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