THE ART OF BODILY SENSATIONS: ARTIST'S NUDE SELF- REPRESENTATION AND POETICS OF REVOLT IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGICAL PROLIFERATION

IZABELLA PRUSKA-OLDENHOF

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by Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof

By virtue of submitting this document electronically, the author certifies that this is a true electronic equivalent of the copy of the dissertation approved by York University for the award of the degree. No alterations of the content has occurred and if there are any minor variations in formatting, they are as a result of the conversion to Adobe Acrobat format (or similar software application).

Examination Committee members:

1. R. Bruce Elder 2. John O'Neill 3. John Picchione 4. John C. Stout 5. Mike Zryd 6. Steven Bailey 7. Barbara Crow Abstract

This dissertation investigates a possible approach of dealing with experimental cinema.

Film studies does not provide a framework for understanding the form and elements that

comprise experimental films, for it mostly focuses on the content and narrative structure.

The fundamental question that this dissertation takes up is how might one deal with films

whose form mirrors the experience of the body? The broader contours of this dissertation

explore the diminishing role of the human body in the digital age. It investigates the

central place of the body in art and, ultimately, in all human experience. This dissertation

adopts two means in developing the framework for considering experimental cinema and,

its related counterpart, the diminishing role of the body and of the real experience amidst

the thrust of technological progress. The first approach concentrates on the

phenomenological body, a body as given in the immediacy of experience, and relies on

the philosophy of Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in describing the experience

involved in making art. The second explores the psychoanalytic conception of the body, a

body propelled by its internal energies and their repressed traces, and turns to Sigmund

Freud, Julia Kristeva and Anton Ehrenzweig, focusing on the role of the body and the

primary process thinking in the art of the avant-garde. The theoretical positions explored in this dissertation permit the assertion that the human body is the source of and site of resistance in the culture of technological progress and technical thinking. Furthermore, this dissertation argues that those forms of the avant-garde art that explore the human body and strive to affirm its importance in human communication are essentially iv feminine. It identifies the characteristics of feminine aesthetics in visual art and experimental cinema by relying on the foundation set by the proponents of ecriture feminin. It insists that radical art today, in order for it to maintain its generative force, must embody the feminine aesthetics; it must assume characteristics of the repressed feminine. The theoretical framework in this dissertation offers a new perspective in the field of experimental cinema and avant-garde art for future artists and scholars.

v Acknowledgmen ts

Several people have been very generous to me by selflessly providing me with

their support, patience, encouragement and inspiration, without which I would not have

been able to complete this dissertation and projects. I would like to thank R. Bruce Elder

for his supervision, guidance and a lot of patience in every step of the way towards

completing this dissertation and becoming an artist-scholar. I am very grateful to him for

introducing me, over a decade ago, to avant-garde cinema and poetics, and for his

ceaseless inspiration through his films, writings, teaching and, of course, our

conversations. I would to thank John O'Neill and John Picchione for their guidance and

support with my dissertation, and for encouraging poetics of imagination in my writing.

Natalya Androsova, Megan Andrews, liana Gutman, Erika Loic and Angela Joosse (five

artist-scholars) have turned my solitary journey into an experience of creative and

intellectual jouissance. Thank you.

I would like to thank my family for their patience and support during my studies.

Thank you to my parents for the sacrifices they made in their lives, including the many

difficult years of emigration in hopes of a better life for my brother and me. Lastly, I

would like to especially thank my husband John Oldenhof for enduring the life of a student for several more years, for ceaselessly providing me with encouragement and for his support during this difficult, yet exciting, journey. Thank you for being such a wonderful partner.

vi Table of Contents

Abstract iv Acknowledgments vi Table of Contents vii List of Figures ix I. Introductions 1 Together: Lived-Bodies and Real Experience 6 Conclusion: together - to gather - to unite - the good - what one clings to 39 Freudian Prelude to Revolt and Revolution in Art Practice 41 The Imaginary Walk: The Magic in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams 41 Dreams: The Royal Road to the Unconscious Activities of the Mind 45 Conclusions Regarding the Importance of Freud's "Die Traumdeutung" 62 The Twists, Turns and Torsions of (Re)volt 63 Revolt in Michael McClure's Poetics: Connecting Revolt with the Somatic Dimension of our Existence, with the Body 70 Carolee Schneemann: Through the Dream-Body into Personal Revolt 72 Art, the Revitalizing Force of Life: R. Bruce Elder's Poetics of Experience 87 The Uncontainable, the Uncontrollable, and the Irrepressible in the Art of Carolee Schneemann and R. Bruce Elder 102 II. Carolee Schneemann 111 Schneemann, Olson & Kristeva's Semiotic Pulsions 112 Conclusion 133 Schneemann, Space (installations and sculptural environments), Kristeva & Chora: "The immeasurable, unconfutable maternal body" 134 Madelon Sprengnether's (M)other 139 Kristeva's Pre-Oedipal Mother 147 Conclusion 154 Schneemann & Polyphonic Cinema 156 III. Art and Thought by R. Bruce Elder as "Putting Your Body on the Line" 159 Chaos or the Polyphonic Vision of Artistic Imagination 160 Conclusion 192 R. Bruce Elder & Thinking-Through-Rhythm: A Semiotic Approach to Rhythm in Experimental Cinema 193 Locating Rhythm in Charles Sanders Peirce's Semiotics 194 Rhythm and Cinema: The Semiotic Approach to Cinema of Jean Mitry and Bruce Elder's Thinking-Through-Rhythm 201 Rhythm and the Body: Kristeva's Semiotics 213 Conclusion 217 IV Conclusion 221 Postscript: Towards the Private and the Intimate Encounter as the Ground of Revolt 225 vii Filmographies 227 Ph.D. Projects 231 Bibliography 237 Endnotes 246

viii List of Figures

Figure 1 The Art of Worldly Wisdom by R. Bruce Elder, 1979 187 Figure 2 Illuminated Texts by R. Bruce Elder, 1982 190 Figure 3 A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised By Joy by R. Bruce Elder, 1997 191

ix /. Introductions

This dissertation investigates a possible approach of grappling with experimental

films—films that I fell in love with while I was an undergraduate student, and which have

summoned me to care for them however I might. Film studies has not been attentive to

the experimental film practice and does not account or provide a framework for dealing

with or understanding the form and elements that comprise these works (e.g., rhythm,

colour, tone, etc.), for it is mostly focused on the content and narrative structure. So, how

might one deal with films whose form mirrors the experience of the body, whether it is

during lovemaking, in rage, or in mourning? This is the simple, basic question I have set

myself. My interest in experimental cinema and in avant-garde art stems from its ability

and, in most cases, its aim to re-activate a more primal mode of experience in the

spectator as well as in the maker, one that asserts the importance of the corporeal

dimension in human existence. Turning to the theoretical writings outside of film studies

and investigating these theoretical texts helped me formulate some notions about approaching the study of avant-garde art and experimental cinema in ways that are more appropriate to them. It also allowed me to situate the human body as the origin and the ground of all human activity, in particular of creative activity.

My interest in avant-garde art is inseparable from and grows out of my interest as a practicing filmmaker in the human body. It is the avant-garde art that connects most

1 directly and engages at the most primal level with the body—first, with the body of the

maker in the process of art-making and later with the bodies of the audience in the

aesthetic experience. In fact, one could state that today some of the most important avant-

garde art is body art, since on the psycho-somatic level, as Julia Kristeva points out, it

bears the imprint of the semiotic modality and is in tune with the irruptive pulsions of the

body, and in history of its practice it is first initiated with poetic language and

performance (body art), and later moves to other art disciplines. Furthermore, it can be

argued that those forms of the avant-garde art that explore the human body and strive to

affirm its importance in human communication are essentially feminine; in particular

body art in performance art, poetic language and experimental cinema which, by virtue of

their temporal quality, best approximate the ebbs and flows of experience in the body.

Avant-garde art asserts the importance of the human body, but a body of pleasure and in

touch with the feminine economy that dissolves and puts into question hierarchical

divisions imposed by the phallocentric and technocratic order. This form of art is perhaps

one of the few genuinely antithetical forces in contemporary culture; it inspires aberrant

challenges to the withering of the corporeal dimension in the culture of the virtual, as its

aim is to engage the body while reaffirming its corporeal importance through pleasure in

the aesthetic (psycho-somatic) experience. If artists are still "the antennae of the race," as

Ezra Pound maintained, and if the philosophers and cultural critics still look to the artists and their art for clues and possible direction or sense of the present situation, then my dissertation will make a significant contribution not only to the academic sphere but most importantly to people living in a world, which appears to have lost its own bearings and 2 to have left the fragile human body at the mercy of the global technocratic

establishments.

This dissertation adopts two means for developing the framework for considering

experimental cinema and, its related counterpart, the diminishing role of the body and of

real experience amidst the thrust of technological progress. The first approach

concentrates on the phenomenological body, a body as given in the immediacy of

experience. The second explores the psychoanalytic conception of the body, a body

propelled by its internal energies and their repressed traces. The phenomenological

perspective relies on Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and thinks through their

philosophy in doing phenomenological sketches of experience involved in art making.

The psychoanalytic perspective, which is situated at the centre of the dissertation, turns to

the work of Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva and Anton Ehrenzweig. I focus on Sigmund

Freud's primary process thinking and the pre-Oedipal phase of human development.

These are not the standard ways of approaching and employing his work. The

predominant view is to consider Freud's work on the later part of child's development, the Oedipal phase, and the sexual dynamics associated with it that manifest themselves in

various mental pathologies, viz. neurosis. Julia Kristeva and Anton Ehrenzweig have given Freud's primary process its due consideration. In fact, Kristeva's theories on revolt and avant-garde poetics, and Ehrenzweig's notions of syncretistic vision and scanning attention, have been fashioned on Freud's dynamic conception of mental functioning and his distinction between the primary and the secondary mental processes. Their works have connected Freud's ideas with poetics, i.e., the making of poetry and of other fine art 3 works. Furthermore, Kristeva and Ehrenzweig include the subject (the artist) as an

integral part of the creative process of art making, which is also the making and the

unmaking of the subject-artist. While paying particular attention to the relationship

between the body and the creative practice, I bring these three thinkers together in this

dissertation along with Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty, in effort to shed further light on the

experience that shapes the process of art-making.

Irigaray's theories on the feminine experience, in particular on the caress and

love, and Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body and the subject-object chiasm are

central to my formulation of the underlying ethical aspect of my project. In this

dissertation I also reflect on the broader ethical effects of radical art. I ask how the return

of the originary meaning that is re-infused into language through experience might have

broader ethical effects on the community, i.e. through the experience of radical art and writing created and experienced within the private/personal context, and being motivated

by the urging need of the private/personal contact with the other. Moreover, I insist that radical art today, in order for it to maintain its generative force, must embody the feminine aesthetics, i.e. it must assume characteristics of the repressed feminine. By establishing a connecting thread, via the unconscious, between Freud's ideas on the methods of the primary process thinking, Kristeva's conception of the function of the semiotic modality in systems of signification, and Ehrenzweig's notion of the syncretistic vision and scanning attention, I offer a description of the indescribable, a sketch of the invisible, and yet the vividly experienced feminine aesthetics.

4 The broader contours of this dissertation explore the diminishing role of the body

in the digital age. The problem that it investigates is the central place of the body in art

and, ultimately, in all human experience, which has been challenged and put at risk with

the introduction of digital technology and the advent of Cyberculture. This concern stems

from my own lived experience as an independent filmmaker, who works with both analog

and digital media, and is an active member of the Toronto's independent film

community. The theoretical positions that I explore in this dissertation help me in

asserting that the human body is the source of and site of resistance in the culture of

technological progress and technical thinking, and more specifically in issues arising

today with the introduction of digital technology and the advent of Cyberculture that put

into question the central place of the body in art and, ultimately, experience. This is why

my dissertation attempts to address this problem by turning its attention to role of the

body and the primary process thinking in art, in particular in the art of the avant-garde

and in experimental cinema, as a possible way of releasing human beings from the

shackles of technological progress and reconnecting them with, or at least giving them an

inkling of, the real experience through art (an aesthetic experience). Through the

framework of Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva and

Anton Ehrenzweig, I offer a new perspective on the field of experimental cinema and, to some extent, on performance art, for future artists and scholars to continue investigating.

I created several art projects as part of this dissertation. I completed four films and, with the help of three collaborators, created a sculptural environment titled Film-

Lab-Digestive-Track (2007). The films were titled as follows: fugitive l(i)ght (2005), 5 Pulsions (2007), Echo (2007), The Garden of Earthly Delights (2008). All these projects

give body its central place, in both the process of creating as well as the content and

subject of the work. Giving body its central place in human experience and in the process

of creation and reception has been the primary goal of all of film projects since 1996.

This dissertation, along with my accompanying projects, have continued that same

objective and have hopefully opened this area for further future inquiry of other artists

and scholars.

Together: Lived-Bodies and Real Experience

In our fabricated world, we can proclaim our demands. But I doubt that the walls of the subway or the noise of machines are changed as a result. We shout, but who listens to us? A variety of worlds separates us: the world of techne, the world of calculation, the world of science, the world of culture. We almost never face each other. We think that we encounter each other but, most of the time, we are infinitely distant. (Irigaray 85)

The following phenomenological sketches involve bodies in their most experientially intense state, the state of nudity. Their main focus is the bodily experience of space and the experience of togetherness. These sketches of experience are informed to a large extent by Maurice Merleau-Ponty's two books, Phenomenology of Perception and

The Visible and the Invisible, in which he describes the living-body of a subject, who exists in "communion" with the world, as a dynamic process of four bodily regions (the perceptive/sensory, the emotional, the motor, and the cognitive) which constantly fold over one another, like layers of flesh, and mutually constitute the living-body.

6 Furthermore, my reading of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is influenced by Samuel

Mallin's teaching and writing on that philosopher, and my phenomenological

descriptions draw on Professor Mallin's phenomenological method of Body

Hermeneutics. As a way of connecting these descriptions with the larger scope of my

Ph.D. dissertation that deals with artist's nude self-representation and its origin within the

feminine, I expand my commentary by drawing on Luce Irigaray's philosophy, in

particular her book To Be Two. Several questions have emerged while gathering

descriptions of the lived-experience of space and togetherness, as well as upon further

reflection on the language itself that underlies our ability to make sense of our bodily

experiences of the self, the other, of togetherness, of the lived-world, and to endow these

experiences with meaning, in its fullest sense. It is my goal that these questions will lead

to more discussion concentrating on the importance of lived experience, real bodies and

real space and will prompt further questions concerning the realms of the virtual body

and virtual space. What does it mean to be together? What role does the lived-body play

in our conception of togetherness? How is the experience of space implicated in our sense

of togetherness? Can we really be together in virtual space? Does your virtual-body in

virtual-space impose the same limits on me as the presence of your lived-body in real-

space? And finally, what are the ethical implications in our present understanding, our sense, of togetherness?

7 To Gather: My Body in Lived-Space

(June 2002)

In a midst of a secluded sand dune, I stand in my bare skin exposed to the summer

sun. As I stand and close my eyes I notice the delicate wisps of wind brushing, touching,

moving against the back of my legs and arms, my buttocks, my back, and through my

hair. My hair flips forward, covers my face, andfalls down to my shoulders. A short

moment of stillness is broken as my senses shift my attention to the feeling of warmth that

settles over the entire surface of my skin, especially my shoulders and the top of head,

until the wind flows in again and brushes against my body while cooling me off. In this in-gathering of the space through my body, I become the witness to the play of the wind and of the sun's rays when I give myself over this natural space and become its plaything.

In this giving, my perceptual modality, my senses direct me and open me to the gifts of this natural space. I open my eyes and the brightness of the sun reflecting off the sand fills my eyes. In trying to lessen this complete flood of light into my eyes, which is starting to cause me some pain, I slightly squint and place a hand just above my eyes to protect them from the light and notice that the entire space, the sand-dunes and the few trees and tall grass scattered around it, is bathed in the reddish hue of my body. I decide to walk over to the tree which has a shady area below it. I take my first step but I stop because I feel the burning sand against my foot. I take the next step carefully and do not place my entire foot on the burning sand, only the ball of my foot. My foot begins to sink into the depth of the sand. I decide that I have to move quickly as not to sink into the sand and not to be burned by it. With each step my motor body orients itself to the given situation and I 8 rather awkwardly run across, while my eyes are quickly scanning well ahead for any

unwanted branches, broken bottles, or rocks that can injure my feet. Iam finally under

the tree and in the comfortable coolness of its shadow, which also protects my eyes from

the excessive flooding of the light, I settle down comfortably orienting myself within the

area of the shadow. I can hear the wind now as it moves past the leaves, and thus also

see it, and I feel it again as touches my skin. As I begin to settle into this space, open up

to it and actively gather it inside me through my body/my senses.

Feeling already comfortably settled into this space I take out my small Super-8 film camera and begin to film my nude body. I hold the camera above my head and spin

while trying to capture both my entire body and the surrounding whirling space. At this

point, my motor body is amplified and the perceptual modality recedes into the horizon of

my experience. I begin to pan the camera in quick swing-like motions from my head to my

toes, while at the same time moving my body in counterpoint to the swings of my arms

and progressively becoming fully immersed in this movement. When filming myself, my

attention constantly oscillates between actively presenting myself in front of the camera

and simultaneously capturing myself with that camera, relying on my senses to guide my

imagination which stands in for the look of the seer that would naturally guide the

movements of the seen and vice versa, in a kind of mirroring of actions. After a while my

arms and my entire body become tired, I sit down on the cool sand and begin to pan the

camera across my body, almost brushing against the surface of my skin with the camera

lens while trying to approximate the correct distance for the image to stay in focus. I

gather with my senses and the camera both my body and the space envelops it. 9 This gathering is suddenly halted when my senses direct me to the progressively

louder sound of human voices. In an instant, the flow of the external space is closed off

and I recoil into myself in fear of being confronted in my vulnerable state by a stranger.

My body tenses up and I duck. Ifeel a flush of cold sweat and can hear the beating of my

heart. I wait in my coiled position, watch two people running in the distance and

eventually leave the field of my vision. I slowly uncoil and resume my in-gathering of the

space, the world, I inhabit.

In this short sketch, I tried to emphasize the amplification of the perceptual

modality in my experience of being alone, and in the nude, in the space of a sand dune.

Because my body did not have the armour or protection of clothing, it opened me, on the

one hand, to a more intensified whole-body experience of the space and its elements, and

on the other hand, made me more vulnerable to the possible dangers of being hurt, for example of stepping on a piece of broken glass. Furthermore, I tried to employ a more capacious meaning of the word "sense" in my description, following Merleau-Ponty's use and definition of this word in Phenomenology of Perception where he pointed out the interconnectedness of senses, meaning and direction as all belonging to the word "sense" or sens in the French. I emphasized in this sketch that my senses direct me through the lived-space, the world I inhabit, connect my body with the space and help me in-gather the space within my body, while simultaneously laying the necessary ground for me to make sense, the cognitive sense of my relation to this space based on linguistic signification. Moreover, by emphasizing the intensification of my perceptual, motor and 10 to some extent emotive modality within the real space of the sand dunes, with the

cognitive modality still being within the horizon of my experience, I tried to demonstrate

that the real lived space is not a concept but a lived and relational experience of the

human subject always already involved in the lived-world by the sheer virtue of our

implantation in the real world. In the concluding section of the chapter on the

phenomenology of space Merleau-Ponty noted that "To experience a [spatial] structure is

not to receive it into oneself passively: it is to live it, to take it up, assume it and discover

its immanent significance" (1962: 258). Therefore to experience real space is to actively

participate in receiving it or in-gathering it through the fourfold of the lived-body, which

is always already woven into the dense fabric of the lived-world, and thus being fully

engrossed in it and to live it.

•The film footage that was shot during my time in the sand dunes appears in the

middle section of The Garden of Earthly Delights (2008).

Together, You and I, United: the Good or What One Clings to—Love.

(January 22, 2008)

Together, you and I are gathered in this small but safe space, where the intrusions from the outside will not disrupt our mutual in-gathering of each other's presence. When

you are in this space with me, your presence summons my attention. Your presence calls

out to me while overcastting everything that my senses would usually direct me to in this

space if I was alone. The space becomes fluid as my emotions intensify through the sheer

11 awkwardness of our nudity. I sense your vulnerability and through this sensing my own

intensifies, while at the same time trying to comfort you. At first we barely look at each

other, because we know that the look of the other can make you feel whole or can

completely crush you.

We are both standing at the opposite ends of the room, each illuminated by a light

above each one of our heads. We discover ourselves in the shadows below. You discover

a game, a shadow game, and we each play with our own shadow like a baby exploring its

still rather foreign body; Oh, here is my leg! Aha, here is my bum! Oh, look what I can do

with my hands, I can make them grow or reduce in size by bringing them further and

closer to light. Then, after having familiarized ourselves with our own shadow bodies, we

proceed to see what else is out there. I discover you, and to my surprise learn that you

have invented other ways of moving andfinding your body. I want to try that too, to

mimic you. And now I see that you are mimicking my movements. This game of mimicking

each other is finally wearing off and we proceed to make contact with each other's

shadows. Sadly we realize that as soon as one of us moves too far to the other and leaves

the light spot to make closer contact, to unite with the other's shadow, the shadow-self dissolves, it disappears. We soon realize that this simple and seemingly childish game of

shadow-self is really a metaphor for human relations and most importantly of the

experience of love, where the firm boundaries of the self and the other are no longer there in this emotional union—the ultimate experience of the good.

We both belong to this lived-space and yet another one is created within it, the intimate space between you and me, which is thick with the emotional intensity that exists 12 between us. I in-gather your presence into myself and in this gathering I open to-wards- you. Together, we open towards one another while the two of us in-gather each other. I experience myself through you. Our mutual exchange is only possible by virtue of your and my real bodily presence, and especially in our most vulnerable states. Our sensitivity to each other's bodily gestures, bodily orientation, and facial expressions that communicate our emotive states, is the basis of our communion—the union that underlies all community building and is rooted in the experience of the lived-body in the lived- world. But the pleasure of our mutuality is always underpinned by risk, the risk of the possible un-pleasure, if you so choose. You can crush me by not reciprocating my accepting look or through a gesture that is disapproving. You can completely close yourself offfrom me and not look at me at all or simply walk away; this of course would double my feeling of nudity and vulnerability. In fact, it would rip me open and in this wounded state I would completely recoil into myself.

I realize that although we co-exist in this space together, the two of us remain two. Your presence at once defines me and puts limits on me. I can never be fully united with you or have complete access to you. Iam bound by my own limits, self, subjectivity, body, just as you are by yours. While aiming at the whole (Oh, the OOOOceanic fullness) but being left with a gaping hole (absence, void, emptiness), a wound that was left behind, /forever long for that union, that source of the good.

I attempted to draw attention to Merleau-Ponty's notion that "being is synonymous with being situated" and, furthermore, by including the presence of the other 13 in this sketch, also being oriented towards other beings (1962: 252). In the above description, my perceptual modality immediately directs me towards the other. This subsequently amplifies the emotive modality while placing the perceptual, the cognitive and the motor modalities at the horizon of my experience. However, these three modalities are attuned to the emotive modality and coloured by it. Furthermore, the perceptual modality, along with the other two, has the ability to transform the current state of the emotional modality by a change in the other's bodily or facial gestures. In fact, it is important to note that all four modalities are always necessarily present but in varying degrees. Perhaps due to the sheer intensity of emotional experience that was engendered in the presence of the other, I gave into the labile nature of language while permitting linguistic slips and acoustic assonances to direct my descriptions. But it is through these momentary absences of my rational ordering of thought that an earlier and more encompassing meaning of the word together has slipped in. So, what has fled or has been driven away from our full and lived sense of togetherness?

The word together is connected to two other words through its etymology: to gather and good. The etymological root of the word "together," and the two other words, dates back to before the twelfth century. "Together" in the Middle English was togedere

(from Old English togcedere, from to "to" + gcedere "together"). It is akin to Middle High

German gater ("together") and to the Old English gaderian ("to gather"). The verb "to gather" was in Middle English gaderen, from Old English gaderian, and akin to Middle

High German gadern ("to unite"). This Middle High German word gadern, which means

14 "to unite," is the etymological root of the word "good," from Old English god, and it is

akin to Old High German guot ("good") and in Sanskrit gadhya ("what one clings to").

Therefore, what escapes our present and very abstracted sense of the word

"together" is the good itself, by virtue of the eclipse of technological thinking over our

lived bodily experience. As I previously noted, it is this lived bodily experience that

imparts the fullness of meaning to language; experience as an active participation in the

lived-world and not as passive reception of the world. "Word and speech," Merleau-

Ponty insists, "must somehow cease to be a way of designating things and thoughts, and

become the presence of that thought in the phenomenal world, and, moreover not its

clothing but its token or its body" (1962: 182). They must become word-flesh.

Furthermore, by virtue of expanding the meaning of words "together" and "sense"

(senses, direction, meaning), which is given to us through our experience of the lived-

body in its active participation in the lived-space (lived-world), their mutual dependence

becomes more visible in the following way: senses direct us to the each other and the

world, while gathering or uniting us in our mutual comm-union, and the meaning is found

in that union, which is the good itself.

The Gift of Imagination at Its Most Bare: Her Caress

(February 4, 2008)

This is our second session together, together as two, and I think that we

discovered yet another art project. It is amazing how the experience of nudity gives rise to creation, creativity: last week a shadow project, today an illuminated screen of 15 togetherness. Why does nudity give? And what is it about this experience that prompts

this giving, this opening towards creativity, creation, imagination? Is it that in the

experience of nudity we are most bare, vulnerable, and open?

Today we took turns photographing one another. The experience of being shot

with a camera feels very different from the experience of being seen in the bare presence

of the other. Without the intermediary of the camera, our eyes turn into hands that touch

without actually touching the surface of the skin. They are in constant motion. Their

quick taps across our bodies, from head to toe, can feel like delicate and comforting

caresses or like painful jolts. Those caressing motions of our eyes produce in-motions in

me; the inward spiraling that gives rise to the most intense emotions.

... Caress (care-ss), caressing (cares-sing); is it not wonderful how fecund is our

language, as long as we permit it to live and flow in our bodies, and to sing it out with

pleasure of our mouths to the other. In this singing/calling I touch you, and in this

touching/caressing is expressed my care for you which hopefully stirs your emotions.

These emotions and perceptive sensations that are the gifts of our bodies recall her caress, the caress of our first other, our mother. Her caressing, her tender care for us

and its expression in her voice were song for us, between us. These rhythmic and tonal

soundings of her voice, our song and our language, our private language only between us, became regulated by law, silenced, and transformed into language as a means of practical communication that granted us entry into the Symbolic. And yet within this practical communication there remain echoes of her, and of our song. In caress, two S's touching-together transform "care " into "touch," leaving these two bodily modalities 16 (affective and perceptive) in close proximity, in embrace as a path for us to re-member our song ...

When the camera lens is separating us it prevents our eyes from touching, from caressing that puts us in touch with one another. With the camera between us, I can imagine that you are not looking at those parts of me that I feel most vulnerable about.

The lens that acts like a thick veil prevents you from touching me, from touching me inside, because it also prevents me from seeing right into your eyes and seeing your expression; the expression of approval or disapproval. I rely on my imagination to comfort myself in thinking that you did not look at those vulnerable parts of me which 1 did not want you to see, and if you did look at them you approved.

Do 1 touch you? Can you feel the tender and hesitant tapping of my touch when I glance at you, when your eyes are hidden behind the camera?

Click, click, Click click, Click, click ... the shutter of the camera clicks away one image after another ... Click, click ... in the silence of our space this repetitive clicking sweeps me into its sound and rhythm ... Click, click ... which is very soothing and strangely familiar ... Click, click... I begin to move to the rhythm that you set for me with the camera ... Click, click, Click, click ... you move in response to my movements ...

Click, click ... we slowly become in-tune with each other Click, click ... and immersed in our rhythmic responses to one another ... Click, click ... no, I don't have to see your eyes, be touched by their gaze ... Click, click ... your body touches me through its in-tune responses to my body in-motion ... Click, click, Click, click

17 I looked at the photographs you took of me, and although I did not want you to take pictures of those vulnerable parts of me, you did, and I liked them. I liked them and I like the fact that you did take them and captured them for me to see. If you had not captured them, I would have wondered why not, and probably would have thought that you did not like them. This process is very generative (creatively, imaginatively and emotionally). When you approve and, in fact, praise these images of me, of me at my most bare and vulnerable, you make me realize that I am all-good, all-good from head to toe.

This feeling helps me open towards you more and more, and look forward to our next generative-generous session—a session in generosity and giving, the gift of our presence.

As a way of extending the contours of caress in the above sketch, it might be worth our while to consider Luce Irigaray's notion of the caress in her book To Be Two, in particular in how it revives the intersubjective relation between the self and the other

(me and you). But first, I would like to make a small digression and focus on the differences that she identifies between how women and men conceive relationship. In the opening paragraphs of the second chapter of her book, she notes:

My experience as a woman demonstrates, as does my analysis of the language of women and men, that women almost always privilege the relationship between subjects, the relationship with the other gender, the relationship between two. ... With men, one finds both a material and spiritual relationship between subject and object in place of the intersubjective relationship—however incomplete—desired by women.... Finally, instead of the feminine universe's relationship between two, man prefers a relationship between the one and the many, between the I- masculine subject and others: people, society, understood as them and not as you. (17)

18 According to this description by Irigaray, it would thus appear that women tend to

be more partial to close and private relationships, whereas men prefer the distant and

therefore public ones. Women, thus, prefer intimate relations between two subjects (the

self and the other, me and you), the intersubjective relationships. Furthermore, this

intimacy between the two (me and you) implies proximity and closeness. Proximity and

closeness are codependent, for spatial proximity is both sensibly and emotively

experienced by the two subjects by manifesting itself in emotional closeness, or at least in

amplification of the emotional dimension that would not be present if they were separated

by distance, which does not impose the same limits on the two as spatial proximity.

However, despite this proximity and closeness, the two subjects remain two (me and you)

in intersubjective relations. The two in intersubjective relation are neither fused, confused

or smothered by my "I," nor does the two become me and them; them the abstracted idea

of the plural other, the others of the group, a crowd, of society that I can only experience

at distance as some-bodies (objects) that impose no limits on me, the subject.

Furthermore, this smothering and con-fusion that distance produces, which Irigaray

identifies as being characteristic of relations common to men, leaves no space for considering of the other sex, the second sex. The second sex or gender difference, according to Irigaray, is the ground of the irreducible alterity, which preserves the

mystery of the other and therefore the gap that keeps the between as a relation between two; the two subjects who are co-dependent and co-creative. Instead the second sex, and therefore the possibility of alterity and of you in "me and you," is generalized into a

universal (uni "one" + versal "world") "them." This is really nothing more than the 19 multiples of me (the one) at a distance, because I never get to know "them" as "you" in

intimacy, in closeness, in private that would reveal to me our irreducible difference and

that you can never be possessed by me. Therefore the between that gender difference

presents, must be preserved for me and you to live together as two subjects and to be in

the intersubjective relationship.

Irigaray maintains that the intersubjective relationships belong to the feminine

universe, which has been exiled from our lives into the oblivion of generalizing

universals through the dominance of Western man who privileges violence, alienation

and "domination of nature, of animals, of other humans" (72). However, although it is

difficult for us today to think what the distinct characteristics of the feminine identity

would consist of, and which Irigaray insists still remain to be considered, she

nevertheless gives us some clues. The characteristics of the feminine to be that she

identifies for us include: contemplation and attunement that would lead to cultivation of

the self and self-mastery without violence, "without sacrifice, amputation, or self- annulment," and which would prompt human becoming as an "unfolding" rather than as

violence of forcing becoming of Western man; and attentiveness, which would place emphasis on emotional closeness rather than the alienating distance, and reciprocity by way of relation between two instead of the possession by the one and annulment of reciprocal relation (intersubjective relation) (Irigaray 72-3). Most importantly, the intersubjective relationship has its origin within the body and its history, which Irigaray insists belong to the feminine universe, and therefore have been exiled from our consciousness in Western culture. However, she remains hopeful in noting that: "Perhaps 20 it is up to women to think [the intersubjective relation]. They, who generate in themselves the other gender, can perhaps better conceive the two of subjectivity, of gender, and not only the one" (34).

In her writing on the intersubjective relations, Irigaray brings to light the history of every human subject, the history that has been repressed and dismissed by patriarchal culture and technological thinking and progress. This is a bodily and an affective history of our first and bodily relationship with our mothers. "The first other which I encounter," she writes "is the body of the mother, and this encounter differs depending upon whether

I am a girl or a boy. This difference in the first relation with the other's body can enter into the constitution of woman's or man's identity" (30). Maternal body and our first relation with mother and her body are already marked by gender. "Moreover, my body is inhabited by a consciousness which begins with its first relationship with the parental other, with the mother in particular. Such a relation is not neutral: it is sexuate" (Irigaray

31). Already this first relationship, according to Irigaray, nurtures me as a sexuate and intentional being, "I am: a sexuate body, a body potentially animated by a consciousness which is my own" (ibid.). "This property: being sexuate, implies a negative, a not being the other, a not being the whole, and a particular way of being: tied to the body and in relationship with the other, including therein the return to the self' (Irigaray 34). In this first relation we were two, two bodies and two intentionalities. In this way Irigaray also tries to bridge the body with consciousness. "In fact, intention exists both on the part of the mother towards the girl or body, and on the part of the child towards the mother.

21 Thus, the affectionate gaze of the mother towards the body of her son and of her daughter, as well as their attention towards the mother" (Irigaray 31).

She criticizes Western philosophy for annulling this first relationship, which writes out the mother along with the body out of history and as a result out of our culture.

Our first relationship, the relationship with the mother, sets up the corporeally grounded consciousness. This corporeal consciousness is the foundation to which we constantly must return as a way of grounding the truly intersubjective relationship, i.e. the relationship between me and you (between two).

This two does not allow the submission of one to the other, if it is not to suffer the loss of the two. It does not even correspond to a juxtaposition of one + one subjects. It has to do with a relationship between. ... This relationship between the two genders cannot be reduced to passivity for the female and activity for the male.... This division annuls one's own identity: the two genders, the two people in relationship with each other no longer remain. (Irigaray 35)

By way of the body it is therefore possible for Irigaray to identify two types of transcendence: the horizontal transcendence and the vertical transcendence. The horizontal transcendence refers to the gender and the vertical to the genealogy (the origin and historical development that is the source of being transcendent to the other in body, intentions, and words). They are both the origins and the guardians of difference. Irigaray enlists spatial metaphors to further help her emphasize the importance of relatedness/relation/relating in her ethical project of to be two, which depends on maintaining of a "between" and "to" of the two in the intersubjective relationship. Instead of relying on the tradition of Western philosophy by identifying transcendence with the 22 spirit or with "pure transcendence inaccessible to sensible experience," the transcendence

that Irigaray proposes has its root in our body and sensible experience of the "irreducible

alterity," and not in the elsewhere of pure thought (Irigaray 18). She writes:

In my present body I am already intention towards the other, intention between myself and the other, beginning in genealogy.... My body is never simple factuality or "facticity," unless it is a denial, an annulment of these intersubjective relationships which, from infancy, have marked it.... The body itself is intentionality: vertical in genealogy, horizontal in the relation between the genders. Denying this intentionality means submitting myself to a consciousness abstracted from my incarnation. (32-33)

Both dimensions therefore comprise our incarnate consciousness and, furthermore, they

are codependent in maintaining the space of difference. Moreover, our consciousness of

their existence is imperative in our relationships with others, in the intersubjective

relationships that preserve the space of alterity and of the in-between of to be two.

The other is and remains transcendent to me through a body, through intentions and words foreign to me: "you who are not and will never be me or mine" are transcendent to me in body and in words, in so far as you are an incarnation that cannot be appropriated by me.... The will to possess you corresponds to a solitary and solipsistic dream which forgets that your consciousness and mine do not obey the same necessities. Rather than grasping you—with my hand, with my gaze, with my intellect—I must stop before the inappropriable, leaving the transcendence between us to be. "You who are not and will never be me or mine" are and remain you, since I cannot grasp you, understand you, possess you. You escape every ensnarement, every submission to me, if I respect you not so much because you are transcendent to your body, but because you are transcendent to me. (Irigaray 18-19)

"To" also acts as noesis (precognitive knowledge, bodily knowledge). "Far from

wanting to possess you," Irigaray writes, "in linking myself to you, I preserve a 'to', a safeguard of the in-direction between us.... This 'to' safeguards a place of transcendence

23 between us, a place of respect which is both obligated and desired, a place of possible alliance.... I stop in front of you as in front of an other irreducible to me: in body and in intellect, in exteriority and in interiority" (19). Moreover, this space of between me and you, the space of to be two, is a space that generates the in-stasy. "You are the one who helps me remain in myself, to stay in myself, to contain or keep me in myself, to remain present and not paralyzed by the past or in flight towards the future. Your irreducible alterity gives me the present, presence: the possibility of being in myself, of attempting to cultivate the in-stasy and not only the ex-stasy" (Irigaray 37).

Just as the body does not figure prominently in our culture today, so have its root and echoes been blocked out from our culture by silencing the mother (the feminine) and our corporeal history. Irigaray's project strives to write them both into our culture and thinking. According to Irigaray, for a revolution in thinking about ethics to take place in

Western culture and philosophy,

[P]hilosophy would have to recognize that two subjects exist and that reason must measure itself against the reality and the to be of those two subjects, in their horizontal and vertical dimensions. Philosophy would, therefore, be refounded upon the existence of two different subjects and not upon the one, the singular, the same.... Such a revolution in thought would permit the constitution of an interiority different from that determined by and destined to a transcendence of the beyond or constituted within a genealogical order. ... This new interiority could exist only in the sphere of a sexuate relationship: since I am not you, I can open a space of interiority in me. The limit which derives from belonging to a gender is not only a limit to my presence: in the world, in my encounter with the other, with others; it is also a limit which delineates a horizon of interiority. Because I am not you, I can return within myself, collect myself, think.

... This interiority of mine safeguards my mystery as your interiority leaves you a mystery for me. (36, 39) 24 According to Irigaray, women are the path to such a revolution in thinking. Because of

their biological incarnation, which echoes the first relation with the parental other that is

already sexuate and the fact that they hold the possibility of giving life to the other within

their bodies, women can help us rethink our current ethics and reconsider intersubjective

relationship within the contours of the vertical and the horizontal transcendence (34).

Irigaray's notion of caress, which she situates within the feminine universe of the

subject-subject relation (the intersubjective relation), is one such attempt at rethinking the

theory of ethics and perception, by means of the sensible experience between me and

you, in their reciprocity.

The caress is an awakening to you, to me, to us. The caress is a reawakening to the life of my body: to its skin, senses, muscles, nerves, and organs, most of the time inhibited, subjugated, dormant or enslaved to everyday activity, to the universe of needs.... The caress is an awakening to intersubjectivity, to a touching between us which is neither passive nor active; it is an awakening of gestures, of perceptions which are at the same time acts, intentions, emotions. This does not mean that they are ambiguous, but rather, that they are attentive to the person who touches and the one who is touched, to the two subjects who touch each other. (Irigaray 25)

The experience of caress that Irigaray describes is not so much a subject-object chiasm

that Merleau-Ponty proposes in The Visible and the Invisible, when describing his hands

in mutual embrace, but the self and the other in a subject-subject chiasm (me-you

chiasm). It emphasizes the space of the in-between, the space of the chiasm

(crisscrossing), maintaining a path of attunement to the sensible experience of the self and the other in reciprocity. Just like Merleau-Ponty, Irigaray wants to dispense with the dichotomy between the subject and object. However, for Irigaray gender difference is of

25 an extreme importance when considering the life of the subject, for it is its foundation.

She criticizes Merleau-Ponty for omitting it in his phenomenology and therefore for

considering "sexuality as 'ambiguity' and 'indeterminacy'.... As a result sexuality does

not favor the emergence of intersubjectivity but, instead, maintains a duplicity in

subjectivity itself in such a way that all of its actions, its sentiments, its sensations are

ambiguous, murky, and incapable of being turned towards an other as such" (21). For

Irigaray we experience and live objectivity with our body by already belonging to a

gender since our birth: "in so far as I belong to a gender, my body already represents an

objectivity for me. Therefore, I am not a simple subjectivity which seeks an object in the

other. Belonging to a gender allows me to realize, in me, for me—an equally towards the

other—a dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity which escapes the dichotomy

between subject and object" (ibid.). The passage from Merleau-Ponty on the sexuate

body that Irigaray considers is from his earlier work The Phenomenology of Perception,

where the subject and the object figure still quite apart, in a dichotomy, but which his

idea of the "communion" of the senses and of the body with the world attempts to

overcome. His introduction of the idea of chiasm in his later work The Visible and the

Invisible, where he deals with the experience of touch, which undoubtedly has been the

model for Irigaray's conception of the caress, I would argue, is breaking out of the

subject-object diachotomy and is introducing the process of dialectic. I therefore have to disagree with Irigaray's accusation that Merleau-Ponty is stuck in the subject-object dichotomy as his later work demonstrates the process of dialectic between the subject

(touching hand) and the object (touched hand) in their continual crisscrossing, the 26 chiasm. However, I support her criticism of his omission of gender difference in his

phenomenology, especially when considering sexual body in his earlier work, as the

ground of the sensible experience and therefore the life of the subject. This is precisely

Irigaray's major contribution in rethinking Western philosophy and ethics.

The caress is a path towards the revolution in thinking that returns us to the

intimate, the space of between me and you, which Irigaray insists on as a ground of new

ethics. Therefore, it has to be a movement away from the social needs and usefulness, as

well as collective existence as citizens, which are all foreign to the language of the

intimate space of the two that is grounded in sensible experience.

The caress is an awakening to a life different from the arduous everyday. It is a call to return to you, to me, to us: as living bodies, as two who are different and co-creators. It is a common act and work, irreducible to those acts and works dedicated either to individual or collective needs.

The caress is the spell directed at you in a way which is irreducible to the common, to the general, to the relative neutralization required by collective life. It is the awakening of you to yourself, and also to me. It is the call to be us, between us.

The caress leads each person back to the I and to the you. I give you to yourself because you are a you for me. You remain you thanks to the you which you are for me, which you are 'to' me—to recall the 'to' of I Love to You, which has nothing to do with possession. Your body does not resemble an object for me, as subject, and the same is true for my body. For me, an incarnate subject, you are an incarnate subject. We are two woven bodies and words, beings and to-bes, and not merely beings under the spell of a master who vanish in imagined virginity. An invitation to peacefiilness instead of to passivity, the caress unfolds as an intersubjective act, as a communication between two, a call to an in-stasy in us and between us, and not to an ecstasy outside of us. (Irigaray 26, 27-28)

Therefore, the source of revolution in thinking that this new ethics proposed by Irigaray will call for is to be found in and between our bodies, the intimate space of "to".

27 Drawing and Shooting: In-Drawing Her

(Feb. 24, 2008)

I must confess that my way of shooting you is not exactly very intimate or giving

towards you. I point the camera at you and while standing still, as to not completely

dissolve you into abstract light of long exposure, I shoot you. Perhaps instead of you

moving in front of the camera 1 should, as a way of having my body gesture to you, show

you where and how I am looking, and how I am moved in this seeing. In this seeing, my

eyes become my body and my body becomes my eyes as you draw them to you.

When you draw me, you draw me out, out of my self from the inside out. Out?

Out where? Where to? To-ward you. You pull me out with the delicate tapping of your eyes, their attentive and engaged gaze that caresses me all over and opens me to you. You

pull, draw in my body into you, into your body.

I enter you.

You pull me in and push me out, by expelling me through your body, like breath.

In and out, in and out...you leave traces of me, of this pulling, this drawing-in of me into you, with your pencil. Each stroke of your hand on the surface of the drawing paper is an extension of your seeing, of you seeing me and reacting to this seeing with gestures of your hand. Seeing, breathing...you take me in, and after not being able to contain me any 28 longer you let me out. I spill, pour, empty out of you, through you, onto the page. Breath after breath, your labour delivers me.

You birth me.

When you draw me, 1feel the caress of your eyes and the undivided attention of your eyes that are directed only towards me. In shooting this direct contact of your eyes and their caresses are absorbed, because mediated, by the camera. When you draw me, I feel very strong sensations, emotions. Why? Perhaps because drawing is more direct or intimate for both of us, as opposed to shooting with a motion picture camera.

It might be also interesting to consider how we respond and are directed by the essence of these two words, by language in general, on an unconscious level; shooting and drawing. In the English language one shoots with a camera. Shooting requires a target, an object to be aimed at with a camera, a machine, and to be captured like a victim. This perhaps might have its roots in the origins of the motion pictures, in particular in Etienne-Jules Marey's experiments in photographic animation in which his used fusil photographique (a photographic gun of his own invention) to investigate animal locomotion. It is nevertheless peculiar that English speakers chose this rather aggressive and death oriented word to correspond to their actions with the film camera. In the French language tourner is used instead, and just as in the Polish language kr$cic both translate to turning, turning around, revolving, and spinning, which correspond to key 29 mechanisms of the film camera, its heart and belly; the motor, the shutter, the turning or winding crank and the take up reel that are constantly turning. This idea of turning that permits the light-image to be inscribed on film with each turn also suggests contact or touching of frames, as they are located one above the other and accumulated on the film roll. In further extrapolation on this action of turning, making a film for the French and the Polish has a strong connotation with copulation; the Sun (light) copulates with the

Earthly materials (film: part mineral, part vegetal, part animal) with each turn, and some parts of the gestation take place in the body of the film camera. Whereas for the English speakers making a film corresponds with the action of shooting, capturing, arresting of life, essentially the act of Thanatos, for the French and the Polish through the action of the turning mechanism it is an act of Eros.

Now what of drawing? Drawing through the continuous activity of pulling in and pushing out appears to me to be also more akin to Eros. Furthermore, drawing continues after the lines have been placed on a page; it is a continuous and repetitive activity of drawing-in the other into myself and then onto the page, and again into myself, etc. And the traces of the other remain in my body longer than when shooting with a film camera, which mediates the process of pulling you into me as it pulls a representation of you into itself.

How then can I overcome this mediating and distancing aspect of shooting and become as intimate with you as you do with me when you draw me? Is there a bridge towards intimacy with the other in cinema via the French and the Polish repetitive and cyclical action of turning, turning around, returning? Returning to what... and who? 30 Respond-Dance and Sea-ing with Camera

(March 11, 2008)

We relied only on a camera today to make representations of each other. In some ways it is becoming more comfortable to be in the nude around you. Is it because I know that you will not look at me there, those parts of me that I feel most vulnerable about, those I do not want you to see because I am afraid to be confronted with your rejection of me, me as wholly goodfrom head to toe? I try to keep your gaze focused on my eyes. I carefully study it, paying particular attention to your eyes breaking away from our interlocked look and quickly scanning parts of my body. I keep trying to read your eyes andfinally, after much assurance from your eyes, I break away from this intent looking. I shift my attention to my body, to be wholly present for you, yet keeping your gaze with the horizon of my experience.

I want to be looked at. And even there, where I have previously not wanted you to look, I desire your look and your acceptance. So far I have only seen acceptance in your eyes and your bodily responses. Your gestures towards me with a camera or with a pencil on paper emanate acceptance, approval, and encouragement. Perhaps encouragement is too strong a word, or perhaps not for it is the encouraging look in your eyes that comforts me and supports my every step to continue and reveal more of myself to you; a look that we all experienced and that perhaps was one of our first most vivid experiences whose echoes still today reverberate within us.

31 But is there another reason why Ifeel more comfortable with you and myself? I

wonder if the camera, the mediated look that it elicits, has something to do with it. We

look through the camera and not directly at each others' bodies, as a way to dispel some

of that initial emotional unease. Stan Brakhage also preferred to experience those

extremely emotionally charged moments through his camera, such as the birth of his first

child in Window Water Baby Moving (1959) or the autopsy of cadavers at a Pittsburgh

morgue in The Act of Seeing with Ones Own Eyes (1970). Perhaps our cameras have

eased us into stripping bare, exposing ourselves physically and emotionally to one

another, and in this vulnerable state of bareness opened us to the generative process

between us, towards art-making.

Another aspect of our sessions with the camera involves reviewing what we have

shot and being attuned to each other's responses to our bodies and their representations

created by one another; my shooting of her body, and her shooting of my body. In this

reviewing process, and quite a revealing process, 1 see your look, your attitude or

sympathy towards me and you see my. If the picture shows me good and beautiful as a

whole, with no parts omitted, I feel all good and whole. However, if the picture does not

present me as all good, i.e. does not present every part of me, Ifeel fragmented and sad.

My emotions no longer beam outward toward you but instead recoil into the darkest, the

most remote parts of my being. I am certain that you experience the same emotions if the

images of you that I made do not depict you as wholly good. That is why I want to capture all of you and in the most beautiful way, so that you will feel accepted, approved

32 and wholly good, as a way to comfort you in your openness towards me; in our mutual

charity.

Indeed, the camera experience is very different from drawing, in which I am

drawn, pulled towards your eyes and enter you, later to be expelled, translated through

your body on paper into a representation of me. There is no intermediary between us, but

a direct immersion in one another, a union, a communion. But is such an intimacy, such

communion, possible when shooting with a camera? If so what would it entail?

When I shoot you, my body responds to you. I respond to every minute movement

and gesture that you make and you to me. I move with you. I dance with you to our

rhythm: the inner rhythm of your body, the inner rhythm of my body while holding the

camera, and the third rhythm of our respond-dance that we co-create together. My

rhythm inscribes and resonates within you and yours within me, while constantly attuning

ourselves to one another and our together rhythm of this coupling. However, within this

coupling and its resulting rhythm you and I do not loose ourselves and merge into one,

instead we remain two. As two, we ensure the continuity of our in-between rhythm and

carry on our respond-dance.

When I shoot you, you immediately respond to me with your body. Unlike in

drawing, where the respond-dance is somewhat delayed, in shooting there is a possibility

of immediate response. Therefore shooting can become equally intimate when it is not

diffused in the labyrinth of reason, of cognitive relay (censorship) between the person

behind the camera and the person in front of the camera. This immediacy of response turns seeing into an even more active and immersive sort of "sea-ing. " Together in this 33 sea-ing we are incessantly attuning to one another, we swim in the thick sea of our active visual engagement. Your gaze solicits my entire body to become eyes, and conversely for my vision to fuse with my other senses, in particular, hearing and touch, that open and attune me to you, to listen, to touch, to put me in-touch with you, with me. In the immediacy of our experience, this sea-ing returns my senses into a synaesthetic communion and helps me remember the history of my being, the history of my first relation with the other, an intersubjective and a bodily relation of "two and one " with my mother. Mother-me, at first two in one, and later seemingly two subjects yet one because interlocked in their dependence and attention to one another. You and I cannot be one, or desire to completely regress or be reduced to one. However, partial regression through remembering into the oceanic is quite desirable and necessary to make porous the wall that protects and keeps me in one piece and to open to you. In this interlocked oneness of our oceanic sea-ing two of us remain. And we must remain two for its ebb and tide to continue, for this intersubjective experience to continue its flowing rhythm between you and me. I can be swept and give myself to you in this sea-ing but not completely. I have to be able to come back to myself, just as you to yourself, so that we can continue this pulse of seeing—sea-ing between you and me.

""The footage of me shot during these sessions appears throughout The Garden of

Earthly Delights (2008).

34 Painting and Sadness

Because I love you absolutely, I, myself, am no longer absolute. Recognizing you gives me measure. Because you are, you impose limits upon me. I am whole, perhaps, but not the whole. And if I receive myself from you, I receive myself as me. We are no longer one.... Does existing not mean offering you an opportunity to become yourself? (Irigaray 15)

(March 25, 2008)

Painting her - blue paint spread on the surface of 16mm clear film leader. Paint

smeared around in a tiny rectangular frame.

Painting her - at first an amorphous blob but slowly begins to echo her form, her

bodily form.

Painting her - one amorphous blob after another. A series of blue coloured

representations of her body are beginning to look like an animated sequence,

reverberating with the animations of my body and her body, together.

Painting her - why I do persistently hear the word "pain " in painting? Why does

it echo in me so profoundly and in its resonance comes to the fore for me? And why have

I not heard its resonance before today, before our encounter together?

In painting you, perhaps "pain " echoes those parts of you that I left out: parts

that are concealedfrom my field of vision; parts that are and must stay concealed from

me to establish the difference that exists between us, and therefore the possibility of you and me; and parts that I cannot physically fit into the tiny 16mm film frame, which is the size of my index finger nail. In painting you, perhaps "pain " springs forth from the sheer nature of working with this medium, which leaves me no choice but to leave out even 35 those parts of you that you presented to me by way of opening to me. I cut them off and

out from the totality of the visual composition, and as a result leave you fragmented, in

parts rather than whole, the wholly good. In the process of painting, my action of

releasing your bodily form onto the celluloid canvas is constantly interrupted, it is

fragmented by having to add paint to the tip of my brush which halts the dynamic flow of

my actions and my immersion in the experience of being together.

In painting you, just like in drawing, I pull you into me, you enter my body and I

release your bodily form through my body with the actions of my hand. And indeed, just

like drawing, these painting actions resemble breathing (inhale and exhale, etc.); taking

the outside in, transforming it, and letting the inside out. The only difference in painting

is that the action of pulling you in and releasing out is disrupted by momentary pauses of

having to add paint to my brush. These momentary pauses disrupt the flow of my activity

and engagement "to "you, therefore the immediacy of our togetherness (our eye-body,

you-me meditation), while fragmenting my experience and the representations of your

bodily form as a result. But one may ask if the process of drawing is really that much

different from that ofpainting? I will have to insist that in drawing the immediacy of my

projective actions in response to the intensity of my experience of seeing her conveys her

form and our experience together in a more direct manner. Perhaps this is where our language leads us, how it thinks us and our actions and gives sense to our being.

Pain ... pain ... is it my pain? Whose pain is it if not hers? But is it really pain?

This is not a real pain, at least not physical pain of any sort, only my imagination of what it must (emotionally) feel like for her to be painted; both the pleasure and pain of this 36 experience. I imagine that the pleasure of this experience for her is the pleasure of presenting or revealing her bodily parts to me, for me to give them presence in the composition. And the pain in this experience may be connected to the absence of these and other parts of her, which appear to be concealed or rejected by me in the composition. By concealing/rejecting those parts presented to me by her, I (the painter) am the pain-inflictor. I am also, however, capable offeeling the pain of the inflicted other, in other words being capable of empathy as the language of my sketch evidently points towards.

But where do language and such words as empathy and sympathy actually lead me, and what significance do they have for me? Empathy (em "in " + pathos "feeling, emotion, experience ") means "the action of understanding, being aware of being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner" ("Empathy," def. 2).

Sympathy (syn "with, together " + pathos "feelings, emotion, experience ") means

"having common feelings, mutuality; an affinity, association, or relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the other; mutual or parallel susceptibility or a condition brought about by it; unity or harmony in action or effect; the correlation existing between bodies capable of communicating their vibrational energy to one another through some medium " ("Sympathy," def. 1,4). Thus, empathy and sympathy are simultaneous with painting and being painted. These words and their corresponding sense (meaning, feeling) are perhaps more amplified in painting 37 than in drawing, or when shooting with a camera. This is in part because the experience of the painting process itself leads us to it and the English language amplifies this experience; paint-ing, the other is in pain because cut out, left out by me, the painter, and not presented as whole in the composition ("to put together [parts] so as to form a whole "), as wholly good. I feel with the other. This pain is sadness, and it belongs to me; the sadness of not being able to paint her fully, wholly, in the composition, both the parts that stay concealed because of my lack of skill as a painter and the parts that transcend me and will forever stay a mystery to me.

But is there more to this absence, this concealment and the mystery of you that transcends me? I took into me a part of you and projected it by means of my body on the clear-leader, the film canvas. But is concealment simultaneous with emotional pain and anguish that is present in the act of painting you here? This absence, which is part of selection (cutting away in selection, rejection, leaving out) in the process of composition, is different from absence whose presence as concealment we can sense andfeel. This absence, the invisible and its mystery, is fecund and nourishing.

... love must keep the mystery of the other intact, to nurture the flow between the two.

Thus the amplification of empathy and sympathy in the experience of painting, as language itself helped in leading us to it, directs us to the essence of the experience of togetherness. This essence being the feeling of mutuality, by means of the reversibility of the self (me) and the other (you) in sympathy and not by physical means of possession.

Therefore the building blocks of love are indeed in the intimate space of to-gether. 38 Conclusion: together - to gather • to unite - the good - what one clings to Would not generating the good together represent the end of conflicts and lacerations? Wouldn't peace between us be born in the birth of the spiritual, which is neither word nor body alone, but the fruit of a love which leaves each of us to ourselves, and opens up a way for each of us to be as two?

To generate the good, to go beyond the clouds, to arrive at the sun, not merely at his light, but at him as a warm, unavoidable presence, both of this world and of another. Remaining here, I have moved into the beyond with you.

For this journey, I have listened, I have opened in myself a space to accommodate you, a clearing of silence. I have welcomed this part of you, this flower of your body, born from your breath and heart, nourished by your sun, which has sprung from you and has inclined towards me. I have wanted to savor and protect this, before wanting more. (Irigaray 60)

How much prompting and provocation will it take to break through the thick shell of social indifference and lack of concern for the vulnerable other and to bring into being a culture that is truly intersubjective? What form should art take in order to engender powerful experience that infuses movement, therefore change through revolt on the personal level, into the alienating and lifeless (because unresponsive and detached from

Eros) social order? Luce Irigaray suggests that a subjective and an intersubjective culture

"would require being faithful to the reciprocity in touching-being touched, itself a matter of perceiving or of speaking" (23). For Irigaray perception and language are paths

"towards sharing the mystery of the other" (20), the mystery that safeguards the irreducible alterity between us, of you and I, while preserving the space of a "to" and maintaining the "in-direction between us" (19). Perhaps this is precisely where artists should start, i.e., in the reciprocity of experience between subjects, while keeping the mystery between them intact. We can also add to this Merleau-Ponty's notion of experience that extends beyond intersubjective relations and into the world, which is to live it and not as passive a reception of the world but as an active participation in the world. He directs us to this notion of experience in his description of the experience of spatial depth in Phenomenology of Perception, which may very well apply to any experience. "To experience a structure is not to receive it into oneself passively: it is to live it, to take it up, assume it and discover its immanent significance" (Merleau-Ponty

1962: 258).

The importance of body in art, and therefore body art, is that it is the source of the good. For my body (perceives, senses - sens [sense, significance, feeling]) directs me through lived-space, the world I inhabit. It connects me with the world (two fleshes), while opening the way to the other through feeling (empathy, love) and granting me the ability to make (cognitive) sense of it all. Thus the experience my body grants me is central in redefining community and the public sphere based on a sense of the good at its core, through the strong binding emotions and love for one another; between two as "I love to you".

40 Freudian Prelude to Revolt and Revolution in Art Practice

The Imaginary Walk: The Magic in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams

The whole thing is planned on the model of an imaginary walk. First comes the dark wood of the authorities (who cannot see the trees), where there is no clear view and it is easy to go astray. Then there is a cavernous defile through which I lead my readers—my specimen dream with it peculiarities, its details, its indiscretions and its bad jokes—and then, all at once, the high ground and the open prospect and the question: "Which way do you want to go?" (Freud 1976: 200)

The above quote is a fragment of a letter (August 6,1899) that Sigmund Freud

wrote to his friend, the Berlin based physician and biologist, Wilhelm Fliess which

outlines the structure of his Die Traumdeutung {Interpretation of Dreams). That book

sent ripples not only through the world of science but also through art, literature and

philosophy, and is one of the most influential books in twentieth century. By choosing an

"imaginary walk" as a model for the investigation of dreams and for the structure of his

book, Freud selected a path which was regarded by many in the medical field with much

contempt; they deemed it unscientific and highly subjective.1 Indeed Freud selected a

path that was more akin to poetic thinking and creation. He begins his book by

presenting the reader with the "dark wood of authorities"—he argues that the previous

dream theories had reached a theoretical impasse because they emphasized the "pictorial

value" and "pictorial composition" in dream formation instead of interpreting the

"pictographic script" of the dream-content through the "symbolic relations" of words

(Freud 1976: 381-2). Poetic thinking, and in particular its emphasis on associations and

"symbolic relations" between words, was key to Freud's approach in interpreting dreams.

41 Poetry, then, provided a way out of the "dark wood of the authorities (who cannot see the

trees)"—the connecting threads of thought crucial in dream interpretation. Freud

demonstrates the potency of word association by providing concrete examples of poetic

thinking in The Interpretation of Dreams by including poems of Johann Wolfgang von

Goethe, Heinrich Heine and Novalis, along side his interpretation work on his own

dreams and those of others, "the specimen dreams." Through the fertile groundwork that

Freud lays out in his book, he becomes the mother of psychoanalysis by leading his

readers, many of whom became future psychoanalysts (his children), through the

"cavernous defile" (the birth canal) into the open. The dream to which he continually

returns in his book, and that lies at the core of his discovery, is his own dream which

occurred in Bellevue, France, in 1895. In this dream, a friend, Otto, gave his wife, Irma,

an injection of an unsuitable dirty needle. This dream fertilized Freud's theory of dream

interpretation through its lethal injection; it threw thought inward and towards "the

immortal wishes of childhood" (Freud 1976: 708) that lie at the core of our being. On

June 12,1900 Freud wrote to Fliess "Do you suppose that some day a marble tablet will

be placed on the house [in Bellevue], inscribed with these words?—In This House, on

July 24th, 1895 the Secret of Dreams was Revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud' (1976: 199).

The impact that Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams had in the last century

results from its having brought to light another dimension or another part of our life,

which has been concealed from us by the illuminating, but blinding, brightness of the

"omnipotent" consciousness, which, prior to Freud's discovery, had been the sole

42 preoccupation of psychological research and had hidden "all else from view" (Freud

1976: 776). Freud turned our attention to the repressed wishes that persistently press

within us, seeking expression. In doing so, he put us in touch with our deeply buried past.

He accomplished this by redirecting our attention to the hidden marvels of our lives, the

repressed "immortal wishes of childhood" that reside in the unconscious and only come

out to play in dreams, jokes, slips of tongue or laughter when the blinding censorship and

attention of the ego has been diverted by some other activity. Most importantly, his

investigation of the unconscious by examining dreams permitted him to develop a theory

(in chapter seven of The Interpretation of Dreams) of two psychical agencies which lie at

the core of mental functioning in dreams and personality development. It allowed him, in

other words, to develop a dynamic model of mental activities. These two psychical

agencies are the primary process and secondary process. He had already indirectly been

led to the notion of these two processes in his previous collaborative work with Josef

Breuer in Studies on Hysteria (1895), where these mental agencies were operating

through the compulsion of neurotic patients to bring multiple ideas into association as

they presented themselves in their minds, just as they do in dreams. But it was his work on The Interpretation of Dreams that brought these ideas into clear focus.

Freud regarded Die Traumdeutung as his most significant work, he wrote:

"Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime" (1976: 43). In his subsequent works Freud further expanded his preliminary sketch of the dynamic mental functioning based on these two agencies by systematically working out the discoveries he initially mapped out in The Interpretation of Dreams. For example, Freud considered his 1905

work Dora: Analysis of a Case of Hysteria as a supplement to The Interpretation of

Dreams. In this study he extended his theory of primary process by demonstrating "how

an art [the Sistine Madonna in Dora's case], which would otherwise be useless, can be

turned to account for the discovery of the hidden and repressed parts of mental life"

(Freud 1963: 135); he maintained that examining the patient's investment in the work

would lead to a fantasy or an "imagined situation of sexual life—such as a scene of

sexual intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth, confinement, etc." (Freud 1963: 124). In the

case of the hysteric, that repressed fantasy manifests itself physically, as it did in Dora,

who experienced attack of appendicitis. That imagined syndrome concealed the fantasy

of childbirth. In another, much later, work, from 1920, Beyond the Pleasure Principle

Freud introduced a distinction in the states of energy in the primary and secondary

psychical processes. He described the primary process energy as "freely flowing," "freely

mobile" or "unbound," whereas the secondary process energy he described as "quiescent"

or "bound." Both processes and their forms of energy, Freud argued, evolve according to

the pleasure principle "a tendency operating in the service of a function whose business it

is to free the mental apparatus entirely from excitation or keep the amount of excitation in

it constant or to keep it as low as possible" (1920: 62); and both are instrumental to the development and organization of personality.

The focus of this section is the dark and hallucinogenic paths of Freud's

"imaginary walk" that are accessible through the associative work of poetic thinking. My

44 goal is to provide a sketch of the primary and secondary processes using Freud's The

Interpretation of Dreams as the primary guide. I also use this theory to lay the

groundwork for considering Kristeva's theory of poetic language, in particular her

notions of "the semiotic" modality of language and the chora. I chose to focus on The

Interpretation of Dreams, for it has been the "Ur" text for many artists and

psychoanalysts that provided them with inspiration and guidance over the last century.

Dreams: The Royal Road to the Unconscious Activities of the Mind Freud saw dream interpretation as the key way of mapping out the dynamic

functioning of the mind and of gaining an understanding of the mind's unconscious

operations. "The interpretation of dreams," he writes "is the royal road to a knowledge of

the unconscious activities of the mind. By analysing dreams we can take a step forward in

our understanding of the composition of that most marvellous and most mysterious of all

instruments" (1976: 769). In the first chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, in a

section titled "Why Dreams are Forgotten After Waking," Freud writes:

[D] ream-compositions find no place in the company of the psychical sequences with which the mind is filled. There is nothing that can help us to remember them. ... After waking... the world of the senses presses forward and at once takes possession of the attention with a force which very few dream-images can resist. ... Dreams give way before the impressions of a new day just as the brilliance of the stars yields to the light of the sun. (1976: 108, my italics)

In this passage Freud paints an image of the mental functioning through poetic associations of language—the last line in particular. He also suggests in this passage that

45 dreams are characterized by their fleeting or mobile quality, which gives way to the force of the sensory stimulation that daybreak brings to the sleeping body. Furthermore, with his analogy of the light intensity and composition of the universe (the stars and the Sun), he suggest that despite the sensory stimulation that enters the body during the day, the remnants of the dream (the far away stars of the unconscious wishes of our childhood) are still present but are obstructed by the conscious mental activities that dominate the individual's mind during the day.

But what are dreams? How are they constituted and what gives them their force?

According to Freud, dreams "have a meaning and are far from being the expression of a fragmentary activity of the brain, as the authorities have claimed. When the work of interpretation has been completed, we perceive that a dream is the fulfilment of a wish"

(1976: 198-9). Dreams are "the blessed fulfillers of wishes" (Freud 1976: 212). Dreams are composed of two components: the manifest-content or dream-content and the latent- content or dream-thoughts. The manifest-content is "a pictographic script" (Freud 1976:

381), for it is expressed primarily in images and is non-linguistic—if words are present they have been disarmed through the work of censorship and become the displaced remnants of dream-thoughts that no longer follow the linguistic ordering of rational thought but are treated like "things" in the pictographic script of the dream-content. By adopting their disguises, they pose no threat to the stability of mental functioning of an individual. It should be noted that thinking in pictures is a developmentally older form of thinking as it is present prior to the acquisition of language; furthermore, thinking in

46 images is the basis for primary process thinking.4 (But more on that later.) Dream-

thoughts belong to the preconscious system (Freud 1976: 691), the system of ideas

(thoughts) which can be "brought into connection with word-presentations" (Freud 1989:

12), and thus linguistically organized into rational thoughts. Since dream-thoughts belong

to the preconscious system, they automatically undergo censorship or the screening

process—the function of the preconscious system—and go through the process through

which the dream-thoughts are transformed into the dream-content. This process, known

as the dream-work, conceals the dream-thought.

The manifest-content with its pictographic script is permitted to enter the

dreamer's consciousness and to be experienced by the dreamer. The dream-thought,

however, remains in the preconscious (1976: 691). With children, censorship is quite

weak and the connection between the dream-thought and dream-content can easily be

traced, without resorting to interpretive work.5 With adults, however, dream-work

process is further complicated with the addition of dream-distortion. Dream-distortion

occurs through condensation and displacement (which do operate in infantile dreams,

though to a far lesser extent). The objective of dream-distortion is to further obstruct the

path from the dream-thought to the dream-content; they put knots in the lines of thought.

Furthermore, the dream is composed not only of dream-contents that represent a single

dream-thought multiple times but also of numerous dream-thoughts that can be connected

to a single dream element or to multiple elements (the later is also known as

"overdetermination"). Freud writes:

47 Not only are the elements of a dream determined by the dream-thoughts many times over, but the individual dream-thoughts are represented in the dream by several elements. Associative paths lead from one element of the dream to several dream-thoughts, and from one dream-thought to several elements of the dream. Thus a dream is not constructed by each individual dream-thought, or group of dream-thoughts ... a dream is constructed, rather, by the whole mass of dream- thoughts being submitted to sort of manipulative process in which those elements which have the most numerous and strongest supports acquire the right of entry in the dream-content. (1976: 388)

Condensation is the process which allows the dream elements to become overdetermined. For through condensation a multiplicity of dream-thoughts may be satisfied by a single element; conversely, it can provide multiple elements for a single dream-thought. Freud writes:

The direction in which condensations in dreams proceed is determined on the one hand by the rational preconscious relations of the dream-thoughts, and on the other by the attraction exercised by visual memories in the unconscious. The outcome of the activity of condensation is the achievement of the intensities required for forcing a way through into the perceptual systems [i.e. the manifest- content of the dream.] (1976: 754-5)

Another feature of the relationship between the dream-content and dream-thought is displacement. If condensation is primarily concerned with compression and intensification of certain dream-thoughts, then displacement operates by displacing or substituting the centre of intensity arising from one dream-thought onto a different dream element. "The dream," Freud writes, "is, as it were, differently centred from the dream- thoughts—its content has different elements as its central point" (1976: 414).

Condensation and displacement are both fuelled by the pressure of censorship and they are indeed the two principal contributors to the impoverished quality of dreams. As Freud

48 noted, "dreams are brief, meagre and laconic in comparison with the range and wealth of

the dream-thought" (1976: 383).

Because of the way dreams are formed, dream-thoughts can only be arrived at

through dream analysis. According to Freud:

The dream-thoughts and the dream-content are presented to us like two versions of the same subject-matter in two different languages. Or, more properly, the dream-content seems like a transcript of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose characters and syntactic laws it is our business to discover by comparing the original and the translation. (1976: 381)

In other words, the meaning of a dream is not revealed in the manifest-content of a dream

but instead stays concealed in the latent dream-thoughts. The task of the analyst,

therefore, is to tease out the dream's meaning from the dream-thoughts by investigating

the relationships between the latent and the manifest components of the dream, and to

trace the processes by which the latent content is transcribed into "another mode of

expression" (Freud 1976: 381).

To gain insight into what gives dreams their impetus or motive force, a more

detailed illustration of how dreams are structurally and dynamically shaped is required. In

chapter seven of The Interpretation of Dreams Freud provides visual diagrams to

illustrate the mental apparatus and its functioning during waking life and sleep. These

diagrams demonstrate the movement of psychic energy that starts from either internal or external stimuli, and thus determines whether the outcome is a reflex, an ideational thought of waking life, a day-dream, or a nocturnal dream (or a dream occurring in

49 sleep). Freud writes: "All our psychical activity starts from stimuli (whether internal or

external) and ends in innervations ... [that is] the transmission of energy into a system of

nerves ... a process tending towards discharge" (1976: 686). At a very basic level the

psychical apparatus consists of a sensory end and a motor end. The sensory end is

connected to the perceptual system (Pcpt.), which forms a mental picture of the sensory

stimulant/object based on the stimulation of the senses. The motor system ("the system

M.") is connected to the motor end, which drives the motor body (muscles and other parts

connected with motor functions) and prompts motor activity. Whether the sensory

stimulation is prompted by an external source (e.g. cold weather) or an internal source

(e.g. hunger or urge to empty the bladder), this excitation always aims towards discharge.

If we take for example a reflex function, such as squinting when looking at the sun, the

sensory excitation proceeds immediately towards the motor activity—contracting eyelids,

to discharge the excitation. Furthermore, sensory excitations, immediately upon entering

the psychic apparatus through system Pcpt., become psychic energy; sensory qualities are

transformed into quantities of energy which are registered by consciousness. If the mental

apparatus is incapable of immediately discharging these psychic energies, they build up

and create the feelings of discomfort or, to use that useful Freudian term, "unpleasure."

At the most basic level the general aim of the psychic apparatus is to try to

immediately proceed to discharge any psychic excitations. If this is not possible, then the

psychic apparatus tries to avoid as much as possible the prolonged buildup of psychic energy, by obtaining pleasure through releasing of tension. Freud calls the principle that

50 operates here the "unpleasure principal."6 The quickest way of discharging unpleasure is to move psychic energy immediately from system Pcpt. to the motor end; very similar to the reflex function. Freud writes: "the psychical apparatus must be constructed like a reflex apparatus" (1976: 686).

The rudimentary mental apparatus that has been sketched out would be found in a very young infant. In a more sophisticated mental apparatus, such as that of a human adult, three more systems are added and the movement of psychic energy becomes more complicated. These additional systems are: the memory system (Mnem.), the unconscious system (Ucs.), and the preconscious system (Pes.); and their development in an individual follows in that order, starting after the perceptual system (Pcpt.). It should be noted that unlike the perceptual system and the motor system, these three systems are unconscious, or to be more precise they vary in degrees of their accessibility to consciousness. The memory system is composed of memory-traces. These memory-traces were formed though repeated exposure to perceptions, which left their traces in the psychical apparatus

(Freud 1976: 687). In fact, the memory system is built up through the course of mental and physical developments during an individual's life. The section of the memory system closest to Pcpt. is the weakest and its memory-traces are immediately accessible to consciousness, whereas the section of the memory system closest to Ucs. becomes more difficult to access, but nevertheless can still be accessed. The unconscious system consists of memories which are repressed and thus barred from entering consciousness, they have "no access to consciousness except via the preconscious, in passing through

51 which its excitatory process is obliged to submit to modifications" (Freud 1976: 691).

Some of the memories belonging to this system are traumatic (for example memories

from the Oedipal phase of our development), and must remain repressed or be modified

before entering consciousness, so to ensure the stability of the mental apparatus. Other

unconscious memories are the oldest in our mental development; these are our infantile

memories. An infantile memory is virtually impossible for us to access completely, in

part because it is very old and in the course of our development has been pushed deep

into the unconscious system by other memories (belonging to Pes.), which were overlaid

on infantile memories. In the process, psychic energy was withdrawn from these deeply

buried memories (Freud 1976: 752). In The Ego and the Id Freud further elaborates on

the repressed nature of the infantile memories by identifying them with the older form of

thinking, thinking in pictures rather than in words (1989: 12-4). Because the infantile

memory was formed prior to our acquisition of language, it does not have a linguistically

structured ideational content; it therefore poses problems for the Pes., which serves as a

screen between the Ucs. and consciousness, by transcribing perceptively organized data

into a linguistically organized system whose elements can pass through into

consciousness.7 Information is misplaced through this translation and becomes

inaccessible. It actually would be more appropriate to refer to infantile memories as

wishes, rather than memories, because infants are capable only of wishing: the id wishes and does not think. Accordingly memories belonging to the unconscious system are difficult to access—indeed it is impossible to access them unless they form a connection with Pes., and when they pass through the Pes. they must "submit to modifications." This 52 happens during our sleep, when the sensory pressures of the external world have diminished and the only source of stimulation comes from the internal world—from those repressed infantile memories or wishes which reside at the core of the psychic apparatus, the unconscious system.

In our waking life, the movement of psychic energy is "progressive"—it moves from the perceptual to the motor system and seeks to discharge energy; during sleep, on the other hand, these external pressures cease and psychic energy begins to move backwards; that is, it assumes a "regressive character," by taking root in the Ucs. with the aim of "producing a hallucinatory revival of the perceptual images" that are registered in system Pcpt. (Freud 1976: 692). Freud writes: "We call... 'regression' when in a dream an idea is turned back into the sensory image from which it was originally derived"

(1976: 693). What sets the course for this backward movement are two factors: sleep and the day residues, which persist in the Pes. and join forces with the wishes of Ucs..

According to Freud "[the] path leading through the preconscious to consciousness is barred to the dream-thoughts during the daytime by the censorship imposed by resistance.

During the night they are able to obtain access to consciousness" (1976: 691). The reason dream-thoughts are able to gain access to consciousness during the night is because in sleep our bodies are in repose, in order to suspend temporarily as much sensory excitement as possible. Furthermore, in sleep, because all the motor activity is suspended, the elements from that day's residues (worries, unsolved problems, overwhelming impressions or, conversely, innocuous impressions of the preceding day) are carried into

53 our sleep and persist as thought-activity in the system Pes..8 Those elements that persist in the Pes. form a preconscious wish, which, as if magically, connects with the repressed infantile wishes in the Ucs. and there infantile wishes reinforce, with the store of psychic energy the Ucs. has at hand, what now becomes the dream-wish. Freud writes:

The dream would not materialize if the preconscious wish did not succeed in finding reinforcement from elsewhere.

... No other course, then, lies open to excitations occurring at night in the Pes. than that followed by wishful excitations arising from the Ucs.; the preconscious excitations must find reinforcement from the Ucs. and must accompany the unconscious excitations along their circuitous paths. (1976: 704, 707)

The "immortal wishes of childhood," which reside in the unconscious, wait to catch the preconscious excitation acquired during the day—they wait to catch some events of the day—that ultimately provide the motive force for a dream. Freud writes:

[UJnconscious wishes are always on the alert, ready at any time to find their way to expression when an opportunity arises for allying themselves with an impulse from the conscious and for transferring their own great intensity on to the latter's lesser one.... These wishes in our unconscious, ever on the alert and, so to say, immortal, remind one of the legendary Titans, weighed down since primeval ages by the massive bulk of the mountains which were once hurled upon them by the victorious gods and which are still shaken from time to time by the convulsion of their limbs.

The fact that dreams are hypermnesic and have access to material from childhood has become one of the corner-stones of our teaching. Our theory of dreams regards wishes originating in infancy as the indispensable motive force for the formation of dreams. (1976: 704-5,746)

Dreams allowed Freud to discover the path of regression that ultimately leads to childhood, to the original infantile wishes dreams express (in an altered form). He writes:

54 "dreaming is on the whole an example of regression to the dreamer's earliest condition, a revival of his childhood, of the instinctual impulses which dominated it and of the methods of expression which were then available to him" (1976: 699). Freud recognized this regressive direction psychic energies took during sleep; he also understood that during our waking hours censorship strives to prevent this regressive movement from reaching the Pcpt. But censorship is active at night as well, for it knots our dreams and obscures their meaning. That concealing is the function of the dream-work. Freud's analyses of dreams opened up for him the idea of there being two types of mental processes that are constantly at work in our mental apparatus: the primary process and the secondary process.

The primary process, though primitive in its operation, nonetheless forms the foundation on which is developed a much more sophisticated and more efficiently functioning mental process, the secondary process. The primary process is formed by first activities that were prompted in the infant psychic apparatus. Infants' underdeveloped bodies and minds are not prepared to deal with the amount of sensory stimulations that assails them both from the internal and from the external world (which infants do not distinguish as separate from themselves). Only the infant's reflex apparatus can discharge the sensory excitations that impinge on us. Then, Freud writes, "at first the apparatus's efforts were directed towards keeping itself so far as possible free from stimuli" (1976:

719). However, the reflex apparatus could not ward off all the stimuli, above all, it could not ward off those, such as hunger, that arise in the body itself. The continuous pressure

55 of this stimulus produces a need that seeks discharge through movement. This "internal change" in the infant, according to Freud, can also be described as an "expression of emotion," as the hungry infant expresses (discharges) this unpleasurable buildup of excitation through the motor activity of his or her body: the helpless movement of the limbs and crying (1976: 719). At this stage, this need can only be assuaged by relying on the help from outside, from his or her parents, who feed the infant, which produces the feeling of satisfaction or pleasure. When the infant is being fed he or she experiences sensations that are then stored in her/his memory system. For example: she feels the soft skin of the mother's breast and her nipple; the warmth of the milk that pours into her mouth; the smell of her mother; the sound of her voice, perhaps of the rhythmic beating of her heart and her breathing, and her own rhythmic sucking sounds. Most importantly, the infant perceives that as the nourishment is ingested and the sensation of hunger dissipates while the experience of satisfaction emerges. This perception of satisfaction lies at the core of the primary process, Freud asserts:

An essential component of this experience of satisfaction is a particular perception (that of nourishment, in our example) the mnemic image of which remains associated thenceforward with the memory trace of the excitation produced by the need. As a result of the link that has thus been established, next time this need arises a psychical impulse will at once emerge which will seek to recathect the mnemic image of the perception and to re-evoke the perception itself, that is to say, to re-establish the situation of the original satisfaction. An impulse of this kind is what we call a wish; the reappearance of the perception is the fulfilment of the wish. (1976: 719-20)

Thus, through repetition of activity that produces the experience of satisfaction, the infant begins to associate the experiences associated with nourishment (milk, being fed,

56 mother's breast, bottle, sucking on the nipple) with reduction of tension arising from hunger. This is what Freud calls "perceptual identity," by which he means "something perceptually identical with the experience of satisfaction" (1976: 720). When the infant experiences the feeling of hunger and her calls for help from the external world are not answered, the infant experiences discomfort. Freud proposed that evolution developed a means that allows the infant to cope well when in difficulty; he or she recathects the memory image of a perception that had previously assuaged the need, and the memory trace will (temporarily) fulfil the wished for feeding. From this we can conclude that the primary process possesses seemingly magical powers of obtaining satisfaction from mere hallucinations—memory images of the original experience of satisfaction are reactivated and taken as real. Like dreams, the primary process does not distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary (hallucinated), nor does it distinguish between the past and the present. It takes a memory image of a previous perception of satisfaction for satisfaction itself. In this sense it lives as if in the continuous present, or conversely it is timeless. (We shall see that avant-garde art draws on the magical powers of this "retrograde" process.)

In the penultimate section of chapter seven in The Interpretation of Dreams,

Freud provides a dynamic description of the functioning of the primary process, that is a description based on analyzing movements of psychic excitations in the mental apparatus.

Based on his findings that the aim of the primary process is to establish perceptual identity, Freud extended his findings by formulating a theory based on the quantities of excitations, where "the accumulation of excitation... is felt as unpleasure and that it sets

57 the apparatus in action with a view to repeating the experience of satisfaction, which

involved a diminution of excitation and was felt as pleasure" (1976: 757). In other words,

any increase in psychical excitation is experienced as unpleasure and the discharge of

these quantities is experienced as pleasure. The goal of the primary process is to

discharge all psychical excitation. Once a perceptual identity has been established the

infant can discharge excitation with the memory image, for the role of the recathected

memory image in the psychic system is identical to the action of percepts in the

perceptual system. Thus, the direction of the psychic energy movement is from the

sensory end to system Pcpt., then to memory system and back to system Pcpt. by means

of perceptual identity. At this stage in the development of the psychic apparatus, the Pes.

and Ucs. systems do not yet exit.

The wish can also be understood in the same quantitative manner as a "current ...

in the apparatus, starting from unpleasure and aiming at pleasure" Freud writes. Further,

"we have asserted that only a wish is able to set the apparatus in motion and that the course of the excitation in it is automatically regulated by feelings of pleasure and unpleasure" (1976: 757).

The function of the primary process is limited to discharging excitation or

investing all the psychic energy into wishes and hallucinations of previous experiences of satisfaction as a way of obtaining pleasure. The psychic apparatus only functions this way for a short period as the hallucination of nourishment can only satisfy the hungry baby temporarily (for example if a parent cannot tend to the baby right away). The primary 58 process develops as the result of exposure to persistent unpleasurable experiences and simply reduces all the psychic energies experienced as unpleasant, without assuaging the real need within the baby. This allows the baby to cope with periods of unpleasure and prepares this little human being for life in the real world.

The secondary process is in touch with the external world and through this connection it can come up with a plan of action that releases tension through real-world means, rather than through a memory image. To achieve this, secondary process thinking cannot permit the total discharge of cathexes that arise within the primary process through perceptual identity. It needs to divert the psychical forces that result from this retrograde movement, as it re-activates memory image, and prevent those energies from entering the perceptual system, "All that I insist upon," Freud writes, "is the idea that the activity of the first ^-system is directed towards securing the free discharge of the quantities of excitation, while the second system, by means of the cathexes emanating from it, succeeds in inhibiting this discharge and in transforming the cathexis into a quiescent one, no doubt with a simultaneous raising of its level" (1976: 759). In this way, the secondary process binds the psychical forces that are being urged by primary system towards discharge and pleasure, and it provides resistance or anti-cathexis that check the cathexis of primary process, steering it in "the direction of the development of unpleasure" (1976: 760) so that "the real perception of the object of satisfaction" can be obtained through voluntary movement in the external world and a more "quiescent" state can be obtained (Freud 1976: 758). Furthermore, according to Freud "the two systems are

59 the germ of what, in the fully developed apparatus, we have described as the Ucs. and

Pes." (1976: 758). By leading us to discern the structural connection between the secondary process and the Pes. system Freud helps us see why this process depends on actual action in the external world: like the Pes. that is positioned next to the M. system

(motor system), it requires movement in the external world to "constantly feel its way" and manipulate the external world so that it can "arrive at the real perception of the object of satisfaction" (1976: 758). Accordingly, the primary process is primarily concerned with the internal world, the body, as the somatic needs draw it into itself, whereas the secondary process tries to mediate between these somatic needs and the external world.

As a result, the primary process does not distinguish between the inner and the outer world because its world is the inner world of the body; the secondary process, on the other hand, perceives the distinction between the inner and the outer worlds, and depends on the action in the real world—action which requires an accurate representation of the real world. (We shall speak of the inner-directed and corporeal character of the avant- garde art.)

There is another decisive distinction between the two processes. This distinction is between the primary process' reliance on pictorial thinking (thinking in images) and

"'perceptual identity' ([established] with the experience of satisfaction" as a way to discharge the excitations, and the secondary process' reliance on linguistic thinking and

thought identity' ([established] with that experience" (Freud 1976: 761-2).9

60 All thinking is no more than a circuitous path from the memory of a satisfaction (a memory which has been adopted as a purposive idea) to an identical cathexis of the same memory which it is hoped to attain once more through an intermediate stage of motor experiences. Thinking must concern itself with the connecting paths between ideas, without being led astray by the intensities of those ideas. But it is obvious that condensation of ideas, as well as intermediate and compromise structures, must obstruct the attainment of the identity aimed at. Since they substitute one idea for another, they cause a deviation from the path which would have led on from the first idea. Processes of this kind are therefore scrupulously avoided in secondary thinking.... Accordingly, thinking must aim at freeing itself more and more from exclusive regulation by the unpleasure principle and at restricting the development of affect in thought-activity to the minimum required for acting as a signal. (Freud 1976: 762)

Unlike avant-garde art, such linguistic thinking, in order to perform as efficiently as possible its function and attain quiescence, has to avoid being deflected by the primary process; that is, it must avoid paying attention to the "intensities of those ideas," which, because they possess psychic energy, can produce affect and can lead the thought astray, by inducing it to engage in condensation and displacement of ideas. We have already learned that these two functions operate in the dream-work.

Freud's dynamic model can also be applied in understanding condensation and displacement. They belong to the primary process and serve to channel its energies. In displacement, energy is rechanneled from one wish to another, whereas in condensation the energy is channelled from numerous wishes into one wish, it is condensed. In the quotation just cited, Freud seems to hint at two different possibilities of linguistic thought, one that follows closely the functioning of the secondary process (everyday verbal exchanges between people, as efficient as possible) and the other which seems to stray off the path of efficient functioning and is swayed into regression to primary

61 process of condensation and displacement. This form of linguistic thinking, which gives in to the intensities of the primary process, can be identified as poetic thinking, which gives sway to metaphor and metonymy.10 There is certainly a remarkable correspondence between metaphor and condensation (one word is "carried over" or "transferred" on to another), as there is between metonymy and displacement (a phrase or a word is

"substituted" for another with which it is closely associated, for example, the word

"crown" substitutes for "king").

Poetic thinking, which associatively uses word-presentations just as dreams use images, also lies at the core of dream interpretation as it permits the analyst and the analysand, by free association (that is, by allowing the primary process to take an

"imaginary walk"), to arrive at the latent dream-thought. Thus, poetry brings thinking closer to the unknown, the repressed infantile memories that form the "dream's navel"

(Freud 1976: 671). "What once dominated waking life, while the mind was still young and incompetent, seems now to have been banished into the night," Freud claimed (1976:

721).

Conclusions Regarding the Importance of Freud's "Die Traumdeutung" Our waking life, then, has been separated from these primal energies. This split, I believe, has become increasingly imperilling, as the distance that separates us from these

(erotic) energies has become greater across the course of history. I wish to turn now to a

62 thinker who has developed systematically the claim I first asserted and whose ideas have

become central to my project of reconnecting art with the body's energy, a project that I

believe has become crucial.

The Twists, Turns and Torsions of(Re)vo!t In her 1996 lecture, which later became a book titled Sens et non sens de la

revolte (The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt), Julia Kristeva argues that today "the very

notion of culture as revolt and of art as revolt" are in peril, as we are submerged "in the

culture of entertainment, the culture of performance, the culture of the show" (2000: 6).

She insists that to break away from what she sees as a stagnating culture and the threat of

"automation of humanity" (2000: 7) we need "real experience," by which she means the discovery of "something unknown, surprise, pain, or delight, and then comprehension of

this impact" (2000: 11), that is the experience of revolt. However, Kristeva argues that

today revolt can only take place on the micro scale of the "speaking subject," which she

insists is the source and only possibility of revolt today—only when the revolt of the speaking subject has been initiated can revolt at the macro level of the social begin.11

The path to the experience of revolt, she argues, can be carved out in two ways,

which in fact intersect. The first is art, avant-garde art to be precise, because "the ultimate goal of art," she argues, "is perhaps what was once celebrated as incarnation. I mean by that the desire to make one feel—through abstraction, form, colour, volume, sensation—

63 real experience" (2000: 11), that is the embodied experience. The second path is psychoanalysis, for the unconscious and primary process thinking are the dwelling of revolutionary spirit. Kristeva sees Freud as a "revolutionary in search of lost time" (2000:

16)—"lost" because the unconscious is "hidden away" and "invisible." She quotes the following passage from a 1936 letter that Freud wrote to a philosopher and psychoanalyst

Ludwig Binswanger: "I have always dwelt only in the ground floor and basement of the building.... In that you are the conservative, I am the revolutionary. Had I only another life of work before me I should dare to offer even those highly born people a home in my lowly dwelling" (Freud qtd. in Kristeva 2000: 15). However, "the word 'revolutionary'" used by Freud," Kristeva argues, "has nothing to do with moral, much less political, revolt; it simply signifies the possibility that psychoanalysis has to access the archaic, to overturn conscious meaning" (2000: 15). I suggest that this is also Kristeva's own theoretical position on revolt. In the following pages I will attempt to disentangle several threads of the meaning and function of "revolt" by focusing only on the micro level of the

"speaking subject" while following writings of Julia Kristeva on this topic and Sigmund

Freud's theory of primary process thinking.12

In The Interpretation of Dreams (published in 1900), Sigmund Freud wrote:

Such phrases as "the return of the mind in dreams to an embryonic point of view" or the words used by Havelock Ellis to describe dreams—"an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts"—strike us as happy anticipations of our own assertions that primitive modes of activity which are suppressed during the day are concerned in the construction of dreams. (Freud 1976: 749)

64 Freud's dream interpretation led him, through the path of regression, to uncover "the

immortal wishes of childhood" and our earliest somatic needs as providers of the

underlying foundation not only of every single one of our dreams but of also the structure

of our fully developed adult mental apparatus. It was within our dreams, and more

specifically within dream-work (relying on condensation and displacement), that Freud

discovered two psychic agencies that are constantly at work in our mental apparatus: the

primary and the secondary process. In the previous chapter we showed that the primary

process typifies the earliest and the most primitive functioning of our mental apparatus.

When infants experience the feeling of hunger and their calls for help from the external

world are not answered, they recathect the memory image of a perception that had

previously assuaged the need, and thus fulfil the wish. The primary process possesses

"magical" powers (in the Freudian sense of "magic") of obtaining satisfaction from mere

hallucinations, i.e. by producing memory images of the original experience of

satisfaction, the infant's wish is instantaneously granted by the imagination. Like dreams,

the primary process does not distinguish between what is real and what is hallucinated,

nor does it distinguish between the past and the present. It takes a memory image of a

previous perception of satisfaction for satisfaction itself. Thus, it lives in the "continuous

present," and does not know time. Kristeva's theoretical writings, in particular those on the avant-garde art and poetic language, are influenced by Freud's notion of revolt. This influence is evident in her theory of "the semiotic" modality of language (le semiotique) and the chora, which she fully develops in 1974 in La Revolution du langage poetique

(Revolution in Poetic Language), for it is modelled on the primary process thinking and 65 emphasizes the regressive movement into an earlier state, the pre-linguistic and somatically oriented state of our existence (the intrauterine and the infantile stages).

In The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt Kristeva unravels the etymological evolution of the word "revolt."

The Latin verb volvere, which is at the origin of "revolt," was initially far removed from politics. It produced derivatives with meanings—semes—such as "curve," "entourage," "turn," "return." In Old French, it can mean "to envelop," "curvature," "vault," and even "omelet," "to roll," and "to roll oneself in"; the extensions go as far as "to loaf about" (galvauder), "to repair," and "vaudeville" (vaudevire, "refrain"). If this surprises you, so much the better: surprise is never extraneous to revolt. Under Italian influence in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, volutus, volute ... as well as volta and voltare suggest the idea of circular movement and, by extension, temporal return. Volta also means "time"— as in "one time" or "once"—hence, "turning back." (2000: 1-2)

These etymological explorations of the peculiar twists and turns the term revolt has undergone over several centuries reveal a connecting thread: in all its forms, the word

"revolt" resonates with "movement." Furthermore, the word connections Kristeva lays out, in particular "return," "curve," "to envelop," "to roll oneself in" and "omelette"

(Lacanian pun on little person hommelette, in this context perhaps even earlier existence of being rolled up like a foetus in the maternal womb), have resonance with the process that constitutes signifiance, which she introduced twenty-two years prior in Revolution in

Poetic Language. For this process returns the irruptive force of the unconscious drives, along with the operations of the primary process, to the signifying practice and simultaneously puts the speaking subject in process/on trial/in question. (But more on this soon).

66 Kristeva identifies Freud's project as the effort to reconcile the body and mind, or

soma and psyche, through language as a subsystem "that serves as a junction" between

the two (2000: 35). Her own project has the same objective. In Revolution in Poetic

Language she identified two linguistic modalities present in the signifying process of a

"speaking subject": "the semiotic" (le semiotique) modality and "the symbolic (le

symbolique) modality. The semiotic modality is pre-subjective, prior to the mirror stage

and pre-Oedipal. It is present in the form of energy charges and discharges of the

psychical drives that move and inscribe themselves within the body of the subject.

Kristeva writes:

This modality is the one Freudian psychoanalysis points to in postulating not only the facilitation and the structuring disposition of drives, but also the so-called primary processes which displace and condense both energies and their inscription. Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body—always involved in a semiotic process—by family and social structures. (1984: 25)

These constraints of the "family and social structures" constitute "the symbolic"

modality, the social body, which is first introduced in the mirror stage and becomes fully

realized with the inauguration of the Oedipal stage, where the newly formed subject

meets the symbolic "law of the father." This stage, too, marks the acquisition of

language. Both the semiotic and the symbolic modalities are always present in the subject, but their relative importance might vary. The "speaking subject" is produced through the dialectic process between the two opposing poles of these two modalities: the semiotic is oriented towards the body and the symbolic towards the social. Furthermore,

67 the oscillation between these two modalities forces the "speaking subject" to dispense

with any sharply defined identity that fix the "speaking subject" in immobility or stasis.

Accordingly this oscillation destabilizes the unified subject position by putting it "in

question" and "on trial." What prompts this dialectic process and serves as the source of

this psychical movement, Kristeva identifies as the energies of the chora.

The chora, Kristeva explains, belongs to the semiotic modality and is formed by

the pulsions and stases of the psychical drives, which like energy surge through the body.

[T]he chora, as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality.

... [T]he chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm. ... The theory of the subject proposed by the theory of the unconscious will allow us to read in this rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which signifiance is constituted. Plato himself leads us to such a process when he calls this receptacle or chora nourishing and maternal. (Kristeva 1984: 26)

The chora, because it is outside temporality (the conscious awareness of the flow of

time), resembles the psychic functioning of the primary process, which too is atemporal.

We experience this atemporality through the forms dream-work produces by relying on

condensation and displacement that shuffle various disconnected memory fragments around, and combine different fragments in a single, overdetermined image. This condensation and displacement create a dynamic collage of dream images, which are not bound by any rational or temporal ordering.

The atemporal and rhythmic quality of chora also suggests that it is a space of our immemorial past, of the maternal womb and of our first relation, the intrauterine relation 68 with our mother. Accordingly, chora underlies the process of signifiance. Signifiance is a

process of getting in touch, through the course of regression, with the deep rhythms of the

chora (the immemorial rhythmic echoing of the mother-foetus chiasm which are

imbedded within the fabric of our unconscious), and then fuelled by the kinetic energy of

chora's rhythms irrupt into the symbolic. Signifiance also opens up signification to free

or "unbound" psychic energy (like those that drive the primary process) and this allows

for condensation and displacement, which prise open linguistic structures and expose

language to a "heterogeneous" and "unbounded generating process" (Kristeva 1984: 17).

According to Kristeva, poetic language, in particular the poetic language exemplified by

the texts of such avant-garde poets as Stephane Mallarm^, Antonin Artaud and James

Joyce, by its close affinity with the semiotic modality, through its emphasis on rhythm

rather than denotation or representation,"... reminds us of its eternal function: to

introduce through the symbolic that which works on, moves through, and threatens it.

The theory of the unconscious seeks the very thing that poetic language practices within and against the social order: the ultimate means for its transformation or subversion, the precondition for its survival and revolution" (1984: 81).

According to Kristeva, poetic language—and, I would contend, experimental

films that P. Adams Sitney would characterize as "lyrical," through their alliance with the semiotic modality—has the ability to return to language, art and to the "speaking subject" the possibility of signifiance and of revolt. This would be both the psychical revolt (as a way of getting in touch with the immemorial past of our childhood and our somatic

69 dimension) and the social revolt (as a means to a free flowing stream of questioning).

Poetic language accomplishes this by setting the subject upon the path of regression from the symbolic to the semiotic. To make these claims concrete, I should turn to examine a work by Michael McClure, a poet whose project has been to reconnect literature with the primal energies of the body. We shall see that his ideas resemble those aspects of

Kristeva's and Freud's writing we have been examining.

Revolt in Michael McClure's Poetics: Connecting Revolt with the Somatic Dimension of our Existence, with the Body Michael McClure's essay titled Revolt ([1963]) begins with the following lines:

"Coming upon some words that begin a writing of mine I was moved by an impulse to write on the meaning of revolt and to make an investigation and exploration. The lines that intrigue me are erotic and universal and I mean but to begin with them and to track down one physiological meaning.—The lines are the first stanza of a poem titled Rant

BloclC (74). Already in these very first lines the semiotic resonates throughout McClure's language: "coming upon some words" suggests cuming-jouissance; "I was moved by an impulse" suggests the semiotic movement and impulses of drives; "lines that intrigue me are erotic and universal" connect with life force, Eros. McClure strives to bring us back in touch with the meaning of revolt and to infuse the corporeal meaning back into the conceptual/linguistic abstraction that revolt has become for us, "the multi-celled meat

70 creatures"(McClure 74) of which—and to which—McClure speaks. McClure uses an example of the most primitive animal, the planaria, in his description of revolt. He writes:

The revolt takes place in this manner: the tail end of the beast [planaria] tightens itself upon an object in the water, a stone or twig, and vigorously shakes from itself the head end ... disavowing the domination of the old head that has made all decisions with its brain and eyes. The subindividual, become individual itself, is now headless and self-decisive. In turn the individuals of itself may revolt from the new growing head in their time. AHH! (75)

Note McClure's emphasis on the body. The psychosomatic/meat/body creature, with all its desires, pleasures and pains (and drives), rises up against the head, the individual, the self; the body seeks to revert the body to the subindividual, which affords the possibility of renewal, rebirth and revelation. In revolt the body takes over—it must, as only the body can subvert reason's order. The self/individual must die, must be sacrificed or murdered, to allow for return of the repressed; it must rebel (re-bell-lion, powerful sound from within) against the symbolic and shatter it from inside. Revolt is a personal affair of the body and the unconscious, and not a social or political action. This is why Kristeva insists on the semiotic being the source of revolt and of the avant-garde poetics, and I would argue that of any real art that opens limitless interpretations and is timeless (not bound by time of its making or of its experience). It is to this place of the lowly, the subspace of the unconscious drives and longings of the body, that my dissertation continually returns, as a way of rebelling against the existing conceptions of the body and art from the humble but volatile pre-position of the subindividual.

71 Carolee Schneemann: Through the Dream-Body into Personal Revolt

The artist that accords body the central place in art and for whom personal revolt is not a foreign terrain is Carolee Schneemann. For Schneemann her body is the spring of imagination and creative activity. Like Michael McClure and Stan Brakhage, she has long thought of the energies of the body as having an influence on dynamics of the mind; and like McClure and Brakhage she also thought of mind as coextensive with the rest of the body (the "meat" body), and not above it. She trusts her body. She follows its energy pulsions in shaping her aesthetics and also her thinking. Schneemann maintains that this corporeal energy is most vivid in dream states and in lovemaking. (Other self-abnegating states such as trance and creative immersion in a field of energy—being in the field— while working on an art project could also be added to those corporeally vivid states.)

Both experiences render the dissolution of the self and the emergence of the subindividual; for the internal energies of the body come to the fore in those experiences and, while flooding consciousness, push aside rational and conditioned operations of the mind. In an interview in 1993 with Carl Hey ward, he posed the following question to

Schneemann: "You have said on several occasions that you trust your body, that you follow your body, that it never leads you astray. Is this close to intuition?" To which she replied:

It is paying attention to how the ecstatic sexual body maintains its sensory richness, merging physicality and aesthetics. I trust the body in terms of dreams, in terms of tactility. Painting came out of the whole organism, using the extended

72 arm, the erotic body in the "eye," so it does not get stratified or constrained or constricted. This leads to different layers; for instance, hormonal shifts trigger different kinds of dreams—different kinds of energy; different forms of perception can provoke aesthetic structures, forms in space. Menstrual dreams have a very particular kind of physical impress and power to them.. .or dreams where you have a fever. The body is going to give you a different kind of imagistic formation when you are hungry, when you are tired.... So all the ways that the body is informing the energy of the mind is where I start. (Schneemann 1993: 200-201)

Dreams play a significant role in Schneemann's creative process. She has relied on dreams as a source of imagery and inspiration for new work, as well as for guidance in her works in progress, since the early 1960s. She always keeps a pen and paper next to her bed to transcribe into language or drawings, immediately after waking, her dream information and hypnogogic messages.

To increase the potential communication I address the dream process before sleep, requesting a further step, solution, clarification. Empty the mind, concentrate on disciplines which sharpen the dream arena, stimulate unconscious recognitions. The sensuous body is coiled with unconscious archetypes of culture, symbol, and myth emerging from within the isolation of personal dreaming. Physiological forces will be as instrumental as psychological ones in dream events. (Schneemann 1981: 238).

Schneemann makes manifest with her artwork and through documentations of her creative process what others, namely theorists, have speculated; that there is a correspondence between the creative process and the process of dream-work in that they operate according to the laws of the unconscious and employ primary process methods. (I will return to this topic in chapter 3 when I will address more directly this correspondence through the writing of Anton Ehrenzweig.) Furthermore, both the creative process and construction of dreams afford us a glimpse of the repressed

73 archetypes of our culture and, most importantly, reconnect us to the primordial realm.

The body (of an artist and of a dreamer) plays the central role in accomplishing both of these tasks, for the dream and the creative process have their origin within the body, as the space from which the energy (of the dream or of the artwork) springs.

Schneemann's 1983 performance Fresh Blood—A Dream Morphology took her menstrual dream, and both the physiological and psychological forces that shape it, as its inspirational source. She describes the dream as follows: "While holding the red umbrella

I had accidentally poked a man in his thigh, producing a spurt of blood; the bouquet of dried leaves [stuffed with little dolls] was given to me by a lover, which I then accidentally left in the waiting room of a famous European veterinarian" (1994: 23).

Through the course of interpreting this dream, while drawing out its visual representations, two dominant elements of the dream's narrative brought her to pose the following question: "What do a red umbrella and a bouquet of dried flowers stuffed with little dolls have in common?" (Schneemann 1981: 238). This question was central to her essay on taboos of menstrual blood, which she developed out of her dream experience and its interpretation. This essay associated the unconscious with the interiority of the female body and posited "the menstrual dream as a generative force of sacred interiority, or prima materia (biochemical, visual, conceptual, alchemical" (Schneemann 1994: 23).

At first, she presented this essay as a lecture that was accompanied with continuous slide relay of what she called the "vector vocabulary," which she developed in response to the dream. Her vector vocabulary consisted of 26 images (purposefully connecting this

74 number to the number of letters in the English language alphabet). These images had plastic correspondences or associations between the "V" symbol (the archaic symbol of female sex) and human body parts, natural things (snowflakes, crystals, explosion patterns, cyclonic storm pattern, branches, molecules), sacred artifacts, and man-made common objects (tent, details of architecture, umbrella, bicycle, alphabet characters)

(Schneemann 1994: 26). (It is important to note that her choice of the word "vector" is quite significant in its connection to the dream and the unconscious processes. However, she does not indicate anywhere whether she was conscious of this connection. Its etymological root in the Latin is "carrier," from vehere meaning "to carry, to convey." It is defined in Merriam- Webster Dictionary as "a quantity that has magnitude and direction, and that is commonly represented by a directed line segment whose length represents the magnitude and whose orientation in space represents the direction," and the Concise Oxford Dictionary adds to this definition: "direct (aircraft in flight) to desired point." If we replace "aircraft" and "line segment" with "repressed wish" then both definitions approximate the operations of the unconscious and the function of the drives, as carriers of quantities of energy to be discharged.)

Schneemann's experience of this lecture opened her to the consideration of extending it into a performance, hence Fresh Blood—A Dream Morphology (1983). "I thought of positioning myself physically and interactively," Schneemann notes, "within the slide projections and the spoken and pre-recorded texts, situating myself as both the source of the dream's content and analysis and an aspect of its actual materialization" (1994: 26). The visual and auditory elements of the performance relied on her personal morphology of the dream imagery to extract various feminine archetypes that are present in our culture but are, nevertheless, invisible to us; they are unconscious. "The personal morphology developed in Fresh Blood is thus expanded into a universal language of shape and deliberate form," she wrote (Schneemann 1994: 26).

Between 1986 and 1988 this performance, along with its video documentation and accompanying vector vocabulary, took on another incarnation, it became the sculpture/video installation titled Venus Vectors (1986-1988). In this sculpture,

Schneemann's desire "of positioning [herself] physically and interactively" in the performance was extended to the viewer. In fact, "The original design was for a walk-in version that was to be constructed in the same way, but with panels measuring 8x10 ft," she notes (1994: 28). Such a large scale sculptural environment would undoubtedly incorporate viewers' bodies into its composition, while at the same time would also provide a more visceral and immersive experience for them. I conjecture that the intended experience of entering Venus Vectors, in its large scale dimensions, was to approximate the experience of entering the space of Schneemann's dream, of her unconscious, i.e., to call forth the unconscious operations of the mind in the participants to navigate through such a space. Schneemann does not provide an explanation why this sculpture was not executed in her desired dimensions, though, I would conjecture, that it might have had something to do with the cost of such a large-scale project. (In the next section, I will address another sculptural environment of an even greater scale Parts of a Body House

76 which she conceived in 1966 but, unfortunately, she has never been able to realize.

Instead, it remains in a series of drawings, which have been published in 1971 in a book

under the same title [Parts of a Body House. Cullompton, Devon, England: Beau Geste

Press, 1972].)

Venus Vectors took on more modest proportions. It is, nevertheless, large enough

to engage the motor body of the viewers, requiring them to walk around the sculpture,

and an emotive response, for this sculpture, being raised to the eye level on a six-foot

circular pedestal, summons attention and response; just like another human being, it

stares right into viewers' eyes. Thus, instead of entering the space of Schneemann's

unconscious, viewers encounter it and are called upon to become acquainted with it. In

other words, the change in the scale of this work has displaced the focus of this piece

from what I would call the pre-Oedipal experience of the world (the experience of

oceanic union) to the experience of mirroring and being summoned that accompanies the

mirror stage; from physically entering the space of Schneemann's dream-body and

becoming coextensive with it, to encountering the space of her dream-body in itself and denying our physical entry into it.

Venus Vectors is composed of 10 Plexiglas panels (2 x 3 ft each), which are hinged in pairs to produce 5 V-shaped sections. Each panel is divided into four quadrants that contain vector vocabulary images printed in black and silver on acetate. The acetate is sandwiched between two acrylic sheets. There are two colour video screens (13" each) positioned one above the other. The two screens display video documentations of

77 Schneemann's Fresh Blood—A Dream Morphology performance, which play as continuous loops. These monitors are encased in another V-shaped section of the same dimensions as that of the Plexiglas sections. All together there are 6 V-shaped sections

(or 12 panels). They are arranged into a shape that somewhat resembles the interior space of an open umbrella; other visual morphologies of the "V" symbol (snowflake, star- symbol, six vulvas, etc.) are also visible. This shape reinforces the visual content of this work, while extending the vector morphology from two-dimensional images into three- dimensional space.

In her writings about Venus Vectors Schneeman notes "The sculpture/video installation Venus Vectors (1988) merges concerns and techniques from my work as a painter, performer, filmmaker and sculptor" (1994: 23). Her use of transparencies in

Venus Vectors produces the effect of images spilling from one panel into another, creating multiple layers. One cannot see images in one panel in isolation; the neighbouring panels impose their images, either through reflection or through transparency, into that panel. In addition, reflections of viewers' bodies, and those of others around the sculpture, become incorporated into the visual complexity of the image.

The two video screens, which contain documentations of the performance, also add to the visual complexity by creating yet another image layer; a moving image layer. In the panel closest to the screens the video image superimposes the miniature body representations of

Schneemann into the image of that panel. The further one moves away from it the further the video image becomes abstracted until finally Schneemann's figure dissolves into

78 flickering coloured light. Her use of multiple image planes, or layers, brings into this sculpture her experience as a painter; working with thick layers of paint as well as with collage compositions, dissolving depth and focusing on surface dynamics. Moreover, the multiple layers in Venus Vectors, which rely on transparency and opaqueness of the image and modulation of light, also bring into this work Schneemann's concerns as a filmmaker; in particular, her use of superimpositions that are characteristic of her films, such as in Fuses (1964-67).

Schneemann's cinematic (and kineasthetic) concerns are further reinforced by the temporal dimension of Venus Vectors. Just as one cannot isolate a single image in the panel, one cannot apprehend this sculpture in one glance or from one position. One must walk around it in order to apprehend its totality, which, conversely, is continuously fleeting one's grasp, for this work is constantly changing with each step one makes; the images in each panel shift and meld into one another and become kinetic. The kinetics of this sculpture also recalls the nature of film, in that film is composed of series of image frames that are viewed in succession, which are propelled by a motor of the projector; the motor body of the viewer in Venus Vectors accomplishes this function. The two video loops also reinforce the film/kinetic dimension. The kinetic quality, thus, brings time as one of the key compositional elements of Venus Vectors. Finally, it is the experience of temporality that unites the sculptural, painterly, performative, and cinematic elements in this work: the two videos and vector vocabulary images in each panel are records of events past; the participating bodies of viewers, along with their movements around the

79 sculpture and superimpositions/reflections of their bodies in panels and in video monitors, anticipate the future events by connecting them with the present as they slip into the past. By means of this bodily participation, which this sculpture asks of viewers, viewers enter into its environment and become part of its composition (visual and temporal).

Through the repetitive circular movement of viewers' bodies around the sculpture and their intense attention to the sculpture's constantly morphing vector vocabulary images, which are coupled with the video images and viewers' own reflections, they begin to drift into a more fluid state of streaming visual, auditory, tactile and linguistic associations and their mutual interpenetration. In this bodily immersion, images take on multidimensional, synaesthetic and polyvalent qualities for viewers. Just as Fresh

Blood—A Dream Morphology and Venus Vectors had their origin in the dream-body and the unconscious of its maker, Venus Vectors returns viewers to their bodies through the aesthetic experience of this work while at the same time triggering unconscious states of streaming associations and synaesthetic perceptions. This grants viewers the possibility of reconnecting with primordial experience; an experience from which we have estranged ourselves but which nevertheless remains close at hand, accessible within, and aesthetic experience is perhaps the only path left to us today towards it.

By proceeding from the personal (intimate) position, rather than social, in treating bodily experience as a source of knowledge (a self-knowledge that is also universal) and employing it as a foundation of her aesthetics, Schneemann is able to question the 80 existing social structures; even infiltrate them. "The unexpected themes and materials that merge the performance Fresh Blood—A Dream Morphology and the sculpture Venus

Vectors can be understood as an archeology of unconscious forms and meanings pulled to the surface of conscious recognition" (Schneemann 1994: 26). In presenting and working out through her art the various feminine imagery and symbols that come to her in her dreams (or unconsciously slip into her work), she makes us aware of what has long remained invisible to us because repressed by our culture.

Some constructivist feminists insist that any analysis of a feminist erotics must first recognize internalizations of male desire, that female sexuality has been constructed by persistent demands and conditions of Western patriarchy. I insist on the value of my experience as a heterosexual who knows her pleasure is in and of her body and that this body provides and integral source of self-knowledge. Within a woman's lived experiences are areas of authority that deflect masculinist projections. (Schneemann 1993: 201)

Schneemann has often noted that these repressed images, which were given material presence in her art, were discovered by her later (sometimes even several years after completing a project) while looking through obscure books or accidentally coming across them while working on another, seemingly unrelated, project. For example in one of images from the Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963) Schneemann poses in a reclined position with her arms above her head and with two garden snakes placed on top of her nude body. Several years later, she discovered a similar image of a Cretan Goddess holding two snakes in each one of her hands and above her head. Another example is of the image that appears in her film Fuses (1964-67) of the couple in a sexual embrace in front of the window, for which she also discovered an equivalent in an archaic sculpture.

81 These two examples are included in Unexpectedly Research (1992), a mixed media work.

This artwork is a culmination of discoveries that Schneemann had amassed over the

period of twenty years. It is structured as a grid of sixteen (17" x 11") images, which are

divided into eight sets of two images (one of her artwork and one she discovered): two

sets across and four sets down. The images she uses from her own works are of two sorts:

those created by her and documentations of her performances by others. They date from

1962-1982. Schneemann's unexpected discoveries of repressed feminine symbolisms in

her previous artwork while researching materials for her new art projects has been a

persistent theme in her work. Her dreams, along with the unconscious processes involved

in the creation of her art, have often guided her towards the material and conscious

revelations of these feminine symbolisms in her work.

Two of my creative projects have also become research revelations for me: the

film titled fugitive l(i)ght (2005); and the sculptural environment/performance Film-Lab-

Digestive-Track (2007). I came to both not by intention but through self-abnegation:

using chance procedures in the film; and working collaboratively with three women

(liana Gutman, Angela Joosse and Erika Loic) in the sculptural environment. I was also,

to a large extent, guided by my body—by "gut feeling." I followed the path that the work

(and collaboration with others) unfolded for me and responded to it accordingly. These

two projects resemble works by two other women artists: Loi'e Fuller (Serpentine Dance,

1892-1920 performances) and Carolee Schneemann (Parts of a Body House - Guerilla

Gut Room (1966), her unrealized project). In both cases, I became aware of these works

82 (and in Fuller's case, her as a performer) while in the midst of working on projects I already had begun. One of my three collaborators (Angela Joosse) and I discovered

Schneemann's drawing with instructions for Parts of a Body House - Guerilla Gut Room while attending her retrospective exhibition in Buffalo in May 2007. We were astounded by our discovery and its similarity to our own project Film-Lab-Digestive-Track, which we began sketching out already in the late winter of 2006; roughly, forty years after

Schneemann conceived it.

There is another layer of connection between the works of these two women artists and my works, it is cinema—and more specifically the kinetic, rhythmic and synaesthetic qualities that cinema can elicit. These are also the province of performance art and sculptural environments (at least those of Schneemann.) The performances of the dancer Loie Fuller's between 1890s and 1920s, I contend, were proto-cinematic. She was a precursor of experimental cinema, in particular of the absolute cinema. Her performances, just like many experimental films, emphasized rhythmic composition of visual events rather than narrative development. They also aimed at producing tension between abstraction and representation, that would result in lability of form. Lastly, her performances involved modulation of (coloured) light, which is again the domain of cinema, in particular of experimental cinema. Schneemann's Parts of a Body House, like her Venus Vectors, also connects with cinema through the kinaesthetic, synaesthetic and temporal elements that this piece was intended to engage in the participants. The participants would have had to traverse the immense space of the Body House and its

83 many rooms: Entrance and Exit: The Coat Room, Cat House, Bathroom, Lung Room,

Heart Chamber/Cunt Chamber, Ice Palace, Liver Room, The Nerve Ends Room, The

Kidney Room, The Guerrilla Gut Room, The Genitals Play - Erotica Meat Room, and

Hair and Fingers Room. These rooms would have been filled with various activities oriented at engaging several of their sensory modalities at once: visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory.13

Schneemann's and Fuller's works are characterized by feminine qualities. The feminine qualities that are present in their work (and also in my own) include: emphasis on rhythm and kinetics (both are also interested in dance, as I am); prominence of morphing or continuously evolving shapes or lability of image (forms becoming abstract and then momentarily concretizing into a representations, and then again fleeing concretization, etc.); prominence of vibrant colours (colour's vibrancy produces visceral and deeply emotive experience); emphasis on synaesthetic experience (returning to the communion of senses we experience as infants); importance of improvisation and self- abnegation (being taken over in the process of making, in the experience); emphasis on poetic and plastic rather than narrative compositions; importance accorded to the human body and natural world, and its order; and prominence of space (environment, dwelling, womb, etc.) as a theme, mostly hidden as a formal theme underlying the work but sometimes given more prominence in the content or title. In other words the feminine qualities emphasize sensuality and rhythmic construction, which labilizes representation in artwork or meaning in text, over rational order. In some instances this sensuality takes

84 over and the work regresses to pre-verbal qualities of experience. These feminine

qualities and their effects, therefore, belong to the realm of feminine aesthetics. However,

these feminine qualities are not only the domain of women: male artists have also been

able to access them. Many of these feminine qualities characterize the films of Stan

Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, and R. Bruce Elder. Moreover, I contend that these feminine

qualities, and therefore the feminine aesthetics, are closely related to the methods of the

primary process. I will discuss these connections in chapter 3 through Anton

Ehrenzweig's ideas of the scanning attention and syncretistic vision that are involved in

process of creation, and the role they play in Elder's cinema.

Is it then possible that by tapping into my own feminine dimension, by means of

self-abnegation or the return to the non-self while in the process of creating fugitive

l(i)ght and Film-Lab-Digestive-Track, I found the universal feminine, and through this

discovered my predecessors, other (women) artists who were/are in touch with the

feminine through their own "unconscious archeology" manifested in their work? I

already discussed the importance of the dream-body and of the unconscious processes

involved in Schneemann's work; Fuller has also arrived at the feminine through the

unconscious, in the process of improvisation in a theatrical performance her Serpentine

Dance was created. One also has to wonder why Fuller decided to call her dance

"serpentine"; none of the sources point to any other origin of this title but the obvious shape that the dance creates. The use of serpentine and circular motifs has been characteristic of the archaic traditions—Schneemann also acknowledges her own use of

85 these archaic forms in her art, as well as her direct application of snakes into the

composition of one of her nude self-portraits in Eye Body (1963) (Schneemann 2002:

198). Moreover, the winding sinuous motifs of the serpentine in Schneemann's visual art

and in the movements of Fuller's dance also suggest the Primal Snake Ouroboros (or

Uroboros). Ouroboros is often depicted in a circular shape of a snake eating its tail, but

also in some cases in a lemniscate shape; the shape that underlies the movements in

Fuller's serpentine dance and the variation of which she used as a symbol for herself.

Most importantly, Ouroboros designates primordial unity and the pre-ego state of

undifferentiation.14 Hence it speaks directly to the claims that I have put forth thus far in

this dissertation, that the primordial experience belongs to the realm of the feminine.

Consequently, to bring us into closer contact with this realm, the unconscious and its

methods, along with the body, must be accorded central place in feminine aesthetics.

Coincidentally, since my first filmmaking attempts (i.e. since 1996) my projects have

been unknowingly tapping into Ouroboros (one of the many repressed feminine

symbolisms) by exploring the notions of undifferentiation and oceanic fusion, and in the

last seven years its lemniscate shape. By putting myself in the state of openness (the state

that working in the process brings about) while creating my projects, Schneemann's and

Fuller's creations were revealed to me and with them the intimations of the repressed

feminine; hence the necessity of the feminine aesthetics and its capacity to return the feminine to our lives.

86 But the feminine aesthetics has another important task today, for it is our only hope of revitalizing our depleted sense of experience through the contact with the primordial. I will elaborate on this by now turning to the poetics of experience in R.

Bruce Elder's cinema.

Art, the Revitalizing Force of Life: R. Bruce Elder's Poetics of Experience

R. Bruce Elder insists that artist's task is to revitalize life through art. Art has the ability to transform the present human condition of alienation and emotional numbness and to attune humans to one another and to the world they inhabit by granting them contact with the primordial experience. Therefore, art, according to Elder, is the only hope that human beings have today in returning them to a more accepting, respecting and loving community. In other words, such art has both ethical and moral implications for culture, especially today for the Western culture that alienates people from real experience and, hence, from each other. However, in this culture art has also suffered. Art has become confused with entertainment and its transformative potential has been subdued by being appropriated by entertainment industry that diffuses art's revolutionary potential into an assembly of amusing distractions. These, in turn, further alienate people from real experience, real life and, consequently, from "what we are fitted for" as human

87 beings, to use George Grant's words. This is the reason why Elder takes on the task of bringing art into closer proximity with poiesis: creation as a mode of presencing or of bringing, leading forth in a sort of "blindsight," into unconcealment. In order to accomplish this, in a culture that prises open every mystery and leaves nothing—in its darkness, in itself—for the imagination but instead turns every being on this planet into an object, a "standing reserve," requires a movement in the opposite direction, i.e. the return to the mysterious, to the despised feminine, and to the joys (and sometimes pains that also teach us important lessons in attunement) of carnal flesh and love.

In the opening of his essay "State/Intended: Some Reflections Parallel to The

Book of All the Deadpublished in a catalogue on the occasion of his retrospective in

1988 of The Booh of All the Dead (1975-1994) film cycle at the Anthology Film Archives

(New York), Elder describes the current human condition, which his films address and attempt to remedy, in the following way:

Ours is a time that has experienced the darkening of the world, a spiritual decline that results from our having broken with both the earthly and the divine, i.e. with what is below and what is above us. The gods have deserted us, and we humans are in the process of being transformed from creatures of flesh into objects of metal. In our time, a gruesome hatred of everything creative has become so strong and all pervasive that the worst affliction that can befall a person in these times is to have an original idea. (The same hatred is expressed in modern culture's abhorrence of the feminine.) Existence has lost its vertical dimension, and experience has been flattened out into a single plane.

.. .Our learning is not edification but indiscretion. Whenever a new pathway opens, our scholars explore it, even if it leads to the devastating understanding unlocked at Los Alamos. But our unrestrained curiosity is simply the most obvious (albeit generally unrecognized) symptom of our spiritual tedium.

88 We pay a high price when the mind's demand for knowledge is not curbed by moral vigilance. The gift of reason, like the gift of love, required jealous guarding; as has become painfully obvious that, like love, it too can lead to corruption and sin. For reason, just as much as curiosity, can succumb to temptation, can be corrupted and can even, when sufficiently goaded by curiosity and unrestrained by wisdom, become complicit with evil. ...

We of today are the last men of our civilization foretold by Nietzsche, for what has, until recently, been the dynamic agent of Western civilization has come down to us in a depleted, weakened, terminal form....

Because we have forsaken knowledge of the Whole, we have come to understand reality only as heterogeneous fragments that, to practical reason, seem utterly incommensurate. We have lost what only love can disclose: the unity of reality, its coherence, its enduringness, the constancy of its structure—in short, its eternal order. We know only the practical and the accessible for we have turned away from the Mystery. In our hearts and minds we have reduced reality from a Mystery in which we are overwhelmingly involved to a problem that we can master. Indeed, we have reduced existence itself to a concept. Our souls have been taken over by the practicalities of the machine and our panic helplessness has driven us to taking shelter in superior human intelligence.... The technical frenzy that characterizes the mondus vivendi of present-day humanity has made us forgetful of the spiritual strength of the earth. The darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the transformation of humans from flesh to metal, the spread of the hatred of fertility and creativity are all processes that have gone so far that they sometimes seem irreversible.... Our most valued form of thinking has declined from prayer to analysis, and analysis presumes what is false—that we stand outside of reality. It denies that we are immersed in reality and in denying our participation in Being, it is one of the causes of our spiritual malaise. We have been deformed by closing ourselves off from the Divine in existence. (Elder 1988: 13-14)

Since creativity and the feminine are despised and, therefore, repressed in Western culture, as is the body (the necessary dimension of human experience and the realm of both the feminine and the creative), then feminine aesthetics (an amalgam of the feminine, creativity, and the body) is one way, if not the only way, of initiating a process that might eventuate in a transformation to the present dire conditions in the Western

89 culture. To be effective, that process would have to reconnect us with the knowledge of the Whole through real experience. It will do so by way of rebellion, by irrupting within the symbolic and challenging its (rational) order with mutability and energy—with energies unleashed by the sentient body coupled with the force of the primordial. These mutable energies are the domain of the repressed feminine. Elder's cinema wages such a rebellion, both through its content and, most importantly, its form.

Elder's films, in particular his The Book of All the Dead, make it apparent that he chose as his life's path (or the path has chosen him) the path of aesthetic rebellion, along with the task of reconnecting human beings with the lost knowledge of the Whole, and therefore with love. For, according to Elder, love is the ultimate knowledge that grants humans insight into the eternal order and our role in this order as human beings; a knowledge that we have tuned out from real experience (love) by abandoning ourselves in the pursuit of technological progress and its truths. In order to attune us to this knowledge Elder's cinema aims at reworking our modes of perception and honing our ability to feel and sense: emotional feeling prompted by cues given by our senses that go out to and "feel" (sympathize) with the other; and sense as signification informed by our bodies, as our bodily immersion in the world. Elder's films are, therefore, composed in such a way as to heighten viewers' experience; he does so by exposing viewers to large, very complex and all-encompassing structures. Through such aesthetic experience, and preferably in the intended way of forty-two-hours of film viewing over the period of three days, viewers' perception is transformed. Immediately following the screening, they

90 begin to notice connections in their daily lives, which were previously unnoticed, between its disparate and fragmented parts. Moreover, they begin to gain sense of their lives as meaningful, for they question and contemplate their connection as mortal beings with other mortals, with the lived world and with the transcendent order. They do so by means of their bodily immersion and participation in the real world; they feel-out the world and infuse sense (significance) and emotion (empathy and even love for one another) into their lives that open them to the possibility of higher knowledge— knowledge of the Whole. But just as they begin to open to this mode of thinking, it begins to slip away. The clamour of daily routine, shaped by the pressures imposed by the system and its technical pursuits, drowns out their ability to dwell in this mode of attunement. However, this experience leaves a gap, a void they now know can be, and must be, filled—with love. Elder's films, therefore, teach people to apply the same mode of thinking, which opens to them through the aesthetic experience, to their experience of life.

R. Bruce Elder learned from the great poets about the spiritually edifying potential of art and, thus, its revitalizing force in human life; Dante Alighieri and Ezra

Pound have been especially important to Elder's project.15 Elder's epic film cycle The

Book of All the Dead and its tripartite structure are inspired by Dante Alighieri's epic poem Commedia (The Divine Comedy). The Book of All the Dead is, thus, divided into three parts: Lamentations, Consolations, and Exultations.'6 These roughly correspond with Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso in Dante's The Divine Comedy. In Dante's epic

91 readers are led by its hero (Dante the poet) on a spiritual journey, by first descending into the pit of hell and finally ascending to heaven towards God. The viewers of Elder's film epic also follow its hero (the filmmaker-poet) in a pilgrimage of "spiritual education," through the three parts of the cycle: first descending towards the state of lament when entering Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World (1985) through the films preceding it that form The System of Dante's Hell (1975-1982), culminating in the horrors produced by our technical mode of thinking in Illuminated Texts (1982), then moving through the three parts of Consolations; Love is an Art of Time (1988) and finally ascending to Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving (1990-1994) and towards the

Wholly knowledge as "the insight that everything given in experience truly is a gift"

(Elder 2005:456).

Both Dante and Elder began their epics at roughly the age of thirty-five. Dante's epic begins with the poet in the dark wood: in the middle of his life's journey, perhaps reflecting on his own mortality and spiritual darkness that surrounds him. Elder's epic adopts the allegory of the dark wood from Dante to present the crisis that one finds oneself in the middle of life's journey. Elder's epic begins approximately with his confrontation with death while critically ill, which is presented in the autobiographical style of The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1979). It then proceeds to the profound sense of vulnerability and helplessness that he experiences as he finds himself in the spiritual darkness of our age that culminates in the horrors of Auschwitz, which is depicted in

Illuminated Texts (1982). It thus appears that both Dante and Elder create their epics out

92 of their own personal crises of existence, driven by despair when confronted with or

made aware of their mortality—no longer being considered at 35 as invincible youth

(oriented towards life), now the path towards the darkness and stillness of death is

moving into their horizon and is the force that prompts their epic. Although death is the

driving force at the origin of their work, their poetics is shaped by the energy of Eros and

the search for Love.

Being inspired by the transformations of consciousness in Dante's The Divine

Comedy, Elder composed The Book of All the Dead to present nine stages in the

transformation of consciousness; from the "ordinary waking consciousness," in the first

stage, to "aspiring to the exalted knowledge of the Love that permeates all things and

sustains all things in their being," in the ninth stage (Elder 2005: 455-456).17 But The

Book of All the Dead does not merely present the nine stages of transformation; in fact, it

triggers transformations in viewer's consciousness through the film-viewing experience.

In the course of the cycle Elder deploys both form and content of the twenty-one films

that The Book of All the Dead comprises in moving viewers away from the analytic and

technical mode of thinking, and returning attentive and willing viewers to the mode of

thinking as prayer; the activity that humans are fitted for, as it opens us to contemplation

of the meaning of the world. Elder asserts that "In prayer, we empty our minds of abstract

thoughts and give ourselves over wholly to perception, to seeing a thing for what it is. ...

It consists in allowing the concrete particular to fill the mind entirely and in giving ourselves over to wonder that is has come to be" (Elder 2005: 465).

93 In shaping the content of The Book of All the Dead, Elder turned for inspiration to

Ezra Pound's Cantos and his use of the paratactical method in this work. According to

Elder, this method is appropriate to cinema, for cinema already operates on the basis of dissociation, recombination and association of desperate elements. He contends that forms created using the paratactical method engender experience that approximates the mode of thinking as prayer; for prayer permits the disparate particulars to fill the mind completely and direct it inward (Elder 2005: 464-465). In the experience of structures created using this method, the mind does not rely on the logical thought patterns (it simply cannot); instead it moves, it drifts among the disparate fragments, and in this drifting intuits what connects.

The experience of drifting, which is produced by the paratactical composition of

The Book of All the Dead, is propelled by the experience of multiple rhythms: the intricate rhythms created by the filmmaker within each shot, between shots, and in sound composition; and rhythms created by viewers in response to the experience of this work.

Moreover, Elder relies on repetition to further induce the sense of inward movement. He accomplishes this in two ways. The first, by presenting viewers with a shot, a fragment of sound, or an idea from another part of the cycle or section of the film, while urging them to shuffle in their memory and to re-member ("put members together" to use Stan

Brakhage's phrase) what the present percept calls forth. The second, by repeating the same image or sound within one sequence to the point of exhausting viewers' conscious apprehension and the ability to anticipate progression or continuity; this induces thinking

94 that relies on the methods of the primary process. (One could say that the experience of

The Book of All the Dead, by turning towards prayer as a mode of thinking, has some correspondence, although it is not identical, with the experience of praying with the rosary; the symbol of the feminine [Mother of the Son of God] in the Roman Catholic

Church. The faithful can come into contact with the experience feminine by means of repetitive reciting of prayers and meditations on the mysteries of the rosary [events in the life of Christ and Mary], which eventually transforms language into music, into song that reverberates with its sounds and rhythms at the core of their being. When it is recited out- loud in the church, which is usually done by women as responsorial recitations, the rhythmic repetition fuses the female voices and fills the space with its echoing sound.)

Therefore, polyrhythms and repetitions create the pulse of Elder's The Book of All the

Dead that pulls viewers inwards, towards the mode of thinking as prayer, granting them contact with the feminine—just as Dante's epic does with his Beatrice, "the embodiment of his experience of love" (Reynolds 51). This opens them to intimations of the most profound knowledge that is love.

Pound's and Elder's epics amass fragments of the greatest works that artists, poets and philosophers have produced over several centuries and even millennia in the Eastern and Western cultures. Their epics also include various styles of literature (Pound and

Elder) and of cinema (Elder), as well as several languages. The paratactical method employed in these epics permits the numerous fragments (cultural artifacts) and styles to co-exist, by virtue of being juxtaposed with one another, and compels the viewer, rather than the artist, to make the links between them; to participate in the co-creation of meaning and form.

In Elder films, the viewers' participation is even more demanding. The visual and auditory complexity of the films renders it impossible for viewers to apprehend all the contents at once and in one viewing. This is further compounded by the fact that viewers cannot stop the film to think or search the source of a given quotation or of an artifact, or even to replay the section that produced some difficulty or remained in obscurity for them. The constant meter of the film projector (24 fps.) sweeps viewers into the rhythms of the film, forcing them to keep moving, to flow with them. In this very fertile state of rational obscurity and bewilderment, when one completely looses oneself in the aesthetic experience, there are moments of profound revelation and illumination; forms and concepts momentarily cohere and create originary arrangements. This produces an acute feeling of pleasure, even joy; for one briefly merges with the filmmaker in this experience, i.e. the two processes of creation (filmmaker's and viewer's) overlap.

Furthermore, with each additional viewing of Elder's films new forms and meanings are created, nothing remains the same, because something always slips past us; we always experience these films as new encounters. Concepts and forms, thus, become labilized and infused with new meaning, new significance, in relation to one another and to the overall experience of the film(s).

In "Further Reflections on the Violence of Art," one of Elder's several unpublished essays that make up The Violence and Charity of Cinema (an unpublished

96 book of his collected texts), he comments on the disordering power of labile forms in his cinema and their analogy to the operations of the unconscious in language, which also explains his interest in employing the paratactical method and his preference for labile forms in his cinema.

Why should I want to maintain that labile forms, forms that shift and change with every phrase, are a sign of destructive element? For doesn't such lability contribute to a greater formal richness and complexity? My reasons for asserting that the primordial domain perpetrates violence against language lie in the analogy between the capacity of the unconscious to disrupt and dismember speech through what Freud (using the word differently) described as "parapraxis" and the capacity of primordial domain to lay simple gestalt form to ruin. Most readers will be aware of Freud's commentary on the way that the unconscious can disturb everyday speech, dismantle intentions and speak another, unrecognized truth.... The effects that the disordering force of the primordial has on gestalt form are analogous to those which the unconscious has on language and behavior: it dismembers language and lays good form to rubble. And, just as the unconscious is that which lies under repression, and is refused representation in consciousness, so the primordial element is the residuum that cannot be represented in language—and so it rises against language and representation, to undo them. The time when we could confidently assert that we assess a work of art by its gestalt form has passed. That was the old conception of art, and it has wasted itself in its constant effort to repress the dynamic element left over from perception, to hold at bay that excess of unrealized possibility, to ward off the return of that which passes into nothing as a thought is configured, that which language consigns to silence; and to expel from sensation that excess which rises against language, against thought, and against representation, to destroy them. That view has exhausted itself in the constant passivity required of it... in the face of the violence that is characteristic of the revenge of the repressed. That conception of art is spent; it has had its day. We must now measure the power of the work of art by its capacity to mime the character of the dance of the primordial. We must come to understand that form has two basic roles, one material and one regulative. Form serves first to embody the play of tension that imitates the dance of the primordial and, secondly, through its regulative function, to focus thought in such a way as to create an opening that enables us to respond to the violence the primordial unleashes. (Elder unpublished book: 145-146)

97 In his opposition to the passivity of viewers and to the closed forms of gestalt configurations, Elder employs the paratactical method and labile forms to create "open form" films that bring viewers into the process of their co-creation. "This compositional method," Elder writes, "makes one's life co-extensive with the quest that the work recounts, and so art and life become one, for it relies on the faith ... that in the form- making process, a subject does emerge—a voice that, while not the commanding authorial presence of traditional texts, nonetheless coheres" (2005: 463). This creative process and the evocation of the subject in process resemble Julia Kristeva's conception of sujet en proces (subject in process/on trial): this subject emerges in the experience of those signifying practices (visual art, poetry, music, etc.) that are marked by the semiotic modality and its propensity for labilizing form and for prising open fixed and closed structures. Elder does not make this connection explicit in any of his published writing, but, as the above unpublished passage suggests, he arrived at similar ideas as Kristeva by studying the works of poets, filmmakers, and philosophers, and while making his films.

In The Book of All the Dead, as in his current film cycle The Book of Praise

(1997-present), Elder aims at presenting another, more primal and poetic mode of thinking, which has been replaced in Western culture by monolinear sequence of abstract thought: "The monolinear sequence of logical thinking is only one way of knowing, and its prospects are narrowly circumscribed, as the attempts to model creativity with logical programming languages show. The mind's natural way of knowing is to heap up an assortment of facts until, at last, it intuits what connects" (Elder 2005: 465). The Book of

98 All the Dead aspires to return us to the more primal and poetic modes of thinking, where we rely on intuition and more rudimentary modes of thinking rather than logic. This is why Elder turns to the greatest poets who help him in leading us on a pilgrimage through the winding paths in the history of Western civilization and towards the transformation of the self through "poetry of experience." For this experience inspires "emotional experience" that opens viewers to their oneness with others and the surrounding world, hence the profound knowledge of love. Elder describes this transformative process as follows: "Consciousness of the significance of the particular is enlarged until, at last, the poetry of experience is awakened, and an emotional experience is called forth that awakens one to our oneness with our 'circumstance,' i.e., that which 'stands around' us"

(Elder 2005:456). This journey of "spiritual education" through the poets and their devices (Virgil for Dante; for Elder Pound and Dante, along with film-poets Brakhage and Emshwiller, both film-poets of the cosmic order and feminine) is also a quest in search of love and for the repressed feminine (and hence our first love). Elder is convinced that only through the poetic forms (methods of the unconscious and feminine aesthetics) can the primordial feminine be reached.

Like Dante who searched through the underworld for his Beatrice, "the embodiment of his experience of love," Elder also searches for love by aspiring towards the feminine, the feminine aesthetics in his cinema; for through the experience of the feminine one encounters love. Barbara Reynolds notes that in Dante's poem "Beatrice does not exclusively or specifically 'stand for' theology, the Christian revelation, heavenly beatitude, the light of glory or any of the abstraction.... She is the image by which Dante perceives such things and her function in the poem is to bring him to that state in which he is able to perceive them directly" (Reynolds 50, my emphases). Thus the function of the feminine (Beatrice) in Dante's poem is extended into Elder's cinema, for we come into contact with the feminine through the form of his films, which transforms our mode of thinking to "poetry of experience" that opens us through

"emotional experience" to love. Thus in this process we open to the repressed dimension

(the feminine and the creative/poiesis) and its gift of love, the most Wholly knowledge.

In The Book of All the Dead the protagonist (the filmmaker-poet) is not an

"asexual angel" (Elder 2005: 462), nor is he a hermaphrodite, which is made up of two gender halves and not gendered wholes. The protagonist is bisexual, and the form and contents reflect these two gendered wholes. This bisexuality is also the domain of the feminine, as H616ne Cixous and Catherine Clement have pointed out to us in their description of ecriture feminin in The Newly Born Woman: bisexuality as "the location within oneself of the presence of both sexes, evident and insistent in different ways according to the individual, the nonexclusion of difference or of a sex, and starting with this 'permission' one gives oneself, the multiplication of the effects of desire's inscription on every part of the body and the other body" (85). In Elder's cinema, the masculine are the fragments that figure as static wholes in the course of the film: the vignettes that employ narrative composition; some of the lengthier passages of voice-over narration that are not diffused by other sounds; some of the representational forms; static images; some

100 of the inter-titles and subtitles. However, through the experience of the entire film these masculine elements become diffused, dissociated and associated through the paratactical method with other elements and themes of the film, and thus are transformed into feminine. The feminine elements abound in this cycle. They are as follows: emphasis on rhythm and repetition instead of narrative progression; polyphonic composition of images and sound; mobile camera; use of multiple superimpositions; use of single frame shooting that create visual staccatos; rendering representational forms abstract by diffusing them into (colour) tones and rhythm (rendering them acoustic); transforming language in text into pictorial forms; emphasis on tactility (use of close-ups, fast cutting, hand-held camera, superimpositions). To this I would also like to add open form as the disordering unconscious feminine, in contradistinction to closed form, the imposition of gestalt (the conscious masculine).

The co-presence of feminine and masculine elements is further reinforced by the footage of nude female and male bodies. However, all the forms and even the content of the nude male bodies tend towards the feminine. For the goal of this project is to reconnect with the feminine, the repressed feminine and the creative, that will lead us to love. Hence the emphasis on poetry, poiesis (creation as a will-less bringing forth, permitting the work to take its own course, in which the unified subject is negated and set into process of becoming, just as in the experience of pregnancy). The feminine and the masculine forms are present side by side, though The Book of All the Dead accords more

101 importance to the repressed feminine. Preserving the mystery (the feminine opens us to it) rather than treating it as a problem is the principle aim of Elder's project.

The Uncontainable, the Uncontrollable, and the Irrepressible in the Art of Carolee Schneemann and R. Bruce Elder

Before concluding this section I would like to address a characteristic that both

Schneemann's and Elder's artworks share, and, more specifically, what energizes and organizes their visual compositions, i.e. rhythm mobilized by strife (between conflicting perceptual and emotional forces, and opposing compositional elements). This striving rhythm echoes the tensions, the pulsing and the plurality of life-sustaining activities that are constantly being carried out (involuntarily and unconsciously) within the living body.

Most importantly, artwork, shaped or characterized by this rhythm, has the ability to return viewers into their bodies in its presence, for it intensifies viewers' experience while bringing their bodies in-tune with its plural rhythms. The art forms that are able to best accomplish this are already predisposed towards the kinaesthetic and synaesthetic elements in their composition. Therefore, cinema and performance art (not excluding sculptural environments for audience participants) are best fitted for this task. Moreover, through its emphasis on plural rhythms, movement, and synaesthesia, which grants viewers an ability to reconnect with something more primal through this aesthetic

102 experience, such artwork belongs to the realm of the feminine aesthetics. My dissertation and my accompanying artworks take on the task of identifying the feminine aesthetics in fine arts (cinema and performance art) and assert both its importance in revitalizing art and its ethical significance for Western culture today. Further, I contend that the feminine is the province of Schneemann's and Elder's aesthetics.

In a conversation with Ted Castle (New York, May 22,1982), Schneemann described her paintings, which could very well have been her films or performances, as being characterized by polyphonic rhythms and corresponding to the plural rhythms and tensions within the body.

"Rhythm" in my work is polyphonic, corresponding to physical intensification— blood, nerves, breath, muscle—an interdependent physiological perception of space filled with movement, reflected light, broken edges, shifting planes, colors in balance and tensions. Dropping, breaking, tearing, spilling, gluing materials introduce forms of randomization grounded by rhythms which redefine my expectations of physical structure. (Schneemann qtd. in Castle 1982: [8])

While referring to Schneemann's collage painting Untitled (Four Fur Cutting Boards)

(1963), Ted Castle notes that associations within the content of this work are

"interminable, fleeting and immutable like sex" (1982: [8]). I would argue that this quality is characteristic of all of her artwork, for the content is assembled and shaped intuitively; it is unconsciously derived (sometimes found) and driven by Eros (and erotic impulses), which is evidently a dominant force in Schneemann's art making. Already in this collage painting from1963, Schneemann was incorporating (motorized) umbrellas into its composition. However, it was only while working in 1980s on Fresh Blood—A

103 Dream Morphology, in the process of physicalizing the ephemeral contents of her dream

(drawing its images on paper), Schneemann's attention was directed to something that she had not noticed before. "I began drawings of the umbrella and the bouquet of leaves, and as I drew," she notes, "I saw the umbrella was both vulvic and phallic. It was container and contained; it related to the interiority of the female body as a metaphor for a physicalized interiority of insight, of knowledge, of the dark unconscious itself' (1981:

235). She, thus, discovered the extension of the vulvic space in the mundane object (an umbrella) of our everyday life, which normally would have been perceived as phallic because the vulvic symbolism has been repressed by our culture; not even Schneemann was conscious of this vulvic symbolism when working with umbrellas in her earlier work from the 1960s. Further, just as the vulvic symbolism has been repressed, so has the interior or bodily knowledge and, I would add, feminine knowledge, for which the vulvic shape is the metaphor. Moreover, what is important about Schneemann's statement is the reversibility of the phallus and the vulva, their analogous form but in the opposite. What she identifies is a characteristic of most of her art, i.e., the coexistence of these and other oppositions, which mutually imply one another (often this being unconsciously motivated, as I noted before), within a single composition: container and contained, vulvic and phallic, feminine and masculine, invisible and visible, interior and exterior, body and culture, private and public, abstract forms and figurative forms, real object and representation, chaos and order, etc.. These are not always consciously combined, but rather slip in unconsciously through the process of assembling her compositions. Rather than resolving the tension or strife that ensues from their coexistence, Schneemann's art 104 is dynamized by its presence: the strife between the opposites, and several different strains of strife present within one composition. These different strains of strife generate polyphonic rhythms in her work; each strain of strife represents different type of rhythm, which is juxtaposed with others creating another more complex level of strife. We must remember that for Schneemann polyphonic rhythms and tensions in her art have a correspondence with the life sustaining functions within the physical body. Since

Schneemann's art is concerned with the body, strife and polyphonic rhythms are therefore central to the formal construction of her compositions.

In Schneemann's compositions the opposing elements or forces are experienced as different. But this difference is non-hierarchical. Instead, it is experienced as reciprocity. For the opposites mutually imply one another and as such are complementary, but contending, counterparts of the same composition. This mutuality and strife are also characteristic of the feminine aesthetics, as is rhythm and especially polyphonic rhythm. In feminine aesthetics, images, associations and meaning are not fixed but labilized and mobilized through this striving between the contending elements or forces. These are propelled by the unconscious and the libidinal drives (of the artist working on the artwork and the viewer experiencing the work), which breach and overturn aesthetic conventions. Since this strife is experienced within the body of the viewer (its experience leaves a visceral imprint sometimes for days and even weeks), it is then possible that by proceeding from the level of personal experience the feminine aesthetics has the ability to extend to the social and rework present cultural conditions:

105 gender difference; contempt for the body, the feminine, and real art; the alienating thrust of technological progress, etc.. It has, therefore, ethical implications and possibilities. In this respect Schneemann's aesthetics, and the feminine aesthetics I am advocating, can be connected with the projects of Luce Irigaray and other proponents of the ecriture feminin

(H&6ne Cixious, Catherine Clement, and Julia Kristeva), whose ideas Schneemann's work anticipates, by at least a decade, and of whom she is quite fond, in particular

Cixious. These women also insist on the personal revolt or in-turning, and see art (for most of them ecriture feminin and poetic language, although Kristeva recently has commented on the value of some installation art) as granting this possibility by engendering real experience. Like them, Schneemann insists on getting in touch with the primordial and on the importance of the body as a means of granting us this contact. This is the reason why much of her work is concerned with energy of the body and is characterized by striving that resembles the energetic pulsions and irruptions of the drives within the aesthetic conventions and the symbolic order. (I will comment on the energetic conception of the body in Schneemann's work in chapter II).

R. Bruce Elder's cinema and writing emphasize the importance of connecting us to something more primal. He contends that strife is one of the chief ways that might grant us this possibility. In "Further Reflections on the Violence of Art" (one of his unpublished essays) he makes the following comments on the importance of strife in art and its connection to the primal, the unconscious:

106 [W]e now understand the aesthetic richness of a poem, or of any work of art, to depend on its vitality—on its capacity to unharness sensations that overturn received modes of experience, to dismantle conventionalized ways of thinking, and to put us in touch with the source that, because it is prior to language and representation (or because it is the residue that is left over when perception has imposed order on that manifold of experience) strives to undo order, to dismantle syntax, to lay representation to ruin. A work of art has a twofold existence. For every work of art is a contention between two impulses: towards form and against form. There are reflected in the twofold character of the artwork, as structure and as process. Every work of art exists simultaneously as a disciplined structure, whose order evolves out of an inner sense of the need for harmony and as a process that exceeds all boundaries, refuses all containment, that dismembers syntax and destroys form, (unpublished book: 144-145)

Paratactical construction of his films creates form in process and subject-in-process, precisely by virtue of this striving between structure and process, or coherence of form and its disintegration. Moreover, this strife manifests itself also in the spiral composition of his The Book of All the Dead. Elder conceived the structure of his film epic as a spiral he discusses this in his letter to Dr. Henderson "Driftworks, Pulseworks, Lightworks"

(2005: 457). The hero ascends from the depths of hell towards the heavens, Paradise, and yet within this Paradise there is still the remnant of Hell, but in a transformed form, just as in Hell light peering through the darkness becomes itself a form of darkness; this constant presence of the other remnants creates a rhythm (articulation and break, stress and release). This strife between Paradise and Hell, or the Good and Evil, propel the spiral movement of its protagonist's journey. The journey suggested is the traditional transformational adventure. Of course, Elder presents the topos only in a fragmented form, but its intention is clear enough. It is a journey from the (spiritual, intellectual, moral) Death/Thanatos (splitting, alienating, inanimate) beginning in the Underworld and

107 at Gates of Hell and ascending up towards the Heavens, the Paradise where Gods dwell, therefore Love/Eros (fusion, animate); starting with Consolations (Love is an Art of

Time) films begin to emphasize multiple rhythms, in particular the staccato pulse of single frame shooting that surges through the bodies of viewers (an oscillation between

Eros and Thanatos). This would not have been possible if we thought of strife as mere oscillation between two opposing poles or two foci. The spiral construction constantly expands, for it undergoes transformation with each turn, or return, nearing one of the two foci; likewise, the experience that the viewer undergoes also resonates with this spiral.

(This spiral movement, I believe, is also present in Kristeva's theory, in particular her notion of signifiance: the second irruption of the repressed semiotic, the maternal, within the symbolic order. In its return, the semiotic leaves a stronger imprint/mark of itself on the structure of the symbolic. In poetic production, this spiraling movement of strife between the semiotic and symbolic (the two foci of the spiral) resulting in irruption or breach is ongoing, and is certainly not limited to only two of such irruptions. This is why,

I contend, Kristeva's idea of signifiance also resembles a spiral movement; she even insinuates this with her etymological descriptions of the word "revolt" and brings it to the revolution of planets, a revolution also in the shape of a spiral. Through this spiral movement, or revolution between the two modalities, they mutually alter one another, while propelling the two further and continuing this striving movement.) We can also think of the spiral when considering Schneemann's work, in particular in terms of its creative development as unconcealment of the repressed feminine, as I noted before in

108 reference to Fresh Blood—A Dream Morphology. She even employs its symbolism, for example, in the snake form as a visual motif in her artwork. Therefore strife, along with polyphonic rhythms and labile forms, are central to Elder's cinema, for these qualities approximate the activities that are going on within the living body; in this respect

Schneemann's and Elder's art have strong affinities to one another. Moreover, since these qualities belong to the realm of feminine aesthetics, I contend that Elder's cinema is feminine. His films certainly retune the viewers. They stay for weeks within the body; one really carries them within oneself. They transform the way the world and others around us are perceived and how time is experienced.

Elder's cinema, therefore, through its emphasis on strife aims not at concepts but real experience. His aim is to attune us to our existence as living beings among other living beings in the real world through percepts, feelings and sensations of pulsing and coursing energies. This is why Pound's parataxis is important to Elder's cinema (his kinema) in shaping the contents and giving shape to the energies in The Book of All the

Dead cycle. In Elder's cinema knowledge develops out of the poetic form and its rhythms, insisting on trusting the body and its experience; his cinema is a cinema of perceptions and revelations. Elder is truly a film-poet, who infuses poetry into the world while returning to us the poetry of experience, and with that opening us to the profound knowledge of love. In "Letter to Dr. Antonio Bisaccia" written in October 1994 in response to a questionnaire on the occasion of his retrospective of The Book of All the

109 Dead in Trento, Italy in 1996, Elder wrote the following statement on his task as an artist and his art:

My works are formed so as to provide a site for something to happen. If I have served well, and if you open yourself to it adequately, it will clear away what you see and do not know. It opens a tear in routine where a future world might come to pass. If I have served well, and you open yourself to it adequately, your vision will be made strange, unfamiliar, uncanny, indefinite, and-yes-disagreeable and troubling. Every artwork begins with a confrontation with a disquieting strangeness. This confrontation is an event that prises open a clearing in which something new can come forth. If I have served well, and if you open yourself towards what transpires here, then you might encounter the beings that you see not as resources available for use, but as beings that have a relation to something more primal, (unpublished book: 176)

Nudity is another common theme in Elder's and Schneemann's works, and it too helps propel strife. In fact, it vivifies it. I will address this theme in the next chapter.

110 II. Carolee Schneemann

My work, both as a filmmaker and as a scholar, concentrates on the human body as the source of every human activity and the necessary foundation of experience. All my films aim at acting on viewers' bodies by generating an intense sensory experience. My films encourage viewers to move with the film's rhythm, as their eyes scan the image's surface, and to follow the animated pulse of 24 images being presented each second.

Furthermore, my body is inscribed into most, if not all, of my films: some by rhythmic shaping through editing; others by performative shooting style with the camera, with which I capture my immediate response to the surrounding environment or a given situation; or others still, where my nude body is present in its photographic or photogramic representation. Most importantly, my writing and my films are all intricately tied to a single question: what is the relationship between body and art? And more specifically what role does the artist's nude self-representation play in art practice, and what, if any, are its implications for the broader contours the social fabric for human life?

In this section I would like to consider the significance of the nude body, and more specifically the artist's nude self-representation in art, as means of questioning and even dismantling established structures (aesthetic and social), while intertwining the private

(personal) and public realms of experience. My discussions in this chapter will concentrate mainly on the significance of nude self-representation in Carolee

111 Schneemann's art: performance works, sculptural environments and installations, and

films.

Schneemann, Olson & Kristeva's Semiotic Pulsions

The poet and theorist Charles Olson looms large in Schneemann's oeuvre—as

large as he was in life. However, not all of Schneemann's references to the poet are

positive. She is understandably aghast at his stating that drama declined after the classical

era, when "cunt" was allowed on stage.18 Her evident anger at his misogyny not

withstanding, Schneemann's fundamental beliefs about the role of art and artists were

affected by Olson's corporeal aesthetics.

I will take Charles Olson's Projective Verse manifesto (1950) as one basis for approaching Schneemann's work. And I will use Schneemann's work to investigate the role of the artist's nude body and the resulting artwork as a means of accessing and intensifying energy, both in the artist as well as in the audience. But before turning to

Olson, I would like to point out the connection Schneemann's work has to Kristeva's ideas.

Julia Kristeva's philosophical project straddles both the psycho-linguistic and the social dimensions, while simultaneously illustrating their inseparability and interpenetration. She attempts to resolve two problems at once: the unpresence of the

112 maternal in patriarchal culture and the repression of the semiotic order in language. Thus

her writings concern the double unpresence of the maternal.

Kristeva constantly draws our attention to the structural constitution of language

and society in the patriarchal culture. Kristeva's project provides an entry to

understanding the shift of twentieth century poetry and other art forms towards "open

form." Just as in her theories of language, subjects are always engaged in a process and

always in question, because they negotiate their position, so also the artist of the "open

form" is in process of creation and thus of continually negotiating artwork's coming into

being and her or his coming into being as maker. The Master-Artist figure, along with her

or his individual ego, is exploded in the "open form" approach, and gives way to the

humble attentive artist who emerges through the process and is continually changed by

the process.

Kristeva's philosophical writings emphasize the importance of the living body

and its biological urges or drives. This body, propelled by its internal energies, inscribes

itself and leaves its trace in every human activity. Most importantly, it is the source from

which every human action springs. Kristeva brings this conception of an action-

prompting corporeal dimension into her investigation of the signifying process—to

signification in language and in nonverbal systems of signification. She refers to this

corporeal dimension in systems of signification as "the semiotic" modality, which she counterposes to "the symbolic" modality. According to Kristeva, the semiotic modality is attuned to the internal energies and rhythms of the body; indeed, it has its origin in the 113 body, in the intrauterine body of a foetus. The symbolic modality is acquired later—it is inaugurated in the mirror stage and develops more fully with the acquisition of language, which Kristeva (like Lacan) connects with the Oedipal stage (i.e., the entry into the family and social structures). Kristeva connects the symbolic modality to the father, to

"the law of the father" in the social and linguistic structures, but relates the semiotic modality to the maternal body and its emphasis on rhythm (vocal and kinetic rhythm) that originates/erupts within the body.

Kristeva compares the structure and dynamics of the semiotic modality to that of the unconscious and the primary process (as Freud elucidated them), i.e., the initiation and management of drives, with their energy charges and discharges. Furthermore, she argues that poetic language, in particular the poetic language found in texts of the avant- garde writers such us Mallarm^, Artaud and Joyce, bears a strong imprint of the semiotic modality through its emphasis on rhythm rather than denotation or representation. She highlights the similarity between her own understanding of the operations of the semiotic modality in poetic language and Freud's understanding of the dynamics of unconscious.

She points out that both share an ultimate goal: "The theory of the unconscious seeks the very thing that poetic language practices within and against the social order: the ultimate means of its transformation or subversion, the precondition for its survival and revolution" (Kristeva 1984: 81). Thus, according to Kristeva's conception of revolt, which regards revolt as a re-turn to an early signifying modality—a modality

114 characterized by its a-social and irruptive bodily pulsions or internal energies—poetic language is a linguistic revolt in practice.

In Revolution in Poetic Language Kristeva concentrates on the structure of language, though her project extends beyond language into the constitution of social structure. She continually calls our attention to the parallels between social and linguistic structures. She calls the thetic "that crucial place on the basis of which the human being constitutes himself as signifying and/or social" (Kristeva 1984: 67). Kristeva also relates the human infant's initiation into the social structure to her/his acquisition of competency in linguistic structural composition when she states that the thetic phase in language

"originates in the 'mirror stage' and is completed, through the phallic stage, by the reactivation of the Oedipus complex in puberty; no signifying practice can be without it"

(Kristeva 1984: 62). Just as an infant proceeds first through the separation in the "mirror stage" and later enters identification in the "phallic stage," language competence develops through similar evolution by undergoing the various stages through which the child is interpellated into the structure of adult language: at 12 weeks, the infant coos; at

20 weeks, he or she learns to produce fricatives, spirants, nasals; at 6 months begins to babble mono-syllabic utterances; at 12 months starts to double syllables, in the echolalia; at 24 months, to join words into two-word phrases; at 36 months, to acquire rudiments of the grammatical pattern of adult language, however with mistakes (Hickerson 30). In the first six moths of language acquisition, the infant focuses on pleasures from the buccal cavity that derive from emitting sounds and bubbling of the saliva. As does the mirror

115 phenomena of all sorts, the echolalia stage involves doubling: the child echoes, doubles or repeats the same sound, just as he sees his own double (or echo) in another infant or in his or her image in the mirror. Over time, the child distances himself from the pleasure of his body and is slowly interpellated into the order of the symbolic. Finally, the child identifies with the structure of the adult language, just as he identifies with the sex of one of the parents, and thus enters into the social structure itself.

The socio-linguistic parallels are more evident in Kristeva's subsequently published essays, such as the 1975 "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini," the

1977 "Stabat Matter" and the 1979 "Women's Time." There she draws a tighter connection between the linguistic and social structures. In those essays, she illustrates the

"sacrificial logic of separation" where the maternal (or feminine) has been sacrificed to the socio-symbolic dimension in patriarchal cultures. "[WJomen ... seem to feel that they are the casualties, that they have been left out of the socio-symbolic contract, of language as the fundamental social bond" (Kristeva 1979: 199). Just as women have been sacrificed to the symbolic order of the paternal, so has the semiotic chora through the thetic break. According to Kristeva this sacrifice is necessary in order for signification to take place. The thetic break is "indispensable to the advent of the symbolic" in language—and on the social level it relates to castration, as separation that "gives full meaning to the lack or to the desire which constitutes the subject" (Kristeva 1979: 198).

While illuminating the sacrificial social dynamic of the patriarchal culture, she also sheds light on its linguistic parallel, i.e. the repression of the semiotic, which is

116 marked by its maternal intrauterine memory. In "Women's Time" she traces the

trajectory of two generations of feminists. The first demanded equal rights in the socio-

symbolic contract, even at the expense of sacrificing its innate biological promptings.19

The second generation, unlike the first one, practiced an inverted sexism by rejecting the

socio-symbolic contract, or society's paternal organization. Kristeva is highly critical of

this in the second generation. "[T]he very logic of counter-power and of counter-society

necessarily generates, by its very structure, its essence as a simulacrum of the combated

society or of power" (Kristeva 1979: 203).

A third generation of feminists has emerged, contemporaries of Kristeva, that is

"less aggressive and more artful" (Kristeva 1979: 208). It does not refuse the socio-

symbolic contract but, rather, tries to "explore the constitution and functioning of this contract, starting less from the knowledge accumulated about it (anthropology,

psychoanalysis, linguistics) than from the very personal affect experienced when facing it as subject and as a woman"(Kristeva 1979: 200). This exploration is a kind of "active research" similar to those attempts "in the wake of contemporary art, to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnameable repressed by the social contract" (Kristeva 1979: 200). In a similar sense, in

Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva does not aim at destroying the symbolic modality of language or preventing the thetic break from occurring. That effort would be futile because "there can be no language without the thetic phase" (Kristeva 1984: 72).

Instead, she strives to mobilize a free flow between the semiotic and the symbolic; to

117 prise open the thetic with the drives of the intrauterine remnants of the semiotic chora.

The meaning that would result from that mobilization would be originary and dynamic,

like those of poetic language. "Though absolutely necessary, the thetic is not exclusive:

the semiotic, which also precedes it, constantly tears it open, and this transgression brings

about all the various transformations of the signifying practice that are called 'creation'"

(Kristeva 1984: 62). Both processes are indispensable to the production of meaning.

Intensifying one process at the expense of another, as a kind of "counter-power," would

not help Kristeva's project, which aims at balancing the flow of energy of both processes.

She therefore insists on the inseparability of both processes within the social and the

linguistic structures; of giving equal weight to the matrilinear and the patrilinear

dimension in the socio-symbolic contract, and of according equal importance the semiotic

and the symbolic dimensions in language.

Kristeva insists on the dyadic composition of contrasting forces—nature and

culture, maternal and paternal, the semiotic and the symbolic—as essential to the process

of signification. The tension between these conflicting forces sets signification in motion,

in process, in question. However, Kristeva's insistence on preserving dyadic relationships

and on the equal participation of both parties of the dyad is linked to an even greater

project: to destroy unity of the transcendental ego, to allow the heterogeneity of the

speaking subject to manifest itself as the "subject in process/in question/on trial."20

Pregnancy, by its very nature, splits the subject—it produces "redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and of an other, of nature and

118 consciousness, of physiology and speech" (Kristeva 1979: 206). Accordingly, pregnancy initiates the destruction of the transcendental ego, of the all knowing subject. Pregnancy also introduces love, love for the other, where one does not "fuse," as one would in a sexual passion, but instead one "forgets" oneself—thus, it destroys the ego (ibid.).

However, the destruction of the transcendental ego, which occurs through the "splitting" during pregnancy, does not result in the "subject in process/in question/on trial"; that requires the subject's subsequent re-entry into the symbolic. In the opening passage of

"Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini," Kristeva writes

Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on. "It happens, but I'm not there." "I cannot realize it, but it goes on." (237)

Here Kristeva illuminates the paradoxical constitution of the mother figure in patriarchy's social order. Though she is there, capable of experiencing and seeing the life of the other unfolding and pressing within, against her body, she is "not there" and "cannot realize" the process. She is absent—or, mother, is an absent presence. But how can she be absent?

Kristeva tries to look for the becoming-a-mother-process and the mother herself in two discourses, the scientific and the theological/socio-symbolic. What she finds, however, is that the mother figure is absent in both discourses. She is absent in the scientific/biological, because science being concerned with the object does not account for the subject. (Hence, the father is also absent.) The Christian theology also does not account for the maternal subject or maternity because she exists only as a signifier of the

119 "sacred beyond," of the "spiritual tie with the ineffable godhead" and of the

"transcendence's ultimate support" (Kristeva 1975b: 237).

In "Stabat Mater" Kristeva traces the trajectory of the Virgin-Mother through the history of Christian humanism and the transformations that Mary's mortal body undergoes in order to provide the seed of the God-Father with a "pure" enough space within her womb. In search for the purity of maternal body, one that is "cleared of sin"

(162), Mary's material mortal body is finally rendered immaterial

Thus Matthew 1.20 ... and Luke 1.34... open a door, a narrow opening for all that, but one that would soon widen thanks to apocryphal additions, on impregnation without sexuality; according to this notion a woman, preserved from masculine intervention, conceives alone with a "third party", a non-person, the Spirit.... [Hence the] filial relationship rests not with the flesh but with the name or, in other words,... any possible matrilinearism is to be repudiated and the symbolic link alone is to last. (Kristeva 1977: 164, my emphasis)

Mary's body, because it is immaterial, prevents her from dying mortal death. Instead either she is transported into a body of a little girl in the arms of her son—now her father—through Dormition or she enters the heavens through Assumption (Kristeva

1977: 168-9).21 Therefore Mary's maternal body through its immortality and immateriality becomes a signifier of the "sacred beyond," which is essential to securing the "immortality of the name of the Father" (Kristeva 1977: 175). This process makes it impossible to locate the Mother subject, matrilinearism, or the becoming-a-mother- process within Christian theology.

120 Furthermore, Kristeva equates Christianity with reason, calling it a "matchless rationalism" (1975b: 237), which is predicated on the "maternal body" and its ability to double, to split into the subject and the other—that is speech. However, the maternal body as a "place of splitting," is reduced to a kind of "filter" or a "threshold where

'nature' confronts 'culture'"—that is, where the maternal body "destined to insure reproduction of the species" confronts the "paternal" of the symbolizing function

(Kristeva 1975b: 238). It is through the body that the maternal-subject becomes a threshold that separates culture from nature. But to ensure the stability of the speaking- subject, we must "imagine that there is someone [the mother] in that filter" {ibid.). The identity formation of the speaking-subject depends on relation to another, and if some other is not there, then the identity formation would consist of relating to "void" or

"nothingness." Through this fantasy of the maternal presence at the threshold dividing culture from nature, the mother becomes a signifier.

According to Kristeva, women, simply by the nature of their biological composition, are closer to the semiotic modality and the maternal body. "By giving birth, the woman enters into contact with her mother; she becomes, she is her own mother....

She thus actualizes the homosexual facet of motherhood, through which a woman is simultaneously closer to her instinctual memory [the intrauterine memory],... and consequently, more negatory of the social, symbolic bond" (Kristeva 1975b: 239).

Therefore, the image of the mother signifies "a paradise lost but seemingly close at hand" for women and for men "a hidden god but constantly present through occult fantasy"

121 (Knsteva 1975b: 240). However, Kristeva insists that an artist, either man or a woman, has the special privilege of entering this maternal splitting or threshold through the

"creative" act of art making that echoes the "creative" act of giving birth (ibid.). Thus, through sublimation an artist is able to translate her instinctual drives and energies into non-instinctual behaviour of the "creative" act in making art. This process resembles the dynamics of signification, in which the semiotic is given form and meaning, through its association with the symbolic. Kristeva's theories on motherhood and language, therefore, do not deny men the joys of the maternal jouissance—they can experience this pleasure of instinctual drives channeled into creative activities (art making).

One of Kristeva's contemporaries and a figure who is often associated with the third generation of feminists is H61£ne Cixous. Both Kristeva and Cixous share similar concern with the absence of the feminine in language and the overarching hold of the patriarchal "machine." Cixous also shares Kristeva's view that artists (including some—a few—men) have that special privilege of being able to get in touch with the maternal order of language.

With some exceptions, for there have been failures—and if it weren't for them, I wouldn't be writing (I-woman, escapee)—in that enormous machine that has been operating and turning out its "truth" for centuries. There have been poets who would go to any lengths to slip something by at odds with tradition—men capable of loving love and hence capable of loving others and of wanting them, of imagining the woman who would hold out against oppression and constitute herself as a superb, equal, hence "impossible" subject, untenable in a real social framework. Such a woman the poet could desire only by breaking the codes that negate her. Her appearance would necessarily bring on, if not revolution... at least harrowing explosions... [so that] the poet [could] slip something by, for a brief span, of woman. (Cixous 249)

122 The woman that Cixous is referring to in this passage is undeniably a mother; the

"signifier" of the gift of love, of life and of creation whom poets "imagine" and "desire."

Her appearance is explosive. Her presence creates irruptions, of the semiotic order, that with its unconscious intrauterine echoing pulsions dynamize the symbolic order. Her presence breaks "the codes that negate her," creates a gap into which the poet can "slip" and bring forth the material gift of art. However, this special task is only reserved for those artists who are attuned to the repressed, to the unconscious—to the maternal and the feminine. It is the task for "... only the poets—not the novelists, allies of representationalism. Because poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious ... the place where the repressed manage to survive" (Cixous 250). The novelists are not fit for the task of creating because they fix everything in representations; they re-present the world of "objects" through the hierarchical ordering of the symbolic and through their

"conscious" subject position, rather than presenting the world in its immediacy. The maternal body is only for poets and artists whose art flees the stasis of representation.

Furthermore, the maternal body is what every poet or artist desires not only because it wreaks damage on the symbolic machine, but also because it is where love is found. Love is a necessity for any creative act, for this is where the gift of creation is born. " ... [S]he gives. She doesn't 'know' what she's giving, she doesn't measure it....

She gives that there may be life, thought, transformation" (Cixous 264). Art comes forth, on its own terms, through love. The subject is fissured and ego forgotten; the hierarchical oppositions of I/thou or subject/object are suspended, finally, when the self has given

123 itself to the process of becoming selfless. Thus, every creative act bears the mark of the maternal love—maternal love is "inscribed" in a creative effort of an artist. Kristeva asks:

"Might not modern art then be [through its departure from representation], for the few who are attached to it, the implementation of that maternal love?" (1977: 177).

According to Cixous a woman—but also a male poet—can return to her body only through writing. Through writing a woman experiences the echoes of the repressed intrauterine reverberations. In doing so, she reaches out towards the mother. By

"inscribing" her own voice within the sedimented structure of language, the symbolic begins to give way and the woman regains access to her body. Cixous pleads: "Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.... [Writing] will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal; it will tear her away from the superegoized structure" (250). A woman's intrauterine promptings help her break "away from the superegoized," the reign of the symbolic law; this grants her access to her repressed body. This biological body has been exiled into the recesses of the unconscious. Cixous believes that the reason for this exile of the body and the maternal is

"because it has always been suspected, that, when pregnant, the woman not only doubles her market value, but... takes on intrinsic value as a woman in her own eyes, and undeniably, acquires body and sex" (262). Armed with the maternal force, "a force that will not be cut off but will knock the wind out of the codes" (Cixous 252), a woman and a poet can proceed to the battle with the symbolic. This maternally empowered body is a

124 shield against the symbolic order because it permits one to see and speak—shout if necessary—but most importantly to create. It is only with the help of the maternal, of the intrauterine promptings of the semiotic, that the creative/artist body finally emerges and the poet's voice can be heard. This body does not just "write"—the entire body with all its sensory constitution participates and "inscribes" itself in the creative act. The ego is suspended as creation involves the entirety of the artist's flesh. "Write! and your self- seeking text will know itself better than flesh and blood, rising, insurrectionary dough kneading itself, with sonorous, perfumed ingredients, a lively combination of flying colors, leaves, and rivers plunging into the sea we feed" (Cixous 260).

In his "Letter to Elaine Feinstein" (1959) the American avant-garde poet Charles

Olson wrote: "The only advantage of speech rhythms ... is illiteracy: the non-literary, exactly in Dante's sense of the value of the vernacular over grammar, that speech as a communicator is prior to the individual and is picked up as soon as and with ma's milk"

(1959: 250). In giving a special privilege to the pre-grammatical, the maternal "pre- symbolic," and to voice Olson's "Projective Verse" (1950) manifesto departs from the

"closed form" poets and artists, who emphasized form over content by forcing a structure, or stasis, onto a dynamic and living fabric of language, the human body. He insists that "FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT" (1966:

16), content being the energy which the poet translates into syllables and lines that constitute a poem. Furthermore, Olson emphasizes the crucial role of kinetics in

"Projective Verse," here he describes the poem as both shaping and being shaped by

125 charging energy, that will be conveyed to the reader. "A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it,... by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.

Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge" (Olson 1966: 16).24 Olson's description of a poem as a

"high energy-construct" and an "energy-discharge" bears a striking resemblance to

Kristeva's semiotic chora, which is perpetually charging and discharging the energies of psychical drives. Furthermore, the poet through her/his attunement to the energy source—within her/his own body and in the outside world—can be also seen as a "filter."

This filter, rather like the one Kristeva describes, mediates between nature (the energies of the semiotic) and culture (the law of the symbolic, with its emphasis on communicative structure and the poem's achieved form). The poem's "projectile" energy binds the poet and the reader together. It frees the verse from the restrictions of a "closed form," thus breaching the symbolic law. However, Kristeva's theories on language do not elaborate on the effect of the poem on the reader's body—and that is Olson's principle focus.

For Olson, a poem is a dynamic form that provides a material basis for the charging and discharging energies. Olson writes:

ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION ... get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions ... keep it moving as fast as you can ... USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER! (1966: 17)

126 A poem, thus, evolves through a process that takes its shape from circumambient

energies. Furthermore, according to Olson the poem consists of two halves: the syllable

and the line. The syllable leads the "harmony" of the poem, from "the HEAD, by way to

the EAR," and not rhyme or meter (Olson 1966: 18). The line, on the other hand, starts at

the "HEART" and takes its shape through "BREATH." He writes: "... line comes (I

swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that

he writes, and thus is, it is here that... the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who

writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its

breathing, shall come to termination" (ibid. 19). Therefore, the composition of the poem

is determined by the contours of the poet's body. The limit or boundary of her or his body

is the boundary of the poem. With the poet's "EAR" and "BREATH" the poem starts and

with them it ends.

Furthermore, Olson's theory of proprioception provides an even more materially oriented basis for poetic language. He describes proprioception as "the data of depth sensibility/the 'body' of us as object which spontaneously or of its own order produces experience of, 'depth' [the] SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM BY

MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES" (Olson 1960: 181). This sensibility involves interoception of the organs which are contained within the body (the guts, the heart, the liver, the kidneys etc.), and each being as instrumental and of equal value in the composition of a poem as the perceptive organs—they all belong to the entire body, not an isolated sensory organ (such as the eye). By according importance to the invisible

127 interiors within the body, to the organs, which act of their own accord, Olson shifts the

focus of poetics from the voluntary calculated ego compositions to the involuntary open

compositions that suspend the "lyrical" ego (to use Olson's phrase). The poet of the

"open form" composition has to be attuned as much to the interior world of her or of his

body as to the exterior world that she or he inhabits.25 Thus, for both Olson and Kristeva,

the poet has to suspend her or his individual ego and its outward thrusts, and become

focused on the body's internal dynamics. Through this attunement the poet submits to the

energies present both within her or his body, gathers them and releases, or discharges,

them within the poetic composition.

Kristeva's, Cixous' and Olson's theories aim at bringing back, or re-inscribing,

the artist back into the artwork by insisting on the inseparability of artwork and the body.

Moreover, all three assert that the individual ego hinders the experience of the body's

truth, and so advocate some form of self-abnegation. Interestingly, Martin Heidegger

proposes similar ideas about artwork and artist relationship when he states in his essay

"The Origin of the Work of Art" that "The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the

origin of the artist. Neither is without the other" (17). Like the other three, he also

advocates some form of self-abnegation: "It is precisely in great art... that the artist

remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that

destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge" (Heidegger 40). What he

was referring to as the destruction of the artist was the dismantling of the overarching ego of those artists, who through sheer arrogance dominate the composition rather than

128 nurture a form that would come to fruition through its own inner principals. One of the points that is raised by Kristeva, Cixous and Olson is that a poet is a biological organism and not above biology. What has to be sought is a process that will equally engage both the body and the mind, both the maternal semiotic and the paternal symbolic.

Olson's ideas of "Projective Verse" and open field poetics greatly influenced

Carolee Schneemann's own conception of art as energy and the artist's body as an instrument for shaping of these energies into an artwork. She openly acknowledges the importance of Olson's poetics to her art, and in particular to her time based works (her films and performances)—for it is the time that allows the audience the experience of the work's rhythmic dynamic—a dynamic that reflects the rhythmic movements of energies within a living body. Schneemann's essay "Maximus at Gloucester: A Visit to Charles

Olson," in which she recounts her visit at Olson's home, states:

Iconography and instrumentality function as two structural poles in my work. Iconography and instrumentality—the sense of the body as the instrument of investigation and the instrument of available sensation—is something I recognized in the Maximus poems of Charles Olson.

His poetics influenced my work in the 1960s: the phrase as a structure in motion about actual space; knowledge in motion of word shape; vitality of research; probity; his notion that an image sustains duration and energy in relation to its factual referents. How do we comprehend this latent force field, when we are, ourselves, part of that force field? The question is, "How do you as an artist know what you're doing?" The answer is, you don't know, exactly, but Olson's work offered a key, a clue: provocation, inspiration, fury, and delight. (Schneemann 2002: 52, my emphasis)

In her performance works, for example in Up To And Including Her Limits (1973-77) and her (1964-67) film titled Fuses, Schneemann's body and the bodies of other participants

129 become the instruments for investigating the energetics of intense sensation. Up To And

Including Her Limits was a solo performance which Schneemann performed ten times, first under the title Trackings in 1973 and the remaining nine times (between 1974 and

1990) under its current title. At The Kitchen in New York her performance took place over the period of two days (Feb. 13-14, 1976). In that work, a nude Carolee Schneemann hung suspended from the gallery ceiling "in a tree surgeon's harness on a three-quarter- inch manila rope," which she could raise or lower during her performance "to sustain an entranced period of drawing" (Schneemann 2002: 165). The performance took place in a corner of a gallery; the two corner walls and a floor were covered with brown paper on which Schneemann drew with coloured crayons, which she held in the palm of her hand as she swung back and forth in her harness. In her notes on this performance at the

Anthology Film Archive (1974, New York), she writes, "Over the hours drawing accumulates as automatic writing or trance markings. The situation is personal—being nude, turning on the rope.... Until discomfort or loss of concentration, I function as a pencil" (1979: 231). And in her statement for Texte Zur Kunst (1999) she further elaborates on the projective actions of her body, "my extended arm holds crayons which stroke the surrounding walls, accumulating a web of colored marks. My entire body becomes the agency of visual traces, vestige of the body's energy in motion" (2002: 165, my emphasis). In this performance she "physicalized the painting process," just as

Pollock did in his paintings, as a dense "web of coloured marks." Most importantly, she revealed and shared with the public her most private (inner) experience.

130 In her writings and public appearances, Schneemann is explicit about wanting to blur the boundaries between what is conventionally accepted as public and as private areas of experience. Her performance works, which are predominantly performed in the nude, aim at accomplishing precisely that. "By going public with my body," Schneemann writes, "I deprivatized it" (1994: 177). This has been indeed her lifelong goal as an artist, and today she is still committed to it.

She began to pursue that goal early, while still a student at the Bard College. In her essay "Istory of a Girl Pornographer" Schneemann writes: "For a painter, no part of the body should have been considered taboo, relegated to a subphysical 'actuality'! As a student, I painted self-portraits using my entire body as one which stood for all or any human shape from which I would learn. I was free to study, perceive my own genital shape and form—as well as my ears and elbows" (1974: 193). However, what at first was the forthright "deprivatization" of the body, by presenting explicit depictions of her nude body, had later become the presentation of the body in performance context in such a way that it unleashed rebellion of energies directed against conventional experience. Thus, in

Up To And Including Her Limits private experience was amplified by her nudity, which was viewed by the clothed gallery audience. The "web of coloured marks" therefore also bears the inscription of the emotional and corporeal intensity that she felt. That energy was transferred from where she got it to the drawing.

The body, in particular the nude body, in performance is experienced by the performers as an entwining of self and world, of private and public, of nature and culture, 131 of the semiotic and the symbolic—world's embrace of the self is felt acutely as the two are mutually involved in process of co-creation. For that to take place, the body of an artist has to attune itself to the other. While being tuned-in to the energy source—within the body and in the outside world—the artist's body becomes a conduit for the dynamic exchange between nature (the semiotic, the private) and culture (the law of the symbolic, the public), whose field includes form of the artwork (performance). Thus, the

"projectile" energy that is contained within the artwork gives the artwork its form, which conveys the circumambient energies to an audience. But it is the physicality of body that grants the artist the possibility of becoming the conduit for energies that pars between the inner and the outer realms. The vulnerability one feels when placed in intense situations, which is especially felt when one is nude, intensifies energies in the body that drive towards the semiotic modality and engage the primary process. Tapping into the primary process thinking facilitates that openness, for which the open form artists strive. The forms that primary process thinking evolves are different from the fixed conceptual ordering of the secondary process. Primary process thinking prompts a more dynamic exchange and the forms that it evolves are more fluid.

The purpose of intensifying body energy is to produce work that overturns established structures, conventions, representation, and preconceptions (the symbolic structures), that drives towards a more primal process, i.e., that drives towards the core of drives until it finally reaches the maternal and the feminine. The form of such artwork would be the energetic resonance of artist's bodily experience that would communicate

132 with the audience on an energetic level, i.e., it would affect the audience corporeally, with the energy of experience before it is turned into concepts. Schneemann speaks for an art concerned with experience before it has been turned into concept, for an art that reconnects with the body through energy. Like avant-garde poetry, performance art and experimental cinema aim at the real experience—aim at returning us to the primal (to the primary process and the unconscious) as the origin of imagination. Thus, they wage an assault on the established aesthetic conventions (the symbolic). By deploying elemental energies this attack shatters the conventional thought, language, and aesthetic practice.

Conclusion Kristeva, Cixous, Olson and Schneemann aim at bringing back not so much the

Master-Artist but the humbly attuned artist who acts like a threshold of the energy flows between nature—the world and the artist's sensuous body—and culture—the poem as a communicative structure and the reader. They help us see that the shift toward "open form" in poetry is a possible response to the traces left in the body of the time in which it was fused with the mother's body, which therefore grants us the possibility of reconnecting with the repressed: the maternal and the body. Perhaps, one of the most important points that is raised by Kristeva, Cixous and Olson is that a poet is a biological organism and not above it. Schneemann also holds this position, and her art as well as her writing are a testimony of her lifetime commitment to it. Her writings have been especially critical of theoretical structures for excluding of the body and corporeal experience.

133 My whole problem with theoretical structures has to do with their displacement of physicality, as if there is a seepage or a toxicity from the experience of the body that is going to invade language and invalidate theory. The struggle with my work from the very beginning has been that it's smart work, it's mentally aggressive and assertive. It locates theoretical constructs in the experience of physicality. And that might be called "essentialist." It might be called, in Lacanian terms, "absence and lack." Or in Freudian terms, "envy of male linguistic expressivity." The projections onto the body are my area of investigation and my work is to assault and aggress and claw and shred the projections that surround the experience that's of the body, that encapsulates certain theoretical structures. (Schneemann qtd. in Strauss 318)

What therefore has to be sought is a process that will equally engage both the body and

the mind, both the maternal semiotic and the paternal symbolic. Some say that we have

long moved past the dyadic oppositions. Have we really? There is abundant evidence of

contempt for the maternal (including the maternal male). Furthermore, the artist, just like

the mother, still remains the invisible constituent of art and society. When an artist tries

to speak in academia she or he is silenced and immediately cast away to the order of the

unknowledgeable maker. How could we have moved on if we are still dealing every day

with the same dyadic blockage?

Schneemann, Space (installations and sculptural environments), Kristeva & Chora:"The immeasurable, unconfinable maternal body

While tracing the course of twentieth century continental philosophy one observes a shift towards the sensory faculty as the ground of "truth." Georges Bataille 134 writes: "... men in former times did not submit without unease to the reduction their calculated activity imposed in the palpable world. This activity deprived the world of poetry, or at least of the elements which would become poetry (it changed perceptible values into use values)" (148, my emphasis). Interestingly, the shift towards the

"perceptible values" for both Georges Bataille and Martin Heidegger meant turning towards the sense of sight and relying on vision to provide "truth." For Heidegger truth was aletheia an "unconcealment"; truth "shined" in a "clearing."27 For Bataille poetry

"bestowed sight." Sight (or at least gestalt vision) seems to require a stable, unified subject. So it is not surprising that the philosophies of both Bataille and Heidegger assume such a subject. In Kristeva's theory, on the other hand, speaking-subject is a

"subject in process" whose existence is always "in question," for speaking-subject arises only through the process of signiflance. Furthermore, in her writing, the subject's coming into being is associated more closely with hearing (auditory immersion). Therefore,

Kristeva searches for the "truth" within the recesses of the unconscious, whose traces extend as far as the intrauterine relations. If Heidegger's and Bataille's philosophies rely on the sense of sight, then Kristeva's philosophy is primarily concerned with hearing; the

"acoustic immersion" with its echoes of the rhythmic pulsations of the maternal womb is central to her theory. Thus, Kristeva's philosophy shifts the sensory primacy from the visual sense to the auditory.

Thinkers have generally accorded hearing, along with the sense of taste, smell and touch, much less importance than sight; indeed sight has assumed the status as a figure

135 for knowledge. In fact, we can easily say today that it has grown to status of Cartesian

cogito: "I see, therefore I know, therefore I am" or simply "I see, therefore I am." Plato's

Cave marked our passage from the auditory space—the cavernous space of the maternal

womb where we were immersed in the sounds of the two bodies—to the visual place of

light and shadow displays. Since Plato we have learned to derive knowledge from sight,

to envision it, or to visualize it. Another decisive turn towards visual culture occurred in

the Renaissance. The invention of the camera obscura and perspective, created the final

split between the subject and the object—between the world as an object and at the

command of the all-knowing subject. By 1500, the telescope had extended the range of

our vision into the heavenly realms, and by the late 1900, the electron microscope and

sequencing gels brought DNA into our visual realm.28

Ours is a world of the visual placement, mapping. So Kristeva's emphasis on

acoustic space,29 and especially on the unvisualizable maternal unconscious space, has subversive potentials. Her thought raises the question, what use is the ear and voice in the world of the eye (I)? Yet, her answer brings us back once again to the mother and to the semiotic chora, the remnant of our mother within us.

[T]he chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm.... The theory of the subject proposed by the theory of the unconscious will allow us to read in this rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which signifiance is constituted. Plato himself leads us to such a process when he calls this receptacle or chora nourishing and maternal. (Kristeva 1984: 26)

136 Kristeva proposes to draw us closer to the chora and to offer the primacy of the acoustic.

She does so to reconfigure the power of the symbolic machine, both on the linguistic and social levels and to permit an equal participation of both the symbolic and the semiotic modalities in the process of signification. Kristeva thinks of the chora as the foundation of the symbolic, because it develops as early as the foetal stage, when the developing child experiences sound and rhythm in the womb. She implies that the auditory sense develops before to the visual sense, which develops only several months after birth.

Consequently, the aural modality relates us more intimately to the mother; therefore early aural experience is driven into the recesses of the unconscious. This is why Kristeva searches within the unconscious for the subject and for evidence of the subject's participation in the process of signification. The involvement of the chora in the process of signification implies the engagement of the body—the engagement of the entire body, which has ordinarily been denied voice. But voice gives thought a physical form; in the materiality of speech voice registers the body. Hence the "flesh speaks true," Cixous maintains (251).

In modernity, voice and hearing are ordinarily separated from the body; speech is generally taken as thought. When they are reconnected back to the body (as with shrieks or ululations), they are accorded a lowly status. Cixous' and Kristeva's project is to dismantle the hierarchy of the senses (that has accorded vision a privileged status), to bring all the senses back to the body and thereby to bring the corporeal energies of the senses into harmony. Hearing and voice, because they are resonant with the voice of our

137 earliest love, our love for our mother, are a source of especially potent forces for restoring the corporeal energies of perception. Hearing, within a dehierarchized ordering of the senses, does not distance itself from the body. Rather it knows its relation to the physical world and exists in a carnal harmony.

Kristeva, Cixous and also poet Olson all privilege hearing—all affirm the linguistic importance of sound "Mama" and call out to her. They re-call her. Cixous writes:

In women's speech, as in their writing, that element which never stops resonating, which, once we've been permeated by it, profoundly and imperceptibly touched by it, retains the power of moving us—that element is the song: first music from the first voice of love which is alive in every woman. Why this privileged relationship with voice? Because ... a woman is never far from "mother." ... There is always within her at least a little of that good mother's milk. She writes in white ink.30 (251)

It is the body of the writer, which responds to the intrauterine "song" within her or his body. They give that response material form through speech or writing that re-inscribes

"Mama" into the text. The rhythmic form of their speech and writing registers the long lost music of the mother. Their speech and writing is filled with her milk and bursts out with laughter. Laughter, that special experience which in our culture only the lowly (the madmen, the women, and the artists) can enjoy, "designates an irruption of the drives against the symbolic prohibition" (Kristeva 1984: 222).31 Thus it is through the mother, through re-calling and reconnecting to rhythm, that the poet is given the privilege of exploding into a laughter that sends the symbolic order into temporary disarray. Laughter

138 reconnects us to the Mother's smile, to the pleasures we took from that simple gesture

which communicated to us, prior to grammar, her love and protection.

Madelon Sprengnether's (M)other Madelon Sprengnether in The Spectral Mother contends that every human being

shares one common event, which is their birth—all come into this world through the

body of a woman. Therefore we all share a common history of our "carnal origin"

(Sprengnether 9). Sprengnether's project involves the difficult task of trying to reclaim a

position for the maternal figure within both the theory of culture, which thus far has been

the sole property of the father, and within the biological-physiological theory, which does

not account for the subject's position. By engaging both sides of the nature/culture dyad,

Sprengnether's mother has the possibility of reclaiming both her body and her subject

position. She writes: "We need, in particular, a language of sexual difference which does

not revolve around the terms of phallic presence and vaginal absence, one that maintains

an allegiance to physical reality in all its stunning variety, without effacing the common

ground of our existence" (245). Sprengnether's project is to rework Sigmund Freud's

later theoretical texts by shifting the notion of castration from the loss of the penis/phallus

to the separation from the pre-Oedipal mother. Central to this effort is the later Freud's

"understanding of the ego as a product of mourning—'the precipitate of abandoned

object-cathexes'" (Sprengnether 9). At the same time, she attempts to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the object relations theory (rooted in Freud's ideas of abandoned

139 object-cathexes)—in her dealing with object relations theory she pays special attention to the work of Nancy Chordorow.

The path toward a solution which I offer in this book involves an intervention into Freud's account of the preoedipal mother so as to remedy her (theoretical) exclusion from culture while preserving her difference and otherness.... A beneficial conjunction between feminism and psychoanalysis must take account of the fact (as Lacanianism and poststructuralism fail to do) that a woman's body is the carnal origin of every human subject without desubjectifying the mother herself (as object relations theory tends to do). (Sprengnether 9)

Sprengnether begins her book with a quote from Freud's "A Special Type of

Choice of Object Made by Men," which undoubtedly supplied ideas for her notion of the

(m)other: "no one possesses more than one mother, and the relation to her is based on an event that is not open to any doubt and cannot be repeated'' (Freud qtd. in Sprengnether

1, my emphasis). Indeed, there is no doubt that we are born only once, separate from the maternal body only once, and will die only once as well. About that there is no question or doubt to the "actual" separation from the maternal body has been a topic of many debates. We can get clear on the nature of this debate by dialectically juxtaposing the ideas of Madelon Sprengnether and Nancy Chodorow. Unlike Chodorow's idea of

"mother-infant union" which continues after birth, Sprengnether's account of the mother- infant inseparability does not continue outside of the womb; in fact, in her view separateness "reaches back into the womb, to the beginning of life itself' (Sprengnether

242). She expands on that claim: "Birth as understood from the mother's point of view may be seen as the completion of a process of internal division that begins with conception. The mother's body itself in the state of pregnancy figures a condition of

140 absent presence or fullness which derives from an indwelling of otherness" (238).

According to Sprengnether, then, a child is from the very beginning experienced as an other within the body of the mother while at the same time being part of her—the mother experiences the developing child as an other dwelling within her body. Therefore

"otherness," in Sprengnether's view, "is inherent in the human condition" (242).

Sprengnether uses the term "(m)other" to describe "the body of the (m)other as a locus of difference and estrangement, instead of the privileged place of unity and fulfillment" (Sprengnether 233). This term, which is almost ideographic through its visual appearance, suggests the simultaneous existence of two words in an awkwardly spliced one word, but not fusing in a single entity. The (m) is enclosed, perhaps imprisoned, by the brackets and exists as an alien form that attaches itself to the other; however an alien form that takes precedence in the awkward non-entity. The mother- infant unity is foreclosed, Sprengnether asserts: "Rather than indulge the nostalgia for lost origins, let us consider that such a condition of plenitude does not exist, can never exist, except at the cost of the subjectivity of the mother herself' (233). Here

Sprengnether evidently attacks the ideas of object relations theorists such as Nancy

Chodorow and also of the psychoanalytic theorists who follow Freud's idea about the pre-Oedipal mother and mother-infant relations.32 That is even more evident in the following passage: "Whatever feelings of tenderness, physical attachment, and pleasure a mother may feel in caring for her newborn, she does not experience a total fusion of self with Other, an absolute identity with her infant" (ibid.). Sprengnether, we know, does not

141 want to privilege culture over nature or psychoanalysis over biology; yet here she seems to be operating in the realm of biologist objectivism, which leaves out of account the subjective dimension of the feelings or emotions that their objects of investigation might have. At the same time she uses words such as "tenderness, physical attachment, and pleasure," words that refer to emotion, and to one's relation to other—in fact they allude to momentary, "imaginary," suspension of the self; the suspension of ego position, in order to feel with an other, to feel an other. Sprengnether's use of these words is devoid of any sentient meaning, that is meaning grounded in real experience. She is a passive observer who "objectively" observes the interaction between the mother and her child from a distance, not being an actively participating social subject who has the capacity to empathize with other subjects. Furthermore, Sprengnether's account of (m)other is conceived from the perspective of an adult, of the mother, and therefore does not account for what the infant child might be experiencing. Feelings of total fusion and of the mother-infant symbiosis are "absurd" in her view and certainly "is not a description of the inner workings of a mother's consciousness" (233) because a mother can only function as a mother—respond to her child's needs—only when she has the ability to perceive herself as a self, physically separate from an infant. Moreover, the mother, as an adult who participates in the social realm by relating to others, also has desires which are not always directed towards her infant but towards her husband, her other children, and other members within her immediate community. I certainly agree with Sprengnether's claim that the mother figure signals otherness for us, for children who are capable of understanding that there is such a being as an other; nonetheless I point out that the figure 142 of the mother's body also reminds us that at one point we were one with her. This

memory can flood us with sadness, because we know that we have become quite separate

from the other. However, the merit of Sprengnether's insistence on the impossibility of

the mother-infant fusion is that (m)other, who from the outset is an "other" to the child, is

granted the position of a subject. This way the mother and the father are both social

subjects. In this configuration "the body of the (m)other provides its own sources of

signification and ultimately a ground for reconciliation between the pre-Oedipal (m)other

and culture, between the (m)other and the Symbolic order" (Sprengnether 234). The entry

into the Symbolic order, or into the social realm, is no longer only in the hands of the

father—the mother has already done this for us through the originary castration that

occurred when she became our (m)other, right in "the conception."

Sprengnether's account of the (m)other has much in common with Julia

Kristeva's paradoxical mother figure as a "splitting" or a "redoubling" subject. In

"Women's Time" Kristeva writes: "Pregnancy seems to be experienced as the radical

ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and

coexistence of the self and of the other, of nature and consciousness" (1979: 206). In

"Stabat Mater" Kristeva describes the maternal body as "the heterogeneity that cannot be subsumed in the signifler nevertheless explodes violently with pregnancy (the threshold of culture and nature) and the child's arrival (which extracts woman out of her oneness and gives her the possibility ... of reaching out to the other, the ethical)" (1977: 182). The body of the mother is a space where the self and the other split, where both life and death

143 begin their course, where culture confronts nature. It is not a safe haven but a space of

"continuous separation" (Kristeva 1977: 178). However, Kristeva does not dismiss the feeling of "oneness." Instead, she suggests that a woman, by having the special privilege of giving birth to a child, is open to the experience of love—a love in which one loses oneself within the other by forgetting oneself in the embrace of this emotion.

The arrival of the child... leads the mother into the labyrinths of an experience that, without the child, she would only rarely encounter: love for an other. Not for herself, nor for an identical being, and still less for another person with whom "I" fuse (love or sexual passion). But the slow, difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself' (Kristeva 1979: 206).

This ability to loose oneself in the other, perhaps not always through love but, also through empathy, guarantees us our sociability. Like our carnal being, this feeling has its root in our mothers, and not in some distant other, some Sprengnether (m)other. As much as social distancing, this proximity and closeness to others grants us our sociability and subject position. For us to have the ability for love or empathy for the other, we must acknowledge them as others and understand that others, through their separate existence, have desires different from our own. To love and to empathize requires us to leave our narcissism behind with our id and let the other be other, while being at the same time able to put ourselves "in their shoes." This is the ultimate in our openness to the other, for a mirroring operation takes place here: the others penetrate us as we enter them by putting ourselves in their shoes. The mirroring operation is the mechanism by which we cope with the disappointment that complete, paradisiacal union is no longer possible—not even in fantasy. I know that I cannot experience again that blissful union with my mother

144 I knew as a baby. But I can hope to keep the traces of that memory alive in me, through identification with the maternal function she imprinted in my body. And, more importantly, I can experience the delight of the magic of this mirroring—in lovemaking, as well as, in art making, while being tuned into one another in a performance, or while filming or painting one another. As John O'Neill points out: "our history is riddled with problems of separation, division, and alienation" (2002: 16). We are all separate beings but our origin, a carnal origin, links us together through our common history of our union with our Mamas.

This common history is our "first history of integration" (ibid.), which is our common ground that guarantees us our sociability. "Without such a ground ... we are condemned to a history without any intelligible origin or end" (ibid.). It is this double existence of both the separation and the union that guarantees us both individual agency, rather than selfless objecthood, and subjectivity which is capable of empathy and love.

Both empathy and love are the links that hold human beings together, because they both have the common origin, our mothers. Sprengnether acknowledges this important dimension to our existence when she concludes her book with the following words:

We are, each of us, male and female, fallen out of that state of fullness of Being which we sometimes imagine as paradise, which we seek falsely to identify with intrauterine existence. And yet each of us enters the world through the body of a woman—a carnal enigma that has virtually baffled our systems of understanding. Rather than fleeing, condemning, or idealizing the body of the (m)other, we need to recognize her in ourselves." (245)

145 I would like to now draw our attention to another area which suffers when the mother becomes (m)other and the importance of memory of mother-infant union is not fully acknowledged. But first let us reflect once again on Sprengnether's criticism of the feelings of mother-infant union. She writes: "total fusion of self with Other, and absolute identity with her infant... such feelings can only be fleeting and a testimonial to the desire that love elicits to efface the distinctions between self and Other. To say that a mother feels one with her child is primarily a poetic statement about her passionate involvement in its physical well-being" (233). Why does Sprengnether dismiss these expressions as "poetic statements"? Maybe these fleeting feelings, like those that one experiences when reading a poem, feelings that are so transient, induce in us a longing for the sense of belongingness we once felt in our corporeal-psychical union with our mother. We also experience that union as adults in the mirroring operation—of surrendering and allowing another's voice to penetrate and to operate us. One's ego dissolves and one becomes the mirror of the other who operates one—"Je est un autre" to use Arthur Rimbaud famous phrase from his "Lettre a Georges Izambard." Thus, these feelings are necessary for our emotional and bodily well being. And they are certainly enough for a poet to create poetry, which, like any great work of art, can transport us back to our originary relation where we were once coexisted with the other, our mother.

How great it feels when a poetic work reaches us on that level. Art helps us re-experience this feeling again and makes sure that it does not become effaced from our lives. In this sense, art ensures our social stability by instilling in us our sense of relatedness.

146 Now, we must turn to Julia Kristeva who sees art or poetic work at the heart of

our social existence and well being, through its constant articulation of the maternal

chora.

Kristeva's Pre-Oedipal Mother Julia Kristeva's theoretical project encompasses both a psycho-linguistic and a

social dimension, and illustrates their inseparability and interpenetration. Her theoretical

inquiry attempts to resolve two problems at once, the unpresence of the maternal figure in

the patriarchal culture and the inhibition of the semiotic order in language. Since, for

Kristeva, the semiotic develops from the intrauterine memories, the absence of both the

mother and the semiotic results in the double unpresence of the mother. She does this by

constantly drawing our attention to the structural constitution of both language and

society in the patriarchal culture. According to Kristeva the only time the mother seems

to emerge is in the moments when the symbolic order in language has ruptured or in the

rare instances of social "revolt." Julia Kristeva's project is invaluable because it provides

us with an entry point, from both the psycho-linguistic and the social perspective, to

understanding the various social and artistic shifts, in particular (social) revolutionary

movements and avant-garde art practices. As in her theory of language, the subject is

always engaged, is always in process of negotiating her or his position, and thus is also

perpetually en proces—on trial and in question. Equally, the artist is always en proces at once creating and being created, as she negotiates with the artwork's coming into being.

147 When the symbolic order is breached, the fixed or motionless subject and master-artist,

along with their individual ego, are exploded. Kristeva contends that the rupturing of the

symbolic occurs through the agency of the intrauterine memories which reside in the

chora. Their echoes make the ego give way and so allow the humble attentive social

subject and artist to emerge, who is immediately set into motion and into process, en

proces.

In Revolution in Poetic Language Kristeva continuously tries to call our attention

to the parallels between the linguistic and the social structure. She begins by outlining

two modalities of the signifying process: the semiotic and the symbolic. The "semiotic" is

a "psychosomatic modality of the signifying process" (Kristeva 1984: 28) which is

constituted through the intrauterine memories and the pre-Oedipal "functions and energy

discharges that connect and orient the body to the mother" (1984: 26). The semiotic is

characterized by its kinetic charges and discharges of the drives, it is preverbal and

precognitive, and thus "precedes the establishment of the sign" (1984: 27). The space

where the semiotic energy charges and discharges are organized is the chora. It is an

acoustic space, rather than a visual place, predicated on the unvisualizable maternal space

within our unconscious. Kristeva argues that the semiotic chora serves as the foundation

of the symbolic order because it develops as early as in the foetal stage, in the acoustic and rhythmic phenomena of the womb. She also implies that hearing develops before sight, and hence has a stronger affinity with the maternal body—an affinity that is already fully developed several months after birth. Because these are such early experiences they

148 are eventually consigned to the unconscious. The maternal function of language is, therefore, the acoustic chora and the paternal function is the symbolic, which is predicated on visual organization and on the social organization of the subject/object system. The symbolic operations "depend on language as a sign system—whether the language (langue) is vocalized or gestural (as with deaf-mutes)" (Kristeva 1984: 27). The symbolic modality is therefore predicated on the syntactical organization. Moreover, the symbolic represents the social dimension of the linguistic system—it is "a social effect of the relation to the other, established through the objective constraints of biological

(including sexual) differences and concrete, historical family structures" (Kristeva 1984:

29). Hence, the symbolic provides the subject's entry into the social system. Though

Kristeva separates the two modalities of language (by aligning the semiotic with the innate biological structuring and the symbolic with socially constructed), the semiotic, nevertheless, is the foundation of the symbolic.

[C]ertain semiotic articulations are transmitted through the biological code or physiological "memory" and thus form the inborn bases of the symbolic function. ... Genetic programmings are necessarily semiotic: they include the primary processes such as displacement and condensation, absorption and repulsion, rejection and stasis, all of which function as the innate preconditions, "memorizable" by the species, for language acquisition. (Kristeva 1984: 29)

Furthermore, "These two modalities are inseparable within the signifying process that constitutes language.... Because the subject is always both semiotic and symbolic, no signifying system he produces can be either 'exclusively' semiotic or 'exclusively' symbolic, and is instead necessarily marked by an indebtedness to both" (Kristeva 1984:

24). Kristeva's project, then, is to demonstrate the coexistence and codependence of the 149 semiotic and the symbolic modalities of language, of the maternal and the paternal functions in the social system, and of biology and culture.

The thetic break is "The second return of instinctual functioning within the symbolic, as a negativity introduced into the symbolic order, and as the transgression of that order" (Kristeva 1984: 69). Kristeva contends that this break, or secondary irruption of drives into the symbolic, is more sophisticated than the "semiotic functioning [which] is fairly rudimentary combinatorial system" (1984: 68).34 The semiotic functioning can only reappear through the thetic by rupturing and entering the symbolic order. Art making has similarities to the thetic break. Art making, too, breaches the symbolic and allows the semiotic maternal to pour out. That semiotic material is subsequently fixed, or organized, according to the principles of the symbolic order, which are, however, modified by that breach. Kristeva writes: "In returning, through the event of death, toward that which produces its break; in exporting semiotic motility across the border on which the symbolic is established, the artist sketches out a kind of second birth" (1984:

70). In giving birth to a work of art, the artist experiences a rebirth. This rebirth, the return "through the event of death" carries one back toward the origin, towards the maternal body. Thus the artist returns to the maternal through a "second birth." The artist thus "introduces into the symbolic order an asocial drive, one not yet harnessed by the thetic" (Kristeva 1984: 71). To further complicate art practice and its position within the process of signification, Kristeva compares art to jouissance. Jouissance is not exactly a very easy term to explain or define because ambiguity is at the heart of it. It comes from

150 the French word jouir, which means to play or to enjoy. Hence it has been most often

used by ecriture feminin writers, in particular by Luce Irigaray, Catherine Clement and

H616ne Cixous, as the joy or ecstatic pleasure—especially of the sort one experiences for

example during an orgasm. But most important aspect of this ecstasy is the fact that it

dissolves the ego's boundary, so the self and other flow into one another, become so

fused in mutual embrace as to be indistinguishable. The effects of dissolution of ego

boundaries resemble the state of the pre-Oedipal mother-infant union. Jouissance thus

carries one back to the pre-Oedipal mother.

Art—this semiotization of the symbolic—thus represents the flow of jouissance into language. Whereas sacrifice assigns jouissance its productive limit in the social and symbolic order, art specifies the means—the only means—that jouissance harbors for infiltrating that order. In cracking the socio-symbolic order, splitting it open, changing vocabulary, syntax, the word itself, and releasing from beneath them the drives borne by vocalic or kinetic differences, jouissance works its way into the social and symbolic. In contrast to sacrifice, poetry shows us that language lends itself to the penetration of the socio-symbolic by jouissance. (Kristeva 1984: 79-80)

However, shattering of the socio-symbolic order through the "vocalic or kinetic"

irruption of the semiotic is not the only goal on artist's agenda. The maternal body is

what every artist desires, not only because it creates a rupture in the symbolic order, but

most importantly because it is where love was first experienced. "This love ...

psychologically is perhaps a recall, on the near side of early identifications, of the primal

shelter that ensured the survival of the newborn. Such a love is in fact, logically speaking,

a surge of anguish at the very moment when the identity of thought and living body collapses" (Kristeva 1977: 176-77). Love is a necessity for any creative act, for through it

151 the boundaries collapse and that collapse establishes the condition in which creation can

take place. Creation comes forth, on its own terms, through love; through the splitting of

the subject where the ego is forgotten, where the hierarchical oppositions of I/thou or

subject/object are suspended. Hence, every creative act, every creation bears the mark of

the mother, of the maternal love, and it is inscribed through a creative act of an artist.

While reflecting on love Kristeva asks: "Might not modern art then be [through its

departure from representation], for the few who are attached to it, the implementation of

that maternal love?" (1977: 177). The act of art making certainly resembles the

generosity of maternal love, where the art pours out of the artist despite its social or

cultural ramifications. It is in her or him and it has to come out, on its own terms, when it

is ready to be born. John O'Neill rightly compares the artist-artwork relation to the state

of pregnancy: "The artist is inside/outside of society like a pregnant woman, listening to

the presymbolic rhythms of the in-fans, to the unspoken bond between her/his body and a

new life, new meaning" (2002: 169). It is certainly not a coincidence that much of the

great art is not appreciated by the social order when it first emerges. The tales of great artworks, the true labours of love, being discovered and revered only after the death of the artist, who lived all her or his life in the utmost poverty, are no exaggeration: it is the

lived reality of many artists, both past and present, in Canada and abroad.

Kristeva presents the reader with two styles of writing in "Stabat Mater." She divides this text into two columns: left and right. The poetic prose in the left column resonates with the maternal semiotic; she describes her experience of pregnancy and

152 childbirth. The theoretical text in the right column obeys the laws of the symbolic; she examines Christian representations of the Virgin Mary and motherhood. In the opening paragraph of the left column Kristeva states: "What is loving, for a woman, the same thing as writing. Laugh. Impossible. Flash on the unnameable, weavings of abstractions to be torn. Let a body venture at last out of its shelter, take a chance with meaning under a veil of words. WORD FLESH. From one to the other, eternally, broken up visions, metaphors of the invisible" (1977: 162). She thus directly correlates loving and feminine writing, or loving and creative practice. The "body," i.e., the maternal body "ventures" out to meet the body of the writer-artist; it is the body, then, that drives the creative act and brings forth meaning-artwork within the nexus of language. "WORD FLESH" is the realm of the feminine writing; it is "the flesh become word" (Oliver 53).35 For it implies the loving embrace or intertwining of the paternal word and the maternal flesh, the symbolic and the semiotic. It also has some similarity to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's

"chiasmic flesh" which eludes any notions of subject/object hierarchy, where the "flesh of the body" and the "flesh of the world" are perpetually folding, overlapping, crisscrossing and encroaching upon one another. He writes: "[Tjhis flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt [.senti] at the same time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality), they are in a relation of transgression or of overlapping" (Merleau-Ponty

1968: 248). The "felt" and the "material" are at once a subject and an object, they are

"thick" with ambiguity, just like Kristeva's "WORD FLESH" and its implied mutual coexistence of the semiotic and the symbolic. One idea that Kristeva's WORD FLESH 153 perhaps suggests (it is certainly not explicitly stated) is that of not treating language as a

tool or instrument, but of responding to it as an other, as the maternal other which it both

embodies and manifests. Merleau-Ponty hints at this notion of WORD FLESH in a

chapter in Phenomenology of Perception titled "The Body as Expression, and Speech."

There he quotes Goldstein: "As soon as a man uses language to establish a living relation

with himself or with his fellows, language is no longer an instrument, not longer a means;

it is a manifestation, a revelation of intimate being and of the psychic link which unites us

to the world and our fellow men" (qtd. in Merleau-Ponty1962: 196). Understood as a

"manifestation" rather than "a means," language and art take on another role, viz. that

which ultimately gathers the living beings and the world within a reciprocal loving

embrace, like the one between the mother and her infant that we have all experienced.

Conclusion Let us rehearse the argument as it has so far unfolded. Madelon Sprengnether

wanted nothing to do with the pre-Oedipal mother or the Oedipal father. Her project

entailed the attempt to dissolve the hierarchical division between the pre-Oedipal and

Oedipal stages of child development. She introduced the (m)other figure, who from the

very beginning perceived the child as an other within her rather than as merged with her.

This idea brought Sprengnether to challenge the classical account of castration.

Sprengnether contends that the original split or castration took place before the father even had the chance to meet the child, within the womb.

154 Julia Kristeva's paradoxical figure of the pregnant mother subject, the "splitting subject" who is neither one nor two, but two-in-one, permitted us to finally make the link between the pre-Oedipal mother and art practice. She shows how that link can be made through our memories of maternal love. Kristeva's subject is not denied her/his subject position but instead is always en proces—always in question, always on trial, always changes as it continually renegotiates his position as both the social and biological being, and continually has to balance the demands of both the semiotic maternal and the symbolic paternal modalities. The semiotic order gives the subject a capacity for love and empathy, while the symbolic order ensures that these emotions can be articulated—that the subject is not disarrayed under the impact of these emotions. This is ensured when the subject has found a way to reconcile the disorganizing and disintegrating forces of energy

(giving the self over/into an other) and the isolating order of egoic autonomy.

Despite the theoretical differences between Sprengnether and Kristeva, they agree on one idea, that our mother's body is our origin and that we are "physically" born only once. Although, as Kristeva pointed out, the artist continues to be "imaginarily" reborn through her or his each subsequent creation. In "exporting semiotic motility across the border on which the symbolic is established, the artist sketches out a kind of second birth," Kristeva contends (1984: 70). Thus, Kristeva, along with Sprengnether, bring me closer to dissolving the enigma of my initial question: What position does an artist assume in relation to her or his artwork? However, this question will nevertheless have to remain in its ambiguous constitution because such is the nature of the artist-artwork,

155 mother-child relation. It can never become definite, because it always escapes stasis through the rhythmic pulsing of life.

Schneemann & Polyphonic Cinema

Schneemann brought the force and the immediacy of Olson's "Projective Verse" into her art in the form of projective performances, like Up To And Including Her Limits.

This subsequently led her to consider vision as a projective force. That consideration led her in turn to formulate a projective, and even polyphonic, conception of vision.

The steady exploration and repeated viewing which the eye is required to make with my painting-constructions is reversed in the performance situation where the spectator is overwhelmed with changing recognitions, carried emotionally by a flux of evocative actions and led or held by the specified time sequence which marks the duration of a performance. (Schneemann 2002: 48)

This projective vision becomes particularly important in the visual composition of her

(1964-67) film Fuses, whose visual polyphony and rhythms reflect the phenomenology of the primary acoustic space. This space of origin, this acoustic space Kristeva identifies with the feminine. She terms that space the semiotic chora, for it is a space of the intrauterine memories and their inscription on the body and psyche of the subject.

Schneemann's Fuses, in addition to physicalizing with the camera the bodily energies that she and her partner experienced during their lovemaking, is a visual composition that approximates music. With the possible exception of Stan Brakhage's films, Fuses, in its

156 polyphonic texture and its emphasis on tone is unlike any other film of that period. The structure of this film is akin to Bach's compositions, in particular his Cantatas, which she in fact was listening to while editing this film.

The action it depicts is presented in a non-sequential and non-narrative form: it does not build to a climax (Elder 1997: 264). The scenes and events depicted— lovemaking between Schneemann and her partner, of the interior of her house and her cat named Kitch, the changing seasons in her backyard, Schneemann at a beach—are divided into sections, and combined with overlaid graphic elements (circles, rectangles and stars).

The separated elements are then laid upon one another as superimpositions and reconstituted in polyrhythmic sequences that echo the energies experienced between the two partners during their lovemaking. This polyrhythmic structure scatters the conscious focus of viewers while drawing them closer to the more primal or primary forms of vision, attention and experience. Therefore the polyrhythmic imagery in this film reflects the character of acoustic space. In an interview with Kate Haug, Schneemann makes the following comments on the making of Fuses:

Explicit sexual imagery propels the formal structure of Fuses. Initially, it was clear to me that people were so distracted by being able to have a voyeuristic permission to see genital heterosexuality that it would take them—if they ever came back to see it again—many showings before the structure was clear: the musicality of it and the way it was edited. Fuses is very formal in how it is shaped; that was crucial to making it have a coherent muscular life.... I did consider the different instrumental voices that Bach could weave and break apart in term of a timbre, a pitch that had a certain weight and certain fracture—an instrumental clunkiness that would then suddenly reattract and reabsorb thematic elements and become ecstatic. In particular, I was submerged in the Cantatas— whose organic, strange, rhythmic dynamic that could conceptually and sensuously

157 unravel in time. Since film is in time, I was thinking about time structure, and about [Charles] Ives being able to layer a dissonant, discrepant montage of sound. As I edited, I thought, "I am going to have a mass of blue and then this arm opens up, and that breaks the reach towards the figure with three frames of yellow, the arm completes its gesture and a mass of blue dissolved into..." So I had all these crazy notes, and that is how I would be editing and counting. There are beats...there are counts, frames of color, of gesture. ...With frames, it is almost like notes. So, yes, I am painting, but I am also time factoring. It is not just gestural. The gestures are subject to internal rhythms. Now, at the same time, these internal rhythms are definitely shaped by the fact that it is a self-shot film. Often, I did not get back the film print I expected. If the camera was set on a chair or hanging from a lamp, the merge of the bodies might shift from the lens focus, and by chance the thirty-second wind-up Bolex camera would only capture my buttocks, or some area of all green. I would accept that as the film offering me the intercourse between the camera and my domestic space. I was always willing to adapt my explicit intentions. I wanted to allow film to give me the sense that I was getting closer to tactility, to sensations in the body that are streaming and unconscious andfluid—the orgasmic dissolve unseen, vivid even if unseeable. (Schneemann 1977: 21-23, my emphasis)

The rhythmic forms in Fuses involve an auditory-visual unity, and that fusion, in turn, elicits tactile experience, through some synaesthetic dynamic. Schneemann heightens these tactile effects by working directly with the film stock—burning, baking, cutting, scratching, painting, coloring, dipping it in acid, leaving it outside in the weather.

This tactility further engages viewers' bodies.

158 III. Art and Thought by R. Bruce Elder as "Putting Your Body on the Line"

To this point, my discussion has focused on the polyphony of Schneemann's work. I have tried to demonstrate how her polyphonic forms release energy as to bring us back to corporeal experience. I now turn toward generalizing that argument to show that other artists' use of polyphony has similar effects. I could, I suppose, make the case by commenting on the work of other artists, especially Stan Brakhage, but I have chosen to focus on the work of R. Bruce Elder, primarily because his work (especially his later work) also raises issue of an artist's nude self-representations, the issue at the core of my dissertation. I have also chosen to partner Elder with Schneemann, to focus on one male and one female artist, as a central point in my thesis is that the memory of, and identification with, the pre-Oedipal mother remains available to both male and female artists (though for reasons relating to the dynamics of repression, it is vastly more commonly available to females).

At this stage in my argument I am proposing that polyphonic forms unbind energy. I have commented on Schneemann's use of polyphony, and now turn to examine

Elder's. I do so in order to show how the unbinding of energy can shatter forms that are the product of later psychic developments and lead back to more rudimentary forms of thought that relate to the pre-Oedipal mother and the delight of skin-to-skin contact. This

159 issue of the elementary pleasure of skin-to-skin contact will become important when we come to deal with the topic of artists' nude self-representations.

To deal with issues raised in Elder's use of polyphonic forms, we must turn to

Anton Ehrenzweig.

Chaos or the Polyphonic Vision of Artistic Imagination It seems that art, almost perversely, creates tasks that cannot be mastered by our normal faculties. Chaos is precariously near. (Ehrenzweig 31)

Many polyphonic films immerse viewers in the complexity of the multi­ dimensional or polyphonic nexus of their moving visual compositions while stimulating a less focused, and more dispersed or scattered, attention in the viewing experience. This scattered attention reaches down to below the grasp of conscious focused thought and reactivates a more primal mode of experience. The aim of these polyphonic compositions is to stimulate intense bodily sensations in viewers by prompting an active engagement that incites the mind to keep shifting attention from sound to sound, from image to image, and from sound to image. The mind moves amidst the densely woven elements of the moving audio-visual compositions—it cannot stop to fix these mobile constellations into concrete concepts. Viewers who take in these compositions are required to constantly negotiate several lines of development, to slide from one rhythm to another, as their eyes glide over the surface of the image—sometimes they are overwhelmed with twenty-four

160 different images in one second or with multiple images in one frame, all accompanied by

several layers of sounds. The flow of experience shaped by these polyphonic cinematic

compositions echoes the uncontainable and plural flow of bodily experience; thus, they

elevate the corporeal experience over rational thought, giving primacy to the body and

asserting the importance of the corporeal dimension in human existence.

The writer and psychoanalyst Anton Ehrenzweig has had much to say about the

psychodynamics of polyphony. Hence, I begin by providing a sketch of his ideas on

artistic imagination and the form of vision and attention that is involved in the creation

and reception of the polyphonically structured audio-visual compositions—doing so will

enable me to assert the centrality of corporeal experience and libidinal interests invested

in these compositions. In particular, Ehrenzweig's concept of syncretistic,

undifferentiated vision (low-level unconscious vision), also referred to by some as

polyphonic vision, will be explored in detail, as that is the form of vision elicited by

polyphonically structured visual compositions.

A statement Anton Ehrenzweig made in The Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the

Psychology of Artistic Imagination (1967) that perhaps illustrates best his theoretical

position on art, its creative process and its indebtedness to psychoanalysis: "Art is a dream dreamt by the artist which we, the wide awake spectators, can never see in its true structure; our waking faculties are bound to give us too precise an image produced by secondary revision" (79). In The Hidden Order of Art Ehrenzweig continues the efforts of other psychoanalytic theorists from the later part of 1950s to revise the classical concept

161 of primary process, to show it as an ordered (and ordering) process, not one characterized by a lack of structure and chaos as many before the late 1950s seemed to believe.

The classical description is based on Sigmund Freud's analysis of primary process, which he first introduced in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), as the mental process involved in the composition of dreams. Prior to Freud's work dreams were understood as chance by-products of the half-paralyzed mind during sleep. By analysing the manifest content of the dream Freud was able to demonstrate its concealed meaning, by referring to the unconscious wish that gave rise to the seemingly disconnected contents of the dream. Freud's analytic methods showed that the seemingly nonsensical content of the dream in fact is meaningful and can be discovered using rigorous methods.

Nonetheless, according to Ehrenzweig, Freud was not able to prove a complete account of the dream's peculiar structure, which, after all, appears to the conscious waking mind as chaotic.

This led Ehrenzweig to carry further the exploration of primary process thinking

Freud began in The Interpretation of Dreams. The distinguishing traits of the primary process include: a peculiar atemporality—a drifting timelessness and sense of a continuous present; a lack of narrative or chronological ordering, and the substitution for them of an order based on auditory similitude and substitution; a lack of a conscious rational idea, for which is substituted forms which cohere through the inner necessity of an unconscious wish; exemption from contradictions; and undifferentiated structure. This last characteristic of the primary process, its undifferentiated structure, is central in 162 Ehrenzweig's revisions to the standard conception of this process' structure—either the view that condemns this as chaotic or the Freudian view that analyzes the dream-work that shapes the manifest-dream. Ehrenzweig's reworking of the notion of primary process thinking takes into account that it is the undifferentiated structure of fantasies and images that makes them unconscious. He argues that the collage or web-like structure of these fantasies impedes their differentiation and thus identification by the consciousness.

As I pointed out in chapter I, primary process operations (which give form to dream-work and, in the waking state, give rise to slips of the tongue or jokes) include: fragmentation, repetition, representation by the opposite, condensation and displacement

(Ehrenzweig 33). Sigmund Freud in an essay titled "The Unconscious" (1915) defined displacement and condensation as follows: "By the process of displacement one idea may surrender to another its whole quota of cathexis; by the process of condensation it may appropriate the whole cathexis of several other ideas" (186). Moreover, condensation and displacement have their equivalents in language, in metaphor (association of two or more entities based on some similarity between them) and metonymy (based on contiguity); further, the notions of condensation and displacement, of metaphor and metomymy, can be extended and applied to other sign systems, such as visual art. Ehrenzweig argues that artists and poets frequently use this more rudimentary process, primary process—and that is one key to the secret power of art. The extraordinary compositional plasticity of dream imagery and the imaginative, but absurd (to the conscious mind, at best) word couplings and substitutions in slips of tongue are an endless well of inspiration for the creative arts.

163 Artists draw on the secret source of dreams, that is the immemorial memories and childhood wishes that are persistently pushed away by censorship. It is therefore understandable that when Ehrenzweig attempted to fathom the seemingly chaotic structure of the primary process he turned to art. He insists that art itself posed a problem to the classical conception of the primary process and required revision to the classical conception of this process. For artistic creations, he understood, dip below the surface of the conscious and the preconscious mental functions; yet they are rigorously organized, and do not give over to chaos. Contrary to the established views which dismissed primary process and deemed what appeared, prima facie, to be mere chaos and without significance, Ehrenzweig was able to demonstrate that primary process was driven by an urge toward form, for he saw its evidence in the formal complexity it produces manifested in art. "It may be that the analysis of art can continue where the analysis of the dream has left off' (4), Ehrenzweig asserted.

Ehrenzweig insisted on making a clear distinction between the concept of chaos and undifferentiation. The groundwork for this distinction is Freud's conception of matching. According to Ehrenzweig some form of matching, which is generally considered the function of the secondary process, also takes place in the primary process.

However the matching the primary process engages in is syncretistic, as opposed to the analytic matching of the secondary process, which is based on dissecting and analytically matching detail to detail. Syncretistic matching is global or total; it does not differentiate and therefore does not focus on detail but instead takes in the total object as an entire

164 indivisible whole. This conception lies at the core of Ehrenzweig's argument, that the mental activity that takes place in the lower-level of the unconscious is not to be dismissed as sheer chaos because of its undifferentiated structure. He emphasizes that the undifferentiation of the primary process is not chaos but syncretism. "The chaos of the unconscious is as deceptive as the chaos of outer reality. In either case we need the less differentiated techniques of unconscious vision to become aware of their hidden order"

(Ehrenzweig 5). To illustrate this, Ehrenzweig provides an example of drawings done by an infant, whose vision and experience of the world is still global or total. In those drawings, a single shape or colour serves to represent various objects. One can also think of numerous examples in the twentieth century avant-garde art where a similar syncretistic matching has been employed by artists, for example: Pablo Picasso, Juan

Miro, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, etc. This understanding led Ehrenzweig to argue against the classical Freudian description of the primary process and the commonly accepted idea that the primary process is only capable of producing a chaotic structure, that requires the secondary process to order it.

Contrary to the classical conception, Ehrenzweig asserts that primary process is "a precision instrument for creative scanning that is far superior to discursive reason and logic" (5). He insists that syncretistic matching is necessary to bring forth a work that holds diverse, contending elements in a unity—only by means of syncretistic matching, and not verisimilitude, is artist capable of bringing forth a composition that holds together the whole, as a delicate balance or an intricately woven web of multiple elements, and

165 simultaneously renders the artwork realistic, however abstract it might appear to ordinary consciousness. Ehrenzweig refers to Pablo Picasso's portraits as exemplary in their use of syncretistic matching.

Picasso's incredibly convincing portraits defeat all analytic matching by jumbling up and distorting all the details of a face.... We then no longer judge the verisimilitude of the portrait by analyzing single features, but intuitively grasp the portrait as an indivisible whole. ... Only superficially does this lack of proper differentiation and spatial coherence seem chaotic. The resemblance achieved by a syncretistic portrait relies on a subtle balance which is not amenable to conscious analysis. (Ehrenzweig 7)

Ehrenzweig makes it clear that the undifferentiated structure of Picasso's syncretistic portraits is not chaotic but carefully ordered renderings of the sitter's face in the portrait, which is treated in its totality that unfolds before the viewers' eyes as a web comprising multiple and discontinuous fragments of the face that together form its genuine likeness. This likeness has of course nothing to do with the detail by detail verisimilitude of analytic matching; rather it is the result of Picasso's undifferentiated syncretistic matching, which dips into the lower registers of his mental functioning and goes directly for the whole, while at the same time eschewing clear differentiation of forms and abstract details (and therefore their conscious identification.) Furthermore, this syncretistic matching picks an element common to a number of the sitter's features and characteristic of the sitter's face, which acts as an instant cue pointing straight towards the individual qualities specific to the portrait model.

We see in Francis Bacon's work the work of another artist who has these thought processes readily available to him. Like Picasso's work, Bacon's paintings eschew the

166 verisimilitude and spatial coherence of analytic matching, and instead rely on syncretistic matching and cues that capture the individual traits of the portrait model or tone of the setting. His 1930 self-portrait presents Bacon as a young and lively twenty-one year old man, who appears to be invigorated by life, as we the viewers are invigorated by the colour pallet which relies on vibrant reds, oranges and yellows set against a white background that bears the marks of orange and red dry brush. Furthermore, the overall composition, which is shaped as a "V," along with the solid and almost straight lines that have a vertical thrust, give the impression of a general upward movement, i.e. as if the head of the portrait model is moving up, growing up towards maturity. Its opposite is

Bacon's 1971 self-portrait, in which he captures himself in a reflective state—certainly fitting for a sixty-two year old man; in that work his face appears to bear the marks of life's toils and exhaustion. The overall composition in this self-portrait is shaped as an upside-down "V," furthermore the predominance of solid lines has disappeared and the facial features are presented as coloured curvilinear planes. These features, an overall emphasis on a downward movement, give the impression of a sagging face—of a face melting downwards and away into death. Moreover, the colour pallet in this painting is composed of grays, blacks, and whites, with only a hint of rose and orange, and the face is set against void eliciting black background. Again, the emphasis in both self-portraits is less on particular details that can be traced directly to the model; instead, the artist forms an impression of the entire composition, that is of how all the parts work together to form a whole. The artist also generally gives the viewer cues to help him or her understand the relation between the elements in the composition and the model. In this 167 sense, in both Picasso's and Bacon's paintings, the true likeness of the sitter's face is captured in the portrait when the artist intuitively attends to the total expression of the face. Thus, the composition is not arrived at detail by detail, by scrupulous matching of each detail to the model, but rather, the entire composition is grasped (intuitively) all at once. It is in this act of intuition that Ehrenzweig locates "the paradox of order in chaos."

The syncretistic vision notes individual details with extraordinary precision, even while it is indifferent to abstract detail or pattern (Ehrenzweig 12). In other words what appears to ordinary consciousness (which operates by analyzing gestalt form) to be utterly chaotic is actually an intricately arranged composition that requires the lower registers of intuition or unconscious processing to comprehend it as an indivisible whole while being guided by the latent details that enable the artist, and later the viewer to apprehend order within this seeming chaos.

Ehrenzweig extends the notions underling his distinction between the analytic and the syncretistic matching to analyzing attention. He distinguishes between two sorts of attention: conscious focused attention and unconscious scanning or scattered attention.

The first, focused attention, is related to the secondary process. It is therefore differentiated: its pinpoint focus divides the visual field into insignificant ground and significant figure, while paying particular interest to detail. However, because of this focus on the particulars, it can only attend to one object in the visual field at a time while forcing the viewer to make a choice to focus "either" on this "or" that particular detail. In contrast to conscious focused attention, unconscious scanning attention is related to the

168 primary process. It is undifferentiated: its scanning abilities allow it to hold the entirety of the visual field in a single undivided act of attention. Furthermore, instead of forcing the viewer to make an "either/or" choice, this scattered attention opens up the total visual field: in one all encompassing "vacant stare" the complexity of the entire composition is scanned and its every minute detail is registered by the unconscious. However, these details are not registered individually but as inseparable from the totality of composition.

To illustrate the unconscious precision of scanning attention Ehrenzweig provides an example of a visual artist working on his painting.

How often have we not observed how an artist suddenly stops in his tracks without apparent reason, steps back from his canvas and looks at it with a curiously vacant stare? What happens is that the conscious gestalt is prevented from crystallizing. Nothing seems to come into his mind. Perhaps one or another detail lights up for a moment only to sink back into the emptiness. During this absence of mind an unconscious scanning seems to go on. Suddenly as from nowhere some offending detail hitherto ignored will come into view. It had somehow upset the balance of the picture, but had gone undetected. (Ehrenzweig 24-25)

What appears simply as the emptiness of a "vacant stare" is actually full—it is replete with the "full emptiness" of unconscious scanning (25). This "full emptiness" lacks the pinpoint focus and is indifferent to the organization of the visual field into a gestalt consistency of a significant figure and an insignificant ground, and for this reason, according to Ehrenzweig, it will strike the conscious perception as empty. Nonetheless, the "full emptiness" of the undifferentiated stare opens the viewer to the richness that lies within the undifferentiated unconscious structure of an artwork which is grasped as a single indivisible whole.

169 Ehrenzweig widens the scope of "full emptiness" of unconscious scanning by extending it from visual arts to music. In doing so, he draws on Paul Klee's writings on painting, in which the artist explores aesthetic concerns in visual art through the lens of music. Ehrenzweig writes: "[Klee] calls his dispersed attention that can attend to the entire picture plane 'multi-dimensional' (this expression happily stresses its irrational structure) and also 'polyphonic.' This too is a good name. Polyphonic hearing also overcomes the conscious division between figure and ground" (25). This "irrational structure" of "multi-dimensional" attention resonates with Ehrenzweig's concept of the syncretistic matching, and in particular with Ehrenzweig's commentary on the spatial coherence of the picture plane in Picasso's cubist portraits—a coherence that is not amenable to three-dimensional compositional logic. By taking cues from Klee and extending his argument from the multi-dimensional attention in visual art to polyphonic attention in music, Ehrenzweig investigates how scanning attention brought to bear on music disperses itself in both time and space; across measures, which mark out time, and over tonal distribution of notes in the space marked in five lines of musical notation.

According to Ehrenzweig there are also two types of hearing, for which musicians have coined the terms "vertical hearing" and "horizontal hearing." Vertical hearing takes its name from the spatial arrangement of notes in standard musical notation, and refers to hearing simultaneously sounding notes. Horizontal hearing refers to listening to pattern

(e.g. melodies) evolving through time. He notes that these two types of hearing also correspond with the two types of attention: the conscious focused attention and the unconscious scanning attention. Vertical hearing is concerned with the vertical 170 distribution of notes that form a solid harmonic arrangement of sounds or chords—the relation of chords to a melody is similar, Ehrenzweig asserts, to the relation of background elements to the distinguishable figure in a painting and its solid presence in visual composition that the pinpoint focus of conscious attention can easily extract.

Moreover, Ehrenzweig argues that the "vertical hearing" of the focused, conscious attention is only capable of apprehending very "loose" or weak polyphonic structure.

That is because conscious attention is incapable of dividing its focus between the two or more independent voices present in a true polyphonic structure. The solid harmonic chords that appear in homophonic composition are heard simultaneously below the dominant melody or voice. However, chordal elements are not apprehended individually, but as merging into a fused block; accordingly, they are not experienced as belonging to independent voices. Rather, they derive from, and complement, the melody. Ehrenzweig writes: "If we observe ourselves more closely it soon becomes apparent that it is impossible—on a conscious level—to divide one's attention even between two independent voices, unless of course one makes it jump between them in a breathless attempt to catch up with each of them in turn. But this is surely not the way to appreciate music" (26).

Vertical hearing, therefore, corresponds to conscious focused attention, and horizontal or polyphonic hearing is concerned with the arrangement of notes in evolving lines through time in musical notation. In polyphonic hearing, attention is unfocused and empty, and relies on the "full emptiness" of unconscious scanning in order to apprehend

171 in an undifferentiated totality several voices simultaneously as a single, indivisible field.

Ehrenzweig maintains that for either a trained musician or a layman, in the "full

emptiness" of unfocused attention, all the needed information is extracted from this

undifferentiated totality with utmost speed and efficiency. In fact, "So quickly is this

information obtained," argues Ehrenzweig, "that in retrospect the moment of emptiness is

forgotten. This is why we know so little about the gaps in the perpetually oscillating

stream of consciousness. In these gaps the work of unconscious scanning is carried on"

(26-27).

Ehrenzweig treats both modes of attention with impartiality. However, he

acknowledges the fact that Western culture has placed larger emphasis and value on the

conscious focused attention, analytic matching, and discursive logic, while treating the

unconscious and syncretistic experience, because of its seeming chaos, as trivial.

Children around the age of eight, Ehrenzweig suggests, find their drawings deficient and

crude because their analytical matching abilities develop at that age and the comparator

set they use is made up of the predominantly analytically oriented works of adults.

Ehrezweig argues against the widespread devaluation of unconsciously oriented

syncretistic matching and scanning attention, and laments the ways that our society

encourages children, at a certain point in their development, to put aside that way of

thinking and to adopt analytic matching and focused attention exclusively. Ehrenzweig

proposes that these unconscious faculties should be preserved, encouraged and honed by exposing children throughout their development of analytic faculties to the works of the

172 twentieth century avant-garde artists, like Klee or Picasso, in whose art the reconciliation

of the unconscious and the conscious modalities is at its best. He maintains that exposing

young people, at all stages of development, to such work would encourage free

movement between the two modalities, because after all "There is no hard and fast

distinction between vertical and horizontal listening just as there is no sharp boundary

between conscious and unconscious processes. One mental level gradually leads into the

other. The oscillation between the two types of hearing can be shallow; but it can also be

profound" (Ehrenzweig 27). Only when such free movement is possible can we reach

down to that sort of experience which allows for polyphonic or multidimensional hearing

and seeing. This is why, Ehrenzweig maintains that a good artist or "trained musician

allows his attention to oscillate freely between focused and unfocused (empty) states,

now focusing precisely on the solid vertical sound of chords, now emptying his attention

so that he can comprehend the loose, transparent web of polyphonic voices in their

entirety" (27). Throughout his book, Ehrenzweig asserts the importance of this

"profound" or deep oscillation between the two types of hearing, or between the two

mental processes. This depth reaching dynamic has atrophied in Western culture,

Ehrenzweig maintains, for this culture gives primacy to reason and analytic logic while

denigrating the importance of the lower level mental activity in the unconscious.

Denigrating these lower level mental activities has led it to dispense with the imagination and bodily experience from which these lower level processes spring. Ehrenzweig attempts to reengage this dynamic oscillation by gradually leading the reader through the

173 spiral of his argument that constantly moves to and fro, between the two modes of mental activity.

After dealing with these two ways of hearing, Ehrenzweig proposes that there are likewise two modes of vision: syncretistic vision and analytic vision. He contends that both modes of vision are important and neither should be sacrificed to the other; one's mind should be able to shift freely from one mode to another, just as the attention must swing between the lower-level and the higher-level faculties in hearing. Analytic seeing or surface-level vision consciously makes distinctions, as it draws on its powers of conscious attention and its "pinpoint focus" to extract detail, simple pattern, or to distinguish figure from ground. Ehrenzweig also calls this form of vision gestalt vision, which he relates to Gestalt psychology. "The conscious gestalt compulsion makes us bisect the visual field into significant 'figure' and insignificant 'ground'" (Ehrenzweig

21). Its opposite, the syncretistic or low-level vision is total or global and undifferentiated; syncretistic vision refuses the sharply focused detailed view and relies on the unconscious to scan the complex web of the visual surface and to hold its complexity in a single undivided and unfocused glance.

By working at the level of the unconscious, syncretistic vision operates in a manner similar to the primary process and employs its methods, for example:

"displacement of emphasis," which reverses the conscious preference from the figure to the background; indifference to temporal and spatial cohesion; use of".. .or-or.. thinking or the forming of "mutually exclusive constellations" by means of its ability to 174 fully interchange the components of its total structure (Ehrenzweig 32-34). Furthermore, because syncretistic vision is undifferentiated, it is also impartial, i.e. it registers and treats all the details with equal importance, while being indifferent to their position either within the figure or the ground. Moreover, like the work of primary process in the dream, the work of syncretistic vision is marked by unconscious plastic coherence, as opposed to rational coherence based on analytic matching; yet, though it is less clearly defined and more plastic, syncretistic vision appears more real than the analytic vision and its abstract pattern recognition.

Ehrenzweig maintains that "we have to suppress our interest in pattern as such in order to make vision into an efficient instrument for scanning reality. The plastic quality of vision giving vividness to reality depends more on the suppression of form than on precise articulation" (14). Furthermore, this is precisely where he situates the paradox of syncretistic vision: the products of the primary process thinking have been mistaken as being chaotic and so the contributions of the primary process thinking were deemed insignificant, yet they are characterized by a global all-comprehending form. Ehrenzweig states the paradox this way: "Syncretistic vision may appear as empty of precise detail though it is in fact merely undifferentiated.... It impresses us as empty, vague and generalized only because the narrowly focused surface consciousness cannot grasp its wider more comprehensive structure. Its precise concrete content has become inaccessible and 'unconscious'" (19-20). According to Ehrenzweig, syncretistic vision is also conjunctive and serial; its structure is open to an unlimited number of variations but

175 within the defined boundaries of the unconscious content and the primary process that manages it according to the rules specific to this process. "While surface vision is disjunctive," he asserts, "low-level vision is conjunctive and serial. What appears ambiguous, multi-evocative or open-ended on a conscious level becomes a single serial structure with quite firm boundaries on an unconscious level" (32).

Ehrenzweig illustrates the operation of serialization using Arnold Schoenberg's serial, twelve-tone compositions as an example. Like the firm boundaries the products of the unconscious possess, Schoenberg's serial variations have definite boundaries; nonetheless, while his compositions are not ambiguous, they are apprehended as nearly formless and massively confusing by a rigid listener, whose focused attention prevents the dispersed unconscious scanning and so cannot apprehend the global nexus, which is necessary to understand in order to appreciate the form of Schoenberg's work. The boundaries in the form Schoenberg composed are established by the basic row, on which

Schoenberg based his compositions—the tone row on which any composition was based is a particular arrangement of the 12 tones of a chromatic scale. Moreover, Schoenberg's

12-tone compositions are serial variations of the basic row, provided according to strict rules (the row may be inverted, transposed or retrograded). Thus, Schoenberg's compositions also held "the eternal theme containing from the outset the unlimited number of permutations which are supposed to preserve intact the identity of the theme"

(Ehrenzweig 34). As Ehrenzweig points out, one of the most characteristic variations of his theme was the back-to-front reversal. Use of such "retrograde" back-to-front reversals

176 disrupts the temporal sequence of sounds, and, therefore, their melodic sequence. Such

disruption makes constellations of sound in Schoenberg's music appear to focused

hearing as disordered and chaotic, for only the unconscious scanning can apprehend the

global form of the composition and grasp its profound sense. Schoenberg's compositions

eschew melody (temporal flow)—they shatter melody by means of serialization and its

limitless permutations. Ehrenzweig points out that in a melody the sequence of intervals

(melodic steps) has to remain roughly constant to ensure that the melody can be grasped

as a "gestalt" form; but this is precisely what serialization and the unconscious scanning

attacks. "Serialization," he writes "discards every remnant of an identical sequence and

systematically attacks every vestige of a surface gestalt" (34). Furthermore, "Serialization

directly attacks all conscious means of continuity" (Ehrenzweig 35). When continuity

has been dismantled, it is impossible to anticipate order based on steady progressive

development. Serialization, therefore, renders ordinary gestalt perception impotent;

while, at the same time, it encourages the lower-level undifferentiated unconscious

scanning, which opens new modes of perceptual engagement and facilitates recognition

of the work's submerged order.

We can extend this disruptive force of serialization in the temporal sequence of

music to visual art, where the elements that make up the visual totality of the work are

interchangeable and scattered across the composition. The use of serialization to dismantle sequence and continuity is evident in the cubist paintings of Picasso, for example: Portait of Ambroise Vollard (1909-1910) or Violin, Glass, Pipe and Inkpot

177 (1912), where it disrupts the spatial sequence; futurist paintings by Carlo Carra, such as

The Funeral ofAnarchist Galli (1911), and by Giacomo Balla Plasticity of Lights +

Velocity (1912-13); the futurist sculptures of Umberto Boccioni, for example his Uniform

Forms of Continuity in Space (1913); and Fernand Leger and Dudley Murphy's cubo- futurist film Ballet Mecanique (1923-24). There are also films whose form derives from combinatory possibilities of serialization, including Peter Kubelka's Adebar (1957),

Schwechater (1958) and Arnulf Rainer (1960), and Bruce Elder's Permutations and

Combinations (1976) and Infunde Lumen Cordibus (2004).

Serial and combinatorial techniques are not the methods only recent artists have used to dismantle continuity. The development of techniques for dismantling continuity of spatial and temporal sequence can be traced across the work of the 20th century avant- garde art—and that course of development culminates in its complete dissolution for example in abstract expressionist and colourfield paintings of the 50s and 60s, and the minimal art of the 70s. Similarly in avant-garde and experimental cinema artists eschewed the continuity of sequence (spatial and temporal) and its resulting differentiated gestalt cohesion, by employing serial methods or by creating polyphonic counterpoint or multi-dimensional/multi-evocative visual composition. Avant-garde filmmakers have used these techniques to engage syncretistic vision and polyphonic or multi-dimensional attention.

Like those of modern painter, the methods of avant-garde filmmaker

(fragmentation, repetition, representation by the opposite, condensation and 178 displacement) resemble that of the primary process in their overall effect. These techniques roughly fall into the following categories: 1) reversal of emphasis and conscious preference: from figure to ground, from subject to object, counterchange patterns, and attention to tension or strife between images and/or images and sounds; 2) indifference to temporal and spatial cohesion: multiple image compositions where images are presented either side by side or as superimpositions, or in serial compositions, and in forms that emphasize rhythm and repetition over continuity; 3) "or-or" structure: compositions that rely on plastic coherence and the ability to interchange images and sounds within the total structure of the composition. These techniques are interconnected and, in fact, depend on each other's presence in a composition as a means of engaging viewers' polyphonic attention, rather as the methods primary process uses in composing a dream—they work together to engage the lower level mental activity of a sleeper.

Perhaps more than any other filmmaker, R. Bruce Elder committed his efforts to the quest of polyphonic cinema (as well as to revealing the fundamental role of bodily experience and unconscious processes in the creation and reception of art). Elder maintains that such low level thinking (which he usually refers to either as "primal experience" or as "primordial experience") might serve as a means to transforming consciousness. Hence, he contends, such low-level thinking possesses revolutionary potential—it can transform life. I also do not think that it would be incorrect to claim that

Elder's entire body of film work, which at this point is well over fifty hours in duration, presents the most comprehensive exploration of the possibilities of primary process

179 techniques in the medium of film. Each film in Elder's oeuvre is strikingly different aesthetically, and hence prompts different perceptual, emotional and mental engagement.38 In addition to its engagement with the modalities of perception, Elder's cinema also explores philosophical themes. The most important of these are: the human cost of technological advance and the place of religion in humanity. For the most part most film critics and theorists concentrate on the conceptual side of Elder's cinema, the content if you will. They have acknowledged only in passing his deeper interests in the corporeal experience, and hence his use of polyphonic structures. Those few who get past the surface level of analytic apprehension of ideas and move into the deeper levels of sensory and mental engagement, open themselves to a more profound, more radical experience. In fact, I believe that the form of his films is the radical crux of his film compositions, for it proposes an aesthetic solution to the philosophical impasse presented in the content. It does so by prompting strong corporeal experience (including erotic experience) and emotive engagement in viewers. To be sure, the use of nude erotic bodies in his films, including macro shots and close-ups of genitals, are important part of the content of the films and they do relate to Elder's philosophical concerns. Nonetheless, the experiential effects of this imagery is paramount—the intimate body, depicted on the screen, elicits strong visceral and emotive response in viewers and recasts their attention, reducing the role of conscious analysis of the content and heightens the importance of unconscious scanning and the apprehension of form. In fact, Elder's films require that viewers shift from the higher levels of conscious attention and analysis, to the lower levels of unconscious scanning and syncretistic or plastic coherence, and back again, in a 180 sort of musical rhythm. Because the polyphonic form of his cinema prompts this to-and- firo rhythmic movement, it becomes virtually impossible to sustain attention for an extended period of time to a single element from the nexus of visual and auditory elements. The key traits of Elder's polyphonic cinema, which appear in different combinations with one another and often simultaneously, include the following: the use of multiple images either side by side or as superimpositions; simultaneous use of several sounds (music, ambient sounds, and narration); use of text (subtitles, inter-titles, or typographic play with scrolls and spirals); image, text and sound often appearing in strife or conflict as opposed to in a harmonious relationship, to register the tensions of bodily experience (the plurality and simultaneity of sensations); prominence of plastic coherence of forms, as opposed to the analytic coherence that inhibits the polyvalent potential of plastic forms and their poetic associations; use of repetition and rhythmic shaping of time as opposed to narrative continuity, thus preventing viewers from anticipating the end while holding them in the "presentness" of experience.

In 1985 Elder wrote the manifesto titled "The Cinema We Need," which was published in The Canadian Forum, as a response to the question "What sort of cinema do we, as Canadians, need?" posed by the Festival of Festival's 1984 retrospective of

Canadian cinema (Elder 1985a: 261-2). According to Douglas Fetherling, Elder's manifesto "is as close as Canadian cinema has ever come to a manifesto, particularly if one adheres strictly to the implication that a manifesto must engage the public" (260).

And it certainly did engage the public. The debates lasted for several years, if not

181 decades, and within the first year of its publication it provoked five written responses both from people who shared Elder's views and those who did not. Even today it continues to inspire some and to outrage many more. Every January one can still find new postings on blogs registering the fury of students who are beginning their course on

Canadian cinema feel when they are required to read "The Cinema We Need." (Most would rather be watching Hollywood block busters.)

So, according to Elder what would this cinema that we need, as Canadians— enslaved by technology's hegemony—be like?

The cinema we need will be a cinema of perceptions, of immediate experiences. It will not be a cinema of ideas. Like narratives, ideas are formed only after the fact, serve only to represent what is already past. We must therefore find a form that is capable of orienting us toward the present, a form not based on ideas.... Such a form would not depend on separating out one aspect of experience from all the others, nor on any pre- or post-conception. ... It will present, simply and directly, the manifold of forces and relations that come into interplay in the coming-to-presence of an event. To achieve this, the form will have to allow for multiplicity and contradiction, since contraries are present in all experience. The attempt to dispose of contraries-in-experience is due to reason, not perception. It will incorporate the full diversity of the manifold of experience by making simultaneous use of multiple images representing internal speech and a variety of auditory phenomena. It would be a polyphonic cinema, possessing several concurrent lines of development.

... Rather than being a calculated metadescription of the "creative process," it will, literally, enact the process of its own emergence into being. The development of such a piece of cinema through time will be like that of a piece of totally improvised jazz (which also enacts the piece's emergence into being) rather than like a schematized metadescription of the manner by which a work might emerge into being. ... As a result, as in jazz, the marks and traces of spontaneity will be valued more highly than through preconceptions.

As it happens, the dynamic by which events come to presentness in experience is permeated by rhythm. Therefore, our cinema should, too, be

182 profoundly rhythmic. Rhythm also happens to be among the most physical of the features of any art form and that physicality, moreover, has a close relationship to the physical experience of the body. This fact points toward the importance the body will play in this form of cinema. This association of the rhythmicality of the process by which events come to presentness in experience with the physicality and rhythmicality of bodily processes means that the rhythmic form of a work of art can, by uniting the pulse of the body with patterns inherent in emergent events ... unite the mind and the body. The cinema we need will, accordingly, make extensive use of rhythmic constructions.

By dealing with immediate experience, the cinema we need would be rooted in the place where we have our being. But where we are, always, is in language, for nothing is given to experience outside of language. ... What we experience, the intended, is made in language and it is language which establishes things in the whole. This being so, the cinema we need, the cinema devoted to enacting the process by which events emerge to presentness in experience, will engage with the formative role that language plays in making present that which is given in experience. It will not be a purely visual cinema, will not be a cinema against the word, but a cinema of the power of the word.

The makers of the cinema we need will be those who have the strength to abide with doubt and uncertainty and still open themselves up to unfolding situations, allow themselves, even, to be remade by experiences the destiny of which they cannot foresee. (Elder 1985a: 267-270, my emphasis)

In summary, the key characteristics of "the cinema we need" include: emphasis on perception, such as would celebrate multiplicity and immediacy in experience; use of polyphonic constructions; the importance of spontaneity; use of non-causal forms and intensely rhythmic constructions; language as a means to apprehending that which presences what is present in experience; eschewing preconceptions and striving to create open form compositions.

Elder does not claim that his films possess the qualities that he outlines in his manifesto. To the contrary, in his rebuttal he states that his films are "far too conceptualized to be the films argued for in my article" and, furthermore, the cinema that

183 he describes "is not any cinema that actually exists, made either by myself or by any other filmmaker" (Elder 1985b: 301). Others like, Bart Testa, claim that Elder's cinema is not "the cinema of perceptions" but "the cinema of ideas" (Testa 282). But Testa makes this claim to dismiss the allegation many made that this manifesto is simply a justification for his own filmmaking.39 However, this was not Elder's intention and it was precisely what he was wrongly accused of by Peter Harcourt. Testa's claim, therefore was, on the one hand, a statement in defence of Elder, and on the other hand, an important way of redirecting attention to one key purpose of Elder's manifesto, i.e., to encourage critics and viewers to acknowledge the tradition of the Canadian experimental cinema, which according to Elder has been largely ignored by film scholars and pillaged by the film industry. Testa, then, emphasized Elder's effort to recover the avant-garde's revolutionary potential, for it represents "the little hope our country now has for reopening the closed system of thought imposed by technique, that is to say, by the U.S."

(Elder 1985a: 262). Both an artist's statement and a manifesto "The Cinema We Need" outlines the ideal which Elder hopes sometime to achieve and which others, those filmmakers that he admires, have achieved. Rather than an effort at self-promotion, it is, if anything, a critique as Testa points out (282). Furthermore, Elder's commitment to writing and promoting the awareness of other experimental filmmakers and their films, and even at the cost of neglect of his own work, about which he rarely writes and which he almost never teaches, is the evidence of his policy on criticism—nearly all his writing is an effort to explain the greatness of films by filmmakers like Michael Snow, Jack

Chambers and Stan Brakhage. 184 However, despite what has been written, including Elder's own claims, I argue that his films achieve precisely what those of other great filmmakers like Snow and

Brakhage have, i.e. elicit the real experience. All one has to do is actually view his films, without permitting preconceptions derived from others' claims about Elder's work to divert attention from the experience, to see that they embody the chief characteristics outlined in his manifesto. Elder believes in the radical potential of these forms to engage people to question technological thinking that orders the world and bodies they inhabit.

The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1979) is the first film in which Elder fully explored the polyphonic possibilities of cinema. This film takes the diary as a model for its composition, and so it presents the viewer with fragments of Elder's life, including his

"afternoon reveries and night dream visions," which he captured in a film diary he kept between 1976 and 1978.40 In this film he employs multiple images that appear as tiny windows side by side on the screen, in combinations of 1, 2, 3,4 and even 5 images.

These images include: Elder, his home, his surroundings, landscape, animals, architecture, footage from travels, images of various technologies including power-plants and steel plants, television footage, religious iconography, close-ups of male genitals.

The sounds (narration, music and ambient sound), like the images, also appear in complexes, in strife with one another and with the images.41 This strife between sounds, between images, and between sounds and images, encourages viewers to try to apprehend the global form of these compositions by scattering their attention and regressing to scanning vision. Viewers who open themselves to Elder's work do so by accepting that

185 focused gestalt perception is essentially impotent. The soft rectangular mattes, mattes shaped by hands, that overlap one another produce the feeling of fluidity in the visual composition—the images flow into one another and fuse in constantly changing complexes. While watching this film the attention has no other choice but to suspend focused attention and to adopt a sort of floating attention that scans the global form.42 The multiplicity of moving images and sounds enter through our senses and the best we can do is to allow these sensations to flow as experience and to momentarily present themselves to our consciousness as plastic associations of images and sounds, and as poetic couplings in language. This dreamlike response is reinforced by the content of images, especially the footage of Elder's travels, where he often shoots landscape and roads through a car window. Such footage, like that of the carousel, which appears at one point and is juxtaposed with the footage of a mother holding her baby, transports viewers into the depths of the unconscious, for it elicits childhood memories.43 The transformation of consciousness is one of the key themes of Elder's The Book of All the

Dead cycle, which he begins with The Art of Worldly Wisdom. In his letter to Dr.

Henderson titled "Driftworks, Pulseworks, Lightworks," Elder writes: "from ordinary waking consciousness (in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, the title of which I keep misspelling in the credits as 'The Art of WORDly Wisdom' in order to suggest the conventional nature of knowledge the film presents)" (Elder 2005: 455). Elder, therefore, opens viewers to a different mode of knowledge and experience; knowledge open to the unconscious through linguistic slips and associations, and through the experience attuned to the bodily promptings. 186 Figure 1 The Art of Worldly Wisdom by R. Bruce Elder, 1979

The last forty minutes of Elder's three hour film Illuminated Texts (1982), the

eighth film in The Book of All the Dead film cycle, also employs multiple image

composition, in this case by using travelling mattes. Like in The Art of Worldly Wisdom,

the emphasis is on strife between images and sounds—and in the last section of the film

that emphasis is especially strongly marked. Furthermore, in Illuminated Texts the strife

is intensified by the superimposed text that is both perceived as visual and auditory.

Unlike the stationary mattes in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, which through the light spillage in the seams of its mattes and the presence of multiple moving images and sounds eventually pull viewers into the deeper mental levels of attention, the movement 187 of the travelling mattes and the movement within the mattes in Illuminated Texts direct viewers' attention more immediately to the surface and the total structure of this audio visual polyphonic composition.

Elder's use of the travelling mattes permits three moving images to be perceived simultaneously. However, the three can only be perceived as constituting global whole when the attention is relaxed. The two prominent lines in Elder's composition, which have been superimposed in the A-roll and the B-roll of the travelling matte, consist of images of the following sorts: European architecture captured during Elder's travels; roads and cars; what is seen while driving in a car; a car race track in Munich's sport's stadium (the same stadium where Leni Riefenstahl filmed Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935); power plants and factories; Polish country side, along with shots of horse buggies, tractors, and Polish army trucks; Auschwitz concentration camp; female and male nudes; slaughterhouse and animal slaughter. Elder draws our attention again and again to movement, travel, transport—to being transported from one state to another state. Further, the shooting in this film is even more dynamic than in The Art of Worldly

Wisdom; images constantly move, swirl, vibrate with the presence of the filmmaker behind the camera. A third constituent of the image complexes in the travelling matte section of Illuminated Texts is the actual travelling matte itself. It is composed of numerous geometric shapes (squares, horizontal and vertical rectangles, triangles, and circles) that are constantly undergoing cycles of transformation in form and size.

188 The emphasis on polyphonic movement in this section makes it virtually impossible to focus on any single moving image—the travelling matte constantly closes in on an image and just as it disappears, it is replaced by a new image. Furthermore, the human eye is necessarily drawn to each new movement, it follows it, and for that reason, while watching this section of Elder's film, viewers' eyes are constantly scanning the screen's surface. Moreover, the intermittent appearance of the text momentarily directs viewers' eyes to the centre of the frame—the text seems to take on special emphasis because viewers use it in an effort to make sense of the combination of text, image and the voiceover narration. This travelling matte sequence in Illuminated Texts brings the figure-ground oscillations to the fore; this oscillation dynamizes the viewers attention, prompting the change from focused to scanning vision and back again—after some time, viewers generally let the distinctions between the figure and ground, the self and the world, the self and the other, become fluid and eventually dissolve into an oceanic bliss.

This bliss is interrupted by the final shot of this film which is completely still and where we see Elder's reflection while shooting with his film camera in a window of the concentration camp barrack. At this point all the fluid pieces from the travelling matte sequence flash in our mind's eye while we are thrown back into the world of division and reason.

189 Figure 2 Illuminated Texts by R. Bruce Elder, 1982

In 1995 Elder returned to the multiple image and sound composition when he

began his new film cycle The Book of Praise. A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has

Been Surprised by Joy (1997) is the first film in this film cycle and like The Art of

Worldly Wisdom is completely composed of multiple moving images that are projected through still mattes (again using rear-projection). The mattes in this film have a much more organic, or even an Art Nouveau, appearance, as they are hand-made cutouts. The footage that is projected through these mattes consists mainly of nude moving images of female and male bodies that are juxtaposed with footage of European architecture and footage taken from Elder's travels in Europe and Canada, and of course footage shot

190 from a moving car. Over these complexes Elder superimposes still text. Again in this film, the visuals seem to be in conflict with the sound, which is made up of music and voiceover narration. His The Young Prince (2007) also employs the polyphonic image and sound composition, this time using digital technology. To create that film Elder has developed numerous computer programmes that would permit him to create new and previously unseen multiple moving image compositions.

Figure 3 A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised By Joy by R.

Bruce Elder, 1997

In both these films, like in his others, the emphasis is on bringing viewers into a slide between focused and unfocussed attention—to move continually from the higher and to lower registers of mental activity by means of strong corporeal engagement with the polyphonic image and sound compositions and back again, in a sort of rhythmic 191 oscillation. Its purpose is to open the way towards another mode, a more primal mode of experience.

Conclusion Anton Ehrenzweig draws our attention to examples of children's syncretistic vision and syncretistic matching. He notes that in adults the capacity for syncretistic vision generally diminishes. He asserts, however, that this decline is not inevitable, that every human being possesses this ability. Because we all experienced it as children, it is the foundation of our mental capacity to organize the world and give it sense. This elemental capacity unites all the people—for it is a common base level. Unfortunately, the reality of living and our toils to survive have forced us to repress syncretistic vision by expelling it to the lower registers of our mental activity. For the most part, our conscious lives depend on analytic vision and focused attention. However, as Ehrenzweig points out, and as I tried to sketch out through the course of this section, art and artists grant us the momentary contact with the world of syncretistic experience and imagination, and in doing so, they reconnect people with this primary form of experience.

My analyses of Elder's films constitute but one level of interpretation, my interpretation.

I do not believe that their imaginative richness has been fully exhausted. Just like a dream, which supplies virtually inexhaustible material for analysis, works of art that engage the deeper levels of mental functioning, in both their production and reception, function in the same manner as dreams and are truly inexhaustible; they are timeless.

192 R. Bruce Elder & Thinking-Through-Rhythm: A Semiotic Approach to Rhythm in Experimental Cinema [H]ow often I see the underground films—and now everybody's making "pattern" films, single frames and all—and it always comes to the same: They remain nothing, nothing can save them, no matter how beautiful some of the shots or frames are, if the footage lacks rhythmic structuring in time, if the personality of the film-maker is flat like a pancake. (Mekas 300)

I hope that through the course of this chapter I will be able to shed some light on the function of rhythm in experimental cinema, for this topic has been rarely addressed by film scholars. Ironically, experimental cinema is rooted in rhythm, as Jean Mitry points outs "rhythmic possibilities of film ... brought into being a movement later described as 'avant-garde' simply because its sole purpose was that of experimentation"

(Mitry 207). But where does one begin when trying to sketch out a quality as ephemeral as rhythm? The most commonsense approach would be first to start by investigating the already existing body of texts on this subject. However, one very quickly comes to a realization that the body of work on this topic is as elusive as the subject itself. Perhaps, one of the most fascinating things that I encountered is the fact that even when I did find materials on this topic this subject was often treated like an appendage—an entity that urges to be acknowledged but is not given enough attention. Therefore chapters on rhythm usually appeared either at the end of a book, and the topic is usually treated in a cursory manner, to cover up the lack of existing conceptual framework to ground this subject. Furthermore, it appears that each discipline seems to have a distinct understanding as to what constitutes rhythm and often even among its scholars the

193 definition is not consistent. Therefore, rather than starting this topic by first providing a

"simple" definition of rhythm, proceeding into its application and investigation in experimental cinema, I will try to sketch it out through the course of this chapter and examine its role and relationship within the avant-garde film practice. I will rely on the theoretical writings on semiotics by Charles S. Peirce, Jean Mitry, R. Bruce Elder and

Julia Kristeva to help me lay down the groundwork for this topic, which is certainly in desperate need of one.

Locating Rhythm in Charles Sanders Peirce's Semiotics Charles S. Peirce's semiotics is undeniably one of the most intimidating of semiotic theories. A beginning student of Peirce's semiotics is simply overwhelmed by the formidable logical apparatus this philosopher brings to bear on his study of signs.

Even experienced philosopher Richard Rorty has confessed to finding Peirce difficult.

However, Peirce's permutations and combinations of the triads of signs and of ideas might prove the most productive when trying to locate rhythm, especially since rhythm is not an entity, an object that can be perceived and represented in itself. Rhythm is more akin to a quality that makes its presence known by means of other entities (sound, image). It is closer to potentiality than to actual, realized, definite form.

Peirce begins an essay offering an introduction to his semiotics by stating, "Logic, in its general sense, is ... only another name for semiotic (oTi^ieicoTucri), the quasi- necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs" (Peirce 1893-1910: 4). Peirce uses the term

"logic" in a sense which is "derived from Scholastic philosophy, where logic was

194 understood as the general theory of representation, that is, a theory of the ways a 'mental product' is able to 'reflect' or 'mirror' veridically the world" (Innis 1). In other words, both logic and semiotics rely on mental representations, that faithfully "mirror" the perceivable world in which we live. Therefore, when we think, we use a process, abstraction, which like a mirror does not present to us the real object itself in its material concreteness but instead offers its abstracted double or reflection, its re-presentation.

Hence, a sign is always a sign for something, a form that makes reference to concrete object or reality. Peirce used the term representamen to refer to a sign which we apprehend in its immediacy as having some direct link for us to an object in the world and, thus, represents it to our senses. He writes: "A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity" (Peirce 1893-1910:

5). Furthermore, this first sign or representamen prompts another sign in our mind, a mental sign or an interpretant, which interprets the first sign by linking it or referring to an idea, perhaps of another sign or situation, this is called the "ground' of the representamen. Therefore according to Peirce a representamen "addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign" (ibid.). Following

Peirce's schematics of a sign, in order for a sign to be considered a sign it must exist as a triad consisting of a representamen, an object and an interpretant.

Furthermore, a sign, like thought, is a mode of representation and therefore "can only represent the Object and tell about it. It cannot furnish acquaintance with or

195 recognition of that Object; for that is what is meant... by the Object of a Sign; namely, that with which it presupposes an acquaintance in order to convey some further information concerning it" (Peirce 1893-1910: 6). In other words, a sign calls our attention to an object that it stands for, and provides enough perceptual data to trigger in us a second sign, the interpretant, that prompts further information (that is, another idea) about that given sign. Nevertheless, between the actual real object and the sign that is its representamen there is a concrete and lived distance (difference) that is maintained. A sign can only be a sign for an object as long as this distance is maintained.

But how does this actually bring us closer to understanding rhythm and its possible place in Peirce's semiotics? Rhythm is not a concrete entity or an object that can be pointed towards and, thus, cannot have a corresponding representamen. What is more, when experiencing rhythm one feels an ineffable sense of proximity and immediacy rather than distance; therefore rhythm cannot be either a mental nor sensory representation for something, if rhythm can be neither representamen nor represented object. Yet, rhythm does exist because we can feel it when it presents itself to us, so there must be a place for it somewhere within Peirce's semiotics. What possible relevance could Peirce's semiotics have to our project; that of understanding rhythm and its importance in experimental film?

Peirce divides signs into three triads, each of which are again divisible by three:

"first, according as the sign in itself;... secondly, according as the relation of the sign to its object;... thirdly, according as its Interpretant represents it" (Peirce 1893-1910: 7). For 196 our purposes we will focus on the first division and its triadic formation. According to the first division, a sign can be further divided into three subsequent sign formations where

"sign in itself is a mere quality [Qualisign\, is an actual existent [S/'/u/gn], or is a general law [Legisign] "(ibid.). Since we have already determined that rhythm is not an "actual existent" that can be apprehended and perceived as an entity by our senses it appears to correspond to the first triad and its first division: "sign as a mere quality." Metre on the other hand, can be cognitively deduced and provides us with an abstracted but definite form of rhythm. It is "the notation of the natural measures of rhythm,... the arithmetic expression of periodicity,... the rhythmic design" (Mitry 213), which is a kind of Replica of the qualities of rhythm. It is therefore a Sinsign (as well as a Legisign) because it is determined by a "law established by men" (ibid.); as such, it is a convention that relies on common understanding between people. Rhythm flees any possibility of being fixed into a determinate entity and so becoming a Sinsign. As soon as it is fixed it is no longer rhythm but its Replica, the metre. It presents itself to us only as a sheer quality and therefore, in Peirce's taxonomy, as a Qualisign, that is, as "a mere logical possibility" which "cannot actually act as a sign until it is embodied" (Peirce 1893-1910: 19, 7).

A Peircean conception of rhythm could well draw on his study of Ideoscopy by getting back to his preoccupation with logic and its connection to his study of signs. In his letter to Lady Welby (Oct. 12, 1904) he states: "Ideoscopy consists in describing and classifying the ideas that belong to ordinary experience or that naturally arise in connection with ordinary life, without regard to their being valid or invalid or to their

197 psychology" (1904: 220). Thus, ldeoscopy appears to bear resemblance to phenomenology because "ordinary experience" is being apprehended through

"intentionality."44 Furthermore, the ideoscopic method, like the phenomenological, has as its subject the conscious subject. This subject experiences the lived world and translates the sensory information through cognition into thought, which is not judged as being valid or invalid. As noted before, signs and ideas in Peirce's philosophy, because they are representations of the world, are treated almost synonymously. Therefore, he also applies his triadic classifications, as he did in semiotics, into his study of ideas and thus throws

"all ideas into three classes of Firstness, of Secondness, and of Thirdness" (ibid.). These categories also resemble Peirce's Qualisign, Sinsign and Legisign, except that he is dealing with ideas in ldeoscopy rather than signs. Ideas of Firstness are "qualities of feeling, or mere appearances" (Peirce 1904: 221). Firstness is a quality of feeling in itself

"without reference to anything else" (ibid.). Idea of Secondness is an experience rather than a feeling, an "experience of effort, prescinded from the idea of a purpose" (Peirce

1904: 222). Peirce contends that the notion of effort presupposes the experience of resistance. Therefore something presents itself to the consciousness as an experience of resistance. In addition, experience also implies an experience of something, as opposed to a feeling of quality. Whereas Firstness does not require conscious apprehension because it does not meet resistance, Secondness, on the other hand, could not exist without the engagement of consciousness that meets resistance and thus experiences effort. Ideas of

Thirdness involve reason and law. Therefore Thirdness is an idea of relation, mainly a relation between Firstness and Secondness. Peirce summarizes ldeoscopy's triadic thesis: 198 "If you take any ordinary triadic relation, you will always find a mental element in it.

Brute action [resistance] is secondness, any mentality involves thirdness" (1904: 225).

Rhythm, as I have already illustrated, bears a close resemblance of a Qualisign\ it should therefore also correspond to the idea of Firstness, and thus to the feeling of quality. But what is feeling and what is "quality," according to Peirce's uses of the latter term? In his 1906 text "A Definition of Feeling," Peirce describes feeling as "an instance of that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever.... [A]n instance of that sort of element of consciousness which is all that it is positively, in itself, regardless of anything else" (1906: 152). In other words a feeling is a state which is immediate and unmediated because it is not distanced from our consciousness by means of "analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever." It presents itself to our consciousness in its immediacy. Because feeling "is positively, in itself' it is impossible to gain knowledge of it through introspection, for that would require the distance of analysis. Therefore, wherever there is an immediate consciousness there is a feeling, which for that very reason remains completely barred from the unveiling of introspection (Peirce 1906: 153). In his further illustration of feeling, Peirce appears to deviate from traditional phenomenology in his suggestion of the possibility of something

(some energy?) prior to consciousness that strives to become conscious, although he does not explicitly state it. He writes: "although a feeling is immediate consciousness, that is, is whatever of consciousness there may be that is immediately present, yet there is no consciousness in it because it is instantaneous.... [FJeeling is nothing but a quality, and a

199 quality is not conscious: it is a mere possibility" (1906: 154). In other words, feeling, because it is a quality, is a "mere possibility" or "abstract potentiality" (Peirce 1896:

230). Its being is that of a mere possibility—but the idea of a mere possibility suggests what pre-exists becoming consciousness; accordingly it strives towards its potential realization in the future, its manifestation. It must be previous to consciousness because it is not yet realized and experienced. Quality is "an element separated from everything else and in no world but itself... merely potential" (Peirce 1896: 232).

To further emphasize the notion of "potentiality" Peirce defines quality by what it is not: "It is not anything which is dependent, in its being, upon mind, whether in the form of sense or in that of thought. Nor is it dependent, in its being, upon the fact that some material thing possesses it" (1896: 230). Peirce's description of Firstness and the distinctions he makes between what presents itself to consciousness and what is a mere potential, indicate how radically his Ideoscopy departs from phenomenology, with its fixation on consciousness and intentionality. From this perspective it might be possible right now to locate rhythm in Peirce's Ideoscopy as a Firstness, a feeling of quality which is a mere potential. However, as soon as a Firstness is apprehended by our consciousness it is transformed into Secondness, a metre, which involves a collision between an existent entity and consciousness.

200 Rhythm and Cinema: The Semiotic Approach to Cinema of Jean Mitry and Bruce Elder's Thinking-Through-Rhythm The "pure" film we all dream of making is a visual symphony of rhythmic images which the feeling of the artist alone coordinates and projects onto the screen. (Germaine Dulac qtd. in Mitry 209)

The purpose of this chapter, as previously stated, is to attempt to apprehend rhythm's key attributes and to situate rhythm in experimental film practice. So far we have been able to develop a very rough sketch of rhythm's character by considering it within the framework of Peirce's semiotics and Ideoscopy. Now, I will try to situate its function in cinema by discussing two distinctly different film theorists, their views on cinema and on the role of rhythm in film (especially experimental film). The first film theorist is Jean Mitry who combines phenomenology and semiotics in his analysis of cinema. The other is R. Bruce Elder, who is also a filmmaker and therefore brings an applied perspective to film studies, and combines those ideas with notions drawn from psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Heideggerian philosophy.

Jean Mitry's semiotics and analysis of film are rooted in phenomenology and therefore primarily focus on consciousness and intentionality. Intentionality (the

"directedness" of consciousness, that fact that consciousness is always a consciousness of something) does not account for ur-conscious (or "preter-conscious") feelings of quality; rather it concentrates on concrete entities that can be apprehended by consciousness as mental representations. This emphasis somewhat impedes the scope of Mitry's film theory, confining his investigation to the realm of representational imagery, imagery that 201 has a direct correspondence with the objects in the real world. Its emphasis on

representational imagery renders much of his theoretical corpus inapplicable to the

abstract imagery of much experimental cinema. This lack of fit is particularly evident in

his chapter on rhythm. However, there are elements of his theory of which those of us

interested in experimental film can avail ourselves. For example, Mitry seems to be

aware and acknowledges imperceptible entities, which he admits, play an important role

in cinema. Quoting Abel Gance and Jean Epstein, he writes: "Long before semiology

ever entered the arena, it was said simply that 'what matters is not the images but what

exists between the images,' or else that 'the images signify less through what they show

... than by their ordering and less by that ordering than by their rhythmic and semantic

relationships'" (10). Unfortunately, because Mitry's theory is in thrall to its

phenomenological underpinnings, it does not account for those entities that exist in the

"between" of the ur-consciousness, and which perpetually flee from concretization.

Instead, in his desperate attempt at trying to locate rhythm within consciousness (within

the realm studied by phenomenology) he imposes intellectualizing answers on a

phenomenon which slips away from the grips of consciousness and representation. Mitry

writes: "rhythm can be perceived only insofar as it is governed by our consciousness....

Thus the notion of rhythm cannot be accepted as anything but an intellectual process

which reconstructs mentally the perceived relationships in order to abstract an

appropriate 'idea'"(211). Rhythm, then, according to Mitry's definition is nothing else

but a representation of a pattern in time which presents itself to the consciousness.

Mitry's approach here, it seems to me, fails to grasp the essence of rhythm; as soon as we 202 become conscious of rhythm and impose our intellectual framework on it, what we apprehend are representations of rhythm (Secondness and Thirdness in accordance with

Peirce's terminology). To put the point otherwise, what we apprehend are descriptions of rhythm—or, more exactly notations of rhythm have assumed the form of metre and cadence rather than rhythm itself in its immediacy. Rhythm, after all, is a quality felt prior to being perceived and apprehended by consciousness, and as soon as it is apprehended it transforms into a concrete entity of metre or cadence which is "nothing more than the 'index' of rhythm" (Mitry 212). But what constitutes perception and consciousness according to Mitry?

Perception, according to Mitry, organizes structures and gathers the raw data of the real world that enters the body through its senses. He uses a metaphor of building to refer to the relation of perception to raw sensory data: perception is a builder that creates a structure from sensory materials. However, the builder can only build within the limits of the materials that are at her or his disposal; in other words "perception ... is able to build only within the limits set by our senses" (Mitry 42). Furthermore, consciousness takes the sensory information and from it forms a perception. In so doing, it organizes the sensory material into "a reality which it is able to dominate because it is the consequence of its efforts"(iW

203 further structure on it. The intentional subject accords those structured entities the status

of objects. By maintaining a distance between itself and the objects of the lived world,

consciousness dominates them—it dominates them by organizing them into an

intellectually structured reality. "The reality presented as images, which seems to us

immediate, is always of necessity—and with good reason—a mediated reality" (Mitry

91). Thus, the world we perceive does not appear to us in its immediacy but is a mediated

reality. The organizing activity of consciousness puts the world at a distance. Therefore

"perceived reality is the form of our perception, which is predetermined, i.e. 'framed and

limited' by our sensory level. To perceive is to construct a world; to be conscious of it is

to present the world as an object" (Mitry 43).

Mitry asserts that consciousness exists by virtue of the objects of which it is

aware; by means of its relation with the object, consciousness '"knows itself within the

object—and through the object.... Thus consciousness defines itself in what appears to

it" (44-5). But how does consciousness deal with imperceptible elements, with non-

objects, with feelings of quality, with Firstness? And furthermore, how can Mitry's

phenomenologically based semiotic approach be applied when examining abstract

experimental films which are devoid of any object reference, and therefore provide no

anchor for consciousness? Mitry writes: "Consciousness neatly avoids what it cannot

perceive and constructs an image by creating tighter and tighter links between the

elements which impinge on it through the senses. Yet non-perceived elements are as

much an integral part of reality as the perceived elements" (41). Consciousness, then,

204 carefully selects only the concrete perceptible entities which are immediately grasped by the senses to create mental representations of the real world. However, both the perceptible and the imperceptible elements, beings and non-beings, concrete entities and

"mere potentialities," make up reality. Rhythm, as a Firstness (to slide into Peircian terminology) belongs to the realm of the imperceptible elements which, as mere possibility, what is present through unpresence, serves to establish the possibility of images being assembled into coherent sequence or sounds forming a melody. Just as it would be impossible for us to see a drop of water unless we immerse our hands in water and lift them up, allowing the water to run down to the tips of our fingers, and to form a drop we can perceive, it would be equally as impossible to conceive of a poem, a film, a piece of music, or a painting without having the perceivable concrete form specific to each discipline come forth from its underside, from the imperceptible matrix of the form.45 But can we simply say that rhythm is a matrix? In accordance with Mitry's film theory this is exactly where rhythm would most likely be located, in the film's formal matrix. This would accord with his previous statement on rhythm that "rhythm cannot be accepted as anything but an intellectual process which reconstructs mentally the perceived relationships in order to abstract an appropriate 'idea'" (211)—the intellect constructs form (metre) from the matrix which is rhythm. Thus, rhythm's non-being manifests itself by being converted into a metric form—but in manifesting its potentiality it is transformed into another form of being (that of a definite entity). Hence, we do not actually perceive the formal matrix that is rhythm in itself; our apprehension of the potentiality that is rhythm is mediated by intellectual construct that is metre. When we 205 think that we perceive rhythm, what we are actually experiencing is no longer rhythm as a matrix, as a felling of quality or a "mere potentiality," but rather as a delineated, objectified being.

I would like to get back to Mitry's insistence on representational imagery in his film theory and his dismissal of abstract cinema. Representation in its direct relation to objects in the real world provides the perfect support for his phenomenological position—it also furnishes the ground for scientific data Mitry uses to buttress his phenomenology. However, film is an art and it belongs to the province of aesthetics, whose methods must extend beyond the purely scientific and phenomenological realm of the senses. How can science or phenomenology account for synaesthesia or the unconscious feelings that the given film might engender.46 Mitry mentions occasionally in his book the abstract films of Walther Ruttman and Viking Eggling, but only to discredit their importance. The abstract films by those two filmmakers, also known as

"absolute film" and "visual music," are visual compositions of geometric and biomorphic shapes which form complex visual rhythms to be experienced like music, but by the eyes/sight. Mitry writes:

[I]t is clear that the eye is able to perceive relative durations from shot to shot because the relevant geometrical shapes become altered within these duration and because the relationships of time are always clearly marked. Yet what is most significant is that these relationships in themselves convey absolutely nothing. They do not provoke any feelings, or any specific states of mind. (219)

He continues by saying that he actually conducted experiments with audiences in cinema clubs and the results proved his point that these films "do not provoke any feelings, or

206 any specific states of mind." But what about music? Do not certain musical compositions engender feelings? Consider the happiness of child's frolics that one might re-experience when listening to Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen Op. 15 (Scenes from Childhood,

1838), or might be brought to tears when listening to Frederyk Chopin's heart wrenching

Preludium Deszczowe Op. 28 no. 15 (Rain Prelude, 1838-1839). Yet, Mitry has a scientific explanation for the difference he identified, that is, between visual and musical rhythm: "Whereas our ears can pick up differences of time of as little as a tenth-of-a- second and wave-patterns of pitch and tonality of as little as a comma (81/80),... our eyes cannot perceive relationships of any less than a fifth of the duration of a relatively short shot" (218). Whatever the scientific explanation for this might be one thing is certain: when I watch Stan Brakhage's Black Ice (1994) or Coupling (1999) these films through their complex visual rhythm produce feelings in me—in fact very vivid feelings, which remain with me longer than other films that use representational imagery. Can I describe this rhythm, i.e. capture it in conceptual form? No, but I can move my body or make a film in response to it. Once again, Mitry's resistance to abstract imagery stems from the fact that his theory is rooted in phenomenology and therefore requires conscious representations to ground his theory.

In concluding this section on Mitry I would like to point out an important slip in his writing. I do so because I believe it lifts the screen of phenomenology and science, behind which his "invisible other" lurks. Mitry writes: "we could never overstate the fact that the most realistic image is not a reproduction, or imitation but an interpretation"

207 (99). Therefore, the "realistic" image is not an image that imitates or reproduces the objects in the lived world, but instead it is an interpretation, a translation by an artist of an object or experience in the lived world into an artwork. The rhythmic structure of an abstract could be considered realistic, for it is the paradigm of an interpretation of the world as a lived experience. Thus rhythm defies being perceived, it is the interpretive inner voice of a film artist, which achieves luminosity only through visual or auditory entities in order to register the inner rhythm/voice in an artist.

The interpretive role of an artist will become more apparent through reflecting on

R. Bruce Elder's notion of thinking-through-rhythm. What does Elder believe rhythm to be that we can think with (or through) it, and what is thinking-through-rhythm?

According to Elder, and very much in line with Martin Heidegger's metaphysics,47 reality and our lived world is a process dynamized by the strife between the urge of Be-ing to conceal itself and its urge to reveal beings. The inner dynamic of this struggle can only be apprehended corporeally because it can only be felt through rhythm. "We apprehend the dynamics through which things come-to-be through the faculty of rhythm ... because rhythm ... reflects the discourse of Be-ing. We become aware of Be-ing in a certain throb, a certain stress, torsion, and flex we feel in our bodies" (Elder 2004: 462, my emphasis).

In other words, the non-perceptible rhythm "reflects the discourse of Be-ing" precisely because Be-ing itself is invisible until it comes forth in the form of a being, but, like rhythm, at that point, it is no longer Be-ing but instead a being. Its Be-ingness is displaced by the concreteness of beings which conceal Be-ing by fixing it and thus

208 transforming it into the actuality of beings. One can certainly see an affinity between

Elder's notion of Be-ing and Peirce's ideas of Firstness—feelings of quality as a "mere possibility." Elder writes: "Flow, speed, liquidity, dynamism, perpetual dynamism, transformation reveal the multiple possibility inherent in that which precedes beings, and so provoke a sense of the gap between what is and What-might-be" (2004: 461). This

"What-might-be" is precisely the "mere possibility" of Peirce and the Be-ing both Elder and Heidegger allude. This Be-ing is open because it is not yet fixed and oriented toward the future because it is potentiality. "Time, and therefore rhythm, reveals to us that future is always without apprehensible content. Thinking-through-rhythm reveals the future's transcendence" (Elder 2004: 463). Rhythm, therefore, by means of its likeness to Be-ing, provides us with the greatest insight into the inner dynamics of "reality," which we can only apprehend as a feeling of "throb, a certain stress, torsion, and flex" within our bodies. Thus, this corporeal apprehension of a feeling we have within our bodies, a

"feeling of quality" because it is not yet a concrete actual entity but a "throb" or "flex" that is implacable, is a form of thinking, thinking-through-rhythm. Thinking-through- rhythm is therefore necessarily pre-ideational and pre-verbal form of thinking, which does not rely on representation that mirrors the "outside" world. It is unlike representational thinking (which Elder usually refers to as discursive thinking) that requires a distance between the subject and the outside "objective" world. Consequently, it is prior to the "thetic" that exists by virtue of this distance and thus positionality

(Kristeva 1984: 43). Elder's thinking-through-rhythm thus resembles what Julia Kristeva defines as the "semiotic" order, but we will return to Kristeva shortly. 209 Thinking-through-rhythm redirects our thought: instead of extending outward towards the "objective" world, it turns inward, towards the dark interiors of our inner self that vibrates with corporeal rhythm. "In responding to rhythm, something deep in us responds to some profound attribute of the dynamics of earth. Giving a place of privilege to thinking-through-rhythm changes thought's relation to its object" (Elder 2004: 463).

"Earth" is concealed in darkness; it is, therefore, the unfamiliar yet familiar "Other," which conceals rather than unveils beings, objects. Therefore, by responding to rhythm we respond to this "dynamics of earth." Doing so changes our relation to objects: they are felt through the body rather than being thought in terms of positionalities of the "thetic."

Furthermore, rhythm, by its flux and pulsation, turns our attention inwards and draws us closer to the primordial, the primordial Other—perhaps the mother with whom we communicated through our intrauterine relations. This reconnects us to what had been forgotten for a time, but not completely lost. "For rhythm always discloses itself at once both as something beyond us, to which we give ourselves, and as something deep in ourselves. Thinking-thorough-rhythm thus reveals the mutuality of self and Other" (Elder

2004: 463). Therefore thinking-through-rhythm allows the self to extend itself in two opposite temporal directions: as a potentiality, towards the beyond of the future, to which we reach out and "give ourselves"; and towards the past which echoes deep within the self. Because the self, when attuned to rhythm, is not fixed within the present, the subject is not concretized and severed from the Other. The self is returned to its mutuality with the Other, to a space before the subject/object division has taken place. "Rhythm makes time, and time is the fundament of our relation to alterity, to what lies beyond us" (Elder 210 2004: 463). Therefore, rhythm grounds a relation to alterity, simply because rhythm and time are one, and the meaning of time is that we cannot really apprehend what "lies beyond us" in the past and in the future—the past and the future always remains Other, forever concealed from us yet related to us, while present always flees us.

Time and alterity in rhythm confer upon us the reality of fragmentation, dispersal, and heterogeneity. Accordingly "Thinking-through-rhythm allows multiple patterns to contend, without resolution" (Elder 2004: 463). Why without resolution? Because resolution presupposes a fixed state rather than a dynamic movement, which is propelled by the contention between incommensurable "patterns." Though it cannot arrive at resolution, thinking-through-rhythm, because of dispersive animation, brings us closer to

"the ungraspable and incomprehensive character of what is alien to rational thinking"

(Elder 2004: 466). It brings us in touch with the ur-conscious (or "preter-conscious") feelings that exist within our bodies and resonate with plurality of the world and alterity of the Other.

How does the fragmentary and dispersive quality of rhythm relate to film, and what function does it have in this art? According to Elder: "[Film's] nature calls for forms that are fragmentary and incomplete; its promiscuity [a consequence of its being- towards others] demands that works composed in the medium be dispersive opera, deploying multiple structures, plurisemic, incomplete, imperfect, unresolved, without closure. Their forms must be contaminated, impure, and full of strife" (2004: 460). Film is fragmentary because it is composed of many different shots which are glued together

211 into a composition.48 Each shot, and in some films even each frame, exists in a dialogue with the previous and the succeeding ones and in some films, which deploy polyphonically structured complex for each element, each element exists in dialogue with all other elements. However this dialogue is more akin to strife, a strife where each shot, being "estranged" from all the others, encroaches, pushes, pulls and tugs at the other without any resolution. This is especially evident in experimental cinema which often employs polyphonic forms or devises open-ended forms. With each repeated viewing of such films, one still feels, even after having seen it often, that there is something that escapes, something that eludes consciousness. This creates an urge to see more and understand more. However with each subsequent viewing something new is unveiled and that revelation opens up to a new experience and meaning, and subsequently adds a new network of connections to the existing nexus. Even so; no resolution is achieved. Elder contends that this multiplicity "opens onto that which cannot be represented, which is similarly plural, similarly labile, similarly without identity" (2004: 460). The effect of these multiple structures is similar to rhythm, for like rhythm, they ensure dynamism, movement, strife, and openness to "what lies beyond us" (Elder 2004: 463) as a "mere possibility." Furthermore, like rhythm, they open us to the function of multiplicity and strife in cinema, to break up and labilize any fixed entity, to prise closure open, and to reinvigorate forms, which, because they are conventional, lack creative thrust. Viewed in this context we can see that Mitry's statement that "the most realistic image is not a reproduction, or imitation but an interpretation" (99) was actually pointing inwards and towards the "inner voice" of an artist, which vibrates with the rhythmic pulsations of 212 "reality," which is plural and cannot be fixed into an "objective" representation but has to always remain as Other.

Rhythm and the Body: Kristeva's Semiotics Among the various twentieth century thinkers, Julia Kristeva appears to be the one who has truly given the most careful and thorough consideration to rhythm and its function in language, psychology, art, culture and semiotics. Her early work is almost exclusively preoccupied with various manifestations of rhythm: the semiotic order of language, avant-garde poetry, the pre-Oedipal mother and intrauterine relations. It might be safe to say that rhythm for Kristeva is what Be-ing is for Heidegger and Elder, the invisible foundation of all that is. Kristeva's approach to avant-garde poetry, which she claims is most closely in touch with the primal rhythmic quality of the semiotic order than any other form of language, can be applied to experimental films.

Notions of struggle and strife are at the core of Kristeva's philosophy. Kristeva highlights the dialectic between the subject's instinctual realm, the unconscious, and his/her conscious reality. Their mutual relationship, one of struggle, assures that the subject is labile, constantly in process, always negotiating its position and its signification. But what is located at the core of this struggle? What prompts it? What directs and drives it? It is the drives that give sense as orientation towards production and signification, to that which "always has a direction" (Lacan 207). "[I]t is not absolutely rigorous to say that human desire alone introduces sense into language. The proof is that nothing comes out of the machine except what we are expecting. This is to say, not so

213 much what interests us, but what we have foreseen" (ibid.). Thus, these drives take their root in the unconscious and constitute "the semiotic" modality of language.

The "semiotic" is a "psychosomatic modality of the signifying process" (Kristeva

1984: 28) constituted by intrauterine memories, the pre-Oedipal function, and the "energy discharges that connect and orient the body to the mother" (Kristeva 1984: 27).

According to Kristeva, the "semiotic" is fuelled by the drives' charges and discharges. It is preverbal and precognitive and, accordingly, "precedes the establishment of the sign"

(1984: 27). Kristeva investigated the etymology of the word semiotic, which derives from the Greek semeion, "a distinctive mark, trace, index, the premonitory sign, the proof, engraved mark, imprint—in short, a distinctiveness admitting of an uncertain and indeterminate articulation because it does not yet refer (for young children) or no longer refers (in psychotic discourse) to a signified object for a thetic consciousness" (Kristeva

1980: 133). Kristeva chose a term deriving from semeion to refer to the psychosomatic modality for its suggestion of uncertainty and indeterminacy—after all this psychosomatic modality bears the mark or imprint of the past, the intrauterine memory of the mother, while being simultaneously an indeterminate potentiality of the future.

Kristeva's sujet enproces (subject in process/on trial) is propelled by the strife between the two coexistent and codependent modalities, the symbolic and the semiotic.

However, the semiotic, prior to the break that inaugurates the symbolic order and is its precondition, is, according to Kristeva, "only a theoretical supposition j ustified by the need for description" (1984: 68). Its functioning, which consists of movements of the 214 instinctual drives, is imperceptible prior to this break, for it requires the "thetic" to draw together "these facilitations and instinctual semiotic stases within the positing of signifiers, then [open] them out in the three-part cluster of referent, signified, and signifier, which alone makes the enunciation of a truth possible" (Kristeva 1984: 68-9).

Only after the break in the symbolic, and in the context of the "thetic," does the semiotic functioning becomes perceptible. Kristeva tells us it enters the signifying process "as a

'second' return of instinctual functioning within the symbolic, as a negativity introduced into the symbolic order, and as the transgression of that order" (Kristeva 1984: 69). This break, or secondary irruption of drives, is more sophisticated than the "semiotic functioning [which] is fairly rudimentary combinatorial system" (1984: 68). The semiotic functioning makes its appearance as "thetic" through a rupture in the symbolic system.

Art making strives to breach the symbolic with the semiotic throbs of rhythm, to pour them out like paint on a canvas which subsequently fixes, or organizes like the symbolic order, the running liquid that refuses to be fixed. "Through themes, ideologies, and social meanings, the artist introduces into the symbolic order an asocial drive, one not yet harnessed by the thetic" (Kristeva 1984: 71). This "asocial drive" is the death drive which presupposes the non-being, or Be-ing that is prior to beings, that is not yet concrete but only a possibility extending towards the future or an echo resounding the past. The artist, by introducing this non-being into a thetic positionality of the symbolic order, grants the possibility of experience, for artwork ensures that the flux or the dynamism resulting from struggle between the being and the non-being, between the symbolic and the semiotic modalities, is maintained. This struggle is necessary because it ensures the 215 continuous life of the language, for an effect of this strife is that language is continually renewed by the irruptions of the semiotic order into the symbolic. Another effect is that the existence of the subject is put en proces ("in process" and "on trial")—the subject's position is always in question, for the subject slides to-and-fro, between the non-being of the semiotic and the social being of the symbolic.

The semiotic order, because it is rhythmic and therefore dispersive, introduces heterogeneity into the symbolic order of language, art, society, and the subject.

Heterogeneity introduces strife and struggle into each one of those areas, and that strife labilizes the entities of those areas. Thus, the semiotic effects change, revolution, as the symbolic is required to formulate new positions to amend those that were brought into question by the semiotic order. By renewing itself in this way, the symbolic escapes being annihilated by the pressures the semiotic asserts. These are the grounds for

Kristeva's valuing avant-garde over scientific discourse, which "aspiring to the status of metalanguage, tends to reduce as much as possible the semiotic component" (Kristeva

1975a: 134). Because the "semiotic" order is the most pronounced in avant-garde poetry, it possesses the greatest quantity of creative power—and the constant renewal of the symbolic ensures poetry's (and language's) continuing existence.

Poetry's creative power comes at a high price, however: that of the loss of meaning.

[T]he signifying economy of poetic language is specific in that the semiotic is not only a constraint as is the symbolic, but it tends to gain the upper hand at the expense of the thetic and the predicative constraints of the ego's judging

216 consciousness. Thus in any poetic language, not only do the rhythmic constraints ... perform an organizing function that could go so far as to violate certain grammatical rules of a national language and often neglect the importance of an ideatory message, but in recent texts, these semiotic constrains (rhythm, phonic, vocalic timbres in Symbolist work, but also graphic disposition on the page) are accompanied by nonrecoverable syntactic elisions ... which makes the meaning of the utterance undecidable. (ibid.)

Despite this elision of meaning, the symbolic order, however diminished and repressed it

might be, is still present in the poetic language. It persists for two reasons: first, because

some meaning is communicated, even if this meaning is incomprehensible to any one else

but the artist; second, because the "thetic function," however disturbed, is still present but

in a different configuration. Its configuration in avant-garde poetry involves the poetic

language positing "its own process as an undecideable process between sense and

nonsense,... between language and rhythm, between the symbolic and semiotic"

(Kristeva 1975a : 135). This process is "undecideable," in the sense that it never resolves,

never stabilizes, never fixes itself in either the semiotic or the symbolic. Whereas

scientific language and other forms of metalanguage appear to conceal this

"undecidability," avant-garde poetry and other forms of language—allied with creativity and the semiotic—embrace that very "undecidability."

Conclusion In this section I have tried to locate rhythm within the broad subject of semiotics.

Because rhythm challenges many of semiotics' received ideas, the task has presented its difficulties. Rhythm in poetry and its implication to the theory of semiotics is challenging enough; adding experimental film into the mix compounds those challenges. Charles S.

217 Peirce's semiotics and Ideoscopy have helped resolve some of those difficulties; indeed it made the subsequent theories on this subject by the other three theorists fall into place like a puzzle, or a "riddle" as Peirce would say. In Peirce's lexicon, rhythm can be identified with a Qualisign, "sign as a mere quality." Peirce's triad of ideas and the idea of Firstness have also helped in formulating the implications rhythm has for the theory of semiotics. Rhythm as Firstness can be defined as a "feeling of quality" which is a "mere potential." This definition has provided the basis for understanding indefinite being and time, to which futurity, that is, openness and indefiniteness, is essential. Peirce also hints at the notion of ur-consciousness (or preter-conscious) but does not make it explicit.

Jean Mitry's semiotics of cinema proved to be actually more phenomenologically oriented than Peirce's. Mitry's phenomenological methods led him to dismiss those forms of cinema that do not bear a close resemblance to the objects in the real world—that is, to dismiss all but the cinema of representations. He does, however, acknowledge a tendency in the cinema to experiment with rhythm, which thought itself more in line with music than with narrative plot. This genre of cinema was called "absolute film" or "visual music," a genre with the avant-garde film. Moreover, his theory does open toward the possibility that the film image does not have to be limited to a representation, a replication of the outside world, for he points out "the most realistic image is not a reproduction, or imitation but an interpretation" (Mitry 99). This suggestion could provide the basis for considering film image not as a replica of an objective world but as

218 a genuine new creation, exhibiting novelty that resonates with the energies of the artist's

internal world.

R. Bruce Elder proposes that rhythm and a primal mode of thinking are intimate

with one another. Because this primal mode of thinking is oriented towards Be-ing which

precedes beings (i.e., objects), the effort to register that mode of thinking helps loosen the

image's bond to objective world and representation. In fact, according to Elder, a

filmmaker should think-through-rhythm, and should not rely on objectifying thought to

dictate the creative process. Looking within oneself and responding to the rhythmic

pulsions within changes of one's relation to the world and to the object itself, Elder avers.

Thus rhythm, in Elder's thinking-through-rhythm, has the role of freeing stasis and

unbinding those fixities established by the "word of the law." Rhythm, Elder suggests,

animates a dialectic, in which opposites contend. This contention introduces multiplicity

and heterogeneity into work, and thereby undoes that gestalt unity which the symbolic

order contrives. Cinema, its fragmented and multiple form (film is montage, Elder

reminds us), is naturally predisposed to engage the artist in thinking-through-rhythm and

thus undo all the tight knots that thetic consciousness imposes on experience.

Elder's ideas about thinking-through-rhythm and his attack on the thetic consciousness as the reign of homogenous subject have many similarities with Kristeva's semiotic theory and her attack on phenomenology, with its homogeneous subject.

Kristeva draws on psychoanalysis and avant-garde poetry to combat the levelling thrust of "law." Like Elder's, Kristeva's theory insists on the importance of getting in touch 219 with the pre-conscious, the unconscious, with the underside of being. This negative entity comes out from the dark interior of our unconscious, which hides our past in the depths of its non-being. The past, the primordial past, appears in a form of drives' rhythmic irruptions, which send the thetic consciousness into convolutions. Thus the semiotic order, the antithesis of the symbolic, puts the subject's position to question—the subject is always "en prods" Kristeva says—always on trial and always in process. Radical art lies within the domain of the irruptive semiotic. On the other hand, art that is determined by the "word of the law" is the fixed and so dead language; belongs to the realm of the symbolic.

Experimental filmmakers' use of rhythm activates elemental processes. Thus, the content of these works is closer to the unconscious. This proximity has the effect of infusing lifeless, formula ridden forms of discourse (the narrative of film) with the semiotic irruptions that send convulsions through the subject's energy system. It presents itself as the force of that which is other than (gestalt) order. The revolutionary potential involved affects first the individual artist, but its impact spreads through the diffusion of the artwork, into the realm of the social discourse. It effects change.

220 IV Conclusion

Participating in a social or cultural movement can create different types of empathy, sympathy, and solidarity between individuals; but they are generally determined beginning from the exteriority of the shared world, and they are not born from me. The environment causes me to be like everyone else, to do as they do, to find solidarity with them rather than to affirm my singularity. For this reason, I am not attentive to the other, to others, but do as they do through passivity, through egoism, I would say. I, thus, become an "any body" which only my intention towards you can help me to overcome. (Irigaray 39)

Modernity and technological thinking has depleted our ability to have a real

experience today. Each day we seem to drift further away from it, and it can even be said

that it is almost impossible for us today to have an inkling of what this experience might

be like. Our mental universe is one in which technological progress is understood as a

liberating force of humanity, after ample evidence of its contrary effects: wars,

holocausts, destruction of our planet, to name a few; and, worst of all, the pervasive

exploration and manipulations of the human body with the ultimate goal of controlling

the course of our natural destiny. This is so despite the fact that all around us

technological progress provides ample examples that it does not free us, as our

governments, business corporations and some scholars would like to have us believe; it

enslaves us. Technological thinking distorts our ability to feel, sense and even think; in

fact, technology thinks us. Cyber technologies and their fashionable slogans of the new

kind of experience of "togetherness" (being together in the virtual world of cyberspace, and yet miles apart in the lived world) are even further estranging us from our experience.

221 People recklessly repeat these slogans. They do not stop to actually contemplate the meaning of the words or the possible implications that such fashionable catchphrases might have for the future of humanity. Language has become just another tool in the machine of technological progress, and as such has become divested of real meaning and resonance in our lives; it has turned into an empty abstraction, strings of letters, and strings of symbols in the efficiency of daily communication. Even the word

"communication" has become estranged from its relation to words such as communion and community, which used to rely on each other in being meaningful for us. In such times we no longer think of real communities, real face to face communication and the experience of communion, as mutual participation, that the real, material presence calls for in real experience. We have estranged ourselves from poetry of language and, consequently, from the poetry of experience; thus severing our connection from the lived- world and alienating ourselves from one another.

In this dissertation I tried to provide an antithesis to the thrust of Modernity that has had (and will continue to have) such devastating consequences for the human beings; through its technical thinking, its mastery over every being on this planet, the sheer arrogance of thought, and lack of moral awareness. I offer the feminine art and aesthetics, i.e. art that explores the human body and the vivifying experience of nudity through poetics, as our only hope of countering this movement and infusing our lives with the force of real experience, with the "poetry of experience" to use R. Bruce Elder's phrase.

For "poetry of experience" has its origin in poiesis; the selfless leading forth into

222 unconcealment, the true creation. As such it belongs to the feminine realm; for it has its origin in our mothers' and our earliest experience of love and selflessness, first in the intrauterine state and later in the pre-Oedipal stage. And the aesthetics that tends towards this mode of creation is the feminine aesthetics, for it employs poetic devices, which are not too distant from the methods of the unconscious and its primary process thinking.

Most importantly, the feminine aesthetics, by means of its strong somatic and unconscious orientation, grants us contact with something more primal that opens us to real experience, in which bodily sensations and emotional feelings are inseparable, thus leading us to love as the ethical ground of our human existence.

In an effort to establish a sketch of feminine aesthetics I turned to the writings on the unconscious and primary process of Sigmund Freud, Anton Ehrenzweig's writing on syncretistic vision and scanning attention, and Julia Kristeva's treatment of the avant- garde poetry through her theory of the semiotic and the symbolic modalities in systems of signification. This is the first time that the connection between Freud, Ehrenzweig and

Kristeva has been explored in such detail, and using the operations of the unconscious as the connecting thread between them. My chief contribution through this dissertation is that I am employing of all three of these thinkers as way of carving out the feminine aesthetics, and extending what was posited by the proponents of ecriture feminin in literature to visual arts: cinema, sculptural environments, and performance. The conjuncture of these theoretical commentaries on my five creative projects (I hope) have provided me with new insights into the feminine aesthetics. I believe that I produced

223 original projects that can be experienced by others as examples of feminine aesthetics. I strongly believe that by returning the feminine and real experience into our life through art will ultimately enrich it and will present us with an alternative to the present depleted experience.

224 Postscript: Towards the Private and the Intimate Encounter as the Ground of Revolt

Why do I give preference to the private encounter and why do I refuse to share it with the public you ask? We live in a world, a "fabricated world" of our (man's) creation, which has distanced itself from nature and in this distancing has built up an armor that resists and quashes any attempts of the intimate, and as a result aborts before it can even make its presence known. This intimate encounter is charitable but vulnerable, and it recoils into itself if not supported by the openness and attention of the other.

Today this intimacy can only exist in the private, among the attentive and those capable of loving. To protect it and ensure its life we must safeguard it from the assaults of the public, whose armor today is impenetrable to the calls of the other. What is the use to call out to you and bring my openness to you if you will not respond to me and will remain closed? It is not the time to appeal to the public, to open to the public. Revolt and love have no longer their place there. They have been driven away by the machinations of reason and economic benefits for individual advancement and gain. As Kristeva and

Irigaray remind us, revolt and love can only be reignited in the private, in the private realm of the subject and in intimate encounters between subjects.

However, the private and its charity in the intimate encounter is always open to welcome new loving and attentive others, those who would like to become in-tune with

225 us, in-love to the other. We will open our arms and open our selves to you only if you can reciprocate that generous act of openness and love to us.

226 Filmographies

R. Bruce Elder

The Book of All the Dead (1975-1994)

PART ONE: THE SYSTEM OF DANTE'S HELL

Breath/Light/Birth, 1975. Film. 16 mm. B&W, sound. 6 minutes.

The Art of Worldly Wisdom, 1979. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 55 minutes

1857 (Fool's Gold), 1981. Film 16 mm. Colour, sound. 25 minutes.

Illuminated Texts, 1982. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 180 minutes.

Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World, Part 1: The Dream of the Last Historian, 1985. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 195 minutes.

Sweet Love Remembered, 1980. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 14 minutes.

Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World, Part 2: The Sublime Calculation, 1985. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 240 minutes.

Permutations and Combinations, 1976. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 8 minutes.

PART TWO: CONSOLATIONS (LOVE IS AN ART OF TIME)

Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time), Part 1: The Fugitive Gods, 1988. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 220 minutes.

Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time), Part 2: The Lighted Clearing, 1988. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 220 minutes.

Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time), Part 3: The Body and the World, 1988. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 240 minutes.

227 PART THREE: EXULTATIONS (IN LIGHT OF THE GREAT GIVING)

Flesh Angels, 1990. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 110 minutes.

Look! We Have Come Through!, 1978. Film. 16 mm. B&W, sound. 12 minutes.

Newton and Me, 1990. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 110 minutes.

Barbara Is a Vision of Loveliness, 1976. Film. 16 mm. B&W, sound. 8 minutes.

Azure Serene, 1992. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 95 minutes.

She Is Away, 1976. Film. 16 mm. 13 minutes.

Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving, 1993. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 90 minutes.

Burying the Dead: Into the Light, 1993. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 90 minutes.

Trace, 1980. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 1 minute.

Et Resurrectus Est, 1994. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 135 minutes.

The Book of Praise (1997- )

A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy, 1997. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 100 minutes.

Crack, Brutal, Grief, 2000. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 122 minutes.

Eros and Wonder, 2003. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 106 minutes.

Infunde Lumen Cordibus, 2004. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 22 minutes.

The Young Prince, 2007. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 125 minutes.

228 Carolee Schneemann

Films and videos either were made or edited by Carolee Schneemann. These entries were taken from Imaging Her Erotics: Carolee Schneemann: Essays, Interviews, Projects.

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.

Meat Joy, 1964. Film. 16 mm. Color, sound. 12-minute version edited by Bob Giorgio and Carolee Schneemann from original film footage of 1964 performance of Meat Joy in New York City. Filmed by Pierre Dominique Gaisseau. This film was reedited for video in 1991.

Viet Flakes, 1966. Film. 8 mm printed to 16 mm. Sound collage by James Tenney. This film was transferred to video in 1991. Black-and-white, toned. 11 minutes.

Fuses, 1965. Film. 16 mm. Color, silent. 22 minutes. Part of "Autobiographical Trilogy." Filming began in 1964. This film was transferred to video in 1992. Color, silent. 18 minutes.

Water Light/Water Needle (Lake Mah Wah), 1966. Video. Original footage by John Jones and Sheldon Rocklin. Color, sound. 12 minutes.

Plumb Line, 1970. Film. Super 8, step printed to 16 mm. Color, sound. 18 minutes. Sound by Carolee Schneemann. Part 2 of "Autobiographical Trilogy." Filming begun in 1968.

Kitch's Last Meal, 1973-75. Film. Super 8. Double projection. Color, sound. 5 hours.

Up To And Including Her Limits, 1976. Video. Black-and-white, sound. 60 minutes.

Judson Project Interview, 1980. Video. Colorized, sound. 10 minutes.

Fresh Blood—A Dream Morphology, 1983. Video. Color, sound. 11 minutes.

Vesper's Stampede to My Holy Mouth, 1992. Video. Color, sound. 15 minutes. Filmed and edited by Victoria Vesna and Carolee Schneemann.

229 Four Recent Installations. 1993. Video. Color, sound. 5 minutes.

Imaging Her Erotics. 1993. Video. Color, sound. 5 minutes. Filmed and edited by Maria Beatty and Carolee Schneemann.

Western Front Interview, 1995. Video. Color, sound. 17 minutes.

Interior Scroll—The Cave, 1995. Video. Color, sound. 12 minutes. Filmed and edited by Carolee Schneemann and Maria Beatty.

Izabella Pruska-Oldenhof

Homoiomereia, 1996. Video. Colour, sound. 15 minutes. my I's, 1997. Video. Colour, sound. 10 minutes.

Vibrant Marvels, 2000. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 22 minutes.

Light Magic, 2001. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 4 minutes.

Song of the Firefly, 2002. Film. 35 mm. Colour, sound. 4.30 minutes. body of water/body of light, 2003. Film. 16 mm. Colour, silent. 5 minutes. scintillating flesh, 2003. Film. 16 mm. Colour, silent. 4.30 minutes. her carnal longings, 2003. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 8.30 minutes. sea-ing, 2004. Film. 35 mm. Colour, silent. 1 minute. fugitive l(i)ght, 2005. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 9 minutes.

Pulsions, 2007. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 9.30 minutes.

Echo, 2007. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 9 minutes.

The Garden of Earthly Delights, 2008. Film. 16 mm. Colour, silent. 8 minutes.

230 Ph.D. Projects

fugitive l(i)ght, 2005. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 9 minutes.

This film explores the morph-like quality of the Serpentine Dance and its intricate play on the visible and the invisible, which extends to the larger context and legacy its originator, the American born Loi'e Fuller, fugitive l(i)ght is composed of elaborately reworked found footage, originally captured by Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers, of various renditions and imitations of Fuller's Serpentine performances, where glimmers of her presence slip into the film by means of the artist's absence; both Fuller's and my momentary suspensions through my use of chance operation. These found films are woven into intricately reworked sequences using several computer programs and following the poetic interpretations of several artists who experienced Fuller's performances in person: texts of Mallarm^, lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec, sketches of Whistler, and a futurist manifesto on dance by Marinetti. The music for this film was composed by Toronto based composer Colin Clark who reworked various LP recordings of Wagner's Die Walkure, the music that often accompanied Fuller's Serpentine performances. fugitive l(i)ght emphasizes rhythmic structures over and above representation, by drawing the viewer's gaze into a maze of multiple folds of continuously unfolding colour patterns, fugitive l(i)ght aims to evoke a charge of energy that might have been experienced by the audience of the 1890s in the presence of Fuller's light performances, and therefore permitting her to meet us again, one century later by making herself and her performance (in)visible to us through its palpitating playful rhythm expressed as a field of energy that resonates within the spectator. 231 Pulsions, 2007. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 9.30 minutes.

Pulsions explores the fluidity of space and time through its emphasis on pulsing movement, which orders this film rhythmically and makes possible for this work to unfold as a resonance with the viewing bodies. In some ways this film also mourns our immemorial past, whose echoing murmurs remind us that it is forever foreclosed from our reach. Pulsions is a companion film to fugitive l(i)ght (2005). The two films grew out of one project that aimed to explore by means of moving images the double ellipse/the infinity "oo'Vthe figure "8" shape that is created through the movements of living bodies, namely humans, birds, and insects underwater and in the air. This theme, and to some extent the moving image treatment, was inspired by moving and still images of motion studies of insects and animals (circa 1869) by fitienne-Jules Marey that documented the double ellipse shape created through the revolutions of the beating wings. However both films are significantly different manifestations of the same theme, which has expanded and taken on new thematic and aesthetic preoccupations through the process of working on these two projects.

Music composed by Colin Clark. Dance choreographed and performed by Lucie Mongrain.

232 Echo, 2007. Film. 16 mm. Colour, sound. 9 minutes.

Echo recalls the childhood and the native home of the filmmaker through image, song and text. This self-portrait hints at the fragments, the pieces, the painful and repressed shards that the self contains, and through which it strives to piece together and illuminate its mysterious gaps. Echo is composed of two elements: (Element 1) a body photogram on 16mm film placed between two pieces of Plexiglas that is meant to be viewed, on the one hand, as a still self-portrait, and on the other, as time capsule created by the shape of the filmmaker's body. (Element 2) the nine-minute 16mm film composed of three sections (IMAGE, SONG, TEXT). IMAGE: employs the body photogram (Element 1) that functions as a traveling matte to create the principal rhythm of the image section into which other film footage is woven in the A-roll and the B-roll. (A-roll: Polish mountains, fields and flowers, B-roll: close-ups of filmmaker's mouth singing). This section is silent. SONG: a sound recording of the filmmaker at the age of ten singing the Polish emigrant song titled Polskie Kwiaty^Polish Flowers, which was taught to her by her neighbor and a professor of Polish language. This recording was made by her grandfather two years prior to her immigrating to Canada. This section has only sound, no visuals. TEXT-part 3: The lyrics of Polskie Kwiaty=Polish Flowers translated into English language. This section is silent, only text.

233 Echo, 2007. Photogram

16mm film, dried field flowers, Plexiglas, aluminum bolts (154 x 61 x 2.5 cm)

234 The Garden of Earthly Delights, 2008. Film. 16 mm. Colour, silent. 8 minutes.

The Garden of Earthly Delights is inspired by the earthly pleasures and wonders as revealed in the vibrant marvels of Stan Brakhage's cinema, in particular his Christ Mass Sex Dance (1991) and The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981), and in the central panel of the 1504 triptych by Hieronymous Bosch titled The Garden of Earthly Delights. This work employs digital photography animation, digital video, Super-8 and 16mm film (a self-portrait photogram). The 16mm photogram is used as a travelling matte that acts as a time-capsule that orders the base rhythm of this work: the interweaving or compositing of the human flesh with the flesh of the world. Other rhythms are subsequently introduced in response to the base rhythm created with the travelling matte, i.e., these rhythms are introduced as a way to break out of the order imposed by the matte or out of "John's Cage," to use Stan Brakhage's phrase from his Metaphors on Vision where he referred to his own process of creating Prelude: Dog Star Man (1964) in those terms.

235 Film-Lab-Digestive-Track, 2007. Performance and sculptural environment.

Conceived and created in collaboration with liana Gutman, Angela Joosse and Erika Loic.

Film-Lab-Digestive-Track is a sculptural environment for human activity and interaction. This installation, which is accompanied by a performance that daily alters its shape, transforms the interior of the intestinal system into an external space. Materially, it is a sculptural tribute to bodily processes. Metaphorically, it grapples with transformation, creativity, creation, process, and digestion of thought.

Tube: polyester lining, acetate lining, tule, spandex, organza, secondhand linens(tablecloths, bed sheets, duvet covers), secondhand clothing (t-shirts, hockey jersey, sweaters, blouses, skirts, pants, dresses, bathrobes, slips, hats, socks, nylons and stockings), nectarines, tissue paper, polyester reinforcement tape, elastic, aluminum grommets, steel hooks, 35mm film and gold paint.

(Approx. 40 x 4 metres, variable width).

Wall Piece: secondhand linens (tablecloths, bed sheets, duvet covers, curtains), liquid light, gold and silver acrylic paint and powder, black & white (8" x 10") photographic paper, photographic flash, two dark bags, metallic threads (silver, gold, bronze).

(Variable dimensions: the size of this piece is dependent on audience involvement).

Costumes: spandex. (Four in total).

16mm Film: five 16mm film projectors. Five 16mm film loops (each approx. between 5- 8 seconds).

Digital Video: DVD player, video projector, digital still camera. Looped video sequence (variable duration of video, it is dependent on the wall piece).

Sound: CD player and speakers. (4 min. sound loop).

*These four films are in the 16 mm film format and are available through my two distributors: Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre in Toronto (www.cfmdc.org) and

Collectif Jeune Cinema in Paris (www.cjcinema.org).

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Schneemann, Carolee. "Anti-Demeter: The More I Give the More You Steal." 1994.

Imaging Her Erotics: Carolee Schneemann: Essays, Interviews, Projects.

Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. 176-178.

. "The Blood Link: Fresh Blood—A Dream Morphology and Venus Vectors.''''

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— . "Fresh Blood—A Dream Morphology." 1981 .Imaging Her Erotics: Carolee

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Essays, Interviews, Projects. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. 47-49.

— . "Interview with Carl Heyward." 1993. Imaging Her Erotics: Carolee Schneemann:

Essays, Interviews, Projects. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. 196-207.

— . "Interview with Kate Haug." 1977. Imaging Her Erotics: Carolee Schneemann:

Essays, Interviews, Projects. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. 21-44

. "Istory of a Girl Pornographer." 1974, More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works

and Selected Writings. Edited by Bruce R. McPherson. 2nd ed. Kingston, NY:

Documentext, 1979, 1997. 192-195.

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Carolee Schneemann: Essays, Interviews, Projects. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT

Press, 2002. 52-53. — . "Parts of a Body House," Fantastic Architecture. Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell

eds. New York, NY: Something Else Press, 1969.

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Essays, Interviews, Projects. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. 162-165.

— . "Up To And Including Her Limits," More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and

Selected Writings. Edited by Bruce R. McPherson. 2nd ed. Kingston, NY:

Documentext, 1979, 1997. 224-233.

Sprengnether, Madelon. The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis.

Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Strauss, David Levi. "Love Rides Aristotle Through the Audience: Body, Image, and

Idea in the Work of Carolee Schneemann," Imaging Her Erotics: Carolee

Schneemann: Essays, Interviews, Projects. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.

316-325.

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webster.com/dictionary/sympathy

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Rpt. in Documents in Canadian Film. Edited by Douglas Fetherling.

Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, [1988]. Pp. 272-283.

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245 Endnotes

1 Elizabeth M. Legge in her book Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources, provides an account of the hostility Freud's psychoanalysis from scientific and medical circles. According to Legge, in the early 1920's the first French translations of Freud's works appeared. They incited angry debates not only in the scientific circles but also in literary and philosophical. The interest non-scientists showed in these works prompted scientists to coin "the term 'Freudism' to draw attention to what they perceived as the wholly subjective, unscientific method of psychoanalysis based on Freud's intuitions" (Legge 17).

2 In chapter four of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud refers to dreams as "picture- puzzles" and to the work of interpretation of dreams, which relies on word replacement for each image in the dream and their association, as a "poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance."

But obviously we can only form a proper judgment of the rebus if we put aside criticisms such as these of the whole composition and its parts and if, instead, we try to replace each separate element by a syllable or word that can be presented by that element in some way or other. The words which are put together in this way are no longer nonsensical but may form a poetical phrase of the greatest beauty and significance. A dream is a picture-puzzle of this sort and out predecessors in the field of dream-interpretation have made the mistake of treating the rebus as a pictorial composition: and as such it has seemed to them nonsensical and worthless (Freud 1976: 382).

3 In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud identifies this mobile or free quality with the movement of energy in the primary process thinking; in the secondary process energy is bound. Undoubtedly Kristeva models the dynamics of the semiotic and the symbolic modalities in systems of signification on Freud's conception of the free and bound energies of the primary process and the secondary process thinking.

4 In the section of The Ego and the Id, Freud describes the Pes. and the verbal residues or word-presentations that exist in memories and belong to Pes. as being at one point perceptions of things in the world. According to Freud, we become conscious of a thing in the world when we connect it with the word-presentation that corresponds to it in the Pes. (12). If the visual representation/image of a thing does not connect with the word-presentation of the Pes., we cannot be fully conscious of it—we are rather incompletely conscious or unconscious of visual representations that are not connected to language.

246 We must not be led... to forget the importance of optical mnemic residues, when they are of things, or to deny that it is possible for thought-processes to become conscious through a reversion to visual residues, and that in many people this seems to be the favoured method.... We learn that what becomes conscious in [visual thinking] is as a rule only the concrete subject-matter of the thought, and that the relations between the various elements of this subject-matter, which is what specially characterizes thoughts, cannot be given visual expression. Thinking in pictures is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some ways, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically. (13-14)

5 In Lecture 11 of his A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud points out that infantile dreams still undergo the process of dream-work but dream-distortion is less or not at all operative at this stage of the child's mental development:

In dreams of the infantile type in which the obvious wish-fulfilments are easily recognized, the process of dream-work has nevertheless been operative to some extent, for the wish has been transformed into a reality and, usually, the thoughts also into visual images. Here no interpretation is necessary; we only have to retrace both these transformations. The further operations of the dream-work, as seen in the other types of dreams, we call dream-distortion, and here the original ideas have to be restored by our interpretive work. (179)

6 Freud elaborates on this topic in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he works out the relationship between the movement of energy, or its prohibition, in the mental apparatus and the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure experienced by an individual as its result. In this work he calls it the "pleasure principle."

7 Incidentally, the etymological root of the word infant can be traced back to French enfant and then to Latin in-fari, which means unable to speak (Oxford Dictionary).

8 The standard psychoanalytic view, which can be found in Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds., Psychoanalytic Terms & Concepts. (New Haven and London: The American Psychoanalytic Association and Yale University Press, 1990) defines day's residue as follows:

The day residue or precipitating stimulus is the dream's recent source material, that is innocuous elements from daily which contribute to the formation of the dream. When events, impressions, perceptions, ideas, and feeling from several preceding days appear in the dream as unimportant, they have acquired their significance through their unconscious connections with deeply repressed infantile drives, wishes, and conflicts. The day residue connects with unconscious 247 infantile drives and wishes of an erotic and aggressive nature, effectively disguising the infantile impulse that is the impetus for the dream. To this disguise is added a process of distortion (including secondary elaborations) accomplished by the dream work. (58)

Freud was inconsistent in his use of this term. For example in The Interpretation of Dreams, he referred to day's residue as the innocent material of the preceding day (this is undoubtedly the source that the above standard definition followed). In the section titled "Recent and Indifferent Material in Dreams," he discusses origins of the material that is incorporated into dreams.

If I examine my own experience on the subject of the origin of the elements included in the content of dreams, I must begin with an assertion that in every dream it is possible to find a point of contact with the experiences of the previous day.... [I]n order to show the regularity with which such a connection can be traced, I will go through the records of my own dreams and give some instances.

[among his examples:] —I had written a MONOGRAPH on a certain (indistinct) species of plant. Source: that morning I had seen a monograph .... on the genus Cylamen in the window of a book shop.

—I saw too women in the street, A MOTHER AND DAUGHTER, the latter of whom was a patient of mine. Source: One of patients had explained to me that previous day the difficulties her mother was putting in the way of her continuing treatment.

—I took out a subscription in S. and R.'s book-shop for a periodical costing TWENTY FLORINS a year. Source: My wife had reminded the day before that I still owed her twenty florins for the weekly household expenses. (Freud 1976: 249-50)

However, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (New York: Norton, 1963) Freud employs day's residue in a different manner; to refer to the problematic material that has to undergo transformation to render it innocent in a dream.

The achievements of the dream-work, however, can be described as follows. A tissue of thoughts, usually a very complicated one, which has been built up during the day and has not been completely dealt with—a "day's residue" [sic]— continues to retain during the night a quota of energy—the "interest"—claimed by it and threatens to disturb sleep. This "day's residue" is transformed by the dream- work into a dream and is made innocuous to sleep. In order to provide a fulcrum 248 for the dream-work the "day-residue" must be capable of constructing a wish— which is not a hard condition to fulfill. (Freud 1963: 199)

The definition of day's residue that I provide is an amalgam of Freud's both uses of this term.

9 Freud was not consistent about these distinctions. In several of his essays he shows that the primary process can operate on, and through, language. See his "Forgetting of Proper Names," "Forgetting of Foreign Words," "Forgetting of Names and Order of Words," and "Mistakes in Speech" in Psychopathology of Everyday Life. New York, NY: Macmillan Publishing, 1914.

10 According to Julia Kristeva two Russian linguists, Mikolaj Kruszewski and Roman Jakobson, picked up this line of thought.

As we know, Freud specifies two fundamental 'processes' in the work of the unconscious: displacement and condensation. Kruszewski and Jakobson introduced them, in a different way, during the early stages of structural linguistics, through the concepts of metonymy and metaphor, which have since been interpreted in light of psychoanalysis. (Kristeva 1984: 59)

11 Kristeva has been criticized by others for this claim, for her repudiation of "political activism." However, it should be noted that her assertion is not dissimilar from those of many artists of the 1960s, who asserted that a revolution of consciousness is the necessary prelude to political transformation. For Kristeva the necessary reality is that of the speaking subject, for me the transformation that is necessary is that of a reconnection with the body. Many artists have attempted to achieve that reconnection through the practice of "art nudity," including nude performance. Hence body art has become a central (if not the most important) feature of recent avant-garde art.

12 Several of my short experimental films resonate with Kristeva's notion of revolt. For example: her carnal longings (2003), fugitive l(i)ght (2005), Pulsions (2005), Echo (2007), The Garden of Earthly Delights (2008), and even one of my first films my I's (1997). I now see that a certain creative process has been "working me" beyond my conscious apprehension for over the last five years, if not longer, and I think that I might be ready to reflect on it and capture it in language. Most importantly, I see my works as cinematic examples that engage with Kristeva's sense of revolt, as an attempt to recall the lost or immemorial time and its somatic dimension through the rhythmic pulsions of its maker that are inscribed into these films and which will hopefully resonate within the viewing bodies and perhaps engender "experience."

13 Carolee Schneemann's detailed notes on each room in the Parts of a Body House

249 project were published in "Parts of a Body House," Fantastic Architecture. Dick Higgins and Wolf Vostell eds. New York, NY: Something Else Press, 1969.

14 Erich Neumann discusses Uroboros as an archetypal symbol for creation out of destruction (life out of death) and its relation to the "dawn of consciousness" and of the ego; its prehistory of undifferentiation, when the child did not distinguish between herself and the world, herself and the mother.

The initial stage symbolized by the uroboros corresponds to a pre-ego stage, and just as this antedates human history, so also in the history of individual development it belongs to the stage of earliest childhood when an ego germ is just beginning to be. But in spite of the fact that this stage can only be experienced "on the border," its symptoms and symbolisms have and important effect upon wide areas of man's collective and individual life. The original situation which is represented mythologically as the uroboros corresponds to the psychological stage in man's prehistory when the individual and the group, ego and unconscious, man and the world, were so indissolubly bound up with one another that the law of participation mystique, of unconscious identity, prevailed between them. (Neumann 266)

In Erich Neumann. The Origins and History of Consciousness. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Foreword by C. G. Jung. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969, cl954.

15 R. Bruce Elder provides a detailed account in "Driftworks, Pulseworks, Lightworks: The Letter to Dr. Henderson" of Dante's The Devine Comedy and of Ezra Pound's Cantos being the key influences on his The Book of All the Dead. Dante & the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression. Ed. James Miller. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. Pp. 450-488.

16 It should be noted that The Book of All the Dead cycle includes ten additional films are all part of The System of Dante's Hell and serve as preludes and interludes of the first part, Lamentations. These include six short films and two long films The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1979) and Illuminated Texts (1982) as preludes; and two short films as interludes following the two long films in Lamentations. According to Elder, these interludes are intended to provide an alternate experience of time for viewers; the longer and more immersive experience when viewers are absorbed or swept into the unfolding time through the rhythms of the film (195 minutes first film and 240 minutes second film) is followed by a short and fleeting experience of time (13 minutes first short and 8 minutes second short), which does not keep the viewer in the state of immersion but instead engenders a vivid impression—a surge. This juxtaposition of the two temporal experiences demonstrates to viewers, on the one hand, that different states of engagement and modes of thinking are, still, possible because they can be engendered through 250 aesthetic experience by works that employ time as a key compositional variable. And, on the other hand, it opens the possibility of reconnecting with the displaced modes of thinking and experience in Western culture, i.e., attunement, accompanied by serenity.

17 The nine stages in the transformation of consciousness presented in The Book of All the Dead are as follows:

"1. from ordinary waking consciousness (in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, the title of which I keep misspelling in the credits as 'The Art of WORDly Wisdom' in order to suggest the conventional nature of the knowledge the film presents); 2. through the consciousness of the workings of the awesome Divine within ordinary life (in 1857: Fool's Gold)-, 3. through the purging of our dreadful condition—i.e., from Hell into Purgatory (in Illuminated Texts); 4. to the comprehension of Pound's 'repeat in history,' i.e., the 'Purgatory of human error' (in The Dream of the Last Historian—for, after all, it is recognition of the historical repeat that puts and end to the terrible vector of history so eloquently described in the Henry Adams section of Illuminated Texts—and into parts of The Sublime Calculation)', 5. and to the sporadic, faltering beginnings of the contemplation of the love that leads one out of Purgatory (in Consolations [Love is an Art of Time]), first in its mode of absence (in The Fugitive Gods), then in the mode of possibility-to-be-made-once-again- present (in The Lighted Clearing, and especially in The Body and the World)-, 6. and, finally, to the various stages of the Beatific Vision, beginning with an acknowledgement of the terrible powers of love (in Flesh Angels); 7. followed by the eschewing of intellectual love (in Newton and Me—a title intended both to disjoin us, as many people, including William Blake, have thought of Newton as the exemplar of Reason and Intellectual Contemplation of the Divine, and to join us, as Newton forsook that paradigmatic activity of reason to reflect on apocalyptic literature. I also intend the title of this section of The Book of All the Dead to suggest the beginning of a new and dynamic cosmology); 8. passing on to the peace of discovering the Divine Love in higher vision (in Azure Serene: Mountains, Rivers, Sea and Sky); 9. and aspiring to the exalted knowledge of the Love that permeates all things and sustains all things in their being (in Exultations (In Light of Great Giving))" (Elder in Miller 455-456).

I o The account of Schneemann's and Tenney's visit to the Olson household is documented in her essay "Maximus at Gloucester: A Visit to Charles Olson," which appears in Imaging Her Erotics: Carolee Schneemann: Essays, Interviews, Project, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 52.

251 19 These are the grounds on which many feminists criticize Kristeva, accusing her of essentialism. I am not fully convinced by social constructivism. I believe that a woman's experience of the family (mother, father, and later with her own baby) is profoundly effected by biology, including sexual difference. My own project explores sexual difference and, in particular, its effects on modalities of corporeal experience. The unfortunate effect of some feminist advocacy is that of encouraging women to embrace values of patriarchal culture and in particular its hostility toward the feminine and the maternal, including maternal love. The real change that is needed to transform this culture is that of transforming consciousness, so that it can embrace the maternal and, eventually, will also grant men the possibility to become more maternal.

20 In the context of experimental cinema, Annette Michelson proposed that Stan Brakhage's cinematic devices were aimed at displacing the transcendental subject and substituting for it the fascinated, engrossed (and so dispersed) subject. It is interesting in that context the maternal manifests in Brakhage's films. He was, of course, the first film artist to make films on the subject of pregnancy and child-birth. Window Water Baby Moving (1959) was his first film on this subject, where his identification with his wife (Jane) was evident.

21 In Hail Mary (1985) Jean-Luc Godard attempted to restore a corporeal (and very teenaged) Mary into Western iconography. However, the Roman Catholic Church condemned him for his efforts and Pope John Paul II proclaimed that this film "deeply wounds religious sentiments of believers."

R. Bruce Elder's new book, Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-Garde Art Movements in the Twentieth Century (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), is concerned with the persistence within the avant-garde of the occult fantasy of being able to magically recreate "Paradise" in which total fusion of minds (spiritualized bodies) would be possible. This would allow telepathy, clairvoyance and thought- transference to become the everyday phenomenon. Of course, Elder is critical of the discorporate aspect of this project—for he, like Kristeva, calls for art to reconnect with the body.

R. Bruce Elder has been a critic of narrative and representation. He made this criticism first known in the highly polemic essay/manifesto "The Cinema We Need" (1985) and later in his 1998 book on Stan Brakhage, titled The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Olson (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press), where he discusses (and embraces) Olson's critique of the image (representation) as a dead spot—a place where energy has exhausted itself.

24 Behind this is the occult fantasy of thought transference, and that fantasy derives 252 from the experience of the "magical" interlocking/interweaving of desire and sensation between the self and the other.

25 For Olson consciousness opens onto a lived world.

26 Julia Kristeva. "Stabat Mater," The Kristeva Reader. Edited by Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 177.

27 Heidegger also uses metaphors relating to hearing. For example he uses words "attunement" and "silence" in his Being and Time (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996).

281 found the best depictions of the evolution of visual culture in the writings by Martin Jay, his Downcast Eyes, Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer and Don Ihde's Bodies in Technology.

291 chose the word "space" to describe the chora. This seems to accord with the way Kristeva conceives the chora. She tries to remove any referential value from the chora, while I use the word "space" to suggest what is before the objectivities that might fill it.

30 At this stage of development both boy babies and girl babies identify with the mother. Most males, as they renounce that identification (switch it to the father) repudiate (repress) these memories. For boys these memories also become associated with the Oedipal, an association which helps drag them beneath the barrier of censorship, and to banish them to the unconscious where they become inaccessible to most males.

"XI Thus, for males, releasing these memories would present threat of stirring up discomforting Oedipal feelings. Hence, most males repress most (if not all) of these memories.

32 The idea of the maternal that is central to my work is the pre-Oedipal mother—that is largely repressed within patriarchy. It is banished into the unconsciousness for its association with later (Oedipal) memories.

331 am referring here to poetry, in a broad sense of the word, as the creative work of an artist/maker, and not solely a linguistic creation.

34 It is a combinatorial system because it operates on existing memory traces and reorders them using the operations of condensation and displacement.

35 Kelly Oliver elaborates on the contents and the presence of two writing styles in Kristeva's essay "Stabat Mater"; the text that introduces the term "WORD FLESH."

253 Oliver's comments are in the chapter titled "The Abject Mother" of Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-Bind (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), on pages 49-55.

36 R. Bruce Elder comments extensively on the non-teleological structure of Schneemann's films and of her other artwork in "The Work of Carolee Schneemann," in his book A Body of Vision: Representations of the Body in Recent Film and Poetry (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997).

37 The following are R. Bruce Elder's descriptions of the serial processes used in the creation of lnfunde Lumen Cordibus (2004) and Permutations and Combinations (1976). Both are available on the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre website (www.cfmdc.org):

"lnfunde Lumen Cordibus was made using principles derived from Stephen Wolfram's work on cellular automata (A New Kind of Science) to determine the content and colour of the shots, their duration, and the time of their appearance: the palette of effects, and their rhythmical development... is entirely the result of computational processes that model natural events. John Cage instructed us that art should imitate nature in its manner of operation; I have tried to take the lesson. The music was composed, using related principles, by Colin Clark with the assistance of Josh Thorpe." In Permutations and Combinations: "Aleatory procedures are used to create movement at the points of fusion of the still images of which the film is constituted. For this reason, all movements within the film are completely reversible. This reversibility is extended into the film's overall structure, as the film is formed into a loop - a closed container for the film's chance elements. Such a structure, I believe, results in the complete elimination of all vestiges of drama from the film....The sounds of the film though determined in their occurrence by specific features of the image line, appear to form their own internal patterns, which phenomenally exist in counterpoint with the patterning of the images."

38 Some of the examples of the various explorations of the primary process techniques include: serialization in Permutations and Combinations (1976) and lnfunde Lumen Cordibus (2004), and to a lesser degree other films in both cycles have used chance operations; use of counterchange patterns in Barbara is a Vision of Loveliness (1976); fragmentation of the visual plane through use of the multiple images, side by side, in The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1979), Illuminated Texts (1982) [the last forty minutes of this film], A Man Whose Life Was Full of Woe Has Been Surprised by Joy (1997), Young Prince [2007], and as superimpositions most notably in Breath/Light/Birth (1976) and Sweet Love Remembered (1980), although the use of superimposition also appears in several other parts of the two film cycles; displacement of emphasis from the figure to ground appears in nearly all the films in both cycles, and Elder's use of sound (narration, music, and ambient sounds) along with text helps to further that displacement;

254 indifference to spatial and temporal cohesion by means of polyphonic composition based on plastic coherence of forms, poetic connections between images and/or sounds, and rhythmic shaping of time rather than narrative continuity, are present in varying combinations in all his films.

39 Elder had been accused of being self-serving in this essay. This is an odd accusation considering that it would not be out of an ordinary for an artist to issue a manifesto advocating the sort of work she or he loves (indeed many have done so in the past). In fact, the history of avant-garde art can be traced through highly volatile proclamations in artists' manifestos. Indeed, such expressions of strong convictions by artists' are precisely what is needed today.

40 This quote is taken from R. Bruce Elder's note on his film in the online film catalogue of Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (http://www.cfmdc.org/content.php?page=catalogue). His notes on his other films are also available in this online catalogue.

41 The title of R. Bruce Elder's new book is Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant- Garde Art Movements in the Twentieth Century and by dissent he means "dissensus"— the eternal force in art work that leads to resistance of (gestalt) form, to dismantling unity, and to disrupting order.

42 This sort of floating attention is also central in psychoanalysis, for it allows associative thinking.

43 Elder thought to use rear-projection in The Art of Worldly Wisdom partly because he knew that Bruce Baillie also used this technique in his film Quick Billy (1967-70), a great diary film on the filmmaker's own struggle with illness (also one of the underlying themes in Elder's film), and partly because Baillie's film was inspired by the Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, in particular the psychic transformation of the poet through the course of his journey towards paradise. Dante's book is one of the central texts, among others, that underlie the structure of Elder's The Book of All the Dead film cycle (The Art of Worldly Wisdom being the first film in this cycle), which is also structured according to the three stages of assent from hell (Lamentations), to purgatory (Consolations) and finally reaches paradise (Exultations)—or so one would hope to reach paradise in Elder's cycle, but instead he reminds us that paradise is still long way from us, because in Modernity our ability to have a real experience has atrophied, for it has been shut out by technique that permeates life and prevents love to give life its meaning.

44 Intentionality in phenomenology refers to the fact that all consciousness is a consciousness of something or is directed towards something.

255 451 use the term "matrix" in the sense that Jean-Francis Lyotard gives in Discours, Figure (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1978). This term is also a rough equivalent to what Elder calls be-ing as distinguished from beings.

46 Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception was the only phenomenology that dealt with synaesthetic perception. Mitry's phenomenology is based primarily on Husserl's phenomenology which concentrates on consciousness and cognition, and not on the sensory organization of the body. Thus, Mitry's understanding of the sensory organization and the human body appears to be informed by science of human physiology.

47 According to Martin Heidegger's metaphysics, the lived world is characterized by perpetual and mutual strife or struggle between the "Earth" that conceals and "World" which opens or reveals. In fact, according to Heidegger's Earth and World exist by virtue of this struggle "where each opponent carries the other beyond itself' (49).

48 In fact, in reality film strips are actually glued together with a splicing tape or with a cement. But I purposefully insisted on using the term glue to suggest the notion of collage, of which montage is yet another variation. Collage necessarily implies fragmentation, plurality, incompletion and thus the kind of indeterminacy which Elder is trying to stress in his argument. In addition, just as collage insisted on breaking up the visual perspective, in experimental cinema, the use of polyphonic visual composition within each shot—a kind of film collage—aims at the same goal.

256