1 Jerry McMillan, Ed Ruscha with six of his books balanced on his head, 1970. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.
3
ED RUSCHA, HEIDEGGER, AND DEADPAN PHOTOGRAPHY
Despite the variability of photographic practices in post-conceptual photography – from the so-called proto-conceptual photographic books of Ed Ruscha, to the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher, to their inheritors in the DUsseldorf School of Photography and beyond – one comes across a remarkable consistency in some of the descriptive terms used to account for this diversity. One of the most intriguing is the word ‘deadpan’. The ambition of this chapter is to see if this term has any purchase in explaining what makes these photographs compelling. Does the deadpan do any real work for us, or is it a ‘dummy concept’ for something else we have trouble articulating about this stretch of photography? Is it merely a catchall phrase for words such as straightforward, matter-of-fact, banal, ordinary, ironic, and non-artistic? Or does it offer a philosophical and aesthetic depth which these descriptions cannot?
In what follows I will concentrate on Ed Ruscha’s photographic books – of which he produced sixteen from the early 1960s to the late 1970s – because they seem to be the starting point for the application of the term deadpan to photography (plates 2, 3, 4, 10). I also want to put these thoughts through their paces in thinking about one exemplary photographic practice, and leave open the question of whether or not the logic of the deadpan as I engage with it here might prove insightful for other photographic practices described in such terms. I will proceed as follows. Firstly, I will provide a brief introduction to the concept of the deadpan in and out of photography, and introduce the vocabulary of’indifference’, ‘fact’, and ‘facticity’, that seems to appear whenever deadpan photography is raised. Secondly, I engage with these terms in relationship to Heideggerian philosophy, where they play a crucial role in world disclosure through the moods of attunement. Thirdly, I suggest that we shift our understanding of the deadpan away from a mode of ‘rhetorical’ delivery – often comedic in nature – and engage with it as a mood or attunement. I begin to explore these issues through Heidegger’s understanding of mood as the determinate ‘medium’ that discloses our modes of being in the world. Fourthly, I posit that the ‘evenness’ of the deadpan relates to the relationship between what Heidegger calls ‘indifference’ and ‘equanimity’. And finally, I will investigate some passages in the writings of the philosopher Stanley Cavell who talks about the silent-film star Buster Keaton – often seen as the epitome of deadpan humour – in terms of what he characterizes as the ‘philosophical mood’ of Keaton’s ‘vision’ of the world, and what this might have to say, if anything, about Ruscha’s deadpan photography and its vision of the world (plate 5 and 6).
Deadpan is literally defined as a flat or emotionless face, the word ‘pan’ being slang for face in nineteenth-century America. Traditionally, it is considered a mode of rhetorical delivery, used in speeches, public lecturing, and comedy, in which humour is delivered without change in emotion or facial expression, usually while speaking in a monotone pitch.1 It also suggests a kind of ‘artless art’ in its dry and direct mode of delivery. This type of humour has been primarily associated with Anglo-American culture. The term itself does not seem to have entered our lexicon as a one-word adverb or adjective for dry humour until the twentieth century. In photography, it is used to suggest a ‘matter-of-fact’ mode of delivery, an approach to photographic presentation that is devoid of subjective emotion or affect. At various times it has been used to describe some of the photographic practices of Robert Smithson, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore, Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Hans Haacke, Thomas Barrow, and Sol LeWitt. No doubt there are other examples to be had. Its acceptance as a loose descriptive category for such photographic practices is embraced in a chapter entitled ‘Deadpan’ in Charlotte Cotton’s survey, Photography as Contemporary Art, published in 2004.2 In Cotton’s words, these artists explore ‘a cool, detached, and keenly sharp type of photograph’.3 This point is echoed by Bernd and Hilla Becher’s claim that their ‘way of looking at things is “cool”and without an artist’s subjective expression’.4 Often deadpan photography is used as a shorthand way to suggest an ironic distancing from, and critical commentary on, issues of artistic skill, and the traditions of expressive art photography or ‘committed’ documentary photography (to jump ahead a bit, I would claim that the deadpan is not fundamentally ironic at all). The deadpan approach, then, is a mode of photography that seems emotionally detached or ‘neutral’ in the sense that it does not make outright judgments, and thus tends to emphasize what might be called an ‘evidentiary’ condition.
In photography, the deadpan first gained significant purchase in discussions about Ed Ruscha’s photographic books.5 In his 1970 essay ‘Artists and photographs’ – an influential text on conceptual and post-conceptual photography – Lawrence Alloway talked about the ‘deadpan candor’ of Ruscha’s photographs.6 At about the same time, the architect Denise Scott Brown in her article ‘Pop Art, Permissiveness, and Planning’ (1969), described Ruscha’s Sunset Strip, ‘a long accordion fold-out’ showing ‘every building on each side of the strip, each carefully numbered but without comment’, as ‘deadpan, a scholarly monograph with a silver cover and slip-on box jacket’ that could, on first glance, ‘be on the piazzas of Florence’.7 For Scott Brown, Ruscha’s photographic books are the primary exemplification of a nonjudgmental approach to the existing environment, providing a model of receptivity and openness to ‘the very immanent world around us’ at odds with premature systematizing and moralizing judgments about the everyday environment of American urban sprawl. Benjamin Buchloh’s influential essay, ‘Conceptual art 1962–69: from the aesthetic of administration to the critique of institutions’ (1990), took the deadpan less as a ‘positive’ openness to the world around us than as a practice marked by its inseparability from administered society. Written under the aegis of Theodor Adorno, this essay and its vocabulary imbricates Ruscha’s deadpan photography in conformity with, and incorporation of, the dominant structures of ‘administered’ society and its levelling effects which, in Adorno’s terms, suppress unique particulars beneath ‘indifferent’ universality. For Buchloh, Ruscha’s deadpan approach to photography is marked by an ‘aesthetic of indifference’, which is characterized by what he calls a ‘commitment to an anti-hierarchical organization of a universally valid facticity operating as a total affirmation’.8
2 Ed Ruscha, ‘Enco, Conway, Texas’ and ‘Mobil, Shamrock, Texas’, from Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962. Offset lithograph on paper and glassine dust jacket, 17.7 × 13.9 cm. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center Library Collection. Photo: Courtesy of Walker Art Center.
3 Ed Ruscha, ‘Bob’s Service, Los Angeles, California’, from Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1962. Offset lithograph on paper with glassine dust jacket, 17.7 × 13.9 cm. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center Library Collection. Photo: Courtesy of Walker Art Center.
4 Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1966. Offset lithograph on paper, and silver mylar-covered slipcase, 17.7 × 13.9 cm. Minneapolis, MN: Walker Art Center Library Collection. Photo: Courtesy of Walker Art Center.
5 Buster Keaton, The Cameraman, 1928. Publicity still. Photo: © mptvimages.com
6 Buster Keaton, Old Stone Face, on the film set of The Cameraman, 1928. Photo: © mptvimages.com.
Five years later, Jeff Wall further pursued this Adornian interpretation in his influential essay ‘“Marks of indifference”: aspects of photography in, or as, conceptual art’.9 If, for Wall, photographic practices such as Ruscha’s are not a total affirmation of administered society, as they seem to be for Buchloh, they nevertheless bear the ‘marks of indifference’ of their relationship and identification with ‘baleful social forces’ and the ‘internalization of society’s indifference to the happiness and seriousness of art’.10 In a more recent essay, ‘Ed Ruscha’s oneway street’, Jaleh Mansoor draws on the language of indifference and facticity from Buchloh’s article but sees Ruscha’s practice as much more engaged with, and critical of, mass culture than Buchloh does.11 In the survey text, Art Since 1900, co-written by Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois, the Adornian interpretation of Ruscha’s deadpan photographic books falls under the shadow of Robert Smithson’s photographic practices, which are now seen as ‘practical guides’ to exploring and relishing, through dark humour, a ‘world depleted of difference and thus of meaning’.12 At this point, Adornian ‘indifference’ has joined forces with Smithson’s entropic dissolution of organization and hierarchy into ‘de-differentiation’ and ‘terminal sameness’.13
The important point to note here is that the vocabulary of ‘indifference’, and ‘fact’ or ‘facticity’ seems to come into play whenever the deadpan is raised in the context of Ruscha’s photographic books. This is hardly surprising, as Ruscha himself claimed that his photographs were ‘technical data like industrial photography’ and that what he was after in his photographic books ‘was no style or a non-statement with a no-style’ that would result in a ‘collection of facts’.14 Alloway responds to this characterization by emphasizing their ‘factual appearance’.15 To my mind, Ruscha’s account of his own work resonates with Roland Barthes’ claim in his important essay ‘. . . That old thing, art . . .’, that pop art wants to ‘desymbolize the object, to give it the obtuse and matte stubbornness of a fact’.16 This sentence has often been read through a Baudrillardean lens as a desire to release the image from deep meaning into simulacral surface.17 But Barthes is insistent on emphasizing the ‘facto-graphic’ dimension of pop art, and notes that it features a philosophical quality of things, which we may call ‘facticity’.18 I want to explore this vocabulary of ‘facticity’ and ‘indifference’ in relationship to Heidegger rather than Adorno, and, by a kind of epoche, to bracket out some of the ‘given’ connotations of these terms.19
ON FACTICITY, FACTUALITY, INDIFFERENCE, AND DIFFERENCE
It is often not quite clear how the word ‘facticity’ is being used in these contexts.20 Facticity could be used in a broad sense to suggest all the entities out there ‘in’ space, and thus to describe Ruscha’s seemingly objective and disinterested accumulation and registering of that ‘data’ in his photographs without any overly conscious imposition of artistic selection or hierarchy. But Barthes might be using the word facticity to suggest a condition of ‘factuality’, a term that appears with some regularity in the work of phenomeno-logists such as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For Husserl, ‘factuality’ refers to the objects of experience, which appear as things found at determinate points in space and time but are nonetheless contingent. Sartre extends this to describe being thrown into the ‘there’ of a given or factual situation.21 For Heidegger, factuality refers to the ‘ontic’ dimensions of the world; that is to say, it refers to all the sundry entities, things, or beings ‘in’ the world. Heidegger and Ruscha equally provide long lists of these things in their works, be they houses, benches, footbridges, jugs, ploughs, or trees, records, pools, people, cakes, and gas stations.22 In Heidegger’s work factuality is always thought about in relationship to what he calls ‘facticity’, and it is this relationship that I want to highlight in connection with the deadpan.23
For Heidegger, facticity, in contrast to factuality, is a way of being-in-the-world rather than the fact of being an entity in the world. Facticity describes that mode of being in which Being becomes a question for itself, that is to say, Dasein. Although facticity is not merely a factum brutum – to be simply equated with all the other myriad objects in space that are ‘objectively present’ – it is never completely detached from its factuality. We can always understand ourselves and others in ways that emphasize their factuality – so and so is of a certain height, weight, eye colour, and so on. These physical or quantitative factors are indeed crucial to who we are, but they do not account for how they are interpreted as existential attributes of our being-in-the-world.24 Facticity denotes this ‘how’ of Dasein’s being-there; the way in which it finds itself thrown into the world among other beings. Heidegger offers the relationship between facticity and factuality as a way of articulating the difference between beings as mere things, and beings that are aware of their being-in-the-world in particular ways. Thus facticity and factuality are inextricably entwined but are not reducible to one another. Indeed, the difference between factictity and factuality makes all the difference in the world. Facticity is a mode of questioning that opens up onto what Heidegger calls ‘ontological difference’, the primordial difference between beings and Being, between the ‘ontic’ and ‘ontological’ realms. We might call (ontological) ‘indifference’ the absence of ontological difference: it points to the reduction, levelling, or equation of Being with mere beings. Despite the words ‘reduction’ and ‘levelling’, Heidegger makes it clear that the analytic of Dasein must begin with indifference.
One of photography’s primary tasks is, I would argue, to embrace our exposure to ‘ontological indifference’ as the determinate condition for any kind of ontological difference to manifest itself. That is to say, that photography never strays too far from the first steps in the analytic of Dasein: to describe all the ontic things in the world, up to and including the human. Deadpan photography makes this perspicuous. Stanley Cavell alludes to this in The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, when he writes that there is an ‘ontological equality of objects and human subjects in photographs’.25 Cavell first raises this ‘equality’ in relationship to Buster Keaton’s deadpan countenance, his remarkable ‘stone face’ that registers the evenness of his response to objects in the world that, in their obduracy, rarely accommodate themselves to him, despite his remarkable agility (plate 5).26 Although Keaton is not necessarily at peace with the world ‘out there’, he is of a piece with it, and his extraordinary gaze suggests his ‘acceptance of the external world and the things in it’.27 One might say that deadpan photography could be understood as a way of seeing how the totality of facts constitutes a world that is not merely a ‘universe of things’, but not quite a world of use and ‘common significance’ either.
In a similar fashion to Buster Keaton’s engagement with the object world, Ruscha’s photographic books cannot be wholly understood in terms of their ‘readiness-to-hand’ for reading, being looked at, leafed through, or even being handled; but nor are they simply ‘present-at-hand’ as obdurate things in the world. His books are neither articles of use nor are they neutral things. Nor are they simply ‘artist’s books’. Ruscha himself is more often than not photographed in terms of his bodily contiguity and balance with them. In a bust-length photograph taken by the artist Jerry McMillan, Ruscha confronts the viewer with an expressionless face and six of his books stacked on his head, as if to say that his relationship to these books is not simply a matter-of-facts but a matter of comportment, about how we hold ourselves in the world (see plate 1). In another photograph by McMillan, Ruscha is lying down on his back in the middle of what looks like a rumpled metallic silver drop cloth, with the top of his head pointed towards the viewer and an array of his photographic books placed loosely over him like a blanket or a second set of loose clothing (plate 7). There is a parallel here between his bodily position as a ‘table-top’ surface, on which objects are placed, and his practice of photographing commercial objects on flat surfaces such as floors, rugs, or tables.28 The whole mise-en-scene of this image recalls the staging of his stunning photography-based print entitled Sweets, Meats, Sheets of 1975, which shows packages of those three quotidian items on a satiny-red backcloth (plate 8). Siri Engberg notes that Ruscha spent a great deal of time arranging the objects for this ‘commerical shoot’, which was described by Ruscha as ‘doing a setup where you make a world on a little tabletop’.29 But does this explain the photograph of Ruscha covered by his books? Is he the table on which objects are placed, or is he placing himself as a mere object within the world of other objects (his books) on a silver backcloth that is analogous to the red one on which sweets, meats, and sheets are elsewhere propped? Is the realm of objects in Sweets, Meats, Sheets, which was shot horizontally, but subsequently oriented vertically, meant to recall the ontological realm of the upright human stance? Equally, is Ruscha’s horizontality in McMillan’s photograph meant to suggest his imbrication with the ontic realm of the commodity? I take it that the ambiguity is pertinent.
In either case the world Ruscha has made is disconcerting, fragile, and barely hangs together as a world. The packages in Sweets, Meats, Sheets were propped up – like the armature that supports the Hollywood sign in his paintings – photographed horizontally and subsequently rotated and exhibited vertically, so that the packages seem to be simultaneously suspended and falling like the books that are precariously balanced on various parts of Ruscha’s body (plate 7). In the latter image, his book Stains is rotated at a ninety degree angle and appears to be propped up by Ruscha’s shoulder and arm, in such a way that a crisply demarcated ‘blank’ white page faces us directly parallel to, and in relationship with, Ruscha’s slightly angled head and deadpan expression. Or consider McMillan’s photograph of Ruscha opening his book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (plate 9). It reveals an unfolded stretch of the eight-metre band from the accordion format book, angled at forty-five degrees and held comfortably within his partially outstretched arms. He is not facing the book or simply looking at it; rather, his head is parallel to that portion of the strip, his profile pressed against its surface. Its surface, in turn, touches the surface of other images fixed to the wall. It is an image that echoes the flat ribbons of Sunset Strip, which unfurled ‘parallel’ to Ruscha’s Ford as the street slid by the side windows, and which were captured by the mounted 35 mm camera with a motor drive that shot a continuous strip of motion picture film.30 This is all to say that facticity begins to open a world at that point where photography responds to, and brushes against, those ‘facts’.
7 Jerry McMillan, Ed Ruscha covered with twelve of his books, 1970. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.
8 Ed Ruscha, Sweets, Meats, Sheets, from the ‘Tropical Fish Series’, 1975. Six-colour screenprint with lacquer overprint, 83.2 × 65.6 cm. Photo: © 1975 Ed Ruscha and Gemini G.E.L.
9 Jerry McMillan, Ed Ruscha unfolding Every Building on the Sunset Strip, 1967. Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica, CA.
For Heidegger, facticity is enabled by our fundamental attunements or moods. It is the ‘how’ according to which one is in such and such a way. In Heidegger’s words: ‘Dasein’s openness to the world is existentially constituted by the mood of an attunement.’31 The essential character of mood is that it ‘displaces us into such and such a relation to the world, into this or that understanding or disclosure of the world’.32 Heidegger goes on to note that attunements are never simply a consequence of our thinking, doing, and acting, but rather ‘the presupposition for such things, the “medium”within which they first appear’.33Mood is like an atmosphere in which we are immersed and which attunes us through and through. This should make it clear that for Heidegger, mood cannot be reduced to the realm of psychological ‘feelings’ or any anthropological understanding of ‘lived experience’. That is to say, we are always ‘in’ a mood; it is never ‘in’ us, nor do we simply ‘possess’ such and such a mood. In sum, moods are world disclosing. They make a world possible as a particular configuration of sense. In moods, we are exposed, vulnerable, and open to the world; we are affected, touched, and struck by things. It is only through mood that the world and the things in it can matter to us at all. Mood is not a mode of ‘knowing’ the world, but the precondition for ways of encountering it.
What I am trying to suggest is that we shift our sense of the deadpan from simply a mode of rhetorical delivery to a fundamental mood or attunement that reveals and modulates our modes of being in the world. In reviewing some of the literature on Ruscha, one gets an inchoate sense of this possibility in passages that call attention to the ‘deadpan tone’ of his photographic books.34 One might say that the medium within which these books appear to us is of a deadpan tonality. Heidegger often refers to mood specifically as a ‘medium’. Perhaps the deadpan is the discovery of a new medium within photography at this time, if we are willing to consider a medium as a way in which we relate to a particular practice and not just its material constituents. More strongly, it is the nature of a new medium to be taken up and put through its paces, which might give philosophical depth to the persistent use of this term to describe certain stretches of post-conceptual photography.35
The descriptive qualities that are attributed to the deadpan – the flattening out of expression, the evenness of affect, its monotone colouration, its apparent disinterest and distance from any engaged relationship to the world – are also the qualities of ‘indifference’, a term which Heidegger uses to describe the average way in which Dasein exists most of the time in the world. He characterizes this condition as a levelling down in which we are caught up in what he calls the ‘everydayness’ of the ‘they’ – which is ‘us’ in our supposedly ‘inauthentic’ way of being-in-the-world. (It is relevant to note that in ‘Marks of Indifference’ Jeff Wall continuously refers to Ruscha as inhabiting or impersonating the ‘Everyperson’ or ‘Everyman’ in his approach to photography.)36 In Being and Time, the ‘persistent, smooth, and pallid lack of mood’ of the ‘grey everyday’ is marked by ‘indifference to everything’ (the language of ‘flatness’, ‘levelling’, and ‘lack of depth’ is ubiquitous in Heidegger’s account of the everyday).37 But it is important to note that indifference is not merely ‘fallen’ or ‘inauthentic’ Dasein for Heidegger, although it is often taken in that way. Indifference is also the condition that allows for the Being of beings-as-a-whole to emerge; that is to say, it is the precondition for our dawning awareness of ontological difference.38 As Heidegger notes, ‘in the most indifferent and harmless everydayness the being of Dasein can burst forth in its “facticity”, that mode of being-in-the-world’.39 In fact, in the fundamental moods of ‘boredom’ or ‘anxiety’ the sinking into indifference is what manifests being as a whole.40 As Heidegger notes, ‘understanding of being is to begin with indifference. That it is without differentiating in any regard to specific ways of being. Our understanding of being is indifferent but it is at any time differentiable.’41
This is often intuited by critics and historians in their accounts of certain strands of post-conceptual photography. Thierry de Duve, for example, comments on how Bernd and Hilla Becher’s industrial photographs are photographed under a set of uniform conditions that emphasize an evenness of tone and setting which, precisely through this uniformity, fosters a heightened awareness of minute aesthetic differences.42 But these differences do not simply remain within the ontic or aesthetic realms. A series of watertowers tend to look alike at first glance, yet they begin to awaken in us an ability to see how ‘the universe of things’ can become a way of relating and responding to each something and someone – co-existing, one might say. We no longer see them merely as ‘brute facts’ that are ‘objectively present’ to be tabulated and compared in ‘typologies’ as the Bechers might say. That these photographs are ‘cool’ and ‘objective’ just demonstrates that deadpan photography encompasses within itself the realm of the factual, and that it raises, rather than merely reflects, the possibility that ‘our’ failures of sensibility and responsiveness to how factuality might relate to facti-city can manifest in a form of ‘coldness’ towards the world. The ‘openness’ at the juncture of the possible failure of sensibility – let’s say a propensity to scan, tabulate, and categorize those water towers in lieu of accounting for how difference and indifference are interwoven as we ‘pan’ across their surfaces – is what the deadpan latches onto.
In Being and Time, the mood of indifference is, at various points, described as ‘smooth’, a ‘muffling fog’, and the ‘grey everyday’.43 These images conjure up an atmosphere in which everything is reduced to the same colour, texture, and tone, and in which we are in the world but at the same time seem to withdraw from it, or it from us. In many of the photographs that we characterize as deadpan there is a preference for dedramatized lighting and an evenness of tone verging on what we might call the ‘grey everyday’. If, as Cavell has argued, black and white film is the natural medium of ‘visual drama’ due to its strong value contrasts evocative of chiaroscuro in painting, then deadpan photography avoids such contrasts.44 David Bourdon notes that for Every Building on the Sunset Strip, ‘Ruscha photographed the Strip in the harsh light of high noon, making it appear as dull and tacky-looking as a Midwestern Main Street’ (plate 4).45 In ‘Marks of Indifference’, Jeff Wall characterizes this as Ruscha’s ‘low-contrast monchromaticism’.46 For Robert Smithson the ‘cloud’ and ‘sun’ dials on his Kodak instamatic camera were not settings for degrees of contrast, but rather registered different values of relatively ‘undifferentiated conditions’.47 Or consider Bernd and Hilla Becher’s many photographs of the Oberhausen industrial area in Germany, most of which were taken under overcast skies in the early morning or mid-day in order to eliminate shadow and foster a neutral atmosphere of the ‘grey everyday’. Equally, Jeff Wall’s light boxes create an evenness of projection for the cibachromes, and thus, in many ways, de-dramatize his tableau-like narratives, as if there was no build up of plot or emotional intensity but rather the display of an equanimity of mood that subtends any modulations of affect and distributes them across the surface. Ruscha once noted that his intervention in the layout of his books was important, because ‘the pictures have to be in the right sequence, one without a mood taking over’.48
Heidegger frequently positions our immersion in the mood of indifference revealed by the grey everyday (and other fundamental attunements such as anxiety and boredom) as opening us up to the ‘nothingness’, ‘abyss’ or ‘void’ of Being. I think we can bring these thoughts to bear on one of the primary design features of Ruscha’s photographic books, the ubiquitous and constitutive role that the unmarked blank page plays in defining their status as books. In Every Building on the Sunset Strip the book is dominated by the eight-metre long blank ‘ribbon’ which runs down the middle of the accordion-folded band of paper, and which is as important, and more prominent, than the two narrower photographic bands of the Sunset Strip running on either side of it (plates 4 and 9). Or take for example Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (plate 10). The ten colour photographs are simply overwhelmed by the fifty-four blank pages that comprise the book.49 One can leaf through five pages before encountering a photograph. Ruscha has stated that the reason for the many blank pages was to adhere to the initial ‘performative’ decision to make a book consisting of precisely nine swimming pools, and that those pages were meant to give it the necessary ‘heft’ to allow it to be handled as a book.50
10 Ed Ruscha, Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass, 1968. Four-colour offset reproduction on paper with glassine dust jacket, 17.7 × 13.9 cm. Photo: © Ed Ruscha. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery.
Ruscha’s recourse to blank pages undoubtedly contributes to the ontic weight and factuality of his books’ existence as physical objects in the world. But this isn’t an entirely satisfactory explanation, as it is clear that there is a sense in which the blank pages are not there merely to lend the books ontic weight, but rather that the rhythm, pacing, and appearance of these blank pages in relationship to the photographs is essential to their pervasive underlying mood, and contributes to their ‘ontological’ weight. And here we need to be a bit more precise and say that the blankness of these pages does not appear ‘tragic’ or ‘catastrophic’ in the way that Heidegger’s existential language of ‘nothingness’, ‘abyss’, and ‘void’ might suggest. The tonality of the deadpan is hardly tragic or catastrophic.51 The blank pages are interwoven into the very fabric of most of Ruscha’s books in such a way that the blank pages are integral to the mood of the everyday world as the viewer moves through the photographs. For example, in Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962) the photographs are laid out in an astonishing variety of relationships with the white space of the page, such that one might see the entirely blank pages as part of this variety (plates 2 and 3). This is also apparent in the typographic spacing in the titles on the book covers, and in the ‘outbreaks of spacing’ that occur in the paratactic rhythms of side street names and building numbers that dot the empty ribbon in Every Building on the Sunset Strip (plate 4).52
One might posit that these ‘blank’ pages (I prefer the word ‘blank’ to ‘empty’ to describe them) have a relationship to Heideggerian ‘danger’ – the risk that we might be unwilling to acknowledge that blankness is a claim made on us. Or perhaps it is more akin to what Cavell describes as Keaton’s species of comedy that accepts human limitations, thus ‘denying neither the abyss that at any time might open before our plans, nor the possibility, despite that open possibility, of living with good if resigned spirits, and with eternal hope’.53 One does not know when or where that open possibility might present itself since it is part of the patterning of life – its ‘layout’ so to speak. Thus that opening is not something we fall into but rather that we confront in the ordinary task of turning the pages of Ruscha’s books. If there is any ‘danger’ here it is not one of ‘plunging’ down to the levelling-off of the ‘fallen’ everyday and mere indifference, but rather that we might want to rise above this ordinary condition, and thus fail to acknowledge that the everyday world – blanks and all – is our world. Ruscha writes that he was trying to make a ‘cohesive thing’ with his books, and only with them did he get a ‘complete feeling of creation’.54 Although we can interpret the phrase as suggesting ‘artistic’ creation, we might also understand that ‘feeling of creation’ as his sense of world disclosure enabled through the mood of his books, in which indifference is integral to the facticity of the world.
It should be clear by now that the term ‘indifference’ is not merely negative. In fact, it opens out on to what Heidegger calls ‘equanimity’. Equanimity is a potential modification of indifference and is characterized by a calm and even-tempered ‘resoluteness’ that has a vision of ‘the possible situations of the potentiality-of-being-as-a whole’.55 But here I want to propose that we shift the emphasis from the volitional, heroic, and tragic connotations of Heideggerian ‘resoluteness’ towards the terms ‘calm’, ‘even-tempered’, and ‘refraining from self assertion’.56 For it is the ‘sober readiness’ that is the heart of equanimity and which is intimately related to Heidegger’s understanding of what he calls the ‘equiprimoridal disclosedness of the world’.57 Our way of relating to the world is not an ‘inner’ condition that reaches ‘out’ to it, but rather one that arises from our being-in-the-world that has the character of ‘being-there-with’ the world that is disclosed through mood. Thus disclosure and attunement are intimately linked: ‘In attunement lies existentially a disclosive submission to world out of which things that matter to us can be encountered’.58 What is striking in this sentence from Being and Time is that Heidegger italicizes every word, as if each one might matter to us, all might bear equal weight of priority and expressiveness. Thus indifference, not caring enough about anything, gives way to equanimity, an openness to caring about possibly everything . . . in the right mood.
ON CAVELL, KEATON, AND THE ‘BEST CASE’
This is the appropriate time to turn to Buster Keaton, Stanley Cavell, and the deadpan. The great silent film actor Buster Keaton is probably the most famous and striking example of deadpan humour. Keaton’s movies such as Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), The General (1927), The Navigator (1924), and The Cameraman (1928), all feature his trademark deadpan visage and attitude to the world, that never flinches no matter what mishap befalls him (plates 1 and 5). At various points throughout this chapter I have alluded to a remarkable instance in the philosopher Stanley Cavell’s work – teased out in three different but overlapping stretches of writing in The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (1979), The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971), and the essay ‘What becomes of things on film’ (1978) – that directly refers to the logic of Buster Keaton’s comedy as one that ‘absorbs skepticism’. As Cavell has put it, ‘[Keaton’s] refinement is to know everything skepticism can think of.’59 He suggests that Keaton’s deadpan humour is an ideal attitude in the face of scepticism; a stance toward the world and others in it that neither succumbs to scepticism nor definitively overcomes it. One might call it a ‘comic acknowledgment’ of the world.60
Cavell’s account of Keaton centres on his particular countenance and the ‘olympian resourcefulness of his body’.61 The lack of emotion in his face and his eternal agility are signs of Keaton’s peculiar receptiveness to the world. His gaze allows an evenness or readiness for the world, whatever it may offer. Such a gaze resists a particular understanding of the world that Cavell characterizes as the ‘best case’ in external world and other minds scepticism. For Cavell, the best case means an object or person that carries the right kind of exemplarity or representativeness for us. For example, one might say from this perspective that an apple ‘compresses’ within itself materiality as whole, such that if this ‘case’ fails to do this for me, I would begin to doubt that the world out there exists at all. Or it would be to say that this person ‘compresses’ within her-or himself my view of psychic reality as a whole, that they exemplify humanity as such, so that if I can’t believe in this person then I can’t know any other person or mind.62
Keaton is not attuned to the world in this way: rather, his is ‘a way of being human . . . that allows an evenness in it [the world] or readiness for it that would not understand the exclusive or compressed stake in a best case; a being for whom any object might be as good as any other, in a world in which any might be loaded.’63 No case is best for him because every case is best. A book like Every Building on the Sunset Strip calls attention to the impossibility, or at least difficulty, of the ‘best case’ when it comes to deadpan photography (plates 4 and 9). In a sense, I am taking this quite literally. In Every Building on the Sunset Strip, the expansive accordion-folded band is ‘compressed’ and gathered between the covers of a small book, 17.7 × 13.9 cm, and enclosed in a silver covered slip-’case’. But it is hardly the ‘best case’. The book does exist in a compressed state within its slip-case, but it can’t be completely seen or viewed in that condition, even when opened and leafed through in a rhythm of folding and unfolding. Our engagement with its evenness of response to the Sunset Strip that takes in ‘every building’, in which any building might be as good as any other, does not allow for a best or worst case. Expression is evened out, modulated, and dispersed across the band, and its expansiveness – its openness to a stretch of the world out there in its plenitude and emptiness – cannot be contained within the bounds of the book. With the band completely spread out, all that remains of the strip’s attachment to the book once it has been laid out flat and opened to its full expanse is a mere three-inch surplus flap of ordinary paper glued to the front paste-down. It is as if it simultaneously says that there is no ‘best case’ to compress and that even within this expansive stretch of the world unfolded before us there is more than we can know or take in even if we are open and ready for whatever it offers. The dead-panning movement of Ruscha’s camera that results in an image like Every Building on the Sunset Strip resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s description of Buster Keaton’s ‘pure continuous trajectory’ through the object world. Keaton’s continuous movement encompasses the rapid cuts, transitions, and gaps as he moves from object to object within his world, just as the eight-metre unfurled band of Sunset Strip displays its dead-pan trajectory through its multiple accordion folds, the ten cut and glued sections that comprise its length, and the gaps opened up by the empty lots, cut off cars, and cross streets that puncture the paper-thin plane of the building fabric.64
The deadpan attitude exemplified by Ruscha refuses to allow us to be too hasty in our categorization of good, bad, best, or worst objects or people in the world. This should recall Denise Scott Brown’s suggestion, which used Ruscha as its primary example, that we might cultivate a sensitivity to the world – heighten our responsiveness to it – by withholding judgment. She reminds us that it is a matter of our attunement or mood towards objects in the world – in her words, ‘an open-minded and nonjudgmental investigation’ of it – that would enable us to do so.65 This would seem to involve, as we have seen, a sense of openness, readiness, equanimity, and, at times, inexpression. We should hardly be surprised, then, to find that Cavell also talks about Keaton in terms of the ‘philosophical mood of his countenance’ and his ‘capacity for sight, or for human awareness generally’.66 I want to remain with this thought in order to conclude with some reflections on what this altered relation of photography to the world might be about.
What if we were to push Scott Brown’s idea of ‘withholding’ towards something like a hyphenated ‘with-holding,’ somewhat analogous to Heidegger’s understanding of ‘being-with’ the world? Withholding in the usual sense suggests a subjective ‘holding back’, a withdrawal of feeling that might tend to look like privileged knowingness, objectivity, or a species of ironic distancing. But the cool, deadpan approach to photography is not an ironic distancing, as if the photographer were engaged in private asides to some privileged or assumed audience (the audience is precisely not ‘given’, in fact). And deadpan photography is not interested in seeing the world from above or below in order to record the ‘being-objectively-present-together of things’ in the world, but rather in situating itself at the limit of the world, alongside its surfaces as a way of ‘being with the world’.67 Thus, it is the surface quality of the everyday, its very opacity to us, that is the precondition for its disclosure. Because the everyday world is in some sense closed to us, it faces us as a surface of exposure. As Bernd and Hilla Becher claim, they do not want to depict their industrial buildings from above or below, but head on, a desire also voiced by Ed Ruscha in his writings and interviews. Deadpan photography is immanent, and it is directed either straight towards the world, or literally ‘pans’ across it like the camera mounted on Ruscha’s car driving along Sunset Strip. After all, mood comes neither from the ‘outside’ nor from the ‘inside’ but rather from the fact that ‘knowing is grounded beforehand in a Being-already-alongside-the world’.68
Perhaps the mood of awareness, readiness, and openness to the world exemplified in the best deadpan photography might be the expression of wonder in our era. This claim might strike us as counterintuitive: firstly because, in the later work of Heidegger, moods are epochal, and the inaugural mood of wonder is reserved for the early Greeks (for Heidegger, our era is an odd shade of grey that consists of a mixture of fear, boredom, anxiety, hope, confidence, and at times joy); and secondly because we are so used to thinking about wonder in terms of the extremes of expression – perhaps as open-mouthed and wide-eyed awe – that we are less alert to the fact that an expression of wonder might at times register as inexpression. Or to be more accurate, it might register as an evenly distributed expression – or, in Heideggerian terms, as ‘equanimity’. Taken in the latter sense, wonder would then be continuous with what Heidegger characterizes as allowing things to be ‘encountered in a circumspect heedful way’, which he goes on to say, ‘has ... the character of being affected or moved’.69 And it is precisely the mood of wonder that strikes us with the awareness that the object does matter, but we do not know precisely the mode of this mattering. In the words of Heidegger, ‘Wonder does not divert itself from the usual but on the contrary, adverts to it, precisely as what is the most unusual of everything and in everything.’70 Wonder might very well look like a deadpan expression, just as a state of calm, cheerfulness, and even joy might pervade ‘authentic anxiety’, as indeed it does for Heidegger.71 Heidegger has a wonderful phrase that seems to capture the idea of wonder as deadpan expression: ‘resolute raptness’. I take this phrase not to mean wonder as an interruption of the ordinary experience of everyday life, but rather the ability to remain open to the ordinary as a site of the disclosure of wonder. It is not meant to expose and overcome the relativity of the ordinary in the pursuit of some distanced and more ‘knowing’ condition, but rather to abide there so that it resonates with Cavell’s claim, in relation to Buster Keaton, that ‘no possibility, of fakery, simulation, or hallucination, goes beyond the actualities of his existence’, or Ruscha’s observation that Los Angeles’ ‘superficiality’ can be profound and funny and worth living for, as it makes one aware that everything is ephemeral when you look at it from the right angle.72
Jean-Luc Nancy has posed the following question: ‘can we think of a triviality of sense – a quotidianness, a banality, not as the dull opposite of scintillation, but as the grandeur of the simplicity in which sense exceeds itself?’73 Perhaps we can. In an interview Ruscha noted that his first book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations, had ‘an inexplicable thing I was looking for, and that was a kind of”Huh?’“To his credit, Ruscha never attempts to convert that ‘Huh?’ into an ‘Aha!’ Not long after, he remarked that ‘one of them [his books] will “kind of almost”knock you on your ass.’ The odds are, though, that you are still standing with the book in your hand and nary an expression crossing your face.
Notes
A special thank you to Maggie Iversen and Diarmuid Costello for their insightful comments and patient reading of this chapter. I also thank Whitney Davis who invited me to give an earlier version of this chapter at a small colloquium he organized on World-Making and World Art at The Consortium for the Arts at UC Berkeley in May 2008.
1 Randall Knoper, ‘Funny personations: theater and the popularity of the deadpan style’, in Knoper, Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance, Berkeley, CA, 1995, 55–73.
2 Charlotte Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art, London, 2004.
3 Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art, 24.
4 Cotton, The Photograph as Contemporary Art, 26; Stefan Gronet, ‘Alternative pictures: conceptual art and the artistic emancipation of photography in Europe’, in Douglas Fogle, ed., The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960–1982, Minneapolis, MN, 2003, 89.
5 It should be noted that when Ruscha talked about his photographic books in terms of humour he sometimes described them as ‘capers’. But one author notes that he seemed dissatisfied with this description. See A. D. Coleman, ‘I’m not really a photographer’, in Fogle, The Last Picture Show, 21–2.
6 Lawrence Alloway, ‘Artists and photographs’, in Fogle, The Last Picture Show, 20.
7 Denise Scott Brown, ‘On pop art, permissiveness, and planning’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, May 1969, 185.
8 Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Conceptual art 1962–1969: from the aesthetic of administration to the critique of institutions’, October, 55, Winter 1990, 121–2. Buchloh is also calling attention to issues of random sampling and aleatory choice in Ruscha’s work.
9 Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of indifference”: aspects of photograpy in, or as, conceptual art’, in Fogle, The Last Picture Show, 41.
10 Wall, “‘Marks of indifference”‘, 44. Drawing on Adorno, Wall notes that in conceptual art the loss of’sensuousness’ in art’s reduction to an intellectual concept allows us to experience that loss as such, that is, as a loss. According to him, this accounts for these photographs’ status as ‘dull’, ‘boring’, and ‘insignificant’.
11 Jaleh Mansoor, ‘Ed Ruscha’s one-way street’, October, 111, Winter 2005, 133. This issue of October is devoted to the work of Ed Ruscha.
12 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Anti-Modernism, Postmodernism vol. 2, London, 2004, 505–8. The section on Ruscha bears the heading ‘Deadpan transience’.
13 Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh, Art since 1900, 505.
14 John Coplans, ‘Concerning Various Small Fires: Edward Ruscha discusses his perplexing publications’ and Henri Man Barendse, ‘Ed Ruscha: an interview’, in Alexandra Schwartz (ed.), Leave any Information at the Signal, Cambridge, MA, 2002, 24, 26, 217.
15 Alloway, ‘Artists and photographs’, 20.
16 Roland Barthes, ‘. . . That old thing, art . . .’, in Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard, New York, 1985, 201–2.
17 I do believe that Ruscha’s photographs – and many of his paintings – ‘desymbolize’ or are meant to suggest a ‘pre-symbolic’ state. Here I am thinking of Ruscha’s paintings of simple words with one syllable, such as ‘oof’, ‘smash’, ‘ok’, ‘not’, that explore the constitutive indetermi-nancy of primitive language games in which we don’t know the ‘force’ of such utterances, and thus how they are to be taken.
18 Barthes, ‘. . . That old thing, art . . .’, 202. I am not applying any particular category to Ruscha’s work such as ‘pop’ or ‘conceptualism’. I am more interested in Barthes’ perspicuous understanding of the mood of image making at a particular moment.
19 Of course there are ways of reading Heidegger and Adorno together in productive and thought-provoking ways. In relation to my thoughts on Ruscha, I have found Ute Guzzoni’s essay particularly insightful. See “‘Were speculation about the state of reconciliation permissible . . .”:Reflections on the Relation between human beings and things in Adorno and Heidegger’, in Iain Macdonald and Krzystof Ziarek, eds, Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions, 2008,124-37.
20 There is a recent collection of essays that begins to explore the issue of facticity with Heidegger’s early writings on the topic as its point of departure. See François Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson, eds, Rethinking Facticity, New York, 2008. In this chapter I have relied primarily on Heidegger’s own writings, in particular Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Albany, NY, 1996, and two early lecture courses, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, Bloomington, IN, 2001, and Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren, Bloomington, IN, 1999.
21 See Giorgio Agamben, ‘The passion of facticity’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford, CA, 1999, 188–9.
22 These sundry lists of things are also ubiquitous in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, reflecting his understanding that ‘the time of modernity is followed by the time of things’.
23 Heidegger sometimes uses the phrase ‘factical life’ instead of facticity.
24 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 135.
25 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Cambridge, 1979, 72.
26 Cavell, The World Viewed, 36–7.
27 Cavell, ‘What becomes of things on film?’, in Cavell, Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes, Chicago, IL, 1988, 174–7.
28 I mention clothing because Ruscha’s Babycakes is placed strategically under his chin in such a way that the pink bow that binds the book also functions as his bowtie.
29 Siri Engberg, Edward Ruscha: Editions, 1959–99: Catalogue raisonne’, vol. 2, Minneapolis, MN, 1999, 32–3.
30 Mansoor, ‘Ed Ruscha’s one-way street’, 130–2. Mansoor does a nice job of describing the condition of skimming over the surface that is evidenced in Every Building on the Sunset Strip.
31 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 137.
32 Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy: Selected Problems of ‘Logic’, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer, Bloomington, IN, 1994, 140.
33 Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington, IN, 1995, 69.
34 Foster, Krauss, Buchloh and Bois, Art since 1900, 507.
35 Cavell, The World Viewed, 107: ‘when a new medium is discovered it generates new instances, it doesn’t merely make them possible, but calls for them, as if what is discovered is indeed something more than a single work can convey.’
36 Wall, “‘Marks of indifference”‘, 43.
37 Heidegger, Being and Time, §134, 345.
38 There are passages in Heidegger where the everyday is not merely fallen and ‘inauthentic’, and thus meant to be transcended in ‘authentic’ ways, but is the absolute condition for being-in-the-world that can be modified but never transcended. Giorgio Agamben, Simon Critchley, and particularly Jean-Luc Nancy are attentive to these issues in their readings of Heidegger. Thus when we hear Wall describe Ruscha in terms of the Everyman we should keep in mind that for Heidegger, ‘The “every-one”has to do with something definite and positive – it is not only a phenomenon of fallenness, but as such also a how of factical Dasein.’ See Heidegger, Ontology, 14.
39 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 134.
40 Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 87–8. The most extensive treatment of boredom is found in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. For example see, 137: ‘boredom takes us back to the point where all and everything appears indifferent to us.’
41 Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 175–6.
42 Thierry de Duve, ‘Bernd and Hilla Becher or monumentary photography’, in de Duve, Bernd and Hilla Becher: Basic Forms, New York, 1999, 15–16. De Duve sees their photographs as a lesson in impersonal or vernacular aesthetics. ‘It is to learn to read difference in composition, rhythm, and formal solutions where an ordinarily distracted eye would see only indifference and standardization.’ He goes on to note that their work demonstrates a ‘lucid innocence’.
43 Heidegger, Being and Time, §29 and §68.
44 Cavell, The World Viewed, 89–94.
45 David Bourdon, ‘Ruscha as publisher’, in Schwartz, Leave any Information, 43. The passage continues as follows: ‘All I was after was that store-front plane,’ he says. ‘It’s like a Western town in a way. A store-front plane of a Western town is just paper, and everything behind it is just nothing.’
46 Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of indifference”‘, 43.
47 Robert Smithson, ‘Art through the camera’s eye’, in Fogle, The Last Picture Show, 105. I hesitate to mention Smithson in this context as this ‘grey-ness’ is of a piece with his understanding of the camera as an ‘entropic machine’. The issue of ‘greyness’ comes to the fore in Smithson’s ‘A tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967)’, (in Jack Flam, ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley, CA, 1996, 74) in his tale of the ‘sandbox monument’, where the box is divided into high contrast black and white sand that is then mixed into an undifferentiated grey that can never be subsequently ‘unmixed’.
48 John Coplans, ‘Concerning various small fires: Ed Ruscha Discusses his perplexing publications’, in Schwartz, Leave any Information, 25.
49 Ruscha’s A Few Palm Trees (1971) also contains sixty-four pages, with only fourteen illustrations.
50 Most of his books are 17.7 × 13.9 cm. Their depth varies but one would never characterize them as hefty.
51 See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis, MN, 1996,174.
52 I borrow the phrase ‘outbreaks of spacing’ from John Sallis, Spacings – of Reason and Imagination in Texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Chicago, ILK, 1987, v.
53 Cavell, ‘What becomes of things on film?’, 175. In this passage Cavell is referring to Keaton’s acting in The General, although I think this description is meant to apply as a whole to his species of comedy.
54 Coplans, ‘Concerning various small fires’, 23.
55 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 345.
56 Nancy, Agamben, Critchley, and Butler tend to see the ‘fallen’ ordinary in a less negative light, and thus try to shift the air of the exceptional, great, heroic and tragic in Heidegger’s vocabulary of ‘authenticity’, ‘resoluteness’ and ‘readiness’ towards a more ‘everyday’ receptive and open disclosure of the world. See for example Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The decision of existence’, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and Others, Stanford, CA, 1993, 82–109. The last phrase comes from Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, New York, 2005, 105.
57 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 137.
58 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 137.
59 Cavell, ‘What becomes of things on film?’, 174–7; Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy, Oxford, 1979, 452; Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Cambridge, MA, 1971, 36–7. ‘Absorbing skepticism’, is from ‘What becomes of things on film/’, 177; and ‘[Keaton’s] refinement ... .’ is from The Claim of Reason, 452. To be clear, Cavell never uses the word ‘deadpan’ in his discussions of Buster Keaton.
60 Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance, London, 2007, 78; and ‘Originary Inauthenticity – On Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit’, in Steven Levine, ed., On Heidegger’s Being and Time: Simon Critchley and Reiner Schurmann, London, 2008, 142.
61 Cavell, The World Viewed, 37.
62 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 429–30.
63 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 452.
64 Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, 173–5. We can move through this trajectory by sequentially unfolding and folding the individual segments of the accordion that are the same dimensions of the book page (17.7 × 13.9 cm), but we still need to unfurl the band in its entirety to get the full sweep of its expansive trajectory.
65 Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, ‘Preface’, Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge, MA, 1972, xi. A similar thought is raised by Heidegger in his valorization of Greek ‘apprehension’ over modern representing and subjectivism in Heidegger, ‘The age of the world picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, New York, 1977, 131.
66 Cavell, The World Viewed, 36–7, and ‘What becomes of things on film?’, 175.
67 This contrast is made in Heidegger, Being and Time, § 57.
68 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, San Francisco, CA, 1962, § 61.
69 Heidegger, Being and Time, § 137.
70 Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy, 145.
71 Martin Heidegger, ‘What is metaphysics?’, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, Cambridge, MA, 1998, 88, 93.
72 Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 452; Ruscha, Leave any Information, 245.
73 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World, trans. Jeffrey Librett, Minneapolis, MN, 1998, 18.