Receiving your Project

My next point of constellation from The Cinematic could be formulated as: the phenomenological parameters of an image or filmic moment are determined by its relationship to those images and filmic moments which precede it. In your experiment, become friendly with the replay button, review your productions with strict attention to its internal ecology. In the same way that you put yourself in the place of the reader in reviewing your writing, put yourself in the place of the viewer/receiver in reviewing your project.

Sergie Eisenstein focuses on the relational constitution of images in his 1929 essay “Montage is Conflict.” He writes about how the final murder scene of Chantal Akerman’s film Jeane Dielman becomes all the more shocking in its comparison to the quotidian events that preceded it (Jeane is shown washing dishes, bathing, etc.). Create a jarring juxtaposition of events in your project in order to manifest the unique felt of a particular image. In this case, a murder scene should indeed be shocking, however, filmic representations of this act have become anything but at this point. Perhaps recourse to Lacan’s notion of the veil in painting would be useful for creating this feeling, establishing an illusion which the film can then subvert. Again, it is not a distortion of reality we are after here; murder is jarring and unexpected, and its representation should be as well.

Gaesenheimer writes rather eloquently in her essay that it “is neither the motif nor the particular position that grant significance to the individual image, but its function as a constitutive fraction of a comprehensive sequence of movement” (69). I think the instruction to be drawn from this point is to not try to control the flow of events in a filmic felt as you won’t really know what you have made until it is finished and you notice how the disparate moments you originally focused on have been reconstituted by their relationship to the whole film. Again, this is the importance of reviewing your project.

What all of these theorists are after in this entire collection is the importance of the relationship between still and moving image. They hold firm that there is constitutive component of the power of the still that can only be captured in its juxtaposition with the moving.

Two Instructions: Contrast

Ulmer brought up a few points about metaphysics last week that I think it would be useful to revisit here as I search for instructions for inventing electracy within Jullien’s text. First, Ulmer mentioned that we have no need to repeat the metaphysics of Aristotle (i.e. present a metaphysics of the “thing”), we already have one of those. What we need, according to Ulmer, is a metaphysics for electracy which, in contrast to the totalizing nature of Aristotelian metaphysics, operates at a more subjective level. Ulmer: “The claim of Internet Invention is that the wide image is a personal metaphysics.” As Ulmer pointed out in class, Jullien’s extrapolation of shi (propensity, tendency) in Chinese culture serves as a starting point for thinking about the shi of our wide image as a personal metaphysics which we can utilize for the invention process. From here, we are to use Jullien to explain the first slot in Ulmer’s  CATTt generator (Contrast).

Thus, the question guiding this blog post is: what does Jullien have to teach us about Contrast?

As a whole, Jullien’s text contrasts Western and Eastern metaphysics and, as Aaron pointed out in his email, Jullien strongly favors the Eastern notion of shi over the Western category, extrapolating shi’s general characteristics from particular cultural practices (e.g. calligraphy, landscape painting, etc.) while positing the static Western category as a general rule from the outset (13). Perhaps this bring us to our first instruction for Contrast: MOVE AWAY FROM THE GENERAL AND TOWARD THE PARTICULAR.

However, before I move to the particular, let’s stick around with the general for a second. This idea of “moving away from the general” seems like a good opportunity for a conductive puncept between General (Western abstraction) and General (army commander) considering the amount of attention Jullien gives to Chinese military tactics. As I pointed out in a previous post, Chinese Generals operated under the attitude of predestined victory: “victory is simply a predictable outcome of a balance that operates in his favor” (26). Winning a battle was not a matter of forcing one’s will upon the situation, but rather aligning one’s desired outcome with the shi of the situation.

Perhaps the Chinese General is a good figure to “move away from” due to the strong connotations of “victory” and “triumph” associated with him. What if, for electracy, “winning” is less important than “losing?” Another possible instruction for Contrast: MOVE AWAY FROM WINNING AND TOWARD LOSING.

Forward Thinking

In The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China, Francois Jullien traces the various deployments of the concept of shi in Chinese culture. Although an ultimate definition is never offered (nor desired) by Jullien, he characterizes it at one point as “the kind of potential that originates not in human initiative but instead results from the very disposition of things. Instead of always imposing our own longing for meaning on reality, let us open ourselves to this immanent force and learn to seize it” (13). Although one might initially brush this off as a typical material determinism/agency binary (which it no doubt is), Jullien quickly complicates the role of the agent in this scenario. The agent is not so much in control of the material elements of the situation, but rather the agent is in control of her position in relation to the material elements of the situation.

Since we are focused on Contrast, I want to think through the differences in Western and Eastern relationships to the material elements of a situation. Specifically, I want to explore the role of predestination within shi and how it can also be seen at work in the Western rhetoric of self-help.

In his chapter on shi in the military, Jullien writes about great Chinese generals who approached a battle with full knowledge of the events that would lead to their ultimate victory. Individual courage and bravery were less important than the dynamism that guided the entire situation. And later, in his chapter on landscape painting Jullien writes about the importance of “contour” (overall plan) over “wrinkles” (details) in the drawing of a mountain. Of the latter, Julien writes, quoting Fang Xun, “Once the shi of a mountain or a rock has been determined, ‘the aesthetic success of that mountain or rock is simultaneously guaranteed’” (99). 

In reading these approaches to various situations, I cannot help but be reminded of the trite self-help mantras that encourage us to “visualize our goals” or “imagine the reality of the success we want to attain.” To me, this doesn’t seem to be what Julien is referring to in these sections. These kind of attitudinal disposition (self help mantras) seems to posit agency back into the subject who can presumably will the situation she desires into existence. This is the moralism of Confucianism, the courage of the individual soldier.

It seems that the primary distinction between the predestination of shi and that of self help is the emphasis given to observation in the former. The general who wants to win the battle and the painter who wants to capture the landscape must not acquiesce their inner desire and force it upon the world, rather they must observe the tendency of the world itself and locate the points at which the world’s tendencies converge with their own. Shi is cartographic; self help is colonial.