Dread Theory: from Dialectical Image to Dub Encounter
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DREAD THEORY: FROM DIALECTICAL IMAGE TO DUB ENCOUNTER By ALAN WRIGHT A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 1998 Copyright 1998 by Alan Wright To pbd . ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My chair, Greg Ulmer, granted me many invaluable insights into the process of writing and working with theory. He always freely shared his time, knowledge and experience. His ability to "imagine" the course of my work, to sense my ideas before I had them, created the most suitable environment for their development. My committee, Robert Ray, Phil Wegner and Nora Alter, also provided useful criticism and advice. I'm pleased to acknowledge Brian Opie of Victoria University, who always showed a keen interest in my progress, and my future colleagues at the University of Canterbury, Sharon Mazer, Peter Falkenberg and Ken Harris. Ann Haarman helped me discover the emotional strength for her kindness and to realize my desires . I am grateful clear judgment. I learnt a lot about writing and friendship while doing this dissertation. Paul Dever knows how both were "paid for with words and tended with love." That's the history of all our dreams In and out of "school," I have enjoyed the company and support of Sedika Mojadidi, Barry Mauer, Marcel O' Gorman, Audrey and Zot, Eric Faden, Michael Laffey, Michelle Glaros, Zareen, Trish and Nivedita. IV Friends and family in other places helped in crucial ways, especially Fenella, Janet and Mike Wells. While in Gainesville, Allen Meek provided much needed intellectual companionship; over the years, I have benefitted from his critical intelligence and ready wit. I saw Robyn Conway and Paul Lee in London and Leeds at a time when I needed to know there was a bigger, brighter world beyond my feeble orbit. My parents and sister always trusted in my ability to get the job done. In New Zealand, I am lucky to know a great bunch of people, particularly Sal and Doug, Gary and Robyn, Mark Crawford, Selwyn, Grant, Katherine and Joanne. I could not have come to the States, let alone survived here, without the fond memory of their friendship and character. Music played an important part in the conception and completion of this project. It kept me sane and buoyed me up. I drew inspiration from two main sources: Adrian good Sherwood of On-U Sound and the Mekons . I had the great pleasure of meeting and talking with Jonny Langford, Tom, and Kevin while writing this. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1V ABSTRACT V111 INTRODUCTION 1 Mascot xi Birds of a Feather 5 Dread Theory 14 "Inna Rub a Dub Style" 18 From Dialectical Image to Dub Encounter 23 CHAPTER 1 WALTER BENJAMIN: THE DIALECTICAL IMAGE 32 Time 32 The Senses 40 Media Aesthetics 88 CHAPTER 2 MONTAGE: HI STORY + CINEMA 63 Happiness and Catastrophe: JLG 63 An Art of the Encounter 68 A Cinematic Poetics of the Mix 74 Happiness and Catastrophe: Marker 81 Impossible Memory 84 Wild Ideas 88 CHAPTER 3 TIME: POETICS OF MEMORY 97 Ticking Time Bomb 97 Highs and Lows 99 Hauntology 197 Excavations H4 I: Dub Housing H9 II: Echomania 128 III: Down in the Coal Hole 126 REPRESENTATION 134 CHAPTER 4 THE SENSES : POLITICS OF CULTURAL The Breast of Aphrodite 134 138 The Arbeit Medallion . vi 1 The Sentence 143 Barthes in Tangiers 148 Bogart in Casablanca 151 Ambient Research 155 "The Future Will be Like Perfume" 160 165 The Present Smells Like Shit . CONCLUSION 173 193 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 198 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH . VI Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. DREAD THEORY: FROM DIALECTICAL IMAGE TO DUB ENCOUNTER By Alan Wright December, 1998 Chairperson: Gregory L. Ulmer Major Department: English 30 theorist Walter 20 ' In the ' s and s, the cultural Benjamin adopted montage--the basic property of film to juxtapose disparate images into a coherent sequence. As the methodological principle which guided his philosophy of history, the dialectical image serves as the cognitive equivalent of the unexpected conjunction of meanings and images that montage permits. Yet the work of the dialectical image in an age dominated by the flow of electronic information and the global displacement of local cultures and populations will feel the force of History differently than in an era of mechanical reproduction and mass revolution. I track the path of the dialectical image as it points in the direction of the "dub encounter." VI 11 My work deals less with a specific topic of research dub music-- than with the itinerary of a conceptual figure as it traverses the fields of critical theory, cinema and media and the postcolonial. The theoretical pattern formed throws the shadowy outlines of a ghostly presence into relief. Indeed, dub is Jamaican patois for ghost. By examining the work of artists and theorists who place the "ghost-effect" at the heart of their production, I propose to release the potential of the encounter between the aesthetic and the political as the pattern for an emergent form of critical writing which I call the dub encounter. The intersecting descriptions of the haunted site of the dub encounter as an existential/political category and as a conceptual /rhetorical strategy determine the core issue which informs this dissertation. Dub, an already existing cultural product, serves here as a theoretical object which embodies a method, a form, logic and reasoning. I examine of the principles of dub as a methodological tool : a poetics the mix, a tekhne of superimposition and juxtaposition, a spectral logic of communication, a temporal modality full of ghosts and echoes. IX INTRODUCTION Mascot From the get-go, my writing proceeded under the aegis of a bedraggled muse. An enigmatic image, introduced but never explained, returns at strategic points throughout Chris. Marker's film Fans Soleil (1982). Its graphic suggestiveness appealed to me with the compelling force of an argument. The first scenes of the film were shot on a Japanese ferry full of sleeping or bored passengers. The equally banal and ominous atmosphere which blankets the ship reminds the "narrator" of life during wartime. She abruptly breaks off her commentary to ask: "and, by the way, did you know that there were emus in the lie de France?" The awkward bird peers back at the viewer. Momentarily, the realm of natural history converges with the world of national mythology. The emu establishes an odd connection between the animal kingdom and human society. Its incongruous presence creates a strange equilibrium in which two distinctly different strata of time overlap. The prehistoric aura which surrounds the Australian continent settles over the civilized wildness of a Parisian park. The 1 2 forgotten spirit of the antipodes inhabits the heartland of metropolitan civility. Such an anomalous encounter produces a disturbance in the flow of time and the apprehension of place. The traces of a cultural-historical phenomenon, the "ghost effect," appear in the unusual juxtaposition of the emu and its foreign surroundings. The ghost effect summons forth an uncanny dimension where an absence animates the present, an object can occupy the place where it isn't, an event occurs in a virtual and actual space and time. Australia coincides with Paris, nature with culture, the primitive with the civilized. The dream time (myth) is imbued with real substance. Conversely, the stuff of history possesses a phantastic life. Emus belong in the lie de France in the same way that spectres haunt old Europe. The conjunction of disparate objects or images within the same frame of reference has long been a staple feature of twentieth century art and criticism. In fact, cinema utilizes the principle of juxtaposition--the basic technical property of the medium to connect images into a coherent sequence whilst respecting their dissimilarity--to order and arrange visual information. Montage achieves a meaningful representation of "reality" through the surprising and unfamiliar combination of images and ideas. The emu in the park graphically conveys the ghostly potential of the medium to provoke disturbing effects and unexpected associations. , 3 Given Marker's ethnographic and literary bent, it also signifies after the fashion of the rencontre or trouvaille technique that permits the (the lucky find) , a surrealist subjective identification with the objective necessity of chance. Lautreamont clinically depicted the inexplicable character of such extra-ordinary processes in "the fortuitous encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table ." 1 The Freudian unheiiulich, the external also appearance of an internal experience (the unconscious) , bears the marks of a traumatic displacement. Both carry an excessive affective charge. The inner configuration of Marker's visual presentation of the ghost-effect also resonates with two of the conceptual images which, according to Susan Buck-Morss, support the "virtual structure" of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project--the fossil, which presents the aliented aspect of social forms in terms of the natural-historical phenomenon of extinction, and the ruin, a figure for cultural decay 2 monuments under the yoke of the commodity . As allegorical to the passage of time, the fossil and the ruin preserve the vitally productive action of history in arrested form, despite the evidence they provide to the contrary of its destructive force. Benjamin, thereby, constructs a philosophy of history which, in its attention to the discarded cultural objects and artifacts caught under the spell of these extremes (petrification or decomposition) , , 4 converts the material of the past into a critical resource for social change in the present. In recent years, poststructuralism and its offshoot, postmodern theory, have continued in the tradition of spectral analysis inaugurated by psychoanalysis, surrealism and Frankfurt School materialism to place considerable emphasis on that which defies description, eludes classification, escapes totalization.