Greg Hainge

Unfixing the photographic image: Photography, indexicality, fidelity and normativity

Normative conceptions of embodiment can operate only by fixing or essentialising the bodys necessarily processural (or existential) ontology. Given that traditional film-based photography and cinema are reliant on the arrestation of a process, a process of fixing analogous to that seen in the constitution of normative bodies, this paper suggests that it is not surprising that photography has long been considered a privileged realm for the presentation of idealised bodies. Some critics have of course problematised this primarily indexical role of the photographic image by showing how this is disrupted in avant-grade practices in both photography and the cinema. In this paper, what is suggested instead is that the rupture of indexicality in traditional cinema and photography was always already inscribed in the technological apparatus or medium itself, and that what appeared to present itself as an ontological precondition of photography (its indexicality) was therefore only the result of the normal usage and perception of this medium. To this end, this paper presents case studies of the work of (amongst others) Edward Weston and Bill Henson, paying particular attention to their conceptualisation of the material ontology of the medium in which they work to show how they, respectively, reinforce or disrupt normative modes of embodiment.

Three non-places of supermodernity in the history of French cinema: 1967, 1985, 2000. 'Playtime', 'Subway' and 'Stand-by'

The telescoping of time and shrinking of space are both effects of a modernist space that is made possible by the late Nineteenth Century’s new technologies such as the locomotive and the cinema. It is, then, no coincidence that the birth of cinema took place on the platform of a train station at La Ciotat in 1895, for since its inception, the cinema has been drawn to such spaces of modernity precisely because the transformation of human perception (or phenomenological space) that it renders possible is mirrored so closely by the reorganisation of physical space in the post-industrial urban sphere (or physical space). The confluence of the history of the cinema and that of the urban spaces of modernity has been examined at length by critics such as Benjamin and Kracauer; rather than expand upon this history, in this article I will instead examine cinematic representations of three spaces of modernity, each of which is situated at a distinct historical juncture: Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967), Luc Besson’s Subway (1985) and Roch Stephanik’s Stand by (2000), each of which is produced in periods we might term, respectively (albeit somewhat problematically), the modern, the postmodern and, after Auge, the supermodern. However, what this analysis will make clear is that, in spite of the paradigm shifts that such a taxonomy appears to imply, what changes in these cinematic representations across this period is the relation of these films’ protagonists to the spaces in which they move as opposed to the spaces themselves, which are always, it will be argued, already supermodern or, perhaps, always simply modern.

A full face bright red money shot: Incision, wounding and film spectatorship in Marina de Van's Dans ma peau

Through an analysis of Merleau-Pontys concept of ‘flesh’, I wish to suggest that this term offers a potential site for the reconsideration of the phenomenological situation of the film viewer. I will do this through an analysis of Marina de Vans film Dans ma peau (2002), a film which addresses the individual spectator directly in the intimacy of the viewing experience and, moreover, interrogates that individual relation of embodied viewer to film. Distancing myself from previous scholarship on this film, I suggest that Dans ma peau stages an explicit reflection not (or not only) on the creative process of filmmaking but, rather, on the embodied, fleshy, phenomenological viewing experience of the audience. However, if the onscreen presentation of the body in Dans ma peau seems to offer the body up as an object to be cut open, the wounding that takes place in the film is of a different kind entirely. Drawing on Deleuzes concept of the wound, I will suggest that in the diegesis of the film and the relation instigated between film and spectator, we witness the construction of a relational matrix constituted by the sensations and intensities that flow across a body which is nothing but the embodiment of a wound that pre-exists it. This, I will suggest, has important ramifications for any phenomenological theory of cinematic spectatorship based on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty in which flesh is coterminous with dehiscence.

Art Matters: Philosophy, Art History and Art’s Material Presence

The call for papers originally issued for this special number of Culture, Theory and Critique stated a desire to rethink the relationship between art history, on the one hand, and the development of a materialist philosophy of art on the other. Under this broad aim, papers were requested that interrogated the way historians of art, and their related projects, have become the focus of academic inquiry in and of themselves. In saying this, reference was of course made to the increasing importance of the work of certain art historians in the development of the philosophy of a thinker such as (to take but one example) Gilles Deleuze. Rather than appearing always to efface itself before the art objects of its contemplation, art history and criticism are considered here to have their own philosophical commitments that are taken up and adapted in the development of other kinds of work more broadly accepted as philosophical. It is precisely because of these philosophical commitments of art history that we also sought papers that engaged with the growing recognition that philosophical writing on art can no longer remain intentionally ignorant of art history or reduce the content of art history to a series of examples. This is not simply an ethical question of giving credit to the philosophical work that has been done by art historians but, rather, an acknowledgement that what philosophical works dealing with works of art access is not the work of art itself in any raw or direct form but, rather, the work of art enfolded within historically contingent forms of thought and discourse. To put this another way, works of art are always caught up in specific determinations of historical time that infuse the work of art history either implicitly or explicitly. In effect, what is being claimed here is that art history itself is a site in which play out a whole host of secondary elaborations in much the same way that the work of art in and of itself is never fixed in time once and for all, is never complete in its discursive phase but, rather, always a stage on which art’s work is performed. Art rarely, if ever, evinces the caricature of realism in which the work is taken to be no more than the immediate presence internally of that which is present externally, a position that can be defined as the Parrhasius myth. This idea is one that is central in the work of Andrew Benjamin, to whom this collection is indebted in many different ways. In his work Disclosing Spaces: On Painting, for instance, Benjamin pushes back against the idea of painting as a representational practice always beholden to a mimetic function. He writes:

A Letter of Thanks to a Man of Letters: Mark Millington and Culture, Theory and Critique

To say that Culture, Theory and Critique was, in many respects, shaped by the research of Mark Millington is not an understatement, but it is a suggestion that needs some explanation, for how this could be so is not immediately apparent. Mark is a scholar of twentieth-century Latin American literature with an impressive publication record that has ranged across authors such as Borges, Cabrera Infante, Carpentier, Donoso, Fonseca, Fuentes, Gallegos, Garcı́a Márquez, Güiraldes, Onetti and Vargas Llosa, to name but a few. Culture, Theory and Critique, by contrast, is, as stated in the journal’s brief, an interdisciplinary journal for the transformation and development of critical theories in the humanities and social sciences that aims to critique and reconstruct theories by interfacing them with one another and by relocating them in new sites and conjunctures. If one were asked to guess how the agenda of the latter resulted from the research of the former, one might be tempted to think that the transformation and reconstruction of critical theories through relocation in new sites was simply the result of something that occurs quite naturally in postcolonial contexts and, perhaps, in Latin America more specifically. This is undoubtedly true, yet there is more to it than this. Indeed, in his self-description of his own research, Mark writes: ‘It is my conviction that critical work should focus on trying to understand the literary work in ways in which it cannot understand itself, in other words critical analysis must go beyond the text to grasp its conditions of possibility and its presuppositions’. It is this conviction that ultimately gave such direction and distinction to the journal under Mark’s gentle guidance, the idea that no text, literary or theoretical, can enact the work of criticism by itself, that a detailed analytical approach is necessary to enable any text to say what it has to say in its own and other contexts. What is laid out with this approach is an entire project, yet it is a project that can have no end, no finality. As Mark argued in his work on transculturation and hybridisation (around the very same time that these terms were being integrated into the journal’s brief), even if terms such as these appear to produce something that ‘does not fit within neat binaries, that . . . straddles, mixes and disrupts’, something that manifests a Culture, Theory and Critique, 2015 Vol. 56, No. 3, 263–265, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2015.1070977

Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation

of re-opening by Deng Xiaoping, there is no guarantee of their credibility due to bias and errors. Keating has made a great effort to construct the complete story of MMC by extracting information from interviews; nonetheless, interviews conducted about four decades after the actual events often contain incorrect information due to the limitation of memories. Therefore, while Keating’s argument is convincing overall, many details still require further research based on more reliable and sufficient sources.

The architect’s scalpel: The monstrous digital futures of Alexa Wright’s Precious

This paper examines a selection of the photographic works of Alexa Wright, which demonstrate a fascination with the monstrous. While commenting on the works dealing with disabled bodies or bodies displaying a pathology of some kind—and in which the pathological or genetic condition is reconfigured in such a way that it can no longer be abjectified—this paper is particularly interested in Wrights works dealing with recontextualised images of invasive surgery, as they appear to deploy the same processes seen in her works dealing with more obviously monstrous bodies into the heart of the normative body. The advantage of dealing with these works in particular, it is argued, is that this approach might bypass perceived dangers inherent in other important approaches such as that proposed by the work of, for example, Margrit Shildrick—for methodologies such as hers are such that the encounter that is able to force a reconsideration of the hermetically closed and guarded spaces of identity and sovereign subjectivity of the normative body is an encounter with that which the normative embodied subject does not want to encounter but, rather, continually to abject. This paper therefore argues for a properly archaeological investigation or intervention of the normative body and argues that Wrights works Geo and Precious figure in a visual medium precisely such an encounter. This paper thus proposes an analysis of these works that takes into consideration not only their manifest content, but also their digital mode of production, which forces us to reflect critically on our identity politics in a digital age.

Seeing Silence: Filmic and Acoustic Convergences in the Work of Thierry Knauff and Francisco López

Analysing the work of Spanish composer Francisco López and the Belgian film maker Thierry Knauffs 2000 production, Wild Blue: notes à quelques voix, this paper aims to go beyond the Deleuzean methodology that it employs. Deleuze argues, in Difference and Repetition, that artistic production deploys an active form of repetition that creates difference in itself and not a banal Platonic form of repetition based on an originary identity. Finding this process at work in the texts studied, we argue that of vital importance in these works and (although it is not explicitly stated) in Deleuzes own theory here is a reflection on the concept of texture. In deploying an artistic form of repetition that is infused with a deep sense of texture, both López and Knauff distance their works from the documentary realm in which they appear to be grounded. This, however, only increases their potential political efficacy which, rather than working according to extensive and limited, therefore, principles, is transmitted via an intensive mode.