“Art is described as being illuminating, and the rest of life as being dark. Naturally, I disagree. If there were a part of life dark enough to keep out of it a light from art, I would want to be in that darkness, fumbling around if necessary, but alive, and I rather think that contemporary music would be in the dark too, bumping into things, knocking others over and in general, adding to the disorder that characterizes life”. John Cage, ‘Notes on Silence’, pg45

Tom Ze – Dor e Dor 

The Dirtbombs – Kung Fu 

Del Rays – Night Prowl

Georgia Anne Muldrow – Wrong Way

Sean J Period – Places Everyone

This list is structured around a wonky, bumping, rolling sound: swung beats, loose drums, dropping rhythms. These are the songs that annoy my father, who always tells me that they just ’sound wrong’. Too right. 

Artwork: Wassily Kandinsky, Fragment 2 for Composition VII, 1913 (180 Kb); Oil on canvas, 87.5 x 99.5 cm (34 1/2 x 39 1/4 in); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Mark Gormley is a brilliant hoax created by Tim & Eric of Adult Swim/’Awesome Show, Great Job’ fame. The aesthetics, production equipment, characterization, transitions, use of green/blue screen, images combining still and moving footage etc. are improbably similar. Their continuing fascination with woe-some community television music videos is obvious to any frequent viewer of their show. To draw a quick comparison:

The screenshots below demonstrate some of the repeating tim & eric-ian aesthetics. 

The above transition, if you pay close attention, features an explosion of black triangular shapes which move and recombine in an identical way to the cat heads in the credits for Tim & Eric’s awesome show season one. The powerpoint style backgrounds and incredibly surreal digi-fx transitions are so ‘tom goes to the mayor’ it hurts.

Awesome show, great job guys.

“Sameness and difference in relation to what?” (Hardt & Negri, 2004; 127). 

The two faces of eurocentrism: ‘they are utterly different from us”, or, “they are just the same as us.” We cannot escape the need to use a cultural defined Identity as a universal standard, the measure of sameness and difference – Difference can only be expressed in relation to a definite whole national imaginary. So how do we form this national imaginary?

Nationalism: the ideology of the modern nation state (Eriksen, 1993; 97). 

“Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist.” Ernest Gellner, (1964: 169). 

The nation as an imagined community – Benedict Anderson

An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and cannot be) based on quotidian face-to-face interaction between its members. Anderson proposed the following definition of a nation: “it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.”(Anderson, 1991 [1983], 6). 

Political movements based on cultural identity are strong in societies undergoing modernization. (Eriksen, 1993; 99). 

Anderson argues that nationalism derives its force from its combination of political legitimation and emotional power. Politics cannot be purely instrumental, but must always involve symbols which have the power of creating loyalty and a feeling of belongingness. (Cohen, 1974; b). The nation is not solely produced through large scale upheavals and war (or revolution), but through everyday practices, symbols and language. Banal Nationalism. 

What are some colloquialisms and symbols expressing national ideology in Australia?

“Australian values”

Mateship

Fair-go

The Aussie Battler

The entirety of Baz Luhrmann’s ham-fisted film Australia:

The Outback

The Red Soil

The Kangaroo

The Koala Bear

Ricky Ponting

Although nations tend to imagine themselves as old, they are modern. Nationalist ideology is a distinctly european / modernist movement. 

Norway/Scandinavia

The creation of Norwegian national identity took place throughout the nineteenth century (a period of modernization and urbanization). The country moved to full independence, leaving the union with Sweden in 1905. The formation of a national identity was in a large way driven by members of the middle class who travelled to the countryside in search of the ‘authentic’, bringing elements of their culture back, and presenting them in cities as expressions of authentic Norwegian-ness.

“Folk costumes, painted floral patterns (rose-mailing), traditional music and peasant food became national symbols even to people who had not grown up with such customs. Actually, it was the city dwellers, not the peasants, who decided that reified aspects of peasant culture should be ‘the national culture’. A national heroic history was established. [...] Certain aspects of peasant culture were thus re-interpreted and placed into an urban political context as evidence that norwegian culture was distinctive, that norwegians were a people, and that therefore they ought to have their own state.” (Eriksen, 1993; 101). 

The Viking

Take for example the figure of the Viking as a symbol of scandinavian identity. More related to fantasy than fact, pictures representing Vikings with horns and other ornaments in their helmets became the norm rather than the exception. The picture of rude Barbarians was frequently perpetrated by artists of different nationalities and, since they were not Scandinavians, they might lack any proper knowledge of the Viking culture. Therefore, this new image for the Barbarian warrior would be made out of a collection of traits associated with prejudicial concepts in the minds of people who were ultimately foreign, that is, not from Scandinavian origin. And this image was often that of a uncivilized brute, carrying all the characteristics of a sub-human creature.  The warriors were mostly shown as if they were “cavemen”, troglodytes wearing animal skins to cover their bodies. 

The horned helmet, which dominates Viking imagery, was actually never worn by Vikings in battle (Langer, 2002). Rather the popular culture industry of the early 19^th century (painting) aimed to demonize Vikings by portraying them as beastly, brutal animals, and many paintings were stylized with this mythic, albeit false touch. “The idealized picture of the Barbarian became part of the artists repertoire of images… art was impregnated with history – but not a “traditional” and “correct” history: more of a mythical interpretation of an immemorial past.” (Langer, 2002: 5). 

This disinformation has reached so far into collective consciousness that what was initially a slanderous image (much like portrayals of Jewish people with horns), was later used to foster a national identity. Scandinavian tennis fans wear horns as a symbol of national pride, a symbol which has no real basis in their actual culture. The viking horns, or lack thereof, perfectly demonstrate the imagined or invented-ness of national identity. 

“What is most monstrous is sequence. When we are there why do we withdraw only in order to return? Is there nothing good enough to transfix us? If she is truly worth fucking why do i have to fuck her again? If the flower is beautiful why does my baby son not look at it forever?” Book of Daniel, pg. 245

“A study today of the products of the animated cartoon industry of the twenties, thirties & forties would yield the following theology: 1. people are animals. 2. The body is mortal and subject to incredible pain. 3. Life is antagonistic to the living.  4. The Flesh can be sawed, crushed, frozen, stretched, burned, bombed, and plucked for music. 5. The dumb are abused by the smart and the smart are destroyed by their own cunning. 6. The small are tortured by the large, and the large destroyed by their own momentum. 7. We are able to walk on air, but only as long as our illusion supports us.  ” pg 287.

“If you look at a thing too directly, you don’t see it…you can see it in an oblique way only if it remains in the background.”(Slavoj Zizek, 2005).

There is a marvelous tension between foreground & background in Senso. If you look at the foreground, it is a sexual adventure, with a kind of desperate ending. But if you look at the background, you see historicized events of unification and national struggle.The film allows us to see the absurdity of Livia and Franz’s lives by placing them against the signs of social change. By framing and presenting these characters as fundamentally lost and flawed, Visconti allows us to see the background even more sharply.

Melancholia

The melancholia of Senso expresses a certain pessimism Visconti felt towards the social and political bleakness of post World War II Italy. Viconti’s melancholic anti-heroes “need not be particularly for the bourgeois revolution, so long as [they are] not against it (Kristeva 2002, 47–50). “To stand outside society and its chaining relationships is the impulse of the typical Viscontian hero . . .”(Nicholls, 2006; 13). 

Franz’s desire in Senso is to avoid the duty of the army, his nation, even his lovers. His character is of particular interest to Visconti because he represents a melancholia brought about by the dissolution of grand narratives after World War II. Referencing Visconti’s The Leopard, Mark Nicholls writes:

“This idea of the Romantic General, the popular hero of the Left, is also subject to constant re-definition throughout the film. In fact, each of Fabrizio’s key encounters with characters who represent the movements and moments of Risorgimento politics seems to modify this picture of Garibaldi, lurking behind the text. It is this mythological face of Garibaldi in the film, weathering so many changes, appropriations and opportunistic transformations, which centers and signifies the melancholy crisis facing Fabrizio. (Nicholls, 2006; 101).

Death to modernism

This dissolution of romantic modernist narratives of the ‘hero’ is also a central motif in Senso. Franz represents a new “root-less” personality, explaining to Livia that he is no longer “an officer or a gentleman. I’m a deserter and a drunk,” and later, “I’m not your romantic hero.”
For Franz, the world can no longer be classed through binaries which oppose high from low, aristocracy from the lower classes. Bacon describes the depiction of the loneliness of “people caged in the ideals of the past” as a central motif in Visconti’s films. When Livia confronts Franz in his apartment, he belittles her position as a “real lady” encouraging the prostitute to follow the antiquated codes of hospitality which seem absurd in the situation of war and chaos. Franz calls Livia a ‘tramp’ and destroys any perceived difference between her and the prostitute, Clara. In his Risorgimento films Visconti creates conflict between ‘modernist’ & ‘postmodernist’ characters. In the beginning of the novel from which the film was adapted, Livia states:

“They say the sum of philosophy consists of knowing oneself: i have studied myself with such apprehension for so many years, hour by hour, minute by minute, that i believe i know myself through and through and can consider myself to be a perfect lady philosopher.”(quoted in Bacon, 1998; 64).

This totalizing drive of Livia mirrors Visconti’s later construction of the Prince Don Fabrizio Salina in The Leopard. Fabrizo’s identity is ‘set in stone’ and his desire to fully know the world is shown through the observatory props, which enable a totalizing view of one’s place in time and space. Into the worlds of these modernist characters come individuals who are in states of becoming rather than being: in Senso Franz is the prime example, in The Leopard, Tancredi. These figures represent the dissolution of distinct identities that coincided with the end of WWII. They are opportunistic, shallow and lack loyalty.

Characterization is challenged by Visconti in Senso, a film which sustains “distance between character and spectator through the film.” (Rocchio, 199; 135). The detached and analytical spectatorship is developed through a predominance of long/medium shots, high camera angles, and a lack of exposition and explanation of character motives – such techniques distance the viewer and encourage a critical reading of Livia and Franz. The death of his cinematographer during the filming of Senso creates a nice visual inconsistency that echoes the state of Franz and Livia’s identities.

In Senso the fragmented nature of identity is established early, perhaps most emphatically in the scene where Franz and Livia walk the streets after the performance. Franz picks up a fragment of a mirror from the ground, and stares at his reflection, commenting: “I always look when i pass a mirror. It’s to affirm that i exist.”Lacan’s Mirror Stage

His desire to locate himself as an entity relates to Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the Mirror stage: the stage an infant passes through when becoming a subject. According to Lacan, the moment when an infant sees his reflection for the first time is an essential stage in identity formation – this is the moment at which the infant sees for the first time himself not as simply an attachment to his/her mother, a breast, etc, but as a complete, single entity.

This phase produces the ‘ideal-i’ or the self image which the subject always attempts to re-create in himself. Franz’s constant desire to “keep looking” expresses the loss of identity popularized by postmodern theorists – a breakdown in the mirror stage. Franz is ultimately unknowable and confusing to Livia, because his identity is in broken into fragments like the mirror he picks up and later discards. He cannot locate himself, and perhaps this is why he creates the false identity of the lover, the seducer, the hero, the soldier. Franz explains that his generation adopts the signifiers of identity: “Our generation are children,” and he continue, “we like wearing uniforms.”

His distrust of the signifiers of identity is a common theme in Visconti’s Risorgimento films; similarly in The Leopard, Fabrizio makes snide comments about Tancredi’s adoption of different uniforms as the political tides change. To modernist romantics like Fabrizio and Livia, one’s identity and uniform should not change – yet the melancholic admits his identity as a construction – Franz laments to Livia – “your idea of me is a pure invention”

Senso suggests that personalities and wars are constructed in similar ways to opera – and to extrapolate from this point – that the concept of unification as being driven by the people was a romantic, idealistic notion. The excellent line “This is the kind of war that suits the Italians: showers of confetti to the sound of mandolins” hints that nationhood, identity and community are ‘operatic’ constructions, they are ‘imagined communities’. Visconti’s melancholic protagonists in Senso & The Leopard end up adopting the ideologies and gestures of melodrama that they are opposed to. As Bacon writes:

“Livia says she like opera, ‘but not when it takes place outside of the stage, or when people behave like the heroes of melodrama, without thinking of the consequences.’ It sounds as if she is criticizing Franz…but as the story progresses, it turns out that she might as well have been talking about herself.”(Bacon, 1998; 73).

“The question is no longer, how can thoughts, feelings and personal experiences hold sway in the sphere of political power. The question now, after Hiroshima and the Final Solution, is: how can they be denied? How can there be anything else?”(Nicholls, 2006; 106).

Visconti chooses a technique and genre that prioritizes such questions of a break down in identity, putting melancholic characters in conflict with the totalizing narratives of history and unification.

Bibliography:

Bacon, H, The Risorgimento films, in Visconti: Explorations of beauty & decay, Cambridge University Press, 1998

Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon, Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. 

Nicholls, Mark; Visconti’s Il gattopardo: Melancholia and the Radical Sensibility, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 23/02/97, 2006

Nowell Smith, G, Senso in Luchino Visconti, BFI, London, 1967

Rocchio, V, Senso: Degenerate Melodrama, in Cinema of Anxiety: a Psychoanalysis of italian neo-realism, University of Texas Press, 1999

Filmography:

Visconti, Luchino, Senso, 119m, Technicolor, 1954

Visconti, Luchino, Il Gattopardo, 187m, Technicolor, 1963

Fiennes, Sophie, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, (written by Slavoj Zizek) 150mins, Color, 2006

Big up to the afrobeat white kids.

I’ve enjoyed their track ‘one’ (more annoyingly known as ‘blake’s got a new face’). So i’ve given it a edit/dub treatment: a laid back, spacey nod to tangorterje’s ‘diamonds on the soles of her shoes’. Cut out and played back for your enjoyment.

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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 (2008) 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

“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

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 (2008) 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

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