sometimes it's best never to ask: A 1-minute play

slowly, a man dressed in a black pinstripe suit and a baseball cap sporting an esso logo enters the stage, taking 50 seconds to get from stage left to stage right


Those are my peanuts! Hands off tough guy! Go away! Go! Go away and leave me! Leave me! Leeeave meeeeeeee! Leave me! Go! Alone! All alone. Leeeeeeave Meeeeeeeee! Forget our past. Just go. Go! Go! They are my peanuts! Mine!! No one else may touch them. No one I tell you! No one!

a callous look is given down at his own groin


No one.


exit

untitled (...the clouds above me don't laugh)

...the clouds above me don't laugh
even though i tell them my truths
instead i am judged
simply by stopping to stare

Eyes Wide Shut: the ritualized death of the cinematic subject, or: how I fell when the image started moving

Marinetti and the Italian Futurists provided artistic circles with a blueprint with which to structure the twentieth century. There would be two principle dictums: technology and kineticism. That the former had published his initial manifesto in 1909 when cinematic forms were just coming into their own is no coincidence. Film was arguably the quintessential modernist statement, and yet simultaneously it was anti-modern in an important respect. Unlike other art forms, film did not encounter an ontological crisis in the early decades of the century. And yet, to say that modernism is at heart a manifestation of a particular crisis of representation in artistic expression is to join the ranks of many critics indeed. Certainly within the traditional means of artistic gesture – literature, painting, music composition, drama – there was indeed a marked conflict between methods of representation and the new modes of production and reproduction made available by modernization. There is little question that photography forever changed the function of ‘realism’ within the visual arts, for example. Photography did something else however, although this accomplishment was certainly not its primary intention. By distilling representation to the capacity of the artist to ‘see’ and consequently to capture his subject, the relative ease with which that moment of subjectivity, between the artist’s gaze and the object of his gesture, could be transmitted (re-presented) to an audience created a new aesthetic for reproducibility which ultimately resulted in the language of cinema. Both cinema and photography emerge from the modern period as perhaps best exemplifying the rupture felt between ‘objective’ reality and subjective experience typical of modernism proper.

There is (of course!) no better place to begin an examination of the aesthetic of film than with Benjamin. Arguably, film is the first mode of expression which counters the notion of authenticity and auratic presence elaborated in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Benjamin had examined the historical dimension of a given art piece within the scope of its cultic function, which is its uniqueness as a material and historical object. The sense of time in the work is lessened by means of facsimile, and what was once the mythic history of art – its auratic nature – is lost. One can attempt to contemplate, for example, the particular history of David’s The Oath of Horatii prior to its mechanical reproduction and thus its entrance into popular discourse, creating a list of all the figures of note who stood in its presence as well as all the historical events it witnessed. In this capacity the artwork retains the ritualistic function Benjamin ascribes to it, namely as a singularity which invokes a sense of awe and transport (aesthetic, spiritual, etc) in the viewing subject. The artwork enters into mythical status at this point, achieving a degree of reverence associated with the sacred. The act of experiencing art in this regard is akin to the Christian eucharist, in which the imbibing of a unique artefact of the divine signals a transubstantiation from the flesh to the spirit. Yet this cultic function of art is entirely lost by mechanical reproduction, and as a consequence any artistic gesture which anticipates its future reproduction will itself be altered by this foreknowledge: “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility” (Illuminations, 224).

Seen in this manner, The Starry Night for example retains and represents the subjectivity van Gogh felt toward “a certain night sky over a small village”; there is no sense that this moment of time is lost as the image is repeatedly consumed. After a process of mechanical reproduction however, it becomes in a sense an infantile photograph (in the sense of a juvenile photographic gesture), standing outside of its original temporality and thus creating a new tradition and history for itself, ignoring even the remnants of the old. Most importantly, this mechanism is performed without the foreknowledge or anticipation by the artist itself. Consequently for the modern viewing subject who has witnessed this image reproduced on everything from mugs and postcards to shirts and desktop wallpaper, the image does not represent an individual’s (van Gogh’s) sense perceptions one night which had been represented in a manner suggesting an aesthetic divergence with the Impressionist and Romantic traditions which dominated the eighteenth century. For many the sense of dread and uneasy anticipation figured by the threatening clouds hovering menacingly over the small village is lost. The work becomes a “beautiful image” and “one of the classics” which ontologically merges with the object on which it is presented, with functions distinctly separate from those ascribed by its original medium. Instead of signifying the original aesthetic gesture of the painting, the reproduced Starry Night signifies the totality of its historical existence in one refigured moment. In other words, van Gogh-on-a-mug alters its history from auratic singularity to art-object, as one consumable good among a mass of others. One experiences not the artist’s subjectivity in relation to the object of his gaze, but rather the history of the image’s representation. The image becomes a sign for its own use as an image always-already consumed, a sign which signifies its own usage as a sign. Thus, one remembers all the times this image has been represented: a shirt worn by someone in the mall, the poster on the wall of a friend’s apartment, and ultimately back to the museum which licences the piece for consumption. In this respect, it is possible to agree with Benjamin’s assertion that in the age of reproducibility, the function of art, no longer ritualistic in nature, “begins to be based on another practise – politics” (224). Sadly, in the case of deceased artists, the only political gesture left to their works is that of consumer consumption and the transfer of wealth.

Yet this very transfiguration of the function of art is ritualistic in a manner perhaps not realized by Benjamin. Mass culture and its bastard child consumerism are themselves rituals in every respect, yet they do not signify anything greater than themselves. They are empty signifiers pointing to themselves; the ritual is never consummated, there is no zenith or sacrificial moment, but rather one is left anticipating the return of the ritual. The modern consumer is immersed in a zeitgeist of dissatisfaction as this is the only means for the ritual of consumption to sustain itself. Adorno and Horkheimer attribute the lack of satisfaction in mass culture to its empty aesthetic gestures, which serve to achieve a “surrogate identity” as authentic artworks by means of simple repetition and intertextual figuration. Certainly the cinema is not immune to such commercial gestures, for as stated in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “ the universal criterion of merit is the amount of “conspicuous production,” of blatant cash investment” (124). In a very real sense, the rules of film making initially established by the studios – at its inception, films which were not documentaries but rather attempted mimetic gestures were exorbitantly expensive – allowed Hollywood to be a self-sufficient entity, producing consumables which inscribe the studios as monopolies. Until recently, media attention, whether in popular press or television, only recognized as legitimate films which followed certain patterns of production. Any deviation from such preconceptions led to categorization (read: rejection) as experimental, foreign, or B-cinema; as Adorno and Horkheimer posit, those outside the mainstream “are confined to the apocryphal field of the “amateur”, and also have to accept organization from above” (122). That the rules for production were inherently hegemonic in origin signified the requirement of a vast expenditure of capitol on the part of a film producer, and led to a uniformity which came to be known as Hollywood – sets and locations had to be “realistic”; actors had to conform to certain standards of appearance; only certain forms of cinematography, tied to studio-grade “professional” equipment, were allowed. Works could in fact be accomplished outside of the studio system, yet a wide exhibition of the film was another matter, for the studios owned both the distribution channels and the majority of theatres. Consequently, avant-guard or “outsider” films remained marginalised to rep cinemas, underground theatres, art galleries, and other equally disreputable venues. Film reception, like production, itself became standardized under the studio monopolies, most evident in the yearly Oscar presentations, reflecting Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument that “the culture industry as a whole has moulded men as a type unfailingly reproduced in every product” (127). The Hollywood film merges product/consumption and aesthetic into a singular entity stripped of its autonomous value: “under monopoly, all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through.... Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce” (121).

To return to Benjamin, is there then no ritual function for cinema, for home music (re)performance, or for interactive entertainments? Must we, as early critics of the culture industry suggest, relegate film to the monotony and mediocrity of commercialism? While certainly not auratic in the sense Benjamin suggests, there are other opportunities for a ritualistic existence outside of the mere totemism implied by the singularity and historical uniqueness of the art object. In its sociological function, cinema suggests, for example, the ritual death of both the mass subject and the pre-eminence of the individual subject. The darkened space and the loud volume of the theatre certainly immerses the viewing subject into the images presented, and one achieves that coveted ‘escape from reality’ which every film magnate espouses. The presence of others within the theatre merely underscores the need for an individual experience with the film; one may forgive the noises of snacking (itself part of the ritual), yet conversations and other noises invariably interrupt and annoy the viewer. Yet this experience, despite its gestures towards interiority, is indeed a collective one, a shared death experience made even more vivid by the re-emergence into the lobby where (hopefully) the film is discussed. This ritualized death is further manipulated by moments of comedy and pathos in their respective film genres, which serve to unite the reactions of the audience into a single emotional gesture. The unified laugh of an audience is the moment of catachresis when the individual realizes its position as individual-within-the-mass, an ontologically different position than either the recognition of individuality or of the mass as ‘other’. In an interesting postmodern twist to this conception of the ritual of the cinema, the home viewing experience is fundamentally different, and consequently the rather empty ritual of commercialism is further emphasized as the only one left linking the viewer to other human subjects. Most stimulating from a Marxist perspective is the DVD format for home viewing, which engages the viewer with extra features as the only reason to buy and not to make a copy of the film, which are almost invariably the marketing materials used to promote the film in the first place. The postmodern consumer thus willingly subsidizes the entire process of cultural production, and endlessly enacts an empty ritual.

Such is not an entirely new phenomenon, however. In twentieth century capitalism, film becomes a glorification of the mode of its production, and thus the list of the top five grossing films rightly enters the news archive of the week. By emphasizing the pleasure the audience receives from registering the leisure and wealth required to produce the film, the audience is itself affirmed as legitimately consuming an art which is itself legitimately produced. Any notion of authenticity – or even Adorno’s conception of autonomy, which he himself put into perspective: “the emphasis on autonomous works is itself socio-political”(AP, 194), which, inverted on Adorno himself, suggests the impulse to seek autonomy in art as itself a function of bourgeois leisure – must be put aside for the moment, for late capitalism has in a sense folded subjective experience in upon itself as yet another element of the process of commodification. Seen from that perspective, all products reflect the reality which created them for precisely the reason that reality as such (or, even more precisely the hyper-reality proposed by Baudrillard, Eco, and others) is merely the narrative creation of a ‘reality’ from the framework of a reflective act post temporum of the product itself. When viewed within the context of the rising uniformity of consumer culture – the wealthy are not distanced culturally from the petit bourgeoisie or the working class, but rather all experience the same television, popular music, and films to a more or less equal measure – it could be argued that there is no longer a bourgeois culture to which the avant-guard reacts. In other words, there is no longer a divide between resistance and affirmation of the dominant modes of production. The pop-art movement in the visual arts had anticipated just such a trend in the 1960s, with both Warhol and Lichtenstein acting as principle negotiators between commercial and artistic expression.

It is here that I would like to put the rather infamous debate between Lukács and Bloch into a contemporary perspective. The former had posited that capitalism was a totalizing front which brought the masses into the same aesthetic space (production or reception) as the elite. Only by artistic gestures towards realism can the masses access the truly revolutionary and come to realize their political situation: “the large-scale, enduring resonance of the great works of realism is in fact due to this accessibility, to the infinite multitude of doors through which entry is possible....The process of appropriation enables readers to clarify their own experiences and understanding of life and to broaden their own horizons” (AP, 56). One cannot avoid the thoroughly bourgeois examples Lukács uses, for all belong to the standard canon of texts which have been the subject of numerous attacks from the 1970s onward by those seeking to expand the canon and redefine the process of canonization. Indeed, Lukács’s thought serves to exemplify Jameson’s notions of the narrativization of history in A Singular Modernity, and one must question the priviledged position from which Lukács’s realism developed. Alternately, Bloch forwarded the notion that the avant-guard could be located precisely in the fissures between social reality and subjectivity. Accordingly, the alienation experienced by subjects under capitalism was made manifest by the individual artwork, and no totalizing concept of art production is possible within a linear framework. For Bloch there is no such thing as a progression for art; rather he posits a more useful (from the perspective of the post-modern) conception of Erbe, which suggests a myriad of potentialities and possibilities for the reception and production of art. There is no truly authentic sense of ‘reality’ within this conception, for such a gesture merely reflects a specific ideological narrativization of a field of texts within the Erbe. Thus, Lukács’s appeals to a certain material reality which one can either represent (authentic art) or avoid (popular art), and is certainly not objective: “Lukács’s thought takes for granted a closed and integrated reality that does indeed exclude the subjectivity of idealism, but not the seamless ‘totality’ which has always thriven best in idealist systems.... Whether such a totality in fact constitutes reality, is open to question” (AP, 22). In this respect, we can view Bloch’s conception of the artist negotiating the Erbe as approaching Benjamin’s notion of a progression towards a universally citable history: Benjamin’s “redeemed mankind” for which “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost” (Illuminations, 254). There is no truth as to the progression of artistic expression except that which emerges with the individual artist; no history for art exists save that which an artist creates through their work.

So where does this leave the cinema? I wish here to state the somewhat precarious notion that the editing process itself, montage if you like (although I do wish to avoid the genre convention of ‘montage’ as such), is precisely the creation of a new temporality which more realistically (in Bloch’s sense, not Lukács’s) represents the fissure in modern culture between social reality and subjective experience than traditional media have been able. Whether or not one wishes to make the value judgement whether film is therefore more important to the twentieth century than literature or painting is beside the point and, as Jameson points out, is regardless simply a matter of taste. The intersection of disparate images during montage is the moment when the pleasure experienced by the viewing subject during the act of imposing a continuous temporality, and thus a narrative, upon those images is met with the interruption of the entire process by the objective temporality of the film itself. In other words, a multiplicity of temporalities coexist within the space between frames: one the sense of objective time, and others corresponding to an internalized sense of time, which can of course be manipulated by the director/editor of the film. The former can be exemplified by a sense conveyed in Kubrick’s 2001 of the precision required for movement in a zero gravity environment by the long time it takes for objects to move onscreen (and the resultant boredom among many viewers, as “nothing happens” narratively speaking). The shower sequence in Hitchcock’s Psycho is perhaps the best example of the latter, in which the rapidity of movement and shot juxtaposition serves to pull the moment, and by extension the viewing subject, out of time. The shock experienced by the viewer is influenced less by content (as the ‘guilty’ pleasures of horror film fans can attest, smiling as body after body is mutilated in ever more graphically exciting ways) than by its presentation.

This process is akin to Barthes’s notion of the punctum in photography, which is the detail in the image which forces a rupture in temporalities between the viewing subject and the photographic image, bringing the former tangentially to an infinitude of reflection while atemporalizing the latter. In this sense the original moment represented in the image is destroyed and cannot be recovered. No degree of ‘realistic’ intentions will therefore represent the original subject in its entirety, but rather gestures toward realism cause the phoenix-like rise of the subject to figure itself as an allegory for its own termination. It was precisely this realization which photography imposed on the visual arts, causing them to modify their representational capacity. If an artist attempts to crystalize a moment by a representational gesture, it can only be judged successful if it takes this death-of-the-subject into account. To recognize this rupture is to historicize the subject, to create it upon reflection. It is difficult to ignore the pleasure this figuration of reality folding upon itself (as the hyper-real), and indeed one can liken it to Barthes’s jouissance, or the moment of death-creation in which the subject becomes a fetish for itself. The fetishized subject will lose its own sense of history by destroying time, entering an atemporal space of pleasure anticipation. This is in a sense both a blessing and a curse, for the subject of the gaze will be at its most pure – aesthetically, politically, etc – at the same time that it annihilates itself. The fetish looks back onto itself, continually trying to recreate the remembrance-of-the-past-anticipating-the-future, and thus becomes temporally displaced from itself. When controlled, the fetish instinct reifies the subject as a sacrificial one, and consequently legitimates the artistic gesture. The history of this (self)control becomes the structure of the artwork itself.

Kubrick recognizes this process in both Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut. Roughly halfway through the former, a scene in which Lady Lyndon is presented lying in her bath contemplating the infidelities of her husband is shot with the focal point of the camera slowly zooming out from a close-up of her upper body, eyes askew, to a neo-Rembrandtian composition with her at the centre. At the end of the camera’s movement, Lady Lyndon glances straight at the camera (this gesture itself a further reference to the Rembrandtian subject). This moment is the point at which the subject becomes aware of her own annihilation as subject (and by means of a structural analysis, a realization by the actress Marisa Berenson herself of her in situ vulnerability), and accordingly she arrests the viewer’s attention to this moment in time. The subject is made immortal by this gesture, which forces the viewer to reconsider their subject-position in relation to the film; the viewer becomes the watched and is made aware of the predatory nature of this relationship, reflecting back upon Lady Lyndon’s subjection to the emotional violence perpetrated by her husband. A similar occurrence – and one which perhaps more directly exemplifies the conception of jouissance that I wish to invoke – happens in the first half-hour of Eyes Wide Shut, during a scene in which Dr. Harford and his wife Alice are kissing in front of a mirror. Alice is focussing on their image in the glass as their ‘passion’ rises (this act itself an analysis of the simulacrum which I do not wish to engage with here), and just prior to a fade from scene Alice (Kidman?) glances directly at the camera with a look of utter contempt at the moment she is taken along with her husband to ‘rapture’. Alice, or perhaps more accurately the Alice-subject, for this process is not one directly linked with the narrative of the film, realizes the pleasure experienced by the viewing subject, in a manner at her expense, and appropriately involves the audience in her ritual slaughter. As a somewhat related aside, Robert Mapplethorp’s 1975 photograph Self Portrait is just such a gesture, a recognition of the ontological absurdity of subjecting himself to the photographic process. His death is met with a smile – I cannot help but amusingly wonder whether Camus would either roll in his grave or laugh triumphantly at this particular realization that suicide is indeed the most pressing of philosophical issues. Mapplethorp’s phallus/arm thrust across the white backdrop playfully reifies the conception that the death of the subject brings about the artistic ‘life’ of the image itself, while his mostly out-of-frame body suggests that the literal insertion of such an obviously generative metaphor conceals the artist himself from the ritual he is simultaneously mocking and invoking.

So we return to the experience of (death-as-) pleasure by the audience. Is it possible to view the conditions under which the film is experienced as preparing the audience for the ritualized deaths to be presented, ‘onstage’ as it were. I wish to return to Benjamin’s comments in this regard, for, as stated above, he believed that mechanical reproduction – here the mediation of the image by the camera – removed the cultic value of the art: “The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera.... This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed” (Illuminations, 228-9). And yet in the very next section he describes the experience of acting before the camera in the very terms implied by the ritualized death outlined above. Quoting Pirandello, “with a vague sense of discomfort [the film actor] feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality [and] life”. Then, in a passage foreshadowing Kubrick’s sentiments: “The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera ... is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public” (230-1). This instance of transport is the ritualized death of the subject, the process of mediation of the original moment by the cinematic process. For a film with only commercial intentions, there is no need for transport or ortherwise transcendental gestures, but simply entertainment. The ‘outer’ ritual of the sociological process of film viewing is enough to sustain the entire mechanism. Is it possible to suggest an avenue for mediating the commercial and the artistic without falling back on the pop-art aesthetic, which by definition was non-political (although I would here agree with Lenin that everything is political)? The commercial product is a fetish, which as outlined above is a temporal discontinuity between the ‘presentness’ of an object and its relocation in the anticipatory gestures of the relating subject. Consequently, if the anticipation of pleasure is in a reductive sense the product being sold and consumed, it is pleasure itself which remains unconsumable and thus the last bastion for the avant-guard, but such is largely outside the frame of this present examination.


Addendum

Robert Mapplethorp: Self Portrait (1975)


Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. ‘Commitment’. Trans. Francis McDonagh. Aesthetics and
Politics. Ed. R. Taylor. New York: Verso, 1997.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schoken, 1968.

Bloch, Ernst. ‘Discussing Expressionism’. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Aesthetics and
Politics. Ed. R. Taylor. New York: Verso, 1997.

Horkheimer, Max & Theodor Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. J. Cumminng.
New York: Continuum, 2001.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.

Lukács, Georg. ‘Realism in the Balance’. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Aesthetics and
Politics. Ed. R. Taylor. New York: Verso, 1997.

The Moderns, or how to write a conference paper about Nothing, in particular

To say that modernism is a constellation of artistic expressions or even a certain totalizing aesthetic, un fait accomplit, is primarily to misjudge the intentions of those who may fall under its aegis. Certainly there was a fundamental shift from the pre-modern to modernité proper, yet the recognition of a single defining point for the commencement of the latter in fact betrays a certain conceptual impulse which we must deem inherently anti-modern. The consequences of periodization are obvious, and perhaps a touch stereotypical; even the overlapping ‘geological’ nature of periods and movements which informs Foucault’s reading of socio-structural changes in Les Mots et les Choses is perhaps too much of a generalization when localized on modernism. It is therefore my intention to look at modernism as a recognition of the multiplicities, contradictions, and absurdities inherent in existence, which then become reified in given artistic expressions. Central to this position is the awareness that a multiplicity of existences has both spatial and temporal concerns; we see, for example, that the modernist gestures of Stein or Kafka do not correlate in either respect with those of Borges or Tarkovsky, and yet each can claim citizenship within a modernist aesthetic. Fundamentally, they make the same interpolative gesture in relation to the viewing subject, in part the abstraction of subjective experience from the capacity to represent and interpret that experience, as well as the same ontological claim upon themselves, namely a negation to which I shall return shortly. The list of unique artistic expressions that can be contained within modernism as narrative trope are as numerous as the points (of rupture, origin, etc) from which modernism as narrative category emerges from the pre-modern: historical occurrences such as the social and religious revolutions in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries; philosophical creations such as Cartesian rationality or the nihilistic individuality of Nietzsche; or perhaps with the introduction of the (self)creation of the human subject by its own (un)conscience, forwarded by Freudian psychoanalysis.

The last example best exemplifies the principle conception about modernism, namely that it knows itself, that it is self-aware and by extension self-referential. In many respects, Freud’s work anticipates the anxieties of representation which were not to enter into modernism proper until serialism in music, abstract expressionism in visual art, and the “lost generation” in literature (and language poetry in the later context of a post-modern crisis). Repetitive gestures of representation, which by the turn of the century had begun to include mechanical techniques of image and language reproduction, created in a sense a high tide of represented figures and exhausted tropes. Reality has by the pre-war period incorporated previously symbolic modes of understanding and expression as tangible and in a very real manner marketable products, and thus the authentic artist, siding with Nietzsche in the belief that the ‘real’ – a construction of reality predicated on the reiterated past – is intolerable, seeks a new language in order to express his own subjective experience of their surroundings. It is at this point that the artistic gesture encounters an impasse in relation to the artist, namely that the latter has seen itself before itself in this very guise. The subject is made painfully aware that it is using a language increasingly distanced from experiential reality, and thus a rupture is formed within the subject’s historical sense of time.

It is here that the subject creates the present by reifying the past as the past, namely as a narrative category or trope by which the present is defined. The modernist sees the eternal present within the recurrent past and the rupture that this creates within subjective relations to time, much as the chronological flow of Proust’s text is famously suspended with reveries of childhood as certain smells and tastes elicit profound reminiscences (and in a physically real sense time is objectively telescoped for the reader, as one compares the simple lifting of a madelaine to one’s lips in relation to the time it takes to read Proust’s narration of the event and realizes that the very physicality of this text – over 3500 pages in many editions – is itself a modernist gesture). The impasse which hinders the artistic gesture mentioned above is the moment when the artist realizes that nothing new has emerged to define the past by a repetition of the present; in other words, the continual repetition of the past annihilates both the past as the present. Consequently, the initial crisis of representation felt by the ‘High” modernists of the visual arts, namely that the introduction of certain technological advances such as still and film cameras made traditional representation in painting and graphic art completely irrelevant, can be correlated to a similar crisis encountered by painters of the late modern period who found that they had exhausted the various schools of interpretation/production within abstract expression. And thus the anti-consumerist gestures of the avant-guard (which in Benjaminian terms is de facto anti-bourgeois) became the pro-consumption repetitive tropes of pop art; the avant-guard gesture of Magritte’s La Chambre d’Ecoute was reiterated by Warhol’s Goethe. In a similar manner the avant-guard of Schoenberg’s serialism and Berg’s atonality in modern composition became the widely popular neo-classicism of Stravinsky. Indeed, one can locate a unique intra-mediary correlation between the artistic gesture in music and the visual arts in the 1950s, when abstract expressionism emerged as the logical extension of the initial crisis of representing the subject realized by the Impressionists at the very same time that freely improvised music emerged from direct compositional influence; one gets the same sense of spatial and temporal play within the art of both Pollock and de Kooning, for example, as one can interpret within the music of Morton Feldman or Ornette Coleman. Each seeks to relocalize the past in order to more accurately situate the present, and thus legitimate the artistic gesture itself. Importantly, film, itself a new medium born with modernité, suffers no such crisis of representation. To summarize in brief, modernity must remain continually at play with its own conceptualization in order to remain truly modern. The modern artist must indeed follow Rimbaud’s dictum, “Il faut être absolument moderne!”, and remain like Baudelaire an eternal flaneur of the present, for living and creating otherwise is precisely the annihilation of history.

And yet the construction of the artist of modernism remains in a very real sense a mythology, and as such requires situation within its own narrative voice. It is here that I wish to posit the closest thing I can to a thesis concerning modernity. Modernism is a description rather than a totalizing category pour-soi. Within rhetorical terms, modernity is a trope for textual production, yet it is one which, in a performative manner, creates and signifies itself. As Fredric Jameson writes in A Singular Modernity – admittedly the guiding critical text for my present formulation of the modern – “this is to say that the trope of ‘modernity’ is always in one way or another a rewriting, a powerful displacement of previous narrative paradigms” (35). And thus an artist who is self-aware is merely one representation of what the modernist artist can be. There are indeed others, suggested by the notoriously unconscious modernist expressions of Jackson Pollock, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet, who remain distanced somewhat from the authentically self-referential texts by ‘High’ modernists such as Duchamp, Joyce, and Faulkner. There is not one narrative which universalizes and conceptualizes all that is located within its jurisdiction. Despite a multiplicity of subjects of and subjective experiences depicted in warfare, Picasso’s Guernica does not attempt to contain all the voices of the participants of the Spanish civil war nor does it attempt to re-present as legitimate their subjectivity to that experience. That space of silence – not an ontological muting but rather a semantic one – is both the negative space of the darkness, which defines the forms and serves to function as a sort of negative dialectic imparting meaning to the ‘positive’ images, as well the geometric and temporal fracturing of the images themselves into their constituent parts. The latter differs the initial experience of Guernica as conceived objet d’art, initially distancing the viewer of the mural from itself as an image, but it also geographically unifies them as a multiplicity of overlapping images which create subelements of visual representation. One can notice, for example, that the white rectangular area to the right of the mural’s centre when viewed in the same plane as the lightbulb-eye conflation just above the horse’s mouth in the centre suggests a darkened room in which the artist repeats the violence done to bodies in warfare by interrogating them as subject to his artistic gaze (simultaneous to this, we see ourselves situated within this room, ourselves interpolated as agent-victim of the recuperated violence).

In this capacity, Picasso’s work doubles in upon itself, replicating the silence of its subjects within a language that can speak only by negation, by precisely what it is not. It has in effect sealed the historical rupture between the gesture of painting (or representation, and by extension of the historical process in general) and the event itself, which upon reflection is an element of and for its own history, and thus solved its own representational crisis by the very act of negating itself within this rupture. That this conscious gesture of rupture is one and the same with the same implicit and unavoidable one in the photographic process is no simple accident of historical synergy. I am here thinking of Barthes’s argument in Camera Lucida, in which the temporality of the photographic subject is utterly destroyed by the infinitude of the moment of time captured in its representation. In other words, the viewer experiences a fundamentally different set of subjectivities in relation to the image, and thus a new mode of production is required for the artist who wishes to express the authentic. Film and still cameras had captured the horrors of warfare (and indeed all of its subjects) more provocatively than was possible with the language of art the moderns inherited. Thus a new language was required to re-create the visual arts as authentically and legitimately expressive. Bodies in Picasso’s mural are made infinitely more sensual than they would given a traditional depictive gesture – I invoke the ontologic interchangeability of orgasm/pleasure and termination/death as the extension of de Sade and the French formulation of jouissance as le petit mort – and thus the violence done to them is even more intolerable. In a very real sense then, the viewing subject is made to experience the dislocation of their own body along with the numerous arms, heads, and legs which populate the scene simultaneous with the realization that this process is one of self-mutilation. This process of internalization is further evidenced by a somewhat more literal interpretation of the figures within the scene, who seem to merge the private and the public spheres of subjectivity and emphasize the violence inherent in this act. They are both the intruders and the intruded upon, and represent places and moments of hiding, discovery, and subterfuge, and one is reminded that the Blitzkrieg – an act of warfare targeting an entire population both civilian and military – was perfected in the Spanish conflict. The sense of dread and guilt, both of the future and the avoidance of the inevitable within that future, permeates Picasso’s mural and the viewing subject is forced to confront the limits of its own rationality. Guernica speaks to the desire for a totalizing experiential representation of its subject and the ontological crises which this process by consequence suggests.

As a logical extension of the principle of narrative multiplicities, we must not, by a process of institutional exclusion and thus textual censorship, avoid the voices of the repressed in modernity, those among the subaltern who may not have the agency to represent themselves as authentic subjects within the conception of modernity. I am here thinking of the recovery strategies proposed by feminist and post-colonial critics, who wish to re-introduce texts that have been excised from the archive of modernity and authenticate them within the canon of academic study; this is a theme to which I will later return. That the modern subject requires certain aesthetic realities for acceptance as ‘modern’ reflects the institutional nature of criticism in its most general sense, namely that of inscribing the past with the voice of the present. Indeed, Jameson identifies such a conception as belonging to the ‘High Moderns’, a term which must be positioned as belonging to the canonization of art and not a category for its production: “most often they allowed representation to follow its own semi-autonomous course ... they allowed it to separate itself from its content and its object” (198). It is my own belief that such an arbitrary stance toward the signifier reflected the sense of play, in the sense proposed by the later Wittgenstein, towards conceptualization in general. In other words, during the moment of artistic gesture the individual artist whether consciously or not creates a text (perhaps body is both more accurate and more suggestive than text) which adheres solely to an internal logic, and in a sense prefigures itself to itself. In this respect, Duchamp’s 1946 piece Paysage Fautif, composed entirely of the artist’s own semen, best exemplifies the gesture of modernism, although in an admittedly abstract manner. The rational mind of the viewing subject seeks order within this particular amorphous geometry produced by Duchamp, and thus the image begins as an overhead picture of an island perhaps, or the conceptualized resistence of an organic, non-angular entity against the angular and obviously mechanized confinement of the frame and the negative (and negated) space it suggests. Rather the gesture Duchamp makes is quite literal: art is simply a jouissance reified and solidified, and consequently made into a gesture, by its own materiality. In the vein of Escher’s representation of mathematical space or the ‘self-sufficient’ compositional feedback of musical phrases in the magnetic-tape era Varèse or Cage, the gesture enters into itself in order to emerge as a concrete entity.

This has been true of artistic expression in a very broad sense throughout post-classical history – the emergence of perspective in Renaissance European art, and western-style tonality in post-monastic musical composition are as self-referential or ‘internalized’ in the sense given above as any artistic gesture of the twentieth century. Yet there is one fundamental difference, namely that which the self represents to itself as an ontological reality; this has indeed changed from the pre-modern to the modernists. The difference within modernism itself is that this process of representation-to-oneself is a process of increasing abstraction and duplication. For the pre-modern artist the representation of a given subject was simply: “I am painting x, and thus need to follow the rules for painting such subjects in order to realize x as x within my audience’s perception of x”. That painting until the middle of the 19th century has been traditionally conceived within the discourse of art history as a process of increasingly ‘realistic’ representations of given subjects, followed by the rupture of an Impressionism which celebrated painting for its own sake, is more reflective of the narrativization of history than historical actuality itself, for the contrapuntal (and to a degree contradictory) subtext to such histories will forever remain the sublimated surrealism of fantasy artists beginning with Bosch and running through the engravings of Blake straight to post-Impressionism. Rather the pre-modern artist remains such precisely because of a belief in a totality and universality of representation, or in other words that x will forever be viewed as x so long as it is painted correctly. Alternately, the modern artist is cognizant that there is no true x except the representation of x, and therefore the act of play occurs in a secondary manner in relation to the subject of the art gesture. For the modern artist, x becomes a mere abstraction for the true process of art, namely “within my audience’s perception of x through medium y, I wish to realize x as y in order to properly situate x as x”. This process can exhaust our alphabet quite readily – Duchamp would locate the museum itself as z, for example – as the subject position of both the artist and the audience are continually negotiated and re-conceptualized.

And yet the ontology of the art gesture is exactly the same, despite the multiplicities it suggests. The subject is annihilated in order to be recreated as as representation. Thus the modern artist, regardless of medium, plays with representation itself knowing full well that the representation of a given subject will then be re-presented to the viewer of the artwork. This is not the same as the process Arthur Danto describes in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, in which the awareness of criticism ontologically changes artistic expression, and indeed changes the modes of its production (Danto himself does not use such an obviously Marxist teleology, but my purposes are served) – Andy Warhol knowing, for example, that the process of art criticism and reception requires a priori certain criteria which are then negated or emphasized in a particular piece of work. More to the point I wish to suggest that within the modernist aesthetic the critical function was itself an element for play within a broader gesture towards culture, which would include not only the critical function but also those of the market, ethics, technology, ethnography, sociology, etc. Indeed, the mark of the modern is the same that marked Cain: having destroyed the traditional subject of art, modern art must now be protected from those who wish it vengeance, and thus it retreats into itself in order to legitimate itself. The rupture from the pre-modern to the modern is an act of violence, and in this capacity I cannot think otherwise than Derrida in Archive Fever. The pleasure of the archive – the institutionalization of the modern as modernism – is precisely the pleasure of inscribing certain texts into the archive and excluding others in a process of negation. Thus the Tintin comic strip is not modern in the institutional sense for the reasons that it is not like that which has been included; likewise Mina Loy has been recovered from the purgatory of the non-modern as a legitimate and authentically modern artist. Indeed, how can one think otherwise, with an example such as ‘There is no Life or Death’ from The Last Lunar Baedeker, which sees only an eternal present created out of a narrativization of its own past: “There is no Life or Death / Only activity / And in the absolute / Is no declivity”. She tells us that nothing exists save a certain subjectivity towards ourselves, and this by extension precludes totalizing gestures (life and death being two of the most obvious examples). This is fundamentally the same gesture as Faulkner’s temporal fracturing of narrative subjectivities in The Sound and the Fury, just as Picasso’s Guernica echoes her line, “There is no Space or Time / Only intensity”, in the refusal to objectively situate a site the ‘real’. The annihilation of the subject of the present inaugurated by the past is the subject of her unpublished ‘Continuity’, in which the eternity of subjectivity encounters the ironic termination of the eternal present by mechanical reproduction. Loy twice invokes the passage, “Continuity / renews / precedence”, which serves as a concept prefiguring its own continuation and reification as poem despite its grammatical fracture. The unpublished ‘Echo’ perhaps best concretizes the expressive gesture towards an ontologic negativity which I have been promoting throughout this discussion. Existence is figured as an inquiry which fundamentally looks through itself to create itself; “our anxious ‘Why’”, the philosophical imperative which constitutes the self, returns as an ambiguity, an echo, which then reifies whatever is external and transcendent to itself as mere subjectivity: “echo is no answer”. The sole answer to the question of existence that Loy is here forwarding is the process of self-creation through negation.

It is with modernism that we enter into the space where institutionalization encounters authenticity, and within this space a certain respect must be given to all those who consciously or not were able to counter the violence done to them by exclusion from the umbrella of (High) Modernism. It must be recognized that there are experiences of modernity which will never be recovered – one must think of the anonymous poets of the first world war who are canonically deferred in favour of an Owen or a Brooke, just as one must think of the anonymous housewives whose expression of domestic subjectivities in textile or food production were as powerful a realization of the modern as Stein’s Tender Buttons. And yet we can accept the relatively nonsensical text of a Stein or a Burroughs as important objects of study precisely because we have the institutional means to accept their existence, namely the study and reproduction of language in both the educational and critical mediums. Other modernist gestures which cannot be so easily contained are excluded from study; they are censored by the archive of modernism itself. It is thus that we arrive at what I initially posited as an institutional function of modernism which is itself anti-modern. Modernism must attempt to contain all that is a gesture of the modern, and yet it cannot for it has created a temporality for itself which cannot inscribe the totality of the modernist oeuvre within its archive. The sense of history is created out of specific modes of production which embraced the expressions of certain artists while rejecting others as ‘not-of-itself’. And indeed, it is to be remembered that Modernism is a narrative creation and as such it a priori excludes that which contradicts a given experiential reality. Thus, while Marinetti’s followers could indeed rejoice in his dictum that there is no painting, sculpture, or poetry, but rather there is only creation (!), all elements of said creation cannot be contained within Modernité proper, as Jameson elaborates in A Singular Modernity: “each mode of production has its own system of temporalities” (79), further emphasizing the inscribing process of history from specific vantage points. In this sense it is easy to see why the readymades of Duchamp were so readily accepted, and indeed consumed, within the art community; had Duchamp’s gesture been less akin to sculpture, had he for example made a film of himself baking a cake and submitted the reels for museum installation and looped presentation, his subversive expression would have been greeted with a sense of boredom rather than anger – the film would be a non-art and thus a non-entity for criticism, whereas the readymades were so obviously anti-art, and thus inherently artistic in their negational qualities. Forgetting the absurdity of the preceding example for a moment, it does serve its purpose, namely to further underline the notion of modernism as a narrative trope, as a history created by the present for the present. A contemporary critic would have no problem whatsoever in discerning the gesture and artistic consequences of a filmed occurrence, regardless of subject; in this sense, it is possible to argue that only within a post-modern society can the modern be truly situated.

the violence of pornography

last night onscreen
there was a girl
and only part of a man

she was gasping, grasping
looking for the air
which he took away for himself

she died seven times
while asking for no memory just video
he pulled back and sought her always

her eyes closed, ice like tears
slowly on her cheek suddenly
she couldn't see and never would again

i came in silence and reloaded