Mapping Signifiers with Prezi

In contrast to the distant reading approach of my last post, I read each set of posts carefully to find serendipitous connections. Each set of blog posts (Julien, Lacan, and Campany) orbits around a distinct term that seems to act as a kind of conceptual filter for the material culled from the text, popping up in almost all of my posts. For Julien, it was movement; Lacan, the unconscious; and Campany, absence.

I made a prezi exploring these connections for each of the texts, locating quote blocks near the term that they appear to be circling. The quotes in the middle relate to all three of the terms. 

Circling the Imagistic Object

My next constellation of instructions begins to tie together Lacanian psychoanalysis with specific filmic techniques from The Cinematic. This will be an important post to return to in formulating my poetics.

Instruction: represent the objet petit a by creating circuitous images of displacement while keeping in mind that to “get at” what is “not-get-at-able”you do not actually “get” there, you can only circle it.

Gaensheimer writes that the blurred movement between images in a photo montage plays the role of “that which is not representable in the concrete idiom of the medium” (74). Its self effacement simultaneously reproduces and conceals the object of its mediatic desire, which is perhaps the same tension between motion and stasis which unites the essays in this collection. This is reminiscent of my previous post about how media betray their innate desires by traumatically obsessing over their representational barriers. Thus, it becomes clear what Gaensheimer means when she writes that this transition from image to image is the thing (the limit) which is “present only in the form of absence.”

Likewise, Wim Wenders discusses how the lack of interpretive clarity in certain films creates potentiality in her essay “Time Sequences, Continuity of Movement.”  She writes that the enumeration of “little details” can be utilized to create “images that don’t come complete with their interpretations” (88). Although the unreflective sustenance of ambiguity can lead to the worst kind of post modern abstractionism, one could take Wenders’ instruction as “don’t force literacy onto the electrate.” Or, more simply, don’t do the speaking for your images because they need to be given space (and time) to communicate in their own language.

A more practical instruction comes from Christian Metz’s “Photography and Fetish” in which he isolates the distinction between off frame displacement in film and photography. Using Pascal Bonitzer’s terms, Metz claims that filmic off frame space is “substantial” while photographic off frame space is “subtle.” Essentially, the distinction is that filmic off frame elements always hold the potential of entering the frame (either visually or auditorily) while photographic elements are held in perpetual abeyance. For Metz, this perpetual absence marks photographics as more explicitly fetishistic than films. Although Metz doesn’t offer much in terms of technical application of this theory, he does allude to Barthes’ notion of the punctum as “the only part of a photograph which entails the feeling of an off-frame space,” thus emphasizing the point that the absence of the off frame element must be evoked by a feeling that is within the image’s frame. Similar to the temporal tension between past and present that I discussed earlier, this punctum propels the viewer outside the frame of the photo only to discover that the “thing” she is in search of was always already the lack initiated by an element within the image itself. This is Lacan’s image of the rim as a diagram of the movement of desire, entering into the gap only to return from where you came.

David Campany explores the notion of absent presence (or present absence) in our current media ecology in his discussion of “late photography” in “Safety in Numbness.” Campany defines late photography as the “trace of the trace of an event,” referring to Joel Meyerowitz’s photographs of the World Trade Center wreckage as a paradigmatic example. He refers to these traumatic images as “remnants of activity.” These are images that arrive late on purpose because the rise of motion in our visual economy has forced photography to relinquish certain claims to knowledge dissemination to other forms of media, thus forcing it to negatively redefine itself in terms of its unique capacity to invoke a contemplative return.

In part, Campany’s goal in this piece is to locate the unique function of photography in our increasingly visual-digital culture and how it has (or will) restructured our subjective relationships to memory. He writes, “The structure of memory is in large measure culturally determined by the means of representation at our disposal. As our image world shifts in character, so do our conditions of remembrance” (187). Continuing, Campany claims that the new position of late photography is less a reaffirmation of a photographic’s affinity with remembrance than a “nostalgic wish that it still has such power.”

In many ways, Campany’s essay reveals how the photograph's search for the thing (the objet petit a) that is missing is the search for photography itself, which is always a position in a constellation of competing media.

I think Campany’s essay is instructing me to discover the new role of photography by returning to those sites of wreckage that are passed over every fifteen minutes or so in the media blitzkrieg of instant access and take some late photographs.

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.

The Temporal Dialectics of Photographic Viewing

An idea that I located in several different places could be reduced to the instruction: “create a photo that initiates a temporal tension between the past and the present.” To clarify this point a little and provide some dialectically fruitful disparities, I will list a few of the places from The Cinematic that seem to orbit around this larger point.

The essay which explores this concept most explicitly is Thierry de Duve’s “Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox” in which de Duve inverts Barthes description of photographic time as the juxtaposition “the here and the formerly” to the “now and there.” While Barthes’s conceives the present of the photograph (here) as spatial and its past (formerly) as temporal, de Duve merely inverts this description in order to emphasize the temporality of the photograph's present (now) and the spatiality of its past (there).

I think the important thing to remember about this parsing of the experience of photographic temporality is that neither de Duve nor Barthes are interested in an imposition of analytical dissection onto phenomenological continuity but are rather focused on displaying the generative conceptual capacity of image logic in reformulating our relationship to time.

In addition, the image itself functions as the material means of reformulating this relationship. Although it is important to describe how images do this, the unique trauma of photography allows the viewer to be intuitively saturated into this relationship and inhabit the ontological dimension of time that language cannot reach in the same way. This is what de Duve describes as the difference between “reading” an image and “relating” to an image.

I’m not sure if this is the image of the soldier to which de Duve refers, but I think it works as one example of the kind of “paradoxical conjunction” of a past that has already/never will happen. Perhaps a specific instruction from de Duve on this point would be to create an image that brings you to the point of action and then stalls, allowing the imagination’s invocatory nature to carry you into the here and now of the present only to have the image pull you back to the precipice from which you threw herself. This is the “unresolved oscillation” of viewing experience (60).

Another good instruction on this point comes from Susan Gaensheimer in her description of the dialectical struggle between narrative and image in Bill Viola’s slow motion film The Greeting. The time in this film is slowed to the point that the viewer is caught in an internal struggle between viewing sequences of single shots and the complete action of the piece. Although it might be technically difficult, it would make for an interesting felt to create a film such as Viola’s which is designed for slow motion viewing. Gaensheimer writes that Viola filmed The Greeting at 300 fps in order to “produce extreme slow motion and at the same time maintain the pristine pictorial quality of a film made at the normal speed of 24 fps” (70-71).

Finally, Raymon Bellour writes in his essay "The Pensive Spectator" that when a photograph is present within a film "two kinds of time blend together, always and inextricable, but without becoming confused" (123).

Agencies of Repetition

According to Lacan, the basis of Freudian psychoanalytic theory rests on the calling forth of the Cartesian subject out of the “structural necessities” of signification. This “recollection,” as he terms it, occurs at our “lowest encounter” with language and is constituted by the very structural constraints it seeks to escape (47). For Freud, It is the “Wiederkehr” (recurrence) of this moment that initiates the gap of the unconscious. It is the encounter between the thinking subject and the lacuna of the real. Lacan writes, “An adequate thought, qua thought. always avoids...the same thing. Here, the real is that which always comes back to the same place-to the place where the subject in so far as he thinks...does not meet it” (49). Thinking is the subject’s search for the thing (the real) whose very refutation makes it (cogito) possible.

I talked in my last post about refutation as the “essential function” of the unconscious, so I’m not going to go into that here. Rather, I want to focus on the function of distributed agency in Lacan’s theory of repetition.

In formulating his theory of repetition, Lacan bridges off of Freud by focusing on the importance of the “human act” occurring in a structure disconnected from the real, and he references ritual suicide as a paradigmatic example (50). Here, Lacan seems to be pointing towards a notion of the human defined by its degree of agency within a field of possible actions

However, Lacan sums up his lecture with what at first seems like a peculiar detour through traumatic repetition in dreams which he posits as the very thing that problematizes the notion of human agency presented above in the way that it de-centers the subject “into a certain number of agencies” (51). Lacan claims that distributed agency is the only means through which the subject can approach a traumatic encounter, a claim that would seem to run counter to the popular notion of traumatic repetition as “mastery.” Which leads Lacan to formulate his question: “Why speak so hastily when we do not know precisely where to situate the agency that would undertake this operation of mastery?”.

Lacan concludes his lecture by noting that repetition can be characterized as the search for the moment in which an event “seems to be under an obligation to yield itself” (i.e. the real, “original” encounter) (51). He then further defines this process rather enigmatically as “the resistance of the subject,” which could presumably be read both as “the subject’s act of resistance” and as “resisting the subject.” In sum, it seems that Lacan is saying that a subject’s attempt to grasp the real (the “human act”) is in an inverse relationship to the “totalizing, synthesizing psyche” that initiates this act in the first place.

Perhaps the instruction to be drawn from this section would be to avoid approaches to the real through consciousness. This is the logic of literacy,which is fine for scientific pursuits, but inadequate for our purposes in electracy which sublates the true/false binary on which such pursuits depend. Similar to my last instruction, our repetitive approach to the real will have “always already” occurred, it is simply a matter of locating this approach retrospectively in the various agencies through which it occurred. Which perhaps leads to another instruction: when mapping the subject’s network of signifiers, look for distributed agencies not a unified agency.