FATAL VISIBILITY 1
Introduction and Letter 1
[This and forthcoming posts are taken from my book, ‘Fatal Visibility’]
Fatal Visibility -
A disordered essay, in the form of letters to an imaginary friend, on a certain visual culture, its ecstasies and its vicissitudes, from the perspective of personal experience and obsessive contemplation.
Artemisia Gentileschi, ‘Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting’, 1638–9 (screenshot by author)
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These letters on images, on art, are addressed to anyone who reads them. Whatsmore, they are addressed to those who will never read them. They are addressed to the fragile yet earnest enigma we, if we are inclined towards a descriptive project, might call Time.
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Letter 1
[ A strange kind of overture; painting and cinema; trauma and image; visuality and Presence; Sight and non-Sight, etc]
It is strange to be writing about the cinema. My relationship to it involves so many disquieting elements, personally. These will become available to the page where relevant and necessary, but I will say here that there is a considerable dark side to my interest in the medium which has impacted upon that interest's compulsively expressed formations and the particular need I have felt over the years to ‘overcome’ the cinema, as it were. I do not consider myself a cinephile, even though I might at times sound like one. I have no interest in offering a chronological account of my engagement with the cinema, any more than I would wish to attempt a chronological history of the medium itself. What will follow in this peculiar, hopefully at times interesting commentary will be a disordered series of observations, there being no ‘point’ to any of this, no ‘justifiable’ reason why I should share any of this information or any of these thoughts, other than it might, for me, operate as a form of therapy. For me, the cinema is ultimately indissociable from all the reasons I might wish to disappear. Yet, at the same time, the cinema carries inside it a seductive and fascinating commentary upon light, upon movement, upon Being, in a sense. My orientation towards the cinema was always painterly and architectonic more than, for instance, plot-driven (and indeed, I would go home after seeing a movie and attempt to draw images from it); and I think the movies that attracted me most in the initial stages were those which seemed to most dramatically exploit those elements of the medium which I found so seductive and compelling. There was something about the concentration of movement in light and colour inside those rectangular parameters which impressed me with its other-worldliness, which I found uncanny but at the same time, deceptive. There was a paradox in the experience of watching cinema, I found. My vulnerability was transferred to the screen but I would then, nonetheless, be capable of feeling embarrassment for how the movie managed that vulnerability. It was precisely the artifice of film that I think, retrospectively, I found most relevant. As a young child, I had already been exposed to the often considerable difference between the way people present themselves and the way they ‘are’, between the experienced reality of everyday life and its systemic conversion into an empire of Appearance, between the appearance of politics and the politics of appearance. The cinema was an organised aestheticisation of these conflicts. Its fascination lay in its domination by material Time, in its demonstration of movement, light, colour as forces. Whatsmore, its very presence on the screen determined the behaviour of those in the audience, which meant, provisionally, I was temporarily safe from the dangerous person who, at the time, I made take me to movies. An extravagant narcissist, an actual abuser, even, could be ‘put in their place’, as it were, by the spectacle of film. These must disturbingly be counted amongst the origins of my interest in film; it potentially overwhelmed a dangerous personality, at least temporarily. The cinema became both an effective mirror of the circulation of roles and appearances elsewhere in daily life and a dynamic counterpoint to the disorder of that circulation.
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I am very attracted to airports where there is a pleasing sense of homelessness, where passengers are moving from one place to another; everybody is going somewhere, there is an extraordinary feeling of non-fixedness. In a way, I think there was something similar I perceived in the cinema, where everything is in movement; even if there is stillness on the screen, the film itself is still moving. Nothing is stable in the cinema and this becomes its paradoxically defining characteristic. This means that things, anything, can potentially change, that identities and relationships are not fixed. It means that Movement itself becomes a principle of identification and clarity. Cinema, in a sense, is travel but as such, it can demonstrate the sameness that has been imposed in different places. Whilst it can operate as an agent of liberation for the frozen moment, it can likewise, through its affinity with the politics of mobility, lead paradoxically into a documentation of a perpetual Present. The screen is absorbed in movement which oddly affines with the stillness of the screen itself. In this way, the cinema (the medium itself, I mean) becomes a sort of protracted essay upon the (im)possibility of movement. Each frame of a given film becomes a kind of witness to an inherently doomed project of moving Time, when, in fact, Time is determining the process and the image is an article of evidence in the trial of movement as freedom. The cinema is a free expression of congenital unfreedom, a tattoo of timelessness upon the flesh of Time, a love letter to the present from an unreliably projected future. The determinateness of Time, its inescapability is central to the energy of the cinema. From early on, I was seduced by the sense of replaceability offered by the consistent movement of the frames and the editing. Images change into each other without trace. One image literally disappears as another appears without any space between them. As a viewer, one is vulnerable in one's irresponsibility for the appearance of the film. One exercises no ‘control’ in the way one does, for instance, by reading at one's own pace, or choosing for how long to look at a painting. Of course, one can choose to get up and walk out of the cinema; but even there, the film continues moving. The cinema also became associated with places, with particular cinemas and their design. The very fact that a place was a cinema gave it a certain strangeness, as though it occupied a psychological space somewhere between a metropolis and a ghost town, almost as though the chairs, curtains, carpet etc were there for the film more than for the audience. Nobody lived there. We knew that the film could have been playing to an empty house. The situation of the film, its distribution to different cinemas, its publicity in newspapers, the decorative affects in the cinema lobbies, etc all became part of the existential intervention that constituted that film. There was always a sense of repetition in cinema, even if I had not already seen the particular film. It was re-presentation in an almost pure sense. The urgency of the film, of the projection lies in the disarming of the instant, as such. It is the capacity for repetition that gives the experience of viewing cinema its identity. As in an airport, the travel is always to the same places, however many places the planes visit, because the world has its parameters and the cinema exists in time and space. It also exists inside particular economic and political conditions and inhabiting different moments in history. The cinema is constituted, like the Encyclopaedia, by a fantasy of an Everything; but it is a suicidal fantasy, because the history it seeks to chronicle offers nothing but itself. The cinema expresses a society that has nowhere to go but the warehouse of its fantasies of repetition. The cinema manifests at once the liberation of everyday time from a politics of sameness and the politics of everyday sameness that fetishises liberation. It is at once the mobilisation of visual presence and the presentist visuality of mobilisation in the context of a society which disproportions the faculty of Sight.
The cinema was always a social and economic agent, as well as an aesthetic one and the former themselves would be aestheticised. The advertisements for movies in newspapers, etc used to replicate the font used in the poster art if not even in the titles of the movie itself, these fonted titles appearing above the name of the cinema or cinemas, followed by session times. The circulation of the movies fascinated me almost as much as the cinema itself and was in fact, in some ways, inseparable from it. Again, it was the assertiveness of their existence, the self-insistence of their visibility, as well as the collusion of cinemas, distributors, etc with the seeming pervasiveness of their exhibitibility that signalled for me that they, the movies, were in turn collusive with a version of reality surgically grafted to the Visible; it was this which awed me, as though existence were contingent upon the visible and hence, if one shut one’s eyes, one might be free. Yet, I was compelled to watch and continue watching, the unliveability of things becoming a perverse novelty under the sinister sign of commercial regulation of time and location.
I would paste the clippings of these entries into a scrapbook, using a paste whose aroma could so easily have contradicted the purest visuality of the exercise, were it not that this particular aroma gave itself, licensed itself rather, to a visualist culture the way a scar might be seen to license itself to the skin against which it appears. In my memory, I can see this aroma to the extent a non-visual sense may well have no right to be seen. What our culture has violated is the right to be unseen, the escape from the Visible, the intention to present without being present. So many of my memories fall together as visual artefacts without, in some parallel universe, standing together as dynamics of the Impresent. I will not apologise for the incoherence of these observations; I will not accept that we must be there for Presence; and I will mobilise all the philosophically criminal elements of my own existence to damage the tyrannical specifism of Visibility in flight. This is not a manifesto against images or against the Visible; let us be clear. This writing is not a cloud of discontented ideas searching for a needless fire to rain upon with all the fruitlessness and tedium of a steel flower. I am not attempting to damage the image; I am attempting to elicit a relationship between the image and the dangers of being; the tenuousness of gravity, the sententiousness of reason, the cruelly unimpressionable life-force of undefined intent.
The cinema intervened in my life at that time, I could say. I knew that as long as we were inside the cinema, that person would not have the privacy to abuse. What was on screen was also, in a literal way, larger than they were, albeit more transitory. However, I have come to feel that it was precisely with its indifference that the cinema protected me; and this is one of the paradoxes of the medium, its vitality and its seductiveness exist inside a certain benign relationship to the world. The screen is essentially passive, although it allows, in its passivity, for the presence of artifice as well as the artifice of presence. The audience are passive in emulation of the screen’s passivity. We are there to believe images are not real. A crucial part of the medium’s persuasiveness lies in its sense of insecurity; moments need to be linked to each other, sounds and images, etc are all in collusion if not simultaneously in conflict. The ultimate force of the film is inseparable from the individual vulnerability of each element. The cinema is a utopia of audiovisual communalist collaboration. It offers the impression that sounds and images, light and colours, etc can always, in some way, work together. The honesty of a given movie is (fancifully) measurable by its reconciliation to its own untruth; the more ‘honest’ movie is the one that makes no assumption to truth. Let us not idealise honesty, however; it is a tool, like the film projector or for that matter, reality itself. (Reality [or truth] is like a hammer; to be useful, it needs to be handled with precision.) I would like to talk to you much more about the ‘nature’ of cinema, as I’ve experienced it. As I look back, words and ideas of my present mind scatter across the force of memories like tears across the cheeks of urgency. I know what I experienced but Language will bend us to its pleasures. The cinema has become part of a certain social and personal history and as such, it is indissociable from some of the darker reasons I needed it in the first place. My own relationship to it became compulsive and troubled as a consequence of the earlier circumstances under which I became familiar with it and its rituals. There is honestly something about its passive specularity combined precisely with an aggressive self-presentism that makes me need to exorcise it. I resent that the cinema never learned that it lived in a world it didn't make. Unlike Painting, which is at once the determination of representation and the representation of determination, the Cinema has no internal dialectic beyond its own specular apologetics. Now, let us be clear. It is precisely the surface of cinema, even more than that of painting, which stands against timelessness; it is of the instant paradoxically in its perpetual transition. Painting has a different relationship to itself; its paradox is different - its immediacy is inseparable from its history. Where Painting has undergone different transformations to assure the immediacy of History, as well as to historicise the politics of immediacy, Cinema has assured the artifice of immediacy by mediating artifice in history. In the cinema, there is a superficiality (not in a bad sense) that is seductive. In painting, the surface is, in a sense, endless. There is an hypnotic quality there to the surface whether or not it colludes with illusion, but in the cinema, it is the ephemeral quality precisely which fascinates. The cinematic image relates to the darkness; it relates to the necessity of Time. Paintings are not necessarily ‘without’ movement but movement is not a property of the medium. They exist as time passes away; they bear witness to movement, whereas the cinema obviates and assures movement. In a sense, movement almost precedes the image in the case of cinema. The cinema proposes that movement, by its nature, should be seen, whereas a painting is seen without a necessary concession to movement. Light and shadow, etc exist there independently of movement, as such. The cinematic image, however, is borne of a certain philosophy of movement which marries it to chronic visibility. Although Painting is naturally visual, it doesn't participate in the rendering of visuality as movement or even necessarily as Presence.
Johannes Vermeer, ‘The Art of Painting’, 1666–68 (screenshot by author)
A painting can, after all, be touched in a way a film, as such, can’t. But to return to the medium’s ability to overwhelm that person, I did feel temporarily safe in that space, which, in a way, is intriguing precisely because of the darkness. I think that I absorbed something during those experiences that I have never really been able to overcome. The image ostensibly protected me but oddly, I also came to feel responsible for the image. This is something that has complicated my relationship to the cinema ever since; and it has probably informed so many of my impressions of the medium and its different practitioners. In a strange way, the cinema paradoxically both makes you aware of your own physical presence but at the same time, liberates you from the culture of having a body. You can’t touch or kiss a cinematic image. There is not the same physical relationship with a painting which exists as a tangible object even though, in a museum, one may be disallowed actually touching it, or a book one can hold. The cinema then is an agent of alienation from the visual at the same time as it almost overdetermines the viewer’s physical sensations. It would be very interesting, from this perspective, to explore the world of on-site sex in porn cinemas, patrons hooking up with each other, etc which was quite common in the seventies. The ways in which people in society are trained and conditioned to relate physically are, in a way, disrupted in the context of a cinematic viewing; couples in the darkness join forces in their alienation, sexuality itself becoming a patron. The viewer is disarmed in their very presence. They are derealised by their own overdetermining stimuli. The images on the screen require the audience as physical witnesses to their overpresence which in turn disallows participation. I will have more to say about the audiences at drive-ins, or patronising home video, etc but in the cinema, when I discovered it, part of the pleasure lay I its effective disallowance of participation in so far as one felt oddly removed from its meaningfulness. One participated by watching but one was a voyeur of one’s own disarmament and this was the compulsion of the medium - it made alienation seductive. The cinema involves a fantasy of being without a body at the same time as experiencing what it is to have one. The experience of physicality is ‘liberated’ into a state of (almost) pure visuality or visual awareness so that one can feel one’s alienation carried through a passage of light and shadow.
There is a certain sensation experienced when blood is taken from me. I think it is inseparable from both a sexual and a visual excitement. There is something very paradoxically generous in the taking of blood, in my experience. I am attached to thoughts of my own loss of blood and indeed, to thoughts of my own death. In the visual realm, in the circulation of images, it is what is lost that I find most compelling. What a visual image removes from the world is for me a defining characteristic of its personality. Loss is a principle of Art. It is precisely, it is possibly only, the Missing which allows itself to be represented; and let us be clear, questions of ‘representation’ are uncanny. To re-present implies a (sense of) repetition, an admission to a doubled presence.
Presentation, Presence or even the Present itself, are never finished. Just like the removal of blood, the removal of the Present, the removal of immediacy, which is the central leitmotif of what we call Art, implicates a world both anticipated and forgotten. The excision of Presence from the ideal(isation) of Time is what makes Art both the avenging angel of general ambiguity and the grand inquisitor of freedom. Art, at once the culture of the desperate and the despair of culture. It exists inside Time and inside the impossibility of everyday transcendence as the transcendence of everyday conceptions of impossibility.
I wanted to write here about my own living with images and these letters will hence be very personal. I get obsessed by the politics of visibility and the mediation of images in a social space where there is a disproportionate emphasis philosophically, politically, anthropologically, upon the faculty of Sight. One needs to investigate what it means to see, what kind of relationship not just to the ‘visual’ (or ‘visible’) world but to images themselves is afforded by sight. As a ‘seeing’ person (one who is not ‘blind’), what do I see? The assumption (in both the mental and physical senses of the word) of Sight conditions a sense of Presence and what it means to be in place; it conditions the understanding of movement, of the physical world including the psychodynamics of Light. It conditions an anthropological politics of Being but also of Nothing. What does Sight owe to the blind, I wonder? What does the cinema owe to the blind? Fantastically, it could be that they have deferred Sight to those unseeing enough to appreciate it. If Sight is a gift, it arrives with the responsibility of powerlessness. With great powers of vision comes great vulnerability of presence. We are prisoners of what we see but we are well-fed prisoners. The true void lies in the continuous visual world which has been accumulated from the visibilisation of Need. Darkness is a giant rationalisation of imagery as Possibility. There is only a living darkness, which always exists as a castle of possibility and infinitude. Down the hall of mirrors mediating the terminal circulation of the visible - that way lies Death. It is an impossibility to see oneself. Mirrors and self-portraits are expressions of this impossibility. But it is an impossibility which conditions the world of the seeing. One does not look into the darkness, one attempts to see with it. Let us not be mistaken. It is not that darkness is absent from the visible; it is an ancestor. I am trying to find a way to live with Sight as my history; I am trying to come to terms with precisely what is unreasonable about Visibility with a committed perversion of Sight. The disappearance that lies implicit in the Visible has been too well guarded by the frenzy of accumulation. Can Sight and non-Sight be reconciled? What would such a project involve? Images cannot escape a politics of revelation, but nor can Appearance transcend artifice. In my way, I am a nihilist, a nihilistic aesthete, because I wish to document my own perverse commitment to a visuality and an anthropology of the Visible, the culmination of which is ultimately Death. I wish to try and describe Sight as a kind of suicide; a strategy of overdetermining Presence which can only be fatal; a strange artificialisation of the malice of Presence. From out of the fog emerges the storm; and the raining night will never become too dark lest Death itself become lost in its own foreshadowing. The existential possibilities images try to articulate act as meteors of the visible of which even dreams are afraid. Sight and Blindness, ability and disability, are liberations from each other, a dialectic cruel enough to strategise absence as a political force, unstable enough to attempt resolution. Sight is an inimitable, vulnerable, irresponsible specimen washed up on the beaches of Blindness, with no hope for survival because it had only hope for survival. What I am trying to describe is what the relationship to images becomes at the point of problematising the distinction between sight and blindness. This is a very personal project because I am involving and directly describing experiences of my own with images as someone who has absorbed them, tried to ‘reproduce’ them in my memory, etc and who has assumed their place and their resonance. I make no claim to ‘objectivity’. I am an example of someone who has lived with images under certain conditions. What interests me is what is possible for an image as well as what images are possible; and what is no longer possible when Possibility, as such, has become the condition of representation. What it is to be visible to the point of fatality, what makes the prospect of visibility compelling, these are amongst my interests; but also what it is to be an object and how that correlates to the Visible in a society which elevates the faculty of Sight almost pathologically.
The cinema offers a nihilism of Presence. The relationship between the images and sounds, the seductiveness of the screen, etc can only end. The driving force of the medium as experienced is its cultivation in a blank screen. Every frame moves inexorably towards the end of the film, accumulating an imposing sense of there-ness. This is, of course, unlike a painting which doesn't ‘change’, which has no trajectory and exists in the same form in the museum when all the lights are out and the visitors have all left. That a movie goes everywhere and nowhere, that it is driven by its own grafting onto Time, this is what fascinates.
In front of a cinema screen, one feels constituted, maybe even defined, by one's passivity; but one is compelled by the mutability of the material, film running through a projector and emerging as light, etc. It is likewise the disappearance of the images from the screen which defines them; they are defined by their temporality. The cinema is Time fetishised to the point of its implosion as image.
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