps ing the mimetic faculty into the 'obvious' iconicity of photographic representa tion." The indexical aspect of photographic representation is, however, by no means absent from the "Work of Art" essay. As Hansen also argues, it returns through the concept of the optical unconscious. See "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,"' New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987), pp.201-202. 103 involuntary memory and its temporal complexity, precisely through the forms of absent minded fascination which the cultural technology of cinema enables. If film's unconscious optics involve something like a Proustian involuntary memory, it is one which is no longer undertaken individually but en masse, and film, too, can involve the temporality of forgetting and remembering, of images and sensa tions that arise unexpectedly. To this extent I'm not so sure that what is seen as the compulsory temporality of the apparatus - the flow of images through the projector and across the screen- prohibits such relations to the image or spectatorial practices. Spectatorship can quite clearly involve a gaze which is both intense

(charging the act oflooking itself) and absent (the object ofthe gaze recedes as images arise from involuntary memory). In privileging the temporality of frames through the projector, the many forms of temporality that can operate in (our experience of) a film are over-looked. It is only by focusing on the temporalities operative in Benjamin's understanding of both film and the dialectical image that we can begin to address the privileged place he gives to modes of reception based in fascination.

As Marcus Bullock has argued, for Benjamin, the photographic and cinematic apparati in themselves have the capacity to produce the form of fleeting unveiling which characterizes the dialectical image, in which the tensions of his tory are visible in their traces. Bullock writes:

Benjamin is at pains to play down the role of intention here. The specific content, the details of the story told, the particular comer of our world which is represented, are not counted nearly so important as the idea that anything shown will be affected by this new tendency to unveil which is inherent in the medium itself. Every point of life on which the camera is turned will be illumi nated equally as the place where the curtain of ideology is rustled.46

46 Marcus Bullock, "The Rose of Babylon: Walter Benjamin, Film Theory, and the Technology of Memory," MLN (Comparative Literature), 103.5 (1988), p.ll 08. 104

We find a site for a form of such fleeting, ungraspable images in Benjamin's

understanding of the filmic and photographic image as being able to unleash what

he calls unconscious optics, but this "tendency to unveil" also underlies his more

well known concept of distraction (Zerstreuung), the root verb of which- as

Samuel Weber has pointed out- is streuen, "cognate to the English 'strew, strewn'

and carries with it a strong spatial overtone. "47 The filmic image, along with the

filmic process, both scatters and collects.

If Benjamin's theory of film (along with his theory of photography) does not privilege certain aesthetics and certain types of images, but rather, as Bullock argues, "anything shown will be affected by this tendency to unveil," then it is not a case of a particular aesthetic being privileged in his conception of cinema. The tendency which Benjamin identifies lies in the film technology itself. Benjamin's interest in other words is in both the filmic image and the cinematic experience, and it is only by addressing both of these that the relations between the cinema and his theory of the image can be more fully understood. If the cinematic image in itself involves a particular economy of legibility and illegibility (particularly in terms of the optical unconscious), then what interests Benjamin is the image that comes forth in or through this legibility and illegibility, in the reading itself.

Benjamin's proposal of film and his theory of modernity more generally shifts our attention to the temporal aspects of the image and of spectator-image relations. And it does so at the same time that his theory of film, his understand ing of the image itself, is based around the spatialization of time and its arrest. As

Gertrud Koch has argued in her discussion of Benjamin's understanding of the fil mic image, for Benjamin, "only the immobilization of time in the spatial image counts as the moment of salvation. The fact that cinematic technology does not

47 Samuel Weber, "Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Ben jamin," Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications, 1996), p.92. 105

actually present (Darstellen) movement but rather represents (Vorstellen) it

illusionistically through a series of photographically fixed moments, turns it, in

the wake of photography, into a medium in which time is immobilized in

space."48 If Benjamin's practice ofthe image can be seen as based around its capa

city to arrest, I would argue that his primary concern is with what such an arrest

activates, and it is here that his work is particularly generative for film and

cultural studies debates.

What does it mean then to say that Benjamin's interest is in the

"immobilization oftime" when my interest in his work here is precisely in the

ways in which it provides us with a framework to address the temporalities operative in and through modes of spectatorship and their relations to the temporal

structurings of experience? This is only seemingly a contradiction, for if Ben- jamin is interested in the image- the photographic or filmic image, Baudelaire's

allegories, or the Surrealist profane illumination - it is precisely in terms of the ways in which time (as a continuum) can be brought to a halt in the image, producing a spatialization of time. In this halt, this arrest, we can confront both an articulation of the temporal structuring of experience in modernity and the possibility of its restructuring. We are confronted, in other words, with experiences oftime, experience as a structuring of time.

Benjamin's proposal of the temporal nature of the filmic image brings questions of memory and historical experience into discussions of film spectator ship. Through its relations to the temporal structuring of shock experience and the new as the always-the-same, the filmic image offers a new form ofmemorative communication. That which comes forth in the filmic image is marked by a form of repetition and return, but - like the logic of belatedness which characterizes

48 Gertrud Koch, "Cosmos in Film: On the Concept of Space in Walter Benjamin's 'Work of Art' Essay," trans. Nancy Nenno, in Walter Benjamin's Philisophy: Destruction and Experience, eds Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p.213. 106

shock experience and trauma - it is also something which is experienced for the

first time in its very repetition. Benjamin's critical practice of fascination plays a

crucial role here- as a temporality of reading (and one which entails both a bring

ing to arrest and the desire to animate the object), and as a means of activating

mimetic cognition.

The optical unconscious, offering a form of auratic experience, is characterised by the anticipated reciprocity of the gaze. As Benjamin writes of auratic

experience in "Some Motifs in Baudelaire":

To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return. This experience corresponds to the data of the memoire involontaire. (These data, incidentally, are unique; they are lost to the memory that seeks to retain them. Thus they lend support to a concept of the aura that comprises the "unique manifestation of a distance"49

This investing of the object with an ability to return the gaze, or even more, a charging of looking itself, is less to do with any literal return of the gaze than with a process of activating or animating the field of correspondences. Now in a sense involuntary memory, like the correspondences in Baudelaire, does return something, but as we repeatedly find in Proust, it is not the subject's look that is returned, but those images/that self which we never know in a waking state. The anticipated reciprocity of the gaze which characterises this redeemed aura entails the experience of a spatial and temporal opening, a play of proximity and distance, of remembering and forgetting.

This anticipated return of the gaze entails the opening of a distance, and it is the nature of this distance that is of interest. As many have argued, in Ben- jamin's definition of the aura as "the unique manifestation of a distance, however close [the object] may be,"50 we are not dealing with a spatial distance, but a

49 Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era ofHigh Capitalism, p.l48.

so Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, p.224. 107

temporal one. Hansen has extensively addressed the form of investment and

anticipation that marks such a gaze in Benjamin's work in her essay "Benjamin,

Cinema and Experience." In the closing section of this essay Hansen argues that

the economy of the gaze that operates here is that of the maternal gaze. She thereby suggests that Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious offers an

economy of vision at odds with cinema's more renowned perversions of

voyeurism and fetishism. The source of this auratic gaze has been forgotten and therefore returns as something "distant and strange,"51 as uncanny: it is the

maternal gaze that is the original form of the look that leaves a residue. Hansen writes:

Benjamin undeniably participates in a patriarchal discourse on vision insofar as the auratic gaze depends upon a veil of forgetting, that is, a reflective yet unacknowledged form of fetishism which reinscribes the female body as source of both fascination and threat. In his almost obsessive and experimental undoing of that very defense, however, he seems to be seeking a position in rela tion to vision, to the image and the eye, which has traditionally been assigned to women, as a group historically excluded from scopic mastery. 52

At one level we could say that what fascinates Benjamin is the appearance of a disappearance, and certainly this is frequently played out in his work on the body ofthe woman. Benjamin's critical practice of fascination brings us to the question of the place of (visual) fetishism in his work. In the next chapter I will examine the degree to which Benjamin's practice of fascination - and his practice of the image more generally- is determined by (and trapped within) a problematic relation to the body of woman and a fetishization of loss.

51 Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology," New German Critique 40 (1987), p.215.

52 ibid, pp.215-6. 108

Chapter3

THE IMAGE, FASCINATION, AND DEATH: FROM MELANCHOLY TO

LOVE

Anything about which one knows that one will soon not have it around becomes an image. I

The economy of desire operating in Benjamin's theory of the image and

his form of dialectical thinking has been critically examined in a number of recent

studies, most notably in Rey Chow's essay "Walter Benjamin's Love Affair with

Death" and Christine Buci-Glucksmann's essay "Catastrophic Utopia: the Femi nine as Allegory of the Modern. "2 What this recent work has put into question are

both the implications of Benjamin's work for feminist critical theory and the ways

in which his work both produces and relies on a particular figuring of femininity

and sexual difference. Most importantly for me here, these critiques have often turned their attention to the ways in which Benjamin's theory and practice of the image entails a particular economy of desire, and seems to implicitly align itself with a relation to the image more generally marked as feminine and allocated to the female subject.

Chow develops a complex analysis of the economy of desire found in

Benjamin's work. Staging her analysis through an examination of Benjamin's

1 Walter Benjamin, "The Paris ofthe Second Empire in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era ofHigh Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London and New York: Verso, 1983), p.87.

2 Rey Chow, "Walter Benjamin's Love Affair with Death," New German Critique 48 (Fall 1989), pp.63-86, and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, "Catastrophic Utopia: the Feminine as Allegory of the Modern," trans. Katherine Streip, Repre sentations 14 (Spring 1986), pp.220-229. 109

relation to the inanimate and the gendering of this relation, she argues that Ben jamin's relation to the image is one based in a form of "necrophilia" which takes

the woman's body as its object. If one of the drawcards of Benjamin's work for

feminist film and cultural theory is that it seems to stage and privilege modes of

experience and spectatorship more regularly aligned with femininity and female

subjectivity, Chow's essay warns against any too eager embrace of his work for

feminist critical theory. For Chow, the form of fascination which underlies Ben jamin's relation to the image operates within a similar economy to that which

Benjamin finds in some of Baudelaire's poetry - a desire "spared, rather than

denied, fulfilment. "3 Chow's essay critically examines this economy of desire, and

she takes to task the place, form, and function of fascination in Benjamin's work

in terms of its inscription of and reliance on the figure of the absent( ed) woman.

This chapter will examine the economies of desire found in Benjamin's work and their relation to melancholy. While Benjamin's practice of the image certainly

entails a melancholic aesthetic and involves a problematic relation to the figure of the woman, I will argue that the economy of desire in his work cannot be understood solely in terms of a fetishized loss- of a desire "spared, rather than denied, fulfilment." Rather, another economy of desire in his work and practice of the image can also be traced, an economy of desire that doesn't stop short at the forms of (fascinated) arrest which characterizes baroque allegory, but instead activates a site of movement. *** Chow's interest is in "the implications, for the politics of gender, of [the] subversive, elusive,feminizing moves"4 of Benjamin's texts, in which "[an] aim-

3 Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire, p.l25.

4 Chow, "Walter Benjamin's Love Affair with Death," p.65. 110

less, impotent look" rather than an active, "virile," male gaze is found. 5 This, for

Chow, is what she at various points describes as Benjamin's "desire for," "fascina-

tion with," and "love of'' the inaminate and his "necrophilia." Beth Sharon Ash

also critiques Benjamin's economy of desire in her essay "Walter Benjamin: Eth

nic Fears, Oedipal Anxieties, Political Consequences,"6 in which she takes issue

with what she calls the "fetishization of forepleasure" in his work. Ash places

Benjamin's work within the framework of masochism or a masochistic aesthetic

(unlike Chow, who argues that Benjamin's "aimless, impotent look" can be

understood in the terms of the "sensory effects of post-castration," in which there

is no nostalgic yearning for a pre-oedipal union). Clearly there are connections

that could be drawn between Benjamin's theory and practice of the image and a

masochistic aesthetic, but only, I would argue, by absenting the political force of

Benjamin's proposal of historical materialism. For instance, a comparison of Ben jamin's "love of the inanimate" with Deleuze's masochistic aesthetic would

certainly reveal similarities- the "transfixed unrest" which Benjamin finds in

allegory and which underlies his concept of the dialectical image would, at first

view, seem to relate to the various "suspensions" Deleuze outlines in the

masochistic aesthetic. 7 These connections however are dependent on reading the

5 ibid, p.81.

6 Beth Sharon Ash, "Walter Benjamin: Ethnic Fears, Oedipal Anxieties, Political Consequences," New German Critique 48 (Fall1989), pp.2-42.

7 Deleuze argues that suspension is central to the masochistic aesthetic and he addresses four types of suspension: in Masoch's texts, climatic moments are moments of suspense; the tortures often involve the (bodily) suspension of the masochist; the torturer manifests states of suspension (the "woman torturer freezes into postures that identify her with a statue, a painting, a photograph. She suspends her gestures in the act of bringing down the whip or removing her furs"); and finally the world (reality) is suspended. See Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: An Interpretation of Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: George Brazillier, 1971), p.30. For a reading ofDeleuze's masochistic aesthetic in terms of spectatorship, see Gaylyn Studlar's In the Realm ofPleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 111

place of fascination in Benjamin's work according to a particular interpretation of

his practice of the image, in which transfixed unrest is understood as the with holding of (an experience of) time rather than its radical fissure. In terms of an

economy of desire, the connections that could be drawn between Benjamin's prac tice of the image and a masochistic aesthetic are dependent on an understanding of fascination as involving a particular idea of arousal - one in which the inanimate, the suspended, the held, produces a transfixing agitation in the subject

(whether becoming hard or becoming corpse), and where this transfixing agita tion is itself the aim.

If Benjamin's work cannot always be contained within an economy of desire where the "sparing" of this desire is in fact the most highly charged aspect of it, this is certainly not because his work consistently avoids such an economy.

If the place and form of fascination in his work cannot be contained within a familiar model of the Medusa it is because his conception of dialectics at a stand still and transfixed unrest takes as its aim less the rendering inanimate of the sub ject and/or object than the rupturing of their very relation. One could say that it is also the overcoming of fascination through fascination itself, suggesting that Ben jamin is calling for a dialectics of fascination in a similar way to his proposal of a dialectics of intoxication.

As argued in the previous chapter, the production of dialectical images involves the spatial fixing of loaded temporal moments, the production and arrest ing of a tension, with this arrested and arresting tension in turn producing a sort of arrested tension between the subject and object. But to pose Benjamin's prac tice of the image in this way is already to mispose it, for the subject/object dis tinction here is far from secure and stable, and what attracts Benjamin to fascina tion - which is closely related to his interest in the place of intoxication in Sur- 112

realism - is precisely the form of subjectivity (-in-dissolution) it entails. By posing the question in this way this fascination and transfixed unrest is also con tained within a particular economy of desire, the economy of desire which Rey

Chow identifies as "necrophiliac." It is perhaps not a case, or not always a case, of a transfixing image (the Medusa effect) gripping the subject in an arresting and agitating tension (as is found in Lyotard's "poseries" for exampleS), but rather that transfixed unrest and fascination enable a particular (and possible) form of move ment, a redefinition of subject-object relations and a different form of proxemics.

This chapter examines the economies of desire in Benjamin's work by focusing on the place of melancholy and melancholic love (and the articulation of sexual difference that we find in his melancholic aesthetic) in his theory and practice of the image. Benjamin's interest in and attraction to melancholy is particularly complex, and his politicophilosophical project is marked by the attempt to overcome and outstep melancholy. In his writings on love, collecting,9 and

Proust's involuntary memory, another economy of desire can be charted - an economy of desire in which the object is not simply emptied out. Rather, it parti cipates in a different economy of exchange, of subject-object relations.

Practices of Fascination: Melancholy and Love

Benjamin's writings are characterized by a steady undermining of the notion of symbolic plenitude in Western representation. Any image, however full, signifies for the allegorist not the presence but the removal of something; the allegorist's eye is therefore one that sees images as the signs or sites of an emptying - to speak in Freudian terms, of a castration; to speak in cinematic language, of

8 Jean Franc;ois Lyotard, "Acinema," trans. Paisley Livingston, Wide Angle 2.3 (1978), pp.52-59.

9 Benjamin's arguments about the forms of love operative in practices of collecting will be discussed in chapter 4. 113

a cut. In all of these, disfigurement is inseperable from a removed history and thus always calls for decipherment. tO

Chow's essay poses a number of important questions regarding the economy of desire in Benjamin's work and its aestheticization of loss, and her essay can be used as a starting point to examine the place of melancholy in his practices of fascination. Is the form of fascination we find in his work "necrophiliac"? an economy of desire which Chow characterizes as a "fascination with," "desire for," and "love of," the inanimate? If this is the case, what are the implications of drawing on this work for an understanding of forms of cinematic fascination, par ticularly when cinematic fascination has predominantly been associated with the figure of the female spectator unable to establish and maintain a distance between herself and the image, and repeatedly figured as looking on, witness to her own objectification and disappearance? With its ambulatory, "aimless," non-fetishistic gaze, Benjamin's relation to the image seems to share a number of features with the figure of the female spectator and ideas of the female gaze. Chow's reading of the place of castration and eroticized loss in Benjamin's work however throws into relief the dangers of any too eager embrace of Benjamin's relation to the image as a framework for theorizing female spectatorship. 11 While Benjamin's

1o Chow, "Walter Benjamin's Love Affair with Death," p.80.

11 As Miriam Hansen writes: "Benjamin undeniably participates in a patriarchal discourse on vision insofar as the auratic gaze depends upon a veil of forgetting, that is, a reflective yet unacknowledged form of fetishism which reins cribes the female body as source of both fascination and threat. In his almost obsessive and experimental undoing of that very defense, however, he seems to be seeking a position in relation to vision, to the image and the eye, which has traditionally been assigned to women, as a group historically excluded from scopic mastery." Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,"' New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987), pp.215- 216. Chow takes issue with aspects of Hansen's essay, particularly Hansen's (redemptive) alignment ofthe privileged modes of looking in his work with a maternal gaze, and certainly such an occupation of the feminine (which Chow argues is a male impotence in the guise of femininity) does not in itself offer much to a feminist critical theory. While I am in agreement with many of Chow's arguments- including her critique of Hansen's references to the maternal gaze- I would argue that the forms of fetishism and fascination in his work are more complex than either theorist seems to acknowledge. 114

work seems to provide a critical revaluing of fascination and aligns itself with a

position characterised as feminine, it must nevertheless be asked both how fas

cination is gendered in this work (in terms of what fascinates whom), and whether

fascination takes a variety of forms. What Chow's essay puts into question is the

relations between the inanimate, death, and the feminine in Benjamin's practices

of fascination. It would be a complex piece of manoeuvering which could pro

duce a reading of Benjamin's work in which a femininity aligned with death did

not play a central role in his thought. Nevertheless, my intent is to repose his

work by complicating this "necrophilia," and this is less a gesture of salvation and

more a means of bringing into the foreground an unresolved tension in Ben jamin's project between different economies of fascination, a tension which can

be charted through the status of melancholy in the practices of the image he

develops.

Chow's essay addresses the aesthetics of loss in Benjamin's thought in

terms of their articulation of sexual difference. More particularly, she asks

whether what we are dealing with in Benjamin's practices of fascination is a form

of eroticized melancholy in which the woman's body is only found as the figure

of death (in modernity, in the form of the commodity fetish), as the eroticised

inanimate. Her essay throws into relief the question of the status of melancholy

and allegory in Benjamin's work in terms of sexual difference. If, as Chow

argues, the economy of desire in Benjamin's work is one in which desire directs itself toward an object which can only be loved and possessed as dead, we are caught in the realm of allegory and its King Midas' touch. The (always melan

cholic) allegorist, Benjamin argues, can only grasp the object as fragment in a manner which loses the object in the very attempt to rescue it (in Baroque 115

allegory, the object can only be grasped as corpse, in Baudelaire the allegorist experiences the corpse from the inside as well12). As Chow argues, this (dead) object, stripped and revivified, is written through with the feminine.

The loved and lost object has a special status in melancholy. As Giorgio

Agamben has argued, melancholy "appropriates its own object only to the extent that it affirms its loss. "13 In this respect, melancholy involves a particular

(impossible) form of object relation, in which the "object" is, in the end, possessed in a unique way. We could say then that melancholia, which for Freud and

Kristeva is seen as the impossibility of an object relation, nevertheless produces for itself a particular form of object relation, one in which the object (regardless of whether it ever existed) is possessed as lost. It takes on the status of an image, or in Agamben's terms, of a phantasm. Agamben's proposal of the form of posses sion and object relations operating in melancholy charts the realm and trajectory of melancholic love and the erotics of melancholy. For Agamben, melancholy is characterised by "the withdrawal not from a defect, but from a frantic exacerba tion of desire that renders its object inaccessible to itself in the desperate attempt to protect itself from the loss of that object and to adhere to it at least in its absence." As he continues:

the withdrawal of melancholic libido has no other purpose than to make viable an appropriation in a situation in which none is really possible. From this point of view, melancholy would be not so much the regressive reaction to the loss of the love object as the imaginative capacity to make an unattainable object appear as if lost.14 (my emphasis)

12 As Benjamin writes: "Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from the outside. Baudelaire sees it also from the inside." "Central Park," trans. Lloyd Spencer, New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985), p.51.

13 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.20.

14 ibid, p.20. 116

The "ambiguous project" of melancholy, argues Agamben, is "the will to trans- form into an object of amorous embrace what should have remained only an object of contemplation."15

Benjamin's work is often written through with such an erotics, particularly in his essays on Baudelaire, but we must also add that Benjamin's relation to melancholy- and to the status of the object in melancholy- is marked by an ambivalence. As Max Pensky has argued, Benjamin is constantly drawn to melan choly at the same time that he seems to call for an overcoming of melancholy

(and Benjamin's attraction to Surrealism must be placed firmly here in Sur- realism's refusal ofmelancholy).16

Love at last sight: spleen, shock, and modern love

In Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire and his essay "Central Park" a particu lar economy of fascination can be found. In Baudelaire, Benjamin finds a modern form of melancholy which goes under the name of spleen, and through which

Baudelaire stages the status of experience in modernity and the world of the com modity. The Baudelaire essays explore the status of experience in modernity by focusing on the centrality of shock in everyday life and its place in the radically redefined relations between self and other- the forms of relations between indi- viduals; between the individual and the crowd; and the relations between the individual, the crowd, and the world of things.

Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire is central to his theory of experience and for the development of many of his central concepts - in particular, his analysis of

15 ibid, p.20.

16 Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). 117

the status of shock in modem experience and its relation to what Benjamin sees as the "atrophy" of experience (of transmissible experience, of experience as transmissibility). What interests Benjamin about Baudelaire's work is the way he stages the tension between Erfahrung and Erlebnis, giving shock experience

(Chockerlebnis) the status or weight of Erfahrung. In Baudelaire's lyric poetry the onslaught of shock sensations is embraced by what Benjamin calls a heroic struggle. Baudelaire's heroism, for Benjamin, lies here, for in Baudelaire's spleen he finds the attempt to tackle the decline of experience (Erfahrung) by living at the heart of appearance, an attempt which cannot be separated from the desire to arrest, to bring to a halt, to interrupt the trajectory of things just going on.

Baudelaire places the form of temporality that characterizes modernity - the temporality of shock - on centre stage, but does so in an attempt to rescue an idea of the eternal from it. This aim gives rise to and explains the relation between the two doctrines that we find in Baudelaire's work- the doctrine of the correspondences and of allegory. As discussed in chapter 1, for Benjamin (and for

Baudelaire) modem experience is defined by shock. Drawing on Freud's concept of the stimulus shield, Benjamin argues that modernity is characterised by shock- like experiences which do not enter consciousness. Rather, consciousness wards off and shields itself from stimuli, thereby allowing sensory experience to be registered only as Erlebnis. In Baudelaire's work Benjamin finds a staging of shock as the principle mode of experience in modernity. 17

17 As argued in chapter 1, Benjamin's reading ofthe centrality of shock in modem experience is marked by an ambivalence. On the one hand, the stimulus shield which wards off and acts as a buffer against the bombardment of stimuli is necessary, and the new technologies of film and photography (which are funda mentally based on the principle of shock) provide the subject with a means to make sense of the forms of experience which characterize modernity. On the other hand, the prevalence of shock and the workings of the stimulus shield pre clude the possibility of experience being transmissible (in the sense of Erfahrung). The project and stakes lie in the possibility of grasping the temporal structuring of experience and making it the basis for a new form of trans missibility. 118

Baudelaire placed shock in the centre of his work through his use of

allegory. These allegories themselves involve a shock, a shock which is the result

of the very language Baudelaire uses to construct them, bringing various levels and forms of language into collision. In Baudelaire, writes Benjamin, "an allegory appears suddenly and without prior preparation."18 What Benjamin finds in

Baudelaire's allegorical writing is the experience of modernity as empty, hollow time, and it is this changed nature and structure of experience (as shock) which is imprinted in his writing as a series of shocks. If Baudelaire's spleen offers a form of melancholy which has critical potential for Benjamin it is because in its staging of the experience of modernity as loss, as empty, hollow time, it produces both an arresting of the temporality of historicism and of the subject.19

As Buci-Glucksmann has argued, the figure of woman has a central place in Baudelaire's work, and in Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire. The figure of woman stands as allegory of modernity - of modernity as shock experience, of the temporality of the commodity fetish. This is clearest in the figure of the whore in

18 Benjamin, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire, p.l 00.

19 Allegory entails a melancholic optic, but as Benjamin indicated, it can also gesture toward melancholy's overcoming. In Baudelaire we find this in the relation between the correspondences and allegory. The correspondences are those moments when the possibility of experience, of a fullness of meaning, is glimpsed, only to be lost by experience becoming a "souvenir" (Andenken). This aesthetics of loss, in which the object can only be grasped as lost, is the cost paid by allegory in its stripping back and disfiguring of appearance. We also find this movement toward the overcoming of melancholy in baroque allegory, for the baroque allegory of the German mourning play contains a gesture of hope, a ges ture towards redemption. We find this most clearly in the closing section of The Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama where Benjamin writes: "And this is the essence of melancholy immersion: that its ultimate objects, in which it believes it can most fully secure for itself that which is vile, turn into allegories, and that these allegories fill out and deny the void in which they are represented, just as, ultimately, the intention does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of resurrection." Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), pp.232-3. 119

Baudelaire- the whore being the definitive commodity for Benjamin and

Baudelaire:

The woman's body,( ... ), in particular the prostitute body, stands as a metaphor for extremes: desire/death, animating/agitating, life/corruption, skeleton ... and serves to materially convert that "petrified unrest" (erstarrter Unruhe) that is the same formula as the "Baudelairean image oflife" (Lebensbild), the image "that knows no development. "20

If the woman's body takes on this status as an immobilised site of fascination, it is

because for Baudelaire the woman's body also stands for a particular relation to the commodity (the commodity as on display and as that which is animated by the projected desire of the potential buyer, the surrounding commodities, and the

swarm of customers). It is through and on the woman's body that the loss of the aura - the impossibility of the gaze being returned - is played out.

Women in Baudelaire: the most precious spoils in the "Triumph of Allegory" - Life, which means Death. This quality is most unqualifiedly characterized by the whore.2I

The decay of the aura and this positioning of the feminine as site and cause of an agitating and arousing fascination are connected in Benjamin's

Baudelaire essays to his reading of the nature of modern love. Modern love would seem to be characterized by its impossibility - it is brought into being by shock experience but also held suspended by shock, hence the importance of what Ben jamin refers to as "love at last sight." This "love at last sight" is the subject of

Baudelaire's sonnet "A une passante," which Benjamin cites in full. Baudelaire's sonnet runs:

Amid the deafening traffic of the town, Tall, slender, in deep mourning, with majesty, A woman passed, raising, with dignity In her poised hand, the flounces of her gown;

20 Buci-Glucksmann, "Catastrophic Utopia," p.228.

21 Benjamin, "Central Park," p.39. 120

Graceful, noble, with a statue's form. And I drank, trembling as a madman thrills, From her eyes, ashen sky where brooded storm, The softness that fascinates, the pleasure that kills.

A flash ... then night! - 0 lovely fugitive, I am suddenly reborn from your swift glance; Shall I never see you till eternity?

Somewhere, far off! too late! never, perchance! Neither knows where the other goes or lives; We might have loved, and you knew this might be!22

Shock experience has here infused erotic experience for the male subject, and what this sonnet stages is the impossibility of a relation, the impossibility of the gaze being returned. In a frequently cited passage following the poem, Benjamin links melancholy and erotic love:

What this sonnet communicates is simply this: far from experi encing the crowd as an opposed antagonistic element, this very crowd brings to the city dweller the figure that fascinates. The delight of the urban poet is love - not at first sight, but at last sight. It is a farewell forever which coincides in the poem with the moment of enchantment. Thus the sonnet supplies the figure of shock, indeed of catastrophe. But the nature of the poet's emotions have been affected as well. What makes his body contract in a tremor - crispe comme une extravagant, Baudelaire says - is not the rapture of a man whose every fibre is suffused with eros; it is, rather, like the kind of sexual shock that can beset a lonely man. 23

Benjamin introduces the poem with the comment that "the crowd is nowhere named in either word or phrase. And yet the whole happening hinges on it. "24

Rather than being described, the crowd appears in or through its very absence.

The woman is both brought into visibility by this crowd and swallowed up by it - she both appears and disappears through the very thing which she, for Benjamin, makes visible. Momentarily swept into vision, the woman - a woman in mourning

22 Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire, p.124-5.

23 ibid, p.125.

24 ibid, p.124. 121

-is the image that fascinates, and fascinates in her very disappearance. Or rather, she fascinates in her status as fading image, or even more, in terms of what her fading makes visible. She appears and disappears in a flash, a flash which also ignites and puts out the male subject's desire. The mourning woman operates like a photographic negative (or what Elissa Marder, in her essay "Flat Death: Snap- shots of History," refers to as a "negative image"25). There are a number of things that are made to appear in their disappearance through this figure: firstly, and of central importance for Benjamin, is the crowd- the new urban mass; there is also a death, a death which has taken place "off stage" and which is unnamed in the poem (and which the woman is mourning); and present also is the ignition of a desire on the part of the one who sees her - a desire which comes when it is already too late (and this is the source and nature of this desire). There are at least three absent presences which this figure- or rather, the gaze upon her- summons: the crowd, death, and desire, and each become inextricably linked.26 Of course it must also be said that there is another disappearance here - that of the woman her self, a woman who disappears not only because she is swept out of vision by the crowd, but because she is figured as both a photographic negative and, as can be argued, a camera which returns the gaze as empty. While Benjamin finds the temporal structuring of experience in modernity allegorically staged in this poem through the figure of the passing woman, he, like Baudelaire, is clearly less inter-

25 Elissa Marder, "Flat Death: Snapshots of History," Diacritics 22.3-4, (Fall-Winter 1992), p.137.

26 As Marder writes: "the veil - the mark of death that separates the face of the woman from the look of the other - becomes the bearer of a relayed reflection of everything that passes around it. The mourner's veil functions like a mechan ical mirror - or photographic apparatus - that turns our gaze away from the (per haps nonexistent) face of the woman and back onto the amorphous crowd which is 'present' all around her. It is by gazing at the veil that the 'present' is represented. Through her veil, which is itself the mark of a prior passage, we can see that which could never otherwise be seen: the experience of the present." ibid, p.135. 122

ested in the woman's positioning in this temporal structuring of experience than in what she brings into visibility through her disappearance. 27

In "A une passante" the love object is marked by death: figured as an animated corpse, the passante makes shock experience visible. In the line: "Agile et noble, avec sajambe de statue" ["Graceful, noble, with a statue's form"], the passante stages the temporality of modernity- in the flash of her visibility, she becomes (or, rather, is remembered as) arrested, staging the temporality of shock

(as well as the place of antiquity in modernity). The woman herself is empty and emptied: she does not look back with her eye but rather as a (mechanical) eye.28

Baudelaire, writes Benjamin, "has lost himself to the spell of eyes which do not return his glance and submits to their sway without illusions. "29 This, we could say, is the defining element of the economy of desire in Baudelaire, an erotics which Benjamin positions against "that love which is sated with the experience of the aura. "30 As Benjamin writes:

The deeper the remoteness which a glance has to overcome, the stronger will be the spell that is apt to emanate from the gaze. In eyes that look at us with a mirrorlike blankness the remoteness remains complete. It is precisely for this reason that such eyes know nothing of distance.3I

27 The absent presences that Benjamin finds in this poem present "a vision of modernity that is permeated in the decay of history," ibid, p.134.

28 This is certainly inseparable from the status of femininity in modernity for Baudelaire - femininity (and the aura of the figure of the woman) being radi cally redefined through the economic and social changes brought about in the modem metropolis. Stripped of her aura and entering the public sphere, the figure of the woman is aligned with the commodity and the "phony" aura that shrouds the commodity.

29 Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire, p.150.

30 ibid, p.149.

31 ibid, p.l50. 123

At the same time that the distance between self and other seems to have been reduced, it has also been increased (both spatially and temporally), but in such a way that the distance has been emptied. It is this form of distance and proximity which fascinates Baudelaire:

[in the Fleurs du mal] the expectation roused by the look of the human eye is not fulfilled. Baudelaire described eyes of which one is inclined to say that they have lost their ability to look. Yet this lends them a charm which to a large, perhaps predominant, extent serves as a means of defraying the cost of his instinctual desires. It was under the spell of these eyes that sexus in Baudelaire detached itself from eros. 32

The economy of desire that clearly fascinates Benjamin in Baudelaire's

Fleurs du mal lies in this (non)exchange oflooks. In "A une passante," this non return of the poet's gaze - a non return which produces the erotic charge - is staged at the centre of the poem. As Samuel Weber argues, in the line "Un eclair... puis Ia nuit!" ("A flash ... then night"), the poet's gaze is returned- not, however, by the woman (does she even see him? would she care if she did?), but by the woman-as-camera. 33 Like the blinding light of the photographic flash, the object (the woman), is flared and then momentarily shrouded in darkness, mark ing the moment as past: it is not only the woman who disappears in this flash but the poet, who is swallowed and reborn. At this point in the poem the woman becomes a mechanical apparatus and as such appears to look back. As Samuel

Weber writes:

What Baudelaire encounters - and indeed, what then gives him a certain intense pleasure - is the human equivalent of the apparatus: eyes that "look up" but do not look back, or even look at. And with this glance that does not look back and yet sees, a very different

32 ibid, p.149.

33 See Weber, "Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin," Mass Mediauras: form, technics, media, ed. Alan Cholodenko (Sydney: Power Publications, 1996), p.94. Marder also discusses this line in the poem in terms of the photographic apparatus in her essay "Flat Death: Snapshots of History," pp.139-140. 124

kind of aura emerges: that of a singularity that is no longer unique, no longer the other of reproduction and repetition but their most intimate effect. 34

The Baudelaire essays are by no means the only points in Benjamin's work where melancholic love (or in this instance, the erotics of spleen) is found to be linked with disappearance and the impossibility of the gaze being returned. This connection is also found scattered throughout Benjamin's work in his comments

on melancholic love. If this melancholic love and the forms of fascination it

involves are based around the empty return of the gaze in the Baudelaire essays, in "One-Way Street," the fascination which infuses melancholic love stages this impossibility of the gaze being returned in terms of it being too much. "But of the two of us I had to be, at any price, the first to see the other. For had she touched me with the match of her eyes, I should have gone up like a magazine," Benjamin writes in "One-Way Street."35 With its dedication of love ("This street is named

Asjis Lacis Street after her who as an engineer cut it through the author"36), "One-

Way Street" is littered with references to both melancholic and auratic love.

"How much more easily the leave-taker is loved!" Benjamin writes, "[f]or the flame burns more purely for those vanishing in the distance, fuelled by the fleeting scrap of material waving from the ship or railway window. Separation pene trates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance. "37

And in Benjamin's most explicit passage in this text on melancholy love, he writes:

34 Weber, "Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin," p.104.

35 Benjamin, "One-Way Street," One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London and New York: Verso, 1992), p.69.

36 ibid, p.45.

37 ibid, p.53. 125

Old map.- In a love affair most seek an eternal homeland. Others, but very few, eternal voyaging. These latter are melancholies, for whom contact with the mother earth is to be shunned. They seek the person who will keep far from them the homeland's sadness. To that person they remain faithful. The medieval complexion books understood the yearning of this human type for long jour neys38

The form of melancholy here is not one imbued with a yearning to return to a lost unity and wholeness: the loss is to be maintained as loss. As Chow has argued,

"[u]nlike Freud's fetishist, there is no reluctance on Benjamin's part to accept his separation from the mother. This may help to explain why the castration complex that notably structures his conceptions of modern as well as premodern forms of representation is not registered with the feeling of a wish that gestures back to a pre-Oedipal or pre-symbolic stage in the Lacanian sense. "39 This is the economy of melancholy love in Benjamin's work, one in which "eternal voyaging" allows the melancholic lover to remain faithful to the lost object. It is a form of "stray ing," a practice for which Benjamin certainly had a soft spot.40 More significant for my argument at this point is the status of such melancholy love - and the forms of fascination it involves - in Benjamin's work. Certainly Benjamin's proposals of fascination, melancholy, and their relations, vary from one text to another (particularly for instance between the Baudelaire essays, the essays on

Proust and on Kafka, and the "Work of Art" essay), and depending on the constellation that is being dealt with. This is partly because the relations between melancholy and its overcoming in the various writers he addresses differ, in a

38 ibid, p.75.

39 Chow, "Walter Benjamin's Love Mfair with Death," p.78.

40 See in particular Benjamin's reminiscences of his journeys into sex worker districts in "Berlin Chronicle" and "A Berlin Childhood." As in Freud's paper "The Uncanny," Benjamin writes of the erotics of straying in terms of his relation to prostitution- of crossing class, geographic, and sexual boundaries (an erotics of straying which the prostitute herself does not seem to have the liberty of participating in). 126

variety of ways, from the relations between melancholy and its overcoming that

Benjamin himself proposes. Whereas Proust, for instance, aims for a recovery of that which has been lost and conceives of it as a utopian moment, and Baudelaire attempts to grasp the transitory for the eternal, Benjamin's relation to loss and its overcoming is oriented toward a critical grasp of the present. It is written through with the idea of awakening, and clearly tied to his form of Messianic thought.

What Benjamin privileges in Baudelaire's allegorical images is a form of shock which has the potential to activate a critical awakening, though this is not to say that he doesn't develop this, in a number of problematic ways, over the body of the woman. Where these two writers and projects part ways is perhaps not so much in their figurings of femininity, but rather in terms of shock's erup tive force for a form of awakening and remembrance.

Benjamin's analysis of the centrality of shock to modern experience and his ambivalence over its potential is certainly sexualized in terms of both what fascinates and who is fascinated, and Chow's reading of the economy of desire in

Benjamin's work has provided a complex critique of its underlying erotics. My interest here is in charting another relation to the image and practice of fascina tion which we find in his work (and which may also enable us to reexamine the economy of desire in the Baudelaire essays). In taking issue with Chow's reading of the economy of desire in Benjamin's work, I would suggest that her reading is based too strongly on the eroticization of absence and the inanimate that charac terizes the Baudelaire essays. This is certainly not to say that these are the only texts she draws on (she discusses Benjamin's work on storytelling, on photography and film, and his study of German Tragic Drama), but rather that she privileges what we could call the "erotics of arrest" that we find in his work on Baudelaire.

Chow's reading of Benjamin's relation to the image privileges the idea of shock and loss that is found in the Baudelaire essays over the idea of recollection 127

and awakening, and this has a number of implications for her argument and for the ways both Benjamin's and her work can be drawn on for understanding cinema spectatorship. For Chow, what fascinates Benjamin about the image is its

"detachability." For instance, in relation to Benjamin's comments on Atget's photographs of deserted Paris streets, she writes:

Deserted streets in Atget's photographs are for Benjamin not the symbols for the pathos of ordinary life, but rather, images which, like scenes of a crime, have been left empty. What interests Ben jamin about the photographic image is the effect of a removal: something is missing.4I

I would suggest that what interests Benjamin here is less the detachability of the image than the idea of emptying, which is found elsewhere in his work in the idea of a form of fading which leaves traces - the appearance of a disappearance. This is particularly clear in the passages where Benjamin draws on astrology, when he refers to the star which burns most clearly in the moment before fading. As in the case of Benjamin's comments on astrology, such appearances of a disappearance require and solicit a reading practice that is written through by mimetic cognition.42

If Benjamin seems to take up and privilege a relation to the image more generally associated with female spectatorship (in terms of the privileging of fas-

41 Chow, "Walter Benjamin's Love Affair with Death," p.72.

42 These stars have another referent in Benjamin's work which is of rele vance here, and this is the figure of the angel in Jewish tradition. The purpose of these angels is to sing praise to God before fading. As Gershom Scholem writes: "Everlasting angels like, say, the archangels or Satan, seen as the fallen angel of the Jewish and Christian tradition, were evidently less important for Benjamin than the talmudic theme of the formation and disappearance of angels before God, of whom it is said in a kabbalistic book that they 'pass away as the sparks on the coals.' To this, however, was added for Benjamin the further conception of Jewish tradition of the personal angel of each human being who represents the lat ter's secret self and whose name nevertheless remains hidden from him." Scholem, "Walter Benjamin and His Angel," trans. Werner Dannhauser, On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), p.65. 128

cination and proximity), Chow's essay challenges any too easy appropriation of

his work for a feminist critical theory which aims at reconceiving debates around

gendered spectatorship. I would suggest that a number of issues are being con

fronted here. Firstly it must be asked exactly what sorts of relations to the image

Benjamin's work does privilege. If they cannot be exclusively contained within

the framework that Chow outlines (of a fascination with the inanimate, of an

interest in the image in terms of its detachability, and based in a desire which is

"spared rather than denied fulfillment"), what are the other sorts of relations to the

image and to fascination that his work proposes? Secondly - and of more impor tance to this project- do these other image dynamics provide a more enabling

framework to discuss particular forms of spectator-screen relations and forms of

spectatorship?

At this point I would like to propose another constellation and draw out another model of relations to the image and fascination in Benjamin's work, one which returns us to his work on Proust and involuntary memory. ***

That Spot is Bewitched: When No Image Satisfies

He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside; that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance advances from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier. Such is the deadly game that Proust began so dilet tantishly, in which he will hardly find more successors than he needed companions. 43

43 Benjamin, "Berlin Chronicle," One-Way Street, p.296. 129

The figure of the fan appears a number of times in Benjamin's work in

relation to both involuntary memory and love. Through the figure of the fan - and the articulation of the dynamics of involuntary memory and love - the forms of

fascination in Benjamin's practice of the image can be readdressed. The relation to the image that is found in this recurring figure involves a mobile proxemics in which fascination enables a mobile space of exchange. This mobile proxemics

cannot be accounted for within the model of the Medusa: rather than the fet-

ishizing and freezing of a distance, the figure of the fan articulates the opening out of a relation, a constant movement of proximity and distance. This figure also allows then the readdressing of what is meant by the idea of transfixing in Ben- jamin's "transfixing image," and what this space and state of fascination enables.

The image here - as something to be grasped and taken in - is something which can be unfolded. This conception of fascination - while not definitively or directly opposed to that found in the Baudelaire essays - shifts the parameters within which the dynamics and place of fascination with/and/ofthe image in Benjamin's theory of experience can be understood.

Fan.- The following experience will be familiar. If one is in love, or just intensely preoccupied with another, his portrait will appear in almost every book. Moreover, he appears as both protagonist and antagonist. In stories, novels, and novellas he is encountered in endless metamorphoses. And from this it follows that the faculty of imagination is the gift of interpolating into the infinitely small, of inventing, for every intensity, an extensiveness to contain its new, compressed fullness, in short, of receiving each image as if it were that of the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes, in its new expanse, the beloved features within it. 44

The opening of the folds of the fan is the opening of the image. The fan can close in on itself, bringing its folds in contact with each other without reducing their differences. If the distance between the various folds of the fan is reduced when it

44 Benjamin, "One-Way Street," One-Way Street, p.75. 130

is closed in, these folds do not merge into a singular surface but become more dis tinct.

The "faculty of imagination" - which could also be seen as the workings of involuntary memory - opens up a space for the receiving of the image. To an extent this faculty of imagination can be seen as fan-like itself ("the gift of[... ] inventing, for every intensity, an extensiveness to contain its new, compressed fulness"). As a fan, as that which can be opened and closed, the faculty of imagination can receive each image as a folded fan, as something which can also be opened out and "draw breath." This idea of enfolding seems to offer another sort of relation to the image and to fascination to that found in Baudelaire's "love at last sight" (where the form of proxemics is defined by a particular idea of loss), and brings me to my proposal of another relation to the image that is found in

Benjamin's work and which can be drawn on for ideas of spectatorship. This type of relation to the image also involves a form of fascination, a form of fascination and a relation between self and other which entails a mobile distance and dif ference - an interval - which is constantly being recharted. The image then is that which opens an interval, and this interval itself.

Both moments of films (both in their viewing and in memory) and films themselves can fascinate us, can find us before them as either the brooder (brood ing over our own brooding, trying to remember what it was that was almost grasped), or the lover (where we find in these moments or films an image of our own inexpressible desire, or rather of its inexpressibility). My concern here is less with whether particular types of films are at issue here (this certainly would be the case), than with where these two relations part ways.

The first of these two types of cinema experience shares a number of similarities with Benjamin's figure of the Grubler or brooder. The Grubler is a melancholic figure who, brooding over their own brooding, tries to remember 131

what it was that he or she once almost grasped. "What essentially distinguishes the Grubler from the thinker is that the Grubler ponders over not just the thing itself but over his own pondering over it. The case of the Grubler is that of the man who once had the solution to the Great Problem, but then forgot it. And now he broods, not so much over the matter as over his past pondering over it. The thought of the Grubler thus stands in the sign of memory. "45 As Max Pensky points out, the German term Grubler signals not just brooding but also grumbling,

"a muttered lament," and grubbing around. The Grubler "concentrates so closely on the earthly fragments that the more he contemplates, the more esoteric and arcane they become. "46 This figure turns up a number of times in Benjamin's work- in the Origin of German Tragic Drama, in the Baudelaire essays, in "Cen- tral Park," and in the Arcades project. It is a figure which has perhaps found a contemporary manifestation in the (sorrowful) cinema spectator who likewise broods over their own brooding- or rather, over their own brooding over their brooding over moments in (loved) films. In such a relation, the moment or film that fascinates is seen as a problem, it poses a question. What is it about this film, this moment of a film, which means I constantly return to it? What is the image that I want to raise from it? The moment or film appears as ruin, as fragment. It is pondered over, viewed repeatedly, set in juxtaposition with other such ruins and fragments which also keep the spectator enthralled, in an attempt to release the meaning it is suspected of holding. Such pondering, rather than releasing the desired meaning, produces more and more images and moments, and it could be said of such a spectator what Benjamin wrote in regard to Proust, that no image satisfies. The brooder is in love with and fascinated by their own brooding and

45 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 5:465, qtd. and trans. in Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, p.162.

46 Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, p.l23. 132

fascination (this would be the Grubler's narcissism).

In such brooding, the distance between the subject and the object expands

in the very attempt by the subject to bridge that distance. What distinguishes such

forms of fascination is the form of spatial and temporal distance they entail. Or

rather, it is precisely because of the form of proxemics operating in such forms of

fascination that the object can only be possessed as lost, and the interval between

subject and object can only be mapped by a melancholic love.

By turning to Benjamin's figure of the fan, a practice of the image can be

traced which doesn't stop short at arrest, but in which fascination (the fascination

of shock, the shock of fascination) activates a practice of remembrance. The prac tice of the image traced through the figure of the fan provides a way of addressing those cinematic experiences in which one takes in a film as a love object, when

one's relation to a film, to a scene, an image throws one into a turbulence. In such

instances one is drawn towards a film, an image, in such a way that one finds the

surprise of recognition (of a desire, of oneself as another), and the recognition of

surprise or shock. In such instances, the film may also be used as a gift - one offers the film, the scene, the image to another (either in viewing or in writing about it) as a substitute for the self, as standing before oneself, as an image of

one's desire. The possibility that this image will not be recognised is anticipated with dread, the possibility that it will be too easily recognised or mis-read, equally dreaded. Is such a phenomenon exclusive to film? could it not also take place in relation to writing, to a place, a gesture, a pose, a sensation? Film is not unique in serving this function but it is, I would argue, particularly amenable to it.

Unlike, for instance, the offering of a book to another (which will be read in isolation), in viewing a loved film with someone - in offering it and oneself to another - we find a strange nexus of gazes, in which it is unclear who or what is mediating what desire. Is the desire for the other mediated by the film in the pre- 133

sentation of the film? (one's desiring gaze is directed to the other by the attempt to meet the other's gaze on the surface ofthe screen), or is it that the film itself is the object of desire (or even the image of oneself desiring, as represented by one's relation to the screen), and what one wants of the other is for this to be recog nised? All these relations are of course possible, and my interest is not so much with privileging one over the other but rather with the temporal contours of such relations - the ways in which such relations to the image involve the opening and charting of a distance. This type of fascinated spectatorship involves a form of enfolding in which the loved object is taken in, intertwined in the folds of the subject, the subject intertwining themselves in the folds of the image. In such an enfolding a form of proxemics is found which involves the constant opening and closing of a distance between subject and object, but in which distance is never collapsed.

One of Benjamin's criticisms of contemplative modes of spectatorship and reception is that they maintain and are based in a relation of (static) distance. This static distance grants both the object and the subject a false unity, and denies the fundamental shifts in modem experience (principally, the central place of frag mentation in the structuring of daily life and the resultant radical rupture in rela tions between memorative practices and consciousness). But Benjamin does not want to relinquish particular forms of distance for the sake of a proximity in which differences are dissolved (relinquishing, in effect, difference and similarity for sameness). In this respect the form ofproxemics found in his practices and theory of the image shares a number of similarities with Irigaray's work on Des cartes "first passion" - wonder. Irigaray's work on wonder proposes a mobile proxemics, this mobility resulting from the opening of a mobile distance between subject and object, self and other. Wonder is the "passion of movement toward" she writes, a passion which "would never stop. Not even at astonishment, as Des- 134

cartes would say. Astonishment being a kind of stupor which paralyzes. "47

Wonder involves and maintains an interval, but this interval is mobile and a site of mobility. Neither the subject nor the object are granted a false unity- each is constantly being refigured, opened out, enfolded. As Irigaray writes:

This other, male or female, should surprise us again and again, appear to us as new, very different from what we knew or what we thought he or she should be. 48

This maintaining of an interval in which the other surprises again and again without being assimilable, entails a similar temporality to that found in auratic experience.49 For Irigaray:

Wonder is not an enveloping. It corresponds to time, to space-time before and after that which can delimit, go round, encircle. It con stitutes an opening prior to and following that which surrounds, enlaces. It is the passion of that which is already born and not yet reenveloped in love. Of that which is touched and moves toward and within the attraction, without nostalgia for the first dwelling. Outside of repetition. It is the passion of the first encounter. 50

For Irigaray, wonder takes place in - and produces - a present which is no longer the past and not yet in the future. In this "movement towards," what is privileged is the interval itself, a spatio-temporal opening. Irigaray's proposal of wonder can

47 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics ofSexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), p.80.

48 ibid, p.74.

49 For Irigaray, wonder takes place in and produces a present which is no longer the past and not yet in the future. We could compare this with Benjamin's concept of the origin, itself integrally tied to his idea of the image. We find this in the Epistemo-Critical Prologue to the Origin ofGerman Tragic Drama. As Ben jamin writes: "Origin [Ursprung], although an historical category, has, neverthe less, nothing to do with genesis [Enstehung]. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis." Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p.45.

50 Irigary, An Ethics ofSexual Difference, pp.81-2. 135

be related then to some of Benjamin's practices of the image, in particular, to the idea of the image in his work on Proust's involuntary memory - or rather to Ben jamin's idea of involuntary memory which he draws out and away from that which he finds in Proust.

Like many of the literary figures who play a central role in Benjamin's work, Proust's project is written through with melancholia. Proust's involuntary memory was to play a crucial role in Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image and its temporal workings, and more generally in his theory of experience. Proust devoted himself to (and made his life work) an attempt to capture, through the images brought forth in involuntary memory, lost moments of happiness. This project is what Benjamin calls Proust's "will to happiness,"51 and it is in terms of the form of happiness being willed that Benjamin's own project veers closer to

Irigaray's idea of wonder and away from Proust's model of happiness.

As John McCole has argued in his chapter on Benjamin and Proust in

Antinomies a/Tradition, Benjamin was drawn to Proust's work at the same time that he struggled against losing his own theory of experience to it. If for Proust involuntary memory was directed towards the regaining of a "lost state, "52 Ben- jamin's idea of a will to happiness, as McCole argues, does not define itself in terms of the restoration of a lost plenitude. Benjamin writes in his essay on Proust of a "dual will to happiness, a dialectics of happiness," which entails a "hymnic" and an "elegaic" aspect. "The one is the unheard-of, the un-precedented, the height of bliss; the other, the eternal repetition, the eternal restoration of the orginal, the first happiness. "53 While Benjamin finds - and indeed proposes - this

51 Benjamin, "The Image of Proust," Illuminations, p.206.

52 John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies a/Tradition (Ithaca and London: Cornelll University Press, 1993), p.261.

53 Benjamin, "The Image of Proust," p.206. 136

dialectics of happiness in Proust's work, the elegaic is clearly more central to

Proust's project than the hymnic. It is for this idea or form of happiness that

"Proust transforms existence into a preserve ofmemory."54 For Benjamin, however, the will to happiness has two components or directions and these two aspects must operate together - hence it is a dialectics of happiness. As McCole writes, for Benjamin, Proust's "fervent wish to recapture the past left him trapped in a charmed circle of eternal recurrence, "55 in which the urgency of the present, the Now, is lost.

The retrieval ofthe past is necessary, of course; that is the role played by recall or, as Benjamin referrred to it, restoration. But the significance it has acquired is something new that arises in the moment of recognition. It is there for the first time - hence the ele ment of the unheard-of, the unprecedented, which Benjamin calls the hymnic moment. And that also helps to explain the sig nificance of the peculiar variety of memory that Proust, and Ben jamin following him, described as involuntary. The moments that must be recalled will tend to be those whose significance was still concealed when they occurred, so that we failed to pay deliberate attention to them. 56

If the elegaic form of happiness is conceived as a longing to return to a union with the mother, the hymnic aspect is not nostalgic for a pre-oedipal union in this way, but rather, in its quest for the "unheard of," aims for the endless pos sibility of transformation (like Irigaray's "passion of the first encounter"). While for Chow the specificity of Benjamin's erotics is characterized by straying and the keeping of a distance (in which, one could say, loss is preserved), the dialectics of happiness entails neither the desire to return to some idea of original bliss nor a desire to possess the object in the form or a fetishized loss. In Benjamin's dialec tics of happiness, the relation to the image involves both remembering and forget-

54 ibid, p.206.

55 McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies a/Tradition, p.261.

56 ibid, p.263. 137

ting, recognition and nonrecognition. The relation between the Then and the Now

is one in which the past and the present charge and activate each other, and this

activation is oriented toward a grasp of the present. The activation of the past for

Benjamin is not so much the recovery of a lost plenitude as the "redemption of lost and missed opportunities, of unrecognized, unacknowledged, and unfulfilled wishes. "57 Clearly what is being dealt with here is a form of auratic experience,

and a form of (shock-like) fascination in which the object, ourselves, time, is encountered anew. The dialectics of happiness- central to Benjamin's redemptive reading of the temporal structuring of experience in modernity - entails a form of fascination which need not be held in a fetishization and aestheticization of loss.

Such a practice of fascination, rather, would entail the opening of an interval: the opening of an interval between self and other, between subject and object, and the opening of an interval within (our understanding of) history.

The excess that is communicability itself58 and which characterizes auratic experiences entails an unfolding and enfolding, and suggests an economy of desire at odds with that which Chow finds in Benjamin's work. For Chow, Ben- jamin's fascination with the inanimate demarcates a particular sexuality, a "sexuality that is stressed with a caution against over-spending and exhaustion, which in turn expresses itself as a valorisation of formal restraint, or formal frugality."

But it must also be said that there is another economy of desire in his work, one which at some points is at odds with such "over-spending" (a "desire spared, rather than denied, fulfillment"), but more often is enabled through it. Whether this economy of desire is named as love, communicability, or auratic experience,

57 ibid, p.264.

58 See Alexander Garcia Diittman, "Tradition and Destruction: Walter Benjamin's Politics of Language," Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p.44. 138

it is an economy of desire which, rather than being characterized by "formal fru gality," is closer to the idea of the gift which shocks and keeps on giving and to the hymnic aspect of Proust's dialectics of happiness ("Gifts must affect the receiver to the point of shock," Benjamin writes in "One-Way Street"). 59 How then can such a form of (redeemed) auratic experience be argued for in relation to film and its modes of spectatorship when the decay of the aura which Benjamin locates at the heart of the new medias of technical reproducibility is so central to his theory of film? The very nature of such auratic experience - its spatia temporal contours as the opening of an interval - would seem to be at odds with many of Benjamin's comments about film and the aura. In the painting which

"reflects back at us that of which our eyes will never have their fill, "60 we would certainly find the excess that is communicability, but where would this leave film? We could trace these two economies- that of a "caution against over spending" and that of a giving which does not expend itself - through the oral and digestive metaphors found in some of Benjamin's comments on the aura. Whereas what the painting "contains that fulfils the original desire would be the very stuff on which the desire continuously feeds," "photography is rather like food for the hungry and drink for the thirsty. 61 And yet, as argued in previous chapters, Ben jamin's proposal of the optical unconscious would move toward a form of auratic experience. The critical force of such a form of auratic experience in and through film lies in the ways in which film can embrace the temporal structuring of expe rience in modernity (and thereby the radical historicity of experience). Like

Baudelaire's lyric poetry, film harnesses shock experience at its very core, but this

59 Benajmin, "One-Way Street," p.71.

60 Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire, p.146-7.

61 ibid, p.147. 139

harnessing and staging of shock experience can also open a new spatio-temporal vista. Proust's dialectics of happiness intersects with Benjamin's redemptive reading of film in terms of the forms of repetition that they in many ways share.

Through its technical procedures, film stages the "yet once again" of the elegaic

(the new as the always-the-same- the temporality of the commodity fetish), and, through its unconscious optics, unleashes the "unheard of' that characterizes the hymnic. Through the juxtaposition of images, through its fragmented "views," through the photographic enlargement of a detail, film enables a form of "read ing" in which we learn to read the familiar anew. Like the folded fan which "only in spreading draws breath and flourishes, "62 film can offer a relation to the image in which we trace ourselves anew in the contours of a gesture, a space, a detail.

Toni Morrison's novel Jazz articulates such an erotics of the image in a passage which both resonates with and complicates that "love at last sight" which

Benjamin finds in Baudelaire. As with Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, this form of modern love is marked by shock experience. And as in Baudelaire also, this shock experience is written through by the temporality of the photograph and the photographic process - the interruptive detail or fragment, and the very mode of reading the loved object. In one of the book's most glorious passages, Morrison describes the wave of black migration from the South to the cities of the North in the late 19th and early 20th centuries:

The wave of black people running from want and violence crested in the 1870s; the '80s; the '90s but was a steady stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it. Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever, and it is like forever. As though there was never a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves. And in the beginning when they first

62 Benjamin, "One-Way Street," One-Way Street, p.75. 140

arrive, and twenty years later when they and the City have grown up, they love that part of themselves so much they forget what loving other people was like - if they ever knew, that is. I don't mean they hate them, no, just that what they start to love is the way a person is in the City; the way a schoolgirl never pauses at a stoplight but looks up and down the street before stepping off the curb; how men accomodate themselves to tall buildings and wee porches, what a woman looks like moving in a crowd, or how shocking her profile is against the backdrop of the East River. The restfulness in kitchen chores when she knows the lamp oil or the staple is just around the comer and not seven miles away; the amazement of throwing open the window and being hypnotized for hours by people on the street below.

Little of that makes for love, but it does pump desire. The woman who churned a man's blood as she leaned all alone on a fence by a country road might not expect even to catch his eye in the City. But if she is clipping quickly down the big-city street in heels, swinging her purse, or sitting on a stoop with a cool beer in her hand, dangling her shoe from the toes of her feet, the man, reacting to her posture, to soft skin on stone, the weight of the building stressing the delicate, dangling shoe, is captured. And he'd think it was the woman he wanted, and not some combination of curved stone, and a swinging, high-heeled shoe moving in and out of sun light. He would know, right away, the deception, the trick of shapes and light and movement, but it wouldn't matter at all because the deception was part of it too. Anyway, he could feel his lungs going in and out. There is no air in the City but there is breath, and every morning it races through him like laughing gas brightening his eyes, his talk, and his expectations. In no time at all he forgets little pebbly creeks and apple trees so old that they lay their branches along the ground and you have to reach down to pick up the fruit. He forgets a sun that used to slide up like the yolk of a good county egg, thick and red-orange at the bottom of the sky, and he doesn't miss it, doesn't look up to see what hap pened to it or to stars made irrelevant by the light of thrilling, wasteful street lamps.

That kind of fascination, permanent and out of control, seizes chil dren, young girls, men of every description, mothers, brides, and barfly women, and if they have their way and get to the City, they feel more like themselves, more like the people they always believed they were. Nothing can pry them away from that; the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of ami able strangers. No wonder they forget pebbly creeks and when they do not forget the sky completely think of it as a tiny piece of information about the time of day or night. 63

63 Toni Morrison, Jazz (London: Picador, 1992), pp.33-35. 141

Morrison's figuring ofthe City could stand just as well for an experience of the cinema: the importance of the fragment which is brought into a new kind of visibility; the centrality of mimetic reading practices which animate and decipher objects, spaces, and gestures as sites of inscription; and the temporality of the instant which both interrupts and activates a memorative practice. In this

City (and in such a cinema), fascination is borne of both distraction and boredom.

In the blink of an eye, an image appears and is swept away, animating a desire which does not stop short at the erotics of arrest but rather gives way to new forms of storytelling. 142

Chapter 4

THE AMOROUS SPECTATOR:

BENJAMIN'S FIGURE OF THE COLLECTOR AND ROSEANNE

Benjamin's work on collecting has played a surprisingly small role in film theory debates drawing on his work. While Benjamin doesn't refer to film (even in passing) in his key essays on collecting ("Eduard Fuchs, Collector and His- torian" and "Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collecting") or in his collecting "file" in the Arcades Project, 1 this aspect ofhis work is nevertheless particularly valuable for addressing both particular film practices and modes of spectatorship. Forms of collecting- whether they be those of the collector proper or of his/her poor cousin the ragpicker- are addressed in Benjamin's work in terms of the memorative practices they entail, bringing collecting squarely into his theory of experience. For Benjamin, collecting can be seen as taking up a complex relation to the temporal structuring of experience in modernity: against the onslaught of the new as the always-the-same (the temporality embodied in the commodity-fetish), the collector sets out to rescue discarded commodities. The collector, for Benjamin, is essentially a physiognomist, an interpreter of the fate

1 See Benjamin's essays "Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian," One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1992), pp.349-386 and "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (Suffolk: Fontana/Collins, 1982), pp.59-67. Benjamin also discusses collecting in his essay "Old Forgotten Children's Books," Walter Benjamin Selected Writings· volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (London and Cam bridge Mass.: Belknap Press ofHarvard University Press, 1996), pp.406-413. See also "Konvolut H" in the Gesammelte Schriften. 143

of objects.2 This chapter looks at Benjamin's arguments about collecting, both its critical possibilities and its potential limitations. The first part of the chapter focuses on the collector's relation to his/her objects- a relation which is preeminently one of love. In this respect, collecting would seem to be opposed to allegory: whereas the collector lovingly gathers discarded objects as fragments and produces, in a sense, a "home" for and through them, the allegorist tears objects/fragments from their context; whereas the collector tries to read meaning from the object and forms the collection through these deciphered traces, the allegorist imposes meaning on the object. But while Benjamin was clearly drawn to collecting in terms of both its memorative practice and particular aspects of its relation to the object (and as I will go on to argue, it is on this basis that we find forms of collecting underlying his concept of the dialectical image), this was not without reservations. For Benjamin, the critical potential of collecting could be cut short by the object (and the collection) being given what he calls a "fancier's value," thereby sealing the objects (and indeed the collector) from a critical grasp of and explosive interruption into the present. The second part of this chapter extends Benjamin's analysis of the practices of collecting by drawing on this work in relation to the television sitcom Roseanne. Roseanne is characterized by similar practices to those we find in Benjamin's collector (who engages in

"dangerous if domesticated passions"3), but it also involves a practice of collect ing which in many ways overcomes some of the limitations Benjamin identifies in collecting as (and for) a critical practice.

2 Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," pp.60-61.

3 Benjamin, "Eduard Fuchs," p.371. 144

Part 1: Cinema's Amorous Subject

Benjamin's figure of the collector provides a way of conceiving of certain forms of cinema-love and the forms of collecting they involve. In the first part of this chapter I will look at the forms of collecting which characterize what could be called amorous relations to film and television - from those cinema practices which play at redeeming the discarded dream images of an ideal, "lost" or

"impossible" cinema (as in Fassbinder's early films), to spectatorial practices which hoard moments of films and television programs as treasures and souvenirs.

The lover of cinema- not so much the "film buff," but what I'd prefer to call, drawing on Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, cinema's "amorous subject"- has tended to be seen as a sentimental and outdated figure, while the lover of televi sion has rarely been addressed in terms of the amorous side of this relation. For the moment I will refer to both as the amorous subject or amorous spectator- not so much to dismiss the differences between modes of spectatorship in film and television, but rather because the kind of amorous relations I will be referring to can operate, in different ways, in relation to both film and television. If the figure of the amorous spectator is now seen as an outdated figure, a figure that is fading, as in its after-life, it is perhaps also in its fading that this figure and its practices have become more recognizable. Rather than simply disappearing, this amorous spectator both circulates in popular memory and has dispersed into other forms and figures.

For it almost appears as ifthe self-alienation ofthe compulsive cinema-goer, his[sic] resigned and yet always revived voyeurism, is somehow taken into the films as the sad sediment of futility 145

which spreads over the beautifully executed camera movements, the classically balanced shots, the languid pans.4

This passage, from Thomas Elsaesser's essay "A Cinema of Vicious Cir cles," offers an evocative proposal ofthe sentiment ofFassbinder's early films, but beyond its pertinence to these films, this passage could be seen more generally as a description of a particular form of cinema love. Elsaesser's term

"compulsive cinema-goer" covers both the idea of the film buff and the film addict (figures which have become implicitly sexually inflected- film buffery being more aligned with masculinity, film addiction with femininity). Both figures are seen as engaging in obsessive behaviour (the first in terms of collecting knowledge/information, the second in terms of a compulsive immersion in the image and the cinematic situation), and both are entranced by detail. In its relation to the loved object, Elsaesser's figure of the "compulsive cinema-goer" sits somewhere between the sentimental and the melancholic, and shares a number of features with Benjamin's figures of both the collector and the Grubler (the ponderer or brooder).

Benjamin's figure of the collector offers a conceptual framework through which amorous relations to film and television can be reconceived. The "figure of the collector, which improves on closer acquaintance, has not often been given its due" writes Benjamin.5 Once we begin to focus on the figure ofthe collector, we find that not only has it not "been given its due" but also that Benjamin's figure of the collector becomes more complex on closer view. Charting the points of inter section between amorous spectatorship and collecting, I would suggest that whilst

4 Thomas Elsaesser, "A Cinema of Vicious Circles," in Fassbinder, ed. Tony Rayns (London: British Film Institute, 1976), p.29.

s Benjamin, "Eduard Fuchs," p.371. 146

both involve a degree of sentimentality, this sentimentality (at least in the instances which interest me here) is offset by a dynamic of anti-sentimentality or irreverence.

The compulsive cinema-goer, like the brooder and the collector, is enthralled by a particular form of amorous state - obsessive, delirious, melan cholic.6 "Every day, walking up and down the main street of my small town, I'd only have eyes for the cinemas," Calvino writes in his account of his adolescent cinema-love.? In the compulsive cinema-goer's "resigned yet always revived voyeurism," films operate- in Benjamin's terms- as "enslaved and enslaving objects" which the viewer takes up as discarded icons, constantly returning to them to re-order, remember, and re-new them. Collecting for Benjamin involves a particular form of possession: the collector comes alive in his or her collection rather than simply the other way around. The collector produces for him/herself a private world, but at the same time, as physiognomists of things and "interpreter[s] offate,"8 the collector can potentially break through the amnesia of modernity and approach something like the form of awakening Benjamin calls for in his theory of experience. The collector's concern is with the pre- and post-

6 For a fascinating account of the figure of the cinephile and the role of cinephilia in various national film cultures, see Adrian Martin, "No Flowers for the Cinephile: The Fates of Cultural Populism 1960-1988," Island in the Stream: Myths ofPlace in Australian Culture, ed. Paul Foss (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1988), pp.117-138.

7 Italo Calvino, "A Cinema-Goer's Autobiography," The Road to San Giovanni, trans. Tim Parks (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993), p.38. Cf. the passage from Balzac's Le Cousin Pons which Benjamin cites in "Eduard Fuchs": '"They look as if they cared for nothing and bothered about nothing; they heed neither the women nor the shop windows. They walk along as if in a dream, their pockets are empty, their gaze is blank, and you wonder to what class of Parisians they actually belong. [ ... ]They are collectors; the most passionate people that walk the earth."' Benjamin, "Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian," p.372.

s Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," p.61. 147

history of the objects in his/her collection, and in this respect, the collector engages in a form of recollection. Gathered as fragments, the collector's objects are rescued from the threat of oblivion (and from the market) by being placed, alongside other fragments, in a collection. The collector's relationship to these objects is one which "does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value- that is, their usefulness - but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate. "9 The question which will underlie this discussion - and which I will set aside for now- is one which we also find in Benjamin's work on the collector: does the collector, Benjamin's "man of the interior" (the etui man), simply find a means of avoiding experience by producing a "buffer" against the stimuli and shocks of modernity, or does the collector approach experience through the forms of possession and storytelling which infuse the collector's practice and passion?

Like the collector, the practices of the amorous subject of cinema and television (considered as a form of collecting) can be seen less as simply a form of sentimentality than as a desire to rescue that which has been discarded and forgotten- the "trash of history": an attempt, in Benjamin's terms, to "discover the new anew." The cinema lover as collector engages in a form of collecting which, as with Benjamin's figure of the collector, involves something like childhood modes of cognition in the desire to re-new the transitory and discarded icons of commodity culture. For Benjamin both the child and the collector are interested in reinvesting objects with new meanings, values, and relations.IO Children, as he

9 ibid, p.60.

10 "Brecht criticized Benjamin's animation of the world of things as 'mysticism'. But it is also the impulse of children, whose mimesis of the inorganic world expresses the fairytale wish to awaken congealed life in petrified objects and to undo the reification of commodities in the process." Susan Buck-Morss. "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering" New German Critique 39 (Fall 1986), p.l32. 148

points out, are interested in the waste products of the modern world, and in this sense share similarities with both the collector and the practices of Surrealism. 11

As Benjamin writes in "One-Way Street":

In waste products they recognize the face that the world of things turns directly and solely to them. In using these things they do not so much imitate the world of adults as bring together, in the artefact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship.12

The child's relation to the object is one less defined by empathy than by what

Benjamin calls "mimetic apprehension" - of reading and producing similarities.l3

Untidy child - Each stone he finds, each flower picked and each butterfly caught is already the start of a collection, and every single thing that he owrts makes up one great collection ... He hunts the spirits whose trace he scents in things; between spirits and things years are passed in which his field of vision remains free of people. His life is like a dream: he knows nothing lasting; every thing seemingly happens to him by chance. His nomad years are hours in the forest of dreams. To it he drags home his booty, to purify it, secure it, cast out its spell. His drawers must become arsenal and zoo, crime museum and crypt. To "tidy up" would be to demolish an edifice full of prickly chestnuts that are spiky clubs, tinfoil that is hoarded silver, bricks that are coffins, cacti that are totem-poles and copper pennies that are shields. The child has long since helped at his mother's linen-cupboard, his father's book shelves, while in his owrt domain he is still a sporadic, warlike visitor.l4

11 See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics ofSeeing, (Cambridge Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1989), p.262.

12 Walter Benjamin, "One-Way Street," One-Way Street and Other Writ ings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1992), pp.52-53.

13 "Children's play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behaviour, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill and a train." Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty," Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p.333.

14 Benjamin, "One-Way Street," pp.73-4. 149

Benjamin frequently returned to that particularly modern figure of the col lector. As well as his two essays dealing directly with collecting, we find many references to versions of this figure in the Baudelaire essays, his essay on Sur- realism, and scattered throughout the Arcades Project. There are two figures who explicitly engage in practices of collecting in Benjamin's work (though once we regard the collector as engaging in a practice of montage, we find traces of the collector in many of his central figures). On the one hand there is the collector proper, who cannot be confused with the collector who amasses goods for invest ment purposes, and on the other, the ragpicker or chiffonier (Lumpensammler), who gathers a culture's junk for a living. 15 The ragpicker, dressed in rags, gathers refuse and is him/herself seen as cultural refuse. The collector on the other hand doesn't make a living from collecting, nor does he or she intend to feed back into capitalism what he/she "rescues," but, more importantly for my argument here, the collector approaches the discarded object or fragment with love. If I am at this point focusing on the collector rather than the ragpicker it is precisely because of the amorous aspects of the collector's practice (which the ragpicker doesn't have the liberty of engaging in). Nevertheless these figures are certainly related, and the ragpicker will resurface in the final section of this chapter.

The figure of the collector for Benjamin is, then, intimately related to many of his other key modern figures. As with the other figures and social types

15 "The actual chiffonier is subject to the production and circulation of commodities, to use- and exchange-value[ ... ]. The collector, as Benjamin con ceives him, 'frees objects from the drudgery of having to be useful' (GS, 5,53), unlike his upper-class counterpart who is in it for the money. And while the col lector pits uselessness against bourgeois utilitarianism, the metaphorical rag picker opposes a militant, Brechtian, utilitarianism to the 'interest-free pleasure' (interesse loses Wohlgefallen) of classical bourgeois aesthetics." Irving Wohlfarth, "EtCetera? The Historian as Chiffonier," New German Critique 39 (Fall1986), p.152. 150

that Benjamin addresses, his interest in the collector (and the ragpicker) is in terms of the relation to the commodity (and the temporality of the commodity fetish) that this figure stages. The collector is interested in the commodity in terms of its status as discarded dream image - its status as ruin. Benjamin's understanding of mass culture as being a dream world is central to the Arcades

Project and underlies his analysis of the commodity and the temporal structuring of experience in modernity. As Buck-Morss writes:

Based on the theories of Max Weber, it has become a shibboleth in social theory that the essence of modernity is the demythification and disenchantment of the social world. In contrast, and in keeping with the Surrealist vision, Benjamin's central argument in the Passagen-Werk was that under the conditions of capitalism, indus trialization had brought about a reenchantment of the social world, and through it, a "reactivation of mythic powers."16

Benjamin's interest is in the utopian potential which could be activated through this dream world, not by simply immersing oneself in the intoxication, but by critically awakening from it and through it, and equally importantly, by awakening that which has been lost- almost petrified- in its folds. As Buck-

Morss argues, there are two axes which structure the Arcades Project and through which Benjamin's analysis of this dream world is staged (petrifed nature transitory nature, and waking- dream), and these axes define four fields and

"faces" of the commodity: ruin, fossil, fetish, and wish image.17 For Benjamin, the commodity can become a ruin in that its promise was not fulfilled and has been left suspended, and because it has been (or soon will be) rapidly cast off in favour of another commodity. As fossil, it operates as a trace, a petrified imprint

16 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics ofSeeing, pp.253-4.

17 As Buck-Morss writes: "Each field of the coordinates can then be said to describe one aspect of the physiognomic appearance ofthe commodity, show ing its contradictory 'faces': fetish and fossil; wish image and ruin." Ibid, p.211. 151

of "living history that can be read from the surfaces of the surviving objects."I8

The commodity, in its presentation as the new, operates as fetish- the ever

"always-the-same"- but also as a "wish image," in that it contains a sort of prom ise and utopian potential (of happiness, fulfillment etc). In gathering the refuse of the dream world of mass culture, the collector is certainly interested in the com modity as ruin and fossil. But equally importantly, in approaching the commodity as ruin and by "renewing" it in the production of the collection, the collector also addresses the discarded commodity in terms of its status as wish image, attempt ing to read and resurrect the wishes which had been invested in it and which it once seemed to embody.

The collector makes of these discarded dream images a private world, a sort of phantasmagoria which can operate as a buffer against the onslaught of shock sensations. Benjamin, for instance, considered the bourgeois individual of the 19th century to be a sort of collector. As Buck-Morss writes: "Already in the

19th century, the interiors of bourgeois dwellings were 'a kind of casing,' in which the bourgeois individual as a 'collector' of objects was embedded with all his appurtenances, 'attending to his traces as nature attends to dead fauna embedded in granite."119 The collector lovingly attends to his or her traces, engag ing in a form of reverie which approaches intoxication.

Collecting for Benjamin is a "productive disorder."20 It is above all a process of renewal: "To renew the old world- that is the collector's deepest desire

18 ibid, p.56.

19 ibid, p.66.

20 ibid, p.352. 152

when he is driven to acquire new things. "21 The collector's relation to his or her objects is similar to the Surrealists' relation to the icons of mass culture. Ben jamin's interest in the collector and childhood cognition is in terms of how both the collector and the child gather and re-invest a culture's discarded objects and icons - the endlessly displaced dream images of mass culture that he calls

"transitory tyrants" (Benjamin's term- taken from Aragon's Paris Peasant- for the endlessly usurped gods of modem existence). In his essay on Surrealism, Ben- jamin refers to these transitory tyrants as the "outmoded" - "the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them. "22 The rapidly redundant commodities of the modem world are transitory tyrants in terms of their double status as both dream image (the unconscious dreams which they embodied and the conscious wishes they contained) and ruin (their discarded, outmoded nature).

By defining them in this way Benjamin has expanded the field of what can be seen as a commodity so that it includes the icons of commodity culture - film stars, advertisements, logos etc. can all operate as transitory tyrants in that they circulate and are sent to market as dream images, evoking empathy on the part of the consumer or spectator. In contemporary commodity culture, these transitory tyrants are often the modem collector's paradise. Scattered everywhere and end lessly being replenished, these discarded transitory tyrants are gathered, revalued, and ordered by the collector.

21 Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," p.61.

22 Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," Reflections, p.181. 153

For Benjamin, as Buck-Morss argues, "it is as a memory trace that the dis carded object possesses the potential for revolutionary motivation,"23 and through which one can "discover the new anew." In many ways cinema operates as a vast museum of such discarded objects which leave traces. Films, scenes, stars, even conceptions of cinema can all operate as so many "transitory tyrants," soon to be discarded but the remnants of which remain. These transitory tyrants make up the storehouse of memories, images and stories in film and television culture. For

Benjamin, dream and wish images cross an individual's lived history and a collec tive history. Each generation inherits not only the dream images of their own gen eration but also of the one before (similar to the way we could speak of the televi sion generation - or rather generations - as inheriting the decayed dream images of the Hollywood ofthe 1930's and 1940's). It is in this way that a dream image's after-life as ruin enters an individual's history. As Buck-Morss writes, for Ben- jamin,

the power of historical remembering, its political strength as a motivation for present action, is the same, whether one is remem bering one's own life or a collective life never experienced directly. He conceived of the past on both levels as a "dream state," and historical recollection which allowed its interpretation as "awakening."24

Cinema and television have come to operate as an everexpanding terrain of discarded dream images, where one's own memories and history of viewing are entangled with generational memories. Cinema (and as we move into the third television generation, we must also include television here) is often intricately connected with a sort of mythical childhood - both the mythical childhood of

23 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics ofSeeing, p.277.

24 Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering," p.l33. 154

cinema and television, and the mythical childhood of a generation. Cinema per haps has a privileged place in this regard, or at least a particular idea of cinema - for instance the idea of "Hollywood" as a lost object. Films like Sunset Boulevard and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (which I will discuss in more detail in the next chapter), play with this idea of Hollywood as a lost object. In both films it is the aging female star who refuses to acknowledge the decayed status of the dream images of her youth (understandably, as it is generally the character/star's youth that has served as a dream image). The idea of Hollywood dream images as ruin is central to a wide range of film and television practices and can take various forms. The playful establishment of a star system in Fassbinder's early films for instance, or Fassbinder's characters themselves and their impossible aspirations toward star status- they never really making it as gangster, rebel, or sex kitten. Or the low-budget American Underground films of Jack Smith and Ken Jacobs in their camp play with the aspirations ofthe B-grade Hollywood film ofthe 1940's.

In films such as these, it is the films themselves that take up the position of amorous spectator, lovingly and playfully (which is not to say uncritically) gathering discarded dream images and aspirations and attempting to resurrect the wishes they embodied.

In speaking of the amorous spectator as a kind of collector, I want to both draw on Benjamin's work on collecting and open it out into some of its con temporary forms. As with many of Benjamin's key figures of modernity, the col lector is no longer a specific figure. Buck-Morss has argued that "[if] the flaneur has disappeared as a specific figure, it is because the perceptive attitude which he embodied saturates modern existence, specifically, the society of mass consump- 155

tion (and is the source of its illusions). "25 The same can be said for the collector - the perceptive attitude of the collector, his/her relation to objects and their his tories, has likewise spread and diversified into other forms, including certain forms of film and television and modes of spectatorship. Collecting as I will be using it here refers to both particular forms of film and television and to what I'm calling amorous modes of spectatorship. It refers to the ways in which cinema and television can operate as a sort of treasure trove, where endlessly discarded wish images, intensities, and fetish moments can be found and taken in as a sort of narcotic substance. But also the irreverent and destructive aspects of such amorous modes of collecting which can serve to blast apart the dream world of commodity culture, restaging a generation's dream images as ruins whilst redeeming the unfulfilled wishes they embodied in a constellation with the present.

The workings of humour are central here - both as a product and means.

Though Benjamin did not write extensively on the subject of humour and the comic, his own writing is frequently infused with humor, and his concepts of dialectical thinking and profane illumination share a number of similarities with the workings of humour, jokes, and the comic as Freud has defined them in his study Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.26 The irreverence of humour- the ways in which it can deflect sympathy and discharge displeasure - and the ways in which humour, jokes, and the comic establish new and unexpected rela tions between words, things, and meanings brings them close to both childhood cognition and the practices of the collector.

25 ibid, p.1 04.

26 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963). 156

sentimentality, irreverence, and amorous states

"the images ... are all cast in the artwork's searing gesture of irony, an adoration neither of the tawdry, nor of beauty, but of the aspira tion toward beauty, the purer for its immersion in the tawdry, a more fond, defiant and compassionate respect for this aspiration, than an adoration of it. "27

In reality, it is unimportant that I have no likelihood of being really fulfilled (I am quite willing for this to be the case). Only the will to fulfillment shines, indestructible, before me. By this will, I well up: I form within myself the utopia of a subject free from repression: I am this subject already 28

We could chart the sentiment of the amorous spectator between these two passages. The first passage is from Stefan Brecht and is cited by Richard Dyer in reference to Jack Smith's notorious film Flaming Creatures, the second is from

Barthes' A Lover's Discourse. While both passages in many ways operate as odes to sentimentality, they are also imbued with a certain form of humour - indeed the humour is almost in the sentimentality. In the first passage the humour lies in the

"outdated" sentiment oflonging, in the latter, in the defiant, child-like will. In both passages, what is "humoured" and treated affectionately is the impossibility of fulfillment, the failure which has already happened because the expectation is too great- what is aspired too, in other words, is already lost and a ruin (and loved accordingly).

By positioning these two passages against each other, I would like to map a particular form of amorous state, an amorous state which approaches delirium.

27 Stefan Brecht, qtd. in Richard Dyer, Now You See It: Studies in Lesbian and Gay Film (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p.149.

28 Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), p.55. 157

It is a state which is marked by longing and enchantment - both the longing for enchantment and, at the same time, the enchantment of longing. What charges this state (and makes it delirious) is the inseperability and co-presence of melan choly and humour. In his essay "Lightness" in Six Memos for the Next Millenium,

Italo Calvino writes of the "weightless gravity" which characterises both melan choly and humour and their intermingling: "As melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness, so humour is comedy that has lost its bodily weight. "29 This intermingling of melancholy and humour is central to the forms of reverie and fascination that the amorous spectator both engages in and desires.

The first passage, beyond its pertinence to Flaming Creatures, signals a logic of sentimentality incorporating both humour and melancholy. It is also the sentimentality of camp, and if we follow Susan Sontag's proposal of a camp sensibility in her paper "Notes on 'Camp,"'30 such a sentimentality has more in common with her notion of "naive" or "pure" camp than the notion of "deliberate" camp (or "camping it up") that she sets it against (the latter would be represented by something like Priscilla, Queen ofthe Desert, or The Golden Girls). Sontag defines naive camp as the innocent and unintentional which fails in its attempt to do something extraordinary. Like the passage from Stefan Brecht, naive camp

29 Italo Calvino, "Lightness," Six Memos for the Next Millenium, (Cam bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p.19. Calvino is drawing here on the passages on the relation between melancholy and humour in Saturn and Melancholy by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl. Calvino goes on to quote a passage from Shakespeare's As You Like It spoken by Jacques: "'but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.' [Calvino continues] It is therefore not a dense, opaque melancholy, but a veil of minute particles of humours and sensations, a fine dust of atoms, like everything else that goes to make up the ultimate substance ofthe multiplicity ofthings." pp.19-20.

30 Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp,"' A Susan Sontag Reader (Penguin, 1982). 158

also is marked by a sort of failed aspiration (to glamour, beauty, spectacle, for instance) which we regard with a sort of amused fondness (Sontag's examples of naive camp include The Maltese Falcon and some of the dance routines in the

Busby Berkeley films). It is the amused fondness with which we regard some thing that we once believed in, something we once were passionate about: a past love object, whether one's own or that of another. Naive camp is the terrain of the

"pre-loved" and discarded. An excellent- and successful- example of how diffi cult it is to produce the effect of naive camp intentionally is the glorious opening cabaret dance sequence of Robert Zemeckis' Death Becomes Her. Here, through some stunningly awkward choreography (too many dance steps, too many props, and the always slightly overdone movements and gestures of Madeline

Ashton/Meryl Streep and her dancing chorus boys) a deliriously bad- and extremely camp - dance routine is produced.

For the moment though I'm less interested in defining camp than in look ing at the points of similarity between a camp aesthetic and the amorous side of collecting, particularly in terms of the privileged place sentimentality and anti sentimentality have in both of these. The above-quoted passage from Stefan

Brecht could just as readily accompany a number of films which otherwise have little in common with Flaming Creatures - Fassbinder's Katzelmacher for exam ple or Godard's Vivre sa Vie. In this passage, the amorous sentiment, the sentimentality, is located before all else in the word "aspiration" -the unvocalised breath, full of anticipation, longing, and a degree of audacity, which is both too much and too little, and which could come as much from the amorous spectator as from the film itself. To aspirate is to release a stop in such a way that the 159

breath escapes with audible friction.3I The "aspiration toward' I suggest is central to the amorous subject of cinema, and it is most readily recognised as the fuel of the woman's film, exemplified in films such as Letter from an Unknown Woman and Stella Dallas. In some respects we could align this "aspiration toward" with what Mary Ann Doane sees as the structuring principle of the woman's film- the

"desire to desire."32 The two "sentiments" part ways in the place and role of humour in each: in the desire to desire, it is the impossibility of attaining the object of desire which is constantly restaged and replayed; in the aspiration toward, it would be this very repetition of the attempt to attain the impossible which would be fondly loved. In the quotation from Stefan Brecht, it is less the particular aspiration itself which is of interest than the fondness with which the amorous subject regards such aspirations. Could this be seen then as the plight of a particular type of cinema-goer? And if this is the case, does this amorous cinema-goer long for glamour, beauty, and spectacle and the like? Or rather, does he/she love the aspiration to these things precisely in their discarded nature? Or is it also that the spectator (in a somewhat narcissistic and melancholic move) loves their own outdated and impossible longings, a love of longing? Perhaps it is all of these. In the idea of aspiration we have a strange temporality - an unfulfilled pre sent reaching toward a future (in which this longing is inscribed as an already

31 As Barthes writes: "A (classic) word comes from the body, which expresses the emotion of absence: to sigh: 'to sigh for the bodily presence': the two halves of the androgyne sigh for each other, as if each breath, being incomplete, sought to mingle with the other: the image of the embrace, in that it melts the two images into a single one: in amorous absence, I am, sadly, an unglued image that dries, yellows, shrivels." A Lover's Discourse, p.l5. It is worth remembering here that the term "aura" comes from the Latin for breath.

32 See Doane's The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film ofthe 1940's (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987). For a detailed discussion of Doane's argument in this book, see the following chapter. 160

experienced loss), by invoking a past in which this aspiration has been left suspended. It is perhaps close to the future perfect tense, though the possibility of fulfillment is deferred - it is the suspension of this fulfillment which is privileged.

It is a moment of "not quite," of an elevated and ecstatic impossibility.

What Stefan Brecht identifies in Smith's film is something like the sentiment of the amorous collector. Flaming Creatures collects and deliriously reas sembles decaying objects and wish images- in this instance, the aspirations ofB- grade Hollywood of the 1940's, exemplified for Smith by the films of Maria

Montez such as The Cobra Woman. "To admit of Maria Montez validities" Smith writes "would be to turn on to moldiness, Glamorous Rapture, schizophrenic delight, hopeless naivete, and glittering technicolored trash! 'Geef me that

Coparah chewel! Geefme that Coparah chewel!' -line of dialogue from Cobra

Woman, possibly the greatest line of dialogue in any American flic. "33 Flaming

Creatures (along with Smith's other Montez-inspired works, including his writings, performances, and unfinished films) lovingly gathers such decaying objects and icons- the aspirations to glamour, spectacle, and beauty- assembling and renewing these discarded dream images in their double status as ruin and wish image. Smith's film shares a similar sentiment to the amorous spectator who likewise collects and attempts to renew those discarded icons and wish images of film and television culture which have been usurped and discarded. As Sontag writes, "[we] are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.

This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out of-date, demode. It's not love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of

33 Jack Smith, "The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez," Jack Smith: Historical Treasures, ed. Ira Cohen (Madras & New York: Hanuman Books, 1990), pp.72-3. 161

aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment - or arouses a necessary sympathy. "34

In the second quoted passage aspiration likewise governs the amorous state. The focus of Barthes' will to fulfillment is on the "will" rather than the "ful fillment" ("it is unimportant that I have no likelihood of being really fulfilled"

Barthes writes, with the "I know, but all the same ... " that also characterises the fetishist). The sentiment of this passage, which could also be seen as that ofthe amorous spectator, poses the question of whether such "aspirations" operate in the film itself, or whether they are generated on the part of the spectator who comes to each film with an impossible request. Where, in other words, is this sentimentality taking place? This sentimentality could be seen as a form of court ship, a ritual which some forms of film and television and modes of spectatorship seem compliant with.

Whilst Benjamin was drawn to the melancholic, he was certainly much less enthusiastic about the sentimental but by no means ignored it. Considering the climate in which he was writing - the production-as-resurrection of a mythical past in Germany - his wariness of sentimentality and its complicity with the con servatism of nostalgia is hardly surprising. One could say that for Benjamin, sentimentality is a form of intoxication, and as such it treads a similar path to the forms of intoxication he deals with in his essay on Surrealism, precariously balanced between on the one hand, both adaptation and alienation, and on the other, the possibility of a resensitization of the subject and a form of mimetic innervation (in "One-Way Street" Benjamin refers to the way "people whom

34 Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp,"' p.113. 162

nothing moves or touches any longer are taught to cry again" in films35). In his paper on Surrealism, Benjamin deals with the possibilities and limitations of forms of intoxication in regard to the Surrealist project: "In the world's structure dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth. This loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed [the Surrealists] to step outside the domain of intoxication. "36 Such forms of intoxication can provide an "introductory lesson" in profane illumination. For

Benjamin, sentimentality is to do with remaining in a dream state, whereas what he is interested in is the moment of awakening from the dream state.

Nevertheless, we frequently find something similar to sentimentality in his work, particularly in terms of the collector's relation to his or her love objects.

This sentimentality is more to do with the idea of an affinity established between the collector and his or her collection, an affinity which is perhaps produced through the collector's "mysterious relationship to ownership"37 which Benjamin repeatedly returns to. As he writes in "Unpacking My Library":

One has only to watch a collector handle the objects in his glass case. As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired. So much for the magical side of the collector- his old-age image, I might call it.3&

For a collector, Benjamin writes, "a collector as he ought to be - ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. "39 The collector gathers and catalogues dis-

35 Benjamin, "One-Way Street," p.89.

36 Benjamin, "Surrealism," Reflections, p.l79.

37 Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," p.60. 38 ibid, p.61.

39 ibid, p.67. 163

carded commodities, rescuing them from the trash heap of history. The form of possession here is complex- on the one hand the collector imbues the objects in his/her collection with a special status (they are, in a sense, fetishized), on the other hand, the collector's practice is about refusing the obligation of use-value for the object, and refusing (its) commodification.40

In Benjamin's work, the practice of collecting has a number of valuable features. Firstly, through a mimetic reading of commodities (the collector is always reading and producing similarities in the formation of a collection), the collector approaches the object as a kind of magical relic through which a practice of remembrance could be activated. Secondly, in being less interested in the fetish character of the commodity and more interested in its "traces," the collector draws attention to (and attempts to counter) the temporality of the new as the always the-same. But Benjamin did not embrace the figure of the collector without any reservations - as I will go on to discuss, one of the key limitations of the collector's practice for Benjamin is that the collector's relation to the object can more or less seal off the object (and the collection) from a confontation with the present, the collector's own historical moment. It is in terms of the relation to the present, to the production ofNow-time, that we can begin to chart both the potential and limitations of the practice of collecting for Benjamin's project, and where he begins to refigure collecting in his own work. The form of historical materialism that Benjamin calls for, and develops, entails the radical juxtaposition of the dis carded dream world. It is at this point- where the practice of collecting is mobi-

40 See Ackbar Abbas, "Walter Benjamin's Collector: The Fate of Modern Experience," Modernity and the Text· Revisions of German Modernism, eds Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp.216-239. 164

lized in and for a radical confrontation with the present - that I would like to look

at the television sitcom Roseanne.

Part 2: The Collector as Wisecracker

Roseanne treats its predecessors and contemporaries in U.S. television

culture as ruins, discarded dream images which it irreverently mobilizes. Through

the workings of humour, joke-telling and the comic (what the characters refer to

as wisecracking), Roseanne blasts apart the dream images of those generations that have come into being with and through television. The show is relentless in

its irreverent treatment of the dream images, icons, and values that operate as transitory tyrants both on screen and off. What operates as the outmoded here is

not simply the genre of the sitcom, but a vast array of popular discourses which,

in their commodity-like status, become objects of play- from mainstream femi nism to self-therapy to post Dr Spock child rearing practices. Roseanne puts these

"commodities" back in circulation in their status as outmoded and discarded, but does so in such a way that the promises that they embodied (and which were not fulfilled) are revealed, and beyond that the demands that these commodities have in fact made (largely on women) are irreverently rejected. These "commodities" serve as the material for wisecracking. Collected as ruins, they are set against their after-life as unfulfilled promises through humour. It is in its relation to such

"commodities'' that Roseanne could be seen as engaging in a practice of collect ing. The centrality of the practice of collecting in the series has certainly shifted over the various seasons of the program, and here I will be focusing on the sea- 165

sons in which this form of collecting took centre stage - the seasons produced between 1990 and 1993.41

In Roseanne the characters themselves operate as collectors of a sort. They gather, reassemble, and blast apart the discourses of television and commodity culture, producing with these images and stories a system and history which is mobilized through wisecracking as a critical practice. Wisecracking here operates as a means of defiant survival in this self-proclaimed (though increasingly less so) working class sitcom. When DJ makes it to the district finals of the spelling bee, the whole family is dragged along to watch and support. Sitting in the school hall with the other parents the Connor's get rowdy, cheering DJ on and trying to jinx the other contestants. As Dan and Rosenanne get more and more worked up another father pleads for decorum:

Dan: Go Deej, you can do it buddy. Be the word, sound it out. Other father: Geez, it's just a spelling bee. Roseanne: Maybe to you pal, but it's all we've got.

Roseanne is relentlessly anti-sentimental, sentimentality constantly being evoked only to be deflected. This is less a moral stance than a means of precluding nostalgia by reinvesting and re-figuring discarded commodities as ruins and wish images. In the show, sentimentality is played with only to be thwarted by humour or wisecracking, and it is in this respect that it sets itself apart from many of its predecessors and contemporaries.

"The kingdom of humour is constantly being enlarged whenever an artist or writer succeeds in submitting some hitherto unconquered emotions to the con-

41 While practices of collecting are still central to the more recent seasons of Roseanne, the irreverence and anti-sentimentality of the earlier seasons has often been forfeited for a form of nostalgia. Roseanne has progressively treated its own past as the terrain for collecting, resulting in an often nostalgic form of self-quotation. My thanks to Viki Dun for this distinction between the earlier and later seasons of the program. 166

trol of humour, in making them[... ] into sources of humourous pleasure" Freud writes in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. 42 Roseanne leaves little unconquered, and little is sacred in this program- childbirth, the mother's body, wishy-washy discourses of liberal humanism, the suburban dream and upward mobility, the list goes on. Liberal discourses of positive discrimination for instance are played out as empty rhetoric in an episode in which Roseanne, Jackie and Nancy apply for a small business loan from a government agency to set up their loose-meat sandwich diner, the Lanford Lunch Box. This scene- which exemplifies the sentiment of the physical and verbal wisecracking and irony that characterizes the series (the 1990-1993 seasons in particular) - is marked less by the telling of "jokes" than by an irreverent and ironic playing out of discourses.

The setting is the office of the "Small Business Administration," presumably downtown, with Jackie, Roseanne and Nancy waiting in the office to be inter- viewed:

Roseanne: Look at this pamphlet here- it's got a whole section on minorities. It says that they give special consideration to businesses run by women. Jackie: That's it, that's our angle, we're women. Roseanne: I say we go with it. Nancy: Well thank God we all brought our ovaries with us. ["Don," from the Small Business Administration, enters to inter view them.] Don: Hi there. Sorry to keep you waiting. Roseanne: Oh, that's okay, we're all real patient, being women and all. [The women are introduced.] Don: Have any of you had any experience in running a restaurant? Roseanne: Oh yeh yeh. I was, well, the best waitress at Rodbells but you know they should have put me up into management but they kind of held me back because I'm a woman. Don: And you, Ms Harris? Jackie: [In a slow, wide-eyed drawl.] I have hauled meat, I have eaten meat. .. Don: And you Nancy?

42 Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, p.232. 167

Nancy: I'm going to have to take a pass on this one Don. Roseanne: Which of course we all know is a woman's prerogative. [All the women laugh.] Don: Well, we do have special provisions for minorities and the handicapped. I assume none of you are handicapped? Roseanne: I have three children. Jackie: I'm in therapy.

Of course they don't get the loan. However, on other occasions where similar forms of wisecracking are used, the members of this extended (and extendable) family thwart the logic of their antagonists either by working rationality to its limits, or performing what Freud calls "idiocy masquerading as a joke." While the characters, both knowingly and unknowingly, expose the banalities and let downs of various commodified discourses, the show re-collects these discarded commodities and sets them in juxtaposition, producing a new, anti-sentimental, practice of collecting. Roseanne Barr's first book My Life as a Woman (published before the production of her sitcom) could just as easily serve as the title for her program. With Roseanne, the anti-sentimentality of the amorous collector- pro duced through humour, joke-telling, and the comic- serves as a means of shock, blasting apart the ruins of the wish images of the television generations.

*** Roseanne mobilizes the storehouse of images, stories, and discourses that make up film and television culture through direct and indirect quotation.

However the series doesn't simply operate as a television buffs delight, offering up its references simply for the thrill of recognition. Rather it gathers and sets in explosive circulation what Benjamin would call the gods of modern existence

(those icons, discourses, and beliefs which circulate as commodities) as a means of blasting apart the present. "Why did we burn our bras? why did we march on

Washington? why did Mary Tyler Moore take her hat and just toss it up in the 168

air? for $2 50 less than Santa? I don't think so," says Roseanne when her boss at

"Rodbells," the mall diner, tells her she can't take on the job of Santa for $1 0 an hour though she could be Mrs Santa for $7.50. Less nostalgic than utopian in its sentiment, Roseanne relentlessly mobilizes the popular culture dream images of a generation in this way, irreverently resurrecting their promises.43

This mobilisation often operates through direct reference; Dan doing a rap version of the Beverley Hillbillies theme song with his poker-playing buddies at the kitchen table (an epilogue to an episode), or the "perfect family" sitcom The

Donna Reed Show (1958-1966) being parodied in an episode when Roseanne is away, and her sister Jackie plays wife and mother to Roseanne's family. In this episode we have Jackie and the children playing out the opening sequence of The

Donna Reed Show: mother/ housewife packing off her roost at the front door with a kiss, wave, and packed lunch each. More indirect references include scenes such as the epilogue to an episode in which DJ steals the car. This episode finishes with a "real tv" Cops-style police raid of the Connor's home, with Roseanne and

Dan performing one of their "white trash" numbers, the credits ending on a close- up of Roseanne's lycra-covered arse, distorted by the image scramble familiar to

"real tv" exposes. Direct and indirect references to Roseanne's predecessors and contemporaries in American television are interwoven with direct and indirect

43 In this respect it is a form of collecting (and of humour) which is very different to Jameson's idea of pastiche. For Jameson, "[p]astiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic." Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983), p.l14. I would argue that much work is still to be done on the various forms and practices of quotation that we find in sitcoms (and in teen pies like Wayne's World and Clueless). Benjamin's work on collecting provides one way of distinguishing between different forms of quotation and what they entail. 169

references to a seemingly endless array of contemporary popular discourses

which circulate as commodity dream images, and which more regularly circulate

as the material for midday chat shows like Donahue and Oprah Winfrey: therapy,

quality time, co-dependency. Special guests are also a feature of the series, as they often have been in American sitcoms ( eg I Love Lucy, Green Acres, and The

Beverley Hillbillies). However, in Roseanne these film stars and television

celebrities are literally incorporated into the family - Shelley Winters plays

Roseanne's grandmother (saying to Roseanne "in forty years you're going to be exactly like me"), and Joan Collins appears as Roseanne's cousin Ronnie. The

"audacity" of some of these relations, more so perhaps Joan Collins as the cousin, is typical of the audacious forms of collecting which characterize Roseanne, and which are central to its form of humour. For instance, in a scene where Roseanne and "Ronnie" reminisce about their adolescence, when Ronnie was Roseanne's hero and role-model, Roseanne says "yeh, remember how upset I got at you for stealing my boyfriend Blake?", Roseanne thus inscribing Dynasty into Lanford, and Lanford into Dynasty. The Joan Collins' episode finishes with Joan, referred to as "Collins" by this point, making coffee for the cast and crew at the "end" of the shoot. Bob Hope turns up in a police line up in the epilogue to an episode in which Roseanne unwittingly witnesses the robbery of the middle class neigh bour's house. As Roseanne had actually spoken to the burglars (thinking they were collecting for charity, and buying from them the neighbours' tacky ceramic dalmation umbrella stand), she is questioned by a police officer (who turns out to be a high school friend) for a description of them. Roseanne describes one of the burglars as looking like one of their friends from high school only with a

"scoopier nose," "more like Bob Hope's." When Bob Hope turns up in the police line up at the end of the episode, Roseanne, in voice over, calls out that he is the guy that looks like the friend from high school. Narratively, Bob Hope is reduced to looking like a friend from Lanford High, who looks like one of the burglars. 170

Visually he is figured as a decayed celebrity, a good foot shorter than the other

men in the line up and considerably worse for wear.

Television personalities are made transitory here, incorporated into the

family, along with other discarded commodities which are stuffed into the garage,

wardrobes and under beds in the family home. Patricia Mellencamp refers to one

of the differences between I Love Lucy and Roseanne as being the way that in the

former, commodities are lusted after whilst in the latter they are left piled in states

of disrepair.44 But we could also say that in the former, the "personality" transitory tyrants are lusted after then "damaged" (by Lucy of course, who in her

enthusiasm usually manages to physically hurt, or drop something, on which ever

star is making the "guest" appearance), whereas in Roseanne, the transitory

celebrity tyrants are marked from the start as domestic debris by being

incorporated if not into the family, then at least into Lanford. In I Love Lucy, special guests are often introduced into the episode as being Ricky's colleagues, and

Lucy spends a large bulk of the episode trying to impress whichever "celebrity" enters their domestic space. In Roseanne, on the other hand, the guests are often

Roseanne's blood relatives (it is always with Roseanne that they have the strongest relations - Ronnie/Joan Collins is primarily figured as Roseanne's cousin rather than Jackie's for instance).45 These transitory tyrants, the discarded celebrities and discourses of television culture, are gathered and collected - they become possessions. To re-cite Benjamin: "for a collector - and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be- ownership is the most intimate relationship

44 Patricia Mellencamp, High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, and Comedy (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992), p.345.

45 There are of course many exceptions, especially in the later seasons. For instance, "Luke and Laura" from General Hospital turn up in the epilogue to one episode and receive some relationship advice from Roseanne and Dan. 171 that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. "46

If Roseanne stages the sentiment of the amorous spectator as collector in its relations to film and television culture, this is not out of some sort of nostalgia.

If we follow Susan Stewart's work on nostalgia in her book On Longing, the sentiment of the show would be one which refuses nostalgia at the same time that it plays with it.47

Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience. Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack. 48

Nostalgia involves a particular form of longing, a longing for an authenticity never lived: "The location of authenticity becomes whatever is distant to the present time and space. "49

Dan: You know when I was a kid my grandpa used to tell me stories about when he was a kid before there was a tv - they used to sit around and tell stories. DJ: What kind ofstories? Dan: I don't know That was his best one.

46 Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," p.67.

47 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to address the incredible appeal of this seemingly "anti-family." The contradictions between on the one hand the figuring of this working class television family as a site of relentless and loud struggle (as its members fight and wisecrack for economic survival, independ ence, and the fulfillment of desires), and on the other hand the attraction of this family, can only partly be explained in terms of the collision in Roseanne of the "promise" of the idea of the "family," and the family as site of struggle. If this figuring of the family avoids nostalgia and sentimentality it is primarily through the workings of jokes, the comic, and humour.

48 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives ofthe Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1993), p.23.

49 ibid, p.140. 172

In Roseanne and its forms of humour, there is no golden past to be lovingly resurrected: rather, there is an ever-expanding landscape of discarded dream images which are to be set back in explosive circulation.

empathy and collecting

Roseanne irreverently gathers and restages the transitory tyrants and dream images of commodity culture, including of course, television. More impor tantly, it does this in such a way that the discarded objects that it gathers are remobilized. In this respect, it is a form of collecting which breaks out of the state of wonder that Benjamin identifies as one of the limitations of collecting as a practice of remembrance. For Benjamin, while the collector is excellent at read ing the after-life of the discarded commodity, he/she is seen as less able to activate the explosive force that that after-life can unleash by being brought into a collision with the present. In Roseanne, it is precisely this collision of the dis carded with the present that underlies the series' form of collecting. In this section

I will be looking at what Roseanne does with the rapidly generated and discarded commodities that it mobilizes, and the relation it takes to that which it collects. At this point, and before venturing further into Roseanne, I would like to return briefly to Benjamin, in particular to his essays on Baudelaire.

For Benjamin, empathy is central to modern relations between the subject and the commodity, and the relation of empathy works both ways- the subject empathises with the commodity, and the commodity appears to empathize with the subject. Empathy, a modern term, plays a major role in Benjamin's theory of the commodity as a poetic object. In the Shorter Oxford Dictionary on historical principles, empathy is dated to 1912 as a psychological term: "The power of pro jecting one's own personality into, and so fully understanding, the object of con templation." For Benjamin, empathy is a form of intoxication, and as such has a 173 particular, iflimited, value. It is, as Buck-Morss explains, an "expression of the desire for a common humanity, but not its realization."50 Benjamin's choice of the term empathy, rather than the older term "sympathy" (with its meaning of "having a fellow feeling") can partly be explained through the contemporary associations of these terms, but equally important here is Benjamin's interest in Freud's work on empathy. Sympathy has come to refer to particular forms of fellow feeling - in particular the idea of charitable commiseration. Empathy on the other hand covers a broader range of "fellow feelings" and for Benjamin, involves a projection, thereby also linking it to his concept of the aura ("the anticipated reciprocity of the gaze," though here in the sense of the phoney aura produced through the commodity fetish). It is through this idea of a form of projection underlying empathy that Benjamin addresses relations to the commodity in terms of an "empathy with inorganic things," and writes of the "intoxication of the commodity" around which "surges the stream of customers."5I Benjamin suggests that the stream of customers are not only intoxicated by the commodity, but that the commodity itself seems to become intoxicated by the crowd: "Commodities derive the same effect from the crowd that surges around and intoxicates them. The concentration of customers which makes the market, which in turn makes the commodity into a commodity, enhances its attractiveness to the average buyer."52

If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentioned in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle. Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the jlaneur abandons himself in the crowd. 53

50 Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore," p.111.

5I Walter Benjamin, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire A Lyric Poet In The Era OfHigh Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1989), p.56.

52 ibid, p.56.

53 ibid, p.55. 174

One could regard empathy as a modern and depleted manifestation of the

forms of affinity which we find in Benjamin's idea of mimetic apprehension. For

Benjamin it is through empathy with the commodity that the commodity can

become a collector's item (and the consumer, a collector).

Benjamin's views on empathy and the commodity became a point of dis

pute with Adorno when Benjamin was preparing his Baudelaire essays for pub

lication through the Institute of Social Research. Responding to Adorno's

criticisms of his use of the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism, Benjamin

writes:

Empathy with the commodity presents itself to self-observation or inner experience as empathy with inorganic matter ... Basically, however, empathy with the commodity is probably empathy with exchange value itself. Actually, one could hardly imagine 'con sumption' of exchange value as anything else but empathy with it. 54

Of course television thrives on and invites forms of empathy in a variety

of ways, particularly around one of its key commodities - the personality: televi

sion constantly invites empathy with exchange value through the audience's

recognition of the personality's transitoriness and the market value of their histories and "problems."

Whether in fact the delirium and intoxication of the commodity which

Benjamin identifies has maintained its currency is a question that I will have to set aside, but generally in Roseanne (and certainly in the seasons I'm looking at here) the only commodities that project their lustful gaze toward these characters are fast food and confectionery. Here commodities in the more familiar sense have lost their delirium, if indeed they ever had it for these characters. Benjamin writes, quoting Baudelaire:

"The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit. Like a roving soul in search of a body,

54 Benjamin, letter to Adorno (9.12.1938), Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Harry Zohn, (London: Verso, 1980), p.140. 175

he enters another person whenever he wishes. For him alone, all is open; if certain places seem closed to him, it is because in his view they are not worth inspecting." The commodity itself is the speaker here. Yes, the last words give a rather accurate idea of what the commodity whispers to a poor wretch who passes a shop-window containing beautiful and expensive things. These objects are not interested in this person; they do not empathize with him. 55 (my emphasis).

For Benjamin, this idea of the intoxication of commodities includes the

intoxication of the commodity by the surrounding commodities, by the swarm of potential buyers, and also the experience of the subject as a commodity. In

Roseanne we find a complex relation to this "intoxication of commodities." Such forms of intoxication are by no means prevalent in the show, or rather we must distinguish between the different types of commodities; between commodities in the more familiar sense (consumer goods) and commodities in the broader sense of transitory tyrants - the dream world of mass culture. Even apparent exceptions to this absence of the intoxication of commodities - such as episodes in which there is a sale at the mall - seem to prove this rule. In these instances commodities are figured as disposable and interchangeable rather than desired and desiring.

More interesting exceptions (usually when Dan has made some unexpected money and there is the possibility of an indulgence buy) include an early episode in which Roseanne is debating as to whether she should buy "Submission" perfume. The make-up and perfume counters are much more upmarket than most of the locations in the show, and this class difference is played out in the exchange between Roseanne and the saleswoman:

Saleswoman: [ ... ] Were you interested in the Body Lotion, the Eau de Toilette, the Dusting Powder, the After Bath Splash? Roseanne: Well, I just kinda wanna buy the regular perfume. Saleswoman: Oh yes of course, but perfume is really the final step in fragrance layering. Roseanne: Well I wasn't that into getting layered, I just urn wanted to get the perfume.

55 Benjamin, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire, p.55. 176

Saleswoman: It's a fabulous fragrance, alluring, sensual. Men love it. Are you married? Roseanne: No. Saleswoman: Well I bet you have a boyfriend. Roseanne: Well I am kinda shacking up with this one guy. Saleswoman: Trust me. A few drops of this will really excite him. Roseanne [sardonically] Well that's what I live for- to excite that man. Saleswoman: What's your boyfriend's name? Roseanne: Lance. Saleswoman: Sexy. Roseanne: He's a race car driver. Saleswoman: Ooh ... a man who likes danger. Well I know a little of this will really turn him on. [ ... ] Saleswoman: Do you know what the fastest way to a man's heart is? Roseanne: Y eh, through his chest.

Whilst commodities in Benjamin's broader sense of transitory tyrants (in which we could include popular culture references such as television programs, stars, and discourses) have a delirious and explosive presence in Roseanne (which cannot be addressed purely in terms of ideas of television's reflexivity), there is considerably less delirium around consumer goods in the more familiar sense.

Wisecracking is pivotal to the currency all forms of commodities have in this series and gives them their explosive charge, though not in the same ways. Like the "poor wretch" who passes a shop window only to find that he/she is not desired by the commodity on display, these characters stage a relation to the phantasmagoria of commodity culture which is by no means marked by intoxication.

Commodities - in the more familiar sense of consumer goods - have a remarkably small role in Roseanne, considering the central place of the local shopping mall (particularly in the early seasons). The mall, endlessly referred to, is rarely figured as the site of delirium. During the season in which Roseanne is working at the diner "Rodbell's" a large proportion of the episodes are located at the mall, though rarely do we leave the locale of the diner except through the still location shots which move us from one scene to another. There is no sense of a 177 delirious world of delectable commodities just out of shot. The mall, rather, is the site of the familiar and the banal, the dead-end that is Lanford, the Connor's home town. Nevertheless, it is at the mall that the characters engage in an array of prac tices pertinent to the forms of collecting in this show. It is where Becky's life out side the home takes place (and in classic sitcom style we rarely follow our characters on these ventures), and it is where Roseanne suggests that she and Darlene could spend some quality "bonding" time (this suggestion being followed by

Roseanne narrating how she and Becky would go and ruin the commodities on display, pulling the mannequins' underpants up their cracks). It is also at the mall that Roseanne and Dan have their anniversary celebrations when Dan can't get time off work: they settle down on a bench outside the Big and Tall menswear shop where Dan is currently working, producing this vacated - rather than delirious- space as a private space. If Benjamin's interest is in the commodity on display, the "Lanford mall" would offer him little in the way of intoxication.

Roseanne's relation to the mall is one of boredom and forced familiarity. This is best illustrated in the episode in which she comes in as a guest speaker to Dar- lene's Home Economics class, and takes the class on an excursion to the supermarket. Roseanne introduces her class, who have been taught how to "follow recipes" and make quiche, to the banalities of "home economics": how to feed a family of five on a limited budget and a busy schedule. This episode comes close to the definitions of humour which Freud outlines in his Jokes study as Roseanne demonstrates and narrates the daily life of a working class woman - both housewife and worker in a range of poorly paid jobs, living in the town she grew up in, and married to her high school boyfriend. Freud writes:

The forms in which humour is manifested are, moreover, determined by two peculiarities which are connected with the con ditions under which it is generated. Humour may, in the first place, appear merged with a joke or some other species of the comic; in that case its task is to get rid of a possibility implicit in the situa tion that an affect may be generated which would interfere with the pleasurable outcome. In the second place, it may stop this gen erating of an affect entirely or only partially; this last is actually 178

the commoner case since it is easier to bring about, and it produces the various forms of "broken" humour - the humour that smiles through tears. 56

Roseanne narrates her lesson on home economics through wisecracking and irony. However, as her wisecracks are certainly barbed, the exaltation of the ego and of the pleasure principle which Freud identifies as crucial to humour is perhaps incomplete here. For Freud, humour finds "a means of withdrawing the energy from the release of unpleasure that is already in preparation and of trans forming it, by discharge, into pleasure. "57 At the supermarket checkout, Roseanne tells her pupils that this is where they will spend the bulk of their adult life; meal preparation is a monotonous chore, and the analogies she offers to her students to explain the life and work of a housewife and mother (it's like running a factory, and the children are like the product) are taken by the students and their teacher as comic remarks. When she brings the class back home as part of their work experience to prepare the inevitable meatloaf for the Connor's family dinner, she considers her job well done when some of the students begin to revolt, asking why they should be stuck in the kitchen preparing a meal that they won't even get to eat. At this point, having sparked dissatisfaction amongst the ranks with domestic labour, the lesson ends.

Commodities in this stricter sense then rarely generate or induce the delirium and intoxication which Benjamin identifies. These commodities pass our characters by and do not empathise with them, nor do they become collectibles. It is the other forms of commodities on display - television and popular culture icons and discourses - that are collected and set in circulation here, and it is in relation to these other commodities that Roseanne can be seen as engaging in a

56 Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, p.232.

57 ibid, p.233. 179 form of collecting which shares a number of features with those of the ragpicker and the collector proper.

While the collector can be seen as a kind of historical materialist, gathering discarded commodities in a practice of montage, this figure also has its shortcomings. While the collector strips objects of their use-value, rescuing them from the trash of history, they are granted what he calls a "fancier's value."

The collector was the true inhabitant of the interior. He made the glorification of things his concern. To him fell the task of Sisyphus which consisted of stripping things of their commodity character by means of his possession of them. But he conferred upon them only a fancier's value, rather than use-value. The collector dreamed that he was in a world which was not only far-off in distance and in time, but which was also a better one, in which to be sure people were just as poorly provided with what they needed as in the world of the everyday, but in which things were free from the bondage of being useful. 58

In Roseanne these transitory tyrants are not only stripped of their com modity character, but the fancier's value they are granted (what we could call a kind of popular culture buffery) is set to use as ammunition for wisecracking.

These transitory tyrants, gathered into a collection, are used for a montage-like form of humour. It is through the show's forms of verbal and physical comedy that the revolutionary potential Benjamin identified in the practices of collecting is unleashed.

dangerous (if) domesticated passions

Benjamin's collector is an ambivalent rather than a heroic figure, whose passions are "dangerous if domesticated." Before looking further at how

Roseanne can be addressed in terms of Benjamin's idea of collecting, it is worth recounting the features of the collector in Benjamin's work.

58 Benjamin, "Some Motifs in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire, pp.168-9. 180

The collector in the Baudelaire study is the man of the interior, the etui man. This figure cushions him/herself against the world outside by occupying the interior, producing a private world. This private world is a "casing" (not simply for his/her collection but for him/herself), produced from and for those objects which he/she "rescues" by stripping them of their commodity character and saving them from the trash heap of commodity culture and the historicism of ideas of cultural heritage. The collector here (as in the essays "Unpacking my

Library" and "Eduard Fuchs") is also a physiognomist who reads the fate of the loved object. The collector's concern is with the pre- and post-history of the object. Collecting in this respect has a number of features which are of value for

Benjamin, but there are two that are of particular relevance here. Firstly collect ing becomes, in a sense, a form of storytelling (the reading of the pre- and post history of the discarded object, the stories produced through the juxtaposition of objects in/as the collection, and the "transmissibility" of the collection itself which was for Benjamin so important). Secondly, and related to the above, the collector's relation to his or her collection involves both voluntary and involuntary memory and their interweaving: the collector's relation to the object entails a practice of remembrance, as we find for instance in Benjamin's essay

"Unpacking My Library" where books in his collection activate memories of the circumstances of their acquisition and of "surrounding" places and moments (as well as, of course, the history of the book itself). In collecting, these pre- and post-histories of the commodity are the traces the collector reads, and indeed col lecting is very much to do with the reading and leaving of traces. The collector both reads the traces of these pre-and post-histories and leaves traces on the col lection, and the collection leaves traces on the collector.

Collecting is clearly a practice of remembrance and a form of trans missibility which is not about the preserving of a heritage, but the refiguring of a 181 discarded past. Ironically then it is through collecting that the figure of the collec tor actually approaches experience (Erfahrung). But here we face the central question about this figure in Benjamin's work. The collector's practice would seem to entail a form of transmissibility which is clearly of value for Benjamin.

However, at the last moment the collector would seem to forfeit mobilising this transmissibility for a critical grasp of the present and sides in favour of the objects themselves. Certainly different features or shades of the collector are brought into light depending on the constellations within which this figure is staged. In each of these stagings it is the collector's (or rather the collection's) modes of transmission that come to the fore. In Konvolut H, the collector is dialectically counterposed with and set alongside the allegorist, thereby juxtaposing the two practices- col lecting and allegory - which Benjamin constantly returns to in his work. Each of these practices, while central to his project, have a limitation. Both allegory and collecting deal with fragments and aim to release their meanings and place them in the context of a whole. The melancholy of the allegorical vision imposes mean ing on the fragment and can only keep its object by losing it. The collector approaches the object/fragment in a different way- the collector wants to embrace or enfold the object (and also be enfolded in it). 59 If the limitation of allegory is that it loses its object in the very attempt to rescue it, the limitation of collecting is that the objects are placed in a sort of magic circle. But while these two practices are in many respects opposed, they are not mutually exclusive, and

Benjamin writes in Konvolut H of the melancholic side of the collector (the col lection is never finished) and the collector side to the allegorist (who can never

59 In the closing paragraph of his essay on book collecting, Benjamin dis appears into his own collection: "So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting." Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library," p.67. 182 have enough of the things/fragments).60 If the practices of collecting that we find in Roseanne appear to overcome the charmed circle of wonder which the collec tor/allegorist juxtaposition throws into light, this could also be understood in terms of one of the other figures or social types Benjamin sets the collector against- the destructive character. As with the allegorist/collector juxtaposition, the destructive character and the collector are two figures which, while appearing to be fundamentally opposed, also have points of connection. The collector shares a number of similarities with Benjamin's "destructive character," who "knows only one word: make room; only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred."61

The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always positions himself at crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble, not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way lead ing through it. 62

The destructive character can be related to what Benjamin sees as the

"dangerous" aspects ofthe collector, who is, despite appearances, anti-systematic, and whose obsessive passion has explosive potential. This figure also shares a number of similarities with the practices of collecting - or rather wisecracking as collecting - that we find in Roseanne, which likewise clear ways everywhere.

60 For an excellent account of the relations between allegory and collecting in Benjamin's work, see Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play ofMourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), pp.240-247.

6! Walter Benjamin, "The Destructive Character," One-Way Street. For a discussion of the destructive character, see Ackbar Abbas, op.cit., and Irving Wohlfarth, "No-Man's Land: On Walter Benjamin's 'Destructive Character,"' Diacritics 8.2 (June 1978), pp.47-65. The relations between the destructive character and the collector (in his/her figuring as the etui man) have been dis cussed in chapter 1 in relation to the crisis of experience.

62 Benjamin, "The Destructive Character," pp.158-9. 183

By refusing to grant the object a "fancier's value" Roseanne's practices of collecting perhaps avoid the conservative aspects that Benjamin identifies in the collector, and could be seen as engaging in something closer to the production of dialectical images. In Roseanne, the refusal to grant the collectible a "fancier's value" is also the central means whereby the forms of sentimentality characteristic of amorous relations to film and tv (and their practices of quotation) is cut short.

Benjamin's idea of a "fancier's value" could also be seen as related to camp (and camp, as I have argued, is certainly a form of collecting).63 Roseanne engages with and critically inflects the forms of collecting and humour found in camp to produce what could loosely be called feminist camp,64 and this critical inflection of camp is produced through the forms of collecting we find in this sitcom (both in terms ofwhat is collected and what is done with the collection). If one ofthe features of camp is to "dethrone the serious," and if camp "proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy,"65 then there are certainly connections between camp and the forms of collecting that we find in

Roseanne. As for many a collector, the out-of-date is important to camp: "It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment - or arouses a necessary sympathy [ ... ] time

63 "The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures [than those of the Dandy]. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the art of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp - Dandyism in the age of mass culture - makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica." Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp,"' p.116.

64 Pamela Robertson has developed an interesting proposal of feminist camp in her book Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to go in to Robertson's arguments here, there would be a number of points of connection between the relations between Benjamin's figure of the collector and the practices of collecting that we find in Roseanne, and theories of camp and Robertson's account of feminist camp.

65 Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp,'" p.116. 184 contracts the sphere of banality [ ... ] Thus things are campy, not when they become old- but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead ofbe frustrated by, the failure ofthe attempt."66 However, ifwe look at

Roseanne's relationship to the outmoded, we find that it is neither Sontag's

"deliberate" camp, nor can it be contained within her account of (the favoured) naive camp. This, I would suggest, is because of the nature of the enjoyment taken in that which has aged and deteriorated. The enjoyment taken in collecting discarded commodities in Roseanne (whether they be objects, discourses, or values) is often more to do with setting them on a collision course with their after-life (as we find for instance in the scene at the loan office discussed earlier).

Here we have a form of collecting in which objects (discarded commodities) are not only stripped of their market value but are also mobilised in such a way that the promises embedded in the commodities are refigured through their collision with the signs of their unfulfillment. Unlike forms of collecting in which the com modity is "rescued" from the debris of history but then granted an aura-like "fan cier's value," here it is precisely the (discarded) commodity's status as ruin- and the unfulfilled wish image that it embodied - that is set in collision with the pre sent. In Roseanne what is collected (popular culture references and discourses as debris etc) becomes ammunition in a form of humour which gathers these frag ments and sets them in collision with their after-life- the banalities of the every day, the dreams and desires left suspended.

Both collecting for Benjamin and jokes and the comic for Freud are integrally tied to forms of childhood cognition and pleasures. Both operate as forms of renewal, which draw on the child's animistic relation to words and things, and involve the revaluing of discourses, words and things. The connec tions between childhood cognition and jokes and the comic is central to Freud's

66 ibid, p.l13. 185

Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and it is by no means the only over lap between his work in this book and Benjamin's work on collecting. The impor tance of empathy in the comic and of a distracted state for comic pleasure and pleasure in jokes and humour are also crucial connections between their works.

Freud, as Strachey points out in his preface to the book, fancied himself as a col lector of jokes, and this "fancy" moreover is seen as one of Freud's three motives for embarking on this study, alongside his interest in the relation between the techniques used in jokes and in dreams, and his interest in Lipp's study Komik und

Humor (Lipps, as Strachey points out, is credited with having introduced the term

Einfuhlung- empathy - a concept which plays a central role in Freud's study, and a central concern, as I have argued, in Benjamin's theory of experience). Freud's self-identity as a collector is evident throughout much of the book- he organizes his jokes and comic stories into categories and labels them accordingly. He also behaves as the classic obsessive collector by fondly mentioning the circumstances in which he came across a particular "collectible" joke. In this respect he behaves in a similar way to Benjamin's figure of the book collector, who cherishes the cir cumstances of each acquisition (whether purchased, found, or stolen, each acquisition is considered to be a discovery, a "find"). For the collector, the traces of the acquisition become embedded in the collected object. Benjamin too of course was a collector, and as well as his book and toy collections (to which he often refers) his mode of thinking and "montage writing" are based on practices of collecting. But when we position Benjamin's arguments about collecting in the context of the form of historical materialism he develops, the collector's practice of stripping things of their commodity character and the classificatory systems produced are a means rather than an end in the production of dialectical images.

Benjamin gathered fragments- images, quotations, advertisments etc- and put them in explosive circulation through a radical confrontation with the present.

Roseanne involves a number of layers or forms of collecting which are set in exchange with each other. At one level, we can regard the show itself as being 186 the site of a particular collection - the popular culture references (both orally delivered and physically performed) which are gathered and irreverently

"ordered" in an explosive system. These popular culture references which are set in circulation draw on generational knowledges rather than simply some idea of an individual's knowledges ofNorth American television and film history (the figure of the popular culture buff/addict): they draw on, redefine, and produce the material of both voluntary and involuntary memory. To re-cite Buck-Morss, for

Benjamin "the power of historical remembering, its political strength as a motivation for present action, is the same, whether one is remembering one's own life or a collective life never experienced directly. He conceived of the past on both levels as a 'dream-state,' and historical recollection which allowed its interpretation as 'awakening."'67 At another level, Roseanne offers material to be collected and treasured (particularly the wisecracks but also the physical and gestural com edy)- material which can be lovingly gathered by the amorous spectator.

The central connection that can be made between Freud's study and Ben jamin's work on collecting is the pivotal role of childhood cognition in both, and the ways in which both collecting and the realm of jokes, humour, and the comic entail the renewal of particular modes of thinking and experience. Freud identifies childhood and childhood cognition as central to jokes, the comic, and humour.

For Freud, the "essence of the comic" can be "located in a preconscious link with the infantile. "68 Pleasure in the comic, he writes, is produced through touching on

"childish nature in general, and perhaps even on childish suffering. "69 In regard to jokes and their use of unconscious thought processes, Freud writes:

the infantile is the source of the unconscious, and the unconscious thought-processes are none other than those - the ones and only ones

67 Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore," p.133.

68 Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, p.225.

69 ibid, p.225. 187

- produced in early childhood. The thought which, with the intention of constructing a joke, plunges into the unconscious is merely seek ing there for the ancient dwelling-place of its former play with words. Thought is put back for a moment to the stage of childhood so as to once more gain possession of the childish source of pleasure. 70

The infantile likewise plays a pivotal role in "the humourous attitude" through what, in his first study of humour (Jokes and their Relation to the Uncon- scious, 1905), Freud calls the comparison of one's present ego to one's childish one (resulting in an exaltation ofthe ego),71 and what in the 1927 paper on humour (in which the concept of the super-ego has entered the picture), he identifies as "not only the triumph of the ego but also of the pleasure principle"

(granted by a benevolent super-ego). 72

One of Freud's aims here is to distinguish between jokes, the comic, and humour in terms of their respective relations to the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious: "the pleasure in jokes has seemed to us to arise from an econ omy in expenditure upon exhibition, the pleasure in the comic from an economy in expenditure upon ideation (upon cathexis) and the pleasure in humour from an economy in expenditure upon feeling. "73 Freud produces, to this end, a complex labelling system: within the terrain of jokes we have jests, innocent jokes, and tendentious jokes (including cynical, aggressive/hostile, exposing or obscene, and skeptical jokes); within the comic, we have the comic of comparison (both verbal and physical/mimicry), and on the borders of the comic, we find irony, the naive, and what Freud calls "idiocy masquerading as a joke," and then there is humour.

Each of these three broad categories involve different relations between the

70 ibid, p.170.

71 ibid, p.234.

72 Sigmund Freud, "Humour," The Standard Edition vol.11, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), p.163.

73 Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, p.236. 188

unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious, as well as different distrib

utions of positions in regard to the source and receiver of the pleasure. Hence the joke involves a three position structure, where the first position is the joke-teller,

the second that of the object of the joke (whether present or absent), and the third

position the hearer/receiver of the joke. The comic works with a two position

structure (that which produces the comic pleasure and that which receives it), and

humour works with a one position structure (in which humourous pleasure is both

produced and taken by the same subject).

Many of the forms of jokes, the comic, and humour that Freud categorises

in his work can be found in Roseanne, though perhaps not in the same key.

Roseanne leaves few of these sources of pleasure untapped, but more importantly, warps these forms and the trajectories of pleasure by shifting the sites of comedy.

Moreover, the humour and comedy is produced through both verbal and physical means. Many of the studies of Roseanne have focused on one or the other. In

High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, & Comedy, Patricia Mellencamp develops one of the most generative analyses of this sitcom to date, focusing mostly on the character, author and personality of Roseanne as a joke-teller, her

"ascerbic one-liners"74 which are, for Mellencamp, rarely upstaged. Kathleen

Rowe, in her paper "Roseanne: Domestic Goddess as Unruly Woman, "75 focuses on ideas of the grotesque and "female unruliness" - on Roseanne's bodily presence

(and to a lesser extent her voice), her "excess" and "looseness." While both these studies identify central sources of humour and transgressive comedy in the show, they each have a double limitation for my purposes here. Both privilege one form of comedy over the other (for Mellencamp, orally delivered comedy, for Rowe,

74 Mellencamp, High Anxiety: Catastrophe, Scandal, Age, & Comedy, p.339.

75 Kathleen Rowe, "Roseanne: Domestic Goddess as Unruly Woman," Screen 31.4 (Winter 1990), pp.408-419. 189 physical comedy as the grotesque), and both focus almost exclusively on

Roseanne (the character/author/celebrity), and in so doing, tend to downplay the importance of the circuit of wisecracking in the show, the ways in which wisecracks cross from one character to another. In Roseanne wisecracking operates as a sort of game, a bit like tag, in which each character can be the object or source of a wisecrack - the aim often being to keep the wisecracking going from one character to another until someone is left speechless. These circuits of wisecracking are similar to what Freud calls "ready repartees," which consist "in the defence going to meet the aggression, in 'turning the tables on someone' or

'paying someone back in his own coin' - that is, in establishing an unexpected unity between attack and counter-attack. "76 Certainly Roseanne is the most skilled and versatile at this game (and this is repeatedly acknowledged in the series), but she is by no means the only wisecrackerJ7 The Connor offspring are constantly drawn into this process, and training the children in wisecracking operates as an important part of empowering them (wisecracking is seen as a means of survival, and despite their frustration at being out-witted, they are "proud moments" for

Roseanne and Dan when their children display their own skills in this art).

The relation between the physical and verbal comedy in Roseanne is com plex, and they are often hard to separate. In her analysis of the show and

Roseanne's "verbal assaults," Mellencamp takes up Rowe's study of Roseanne's physical and gestural presence and performance and argues that it is only with

Roseanne's verbal wit that she becomes a powerfully rebellious figure (both as character, personality, and author/producer). Roseanne certainly does, as Mellen camp claims, turn the "Freudian tables" by shifting the site of comedy, shifting

76 Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, p.68.

77 In the later series in which the children are older, we find Darlene (increasingly modeled after Roseanne's form of wit), becoming Roseanne's com petitor for the status of chief wisecracker. 190 the object of the joke from women's bodies and marriage as an institution designed to trap men, to joking about men, husbands, children, and class preten sions. However, in the telling and hearing of such jokes or wisecracks, there is also a fair degree of physical comedy involved.

Much of the humour and comedy in Roseanne is produced verbally rather than physically, and the practices of collecting which form the ammunition for its humour are perhaps more readily evident in the dialogue. However Roseanne's physical comedy is based in similar practices of collecting in terms of the man nerisms, gestures, poses, and performance styles used. The comic is the terrain of physical comedy, of which the show is in no short supply. This physical comedy is not exclusive to Roseanne herself. It is often more prevalent in some of the other characters - in Dan's easy transition to camp, in Arnie's awkward and exaggerated performance of masculinity, and primarily in Jackie's butchness

(which we also find with Crystal). Jackie, the ex-cop, ex-truckie, who has also tried at being a "perfume squirter" in the local mall, offers a deliriously excruciat ing image of "not-quite" -doing "cop talk," for instance, with the local police force (well after her brief stint as a police woman is over); her bodily comic per formance always oscillating between butch bragging and hysterical neurosis.

While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the performance styles of

Roseanne, I would like to briefly address them in terms of the form of collecting they involve.

The discarded commodities that are gathered and set in circulation here include popular culture "characters" and mannerisms that have left traces on the

Roseanne characters. Jackie (Laurie Metcalf) has a face and body as malleable as

Lucille Ball's and Stan Laurel's, and frequently seems to be possessed by the traces of these characters and actors (the "intimate" ownership Benjamin talks about in regard to the collector, in which the collector lives in his/her objects). As she "mugs" and swaggers through a constant slippage between bravura and 191 desperate flirtation, Jackie is perhaps the most interesting of the comic perform ances. Dan (John Goodman), likewise, can be considered a sort of collector in terms of his character's performances. He is just as likely to slip into a perform ative femininity (his "Ann Margaret" mode) as he is to slip into a performative masculinity (for instance his de Niro, or Elvis modes). He is equally likely, however, to slip into a more childlike form of performance or play, similar to

Benjamin's comments on children and mimicry (the child who can just as readily play at being a train as being a teacher). Dan's incredibly mobile body is con stantly in a state of transformation- it can become a bathing beauty, a panting puppy, or a mass of unco-ordinated limbs and features. In this respect he is reminiscent of Fatty Arbuckle, particularly the Fatty Arbuckle of Coney Island who can just as readily "pass" as a woman (when he steals the bathing suit of an equally large woman and spends the bulk of the film cross-dressed) as he can

"pass" for a porpoise (when, in a bizarre "swimming" chase sequence, he "loops" his way through the water like a giant fish).

The physical and verbal comedy of these characters marks them as collectors, and constantly confuses the lines between character and actor. This confu sion is also foregrounded in Roseanne through the regular use of scenes where actors seem to slip out of character, primarily in response to another "character's" performance - as if the delight taken in another's performance is too much. These moments operate in a number of ways: they produce the idea of improvisation; of the performance as pleasure; but they also - and this is what interests me most - produce a strange form of alliance between viewer and program, foregrounding performance itself as a practice of quotation and play.

To be witty or a wisecracker suggests a certain virtuosity with language. It is a potency not just in terms of the wisecracker's joke "technique, "78 but also in

78 "As regards joking[... ] I can assert, on the basis ofthe two discoveries we have already made, that it is an activity which aims at deriving pleasure from mental processes, whether intellectual or otherwise [ ... ]we hold firmly to the view that the joke technique and the tendency towards economy by which it is 192 his or her ability to lift internal prohibitions and make "sources of pleasure fertile

which have been rendered inaccessible by those inhibitions"79 in the listener.

Freud's admiration for such virtuosity permeates his text as he recounts and dis plays his joke collection. The virtuosity which I would argue is a central com ponent in wisecracking can be found in most of the central characters in Roseanne

(with the noticeable exception of Arnie, the character played by Roseanne-the author's (ex)husband and business partner, Tom Arnold), and is a major source of their appeal. Of course such "potency" has generally been the terrain of the male jokester, as Mellencamp points out in her study, with a large percentage of tendentious and obscene jokes having women and women's bodies as the brunt of the joke. Freud deals at length with such forms of jokes, particularly the obscene jokes which he places under the category of "smut." Here one could say we are also dealing with the implied sexual potency of the joke teller, which may be given greater or lesser value than the "virtuosity" of the joke itself. Freud differentiates smut according to class. For the lower classes, Freud writes, the male jokester requires the woman to be present for the smut to be effective. In upper classes, the presence of the woman (and we must assume here an upper class woman) brings the smut to an end. (Whether Freud's class analysis- based in early twentieth century Vienna - still stands is a question which I will have to leave aside here.) Roseanne, for her part, does her own analysis of smut- both of smut jokes and smut bragging. In one halloween episode, in which gender identity plays the central role (DJ wants to be a witch rather than a warlock, much to Dan's distress), Roseanne cross-dresses as a redneck, only to be left stranded because of a car breakdown with Jackie at the local bar, "The Lobo." Deciding to

partly governed have been brought into connection with the production of pleasure." Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, p.96.

79 ibid, p.130. 193

do a bit of anthropological research into the various rituals of male bonding in the

bar, Roseanne tells her "squeeze-box" Jackie that she's going to "hang out with the guys." Joining a bunch of local men at the pool table, Roseanne tries to blend as she watches the "head gorilla" brag to all the "less dominant gorillas" about his

sexual conquests. She enters the scene as the head gorilla is regaling his pool-cue- holding-buddies with his latest victory:

Ist guy: Y eh, then she brings out this suitcase full of sex toys and I'm thinking this broad is freaky. [men laugh] 2nd guy: As long as you're getting your battery charged, what's the damn difference? [men laugh] 3rd guy: Yeh I mean while you're getting your car washed, you might as well get the hot wax, right? [men laugh] Roseanne: One thing I want to know is what does she want with you if she's got a suitcase full of sex toys? [men silent, mostly women's laughter on laugh track] 1st guy: Is that supposed to be a joke? Roseanne: Okay. 1st guy: Oh... well anyway ... [and his story continues]

Of course, here it is Roseanne who operates as the wisecracker for the audience rather than the men, and the latter can only place her "innocent" interjection by precariously reading it as a not very good smutty joke. In this and a later scene

(still set in the Lobo), Roseanne's cracks are almost involuntary, as she is genuinely trying to "pass" for the purposes of her research. As the "head gorilla's" story continues with more and more scenarios of sexual conqest, Roseanne can't help interrupting him to ask "Are you making this stuff up as you go along?" At the "head gorilla's" aggressive challenge as to whether he/she is calling him a liar,

Roseanne tries to pass by offering her own smut: "as long as you're getting your cue chalked it doesn't matter what ball you hit." By cross-dressing, Roseanne can neither be the middle class woman whose presence brings smut to a halt, nor the working class woman whose presence is necessary for the smut to have effect. *** 194

The practices of wisecracking as a form of collecting in Roseanne can be seen as working according to similar principles to Benjamin's dialetical image. As discussed in chapter 2, Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image is central to the Arcades project, the Baudelaire essays, and his essay "Theses on the

Philosophy ofHistory," though one can find traces of it- and of its development across much of his work. There are two aspects of the dialectical image that are of relevance here. Firstly, the juxtaposition- or rather collision- of two moments:

"To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it 'the way it really was' (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger."80 Or, to re-cite Roseanne: "Why did Mary Tyler Moore take her hat and just toss it up in the air? for $2.50 less than Santa? I don't think so." This collision-like constellation is to entail an arresting of the movement of (habitual) thought, and a rupturing of the relation between past and present (and their seeming continuity), and of our very understanding of "past" and "present." Secondly, the dialectical image is characterized by the flash-like recognition with which it is momentarily and fleetingly grasped: "The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. "8 1 The pleasure activated through wisecracking is also fleeting. In Freud's work on jokes, we find that the pleasure in "innocent" jokes lies in the play with meanings and words: "A 'good' joke[... ] comes about when what children expect proves correct and the similarity between the words is shown to be accompanied by another important similarity in their sense"82 - a

80 Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, (Suffolk: Fontana/Collins, 1982), p.257.

81 ibid, p.257.

82 Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, p.121. 195 mimetic similarity which the joke hearer grasps in a flash-like instant of recogni tion. In tendentious jokes (or jokes with a purpose) we have another layer - the articulation of repressed wishes. The pleasure yielded by tendentious jokes is that they "make possible the satisfaction of an instinct (whether lustful or hostile) in the face of an obstacle that stands in its way"83 - the momentary release of an erotic or aggressive inhibition. In both forms of jokes this flash-like recognition and release leads to the release of laughter (if, that is, one not only gets the joke but finds it amusing).

While Benjamin's dialectical images are by no means equivalent to Freud's lifting of inhibitions in the joke in technique or aim, they nevertheless both share a montage-like structure. What is set in collision in the montage-like structure of

Roseanne's wisecracking is, of course, the discarded dream images of commodity culture, which are mobilised in their status as ruins and as lost or betrayed wish images. Through the relation to that which is collected and the gendering of wisecracking in the show, Roseanne also offers a shift away from the forms of collecting and quotation that we find in the majority of films and television programs (such as the teen pic) which explicitly play with a popular culture buff ery or fandom. Even in the most interesting teen pies - for example Penelope

Spheeris' Wayne's World (1992)- it is the (overgrown) adolescent boy who assumes and is granted the position of cultural custodian of popular culture memory, both in terms of narrative and in terms of the films' implied viewer (and certainly also in terms of the promotion and marketing of these films as cult texts). In Roseanne on the other hand, we find that it is the female characters who get to claim popular culture memory, but without taking up a sentimental relation to it. Perhaps we could also understand this shift in the forms of collecting that we find here in terms of the distinction between the ragpicker and the collector,

83 ibid, p.1 01. 196 for it is the collector who has the liberty to take up a love-relation to the object/commodity. Roseanne would seem to entail the modes of collecting of both the ragpicker and the collector proper, and of the "actual" ragpicker and the

"literary" ragpicker. As Wohlfarth writes:

Whereas the real-life chiffonier seeks to salvage his own existence by collecting debris that is to be fed back into the jaws of (an allegorically 'capitalized') Industry, thereby paying the mythical 'divinity' the strange tribute of serving her own 'waste' into her jaws, his literary counterpart seeks, by contrast, to save his 'treasure' from the capitalist order of things in order to construct objects that will help upset its digestive system. 84

Perhaps we could argue that the forms of collecting operating in Roseanne - par ticularly in the seasons between 1990-1993 - are closer to those that we find in both the actual and literary ragpicker, and that the forms of collecting that

Roseanne offers to its viewer are closer to the collector proper. I suggest however that the show constantly oscillates between each of these practices of collecting and equally importantly, refigures the relations between them. Roseanne "the col lector" draws on the practices of collecting in such a way that the material of this collection is set on a collision course with these commodities' after-life. In this respect, collecting here is less, to paraphrase Benjamin, a dangerous if domesti cated passion than perhaps a dangerous domestic passion.

84 Wohlfarth, "EtCetera? The Historian as Chiffonier," p.152. 197

Chapter 5 FEMALE SPECTATORSHIP: FROM LONGING TO RAGE

Female spectatorship, because it is conceived of temporally as immediacy (in the reading of the image - the result of the very absence of fetishism) and spatially as proximity (the distance between subject and object, spectator and image is collapsed), can only be understood as the confounding of desire. Doane, The Desire to Desirel

It's odd, but I can say of much in my life, "almost." Effi Briest2

Since the 1970's, or more accurately perhaps, since Mulvey's essay

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," female spectatorship has been a central area of inquiry in feminist film theory. Mulvey's argument in this essay posed a specific question and agenda for both feminist film theory and feminist film practices: if, as she argued, visual pleasure in narrative cinema is organised around the male subject (both in terms of primary and secondary identification), then what are the pleasures available to the woman in the audience?3 As Mulvey argued in this early essay, the enunciative mechanisms of classical narrative cinema entail a particular orchestration of looks, whereby the male subject in the image and - by extension- the male subject in the audience (for here she certainly assumes a straightforward identification) become the agent of the look. Regardless of the

1 Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film ofthe 1940's (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p.13.

2 Intertitle from Effi Briest (Fassbinder, 1974).

3 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16.3 (1975), pp.6-18, reprinted in Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 198

sex (or much else) of the actual viewer, classical narrative cinema produces and privileges a masculine spectating position. While Mulvey did not directly address female spectatorship in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," the conceptual framework that she developed in this essay served to establish female spectator ship in classical Hollywood cinema as a central issue in feminist film debates.

Following the implications of her argument (and more directly addressed in her essay "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"'),4 the woman in the audience must go through complicated identificatory processes if she is to have access to the film's privileged meanings and pleasures. Since her "Visual

Pleasure" essay, a variety of theories have been proposed to address these possible identificatory processes: for Mulvey it is transvestism, for Doane it is masquerade which offers the female spectator a distance from the image and thereby pre- eludes a masochistic viewing position, for de Lauretis it is double identification, and for Gaylyn Studlar it is by replacing the oedipal scenarios of Freudian psychoanalysis as the primary interpretive framework for addressing the structuring of cinematic pleasure with a Deleuzian model ofmasochism.s Mulvey's

"Visual Pleasure" essay has been taken to task on a number of fronts - for the limitations of its proposal of identificatory processes, for its limited account of spectatorial and cinematic pleasures, and for its generalizations about classical

Hollywood cinema. Rather than recharting the "problem" of female spectatorship

4 Laura Mulvey, "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired by 'Duel in the Sun' (King Vidor, 1946)," Framework 15/16/17 (1981), pp.12-15.

5 See Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987); Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator," Screen 23.3-4 (Sept-Oct 1982), pp.74-87, and "Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator," Discourse 11.1 (1988- 89), pp.42-54; and Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm ofPleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 199

and how it has been debated, I want to examine and repose the conceptual frame works through which it has been addressed by drawing on Benjamin's work on film reception and his analysis of the commodity fetish. My interest here is in the ways in which female spectatorship has been conceived, theorised, and valued, and the ways in which we may need to critically re-examine the practices of fas cination seen as underlying female spectatorship.

The female spectatorship debate has taken a number of forms and direc tions over the last twenty years. Whereas in the 1970's questions of gendered spectatorship were primarily associated with feminist film theory (particularly

Anglo-American film theory), they have more recently also taken on an important role in cultural studies debates. Theoretical work on female spectatorship has crossed and drawn on a range of methodologies - from ethnographic research

(such as we find in the work of Jackie Stacey and Jacqueline Bobo),6 work drawing on Freudian and/or Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (such as we find in

Doane's early work), and more recently, work which focuses on the historical formations of gendered spectatorship (for instance the work of Miriam Hansen,

Patrice Petro, and others which draws on the theoretical debates of the Frankfurt

School). Here I would like to look at the conceptual frameworks which underlie some of this work. What many of the psychoanalytic-based studies share (along with much of the ethnographic-based work) is an unproblematic acceptance of the very terms which underly high culture/popular culture debates - principally the recurrent dichotomies of proximity/distance, passivity/activity. The terms may be

"revalued" in some of this work, but they are rarely critically examined. For instance, in her recent book Cinema and Spectatorship, Judith Mayne writes:

6 Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectator ship (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), and Jacqueline Bobo, "The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers" in Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, ed. Deirdre Pribram (London: Verso, 1988). 200

Spectatorship is one of the few places in my life where the attrac tions to male adolescence and feminist avant-garde poetics exist side by side. For Chantal Akerman's particular approach to spec tatorship, for instance, engages me in different but equally satisfy ing ways as Arnold Schwarzenegger's.

Film studies tells me that the difference between these two experi ences of spectatorship is not so much that one is art and the other isn't, but rather that one kind of spectatorship is "critical" (Akerman's), engaged as it is with the relation between memory and duration, gender and address; while the other (Schwarzeneg ger's) is not. One kind of spectatorship makes me think and reflect, while the other makes me act out and forget. One kind of spec tatorship challenges cinematic conventions and attempts to create a new language of the cinema; the other perpetuates dominant cinematic and cultural practices. 7

I have quoted this passage in full because it is emblematic of the sorts of problems inherent in a lot of recent work on spectatorship. This passage is particularly problematic to me, not so much because I favour an Akerman film over a film with Schwarzenegger or vice versa and do not want to see them addressed "side by side," but because by posing spectatorship in this way, Mayne has said little more than that there are different kinds of films with different kinds of pleasures, and that feminist film theorists can be fun too. Presumably we can take it for granted that an Akerman film is different to Terminator 2: Judgement Day- they are different forms of cinema. It is unlikely that one would ever see an Akerman film in a major city cinema with a packed audience (though I have seen

Terminator 2 in a major cinema complex with an audience consisting nearly totally of leather boys), and while I certainly do not want to suggest that

Akerman's films are equivalent to Schwarzenegger-vehicles like The Terminator or Terminator 2, I think there are a number of problems in Mayne's aside that these films offer her "different but equally satisfying" pleasures. While it is certainly important to critically address and to argue for the different pleasures

7 Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectators hip (London and New York: Rout ledge, 1993), pp.3-4. 201

cinema can entail (and certainly this has been central to many of the critiques of psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory), perhaps there are as many dangers in seeing different forms of cinema as not also entailing, at points, similar forms of pleasure. One of the central problems in the kind of arguments about spectator ship we find in this passage is the way in which such "pleasures" divide down the line between active/passive, distance/proximity, and thinking/forgetting. Mayne has, in effect, reinforced the very same paradigms - central to apparatus theory - that her book seemingly sets out to challenge. And one of the key problems in this is that there is no attempt to reassess what we mean by active and passive, dis tance and proximity. We are left with the familiar women's burden of a choice between that which one should do (Akerman is somehow worthy) and that which is set up as a sort of illicit pleasure. As Mayne writes in the passage preceeding the above quotation: "For as much as feminism, for instance, is fully part of my everyday life, I have somewhat peculiar (peculiar, that is, to my friends and fam ily; not to me) regressive fantasies about male adolescence which are given per fect expression by Schwarzenegger."8 If we are to address both the similiarities and differences between different types of cinema and spectatorial practices, we need to develop a critical examination of what, in fact, is meant by active/passive, distance/proximity, and thinking/forgetting.

It is here that Benjamin's work is particularly valuable. His work provides us with a way of addressing modes of spectatorship operative in cinema without falling into the ahistoricism that we often find in psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory, or into the kind of apologetic pluralism that characterises some of the more recent work on spectatorship and relations to the commodity in both film theory and cultural studies. If critical work on spectatorship merely takes the

8 ibid, p.3. 202

apparatus model to task for its totalizing and agency-less articulation of spectator

ship, and posits in its place a more "friendly" embrace of different spectatorial

and film practices without examining the very terms in which modes of spectator

ship are understood and valued, then we risk losing the critical and political

stakes which both the Frankfurt school and psychoanalytic-semiotic film theory

(for all its blind spots) have drawn into focus. ***

This chapter draws on Benjamin's work to address debates around female spectatorship. Benjamin's work (and not just his theory of film) occupies a com plex position here. On the one hand we could argue that he seems to privilege modes of reception which have frequently been aligned with the figure of the female spectator and consumer. Through the critical attention he gives to forms of visual fascination and distracted modes of reception, his work certainly offers a basis for rethinking ideas of fascination and proximity in relation to the image, and thereby the female spectator's defining tropes. On the other hand we must also add that Benjamin does not address questions of gender in his work on film.

While his work is particularly suggestive for rethinking ideas of female spectator ship, he certainly doesn't offer a theory or proposal of female spectatorship. Nor can we use his work as a basis for defining female spectatorship: to do so would risk essentializing a cultural representation (the woman entranced by the image) rather than looking at historically, culturally, and gender specific viewing prac tices. Benjamin's work, rather, has specific value for debates around female spec tatorship. Firstly, he gives critical attention to what are generally considered to be marginal modes of both reception and experience (which is certainly where female spectatorship tends to be found). Benjamin's theory of experience aimed to 203

"embrace the totality of experience,"9 which meant the inclusion of those forms of cultural experience- such as drug-induced intoxication and boredom- which were excluded from Kantian and neo-Kantian thought. In this respect, his work can provide a framework to address modes of spectatorship and relations to the image which have received limited critical attention. Secondly, he radically refigures what we have come to see as the defining tropes of female spectatorship and what they may entail (most significantly perhaps through his proposal of proximity and distance as entailing spatio-temporal, rather than simply spatial, components). And thirdly, his analysis of modes of reception and spectatorship is always historically located (despite its simultaneously utopian and belated tone), and as such, provides a useful framework for addressing historically specific modes of spectatorship. In her contribution to Camera Obscura's special issue on female spectatorship, Patrice Petro signals the importance of the work of Ben jamin, Adorno and Kracauer for spectatorship debates:

Underscoring the ways in which capitalism and technology have transformed vision and experience, they consistently demonstrate how sense perception is neither natural nor biological but the result of a long process of differentiation within human history. Isolating key areas of investigation (the aesthetics of the city, the formal procedures of various media, the fragmentation of everyday life), their argument about perception is also an argument about large scale historical shifts in structures of subjectivity.

And as Petro goes on to add:

Although in many ways limited and incomplete, particularly with respect to the place of the female subject, the Frankfurt School approach enables us to take up questions of historical subjectivity,

9 Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne, "Introduction," Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p.x. 204

analyzing changes in technologies of representation as they reveal changes in modes of looking and perception.IO

In this chapter I will be looking at the ways in which female spectatorship has been theorised, and in particular, the ways in which female spectatorship has been characterised by a lack of distance from the image; characterised, in other words, by an all-embracing experience of proximity. My focus will be on the connections that can be drawn between the modes of reception which Benjamin addresses and proposes, and theoretical debates about female spectatorship in contemporary film theory. By reading arguments about female spectatorship through and against Benjamin's work, we can begin to repose what such forms of proximity may entail. His understanding of the forms of proximity and distance involved in both film reception and in auratic experience, and the forms of fas cination operative in the phantasmagoria of commodity culture can provide a basis for rethinking if not female spectatorship itself, then certainly its defining tropes and the ways in which they have been theorised and valued.

This chapter is divided into two parts. The first section focuses on the ways in which female spectatorship has been understood in spatial terms - from arguments about female spectatorship being defined by an experience of spatial proximity to the image, to more recent work which proposes the spatial para meters of spectatorship in terms of a form of travelling (as for instance in proposals of female spectatorship as involving a form ofjlanerie). The second section shifts the focus from spatial aspects of spectatorship to questions of temporality and spectatorship, drawing on Benjamin's attention to the spatia temporal components of reception and experience, and critically inflecting this

10 "From this perspective," Petro writes, "the crucial question is not, 'How does the representation of the female body figure as a sign of castration?'- but rather, 'How do perceptual changes reveal socially and historically specific changes in the organization of sexual difference?"' Patrice Petro, contribution to Camera Obscura 20/21, 1989 (special issue on female spectatorship), pp.262-3. 205

aspect of his work in terms of gendered spectatorship. The second section takes up Benjamin's theory of the image- as entailing a temporal loading or charging and uses this as a basis to propose a form of female spectatorship which entails boredom and rage (rather than the more familiar relation of longing). My aim is not to essentialize female spectatorship, to abstract it from specific forms or moments of cinema as a cultural technology, but rather to look at the ways in which we may want to reconceive the central tropes of female spectatorship and what they may entail. Once again then, we move from the spatial to the temporal aspects of both spectatorship and experience.

Part 1: Female Spectatorship: from "too close" to cruising spatial proxemics

In her essay "Carnal Knowledge," Jane Gallop asks: "How can we admit our resemblance to the 12-year-old-girl who simply loves all pictures of horses, regardless of their formal and aesthetic qualities?" 11 While Gallop is dealing with neither film theory nor cinema here, this seemingly throwaway line evokes both a mode of spectatorship (that which has been theorised as the "too close, lack of distance" variety) and a certain kind of relation to cinema. If this line suggests a particular relation to cinema, it is that of an obsessive, monomaniacal attraction to the very idea of cinema, an attraction which seems less to do with the love of par ticular films than with an amorous state - the idea of a relation and an encounter

(or at least an anticipated encounter). What Gallop has presented here is a famil-

11 Jane Gallop, "Carnal Knowledge," Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p.138. 206

iar representation of the female spectator, as she who is caught in an enchanted web of love with the image.

Gallop's argument in "Carnal Knowledge" is about "charged pleasures," an erotics of engagement in relation to the artwork. She proposes this erotics of engagement through a reading of two texts: Freud's "Moses of Michelangelo," and in a later section, Barthes' Camera Lucida. In her reading of Freud's text, Gallop argues that "good" psychoanalytic art criticism is not so much concerned with uncovering a latent sexuality in subject matter but is concerned, rather, with (the sexuality of) a charged attraction, a type of encounter. Gallop writes:

I am trying to suggest here that there are two different ways in which psychoanalytic criticism can be linked to sex. The more familiar and least interesting concerns latent subject matter, but the criticism that interests me, which may in fact be one that barely exists at all, is concerned with what we may call the erotics of engagement, a sexuality that is not in the object, however deeply hidden, but in the encounter.I2

One could claim that a lot of psychoanalytic feminist film theory has, for some time now, been concerned with something more like an "erotics of engagement" than with latent subject matter, even if this has frequently been limited to a some what restricted proposal of spectatorial pleasures (let alone spectatorial erotics).

What is interesting about Gallop's argument is the idea that such encounters are

"erotic" because they involve what she calls an illegitimate attraction. When the attraction is in some sense "improper" (a status which produces a sort of pleasurable unease in the one so afflicted), the relation or encounter is charged. In

Freud's text this illegitimate attraction takes the form of an interest in subject mat ter rather than the work's formal or aesthetic qualities. While Freud claims that such an interest or attraction is in some sense illegitimate, it is this very interest which he claims as his own. It holds a "stronger attraction" for him than the

12 ibid, p.138. 207

aesthetic qualities of the work. For Gallop it is this attraction and its illegitimacy, rather than the "uncovering" of a latent sexual content in Michelangelo's work, which is the site of sexuality in Freud's essay - a sexuality which lies in and is produced by an attraction which is in some sense "not proper." It is, then, a sexu ality which is tied to the relation between viewer and work, and the system of values around such relations. "Subject matter," she claims, "is sexual not because it is about some experience of sexuality but because we experience the relation to subject matter in art as forbidden, powerful, desiring and embarrassing." 13

Cinema as a cultural form is of course radically different to the high art which is the subject of Freud's essay, and these differences cannot be overlooked.

In many ways cinema operates as that place where one can, in fact, indulge in such "illegitimate pleasures", but this then begs the question of what are cinema's

-or rather film theory's- forbidden and therefore charged pleasures and attrac tions. When it comes to cinema and certain forms of film theory and cultural studies, there is nothing particularly improper, for instance, in declaring a love for

Steve Martin films or for a good Busby Berkeley-style routine. Rather it can add to one's academic street credibility. The anxiety that Gallop's question induces is instead to do with the possibility of there being a similarity between such cinematic obsessions or practices and those of this hypothetical twelve-year-old girl and her pictures of horses. If there is a certain anxiety attached to this anal ogy, it is, I would suggest, because what it foregrounds is a relation of proximity to the image - a form of proximity seen as characterising female spectatorship - and related to this, a particular form of possession. But rather than refusing this analogy, I would like to push it further. One could regard both this young girl and this cinema-lover as being involved in an amorous enterprise. What cinema's

13 ibid, p.138. 208

amorous subject collects- both nurtures and hoards- are discarded images

(scenes, moments, scraps of dialogue, certain poses, whole films).I4

Perhaps what is illegitimate in cinema and in film theory is a particular type of obsession (and perhaps eroticism), a mode of spectatorship which, like the activities of the collector, operates as a form of investment, longing, and invoca- tion. Such a mode of spectatorship has frequently been allocated to the female spectator. While we could say that it is regarded as somehow "improper," we must also add that such modes of spectatorship are intricately tied to cinema's relation to, and place in commodity culture. Such forms of fascination are, after all, both solicited and marketed in relation to the commodity and the image. Film theorists such as Mary Ann Doane and Anne Friedberg have developed important studies of such modes of reception and engagement in their historically specific forms, particularly in terms of the relation between female spectatorship, the mobile gaze, and commodity culture.1s What we would seem to be dealing with here then is a form of fascination which is central to commodity culture and to the cultural technology of cinema, and as Doane, Friedberg, and other have argued, it is a form of fascination which is clearly sexually inflected in terms of its solicitation of and availability to the female spectator-consumer. As Linda Williams writes of Friedberg's argument, "[t]he paradoxical immateriality ofthe new image

14 It is no doubt with pornography that one can be most specific about subject matter that takes one's fancy. Certainly one of the pleasures of porn is a kind of literalness - the preference for particular scenes, acts, poses, types of shot -a literalness which no doubt also characterises horse pictures for this hypotheti cal girl.

15 See Doane The Desire to Desire and Anne Friedberg Window Shop ping: Cinema and the Postmodern Condition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). For discussions of the idea of the mobile gaze in terms of television, see Margaret Morse, "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television," Logics ofTelevision: essays in cultural criticism, ed. Patricia Mellencamp (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp.193-221. 209

commodity made it possible for women to be seduced by images in a way that they had not been seduced by objects. In other words, the image culture of nineteenth-century modernity involved a shift from the commodity as object to the commodity as a form of visual experience. "16 At question here is how we can begin to unravel such modes of spectatorship and what they may entail. To pose this question in more Benjaminian terms, are such charged relations to the image caught within the "charmed web" of fascination? Are they held in that

"bewitched" state that Adorno found so problematic in Benjamin's "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"? Or can we trace a practice of fascination in female spectatorship (and indeed, in spectatorship more generally) where we find the forms of innervation which Benjamin has hopes for? To what extent, in other words, can such modes of reception and spectatorship entail a renewal of experience?

While Gallop argues her erotics of engagement through Freud's "Moses of

Michelangelo" and Barthes' Camera Lucida, the idea of charged relations to the image can also be approached by drawing on Benjamin's work. Benjamin provides us with a framework for rethinking that experience of proximity and longing, as an amorous relation, that underlies this hypothetical girl and her pic tures of horses. Gallop's argument is clearly marked by the gendering of such relations. By summoning the image of the 12-year-old-girl with her horse pictures

(rather than, to summon another stereotype, the 12-year-old-boy with baseball cards) she is already summoning a relation which is culturally marked as both

16 Linda Williams, "Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the 'Carnal Density of Vision,"' Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1995), pp.3- 41, p.20. In this essay, Williams extends Friedberg's arguments (along with those of Jonathan Crary) to argue for an "erotics ofspectator-observers" which would result from "the many discourses and practices constructing the bodies of spectator-observers as an amalgam of disparate and decentered perceptions" - an argument which she develops in relation to early pornography. 210

amorous and melancholic. She is, in other words, summoning the figure of the female spectator and reader as she who is somehow more enchanted or enthralled than is appropriate (and, I would add, the figure of a fan/spectator/consumer/lover who is very serious about her pleasures)- what we could call "the Bovary syndrome." Gallop's choice of this figure is so overloaded that it is almost suf focating - the girl with her pictures presumably taking private and secret pleasures in her love objects (rather than swapping them, as for instance her hypothetical brother might with his sports cards), forever caught in the space of daydream. So let's replace her for a moment, take her minimally up in age, and give her both a friend and a lover (for the female spectator is perhaps never quite as alone as some of her psychoanalytic-semiotic characterisations would suggest). Rather than Gallop's 12-year-old, we could offer Heavenly Creatures' Juliette and

Pauline with their shrine to Mario Lanza (and in so doing, we have also ridded her - and ourselves - of the more downmarket associations of the horse pictures, and have acknowledged that some types of subject matter are perhaps less

"troublesome" to admit to than others),l7 For Juliette and Pauline, "Mario Lanza"

- along with the rest of the cast of characters that the two girls summon (including the expelled Orson Welles) - is both prop and mise-en-scene for an everexpanding horizon of erotic possibilities.

But of course it is not Juliette and Pauline who stand as the familiar figure of the female spectator in theoretical and popular discourses, but the isolated female spectator. So what is it that characterises such a figure? Firstly, an over-

17 Heavenly Creatures, Dir. Peter Jackson, 1994. It would be possible to push the relation between Heavenly Creatures' Pauline and Juliette and Gallops' 12-year-old-girl further. In the scene in which Juliette joins Pauline's class- the scene in which their future alliance and romance is first indicated - we find Pauline sitting at her desk drawing pictures of horses. In the next scene, where the two girls are made to work together in their art class doing "life drawing," Juliette draws winged horses (rather than Pauline). Pauline's interest in horses is soon replaced by her fascination with Juliette. 211

identification with the image and a longing for it to return the gaze, and following from this the idea that the image is misrecognised and seen as having almost magical qualities (similar, in many ways, to the anticipated reciprocity of the gaze that characterizes the aura). The classic figure of the female spectator is she who is held in a state of anticipation. This figuring of the female spectator (or the naive spectator more generally) is discussed in Doane's The Desire to Desire where she gives as her example Mia Farrow's character in The Purple Rose of

Cairo. As Doane writes, Farrow's character is figured as a spectator-lover, entranced before the screen of the film within the film, Purple Rose. She is "in spectatorial ecstasy, enraptured by the image, her face glowing," and after repeated viewings of the film, finally gets the male lead to return her gaze and he steps out of the film to join her. As Doane writes, what the shot of Farrow's character in a state of cinematic bliss signifies "is the particular susceptibility to the image - to the cinematic spectacle in general - attributed to the woman in our culture." 18

Farrow's character is certainly a familiar figure, and this idea of the female spectator wanting to collapse the distance between herself and the image has become a constant not only in film, but also in television and cinema advertising.

I Love Lucy plays out this figure of the female spectator beautifully in "The

Publicity Agent" episode.J9 Lucy, trying to get some publicity for Ricky's act at the club, produces a story about a "Maharincess of Franistan" who has fallen in love with Ricky after hearing one of his records and who is flying to the U.S. to hear him. Lucy, of course, is this Maharincess, and Ricky, as usual, cannot recog nise her behind her disguise. Lucy and Ethel arrive at the club as the visiting

18 Doane, The Desire to Desire, p.l.

19 "The Publicity Agent," episode 31 (first broadcast 12.5.1952). 212

royalty for a private performance for the Maharincess and the press (which Lucy has summoned for the occasion). After the introductions and various rituals,

Ricky launches into song, the central lyrics being "when we're dancing and you're dangerously near me." As soon as he reaches the words "dangerously near," Lucy, on cue, wails and pretends to faint. Ricky, somewhat thrown, turns to the

Maharincess' side-kick (Ethel) and asks what's wrong, to which Ethel replies in glorious dead-pan: "you sing, she swoon." Ricky suggests that if the Maharincess is going to faint he should stop singing. Lucy at this point makes the scene by coming to just enough to open one eye and say "I like it," obliging Ricky to return to the song, and the cycle starts all over again.

What Lucy plays out here is a particular image of the female spec tator/fan/lover in a sort of state of rapture, unable to take up or maintain a distance from the image (here in the form of Ricky). While Lucy is clearly parody ing this figure, I'd like to shift the focus on such forms of proximity and what their charged nature entails, and to do so via Benjamin's work on film and its place in his theory of experience. ready to travel

Mary Ann Doane's book The Desire to Desire, along with some of her earlier articles such as "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spec- tator, "20 is one of the most important studies of female spectatorship in contemporary film theory debates. Doane's analysis of female spectatorship is developed through and in relation to a particular genre, the Hollywood woman's

20 Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator," Screen 23.3-4 (Sept-Oct 1982), pp.74-87, and "Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator," Discourse 11.1 (1988- 89), pp.42-54. 213 film of the 1940's, in which a female gaze is explicitly solicited. Her focus is on the ways in which the Hollywood woman's film of the 1940's specifically addressed a female spectator and presented an inscription of female subjectivity.

(Though as Doane points out, this female subjectivity is an "image repertoire of poses - classical feminine poses and assumptions about the female appropriation of the gaze. Hollywood women's films of the 1940's document a crisis in sub jectivity around the figure of the woman- although it is not always clear whose subjectivity is at stake."21) The aim ofthe book, as Doane states in the first chap ter, is "to outline the terms in which a female spectator is conceptualized - that is, the terms in which she is simultaneously projected and assumed as an image (the focal point of an address) by the geme of the woman's film. "22 While Doane focuses on particular sub-gemes of the woman's film, such as the maternal melodrama and the love story (and is therefore concerned with a particular figur ing of female subjectivity and spectatorship in these subgemes and its relation to cinema and commodity culture), her argument also extends to a more general analysis of the figure of the female spectator and her defining tropes. Without wanting to sidestep the importance of Doane's focus on a specific historical period and a particular geme of film (and this is, of course, one of the strengths of her study), I nevertheless want to look at how she both conceives of and interprets this female spectator's defining tropes.

For Doane, female spectatorship is marked by an experience of proximity to the image. In The Desire to Desire, her account of female spectatorship and female subjectivity draws heavily on psychoanalytic debates (both Freudian and

Lacanian), and psychoanalytic film theory (most notably Metz). Following the work of a number of French feminist theorists, in particular Montrelay, Kristeva,

21 Doane, The Desire to Desire, p.4.

22 ibid, p.9. 214 and Irigaray, Doane argues that the female spectator- as with the female subject in psychoanalysis - is distinguished by a form of proximity which positions her outside the symbolic order.23 Doane examines the ways in which this proximity to the image is constructed in historically and socially specific frameworks, particu larly in terms of the ways in which women's visual pleasures are constructed through both the consumer gaze and the spectatorial gaze. It is in her focus on historically, socially, and sexually specific modes of spectatorship that Doane turns to the work of Benjamin. Her book is not (and nor does it claim to be) a

Benjaminian study of female spectatorship. She does, however, draw on his

"Work of Art" essay in her proposal of the ways in which the woman's gaze - both as spectator and as consumer - is characterised by a form of proximity. As

Doane writes in the first chapter of her book:

Benjamin's conceptualization of the opposition between the effect of the aura and that of mechanical reproduction is expressed in the spa tial terms of "distance" and "closeness". The aura attached to natural objects is "the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be." And the logic of the consumer's relation to the commodity annihilates this distance: "Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction." It is not accidental that the logic of consumerism and mechanical reproduction corresponds to a logic of perception attributed to the female spectator whose nonfetishistic gaze main tains a dangerous intimacy with the image. 24

What Doane draws on here is Benjamin's attention to historically specific modes of perception, and the ways in which in modernity they are intricately bound to

23 This argument is developed in Doane's essay "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator." By being unable to establish or maintain a dis tance in relation to the image (the woman, rather, is the image), the female spec tator is positioned in an impossible place. In "Film and the Masquerade" Doane argues that women can establish this necessary distance through masquerade. Drawing on Joan Riviere's classic article "Womanliness as a Masquerade," she argues that it is by femininity being held at a distance that femininity can be seen as image/construct (an image that can be put on and taken off) and the female spectator can herself take up a position of distance from the image, offering, in effect, a form of female fetishism. It is through masquerade, Doane argues, that the female spectator can overcome this proximity to (herself as) the image.

24 Doane, The Desire to Desire, pp.31-2. 215 the rise of commodity culture, to new technologies like film, and to the shifting parameters of the public and private spheres. Taking up Benjamin's argument about the decay of the aura and the privileging of proximity over distance in rela tion to the commodity and the image, she draws an important connection between such modes of reception and/or relations to the image and the female spectator/consumer. However, in so doing she also simplifies Benjamin's proposal of proximity and of modes of reception based on forms of visual fascination. She keeps his proposal of proximity within the spatial register rather than looking at the forms of temporality it can involve. My interest here is in looking at the ways in which we may want to reconceive what forms of visual fascination may entail, whether an experience of proximity to the image, overidentification with the image, or the "hovering" gaze associated with the female spectator as jliineuse.

By focusing on the temporal aspects of Benjamin's work on film reception- and the centrality of questions of time and temporality for his theory of experience more generally - we find a productive basis for rethinking debates around spec tatorship and its gendered (and historically located) forms.

Questions of film reception and spectatorship lie at the centre of Ben jamin's "Work of Art" essay, most notably in his (re)proposal of the distinction between contemplative and distracted modes of reception. As discussed in chapter

1, he not only claims that distraction characterises the mode of reception (and rep resentation) in the cinema, but he also claims that such a mode of reception is more appropriate - and indeed more promising - than contemplation, the mode of reception more generally associated with high art. The distinction between contemplative and distracted modes of reception is by no means Benjamin's own, and it has a long history in mass culture/high culture debates.25 Contemplation and

25 As discussed in chapter 1, Benjamin's work on distraction is crucially informed by that of his friend and colleague Siegfried Kracauer. While Kracauer's arguments about distraction would seem to be more clearly marked by gender (as for instance in his essay "The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies"), my focus here is primarily on Benjamin's work and the ways it has informed a number of argu ments in contemporary film theory, and in particular, feminist film theory. For a 216 distraction are related to other sets of terms - distance and proximity, activity and passivity, (and with these, masculinity and femininity)- terms which have been also been central to film theory debates.26 What is important about Benjamin's articulation of this distinction is that he not only seems to privilege the devalued term (distraction, and with it proximity) but that he radically reconceives what distraction, and with it proximity, can entail. It has certainly been on this basis that his work has been taken up in a range of debates - in cultural studies, in

Brechtian film theory, and in a number of counter cinema practices (particularly in the 1970's). In Benjamin's attention to and reproposal of ideas of distraction he seems to be privileging at least the tropes of what has been seen as female spectatorship - a fascination with the image, a lack of distance, the tropes which

Doane addresses in her study. There are of course many differences between Ben jamin's proposal of modes of reception based in proximity and Doane's, and I am by no means comparing the projects in terms of their genres, political agendas, or historical moments. What is significant however is that Doane, while examining the complex contours of the figure of the female spectator and the forms of proximity which she is seen as both exemplifying and suffering from, does not question the very concept of proximity and what it might mean in film spectator ship. She remains, as Petro has pointed out, within a psychoanalytic framework

discussion ofKracauer's arguments about distraction in terms of their gendering, see Sabine Hake, "Girls and Crisis: The Other Side of Diversion," New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987), pp.147-164, and Patrice Petro, "Modernity and Mass Culture in Weimar: Contours of a Discourse on Sexuality in Early Theories of Perception and Representation," New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987), pp.115- 146. Kracauer's essays on distraction have been republished in The Mass Orna ment, trans. and ed. Thomas Levin (Cambridge Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1995).

26 See Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (London: Macmillan Press, 1988). See also Patrice Petro, "Mass Culture and the Feminine: The 'Place' of Television in Film Studies," Cinema Journa/25.3 (Spring 1986), pp.5-21. 217 which regards (a particular idea of) distance as essential to the possibility of representation and subjectivity.27

What are the connections between the modes of reception and relations to the image that we find in the "Work of Art" essay and what has come to be char acterised as female spectatorship? Clearly there are a number of similarities between the tropes of female spectatorship as they have been conceived both in theoretical debates and in popular discourses and Benjamin's proposal of film reception. If we focus on the more materialist aspects of his theory of film, Ben jamin's figuring of the masses and the mass audience would share a number of similarities with the figure of the female spectator/consumer (and though Ben jamin certainly doesn't address this, women would quite clearly be part of this mass audience). For Benjamin, as he writes in the "Work of Art" essay, the mass audience is characterised by the desire "to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly."28 For Doane, it is this idea of bringing things closer- of favouring proximity over distance - that would seem to correlate with the figure of the female spectator/consumer. For the female spectator/consumer is she who is seen as wanting to bring things closer (and as simply wanting). As Doane writes:

"Proximity rather than distance, passivity, overinvolvement and overidentification

[ ... ]-these are the tropes which enable the woman's assumption of the position of

27 "In line with Metz, for example, Doane attributes both knowledge and pleasure in the cinema to a necessary distance from the image[... ] Doane surmises that when the female spectator fails to distance herself from the image of woman, she necessarily merges with that image and, consequently, loses herself. Equating the cinematic apparatus with a theory of the male imaginary, Doane winds up affirming the model of spectatorship she initially sets out to expose: conflating vision with intellection, Doane maintains that the female spectator can 'see' (and thus assume a position of knowledge) in the classical narrative cinema by manufacturing a distance from the image of woman and taking up the position of fetishist." Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), p.48.

28 Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (Suffold: Fontana/Collins, 1982), p.225. 218

'subject' of the gaze."29 By drawing on Benjamin's work here, Doane shifts the understanding of the forms of immersion seen as characterizing female spectator ship, though the female spectator certainly still remains immersed. In her proposal of the desire to "bring things closer," the female spectator is less held suspended by the image than moving across it:

At the cinema, the consumer glance hovers over the surface of the image, isolating details which may be entirely peripheral in relation to the narrative. It is a fixating, obsessive gaze which wanders in and out of the narrative and has a more intimate relation with space - the space of rooms and of bodies - than with the temporal dimen sion. It is as though there were another text laid over the first - a text with an altogether different mode of address - so that the film becomes something of a palimpsest. In this other text, the desire to possess displaces comprehension as the dominant mechanism of reading.3o

While it is not explicitly named as such, the "temporal dimension" referred to here would appear to be that of narrative. The female spectator is less immersed in narrative than in the spatial contours of the image and movement, the form of exhibition and display which links cinema to the display of the commodity and the phantasmagoria. What we find here is a form of proxemics which, like the commodity on display in the phantasmagoria of the department store, entails something being brought up close at the same time that it is separated from the space of the spectator/viewer by its very mode of presentation. Doane's argument is informed by both Benjamin's "Work of Art" essay and by Schivelbusch's book

The Railway Journey.3 1 Schivelbusch's work has played a key role in con temporary film debates - particularly around pre- and post-classical spectatorship; what he addresses in his study is the prevalence in modernity of a mobile or

29 Doane, The Desire to Desire, p.2.

30 ibid, pp.30-31.

31 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century, trans. Anselm Hollo (New York: Urizen Press, 1977). Doane also discusses Schivelbusch's work in terms of gendered spectatorship in her earlier essay "' ... when the direction of the force acting on the body is changed': The Moving Image," Wide Angle 7.1-2 (1985), pp.42-57. 219

"panoramic" gaze, which was tied to both the development of railway travel and new technologies like film. The introduction of railway travel brought with it a different relation between the traveler, the image, and space. The train traveler does not occupy the space he or she is travelling through, but rather is its spec tator: the traveler is moved between a departure point and a destination, the spaces between appearing through the carriage window as so many "views." What these arguments suggest are the ways in which spectatorship can entail a form of

(virtual) movement and travel. Doane's use of these arguments offers a shift away from figuring modes of spectatorship based in an experience of proximity as necessarily entailing a kind of "arrest." If the female spectator is seen as immersed in the image, like Farrow in The Purple Rose ofCairo, like Joan

Fontaine's Lisa in Letter from an Unknown Woman, then Doane's "hovering gaze" would seem to depart from the overly attentive and arrested gaze which character ises such figurings of the female spectator, in favour of a gaze which would seem to alternate between cruising and fixating.

The "hovering" gaze that Doane identifies in the female spectator/consumer is one of the few forms of mobile gaze which is socially sanc tioned for (some) women in modernity, and there has been considerable work done recently on the ways in which cinema has, in different historical moments, provided women with a different access to the public sphere (and has also operated as an alternative public sphere). As Guiliana Bruno writes in her study of female spectatorship and early Italian cinema:

The "institution" of cinema (that is, the act of going to to the movies and its viewing place) historically legitimized for the female subject the denied possibility of public pleasure in leisure time. Cinema pro vided a form of access to public space, an occasion to socialize and get out of the house. Going to the cinema triggered a liberation of the woman's gaze, enabling her to renegotiate, on a new terrain of intersubjectivity, the configuration of public/private. Moreover the cinematic situation made it possible for the female to experience a form offemalejlanerie, as film, triggered by a desire for loitering, offered the joy of watching while travelling ... Textually and con textually, literally and figuratively, historically and fantasmatically, the female subject's encounter with the cinema constructs a new 220

geography, gives licence to venturing. In its embodiment of fantasy, female spectatorship maps out the space of the gaze as site to traverse and trespass. 32

Whereas Doane speaks of a "hovering gaze" which both wanders and fixates,

Bruno proposes a type of gaze which is closer to loitering. Both theorists are addressing the forms of visual fascination which the cultural technology of cinema both enables and offers to the female spectator (though Bruno perhaps finds more transgressive possibilities in such forms of travel, and certainly extends this discussion into questions of the public sphere). What we find in these arguments, and certainly more so in Bruno, is a proposal of proximity which is tied to movement - both virtual and actual. But what we also find in this work is that even when visual fascination is reconceived, the focus is still on the spatial rather than temporal aspects operative in such relations to the image, despite

Bruno's attention to the idea of loitering - which quite clearly implies a temporal component (defiantly "wasting" time).

While I am by no means disputing these arguments about the mobile gaze and its place in forms of visual fascination in modernity, my aim is to draw on and reposition them in terms of the ways that forms of visual fascination entail and intersect with temporal structurings of experience. Clearly the mobile gaze entails forms of temporality, though I would suggest that it has primarily been addressed in terms of something like the temporality of daydream. While it is certainly in this respect that cinema links up with the phantasmagoria of the com modity, the temporality of daydream (of the phantasmagoria as a kind of intoxica-

32 Guiliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films ofElvira Notari (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p.51. See also Petro's Joyless Streets, Hansen's Babel and Babylon and Hansen's essay "Early Silent Cinema: Whose Public Sphere?", New German Critique 29 (Winter 1983), pp.l47-84. This work has certainly developed some ofthe most interesting arguments in recent feminist film debates. Though my own arguments are crucially informed by this work, I will only touch on these debates here as my focus is with the ways in which we can repose ideas of cinematic fascination and female spectatorship in terms of the temporal structurings of experience. 221 tion and travel) is by no means the only form of temporality operative in the mobile gaze, or in forms of visual fascination generally. If, following Benjamin and Schivelbusch, cinema offers a mobile gaze and is a cultural technology cru cially implicated in the forms of perception which characterise modernity, then this mobile gaze and its forms of proxemics also involve particular forms of temporality and can be addressed in terms of (the different relations to) the temporal structuring of experience in modernity. As discussed in chapters 2 and

3, Benjamin's practices of fascination entail a temporal dimension, and it is in this respect that his work is particularly generative for addressing spectatorship and its gendered forms. By placing the discussion of female spectatorship, proximity, fascination, and the phatasmagoria in the context of Benjamin's theory of modem- ity, the terrain of the debate can be opened.

As Peter Osborne has argued, "'modernity' is thematized in Benjamin's work not merely as a distinct form of temporal experience, produced by a range of social practices and forms [ ... ],but as a decisive mutation of historical experience, which gains its meaning from its dialectical relations to tradition" (modem- ity as the destruction oftradition).33 The second part of this chapter will focus on the first aspect of Benjamin's theory of modernity that Osborne addresses - the temporal structuring of experience in (and that is) modernity, and will draw on these debates to repose ideas of female spectatorship. If modernity is characterised by the temporality of the new (the temporality of the phantasmagoria, of the new as the always-the-same- a temporality embodied in the commodity), one cannot conclude from this that all subjects (and all social practices) are positioned in the same ways in relation to this temporality. Whereas Doane (and to an extent

Bruno) places this hovering gaze in relation to the figure of the female consumer roaming the up-market department store as ajlaneuse, her eyes racing from one

33 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 1995), p.114. 222 wonder to another, we should not be too eager to embrace this figure of the happy shopper at the expense of that other female spectator-consumer who is standing outside the shop window staring at the one thing she wants and can't have. The next section will look at other kinds of relations to the commodity-image and how they can be understood in terms of the temporal structuring of experience in mod ernity. The various figures and social "types" which populate Benjamin's work

(the collector, the ragpicker, thejl{meur, the whore etc) can each be seen as stag ing particular relations to the commodity, and to the temporal structuring of expe rience in modernity. I will add another figure to Benjamin's collection: the figure of the aging actress. Like the figures Benjamin addresses, this figure too comes into visibility at the point of its disappearance. More importantly for my argument here, she stages a particular relation to the temporality of modernity and the new as the ever always-the-same, one which can be particularly useful for developing an analysis of both gendered spectatorship and, more generally, gendered rela tions to shock, distraction, and the image.

In the next section the focus will be with relations to the image in which both the image- and the relation to it- are charged. Whereas in the women's film for instance we find a relation to the image where the image (and the relation) are charged with a kind of longing, here I would like to address a relation where the image, and the type of gaze it solicits, are charged with something closer to rage.

Part 2: Rage and the Female Spectator

In her recent work on boredom, Patrice Petro has proposed a shift of focus in contemporary debates drawing on German critical theory. Turning her atten tion to boredom, with which both Benjamin and Kracauer dealt extensively, she traces another side to modernity. In many ways this work continues the project begun with her earlier book Joyless Streets which likewise examines the ways in which theories of modernity, and experience in modernity, are crucially marked 223 by gender. In her essay "After Shock/Between Boredom and History," Petro defines her terms in the following way:

By "after shock" I mean to suggest another side to modernity, when the "shock of the new" ceased to be shocking, when change itself had become routineized, commodified, banalized, and when the extraordinary, the unusual, and the fantastic became inextricably linked to the boring, the prosaic, and the everyday. The term after shock preserves an element of shock, but nonethe less signals the fading of its initial intensity. Not unlike the term uafterimage", it invokes an impression, or experience, or affect that persists long after an image or stimulus has passed from view.34

Boredom then could be seen as shock's residue and also as its buffer, and Petro's articulation of "after shock" suggests a stimulus shield grown both thick and weary. Boredom can also be seen as a way of anticipating shock, and anticipating it with what is always regarded as the most dismissive, insulting form of attention

- with indifference. With boredom, we could say, distraction has become familiar.

It no longer distracts and has lost its force.

As Petro writes, the appearance of particular forms of boredom in mod ernity was understood as a condition curable by stimulus. The cure for boredom would then be (more) distraction, which, of course, was also seen as one of its central causes. Following both Kracauer's and Benjamin's theories of boredom and its central place in modernity, she argues that for these theorists (though in different ways) "boredom captures the modern experience of time as both empty and full, concentrated and distracted (the experience of temporal duration as well as temporal disruption in the sense of 'killing time'). "35 Tracing her argument through the work of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin, Petro charts the relations

34 Patrice Petro, "After Shock/Between Boredom and History," Discourse 16.2 (Winter 1993-4), p.77, and reprinted in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). See also Petro's essay "Historical Ennui, Feminist Boredom," in The Persistence ofHistory: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York and London: Routledge, 1996).

35 Petro, "After Shock/Between Boredom and History," p.86. 224 between boredom and distraction - boredom as the other side of distraction, its residue:

Boredom and distraction, in other words, are complementary rather than opposing terms, whose relationship might be stated as follows: reception in a state of distraction reveals cultural disorder and increasing abstraction; the cultivation of boredom, however, discloses the logic of distraction, in which newness becomes a fet ish, and shock itself a manifestation of the commodity form. 36

Following Simmel, she argues that in commodity culture boredom is available to everyone. But Petro also places her discussion of boredom in the con text of feminism - of repetition, of suspended and unfulfilled hopes and promises

("to what extent has the weight of the past actually 'suffocated' women's creativity and the very possibility of social and political change?" she asks. "Is it, in fact, the weight of the past or the leaden quality of the present that inhibits feminist novelty and produces ennui"?).37 Equally importantly, and certainly related to the gendered forms of boredom, she argues that in the 20th century boredom takes on a primarily visual dimension: boredom is both a response to and result of the ons laught of visual thrills and distractions, a response to and experience of the form of visibility that characterises the phantasmagoria. Following from this, and as

Petro's argument suggests, we could say that boredom can also emanate from a

36 ibid, p.86. In this essay Petro develops her account of boredom and its after shock economy through an examination of two series of photographs - the first, the 1930's photographs ofBrassa'i, Paris By Night and The Secret Paris, the second, the restaging of these photographs by Stephen Meisel ("Flesh and Fan tasy") with Madonna at the centre and published in Rolling Stone. Whereas in the first series of photos - images of gay and lesbian nightclubs, brothels, and their disinterested inhabitants - Petro finds a figuring of the city as "an unsettled heterogeneity after the 'shock of the new,' when sexuality ceases to be shocking, and when boredom itself assumes the quality of a relief from anxiety" (p.90), she argues that the contemporary photographs "[reinvest] sexuality with the sense of the eventful; as a result, sexual otherness reemerges in our time as both provoca tive and shocking, the purported proof that something (rather than nothing) is taking place" (p.78). Shock in this respect- the forms of shock staged in the Madonna photographs, of a feminine sexuality as enigma - can be seen as both a compensatory and empty gesture. What shock disguises here is banality.

37 Petro, "Historical Ennui, Feminist Boredom," p.189. 225 certain weariness in representing the new, of standing as the distraction. 38 It is here, in this visual dimension of boredom, that we can begin to chart a gendered experience of modernity and the crisis of experience which it is seen as entailing.

The practice and experience of boredom clearly marks a different relation to the temporality of the new - the temporality of the commodity fetish - than we find in the figure ofthejlaneuse. There is none of the joyous delight (at both the spectacle of the commodity and at her new found access to the public sphere) which characterises the jlaneuse in her spectator-consumer figurings here. While my focus is not with boredom, there are a number of elements that I want to retain from Petro's recent work. If her work provides the basis for proposing both a form of gendered spectatorship and, by extension, a framework within which we can address a gendered crisis of experience, it does so on a number of grounds. Firstly, Petro's focus on the historical and gendered specificity of forms of boredom offers a framework through which we can address the ways in which experience in modernity is gendered. Secondly, the crucial connection she draws between boredom, vision, and visibility provides a ground from which we can address a different kind of relation to the image, and equally importantly, to one's status as image. And thirdly, Petro's attention to the temporality of boredom offers a basis for rethinking relations to the image. Boredom entails a loading of time. As Petro writes, it marks the present as both full and empty. "[H]idden in the innovation of distraction and shock is a despair that nothing further will hap pen. Hidden in the negativity of boredom and waiting, however, is the anticipa tion that something (different) might occur."39 Boredom can be seen then as a loading of time at the same time that it is a refusal of the intensity of the instant.

In boredom, ironically perhaps, there is a gesture of hope. It is this idea of a load-

38 Petro, "After Shock/Between Boredom and History," p.83.

39 ibid, p.86. 226 ing or charging of time that can serve as a framework for rethinking ideas of female spectatorship (and modes of spectatorship more generally), particularly in terms of ideas of visual fascination. If the figure of the female spectator has often been characterised by the idea of waiting, longing, and anticipation (as in Doane's example of the recurring figure of the woman at the window), this waiting may also take the form of a boredom which fills and charges time. What Petro's work offers is a framework within which we can address the different ways of occupying and being positioned in the visual sphere, and the ways in which these are marked by gender.

What happens when the woman herself has stood for the modern and the new? What happens when this new - as the new always is - is discarded for another new? How can we pose and address the possibilities and strategies for refiguring the relations between oneself and/as the discarded, and think this outside a crisis of narcissism? The next section proposes a form of proximity to the image marked by rage, focusing on a group of films which mark a trajectory of boredom and rage for the female character - for women who are seen as no longer the shock of the new (and commodity fetish) but represent a different kind of shock: the shock of the redundant and discarded, or more accurately, the shock of finding oneself discarded (here in the form of the aging female performer who wants to stay on the stage).

the rage of the discarded (or: ifyou find you've been made into a museum piece, don't just sit there, put on a show)

It took me donkey's till I saw the point but saw the point I did, eventually, though not until the other day, when we were watching The Dream again in Notting Hill, that time, couple of batty old tarts with their eyes glued on their own ghosts. Then I understood' the thing I'd never grasped back in those days, when I was young, before I lived in history. When I was young, I'd wanted to be ephemeral, I'd wanted the moment, to live in just the glorious moment, the rush of blood, the applause. Pluck the day. Eat the 227

peach. Tomorrow never comes. But, oh yes, tomorrow does come all right, and when it comes it lasts a bloody long time, I can tell you. But if you've put your past on celluloid, it keeps. You've stored it away, like jam, for winter. That kid came up and asked for our autographs. It made our day. I could have wished we'd done more pictures. 40

My intention here is not to propose or claim a theory of female spectator ship, but rather to look at and repose some of the possible contours of cinematic fascination and its gendered forms. To this end I will focus on a select group of films (what we could almost regard as a sub-genre), a group of films from the

1950's and 1960's that present a particular figuring of the woman in relation to the image, a relation seen as defined by a dangerous proximity. The central characters in these films are middle aged or older actresses, usually film stars but sometimes from the stage or television, and the "dangerous proximity" that we find in these films is of the woman to herself as image (what would more generally be addressed in terms of narcissism). This proximity is narratively and visually pro duced between the aging actress and the image of her youth (her "transportable" image, her commodity form), an image which has surpassed her and which has itself faded. If her image has faded before she has, she, on the other hand, has simply been discarded. It is important to stress that it is not always the woman in these films (the aging actress) who experiences a relation of proximity to the image of herself and who confuses herself with her image, but rather that she is repeatedly presented with and against that image. As I will go on to argue, it is the ways in which this proximity is negotiated in these films that we can chart a form of proximity which entails a charging and stretching of time.

The films that I want to look at are Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder,

1950), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), All About Eve

(Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950) and The Killing ofSister George (Robert Aldrich,

40 Angela Carter, Wise Children (London: Vintage, 1991), p.125 228

1968). The central characters in these "aging actress" films were generally played by a major female star, each of whom represented an earlier moment of cinema:

Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and Bette Davis in both All About Eve and

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (along with Joan Crawford). Sister George made in England and starring Beryl Reid, who had played the role in the earlier stage production - is the only one of these films which does not incorporate a major star.4I Produced as the studio system was at its end and the domestic intro duction of television was well underway, these films played out the passing of the old Hollywood through the figure ofthe aging actress.42 Despite their pending (or already enacted) demise as public stars or celebrities, these characters all make an heroic attempt at a grand performance either on or off stage. Each make a desperate move to thwart the attempts to place them on both the cultural trash heap of discarded moments of cinema and television, and the trash heap of dis carded women.

It is precisely in the ways in these women negotiate their place in the visual sphere and their status as image that we find a different form of proximity.

If they are constantly positioned in a relation of proximity to themselves as image

(a proximity which is narratively and visually produced as a site of madness and

41 While The Killing ofSister George differs from the earlier films in a number of respects, I have included it here for specific reasons. Sister George certainly doesn't draw on Hollywood star discourses in the same ways that the earlier films do - the film is set in England rather than in Hollywood, and Beryl Reid, who plays George, is by no means a star in the way that Davis, Crawford, or Swanson are (and hence there is no idea of a correlation or discrepancy between actor and role, except of course - in the publicity around the film - in terms of Reid's sexuality). Nevertheless Sister George, like the earlier films, revolves around an aging actress who is being dismissed from the visual (and public) sphere, and stands as an interesting comparison to Aldrich's earlier aging actress film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? As with all of these films except Sunset Boulevard, the focus is on a relationship between two women, and as with All About Eve and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? -though more explicitly it involves a butch-femme dynamic.

42 Andrew Ross discusses Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in terms of the "traumatic passing of silent film" in No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), p.138. 229

monstrosity), they perform this proximity, stretching it to breaking point and infusing it with a kind of joyous rage. Norma Desmond and Baby Jane seem to burn themselves into the celluloid as a blaze of white, delirious fury in their final moments of occupying a stage and finding an audience. Margo Channing finds a performance space off stage by relinquishing her career and taking on the bit part of the entertaining, smart-talking wife (but not without getting in a few good off-

stage performances first), and George- who is subjected to more brutal humilia tions than her earlier colleagues- at least gets to hold court during her character's wake, and refuses the "killing" of her character by quite simply refusing to lie down and die (she refuses to play dead- she will pretend to be asleep, pretend to be drunk, but she will not play dead). George alone out of these four women has no audience for her final moment and is last seen on the empty set of the tv show that she has, until recently, starred in. On the dimly lit set, she finds the coffin that her character is to be buried in and begins to smash it (and the set) to pieces.

As the camera tracks back into a long shot from above, George begins to wail - or rather she lets out a long, heart-wrenching "moo" (her only future job offer being the voice of a cow, in an animated children's program).

The fascination of these films is primarily in the ways that each of the central characters tries to refuse being positioned as the figure of loss, a refusal which, by and large, fails. And of course it is not surprising that their attempts fail, their options are limited: to refuse their status as what Benjamin (following

Aragon) calls "transitory tyrants"43 (or rather discarded transitory tyrants) they

43 Benjamin takes this term from Aragon's Paris Peasant, where it des cribes the endlessly usurped gods of modern existence. Benjamin refers to these transitory tyrants as the "outmoded," "the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them." Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), p.l81. See chapter 4 for a more detailed account of Benjamin's idea of the transitory tyrant in relation to popular culture memory. 230 can, like Norma Desmond, attempt to freeze time (and their place in it) by trying to resurrect their status as fetish, leading to an economy of narcissism. Or they can accept their place in a gendered discourse of aging which will define them as too late. But in their negotiation of these two options - attempting to maintain their status as fetish or accepting their place as loss - we find something else.

While narratively these characters may fail in their attempts to avoid the trash heap, they nevertheless stage a particular form of crisis, a crisis which is before all else an experience of time.

Each of these women- Norma Desmond, (Baby) Jane Hudson, Margo

Channing, and (Sister) George/June - are having a breakdown. Each stages a par ticular form of crisis - a crisis which is not the "result" of her aging, but of finding herself occupying the position of cultural refuse. If these films stage, in different ways, a form of crisis, the crisis is one of confronting one's status as image, and as an image marked by its use-by date. These characters are marked by time twice over - as aging stars (as image) they are marked as both frozen and transitory, and as aging women, they are marked as outside desire. Twice over they become cultural refuse.

If these women (who aren't after all that old) are staged in the moment of their redundancy (and it is a long moment), it is their refusal of this position that keeps us enthralled. Both their refusal to leave, and the ways they negotiate their status as image take the form of stretching time, ofre-pacing the temporality of spectacle, display, and performance. In this respect, and as I will go on to argue, these characters engage in a particular mode of spectatorship, staging a specific relation to the image and to the temporality of the new. They summon themselves as an image, as the scene and site of a disappearance and a forgetting, staging a form of crisis. What I would argue is that while these women could certainly be seen as practicing a form of spectatorship characterised by an experience of proximity in relation to the image (the classic figuring of female spectatorship in 231 psychoanalytic-semiotic feminist film theory and in popular culture representa tions of the female spectator/consumer), here this proximity is summoned and infused with an explosive tension, charging the image with a kind of rage. And perhaps we could see these films as soliciting a similar kind of gaze from the spectator - both now, and at the time of their release. Each of these women stage a kind of boredom and disinterest with the present they find themselves in (a pre sent which certainly excludes them), a disinterest and frustration with the logic of the new and novelty. The 1950's pseudo-bohemian young Hollywood writers' scene in Sunset Boulevard is represented as vacuous (particularly in the New

Year's Eve party scene); All About Eve's heralding of a new kind of "1950's" star, embodied in Eve/Anne Baxter and Eve's own soon-to-be successor "Phoebe," offers a kind of star who is formulaic and bland (the new as the always-the-same), against which Margo/Bette Davis' tempestuousness, rage, and sheer presence can only stand as magnificent; and in those rare scenes in Whatever Happened to

Baby Jane? when we leave Jane and Blanche's house, late 1950's/early 1960's

Californian culture seems to be more arrested in an eternal, amnesiac, present than Jane and Blanche are caught in their past. If the present that these women find themselves in excludes them, this present doesn't seem to offer much worth claiming either.

performing proximity

These films stage a figuring and scenario of female spectatorship where a proximity to and fascination with the image is less about longing and enchant ment and more to do with frustration and fury. We could perhaps see these films as the revenge of the woman's film, its talking back. Certainly a number of the actresses in these films had played major roles in women's films of the 1930's and

1940's. For both Crawford and Davis, their statuses as stars relied heavily on their 232 roles in a number of these films from the decades prior, something audiences in the 1950's and 60's would have been well aware of.

Aldrich's psychological horror film Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? brought together two highly recognisable stars associated with the Hollywood of the 1930's and 40's, Davis and Crawford. The film relied heavily on the volatile relationship between these two stars - a volatile relationship which was both part of their respective star images and important to the film and its promotion.44 Baby

Jane presents us with two figures of the (discarded) female star and two types of relations to the commodity-image. Crawford and Davis play two aging sisters who have both, in their respective heydays, been stars: one as a precocious child star in vaudeville (Bette Davis as Jane), the other as a glamour queen in 1930's

Hollywood (Joan Crawford as Blanche). In the "now" ofthe film, the late 1950's in Hollywood (marked by an intertitle as "Yesterday"), these two sisters are fig ured as grotesque, though in different ways. Jane embodies the visual and aural traits of the grotesque woman while Blanche is an emotional monster. The two sisters are bound together by hatred and guilt (and of course familiarity), with

Jane believing she is responsible for a car accident which left her sister crippled thirty years ago and Blanche knowing that she has produced her sister as mad (as she says at the end of the film, "you weren't ugly then, I made you that way. I even did that to you"). In the final moments of the film we discover that it is not

Jane who caused the accident that crippled her sister, but Blanche who crippled herself in an unsuccessful attempt to run over a young and (already habitually) inebriated Jane. It is in fact Blanche, crying victim for the last thirty years, that has blackmailed Jane into relinquishing her life and will to play nursemaid to the sister she believes she has crippled. In the light of this most horrific of acts, Jane's

44 For an entertaining account of the dynamic between these two women and the making of this film, see Shaun Considine's Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud (London: Sphere Books, 1989), and also by Considine, "What Ever Hap pened on 'Baby Jane'?", Premiere 3.3 (Nov. 1988), pp.68-70. 233 physical torturing of Blanche (which makes up the bulk of the film)- dragging her down the stairs, starving her, tying her to the bed and gagging her until near death in the final moments of the film- is mere child's play. Moreover it seems justified, a relatively speedy suffering compared to the long drawn out torment of

Jane, of which we see only the fmal product - the mad Jane. Blanche has pro duced a shrine to herself and trapped Jane in it. This is the revenge that she has taken on behalf of the child Blanche who was left in the wings as Jane had the stage. The struggle that Jane enacts through the film is an attempt to release her self from the museum within which she finds herself. While it seems like it is

Jane who is psychotically caught in her past (she, after all, performs the same childhood numbers and gets her childhood dresses remade for her planned

"return" to the stage), it is in fact Blanche who has frozen herself in relation to her image.

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? stages two types of relations to the image through its central characters - what I am calling here a relation of longing and a relation of rage (and each of which is based in an experience of proximity in relation to the image). If we compare Jane and Blanche we can see two modes of (female) spectatorship based in an experience of proximity. Blanche could be seen as the more familiar figure of the female spectator (as she who is entranced by the image). When we are first introduced to Blanche (the adult Blanche, the

Blanche of the now of the film) it is through her gaze at her own image. In the loungeroom of the next door neighbours' house, an old Blanche Hudson film (and an old Crawford film) is doing a matinee rerun on television, watched by mother and daughter. Seemingly following the gaze of these two women, the camera moves in to the television screen until the whole frame is filled with the image of

Blanche/Crawford, a close up of a close up of the star. As the camera draws back out, we find ourselves in Blanche's bedroom, and it is now Blanche who is seen to be captured by the image. (This is one of the most interesting edits in the film, not 234 simply because of its "neatness," but also because it establishes the gaze at the close up - one of the most familiar traits of the female spectator's alleged proximity to the image - as involving a mapping and connecting of various gazes, producing a kind of web.) Blanche is entranced by her own image: she smiles with that highly posed wide-eyed gaze we associate with Crawford (though this is interrupted by a moment of irritation which makes it clear that she is/was the pro ducer of that image: "I told him not to cut that shot so soon" she says to herself.

But this is just a passing interruption of her enchantment, and she returns to her smile, until, that is, Jane enters the room and breaks the spell).

If Blanche represents the more familiar model of the female spectator caught in a relation of enchantment with the image, Jane takes up a quite different relation to both herself as image now and herself as image/star "before." Jane dis plays herself, and the ways she does so are crucially to do with charging time and charging herself into it. Jane certainly operates as an anachronism, a kind of cinema dinosaur. But at the same time that she stands as a figure arrested in time, she attempts to arrest time, to arrest the present, charge herself into it, and blast it apart. Jane spends most of the film largely oblivious to the fact that she is no longer in the limelight, and continues to operate as if she were. She seems to emanate her own stage lights, as if in her years as a child star she voraciously soaked up all the gazes upon her, hoarding them and adorning herself with them so that now they seem to beam out from within. The slightest suggestion of an audience and she radiates.

Jane performs a particular kind of intoxication, a practice of fascination through which she attempts to animate (herself as) an image. Six years later Sister

George will put on a a rowdy drunken performance at her "farewell lunch" at the studio, much to her girlfriend's distaste. "Appearing to be drunk is one of the easier ways of getting through life's more embarrassing situations," George tells her. Jane's attempts to resurrect her childhood act are perhaps a similar means of 235 dealing with humiliation and redundancy, though she produces herself as a state of intoxication rather than simply feigning intoxication like George does. While all of these women are certainly good drinkers, they practice forms of intoxica tion which extend well beyond their states of alcoholic inebriation. George may pretend to be drunk at her wake to save face, but at other times George, Jane,

Norma and Margo perform a type of intoxication in relation to (themselves as) the image which crosses between a desire to merge with that image ("they just didn't love you enough" Jane tells her "Baby Jane" doll) and a desire to blast the image apart and set it in circulation. It is in this respect that their forms of intoxication diverge from that which Benjamin identifies in thejlaneur:

The crowd is not only the newest asylum of outlaws; it is also the latest narcotic for those abandoned. The flaneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. In this he shares the situation of the com modity. He is not aware of this special situation, but this does not diminish its effect on him and it permeates him blissfully like a narcotic that can compensate him for many humiliations. The intoxication to which the jlaneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers. 45

While theflaneur "surrenders to the intoxication of the commodity," for these women - abandoned much more thoroughly than the.flaneur - such intoxication is not an easy option, and has to be countered by another form of intoxication which attempts to rupture the very logic of the new. Easy or not and successful or not, the forms of intoxication these characters perform entail a loading of the image, a practice of fascination in which time is both arrested and becomes explosive.

45 Walter Benjamin, "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era ofHigh Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London and New York: Verso, 1989), p.55. 236 rage and the commodity

These films could be seen as playing out a particular temporal economy of the commodity. These women and the moments of cinema that they serve to represent have operated as commodity fetishes (both narratively and, through the use of stars in these films, extratextually). In the "now" of the films however, they are the discarded. The ways in which these films mobilize star discourses is of course crucial here, and one of the fascinations of these films is the relation between the star/actress who has, in some sense, been discarded, and her perform ance of such a character. The degree to which these stars are playing "themselves"

(and some of their previous characters) is kept in the forefront, particularly through the use of footage from their earlier films (in both Sunset Boulevard and

Baby Jane),46 producing a kind of anxiety around whether these women are, in fact, further exacerbating their status as discarded.

If we were to read these films through Benjamin's work, we could say that these characters stand at the intersection of the two axes that Buck-Morss outlines in her reading of the Arcades Project- petrified nature and transitory nature- and

46 Sunset Boulevard is particularly interesting in this regard. The film is, in fact, populated by a number of discarded stars- Buster Keaton, Hedda Hopper, and Francis X. Bushman are in Desmond's bridge group (referred to by Joe Gillis/William Holden as the "wax works"), and Hedda Hopper reappears in the final scene of the film as herself (in her later life role as a gossip columnist). Swanson was to play out her "fading star" character in a different way in an episode of The Beverly Hillbillies. In this episode, Swanson, playing "herself," is selling her house for charity. Granny Clampett hears of this, and thinking that Swanson is in desperate need of money, produces a film starring Swanson (with the rest of the family as the supporting cast) to save her from financial destitution. (Granny is also motivated by the fact that she believes that she and Swanson are twin sisters. The two women are, she claims, the spitting image of each other). Granny "returns" Swanson to the silent screen, producing a silent melodrama which has its opening night in a barn in the family's hometown. It is worth adding that at the time of Sunset Boulevards release, Swanson had not exactly left the public eye: the year before she had started her own tv program. For a discussion of Sunset Boulevard and its use of stars, see Lois W. Banner, In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 237 stage the four "faces" of the commodity (ruin, fossil, fetish, and wish image).47 In these films, the aging actress stands as the site on which the various "faces" of the commodity are juxtaposed and brought into a tension. We find this most clearly in Sunset Boulevard and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, primarily because of the temporal distance the two films establish between the women's status as fetish and wish image and their status as fossil and ruin, and because of the ways in which these two films explicitly draw on the discarded nature of their central actors. But if the aging actress stands as the site on which the various faces of the commodity are brought into juxtaposition, she also can be seen as taking up par ticular relations to the commodity-image, and as such can be positioned alongside the figures and social types that Benjamin deals with and brings into visibility.

The various figures that populate Benjamin's work- whether the rag picker, the collector, theflaneur, or the whore- can each be seen as staging a par ticular relation to the temporality of the commodity. While the ragpicker and the collector are more concerned with the discarded commodity in its status as discarded, the whore and the jlaneur are aligned with the commodity as fetish and

"wish image." Each of these figures also embodies a particular aspect of the com modity: the ragpicker not only collects a culture's trash, but is also allocated to the position of cultural trash, the collector is also part of his/her collection, the jlaneur, like the commodity, is intoxicated by the crowd, and the whore is both commodity and seller in one. The central characters in these films would seem to incorporate a number of these figures. Like the collector, they gather the dis carded and have become part of their collections (they collect moments of cinema

47 See Buck-Morss, The Dialectics ofSeeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (London and Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), p.211. See the previous chapter for a more detailed discussion of these distinctions in relation to the figure ofthe collector. 238 and re-order them, placing themselves in the collection as prize possession),48 and they are also discarded commodity wish images, or in Benjamin's terms, ruins.

They stand as custodians and collectors of a discarded past: they not only represent discarded periods of film and television history, they also summon and perform characters, stars and acts from other moments of cinema - including the earlier star images of these actresses themselves. Norma does Chaplin and

Merman in a private show for Joe49; George and her girlfriend Childie/Susannah

York do Laurel and Hardy at the local lesbian bar (though are misrecognised as

Abbott and Costello by an upmarket john visiting their prostitute neighbour);

Margo Channing performs "Bette Davis," and Jane has no problems in performing and mimicking Blanche's femme-screen-goddess number (and, we could add,

Davis has no problems in performing Crawford). Like thejlaneur, who "charges time like a battery, "5° these characters practice a form of intoxication. Like Ben- jamin's privileged figure of the whore, these women (or their youth) are both commodity and seller in one. "The commodity attempts to look itself in the face,"

Benjamin writes in "Central Park," "[i]t celebrates its becoming human in the

48 The exception here would be The Killing ofSister George. Unlike her earlier colleagues, George does not surround herself with images and souvenirs from her own performances, and Margo Channing is only once imaged next to a poster of herself (we could perhaps develop an argument here that the more souvenirs, the more discarded the woman. Both Margo and George are facing their dismissal. Blanche, Jane and Norma are well and truly discarded from the public ~ye). George however, like her colleagues, performs various cinema souvemrs.

49 In a promotion-review article in The New York Times titled "Rebirth of a Star," stills from Sunset Boulevard are set against portrait-style stills from some of Swanson's earlier films. What is most striking about this spread is how many of the characters Swanson had played (and the article singles out) are quoted in Sunset Boulevard: her Mack Sennett period (which Desmond performs for Joe), her "Sadie Thompson" character (which she often slips into), and most inter estingly, a still from Stage Struck, where Swanson had parodied Chaplin (as she does for an unappreciative Joe in Sunset Boulevard). See The New York Times, April 23rd 1950 (section VI, pp.26-27). 50 Benjamin, G Morss, The Dialectics ofSeeing, p.l05. 239 whore."5I These aging actress characters would seem to have most resonance with the figure of the whore in the Baudelaire essays. However, they also complicate this figure.

For Benjamin, the whore stands as an allegory of modernity. She "mimics the commodity and takes on its allure. "52 The figure of the whore embodies the forms of proximity which characterise the commodity in modernity in terms of its exhibition value, its claims to newness (she is aligned with fashion) and the forms of empathy (with exchange value) that she and it solicit. The proximity which the whore embodies however is infused with a temporal and spatial distance - the dialectic of proximity and distance which we find across so much of Benjamin's work. Benjamin is fascinated by the whore at the point of her disappearance as a specific type. The whore that interests Benjamin is a "threshold-dweller. "53 She stands at the entrance to the arcades (and the dream images of the past) soliciting trade, and she also stands at the threshold of Benjamin's memory in those texts where he summons his childhood. 54

51 Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," One-Way Street, p.229.

52 Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics ofLoitering," New German Critique 39 (Fall1986), p.120.

53 Sigrid Weigel, "'The female-has-been' and the 'first-born male of his work': from gender images to dialectical images in Benjamin's writings," trans. Rachel McNicholl, New Formations 20 (Summer 1993), pp.21-32, p.31.

54 "There is no doubt, at any rate, that a feeling of crossing the threshold of one's class for the first time had a part in the almost unequalled fascination of publicly accosting a whore in the street. At the beginning, however, this was a crossing of frontiers not only social but topographical, in the sense that whole networks of streets were opened up under the auspices of prostitution. But is it really a crossing, is it not, rather, an obstinate and voluptuous hovering on the brink, a hesitation that has its most cogent motive in the circumstance that beyond this frontier lies nothingness? But the places are countless in the great cities where one stands on the edge of the void, and the whores in the doorways of tene ment blocks and on the less sonorous asphalt of railway platforms are like the household goddesses ofthis cult of nothingness." Benjamin, "A Berlin Chronicle," One-Way Street, p.301. 240

The central characters in these films are also threshold-dwellers. At the same time that they perform a boredom and indifference to the economy of spec tacle in the present (which they treat with a kind of intolerance and distaste which leaves the new hanging as the banal), they attempt to summon and remember another economy of spectacle and the image. To what extent do they mobilise themselves as the discarded? Thus unleashing the "revolutionary energies that appear in the 'outmoded'"55 that Benjamin found in Breton's Nadja and which was so central to his enthusiasm for Surrealism? Each of these women, though in different ways, attempts to mobilise the discarded by bringing it/themselves into a volatile juxtaposition with the present: they attempt to charge themselves into the present at the same time that this present is to be blasted apart, unleashing the rage of the discarded. They are located at an intersection, reluctant witnesses to their own disappearance: but by being located (and locating themselves) at this intersection, they also stage a juxtaposition or collision of the different faces of the commodity, producing a volatile site in which the temporality of the com modity is charged to breaking point and through which particular relations to the image can be charted.

The tension between these different aspects of the commodity is staged through and by Jane, Blanche, Margo, Norma, and George in a number of ways.

On the one hand the tension is enabled through the ways in which the films draw on audience knowledges of the particular stars. Both the actors themselves, and the periods of cinema that they narratively stand as guardians of, function as souvenirs, and these souvenirs are brought into a volatile juxtaposition with each film's present. This tension between the different faces of the commodity is also produced by the ways in which the characters are framed, the ways they are fig ured as arrested and arresting image. Norma/Swanson, for instance, is often

55 Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," One Way-Street, p.229. 241 imaged as mummified, sitting in her "throne" like a wax figure. These shots, offered up as moments of horror, mark a different monstrosity to that which is narratively defined as monstrous in the film, the "horror" of mutton dressed up as lamb. If these shots establish the obscenity ofNorma, this obscenity is not (or not only) to do with her refusal to perform a socially sanctioned version of the aging woman, but is to do, rather, with the fact that she has economic- and indeed performative- power over Joe and has no qualms about displaying this. It is shots such as these which are, perhaps, the souvenir "trademarks" of these films: the shots which become the promotional stills tend to be those shots where the aging actress is figured as both arrested and arresting (as dinosaur and as medusa). In the films themselves however, these shots are also the most interesting and the most complicated, for while the characters may sometimes "forget" that they are seen as dinosaurs, they are well aware of the ways in which their very (self-) production as image carries the threat of freezing them in time. It is here - at the site of this tension- that they (unsucessfully) play out their struggle and stage their war.

We're stuck in the period at which we peaked, of course. All women do. We'd feel mutilated if you made us wipe off our Joan Crawford mouths and we always do our hair up in great big Vic tory rolls when we go out. We've still got lots of it, thank God, iron grey though it may be and tucked away in scarves, turban style, this very moment, to hide the curlers. We always make an effort. We paint an inch thick. We put on our faces before we come down to breakfast, the Max Factor Pan-Stik, the false eyelashes with the three coats of mascara, everything. We used to polish our eyelids with Vaseline, when we were girls, but we gave up on that during the war and now use just a simple mushroom shadow for day plus a hint of tobacco brown, to deepen the tone, and a charcoal eyeliner. Our fingernails match our toenails match our lipstick match our rouge. Revlon, Fire and Ice. The habit of applying warpaint outlasts the battle; haven't had a man for yonks but still we slap it on. Nobody could say the Chance girls were going gently into that good night. 56 (my italics)

56 Carter, Wise Children, pp.S-6. 242

It is perhaps primarily in the area of performance, or rather in the pacing of performance, that these films bring the different faces of the commodity into the most volatile tension. At moments when the aging actress is figured as arrested and arresting, we find both an articulation of her status as frozen image and at the same time the collapse or refusal of this arrest. Norma's silent screen melodrama acting is set against the cool indifference of Joe's 1950's aloofness and restraint. The pacing of her performance and presence slows down time, making it heady, while Baby Jane Hudson's wide-eyed expressions and gestures from pantomime and vaudeville drown out everything else in the frame. It is here, in the pacing of performance, that we find a juxtaposition in which the discarded and forgotten returns to haunt the present. The recently discarded returns as the archaic, and a temporal abyss opens between the present and the recent past, freezing and rupturing the present. If the characters are marked by a form of fas cination with the image (a fascination they perform), they also stage a form of fascination which is less about a form of arrest than a stretching of the temporality of the image- an attempt to (re)animate the image, to unleash that which has congealed in it. Jane stands before the rehearsal mirror in the parlour, decked out in in her "Baby Jane" costume and singing "I've Written a Letter to

Daddy." Her performance is intoxicating, our gaze framed and held by her image in the mirror, the horrific whiteness of her presence seems to erode the surface of the film and burn into our eyes in the same way that early studio lights were said to burn out the eyes of the actors. But she is, of course, superb - she seems to stretch and distort the temporality of performance and spectacle. 57 In these scenes

57 The film's present is impossible to locate or contain here. As Jane does a slow spin, her dress swirls up and we see the considerably younger dancer's legs of Davis: this body itself refuses classification. Discarded commodity wish images return en masse- the performance style, the posture of her body, the stage lights around the mirror - and in doing so seem to take on a life of their own, returning like the uncanny. 243 it is the return of the gaze which marks her as grotesque - the unwanted "intru- sion" of the cut away from Jane to the look of distaste on her accompanist's face, or when, in her unaccompanied performance of this number, she screams and turns away from her own reflection before slamming down the lid of the piano and leaving the room with a ballsy swagger (and what is it that really breaks the spell for her here? is it her reflection, rendered grotesque by poor lighting? or the persistent calling of Blanche's buzzer, summoning her back to the banality of her present?). Jane, of course, does not need to be performing her "Letter to Daddy" number to distort the temporal logic of spectacle here: she does it just as well in the ways she occupies the frame, the ways she seems to make the camera/image wait for her, and then make it wait a bit longer. Through the pacing of perform ance, these characters stretch and load the temporal economy of spectacle and fas cination. Proximity here becomes a site in which the force of the discarded is to be summoned.

In her reading of Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus, Mary Russo addresses a passage where Fevvers, the winged aerialiste, the Cockney Venus, stages a form of defiance, a defiance not so much of her body and its limits, but of the temporal economy of performance and spectacle. Russo quotes the follow ing passage from the novel (a passage which appears in the first few pages of

Nights at the Circus and sets the pace for Fevvers' character, both for her mode of performance and her form of storytelling):

When the hack aerialiste, the everyday wingless variety, performs the triple somersault, he or she travels through the air at a cool sixty miles an hour; Fevvers, however, contrived a contemplative and leisurely twenty-five, so that the packed theater could enjoy the spectacle, as in slow motion, of every tense muscle straining in her Rubenesque form. The music went much faster than she did; she dawdled. Indeed, she did defy the laws of projectiles, because a projectile cannot mooch along its trajectory; if it slackens its speed in mid-air, down it falls. But Fevvers, apparently, pottered along the invisible gangway between her trapezes with the portly diginity of a Trafalgar Square pigeon flapping from one proffered 244

handful of corn to another, and then she turned head over heels three times, lazily enough to show off the crack in her bum. 58

For Russo, Fevvers' "mooching" "reveals what angels and circus stars normally conceal: Labor and its bodily effects in the midst of simulated play and the creation of illusion. Her body dawdles lazily (the hardest work of all in the air) and yet, unlike her angelic sisters, she never seems to occupy discrete spots on her trajectory; she does not rest. She vamps in the musical sense, filling in the intervals with somersaults."59 While I'm certainly in agreement with Russo's reading of this passage, ofFevvers' act as the reinscription of labour back into the spectacle, my interest in this passage is rather in the ways in which Fevvers' dawdling in mid-air, "lazily enough to show off the crack in her bum"- dawdling while all eyes are upon her - is the mark of an incredible defiance which crosses from humour to rage and back again. It is sheer display, and a form of display which charges time, marking it and one's trajectory in it (and of it) on the body.

Like Fevvers, Jane, Blanche, Norma, George, and Margo disrupt the temporal economy of performance and spectacle. They both refuse to leave, and their "performance" of this refusal stretches and loads time. Like Fevvers, they stage a type of defiance, a defiance which is principally in relation to their status as image and which takes the form of recharting the temporality of spectacle. It is in their renegotiation of the temporalities of performance that we find a form of proxemics which is crucially written through by temporality, a practice of fas cination in which the image is held suspended as a site of forgetting and of pos sibility.

Transitoriness is the key to Benjamin's affirmation of the mythic element in cultural objects, redeeming the wish-images attached to the transitional, "too-early" ur-forms of modern technology as

58 Qtd. in Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modern ity (New York and London: Routledge, 1994) pp.176-7. This passage appears on p.17 of Carter's Nights at the Circus (London: Vintage, 1994 ).

59 Russo, The Female Grotesque, p.177. 245

momentary anticipations of utopia. But in the process of com modification, wish image congeals into fetish; the mythic lays claim to eternity. "Petrified nature" (erstarrte Natur) characterizes those commodities that comprise the modem phantasmagoria which in turn freezes the history of humanity as if enchanted under a magic spell. But this fetishized nature, too, is transitory. The other side of mass culture's hellish repetition of "the new" is the mortification of matter which is fashionable no longer. The gods grow out of date, their idols disintegrate, their cult places - the arcades themselves - decay. 60

While the aging actresses in these films are presented as ruins - discarded wish images- their project, we could say, is to resurrect the discarded dreams embodied in themselves as image. This, of course, is where these women get trapped, for in their attempts to resurrect their status as wish image, what they summon has both congealed into the fetish and then decayed, and in the process they further define themselves as the discarded. While they do not, in the end, avoid the trash heap, they nevertheless stage something else - an experience of time and their place in it (as both historical markers and as discarded from the present) which is written through by shock and crisis and manifests as a form of rage. What the characters and their performances offer is a figuring of crisis in which time is loaded to breaking point- the temporality of the commodity, the temporality of stardom for women, the temporality of woman as image.

"Baudelaire never once wrote a whore-poem from the perspective of the whore," Benjamin writes in "Central Park"61 (and as Buck-Morss adds, Benjamin likewise never presented the whore from the whore's perspective). 62

"No form of eternalizing is so startling as that of the ephemeral and the fashionable forms which the wax figure cabinets preserve for us. And whoever has once seen them must, like Andre Breton (Nadja, Paris 1928) lose his heart to the female form in the Musee Grevin who adjusts her stocking garter in the comer of a loge" (V, 117).

60 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics ofSeeing, p.159.

61 Benjamin, "Central Park," p.42.

62 Buck-Morss, "The Flaneur, The Sandwichman and the Whore," p.120. 246

The wax woman still adjusts her garter, as she has for half a century. Her act is a moment frozen in time. She is unchanged, defying organic decay. But her red dress is musty; her figure and hair are no longer fashionable; she has clearly aged.63

Unlike the wax figure whore frozen in time, the women in these films both play out and attempt to thwart the temporality of the commodity-image. The form of shock and trauma that mark these characters - and which underlies their rage - is a result of their dismissal. In their refusal to be allocated to the position of loss however they produce a shock or arrest of the present, though in the end they are left suspended there. While these women (and these films) give form to crisis, they do not manage to rupture their status as historical markers (of history as chronology) and their status as faded image. Each of the films draws to a close with the aging actress staging (or restaging) her own disappearance in the very attempt to refuse it and carve or burn her way into the present. As sole witnesses to their own disappearance, their only option seems to be to reproduce their dis appearance- now with an audience- through performing an excessive visibility.

("To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event"64 writes

Cathy Caruth). "The historical power ofthe trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its forgetting that it is first experienced at all. "65 In the final scenes of Sunset Boulevard and

Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Norma and Jane are both swallowed into whiteness, as if disappearing into and becoming one with the light of the pro jector. In All About Eve Margo/Davis avoids her disappearance by quietly leaving the public eye, but in her place we witness another disappearance. In the final

63 ibid, pp.130-l.

64 Cathy Caruth, "Trauma and Experience: Introduction," Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp.4-5.

65 ibid, p.8. 247 shot, Eve's replacement performs the disappearance which has already been marked as her future. Standing before a set of mirrors, her image is fractured across a million reflections, lost, once again, in a blaze of light. It is only Sister

George who is swamped in darkness.

In a photograph of Bette Davis taken in 1982, she is pictured sitting in what is presumably her loungeroom holding a cushion on which is embroidered

"Old Age Ain't No Place for Sissies." None of the central female characters in these films could be seen as "sissies," each is involved in a battle to articulate her experiences of time, and each stages the temporal structuring of experience in the age of the commodity fetish- the relation between woman-as-image (star) and the commodity as the new as the always-the-same (and the soon to be discarded). In a letter written to Adorno in 1935, Benjamin writes ofthe Gracian motto that he attempts to put into practice in his work (and which we could see as central to his understanding of - and relation to - the temporal structuring of experience in modernity): "Seek to enlist time on your side in all things. "66 To enlist time on your side would not be to refuse aging (Benjamin's valuing of the process of aging in terms of the forms of remembrance it entails is a constant in his work), but rather to grasp the temporal structuring of experience and use it as the basis for a new form of transmissibility.

66 Benjamin to Adorno, May 31st 1935, published in The Cor respondences ofWalter Benjamin: 1910-1940, eds Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p.448. 248

Chapter 6

Performing Breakdowns: Gendering the

Crisis of Experience

From what are phenomena rescued? Not just or not so much from the ill-repute and contempt into which they've fallen, but from the catastrophe when a certain form of transmission often presents them in terms of their "value as heritage." - They are rescued by exhibiting the discontinuity that exists within them. There is a kind of transmission that is a catastrophe.!

For Benjamin, as Peter Osborne argues, modernity is "a decisive mutation of historical experience, which gains its meaning from its dialectical relations to tradition. [ ... ] modernity is in principle a destruction of tradition: it involves the inauguration of new forms of historical consciousness, of necessity. "2 Modernity is both a crisis of tradition (of tradition's traditional modes of transmission- the production of a sense of continuity between past, present, and future) and the establishment of new temporal structurings of experience. If tradition operates as a form of commemoration, a practice of handing down which interweaves individual and collective memory, the destruction of tradition is also a crisis of memory. Osborne has provided one of the most sophisticated accounts of Ben jamin's theory of modernity in his book The Politics ofTime. As he writes, "Ben- jamin's reflections on the fate of tradition as the Urform ofmemorative com-

1 Benjamin, "N [Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]" (N9,4), trans. Leigh Hafrey and Richard Sieburth, Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p.63.

2 Peter Osborne, The Politics ofTime: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 1995), p.114-115. 249

munication seem to culminate in an aporia. The established forms of memorative communication are archaic, but the new forms of communication do not have any memorative content. At the level of social experience, modernity is a form of forgetting, or, at least, the repression of history into the cultural unconscious. "3

Benjamin's aim is not to restore tradition and traditional modes of transmission.

Such a project would be both futile and politically retrograde in that it would not be able to critically embrace the structuring of experience (as inherently interrupt ive) that forms and underlies modernity, and therefore his (and arguably our) his torical moment. Rather, Benjamin's aim is to find a way in which the temporal structuring of experience in modernity (the new as the ever-always-the-same) could be critically, brutally, grasped, and be the basis for a new form of trans missibility. As argued in Chapter 1, it is in these terms that Benjamin positions his theory of film.

Benjamin is arguing then for a form of transmissibility that can both grasp the structuring of experience in modernity and make it transmissible, but he is also arguing for a form of transmissibility which does not preserve and seal off phenomena and experiences by handing them down in terms of their "value as heritage." Benjamin's relation to tradition, its modes of transmissibility, and its destruction is complex. On the one hand, tradition glazes over ruptures and fis sures for the sake of continuity (tradition is always the tradition of the victors for

Benjamin) and as such, misses the possibility of grasping and rupturing the moment of possibility (however slim) which, he argues, is available in each pre sent. On the other hand, tradition entails forms of remembrance, practices of handing down which can interweave individual and collective memory. Tradi tional modes of transmissibility are inadequate, precisely because they cannot

3 ibid. p.137. 250

grasp the structuring of experience in 20th century modernity. 4 This chapter addresses crisis and the performance of crisis - and performance as crisis - in terms of questions of transmissibility (or what Osborne calls memorative com munication).

In shifting the discussion to performance, both performance in film, and to questions of performance and crisis more generally, my aim is twofold: firstly, to look at the potential of gesture and performance as a form of memorative com munication through which the experience of crisis can be both grasped and made transmissible; and secondly, to extend Benjamin's analysis of crisis into our own historical moment and to address its gendered forms. The form of crisis which will be discussed here is characterized by its constancy and on-going nature, it is characterized in other words by its form of repetition - the breakdown which seems to know no end and which becomes familiar. It is a form of crisis which more generally goes under the name of depression (and which is, of course, more generally associated with women). And yet while depression and breakdowns seem to be far removed from the terrain of crisis and trauma precisely because of

4 We find this argument throughout Benjamin's work, and perhaps most famously in this often quoted passage from "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work ofNikolai Leskov": "experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessness. Every glance at a newspaper demonstrates that it has reached a new low, that our picture, not only of the external world but of the moral world as well, overnight has undergone changes which were never thought possible. With the [First] World War a process began which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battelfield grown silent- not richer, but poorer in communicable experi ence? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A gener ation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explo sions, was the tiny, fragile human body." Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Suffolk: Fontana/Collins, 1982), pp.83-4. 251

the former's chronic and on-going status, it is the very constancy and pedestrian nature of the extended breakdown which marks it as a contemporary form of the crisis of experience.

John Cassavetes' Love Streams (1984) and his earlier film Opening Night

(1978) could be seen as being structured through forms of crisis. Reading these films through and against Benjamin's work, this chapter explores the ways in which a form of gendered crisis is staged in these two films through a gestural practice. Rather than focussing on particular gestures in these films, I will look at the ways in which the temporal charging that characterizes Benjamin's concept of the gestus (and his gestural practice more generally) can be seen as underlying the very logic of the scene in Love Streams and Opening Night. This chapter, then, returns to some of the questions posed in the first chapter regarding gesture, cinema, and the destruction of experience, here looking at two films which place crisis - and the crisis of experience - on centre stage. *** smashing your head, passing out: staging a breakdowns

Like the films discussed in the previous chapter, Cassavetes' Love Streams and Opening Night deal with women, crisis, and performance. Certainly there are many films that address women's experience of crisis and depression, particularly in the histories of feminist filmmaking where this is frequently tied to experiences of time, and often through staging the contours of boredom (exemplary here would be the early films of Chantal Akerman and some of Marguerite Duras' films). What interests me about these two Cassavetes films is their figuring of a

5 With thanks to Lesley Stern for her work on Gena Rowlands and Open ing Night: "Opening Out: The Acting Out of Gena Rowlands," unpublished paper. 252

particular form of crisis, and the ways in which this crisis is made transmissible.

Ifthe films' characters are constantly subjected to shock- to sensory bombard ments which both paralyze them and send them spinning - shock here is brought about by a return of the gaze which recognizes these women only as figures of loss. In this respect, they offer an interesting reply to those films from the 1950's and 1960's which played out a particular form of shock through the figure of the aging female star. In the earlier films, the characters attempt to refuse their posi tion as figures of loss by resurrecting their status as image. Faced with their dis missal, they try to summon or maintain their status as fetish (commodity-image) by burning themselves into the space of spectacle, performing a kind of intoxica tion - a charging of time. In the Cassavetes films however, the central female characters mobilize shock and crisis in an attempt to rupture both the banality and dead time that they find themselves in, and the discourses of aging, depression, and femininity that they seem to be implicated in. The different forms and poten tial of crisis and breakdown in these two groupings of films could also be understood through the different relations to boredom that Buck-Morss identifies in Benjamin's work. "Benjamin distinguished politically between different social types in terms of their attitude toward boredom: the gambler just killing time, the flaneur who 'charges time like a battery,' and 'finally, a third type: he charges time and gives it out again in changed form: - in that of expectation. "'6 If we were to read these two groups of films in terms of these distinctions, the aging actress films ofthe 1950's and 60's would seem to have more in common with the figure of the flaneur, charging time like a battery, whereas the two Cassavetes films would have more in common with the "third type"- which Buck-Morss aligns with the revolutionary who "charges time and gives its power out again in

6 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics ofSeeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1989), p.105. 253

changed form," who grasps shock experience, transforms it, and produces a new form of transmissibility through it.

As with the aging actress films of the 1950's and 60's, the central female characters in Opening Night and Love Streams are attempting to locate themselves at the very point at which they are threatened with their own disappearance. In

Love Streams, the central female character Sarah Lawson/Gena Rowlands- wife and mother, deserted by husband and child- refuses her allocated position of loss by attempting to articulate her experience of time. In Opening Night

Myrtle/Rowlands is a 40ish actor who is to play a role which, she fears, will define her as "too late." The two central characters in these films are both, in different ways, trying to find a way of locating themselves in relation to discourses of desire. Both films involve a central female character who is attempting to articulate loss and locate what this loss is, while not being defined by or as it.

Both these films deal with women in shock. The forms of shock the two women undergo inscribe their characters in a number of ways: they are unable to locate themselves, unable to communicate their experiences (they can barely recognize them as their own), and they are constantly brought face to face with representations of themselves which they simply don't recognize. Opening Night's

Myrtle and Love Streams' Sarah struggle against and refuse a discourse of depres sion and aging which allocates them to a position of domesticated and inevitable loss. Sarah tries to find ways of occupying the situations she finds herself in through what De leuze would call the attitudes and postures of her body, but her actions, movements, and gestures are always anomalous. 7 While it is through a kind of gestural practice that she tries to locate herself and attempts to find a cir-

7 Deleuze briefly discusses Cassavetes' work in Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp.192-3. 254

cuit of exchange - a kind of narrativity - for her gestures, it is these same attitudes and postures of the body, written through by shock and interruption, which serve to further dislocate her from the situations and spaces she precariously occupies.

Her gestures and movements are both written through by shock and, through the ways that they drown out everything else in the frame, constantly infuse each pre sent with a shock. In Opening Night Myrtle attempts to wrest herself from a nar rative which she fears will mark her as loss, and at the same time tries to find a way of both giving form to the crisis she is experiencing and come through it.

Both films offer an articulation of the crisis of experience, and this crisis is clearly marked by gender and takes gendered forms.

Reading the forms of crisis Opening Night and Love Streams stage through Benjamin's work provides a framework to address the ways in which the crisis of experience (which lies at the heart of his project) can be seen as taking specific forms. Shock experience does not remain the same. This is not simply to say that what shocks changes (which would bring us into a concept of history as progress, as a movement towards the new regardless of whether that new

"pleases" or not). It is also to say that the status of shock changes. Agamben has addressed the historical changes that have to be taken into consideration in any discussion of the decay or poverty of experience which is seen as characterizing modernity. If for Benjamin the destruction of experience, which World War 1 exemplified, was a catastrophe, Agamben argues that: "Today, however, we know that the destruction of experience no longer necessitates a catastrophe, and that humdrum daily life in any city will suffice. "8 If the destruction or decay of experience- the "non-translatability into experience" of everyday life,9 the

8 Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London & New York: Verso, 1993), p.13.

9 ibid, p.14. 255

impossibility of locating oneself in time and space and in relation to others - no longer operates as catastrophic but is rather simply the familiar, this decay of experience and its non-translatability nevertheless takes gendered forms. In Open ing Night and Love Streams we could say that this "everydayness" of the poverty or decay of experience is in fact catastrophic (or rather it is such for the central female characters). Both of these films stage the everydayness and banality of the poverty of experience - its quotidian aspect. And equally importantly, both films explore the ways in which the poverty or crisis of experience takes gendered forms (here in the form of depression and boredom) and is valued accordingly.

Certainly both these films deal with melancholy - or what, in relation to women, goes under the less sublimated term of depression. In her book The Gendering of

Melancholia, Juliana Schiesari examines the ways in which "questions of 'loss' become differently inscribed according to gender," arguing that "loss and lack

[ ... ]are subjected to a cultural determination in terms of who has the most privileged access to the display of loss." 10 If, as Schiesari has argued, women's losses and experience of loss are barely recognized outside the terms of female depression - and certainly barely recognized as significant or as a site of

"creativity" as is the case with melancholia, I want to look at the ways in which these experiences of loss can be understood in terms of a crisis of experience.

Benjamin does not address the ways in which the crisis of experience which underlies modernity takes gendered forms, but his analysis of the ways in which this crisis must be both grasped (as our historical experience) and can become the basis for new forms of transmissibility - and, perhaps, new forms of narrativity - provides us with a valuable framework to address the gestus of a gendered experi-

10 Juliani Schiesari, The Gendering ofMelancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics ofLoss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p.31. 256

ence of crisis. ***

We read a text or a commentary, an analysis or an interpretation; but instead of beginning by imprisoning ourselves in knowledge, in an apprenticeship to and a reproduction of dogmas and contents, of instituted forms and acquired rules, we suffer a shock which throws us forward and backward, which paralyses us and devotes us to thinking and writing. This experience of excess, this excessive experience, is only the experience of communicability [ ... ] Such is what occurs when one is simultaneously paralysed by and devoted to thought and writing.11

Diittrnan's "experience of communicability" is produced through shock - the kind of shock that comes when we are bewildered and fascinated, confronting something which we cannot place but which holds us enthralled. This experience of shock, this shock which throws us forwards and backwards, is for Duttman the

"experience of communicability"- an excessive experience, an experience of excess, the excess of experience. As Hansen has argued, it is in this way that shock, for Benjamin, can serve as an artificial means of propelling the body into

"moments of recognition," 12 enabling a form of awakening. How can we understand the "moments of recognition" that shock can bring forth in terms of gendered experiences of the fragmentation and decay of experience? What is the relation between shock and depression? What would such a shock which throws us forwards and backwards be in the context of a gendered decay of experience?

11 Alexander Garcia Duttman, "Tradition and Destruction: Walter Ben jamin's Politics of Language," trans. Debbie Keates, in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p.44.

12 Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,"' New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987), p.211. 257

And equally importantly, in what circumstances are these experiences of shock

recognised as such?

This shock which throws us forward and backward is certainly a familiar

one when confronting Benjamin's work. It also describes a familiar experience in

relation to films that hold us enthralled and bewildered. Cassavetes' Love Streams

and Opening Night exemplify such a form of shock on two fronts. Firstly they

stage this form of shock - they articulate its form and perform it - through particu

lar (female) characters. Secondly, they produce this experience of shock- of

being thrown forwards and backwards- for and in the spectator. If they set the

spectator spinning, this is both through cinematic means (framing, editing, the

pacing of performance etc - the ways in which shock experience infuses the very

structuring of the films) but also because this shock and chaos is never named or

contained as such, and as a result, occupies the films themselves rather than

simply defining particular characters.

If it is a form of shock which induces the breakdowns of the two central

female characters in these films, it is also a form of shock which throws these

characters into the attempt to both find a way of articulating this depression and

unleashing its force. This economy of shock experience is explictly played out in

Cassavetes' films, and in these two films in particular. In Opening Night the cen tral character Myrtle/Gena Rowlands is seen standing in the doorway of a hotel room, shot first in medium long shot and then in close up. After standing there for

a moment she suddenly hurls her head (or better, her head seems to hurl itself) into the doorframe. Repeatedly her forehead and skull smash against the wood.

She is doing this to herself she says (and she is the only figure in the frame), but it is the parameters of herself that are in question here. What is so startling about this scene is the ways in which Rowland's character (Myrtle) puts herself through a variety of forms of violent shock - to the extent that she bashes her head 258

repeatedly- in an attempt to locate herself. We could say that she undergoes these shocks as a means of generating that image which will give form to and express the decay of experience which she is being brought face to face with and also expected to represent. But these experiences of shock are also the very means through which this character attempts to grasp herself and her present. In a sense,

Myrtle is wanting to grasp and break through an experience of time. She is at an impossible point between two different discourses and experiences of time. On the one hand she is being incorporated into a narrative of women's aging (in which she is marked as fading), on the other she is experiencing her life as a col lection of random, fragmentary, shock-like events. Both experiences of time threaten to annihilate her. It is only by bringing the force of shock, of the rupturing instant, against this narrative of aging that she can both rupture and produce an image of (gendered) experience.

Opening Night's Myrtle and Love Streams' Sarah struggle against and refuse a gendered discourse of depression which allocates them to a position of domesticated and inevitable loss. Sarah Lawson attempts to generate images in which the loss she experiences is given form. Myrtle attempts to wrest herself from a narrative which will mark her as loss by staging - through the parameters of performance - the gestus of a form of crisis. These films do more than simply stage a (gendered) form of crisis; rather, the very logic of shock experience (of empty, repetitive, interruptive time) is grasped and charged to breaking point and becomes the basis of a form of narrativity. In Cinema 2, De leuze reads Cas- savetes' cinema through Comolli, arguing that it is a cinema of "revelation."

Quoting Comolli, Deleuze writes that in Cassavetes' films:

the only constraint is that of bodies, and the only linkage that of linkages of attitudes: characters "are constituted gesture by gesture and word by word, as the film proceeds; they construct them selves, the shooting acting on them like a revelation, each advance ment of the film allowing them a new development in their 259

behaviour, their own duration very precisely coinciding with that of the film." 13

Certainly these films would seem to be constructed through the linkage of attitudes and gestures of the body, but more importantly these attitudes and ges tures are themselves structured by (and as) shock experience. What characterizes

Cassavetes' films is the ways in which these shock-like and shock-infused ges tures become the basis of and means to a form of storytelling. As argued in chap ter 1, for Benjamin the gestus is characterized by a dual force - as an interrupted fragment it is both framed and enclosed, but as interrupted fragment it also ges tures beyond itself. The gestus entails a compression and contraction of time into an instant, charging it and infusing it with a shock. The gestus stages a complex temporality, for at the same time that it entails a compression and contraction of time, it also activates both the temporality of remembrance (through what could be called its memorative content), and, through its gesturing beyond itself, an opening and rupturing of the present. Opening Night and Love Streams stage and are structured through this complex temporality of the gestus. It is as if gestures are constantly trying to find other gestures and situations with which they can couple and exchange.

Cassavetes' Love Streams is structured around the principle of shock and interruption - in terms of editing, mise en scene, performance, characters, and interactions. Shock here takes the form of a series of encounters which are defensively and offensively countered. More importantly however, Love Streams presents two forms of depression and shock experience, and these are represented by the two central characters (siblings): Robert Harmon!Cassavetes and Sarah

Lawson!Rowlands. Through these two characters the film stages two different

13 Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp.192-3. 260

economies of shock and crisis. Love Streams is both brutal and tender, each scene is marked by the "meeting" of different manifestations of crisis as characters negotiate their way around each other. Robert Harmon is a successful writer of what are variously described as books "about women," "about sex," and "about love." He is located within a per petual present of fragmentary interactions and moments, each of which is defined by its interruptiveness and interruptability. This character confronts every situa tion in terms of its shock potential, or rather produces every situation as one of shock. If we were to locate his "stimulus shield" it would be his endlessly recycled gestures and expressions which he uses as a buffer in virtually every interaction. The film opens with a scene at his house - he has hired about ten young women, presumably sex workers, moving them into his home for a few days so that he can interview them for material to be used in his new book on

"nightlife." What he wants of them, as with many of the other women that he will have brief encounters with, is for them to give him their "secrets" (for they must, he half-heartedly seems to believe, have a secret). Seating the women around his bar, he gives them a drink and then proceeds to question them in a manner which is both obstinant and aggressive, yet shrouded in the gestures of seductive charm.

What is excrutiating and at the same time fascinating about this scene (which has barely been narratively located and is a brutal opening to the film) is the mix of aggression with the emptied gestures of seduction. These gestures seem abstracted from his character - they are a repertoire of empty "moves" and poses which will be brought out and recycled constantly throughout the film (and also across many of Cassavetes' earlier films). The wry smile, the knowing wink, the seductive gaze which is both penetrating and vacant at the same time - these gestures hang there devoid of emotion and empty as he delivers them without committment. He will simply repeat and alternate them as the young women refuse - or can't be bothered - to play enigmatic. 261

Caught in a perpetual present of repeatable and interchangeable interac

tions, each of which he produces as a form of shock, it could be said of the

character- as Benjamin wrote of Baudelaire- that "[p]etrified unrest[ ... ] is the

formula for the image of [his] life, a life which knows no development."l4 Robert

Harmon has the compulsiveness of a gambler and performs the gestures of the

Gritbler - seeing the world as vacated of meaning, each interaction is the attempt

to grasp the object as fragment, to ply it open. It is women whom he will want to

perform this role for him (with the exception of his sister). These gestures will be

repeated so incessantly, and such interactions recur so frequently, that they

become simply the mark of shock. At one level we could say that he is constantly

trying to generate that experience of shock which will startle him out of the

empty time he occupies, but the emptiness of the gestures, the ways they are

framed by the camera and presented as endlessly interchangeable fragments, pre

cludes the possibility of this economy of shock ever breaking out of the familiar.

Sarah Lawson on the other hand undergoes a quite different economy of

shock. Sarah is marked by loss more clearly, and by quite real losses. She has

located herself in a discourse of desire - as wife and mother - only to find that

now she has no location and no identity. "Love is a stream" she tells her therapist,

"it doesn't stop." She, however, has been set adrift. At one level she is the

prototypical figure of the woman undergoing a breakdown - she is a white, mid

dle class, heterosexual, mother, divorcee. The experience of shock which she

undergoes is the confrontation with the images of her non-identity which are con

stantly presented to her. If Robert looks the same everywhere, Sarah is constantly

' changing, and there is virtually nothing that can be called her own. Whereas

Robert approaches every situation in the same way, confronting every interaction

14 Benjamin, "Central Park," trans. Lloyd Spencer, New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985), p.40. 262

with the same repertoire of gestures (regardless of whether it is the son that he has never bothered to know who he suddenly finds himself looking after for the weekend, the sex workers he hires, or the singer he tries to seduce), Sarah has no set gestures. She tends to read situations literally. She goes ten pin bowling and tells the clerk at the desk that she is "looking for the sex." Often shot in the harsh light of daylight and neon, she is left exposed in spaces she can hardly navigate.

The shocks she undergoes are experiences which she can't articulate, the losses she feels are barely recognised by others as losses. She is figured as crazy, depressed, on the edge. If these shocks mean she can't locate herself and can't find a way of grasping and occupying the present, her response is to black out. Sarah passes out a number of times during the film, and the hallucinations of each black out become progressively more and more elaborate. She is first seen passing out relatively early in the film, when she passes out in the offices of the Family

Court, collapsing to the floor with the sort of composure that marks her black out as something which she has done before and will do again - it is a particular form of refusal. It is a shocking and magnificently timed response to that which is simply too much. Sarah and her husband are getting divorced. Their child, a young teenage girl, has decided to live with her father. Sarah is having a break down. "Nobody leave this room until we find out what it means. I can discuss it -

I've got a lot oftime" she says. The question here is "love," and clearly nobody wants to discuss it, least of all, I suspect, with her. It is at this point that she leaves the closed family court room and crumples to the floor, passing out between the desks of the office staff. This will not be the only time where Sarah

Lawson blacks out in this way. At these points the ground falls from underneath her and she no longer knows who she is. When she can't find a way of locating herself, blacking out is a means of both rupturing the present and, ironically, grasping it. It is through these black outs, and the hallucinations that they entail, 263

that she manages to charge and rupture the dead time that she finds herself in. In

her most remarkable black out sequence, Sarah is seen lying on a bed at her

brother's house laughing to herself. Following her laughter, the film cuts to her

blackout dream: Sarah is standing by the pool of the family home. Seated before her are her (ex)husband and teenage daughter. Sarah has decided that she will make them laugh in 60 seconds (that should win their love back). She places a timer on the table, and as its ticking fills the scene, she proceeds to perform an endless series of trick-shop pranks - squirting rings, fake popcorn, chattering teeth which jump across the table. "You're not funny" her daughter tells her (her family is clearly a bore). As her time runs out and the buzzer goes off, Sarah does her grand finale. Standing on the diving board of the pool and fully dressed, she does a double blackflip into the water. The camera remains on the surface of the water, but Sarah doesn't rise. Instead, the scene cuts to another, and we enter the next dream. If losing consciousness is one of the principal ways in which shock is manifested on this character and body - when the shock is that of a constant con frontation with (images of) her non-identity- then the sequences brought forth in these black outs are, at the same time, both what this shock induces and that which gives form to and attempts to overcome this shock. Like the Surrealist

"alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds,"IS for Sarah, crisis is the constant state through which daily life is structured.

IS Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London and New York: Verso, 1992), p.239. 264

women and crisis: "everything is not alright"

In Opening Night the central character Myrtle/Rowlands is constantly trying to bring forth an image through which she can locate herself and make sense of the character she is to perform - a character that she says she feels nothing about, a character "without hope." To do this she puts the very parameters of herself at risk - through intoxication, physical trauma, possession and exorcism. Myrtle is at an impossible place. At the same time that she is being incorporated into a particular narrative of aging - a narrative defined by con tinuity (and in which she is marked as fading) - she is experiencing her life as a collection of random, fragmentary, shock-like events. Both experiences oftime threaten to annihilate her. It is only by bringing the force of shock, of the rupturing instant, up against this narrative of aging that she can both rupture and produce an image of gendered experience. Opening Night, more than Love

Streams, stages this struggle to grasp oneself. Myrtle, it would seem, undertakes those practices of remembering that go under the name of Eingedenken for Ben jamin: the form of recollection in which what is grasped is neither an origin, a cause, nor a meaning, but the traces of missed experience which can activate an interruption or rupturing of the present. If what is to be remembered - what is to be brought into confrontation with the present - is the unfulfilled wishes and

"ruins" of the past, here this memorative practice is both individual and collec tive. What is remembered here are not only images of an individual life

(Myrtle's), which are rescued and rewritten at the moment when they are threatened with being lost to a narrative that can only accomodate them as loss. It is also a case of re-collecting, interrupting, and rewriting a discourse of women, aging, loss, and depression. This film also remembers and forgets other films about women, aging, crisis, and performance- in particular, it remembers and 265 forgets All About Eve. In a way we could say that its rewriting of this film is a form of remembering, a remembering which unpacks the unfulfilled promises of the earlier film.

Myrtle undergoes shock and even summons shock as a means of rupturing both the present that she finds herself in and the narrativizing of the past (and her future) that she is confronting. Myrtle manages this rupturing of the present more than Cassavetes' other female characters, and achieves this for a variety of reasons, but primarily because of the place of performance in this film. By being about performance, about women and performance, about a woman who has to perform a role which she wants to both refuse and make sense of, Opening Night has allowed itself a narrative and performative framework through which a gen dered experience of shock and what it enables can be unfolded. If the overcoming of shock through shock is gestured toward here (the idea of "renewal" which Ben- jamin regards as possible within contemporary forms of experience and through the new technologies of reproduction like film), it is because it is understood in terms of the necessity of grasping shock (as a temporal structuring of experience) as the basis for a new form of narrativity. The fragmentation of the body which characterizes shock experience, the inability to locate experiences on the body, the loss - we could say - of the gestural sphere as a site of exchange between self and other, are all brought to the fore here by locating the film around questions of performance. Performance in this film becomes a site of crisis. Performance or its ruin is the stage on which experience is to be made transmissible for Myrtle.

Like Kafka for Benjamin, Myrtle too is struggling to find "fragments of

[her] own existence,"I6 and this struggle is one which threatens to annihilate her.

Myrtle is performing a character in a play, a character that she struggles against.

16 Benjamin, "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death," Illu minations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (Suffolk: Fontana/Collins, 1982), p.137. 266

This character is the figure of a woman who is "past her prime," for whom it is

"too late for love" and who is coming into acceptance of this (she'd like to fall in love but it is too late- it's as simple as that Myrtle is told by the play's author

Sarah Goode/Joan Blondell when she retracts from the character, once again interrupting a rehearsal). The film stages Myrtle's struggle with this role - a role about women, aging, desire, and power. If she is trying to make sense of the character she is to play, a character which others keep on expecting her to find an image of herself in, she must also, she believes, be able to locate herself some where in all of this. As she tries to find fragments of her own existence, she brings forth two figures, both of which she has an ambivalent relation to. One is the character she is to perform in the play "The Second Woman" and who, profes sionally, she has to bring forth. The other is a young woman - a figure which she summons to stand for her own youth, for that which she thinks is lost or being killed off (some idea of passion, intensity, and a position in discourses of desire), and in relation to whom she is not sure whether she should be grieving or whether in fact this loss has even taken place.

The first of these two figures is the play's character "Virginia," a woman who is regretting the choices she has made in her life, who revisits ex-husbands in an attempt to locate exactly what it is that has been lost, and who is confronting her aging as the realisation of lost opportunities. The other figure - Nancy - is a young woman, a fan of Myrtle's who becomes what we could call a casualty of the theatre, knocked down by a passing car outside the theatre as Myrtle and her colleagues are leaving. If the young woman's death is hardly noticed by those who witness it (Myrtle's cast and crew), this death also represents for Myrtle those things which she suspects are both being killed off in herself and defined as losses for the character she is to perform. Nancy is first seen in a pre-credit sequence outside the theatre that Myrtle is performing in, pushing her way through a crowd of fans and clinging to Myrtle hysterically. This is the only scene 267 in which Nancy is seen alive, and even here her presence is precarious: shrouded in a raincoat and hat, her profile is obscured by the hair hanging over her face; her gestures are erratic, out of keeping with the gestures and movements of the other characters and seem to already mark her as an apparition. Myrtle "takes in" this young woman in the sense that she is possessed by her. She mourns her, or rather does not mourn her: Nancy becomes a melancholic loss. Myrtle takes her in as her "first woman," her first life (which she is not willing to give up for the second), the "Myrtle" that she is told is lost and for whom it is "too late." If

Myrtle feels like she is undertaking her own embalming in the role of Virginia

(and equally that she is participating in the laying out of the body of her charac~ ter), Nancy at first seems to offer her a way of both giving form to this loss and disavowing it. From this point on Nancy appears as a presence, a ghost, who increasingly threatens to consume Myrtle and take her over, and who eventually

Myrtle kills.

Both these women threaten to consume her, to define her as loss. For

"Nancy," Myrtle becomes an older woman, "afraid" and a "coward." Virginia threatens to define her professionally and personally as outside of desire. Both these other women (we could see them as the "first" and "second" woman, leaving

Myrtle in the nowhere zone in between) have to be summoned, and they have to be brought forth by Myrtle herself. Virginia exists on the page and in the per formance. This character, as Myrtle is told by the play's author, only requires of her that she reads her lines and she will appear (exactly what Myrtle fears in fact).

Nancy exists as a ghost. She tries to recognise herself in these figures and these figures in herself, but to do so she must take them in and also keep them at a dis tance. Myrtle's dilemma is to find a way of bringing forth an image of women and aging in which she can also locate herself, which is not defined by loss and melancholy, and which doesn't send the middle aged woman to the wings. This refusal to be located in the "too late" is what mobilizes a form of remembering 268 that aims at thwarting a narrative and narrativizing over which she feels she has no control. Like Sarah at the family pool, Myrtle attempts to charge time - to charge herself into it and to make it explosive rather than serving - as the female star so often does (aligned as she is with both fashion and the image) - as a his torical "marker."

Myrtle is thrown forwards and backwards throughout the film. The shocks she undergoes are the recognition of her own allocated disappearance, of her own no place, of her loss of identity. It is the possibility of recognising expe riences as her own that has her "corning off the wall" (and Myrtle will spend much of this film up against walls - clambering them when she is too drunk to walk, throwing herself against them each time she exits the traumatic space of the stage). What Myrtle suspects is letting her down is performance itself, and Myrtle is before all else a performer. The structuring of the film - the lines and relation ships that cross from on-stage to off-stage (Myrtle's ex-lovers are her co-workers, and play her character's lovers and ex-lovers), the virtual impossibility of ever definitively distinguishing between what is part of the play, part of its improvisa tion, and what is taking place outside the play - means that performance occupies all the parameters of the film. If performance here seems to be letting Myrtle down it is because she cannot find a way to play her part. If she is to perform a character who is defined by loss because of how she is positioned in a gendered discourse of aging, Myrtle wants to find a way to both articulate loss without being defined by or as it and find a way of articulating the crisis she does find herself in. It is only by producing a performance which is written through by shock experience that Myrtle finds a way of redeeming the possibilities of per formance. She harnesses the force of shock as a means of charging time.

Myrtle is tossed around on and off-stage as she looks to find a way to locate herself. When we see her on stage (whether in rehearsal, in the out of town performances, or on the opening night performance) she is in a state of crisis. 269

With each of her exits it is as if she is hurled off the stage- she crumples, col lapses, or is in a rage. Sometimes she simply walks off stage mid-performance, leaving the stage like she has been hit each time she is forced into that kind of visibility (a visibility which she experiences as becoming-invisible). Myrtle will go to great lengths to grasp that image in which the character she is to perform and the gendered experience of aging will make sense. She tries the dissolution of self through intoxication approach (a technique which is certainly not exclusive to the Surrealists), drinking her way through the film. She will try to locate herself by revisiting a history of affairs and relationships (as her character Virginia does as well), but most dramatically, she will summon the image of the young woman

"Nancy." Nancy serves a number of functions. Firstly, she is a way of giving form to and simultaneously disavowing the experience of loss Myrtle is undergo ing. ("[Ghosts] represent the impossibility of either dying or living: what has been improperly or unsafely buried[... ] comes back to haunt the living in the eternity of a recurrence without resurrection or the consolation of eternal life [ ... ]. The ghost expresses the recurrence of what cannot, as such, return or make good the losses. ")17 Secondly, if Myrtle finds that she can no longer recognise her gestures and emotions, she takes in a figure which is all affect.18

17 Rebecca Comay, "Benjamin's Endgame," in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, eds Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p.280.

18 The first time that we see Nancy as a ghost- her first apparition- is in Myrtle's dressing room. Nancy's face (rather than her own) appears in the dress ing room mirror, their two faces shot in close up and extreme close up to the point where the spatial relations between them become unclear (is Nancy only in the mirror or is she also behind Myrtle?). The second time that she appears is in the bathroom ofMyrtle's hotel suite. If in the first apparition the two women's gazes only meet through the mediation of the mirror, in the second apparition, their gazes do not meet at all - the two women occupy the same space, standing at right angles to each other. It is as if with each apparition, the two women become progressively separated to the point where Myrtle can confront this figure. The third time she appears, Nancy attacks her from behind and Myrtle barely gets a chance to see her, but by the fourth and final apparition, the two women are face to face. The erotic charge that we find between the two women in the first two appearances is still there but now it is infused with terror. If Myrtle has to kill off Nancy in this fourth appearance it is because Nancy locates her in the same dis course of women's aging that Myrtle is attempting to rupture ("you're an older 270

It is not that the play she is to perform throws her forwards and backwards

(we see early in the film that the part she is to play, the way it "reads" her life, simply throws her into depression). It is the image of herself as loss that she is confronted with that throws her forwards and backwards. It is the way the text figures her - her inability to locate herself in relation to the image of femininity as loss that she is to produce. "Does she win or does she lose?" is the question she asks and wants answered in relation to her character. What throws her forwards and backwards then are those representations of the middle aged woman as loss in which she is supposed to recognise herself, and which she receives as shocks. If for Duttman such an experience of shock which throws us forwards and backwards paralyses us at the same time that it sets us off in a devotion to learning, this paralysis and learning is clearly just as tumultuous as the shock itself. What really sets her spinning is the text or image that she is trying to produce - a way of figuring women in relation to aging which is not defined by the idea of too late, nor caught frozen in an image of narcissistic youth.

It is not that she finds a way of representing women's experiences of loss, desire, and aging and the ways they are intermingled (what would such a repre sentation be?), but that she finds a way of interrupting their narrativization. Of course she interrupts tkis narrativization repeatedly during the film, each time she leaves a rehearsal or performance or refuses it through her rewriting of the part she is to perform. But these earlier interruptions are read within the same narra tive - Myrtle is having a breakdown, Myrtle refuses to recognise the reality of her aging, Myrtle is being a drama queen, enjoying the self indulgence that others have to "tolerate" in women performers. To all this Myrtle can only respond "I'm in trouble - I'm not acting." If in the end she finds a way of playing the part on

woman, you're scared, and you're a coward"), and because her affect-driven presence is tyrannical. 271 opening night, it is because she has found a way of interrupting this narrative and narrativizing by embracing rather than refusing the stage.

Barely arriving for the opening night performance, she eventually turns up so drunk that she really only passes through the first two acts. Propped up on and off stage, she collapses in shock with each exit. By the final scene Myrtle has come into her own. We see her in a performance style unseen up until now. In a mix of slapstick and 1930's vamp, she finds a way of both bracketing and occupy ing her performance and the part she is to perform. In this way she interrupts the narrative she has found herself both producing and implicated in.

If it is through shock that Myrtle (and the film as a whole) attempts to grasp a form of crisis, this is inextricably linked to a form of remembering - a form of remembering which has as much to do with forgetting as it has to do with remembering. For Benjamin, Eingedenken (remembrance or recollection) is valued for its capacity to overcome the fragmentation of experience (at least in terms of the overcoming of the forgetting of this fragmentation). Central to the poverty and decay of experience is the loss of the meaning of gestures, of the individual and collective histories written on the body. The form of fragmentation that Myrtle is confronting (and which is foregrounded by her role as a performer) is the bodily manifestation of the decay of experience - her gestures are barely recognisable to her as her own. If she spends the bulk of the film trying to find a way of playing the part of Virginia, this process is very much about remembering and forgetting. Her lines often shock and surprise her, the lines of her character become confused with her own perceptions, her gestures seem alien to her. And yet it is through this process that she produces a way of playing the character, and of producing her own relation to performance. If in the final (opening night) per formance she has found a way of performing the part, it is not by producing a unified character, subject, or body for Virginia. Rather it is through further frag menting the image of the woman for whom it is "too late." 272

In Myrtle's opening night performance another female presence becomes visible. Dorothy/Zohra Lambert- the wife of the play's director- has a crucial if barely articulated role in relation to Myrtle and her character for most of the film.

However, by the film's close, the relation between these two characters is estab lished by the crossing of gestures from Dorothy to Myrtle and by the increasing proximity of these two women in the frame (Myrtle rarely even addresses

Dorothy throughout most of the film, but the film's closing image is of the two women held in an embrace. In the "opening night" performance, Dorothy is shown in the audience as Myrtle's true audience). Dorothy's place in the constella tion of female characters which make up the gestus of the final performance is established relatively early in the film. In a remarkable scene about women, boredom, and experiences of time, Dorothy and her husband Manny/Ben Gazarra attempt to articulate their different experiences of time and aging, their lines cir cling around each other without ever meeting. "I'm going to go crazy if you don't tell me what it's like to be alone as a woman" Manny says to Dorothy - he needs to know for the play, he wants Dorothy to "fill Myrtle in" on herself. Dorothy is allocated to the position of loss, and responds to most of his questions with a form of laughter closer to crying. As Manny complains about the rehearsals, saying he is getting bored with things, with himself, Dorothy replies, "Manny I'm dying. I know I'm dying because I'm getting tired. It's always the same - you talk, I sleep."

But it is Dorothy's mute response to Manny's erasure of her which is taken up in

Myrtle's final performance. Later in this scene Myrtle rings Manny to discuss her problems with a scene in the play when she is to be slapped by her lover. As

Manny tries to reassure her about the slapping scene ("its a tradition - actresses get slapped" he tells her), Dorothy fools around in the room beside him shadow boxing, playing at punching herself in the head and collapsing on the bed. By the opening night performance it is these gestures that Myrtle will perform: Myrtle has managed to rewrite the play to the point where the slapping "episode" has dis- 273 appeared, replacing it with a form of shadow boxing where she hits towards the character who was to hit her.

Myrtle's opening night performance is written through by a number of female characters, their gestures and desires- Nancy's passion, Virginia's impossible position in gendered discourses of aging, Myrtle's desire to perform.

The generating and production of this performance - or this image - is a practice of remembering which re-collects and interrupts fragments, using them as the basis for a gestural practice and a form of narrativity.

the unfolding of All About Eve

There is another figure that haunts this film, whose image is inextricably intertwined with Myrtle's, and which is also caught up in this process of remem bering. This is Margo Channing from All About Eve, perhaps the quintessential

Hollywood film about women, performance, aging, and crisis. Unlike Nancy and

Virginia, this figure doesn't have to be summoned, but rather seems to sit in the wings of this film (and certainly haunts it for the viewer). Opening Night is by no means simply a remake of All About Eve, though it does restage the earlier film, taking its central characters and its discourse of aging, femininity, and perform ance and refiguring them. And in this restaging, what is both brought into visibility and unfolded is what was allocated to All About Eve's "footnotes" -

Margo Channing's/Davis' breakdown.

Opening Night unfolds All About Eve and interrupts it. Myrtle, like Margo

Channing, is a successful actor, and also like Margo, she is struggling against a gendered discourse of aging which threatens to make her disappear and in which she can no longer place herself. In All About Eve Bette Davis' Margo is in an impossible place, unable to locate herself in discourses of desire and constantly being defined by roles of a "young girl, around 20" (Margo at this point is 40. 274

Standing in her kitchen, drunk, she spells it out to her producer and to us: "I'm

40," she says in a classic Davis drawl, "4~0"). In Opening Night on the other hand, Myrtle is to perform an older woman - a woman who is defined as entering her "second" womanhood, of accepting a position ofloss, oftoo late. In both films it is this gendered discourse of aging - the young desirable woman or the older woman defined as beyond desire - which is central. In All About Eve of course, Davis' Margo accepts the position of loss, though this acceptance is precarious. Deciding to marry her younger lover and colleague, she finds a way of locating herself in this gendered discourse of aging by choosing to become a wife and handing over her next role to Eve (who has already moved into it, with the complicity of Margo's friends, colleagues, and lover). Opening Night refuses such a precarious resolution based on loss- Myrtle remains on the stage, rewrit ing the character she is to perform if need be.

There are three choices available to Margo Channing in All About Eve: to continue to work, to act, she can perform the character of a young woman, a role which she no longer seems that interested in; she can take up the position of the angry bitch- the drama queen who holds court (the "deliberate camp" that Sontag finds in this film); or she can accept the gendered discourse of aging which fig ures her as in her moment of fading. To articulate this choice she is located at the centre of a number of female characters - Eve, the young fan who Margo takes in

(not quite as literally as Myrtle takes in Nancy) and who threatens to usurp her both on the stage and in her personal life; her close friend Karen; and her assistant

Birdie, herself an ex-performer from vaudeville. A woman a generation below, a woman her age, and a woman a generation above.I9 If Margo Channing chooses the latter option - leaving the stage to become a wife and learn that "profession"

19 This nexus of characters is also found in Opening Night of course: Nancy the generation below, Dorothy (the director's wife) and who in a way stands by Myrtle more than any of the other characters, and her assistant Kelly, a generation above. 275 that, as she says, "all women have in common, being a woman" - this resolution is only possible because we do not see Margo on the stage (except once from the wings via Eve's point of view as Margo is taking her bow at the end of a perform ance). If we know Margo as a performer and as someone who takes pleasure in performing, it is less in terms of her work and more in terms of her performances off stage: the histrionics that we know and love in Margo Channing (and equally importantly in terms of the film's discourse of stardom, in Bette Davis). Margo is reminded that "what is attractive on stage is not necessarily attractive off stage," but if it is these histrionics for which she is both loved and punished (her histrionics are, after all, what define her as a "true star" in the film), the resolution which the film offers is both precarious and acceptable precisely because it is this histrionic form of performance - though muted - that we assume she will continue to produce, even if she leaves the stage. Before the film returns to the scene of its opening sequence (the crowning of Eve as Margo's unworthy heir), and we find

Margo and her lover announcing their impending marriage to their "dearest and closest" friends in a double date at the "Cubhouse." As she meets the toast of the film's male villain (Addison de Witt) with the raising and eating of a celery stick, it is clear that Margo has not in fact forfeited performing, but rather her profes sion.

If Margo's resolution allows her still to perform and simply to produce a smaller stage for herself within the decorum of marriage, for Myrtle this on stage/off-stage distinction is less certain. Her image and her gestures have become abstracted from her on and off the stage. What has been lost - almost without her having noticed - is her ability to occupy her body. It is as if it has been erased by a narrative which is now rewriting it. Against this she embarks on a process of remembering, and without the ideal circumstances in which Proust undertook his project (his corklined room, and his cast and crew of supporting staff working off stage to produce and maintain the necessary environment). Worse she has a dead- 276 line. She is not so much struggling against the temporality of aging as against a deadline she can neither avoid nor postpone - opening night.

The relation between these two films can be more readily demonstrated by looking at the networks of female characters in each film. Groupings of female characters are central to both Opening Night and Love Streams - intergenerational

"sets" of three. In All About Eve there are two sets of such characters, one of which could be seen as representing an axis of women's aging in terms of ideas of femininity, the other representing an axis of women's aging in terms of perform ance, the stage, and stardom. On what we could call the axis of women's aging we have Eve on the left, Margo in the middle (the Margo before her crisis of identity), and on the right we have an open position which is where Margo would end up if she were simply to remain on the stage, being "not a woman." This axis is demonstrated to be cyclical by the film's ending. Eve moves into the middle position, Margo avoids the last (but the film leaves it there open as a sort of threat) and Eve's original position is occupied by the new young female fan,

Phoebe, seen in the closing shot of the film caught in a mirror maze of her own reflection. On the other axis - the axis of women and the theatre - we find Eve on the left (entering the space of spectacle), Margo in the middle (about to leave the space of spectacle), and on the right, Margo's assistant Birdie (the ex-vaudeville star now allocated to backstage and outside the space of spectacle). Both of these axes seem to be marked by a movement towards disappearance, in the middle

Margo, and at the bottom Eve. In Opening Night, these axes are both restaged and interrupted: on the axis of women and the theatre, we have Nancy on the left,

Myrtle in the middle, and on the right, Sarah Goode, the play's author (played by ex-Busby Berkeley star, Joan Blondell); and on the axis of women's aging we have Nancy on the left (in the position of Eve), in the middle we have Myrtle, and on the right - the space left ominously empty in All About Eve - the character

Myrtle is to perform, Virginia. In Opening Night's restaging of All About Eve 277 these axes no longer stand for a movement towards disappearance: it is not that

Myrtle kills off the young woman and refuses the role of Virginia (the position on the right) so that she can retain her position in the middle. This position too is ruptured. In Opening Night these networks of characters are interwoven in such a way that the middle aged woman is not confronting her disappearance from the present, but rather struggling for her appearance in it.

In a way Opening Night does the work of remembering and forgetting for

All About Eve and its place in one's viewing memory. In unfolding the figure of the female performer (as that which can only grasp itself as an image which is fading), what is redeemed is performativity itself. If this film takes in All About

Eve and unfolds it, what is unfolded is a form of crisis and breakdown: crisis itself becomes the basis for a form of narrativity.

Opening Night and Love Streams could be seen as establishing the gestus ofthe temporality of modernity, or rather, ofthe ways in which this temporal structuring of experience takes gendered forms. The gestures and bodily attitudes of these characters are written through by a double shock - firstly in that they are structured by a form of shock experience (here in the form of being positioned within, or allocated to, dead time), and secondly in that they are the means through which these characters attempt to rupture the empty, repetitive, dead time that they find themselves in. But this logic of the gestus is not confined to the gestural in these films - the compression and contraction of time that character izes the gestus spreads to and structures the logic of the scene in Cassavetes' work. For Benjamin, film is written through by the principle of shock- the same principle of shock which structures experience in everyday life. As both Miriam

Hansen and Susan Buck-Morss have argued, if Benjamin places his bets on film, it is on the basis that (as Hansen writes) shock can "provide an articifial means of 278 propelling the human body into moments of recognition. "20 A shock, in a sense, that breaks through shock. In the 1950's and 60's films on the aging female actress, shock is arrested too soon and is embodied, moreover, in the figure of the aging woman. These women attempt to thwart their refuse status by freezing time. In Opening Night, this shock of recognition must itself be understood as a crisis.

20 Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema and Experience," p.211. 279

Conclusion

One of the central values of Benjamin's work for contemporary film theory debates is the ways in which he develops his analysis of film in terms of the intersections between film's modes of reception and representation and the temporal structuring of experience in modernity. Benjamin's theory of film turns our attention to the temporal aspects of spectatorship (most notably through the centrality of the concept of shock experience in his work on film), and brings questions of the memorative practices of different cultural forms into discussions of cinema. By placing his analysis of film in the context of historical formations of perception, reception, subjectivity, and experience, his work is particularly generative for examining the relations between film and gendered experience.

While gender and gendered experience are by no means central to Benjamin's project, his work is valuable for feminist film theory debates for a number of reasons: firstly, in terms of the ways in which he addresses the relations between the cultural technology of cinema and other cultural forms and practices (most significantly, the ways in which film reception and representation intersect with the phantasmagoria of commodity culture and the display of the commodity); and secondly, in terms of the critical attention he brings to relations to the image and commodity which have been aligned with the female spectator and consumer.

These two aspects of his work, however, need to be placed in the context of his politico-philosophical interest in film. Benjamin's hopes for film, I would argue, is the area of his work which is most generative for feminist film theory, but it is also the area which is most complex for a feminist reading of his work. Benjamin places his analysis of film in the context of the crisis of experience which underlies modernity, and it is from this basis that he develops his redemptive 280 reading of film. If modernity is marked by a crisis of memorative communication

(and indeed this is one of the central features of modernity as a form of historical experience), film, for Benjamin, offers a means of grasping the temporal structur ing of experience in modernity (the fragmentation of time into a series of instants

-the new as the always-the-same) and of making experience transmissible. To draw on Benjamin's redemptive reading of film for feminist film theory one has to both bring questions of gender and gendered experience to his theory of mod ernity and look at the implications of doing so for his redemptive hopes for film.

Benjamin's analysis ofthe dream world of mass culture and its place in the structuring of experience is developed in part through his "portraits" of a number of marginalized social types or figures - the collector, the jlaneur, the whore, the ragpicker etc. Each of these figures stages and represents a different relation to the temporal structuring of experience in modernity; each takes up and is marked by a different position in relation to the commodity fetish. I would argue that

Benjamin's analysis and use of these figures- and the ways in which he brings them into visibility - is one of the most valuable aspects of his work for feminist film theory and cultural studies in terms of thinking through the relations between gendered spectatorship and gendered experience. These figures are both marginal to, and yet critically implicated in, the dream world of mass culture. What they offer to feminist film theory and cultural studies is a conceptual framework through which we can address the different ways in which women - as spectators and as subjects- are positioned in relation to the temporal structuring of experi ence in modernity; of the new as the always-the-same.

While the figure of the flaneur has received most attention in recent film and cultural studies debates drawing on Benjamin's work (particularly in terms of the ways that the consumer gaze and the spectatorial gaze are intricately inter twined), I would argue that thisis by no means the only one of Benjamin's

"characters" that is of value for debates about gendered spectatorship. Though we 281

may want to "update" some of these figures and critically inflect them in terms of gender, there are a number of resonances between the different relations to the commodity/image that we find in these figures and contemporary spectatorial and film and television practices.

Rather than focusing on the jliineur (or the jliineuse ), I have turned to

some of Benjamin's other characters- the whore, the brooder, the destructive character, and most importantly for me here, the collector and the ragpicker. The collector and the ragpicker are particularly useful for thinking through female

spectatorship. Both inside and outside the "market," the collector and the rag picker gather that which has been discarded, "reading" the pre- and post-history of the no-longer-new commodity, producing a memorative practice. The ragpicker gathers those commodities (and commodity-refuse) which passed this fig ure by and which did not empathize with him/her. The female spectator I would suggest shares a number of features with both the collector and the ragpicker, gathering that which has been discarded and/or that which she often can only have a mediated relation to. In a way this project has taken up many of the prac tices of the ragpicker and the collector, gathering fragments and loved moments from film and television and reading them through Benjamin's work.

But from what can something from the past be saved? Not so much from the contempt and disregard into which it has fallen as from the particular way in which it has been handed down. The way in which is celebrated (gewurdigt) as our 'heritage' is more ominous than any oblivion.

'Celebration' or aplogetics aims to smooth over the revolutionary moments of the historical process. Its concern is to construct a con tinuity. It accentuates only those elements of a work which have already entered posterity. What it misses are the jagged edges which offer a foothold to someone who wants to get beyond that work. 1

1 Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 113 p.1242 and 112 p.658, trans. and qtd. in Irving Wohlfarth, "The Measure of the Possible, The Weight of the Real and the Heat of the Moment: Benjamin's Actuality Today," New Formations 20 (Summer 1993), pp.1-20, p.2. 282

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