Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 237
Christophe Den Tandt Université Libre de Bruxelles (2015)
CHAPTER 8
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality1
2.3.1 Signs that Matter: The Judicial Spectacle of Material Evidence In the climactic scene of Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia (1993), plaintiff Andrew Beckett (Tom Hanks) and his attorney (Denzel Washington) win their court case by a canny manipulation of what we might call realism’s referential apparatus—the materially heterogeneous gamut of signifiers available to referential discourse. Andrew is an AIDS patient who sues his former employer, a law firm, for firing him discriminatorily. He claims that his law partners,
1 This paper is the ninth instalment of a book-length study provisionally entitled On Virtual Grounds: Blueprint for a Postmimetic, Dialogical Realism. Previous instalments—entitled respectively “Toward a Dialogical and Postmimetic Realism,” and “Classic Realism, the Nostalgic View,” “Modernist Antirealism: Existential Alienation and the Solace of Form,” “The Thingless Sign: The Structuralist and Poststructuralist Challenge against Referential Illusion,” “The Politics of Mimesis: Realism as Discursive Repression,” “Antirealism and the Visual Media,” and “The Reality Bet: Realism under Postmodernity,” and “Negotiated Disclosures: The Core Strategies of Dialogical Realism” —are also available on Academia.edu
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 238 unwilling to keep an AIDS patient among the staff, set him up to commit a professional mistake. The film’s judicial debate revolves around the ability to identify AIDS symptoms. Andrew was indeed discharged after one of the firm’s attorneys spotted an AIDS scar on his forehead—a lesion whose medical significance the attorney had previously learned to recognize. The law partners plead, however, that they were ignorant of Andrew’s condition. Their claim seems borne out by the fact that at the trial, Andrew’s face shows no lesion of the type his colleague identified. Their defence attorney (Mary Steenbruggen) exploits this felicitous coincidence by having Andrew look at his own scar-free face in a mirror. Andrew’s counsel then feels some theatrical breach of legal protocol is in order: he asks his client to bare his chest, letting Andrew display a body covered with lesions that seem to act as natural signs of the disease. Philadelphia’s chest-baring scene picks up a familiar motif of courtroom films. These works often highlight the fact that the judicial system obeys a referential contract restricting the scope of evidence that may be invoked in order to construct what we might call judicially admissible reality. Most courtroom films feature rules-of- evidence deliberations allowing attorneys, prosecutors, and judges to determine which witnesses or documents may be retained as judicially relevant. Decisive court victories in this context are scored by breaking this narrow referential contract: the court is forced to consider elements originating from outside the boundaries of admissible reality—in most cases items, signs, and facts with a different material and semiotic status than the elements thus far examined in the debates. In Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936) and Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) the contract-breaking gesture is achieved by bringing forth cinematographic evidence contradicting attorneys’ and witnesses’ verbal arguments. Fury’s protagonist (Spencer Tracy) is nearly killed by a lynch mob who burn down the jail in which he is detained on false accusations of kidnapping. Yet in their blind rage, the assailants fail to mind the presence of newsreel crews filming their raid. When the case comes to court, the press footage destroys their professions of innocence. Similarly, the prosecutor of the Nuremberg court case in Kramer’s film (Richard Widmark) dispels any doubt concerning Nazi atrocities by setting up a court screening of death camps footage. In other films, discreet parasemiotic elements—signs at the periphery of articulated language—are sufficient to break the frame of admissible reality. In
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 239 Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men (1957), a single compulsive gesture discredits what should have been the most incriminating testimony against a murder suspect. A young woman claims she witnessed the murder from across the street, through the window of a passing elevated-train. Yet as she testifies in court, she keeps rubbing the bridge of her nose, thereby revealing she usually wears glasses. The sole juror skeptical of the guilty verdict (Henry Fonda) is therefore able to turn his fellow jurors around by pointing out that the young woman is no reliable eyewitness. In Judgment at Nuremberg, the unconsciously brutal attitude of a German attorney (Maximilian Schell) badgering a traumatized witness serves as indirect proof of the authoritarian system the court is meant to put on trial. In Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny (1954), the irrepressible urge of Navy Capt. Philip Francis Queeg (Humphrey Bogart) to juggle steel marbles in his hands during court-martial debates lays bare the nervous imbalance that rendered him incapable to man his destroyer, and prompted his crew to mutiny. The examples above depict moments of heuristic disclosure in appearance similar to those we have encountered in Chapter 7 in Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s Smoke (1995) and Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (1999). More explicitly than in the latter two films, however, courtroom scenes make disclosure dependent on dialogical interactions between dissimilar, heterogeneous planes of signs. Breaches of referential contract are here triggered by intermedial discontinuities, or by what we might call nature differentials: the evidential value of speech is contrasted with the supposedly stronger signifying tenor of photographic images and material praxis. As such, these scenes highlight the main stakes of the analysis of realism’s referential apparatuses. They lead us to examine the impact exerted on realist representation by dialogical interactions at the level of the materiality of signifiers: we need to determine to what extent the choice of signifiers affects the validity of realist disclosure. Nature differentials, in this logic, are expected to allow realist authors to carry out what might be called grounding gestures: they open up the possibility for texts to switch toward sign systems that paradoxically reach out toward non-semioticized reality. According to the terminology introduced in Chapter 7, grounding gestures are catalysts of dialogical solidarity: the gesture by which Andrew Beckett displays his AIDS lesions to the courtroom audience takes for granted the fact that the shift from abstract legal argument to scars on the plaintiff’s
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 240 body will heighten instead of weaken dialogical convergence. By baring his chest, Andrew aims to provide an anchoring point for the various signifying systems at his disposal, thereby orienting the latter toward disclosure. Admittedly, the insight thus produced is the product not only of certifiable evidence but also of philosophical commitment. Texts relying on grounding gestures—courtroom dramas, notably—disregard what would be the poststructuralist evaluation of intermedial discontinuities—the expectation that multi- layered semiotic configurations must make an argument more fragmented and indeterminate, hence less conclusive. Instead, most courtroom dramas endorse the representational ethos of the reality bet: they opt for the possibility of knowledge against dogmatic skepticism.
2.3.2 Virtualized Bodies: The Construction of Technospace in Music Videos Courtroom dramas are proper introductory examples for an argument on semiotic materiality because they portray the mechanics of nature differentials and grounding gestures with considerable metadiscursive clarity. Yet they are also disarmingly schematic. For viewers unsympathetic to realism, courtroom disclosures are mere gimmicks sustaining a particularly pernicious type of referential illusion. These cinematic climaxes, as they seek to render privileged signifiers referentially self-evident, only fool audiences untrained in the semiotics of film. In what follows, I therefore analyze nature differentials in more complex source material. The following sections focus on plurimedial texts concerned with the representation of urban space—music videos, alternative films, and urban performance art. This corpus is broader, less tidy, and therefore better able than judicial thrillers to sustain an analysis that validates the referential claims of nature differentials without overlooking the complexity of the mechanisms involved. The resulting argument has a predominantly methodological focus: it defines a classificatory scale indicating how the materiality of signs—their position within nature differentials— affects referential value, and indeed maximizes dialogical solidarity. However, beyond the purely semiotic argument, I also use this corpus in order to comment upon the technological refashioning of the urban world. I pointed out in Chapter 6 that in contemporary works virtualization, together with dialogization, is the chief impediment to realist mapping of the contemporary city: it renders urban space paradoxically both insubstantial and overwhelming. Revisiting this
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 241 topic from the angle of plurimediality and nature differentials leads us to evaluate whether realist works might counteract the sense of unreality of contemporary urban space by virtue of the sheer materiality of their semiotic means. Among the various elements of the corpus defined above, I address music videos first. The structuring principle for the present discussion is indeed each medium’s proximity or distance with regard to the aesthetic of postmodernism. By these standards, music videos come closest to the postmodernist pole of the spectrum. The prominent status of videos in the postmodern culture of the spectacle was highlighted in the early 1980s, as soon as they became a topic of academic analysis (Jameson, Postmodernism 299-300; Kaplan, Rocking 44-48). Video clips attracted the attention of theorists of postmodernist culture because, on the one hand, they occupy a hybrid position in the cultural field—half-way between advertising and art—, and, on the other, because, as Andrew Goodwin puts it, they effect “the fusion of modernist high art and more popular discourse”: they are purveyors of a commercially oriented avant-garde aesthetic for the masses (Goodwin, “Popular” 174; also E. Ann Kaplan 33-48; Jameson, Postmodernism 69, 300; Wollen 167). The status of videos as quintessentially postmodern also has considerable relevance to the issue of semiotic materiality. We have seen above that the aesthetic of postmodernism is wedded to a concept of social relations viewed as unstable, fluid, even dematerialized. Reading videos from the perspective of referential apparatuses and nature differentials therefore allows us to determine how a realist grasp of the contemporary urban scene may be wrested from the signifying matter of texts whose dominant aesthetic orientation otherwise undercuts realist mapping. As a channel for the representation of the city, music videos are postmodern in their portrayal of human subjects interacting with an electronically reconfigured urban lifeworld. The short discussion of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ CALIFORNICATION (2000) in the Introduction to the present essay has already given some sense of the capacity of music videos to register this techno-induced change. In its evocation of the contemporary US, CALIFORNICATION marks out the sphere of agency available to performers inhabiting a landscape that was previously located in phenomenal space, but has now become virtualized. In this, CALIFORNICATION deploys what may be regarded as the core thematic and formal pattern of urban-focused videos—in fact, their chronotope: videos explore the boundary between what
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 242 might be called body space and technospace. The former term designates the area of (urban) reality that can be explored and acted upon by the agency of performing bodies (singers and musicians, dancers); the latter stands for the virtualized social interactions of which the contemporary city constitutes the most visible embodiment. Body space manifests itself typically in shots of performers miming their music in rehearsal rooms, clubs, or any other locale (streets, natural landscapes) signifying the solidity of phenomenal space. This physical realm is often portrayed by the traditional codes of realist cinematography—indeed by what in Chapter 5 I call iconic/indexical images. Technospace, on the contrary, is typically made visible by various forms of technopsychedelic image processing, from virtuoso camera movements and defamiliarizing montage to video effects and, as in CALIFORNICATION, computer generated imaging. It is therefore often conveyed by hyperindexical and hypericonic signs— photographic footage recontextualized by electronic processing and, on the other hand, images entirely generated by computer software. On the basis of previous stages of rock culture, one would expect videos to favour body space as an anchoring point of existential authenticity and cultural/political resistance. A proper celebration of body space must in this logic resemble the urban carnival depicted in Avril Lavigne’s SK8ER BOY (2002). In this clip, members of a youth gang stake out the venue of a clandestine rock performance by painting a red pentagram on the asphalt of a street intersection, then summon hundreds of rock rebels to party in the middle of city traffic. Lavigne’s video thereby echoes previous clips—Cindy Lauper’s GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN (1983) or The New Radicals’ YOU GET WHAT YOU GIVE (1999)—perpetuating the rock ’n’ roll mythology famously expressed in Martha and the Vandellas’ song “Dancing in the Streets” (1964): cities (plazas, malls or corporate buildings) must be appropriated as live performance areas. Conversely, ostensibly antitechnological clips offer a nostalgic endorsement of body space as they warn their viewers against its possible disappearance. Faithless’s INSOMNIA (1996) portrays a lone singer wandering through dehumanized administrative buildings, his body twisting in angst-ridden contortions. Placebo’s THE BITTER END (2003) and Nik Kershaw’s WOULDN’T IT BE GOOD (1984) connect these dystopian images of urban blight to virtualization and the resulting withering of physical selfhood. The former clip features characters reduced to spectral video-processed silhouettes haunting
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 243 industrial buildings. The latter subjects Kershaw to techno-erasure: his body’s outline is replaced by bright embedded video images, and is eventually beamed into space by a satellite dish. Yet we must reckon with the fact that music videos follow the ideological indeterminism of postmodernist culture, and accordingly do not deal with body space and technospace as if they were mutually incompatible. Even as THE BITTER END and WOULDN’T IT BE GOOD champion body space through their disenchanted portrayal of alienating modernity, they give in to what might be called techno- ecstasy. The virtualized urban subjects they depict are forbidding, yet also fascinating. Techno-ecstasy in its purest form appears in clips cognate to Jean Baudrillard’s reflections on urban postmodernity. Jean-Luc Ponty’s INDIVIDUAL CHOICE (1983) and Madonna’s RAY OF LIGHT (1998), for instance, make megalopolitan landscapes exhilarating in their very dehumanization. Ponty’s video, using time- lapse photography, offers a fast-spaced one-day chronicle of cityscapes magnified by the ceaseless stream of their changing skies, yet peopled only with human agents reduced to cogs in collective processes (stock-market frenzy, traffic, subway crowds). Madonna’s clip unfolds against a mesmerizing backdrop of fast-paced footage of urban traffic and crowds. In this, what was previously a body-space environment is metamorphosed into the “astral” landscapes Jean Baudrillard evokes as he compares postmodern metropolises to mountain ranges in the desert or to chaotic swirls devoid of human purposes (Amérique 4).2 We will see below that, due to the commercial constraints bearing upon the MTV format—notably the necessity to foreground performers—, videos cannot restrict themselves to such technopsychedelic footage. Yet the seduction exerted by this dehumanized view of the urban scene is considerable. Even in the otherwise dystopian CALIFORNICATION, there is a trance- like intensity in the singer’s smooth glide through the computer- generated scenery. The presence of a techno-ecstatic bias in music videos is most noticeable in scenes of metamorphosis and transfiguration—indeed in all the narrative and graphic motifs expressing the moment of passage from body space to technospace. As of the 1990s, music videos popularized visual morphing—the image-processing effect that turns performers into shape shifters. Michael Jackson in BLACK OR WHITE
2 All translations of non-English originals are by Christophe Den Tandt.
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(1991) and George Michael in FASTLOVE (1996) allow their bodies instantly to morph into other physical embodiments or to be reduced to patterns of video lines and digital pixels. This practice is particularly significant for our purposes because it is geared to semiotic materiality and nature differentials: in their portrayal of transits into technospace, music videos suggest that the signifiers closely associated to body space display some natural proclivity to be superseded by the hypericonic and hyperindexical signs that form the texture of technospace. While courtroom dramas privilege evidence with the highest degree of semiotic materiality, videos suggest on the contrary that their own signifiers are most valuable when they mimic the fluid dynamics of virtualized environments. The devices deemed specific to the video aesthetic—the mobile camera, fast cutting, fast- paced montage, time-lapse photography, image processing—mimic the Heraclitean flux of techno-generated postmodernity. The foregrounding of signifiers that are metaphorically speaking light and flexible signals the existence of a techno-generated world liberated from constraining facts. In music videos with an urban setting, the performing subject’s assimilation into technospace is traceable in the recurrent motif of street perambulation. In a video variant of the flâneur aesthetic, performers avail themselves of modes of transit across urban space stretching from the simplest physical exploration of phenomenal reality to virtualization itself. Similarly, the material means required to produce this type of footage range from familiar body-space techniques—typically, tracking and crane shots—to graphic computer imaging. From early on, clips have portrayed performers walking through city streets. In WAITING ON A FRIEND (1981) Rolling Stones singer and guitarist Mick Jagger and Keith Richard move leisurely down a New York sidewalk, from one brownstone to the next. In Bruce Springsteen’s STREETS OF PHILADELPHIA (1993), the American singer strolls through several areas of the City of Friends, including blighted inner-city neighborhoods. One step higher on the technological gradient, one finds the numerous clips where performers cruise through city avenues in cars (Madonna’s MUSIC [2000]), on bicycles (Thicke’s WHEN I GET YOU ALONE [2003]), or on a moving platform—a flatbed truck, typically. Graphically, this set-up evokes a moving stage—a literal, almost naive enhancement of the body-space performance area. Thus, Lauryn Hill in IF I RULED THE WORLD (1998) glides effortlessly through night-time, neon-lit streets, while
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Björk, in BIG TIME SENSUALITY (1993), in a more physically aggressive act, defends her mobile body-space perimeter against encroaching New York traffic. There is a point, however, when the expansion of body space tips over into virtual technospace. The Rolling Stones’ dallying on New York sidewalks in WAITING ON A FRIEND must in this respect be contrasted with the same band’s appearance in LOVE IS STRONG (1994). In the latter clip, the digital embedding of hyperindexical photographs allows the musicians to appear as tall as New York high-rises and to fuse with, even trample the city’s monumental landmarks. In The Cardigans’ FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH (2003), the shift from phenomenal to virtual—from signs to hypersigns—occurs in mid-clip. Using location shots, this video first shows the band performing from a flatbed train wagon traveling through the desert. Yet at one point, visuals abruptly shift to shots of the musicians surrounded by swirls of video effects. The leisurely transit through body space gives way to a vertiginous technopsychedelic absorption into the non-space made visible by video hypericons—a condition that abolishes spatial coordinates.
2.3.3 The Dialogical Play of Light and Heavy Signs: Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog As they foreground nature differentials tilting toward disembodiment, the urban-focused videos discussed above seem unlikely vehicles for the grounding gestures on which contemporary realism relies. Still, in what follows, I indicate how a reflection on semiotic materiality eventually allows us to reclaim such graphics for realism. In the first place, technosigns, however disembodied, have a metarealist value. Like the urban choreography of cyberpunk films—the shots of characters in Matrix (1998) careening through urban settings in defiance of gravity—, video graphics render account of a reconfiguration of experience. Yet the metarealist reading of these visuals is valid only if we avail ourselves of a reality criterion. Only thus can we gauge to what extent image processing fosters what technorebels in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999) call “deformations of reality.” Short of this norm, we could not assess whether the spectacle of technopsychedelia triggers metarealist reflections about the discursive mechanics involved in the representation of the social world. In practice, we must identify in videos’ referential apparatus an element that counteracts techno- ecstasy. In order to do so, I wish, by way of a long methodological
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 246 detour, look at the semiotic means deployed by turn-of-the-twenty- first-century independent films and by the variety of performance art called Parkour (freerunning). Both of these practices are centrally concerned with urban space, yet they set up referential apparatuses whose overall dynamics stands in stark contrast to videos’ displays of technosigns. Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog (1999) will be my main example for the discussion of the semiotic apparatus of independent film. I noted in Chapter 6 that indie films in part align themselves on the aesthetics of postmodernism, yet also view it from a critical distance. In a gesture typical of the realist underground, they counteract the culture of the information society by highlighting how micro-communities withstand the pressure of virtualization. Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog illustrates this double cultural affiliation: it interweaves the metacultural ironies of 1980s and ’90s action films with a story of human connectedness. Its action plot focuses on the last weeks of the eponymous character’s life: Ghost Dog, the reclusive African American contract killer obsessed with Samurai culture (Forest Whitaker), is hunted down by the mafia mobsters who once employed him. Within this crime-film lattice are embedded the subplots portraying the encounter between Ghost Dog, a young girl named Pearline, and an Haitian ice-cream vendor. These scenes justify the film’s inclusion in the corpus of the realist underground not only by their humanist tenor but also because of their setting: they unfold in an industrial suburb devastated by urban blight—an environment in stark contrast with the technopsychedelic glamor characterizing part of MTV’s or cyberpunk’s representation of urban space. In this section, we must show that the realist resistance implied hereby is partly carried out by the deployment of specific semiotic means limiting the technologically induced dissolution of experience. Semiotic materiality is a prominent feature of Ghost Dog because Jarmusch structures his film as a patchwork of deliberately heterogeneous signs. On first inspection, this semiotic variety serves as raw material for metafictional games, disqualifying the film from acting as a realist chart of the urban waste land in which it is set. Postmodernist playfulness unfolds on two levels in this case. In the first place, the film is overtly intertextual, flaunting numerous cinematographic, literary, or musical sources. Ghost Dog is a crossbreed of Samurai epics à la Kurosawa, Chinese martial-arts movies, and Hollywood gangster flicks. Its protagonist is shown
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 247 practicing Japanese sword-fighting on a tenement roof. One of the favorite readings he shares with Pearline is Rashômon, famously adapted for the screen by Akira Kurosawa. As far as American sources go, Ghost Dog borrows from mafia epics—Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990)—and from the corpus of 1990s hip-hop-influenced black urban thrillers—Mario Van Peebles’s New Jack City (1991); John Singleton’s Boyz ‘n the Hood (1991); Allen and Albert Hughes’s Menace II Society (1993). There are also hints of the Hollywood western in the contract killer’s demeanor: he is a proud gun-toting male with a meticulously defined code of conduct, fated to die in a shoot-out reminiscent of Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1955). In a different vein, the scenes in which Ghost Dog interacts with Pauline and the Haitian ice-cream vendor hearken to Frank Capra’s urban pastorals. Also, in a gesture that both corroborates and complicates Ghost Dog’s relation to the realist movement, the aspects of the film verging on the documentary aesthetic—its footage of urban-industrial settings, notably—partly rely on identifiable intertexts. In particular, Ghost Dog alludes to Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954), a movie praised for its naturalistic footage of working-class locales. Secondly, Ghost Dog is metafictionally playful in its often comic foregrounding of rituals of communication and semiotic processes. The hit man maintains his ghostly anonymity by communicating with the outside world—with his mafia boss, notably—exclusively through carrier pigeons. While Ghost Dog handles the birds with elegance and affection, the mobsters chase them around their apartment in slapstick fashion, awkwardly trying to fasten messages to their legs. A comparable metacommunicational game unfolds through the exchange of books—a process by which protagonists advertise their life- choices. Ghost Dog receives his copy of Rashômon from the mafia boss’s daughter before entrusting it to Pearline. Before his death, he also offers Pearline a copy of The Hagakure, the life code of the Samurai, encouraging her to model her life on the same precepts. Ghost Dog and the Haitian ice-cream salesman communicate by means of similarly eccentric strategies. The Haitian only speaks French, which Ghost Dog does not understand. Oddly, there is no practical misunderstanding in the two characters’ exchanges: whatever one says is almost magically repeated by the other in his own idiom, as if their interactions embodied a utopia of intuitive communication.
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 248 Against its ostensibly postmodernist features, Ghost Dog can be reclaimed for realism from two interrelated though seemingly opposite perspectives—the former pertaining to realism’s contractual and reflexive dimensions, the latter mostly to heuristics. In the first place, the film, as it foregrounds its characters’ communicational expertise, carries out what might be described as a realism of signifying practice. Jarmusch’s film portrays—indeed acts out—a world that sustains itself performatively, on the mere basis of contractual bonds, speech acts, and intertextual references. In this respect, Ghost Dog, though apparently remote from classic realism, fits Brook Thomas’s vision of a perfected realist universe: it fulfills the logic of what in Chapter 7 I called the reality contract. Characters and settings are endowed with a mode of existence identical to the discursive interactions they engage in. Still, in the discussion of Thomas’s contractual concept of realism, I noted that reducing reality to a reality contract is at best a utopian temptation: doing so betokens, as Catherine Belsey points out, a covert commitment to a variant of metaphysical idealism that fails to distinguish between human-centered culture and reality (13, 16). Intriguingly, Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog acknowledges this objection. Even as it pictures characters in constant semiotic interaction, it intimates that the latter’s reality exceeds the reassuring perimeter of contractual exchanges. Accordingly, the film’s referential apparatus includes signs that cannot be circulated with the playful ease and fluidity informing the characters’ skilled signifying behavior. A nature differential separates, metaphorically speaking, lighter and heavier signs: the film’s semiotic components can be ranked according to their greater or lesser amenability to semiotic negotiation. Symptomatically, compared to the music videos analyzed above, Ghost Dog orients its nature differentials downwards rather than upwards—not towards the insubstantiality of technospace, but towards signs implying the higher degree of materiality of body space. Like the courtroom dramas discussed above, Jarmusch’s film displays graphic evidence that, by its physical status, is meant to withstand counterarguments. Resistance to semiotic negotiation in Ghost Dog manifests itself through the film’s systematic recourse to location shooting. Jarmusch’s work would indeed be a very different and far less interesting film if it had been shot entirely in studio settings or even in minimalistic out-of-studio locales deprived of the capacity to gesture toward a contingent social environment. Instead, Ghost Dog opens
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 249 with a long overhead helicopter shot of urban-industrial New Jersey, letting the camera hover over seemingly endless expanses of factories, railroad yards, and parking lots. This long panoramic take leads the viewer’s gaze to the tenement roof where Ghost Dog raises his pigeons. The rest of the film’s narrative is shot either in neighborhoods of cheap frame houses where the fictional mafia mobsters reside, or in the vicinity of a park surrounded by derelict brownstones, where Ghost Dog meets with Pearline and the Haitian vendor. Location shooting of this type is less frequent in Hollywood films and televised fictions than most viewers might suspect: action that according to narrative logic occurs outdoors (in external diegetic space) is still commonly filmed in the technically manageable environment of sound stages or in outdoor lots within studio compounds. In recent years, confinement to studio shooting has even enjoyed new prominence due to the advent of ever more technologically advanced special effects minimizing the share of live capture (Monaco 156-59; Finance and Zwerman 53-54, 64-65). In this context, Jarmusch’s predilection for outdoors location shooting signals his affiliation to the aesthetic of alternative cinema, harking back to the practice of the French early-1960s Nouvelle Vague and the documentary style of Cinéma Vérité (Thompson and Bordwell, Film History 521-23; 570-71; David A. Cook 566-67; Pam Cook 42). Location footage fulfills these film-makers’ aspirations to unmediated realism in so far as images shot in an off-studio context—especially extreme long shots with a panoramic scope—can never entirely be the graphic record of a planned mise-en-scène: the cinematographic frame opens out to include locales existing independently from any plotting prescribed by the film’s screenplay. The camera must be allowed to capture traces of experience over which the semiotic strategies of directors, screenwriters, and characters have no hold. The suggestion that location shots elude semioticization and aesthetic structuring must admittedly reckon with the semiological arguments minimizing the claims of reflectionist mimesis in cinephotography. We have seen in Chapter 5 that the mere graphic properties of photographs do not confer to the latter the status of natural signs: images do not trigger heuristic disclosures out of their intrinsic resources. Even the double status of photographs as icons and indices, which leads most observers to mistake them for mirrors of the world, generates no self-evident meaning: photographs acquire determinate meaning only from their interlinking with their discursive
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 250 context. This caveat, if applied to film, implies that indexical iconicity offers no absolute foundation for a distinction between documentary footage and fiction. The stage-managed fantasy universes of non- realist films—Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939); Merian C. Cooper’s and Ernest B. Shoedsack’s King Kong (1933)—are evoked to a considerable extent through iconic/indexical shots, in the same fashion as documentary arguments may be backed by non-indexical icons such as diagrams, captions or even cartoons. One should therefore not be surprised to notice that Ghost Dog’s filmic signifiers are overwhelmingly made up of iconic/indexical images, regardless whether they represent the seemingly less realistic scenes of metacultural interplay or the panoramic views of real-world locations. Simultaneously, the naturalistic visuals of Ghost Dog fall within the remit of poststructuralist arguments over the intertextuality of realist devices. We have seen in Chapters 2 and 3 that the poststructuralist concept of the reality effect, developed notably by Roland Barthes, suggests that the literary representation of the details of social life, instead of offering documentary insights, merely signals a text’s endorsement of the conventions of the realist genre: it creates an intertextual link between each instance of the realist corpus to previous works pursuing the same goals. Applied to Ghost Dog, this demystifying approach reveals, for instance, that the film’s introductory aerial shot, despite its apparent documentary self- evidence, is overlaid with ironical echoes of the cinematic past. Aerial panoramic long takes are a classic expository device, going back to films as diverse as Robert Wise’s West Side Story (1961) or Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin (1987). Jarmusch gives an ironical nod to this tradition by letting us discover Ghost Dog’s urban- industrial landscape through the point-of-view of one of the contract killer’s pigeons, hurrying back to the coop to deliver a message. The closest intertext evoked thereby is arguably the opening shot of Ridley’s Scott’s Blade Runner (1992): the pigeon’s eye view of a rust- belt waste land is a whimsical inversion of Scott’s futuristic urban sprawl focalized through the gaze of a rogue android. Similarly, the tenement settings revealed at the end of the introductory sequence are borrowed from Kazan’s On the Waterfront: Forest Whitaker raising pigeons on a tenement roof is the visual echo of Marlon Brando tending to his beloved birds in Kazan’s film. The antirealist impact of these intertextual references is compounded by Jarmusch’s decision not to confer real-world names to the locales in which Ghost Dog’s
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 251 narrative action unfolds: Jersey City is mentioned only in the final credits. Cars in the film bear license plates bearing fictional generic labels such as “The Industrial State” and “The Highway State.” In the face of these objections, it is the more important to point out that the grounding gestures triggered by Jarmusch’s location footage are reducible neither to a purely reflectionist use of cinematography nor to the denial of intertextual sources. They mark instead a specific position—resistance to semioticization—within a dialogical gradient that does not merely pit pure matter and pure discourse against each other. In this logic, location shots, by their indexical and iconic properties, render possible the most reliable mechanism of heuristic disclosure that can be carried out in a framework that is otherwise organized discursively, dialogically, and intertextually. Jarmusch’s location footage would indeed be utterly meaningless if it remained entirely resistant to semiotic negotiation. Photographic disclosure cannot aspire to being irrevocable in the literal meaning of the term since it is always produced by documents whose significance stems from their capacity to circulate as communicational or intertextual tokens. Ghost Dog reveals, however, that, barring absolute non- negotiability, photographic documents may possess a degree of imperviousness to semiotic play compelling enough for them to serve as vehicles for grounding gestures. Given the proper fit between signifiers, signifieds, and object, they may display the referential stability of quasi-natural signs: their referential trustworthiness is, if not absolute, at least binding in their context of production and reception. The lesser negotiability of location shots is evident if the latter images are contrasted with the spectacle afforded by technosigns. I pointed out above that music videos make postmodern fluidity perceptible by means of graphically malleable signifiers, notably software-generated hypericons and hyperindices. The effortless alterability of these computer-processed signs matches the labile configuration of contemporary experience, making the former the proper vehicle for the latter. Conversely, alternative films, as they borrow from the tradition of classic documentaries, find in indexical/iconic photography the semiotic means to implement the opposite agenda. Photographs are indexical in so far as they register and communicate the trace of a physical pattern that is not alterable at will: they are bound by what we might call constrained mimesis. The resulting signifiers, with their comparative resistance to graphic
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 252 refashioning, are therefore well suited to map a social environment whose physical configuration and cultural significance is similarly not amenable to quick transformation. Thus, the iconic/indexical urban panoramas of Ghost Dog use signifiers subjected to nearly inalterable graphic constraints in order to render perceptible the unmanageable thereness of rusty factories, parking lots, frame houses, telephone poles with tangled cables, and dejected housing projects. Without assuming that these background elements are immune to historical change, the film suggests that they are the offshoot of a slow process of historical sedimentation: their historical fashioning has occurred at a pace starkly contrasting with the postmodern fluidity of discourse, the plasticity of constructed experience, and indeed the presumably infinite alterability of technosignifiers. The previous remarks convey the raw impact of Jarmusch’s grounding gestures, yet they are still too impressionistic to render justice to the complexities of a realist strategy carried out through the plurimedial discourse of film. Movies are indeed heterogeneous both in their discursive vehicle and in the make-up of their represented world—in their signifiers and signifieds. Even relatively simple courtroom films are semiotically hybrid in so far as they use variegated means of expression—photographic images, speech, captions, intertitles—in order to evoke fictional worlds that are themselves structured according to several planes of signifying material—verbal testimonies, photographs, material evidence. For accuracy’s sake, we must therefore fine-tune the metaphor I have used so far—the juggling of lighter and heavier signs. We must point out that in the multilayered referential apparatus of film, nature differentials do not trace out a sharp divide among two classes of signs, one consistently referring to stable, the other to labile elements of the lifeworld. Instead, differentials cut across signifiers and signifieds in complex fashion, making the film’s referential apparatus resemble a staggered continuum of dialogical tensions stretching from the lightest to the heaviest signs. A first dialogical tension opposes what for simplicity’s sake we may regard as dissimilar filmic signifiers. The lightest signifiers of Ghost Dog’s filmic discourse are in this logic its credits, intertitles, and dialogue panels. In Peirce’s terminology, they qualify as symbols (arbitrary signifiers), and are as such amenable to flexible rewriting and restructuring. They are contrasted with the indexical/iconic photographic signifiers that make up the majority of the film’s footage—images whose graphic
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 253 properties are in part constrained by live capture and therefore resistant to aesthetic control. A second differential structures what we may schematically regard as indexically evoked signifieds—the elements of the mise-en-scène captured by photographic footage. Various filmed objects of the mise-en-scène indeed have quite dissimilar material statuses. The lighter among them are those that lend themselves to communicational and narrative scripting—actors’ movements, dialogues, and props. The Haitian ice-cream vendor’s van, with its colorfully customized decoration, is a proper instance of this flexible material. It is an overtly semioticized object, and is as such held in dialogical tension with such heavier signifieds as the aggregate bulk of the physical background—the inert mass of social life—captured by the location shots. In this logic, the film’s signature grounding gesture is fully realized only when the two differentials mentioned above mutually reinforce realist disclosure. This occurs when, figuratively speaking, heavier signifiers carry heavier signifieds: the low negotiability of the indexical/iconic footage—its constrained mimesis—underscores the corresponding historical, material, or social inertia of the filmed background. In this dynamic, the constraints bearing upon the indexical images seem to rub off on the represented objects, leading viewers to believe that the latter escape the remit of semiotic negotiation. In an antirealist perspective, the mirror-like fit between heavy signifiers and heavy signifieds—between indexical/iconic images and a social scene resistant to change—may admittedly be viewed as the result either of coincidence or scripted artistic choice. The former case—fortuitous likeness—, makes realist film-making a game of chance. The latter—stage-managed correspondence—, makes it the product of a monologic, logocentric gesture: realist films are in this perspective bound to unduly privilege location footage over other film practices—metadiscursive language games, for instance. Still, such antirealist arguments lead us to misidentify the actual referential value of Ghost Dog’s dialogized nature differentials. The quasi-reflectionist semiotic fit depicted above, however important to the film’s realist aesthetic, matters less than the recognition of the fact that the signifying chain contains at least one purely non-negotiable link—the constrained mimesis of indexical images. The latter element has the value of an index of closure. The very existence of constrained mimesis signals that the play of signifiers, so explicitly foregrounded in Ghost Dog, cannot entirely be free. Thus, according to the logic of
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 254 the reality bet, this non-negotiable kernel serves as anchoring point for dialogical solidarity: it encourages us to take good measure of obstacles to semiotic negotiation present at other levels of the film and its represented world. Notably, it alerts us to the intractable thereness of the social landscape, history, and social relations made visible by the location shots. In this perspective, the value of location footage in Ghost Dog— and in other independent films—goes beyond heuristics. These images make semiotic non-negotiability the object of a reflexive, metadiscursive deliberation. Their metadiscursive component is the more apparent if we contrast Ghost Dog with films where urban location footage is used in classic reflectionist fashion. Urban thrillers such as William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) picture urban landscapes as a backdrop to which characters relate unproblematically. The social background thus depicted is admittedly neither meaningless nor inert: it defines specific narrative possibilities and constraints, and serves as sociological yardstick for characterization. Yet it does not initiate reflections on the conditions of its own representation. By comparison, urban footage in Ghost Dog serves as a token in a negotiation of human experience carried out across the film’s whole semiotic spectrum. Ghost Dog indeed achieves its full referential impact precisely as it plays out the heavier, less negotiable signs of its location shots against its metacultural rituals of communication. The urban squalor disclosed by the initial helicopter shot must be set off against the whimsical crosscuts of the carrier pigeon hovering over New Jersey or against the decorous choreography of Ghost Dog’s Japanese sword practice; the real-world banality of lower-middle-class houses must be contrasted with the ludicrous antics of mobsters unable to pay their rent; the derelict brownstones must clash with the romance merriness of the Haitian vendor’s ice-cream van. Without these nature differentials, the thematics of historical and social sedimentation would not emerge with any clarity. Only thus does the film reveal that contemporary realism is concerned with the greater or lesser amenability of social structures to human agency.
2.3.4 Urban Performance Art: The Struggle with Residual Materiality In a Lacanian perspective, the barely semioticized plane of experience Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog brings to light qualifies as the real. We have seen in Chapter 3 that Catherine Belsey discerns in mimetic realism
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 255 some capacity to evoke the Lacanian real by indirection. Realist literature and painting do so, she claims, by revealing what their own practice of imitation must ineluctably leave unrepresented (151-52). Transposed to Jarmusch’s cinema, this argument implies that Ghost Dog’s location shots render indirectly perceptible the haunting figure of the real in the intractable materiality of urban space. Yet I have mentioned in the Introduction to the present essay that Lacan’s conceptual framework is axiomatically antagonistic to realism. In the contemporary texts discussed here, reality does not ineluctably elude the subject’s grasp: it stands as an object of heuristic investigation or as the material fabric of a residual lifeworld. Ghost Dog admittedly approaches this residual materiality predominantly in a contemplative mode, which encourages a Lacanian reading: the film emphasizes the enigmatic presence of residual space as well as the opportunities it offers for characters to develop personal bonds in the interstices of dominant social networks. In other areas of contemporary realism, residual materiality is viewed more explicitly as a field of resistance. We have already encountered realist practices—undercover reporting, in particular—in which the chief reality norm is the physical resistance of the world. In these works, the power or powerlessness of investigators in the face of material constraints or even physical danger marks out the limit of negotiable and perceptible experience. The same logic informs urban-focused performance art—base jumping, hip-hop dancing, and Parkour running, the latter of which I discuss in more detail below. These practices suggest that semiotic non-negotiability must be experienced physically. From a semiotic perspective, the referential apparatus mobilized thereby addresses material reality by means of signs heavier than the indexical icons available in film. Likewise, the subject position these practices construct with regard to urban space is not limited to appraisal, observation, and contemplative inhabiting: it includes risk and physical mastery. Parkour is an urban-focused physical discipline that developed in the 1990s in the French banlieues—the suburban projects home to large numbers of immigrant families or French citizens of colonial ancestry. The term Parkour is derived from the French “parcours du combatant,” designating boot-camp obstacle courses (Belle 41-42; my italics). In its modernized spelling, Parkour refers to the set of gestures allowing runners—or “traceurs” (Belle 100)—to overcome physical obstacles (buildings, fences, bridges, railings) by means of well-
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 256 rehearsed climbs or jumps, thereby creating for themselves itineraries defying the physical capabilities or even the imagination of less physically trained or daring subjects. The basic gestures of Parkour were created by a group of French teenagers from the Paris suburb of Lisses, among whom the chief initiator of the movement, David Belle. Their exploits were popularized in France through teenage-oriented action films—Ariel Zeitoun’s Yamakasi (2001), Pierre Morel’s Banlieue 13 (2004)—produced by French popular-cinema mogul Luc Besson. The discipline later acquired international fame, notably in Britain, where it spawned the Parkour Nation movement. Though Parkour may in principle be practiced in natural environments, it is closely associated with the now decrepit modernist architectural landscape of 1960s and ’70s suburban Habitations à Loyer Modéré (low-rent housing projects)—France’s ubiquitous form of social housing. As such, it ranks among cultural practices such as hip-hop and graffiti writing, which grew out of an environment increasingly ridden with alienation, racism, and crime—a world to which the initiators of Parkour claim to offer a disciplined alternative. The dimension of Parkour that is of prime interest here is predictably its capacity to act as a physically based practice of urban exploration. Parkour, Belle claims, enabled him to “discover locales within urban projects unknown even to the neighborhood’s inhabitants” (63; my translation). Likewise, Dan Edwardes, in The Parkour & Freerunning Handbook, points out that Parkour runners, as they start training, find out that “their perception of their environment undergoes a fairly radical overhaul”: [w]alls, railings, buildings, barriers … structures of every shape and size cease to be seen as they were intended to be seen” (Edwardes 24). Heuristic exploration is wedded to praxis in this case: the appraisal of urban space obtained through Parkour leads to physical and psychological emancipation. Belle, in his account of the genesis of Parkour, describes the practice as an ascetic training code modeled on military discipline and the martial arts. Its goal is to secure self-improvement through self- mastery. Thanks to Parkour, Belle claims, he has been able to shed the oppressive burden that “smothers” inhabitants of social projects (63): he became able to “wipe out [the] concrete block that blocked [his] vision” (63). The character played by Belle in Banlieue 13 elegantly enacts this empowering agenda as he exits a police precinct not through the door but, in one smooth jump, through a narrow horizontal window between door and ceiling. Likewise, Edwardes
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 257 states that in the dynamics of Parkour, “[b]oundaries fall away, and structures built to contain become stepping stones to greater physical and mental liberty” (Edwardes 24). The previously alienating suburban landscape turns into “a vast, almost limitless playground” (Edwardes 24). On this basis, Parkour qualifies as a heuristically and pragmatically focused discipline whose referential apparatus seemingly draws on purely material signs. It mobilizes a repertory of gestures—“[ro]lls,” “mounts,” “vaults,” “[w]all runs,” “[d]rop jumps”(Edwardes 40, 46, 50, 56, 62)—providing the components of a discourse of urban mobility. The terminology best suited for the analysis of what Belle initially called the “art of displacement” (Edwardes 8) might be derived from Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of cinema. We have seen in Chapter 5 that Deleuze views film neither as “a language system nor a language,” but instead as a “plastic mass”—a “non-language material” displaying various modalities of movement (Deleuze, Cinema 2 28; italics in original). Parkour apparently fits this definition: its sequences of gestures have no determinate literal signifieds or coded syntax; any sociological or existential meaning they may carry is grafted onto them retrospectively, by connotative and allegorical means. Instead, the traceur’s itineraries may be broken down into units comparable to the fluid “figures” Deleuze discerns in film (Deleuze, Cinema 1 187)—“vectors” and “lines of the universe,” in particular (Deleuze, Cinema 1 192). Parkour seems indeed ideally suited to trace out across the suburban landscape what Deleuze calls “line[s] of flight”—empowering gestures of deterritorialization (Deleuze, Cinema 1 198), There is, however, something excessively utopian in this Deleuzian reading. Parkour is neither a perfectly free dynamics of empowerment nor a set of purely material gestures requiring no articulate language for its testing of the world. Instead, it is inevitably caught up in a hybrid referential apparatus with several levels of mediation. In particular, it is intricately linked not only to the aesthetic but also the practice of videos and action films. Its leading practitioners are reluctant to acknowledge this mediatic hybridity. Belle cherishes the vision of a discipline in stark contrast with the “virtual” world of “video game consoles” (Belle 84-85; my translation). Parkour should, in his view, rely exclusively on the confrontation of bodies against urban concrete, and be regulated by a reasoned calculus of danger. Its sole legitimate social appropriation should be the training of
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 258 professionals in rescue services (Belle 114). “Freerun”—the variety of Parkour cultivating spectacle for its own sake—amounts in this light to commercial betrayal (Belle 106). Still, the bond with film and photography is impossible to ignore. On the one hand, Parkour gestures are strikingly similar to routines in film musical and music videos to the point that some degree of influence, however unconscious, seems impossible to rule out. On the other hand, Parkour established its reputation among other forms of street art precisely through the very media channels—documentary, fiction films, music videos—Belle claims to condemn (Belle 79). The circumstances that led to the filming of Yamakasi and Banlieue 13 illustrate both Belle’s efforts to maintain the integrity of the art of displacement and its inevitable reprocessing through the media (Belle 124-25). Accordingly, the full-fledged referential apparatus of Parkour ranges from the heaviest to the lightest variety of signifying material: it encompasses both the material signifiers making up the sequences of gestures across urban locales and the semiotic machinery I described in the discussion of music videos and Jarmusch’s film-making.
2.3.5 The Material Reappropriation of Technosigns Ironically, Parkour’s semiotic hybridity—its unacknowledged reliance on the electronic media—is the very feature that makes it significant for the present argument. Parkour indeed encourages us to look for covert nature differentials in all signifying practices based on dialogical continuums of light and heavy signs. In particular, it leads us to spot dialogical tensions in the practices whose semiotic medium is most remote from freerunning—technopsychedelic videos and computer-generated images. From this dialogical perspective, just as Parkour cannot be reduced to the purely physical exploration of city space, music videos and CGI graphics must contribute to a physically anchored contemporary realism, however incompatible this gesture may seem to their ostensible endorsement of virtualization. If Parkour’s referential apparatus cannot be severed from the technosphere, technospace media can by the same token not utterly dissolve urban space and human bodies into technosigns. Videos and CGI must therefore remain beholden to a residual share of materiality—indeed to what I called above body space. Retrieving a share of body space from the technospace texture of music videos and CGI qualifies as a variant of what in the analysis of photography and film I called indexical reappropriation. We have seen
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 259 in Chapter 5 that the meaning of visual documents can be conceptualized from two antagonistic perspectives—one based on Peircean indices, the other the Saussurean concept of arbitrary signification. The former approach, favored by Deleuze in his comments on cinema, privileges the capacity of cinephotography to record reality as a direct indexical imprint. The Saussurean view, on the contrary, considers the syntagmatics of montage as the primary source of meaning, thereby making graphic evidence dependent on conventional semantic construction. In the present context, the distinction between indexical and arbitrary visual meaning is homological to the body space/technospace binary: on the one hand, matter-oriented body space is to a large extent signified by indexical signs—be they cinephotographic documents or the heavier bodily kinetics of Parkour. On the other, technospace is anchored in arbitrary signification because the fluid lifeworld it evokes is signified by tokens that admit of fast negotiations and reconfigurations. Body space, in this light, must be reappropriated indexically against the background of a ceaselessly renegotiated technosphere. Still, we have also seen in Chapter 5 that the radical indexical reappropriation derived from Deleuze’s time-focused concept of cinema is a dead end for realist practice: no theory of realism can profit from making arbitrary and indexical interpretations irreconcilable opposites; truth- oriented representations cannot limit themselves to pitting arbitrary signs against mute indexical prints. Against this dichotomized approach, the discussion of nature differentials developed in the present chapter indicates that indexical reappropriation will be the better able to serve as support for grounding gestures if it acts within the semiotic continuum of hybrid referential apparatuses. In this logic, technospace media can not only be reintegrated into the phenomenal lifeworld, but more importantly, the residual materiality retrieved from them does not revert to mute indexicality: it finds its place in the meaningful field of nature differentials of the referential apparatus, which accommodates both body and technospace—heavier and lighter signs. Music videos are amenable to indexical reappropriation in so far as, contrary to what their displays of special effects might suggest, they fail to wholeheartedly condone the human subject’s absorption into technospace. Even overtly technopsychedelic clips must concede some ground to body space, thereby limiting the impact of virtualization or even opening up a site of explicit resistance against it.
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 260 The physical struggle against technology is illustrated with disarming explicitness in Guns ’n’ Roses’ YOU COULD BE MINE (1991), where performers defend their body-space performance area against an attack of the Terminator cyborg (Arnold Schwarzenegger in person, since the clip served as promotional material for James Cameron’s Terminator 2). Madonna’s clip for the James Bond theme song DIE ANOTHER DAY (2002) develops the same theme with more subtlety. It displays the singer vigorously fencing against her own double or enduring tortures inflicted by North Korean villains. In the latter scenes, Madonna’s scantily-clad body withstands not only the efforts of her unsavory assailants but also the dissociation induced by the clip’s technologically enabled fast montage. The video suggests as such that the body’s exposure, even resistance to unwanted refashioning is as important a trope for music videos as the subject’s technopsychelic erasure. In this respect, DIE ANOTHER DAY reveals the residual anthropocentrism that has characterized the video aesthetic across the several decades of their existence: in spite of their ubiquitous image processing, video clips have never durably veered toward purely technogenerated graphic abstraction. Only footage displayed as visual background to live concerts or DJ performances takes the form of pure flows of technosigns. On the contrary, most clips broadcast by MTV or YouTube feature human performers at least in some segment of their footage. Commercial constraints may partly account for this foregrounding of performance. As an advertising medium, videos must display the commodity they are actually peddling: they contribute to the construction of what Andrew Goodwin calls the “star text”—the narrative of stardom (Goodwin, Dancing 300; also Frith 224-25). Yet this objection begs the question why human agency constitutes a focus of interest with a market value at all. A more nuanced appraisal of this issue should therefore acknowledge that clips, instead of effecting the erasure of body space by virtualization, make visible the dialogical complementarity— sometimes complicit, sometimes antagonistic—of these two levels of experience. In this light, technopsychedelic videos such as Nik Kershaw’s WOULDN’T IT BE GOOD (1984) and The Cardigans’ FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH (2003), as they portray performers being beamed out of a satellite dish or dissolving into video swirls, express a fascination for dematerialization that their referential apparatus cannot altogether bring to completion. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ CALIFORNICATION, by comparison, offers a more balanced realist
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 261 assessment the interplay of bodies and technospace. The clip’s computer-generated panorama of California is set off against shots of the musicians’ well-toned bodies, making it clear that a struggle against electronic refashioning is possible, and that it finds its anchoring point in the most overtly physical dimension of phenomenal space, whose presence cannot be negotiated away.
To some extent, computer generated imagery lends itself to similar procedures of indexical reappropriation as music videos. Computer- generated images, the previous examples indicate, are prominently featured among the special effects by which music clips stage the struggle of body space against technospace. They contribute to the nature differential this spectacle makes visible and are thereby dialogically linked to body signs. Still, if CGI is taken as a medium in its own right, the indexical reappropriation it renders possible follows a slightly different, more substantial path. CGI is indeed linked to the phenomenal world by performative means: its images connect to real space through chains of actions and gestures. The discussion of CGI in Chapter 5 purposely did not address this performative dimension. There, I dealt with computer-generated graphics according to the dismissive logic of antirealism. From this perspective, it was possible to indicate that these images piece together a graphically flawless pseudo-physis either through pure computer generation (by means of hypericonic signs) or through the mixture of computer processing and analogical capture (by means of hyperindices). The creaseless iconography resulting therefrom, I pointed out, has a psychological and ideological value of the order of the Lacanian imaginary: CGI’s virtualized hyperreality offers a fantasy compensation for the limits and frustrations of the embodied world. Still, even as staunch a critic of late-capitalist hyperreality as Jean Baudrillard acknowledges that computer-generated environments are more than just a set of sanitized icons. The French theoretician dislikes hyperreal simulacra not merely because of their graphic hyperrealism but because of their capacity for action. In his view, their power consists in their capacity to engender further simulacra. In what amounts to technologically enabled incest, hyperreality sustains itself through technosigns providing for their own reproduction (Simulacres 11-12). Predictably, I interpret the performative aspects of virtual images differently from Baudrillard. In the present perspective, technosigns do close in upon themselves. Instead, they are performative and indexical in their capacity to enter
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 262 nature differentials allowing them to accomplish tasks and gestures oriented towards or originating from the phenomenal world. The clearest instances of indexical and performative appropriation of virtual imagery occur in what might be regarded as the latter’s nonfiction applications. Since the early 1990s, computer-generated graphics have been essential to the interfacing mechanisms of computer exploitation systems. The sequences of actions making up most contemporary clerical work are accomplished by activating and manipulating the virtual-reality graphics—the so-called icons—of computer software. Virtual-reality graphics are also central to scientific research and engineering: the physical properties of internal combustion engines, airplanes, or even nuclear explosions are tested by means of computer simulation before the latter machines or events are produced as physical realities (“Enhance”; “Virtual Reality”; “Virtual Engineering”). In either case—be it in computer commands or engineering design—an indexical link of a pragmatic/performative nature is established between software-generated icons and, on the other hand, gestures and objects in the phenomenal world. By comparison, virtual images in fictions—the special effects of music videos or SF and fantasy films—are indexical and performative primarily in a metarealist perspective: fictional CGI graphics, whether hypericons or hyperindices, implicitly gesture towards the physical tasks and procedures that make up their process of production and their context of reception. More even than photographs and paintings, they indirectly signal the programming work invested in fashioning them into reality simulacra. Contrary to what Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality suggests, technosigns are not exclusively interpreted as constituents of a purely autonomous realm—as a world unto themselves. Like all other signs, their value is defined by their position in an environment that is not restricted to their own semiotic medium. Thus, viewers may feel initially intrigued by CGI apparent capacity to supersede objects of the phenomenal world, yet they are not entirely fooled by it. They are led instead to match CGI images against their phenomenal counterparts—of comparing the computer simulacrum to its putative original—a gesture that lays bare the limits of CGI simulation. This ambivalent, yet not thoroughly naïve mode of appropriation of CGI graphics lies at the root of viewers’ interest for the technological prowess on which these graphics rely. Fascination for the technological underpinnings of CGI is the primary object of the “making-of” documentaries accompanying SF and fantasy films,
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 263 which are often featured as bonuses to DVD copies or are sometimes issued as separate releases. The manufacturing of virtual reality—a process accomplished in phenomenal time and space by human subjects—is therefore a metarealist film topic in its own right. A specific subset of computer generated graphics lends itself to performative processes and indexical appropriations that go beyond the metarealist function sketched out above. Numerous SF and fantasy films— James’s Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Avatar (2009); Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)—feature virtual-reality characters whose screen figure is produced by means of digital techniques relying on the direct performative interaction of body and technospace—digital rotoscoping and motion capture, in particular. The monstrous Gollum (Andy Serkis) in Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King or the extraterrestrial embodiments of Sam Worthington and Sigourney Weaver in Avatar are the offshoot of a special-effects process whereby the actors’ spatial outline and movements are scanned by digital captors, producing a digitized space/motion matrix that is eventually fleshed out with a computer-generated texture. The resulting images might be called performative hyperindices, as they are obtained by the indexical interfacing of work in real space with computer computation. CGI’s Performative hyperindices illustrate a mode of body/technospace interaction whose field of application is much broader than filmic special effects. The handling of digital music instruments—synthesizers, electronic drums—obeys a similar logic, for instance. On first inspection, the digitized sounds of synthesizer technology qualify as audio hypericons and hyperindices: they are generated either entirely by computation or by computer- processed recordings of live sound samples. Yet this classification makes sense only in the abstract—indeed for sounds outside of actual performance. The same sounds become performative hyperindices when they are triggered by keyboards, electronic drum sets, or any other musical controller activated by human players or any other musical agent in the phenomenal world. The sound performance thus produced arises at the border of body and technospace: the patterns of real-space musical gestures of the triggering agent act as a structuring shell for the activation of encoded digitized samples. Comparing CGI with digital music technology makes it easier to point out that the value of performative hyperindices lies in their abiding by certain limits dictated by spatial and temporal constraints.
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 264 In theory, computer generation may create a broad gamut of images and sounds of which only a small portion have graphic or musical merit. In this context, performative indexicality performs a grounding function: because it structures computer generation according to real- time/space patterns (schemata such as the outlines of actors’ bodies or the kinetics of musical performance), it selects those configurations that have a tested value with regard to the lifeworld of their intended audiences. The make-up of Terminator 2’s main villain, a cyborg named T-1000, illustrates to what extent the constraints of phenomenal embodiment contribute to the genesis of technosigns. This robotic assassin, played in real-space film capture by actor Stan Winston, is a humanoid machine with the plasticity and resilience of liquid metal. It is as such capable of reconstituting its human-shaped body after withstanding bullet wounds, mutilating cuts, or even dissolution into tiny droplets. Conversely, its body parts morph into various tools and weapons—pliers, swords, etc. Admittedly, from the perspective of the practicalities of special-effects craftsmanship, this figure only required a modest input of computer-based visuals: its physical metamorphoses are produced mostly by such traditional means as foam and plastic puppets (Winston; Welch; “Terminator 2: Judgment Day T-1000 Effects”; “Learn Monster Making”). CGI, still prohibitively expensive at the time of filming, intervened primarily in order to secure the homogenizing effect of hyperindices: it facilitated the visual morphing of Stan Winston’s body, the foam puppets, and the computer-generated hypericonic body extensions. This comparatively low-tech pedigree makes the T-1000 cyborg even better able to demonstrate the workings of grounding gestures and performative/indexical reappropriation. Whereas the robotic killer was meant to showcase a special-effects technological breakthrough—the creation of visuals in apparent defiance of physicality—, it simultaneously foregrounded its covert reliance on plain embodiment. Whether as spectacle, narrative agent, and special-effects artefact, T- 1000 is indeed the more effective as it is no pure technosign. A more alien villain might be more destructive, yet it would only be an abstract threat deprived of relevant connections to the environment in which it evolves. In this, T-1000 offers an apt reminder that technosigns in fictional texts, unless they are viewed from a dogmatically techno-utopian perspective, are still tied to phenomenal constraints. The nature differentials so clearly foregrounded in courtroom films like Philadelphia do structure the seemingly
Nature Differentials: Realism and Semiotic Materiality 265 disembodied world of postmodern SF. The Residual materiality of technosigns—their status as performative hyperindices—acts as a reality norm at the very least in the manufacturing process, and in many cases also in the narrative function they fulfil.
2.4.6 Toward A Materialist Monologism? To some extent, the analysis of referential apparatuses developed above legitimizes the claims of postmimetic realism. If the elusive technosignifiers of music videos and CGI as well as the seemingly mute physical gestures of Parkour can be shown to contribute to the representation of reality, we must accept that realism unfolds across a much larger and diverse field of signifiers than that taken into consideration by classic mimesis. The present discussion endorses these postmimetic practices in so far as it highlights the pluralist validation procedures made possible by the diversity of signifying material available to authors and texts. Referential apparatuses, I have argued, are composed of signifiers with dissimilar referential prerogatives. A plurality of referential apparatuses with their specific nature differentials therefore exists, each defining grounding gestures likely to differ from the iconic bond between text and world postulated by reflectionist mimesis. Among this multiplicity, each apparatus has its own epistemological scope: its material configuration is oriented toward a specific area of reality—the body/technospace interface in music videos and postmodern SF, or, in alternative film- making, the tension between discursive playfulness and a seemingly non-negotiable social environment. Yet the postmimetic practice thus evoked cannot escape axiomatic limits of its own. In spite of the attention paid to the plurality of grounding gestures, my argument cannot conceal its nostalgia for a referential anchoring point—indeed for a new variant of monologism. Since the procedures of referential validation reviewed above revolve around semiotic non-negotiability, they promote materiality itself as a reality norm, with the restrictiveness such a gesture involves. The ensuing materialistic monologism is noticeable in the fact that my analysis of nature differentials privileges heavier, physical signs within the semiotic continuum of realist works: less or non-semioticized experience is flaunted as benchmark of reality. For the sake of methodological transparency, it is fair to point out that later chapters of the present essay will nuance, yet not entirely refute the materialistic hierarchy defined above. In part, the choice of
Christophe Den Tandt On Virtual Grounds 266 a realist paradigm based on lesser semiotic negotiability is a matter of commitment: it is an aspect of what in Chapter 6 I call the reality bet. Yet however fitting this choice may be to the contemporary realist corpus, it raises problems of practical interpretation. The very concept of nature differentials can indeed not function with equal felicity across all segments of realist art. While the plurimedial texts of the information age have the capacity to play signifiers of various material statuses against one another, literary realism, which formed the very template of realist representation in nineteenth-century culture, is less well equipped to do so. Literature relies mostly on one single class of signs. Ironically, its tokens—Peircean symbols or Saussurean arbitrary signs—qualify as lightest and least trustworthy in the materialistic continuum of nature differentials. In a later section, I will therefore determine how literature realism may be reclaimed into the present paradigm of realism. At this stage, I can only highlight the reassuring fact that the materialist bias informing the present discussion is softened by realism’s dialogical configuration. The next chapter shows indeed that the referential impact of specific texts, though it is pegged to semiotic materiality, is never restricted to this materially validated anchoring point. The naive materialism informing the courtroom dramas mentioned in the beginning of the present chapter is therefore only a reductive shorthand for the guiding principles of the present approach. Separate texts do not produce realist proofs by the mere ostension of their signifying material. Instead, Jarmusch’s cinema, music videos, postmodern SF, and Parkour suggest that the heavy signs in their referential apparatuses are effective only by the combined impact of their physical presence and of their interaction with semiotic levels enjoying a different degree of materiality. The next chapter generalizes this insight: I argue that realist works, far from being validated merely on the basis of their intrinsic textual or semiotic resources, are caught up in a negotiation extending beyond the boundary of separate texts: they set in motion a referential trail propelled by the dynamics of cultural production and reception, and, in the process, confront their own signifiers with signs endowed with different material, practical, and cultural prerogatives.
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