A creator who creates, who is not an academician, who is not someone who studies in a school where the rules are already known…is necessarily of his generation. His generation lives in its contemporary way but they only live in it. In art, in literature, in the theatre, in short in everything that does not contribute to their immediate comfort they live in the preceding generation
—Gertude Stein Picasso
As Gertrude Stein’s Picasso (1938, 30–31) observes, one of the greatest problems for the cultural cartographer is the task of identifying appropriate conceptual, theoretical, and aesthetic points of reference in order to chart ongoing technological work-in-progress. Confronted by contemporary mutations in and across mass-market publicity, photography, film, television, video, and computer art—not to mention hybrid forms of multimedia installation and performance—it is difficult to discern good from bad, substantial from superficial, innovation from entropy, originality from banality.
Indeed, as French theorist Paul Virilio remarked in an interview of January 1995, “The problem is that so far as technological art is concerned, there is virtually no critical theory.” (Virilio, 1996, 117) As becomes obvious, theorists such as Virilio and Baudrillard frequently focus upon the negative implications of mass-technoculture, although both authors also insist that their analyses of the postmodern condition are not necessarily negative in spirit. Baudrillard has observed: “I’m far from being a pessimist,” (1993a, 133) and Virilio now rather similarly specifies, “People say ‘You’re opposed to technological creativity!’ But it’s not the case at all. On the contrary, its quite evident that my writings on art are all clearly in favour of technology! It’s absurd to separate art from technology! I realise that many people claim that I am apocalyptic, negative, pessimistic. But all of that is out of date—it doesn’t rise to the heights of the situation!” (1996, 117).
Reading the most accessible, the most seductive and the most influential writings of Baudrillard and Virilio, one might be forgiven for typecasting their responses to technoculture as “apocalyptic, negative, pessimistic.” It’s all too easy to misread postmodern culture as a whole in terms of highly polemical, highly partial accounts of mass culture’s bewildering superficialities. Or, if one’s optimistically inclined, perhaps it’s all too easy to overemphasize the positive potential of other—equally partial—exceptions to mass-cultural mediocrity.
Nevertheless, as these paragraphs will suggest, Baudrillard, Virilio, Roland Barthes and William S.Burroughs all seem to make best sense when they consider technoculture and techno-imaging in terms of those emerging positive practices that offer crucial exceptions to the kind of hyperaccelerated confusion that journalistic polemic all too readily attributes to every facet of contemporary experience.
For example, according to some of the more hallucinatory pages of Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil (1993), we have now reached a cultural condition in which it is impossible to make value judgements; a situation in which “there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to anything whatsoever, by virtue of pure contiguity…there is no longer any equivalence, whether natural or general…no law of value, merely a sort of epidemic of value…a haphazard proliferation and dispersal of value…(a) chain reaction (which) makes all valuation impossible.” (Baudrillard 1993b, 5)
Why should the possibility of valuation disintegrate into this sort of epidemic of haphazard proliferation and dispersal? According to Baudrillard, points of reference and concepts of cultural value proliferate and disperse because of their unprecedentedly accelerated speed: a speed which—like that of microphysical particles—resists calculation, comparison and evaluation: “It is as impossible to make estimations between beautiful and ugly, true and false, or good and evil, as it is simultaneously to calculate a particle’s speed and position. Good is no longer the opposite of evil, nothing can now be plotted on a graph or analysed…. Just as each particle follows its own trajectory, each value or fragment of value shines for a moment in the heavens of simulation, then disappears into the void along a crooked path that only rarely happens to intersect with other such paths. This is the pattern of the fractal and hence the current pattern of our culture.” (1993b, 5–6).
Why, we should surely ask, is the “current pattern of our culture” necessarily either “crooked” or “fractal”? Why, in other words, should we accept Baudrillard’s hypothesis that microphysics offers the most appropriate conceptual model for our experience of multimedia culture? This question is a crucial one, for obvious reasons, insofar as one’s cultural model more or less pre-cooks one’s books, and a “fractal” reading of media culture necessarily fractures all hope of locating permanent signs of cultural coherence and value.
Reiterating this rather mechanical diagnosis of contemporary culture at the end of The Illusion of the End (1994), Baudrillard suggests that we now inhabit a curiously neutral timeless zone, without past, without future and in consequence a realm without finite or final possibilities: a de-finitive realm characterized by a sense of melancholia, resentment and disappearance. In Baudrillard’s terms, “We are, then, unable to dream of a past or future state of things. Things are in a state which is literally definitive—neither finished, nor infinite, nor definite, but de-finitive that is, deprived of its end. Now, the feeling which goes with a definitive state…is melancholic. Whereas, with mourning, things come to an end and therefore enjoy a possibility of returning, with melancholia we are not even left with the presentiment of an end or of a return, but only with ressentiment at their disappearance” (1994, 120).
What we witness here is a kind of descendental surrealism: a world not so much heightened by the fusion of the realms of real and surreal, consciousness and dream, as neutralised by its absence of past and future and of any kind of dreaming. Put another way, Baudrillard lyrically invokes a melancholic world without possibility of end and certainly without the kind of miraculous revelation that Paul Eluard’s Lady Love (1924) attributes to the influence of the shared omnipresent dreams of the “She” who:
…will never close her eyes And…does not let me sleep And her dreams in the bright day Make the sun evaporate And me laugh cry and laugh Speak when I have nothing to say.
If Eluard’s poem addresses the problem of verbalizing the experience of ecstatic, postverbal communion, Baudrillard’s poetic writings more often than not insinuate that we inhabit a post-surreal culture. In such a culture the problem of reformulating ecstatic poetic experience appears virtually irrelevant insofar as we now supposedly exist without poetry, without dreams, without values, without the beautiful and without the ugly, within crooked, incalculable, omnipresent “fractal” acceleration and disintegration.
According to the American novelist William S.Burroughs, such a condition seems likely to be both a domain of melancholia and a domain of imminent death, if it is indeed the case, as Burroughs claims in Painting and Guns (1992), that “Scientists have found that dreams are a biological necessity. If you deprive someone of the dream state for more than two months they will die, no matter how much dreamless sleep they are allowed. People hunger for dreams, they need them. Dreams are not some kind of elite luxury” (46). For Burroughs, it follows that artists are providers of what one might very generally call “dreamtime”: “What do artists do? They dream for other people, We dream for those people who have no dreams of their own to keep them alive” (46).
Put another way, the most unhealthy impact of Baudrillard’s writings culminates in what Gene Youngblood terms the “numbing” effect of pseudoscientific accounts of “fractal” culture (1989, 14), or what Burroughs associates with scientific dogma insisting that “nothing means anything to anyone” within a “dead thermodynamic universe where there is no meaning at all” (1992, 23), and which may perhaps be considered a kind of descendental black magic. Burroughs, by contrast, defines his art as the more transcendental white magic that he associates with the unnumbing impact of artists such as Paul Klee: “When I read Klee, fairly recently after I started painting, I said ‘Jesus he’s sayi ng just what I’m talking about.’ He says the artist’s call is trying to create something that has a life of its own” (1992, 33–34).
In Burroughs’s terms, this implies that art is a kind of “evocative magic” which, far from “trying to make people sick,” tries “to make people aware…of what they know and don’t know that they know” (1992, 37). In Burroughs’s view, the most productive model for analysis of both the present and future potential of our culture is the work of those artists, and creative thinkers who— in his terms—are already exploring “space”: “What you glimpse in dreams and out of the body trips, what you glimpse in the work of artists and painters, is the promised land of space” (1986, 103). For Burroughs, these artists, creative thinkers, and one might add, creative explorers of filmic media, “are already waiting, painting and filming space,” and “providing us with…maps for space travel.” More specifically, Burroughs explains, “We are not setting out to explore static pre-existing data. We are setting out to create new worlds, new beings, new modes of consciousness. As Brion Gysin said, when they get there in their million dollar aqualungs they may find that the artists are already there” (1986, 102; emphasis in the original).
My point thus far is that Burroughs’s writings helpfully challenge Baudrillard’s pseudoscientific accounts of our culture’s apparent demise, if only by reminding us that the black magic of Baudrillardian fractal theory may well be countered by the white magic of multimedia creativity and by the possibilities of gradually mapping, invoking, revealing, and recording “new modes of consciousness”
To be fair to Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End also sketches precisely this kind of seemingly anti-Baudrillardian “magic” when its final pages posit the possibility of escaping the neutrality of fractal culture and of fractal theory—or in Baudrillard’s case fractal fiction, perhaps—by undertaking or provoking what Baudrillard unexpectedly terms “a poetic reversibility of events.” Acknowledging that more or less confident artistic and literary experimentation still continues in the face of the apparently anaesthetizing omnipresence of fractal, mass-media cultures, Baudrillard’s conclusion to The Illusion of the End tentatively observes: “Against this general movement, there remains the completely improbable and, no doubt, unverifiable hypothesis of a poetic reversibility of events, more or less the only evidence for which is the existence of the same possibility in language” (1994, 120).
What we witness here is a sort of discursive slippage as Baudrillard hesitantly posits that the possibility of “poetic reversibility” within language perhaps implies that similar reversals may well modify the apparent terminal entropy of the electronic media. More generally, then, the possibility of literary “poetic reversibility” suggests that late-twentieth-century media culture as a whole may similarly undergo such liberating mutation, rather than being locked forever within the kind of over-accelerating fractal fragmentation that Baudrillard usually considers to be the “current pattern of our culture.” At his most objective, Baudrillard pragmatically acknowledges that generally speaking, “the effect of something written is nil today,” but adds, very significantly, that certain exceptions to this rule exist nevertheless, insofar as there can still be “something at stake”: “At a given moment…you cause things to exist, not by producing them in the material sense of the term, but by defying them, by confronting them. Then at that moment it’s magic” (1993a, 44).
Like Burroughs—for whom “what we call art—painting, sculpture, writing, dance, music—is magical in origin” (1992, 32)—Baudrillard eventually returns to the rhetoric of creative magic or alchemy, insisting moreover that such magic or alchemy is not so much a process of rhetorical reversal (or deconstruction), as more substantial constructive invocation: “Writing…and theory as well…is not just a simple question of producing ideas or differences. It’s also a question of knowing how to cast a spell” (1993a, 45).
As Baudrillard indicates in another interview, he seems to have theorized himself into a corner from which there seems no escape save via alternative discourses to those of theory. If the literary model of “poetic reversibility” offers Baudrillard one such escape route, the surprisingly optimistic “will to create” of the most visionary postmodern artists seems to suggest another alternative to hypertheorized melancholia. Comparing his sense of theoretical indifference to that of creative commitment, Baudrillard observes: “Personally, I’m no longer involved in political analysis or philosophy, nor in sociology… whereas the artists, as I see them, are still fascinated by art, they’re still within a history, a will to create, to communicate” (1993c, 85).
Somewhat as Burroughs’s associate, Brion Gysin, observed that “Writing is fifty years behind painting” in his 1958 manifesto Cut-Up Self-Explained (1973, 11), Baudrillard seems to have made much the same discovery some thirty-five fears later. In this respect, one might suggest that Parisian theory is thirty-five years behind avant-garde New York writing, and eighty-five years behind painting, in the sense that until very recently, it has relentlessly labored under the illusion that the cultural logic of the late twentieth century can be reduced to updated evocations of the same kind of entropic fragmentation or accelerated confusion that late-nineteenth-century pessimists such Max Nordau attributed to early metropolitan cultures.
What seems most interesting at present is the way in which both relatively apocalyptic writers like Burroughs, and highly apocalyptic theorists like Baudrillard now seem to be in the process of elaborating far more positive accounts of the present in terms of ways in which photographic and filmic media may well take highly effective account of updated “poetic” and “magic” effects, and in the process reveal what Burroughs terms “new modes of consciousness” and what Baudrillard terms the magic process of causing new things “to exist.”
Still more significantly, perhaps, what we might now call the impulse of “poetic reversal” in Baudrillard’s theory coincides with Baudrillard’s own entry into the activity of photographic practice: an initiative prompting his sense that contemporary culture cannot be adequately accounted for in terms of familiar practices viewed from “the standpoint of reason” insofar as what one might call “the standpoint of creative surprise” suggests that things are far more complicated than one might initially have assumed. In Baudrillard’s terms, “Perhaps the desire to take photographs arises from the observation that on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world has a stunning clarity” (1993b, 155).
Burroughs tempers his more anarchic tendencies with similarly surprising qualifications. Asked if his work was essentially an exploration of literally postmodern images which—unlike Proustian modernist metaphors—“didn’t cohere,” Burroughs disarmingly replied, “Well, that’s a little vague because images always cohere by nature, there’s a sort of magnetism. If you have an image over here it’s going to attract—or attach itself to—similar images. That’s simply a matter of the way the words work. There seems to be a sort of magnetism” (Burroughs 1983). As Burroughs suggests, by the mid-eighties, postmodern aesthetics had looked beyond the confusion that I associate (in chapter three) with the kind of “métaphore manquée” evoked by early postmodern fiction, exploring new kinds of extra-rational structural and symbolic harmony and coherence.
Burroughs’s sense of the essential potential coherence or magnetism of contemporary creativity is evidenced particularly clearly in his Aperture article on the American photographer Robert Walker, Here Burroughs acknowledges the general fractal quality of New York, insofar as “the whole city is a backdrop which could collapse at any moment,” but also insists that Walker’s photography “catches…the underlying unities of disparate elements,” (1985, 86). Discussing an image of “a young man in striped black-and-white T-shirt and blue jeans” whose “blank” expression seems captured by “something…we can’t see,” Burroughs cites it as a catalyst of subsequent dreamworld revelations: “I had a dream about this picture in which I touched his arm and found it cold, dead cold, and started back exclaiming, ‘He is an Empty one! A walking corpse, a body without a soul’” (66).
If Burroughs initially acknowledges Walker’s ability to evoke the prevalent fragmentation and confusion of everyday New York, he still more interestingly associates Walker’s art with evocations of what Baudrillard would term revelations of “stunning clarity.” For his part, Burroughs defines this clarity as “the meaning of meaninglessness, the pattern of chaos, the underlying unities of disparate elements” (66).
Looking in turn beyond the definable domain of everyday codes, Barthes similarly identifies this possibility of recording haunting clarity in Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson. Barthes uses this example to define his concept of photographic “punctum” or his apprehension of a photographic detail that he cannot reduce to the kind of “structural rule” that he associates with studium.” For Barthes, punctum implies a quality of emphatic detail that “pricks me…is poignant to me,” (1981, 27), which “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (26). “Wilson holds me, though I cannot say why, i.e. say where The effect is certain but unlocatable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands in a vague zone of myself; it is acute and yet muffled, it cries out in silence” (51–53).
For Barthes, as for Burroughs, this impact is extremely personal. It is what he associates with “Absolute subjectivity” (55) while at the same time evincing “intense immobility” (49), and one might add, a sense of intense inevitability, insofar as this kind of image seems to be one that the photographer “could not not photograph” (47). As such it evokes what Barthes calls the
dimension of “photographic ecstasy,” transcending the boredom of “universalised” images (119).
Discussing those images that he associates with a more objective, more material form of punctum, or “the sense of the singularity of the object at a given moment…where things have no meaning—or do not yet have meaning—but appear all the same” (Baudrillard, 1997a, 39), Baudrillard in turn suggests that photographs may transcend “universal banality” (1993b, 151) and attain what he too calls “the ecstasy of photography” (1997a, 37), within a state restoring “the immobility and the silence of the image “irrespective of “the violence, the speed or the noise of its surroundings” in “the thunderous context of the real world” (1997b, 31). For Baudrillard, such images are “the purest of images” because they attain “pure objectality,” evoking—ideally—“a universe from which the subject has withdrawn” (1993b, 154). Baudrillard’s photograph Paris (1989) which depicts his indentations upon a sheet of red fabric covering his chair, perhaps approximates this ideal insofar as it is an evocation of “the absence of the subject—absence modelled within a certain form.” Put another way, this photograph might be said to register the same kind of evocative absent presence or present absence as sheets upon which “[a] light body leaves no trace” (1990, 210).
What seems most significant here is surely the way in which Baudrillard— like Burroughs and Barthes—suggests the ways in which photography may triumphantly immobilize the particular quality of a particular perception, isolating it from its “thunderous” “banal” “fragmentary,” or purely structural context, with a sense of uncanny authority and inevitability. Thus, for Baudrillard, “an object creates a sense of emptiness” and “imposes itself” (1997a, 34).
What Baudrillard, Barthes, and Burroughs describe, in other words, is an art of appearance, a photographic art of appearance or of reappearance, working against the confusions of fractal culture, and culminating—objectively or subjectively—in the kind of mysterious and almost mystical apparition that Virilio’s The Art of Disappearance (1991) associates with perceptions of “infraordinary reality,” involving the “passage from the familiar” to “unfamiliar” reality, in such seeming miracles as Bernadette Soubirous’s sightings of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. Soubirous recounts: “I heard a noise. Looking up I saw poplars…quiver as if the wind was shaking them, but all around nothing moved and suddenly I saw something white…and this white was…a white girl…a white girl no bigger than me. She greeted me, bowing…” (Virilio 1991, 38). And Baudrillard in turn describes the equally unexpected way in which “an object imposes itself—suddenly one sees it, because of certain effects of light, of contrasts, and things like that, it isolates itself and creates a sense of emptiness…and then it irradiates this emptiness” (1997a, 34).
For Virilio, the potential for such revelations seems eclipsed by what The Aesthetics of Disappearance calls “the fait accompli of technology” (1991, 42). By this he means the neutralizing “violence” of the speed which—so far as he is concerned—“dominates the technical world” (100), in much the same way as it dominates the war machine’s quest for ever more effective modes of “surprise” attack. For Virilio, “war is the best model” in “the technical domain” (94). Taking us all by surprise in ever more baffling ways, it would seem that “high technological speeds…result in the disappearance of consciousness,” as the “authority of electronic automatism” allegedly reduces our will “to zero” (104).
Considered in the highly disturbing general context of the war machine, cinema for Virilio is not so much a potentially liberating “seventh art,” offering visionaries the opportunity to film what Burroughs calls “the promised land of space” (1986, 103), as a hybrid local anaesthetic causing “the dominant philosophies and arts…to confuse and lose themselves” in a state of “decomposition” (105). At worst, as Walter Benjamin observed, quoting Georges Duhamel, it may well be the case that cinema culminates in “a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence… which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope” (Benjamin 1979, 241). But at best, as Barthes, Burroughs, and Baudrillard all consolingly imply, media culture may also perhaps isolate forms of provocative punctum by retrieving and asserting something “at stake” apart from “the violence, the speed or the poise of its surroundings.”
For Virilio, by contrast, the “transformation [of reality] into video signals stored on tape, “appears inseparable from the tendency for high-technical speeds to inaugurate “the disappearance of consciousness” (1991, 104). Indeed, according to The Aesthetics of Disappearance, the very act of taking photographs seems depassé, since “photography, overcome by indifference, seems from now on incapable of finding something new to photograph,” in an age in which modes of “collective thought imposed by diverse media” seem well on the way to “annihilating the originality of sensations” (47–48). According to Virilio, we are the predestined victims of “technical fatality” (95) within a computerized culture comparable to “a reactor that’s out of control.” At this point it seems that technological culture signals the death of poetry, the death of contemplative control, in a world in which “the technician becomes the victim of the movement he’s produced” (96), lost as it were “in motion” and “in transit” and forever exiled and alienated from “unique historical time” (110).
Persuasive as Virilio’s general argument frequently appears, it seems to pivot upon the distorted and distorting model of the war game, regarding technology as a force almost exclusively definable in terms of its neutralizing acceleration. While Burroughs also considers that “This is a war universe,” he rather more interestingly considers the war machine at several speeds: “Some weapons may hit you right away, other weapons may take five hundred years to hit” (1992, 64).
As seems so often the case, Burroughs’s seemingly casual asides offer timely reminders of the complexity of notionally self-evident assumptions. Technology is a tri-part source of accelerated speed, of real-time speed, and of decelerated speed, and it makes little sense to typecast it simply in terms of “the violence of speed.” As Virilio himself specifies, speed can obviously be both “negative and positive” (1996, 117).
If “the violence of speed” seems to dominate technology, then this is doubtless merely because we are more accustomed to being surprised by acceleration than by deceleration. Superman is after all faster—rather than slow-er—than a speeding bullet, and we perhaps mistakenly assume that acceleration is the only possible kind of innovative momentum. Exemplifying this tendency, the Australian video artist Peter Callas remarks how he initially found it strategically effective to differentiate his work with video and computers from cinematic art’s slower registers: “I was interested in the idea of playing up the characteristics of the medium to distinguish it as much as possible from film. One of these aspects was the idea of speed and bombardment—of thinking about the electronic gun, and the compression of images on the glass surface of the monitor. Virilio’s metaphor of the gun, and the image of the electrons that stop on this glass screen…to me all that fitted together very well” (Callas 1994, 116).
Looking at the work of Callas one can understand his point. As he observes, it attempts to present what he calls “the idea of the tantalizing image, of things you half see, of flashes in your mind or dream images, that you want to bring back but which remain so perfect in the very fact they elude you when you try to recall them or recreate them” (119). Nevertheless, what Callas does is precisely to re-create this sense of fleeting, flashing dream imagery in a format which, as he observes, can be both tantalizingly fast and transparently slow.
On the one hand, viewed in real time, these images enter what Callas terms “a zone of speed created by the editing and the rhythm of the images so that the person watching it had to let go of symbolic thought—because if you tried to hold onto it in an attempt to piece it together as you’re watching the tape you’d be lost. You’d have to watch it in a different way to the way you might look at a painting” (117).
On the other hand, however, Callas also comments that he makes such tapes “to be seen again”—either in rapid real time or decelerated reel time: “I don’t mind if someone watches a tape through frame by frame, because I have a reason for the placement of each and every image, or at least I’ve made a decision to place each image and all the layers mean something to me” (117).
In much the same way, listening to a speech in a Shakespeare play we are unlikely to consciously dwell upon every ambiguity of every image and every wordplay, hearing it differently, as it were, to the way in which we hear someone asking for the time or asking for directions. As with Callas’s video and computer compositions, we can return to the text of Shakespeare’s plays, confident that Shakespeare probably “had a reason for the placement of each and every image,” and confident that “all the layers” potentially “mean” something to which we can perhaps gradually gain deeper access if we read individual speeches at our own pace, beneath our lamp, at our desk, without the accelerated distraction of all the other words and actions advancing in performative real time on stage. Callas notes that when his work is on television “the audience has the opportunity to record it, and to watch it back at their own leisure,” adding, “And as I said, I’m not adverse [sic] to that” (119).
Indeed, contemplating more recent forms of image retrieval systems, Callas posits that in many respects we may already be successfully engaging in adequate subconscious mediated interaction with mediated culture such as video and computer art, insofar as it seems likely that “the subconscious (of the maker) were speaking to the subconscious (of the audience) on the shared domain of media(ted) culture” (118).
Reconsidered in the context of Callas’s comments, Baudrillard and Virilio’s insistence upon the impossibility of reading, interpreting, and evaluating media texts seems doubly suspect. Firstly, as Baudrillard himself now intimates, it seems evident that certain forms of photography may well retrieve and immobilize subjective and objective punctum from their “thunderous” surroundings (1997a, 31). Secondly, as Callas suggests, even high-speed media texts seem likely to inaugurate some significant subconscious interchange with their audiences, and may subsequently be examined in decelerated time, as slow, frame-by-frame sequences, as many times as it takes the viewer to decode their symbolic and structural logic.
What this effectively means is that—in Burroughs’s terms—when it comes to watching seemingly impossibly accelerated images, audiences may well know things that they “don’t know that they know,” and like Molière’s bourgeois gentilhomme, may well have been reading certain kinds of poetry or prose—in this instance, mediated poetry and prose—without ever realizing it
With such possibilities in mind it seems evident that media art need not always be the art of “disappearance” that Virilio supposes it to be, and that media art—like photography—may often be compatible with that whole range of subjective, objective, interpretive and evaluative responses that many of Virilio’s writings appear to designate as obsolete. Roughly summarized, these responses may be identified in seven groupings:
Briefly, there seem very few grounds for referring to the apocalyptic fait accompli of technology. All available evidence indicates that new technologies are simply in the process of navigating the most elementary moves within an immense array of options ranging from obvious examples of confusing mediatized acceleration, to those more subtle and less self-evident mediatized variants of mystical “infra-ordinary” revelations that Virilio defines in Proustian terms as “the suddenness of…entry into another logic which dissolves the concepts of truth and illusion, of reality and appearance…hat which pertains to a moment that is singular and, by definition, different” (1991, 35).
In Bernadette Soubirous’s terms, these are precisely the kind of moments for which “you’d give a whole lifetime” (39).
It is surely this ideal that André Breton had on his mind in his Surrealist Manifesto’s annunciation of the eventual—or seemingly impossible—fusion of the real and the superreal, an eventuality he notes, which would make “death… matter little to me could I but taste the joy it will yield ultimately” (Breton 1934, 414). Paradoxically perhaps, it is likewise surely this ideal that Robert Wilson realized in his performance Deafman Glance. Discussing this work in terms of surrealism’s unrealised aspirations, the veteran Surrealist Aragon writes:
“The miracle was produced, the one we were waiting for, about which we talked…the miracle came about long after I stopped believing in them…I never saw anything more beautiful in the world since I was born. Never never has any play come anywhere near this one, because it is at once life awake and the life of closed eyes, the confusion between everyday life and the life for each night, reality mingles with dream Bob Wilson’s piece which comes to us from lowa is not surrealism at all, however easy it is for people to call it that, but it is what we others, who fathered surrealism, what we dreamed it might become, after us, beyond us…. Distinguished professors, it is not surrealism, that is to say, for you something to be classified, a subject for a thesis, for a class at the Sorbonne, no, no, no. But it is the dream of what we were; it is the future we were foretelling…. All scientific conquest is human triumph, for man. His freedom is exercised beyond the fields which were once his: as pipes relieve man from going to the well…Man starts each day beyond himself, beyond his past, his efforts and his discoveries. I say that for cybernetics, computers and the use of the atom and this still nameless thing of which, with no doubt in my mind, this spectacle I am writing of is the first dawning. A play like Deafman Glance is an extraordinary freedom machine Never as here, from a dark hole in the theatre, have I ever experienced the feeling, in confronting the spectacle of Robert Wilson, that if ever the world changes…it’s through freedom man will have changed. Freedom, radiant freedom of the soul and the body” (Aragon 1971).
Significantly, Virilio himself acknowledges that early cinema, especially what he calls slightly disparagingly the “special effects” and “trick photography” of Méliès, allowed cinema—as Méliès himself observed—“to make visible the supernatural, the imaginary, even the impossible” (1991, 15).
This is precisely what Wilson’s works for stage and screen achieve, and it should not surprise us that Burroughs, perhaps America’s other foremost explorer of new ways of interweaving media in order to evoke “the supernatural, the imaginary, even the impossible” unreservedly celebrates Wilson’s “visionary grasp of the complex medium of opera,” affirming that “The future of drama and opera rides with Robert Wilson” (Burroughs 1991, 17). In Burroughs’s terms, Wilson “is presenting beautiful life-saving dream images on stage and canvas,” because “(he) sees what he wants, and is able to translate his inner vision into stage terms, and to circumvent the crippling conventions of dramatic presentation: what he calls ‘ping pong dialogue’ and soap opera plots” (1991, 17).
Burroughs’s distinctions are crucial. For as he suggests, the positive potential of what we might call poetically correct multimedia creativity both circumvents available conventions for presenting available perceptions (the domain, in other words, of cripplingly familiar studium), and invents unfamiliar, emergent conventions for translating “inner vision.” Like any other truly inventive artist—premodern, modern, or postmodern—Wilson looks beyond and looks across the seemingly fixed parameters of available media, and in the process both invokes—and reinvokes—the visionary potential of his “complex medium,” rather than reiterating the banalities of soap opera plots and of what one might think of as generic, highly simplistic, “soap opera theory,” annunciating the post-auratic quality of technocreativity.
While it is undeniable that many contemporary media artists ape the adlogic and the ad-frequencies of high-speed, low-IQ telepublicity confirming Virilio’s and Baudrillard’s wildest fantasies regarding the omnipresent impact of self-neutralizing discursive acceleration, it is equally evident that many of the most interesting—and most visionary—contemporary media artists are energetically exploring far more significant modes of self-empowering discursive deceleration.
Discussing Burroughs’s textual experiments, Wilson comments that Burroughs commands respect because “he’s not afraid to destroy the codes in order to make a new language,” adding “The language becomes more plastic, more three-dimensional, like molecules that can bounce, combine and are reformed. That interests me a lot. Because essentially that’s what all artists do. One invents a language and then once this language becomes discernible, we destroy it and start again. I think that’s what Mozart did when he was composing—you know—the theme and the variation. I think that’s what we do essentially” (Wilson 1991).
For Wilson, there is nothing especially shocking or new about the alleged narrative discontinuities or ambiguities of postmodern composition. Rather, such imprecisions seem inseparable from all great art’s punctum, be this the work of Mozart and Shakespeare, or of Wilson and Burroughs. Rejecting the commercial media-logic that he associates with television’s simplistic “one-liners”Wilson explains:
“I don’t want to draw any conclusions, and I’d rather process it in time, as something we think about, that’s a continuum. When the curtain goes down, you don’t stop thinking about it You go home and still think about it. It’s part
of an ongoing thing, it’s a continuum, it’s something that never, never finishes. It’s something that continues to intrigue or fascinate. Why do we go back to King Lear? Because we can think about it in multiple ways. It has no one way of thinking about it It cannot be interpreted. It cannot be fully comprehended. So it’s foolish for us to think that we can understand what it is that we’re saying or doing. Because it’s far too complex. We can reflect on it and think about it, have understandings. But to assume we can understand what it is we’re doing is a lie.” (1991)
Wilson’s enthusiasm for decelerated visions, processed “in time” and existing as intriguing ongoing kinds of iconic continuum, is obviously a consequence of his own theatrical practice. As he observes, “I can have someone cross the stage in an hour and a half and it can hold the audience.” Not all media artists necessarily share Wilson’s fascination for decelarated poetry-in-motion. But it seems likely that almost all would agree with Wilson that the new postmodern technologies are most valuable insofar as “they help us to destroy our codes, to find new languages, and to rediscover the dassics.” (1991)
While the high-tech tedium of high-tech studium undoubtedly neutralizes our sensibilities, it is surely arguable that the kind of multidimensional poetic continuum that Wilson associates with the punctum of new high-tech languages revitalizes our consciousness in much the same way that great art has always revitalized its audiences, and in this respect allows us to rediscover the register of “the classics,” albeit from a distinctively contemporary point of view.
Discussing Bill Viola’s video installation Nantes Triptych—a work recently purchased by London’s Tate Gallery—Richard Dorment suggests that it typifies all the qualities that I have tried to define in the preceding paragraphs in terms of Wilson’s lucid comments upon the overlaps between the new and the old media.
Emphasizing the way in which this “modern masterpiece” both invites and sustains “repeated viewing,” Dorment’s review observes:
“For all its stark simplicity is not the Nantes Triptych merely a repackaging of one of the oldest subjects in art, the cycle of life, for the age of film and video? On one level, the answer has to be yes, but it is also much more. The longer one stays in the room, the more the work begins to exert its hypnotic hold. The slow regular rhythm of the action, the enveloping scale, and the monotonous soundtrack all militate against our trying to understand it through reason alone. After a few minutes we allow our senses to take over, letting go of our conscious thought processes. By the end of the video, our ego or identity has been absorbed into something larger than ourselves: the Nantes Triptych represents a journey into new realms of consciousness.” (Dorment 1994, 16).
Yet as Dorment adds, such “new” realms of consciousness are themselves the self-same concerns of “St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila, both of whom used prayer to experience an exalted sense of mystical union with the Creator” For Dorment, then, Viola’s work is most distinctive in terms of the ways in which its tri-part subjects—“birth…shown in real time” “death in slow motion,” and the unsettling image of the artist floating under water—suggest precisely the kind of “infra-ordinary reality” that Virilio associates with mystic revelation and at times seems to consider extinct within an age of “electronic automation reducing our will to zero” and imposing the supposed “disappearance of consciousness” (1991, 104).
It is a somewhat poignant sign of the times that Dorment feels compelled to defend his account of Viola’s installation by anticipating the charge that he has perhaps made it sound “like a trip for superannuated hippies.” It may be the case that Viola’s sensibility emerges from the sixties (“that much maligned and misunderstood decade”) and “is continuing to explore religious and philosophical ideas which have long fallen out of fashion” (1994, 16). But one might equally ask why we should restrict our expectations of technocreativity to those postauratic, post-aesthetic, post-religious, and post-philosophical prejudices presently in fashion in the nineties. Indeed, as Felix Guattari suggested, the intellectual fashions of the nineties may well be still more savagely maligned—and still more justifiably maligned—than those of the sixties, when considered in terms of the “black stain” of their facile “ethical and aesthetic abdication” (Guattari 1996, 116). Happily such “abdication” has become increasingly discredited.
Just as Baudrillard’s recent comments upon photography’s capacity to restore the object to “the immobility and the silence of the image” (1997a, 31) reassuringly challenge his more extreme polemic, and refreshingly reemphasize photography’s capacity to evoke unexpectedly incisive realms of punctum beyond the decodable dreariness of studium, Virilio freely admits that over and above the predictable domain of “the publicity mentality,” he is “interested by two kinds of art at present: dance and video-installation.” More specifically, Virilio observes, “I’m interested in video-installation—not in video, but in video-installation—because it poses the question of the relationships between images and space. I tell my architectural students that they need to pay attention to developments in installation art, because the problems confronting contemporary architecture are precisely those of video-installation” (1996, 120).
Still more tellingly, perhaps, when asked whether he agreed that certain video-installations now address the same kinds of questions regarding time and space as earlier writers and artists such as Proust and Turner, and whether he agreed that the new media may well be entirely commensurate with such substantial thematics, Virilio replied “Yes, I think so. There’s a quality of truth in the work of the best of these artists that clearly corresponds to that of the great writers, the great painters—and the great architects” (120).
Viola’s video-art, like Wilson’s work for stage, video and multimedia performance, and like Burroughs’s work for page, tape, film, and verbal-visual montage, distinctively exemplifies the ways in which exceptions to postmodern “soap” culture identify and intensify different kinds of “infra-ordinary” experience, and testify to the extent to which the work of art in the age of high-techmechanical production and mechanical reproduction remains as forcefully an art of appearance and an art of truth as the art of any other previous era.
To attempt to analyze postmodern culture on the basis of the war machine or the soap machine—as Virilio’s and Baudrillard’s more seductive writings often do—is to overestimate the significance of superficial half-truths, and to underestimate what Virilio terms “the heights” of a “situation” requiring a far more rigorous “grande curiosité” (123). As Robert Wilson suggests, “It’s the uncovering of the knowledge that is the learning process” (1991). It is surely time that contemporary media theory became more knowledgeable about those frequently marginalized—but absolutely “central”—contemporary artists curiously mapping and mastering the margins of the technocultural future.