The Space of Editing: Playing with Difference in Art, Film and Writing
The space of editing: playing with difference in art, film and writing
Grant Stevens Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) (QUT)
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2007
Visual Arts Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology
ii Abstract
This research project explores the creative and critical functions of editing in art, film and writing. The written component analyses the histories and discourses of ‘cutting and splicing’ to examine their various roles in processes of signification. The artistic practice uses more speculative and open-ended methods to explore the social ‘languages’ that inform our inter-subjective experiences. This project argues that editing is a creative methodology for making meaning, because it allows existing symbolic systems to be appropriated, revised and rewritten. By emphasising the operations of spacing, questioning and play, it also identifies editing as an essential tool for critically engaging with the potentials of art and theory.
iii Keywords
art; collage; creative practice; cutting; deconstruction; Derrida; difference; editing; Eisenstein; film; graft; grammatology, language; montage; play; postproduction; post-structuralism; signification; spacing; splicing; structuralism; text; trace; video; writing
iv Table of contents
Abstract...... iii Keywords ...... iv Table of contents...... v Table of figures ...... vi Statement of original authorship ...... viii Acknowledgements...... ix Introduction: The suspicion of editing...... 1 Chapter 1: Expanding editing, and the organisation of artworks...... 20 Chapter 2: Beyond words: writing as a process of play ...... 61 Chapter 3: Compelling criticism: editing the gaps of narrative, metaphor and film ... 91 Chapter 4: Choking on words: the cutting and splicing of an artistic practice ...... 121 Part I: Working with editing, language and video ...... 121 Part II: Recent shifts and ‘New Ideas for Cake’...... 155 Conclusion: The final cut: an ongoing practice ...... 180 Bibliography ...... 187 Filmography ...... 220 Supplementary material: Selected works DVD ...... 223
v Table of figures
Figure 1: Pierre Huyghe, ‘Two Minutes Out of Time’ (2000)...... 6 Figure 2: Pierre Huyghe, ‘One Million Kingdoms’ (2001) ...... 6 Figure 3: Pierre Huyghe & Philippe Parreno, ‘A Smile Without a Cat’ (2002)...... 6 Figure 4: Dziga Vertov, film still from ‘The Man with the Movie Camera’ (1929) ...... 28 Figure 5: Dziga Vertov, film still from ‘The Man with the Movie Camera’ (1929) ...... 28 Figure 6: Pablo Picasso, ‘Au Bon Marche’ (1912-1913) ...... 43 Figure 7: Georges Braque, ‘Still Life on the Table’ (1913) ...... 43 Figure 8: Marcel Duchamp, ‘Bottle Dryer’ (1914)...... 43 Figure 9: John Heartfield, ‘Millions Stand Behind Me’ (1932) ...... 45 Figure 10: Francis Picabia, ‘The Cacodylic Eye’ (1921) ...... 45 Figure 11: Erich Buchholz, ‘Model of Berlin Studio’ (1922)...... 46 Figure 12: Kurt Schwitters, ‘Merzbau’ (1923)...... 46 Figure 13: Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Retroactive II’ (1964)...... 49 Figure 14: Joseph Kosuth, ‘One and Three Chairs’ (1965)...... 49 Figure 15: Ed Ruscha, ‘Twentysix Gasoline Stations’ (1963) ...... 50 Figure 16: Andy Warhol, ‘Plane Crash’ (1963)...... 50 Figure 17: Piotr Uklański, ‘Untitled (GingerAss)’ (2002)...... 52 Figure 18: Pierre Huyghe, ‘Streamside Day Folies’ (2004)...... 52 Figure 19: Candice Breitz, ‘King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson)’ (2005) ...... 56 Figure 20: Donald Judd, ‘Untitled’ (1966)...... 59 Figure 21: Robert Morris, ‘Untitled (Mirrored Cubes)’ (1971)...... 59 Figure 22: Sergei Eisenstein, film stills from ‘October’ (1927) ...... 81 Figure 23: Jean-Luc Godard, film still from ‘A bout de soufflé’ (1960) ...... 107 Figure 24: Jean-Luc Godard, film still from ‘A bout de soufflé’ (1960) ...... 107 Figure 25: Video stills from ‘Danger Zone’ (2003)...... 121 Figure 26: Ed Ruscha, ‘Standard Station, Amarillo (Texas)’ (1963) ...... 127 Figure 27: Ed Ruscha, ‘Every Building on the Sunset Strip’ (1966)...... 127 Figure 28: Richard Prince, ‘Untitled (pens)’ (1979) ...... 127 Figure 29: Richard Prince, ‘Untitled (three women looking in the same direction)’ (1980)...... 127 Figure 30: Video still from ‘Mr President?’ (2001)...... 129 Figure 31: Video still from ‘I Love NY’ (2001)...... 129 Figure 32: John Baldessari, ‘What This Painting Aims To Do’ (1967) ...... 131
vi Figure 33: Douglas Huebler, ‘Variation Piece No.20’ (1971) ...... 131 Figure 34: Martin Scorsese, film still from ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976)...... 136 Figure 35: Martin Scorsese, film still from ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976)...... 136 Figure 36: Video stills from ‘Your Move’ (2002) ...... 136 Figure 37: Installation view of ‘Dazed and Praised’ (2004) ...... 139 Figure 38: Video stills from ‘Nothing's Changed’ (2004) ...... 143 Figure 39: Installation view of ‘Nothing's Changed’ (2004) ...... 143 Figure 40: Video stills from ‘Like Two Ships’ (2005) ...... 147 Figure 41: Installation view of ‘Like Two Ships’ (2005) ...... 147 Figure 42: Installation view of ‘When There's Love’ (2005) ...... 151 Figure 43: Alexander Rodchenko, ‘Pure Colours: Red, Yellow, Blue’ (1921) ...... 157 Figure 44: Marcel Duchamp, ‘In Advance of a Broken Arm’ (1915, 1964)...... 157 Figure 45: Piotr Uklański, ‘Untitled (GingerAss)’ (2002)...... 165 Figure 46: Piotr Uklański, ‘Untitled (Wet floor)’ (2000) ...... 165 Figure 47: Piotr Uklański, ‘The Nazis’ (1998)...... 165 Figure 48: Pierre Huyghe, ‘Remake’ (1994)...... 166 Figure 49: Pierre Huyghe, ‘L’Expédition scintillante: A Musical (The Scintillating Expedition)’ (2002)...... 166 Figure 50: Pierre Huyghe, ‘Atari Light’ (2000-2003)...... 166 Figure 51: Installation view of ‘Turtle Twilight’ (2006) ...... 170 Figure 52: Installation view of ‘Turtle Twilight’ (2006) ...... 170 Figure 53: Video still from ‘The Feeling’ (2006) ...... 173 Figure 54: Video still from ‘The Feeling’ (2006) ...... 173 Figure 55: Video still from ‘Bang’ (2006)...... 177 Figure 56: Video still from ‘Bang’ (2006)...... 177
vii Statement of original authorship
The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference is made.
Signature: ______
Date: ______
viii Acknowledgements
When I started this study in 2003, my supervisors told me that it would take over my life for three or four years. Although I only half believed them at the time, I’d like to thank them for the warning. Their words have echoed in my ears since then, reminding me of the dedication required to undertake this qualification. What they didn’t tell me, of course, was that it would also take over major parts of their lives, and require similar levels of commitment and rigour on their behalf. This small acknowledgement cannot do justice to the time and energy that Mark Webb (principle supervisor) and Dr Mark Pennings (associate supervisor) have put into this project. Without their encouragement, feedback and attention to detail, this project would not have been possible. I cannot thank them enough.
For their assistance and guidance, several other QUT staff also warrant recognition. Sincere thanks to Dr Andrew McNamara, Daniel Mafe, Jill Barker, Dr Courtney Pedersen, Dr Brad Haseman, Leanne Blazely, Angie Smith, Leon van der Graaff and Lubi Thomas.
Thanks also to Barry Keldoulis and Sally Brand, for I would not have survived this project without the ongoing support of Gallery Barry Keldoulis.
My friends and colleagues have also provided genuine encouragement, understanding and insight throughout this project. Thanks to Dirk Yates, Natalya Hughes, Wes Hill, Wendy Wilkins, Nicholas Chambers, Gemma Smith, Angela Goddard, Peter Alwast, Rachel O’Reilly, Kim Machan, Rachael Haynes, Lily Hibberd and many others.
Finally, I would like to thank my family for their unconditional and unwavering support. I owe an immeasurable debt to my parents, Brian and Patricia Stevens, for teaching me the value of education, and for encouraging me to pursue my enthusiasm for that scary thing called ‘art’.
ix
x Introduction
The suspicion of editing
To edit something is both to prepare it and to change it. It is to enable something to come into existence by facilitating its presentation, and yet, it is also to change the presentation of something that already exists. Editing involves a complex temporal logic, for it is the process by which something is modified in order for it to be presented. As we shall see throughout this thesis, editing is much more than the simple cutting and splicing of film, or the process of revising written material. Instead, it is a wide ranging methodological tool which can be used to amend, append, adapt, add, assemble, appropriate, alter, adjust, arrange, cut, crop, copy, compose, construct, change, censor, condense, convert, collate, collage, correct, delete, detail, disassemble, detach, dissect, dislodge, extract, erase, efface, filter, graft, mime, mirror, mask, modify, montage, paste, prepare, revise, refine, reword, rewrite, review, sort, splice, slice, sample, sequence, style, shape, substitute, trace, translate and transform. In short, editing is an organisational device which facilitates the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of ‘things’: films, writings, ‘texts’.1
In this expanded sense, there are a variety of functions that editing can serve. It can be used to clarify something or to the confuse it. In a film for example, the editor can make it more or less difficult to understand the plot, depending on how s/he chooses to cut and splice the images and sounds together. In the field of writing, the editor can refine the clarity of a text by rearranging its
1 I will examine the notion of ‘text’ throughout this thesis, but it is important to note here that I deploy the term in the sense that Roland Barthes described: that is, as a multi-dimensional and associative construction (rather than a linear and self-evident container of meaning). See: Roland Barthes (1977). “From Work to Text” in Image, Music, Text. New York, Hill and Wang, pp.155-164.
1 paragraphs, deleting certain sentences and adding their own phrasings. In both cases, the editor controls which information is kept, how it is presented and in what order it is arranged. By facilitating the organisation of ‘texts’ (those multifaceted social assemblages so convincingly described by Roland Barthes), the process of editing determines how meaning is constructed and disseminated, and hence also, how we make sense of the world around us.2
As an artist, I am compelled to explore how meaning is produced and circulated. It seems to me that the most important aspect of artistic practice is its ability to explore, and experiment with, the various social and cultural conventions that structure how and why meaning is made. Editing, as I have outlined it here, presents itself as an all important site and method for this artistic investigation. Since early modernity (say since Gustave Courbet began questioning the distinctions between fine art and everyday life), I believe the most compelling art has reflected upon, and re-presented, the symbolic systems that inform experiences of social reality. Throughout modernity, post-modernity and beyond, artists like Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Douglas Gordon and Pipilotti Rist, used their work to rethink how art, and broader forms of culture, ‘cut and paste’ in order to disseminate meaning. Today, artists like Pierre Huyghe, Piotr Uklański and Candice Breitz continue to interrogate cultural languages as a means to open up, and question, the often incongruous relations between these socially constructed languages, and the personal forms of identification and inscription which underscore lived experience. In my own practice, I also attempt to inhabit this uncertain zone between the personal and the social. For me, making art is a way of tracing, grafting and playing with my own dilemmas and insecurities, as well as interrogating those processes of signification which inform and construct inter-subjective experiences.
It is for these reasons that I take editing as the object of my investigation. I want to argue that because editing is entrenched in all operations of
2 Ibid, pp.155-164
2 constructing and disseminating meaning, it is a crucial cultural device at, and through which to examine the complex relations between personal and social forms of inscription. My investigation occurs on two fronts. In my creative practice, my approach is largely speculative and open-ended. From my initial appropriations of Hollywood films, to the use of text and sound, and more recent explorations with video installation, my works seek to create reconceptualised versions, or different edits, of the cultural codes that frame my/our experiences of the world. In comparison, the written thesis adopts a more methodical and analytical line of attack. By analysing various philosophical shifts (from structuralism, through post-structuralism to deconstruction and beyond) it charts a range of theoretical propositions about editing and its role in processes of signification. Above all else, it pays attention to understanding how editing, and its role in the histories and discourses of film and writing, provides a methodology for ‘making meaning’ and for making art.
Curiosity and caution
These interests in editing, and its role in processes of signification, derive from two kinds of suspicion: curiosity and caution. In many ways, these suspicions developed out of my artistic practice. In my early video works, I appropriated and manipulated fragments of Hollywood films.3 Typically in these works, small sections of a film would be isolated and looped to disrupt the original narrative of the film. By directly sampling and reformatting these distinctive slices of Hollywood films, I developed a curiosity about the potential of editing, and its capacity to actively engage with the social codes and conventions around me. But by working in this way, I also became more aware of, and more cautious about the symbolic systems at work in these mass cultural forms. It seemed to me that editing was, paradoxically, both the method through which these popular films constructed meaning (and hence
3 For example: Mr President? (2001), Your Move (2002) and Danger Zone (2003) use fragments from Independence Day (1996), Taxi Driver (1976) and Top Gun (1986) respectively. See attached ‘Selected works DVD’.
3 also perpetuated their hegemonic value systems), and the means through which I could begin to deconstruct and reconstruct these existing symbolic forms.
Thus I reached the intersection of my curiosity and caution. By re-editing sections of Hollywood films, I began to develop detailed practical and theoretical knowledge about the significance of each edit-point. Indeed, I became aware that the edited constructions of each film sequence were the very methods through which films disseminate their meanings, and therefore the ways in which they often perpetuate mainstream value systems. However, I also began to see these edit-points as the sites at which I could dissect, break down and re-splice the symbolic systems at work. Consequently, editing has become a way for me to mime, trace and imitate popular culture, as well as to disrupt, dislocate and disturb its conventional narrative and symbolic flows. In short, the processes of cutting and pasting, of reformatting, reconfiguring, re-contextualising and re-editing, enable me to both employ and critique the symbolic systems operating in popular culture. In this way, I believe that editing can be a method for both deconstructing and reconstructing existing cultural codes.
However, in this conception of editing, I am caught in a certain dilemma. On the one hand, editing is a tool for the perpetuation of dominant cultural conventions, yet, on the other, it is also a device for unpacking and recontextualising these methods of communication. My suspicion of editing, therefore, also revolves around its role in the dissemination of existing power structures, as well as its potential as a political or critical methodology for artists and thinkers. It is my contention that through its prominent role in constructing and disseminating meaning, editing must be understood as being an always already politicised device.4 It must be considered as the processes
4 Again, I am thinking of editing in its broadest sense, as it is embedded within hierarchies of power. For example, it is not just the author and/or the copyeditors who determine what is printed in newspapers. Editorial staff set stylistic guidelines, they prioritise specific storylines over others, and ultimately they advance agendas based on philosophical and moral hierarchies. Beyond this, employees also answer to the wishes of owners and shareholders who are, in turn, driven by complex and often indivisible combinations of economic, moral and ideological rationales.
4 of direction, censorship, prioritisation and exclusion which pervade the communication of meaning, as well as those practical processes of cutting, splicing and revising which enable texts to be prepared and presented. My suspicion about editing therefore stems from this assumption about the political nature of all symbolic activity. Whether economically or ideologically driven, and whether on a mass or inter-personal scale, choices about what, how and when to communicate are never neutral.5 This is of course something akin to what Edward Said insinuated, when he asked: “Who writes? For whom is the writing being done? In what circumstances?”6
My hunch about editing, as a creative and critical methodology for artistic practice, derives from this awkward combination of distrust and curiosity. It is my contention that artists like Huyghe, Breitz and Uklański, provide ways in which the politics of editing are examined and illuminated.7 One example of this is when Huyghe and collaborator Philippe Parreno bought the rights to a redundant manga character, Annlee. By inviting other artists to ‘employ’ her in their work, the artists pointed allegorically to how employment and labour paradoxically enable, and exploit, our experiences of reality. By giving Annlee ‘life’ in a variety of creative projects, these artists also parade the ways in which the operations of selection and inclusion necessarily involve processes of cropping and exclusion. In other words, whether in regards to the animation industry, or to mass culture more pervasively, these artists critically and creatively engage with the ways in which ‘lived experience’ is edited through our everyday lives.8
5 Of course, Louis Althusser proposed that “there is no practice except by and in an ideology”. (Louis Althusser (1970). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses". A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. Easthope, Antony, and McGowan, Kate. Sydney, Allen and Unwin: pp.50-58, p.53.) 6 Edward W. Said (1998). "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community". The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Foster, Hal. New York, The New Press: pp.155-183, p.155. 7 Artists like Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger provide more polemic examples of this political investigation, but as I will argue throughout this thesis, it is the speculative nature of Huyghe’s and Uklański’s works that I find more compelling, and hence also, more critically engaging as a viewer. 8 The diverse outputs of this project go under the collective title, No Ghost Just a Shell (1999- 2002).
5
Figure 1: Pierre Huyghe, Two Minutes Out of Time (2000)
Figure 2: Pierre Huyghe, One Million Kingdoms (2001)
Figure 3: Pierre Huyghe & Philippe Parreno, A Smile Without a Cat (2002)
6 Just as Picasso, Warhol and Koons before them, artists like Huyghe and Parreno probe and seek out loopholes in popular culture by actively appropriating and engaging with forms of mass communication. They reformat and revise the languages of popular culture in order to enable new possibilities for making meaning. It is the ‘possibility’ of this kind of cultural critique – the ability of editing to question and speculate on the dissemination of meaning – which lies at the heart of this project and my personal motivations for making art.9
Editing is a creative and critical methodology for artists to engage with. The analogy between editing and art is two-fold. On the one hand, art is a process of editing. Like any other ‘textual’ practice (in the sense that Barthes proposed), it involves the formal and symbolic operations of cutting, pasting, composing, appropriating, juxtaposing and refining. Through these procedures, artists edit the arrangements of their works. Whether they make decisions based on economic, ideological, aesthetic or ethical motivations, artists chose to organise and disseminate symbolic codes and conventions in their works. And so in this way, art must also be understood as a function of editing.
On the other hand, as the example of Huyghe and Parreno suggests, editing is also a means of activating a political or critical dimension of art (even if it is more esoteric than polemic). As a practical and conceptual method, editing allows artists to critically analyse, question and reformat the symbolic codes of art and culture. In fact, I propose that editing plays a fundamental role in the history of ‘criticality’ in art, and the tradition of the avant-garde. At least since the cubist collages of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, the operations of cutting and splicing have recurred throughout art history. For Picasso and Braque, editing was a means of interrogating the ‘language’ of painting, as well as reconnecting ‘fine art’ with the social dimension of everyday life.
9 Making art is a speculative and provisional practice for me. I consider making art as a way of opening up, exploring and examining the dominant cultural codes that inform my/our lived experience. My work is not overtly political, but I believe the attitudes and strategies of experimentation and play, which are embedded in my artistic practice, are ways in which I can begin to question the political nature of meaning (in the broadest sense of these terms).
7 Likewise, for Marcel Duchamp, cutting and pasting (with ‘context’ as a material) allowed him to critically interrogate the relationship between art and social reality. Since then, artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman, Douglas Gordon and Candice Breitz have demonstrated the various ways in which editing can be employed to examine the borders between representation and reality.
It is my belief that editing has reappeared, time and again, in artistic practices that seek to interrogate the relations between art and its social, cultural and ideological contexts. This ambition, to explore the points of connectivity and displacement between art and the various symbolic and ideological systems that surround it, describes the motivation of a continuing avant-garde project. The initiation over the last hundred years or more, of the avant-garde project (which must be described as a diverse and heterogeneous conglomeration of practices, rather than a singular artistic method or ideology), has installed a social responsibility in art. Against the rhetoric of its name (to be in advance), the success of this ‘responsibility’ has been the ability of artists to play with the aesthetic, ideological and psychological underpinnings of existing social languages, and to open up new spaces where different reflections, debates and activities can take place.
Editing continues to provide a crucial practical and conceptual methodology for artists to rearrange social languages. It allows them to cut and paste matter (whether physical or symbolic) from the ‘real’ world into the contexts and discourses of artistic production. By enabling them to organise and reorganise the dissemination of meaning, editing has become a critical tool for artistic innovation and intervention. Most importantly, editing has allowed artists to emphasise, and demystify the ways in which meaning is distilled, classified, organised, distributed, and edited.
8 The problems of (invisible) editing
This project is framed by similar motivations to demystify editing. However, taking editing as an ‘object’ of study is a difficult task. Editing is a process of preparing, presenting and changing; it is a method of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing texts. Because of this, any attempt to take editing as an object, and an identifiable entity, is a somewhat problematic and perhaps paradoxical task. Furthermore, through its diverse applications in film, writing and art, we can see that editing is a highly malleable and dynamic device that can be used for a wide range of purposes. The discourses and histories of these heterogeneous applications do not seem to follow any particular logic, or model of progression.10
There does not seem to be an overriding narrative that accounts for the appearance, persistence, or diversity of editing practices. One has only to look at the history of film form to understand that its examples are as diverse and malleable as the differences between the long, slow shots of Dances with Wolves (1990), and the rapid jump cuts of Pulp Fiction (1994). In its expanded sense, editing is also as heterogeneous as a scripted political address by the Prime Minister, and a homemade ‘zine’ handed out at an exhibition opening.
Having said this, editing does, at times, follow certain stylistic patterns. The prevailing conventions of continuity editing and Sergei Eisenstein’s model of montage are just two examples. One of the problems with investigating editing is, therefore, this tension between its sheer ‘specificity’ (from one edit to the next), and its ‘generality’ (the ubiquity of cutting and splicing in operations of making meaning).
10 Just as Rosalind Krauss described the recurrence of grids in art history as non- developmental, I think it is possible to argue that editing has persisted in diverse practices precisely because it is a malleable organisational method. See: Rosalind E. Krauss (1985). “Grids” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, pp.8-22.
9 In analysing how editing functions as a general, and even omnipresent process in signification, and in examining the political dimension of editing as a specific tool for the dissemination of meaning, a series of questions present themselves: should we look at what is edited in, or what is left out? What is cropped, composed and prioritised, or what is excluded and negated? What points of connection are detailed, or what points of disconnection are produced? And where is the ‘evidence’ to be found: on the editing room floor, in the earlier drafts, or in the finished product? Should we compare and contrast a draft to its final cut in order to discern how editing informed the resolution of the text? Or, does the final version contain all the evidence of inclusion and exclusion, presence and absence? Would a draft provide a more ‘pure’, unadulterated version of an author’s thinking because it has been edited less? Or, would the final text represent the author’s (filmmaker/artist/writer) intention more accurately because it has been edited more?
In many ways, these problems of locating editing result from the contrast between its centrality in the construction of meaning, and its intangibility, or invisibility, in these processes. Although it plays a central role, editing is not really ‘self-evident’ in the presentation of a text. In a film, for example, we never actually see an edit-point. Even in a wipe from one shot to the next (so that the line between the two images moves across the screen) the cut does not look like anything; it is an invisible slice that both connects and disconnects the two shots. Here, editing is only discernible through the relations of difference between the two images. It is only ‘evidenced’ by this transition or relation between the shots. More importantly, the stylistic treatments of this irreducibly thin line (whether in a wipe, a dissolve, or a straight cut) do not produce meaning in isolation. Instead, the significance of a transition is always contextual and relational. Meaning always relies on the relation between the images and the diegetic contexts in which this relation takes place.11
11 Even conventional editing techniques, like a ‘shot, reverse-shot’, rely on the relation between the images and the diegetic contexts of the film for meaning. The recurrence of formal techniques demonstrate the ways in which editing is able to follow and reinforce
10 In these ways, editing appears as the residue of something that has already happened. It becomes visible only as a trace, or after effect, of a range of aesthetic, practical and conceptual decisions, which are themselves, the very operations of editing. Thus, we can say that in a strange way, something is editable because it is has already been edited. Even before a set of film fragments hit the editing table, the filmmaker’s choices of when to start and stop filming have already begun to edit the film. As much as the final cut of a film has been edited, so too, these fragments are already ‘edits’. Likewise, the copyeditor is not the first editor of a written text. As the writer writes, s/he continually cuts and pastes, deletes, rearranges and rewrites.
Given all of this, when we begin to study editing, it is no longer pertinent to think in terms of ‘before’ and ‘after’. This kind of linear affiliation does not hold. The ‘before’ of editing (before the editing table or before the copyeditor for example) is, in fact, already ‘after’ editing, since it is editing that enables that product to be prepared and presented in the first place. Thinking about editing in this way also confuses the typically linear progression from a ‘draft’ to a ‘final’ edit. In many ways, the draft (like the fragment) is already an edit for it is already cropped and composed. Likewise, to the extent that it is fragmentary and partial, the final edit is itself like another draft – a different version of the fragments that are compiled and collaged together.
In these ways, the challenge of how to study editing is amplified because it opens out on to a wide variety of epistemological, ontological, semiotic, aesthetic, ideological, psychological and historiographic debates. Focussing on the role of editing in the production of meaning poses significant challenges to some traditional assumptions about authorship, authenticity, originality and identity. The idea of editing as a process of revision, reorganising and redaction undermines the notion that a work originates as a seamless translation of an author’s ideas. Through the processes of editing, and whether willingly or not, the author appropriates the forms, styles and methods of other texts in order to reconstruct his/her own. S/he collates,
certain communicative patterns, but it does not demonstrate the presence of a stable underlying syntax of film. This will be explored in more detail throughout this thesis.
11 collages, adapts and amends in order to construct different combinations of existing symbolic codes. As such, to focus on the role of editing is also to challenge the conception of a work as a self-present container of meaning, because its ‘origin’ is dispersed and dislocated across this range of fragmentary references and quotations. In studying editing, it becomes difficult to maintain assumptions about the singularity, authenticity and self- evidence of meaning. Instead, meaning must be understood as only ever partial and provisional, or to be more precise, as a process of ‘becoming’.12
To examine editing in these ways is, therefore, also to consider different models of authorship, originality and authenticity than those privileged in the history of Western individualism and rationalism. By focussing on the role of editing in the production of meaning, it is possible to reconsider authorship as an ongoing process of hesitation, deferral and displacement. Furthermore, this process does not necessarily lead to a conclusive and definitive outcome, but instead to another draft, another version, or another edit of a text, which is always in the process of being reread and rewritten. These problems associated with the study of editing intersect with my initial curiosity about it. That is to say, editing offers a potentially creative and critical methodology precisely because it poses these difficulties for maintaining the aforementioned assumptions. In short, what compels me to explore editing is the possibility that it is capable of demystifying assumptions about authorship, originality, as well as the relation between subjectivity and sociality.
Continuity editing or jump cuts: theory and practice
Because of its divergence from traditional models of authorship, originality and causality, I have had to find new ways to locate, define and analyse editing as a creative and critical methodology. In order to do this, I have
12 Here, Derrida’s notion of ‘play’ is important because it enables us to understand meaning as a process or activity, rather than a destination or result. For Derrida, play describes the tension between the infinite substitutions and deferrals of signifiers, and the processes of identification and inscription which allow meaning to be constructed. See: Jacques Derrida (1978). “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Writing and difference. Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, pp.278-293.
12 sought to emphasise the various points of connection and disconnection between the diverse discourses and histories of editing in film, writing and art. In this sense, I have approached editing as not only the subject, but also the methodology of this research project. It is the key theoretical focus of this thesis, as well as the fundamental method by which I have organised my research and practice. In other words, the creative practice and the written thesis examine editing by employing processes of editing.13
Moreover, as complementary components of this research project, the writing and the practice also edit across one another. As a model for ‘writing’ in its broadest sense, editing allows the artistic practice and the written component to cut and splice with each other. They are not didactic illustrations of each other, or even two demonstrations of the same idea. Instead, like the differences between continuity editing and jump cuts, they sometimes leave gaps and at other times create overlaps. They are independent of each other in form, but they are also inextricably linked in motivation and scope. They sometimes support and frame one another, and they also, sometimes, challenge and contradict each other.14
While this somewhat unpredictable relationship between the two components of the project has been difficult to manage at times, it has ultimately produced a kind of tension conducive to the exploration of my initial suspicions about the possibilities of editing. The varying approaches – one intuitive and experimental, the other more theoretical and analytical – have enabled me to channel my interests, curiosities and fascinations across a constantly shifting and dynamic project of inquiry. In this way, it is also possible to understand that the project itself is always already fragmented, partial and decentred. It is simultaneously located, and dislocated, in the two very different yet
13 For example in the written thesis, Jacques Derrida’s philosophical interrogation of ‘writing’ is pasted or juxtaposed alongside Sergei Eisenstein’s model of filmic montage. Alternatively in the creative practice, my works seek to appropriate and rework the languages of popular culture. To take just one example, Some Want It All (2004) reorganises phrases that have been appropriated from movie previews in order to create a new and sometimes absurd narrative. See attached ‘Selected works DVD’. 14 The fourth chapter of this thesis discusses some of the overlaps and gaps between the practice as an exploratory and speculative process, and my writing as a more analytical form of research.
13 interrelated activities that make up this research project. And importantly, it is this very fragmentation, this simultaneous connection/disconnection, which seems concomitant with editing as a methodology not only for this project, but also in a broader context.15
While the thesis and the practice sometimes seem to operate like a shot reverse-shot structure in continuity editing, at other times they also seem to function like a disruptive jump cut. They might explore similar issues, themes and discourses, but their tones and strategies can be quite different. As a researcher and as an artist, it is this complicated relationship which makes this project provocative, compelling and intriguing, and yet, at the same time, challenging and demanding. Ultimately, in this project, my aim is to open up and create tensions between these two aspects of the research, to examine the gaps and inconsistencies between them, and to challenge the assumptions and suspicions which underscore the ways in which they construct their meanings.
Backward and forward
The importance of difference and dislocation to this project does not just lie in the relation ‘between’ its written and practical components. Instead, these ‘symptoms’ of editing, and of inscription more generally, are explicitly examined in the written thesis and the creative practice respectively. By analysing the histories and discourses of editing in film, writing and art, this thesis explores, examines and enacts these processes of spacing, difference
15 Indeed, if we look at a rough history of editing, its emergence might be considered concurrent with the technological, social and cultural developments of modernisation and modernity. These changes – the development of a mass public through rapid urbanisation, the development of a mass media through new printing technologies, the division of labour through industrialised production processes, and of course, the development of film technologies – all seem to exemplify the increased speed, fragmentation and heterogeneity characteristic of modern life. It is not a complete surprise, then, that alongside these developments, the ‘editor’ became an important, if not, fundamental occupation in modernity. Whether the production line worker, the newspaper copy editor, the film editor, or even the individual surrounded by anonymous strangers on a crowded train, people became accustomed to manipulating, revising, combining and navigating the fragmentation of modern life.
14 and dislocation. As suggested previously, this is important because editing does not have a linear or developmental history, and it cannot be described in terms of an overarching or singular narrative. Instead, if it is to be examined in a meaningful way, it must be traced through its points of connection and disconnection, through its continuities and discontinuities, and across its diverse range of applications.
In saying this, I am constantly compelled to try to explain my suspicions and findings about editing all at once. I want to articulate all of the differences and similarities between the various forms and functions of editing, in one clear and self-evident statement. However, as previously suggested, the notion of signification as a self-evident and permanently fixed ‘destination’ is made problematic when examining the role of editing. Although necessarily arranged in a sequence, the chapters in this thesis create associations between and across each other; they operate like a spatial network of backward and forward movements, between and across the various aspects of the text. My somewhat contradictory compulsion to say it all at once demonstrates the extent to which many of the ideas and debates opened up by thinking about editing, are interrelated, contingent and often co-dependent. The back and forth movement throughout the different parts of the thesis are further examples of the complex and multifaceted operations of difference, displacement and deferral which pervade all processes of making meaning.
A number of important philosophical and practical reference points recur in the back and forth movement of ideas. For example, Jacques Derrida’s critique of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic model, to a large extent, enables my analogy between editing and art. His work therefore features prominently throughout this thesis. Sergei Eisenstein’s paradigm of filmic montage is also recalled and examined multiple times because it offers a compelling prototype of filmic meaning. His theoretical and practical work also makes it possible to consider the political dimension of editing in more specific ways. Through reference to these and other thinkers, what becomes integral to the development of my argument are the ways in which spacing, grafting, difference, and play, function in processes of inscription. Ultimately,
15 it is the points of continuity and discontinuity between the works of Saussure, Derrida, Eisenstein and others, which makes it possible for me to imagine and activate editing as a creative and critical device for artistic practice.
The first chapter examines various theories of film form in order to establish an analogy between editing and artistic practice. Eisenstein’s film theory and practice make it possible to reconsider editing not simply as a practical process of postproduction, but instead, as a communicative tool which is integral to the various formal patterns of filmic meaning. I also propose an understanding of editing as an expanded idea that is embedded within the decision making processes which govern what, and how, meaning is constructed. This expanded notion of editing is put into a contemporary context by considering some of the cultural and technological changes that have accompanied the development of new media. Here, editing becomes fundamental to understanding the formal and conceptual devices that prevail in new technological interfaces. It is also vital for considering contemporary forms of subjectivity, social and inscription. Finally, these ideas about editing’s broader creative applications are explored through the examples of contemporary art, particularly Candice Breitz’s artistic practice and the theoretical observations of Nicolas Bourriaud.
The second chapter analyses Saussure’s linguistic model and Derrida’s subsequent philosophical renovations. Derrida’s model of writing (‘grammatology’) is contrasted with Eisenstein’s filmic paradigm of montage in order to advance a model of signification based on this expanded concept of editing. Their respective political ambitions (explicit in Eisenstein, but perhaps more implicit in Derrida) are also raised in order to question the limits and possibilities of a ‘critical project’ in theories and practices of editing. Here, Derrida’s notions of grafting and tracing are integral for rethinking editing as a device for inscription, because they emphasise the roles of difference and displacement in the construction of meaning. To the extent that it enables the ‘rules of the game’ to be experimented with and challenged, Derrida’s notion of play also proves to be crucial to my argument about editing as a creative and critical tool.
16 The relationships between film, language, narrative, editing and criticism are the focus of the third chapter. Christian Metz’s semiotic approach is scrutinised in order to question the limitations of structural film theory. Subsequently, the debate about editing is considered through the discursive and speculative possibilities provided by post-structural and deconstructive theories of ‘film writing’. In this context, the signifying processes of metaphors are examined. At the core of narrative and filmic meaning are complex mental operations involving figurative forms of substitution, invention, intuition and imagination. Here, the partial and fragmentary characteristics of film, narrative, metaphor and writing begin to converge in the methodological or organisational principles of editing as an expanded concept. Most importantly, thinking about the relations between metaphors, narrative, film and writing, also makes it possible to consider the critical application of editing as no longer contingent on models of oppositionality (such as that proposed by Eisenstein). Instead, editing is positioned as a device that can provide critical interventions by enabling open-ended forms of speculation and questioning.
In the final chapter, I discuss a number of my own video works and installations in the context of these ideas. Being anxious about the problems of writing about my own works (of locating, identifying and limiting them within specific contexts and paradigms) I struggle to resist the circular logic of writing about writing about the works. Instead, by reinforcing the notion of editing that I have developed throughout the thesis, I allow myself to describe the various practical, conceptual and methodological processes involved in the conception and construction of the works. This liberty afforded by editing also enables me to speculate on the potential of my work, and its ability to unpack and reformat the social constructs which inform my lived experience. What is fundamentally important, is the way that editing can provide a model of inscription that enables me (in both my artistic practice and my writing) to explore my suspicions, anxieties, uncertainties and insecurities, as well as to imagine and initiate dialogues about broader questions of authorship, originality and authenticity.
17 In many ways, what I come to describe throughout this thesis are the ways in which editing is also an open-ended authorisation to explore, question, test and experiment. The importance of editing lies in its ability to move back and forth, between and across, a diverse range of symbolic systems. This is because, by doing so, it allows difference and play to be prioritised. As the subject and methodology of this project, editing allows me to imagine and construct theoretical possibilities that do not always conform to the conventions and traditions of dominant symbolic and philosophical systems. As Eve Tavor Bannet suggests, it is this freedom to explore, and experiment, which is fundamental to the value of theoretical investigation.
The worlds constructed by theories are therefore fictional in the first sense I described: they are both real and unreal, both extant and non- existent, both made and related to some actuality. And this relation to actuality runs both ways: we not only move from the actual world or actual text to elaborating possible constructions, but from possible constructions we elaborate actual texts and the actual world.16
It is this movement back and forth between theory and actuality that compels me to explore my initial suspicions about editing. My artistic practice seeks to creatively and critically engage with the relations between symbolic and lived experiences. It does this by calling on, and reorganising symbolic fragments into new and unexpected relations. Although its tone and form may differ from my creative practice, this thesis is also a function of my imagination. It is an effect of the open-ended permission to explore, question and play which, in themselves, define the creative and critical potentials of editing. This thesis examines editing so that it might be applied in new and diverse ways in the future. It does not enclose editing in a case study or an historical survey, but rather, it allows us to see the points of connection and disconnection across its various manifestations. By doing so, it opens up new ways for editing to be understood and utilised.
16 Eve Tavor Bannet (1993). Postcultural theory: critical theory after the Marxist paradigm. Basingstoke, Hampshire, Macmillan, p.131.
18 The purpose of this inquiry, in both its written and artistic forms, is to elaborate, test, and reformulate, the symbolic and philosophical discourses which inform lived experience. Without creative and critical investigations into the discourses around us, we are resigned to perpetuate the status quo. It is for these reasons that I take editing as the most important site of contemporary artistic and theoretical investigation. It is not only the method through which mainstream culture constructs and disseminates its meanings, it is also the means through which artists, theorists and individuals can deconstruct and reconstruct them. It is my contention that by actively engaging with editing as a methodology, it is possible to interrogate the mechanisms of hegemonic culture, and to cut and splice, to graft, to play with, and to reshape them into new forms. The different symbolic possibilities that arise from these creative and critical approaches, allow for new ways of negotiating and navigating our experiences. This is precisely the value of editing: to rigorously, and yet speculatively, question and rearticulate the relations between identity, sociality and signification. Ultimately, it is by imagining alternatives that we can critically and creatively re-edit our experiences of actuality.
19 Chapter 1
Expanding editing, and the organisation of artworks
From the simplest choice of when to start and stop filming, to issues of framing, lighting and staging, there are a wide range of formal decisions that occur during the filmmaking process. What and how action occurs in front of the camera is an amalgam of these practical, stylistic and conceptual choices. Together with editing (the cutting and splicing of filmed action), these compositional decisions (typically referred to as mise en scène) are the primary means through which films begin to construct meaning. Although there have been various attempts to chart the development of these formal aspects in the history of film, more often than not, they have tended to do so according to narratives of cultural and technological change. These have proven to be useful ways of describing filmmaking in theoretical terms, but they are perhaps too limiting for describing it in practice. This is because the formal decisions involved in the filmmaking process are informed, like other communicative pursuits, by a range of practical, social, economic, political, subjective, ideological, stylistic and aesthetic frameworks, which are themselves interwoven in complex and indistinguishable ways.
My task in this chapter is not to rewrite the history of film, but rather to outline some of the key models developed throughout this history. In particular, I intend to focus on how editing is positioned within various discourses of film, because I want to argue for a more complex understanding of the role of cutting and splicing in the production of filmic meaning. Rather than locating editing as a technical and derivative process of postproduction, I consider it as central to the construction of film form. By examining various examples in the
20 history of film theory, it will be possible to consider editing as an essentially expressive, rather than merely subservient, aspect of film production. To this end, Sergei Eisenstein’s model of montage will provide a base from which to define editing as an overarching methodology that influences all aspects of the filmmaking process. I will then examine editing in an expanded sense: that is, as an organisational and broader creative device not just applicable to film. I will also explore the recent cultural and technological developments associated with new media, and in particular, the pre-eminence of editing as a communicative device in digital environments.
Film editing
Beginnings of film form
The beginning of film as a formal discipline is associated with an array of technological breakthroughs. For instance, in the late 1800s, Eadweard Muybridge began using multiple photographic cameras to capture still images in quick succession. This kind of ‘series photography’ enabled him to be among the first to depict the movement of forms over time. By playing the images back at a certain speed, it also became possible to simulate motion in real time.1 Soon after these developments, Auguste and Louis Lumière combined a motion camera, film printer and projector to create an apparatus called the ‘cinematographe’. In 1895, they used this device to produce and present what is often claimed to be the first motion picture, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory.2 Another Frenchman, Georges Méliès, then created a
1 This capacity to read a series of still images as movement is called ‘the persistence of vision’. It is the ability of the human brain to retain images and connect them together without distraction. There are various frame-rates, but 24, 25 and 30 frames-per-second are the most common. These speeds make it possible to conceal the static image within the ‘impression’ of movement. This is a very important aspect of film form because it enables filmmakers not simply to simulate motion in real time, but also to begin to construct ‘believable’ diegetic realities. 2 Jarek Kupść (1989, 1998). The history of cinema for beginners. London, Writers and readers, p.3.
21 large number of short films using more complicated shooting and staging techniques. His most famous work, A Trip to the Moon (1902), demonstrated a range of imaginative possibilities that film could engage with. Perhaps most importantly, it confirmed the ability of film to communicate narratives and to construct different onscreen-realities (for example life on the moon).
Of course, all of these early filmic experiments were silent. Although there had been various attempts to link sound and image, the ability to synchronise and amplify sound only became available in the 1920s. So, these early films relied heavily on the dramatisation of narrative action and the articulation of diegetic reality through images. And although often accompanied by live music, these films emphasised the symbology contained within the frame. The arrangements of sets and props were prioritised in order to create the desired visual tableau. There was also very little editing, and the cutting that there was, usually maintained a consistent distance from the scene, so as to not distract from the ‘natural’ appearance of images in motion.3
As filmmaking techniques improved, the ability to ‘artificially’ recreate believable impressions of reality became more widespread. For example, the films of D.W. Griffith in the early 1900s seem to operate through much more complicated methods than Méliès’ earlier works. Griffith understood that by varying lighting effects, camera angles and rhythms of editing, he could create filmic effects that enhanced, rather than distracted from the onscreen narrative. So, Griffith’s innovation was to use editing to advance his narratives. In films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915), we can witness the advent of the now familiar formal techniques of ‘continuity editing’, such as cross-cutting, establishing shots, close-ups, panning, and so on. Because film at this time was borrowing heavily from the literary conventions of narrative, the stories tended to occur across a range of locations and temporal periods. The formal operations of editing provided ways in which filmmakers, like Griffith, could organise and articulate the relations between these complex
3 As David Bordwell describes: “The actors are arranged in a row and stand far away from us. They perform against a canvas backdrop complete with wrinkles and painted-on décor. The shot unfolds uninterrupted by any closer views.” David Bordwell (1997). On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, p.1.
22 space-times of the plot. Here editing began to service the narrative, for it provided ways of creating ‘meaningful’ and ‘expressive’ effects in order to communicate stories.4
This acute relationship between editing and narrative has been profoundly influential on the history of film. Indeed, shortly after Griffith’s innovations, a number of Soviet filmmakers started to explore the formal potentials of film in more explicit ways. For them, the particular relationship between editing and narrative was a means to deploy psychological and ideological effects, as well as to communicate specific plotlines. Film form was not at the service of narrative, but rather narrative was at the service of film form. For directors like Lev Kuleshov, editing was more than a way of articulating the spatial- temporal changes of a plot; it was a way of deploying and manipulating meaning.
By re-editing existing films, Kuleshov supposedly demonstrated that new meanings would necessarily be made when images were juxtaposed together in different combinations. This seemingly inevitable human impulse to project meaning onto the collision of two images became known as the ‘Kuleshov effect’.5 Together with a Marxist model of dialectics, this means of provoking cognitive effects gave rise to the Soviet canon of montage editing. Although the ‘scientificity’ of Kuleshov’s claims has been disputed, at the very least he showed that filmic meaning occurs in the relations between and across film images, rather than being simply contained within the singular tableau of the film frame.
Kuleshov’s experiments gave theoretical weight to montage as an ‘essential’ aspect of film form. For Soviet directors, the relation between editing and the human impulse to deduce meanings from the collision of images was the defining aspect of film as a creative discipline. It is important to emphasise that the Soviet directors were driven to distinguish film as a unique discipline.
4 Jarek Kupść (1989, 1998). The history of cinema for beginners. London, Writers and readers, pp.9-13. 5 Don Fairservice (2001). Film editing: history, theory, and practice: looking at the invisible. Manchester; New York, New York, Manchester University Press, pp.180-183.
23 This form of self-analysis attempted to validate film as a new and worthy art- form, as well as to rationalise its place amongst the other arts. Like other art- forms at the time, film was undergoing an ‘internal audit’ to determine the essential and unique attributes of its form.6 For the Soviet directors then, it was this condition of juxtaposition that lay at the core of film as a discipline. In later chapters we will explore the importance of juxtaposition and collision in the ideological basis of Soviet montage, but for the moment it is necessary to examine how this model of montage was considered as a ‘total’ or overarching filmic system. Of course, the key protagonist in this discourse was Sergei Eisenstein.
The montage system
Having previously worked as a set designer for the Moscow Proletkult Theatre under the direction of Vsevolod Meyerhold, Eisenstein approached film initially as a form that extended the dramatic possibilities of theatre. For him, film was a medium that owed a debt to theatre, but at the same time it was able to surpass the illusionistic mechanisms that the theatre embodied. Curiously enough, film appeared to Eisenstein as a way of getting past the fictitious staging of theatre by enforcing an ‘actual’ reality upon the viewer.7 For him, theatre was fated by its construction of illusion in the ‘real’ space of the audience (the disparity between the fictitious staging and the ‘real world’ space of the theatre was too obvious). Film’s penchant for constructing cognitive realities (a notion derived from Kuleshov’s experiments) meant that
6 We can see similar questions being raised in other disciplines at this time. In painting, for example, the Cubists had already attempted to question the limits of their medium by resisting the illusionistic space of perspective. The De Stijl artists used a limited colour range, grids and planarity to emphasise the flatness of the painting surface. The Russian Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko had proposed the ‘end of painting’ with his triptych of yellow, blue and red panels. There are many other examples that also demonstrate this broader rationalisation of cultural forms. 7 Eisenstein described his shift from theatre to film. “This all happened because one day the director had the marvellous idea of producing this play about a gas factory – in a real gas factory. As we realised later, the real interiors of the factory had nothing to do with our theatrical fiction. At the same time the plastic charm of reality in the factory became so strong that the element of actuality rose with fresh strength – took things into its own hands – and finally had to leave an art where it could not command. Thereby bringing us to the brink of cinema.” Sergei Eisenstein (1949). Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York, Harcourt Press Jovanovich, p.8.
24 it could escape this theatrical dilemma. Rather than a disjunction between theatrical illusion and material reality, the photographic quality of the film image was seen as a direct means of recalling the material processes that inform experiences of reality.8
This was the beginning of Eisenstein’s theory of montage. The mimetic quality of the film image (with its supposedly direct access to material reality) was combined with a model of juxtaposition derived from Kuleshov’s experiments. Here, film was much more than a realistic depiction of reality. In order for film to tell stories and to disseminate meanings, film images needed to be arranged in sequences that prioritised certain symbolic associations over others. Again, this combination of the image and editing was important to defining film as a discipline. No other medium had the ability, or the necessity, to organise images into temporal arrangements. Montage editing was therefore a complementary device to the photographic image, and together they constituted the defining features of film form.
However, we need to emphasise that although montage appeared as an auxiliary function of filmmaking (post-production), Eisenstein conceived it as influencing all aspects of film production. While editing could provide a kind of syntax or grammar to its images, these images also needed to be internally composed. If Kuleshov’s experiments had shown anything, it was that images had powerful and provocative effects when put into sequences, and these effects were contingent on the content of images themselves. The internal compositions of images could therefore not be ignored. Contrasts of light and dark, of shape, line, form and the spaces between objects, characters and sets, were all ways of directing the viewer’s attention within the frame. Erratic and rhythmical movements within the frame also manipulated the viewer’s attention, and hence also created certain ‘montage’ effects. So, rather than
8 We can begin to see the Marxist beliefs that underpinned Eisenstein’s theory and practice. He placed much emphasis on the photographic quality of the image because its proximity to material reality would enable him to reveal the ideological foundations of social and historical processes.
25 being relegated to a secondary process, editing was understood to also pervade the internal ‘logic’ of the frame.9
Eisenstein’s model of montage soon became an overarching methodology. Instead of a derivative process, montage was conceived as integral to the composition and framing of each shot. It was not limited to the editing table, but rather implicit in all aspects of film production. In this approach, mise en scene, narrative, sound and casting were all understood as equal components within this broader system of filmic signification. Montage was therefore the prevailing organisational principle of Eisenstein’s work, and the primary method by which he sought to construct and recast filmic meaning.
While this model was highly specific and can be considered just one style or mode of editing in film history, it is a valuable prototype for the development of my argument.10 I propose that Eisenstein’s emphasis on the interrelation between editing and mise en scene is a condition embedded within the practical and conceptual considerations of all filmmaking. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a filmmaker that has not considered how his/her film would be edited prior to shooting.11 As Eisenstein’s idea of montage demonstrates, even compositional choices are already practices of editing. They are always already methods of controlling and manipulating the dissemination of filmic meaning. By extension, I propose that ‘editing’ is an expanded term that encompasses the organisation principles which pervade all aspects of film production. Later in this chapter, this expanded notion of editing is important for considering its analogous relation to other creative pursuits, especially artistic practice.
9 For example, Eisenstein has described that in the famous ‘Odessa steps’ sequence, the rhythms of the soldiers’ marching became integral to the effect of his montage editing. Ibid, p.74. 10 I will explore in later chapters how Eisenstein’s specific notions of collision and juxtaposition coalesced with a particular understanding of Marxist dialectics. This will provide insights into his underlying political and ideological ambitions, and allow us to consider the ‘critical’ potentials of editing as a broader creative methodology. 11 Aleksandr Sokurov’s recent film Russian Ark (2002) is a good example. Even though the film is one continuous (i.e. ‘un-edited’) shot, it would have to be one of the most highly choreographed and pre-planned films of all time. Clearly, even the choice ‘not to edit’ is a form of editing itself.
26 The ‘expressions’ of editing
Filmmakers like Eisenstein, Kuleshov and Griffith showed that editing is a more complex feature of cinema than simply the cutting and splicing of shots. At the hands of these filmmakers, it is also a malleable and diverse tool. While Griffith used the formal techniques of continuity editing to enhance his narratives, Eisenstein revealed the characteristics of the medium by emphasising the juxtapositions and discontinuities of editing. Editing therefore plays a central role in managing how narrative information is revealed to the viewer. Whether through continuity or discontinuity, editing is the filmmaker’s device for articulating changes in the time and space of the plot.12 As already described, narrative is, in part, defined by the very fact that it develops and changes across a range of spatial and temporal settings. So it is editing that determines which aspects of the narrative are revealed, and in which order. Consequently, in its expanded sense, editing controls all aspects of filmmaking including sequencing, framing, composition, dialogue and so on.
The rhetoric of editing
Although we can now readily understand editing as a communicative device, and a way of enabling and articulating all facets of plot development, it is still a somewhat ‘invisible’ form. Even in Eisenstein’s overt montage sequences, editing can only really be located in what and how we see narrative action. Likewise, in any of Kuleshov’s juxtapositions, we can see the images that are juxtaposed, but the edit-points are intangible; they are the imperceptible gaps between the images. Again, in Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera (1929), which deliberately reveals the processes of filmmaking, the ‘evidence’ of editing is still found in its images. In all films, we can witness the changes that occur in and between images, but we cannot visibly see the
12 Noël Burch described this quality of editing in detail. He outlined five ways that editing articulates temporal movement, and three ways it expresses spatial change. According to this formula, editing enables a total of fifteen different spatial-temporal relations. See: Noël Burch (1969, 1973). Theory of Film Practice. London, Secker and Warburg, pp.3-15.
27
Figure 4: Dziga Vertov, film still from The Man with the Movie Camera (1929)
Figure 5: Dziga Vertov, film still from The Man with the Movie Camera (1929)
28 editing.13 This makes editing a problematic ‘object’ of study because it is both everywhere and nowhere; it is both perceptible and imperceptible.
In some ways, editing seems to operate through subliminal or unconscious means, or through the psychological mechanisms of gestalt. Even in the simplest succession of similar images (as in a Muybridge-type sequence), we see objects in motion because our brain allows us to do so, without being aware of the individual frames themselves. This ‘persistence of vision’ is thevery first layer through which film communicates subliminally. The extent to which subconscious cognitive effects can be manipulated through the organisation and juxtaposition of images is, of course, taken to an extreme in Eisenstein’s work.14 On the other hand, films also allow us to consciously speculate on their meaning, for they offer up clues that require active hypothetical testing and not just passive absorption. As films disseminate their narrative events, we actively construct and reconstruct ‘cause and effect’ relationships between different aspects of the plot. In these complex back and forth movements, films play with our perception and cognition, but at the same time, we also play with them – we actively construct and reconstruct meaning.
Valerie Orpen likens this complex ability of editing to inform our perceptions of meaning both consciously and unconsciously, to the communicative patterns of rhetoric.15 Although modern day usage of the term is most often associated with certain forms of political posturing and sometimes deliberate deception, its foundations are as a practice of public oration for the purpose of persuasion. Rhetoric was a method of argumentation that relied on appeals to both the rational and emotional faculties of the audience. Consequently, the idea of rhetoric highlights the degree to which audiences make judgments
13 Even in a wipe transition, the edit-point is that irreducibly thin line that separates the images. To examine the edit-point is only ever to consider what kind of relation it produces between the images. The thin line that wipes across the screen has no specific meaning other than that which is produced by the images being combined/separated by that line. 14 Eisenstein’s concepts of ‘tonal’ and ‘overtonal’ montage seem to advocate a similar subliminal process whereby metric and rhythmic forms of montage produce overriding impressions and sensations. Sergei Eisenstein (1949). Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York, Harcourt Press Jovanovich, pp.75-81. 15 Valerie Orpen (2003). Film editing: the art of the expressive. London, Wallflower, pp.7-10.
29 by logically assessing facts, as well as through more emotive, moralistic and intuitive means.16 It is here that Orpen makes an analogy between editing and rhetoric. As in traditional forms of oration, editing often functions through rhetorical means because it can be used to attract, and ultimately persuade the viewer to follow the diegetic world of the plot. In other words, editing functions like rhetoric because it ‘persuades’ us to follow the spatial and temporal developments set out by the filmmaker. It appeals to both our conscious awareness of plot developments, as well as more intuitive and emotive means of making meaning.
Importantly, while editing serves the purposes of narrative comprehension, it also asserts its own communicative agency. Hence, we can understand this as the common ground between Griffith and Eisenstein’s respective ideas about film form. For both filmmakers, editing was a means of communication; a way of developing cognitive and emotional effects that contributed to the overall meaning of the film. So while it is tempting to see editing as a supplementary process in filmmaking, it must be acknowledged as intrinsic to the very fabric of filmic meaning (whether it appears in systems of continuity editing or dialectical montage). Once again, we can see that as a practical as well as an expressive procedure, editing presupposes the entire creative process for it is embedded in all decisions pertaining to film form and style. As Orpen suggests:
This leads to the possibility of investigating editing in a new way: if a cut can be just as expressive, though in a different way, as the reframing of the camera, perhaps it would make more sense to approach editing as something broader, more far-reaching, and I am tempted to say, more three-dimensional, than merely cuts which are not all that visible in the first place.17
16 Leon Mayhew describes rhetoric as the pre-eminence of the “logic of communicative reason” over the “logic of instrumental reason”. According to him, it is founded on the idea that intuitive and expressive methods of communication can generate persuasive effects beyond blunt, didactic or pragmatic methods of delivery. Leon H. Mayhew (1997). The New Public: Professional Communication and the Means of Social Influence. Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, p.90. 17 Valerie Orpen (2003). Film editing: the art of the expressive. London, Wallflower, p.116.
30 The rhetorical function of editing leads us back to an expanded idea of what editing can be. At this point one can argue that editing pre-empts and infects the entire filmmaking process. Rather than simply acting as a secondary technical process, it is an overarching methodology that influences all decisions about film form. Additionally, editing is a communicative and expressive device that is inseparable from the development of filmic meaning. In light of this, one can argue confidently that editing is an organisational device that actively interfaces with issues of audience affect and narrative comprehension. However, saying that editing presupposes production is not the same as saying it predetermines production. If editing is communicative and if it does pre-empt all aspects of production, it is because it is a way of resolving a range of practical and conceptual problems for both the filmmaker and the audience.
As demonstrated, the filmmaker’s formal and conceptual choices are his/her ways of persuading or drawing in the audience to engage with the story world. Often, these choices cannot be anticipated in any real sense before production ‘begins’.18 As such, we are also aware that filmmaking is a complex and ongoing process that juggles economic and pragmatic restrictions against stylistic and conceptual ambitions. As Orpen observes, “the editing stage is never finished; it can be re-jigged and reshuffled ad infinitum, provided there is sufficient time and money available.”19 It is therefore important to look at how and why editing processes do finish, and how editing offers up potential resolutions (even if they are more speculative and provisional than definitive and authoritative). By doing so, we will see that editing might also describe the ways in which viewers reconstruct meaning from film form.
18 The question of when any creative pursuit ‘begins’ is difficult. I contend that creative pursuits, indeed all forms of inscription, stem from complex and often intangible processes of the imagination. As Edward Said says, “The starting point is the reflexive action of the mind attending to itself, allowing itself to effect (or dream) a construction of a world whose seed totally implicates its offspring.” This is not to suggest that beginning is a fully self-conscious act. On the contrary, beginning is a somewhat ironic function of the mind that allows us to ‘write’ as if its product will have meaning. Edward W. Said (1975, 1985). Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York, Columbia University Press, p.48. 19 Ibid, p.7
31 Problem solving
Rather than connecting the history of film form with linear narratives of cultural and technological change, David Bordwell has sought to locate the history of film style within a more complex model. By examining the historical development of film’s various forms, he has described the filmmaking process as having developed according to a problem-solution model.20 Faced with an almost infinite array of problems – how to frame a shot, how to costume a character, how to light a scene, how to sequence the narrative – the filmmaker proposes solutions that allows the film to be made. Sometimes the solutions are obvious, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are restricted by practical means, while at other times they are opened up by new technological potentials. Here artistic and creative ambitions are always juggled in relation to other formal, practical and economic capabilities. For Bordwell, thinking about filmmaking in this way can account for the assortment of stylistic continuities and discontinuities throughout film history.21
This problem-solution model might also help us understand how certain aspects of film form become conventional. That many filmmakers are presented with similar problems is not an unrealistic assumption. Take a simple conversation between two characters. Let’s say it is a crucial part of the plot where the dialogue is the most important aspect of the scene. The filmmaker is presented with a range of practical problems that revolve around how to best get the dialogue across in a clear and concise manner. The most obvious solution would be to put a character on each side of the set. Start with a shot that establishes their spatial positions in the scene. As one character begins talking, show a close up of him/her by maintaining a similar camera angle as the initial establishing shot. When the second character responds, cut to an alternating close-up by using the initial establishing shot
20 David Bordwell (1997). On the History of Film Style. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, pp.149-150. 21 So for example, movements such as the French New Wave and the more recent Dogma group can be understood as ‘collective’ responses to artistic and ideological concerns in general. But the differences between individual films are understood as responses to the highly specific questions posed during filmmaking – which costume, which prop, and so on.
32 as rotation-point. As the dialogue continues, cut back and forth between the two characters. End scene.
Of course, these are the conventions of continuity editing: the establishing shot, analytical editing, shot/reverse-shot, the 180 degree rule. They are ways of ‘concealing’ the camera and the editing in order to focus on the narrative action. By why do these techniques seem obvious? It is because they maintain a certain spatial-temporal logic that places the viewer at the ‘point of view’ of the camera. The camera stands in for the visual perception of the viewer; and the viewer subsequently becomes the central point from which all narrative action is seen. More importantly, these formal solutions appear as obvious, logical or even ‘natural’ to the filmmaker because he/she has seen them ‘work’ in other films. Because continuity editing has helped other films to convey their narratives, filmmakers appropriate these formal tropes and use the examples of other films to deploy already tested visual syntaxes.22
Here, we can see that a problem-solution model is also performed by the film viewer. As discussed previously, editing is not only a way of deploying the rhetorical effects of style, but it is also a means of reading or apprehending those effects. Whilst editing allows the filmmaker to momentarily resolve a range of practical, stylistic and rhetorical problems, it also enables the film viewer, through a kind of reverse-engineering, to reconstruct the communicative logic at work in the film. While watching the film, the viewer (whether consciously or subliminally) looks for clues as to the connections and developments of the plot. S/he projects certain cause and effect relationships between the various aspects of the plot. As Bordwell points out however, this process is less akin to a scientific or rational form of deduction,
22 When these conventions become overused films can appear as too obvious and hence boring. Hollywood romantic comedies are an example of this kind of film-as-formula. In contrast, the most interesting and compelling films (at least for me) are those that confuse conventions and force the viewer to constantly rethink the communicative ‘logic’ of the film. Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002) is a good example, because it manipulates forms of continuity editing in order to displace and disrupt the coherency of the viewing experience.
33 than a speculative and provisional process contingent on social and subjective forces.23
These ideas will be explored in more detail in later chapters, but for now it is important to emphasise the problem-solution model for our expanded notion of editing. To the extent that the viewer edits their own experiences and understandings by reconstructing meaning from the clues edited by the filmmaker, it is necessary to understand editing as implicit in both film-making and film-viewing. Indeed, because the filmmaker’s various decisions attempt to anticipate how his/her film will be read, the operations of making and interpreting are posited in another back and forth relation. That is to say, the filmmaker and film viewer both anticipate, and project, meaning across the symbolic and rhetorical functions of the film.
As we have now established, editing crosses the boundaries between preproduction, production and postproduction; it traverses back and forth between the specific problems facing the maker and the solutions offered by other films; and finally, editing is mimed by the viewer in order to project and reconstruct meaning. Consequently, our expanded notion of editing can be said to incorporate all aspects of filmic meaning, and by extension, one can argue that these complex operations of signification are not just limited to the field of film. The cutting and splicing of editing can be thought of as models for practices of ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ more generally. Editing is not simply a way of deploying and inferring meaning in film, it is also a methodology that permeates all forms of signification. It allows us to temporarily resolve problems of representation and to speculate on the implications of symbolic forms. In short, cutting and splicing are the ways in which we make and remake meaning. Although they might remain ‘invisible’ at times, the operations of editing allow us to constantly reconstruct and reinscribe meaning through the symbolic systems which surround us.
23 David Bordwell (1989). Making meaning: inference and rhetoric in the interpretation of cinema. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, pp.3-4.
34 These ideas will be expanded on in the next chapter, particularly through the relation between Jacques Derrida’s grammatological model of writing, and Eisenstein’s montage system. For the moment, it is necessary to elaborate on this already expanded notion of editing. The developments of new technologies can also help us understand how editing functions as an expanded methodology beyond the limits of film form.
Editing in new media
Advances in computer-based technologies have altered the ways in which we distribute, gather and store information in our everyday lives. They have also begun to reshape and redefine our notions of subjectivity and sociality. Not only are e-mails and online communities changing how interpersonal relationships are formed in ‘virtual’ and ‘actual’ spaces, but technology like MP3 players, portable DVD players, mobile phones and laptop computers are transforming our methods of navigating the various interfaces of social space (whether virtual or actual). New forms of hardware, like digital cameras (including camera phones and personal video cameras), DVD recorders and faster computer processors are combining more and more with creative software packages to provide access to professional image, video and sound applications.24 These new ‘interfaces’ between hardware and software are enabling users to imagine, invent, and remake their own personal expressions and realities in ways that were unimaginable a decade ago. Importantly, these new technologies have necessitated the development of a range of new symbolic systems, new languages, and new ways of making meaning, necessary to keep up with these changing attitudes towards creative activity.
As already discussed through the example of film, the traditional distinctions between form, content and meaning are difficult to maintain when considering the role of editing in the construction of meaning. For the same reasons, it is
24 In particular, Apple’s iLife range which includes applications including iMovie, iPhoto and Garage Band.
35 impossible to disentangle new media forms from the complex combinations of new and old symbolic systems. The visual and formal ‘literacies’ of old technologies, have been inherited throughout the development and various uses of new ones. It is therefore possible to argue that editing plays an integral role in the way that new media forms allow users to negotiate these various cultural idioms, and inform contemporary experience. From Microsoft Word to Final Cut Pro, from a home DVD recording of the football, to a podcast of a live music set, the formal operations of cutting and pasting prevail as principal methods for using these hardwares and applications. The extent to which they also allow us to save, delete and remake multiple versions of our material, is a marker of how editing also provides methods of trial and error in the construction of these cultural expressions. In these ways, editing has become both a formal device available to us, as well as an attitude for engaging with our cultural forms and languages. It has become deeply embedded within new technological interfaces, as well as the intuitive ways in which we use them, so that they seem almost natural to us now.
Manovich: what’s new is old
While this world in which we now live is a very different one from that which saw the early developments of film technologies, editing remains a principal method of making meaning. Although we can argue that film is no longer the dominant mass medium, but rather one part of a broader spectrum of cultural production, editing remains the pre-eminent means of constructing meaning in a contemporary ‘globalised’ culture. It is possible to argue further, as Lev Manovich does, that editing is as integral to the communicative patterns of new media as it is to film.25 He suggests that new media have appropriated and revised the symbolic systems of film, so much so that the ‘logic’ of selection and combination (cutting and splicing) has become the dominant
25 Manovich places ‘new’ media in a continuum with ‘old’ media – particularly film. His point is not to articulate a linear progression from old to new, but conversely, to demonstrate how the forms and functions of new media are intrinsically connected with the history of film. See: Lev Manovich (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass. and London, MIT Press.
36 contemporary model of personal expression.26 At this point, we can begin to see that editing is not just a formal device that is applied to symbolic systems. Rather, it is embedded within the complex cognitive and psychological processes of identification and differentiation.
Manovich argues that new media users actively engage with the forms of identification and expression through this logic of combination and selection. Whether creating personal play-lists in iTunes, modifying internet browser options, personalising desktop appearances, or ‘Photoshoping’ family snapshots, Manovich argues that editing allows individuals to positively inform their experiences of reality.27 In this way, we can see once again how editing operates across an expanded field of possibilities. It is not just restricted to something done by filmmakers and film viewers, but it is also embedded in the various methods we use to navigate, negotiate and make sense of the world around us.
Manovich also makes an important observation which allows us to reiterate this broad conception of editing. He suggests that even though new media seem to amplify the activities of cutting and splicing, and although they might seem to disperse human experience across a vast array of cultural forms and languages, the resulting cultural expressions do not necessarily emphasise conditions of fragmentation and disruption. On the contrary, he proposes that new media are proliferating models of seamless interaction and integration, as opposed to those disruptive forms of montage established by Soviet directors early last century. In this contemporary scenario where seamless ‘compositing’ is privileged over the unsettling montagist, the DJ becomes the prototypical new media user.
Montage aims to create visual, stylistic, semantic, and emotional dissonance between different elements. In contrast, compositing aims to blend them into a seamless while, a single gestalt. […] The DJ’s art
26 Manovich asks, “How can a modern subject escape from this logic? In a society saturated with brands and labels, people respond by adopting a minimalist aesthetic and a hard-to- identify clothing style.” Ibid, p.128 27 Ibid, p.128
37 is measured by his ability to go from one track to another seamlessly. A great DJ is thus a compositor and anti-montage artist par excellence. He is able to create a perfect temporal transition from very different musical layers; and he can do this in real time, in front of a dancing crowd.28
Indeed, many new media ‘expressions’ exemplify this penchant for seamlessness. From advanced video games to GPS navigation systems and the integration of 3D computer graphics within film, emphasis is often placed on the uninterrupted flow of information, movement and sensation. Likewise, in the never-ending quest for faster broadband connections and increased processing power, spontaneity, convenience and immediacy are esteemed. I argue, however, that it is difficult to separate compositing from montage, at least in the way Eisenstein imagined it. For, when he wrote about the “synchronization of the senses”, he stressed that compositional elements and editing could coalesce to create immediate tonal and overtonal effects.29 And even though his notion of montage was a way of emphasising contrast and conflict, it was also something he imagined to occur spontaneously in the viewer’s mind. So rather than opposing montage and compositing as readily as Manovich, I would locate them under the umbrella term ‘editing’. They are not mutually exclusive, but rather, two sides of the same coin.
Collage life
Thus, editing appears to us in a myriad of ways that do not follow an ‘either/or’ logic (either montage or compositing). Instead, cutting and splicing permeate all forms of inscription and signification, whether it accentuates discontinuity or continuity, disruption or seamlessness. Indeed, as Manovich suggests, we cannot separate the examples of early film experiments from the complex technological forms of the present. As users, or ‘prosumers’, of culture (rather
28 Ibid, p.144 29 Sergei Eisenstein (1942, 1975). “Synchronization of the Senses” in The Film Sense. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp.69-109.
38 than simply consumers), we are potentially able to call on an endless array of existing examples by which to model and reconstruct our own experiences. Eisenstein’s montage and the DJ’s compositing are equally ‘available’ models for making sense of the world. Just as the conventions of continuity editing can be appropriated and revised accordingly, these forms of editing are existing examples which allow us to personally mimic and remake for our own purposes. As the Apple website tells us, by using our iBooks and iLife software package, we can:
[…] collect, organize and edit the various elements. Transform them into mouth-watering masterpieces with Apple-designed templates. Then share the magic moments in beautiful books, colorful calendars, dazzling DVDs, perfect podcasts, and attractive online journals. All starring you.30
While Apple’s description of their product promotes an undifferentiated and utopian version of new media rhetoric, it also signals the extent to which the distinctions between our lived experiences and our representations of them are becoming more and more blurred. Like the symbolic interaction of a ‘real’ newspaper fragment and a graphic illustration of a violin f-hole in a cubist collage, our differentiations of actual and virtual, real and representation, are becoming harder to maintain. Life itself has become like a collage of fragments, some of which are pasted seamlessly side by side, and others which are superimposed. In this collage of lived experiences, interactions in virtual space are as ‘real’, as ‘evident’ and as ‘true’ as those that take place in actual spaces.
This is, in many ways, similar to what Jean Baudrillard described some thirty years ago as “the hyperrealism of simulation”.31 Just as he explained, the long held distinctions between reality and unreality are no longer sustainable.
30 Apple (2006) Apple iLife. http://www.apple.com/ilife/. Accessed: 20/08/2006. 31 Jean Baudrillard (1976, 2003). Extract from "Symbolic Exchange and Death". From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Cahoone, Lawrence E. Malden, Mass. and Oxford, UK, Blackwell: pp.421-434, p.430.
39 Representation does not simply stand in for reality; instead it is the only possible reality. However, where Baudrillard’s claims might have tended towards a pessimistic, or even dystopian view of reality (experienced as an “hallucination”), I would like to mark out a space somewhere between his position and Apple’s utopian version. It is my contention that while we are certainly surrounded by representations of representations, and while these seem to exclude us from traditionally held conventions of ‘reality’, we are also able to inscribe our personal sensibilities within the often intimidating flow of symbolic systems which inform our lives. These are not entirely ‘liberating’ forms of expression, but they can offer profound and important ways of navigating and negotiating contemporary experience. Indeed, the advances of recent technologies have opened up new deterritorialised flows of information, networks of distribution and models of communal space which resist the traditional modes of socialisation, identification and differentiation.
It is these different kinds of spaces and different models of inscription which offer the creative and critical potentials of new media technologies. These myriad social clusters, languages and methods of dissemination are important for enabling and emphasising diversity and heterogeneity against the hegemonic tendencies of dominant culture. Rather than refuse understandings of identity and reality, these mediated experiences allow us to imagine and mark out our various places in the world. These experiences are our multiple realities and multiple identities. They allow us to piece together different fragments and versions of ourselves in order to negotiate our everyday lives.
Moreover, by actively engaging with these processes and by reconstructing versions of ‘self’ and ‘reality’, we are also able to open up and examine the ‘seams’ and ‘edit-points’ that constitute the gaps and overlaps of our various experiences. By appropriating and juxtaposing the visual styles and languages that surround us, we can begin to actively rethink and critique the legitimacies and authenticities of those cultural forms. This is the value of applying editing as a creative and critical principle in my particular artistic practice. It is a way of both engaging with, and critically questioning the
40 languages of dominant culture. It is a way of cutting and splicing these fragments of contemporary experience into new forms that seem both familiar and unfamiliar.32
Apple’s utopian notion of digital interaction and Baudrillard’s nihilistic conception of simulation merge in my model of editing. Just as the two sides of my initial suspicion about editing forecast, cutting and splicing can function both as means of exploring curiosities and fascinations, as well as interrogating and unpacking cautions, uncertainties and doubts. Editing provides an important conceptual and practical methodology for making meaning precisely because it combines these dual suspicions in equal quantities. It provides creative and critical strategies for engaging with dominant cultural codes and traditions by giving us permission to explore, experiment and speculative in provisional and open-ended ways. It is in this provisional and speculative sense, that editing has provided vital methodologies for artists to engage with existing symbolic systems in creative and critical ways.
The art of editing
Cut and paste beginnings
Cutting and pasting have been used in artistic practices since the cubist collages of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque early in the twentieth century. For them, the insertion of newspaper clippings, chair caning, razor-blade packets and other fragments of ‘reality’ seemed to resist the artifice of
32 This is similar to Nicolas Bourriaud’s argument that: “What we usually call reality is a montage […] From the same material (the everyday), we can produce different versions of reality. Contemporary art thus presents itself as an alternative editing table that shakes up social forms, reorganizes them, and inserts them into original scenarios. The artist deprograms in order to reprogram, suggesting that there are other possible uses for the techniques and tools at our disposal.” Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). Postproduction: culture as screenplay: how art reprograms the world. New York, Lukas & Sternberg, p.66.
41 representation. Collage was a way of negating the illustionistic space of painting established through the conventions of perspective. However, by inserting actual materials from lived experience into a flattened picture plane, Picasso, Braque and other collagists somewhat paradoxically began to reference or ‘represent’ aspects of their lives. Collage served as a resistance to perspective, but at the same time it provided an indexical model of signification. In this way, their collages were still like representations because they allowed viewers to imagine the images as ‘windows’ onto other realities: the everyday lives of the artists, and the space of representation itself.
Because of this, we can understand the major point of difference between cubist collage and traditional perspective painting as a shift from illusion to ‘allusion’. Rather than create the illusion of depth within their ‘paintings’, theyrecast the viewer toward the surface of the picture plane. By emphasising the juxtapositions of elements across the surface they developed syntactical compositions within the frame, and yet they also provided semiotic reference that extended outside the frame. Through the resulting compositions, these artists became aware of the ways in which these fragments of real world materials could operate indexically and metonymically to allude to whole objects. They came to understand that they were not just actual materials from everyday life, but also ‘signs’ that stood in for the presence of other real world objects – or rather, the idea of the presence of objects.33 So by cutting materials from the reality of lived experience, and by pasting them into the ‘reality’ of the image (like the diegetic world of a film), the cubists began to actively engage with, and interrogate the constructed nature of ‘painting-as-representation’.
Another major figure in early twentieth century who recognised the significance of cutting and pasting was Marcel Duchamp. But while the cubists cut and pasted materials into two-dimensional compositions,
33 Rosalind Krauss has described that this ‘presence’ is itself only constituted by a condition of ‘absence’. That is, the ability of a fragment to operate as a ‘signifier’ is only possible because the ‘signified’ is absent from the picture plane. See: Rosalind E. Krauss (1985). “In the Name of Picasso” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, pp.23-40, p.33.
42
Figure 6: Pablo Picasso, Au Bon Marche (1912-1913)
Figure 7: Georges Braque, Still Life on the Table (1913)
Figure 8: Marcel Duchamp, Bottle Dryer (1914)
43 Duchamp cut objects from the real world and pasted them into the context of the gallery. Thus, he too transferred the materials of lived experience into the realm of art. And by doing so, his ‘readymades’ placed the constructed nature of art, or more specifically, the constructed nature of aesthetic judgment under intense interrogation.34 Perhaps more importantly, he emphasised the extent to which the traditional canon of art had sought to differentiate between the space of art, and the reality of the real world. So, in Duchamp’s readymades it is possible to see cutting and pasting as more than just a formal process involving scissors and glue. Cutting and pasting became a conceptual strategy for questioning the very basis of the production and reception of art. They became ways of transforming and juxtaposing materials and context, of exploring the gaps between art and its reception, and of reconsidering the overlap between lived experience and the world of art.
The strategies of cutting and pasting have been used throughout the history of modern art as a legacy of Picasso, Braque and Duchamp’s experiments. Cutting and pasting continue to appear as practical and conceptual tools, whether in John Heartfield and Hannah Höch’s Dadaist photomontages, Francis Picabia’s The Cacodylic Eye (1921), Erich Buchholz’s Coloured Room (1922) or in Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau (1923-1947). Sometimes collage, montage and editing are used for political means, as in Heartfield’s deconstruction of Nazi propaganda, and sometimes simply for formal and aesthetic purposes, as in Buchholz’s detailed three-dimensional composition of colour, shape and form. But in all cases, cutting and pasting are ways of questioning and rearticulating the interface between the conditions of art’s production and the reality of lived experience.
By converting his home into an ongoing installation of symbolic and material fragments, Schwitters dissolved the boundary between aesthetic production and everyday life. Likewise, when Picabia asked other artists to sign the surface of his work, he made it impossible to distinguish between the art
34 Thierry de Duve argues that after Duchamp, the problem of aesthetic judgment in art must revolve around the question ‘what is art?’ rather than the traditional issue of ‘what is beauty?’ Thierry de Duve (1996). Kant After Duchamp. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, p.314.
44
Figure 9: John Heartfield, Millions Stand Behind Me (1932)
Figure 10: Francis Picabia, The Cacodylic Eye (1921)
45
Figure 11: Erich Buchholz, Model of Berlin Studio (1922)
Figure 12: Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau (1923)
46 object and its social context. In all of these ways, cutting and pasting, or ‘editing’, function as key creative and critical methodologies for engaging art with broader social and cultural realities.35 Perhaps most importantly, editing was also the means by which these modernist artists began to break down the traditional notions of authorship, authenticity and originality which had dominated the canon of artistic production since the Renaissance.
Expanded cutting and pasting
The formal and conceptual advancements provided by the aforementioned modern artists, can be considered forerunners to the developments of neo- dada, pop art, fluxus and conceptual art from the late 1950s onwards.36 Like the cubist and dada artists before them, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg confounded the boundaries between object and image, between reality and representation, by combining elements from the real world into their works. Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein placed their social reality, ‘consumer culture’, at the heart of their practices. By directly appropriating, or cutting and pasting the imagery and reproduction techniques of the mass media, they blurred the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art. The fluxus performances staged by Allan Kaprow and others confused the borders between artist and audience. Rather than paste art onto the life, or life onto art, they cut away the separation altogether. In a different way, conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner
35 It is possible to argue that the emergence of editing in artistic practice is contemporary with the modernist avant-garde ideals of connecting art and life. Although it did not produce widespread social revolution (as the rhetoric sometimes proposed), through its dual operations of cutting and splicing, editing allowed modern artists to question the borders between aesthetic reality and its social, cultural and ideological contexts. Just as Rosalind Krauss described the role of the grid in modern art, it is also possible to argue that editing emerged as a dominant formal method which allowed modern artists to organise relations between time and space. By doing so, editing appears (like the grid) as historically ‘non- developmental’. That is, it does not advance towards any particular goal or purpose (medium-specificity for example), but rather, it serves different purposes for different artists. See: Rosalind E. Krauss (1985). “Grids” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, pp.9-22. 36 Hal Foster suggested that the ‘neo-avant-garde’ practices that emerged in the 1960s, reused and reworked particular formal and conceptual strategies initiated by modernist avant- garde artists. See: Hal Foster (1996). "What's Neo About the Neo-Avant-Garde?" in The Duchamp Effect. Buskirk, Martha and Nixon, Mignon. Massachusetts, October Books: pp.5- 32.
47 ‘dematerialised’ their artworks by ‘pasting’ language as surrogates for art objects.
In all of these cases, the expanded functions of editing provided these artists with practical and conceptual means to construct and disseminate meaning. As a form of experimentation and play, these artists edited the various social languages in order to rupture the models of authorship and originality which are embedded within the prevailing codes and conventions of dominant culture. For example, when Ed Ruscha produced his book Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), he not only emphasised the formal repetitions of architecture and signage, he also pointed to a new conception of artistic practice: one freed from conventional notions of authorship and originality. His use of photography as a ‘dumb’ documentation tool, his banal sequencing and titling of the images, and his removal of signs of authorship (reinforced by his deadpan formal delivery) continued a critical tradition established by the experiments of Picasso, Braque and Duchamp. Authorship and originality were further debated through the artist’s ironic forms of production and classification. In short, artists in the post-war period like Ruscha, re-enacted the formal operations of editing in order to question and emphasise the ways in which information is continually selected and combined in dominant culture.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, artists like Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons expanded on these artistic strategies by foregrounding the connections (or disconnections) between art and its social reality. These artists bought, copied and manipulated the symbolic codes of popular culture. They copied and pasted mass media methods and techniques in order to parody the mechanisms of dominant culture. In this way, their works are examples of how the various ‘languages’ that surround us in everyday life can be reorganised and reformatted to create new, and perhaps critical, versions of reality. Whereas Picasso and Braque introduced elements of the real world into the picture plane, these artists took the dissolution of reality and its representation to the extreme. By exhibiting vacuum cleaners as if they were museum objects, Koons for example, used the formal strategies of collage in a highly conceptual sense. By creating a
48
Figure 13: Robert Rauschenberg, Retroactive II (1964)
Figure 14: Joseph Kosuth, One and Three Chairs (1965)
49
Figure 15: Ed Ruscha, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963)
Figure 16: Andy Warhol, Plane Crash (1963)
50 continuity edit between art and consumer culture, he questioned the relationship between artistic practice and social reality. Subsequently, like these other artists, Koons interrogated the conventions of authorship and originality by emphasising the complicity of art with the symbolic languages of dominant culture.
More recently, artists like Douglas Gordon, Pipilotti Rist, Stan Douglas, Fiona Banner, Pierre Bismuth, Claude Closky, Candice Breitz, Pierre Huyghe, Piotr Uklański and Paul Pfeiffer who have continued this trajectory of artistic practice. These artists, and many others, continue to use the forms and conventions of popular culture as readymades. For some, like Breitz, Douglas and Bismuth, film has provided a readymade source from which to unpack the dissemination of dominant cultural codes. For others like Closky and Uklański, it is the seamless array of symbolic networks which become the site of interrogation. Whether explicit, as in his work The Nazis (1998), or an implicit, like in Dancefloor (1996), Uklański is a prime example of a new model of artistic practice where all symbolic interfaces are up for grabs. Through strategies of appropriation, imitation, re-staging and revision, artists like Uklański remake and rearrange popular culture to suit their needs. While they are perhaps less ironic than their predecessors, these contemporary artists continue to rigorously critique and rework the symbolic systems that permeate lived experience. Indeed for these artists, popular culture is no longer something to be commented upon. It cannot even be separated from the collage-like experience of everyday life. Instead, it is ‘always already’ connected with how they (and their audiences) navigate and negotiate the world. It seems like an almost natural process of constructing and reconstructing symbolic associations.
What distinguishes these artists is the extent to which they create different spaces and different forms of inscription by redeploying the codes of dominant culture and lived experience. Even if it is just the ‘double-take’ produced by Uklański’s advertisement in Artforum, Untitled (GingerAss) (2002), or Huyghe’s capricious (yet ambitious) exposition of communal affiliations in Streamside Day Folies (2004), these artists allow for difference and spacing
51
Figure 17: Piotr Uklański, Untitled (GingerAss) (2002)
Figure 18: Pierre Huyghe, Streamside Day Folies (2004)
52 to occur within the constant stream of symbolic activity in everyday life. They are at the forefront of contemporary artistic practice precisely because they employ the methodologies of editing in complex, and often confounding, conceptual combinations. They make it difficult to place meaning and intention in a world otherwise defined by corporate value systems and economic rationalisations.
Remaking and revising
In his book Postproduction, Nicolas Bourriaud identifies and discusses a similar range of strategies and tendencies in contemporary artistic practice.37 Rather than arguing specifically for an expanded idea of editing in contemporary art, as I do, Bourriaud nominates ‘postproduction’ as a model to describe the role of cutting and pasting in artistic practice. For him, artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Pierre Huyghe and Douglas Gordon exemplify this tendency because they examine and problematise the boundaries between the production and consumption of culture.38 In other words, these artists continue the tradition traceable from Duchamp through to Breitz and Uklański. These artists are not merely passive consumers of dominant cultural codes, but rather they reshape and remake them through their work. Bourriaud’s observations are based on a notion of contemporary subjectivity similar to the role of collage I have emphasised above.
37 Bourriaud’s notion of postproduction aligns in many ways with my model of editing. However, I propose that in addition to the evocation of film and television contexts, my notion of editing also relates to, and extends upon, the multifaceted and speculative idea of inscription opened up by Jacques Derrida’s radical examinations of reading and writing more generally (I will explore this in more detail in later chapters). Thus, while Bourriaud’s observations are analogous to the progression of my argument, I extend the notion of editing as a more complex and multidimensional understanding of these methodological tendencies in contemporary art practice. While postproduction seems to preserve a secondary or derivative relation to a pre-existing set of signifying codes and conventions, I argue that the processes of editing are necessarily engrained within all practices of making meaning as those cognitive movements backward and forward, between and across the fragmented construction of any text. 38 Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). Postproduction: culture as screenplay: how art reprograms the world. New York, Lukas & Sternberg, pp.7-9.
53 What we usually call reality is a montage. But is the one we live in the only possible one? From the same material (the everyday), we can produce different versions of reality. Contemporary art thus presents itself as an alternative editing table that shakes up social forms, reorganizes them, and inserts them into original scenarios. The artist deprograms in order to reprogram, suggesting that there are other possible uses for the techniques and tools at our disposal.39
Candice Breitz’s 2005 work, King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson), is a useful example to consider because it opens up new ways of understanding the relationship between artistic practice and forms of socialisation embedded in contemporary subjectivity. To make this work, Breitz invited sixteen Michael Jackson fans to re-perform his seminal album Thriller (1982) in a recording studio in Berlin. Isolated against a black backdrop, each ‘everyday’ performer recited their version for the camera. As they mimicked Jackson’s voice, appearance and mannerisms to varying degrees, each performer transformed Jackson’s iconic songs into their own very individual and personal expression. When Breitz exhibits these individual performances simultaneously in a 16- channel configuration, the personal performances also become part of a collective expression. The result is a kind of cacophonic and communal, yet fractured and idiosyncratic, rendition of this archetypal pop music. By bringing these individual voices together in a collective expression, Breitz lays bare the diminishing separation of lived experience and popular culture. Personal, everyday forms of identity and self-expression are not placed in opposition to the world of celebrity. Rather, they are made possible precisely because of ‘shared’ sensibilities, languages, conventions and representations of stardom.
Breitz not only edits together a new version of Jackson’s album, she also enables her performers to edit their own understandings of identity and experience. Breitz and her performers do not simply imitate or mimic popular culture; rather they translate, revise and remake their own versions of it. As the artist says:
39 Ibid, p.66
54
I think it’s less about what pop culture can do, than about how it is used. Pop culture in itself, or any work of art for that matter, only starts to be interesting in the moment of reception. As you absorb pop, you decide what you want it to mean, what you want to take from it. There’s a moment of translation rather than an inherent potential.40
Editing not only describes Breitz’s conceptual and practical methods, but also the ways in which experiences and expressions of identity are potentially made and remade in the context of contemporary mass media and popular culture. This is because identity and ‘authorship’ are positioned in the tensions between self-perception and the perception of others, between mimicry and self-expression, and between shared languages and individual appropriations.
Breitz, and other artists like her, exemplify how editing can be applied as a creative methodology for contemporary art practice. Whereas Picasso and Duchamp interrogated the relation between art and broader social realities by inserting real world objects into the discourses of art, these contemporary artists employ editing because it is engrained in the very fabric of contemporary experience. Importantly, they do not simply reproduce the forms and languages of dominant culture; rather they remake and revise them to produce different versions and new spaces for signification and inscription to take place. They use editing as a method of interpreting, translating, rethinking and reshaping notions of identity, ideology, knowledge and history as pliable and ongoing processes. They do not simply reflect or oppose dominant understandings and relations of power in a polemical sense; instead, they actively engage with and manipulate the codes and conventions of popular culture to produce new and divergent models of signification and meaning. Not only do they edit their works by selecting and combining fragments of other media, forms and languages, but in the process they edit their own experiences and their understandings of reality and identity.
40 Christy Lange (2005). "Crazy for You: Candice Breitz on Pop Idols and Portraiture." Modern Painters: International Arts and Culture, September 2005: pp.68-73, p.73.
55
Figure 19: Candice Breitz, King (A Portrait of Michael Jackson) (2005)
56 The analogies between artistic practice and the notions of film editing outlined earlier in this chapter, are now becoming clearer. Across its various uses in these disciplines, editing is a malleable organisational device. It is a way of managing and disseminating symbolic systems and the operations of making meaning. It is both a practical necessity and a means of expression. It can follow logics of continuity or it can disrupt expected relations between author, text and audience. It can cut and paste, appropriate and manipulate the languages of dominant culture in order to question existing models of identity and knowledge. Along the way, it can allow new forms of expression and new models of making meaning to emerge. I will briefly conclude this chapter with a few notes on the role of editing as a problem solving tool for artists.
Editing an installation
In 1965, Donald Judd famously claimed that the best art was “neither painting nor sculpture”.41 Today it might be said that the most interesting art is still neither painting nor sculpture – nor is it drawing, text art, performance art, sound art, or video art.42 Most of the most exciting art uses multiple media in the works’ conception, production and/or presentation. For these reasons, many artists do not restrict themselves to working along medium-specific lines. Instead, they move between and across media depending on the conceptual requirements of each work. Consequently, the majority of this art appears to us now under the broad category of ‘installation’. We still talk about categories like ‘painting’ or ‘sculpture’ or ‘video’, but the way in which much of the most interesting and demanding art is approached is largely through its display, or its ‘installation’.43
41 Donald Judd (1965, 1996). "Specfic Objects". Theories and documents of contemporary art: a sourcebook of artists' writings. Stiles, Kristine and Selz, Peter. Berkely, University of California Press: pp.114-117, p.114. 42 It may not be wise to prioritise one medium over another, or to unreservedly place ‘value’ on the materials of any work. A great deal of this art is neither one medium nor another, but a mixture of many. 43 Exhibitions of painting and sculpture certainly do still take place, and artists do work closely with particular materials. However, these are no longer privileged as dominant forms of making art – they are no longer ends in themselves. They are just options among many that can be employed and manipulated according to the artist’s inclinations and intentions. Rosalind Krauss labelled this shift a “post-medium condition”. Rosalind E. Krauss (1999). "A
57
This shift towards installation can be understood according to a similar art historical trajectory as the one mentioned above. The importance of minimalism should not be underestimated either. By emphasising the physiological and perceptual experience of the viewer as an intrinsic aspect of art, minimalists like Judd and Robert Morris, called attention to the details implicit within the presentation of art. When we encounter minimalist objects in galleries, we are refused traditional ‘symbolic’ clues that help us project meaning onto the work. We might, therefore, notice seemingly trivial and incidental aspects of the work, as it sits in the gallery. We can become highly aware of scratches on the surface of the works, a dirty mark on the wall nearby, the power-point in the periphery of our vision, and so on. I think much of the best contemporary art pays close attention to these details, not just in the sense that the artists might be ‘perfectionists’, but rather that all aspects of production and presentation are equally ‘legible’ or readable. Indeed, it is the ‘theatricality’ of the viewing experience that becomes prioritised in much of this work, because it is a way of emphasising the processes of ‘staging’ that occur in all operations of signification.
So, whether it is an immersive new media environment, or a more ‘straight- forward’ painting exhibition, the production of the work has become inseparable from its display.44 The necessity to eventually display or ‘install’ art is not just a requirement that presupposes the entire creative process; it also constitutes a large part of the artist’s profession. Take a ‘simple’ exhibition of ceramics. Do you put the works on shelves, on plinths or can they go on the floor? Do they need to be suspended from the ceiling? If shelves: what kind, what colour, how big, what shape? How high should they be mounted off the floor? Where in the gallery should they be placed? In what order should the works be arranged? How much space is needed between them? What kind of didactic labels are needed? What should they look like? What about the title of the exhibition: does it need to be visible in
Voyage on the North Sea": Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London, Thames & Hudson. 44 Duchamp’s readymades provide an historical precedent.
58
Figure 20: Donald Judd, Untitled (1966)
Figure 21: Robert Morris, Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) (1971)
59 the gallery? What combination of text and image should go on the invitation? And so on.
Even in the most basic forms of display, the artist must find solutions for many questions. Some seem banal but others are more pressing. Some are merely pragmatic, while others can impact more directly on the conceptual dimension of the work. In these ways, all art becomes ‘site-specific’ to some extent. For me, the pervasiveness of these kinds of decisions, and the degree to which they inform the making process, make it possible to extend the analogy between artistic practice and editing. It is no longer possible to make a distinction between preproduction, production and postproduction. Just as the filmmaker must decide how to frame the shot and which prop to use, the artist must consider how ‘meaning’ will be disseminated and constructed through the physiological, perceptual and intellectual experiences it provides.
In contemporary art, it can be seen that editing is pervasive. Rather than just being a simple formal or stylistic technique, editing is a critical and malleable tool that aids the practical and conceptual problems of producing and presenting art. Through its prominence in new media forms, editing has become a dominant way of engaging with and understanding contemporary subjective experience. As artists like Candice Breitz, Pipilotti Rist, Pierre Bismuth, Piotr Uklański, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe and Stan Douglas demonstrate, editing is also a paramount strategy for critically engaging with and remodelling these experiences and their relations to the languages of art and popular culture. By actively engaging it as a tool for creative practice, artists can explore and examine the relations between the conventions of dominant culture and the ways in which we experience and negotiate everyday life.
60 Chapter 2
Beyond words: writing as a process of play
In the 1960s and 70s, the theoretical landscapes of philosophy and critical theory were irrevocably altered. Alongside a range of social and cultural revolutions (the Civil Rights Movement, feminism and the anti-war movement, to name a few) some artists, philosophers and theorists began to interrogate the universalism and rationalism that was at the heart of Western thought. The apparent authority or ‘self-presence’ of concepts such as originality and authorship, as well as much broader notions of history, society and identity, all came under heavy scrutiny. In this wide-ranging critique (which we now identify as the shift from structuralism to post-structuralism), the means through which meaning is constructed became an important site of critical renegotiation.
In this chapter, I will chart these complex philosophical shifts specifically through Jacques Derrida’s revision of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of linguistics. My aim is to develop an understanding of how Derrida’s critique recasts processes of signification beyond Saussure’s structural model. Derrida’s revision also allows us to reconsider the role of editing beyond its conventional application in film. His notions of tracing and grafting make it possible to rethink editing on a broader scale and as integral operations within all forms of writing and inscription. To this end, I will also examine the formal intersections between Derrida’s theories of writing and Sergei Eisenstein’s model of filmic montage. Their models of making meaning further advance my argument about editing as a creative and critical device, because they point to the divergent ways that editing can be applied as a political tool.
61 Derrida’s critique of Saussure
Writing at the beginning of the 20th Century, Saussure’s goal was to establish a broad science of language (a “semiology” as he called it), which could be applied to the operations of all symbolic systems.1 In order to establish such a science, he examined the structure of linguistics as a metonymic model for other sign systems. For Saussure, the unique value of linguistics lay in its illumination of how language functions through abstract and systematic forms of substitution. Consequently, his study of language was largely motivated by two interrelated questions: ‘what is language?’ and ‘how does it work?’
This dual enquiry, the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of language, demanded that he consider language as both an identifiable object, as well as a working process. Subsequently, he understood language as both a self-contained system of signs (langue), and the specific speech acts through which individuals communicate (parole).2 In this separation of language, the language system became the identifiable totality of codes and conventions, while speech was situated as a somewhat intangible and individual activity of enunciation; a kind of transient execution of the language system. Because of the transitory and ‘singular’ aspects of individual speech acts (each act relying on context and other auxiliary information for meaning), Saussure focussed primarily on the delineation of language as a generalised and abstract system of substitution.
In Saussure’s model of linguistics, signification was understood as a kind of circuit.3 For him, even in the most basic of circuits (an exchange between two people) communication involved the transference of concepts through symbolic tokens. Person A replaces thoughts with linguistic signs, and upon recognising those signs, person B re-translates them back in to their own thoughts. In this sense, signification employed both physiological and
1 Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Bally, et al. (1966, c1959). Course in general linguistics. New York, McGraw-Hill, p.16. 2 Ibid, pp.9-13 3 Ibid, p.11
62 psychological activities for it required cognitive processes of association, as well as bodily or sensory forms of expression and reception.4 For Saussure, signification was confirmed through the seeming totality of this circuit.
This basic pattern of transference described the fundamental operation of the sign. As the smallest signifying unit, the sign was effectively an association between thought and sensory activity, or to use Saussure’s terms, between a concept and a “sound-image”.5 The sign did not, and could not stand in for an actual thing, but it did serve to rouse the concept or idea of that thing. The sign was therefore split between its sensory or material occurrence as a signifier (the verbal, graphic or pictorial representation of a thing), and its manifestation as a signified concept or idea. For Saussure, the ‘necessary’ division of the sign into signifier and signified demonstrated that language was not a natural or predetermined symbolic code. Instead it was a social construct that relied on what he called “the arbitrariness of the sign”, or in other words, an abstract relation between a linguistic unit and its meaning.6
Importantly, with Saussure’s distinction between language as a system and as its performance in speech, language became the product of its social usage; “the norm of all other manifestations of speech”.7 Language was a kind of system of averages. Even in the endless array of heterogeneous speech events, in which individuals necessarily attach different concepts to different signifiers, some regularities emerged that enabled understandings to be shared and communicated.8 Importantly, it was the presumption of such consistencies that enabled Saussure to envisage language as a relatively
4 Ibid, p.11 5 Ibid, p.66 6 Ibid, p.68. This arbitrary feature of the sign does not mean that the relations between ‘signifiers’ and ‘signifieds’ are merely haphazard or vacuous. Instead, Saussure suggests that although there is no ‘natural’ connection between a concept and a particular sound-image, years of social interaction have enabled us to agree, more or less, on the meanings of our shared codes and conventions. It should also be made clear that it is this arbitrary nature of the sign – and the degree to which language is therefore an abstract system of exchange – that enables Saussure to use linguistics as a “master-pattern for all branches of semiology” (p.68). 7 Ibid, p.9 8 For example, Saussure used the example of the linguistic signifier ‘tree’ to introduce the arbitrary relation between a signifier and a signified. For him, the word ‘tree’ would always function just like the image of a tree; that is, to denote the concept ‘arbor’ Ibid, p.67
63 fixed and stable structure. As a result, he was able to affirm that the general structure of language (rather than its specific enunciations) was the positive or concrete entity in linguistics, and therefore the proper object for his scientific undertaking.
However, it is here that Saussure’s model of linguistics presents a troubling contradiction for semiotics in a broader sense. On the one hand, his model of signification was constituted by the inherent divisions between a signifier and a signified, and between speech and the language system. In this way, the connections between signifiers and signifieds that occur in communication were thought of as only ever momentary and always relying on the specific contexts of the speech act. Yet on the other hand, Saussure’s model suggested that language should be approached as a singular, distinct and homogenous body that has a stable and durable structure. Our problem here relates to his understanding of language as a specific and relational event in one instance, and considering it a permanent and enduring structure in another.
Upon such inspection, Saussure’s model thus becomes inconsistent. Although he attempted to establish a linguistic science by connecting what language is with how it operates, he inevitably prioritised ‘structure’ over ‘process.’ In doing so, his discussion was confined to identifying languages as a formal system of abstract substitutions. The complex and dynamic characteristics of signification were superseded by a philosophical inclination for structures of continuity and correspondence. This means that language was understood as something like a permanent storehouse of signs that individuals passively consume and deploy, rather than a mobile and nebulous process of invention and exchange. The binary oppositions between langue/parole and signifier/signified enabled Saussure to demarcate language as a concrete object of study, but it was precisely these distinctions that gave rise to his model’s limitations and contradictions.
64 Speech and writing
Importantly, it is also from these points of contradiction that Derrida’s critique emerged.9 One of Derrida’s primary objections to Saussure’s model was the prioritising of speech over writing.10 He argued that in Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, writing was mistakenly positioned as a derivative of speech. In Saussure’s model, writing became an extra level of translation in the seemingly natural progression of thoughts to speech to written words. It was this imitative or supplementary characteristic that enabled Saussure to locate writing as apparently outside of what ‘essentially’ defines language as an object of study. However, Derrida has suggested that in this separation of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ Saussure reinforced a problematic assumption that affords ‘what is interior’ a kind of transcendent purity or truthfulness over ‘what is exterior’. As Derrida argued, this kind of binary opposition, where one term takes priority over another, is unsustainable.
One already suspects that if writing is “image” and exterior “figuration,” this representation is not innocent. The outside bears with the inside a relationship that is, as usual, anything but simple exteriority. The meaning of the outside was always present within the inside, imprisoned outside the outside, and vice versa.11
For Derrida, oppositions like this demonstrate the degree to which the process of signification operates through strict relationality, or to be more specific,
9 Although Derrida’s oeuvre is difficult to define or pin down in a limited sense, it is often considered part of the post-structural movement that occurred in the 1960s (particularly in France). Like other post-structuralists such as Jacques Lacan and (later) Roland Barthes, Derrida’s work is here understood as a response or reaction to the positivist and empirical tendencies of structuralism. Where structuralism sought to reveal the fundamental or essential structures of language, society and subjectivity, post-structuralism questioned and challenged the philosophical assumptions that underpin these processes of identification and classification. For the post-structuralists, ‘essentialist’ forms of analysis and knowledge only served to reinforce certain hierarchies and divisions of power that had been propagated by the history of Western rationalism. And so, post-structuralism’s task, if it can be provisionally determined at all, was to not only interrogate this history of rational thought, but also to offer alternative ways of understanding and navigating human experience. 10 I will be focussing specifically here on the chapter “Linguistics and Grammatology” from (1967, 1976) Of Grammatology. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, pp.27-73 (pp.30- 31). 11 Ibid, p.35
65 through relations of ‘difference’. To follow the example at hand, what defines the inside as the inside is that which it is not: the outside. The inside and the outside are therefore not completely disconnected, but are rather implicated and defined by each other. So this binary opposition, which appears as obvious or even natural to begin with, is in fact far more complicated. Indeed, by extension, we can understand that because the meaning of any ‘sign’ relies on its difference from others around it, all forms of signification and inscription involve this contradictory interplay between identification and difference, and not simply a prioritisation of one over the other.
There is more at stake here, however, than revealing the implicit relationality of symbolic systems. For Derrida, Saussure’s separation of speech (as internal) and writing (as external) reinforced a philosophical hierarchy of presence over absence. Derrida claimed that in the history of Western thinking, writing had been understood as inflicting a kind of violence or contamination against speech.12 Because it appears as a supplementary and permanent form of inscription, as a graphic trace of an absent author, writing seems to challenge the innate and self-evident temporality of spoken language.
This different temporal dimension is perhaps exemplified by the experience of hearing oneself speak. In this situation, the speaking subject registers him/herself through the simultaneity of speech and sound. This simultaneity and the immediacy through which this is felt, seems to confirm the subject’s presence or existence as a subject. The speaking subject recognises that s/he not only has the ability to communicate, but also has the intention to do so. Importantly, it is this registering of intention that seems to verify to the subject that s/he is a real, fully-present and fully-conscious being in the world. Derrida explained that this temporal character of speech operates as a practice of self-confirmation and self-identification:
12 Ibid, pp.34-37
66 For the voice meets no obstacle to its emission in the world precisely because it is produced as pure auto-affection. This auto-affection is no doubt the possibility of what is called subjectivity or the for-itself, but, without it, no world as such would appear.13
The traditional priority of speech over writing, emphasised by Saussure’s model of language, can therefore be understood to derive from the different temporal relationships that writing and speech enforce between the subject and language. Rather than the immediacy and simultaneity of hearing oneself speak, the temporal relation of writing is constituted by the very different processes of deferral and delay. The subject does not experience an apparent synchronisation of ability and intent, but rather, a kind of temporal displacement and deferment. This temporal distancing between the subject and language also imposes a kind of spatial disconnection from his/her feeling of self-presence or self-consciousness. It is therefore possible to argue that, through writing, the subject appears both spatially and temporally distanced from language, or rather, the experience of the closed circuit of speech that Saussure described. Through the opening out of the circuit (one can write in the absence of a listener or receiver), the writing subject is therefore also detached from his/her symbolic methods of self-recognition and self- identification: the ‘feedback loop’ of hearing oneself speak, as well as witnessing the listener ‘receive’ one’s speech. We can see then, that it is this distancing or spacing which perhaps lies at the root of the notion of writing as a violent rupture between subject and language.
By recognising the apparent violence or trauma associated with these spatial and temporal disruptions, it becomes possible to understand Saussure’s prioritisation of speech over writing in a new way. What Derrida’s excavation of Saussure’s theory demonstrates, is not only that the histories of positivism and empiricism reproduce a privileging of presence over absence, but also that this hierarchy of values derives from certain anxieties and fears that are
13 Jacques Derrida (1967, 1973). Speech and phenomena, and other essays on Husserl's theory of signs. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, p.79.
67 symptomatic of subjective experience.14 Derrida therefore reveals yet another contradiction implicit in Saussure’s linguistic theory: although it has all the pretence of an objective ‘science’ of linguistics, it is inevitably predicated on a range of subjective impulses.
Derrida’s point was not simply that Saussure missed the mark by giving in to his human urges. Rather, Derrida’s critique allows us to understand that the separation of the ‘subjective’ from the ‘objective’, like all binary oppositions, is unsustainable. Here, Derrida‘s re-reading of Saussure also allows us to question the very possibility of a “science of writing”.15 If a theory of writing is to be advanced, it must approach its task through different means to those empiricist and positivist models perpetuated by Western rationalism. This is because the very frameworks of ‘scientificity’ and ‘historicity’ are themselves a product of the supposed self-evidence and immediacy of symbolic activity that is perpetuated by the traditional prioritisation of speech over writing. Saussure’s model must therefore be understood within the traditions of Western rationalism which have followed a logic privileging what can be identified and quantified, over that which cannot.
The trace and the graft
For Derrida, this critique of Saussurean linguistics required a shift away from the apparent phonetic unity of the word (the simultaneity of the sound of speech), to the dislocations of graphic inscription. And in doing so, it would demand that the foundational unit of linguistics, the phoneme (the sound of
14 While I cannot go into detail here of how Derrida’s work might overlap with post-structural models of psychoanalysis, it is important to make a brief note. I am thinking particularly of Jacques Lacan’s notion of the ‘Mirror Stage’ and the degree to which subjectivity is structured like a language – that is, through seemingly contradictory processes of identification and differentiation. These ideas of subjectivity will be explored implicitly rather than explicitly in this thesis, however, they will reiterated especially in relation to understandings of ideology and the political implications of ’Otherness’. See: Jacques Lacan (2003). "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Pyschoanalytic Experience". From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. Cahoone, Lawrence E. Malden, MA; Oxford, Blackwell Publishing: pp.195-199. 15 Jacques Derrida (1967, 1976). Of Grammatology. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, p.27.
68 speech), be replaced by another unit, the grapheme (the graphic representation of language). For Derrida, this shift was important because the grapheme is a very different kind of ‘unit’ to the phoneme. That is, where the phoneme seems to confirm itself as a ‘unit’ through its immediacy and supposed ‘self-presence’, the grapheme contains the seeds of its own dissolution. In the process of graphic inscription (‘writing’) the grapheme does not ‘appear’ as an immediate representation of thought. Instead, it materialises through the spatial and temporal spacings of inscription. The supposed ‘naturalness’ and ‘neutrality’ of language (which appear as by- products of hearing oneself speak), is therefore destabilised by the inherent ‘dis-unity’ of the grapheme. Consequently, signification becomes a product of hesitation, mediation and partiality, rather than the seamless and unmotivated execution of pre-existing symbolic systems.
This shift in emphasis from the phoneme to the grapheme constituted for Derrida, the possibility of understanding all systems of symbolic exchange as being underpinned by a paradigm of grammatology, rather than by Saussure’s model of semiology which reiterates the primacy of phonetics.16 Where Saussure’s semiology was based on the unity of the linguistic sign (exemplified by the correspondence between signifier and signified), Derrida’s grammatology emphasises the conditions of spacing, difference and deferral that occur in all forms of inscription. So, grammatology, if it can be provisionally defined, is a model of signification that attempts to reveal ‘spacing’ and ‘difference’ as integral the symbolic activity. Furthermore, the processes of dislocation and displacement, which are emphasised by the spatial and temporal spacing of writing, are as the very conditions that underscore all forms of inscription.
In this way, Derrida’s grammatology destabilises the hierarchy of speech over writing. It locates speech as just one form of inscription, or ‘writing’, in its broadest sense. The unity and self-presence of speech that Saussure took for granted is therefore revealed as an illusion. The self-confirmation and self-
16 Ibid, p.51
69 identification that the subject experiences when hearing oneself speak, can now be understood as an operation of a psychological drive rather than a precondition of language. Instead, like other processes of writing, speech is also predicated on processes of displacement and deferral.
Now we must think that writing is at the same time more exterior to speech, not being its ‘image’ or its ‘symbol,’ and more interior to speech, which is already in itself a writing. Even before it is linked to incision, engraving, drawing, or the letter, to a signifier referring in general to a signifier signified by it, the concept of the graphie [unit of a possible graphic system] implies the framework of the instituted trace, as the possibility common to all systems of signification.17
For Derrida, it was the idea of the ‘trace’ that enabled him to imagine a model of signification that escapes, or at least resist, the logic of Western rationalism. This is a difficult concept to grasp because, as a graphic form of inscription which typifies the play of difference and deferral, writing is understood as both an activity of tracing as well as a trace itself. Derrida described this paradox as the “unheard difference between the appearing and the appearance”.18 It is the condition whereby writing must be understood both as a process of substitution and as an actual or material form of inscription.
To elaborate: through all processes of mark-marking – of imitating or tracing signs systems – individuals are understood to inscribe, register or materialise their existence in the world. However, while this sounds something like the sensation of hearing oneself speak, Derrida made an important distinction. Because all kinds of inscription involve conflicting forms of identification and differentiation, the ‘inscribing subject’ is positioned “neither in the world nor in ‘another world’.”19 The subject is therefore never self-verified or substantiated in a spontaneous ‘presence’, but rather s/he is only further dislocated and
17 Ibid, p.46 18 Ibid, p.65 19 Ibid, p.65
70 disconnected from any sense of origin. The activity of writing (or tracing) the self through exterior sign systems therefore only serves to reiterate the absences of any absolute origins. Identity and signification are not predetermined by a fixed and underlying code, but rather through the processes of tracing other traces.
The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general. The trace is the differance which opens appearance [l’apparaître] and signification.20
While this condition of infinite deferral might seem like a nihilistic form of decomposition or deconstruction, it is important to remember that grammatology also provides a means of interacting with, and navigating systems of signification. Paradoxically, this method also stems from the status of writing as a process of tracing, or more specifically, from writing as a trace of a trace. As Derrida argued, because writing cannot be reduced to any absolute origin, it also cannot be predetermined by a definitive symbolic code.21 Instead, what makes writing ‘legible’ or ‘intelligible’ is simply that it is repeatable, reproducible, traceable. Derrida labelled this condition of reproducibility writing’s “iterability”.22 Here, it is the very structure of writing (as a trace of a trace) which facilitates the possibility, or indeed the necessity, that any piece of writing can itself be mimed or re-traced.
Importantly, this idea of writing as a trace makes it possible to understand Derrida’s grammatology as a model that merges the activities of reading and writing.23 In order to ‘write’, the writer does not simply execute a pre-existing and absolute symbolic code. Instead, he/she reads, mimes, and traces over existing ‘texts’. The writer remembers and retraces the symbolic networks of
20 Ibid, p.65 21 Jacques Derrida (1972, 1982). Margins of philosophy. Brighton, Harvester Press, p.315. 22 Ibid, p.315 23 Further analyses of this topic are provided by Roland Barthes. In his essays, “The Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text”, Barthes outlined similar notions of authorship and textuality that emphasise conditions of fragmentation and difference in the processes of signification. See: Roland Barthes (1977). Image, Music, Text. New York, Hill and Wang, pp.142-148, and pp.155-166.
71 other texts in order to construct his/her own. What makes this process of assemblage possible is that these other texts are themselves already traces of other traces: they are themselves constituted as assemblages. In order to negotiate the fragmentations and dislocations that constitute any text, the writer disassembles the text and retraces, ‘re-reads’ and ‘re-writes’ it according to his/her subjective experiences. Hence, the reader/writer constructs meaning from the text by tracing over it, by disassembling and reassembling it, by reconstructing and rewriting it.
We can now understand the written text (any text) is an assemblage of fragments. They are not self-contained bodies of meaning, but instead, traces of other traces. They require assembling and disassembling, constructing and deconstructing, composing and decomposing. In these ways, the complex processes of reading and writing become inseparable. They are interrelated operations that enable us to engage with, reconstruct and recompose meaning, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the innate fragmentation and textuality that constitutes all symbolic activity.
Finally, we can also see how Derrida’s philosophical work opens up the possibility of considering reading and writing in terms of editing. In the constant exchange of traces for other traces, the text becomes something like an assemblage of fragments. It is grafted together from remnants of other texts and other symbolic activities. It is recomposed, reassembled and ‘cut and spliced’ from the symbolic references and traces that inform both the operations of reading and writing. These dual processes of reading and writing, of disassembling and reassembling, are operations of ‘grafting’. Importantly, grafting is analogous to other forms of editing (like collage and montage) because it involves both the ‘cutting’ and the ‘splicing’ of textual fragments. As Gregory Ulmer points out:
72 Derrida in fact takes this possibility of cutting free and regrafting as his (de)compositional principle. Iterability, as a mode of production, may be recognized as collage.24
Grafting is thus the practical device by which ‘writing’ is both ‘written’ and ‘read’. It is the method that enables the multiple deferrals and tracings of the text to be cut and spliced across one another. It is the tool by which the incessant relationality and fragmentation of texts are navigated and negotiated. And therefore, grafting is not only a means of dividing, cutting free and dislodging textual fragments; it is also a means of attaching, adding and appending such fragments.
It is here that we can see resemblances between Derrida’s grammatological model of writing and the formal and conceptual potentials of editing. Editing and writing can both be understood as organisational principles that operate through the dual processes of cutting and splicing. They are ways of constructing and reconstructing texts that allow meaning to emerge in the backward and forward movements between and across other texts. This is a very different notion of signification than that proposed by Saussure’s closed circuit for it begins to signal the ways in which meaning is also an ongoing process of quotation, revision and juxtaposition. In order to further explore these correlations between editing and writing, it will be useful to examine grammatology alongside a model of filmic montage.
Derrida’s grammatology and Eisenstein’s montage
For Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein, the medium of film possessed a communicative potential that went beyond the elaboration of narrative events. As we saw in the previous chapter, through the use of particular formal strategies such as framing, composition and editing,
24 Gregory L. Ulmer (1985). Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, p.59.
73 Eisenstein believed that filmmakers could also provoke specific tonal, emotional and intellectual effects. These effects not only complemented the information already contained within the plot, but they also enhanced film’s potential to iterate ideological meanings.
As a theorist, Eisenstein established something akin to a structural model of film. He was compelled to explore the essential elements of his discipline by asking ‘what is film?’ and ‘how does it work?’ For Eisenstein, the answers lay in the formal necessities of filmmaking, and more specifically in the cutting and splicing of film. Editing was not simply associated with secondary to scripting, directing and filming. Instead, he emphasised the degree to which the necessity to cut and paste film (in ‘postproduction’) was already implicit in the choices made in ‘production’. So for Eisenstein, editing became the essential procedure of filmmaking not just in terms of its practical requirement, but also in terms of its capacity to evoke and deploy meaning.25
His understanding of editing was founded on the recognition that filmic meaning takes place in the viewer’s interpretation of the relations between images. Because of the importance of editing, his model of filmmaking did not just advocate any kind of cutting and splicing. For him it was a particular style of montage that constituted film’s potential as a symbolic practice. As he suggested, the communicative potential of editing “consisted in the fact that two film pieces of any kind, placed together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition.”26 And so it was this particular attribute of film – the parallel between montage and mind – which Eisenstein sought to develop.
Because of this, Eisenstein also envisaged montage as a total system of filmmaking. Rather than being limited to the editing-table, the principles of montage were applied to all aspects of film production.
25 Sergei Eisenstein (c1970). The Film Sense. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p.4. 26 Ibid, p.4
74 The art of plastic composition consists in leading the spectator’s attention through the exact path and with the exact sequence prescribed by the author of the composition. This applies to the eye’s movement over the surface of a canvas if the composition is expressed in painting, or over the surface of the screen if we are dealing with a film-frame.27
This ‘overarching’ approach to filmmaking was important for Eisenstein because he was ambitious about controlling filmic effects. Later in the chapter I will examine how this ambition intersected with Eisenstein’s political disposition. For the moment however, it is important to reinforce how his model of montage was envisaged as a wide-ranging methodology not limited to film.28 This is important because it meant that he did not see film as a language; at least not through the Saussurian division of langue (system) and parole (enunciation). Although he intended to use montage to manipulate and control viewer responses, he did not believe that filmic effects could be defined as a ‘stable’ system of exchange.29
Indeed, this type of definition was unworkable in Eisenstein’s paradigm, for montage was conceived as activating cognitive processes, and it was therefore not a tangible object to be deployed. It was also, always, the performance of conflict; between shots, between compositional elements of the image, between the frame and the image, between sound and image, between cinematic and linear time, between the intention of the filmmaker and the inferences of the spectator, and so on.30 This highlighting of conflict as a communicative tool points to the extent to which Eisenstein understood filmic meaning as an ‘effect’ of collision and difference, rather than as a simple
27 Ibid, p.190 28 It is possible to draw another parallel with Saussure here. Just as the Swiss linguist envisaged using his study as a meta-model for a broader theoretical program (semiology), Eisenstein imagined his model of montage as a stimulant for a broader social system (namely a Marxist brand of dialectics and historical materialism). This will be examined in more detail later in the chapter. 29 He did, however, imagine the possibility of locating filmic effects within a finite spectrum of categories: metric, rhythmic, tonal, overtonal and intellectual. See his essay “Methods of Montage” in (1949) Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York, Harcourt Press Jovanovich, pp.72-83. 30 Ibid, pp.37-39
75 execution of a pre-existing symbolic system. Eisenstein’s model of montage was therefore constituted primarily by its explicit emphasis of fragmentation, relationality and contextuality.
Here, we begin to see some correlations between Eisenstein’s montage and Derrida’s grammatology. Both thinkers place emphasis on the heterogeneity of the text, whether filmic or written.31 This was because they both wanted to stress the degree to which texts are constructed as assemblages of fragments. They understood signification as relational operations and processes of exchange, substitution, deferral and difference, rather than as ‘natural’ or ‘self-evident’ executions of symbolic circuits. As such, for Derrida and Eisenstein, symbolic activity was always already infused with the residues (or traces) of multiple references, relations, contexts and languages. This is important because we can start to see how both thinkers accentuated the back and forth movements enabled by editing in the construction of meaning.
But there are also differences between Derrida and Eisenstein’s respective frameworks. While Derrida nominated the organisational principles of grammatology (namely the dual processes of grafting) as devices that open up inscription to the play of difference, Eisenstein sought to deploy difference as a means of controlling viewer responses. These divergences can be explained as the political disparity between the two frameworks, and they are important to consider because they demonstrate the malleability of editing, and the extent to which it can be employed as a political device. In order to fully understand this divergence it is useful for us to examine how the two models of signification play out in relation to a shared reference point: ideogrammatic writing.32
31 Derrida would argue that films are also ‘written’. 32 It is not a coincidence that both Derrida and Eisenstein look to forms of ideogrammatic and hieroglyphic writing while developing their respective models of inscription. As I have been suggesting, both projects can be understood as explorations into the operations of meaning that take place beyond the limitations of existing studies of signification (particularly Saussure’s).
76 Ideogrammatic writing and hieroglyphics
Eisenstein turned to Japanese writing to develop his ideas about montage.33 He was especially intrigued by how the historical transition from pictorial forms of representation to scriptural ones in Japan enabled an entirely relational model of signification to develop. This enabled, for instance, “the picture for water and the picture of an eye signifies ‘to weep’”.34 We can already begin to see what Eisenstein was drawn to, for this system of writing mimics the formal operations of juxtaposition and collision that lie at the heart of his theory of montage. In both systems, individual shots or pictographs are sequentially arranged in order to produce additional concepts, which themselves become irreducible to a single image/pictograph. This conceptual or cognitive process also seems to reinforce the maxim ‘one plus one equals three’. The collision of one symbol upon another is understood to induce an additional or, what Roland Barthes labelled, a “third meaning”.35
The pictorial foundation of Japanese writing also reinforced Eisenstein’s understanding of the author-audience relationship. That is, although he thought formal effects could be estimated, appropriated and deployed (in ideogrammatic writing as well as in filmic signification), he argued that the specific meanings associated with sequences or sentences were determined through complex processes of negotiation. The intention of the author was never directly synthesised into the mental processes of the audience, but instead, symbolic associations were communicated through the interplay of anticipation and identification. Meaning neither resided in the shots or
33 I will focus here on his essay “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram” in (c1949) Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York, Harcourt Press Jovanovich, pp.28-44. 34 Sergei Eisenstein (c1949). Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York, Harcourt Press Jovanovich, p.30. 35 Roland Barthes (1977). “The Third Meaning” in Image, Music, Text. New York, Hill and Wang, pp.52-68, p.65. Barthes also writes: “The filmic, then, lies precisely here, in that region where articulated language is no longer more than approximative and where another language begins (whose science, therefore, cannot be linguistics, soon discarded like a booster rocket). The third meaning – theoretically locatable but not describable – can now be seen as the passage from language to significance and the founding act of the filmic itself.” (p.65) Barthes uses this idea of the third meaning to argue that the ‘filmic’ is paradoxically only locatable in the image, rather than in the movements between them. The image is important for Barthes specifically because it emphasises the fragmentation implicit within the construction of meaning. (pp.65-68)
77 pictographs as individual elements, nor simply in the collisions or relations between them. Instead, it was activated by the receptions and (re-) cognitions of those relations ‘suggested’ by the filmmaker.
For Derrida, ideogrammatic or hieroglyphic writing acted as a prototype for his notion of grammatology. In particular for him, the hieroglyph stood as an example of writing that moves beyond the historical hierarchy of speech over writing. The Western tradition privileges phonetics, but in ideogrammatic and hieroglyphic systems of inscription, the grapheme (or the pictorial) assumes a central role. As multidimensional forms that combine the graphic and the phonic, hieroglyphs therefore seem to resist the metaphysical privileges implicit in the structural notion of the sign. Hence, they assisted Derrida in unpacking and undoing those Western hierarchies implicit in conceptions of writing. Indeed, the value of the hieroglyph for Derrida was that it could not be split into strict binaries such as signifier/signified, speech/system. In phonetic traditions, the graphic representation of language seemed to displace the self- evidence of speech, but here in hieroglyphic systems, both the graphic and the phonic operated through processes of spatial and temporal spacing. Derrida noted:
The model of hieroglyphic writing assembles more strikingly – although we find it in every form of writing – the diversity of the modes and functions of signs in dreams. Every sign – verbal or otherwise – may be used at different levels, in configurations and functions which are never prescribed by its “essence”, but emerge from a play of differences.36
Gregory Ulmer has recognised that the importance of the hieroglyphic model can be witnessed in one of Derrida’s own key theoretical devices: the notion of differance.37 Derrida regularly deployed this term as a shorthand mark for the irreducible play of difference implicit in all forms of inscription. By
36 Jacques Derrida and Alan Bass (translator) (1978). Writing and difference. Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, p.220. 37 Gregory L. Ulmer (1985). Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, p.17.
78 substituting an ‘a’ for an ’e’ in its graphic form, differance became a way of evoking the performance of this irreducible difference. Because the term does not differ phonetically from ‘difference’, the ‘a’ remains a silent trace of difference. Thus, the ‘concept’ of differance becomes inseparable from its written (or pictorial) form. Any attempt to differentiate the ‘e’ from the ‘a’ in speech only instigates another substitution, another divergence from the notion of differance. In this way it can be seen to operate like a hieroglyph, fractured internally as a figure of difference upon difference.
Furthermore, by disabling the separation of the phonetic and the graphic, and by negating the possibility of speaking the difference, differance disrupts the privilege traditionally afforded to speech over writing. Derrida’s apparently minor intervention therefore becomes a base from which to build an understanding of writing as a process of assemblage, or for our purposes, as a practice of editing. This is because, like differance, all forms of inscription involve these movements in and out of the text. They graft across and between unlike terms, they cut and splice heterogenous traces and fragments, and they involve paradoxical methods of identification and differentiation that break with Saussure’s notion of the communicative circuit.
Hieroglyphic editing in ‘October’
Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier has examined Derrida and Eisenstein’s shared interest in hieroglyphic writing in order to argue for a notion of ‘film writing’. Through her analysis of Eisenstein’s film October (1927), Ropars- Wuilleumier argued that the linguistic model of ‘metaphor’ is inadequate if applied to film’s method of figural representation.38 Whereas linguistics identifies the structure of metaphor as the paradigmatic substitution of unlike signifiers, filmic metaphors, particularly those presented in October, appear to be overtly syntactical. She suggested that filmic metaphors are founded on metonymic relations, for rather than the substitution of unlike terms, the
38 Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier (1978). "The Function of Metaphor in Eisenstein's 'October'." Film Criticism 2 No. 2-3, (Winter-Spring 1978): pp.10-34.
79 structure of metonymy demands that the one term is superimposed over another.39 In other words, filmic metaphors operate through association rather than simple substitution.
Ropars-Wuilleumier examined one particular sequence in October where metaphors build up around a chain of images depicting religious idols and iconography.40 By juxtaposing this series of religious images, Eisenstein seems to emphasis the symbolic, and therefore the abstract and ideological foundations of ‘religion’ as a social construct. She goes on to argue that this metaphor is underpinned by a series of metonymic extensions. Rather than deriving simply from the similarities and differences between these images, the larger metaphor first requires that the icon of Christ stands in for Christianity, that the image of Buddha replaces Buddhism, and so on. Indeed, these metonymic, or synecdochic, extensions are what enable us to identify Eisenstein’s commentary on the ideological basis of religion. They allow us to superimpose the general (Christianity) onto the specific (Christ), and then, by continuing that extension, overlay an even broader category (religion) across more specific ones (Christianity, Buddhism, etc.).
However, these metonymic extensions do not occur ‘naturally’ in the individual images themselves. Rather, they result from the montage structures. The metonymic (and metaphorical) associations are only made possible through the rhythmical and syntactical relations between the images. Specifically, the formal repetitions between the images demonstrate the abstract qualities of these icons, and they then begin to be seen as images, and as symbolic representations that stand in for intangible religious belief systems. So, the communicative pattern of the montage does not operate in a linear sense whereby images simply follow one after another. Instead, the images superimpose and trace across each other in order to construct both specific and general allusions. Through their rhythmical and syntactical relations, they fuse their denotative qualities (the mimetic quality of the image) with their ‘excessive’ connotations (the ideological meaning that lies outside the frame).
39 Ibid, p.10 40 Ibid, pp.17-31
80
Figure 22: Sergei Eisenstein, film stills from October (1927)
81 It is here that Ropars-Wuilleumier begins to signal the possibility of a filmic writing. Like Derrida’s concept of differance, where concept and word/image are fused together around an internal fracturing of difference, the idea of filmic writing becomes inseparable from the cognitive effects initiated by the metonymic and metaphorical principles of montage. Elsewhere, she calls this kind of writing – with its implicit connection between the film image, montage and meaning – as a “hieroglyphic form of editing”.41
And so it is possible to see how the hieroglyphic model might allow us to combine Eisenstein’s montage editing with Derrida’s grammatological writing. However, it is also here that we can see the disparities between how Eisenstein and Derrida understood the role of ‘difference’ in processes of signification. Where Eisenstein concentrated on the seemingly direct connection between syntactical collisions and the production of meaning, Derrida envisaged the hieroglyph as an intrinsically fragmented sign. Rather than allowing the filmmaker to unite montage and meaning, as Eisenstein imagined, Derrida understood the hieroglyph as an archetype of the displacements and dislocations that occur in all forms of signification. As Laura Oswald describes:
In Derrida’s critique of Saussure, the ideogram serves as a model for the deconstruction of the internal closure between voice and meaning in the phonetic sign. Ideogrammatic writing upsets the metaphysical hierarchies which posit unity, self-presence and logic as origins by introducing the supplement, the graft, the outside into the inside of meaning (Derrida 1979: 26). For Eisenstein, on the contrary, the ideogram is not the site of a deconstruction of meaning, presence, or being. His reference to ideogrammatic writing is usually shaped within an ideal of closure between form and meaning in filmic figures.42
41 Marie-Claire Ropars (1982). "The Graphic in Filmic Writing: A bout de soufflé or the Erratic Alphabet." Enclitic 5-6: pp.147-161, p.147. 42 Laura Oswald (1986). "Semiotics and/or deconstruction: In quest of cinema." Semiotica 60- 3/4: pp.315-341, p.321.
82 In Eisenstein’s model, difference is captured and deployed through the dialectical synthesis of montage collisions, while in Derrida’s theory, difference remains irreducible and pervasive; a compositional necessity of all symbolic forms. So, it is here that this divergence must be understood in terms of a disparity between the thinkers’ respective political motivations. While Eisenstein’s project remained devoted to Marxist concepts of dialectics and historical materialism, Derrida’s sought to free writing from the metaphysical hierarchies perpetuated by Western rationalism.43
The political dimensions of Derrida and Eisenstein
Eisenstein’s Marxist principles
Eisenstein’s dialectical conception of montage provides the first clue to examining the political foundations of his theory.44 Of course, the dialectic method, with its central precept of contradiction, was a key principle in the Marxist struggle against the alienating forces of ideology. It was posited as a means of contesting the seemingly natural relationships in the world in order to reveal the ‘real’, ‘actual’ or ‘material’ forms of human experience. Adapted
43 It would be valuable to also examine how Derrida and Eisenstein’s respective models intersect with other post-structural frameworks which link subjectivity, sociality and ideology. I imagine that this could occur on two fronts (which are themselves interconnected): through the psychoanalytic paradigms established by Jacques Lacan’s re-reading of Freud, and through the revision of Marxist ideology by Louis Althusser. For the meantime, it is worth noting, only in a provisional manner, that both Lacan and Althusser approached such categories – subjectivity, sociality and ideology – through similar gestures to Derrida’s revision of Saussure. That is, they challenged the seemingly ‘natural’ divisions of inside/outside, real/imaginary, material/symbolic, conscious/unconscious, identity/‘other’, recognition/misrecognition, and so on. So, rather than maintain the binary oppositions of structuralism, Lacan and Althusser sought to break down the either/or distinctions that characterised structural thought. Such a study, which connects models of inscription with models of subjectivity and ideology, might enable us to better understand the extent to which processes of signification are predicated on the relations of difference operating not only in the ‘text’, but also in the very structures of ‘self’ and ‘society’. The recent works of Slavoj Žižek offer some illustrations of how this study might manifest. For example see: Slavoj Žižek (2000). Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York, N.Y., Routledge. 44 For example see: Sergei Eisenstein (1949). “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York, Harcourt Press Jovanovich, pp.45-63.
83 from Hegel’s formula which led from thesis through antithesis to synthesis, the Marxist understanding of dialectics was Eisenstein’s means of political filmmaking. He believed that the dynamic movement between two contradictory or conflicting shots in a sequence was a tool to provoke a dialectical thought process in the audience. Montage was therefore not only a symbolic method for him, but also a social and political tool.
It is art’s task to make manifest the contradictions of Being. To form equitable views by stirring up contradictions within the spectator’s mind, and to forge accurate intellectual concepts from the dynamic clash of opposing passions.45
This is why difference and collision are such important strategies in Eisenstein’s model of montage. For him, filmic collisions, like other kinds of conflict, facilitated the contradiction of “the logic of organic form” with “the logic of rational form”46. In so doing, the seemingly natural (and therefore ideological) relations in the world would be called into question through rational thought. It was in the conjunction of montage and dialectic thinking that Eisenstein envisaged a path towards the intellectualisation of cinema, and in turn, the “synthesis of art and science”.47 In his paradigm, film could expose the actual or material conditions of experience, and therefore it could also undermine the ‘hidden’ and alienating forces of ideology. For Eisenstein, these processes of disclosure were the ‘overtonal’ effects that provided cinema with its political potential.
It was here that Eisenstein’s model of montage was intertwined with another Marxist theory; that of historical materialism. In his films, he was concerned not only with the formal qualities of film as an object, but also with the depiction of historical narratives that revealed the mechanisms of social transformation.48 Although we have seen how the material conditions of
45 Ibid, p.46 46 Ibid, p.46 47 Ibid, p.63 48 Some key examples include October (1927), The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Ivan the Terrible (1944). These all take an historical event or character as their primary subjects.
84 filmmaking informed his theory of montage, it was also the potential to communicate these historical narratives which influenced Eisenstein’s methodological approach. This is because these stories were meant to expose the material developments of history. They were intended not simply as representations of stories, but rather, through metonymic and metaphorical extensions, they could inform material experiences of the present. In these complex ways, the depiction of specific stories enabled him to reveal the social and ideological mechanisms that drive the narration of history, and inform consciousness in the present.
This is the Marxist idea of historical materialism. It is the notion that history is produced as a complex of social, economic, symbolic, ideological and material processes. History is here conceived of as a result of dialectical conflicts and revolutions that occur in the social realm. Rather than a natural, pre-determined and remote form of evolution, it is a dynamic entity that also determines the material conditions and consciousnesses of the present. In this way, historical materialism also involves the idea that social and material conditions are what shape the progression of history. Importantly, in this Marxist concept of historical development, Eisenstein was also presented with a model of social activism. If history was not a pre-determined evolution, it could be shaped and transformed by the material actions of individuals in the present. For Eisenstein, film could provide a means of exposing historical processes in order to activate social consciousness in the present.
Historical materialism therefore provided a model of history that could be emphasised and exposed through his model of filmmaking. Rather than maintain a passive relation to historical development, Eisenstein re-staged it as a revolutionary process initiated by actual people and ‘material’ conflicts. He therefore treated history not simply a means of reflecting upon the past, but rather as a way of grappling with the social structures and ideological formations of the present. By demonstrating the material nature of historical development, Eisenstein sought to reveal the material development of history, as well as the capacity for its material change in the present.
85 As we have seen, his formal method was a dialectical model of montage. It was through his use of montage as an overarching methodology that he was able to expose and reveal the operations of history in his films, for dialectic montage was a means of provoking heightened forms of awareness and consciousness in his audience. Once again, the parallel between montage and mind assumed a vital importance in Eisenstein’s thinking. The collisions between images were the means by which he could induce certain cognitive processes of association, and therefore also, new states of consciousness in his audience.49
However, as a device for social transformation, Eisenstein’s model of montage presents a troubling paradox. The problem here is not that montage is a means of signification, but rather that it would correlate with any specific end. As theorists like Louis Althusser have pointed out, the critical value of the Marxist dialectic lies in the extent to which it services a process rather than a state of change.50 Here, the dialectic does not resolve itself in stasis, but rather, it produces another contradiction. In Eisenstein’s model of montage however, contradiction and difference are envisaged as ways of directly achieving certain cognitive associations and filmic meanings. So Eisenstein emphasises difference only in order to achieve a certain static concept: the viewer’s consciousness of history as a material process. His model of montage therefore fails to take into account the extent to which difference and deferral also function to disperse meaning, to and produce situations of doubt, uncertainty and hesitation. It is here that Derrida’s understanding of difference provides a contrasting model of symbolic dissemination.
49 To the extent that these associations also often mock bourgeois and capitalist ideologies on the one hand, and lionise the collective actions of the working class on the other, we can understand Eisenstein’s model of montage as being firmly entrenched in this Marxist paradigm. 50 Althusser states: “The specific difference of Marxist contradiction is its ‘unevenness’, or ‘overdetermination’, which reflects in it its conditions of existence, that is, the specific structure of unevenness (in dominance) of the ever-pre-given complex whole which is its existence. Thus understood, contradiction is the motor or all development. Displacement and condensation, with their basis in its overdetermination, explain by their dominance the phases (non-antagonistic, antagonistic and explosive) which constitute the existence of the complex process, that is, ‘of the development of things’.” (1965, 1990). For Marx. London, Verso, p.217.
86 Derrida’s ‘critical’ devices
Although it sought to destabilise conventions in Western rationalism, the political dimension of Derrida’s philosophical project is implicit rather than explicit. Where Eisenstein was guided by a particular ideological system (socialist Marxism), Derrida’s critical inquiry was framed less by a ‘party- oriented’ position and more by an attitude of dissent.51 In the context of broader forms of social dissonance in the post-war period, Derrida’s deconstruction of metaphysical hierarchies can be understood as an attempt to open up philosophical, social and cultural discourses to notions of difference and ‘otherness’. For him, these were ways of questioning and disabling the hegemonic values of dominant culture. So, for these reasons it might be more appropriate to describe his project as promoting a ‘critical’ attitude and an ethical responsibility, rather than a strictly ‘political’ program.52
Derrida’s understanding of the role of difference in signification is therefore important to his critical attitude. As we have seen, the play of difference was irreducible in Derrida’s idea of grammatology, and so by extension, his emphasis on difference in symbolic activity can be understood as analogous to his motivation to enable difference and otherness in constructions of sociality. In other words, for Derrida, it was precisely because difference could not be contained and controlled that it provided a vital tool for opening up spaces in which difference and otherness could play out. Here, rather than a-means-to-an-end (as in Eisenstein’s montage model), difference is always a kind of performance or ‘play’. This notion of play is integral for understanding the critical dimension of Derrida’s philosophical project, because it functions against the totalising and homogenising effects of dominant cultural expressions. Or perhaps to be more precise, play is both enabled by and it opens up the extent to which the totalising forms of hegemonic culture are founded on a variety of contradictions. As he stated:
51 See: Eve Tavor Bannet (1989). Structuralism and the logic of dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan. Basingstoke, Macmillan. 52 The term ‘critical’ appeals to me because it implies that Derrida’s methods are both necessary and forms of critique. He identifies the graft and the trace as implicit conditions of signification as well as possible sites of intervention.
87
If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field – that is, language and a finite language – excludes totalization. The field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because […] there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.53
For Derrida, play confirmed the degree to which all origins are characterised by their sheer supplementarity. Signification is not derived from the execution of a stable code, but rather, performed or played out through processes of substitution – a supplement for a supplement, and so on. Importantly, this infinite substitution or deferral does not create a vacuum of signification. Instead, it results in what Derrida describes as the “overabundance of the signifier”. 54 In this paradox, meaning is produced through both excess and lack: it proliferates precisely because there can be no determining code or origin that limits it.
From this we can see that ‘play’ establishes certain kinds of tension. Although it appears to acknowledge the ‘rules of the game’, it thrives because the very structure of the game is constituted by lack, deferral and difference.55 So, play demonstrates the impossible division of presence and absence, for it is consistently caught in the tension between the two. It permeates the gap between purposiveness (the rules of the game) and purposelessness (of the game as a game).
53 Jacques Derrida (1978). “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Writing and difference. Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, pp.278-293, (p.289). 54 Ibid, p.290 55 It should be noted here that ‘game’ is being applied as an analogy for other structures and forms of totalisation. Derrida’s use of play arises specifically from his critique of Claude Lévi- Strauss’s structural model of anthropology. In this context, as social and cultural phenomena, it might be possible to argue that all games stand in for another kind of lack: the lack of a definitive and rigid social order.
88 These tensions allow us to describe play as a process of becoming. Play is not a destination or a result, but rather, it is an activity. It is a practice, a trial- and-error experimentation structured by the very indeterminate conditions of signification. Play is enabled precisely in those spaces between excess and lack, presence and absence, purpose and purposeless, identification and difference. Moreover, because it is not an execution or a translation of a predetermined system, but rather an ongoing process of substitution, play necessarily also seeks to reform, remodel and restructure the game at hand. It actively traces over and supplements the very site at which it is constituted: that is, in the tensions between presence and absence, excess and lack.
Integrally connected with Derrida’s grammatological model of writing then, we can understand play as an ongoing process of hesitation, deferral and difference, as well as a form of inscription and identification. The critical potential of play lies in the extent to which it breaks down existing hierarchies. By challenging the division of presence and absence, play appears for Derrida, like grammatology and deconstruction, as a potential method through which to rethink the metaphysical hierarchies implicit in Western rationalism.
Derrida asks us through his work not simply to play within the rules of the game, but rather to question the very nature and ‘naturalness’ of those rules. He invites us to seek out the gaps, fractures, lacks and excesses of the structures that appear as pre-supposed and pre-determined in our lived experience. More than this, he invites us to actively challenge and intervene in these structures of experience and knowledge. So, rather than an explicit or polemical political program, Derrida’s work offers particular methods for navigating and negotiating the complex and contradictory experiences of the world. Because these methods emphasise the degree to which all processes of inscription are subject to spatial and temporal distancing, they enable us to question the forms and structures of hegemonic culture. Rather than reinforce the illusion of self-evidence (as occurs when hearing oneself speak), grammatology, grafting, tracing and play, are offered as practical methods of writing that consciously engage with the fragmentations and relations of
89 difference that constitutes all practices of inscription, and all disseminations of meaning.
Derrida’s work allows us to imagine that all writing operates through similar processes of cutting and splicing, and therefore as a kind of editing. Here, the operations of grafting and tracing serve as the practical devices through which to both deconstruct, and reconstruct, the heterogeneous fragments of the text. They demonstrate the extent to which all symbolic activities are structured through these various forms of displacement and dislocation, rather than a singular, self-evident authorial voice. If Derrida’s model of writing is to be extended upon as a creative and critical application of editing, for the purposes of this study, it must be interrogated through the specific and complex cognitive processes associated with signification. In order to avoid the didacticism of Eisenstein’s model, my model of inscription-as-editing must not take ‘difference’ and ‘play’ as means to an end, but as ongoing processes that allow meaning to be continually constructed and disseminated in new ways. This will be the task of my next chapter.
90 Chapter 3
Compelling criticism: editing the gaps of narrative, metaphor and film
Film theory has become an important site for developing aspects of Jacques Derrida’s philosophical paradigms. This is particularly the case in this current study because film’s ‘discursiveness’ and ‘multidimensionality’ seem to intersect with his idea of writing. As we have begun to see throughout this thesis, films construct meaning by drawing on, and tracing across, the heterogeneous networks, conventions, and symbolic systems of other texts. They combine fragments of spoken, written, visual, aural and syntactical ‘languages’ in order to develop associations both inside the diegetic reality of the frame, and yet also outside the frame in the cognitive operations of the viewer. As I have shown in previous chapters, Derrida’s notions of differance, grafting, tracing and play allow us to develop analogies between writing and these complex operations of filmic meaning.
In this chapter I will continue to explore the various points of continuity and discontinuity between writing and editing, by looking at the role of narrative and metaphor in filmic meaning. By interrogating the problematic notion of ‘film language’, as proposed by Christian Metz, we will see how structural categories are no longer sustainable for thinking about filmic meaning. As alternatives to ‘film language’, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier’s notion of ‘film writing’ and Laura Oswald’s theory of ‘cinema-graphia’, make it possible to recast narrative and metaphor as cognitive processes that call on imaginative and intuitive processes of association. Here too, these alternatives require us to rethink the role of editing by moving away from the
91 ‘self-evidence’ of the image. Once again, Derrida’s accentuation of difference (or differance) and play make it possible to consider the critical potential of editing in terms of its ability to enable hesitation, displacement and deferral to open up different models and spaces of inscription.1
Metz and Barthes: film language and narrative
Film language ‘as speech’
Christian Metz attempted to apply Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic model to film. By working through Saussure’s linguistic categories, Metz sought to locate the operations of filmic meaning in the consistencies of its various structures. While he was aware of the limitations of applying Saussure’s linguistic principles to these structures, he argued forcefully that linguistics could still serve as a prototype from which to develop a semiotics of film.2 Consequently, he reworked linguistic divisions, such as langue and parole, in order to understand how film functioned like a codified system.
Through this investigation, Metz was faced with a number of challenges for he could not always directly apply linguistic principles on to the complex character of filmic signification, even though it appeared in many ways to operate like a language. For example, while some examples of Soviet montage seemed to demonstrate an overt syntactical foundation of filmic meaning, these examples did not necessarily point to an omnipresent filmic code. Hence, this syntactical dimension of film did not necessarily correlate
1 As we saw in the previous chapter, ‘play’ is understood by Derrida to be made possible by the lack of any definitive origin or code. It is caught up in the tensions between presence and absence, general and specific, purpose and purposeless. See: Jacques Derrida (1978). “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” in Writing and difference. Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, pp.278-293. 2 Christian Metz (1971, 1974). Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. New York, Oxford University Press, p.60.
92 directly with Saussure’s notion of a language system (langue).3 Likewise, although film seemed to announce certain meanings as if it were a kind of speech (parole), this enunciation was not underpinned by a closed system of cinematic techniques. However, these problems did not provide Metz with enough reason to totally disregard the linguistic model, for as he suggested:
Nevertheless there are certain ‘syntactical procedures’ that, after frequent use as speech, come to appear in later films as a language system: They have become conventional to a degree. Many people, misled by a kind of reverse anticipation, have antedated the language system; they believed they could understand the film because of its syntax, whereas one understands the syntax because one has understood, and only because one has understood, the film.4
So for Metz, filmic meaning did not follow a strict or concrete language system. Instead, it was always necessarily intertwined with the symbolic procedures of the narrative at hand. The cognitive processes involved in narrative comprehension were implied in the very fabric of filmic meaning.5 This recast the idea of film language because it placed meaning at the disposal of narrative content rather than syntactical structure. By doing so, it seemed to disallow an analogy between film and linguistics. However, Metz proposed another way of understanding the tenuous relation between film and language. He argued that because of the ‘denotative’ and mimetic qualities of the film image, film functioned as a semiotic system, or to be more precise, “as a language without a system”.6
3 Ibid, pp.39-40 4 Ibid, p.41 5 This becomes obvious when one tries to attach meaning to syntax in isolation. Whether it is a straight cut, a dissolve or another kind of edit, film syntax can only be comprehended in relation to the images that it splices together. And so, we can begin to see some problems with Metz’s theory. His attempt to outline a ‘general’ semiotics of film seems to be negated by the ‘narrative specificity’ of every edit point. Although he is aware of the limitations of Saussure’s categories, his theory seems to be trapped within the contradictions of structural linguistics. 6 Ibid, p.65
93 Metz’s theory of filmic meaning was underpinned by this particular understanding of the role of the image, and importantly for him, it was this notion of the image which made it necessary to continue the analogy between film and language. As the smallest signifying unit of film, Metz thought that the image functioned as a kind of sentence. That is, rather than working as a ‘sign’ in the same way that a word might, the film image seemed to assert itself as a self-contained expressive element. Metz’s example was the image of a gun. He suggested that the image does not simply denote the concept ‘gun’ in the way the word ‘gun’ does. Instead, the image asserts the presence of a particular gun in a particular time and space.7 The film image therefore operated for Metz as a self-evident and self-present form of assertion: “The image is therefore always speech, never a unit of language.”8
For Metz, this quality demonstrated that film language could not have had an already formed ‘language system’ (langue). It could not have functioned as the performance of some underlying code or repository in the same sense as linguistics, because the symbolic level of the ‘word’ was no longer applicable. Instead, the infinite range of film images, all with their highly specific and self- evident denotations, could only demonstrate the image’s analogous relation to speech.
Yet this notion of ‘film as speech’ does not fully explain how filmic meaning is produced. This is because film does not appear as an isolated image, but rather as sequences of images. For Metz’s theory of film language, the individual image only ‘described’ or ‘denoted’, whereas their organisation in sequences enabled films to tell stories. Importantly, Metz saw this as a necessary condition of film form.
It is as if a kind of induction current were linking images among themselves, whatever one did, as if the human mind (the spectator’s as
7 Ibid, p.67 8 Ibid, p.67
94 well as the film-maker’s) were incapable of not making a connection between two successive images.9
Like Sergei Eisenstein’s model of montage, which we have examined throughout this thesis, Metz understood film form to fuse with particular cognitive functions which draw connections between images. What I would like to stress here, is the degree to which Metz (like Eisenstein) understood this process as an ‘inevitable’ or even ‘natural’ process of association whereby meaning is shaped through sequential flows. Rather than a complex model of reconstruction, where meaning is produced through the tension between excess and lack (as Derrida’s grammatology might suggest), film’s figurative capacity was understood as always already self-evident.
Everything is present in film: hence the obviousness of film, and hence also its opacity. […] A film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand. The image impresses itself upon us, blocking everything that it is not.10
So, although he placed much emphasis on the role of narrative in the formation of filmic meaning, Metz also recognised it as something like an act of ‘unaffected’ association. His model seems to neglect the complex back and forth movement that occurs in processes of narrative, and instead it favours the ‘absoluteness’ of the image. This position is difficult to maintain for two reasons. Firstly, the complex cognitive processes activated by narrative do not simply unfold in the strictly self-evident or spontaneous ways which Metz suggests. Rather, they are underscored by spatial and temporal disruptions. Secondly, like all forms of inscription, film images are constituted by ‘difference’ and fragmentation; they are already the grafts and traces of other texts, rather than contained and self-present emblems. I will return to the problem of the film image later in the chapter, but now it is necessary to examine the complex movements and structures of narrative, for they will
9 Ibid, p.46 10 Ibid, p.69
95 enable us to rethink the roles of difference and dislocation in the operations of filmic meaning.
Narrative ‘as becoming’
In his “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives”, Roland Barthes defined narrative as a complex pattern of human thought that is activated by various symbolic practices.11 Like Metz, Barthes used linguistics as a starting point for his work. He compared the general structure of narrative to that of the sentence, for just as the sentence cannot be reduced to the sum of its words, a narrative is not the literal product of its signifying units. In the sentence and in narrative, concepts are produced not merely as the product of sequential orders, but rather through the interactions and interrelations of multiple levels. Thus, as he noted, although a sentence can be described according to a number of linguistic categories, such as phonetics, syntax and context, these groupings do not always operate through linear affiliations. Instead they are ordered through hierarchical or vertical relationships.
A unit belonging to a particular level only takes on meaning if it can be integrated in a higher level; a phoneme, though perfectly describable, means nothing in itself: it participates in meaning only when integrated in a word, and the word itself must in turn be integrated in a sentence.12
Here, narrative is understood to operate through a complex temporal logic. Rather than simply shape meaning through linear and sequential juxtapositions (as both Metz’s film language and Eisenstein’s montage might
11 Roland Barthes (1977). “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” in Image, Music, Text. New York, Hill and Wang, pp.79-124. Barthes’ work appeals to me because it begins to bridge the contradictory foundations of Metz’s structural film theory and later post- structural revisions that emphasise the fragmentary cognitive aspects of film narrative. 12 Ibid, p.86. Metz’s theory of film language was also based on an analogy with the sentence. However, where Metz replaced the paradigmatic function of film language with the autonomy and self-evidence of the image, Barthes’ general theory of narrative demonstrated that the relations between narrative fragments are never simultaneous or linear, but rather subject to deferrals and displacements.
96 appear to advocate), aspects of the plot have the potential to return at later points to illuminate new ‘cause and effect’ relations which recast meaning according to different, nonlinear affiliations. So, to follow what happens in a narrative is not the same as understanding how and why that narrative changes over time. To follow a sequence of events is to move horizontally within the plot, but to understand the significance of a particular event or sequence of events within the context of a narrative is to move vertically through the plot. Furthermore, rather than a linear process of change, this vertical dimension of narrative might be better described as a kind of back and forth movement between, and across the various levels of the narrative.
What Barthes demonstrated was that narrative is not a self-contained or self- fulfilling unit in the way Metz’s imagined. In contrast to Metz’s reliance on the image as a signifying unit, Barthes’ idea of narrative showed that the literal events of the plot are continually supplemented, and deferred, through the back and forth movement of narrative comprehension. By extension, we can argue that the seeds of narrative meaning are not contained within the internal composition of the narrative, but rather in the fragmented and supplementary character of the narrative as a ‘text’: as a field of multiple associations and citations where meaning is produced through the irreducible play of substitution.13 In this way, narrative operates as a discursive network, rather than a linear and ‘unaffected’ form of association. It is a complex cause and effect process; one that is coded against the social, psychological, ideological and historical circumstances of the reader.14
The ‘narrational’ level of meaning therefore occurs beyond the limits of the narrative sequence. It persists in the nonlinear movements of symbolic association, as well as in the social and ideological value systems that inform the reader. Most importantly, these vertical, or back and forth movements are facilitated by the various tensions that structure the plot. In other words, it is
13 See: Roland Barthes (1977). “From Work to Text” in Image, Music, Text. New York, Hill and Wang, pp.155-164. 14 I use ‘reader’ here in its broadest (post-structural) sense, where the reader is also a ‘writer’ of the text. The multiple forms of narrative make it difficult to use alternatives like ‘spectator’, ‘viewer’, ‘audience’, let alone the more problematic ‘receiver’ or ‘addressee’ labels.
97 precisely because the narrative is not self-contained and self-evident, that the reader must retrace and reinvent the cause and effect relations of the plot. The reader ‘makes sense’ of the plot by drawing implications from the fragmentary and partial presentation of the narrative. Furthermore, this fragmentary character of narrative is necessary because the plot is necessarily characterised by multiple spatial and temporal dislocations. That is to say; stories do not only take place across various locations and through various times, but also, and most importantly, the very condition of narrative comprehension is characterised as the re-cognition of these disjunctions as a process of temporal change itself.
So again, in a manner reminiscent of Derrida’s notion of play, we can recognise that narrative meaning is a process rather than a destination. Just as play seeks out the loopholes of a game, ‘narrative play’ persists in the gaps between purposiveness (the future resolution of the plot) and purposelessness (the plot as a plot). Narrative meaning, therefore, depends on the tensions between anticipation and explanation, insinuation and demonstration, allusion and revelation, lack and excess. Thus, narrative is a cognitive practice of trial-and-error, as well as a process, par excellence, of ‘becoming’.
Narrative meaning is always emerging, and always becoming, because it is continually being rethought, recast and remodelled to accommodate new forms of association and affiliation. Even when meanings are derived, such as in the resolution of a plotline (for example, a sex scene that resolves the romantic tension between two characters), these ‘meanings’ or ‘plot-facts’ are immediately reinscribed into the overall development of the story. After the sex is over, one can begin to retrace the developments of the romance in new ways, and one can also attempt to predict future events and outcomes in the story (perhaps more sex). In other words, narrative meaning always involves this complex interplay between before and after, and between cause and effect. As such, it is a model from which we can begin to understand the
98 complex relationship between meaning and the formal operations of film in quite different ways than those proposed by Metz.15
Metaphor and narrative
As we have seen, it is more useful to consider how narratives combine levels of meaning in complex and non-sequential ways, than as a strict sequence of events. Because a narrative cannot be told all at once, and because it takes places across a spatial-temporal field of affiliation, narrative meaning requires the reader/interpreter to innovate, reinscribe and anticipate symbolic associations. The reader is caught in a game where s/he must constantly modify and recreate cause and effect relations precisely because the narrative ‘text’ lacks a distinct origin or point of totalisation. Understanding how these processes operate like the structure of ‘metaphor’ can help us move beyond Metz’s problematic notion of film language, as well as supplement Barthes’ idea of narrative.
Compelling metaphors
In linguistic terms, metaphors function through the substitution of one word for another, so that the original paradigmatic relations of each term are superimposed across one another.16 These superimpositions are, in turn, further complicated by their syntactical arrangement within the statement or
15 I argue that the concept of editing describes this relationship between the formal and cognitive movements activated by the film text. By connecting this idea of editing with Derrida’s philosophical paradigm, it is also possible to imagine it as a creative methodology that enables critical forms of inscription and intervention. 16 I am aware of the problems of reverting to a linguistic model of metaphor. I use it here provisionally, as a launching pad from which to consider the role of metaphor in narrative and film. As Paul Ricoeur noted, the study of metaphor always involves certain theoretical paradoxes: “The theory of metaphor returns in a circular manner to the metaphor of theory, which determines the truth of being in terms of presence. If this is so, there can be no principle for delimiting metaphor, no definition in which the defining does not contain the defined; metaphoricity is absolutely uncontrollable.” Paul Ricoeur (1978). The rule of metaphor: multi-disciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in language. London, England, Routledge and Kegan Paul, p.287.
99 sentence. For example in the sentence ‘My heart burns for you’, the words ‘heart’ and ‘burn’ become fused together to generate a new concept. While a ‘burning heart’ can be understood literally as a heart that is on fire, the statement is more likely to be taken as a figurative declaration of deep affection.17 It might be further translated as something like ‘I have intensely passionate feelings about you, so much so that it hurts’. Not only do ‘heart’ and ‘burn’ stand in for other things (‘feelings’ and ‘passion’), but also, these paradigmatic substitutions become inseparable in this process of syntagmatic association.
In this way, metaphors juxtapose, open up and reconfigure categories and relations that would ordinarily, or at least in literal uses, remain discrete. In linguistic terms, metaphor functions through the complication of the ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘syntagmatic’ division of language. Here, metaphors can be understood to activate unresolvable tensions between horizontal and vertical (or back and forth) methods of signification. Thus, we begin to see how metaphoric processes underpin narrative meaning, because the processes of superimposition, and the figurative associations that they evoke, are those same cognitive procedures that result in the back and forth movement of narrative meaning. Rather than simply acting as an additional or superfluous level of meaning, the function of metaphor in narrative must be understood as implicit within the construction and dissemination of meaning. Indeed, the ‘open’ and ‘fragmented’ structure of metaphor is precisely what allows narratives to be potentially and endlessly compelling in their complexity.
The recreations of cause and effect relations are ‘compelling’ because, as Trevor Whittock has suggested, the human mind is ‘compelled’ to make sense of discontinuous and fragmentary things. For him, this described a common ground between myth, art and film.
17 Given that it appears to be uttered by a living being, the figurative association is more obvious: it would be hard to enunciate if one’s heart was literally on fire.
100 In an artistic work everything must fit, and have its reason for being there. […] This is more than sensible exhortation. It is the fundamental axiom that underlies all that readers and viewers do when they approach a work of art, and seek to understand its unity and coherence. The artist’s obsession with binding things together in a coherent totality is quite as great as the reader’s or the viewer’s. One cannot, indeed, encounter Eisenstein’s discussion of montage without feeling the intensity of his fixation on linkage.18
In many ways, this is the same connection that Eisenstein envisaged between montage and mind. But unlike Eisenstein, Whittock argues that the compulsion for ‘intelligibility’ is somewhat unpredictable and uncontrollable because it is contingent on the tensions between rational and irrational thinking. It is less about an ideological function of form and style than the rhetorical, creative and imaginative processes of cognition. Derrida’s idea of play, once again, has relevance here because it positions the operations of narrative and metaphoric meaning as speculative operations of cognition. Here too, we are reminded of the notion of editing developed in the first chapter; that is, as a rhetorical tool that calls on both conscious and unconscious methods of association and affiliation. What makes the structures of myth, art, film, narrative and editing potentially analogous here, and what also makes them potentially compelling forms to engage with, are the dynamic cognitive activities that they provide. By allowing us to reform and recreate cause and effect relations, these forms can provide stimulating and provocative modes of signification precisely because they lead us through, rather than to, moments of symbolic resolution and dissolution.19
18 Trevor Whittock (1990). Metaphor and film. Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, p.106. 19 The desire for intelligibility cannot be an end in itself, for as Derrida has shown, the absoluteness of meaning is strictly an illusion. Here, a psychoanalytic notion of desire can assist because it demonstrates that the subject, like forms of inscription, is constituted by an ongoing play of lack and excess: “[…] the realization of desire does not consist in its being ‘fulfilled’, ‘fully satisfied’, it coincides rather with the reproduction of desire as such, with its circular movement.” Slavoj Žižek (1991). Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, p.6.
101 Testing schemata
Although metaphors are uncontrollable, they are not entirely haphazard. As the earlier example of a ‘heart that burns’ demonstrates (because it is a cliché), at certain points metaphors also become conventional. Indeed, metaphors should not be thought of as superfluous or ornamental forms of meaning, but rather as tools for understanding the complex and often incongruous relations between symbolic and psychological realities. In other words, metaphoric understandings reign when literal ones do not suffice. This apparent paradox of metaphors, as both conventional and unpredictable, can be resolved by understanding the operations of schemata in the production of metaphoric meaning.
As sense-making tools, cognitive schemata are important because they allow us to test out and revise meanings through complex affiliations. Schemata do not just defer to the literal application of linguistic codes or permanent symbolic systems, but rather, they contribute to the formation of narrative and metaphoric meanings by extending beyond the limits of formalised languages. As described earlier, in the metaphoric associations of narrative meaning, the mind relies on the provisional and intuitive testing of cause and effect relations. Here, schemata provide cognitive short-cuts that enable the reader to review and reconstruct causal relations. They are founded on memories of other symbolic activities, as well as on the examples provided by existing structures of signification, and the communicative patterns of everyday life. Importantly then, schemata allow us to compare and recast existing knowledge and experience with the symbolic disparities at hand. As Whittock points out:
A schema may be as fleeting as the fractional hesitation before we identify an old friend, or as considered as a scientific hypothesis. It permits the possibility of our entertaining an illusion, as well as the
102 possibility of our improving our grasp of reality. It straddles both recognition and learning.20
Schemata therefore operate in the complex interplay between narrative, metaphor and filmic meaning. Because we encounter the unfolding of narrative events in temporal and partial ways (the whole story cannot be told at once), our comprehension requires that we engage with ongoing processes of recall, synthesis, and mental experimentation to fully grasp the implications and interrelationships between the fragments of the narrative trajectories. This is not a sequential method of making meaning, but a complex and dynamic integration of various levels of meaning. The communicative patterns of narrative and metaphor are implicated intrinsically within the structure of film.
Like the problem-solution model of editing, schemata provide the methods of organising relations between space, time and causality for both the filmmaker and the viewer. The filmmaker attempts to deploy schematic devices in order to advance the narrative, while the gaps left between points of narrative resolution are intuitively and temporarily resolved by the viewer through ongoing processes of trial and error. In this way, the construction and dissemination of filmic meaning are not produced through a closed system (as in Metz’s and Eisenstein’s accounts), but rather through processes of editing, grafting, tracing, play and becoming. Furthermore, it is ability of these devices to enable open-ended patterns of inscription, which allow films, narratives and indeed artistic practices to communicate powerful, provocative and compelling meanings.
20 Ibid, p.109
103 Film writing and the problem of the image
Although cognitive schemata allow us to interpret the spatial-temporal unfolding of narrative events, there is a problem in theorising this process. On the one hand, schemata seem to operate through a one-way relation between film and viewer. By using schemata to reconstruct cause and effect relationships, the viewer appears to apply or superimpose existing communicative patterns in order to develop their levels of comprehension. Yet on the other hand, these back and forth movements of ‘application’ (and reapplication) seem to occur simultaneously with the experience of viewing the film. Although some levels of meaning may be developed in retrospect (after the film has finished), we generally understand the significance of plot events at the same time as they are being played out on screen. For example, when two characters converse onscreen, we understand that this conversation is taking place in real time. Unlike a documentary where we might imagine events to have already occurred, in narrative film we seem to inscribe meaning in the very same ‘real time’ as the film. This immediacy of the film viewing experience therefore seems at odds with the application model of schemata. In order to examine this problem further, it is necessary to return to the question of the film image, for it is one of the primary ways that film enables this sense of immediacy.
Ropars-Wuilleumier’s ‘film writing’
To negotiate this complex territory between the immediacy of film viewing and the ‘spacings’ of filmic meaning, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier argued for a concept of ‘film writing’. Her preference for the term ‘writing’ (rather than Metz’s ‘language’) was a deliberate attempt to integrate Derrida’s philosophical paradigm into film theory. Her analysis of Jean-Luc Godard’s film A bout de soufflé (1960), focused on the idea of film writing in two ways: through the idea of the film as a ‘text’ (as an edited assemblage), and through
104 the insertion of texts (words) within the film frame.21 What interested her in Godard’s film was the correspondence between a certain kind of ‘textual’ editing (which she compared to hieroglyphics), and the prominent appearance of words in the imagery of the film. For Ropars-Wuilleumier, this concurrency of hieroglyphic editing and graphic inscription caused a “[r]efusal of illusion” which rejected the methods of classical narrative realism.22 What is important is the way that she intersects Derrida’s notion of the hieroglyph (which we examined in chapter two) with this particular relationship between editing and the film image.
By looking closely at Godard’s editing techniques as well as the graphic incisions of text within the image, Ropars-Wuilleumier built up a complex understanding of filmic meaning as it is propelled by, but also in excess of, the film’s sequential arrangement of images. She argued that in A bout de soufflé, the graphic representations of words cut into the film images, and produce dynamic movements, back and forth between the diegetic space of the film and the figurative associations of the mind.
For the sign’s graphic inscription causes it to oscillate between figure and signification: the letters are thrown out, and this radiation refers them to the hieroglyph, which is always divisible and combinable, always ready to disperse meaning when traces explode, where filmic writing is done: but through the crystallization of these same letters, the constellation of the name can always be formed again in the sign, and the inscription, which was scriptuary, can become funerary.23
Much in the same way that writing seemed to violate the self-presence of speech in linguistic terms (something Derrida firmly contested), the graphic inscription of words in the film frame appear as violent interruptions to filmic construction of illusionistic space. So for Ropars-Wuilleumier, the constant insertion of text into the image demonstrated the constructed or written nature
21 Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier (1982) "The Graphic in Filmic Writing: A bout de soufflé or the Erratic Alphabet." Enclitic, 5-6: pp.147-161. 22 Ibid, p.150 23 Ibid, pp.152-153
105 of film. This violation of illusionistic space fractures the immediacy and self- evidence of the film image. The textual insertions therefore serve to displace and dislocate the viewing experience. Rather than being passively pulled along by the illusions of diegetic space, the viewer is actively reminded of the artificial, multidimensional and fragmentary nature of film form. They are, in other words, reminded that the film’s temporal spacings manifest because of their already having been written.
As her analysis of Godard’s film demonstrates, the distinction between text and image is problematic. The word itself is always an image (a ‘figure’ of writing), and the image is already a text (structured by internal fragmentation and displacement). Accordingly, Ropars-Wuilleumier calls on the example of the hieroglyph to explain the relation between text and image. In the hieroglyphic unit, the word is no longer simply literal, or indeed letter-al, but also figural. Similarly, the image is not simply figural, but also text-ual.24 Editing, therefore, becomes the tool by which these figurative, literal and textual relations are organised. For Ropars-Wuilleumier, the concept of ‘film writing’ is this merging of the hieroglyphic film form (the indivisibility of text and image) and editing as a necessary organisational tool. Like Derrida’s notion of writing, this conception emphasises the spacings, dislocations and deferrals that undermine the apparent immediacy of the film image.
Ropars-Wuilleumier’s work helps reiterate the idea that meaning is constructed through the complex back and forth movement of signification, and not simply the succession of denotative images. The supposed self- evidence or present-ness of the film image (which Metz’s notion of ‘film language’ relied on so heavily), is undercut by the ‘always already’ fractured multiplicity of the hieroglyphic unit. As such, Ropars-Wuilleumier’s analysis advances a critique of the self-evident authority of the film image. Instead of an implicit self-presence, the image is posited as internally complicated,
24 The collages of Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and other cubist artists in the early 20th century also demonstrate this lesson. However, where Braque and Picasso’s collages operated within (yet also against) the constraints of a static pictorial plane, Godard’s film unfolds across the temporality of the film. Thus, rather than merely repeating the innovations of two-dimensional collage, the film enables a new concept of montage, and indeed editing, to emerge.
106
Figure 23: Jean-Luc Godard, film still from A bout de soufflé (1960)
Figure 24: Jean-Luc Godard, film still from A bout de soufflé (1960)
107 layered and multifaceted. More importantly, this complexity of the image (as a ‘hieroglyphic text’) is inscribed and made comprehensible through its temporal ordering in edited sequences: its relational editing.
However, her analysis is not without problem. Although she developed some innovative and fascinating associations between Derrida’s concepts of writing and the study of film (and the proliferation of written words in some French films of the 1960s, is a particularly interesting phenomenon), she was in some ways still bound to the ‘evidence’ found within the film frame. It is somewhat ironic, then, that her work borders on a literal, or at least literary, association of Derrida’s concept of writing. While Derrida’s theory of writing was not intended to be restricted to the written word, but rather to the fragmented characteristics of all forms of inscription, Ropars-Wuilleumier’s discussion appears to be tied to the graphic representations of words that are ‘visible’ or ‘evident’ in the film image. Most importantly, although she located editing as a necessary function of film writing, she placed it in a secondary or supplementary relation to the hieroglyphic status of the image. In order to move beyond this limitation, it is necessary to consider how the complex signifying processes of film also occur between, and across, film images.
Oswald’s ‘cinema-graphia’
Like Ropars-Wuilleumier, Laura Oswald has taken up the task of incorporating Derridean philosophy into film theory. Her theory of ‘cinema-graphia’ offers an alternative model of film signification that does not resort to the supposed self-evidence of the image.25 The substitution of ‘graphia’ in place of (cinema)-‘tography’ in her neologism is a gesture of this resistance. It signals a shift of emphasis, from the photographic qualities of the film image, to the movement of signification “across the frame”.26
25 Laura Oswald (1994). "Cinema-Graphia: Eisenstein, Derrida, and the Sign of Cinema". Deconstruction and the visual arts: art, media, architecture. Brunette, Peter and Wills, David. Cambridge; New York, NY, USA, Cambridge University Press: pp.248-263. 26 Ibid, p.250
108 For Oswald, this is not an entirely new debate. As she points out, in the 1950s both Alexandre Astruc and Andre Bazin presented opposing conceptions of the role of the camera in filmic meaning.27 On one side, Bazin argued for the proximity of cinema to photography because of the mimetic quality of the film image. But on the other, Astruc compared the camera to a kind of pen and thus also to the signifying processes of film as “[w]riting-in- movement”.28 While Bazin’s theory remained rooted in concepts of narrative continuity and mimetic realism, Astruc’s proposal opened up the possibility of a malleable model of filmic writing that extended beyond the photographic qualities of the image. Rather than reinforce a correlation between narrative realism and the ‘natural’ mental operations of the viewer, Astruc’s model understood film to impress artificial and constructed realities upon the audience. So rather than suppress the formal conditions of filmmaking (which narrative realism does through codes of continuity), Astruc’s theory emphasised the operations of cutting and splicing, and the forms of discontinuity and disruption which narrative realism attempts to cover over.29
Oswald’s idea of ‘cinema-graphia’ follows a similar theoretical trajectory to Astruc’s. For her, ‘cinema-graphia’ is a possibility for both the theory and practice of film. It can be recognised, in different ways, through the works of Eisenstein, Godard, Marguerite Duras and Andrei Tarkovsky, yet at the same time, it cannot be limited to these examples.30 ‘Cinema-graphia’ is the possibility of film as a site articulated by absence, or rather, as the ‘non-site’ of the splice.
27 Ibid, pp.248-249 28 Ibid, p.249 29 Astruc’s theory was applied in a practical sense through the works of Godard, Jacques Rivette and other French New Wave directors. In particular, they used editing techniques, such as the ‘jump cut’, as a means to break with the illusionism of film form as well as to create stylistic effects that ‘ruptured’ the viewing process. 30 If cinema-graphia is exemplified by these filmmakers, I argue that a number of recent films also contribute to the discussion. Films such as Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003), Mike Figgis’ Timecode (2000), Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998), and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002), all explore how the spatial-temporal dissemination of film is constituted by forms of disruption and dislocation. In very different ways, they challenge the seamlessness of conventional narrative film and they call attention to the ‘written-ness’ of the medium. Importantly, this written-ness allows these filmmakers to move beyond the evidence of the image and construct provocative effects through the movements across and between frames.
109
The notion of cinema-graphia locates the question of cinema in the spaces between the terms of the enunciation, with those traces of non- presence variously called the splice, the cut, or the frame […]31
Oswald locates film’s formal devices, especially editing, as the means through which it can resist and contest the coherency and immediacy of film’s supposed ‘seamlessness’. The non-site of editing, its ‘invisibility’, is a way of challenging the priority of presence in symbolic activity. By emphasising the significance of Derridean notions of the graft and the trace, and indeed of the cogency with editing, her concept of cinema-graphia therefore allows us to reconsider the operations of non-identification, disconnection, spacing, and difference in filmic meaning.
This emphasis on editing also, importantly, underscores the ‘critical’ potentials of cinema-graphia. Oswald does not argue that all editing is ‘cinema-graphic’. Instead, as we might recognise through the filmmakers she celebrates, the potential of cinema-graphia lies in its ability to disrupt and destabilise the author-text-audience circuit. So, where continuity editing seems to erase the ‘difference’ between film space and cognitive space, certain forms of montage and jump-cutting seems to highlight the gaps and fissures that occur between form and formation. On the one hand, continuity editing seems to unite subject and discourse, but,
Cinema-graphia, on the other hand, names the endless production/deconstruction of the meaning and subject of film discourse across the film frame. In this context, the categories of primary and secondary identification, or origin and supplement, of reality and representation, lose their meaning. Cinema-graphia shatters the mirror in which the subject is held as a unity by defining the image as a trace for another image, a moment in the relentless movement of semiosis across the frame. In this sense, the cinema, rather than realizing the
31 Ibid, p.261
110 aspirations of classical mimesis, exposes mimesis as the endless pursuit of an illusion: imitation imitating itself.32
For Oswald, editing offers the possibility of disrupting the conventional operations of signification in the discipline of film, as well as across broader social practices. It therefore also opens up the possibility of radically questioning the philosophical foundations by which we understand the realities of subjectivity, history and discourse. By deconstructing the priorities afforded to origin and presence, editing is a way of opening up the points of contradiction, discontinuity and dislocation that underpin all forms of inscription. It is also a means of reconstructing, reforming and reinscribing these hierarchies. The critical potential of editing is therefore its capacity, as a method of rearranging and reorganising existing structures, to allow for moments of slippage and ‘non-sense’.
In these ways, we can understand editing as a device for both critical intervention and creative speculation. It is a way of navigating and negotiating the complex play of signification in a world structured by hesitation, difference and lack, rather than presence, origin and code. Editing, therefore, allows us to remake the cognitive schemata that inform processes of signification. It enables us to recognise and reorganise the schematic communicative patterns that inform the experiences and constructions of subjectivity, history and discourse. Like Derrida’s notion of the graft, editing is a method of deconstruction which, in turn, facilitates new modes of reconstruction. And most importantly, by emphasising the spacings and dislocations of signification, these new modes of inscription have the potential to move away from conventional hierarchies to accommodate and emphasise diversity and difference within the constructions of subjectivity and sociality.
32 Ibid, p.261
111 Critical dimensions
It is clear that the communicative patterns of narrative, metaphor and film coalesce in the non-site of the edit-point. By inhabiting the gaps between images, between cause and effect, between the horizontal and the vertical, and between form and formation, editing allows us to examine and reinvent the way meaning is made. As Derrida’s work demonstrates, this activity of the graft is not limited to any specialised symbolic forms. Instead, it is involved in all processes of inscription. So although editing is ‘visibly’ exemplified in narrative, metaphor and film, we must also think about how it underwrites practices of reading and writing. If we are to take up the ‘possibilities’ that Oswald identifies (of editing as a creative and critical tool), it is also important to examine her focus on ‘disruption’ in a broader context. In her emphasis on disruption, we can consider how Oswald’s model intersects with the ‘critical’ dimensions of Derrida’s project, which was developed in the previous chapter.
The question is how Derrida’s idea of grafting (which Oswald locates in cinema-graphia, and which I describe as ‘editing’) can enable forms of critique. Yet again, there are problems of directly associating Derrida’s work with any particular political program, at least in the conventional sense. Firstly, the traditional notion of critique implies a certain separation between subject and object, because it installs a hierarchical relationship between the ‘object’ being studied, and the ‘subject’ of the study itself. Secondly, in order to be commented upon, the object of study must already be envisaged as being an object – as already constituting a self-contained, self-evident entity. It is the ‘evidence’ afforded by the presence of the object that enables critique.
These problematic procedures of criticism cannot be sustained when considering Derrida’s paradigm. Assumptions of self-evidence, of definitive separations, and of hierarchical relations are all constructs which Derrida destabilised. Indeed, through his ideas of the trace and the graft, Oswald’s notion of cinema-graphia and my own concept of editing, the identification of ‘empirical evidence’ is contested. Instead, we are offered only the non-site of
112 the edit-point, the movement of writing across the frame, the ongoing play of difference, and the process of meaning as becoming. So, before we can consider the creative and critical possibilities proposed by Oswald, and before we can examine the importance of disruption as a creative and philosophical strategy, we need another model of criticism; one that opens up the gaps and spaces between and across discourses, rather than the model of closure provided by polemic critique.
Said’s worldliness
The issue here is the disparity between traditional modes of identification and the non-site of editing. Edward Said spent much of his professional life interrogating similar problems, particularly through examples offered by the discourses and practices of literary criticism. He engaged with these difficulties of ‘critique’ by arguing for a complex notion of textuality. For him, the constructed and multifaceted dimensions of texts were the means through which they became politicised, and yet paradoxically, also difficult to unravel and identify.
Textuality is considered to take place, yes, but by the same token it does not take place anywhere or anytime in particular. It is produced, but by no one and at no time. It can be read and interpreted, although reading and interpreting are routinely understood to occur in the form of misreading and misinterpretation.33
Like the non-site of the edit-point, the textual character of meaning seems to refuse the possibility of critical forms of commentary. However, Said proposed an alternative. Against the appearance of textual indeterminacy, he suggested that texts take place as ‘worldly’ events. While meaning is still understood as textual play – as the multiple, fragmentary processes of
33 Edward W. Said (1983). The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, p.4.
113 quotation, reference and association – it is also recognised as taking place in the ‘actual’, ‘real-world’ spaces of reading and writing. As he claimed:
The point is that texts have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place and society – in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly.34
Although it is complex and multidimensional, Said suggested that meaning is not completely abstract and unidentifiable. Rather than being separated from lived experience, the production of meaning, or ‘semiosis’, is intrinsically enmeshed with the social, historical and cultural conditions in which it takes place. This condition of ‘worldliness’ allows us to consider semiosis as both the various plays of difference, dislocation, spacing and fragmentation that occur in the process of signification, as well as the practice of actual social and historical forces.
In this way, the ‘worldliness’ of texts also demonstrates how semiosis is unavoidably a political activity. That is, it shows how making meaning is a process ‘always already’ structured through particular hierarchies, priorities and assumptions. It is never a neutral zone of enunciation, but rather a complex interplay of social coding and historical circumstance.35
Thinking this way allows us to identify the ‘textuality’ of the text as a site for investigation (an ‘object’ for critique). The constantly shifting status of textuality is not a condition that denies the ‘possibility’ of the critic. Rather, the critic must involve him/herself in an ‘ironic’ movement between subject and
34 Ibid, p.35 35 It would be a mistake at this point to apply a strict causality, such as, code plus circumstance equals meaning. In revisiting Louis Althusser’s model of ideology, Paul Ricoeur found a similar causality in Althusser’s theory of ideology. Because it placed emphasis on the ideological ‘overdetermination’ of all aspects of life, Ricoeur saw Althusser’s model as maintaining a Marxist division of ‘recognition’ and ‘misrecognition’. In its place, Ricoeur proposed a ‘motivational’ concept of ideology which sought to dissolve such boundaries and instead posit the production of meaning as resulting from motives and motivations. In this way, Ricoeur re-ascribed a certain level of agency on behalf of the subject (rather than simply being a product of social and ideological ‘overdetermination’). See: Paul Ricoeur (1994). "Althusser's theory of ideology". Althusser: A critical reader. Elliott, Gregory. Oxford, England; Cambridge, Mass, Blackwell: pp.44-72.
114 object.36 This movement is ‘ironic’ (because the critic is aware of the spatial and temporal disjunctions being inflicted upon the text), and ‘necessary’ (because the ‘text-as-object’ is already a paradoxical foundation).
Since there can be no absolute correct and ‘original’ text firmly anchoring subsequent transcriptions in reality, all texts exist in a constantly moving tangle of imagination and error. The job of the textual critic is, by fixing one text securely on the page, to arrange all other versions of that text in some sort of linear sequence with it.37
Said did not propose that this ironic foundation of criticism curtailed its political potential. Instead, he positioned it as a strategy criticism must undertake if it is to have any value as an activity. As manifestations of social, cultural and historical forces, texts are subject to the institutional priorities of hegemony. In all its irony, criticism is a way of questioning and destabilising the orthodoxies of social and textual practices.38 Here, the ‘worldliness’ of the text becomes the very site at which critique must occur, for it is this condition of the text that marks the hierarchies and priorities of dominant culture.
Said’s attitude towards hegemony goes some way to describe the political aspirations of his work. For him, without a certain ‘oppositional’ outlook, criticism was resigned only to repeat and reiterate the hierarchies and assumptions perpetuated by existing relations of power. He saw criticism as a means of actively revealing, negating and opposing such processes. He described the methodological application of this particular philosophical and political attitude as “interference”.39
36 Edward W. Said (1975, 1985). Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York, Columbia University Press, p.88. 37 Ibid, p.206 38 “More explicitly, the critic is responsible to a degree for articulating those voices dominated, displaced, or silenced by the textuality of texts. Texts are a system of forces institutionalized by the reigning culture at some human cost to its various components.” Edward W. Said (1983). The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, p.53. 39 Against the perpetuation of ‘specialised’ disciplines, Said sought to reconnect criticism with its social-political potential. ‘Interference’ was proposed as an alternative to what he called the “cult of expertise and professionalism” (p.156). For Said, the model of ‘interference’ would interrogate the ‘textuality’ of texts (their ‘worldliness’), and actively seek out connections
115 Said’s work, therefore, provides us with a model that escapes, or rather, actively negotiates the contradictory theoretical movements involved in the practice of criticism. The degree to which Said understands the ironic posturing of criticism to activate a political and, indeed practical, mode of investigation, points in the same direction as Oswald’s priority of disruption. Said’s notion of ‘interference’ intersects with Oswald’s ‘possibility’ of broader forms of questioning. At their core, ‘cinema-graphia’ and ‘criticism-as- interference’ are critical attitudes. They prioritise questioning over status quo, opposition over sameness, rupture over seamlessness. And they provide critical strategies to do so: irony, opposition, disruption, interference.
The creative and critical potentials that Oswald recognised in the non-site of editing are its capacity to emphasise the displacements and dislocations that underscore all forms of inscription. Editing is a means of ‘interfering’ with the dominant paradigms of history and knowledge because it can reveal the illusions of seamlessness, origins and self-evidence. Practices of editing can also disrupt the symbolic systems that inform our social and ideological experiences. They can enable, perhaps even force, us to remake and revise the cognitive schemata through which we negotiate the complex processes of signification.
In these ways, editing expands the critical aspects of Derrida’s work. It reinforces the condition of meaning as a process of grafting, tracing, play and becoming. It enables creative and critical forms of questioning to intervene, or better, to incise within the hegemonic forces of contemporary experience. Perhaps most importantly, it is through these probing and playful forms of incision that editing allows us to remake, revise and re-inscribe our personal sensibilities within complex social, cultural and political formations.
between and across various fields of inquiry. See: Edward W. Said (1998). "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community". The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Foster, Hal. New York, The New Press: pp.155-183.
116 Post-oppositional
In this chapter, I have proposed that narrative, metaphor and film coalesce in the non-site of the edit-point. It is because fragmentation and difference lie at the core of these communicative forms, that they give rise to the indeterminacies that compel readers to reconstruct cause and effect relations. This operation demands that cognitive schemata are continually tested and remade in order to feed this desire for intelligibility. These trial-and-error processes are enabled by the practical and cognitive functions of grafting, tracing and editing. By emphasising these terms, it is possible to move beyond the limitations of film language, and fully consider the possibilities of film writing and cinema-graphia. In doing so, the displacements and dislocations of editing can be prioritised over the supposed self-evidence of images. And finally, by extension, the political potential of editing can be located in this capacity for displacement: as a method through which to interfere with, and disrupt, the status quo.
However, this leads me to consider whether the capacity for disruption is the only creative and critical aspect of editing. Said’s ideas of textuality, worldliness and interference are certainly invaluable, but are these forms of ‘oppositionality’ the only means of critical resistance? In a world where the ethical counter-arguments of the Left are being marginalised precisely because they (perhaps unrealistically) oppose the rhetoric of economic rationalism, it is important to consider whether oppositionality is even sustainable in a contemporary context.40 In response, is it possible that editing could act ‘incisively’ to question dominant cultural forms by imitating and mimicking them? Could critique manifest as compliance, continuity and conformity, rather than just polemics, oppositions and defiant conflicts?41
40 The critical paradigm set out by Said has taught me to be wary of things that seem to fit, to question the natural appearance of things, and to interrogate the assumptions implicit in the logic of argumentation. For these reasons, it is important to reconsider the coherency of Said’s model with my previous discussion of narrative, metaphor and film. 41 Eve Tavor Bannet also posed a similar range of questions. She argues that such (Marxist) models of conflict can no longer be maintained. In their place she proposes a model of ‘intertranslation’. As she states: “Where critique perpetuates the conflict and struggle which perpetuate it, intertranslation builds alliances. Through intertranslation, the word can cross
117 The political/critical dimension of Derrida’s work remerges as a model from which to consider these questions. In particular, his notion of ‘play’ is important because it is a potential method of critically intervening in the rationalisations of contemporary culture. On the one hand, play permeates all processes of signification (because it lacks a definitive origin or code), and on the other hand, it is precisely this lack, which enables us to reform and revise the languages around us. This is the critical aspect of play: by revising existing languages, it allows us to question the status and rigidity of dominant social, cultural and historical paradigms. It is not simply to ‘play the game’, but to question the rules of the game, to seek out the gaps and loopholes in it, and to emphasise contradictions as possible spaces for revision and re- inscription.42 The political potential of Derrida’s notion of play does not come to us as a model of didactic and polemic opposition, but instead as a way of exploring, and rewriting, our personal sensibilities within the complexes and contradictions of lived experience.
In these ways, I propose that play is a strategy for rethinking Said’s oppositionality. Instead of polemical conflict, play allows us to question and critique dominant paradigms through methods of ironic imitation and parody. These exaggerated forms of emulation allow us to emphasise the contradictions and hierarchies at work in hegemonic culture in more subtle, but no less effective, ways. Indeed, to the extent that play relies on a range of uncertain tensions (between recognition and misrecognition, purpose and purposelessness, presence and absence), it might now seem to be a more compelling form of critique. Rather than simply inverting or reversing hierarchical relationships (in the way polemical or didactic argumentation does), play makes the categories of knowledge, history and ‘judgment’
those national(ist), cultural, linguistic, ideological and disciplinary frontiers which were once drawn by conflict and war and preserved (in the name of some imagined superiority) by deafness, denigration of others, and the policing of boundaries. Through intertranslation, the word can weave back and forth across frontiers, building bridges between linguistic-cultural households and helping them to join in building something which none could say or do alone.” Eve Tavor Bannet (1993). Postcultural theory: critical theory after the Marxist paradigm. Basingstoke, Hampshire, Macmillan, p.188. 42 Jacques Derrida (1978). Writing and difference. Chicago, Ill., University of Chicago Press, pp.289-293.
118 uncertain; it makes what might have once seemed obvious and natural, now tentative, undecided and ambiguous.
Just as narrative, metaphor and film use their very fragmentation, their infinite plays of difference, and their ongoing forms of substitution to draw in the reader, play also requires the reader to remake cause and effect relations. By making what was obvious now uncertain, play makes us question and revise our cognitive schemata; it forces us to rethink our established ways of navigating and negotiating lived experience. As the coalescence of narrative, metaphor and film has shown, the ongoing processes of provisional speculation are also what make these forms evocative and compelling. And so, as a strategy for critique, play is a rich and valuable methodology to do just that.
Importantly, it is here that editing and play become complementary operations. As previously described, these practices of rethinking and rewriting can also be identified as processes of cutting and splicing: they are forms of re-tracing, re-grafting and re-editing. On the one hand, play and editing are implicit in all processes of signification: they are conditions by which texts are understood despite (or because of) their fragmentary and paradoxical compositions. On the other hand, and most significantly, play and editing are critical strategies for interference and intervention. They are methods by which existing texts, languages and discourses can be opened up to interrogation and reformation. The gaps and excesses offered up by play and editing, are the very means by which we can emphasise and question the hierarchies implicit in dominant culture. Rather than being necessarily disruptive and oppositional, play and editing can come together in the critical forms of ironic resistance and parody, and perhaps most importantly, in the different and ambiguous spaces of signification and inscription that they open up. These are significant philosophies and strategies by which we can navigate, negotiate, question and remake the complexes of lived experience. They are vital methods by which dominant social, cultural and political paradigms can be made uncertain, and subsequently be rewritten and
119 reedited to enable discursive, diverse and different personal forms of identification and inscription to persevere.
120 Chapter 4
Choking on words: the cutting and splicing of an artistic practice
Part I: Working with editing, language and video
Figure 25: Video stills from Danger Zone (2003)
In 2003, I made a video work called Danger Zone by re-editing a scene from the film Top Gun (1986).1 In the original scene, Charlie (Kelly McGillis), a civilian flight instructor, flirts with her hot-headed, fighter-pilot student, Maverick (Tom Cruise) in the awkward confines of an elevator. The two exchange words and glances, but they fail to resolve the sexual tension between them. In my video, I have edited out the dialogue so that Charlie and Maverick never speak. While the original shot reverse-shot structure remains
1 See attached ‘Selected works DVD’.
121 intact, my video loops. As they struggle to find words to articulate their attraction, the couple are caught in a never-ending exchange of sighs, glances and gestures. It is as if neither is willing to speak first for risk of spoiling their mutual attraction. As they choke on their words, unable to translate their affection, their self-conscious anxieties about speaking, become almost debilitating.
Trying to verbalise my art practice is characterised by a similar apprehension. The process of beginning to write about my work is imbued with all the insecurities and doubts apparent in Danger Zone. Just as these fictional characters resist translating their attraction into words, I too struggle to verbalise my practice for fear of demystifying the somewhat tenuous, and vulnerable, conceptions and associations at its core. My hesitations, procrastinations, qualifications, and processes of beginning again, are almost paralysing in this process of writing. In many ways, the self-conscious caution about verbalising my practice derives from a similar choking to that which strikes Charlie and Maverick; an almost debilitating fear of starting to speak.
In this chapter, I will negotiate this anxious relationship between my artistic practice and its verbal rendering. By re-considering some of the films, artists and theorists that have influenced the way I approach making art, I will find ways to write through these hesitations and anxieties. And, by examining some of my works in more detail, I will unpack the speculative methodologies of my artistic practice. Finally, through the processes of cutting and splicing, of grafting and editing, I will sketch out, and put into practice, some of the methods and models that I have been developing throughout this thesis. From this it will become clear how editing serves as the practical and conceptual tool that enables the back and forth, speculative, and provisional movements between my artworks and the various discourses that frame and inform it.
122 The ‘Danger Zone’ of beginning
To begin. To begin. How to start. I’m hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. But I should write something first. Then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. Okay, so I need to establish the themes. (pause) Maybe banana nut. That’s a good muffin.2
As Danger Zone suggests, part of my problem with writing about my work involves the process of beginning. Because the works often develop out of the curiosities and cautions of my ‘suspicions’ (in the sense that I advanced in the introduction to this thesis), and because these are spread across an array of fields of inquiry (other art, theory, film, popular culture, and in fact, all aspects of my lived experience), there does not appear to be any logical or obvious place to start. Although the works are interrelated, and many share conceptual and formal approaches, they do not constitute a cohesive or linear narrative. Similarly, although each work might elicit its own networks of meaning, they cannot really be ‘contained’ within logical forms of explanation. When I make art, and when I reflect on the process, there is never a singular goal, ambition or framework that I want to illustrate or prioritise. Instead, I want each work to remain open, discursive, fragmented, tenuous, and sometimes even awkward and confusing.
The necessity to start ‘somewhere’ poses a problem because it seems to set in motion linear and logical forms of explanation which I would rather not apply, even retrospectively, to my practice. By establishing certain frameworks, themes and discourses, the process of beginning seems to go against many of my artistic motivations and formal strategies. This particular dilemma is exacerbated, because many of my works actively engage and play with narrative conventions. Although works such as Danger Zone might
2 Charlie Kaufman, Donald Kaufman, et al. (2002). Adaptation: the shooting script. New York, Newmarket Press, p.14.
123 allude to particular narrative events, they also resist conventional resolutions through their emphases on the repetitions and deferrals of meaning.3 These works play on the expectations of narrative, and the processes of anticipation and reconstruction that facilitate the back and forth movements of meaning. To begin writing about these works, therefore seems to superimpose an additional narrative framework (authorial intention, for example) precisely at the point I am trying to experiment around such processes. In this way, verbalising the works seems to limit, and even literalise, the discursive and ambiguous aspects of making meaning that I am trying to explore.4
However, the anxiety about ‘pinning down’ my work, assumes language to be fixing. It is an understanding of language that, by following Jacques Derrida’s lead, I have attempted to challenge and reformulate throughout this thesis. As Derrida’s model of grammatology suggested, writing is always a process of grafting and tracing. Writing is not the natural or straightforward execution of language, but rather a complex back and forth movement between re-reading and re-writing.5 As I have proposed, his model of writing is a way of highlighting and emphasising the spacings and dislocations that occur in all forms of inscription. And in a similar way, my works operate through recognising, and reorganising, the gaps and slippages of language as the very conditions that underscore all processes of making meaning.
As a method of editing, this model of writing is a way of negotiating that paralysing fear of beginning to speak. By acknowledging that the writing will necessarily take the work elsewhere, that it will both displace and reconstruct the practice, and that it will demystify my role as the ‘author’ of these works, I
3 I like to work with the probability that (in an exhibition context) the audience will encounter the work somewhere between beginning and end. Furthermore, I am aware that they may not watch an entire loop of the work. For these reasons, the works are designed to be encountered at any point. Generally speaking, one five second segment is no more important or necessary to viewing the work than any other section. Climaxes become anti-climaxes as the stories are caught in ongoing loops. 4 This form of written reflection also demystifies my role as the artist. It makes me uncomfortable to describe and explain the development of my works because it seems to lay bare my personal intentions and methods. More importantly, it opens up the extent to which these intentions and methods are tenuous, hesitant and speculative, rather than confident and self-evident. 5 See: Jacques Derrida (1967, 1976). ”Linguistics and Grammatology” in Of Grammatology. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, pp.27-73.
124 am able to reframe my misgivings in a different way. While these hesitations and uncertainties about processes of verbalisation at first seem like potential limitations or failures, I now recognise that they are precisely the aspects of semiosis that I am trying to examine in my artworks. So, rather than restricting or constraining the work, this process of writing becomes a means of extending the work, and my interests in the displacements of language.
Indeed, this process of verbalisation is a way of organising the various points of connection and disconnection that occur between, and across, my conceptual fascinations, and the formal manifestations of my work. Instead of pinning it down to a singular and pre-prescribed narrative, this writing allows me to highlight and extend upon the fragmentary, provisional and speculative aspects of my practice. It allows me to reflect on my influences, ambitions and formal approaches in order to complement, augment, and actively shift the work. It enables me to reframe and reconstruct the development of my practice according to new narratives that illuminate, rather than limit, the conceptual and practical potentials of it as an ongoing project of inquiry.
Starting to cut and paste
My interests in the conceptual aspects of editing, and its application for my artistic practice, developed largely after seeing Jacques Rivette’s film Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974). When I saw this film in 1999, I became excited by the possibility of disrupting the conventional structure of narrative film. The experience of watching this film was very different to the mainstream films that I was used to. Instead of developing a plot through the linear progression of events, Rivette’s film cut back and forth between different spatial and temporal locations. The film follows the daily lives of two young women, but it seemed as if the scenes were edited together according to a database of possibilities, rather than a strict or predetermined sequence of connected events. Indeed, the repetition of some scenes further confused my expectations of narrative continuity. In direct opposition to the idea that narrative events occur only once in a plot (like in ‘reality’), Rivette’s repetitions
125 seemed to demonstrate the utterly constructed nature of time-space relations in narrative film.
Like other French New Wave films of that era, Rivette’s film sought to disrupt, and reveal, the illusions of narrative realism by emphasising the edited construction of the film. This emphasis on discontinuity demonstrated a new way of activating meaning: that is, through processes of fragmentation and disconnection. More importantly, the extent to which the film’s dissimilarity from my expectations was simultaneously perplexing, and utterly compelling, opened up new possibilities for my artistic practice. It seemed to me that the conventions of continuity editing, narrative linearity and the ‘realism’ of film, could function like ‘readymades’ to be manipulated and redeployed to communicate different meanings.
The idea of simultaneously engaging with, and yet also challenging, established symbolic conventions, was also manifest in the artistic practices I was attracted to at this time. Through their different uses of appropriation and their ironic sensibilities, artists such as Ed Ruscha and Richard Prince appealed to me as examples of the most fascinating potentials of art. I was intrigued by the ways they ironically undermined the apparent authority, or ‘naturalness’, of mediated imagery.6 While Ruscha re-modelled the codes of print media, advertising, commercial art, architecture and film culture (for example, Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963), Prince exposed these visual languages by simply re-staging and re-performing them (as in Untitled (pens) (1979)). Ruscha and Prince offered something similar to Rivette’s film: the possibility of engaging with the mediums and symbolic systems of mainstream culture, in order to question and challenge them. In this way, these artists also helped me to define my own somewhat paradoxical relation
6 As detailed in the first chapter, it is possible to locate Ruscha and Prince within a rough historical discourse which includes the collages of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, as well as Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades’ and ‘assisted readymades’. These modernist examples were also concerned with exploring the lines between art and its social and cultural contexts. Like Ruscha and Prince, they used the visual languages and social discourses that surrounded them as ‘found objects’ to be cut and pasted, to be manipulated and redeployed.
126
Figure 26: Ed Ruscha, Standard Station, Amarillo (Texas) (1963)
Figure 27: Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966)
Figure 28: Richard Prince, Untitled (pens) (1979)
Figure 29: Richard Prince, Untitled (three women looking in the same direction) (1980)
127 to mainstream media: being simultaneously curious and cautious, seduced and sceptical, complicit and critical.7
The work I produced around this time owed large debts to the formal and conceptual strategies of Rivette, Ruscha and Prince. By appropriating and re- editing sequences from Hollywood films, I attempted to play with, question and recontextualise the dominant symbolic languages around me. Similarly, just as Rivette had disrupted my expectations of narrative film, I wanted to challenge my viewers’ customary relation to these Hollywood narratives. By juxtaposing and looping small segments, by creating split-screens, and by fracturing existing narratives, I was trying to expose the constructed nature of popular culture to allow new meanings to emerge.
One of my primary approaches was to select seemingly incidental, or fleeting moments in films, and re-edit them so they became the central focus of entire works. In Mr President? (2001) and I Love NY (2001) for instance, fragments of Independence Day (1996) and Deep Impact (1998) were manipulated and re-dispatched.8 Reformatting these fragments was a quite direct way for me to subvert the conventions of the mass media (even if to a small gallery-going audience). Yet at the same time, because the film images were highly iconic, the works remained defined by their references and relations of difference to film. The results were often humorous, but they became (at least for me) like ‘one-liners’: short, sharp assaults on well-trodden filmic tropes, such as explosions and unrequited love.
Although they fulfilled my creative and critical motivations to parody dominant culture for some time, these works did not sustain my aspiration to keep exploring and experimenting. Editing was an effective tool for appropriating
7 The tension between being complicit and critical is precisely what I find compelling about Ruscha’s and Prince’s works. It also illustrates my own ambiguous feelings about the codes and conventions of dominant culture. Although they also seem clichéd and formulaic, they are also a major interface through which I engage with the world. While I would like to critique and question them, I find them compelling and fascinating at the same time. For me, making art is a way of exploring these paradoxical relations. In this way, it is both a creative and a critical form of questioning. 8 See attached ‘Selected works DVD’.
128
Figure 30: Video still from Mr President? (2001)
Figure 31: Video still from I Love NY (2001)
129 and manipulating found material, but in this usage, it was also a little too clear-cut. I wanted my works to edit cultural ‘languages’ in more compelling ways; to provide ‘reading’ possibilities, more like my experience of seeing Rivette’s film, contemplating the understated and epic gesture of Ruscha’s Every Building on The Sunset Strip (1966), or endlessly laughing at Prince’s Untitled (three women looking in the same direction) (1980).
Editing images out: ‘Your Move’
In 2002, I began working almost exclusively with text and sound in my videos. Rather than a conscious decision to avoid images, this tendency in my work emerged for a number of reasons which are, even now, hard to identify and separate. Perhaps one of the main reasons was that I was fascinated by other artists using text; especially in the ways they seemed to complicate the authority and immediacy of the image. Whether it was Ruscha’s puns of text as image, Prince’s banal jokes, Christopher Wool’s anxious stencils, Lawrence Weiner’s verbal translations of ‘material’ experiments, Douglas Huebler’s conceptual proposals, or John Baldessari’s explorations of the discourses of art, language seemed like a highly malleable and evocative device for creative practice. These artists demonstrated that language could be used for many different purposes: from the serious and didactic, to the humorous and playful. Moreover, they showed that language in art need not be confined to a specific medium or historical tradition, but could interrogate and reformulate established paradigms of visual literacy.
The idea of ‘language’ was becoming part of an expanded framework for my practice. Through the process of re-editing existing films, I began to consider the ways in which these blockbuster films seemed to function as if they conformed to, and reinforced, an underlying language. The commonalities between numerous films seemed to suggest the existence of common codes
130
Figure 32: John Baldessari, What This Painting Aims To Do (1967)
Figure 33: Douglas Huebler, Variation Piece No.20 (1971)
131 and conventions.9 As I suggested, artists like Ruscha and Prince demonstrated that advertising, television, print media and other forms of visual culture operated through (overlapping) symbolic systems that could be identified and played with. Thinking about ‘language’ in these ways helped me to consider how meaning is communicated in broader cultural contexts. Importantly, these questions involved considerations of how the cultural codes around us inform our understandings of reality and identity, and how art can reconfigure and complicate these symbolic operations.10
As I began using text in my work, I wanted to explore the connections (and disconnections) between language and notions of subjectivity. In my research, I concentrated on how theorists like Andrew McKenna connected language with the mediation of social violence. By drawing connections between René Girard’s work on social sacrifice, and Jacques Derrida’s theory of writing, McKenna argued for an association between the structure of difference (in writing), and the arbitration of violence through the ‘scapegoat’ (those objects/individuals used to defer social transgression).11 In particular, he suggested that, as forms of displacement, writing and scapegoats functioned analogously, as symptoms of the irreducible difference that underscores all social activity.12 Through McKenna’s theorisations, I began to consider how language functions as a form of manipulation, of social regulation, and as a means to assert and preserve hierarchies of social power.
9 As I argue throughout this thesis, the idea of ‘film language’ (particular the one proposed by Christian Metz) is problematic. Although there appear to be a range of shared codes and conventions throughout film discourse, I prefer to follow David Bordwell’s problem-solution model. This model locates them within a diverse and ever-changing process of trial and error, rather than a fixed and stable system of signs. 10 At this point, my research guided me in a number of directions. Much of this thesis has examined this theoretical territory, particularly in terms of theoretical discourses interrogating linguistics and semiotics. However, there is another aspect of this research not yet detailed, and it is particularly relevant to the development of text in my artistic practice: the relation between language and subjectivity. 11 As discussed in chapter two, Derrida interrogated the distinction between speech and writing to unpack this notion of violence. He deconstructed the hierarchy of ‘presence’ (of the speaking subject) over ‘absence’ (of the writer), and argued that all forms of inscription operate through spacing, difference, displacement and deferral. 12 “Any sort of thing can substitute for the victim precisely because the victim is always already a substitute, a signifier, a mark, in Derridean terms, of a deferral.” Andrew J. McKenna (1992). Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction. Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, p.76.
132 Other theorists related language and subjectivity in more specific ways to cinema. For example, Slavoj Žižek unpacked the ways in which narrative and filmic codes play on the anxieties and desires of viewers. He proposed that both film and subjectivity are constituted by irresolvable tensions of excess and lack, presence and absence. These are tensions that can be understood as underscored by the very structure of desire.13 In these ways, I began to consider the role of language in the construction of subjectivity: as a way that individuals continually recognise (as well as misrecognise), and reconstruct notions of self.
By examining the specific phenomenon of the voice-over, yet another theorist provided a ‘tangible’ way of exploring some of these ideas through my work. Joan Copjec suggested that in film noir the disembodiment of the voice-over often correlates with some form of death in the diegetic reality of the film (whether literal or metaphorical).14 The absence of the speaking character on screen also reinforces the dislocations between self and language. She also noted that the disembodied voice in documentary is one of authority. By explaining the images on screen, the documentary narrator disseminates meaning from a seemingly universal or privileged zone of knowledge. This voice of knowledge, belonging to no-one in particular, is very different to the noir voice which, although absented from the images, cannot be separated from a projection of identity. In this way, the noir voice is always ‘someone’. Whether they are already dead (in the ‘world’ of the plot) or still active in the narrative action, the noir voice is a subjective voice.15 Here Copjec recalled Roland Barthes’ notion of the ‘grain of the voice’ to explain this phenomenon.
13 “The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed – and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes it in. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire.” Slavoj Žižek (2000). Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York, N.Y., Routledge, p.6. 14 Joan Copjec (1994). Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, pp.183-184. 15 It is not just the voice-over that enforces a disjunction between voice and subject in film noir. Take the prevalence of the telephone in films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). In this instance, the disembodied voice is a means of (dis)locating narrative action beyond the limit of the frame. The separation of voice from body (even through the telephone), and the rupturing of the frame, are once again means of extending and enforcing a sense of immanent violence in the film.
133
The grain works in the voice as index in the same way as the index works in detective fiction: to register a resistance to or failure of meaning. It is this friction that prompts interpretation. Don’t read my words; read my desire! This is what the grain of the voice urges. That is, don’t take me literally (i.e., universally), but realize that these words are the unique bearers of my desire.16
So, rather than reverting to an all-knowing voice of authority (as in documentary), through the grain of the noir voice, meaning is opened up to the fragilities, hesitancies and complexities of the speaking subject. Copjec, Žižek and McKenna’s respective works caused me to reflect upon my own frustrations and apprehensions about verbal communication. I came to acknowledge that these frustrations were aspects of my own subjectivity, which in turn, were informing my compulsion to explore language through my practice. Exploring the languages of popular culture was therefore as much about deconstructing and questioning existing codes, as it was about exploring my own uncertainties about language.
Here, my personal curiosities and hesitations intermixed with these theoretical affiliations between language, subjectivity, desire and violence, seemed to have parallels in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver (1976). Throughout the film, the protagonist, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), grows progressively disenchanted with the world around him. We follow his psychological dis- integration through a number of diary entry voice-overs throughout the film. In these, Bickle contemplates his job driving taxis, his unrequited attraction to Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), and his disapproving attitudes towards society. These voice-overs chart Bickle’s mental deterioration until the climactic scene of the film where his words can no longer substitute for, or suppress, his violent disposition.
16 Ibid, p.189
134 By isolating and re-editing these voice-overs, I made a work called Your Move (2002).17 I cut and pasted the audio from the film and replaced the imagery with the visual representation of the spoken words. One by one, the words flashed up in a white stencil font against a black background. Each word appeared on screen at the same time as Bickle’s anxious and paranoid voice enunciated the word. In the installation of the work I used two projections. Each played the same video (which was about seven and a half minutes long), but they were started three minutes apart. This created a disjunction between the screens, with chance determining the relationships between them. I also left silent/black spaces in between each voice-over segment so that there were some instances when there was no sound and image (text), some when only one screen played, and others when both played in competition with each other.
By removing the original imagery and replacing it with the appearance of white words on a black background, I wanted to explore some of the theoretical territory outlined by Copjec, Žižek and McKenna. The absence of imagery dislodged Bickle’s voice from the diegetic space of the film, and thus transported the fragmented script into the stark ‘non-space’ of the blackened gallery. Through the intense contrast of white text against black screens, I wanted the language to incise, or cut into, the physical space of the viewer. The severe visual experience was intended to emphasise the ‘violence’ of the disembodied voice, as well as the ‘spacings’ of language. In this way, the dual screen installation of the work was another technique through which I attempted to iterate the displacements and dislocations of language, and its role in the construction of subjectivity.
Using text as a medium was as much about the emptiness of the screen, and the negation of the image, as it was about questions surrounding the psychological spaces (spacings) of language. In fact, I was beginning to understand how these interests were completely and utterly intertwined. The black space of the screen was a way of disrupting the expectations of film’s
17 See attached ‘Selected works DVD’.
135
Figure 34: Martin Scorsese, film still from Taxi Driver (1976) (featuring Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle)
Figure 35: Martin Scorsese, film still from Taxi Driver (1976) (featuring Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle)
Figure 36: Video stills from Your Move (2002)
136 photographic quality. It was also a way of disallowing the diegetic reality of film to create an almost vacuous space for the projection of the viewer’s imagination. The absence of imagery, and the substitution of written words, was another way of emphasising the violent non-presence of the speaking subject. Similarly, the non-space of the black screen, and the incisions of the severe white text, became metaphors for the anxieties and desires that are continually caught between subjectivity, and its tenuous performances of self- identification (and misidentification) through language.
As such, Your Move opened up a new range of creative possibilities for my practice. Rather than relying on literal cutting and pasting, I could now edit an existing film to construct a particular physical space, as well as a cognitive experience. The absence of imagery, the blackness of the screen, the stark (even violent) contrast of the white text, the fragmentation of the multi-screen installation, the simultaneity of spoken and written text – were all ways in which I could re-edit film (as a ‘found object’) to construct very different forms of visual, symbolic and cognitive engagement. These formal techniques were ways through which I could reuse the conventions of film, in order to evoke specific physical, emotive and intellectual effects. Rather than the ‘one-liner’ nature of earlier works, these new techniques made it possible to produce more compelling spatial and temporal experiences, which explored the discursive possibilities of subjectivity.
Some delusions about language and identity
Over the past few years, many of my video works have employed the approaches outlined above to explore an array of symbolic paradigms. While these works have maintained a certain formal sensibility (particularly the use of white text, black backgrounds, verbal dialogue, and so on), each work has explored different aspects, nuances and instances of how meaning is communicated through various socially constructed symbolic systems. The denying of the filmic or photographic image, and the substitutions of written
137 and spoken languages, have also been dominant methods through which I have attempted to examine the relationship between language and the problematics of subjectivity. What is more, by emphasising, and opening up the abstractions and ambiguities of language, these formal methods have also helped me to navigate and negotiate my concerns and suspicions about verbal communication.18
‘Dazed and Praised’
These interests developed through works such as Dazed and Praised, which focussed on the ‘mistranslations’ of subjective experience.19 In this work, I re- edited the dialogue from a documentary film, Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001), which reflects on a group of skaters in the 1970s that pioneered contemporary skating techniques. By editing out the images, as well as the specific references to time, location and skating, I disconnected the voices from their original context. What remained was a series of spoken fragments that used sub-cultural jargon to recast past events (more often than not in glorified terms).20 As in Your Move, the graphic representations of words were synchronised with those being spoken.
In its installation, I displayed this video on a plasma screen, with headphones attached so that the sound of the voices could only be heard when the viewer was directly engaged with the work. The gallery space was filled with classic rock tracks by bands such as Cream, The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Led
18 This process of writing about my work is another means through which I can examine and reconstruct my concerns about language. It is a way of looking at the continuities and discontinuities throughout my practice in order to extend and reframe the way I approach my work. In doing so, I am constantly aware that my writing, with its pretensions of self-reflection and explanation, is cutting and splicing, grafting, and editing the work into new forms and new narratives which are quite distinct from the experience of viewing them in an exhibition context. I am trying to straddle this line between creating new fictions and remaining true to the works. 19 See attached ‘Selected works DVD’. 20 Dialogue includes: “It turned into like a rock star thing you know […] and for some reason by doing something that everyone said was a waste of time, we ended up influencing kids all around the world.” And: “They were all riding around like stick men man and we were just like slipping and sliding and jamming.”
138
Figure 37: Installation view of Dazed and Praised (2004) at Pestorius Sweeney House (photograph: David Pestorius)
139 Zeppelin.21 This permitted two ways of experiencing the flashing text of the video: one with the music playing in the space, and another with the headphones on. By distinguishing between these two different experiences, I tried to create a tension between the social space of the gallery (where one could have a collective experience of the music and text, as well as the possibility of interacting with other viewers) and the more private space with the headphones on (where the text and sound became like an ‘inner dialogue’).
Through these methods, I explored how language functions in a dynamic sense, between, and across the processes of socialisation and identification. By making the individual engagement with the headphones a public act (that could be witnessed by other viewers looking at the video), it was never possible to completely separate the public from the private in the reception of this work. The ‘internal’ zone, provided by listening through the headphones, was always situated, perhaps awkwardly and uncomfortably for some, within the bounds of the social viewing space of the gallery. Where the skaters put their subjective experiences on display by remodelling them in glorified ways, I wanted my viewers to encounter the dislocations and displacements of symbolic activity through their physical engagement with my work.
In this way, by removing the voices from their original images, by substituting the written for the pictorial, and by creating two ways of experiencing the work, it became possible to open up the tension between the public and private, social and individual, differentiation and identification. Indeed, the most valuable aspect of this work was the extent to which it made these separations awkward to enact. The work was also important because it pointed to ways in which verbalisations of subjective experience project
21 I originally made this work for a one-day exhibition at Pestorius Sweeney House in Brisbane. With the all-day event in mind, I constructed a work that also accommodated a social environment within the gallery. The compilation CD became like background music at a party, and the audience could choose to engage with the video in a one-on-one sense by putting on the headphones. The choice of music also had specific connotations for me, because in my teens, it was these bands which enabled me to construct a point of differentiation (from those more popular ‘tastes’ in music), as well as identifications with my friends who shared my appreciation of classic guitar rock.
140 notions of self (and of bygone ‘material actualities’), which are products of retroaction, writing, and spacing.22
‘Nothing’s Changed’
I continued my creative exploration of language and identity in Nothing’s Changed (2004).23 Rather than the retroactive construction of self (like the skaters in Dogtown and Z-Boys), this video installation took the self-reflexive work of Woody Allen as its starting point. Whether in Bananas (1971), Zelig (1983), or Deconstructing Harry (1997), Allen plays similar character types, which are, arguably, like different versions of his ‘self image’. The inclusion of his friends and partners in his films, for example Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1977), and Mia Farrow in Husbands and Wives (1992), also seems to blur this line between fiction and reality. His self-conscious and self-referential narratives also rely heavily on language to explore issues of emotional insecurity, sexual tension, and sometimes the anxieties associated with creative pursuits like writing. Allen often mobilises these self-reflective and exploratory forms of expression through long monologues, dialogues with
22 As Edward Said pointed out, processes of verbal translation are akin to the forms of invention, substitution, aberration and delusion that occur in psychoanalytic processes of verbalisation: “Both sorts of delusions, the patient’s and the analyst’s, build up around a kernel of historical truth that by definition appears exclusively in verbal substitutions for the truth, or as an already repudiated experience. Words, therefore, stand at the beginning, are the beginning, of a series of substitutions. Words signify a movement away from and around a fragment of reality. This is another way of characterizing the human capacity for language. To use words is to substitute them for something else – call it reality, historical truth, or a kernel of actuality.” Edward W. Said (1985). Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York, Columbia University Press, pp.65-66. 23 This work was originally produced for the Octopus 5 exhibition at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces in Melbourne. In place of a routine curatorial grouping according to thematic or medium correspondences, guest curator Nicholas Chambers invited four artists to participate in the show with a different curatorial system in mind. Raafat Ishak, Koji Ryui and I were asked to produce new works irrespective of a particular thematic or material constraint. The fourth artist, Horst Kiechle, was then engaged to develop the exhibition layout and design. Kiechle, who works between architecture and art, was asked to respond to the particular spatial and conceptual requirements of the other three artists as well as explore his own interests in developing architectural spaces. Kiechle’s eventual strategy was to divide the gallery space into three distinct zones (one for each artist) by assembling sheets of pre-cut cardboard. The space designed for my work was at one end of the gallery and allowed for the three-channel video installation which I had pitched to Chambers and Kiechle. See attached ‘Selected works DVD’.
141 friends, meetings with his psychoanalyst, voice-overs, and the writings of his on-screen characters.
Although she was discussing the relationship between language and the self in video art, Rosalind Krauss’ account goes some way to illuminating the recurring traits in Allen’s oeuvre.
Using this monologue to explain himself and his situation to his silent listener, the patient begins to experience a very deep frustration. And this frustration, Lacan charges, although it is initially thought to be provoked by the maddening silence of the analyst, is eventually discovered to have another source […] What the patient comes to see is that this ‘self’ of his is a projected object and that his frustration is due to his own capture by this object with which he can never really coincide.24
It seemed that Allen’s ‘silent analyst’ might well be his film audience, and that his self-referential style might be an example of this play of perpetual frustration. Just as Bickle’s diary entries served as a starting point through which to explore language and violence in Your Move, Allen’s ‘perpetually frustrating’ rants provided a source material for Nothing’s Changed. As in previous works, I edited together an array of Allen’s voice parts, removed the imagery and synchronised the spoken with the visual/written. I also made this work a three-screen installation to enhance a sense of fragmentation and disorientation in the viewing experience. Again, white words flashed against the blackness of the screen. However, in this work there was very little silent or blank space, meaning there was very little ‘breathing room’ between Allen’s verbal stutterings. As Allen’s words registered across the three screens, they came and went in an instant. They also overlapped with the banter of the other screens, and slipped back and forth between the cacophony of Allen’s multiplied voices and the specific narratives that they advanced.
24 Rosalind E. Krauss (1986). "Video: the aesthetics of narcissism". Video culture: a critical investigation. Hanhardt, John G. Layton, Utah, Peregrine Smith Books: pp.179-191, p.185.
142
Figure 38: Video stills from Nothing's Changed (2004)
Figure 39: Installation view of Nothing's Changed (2004) at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces
143 Rather than becoming a stable means of definition and identification, his words became entangled and enmeshed in the audio-visual confrontations of the installation. Instead of getting closer to ‘knowing’ Allen, the viewing experience further emphasised the slippages, fragmentations and frustrations that necessarily occur in the spaces between language and identity. Again without recourse to imagery, through the incisions of the white text, and the multiple screen installation, the relations between language and identity were complicated. These formal strategies allowed me to appropriate Allen’s films as found objects, as well as to explore the problematic and perplexing terrain between identity and language, between the psychological and the symbolic.
Language and love
‘Like Two Ships’
These explorations into the tenuous relationship between language and subjectivity developed, and shifted, through the work I made in 2005. In a series of three videos, Then I Let You, Like Two Ships and Why The Long Face?, I engaged with literary devices (rather than film) as ‘found objects’ and starting points.25 By experimenting with a range of linguistic forms I wanted to question the spacings and displacements of language in more direct and immediate ways. Where works such as Your Move, Dazed and Praised and Nothing’s Changed had used the simultaneity of sight and sound to contrast with the blackness of the screen (the space of language against the gaps between), these works began to upset this synchronisation. While some words were seen and heard concurrently, others differed slightly. In these instances, words that either looked like, or sounded similar to those being spoken flashed up on screen. They were in synch with the timing of the
25 See attached ‘Selected works DVD’.
144 sound, but out of synch in terms of symbolic correlation.26 The effect of these disjunctions was a kind of conceptual and cognitive jarring; a ‘double-take’ of sorts, which made it difficult to confine the language to any singular meaning.
Through this kind of ‘spacing’, Then I Let You emphasised the clumsiness of a teenage love poem, and Why The Long Face? made a series of bad jokes even worse. But it was the complication of metaphors in Like Two Ships that made this work the most compelling and satisfying for me. It was developed from a collection of mixed metaphors and clichés that I had gathered from the internet, and from my own observations of news and sports broadcasts. Out of this collection I constructed a script that resembles a narrative, but without the usual sense of plot development. Indeed, because the narrative was compiled completely out of mixed metaphors and clichés, it refused any ‘actual’ references to specific characters, places or narrative events. The double-take between the illusion of narrative, and its negation, was further amplified by the formal technique of disrupting sight and sound (as described above). The spoken metaphors became even more complicated through the abstractions, and multiplications, of their disparity with the words written on screen.
While the mixed metaphors and clichés of the spoken and written texts did not really ‘make sense’ on their own, taken together, they were paradoxically more confusing and more compelling. Although it was possible to derive some sense of narrative from the figurative excesses of these phrases, ultimately it was impossible to reconcile the slippages of meaning that take place between sight and sound. The multiple narratives collapsed into a vacuum of meaning, and yet, this process produced its own meanings. Through the experience of trying to make sense of the video, the viewer became aware of the absurd stammerings and stumblings that ‘slip’ into the highly contrived and mediated languages of popular culture. In this way, the video evoked and expanded upon those instances where the formulas of
26 For example, in Like Two Ships the line “he wasn’t the brightest cookie in the lamp nor the sharpest knife in the deck” is spoken, but the words “he wasn’t the biggest cookie in the jar nor the highest card in the deck” are written on screen.
145 media languages become transparent and fall apart – where they no longer make sense, and where they become vulnerable to other plays of meaning.
The work also functioned like a metaphor for the tension between connotation and denotation at the core of metaphor itself. As we concluded in the previous chapter, metaphor is structured by the back and forth movements of meaning that derive from the unresolvable symbolic tensions between unlike terms. Importantly, it is the impossibility of absolutely reconciling this play, this irreducibility of difference, which can make certain metaphors powerful and compelling communicative devices. And it is precisely because they cannot be pinned down to definitive meanings that they are alluring. So, in this work I tried to emphasise that these dispersals and differences persist even in the most well-known and clichéd metaphors. ‘Opening a can of worms’ might seem obvious to us now, but without a concrete reference point it is a vague and even nonsensical activity. As Paul Ricoeur suggests:
Abstracted from this referential function, metaphor plays itself out in substitution and dissipates itself in ornamentation; allowed to run free, it loses itself in language games.27
Like Two Ships encapsulated a range of things I had been considering in my practice. It almost literally called attention to the slippages and disconnections of language. It used humour to question the ‘naturalness’ of language and reveal its underlying reliance on of substitution and deferral. By doing so, it also disclosed the ways in which the mediated languages that inform our understandings of the world, are themselves prone to these plays of signification.
27 Paul Ricoeur (1978). The rule of metaphor: multi-disciplinary studies of the creation of meaning in language. London, England, Routledge and Kegan Paul, p.40.
146
Figure 40: Video stills from Like Two Ships (2005)
Figure 41: Installation view of Like Two Ships (2005) at Kings ARI (photograph: Brendan Lee)
147 In these ways Like Two Ships seemed to resolve a range of questions that had arisen through my interest in language as communicative device. Because this work seemed to fold back on itself (by referencing its own construction through the incessant deferrals of metaphor), it also appeared to bring this specific exploration of ‘language’ to some point of resolution. This is not to say that I had reached a definitive conclusion, but rather that I felt I had unpacked some of my initial suspicions and questions about language as a communicative medium. It then became important for me to consider how my practice could develop beyond linguistic or literary investigations.
Although I still found text a compelling and important tool to work with, I did not want my practice to become confined by the ‘logic’ of language games. My practice had developed a range of formal and conceptual consistencies (white text, voice, and so on), but I wanted to extend my creative and conceptual approaches. I wanted to make art that was not just self- referential, but which also negotiated, and opened up, the social interfaces of lived experience. At this point I realised that I did not have to limit myself to questions about filmic meaning or of verbal language, but instead I could use and manipulate their symbolic schema in ways that went beyond the limitations of the screen.
I became more interested in the physical and spatial dimensions of my practice.28 Most importantly for me, it was the materiality of editing – the ability to organise combinations of sight and sound – that lay at the heart of my formal and conceptual compulsions. I began to consider how editing could allow me to cut and paste symbolic systems into spatial relations and installation environments. If previous works such as Like Two Ships had focussed on the cognitive ‘spaces’ of making meaning, then I wanted to
28 Since Your Move I had been interested in the physical experience of my work. The contrast between the black background and the white text of my videos had always been a way to elicit particular physical (and cognitive) experiences of my work. When making work I have always been very conscious of the work’s physical installation. Issues of whether to project the work (and at what scale), whether to show the videos on LCD or plasma screens (and which kind), whether to have headphones or speakers (and at what volume levels), how dark (or light) the gallery space needs to be, and so on, are always at the forefront of my mind. Although the videos might be transportable as DVDs, for me, they are only realised when installed in an exhibition space.
148 further expand my practice to investigate the intersections (or fractures) between cognition and the sensory experiences of the work. Here, editing was not only a theoretical framework, but also a means to explore and inhabit the intersections between the senses and cognition.
‘When There’s Love’
In order to explore this line of thinking, I developed a video installation called When There’s Love in 2005.29 It featured three video projections (with headphones), ambient music and four mirror balls.30 The three videos were spread throughout the gallery, and they displayed sequences of lyrics which I had appropriated from a variety of love songs. As each line of white words scrolled across the surfaces of the walls, a male voice could be heard singing the same words through the headphones. Meanwhile, speakers throughout the gallery played The Righteous Brothers’ version of the classic lament, Unchained Melody (1965). Together with the rotating fragments of light thrown by the mirror balls, this music transformed the gallery into something like a high-school dance. However, this atmosphere was not the contemporary version of the high-school dance (which I imagine might feature the Pussycat Dolls and the Black Eyed Peas), or even the kinds that I experienced (dominated by Los del Río’s Macarena, and Tina Turner’s Nutbush City Limits). Instead, this installation alluded to, and evoked, a romanticised idea of a dancehall.
In order to recognise the clichéd symbols of the dancehall you had to ‘experience’ them. While the mirror balls and the music functioned as signs for the idea of a dancehall, in doing so, they also recreated the ‘actual’ atmosphere of one. While the repetition of Unchained Melody served to reinforce a difference between the ‘real’ thing and its stereotyped version, the
29 See attached ‘Selected works DVD’. 30 The format of this work was designed specifically for the Main Gallery at Metro Arts. When I exhibit it again, depending on the specifics of the exhibition space, it may take on a different format. For example, another space might require only one mirror-ball and one video projection. Unlike other works such as Your Move, I am flexible about the presentation of this work because it is contingent on the visual and emotive effects of its ‘spatial’ installation.
149 rotating lights, and the evocative power of the song made the installation immersive – like a dancehall.31 Deploying the lighting and musical effects in the gallery were ways of recreating both the appearance of a romantic disco, and the feeling of one. They were methods of displaying the codes and conventions of romance, as well as redeploying the potentially emotive and immersive effects of these codes.
The work explored the sometimes contradictory and ambiguous relation I have with the forms and conventions of dominant culture. While I am often sceptical and cautious about dominant cultural codes (particularly where love and romance are involved), I am also strangely attracted to them. Although I can see how Unchained Melody reiterates particular social mythologies (like the idea of everlasting love), I also find the song evocative and endearing. My response to this kind of material in Hollywood blockbusters, television sit- coms, popular music, etc, is therefore ambivalent. I interchangeably cringe and crumble at these clichés of romance. They are at once obvious and seductive, mediocre and sentimental. What intrigues me is that, although I am cautious of them, these codes and conventions are still symbolically effective and emotionally affective.
As an artist, it is stimulating to be able to deploy these symbolic and emotive sensations in ways that do not insist on a didactic or polemical interpretation. Thought of in this way, the codes and conventions of popular culture are not ‘objects’ to be commented upon, but rather tools and mediums to be toyed with and worked through. Appropriation and quotation are not simply ways of critically reflecting on the mechanisms of mass media; they are also creative
31 The repetition of the song also seemed to suggest that this installation could be a slice in time like a fleeting (but recurrent) memory of adolescence, or even a climactic moment in a film. Unchained Melody also has a very specific connection to the 1990 film Ghost and its famous scene where Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore overcome their mortal separation over a rotating pottery wheel. However unlike earlier works, this particular reference to film was not a condition of experiencing the work. Indeed, it allowed me to start integrating more anecdotal and incidental references, not as a means to communicate idiosyncratic narratives, but to open up the work to the play of various symbolic possibilities.
150
Figure 42: Installation view of When There's Love (2005) at Metro Arts
151 methods of re-constructing meanings from and through them.32 In developing When There’s Love, my goal was not to expose or exaggerate the formulaic nature of love songs or the clichés of romance. Instead, it was to tease out my paradoxical attraction and repulsion to these rituals of popular culture. So rather than being objects at the service of a one-way critique, the mirror balls and the Righteous Brothers’ version of Unchained Melody became mediums through which I could confuse the appearance and the sensation of a dancehall – and hence also open up a tension between loving and loathing the clichés of romance.
In a similar way, the lyrics scrolling across the walls of the gallery were also tools or mediums, rather than objects to be parodied. It was perhaps the visual effect of the text videos in this work that, in retrospect, was most interesting for the development of my practice. This was because although the music called on symbolic and emotive effects, the scrolling lyrics functioned on a more visual level to reinforce the sensorial experience of the installation. In a formal sense, the process of reading the words, as they scrolled around the gallery, accentuated the rotations of the mirror balls and created a disorienting physiological effect (following the lines of text made the entire room feel like it was rotating). This disorientating experience became a way of evoking certain lived experiences: perhaps that feeling of looking for someone across a crowded dance floor; those mental images which return as fragments the ‘morning after’; or indeed that point of intoxication when vision spins nauseously out of control.
The inclusion of headphones allowed another way of experiencing the installation. In addition to the emotive and physical effects of the mirror balls,
32 While pop artists in the 1960s (like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein) exaggerated the techniques of mainstream media to question the opposition of high and low art, and while artists in the 1980s (such as Richard Prince and Jeff Koons) used ironic forms of replication to reveal the complicity of culture at large, today, in my opinion, artists like Candice Breitz, Pierre Huyghe and Piotr Uklański use appropriation to undertake more inter-subjective investigations. As I suggested in the first chapter, and as I will examine in more detail later in this chapter, I believe that artists like Huyghe and Uklański are at the forefront of contemporary artistic practice because they inhabit the spaces between complicity and critique, and between the personal and the social (rather than prescribing ethical messages in the way artists like Barbara Kruger might).
152 the scrolling text and the music, I wanted to create a more private space within the installation (as in Dazed and Praised). The contrast between the social space of the dancehall, and a more private space (with the headphones on) was important because it created a friction between public and private, inside and outside. In this sense, it also recalled (at least for me) certain adolescent tensions between the external projections of lust and desire, and the internal dialogues, anxieties and apprehensions that made high-school dances highly uncomfortable experiences. In these ways, the male voice singing through the headphones was a surrogate for my own adolescent memories, as well as my later ambivalence towards these signifiers of romance.33
I now recognise that although this aspect of the work did not function as successfully as I had anticipated (people were reluctant to put on the headphones, and the voice perhaps overemphasised the formulaic qualities of the lyrics), the installation as a whole was important for the way I now think about my practice. The codes and conventions of dominant culture were not being directly or dogmatically critiqued. Instead, they were mediums to be played with and integrated into the symbolic and physiological fabrics of the work. I now believe that the formal and symbolic conventions of popular culture are ‘immediate’, ‘available’ and ‘appropriate’ to utilise in this way, because they inform contemporary constructions of identity and sociality. Moreover, I would argue that because these cultural forms recall specific interfaces between socially ‘shared’ languages and personal experiences, they are the most important and significant critical site through which to explore constructions of subjectivity and signification in a contemporary context.
Once again we can see how crucial editing is. Just as it functions as an overarching methodology in filmmaking (a means of constructing physical, emotional and cognitive spaces), editing is also the practical methodology by
33 Without the aid of a backing track, the voice mimics the conventions of pop songs (there is even an American ‘twang’ to the singer’s enunciation at times) in order to invent his own ‘original’ song as he goes.
153 which to cut and paste fragments of cultural languages, as well as compose and construct installation environments. Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, it is the conceptual and philosophical model that permits me to trace through, play with, and re-graft my personal sensibilities and insecurities, through the idioms of social reality.
When There’s Love opened up a variety of possibilities for extending my practice. It enabled me to construct particular kinds of spaces (cognitive, emotive and physical) through the integration of formal and symbolic devices. This work was a stepping stone which enabled me to expand my practice beyond the literal cutting and pasting of film fragments, and beyond the exploration of language games. It opened my practice up to the possibilities of examining and integrating a vast array of formal and symbolic devices; not just film and language, but lighting, music and spatial arrangements.
In the process of developing this work, I came to realise that my practice need not be confined to specific investigations of filmic meaning or linguistic codes. Instead, it became possible to move between, and across, various symbolic systems and social interfaces. My memories of high-school discos are as immediate and relevant to explore as the latest blockbuster film. Or perhaps more precisely, my personal memories, anecdotal recollections and intuitive associations, are integrally related to my interests in film, language and popular culture, because they are all ways in which meaning and identity are continually constructed and reconstructed. These are the devices and interfaces that enable meaning and identity to be reorganised, played with and re-edited through my artistic practice.
154 Part II: Recent shifts and ‘New Ideas for Cake’
Sociological mapping or social interstices
At the beginning of this project, Hal Foster’s argument about the ‘neo-avant- garde’ (which contextualises the strategies of minimalist and conceptual artists in the 1950s and 60s in terms of an ongoing avant-garde project) was essential to my artistic practice.34 However, more recently, I have been drawn towards an alternative position put forward by Nicolas Bourriaud. In his books, Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction, Bourriaud describes a range of artistic tendencies from the 1990s onwards that seem to emphasise the various relations or ‘interstices’ between art and its social contexts.35 While there are certain commonalities between his ideas and Foster’s, the differences have helped me come to terms with my own changing conceptual approaches and critical motivations.36
Foster’s argument initially appealed to me because it situated the sometimes abstract and idiosyncratic gestures of conceptual art, in a social, historical, and ideological context. By associating the methodologies of conceptual art with an avant-garde tradition, Foster provided a critical framework in which I could locate the often ‘ironically detached’ strategies of the artists that fascinated me (for instance Ed Ruscha, Richard Prince, John Baldessari and Douglas Huebler). And so, it also enabled me to imagine that there is/was an ongoing critical project within art history in which I could situate my own practice and motivations.
34 Hal Foster (1996). The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. 35 Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). Relational aesthetics. France, Les presses du reel, and Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). Postproduction: culture as screenplay: how art reprograms the world. New York, Lukas & Sternberg. 36 I have described these shifts through the transitions of my works. Where I was initially cutting and splicing of film fragments, then examining the symbolic operations of language, I am now attempting to explore, and perhaps confuse, the symbolic and its ‘affective’ qualities.
155 Foster’s argument was also important because it dealt with the problematic conception of art’s relation to broader society. By arguing that neo-avant- garde artists reformatted and reinscribed the artistic strategies of the historical avant-garde, he reframed the avant-garde ideal of connecting art and life. For him, this ideal should not be taken at face value as a literal claim for total social transformation. Instead, he proposed that it should be understood as rhetorical. That is, it was a heterogeneous process of ongoing experimentation and exploration, rather than a progression towards a defined goal.
For the most acute avant-garde artists such as Duchamp, the aim is neither an abstract negation of art nor a romantic reconciliation with life but a perpetual testing of the conventions of both. Thus, rather than false, circular, and otherwise affirmative, avant-garde practice at its best is contradictory, mobile, and otherwise diabolical.37
Foster thus argued that the critical strategies of modern artists like Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Rodchenko (particularly his Pure Colours: Red, Yellow, Blue of 1921) were already ironic, even self-consciously paradoxical. And rather than being seen as didactic attempts to destroy the distinctions between art and its broader social and cultural contexts, Duchamp’s readymades and Rodchenko’s monochromes were experiments with the limits, interfaces and definitions of art. Furthermore, it was precisely because of the gaps between art and life which enabled Duchamp’s readymades to be so provocatively labelled ‘art’. Similarly, it was the separateness of art, its specific canon of inquiry, which allowed Rodchenko’s monochromes to be understood as challenging (some might say ending) the conventions of painting. These works did not seek to unite art and life; they inhabited the very distinctions between them.
37 Ibid, p.16
156
Figure 43: Alexander Rodchenko, Pure Colours: Red, Yellow, Blue (1921)
Figure 44: Marcel Duchamp, In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915, 1964)
157 For Foster, the ‘institutional critiques’ of artists in the 1960s were extensions of this rhetorical and paradoxical avant-garde project.38 What was important for my own practice, was the way that Foster located the supposed ‘failures’ of art (its inability to evoke total social transformation), as integral to its very constitution. Consequently, artistic practice could become an ongoing process of experimentation and exploration, rather than a lineage towards a particular result. This understanding of art, and its critical history (as the back and forward movement between different formal and conceptual strategies), allowed me to imagine the possibility and potential of play; of experimenting with, and testing out the distinctions between art and its social context.
In Foster’s expanded conception of avant-gardism, art did not have to provide personal signs of genius (or expressions of angst), but instead it could be a process of “sociological mapping”.39 This idea was also important for me because it positioned artistic practice as a means of engaging with the codes and conventions of social languages. My artistic practice did not have to enforce radical breaks with tradition, or new proposals for social transformation. Instead, it could seek out and inhabit the spaces of “culture understood as text”.40 By miming and tracing over existing social languages (and the codes through which ‘information’ is distributed socially; advertising, television, film, news broadcasts, and so on), I could highlight, and perhaps occasionally undermine the authority of those cultural codes.41
38 Ibid, p.20. Foster’s overarching argument was that by reinscribing the strategies of the historical avant-garde, the neo-avant-garde made the symbolic ‘traumas’ of the avant-garde ‘real’. Through an analogy to the psychoanalytic model of ‘deferred action’, he proposed that it was only through the work of minimalist and conceptual artists in the 1960s that the avant- garde project could be fully registered. He stated: “On this analogy the avant-garde work is never historically effective or fully significant in its initial moments. It cannot be because it is traumatic – a hole in the symbolic order of its time that is not prepared for it, that cannot receive it, at least not immediately, at least not without structural change.” (Ibid, p.29) 39 Foster described ‘sociological mapping’ as a methodology for exploring forms of social ‘alterity’ in the 1960s. Here, issues such as race, gender, sexuality and social inequality became not only the subjects of artistic practice, but also the site at which it took place (for example, in her 1976 work Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, Martha Rosler used the ‘gendered’ body as both a theme and a medium in her work). Foster argued that along with this ‘siting’ of art in various social discourses came an analogy to ‘mapping’. Artists did not just identify or categorise cultural texts, but rather they re-sketched and re-traced them as if they were tangible landscapes within the fabric of social discourse. (Ibid, p.185) 40 Ibid, p.180 41 Foster’s theorisation of the avant-garde project intersected with my interests in artists like Ruscha and Prince. While I could see certain forms of ‘critique’ in Ruscha and Prince, they
158 The evocation of sociological mapping as an artistic model was akin to my own motivations for making art. Rather than exploring strictly idiosyncratic and personal narratives, I wanted to unpack and examine how meaning and identity are constructed through social codes. Foster’s conception of artistic practice allowed me to imagine that my processes of appropriation and re- editing could imbue my practice with a critical function. These were formal and conceptual methods through which I could use the languages of popular culture, not in order to radically transform them, but to reinscribe and rearticulate them in new ways.
While Foster’s work was important in these ways, I have recently become more sceptical of how it positions social discourses as relatively stable and distinguishable objects. Through the development of When There’s Love, I was excited by the possibility of confusing the appearance of a dancehall with the sensation of one. Where Foster’s model might suggest that the high- school dance is a particular social interface to be examined and ‘mapped’, for me, it was a means of evoking a particular social experience. Using mirror balls and the Righteous Brothers’ song was not intended to critique the clichés of romance, but rather to recreate the sensation of one in the ‘actual’ space of the gallery. By suggesting that art was a way of mapping social languages, Foster enforced the idea that social codes are ever-present and identifiable forms that can be mapped. In my work, I wanted the ‘map’ (the immersive atmosphere of the gallery) to be indistinguishable from the ‘mapped’ (the social codes of romance).
The shift in my thinking was subtle, but important, because it distinguishes between understanding social interfaces (like the lights and music of a dancehall) as objects to be mapped and critiqued, or as vehicles through which to construct new relations and new experiences. Here, Bourriaud’s observations about contemporary art practice provide a way to unpack this shift. In contrast to Foster’s notion of sociological mapping, Bourriaud proposes the idea of art as ‘social interstice’.
were not oppositional or didactic. Instead, they used parody and irony to disrupt and question the ‘naturalness’ of dominant symbolic systems.
159
The interstice is a space in human relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggests other trading possibilities than those in effect within this system. This is the precise nature of the contemporary art exhibition in the arena of representational commerce: it creates free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that differs from the ‘communication’ zones that are imposed upon us.42
Bourriaud positions art as interwoven with broader social contexts. For him, the ‘interstice’ is an incision and insertion, a cut and splice, within the social fabric of everyday life. In this way, art can offer different value systems to those perpetuated by hegemonic culture. Art can allow for ‘trading possibilities’ and ‘systems of exchange’ that are otherwise disallowed by the dominant conventions of global commerce.43 For Bourriaud, art “is the special place where such momentary groupings may occur, governed as they are by differing principles.”44
In Bourriaud’s argument, art is the possibility of creating personal and social experiences, which differ from those offered by global consumerism. It is not a means of escaping, or even critiquing the economy of lived experience. Instead, it is a way of reshaping and reorganising the relations between the individual and the social, to open up different spaces. Where Foster maintains a hierarchical model in which art traces over social interfaces, Bourriaud proposes that art is another form of social mediation, and a process of tracing through. Art’s critical value is that it allows us to experience different (‘alternative’) versions of the symbolic systems which underscore our social and personal lives. In doing so, art does not radically subvert or transform dominant culture, but it does construct new ways of structuring
42 Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). Relational aesthetics. France, Les presses du reel, p.16. 43 To follow one of his examples, by broadcasting jokes in Turkish in a public square in Copenhagen, Jens Hanning was able to create a momentary social event which would otherwise be disqualified by an insufficient commercial market. 44 Ibid, p.17
160 social encounters, and systems of symbolic exchange. Art thus facilitates a diverse range of experiences in a world otherwise constituted by hegemonic rationalisations.
In Bourriaud’s model, art is a process of play that can seek out the ambiguities and loopholes in existing social conventions. It can reorganise these fissures to allow for new possibilities of inter-subjective experience that confuse the boundaries between production and consumption, ‘real’ and ‘virtual’, fact and fiction, and between screen-based cultures and lived experiences. It does not map over cultural forms, but rather, it traces through them.45
This position has clear philosophical and political differences from Foster’s argument. Where Foster holds on to the separation of culture and its critique, Bourriaud locates art as a variation of social languages and interfaces. Where Foster positions individual practices within a broader project of cultural critique (the continuum of avant-gardism), Bourriaud suggests that artists now work to reorganise inter-personal narratives and experiences on an inter- subjective scale. And where Foster’s idea of the critical dimension of art is its ‘critical distance’ from culture, for Bourriaud it is the possibility of participating and reworking culture by constructing and inhabiting its interstices.46
The debate here is between art as a stable form of reflection and opposition on the one hand, and art as enabling ongoing participation and revision on the other.47 Ironically, both Foster and Bourriaud seem to argue for an ‘active’
45 As Bourriaud says, “the contemporary work of art does not position itself as the termination point of the ‘creative process’ (a ‘finished product’ to be contemplated) but as a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities.” Nicolas Bourriaud (2002). Postproduction: culture as screenplay: how art reprograms the world. New York, Lukas & Sternberg, p.13. 46 As detailed in the previous chapter, oppositionality may not be a sustainable critical strategy in a contemporary context. Indeed, I argue that the political dimension of Bourriaud’s model is concurrent with Eve Tavor Bannet’s description of a ‘post-cultural’ landscape where traditional forms of geographic, political and ideological identification no longer hold. In this context, Bannet describes the potential of criticism in terms of its capacity for ‘intertranslation’ whereby the critique builds connections, alliances and affiliations, rather than reinforces models of oppositionality and polemic differentiation. Eve Tavor Bannet (1993). Postcultural theory: critical theory after the Marxist paradigm. Basingstoke, Hampshire, Macmillan. 47 Some of these distinctions are illuminated in Foster’s book review, “Arty Party”, where he claims: “But surely one thing art can still do is to take a stand, and to do this in a concrete
161 relation between art and broader forms of culture. Yet, where Foster holds on to the assumption that art is a rarefied, discrete and privileged sphere of contemplation, Bourriaud replaces this idealism with a model of immersion, participation and adaptation.48
While both of these positions have their relative merits, I find Bourriaud’s argument more compelling because it does not offer a prescriptive model of avant-gardism. Instead, his observations and arguments allow me to imagine the possibility that art can be a forum for analysing, reworking, and toying with the symbolic systems of culture. It does not lay claims towards total social or aesthetic transformation, but instead simply allows for different versions of inter-subjective experience.
This position is more analogous to the provisional and speculative nature of my practice. I do not intend my works to be statements of intent, nor as forms of analytical exposition. Instead, they are re-contextualisations and re-edits of various social languages. They do not offer ways of escaping dominant culture, but they do suggest different, speculative, and provisional methods of engaging with it. Bourriaud’s position is also commensurate with my paradoxical attraction to, and repulsion from, forms of popular culture. This is because it locates artistic practice between the seductive and suspicious permutations of mainstream culture.
register that brings together the aesthetic, the cognitive and the critical. And formlessness in society might be a condition to contest rather than to celebrate in art – a condition to make over into form for the purposes of reflection and resistance (as some Modernist painters attempted to do).” Hal Foster (2003). "Arty Party." London Review of Books: pp.21-22, p.22. 48 In this paradigm, the act of making art can itself be a political gesture. The predilection for ‘questioning’ or examining our languages, institutions and social interaction is embedded within the very endeavour of ‘making’ or ‘creating’ where the underlying or determining factor is not economic. This is not to deny naïvely that art somehow escapes the economic forces that inevitably structure all aspects of culture. Rather, in a similar manner to Bourriaud, I argue that the practice of making art can function as a process of play and experimentation, as a space where both critical and creative forms of self-inscription and self-transformation can take place in different ways to those conventionally afforded by mainstream consumer culture.
162 Practices at play
Bourriaud’s account is therefore important because it highlights a shift in the way a range of contemporary artists use appropriation and quotation. Where the ‘complicity’ of artists such as Richard Prince and Jeff Koons once seemed to exaggerate ironically the mechanisms of consumer culture (as a ‘vacuum’ of consumption and reproduction), today artists are utilising the methods of appropriation and quotation in different ways.49 For artists like Pierre Huyghe, Candice Breitz, Pierre Bismuth, Claude Closky and Piotr Uklański, these formal methods (of cutting and pasting, of editing) are ways to actively construct meaning. They do not seek to amplify the supposed vacuousness of popular culture by removing signs of subjective selection and juxtaposition. Instead they reuse, rearticulate and re-edit social interfaces, in order to construct their own subjective versions of reality. By doing so, they demonstrate how popular culture, commodity consumption, art history, personal anecdotes and intuition are all active in the production of meaning.
This speculative and provisional understanding of the social function of art is an apt explanation for the kinds of conceptual and formal approaches found in these contemporary practices. Artists like Huyghe and Uklański are also important to me because their works are not confined to any particular artistic style, medium, subject or line of inquiry. Instead, they move unreservedly between, and across apparently disparate and incongruent symbolic systems. They do not privilege one social interface over another, but rather, they reposition them in unassuming, playful, and sometimes awkward and humorous ways. They epitomise the philosophical attitudes and artistic approaches identified by Bourriaud. More importantly, they produce works which I find utterly absorbing to engage with as a viewer.50
49 For a comprehensive discussion of the aesthetic and ethical implications of complicity see: Johanna Drucker (2005). Sweet dreams: contemporary art and complicity. Chicago, University Of Chicago Press. 50 As discussed in the previous chapter, it is the irresolvable play of difference in narrative, film and metaphor which make them potentially compelling communicative devices. I argue that the same conception applies to these contemporary art practices. It is their paradoxical
163 In these practices, it seems that everything is up for grabs. Uklański has produced a three-page advertisement in Artforum (which features the naked buttocks of curator Alison M. Gingeras), a wet gallery floor, and a collection of photographs of actors playing Nazi characters.51 Huyghe has created a remake of Rear Window (1954), a dance-floor for penguins, and a version of the computer game ‘Pong’ installed via interactive lights mounted in a ceiling.52 These works toy with the conventional formats and expectations of art, design, architecture, film and narrative. They question and redeploy the symbolic networks of popular culture, art history, and indeed, the social fabric of life itself. They are often as puzzling as they are comical, for they seem to straddle the lines between the epic and the understated, the general and the specific, the conceptual and the material, and the psychological and the sensual.
Where I was once engrossed by the ironic detachments of Ruscha, Prince, Baldessari and Huebler, I am now captivated by the ways in which Huyghe and Uklański manage irony and ‘cool indifference’ with equal doses of romanticism, idiosyncrasy and whimsy. By confusing symbolic effects with emotional affects, they resist choosing one ideological posture over another. Instead, they mix them up in confounding, yet compelling, ways. These artists demonstrate a shift from thinking about art as a form of social commentary, to considering it as a means for allowing particular inter-subjective experiences. The social interstices that Bourriaud describes are precisely the sites that they inhabit, allowing us to recast our understandings of various social formations.
These artists operate not simply as examples of artistic practice, but more importantly, as forms of permission to experiment and play in my own practice. They challenge me to look beyond the cutting and splicing of film, and the language games of verbal discourse. They urge me to seek new
proximity to, and yet dislocation from, conventional models of making meaning (whether artistic, filmic, and so on) that makes their work so provocative and fascinating. 51 Respectively, these works by Piotr Uklański are: Untitled (GingerAss) (2002), Untitled (Wet floor) (2000), and The Nazis (1998). 52 Respectively, these works by Pierre Huyghe are: Remake (1994), L’Expédition scintillante: A Musical (The Scintillating Expedition) (2002), and Atari Light (2000-2003).
164
Figure 45: Piotr Uklański, Untitled (GingerAss) (2002)
Figure 46: Piotr Uklański, Untitled (Wet floor) (2000)
Figure 47: Piotr Uklański, The Nazis (1998)
165
Figure 48: Pierre Huyghe, Remake (1994)
Figure 49: Pierre Huyghe, L’Expédition scintillante: A Musical (The Scintillating Expedition) (2002)
Figure 50: Pierre Huyghe, Atari Light (2000-2003)
166 possibilities for my practice, and to continue to remodel it as an ongoing, and constantly shifting field of experimentation and play.
New Ideas for Cake
The final creative works of this research project were largely informed by the various conceptual and methodological shifts which I have outlined in this chapter. Rather than representing results or culminating points of my research, the three works exhibited in my exhibition New Ideas for Cake are examples of the ongoing nature of my creative practice. Just as Huyghe’s and Uklański’s works open up spaces and tensions between social languages and personal narratives, these works rearrange elements from lived experience to create different symbolic possibilities. They moved beyond the limits of film and language, and in turn, engaged with particular music, social spaces and other screen-based cultures. So, not only were the artists and thinkers mentioned throughout this thesis a context through which these three works emerged, but so were many other cultural figures and forms. My fascinations with Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, David Lynch, cover bands, guitar rock, ‘rate me‘ websites, internet dating websites, nightclubs, music videos, travel blogs, fashion trends, window displays, and so on, all contributed to the development of this exhibition.53
‘Turtle Twilight’
In Turtle Twilight, I used two large video projections, a single music track and some ambient lighting to explore some of these interests.54 One video played a series of diary-like texts, which chronicled the observations and reflections of a traveller sailing through tropical islands. As each typed paragraph
53 While these interests are not necessarily overtly referenced in the presentation of my works, they informed many of the formal and conceptual strategies I tried to explore. 54 See attached ‘Selected works DVD’.
167 appeared across the screen, these diary entries (adapted from a travel blog) recounted romanticised tales of watching turtles lay eggs, of bunkering down during a storm, and of watching sunsets, sunrises and star-scapes. The second video slowly panned and zoomed around the image of a sunset. This image, with its palm trees and orange-hued beach setting, was originally a background image for a PC desktop. Through video editing software, I animated the image so that it became reminiscent of a screen-saver. However, through its large scale in the installation it became almost cinematic. The mellow and soothing qualities of the music in the space, and the warm glow of the lighting, served to reinforce an atmosphere of relaxation and contemplation. These installation elements created a strangely dreamy and quixotic ambience, located somewhere between a filmic moment, an oversized computer environment and a corporate function.
In some ways, this work explored how the natural environment is romanticised and idealised through the mediums and discourses of popular culture. In particular, I was interested in how films as diverse as The Blue Lagoon (1980), Cocktail (1988), The Beach (2000) and Cast Away (2000), connect the ‘tropical paradise’ with ‘coming of age’ stories. In fact, the idea of ‘travelling’ has become almost synonymous with the quest for personal enlightenment in everyday life. Gaining a break from everyday life, and travelling to a foreign location (often an idyllic one), are understood not only as ways of ‘seeing the world’, but also of getting to ‘know the self’. Such experiences are often positioned as somehow more authentic, or more real, that the banal grind of urban life.
It is not just films that remind us of the distinction between our everyday lives and the idyllic ones offered by the tropics. Desktop backgrounds and screen- savers illustrate our desires and idealised projections about exotic (‘other’) experiences. They function as indicators of an alternative reality beyond the computer screen. Consciously or not, they tap into our hopes and dreams. They remind us of past travel and aspirations of future travel. They function as symbols of another reality, that other space where relaxation and
168 recreation take priority over deadlines and ‘key performance indicators’. As this download website succinctly announces:
Everyone needs a break from a hectic schedule. What better way to turn off your mind than to relax to this tropical screen saver? It includes images of warm beaches, lush palm trees, painted sunsets, and pristine bays.55
Turtle Twilight also functioned to sublimate my personal anxieties of a ‘screen-based’ life. The appropriation of a travel blog, and the animation of that prototypical sunset, allowed me to satiate my personal cravings for a holiday, and to negotiate the perpetual frustration of having desires play out in the fantastical worlds of film, television and my PC. My addiction to the trivial plotlines and characters of The OC, and my email correspondences with friends travelling through other countries, became both necessary and frustrating distractions from my daily routine. They were necessary in that they allowed me to imagine a future situation (where I would be fishing, sitting on a beach, or travelling through America and Europe), but they also reinforced my inability to actually ‘escape’ the stress of my immediate workload. This coupling of anticipation and dissatisfaction is, of course, the tension that constitutes the perpetuation of ‘desire’. It is the shifting back and forth between hope and anti-climax which makes these feelings of longing both satisfying and frustrating.
Turtle Twilight was therefore a means to channel my personal cravings and anxieties into new forms. It was also a way of recreating tensions between the ‘signs’ of travel and nature, and the romanticised atmosphere of the gallery. As in When There’s Love, I wanted this work to confuse the surface appearance of symbolic systems, with the immersive experience of them. It was not about revealing the codes of nature, but reusing them to create another space – another kind of experience that was neither ‘screen-based’
55 PC Advisor (2006) Downloads - A Tropical Paradise Screen Saver. http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/downloads/index.cfm?categoryid=1453&itemid=8058&pg=11&sort by=name. Accessed: 03/09/2006.
169
Figure 51: Installation view of Turtle Twilight (2006) at The Block (photograph: Carl Warner)
Figure 52: Installation view of Turtle Twilight (2006) at The Block (photograph: Carl Warner)
170 nor ‘actual’, but instead positioned awkwardly in-between. I also wanted this work to sit somewhere between satire and seduction, attraction and repulsion, the romantic and the mundane. It is my contention that these kinds of tensions open up new spaces and possibilities for the negotiation of desire. They allow desire to be actively reformatted and recontextualised, rather than passively perpetuated.
‘The Feeling’
Similarly, I wanted to play with tensions that arise between signs and sensations in The Feeling.56 Whereas Turtle Twilight explored particular symptoms and spaces of desire in relation to nature, The Feeling was a way of investigating the operations of sexual desire. This work was a single screen video projection featuring phrases of coloured text spinning in sync with a house-music track. As the music thumped away, lines of text described a range of romantic scenarios, from driving in the countryside to spending a night in a log cabin. The text also provided tips about how to impress and seduce a potential lover: “give her flowers / eat strawberries / and whipped cream”. Rather than tell a complete or singular narrative, it moved in and out, between and across, a range of scenarios that suggested multiple manifestations of romantic and sexual desire.
In the process of developing this work, I had been thinking about the ways nightclubs construct physical spaces to play out the mechanisms of desire. The combination of music, dark spaces, moving lights and social lubricants (like drugs and alcohol) make nightclubs and bars conducive to certain ‘non- verbal’ exchanges which, in turn, lead to the possibilities of ‘resolving’ sexual desire.57 I was thinking about the ways that pop music videos often present
56 See attached ‘Selected works DVD’. 57 As one website eloquently puts it: “To me, the site of young girls in hot fashions wiggling their tits & asses in an open display of sexuality where they WANT to be SEEN & FUCKED is an incomparable turn-on. The music/lights/smells create an atmosphere that we HUMAN ANIMALS can turn on to!!!” Maniac High (2006) Pick Up Guide: Maniac High's Pick Up Girls Guide and Seduction Website. http://www.pickupguide.com/kippclub.htm. Accessed: 04/09/2006.
171 ’idealised’ versions of the club environment. In clips like Madonna’s Hung Up (2005) and Nelly Furtado’s Promiscuous (2006), the club functions as a vessel in which sexuality can be confidently and flirtatiously expressed. Dancing becomes like another form of language; a nonverbal gesturing that might potentially lead to a sexual encounter.
What interested me was the way these clips inform our encounters in the actual space of the nightclub. Even though we might know we are not in a Madonna video clip, we often mime the gestures and ‘languages’ from these forms of popular culture (dance moves, eye contact, fashion, and so on). We also project the idealised potentials and possibilities of subjectivity and sexuality within these spaces. Unlike other spaces which might subdue sexual desire (the office for example), the nightclub allows libido to manifest in more explicit ways. Nightclubs and music videos intersect to transform the potentials and projections of self. However, these projections of ‘potential self’, and of the ‘potential sexual encounter’, can differ quite radically from the uncertainties and insecurities that can otherwise structure subjectivity. There is a disjunction between the representation of self and sexuality, and the apprehensions that so often inhibit such social interactions.
Around this time, I was looking at an array of websites offering tips about how to pick up in nightclubs, and seduce sexual partners generally. It seemed as though these websites specifically targeted the gap between the confident projection of self (perhaps informed by mass culture, and the atmosphere of the club) and the socially awkward and anxious forms of self, which often pervade subjectivity in the public domain.58
58 For example: “I do not recommend going for the Jude Law AI pimp look (wide collars, massive jewelry, leather) for beginners. Advanced players can pull of an aggressive, pimp look. Unless you have major attitude to go with this, I don’t advise it. I will also sometimes wear no underwear or a leather brief if I want to make myself more conscious of my male power (this is a bit OT, but it works for me and can make me more sexually charged than I otherwise would be).” (sic) Maniac High (2006) Pick Up Guide: Maniac High's Pick Up Girls Guide and Seduction Website. http://www.pickupguide.com/kippclub.htm. Accessed: 04/09/2006.
172
Figure 53: Video still from The Feeling (2006)
Figure 54: Video still from The Feeling (2006)
173 Although my video was not a direct recitation of these interests, it did provide a speculative and exploratory distillation of them. Without composing an illusion or representation of a nightclub, the music and the spinning movement of the text were redolent of the music and lights one might encounter in a club environment.59 The synchronisation of image and sound also created a hypnotic effect. This effect was an important way of influencing the physiological receptions of the viewer. Like previous works, such as When There’s Love, I wanted the environment and atmosphere offered by the work to become inseparable from the physiological and cognitive spaces of its reception.
Through the evocations of certain romantic clichés, I also contrasted the formulaic aspects of the text with the sensuous and sensorial characteristics of the sound/image relationship. Here, as in nightclubs, the combination of sound, movement and colour create evocative and mesmerising effects that facilitate the acting out of desire and lust. However, in my work this contrast between the clichéd text, and the sensory effects of the sound and image, complicated the conventional activations and manifestations of desire. Where nightclubs and video clips might reinforce the confusions of self-assurance and anxiety that perpetuate desire, I wanted my work to open up these confusions through the awkward relation between signs and sensations. Once again, what I was trying to explore and illuminate in this work, were the disjunctions between anticipation and identification, between expectation and anxiety, between appearances and feelings. Music videos present idealised versions of libidinous subjectivity, and clubs provide spaces for the projection of ‘potential self’. However in my work, the awkwardness of the meandering narrative, the video’s negation of ‘embodied’ images, and its hypnotic physiological effect, opened up these formations of desire to be reinscribed and negotiated through different associations and affiliations.
59 The movement of the text also borrowed from the conventions of PC screen-savers. This was another means for me to explore the possibilities of toying with the tensions between screen-based and ‘actual’ realities.
174 ‘Bang’
Where Turtle Twilight and The Feeling operated through codes of romantic expectation, the third work in the exhibition, Bang, exposed some of the ways in which anxieties and insecurities can manifest in negative and disparaging ways.60 As the video displayed fireworks bursting into layers and patterns on screen, a male voice-over narrated stories about infidelity, unrequited love, sexual experiences and personal angst. This combination of sound and image was intended to create a blatant disjunction between the public spectacle of fireworks and the privacy of personal narratives. However, this contrast was also a way of pointing to the possible overlaps between the two. I have always imagined fireworks as a kind of ‘social orgasm’ that functions (in a similar way to the carnivalesque) as a surrogate for personal forms of transgression. This work was an attempt to explore the ways in which displays of sociality (the public spectacle of fireworks), might substitute for, and perhaps even conceal, the difficulties, anxieties and delusions that inform lived experiences.
Bang was therefore a way of exploring the connections and disconnections between displays of sociality and inner dialogues. By assembling the monologue from confessions posted on an anonymous website, the voice became both detached and personal.61 Just as Joan Copjec described the noir voice-over as inflicting a certain ‘violent’ psychological displacement, the disembodied voice in Bang was a marker of those forms of dislocation and deferral which occur in all forms of social inscription (whether on an anonymous website, or in more public or private forums). Moreover, because the narrative trajectories of the monologue could not be associated with a single person (the stories began to separate and contradict each other after some time), and because of its disembodied ‘presence’, the voice slipped
60 See attached ‘Selected works DVD’. 61 The work was edited together from confessions found at Group hug // anonymous online confessions: http://grouphug.us/.
175 across and between various scenarios, and produced awkward and confronting narratives.62
As in previous works, the blackness of the screen served to enforce a disjunction between voice and image. After the fireworks fused into more and more intricate and complex patterns, they vanished intermittently into the void of a blank screen. At these points, the work’s silences (both visually and orally) were incised with anxious, aggressive or embarrassing verbalisations: “Sometimes I cry when I masturbate”. These spacings and disruptions were important because they signalled the ways in which meaning and identity are constantly being reconstructed through the operations of hesitation, deferral and displacement.
This work was also important in the development of the exhibition because it counter-balanced the romantic and optimistic dispositions of the other two works. It provided insights into the more sadistic and visceral forms of identification and desire which contribute to constructions of meaning and identity. Bang was an opening out of those inner dialogues and frustrations, which are suppressed in our every day negotiations of sociality and subjectivity. Filmic characters like Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) in Taxi Driver (1976), and Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) in Blue Velvet (1986), served as examples of the ways in which the underbellies of social facades have been played out in screen culture. Like these characters, the voice in Bang exposed how anxiety and violence transgress, contravene, and burst through (like fireworks) the artifices that surround and inform the social practices of everyday lives.
62 Although the voice at first appeared quite distinct from the imagery, every now and then a firework exploded in sync with a certain word or phrase. This was another way of interrelating the personal and the social. It was also a method of exploring the ways that language itself becomes a tool for socialisation and for self-identification, as well as for aggression, sadism and violence.
176
Figure 55: Video still from Bang (2006)
Figure 56: Video still from Bang (2006)
177 Like trying to come up with new ideas for cakes, all three works in this exhibition attempted to rethink the ingredients and the recipes of popular culture. By playing with existing symbolic networks in film, PC’s, the internet, nightclubs, or the spectacle of fireworks, these works sought to articulate, and enable playful, and open-ended responses to the fragmented, multidimensional and often mystifying aspects of our lives. They edited, traced and grafted pathways through which to re-register the forms of mediation that shape contemporary forms of identification, sociality and inscription.
New Ideas for Cake was a very important exhibition in the context of my practice, and this research project, because it gave me permission to challenge my own expectations of creative practice. It required me to imagine broader creative and critical applications for developing future work. In this chapter I have tracked a number of conceptual and formal shifts which my practice has undergone through the process of this project. These shifts have not resulted in any concrete clarifications for me as an artist; on the contrary, they have opened up a new array of questions. But most importantly, these questions are necessary for me to continue developing my practice in speculative, provisional and exploratory ways. Just as my interests in Huyghe and Uklański are provoked by being perplexed and confused about their work, in my own practice I want to continue to challenge my own preconceptions and patterns of working. By engaging with the various disjunctions, and intersections, of popular culture and personal narratives, of sociality and individuation, I am able to continue exploring and inhabiting the tensions and uncertainties that inform processes of signification and identification in a contemporary context.
Ongoing editing
Editing is the conceptual and practical method by which I can continue the provisional and speculative process of being an artist. As a creative and critical device for making art, editing does not provide static objects,
178 destinations, outcomes or results. Instead, as a method and a practice, it is always already ongoing, and it enables different models of signification and inscription to be deconstructed and remade. It is precisely the intangible, adaptable and conceptual nature of editing that enables me to re-imagine and reshape my obsessions and fascinations with the interfaces of social reality into alternative forms of inscription. Significantly, the resulting manifestations have helped me, and perhaps the audiences of my work, to further explore and grapple with the excesses and imperfections of inter-subjective experience.
Ultimately, as a creative and critical device, editing gives me permission to imagine and construct alternative models of making meaning that reformulate the conventions of mainstream culture. By appropriating and reorganising the codes and conventions of lived experience (which include the symbolic systems of popular culture), making art is a way of exploring, and emphasising, the hesitations, uncertainties, deferrals, displacements and disruptions that underscore all symbolic activity. Importantly, such processes allow me to grapple with my own self-conscious anxieties of starting to speak, of starting to write, and of starting to make art. Through processes of grafting, tracing and editing, I can now envisage new ways of opening up, reconstructing and reinscribing meaning. Finally, editing allows me to continue making art in speculative and exploratory ways, to experiment, and play with, the symbolic systems around me, to inhabit and confound social interstices, and to find ways of ‘writing’ without choking on my words.
179 Conclusion
The final cut: an ongoing practice
I began this research project with a suspicion about editing. I thought that it might describe the practical and conceptual methods that I was using in my art practice, as well as to help me locate my methods within an art historical context. In addition, editing seemed to provide an umbrella term for the various methodologies of cutting and splicing which pervade film, writing, and the processes of making meaning. And while I was enthusiastic about the possibilities of cutting and splicing fragments of popular culture in my own practice, I was also apprehensive about applying this model to the complex and discursive networks of other artistic practices, film, critical theory and philosophy.
Throughout this thesis, it has been my task to grapple with these contradictory impulses. By moving between my artistic practice, and the theoretical and practical models provided by a range of artists, filmmakers and critical thinkers, I have attempted to explore editing as a creative and critical methodology. My purpose has been to examine various discourses of editing in order to highlight the ways in which cutting and splicing can be used to question, and play with, the symbolic systems which inform lived experiences. My own anxieties, hesitations and uncertainties have provided ways into the tensions between identification and sociality. They have enabled me to analyse and reformulate the complex and often incongruous structures informing everyday experiences. Through my creative practice and my written thesis, these curiosities about language have provided a catalyst to explore and elaborate on the deferrals and displacements that take place across processes of signification.
180
This thesis has taken an analytical and suppositional route through various manifestations of editing in art, film and theories of writing. Writing this text has been a creative and critical process, because it has challenged me to explore and develop new ways of theorising and creating discourses about signification. Instead of providing a literal or linear account of the various functions of editing, this thesis is a product, an effect, and an enactment, of my manifold investigations into the disciplines of film, writing, philosophy and critical theory. In the end, what makes these disciplines analogous to artistic practice is the way that they cut and paste between and across each other, much in the same way as a cubist collage or a Candice Breitz video installation might.
In these ways, editing has been both the subject and the methodology of my project. It has allowed me to simultaneously develop my creative practice and a theoretical study. The tension between these two aspects of the project has ultimately been an important stimulant for the development of my ideas. On the one hand, the similarities between them seem to make the writing and the practice coalesce into an integrated whole. Their shared interests in language, writing, speech, and the codes and conventions of symbolic systems, position the writing and the practice like two sides of a coin. To the extent that they both explore and engage with editing as a methodology, the two components of the project are therefore inextricably linked: they seam between and across one another, allowing new possibilities to be imagined, and new edits to be experienced.
On the other hand, there are certain differences between the written thesis and my artistic practice that are irreducible. Their tones, formats and sensibilities seem almost completely at odds, one being resolutely analytical and methodical, while the other is more experimental, aleatory and speculative. However, as I have suggested throughout this thesis, it is precisely these tensions between the two aspects of the project which have driven my investigation into editing in a fruitful way. Rather than being structured in a hierarchical sense (the writing being a derivative explanation of
181 the work for example), the friction between the two approaches has amplified the open-ended nature of the project. These tensions have allowed me to move back and forth between the two components, in order to speculate on different positions, possibilities and propositions about editing. The writing has forced me to rethink my artistic practice, and in return, the artistic practice has directed my theoretical research. In these ways, the similarities and differences between my creative practice and my written work have manifested as open-ended forms of permissions to explore, and experiment with, assumptions about how meaning is constructed. These tensions have developed out of, rather than categorically resolved, the provocative and productive consequences of ‘not knowing’.
Once again, I return to my initial motivation for undertaking this project. The simultaneous curiosity and caution I had about editing was a paradox, because it required me to at once ‘believe’ that the analogy between editing and art was possible, and yet also to critically engage with its misgivings and problematics. In the end, I can neither prove nor disprove my initial suspicion. And indeed, this is the point. Ultimately, all that my project can provide is a speculation about something, or rather the suggestion that a variety of ideas might be possible. Most importantly, it is the articulations and provisional manifestations of these possibilities that I have provided throughout this project, which make them ‘real’, tangible and adaptable to be considered and reworked by others.
By examining editing, and by emphasising its role in both the creative and written aspects, I have opened up an expanded model of editing to provide a methodology for other, different forms of inscription to emerge. In the written thesis, it has been Jacques Derrida’s grammatological model of writing which has offered the most significant philosophical, and practical, guidance for extrapolating the conventional notion of editing. His theoretical revision of Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic model has enabled me to imagine a correspondence between the expanded notions of language, writing and editing. Here, grafting and tracing are integral to shifting from a paradigm founded on hierarchies of presence (in authorship, originality and meaning) to
182 one which emphasises difference, deferral and displacement. This shift in emphasis points directly to the potential of editing to play an active and productive role in artistic practice. Rather than revert to assumptions about the self-evidence and self-presence of meaning, the emphasis on displacement makes it possible to continually question and debate the construction and dissemination of meaning. It also makes it possible to pull apart, to dissect, and subsequently reconstruct, existing symbolic systems at the very site at which this displacement occurs: the edit point.
Like Derrida’s notion of play, editing is a creative and a critical device for speculative and provisional dimensions of artistic and theoretical inquiries. The experimental, intuitive, and interrogative aspects of play are an important aspect of editing because they provide permission to critique, and create the edit points of subjectivity and sociality. Editing becomes a tool for personal expression, the exploration of personal obsessions as well as the rearticulation of social idioms. To this extent, editing must also be considered as a political tool; a device which can interrogate and reformulate complex oppositions between inclusion and exclusion, presence and absence, inside and outside, which constitute the political dimension of any text.
In my artistic practice, I have actively engaged with the creative and critical potentials of editing. From re-editing Hollywood films, to cutting and splicing language in my text and sound videos, and to my more recent experiments with the sensory and physiological possibilities of installation environments, my works have played with, and disrupted, the formats of familiar symbolic codes. In this sense, editing has provided unexpected, and yet completely stimulating, developments for me as an artist. The way I think about my practice now, is that it is much less about something – about language, clichés, film, popular culture, politics or art – than it is engaging with the operations of those things. Through the examples of Candice Breitz, Pierre Huyghe and Piotr Uklański, through the theoretical dialogue between Hal Foster and Nicolas Bourriaud, and through my research into various theories and applications of editing, my attitudes and approaches to making art have shifted significantly. It has been a challenging, exciting and stimulating
183 process to go through. I now recognise that it is precisely these processes of change that acutely characterise the importance of editing as a creative methodology for artistic practice.
By exploring editing as a methodology for artistic practice, I have come to understand that editing enables critical attitudes and creative applications to coexist in my artistic practice. In this way, editing is not simply a practical method of organising fragments, it is also an overarching conceptual strategy enmeshed in the exploratory, fragmented, provisional and speculative aspects of making art. I have therefore come to understand it as an attitude, a form of permission and a process through which to experiment, revise and reinscribe personal sensibilities within the complexities and contradictions of lived experience.
As a device for making art, editing is not a static material, an object, a destination, an outcome or a result. Instead, it is a method, a practice and a tactic that is ‘always already’ ongoing. As we have seen throughout this thesis, because it is an ongoing process, editing is sometimes difficult to locate and identify. However, as an artist, it is precisely the intangible, adaptable and conceptual nature of editing which permits me to re-imagine, and reshape, my fascinations across different forms of inscription. Significantly, the resulting manifestations help me, and perhaps audiences of my work, to further explore and grapple with the complexities and excesses of inter-subjective experience.
The three works in my exhibition, New Ideas for Cake, exemplify this development in my artistic practice. I may have manipulated the social interfaces of film, the Internet or the nightclub, but these works did not reject or oppose popular culture – instead they sought to revise and remodel its various permutations. These works reprocessed the ingredients of popular culture to come up with different takes on well know recipes. They were part of the trial-and-error experiments that constitute my art practice. They sought to articulate and facilitate new responses to the fragmented, multidimensional and often mystifying aspects of our lived experiences. They were attempts to
184 re-edit, to cut and paste, and to graft anomalous moments within the mediated landscapes that so profoundly shape contemporary forms of identification and inscription.
I began this thesis by explaining that because editing is a process and a method, it is sometimes difficult to pin down. As we have come to appreciate, however, the ways in which it can be identified and described are precisely through its shifts and changes. It is the back and forth movements, between, and across constantly shifting symbolic paradigms, which define the role of editing in processes of signification. In similar ways, I have come to understand that this project is itself ongoing. Although it is constituted by a body of artistic practice, as well as this written thesis, its value for me is that it provides new questions, new problems, and opens up further possibilities for exploring the construction of meaning. In this way, this project has given me the means, and the permission, to follow up on suspicions, curiosities, hunches, cautions, doubts, uncertainties, insecurities and anxieties. I now realise that it is the very conditions of not knowing that makes artistic practice and theoretical investigations vitally important and compelling pursuits.
Ultimately, of course, this project can only ever be provisional, exploratory, fragmented and partial, and it will be re-interpreted, re-written and re-edited by whoever comes across it. This is indeed the point. It is still just a suspicion, and suspicions involve as much doubt and circumspection as they do proposals and propositions. This is precisely the value of my project, for editing is always an ongoing process of speculation and questioning. Editing never stops; it always opens out onto more questions, more contradictions and more debates. So, in the end, as in the beginning, this project is constituted by a paradox. Where editing initially enabled me to explore my curiosities and cautions, this moment of editing, this final cut, is simply another edit point – another opening or spacing from which to develop and graft new creative and critical lines of inquiry.
185
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218
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219 Filmography
Allen, Woody (1971) Bananas
----- (1977) Annie Hall
----- (1983) Zelig
----- (1992) Husbands and Wives
----- (1997) Deconstructing Harry
Boyle, Danny (2000) The Beach
Costner, Kevin (1990) Dances with Wolves
Donaldson, Roger (1988) Cocktail
Eisenstein, Sergei (1925) Battleship Potemkin (aka Bronenosets Potyomkin)
----- (1927) October (aka Oktyabr, aka Ten Days That Shook the World)
----- (1944) Ivan the Terrible (aka Ivan Grovsnyy)
Emmerich, Roland (1996) Independence Day
Figgis, Mike (2000) Timecode
Godard, Jean-Luc (1960) Breathless (aka A bout de soufflé)
Gondry, Michel (2004) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
220 Griffith, D.W. (1915) The Birth of a Nation
Hitchcock, Alfred (1954) Rear Window
----- (1960) Psycho
Jonze, Spike (2002) Adaptation
Kleiser, Randal (1980) The Blue Lagoon
Leder, Mimi (1998) Deep Impact
Lumière, Auguste and Louis (1895) Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (aka La Sortie des ouvriers de l'usine Lumière)
Lynch, David (1986) Blue Velvet
Méliès, Georges (1902) A Trip to the Moon (aka Le Voyage dans la lune)
Peralta, Stacy (2001) Dogtown and Z-Boys
Rivette, Jacques (1974) Celine and Julie Go Boating (aka Céline et Julie vont en bateau)
Scorsese, Martin (1976) Taxi Driver
Scott, Tony (1986) Top Gun
Sokurov, Aleksandr (2002) Russian Ark (aka Russkiy Kovcheg)
Tarantino, Quentin (1994) Pulp Fiction
Trier, Lars von (2003) Dogville
221 Tykwer, Tom (1999) Run Lola Run (aka Lola Rennt)
Vertov, Dziga (1929) The Man with the Movie Camera (aka Chelovek s kino- apparatom)
Zemeckis, Robert (2000) Cast Away
Zucker, Jerry (1990) Ghost
222 Supplementary material
DVD of selected works by Grant Stevens (see hardcopy in QUT Library)
223