The Autonomous Hand of the Artist

 

When Walter Benjamin wrote the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction, he commented that reproduction removed from art it’s ‘aura’ (Benjamin, 1936). Pre-industrial commodities relied on the producer’s hand marking the goods to be sold, but this aura was removed by machinic production. As Roland Barthes and others have noted, the author of the text was dead. (Barthes, 1967).

When we purchase commodities, we no-longer understand their conditions of production - what Bernard Stiegler has described as the ‘unknowable past’ of technologies. (Steigler in Gallope; 2006). For music and the arts in particular- technologies which we use to store our consciousness - this lack of ‘aura’ hinders the ability to have an intimate relationship with these machines. As Gallope exaplains, this storing of consciousness outside the body requires trust: “Every technical device must be trusted to be used, to be, in Heidigger’s term, ready to hand.” (Gallope; 2006) Steigler, who used the word technics to refer to philosophies of technology, argued that we trust technics as consciousness prosthetics, as workable instruments whose “history we did not live” (Gallope; 2006).

“It is this duality of a technical constitution and a necessary trust or faith in the unknowable past that determines consciousness as extended outside itself, where memory is deposited in technical objects, where consciousness is outside itself” (Gallope; 2006, 7). 

Our trust in the technologies we use relies on their congruity with our own body - and since almost all our interactions are mediated through our hands - trust in their suitability for them. In order for us to trust and purchase commodities we rely on this hand-mark, and so techniques of re-instating the hand have been employed: The re-instatement of ‘hand-made’ aesthetics (made-by-hand). & the creation of ‘ergonomic’ products (made-for-hand). This post will focus on the circulation of conspicuously hand-made commodities which attempt to re-instate the missing aura of the commodity.

Let’s talk about this concept of re-instating the hand-made using the example of a vinyl album released in 2006 by JDilla (James Dewitt Yancey), titled Donuts. The album is a collection of short edits of soul and funk songs, looped and cut together live on a sampler. It is important to consider that at the time the album was produced, JDilla was in hospital (he passed away three days after the album was released).

The album is heavily stamped with the artist’s own touches - recording the album live, adding errors, scratching, re-cueing the records, adding static, out of time loops, etc. At each song we are reminded that whilst “recordings exist without death, available for nearly infinite playback”, the producer, Dilla, can still be present (Gallope; 2006, 8). Abbate theorizes that we can “sense within the events of music, the voices of the commentators that enunciate them.” (Abbate; 1991, 15). Knowing that he would soon die, J’Dilla has marked himself on the record with song titles including: ‘Bye’; ‘Dilla says go’ & ‘Don’t Cry’. The album is an attempt to impress temporaility and ‘live-ness’ onto the continuous commodity of the record. This is a tactic that is increasingly common since the adoption of digital reproduction techniques.

Gallope sees this drive for ‘live-ness’ as a response to the ‘cold-ness’ of digital recording.

“Performance suddenly appears nostalgic, more real, vulnerable, expressive, ephemeral or drastic. Modern musical performance, whether on the classical stage performing a composed work, touring an album, or reproducing a traditional style, it must be anxiously marked live, authentic, organic, real, as if to preserve the difference of humanity against the constant haunting of immortal, insomniac recordings that seem to proliferate in ever increasing numbers, seeming to come out of nowhere.” (Gallope: 2006, 9)

The liveness of Donuts is in direct opposition to the modes of production critiqued by Adorno & Horkheimer in their essay Enlightenment as Mass deception, in which they noted that in mass entertainment ”every detail is so firmly stamped with sameness that nothing can appear which is not marked at birth.” The anxious inclusion of errors, static, noises and the artist himself aims to counteract the disembodied nature of digital music.

Donuts transcends the death of the artist brought about by recording, and in this case, death of the artist literally. JDilla demonstrates that the death of body does not equal death of social presence “…in the absence of the body, social presence still persists, so challenging the current orthodoxy that our embodiment is essential to social membership” (Hallam, Hockey, Howath; 2001, 74). Discogs lists around 13 posthumous releases - he is still releasing albums, creating flows, spawing fansites, producing commodities after death.

To explain the circulation of a self stamped on a object we should consider Marcel Mauss, who wrote in his classic work The Gift that “The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver. The objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them.” (1990:31). This contradicts the logic of capitalism which encourages obligation free transfer of capital through monetary systems. Hand-made commodities have the indelible ties with their producers. This intersection between native values of eros and capitalist value of logos is discussed in Hyde’s critique of Mauss, in which he positions the gift as eros in opposition to the market economy as logos. (Hyde, 1983).

When Mauss says “the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given” (1990), he touches on not only gifts, but on secondhand objects themselves. Movies such as The Eye (200 centre themselves around the continuation of a person when their objects or body parts are transferred to other people. The fear of such object-personification is dealt with in rituals of ‘cleansing cursed objects’. Such superstitious practices are in place because some cultures recognise that “diabolical undeadness is what partial objects are about” (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006).

So what are we refering to when we talk about autonomous partial objects? Zizek, following on from Lacan, sees the partial object as a site of fear, because it acts without meter or constraint (Zizek, 1995).

The tongue is driven into action by its desire - and must seperate from the body at large in order to persue its desire. The machinic processes that bind the tongue - namely the mouth, teeth, the body, notions of civility and good manners - are transcended by the autonomous tongue which can now fully embrace its own ‘toungue-ness.” Whilst this was considered an abject image, and spawned much criticism, it was ultimately a more comfortable situation than the other possibility: the man becoming the tongue.

Zizek mentions the Hans Christian Anderson tale of The Red Shoes in a short peice on Lacan. In this story, an impoverished girl chooses a new pair of shiny red shoes, which cause her to dance uncontrollably day and night, almost killing her. She is saved when an executioner cuts off her feet, which continue to dance around. “These shoes stand for drive at its purest: an ‘undead’ partial object that functions as a kind of impersonal willing: ‘it wants’, it persists in its repetitive movement (of dancing), it follows its path and exacts its satisfaction at any price, irrespective of the subject’s well-being.” (Zizek, 1995).The fear of ’becoming the other’ is a metanarrative used in Dr. Jekyl & Mr. Hyde, The Exorcist and numerous zombie/werewolf films. Zizek terms this the ‘ventriloquist effect’ - something acting through you. (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006). But as Zizek speculates; “Perhaps the ultimate bodily part which fits this role of the autonomous partial object is the fist, or rather the hand.” (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006). For an excellent website on disembodied hands in horror films, see this site.

The Hands of Orlac (released 1924, remade by Christopher lee in 1960, below), stars a pianist whos hands are severed in an accident. When they are replaced with the hands of a murderer, he takes a liking to strangulation rather than sonatas. As the excellent trailer below asks: “Do the hands control the man that owns them?”

The Beast with five fingers explores the return of a dead man’s hands, seeking revenge, and playing pianos.

 

 

Similarly Dr. Stranglove, played by Peter Sellers (below) literally is unable to control his right hand. The fight to control this object which does as it pleases it central to the film - to control mindless acts of total identification with something.  

 

The fascinating thing about partial objects, in the sense of ‘organs without bodies’, is that they embody what Freud called “death drive”…the dimension of the undead, the living dead, something which remains alive even after it is dead. Something you cannot destroy – the more you cut it, the more it exists. It goes on. (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006).

Zizek employs the Deleuzian ‘Bodies without organs’ concept in reverse, an act which i ultimately see as nothing more than a slight re-orientation, rather than a true shift in meaning (Deleuze & Guattari; 1972). It is possible to see the BwO as the result of a body shifting from a metamachine, an organised whole compiled from smaller parts, to a single machinic entity, which is the subject of singular desire. Is not the BwO a single organ? A disorientated autonomous partial object/organ seperated from a whole?

Michel Gondry’s excellent film The Science of Sleep (2007) also deals with partial objects, centering around Stephane’s inability to control his hands. In the opening sequence of the film, a piano falls down the stairs of his apartment, crushing his hand. When it is being bandaged, a neighbour sprays his hand with foot deoderiser as a placebo - which he perceives as being effective. It is as if his hand lacks identity - it is effortlessly re-territorilized as a foot.

Stephane’s seeming lack of control in his own life is represented in his dreams by cumbersome hands, which cause him to ‘make mistakes’. In his dreams they become “the size of houses,” they become autonomous -violently attacking his dull co-workers. This is ultimately a liberating experience for Stephane - he takes the boss’s office, has sex with the secratary over a xerox machine, and relaxes in a desk chair. “This is what liberation means…the only way to get rid of this autonomous partial object is to become the autonomous partial object.” (Zizek in Fiennes; 2006). Stephane’s hands, the autonomous partial object, ‘take over’.

This desire to become a pure ‘hand-machine’ sees Stephane lust after a character who is dexterous and in control of her hands. Stephanie’s skill is embodied by an apartment full of delicate hand made dolls and dioramas, as well as her ability to play the piano (a hand-centric instrument). In the short clip below, he comments that “it’s as if her synapses are directly married to her fingers.”

 

Liveness and transcience are key markers of hand-made objects - seemingly because they enunciate their circumstances of production. Machined products are ideally without flaws, without seams - most perfectly represented in the modernist alien spaceship of the 1950s - a circular single, perfect peice of smooth metal. But with the hand-made, we distinctly desire a roughness, an uneven, ’striated’ surface (Deleuze & Guattari; 1987).

The fetish of serendipity & chance is realised through physical movements of the body - most obviously represented by the abstract expressionist art movement, and in particular the works of Jackson Pollock. As for music, artists are encouraged to use machines that allow experimentation - machines that produce varied results. Rather than brokenness or obsolescence, musicians speak of the warmth, authenticity, humanity, and even sexuality of analog sounds, tube amplifies, and vinyl LPs, as compared to the coldness, inauthenticity, and disembodied character of digital recording, integrated circuits, and compact discs.(Goodwin; 1988, 265, Auner; 2000). The disembodiment of digital recordings can be taken literally: when we create, play and use a digital file, we no-longer engage with it physically. As the jack of all trades Brian Eno elaborates:

I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. This transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse. Musicians enjoy drawing on that finesse (and audiences respond to its exercise), so when muscular activity is rendered useless, the creative process is frustrated.

A musician’s own personal style is communicated through movements which are difficult, if not impossible to emulate due to the “unreliable muscles” we enact. This aesthetic allows individuals to trust technics whose “history we did not live” (Steigler; 1998, Gallope; 2006, 7).  I think this is Link’s point when he comments about roughness, mistakes and distortion, which he terms ‘noise’.

“Noise can thus function as a ’suture’ in film theory, stitching our subjectivity into the recording. An LP’s hiss, crackle, and warpage emerge as surprisingly essential aspects of listener identity.” (Link, 2001)

This yearning to understand the terms of production which in mass production are obscured and hidden is allowed by hand-made aesthetics, which enuciate the terms of a commodity’s production. This yearning to understand process is touched on in Northern Exposure, Season 3, Episode 12 “Burning down the house”. This episode deals primarily with Chris’s attempt to create a personal, hand-made event by flinging a cow using a trebuchet .

“I’ve been here now for some days, groping my way along, trying to realize my vision here. I started concentrating so hard on my vision that I lost sight. I’ve come to find out that it’s not the vision, it’s not the vision at all. It’s the groping. It’s the groping, it’s the yearning, it’s the moving forward. I think Kierkegaard said it oh so well, ‘The self is only that which it’s in the process of becoming.‘ Art? Same thing. The thing I learned folks, this is absolutely key: It’s not the thing you fling. It’s the fling itself.”

For more on this episode, see my post here.

So what does the actual flinging of a piano represent?

When Chris is dragging a log down main street for part of the trebuchet, there is an obvious allusion to Jesus carrying the cross.

In creating the trebuchet, Chris is creating an event, an element stretched over following ones that forms an infinite series that contains “neither a final term, nor a limit.” (Deleuze; 1992, 2). Later in the fourth season the trebuchet is re-used to fling the coffin of a deceased friend of Chris.

This ’stretching’ of the event over time is also apparent in Christ’s crucifixion. Rather than his death being the limit of compassion, of ’god’s love’, the event is repeated both symbolically in the form of the cross and relgious services, and also by Catholic Flagellents in New Mexico, who actually crucify themselves (not to death, however).

Both Chris’ strive to fling a cow and Christ’s death include what Deleuze names as the third component of the event - the individual - which comes to represent “creativity, the formation of a new.” (Deleuze; 1992, 2). To Chris, a character obesessed with the creation of his own becomings, the event is symbolic of his own “groping around in the dark”. For Jesus, it wasn’t the death that mattered, moreso the act of dying. Crucifixion, which is a slow and public death, suits this purpose perfectly. If Jesus had been guillotined, or shot, or thrown off a cliff, the transitory nature of the dying body would not have lasted long enough to me remembered. To be on the cross is to be in the becoming state between life and death. It thus served to create the death of Jesus as an event. And even the final death and entombment became the opportunity for another becoming - the ressurection.  

The trebuchet fling is an event crafted by Chris to create ‘tomorrow’s memories’, to create a social participation that will likely outlast his own physical embodiment. In his strive to create the authentic, he is striving to create something original, something hand-crafted that demonstrates his own personal becomings.

If indeed industrialization of art removed it’s aura, then perhaps the action of handmade aesthetics re-instates this aura, marking it within a time and space. The circulation of such commodities is based on both a fetish and fear of the disembodied object or artist. A hand free of a body is free to pursue its desire - for better or for worse - which is why this motif has been so heavily utilised in screen texts. The hand is an event that is depicted as ‘going on’ after death - demonstrating that even if the author is dead (literally in the case of j’dilla) he or she can still ‘touch’ you.

 

 

Bibliography:

Abbate, Carolyn, Unsung Voices: Opera & Musical Narrative in the 19th Century, Princeton University Press, UK, 1991

Adorno, Theodore & Horkheimer, Max; the Culture Industry: Enlightenment as mass deception in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During, London & New York, Routledge, 2007

Benjamin, Walter, the Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, 1936
Cage, John Silence: Lectures & Writings Wesleyan Publishing, NY, 1961

Deleuze, Giles, & Guattari, Felix Anti Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia University of Minnesota, 1977.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix, The Smooth & the Striated, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, B. Massumi (trans) London & New York, Continuum, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles; What is an Event? In The Fold: Leibniz & the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, London, The Athlone Press, 1992

Eisenberg, Evan, Music Becomes a Thing, in the Recording Angel: Music, Records & Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, Picador, London, 1987

Eno, Brian. “The Revenge of the Intuitive: Turn Off the Options, and Turn Up the Intimacy.” Wired 7/1 January 1999. .

Gallope, Michael, Heidegger, Stiegler, and the Question of a Musical Technics, New York University, July 2006

Guattari, Félix, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. Rosemary Sheed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984

Hallan, Elizabeth; Hockey, Jenny; Howath, Glennys; The Body In Death; Contested Bodies eds

Holliday, Ruth, and Hassard, John. London and New York; routledge, 2001.

Link, Stan, The Work of Reproduction in the Mechanical Aging of an Art: Listening to Noise, Computer Music Journal; Spring2001, Vol. 25 Issue 1, p34-47, 14p

Lyssiotis, Peter; Gyorgy, Scrinis; CD’s and other things, Backyard Press, Melbourne, 1994

Steigler, Bernard, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (trans) Collins & Beardsworth, Stanford University Press, 1998

Zizek, Slavoj, Organs Without Bodies, Deleuze & Consequences, Routledge, New York, 2004

Zizek, Slavoj; Love beyond Law, The Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society issue 160-61 1996

Filmography:

Fiennes, Sophie & Zizek, Slavoj; The Perverts Guide to Cinema, 150 min, 2006

Gondry, Michel; the Science of Sleep, 105mins, 2007

Harrison, Nate; Can I Get an Amen? [Sound recording on acetate], total run time 17:46, , 2004

Johnsen, Andreas; Christensen, Ralf; Moltke, Henrik; Good Copy, Bad Copy, Rosforth productions, 58mins, Denmark 2007

Kubrick, Stanley, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb, 93 mins, 1964

Shallet, lee, Northern Exposure, ‘Our Tribe’ (Season 3, Episode 12) Original Air Date: January 13, 1992

Thompson, Rob, Northern Exposure, ‘Burning down the house’ (Season 3, Episode 14) Original Air Date: February 3, 1992

 

Zizek, the big bad monster

“The worst thing to play is this ‘we are all humans’ game that some intellectuals like to play. you project a certain intellectual persona, the cold thinker or whatever. but then you signal through the small details, you know ‘but basically I’m like you, i like small pleasures of life, i am human like you.’ I am not human. I am a monster, i claim. It’s not that i have the mask of a theoretician and beneath i am a more human person, ‘I like chocolate cake, i like this and like that’ and so on, which makes me human. I rather prefer myself as somebody who, as not to offend others, pretends, plays at being human.”

 When Zizek got married, he stuck with his guns, giving the cameras a surly, non-smile.

 

“The exemplary case of the “pathological,” contingent element elevated to the status of an unconditional demand is, of course, an artist absolutely identified with his artistic mission, pursuing it freely without any guilt, as an inner constraint, unable to survive without it.” (Zizek, 1998).

 Zizek, Slavoj, Kant & Sade: The ideal couple, in Lacanian Ink 13, The Wooster Press, 1998

Maus & the Gift economy

Felicity kindly pointed me in the direction of Marcel Mauss, another French sociologist, who wrote about gift economies.

“In his classic work The Gift, Mauss argued that gifts are never “free”. Rather, human history is full of examples of gifts that give rise to reciprocal exchange.”
“The giver does not merely give an object but also part of himself, for the object is indissolubly tied to the giver: “the objects are never completely separated from the men who exchange them” (1990:31). the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given that causes the gift to have a power which compels the recipient to reciprocate.”

“Gift exchange therefore leads to a mutual interdependence between giver and receiver.”
To borrow an example from Northern Exposure again, an episode titled “Our Tribe” (S3.EP12) deals with a tribal intiation ceremony of potlatch, an example Mauss used in describing gift giving among native indians. The potlatch ceremony involves Dr. Fleishman, the in-house capitalist, having to give away all his posessions to other members of the community. He is angered when he receives other people’s items in return for his - “this isn’t my toaster. My toaster was a four slice. This is a two slice.” This intersection between native values of eros and capitalist value of logos is discussed in Hyde’s critique of Mauss, in which he positions the gift as eros in opposition to the market economy as logos. (Hyde, 1983).

When Mauss says “the identity of the giver is invariably bound up with the object given” (1990), he touches on not only gifts, but on secondhand objects themselves. Movies such as The Eye (200 centre themselves around the continuation of a person when their objects or body parts are transferred to other people. The fear of such object-personification is dealt with in rituals of ‘cleansing cursed objects’.

But having an object marked by hand is also a site of fetish: The value of hand-made objects is often loosely determined by their closeness with the creator. People almost wish to believe when they purchase an overpriced Bob Dylan LP, that he sat there carving the music directly into the grooves with jagged fingernails. If they can’t get that, then they go for a signiture…

 

References:

Mauss, Marcel, Essai sur le don. (The Gift), trans. W.D. Hall, Routledge, 1990

Hyde, Lewis; The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property , Vintage, 1983

The Science of Sleep

Michel Gondry’s excellent film The Science of Sleep (2007) comments extensively on the ways in which we perceive, control and use our hands.

In the opening sequence of the film, a piano falls down the stairs of his apartment, crushing his hand when he tries to support it. When it is being bandaged, a neighbour sprays his hand with foot deoderiser as a placebo - which he perceives as being effective. It is as if his hand lacks identity, and has been easily re-territorilized as a foot.

Stephane’s seeming lack of control in his own life is represented in his dreams by cumbersome hands, which cause him to ‘make mistakes’. They become “the size of houses,” and become autonomous -violently attacking his dull co-workers.

Stephane sees Stephanie’s dexterity and control of her hands as a desirable attribute, and one that he envies. Her skill is embodied by an apartment full of delicate hand made dolls and dioramas, as well as her ability to play the piano (which is an obviously hand-centric instrument). In the short clip below, he comments that “it’s as if her synapses are directly married to her fingers.”

 

Gondry, or at least Stephane, also explores how consciousness can be split, linked and exist outside the body. There is a sequence where Stephane & Stephanie play tricks with eachother’s hands, tricks that reveal “how our unconscious sensory processing systems can produce impressions at odds with reality”. (Princenthal, 2008).

Stephane is momentarily enchanted by putting two of his fingers together tip to tip and looking beyond them, which seems to make them grow an extra joint, He also likes tactile illusions that create confusion about where his body ends, as when he puts his hand against the hand of Stephanie, his would-be girlfriend, and strokes their aligned fingers…. under which circumstances it’s very hard to tell whose are whose.

Stephane’s inventions extend and create links between human bodies, such as the thought communication device, above. But he also describes loops between minds that have no direct physical connection - a phenomenon he describes as “parallel synchronized randomness”.

References:

Princenthal, Nancy. Eyes wide shut: ‘The Science of Sleep’  Art in America 96.4, April 2008

Digital Disembodiment

 

The defining characteristics of older technologies are valued over the new. Rather than brokenness or obsolescence, musicians speak of the warmth, authenticity, humanity, and even sexuality of analog sounds, tube amplifies, and vinyl LPs, as compared to the coldness, inauthenticity, and disembodied character of digital recording, integrated circuits, and compact discs (Goodwin 1988 265, Théberge 207-13). Eno describes how the apparent “weaknesses” and limitations of instruments and media, these aspects regarded as “most undesirable,” become ‘their cherished trademark.” (Auner, 2000)

Auner’s point of disembodiment of digital recording can be taken almost literally: when we create, play and use a digital file, we no-longer engage with it physically. As the jack of all trades Brian Eno elaborates:

I’m struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity. This transfer is not paying off. Sure, muscles are unreliable, but they represent several million years of accumulated finesse. Musicians enjoy drawing on that finesse (and audiences respond to its exercise), so when muscular activity is rendered useless, the creative process is frustrated.

Musicians are a touchy feely bunch of people. They like to hold things in their hands, tweak things, bend things, break things, scratch things. Most of the iconic musicians did things with their hands and instruments that had never been done before - most often they interfered with the instruments normal actions - lets say the distortion of hendrix, the scratching of Grandmaster flash. And they could do so because the instruments they used allowed their hands to get in the way.

Digital technologies don’t allow phyiscal movements to be utilised : because we interact with them, as Eno says, through “mental activity”. It doesn’t matter how many buttons i have on screen, how many things to manipulate, how many choices, i have a single mouse with one or two buttons, and a keyboard. No matter what variable i change on-screen, the physical process is the same. I use the same mouse click to copy and mp3 file as i use to transfer thousands of dollars between online bank accounts.

And it doesn’t matter who i am: even the most technically astute programmer is no better (or worse) at clicking on an icon than I. Obviously this is not the case with analogue technologies, which required different physical skills for each machine:

In drawing our attention to the technology itself, its machines and media, noise becomes a metaphor attaching a kind of tactility to sound. Radio static becomes the feel of a tuning knob. The crackle of dust becomes the vinyl itself. The hum of tubes evokes their warm temperature. A stylus dropping carries the weight of a tone arm. (Link, 2001).

We enjoy these actions because they allow individual differences - DJs can take playing a record, a universal, mundane action which (20 years ago) we all would have performed, and skillfully scratch and manipulate music. Their own personal style is communicated through these movements, movements which are difficult, if not impossible to emulate due to the “unreliable muscles” we enact.

I think this is Link’s point when he says that:

Transduction noise can thus function as a “suture” in film theory, stitching our subjectivity into the recording. An LP’s hiss, crackle, and warpage emerge as surprisingly essential aspects of listener identity. (Link, 2001)

It’s not what you fling - It’s the fling itself

“I’ve been here now for some days, groping my way along, trying to realize my vision here. I started concentrating so hard on my vision that I lost sight. I’ve come to find out that it’s not the vision, it’s not the vision at all. It’s the groping. It’s the groping, it’s the yearning, it’s the moving forward. I think Kierkegaard said it oh so well, ‘The self is only that which it’s in the process of becoming.‘ Art? Same thing. The thing I learned folks, this is absolutely key: It’s not the thing you fling. It’s the fling itself.”

From Northern Exposure, Season 3, Episode 12 “Burning down the house”. The clip is on youtube above….but a part of the speech has been cut out for some reason. If you want to see a piano get flung through the air, then have a look.

The episode was written by Robin Green, who was an executive producer for The Sopranos. Another creator of the Sopranos, David Chase, also wrote for NX, but was quoted as hating of the optimism and cheesiness of Northern Exposure, “It was ramming home every week the message that life is nothing but great…”  (Chase quoted in: Lavery & Thompson; 2002, 2). Nevertheless i think some interesting concepts have managed to slip past the filter of the ‘culture machine’. 

This episode deals primarily with Chris’s attempt to ‘create a pure moment’ by flinging a cow using a trebuchet.

“You see Shelly - what I’m dealing with is the aesthetics of the transitory. I’m creating tomorrow’s memories - and as memeories my images are as immortal as art - which is concrete.”

Chris later learns that the flinging of a cow has occured - in a Monty Python film - and he becomes disheartened, citing ‘repetition is the death of art’. But when a fire destroys Maggie O’connel’s house (played by the delicious super babe Janine Turner, below), Chris is gifted a burnt piano to destroy.

(Janine, if i could go back in time, it would be for you, when you were still supple and short haired.)

So what does the actual flinging of a piano represent?

When Chris is dragging a log down main street for part of the trebuchet, there is an obvious allusion to Jesus carrying the cross.

In creating the trebuchet, Chris is creating an event, an element stretched over following ones that forms an infinite series that contains “neither a final term, nor a limit.” (Deleuze; 1992, 2). Later in the fourth season the trebuchet is re-used to fling the coffin of a deceased friend of Chris.

This ’stretching’ of the event over time is also apparent in Christ’s crucifixion. Rather than his death being the limit of compassion, of ’god’s love’, the event is repeated both symbolically in the form of the cross and relgious services, and also by Catholic Flagellents in New Mexico, who actually crucify themselves (not to death, however).

Both Chris’ strive to fling a cow and Christ’s death include what Deleuze names as the third component of the event - the individual - which comes to represent “creativity, the formation of a New.” (Deleuze; 1992, 2). To Chris, a character obesessed with the creation of his own becomings, the event is symbolic of his own “groping around in the dark”. For Jesus, it wasn’t the death that mattered, moreso the act of dying. Crucifixion, which is a slow and public death, suits this purpose perfectly. If Jesus had been guillotined, or shot, or thrown off a cliff, the transitory nature of the dying body would not have lasted long enough to me remembered. To be on the cross is to be in the becoming state between life and death. It thus served to create the death of Jesus as an event. And even the final death and entombment became the opportunity for another becoming - the ressurection.  

The trebuchet fling is an event crafted by Chris to create ‘tomorrow’s memories’, to create a social participation that will likely outlast his own physical embodiment. In his strive to create the authentic, he is striving to create something original, something individual that demonstrates his own personal becomings.

Whilst the final scene of the episode is collective, in that it focuses on a group’s perception of the piano fling, it also has seperate reaction shots of each main character uttering a catchphrase when the piano hits the ground - to deploy Althusser’s term - demonstrating their own interpellation, which puts aside the loyalties of the group. (Althusser in Bauman; 2000, 97). 

Ed: “neat”

Joel: “that’s interesting”

Maggie: “nice”

Maurice: “well i’ll be…”

Chris: “yeah”

This becomes more clear when we consider that the subplot of the episode is about the loss of a house, but perhaps the re-territorialization of home - the grasping of the identity which we carry with us “like snails carry their homes on their backs.” (Bauman; 2000, 98).

Maggie loses her posessions, but is visited by her Mother. The chimney-sweep who is hiding from his failed golfing career is taught to re-capture his fame by Dr. Fleischman. And Chris, who temporarily loses his ability to create, regains it by flinging a piano through the air with a resounding CLANG of self affirmation.

Hand Made Donuts

“Are the events of music simply there or do we occasionally sense within them the voices of commentators that enunciate them.” (Abbate; 1991, 15).

Let’s talk about this concept of re-instating the hand-made using the example of a vinyl album released in 2006 by the now dead JDilla (James Dewitt Yancey), titled Donuts. The album is a collection of short edits of soul and funk songs, looped and cut together live on a sampler. It is important to consider that at the time the album was produced, JDilla was in hospital (he passed away three days after the album was released).

The album is heavily stamped with the artist’s own touches - recording the album live, adding errors, scratching, re-cueing the records, adding static, out of time loops, etc. At each song we are reminded that whilst “recordings exist without death, available for nearly infinite playback”, the producer, Dilla, can still be present (Gallope; 2006, 8). This album is an attempt to impress temporaility and ‘live-ness’ onto the continuous commodity of the record.

Gallope sees this drive for ‘live-ness’ as a response to the ‘cold-ness’ of digital recording.

“Performance suddenly appears nostalgic, more real, vulnerable, expressive, ephemeral or drastic. Modern musical performance, whether on the classical stage performing a composed work, touring an album, or reproducing a traditional style, it must be anxiously marked live, authentic, organic, real, as if to preserve the difference of humanity against the constant haunting of immortal, insomniac recordings that seem to proliferate in ever increasing numbers, seeming to come out of nowhere.” (Gallope: 2006, 9)

The liveness of Donuts transcends death of the artist brought about by recording, and in this case, death of the artists corporeality. JDilla demonstrates that the death of body does not equal death of social presence ”…in the absence of the body, social presence still persists, so challenging the current orthodoxy that our embodiment is essential to social membership” (Hallam, Hockey, Howath; 2001, 74). Discogs lists around 13 posthumous releases - he is still releasing albums, creating flows, spawing fansites, producing commodities after death.

‘Ready to Hand’ - Technics and Trust

“Every technical device must be trusted to be used, to be, in Heidigger’s term, ready to hand.” - Gallope, Michael

Bernard Steigler, who used the word technics to refer to philosophies of technology, argued that we trust technics as consciousness prosthetics, as workable instruments whose “history we did not live” (Gallope).

“It is this duality of a technical constitution and a necessary trust or faith in the unknowable past that determines consciousness as extended outside itself, where memory is deposited in technical objects, where consciousness is outside itself” (Gallope; 2006, 7). 

Our trust in the technologies we use comes from their congruity with our own body - our trust in their suitability for our hands. Pre-industrial commodities relied on the producer’s hand marking the goods to be sold - by signiture or by style. But the indsutrial revolution saw the producer’s signiture becoming dislocated from the commodities produced. In order for us to trust and purchase commodities we rely on this hand-mark, and so techniques of re-instating the hand have been employed:

• the re-instatement of ‘hand-made’ aesthetics (made-by-hand).
• the creation of ‘ergonomic’ products (made-for-hand)

Autonomous Partial Objects

The fascinating thing about partial objects, in the sense of organs without bodies, is that they embody what Freud called “death drive”…the dimension of the undead, the living dead, something which remains alive even after it is dead. Something you cannot destroy – the more you cut it, the more it exists. It goes on. - Slavoj Zizek, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

 Zizek employs the Deleuzian ‘Bodies without organs’ concept in reverse, an act which i ultimately see as nothing more than a slight re-orientation, rather than a true shift in meaning. It is possible to see the BwO as the result of a body shifting from a metamachine, an organised whole compiled from smaller parts, to a single machinic entity, which is the subject of singular desire.

Is not the BwO a single organ? A disorientated autonomous partial object/organ seperated from a whole?

The tongue is driven into action by its desire - and must seperate from the body at large in order to persue its desire. The machinic processes the bind the tongue - namely the mouth, teeth, the body, notions of civility and good manners - are transcended by the autonomous tongue which can now fully embrace its own ‘toungue-ness.”

As Zizek speculates;

Perhaps the ultimate bodily part which fits this role of the autonomous partial object is the fist, or rather the hand.  - Zizek, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

The presentation of the autonomous partial object (ApO) is common in popular culture. Disembodies hands represented in popular culture screen commodities - generally to invoke a feeling of fear and unease in horror texts. The final scene of Carrie features the hand of the ‘dead’ reaching up from the grave.

But as well as a feared, the BwO / ApO is a site of fetish.

Protagonists of action films often become an ApO / BwO - demonstrating that the BwO is fetished as a liberated body. There is the moment in action films where a character (after being slowly stripped down to a BwO) knows what they need to do - an single act. This is the point where the charachter runs fowards taking bullet after bullet, but not stopping because he/she no-longer has limbs to feel pain with, no longer sees anything but the goal, the desire.

Major Kong in Dr. Strangelove becomes nothing but a ‘bomb releasing machine’.

This is what liberation means – you first have to get rid of, what within you, attaches you to the leader, the conditions of slavery, etc. - Zizek, Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

This kind of ‘death defying’ gesture of the BwO is at the heart of heroism. We can examine the internet fad of ‘epic maneuvers’ as valorizing the grandiose actions of a BwO - these short looping gif animations highlight the moments of ‘dancing inside out’ as Artaud would put it.

 

I’ll be developing these concepts for my final blog post - particularly how artists and creative people use and create themselves as a BwO to sell their products.

I’m also very interested in how the desire for and fear of the autonomous partial object is reconciled.

Get your hands off me! a handcrafted essay question?

Essay questions - choosing one is like choosing your identity.

i’m finding it extremely difficult to seperate my knowledge into weeks, like the questions are listed. I’m also finding it difficult to focus solely on tv texts, because i’ve found the theory useful in any aspect of commodity culture.

I had an idea, an entry point into the theory, and that was an analysis of how ‘the hand’ is a super-commodified object, producing desire in particular, and how this is shown in screen texts. It’s a Digital culture (as in fingers.) The hand without fingers is the equivalent of the body without organs - the fist, the unified action of a flat palm.

It just piled up: all these examples of hands in a single day.

• Starting with ‘eyes wide shut’ - the hands being the only non-cloaked skin shown in the mansions, wedding rings, gloves being warn to hide the hands, leading by the hand, the whole film was like a dance of hands - of homunculus puppets.

                              

• Skins - start of season two, Tony is trying to write after his accident - cannot control his hands.
• J’dilla’s album donuts, and a friend commenting how he has stamped himself all over the record - he has put his little signitures: gestures, re-cueing records, mistakes, scratching.
• scratching itself - hip hop culture - is hands on - getting your hand ON something, stopping the record.

We all desire the authentic other - the non-commodified, ‘real’, which never actually exists but it used as a way of selling the ‘hand made’, as if it somehow bypasses commodity culture.

We all desire contact, real touch - yet we fear the touch of strangers. Zombies are highly corporeal - they pretty much ‘feel around’, sense only by touch, hands held foward. Hand’s outstretched like the feelers of some massive community BwO.

Medical TV always with the ‘doctors life saving hands’ this touching, feeling, tempreture reading, pulse counting, blood stopping (saving private ryan), gloves, getting your hands dirty.

Palm reading (literally reading the hands). Hands as a sign system - waving, shaking, ‘peace’, ‘fuck you’, ‘thumbs up’ that superseeds verbal communication.

Andre Breton wrote:

Tu cuerpo se ajustaba al miouna mano se ajusta a lo que quiere ocultar…

(Your body was consistent with my own, As a hand fits what he wants to hide…)

Our hands are producers of becomings.

There is a commodified ‘hand-made’ aesthetic - used to sell high and low end goods.

Commodity culture serves hands - ergonomic pens, walking canes with shaped handles - these define politics of the hand. The double glove (below) challenges the hand as a single entity.

The hand is a metamachine: nearly all human/machine couplings are mediated by the hand machine.

Only one question left: what the hell kind of essay question does this fit into? If anyone can help, ill promise you a lovely handmade mix cd.

C’mon, give me a hand.