Using Big Data Tools on Petit Objets

As an entry point into my poetics (a productive synthesis of my instructions from the three texts used for our experiment) I wanted to test the generative potential of some topic modeling software (MALLET) that has become somewhat popular amongst digital humanists. Essentially, MALLET organizes words from a set of document into a preset number of “topics” based on their statistical likelihood of appearing in the same document.

After running  my 15 blog posts through MALLET, it generated the two data sets below. In the first table, the right column (Terms) is the set of terms that MALLET deemed statistically correlative, and the left column (Possible Topics) is my best guess at the conceptual string that connects these terms. It might be useful to revise the left column as I continue with my poetics or take suggestions for alternate topic possibilities in class.

Possible Topic	Terms
Interpretation	relationship desire painting art position viewer importance material artistic individual attention locating things determined focused artist social author extrapolating
Experimentation	images essay moving process filmic creation experiment audio representation felt unique bresson event metz object collection put logic project
Disparity	writes photography movement frame role kind world campany terms absence late elements part don control means mountain element doesnt
Precision	media julien search bragaglia specific focus tension claims locate photodynamism technology poetry poetics list initiated earlier subtle explicitly explores
Psychoanalysis	subject real agency human lecture approach freud repetition theory network act moments encounter consciousness leads relation traumatic place back
Fluidity	jullien shi contrast metaphysics chinese general western ulmer reality move thinking eastern situation culture aesthetic dynamism victory agent disposition
Unconscious	lacan unconscious function signifiers language conscious relations essential signifier description identical system pre constitutive mapping cut processes state understanding
Discovery	electrate important term metaphysics method concept century level matter characteristics word fact due definition question place made describes addition
Experience	image time film point present de duve nature refers photograph motion simply difficult order past photographic barthes literacy psychoanalysis
Jargon	instruction notion thing post space text moment section mind formulating contradiction instructions structure subjective clear similar posits claim binary

Most of the topics are fairly predictable as is their distribution which essentially aligns with the three different texts. In coming up with names for my topics, I just read the list of words two or three times and wrote down the word that came to my mind. I think the best topics I got were “Precision” and “Experimentation,” a somewhat contradictory pair, both of which figure prominently in my cinematic blogs. Topics such as “Unconscious” and “Psychoanalysis” were not very illuminating, although I think its interesting that “interpretation” figures  prominently in my lacan posts.

Blog	Topic Prevalence 1	Topic Prevalence 2	Topic Prevalence 3
cinematic1	Precision-38%	Discovery-11%	Fluidity-10%
cinematic2	Experience-54%	Discovery-10%	Interpretation-8%
cinematic3	Experimentation-29%	Interpretation-16%	Experience-14%
cinematic4	Disparity-32%	Experience-14%	Experimentation-13%
cinematic5	Experimentation-39%	Experience-17%	Jargon-9%
julien1	Fluidity-26%	Disparity-26%	Interpretation-14%
julien2	Discovery-27%	Fluidity-16%	Disparity-11%
julien3	Fluidity-53%	Discovery-10%	Jargon-8%
julien4	Fluidity-35%	Jargon-15%	Precision-11%
julien5	Discovery-25%	Precision-25%	Jargon-8%
lacan1	Unconscious-33%	Discovery-15%	Jargon-9%
lacan2	Unconscious-38%	Discovery-13.5%	Jargon-11%
lacan3	Interpretation-38%	Psychoanalysis-12%	Jargon-12%
lacan4	Unconscious-30%	Psychoanalysis-25%	Discovery-8%
lacan5	Psychoanalysis-43%	Jargon-14%	Unconscious-12%

Of course, this data is only really valuable for its generative potential considering it is almost entirely dependent on interpretation. But, since “all roads lead to Rome” (i.e. the unconscious), I don’t see a reason why we can’t use tools like this in electracy for mapping constellations of signifiers. Maybe an instruction could be formulated from the most prevalent topics in the three blog sets (unconscious, fluidity, and experience). Here is an attempt: An electrate metaphysics explores the unconscious fluidity of experience.

Toward Techniques of Flippant Precision

My last set of instructions from The Cinematic is a bit more difficult to condense into a single idea because they are more technical in nature. I suppose my best attempt at a single instruction would be: have an attitude of flippant precision in capturing images of the particular event, technique, felt, or object you are focusing on. Hopefully this instruction will become less vague as the post continues.

In his essay “Images a la sauvette,” Henri Cartier-Bresson navigates the border between genuine “picture stories” and contrived compositions, citing the former as that collection of images which “can strike sparks from a subject” (43). For Cartier-Bresson, the role of movement is vital to the creation of a picture-story because “you cannot be stationary in your attitude toward something that is moving.” Unlike the static, analytical method of literacy, electracy flows according to the logic of its object. Similar to shi, you have to position yourself in accordance with the dynamics of the situation as it presents itself to you. Be flippant about your control over the representation, just be precise in maintaining this element of flippancy.

Similarly, Cartier-Bresson mentions that in the creation of a picture-story (the “spark” for the subject, the punctum, objet a, etc.) one must resist the urge to overshoot as this will “clutter your memory and spoil the exactness of the reportage as a whole” (44). This is an especially important point to keep in mind in our era of practically unlimited image taking and archiving capacity. Don’t leave all of your editing until later; discriminate during the creation process itself. Also, Bresson invites us to integrate text into our images as well, since captioning can “illuminate whatever relevant thing it may have been beyond the power of camera to reach” (46).

Gaensheimer writes about a six-minute film called Gellert that might serve as a good model for our experiment. The film is simply a montage of photographs all taken within the same hour combined with a continuous stream of audio from the event. The effect of the still images and streaming audio collapses the temporal barrier between past of the image and the present of the audio to the point that “what was, what is, and what will be merge smoothly with one another” (76).

This experiment could even be accomplished with images and audio found online. This experiment would be mostly flippant in selecting the materials; the precision comes into play in the final product, or that reified moment of hitting the play button and watching the object organically unfold. Blake Stimson refers to this (post)process in his essay “The Pivot of the World” as “entering into a dynamic relationship that gives its truth only in the process of its unfolding” (94).

As a final note from the Stimson essay (and the collection as a whole), I would like to drive home the point that you should intersperse moving and still images in your experiment since each genre conveys a unique relationship to time. Stimson astutely points out that film is actually much more limited in its representation of time because it homogenizes time into a “false synaesthetic naturalism” which sacrifices the atemporal abstraction offered by photography. The question to propel my next series of posts on my electrate poetics would then be: how can I capitalize on this unique perceptual experience offered by the combination of still and moving images in the creation of my felts?

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).

Shattering Barriers with Photodynamism

Anton Bragaglia’s essay on “Futurist Photodynamism” reverberates with the same energetic potential that he locates within the emerging cinematic technology of the early twentieth century. Written in first person plural with a defiant, antagonistic tone, Bragaglia’s passionate manifesto laments the shortcomings of specific cinematic devices while at the same time celebrating the conceptual potentiality of their future constellations.

In emblematic (and Bergsonian) fashion, Bragaglia denigrates the stale reflection of reality he sees as inherent to cinematography: “We despise the precise, mechanical, glacial reproduction of reality, and take the utmost care to avoid it” (25). He continues to cite other problems with cinematography, describing it as “absolutely idiotic,” noting how its cold dissection of movement destroys “any kind of aesthetic concern for rhythm.”

Bragaglia uses the negativity of these denunciations as the basis for his concept of photodynamism. Contrary to cinematography’s neglect of “trajectory” in its “mechanical” reproduction of reality, Bragaglia cites this as photodynamism’s “essential value.” Likewise, in contrast to the representational depiction of motion, photodynamism aims at a more synaesthetic approach to movement that, once experienced, “still palpitates” in the viewer’s memory.

Here, Bragaglia’s method of media analysis may be of use to our search for an electrate metaphysics in the way that he employs the use of contrast in formulating his theory of photodynamism. In a previous lecture, Ulmer characterized our second project as looking for a way to “get at what is not get-at-able.” Perhaps one such way of beginning this search would be to combine this axiom with Bragaglia’s approach to media and locate the ways in which technology itself is trying to “get at what is not get-at-able,” in other words, locate the desire of the other (which is also our desire) in your media. In formulating a technology’s desire, isolate the physical, emotional, perceptual, psychical limitations it claims to overcome and use this as a contrast to formulate your electrate poetics for a particular device. Then, once you isolate the limitations that a technology claims to overcome but fails to do so, use this failure as the basis for an electrate poetics that (although not yet existent) would transcend this border.

Similar to the way Bragaglia’s essay formally enacts the spirit of photodynamism, it also might be useful to experiment with the genre or style of your writing by drawing upon the same energy of the conceptual theme and/or technology you are exploring.

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.