Cutting the Divide

There's a long pause that kind of freaks me out and Daniel finishes his drink and fingers the sunglasses he's still wearing and says, "I don't know. Just back."

Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

It is difficult enough to make a post-critical object, much less talk about it. In doing so I am looking back on a process that is in many ways simply in my body, and not in my conscious mind. However, I am reminded of the notion of Lyotard that "it is not our business to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable that cannot be presented" (81). The video that I created dealt with the way in which nostalgia represents itself in a post-critical object and its relationship to an ahistorical sublime and the resulting role of sadism and fetishism in that relationship. In this paper, I look back at not only the process of creating this post-critical object, but also lay out the theoretical framework of my post-critical object.

The looking back I have managed in my post-critical object, the video entitled "Nostalgic Cuts: Some Sublibinal Divide", is linked to the sort of nostalgia that looks back on and represents a certain time in the memory. The time that I kept looking back to was not in my own memory, but the historical memory of events that have been called sublime. Specifically I was drawn to the sublime images described during the French Revolution. For instance, throughout my video, the looping imagery of various types of guillotines skip the initial "establishing" shots of a recognizably consistent form. It not only introduces the viewer to fetishistic fragments but also to what may have come before. My gallows are a type of post-critical nostalgia that mimics Marx's alienation: surrounding oneself with fetish objects. However, my guillotine fetishism, and the motif of sadism, entails a severing of the body that replaces my nostalgic cuts (the references to the historical sublime, the French Revolution) with a real a-historical "sublime sentiment, which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain." (Lyotard)

This ahistoric sublime can be best represented using the notion of montage/collage, which is also what I relied on in developing my film. According to Sergei Eisenstein, "The essence of cinema does not lie in the images, but in the relations between the images!" (172). Jacques Aurmont concurs with Eisenstein but also claims that montage is derived from a "bulk of work taking place after shooting in the editing stage." At the same time that I was introducing images of guillotines into my video, I was also cutting my video. Not only was there the initial editing process of cutting and placing individual images in a sequence, there was the recutting (severing) of the original film, which also reflected a layering of montage and collage. The connections among the images were created and then severed so that the final result was that of instability and indeterminacy. I selected the images, and placed them beside each other, but the "result of this willful 'economy of means' is that there is no need for the film to produce explicit meanings; much of the work is then done in the spectator's mind as he 'processes' the associations" (Aurmont, 167).

In turn, the spectator is both faced with the sublibinal divide that is presented in their view of the video and faced with the "looking back" that underlies the associational images embedded in memory. To use a Marxist metaphor, the product that the worker (viewer) produces becomes alien to him and the only way in which he can relate to that object (the video) is via consuming it (making it his own). Just as Marx argues that it is alienation that creates commodity fetishism, I would argue that nostalgia of the viewer relies on fetishes. Our desires are reflected in what objects we feel attachment to; by revealing my own fetishes in my film, the viewer is faced with looking back at his own fetishes.

The nostalgia that the viewer experiences is similar to the "assemblage of movement-images as constituting an indirect image of time" that Deleuze describes (30). By interrupting actions and images with cutting and pasting of video, there is an interruption of the natural flow of time. This is similar to the cutting and pasting we do in our mind when reorganizing our nostalgic memories. Deleuze points out that "time remains an indirect image which is born from the organic composition of movement images, but the interval, as well as the whole takes on a new meaning." By playing with time and the relationship of various images to one another, the space of nostalgic moments can be reorganized in a sublibinal fashion (37).

This new meaning that Deleuze talks about is similar to the third meaning described by Barthes. The third, or obtuse meaning, "disturbs" the viewer, and the punctum, which he develops in Camera Lucida, wounds the viewer. The stabbing or wounding from the third meaning is similar to the effect that the leap from one movement-image to another has. Ulmer points out that the gag (which in my case would be the sadist imagery and text) "names the fading of the subject and the emergence of the body of desire" (50). In my video, I wanted the viewer's subjectivity to fade, and their own body of desire, their own post-critical nostalgia, to emerge through the movement from one cut to another.

I agree with Ulmer that if "commodity fetishism is the question, then the camera is the answer." In doing cultural studies, the camera allows one to become aware of one's own fetishes and nostalgic attachments. The question now in cultural studies is how to represent the object of study in a critical text. One device that many in digital studies use is the compositional pair of collage/montage. However, it is not just the poetics of collage/montage that delivers the post-critical object. The theory of collage/montage helps to bridge the critical divide.

However, this critical divide can only be approached if it is willing to be seen. We may have the theory, but not the inclination. According to Guy Debord, "the spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life." Just as in the French Revolution, the terror, the horror, the sublime gallows were the spectacle that occupied the masses. The very attempt to avoid their own death allowed a perverse obsession with the public death-act, the ultimate spectacle.

However, what in our culture is a non-nostalgic representation of the sublime, a current sublimity, which we can address as a post-critical object? The sublime event is what our consciousness cannot formulate, however, a case can be made that the sublime is an event that exists in only a "looking back" temporal pose. Perhaps the sublime always has a nostalgic quality in that we have to reformulate it to make it comprehensible (and thus a modern object.)

Even though there may not be a direct experience of the sublime that can be immediately conveyed, the collage/montage compositional approach can separate the sublime from a nostalgic context. Debord points out that "When the real world changes into simple images, simple images become real beings and effective motivations of a hypnotic behavior" (#18). Perhaps the viewer of a video puts people in a more susceptible mood for becoming aware of the viewer's fetishism.

From a cultural studies perspective we have to acknowledge that our cultural is visual, the prime consuming medium being the television. One of the images I used in my video is of a guillotine with a woman waiting for a blade, but the blade is a television set. So often in our culture, we argue that the television set is just as deadly as the blade of the guillotine. However, this image also represents the complex nature of our cultural fetish--we acknowledge its deadliness and yet are willing participants. From fashion, to politics, to education, to emerging technology, television serves as the object by which we define most of our reality. As the Talking Heads have sung:

I'm looking and I'm dreaming for the first time
I'm inside and I'm outside at the same time
And everything is real
Do I like the way I feel? ...
Television made me what I am ...
(I'm a) television man.

However, as Jean Baudrillard points out, we no longer are in the society of the spectacle--our medium is no longer easily discernible (54). We have merged with the television and become the television man. However, this television man, even when he acts, succumbs to both the principled non-actions of the spectator and the spectacle. Marx spoke of the degradation of being into having, where creative praxis is reduced to the mere possession of an object, rather than its imaginative transformation, and where need for the other is reduced to greed of the self. This greed of the self that those in cultural studies are trying to address can only be grasped in terms of the implosion of spectator and spectacle. They are not being dragged off to the gallows and the impending blade--they gladly lay their heads to gaze up at the television.

According to Agamben, praxis is what produces a concrete effect. However, the alienation of the viewer/worker/producer isn't due to an inability to produce a concrete effect, but due the fact that, in the age of simulation, the effect is not clear (71). This is where the nostalgia for the real, the authentic, the true comes in. The viewer who watches a video must have a fetishism in mind when faced with the terror that occurs as the result of loss of the real. We, just as the movement-image on the screen, become frozen in motion.

This is partly why Agamben claims:

Aesthetics, then, in a way performs the same task that tradition performed before its interruption: knotting up against the broken thread in the plot of the past, it resolves the conflict between old and new... this being that man has lost himself in time and must find himself again, and for whom therefore at every instant his past and future are at stake, is unable to live (110).

We want connections to the past, especially in wanting to make sense of the real. We cling to our family photos and videos, not because they simulate the past, but because they are entrances into a nostalgic reorganization. As teachers, our students resist any challenge to their current ideology because they cling to their own fragmented nostalgic notions. We are layers upon layers of nostalgic moments and the real terror is the loss of those moments.

However, as Lyotard points out, the post-critical embraces the unrepresentable, even if it means facing the terror of loss (81). Whether it is the loss of the image, the loss of the body part, the loss of the memory, the post-critic is aware, if not prepared. Instead of clinging to the organizational forms of the past, the post-critic formulate rules of "what will have been done" (81).

In my video, I use fetish-suggestive images because fixating on a certain object, often a body part, is related to the desire of a post-critical object. These images speak of a certain relationship of nostalgia to the sublime. I was also interested in presenting sadism, which serves as a paralogy to the post-critical notion of the mixture of pleasure and pain. According to Laura Mulvey, a fetish can be described as anything that substitutes for and symbolizes the loss of a desired object (8). The image on the screen for the viewer is not real, and so the loss of the real is considered a threat. Not just a fetishist, the spectator is also a voyeur and therefore, according to Mulvey, a sadist. However, the obsession with objects, especially parts of the body, could be seen as a nostalgic avoidance of the larger, and harder to deal with, notion of the sublime. The concept of the gaze, especially the gaze of the sadist who cannot deal with any notion of loss of the real, is interesting in terms of the claim that the spectator is devoid of praxis. The gaze is therefore of a frustrated sadist, unable to act.

According to Laura Kipnis, this traditional feminist film-theorist view that Mulvey represents has consequences to the notion of possible (third) meanings in post-critical video. Kipnis encourages women to say "fuck you" to both the believers in and the male gaze itself (10). In my own video I played with the notion of the male gaze by voyeuristically filming men and women, re-appropriating sexually charged fetish images, and imploding the concept of the gaze in general by re-filming my footage as it played on the computer screen more than once.

However, much as I enjoy playing around with the antagonism of Kipnis to the male gaze, I cannot as easily dismiss the notion of sadism in the gaze of the spectator. The desire to sever, to reorganize the images presented to oneself, to possess the fetish-objects, seems to result, to some degree, from a sadist experience. One way to counter this sadism, this resistance, is to be open to the wounding that occurs due to the third meaning.

In the editing room, I also acted on my sadist impulses, cutting and merging disparate images unlike like anything I have seen in the world. I took a certain delight in deleting each discarded movement-image, aware that I was the master of my domain. Yet, my editing itself almost eradicated the gaze in the first place. My footage was no longer the result of peering behind windows, but the montage of many moments of voyeurism until no one moment was seen by the original eye. In effect, the sadist wins over the voyeur.

The production of such a video involves encountering within oneself personal fetishes and associations. The first step involves identifying objects that have meaning, that pulls one towards them. They turn into my objects, my people, my colors, and my sounds. As I possessed this images I found it harder and harder to let go of them, even when it is time to "trash" them. The transition from spectator to creator of a video introduced a new praxis. Every time I watched my video, I could not view it with the eye of the spectator--whether from the lack of critical distance caused by the urge to fix one more thing or from knowing every single scene. The camera perhaps distances oneself from the object, but through the re-viewing process that goes along with editing, the distance becomes negotiable. In fact, at the end of the process the lack of distance from the object was almost oppressive. I felt like the woman lying on the guillotine, but on my television/blade was an unending showing of my video.

Part of the reason writing this paper is so hard is due to this lack of critical distance. I am attached to my object--my video has become my fetish. I know every part of it, I have birthed it, and I have reorganized it in my mind so that it has no identity outside of myself. It isn't a simulation of anything for me and it is a thing in itself, but it is an object that has become molded to my body. Perhaps that is the ultimate goal of doing such a video, achieving a sort of third eye, that no matter what, you can't rid of. However, hopefully the two eyes right underneath will be able to open again.

Despite all this, I am a truly nostalgic person, and this is partly why I cannot embrace the social-epistemic desire to change the world (through our students)--I like television, I like my gaze, and I tend to embrace my fetishism. However, I also am attracted to the notion of the sublime. For me, the nostalgia for a historical sublime, the French Revolution, cradles my nostalgia that seeks to surpress the ahistorical sublime. By creating my film, I had the pleasure, although I didn't come close to supplying reality, to invent some allusions to that will have been.

Beyond all this, I really am making up this rationalization as I go along. I selected the fetish/sadist imagery before I ever connected the theory to the images. The genesis of this video/paper was truly associational, stemming from the sublime imagery of a woman who appears to be in the process of being seduced but instead ends up getting her head cut off by the seducer/executioner in a guillotine. This scene was the opening of the movie about the Marquis de Sade, Quills, and this sublime image wounded me so that no matter what images I tried to put in the video (whether my cat, a student, or a rave scene), the rogue head falling into the basket kept popping back up. My fetish was a sublime moment, one that I could play over and over in my mind. Later I would finally choose the song, "Where is my mind?" by the Pixies as one track of sound for my video, and the rolling head in my mind seemed to be asking the same question. The result is a video that makes me squirm when I watch it, and unsettles me from the opening image to the end. The content, by itself, wounds me so, I have a hard time putting it aside to get to the theory. However, in making up a rationalization to go with my video, I feel as if my fetish and sadism has been sanitized. My images make sense in light of the readings I refer to, and the nostalgia of my mind, which merges with the sublime image that won't leave my mind, seems acceptable. The wound might not go away, but this paper might then serve as a Band-Aid.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. The Man Without Content. Stanford UP, 1999.

Aurmont, Jacques. Montage Eisenstein. U of Indiana P, 1987.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations, NY: Semiotext(e), 1983.

Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Red and Black, 1970.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. U of Minnesota P, 1989.

Ellis, Bret Easton. Less Than Zero, NY: Penguin, 1986.

Kipnis, Laura. Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender, and Aesthetics. U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, U of Minnesota P, 1999.

Ulmer, Gregory. " 'A Night at the Text': Roland Barthes's Marx Brothers." Yale French Studies. No. 73 (1987): 38-57.