Jean-Luc Godard. 2 Or 3 Things I Know About Her. 1967

Jean-Luc Godard. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. 1967.

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MICHAEL CRAMER

In an August 1967 interview conducted upon the release of La Chinoise, Jean- Luc Godard explained that the film’s main character, a philosophy student, “represents the problem of education, hence of knowledge, which is, in my opin- ion, the one that determines all others in France today.”1 Such a comment is hardly surprising, given the context of burgeoning student radicalism that would result in the uprisings of the following year. Indeed, La Chinoise is often cited as a prescient foreshadowing of the events of May 1968. Even so, Godard’s self-proclaimed interest in education deserves further scrutiny, insofar as it would remain one of the guiding concerns of his artistic practice from this point on, from the leftist didacticism of his Groupe Dziga Vertov films to the history through and of images offered in his Histoire(s) du cinéma (8 episodes, 1988–98). This facet of the director’s work—what we might call Godard’s pedagogical turn—has been most extensively treated by Serge Daney in his 1976 article “Le Therrorisé (Pédagogie godardienne).”2 Here, Daney positions the filmmaker’s movement toward pedagogy as part and parcel of post-’68 radicalism, a politically motivated effort to both deprivilege and instrumentalize cinema. A radicalized filmmaker, Daney argues, “must learn to leave the movie theater (of the obscurantist cinephile) or, at least, to connect it to something else.”3 In Godard’s case, this move beyond cinephilia reverses a youthful shirking of the university classroom in favor of the cinema, and traces “a path in the opposite direction: from cinema to school.”4 The “school” Daney has in mind here is the one set up by Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin in their political films made under the Groupe Dziga Vertov banner, and his analysis pri- marily deals with films made in the 1970s. Godard’s turn to pedagogy, however, cannot be conflated with his militancy and political “conversion,” and in fact begins much earlier. In this essay, I consider Godard’s interest in education and his self-presentation as a pedagogue in the mid- to late 1960s, the period prior to

1. Yvonne Baby, “‘La Chinoise’: Quelques individus-types avec pour seul point commun la jeu- nesse,” Le Monde, August 24, 1967. 2. Originally published in Cahiers du cinéma, reprinted in Serge Daney, La Rampe (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/Gallimard, 1983), pp. 85–95. 3. Daney, La Rampe, p. 86. 4. Ibid.

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his transformation/subsumption into the Groupe Dziga Vertov. Tracing Godard’s concern with pedagogy through his films of this period—particularly Masculin féminin, 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her), La Chinoise, and Le gai savoir—allows us to see the extent to which it served as the primary motor behind his aesthetic and theoretical innovations, and sheds new light on the role played by Communism (and Maoism in particular) in his pre–Groupe Dziga Vertov works. Godard’s interest in pedagogy led him to consider how images might teach, and hence how the filmmaker could communicate with his audience, an issue that would be fundamental to his 1970s work (particularly the television series Six fois deux: Sur et sous la communication). Such questions arose from a central problem whose basic terms were laid out in the films of the late 1960s: If communication is compromised or even rendered impossible by the fact that it always takes place through an ideologically loaded language system (of which images are a part), and therefore can never convey true knowledge, how can the artist (or anyone else, for that matter) engage in successful pedagogy? These questions are posed in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967) while La Chinoise (1967) and Godard’s most explicit treatment of pedagogy, Le gai savoir (1968–69), offer possible responses by engaging two primary frameworks. One is Maoist politics; the other is a theologically inflected conviction that there exists a privileged or pure knowledge that is not subject to ideology or to the epistemological doubt directed toward most forms of communication and signification. La Chinoise and Le gai savoir reject the idea of an artist-pedagogue who teaches either through a transparent process of communication or by acting upon or “repairing” language. Instead, they consider how the artist might be able to convey a truth originating from a source that resides outside or beyond language, one that is not subject to the same distance from the real and enmeshment with ideology that normally renders communication impossible. That source takes several different forms but is consistently associated with a messianic Communism (i.e., that which is still to come) and with Chairman Mao in particular. By resolving the problem through an appeal to a form of knowledge that lies beyond language, Godard ends up practicing a mode of pedagogy that can be most aptly characterized as revelationist. It is a mode that hinges not on the communication of concepts or information, but on the artist’s capacity to grant being or presence to a “word” that is located elsewhere, whether in far-off China or in the heavens above. Godard’s conception of the image’s pedagogical capacities immediately prior to his work with the Groupe Dziga Vertov, then, is one that casts the image as the means through which an unquestioned but somehow absent, possibly even incorporeal, truth becomes a self-evident, irreducible presence. This “solution” to the problem of pedagogy, however, is only arrived at after several preliminary steps and rejected alternatives, and itself poses new problems that will surface repeatedly throughout the rest of Godard’s career.

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From Cinema to School Godard’s concern with cinema’s pedagogical potential and with the possibility of moving, as Daney puts it, “from cinema to school” finds an early manifestation in 1966’s Masculin féminin. In his public discussion of the film, Godard described it as the work not of a filmmaker but of a sociologist or scientist: “To speak in the manner of sociologists, I tried to study youth from the point of view of ‘structures.’ I proceeded a bit in the manner of a researcher who studies cells, attempting to isolate one and watch it live.”5 Such comments, of course, reflected the already waning structuralist vogue and its pretension to “scientize” discourse about art. One might also detect the belief that someone seriously con- cerned with social issues cannot remain an artist, but that the artist may possess a certain capacity—that of observation (“to isolate one and watch it live”)—that can be used in the service of epistemological pursuit. Godard’s subsequent film, 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, continues to manifest signs of a scientific approach, with the filmmaker declaring in voice-over, “I examine the city, its inhabitants, and the bonds between them, as intently as the biologist examines the relations between individual and race in evolution.” But it also consid- ers more deeply whether or not the identity and practice of the artist overlap with those of the social scientist. The film’s trailer, which requests in written titles that the spectator “Apprenez en silence deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle” (“Learn in silence two or three things I know about her”), and its title strongly suggest that the supplementary role of the filmmaker has become that of pedagogue.6 The scientist of Masculin féminin has become something far more abstract, an unabashed manifestation of the Lacanian sujet supposé savoir, one who knows, one who speaks to us in the first person with an authoritative “je sais.”7 His command to the spectator implies a master-pupil relationship in which the one who knows speaks, transmitting information to the ignorant. This dynamic suggests a director-spectator relationship that brings together a concern with semiotics (emphasizing the transmission of a “mes- sage”) and the conception of film as first-person communication from director to audience that had gained wide acceptance as a result of Cahiers du cinéma’s politique des auteurs; by positioning himself as the one who knows and the spectator as his student, the director establishes both a new identity and a new activity. Yet the very terms in which this takes place—a command to “apprenez en silence”—raise the specter of what Daney will later call the “discours du manche,” a preexisting and unquestioned discourse that is always assumed to be true and demands acceptance from both the spectator and the one who repeats it.8

5. Yvonne Baby, “Masculin-Féminin: Les enfants de Marx et du coca-cola,” Le Monde, April 22, 1966. 6. For an account of the trailer, see Émile Breton, “2 ou 3 Choses en deux temps trois mouve- ments,” in Jean-Luc Godard: Documents, ed. Nicole Brenez et al. (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2006), p. 77. 7. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 230 –36. 8. Daney, La Rampe, p. 89.

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Bouvard, Pécuchet, and Jean-Luc: 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle The artist-pedagogue announced by the trailer for 2 or 3 Things and the manner in which he would function are not, however, defined conclusively by the film itself: It remains unclear how the functions of art and pedagogy relate, whether they can be united in a single practice, and how they might be situated in a larger framework that also addresses political critique and practice. The film is thus forced to retreat from the position of authority proclaimed in its title and trailer, as it discovers in its unfolding the challenges for the artist in assuming the role of pedagogue. This initial presumption of knowledge and subsequent retreat from it are both articulated within the film. 2 or 3 Things functions as a knowing statement about contemporary society, much like the one that would be offered by the social scientist that Godard evokes in his comments on Masculin féminin, but ultimately reveals its pretensions to “scientific” knowledge to be baseless. With his opening declaration that he intends to study the city “as intently as the biologist examines the relations between individual and race in evolution,” Godard once again signals observation to be his primary activity. Before teaching us anything about his object, he will investigate it, merging observation and pedagogy in what Jacques Rancière calls “Godard’s method of the ‘leçon des choses.’”9 The knowledge (“2 or 3 things”) gained from observation will then be relayed to the viewer. Following this procedure, the pedagogical film functions something like the books that it depicts: Indeed, a shot of the cover of Raymond Aron’s Eighteen Lessons on Industrial Society suggests that the film’s lessons might be seen as audiovisual ana- logues to the sociological essay. Godard knows, however, that communication is never so simple, and that even if one can confidently proclaim “je sais,” one cannot presume that knowledge is transmissible. The film slides into a disavowal of pedagogical authority in a scene in which two men, named after Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, thumb through a massive pile of books. One reads sentences while the other copies them down, creating a book that mixes together all books, merging all signs indiscriminately into a meaningless jumble.10 Books are revealed not to be authoritative objects that can give us coherent lessons about the world we live in, as the other images of book titles in the film might have led us to believe, but only confused tangles of signifiers that serve to separate us from the real—and thus are in no position to teach anything. The film’s critique of the hubris of the book, as an object that pre- sumes to offer a transparent lesson yet fails to deliver upon that lesson, enacts the move from a “scientific” structuralism to a philosophy, such as Wittgenstein’s, that

9. Jacques Rancière, Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg, 2006), p. 143. The “leçon des choses” or “object lesson” is a pedagogical technique in which, rather than describing or explaining something, the pedagogue simply presents an object or a process from which the student can learn directly. 10. Bouvard and Pécuchet are copy-clerks and the main characters of Flaubert’s eponymous novel. In their retirement, they study a wide variety of subjects, reading every possible text available. Because they derive their knowledge only from books, they often confuse signs with reality.

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grants primacy to the question of language’s relationship to knowledge. Indeed, 2 or 3 Things declares its interest in language and signs early on: When a child asks his mother (Marina Vlady’s Julliette Jeanson) what language is, she responds, recalling Heidegger, “Language is the house man lives in.” Later in the film, Godard paraphrases Wittgenstein in a whispered voice-over, reminding us that “the limits of language, of my language, are the limits of the world, of my world,” and that “in speaking, I limit the world, I end it.” The presumption of pedagogy is thus thwarted by the realization that language can only lead us farther from what we wish to know. This blockage forces Godard to reconsider the possible functions of the artist, for if language ultimately thwarts or limits communication, how can the artist best teach? Contemporary debates on the role of language and art in effecting political change suggest one

Cover of the Raymond Aron book, in the Gallimard edition, as reproduced in Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. 1967.

possible response, albeit one Godard ultimately rejects: The ideal relationship between art and pedagogy is posited not as one of transmission—where art simply becomes one vehicle among others for conveying ideas or lessons—but rather as one in which artistic activity enacts the alternative to or transformation of the state of things through its action upon the sign. Godard’s voice-over, which begins with a declaration of his intention to “examine the city,” ends with the expression of a desire to change it: Only through examination, the artist-pedagogue tells us, “can I tackle problems of social pathology, and formulate the hope for a genuine new city.” The artist-pedagogue’s role, then, is not simply to observe and convey facts about the city, but to work toward the creation of a new one. The artist’s role in such creation, however, is unlikely to be the same as that of the social scientist: The filmmaker does not work with demographic data and city plans but with audiovisual signs. He is, as contemporary characterizations would have it, a worker

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engaging in semiotic production. His role in laying the foundations of the new city would thus lie in the creation of a new language to replace the old, opaque one, which is composed, in Godard’s words, of “signs which make me doubt language by drowning reality rather than detaching it from the imaginary.” If the filmmaker takes on this function, several problems might be solved at once: The role of the artist in effecting political change gains greater specificity by being defined as semiotic work rather than as observation or transparent communication (which are hardly practices unique to the artist), while the inadequacy of existing language and the corresponding impossibility of pedagogy are addressed through the creation of new signs. Recognizably avant-gardist, this vision of the artist’s task is one in which what we might call symbolic renovation is paramount, whether in a redemptive (as in Nietzsche) or a transgressive or revolutionary manner (as in Kristeva).11 Like Kristeva and her colleagues at Tel Quel, 2 or 3 Things suggests that the artist can be an agent of symbolic production, a worker hammering away at the materiality of signs to reveal the world (or at least the processes of production) obscured beneath them, or to build a new one from a renovated language. Ultimately, however, the film does not endorse this position, and Godard’s estimate of the artist’s capacities ends up being considerably lower than that of Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language. Rather than transgressing the symbolic or revitalizing a stultifying language, Godard finds himself drowning in a sea of mixed-up signs: “But are these the words and images to use? Are there no others? Am I talking too loud, looking too close?” The artist, it seems, can only endlessly question and doubt his own inadequate efforts. A merging of pedagogical, artistic, and political practices thus remains little more than a distant ideal, highly desirable yet rendered impossible by the limitations of the artist’s productive capacities. Unable to draw closer to the real through any symbolic system—old or new, inherited or invented—the artist founders in his role as redeemer, subverter, or renovator of signs. But if the artist cannot create a new language, perhaps someone else can. The search for a true master, one who speaks a language that allows for the knowledge (“je sais”) and the pedagogical communication (“apprenez”) invoked in the film’s trailer, leads Godard both to Communism and to theologically inflected notions of truth and its revelation. 2 or 3 Things introduces a scenario that will be repeated more or less explicitly throughout his subsequent films, in which a certain level of knowledge is situated beyond or above the level of language, not subject to the same doubt, but rather self-evident and infallible. This scenario suggests that for Godard, language

11. My characterization of Nietzsche is derived from Henri Lefebvre’s account of his poetry: “For Nietzsche the poet, poetry consists in a metamorphosis of signs. In the course of struggle which over- comes the antagonism between work and play, the poet snatches words from the jaws of death. In the chain of signifiers, he substitutes life for death, and ‘decodes’ on this basis.” See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 135. Kristeva’s theory of “poetic revolution,” articulated partly in Lacanian terms, casts poetic language as transgressive of the symbolic (and hence of the subject). See “Revolution in Poetic Language” (an excerpt from the book of the same title), in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia, 1986), especially pp. 118–22.

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(and thus the possibility of pedagogy) can only be redeemed by something external to it, an exceptional condition or guarantor. The artist thus requires something from outside (of himself and of language) to ensure effective pedagogy; as Daney puts it, “Godard is not the bearer—even less the origin—of this discourse that demands our submission, but something like its drill-master [répétiteur].”12 Daney astutely notes that Godard’s mode of pedagogy entails an abdication of authority and power (to create the world anew through work on signs, or even to say “je sais”) and its transfer to some unspecified other. I would diverge from him, however, in noting that this oper- ation entails not simply looking beyond oneself for the correct line, but to some site or source in which the usual shortcomings of language no longer exist. By positing the existence of knowledge or truth beyond language, Godard demotes language itself to the status of a reflection or translation that only becomes fully transparent when something external to it acts upon it. The contours of this “something” come into clearer focus in the subsequent films, but here it is simply designated by the name “Communism.” In the film’s penul- timate scene, Blandine Jeanson asks a Communist what Communist ethics will be like. He tries to explain, but he only manages to describe an ethics exactly like that which already exists, as though demonstrating Wittgenstein’s dictum about the limits of language being the limits of the world. When Blandine inquires again as to what the difference will be, he gives up and simply says, “Avec le communisme, ce sera plus facile à expliquer” (With Communism, it will be easier to explain). This response can be taken at least two ways. On the one hand, it suggests that when Communism arrives, we will be able to construct a new language, one capable of expressing concepts that are at present inexpressible. In this case, a conception of language as production would remain operative, even if its successful production is rendered sub- ordinate to other factors (i.e., revolution, an end to bourgeois political, economic, and symbolic order). On the other hand—and in my preferred reading—it suggests that Communism itself will function as a kind of external guarantor, restoring transparent meaning to all that has lost it, including language. Communism would not enable a new language so much as it would transcend the problem of language. In the latter case, treating the artist’s activity as symbolic production would cease to be of importance, insofar as he would be reduced to merely translating or transcribing that truth that would manifest itself beyond and outside of language when Communism arrives. He becomes, as Daney puts it, a répétiteur. As presented by 2 or 3 Things, however, Communism remains little more than a placeholder; it functions as a hypothetical and nonspecific condition, impossible to teach about or to “repeat” both because its character remains unclear and because it can only be articulated linguistically upon its own advent. La Chinoise, released later in the same year, begins to grapple with these problems but also underscores the extent to which Godard’s search for a pedagogy beyond language leads to a revelationist paradigm.

12. Daney, La Rampe, p. 89.

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“Avec le communisme, ce sera plus facile à expliquer”: La Chinoise Whereas in 2 or 3 Things art’s connection with pedagogy and politics is defined in terms of its capacity to observe, decipher, and (potentially) symbolically reconstruct the world, in La Chinoise (1967) art and pedagogy are, at least for the film’s characters, defined as components of political struggle on the cultural front, as two varieties of what Althusser would call ideological practices.13 The understanding of art’s relationship to politics expressed by the characters in La Chinoise, however, should not be mistaken for the one that is implied by the film itself. In the actions of its characters, the film depicts a typically (French) Maoist program in which culture (encompassing both art and education) becomes a privileged site of political struggle. It is in order to transform artistic and educational practices, rather than explicitly political ones, that the Maoists of La Chinoise carry out (or plan to carry out) their acts of terrorism. The sole act of political violence accom- plished in the film is Véronique’s assassination of the Soviet cultural minister and novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, author of And Quiet Flows the Don. Sholokhov, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1965, serves in the film as a representative of respectable Socialist Realism, the artistic manifestation of the “revisionist” position against which the Maoists define themselves. To kill Sholokhov, then, is to kill a certain relationship between art, pedagogy, and politics, one in which art’s pedagogical function is limited to the transparent and heroic narratives of Socialist Realism, which serve as models for good Communist behavior. Because it is dependent on the external guarantor of Communism, the joining of artistic and pedagogical practices in La Chinoise finds Godard deferring pedagogical authority altogether. The true pedagogue is Mao himself, and the artist merely his adjunct. As Godard puts it, the characters in the film “are passing from one social structure to another, and they need a friend for this passage. The only one that seems to give good advice is President Mao.”14 If Mao, however, has taken over the role of pedagogue, what remains for the artist to do? A clue lies in the statement that appears on the apartment wall near the beginning of the film: “Il faut confronter les idées vagues avec des images claires” (One must confront vague ideas with clear images). Given his status as an image-maker, this imperative would seem to be directed at Godard himself. But what does it mean to make images claires? Godard assigns the artist-pedagogue the task not simply of showing what Maoism looks like, nor of verbally “repeating” it, but of creating images that will be adequate and identical to the idea of Communism. If an idea is “vague,” perhaps it is not because it lacks force or clarity, but rather because it seeks its material counterpart or vessel. The command to confront vague ideas with clear images is a call not to replace one thing with another but to bring image and idea together as a single material sign, to produce an image that is also an idea. By doing so, the artist can attempt to bypass the level of language altogether, and instead create a vessel through which a pre- or nonlinguistic truth is given tangible

13. That is, transformative practices that take as their object or “raw material” men’s “conscious- ness.” See Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: New Left Books, 1969), p. 167. 14. Baby, “La Chinoise.”

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being or presence. The solution to the deadlock at the end of 2 or 3 Things is reached through an assertion that the artist can bridge the gap between the yet-to- come and the actual, between the nonlinguistic and the communicable, rather than waiting for language to be redeemed by Communism.

Une image claire By presenting the idea as image claire, the artist-pedagogue finds his function: to give visibility and concrete presence to an idea derived from beyond the realm of language. It is through this visibility, Jean-Louis Comolli argues, that we can understand the idea itself: “One can unerringly arrive at the bare idea by confin- ing oneself to the image, which is austere and pure, transparent and precise.”15 The utopian state depicted by the film is not so much a political one as a linguistic one, in which the problems of language and communication have been resolved.

15. Jean-Louis Comolli, “La Chinoise,” in The Films of Jean-Luc Godard, ed. Ian Cameron (London: Studio Vista Limited, 1969), p. 155.

Godard. La Chinoise. 1967.

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We might read the images of the film as demonstrations of linguistic “solutions,” indications that the problems that normally plague language have, at least in the hypothetical or imaginary space of the film, been solved. In some cases, a verbal metaphor expressive of a particular idea is literally visualized: This is the case, Rancière argues, when “Juliet Berto illustrates the idea that the Little Red Book is the rampart of the masses against imperialism by standing in front of a wall of red books.”16 Here, images are simply revealed to be up to the task of “translating” words, the wider implication being that all registers of communication, all kinds of signs, are interchangeable, equally well equipped to transparently and effectively convey ideas after the establishment of an external guarantor. But there is also another sort of image claire, one that does not have a verbal equivalent but instead seems to refer directly to an otherwise inexpressible idea. Such images are not merely “translations” from another form of language; they constitute the idea itself in an irreducible way, so much so that they become indistinguishable from it. We might describe them as “icons,” in which the idea takes on material form. The young painter Kirilov, in front of a blackboard with a gun in his hand, beside a pic- ture of Malcolm X, is revolutionary destruction. Véronique, sitting in front of a bookcase filled with Little Red Books, is revolutionary intellect. These images, 16. Rancière, Film Fables, p. 147.

Godard. La Chinoise. 1967.

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unlike the visualized verbal metaphor, seem to be new. That is, they are creations rather than translations. As Comolli writes, “The image here will perhaps not be the projection of an image already in existence, registered and preserved in a showcase . . . but rather the momentary throwing out of an idea snatched the instant it arises.”17 But if these images appear to emerge from nothingness, it is not, as Comolli suggests, because they mark the simultaneous creation of idea and image, but because they make visible that which was formerly invisible, material that which was ideal. The sort of pedagogy enacted in the creation of such images is not one that invites us to interpret, to examine, or to analyze; it simply reveals. The artist-pedagogue presents an idea and an image, but no more work need be done by the student. This impossibility of interpretation, the forbidding of multiple meanings or of miscommunication, attests to the advent of a situation in which all signs mean only one thing and are self-evident. Comolli suggests this quality when he writes of La Chinoise, “The image is to be read; there is nothing there that need not be read, and nothing can be read in it that is not there. To read the image . . . is not to interpret the signs, decode the figures nor analyze the premises and conclusions.”18 The image is a fact, like the “faits précis” explicated by Godard in Masculin féminin (subtitled “15 faits précis”) but now beyond question, no longer expressible in any other way or subject to the artist’s doubt as to whether he has arranged things properly. As clear as Godard’s images are, though, there is something wrong with this pic- ture. As I’ve suggested, the image claire as it manifests itself in La Chinoise must be taken as existing within an imaginary or provisional condition; the coincidence of image and idea that it achieves is part of a utopian fiction. Communism has not really come, and hence language has not really been redeemed, but what if we were to sus- pend disbelief and pretend that it had? This is precisely the state of suspension in which Godard makes La Chinoise, and both the function of artist-pedagogue he suggests and the images he produces can only exist within such a state. The film projects in its very construction a world in which the kind of images it creates would be valid. Such clear images, however, cannot exist outside the confines of the film. Godard, in this sense, is every bit as much a “Robinson” as the characters he depicts, existing in a pure state detached from the rest of the world.19 The idea that the linguistically pure space of the apartment (as well as the filmic space in which the images claires emerge) is somehow hypothetical is indi- cated by the few sequences of the film that take place elsewhere. The pure colors that we find in the apartment, Rancière notes, contrast greatly with the more nuanced greens found outside.20 Such colors, and the images claires constructed

17. Comolli, “La Chinoise,” p. 155. 18. Ibid., p. 156. 19. Godard refers to them as such, referencing Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: “They are Robinsons, and Marxism their Friday.” See Baby, “La Chinoise.” 20. Rancière argues that La Chinoise is “entirely structured by the chromatic apparatus,” with red as the color of thought. See Film Fables, p. 148.

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with them, are tenable only in an isolated state of pure thought. (A similar idea manifests itself in Véronique’s mistaken assassination of someone other than Sholokhov: She reads the hotel register upside down and as a result kills a man in the wrong hotel room.) Outside the apartment, signs are no longer legible. The question for the film’s protagonists, and for Godard himself, is how these ideas, these colors, and the imagined utopia of signs might be transported beyond the apartment walls. Perhaps this will only be possible once Communism arrives; perhaps there is nothing that the artist can do to solve the problem, which remains instead the task of the militant. Given Communism’s failure to materialize in anything but the hypothetical realm, Godard must adjust his approach in his later films. Since it will not simply arise on its own, the filmmaker must work toward it, turning his pedagogy into something with an instrumental, material effect. The recognition of the hypothetical character of the condition expressed by La Chinoise thus provides the filmmaker with a potential escape from an ideal, apolitical Communism, insofar as it forces him to work toward a new state of things in a way that engages with the actual, rather than simply jumping ahead to an imagined utopia. Just as Véronique and Guillaume seek to destroy the existing forms of art and pedagogy in order to better construct new ones, so, too, must the artist-pedagogue’s function be limited to destruction and critique; while this function is not entirely unrelated to the idea of symbolic renovation, it is more purely negative, and does not presume to create a new world through work on the sign, even in a hypothetical sense. Seen from this perspective, La Chinoise thus appears to be an all-too-hasty step forward, a kind of cinematic voluntarism and an effort to circumvent the study that would allow for the understanding of the “concrete situation” in order to better dissolve its ele- ments. Instead of creating an image-idea, the artist-pedagogue must initiate a process. As Patricia Lumumba (Juliet Berto) explains in Le gai savoir, “Before beginning from zero, we have to get there, return to zero.” Godard must dissolve the radiant red of La Chinoise, full of self-evident meaning and beyond interpretation, leaving only the empty black studio that serves as the main setting of Le gai savoir. If in La Chinoise the icon served as a means of revelation, here Godard turns to iconoclasm, emptying out the image to the point that instead of containing an incontestable truth, it seems to contain nothing at all.

From Red to Black: Le gai savoir Le gai savoir constitutes Godard’s most explicit treatment of pedagogy, sit- uating it in clear relation to politics.21 Its only two “characters,” Patricia Lumumba and Émile Rousseau, propose to carry out a study of sounds and images so that they may “turn against the enemy the arm with which he attacks us: language.” The film asks implicitly what sort of education will be necessary to prepare the revolution and how sounds and images can be part of this education. In these questions, we can see a turn away from both the production of signs or symbolic 21. The film originated, like so many of Godard’s films, as an adaptation of a text that is barely detectable in the final product, in this case Rousseau’s Émile.

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Godard. Le gai savoir. 1969.

renovation and the incarnation of an ideal, invisible truth: Here, pedagogy teaches about images, rather than assuming they can convey knowledge directly. One cannot place a lesson in an image precisely because the condition imagined in La Chinoise has not arrived; images and words are once again fallen, incapable of containing meaning within themselves. Patricia and Émile’s proposed curriculum entails three years of study: In the first, they will “collect images and record sounds”; in the second, subject them to critique; and, in the third, “make two or three models of sound and image.” The spontaneous outbreak of meaning and of image-production in La Chinoise is thus replaced by years of careful study, undertaken in order to assure that, as Patricia puts it, “the fabrication of images, I hope, will be carried out from known things instead of unknown things as it is today.” If in La Chinoise Godard was Mao’s trans- lator, situated directly below him in a hierarchical configuration, in Le gai savoir he stands to the side, seeking to establish the preconditions for knowledge without ever claiming to give it full expression. As the two students begin their study, watching and listening to a chaotic assemblage of images and sounds, they find themselves in a situation much like the one Godard lamented in 2 or 3 Things, in which signifiers lead only to confu-

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sion: “One can’t understand very well,” notes Émile. “Of course,” Patricia responds, “they’re speaking out of order.” Their subsequent task, however, will not be (yet) to create order out of chaos, but rather to “dissolve images and sounds.” The literal attacks on culture and its representatives in La Chinoise are substituted here by attacks on language itself that seek to reduce it to its elementary particles in order to better understand it before attempting to create a new one. This attack on language, however, is a rather modest one: It does not presume that one can alter reality by altering language, but rather that the knowledge of language may assist in the accomplishment of revolutionary tasks. The film does not limit itself, however, to the study of images and language. It also illustrates several ways in which the artist-pedagogue, as a figure with a spe- cific capacity for working with images, might produce new knowledge or meaning in the absence of revolutionary work upon signification or a pedagogy of visual revelation. Within the black space (or perhaps better, nonspace) of the film, which connotes the didactic emblem of the blackboard, Godard chains images together in a technique that amounts to a cinematic variation on collage: still images from various sources (magazines, posters, books) are edited together in series; some remain unaltered, while others are written, drawn upon, or pasted together by the filmmaker. As Kaja Silverman notes, “Whereas the blackboard usu- ally offers a relatively durable and intelligible image, here one image replaces another with lighting rapidity, and even within individual images meaning is

Godard. Le gai savoir. 1969.

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volatilized through the juxtaposition of visual and verbal signifiers.”22 Such erup- tions of images are, of course, nothing new in Godard’s films. Here, however, the images used are more radically detached from their contexts than they had been previously: They do not originate from materials that the characters read (as in Pierrot le fou or 2 or 3 Things) nor are they illustrations of their speech or ideas (as with the images of Mao and Lenin in La Chinoise). They are presented bereft of any anchor that would attach them to either the gaze of a character or a situation within a previously existing discourse, and therefore subject to rearrangement and to the creation of new meanings. The images used in these collages, furthermore, are not Godard’s own, but ones collected elsewhere. Collage thus allows the artist- pedagogue to produce knowledge with or through images without assuming it can be found in them. In the absence of the image claire, collage provides a means for the artist-pedagogue to work with sounds and images without having to create “correct” ones (the images justes later disavowed in Vent d’est [1970], which intro- duced Gorin’s famous dictum “Ce n’est pas une image juste. C’est juste une image” [“It’s not a just/correct image. It’s just an image.”]). Alongside this strategy, however, exists another that seems to challenge or even contradict it. Godard speaks in voice-over throughout the film, and this voice, like that of Radio Peking in La Chinoise, represents the “correct line,” that of “the subject who says he knows,” as Silverman notes.23 While a pure, unquestioned knowledge may no longer be manifest in the images themselves, the broadcast voice evokes its continued existence. Godard’s voice at first whispers vague calls to strike and revolt, and later holds forth about the complicity of scientists and philosophers with the rul- ing class and the political and economic situation in France. The persistence of this distant truth demonstrates the film’s failure to “dissolve” all words and images, the impossibility of reaching a “zero” that is not already occupied by discourse. The iden- tification of the “correct line” with the word bears out Daney’s critiques of Godard’s reliance on an unquestioned discourse; the only difference from La Chinoise is that this discourse is situated as incommensurate with images, incapable of being found in or translated into them. This difference undoubtedly changes the film’s pedagogical method, reducing the image to a tool rather than positioning it as a site of meaning. At the same time, however, the film essentially recapitulates the same paradigm laid out in 2 or 3 Things and La Chinoise: While the status of the image has changed, the operative conceptualizations of truth and knowledge have not. The desire to “dissolve” and “return to zero” on the one hand, and the persistence of an unquestioned discourse on the other, are not in fact as contradictory as they might first appear. The “zero” in question here does not express radical skepticism or the total impossibility of truth or meaning, but rather a situation in which the word that was made flesh in La Chinoise remains disincarnate in the face of a fallen language, unable to find a material vessel to contain it. Godard’s voice-over, even if characterized as an unquestioned discourse, remains in some sense obscured and compromised, interrupted by static and electronic noise and spoken in whispers. It is much like the failed speech of

22. Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking About Godard (New York: NYU Press, 1998), pp. 115–16. 23. Ibid., p. 125.

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the Communist in 2 or 3 Things; once again, we must wait for some future state before it can be fully understood. As in La Chinoise, the advent of that state is conceived of in terms of incarnation, but this time as incarnation into a living human body rather than into images. This modification is demonstrated in a sequence in which Émile and Patricia attempt to replicate the intonation of a friend’s words (“Ah, oui”). As they fail, Patricia laments that the correct intonation is “terribly difficult to transmit.” Émile suggests that they ought to have recorded it, to which Patricia replies, “I didn’t say we should reproduce it, but transmit it; to someone, in someone, living.” The full truth of the word, at this point present only in a disembodied voice, can only be fully manifested if it resides in someone. The word must be made flesh if it is to be understood, and we might even say (particularly if we bear in mind later works like Hail Mary and Hélas pour moi) that it desires its own incarnation. One need not necessarily read the paradigm constructed by these films as theo- logical in character; the messianic notion of a future state in which word is commensurate with flesh could easily be taken as an allegorical and secular articula- tion of Godard’s frustrations with both verbal language and images. It offers a way to project a utopian condition that need not be conceived of as actually possible, whether by representing its imagined advent (La Chinoise) or indicating its absence (Le gai savoir). Whether one follows this reading or believes that Godard is genuinely conflating Communism and theology, his need to posit a transformed world or exceptional condition in order to imagine the possibility of a successful pedagogy of the image leads to further contradictions. In his subsequent work, Godard’s desire to use his art as a form of instrumental pedagogy advances in tandem with his increasing political commitment, yet is often thwarted by a deep conviction that truth and knowledge are ultimately inexpressible through images. As Colin MacCabe notes of the Groupe Dziga Vertov films, “All the films are in some simple sense unwatchable— the premise of each is that the image is unable to provide the knowledge it claims.”24 Godard provides a more utopian gloss on the same notion when speaking to MacCabe about Six fois deux, the highly didactic television series he made in 1975 with Anne-Marie Miéville, explaining that if a viewer finds its episodes a bore, it might be because “they don’t suit the time that you’re looking at them because you’re obliged to live in this society.”25 Histoire(s) du cinéma and other works, meanwhile, make repeated use of the phrase “The image will come at the time of the resurrection,” sug- gesting that the full revelatory power of the image—perhaps something like what we find in hypothetical form in La Chinoise—will emerge only in some future utopian state. In each case, however, a proclaimed impossibility or failure—the same failure that emerges in rebuke to the filmmaker’s pedagogical ambitions in 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her—does little to deter him from his conviction that the image can and must be used to teach, to communicate, and to understand.

24. Colin MacCabe, Godard: Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 216. 25. Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 159.

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