Because happiness is a warm gun, momma

She's not a girl who misses much
Do do do do do do- oh yeah
She's well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand
Like a lizard on a window pane

The man in the crowd with the multicoloured mirrors
On his hobnail boots
Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy
Working overtime
A soap impression of his wife which he ate
And donated to the National Trust

I need a fix 'cause I'm going down
Down to the bits that I left uptown
I need a fix cause I'm going down
Mother Superior jump the gun
Mother Superior jump the gun
Mother Superior jump the gun
Mother Superior jump the gun
Mother Superior jump the gun
Mother Superior jump the gun

Happiness is a warm gun
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
Happiness is a warm gun, momma
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
When I hold you in my arms
(Ooooooooohhh, oh yeah!)
And when I feel my finger on your trigger
I know nobody can do me no harm
Because happiness is a warm gun, momma
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
Happiness is a warm gun
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
-Yes it is, it's a warm gun!
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
Happiness is a warm, yes it is...
GUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
Well don't ya know that happiness is a warm gun, momma?
(Bang Bang Shoot Shoot)
Yeeeaahhh!

beatles

Author

what is an author? Michel Foucault

The coming into being of the notion of "author" constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy, and the sciences. Even today, when we reconstruct the history of a concept, literary genre, or school of philosophy, such categories seem relatively weak, secondary, and super imposed scansions in comparison with the solid and fundamental unit of the author and the work. I shall not offer here a sociohistorical analysis of the author's persona. Certainly, it would be worth examining how the author became individualized in a culture like ours, what status he has been given, at what moment studies of authenticity and attribution began, in what kind of system of valorization the author was involved, at what point we began to recount the lives of authors rather than of heroes, and how this fundamental category of "the-man-and-his-work criticism" began. For the moment, however, I want to deal solely with the relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this figure that, at least in appearance; is outside it and antecedes it. Beckett nicely formulates the theme with which I would like to begin: "What does it matter who is speaking;' someone said; 'what does it matter who is speaking.'" In this indifference appears one of the fundamental ethical principles of contemporary writing [écriture]. I say "ethical" because this indifference is really not a trait characterizing the manner in which one speaks and writes but, rather, a kind of immanent rule, taken up over and over again, never fully applied, not designating writing as something completed, but dominating it as a practice. Since it is too familiar to require a lengthy analysis, this immanent rule can be adequately illustrated here by tracing two of its major themes. First of all, we can say that today's writing has freed itself from the theme of expression. Referring only to itself; but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier. Writing unfolds like a game [jeu] that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears. The second theme, writing's relationship with death, is even more familiar. This link subverts an old tradition exemplified by the Greek epic, which was intended to perpetuate the immortality of the hero: if he was willing to die young, it was so that his life, consecrated and magnified by death, might pass into immortality; the narrative then redeemed this accepted death. In another way, the motivation, as well as the theme and the pretext of Arabian narratives – such as The Thousand and One Nights – was also the eluding of death: one spoke, telling stories into the early morning, in order to forestall death, to postpone the day of reckoning that would silence the narrator. Scheherazade's narrative is an effort, renewed each night, to keep death outside the circle of life. Our culture has metamorphosed this idea of narrative, or writing, as something designed to ward off death. Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life: it is now a voluntary effacement that does not need to be represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer's very existence. The work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to be its author's murderer, as in the cases of Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka. That is not all, however: this relationship between writing and death is also manifested in the effacement of the writing subject's individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing. None of this is recent; criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance – or death - of the author some time ago. But the consequences of their discovery of it have not been sufficiently examined, nor has its import been accurately measured. A certain number of notions that are intended to replace the privileged position of the author actually seem to preserve that privilege and suppress the real meaning of his disappearance. I shall examine two of these notions, both of great importance today. The first is the idea of the work [oeuvre]. It is a very familiar thesis that the task of criticism is not to bring out the work's relationships with the author, nor to reconstruct through the text a thought or experience, but rather to analyze the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships. At this point, however, a problem arises: What is a work? What is this curious unity which we designate as a work? Of what elements is it composed? Is it not what an author has written? Difficulties appear immediately. If an individual were not an author, could we say that what he wrote, said, left behind in his papers, or what has been collected of his remarks, could be called a "work"? When Sade was not considered an author, what was the status of his papers? Simply rolls of paper onto which he ceaselessly uncoiled his fantasies during his imprisonment. Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both theoretical and technical. When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche's works, for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be published, but what is "everything"? Everything that Nietzsche himself published, certainly. And what about the rough drafts for his works? Obviously. The plans for his aphorisms? Yes. The deleted passages and the notes at the bottom of the page? Yes. What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list: is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum. How can one define a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death? A theory of the work does not exist, and the empirical task of those who naively undertake the editing of works often suffers in the absence of such a theory. We could go even further. Does The Thousand and One Nights constitute a work? What about Clement of Alexandria's Miscellanies or Diogenes Laërtes' Lives? A multitude of questions arises with regard to this notion of the work. Consequently, it is not enough to declare that we should do without the writer (the author) and study the work itself. The word work and the unity that it designates are probably as problematic as the status of the author's individuality. Another notion which has hindered us from taking full measure of the author's disappearance, blurring and concealing the moment of this effacement and subtly preserving the author's existence, is the notion of writing [écriture]. When rigorously applied, this notion should allow us not only to circumvent references to the author, but also to situate his recent absence. The notion of writing, as currently employed, is concerned with neither the act of writing nor the indication – be it symptom or sign – of a meaning that someone might have wanted to express. We try, with great effort, to imagine the general condition of each text, the condition of both the space in which it is dispersed and the time in which it unfolds. In current usage, however, the notion of writing seems to transpose the empirical characteristics of the author into a transcendental anonymity. We are content to efface the more visible marks of the author's empiricity by playing off, one against the other, two ways of characterizing writing, namely, the critical and the religious approaches. Giving writing a primal status seems to be a way of retranslating, in transcendental terms, both the theological affirmation of its sacred character and the critical affirmation of its creative character. To admit that writing is, because of the very history that it made possible, subject to the test of oblivion and repression, seems to represent, in transcendental terms, the religious principle of the hidden meaning (which requires interpretation) and the critical principle of implicit signification, silent determinations, and obscured contents (which give rise to commentary). To imagine writing as absence seems to be a simple repetition, in transcendental terms, of both the religious principle of inalterable and yet never fulfilled tradition, and the aesthetic principle of the work's survival, its perpetuation beyond the author's death, and its enigmatic excess in relation to him. This usage of the notion of writing runs the risk of maintaining the author's privileges under the protection of the a priori: it keeps alive, in the gray light of neutralization, the interplay of those representations that formed a particular image of the author. The author's disappearance, which, since Mallarmé, has been a constantly recurring event, is subject to a series of transcendental barriers. There seems to be an important dividing line between those who believe that they can still locate today's discontinuities [ruptures] in the historico-transcendental tradition of the nineteenth century and those who try to free themselves once and for all from that tradition. § It is not enough, however, to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. For the same reason, it is not enough to keep repeating that God and man have died a common death. Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author's disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings this disappearance uncovers. First, we need to clarify briefly the problems arising from the use of the author's name. What is an author's name? How does it function? Far from offering a solution, I shall only indicate some of the difficulties that it presents. The author's name is a proper name, and therefore it raises the problems common to all proper names. (Here I refer to Searle's analyses, among others.') Obviously, one cannot turn a proper name into a pure and simple reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an indication, a gesture, a finger pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description. When one says "Aristotle," one employs a word that is the equivalent of one, or a series, of definite descriptions, such as "the author of the Analytics," "the founder of ontology," and so forth. One cannot stop there, however, because a proper name does not have just one signification. When we discover that Arthur Rimbaud did not write La Chasse spirituelle, we cannot pretend that the meaning of this proper name, or that of the author, has been altered. The proper name and the author's name are situated between the two poles of description and designation: they must have a certain link with what they name, but one that is neither entirely in the mode of designation nor in that of description; it must be a specific link. However - and it is here that the particular difficulties of the author's name arise - the links between the proper name and the individual named and between the author's name and what it names are not isomorphic and do not function in the same way. There are several differences. If for example, Pierre Dupont does not have blue eyes, or was not born in Paris, or is not a doctor, the name Pierre Dupont will still always refer to the same person, such things do not modify the link of designation. The problems raised by the author's name are much more complex, however. If I discover that Shakespeare was not born in the house we visit today, this is a modification that, obviously, will not alter the functioning of the author's name. But if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions. If we proved that Shakespeare wrote Bacon's Organon by showing that the same author wrote both the works of Bacon and those of Shakespeare, that would be a third type of change that would entirely modify the functioning of the author's name. The author's name is not, therefore, just a proper name like the rest. Many other facts point out the paradoxical singularity of the author's name. To say that Pierre Dupont does not exist is not at all the same as saying that Homer or Hermes Trismegistus did not exist. In the first case, it means that no one has the name Pierre Dupont; in the second, it means that several people were mixed together under one name, or that the true author had none of the traits traditionally ascribed to the personae of Homer or Hermes. To say that X's real name is actually Jacques Durand instead of Pierre Dupont is not the same as saying that Stendhal's name was Henri Beyle. One could also question the meaning and functioning of propositions like "Bourbaki is so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-forth," and "Victor Eremite, Climacus, Anticlimacus, Prater Taciturnus, Constantine Constantius, all of these are Kierkegaard." These differences may result from the fact that an author's name is not simply an element in a discourse (capable of being either subject or object, of being replaced by a pronoun, and the like); it performs a certain role with regard to narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function. Such a name permits one to group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them from and contrast them to others. In addition, it establishes a relationship among the texts. Hermes Trismegistus did not exist, nor did Hippocrates - in the sense that Balzac existed - but the fact that several texts have been placed under the same name indicates that there has been established among them a relationship of homogeneity, filiation, authentication of some texts by the use of others, reciprocal explication, or concomitant utilization. The author's name serves to characterize a certain mode of being of discourse: the fact that the discourse has an author's name, that one can say "this was written by so-and-so" or "so-and-so is its author," shows that this discourse is not ordinary everyday speech that merely comes and goes, not something that is immediately consumable. On the contrary, it is a speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status. It would seem that the author's name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author's name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being. As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there area certain number of discourses endowed with the "author function" while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer – it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor – it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has an editor – but not an author. The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society. § Let us analyze this "author function" as we have just described it. In our culture, how does one characterize a discourse containing the author function? In what way is this discourse different from other discourses? If we limit our remarks to the author of a book or a text, we can isolate four different characteristics. First of all, discourses are objects of appropriation. The form of ownership from which they spring is of a rather particular type, one that has been codified for many years. We should note that, historically, this type of ownership has always been subsequent to what one might call penal appropriation. Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors (other than mythical, sacralized and sacralizing figures) to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive. In our culture (and doubtless in many others), discourse was not originally a product, a thing, a kind of goods; it was essentially an act - an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous. Historically, it was a gesture fraught with risks before becoming goods caught up in a circuit of ownership. Once a system of ownership for texts came into being, once strict rules concerning author's rights, author-publisher relations, rights of reproduction, and related matters were enacted - at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century - the possibility of transgression attached to the act of writing took on, more and more, the form of an imperative peculiar to literature. It is as if the author, beginning with the moment at which he was placed in the system of property that characterizes our society, compensated for the status that he thus acquired by rediscovering the old bipolar field of discourse, systematically practicing transgression and thereby restoring danger to a writing that was now guaranteed the benefits of ownership. The author function does not affect all discourses in a universal and constant way, however. In our civilization, it has not always been the same types of texts that have required attribution to an author. There was a time when the texts we today call "literary" (narratives, stories, epics, tragedies, comedies) were accepted, put into circulation, and valorized without any question about the identity of their author, their anonymity caused no difficulties since their ancientness, whether real or imagined, was regarded as a sufficient guarantee of their status. On the other hand, those texts we now would call scientific - those dealing with cosmology and the heavens, medicine and illnesses, natural sciences and geography - were accepted in the Middle Ages, and accepted as "true," only when marked with the name of their author. "Hippocrates said," "Pliny recounts," were not really formulas of an argument based on authority; they were the markers inserted in discourses that were supposed to be received as statements of demonstrated truth. A switch takes place in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. Scientific discourses began to be received for themselves, in the anonymity of an established or always redemonstrable truth; their membership in a systematic ensemble, and not the reference to the individual who produced them, stood as their guarantee. The author function faded away, and the inventor's name served only to christen a theorem, proposition, particular effect, property, body, group of elements, or pathological syndrome. By the same token, literary discourses came to be accepted only when endowed with the author function. We now ask of each poetic or fictional text: From where does it come, who wrote it, when, under what circumstances, or beginning with what design? The meaning ascribed to it and the status or value accorded it depend on the manner in which we answer these questions. And if a text should be discovered in a state of anonymity – whether as a consequence of an accident or the author's explicit wish – the game becomes one of rediscovering the author. Since literary anonymity is not tolerable, we can accept it only in the guise of an enigma. As a result, the author function today plays an important role in our view of literary works. (These are obviously generalizations that would have to be refined insofar as recent critical practice is concerned. Criticism began some time ago to treat works according to their genre and type, following the recurrent elements that are enfigured in them, as proper variations around an invariant that is no longer the individual creator. Even so, if in mathematics reference to the author is barely anything any longer but a manner of naming theorems or sets of propositions, in biology and medicine the indication of the author and the date of his work playa rather different role. It is not simply a manner of indicating the source, but of providing a certain index of "reality" in relation to the techniques and objects of experience made use of in a particular period and in such-and-such a laboratory.) The third characteristic of this author function is that it does not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individual. It is, rather, the result of a complex operation that constructs a certain being of reason that we call "author." Critics doubtless try to give this being of reason a realistic status, by discerning, in the individual, a "deep" motive, a "creative" power, or a "design," the milieu in which writing originates. Nevertheless, these aspects of an individual which we designate as making him an author are only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations we force texts to undergo, the connections we make, the traits we establish as pertinent, the continuities we recognize, or the exclusions we practice. All these operations vary according to periods and types of discourse. We do not-construct a "philosophical author" as we do a "poet," just as in the eighteenth century one did not construct a novelist as we do today. StilI, we can find through the ages certain constants in the rules of author construction. It seems, for example that the manner in which literary criticism once defined the author – or, rather, constructed the figure of the author beginning with existing texts and discourses – is directly derived from the manner in which Christian tradition authenticated (or rejected) the texts at its disposal. In order to "rediscover" an author in a work, modern criticism uses methods similar to those that Christian exegesis employed when trying to prove the value of a text by its author's saintliness. In De Viris Mustribus, Saint Jerome explains that homonymy is not sufficient to identify legitimately authors of more than one work: different individuals could have had the same name, or one man could have, illegitimately, borrowed another's patronymic. The name as an individual trademark is not enough when one works within a textual tradition. How, then, can one attribute several discourses to one and the same author? How can one use the author function to determine if one is dealing with one or several individuals? Saint Jerome proposes four criteria: (i) if among several books attributed to an author one is inferior to the others, it must be withdrawn from the list of the author's works (the author is therefore defined as a constant level of value); (2) the same should be done if certain texts contradict the doctrine expounded in the author's other works (the author is thus defined as a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence); (3) one must also exclude works that are written in a different style, containing words and expressions not ordinarily found in the writer's production (the author is here conceived as a stylistic unity); (4) finally, passages quoting statements made or mentioning events that occurred after the author's death must be regarded as interpolated texts (the author is here seen as a historical figure at the crossroads of a certain number of events). Modern literary criticism, even when – as is now customary – it is not concerned with questions of authentication, still defines the author in much the same way: the author provides the basis for explaining not only the presence of certain events in a work, but also their transformations, distortions, and diverse modifications (through his biography, the determination of his individual perspective, the analysis of his social position, and the revelation of his basic design). The author is also the principle of a certain unity of writing - all differences having to be resolved, at least in part, by the principles of evolution, maturation, or influence. The author also serves to neutralize the contradictions that may emerge in a series of texts: there must be - at a certain level of his thought or desire, of his consciousness or unconscious - a point where contradictions are resolved, where incompatible elements are at last tied together or organized around a fundamental or originating contradiction. Finally, the author is a particular source of expression that, in more or less completed forms, is manifested equally well, and with similar validity, in works, sketches, letters, fragments, and so on. Clearly, Saint Jerome's four criteria of authenticity (criteria that seem totally insufficient for today's exegetes) do define the four modalities according to which modern criticism brings the author function into play. But the author function is not a pure and simple reconstruction made secondhand from a text given as inert material. The text always contains a certain number of signs referring to the author. These signs, well known to grammarians, are personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and verb conjugation. Such elements do not play the same role in discourses provided with the author function as in those lacking it. In the latter, such "shifters" refer to the real speaker and to the spatio-temporal coordinates of his discourse (although certain modifications can occur, as in the operation of relating discourses in the first person). In the former, however, their role is more complex and variable. Everyone knows that, in a novel offered as a narrator's account, neither the first-person pronoun nor the present indicative refers exactly to the writer or to the moment in which he writes but, rather, to an alter ego whose distance from the author varies, often changing in the course of the work. It would be just as wrong to equate the author with the real writer as to equate him with the fictitious speaker; the author function is carried out and operates in the scission itself, in this division and this distance. One might object that this is a characteristic peculiar to novelistic or poetic discourse, a game in which only "quasi discourses" participate. In fact, however, all discourses endowed with the author function possess this plurality of self. The self that speaks in the preface to a treatise on mathematics - and that indicates the circumstances ofthe treatise's composition identical neither in its position nor in its functioning to self speaks in the course of a demonstration, and that appears the form of "I conclude" or "I suppose." In the first case, the "I" refers to an individual without an equivalent who, in a determined place and time, completed a certain task; in the second, the "I" indicates an instance and a level of demonstration which any individual could perform provided that he accepted the same system of symbols, play of axioms and set of previous demonstrations. We could also, in the same treatise locate a third self; one that speaks to tell the work's meaning, the obstacles encountered, the results obtained, and the remaining problems; this self is situated in the field of already existing or yet-to-appear mathematical discourses. The author function is not assumed by the first of these selves at the expense of the other two, which would then be nothing more than a fictitious splitting in two of the first one. On the contrary, in these discourses the author function operates so as to effect the dispersion of these three simultaneous selves. No doubt, analysis could discover still more characteristic traits of the author function. I will limit myself to these four, however, because they seem both the most visible and the most important. They can be summarized as follows:(1) the author function is linked to the juridical and institutional system that encompasses, determines, and articulates the universe of discourses; (2) it does not affect all discourses in the same way at all times and in all types of civilization; (3) it is not defined by the spontaneous attribution of a discourse to its producer but, rather, by a series of specific and complex operations; (4) it does not refer purely and simply to a real individual, since it can give rise simultaneously to several selves, to several subjects - positions that can be occupied by different classes of individuals. Up to this point I have unjustifiably limited my subject. Certainly the author function in painting, music, and other arts should have been discussed; but even supposing that we remain within the world of discourse, as I want to do, I seem to have given the term "author" much too narrow a meaning. I have discussed the author only in the limited sense of a person to whom the production of a text, a book, or a work can be legitimately attributed. It is easy to see that in the sphere of discourse one can be the author of much more than a book - one can be the author of a theory, tradition, or discipline in which other books and authors will in their turn find a place. These authors are in a position that I will call "transdiscursive." This is a recurring phenomenon – certainly as old as our civilization. Homer, Aristotle, and the Church Fathers, as well as the first mathematicians and the originators of the Hippocratic tradition, all played this role. Furthermore, in the course of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Europe another, more uncommon, kind of author, whom one should confuse with neither the "great" literary authors, nor the authors of religious texts, nor the founders of science. In a somewhat arbitrary way we shall call those who belong in this last group "founders of discursivity." They are unique in that they are not just the authors of their own works. They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts. In this sense they are very different, for example, from a novelist, who is, in fact, nothing more than the author of his own text. Freud is not just the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious; Marx is not just the author of the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital: they both have established an endless possibility of discourse. Obviously, it is easy to object. One might say that it is not true that the author of a novel is only the author of his own text; in a sense, he also, provided that he acquires some "importance," governs and commands more than that. To take a very simple example, one could say that Ann Radcliffe not only wrote The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and several other novels but also made possible the appearance of the Gothic horror novel at the beginning of the nineteenth century; in that respect, her author function exceeds her own work. But I think there is an answer to this objection. These founders of discursivity (I use Marx and Freud as examples, because I believe them to be both the first and the most important cases) make possible something altogether different from what a novelist makes possible. Ann Radcliffe's texts opened the way for a certain number of resemblances and analogies which have their model or principle in her work. The latter contains characteristic signs, figures, relationships, and structures that could be reused by others. In other words, to say that Ann Radcliffe founded the Gothic horror novel means that in the nineteenth-century Gothic novel one will find, as in Ann Radcliffe's works, the theme of the heroine caught in the trap of her own innocence, the hidden castle, the character of the black, cursed hero devoted to making the world expiate the evil done to him, and all the rest of it. On the other hand, when I speak of Marx or Freud as founders of discursivity, I mean that they made possible not only a certain number of analogies but also (and equally important) a certain number of differences. They have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded. To say that Freud founded psychoanalysis does not (simply) mean that we find the concept of the libido or the technique of dream analysis in the works of Karl Abraham, or Melanie Klein; it means that Freud made possible a certain number of divergences – with respect to his own texts, concepts and hypotheses – that all arise from the psychoanalytic discourse itself. This would seem to present a new difficulty, however, or at least a new problem: is the above not true, after all, of any founder of a science, or of any author who has introduced some transformation into a science that might be called fecund? After all, Galileo made possible not only those discourses which repeated the laws he had formulated, but also statements very different from what he himself had said. If Georges Cuvier is the founder of biology, or Ferdinand de Saussure the founder of linguistics, it is not because they were imitated, nor because people have since taken up again the concept of organism or sign; it is because Cuvier made possible, to a certain extent, a theory of evolution diametrically opposed to his own fixism; it is because Saussure made possible a generative grammar radically different from his structural analyses. Superficially, then, the initiation of discursive practices appears similar to the founding of any scientific endeavor. Still, there is a difference, and a notable one. In the case of a science, the act that founds it is on an equal footing with its future transformations; this act becomes in some respects part of the set of modifications that I makes possible. Of course, this belonging can take several forms. In the future development of a science, the founding act may appear as little more than a particular instance of a more general phenomenon that unveils itself in the process. It can also turn out to be marred by intuition and empirical bias; one must then reformulate it, making it the object of a certain number of supplementary theoretical operations that establish it more rigorously, and so on. Finally, it can seem to be a hasty generalization that must be retraced. In other words, the founding act of a science can always be reintroduced within the machinery of those transformations which derive from it. In contrast, the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogeneous to its subsequent transformations. To expand a type of discursivity such as psychoanalysis as founded by Freud, is not to give it a form generality it would not have permitted at the outset but, rather, open it up to a certain number of possible applications. To limit psy choanalysis as a type of discursivity is, in reality, to try to isolate in the founding act an eventually restricted number of propositions or statements to which, alone, one grants a founding value, and in relation to which certain concepts or theories accepted by Freud might be considered as derived, secondary, and accessory. In addition, one does not declare certain propositions in the work of these founders to be false: instead, when trying to seize the act of founding, one sets aside those statements that are not pertinent, either because they are deemed inessential, or because they are considered "prehistoric" and derived from another type of discursivity. In other words, unlike the founding of a science, the initiation of a discursive practice does not participate in its later transformations. As a result, one defines a proposition's theoretical validity in relation to the work of the founders - while, in the case of Galileo and Newton, it is in relation to what physics or cosmology is in its intrinsic structure and normativity that one affirms the validity of any proposition those men may have put forth. To phrase it very schematically: the work of initiators of discursivity is not situated in the space that science defines; rather, it is the science or the discursivity which refers back to their work as primary coordinates. In this way we can understand the inevitable necessity, within these fields of discursivity, for a "return to the origin." This return which is part of the discursive field itself, never stops modifying it. The return is not a historical supplement that would be added to the discursivity, or merely an ornament; on the contrary, it constitutes a effective and necessary task of transforming the discursive practice itself. Reexamination of Galileo's text may well change our understanding of the history of mechanics, but it will never be able to change mechanics itself. On the other hand, reexamining Freud's texts modifies psychoanalysis itself, just as a reexamination of Marx's would modify Marxism. What I have just outlined regarding these "discursive instaurations" is, of course, very schematic; this is true, in particular, of the opposition I have tried to draw between discursive initiation and scientific founding. It is not always easy to distinguish between the two; moreover, nothing proves that they are two mutually exclusive procedures. I have attempted the distinction for only one reason: to show that the author function, which is complex enough when one tries to situate it at the level of a book or a series of texts that carry a given signature, involves still more determining factors when one tries to analyze it in larger units; such as groups of works or entire disciplines. § To conclude, I would like to review the reasons why I attach a certain importance to what l have said. On the one hand, an analysis in the direction that I have outlined might provide for an approach to a typology of discourse. It seems to me, at least at first glance, that such a typology cannot be constructed solely from the grammatical features, formal structures, and objects of discourse: more likely, there exist properties or relationships peculiar to discourse (not reducible to the rules of grammar and logic), and one must use these to distinguish the major categories of discourse. The relationship (or non-relationship) with an author, and the different forms this relationship takes, constitute – in a quite visible manner – one of these discursive properties. On the other hand, I believe that one could find here an introduction to the historical analysis of discourse. Perhaps it is time to study discourses not only in terms of their expressive value or formal transformations but according to their modes of existence. The modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each. The manner in which they are articulated according to social relationships can be more readily understood, I believe, in the activity of the author function and in its modifications than in the themes or concepts that discourses set in motion. It would seem that one could also, beginning with analyses of this type, reexamine the privileges of the subject. I realize that in undertaking the internal and architectonic analysis of a work (be it a literary text, philosophical system, or scientific work), in setting aside biographical and psychological references, one has already called back into question the absolute character and founding role of the subject. Still, perhaps one must return to this question, not in order to reestablish the theme of an originating subject but to grasp the subject's points of insertion, modes of functioning, and system of dependencies. Doing so means overturning the traditional problem, no longer raising the questions: How can a free subject penetrate the density of things and give it meaning? How can it activate the rules of a language from within and thus give rise to the designs that are properly its own? Instead, these questions will be raised: How, under what conditions, and in what forms can something like a subject appear in the order of discourse? What place can it occupy in each type of discourse, what functions can it assume, and by obeying what rules? In short, it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse. Second, there are reasons dealing with the "ideological" status of the author. The question then becomes: How can one reduce the great peril, the great danger with which fiction threatens our world? The answer is: One can reduce it with the author. The author allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one's resources and riches but also with one's discourses and their significations. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely. The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations that fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inserts it, one has an ideological production. The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning. In saying this, I seem to call for a form of culture in which fiction would not be limited by the figure of the author. It would be pure romanticism, however, to imagine a culture in which the fictive would operate in an absolutely free state, in which fiction would be put at the disposal of everyone and would develop without passing through something like a necessary or constraining figure. Although, since the eighteenth century, the author has played the role of the regulator of the fictive; a role quite characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property, still, given the historical modifications that are taking place, it does not seem necessary that the author function remain constant in form, complexity, and even in existence. I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint – one that will no longer be the author but will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced [expérimenter]. All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. We would no longer hear the questions that have been rehashed for so long: Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest sell did he express in his discourse? Instead, there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking? § NOTES i John Searle, Essay in the philosophy of language (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1969) pp. 162-74

*This essay is the text of a lecture presented to the Societé Francais de philosophie on 22 February 1969 (Foucault gave a modified form of the lecture in the United States in 1970). This translation by Josué V. Harari has been slightly modified.

Utterance

Bakhtin's theory of the utterance  Maurizio Lazzarato

Bakhtin's theory of enunciation is a 'carnevalesque' integration of all the elements that Hannah Arendt's theory of action and the word had emptied out or subordinated to the totalising power of language. The recognition of the multiplicity of the semiotic, the polyphony of matters of expression (both verbal and non-verbal), the heterogeneity of linguistic and non-linguistic elements, becomes on the one hand, the basis of a 'strategic' theory of action between speakers whereby it is possible to define meaning as an 'action on possible actions' (to use Foucault's expression) [1], and on the other hand, it is the basis of a theory of creativity and production of subjectivity. Bakhtin's theory has no room for the concept of the performative beause 'all speech acts' are 'social acts, not just performative ones. All utterances are 'speech acts' that engage a 'social obligation'. Despite an homology of terms, there are remarkable differences between Austin's and Bakhtin's theories of speech acts. To begin with, the latter affirms a difference of nature between language and the utterance. In order for words, propositions, and grammar rules to become complete utterances and linguistic acts, there needs to be a 'supplementary element' that remains 'inaccessible to all categorisations and linguistic determinations, one that linguistics cannot grasp'. The word, the grammatical form, propositions, and statements separated from the utterance (from the speech act) are 'technical signs' at the service of a signification that is only potential. The individuation, singularisation, and actualisation of this potential of language operated by the utterance (this 'achievement') allows us to enter an other 'sphere of being': the 'dialogical sphere'. What makes us turn words and linguistic propositions into complete utterances, into a 'totality', are pre-individual affective forces and social and ethico-political forces that whilst being external to language are actually inside the utterance. 'The enunciated, Bakhtin says, is completely traversed by these extra-linguistic (dialogic) elements.' In the theory of the speech act, speakers are not first and foremost linguistic or psychological subjects, but 'possible worlds' - (singularities or existential cristallisations - in the language of Guattari). They occupy 'chronotopes' (blocs of space-time, 'existential territories', in the language of Guattari), and these are absolutely irreducible. The dialogic relationship between possible worlds and processes of existential singularisation is constituted by affective, ethical and political forces. Through the utterance, these express friendships and enmities, agreements and disagreements, sympathies and antipathies. They organise the relation of cooperation that opens to the creation of possibilities or, on the contrary, establish relations of domination that fix the same possibilities. The origin of all of these forces is not linguistic, even though they express themselves through language and signs. Rather, they are variables internal to the creation and transformation of the utterance. Affective and ethico-political forces are firstly expressed by the voice. In an important article, Guattari notes that in the utterance one finds both the 'pre-individual voice' that expresses a will based on emotional evaluations (in his words, sensible affects) and 'social voices', ethico-political voices that express 'universes of references and values' (the beautiful, the just and the true), which are problematic affects in Guattari's words. Wherever linguistics wills structural and differential relations between signs, Bakhtin, like the enlightened, the idiots and the mad, 'extends the voices, their dialogic relation' and the existential territories that support them. This voice is deployed on this side of articulated language. According to Bakhtin, the voice or intonation, not yet captured in the 'phonetic abstraction' of language, is always produced 'on the threshold of the verbal and the non-verbal, the said and the non-said' and it is through it that it addresses itself to the other. This address is affective and ethico-political rather than linguistic. It 'appropriates, travels, avails itself of linguistic and semiotic elements, confirms and drifts away, critiques and legitimates meanings and established intonations'. Voices operate a singularisation of language that we might call strategic because they distribute and 'name' speakers according to a proto-political model that structures the space of the word along the lines of power relations between speakers. The voice already engages a specific mode of action of discourse that with Foucault we can call 'the action on possible actions', because it expresses evaluation, differences and values. 'Intonation seems to indicate that the world that surrounds the speakers is full of animated forces: it is menacig, indignant, loves or flatters objects and phenomena'. In the voice, we find again the 'animism' rivendicated by Guattari, that is to say, the taking sides in an ethico-political way in relation to others and the world. The voice expresses itself, vibrates in a dialogical space that is a sui generis 'public space'. The voice can produce itself on the basis of 'different fundamental tones' (Bakhtin) that depend on the power relations in the 'public space' where it evolves. These are power relations (of domination or of cooperation) that modulate and influence its modes of expression. The voice can be deployed and differenciate between an 'athmosphere of sympathy', of 'complicity' or of 'defiance' and 'embarassment'. In each voice there is a double address. the voice addresses not only the addressee but also the 'object of the utterance' in so far as the object is called into being both as 'judge and witness' and therefore, as its 'ally or enemy'. According to Bakhtin, one must radically distinguish between the 'evaluative expression', which can be affective and axiological, and 'semantic expression', because - contrary to what Wittgenstein claims - the latter can never replace or substitute the former. There will always be a iatus, an irreducible disjunction between desire and affective expressions, on the one hand, and language (its words and statements) on the other. Linguistic exclamations that we learn can never replace or substitute the cry of pain of the body. Here lies the difference between linguistics and the philosophy of language: pre-signifying corporeal semiotics (gestures, postures, moves, attitudes), the 'universe of values' and existential territories, are part and parcel of the components of the utterance. They are, notably in Guattari, an autonomous power of the production of speech. 'Intonation and gesture are linked by a close relation that finds its origin in bodies - the 'primary and ancient matter of evaluative expression'. In each gesture, as in each intonation, always lingers and sleeps in waiting an embryo of attack and defence, menace and tenderness. For this reason every utterance always puts the speaker in a position of 'ally or witness', friend or enemy. Even the poet, says Bakhtin, 'always works with the sympathy or antipathy, consensus or dissent' of the listener. It is only when the voice penetrates and appropriates words and statements that the latter loose their linguistic potentiality and turn into actualised expression. It is only at that moment that words and statements are encumbered with the a unique and non reproducible role in verbal exchange. 2. The active and creative dimension of dialogic relations, their character as strategic games of 'possible worlds', and the existential singularities and spaces that support them, is evident when one compares them with the linguistic elements of the statement. Whilst the latter are 'reproducible' components, dialogic relations represent the 'non reproducible', always renewed elements of the utterance, whereby singularity arises from the evenemential nature of the utterance. These two dimensions (reproducible and non reproducible) are clearly distinguishable both in the address and in the response that the utterance calls for. All speech acts are addressed to someone or something, respond to someone or something and through this addressing or this response they express values, points of view, emotions, affects, sympathy and antipathy, agreement and disagreement in relation to the situation, in relation to the other and to one's own utterance, in relation to other utterances and also in relation to the utterances that circulate in the public space (notably those that refer to 'the true, the just and the beautiful', as Bakhtin remarks). All these speech acts aim to an agreement or a disagreement, refer back to an enemy or a friend. All speech acts are questions that interrogate others, oneself and the world. Bakthin's theory of enunciation implicates the world as a problem, as an event and as something that is never accomplished, unlike Austin's theory of performativity and speakers, which entails the world as convention, institution, and something to reproduce. In his last years Guattari refers to a 1924 text by Bakhtin that talks about poetic creation, from which he draws lessons for a theory of the utterance and of the production of subjectivity in general. Even in the case of poetry, it works not only on the signifier, but always refers back to the existential point of view. Bakthin underlines how if one wanted to account for the address it would be insufficient to stay at the level of the mere material of language. One needs to refer to material languages that are non discursive. In the speech acts (here poetic speech acts), it is affect, the existential function, that uses and appropriates different semiotic elements to compose them and keep them together, to accomplish them and achieve them. The existential function that Guattari calls the refrain relies on certain 'discursive chains', on certain linguistic elements, and it detaches them from their meaning and normal signification and denotation to confer to them their own movement, ultimately another meaning. In this way it plays the role of an ontological existential affirmation. Bakhtin distinguishes between five elements of enunciation: 1) the sound side of the word, its musical aspect; 2) the material meanings of all its nuances and its variants; 3) its aspect of verbal relations and interrelations; 4) the intonation aspect that expresses its emotional and volitional orientation at the psychological level and its direction in relation to ethico-political and more specifically social values (pre-individual and social voices); 5) the sentiment of verbal activity, of the active engendering of its meaning (the feeling or affect in which one needs to include all moving elements of articulation, gesture, mimicry and others, all the inner drive of the person) - Affect expresses the existential apprehension of the world and the self that presides over the dispositions of elements of enunciation, their selection and modes of composition. The first three components of the utterance that constitute the linguistic and semiotic elements of the utterance represent their 'reproducible' parts that can be reiterated, whereas the last two elements cannot be reproduced, they are absolutely singular, and created for the first time and in the speech act. The fourth element is specifically dialogic and expresses both affective (emotional and volitional) evaluations and social (axiological) ones. The last element, that represents the sentiment of activity in the creation of the word, expresses the existential and ontological force of affect. It constitutes the non-discursive element that generates not only the psychic reality of the word, but also 'meaning and appreciation'. By means of the utterance, the speaker inhabits an 'active position' (she operates in an existential self-positing as Guattari will say) in relation to the world and others: 'in other words, the sentiment and feeling of taking up a role that concerns man as a whole, of a movement that involves both the organism and semantic activity, because what it generates is the soul of the word in its concrete unity'. Guattari draws general conclusions. With Bakhtin, he says, 'we can learn to read the utterance, its multiple voices and its multiple centres' (p. 40). The utterance and the process of production of subjectivity are 'a composition of heterogeneous modes of semiotisation (production of meaning)'. An always partial (non totalising) composition of a multiplicity of elements (both linguistic and non-linguistic) and an heterogeneity of semiotics (signifying and corporeal, iconic, pre-signifying and machinic). But it is this affect, the refrain that operates the 'enunciative crystallisation', that produces at the same time a 'relative feeling of unity' and of singularity, specific each time, to the disparate multiplicity of these linguistic elements, corporeal and axiological, that traverse the speaker. The affect is a process of existential appropriation which, on the one hand, selects the semiotic components by detaching them from their meanings and ordinary denotations, and on the other hand operates as a 'catalyst', as an attractor that keeps them together as in a musical 'motif', as in the refrain by giving coherence to these heterogeneous elements through repetition. It is always affect that has the ability to 'transversalise' this heterogeneity of elements, to give them colour, a tone that makes them converge, in time, towards the singularity of the utterance. Affect represents an opening of non discursivity that is at the heart of discursivity and makes it crystallise and works on it, organises it and valorises it. Like in Bakhtin, in Guattari too, the affects that provide the utterance with the character of an existential singularity are both 'affects of sensibility' (pre-individual, volitional and emotional) and 'affects of problematics' that activate references that are 'sentimental, mythical, historical and social', universes of values and references. This active power of the affect, despite being non discursive, is no less complex, and Guattari defines it as 'hyper complex to mark the fact that it is an example of the engendering of the complex, a processuality that is in a nascient state, a place of proliferation of becomings'. The human sciences and in particular psychoanalysis have for too long been used to think of affect in terms of the elementary entity of pulsion and instinct. But, according to Guattari, there are also 'complex affects', highly differentiated, that inaugurate irreversible diachronic ruptures and should be called 'christic, debussyst, leninist (and as will happen, Sarkosyst). It is thus that throughout the decades a whole constellaton of existential refrains, of enunciative ruptures, has given access to a 'Lenin-language' that engages specific procedures belonging to the order of rhetorics and lexicons belonging to the order of phonology, prose and images'. One should go back more specifically to the novelty introduced by the theory of Guattari and Deleuze, that is to say, to the role played by the existential function of affects in speech and the production of subjectivity. For the time being I just want to underline the creative elements, the forces of affirmation and transformation of the relationship to the self, others and the world, that are non-linguistic forces, because they are affective, social and political. They are exterior to language, but inside the utterance. We find the same fundamental distinctions in the act of response to the address ('comprehension'). All speech acts are a 'question' that requires a response, but the response that the utterance awaits is an 'active responsive attitude', an 'active responsive comprehension' of the other, unlike the performative, where the other is neither autonomous nor free. For the utterance 'nothing is more terrible than lack of response'. But the 'response-act' that operates in the word is not primarily linguistic. If, as Bakhtin suggests, rather than the 'polyphony' and heterogeneity of the semiotic linguistic and non linguistic elements of the address, we consider those of 'comprehension', we find the same multiplicity of linguistic (reproducible) and non linguistic (non-reproducible) elements. In comprehension, there is an active response-reaction that we can distinguish. 1) the psychophysiological perception of the physical sign (word, colour, spatial form). 2) the recognition of the sign (as known or unknown), the comprehension of the reproducible (general) signification of language 3) the comprehension of its meaning withint the given context (close and distant) 4) the 'active dialogic comprehension (agreement and disagreement), the insertion in a dialogic context, the value judgement, are degrees of depth and universality. This last element, the properly dialogical element is the most important because it is what singularises and gives existential coherence to the response-reaction. It is what selects, orders and achieves the multiplicity of the different matters of expression. Linguistic comprehension is not the same thing as dialogic comprehension. The first is made up of reproductible elements (the first two elements of Bakthin's citation), the second, of non-reproducible components, singular and created by the same act of comprehension. Comprehension is always a taking up a position, a judgement, a response - an action inside dialogical relations. The responses-reactions express a sympathy, an antipathy', an 'agreement, a disagreement, an adherence, an objection, an execution, a stimulus to action, etc'. All responses-reactions 'refute, confirm, complete and stand upon the questions to which they are addressed.' Unlike the recipient of the utterance in Virno, who only contemplates, is witness to and judge of the elocution ('I speak'), who, as in the classical performative, is only subjected to an institutional effect, in Bakthin the interlocutor fully participates to the accompishment of the action. Also as in the later theory of Foucault of power relations the interlocutor is active and 'free'. In the event of enunciation, one determines the dynamics and orients the actualisation. The utterance is a co-production of a polemical or cooperative co-actualisation of linguistic virtualities and worlds of values or existential territories that support them. Similarly to Foucault's power relations, the relations of power of the speech open up an active field of comprehension, responses-reactions, and a field of possibilities that cannot be determined or actualised outside the 'making' of the utterance. If we follow the 'making' of the utterance, we can easily see that the nature of the utterance is not performative but dialogical, strategic and evenemential. The speech act is an action on the possible action of others that starts from the ethico-political dimension and the affective dimension of the relation with the other. Bakhtin has an 'agonistic' notion of the utterance that functions as a struggle between speakers, or rather, as a form of government of others that is expressed through a whole series of techniques and tactics of which linguistic and semiotic techniques and tactics are part and parcel. 'When I elaborate my speech, I tend to, on the one hand, determine this response in an active fashion, on the other hand I tend to presume that response and this presumed response acts itself on my utterance (I mark restrictions). When I speak, I take into account the a-perceptive foundation on which my word will be received by the recepient: the degree of information that he has of the situation, his specialised knowledge in the domain of the cultural exchange, his prejudices (of my point of view) and sympathies and antipathies. Because this will condition his responsive comprehesion of my utterance'. The choice of kinds of utterance, the choice of compositional processes and linguistic means will start from the power relation with the other, because unlike Saussure's linguistics the utterance is not simply an individual process. These choices can be determined only inside the utterance in the process of their making where the other is integrated as a living, dynamic and free element. Translation by Arianna Bove

[1] ' To govern, in this sense, is to structure the possible field of actions of others' ( Foucault , 'The subject and power' in Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 221)

Paper presented at http://imaginaryproperty.com/intervention3

reversal of form

by Robert C. Morgan

Installation view at Kitakyushu Museum, Japan, 1999. Anodized aluminum channels with pink and aluminum color, 120 pieces measuring 87 x 7 x 2.5 in.

It is refreshing to know that there are artists working today who are not seduced by the allure of popular culture and who are willing to step back from the banalities of everyday life and see art in its own terms through its own visual syntax and within the terms of its own space. I am not referring to what the French Nabis called "art for art's sake" nearly a century ago. Nor am I advocating an approach equivalent to the formalist movement in American painting during the peak of high Modernism in the 60s. What is indeed unique about Tadaaki Kuwayama's art is a certain boldness in coming to terms with a new paradigm that exists outside the domain of popular culture. While the American Minimalists provide a clear antecedent in his work, there is a question as to whether this is the proper or even the most appropriate term to describe the work of Kuwayama. While one cannot deny that Minimalism has had an effect on changing the direction of art in recent years, or disregard the fact that Kuwayama's reductive position is obliquely tied to that history, it should be clear that not all art that carries a reductive posture is Minimal art.

Installation at  Stiftung for Konkrete Kunst, Reutlingen, Germany, 1995. Metallic blue and aluminum color on bakelite with aluminum angles, 96 ft. long.

Although Kuwayama began his career as a painteron fact, a reductive painteron the late 50s in New York (where he eventually exhibited at the famous Green Gallery), it is important to examine the development of his work for what it is. The artist's relationship to the frontal surface, for example, is distinct from what defined many of the ideas inherent in Minimalism. The inappropriate term Minimal painting has been persistently used, in both gallery and museum exhibitions, as a means of identifying a kind of painting that might better be called reductive. From this perspective, one might consider the non-relationa paintings of Barnett Newman as having had an influence on the early paintings of Frank Stella and Brice Marden, not to mention on the early work of Kuwayama, whereas the late black painting of Ad Reinhardt seem less conducive to painterly influences than to works by early Minimal and Conceptual artists, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Lawrence Weiner, and Joseph Kosuth.

Installation views at Kitakyushu Museum, Japan, 1999. Anodized aluminum with yellow, blue, and aluminum color, 8 x 24 x 2.5 in.

Even so, there are those who will insist that their obsession with the frontal surface is primarily about the object or the transformation of surface into object. This evolution toward objecthood through the frontal surface of painting finds antecedents in works by the Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko and later in the monochromes of the Nouveau Realiste Yves Klein. Although their efforts were made nearly 40 years apart, there is a clear direction toward reductive painting that has little to do with the Minimalist object. Engaging in a reductive posture, whether on the frontal surface or in object form, may proceed from very different and diverse intentions. For an artist to work reductively does not automatically imply Minimalist art any more than an artist with a good idea should imply Conceptual Art. I would argue that Kuwayama is an artist who evolved from a reductivist position, yet whose work has often, though mistakenly, been called Minimalist.

Installation views at Kitakyushu Museum, Japan, 1999. Anodized aluminum with yellow, blue, and aluminum color, 8 x 24 x 2.5 in.

In 1967, Kuwayama painted a series of monochrome panels, placed vertically in frames and tangential to one another, with titles such as Red, Mustard Yellow, and Pale Blue. The important feature of this work was that the color was directly painted on canvas and therefore was still contained within the fictionalized space of the painterly field. Their subject matter is as reduced as that of Newman's Vir Heroicus Sublimus or the Untitled white panels of Rauschenbergs' both of which were painted in 1951 and therefore could be cited as antecedents of the vertical monochromes of Kuwayama, painted six years later.

Installation at Ingolstadt Museum, Germany, 1997. Anodized aluminum channels with yellow and aluminum color, 20 pieces measuring 8 x 84 in. long.

Whereas painting retains the space of fiction, no matter how constructive or reductive, Minimalism is essentially about the objective point established by Donald Judd. Once art leaves the fictional space of the surface without necessarily becoming sculpture (in the relational sense of diverse parts in search of a formal resolution), and if it retains a position of reductive neutrality in object form, usually fabricated, then we can talk about Minimal art. While the method that supports this position may be a type of linguistic formalism (unrelated to Greenberg's aesthetic formalism), the result is perpetually directly related to form more specifically, the form of the object within a given context.1 What distinguishes the more recent modular work of Kuwayama is that his forms (panels or linear elements) are designed not so much to intercede within a given space as to create a new space through modular equivalence and repetition. In doing so, a reversal begins to happen whereby the emphasis is no longer given to the forms themselves but to the total space they inhabit. It is here that the viewer may begin to embark on another approach. Instead of focusing attention on the formal elements in order to create some sort of dialectical encounter with the space, the forms (as in the artist's recurrent use of color-tinted Bakelite panels) visually recede into the space. Having been altered through the placement of the panels, the recession of the forms into the space reaches a point that the artist calls infinity space without beginning or end, a pure space. In essence, the form(s) disappear and create space.

Installation at Satani Gallery, Japan, 1996. Mixed media, glass, mylar, graphite, and aluminum.

As a theoretical comparison, this is different from the large-scale steel sculpture of Richard Serra. Whereas Serra (whom the critic Robert Pincus-Witten once termed a Postminimalist) is concerned with site specificity, his weathering steel plates are still within the context of sculpture. Serra's work is pragmatic in its confrontational value. It offers itself as an intervention into everyday time and space. Kuwayama's approach goes in another direction. Instead of insisting on his work as sculpture, Kuwayama transforms the space through the repetition of modular elements and thereby offers a completely new syntax to the way a space is normally perceived, both physically and conceptually. This was made evident in his recent site-specific installations at the Chiba City and Kawamura Memorial Museums in Japan in 1996. Although different elements were employed in each case, using different sizes and modular shapes, fabricated in synthetic Bakelite or constructed in mylar, glass, and aluminum, the emphasis was not on the sculpture but on the transformation of the space through the use of modular elements and the concept of disappearance in relation to the repetition and placement of the elements. In a Kuwayama installation, the space becomes the object through this process of reversal. The materials are simply the vehicles to make a passage into the reality of a new kind of space, to bring space into being which is close to the practice of the great 15th-century Japanese landscape painter Sesshu.

Installation at  Chiba City Museum, Japan, 1996. Aluminum color on bakelite, 15 pieces measuring 4 x .75 ft.

Kuwayama likes to refer to this kind of space as absolute, as if there were no beginning or no end, as if the transference into time were an entry into the moment, and the moment would be absolute, unequivocal, unremitting in its perceptual sense of wholeness, its gestalt. There is a purity here that again recalls the unwavering commitment often attributed to Ad Reinhardt. One of the most lucid articulations of this concept in relation to Kuwayama has been written by the Japanese critic Koji Taki:

Pure space may seem very different from the actual space in which we live, but this purity stimulates our imagination. Purity means more than mere simplification. And we are made to leap into this pure space, carrying our load of complexity, moving beyond the real world with the freedom of the imagination. We do not see a world which is breaking down, a world going to ruin, a world full of amorphous human passion, or a world of simple beauty. Rather we see a world which appears beyond human perceptions, beyond settled and familiar meanings, a world which horrifies and thrills our spirit. We experience simultaneous terror and ecstasy transcending reality.2

Installation at  Chiba City Museum, Japan, 1996. Three corners with three colors, metallic pink, yellow, and blue on bakelite.

This pure space is the space of the imagination made real without interference, without temporal intrusions. One could argue that Taki's description of pure space is close to Minimal art specifically the light installations of Dan Flavin, the stacks of Donald Judd, the elevated grid structures of Sol LeWitt, the alloy planes of Carl Andre. It might even apply to the 努hite�paintings of Robert Ryman (although given his concern for the framing edge, Ryman could not be considered a Minimalist). But there are other factors (previously described) that distinguish Kuwayama痴 recent installation from the work of these artists, both formally and conceptually. The concern here is how to deal with the isolation of a pure space that is somehow exempt from the flow of history, that is entirely within the realm of the imagination, a space somewhere between phenomenological Neo-Platonism and Sesshu's marvelous void.

Installation at Kawamura Memorial Museum, Japan, 1996. Metallic pink and yellow on bakelite, 136 pieces, 8 ft. high.

The theologian Paul Tillich once spoke of the space of tragedy as a condition in which the historical sense of time is lost. In his book Theology of Culture, he refers to the Greek tragedies as events conceived in a space that is removed from diurnal processes:

Human existence under the predominance of space is tragic. Greek tragedy and philosophy knew about this. They knew that the Olympic gods were gods of space, one beside the other, one struggling with the other. Even Zeus was only the first of many equals, and hence subject, together with man and other gods, to the tragic law of genesis and decay. Greek tragedy, philosophy, and art were wrestling with the tragic law of our spatial existence. They were seeking for an immovable being beyond the circle of genesis and decay, greatness and self-destruction, something beyond tragedy.3

Installation at Kawamura Memorial Museum, Japan, 1996. Metallic pink and yellow on bakelite, 136 pieces, 8 ft. high.

Somehow Tillich's concept of spatial dominance seems too overtly Western in its interpretation, too laden with the cultural weight of the past, and therefore exempt from the possibility that space exists as a reversal of form in relation to time. As a visual antidote to Tillich's theology, Kuwayama offers a reversal of form through the abstraction of the measured interval, a rhythmic punctuation that lightens the effect of the physical space. The premise of spatial dominance is suddenly transformed into a recession of form, thereby permitting a meditative pure space to evolve into the viewer's consciousness as an intentional act. We see it, for example, in the artist's recent anodized aluminum panels (what he calls channels in which two channels, measuring 19 centimeters are jointed and alternate according to two chosen colors. We see it again in the Kozo paper works in which three layers of paper are laminated through the artist's wax-pressing technique. Using modular elements in a repeatable format, Kuwayama places a single horizontal pencil line in each of six units, alternating three times between blue and red.

Installation view at  Stiftung f� Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zuich,  1998. Metallic blue and aluminum color on bakelite with aluminum angles, 8 ft. long.

Given Moholy-Nagy's cultural synthesis of space and time into a single space/time based on his own research and experimentation in visual perception and relative motion, it would appear that Tillich's view of culture is more related to a single linear view of time that is essentially pre-relativistic. This is not to dismiss Tillich's understanding of spatial predominance as a cultural force capable of usurping history in favor of mythology. An abundance of spectacles supports Tillich's view, based on the current fascination for visual art that echoes the vapid premises of pop culture. Ironically, it is within the realm of globalized pop culture that the mythological references to the mass media are strongest, not in the reductive art of Kuwayama. Simply stated, the tragic sense of space in Western history which is slowly becoming a history of media should not be confused with the concept of pure space in Eastern culture which tends toward a deeper spiritual understanding of reality. It is this latter reality that concerns Kuwayama. It is a reality removed from the everyday media and all the material consequences that it entails.

Installation view at Stiftung f� Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zuich, 1998.  Metallic blue and yellow on bakelite with aluminum angle, 4 x 4 ft.

One could make the claim that the kind of pure space advocated by Kuwayama is not so much a tragic space as it is an evocation, an opening or a threshold, that allows for a moment or moments of elevation beyond the banalities that pull us down into the gravity of our existential reality or even the denial of that reality. Kuwayama has described the desired effect of his art as being something not of this world, in other words, transcending what we already know through the mass media and through the tragic events that surround us. He is not concerned with making an expression or with signifying a social truth or with offering a new global paradigm for art. Fundamentally, Kuwayama is interested in the kind of rarefied experience that can be obtained through his form of total art. What he describes as something not of this world is indeed a perception of infinity, a rare glimpse of something to which human beings have not yet been acculturated. One might call it science fiction, but this is too facile. It is not science fiction.

Installation view at  Stiftung f� Konstruktive und Konkrete Kunst, Zuich, 1998. Repetition of two colors, aluminum and yellow, anodized aluminum channels, 8 x 12 x 2 in.

I like the concept of the Noh actor described by Nobuyuki Hiromoto, riken no ken.4 As I understand Hiromoto, who cites the work of Zeami, one of the great practitioners of Noh theater, riken no ken is the method by which the actor looks at himself by using his internalized outer image. This concept may seem close to the Western gestalt yet is beyond the Western analysis of perception. Kuwayama's art is fundamentally concerned with the act of perception indeed, the viewer's experience through the reversal of form into space, whereby the material focus is transformed into an arena of pure space. This is far removed from the pragmatic objecthood of Minimal art. Yet, at the same time, Kuwayama does not deny the essential materiality of his work. Rather, he is concerned with how the act of perceiving this materiality as a modular sequence of forms gives us the exacting quietude of a spiritual experience.

Robert C. Morgan is a critic and artist whose books include Between Modernism and Conceptual Art.

Notes
1. The distinction between aesthetic and linguistic formalism is analyzed and discussed in my essay Formalism as a Transgressive Device in Arts, December 1989. 
2. Koji Taki, Tadaaki Kuwayama's New Project in Tadaaki Kuwayama Project '96, co-published in conjunction with the two exhibitions at the Kawamura Memorial Museum of Art (June 1 - July 21, 1996) and the Chiba City Museum of Art (June 15 - August 18, 1996), p. 54. 
3. Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 33. 
4. Nobuyuki Hiromoto, Objective Space: Looking Forward to Project '96, in Tadaaki Kuwayama Project '96, op. cit., p. 61.

sans soleil

 

     

rhizomes.08 spring 2004

Letters from an Unknown Filmmaker: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil 
and the Politics of Memory
Chuck Tryon

[1] During an early sequence of his 1982 film, Sans Soleil, Chris Marker's restless camera records what he describes as a Japanese ceremony for broken dolls. On a specific day every year, Marker tells us, Japanese girls bring their broken dolls to this ceremony to be consumed by a fire. In the shot we witness the detritus of everyday life, the discarded objects that might provide us with an interpretive clue for understanding our position within mass culture. A following shot shows a broken doll Marker later found in the marketplace in Guinea Bissau. The shot of the burning dolls seems to suggest the speed with which they have become outmoded, fallen out of fashion. This disjunction between the temporality of Guinea-Bissau and of Japan provides Marker with a position from which he can consider, more broadly, the construction of cinematic time and space. These questions of constructions of time and space inevitably have political consequences in that our understandings of time and space inform our definitions of history, memory, utopia, crisis, and revolution [1]. Sans Soleil, itself an artifact from an already receding past, uses emergent digital technologies to disrupt the reified, regulated time of cinematic movement in order to challenge the dominant historical narratives of the 1980s that had come to celebrate the spectacular culture associated with the expansion of capitalism into new sectors of the world and the subsequent transformations of everyday life that this expansion entails. In Sans Soleil, this reflection on cinematic time takes the form of a traveling filmmaker who circles the globe, filming images that capture his interest. Through this figure, Sans Soleil offers a new way of seeing and thinking not only our relationship to images but also the role of images-cinematic and otherwise-in producing our experience of time. This disruptive force involves the relative temporal structures of cinema, television, and new media as they impose upon definitions of history, memory, and utopia, in that the disruption of reified and regulated cinematic time constitutes an interruption of the standardized chronological time that emerges with the development of industrial capitalism. This disruption of chronological time also enacts a resistance to the present that can be understood as a starting point for utopian thinking.

[2] Sans Soleil employs a time-travel narrative in order to reflect on the temporality of cinematic, televisual, and digital images. The film focuses on the journeys of a fictional filmmaker, Sandor Krasna, who travels around the globe, filming whatever interests him and sending those images to an unseen woman, Alexandra Stewart, who reads, paraphrases, and sometimes comments on the letters that accompany his films. In one of his "letters," the filmmaker reports that he has become interested in "the coexistence of different concepts of time." Marker's film generally consists of documentary footage taken in Japan, Guinea-Bissau, San Francisco, and Iceland, though many of the film's images are composed on a synthesizer that Krasna refers to as "The Zone," in homage to Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker. These documentary images are reworked, worked on, by the new technology of the computer synthesizer, establishing Marker's complicated analysis of the viewing technologies of the cinema and television and the new one associated with the computer. Sans Soleil shifts restlessly between Iceland, Japan, and Guinea-Bissau, drifting back and forth between the 1960s and the 1980s, simulating the space and time travel of the cinematic time machine. These cinematic journeys, which resemble the unpredictable rhythms of memory itself, allow Marker to create a "resistant memory" through the work performed by the computer synthesizer, which "remembers" the images of the past, but also transforms them, reactivating them in a new context, for the purposes of political transformation [2]. This physical transformation of the image becomes a means of rethinking the ways in which the past is rewritten by technologies of history and memory and therefore provides a key for resisting the current social order, which Marker accomplishes through the disruption of cinematic time, which he presents as homologous to the disruption of the everyday. Through the "disruptive" visual interpretations he creates in the Zone, Marker reactivates the forces of resistance from the social revolutions in the 1960s, reclaiming them for the present in the spirit of continued resistance against domination. This emphasis on disruption, figured through the Zone, allows Marker to think historically, while at the same privileging the act of creating new concepts and mew images.

The Emergence of Post-Cinematic Time

[3] In order to understand the disruptive force of Marker's cinematic time machine, it is important to keep in mind that cinema itself has long been understood in terms of its capacity for representing time. Within discussions of film theory, it is not uncommon to understand cinema as a type of time machine, a technology that, figuratively speaking, can transport us through time and space. Anne Friedberg, tracing cinema's tendency toward producing time-shifting experiences, notes that cinema constructs what she calls a "mobilized, virtual gaze," which had the potential to provide spectators with the illusion of being transported in time and space. Friedberg reads this virtual mobility as potentially overwhelming to viewers who were not familiar or comfortable with such time-shifting technologies, creating the effect of "detemporalized" spectators [3]. Friedberg's concept of a detemporalized spectator seems to imply an original, temporalized subject-before the emergence of the cinema and other time-shifting technologies who had an unmediated relationship to time.

[4] More crucially, this understanding of cinema as producing temporal disorientation requires a cinematic time characterized by the construction of a reified, regulated, linear time. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Mary Ann Doane notes that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "the emerging cinema participated in a more general cultural imperative, the structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity" (3-4). Doane argues that new technologies of representation led to a thorough reconsideration of the representability of time, a question that re-emerges in contemporary considerations of digital technologies and their relationship to the construction of time. In this context, it is important to note that I am not arguing for the existence of a natural, or unmediated, experience of time that antecedes the emergence of cinema and other "time-shifting" technologies. Instead, cinema is one of many technologies that emerge during industrial capitalism that were involved in changing human representations and experiences of time and space. The image of time that emerged in the early twentieth century, Doane points out, "became increasingly reified, standardized, stabilized, and rationalized" (5), a temporal organization that can be understood in terms of the inexorable progression of photograms at twenty-four frames per second through the film projector [4]. Doane further argues that this rationalized, irreversible time is complicit with "notions of the inevitability of a technologically induced historical progress" (7).

[5] This automatic movement produces, as Gilles Deleuze points out, an automatism of thought as well, reinforcing habitual ways of seeing and thinking [5]. Deleuze describes this relationship in terms of the transition from the regime of the movement-image into that of the time-image. Rather than the ordered, logical, and rational movement of chronological time associated with the early cinema's attempts to track movement, the time-image becomes identified with "images of disorder, instability, and diversity" (Rodowick 16). Deleuze argues that the crisis of the movement-image grew out of an increasing number of situations that outstripped our abilities to react and describe [6]. Like Deleuze and Doane, I see the cinema of the movement-image as producing habitual ways of thinking and seeing. Further, cinematic time develops alongside other technologies-such as the assembly line and railroad transportation that have similar effects on structuring experiences of time and space [7]. It thus becomes the goal of cinema to create new concepts of time.

[6] Against the irreversible linearity of cinematic movement, other temporalities can and do emerge to challenge this notion of progress. In fact, it is precisely this homogeneous time that allows for Marker's temporal experimentation in Sans Soleil. During the opening sequences of the film, Sans Soleil uses tracking shots taken from the window of a commuter train, creating a homology between the linear movement of the train along the railroad tracks and the steady progression of the filmstrip through the movie projector. Gradually, in Sans Soleil, as new visual technologies are introduced into the narrative, this homogeneous cinematic time begins to unravel, opening the film up to the temporal structures of television and computers. In this context, it is important to recall that cinema itself constantly engages multiple temporalities simultaneously. Thus far, I have been speaking primarily of the temporality of the apparatus itself, the ordered movement of film frames through the projector, but against that temporal movement, we must also consider the temporality of reception, which may very well be distinct from the apparatus, despite efforts to fuse them together. Further, the time of the narrative itself may diverge considerably from the time of the apparatus and the time of reception.

[7] In Sans Soleil, Marker not only disrupts the regulated chronological time of cinema with the incursion of the digital, but he also makes visible time relations within the image by invoking pasts that haunt the present, but may also provide a key to transforming the present and the future. This approach to cinema is consistent with what D.N. Rodowick refers to as a "utopian art and philosophy." According to Rodowick, "The utopian aspect of art and philosophy is the perpetuation of a memory of resistance. This is a resistance to habitual repetition-a time that is calculated, rationalized, and reified. But it is also a resistance to all forms of commerce or exchange, whether in the form of communication or that of commodities" (204). Sans Soleil enacts this form of resistance by disrupting cinematic time through the new digital technology that Marker refers to as "The Zone," which is explicitly portrayed as breaking the habitual repetition of the "everydays" of both Tokyo and Guinea-Bissau and recovering forgotten aspects of their pasts in order to transform the present.

[8] Sans Soleil challenges these dominant narratives, in part, through its critique of documentary form. One of the typical expectations of documentary filmmaking is that the film will be "objective" in its presentation, that the camera, because it is "objective" can or will present the material it films without bias. In "Signs of the Time," Laura U. Marks writes, "documentary's discursive stumbling block is the myth of objectivity" (201). According to Marks, because the ideal of truth in documentary filmmaking is based upon a fiction, working within the logic of objectivity will always reaffirm the dominant history. Marker resists this logic through his efforts to acknowledge the subjectivity of his approach to the images he films. He emphasizes the filmmaker's subjectivity through the trope of the letters or "cinematic postcards" that the film's fictional filmmaker sends to the unseen narrator. At the same time, this "subjectivity" is complicated by the distancing effect of the narrative premise of the fictional filmmaker Sandor Krasna. Further, the narrator's comments on the letters emphasize the role of the viewer in making sense of the images. Catherine Lupton affirms this complication of the distinction between objective and subjective images, commenting that this layering of recollections in Sans Soleil "alert us to the fact that even the most apparently spontaneous verbal expressions of personal memory are no less representational and conventional than filmed images" [8]. Instead of an authoritative account of these global relations, Marker offers us a partial narrative, one that is clearly filtered through the lens, and language, of the fictional filmmaker. Through this method, Marker avoids the dangers of producing a purely objective or subjective image of Japan or Guinea-Bissau.

[9] This recognition of the difficulties of representation and recollection manifests itself in Krasna's reflection on how to film the women of Guinea-Bissau, culminating in a series of medium-close-ups of African women in the marketplace conducting their daily business. The camera sustains a respectful distance, looking closely without invading the space of the other. These sequences acknowledge Marker's self-consciousness about the possibility that his camera may be seen as invasive. As Olu Oguibe observes, "Wherever open hostility developed towards the camera, it almost always had to do more with the invasive tactics of its European operators than with a peculiar African inability to understand or accept the medium" (567) [9]. When Marker films the African women, most of the women look into the camera with a frankness that contradicts the cinematic practice of creating the false image of an objective event taking place in front of a silently observing camera. This sequence culminates in an exchange of glances between Krasna's camera and an African woman: "I see her. She sees me. She drops me her glance but just at an angle where it is still possible act as though it was not addressed to me." Finally the woman looks directly into the camera, but only for the duration of one film frame, reinforcing the extent to which cinematic movement is the product of isolated photograms passing relentlessly through the projector.

Marker's Cinematic Postcards

[10] In order to develop these questions about cinematic time and memory, Sans Soleil also investigates the problem of cinematic address, meditating not just on the recording and production of motion pictures, but their reception and transmission as well. This conceptualization of the cinema reworks the formula offered by Jean-Luc Godard who once claimed that "to make cinema or television, technically, is to send twenty-five postcards per second to millions of people, either in time or in space, of that which technically can only be unreal" (quoted in Dienst 129). The logic of the postcard as a system for thinking about images, messages, and their transmission is developed in Jacques Derrida's The Post Card, with the postcard becoming a means for thinking about not only the relationship between sound and image, but also about the need for sufficient postage, the tremendous capital required to make a film. Postcards also require a correct address, an audience that is directly addressed by the film [10]. In Sans Soleil, the visuals are accompanied by the voice of an unseen woman, Alexandra Stewart, reading letters she has ostensibly received from a globetrotting filmmaker, Sandor Krasna. This motif makes us more fully aware that the sender of these images, Marker or Krasna, chooses only those images that interest him. At the same time, the unseen reader receives the letters, sorts through them, making connections, and interpreting them in the light of the images that accompany them. More significantly, the postcards convey a sense of fragmentation, of partial and incomplete narratives that stand in for the fragmentation of contemporary experiences of time and space.

[11] This notion of travel is also bound up in the image of the postcard, which as Malek Alloula notes, always involves traversing spatial and temporal distances: "Travel is the essence of the postcard, and expedition is its mode. It is the fragmentary return to the mother country. It straddles two spaces: the one it represents and the one it will reach…. In the postcard there is the suggestion of complete metaphysics of uprootedness" (520). Only a small number of shots in the film were filmed in France, Marker's home. Marker's alter ego, Sandor Krasna, has the capital necessary to make these journeys around the globe, a position that is open only to a small number of people. His apparent unregulated mobility suggests a liberation from the regulation of a public time-schedule based on his apparent freedom to travel unlike the forced mobility of many of the people that Krasna encounters during his journeys across the globe. In Questions of Travel, Caren Kaplan addresses the various distinctions between travel and displacement, reminding us that for many people, the world has changed so deeply that "staying home" is no longer possible (7). Thus, images of travel are always marked by other terms that signal far less desirable separations from home-displacement, homelessness, and exile, a theme that returns with incredible frequency in Sans Soleil. Marker's attention to Tokyo's unemployed and homeless during the opening sequences of the film underscores this focus. This sense of uprootedness is also reflected in the experiences of the people of Guinea-Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands, whom Krasna describes as "travelers, wanderers, and navigators." Finally, Marker considers another, more pernicious form of displacement when Krasna reflects on the experiences of the men and women of Okinawa who were suddenly thrust into the twentieth century due to the violent World War II battles that took place on the island country. He reports that gift shops now sell cigarette lighters modeled on the hand grenades that several Okinawa girls used to commit suicide rather than face the brutality of the war. More recently, the American military base on the island brings with it the detritus of contemporary capitalism and Western culture, such as bowling alleys and gas stations, with the result that the indigenous culture of the island will be lost forever, with history being transformed into mere image.

[12] It is also important to note that all postcards require sufficient postage in order to ensure delivery. In this context, the "stamp" of a documentary film would be the funding required for production and distribution, and as Marks observes, funding institutions tend to privilege those films that already have an established viewpoint: "The funding process therefore biases documentary production to prejudge the world, rather than to allow the world to flow into the film" (202). This approach to documentary filmmaking obviates the creation of new thoughts and merely reproduces accepted truths about the world [11]. Such an approach not only limits the production of new concepts, it also affirms the existent social order. As Richard Dienst observes, "The stamp commemorates a payment to tradition, to heritage and authority" (139). In this sense, the goal of a critical documentary filmmaker is to counteract the official discourse, in Marker's case, on the global relations being mapped by the Cold War proliferation of destructive weapons and the capitalist expansion into new markets. Throughout the film, the images captured by Marker's camera struggle against already established meanings or interpretations of Japan and Guinea Bissau.

"Only Banality Still Interests Me": Marker and the Everyday

[13] Marker's critique of documentary filmmaking in Sans Soleil is informed by his complicated treatment of the everyday. Kransa introduces this focus on the everyday early in the film, commenting, "I've been around the world and now only banality still interests me. On this trip, I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter." This "everyday" is intimately linked to the homogeneous time of the dominant history and the reified, regulated time of the cinematic image. During an early sequence of the film, Marker develops a critique of the everyday-the Japanese commuters rising before dawn to travel to the city center and the African women shopping in the marketplace-through images of repetition. The implacable movement of film frames through the motion picture projector echoes the rhythm of the commuter train, with tracking shots out the train's window confirming this perception, this way of seeing. This contemplation on the everyday is framed through Kransa's reference to Sei Shonagon, the 11th century poet who, according to Krasna, drew "a melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things," by creating lists of elegant things, things not worth doing, and things that quicken the heart. Krasna identifies himself with Shonagon, noting that her lists are "not a bad criteria" when he is filming his cinematic postcards. At the same time, the references to Sei Shonagon emphasize the act of creation, her act of producing the lists that so profoundly affected Japanese culture.

[14] By everyday, I mean precisely the banality, the daily activities that are taken as commonplace, habitual, or normative, the repetition that prevents thinking. At the same time, the everyday involves the possibility of the chance occurrence that can potentially disrupt it. In his discussion of Henri Lefebvre, Peter Osborne comments that "in the past,… the everyday was offset by the interruptive break of the religious holiday, the festival, or the carnival. In capitalist societies, on the other hand, the break from work becomes increasingly routinized within the everyday" (193). Marker engages with this tension throughout Sans Soleil: shots of carnivals in Guinea Bissau link to images of neighborhood festivals in Japan. Japan fascinates Krasna in part because of the many religious ceremonies he encounters and their implied connection to an ancient past, but at the same time, there is the danger that these ceremonies may lose their ruptural force, instead functioning to reproduce the habitual practices of the everyday. Over a shot of Japanese tourists gazing at artifacts borrowed from the Vatican and displayed in a Tokyo department, Krasna imagines the viewers inventing "a more efficient form of Catholicism," or incorporating the disruptiveness into the everyday. Further, Osborne observes that everyday life can be understood simultaneously as "the sedimented result of myriad repetitive practices" and as "open to the randomness of the chance occurrence" (197). Marker's film opens up both possibilities as well, emphasizing the repetitive practices of daily life in Guinea Bissau and Tokyo, while at the same time intercutting the two versions of the everyday in order to break them down.

[15] The everyday must also be understood as a geographically and historically specific concept, one rooted in contemporary global capitalism, but also regionally specific based on modes of production. The "everyday experience" that Krasna tracks during his visits to Tokyo-the spectacular images, the trains, the department stores, and television shows-flourish within the context of the Cold War and capitalist expansion after the Second World War. At the same time, Tokyo, like many other cities, offers a mixture of old and new, cutting between sites of "spectacular imagery" and the ancient past, the neighborhood celebrations, the local legends, such as the statue of a dog who used to wait for his owner beside a rail station. These swirling temporalities inform the experience of everydayness in Tokyo.

[16] In this sense, the everyday is a highly complex temporal concept. The everyday is, on the one hand, marked by endless routine and monotony. On the other, it is characterized by speed and acceleration. As Henri Lefebvre describes it: "The days follow one another and resemble one another, and yet-and here lies the contradiction at the heart of everydayness-everything changes. But the change is programmed: obsolescence is planned…. Some people cry out against the acceleration of time, others cry out against stagnation. They're both right" (10). It then becomes the object of a resistant art to disrupt the everyday, a process that takes place on two levels in Sans Soleil, formally through techniques that interrupt the reified temporality of the cinematic apparatus and philosophically through the reflections on how these techniques can produce a "resistant memory." Thus, by establishing this image of the everyday, Sans Soleil puts us in a position to disrupt it through the travel narrative Sandor Krasna, and later through the interruptive technology of Zone.

Impossible Connections

[17] Sans Soleil asks us to think through the multiple temporalities of cinema in order to rethink the politics of the representation of time. This problem is situated around the logic of cinematic movement and the concept of the everyday. In order to investigate this relationship between cinematic time and the everyday, Marker opens with a compelling montage sequence that is fulfilled only much later in the film. The film opens with a strip of black leader, as Alexandra Stewart reads one of Krasna's letters: "The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland." We then see, without any sound or narration of any kind, a shot of three laughing children walking across a lush green field in Iceland in 1965. Over black leader, the film's narrator recounts that

He said that for him it was the image of happiness, and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me, "one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader. If they don't see the happiness, at least they'll see the black."

The image of happiness cannot be "seen" in its fullness, recognized, until the film cuts to a segment of black leader, disconnecting the shot from the rest of the film and calling attention to the cut, to the links between images and how they create meaning. In this sequence, Sans Soleil introduces the "postcard" motif, with Krasna's letters and images traversing distances of time, space, and thought, while also establishing a disjunction between sound and image, between what the camera witnesses and what the filmmaker says about it. However, rather than affirming either sound or image as primary, Sans Soleil puts into play the tension between the two in order to rethink, and potentially rework, cinematic representation. The voice-over narration emphasizes the opposition between the camera capturing the image and the relays and gaps between filming the image and broadcasting it, while establishing the distinction between sound and image. This method immediately invokes the fragmentary logic of the postcard motif, recalling for the viewer the representational limits of both sound and image, specifically in the context of ethical documentary filmmaking. Laura U. Marks comments that in cinema, "image and sound tracks usually corroborate each other, but they can also be used to undermine each other, to show the limit of what each is able to represent" (204). This limitation has powerful implications in that it gestures toward the impossibility of representing everyday experiences. The image is initially isolated, stranded, at the beginning of the film, in a self-conscious resistance to images that are easily understood and connected to other contexts.

[18] The impossibility of linking two seemingly incommensurable shots is reinforced by the physical and temporal "space" between the first two shots of the film. Following this strip of black leader, we see acquired footage of bomber planes disappearing into an aircraft carrier and satellites orbiting around the earth, recalling the Cold War context in which the film was made, suggesting the potential for apocalyptic destruction and placing the entire film under the sign of crisis. This framing narrative will return later in the film when Krasna "returns" to Iceland a few years after he filmed the children, when a volcano erupted burying their village. The implication is that this moment captured by Krasna's restless movie camera-"the image of happiness"-has been endangered, that it cannot be connected to the contemporary situation in which he produces the film. The bomber planes and Polaris missiles might also be understood in terms of their relationship to cinematic perception, echoing the arguments made by Paul Virilio, who has linked cinematic perception to the logistics of war and fascism [12].

[19] Shots of satellites floating over the earth have a slightly different significance. As Lisa Parks points out, "both satellites and computer networks became the quintessential strategic technologies, emerging at the peak of the Cold War" (279). For Parks, while computer networks, during the Cold War, had the tendency to close worldly space, satellites had the opposite effect, suggesting that "the world would become a smaller and more intimate place" (279). The satellite photographs, which began to appear during the 1960s context crucial to Marker's politics, reinforce this notion of fragility associated with the isolated "image of happiness" at the beginning of the film. However, as Parks points out, more recent projects, such as the Digital Earth, should remind us that these satellite representations are far from innocent and may have the effect of presenting a Eurocentric, culturally elitist, and sanitized history that reinforces official discourses on global relations. Marker's film explicitly challenges this ideology by invoking the images of the satellites and reinscribing them precisely in order to challenge these discourses.

[20] These impossible linkages, connected through the narrative structure of the traveling filmmaker, anticipate the shift in time and space from 1960s Iceland through 1980s Japan and finally to Guinea Bissau, with Marker himself shifting to a focus on opening up, and rupturing, the everyday. After the shot of the bomber planes, Sans Soleil cuts to an early morning ferry off Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan, carrying sleeping commuters into Tokyo. During this sequence, Marker begins his reflection on the everyday, linking it to the repetition of cinematic movement through the tracking shots taken from the window of the ferry from Hokkaido and the commuter train entering Tokyo. Krasna comments in one of his letters that "rich and harried Japanese take the plane. Others take the ferry. Waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep-curiously, all of that makes me think of a past or future war. Night trains, air raids, fallout shelters; small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life" (my emphasis)[13]. Because the shots of the commuters follow several shots of powerfully destructive weapons, the specters of past and future violence-including the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki-haunt the image, but at the same time, the shot sequence emphasizes the extent to which these technologies condition the everydayness of Japanese life.

[21] This shot sequence introducing the everyday life of Japan is disrupted by a cut to shots of the everyday in Guinea-Bissau; the "spectacular culture" of Tokyo is contrasted with the African marketplace. Marker interrupts the everyday of Tokyo through the sudden, unexpected cut to shots of ordinary life in the tiny African nation of Guinea-Bissau. It might be tempting to see these sequences in isolation, to read them in terms of two versions of daily experience, as if the idea of "everyday life has always existed," but Sans Soleil short-circuits that interpretation, focusing instead on how the two locations have much different experiences of time and space. This disruption pivots, in part, on the different temporalities established during these sequences, and these temporal structures are reflected in part by the contrasting modes of production identified with the two locations. During this sequence, Stewart recalls that Krasna had "contrasted African time to European time and also to Asian time. He said that in the nineteenth century, mankind had come to terms with space and that the great question of the twentieth century was the coexistence of different concepts of time" [14]. This division between the two concepts of time is explicitly connected to technologies of visual representation. Tokyo is characterized as a culture completely immersed in spectacle, with televisions, robots, and computers dominating the mise-en-scène, while Guinea-Bissau is initially identified with the illusion of realism associated with documentary filmmaking. Images of work and leisure in Guinea-Bissau might initially appear to be unmediated, the result of a camera objectively filming whatever happens to pass in front of it, but the disjunction between sound and image shatters this apparent objectivity.

[22] During this sequence, Marker also explains his fascination with Guinea Bissau and the Cape Verde islands, noting that they successfully fought a guerilla war, led by Amilcar Cabral, against their Portuguese colonizers, with Krasna recalling in one letter that "they did what they could," freeing themselves from their Portuguese colonizers. After the successful revolution against the injustices of colonialism, the two nations fell into political strife. Amilcar Cabral was assassinated before he had a chance to lead the postwar government, and one of Cabral's former generals led a coup against Cabral's brother, Luis, forcing him into exile in Cuba. As Krasna points out, this revolutionary moment is in danger of being forgotten, lost within the official discourses that neglect this history. At the same time, Marker suggests that contemporary images of Guinea Bissau are inadequate in representing this history or the experiences of the people of Guinea Bissau and the Cape Verde islands. Instead, new ways of seeing must be imagined.

Television, or the Sense of History

[23] Marker expands this reflection on visual technologies and their corresponding representations of time and history by returning to Japan. Tokyo comes across as a futuristic city, already well into the age of simulation. InTerminal Identity, Scott Bukatman notes that the Tokyo sequences present the city "as a science fiction metropolis" (25), producing in the viewer a sense of disorientation due to the signs that Krasna encounters and chooses to film. In this context, Bukatman argues that Tokyo entails "a proliferation of semiotic systems and simulations which increasingly serve to replace physical human experience and interaction" (26). This alienation, however, is still being contested, as the images of the neighborhood ceremonies and the teenage subcultures imply. These activities continue to offer one potential disruption of the everyday, however attenuated they might be. At the same time, Bukatman misreads Marker's full treatment of spectacular culture when he identifies the experience of Tokyo as utterly passive. Such a reading glosses the film's dialectic between the different temporalities of Tokyo and Guinea-Bissau and their potential disruption in the Zone.

[24] This gradual transformation of the everyday in Tokyo emerges in Marker's treatment of Japanese television. TV, of course, offers a much different representation of time and space than the cinema. As Richard Dienst points out, television is "a machine for the prodigious regulated construction and circulation of time" (159). However, unlike cinema, which tends to produce a regulated, linear, chronological time, TV produces an experience characterized by multiple simultaneous channels. Margaret Morse notes that television entails "multiple worlds condensed into one visual field," adding that "the representation of mixed and simultaneous worlds is deeply allied with the cultural function of television in symbolically linking incommensurabilities of all sorts-the system of goods or commodities and the economic relations it orders, the sexual-matrimonial system which orders sociality, and the symbolic order of language, including images, symbols, and the spoken and written word" (115). Television, in Tokyo, performs precisely this operation, linking together a broad array of images, including a show on Cambodia and a documentary on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which Krasna struggles to understand as he watches in his hotel room, leading him to ask whether these connections were accidents or "the sense of history." Because the images all appear on television, they now have equal status and can be exchanged for each other. The images that Krasna encounters span the globe, suggesting that like the satellites that we see earlier in the film, TV embodies a dream of "seeing" the entire world. Krasna later refers to television as a "memory box," reinforcing this question of TV's status as an object for organizing and ordering our experiences of time and space.

[25] This experience of watching television is characterized by Krasna's passivity, his inability to make sense of the images that he watches, as Bukatman points out. Further, watching TV in Japan defamiliarizes the images he sees, making them virtually incomprehensible, with Krasna finding that the images of Europe are the most difficult for him. Later, Krasna reports the sensation of feeling watched by Japanese television ("voyeurizing the voyeurs"), a perception he reinforces by panning and tilting between stacked televisions showing heroines from Japanese horror films, all staring directly into the camera. This is not to suggest that television's construction of time and space is necessarily destructive or utterly resistant to historical thinking. Instead, as Margaret Morse points out, "'Kinks in the road' on television are temporal in order, possibilities of irruption of the unexpected in a plot or a schedule within an endlessness of parallel worlds which go on whether switched on or not" (121). This possibility of the emergence of the unexpected will inform Marker's later attempt to use the Zone as a technology that disrupts the everyday.

[26] This meditation on cinematic and televisual time becomes emblematic of the contemporary experience of Tokyo, with the everyday is permeated by the transmission and flow of images, producing a sense of passivity and artificiality. Krasna himself reflects that Tokyo's residents have "got in the habit of moving around in a world of appearances." Later in the film, Marker expands the stakes of this observation as Tokyo itself becomes a film. A shot of a transit worker collecting tickets from commuters suggests a ticket-taker at the movie theater providing admission to a movie. The shot, showing dozens of passengers passing through the turnstiles, also recalls the association between repetition and the everyday established earlier in the film in the sequence filmed from the commuter train. Then, after the commuters have boarded the train, Marker imagines their "dreams" to be haunted by the television broadcasts we have just watched, specifically the violent images from Japanese samurai and horror films. The filmmaker tells us,

More and more my dreams find their setting in the department stores of Tokyo. […] I begin to wonder if these dreams are really mine, or if they're part of a totality, a giant collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection. […] The same companies own the stores and railroads that bear their name. The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all the fragments of dreams, makes a single film of them, the ultimate film.

The implication of imagining the city of Tokyo, specifically its department stores connected by the subterranean rail system, as a giant collective dream, one that must be read through the objects of that dream, the television images that grow increasingly disturbing, and the setting, the department stores that contribute to the production of this world of appearances. This "collective dream" can be interpreted via Benjamin's discussion of the Paris Arcades. Howard Hampton comments that Marker's films "could be considered the cinematic equivalent of Benjamin's sprawling, saturnine notebooks for his unfinished, literally interminable Arcades Project" (33) [15]. In this sense, television, fashion, and transportation all participate in the fabrication of an everyday experience characterized simultaneously by repetition and acceleration. It then becomes the goal of the film to reconfigure the everyday, disrupting it in order to imagine alternative forms of existence.

Into the Zone

[27] The world of appearances creates one possibility for reproducing an everyday characterized by repetition and acceleration. However, there are other possible configurations of the everyday that might challenge the official discourse, providing a reconsideration of what can and cannot be seen and said. In this context, it is important to emphasize that older concepts of liberation are untenable. It is impossible to return to a pretelevisual world of politics and the everyday. The concept of the Zone is a potentially resistant memory in that it entails a recognition that we cannot return to a world without television or an economy before capitalism. Instead, according to Marker's model, we are better served by recuperating elements of the failed revolutions of the past in order to imagine a way of transforming the present.

[28] This is not to suggest that all uses of the digital are inherently capable of defamiliarizing or transforming the everyday. In fact, Sans Soleil specifically shows how digital technologies, specifically video games, are already complicit in a kind of sensory training. Krasna recalls that on one of his visits to Tokyo, he became fascinated by the video games that began appearing around the city, including games built into tables so that people could continue to play while they were eating. In these games perception is aligned with weapons intended to shoot alien invaders in much the same way that the Digital Earth would align the viewer with the point of view of a sanitized historical narrative [16].

[29] Even though computer technologies have now remade constructions of time and space in ways that reinforce the logic of consumer capitalism and national defense, Marker identifies, in the defamiliarizing images of the Zone an alternative means of remaking perception and rewriting memory [17]. In order to enact this disruption, Marker thus turns to the emergent computer technologies to work through the representability of history, and the possibility of oppositional memory. This sequence essentially allows the filmmaker to regain control over the image, to overcome the passivity imposed by televisual images. Named in homage to Tarkovsky's Stalker, the Zone radically transforms the cinematic images captured by Marker's camera. In these sequences, shots of revolutionary soldiers led by Amilcar Cabral and of protestors resisting the building of an airport are digitally reworked, so that we become conscious of them as representations. Yamaneko tells Krasna at one point that he prefers the Zone to film because at least its images call attention to the fact, admit, that they are images, inauthentic representations of a lost past: "at least they proclaim themselves to be what they are, images." We recognize them immediately as manipulated, partial, and incomplete, virtually unrecognizable in comparison to the realist documentary footage presented earlier in the film. These sequences disrupt the linear progression of cinematic time, the reified, regulated time that represents technological progress. Instead, they combine a lost past, one that is in danger of being forgotten, with the anticipated future of digital technologies.

[30] Because of this complex temporality, Yamaneko sees in his synthesizer a means for establishing an oppositional memory, telling Krasna, that if he does not like the images of the present, then he can change the images of the past. Because of the Zone, Yamaneko and Krasna are capable of changing the memory of the past, of running images through the synthesizer in order to activate the "unfulfilled but possible futures" of the social revolutions of the 1960s [18]. In Marker's treatment of the Zone, the political resistance of the 1960s return to the surface, the memory of failed revolutions reborn through their re-insertion into the Zone [19]. These images include footage of the two political conflicts that capture Marker's attention, the guerilla war led by Amilcar Cabral and the attempt by Japanese activists to prevent the building of an airport. These images are broken down digitally, with colors and figures fading together until the images are virtually unrecognizable. Krasna reflects, in fact, that the images "resemble letters being burned," implying that the Zone is a form of forgetting. In this sense, the malleability of digital images serves as a metaphor for Krasna and Yamaneko's project of changing the images of the past, of reactivating the moments of resistance against the dominant social order. Through this digital simulation, Marker activates a political memory for a lost past, allowing us to imagine alternative futures growing out of forgotten pasts. This oppositional memory should not be understood as completely caught up in the logic of revolution associated with the 1960s. After all, both revolutionary moments that Krasna feeds into the Zone are characterized by their apparent failure: Cabral's attempt to establish a unity between Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau falters after the revolutionary moment, and despite the protests of Japanese peasants, workers, and students, the airport at Narita was eventually completed. Marker instead seizes on the moment of resistant thinking, associated with Amilcar Cabral and the Japanese activists, hoping to renew that moment of possibility when things might have taken a different direction.

[31] For this alternative vision of history and cinema to be imaginable, Krasna imagines making a film about a time traveler from the year 4001, "when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. After so many stories of men who have lost their memory, here is one who has lost forgetting." It is at this point in the film that Krasna "returns" to Iceland, with Marker showing acquired footage of the village he had filmed several years earlier buried under volcanic ash. Krasna observes that U.S. astronauts had visited the village in order to prepare for the experience of walking on the moon, creating the sense of an otherworldly place. But at the same time, the time traveler is also understood in terms of the homogeneous time of cinema, the impossibility of change or difference. In this sense, the time traveler stands in stark contrast to the inventiveness of time as Deleuze imagines it.

The Spirit of Unmailed Letters: Reactivating the Utopian Imagination

[32] As I have suggested, the role of Alexandra Stewart in reading Sandor Krasna's letters opens up this question of the temporality of reception, including the possibility that the letters, the film, might not be received at all. At the end of the film, Krasna, largely assimilated into the culture of Tokyo to the point that he imagines himself to be Japanese, reflects that "even if I was expecting no letters, I stopped at the general delivery window for one must honor the spirits of torn up letters and at the air mail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters." This recollection, made at the end of the film, over the defamiliarized and defamiliarizing images of the Zone, ultimately reinforces the utopian logic of the Zone, with its fragmentary images that invoke, for Marker, the possibility of a resistance to the present social order.

[33] As the film concludes, Marker takes us back into Yamaneko's Zone, which produces the falsifying images of the 1960s struggles for liberation that Marker had shown earlier in the film. He tells us in the final letter of the film that he is finally persuaded by Yamaneko's enthusiasm for the Zone: "His language touches me because he talks to that part of us which insists on drawing profiles on prison walls, a piece of chalk to follow the contours of that which is not, or is no longer, or is not yet." The Zone is therefore the site not only of opposition but also of creation, of a utopian imagination. As the film concludes, the reader of Krasna's letters can only ask, "Will there be a last letter?" This question suggests, of course, the impossibility of representing everything, of capturing all the details of everyday life, but it also implies the incomplete project of transforming the everyday, and by extension, the impossibility of such a project ever reaching completion.

[34] Marker's film is deeply concerned with the new, the emergent, the ephemeral, the not-yet-thought. This belief in utopia is not a belief in a new world or a transformed world within the traditional dialectic. Instead, it is focused purely on a resistance to the present, represented in part by the presentness of television broadcasts, an attempt to activate the political resistance of the past through the then emergent technologies of digitization.Sans Soleil asks us "to believe again in the inventiveness of time where it is possible to think and to choose other modes of existence" (GDTM 200). In Sans Soleil, the inventiveness of time meets the inventiveness of cinema in the attempt to develop a utopian resistance to the present. Marker's emphasis on the creative act, whether scribbling lists, scrawling on prison walls, or making movies, becomes a crucial means by which we can navigate, and potentially transform, the everyday.

 

Works Cited

Alloula, Malek. "From The Colonial Harem." The Visual Culture Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge, 2002. 519-24.

Beller, Jonathan L. "Capital/Cinema." Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1998. 77-95.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.

----. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1968.

Braun, Marta. Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904). Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992.

Brunette, Peter and David Willis. Screen/Play. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989.

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

----. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.

Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.

Dienst, Richard. Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.

Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, and the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Studies in Parapsychology. Ed. Philip Reiff. New York: Collier, 1963.

Friedberg, Anne. Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Hampton, Howard. "Remembrance of Revolutions Past." Film Comment 39.3 (May/June 2003): 33.

Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.

Kirby, Lynne. Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and the Silent Cinema. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

Lefebvre, Henri. "The Everyday and Everydayness." Yale French Studies 73, 1987.

Lupton, Catherine. "Chris Marker: In Memory of New Technology." Silver Threaded Presents: Chris Marker. 3 June 2002. Silverthreaded.com. 5 April 2004. «http://www.silcom.com/~dlp/cm/cm_memtech.htm»

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.

Marks, Laura U. "Signs of the Time: Deleuze, Peirce, and the Documentary Image." The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Ed. Gregory Flaxman. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. 193-214.

Morse, Margaret. Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1998.

Oguibe, Olu. "Photography and the Substance of the Image." The Visual Culture Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge, 2002. 565-83.

Osborne, Peter. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. New York: Verso, 1995.

Parks, Lisa. "Satellite and Cyber Visualities: Analyzing 'Digital Earth.'" The Visual Culture Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff. New York: Routledge, 2002. 279-94.

Potter, Daniel. "Wounded Time." Silver Threaded Presents: Chris Marker. 3 June 2002. Silverthreaded.com. 5 April 2004. «http://www.vajramedia.com/Passagen/cm.home2.html»

Rodowick, D. N. Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.

Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Stewart, Garrett. Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Virilio, Paul. War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Trans. Patrick Camiller. New York: Verso, 1989.

Walsh, David. "Chris Marker and the Talking Heads: Two Films from 1983." World Socialist Web Site. 13 May 1999. World Socialist Web Site. 4 April 2004. «http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/may1999/sff4-m13.shtml»

 

Notes

[1] For a more detailed discussion of the political valence of these terms, see Peter Osborne's The Politics of Time.

[2] In this context, my use of the term, "resistant memory" consciously echoes D.N. Rodowick's use of the term "memory of resistance" in Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine.

[3] Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping, 2.

[4] In Between Film and Screen, Garrett Stewart emphasizes this problem, noting that cinematic movement generally seeks to suppress its basis in photograms, the still images that create the illusion of cinematic movement.

[5] See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image.

[6] Cinema 2 xi.

[7] See also Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992); Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983); and Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and the Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke UP, 1997).

[8] Lupton's essay focuses primarily on Marker's more recent multimedia work, such as Level Five and Immemory, in order to trace Marker's ongoing interest in new media technologies and the possibility of memory. See Lupton, "Chris Marker: In Memory of New Technology," «http://silcom.com/~dlp/cm/cm_memtech.htm».

[9] See Olu Oguibe, "Photography and the Substance of the Image," The Visual Culture Reader, 2nd ed, Ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2002). Kaja Silverman echoes these observations, noting that althoughSans Soleil presents images that are apparently ethnographic, Marker's film "does not attempt to 'penetrate' these cultures" (186).

[10] For discussions of Derrida's The Post Card in relationship to film theory, see Richard Dienst's Still Life in Real Time (Durham: Duke UP, 1994), and Peter Brunette and David Willis, Screen/Play (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989).

[11] This observation would seem to affirm the Deleuzian maxim, borrowed from Fellini that "When there is no more money left, the film will be finished" (77). In this context, Deleuze acknowledges that "The cinema as art itself lives in a direct relation with a permanent plot [complot], an international conspiracy which conditions it from within, as the most intimate and most indispensable enemy. This conspiracy is that of money; what defines industrial art is not mechanical reproduction but the internalized relation with money" (Cinema 2 77). Unfortunately, Deleuze abandons this line of argument quickly without fully resolving this "internalized relation." In this sense, like Jonathan L. Beller, I am somewhat troubled by Deleuze's formalist account of cinema as an "expressive machine," which tends to reduce emphasis on questions of political economy. See Beller, "Capital/Cinema," 86-7.

[12] See Paul Virilio, War and Cinema. See also, Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, 188, and Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 164-65 and 309.

[13] The shot of the commuters, associatively linked to the shot of the bomber planes and footage of Polaris missiles through the disjunctions between shots, and between sound and image tracks, suggests what Kaja Silverman refers to in The Threshold of the Visible World as "Japanese war memories" (187).

[14] Paul Virilio notes this transformation in Open Sky, commenting that in the twentieth century, "the urbanization of real space is currently giving way to a preliminary urbanization of real time" (9). Lev Manovich notes this logic at work in Virilio, commenting that Virilio noted that "whereas space was the main category of the nineteenth century, the main category of the twentieth century was time" (278).

[15] See Howard Hampton, "Remembrance of Revolutions Past." Film Comment 39.3 (May/June 2003): 33. This Benjaminian reading also seems confirmed by Daniel Potter's online essay, "Wounded Time," in which Potter triangulates between Benjamin and Marker through the figure of the collector: «http://www.vajramedia.com/Passagen/cm.home2.html».

[16] Parks, 281.

[17] Lupton argues that Sans Soleil celebrates the Zone's ability to illustrate "the distorting, transforming operations of recollection. The Zone blocks the illusion that mimetic images of the past give us, which is that we have immediate access to that past."

[18] This term comes from Sigmund Freud's essay, "The Uncanny." In this context, it might make sense to speak of history as haunted.

[19] Marker's treatment of the 1960s gets a much more critical treatment in David Walsh's essay on the World Socialist Web Site: «http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/may1999/sff4-m13.shtml». Walsh's reading of the film ignores the dialectic between the film's mediation between nostalgia for the 1960s and its utopian imagination associated with the new technologies of memory that serve to "change the images of the past."