“HAVOC OF MATTER”:

DÉTOURNEMENT

IN THE FILMS OF DEBORD, ROUCH, GODARD

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED

TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ART AND ART HISTORY

AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES

OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Soyoung Yoon

August 2010

© 2010 by Soyoung Yoon. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/ry903pp1294

Includes supplemental files: 1. Illustrations (Yoon_Dissertation_August 2010_2.pdf)

ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Pavle Levi, Primary Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Scott Bukatman

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Jean Ma

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Tom McDonough

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education

This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.

iii

Abstract

The dissertation addresses the significance of the practice of détournement in the films of Guy Debord, Jean Rouch, and Jean-Luc Godard. The purpose is threefold: to see détournement 1) as part of a re-conceptualization of montage after

World War II; 2) as a critique of the reification of political representation during les trentes glorieuses, the so-called Golden Age of capitalism from 1950’s to the 1970’s;

3) as a method for the (de)construction of subjectivities.

For Debord and the Situtionist International [SI], détournement was a re- conceptualization and radicalization of montage – a method of appropriating an image, of turning it away and leading it astray from its seemingly natural, normal use. Emphasizing various contemporaneous critiques of the relation between power, knowledge, and subjection/subjectivation (especially, the critiques of Debord,

Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze), I argue for the practice of cinematic détournement as a deconstruction of the image that not only dissociates it from its source, but also dissociates our habituated modes of perception and experience, action and reaction, of relating to the world and to oneself – especially those modes through which one constitutes and recognizes oneself as a subject. The dissertation underscores the affective force of such dissociations, especially its implications for the struggles against subjection/subjectivation, that is, the struggles against a form of power in which procedures of subjection become ever more implicated with the processes of subjectivation. Particularly, I point to how détournement is deployed in attempts to

iv respond to the unsettling, disjunctive encounter with the new political subjectivity of the colonized subject in France of the 1950’s, 60’s – not only in relation to the struggles for decolonization (for example, the Algerian War, an especially significant example for France at this moment), but also in relation to the struggles against “the colonization of everyday life” (for example, the SI’s call to address the problem of the quality of life, of “happiness,” during the period of an aggressive, at times violent, form of state-led modernization).

In short, the dissertation aligns the practice of cinematic détournement with a method of analysis that seeks to deconstruct the habituated truths about one’s relation to oneself and others (particularly, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and

Jean Laplanche). And it addresses the significance of this method in the films of not only Debord but also his contemporaries, Rouch (cinéma-vérité) and Godard (French new wave, Dziga Vertov group) – two of the foremost practitioners of a new mode of filmmaking that unsettles the dichotomy between documentary and fiction, objective and subjective, true and false, and poses the question of how truth is articulated, imposed, enacted upon and for whom.

v

Acknowledgements

At the end of a long and challenging process of writing a dissertation, I am moved, even overwhelmed, by the number of people who have assisted me in various ways throughout this entire endeavor. I offer my most sincere gratitude to my advisor, Pavle Levi, for his unparalleled generosity and patience, his enthusiasm and support for my work, and whose own work has been and always will be a perpetual source of inspiration. I thank him, and other members of my doctoral committee – Tom McDonough, Jean Ma, Scott Bukatman – for their insights and encouragement, especially during the final stages of the materialization of this dissertation. I’d also like to thank Pam Lee whose teaching was significant in the formative stages of thinking and writing.

Among the many colleagues from Stanford University, I am indebted to the camaraderie of Kiersten Jackobsen, Karen Rapp and to the care of Jill Davis without whom it would have been impossible to complete this degree. I am also specially grateful to the support of following colleagues throughout the process: Daniel

Hackbarth, Arnold Kemp, Diane Landry, Naomi Nagano, Megan O’Hara, Kenneth

White, and others.

Ron Clark and the Whitney Independent Study Program have been influential in the crystallization of my arguments for this dissertation. I thank Ron Clark for our invaluable conversations about critical theory and his commitment to creating an exceptional space for the rigorous discussions/debates about politics and aesthetics.

vi As a critical studies fellow at the Whitney ISP, I have been fortunate to be in dialogue with many of the writers and artists who have made significant contributions to the fields of study with which this dissertation is concerned. In particular, I thank Emily Apter, Benjamin Buchloh, Tom McDonough, and Laura

Mulvey for their guidance during the process of writing the initial chapter of this dissertation. From the Whitney ISP, I’d like to single out the support of the following friends: Matthew Buckingham, Maggie Clinton, David Dempewolf, Ewa Einhorn,

Elaine Gan, Andrea Geyer, Tamar Guimares, Sharon Hayes, Lan Thao Lam, Steven

Lam, Simon Leung, Lana Lin, Rit Premnath, Minnie Scott, Virginia Solomon, Mike

Sperlinger, Jeannine Tang, Jonathan Thomas, among others. I also thank Anne

Lislegaard and Jee-Eun Kim for their invitation to teach and present my work at the

School of Media Arts, Royal Danish Art Academy of Fine Arts and the Malmö Art

Academy, Lund University.

Significantly, the bulk of this dissertation was written whilst teaching at the

Film Program of SUNY Purchase College. I offer genuine gratitude to my colleagues and students who have taught me the strength of the pursuit of theory through practice. Of my fellow faculty and staff, I thank Iris Cahn, Deanna Kamiel, Lorraine

Miller – as well as Tom Gunning, a former faculty, who established a model for the dialogue between film theorists and filmmakers and whose guidance for a fledgling teacher have been most informative. For sharing their ambitions and passions for an intellectual cinema, I thank all of my students, especially the students of my seminars on André Bazin, Jean-Luc Godard, and the Soviet School of Montage. In particular, I thank my teaching assistants Joel Anderson and Nikki Morse.

vii Last but not least, I offer my deepest, deepest gratitude to Una Chung and to my family, whose contribution throughout this difficult process of dissertation writing is even more difficult to put in words. So, to them, I offer a simple but most heartfelt thank you. It is to my family that I dedicate the efforts of this dissertation:

Junyoung Park, Chulsoo Yoon, Eunha Park, Sojin Yoon.

viii Table of Contents:

“Havoc of Matter”

Détournement in the Films of Debord, Rouch, Godard

Abstract iv

Acknowledgements v

Table of Contents ix

List of Illustrations x

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: “Détournement” 17

Chapter 2: “Pédovision” 55

Chapter 3: “Close-Up” 130

Conclusion 183

Select Bibliography 187

Illustrations 201

ix List of Illustrations

Fig. 1. “The Return of Charles Fourier”

Fig. 2. Still from Chronicle of a Summer (1961)

Fig. 3. Still from Chronicle of a Summer (1961)

Fig. 4. Still from Chronicle of a Summer (1961)

Fig. 5. Still from Chronicle of a Summer (1961)

Fig. 6. Still from Chronicle of a Summer (1961)

Fig. 7. Still from Chronicle of a Summer (1961)

Fig. 8. Still from Critique of Separation (1961)

Fig. 9. Still from On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959) Fig. 10. Still from Critique of Separation (1961)

Fig. 11. Still from Critique of Separation (1961)

Fig. 12. Still from Critique of Separation (1961)

Fig. 13. Still from On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (1959)

Fig. 14. Still from Le Petit Soldat (1960)

Fig. 15. Still from Le Petit Soldat (1960)

Fig. 16. Still from Le Petit Soldat (1960)

Fig. 17. Still from A Letter to Jane (1972)

Fig. 18. Still from A Letter to Jane (1972)

Fig. 19. Still from A Letter to Jane (1972)

Fig. 20. Still from A Letter to Jane (1972)

Fig. 21. Still from A Letter to Jane (1972)

x Introduction

In a 1972 issue of the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma, the film critic

Serge Daney offers a curious re-reading of Bazinian realism.1 If we were to follow what is a fundamental principle of such realism, the prohibition of editing, especially when a frame encloses two heterogeneous objects, “we shall see that the essence of cinema becomes a story about animals.”2 Daney comments on André Bazin’s privileged examples – for instance, the enclosure of a man and a lion in a single shot

(Charles Chaplin, The Circus, 1928). Significance is in the relation of heterogeneity, of radical incommensurability between the filmed subjects, the sharing of a frame at the risk of their lives: “The ban on editing is a function of this risk.”3 The risk, the spectator’s heightened sense of an unsettling encounter that seems to splinter the image is not limited to the encounter between the filmed subjects, but also between the filmed subject and the filmmaker, of filmed event and the filmmaking process – as in the case of a long take that persists till the filmed subject stares at the camera and calls out “Cut!” in desperation (Marc Allégret, Avec André Gide, 1952). And

Bazin speaks of our experience of the materiality of the filmmaking process as an almost intolerable passage of time, a process in which “time does not flow. It

1 Serge Daney, “The Screen of Fantasy (Bazin and Animals)” in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed. Ivone Marguiles (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2003), 32-41. For a recent re-reading of Bazin that addresses the relationship between Bazin and Daney, see Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is!: Bazin’s Quest and its Charge (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.) Andrew credits Daney and Gilles Deleuze for the rediscovery of a Bazin for whom “the reality attained by a film is what is precisely not visible in its images” and as such has affinities with a philosophy of “the virtual” (or “the Real”). 2 Daney, 32. 3 Daney, 33.

1 accumulates in the image until it is charged with an overwhelming potential whose discharge we await, almost with anguish.”4 To ban editing then is not so much to preserve the integrity of a pro-filmic reality as to apprehend its rupture: “Difference, rupture, discontinuity – they are not absent from Bazin’s discourse nor from the cinema he defends; they are in fact so present that they ‘burst’ the screen. A cinema seeking continuity and transparency at all costs is identical to a cinema that dreams of filming discontinuity and difference as such.”5

As curious as Daney’s re-reading is in the context of our common understanding of Bazinian realism, it might seem even more curious to introduce a dissertation on détournement with an evocation of an aesthetic of realism and its prohibition of montage. For détournement is a re-conceptualization and radicalization of montage by Guy Debord and the Situationist International [SI] – a method of appropriating an image, sound, text, or object, of turning it away and leading it astray from its seemingly natural, normal use – and as such it would seem that it is a practice par excellence for the critique of any realist aesthetic. However, I re-read and expand upon the practice of cinematic détournement not as a critique of realism per se, but as a modality of “a cinema that dreams to film discontinuity and difference as such.”6 It is a cinema that calls forth that heightened sense of an unsettling encounter through techniques of fragmentation, framing and re-framing, interrupting, loosening and stretching the tensions of an audio-visual image. For the

4 André Bazin, “André Gide” quoted in Daney, 39. 5 Daney, 33. 6 Consequently, the dissertation qualifies the dichotomy between realism and modernism in the discourse of “political modernism.” See especially David Rodowick, The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

2 SI, such a practice would be part of their various critiques of the function of images in “the society of the spectacle.”

The problem is not the image per se, but its function: the increasing subsumption of the act of perception into that of inscription, codification, verification, that is, a social function of power, knowledge and subjection. The problem is the equation between an image and a spectacle, the relativization and subordination of the aesthetic function of the image to the social function of the spectacle. As part and parcel of the SI’s recognition of the relation between power and knowledge, the art historian Tom McDonough has argued, “détournement was the Situationist recognition of the need to struggle for control of the sign’s use, its range of reference, and the meaning it would assume in specific, conjunctural instances.”7 Following the philosopher Michel Foucault’s emphasis on the relation between power, knowledge, and subjection/subjectivation, this dissertation argues for the practice of cinematic détournement as a deconstruction of the image that not only dissociates it from its “source,” but also dissociates our habituated modes of perception and experience, action and reaction, of relating to the world and to oneself

– especially those modes through which one constitutes and recognizes oneself as a subject. I underscore the affective force of such dissociations through which one is confronted by an image that one cannot recognize, that cannot be acculturated into one’s order of things, that is seemingly not meaningful, not signifying – and thereby brings forth the question of What does it mean? What is it trying to tell me? What is

7 Tom McDonough. “The Beautiful Language of My Century”: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 26.

3 it asking of me?: “Che vuoi?”8 Particularly, I turn to the psychoanalyst Jean

Laplanche’s concept of “the enigmatic message”– his re-conceptualization of the analyst as the bearer of an enigmatic message (rather than the truth) and the analytic situation as a scene of address (rather than interpretation), an unsettling encounter that lures and leads one astray.9 In short, the dissertation aligns the practice of cinematic détournement with a method of analysis that seeks to deconstruct the habituated truths about one’s relation to oneself and others.10 And it addresses the significance of this method in the films of not only Debord but also his contemporaries, Jean Rouch (cinéma-vérité) and Jean-Luc Godard (French new wave, Dziga Vertov group) – two foremost practitioners of a new mode of filmmaking that unsettles the dichotomy between documentary and fiction, objective and subjective, true and false, and poses the question of how truth is articulated, imposed, enacted upon and for whom.

The dissertation contextualizes the practice of cinematic détournement as part and parcel of “the struggles against subjection [assujettissement], against forms of

8 Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” in Jacques Lacan: Écrits, A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 281-312. 9 Jean Laplanche. Essays on Otherness, ed. John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999). 10 Subsequently, the dissertation differs from film theory’s use of Laplanche (and Jean- Bertrand Pontalis) primarily for the clarification of the concept of primal fantasies. See, for instance, Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991), 2-13. Here, Williams turns to primal fantasies to explicate the structures of repetition in “body genres” such as pornography (seduction), horror (castration), melodrama (origin). However, it is important to note that Laplanche and Pontalis clarify the concept to critique the implications of its persistence in psychoanalytic theories and practices.

4 subjectivity and submission.”11 Particularly, I point to how détournement is deployed in the filmmakers’ attempts to respond to (rather than to recognize and acculturate) the unsettling, disjunctive encounter with the new political subjectivity of the colonized subject in France of the 1950’s, 60’s – not only in relation to the struggles for decolonization (for example, the Algerian War, an especially significant example for France at this moment), but also in relation to the struggles against “the colonization of everyday life” (for example, the SI’s call to address the problem of the quality of life, of “happiness,” during the period of an aggressive, at times violent, form of state-led modernization). In “The Subject and Power,” Foucault argues for the ever-increasing importance of such struggles against subjection as a specific mode of resistance against a predominant, modern form of power: a power that is both totalizing and individualizing:

This form of power that applies itself to immediate everyday life,

categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality,

attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he

must recognize and others have to recognize in him. It is a form of

power that makes individuals subjects.12

Foucault’s point here is not to ignore the importance of political domination and/or economic exploitation in the interests of a certain group or class. Rather, the point is that such totalizing functions have become ever more implicated with the function of individuation, that procedures of subjection have become ever more implicated with

11 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power” (1982) in Michel Foucault: Power, The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et. al. (New York: The New Press, 2000), 331. 12 Foucault, 331.

5 the processes of subjectivation. And it is in such a circumstance that the philosopher

Gilles Deleuze claims “the struggle for subjectivity presents itself, therefore, as the right to difference, variation and metamorphosis.”13 Speaking of the cinema of

Rouch, Deleuze argues that it refuses a position of internalization and identification:

“The Ego = Ego form of identity (or its degenerate form, them = them) ceases to be valid for the characters and for the film-maker…What allows itself to be glimpsed instead, by profound degrees, is Rimbaud’s ‘I is another’ [Je est un autre].”14 And it is a cinema such as that of Godard that most explicitly and elaborately re- conceptualizes montage as a method of inducing a relation of radical incommensurability, a rupture, between images, between images and sounds, within the image: “It is the method of BETWEEN, ‘between two images,’ which does away with the cinema of the One. It is the method of AND, ‘this and then that’, which does away with all cinema of Being = is.”15

Consequently, the dissertation qualifies a certain tendency in the literature on cinematic détournement that sees the dissociations, the paratactic structure of “this and then that” as a mimesis and/or a symptom of the systematic amnesia and aporia of the society of the spectacle. In a canonical essay on Debord’s cinematic détournements, Thomas Levin proposes that the significance of the films consists in a “mimesis of incoherence”: “the deliberate staging of confusion as both a refusal of

13 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, ed. and trans. Seán Hand (London: Continuum, 1988), 87. 14 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989), 153. 15 Deleuze, 164.

6 a false and reductive pseudocoherence of (narrative) spectacle and as a reflection of the fundamental incoherence of the reality of late capitalism.”16 Emphasis is placed on the paratactic structure of the films: the seeming lack of a relation of coordination or subordination between the appropriated images, sounds, and texts, a lack that is all the more exacerbated via the heterogeneity of the images and the sheer density of their superimposition; furthermore, the lack of a position of synthesis from which the film would be meaningful, signifying, or rather, coherent. According to Levin, the spectatorial experience of the films is one of incoherence and distanciation. Thus, the films function as a “counter-cinema” that negates the practices of the dominant mode of cinema, that is, narrative films according to the classical Hollywood system of continuity editing.17 In other words, it is a negation that is part and parcel of a

16 Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 358. Such an interpretation is not limited to the practice of détournement in cinema. See, for instance, Claire Gilman, “Asger Jorn’s Avant-Garde Archives,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, 189-212. October 79 (Winter 1997), 32-48. Focusing on the détourned paintings of Asger Jorn, Gilman points out the paratactic logic of Jorn’s collage and “the impotence” of Jorn’s painterly gestures: “Jorn’s works function as a sort of neutral collection in which meaning has not been overturned but evacuated,” “as memory tableaus, which, nonetheless, do not provide intimate, internal access to past moments.” When confronted with Jorn’s paintings, Gilman says, one is tempted to laugh: “Our laughter is tinged with embarrassment – for ourselves viewing but, more important, for Jorn. ‘What is going on here?’ we ask. ‘What can be the point?’” I would argue that that is the point – our laughter, our embarrassment, our anxiety of not knowing, the encounter with an enigma that compels us to ask: What does it mean? 17 See Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter-Cinema: Vent d’Est” (1972) in Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-Strategies (London: Verso, 1982), 79-91. According to this highly influential polemic for a counter-cinema, if the “seven deadly sins” of the dominant mode of cinema (“Hollywood-Mosfilm”) are “narrative transitivity-identification- transparency-single diegesis-closure-pleasure-fiction,” then their revolutionary, materialist counterpoints are the “seven cardinal virtues” of “narrative intransivity-estrangement- foregrounding-multiple diegsis-aperture-unpleasure-reality.” For Levin, such virtues are also characteristic of Debord’s films. Note that for Wollen, the significance of a counter-cinema such as Godard’s Vent d’Est is as a counter-point to the dominant mode of cinema – “It can only exist in relation to the rest of the cinema. Its function is to struggle against the fantasies,

7 critique of the ideological functions of continuity and coherence in classical cinema, especially of its claim to realism: Debord’s cinematic détournements as primarily a practice of what would later in the 1970’s appear as “apparatus theory” (a point to be further pursued and questioned in this introduction).

For Levin, if Debord’s films refuse classical cinema’s claim to realism in their deployment of détournement as a “frontal attack on the conflation of the iconico-indexical signifiers of cinema with reality,” they reflect another reality: the

“reality” of everyday life in the society of the spectacle. If the spectacle is a “false” resolution of the splitting up of society, of the isolation and separation of individuals from one another by the extension and intensification of the division of labor, the films are a reflection of this split: “Debord’s cinema is not a broken mirror fragmenting a homogeneous reality but an unbroken mirror reflecting a fragmented

‘reality’ (only an unsatisfactory film can correspond to an unsatisfactory reality).”18

According to this thesis of “mimesis of incoherence,” Debord’s cinematic détournements constitute an anarchic archive of heterogeneous and discontinuous images, sounds, and texts, which mirrors the reality of one’s relation to the world, to others, to oneself in the society of the spectacle – a reflection of the crisis of perception and experience, of memory, especially of historical memory.

ideologies, and aesthetic devices of one cinema with its own antagonistic fantasies, ideologies, and aesthetic devices…It is the starting-point for work on a revolutionary cinema. But it is not that revolutionary cinema itself,” Wollen, 92. For Levin also, Debord’s counter-cinema is but a negation of the other cinema and “sketches the contours of an alternative only negatively, by means of its relentless violation, refusal, and critique of the contemporary politics of representation,” Levin, 371. 18 Levin, 369.

8 This thesis is not limited to the interpretation of Debord’s re- conceptualization of montage. For instance, in Benjamin Buchloh’s account of the practice of collage/montage of the post-war avant-garde, the incoherence of its paratactic structures speak of an insistence on “anomic banality” as a reflection of the crisis of historical memory in a society driven by all-too-rapid reconstruction and consumerism.19 Furthermore, Fredric Jameson has famously diagnosed such incoherence as one of the defining characteristics of “postmodernism,” “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” a logic that is perceived to have emerged around the end of the 1950’s or the early 1960’s. 20 For Jameson, postmodernism is a symptom of the de-centering of the once-centered subject, not alienation but rather fragmentation of the individual, a schizophrenic shattering of any coherent sense of identity on account of its inability to link its past-present-future into the coherence and continuity of a narrative: “it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but ‘heaps of fragments’ and in

19 Particularly in relation to Gerhard Richter’s “Atlas,” Buchloh argues that the question is not simply a reflection of the conditions of experience in a society of consumerism (a la Pop Art), but also, in the context of postwar Germany, of “the collective lack of affect, the psychic armor with which Germans of the postwar period protected themselves against historical insight. Thus banality as a condition of everyday life appears here in its specifically German modality as the condition of the repression of historical memory, as a sort of psychic anesthesia.” Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’: The Anomic Archive,” October, vol. 88 (Spring, 1999), 141. See also See also Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. Neo-Avantgarde and the Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 ~ 1975. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). 20 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991). For a particularly incisive critique of Jameson, especially the implications of his reduction of poststructuralist’s critique of the centered subject to a symptom of late capitalism, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 312-421.

9 a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory.”21 And the de-centered subject itself is a symptom of the radical de-centering of capital, of the subject’s inability to position itself in relation to the deterritorializations of late capitalism. Jameson speaks of the “impossible” position of the spectator of a postmodernist work, who is called upon “to rise somehow to a level at which the vivid reception of radical difference is in and of itself a new mode of grasping what used to be called relationship: something for which the word collage is still only a very feeble name.”22

However, in this dissertation, I argue that the aim of practices such as détournement is precisely such vivid receptions of radical difference. The aim is for a temporal rather than a spatial difference: not for a position of detachment whence a

(re)centered subject can speak to/for us, but for a process of deconstruction that de- centers the subject, again and again. Contra the thesis of the mimesis of incoherence,

I suggest that it is through such disjunctive temporalities that there is the potential for different forms of historical memory – particularly the potential to constitute a situation, a scene of address, or a “constellation” which activates a memory that is perceived and experienced as if it comes from the other, a memory brought back to life to address me, a living memory, the echoing back and forth of the past and present. As Walter Benjamin would argue for the disjunctive temporality of the dialectical image:

21 Jameson, 26. 22 Jameson, 31.

10 It's not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is

present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has

been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.

In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the

relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one,

the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not

progression but image, suddenly emergent.23

Accordingly, theorization of the effect – and affect – of cinematic détournement attends to a relation between the cinematic apparatus and the subject

(the filmmaker, the actor, the spectator) according to which film is a process of the construction (and deconstruction) of subjectivities. As such, this dissertation addresses a set of issues similar to those raised by “apparatus theory” of the 1970’s – but from a different direction.

Through French film journals such as Cahiers du cinéma and Cinéthique, the

British journal Screen, and film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian

Metz, theories of the cinematic apparatus effected a shift in the textual analysis of film: from film as a reflection of pro-filmic reality to film as a process that participates in the production of a subject; from an analysis of the relation between

23 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 462.

11 image and its referent to the relation between image and its spectator-subject.24

Dudley Andrew has described this shift from classical to modern film theory as the advancement of a new metaphor for the screen: the screen not as window and/or frame, but the screen as a mirror.25 For Baudry, film’s “impression of reality,” its powers of illusion, is a question not so much of appearance as of spectatorship, particularly the positioning of the spectator-subject: “The entire cinematographic apparatus is activated in order to provoke this simulation: it is indeed a simulation of a condition of the subject, a position of the subject, a subject and not reality.” In short, the “reality-effect” of film is first and foremost a “subject-effect.” The political implication of Baudry’s thesis is to emphasize the cinematic apparatus as an ideological apparatus – an apparatus that positions the spectator as a cause (rather than an effect) of meaning, of signification, as the “transcendent” or “transcendental” subject for whom the world is an object of the subject’s own representation.

It is important to note the premise of such critiques of the cinematic apparatus: the assumption of an analogy between the cinematic apparatus and our psychic apparatus, which (re-) enforces the function of the dominant mode of cinema, i.e. classical cinema, as an apparatus of ideology – not of coercion but of consensus, of the individual’s desire for its own subjectivation/subjection. Inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis, especially Jacques Lacan’s theorization of “the mirror

24 See especially Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” 286-98; Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,” 299-318 in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, Philip Rosen, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); See also Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 1982). 25 Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 134.

12 stage” as a fundamental dynamic in the formation of subjectivities, apparatus theory argued that the cinematic apparatus complements the work of our psychic apparatus: the cinematic apparatus activates and is activated by one’s desire to repeat an earlier stage of psycho-physiological development and the processes of subject-formation, of internalization and identification, over and over again.

Critique of apparatus theory developed in the 1980’s and 90’s as part of a historiographic turn in the field of cinema studies. Especial emphasis was placed on the historicity of the cinematic apparatus itself and the diversity of modes of spectatorship. Notably, historians of early cinema have indicated an alternative mode of spectatorship in the period before the rise of classical cinema – what Tom

Gunning famously formulated as a “cinema of attractions.”26 Here, however, I emphasize not only the historicity of the cinematic apparatus, but also the historicity of our psychic apparatus so to speak. In particular, the dissertation follows

Foucault’s attention to the historicity of one’s relation to oneself and others. I turn to the shift of emphasis in the later Foucault in which the subject is understood as an effect not simply of techniques of power and/or of discourse, but also of the techniques of subjectivation, of those the practices through which one constitutes and recognizes oneself as a subject. This shift underscores a crucial distinction between processes of subjectivation and the procedures of subjection – plus, an awareness

26 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant- garde.” in Early Cinema: Space-Frame-Narrative, eds. Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56-62. See the other essays in this anthology for an exemplary collection of scholarship on early cinema.

13 that the subject who constitutes oneself as a subject in one’s subjection to the Law, that is, the juridico-moral subject, is but one form of becoming-subject.

Subsequently, the dissertation also questions the assumption of a relationship of analogy between the cinematic and our psychic apparatus in apparatus theory.

Here, I draw on the seminal work of Walter Benjamin for whom technology is not merely an extension of the filmmaker’s preexistent capacities to see and hear, but that which sets off a different – and new – relation between the filmmaker and the subjects of his/her film, the actor, the spectator. I particularly draw on Miriam

Hansen’s emphasis on the necessity to reexamine the theses of The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility in light of the second version of the essay – a version that Benjamin himself considered as the “Ur-text.”27 Hansen considers the famed call for the politicization of art in relation to Benjamin’s concept of “play

[Spiel]” and its various implications in his claims for cinema: “What is lost in the withering of semblance [Schein], or decay of aura, in works of art is matched by huge gain in room-for-play [Spiel-Raum]. This space for play is widest in film.”

Hansen points out how the concept of play is related to a specific modality of response – what Benjamin would describe as “a bodily presence of mind” – that is not so much a mode of adaptation as “the interpenetration of human physiological and mental functions with heteronomous, mechanical structures.” Crucial to this interpenetration is the destruction of the autonomy of the individual, an assertion of the subject’s embeddedness in his/her social relations and technological apparatuses.

27 See Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008), 340; Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (Summer 2004), 3-45; “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999), 306-43.

14 Finally, it is psychoanalysis, particularly that of Lacan and Laplanche, as already noted above, that is central to the methodology of this dissertation. In her critique of apparatus theory, Joan Copjec has argued that the metaphor of screen as mirror is a misrecognition of the more radical implication of Lacanian psychoanalysis: the mirror as a screen.28 According to apparatus theory, one becomes a subject by assuming a position from which the world is meaningful, signifying –

“sense founds the subject – that is the ultimate point of the theoretical concept of the gaze.” According to Lacan, however, one becomes a subject by not being able to assume such a position, that is, when one is confronted by representations that are not meaningful, not signifying, and thus brings forth the question of What does it mean? Che vuoi? “Contrary to the idealist position that makes form the cause of being,” Copjec points out, “Lacan locates the cause of being in the informe: the unformed (that which has no signified, no significant shape in the visual field); the inquiry (the question posed to representation's presumed reticence). The subject is the effect of the impossibility of seeing what is lacking in the representation, what the subject, therefore, wants to see.”

In a slightly different orientation, I underscore the process of subjectivation – not being but becoming. It may be that the movement of bodies between positions, of matter that has yet to be inscribed, is what matters most in the filmmaking strategies of Debord, Rouch, and Godard. For these filmmakers, I argue, the act of filming must be understood as a mode of praxis or the practice of theory. Through an

28 Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan.” October 49 (Summer 1989): 53-71.

15 analysis of the films of Debord, Rouch, and Godard their different modes of détournement, the dissertation accentuates cinema’s force of dissociation, especially its dissociation of one’s habituated modes of constituting and recognizing oneself as a subject – a “temporal alienation” that distances one from oneself, allows one to lose oneself, to become other.29 It is this becoming that is fundamental to the emergence of a historical and political consciousness. Such consciousness does not develop of its own accord, but through an unsettling encounter with the suddenness and abruptness of an excessive reality that contradicts its representations of the order of things. As Daney would say: “Politics. How to film ‘the coming into consciousness’?” And I propose that it is precisely through an adamant insistence on the force of dissociations that film asserts itself, in Benjamin’s words, as “an excellent means of materialist exposition”: it shows “how matter plays havoc with human beings.”30

29 “Time is a necessary alienation being the medium in which the subject realizes himself while losing himself, becomes other in order to become truly himself. The opposite obtains in the case of the alienation that now holds sway – the alienation suffered by the producers of an estranged present. This is a spatial alienation, whereby a society which radically severs the subject from the activity that it steals from him separates him in the first place from his own time.” Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson- Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 115-6. 30 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-38, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), 126.

16 Chapter 1

“Détournement”

Politics. How to film “the coming into consciousness”?

Serge Daney31

“I complicate a ‘relation’ by a ‘situation.’”

Roland Barthes32

On Monday, March 10, 1969 at 7 pm, the statue of the utopian socialist

Charles Fourier returned, briefly, to its empty pedestal in the Place Clichy in Paris

(Fig. 1). The timing of Fourier’s return was punctual: the members of the Situationist

International [SI] placed an almost exact reproduction of the original statue at “the precise moment when a ‘general strike’ – carefully limited to 24 hours by union bureaucrats – was scheduled to commence,” along with a plaque that said, “A tribute to Charles Fourier, from the barricaders of rue Gay-Lussac.” The pedestal had been vacant ever since the Nazis pulled the statue down in 1941. It would be vacant again, once the French authorities pulled down its short-lived surrogate after only a day. A few months later, in an editorial published alongside a series of articles attributed to

“The Practice of Theory,” the SI exclaimed of this event, “Never before has the

31 Serge Daney, “The Screen of Fantasy (1983)” in Rites of Realism, ed. Ivone Marguiles (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002), 40. 32 Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater (1975)” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 349.

17 technique of détournement reached such a domain.”33 “The Return of Charles

Fourier” was accompanied by another practice of theory, “Cinema and Revolution,” which reiterated the call “that each Situationist be as able to shoot a film as write an article.”34

I.

Colloquially, détournement connotes the effect of a “diversion”: a

“distraction” of attention with the implication of an illicit pleasure, notably, as in the corruption of a minor; a “deviation” from due course as in an embezzlement of funds; or a military maneuver to attack the enemy unawares. As if to literalize Pierre-

Joseph Proudhon’s famed assertion that “property is theft,” détournement is a strategy of stealing from the spectacle.35 I would argue that détournement is a critique of private property in all its effects, especially a critique of the institution of the individual as a “free” proprietor to be realized through one’s power of appropriation, the power not only to possess things (or others as things), but also to

33 “The Practice of Theory: The Return of Charles Fourier,” International Situationniste 12, September 1969. 34 “The Practice of Theory: Cinema and Revolution (1969)” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 187-8; René Viénet, “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action against Politics and Art (1967)” ibid., 185. 35 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (1840), trans. Benjamin R. Tucker (New York: Dover, 1970). For an informative investigation into how détournement participates in particular debates over literary property and propriety in post-war France, see Tom McDonough, “The Beautiful Language of My Century”: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 13-51.

18 possess one’s self, one’s own self. Even in the Social Contract (1762), the text that informed the institution of the individual as such in the Declaration of the Rights of

Man and Citizen (1789), Jean-Jacques Rousseau states it is a reality in which man loses “his natural freedom and his unlimited right to everything that tempts him,” where “each is forced to be free.”36 According to Guy Debord and the SI, it is a

“false” reality, founded on the dispossession of one’s freedom, of one’s enjoyment in all that tempts him/her and in particular, the dispossession of one’s time:

Time is a necessary alienation being the medium in which the subject

realizes himself while losing himself, becomes other in order to

become truly himself. The opposite obtains in the case of the

alienation that now holds sway – the alienation suffered by the

producers of an estranged present. This is a spatial alienation,

whereby a society which radically severs the subject from the activity

36 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract, I, ch. 8 in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridg Univ. Press, 1987), 53-4. For an illuminating inquiry into the relation between property and subjectivation/subjection, see Etienne Balibar, “What is the Politics of the Right of Man?” in Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994). Balibar underscores how property as a form of possession presupposes “an arbitrary decision: that every object, raw or refined material, every natural or artificial (or even immaterial) ‘thing’ is effectively appropriable (whether by an individual or an institution) in the form of an exclusive disposal. And despite some difficult cases – paradoxical ‘exceptions’ – the principle of total possession of objects has reigned unchallenged, and has appeared as the corollary of the constitution of individuals as free proprietors, of their realization in and by property. Ever since old theological or theologico-political notions such as the ‘eminent domain’ of God or of the sovereign over the entire earth have lost all significance, what has posed problems (and is today undergoing new developments) has above all been the possibility of extending the application of this principle of total possession to the human person itself, particularly when the human body, the use of its services and its capacities enters into commodity circulation. But the question was never again posed whether the principle of total possession brings with it intrinsic limits, that is, whether there are not ‘objects’ that, by nature, cannot be appropriated, or more precisely that can be appropriated but not totally possessed,” Balibar, “What is the Politics of the Right of Man?,” 219 ~ 20.

19 that it steals from him separates him in the first place from his own

time.37

The problem is not the loss of self. On the contrary, there is the necessity of an abandonment of self, of becoming, of becoming other. The problem is the separation and isolation of the self, the individual, as an autonomous, self-sufficient entity – and subsumption of all “freedom” to that of possession, of the domination of the other through a procedure of expropriation, the other itself defined to consolidate the identity of the individual. For the SI, détournement would be the labor of a constant displacement of the language of capital; it is also, an insistence on the critical displacement of the spectator, particularly, I propose, a temporal displacement. It is worthwhile to note that “to displace” does not merely mean “to dislocate,” but also

“to depose”: a qualitative move and, in psychoanalytic terms, a transfer of affect. To displace the spectator is to refuse any point of view from which the world can be possessed as an image, any contemplative, interpretive position of exteriority from which the world and all of its subjects/objects have their place in “the order of things”: “The passions have been interpreted enough: the point now is to discover others.”38

The concept of the spectacle speaks to the contradictions within the capitalist mode of socialization, of subjection, especially the intensification of schema of alienation according to which the splitting up of society is “resolved” through the

37 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 115-6. 38 Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency (1957)” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 50.

20 transposition of social relations onto the congealed form of an image, a reified image, a representation – the reification of “everything that in human activity exists in a fluid state so as to possess it in a congealed form.”39 The chapter underscores the definition of the spectacle as a reification of political representation, the substitution of agency by an image of agency, of subjectivity by an identity. For instance, “The

Proletariat as Subject and Representation,” Chapter 4 of The Society of the Spectacle

(1967), offers a substantial account of the history of the workers’ movement that underscores the implications of the spectacular organization of the movement during the period of 1918-20, “when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world.”40 For Debord, it is the definitive inauguration of a social order that founds the society of the spectacle, “the moment when an image of the working class arose in radical opposition to the working class itself.” The issue here is representation, that is, the political act of standing for and in the place of another as well as the aesthetic act of re-presentation, a reproduction of a presence: representation as substitution and appearance.

As we shall see, what is at stake for the SI is what resists representation within representation. When all forms of exteriority are understood to be obsolete, indeed problematic, the call for critical distance changes from a spatial distance

(whence a centered subject can speak to/for us) to a temporal one (which de-centers the subject, “I” from “We,” “I” from “myself”). The aim is for the tension of a temporal distance – “a temporal alienation” that distances one from oneself, allows one to lose oneself, to become other. It is this becoming that is fundamental to the

39 Debord, 26. 40 Debord, 69.

21 emergence of a “historical consciousness.” Such consciousness does not develop of its own accord, but through the chance encounter with the suddenness and abruptness of an excessive reality that contradicts its representations of the order of things. And for Debord and the SI, this encounter would be the priority of “the proletariat,” that is, the proletariat re-conceptualized as one who is out of place in the current social order. When Debord insists upon “the proletarianization of the world,” it is both a critique of alienation in advanced capitalism as well as an insistence upon the possibility of one’s foreignness to oneself. Thus, not to recover or restore knowledge of the world as it is, but to participate in a process of unknowing, to experience how

“I” could not know.

II.

To return to the presence of Fourier in 1969: The tribute to Fourier can be seen as the SI’s criticism of the Left’s orthodoxy, its prescription of political struggle to only one of economic reform. It is an economism that is part and parcel of “the reign of economy” in capitalism, especially as it enforced a reified form of history: history as a law, a linear succession of stages of development, preordained by the autonomous and thereby unconditional legitimacy of economy. Hence, Debord says,

22 the appearance of history as “the time of things,” the spectacle of history as “a new fatality that no one controls.”41

For Marx, Fourier’s greatest contribution was “to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as its ultimate object.”42 Unlike other utopian socialists of the early nineteenth century for whom the ultimate object was merely to abolish money, Fourier’s utopia of a radical, total reconfiguration of society was an implicit recognition that money and commodity fetishism is constitutive of the mechanism of socialization, of subjection. For the SI too, Fourier’s importance lay in his insistence upon the suspension of the relations of production (in contradiction to the forces of production), specifically for a society organized à la the affirmation of all pleasure.

The argument for the sociality of pleasure was crucial – along with the awareness that we are alienated not only from our labor but our pleasures too; that poverty itself had to be redefined, not only as privation but also as poverty of everyday life, deprived in every way we engage with the world, the subject with the object, the “I” with the “us,” the “I” with “myself.” Enjoyment is engagement: it motivates the very mechanism of how we constitute ourselves as social beings, as much as enjoyment itself is constituted and re-constituted by society. For Debord and the SI:

It is doubtless impossible to contrast the pseudo-need imposed by the

reign of modern consumerism with any authentic need or desire that is

not itself equally determined by society and its history. But the

41 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 105. 42 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy in The Marx- Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 290.

23 commodity in the stage of its abundance attests to an absolute break

in the organic development of social needs.43

Thus, the critique of everyday life must be accompanied by a new concept of happiness: “to concretely contrast, at every opportunity, other desirable ways of life with the reflections of the capitalist way of life; to destroy, by all hyperpolitical means, the bourgeois idea of happiness.”44 As Roland Barthes would put so eloquently a couple of years later, “Fourierist pleasure is the end of the tablecloth: pull the slightest futile incident, provided it concerns your happiness, all the rest of the world will follow: its organization, its limits, its values.”45

43 Debord, 44. 44 Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency (1957)” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 50. 45 Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), 80. Barthes offers us an absurd anecdote to account for the significance of the Fourierist utopia: he is invited to eat couscous with rancid butter, but he does not like rancidity. What to do? “Eat it, of course, so as not to offend my host, but gingerly, in order not to offend the conscience of my disgust.” He then appeals to the imaginary court of Fourier, how Fourier would have argued: 1) taste is no trivial matter (for Fourier, such battles over rancid or fresh is “no more ridiculous than our Religious Wars over Transubstantiation”); 2) society to its discontents suppresses these pleasures (or dis- pleasures) as abnormal, thereby establishes a norm; forces one to sacrifice pleasure in the name of a “good” presented as both virtue (common to all) and value (property). Fourier, then, would have plucked Barthes from his predicament, “sending me to the Anti-Rancid group”: “Where I would be allowed to eat fresh couscous as I liked without bothering anyone – which would not have kept me from preserving the best of relations with the Rancid Group, whom I would henceforth consider as not at all “ethnic,” foreign, strange, at for example a great couscous tournament, at which couscous would be the “theme” and here a jury of gastrosophers would decide on the superiority of rancid over fresh.” Barthes, 78. The anecdote directs us, discreetly (and, dare I say, deliciously), to the question of the political in Fourierist utopia: the question of collectivity, the constitution of collectives, the relationship between the individual and the collective. For Fourier, the collective is not homogenized or homogenizing – there is a presupposition of the necessity of fundamental dissonances. One competes with the other. Always. The crux here is that all pleasure is affirmed; my/our pleasure is not suppressed in the name (norm) of another and there is pleasure in “pure” exchange, competition as game or play (as in the dance of the great couscous tournament). This is the utopian aspect of Fourier’s society. And the criticism that this utopia allows us to level against our own society – as the SI would critique of the society

24 Yet, the presence of Fourier in 1969 was fleeting – and that was precisely the point. The statue was erected with an expectation of its erasure. One could claim that the event prompted the French government to repeat the erasure enacted by the

Nazis, to repeat history with a recognition that the Fifth Republic’s repressive policies were akin to that of fascism. The SI had made this comparison in the midst of the crisis of 1958 when Charles de Gaulle returned to extraordinary executive power with the support of the Right and its brutal denial of any form of Algerian independence: the Fifth Republic as fascism with neither a party nor a program.

Dissatisfied with the instability of the Fourth Republic, especially with respect to the

Algerian War, the military staged a coup d’etat in Algiers on May 13, 1958.

Threatening to invade Paris too, the military forced the return of De Gaulle to prevent “the abandonment of Algeria” – “De Gaulle” as the name that would save the nation again, however, as the novelist and literary critic Maurice Blanchot would say in dismay, “brought about not by the Resistance this time but by the mercenaries.”46

In an editorial of the first issue of International Situationniste, “A Civil War in France” (June 8, 1958), the SI criticized the ineffectiveness of the Fourth Republic

of the spectacle – is that there can be no pure exchange between one and the other when the relation is determined by a disparity in power, when one dominates the other through a systematic process of expropriation, when the other itself is defined to position the “I” or “We” in a seat of mastery, to consolidate the self as sovereign. To reconstitute how one acquires a sense of self, individual and collective – how one relates to oneself and to others – is the critique of Fourierist utopia. See also Fredric Jameson, “Fourier, or, Ontology and Utopia” in Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 237-53. 46 Maurice Blanchot “Refusal” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1997), 111-2.

25 to resist the return of De Gaulle.47 With a nod to Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of

Louis Bonaparte (1852), the SI argued that this parliamentary republic also succumbed to the fear of popular insurrection: the Right’s myth of the red scare. In an analysis of the coup d’etat in 1851, Marx highlights how all classes united under

“the party of order” against the “specter” of the June insurrection of 1848, against the proletariats as “the party of anarchy, of socialism, of communism.”48 The party of order is “a social rather than a political banner.” It is representative of the political and economic interests that the bourgeoisie had in its social order, its values of

“property, family, religion, order” turned into military passwords: “The bourgeoisie kept France in breathless terror at the prospective horrors of red anarchy.”49

Scrambling to sustain the present, fearing a future conceived of in the catastrophic terms of an apocalypse, the party of order vehemently turned to the past: “the old dates rise again, the old chronology, the old names…”50

The SI was also critical of the French Communist Party’s inability to act: the defense of its presence within the parliamentary republic, therefore, the defense of social order, the current social order, rather than the “risk” of revolution. In subsequent issues of the International Situationniste, this inability to act is aligned with the orthodox Left’s general lack of engagement with Algeria, any limited

47 Raoul Vaneigem, “A Civil War in France (1958),” International Situationniste 1, June 1958. 48 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Burmaire of Louis Bonaparte in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 594-617. See also Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, ibid., 618-52. For quotations from The Eighteenth Burmaire…, I refer to Terrell Carvel’s translation in Marx: Later Political Writings, ed. Terrell Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 31-127. 49 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire, 111. 50 Marx, 33.

26 engagement itself limited by myths of past political struggle: merely nostalgia for what was done, for what ought to have been done. Indeed, according to the SI, there is a lack of political presence for either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat in post-war

France – nothing but pronunciamentos. A lack that is signified by the singular example of the demonstration on May 28, 1958, the eve of De Gaulle’s return, by a people betrayed by both the State and the Party. For Blanchot, it is a lack that specifically erupted as silence: the silence of an absolute, categorical refusal against an appearance of reason, “against the power that claimed to reconcile us honorably with the events, by the sole authority of a name”:

Men who refuse and who are tied by the force of refusal know that

they are not yet together. The time of joint affirmation is precisely that

of which they have been deprived. What they are left with is the

irreducible refusal, the friendship of this certain, rigorous No that

keeps them unified and bound by solidarity.51

It is “a relation thus with the absolute,” which, Blanchot declared, also distinguishes the solidarity of the spontaneous uprisings of May 1968. And, I would argue, it is this silence, the exigency of refusal against all appearances of reason, the spectacle of an alienated and alienating power, be it the bureaucracy of the capitalist State or that of State socialism, which the SI sought to give voice to within art and politics – as well as the redemption of the absent time of joint affirmation.

Significance of the SI’s détournement of Fourier’s empty pedestal lies in rendering the emptiness perceptible, palpable and potentially meaningful. Not a rip

51 Blanchot, 111.

27 in the urban fabric to be sewn over with another monument, not a cut which we

“suture” ourselves into for the ceaseless flow of yet another narrative. The crux is the temporality of the cut. The SI does not imbue it with a sense of belatedness as if it were a wound, the trauma of past, which one could not adequately respond to and thereafter were compelled to encircle its site over and over again. The empty pedestal has the deictic force of a footprint. Following a recurring motif of the SI, it can be seen as “the shadow of an absent figure in a painting by de Chirico: it makes visible the lack of a much-needed future.”52 It is a footprint specifically attached to a figure still to be represented, a footprint to an opening, an index of a future, an immediate future. And the statue of Fourier itself exists only as a photograph, an index of a desire for this future. As Denis Hollier says of Giorgio de Chirico and the

Surrealist’s “false shadows”: “indexical signs leave doors ajar through which the demain jouer, the gambling tomorrow, does or does not make its entry.”53 Thus, for the SI, it is not the too-late, but the being-behind; not the guilt of actions that were not taken, but the impatience to play catch up.

This event, its cut and the temporality of this cut, exemplifies a certain iconoclastic tendency of the SI as they advocated the annihilation of all past forms of

52 Guy Debord, “Contribution to the Debate ‘Is Surrealism Dead or Alive? (1958)’” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 67. 53 Denis Hollier, “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows” trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 69 (Summer 1994), 128. “One of the most important among them [the shadows represented in the Surrealist pictures by de Chirico and Dali] is the production of what I would call orphan shadows, shadows detached from their indexical origins, shadows cut off from their cause, shadows thrown by an invisible object, shadows of objects repressed outside the frame. They use the iconic detachment of the photographic index to produce pictorial catachreses: they represent an object that has never been presented,” Hollier, 120.

28 art and politics. The problem was that post-war art and politics stalled in relations that trailed behind the forces of capitalism, all endeavors restricted to protecting, protracting the status quo – at times violently, nevertheless, as the SI adamantly maintained, in vain. Such theories and practices were blind to the potentialities of production, founded upon “ideological formulations of a past society that has prolonged its death agony to the present.”54 “Suffice it to say that in our view,” the

SI said in sardonic protest, “the premises for revolution, on the cultural as well as the strictly political level, are not only ripe, they have begun to rot.” Détournement attempts to meet the haste of this demand, the demand for the necessity of negation, through a “liberation” of time, which allows for a singular perception or experience of temporality. As Walter Benjamin asks of the historical materialist, it is a demand

“to blast open the continuum of history,” the willing conformism of the present to a garrulous past; it is a demand to hear the echoes of a past that has been systematically silenced. 55

Benjamin’s plea was a powerful critique of an evolutionary model of history,

“historicism,” not only of the bourgeois science of history, but also of the ideology of the Second International and particularly of the Social Democratic Party of

Germany. “Nothing has so corrupted the German working class,” Benjamin retorts,

“as the notion that it was moving with the current.”56 For the SI too, historicism was

54 Guy Debord & Gil J. Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” Les Lèvres Nues 8, May 1956. 55 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-40, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), 389-400. 56 Benjamin, 393. For Benjamin, the historicism of the Second International was part and parcel of its positivistic comprehension of technology and technological development:

29 part and parcel of the science of bourgeois political economy, especially the tendency to separate politics and economics, to disavow the pressure of politics, of political agency and thereby foreclose the fundamental question of class and class struggle in history. Furthermore, in the Stalinism of the Soviet Union and the French

Communist Party (what Louis Althusser called “the posthumous revenge of the

Second International”), a history of the “objective” stages of development becomes the basis of the State/ Party, its existence, moreover, its violence upon the people it purports to represent. To which the SI responded with an insistence on “a non- continuous conception of life,” on “situations” which would construct a montage of one’s life.57

Cinema, then, must also be superseded. As a medium particularly privy for discontinuities and ruptures in the representation of reality, cinema is where the SI argue détournement would find “its greatest effectiveness and, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty.”58 As mentioned earlier, “The Return of Charles

Fourier” was supplemented by another practice of theory, “Cinema and Revolution.”

The SI are to seize “the very suggestion of the spectacle” through which they might finally fulfill Sergei Eisenstein’s desire to film Marx’s Capital (1867).59 To détourn

technology as simply an extension of one’s “preexistent” capacity to master – to exploit – nature. “Compared to this positivistic view, Fourier’s fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, cooperative labor would increase efficiency to such an extent that four moons would illuminate the sky at night, the polar ice caps would recede, seawater would no longer taste salty, and beast of prey would do man’s bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, would help her give birth to the creations that now lie dorman in her womb.” Benjamin, 394. 57 Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations…,” 48. 58 Debord & Wolman. 59 Viénet, 182. “Let us appropriate the stammerings of this new form of writing: let us, above all, appropriate its most accomplished and modern examples, those that have escaped the

30 Marx, that is to say, not by quoting him, studding one’s speech with extractions from

Capital, but by appropriating him, throwing him back into play, translating him into a new form for a new historical context – or rather, a new historical content. What motivates the SI in their criticism of all current forms of art is an insistence on the social determination of a specific form, the content of a form as it were: “the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technical content.”60 Marx had said that the social revolution must not repeat the form of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century. If the bourgeoisie had dulled itself to the social implications of its own revolutions with the trappings of “time honored guise” and “borrowed language,” the social revolution “cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future”: “There form transcended content, here content must transcend form.”61

The new poetry, the SI asserts, “wishes time to redirect the whole of the world and the whole of future according to its own end. As long as it lasts, its claims can know

ideology of art to an even greater extent that American B-movies: I mean, of course, newsreels, trailers, and most of all filmed advertisements. Made in the service of the commodity and the spectacle, indeed, when freed from that support, filmed advertisements can lay the foundation for what Eisenstein foresaw when he spoke of filming The Critique of Political Economy or The German Ideology.” Viénet, 184. See Chapter 3 for the dynamics of the détournement of advertisements. On Eisenstein’s proposal for a film of Capital: see Sergei Eisenstein, “Notes for a Film of Capital,” October 2 (Summer 1976), 3-26; Annette Michelson, “Reading Eisenstein, Reading Capital.” October 2 (Summer 1976): 27-38; October 3 (Spring 1977): 82-89. “CAPITAL will be dedicated – officially – to The Second International! They’re sure to be ‘overjoyed’! For it is hard to conceive of any more devastating attack against social democracy in all its aspects that CAPITAL. The formal side is dedicated to Joyce.” Eisenstein, 21. 60 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 18. “If the spectacle – understood in the limited sense of those “mass media” that are its most stultifying superficial manifestation – seems at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about it, and that it answers precisely the needs of the spectacle’s internal dynamics.” 61 Marx, 34.

31 no compromise. It throws back into play the unsettled debts of history.”62 For the SI, a new poetry of cinematic practice is part of a program for the construction of situations. It is a program accompanied by an analysis of advanced capitalism as the dominance of the spectacle and a reified form of temporality and historicity; a program for the constitution of new social relations in accord with the forces of production, for new political subjectivities via a re-conceptualization of the proletariat and a reassertion of its historical role in post-war society: in short, Debord says, a program “that will bring about a higher harmony of form and content.”63

III.

In his last film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), Debord states, “I have shown that cinema can be reduced to this white screen, then this black screen.”64 However, it is only in his first film, Hurlements en faveur de sade (Howls for Sade, 1952) that we have such a radical reduction of cinema to the act of montage, the place of projection and spectatorship. Howls for Sade is an eighty- minute film entirely emptied of images with a mere twenty minutes of dialogue, shifting back and forth from white screen to black screen, slowly, almost too slowly without even the “satisfaction” of the sensorial attacks of a flicker film, till the last

62 “All the King’s Men (1963)” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 156. 63 Guy Debord, “One More Try If You Want to Be Situationists (The SI in and against Decomposition (1957)” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 55. 64 When quoting dialogue from Debord’s films, I refer to the scripts in Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents, ed. Ken Knabb (Oakland, CA; AK Press, 2003).

32 twenty-four minutes of total darkness throughout which we must sit in an almost intolerable silence. It is a cinema seemingly free of content: a white screen accompanied by speech and the presence of the audience; a black screen accompanied by silence, from which we are denied sight even of those bodies, now only to be hinted at by an anonymous murmur of sighs, groans, coughs – bodies held in suspension. Silence rules the day, continuously breaking up the conversation, finally eclipsing the film in an uninterrupted twenty-four minutes of nothingness. As if the cut that delineates the “in-between” of image and sound had expanded and extended to engulf not only the screen but also us, the spectator. It is a perception of the cut, which the dominant mode of filmmaking marshals all the laws of montage to suppress, so that image and sound are “naturally” bound to one another. Here, the cut has become almost suffocatingly visible – as a void.

The space of cinema is provocatively called into question. Day and night alternate to reveal the heterogeneity of the auditorium: the projector, the screen, the hall in which we are sitting. Emptied of images, it is now sound which must demarcate the space of diegesis. However, these voices are neither those that are liable to appear in the visual field at any moment nor those that occupy a place absolutely other to their addresses. We hear voices when we see ourselves. They come from our place within the auditorium – more precisely, from our shadows cast upon the white screen. There is no imaginary play of on- and off-screen space that underlies the narrative paradigm of film. Initially, then, one would presume that the screen has been destroyed – or, at least, dethroned: it is no longer the privileged site of the filmic text. Supposedly, the difference between screen and stage is abolished;

33 off-screen space is off-stage; film has become theater. Voice no. 5 says, “There is no film. Cinema is dead. No more films are possible. If you wish, we can move on to a discussion.” This is Isidore Isou, reading from his own manifesto for a Lettrist cinema, Aesthetics of Cinema of 1952.

So, apparently, it would seem that after Howls for Sade, cinema ought to become as simple as a conversation between “you” and “I.” But to move onto discussion is not so simple. This is the crux of Debord and the SI’s persistent critique of advanced capitalism in which communication is itself alienated and alienating – and I propose that this would be the very point where Debord parted with Isou’s

Lettrism. For in Howls for Sade, the voices are not our voices. Claimed neither by a character nor a narrator, nor by the spectator, the dialogue of the film hesitates between the space of fiction and documentary. Five monotonous voices can only speak in fits and starts and even then, primarily through appropriations from a disparate array of external sources – the French Civil Code, newspapers, Louis de

Saint-Just’s speech to the National Convention (1794), James Joyce’s Ulysses

(1922), Andre Breton’s Lost Steps (1917-23), John Ford’s Rio Grande (1950), etc.

The title of the film is also strangely out of place: Voice no. 4 complains, “But no one talks about Sade in this film.” The dialogue is loosely structured as aborted attempts at a discussion about the legal status of an individual; desire, transgression, love, relationships; solitude, suicide, death; art, cinema and so on. For the spectator, it is terribly taxing to follow, not only on account of the distraction of the Voices, randomly careering from one theme to another, but also due to the disruption of the darkness, extinguishing the babble in every more extended periods of silence. The

34 film ends with Debord as Voice no. 2, “Like lost children [enfants-perdus], we live our unfinished adventures,” then, “twenty-four minutes of silence during which the screen remains dark.”

The Voices’ attempt to speak of themselves becomes increasingly difficult as public discourse continuously weighs down upon the private subject, rendering the latter obsolete. Barthes says that in the movement of writing on oneself, “the pronoun of the imaginary ‘I’ is im-pertinent: the symbolic becomes literally immediate: essential danger for the life of the subject.”65 For Debord and the SI, the symbolic at stake is the language of capital, specifically the very form of the commodity that extends beyond the economic to “colonize” everyday life. Perhaps we could try to “interpret” the dialogue and see as symptomatic of such colonization, the unsettling presence of the French Civil Code in the détourned passages. In Howls for Sade, the Code re-appears over and over again, lodged amidst the manifestation of desire (from “Happiness is a new idea in Europe”(Saint-Just) to “Tell me, did you sleep with Francoise?”), of the individual’s intense solitude akin to that of the revolutionary artist (Leopold Bloom, the “Wandering Jew,” juxtaposed with Jacques

Vaché and Arthur Cravan, and their feeling of isolation as “The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit,

Centrigade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn”(Joyce)).

According to Debord, Howls for Sade was a transitional film – “it was not a hoax and still less a situationist achievement” – a film that positioned itself within

65 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994), 56.

35 Lettrism as it simultaneously seceded from it in 1952.66 A chief claim of Lettrist cinematic practice is to de-privilege the photographic image in the name of a renewal of the cinematic medium. “The significance of my deed,” Isou says, “stems precisely from the fact that what I’m doing is not cinema now, but shall henceforth, thanks to me, become cinema.” According to Isou, aforementioned as Voice no. 5, there are two successive tendencies in the development of any artistic medium: the “amplic phase” and the “chiseling phase.” 67 Currently, Isou declares, cinema has become obese; cinema must now move into its chiseling phase, the subsequent period of radical reduction and self-reflexivity. Especially, cinema is to be purged of the photographic image – to chew, digest, vomit the image for “the sadism of photography” – thereby, allow the flow of words themselves to be film: “Who ever said that cinema must be movement of image and not movement of word?...Photography in cinema bothers me.” Even a novel could be re-conceived of as cinema: “A novel recited by a reader to friends, squatting before the burning hearth of the silver screen, watching the sequences fall like logs and pass without hiatus from incandescence to ashes.” Soon words themselves will no longer be

66 Here, it is important to note that Howls for Sade is not yet a “situationist film.” However, following Debord’s own characterization of Howls for Sade as a “qualitative turning point,” “rupture,” “a wager on certain formations of the future,” I argue that if Howls for Sade is not yet a situationist film, it is an initiation into one. Thus, at the foundation of Debord’s cinematic détournements, there are the “howls for Sade.” See Guy Debord, “One More Try If You Want to Be Situationists (The SI in and against Decomposition) (1957)” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 51-9. 67 Isidore Isou, Treatise on Slobber and Eternity, 1951. “I think first of all the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It has reached its limits, its maximum. The moment when it attempts to grow any further, cinema will explode. Suffering from a case of congestion, this pig stuffed with fat will rip apart into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, of the rupture of this bloated and pot-bellied organism called film.”

36 necessary as cinema chisels itself further into “imaginary elements” to address the audience without mediation.

This appeal for an “unmediated” form of communication is precisely what is not at stake for Debord – nor for that matter, a renewal of the cinematic medium in its current social status, as in the Lettrist’s proposal for a conceptual expansion of the field of cinema. The SI saw such appeals to the imaginary, significantly in the case of Surrealism, as a theoretical fallacy that accounted for the increasing isolation,

“impotence,” of art in post-war society. Though undoubtedly indebted to Surrealist practices, for the SI, “the error that is at the root of Surrealism is the idea of the infinite wealth of the unconscious imagination”: “We now know that the unconscious imagination is poor, that automatic writing is monotonous, and that the whole genre of the ‘unusual,’ which the changeless Surrealist trend ostentatiously parades, is extremely unsurprising.”68 The Surrealist strategy of automatic writing is a game in which you “absolve” yourself from authorship via the mechanism of chance and the ensuing speed of thought that outstrips any intention, any imposition of an authorial agency; so a game that is a gamble for innocence, writing without censorship (external and internal), immersing in the realm of imagination. However, for the SI, automatic writing becomes an act of confirming the limitations of imagination. Along these lines, we could perhaps propose that the value of automatic writing is its potential for a critique of a social imaginary, rather than an unmediated access to the unconscious. The value then would be the monotony of the writing: to see what structure emerges from the seeming-spontaneity, what is repeated over and

68 Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations…,” 33.

37 over again; to recognize how language is above all a discourse and an institution, how writing (and speech) is inscribed within a specific social scene of address, how difficult it is to release oneself from such a scene – and to say that this recognition is part and parcel of critique.69

Nevertheless, the issue is not the wealth or the poverty of one’s thought.

Indeed, the problem is that this is the wrong issue. The SI’s charge against modern art is informed by a critique of individualism, of a conception of art as expressive of the artist’s self. Especially, for the SI, such individualism is part and parcel of an anachronistic propping up of the individual, a reactionary adherence to a historical use (or rather, mis-use) of the subject. As part of the Enlightenment and “the disenchantment of the world,” the concept of the “universality” of the individual was strategically set up to negate the “divine rights” of the ancien régime. However, as

Marx reminds us, it was a blunted tool even in the eighteenth century by its disavowal of a consciousness of class, its subsequent function as a justification for the domination of the new ruling class, the bourgeoisie. According to the SI, the relation of domination is intensified in the society of the spectacle. The increasing isolation of the individual among atomized masses is unified by a particular representation that purports to be a universal one, that is to say, the spectacle is a representation determined by the disavowal of its own particularity. “For what the

69 The SI was even more unsympathetic about the uncritical celebration of such monotony, “a settling into the mental ruins,” the voiding of all meaning from a work of art to revel in the commodification of such poverty. As in the case of Yves Klein’s empty gestures, the work of art here is completely reduced to its status as a commodity, not to critique such commodification, but merely to further fortify the myth of the artist, to doubly fetishize the mark of the artist. See “Absence and Its Consumers (1958)” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 79-83.

38 spectacle expresses is the total practice of one particular economic and social formation.”70 As an ever more global capital effectively “unifies” the world, the division of labor appears as aggressive internal exclusions, the separation of all aspects of society, along with sovereignty more and more enforced at the level of the individual and his/her identity – a shift from territorial borders to the “new” border between identities, the colonization of everyday life with actual and virtual walls, anywhere and everywhere.

Furthermore, for Debord, the fundamental flaw of modern art is its foundation upon an evolutionary model of history, “a mechanistic idea whose function is to reassure: ‘Art goes on, or else it dies. We are among those who have chosen to go on.’”71 It is an aesthetic reformism, “a denial of all dialectics, of any real change,” closely associated with a political reformism, “impotent but just as harmful: living on the sale of false remedies.” Within the society of the spectacle,

Debord argues, art is at “a state of decomposition that has arrived at its final stage.”

Modern art conceived of its negations as “merely historically necessary social stages of artistic production,” therefore, “not engaged in a contradictory practice, for their contempt was dictated by the course of social progress itself.” Confronted with the realization of its negations by capitalism – namely, the negation of art as a separate category and discipline – art turns in on itself to become a figure of ressentiment, “a tainted position, requiring submission to the indefinite prolongation of an aesthetic death.” Contemporaneously, Theodor Adorno claimed that “this is not a time for political art, but politics has migrated into autonomous art, and nowhere more so

70 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 15. 71 Debord, “One More Try…,” 54.

39 where it seems to be politically dead” – a statement perhaps more significant for what it says about the political impasse of the Left and the seeming-absence of possible praxis at this moment.72 For Debord, this is but a formalistic stance, aesthetically and politically, in which the autonomy of art as an anti-social and thereby oppositional position has deteriorated into a spectacularization of its self- alienation.

Thus, there is a necessity to emphasize the absolute negativity of the dialectic

– not merely a refusal within the existent framework of art, but a refusal of the framework of art itself; not merely a change of the imaginary, but a change of the symbolic; negativity as a rupture of the symbolic – or “totality” as the SI would say.

Indeed, the SI argued that the cultural impasse of post-war society could no longer be resolved other than in relation to a rupture that could radically, totally reconfigure society. In other words, in the emerging cultural logic of late capitalism, the problem of art can no longer be solved “artistically.” For Debord, Lettrism erred precisely in its placid acceptance of “the idealist fallacy that aesthetic disciplines should take a new departure within a general framework similar to the former one,” and accordingly, “its productions were restricted to a few laughable experiments.”73

“When you stop to think that at certain moments of rupture,” Debord says in bemused indignation, “one is either aware or not of a qualitative turning point: and if not, the nuances don’t matter.” What distinguishes Howls for Sade (along with

Debord’s other situationist films) is “its possible threatening meaning for the culture around us, namely, a wager on certain formations of the future.” The split between

72 Theodor Adorno, “Commitment” in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007). 73 Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situationist…,” 40.

40 Lettrism and Debord, then, revolves around the social status of cinema – as well as the social status of the word or rather, the flow of words: writing, speech, the flow of images and sounds in a film, that is to say, all current forms of communication that mediate the relation between “I” to “we,” “I” to “I.”

One of the significance of the SI within post-war Marxist discourse is to have recognized the centrality of the problem of language and emphasized language itself as one of the primary battlefields for political struggle. Continuing the criticism that arose within the Left during the inter-war period, Marxist revisionists of the 1950’s and 60’s severely put to task orthodox Marxism’s inability to theorize the subject’s desire for the State and other material forms of ideology. The political rationality of bureaucracy was especially problematic. Bureaucracy had not only stretched the values of the market to all social spheres, but it also oversaw the rise of “homo bureaucratis”: a modern man characterized by his willing complacency, his willingness to conform to the very conditions of his alienation and his willingness to sacrifice himself for a common good to come, be it the indefinite future of the State or the Party. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord credits The Eighteenth

Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte for its prescient analysis of the bureaucratic apparatus of the State. Marx had described bureaucracy as “this fearsome parasitic body, which traps French society like a net and chokes it every pore,” a power controlling each and every aspect of society “from its most all-encompassing expressions to its most insignificant stirrings, from its most universal models of existence to the private

41 existence of individuals.”74 For Debord, this “fusion of capital and State” is “the sociopolitical bases of the modern spectacle,” where “the bourgeoisie thus renounced any historical existence beyond its own reduction to the economic history of things, and permitted itself to be ‘condemned along with the other classes to a like political nullity.’”75

To retort, political analysis extended to even the most intimate forms of exchange, from day-to-day practices of institutions to the institution of language itself. Especially for the SI, the bureaucratization of language accompanied “a more profound militarization of the entire society, its division into two main categories: the managerial caste and the great mass of those who carry out the orders.”76 To communicate has become the power of a switch: to command or to obey. To fetishize the flow of words as a form of unmediated communication is a disavowal of the relationship between language and power. It also submits language to the “myth” of perfect circulation, transmission without a trace of interference or residue – part and parcel of the capitalist myth of “pure” exchange, of the extraction of a quantitative difference (i.e. human labor as wage labor). The myth, Etienne Balibar emphasizes, is a disavowal of the fact that the exploitation of labor necessitates a relation of domination; it is “nothing but an illusion resulting from the contractual form in which the ‘seller’ and ‘buyer’ of labor-power ‘exchange’ their respective

74 Marx, 68. 75 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 57. 76 Mustapa Khayati, “Captive Words (Preface to a Situationist Dictionary) (1966)” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 177.

42 ‘properties.’”77 When the SI made their appeal for poetry as “language in revolution,” poetry is re-conceptualized specifically as resistance to circulation, a resistance to communication within communication: “Poetry as empty space is more and more clearly the anti-matter of consumer society, because it is not a consumable substance.”78 This heterogeneity is a qualitative difference within the dominant discourse; moreover, the signifier of a radical alterity, an absolute negativity akin to anti-matter with its explosive potential to annihilate and produce.

Furthermore, the irreducible materiality is representative of the material/ social status of the proletariat: “Words coexist with power in a relationship similar to that which proletarians may maintain with power. Employed almost all the time, used full-time for their maximum sense and nonsense, they remain in some ways radically foreign.”79 Note that the implication here is not of an analogy, but of representation. As Benjamin would say, what is at stake is a politicization of art: to establish a short-circuit between art and politics in which poetry is not merely a mirror image, a “true” reflection of reality, but rather re-defined to assert the immediacy of its relation to a specific social public. “Poetry is nothing other than liberated language, language that wins back its richness…thus dependent upon a standard of richness in which, at a given stage of socio-economic development, life may be lived and changed.”80 Accordingly, for the SI, the specific social public is the present herald of change: the proletariat as the anti-matter of the current social order. Analyzing the effect of the concept of the proletariat, Balibar highlights how

77 Balibar, 140. 78 “All the King’s Men,” 156. 79 ibid., 153. 80 ibid., 154.

43 the concept establishes short-circuits between politics/economics, state/society, public/private, hierarchy/equality, compulsion/freedom, subjectivity/objectivity, etc.

Consequently, the proletariat “figure as foreign bodies in the space of the dominant ideology,” an empty space as it were, “a sphere that is defined as ‘nonpolitical,’ which the State, in order to function as a State of the ruling-class, must keep

‘outside’ of politics.” Balibar insists, political discourse is not static and undoubtedly, the SI would concur – the line between political and non-political perpetually advancing and retreating, a line which also re-defines or rather re- situates the proletariat, bodies foreign to a social order at a specific historical conjuncture. Balibar re-asserts, then, what I would argue is the crux of détournement:

[Political discourse] is a process that must confront the

unexpectedness of an excessive reality that contradicts its own

representations. As a consequence, what is significant is the

conceptual displacements, the effects of the twisting of the dominant

discourse that, in a given conjuncture, make its coherence vacillate.81

IV.

“The only interesting undertaking is the liberation of everyday life,” Debord declares, “This entails the withering away of alienated forms of communication. The cinema, too, has to be destroyed.”82 What has to be destroyed is a cinema that

81 Balibar, 135-6. 82 Guy Debord, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time [Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps], 1959. When

44 emboldens homo bureaucratis, entrenching him/her deeper into his/her habits of passive consumption – especially by representing the world as it is, as an ever elusive, therefore, ever more desirable commodity. In the cinema-to-be-destroyed the question of seeing the world becomes a problem of possessing it as property. It establishes a dichotomy of a subject and his/her representation, a purely reciprocal relation though which the image merely speaks to the subject – without the combustible crackling of the medium. “The privilege of the subject seems to be established here from this bipolar reflexive relation by which, as soon as I perceive, my representations belong to me,” Jacques Lacan says, “this belong-to-me aspect of representations, so reminiscent of property.” 83 It is to see the world by branding one’s mark on it; moreover, to point to the world to say not only “this is mine,” but also, “this is I.” “To be” becomes “to have” – or rather, “to have more.” And what

“I” am offered is not the satisfaction of desire, this will to possess, but only the endless deferral of desire, the perpetual postponement of satisfaction. Fueled by the anxiety of being in a world uprooted by the War, further uprooted by the force of post-war industrialization, homo bureaucratis becomes a voracious voyeur. What has to be destroyed is a cinema that colonizes all spectatorial pleasure and demotes to the

quoting dialogue from Debord’s films, I refer to the scripts in Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents, ed. Ken Knabb (Oakland, CA; AK Press, 2003). 83 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998 [1973]), 81. “This is how the world is struck with a presumption of idealization, of the suspicion of yielding me only me representations…When carried to the limit, the process of this meditation, of this reflecting reflection, goes so far as to reduce the subject apprehended by the Cartesian meditation to a power of annihilation. The mode of my presence in the world is the subject in so far as by reducing itself solely to this certainty of being a subject, it becomes active annihilation.”

45 “pathology” of cinephilia, those punctual moments when our desire exceeds the generalized economy of the image.

This is what Barthes once criticized as the ethical question of our society in which “pleasure passes through the image,” all pleasure subsumed into the voyeuristic pleasure of the viewer and his/her sense of visual mastery: “not that the image is immoral, irreligious, or diabolic…but because, when generalized, the image completely de-realizes the human world of conflicts and desires, under the cover of illustrating it.”84 For Barthes, it is a society that consumes images instead of beliefs; instead of the all-seeing eye of some almighty god, it is the individual who is the supreme possessor of power, who is obliged to incessantly assert his/her authority by

“producing a world that is without difference (indifferent), from which can rise, here and there, only the cry of anarchisms, marginalisms, and individualisms.” The ethical question is not only an ethics of our relation to the image, but also of our relation to being, our own as well as another’s. Today, in an increasingly more specular economy than Barthes,’ we face the paradox of an ever more aggressive individualism coupled with various, vehement cries for the return of the “Father,” be it that of the State (in the form of ethnic nationalisms) or the Church (the case of religious fundamentalisms), etc. In short, the modern compulsion to see – an imperialist logic of vision as it were – conflates the look and the gaze, subdues and suppresses the presence of the other, the other’s “foreign body,” thereby constitutes the subject as consciousness of its self in its identity, positions the self as the “I” who is in control over how I see, what I see, moreover an I who must always see more.

84 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000 [1980]), 118-9.

46 As a response to such ethical questions, Daney insisted upon a refusal to subdue and suppress what he calls “the alterity of the image”85: the image’s affect, its ability to de-stabilize us, to reveal our vulnerability, our radical dependency on the other and therefore our responsibility to the other. The modern compulsion to see, that is, to simply see, not only allows for the complete control over our perception – how I see, what I see – but also the foreclosure of our fundamental feelings of vulnerability via perception, as if to see is to know, knowledge itself solely defined within the domains of power. In other words, our radical dependency on the other is mis-recognized as one of dis-empowerment and, as our sense of powerlessness becomes more pervasive, we must strive to know, to know more. As the age-old proverb goes, the more you know, the more you know you ought to know – knowledge and the obligation to know, the compulsion for ever more knowledge.

We set our sights on those dark corners of ourselves, a darkness too often displaced onto an other of a different class, gender, race or ethnicity, diminish the threat of their difference as something to be analyzed, categorized, stored safely away like a dusty old doll or fetish, a relic of our ignorance – or the darkness of the unconscious itself, pathologize its unruly irruptions in our day to day as something to be cured by the couch or the pill. Here, the crux is the mis-recognition (méconnaissance), how our sense of powerlessness feeds off our self-definition as possessors of power.86

85 See also, Serge Daney, “Before and After the Image” (1991) http://home.earthlink.net/~steevee/Daney_before.html (originally published in French in Revue des etudes palestiniennes 40 (Paris: Summer 1991) and in English in DOCUMENTA X.) 86 Jacques Lacan, in “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” (1949) explains that the subject acquires his/her initial sense of self through a mis-recognition (méconnaissance), instead of a fragmented body, the “finally donned armor of an alienating identity”: the

47 Thus, the more we possess, the more powerless we feel, with the de-territorializing logic of capital fueling the seeming irony of this closed circle.

Underlying Daney’s call for the alterity of the image is an insistence on the affect of the image that resists all reciprocity, all exchange, and all appropriation into a totalizing point of view that would support the self-possession of the spectator, his/her sense of visual mastery. Daney distinguishes between the Image and the

Visual – a distinction, I would argue, corresponds to the difference between an image and a spectacle. The Visual is the image shorn of affect, generalized into a cliché, a stereotype, reduced to the act of reading through which we see what we are supposed to read, “an optical verification of power.” The Image is “what still holds out against an experience of vision and of the Visual”: “the sine qua non of the Image is alterity.” 87 The exemplary instance of the Image is the appearance of the gaze of the other, the look that arrests us, profoundly disturbs us from the comfortable conformity of our position in the world. Daney points out how we go to war to put a

sound, sturdy silhouette of his/her image, the reflection in the mirror, as it were. The key here being that this process is experienced as “a temporal dialectic” “whose internal pressure pushed from insufficiency to anticipation.” Joan Copjec in her remarkable readings of Lacan succinctly sums this up as a transition from a question of force to power, of being to having – or more precisely, of having more; of how the subject’s fundamental vulnerability, his/her anxiety, transforms through processes of socialization into the subject’s sense of guilt, the guilt of always missing the mark. See, especially, Joan Copjec, “May ’68, The Emotional Month” in Lacan, the Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2006), 90 ~ 114. Here, she quotes Steve Conner’s distinction of force vs. power: “For something we want to call a power, there is a notion of an agent that precedes and deploys the power, a who looming through the what. A force, by contrast, exerts itself, and exerts itself on itself.” For Copjec, guilt is a feeling in which a force internal to the subject is experienced as a power exercised on the subject by an external agency. In short, the subject shifts from the anxious lack of identity to the guilty loss of identity, an identity perceived as possessable as property. And the threat of an other of a different class, gender, race or ethnicity lies in that this other seems to possess an identity that I have lost, an identity that has been stolen from me. 87 Daney, “Before and After the Image.”

48 face to the other’s gaze; in other words, to allow the strange yet intimate other to be externalized by a figure we can face, displacing the anxiety of affect into the fear of the other. Representation of war by the media today, however, erases even the sight of these bodies, fearful of their volatility. With the reign of the Visual, “the other’s eyes have disappeared, by a common and implicit accord.”

Here, it is important to emphasize that the distinction between the Image and the Visual is not between two types of representation, a difference of style by which we identify one or the other as if to order the plethora of what we see into tight, tidy lists entitled Image or Visual, image or spectacle. Rather, it is a heuristic distinction between two different functions of representation. To paraphrase Deleuze (from his letter to Daney), the “aesthetic function” of the Image contrasts with the “social function” of the Visual, the latter’s aesthetic function stifled by the social function of surveillance and control, of knowledge, of power. The Image offers “pedagogy of perception” as it punctures the visual mastery of the viewer and thereby points to the presence of the other, exposing the embodied nature of our perception; the Visual, on the other hand, offers “ the professional training of the eye, a world of controllers and controlled communing in their admiration for technology, mere technology.”88

And the Visual is epitomized by the role of television today as “the ultimate consensus,” the spectacle, a constant confirmation of not only what we know, but that we know, along with the dream of subduing and suppressing all alterity by displacing difference into the distance of an other – a distance that is all-too easily

88 Gilles Deleuze, “Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism, and Travel” in Negotiations: 1972~ 1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1995 [1990]).

49 erased with the tap of a key. Daney describes his dismay at a video that superimposed an image of indignant Europe with that of the plight of Africa, a dissolve that “elegantly carried out this electronic communication between North and

South”: “a dissolve makes the dying and the famous dance together.”89 To sum up, the distinction between the Image and the Visual is two different ways of seeing, of engaging the spectator, two different forms of spectatorship – furthermore, two different ways of engaging with the world.

Howls for Sade ends in a prolonged absence with only our bodies reverberating in the darkness. This is not a film merely to be heard (like a radio). The presence of the screen matters (so, not even like a theater.) The film is also to be seen, even endured – the anxiety, then, the boredom of the silence reveals the messy materiality that must be suppressed for us to see. Watching a film where there is nothing but the workings of the apparatus, the act of montage, the place of projection and spectatorship, we, the audience, realize the increasing impossibility to simply see. We become more and more acutely aware of the shuddering of our eyelids, the tics and spasms of our muscles, the sounds of twitching and trembling in the space around us. Barthes claims that, for him, the fascination of any film is in the darkness of the cinema, the darkness as “the ‘color’ of a diffused eroticism.”90 The theater of the cinema is “a site of availability” with its “inoccupation of bodies” – bodies without a name, but also bodies somewhat out of place, out of time, bodies in slight disarray as it were, slumped into their seats, in fact, a sleepy body, “his body has become something sopitive, soft, limp, and he feels a little disjointed,

89 Daney, “The Tracking Shot of Kapo” 33~34. 90 Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater” 346.

50 even…irresponsible.”91 “A veritable cinematographic cocoon,” Barthes exclaims, “it is because I am enclosed that I work and glow with all my desire.”92 The space of cinema is specifically contrasted to the “tamed” space of television, a space without darkness: “the eroticization of the place is foreclosed: television doomed us to the

Family, whose household instrument it has become – what the hearth used to be, flanked by its communal kettle.” To “unglue” oneself from the image, not by disavowing the fascination of film, but “by letting oneself be fascinated twice over, by the image and its surroundings – as if I had two bodies at the same time”: one that succumbs to the seduction of the image and the other, “ready to fetishize not the image but precisely what exceeds it: the texture of the sound, the hall, the darkness, the obscure mass of the other bodies, the rays of light, entering the theater, leaving the hall.”93 Not a critical distance from where the spectator stands outside the spectacle, but rather one in which the spectator is displaced, de-centered, split within the spectacle – what Barthes calls an “amorous distance”: “I complicate a ‘relation’ by a ‘situation.’”94 It is a politics which does not seek to destroy from a position of exteriority in which one absents oneself, but to decompose from within: “I agree to accompany such decomposition, to decompose myself as well, in the process: I scrape, catch, drag.”95

91 Barthes, 345. 92 Barthes, 346. 93 Barthes, 349. 94 Barthes, 349. 95 Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994 [1975]), 63. Here, we can argue that the call for affect, the alterity of the image, differs from a Brechtian distanciation – the Verfremdungseffekt would have the spectator sit as far as possible from the stage, from the picture, to refuse its illusion (split between spectacle and reality, spectacle as a form of false consciousness); on the other hand, Barthes puts the spectator on

51 The lesson of Howls for Sade is to recognize what must be repressed for us to simply see, the distance in-between images as well as the distance within the image, our “empty space,” the irreducible materiality of the spectator-subject. By negating the normative relationship in which the spectator passively consumes the flow of images, the intimate interdependence of the spectator and cinema is almost aggressively re-discovered. It wrenches open the space for the image to return – and in the subsequent five films of Debord, images will return to the screen en masse. It is also a critique of the invasiveness of the visual in the society of the spectacle, the proliferation of the media as well as the media’s shocks that are characterized by a lack of intimacy – or rather the “false” intimacy of a society in which, as Jean-Paul

Sartre would say, “the individual, a solid and indivisible particle, the vehicle of human nature, resides like a pea in a can of peas: he is round, closed in on himself, uncommunicative.”96 The proliferation of the media and its shocks de-sensitize rather than sensitize, render the spectator increasingly immune to the affect of the image: I laugh, cry, perhaps even cry out in frustration or fear, but in spaces that doom me to the Family, I do not doubt my ability to see, my right to see, I am not estranged from my identification with the world I see, and, as I consume more and more images, I know, I know that “I” know. What is at stake is an intimacy that counters the conformity of our residence as a pea in a can of peas, counters the alienation of our individual and collective agencies, the reification of subjectivity, psychological and political. What is at stake, then, is the strange intimacy of cinema the stage, in the picture, not only I see but also I am seen, part and parcel of the spectacle (split the subject itself, spectacle as a form of the unconscious.) 96 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Presentation” (1945) trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, in What is Literature? and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988).

52 and its shock, an intensification of our perception or experience that leads not to the self-possession of the subject, the coherent consciousness of one’s ego, but rather to its shattering, the implication of what is radically foreign to oneself. Or there is the proposal for a certain iconoclastic cinephilia by puncturing the image, by leaving its space empty: Daney gives us the example of Jean-Luc Godard who, after an interview, asked to have it illustrated with a gap, a hole, captioned “here, the customary photograph.” For Daney, “By leaving the space empty, he showed the possibility of not pasting over.”97

Underlying the SI’s criticism is a concept of cinema as a specific institution of language. However, this criticism is not a disavowal of all cinema. Cinema is not to regress as if it were possible to return to the innocence of a language uncontaminated by power: the case of the Lettrists and their appeal to the imaginary.

Nor can it be “the spectacle of refusal,” as in the case of so much modern art, which presupposed its own alienation as the very condition of art. What is at stake is not only that power inhabits the language of cinema but, more importantly, the impossibility of power to ever completely occupy it – as much as capital itself embodies insurmountable contradictions, never the smoothly running, frictionless automaton it alleges to be. When Debord seeks to undo all alienated forms of communication in which “cinema, too, has to be destroyed,” it is by way of cinema that cinema is to be fought, ultimately to redeem itself: “It is society and not

97 Daney, “Before and After the Image.” Daney is much more pessimistic about our society of the spectacle: “Today I have the feeling that we’ve lost, that Godard has lost, and that the media – with the TV in the lead – forbid us to think: “Hmm, we’re missing an image, let’s leave that slot empty, let’s wait to fill it.” The fear of the void is so strong that it takes us over as well.”

53 technology that has made cinema what it is.”98 What characterizes Debord and the SI is not a neo-luddite attack against technology or any other aspirations for the pre- history of modern man. On the contrary, what distinguishes them is their very belief in technology – that is, not only technology to be developed, but also, technology that is already pervasively present in our everyday life. For the SI, we have the means of satisfaction. What is absent is our desire. It is not reality that must meet pleasure, but it is pleasure that woefully does not meet reality. In short, we do not know how to desire. If a General Ludd is to rise again, Debord says, it will be a new one: “When the enfants-perdu of this as-yet immobile horde enter once again upon the battlefield, which has changed yet stayed the same, a new General Ludd will be at their head – leading them this time in an onslaught on the machinery of permitted consumption.”99

98 Guy Debord, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 1978. 99 Debord, 86.

54 Chapter 2

“Pédovision”

We create situations; we create enigmas for ourselves.

Jean Rouch100

There was the fatigue and the cold of morning in this much traversed labyrinth, like an enigma that we had to resolve. It was a trompe-l’oeil reality through which we had to discover the potential richness of what was really there.

Guy Debord101

“The break is not between fiction and reality,” says the philosopher Gilles

Deleuze in Cinema 2 (1985), “but on the new mode of story which affects them both.”102 For Deleuze, the common practice of distinguishing two categories of filmmaking, fiction and documentary, is not a fundamental distinction. On the contrary, both categories aspire to and abide by one and the same model, “the model of the true,” which presumes the existence of a truth – moreover, a truth that functions as the criterion, the norm, according to which we separate true from false, objective from subjective, documentary from fiction. If there is indeed a break within

100 Jean Rouch, Interview with Enrico Fulchignoni, “Ciné-anthropology” in Ciné- Ethnography: Jean Rouch, ed. Steven Feld, (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003), 149. 101 Guy Debord, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time [Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps], 1959. When quoting dialogue from Debord’s films, I refer to the scripts in Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents, ed. Ken Knabb (Oakland, CA; AK Press, 2003). 102 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989), 150.

55 the history of cinema, it is to be found amidst the emergence of a new mode of story that specifically breaks with this function of truth as norm. It is a mode of storytelling that does not pose the question of what is the truth, but rather asks truth for whom: how are truth-claims deployed here and now, and for which interests.

Deleuze finds an exemplary instance of this storytelling in the cinéma-vérité of the filmmaker and ethnologist Jean Rouch: “Thus the cinema can call itself cinéma- vérité, all the more so because it will have destroyed every model of the true so as to become creator and producer of truth: this will not be a cinema of truth but the truth of cinema.”103 And I would argue that this cinéma-vérité informs Guy Debord’s

“experimental documentary” and its new mode of story, the method of détournement.

I.

Cinéma-vérité is one of the new forms of documentary filmmaking precipitated in the early 1960’s by the development of lighter, more mobile cameras and especially new synchronous sound technologies. In particular, cinéma-vérité presents the figure of the filmmaker as a provocateur, rather than an observer – one who provokes and participates in a situation where the subject is incited to speak of

“oneself,” not in the manner of an interview, but that of psychoanalysis. However, within the discourse of cinéma-vérité, there are crucial differences in the conceptualization of filmmaker as provocateur. I would argue that this difference

103 Deleuze, 151.

56 underscores two tendencies, even a conflict, in the collaboration between Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin in their film, Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d'un

été, 1961) – a film that is often perceived to be the opening salvo of cinéma-vérité as a movement.

According to Morin, Rouch heralds a new figure of the filmmaker, “the

‘filmmaker-diver’ who ‘plunges’ into real-life situations”: “Ridding himself of the customary technical encumbrances and equipped only with a 16mm camera and a tape recorder slung across his shoulders, Rouch can then infiltrate a community as a person and not as the director of a film crew.”104 For Morin, the development of newer, lighter, more mobile technologies achieves a certain vanishing act: the effacement of the cinematic apparatus and its replacement by the face, the human face, of the filmmaker. Emphasis is to be placed on the newfound intimacy in the relation between the filmmaker and the subjects of his film, the relation through which the filmmaker approaches his subjects not as an apparatus but as a person. It is an intersubjective relation and Morin describes its modality as one of mingling, mixing and blending together: “there is not a moat on either side of the camera but free circulation and exchanges.”105 The filmmaker provokes the subjects to speak of themselves in the way in which we presumably start a conversation. Thus, for the filming of Chronicle of a Summer, Morin puts forth a method of “commensality.”

And a privileged place to enact this method of filming is in fact at a meal around a common table in the privacy of a home:

104 Edgar Morin, “For a New Cinéma-Vérité” (1960) in Ciné-Ethnography: Jean Rouch, ed. Steven Feld, (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003), 230. 105 Edgar Morin, “Chronicle of a Film” in Ciné-Ethnography: Jean Rouch, ed. Steven Feld, (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003), 233.

57 Once filming begins, the actors at the table, isolated by the lighting

but surrounded by friendly witnesses, feel as though they are in a sort

of intimacy. When they allow themselves to be caught up in the

questions, they descend progressively and naturally into themselves.

It is, in a way, the possibility of a confessional but without a

confessor, the possibility of a confession to all and to no one, the

possibility of being a bit of one’s self.106

A confessional? Morin’s analogy of commensality to the confessional is a curious and significant one. All the more so, when we consider that the ritual of confession necessitates a hierarchal relation between the one who speaks and the one who listens, even in the seeming absence of a confessor – a point to be pursued later in the chapter. For Morin, the aim of cinéma-vérité-as-confession is to offer the subject of the film the opportunity to “descend” into oneself, that is, “the possibility of being a bit of one’s self.” Here, there is the presupposition of a natural and necessary relation between confession and being, as if to speak of oneself is to tell the truth of oneself, as if this truth is what lies within, a truth that necessitates a movement of descending, of “diving” into the depths of oneself, if one is to recover it, if one is to be. What cinéma-vérité recovers has the value of “psychoanalytic truth,” Morin says, since “precisely that which is hidden or repressed comes to the surface.”107 Morin maintains that the novelty of cinéma-vérité as a form of documentary filmmaking is its access to what had been/is the territory of fiction filmmaking: the subjective dimension of one’s relation to oneself and others, one’s

106 Morin, 234. 107 Morin, 232.

58 thoughts, fantasies, feelings and desires. Cinéma-vérité sets up a situation where “the eye of the camera is psychoanalytical: it looks into the soul.”108 Furthermore, cinéma-vérité presents this subjective dimension, “the soul,” as an objective representation, that is, as “truth.” The function of the filmmaker then is not only to provoke the subject to speak, but to represent what is said as truth, a truth that the subject can accept as his/her own. As we shall see later, what is particularly important for Morin is the representation of this truth as a truth that is shared by us all, the subjects of the film, the filmmaker, and the audience: “The quest for a new cinéma-vérité is at the same time a quest for a ‘cinema of fraternité.’”109

However, if we turn to Rouch’s own writings, there are significant differences in the function of the filmmaker and the aim of cinéma-vérité. For

Rouch, the filmmaker does not approach the subjects of his film as a person, but as an apparatus. Indeed, through the mediation of the apparatus, the filmmaker is de- personalized, estranged from himself, and it is precisely this abandonment of the self that allows for a different mode of intimacy between the filmmaker and his subjects.

Note that to de-personalize the filmmaker is not to render him impersonal; the emphasis on the mediation of the apparatus is not an appeal to impartiality, to the seeming objectivity and neutrality of a mechanical consciousness. On the contrary,

Rouch’s word for this abandonment of self via the apparatus is “trance,” that is, the suspension of consciousness for a state of exaltation, rapture, ecstasy: “ciné-transe.”

I now believe that for the people who are filmed, the “self” of the

filmmaker changes in front of their eyes during shooting. He no

108 Morin, 260. 109 Morin, “For a New Cinéma-Vérité,” 231.

59 longer speaks, except to yell out incomprehensible orders (“Roll!”

“Cut!”). He now looks at them only through the intermediary of a

strange appendage and hears them only through the intermediary of a

shotgun microphone. But paradoxically it is due to this equipment and

this new behavior that the filmmaker can throw himself into a ritual,

integrate himself with it, and follow it step-by-step. 110

Contrary to Morin, the apparatus is not effaced for the human face of the filmmaker, but the face of the filmmaker is effaced or rather transformed through the mediation of the apparatus into the “non-human” face of a “sphinx.” The filmmaker provokes the subject to speak of him-or herself, Rouch proposes, in the manner of a sphinx, that is, by posing a question, a riddle, an enigma. The filmmaker yells out incomprehensible orders; he who is otherwise silent and does not – or rather cannot – explain his presence either to himself or to the subjects of his film; he who presents himself as an enigma. Speaking of his relation to the subjects of his films, Rouch describes it not as a conversation (or a confession), but as a game of charades, “we create situations, we create enigmas for ourselves.”111 Furthermore, this game, this situation, also describes his relation to the audience of his films: “This is maybe what

I have tried to do in my films: to pose riddles, to circulate disquieting objects. If, in a thousand viewers, there is just one who asks the question ‘What does it mean?’ then knowledge has been saved.”112

110 Jean Rouch, “On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer,” in Ciné-Ethnography: Jean Rouch, ed. Steven Feld, (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003), 99. 111 Rouch, “Ciné-anthropology,” 149. 112 Rouch, 152.

60 If there is an analogy to be made here to psychoanalysis, then it lies in the filmmaker who is akin to the analyst provoking the analysand, the subject of the analysis, with an enigma. And it is an enigma to which the subject responds not with the confession of hidden or repressed truths, but with questions: What does it mean?

What is it trying to tell me? What is it asking of me? To the filmmaker’s provocation, the response of the subjects of the film (and the hoped-for audience) is that of “Che vuoi?” – the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s famed quote describing the relation between analyst and analysand, a relation of intimacy but not of intersubjectivity.113 Lacan here refers to the scene in Jacques Cazotte’s The Devil in

Love (Le Diable amoureux, 1772) in which the protagonist, Alvaro, through incantations, brings forth an apparition, a camel’s head hovering in a flood of light – a close-up in what we could call a proto-cinematic situation. The apparition asks of

Alvaro the question “Che vuoi?” – “All the surrounding caves and vaults echoed back the terrible “Che vuoi?” – and Alvaro responds by echoing back the question,

“What do you mean, oh brazen one, by appearing in such hideous guise?”114

According to this analogy, the filmmaker/analyst appears not so much as a person, but as a strange and inexplicable apparition. Moreover, the appearance is overwhelming – Alvaro’s account suddenly shifts from past tense to present, and he describes his experience of the encounter as the irresistible over-saturation of all the senses: “a multitude of feelings, ideas, and reflections touch my heart and pass

113 Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” in Jacques Lacan: Écrits, A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 281-312. 114 Jacques Cazotte, The Devil in Love, trans. Judith Landry (London: Dedalus, 1991), 34-5.

61 through my mind and make their impression all at once.”115 For Alvaro, the appearance will be rendered all the more overwhelming and irresistible, as the apparition transforms itself into the fateful figure of seduction, Biondetta, the devil in love, as if in response to Alvaro’s “What do you mean…?” The scene of analysis here is a game of charades – and a game of seduction, of luring and leading astray.

As Rouch would say, “knowledge is saved” through this leading astray in which thought is thrown off track, indeed détourned, and provoked to think otherwise. In short, Rouch offers a different function of the filmmaker/analyst than that of Morin – one that emphasizes the mediation of the apparatus and the “alien-ness”

[étrangèreté] of the filmmaker, a point we will return to later in the chapter.

Subsequently, Rouch’s own account of Chronicle of a Summer is almost entirely allocated to technological developments of the apparatus that allowed for the filming: for instance, the collaboration with André Coutant on a soundproof camera, and especially the collaboration with Michel Brault on the technique of “the walking

115 Cazotte 35; According to Dorothea E. Von Mücke, Lacan’s reference to Cazotte could also be claimed as an insight into the significance of the genre of the fantastique as it emerges on the eve of the French Revolution: “a decisive role in elaborating a problematic subjectivity that challenged the rationalist models of a unified, consciousness-centered human subject.” For von Mücke, the Che vuoi sequence stages a series of interpellations – the devil’s interpellation of Alvaro, Alvaro’s interpellation of the devil, the text’s interpellation of the reader – that de-stabilizes the identities of the protagonist-narrator and the reader. Through oscillations in time – the shift back and forth from past to present tense in Alvaro’s account – and the space of narration – the mirroring of the “many-mansioned” internal landscape and the external landscape of caves and vaults, “the distinction between internal and external perceptions is radically suspended not only for the protagonists within the diegetic universe of the tale but also for the reader in his attempt to recreate the narrated observation in terms of aural and visual hallucination.” Dorothea E. Von Mücke, The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003), 18-57.

62 camera” with synchronous sound.116 This is not merely a question of technology, but more importantly a question of method. Technology here is not an extension of the filmmaker’s preexistent capacities to see and hear, but is specifically that which sets off a different – and new – relation between filmmaker and the subjects of his film.

In contrast to Morin’s “commensality,” Rouch’s method of filming is “pédovision”: to film the subject walking through the streets talking to him/herself.117 Rather than a confessional, the filming is a procession in which the director and the crew accompany the subject’s passage with a camera. The subject speaks of him- or herself in a state of distraction – one is lured and led astray again and again – and what the subject speaks of is as much about the spectacle in the streets as about the self.

Rouch’s method of “pédovision” is evident in what is perhaps one of the most noted and moving sequences of the entire film: Marceline’s account of her deportation to the concentration camps as she walks through the streets of Paris on

August 15, 1960 (Fig. 2). The date and the itinerary of Marceline’s walk from the

Place de la Concorde to Les Halles are not insignificant. Marceline is asked to speak of herself on the date that had ended the war fifteen years ago, and the filmmakers search for quiet places, such as the silent and deserted Les Halles, where Marceline’s voice could be picked up by a clip-on lavaliere microphone and a tape recorder strapped across her shoulders. At this moment in Chronicle of a Summer, we have become somewhat accustomed to the character of Marceline. We have seen her

116 See Jean Rouch, “The Cinema of the Future?” in Ciné-Ethnography: Jean Rouch, ed. Steven Feld, (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003), 266-73. 117 Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 240.

63 several times, for instance in the opening sequence where she sat between Rouch and

Morin, rather ill at ease, at the first meal of the film, or in the famous sequence of

“Are you happy?” where she was one of the sphinxes who poses the question to passersby in the street. Now, we see as well as hear Marceline as she walks alone, talking to herself. “This Place de la Concorde is as deserted,” she says, “as it was twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, I don’t remember any more…Pitchipoi…” Her voice seems small, soft, steady, subdued – all the more so as it is heard, “framed,” within a deep whirr of distant traffic, the jagged agitation of her coat against the wind, the blunted beat of her heels upon the pavement. She walks/talks in the foreground, near the camera, close to us, and the dynamic between foreground and background is not only spatial but also temporal: the calm and collected meter of her tone, its resolute rhythm, is contrasted with the speed of the cars that outstrip her or the haste of the couple dashing across the square in the far background. There are two planes, and there is nothing in-between the two but the relation of tension itself: a mise-en-scène that effects a montage within a single shot. “The pretext, the provocation,” for Marceline to speak in this manner, both to herself and to us, Rouch states, “was the presence of the camera.”118 The camera is the condition for the breaking of “an established order, an architecture,” the breaking of a social code of how one is supposed to inhabit a specific time-space, of how one is supposed to relate to oneself and others in a particular discourse.119 The camera slowly

118 Rouch, “Ciné-anthropology,” 154. 119 Rouch, 154. “Marceline would never have walked alone, talking all by herself, if there hadn’t been a camera there, if she wasn’t wearing the microphone, if she didn’t have a portable tape recorder. It was provocation; it was disorder. It was disorder because we were breaking an established order, an architecture; and we broke it by asking someone to talk

64 accompanies Marceline through a series of dolly shots, at first a few feet ahead, then so close that we see her face at a relatively low angle against the backdrop of a summer sky (Fig. 3). Again, there is the tension, the intensity of an internalized montage within the same frame – the unperturbed placidity of the sky and

Marceline’s downcast eyes, the expressive but undemonstrative restraint of her face.

It is as subdued as the tone of her voice, at times there is even a flicker of a muted smile, as we hear of the terrible separation from her father at the concentration camp.

“And then here I am now, Place de la Concorde,” she says, “…I came back, you stayed…Papa.” The camera also directs Marceline; it tugs her along, beckons her to follow one thread after another, all the while following her, keeping in step with her tale, preserving and punctuating the pace of her telling.

As Marceline reaches “the strangely dead setting” of Les Halles, and an especially charged moment in her account, the camera rapidly pulls out, rushes on ahead, till it stops and waits for her arrival into the foreground (Fig. 4-5).120 We see her solitary figure in the distance, almost obscured by the immense iron structures and the vacuous, desolate space of Les Halles – the old central food markets, which we will see later in Debord’s film as the center of Situationist Paris. It is a place that

Émile Zola once called “the belly of Paris” in 1873: here, it is a neglected space threatened with gentrification throughout the 1950’s, ‘60s and at last torn down for the new RER Métro in 1971. Especially in this sequence, the relics of the Industrial

Age evoke the vaulted roof a train station. It is as if the setting triggers Marceline to

along in the street (something that is never done); and the pretext, the provocation, was the presence of the camera.” 120 Morin, 240.

65 speak of her return from the concentration camps. Or is it that she triggers the setting to change shape, to transform, so that the landscape echoes the despair of rejoining the remainder of her family at Gare de l’Est? The point of view of the camera blurs with the perspective of Marceline; the objective image is stained by or seeps into the subjective image.121 “I saw…saw everyone on the station platform – Mama, everybody. They all kissed me. My heart felt like stone,” she says. “It was Michel who moved me. I said, ‘Don’t you recognize me?’ He said, ‘Yes, I think…I think you’re…Marceline…’ Oh, Papa…”

The camera not only provokes Marceline to speak, but it accompanies her walk/talk, sensitive and attuned to its rhythm – the almost methodical tone of her telling in contrast to the horror of her tale. It is important to note that the camera is attuned to how she speaks, rather than what she speaks of. During the process of filming, the director and his crew could not see nor hear what Marceline said into her microphone. Brault was behind the camera, Rouch was at his side, and according to

Rouch’s directions, Morin and the rest of the crew pushed the Citroën 2 CV on which the camera had been placed. Rouch describes his surprise at seeing this scene with sound for the first time during the rushes – the capture of a scene, as if by chance or “grace,” in which the camera is so responsive to Marceline’s subtle

121 I would argue that this is an exemplary instance of what Pier Paolo Pasolini calls “free indirect discourse.” Deleuze defines this “contamination” of the objective and the subjective image as one of the key characteristics of a new mode of storytelling that initiates modern cinema: “the distinction between what the character saw subjectively and what the camera saw objectively vanished, not in favor of one or the other, but because the camera assumed a subjective presence, acquired an internal vision, which entered into a relation of simulation (‘mimesis’) with the character’s way of seeing,” Deleuze, 148.

66 movements that the landscape, the composition of space, mimes the affect of her storytelling.

In the empty Halles, when Marceline is talking about her deportation,

she speaks in rhythm with her step; she is influenced by the setting,

and the way she is speaking is absolutely inimitable. With post-

synchronization and the best artist in the world, you would never be

able to achieve that unrelenting rhythm of someone walking in a place

like that.122

“We had not seen or heard anything,” Rouch exclaims, “We had simply provoked two movements, feelings, emotions, memories.”123 Through the choreography of two movements, the movement of Marceline and that of “the walking camera,” the Paris of Marceline’s past is superimposed upon the Paris of our present. Each movement constitutes a sheet of time that bleeds into another, influencing and infecting each other. Marceline’s tale magnetizes our world and our temporal orientation is disoriented and re-oriented, attracted and repelled, lured and led away over and over again. This sequence in Chronicle of a Summer especially recalls Deleuze’s description of Alain Resnais’ famed tracking shots and their internalized montage:

“we constitute a sheet of transformation which invents a kind of transverse continuity or communication between several sheets [of time], and weaves a network of non-localizable relations between them.”124 And it is precisely this network of

122 Jean Rouch, Interview with France Observateur, quoted in Morin, 252. 123 Rouch, “Ciné-anthropology,” 153. 124 Deleuze, 123. “Throughout Resnais’ work we plunge into a memory which overflows the conditions of psychology, memory for two, memory for several, memory-world, memory- ages of the world.” Deleuze, 119.

67 non-localizable, non-causal relations as well as the process of weaving (and un- weaving) that deters the debasement of history into a common recollection, that is, a snapshot of the past to be catalogued and archived into collective memory as information, fact, “truth” – an ossified, lifeless truth that refuses to pose itself as a question, that forecloses the question of truth for whom. “If there is no debasement of information,” Deleuze retorts, “it is because information itself is a debasement”:

“The life or afterlife of cinema depends on its internal struggle with informatics. It is necessary to set up against the latter the question which goes beyond it, that of its source and that of its addressee.”125 What this sequence of Chronicle of a Summer produces then is not recollection, but reminiscence, a living memory as it were, the echoing back and forth of the past and the present.

Throughout this sequence of the film, the past is told with the same, sustained hush, along with occasional sighs and humming; the tone and timbre of Marceline’s storytelling is consistent. Why then is her voice so much more poignant in that last shot? It is not only because of how she is visually framed within the image, how the form of her distant silhouette is engulfed by the glass-and-iron pavilions, but also because of how her voice is made to echo through the juxtaposition of sound and image. Close our eyes and listen to the film; we realize that the texture of the sound is constant. However, her voice echoes, closer and louder, as soon as it is accompanied by the image of a resounding space, the void of Les Halles. For us, it is a strange sensation in which we experience the unbearable reverberation of a voice, its closeness, from a source we perceive to be ever so far from us. The camera

125 Deleuze, 269-70.

68 rapidly pulls out, but its gaze is turned toward the background, to Marceline; it stops and awaits her arrival into the foreground: the camera as “the angel of history.”126

We see and hear Marceline’s voice transverse this space between the two planes, the two sheets, this chasm. It is a voice from the past that reverberates louder and louder into our present; a voice, a pale voice, which is all too easily submerged in the beck and call of the streets, the bright and radiant colors of the world. “This is, for me,” says Rouch, “the creation of something that goes beyond the tragic: an intolerable mise-en-scène, like some spontaneous sacrilege that pushed us to do what we had never done before.”127 An “established order” is broken and a new “architecture” is created. If I am moved in each and every screening of this sequence, it is because I am confronted by “an intolerable mise-en-scène,” an overwhelming and irresistible tableau. And I ask of this scene: What does it mean? What is it trying to tell me?

What is it asking of me? We are caught short and compelled to stop, to take another look, to listen, again and again. The past has a claim over us, as Walter Benjamin would say, and “such a claim cannot be settled cheaply.”128

The problem of sound, specifically of synchronization, is significant here as it underscores the difference between Morin and Rouch, the difference in their conceptualization of the function of the filmmaker and the aim of cinéma-vérité, especially the difference in the implications of “commensality” and “pédovision.”

The film critic and theorist Michel Chion speaks of “the spatial magnetization of

126 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-40, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003), 392. 127 Rouch, “Ciné-anthropology,” 153. 128 Benjamin, 390.

69 sound by image.”129 Sound in film does not exist in and of itself. It is perceived and experienced in relation to the image, and we hear it as if coming from a source on- or off-screen, rather than from the amplifier in the cinema: “Film sound is that which is contained or not contained in an image.”130 The problem of synchronization lies in how sound is contained in an image, how it is related to its visualized source – the question is not where is the sound, but where is the sound coming from.

“The words burst forth at the very moment when things are seen,” Morin states, “which does not occur with post-synchronization.”131 For Morin, if cinéma- vérité is a confession, the recovery of hidden or repressed truths of the self, it is important that the film also represents these truths as that which the subject accepts as his/her own, that which the subject internalizes and identifies with. Consequently, he privileges close-ups, particularly close-ups in which we, the audience, not only hear what the subject says, but see the words emerge, explode, “burst forth,” from the subject’s face.132 Words are to be heard and claimed; a causal relation between speech and subject is to be established, determined, clarified for all – the subject of the film, the filmmaker, and the audience. From time to time, if the camera turns from the one who speaks to the one who listens, it is because the consequence, the meaning, of what is said is better clarified in the expression of the latter. “It is the cameraman’s responsibility to capture the significant face,” Morin declares.133 The

129 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. Claudia Gorbman, (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), 70. 130 Chion, 68. 131 Edgar Morin, Interview with France Observateur, quoted in Morin, 252. 132 Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 237. 133 Morin, 238. “It is the cameraman’s responsibility to capture the significant face, which is not necessarily the speaker’s face; in the course of filming, Morillère, Rouch, Viguier,

70 significant face is not simply one speaking, but one reacting to the filmmaker’s provocations, that is, the one signaling the meaning of the speech to the audience. cueing the audience how to react too. According to Morin’s declaration, ironically, the significant face is often the one that stops speaking, the voice that hesitates, the eyes that nervously waver and avoid the look of the camera, especially the eyes that blink back tears: a face whose silence is perceived to be pregnant with meaning. The significant face for Morin is in fact a face in tears. Tears function as a testimony of the difficulty of speaking, a difficulty with what is said – and the difficulty itself seems to verify the truth of what is said, a truth that must be delved into and captured from obscurity, the truth of the speaking subject. Hence, it is all the more important for Morin that these tears are not acted but real:

In acted cinema, the actor forces the expression on his face to signify

his tears; even when he is really moved, he exaggerates his emotions

so as to convey it. In real life, we make tremendous efforts to

dissemble tears: we hold back sobs, tighten our facial muscles, we

inhibit instead of exhibit.134

According to Morin, acted tears are signs, real tears are symptoms; acted tears are external and false, real tears are internal and true.

In Morin’s account of Chronicle of a Summer, he commends the sequences in which we see faces in tears – and I would argue that it is suggestive of a certain

Tarbès, and (later) Brault all had some of these inspired moments that involved more than talent: sympathy and communication.” I question if inspiration in this case is an issue of “sympathy and communication.” On the contrary, through the description of Rouch’s directing, I have attempted to differentiate a mode of responsiveness, of sensitivity and attunement, which is not of sympathy or communication. 134 Morin, 239.

71 ethics and politics of the close-up that all of Morin’s privileged examples are women’s faces, an issue to be addressed in the next chapter. Morin’s interview with

Marceline and Jean-Pierre offers an instance of such a woman’s face. The interview occurs several sequences before Marceline’s walk from the Place de la Concorde to

Les Halles. In this sequence, her face centers and fills the frame, and the backdrop is black and abstract (Fig. 6). Note the contrast to the manner in which Rouch frames her; here, there is no internalized montage, no relation of tension between Marceline and the landscape. Space is entirely enclosed in the halo of her face; space is suspended. Her close-up is cut to and fro close-ups of those sitting around the common table. If there is a sense of concrete, material temporality in this sequence, it does not derive from the relation between the shots – the shot-to-shot relation is inscribed as one of continuity and causality as each shot is structured as a reaction to the last. Rather, it derives from the curls of smoke from Jean-Pierre and Morin’s cigarettes – what Chion describes as the “vibrating, trembling temporality” of

“micro-rhythms” such as these.135 Coincidentally, there is a peculiar close-up of

Jean-Pierre in which he is seemingly so absorbed in his storytelling that he forgets his cigarette, and the curls of smoke become so thick and dense that it looks as if for a moment he is literally incensed (Fig. 7). This, I would claim, contra Morin, is the significant face of the sequence, the curious shot of Jean-Pierre ablaze, rather than the shot of Marceline in tears. Otherwise, time in this sequence is also enclosed in the circumference of faces – and we listen in anticipation of Marceline’s tears. Morin asks her to react to Jean-Pierre’s speech. Her eyes glisten, her hands fidget and fret,

135 Chion, 16.

72 she seems more than ever conscious of the camera, ever more self-conscious, and she answers: “I have to say that I feel very responsible for that…”

For Morin, synchronous sound technology allows for a natural and necessary relationship between sound and image, a coincidence between speech and subject through which the former is perceived to be supplementary and subordinate to the latter. What we hear enhances our comprehension of what we see; the subject is accounted for and affirmed by what s/he says. The value of sound is relegated to that of “added value” – and Chion points out that the added value of sound in dominant practices of cinema is primarily that of speech: cinema as “a vococentric or, more precisely, a verbocentric phenomenon.”136 The history of the development of synchronous sound technologies is less a search for “acoustical fidelity to original timbre, as the guarantee of effortless intelligibility of the words spoken.”137

Generally, the recording of sound in film privileges the voice over other types of sound; moreover, it privileges the voice as a medium of speech, rather than the voice that sighs, gasps, groans or murmurs.

Morin’s emphasis, however, is not simply on synchronization, but more importantly on internalization and identification. The emphasis is on establishing a causal relation between subject and speech: speech as that which comes from within the subject, the subject’s interiority as the source of speech. The status of the subject’s voice is what Chion calls the “I-voice”: “a pivot of identification,

136 Chion, 5. For instance: “curls of smoke, rain, snowflakes, undulations of the rippled surface of a lake, dunes, and so forth – even the swarming movement of photographic grain itself, when visible.” 137 Chion, 6.

73 resonating in us as if it were our own voice, like a voice in the first person.”138 The I- voice is the narrating voice, and it is a voice that is internalized by the audience as well as by the character that motivates the narrative of the film. The I-voice is not simply the voice that says “I,” Chion explains. There are certain norms of performance and recording for the I-voice. The voice must be as close as possible,

“such that we sense no distance between it and our ear.”139 And the voice must have no reverberation, for reverberation situates the voice in a concrete, material space; the I-voice must transcend space, “it must be its own space unto itself”:

All you have to do is add reverb in the mix to manipulate an I-voice;

the embracing and complicit quality of the I-voice becomes embraced

and distanced. It is then no longer a subject with which the spectator

identifies, but rather an object-voice, perceived as a body anchored in

space.140

The I-voice also transcends time. The quality of the memory it evokes is that of a flashback – it recalls the past with a cut, a brief break in continuity, it comments upon the images we see, it contextualizes the images as the subject’s history,

138 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), 51. For Chion, the profound affect of the I-voice derives from an earlier, “originary” I-voice, that of the Mother (or the Father), whose voice envelops the child like a veil that filters and orders the child’s initial perception/experience of the world: “Since the very dawn of time, voices have presented images, made order of things in the world, brought things to life and named them. The very first image presented is the mother, before the child learns any written signs, her voice articulates things in a human and linear temporality…The cinema might recall this strong and close presence of the parental voice, but perhaps on the other hand it causes us to lose opportunities for life, closeness, and the possibility of two- way communication.” Chion, 49-50. See also Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), 335-348. 139 Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 51. 140 Chion, 51.

74 biography and curriculum vitae, and re-establishes continuity so that the past informs us of the subject and its being. The past then is presented as both distinct from and subordinate to the present. For Morin, the I-voice that emerges from Marceline’s face is a voice with which Marceline, the filmmaker, and the audience identifies. We cringe when she cringes at Morin’s questions; her tears implicate us as we wince at the sight of her distress. According to Chion, this is “an effect of corporeal implication, or involvement of the spectator’s body, when the voice makes us feel in our body the vibration of the body of the other, of the character who serves as vehicle for the identification.”141

However, in the aforementioned sequence of Marceline’s walk from the

Place de la Concorde to Les Halles, the voice is close but it reverberates via a dynamic relation between image and sound. The voice itself is enveloped in the noises of the streets, the direct sounds of a specific day in a specific city in the summer of 1960. The voice is no longer embracing and complicit, but rather embraced and distanced. It is anchored to Marceline’s body, the rhythm of her walk/talk preserved and punctuated by the camera. “With post-synchronization and the best artist in the world,” Rouch says, “you would never be able to achieve that unrelenting rhythm of someone walking in a place like that.” 142 For Rouch, in contrast to Morin, synchronous sound technology allows for a different relation between sound and image. Sound becomes concrete and material; it is situated in a particular time and place, a particular subject embodies it. And neither image nor sound is subordinate to the other: sound and image are coincident but not identified;

141 Chion, 53. 142 Rouch, Interview with France Observateur, 252.

75 one resonates with the other. A new mode of speaking emerges, as Chion would say, when the I-voices of cinema began to doubt, “when they no longer behaved like voices that knew and saw everything.”143 The voice of the narrator questions itself. It reverberates. Or, as in Debord’s films, the narrator’s voice splinters and multiplies into the confused incoherence of several voices that speak but in fits and starts. It speaks as if spoken from elsewhere, by others, voices within a voice: “We don’t know what to say. Sequences of words are repeated; gestures are recognized. Outside us.”144 The doubting I-voice is part and parcel of modern cinema, its new mode of story, Deleuze would argue, which appears alongside “a sliding of ground, breaking the uniformity of the internal monologue to replace it by the diversity, the deformity, the otherness of free indirect discourse”:

There is no longer the unity of the author, the characters and the

world such as was guaranteed by the internal monologue. There is

formation of “free indirect discourse,” of a free indirect vision, which

goes from one to the other, so that either the author expresses himself

through the intercession of an autonomous, independent character

other than the author or any role fixed by the author, or the character

143 Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 55. “What we can say at this point is that a kind of detour in the voiceover as the representation of the Other’s/Master’s knowledge can be detected in a number of films since the 1970s.” 144 Guy Debord, Critique de la séparation, 1961. For example, there are the “somewhat apathetic and tired-sounding voices” of On the Passage or the “drunken monologue” of Critique of Separation “with its incomprehensible allusions and tiresome delivery. With its vain phrases that do not await response and its overbearing explanations. And its silences.”

76 acts and speaks himself as if his own gestures and his own words

were already reported by a third party.145

To sum up: For Morin, the significance of cinéma-vérité is in its content, the recovery of a hidden or repressed truth of one’s being. For Rouch, the significance of cinéma-vérité is not the truth that is told – he dismisses it as not very interesting in and of itself. 146 Rather, it is the telling, the form or more precisely the formation of the film, and the subject’s passage from the beginning to the end of the film – à la

Debord, “the passage of a few persons through a rather brief unity of time.” Later, we will return to this difference in the aim of cinéma-vérité via the contrast in Morin and Rouch’s method of editing. In the following section of the chapter, I turn to the function of the cinematic provocation to analyze oneself and to the function of analysis itself. How are we to comprehend this provocation to analyze oneself? Why is this analysis performed in front of a camera for an indeterminate audience? What is the effect – the affect – of this performance? In short, why is this analysis filmed?

II.

Regardless of the type, whether documentary or fiction, Benjamin proposed that all film performances could be perceived as a performance of oneself: “In the case of film, the fact that the actor represents someone else before the audience

145 Deleuze, 183-4. 146 Rouch, 251.

77 matters much less than the fact that he represents himself before the apparatus.”147

For Benjamin, film performance establishes a different relation to oneself than that of theater performance. “The stage actor identifies himself with the role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His performance is by no means a unified whole, but is assembled from many individual performances.”148 In contrast to the stage actor of the classical theater, Benjamin argues, the film actor does not relate to himself primarily through a mode of identification with the role; rather, the mode is one of fragmentation, of montage. Significance here is in the incessant interruptions of the film actor’s performance by the director and crew – the calls to leap in and out of performance at once, to revise and repeat the performance, again and again, at multiple angles of the camera – plus the substitution of the camera for the live audience. To act is to confront an apparatus that fragments the acting and deconstructs the act in order to reconstruct it later on the editing table; to act is also to confront the enigma of a yet-to-be-determined audience. For the stage actor,

Benjamin implies, the important question is whether I have immersed myself in my role; whether I have delved into the depths of my character to seek out his/her motivations, thoughts, fantasies, feelings, desires; whether I have interpreted such motivations into a dialogue, an expression, a tone of voice, a tenor of a look so that the audience accepts them as my own, whether my performance is experienced as authentic for myself and the audience – in short, whether I identify myself with the role. However, the question for the film actor is not that of a why, but of a how –

147 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-38, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), 112. 148 Benjamin, 112.

78 how can I pull off a specific gesture, over and over again in a succession of takes, within a state of distraction? Film performance is a testing of this how, an examination of the actor’s capacities to pull off an act, through a series of trials and errors. “To perform in the glare of arc lamps while simultaneously meeting the demands of the microphone [of the director] is a test performance of the highest order,” Benjamin exclaims. 149 Thus, for the film actor, regardless of the role, film performance is in principle a performance of oneself.

Benjamin found the model of such performance of self not in the soliloquy of the tragic actor – there is no time for soliloquies in film, it seems – but in “the bodily and mental postures” of the comedian, the gestures of Charlie Chaplin.

Each single movement he makes is composed of a succession of

staccato bits of movement. Whether it is his walk, the way he handles

his cane, the way he raises his hat – always the same jerky sequence

of tiny movements applies the law of cinematic image sequence to

human motorial functions.150

Chaplin’s gestures are cinematic, Benjamin says. Chaplin does not just walk. He fragments the move into “a succession of staccato bits of movement,” clips each instant to separate and punctuate it, so that in his walk, there is a sense of “jerky” disjointedness and precarious grace. It does not matter where he is walking, why he is walking, but that he walks – we do not ask why, but laugh at his how. Speaking of

Chaplin’s gestures, André Bazin would later emphasize their effect of abruptness and

149 Benjamin, 111. 150 Walter Benjamin, “The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-38, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), 94-5.

79 accuracy for the audience: “they allow just enough time for you to ‘get it,’ nor are they followed by a time lag that gives you a chance to think about them.” 151

Chaplin’s art is not one of elaboration but of “the greatest elliptical clarity.” It forces the spectator to test him/herself, to be alert, to be sensitive and attuned to “the delight of anticipating and recognizing perfection” – a subtle pleasure that is not exhausted after the initial screening, that compels the spectator to watch the film over and over again. It forces the apparatus to test itself too: the director and the crew are as alert as the spectator; the camera is sensitive and attuned “so that it becomes a high precision mechanism capable of responding instantly to the most delicate of springs.” There is a certain reciprocal relation between the apparatus and the actor: if the apparatus provokes the actor’s performance, it must also be responsive to it. Note the modality, especially the temporality of this response. To respond here is not to contemplate, to ponder, to mull over and weigh up; there is no time here for introspection. Rather,

Bazin underscores the speed and precision of this response – a modality of response, which in another context he would compare to that of a surgeon’s cut: “certain genres call for speed, for work done in the heat of a moment, but surgery could not call for a greater sureness of touch, for greater precision.”152

The comparison of the camera to a surgeon reminds us of one of the best- known sentences in Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of

Technological Reproducibility (1936)”: “Magician is to surgeon as the painter is to cinematographer. The painter in his work maintains a natural distance from reality,

151 André Bazin, “Charlie Chaplin” in What is Cinema? Vol. 1, ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1967), 144-53. 152 André Bazin, “An Aesthetic of Reality: Neo-realism” in What is Cinema? Vol. 2, ed. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1971), 32.

80 whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissue.”153 Maybe Benjamin’s choice of words such as “distance” and “depth” is misleading. For there is a tendency in scholarship to attribute to the surgeon/cinematographer – and to Benjamin’s claims for cinema in general – a power of hermeneutics: to discover and disclose a truth hitherto inaccessible to the human eye, “an optical unconscious,” a truth to be recovered by consciousness through the technology of photography and film, a truth which in essence was always already accessible.154 However, we should recall

Benjamin’s own definition of “distance” in this essay – distance is specifically that of “aura,” “a strange tissue of time and space: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.”155 And if cinema participates in the famed withering away of aura, it is not because it substitutes an internal space for an external space. The closeness of the camera is of immediacy – the responsiveness not of introspection, but of “a high precision mechanism capable of responding instantly to the most delicate of springs.” The surgeon/cinematographer comes closer, “penetrates deeply,” to break apart the body into tissues, as in the breaking apart of a gesture as familiar as the lighting of a cigarette – one of Benjamin’s own examples – in order to see the subtleties of what happens between the hand and the metal of the lighter, to see how this succession of movements varies with different moods. The criterion of analysis is praxis, rather than “truth”: “On one hand, film furthers insights into the necessities governing our lives…on the other hand, it manages to assure us of a vast

153 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” 116. 154 Benjamin, 117. “This is where the camera comes into play, with all of its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.” 155 Benjamin, 104-5.

81 and unsuspected field of action [Spielraum].”156 “The painter’s image is a total image,” Benjamin says, “whereas that of the cinematographer is piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law.”157 The camera comes closer to reality to deconstruct it, not to close in and place reality within reach, not to restore the optical unconscious to conscious perception. For the unconscious is itself, let us recall, the realm of radical alterity – this point, to be pursued later in the chapter, is summed up in the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s neologism for the otherness of the unconscious, “alien-ness” [étrangèreté] and his definition of analysis as “first and foremost a method of deconstruction, with the aim of clearing the way for a new construction.”158

According to Benjamin, the film actor foregoes his identification with the role; he foregoes his aura “for the aura is bound to his presence in the here and now.”159 The dramatist Luigi Pirandello was anxious over this loss: “The film actor feels as if exiled. Exiled not only from the stage but from his own person.”160 For

Benjamin, however, the exile from one’s own person is not only the very condition of modern subjectivity, but also the potential to produce a new subjectivity, a new relation to oneself – an abandonment of the self, that is, an abandonment of a specific sense of self understood to be as anachronistic as the concept of aura, its claims to origin and authenticity. For the film actor, to act is to test oneself, to examine oneself

156 Benjamin, 117. Note that a more literal translation of Spielraum would be “scope for play.” The verb ‘spielen’ has various connotations of the verb ‘to play’: to gamble; to perform on stage or in a film; to act. 157 Benjamin, 116. 158 Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, ed. John Flecher (London: Routledge, 1999), 165. 159 Benjamin, 112. 160 Benjamin, 112.

82 according to the criteria of capacity, of praxis, and not of authenticity, of truth. In the next chapter, we will turn to the social significance Benjamin attributes to this abandonment of the self, especially its implication for a new collective subjectivity,

“a mass-like [massenweise] existence,” which is neither a unified whole nor a mere collection of individualities – and how this relates to Debord’s own critique of figuration and reification in the society of the spectacle. Seeing that Benjamin’s privileged examples of the film actor comes from silent cinema (as in the case of

Chaplin), in the next chapter, we shall see how Debord – and a contemporary filmmaker such as Jean-Luc Godard – critique the representation of the film actor in the age of “talking cinema”: the figuration and reification of the actor as the speaking subject. According to Godard, the film actor of the talkie tends not to gesture, but to express – an expression that is but a reification, an appearance, of an expression: “an expression of an expression.”161 It is an expression that says there is depth underneath the surface of the face – the expression of an interiority, a self, an “I” and the truth of the “I” who speaks: “an expression that talks but only to say how much it knows and nothing more than how much it knows.”162 Here, we will further pursue the proposal for self-examination, knowledge of oneself, which refers to praxis rather than truth, gesture rather than expression – “know thyself” that is not offered in the form of confession, of “tell the truth of oneself.”

III.

161 Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, A Letter to Jane, 1972. 162 Godard and Gorin, 1972.

83 “We have since become a singularly confessing society.”163 It is perhaps the strength of this statement, a statement that encapsulates the philosopher Michel

Foucault’s critique of modern subjectivity, which causes us to be suspicious about all offers of self-examination. According to Foucault, in a history that stretches from the beginning of the Christian era to our own time, confession has become one of the

West’s most pervasive techniques for the production of truth:

One confesses in public and in private, to one’s parents, one’s

educators, one’s doctor, to those one loves; one admits to oneself, in

pleasure and in pain, things it would be impossible to tell to anyone

else, the things people write books about. One confesses – or is forced

to confess.164

We rationalize the compulsion to confess as the desire to assert ourselves through the medium of truth: I assert myself via the discovery and disclosure of a truth that is dormant within me. This rationalization proceeds from several assumptions: the assumption of a natural relation between confession and truth, between truth and freedom, between truth and subjectivity. In the chapter on confession’s fundamental role within the human sciences from The History of Sexuality, Volume I (1976),

163 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1990), 59. 164 Foucault, 59. The quotation continues to point out the “shadow” of such confessions: torture. “When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat; it is driven from its hiding place in the soul, or extracted from the body. Since the Middle Ages, torture has accompanied it like a shadow, and supported it when it could go no further: the dark twins.” The next chapter addresses this problem of torture - and how this problem is raised through the ethics and politics of close- ups in the films of Debord and Godard in the context of the Algerian War (1954-62). The critique of how an individual is figured and reified as the speaking subject in the society of the spectacle has an especial exigency in the context of a war that established torture as its primary technology.

84 Foucault critiques the assumption of a natural and thereby necessary relation between confession, truth, and freedom - as if to tell is to free, as if the difficulty of this telling is to be attributed to a power that is prohibitive or repressive. And if sex is the persistent theme of these confessions, from Christianity to the present, it is because sex is constituted not merely as a moral issue, but more importantly as an issue of truth, the truth, the secret and the cause: “Between each of us and our sex, the West has placed a never-ending demand for truth: it is up to us to extract the truth of sex, since this truth is beyond its grasp; it is up to sex to tell us our truth, since sex is what holds it in darkness.”165 For Foucault, this is an assumption that must be probed into and pulled apart by a “political history of truth,” a history of the function of truth in specific knowledge-power relations.166

In the later works (particularly from The History of Sexuality, Volume 2

(1984)), we are directed toward a discussion of confession not only as a technique of knowledge-power but also as a technique of subjectivation. Furthermore, we directly address the assumption of a necessarily relation between truth and subjectivity, the problem of what Foucault calls “the hermeneutics of the self”: the techniques that force us to examine ourselves in order to find the truth of our being; the practices that compel us to decipher our thoughts, fantasies, feelings, and desires for the revelation of such truth. This is a transition in the methodology of the later Foucault: to supplement a history of knowledge-power relations with a genealogy of the

165 Foucault, 77. 166 Foucault, 60. “Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a ‘political history of truth’ would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free – nor error servile – but that is production is thoroughly imbued with the relations of power. The confession is an example of this.”

85 subject, that is, to put forth a relation to oneself that is informed by but not reduced to relations between forms of knowledge and power-relations. Foucault proposes to address the “games of truth” [jeux de verité] in “the forms and modalities of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject.”167 How is truth conceptualized in a particular culture? What is the function of this truth in subjectivation? How does truth mediate one’s relation to oneself? The proposal to address such games of truth is not to ask what is true or false in one’s relationship to oneself – this question implies that there is a true relationship to the self. Rather, emphasis is to be placed on the historicity of the subject, on the history of one’s relation to oneself; the “I” is not universal, but historical.168 What seems to be at stake is the search for specific games of truth that lead up to the modern concept of self – and to open up the possibility of a transformation of one’s present relation to oneself. “The object was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.”169 Or to quote Deleuze’s fine formulation of Foucault’s methodology:

“Thought thinks its own history (the past), but in order to free itself from what it

167 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1990), 59. 168 Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth” in Political Theory, vol. 21, no.2 (May 1993), 202. “I have tried to get out from the philosophy of the subject through a genealogy of this subject, by studying the constitution of the subject across history which has led us up to the modern concept of the self.” For Foucault, the philosophy of the subject refers to a thought that refers itself to the centrality of the subject. See also Deleuze on Foucault’s methodology: “On these three questions [of knowledge, power, subject], the ‘I’ does not designate a universal but a set of particular positions occupied within a One speaks-One sees, One confronts, One lives.” Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, ed. and trans. Séan Hand (London: Continuum Books, 1999), 94. 169 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, 9.

86 thinks (the present) and be able finally to ‘think otherwise’ (the future).”170 I would add here: is this not an instance par excellence of a self-examination that refers to praxis, rather than to truth? “If Foucault’s interviews form an integral part of his work,” Deleuze says, “it is because they extend the historical problematization of each of his books into the construction of the present problem, be it madness, punishment or sexuality.”171

The earlier volume of The History of Sexuality had addressed the increasing codification of confession as the technique for the production of truth of oneself. In the genealogy of the modern subject, Foucault underscores a transformation that initiates the hermeneutics of the self – the effects of a shift from the ethics of Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity to that of Christianity. For the purposes of this chapter, we will briefly follow the transformation via the shift from the Delphic precept of

“know thyself” to the monastic precept of “confess, each and every one of your thoughts, to God or his earthly representative, your spiritual master.”

The transformation in one’s relation to oneself from the Greek and Greco-

Roman antiquity to Christianity is a problem not so much of different codes of conducts, but rather of the difference in the manner in which the codes are articulated, imposed, enacted upon, the value of these codes, and the form of subjectivity to which the codes refer. To address the function of self-examination in

Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity, Foucault gives us an example from Seneca, the

Roman philosopher. Seneca speaks of the virtues of his day-to-day practice of examining himself:

170 Deleuze, Foucault, 98. 171 Deleuze, 94.

87 How calm it is, deep and free, when the soul has received its portion

of praise and blame, and has submitted itself to its own examination,

its own censure…I reason with myself and take the measure of my

acts and words. I hide nothing from myself; I spare myself nothing.

Why, in effect, should I fear anything at all amongst my errors whilst

I can say: “Be vigilant in not beginning it again; today I will forgive

you…”172

Seneca’s self-examination is for himself, not for another authority to judge.

Furthermore, the purpose of examining oneself is not to judge one’s past, but rather to account for one’s present, to forgive one’s errors today and correct them tomorrow. And what Seneca takes account of are not so much his thoughts, but his actions.173 What did I do or not do today? What were the effects of my acts and my words? If my actions produced negative effects, how could I correct them tomorrow?

If my actions produced positive effects, I must establish them as codes of conduct to enact again, etc. The value of this self-examination is vigilance in one’s relation to oneself and to others. Vigilance here is not surveillance; the call for vigilance is not to put oneself and others under the gaze of an authority with the power to judge, to discipline and punish, to console and reconcile; the call for vigilance is not to ward off an enemy, be it a threat posed from outside or from within (sin, disease or

172 Seneca, “On Anger,” quoted in Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” 206. 173 Foucault points out that Seneca’s language of self-examination is akin to that of an administrator, rather than a judge: “With regard to himself, he is not a judge who has to punish; he is, rather, an administrator who, once the work has been done or the year’s business is finished, does the accounts, take stock of things, and sees if everything has been done correctly. Seneca is a permanent administrator of himself, more than a judge of his past.” Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” 206-7.

88 repression). For the Roman philosopher, vigilance wards off the fear of error; it enables one to act but not to act without restraint; it allows one to be awake, to be alert, to be attentive to oneself and to others – a responsiveness that Seneca characterizes as one of freedom. Foucault emphasizes that freedom for Greek and

Greco-Roman antiquity was not the emancipation from an external or internal constraint; freedom was not that of free will. Rather, freedom was one of moderation, “a power that one brought to bear on oneself in the power that one exercised over others.”174 Lest we mistake Foucault’s genealogy as an anti-modernist proposal to return to antiquity, note that this freedom was for free men and only for free men: a power over oneself for those who had the right to exercise power over others, a power of moderation for those who had the right to be immoderate.175 An exemplary figure of such a concept of freedom would be the leader, who is capable of curbing himself in his exercise of power over others, who is moderate in his relation to himself and to others; his opposite is the tyrant, not the slave.

From the Christian era, however, we see a transformation in the function of self-examination – a shift from the Delphic code of “know thyself” (as in the case of

Seneca) to the monastic code of “confess.” The Vita Antonii [The Life of Saint

Anthony] of Athanasius is a source often cited by Foucault as an example of the function of self-examination according to the monastic code of confession. I turn to a particular example in which Athanasius exalts the virtues of confession through

“self-writing,” that is, to write of oneself in solitude, to examine oneself in the

174 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, 80. 175 Foucault, 80. “In fact, the person, owing to his status, was under the authority of others was not expected to find the principle of his moderation within himself; it would be enough for him to obey the orders and instructions he was given.”

89 absence of a “live audience” as it were. According to Athanasius, the purpose of self- writing is to guard ourselves against our thoughts of sin, “a safeguard against sinning.” What is to be the deterrent, the impassable guard at the gate? It is shame,

Athanasius answers, “utter shame of becoming known”: “Now, then, let the written account stand for the eyes of our fellow ascetics, so that blushing at writing the same as if we were actually seen, we may never ponder evil.”176 The significance of self- writing is not in the act of writing itself, nor even in what is written per se, but the production of a gaze, particularly a gaze that is directed inwards, into the depths of our soul, a gaze with the authority to cause us to blush, to cause us to be ashamed.

Furthermore, what one accounts to this gaze is not so much one’s actions, but one’s thoughts – and, in History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault shows us the steady increase in the scope of confession from acts to thoughts, fantasies, feelings, desires,

“shifting the most important moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings – so difficult to perceive and to formulate – of desire.”177 Self-examination here is not for oneself, be it within the enclosed space of the confessional or one’s own table. Nor is it a testing of oneself in the manner of a confrontation with the enigma of a yet to be determined audience (as in Benjamin’s proposal of the cinematic provocation to analyze oneself in front of a camera). Rather, the

“audience” here is defined and all too determined: “the eyes of the fellow ascetics”

176 Saint Anthony, The Life of Saint Anthony, quoted in Michel Foucault, “Self-Writing” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 207-8. 177 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 20-1. Here, Foucault is discussing the crucial role of the confession in the transformation of sex into discourse, “the incitement to discourse,” in its establishment of the following imperative: “Not only will you confess to acts contravening the law, but you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse.”

90 or other surrogates for the eye of God. If the audience is absent, as in the case of

Athanasius’ self-writing, the absence does not at all diminish the presence of the audience. On the contrary, the presence is further reinforced through its evasion of conscious perception, its veiling, its aura. Succinctly, let us take note of the status of the audience in Morin’s cinéma-vérité-as-confession. It is important for the subject of analysis, the subject of the film, to be aware that analysis here is “a matter for addressing everyone and no one”: “it is destined for the cinema, that is to say, for isolated individuals in a dark theater, invisible and anonymous, but present.”178 For

Morin, the audience of the cinema is both present and absent, or more precisely, present as veiled, an auratic presence.

The value of self-examination according to the monastic code of confession is also vigilance, but vigilance as surveillance. The demand for vigilance is to put oneself and others under the gaze of an authority with the power to discipline and punish – moreover, the power to interpret and to verify. Much of theVita Antonii is devoted to exhaustive descriptions of temptations as that which deceive and delude us about ourselves. There is then an imperative to investigate the source, the cause of

178 Morin, 234. Morin argues that the intimacy of “commensality,” an intimacy he compares to that of the confessional, is not only due to the status of the filmmaker and his relation to the subjects of his film, the method of filming, but also due to the status of the audience of cinema. The cinematic audience is in contrast to the televisual audience: “The prospect of being televised, on the other hand, would not provoke such internal liberation, because then it is no longer a matter of addressing everyone and no one, but a matter of addressing people who are eating, talking.” According to Morin, the audience of television is in a state of distraction (which is not conducive to confession); the audience of the cinema is in a state of concentration and absorption (which is conducive to confession.) For Morin, the audience of the cinema is “invisible and anonymous, but present.” Contrast this conceptualization of the cinematic audience to that of Benjamin: “Reception in distraction – the sort of reception which is increasingly noticeable in all areas of art and is a symptom of profound changes in apperception – finds in film its true training ground.” Benjamin, 120.

91 our thoughts: What is the origin of the thought? Is the thought pure or is it contaminated by other motivations? As Foucault points out, the question for

Athanasius is not whether I am wrong to think as such, but whether I have been misled by this thought, where does this thought derive from, what is its truth.179

Confession functions as the safeguard against “impure” thoughts, precisely because it produces the authority of a gaze that distills and separates pure from impure, true from false, an authority that interprets the truth of our thoughts, an authority with the power of judgment.

The transformation in the function of self-examination from “know thyself” to “tell the truth of oneself” is part and parcel of the beginning of the hermeneutics of the self. For Foucault, it is a decisive chapter in the genealogy of the modern subject, that is, in the history of knowledge-power-subject relations that have constituted the modern concept of the self, one’s present relation to oneself. There is a continuity between the monastic code of confession and the techniques of our human sciences: the constitution of oneself as that which must be interpreted for the truth of one’s being, plus the production of a gaze that is the bearer of this truth, a gaze with the power of interpretation and verification. There are several ways in which Foucault tracks the codification of the ritual of confession into the techniques of science; the codification is a complex process of continuity, modification, and diversification across history. In the next section of the chapter, I shall focus on the technique of interpretation, particularly in relation to psychoanalysis.

179 See also Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” 215-221.

92 IV.

Through the technique of interpretation, Foucault says, confession is no longer a test, but rather a sign.180 It necessitates a specific knowledge-power-subject relations in which there are two parties, the one who speaks and the one who listens.

It is specifically a hierarchal relation through which “the one who listened was not simply the forgiving master, the judge who condemned or acquitted; he was the master of truth. His was a hermeneutic function.”181 It is precisely this hermeneutic function attributed to the one who listens, the analyst, which Laplanche criticizes in his writings on the technique of interpretation in psychoanalytic theories and practices. Laplanche points out that the debate about interpretation in psychoanalysis is polarized between two positions of “determinism” and “hermeneutics,” “nicely summed up by the antithetical terms of reconstruction and construction.”182 For

Laplanche, however, the problem is not to choose one or the other. Both positions assert the sovereignty of the analyst. The analyst is “the master of truth” and analysis is conceptualized as a practice of hermeneutics, be it a practice of reconstruction or construction.

180 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 66. 181 Foucault, 66-7. “The truth did not reside solely in the subject who, by confessing, would reveal it wholly formed. It was constituted in two stages: present but incomplete, blind to itself, in the one who spoke, it could only reach completion in the one who assimilated and recorded it. It was the latter’s function to verify this obscure truth: the revelation of confession had to be coupled with the decipherment of what it said.” 182 Jean Laplanche, “Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics: a Restatement of the Problem” in Essays on Otherness, ed. John Flecher (London: Routledge, 1999), 138 – 165.

93 According to the determinist position, the object of analysis is “a disease of memory.” Consequently, the aim of analysis is to recover and reconstruct the subject’s history, “the subject’s real history.” Note the determinist’s position on the relation of memory to history: memory is a recollection of the past; repression is a false recollection or a refusal to recollect, a false/forgotten memory. This relation of memory to history implies that the former is supplementary and subordinate to the latter: all memories are “mere” copies, reproductions, representations of history – and access to the subject’s real history, the facts of his/her past, is essential for the recovery of the truth of the subject’s being. As Laplanche points out, determinism is suggested in the English translation of Nachträglichkeit as “deferred action,” a deferral between cause and effect, according to which the past is the cause and it effects, indeed determines, the present.183 To interpret here is to cure the subject of false/forgotten memories, even of memory itself, to recover the subject’s history – his/her “truth” – and to reconstruct it into a coherent and complete narrative. The aim of interpretation is the restoration of the self to its uniformity, its undivided identity.

Analysis ends when the analysand internalizes the analyst’s interpretation; it ends

183 Thus, Laplanche translates Nachträglichkeit as “afterwardsness,” rather than “deferred action.” See Jean Laplanche, “Notes on Afterwardsness” in Essays on Otherness, ed. John Flecher (London: Routledge, 1999), 260 – 5. Note that for Sigmund Freud, Nachträglichkeit referred to instances such as “a case of memory arousing an affect which it did not arouse as an experience, because in the meantime the change in puberty had made possible a different understanding of what was remembered.” The first part of this sentence raises the possibility of an arousal via memory: the possibility of shifting the cause to the present, from the event to the representation of the event, the ‘reality’ of the representation itself. However, the second part of the sentence returns to a biological model of evolution through which Nachträglichkeit is naturalized and the past yet again determines the present. Sigmund Freud, “A Project for Scientific Psychology” (1950a [1895]) quoted in John Flecher, “Introduction: Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Other” in Essays on Otherness, ed. John Flecher (London: Routledge, 1999), 7.

94 with the unequivocal voice of an “I” through which the subject says: “Yes, I am…(because you say I am).” Laplanche calls attention to the tautological structure of this mode of analysis and its assumption of the authority of the analyst – the analyst as not only an historian, but also a mirror that exchanges one’s desires for one’s truth and says: “you clearly see that it’s you that…”184

For the hermeneutic position, the problem of the determinist model is not so much the structure of analysis, but the assumption of the analyst’s access to the subject’s real history. According to the psychoanalyst Serge Viderman, a proponent of the hermeneutic position: “What matters is that the analyst, without regard to reality, adjusts and assembles these materials [memories] to construct a coherent whole which does not reproduce a fantasy pre-existent in the subject’s unconscious but causes it to exist by telling it.”185 Here, too, interpretation produces a coherent and complete narrative of the subject’s truth; the aim of interpretation is also the restoration of the self. But the emphasis is on the present, the present of the analyst, rather than the past of the analysand – and interpretation is retroactive and constructive. This is not an argument for the arbitrariness of the analyst’s

184 Jean Laplanche, “Transference: Its Provocation by the Analyst” in Essays on Otherness, ed. John Flecher (London: Routledge, 1999), 228; see also Laplanche, “Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics: a Restatement of the Problem,” 160. “It is an explanation that will always fall into the famous parody of psychoanalysis, brilliantly anticipated by Molière: “’And that is why your daughter is dumb.’” The quotation from Molière is: “I inform you that your daughter is dumb”; “Yes; but I wish you could tell me what it comes from”; “Nothing easier: it comes from the fact that she lost her speech”; “Very good, but the reason, please, why she has lost her speech?”; “All our best authorities will tell you that it’s the stoppage of action of her tongue.” Molière, “The Doctor in Spite of Himself” in Molière: The Misanthrope and Other Plays, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Signet Classic, 1968), 112. 185 Serge Viderman, La Construction de L’Espace Analytique (Paris: Denoël, 1970), 164; quoted in Laplanche, “Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics: a Restatement of the Problem,” 140.

95 interpretation. On the contrary, the authority of the analyst’s interpretation is informed by the assumption of another category of truth. Truth of the subject’s being is not in objectivity, but in subjectivity; not in fact, but in fantasy, that is, “the primal fantasy”: “It is upon the deep, fundamental form of the primal fantasy that the modulations of the events which singularize the subject’s history and which historicize him act.”186 For the determinist position, the analyst is a historicist; for

Viderman and the hermeneutic position, Laplanche argues, the analyst is a Kantian:

“He postulates a priori categories, the common heritage of all men which regulates their apprehension, their ‘construction,’ of the real.”187 If the determinist position represents the past as an individual inheritance, the hermeneutic position represents the past, a primordial past, as the collective inheritance of the species, the race, “the common heritage of all men.” And the status of primal fantasies that derives from this primordial, prehistoric past is not that of law, but of norm – or more precisely, a law that functions as a norm. It legitimizes the analyst’s interpretation as truth, moreover, it regulates our perception and experience of reality; it is a norm that regulates our subjectivation.

Laplanche is critical of both representations of the past – in the case of the latter, the hermeneutic position, how it too “barely attempts to conceal its normative aims and theological reference points.”188 “The conferring of sense whose action is retroactive cannot remain suspended in mid-air,” Laplanche says, “when Freud himself ventures to do this with Little Hans, so to speak injecting the Oedipus

186 Viderman, quoted in Laplanche, 140. 187 Laplanche, 140. 188 Laplanche, 160.

96 complex into the situation, he immediately draws down on himself the question:

‘Does the Professor talk to God…as he can tell all that beforehand?”189 Ironically, particularly in psychoanalytic film theory, the fame of Laplanche and his collaborator Jean-Betrand Pontalis is in their clarification of the concept of primal fantasies. However, it is important to take note of the fact that Laplanche and

Pontalis do not advocate the concept, much less endorse its persistence in psychoanalytic theories and practices. They clarify the concept in order to critique it:

“Twenty-five years later, people are dumbfounded and incredulous when I affirm my steadfast opposition to the fable of fantasies transmitted phylogenetically from the father of the primal horde.”190

For Laplanche, the polarization of the debate about interpretation into determinism versus hermeneutics is “a trap.” The problem is not whether to choose one or the other, since both positions assume the authority of the analyst and his/her power of interpretation and verification. According to Laplanche, it is a trap that stems from a certain oscillation in Freud’s own position: an oscillation in the status of the unconscious. Laplanche offers us the example of Freud’s seminal essay of

189 Laplanche, 160. 190 Laplanche, 141. Here, I would argue is the potential for a productive dialogue between Laplanche and Foucault – especially through the latter’s critique of “bio-power,” a power that is “situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of populations.” Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 137. Note Foucault’s analysis of bio-power and its relation to the normative function of the law: “I do not mean to say that the law fades into the background or that institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A normalizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centered on life.” Foucault, 144.

97 1917, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-analysis.”191 Freud begins the essay with an emphatic statement: the discovery of the unconscious is “the most wounding” of the three blows to “the universal narcissism of men, their self-love,” that is, the ideal of man as the subject of knowledge, the centrality of the subject as the point of reference for the order of things.192 Following the discoveries of Copernicus and of

Charles Darwin, the discovery of the unconscious is the third and most severe blow to the concept of the centered subject. The unconscious de-centers the subject from oneself:

Thoughts emerge suddenly without one’s knowing where they come

from, nor can one do anything to drive them away. These alien guests

even seem to be more powerful than those which are at the ego’s

command…Or else impulses appear which seem like those of a

stranger, so that the ego disowns them; yet it has to fear them and take

precautions against them. The ego says to itself: “This is an illness, a

foreign invasion.” It increases its vigilance, but cannot understand

why it feels so strangely paralyzed.193

The unconscious manifests itself for the ego as that which originates from elsewhere, from someone else, “foreign,” “alien.” I sense the presence of an agent that cannot be

191 Jean Laplanche, “The Unfinished Copernican Revolution” in Essays on Otherness, ed. John Flecher (London: Routledge, 1999), 52-83. 192 Sigmund Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis (1917)” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Words, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 135-44. 193 Freud, 141-2.

98 attributed to myself, an agency that cannot be incorporated into my mind, as if I am doubled by an alien agency, as if I am possessed. However, in the same essay, within the space of few pages, Freud retracts from the implication of this discovery and puts forth a plan to assimilate the alien via an interpretation of such “foreign invasions”:

Psychoanalysis sets out to explain these uncanny disorders…until at

length it can speak thus to the ego: “Nothing has entered into you

from without; a part of the activity of your own mind has been

withdrawn from your knowledge and from the command of your

will...Even if you are not ill, who can tell all that is stirring in your

mind of which you know nothing or are falsely informed? You

behave like an absolute ruler who is content with information

supplied him by his highest officials and never goes among the people

to hear their voice. Turn your eyes inward, look into your depths,

learn first to know yourself!”194

The unconscious is redefined as that which the ego has withdrawn from itself, withdrawn from its knowledge and its will, that which “I” have repressed. The alien is but a bit of myself that I have estranged from myself, that I have forgotten in the depths of my mind, and I can be free of the sense of its invasion by colonizing it, by

(re)settling it within myself, by knowing it: the restoration of agency to the “I.” The method of analysis is coded as a technique of surveillance, the gathering of information from even the most humble, obscure, secret of sources – and since the information tends to be “incomplete and untrustworthy,” analysis is to redouble its

194 Freud, 142-3.

99 vigilance, double and enforce the ego’s own vigilance. The ego might not resume its sense of mastery, but analysis can and shall restore the ego’s sense of security, the security and stability of the “I” as the subject of knowledge.

According to Laplanche, this redefinition domesticates not only the unconscious, but also the method and aim of psychoanalysis. The unconscious is reduced to “what one could call, along with theologians and those of a certain faith, an intimior intimo meo [‘something more inward than my inwardness’].”195 Analysis is reduced to assimilating the threat of the alien through the injunction to “turn your eyes inward, look into your depths, learn first to know yourself.” The problem here is the principle that “nothing has entered into you from without.” It naturalizes the unconscious into a matter of individual or collective inheritance, of heredity and biology, “ultimately nothing but the expression of somatic forces, on which the evolution of the species – and beyond that, of life itself – has left its indelible imprint.”196 “The invocation of phylogenesis, of the hereditary nature of drives and even of scenarios and fantasies,” Laplanche says, “comes to the fore every time psychoanalytic de-centering recedes from view.”197 At the end of the essay, Freud says: “The ego is not master in its own house.”198 “Certainly, the ego is not master of its own house,” Laplanche retorts, “but it is, after all, at home nonetheless.”199

Consequently, Laplanche insists on the un-homeliness of the unconscious – and he coins a neologism to emphasize the alterity, the radical alterity, of the

195 Laplanche, 67. 196 Laplanche, 81. See also footnote 93. 197 Laplanche, 81. 198 Freud, 143. 199 Laplanche, 67.

100 unconscious: “alien-ness” [étrangèreté].200 Emphasis is on the hyphen: not simply the sense of strangeness, but that of an intransigent stranger, of the other. If Freud had famously stated, “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden,” Laplanche states, “Wo Es war, wird (soll? muss?) immer noch Anderes sein”: There where there was id, there will be always and already the other.201 Laplanche argues for a re-reading of Freud

(despite Freud’s oscillations) that focuses on two facets for the de-centering of the

“I”: “The first is classical: the discovery of the unconscious, in so far as it is precisely not our center, as it is an ‘excentric’ center; the other facet, the seduction theory, is hidden but indispensable to the first for it maintains the unconscious in its alien-ness.”202 Through the theory of seduction, Laplanche proposes a different function for the analyst, a different relation between analyst and analysand. The analyst provokes the analysis not through the offer of interpretation, of truth. Indeed,

Laplanche says, again and again, analysis is to be characterized by “a radical refusal to know the good of its patient, to know the truth about his good.”203 Rather, the provocation of the analyst consists in the offer of seduction. The analyst is not the

200 See the editor’s note on the English translation of étrangèreté as alien-ness rather than stranger-ness: “The English ‘strange’ has a subjective dimension that is relative and reducible. Strangeness is in the eye of the beholder: the ‘stranger’ can become overtime familiar, whereas ‘ alien’ denotes an irreducible strangeness, the result of an external origin…The hyphenated form ‘alien-ness’ allows the reader to hear the noun in Laplanche’s neologism – étrangèreté – and distinguishes it from the usual abstraction ‘alienness’ – étrangeté,” Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, ed. John Flecher (London: Routledge, 1999), 62. 201 Laplanche, 83. 202 Laplanche, 62. “Indeed, if Freud is his own Copernicus, he is also his own Ptolemy….It is only in a schematic way that one might wish to date Freud’s ‘Ptolemaic’ going-astray from the famous letter of the 1897 equinox or turning-point, where the abandonment of the seduction theory is solemnly announced. In Freud, one should speak, at almost every period, of an alternation between relapses into Ptolemaism and resurgences of the Copernica, other- centered vision.” Laplanche, 60. 203 Laplanche, “Transference: Its Provocation by the Analyst,” 228.

101 representative of truth, but a representative of the other; not the bearer of a gaze that interprets and verifies, but a bearer of an enigma, an enigmatic message.

The function of the enigmatic message is “to address someone with no shared interpretive system, in a mainly non-verbal manner.”204 This concept counters a fundamental premise of both the determinist and the hermeneutic position: the presumption of a “shared interpretive system” between analyst and analysand. For these models, the authority of the analyst is established by his/her access to this system, the analyst’s knowledge of a language, moreover, a meaning, a truth that ought ideally be shared. Both positions assume the truth as an ideal and a norm. It is in the name of the truth, “the truth about the subject’s good,” that analysis is conceptualized as a practice of interpretation, of evaluation and correction, and as a technique of judgment. And the analyst is conceptualized as a doorkeeper to truth, a gate that ought to be accessible to all – but one in front of which the subject waits and waits, even till eternity, to be let the subject through, as in Franz Kafka’s parable of the subject before “the Law.”205 The problem with the debate about interpretation in psychoanalysis is its very terms. To choose either determinism or hermeneutics is a “choice” of what is the truth: objectivity or subjectivity, fact or fantasy, “perceptual reality” or “psychological reality.” For Laplanche, this is a false choice, “a trap.” He argues for “a third reality, that of the message, i.e., of the signifier in so far as it is addressed by someone to someone.”206 The question then is not what is the truth, but rather truth for whom, the question of the source and its addressee, of the subject and

204 Laplanche, “The Unfinished Copernican Revolution,” 79. 205 Franz Kafka, “Before the Law,” in Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 3-4. 206 Laplanche, “Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics,” 159.

102 the other. The other is the sender of a message, a message that neither the sender nor

I can comprehend, a message that is enigmatic for both the analyst and the analysand. It is not a meaning shared, but rather a meaning missed: What does it mean? What is it trying to tell me? What is it asking of me? Che vuoi?

If analysis is not to be a technique of judgment, “an entirely different conception of causality” is necessary. According to Laplanche, the object of analysis is “not history but actualized scenes and affects.”207 Subsequently, he compares the method of psychoanalysis to the method of not history, but archaeology and art history – or more precisely, the predecessors of the latter discipline, the rather disreputable figures of the collector, the traveler, and the pillager. “What our three characters,” Laplanche says, “have in common is without a doubt love of the object for itself, an object which is at one and same time beautiful, strange and lucrative. It is the search for the emotion connected with the object unearthed from the past, be it intact or partially reconstituted.”208 Benjamin also spoke of the collector as such. His example is the book collector’s passion for his books: “a relationship to objects which does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value – that is, their usefulness

– but studies and loves them as the scene, the stage, of their fate.”209 The collector is a “transient,” the one who travels from city to city in pursuit of the object and imbues each corner of the city with a tactical interest: “their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most

207 Laplanche, “The Unfinished Copernican Revolution,” 64. 208 Laplanche, “Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics,” 145. 209 Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Collecting,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927 - 1945, eds. Michael W. Jennings, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 487.

103 remote stationery store a key position.”210 All these pursuits, these “scenes,” are part and parcel of the seduction of the object, its enigma. In fact, a defining characteristic of the book collector is “the nonreading of books.”211 Books are not collected for their meaning, but rather for their non-meaning, that is, their resonance, voices that overwhelm the collector in a tide of “not thoughts, but images, memories.” If collecting is a mode of possession, it is one in which the subject does not possess the object, but rather the object possesses the subject. For the book collector, books are brought back to life to address him: “Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”212 However, Benjamin is aware “that night is coming for the type that

I am discussing here.”213 And Laplanche points to the modernization of the collector and the institutionalization of the discipline of archaeology/art history.

Institutionalization entails a shift in method: not the object for itself, but the object as a clue to its context, its function, its utilitarian or socio-cultural value. The institutionalization of archaeology/art history – and psychoanalysis – coincides with a disciplinary prioritization of “the most complete documentation, or the tidiest

210 Benjamin, 489. 211 Benjamin, 488. See also Roger Callois, “The Ultimate Bibliophilia,” 1963: “What is the bibliophile if not a person who values the book as object more than the quality of the text within? While people tend to think of these two tastes as complementary, to my mind they are in fact incompatible. Indeed, what must be done in order to scrutinize a book’s printed pages is a threat to its integrity as a physical object…Hence the book lover will keep his precious volume safe behind glass and take it out only on rare occasions: when he cannot sleep, or when the scent of ink and paper draws him to it, or when he longs to admire the perfection of typography, the layout of the pages, or the use of some novel font.” Roger Callois, “The Ultimate Bibilophilia” in Postwar French Though Volume II: Literary Debate, eds. Denis Hollier and Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: The New Press, 1999), 61. 212 Benjamin, 492. 213 Benjamin, 492. “I do know that night is coming for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio. But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.”

104 possible indexing of human phenomena”: “Its objects are now mere bundles of relations and techniques.”214

And yet, what of the affect of the object? What is the spectator’s relation to the object? What is the dynamics of an exhibition, for instance, a “scene” in which the affect of the object is “actualized”? As we walk through the exhibition, a plethora of maps, charts, and diagrams distract us. But, Laplanche says, “this entire route, so well signposted by historical reason, is in fact ‘magnetized’ by one thing: the wonderful object of the exhibition”:

This unique object, isolated…displayed in a casket of light, and,

preferably, in a separate sanctuary draped in black velvet, this object

usually made of an indestructible material, this gold object that

constitutes the main draw of the posters…this timeless object –

having journeyed through centuries and millennia to address itself

direct to us – this mask of Agamemnon, what does it want from me?

Che vuoi? 215

The spectator’s relation to the object is significant for it speaks to the dynamics of the scene of analysis, the relation between the analyst and the analysand: a scene of seduction, rather than interpretation.

For Laplanche, the analyst is not the interpreter of dreams, but rather “a director” and “a companion.”216 Indeed, Laplanche’s proposal is akin to Benjamin’s own proposal for a certain reciprocal relation between the apparatus and the actor –

214 Laplanche, 146. 215 Laplanche, 146-7. 216 Laplanche, “Transference: Its Provocation by the Analyst,” 227.

105 responsiveness not of introspection, but rather of fragmentation and alertness, sensitivity, attunement. The analyst provokes the subject to analyze him- or herself; the analyst must also be responsive throughout the process of analysis. Furthermore, analysis is neither the reconstruction nor the construction of a coherent and complete narrative of the subject, but rather is defined as a method of deconstruction of inherited narratives, inherited “truths,” about the subject’s relation to oneself and others: “It ana-lyses, that is, it dissolves.”217 “The aim here is not to restore a more intact past (whatever would one do with that?),” Laplanche says, “but to allow in turn a deconstruction of the old, insufficient, partial and erroneous construction.”218

As a counterbalance to this deconstruction, “this force of unbinding,” the analyst also offers constancy, “the constancy of a presence, of a solicitude, the flexible but attentive constancy of a frame.”219 The relation between the analyst and the analysand is not an intersubjective relation of correspondence and coincidence. It is not a correspondence between two subjects, two individuals, two monads, as if there is “a shared interpretive system” between the two. It is not the coincidence of one reflecting the other, as if the aim of analysis is for the analysand to reflect the self of the analyst, that is, to accept, internalize and verbalize the truth of the analyst. “What is offered is a place for speech, for free speech,” Laplanche says, “but not properly speaking, the place for an exchange.”220 The analyst does not approach the analysand

217 Laplanche, 227. The deconstruction is a “re-opening”: “A re-opening, because the entire process of the constitution of the subject takes place through closure, which is, precisely, repression, the formation of topographical agencies, the internalization of the other and its enclosure in the form of the unconscious.” Laplanche, 226. 218 Laplanche, “Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics,” 145. 219 Laplanche, 227. 220 Laplanche, 227-8.

106 as a person, but as a sphinx, a bearer of an enigmatic message. Neither a conversation nor a confession, analysis is a game of charades and of seduction. And it is precisely in the manner of a sphinx, as Rouch would say, that the analyst is able to play the game, “to throw himself into a ritual, integrate himself with it, and follow it step-by-step.”221 The aim of analysis is not Oedipus’ famed answer to the sphinx,

“That being is man” – “Enlightenment’s stereotyped message.”222 Rather, it is the offer of the question; the aim is the game itself.

Laplanche also compares analysis to the task of mourning – a significant comparison as it allows us to address again the sequence of Marceline’s walk from the Place de la Concorde to Les Halles in Chronicle of a Summer: Marceline’s mourning of the loss of her father. Psychoanalysis defines mourning as “the Lösung of the libido.”223 The English translation of Lösung is “detachment” – a translation that Freud seems to confirm as he describes the process of mourning as the cutting of ties. Mourning proves to be a problem, “a riddle,” for Freud: “But why is it that this detachment of libido from its objects should be such a painful process is a mystery to us…We only see that libido clings to its objects and will not renounce those that are lost even when a substitute lies ready at hand.”224 However, Laplanche calls attention to the connotations of the German verb “lösen”: to loosen, to unbind, to dissolve.

221 Rouch, “On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer,” 99. 222 Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, “The Concept of Enlightenment” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schimd Noerr (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2002), 4. 223 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia (1917)” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914-1916):On the History of Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 237-58. 224 Sigmund Freud, “On Transience (1916),” quoted in Jean Laplanche, “Time and the Other” in Essays on Otherness, ed. John Flecher (London: Routledge, 1999), 249-50.

107 Mourning then is not detachment, but rather “disentanglement” – disentanglement not only from the object or the memory of the object, but more importantly, from the message of the object:

For the person in mourning, that message has never been adequately

understood, never listened to enough. Mourning is hardly ever

without the question: what would he be saying now? What would he

have said? Mourning is hardly ever without regret or remorse for not

having been able to speak with the other enough, for not having heard

what he had to say.225

Laplanche turns to the classic case of Homer’s Penelope. He accentuates the

Greek verb analuein: to analyze, to unweave. “By day she wove a great fabric; And by night, she analyzed it”226:

We are told in the manifest tale: a faithful and wise spouse, she

wishes to get rid of her suitors, and she weaves with the sole aim of

unweaving, in other words to gain time until her Ulysses returns. One

can equally well suppose, however, the reverse: that perhaps she only

unweaves in order to weave, to be able to weave a new tapestry. It

would thus be a case of mourning, mourning for Ulysses. But

Penelope does not cut threads, as in the Freudian theory of mourning;

she patiently unpicks them, to be able to compose them again in a

225 Laplanche, “Time and the Other,” 254. 226 Homer, The Odyssey, quoted in Laplanche, 251.

108 different way…One can imagine that one evening the new cloth, for a

while at least, will not be unwoven.227

To analyze here is to disentangle, to unweave in order to weave, again and again, not for the return of the master, but rather to mourn that the loved one is no longer. For

Laplanche, mourning could be perceived as “the very model of psychoanalysis: unweaving so that new fabric can be woven, disentangling to allow the formation of new knots”228: “Analysis is first and foremost a method of deconstruction (ana-lysis), with the aim of clearing the way for a new construction, which is the task of the analysand.”229

If mourning is detachment, then the aim of mourning is to forget. Forgetting is not merely I do not remember; it is also I detach myself from the past, so that I can recollect it as if it is dead and done, so that I can substitute it for a spectacle of the past, a monument, a museum or even a film. However, if mourning is disentanglement, then the aim of mourning is to remember. I unbind myself from the past, but I hear it beckon; the past is preserved in the present as a voice that echoes, a memory brought back to life to address me, a living memory. If we turn to another tale of Ulysses, perhaps this voice could be compared to that of the Sirens: “Their allurement is that of losing oneself in the past.”230 For Theodor Adorno and Max

Horkheimer, the Sirens’ song is a challenge to “a fixed order of time”: “The tripartite division [of past-present-future] is intended to liberate the present moment from the power of the past by banishing the latter beyond the absolute boundary of the

227 Laplanche, 251-2. 228 Laplanche, “Time and the Other,” 254. 229 Laplanche, “Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics,” 165. 230 Adorno & Horkheimer, 25.

109 irrecoverable and placing it, as usable knowledge, in the service of the present.”231

Ulysses escapes the seduction of the Sirens by binding himself to the mast of his ship; thereby, he detaches himself from the Sirens, he detaches and reifies the beauty from the affect of their song, so that “their lure is neutralized as a mere object of contemplation, as art,” as spectacle.232 However, in the provocation of Rouch’s camera, its creation of “an intolerable mise-en-scène,” I would argue that what we hear – and see – is a scene that actualizes the power of the past. The camera provokes and accompanies Marceline’s mourning. As Marceline walks, she loosens herself from the stranglehold of her past, her trauma, and she weaves a new tapestry in which the past is part and parcel of her present, our present. As the camera moves, it destabilizes us from the security and systematic amnesia of our spectacular society.

It unweaves in order to weave Marceline’s past into a new composition that preserves and punctuates the pace of her walk/talk, a new mise-en-scène in which

Marceline’s voice echoes. And the function of her voice is that of the enigmatic message: “to address someone with no shared interpretive system, in a mainly non- verbal manner,” that is, to address us, the audience, to lure and lead us astray.

231 Adorno & Horkheimer, 25. “Measures like those taken on Odysseus’s ship in face of the Sirens are a prescient allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment,” 27. For Adorno and Horkheimer, it underscores not only the neutralization of art due to its separation from praxis, but also the separation of praxis as part and parcel of the division of labor: Ulysses as the representative of the bourgeoisie, the rowers of Ulysses’ ship as the workers with wax in their ears. “Just as he cannot give way to the lure of self-abandonment, as owner he also forfeits participation in work and finally even control over it, while his companions, despite their closeness to tings, cannot enjoy their work because it is performed under compulsion, in despair, with their senses forcibly stopped. The servant is subjugated in body and soul, the master regresses,” 27. 232 Adorno & Horkheimer, 27.

110 In Debord’s film, Critique of Separation (Critique de la separation, 1961), there is a sequence in which a film-still of a radio-telegrapher is followed by a helicopter aerial shot of the Place de la Concorde. We hear Debord’s voice: “After all the ‘dead time’ [temps mort], all the lost time [temps perdu], there remain these endlessly traversed postcard landscapes; this distance between each and everyone.”

And a subtitle is superimposed over the images and the voice (Fig. 8): “Do you hear me? Do you hear me? Answer me, Answer me…Over.”233

IV.

According to the film historian Erik Barnouw, “Cinéma-vérité was committed to a paradox: that artificial circumstances could bring hidden truth to the surface.”234 However, this presumed-paradox of cinéma-vérité is paradoxical only if we abide by “the model of the true” – a model that distinguishes pro-filmic reality as external, objective and true, and filmed reality as internal, subjective and false (or

233 Guy Debord, Critique de la séparation, 1961. I have modified Knabb’s translation. Note: Rather than a translation of temps mort as “empty moments”(Knabb), a literal translation of “dead time” is perhaps more appropriate for its various connotations. For instance, “dead time” is the time after each event during which the system is not able to record another event – for example, the pause after the flash of the camera. Thus, it also refers to “suspended moments.” 234 Barnouw sets up a classic dichotomy within the new forms of documentary filmmaking, a dichotomy between direct cinema and cinéma-vérité, where the former positions the filmmaker as the observer and the latter positions the filmmaker as the catalyst of a situation: “The direct cinema documentarist took his camera to a situation of tension and waited hopefully for a crisis; the Rouch version of cinéma-vérité tried to precipitate one. The direct cinema artist aspired to invisibility; the Rouch cinéma-vérité artist was often an avowed participant. The direct cinema artist played the role of uninvolved bystander; the cinéma- vérité artist espoused that of provocateur. Direct cinema found its truth in events available to the camera. Cinéma-vérité was committed to a paradox: that artificial circumstances could bring hidden truth to the surface.” Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of Non-Fiction Film (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 254-5.

111 rather of artifice, of art). I would argue that this distinction is precisely what is questioned in the documentaries of Rouch and Debord. The aim here is not to underscore yet again the impossibility of an unmediated access to pro-filmic reality, i.e. all perception of reality is mediated and therefore the quest for the truth is but an aspiration. Rather, the aim is to question this aspiration itself. As Deleuze would say, to problematize the impossibility of access to the “raw real” is a “false problem.”235

Indeed, no intervention of the camera is neutral. The question is why we problematize this as a problem – and what technologies are developed and deployed to satisfy this aspiration for the raw real, the aspiration for “the truth.”236

The difference between Morin and Rouch regarding the aim of cinéma-vérité, especially the difference between “commensality” and “pédovision,” forcefully comes to the fore in their conflict over the process of editing Chronicle of a Summer.

How to extract a film of about an hour and half from more than twenty-five hours of footage is not merely a technical question, but a question of meaning.

Morin proposes a method of structuring the film according to specific themes. The themes would speak to the question of “How do you live?” – for Morin, specifically a question of the alienation of labor, of leisure, of life, especially the alienation of the subjective dimension of one’s relation to oneself and others, one’s

235 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 151. 236 Benjamin would call this aspiration for the raw real: “the Blue Flower in the land of technology.” “The equipment-free aspect of reality has here become the height of artifice, and the vision of immediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of technology.” Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 116. The “Blue Flower” is a reference to German Romanticism and its emphasis on auratic perception, on Schein (“light” or rather “glow”; “appearance,” “semblance”).

112 thoughts, fantasies, feelings and desires.237 The structure of the film is to categorize each character according to his/her social status (class, gender, race and ethnicity). It is to present the character as a representative of a community; what he or she says is a specific variation on the general question of “How do you live?” The film would construct not a mere collection of individualities, but rather a unified whole that assimilates individuals as integral parts of the whole: “I would like to talk about individual characters in order to go on to a more general problem and then come back from the general problem to the individual.”238 The film counters the atomization of society and the increasing isolation of the individual – of especial significance for France in the midst of “les trentes glorieuses,” the so-called Golden

Age of capitalism, as well as a France ever more divided due to the Algerian War

(1954-62). The film also counters the formation of a whole that is not unifying, but totalizing, a whole that negates the individual and reduces him/her to a symbol: “I would say only that the meaning of the film is clear if one conceives of it as contesting both the reigning values of bourgeois society and Stalinist or pseudo-

237 Morin, “Chronicle of a Film”, 232. “It is an experiment in cinematographic interrogation. ‘How do you live?’ That is to say, not only the way of life (housing, work, leisure) but the style of life, the attitude people have toward themselves and toward others, their means of conceiving their most profound problems and solutions to those problems.” No doubt, Debord and the SI would agree with Morin’s assessment that capital’s reach is no longer limited to the realm of labor and the sites of production, but it has expanded and extended, penetrated deeply, to the sites of consumption and the realm of thought, fantasy, feeling, desire: “Along with the exploitation of man, the passions, compensations, and habits that were its products must also wither away. Now, we must define desires appropriate to today’s potentialities.” Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 42. 238 Morin, Interview with France Observateur, 252.

113 progressive stereotypes.”239 Emphasis is to be placed on the construction of a

“mosaic-type montage” that concentrates a “collective halo” around the characters of the film and their plurality of positions: “I would not, in the end, like to see everything reduced to purely individual stories, but rather there should be a dimension, not so much of the crowd, but of the global problem of life in Paris, of civilization, and so forth.”240

For Morin, “commensality” is both a method of filming and editing – and a principle for the formation of a certain type of collective: the collective as a unified whole. If the relation between filmmaker and subjects of the film is an intersubjective one of “free circulation and exchanges,” Morin imagines the modality of the relations within a collective as one of mingling, mixing and blending together, namely, “communication”: “We have gambled on the possibility of using cinema as a means of communication, and the therapeutic idea of our plan is that all communication can be liberation…And I reaffirm this principle: things that are hidden, held back, silenced, must be spoken”241 Liberation is to be in the form of confession, “the hermeneutics of the self.” Cinéma-vérité-as-confession not only provokes the subject to speak of oneself, but it also produces the gaze of the audience – and as we noted earlier in the chapter, there is a “collective halo” around the audience too, the auratic presence of the audience as both absent and present, no one and everyone. For Morin, the aim of Chronicle of a Summer is a “final encounter”:

239 Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 262. 240 Morin, Interview with France Observateur, 252. 241 Morin, “Chronicle of a Film,” 260.

114 I had dreamed of a sort of confrontation in a large room after

projecting the film, with multiple cameras and microphones recording

not only the reactions to the film but also the conversations that would

start up spontaneously and according to the affinities among the

different characters. A big final scene where the scales would fall and

consciousness would be awakened, where we would take a new “oath

of the tennis court” to construct a new life.242

The end of the film is to be the beginning of another assertion of the sovereignty of the people, another declaration of the rights of man. Morin’s dream of a “final encounter” derives in part from his conceptualization of the cinematic apparatus. In The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man: An Essay in Social Anthropology

(1956), he underscores the unity of film and spectator:

Starting from this whirl of lights, two dynamisms, two systems of

participation, that of the screen and that of the spectator, are

exchanged, flow into one another, complete each other and join in a

single dynamism. The film is that moment where two psyches, that

incorporated in the film and that of the spectator, unite.243

The spectator’s participation is one of projection and identification. The screen is a mirror upon which I project my desires; I internalize and identify with the mirror’s reflection as an image of myself. If film provokes our projection and identification,

242 Morin, 248. 243 Edgar Morin, The Cinema, or The Imaginary Man: An Essay in Social Anthropology, trans. Lorraine Mortimer (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005), 201. One could argue that Morin’s book presents a precursor to apparatus theories of the 1970’s, such as that of Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz.

115 Morin argues, it is because the cinematic apparatus “doubles” our own internal apparatus: “This symbiosis is possible only because it unites two currents of the same nature…Nascent mind, total mind, the cinema is so to speak a sort of mind- machine or machine for thinking.”244 Film not only reflects the world, but our minds: the psyche of the film = the psyche of the spectator. Furthermore, film reflects that of which we are conscious and unconscious. It externalizes the unconscious to put it within our reach, our gaze, and hence, our unconscious is offered up to our interpretation and verification: “The cinema makes us understand not only theater, poetry, and music, but also the internal theater of the mind: dreams, imaginings, representations: this little cinema that we have in our head.”245 The cinematic apparatus is attributed with the power of hermeneutics – and the authority of the apparatus is founded upon the following assumption: the universality of the language of cinema. According to Morin, the language of cinema is not only a “shared interpretive system,” but also a shared affective system: “The secret messages, the innermost depths of the soul are there, alienated, tapped in this [cinematic] imaginary that expresses universal needs as well as those of the twentieth century.”246 Film expresses a universal and contemporary need, that is, “the fundamental need: to make man the subject of the world.”247 For Morin, the need for the centered subject

244 Morin, 201-2. 245 Morin, 203. 246 Morin, 217. According to Morin, the universality of the language of cinema is exemplified in the case of “children” and “archaic people,” those presumably without a shared language and yet with an almost intuitive, natural knowledge and desire of cinema: “What is important is not only that Africans or children understand film, but that they love it. What is important is that the cinema is awakened, reawakened, or attracted to it a need.” Morin, 197. 247 Morin, 209.

116 is essential; it is “human,” “anthropo-historical,” “onto-phylogenetic.” Thus, the question here is not “What is cinema?” but “Why, cinema?” or rather, “Why cinema could not but be – for man?” In short: for Morin, film doubles the “I”; the double is but a projection of the self. The claim is tautological: it establishes a reflective relation between film and spectator, an equation between cinema and “the little cinema we have in our head”; so, it is all too natural and necessary for us to internalize the images on the screen…because it is after all an image of ourselves.

And the authority of the claim is founded upon a presumption of a truth, the truth of the subject’s being.

For Rouch, however, the double is not a projection of the self, but rather “I” am the projection of the double, the double as the other: “I is another” [Je est un autre].248 Emphasis is not on the subject’s being. Rather, it is on the subject’s becoming, moreover, the subject’s becoming other. For the editing of Chronicle of a

Summer, Rouch proposes a method of approximation, that is, to successively cut the footage till it approaches the limit of an hour and a half. It is important to preserve the order of filming as much as possible: “My position is the following: The interest of this story is the film; it’s the chronology and evolution of the people as a function

248 Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, ed. Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), 129. “In calling his film Moi, un Noir, Jean Rouch, who is white like Rimbaud, like him is saying I is another.” “I is another” is from Arthur Rimbaud’s letter to Paul Demeny (May 15, 1871), the “voyant” letter: “[For I is another.] If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes on to the stage in a leap. If old imbeciles had not discovered only the false meaning of the Ego, we would not have had to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, for time immemorial, have accumulated the results of their one-eyed intellects by claiming to be authors!” Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966), 305-6.

117 of the film.”249 The order of filming is the function of the film: the film provokes the subject to analyze oneself and accompanies the process of analysis. The order of filming is “the chronology and evolution” of the subject: the passage of the subject is one of seduction, of luring and leading astray, one’s becoming other. Thus, Rouch exclaims, “It is almost impossible to upset the filming order.”250 Furthermore, the film is to follow the start and end of the summer of 1960 – for Rouch, the “gamble” is not for “communication” (as the in case of Morin), but to chronicle what could be a significant summer for the history of France and decolonization, a decisive moment for the outcome of the Algerian War as well as the Congo Crisis (1960-1965). The film would capture the significance of the summer through its “repercussions” on the subjects of the film – to see and hear how history echoes in “the passage of a few persons through a rather brief unity of time.” The moment, however, did not prove to be a decisive one, and the end of the film is as inconclusive as the end of the summer: “It was a gamble; we lost…Nothing remains of this except the Algeria-

Congo discussion and the title, Chronicle of a Summer.”251

“Pédovision” then is both a method of filming and editing – and a method of analysis, of the de-centering of the “I”, not only the “I” of the subjects of the film, but also those of the filmmaker and the audience. Earlier in the chapter, I mentioned how the movements of Marceline and “the walking camera” are superimposed over each other; how each movement constitutes a sheet of time, the Paris of Marceline’s past and the Paris of our present, which influences and infects the other. However, it

249 Rouch, Interview with France Observateur, 251. 250 Rouch, 251. 251 Jean Rouch, Footnotes to Edgar Morin’s “Chronicle of a Film,” in Ciné-Ethnography: Jean Rouch, ed. Steven Feld, (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2003), 264.

118 is not a sequence where, as Morin would argue, the two movements are “exchanged, flow into one another, complete each other and join in a single dynamism.”252 Here, to influence is not to project and identify the two movements: the objective image and the subjective image, the point of view of the camera and the point of view of the character. Rather, to influence is to confront, even to contradict – and to contaminate: the blurring of the two types of image, the two perspectives. “Objective and subjective images lose their distinction, but also their identification,” Deleuze says, “in favor of a new circuit where they are wholly replaced, or contaminate each other, or are decomposed and recomposed.”253 The aim is not for assimilation, an

“Ego = Ego form of identity.” “The Ego = Ego form of identity (or its degenerate form, them = them) ceases to be valid for the characters and for the film-maker,”

Deleuze says of Rouch, “What allows itself to be glimpsed instead, by profound degrees, is Rimbaud’s ‘I is another’ [Je est un autre].”254 The aim is not to construct a collective memory, a “collective halo,” but rather to bring forth the question of a memory of several – or even a memory of one in which my memory is not mine to own but a memory that is perceived and experienced as if it comes from the other.

The answer is not “communication” – nor even the difficulty of communication. The difficulty of communication is the question. And the aim of the film is the offer of the question, the riddle, the enigma.

This is precisely how Rouch’s cinéma-vérité, especially his extensive documentaries in Africa, forcefully critique colonial logic. The films question what

252 Morin, 201. 253 Deleuze, 149. 254 Deleuze, 153.

119 Gayatri Spivak calls “the epistemological violence” of colonialism: the colonialist’s quest for “consolidating the Self of Europe by obliging the native to cathect the space of the Other on his home ground...by obliging them to domesticate the alien as

Master.”255 Colonialism is a history of how the West identifies itself as the subject.

And its violence is a system of power, knowledge, interests and desires that displace the colonized subject and compel one to naturalize one’s colonization as norm, as

“truth,” to see and know oneself as the projection of “the Self of Europe” – the Poor, the Female, the Black in relation to the Rich, the Male, the White of Europe, that is, the “them” to the “us” of the West. Spivak asks: “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Her question underscores the difficulty of the colonized subject to speak in one’s own name – and it allows us to critique a position that automatically prescribes agency to those who speak for themselves, a position that seeks liberation in the form of communication or confession. Rouch’s films are not an attempt at communication, which presupposes and necessitates the imposition of one, dominant, “shared” interpretive system. Rather, the films call forth an enigma that refuses this imposition and the consolidation of “the Ego = Ego form of identity (or its degenerate form, them = them)”; an enigma that insists upon the “alien-ness” [étrangèreté] of the filmmaker and the subjects of his film, the de-centering of the self, one’s becoming other.256 “No one has done so much,” Deleuze says of Rouch, “to put the West to flight, to flee himself, to break with a cinema of ethnology and say Moi, un Noir.”257

255 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward A History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 211. 256 “That is one of the essential questions of all of my films: how can cultures survive and continue to be transmitted when they come into contact with another culture as consuming as our own? For example, after The Lion Hunters, a couple of English filmmakers reproached

120 For Deleuze, Rouch offers not only a new mode of story, but also a new mode of political storytelling – a political cinema that does not presuppose the unity of “the people” (“them = them,” “us = us”), but brings forth a question: “the people no longer exist, or not yet…the people are missing.”258 There is a recognition that the dominant mode of politics is a technique of judgment: a struggle over the claims of “truth”; a fight for the authority, the “right,” to define what is the truth, the norm, the good. Thus, there is a proposal for a different politics, a different political cinema. And, here, we can pose the question of Debord and the SI’s politics, especially the critique of “the colonization of everyday life.”259 Whether it is a struggle for another truth, a truth other than that which is imposed upon us through the spectacle and therefore, a politics of hermeneutics, of discovery and de- me for having left the hunters wearing tennis shoes, or for not having taken away their blue jeans. I, on the other hand, find admirable the introduction of our culture in the middle of other thought systems with which it has nothing in common. Another example: A few years ago in Niger, a good typist knew how to type in rhythm; he used the tabulator pedal like that of a bass, and typed with a beat. As the Nigerians said, in the office of a good typist, everyone is happy. And it’s the same thing for filling a tire: these are work and music at the same time. When I made Jaguar and Moi, un Noir, it was to show this difficult contact between a traditional culture and a so-called industrial culture; and I had no response but these two fiction films to this essential problem in Africa today.” Rouch, “Ciné- Anthropology,” 159. 257 Deleuze, 223. 258 Deleuze, 220. “Art, and especially cinematographic art, must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people. The moment the master, or the colonizer, proclaims ‘There have never been people here,’ the missing people are a becoming, they invent themselves, in shanty towns and camps, or in ghettoes, in new conditions of struggle to which a necessarily political art must contribute.” Deleuze, 217. 259 Kristin Ross urges that we take seriously the catchphrase of “the colonization of everyday life” – the story of France’s “headlong, dramatic, and breathless” modernization and the story of decolonization. According to Ross, the “interior colonialism” is part and parcel of how France consolidates a new middle class, a national middle class, and how it separates itself from its colonies, “both within and without”: “this is the movement of the great cordoning off of the immigrants, their removal to the suburbs in a massive reworking of the social boundaries of Paris and the other large French cities.” Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 11.

121 concealment, of recovery, restoration, revelation. Or, whether it is a fight according to a different criteria, that is, to critique the manner in which the spectacle imposes a truth upon us, the sovereignty of the position from which the spectacle speaks to us and in our name – thus, a politics that is not that of truth, but how is truth articulated, imposed, enacted upon and for whom. I would argue that the method of détournement in Debord’s films is one of disentanglement, rather than detachment: not to critique the sovereignty of the spectacle in order to (re)establish the sovereignty of Debord or the spectator, but to disentangle, to unweave in order to weave, again and again – not for the return of the master, but rather that the master is no longer. The aspiration is not for the truth, but for a different relation to truth, a transformation, a metamorphosis, a becoming other. As Deleuze declares, “the new object of political cinema: putting into trance, putting into crisis.”260 Over shots of the crisis in Congo and Algeria, which further rupture the fitful rhythm of the film, we hear Debord’s voice:

This dominant equilibrium [of the spectacle] is brought back into

question each time unknown people try to live differently. But it was

always far away. We learn of it through the papers and newscasts. We

remain outside it, relating to it as just another spectacle. We are

separated from it by our own nonintervention. And end up being

rather disappointed in ourselves. At what moment was choice

postponed. When did we miss our chance? 261

260 Deleuze, 219. 261 Guy Debord, Critique de la séparation, 1961.

122

V.

For Rouch, there is no “final encounter,” but a series of chance encounters, moments of “grace,” which bring about a tableau, an overwhelming and irresistible tableau that asks of us, Che vuoi?

I know there are places in the world where I walk around and I

suddenly come upon this peculiar perspective: “grace,” a grace which

depends on a certain lighting, which depends on a certain mood,

which depends on a certain season. So when I make films, it’s sort of

like that. I would like to paint with movement, with color, moments

like those that ask questions of the viewer and give no answer. It is up

to them to find it, just as I found it when I was my own first viewer,

looking through the viewfinder of my camera.262

An example of a chance encounter would be the scene of Marceline emerging from

Les Halles – or a scene from Moi, un Noir (1958) when “Rouch, kneeling beside [the characters] with the camera on his shoulder, suddenly straightens up slowly and lifts

à la Anthony Mann, his knees serving as the crane, to frame Abidjan, O! Abidjan of

262 Rouch, 152-3.

123 the lagoons, on the other side of the river.”263 (“I love it,” Godard exclaims.) For

Rouch, these chance encounters are the privileged moments of becoming other,

“ciné-transe,” an abandonment of the self through the mediation of the apparatus:

“With a ciné-eye and a ciné-ear, I am a ciné-Rouch in a state of ciné-trance in the process of ciné-filming. So that is the joy of filming, the ciné-pleasure.”264 The filmmaker here is an analyst, the analyst as the bearer of an enigmatic message. In this figure of the filmmaker-analyst, as Laplanche would say, we can see the disreputable figures of the collector, the traveler, and the pillager. Moreover, could we not also see the even more disreputable figure of the Situationist – the SI with their method of stealing from the spectacle, détournement, and especially their method of dérive?

For the SI, the dérive is one of their various attempts at “a new manner of deportment.” The dérive is defined as “a passionate uprooting” [dépaysement passionel] through the hurried change of environments.”265 It is a strategy of losing oneself in the city, of the pursuit of chance encounters that bring about “situations,” that is, “the concrete construction of temporary settings of life and their transformation into a higher, passionate nature.” 266 The situation is a mise-en-scène, as Rouch would say, which effects a “spontaneous sacrilege,” a breaking of established manners of “deportment,” of how one is supposed to inhabit a specific

263 Godard, 134. 264 Rouch, 150. 265 Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations…,” 43. For a more extensive and incisive commentary on the Situationist dérive: Tom McDonough, “Delirious Paris: Mapping as a Paranoiac-Critical Activity,” Grey Room 19 (Spring, 2005), 6-21; also Tom McDonough, “Situationist Space” October 67 (Winter, 1994), 58-77. 266 Debord, 44.

124 time-space, how one is supposed to relate to oneself and others. The situation then is also a scene that actualizes the affect of the object.267 In the case of the dérive, the object is the city itself, specific sites of Paris such as the aforementioned Les

Halles.268 In Debord’s film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather

Brief Unity of Time (Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps, 1959), there is a sequence in which “somewhat apathetic and tired- sounding voices” accompany the shots of Les Halles by night and at dawn (Fig. 9):

“There was the fatigue and the cold of morning in this much-traversed labyrinth, like an enigma that we had to resolve. It was a trompe-l’oeil reality through which we had to discover the potential richness of what was really there.” 269 Les Halles offer themselves as trompe-l’oeil – not an illusion, but a lure, as Lacan would say, that which seems to be other than it is or rather to be the other and thereby incites the

267 Rather than “setting,” I propose that “scene” is a more appropriate term for the “situation” – it not only underscores the temporality of a situation,” but also deflects any residual undertones of Existentialism in the concept of the “situation” (a concept that derives from Jean-Paul Sartre.) 268 For more on the specificity of the such privileged sites, see Tom McDonough, “Situationist Space”; also see Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.) 269 Guy Debord, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps, 1959. See Tom McDonough, “Delirious Paris: Mapping as a Paranoiac-Critical Activity” for the hallucinatory, obsessive and critical implications of the SI’s fascination for such trompe-l’oeil realities – the trompe-l’oeil architecture of a film set as “critical alternatives to a reigning postwar functionalism.” McDonough argues for a comparison between the SI’s systematic strategies of mapping (such as the dérive) and Salvador Dali’s strategy of critical paranoia, that is, “to systematize confusion and thus to help to discredit completely the world of reality”: “It was the task of Dali’s paranoiac-criticism and of Situationist dérive alike to induce that hallucinatory state, to adopt the obsessional neurotic’s belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and desires, in order to momentarily assert the possibility of radical change in the form of a world fully accommodated to the subject.” McDonough, 16.

125 subject with the question of Che vuoi?270 According to the narrators of On the

Passage, Les Halles are part and parcel of the setting of “the diminutive unhappiness of the petit bourgeoisie” – a scene that Zola had so vibrantly and viciously described as “the belly of Paris” in 1873, the site of Haussmanization and the figure of the

Second Empire’s rapacious consumer society:

They seemed like some satiated beast, embodying Paris itself, grown

enormously fat, and silently supporting the Empire…Les Halles were

the shopkeeper’s belly, the belly of respectable petit-bourgeois

people, bursting with contentment and well-being, shining in the sun,

and declaring that everything was for the best, since respectable

people had never before grown so wonderfully fat.271

“Respectable people…What bastards!”: the last line of Zola’s novel.272 For Zola’s protagonist, through his passage from the start to end of the novel, the markets metamorphose into “a huge ossuary, a place of death, littered with the remains of things that had once been alive, a charnel house reeking with foul smells and putrefaction.”273 Les Halles in Debord’s film are also “a huge ossuary,” a bleak landscape caught in “the fatigue and the cold of morning.” There are but faint

270 “What is it that attracts and satisfies us in trompe-l’oeil? When is it that it captures our attention and delights us? At the moment when, by a mere shift of our gaze, we are able to realize that the representation does not move with the gaze and that is merely a trompe- l’oeil. For it appears at that moment as something other than it seemed, or rather it now seems to be that something else.” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 112. 271 Émile Zola, The Belly of Paris, trans. Brian Nelson (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 124-5. 272 Zola, 275. 273 Zola, 189.

126 reverberations of “the mighty awakening” and the teeming life amidst which Zola’s protagonist began his walk through Les Halles. In On the Passage, the landscape of

Les Halles speaks of the relentlessness of capital’s reach, the site of another

Haussmanization as well as the figure of the Fifth Republic’s own rapacious consumer society – the reign of the spectacle. And it also speaks of the SI’s own history, “where a few people put into practice…a total critique of society and its ideal of happiness.”

To account for the society of the spectacle through an account of one’s own history is a characteristic of all of Debord’s films. This recurring, reflexive gaze onto one’s past is not that of nostalgia – as is too often said in descriptions of Debord’s films. Rather, I would argue that it is Debord’s analysis of oneself. “Analysis is a movement towards the past, a going back over,” Laplanche says, “What should be added emphatically, however, it is a going back over which dissolves, and not a going back to the so-called ultimate formula of my being.”274 The going back over in

Debord’s film is not for being, but for becoming, that is, becoming other: “I is another.” Or, as Deleuze said of Foucault’s own going back over: “Thought thinks its own history (the past), but in order to free itself from what it thinks (the present) and be able finally to ‘think otherwise’ (the future).” 275 In a sequence from Critique of

Separation, Debord states:

The function of cinema is to present an isolated, false coherence,

whether dramatic or documentary, as a substitute for an absent

communication and activity. To demystify documentary cinema it is

274 Laplanche, “Time and the Other,” 258. 275 Deleuze, Foucault, 98.

127 necessary to dissolve what is called its subject [Il faut dissoudre ce

que l’on appelle son sujet]. 276

As the art historian Tom McDonough argues, “Debord played on the double meaning of the term ‘subject,’ suggesting the need to break up both the carefully circumscribed subject matter of the typical documentary film as well as its existential guarantor, the coherent ego of its author.”277 Debord’s statement accompanies the sequence of a slow, steady 360-degree pan shot of the Plateau Saint-Merri, another neglected space at the center of Paris – a site dubbed with the disreputable title of

“îlot insalubre n°1” in 1906, demolished then forgotten, till the rise of the Centre

Pompidou in 1977. The deliberate tone of the narrator’s voice and the movement of the camera are juxtaposed with the march of François Couperin’s music echoing against the aloof fronts of buildings. And, as if by chance, in the far, far background, we see an almost obscure figure of a boy on his bicycle, weaving his way around the space, tottering on the edge of the frame of our vision, seemingly luring or being led by the camera (Fig. 10). A subtitle is superimposed over the entire sequence, a quotation from Dante: “Midway on the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark forest, where the right way was lost.”

276 Guy Debord, Critique de la séparation, 1961. Here, I have followed Tom McDonough’s translation. See next footnote. 277 Tom McDonough, “Calling from the Inside: Filmic Topologies of the Everyday,” Grey Room 26 (Winter, 2007), 19. McDonough argues that Debord’s film, Critique of Separation, is a response, specifically a refutation of Rouch and Morin’s film, Chronicle of a Summer. For a reading of Chronicle of a Summer, McDonough focuses on Morin’s method and aim for the film – and I would agree that Debord would have been critical of Morin’s participation.

128 Voice 2: Once again, morning in the same streets. Once again the

fatigue of so many similarly passed nights. It is a walk that has lasted

a long time.

Voice 1: Really hard to drink any more.

A Blank White Screen. 278

278 Guy Debord, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps, 1959.

129 Chapter 3

“Close-Up”

These people also scorned “the subjective profundity.” The only thing that interested them was a satisfactory concrete expression of their own lives.

Guy Debord279

How can one render the inside? Precisely by staying prudently outside.

Jean-Luc Godard280

“Why is this absurd picture here?”281: In Debord’s film, Critique of

Separation [Critique de la séparation] (1961), there is a shot that seems to function as a group photograph of four members of the SI (Fig. 11). But it is a curious shot.

There is no sense of depth – the four are pushed up against the wall, their elbows resting on the bottom edge of the frame as if it were a table or a bar; each person is positioned in equal distance to the other, side-by-side, not eye-to-eye, and no one meets each other’s look, much less ours. Furthermore, they are pushed down so to speak, compressed into less than one-fourth of the plane. And a painting looms over their heads, covering almost all of the composition – an absurd picture of a

279 Guy Debord, Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps, 1959. When quoting dialogue from Debord’s films, I refer to the scripts in Guy Debord, Complete Cinematic Works: Scripts, Stills, Documents, ed. Ken Knabb (Oakland, CA; AK Press, 2003) 280 Quoted in Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, “Nana is an Animal: My Life to Live/Vivre sa Vie (1962)” in Speaking about Godard (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1998), 15. 281 Luis Buñuel, Las Hurdes: Land without Bread (1933).

130 hyperbolically bucolic countryside; in a word, kitsch. According to Milan Kundera, kitsch is an ideal, a representation of a world without contradictions: “Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”282 It is according to this sense of kitsch, “the second tear,” we could claim that the curious shot performs a parody of the function of the spectacle, its imposition of an image of unity, a false unity, “for what the spectacle expresses is the total practice of one particular economic and social formation.”283 The film cuts from the shot to close-ups of two other members of the SI – then, to a brief encounter with a face of a woman (Carol Rittener) that appears from time to time, weaving in and out throughout the film (Fig. 12): “And only a few encounters were like signals emanating from a more intense life, a life that has not really been found.”284

The curious shot from Critique of Separation is followed by a series of subtitles that spell out a few of the principles of Situationist practice, particularly the call for “new settings that will be both the product and instrument of new behaviors.”285 This chapter underscores the implications of the SI’s emphasis on

282 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1984), 251. “The feeling induced by kitsch must be a kind the multitudes can share. Kitsch may not, therefore, depend on an unusual situation; it must derive from the basic images people have engraved in their memories” Kundera, 251. 283 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 15. 284 Guy Debord, Critique de la séparation, 1961. 285 Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, Tom McDonough, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 42.

131 “new behaviors” – on the construction of situations that bring forth, indeed body forth, “a new manner of deportment.” According to Debord, the spectacle reinforces not only the separation and isolation of one from others, but also the alienation of one from oneself or rather from one’s own gestures: “The spectacle’s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual’s own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him.”286 In this light, I discuss how Debord and a contemporary filmmaker,

Jean-Luc Godard, critique the dominant mode of representation of the film actor in the age of “talking cinema”: the figuration and reification of the actor as the speaking subject. In A Letter to Jane (1972), Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin propose that the film actor of the talkie tends not to gesture, but to express – an expression that is but a reification, an appearance, of an expression: “an expression of an expression.”287

As Debord would say, this reification is an exemplary instance of the spectacle, especially its “colonization of social life”:

An earlier stage in the economy’s domination of social life entailed an

obvious downgrading of being into having that left its stamp on all

human endeavors. The present stage, in which social life is

completely taken over by the accumulated products of the economy,

entails a generalized shift from having to appearing: all effective

286 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 23. 287 Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, A Letter to Jane, 1972.

132 “having” must now derive both its immediate prestige and its ultimate

raison d’être from appearances.288

The proposal is for a correspondence between technology and subjectivity, between the talkie and “the hermeneutics of the self.” Note that this is not an argument for technological determinism – and Debord emphasizes that the development of a technology does not prescribe an “inevitable outcome”: “On the contrary, the society of the spectacle is a form that chooses its own technical content.”

If the spectacle – understood in the limited sense of those “mass

media” that are its most stultifying superficial manifestation – seems

at times to be invading society in the shape of a mere apparatus, it

should be remembered that this apparatus has nothing neutral about

it, and that it answers precisely the needs of the spectacle’s internal

dynamics.289

This chapter focuses on how film answers – or questions – the needs of the spectacle,

“the colonization of social life.” Accentuating the term “colonization,” I will address how the critique of reification of the actor as the speaking subject has an especial exigency in the context of a war that established torture as its primary apparatus of interrogation: the Algerian War (1954-62). And we will also see how this problem is raised through the ethics and politics of close-ups in the films of Debord and Godard.

288 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 16. To continue the quotation of Thesis 16: “At the same time all individual reality, being directly dependent on social power and completely shaped by that power, has assumed a social character. Indeed, it is only inasmuch as individual reality is not that it is allowed to appear.” 289 Debord, 18.

133 I.

For Debord, the spectacle is a reification of political representation, the substitution of agency by an image of agency, furthermore, of subjectivity by an identity: “We recognize our old enemy the commodity.”290 And the star system is an exemplary instance of such an extension and intensification of commodity fetishim:

“Media stars are spectacular representations of living human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles.”291 Stars function as

“images of possible roles,” as models of identification, and the diversity of such models seems to offer “various styles of life and various views of society.” However,

Debord retorts, the choice of one model or another is “a false choice.” For the difference between one and the other is a difference not of “style” but of power. The star system speaks not of diversity but of the hierarchy of roles, the relativization of points of view into a system of judgment. “At the root of the spectacle lies that oldest of all social divisions of labor,” Debord insists, “the specialization of power.”292 If the relation between one and the other is determined by a disparity in power, there can be no freedom of choice, no play or game of contest, no pleasure of rivalry or competition amongst a collective – all pleasure is subsumed into that of alienated consumption or possession, of the domination of the other through a procedure of expropriation, the other itself defined in order to consolidate the self, the sovereignty of the “I.” And “the false choice offered by spectacular abundance” is reinforced

290 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 26. 291 Debord, 38. 292 Debord, 18.

134 through the resuscitation of “false conflicts of ancient vintage”: “regionalisms or racisms whose job it now is to invest vulgar rankings in the hierarchies of consumption with a magical ontological superiority.”293

In Debord’s film, On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief

Unity of Time [Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps] (1959), the voice-over’s critique of the star system is juxtaposed on screen with shots of media stars. There are “the stars of decision” – the figure of

Charles de Gaulle and his supporters in the French military, Jacques Massu, Raoul

Salan, etc. who staged the coup d’etat of May 13, 1958 in Algiers to prevent “the abandonment of Algeria.” There are “the stars of consumption” – the figure of an actress for a soap advertisement, the face of Anna Karina (Fig. 13). The choice of a soap advertisement is not arbitrary. As the cultural historian Kristin Ross argues, there is a “symptomatic return to the example of soap, to soap as an example” in the accounts of everyday life during this period of transformation from a post-war society to a society of consumerism.294 According to Ross, the privileged example of the soap advertisement that recurs again and again in contemporary accounts underscores a specific ideology that supported the aggressive, at times violent, form of state-led modernization – an ideology of not simply plenty, but purity, hygiene, cleanliness.

The question is the relation between cleanliness and modernization, between hygiene and the consolidation of the nation-state. Ross points to the increasing socio-

293 Debord, 40. 294 Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 73.

135 cultural emphasis on “personal hygiene,” especially the cleanliness of French women

(“La Française, est-elle propre? [Is the French Woman Clean?], the question of a

1951 issue of Elle.)295 The focus on the body of the French woman is indicative of a certain “chain of equivalences” according to which the cleanliness of the woman is directly related to the cleanliness of the nation: the status of woman as the subject of propagation and nurture, as both housekeeper and kept at home, the keeper/kept of the home, the family and therefore of the nation.296 Here, the health of the propagating and nurturing body is a socio-cultural issue, furthermore, an issue of the state, the body of the inhabitant as that which the state is to regulate and control. As

Foucault would say, it is “a bio-politics of the population,” a politics that focuses not on people, but on population, “the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of biological processes.”297 One of the consequences of the politicization of “biological existence,” Foucault says, is the increasing importance of the norm (rather than the law) and issues of identity (not the legal or moral subject, but the individual defined by his/her “nature,” that is, sex, race, species.)

In Mythologies (1957), Barthes argues for the necessity to analyze the massive advertising of soap-powders and detergent as a symptom of a certain obsession with cleanliness. He highlights the function of cleaning agents such as soap-powder and detergent, their procedure of selection and separation, not to “kill”

295 Ross, 76. 296 “A chain of equivalences is at work here; the prevailing logic runs something like this: If the woman is clean, the family is clean, the nation is clean.” Ross, 78. 297 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1990), 139.

136 the dirt (as in the case of chlorine or ammonia), but to free, “to liberate the object from its circumstantial imperfection”: “their function is keeping public order not making war.”298 And what is advertised is this function. The advertisments accentuate the effects of their products, not through their results, but through their procedure, technique, mode of action: “they involve the consumer in a kind of direct experience of the substance, make him the accomplice of a liberation rather than a mere beneficiary of a result.”299 Barthes foregrounds another fantasy that supports this norm of cleanliness: “to remake the virginity of the object over and over again, to give it the immobility of material on which time has no effect (the obsession with cleanliness is certainly a practice of immobilizing time).”300 His example is of an almost excessive desire for the cleanliness of the car; one does not clean a car, but caresses it, scrubs it, waxes and shines it; one purges the object of traces of time and makes it immaculate. The obsessive cleaning awakens a dream, “a myth,” of a flight from politics into the comforts of the home, the stability and security, the

“timelessness,” of the private. The libidinal economy of the obsession with cleanliness then entails a desire for productivity and purity, a freedom from the passage of time, from history, a liberation or rather escape from not merely the burden of history but even its memory.

Barthes’ text was written in 1963, a year after the Algeria War, the end of almost a decade of the sale de guerre, the dirty war. Speaking of the Situationist

298 Roland Barthes, “Soap-powders and Detergents” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 36. 299 Barthes, 37. 300 Roland Barthes, “La voiture, projection de l’égo,” Réalités, 213 (1963), 45; quoted in Ross, 105.

137 critique of “the colonization of everyday life,” Ross argues that the term

“colonization” speaks of a direct relation between French post-war modernization and decolonization:

With the waning of its empire, France turned to a form of interior

colonialism; rational administrative techniques developed in the

colonies were brought home and put to use side by side with new

technological innovation such as advertising in re-ordering

metropolitan, domestic society, the “everyday” life of its citizen.301

Furthermore, the new techniques of administrating life in the “interior” are taken across the sea and applied to another housekeeping as it were: Algeria as “the scene of some violent housecleaning.”302 Ross offers the example of a contemporary cartoon by J.M. Bosc that shows the relation between modernization and the state’s technique for suppressing the struggle for decolonization — a French paratrooper with his hands immersed in a sudsy bathtub, a box of soap-powder next to the tub and a man’s legs sticking out from the water. The caption reads: “Il faut que la torture soit proper [It is necessary that torture be clean].”

If soap-powder advertisements turn to foam to cover over the corrosive function of detergent, Barthes says, the “delicious” image of foam satisfies in us an idealistic, almost spiritual tendency “to imagine matter as something airy, with which contact is effected in a mode both light and vertical.”303 Soap is represented as that which liberates the self from confines of matter, the contours of our “biological

301 Ross, 7. 302 Ross, 108. 303 Barthes, “Soap-powders and Detergents,” 37.

138 existence,” and purifies us of a body that is perceived and experienced to be a body- too-much: the bathtub as a modern confessional.304 In the Bosc cartoon, the airy matter is the figure of a man, the body-too-much of the Algerian other, his agonizing gasps for air transfigured into the effervescence of foam by the “light and vertical” touch of a “clean torture.” And the representation of torture as housekeeping is not merely metaphoric. The space of the kitchen and the bathroom approach us in unsettling, disturbing dimensions as the very site of a “clean,” “functional” technique of interrogation and forced confession, along with the uncanny appearance of familiar objects as tools of torture – a bathtub, a kitchen sink, a telephone, an electrical plug, a bottle and a toothbrush (as in the infamous case of the rape of

Djamila Boupacha.) Pointing to personal accounts of torture during the Algerian

War, such as Henri Alleg’s The Question (1958), Ross says: “the newly modernized

French interiors and techniques, the electricity and indoor plumbing, appear in a distorted, nightmarish guise in their narrative reflection across the sea.”305

The Question was the first and most influential of the personal accounts of interrogations and forced confessions, “the questioning,” within “the torture factory.”

French authorities banned The Question two weeks after it was published, but that would be after circulation of an estimated sixty thousand copies – and, in 2006, an

304 In a 1959 novel by Elsa Triolet, the female protagonist, a young woman from the provinces, describes her first modern bath as a “the baptismal font of modern comfort,” a ritual of purification as well as interpellation and identification – here, with the modernity of the middle-class: “she was overcome by an emotion that had something sacred about it, as though she were about to be baptized…Modern comfort happened to her all in one fell swoop, with running water, gas heating, electricity…and Martine scrubbed every innermost recess of her body with soap, pumice-stone, brushes, sponges, scissors.” Elsa Triolet, Roses à crédit, vol. 1 of L’age du nylon (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 39-40; quoted in Ross, 93-4. 305 Ross, 111.

139 English translation of the book would be re-published in the United States with regard to Abu Ghraib, Baghram, Guantanamo as well as the French parliament’s passing of “Loi du 23 février 2005” with its controversial clause that “school courses should recognize in particular the positive role of French presence overseas, notably in North Africa.”306

In “A Victory,” an article in a 1958 issue of Les Temps modernes, Jean-Paul

Sartre puts forward a powerful critique of the limitations of the discourse on torture – limitations, he argues, that the “lucid calm” of Alleg’s text allows us to confront and overcome.307 If the problem of torture is met by a certain muteness within France,

Sartre says, it is not on account of “the degradation of the people,” but “stagnation and stupor,” a question of politics, rather than morality: the paralysis of praxis and a landscape of fear that imposes the false choice of torturer or tortured, the choice to terrorize or to die by terror. He retorts: “Inhumanity does not exist, except in the nightmares which engender fear.”308 For the issue is not that man is inhuman, as if torture is a problem of our inhumanity, of our innate violence, aggression, savagery, as if nature is an alibi for a secularization of original sin. Our answer cannot be an appeal to our humanity. “We would almost be too lucky if these crimes were the work of savages,” Sartre declares, “the truth is that torture makes torturers.”309 For instance, he underlines Alleg’s description of the torturers, not the “sadist,” “the fallen archangels” as they themselves would have us believe, but those who are

306 See the new foreword by Ellen Gray and introduction by James D. Le Sueur in Henri Alleg, The Question (Lincoln and London: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2006.) 307 Jean-Paul Sartre, “A Victory” in Henri Alleg, The Question (Lincoln and London: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2006), xxvii-xliv. 308 Sartre, xxxii. 309 Sartre, xxxiv.

140 transformed into torturers by the immense machinery of torture itself, from the novice who hesitates to touch the body with his hands to “the lunatics who spin around like a dead leaf with the impetus of their own violence”: “Between the best and the worst, there is only one difference: the former are novices and the latter have been at it some time.”310

Against the justification for torture, the “nice hypocrisy” of the extraction of information, Sartre underscores the senselessness of its violence. The function of violence in torture is twofold. First, it is violence against terrorism. Terrorism, Sartre argues, is a mode of war demanded by the disequilibrium between France and

Algeria, between rich and poor: “We have the men, the money and the arms. The rebels have nothing but the confidence and support of a large part of the population.

It is we, in spite of ourselves, who have imposed this type of war.”311 Furthermore, terrorism is perceived – and feared – as one of secrecy, of silence, that of the uncommunicative and faceless enemy. Torture then is a form of forced confession that compels the enemy to speak, to force upon it a face – or rather a tongue, that is, an identity:

Everybody, everywhere, is hiding something: they must be made to

talk. Torture is senseless violence, born of fear. The purpose of it is to

force from one tongue, amid its screams and its vomiting up of blood,

the secret of everything. Senseless violence: whether the victim talks

or whether he dies under his agony, the secret that he cannot tell is

always somewhere else and out of reach. It is the executioner who

310 Sartre, xxxv. 311 Sartre, xxxviii.

141 becomes Sisyphus. If he puts the question at all, he will have to

continue forever.312

However, Sartre continues, terrorism cannot fully account for torture, the very senselessness of its violence. Torture is not a struggle for individual or collective interests (that of a nation, of a class, etc.) The torturer does not simply force one to speak, but more importantly, to betray, to betray others, to betray oneself: “The victim must turn himself by his screams and by his submission into a lower animal, in the eyes of all and in his own eyes…He who gives way under questioning is not only constrained from talking again, but is given a new status, that of a sub-man.”313 If the torturer represents himself as a “superman” – a man beyond the realm of man with all the violence of an inexplicable, irrational power – it is because “the torturer pits himself against the tortured for his ‘manhood’ and the duel is fought as if it were not possible for both sides to belong to the human race.”314

Torture is part and parcel of a colonial logic, a racism, that necessitates “the complete exclusion of the other,” the annihilation of not only their sovereignty as the people, their political-economic existence, but their norms and values, their “nature,” that is, their “biological existence” as a population, a race, a species. For Sartre, torture is the expression of racism. The “senseless violence” of torture is the expression of hatred, a racial hatred against the other, and a fear of the threat that the other apparently poses on our own existence, the seeming necessity of the sacrifice of one life for the existence of all: “In his rage he may dream romantically of

312 Sartre, xxxix. 313 Sartre, xl. 314 Sartre, xxxix.

142 Genocide.”315 “If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers,” Foucault says,

“this is not a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.”316

The institutionalization of torture is not new. As Foucault argues, torture has followed confession like a shadow:

When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative,

the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat; it is

driven from its hiding place in the soul, or extracted from the body.

Since the Middle Ages, torture has accompanied it like a shadow, and

supported it when it could go no further: the dark twins.317

For Foucault, as we have seen in the previous chapter, if our society has normalized confession as one of the most pervasive techniques for the production of truth, confession is part and parcel of a technique of subjectivation, a practice for the constitution – and consolidation – of the modern concept of self: “the hermeneutics of the self.” Torture, too, is a practice of the constitution of oneself as that which must be interpreted for the truth of one’s being, plus the production of a gaze that is the bearer of this truth. It attempts to extract this truth of the other, “the secret” that is

“always somewhere else and out of reach.” And, as Sartre argues, the aim is to extinguish not so much the other’s body (i.e. to inflict pain, even to kill), but the other’s body-too-much, the threat of a presence that cannot be named, that alludes

315 Sartre, xli. 316 Foucault, 137. 317 Foucault, 59.

143 the various attempts at its subjectivation and subjection, its colonization: “The body may live, but the spirit must be killed.”318

With regard to the Algerian War, what is brought about is not only a further consolidation of the modern concept of self – according to the colonial logic, the self of Europe and the West – but also a shift in the techniques of torture: a mass- production of the procedure, a streamlining of the mode of action. If the ideology of purity, hygiene, cleanliness supports the techniques of everyday life, it is also employed for new techniques of torture, the French army’s obsession for the purging of traces. Reading Alleg’s account, Sartre underscores the speed with which the torturers rush from one session to another: “they only keep themselves going by speed; if they lose impetus, they collapse.”319 And, as we have seen in our own immediate moment, there is a “cleaner” technique than torture by pain and by the boredom of speedy, endless repetitions, a boredom that obliterates one’s sense of time. There is torture by image: the staging of the body for the camera. It is as if in the society of the spectacle, to “kill” the other, it is possible to figure, to twist and contort, the body of the demeaning behaviors, to engrave on this body-too-much a recognizable identity – and to show it as such in a snapshot. To reiterate the quotation from Debord: “The spectacle’s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that the individual’s own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who represents them to him.”320 It is as if

318 Sartre, xli. 319 Sartre, xxxiii. 320 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 23.

144 the limit of the figuration and reification into the speaking subject is in torture as photography. Or is it photography as torture?

II.

Godard’s film, Le Petit Soldat (1960), poses the question of the relation between torture and photography, as it addresses the use of torture during the

Algerian War by the French and the FLN (National Liberation Front of Algeria).

Banned by the French authorities, the film would not be released till after the end of the War in 1963. The dull sense of a paralysis of praxis – the paralysis that Sartre characterized as muteness – is delivered in monotones: the swish-pans of the camera that flatten and further cloud the overcast landscape of the city, the atonal piano music and the toneless internal monologue of the protagonist Bruno Forestier

(Michel Subor), a French journalist living in a “neutral” Geneva of 1958 and working for French intelligence in order to escape enlistment. It is a situation where

Bruno finds himself forced to kill a “pro-FLN” radio broadcaster (the voice of “A

Neutral Speaks”) or to be killed by the French (a faction of “mixed men and ideas,” of “bureaucrats, bankers, car salesmen, parachutists, filial sons”). And it is where he learns that his FLN torturers also read Alleg and Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. The film opens with Bruno’s thoughts: “The time for action is past, that of reflection is beginning.”321 “It’s the inside seen from the inside,” Godard says of Bruno’s narration, “the monologue of someone trying to justify himself before an almost

321 Jean-Luc Godard, Le Petit Soldat, 1960.

145 accusing camera, as one does before a lawyer or a psychiatrist.”322 And, I would argue, a central focus of the film is the “almost accusing camera” – Godard’s camera, Bruno’s, as well as the cameras of both the French and the FLN. The problem is the function of this camera, the disposition of its inquisitive gaze – to question as in to interrogate, to interpret and to verify, to know, that is, to judge.

The interrogation and torture of Bruno begins with a procedure of identification (Fig. 14). A photograph identifies Bruno for his abductors and soon-to- be torturers. A hand circles Bruno’s face on the photograph; the gesture of indication appears all the more calculated through the grip and the pressure of the crayon, the passing of the photograph from one pair of hands to another. During the interrogation, we confront another series of facial close-ups; the repetition of “Who is he?” and “I don’t know,” then the flaunting of faces of those who refused to speak, battered and bloodied, the photographs as proof and promise of violence-to-come.

Furthermore, each photograph is held up so close that it reframes Bruno’s face, slicing into it as it were, and we see nothing of his face but his eyes, an involuntary flicker at the image pressed up in front of it, a seeming commentary on the intimacy of close-ups (Fig. 15).

We are introduced to the scene of Bruno’s torture via an excessive isolation of all of its significant components. Our eyes move from the face of a man who enters the bathroom, then to the gun in his hand, then to another pair of hands handcuffing Bruno’s right hand to the faucet, then to the mirror in which we see the owner of the pair of hands, then back to the handcuffing at the faucet, then to Bruno

322 Jean-Luc Godard, Godard on Godard, ed. Tom Milne (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), 179.

146 in the bathtub, then back to the gun, then to Bruno’s left hand, handcuffed, hanging from the towel bar, then back to Bruno in the bathtub. It is a step-by-step procedure in which each “step” is forcefully focalized by the proximity of the camera (close- up) and the sharp, emphatic abruptness of camera movement that connects one to another. The mode of connection is significant. Godard’s camera movement accentuates – and interrupts – the chain of associations, which would relate one close-up to another, which would translate the conjunctive “and” into the continuity and causality of a repetitive “then.” Later, it is the pensive tones of a piano sonata that perform this function of interruption. The music brings to the fore the breaks between one session and another – for instance, it follows a long shot of one interrogator combing his hair in front of the mirror in the bathroom, turning to jest with the other as he tucks the comb into his back-pocket, a good-humored repartee of two amiable-looking people. The music becomes all the more significant as it carries over into time-space of the torture – a close-up of the carry-over via the placing of a portable player on the sink. The film interrupts the music as soon as we hear/see one of the interrogators light a set of matches, then light his cigarette, then put the lighted matches under Bruno’s handcuffed hand. We see the spasm of Bruno’s hand; we hear the clattering of handcuffs and a gasp of pain. A cut returns us to the portable player, and the film resumes the music. The interrogator adjusts the dial, raises the volume; the “intermission” is over or rather silenced, muffled by the music – the silencing of a silence, the suppression of Bruno’s refusal to speak and of the unspoken, unintelligible paroxysms of pain. The sequence is repeated, the music then the silence, stopped and re-started, over and over again – a gagging à la the

147 temporality of an assembly line, the boredom of endless repetitions. Bruno says to himself: “Torture is so monotonous and sad, it’s difficult to talk about it, so I’ll barely mention it.”323

The sequence of gagging comes to a crescendo in a close-up of Bruno’s face

(Fig. 16). He turns his eyes toward the camera, to us, and we are confronted by a strangely impassive face, an immobile face, an immobility and stasis that is at odds with the speed of its thought: “Think of anything, fast, anything to avoid the pain.

Faster. The sea, the beach, the sun. Think so fast you can’t think of anything…Write to Veronica! Faster! Faster! Don’t think of the pain. Faster! Write a letter! Faster yet!

Beat the speed of the pain!...Veronica.”324 The close-up offers a reflective face, but the face does not (or rather, cannot) reflect the intensity of Bruno’s internal monologue, as if Bruno’s resistance to torture erased his face of its expressions, as if torture had stripped the face of its affect. Here, he cannot but reflect, retreat into the self, that is, consolidate the self as the last entrenchment, an interior withdrawn and free from the violence of the exterior, a separation and isolation of mind over body:

“I think, therefore I am.”

And torture is a situation where “I” is under siege, when “I” cannot but think

– however, I think so fast that I can’t think; I stop thinking; I speak or the body spasms. For Bruno, the impossible situation of torture offers but one form of resistance, to reach the limit of the refusal to speak in the erasure of the speaking subject itself: suicide. According to Jacques Lacan, any imposition of “a self- sufficiency of consciousness” is problematic (and therefore the necessity for Lacan

323 Godard, Le Petit Soldat, 1960. 324 Godard, Le Petit Soldat, 1960.

148 and psychoanalysis to argue for the radical alterity, the “alien-ness” of the unconscious). The limit of such impositions are “subjective impasses” that offer “a freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison” and

“a personality that realizes itself only in suicide; a consciousness of the other that can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder.”325 And, in 1949, Lacan sees such insistence on the autonomy of the “I” as a response to “the historical effort of a society to refuse to recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one, and in the anxiety of the individual confronting the ‘concentrational [concentrationnaire]’ form of the social bond that seems to arise to crown this effort.”326

As the interrogation continues, it culminates in a close-up that not only erases

Bruno of his expressions, but also his face (Fig. 17). The interrogator covers Bruno’s face with a cloth; the cloth is pulled so closely and tightly that we discern traces of

Bruno’s features, a set of lines in place of what was a pair of eyes, a nose, a mouth. It is a face reduced to its outline, the circumference of a face and a summary of its essential features, a generality given in cursory sketches, devoid of detail, of matter: an immobile, mortified face, the figuration and reification of a face. For a brief, brief, almost imperceptible moment, we see this face-less face turn toward the camera to confront us – not with eyes but with a gaze. Then, it yanks itself away in convulsive lurches of pain, the mark of what was a mouth gaping, gasping for air, the mouth no longer an organ of speech (or even the refusal of speech) but a cavity for the futile attempt at respiration. The scrutiny of an interrogative gaze produces an inscrutable

325 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function, as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), 8. 326 Lacan, 8.

149 face as it were – not only reflective faces calcified into the immobility of a mask, but also faces, battered and bloodied, even obliterate.

III.

But inquisitive gazes are not limited to the prying (or the spying) of knowing looks. To question is also to pose a riddle, an enigma – and thus, as we have seen in the previous chapter, to create a situation that is a game of charades and of seduction.

There is then an inquisitive gaze that seeks not so much to know but to be curious, to be intrigued and astonished. In Le Petit Soldat, there is a difference in the function of the various cameras: a camera that forces the subject to speak in order to speak for him/her or a camera that is struck dumb. The difference is critical, indeed perilous, for the functions are seemingly similar – or rather, one function becomes subsumed into the other, more or less, as if in the society of the spectacle to question is to interrogate, as if to see/hear is to know, the experience of perception reduced to the static-free, “clean” transmission of information. More or less. The film stages the drama of this difference on the image of a face, the close up of Bruno and the close up of Veronica Dreyer (Anna Karina) – the rhyming of two scenes, a scene of interrogation and a scene of seduction, and the critical discordance of their respective facial close-ups (Fig.18).

The naming of Karina’s character as Dreyer is not arbitrary; a reference to a silent film of close-ups released at the cusp of the transition to the talkie, the film of close-ups: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). (And Godard

150 would return to this association between the face of Dreyer’s Joan (Maria Falconetti) and that of Karina in Vivre Sa Vie (1962). In a footnote to the Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936), Benjamin also references The Passion of

Joan of Arc to further explicate the difference between the film actor and the stage actor of the classical theater. For Benjamin, as we have seen in the previous chapter, film performance allows for a different relation to oneself and to the apparatus – not a mode of identification, but of fragmentation and alertness, sensitivity, attunement.

Vis-à-vis The Passion of Joan of Arc, the significance is in the filmmaker’s relation to his actors, especially his technique of selecting the forty actors of the Inquisition, a procedure akin to the hunting of a prop: “Searching for these actors was like hunting for rare props. Dreyer made every effort to avoid resemblances of age, build, and physiognomy in the actors.”327 The attention to the materiality of the face – not as an expression of the self, but as a prop, a support for the action on stage or set – proffers a potential for film to be “an excellent means of materialist exposition”: “Film is thus the first artistic medium which is able to show how matter plays havoc with human beings [wie die Materie dem Menschen mitspielt.]”328 Benjamin underscores

Dreyer’s insistence on faces without make-up, on flesh, skin, wrinkles, spots – not as

“circumstantial imperfection” to be liberated from, but as “blemishes” of time and affect: the havoc of matter.

For Benjamin, it is the face-as-prop that is to counter “the last entrenchment” of aura, its claims to origin and values of authenticity, authority and individuality:

“the human countenance,” particularly “the fleeting expression of a human face” in

327 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 126. 328 Benjamin, 126.

151 early photographs from the mid-19th century.329 It is important to emphasize,

Benjamin says in Little History of Photography (1931), that these are photographs from a particular period, primarily from the first decade of photography, “the decade which preceded its industrialization.”330 The photographs were produced under cloistered conditions of not distraction but concentration (for instance, not the city but the cemetery on its outskirts, that is, cemeteries that look like “an interior, a separate and closed-off space”); of long-suffering exposures in which “the subjects had to be given supports so that they would remain fixed in place”: “The procedure itself caused the subjects to live their way into, rather than out of, the moment; during the long duration of the exposure, they grew into the picture.”331

329 Benjamin, 108. Miriam Bratu Hansen points out, here, in Little History of Photography (as in The Work of Art essay’s comparison of the film actor to the stage actor of the classical theater), “aura” retains the more common definition of an emanation surrounding the body that refers to its essence. See Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008), 340. Hansen argues that Benjamin’s concept of “aura” as the mode of being of the traditional works of art (and thus associated with the values of the singular status of the artwork) is a restrictive one à la the well-known third version of The Work of Art essay (1939) – aura as that which “withers in the age of technological reproducibility.” And it is this restrictive definition that occasions the famed call for film’s fundamental role to be the destruction of this decaying aura: “the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage.” “The essay thus jettisons what I take to be Benjamin’s more productive reflections on the reconfiguration of distance and proximity in modernity, specifically as they revolve around new economies of body and image space and the role of film enabling a collective, playful innervation of technology,” Hansen, 355. Hansen emphasizes “the broader anthropological, perceptual-mnemonic, and visionary dimensions of aura” – and how it is variously deployed in Benjamin’s attempts to theorize the conditions of the possibility of experience (Erfahrung) in the context of its impossibility (“the poverty of experience”), especially secularized and modernized in concepts such “the optical unconscious.” See Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (Summer 2004), 3-45; “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999), 306-43. 330 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 507. 331 Benjamin, 514. The translation is modified according to a more recent translation in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2008), 280.

152 It is not simply a question of a “primitive” technology, but once again, the relation between technology and subjectivity – and early photographs speak of a congruency between technique and subject, between the stasis of photography and the stability, the self-possessed security of the bourgeois subject: “the photographer was confronted, in the person of every client, with a member of the rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into every folds of the man’s frock coat or floppy cravat.”332 As Benjamin would exclaim of a photograph of the philosopher

F.W.J. Schelling, there is a sense of posterity, “immortality,” in the image of the subject, the subject – and the subject’s coat: “It will surely pass into immortality along with him: the contours it has borrowed from its wearer are not unworthy of the creases on his face.”333 The fantasy was not that of an immobilization of time, as in the expendable excess of post-war consumerism, the obsession with cleanliness of the re-consolidated middle class that would have washed and ironed out even the suggestion of a crease. The desire was not “to remake the virginity of the object over and over again.” Objects wore the weight of the body – and of time and history or rather a certain concept of time and history. The early photographs address the definitive, almost defiant, finality of the rising class, the bourgeoisie of the

Restoration and the Monarchy – a shared certainty of origin, of being and of the causal relation between mind and body, the body as not merely a reflection but a firm, irrefutable imprint of the mind, the face as a proof of the soul. There is then a correspondence between the individuating procedures of the photograph and the status of the individual: early photography is the art of portraiture.

332 Benjamin, 517. 333 Benjamin, 514.

153 The decline of this certainty of the individual is met with the decline of the aura of the photograph – a certain “disenchantment of the world” that corresponds to a shift from the art of portraiture to that of the fleeting snapshot, the circulation of such fugitive images as advertisements or illustrations for newspapers and magazines. Evoking a late-19th century photograph of Kafka as a child, Benjamin says: “This picture, in its infinite sadness, forms a pendant to the early photographs in which people did not yet look out at the world in so castaway and godforsaken a manner as this boy.”334 For it is these “immensely sad eyes” that see the alienation that his contemporaries have yet to see – an alienation that Kafka’s characters experienced as the burden of an identity as unfathomable as fate, of living in one’s own body as if in a foreign land, “a stranger, an outcast who is ignorant of the laws that connect this body to higher and vaster orders.”335 And Kafka shows that this

“land” can turn hostile toward us, so much so that we can wake up one morning to find ourselves transformed into something less than human (Metamorphosis (1915)).

The stubborn blindness to such alienation appears in the fashion for a pose “whose rigidity betrayed the impotence of that generation” and for studios that cluttered their spaces with out-of-place props, with settings that simulated foreign, exotic lands – spaces “which occupied so ambiguous a place between execution and representation, between torture chamber and throne room.”336 It is an alienation of politics that aims at an aesthetic of immobility, rather than immortality. As Debord would say of the

334 Benjamin, 515. 335 Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer” in Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927 - 1945, eds. Michael W. Jennings, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 497. 336 Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” 515.

154 bourgeoisie, “The ruling class, made up of specialists in the ownership of things who for that very reason are themselves owned by things, is obliged to tie its fate to the maintenance of a reified history and to the permanent preservation of a historical immobility.”337

According to Benjamin, counterattacks to such anachronistic and ever more violently regressive measures to sustain the status of the individual are to be found in the empty, unpopulated photographs of Eugène Atget and the Surrealists – or in the films of the Soviet avant-garde. “And immediately the human face appeared on film with new and immeasurable significance. But it was no longer a portrait.”338 The films of an Eisenstein – and we could add here Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc

– focus on the “anonymous physiognomy” of “milieu and landscape,” rather than individual as star. In place of portraits of individuals, the films offer us “a tremendous physiognomic gallery,” a gallery of faces from each and every social stratum. The significance is an alertness to faces, all faces, according to their social relations as well as a sensitivity to the detail, the matter, of each face: “It gives free play to the politically educated eye, under whose gaze all intimacies are sacrificed to the illumination of detail.”339 To “the politically educated eye,” the “intimacies” of individual relations are overlooked for “the illumination of detail,” the details of social relations. For Benjamin, I would argue, one of the significances of the détournement of physiognomy, an obsolete science in the age of the photographic image, is to call attention to the relation between a face and it context, that is, its

337 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 106. 338 Benjamin, 519-20. 339 Benjamin, 519.

155 social relations, the contradictions of its concrete, material condition. By contrast,

“when photography takes itself out of context,” Benjamin says, “it becomes

‘creative’”: “The more far-reaching the crisis of the present social order, the more rigidly its individual components are locked together in their death struggle, the more the creative becomes a fetish, whose lineaments live only in the fitful illumination of changing fashion…the true face of this photographic activity is the advertisement or association.”340

If there is an added urgency to Benjamin’s insistence on the significance of such a gallery, it is due to its seeming resemblance to another gallery of faces – that of “bio-politics,” especially fascism. But the latter is not an exhibition constructed according to the criterion of social relations, of political-economic existence. It is exhibited in order to organize – to hierarchize, to select, to breed and to exterminate

– according to the norm of “biological existence,” race, species: to represent an image not of the people, but of a population, a different conceptualization of the expressiveness of a face, of one’s relation to one’s body, one’s self. As a reaction to the perpetual social displacements of capital, fascism enforces a fantasy of a belonging, a promise of a (re)turn to a “natural” order in which everyone (again) has his/her place. As Benjamin famously states in The Work of Art essay:

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while

leaving intact the property relation which they strive to abolish. It sees

its salvation in granting expression to the masses – but on no account

granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property

340 Benjamin, 526.

156 relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these

relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an

aestheticizing of political life.341

Fascism seeks to sustain the status quo not only through the immobilization of time, but also through the immobilization of the masses into “a compact impenetrable entity” – a figuration and reification of the people into an image, a spectacle, of a population. The difference between the two types of galleries is critical, not because the two are so obviously different, but because their difference is not so obvious, the two have become seemingly similar – an equation between an image of the people and a spectacle of a population, indeed, between an image and a spectacle. The equation is the problem; it speaks of the enforcement – and violence – of a chain of associations according to which the former (the image, the people, the social) is subsumed into the latter (the spectacle, the population, the biological.) If fascism – and other forms of “bio-politics” – focuses on the consolidation of a compact, impenetrable mass, Benjamin argues, “the proletariat, on the other hand, is preparing for a society in which neither the objective nor the subjective conditions for the formation of masses will exist any longer.”342 For “the politically educated eye,” the very structure of the masses is different or transformed, not that of congealing, but of

“loosening”: “the dead, un-dialectical opposition between the individual and the mass is abolished; for the comrade, it does not exist.”343

341 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 120-1. 342 Benjamin, 129. 343 Benjamin, 129.

157 The Passion of Joan of Arc as “a tremendous physiognomic gallery”: the film avoids resemblances of appearances in the forty actors of the Inquisition, I would argue, in an attempt to displace the focus from the actors to the ecclesial court itself.

The aim is not to individualize the court, not to personalize and psychologize it into, say, the deviousness of Pierre Cauchon, the head of the court. Rather, it is to body forth the Inquisition in its social function – and to bring forth the problem of the consolidation of singular faces into a unified function, the interrogation of Joan. The problem of this consolidation, this spectacle, is not that it suppresses all differences.

And the point of the film is not that the court is constituted of diverse men

(according to which the unity of the court would be perceived as a spectacle of the universality of man, his ignorance and egotism.) The problem is not suppression, but relativization and subordination of all differences to one difference: a difference of power. The point is the situation. And Dreyer’s camera emphasizes this in the manner of its close-ups. Each face relates to another without continuity or rather false continuity. The spectator is compelled to sense the difference of power through the dynamism of discontinuous interruptions, a sharp, emphatic montage (close-up, close-up, close-up) or of a camera movement that flattens and denaturalizes our sense of time and space, presses our noses against the screen, renders all shots the proximity of close-ups (“flowing close-ups,” Dreyer says.) Further significance is in how each face is framed: the camera cuts into the circumference of a face, dissolves the outline into the movement of details. Faces are loosened and fragmented into a mobile mass of furrowing brows; narrowing, widening eyes; howling, growling, curling, groaning, moaning, shuddering lips; flesh, skin, wrinkles, spots – the havoc

158 of matter or to quote the filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein: “a histophysiology of the passions.”344

It is this sense of a sudden, abrupt interruption of continuity and of the dissolution of the face into a mobile, animated mass that Epstein attributes to the affect of the close-up. In Magnification (1921), Epstein speaks of his inability to speak of his fascination for close-ups – an experience of astonishment that strikes one dumb: “Point blank. A head suddenly appears on screen and drama, now face to face, seems to address me personally and swells with an extraordinary intensity. I am hypnotized.”345 The spectator is dumbfounded by the image of a face that “seems to address me personally.” The modality of this address is important. The intimacy of the image, the “face-to-face” relation, is not an intersubjective relation as in a conversation between two people. Rather, the relation is one of “hypnosis.” And, as we have seen in the previous chapter, it is akin to what Jean Rouch would call “ciné- transe,” a suspension of consciousness for a state of exaltation, rapture, ecstasy, an abandonment of the self via the mediation of the apparatus. The magnification and proximity of the close-up estranges the familiarity of a face; it de-personalizes, de- individuates the face into a drama of details, of “muscular denouement”: “A muscle bridles. The lip is laced with tics like a theater curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis. Crack. The mouth give way, like a ripe fruit splitting open. As if slit by a scalpel, a key-board smile cuts laterally into the corner of the lips.”346

Epstein emphasizes the temporality of this denouement, “a spark that appears in fits

344 Jean Epstein, “Magnification,” trans. Stuart Liebman, October 3 (Spring, 1977), 11. 345 Epstein, 9. 346 Epstein, 9.

159 and starts”; a temporality that affects the modality of the spectator’s response, not that of introspection, but of fragmentation and alertness, sensitivity, attunement:

“Intermittent paroxysms affect me the way needles do.”347 For Epstein, the affect of the close-up of face is not in what the face expresses or says. Rather, “I love the mouth which is about to speak and holds back, the gesture which hesitates between right and left, the recoil before the leap, and the moment before landing, the becoming, the hesitation, the taut spring, the prelude, and even more than all these, the piano being tuned before the overture.”348

Commenting on the exuberance of Epstein’s rhetoric – an exuberance that is characteristic of others such as Bela Balazs, Benjamin, Deleuze, who sought the specificity of cinematic experience in the technique of the close-up – Mary Ann

Doane has argued that “the excessiveness, even hysteria” of such rhetoric is a symptom of the experience of modernity: the individual’s loss of a sense of totality, a desire for the resolution of the split in society through the image of totality.349 And it is this desire that is implicitly articulated in the rhetoric, which extracts and abstracts the close-up not only from the body (in its privilege of the facial close-up), but the body of the film itself, the spatial-temporal co-ordinates of the narrative – moreover, which asserts this abstraction as the essence of the close-up itself, its mode of being, the autonomy, self-sufficiency of the close-up that exceeds representation, that poses itself as the other to narrative, “a lurking danger, a potential semiotic threat to the unity and coherency of the filmic discourse.” For Doane, the exuberance of the

347 Epstein, 9. 348 Epstein, 9. 349 Mary Ann Doane, “Close-up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2003), 89-111.

160 rhetoric is primarily a response to the scale of close up, of the screen – the close up as “larger than life,” an image of totality that is also a promise of the totality of vision. “The cinematic spectator clings to the fragment of a partial reality – a fragment that mimics the effect of a self-sufficient totality. The classical close-up assures us that we can indeed see and grasp the whole in a moment rich with meaning and affect.”350 And film theory unconsciously speaks to this function of the close-up in classical cinema, that is, its ideological function as a spectacle, an image of totality that seems to resolve the isolation and separation of society. Furthermore, the “excessive” claim for the autonomy of the close-up is to be understood as a desire to reassert the space of the spectator, of the spectator’s body (and thus the claim for the other senses, especially of touch, as part and parcel of the corporeal experience of spectatorship) – against the annihilation of this space and the decorporealization of the spectator in classical cinema. According to Doane, despite film theory’s seeming embrace of the ecstasy of the loss of self via the close-up, it is an argument against the loss of self: “Such an ecstasy seemed to celebrate, but actually resisted, the lure of absorption into the image, of losing oneself.”351

Doane’s symptomatic reading of film theory hinges on a curious distinction between memory and experience of a film – one that folds over a distinction between theory and practice: “Why the marked discrepancy between theory’s excessive concentration on the close-up’s extractability from all spatio-temporal coordinates, its production of a hithero unknown dimension, and its practice within specific

350 Doane, 109. 351 Doane, 110.

161 films?”352 Through an analysis of sequences from specific films of classical cinema, she underscores the legibility of the close-up for the spectator, a legibility that is linked to the very lack of autonomy of the close-up in such sequences via the function of narrative. Thus, Doane argues, the theory is more applicable to the film theorist’s memory of the film, a remembered close-up, than its experience. And it is the remembered close-up that effects an appearance of a face that “seems to address me personally” a la Epstein – or a la Benjamin’s evocation of the aura of early photographs, a sense of aura that is folded into his later definition of aura as the experience of investing a phenomenon “with the ability to look back at us.” “In memory,” Doane insists, “ it is possible to believe that the gaze of the face in close- up is directed at me, whereas in reality, given the strictures of the classical cinema, it is more often caught in a network of other gazes.”353

However, the question, as I see it, is the status of this “me.” And there is a difference between the exchange of looks and the gaze “that seems to address me personally” – a gaze that is captivated and seduced by the image of a face that poses itself as a question. Epstein’s description of the defamiliarization of the face via the close-up – indeed, in part, an effect of the scale of the close-up, its magnification and proximity - is not so much an image of totality, “a for itself” removed from the rhythms from the diegesis, as a de-personalization, a deindividuation of the face into a drama of details. This is an enigmatic face, rather than the spectacle of an inscrutable face that incites one to know, to interpret and to verify, to interrogate, even to torture. It is an enigma to which we respond with questions: What does it

352 Doane, 105. 353 Doane, 97.

162 mean? What is it trying to tell me? What is it asking of me? “Che vuoi?” If the close up effects an estrangement of the face, it also effects an estrangement of oneself from oneself, an abandonment of the self via the mediation of the apparatus. The problem of symptomatic readings such as Doane’s is not simply the distinction between memory and experience (and experience reduced to interpretation, of the spectator’s ability to internalize and interpret the meaning of a close-up). Through an emphasis on the scale of a close-up, its spatial ratio in reference to human perception, the reading glosses over a critical dimension of the claim for the defamiliarization of the close-up: its disruptive, disjunctive temporality and how it affects the modality of address and response, not so much despatialization as a deterritorialization of time and space, of our relation to the image and to the world, to another, to oneself.

In particular, the emphasis on scale reduces Benjamin’s emphasis on details – the havoc of matter – to a matter of scale, of capturing “minute aspects of life otherwise lost.” However, I would argue that for Benjamin if there is a correspondence between technology and subjectivity, it is not a relation in which technology extends and/or substitutes for the preexistent subject, but one where technology is part and parcel of the constitution of subjectivity, of the process of subjectivation, of one’s relation to oneself and others. If I have argued that the détournement of physiogonomy is to call attention to the relation between a face and its context, this is not an argument to show the context as the ground from which the face separates and isolates itself as a figure – an assertion of the self. Rather, it is again an assertion of the subject’s embeddedness in one’s social relations – or a la

Marx, “the human essence is an ensemble of social relations.” And it is an awareness

163 that necessitates the destruction of the illusion of the autonomy of the individual. To reiterate: “It gives free play to the politically educated eye, under whose gaze all intimacies are sacrificed to the illumination of detail.” Speaking of the modern cinema such as the French New Wave’s emphasis on the everyday, Deleuze argues, it is especially in the sphere of the everyday that our habitual modes of perception and experience have become second nature. And it is in such a sphere that even the most minute disruption of the equlibrium between stimulus and response has a most profound effect: the production of situations to which we cannot adequately act or react to, of situations that provoke what does it mean? In short: a reverse shot that is not a reaction shot.

“Civilization of the image?” Deleuze asks in the opening chapter to his account of modern cinema. Rather, he argues, it is a civilization of the cliché – “the cliché” conceptualized as “a sensory-motor image of the thing,” as our habitual modes of perception and experience that allows a thing to be recognized as long as it is assigned its place in the order of things, furthermore, allows for an appropriate action or reaction: the more we recognize, the less we see. And, for Deleuze, the problem is that even the most intolerable situation becomes tolerable as soon as it is inscribed within a system of actions and reactions. In the next section, we shall examine the particular political significance of this break of the sensory-motor schemata, as Deleuze would say, in the context of a political impasse that confronted the Left, the French Left, in the 1970’s, at the moment of the return to order after the events of 1968 and the increasing violence of Vietnam War.

164 First, I’d like to turn to Doane’s essay once more, especially to her reading of

Godard and Gorin’s A Letter to Jane. For Doane, A Letter to Jane effects a deconstructive approach to the photograph – an approach that my own analysis will pursue in detail – and as such not only critiques the neutrality of a well-known photograph, but also problematizes the absence of the voice of the other, that is, the absence of an appropriate reaction shot to this other. It is the latter part of this phrase that I question, as much as it implicitly aligns A Letter to Jane with a politics of allowing the other to speak for him/herself. For Doane, A Letter to Jane supports what she perceives is the thesis of Jacques Aumont’s analysis of the “ordinary face” of the talkie: “it is the shot/reverse shot that consolidates that humanity as an aspect of intersubjectivity.”354 However, if we take a look at Aumont’s analysis itself: the ordinary face of the talkie is “an attribute of a free and equal subject with rights like all the others but that must ceaselessly exercise its liberty and equality in confronting that of other free and equal subjects.”355 The problem here is the very constitution of the subject as free and equal, a subject of liberal thought, one that Aumont argues necessitates an exchange of rights of other free and equal subjects, a

“communication.” And here we can recall Marx’s criticism of such an assumption of

“free and equal subjects”: “Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom.”356 Thus, I wish to demonstrate how A Letter to Jane is not simply a critique of photography’s claim of realism, but

354 Doane, 106. 355 Jacques Aumont, Du visage au cinema, quoted in Doane, 106. 356 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1973), 245.

165 that it also proposes a heuristic distinction between the reverse shot and the reaction shot – a reverse shot that shows the embeddedness of the individual in his/her situation, moreover, questions the very distinction between individual and collective.

What is at stake is not simply a politics of allowing the other to speak, but also the question: how is it that we do not allow the other to speak by subsuming the other into the structure of a shot-reaction shot.

IV.

A Letter to Jane is a film that accompanies the screening of Godard and

Gorin’s Tout va bien (1972).357 Instead of a preview, an interview or a behind-the- scenes account, Godard and Gorin offer the audience another film. A Letter to Jane is to be an “advertisement” for Tout va bien, a détournement of the common practice of promoting a film – as if to stress, as Theodor Adorno would say, the increasing difficulty of distinguishing “the main attraction” from “the coming attraction,” the dominance of films that function as advertisements for themselves: “Every commercial film is actually only the preview of that which it promises and will never deliver.”358 What is problematized in A Letter to Jane is precisely this “promise,” a

357 See also James Roy Macbean, Film and Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1975); Colin McCabe and Laura Mulvey. Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1981. 358 Theodor W. Adorno, “Transparencies on Film,” New German Critique (Fall/Winter 1981 [1967]), 205. Based on an article in Die Zeit, November 18, 1966, the essay was published in Adorno’s Ohne Leitbild (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1967). “One will have observed that it is difficult, initially, to distinguish the preview of a ‘coming attraction’ from the main film for which one is waiting. This may tell us something about the main attractions. Like the previews and like the pop hits, they are advertisements for themselves, bearing the

166 promise that is also a deferral – the promise of the meaning of the film, that is, the motor of narrative itself with its promise of the resolution of a crisis, its forward movement, its repetition of anticipation and deferral folded in and incorporated into a dramatic arc of exposition-climax-denouement. To the question of the meaning of

Tout va bien, of the intention of its filmmakers, A Letter to Jane answers with a series of questions – and a provocation, a scene of address, even confrontation, of the audience in the cinema. The question of intention – and the sovereignty of the author as master of the meaning of his/her text – is displaced through the “detour” of another film. For Godard and Gorin, it is a necessary detour, “a direct detour,” that does not offer the promise of a resolution-to-come, but brings forth a crisis – a crisis of aesthetics and politics as their films speak to a paralysis of praxis in Europe and the United States. As a “supplement” to Tout va bien, the audience is confronted by an hour-length film that is almost too dense for a first viewing – the density of what we hear exacerbated by the austerity of what we see, primarily a single image, a well-known photograph of Jane Fonda in Vietnam by an American photographer,

Joseph Kraft, from a 1972 issue of the French magazine L’Express (Fig. 19).

The film begins with a black blank screen and “Dear Jane…” If A Letter to

Jane is an address to the audience in the cinema, it is also a letter addressed to the subject of the photograph: “Jane.” What is at stake here is not Jane (as in Jane Fonda the individual), but the function of “Jane” (Fig. 20). And the function of “Jane” in the photograph is that of an actress – a famous actress, who has been invited by the

North Vietnamese to represent their fight for freedom. “Jane” then is not only the commodity character like a mark of Cain on their foreheads. Every commercial film is actually only the preview of that which it promises and will never deliver.”

167 representation of a star, but also a militant. The crux of Godard and Gorin’s film is to question this analogy between star and militant: Is it the star as militant? Or is it the militant as star? Perhaps, in 1972, it is the same question for the North Vietnamese, but not in Europe or in the United States – a distinction, the film declares, which has been disavowed, systematically, through the manner in which the photograph has been consumed by the Western media and by the audience sitting at a screening of

Tout va bien. The photograph presents itself as an answer, “a practical answer,” to the question of the role of the actor, the star, moreover, the intellectual: “What part should intellectuals play in the revolution? To this question the photograph gives a practical answer. The answer it gives is its practice.”359 It is precisely at the level of practice – how the photograph represents its subject, how it engages the spectator, and the social implications of this “how”– that the answer is different: the answer from Vietnam, the answer from Europe and the United States. However, the aim of the film is not to offer yet another answer.

Rather, I would argue, the aim is not to answer; the aim is to bring forth the force of this question as that which confounds any answers. The question of the role of the intellectual is problematic as the very status of the intellectual is or ought to be in question; that question of the role of the intellectual in this struggle, the struggle of the North Vietnamese, is problematic as the very terms of the struggle is in question.

In short, the aim is to call forth an enigma that is part and parcel of the impasse of the Left. And if this impasse is intolerable – all the more intolerable in the post-1968

359 Godard and Gorin, A Letter to Jane.

168 context of a return to order – the aim is not to render it tolerable, but to see and to hear. What have we seen? What have we heard?

The photograph is a close-up of “Jane,” the three-quarter profile of a face that is turned inward to itself – and turned toward us, the spectator, not too much as if it were aware of our presence, but enough so that we can share its sense of contemplation. Naught is neutral about the representation of this face, the film insists. The frame is centered on the actress who is looking, rather than what she is looking at. It is her face that is in focus – at the expense of those who surround her.

We almost pass over another face that is turned toward us, directly, blurred into the background as if it was but a part of the landscape, the surrounding, a mere context or pretext for the face of the famous actress: the anonymous face of the North

Vietnamese, the Vietnamese Left.

The strength of the film’s critique is in bringing forth this other face, bodying forth the other, via an analysis of photograph. The film offers us a different manner of consuming or rather not consuming this too-well-known image through a series of fragmentations, framings and re-framings, a deconstruction of the surface of the photograph, till we see the face of the other embedded in the background. And we do not simply see: we are startled by the sudden, abrupt appearance of a face that was seemingly not there. For the point of the film is not to isolate and separate another face, that is, to individuate the other, but rather to show a face that cannot be isolated from the landscape – as if the landscape itself looks back at us, the unsettling glow of a gaze (Fig. 21). “In this photograph, the famous American is sharp and clear, and the anonymous Vietnamese is blurry and unclear; but in reality, it is the American

169 Left that is blurry and out of focus, and the Vietnamese Left that is exceptionally sharp and clear.”360 The North Vietnamese face cannot be isolated from its context; the function of this face is to reflect the reality of the revolution, the daily struggle,

“the extraordinary ordinary facts” of the war: “It has a definite reverse shot.”361 In contrast, the face of the actress is isolated – or rather it is staged to be isolated, “the face lends itself to this separation”: “no reverse shot.”362 It reflects itself, but “a self that is no where, lost in the infinite immensity and immortal tenderness of the pieta by Michelangelo, a Woman’s face that does not reflect other women.”363

If the face of the actress lends itself to separation and isolation, it is not only on account of how the face has been framed and focused, how the face has been shot in close-up. It is also how the face has composed itself within this shot, the expression of the actress, specifically the expression of a tragic actress – one with a particular technical and social training: “the Method.” Established in the United

States in the early 1930’s, Method acting standardized a specific mode of performance, a “natural” style in which the acting is to be expressive of the actor’s self. According to the Method, the actor is not “to act” but “to be” – or rather, “to act out,” to identify with the role via an excavation of bits and pieces of one’s “inner” self, to “free” the self through introspection and extraction: the Method as an

“hermeneutics of the self.” As the film scholar James Naremore points out, the

Method is a procedure, rather than a style. The aim of the procedure is not only to be in touch with one’s self, especially with one’s feelings, but also to formulate such

360 Godard and Gorin, A Letter to Jane. 361 Godard and Gorin, A Letter to Jane. 362 Godard and Gorin, A Letter to Jane. 363 Godard and Gorin, A Letter to Jane.

170 expressions of self and inscribe them into a system of stimulus and reaction: “Most of all, it tried to develop an ‘affective’ or ‘emotional memory’ that functioned rather like an onion concealed in a handkerchief, producing real rather than artificial tears.”364 And the procedure could be explosive.365 During the Pax Americana of the

1950’s and the standoff of the Cold War, the performance of a Marlon Brando or a

James Dean becomes a brutal, even painful, procedure of extraction – the brutality and sensuality of their physical performance underscored by their inability to be articulate via speech, “an uneasiness with official language and no words for his love or rage.”366 It is as if in a period of conformism and stultifying stalemate, one could not but act out in futile, violent attempts at escape, as if “to be” is to agonize over the inability to act, that is, to act with any significance to one’s situation: the masochism of the rebels without a cause, the avatars of a paralysis of praxis.367

364 James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 197. 365 “And it precisely after the war – at the very moment when the American Dream is collapsing, and when the action-image is entering a definitive crisis, as we shall see – that the dream finds its most fertile form, and action its most violent, most detonating, schema. This is the final agony of the action cinema, even if films of this type go on being made for a long time yet.” Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, 157-8. 366 “Whether the character is a laborer, an upwardly mobile son of a wage-earning family, or an affluent teenager, he has the same problem: an uneasiness with official language and no words for his love or rage. At the same time, he brims over with sensitivity and feeling, the intensity of his emotion giving him a slightly neurotic aspect,” Naremore, 201. The inarticulate is coupled with an excess of emotion, be it anger or love – and an excess of the bodily, perceived as the suggestion of “a scandalous sexuality”: “A high contrast to the utterly straight Waynes, Gables, and Pecks of the forties, Brando is symptomatic of the period that produced Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe – all of them brooding, ostensibly inarticulate types who suggested a scandalous sexuality and who signaled American entertainment’s drift toward adolescent audiences in the decades after the war,” Naremore, 195. 367 If such performances, particularly of the American family melodramas of the 1950’s (rather than the other genres), offer a powerful social critique, Thomas Elsasesser argues, it is “by emphasizing an emotional dynamic whose social correlative is a network of external forces directed oppressingly inward, and with which the characters themselves unwittingly

171 However, the photograph of “Jane” offers us a different, much more muted figure of the rebel without a cause, of the “blurry” and “out of focus” American Left

– an appearance of not rebellion but resignation. The figure contemplates, rather than agonizes; the action is kept in check and contained within the circumference of a face, a reflective face, an expression of absorption and universal compassion, sympathy, pity. For Godard and Gorin, the expression is an abstraction, a spectacle, akin to that of the ageless Madonna of La Pietà (1499) or Le Penseur (1902) by

Auguste Rodin, the representation of “the thinker” in Western culture – an archetypal composition of a face that articulates the quintessential process of Cartesian thought:

“I think, therefore, I am.” The film cuts to various representations of the one who thinks – the stars of movies, but also of other media, the writer, the philosopher, the politician, etc. – and each face repeats this all-too familiar expression of the

Cartesian self. According to Fredric Jameson, if the Method of the 1950’s systematized a mode of performance “to render this asphyxiation of the spirit that cannot complete its sentence,” its later application presents a “paradox” of an asphyxiated-self that says too much: “the inarticulate becomes the highest form of expressiveness, the wordless stammer proves voluble, and agony over un- communicability suddenly turns out to be everywhere fluently comprehensible.”368

collude to become their agents...alienation is recognized as a basic condition, fate is secularized into the prison of social conformity and psychological neurosis, and the linear trajectory of self-fulfillment so potent in American ideology is twisted into the downward spiral of a self-destructive urge seemingly possessing a whole social class.” Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” Monogram 4 (1972), 2-15. 368 Fredric Jameson, “Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film (1977)” in Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, 1992), 43. For Jameson, the Method’s representation of the existentialist anti-hero is related

172 There is then a lack of specificity in the actress’ expression: “no reverse shot.” The same expression circulates in different contexts; the film cuts to stills of other films from the actress’ career, to stills from other actors of the Method, be it from Left or the Right, say, the face of Henry Fonda (from Young Mr. Lincoln

(1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940)) or of John Wayne (from The Green Berets

(1968)). It is the same composition of a face as the reaction shot to various situations, as if all these “tragic” situations call forth the same knowing-look of compassion – sympathy, pity, perhaps a shade of sorrow, the sense of sharing another’s suffering

(but not his/her contradictions), of sharing the suffering of humanity (but not of the situation of other men or women.) As Brecht would critique of the classical theater:

“All its incidents are just one enormous cue, and this cue is followed by the ‘eternal’ response: the inevitable, usual, natural, purely human response…The cue can take account of what is special, different; the response is shared, there is no element of difference in it.”369

In one of its most powerful sequences, the film cuts from “Jane” to a collage in which the image of The Thinker has been pasted onto a corner of a photograph of

to “the systematic psychologization and the privatization of the ideology of the fifties and early sixties.” However, there is a paradox in its “second-generation re-appropriation” in the seventies. It is a paradox, Jameson argues, that is part of the nostalgia for the fifties - nostalgia for “the good old days” when one’s worries were presumably limited to the psychological and the private. And it is also part of a re-conceptualization and recuperation of the status of ‘the marginal.’ Marginality “has ceased to be thought of as anti-social and has rather become a new social category in its own right” – a recuperation of (and identification with) ‘the marginal’ that is symptomatic of the sudden insecurity and instability of the middle class after the end of “the Golden Age of Capitalism,” “when a middle-class audience suddenly comes to an unpleasant consciousness of its own historicity.” Jameson, 41-4. 369 Bertolt Brecht, “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting (1936)” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 97.

173 “U.S. crimes in Vietnam” (Fig. 22): “Why not carry this statue around wherever there is a catastrophe in the world to inspire the crowds with a feeling of pity?” 370

The incongruity is startling. We become aware of the disproportions of the photograph – the soldiers occupy three-fourths of the picture-plane, standing, hands on hips, surveying the neat alignment of bare bodies at their feet; the dead are compressed into a mass, reduced to a receding line of not faces but the twisted and contorted rigor mortis of arms and legs. And the image of The Thinker looms over the end of this line. It stands in for an image of a photographer within the initial composition of the picture (Fig. 23); its startling incongruity underscores – and disrupts – the photographer’s function. For the latter’s function is to seamlessly close a circle of looks – the circulation and exchange of knowing-looks mediated by the image of the dead; the communication of not what we are looking at (Vietnam), but that we are looking (the soldiers, the photographer, the camera/spectator); not a photograph of Vietnam, but a photograph of the taking of a photograph.

It is “an expression of an expression,” the film argues: “this expression talks but only to say how much it knows…but it says nothing more than how much it knows.” 371 And Godard and Gorin propose that the expression appears at a particular moment in the history of cinema – the triumph of the talkies in the early 1930’s.

There is a correspondence between technology and subjectivity, between the talkie and the Method’s technique of subjectivation, its practice of introspection, extraction, formulation and inscription of the “I,” its “hermeneutics of the self.” The dichotomy that A Letter to Jane seems to establish between silent cinema and the

370 Godard and Gorin, A Letter to Jane. 371 Godard and Gorin, A Letter to Jane.

174 talkies is not a binary between image and sound – as if to claim an ontology of cinema, cinema as essentially a medium of sight, and subsequently the dominance of the talkies in the 1930’s as a history of decline, even a betrayal, a Fall. Rather, I would argue, the distinction between silent cinema and the talkie here is between gesture and expression, that is, two modes of relating to oneself and to others, two modes of subjectivity – not so much an ontology but a politics of cinema. The function of the distinction is to underscore the aesthetic and political implications of the figuration of the actor as the speaking subject. The problem of the talkies here is not so much sound but speech, specifically the mode of speech as a medium of information – the suppression of the materiality of other sounds (and silences) according to the criteria of “intelligibility.”

Focusing on the period of the rise of the talkie, from the late 1920’s till the late 1930’s, the film historian Rick Altman underscores a shift of criterion in the theories and practices of early synchronous sound technology: a shift from “fidelity” to “intelligibility.”372 According to Altman, the talkie at its initial stage attempted to approximate the specific spatial-temporal experience of sound in space – an attempt that is exemplified in the norm of a single immobile microphone: “A character receding or turning away from the mike was recorded with a higher ratio of reflected to direct sound; similarly, the size of the room had its effect on volume, reverberation, and frequency characteristics.”373 Movement was not only to be seen, but also to be heard; the scale of sound was to be matched to the scale of image, and

372 Rick Altman, “Sound Space” in Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 46 – 64. 373 Altman, 53.

175 if a character moves from foreground to background, we were to see and to hear how the body recedes, how the voice ebbs and subsides. However, in the 1930’s, the norm is no longer of a single immobile microphone, but microphones that move in tandem with the character, that is, the character that speaks. The microphone sustains the same distance from the speaker throughout the sequence; new technologies are developed in order to enhance the capacity to record and to represent a clean, clear, continuous stream of spoken dialogue. The emphasis is not on the specific temporal- spatial experience of sound in space, but on the perception of speech, specifically speech that informs the spectator of the narrative. Other sounds are demoted to the status of noise and suppressed as such or re-inscribed into the narrative as a part of the character’s surrounding. And the spectator is positioned at an appointed point of audition within the film (rather than at dispersed points amongst the audience in the cinema) – the experience of sound as a point of internalization and identification with the character: “We are asked not to hear, but to identify with someone who will hear for us.”374 As film scholars such as Alan Williams point out, the standardization of the talkies in the 1930’s accelerated the standardization and commodification of narrative film à la the classical Hollywood system of continuity; the talkies rendered the system “stronger and more normative.”375 Speech is added; it redoubles the

374 Altman, 60.“This insistence on intelligibility at the expense of fidelity to the pro-filmic situation suggests that the referent of Hollywood sound is not the pro-filmic scene at all, but a narrative constructed as it were ‘behind’ that scene, a narrative that authorizes and engenders the scene, and of which the scene itself is only one more signifier,” Altman, 59. 375 Alan Williams, “Historical and Theoretical Issues in the Coming of Recorded Sound to the Cinema” in Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 126-37. “If there was an evolutionary pressure at work in cinema history which eventually culminated in the general adoption of synchronized recorded sound, this trend arguably has little to do with demand, the sphere of consumption, and much to with the logic

176 structure of narrative as well as the narratability, the intelligibility of the image. The talkies reinforce a chain of associations that naturalizes the relation between sound and image, between speech and subject – and the subject is accounted for and affirmed by what he or she says.

Confronting the aesthetic and political implications of the standardization of the talkies, filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein would argue that the problem was precisely the practice of adding sound to images, of naturalizing the relation between sound and image: “Sound used in this way will destroy the culture of montage, because the addition of sound to montage fragments increase their inertia as well as their independent significance.”376 The naturalization of the relation between sound and image not only hampers the flexibility of montage, but also allows for the autonomy, the self-sufficiency of the isolated, separated shot: “The shot itself as

‘star.’”377 For Eisenstein, the individuation of the shot supports the individualism, the

“starism,” of Western culture, especially of “bourgeois cinema”: “Someone has to be the ‘star.’ One person…The idea that a film is the result of collective efforts goes to the devil.”378 Eisenstein retorts: “Let us have neither personal stories nor those of people ‘personally’ isolated from the mass” nor “the personification of cinema in the

of industrial production. For what the triumph of Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone finally accomplished was to complete a process begun long before: the progressive mechanization of the cinematographic spectacle…And with full mechanization comes the most pervasive, general change brought about by the conversion to sound: increased standardization.” Williams, 128. 376 Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin and Grigori Alexandrov, “Statement on Sound (1928)” in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 80-1. 377 Sergei Eisenstein, “Béla Forgets the Scissors (1926)” in The Eisenstein Reader, 69. 378 Eisenstein, 68.

177 individualized shot.”379 “We must look for the essence of cinema not in the shots but in the relationships between the shots,” he argues, “just as in history we look not at individuals but at the relationships between individuals, classes etc.”380 Thus, in

Statement on Sound (1928), Eisenstein and other filmmakers of the Soviet school of montage insisted on “the contrapuntal use of sound,” a relation between sound and image that is of discontinuity, rather than continuity. The emphasis is on a relation not of association, but of the contradiction between sound and image, between speech and subject.

In the 1970’s, the film scholar Noel Burch, appropriates the figure of the benshi, the vocal commentator of Japanese silent cinema, as an alternative to the dominant mode of the sound-image relations. Burch describes how the benshi supplemented a single voice for all the characters as well as a commentary on each and every detail of the images on the screen, “often repeating himself in chanting patterns if he ran out of anything new to say.”381 For this “distant observer,” the benshi’s performance relieves film of “narrative burden” – and by changing the structure of a narrative, the meaning of a sequence, it relieves “even the possibility of the images producing a univalent, homogenous diegetic effect.”382 “Speech was indeed explicitly absent, since it was removed, put to one side; the voice was there, but detached from the images themselves.”383 And Burch argues for the significance

379 Eisenstein, 68. 380 Eisenstein, 68. 381 Noël Burch, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1979), 77. 382 Burch, 78-9. 383 Burch, 78. We could compare this separation of speech from its source (on screen) to that of the intertitles. However, Burch argues: “In the dominant cinema of the West, the dialogue

178 of this detachment via a reference to the account of Barthes, another “distant observer,” on the Japanese theater – an aesthetics Barthes compares to that of

Brechtian theater:

It functions by the discontinuity of the codes, by this caesura imposed

upon the different traits of representation, so that the copy made on

stage should be, not destroyed but broken, so to speak, spared the

metonymical contagion of voice and gesture, of voice and soul in

which our actors are mired.384

In A Letter to Jane, I would argue that Godard and Gorin also present themselves as a figure akin to the Burchian benshi to offer a commentary on each and every detail of the photograph of “Jane,” even repeating themselves in chanting patterns in their heavily French-accented English – the materiality of their voices further emphasized by the interruption of “noise” such as the sporadic fragments of Vietnamese songs that overwhelm their overwhelming commentary. The film dissolves the “univalent, homogenous diegetic effect” of this too-well-known image, the effect of the photograph’s close-up, its separation and isolation of the expression that “talks but only to say how much it knows…but it says nothing more than how much it knows.”

For Godard and Gorin, the problem of the figuration and reification of “Jane” as the speaking subject is corroborated by the accompanying caption, a text written

titles always made it clear that Speech, the Word, was an intangible, ineradicable presence inside the diegesis, that printing was merely its passive outward vehicle: this was implicit in the way in which the title demanded a momentary suspension of the images. It was isolated in a decorative frame, and against a timeless black background, signifying the parenthetic suspension (not the acknowledgement) of representation.” Burch, 78. 384 Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); quoted in Burch, 72-3.

179 not by the North Vietnamese but by L’Express. In Little History of Photography,

Benjamin had asked: “Isn’t inscription bound to become the most essential component of the photograph?”385 For Benjamin, the pressing problem is no longer the illiteracy of text, but illiteracy of the photograph, that is, the inability to see the details of an image, the unacknowledged, indeed unspoken, silent (or rather silenced) details of landscape and anonymous faces – a “paralysis” of “the associative mechanisms of the beholder.”386 And it is a paralysis that corresponds to a reification of sociopolitical relations, a paralysis of praxis, according to which, “less than ever does the mere ‘reproduction of reality’ say anything about reality.”387 Here, the caption inscribes “Jane” as the actress, the militant – and as the one who speaks, a description that covers over the fact of the photograph itself, the detail of the actress- militant’s sealed lips: “The caption takes advantage of, profits by, the implicit authorization of the picture to hide the fact that the militant is listening.”388 The caption obfuscates the distinction between the speaker and the listener – or rather the distinction is relativized so that the function of the listener is subordinated and subsumed into that of the speaker. Moreover, L’Express has not published the supposed-dialogue between the famous American and the anonymous Vietnamese – as if it is enough to represent “Jane” as the one who speaks. The meaning of the photograph, of “Jane” in Vietnam, is accounted for and affirmed by the figure of the speaking subject. If the face of the actress lends itself to this individuation, the

385 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927-34, eds. Michael W. Jennings, et al. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 527. 386 Benjamin, 527. 387 Benjamin, 526. 388 Godard and Gorin, A Letter to Jane.

180 caption exploits the limitations of the face – how the face has been shot in close-up, how the face has composed itself within this shot – in order to interpellate “Jane” as the subject of the photograph, the star. Furthermore, the caption inscribes “Jane” as the one who speaks, the one who speaks of and for Vietnam, the star as militant.

“The star as militant” is the answer of the Western media to the “big, well- known” question of the role of the intellectual. For Godard and Gorin, the question itself is problematic: “By expressing itself in that way, it becomes paralyzing.”389

When an interviewer asks Michel Foucault the same question for a 1980 issue of Le

Monde, Foucault points to the problematic implications of the “starism” of the intellectual, the individuation and personification of various activities of thought:

“the intellectual is raw material for a verdict, a sentence, a condemnation, an exclusion.”390 In the interview, Foucault declines to offer us his name. He insists on anonymity for “some chance of being heard,” that is, to be read by a reader for whom the philosopher’s answers are yet to be inscribed by the name of “Foucault”:

“A name makes reading too easy.” And the philosopher evokes a screening of a film for two types of spectators – two modes of relating to a film, moreover, two modes of relating to oneself and others. For the audience of a different culture, “only one thing interested them in this story involving three characters: the movement of light and shadow through the trees.” However, “in our societies, characters dominate our perceptions. Our attention tends to be arrested by the activities of faces that come and go, emerge and disappear.” For the philosopher, the choice of anonymity is to

389 Godard and Gorin, A Letter to Jane. 390 Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher” in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 322.

181 present the potential reader with a nameless, enigmatic face that poses itself as a question: “It is a way of addressing the potential reader…more directly.”

182 Conclusion

What I have attempted to develop in these three chapters is a relatively inclusive but systematic reading of the theory and practice of détournement in cinema. Allow me now to reconstruct the key aspects of my analyses. The three chapters, it might be said, each respectively focuses on the aspect of time, movement, and reaction/interaction. In the first chapter, I introduce the method of détournement via an analysis of two Situationist events: the détournement of the statue of utopian socialist Charles Fourier on Monday, March 10, 1969 at 7 pm, and

Debord’s first film, Hurlements en faveur de sade (1952). My reading focuses on various implications of the temporality of both events, and their gesture of rendering emptiness perceptible, palpable and potentially meaningful. These explorations of time/ temporality suggest that détournement might be understood: 1) as part of a re- conceptualization of the practice of montage after World War II; 2) as a critique of the reification of political representation during les trentes glorieuses; 3) as a method for the construction (and deconstruction) of subjectivities. In particular, I emphasize the SI’s critique of the ideology of communication, their attacks on a temporal coherence provided by the structure of narrative and History, which ensures the domestication and stabilization of the image, and enables the transformation of affect into its value as information. Additionally, temporal integration of subjectivity increases subsumption of the act of perception under the social functions of knowledge and power. Thus, in these two détournements of time discussed in

Chapter 1, there is an insistence on the affect of the image that resists all

183 appropriation into a totalizing point of view supportive of the spectator’s sense of self-possession and visual mastery. What is at stake is an intensification of our perception and experience that leads not to the coherent consciousness of the ego, but rather to its shattering, the disturbing and unsettling implications of what is foreign to oneself.

The second chapter discusses Debord’s “experimental documentary” and its method of détournement in relation to Jean Rouch’s cinéma-vérité. In particular,

Rouch’s work enacts a subversion of the classic dichotomy between documentary and fiction and opts for a different mode of political discourse than that of truth- claims and judgment. Cinéma-vérité presents the figure of the filmmaker as a provocateur, rather than an observer. Both the filmmaker and the cinematic apparatus are mobilized in such a way that the spectator is moved out of a static or passive relationship to the image; Rouch’s aesthetics move the spectator away from judgments of truth toward an unceasing momentum of investigation. I propose that

Rouch offers a new relation between the cinematic apparatus and the subject. The filmmaker is estranged from himself via the mediation of the apparatus (“ciné- transe”). The method of filming is not a confessional but a procession in which the filmmaker accompanies the subject’s passage with a camera, in which the subject is provoked to speak of him- or her-self in a state of distraction, lured and led astray again and again: “walking camera” or “pédovision.” The subject cannot respond to the enigma of the act of filming with a confession of hidden or repressed truths, but only with further questions: What does it mean? What is it trying to tell me? What is it asking of me? Thus, for Rouch, the filmmaker is one who provokes and

184 participates in a situation where the subject is incited to speak of him/herself not in the manner of an interview, but that of certain kind of psychoanalysis.

The third chapter focuses on the ethics and politics of close-ups. I discuss how Debord and Godard critique the representation of the film actor in the age of

“talking cinema.” They show us that the figuration and reification of the actor as the speaking subject need not be assumed or accepted as a necessary step in the evolution of cinema. The very notion of reaction and interaction as a dialogic mechanism inherent to cinema is to be questioned. Although the power of speech and voice in the talkie seemed to instantly gain dominance, an aesthetics of détournement would be interested in precisely those aspects of cinema where voice is neither returned to the subject nor exchanged with the other. In A Letter to Jane

(1972), a film examined closely in this chapter, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin propose that the actor of the talkie tends not to gesture, but to express – an expression that is but a reification, an appearance, of an expression: “an expression of an expression.” Thinking through the aesthetic and political implications of the standardization of the talkies, I analyze Godard and Gorin’s proposal of a correspondence between technology and subjectivity, and between the talkie and

Method acting’s techniques of subjectivation. By focusing on an earlier work of

Godard, Le Petit Soldat (1960), I also emphasize the difference between a camera that forces the subject to speak and a camera that is struck dumb. The drama of this difference, I argue, is played out in the images of the human face.

In summary, this dissertation has attempted to demonstrate the critical relevance for practice of an engagement with Debord’s notion of détournement that

185 takes seriously the idea that dissociation, discontinuity, and difference are productive categories of aesthetic technique. If such techniques emerged at a historical moment with the politics of the image and the society of the spectacle were intensifying, then it would not be surprising that art practices based on such techniques would be wagering on the possibility of détourning subjectivity itself.

186

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