Things Your Mother Never Though She Taught You

I'm getting sleepy... Very sleepy... ow, the movie is about to start.

I am ensconced in the darkness of my neighborhood cinema… this time it is at what once was the Famous Players Paramount but is now a Cinéma Banque Scotia Montréal.

The CGI animation announcing the Feature Presentation starts up, but it is designed to play as if the projector is started cold and needs to get to speed as the film runs through it. The footage flickers slowly at first and then faster until the strobing of the flicker effect is no longer visible once the “projector has attained full speed.”

It gets me thinking of the butterfly shutter blades running before the stream of light; it reminds me of the flickering light show of a moth drawn to an open light bulb. Is the moth drawn by the heat of the light or the interplay of light on the faceting of the multi-lenticular structure of its eyes? Could the moth be experiencing pleasure from the lightshow in its visual cortex?

Doesn't this resonate with peek-a-boo? Now you see it and now you don’t. The image is there and then it’s not. Fort-Da. Fort-Da. Fort-Da. 48 times a second. The alternation between a pleasureable (agreeable state) and an unpleasant (disagreeable state) that Lacan makes out as a “matter of an intersection between a play of occultation and an alternative scansion of two phonemes.” But contrary to the usual conception of Freudian pleasure, where pleasure happens in seeing the mother and displeasure in her absence, perhaps the pleasure exists elsewhere. Freud goes on at length at the erotogenic pleasurable aspects of sucking (for its own sake, i.e. a pacifier without milk) —perhaps a parallel sensorial mechanism (pleasurable machinism) can be extended to sight for its own sake without involving a subject?

According to Guattari’s reading of Lacan, there seems to exist a desire mechanism in the Fort-Da game where “the wait for the return of the object is constituted as an “anticipating provocation,” which takes form “in the symbolic dyad of two elementary exclamations.” In playing the Fort-Da refrain, the projector becomes a producer of desire (negative affect) during the black out and a generator of affect during the instances of light. This creates a genderless masturbatory “compulsion to repeat” that is checked or contained by the plane of content. Although most readers would dismiss the shutter effect as too rapid an effect to be sensed (even subliminally) as a Fort-Da process, Oliver Sacks has shown through clinical study of his own practice that certain patients with Parkinsonism generate and react to vibratory stimuli many times faster than the shutter of the cinematic apparatus.

I thus foreground the flickering of the shutter as a possible localized sensorial excitation capable of autonomic arousal: could the Fort-Da of the shutter flicker be the generator of affect that generates the dynamic autonomic response that makes the film so eminently watchable and differentiates this medium from all others?

The strobing of the shutter could very well be a Fort-Da refrain that runs as a bass line foundation to the parallel polyphony of narrative content, of the dialogue, music and effect tracks and visual stylistics of the film: the (usually underplayed) affective event of the field of expression that runs parallel to the just as important enunciative assembly of the plane of content.

I wrote this as part of a paper for Film Theory this term. In writing the paper, I felt like a non-swimmer in deep water with partially inflated floaters on my arms. Too many new words, too many new ideas—it's like writing in a foreign language one is just learning.

The paper actually has references:

Massumi, Brian. “Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible.” Hypersurface Architecture. Ed. Stephen Perella, Architectural Design (Profiles no. 133), vol. 68, no. 5/6, May-June 1998.
Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. “General Introduction to Psycho-analysis.” In The Major Works of Sigmund Freud. Freud. Vol. 54 of the Great Books of the Western World. Robert Maynard, ed. in chief. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1952.
Sacks, Oliver. Awakenings. New York: Vintage. 1973.
Massumi, Brian. ”The Autonomy of Affect” in Movement, Affect, Sensation: Parables for the Virtual. Durham. Duke University Press: 2002.

Agent 86's Cone of Present-ness(Kaos' answer to the Cone of Silence)

Bonjour les amis,

I went to see the new Vittorio Rossi play the other night... an autobiographical melodrama about his father dying from Alzheimer’s. For me, the most interesting aspect of the play was the portrayal of the dissolution of the linkages of memory. As memories went off-line, from the latest to the earliest, the present refused to come to be because that which allows linkage to the past is no longer there. How can I walk forward if there is no back-there left to walk from? As time moves on, the gap between the actual present and the front edge of the past gets wider and wider to the point where there's no past, just a perpetual unfolding of present without future. Without the immediate past, the immediate future (read present) cannot take form; without a succession of immediate pasts there can be no actualizations of presents (perpetual becomings).

This brought me to think of Deleuze’s peaks of present and how to visualize them. The past can never become the present in the same way that the future can never be the present; in this conception/presentation, past and future become present at infinity and for zero duration. In considering the present in an asymptotic relationship to the past/future, I feel like I can see the linkage between the paradoxes of Zeno, ideas about constant movement and change, the intensity in touch, Deleuze’s formulation of past/future and the present, etc. I came up with the following figure in trying to make sense of the cone image and it started making sense.

infinity

The vertical is a measure of present-ness (i.e. the quality of an instant of time to be the present) that continually “scrubs” the horizontal line that denotes time passage-ness—like working the cursor on an Avid timeline. The left of the ordinate “quantifies” past-ness and the right, future-ness. As the circle (denoting any present whatever) scrubs left or right, the past-ness and present-ness keep moving alongside to keep up, but the curves depicting present-ness as a function of past-ness or future-ness will never touch at a static definite present; past-ness and future-ness could fuse into a present in infinity but infinity does not happen, so neither does the present. The present exists as a discontinuity within the continuum of past and future; the present is an ever-becoming peak that never actually happens. The present cannot be reconstituted with immobile sections because it is never static—as a continuous succession of events of zero duration it is always in the process of becoming or un-becoming, always moving without ever having become, except at a dsicontinuity called infinity.

The theme of movement seems to recur under different guises in the readings and I thought the drawing useful, but for all I know, it could be way off base. Feel free to comment.

Regards,

Felix

Ch-ch-changes

I think this little quote about change and transformation (by Jason, the main character in David Mitchell's novel, Black Swan Green), will tickle and titillate your thought processes, if not provoke them profoundly:

In the second mirror was a Gelatinous Cube. All face, no body, just twiggy limbs waving at its corners. By puffing out my cheeks I nearly doubled its size. No, answered the Cube. You can only change superficial features. An Inside-You must stay unaltered to change the Outside-You. To change Inside-You you'd need an Even-More-Inside-You, who'd need an Inside-the-Even-More-Inside-You to change it. And on and on.

(249)

Besides being just a novelist, British writer David Mitchell is something else. I can't put a label on it, and if I do, I fear that something will lose its aura. I find it amazing how Mitchell smuggles philosophical language (not just ideas, mind you) into his story in a way that just works perfectly but completely alters the way the genre has been achieved heretofore. A great number of the accolades for this latest book Black Swan Green rant and rave about how wonderful it is and how it doesn't use gimmicks like Cloud Atlas did.
Gimmicks? How much sophistication do you need? Cloud Atlas was highly accessible. I think that these people are afraid of its political potency. If I had my way, I would use huge chunks of Cloud Atlas for manifesto material at political rallies.
As wonderful as it is, Black Swan Green is only a coming-of-age or bildungsroman. Cloud Atlas is much more than what it is. Which is what every book should be. I would say what it is is tranformative, in the way that that the Cube mirror in the carnival wants Jason to be inside himself.

Theo Jansen: Flexible geometries, movement, evolution

Hi All,

Yesterday's presentation on Dymaxion geometries made me think of two things: The second thing is the way we have started to study the brain, modeling it into a flexible geodesic sphere, and then stretching it and moving it enough to make it look like an individual's brain. I can show you cool pictures of that in class, but I cannot post them here yet as they are lab property!! From there on, we seek to define the difference and the similarities and etc.

But the more important idea that popped in my head was the the work of Artist/scienceist Theo Jansen, a sample of which you will see below.



It is of course importatnt to see his "animals" (as he calls them) in motion.



His objective is to have these "beasts" survive in nature.

I highly recommend that we watch This video

Cheers
Naj

Lesley Plumb's Audio Piece

Hi all,

I was reading Guatarri's Chaosmosis and fell upon a section that I thought was relevant and interesting to Lesley's audio piece she played for us on Thursday afternoon.

The passage in question comes from Chapter 1 entitled "On the Production of Subjectivity". I really enjoyed listening to the work and it's cool when something is "pleasing to the ear" but also resonates with the intellect, so here's the intellect: 

 

"In the domain of poetry, in order to detach itself, autonomise itself, culminate itself, creative subjectivity will tend to seize upon:

1. the sonority of the word, its musical aspect;

2. its material significations with their nuances and variants;

3. its verbal connections;

4. its emotional,intonational and volitional aspects;

5. the feeling of verbal activity in the active generation of a signifying sound, including motor elements of articulation, gesture, mime; the feeling of a movement in which the whole organism together with the activity and soul of the word are swept along in their concentric unity.

And it is in this last aspect, declares Bakhtin, that encompasses all the others.

 

Regards,

 

Felix

Faces that Launch...

I hope you don't read the title of this post as "Faces that Lunch!" A novel within a post about cinema and the senses would digress us for thousands of years, would be too much! ...like Deleuze's crystal images going too far in their self-production.

This post is about chemistry, registry, the buzz, immediacy and sharping (you have to watch me, sometimes I go too far with neologisms!), that occur within our experiences and memories...

How much does this discussion divert all of you and me from the work that we have been doing so far, or from the readings and interrogations in which we will participate very soon? Not very far. Eventually, anyway. So have no fear.

Let us start by analyzing what Deleuze means in this segment from his Cinema 2: The Movement Image:

But increasingly, he came to say something quite different: the only subjectivity is time, non-chronological time grasped in its foundation, and it is we who are internal to time, not the other way round. That we are in time looks like a commonplace, yet it is the highest paradox. Time is not the interior in us, but just the opposite, the interiority in which we are , in which we move, live and change. [...] In the novel, it is Proust who says that time is not internal to us, but that we are internal to time, which divides itself in two, which loses itself and discovers itself in itself, which makes the present pass and the past be preserved.

(Cinema 2, 82)

Deleuze is, at this point, determined to make clear, to himself, and to us, what time is, and what the passage of time means, as it occurs about us, around us, and, in potentia, in us. If it occurs in us, it is as a virtual state. This does not mean that we don't see the bowl of pickles that we remember seeing someone eating pickles, that rainy day in September. However, those items will retain an element of trace in the memory. It might be a memory that is common to all of us, and might actually retain a sense of real commitment to the sensation of experience. However, because it is just a detail, and because that detail is not involved in flowing of time's passage, it is virtual, not actual. The actual involves a complex flow of events involving common subjects who experience the same events.

In a film, if I draw from Deleuze correctly, the actual will only reside if the events are objective. I understand the affection image is, as Deleuze states here, the virtual.

The actual is always objective, but the virtual is subjective: it was initially the affect, that which we experience in time; then time itself, pure virtuality which divides itself in two as affector and affected, 'the affection of self by self' as the definition of time.

(Cinema 2, 82-3)

The subjective "image" (in all its virtuality) is both raw material for other kinds of images, as well as a frightening blind spot, that is, and is not, a part of us - read one of Deleuze's last sentences in this section, which makes it very clear:

Subjectivity is never ours, it is time, that is, the soul or the spirit, the virtual.

(Cinema 2, 82-3)

Do Deleuze's action-images find their equivalence in actual-images? For now, I would say yes. Many definitions in Deleuze's writings are fluid, so a provisional equivalence is all that we can manage. As one or two of you have mentioned earlier, the import that Deleuze's writing brings, is different every time. Deleuze's definitions of actual and virtual are particularly hazy in this regard.

After having dispensed with that aside, let us continue. I find what is most interesting about this discussion of time and subjectivity is the very complex questions that intersubjectivity bring up. How can one individual, one person-image, or one group of people, with its or their integral experience, develop a common framework when only one of our placings of time is truly common to all. How can we all see the same face in one memory. How could the Spartans have all seen that famous face that launched a thousand ships? (I am being disingenuous and simplistic, of course, since obviously it was word of mouth and powerful leaders that literally launched these ships.) Be it word of mouth, vision, sight, or smell, how do we all experience the same thing? The very notion that this is possible (and the very dupe of it, since it involves a common, social and self-deception should make one angry)!

These are complex questions. Perhaps I live on a different, er, layer, than all of you, or perhaps not. It is a good and pleasant thing to live on the same layer of time, of memory (those are two different things, obviously, although, to a certain extent, Deleuze obfuscates these things). How, and at what point does "everyone's" (and that everyone is obviously very provisional) times merge?

I have always seen part of my pathetic role in existence is to try to scratch away the illusion, so that we don't always have to rely on an illusion that, when taken for granted, becomes a crutch or a dead thing. When it becomes a crutch, how does one deal with a disease like Alzheimer's, for instance? How much does awareness of such things change us? Is anyone up for doing a Deleuzian analysis of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949)? Of whose subjectivity are we part. Which Willy Loman? Is it possible to reach one particular branch of time, break it off, and make that branch real, if you will? These are highly speculative ideas, but, hopefully, thought-provoking, as well as being fruitful for your own inquiries.

Can someone operate a microcassette recorder?

Unfortunately, I can't make it to class on Thursday but I'd really like to hear Paul's lecture.
If anyone can operate a cassette recorder I can leave a microcassette recorder with fresh batteries and some tapes at the Cinema Office on Wednesday....
Perhaps this can become a weekly thing where we can then post these recordings as mp3s?
I mentioned this to Erin and she has no problems with the posting of lectures on the web.
Regards,
Felix

I Am Sitting in a Room

You can listen to or download Alvin Lucier's 1969 original recording of "I Am Sitting in a Room" at http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html

There's also an audio documentary on his work at the same link. Enjoy!

Paul Morley Words and Music scan

Hello everyone, my apologies for the terrible scans I sent you. I will distribute paper versions of the text in class tomorrow. Cheers, Paul

Paul Morley Words and Music

Hello everyone, I know this will seem like alot to read on top of the weekly readings for next week's class on audiovision, but it is really a great piece and, honestly, an easy read. I am sending you the first 63 pages of Paul Morley's fantastic book via e-mail today. It is a great piece to understand how to write on sound and engage more personally with it, beyond mere technicalities of pitch, wave, amplitude, and the likes. I am also very open to any suggestions you might have regarding specific things you want to see or hear during my class on september 20th. For now, I would also recommend you try thinking on sound and write a half page paragraph on a piece of music you think reflects some of the properties in sound Chion is discussing, or perhaps even just a particular piece that has your imagination wander in a different space-time frame of reference. You do not have to do this, but if you want to share your insight on a particular song or sound, feel absolutely free to do so. I will also conduct a little sound experiment for the first hour of the class or so before I actually engage with Chion, but I will not strictly stick to this text. Till tomorrow, Paul

Thanks for setting up this blog, Troy.

I was thinking of GD over the weekend... I had the good fortune of spending two days on a sailboat in the Thousand Islands. Friday evening was warm and a touch humid, yet the sky was clean and clear. Rather than get into my berth in the cabin I lay down in the cockpit to gaze at the starry night. There's virtually no light pollution where we were staying so I was free to stare wide-eyed at the celestial vault in all its magnificence... countless stars shimmering veiled by the gossamer fabric of the milky way. There was no wind; the boat had a very gentle and slow side to side roll to it on account of the wake coming in from the water beyond. Although, I could not feel the boat roll, I knew it was rolling because the stars above were changing position in relation to the mast. I was drifting off to sleep and in that state of semi-somnolence I couldn't figure out whether it was the boat or the celestial vault that was rolling. I thought of the first chapter of The Movement-Image. Why should the space be distinct from the movement? The vacuum created behind the movement changes the space in the same way that movement moves. Who gauges the frame of reference and whose subjectivity? When space is considered as an infinite expanse of homogeneous volume, isn't this the same type of quality we ascribe to time as a scientific constant throughout the universe? Homogeneous time and space are handy fabrications for the sake of analytical simplification. Space in its infinite dimension is not homogeneous and neither is time—just ask David Lynch, he'll tell you— and as we subdivide movement into smaller and smaller differentials of movement it becomes probability and the certainty of the subdivision is lost into nothingness. Ink on a sheet of white paper the shimmering of starlight on the darkness of deep space.

Welcome to Sensing Cinemas

This is a space for everyone to discuss, comment, and question the readings. Since the readings are a challenge and everyone cannot always meet outside of class this is a space for everyone to help each other out with the concepts in the films and text for the class.