Electric Seeing: Positions in Contemporary Video Art 9783839457009

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Charlotte Klink Electric Seeing

IMAGE

Volume 193

To Cornelia, Reiner, and Daniel

Charlotte Klink is an artist and art theorist. She works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Bern. Her artistic practice focusses on drawing, writing, video, and performance. She completed her PhD at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart (ABK) and was a visiting scholar at Tel Aviv University as a fellow of the Max Planck Society's Minerva Fellowship Program. Her research foci are contemporary art and aesthetics under the prism of psychoanalytic theory, intersectionality and poststructuralism.

Charlotte Klink Electric Seeing. Positions in Contemporary Video Art

Thesis Dissertation of the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart (ABK Stuttgart) for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy submitted by Charlotte Klink Date of the doctoral exam 29.04.2020

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2022 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

Rector Prof. Dr. Barbara Bader Examiners 1. Prof. Dr. Felix Ensslin, Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, Professor für Kunstvermittlung, Ästhetik und psychoanalytische Kulturtheorie im Studiengang Bildende Kunst; 2. Prof. Dr. Shirley SharonZisser, Tel Aviv University, Department of English and American Studies Funding This dissertation was supported by a Minerva Fellowship of the Minerva Stiftung Gesellschaft für die Forschung mbH.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Copy-editing Bonnie Begusch Design and Typesetting Studio Nicolas Zupfer Cover and Chapter Illustrations Charlotte Klink, Bonnie Begusch, Nicolas Zupfer Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5700-5 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5700-9 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839457009 ISSN of series: 2365-1806 eISSN of series: 2702-9557 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Acknowledgements A book needs a reader. And even though most writing is done in relative solitude, a writer also needs readers to whom she can address her words. The readers I had in mind when I wrote this book are the people who are close to me, whose wisdom and wit I appreciate, and with whom I have had many conversations, both real and imaginary, during the process. You all made it possible for me to write because I wrote for you and with you. First, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to my advisors Prof. Dr. Felix Ensslin and Prof. Dr. Shirley Sharon-Zisser, without whom this book would never have existed. Prof. Felix Ensslin introduced me to the world of theory and philosophy. His teaching and our seminars, exhibitions, and performances together allowed me to think in ways I have never thought possible and eventually helped me to insist on my own work. Prof. Shirley Sharon-Zisser taught me precision and, most of all, how to read, while being an inspiration for so much more than the pursuit of academic achievements. Her guidance went beyond the extraordinary and came from a place of love. During my years in Tel Aviv, Prof. Sharon-Zisser supported me in more ways than I can list here, and I am deeply grateful for her friendship and her dedication to our work. For me, the very possibility of writing is a product of analysis. Therefore, I would like to thank my analyst. I want to thank Katharina Jabs for our ongoing discussions on art, theory, and the differences between film and video, for her long-standing friendship and trust, and for working together and in parallel on Electric Seeing and its filmic counterpart, her film and eponymous book A Grin Without a Cat: The Very Tale. In the same spirit, I wish to thank Dr. Tamar Gerstenhaber for innumerable inspiring conversations on art, literature, theory, and everything beyond, for her wise thoughts and keen observations, for our work together, and for writing alongside me for years in various coffee shops.

I would like to extend my deepest appreciation to the PhD committee, especially to Prof. Dr. Nils Büttner, whose teaching, guidance, and support laid the foundation for this book and made the dissertation process successful. Thank you also to Prof. Dr. Sabeth Buchmann for her manifold support throughout the years, which was decisive for this project’s success. I want to thank my friends and colleagues for their important (and patient) comments on my work, and for keeping me company along the way: Valentin Leuschel, Leonora Ruchay, Julia Wirsching, Daniel Hopp, Anna Gohmert, Ethel Gutman, Marion Bührer, Karolin Probst, Swetlana Boos, Nadia Khismatulina, Asaf Agranat, Dr. Keren Shafir, Dr. Balthasar Grabmayr, Pazit Dank, Dr. Erez Ostreich, and Dr. Yael Deri. Many thanks also to the Minerva Foundation, in particular to the committee, Prof. Dr. Karin Gludovatz, Dr. Lou Bohlen, Sieglinde Reichardt, and Julia Lechler, and also to the Baden-Württemberg-Stipendium and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs scholarship for international students for providing me with the necessary funding and, even more importantly, the peace of mind to finish this project. I also want to express my sincere thanks to Bonnie Begusch and Nicolas Zupfer for their brilliant and meticulous work in turning the manuscript into a book. Most of all, I want to thank my family: my husband Daniel, my parents Reiner and Cornelia, and my mother-in-law Gabriela for their infinite support. Without their love, trust, and belief in me, I could never have finished this book.

Table of Contents

Introduction

12

I. Video—I See

20

Three Approaches

24

1 Heterogeneity

25



26 31

1.1 1.2

Medial Struggles Practical Struggles

2 Technology “Seeing Electric”: Video avant la lettre



2.1



2.2 Optics

39 40 44



2.2.1 The Camera Obscura 2.2.2 The “Electric Eye” 2.2.3 Cameras and Warfare

44 49 51



Electronic Medium

58

2.3

2.3.1 The Emergence of Video 2.3.2 Simultaneity/Immediacy 2.3.3 Storage

61 62 64



72

2.4 Convergence/Positioning

3 Etymology

74



74 76

3.1 3.2

Video—I see Audio—I hear

II. Medium and Index

78

1

The Medium

81



1.1 The Third 1.2 Erosion 1.3 Process/Psyche

83 86 90

2

The Index

94



2.1 Video and Index 2.2 Contact 2.3 Trace 2.4 Shadow 2.5 On Indexical Circulation in Video

96 97 100 104 108

III. The Aesthetics of Narcissism: Medium, Perspective, Subject, Body

112

Aesthetics of Narcissism—An Introduction

115

1

“A Commonplace of Criticism”— Two Moments of Video’s Aesthetic Heritage

119



1.1

120

Aesthetics of Acknowledgement

1.1.1 Cavell/Fried: On Re-present-ation 1.1.2 Hegel and the Dialectic Movement of Acknowledgement (Anerkennung) 1.1.3 Symmetry and Modern Art

120 123



128

1.2

Pointing at the Center

1.2.1 1.2.2 1.2.3

The Representational Regime Central Perspective as “Symbolic Form” “Shattering One-Point Perspective into a Thousand Pieces”

126

133 136 139

2

Medium, Subject, Body

144



2.1 Medium: Specificity and Matter 2.2 Body/Subject 2.3 Bracket and Parenthesis: On Object/Subject 2.4 Collapsed Present

148 152 159 167

3

The Aesthetics of Narcissism

169



3.1

On Narcissism

169



3.1.1 3.1.2 3.1.3

171 176 182



On the Other

3.2

Ovid’s Narcissus and Echo Freud on Narcissism Lacan on Narcissism: Schema L

184

IV. Video: The Aesthetics Of Phantasm

188

On Si[gh]t(e): The Video Condition

191

1 Apparatus

201

2

From the Imaginary to the Phantasm

212



2.1 Phantasma 2.2 The Scene 2.3 Grammar I (Phantasy) 2.4 Grammar II (Drive)

220 226 238 243

3

The Phantasm—$ ◊ a

248



3.1 Repetition: Missed Encounter 3.2 The Veil/Screen 3.3 Aphanisis 3.4 Eye (I)/Gaze 3.5 Encircling the Hole: Drive

249 256 272 277 290

Transformation of a Missed Encounter: Circulation, Lack, Drive

298

Appendix. Bodies, Testifying: The Performance Works of Alexandra Pirici and Anne Imhof

312

Bibliography

330

Illustrations

344

Introduction

Introduction

15

Zoom to a summer evening in 2011. […] West Coast video curator Carole Ann Klonarides spoke about the history and collecting of Los Angeles-based video work. In her discussion of the actual material of videotape, she claimed “video is dead,” and in that moment, I realized either you’re a purist or you’re not.1 “What is video?” seems to be an adequate question for our time. Video is by now a ubiquitous practice, be it in the realm of art or everyday life: it surrounds us all, every day, in various forms. If in the middle of the last century, television—with its one-sided sender-and-receiver logic— dominated the visual realm, the video technology that soon became available (and to a large audience, affordable) fundamentally changed the division between production and perception. Video’s inherent capacity to simultaneously record and play back footage has shaped the prevailing argument that video democratizes the visual social realm insofar as it decentralizes2 the role of both the producer and the spectator of a (moving) image. I want to investigate this premise by taking a close look at the topological relations the video situation presents for a spectating subject and at the images this subject gets to see. The premise of this book does not, however, pertain to an essentialist or (as stated in the opening quote) “purist” approach to video. Instead, it centers on its very structure: the circulation of the electromagnetic signal as video’s sine qua non. The difference is decisive and yet it is not often addressed in the study of video in particular or the moving image in general. The shift from analog to digital, from magnetic tape to digital storage, is thus less of interest here, since the basis for both is the electromagnetic signal, and since all contemporary moving image practices, including film, have converged to use this same material as their foundation.

1 2

Gabrielle Jennings, Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015), xix. “One of the already familiar clichés about portable video is that it decentralizes television, allowing for a genuinely local use of the medium. […] Lanesville TV could be one of the signposts toward a future in which we all will have video cameras.” WNET Video Television Review, “Videofreex Lanesville NY 1973,” YouTube video, uploaded by Molestastic69, September 6, 2011, 1:00:48, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8YT3OVCOaA.

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Thus, I choose to discuss video in particular and abstain from a more general discussion of the moving image—unless I need to contrast specific differences. I do so with the aim to show the structural predispositions that video offers and to yield a concrete concept of what video can signify for us. In the following chapters, I demonstrate how video’s structure fundamentally deviates from other moving image practices (such as classic film) and from a whole tradition of moving image theory. I argue that video is not an illusion apparatus, a phantasmagoria, or a shadow play—at least insofar as these terms denote some sort of “unreality” in contrast to a given reality. Instead, I argue that in its structural premises, video allows us to explore subjectivity and mediality more closely than most other artistic forms. This book thus follows the development of electromagnetic technology in the pursuit of “electric seeing” as it emerges in the nineteenth century and demonstrates how this development lays the foundation for what we today know as “video.” In this application of electromagnetism as an extension of human organs and their function—in the case of video technology, the eye/seeing, and in the case of radio and telephone technology, the ear/hearing—we find a curious relation to another nineteenthcentury discovery, namely, the structure of the human psyche at the advent of psychoanalysis. The main endeavor of this book is, therefore, to show that this concurrence of video (avant la lettre) and psychoanalysis is more than just an arbitrary parallelism; it is, instead, a symptom of a shift in modes of thinking subjectivity and mediality drawing from the same source of technological enhancement. I thus hope to demonstrate and make productive the underlying structure shared by both video and psychoanalysis—namely, the question of the positioning of the subject after the onset of (late) modernity at the verge of the twentieth century. As modernity is a complicated and somewhat difficult notion from an epistemological and historical perspective, I must specify that the “modernity” I refer to here is what is known in the arts as “classical modernity.” Early modern concepts of subjectivity and perspective—those of the Renaissance and the following 400 years—will interest me in relation to this rupture. I will also seek to answer how video relates to earlier artistic disciplines and aesthetic preconditions. My focus, however, is on classical modernism and postmodernism, in which both video (sometimes avant la lettre, as I demonstrate in chapter I.) and psychoanalysis symptomatically answered to—or maybe even formu-

Introduction

17

lated—a question concerning the position of a newly exposed subject. Sigmund Freud’s famous dictum that “the ego is not master in its own house”3 gives testimony to this shift in conceiving the subject and what we call subjectivity. This ascertainment is directly connected to Freud’s discovery of the unconscious—that is, of consciousness and psyche as incongruent—and of the psychic apparatus holding many unconscious drives and representations of these drives (Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen, as Freud calls them): wishes, dreams, phantasies, and other material that is not (or is hardly) accessible through its conscious parts (which we colloquially call the ego). Freud aligns this fundamental discovery with two other “fundamental mortifications” (Kränkungen) to human narcissism—the Copernican turn (the understanding that Earth is not the center of the universe) and the biological turn connected to Charles Darwin and evolutionary theory (the understanding that humans are not the “pride of creation” but a part of animality). The result is a definition of subjectivity that is no longer congruent with a conscious rendering but is fundamentally displaced from the position it presupposed—and still supposes—(for) itself.4 This problem of subjectivity as it emerges in the nineteenth century serves as a basis for both technological advancements—including the “electric eye” as an early manifestation of video, and general questions of perspective, optics, and seeing (“tele-vision”) that became ubiquitous objects of research and invention—and, simultaneously, the invention of psychoanalysis. Observed through this prism, it might not surprise us to find many examples in Freud’s own writing that draw analogies between the psychic apparatus (itself a technological term), electromagnetism, and optical devices. These analogies persist in the teachings of Jacques Lacan, and some get carved out with even more precision as they lose their analogous meaning and turn into something more material. One example of this can be found in the concept of the phantasm rendered as “a frozen image on the cinema screen,”5 a notion that is central to the concluding chapter.

3

4 5

Sigmund Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” (1917) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1917–1919) (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 143. Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” 140–43. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), 60.

Charlotte Klink: Electric Seeing

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Thinking of video as a scene is crucial for this book’s argumentation. It presupposes an understanding of media theory and mediality that includes what psychoanalysis designates as the analytical third—that is, the topological relation that unfolds between and partakes in all positions (subject, object, “message”) of a medial situation. This way of thinking media opposes an understanding of communication in which message, sender, and receiver are discrete entities and the “success” of communication is expressed in how much of the message is properly transmitted to a receiver. Instead, psychoanalysis asks: Who speaks? From where? To whom? Most importantly, this “From where?” already implies a dimension of the message that is not just a piece of information but a piece of subjectivity to which misunderstandings, Freudian slips, and other everyday fallacies give testimony. A message, then, always contains more (or less) than what is “intended”—in other words, it contains more than its “informational character.” It is precisely this residue—a “too much” or “too little”— that psychoanalysis listens to in order to locate the subject in the scene. Thus, there is something that articulates itself in a medial process that not only pertains to the difference between what is said and what is meant but also to the process of articulation itself being split as an effect of the split subject: There is a difference within what is meant, and this is what I call mediality; this is what I call the place for the subject to emerge. Video, I argue, is the epitome of this medial structure in our contemporary world. Hence, I seek to redraw the lines of subjectivity and mediality in the realm of video by means of psychoanalysis. This book thus attempts to determine video’s structural presuppositions from a psychoanalytic perspective. It examines video in four chapters from four different angles: Chapter I exposes the etymological, historical, and technological roots of video as a constantly circulating electronic signal, from the technological advancements of “electric seeing” in the late nineteenth century to portable camera systems in the late 1960s. Chapter II addresses two fundamental concepts of video: the notions of the medium and the index. By analyzing these often problematic terms, I present a media theory that does not depend on a dualism of a “sender-receiver” model but instead perceives the medium as that which mediates—which fluctuates between and partakes in the very positions it mediates.

Introduction

19

Chapter III makes use of the findings of the previous chapters in a close analysis of Rosalind Krauss’s groundbreaking essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” and the discursive field in which the essay is situated.6 The first part of the chapter analyzes the context of 1960s art criticism and its Hegelian roots in the dialectic concept of acknowledgement—and how it is challenged by video’s medial structure. The second part focuses on questions of perspective and the shift that video brought about from the central perspective of the Renaissance to the “shattered,” multiplied perspective characteristic of video. Lastly, chapter IV offers a structural analysis of video through a psychoanalytic lens. Here, the concept of the phantasm—the most instructive “classic” concept in film and media theory—is reconstructed from its Platonic roots to its emergence in Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory under the auspices of contemporary video works by Yael Bartana, Hito Steyerl, Ulla von Brandenburg, and others. This book thereby exposes video’s circular structure as a significant example of the psychoanalytic rendering of subjectivity and shows the close structural relationship that video and the practice of psychoanalysis have shared since their simultaneous emergence in the late nineteenth century.

6

Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (1976): 50–64.

I.

Video—I See

I.

Video—I see

23

How can one fail to see here the essential characteristic of video technology: not a more or less upto- the-minute ‘representation’ of an event, but live presentation of a place or an electro-optical environment—the result, it would seem, of putting reality on waves by means of electro-magnetic physics?1 And although the term ‘video art’ connotes an analogue era and an apparent fixed-ness, its material specificities are in flux. As such it necessitates continual theoretical or philosophical review; the polemics are open to change; so that video is and always has been a technology of combination, and in its current guise, a chameleon-like extant property in the continuing history of digital ‘new’ media. A philosophy based upon ‘video’ materiality per se would be built upon shifting-sands […]. The technology itself resists definition on the basis of analysis of its material constituents. In the late 1960s to 70s, it was the apparatus of videotape, which was a definable object, i.e. a portapak, a monitor, the conduit of broadcast, but ultimately, video is a stuff of concept, and a challenge to medium specific rhetoric; a perceptual thing—post-material moving-image.2

1 2

Paul Virilio, Polar Inertia (London: Sage, 2000), 1. Jackie Hatfield, “Expanded Cinema—Proto, Post-Photo,” in Experimental Film and Video: An Anthology, ed. Jackie Hatfield and Stephen Littman (New Barnet: John Libbey, 2015), 239.

Charlotte Klink: Electric Seeing

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Three Approaches A return to the manifold and largely diverging origins of video is a persisting symptom of the research in this field—an approach that gives rise to the ubiquitous and vastly accepted claim of video’s elusiveness. For this reason, it seems appropriate to begin this investigation with not one but three possible ways to address video’s roots. The first approach considers video’s heterogeneous heritage on a historical, discursive plane, beginning with video’s emergence in the late 1960s. The second approach elucidates the possible technological premises of video in order to define, from a technical point of view, the necessary components to create or experience it. Finally, the third approach examines the etymological scope of video’s potential meaning. These three approaches are in no way arbitrary. Rather, they attempt to formulate three main conceptual strands that can be found in various combinations in any publication on video. Rarely, however, are these three approaches distinguished from one another, nor are they identified for what they are. The first approach is a genealogy formed by the logic of ancestry. With all its cracks and irritations, this genealogy describes a continuous lineage of art forms in which one form gets shaped out of others—and is, in time, bound to shape another. The second approach is materialistic, as it focuses on the physical conditions, means, and tools necessary to produce and experience video. The third approach is structural, following the logic of etymology and the signifier, and aims to register and classify video within its semiotic context, examining its conceptual origins. Irrespective of which approach one considers most important, all three, in their own right, provide an answer to the question: What is video? It is only if we acknowledge the complex tension between all three approaches that we can shed light on the conglomeration of semantic relations that we call video. Thus, when I examine each aspect closely and separately for its modus operandi in this chapter, it is merely to highlight a certain discursive angle in relation to video and to focus on the implications and problems this position entails. In other words, the separation of these three approaches— analyzing one aspect of video’s structure at a time—must always be artificial. Thus, the approach I take in this chapter is not an attempt to reduce video to any of these positions, nor is the material discussed in each section disconnected from the others.

I.

Video—I see

25

1 Heterogeneity We thus face the first theoretical paradox in the definition of a post-modern electronic medium which doesn’t extend modern traditions, techniques or genres, in spite of the obvious relations to film and photography, nor respect the conceptions and cognitive orders on which modernist categories of art/art objects were based. […] An aesthetic theory of “video art” would have no object of study commensurate to the analytical and referential constructs of autonomy, authority, authorship, genre, style, and intellectual property through which subject/object boundaries of knowledge and representation were drawn in modern literate culture.3 When video emerged in the late 1960s—just sixty years ago—it presented itself in many ways as a Pandora’s box for the modes of modernist art production. With its uncommitted and unspecified aesthetic, material, technological, discursive, and conceptual predispositions and boundaries, video posed not only a question but a threat to the modernist paradigm of medium specificity, which was, in fact, not much older.4 Modernism had, in this regard, been based on a certain understanding of purity: a quasi-essentialist division of different “media,” such as film, painting, and sculpture, which were divided not only by their means but also by corresponding theories and modes of thinking and practicing. Video’s emergence challenged both the pre-existing divisions between genres or disciplines and the very concept of dividing artistic forms into disciplines. Along with contemporary practices such as performance, happenings, and fluxus, video questioned the idea of a medium-specific art altogether, engaging in fluid forms between the genres rather than “medial purity.” However, it assumed a special position in this development because it not only combined different pre-established “media” but also introduced a completely new technology to the realm of art. Video thus shook the ground of the mid-century art world, introducing,

3 4

Johannes Birringer, “Video Art / Performance: A Border Theory,” Performing Arts Journal 13, no. 3 (1991): 54–55. For a further discussion of the problem of the medium and medium specificity, see chapter II.1: “The Medium.”

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along with its new technology, a new aesthetic, social, and medial realm that had yet to be defined. Informed and influenced by pre-existing media, video art drew from different sources. First of all, it drew from television, which made the earliest “video” artworks possible avant la lettre, before portable and affordable video cameras and videotape recorders (VTRs) became available.5 It also drew from performance art, which used video as a means—as a document or component—before video art itself emerged.6 Video also drew from painting, film, theater, and other artistic practices. However, although pre-existing media helped to shape and establish video within the realm of the fine arts, video formed a vacuum in artistic (and social) practice that—as is true for any medium—only began to be occupied over time, and was never entirely filled.

1.1

Medial Struggles

One year prior to video’s introduction to the public, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964) proved almost prophetic in its anticipation of this new tool, indicating the fundamental problem any new technology poses to a society: In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any

5

6

“Prior to the arrival of the Sony portable video system in 1968, ‘video art’ was primarily a matter of manipulating signals within the frame of the television screen. Magnets were applied to TV sets, internal circuitry was altered and black boxes were attached.” Paul Ryan, “A Genealogy of Video,” Leonardo 21, no. 1 (1988): 40. “The use of video as a medium in the context of performance and installation work, which began in the late sixties and continued throughout the seventies, functioned essentially in three ways: one, as a form of performance documentation; two, as a prerecorded component within a performance or installation; and three, as a ‘real time’ component within a performance or installation. It is worth noting that these ‘intermedia’ models existed before the genre known as ‘video art’ began to appear in the mid-seventies.” Robert C. Morgan, “Moving Images,” Performing Arts Journal 18, no. 2 (1996): 57.

I.

Video—I see

27

extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.7 McLuhan’s now iconic phrase “the medium is the message” points to the core of the problem. Any new technology used as “an extension of ourselves” (i.e., a “medium”) not only shifts social relations that directly pertain to technology or the discourse around it but also entirely restructures social practice and perception. Thus, the world before and after the introduction of a new medium is rendered fundamentally changed and all prior media and social constellations attached to them are reorganized and resignified.8 In this sense, video’s introduction to the realm of art does indeed imply a rupture in a previous system of categorizing artistic genres, not only in terms of concept but also at the levels of perception and production. Following this train of thought, we might ask how fruitful it is to think of video as a rupture in the classic paradigm of modernist art and, consequently, to what extent this paradigm of medium specificity was ever justified at the level of production. As the film researcher Gregory Zinman argues in his text “Analog Circuit Palettes, Cathode Ray Canvases: Digital’s Analog, Experimental Past“ (2012), the boundaries between media were never as static and pure as the discourse around them suggested, and projects that combined different media (such as painting and film) were created throughout the history of modernism.9 Film, in this specific sense a predecessor of video, struggled in similar ways with the modernist idea of medium specificity. As Andrew V. Uroskie points out, “Time and time again, cinema’s complex ensemble of social and technological factors frustrated this mode of reduction” and could “not be definitely separated from the rival arts of painting, music, sculpture, and performance.”10

7 8

9

10

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 7. “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance. The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.” McLuhan, 18. “In fact, the desire to make ‘paintings in time’ stretches back to the first publicly screened abstract film, Walter Ruttmann’s Opus I (1921), and continues through animator Mary Ellen Bute’s experiments with cathode ray oscilloscopes in the 1940s and 1950s.” Gregory Zinman, “Analog Circuit Palettes, Cathode Ray Canvases: Digital’s Analog, Experimental Past,” Film History 24, no. 2 (2012): 136. Andrew V. Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 7.

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The idea that video emerged in an art world shaped by the concept of medium specificity thus clearly requires a closer analysis. The often-quoted paradigm of medium specificity was formulated by Clement Greenberg in his 1960 essay “Modernist Painting” (first published 1961), just several years before the fundamental changes that would take place in artistic practice in the mid to late 1960s. We might therefore see Greenberg’s idea not so much as a modernist paradigm but as a last attempt to save the already frail discourse of late modernism from the emergence of new, fluid artistic forms. When Greenberg defined flatness as “unique and exclusive to pictorial art”11 (i.e., painting), he was, in fact, trying to defend art against the ruptures of modernism itself. His call for medium specificity was uttered at a time when the “symptom” of said specificity in the arts was no longer functional. Thus, what Greenberg identified in modernist painting as a unique form, expressed by means of what he deemed the equally unparalleled modernist capacity for “self-criticism,”12 was already in the process of collapsing and transforming into a medial structure. This is to say that painting, like all other artistic disciplines at this point, had to take on the ruptures within its own framework, the precarious place of mediation (meaning the need to mediate different disciplines and positions) that these ruptures invoked, and, in short, the fact that art forms are never proprietary to anyone or anything, but emerge in relation to different positions. Another curious aspect of Greenberg’s idea of medium specificity is that he identifies flatness as unique to painting, while painting’s other attributes—such as “color” and “enclosing shape”—are shared with arts like theater and sculpture.13 This argument is particularly interesting since it excludes photography and film (which are also “flat”) from the list of arts in question. Only a few years after Greenberg’s essay was published in 1961, the first Portapak camera was sold in the United States, introducing video as another art form sharing flatness with painting. One can argue, however, that the flatness in photography, film, and video is not quite the same as the flatness in painting. In the latter, flatness exists on a level support, whereas in photography, film, and video,

Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance: 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 87. 12 Greenberg, 85. 13 Greenberg, 87. 11

I.

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a whole apparatus is necessary to transmit the flat (and supposedly immaterial) image onto a surface. Yet although the “enclosing shapes” in painting and theater are not the same, Greenberg treats them as such. Whether the shared (or allegedly shared) attributes of different art forms are essentially the same or similar is irrelevant here. What is most important to note is that flatness, the attribute Greenberg defines as particular to painting, is already non-exclusive to painting at the moment Greenberg articulates his claim. To see just how relevant this argument is in relation to video’s emergence, it is important to remember the context. While portable video equipment was not yet available, video images (in the form of broadcast television) were already ubiquitous in the majority of Western households. Greenberg thus wrote his essay within a fundamentally changing world in which the mass medium of television was already anticipating the next revolutionary development: the introduction of video technology for a vast private audience. Purity needed to be proclaimed because it became clear that no such thing existed in late modernism, with its many intermedial approaches. “Medial purity” was, indeed, a paradoxical construct; a phantasy exposing the fact that mediation requires a fluctuating position between and within positions. It would not, however, do Greenberg’s project justice to perceive it as merely reactionary, provoked by a confrontation with intermediality in the arts at the verge of postmodernism. His project is also just as much an attempt to save the arts from obsolescence caused by modernism’s internalized criticism. As Greenberg emphasizes, this process of cultural criticism begins with the Enlightenment, continues its trajectory through Kant’s philosophy, and eventually enters modernism: We know what has happened to an activity like religion, which could not avail itself of Kantian, immanent, criticism in order to justify itself. At first glance the arts might seem to have been in a situation like religion’s. Having been denied by the Enlightenment all tasks they could take seriously, they looked as though they were going to be assimilated to entertainment pure and simple, and entertainment itself looked as though it were going to be assimilated, like religion, to therapy. The arts could save themselves from this leveling down only by

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demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.14 Perceived in this way, Greenberg’s project is an attempt to save the arts by assigning them a specific place within the realm of cultural practice. However, medium specificity does not solve the problem Greenberg identifies in this climate of social, political, and artistic change at the beginning of the 1960s—namely, the issue that the arts, just like religion in early modern times, had become profane.15 With the introduction of video, it became apparent that no attempt or claim of medium specificity would change the fact that mediality had become a problem for artistic practice, just as artistic practice had become a problem for mediality. That is to say that when video technology was introduced to a broad private audience, it was far from clear what sort of practice would develop from it (fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Image reproduced from Mike Leggett, “Eighteen Months Outside the Grounds of Obscenity & Libel,” in The Video Show: Festival of Independent Video at the Serpentine Gallery, 1975, exhibition catalog, unpaginated.

14 Greenberg, 85–86. 15 See chapter III.1.2: “Pointing at the Center.”

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1.2

Practical Struggles

31

In “A Genealogy of Video” (1988), Paul Ryan, a New York-based artist who worked as Marshall McLuhan’s assistant from 1967 to 1968 and was an early adopter of video technology, recounts the struggle to attribute meaning to this new form in the late 1960s and early 1970s. An especially important question was “whether video would be considered a tool of social change or a medium of art.”16 Ryan divides the question of meaning into six “dimensions”: technological, theoretical, political, institutional, economic, and cultural. Each dimension offers insight into a field that is deeply heterogeneous in how it is used and understood. Different demands were expressed to video depending on how it was put into practice. Ryan thus emphasizes that video art is a “mutation” sprung from the “unlimited sense of possibility that early video held.”17 Like many of his contemporaries, Ryan frames the question of whether video should be seen as a social or an artistic tool within the context of the ongoing Vietnam War as well as the racial and gender struggles dominating the sociopolitical climate of the United States in the 1960s. Instead of joining the military, Ryan spent this period as McLuhan’s assistant at Fordham University. His own attraction to video was directly associated with the “ideal put forth by Marshall McLuhan of a more harmonious society based on electronic communications.”18 This was not a solitary perspective: the view was symptomatic for the era, which becomes apparent through the diverse examples of video practice that developed during this time. Two famous examples of the ambiguous use of video technology—located somewhere between artistic expression and the struggle for social change—are the video collective known as the Videofreex (who ran their own pirate television station, Lanesville TV, in the Catskill Mountains in New York,

16

“The genealogy of video is a history of the struggle between the drive to use video as a tool of social change and the drive to use video as a medium of art. Specifically, this version deals with New York City video from 1968 to 1971. I settle on the term ‘drive’ because during that period there were no clearly defined factions of art versus social change. There were videomakers who thought of themselves as artists and saw their work as promulgating social change, and there were videomakers working for social change who considered their work artistic. Activity in the video field tended toward one or the other of these diverging poles. Choices could be made according to an agenda of social change, and choices could be made that individuated oneself as an artist.” Ryan, “A Genealogy of Video,” 39–40 17 Ryan, 39. 18 Ryan, 40.

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figs. 2–5)19 and the Raindance video collective in New York City. 20 These strong expressions of idealism in relation to the medium are particularly remarkable considering the circumstances of video’s emergence. The United States military had developed portable video technology from broadcast television equipment as a means of surveillance in the Vietnam War.21 It seems somewhat curious that artists and political activists would place their hopes for a “harmonious society” in the very technology that had been invented and employed by their two major opponents: the military and broadcast television, both of which were understood as tools for strategic control and social normalization. However, the new availability of video and the resulting void of its potential application gave rise to hopes that the new medium could be used to bring about social change. Video is far from the only example of a technological innovation introduced by warfare and later transformed into an artistic medium. In War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1989), Paul Virilio demonstrates the relationship between modern military technology and modern medial modes of perception: If we remember that it was an optics professor, Henri Chrétien, whose work during the First World War perfecting naval artillery telemetry laid the foundations for what would become Cinemascope thirty-six years later, we can better grasp the deadly harmony

19

20 21

See, for instance, the 1973 WNET Video and Television Review featuring the Videofreex, which reflects on the possibility that video “decentralizes television” (an idea that is already called a “familiar cliché”). WNET Video Television Review, “Videofreex Lanesville NY 1973.” Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 79. “Like many technologies, video was born of an alliance between military and industrial concerns in the West. The first portable equipment was developed in the early 1960s by the US army for surveillance purposes in Vietnam. The medium already existed in the form of broadcast television, an institution that was increasingly dominated by commerce and subjected to political pressures. Shot through with thinly disguised ideological messages such as the ultimate desirability of consumer goods and the ‘natural’ place of women in the kitchen, the new ‘opiate of the people’ was looking more like an agent of social control than a form of family entertainment. Video art came into being deeply opposed to both its progenitors and, when Sony Portapaks went on sale in the mid 1960s, artists decisively reclaimed video as a creative medium capable of challenging the military, political and commercial interests from which it sprang.” Catherine Elwes, Video Art: A Guided Tour (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), 3–4.

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that always establishes itself between the functions of eye and weapon. And, indeed, while the advance of panoramic telemetry resulted in wide-screen cinema, so the progress of radio-telemetry led to an improved picture: the radar picture, whose electronic image prefigured the electronic vision of video.22 Here we are inclined to ask: What does a technology entail on a discursive level and to what degree can it be used by a pre-existing institutionalized discourse? To what extent can—or must—it subvert the preexisting social framework it is thrown into? According to McLuhan, the answer could be that video, as a technology that was turning into an artistic medium, proved “that any technology could do anything but add itself on to what we already are.”23 Video thus found itself in the middle of an ideological rupture while simultaneously existing on both sides of the struggle: as the mass medium of broadcast television and a tool of commerce and military surveillance on the one side, and as a new, idealized democratic tool for a political, artistic, and social revolution on the other.

Figs. 2–5 Video stills from Lanesville TV, WNET, Video and Television Review,1973.

22 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989), 69. 23 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 11.

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The idea that video technology held the cathartic power to democratize society through decentralized broadcasting—thus altogether subverting mass media—stood in direct contrast with other broadcasting projects. Video shows emerged that were commissioned by public television. WGBH in Boston, for instance, invited the artists Alan Kaprow, Otto Piene, Aldo Tambellini, James Seawright, Nam June Paik, and Thomas Tadlock to produce a show called The Medium is the Medium.24 This example is paradigmatic for a practice of video art formatted for television. Such approaches were, as Ryan points out, not so much invested in practical social and political questions but in exploring aesthetic forms. Gene Youngblood, who was the first theorist to conceptualize video as art in Expanded Cinema (1970), described the early relationship between television and video art thus: “Until videotronic hardware becomes inexpensive enough for individual use it is the producers, directors, and station managers who make today’s video art possible.“25 Access to video technology was indeed a problem for many artists in the 1960s and 1970s. The artist Mike Leggett describes the situation in his catalog contribution for the Serpentine Gallery’s first video exhibition, “The Video Show,” in 1975: Creating the conditions for people to make their own recordings, to employ video as a valid, explicit, easily assimilated tool, is not a straightforward matter; thought [sic] the cost of its functioning is relatively low the accessibility of the equipment itself is problematic. I myself borrow it in the course of employment at an institute of further education but at the present time because video is largely regarded by Industry and Education as being second string to the aesthetic and technical resources of the broadcast stations the proliferation of resources to “outsiders” has been virtually nil.26

24 Ryan, “A Genealogy of Video,” 40; Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970), 281–82. 25 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 282. 26 Mike Leggett, “Eighteen Months Outside the Grounds of Obscenity and Libel,” in The Video Show: Festival of Independent Video at the Serpentine Gallery, 1975, exhibition catalog, unpaginated.

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The lack of available equipment encouraged collaborations not only between artists but also between artists and institutions outside of the realm of art, such as public television stations and educational institutions like schools, libraries, or universities. Meanwhile, the new field was—at least in the United States—largely funded by private organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Markle Foundation as well as public institutions like the New York State Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Established in the 1960s by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, the New York State Arts Council—the first of its kind—provided over half a million dollars for video in 1969 alone. Initially, the money was equally distributed between video groups based in New York. According to Ryan, this led to a “gift economy” in which practitioners circulated both equipment and knowledge within the movement.27 Video’s beginnings were not just characterized by problems around the availability of technology and the collaborations that occurred as a result. It was also shaped by the shift that television/ video technology underwent under the auspices of art. Due to its new portability, video changed both artistic practice and viewing habits: Tripods, with their fixed viewpoints, were out; handheld fluidity was in. Video’s unique ability to capitalize on the moment with instant playback and real-time monitoring of events also suited the era’s emphasis on “process, not product.” Process art, earth art, conceptual art, and performance art all shared a deemphasis on the final work and an emphasis on how it came to be. The absence of electronic editing equipment— which discouraged shaping a tape into a finished “product”—further encouraged the development of a “process” video aesthetic.28 We can indeed view “process, not product” as a key attribute of early video. The first tapes were of poor quality and could not compete with television images. Instead of broadcasting video signals “through the air,” video practitioners sought “alternative kinds of TV making, and

27 Ryan, “A Genealogy of Video,” 42–43. 28 Deirdre Boyle, “From Portapak to Camcorder: A Brief History of Guerilla Television,” Journal of Film and Video 44, no. 1/2 (1992): 68.

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one alternative form of transmitting it: closed-circuit links to small groups or even individuals.“29 This practice was more than just an alternative: it was a fundamental change in position toward video technology and its implications, as demonstrated in the following analysis by John Howkins in the catalog to “The Video Show”: Video as process gets even closer to television’s electronic potential. Broadcasters have used it, but secretly. A chat-show host may look at his private monitor to check that his tie is knotted smartly, but he would be ashamed if his vanity was broadcast to the audience. Video people take the opposite view. They actually concentrate such personal moments of feedback. They don’t use process as a secret preliminary to the performance, but as the show itself. It can be private or public, boring or spectacular; funny or frightening. […] Seeing myself from the outside can change my idea of my body; my sense of identity; my attitude and behaviour towards others.30 While this “seeing myself from the outside” is a key attribute of video and will be of great importance in the following chapters, it is crucial to emphasize the importance of the change of direction described here in the shift from television to video. Instead of a hierarchical and highly ideological broadcasting model in which the means of production (monitors, cameras, the set, etc.) are veiled as much as the product (the viewer),31 video exposes the radically circular and non-hierarchal structure on which it is based. This goes far beyond Howkins’s analysis: what is veiled is not just the vanity of the host looking at the monitor but the fact that the host also has a monitor in front of him—just like the viewer at home in front of the television. Thus, video is not so much about “personal moments of feedback” (since this is already an effect, not a cause). More

29 30 31

John Howkins, “The Video Show,” in The Video Show, unpaginated. Howkins, “The Video Show,” unpaginated. Here I distinguish between the viewer (which I use for broadcast television) and the spectator (which I use for video and film) in order to emphasize the different ways they function within their respective framework. “Viewer” supports the idea of a passive position while “spectator” highlights the activity on the part of the watching subject. While both are “active,” television veils this condition while video exposes it.

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fundamentally, it is defined by the fact that there is always instantaneous feedback, be it in the television studio or in works by early video artists. Broadcasting veils this feedback and makes it seem like there is a one-sided relationship between a sender and a receiver; a relationship in which the sender conveys or imposes something on the receiver, who, in turn, absorbs it. Video, however, exposes its own (and with it, also television’s) circular structure. This not only ruptures how television is perceived but also poses the question of how both the producer and the viewer relate to the medium, thus challenging the supposedly unproblematic relationship between them. It is not that the producer—in this case, broadcast television—imposes its “ideology” on viewers. Rather, video’s instantaneous feedback demonstrates what is true for any medium: that it produces its subject at the very moment of contact. It doesn’t matter if it is a painting, a sculpture, a performance, a text, or a video: the relationship between a subject and its medium is never unproblematic. Following this train of thought, video (and related contemporary practices, such as performance, body art, etc.) shows us that the assumed split between the producer and the recipient is nothing but ideology—and that this differentiation cannot be maintained. The exposure of this ideology is what early practitioners referred to as the “democratizing power” of video. It could, however, be argued that this exposure is not so much a democratizing move (a claim that itself sounds highly ideological) but one that simply de-hierarchizes and decentralizes video once and for all. Thus, the question of what to do with video becomes more urgent than ever. Leggett’s pamphlet-like catalog contribution suggests that in the face of the “tyranny we are all nightly affected by in the shape of Broadcast Television,” there is no value in people coming to the gallery to gaze for an indefinite period at other people [sic] work. From my experience of working with video, the time is better spent in making recordings. The other reason is that if people come to the Show to simply consume other peoples [sic] ideas and experiences, albeit secondhand, in the way broadcast television trains us to accept, then they will in the same way have to pay for it.32

32 Leggett, “Eighteen Months Outside the Grounds of Obscenity and Libel,” unpaginated.

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Leaving aside Leggett’s idea of an unproblematic split between the side of production and the side of reception, one could argue that it is precisely at this point of producing/watching that video reveals itself. Hence, becoming a video practitioner has little to do with whether someone picks up a camera. Instead, it is connected to the position taken in relation to video as a whole. As Leggett shows, a “consumerist” position toward video is attributed to television and its corresponding hierarchies. If we watch video in this manner, he suggests, it simply ceases to be video. Making video nonetheless requires more than just contrasting it with a consumerist attitude. Since video is technically rooted in the simultaneous production and reception of an image—that is to say, a simultaneity of making and watching—the conceptual line between production and reception is no longer clear-cut. “Making” is a position that not only can but must be taken from both sides, reception and production, and the same goes for “watching.” Although this may be true for any art, it becomes most obvious in video, since the medium openly demands that both positions be taken at once. Another demand also surfaces—namely, to reconsider these positions and their relation to one another. In a wider framework, these demands challenge a certain idea of expertise and craftsmanship in the arts. Although this notion has been questioned since the shift towards a processual understanding of artmaking in the eighteenth century (and was proclaimed dead by modernist modes of art production), it has never found a clearer formulation than in video.33 In contrast to the television image, the poor quality of early video, the tenuousness of its technical supports, and the perishability of early videotape did not allow for much craftsmanship. Instead, early practitioners focused on an experimental approach to “making.” In this sense, making videos, rather than consuming them, is what attracted many to the portable video system. Turning everybody into a (potential) producer entailed a shift in the way we theorize media—one that has had wide-reaching effects. Nowadays, almost everyone is a video practitioner.

33

The discussion of processuality and the shift in art from “product” to “production” since the eighteenth century is too complex for a detailed examination here. For a comprehensive analysis of the subject, see Michael Lüthy and Christoph Menke, Subjekt und Medium in der Kunst der Moderne [in German] (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2006).

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2 Technology But I want to approach my conclusion by way of what Hegel says about gunpowder, another technological agent of dissolution. (As with Hegel so with Deleuze, I am inclined to say: when insides cease to be impregnable, people cease to believe in them and soon stop building them altogether.)34 Video, unlike other artistic practices of the same era, is not solely based on the rearrangement and recodification of already known and established techniques and technologies. Instead, it emerges with its very own technological support. While the analog video image uses the same cathode ray tube technology as the televised image, it is of poorer quality. And although it is a moving image like film, it shares very little of film’s technical specifications. Video is an electronic image that is transmitted between devices, most commonly a camera and a monitor/screen, supported by a continuously flowing electronic signal. Closed-circuit transmission and the ability to produce a live image are key characteristics of the medium, along with its aforementioned decentralization (in contrast to television). In addressing video’s specific technological conditions, I speak from the perspective of theory and artistic video practice, not from the standpoint of a video technician or physicist. My intention is to extract certain properties of video technology and to contextualize them both historically and theoretically, thus building a comprehensive theory of video’s preconditions and how they affect us. Video technology is almost everywhere today, from the surveillance cameras in the streets to the mobile phones in our pockets. Despite its prevalence, it is curious that video practitioners usually do not know much about how the technology works, while the technicians who have this knowledge often do not make videos. The video artist and historian Chris Meigh-Andrews refers to this as video equipment’s “own ‘bias’,” adding that this “bias may well include (or certainly extends towards) the ideological, and in this sense we get the ‘tools’ that we are given, rather, than necessarily, the tools we might want, even supposing we knew what they were or might be.”35 This split between the technician and the end user is a decisive moment in the shift from the arts to art—

34 Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “Blankness as a Signifier,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997): 170. 35 Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, 6.

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that is, from art understood as craftsmanship to art understood as a process in which technical devices decentralize art production.36 Video is possibly the best locus to track this development.

2.1

“Seeing Electric”: Video avant la lettre

Whatever differences we have previously identified between television and video on a discursive level, these fields share the same technological roots. I will thus allow myself—in this section only—to use video and television synonymously when referring to the early years of video/ television technology. In this section, I will use the more general and contemporary term “video,” even though some of my sources refer to the technology as “television” (which, from a historical point of view, is the correct term). In order to understand the origins of video/television technology, it is important to first separate two capacities of video that now seem inseparable: the camera and the storage medium. Today, when we refer to a camera, we usually mean a technical device that is not only able to “see” but also to store images. In the early days of video technology, these functions were not yet linked. Thus, while the camera is “the eye of the video system; an instrument capable of absorbing the light values of a scene and converting them to a corresponding series of electrical pulses through the use of a cathode ray pickup tube,” 37 a recording device is needed to store these electrical pulses. Recording, on the other hand, is the “process of impressing an audio or video signal on a medium in such a way that it can be reproduced whenever required.”38 Camera technology based on the absorption and transformation of light dates back to the 1873 discovery that “metallic selenium is electrically sensitive to light,” a finding that gave way to the innovation of converting “optical images into electric currents” (fig. 6).39 The

36

37 38 39

See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); Lüthy and Menke, Subjekt und Medium. Keith Jack and Vladimir Tsatsulin, Dictionary of Video and Television Technology (Boston: Newnes, 2002), s.v. “camera.” Jack and Tsatsulin, Dictionary of Video and Television Technology, s.v. “recording.” George Shiers, Early Television: A Bibliographic Guide to 1940 (New York: Garland, 1997), 1; See also R. W. Burns, Television: An International History of the Formative Years (London: Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1998), 35.

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realization that ”selenium could be put to use for seeing by electricity”40 ultimately led to the invention of the cathode ray tube in 1897. In 1881, the first devices transmitting “luminous patterns” were introduced, featuring a linear scanning process with flyback.41 This became the basis of television/video transmission technology. Surprisingly, video is not the successor of film but rather its contemporary, emerging along with the technical revolution brought about by electrical engineering and, more concretely, the discovery of electromagnetic waves and the photoelectric effect.42 The rise of cinematography in the mid-1890s

Fig. 6 Schema of the selenium camera, reproduced from R. W. Burns, Television: An International History of the Formative Years, 50.

40 Shiers, Early Television, 2. 41 Shiers, 13. 42 Shiers, 25.

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influenced the pioneers of video technology to use camera set-ups or projection techniques in similar ways. They also used scanner and modulator technology that was characteristic of video, and adopted other inventions in the realm of electrical engineering, such as induction coils, transformers, shutters, and, famously, the Nipkow disk (fig. 7).43 The latter is a mechanical scanning disk that allowed for the first mechanical television systems after World War I. It was replaced in the late 1920s to 1930s by hybrid mechanical-electronic forms and, shortly thereafter, by completely electronic systems.44 The cathode ray tube, which forms the basis of the electronic scanning system, was invented and refined in parallel to the mechanical scanning systems. Thus, on a technological level, video is also a mixture of very disparate technical influences, unified in the aim to create “electric seeing.” The introduction of broadcast radio in the 1920s and the growing popular interest in technological innovations raised curiosity about the possibility of image-transmitting technologies like phototelegraphy and television, which ultimately resulted in the technology we know today as video.45 The idea of “electric vision,” a concept that motivated the development of early video/television technology, can also be found in video’s second pioneering phase—namely, in the early years of its medial (as opposed to technological) evolution in the 1960s. Famously, it was expressed by the artist Nam June Paik at a screening on October 4, 1965 at the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village. For many, this marks the beginning of video practice and can at least be considered the founding myth of video art. Presenting footage he had shot just hours before with a Sony Portapak camera—purchased that same day at the Liberty Music Shop on Madison Ave in New York City—Paik stated: In my videotaped electric vision, not only you see your picture instantaneously and find out what kind of bad habits you have, but see yourself deformed in 12 ways, which only electronic ways can do.

43 Shiers, 25. 44 Jack and Tsatsulin, Dictionary of Video and Television Technology, s.vv. “BBC standard,” “mechanical television,” “Nipkow disk.” 45 Shiers, Early Television, 61.

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* ** *** ****

43

It is the historical necessity, if there is a historical necessity in history, that a new decade of electronic television should follow the past decade of electronic music. Variability & Indeterminism is underdeveloped in optical art as parameter Sex is underdeveloped in music. As collage technic (sic) replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas. Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors & semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins & junk.46

It comes as no surprise that this desire for “electric vision” attracted early pioneers of video art just as it had attracted the pioneers of video technology a century earlier, given that the key property of video technology is,

Fig. 7 Schema of the Nipkow disk, reproduced from Richard C. Webb, Tele-Visionaries (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 8: “As the disk rotates, the apertures trace over the image field a line at a time, either reading scene brightness information as a camera, or releasing light as a viewing screen.”

46

Nam June Paik, quoted in Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, 17–18. It is a matter of dispute whether the events of October 4, 1965 have been accounted accurately. For this discussion, see Tom Sherman, “The Premature Birth of Video Art,” NEWSgrist, January 12, 2007, http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/ 2007/01/the_premature_b.html.

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and always has been, the image as an electronic signal, transmitted and circulating in a complex setting between camera and monitor. In this sense, video, as John Howkins claims, “resurrects the original meaning of the word television: the use of electronics to see something from an external viewpoint.”47

2.2 Optics This “external viewpoint” is given by “the eye of the video system,”48 the camera. It is thus necessary to outline a few aspects of optics and camera technology. Photography, film, and video share their heritage in this realm of the camera as an external point of view. However, one must be careful not to confuse this conceptual similarity with a historical lineage. Just as video’s roots are not found in film—since video is, in fact, a parallel development (a technology that, contrary to popular belief, predates the technology of radio)49—one cannot assume a historical or epistemological lineage from the camera obscura to photography and film, despite the popularity this concept enjoys in art theory.

2.2.1 The Camera Obscura The perception that the camera obscura is a direct predecessor of the cinematic and photographic camera often gives way to an idea of technological determinism. Recent theory has, however, challenged the linear and teleological argument concerning the development of an increasingly accurate depiction of the physical world. As Jonathan Crary demonstrates in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990), the camera obscura’s model of vision collapsed with the emergence of a “new kind of observer.”50 At the same time, the technological premises of “what constituted vision” shifted— along with the significance of the camera obscura itself—from a locus of truth to one that mystifies and conceals truth.51 Had the camera ob-

47 Howkins, “The Video Show,” unpaginated. 48 Jack and Tsatsulin, Dictionary of Video and Television Technology, s.v. “camera.” 49 Shiers, Early Television, x. 50 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 3; 14. 51 Crary, 27; 29.

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scura, for over two hundred years, been seen as a “model, in both rationalist and empiricist thought, of how observation leads to truthful inferences about the world,”52 the new technological and social paradigms of the nineteenth century changed both the position of the subject as spectator53 and the divisions and organizations of visuality and representation. The numerous technical inventions of this time (many of them in the fields of camera technology and optics, such as stereoscopy and photography), as well as the many experiments related to electric seeing, brought a multitude of perspectives rather than one unified view, as had been the case with the camera obscura. It is instructive here to think of the formal similarities between the camera obscura and today’s “black box,”54 which often serves as a setting for viewing film and video. Although the formal setting is similar in both cases, the modes of spectatorship and representation are radically different. We can see a shift beginning in the mid-nineteenth century through the change of perspective(s) from the camera obscura to the modern camera: from the concept of a rational (Cartesian) subject55 and its fixed and bodi­less view in relation to the physical world, to a dependent, precarious,

52 Crary, 29. 53 While Crary prefers the term “observer,” I prefer to use “spectator” here, since the word contains a reference to the activity of seeing, which, to my eyes, “viewer” or “observer” do not adequately address. 54 The term “black box” (or “black cube”) originally referred to cinema and now indicates all spatial settings designed to show film, video, or other forms of media art. It denotes a darkened room in which moving image works are shown. The term is usually juxtaposed with the notion of the “white cube,” which refers to the space of the modern or postmodern gallery or museum displaying art on white walls. 55 The Cartesian subject is a rational subject of certainty (cogito ergo sum) coinciding with what in psychoanalysis is called the ego. Here I follow Crary’s argument, which defines the function of the camera obscura as analogous to the Cartesian cogito of rational perception: “In the Second Meditation, Descartes asserts that ‘perception, or the action by which we perceive, is not a vision … but is solely an inspection by the mind.’ He goes on to challenge the notion that one knows the world by means of eyesight: ‘It is possible that I do not even have eyes with which to see anything.’ For Descartes, one knows the world ‘uniquely by perception of the mind,’ and the secure positioning of the self within an empty interior space is a precondition for knowing the outer world. The space of the camera obscura, its enclosedness, its darkness, its separation from an exterior, incarnate Descartes’s ‘I will now shut my eyes, I shall stop my ears, I shall disregard my senses.’ The orderly and calculable penetration of light rays through the single opening of the camera corresponds to the flooding of the mind by the light of reason, not the potentially dangerous dazzlement of the senses by the light of the sun.” Crary, 43 (quotation: René Descartes, “Second Meditation,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 21–24).

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decentralized subject who cannot misunderstand itself as identical with the camera’s perspective. The camera obscura ascribes prevalence to space (which unfolds before its fixed point of view), allowing for a subject positioned to see itself as structuring, organizing, and thus mastering this space. The introduction of the modern camera and the emergence of the electric age, however, shifted prevalence to time and temporality, emphasizing the process of image production rather than its product.56 The effects of nineteenth-century technological inventions like stereoscopic or photographic perspective reveal that the subject’s position, his or her viewpoint, can no longer be guaranteed. This development is intrinsically connected to the emergence of the moving image. However, it is not merely associated with technical possibilities, since it could also be argued that the camera obscura presents a moving image. Instead, the change relates to how the spectator is positioned within the technical set-up—that is, how the subject is represented in this setting. This argument provides further distance from the popular idea that the camera obscura is equivalent to linear perspective while the introduction of the modern camera corresponds to a break with this perspective or the formation of a “new subject.” Instead, it raises the question of how the subject is positioned within the respective setting. This points to a problem of representation relating to both temporality and the body—an issue that had been elided in the concept of the camera obscura. Crary emphasizes that “the movement and temporality so evident in the camera obscura were always prior to the act of representation; movement and time could be seen and experienced, but never represented.”57 Analogously, what makes the camera obscura a “metaphysical” rather than “mechanical eye”58 is the lack of representation of the observing body: The camera obscura a priori prevents the observer from seeing his or her position as part of the representation. The body then is a problem the camera could never solve except by marginalizing it into a phantom in order to establish a space of reason.59

56 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 347. 57 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 34. 58 Crary, 48. 59 Crary, 41.

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To be inside the camera obscura is thus, at an ideological level, to be inside the eye, to misunderstand oneself as identical with the point of view. Crary’s argument becomes most instructive for our investigation of video when he problematizes perspectivity itself. He contends that it might be misleading to pose the vantage point of the camera as fully analogous to a divine eye. It is important that the camera obscura be understood within the context of a distinctly post-Copernican framework, within a world from which an absolutely privileged point had vanished and in which “visibility became a contingent fact.”60 In other words, the camera obscura is itself already a symptom of a frail reality in a secularized world order and its function is to constitute a “privileged point” rather than exemplify a “divine eye.” Indeed, the rise of perspective and the camera obscura in the early modern period can be seen, in the context of secularization, as the need to construct a divine eye where it is no longer self-evident.61 Thus, the supposed “break” of (classical) modernity—with the introduction of the modern camera, electricity, and other technological inventions—is not so much a rupture as a deferred response to secularization and the resulting problem of perspectivity since the beginning of the early modern period. Accordingly, Crary argues that the rise of the camera obscura “indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity, the hegemony of a new subject-effect” and that its very setting creates a split between inside and outside, “interior” and “exterior world”:62 First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one’s relation to the manifold contents of

60 Crary, 50 (quotation: Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 371). 61 I will return to this in detail in chapter III.1.2: “Pointing at the Center,” which discusses the early modern period and secularization, and in chapter IV.3.4: “Eye (I)/Gaze,” which examines the principles of perspective and corresponding subject theory. 62 Crary, 38.

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the now “exterior” world. Thus the camera obscura is inseparable from a certain metaphysic of interiority: it is a figure for both the observer who is nominally a free sovereign individual and a privatized subject confined in a quasi-domestic space, cut off from a public exterior world.63 In Crary’s argument, the camera obscura is thus rendered as the locus of a modern concept of subjectivity and bears a considerable resemblance to today’s black box. Both feature a similar setting—a darkened room in which the spectator can freely walk around, exposed to a moving image— yet their structural conditions diverge drastically. While the camera obscura had been “the most widely used model for explaining human vision, and for representing the relation of a perceiver and the position of a knowing subject to an external world,”64 we might describe the black box as the reverse of the camera obscura.65 Instead of representing the subject as a (Cartesian) subject of certainty, the black box apparatus confronts the subject with his or her uncertainty, dependency, and decentralized position. It can be argued, extending Crary’s thesis, that this shift relates to the “mechanical eye” of the modern camera and the general apparatus of film or video, which exposes the possibility of other positions beyond that of the spectating subject, hence questioning the subject’s position itself.

63 Crary, 38–39. 64 Crary, 27. 65 This point can be taken quite literally and is particularly striking with respect to the camera obscura’s capacity to veil its ideological underpinnings. The camera obscura’s image is indeed reversed, in the sense that it is both mirrored and upside down. Hence, one might ask how this twice-reversed image was seen as “truthfully” exemplifying human vision and modeling rationality. Famously, for Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the camera obscura thus becomes a metaphor to expose ideology’s ability to distort human relations by reversing the status of being and consciousness: “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men—the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men at this stage still appear as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. […] Consciousness (das Bewusstsein) can never be anything else than conscious being (das bewusste Sein), and the being of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The German Ideology,” in Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 36.

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2.2.2 The “Electric Eye” The discovery of photosensitivity—first in the field of photography and later with the film and video technology emerging in the late nineteenth century—changed the premise of perspective as constituting subjectivity. The technological developments of that time, together with their social impacts, exposed the subject as decentralized and dethroned from its formerly presumed position—the central position of the Cartesian subject that misconceives itself as rational and identical with the perspective in which it unfolds. The relation between perspective, camera, and subjectivity in the technical developments of the nineteenth century is particularly interesting with regard to the concurrent emergence of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis not only offers an analogous shift in the concept of subjectivity, its theory is also rooted in the very discovery that “the ego is not master in its own house.”66 Freud famously identifies three “severe blows” to “the universal narcissism of men,”67 all of which can be associated with contemporaneous technological inventions in the field of optics and visuality. If the camera obscura belonged to a world governed by the post-Copernican regime of representation—creating a subject that reflects the loss of an absolute point of view (god)—it coincides with what Freud calls the cosmological blow; namely, the realization that the Earth is not the center of the universe. Modern photography emerges together with the second biological blow in the mid-nineteenth century. It is connected to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which dethrones humanity from its position as the “crown of creation” and exposes that “man is not a being different from animals or superior to them.”68 Lastly, the psychological blow provides the premise of psychoanalysis that “the ego is not master in its own house.” Freud’s discovery coincides with the dawn of the electric age and the birth of the moving image in the form of film.69 The common denominator of all three blows is the motif of centrality, of a central position that is voided. The same motif can be found in corresponding camera techniques that symptomatically explicate the role of the subject as decentralized and marginal in relation to the camera’s artificial eye.

66 Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” 143. 67 Freud, 139–41, 143. 68 Freud, 141. 69 Both film and psychoanalysis share their year of birth (1895). See chapter IV.1: “Apparatus” and Raymond Borens et al., eds., Riss. Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse: Psychoanalyse und Film 23, H. 72/73 (2009): 7.

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Of particular interest here is the third blow and its connection to video in the context of electricity.70 While video, as already demonstrated, developed its technical framework alongside photography and film, it was only much later that it emerged as a “medium proper.” However, the electromagnetic inventions of the nineteenth century found a first form in the 1920s with the development of electromechanical television, which shifted toward an all-electronic system using cathode ray tube technology in the 1930s: Whisperings of the “electric eye” began to circulate in the late twenties. But with almost everyone kneedeep in mechanical apparatus, the barest details that were released about the electronic camera seemed little more than science fiction. By 1930, however, it became more clear that perhaps, after all, the “crystal globe” and the “electric pencil” would some day work together and eliminate all moving parts.71 Here it becomes evident that the differences between the photochemical process of photography/film and the electronic process of video extend to an epistemic level. The video apparatus, as introduced with those early experiments, is constructed from fundamentally different materials than the apparatus of film. The shift from the electromechanical to the electronic separates video technology from film and photography like nothing else. The apparatus in question is not (or no longer) mechanical, but, in fact, a continuously flowing signal transmitted in electronic waves. If the common denominator between film and video is the aspect of temporality inherent in both, speed and visibility in the form of these electronic waves sets them apart, as Paul Virilio points out: For if speed is not at all a ‘phenomenon’ but only the relation between phenomena (relativity itself), we might adapt Bernard de Clairvaux by stating that light is the name for the shadow of absolute speed, or, to be more precise, that the speed of rays of light (geometrical optics) is the name for the shadow of the speed of light of electro-magnetic waves (wave optics).

70 For a more detailed discussion of this relationship see chapter IV.1: “Apparatus.” 71 Shiers, Early Television, xii.

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[…] On the one hand, direct light of the sun’s rays and electric lamps. On the other hand, indirect light of electro-magnetic waves which are useful for communicating, for relating more than illuminating, for bringing to light things (quantity, quality) to be apprehended in the instant of looking at them.72 Visibility thus depends on speed understood as a relation between “phenomena” (which, according to etymology, is something that shows itself, a “thing appearing to view”).73 This addresses the difference between the visibility of a photo-mechanical apparatus in motion (i.e., film) as opposed to the instantaneous visibility of the video image. In both processes, visibility is asymmetrical. In the photographic method, the imaging process is, to a large extent, visible, while the image is concealed (it first needs to be developed in a darkroom, away from the eye). In video, on the other hand, the process by which electromagnetic waves produce the image is imperceptible, but the image is immediately available. This difference in visibility can also be found in another predecessor of video technology besides television—namely, in the technology of war.

2.2.3 Cameras and Warfare While the shared roots of video and television are commonly addressed, we often forget that war technology was a driving force in developing and advancing video (and optical technology in general). The first portable video system was developed by the United States military as a surveillance device for the Vietnam War in the 1960s. However, the history of the relationship between video technology and warfare has much deeper roots. This history brings us back to the question of mediality that emerged with the technological developments of (mass) communication in the late nineteenth century and their global distribution in the decades that followed.74

72 Virilio, Polar Inertia, 45. 73 Oxford Dictionary, s.v. “phenomenon,” accessed August 4, 2019, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/phenomenon. 74 For example, the submarine telegraphy network established in the mid-nineteenth century. See Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (New York: Walker and Company, 1998), 73; Paul Marshall, “Inventing Television: Transnational Networks of Co-operation and Rivalry, 1870–1936” (PhD diss., University of Manchester, 2011), 60–61.

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Paul Virilio calls World War I the first “mediated conflict,” with a dramatic rise during the war in French production of optical glass (for rangefinders, periscopes and camera lenses; for telemetry and goniometry)—from 40 tonnes to 140 tonnes a year, half the total Allied output.75 During this time, Virilio argues, the “necessities of strategic observation” first combined film cameras76 and aircraft with the goal of “panoramic apperception”—that is, a way of extending the visual field from a singular, subjective viewpoint to a technologically widened “range of human vision.”77 Analogously, early television (specifically Vladimir Zworykin’s 1933 invention of the iconoscope, the first electronic video camera) was not meant to be a means of mass communication, but was, instead, used to increase visibility.78 While the camera obscura and its visual regime provided a singular viewpoint, thus tying together the spectator and the camera, the modern camera abolishes precisely this unity and replaces it with a radical separation. Simultaneously, Crary argues, the modern camera conceals this separation between spectator and camera by “masquerad[ing] as a transparent and incorporeal intermediary between observer and world,” at the same time veiling the “fully embodied viewer […] as the ground of vision.”79 Thus, the humanly impossible viewpoint that modern cameras offer—especially when amplified by a vessel like an aircraft or rocket—becomes the bearer of the supposed transparency of modernist “pure perception”80 while at the same time veiling the spectator’s body. When the fixed viewpoint of the camera is abolished, Crary argues, the process of perception itself becomes the distinctive mark of modernity: It is only in the early nineteenth century that the juridical model of the camera loses its preeminent authority. Vision is no longer subordinated to an

75 Virilio, War and Cinema, 69. 76 It is important to note that the history of the development of optical warfare technology discussed here is not strictly limited to video technology but also implies (especially in its beginning) photography and film. 77 Virilio, Polar Inertia, 27 78 Virilio, 27. 79 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 136. 80 Crary, 136.

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exterior image of the true or the right. The eye is no longer what predicates a “real world.” The work of Goethe, Schopenhauer, Ruskin, and Turner and many others are all indications that by 1840 the process of perception itself had become, in various ways, a primary object of vision.81 The enhanced, process-based vision of the modern camera and its ramifications for the spectating body thus emerges as a problem of mediation: the body and the viewpoint appear as completely separated positions rather than as connected and interdependent (as in the camera obscura). For this reason, they need to be mediated or put in relation to one another. Simultaneously, the means of production—the optical (and initially mechanical) apparatus—are veiled in this mediatory process, as Walter Benjamin points out in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 1936): The shooting of a film, especially a sound film, offers a hitherto unimaginable spectacle. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to the spectator a single viewpoint which would exclude from his or her field of vision the equipment not directly involved in the action being filmed—the camera, the lighting units, the technical crew, and so forth […]. In the film studio the apparatus has penetrated so deeply into reality that a pure view of that reality, free of the foreign body of equipment, is the result of a special procedure—namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted photographic device and the assembly of that shot with others of the same kind. The equipment-free aspect of reality has here become the height of artifice, and the vision of immediate reality the Blue Flower in the land of technology.82

81 Crary, 138. 82 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 34–35.

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Here Benjamin (who wrote this text during his exile in Paris, in the context of the looming war) addresses the changing paradigm of art under the influence of the technological advancements brought about by photography and film—and, in a wider sense, under capitalist means of production since the Industrial Revolution. It becomes clear that what changes at this time is the relation between the spectator and the world. The (modern) camera introduces a viewpoint that is not only in itself impossible for the spectator to take up but also impossible in the sense that this view on a given “reality” is already mediated by the filmic apparatus, while the mediating force, the apparatus itself, is veiled. Benjamin’s considerations lead to a lineage of materialist film critique that identifies the cinematic apparatus as ideological. Although my argument does not follow this lineage, as I elaborate in the following chapters, it is important to highlight the loss of a single viewpoint caused by the introduction of the modern camera. Benjamin wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in the context of rising fascism in Europe and related “efforts to aestheticize politics” through technological warfare, thus subsuming the relation between viewpoint and reality under the fascist Futurist formula: “Fiat ars— pereat mundus”—“Let art flourish—and the world pass away.”83 Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema demonstrates that this dictum precisely identifies the relation of camera, spectator, and physical world so relevant for the beginning of the twentieth century and its wars of mass destruction. As we learn here, the replacement of the human eye with the artificial eye of the camera is directly linked to the necessities of modern war and the shift from static warfare toward a positional strategy in which “aviation took over the cavalry’s functions and reconnaissance planes became the eyes of the high command.”84 Virilio emphasizes how, beginning with World War I, maps and landmarks lost their significance and were replaced by the “cinematic landscape” produced by on-board cameras: For only the lens-shutter could capture the film of events, the fleeting shape of the front line, the sequences of its gradual disintegration. Only serial photography

83 Benjamin, 41–42. 84 Virilio, War and Cinema, 70.

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was capable of registering changing troop positions or the impact of long-range artillery, and hence the capacity of new weapons for serial destruction.85 This war photography/filming was not intended to bring formerly invisible phases of a “whole body’s” movement into visibility (as found, Virilio argues, in the pioneering film work of Étienne-Jules Marey or Eadweard Muybridge). Instead, its aim was to “reconstitute the fracture lines of the trenches, to fix the infinite fragmentation of a mined landscape alive with endless potentialities.”86 Interestingly, Virilio does not emphasize the fragmenting tendencies of the moving image (that is, the cutting, editing, field size, etc.). Instead, he depicts the world since World War I as an infinitely disintegrating one; a world everchanging under the auspices of mass destruction. The moving image, then, is a way of tracing, witnessing, and, more importantly, framing those endless reorganizations that no human eye is capable of seeing; framing both space and time for a spectator, framing the world which has, without a camera, become unobservable—and therefore also unattainable. We can thus see why Virilio describes World War I (and all wars since) as “mediated conflict”: Already in the Great War, as we have seen, the industrialization of the repeating image illustrated this cinematic dimension of regional-scale destruction, in which landscapes were continually upturned and had to be reconstituted with the help of successive frames and shots, in a cinematographic pursuit of reality, the decomposition and recomposition of an uncertain territory in which film replaced military maps.87 Here the world emerges as “uncertain territory”: uncertain for the human eye and too fast for the human hand. As Benjamin notes, photography and film accelerated “the process of pictorial reproduction” in such a manner that the hand became obsolete for the artistic process, which now “devolved upon the eye alone.”88 The spectator therefore

85 Virilio, 70. 86 Virilio, 70–71. 87 Virilio, 79. 88 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 20.

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enters a position in which the eye, augmented by the camera’s “panoramic apperception,” finds itself in a position of absolute visibility, transparency even, while it is at the same time unable to locate or identify its position. Virilio demonstrates this sense of “cinematic derealization”89 when he quotes Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, a highly autobiographical account of World War I: In this war where fire already attacked space more than men, I felt completely alien to my own person, as if I had been looking at myself through binoculars … I could hear the tiny projectiles whistling past my ear as if they were brushing an inanimate object… . The landscape had the transparency of glass.90 For Virilio, this is a testimony not only of war but of modernity itself, which “illustrates the derangement of perception in an environment where military technology is distorting not only the battlefield, but also, and especially, the space-time of vision.”91 It is particularly important to note that the alienation toward one’s own spectating body, an alienation that is expressed in Jünger’s account and analyzed in Virilio’s text, is symptomatic for the introduction of the moving image. Even though the cameras introduced to warfare in World War I were not video cameras, other fundamental electromagnetic technologies, such as radio transmitters, were used to communicate between aircraft and ground control.92 And while the moving images of World War I were mechanical—film—and could only be seen with a delay, military technology soon shifted to the development of electronic optical technology, introducing instant imaging technologies such as radar and other surveillance devices, as well as sensors and missile guidance technology. If World War I was the first mediated conflict, the Vietnam War was, according to Virilio, the “first electronic war […] devised at Harvard and MIT”:

89 Virilio, War and Cinema, 85. 90 Ernst Jünger, In Stahlgewittern (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), 316, quoted in Virilio, 72. 91 Virilio, War and Cinema, 72. 92 Burns, Television, 135.

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It began with the parachute-drops of sensors all along the Ho Chi-Minh Trail, and continued in 1966 with the development of the electronic ‘MacNamara Line,’ consisting of fields of acoustic (Acouboy, Spikeboy) and seismic (Adsid, Acousid) detectors spread along the Laos access routes, around US army bases and especially the Khe Sanh stronghold.93 The portable video camera was also developed during this time and it is important to note that it was almost entirely used for the purpose of field surveillance. This aspect is so significant because the television footage of the Vietnam War was, as all on-site television material at this time, entirely shot on film. There was thus “at least a 24-hour delay for images of the Vietnam War to reach the United States.”94 In contrast, the first “live television” war—that is, the first instantaneously broadcasted war applying advanced portable video systems—did not occur until the Persian Gulf War in 1990.95 Since then, Virilio points out, projectiles have awakened and opened their many eyes: heat-seeking missiles, infra-red or laserguidance systems, warheads fitted with video-cameras that can relay what they see to pilots and to ground-controllers sitting at their consoles. The fusion is complete, the confusion perfect: nothing now distinguishes the functions of the weapon and the eye; the projectile’s image and the image’s projectile form a single composite.96 Here Benjamin’s application of the fascist Futurist dictum reveals its impact on our contemporary mediated world, especially in the relation it constructs between art and war. According to Benjamin, “Fiat ars— pereat mundus” is the true fulfillment of “l’art pour l’art.”97 With the

93 Virilio, War and Cinema, 82. 94 Marita Sturken, “The Television Image and Collective Amnesia: Dis(re)membering the Persian Gulf War,” in Transmission, ed. Peter d’Agostino and David Tafler (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995), 137. 95 Sturken, 137. 96 Virilio, War and Cinema, 83. 97 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 42.

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development of the artificial eye of the camera, with electronic sensors to perceive what no human eye can perceive, the alienation between the spectator and the world has reached new levels. Beyond this, the self-alienation (one could also say: self-referentiality) introduced by the camera has turned the human (body) from a scopic object for the Olympian gods98 into a scopic object for itself.

2.3 Electronic Medium After an electromechanical system of television was introduced in Britain in 1929,99 mechanical television was slowly replaced by the cathode ray tube100 in the first half of the 1930s, and a more complex apparatus began to develop. Resolution increased with the greater number of scanning lines and viewing screens doubled in size (fig. 8).101 The use of cathode ray tubes introduced electronic scanning methods “in which a beam of electrons can be controlled and directed by an electronic lens so as to produce a visible display of information on the surface of the tube or to store data in the form of an energized portion of the tube’s surface.”102 This transformation of the electronic signal forms the basis of video’s technology. The art historian Yvonne Spielmann thus calls video an “electronic medium,”103 pointing both to its technical formation and its status as a (if not the) medium of the twentieth century.

98 Benjamin, 42. 99 Jack and Tsatsulin, Dictionary of Video and Television Technology, s.v. “Baird, John Logie.” 100 “The cathode-ray tube, like the oscilloscope, is a special kind of television tube. It is a vacuum tube in which a grid between cathode and anode poles emits a narrow beam of electrons that are accelerated at high velocity toward a phosphorcoated screen, which fluoresces at the point where the electrons strike. The resulting luminescent glow is called a ‘trace-point.’ An electromagnetic field deflects the electron beam along predetermined patterns by electronic impulses that can be broadcast, cabled, or recorded on tape.” Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 194. 101 Shiers, Early Television, xii. 102 Jack and Tsatsulin, Dictionary of Video and Television Technology, s.v. “cathode-ray tube.” 103 Yvonne Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 5.

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It is important to note that Spielmann emphasizes the process of writing as another constitutive moment for video. “In a simple technical assembly with a camera and a monitor,” Spielmann states, “information carried by light is registered by the cathode ray and translated into video signals that are transmitted to a screen radiating the electronic signal.” Logically, the basis for this process of translation is found in the “processes of registering and reproducing” the electronic signal, which is thus “continuously written in scan lines […] from left to right and from above to below, as this order corresponds to the writing and reading process in Western cultures” (fig. 9).104 While I agree that video is indeed written— insofar as there is an inscription, a trace involved in the creation of the video image—I would argue that what is produced by this writing process is an image. This image is not, however, one coherent picture, but a half image produced by scanning one part of the image information and then jumping back to scan the other part. This process is called “interlacing.”

Fig. 8 Comparison of increased resolution resulting from an increased number of scanning lines, reproduced from Richard C. Webb, Tele-Visionaries, 11.

Fig. 9 The scanning process, reproduced from Eugene Trundle, Newnes Guide to Television and Video Technology (Oxford: Newnes 2001), 2.

104 Spielmann, 3.

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The signal refreshes “every second line 60 times a second [in NTSC format; however, in PAL the rate is 50 times per half image] and then jumps to the top and refreshes the other set of lines also 60 times a second.”105 Interlacing causes the characteristic flickering familiar from cathode ray tube screens. In modern HDTV, however, the complete screen is refreshed at once, guaranteeing a non-flickering image. The resulting full image is called a “frame,” with video standards varying between 25 (PAL) and 30 (NTSC) frames per second (fps). Thus, video’s writing process is radically different from Western writing systems (or any other classic writing systems), as both the process of recording and reproducing as well as reading, diverge. The process of interlacing finds the image in a constant state of change, requiring a reading process in which the eye must continuously jump between the lines to create a coherent image. Furthermore, video is based on the transfer and transformation of electronic signals that are continuously flowing, circulating between devices, and capable of creating a closed-circuit setting (“feedback loops”). Analog video systems use cathode ray tubes in both the camera and the monitor, with the camera’s pickup tube absorbing and converting the information of light into a “corresponding series of electrical pulses.”106 These are then modulated and can be modified and transmitted “both auditively and visually,” as Spielmann emphasizes.107 Video consists of both audio and video signals.108 They are interchangeable109 and the way to generate a video signal is essentially open. Video signals can be created by an external light impulse or an internal generator and these signals can be endlessly modified by devices like synthesizers.110 Video can form a closed circuit between camera and screen—as in the early video works of artists such as Joan Jonas, Lynda Benglis, and Vito Acconci, where the

Jack and Tsatsulin, Dictionary of Video and Television Technology, s.v. “interlacing.” Although contemporary digital video technology can produce a complete image on the screen at once, it must be noted that this picture is still the result of discrete parts (pixels) that are reproduced together and merely give the impression of one coherent image. 106 Jack and Tsatsulin, s.v. “camera.” 107 Spielmann, Video, 1. 108 Shiers, Early Television, xi. 109 See Nam June Paik’s account of his early video modulation in Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, 13–14. 110 Spielmann, Video, 134. 105

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camera is pointed at the screen, creating a recursive structure. However, it is also possible to create an open-circuit setting (like television) in which there is a sender-receiver constellation without feedback. The openness in video’s structure allows for almost endless variations. More interestingly, it creates a medial organization that does not rely on any of the technical parts as a necessary element. Video does not require a camera, a screen, or any kind of generator in order to emerge. It can exist with a complex set of different electronic devices or with just a few of those parts, none of which are indispensable. The relationship between video and its technology is thus somewhat paradoxical: on the one hand, video relies heavily on technology, and on the other, it denies a fundamental role to any of its technological parts. Therefore, the only constitutive element we are left with is the continuously circulating electronic signal.

2.3.1 The Emergence of Video Video made television portable.111 In 1965, the first consumer video recorder system, the Sony CV-2000, was sold in the United States. It could be used together with the Sony CVC-2000 camera, the first domestic video camera on the market, or, if attached to a television, it could record programs. However, due to its heavy weight of forty-nine pounds and the fact that it was not yet battery-powered, the CV-2000 series was not a portable system.112 Two years later, the Sony Video Rover DV-2400 Portapak, sold in a set

Fig. 10 1967 Sony ‘Video Rover’ DV-2400 Portapak, © Sony

111 112

d’Agostino and Tafler, Transmission, xxv. Sherman, “The Premature Birth of Video Art.”

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with the DVC-2400 vidicon camera, was introduced as the world’s first portable reel-to-reel video recording system, featuring a battery pack as well as a record-only VTR (fig. 10). The tapes—twenty minutes long, measuring half an inch, black and white, and of poor quality—had to be rewound either manually or by using a VTR of the CV-series. The DV-2400 VTR did not offer a playback function, allowing the device to be lighter and hence easily transportable.113 However, in these early years of video, cameras were often used in closed-circuit assemblies, as these configurations did not require tape recording. Thus, the resulting “live” image performances of this period are, for the most part, lost. If they were recorded, the live footage was filmed from the video screen with a film camera. When taped, however, both guerilla television and video art were presented in “video theaters”: private lofts or galleries where “videotapes were shown closed circuit to an ‘in’ crowd of friends, community members, or video enthusiasts.”114

2.3.2 Simultaneity/Immediacy The storage of video material was a problem in the late 1960s and early 1970s—not only for early video but also for television. Television shows were either transmitted live or, if produced on site outside of the studio, filmed with a film camera and then developed and shown one or two days after recording.115 Live television was also recorded using kinescope technology, which entailed filming the material from a video screen.116 Since video’s capacity for memory was still rather limited, video practice focused on the instantaneity of the video image and its simultaneous ability to record and transmit. These two aspects also shaped early video theory, most famously in Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” (1976):

113 “1967 Sony Video Rover DV-2400 Portapak,” Rewind Museum, accessed October 2, 2019, https://www.rewindmuseum.com/vintagecamera.html. 114 Deirdre Boyle, “Guerrilla Television,” in d’Agostino and Tafler, Transmission, 153–54. 115 John G. Hanhardt, ed., Video Culture: A Critical Investigation (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986), 152; Marshall, Inventing Television, 34. 116 Rudy Bretz, “Video Tape: A TV Revolution,” The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, vol. 11, no. 4 (Summer, 1957): 399; Ina Blom, “Video Water, Video Life, Videosociality,” in Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology and the Social, ed. Ina Blom et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017), 156.

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Unlike the other visual arts, video is capable of recording and transmitting at the same time—producing instant feedback. The body is therefore as it were centered between two machines that are the opening and closing of a parenthesis. The first of these is the camera; the second is the monitor, which re-projects the performer’s image with the immediacy of a mirror.117 Video’s beginnings as a mostly “live” practice thus demonstrate its inherently radical properties of instantaneity. While video and television share this characteristic of “live” practice, their fundamental difference lies in video’s simultaneous ability to record and transmit, creating a feedback loop—a circulating electronic signal—rather than a one-directional broadcast signal that disrupts the signal’s circulation.118 In relation to this difference, the art historian Ina Blom points out that at the time, the question of simultaneity and instantaneity in television had already been discussed as a “totalization of the social field that might provide the basis for new economic utopias—capitalist for the one, socialist for the other.” Television was thus attributed with “a form of pure presence”: Television seems to survive precisely through flow, whose transmission washes away the particularity of messages along with the reception of them, draining perception of the resistant holding powers of memory.119 Video therefore replaced the totalization of broadcasting with the particularity of closed-circuit configurations while maintaining the continuous flow of the electronic signal as its distinctive mark. Video’s instantaneous and simultaneous character is essentially the reduction of distance—that is, of both space and time.120 While the same can, to a

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Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 52. “In many of the strategies adopted by performance and video artists, the one-way flow of information in both fine art and broadcast television was reconstituted as a two-way process. The meaning of a work now lay in the creatively charged relationship between ‘witnessing subjects’, the materials in play and the imagination of the artist—that self-appointed visionary who speaks through the medium of art.” Elwes, Video Art, 9. 119 Blom, “Video Water, Video Life, Videosociality,” 154. 120 See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986). See also chapter IV for further discussion of this point.

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certain extent, be said about television, video treats space and time in a different way. Whereas live television presents space and time as dimensions that can simply be overridden by a continuous “now,” video points to the inherent shift or transformation these realms undergo when recorded and transmitted. While television veils distance and brings events from all around the globe to the living room—claiming a certain participatory capacity in this feature—video either redoubles the present (in a feedback loop) or (in a prerecording) points to the lack of presence at the very moment of watching. In video, time is thus collapsed into a continuous present121 rather than eradicated by the signal’s circulation. Space is not only reduced through the transmission between a sender and a receiver but also transformed to an “elsewhere” that video creates in its very material. Thanks to its circular setting, video is always “now,” whether it is live or taped. However, this “now,” as we will soon see, is indexical. It always points to an already lost moment, one whose temporality is either preserved in the stored video or in the minimal delay of the feedback loop.

2.3.3 Storage In order to differentiate video from television, it proves most instructive to think about storage capacity. This difference can be seen first and foremost in the use of videotape. As Gene Youngblood put it, “VT is not TV: videotape is not television though it is processed through the same system.”122 The change that video/television technology underwent with the introduction of videotape in the 1950s is thus one of the most decisive moments in the emergence of what we now call video. The media theorist Michael Z. Newman identifies the development of videotape—in other words, video’s capacity for storage—as the medium’s second paradigmatic phase. While the first era of video technology was characterized by broadcasting (and here, Newman points out, “television” and “video” were perceived and used as synonyms), videotape shaped the second phase, differentiating video from television. This lasted until the third phase arrived with the digital moving image. Newman emphasizes that all three phases are “defined in terms of their

121 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 55. 122 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 281.

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dominant technologies (transmission, analog recording and playback, digital recording and playback) but more importantly by ideas about these technologies and their uses and users.”123 Magnetic tape had already been used for sound recording since World War II.124 Though costly, video storage in the form of magnetic tape quickly gained popularity after its introduction in the 1950s, since it drastically improved the image quality of recorded material compared to kinescope technology and was “practically indistinguishable from a live TV picture.”125 Instead of kinescope’s complicated process and the quality loss resulting in the shift from “electricity to optics to chemicals to optics and back to electricity again”126 (fig. 11), videotape recordings allowed for reuse and—most importantly—immediate playback, which had not been possible before in television or film.127

Fig. 11 The stages in kinescope recording (left) as opposed to videotape recording (right), reproduced from Rudy Bretz, “Video Tape,” 404.

123 Michael Z. Newman, Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 22. 124 Newman, 43. 125 Bretz, “Video Tape,” 400. 126 Bretz, 401. 127 Bretz, 413.

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Though it was not broadcast quality, the growing availability of affordable consumer videotape in the 1960s finally enabled video to distance itself from television.128 It was only with this possibility to store footage that video could, as a medium, unfold its specific trait. Krauss calls this characteristic the “collapsed present,”129 referring to video’s ability to record or store the image while at the same time allowing for instant playback. One of the most typical manifestations of this collapsed present is the loop, which presents footage in a continuous circulation.130 Strictly speaking, video contains two loops. The first is the aforementioned “feedback loop” that is unique to video technology and consists of the ability to film and broadcast at the same time, with a minimum time lag of one frame. The second is the loop that is most often mentioned in relation to contemporary video art: the “storage loop” of the recording— that is, looped videos in the exhibition context that are not live, yet actualize themselves over and over again in playback. Together these form video’s inherently paradoxical circular structure. Electronic data processing allows for instant playback (as opposed to film technology, which operates as a photographic process and cannot immediately be watched). Yet it also allows for storage. Hence, video can mediate between a moment long gone and the present instant of watching in a way that differs from the indexical functions of photography and film. Given video’s unique ability for instant feedback, it circulates around a hole that is torn open by the fact that the present can no longer be located yet is constantly materialized in video’s radical “here and now.” Video is not linear. It always actualizes itself and, in doing so, it dislocates itself from

128 Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, 3. 129 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 55. 130 For a detailed discussion of the loop, see Franziska Stöhr, Endlos: Zur Geschichte des Film- und Videoloops im Zusammenspiel von Technik, Kunst und Ausstellung [in German] (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016). Stöhr examines the difference between looped works, seamless loops, and loops that are “physical” (using video’s ability to circulate signals rather than presenting looped content). From a structural point of view, only two loops are relevant: the looped footage (seamless or not) made possible by a storage medium such as tape, and the loop created by the physical conditions of video transmission (the circulation of an electronic signal). The latter is necessary for the former. For further discussion of how the loop/circulation and the collapsed present operate in video, see chapter II.2: “The Index.”

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the logic of a linear timeline: it is always displaced, never completely here, never completely now, never completely past, but always elsewhere, some other time. The possibility to record and store video thus shifts time from a continuous “live” present (as it was practiced in television) to a circular “now” that is detached from any linear temporal organization. This circular structure is found in all video, whether looped or not, since the storage medium (be it tape, CD, or USB flash drive) allows for repeated playback. Here we encounter another instructive property of video—namely, the mode of storage itself. In video, the stored footage cannot be perceived unless it is played back with a device, giving a video work two basic modes of being: one of a circular “now” and one of being latent—a mode in which the material is not gone, but also not here.131 The media theorist Friedrich Kittler has pointed out that this mode of memory storage—which is characteristic of modern media and, specifically, video— bears a striking resemblance to Freud’s discovery of the function of the unconscious. For Kittler, the “switch from writing to media”132 that occurred in the nineteenth century was not only performed by the development of new technologies but also by the invention of psychoanalysis.133 Consequently, the problem of storage is prevalent in both: Following the nationalization of the Vienna telephone exchange in 1895, he [Freud] not only had a telephone installed in his study but also de­scribed the work that

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The fact that this quality is specific to video can be seen in a comparison with film. After film has been developed, the image is visible to the naked eye. Video, however, offers no such possibility and requires an apparatus for the material to become visible. At the same time, the video material can be re-used and the recordings can be overwritten, but not without leaving traces. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 83. “Freud’s ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ (1895) saw the state of ‘being hallucinated in a backward flow of Q to φ and also to ω.’ In other words: impermeable brain neurons occupied by memory traces rid themselves of their charge or quantity by transferring them onto permeable neurons designed for sensory perception. As a result, data already stored appear as fresh input, and the psychic apparatus becomes its own simulacrum. Backflow or feedback comes as close to perfect hallucinatory wish fulfillment as Freud’s ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’ does to technological media.” Kittler, 37–38.

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went on in that study in terms of telephony. As if “psychic apparatus,” Freud’s fine neologism or supplement for the antiquated soul, were to be taken literally, the unconscious coincides with electric oscillations. […] Nonetheless, his principle that consciousness and memory are mutually exclusive formulates this very media logic. For that reason, it is consistent to define psychoanalytic case studies, in spite of their written format, as media technologies.134 Kittler’s analogy—and his criticism towards the “not absolutely—phonographically—exact” and “monopolized” storage of the analysand’s unconscious material in the writing of the analyst135 —focuses on new medial storage versus written storage. However, the more fundamental analogy that interests me here is the parallel between video storage and the unconscious in the way that both preserve latent material even while it is not “brought to presence” (be it by a projector/screen or in consciousness).136 Kittler’s criticism misses the point insofar as the analogy is not between the analyst’s written storage of the analysand’s unconscious material (in other words, case studies) and “medial storage” such as a phonographic recording, but—as he points out in the quote above—between the storage function of the unconscious itself and that of electronic signals. In other words, video’s electronic signal is structurally equivalent to Freud’s psychic apparatus—specifically to the storage function of the unconscious. Thus, for video, the aspect that

134 Kittler, 89. 135 Kittler, 89–90. 136 In “Das Unbewußte” (“The Unconscious”), Freud differentiates between latent memories (Erinnerungen) that are stored in the unconscious, and consciousness, which only contains a limited amount of material at any given moment. The difference between consciousness and memory (Erinnerung) is the split of the subject that is addressed in psychoanalysis. According to Lacan, the unconscious is neither about “being, nor non-being, but the unrealized.” See Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 167; Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jaques Lacan, bk. XI (New York: Norton, 1998), 30.

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interests us here is not just the difference between memory and consciousness that Kittler emphasizes but also the difference between memory (Gedächtnis) and remembrance (Erinnerung):137 if video offers a memory, whether in its analog form as videotape or in its digital form as binary data, it is a faulty and short-lived one. As many of us might still remember from personal experience, videotapes are vulnerable. They easily scratch, rip, or get caught in the VTR (or VCR), causing a tape jam. The tape’s thin coating of iron oxide can be faulty, creating analog videotape’s characteristic white streaks in playback.138 Re-using the same tape several times causes a loss of image quality as the tape is worn out. Even when tapes are not used, they age quickly and are destroyed within a short time.139 Thus, in order for the “memory” stored in videotapes to withstand the ravages of time, a system of copying data from old tapes to new ones is required to preserve the material. However, even this practice cannot fully eliminate the problem. The loss of data caused by the copying process itself is called “generation loss” and it affects not only tape but also digital storage. The stored image is endangered both in

The difference between memory (Gedächtnis) and remembrance (Erinnerung) derives from classical aesthetics, which introduces a separation between “memory as a repository for impressions and experiences on the one hand and remembrance (Erinnerung) as a mode of working on this storage [translation by the author].” Gerald Siegmund, “Gedächtnis/Erinnerung,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, vol. 2, ed. Karlheinz Barck [in German] (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010), 609. This “working on memory” becomes highly significant in Freud’s cure as a way of “working through” unconscious memories in analysis to resolve the unconscious repetition of these memories in the symptom. Freud’s work on the unconscious repository of memory— work that is radically subjective—cast doubt on the notion that memory storage is an objective reservoir, as it is only in the subjective process of working on memory (Gedächtnis) that memories (Erinnerungen) can be made accessible. In English, “memory” refers to both meanings. I will thus continue to use “memory” for Erinnerung unless otherwise indicated. For a detailed overview of the distinction between memory and remembrance in German, see Siegmund, “Gedächtnis/ Erinnerung,” 609–29. For a discussion of the process of working on the unconscious in psychoanalysis, see Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works (1911–1913) (London: Hogarth Press 1958), 145–56. 138 Bretz, “Video Tape,” 409–10. 139 Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, 4. 137

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linear and nonlinear editing and storage.140 In linear editing, generation loss occurs mainly through mechanical usage—the wearing of the tape as it is copied from one generation to the next, causing a constant loss of image quality. In nonlinear editing and storage, the loss of image quality occurs through the compression of digital data, causing so-called “compression artifacts”:141 small errors in the image that are reproduced with each new copy and increase over time as the material is compressed and decompressed. Hence, in both cases, generation loss occurs in the memory function, causing the image to become increasingly distorted as it is used. We can thus conclude that video recording does not produce “memory storage” insofar as this refers to an unchanged repository. Instead, it produces “remembrance storage” because video does not, as Kittler suggests, create an “exact” record of what has been said and done. On the contrary, video offers a highly subjective process of remembrance, one that can be written and rewritten simultaneously. The media theorist Sean Cubitt argues that video thus claims a unique position: Enmeshed in the Symbolic, video is also imbricated in the production of history and cannot claim eternity like other media, not least because of the phenomena of lost generations, as the material moves from master to submaster, to broadcast, to timeshift, where it begins to degenerate with every play.142 Video is in a constant process of disintegration, but within this process, another development takes place that is marked by constant reproduction. The image is transformed; errors are passed on to subsequent generations like genetic mutations are passed on through the RNA transcription of

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The difference between linear and nonlinear editing and storage lies in how the original material is used. While in linear editing the different scenes of a sequence are recorded directly (and in the right order) from the master tape to a second tape, in nonlinear editing the original material is stored in memory until the sequence is ready to be exported. In this way, nonlinear editing protects the material from generation loss in the editing process. In linear editing, the master tape (the original material) is stored away. If new copies are needed, they are taken directly from this first-generation material in order to minimize the effects of generation loss. See Jack and Tsatsulin, Dictionary of Video and Television Technology, s.vv. “linear editing,” “nonlinear,” “nonlinear electronic editing.” Jack and Tsatsulin, s.v. “compression artifacts.” Sean Cubitt, “Lost Generations,” in d’Agostino and Tafler, Transmission, 1.

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human DNA.143 This unreliable memory-writing process (a process of remembrance) takes place in a circular “now” and is much more invested in writing the present than in storing the past. The process gives testimony to the fact that “the present has discredited the past, while the history of the present is recorded by machines, not ‘written’ by men, and is thus out of our hands as a ‘man-made’ phenomenon,” as Gene Youngblood asserts. He goes on to specify that the relation between media storage and subjective memory is inseparable—not only in video but in all modern media: We don’t “remember” the assassination of John F. Kennedy because we never experienced it directly in the first place. For millions of people who were not actually present in Dallas, Kennedy’s death exists only in the endless technologically-sustained present. We “remember” it in the same way that we first “knew” it— through the media—and we can experience it again each time the videotapes are played. Since we see and hear and feel only the conditioning of our own memory, a great flood of nostalgia is generated when technology erases the past and with it our self-image.144 It is curious that the introduction of storage to video technology resulted in a medium that no longer follows a linear logic—a patriarchal logic of descent—while at the same time the principle of genetics—of inheritance in the form of a loss from one generation of media storage to another—is one of video’s most dominant traits. As paradoxical as this seems, the key difference between both logics is the loss that video inherits. As a medium that contains a hole at its very core (due to its circular structure), video is in constant movement, continuously rewriting its history and our own history as spectators. However, the “inheritance” in video is constantly

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Gene Youngblood and many of his contemporaries interested in cybernetics emphasized the similarity between electronic media’s storage functions and current findings in genetics: “Science has discovered that ‘molecular memory’ is operative in single-celled and some multi-celled organisms, and there’s evidence that memory-in-the-flesh exists in humans as well. Biochemists have proven that learned responses to environmental stimuli are passed on phylogenetically from generation to generation, encoded in the RNA of the organism’s physical molecular structure. And what could be a more powerful conditioning force than the intermedia network, which functions to establish meaning in life?” See Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 55. 144 Youngblood, 144.

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lacking: lacking a present, lacking duration, lacking a place. It thus cannot be integrated into a patriarchal sense of history (as inherited from the seemingly endless biblical lines of genealogy, guaranteeing an archē, a point of origin145). The process-based artistic (and social) practices we encounter today are a direct result of this kind of “inheritance-through-storage loss.” As McLuhan emphasizes, the shift from the mechanical age to what he calls the “electric age” lies in the difference of its inventories: Since electricity, inventories are made up not so much of goods in storage as of materials in continuous process of transformation at spatially removed sites. For electricity not only gives primacy to process, whether in making or in learning, but it makes independent the source of energy from the location of the process. In entertainment media, we speak of this fact as “mass media” because the source of the program and the process of experiencing it are independent in space, yet simultaneous in time.146 Here McLuhan points to another result of this “continuous process of transformation”—namely, the effects such transformed inventories have not only on temporal but also on spatial displacement. Video and other modern media of the electric age also circulate between spaces. If linear time in video is replaced by simultaneity, spatial definitude is replaced by circulation.

2.4 Convergence/Positioning video Literally “I see” in Latin. Refers to picture information or a medium which uses TV to transmit and receive video. Video has emerged to a position in which it is no longer synonymous with TV. For

,

Archē, gr. ἀρχή means beginning or origin. George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “Ἀρχή (Archē),” accessed June 4, 2018, http:// www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057% 3Aentry%3Da)rxh/. 146 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 347. 145

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instance, video does not have to be sent from long distance as TV does. Participating in a video game or playing back a videotape or videodisc is not watching TV. TV is, or has become, only one form of video, albeit a major one.147 Since its early days, video technology has rapidly changed from a limited analog set of recording and image-manipulating equipment to a manifold and elaborated digital form. This development is known as “convergence,” meaning the “coming together of various technologies that were previously unrelated.”148 Convergence addresses not only “classic” video technology, such as camcorders and VCRs, but also (television and internet) broadcasting technology, game consoles, video editing programs, and, most importantly, video’s merging with other types of moving-image technology, such as film, VR, AR, and 3D. Here I am particularly interested in the convergence of video and film technology. Though video and film share an analog past, their technical preconditions were almost entirely distinct from one another. However, with the shift from analog to digital, video and film have converged to a point where, from a technical point of view, very little difference can be found between the two. While this technological merging has been interpreted as a blurring of the lines between these realms with respect to both the “experience of viewing and engaging with work” as well as “the aesthetic or cultural significance” of these distinctions,149 the subsequent chapters will examine whether the difference between contemporary film and video lies beyond their technological conditions. Furthermore, I will consider whether these differences have not always taken place elsewhere; for example, in a positioning toward and within a technological framework rather than in the technical support itself.150

147 Jack and Tsatsulin, Dictionary of Video and Television Technology, s.v. “video.” 148 Jack and Tsatsulin, vii; Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, 89. 149 Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art, 89. 150 One preliminary consideration, which I will discuss in the following chapter, relates to the difference in practice between different media and their respective “settings.” See Uroskie: “Consciously or unconsciously, spectators of painting, film, and performance have always understood the art gallery, the cinema hall, and the theatrical stage as being governed by their own particular conventions of production and reception.” Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube, 11.

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3 Etymology While it may seem more intuitive to begin (rather than end) an introduction to a topic with etymology, a deviation from this convention seems justified in relation to this particular subject. In the following, I attempt to shed light on the etymological roots of video and to offer a nomenclature for other, at times competing terms in the field of the moving image. While it was first necessary to build a solid structural framework within which to distinguish between different moving image practices, video’s etymology offers a vantage point for a structural discussion of video, which I will examine in the following chapters.

3.1 Video—I see Video, deriving from the Latin videre (to see), translates to I see. Nowadays, however, video refers to the “magnetic recording of images.”151 Through its Indo-Germanic roots, it is etymologically related to a wide range of words in various languages. Most illuminating is its relation to the Greek εἶδον (eîdon), which means to see, to behold, to perceive, and is related to ἰδέα (form, semblance) and εἶδος (that which is seen; image, form, shape, or appearance).152 Through the past tense form οἶδα (I have seen), which also means to know, video is semantically related to knowledge.153 This relation becomes even stronger when we consider other languages with Indo-Germanic roots. In Sanskrit, the word vēda means to know, vindāmi means to find,154 and vidya means knowledge.155 Analogously, in the Germanic languages, video is related to Wissen (to know, knowledge) and verweisen (to rebuke, but also to indicate something).156

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Friedrich Kluge and Elmar Seebold, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache [in German] (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), s.v. “Video.” Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. “video,” accessed October 3, 2019, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3 Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dvideo. Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “Εἶδον (Eîdon),” accessed October 3, 2019, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A199 9.04.0058%3Aentry%3Dei%29%3Ddo. Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. “video.” Alois Walde, Lateinisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch [in German] (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 1910), s.v. “video.” Walde, s.v. “video.”

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Curious is the fact that “video” is not the infinitive of the verb but the first person singular: in other words, it implies an “I,” a speaking subject who perceives, knows, finds, or indicates—and states that he or she is doing so. This word is thus also a sentence: I see. But since this sentence lacks an object, its structure raises questions. What or whom do “I” see, who is “I,” and from where do “I” see? In grammatical terms, the verb to see can be transitive or intransitive—in other words, with or without an object. In its intransitive form, it emphasizes the function rather than an object, or to be more precise, the function of seeing becomes its own object. In this understanding, I see gains a certain performative effect and could be identified as a speech act: an utterance in which “talking is performing acts according to rules.”157 Thus, I see is not merely a description of a disjunct and external process for the subject; I see is an act that produces its own relation between the subject who speaks and the process of seeing that he or she addresses. The sentence introduces a speaking subject who claims authority over a process that is neither identical with the subject nor with the act of speaking that he or she performs (the subject speaks, speaks about seeing, and speaking is, after all, not the same as seeing). In other words, this speech act introduces a split that is already familiar from the Cartesian subject’s formula of self-certainty (“I think, therefore I am”). Video says, analogously, “I see, therefore I am,” and thus establishes its subject on the performative act of seeing. In Seminar XI (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964), Jacques Lacan identifies the split in this performative act. Lacan emphasizes that Descartes’s “I think” is only possible in the form of an address—in other words, the certainty of the subject’s existence is directed at and based

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John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 22; Furthermore, J. L. Austin emphasizes that the performative function in speech-act theory is directly linked to first person singular pronouns (although not always limited to them): “We shall take, then, for our first examples some utterances which can fall into no hitherto recognized grammatical category save that of ‘statement’, […] all will have, as it happens, humdrum verbs in the first person singular present indicative active. […] In these examples [the examples include ‘I do’ and ‘I name this ship the Queen Elisabeth’] it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it […] What are we to call a sentence or an utterance of this type? I propose to call it a performative sentence or a performative utterance, or, for short, ‘a performative’.” J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 4–6.

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on the reassurance of the Other to which this speech is aimed.158 The same is true for video. The sentence “I see” implies that there is an Other, addressed by the subject who speaks and who sees. Pronouns like “I” hold a special status in linguistics, as they do not refer to a specific thing, but to different grammatical objects and subjects, depending on the context of their use.159 The position of the “I” can never be located and identified unambiguously. And so, in the case of video, we encounter a grammatical structure at the very center of the concept. This will serve as a key to the question of where (and how) video is located and how this position might be described.

3.2 Audio—I hear Video is not just visual but also auditive, even though this aspect is often overlooked in research. As Yvonne Spielmann emphasizes in Video: The Reflexive Medium (2008), one of video’s most significant characteristics is its audiovisuality. This quality is not, however, based on the assemblage of an apparatus (or several different apparatuses). Unlike film, video is not an “additive process”160 that combines sounds and images (two technologically very different materials). Instead, one of the specific characteristics of video’s electronic signal is that it is freely transformable from image to sound and vice versa. Spielmann refers to electronic information as “noise” and states: “Audio and video are interconnected noises with which the video signal can selectively produce the electronic noise aurally/auditively and visually.” 161 Thus, given video’s audiovisual character, we must also examine the etymology of “audio.” Audio—which, like video, is a Latin verb in the first person singular present indicative active form (with all the implications I have already mentioned for this grammatical category)—means I hear. It is related to the Greek αἰσθ-άνομαι (aísthomai), to perceive,162 hence sharing its root with the word αἴσθησις (aísthēsis), from which “aes-

158 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 35–36. 159 A further discussion of this issue can be found in chapter II.2: “The Index.” 160 Spielmann, Video, 8. 161 Spielmann, 8. 162 Walde, Lateinisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, s.v. “audio.”

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thetics” derives.163 These words all stem from the Sanskrit root av (to notice).164 They are also closely related to the Latin auris (ear) and its many derivations, such as the German Ohr (ear), hören (to hear), and horchen (to listen), or the English ear and hear, as Alois Walde’s Lateinisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (1910) points out.165 It is striking that both a passive and an active state derive from the same root: hearing (active) and listening (passive). What is even more intriguing is that Walde mentions—in a surprisingly decisive rejection—another “unacceptable” etymological lineage for video and audio through the word a-vidì̯ ō, which “originally, was supposed to be a general expression for sensual perception.”166 Whether or not this is a false etymology— Walde does not elaborate as to why this lineage is unacceptable—the fact that there is an etymological relationship between seeing and hearing is also indicated by another source: the word ὄψ (óps), meaning both eye and face as well as voice and sound.167 This word, which we still encounter in the modern derivatives “optics” and “optical,” not only connects the sense of sight to the sense of hearing but also demonstrates the relation between active and passive that is operative in perception, an idea that I will examine in the following chapters. While eye and voice indicate an active side, a locus from which to gaze and to speak, face and sound are their passive counterparts. That which is looked at168 and that which is heard. This is of utmost interest not only for our investigation of video—in which the question of perception will take a central position—but also for a fundamental understanding of the origins of aesthetics.

Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “Αἴσθησις (Aisthesis),” accessed October 4, 2019, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l= αἴσθησις&la=greek#lexicon. 164 Walde, Lateinisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, s.v. “audio.” 165 Walde, s.v. “audio.” 166 Walde, s.v. “audio” (translated by the author). 167 Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “Ὄψ (Ops),” accessed October 4, 2019, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057: entry=o)/y1. 168 The German word Gesicht (face) is revealing here, as it means, literally, that which is in sight. 163

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The Medium

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At first I thought I could simply draw a line under the word medium, bury it like so much critical toxic waste, and walk away from it into a world of lexical freedom. “Medium” seemed too contaminated, too ideologically, too dogmatically, too discursively loaded.1 When we refer to video, whether within a colloquial or a more rigid theoretical framework, the term medium is instantly implied and often used in more or less problematic ways. The medial concepts attributed to video are manifold and are often presupposed without closer analysis. Some authors, for instance, emphasize the idea of a certain “communication model” that follows Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the medium is the message.”2 Others presuppose a more vernacular idea of the medium—one that splits the artwork into “form” and “content” and perceives the medium as that which mediates the message (the content) to the viewer by certain means (the form).3 The latter idea, in turn, oscillates between an understanding of the medium as that which mediates in a sender-receiver model (where the message is thought of as independent of the subjectivity of both the sender and the receiver) and a phenomenological and somewhat solipsistic understanding in which the experiences of the beholder are a constitutive element of the “visual strategy” of the artwork.4 The result is a (supposedly) subjective dimension in the second concept. However, this model eliminates subjectivity to the same degree as the sender-receiver model insofar as what emerges as “subjective” is thought of as autonomous, non-intersubjective, and thus ultimately non-medial.5 Other readings of “media” are concerned with the longing for medium specificity, based on the presupposition that there was ever something like purity in media (an idea that is merely an attempt to save modernism

1 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 5. 2 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 7. 3 See, for instance, Helen Westgeest, Video Art Theory: A Comparative Approach (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 7–8. 4 Westgeest, 8. 5 For more on the subject and the medium, see the discussion of the psychoanalytic concept of the medium in relation to Krauss’s essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” in chapter III.2: “Medium, Subject, Body.”

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from its own genre-dissolving, disruptive capacities6). This model presumes that media convergence is an inherent threat: a process that objectifies communication, rendering the subject obsolete.7 Other theorists place the medium in a contraposition to technology8 or, in a McLuhanian spirit, define the medium as “wiring people and technologies.”9 These various and (sometimes in themselves) contradictory models of mediation require clarification on a structural level. We can categorize the aspects of video/media theory that are most instructive for our investigation of the medium as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.

6 7

Medium as message (McLuhan)10 Medium as a psychological category (Krauss, Kittler)11 Medium as middle, as “between” two poles or states Medium as a matter or substance, which splits into an idea of a medium as “neutral” means or instrument and an idea of a medium as milieu12

See chapter I.1.1: “Medial Struggles” and chapter III.2: “Medium, Subject, Body.” See, for instance, Mark B. N. Hansen’s critique of Kittler. Hansen seeks to save media from the process of “digital convergence” in which all media, understood as “wiring people and technologies,” will become eradicated and “absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop” (Kittler, 2). There seems to be a misunderstanding here between specific media and the medium as structure. Video exposes this difference since the convergence of specific media (such as film, video, and computer imagery) does not affect the structural function of the medium, which is to mediate something to a spectator. What is, for Hansen, a phenomenological argument (“media have simply become obsolete,” Hansen, 1) is, for Kittler, structural: digitization, he argues, makes a spectator (and hence mediation) obsolete. Both positions, however, fail to account for the difference between media and the structure of the medium. They also miss the fact that the (spectating) subject is as much a link in the digital chain of the electronic image as it was in classic film or analog video. When we think of the algorithms that affect our lives today, such as blockchain technology, we can see what Kittler refers to: an automated system that does not need a human being in order to operate. However, these technologies do not operate discretely in relation to human life; instead, they have a great impact on us. We can see that mediation is not something that depends on a certain technology, but on the structure of the human psyche in relation to things. See Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter; Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). See Yvonne Spielmann, “Video: From Technology to Medium,” Art Journal 65, 8 no. 3 (Fall 2006). 9 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 2. 10 See McLuhan, Understanding Media. 11 See Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism”; Rosalind Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (Winter 1999); Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. 12 See Jacques Rancière, “What Medium Can Mean,” Parrhesia, no. 11 (2011): 35–43.

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5. Medium as grammatical voice, or genus verbi, that is situated between active and passive13 6. Medium as memory (IT-storage medium) The heterogeneity found in these concepts of mediality is not coincidental but pertains to a problem rooted at the core of the medium’s very structure. We thus need to ask: Where does a medium occur? What does it mediate, from where, and to whom?

1.1

The Third

Let us first address a problem that emerges in all the aforementioned concepts of mediation. If a medium is understood both as what mediates (a form, an apparatus, pigment, canvas, etc.) and the mediation process itself (which is not identical with the form or content it carries), we already find ourselves removed from a simple understanding of the medium as a situation between a sender and a receiver. Along these lines, there are three (not two) moments operative in a medium, as Jacques Rancière emphasizes in “What Medium Can Mean” (2011): Indeed, the idea of the medium clearly exceeds the idea of the apparatus. And there is no doubt that rather than speak of medium, it would be better to speak here of mediality, understood as the relation between three things: an idea of medium, an idea of art and an idea of the sensorium within which this technological apparatus carries out the performances of art.14 What stands out in Rancière’s formulation is how the medium is rendered, as the word suggests, as operating in between. But between what? Rancière gives a curious answer. He does not speak of the relation between the

I will return to this sense of the medium as genus verbi in chapters III and IV, which address reflexivity, the phantasm, and the drive. For now it is worth noting that, unlike modern English, Latin and Greek know a third verb form aside from the active and passive voice. In Latin, this third mode is called the medium. The medium can be translated as a reflexive mode: if the active mode denotes an action performed by the subject and the passive mode denotes an action that is aimed/ targeted at a subject, the medium is a mode in which the action both sets out from and targets the subject. 14 Rancière, 36. 13

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medium, art, and the apparatus, but instead of an idea of medium, an idea of art, and an idea of the sensorium in which the apparatus operates. Clearly, then, we cannot simply locate the medium in the split between “an idea and its realization, between a thing and its reproduction”15—nor is it a mere instrument, a means to an end. Instead, we must acknowledge the medium as something in which an idea (and we can think of all the semantic connotations here: thought, image, (re-)presentation) already resides, which cannot be separated from the function of mediation. Hence, the mode of in-betweenness we encounter in the medium partakes in all the positions it mediates. The medium can thus be thought of in a relational manner, like a grammatical structure.16 In this respect, I offer two ways of conceptualizing the medium in video. The first is Lacan’s famous dictum that “a signifier represents a subject for another signifier,”17 which serves as a precise definition of a medium as grammatical structure. The second is the grammatical structure explored in the previous chapter through the etymology of video as “I see.”18 The grammatical subject (“I”) is a shifter,19 which is to say that the “I” in a sentence is never identified with a certain speaker. Instead, it is a function, a position from which to speak—or, in video’s case, to see. Both concepts prove productive in the face of the problem posed by the medium. If the medium is understood as a function, as something that, in shifting its position, carries with it a representation of a subject, its function needs to be organized around a lack or gap to make said shift possible. The mediation process thus takes place between two positions (spectator/image, camera/screen, etc.), thereby forming a third position—and what is mediated in this process is the subject. This process becomes evident when we look at the field of video art. We cannot assume a less complex understanding of the medium as a set of materials, an apparatus through which a message is conveyed, for a discipline in which no such set exists. What does video need in order to emerge? As already demonstrated, none of video’s components are absolutely necessary, apart from the circulating electronic signal.20 In

15 Rancière, 35. 16 Which, as previously demonstrated, is one of the connotations of the term “medium”—namely, as middle voice, the Latin genus verbi. 17 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 157. 18 See chapter I.3.1: “Video—I See.” 19 Shifters, which I discuss later in this chapter, are a linguistic concept coined by Roman Jakobson. See section 2: “The Index.” 20 See chapter I.2.3: “Electronic Medium.”

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most cases, a camera is used, but not always.21 The same can be said for any other technical or structural components that potentially form part of video’s setting. It is thus obvious that video is more than merely the sum of its parts. Each video work offers a unique set of technological and discursive conditions that are not simply decoration for an underlying idea. Rosalind Krauss identifies that there is a “rift between the nature of video and that of the other visual arts,” subsequently concluding that “the ease of defining it [the subject of video] in terms of its machinery does not seem to coincide with accuracy, and my own experience of video keeps urging me towards the psychological model.”22 Krauss bases her argument on the diagnosis that the video works she found herself confronted with in the mid-1970s (only about a decade after the introduction of video art) were subverting the formalist criticism of the 1960s and the “particular logic of a given medium.”23 Instead, she argues, these video works displayed their medium through the “image of self-regard” ubiquitous in video, a quality Krauss identifies as narcissism.24 By basing video on a “psychological model,” two understandings of the term medium are here defined as crucial for video: “the simultaneous reception and projection of an image; and the

21 A good example is Jon Rafman’s work (discussed later in this chapter), which uses 3D renderings found on YouTube. 22 “Video depends—in order for anything to be experienced at all—on a set of physical mechanisms. So perhaps it would be easiest to say that this apparatus—both at its present and future levels of technology—comprises the television medium, and leave it at that. Yet with the subject of video, the ease of defining it in terms of its machinery does not seem to coincide with accuracy; and my own experience of video keeps urging me towards the psychological model. Everyday speech contains an example of the word ‘medium’ used in a psychological sense; the uncommon terrain for that common-enough usage is the world of parapsychology: telepathy, extra-sensory-perception, and communication with an after-life, for which people with certain kinds of psychic powers are understood to be Mediums. Whether or not we give credence to the fact of mediumistic experience, we understand the referents for the language that describes it. We know, for instance, that configured within the parapsychological sense of the word ‘medium’ is the image of a human receiver (and sender) of communications arising from an invisible source. Further, this term contains the notion that the human conduit exists in a particular relation to the message, which is one of temporal concurrance. Thus, when Freud lectures on the phenomenon of telepathic dreams, he tells his audience that the fact insisted upon by reports of such matters is that the dreams occur at the same time as the actual (but invariably distant) event.” Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 52. 23 Krauss, 50. For a detailed discussion of Krauss’s argument, see chapter III.3: “The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” 24 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 50.

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human psyche used as a conduit.”25 In other words, the simultaneousness that characterizes video is linked to a figure of mediation—the human psyche as conduit. The question “Whose psyche is it that is addressed here—the spectator’s or the artist’s?” is less interesting than the question “What is connected through this ‘psyche as conduit’?” These two understandings do not so much complement each other as decentralize the situation. While an idea of simultaneous reception and projection allows for a certain stability in video’s mise-en-scène (a closed circuit), the third position introduced here (the psyche as conduit) challenges the idea of a “neutral” medium—an “automatism,” as it were—and dis-locates any form of agency within video’s medial structure. The human psyche, which is neither identified on the side of reception nor production, is what structures the mechanism into a medium. The psyche is thus, in a manner of speaking, stretched out over the whole structure, “dwelling” in both the positions of reception and projection— and circulating between them.

1.2. Erosion In a later text, “A Voyage on the North Sea” (1999), Krauss calls the medium a “recursive structure—a structure, that is, some of the elements of which will produce the rules that generate the structure itself.” She adds that this recursive structure is something made, rather than something given, is what is latent in the traditional connection of “medium” to matters of technique, as when the arts were divided up within the Academy into ateliers representing the different mediums—painting, sculpture, architecture—in order to be taught.26 While modernist paradigms had postulated the autonomy of different mediums, Krauss states (with recourse to Clement Greenberg’s theories27) that art production in the 1960s and early 1970s started to erode the fundamental principle on which it was based:

25 Krauss, 52. 26 Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, 6–7. 27 Krauss refers here to Greenberg’s essay “Modernist Painting.” See also chapter I.1.1: “Medial Struggles.”

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The paradox was that this autonomy had proved chimerical, and that abstract art’s very modes of production—its paintings being executed in serial runs, for example, seemed to carry the imprint of the industrially produced commodity object, internalizing within the field of the work its own status as interchangeable and thus as pure exchange value.28 The results and mechanisms of the erosion of medium specificity29 were not limited to painting; they found expression in various art forms, groups, and practices of the era, such as happenings, art informel, fluxus, and pop art. The explosion of different artistic subgenres can be seen as a result of that inherent erosion in the concept of medium specificity since the modernist claim for medial purity made a more articulated differentiation possible (and also necessary). Paradoxically, this opened specific practices to the principles of other fields.30 It is obvious that even in her criticism of Greenberg’s paradigm of the autonomy of the medium, Krauss still reaffirms the idea of a medial specificity insofar as she ascribes specific qualities to specific mediums—for example, attributing narcissism to the medium of video. As Juliane

28 Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, 11. 29 See chapter I.1.1: “Medial Struggles.” 30 See, for instance, Juliane Rebentisch’s argument regarding the paradox of medium specificity: “Although Krauss and Fried criticize Greenberg’s media positivism and open the question of a ‘unique and proper area of competence’ of art to the historicity of artistic medium/form relations, both remain true—if in very different ways—to his basic theoretical intuition. Accordingly, like Greenberg, Michael Fried insists that a ‘proper area’ of competence of art and, hence, aesthetic autonomy can exist only within the individual arts—and this means, only within the traditional boundaries between the genres. All interpretations of an aesthetic medium in the historical process of formal creation must ultimately serve to uphold these boundaries; they may expand or renew the concept of a given art, but they may not disrupt them by power of intermediality. Yet such a disruption […] would not be the end of all reflection on the specific qualities of the respective means of aesthetic representation, but merely of the identification of these means with the methods of form-creation within the traditional generic boundaries. From the perspective of intermediality, the concepts of medium specificity and genre-specificity can no longer be identified. For Greenberg, however—and Fried follows him in this—the self-critical reflection on the means of representation unequivocally serves to demarcate and reaffirm the identity of each genre. This is, in fact, the decisive project of what Greenberg himself calls modernism. With the production of the sixties, at the very latest, however, it became clear that such reflection on and reassertion of generic property is closely and structurally interrelated to an engagement of what is beyond its boundaries.” Juliane Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 84–85.

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Rebentisch demonstrates in Aesthetics of Installation Art (2012), Krauss still maintains a (veiled) affirmation in the form of the basic assumption that she (like Greenberg) understands aesthetic autonomy as a proper area of competence determined by the medium of each art, an area that must be defended against the evil variously known as the “culture of spectacle” or the “flood of images” or the “aestheticization of the life-world.”31 In her attempt to distance herself from Greenberg’s problematic definition of a medium, Krauss thus tries to look for a less questionable concept, initially opting for Steve Clavell’s term automatism.32 While the term offers a different and appealing set of ideas for her, such as “improvisation” and “convention” (and their interrelations), Krauss quickly returns to the notion of the medium as it delivers both the idea of a “layered” or “recursive structure” and is a central symptom in the shift from modernist to postmodernist thinking, in spite of the “misunderstandings and abuses attached to it.”33 There are several consequences if we reconnect Krauss’s later considerations of the medium to her earlier attempt to specify the medium of video by basing it on a “psychological condition” rather than on Greenberg’s claim that a medium is defined by specific material

31 Rebentisch, 81. 32 Cavell’s concept of automatism is another attempt to rid mediality of subjectivity: “Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, a way that could not satisfy painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction.” See Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 23. Hence, the concept is eventually bound to fail Krauss, as she seeks to find a way to consider the subject in the mediation process rather than assuming that modes of technological reproduction are separate from the subjects they produce. 33 Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, 7.

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properties.34 Turning the medium into a psychological rather than a “substantial”35 category only subverts Greenberg’s definition at first glance, without changing its central claim that medium specificity exists within a certain artistic discipline. The problem merely shifts and one substance is replaced with another. However, “the human psyche,” which underpins this new definition of the medium, can hardly be seen as a substance in a stricter Greenbergian (that is, essentialist) sense. Moreover, Krauss’s rendering of the medium as a psychological function, as opposed to a material set of properties, assumes, to a large extent, a dualistic model of mind and matter, which contradicts the psychoanalytic concepts that underpin her argument.36 On the other hand, Krauss’s argument lays bare the Greek origins of the concept of substance in relation to the concept of the subject: the hypokeimenon, the subject, emerges as that which is itself a bearer of substance, or, in

34

35

36

“The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment—were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly. Manet’s became the first Modernist pictures by virtue of the frankness with which they declared the flat surfaces on which they were painted. The Impressionists, in Manet’s wake, abjured underpainting and glazes, to leave the eye under no doubt as to the fact that the colors they used were made of paint that came from tubes or pots. Cézanne sacrificed verisimilitude, or correctness, in order to fit his drawing and design more explicitly to the rectangular shape of the canvas. It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface that remained, however, more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism. For flatness alone was unique and exclusive to pictorial art. The enclosing shape of the picture was a limiting condition, or norm, that was shared with the art of the theater; color was a norm and a means shared not only with the theater, but also with sculpture. Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art, Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.” Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 86–87. Like Rosalind Krauss, I use the term “substantial” here rather than Greenberg’s preferred notion of the “essential”: “If the traditional medium is supported by a physical substance (and practiced by a specialized guild), the term ‘technical support,’ in distinction, refers to contemporary commercial vehicles, such as cars or television, which contemporary artists exploit, in recognition of the contemporary obsolescence of the traditional mediums, as well as acknowledging their obligation to wrest from that support a new set of aesthetic conventions to which their works can then reflexively gesture, should they want to join those works to the canon of modernism.” Rosalind Krauss, “Two Moments from the PostMedium Condition,” October 116 (Spring 2006): 57. For further discussion of the dualism in Krauss’s video theory, see chapter III.2: “Medium, Subject, Body.”

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a logical/grammatical sense, as that which “carries” the predicate. In other words, Krauss’s struggle for a consistent concept of the medium illustrates that mediality always requires a subject, and vice versa. Every attempt to consider the medium as separated from subjectivity must either end in a quasi-essentialist and highly arbitrary set of rules and properties (for instance, Greenberg’s famous attribution of flatness to painting) or simply equate technology with medium, disregarding the fact that technology is not an end in itself, but rather, in McLuhan’s words, “an extension of ourselves”37—and thus always already caught up in the muddy waters of subjectivity.

1.3 Process/Psyche In conclusion, we can argue, echoing Juliane Rebentisch, that Krauss’s later attempts to sidestep this fraught term by calling for a “post-medium condition” simply reaffirms an essentialist understanding of the medium.38 What is lost in this reading, however, is Krauss’s attempt to pinpoint an operational, structural mode that is active within the work, specific for different artistic practices, and the fact that she places this mode in the realm of the psyche. If we understand the medium as an outdated or even reactionary category that seeks to retain the purity of certain genres, it is evident that this attempt must fail. Even more so in light of an analysis of video, which, from its very beginnings, appropriated different characteristics from different artistic disciplines, such as body art, performance, film, and painting. While there are no definable sets of rules, properties, or means that are unique and specific to the medium of a certain artistic discipline, certain forms of thinking or discourse are connected to different practices. Moreover, one has to take a position in relation to a specific practice. In the shift from discipline to practice, the medium loses its essentialist connotations. When Krauss formulates her proposition that the medium of video is a “psychological condition,” she emphasizes the practice, the process of video—indeed, of any art—as its respective medium. Thus, the question is not “How is a certain artistic discipline specified and discerned from others?” but rather “What is the mode of thinking, acting, and producing in a certain artistic practice?”

37 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 7. 38 See Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea; Krauss, “Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition.”

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In other words, my definition of the medium and mediality is not based on a dualism between psyche and material, content and form, sender and receiver, or technology and its social use, but on what we can, according to Fredric Jameson, subsume under “cultural materialism”: It is because culture has become material that we are now in a position to understand that it always was material, or materialistic, in its structures and functions. We postcontemporary people have a word for that discovery—a word that has tended to displace the older language of genres and forms—and this is, of course, the word medium, and in particular its plural, media, a word which now conjoins three relatively distinct signals: that of an artistic mode or specific form of aesthetic production, that of a specific technology, generally organized around a central apparatus or machine; and that, finally, of a social institution. These three areas of meaning do not define a medium, or the media, but designate the distinct dimensions that must be addressed in order for such a definition to be completed or constructed.39 Whether we follow Jameson’s version of mediality or Rancière’s, it is noteworthy that both authors attribute three moments to the medial process rather than two. Both models entail the same basic aspects: an aesthetic, sensual moment, a technological moment, and a social moment that is attributed to the mediatization process itself. Art production in the 1960s and 1970s was heavily informed by the complications within the claim of medium specificity, whether by taking an overtly critical positioning toward it or simply by being a structural effect of it. Video takes a special role in the art production of this era and the related erosion of medium specificity. This is due to its inherent processual and, in a literal sense, medial understanding of the medium. Ever since cheap video equipment became available with the introduction of the Portapak in the early 1960s, video—more than any other practice—has exemplified “heterogeneity”40 in its means. In

39 Fredric R. Jameson, “Surrealism without the Unconscious,” in Transmission, ed. d’Agostino and Tafler, 21. 40 Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea, 31; Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 110.

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video, the medium hinges on a technology that is characterized precisely by its indistinct means; it is a matter of transition, transformation, and transposition between two or more poles. None of video’s possible parts are indispensable.41 Yet, paradoxically, video (understood as a technology) possesses very distinct capacities that belong only to video, such as simultaneous recording and transmission (and the production of resulting feedback loops),42 electronic image transmission, and the ability to store audio and video signals. The paradox is that video is based on a technology proper only to itself, but the characteristics of this technology are not fixed or individually necessary for the “successful” production of a video. It therefore eludes the unproblematic definition of a medium as a technology that is culturally and discursively put to use,43 but it also eludes the popular understanding of a medium as a means of communication, where this is based on the assumption of a simple relation between a sender and a receiver.44 However, this paradox is easily overcome if the axiom changes: a medium is not distinct from its technical conditions and the technology is, simultaneously, not antecedent to the medium. The idea that no new technology emerges without already being mediated does not, however, lead to the conclusion that no epistemological ruptures are caused by technological innovation. Video is the perfect example: its technical capacities—and herein lies the actual paradox—ushered in its own radically new medial conditions. A medium is thus not what is made of certain innovative technology. Its very means are already contained in both its technology and the social framework within which it appears. A set of different technical premises, together with various forms of presentation and modes of exhibition, give way to a more situational understanding of the medium

41

42 43

44

See Spielmann, Video, 8: “Even if film, on its technical principle, can be generated without a camera (by scratching, painting, and treating the filmstrip chemically, etc.), the medium cannot dispense with its material basis. By contrast, video can manage completely without videotape, and even the video recorder does not represent a necessary condition for its realization as a medium.” Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 52. See Spielmann, Video, 11: “A medium also does not appear as pure technology, but always in culturally semiotic forms of expression that not only communicates the particular, specifically technological characteristics but also generates those features, which a particular medium has in common with other media.” See Westgeest, Video Art Theory, 7–8: “In this book, I will use the notion of medium mainly to refer to particular capabilities and conventions in mediation: with what means can or usually do artworks communicate their contents to the beholder? As such, the medium is part of the ‘visual strategy’ of the artwork, but also relates to the expectations and experiences of the spectators.”

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of video. However, the set is never quite complete. While some works use found footage (for instance, Nam June Paik’s manipulations of tapes or the electronic signal of cathode ray tubes with the help of magnets), others draw from performance and body art and use video’s ability for instant feedback, each time creating a whole new set of conditions. Video thus clearly demonstrates the shift in mediality as processual and oriented at a (subjective) practice. We can still see the aftermath of the problematic conception of medium specificity in contemporary writing on video. There is a certain inclination or stance in video theory (especially in art history) to uphold the division into genres and save it from the chaotic, postmodern blurriness of ever-branching differentiation. This is often done by focusing on early video technology and by distinguishing between analog video and converged digital forms.45 In such instances, analog video is defined as “video proper” and digital video is subsumed under the term “moving image.”46 While it is important to speak concretely about specific artistic practices, this path is unproductive. When analog video is essentialized (for instance, when the presence or absence of magnetic tape becomes a marker for when we can and cannot speak of video), the category of the moving image is used to avoid the difficult and not entirely satisfying distinctions between film, video, 3D, AR, VR, and other forms. Thus, the notion of the moving image merely avoids the problem of mediality rather than solving it. As I have demonstrated, video, in its very technology and materiality, reveals that medium specificity is an ideological construct that erases difference (and, of course, congruence) between media by ascribing certain conclusive attributes to specific disciplines. This is, at its very core, a reductionist move. If, according to Clement Greenberg, flatness is irreducible to modernist painting, this categorization clearly eliminates artworks that do not share this attribute. The same can be said about magnetic tape as a distinguishing feature between video and the digital moving image. Instead of reducing works of art to a more or less arbitrary list of attributes belonging to a certain technology, we must understand the medium as that which mediates between (and partakes in) technical frameworks, their material actualization, and the spectating subject.

45 46

See, for instance, Spielmann, Video. See, for instance, Catherine Elwes, Installation and the Moving Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Uroskie, Between the Black Box and the White Cube; Jennings, Abstract Video.

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The Index What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This (this photograph, and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression.47

Thinking about the medium of video leads us to another rather opaque notion—that of the index. Like the concept of the medium, the index is ubiquitous in the theory of photography and video. Generally speaking however, some scholars would prefer to move away from this term, toward something less complicated, problematic, and essentialist. This sentiment raises the question: What makes the concept of the index so troublesome? It also arouses a suspicion that where there is resistance, something might be at stake that is worth further examination. It is not arbitrary to follow an investigation of the medium with a discussion of the index since the index lies at the very core of the medium. That is to say, the index is the mediatory function itself. To understand what this means, it is necessary to revisit the beginnings of index theory in the roots of photography. The question of the index is a question of the relation between the image and the world: a relation that is not structured by similarity or symbolization but by a direct connection between the image and the object it depicts. Although this question existed prior to the rise of photography, photography

47

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 4.

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gave a new push to the claim that there is an “objective image”—an image that is freed from the troubles of subjectivity that afflict other artistic disciplines.48 Since the dawn of photography, this claim has, it seems, only grown and become more prevalent in contemporary discourse. From social media to political events, from “food porn” and selfies to scientific imaging processes, our world is dominated by the photographic image, which is presumed to depict reality and offer snippets of moments, experiences, and events. Especially in the latter context, images are supposed to reflect the world in a “true” and scientifically objective manner while also “truthfully” telling us where the phenomena of the world originate from: whether in the pictures of Google Street View, in which the user can ostensibly wander the world on their computer screen, or in the cerebral topography of depression offered by scientific imaging techniques. Admittedly, not all scientific imaging processes are strictly “photographic” since different physical “forces” are used to produce them, such as MRI (magnet resonance imaging) or PET (positron emission tomography). However, the specific relation to the empirical world claimed by such images allows us to subsume them under the general category of photography, where they are indexical. In other words, the idea of a photographic image as “objective” already contains an idea of an indexical relationship between an image and its “origin”—the physical object from which it derives, which the photograph tells us about in a “truthful” manner.

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See, for instance, Bazin’s considerations on photography: “Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism. No matter how skillful the painter, his work was always in fee to an inescapable subjectivity. The fact that a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image. Again, the essential factor in the transition from the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process (photography will long remain the inferior of painting in the reproduction of color); rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays no part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved but in the way of achieving it.” André Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 12.

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Yet this view of photographs is complicated by our own ambiguous attributions. While there is a common and historically founded understanding of the photograph as an objective, truth-telling document, we are now just as accustomed to the view that pictures lie. We no longer like to think of the photographic image in terms of objectivity, and those who still insist on this idea are considered somewhat naive. At the same time, we use pictures every day as documentation of our lives, claiming that there is a direct link between a picture and its object. The social media hashtag #nofilter is supposed to guarantee accurate documentation, an objective image; simultaneously, however, there are widespread doubts about this claim. The index is thus a mediating figure—mediating between the image and the world, where these two contradictory positions pose a problem. Are we to think of the index as an ontological, universal category, a guarantor of connection between the image and the world? Or are we to abolish this notion in a mode of “enlightened” contemporariness, acknowledging that there is no actual objectivity in the image, only interpretations, ending up in a merely speculative perspective on the world?

2.1

Video and Index

What is the connection between the image and the object in the index?49 How does this connection manifest? What does it mean? Can there be a position that mediates between the two ideas of the indexical relation? Video offers the perfect locus for these questions since it allows us to observe the function of the index far better than in any other medium. Unlike photography, video introduces another factor to the problem, which is the element of time.50 As a time-based medium, video can teach us about the index’s function of capturing space AND time. How does

49

50

In this chapter—unless stated otherwise—the “object” denotes a physical object. This differs from the following chapters, which discuss the psychoanalytic concept of the object. This argument also extends to the comparison with film, which is, technically, photography in motion. As demonstrated in chapter I, however, video actually moves via an ever-circulating signal; there is never a still image. In film, movement is simulated by a sequence of stills. See also Bill Viola, “The Sound of One Line Scanning,” quoted in Elwes, Installation and the Moving Image, 5.

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video capture space and time, and what happens to them in the process? A movement takes place in video—one that we call circulation. This circulation pertains to the electronic signal. Based on this circulation, there is another circulation: that of time and space as they are preserved and stored in video. As I will show, this latter circulation possesses an indexical function. Deeply rooted in the heterogeneous art production that developed in the 1960s, video’s indexical function is informed by an assortment of different practices, including body art, performance, photography, film, and painting. There is, I argue, a strong connection between the emergence of video art and the rise of a poststructuralist understanding of the index as trace, as defined by authors such as Roland Barthes and Rosalind Krauss. Can these now nearly forty-year-old ascertainments still serve as a valid concept of video art today? Technology has fundamentally changed from magnetic tape to digitization, bringing video and film closer together. Image manipulation technologies have reached new levels of power and availability. 3D renderings and VR are omnipresent in video exhibitions all over the world, as well as in our daily lives. How does this technological change affect the indexical function of video? Can we still cling to a notion that presupposes a fixed physical connection between an image and its object at a time when some videos are entirely made in a virtual environment? Is it necessary to divide video into indexical and non-indexical production according to the status of the depicted object? Or would this understanding of the index miss the point? To try to answer these questions, let us first take a brief look at Charles Sanders Peirce’s basic concept of the index before continuing to the art theoretical dimension of the idea.

2.2 Contact At the beginning of “What is a Sign” (1894), which is still one of the fundamental texts on the index, philosopher and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce discusses the relation of signs to the idea of a medium. Peirce defines a sign as the third of three ways of “taking interest in a thing”—namely, as a “mediatory interest”: §2. There are three kinds of interest we may take in a thing. First, we may have a primary interest in it for itself. Second, we may have a secondary interest in it, on account of its reactions with other things. Third,

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we may have a mediatory interest in it, in so far as it conveys to a mind an idea about a thing. In so far as it does this, it is a sign, or representation.51 What is striking in this preliminary statement is that it renders a sign as something that “conveys to a mind an idea about a thing.” That is to say that a sign is the representation of an idea, not a representation of the thing that the idea and the sign refer to. For Peirce, representation is thus already detached from the objective world in a twofold manner. What is represented is an idea of a thing, not the thing itself. This representation, on the other hand, is not just an inherent quality of the thing it represents, but something that is conveyed: a message. Moreover, at this very early stage, Peirce reveals the relation between the index and the medium: every sign is a medium, and mediating means conveying an idea about a thing to a mind. But where does this idea set out from? What is this “we” Peirce uses to mark this position, this perspective? Is “we” a structural way of saying “a mind”? The mind is, indeed, the source for Peirce’s considerations. In the first paragraph of the text, he gives the example of three states of mind, which, in the second paragraph, he likens to three categories of signs. So the formula would be: “A mind conveys an idea about a thing to another mind.” This bears a striking structural resemblance to a statement we have already encountered in our discussion of the medium52—namely, Lacan’s formula of representation: “A signifier represents a subject for another signifier.”53 It could be argued that a mind and a signifier are two very different things and that it would be strange to substitute an “idea about a thing” with a “subject,” but that is not our focus here. What is important in this comparison is the strange distance both concepts create to the positions they offer. Just as in Peirce’s model, where there is no direct connection to things, but rather a twofold representation that is mediated from mind to mind, the subject in Lacan’s concept is

51 Charles S. Peirce, “What is a Sign?,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 5. 52 See section 1.1: “The Third” in this chapter. 53 This resemblance is not coincidental, as can be seen in numerous investigations of how Peirce’s concept influenced Lacan’s semiology. See, for instance, John P. Muller, Beyond the Psychoanalytic Dyad: Developmental Semiotics in Freud, Peirce, and Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1996); Nina Ort, Objektkonstitution als Zeichenprozeß: Jacques Lacans Psychosemiologie und Systemtheorie [in German] (Wiesbaden: Dt. Univ.-Verlag, 1998).

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merely an effect of a mediation process that emerges in the gap of signification between two signifiers. In other words, the resemblance is strongest in its middle part, its object. Both the idea about a thing and the subject only happen in between, in a mediating process—as its product or even just as a structural effect. Continuing this thought, Peirce defines three different signs: icon, symbol, and index. While icons are structured by the logic of likeness to and imitation of a thing, and symbols are “general signs” that are “associated with their meanings by usage,” indices “show something about things, on account of their being physically connected with them.“54 Indices, Peirce elaborates, are found in different forms, such as a “guidepost, which points down the road to be taken, or a relative pronoun, which is placed just after the name of the thing intended to be denoted, or a vocative exclamation, as ‘Hi! there,’ which acts upon the nerves of the person addressed and forces his attention.”55 While the definitions of the icon and the symbol seem fairly consistent and acceptable on an intuitive level, the definition of the index raises a certain discomfort. We are accustomed to the idea that the word “chair” is not necessarily connected to the object it denotes, which is already shown in the fact that there are many different words in different languages for “chair” describing the same item, just as the word refers to many different chairs. We can also accept likeness as a way of denoting an object—such as a painting of a chair, whose materiality and function is nothing like a real chair. However, the index’s “physical connection” with the thing is more opaque. How is such a connection possible? Peirce takes the idea another step further when he states that the index and its object “make an organic pair. But the interpreting mind has nothing to do with this connection, except remarking it, after it is established.”56 As we can see, it is not in Peirce’s interest to define the index as having a purely arbitrary and conventional connection with its object. Instead, he insists on the physical dimension of the connection between the index and the object, no matter how it will later be interpreted. This is a radical claim—especially in our time, when signs are thought of as merely a matter of interpretation and convention, with meanings that can be changed to the liking of those who use them. A physical connection

54 Peirce, “What is a Sign?,” 5. 55 Peirce, 5. 56 Peirce, 9.

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to an object, as the index offers, on the other hand, does not care much for interpretation. Instead, it creates a subject that must live under preestablished signs: not creating them, not changing them, but merely “remarking” them. Peirce goes on to specify the nature of the connection between the image and the object, which is especially significant in photography: Photographs, especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs [indices], those by physical connection.57 Thus, Peirce’s theorization of the index involves a dimension that will later be fruitful for an understanding of video: that of the forced physical connection between the image and the object. However, it becomes clear that this connection is not made by the observing mind—what we might, in Lacanian terms, call the subject.58 Nor does this connection become irrelevant through the subject’s interpretation. This indexical connection is always only “re-marked” (or, more precisely, re-traced) and re-enacted by the subject.

2.3 Trace Rosalind Krauss emphasizes the understanding of the index as a trace in her essay “Notes on the Index” (1977). Krauss begins her investigation not with the index itself, but with another concept: that of the shifter as defined by linguist Roman Jakobson. As we learn in Jakobson’s text “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb” (1957), shifters are pronouns such as “this,” “I,” and “you”; words that are devoid of a concrete meaning and change according to the situation (who speaks, of

57 Peirce, 5–6 (emphasis mine). 58 In this equation between observing/interpreting mind and subject, I follow a Lacanian reading of Peirce as proposed by the aforementioned authors (see footnote 53 in this chapter).

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what, etc.). Jakobson’s examples of such shifters are—and this is remarkable—identical to Peirce’s examples of the index. Jakobson himself writes about this connection between the shifter and the index: According to Peirce, a symbol (e.g. the English word red) is associated with the represented object by a conventional rule, while an index (e.g. the act of pointing) is in existential relation with the object it represents. Shifters combine both functions and belong therefore to the class of INDEXICAL SYMBOLS.59 Krauss states that Jakobson’s notion of the shifter is “filled with significance” because it is actually “empty.” Although not completely identical, both the index and the shifter share the ability to point to something. Krauss uses this congruence to combine both concepts into a definition of the index as trace: But insofar as their meaning depends on the existential presence of a given speaker, the pronouns (as is true of the other shifters) announce themselves as belonging to a different type of sign: the kind that is termed the index. As distinct from symbols, indexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents. They are the marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify. Into the category of the index, we would place physical traces (like footprints), medical symptoms, or the actual referents of the shifters. Cast shadows could also serve as the indexical signs of objects. …60 We can thus acknowledge that both the index and the shifter become congruent at the precise moment when a “pointing toward” something occurs that is not clearly defined—that is to say, when we split the structural side of the index from its phenomenological side. The index

59 Roman Jakobson, “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb,” in Selected Writings II (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 131–32. 60 Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977): 70.

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in an image has a forced connection to its object, but the object is already lost when the image comes into being. In effect, the index becomes an empty structure, pointing to a place that is elsewhere and is (no longer) taken by an object. The empty space allows the index to keep insisting, and the whole structure might come to remind us of what Freud describes as the “Fort-Da” game in his famous essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920).61 Here Freud describes how a young child (his grandchild) plays with a spool of yarn in reaction to his mother leaving the house. Freud notes that the game reenacts the absence of the object (the mother) and her reappearance: the child throws the spool as far away as possible, holding the string while shouting “Fort” (gone, absent), then pulling it back while shouting “Da” (here, present). What interests me in this account is not so much the traumatic experience of a lack of control over the mother leaving and reappearing and its transformation into a game in which the child gains absolute control over presence/absence. Rather, what is noteworthy is the act of replacing the real object with something else, the spool of yarn, and continuously pointing toward the absent object, the mother, by means of language: “Fort!”/“Da!” We can think here of Lacan’s reading of the “Fort-Da” game as “a first manifestation of language,” which introduces the signifier as a presence made of absence and puts the child in a position where he is “master of the thing, precisely in so far as he destroys it.”62 The game only works when the object is gone, leaving behind an empty spot in which the game’s indexical function, pointing to the absence, can circulate. For Krauss, the notion of the index as trace is deeply rooted in the art of the 1970s. Among the different practices characteristic of the “diversified, split, factionalized” “pluralism”63 of this era are “video; performance; body art; conceptual art; photo-realism in painting and an associated hyper-realism in sculpture; story art; monumental

61

62 63

See Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” (1920) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (1920–1922) (London: Hogarth Press, 1955). Jacques Lacan, Freud’s Papers on Technique: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. I (New York: Norton, 1991), 173. Krauss, “Notes on the Index,” 68.

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abstract sculpture (earthworks); and abstract painting.”64 It is remarkable that the index becomes important for Krauss in light of the diverse and heterogeneous practices of the late 1960s and 1970s, and that she does not use this concept to describe a certain discipline, but a whole set of very different practices. Video, however, takes a special role in this conception, as it is where Krauss locates the congruence between the shifter and the index, as exemplified by Vito Acconci’s Airtime (1973), in which the pronouns “I” and “you” constantly slip and slide as Acconci addresses his own reflection in the video image (fig. 12). In other words, Krauss describes a reflexive function in video, in which the positions of speaking/addressing are constantly interchangeable. And she uses this reflexive circulation of positions to carve out her theory of the index/shifter as the trace of an encounter with a real object. For Krauss, the logic inherent in the forms and practices of 1970s art, first and foremost video, “involves the reduction of a conventional sign to a trace, which then produces the need for a supplemental discourse.” From there she goes on to describe movement, and we could argue that

Fig. 12 Vito Acconci, Airtime, video still, 1973, reproduced from Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 54.

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Krauss further specifies: “The readymade’s parallel with the photograph is established by its process of production. It is about the physical transposition of an object from the continuum of reality into the fixed condition of the art-image by a moment of isolation, or selection. And in this process, it also recalls the function of the shifter. It is a sign which is inherently ‘empty,’ its signification a function of only this one instance, guaranteed by the existential presence of just this object. It is the meaningless meaning that is instituted through the terms of the index.” Krauss, 78.

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movement is the basic condition of discourse—of language understood not merely as symbolic, but as pertaining to a real of which the index is a trace: Movement ceases to function symbolically, and takes on the character of an index. By index I mean that type of sign which arises as the physical manifestation of a cause, of which traces, imprints, and clues are examples.65 In this assertion, Krauss refers to Roland Barthes’s understanding of the index as a “message without a code,” 66 one whose function Barthes describes as pointing to something “that has been.”67 If the object of the index is changed here to a “trace of the object,” how do we understand the status of the object and how can we apply this idea to contemporary artworks? For now, it is important to note that this “trace of the object” is not merely a structural concept that is detached from the real object. Instead, it is a remainder, evidence of a physical connection with the object. Or, to be more precise, the structure of this trace holds a dimension of the real—that is to say, a remainder of the object.68

2.4 Shadow The idea that the index points to a trace, a remainder of the object, brings us to another instructive point, which Philippe Dubois elaborates in his theory of the index in video. Referring to Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis, Dubois’s La question vidéo (2011) addresses the mythological origins of photography in the practice of shadow drawing. Reflecting on the relationship between the shadow and photography, Dubois quotes Leonardo da Vinci: “(Les ombres) sont toujours de compagnie de

65 Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2,” October 4 (Autumn 1977): 59. 66 Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 17. 67 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 115. When I say “real” here I do so with respect to the Lacanian concept of the real 68 as that which is radically irrepresentable. For further discussion of Lacan’s triad of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, see chapters III and IV, especially chapter III: “Aesthetics of Narcissism—An Introduction”; chapter III.2: “Medium, Subject, Body”; chapter IV: “On Si[gh]t(e): The Video Condition”; and chapter IV.3: “$ ◊ a.”

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jointes aux corps” [“Shadows are always in company attached to bodies”].69 And precisely like shadow drawing, Dubois argues, the photographic image depends on the inscription of the “shadow,” a moment of contact that transforms its temporal and spatial indexicality. The “here and now” of the shadow is displaced to a continuous “there and then” of the photograph/image. It is illuminating to draw a connection between Dubois’s argument and Barthes’s concept of the photographic image as “that has been,” in other words, the index understood as a trace of a physical encounter. In photography, the connection with the referent is preserved—or, as Dubois puts it, “mummified.” It is transformed in the imaging process from a pure referential presence to one in which the referent, the real object, has shifted in time: it is anterior to the image but always already gone when the image comes into being. The image is caught in another time, in another place, pointing to the spatially and temporally lost referent, the body that prompted its existence. Thus, photography, like the shadow drawing, cannot rid itself of the bodies attached to it—just as the Latin corpus Dubois refers to is always as much a corpse, a remainder, as it is a body.70 The double entendre between body and corpse is the foundation of the indexical function. We also find it in Barthes’s concept of photography, which introduced our discussion of the index in this chapter: The Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This (this photograph, and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls the Tuché, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression.71

Leonardo da Vinci, Ms 2038 Bib. Nat. 21 v, quoted in Philippe Dubois, La question vidéo: entre cinéma et art contemporain [in French] (Crisnée: Yellow Now, 2011), 22. “Par son inscription, l’ombre perd son indicialité temporelle et renvoie son indicialité spatiale au passé (in illo tempore). Et cette perte d’indicialité est un gain d’iconisation. L’autonomisation temporelle (qui fait signe), tout en conservant un rapport de connexion réelle au référent, le donne désormais comme nécessairement antérieur, comme origine toujours dépassée. On voit bien, à partir de là, que cela correspond à un grand fantasme de la photographie: à la fois affirmer l’existence du référent (le signe est là comme une preuve irréfutable de ce qui a eu lieu) et l’éterniser, le fixer par-delà sa propre absence. Mais aussi, par là même, désigner ce référent (momifié dans une représentation) comme quelque chose de lointain, d’inéluctablement perdu, de rendu inaccessible en tant que tel, pour le présent.” Dubois, 22. 71 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 4. 69 70

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The “real” Barthes refers to pertains to the psychic register of the real as Lacan defines it: what is, for a given subject, fundamentally beyond representation, contingent. The real can be encountered only “as if by chance” 72 and expressed, interpreted, or represented only with a deferral. This deferral—or Nachträglichkeit73—is also the place and mode of the index, which is caught in a paradoxical loop, pointing to an always already lost object while insisting on this very spot as its point of origin. Accordingly, Margaret Iversen summarizes Barthes’s concept of photography as “a collapse of time that seals one’s own fate.”74 We can thus see how video amplifies the index function (the “collapsed time”) inherent in photography: it adds another aspect to this function—namely, preserved, stored time. This process of “mummifying” time (a Dubois puts it) can actually be observed in video. While photography is a “snippet” of mummified time and space, video—with its capacity to simultaneously store and transmit, to loop its images—transposes a photographic “that has been” to a continuous “here and now.” Video mummifies time itself by “breaking off” a sequence and preserving it. We can see this indexical function in all kinds of video, whether filmed with a camera or made with computer-generated images (CGI). An example of the latter is the video work of Jon Rafman, which is often entirely assembled from footage collected from the internet or, as in his 2016 Berlin Biennale contribution View of Pariser Platz, created

72 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 54. 73 The Freudian term for this deferral is Nachträglichkeit, which is the mode I address here. The (likely traumatic) encounter with the real is only made sense of nachträglich, in a deferred action. That is to say that every representation of the encounter is an interpretation seeking to incorporate the real into the symbolic, which must, to a certain extent, always fail. See chapter IV, especially section 3.1: “Repetition: Missed Encounter” for a more detailed discussion of the function of the real. 74 “But its underlying theme is taken from Lacan’s account of the encounter with the Real which is ultimately an encounter with the persistently denied fact of one’s own mortality. Barthes declares that every photograph contains an ‘imperious sign of my future death.’ Looking at old photographs one thinks simultaneously of a future—‘he is going to die’—and of an absolute past—‘he has died’—a collapse of time that seals one’s own fate. But Barthes, so to speak, develops this painful recognition from a negative into a positive, from dark to light, through Freud’s conception of the death instinct as mediated by Lacan.” Margaret Iversen, “What is a Photograph?,” Art History 17, no. 3 (September 1994): 451.

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by means of VR technology. The 2016 Berlin Biennale shed a particularly interesting light on the function of the index today. Subtitled “The resent in Drag,” the exhibition replaced history, critique, and theory with a strong and superficial present, raising the question: What effect can art possibly have in a post-factual world?75 The curatorial claim— that the real as referent has become obsolete and that the artworks shown, mostly videos consisting of 3D renderings and VR, point at nothing but themselves—was undermined by certain works, including Rafman’s. Rafman’s video is, in fact, a perfect example of the index in our contemporary world. Although the images in this piece are appropriated, Rafman treats them as if they are the narrator’s own, dearest memories. Inner and outer world overlap in a frightening way as it becomes clear that an image of something or someone is not one’s property, but a separate entity of its own. This is an indexical experience in which the image itself is lost.76 Other examples of a structural rather than a phenomenological understanding of the index are Yael Bartana’s Trembling Time, in which loss itself becomes the lost object that video circumvents,77 and Bartana’s video trilogy … and Europe will be stunned, in which history is turned into potentiality (figs. 13/14).78

Figs. 13/14 Yael Bartana, Zamach (Assassination), video stills, 2011, part 3 of … and Europe will be stunned, courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

75 76 77 78

For a more detailed discussion of the 2016 Berlin Biennale, see chapter IV.2: “From the Imaginary to the Phantasm.” See chapter IV.3.2: “The Veil/Screen” for a discussion of Rafman’s work. See chapter IV.3.1: “Repetition: Missed Encounter” for a discussion of Bartana’s work. For a discussion of this work, see my text “Yael Bartanas A Manifesto: Widerständigkeit und Entgrenzung der Kunst,” in Clear the Air: Künstler-Manifeste seit den 1960er Jahren, ed. Burcu Doğramaci and Katja Schneider (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017).

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Here lies the biggest conceptual shift from a customary reading of Peirce’s index as a “forced physical connection” with the object. When this argument is taken to be structural, not phenomenological, the connection between the object and the index is real—which is not the same as to say that it is physical. It is real in the sense that this connection pertains to an object that has been encountered and is always already lost at the moment of its indexical emergence.

2.5 On Indexical Circulation in Video The index points. But what exactly does it point to? Our tour from Peirce to Jakobson to Kraus, Barthes, and Dubois has shown that it is worthwhile to consider the index in a more structural and functional rather than essentialist way. The index is not an ontological category that can divulge the truth about an object. Nor is it a matter of likeness or convention. The index is physically connected to its object, and it is a forced connection. The minimal difference between the two initially described poles—the index as ontological or universalist, with a naturalistic undertone, and the index as obsolete in an art world that, more than anything, proclaims self-referentiality—can be found in a third definition: the index as something that captures and preserves a part of the real in the work. However, this Real is not understood in a naturalistic way, in which the object and the index correspond one to one. What the index captures must be understood more structurally, as a preserved moment in time that is devoid of its context, its natural quality, as it is ripped out of its timeline and deprived of its object. At the same time, the index keeps insisting on its function, pointing to itself. This is where Jakobson’s model of the shifter can be illuminating. Although the meaning of a sentence is constructed around it, the shifter is itself devoid of meaning. Instead, it merely points to “this,” “me,” or “you,” insisting on the efficacy of its operation without a fixed referent. The index, on the other hand, has a fixed referent, but one that immediately becomes absent. The index and the referent never exist together as the index not only points to a “what” and “where” but also to a “when.” The unassailable circumstance of time constitutes a problem, and in this problem the index and the shifter become congruent.

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The index is thus initially singular and arbitrary in its connection to the object, but the connection is physical, irresolvable, and resembles the idea of Freud’s concept of the einziger Zug (only choice / unary trait), which Lacan defines as the primary identification from which subjectivity is constructed.79 According to Lacan, the identification with the unary trait is the only real choice a subject ever makes—it is, in fact, the choice that constitutes the subject. It is a choice, but it is a forced one, because it depends on contingent circumstances. Once the choice is made, everything around the subject—as well as the subject itself—is structured under the signifier of this primordial choice, known in Lacanian terms as S1.80 Similarly, the index and its object are in a forced relation. What this means for the index function in the arts is this: There is something of the object in the photograph and the video, a remainder that insists and refuses mere representation. What an index says about its object is what Barthes calls “that has been,” a formula that itself already contains a shifter. By overlapping Peirce’s model of the index as a “forced physical” connection between an object and a photo/video and Jakobson’s model of the contingent shifter, we can establish an understanding of the index that is neither essentialist nor self-referential. For video, this function can be described with Dubois’s notion of mummifying the referent in a transformation of time into space. We can actually see mummified time at work in video. A sequence, however short, is captured, preserved, and, in most cases, looped. A piece of time is taken out of its context and preserved in a series of images. Whereas in photography the transformation is spatial (taking the form of a physically existing object), video’s transformation mummifies time itself. And just like the “Fort-Da” game interpreted by Freud, it circulates. As in the game, an already absent moment is repeated (or at least potentially repeatable), over and over again. Although the series

See Sigmund Freud, “Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse,” (1921) in Jenseits des Lustprinzips. Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse. Das Ich und das Es, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13 [in German] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1967), 117; Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” (1921) in Standard Edition, vol. 18, 107; Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English (New York: Norton, 2006), 684. 80 Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. XVII (New York: Norton, 2006), 48–51.

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of images is not physically “there,” each of the images points to a “when” and a “where” that lies in another time, elsewhere. Pointing to its unattainable object at 25 (or 24, or 30) frames per second, the indexical function of this circulation of time is laid bare. Lost in another time and space, the referent flickers through the material in the sequence, with a remainder, a little residue captured in video’s preserved time. This remainder of the real keeps insisting, pointing to its own time and space, which can never be captured in the video. What we see here is an indexical function that applies just as much to conventional video as it does to new forms of images, digitization, VR, and 3D renderings. As demonstrated through a comparison with the “Fort-Da” game, the index pertains to the presence of an absence. As such, it can be defined as an index for the real, which, as already indicated, is not the same as a “physical object.” The index does not point to a physical object but to a real object that is always already lost for the subject. This is true for computer-generated imagery just as much as any other video. Such works point to a real that is not located in a physical object, but in its lack.

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The Aesthetics of Narcissism: Medium, Perspective, Subject, Body

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The only advantage that the psychoanalyst has the right to draw from his position, were this then to be recognized as such, is to recall with Freud that in his work the artist always precedes him, and that he does not have to play the psychologist where the artist paves the way for him.1

Aesthetics of Narcissism—An Introduction The previous chapters shed light on the long and varied roots of video as “electric seeing” and led us into the fields of optics, etymology, and linguistics, all to raise the questions: What is the subject of video? Who is the “I” in “I see”? And from which position—and what—does this “I” see? This chapter analyzes the structural roots and aesthetic predispositions of video, which not only shape its own medial functions and appearances but also operate at the core of what we call media theory today. Rosalind Krauss’s essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” is, until today, one of the most influential and frequently cited texts on video. I have chosen Krauss’s essay as a point of departure for my argument as it succeeds in grasping something about video’s structure that is so central and can, on a more general level, teach us about media and media theory up until the present. The essay is crucial for two reasons: it is an early attempt to theorize video at a time when video art had just emerged, and it does so by defining video’s particularity not as a technical form or an art-historical lineage but as a psychic structure.2 Like any “vanishing point” through which one must necessarily structure research, this choice holds several strong assumptions that organize the way we think about media, particularly how we conceptualize video, to the present day. Krauss views media in a structural and psychoanalytic framework—in other words, as a question of the relation between one subject and the other under the aegis of a message (here understood as anything: an artwork, an exclamation, or any kind of social interaction

1 Jacques Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras, on Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein,” in Marguerite Duras (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987), 124. 2 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 50–52.

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that prompts a moment of interpellation3 between the addresser and addressee). What interests me first and foremost in Krauss’s discussion is the definition of the medium, which shifts away from a “substantial” argument toward a psychological one (something we can, to a large extent, also find in the writing of Marshall McLuhan).4 By means of Freud’s concept of narcissism and Lacan’s rendering of the medial properties of the psychoanalytic setting, Krauss opens nascent video theory to the realm of psychoanalysis. However, when I turn to psychoanalysis to conceptualize video in this chapter, it is not simply due to the “psychological model”5 of mediality that Krauss offers us. As already indicated in the first chapter, the structural relations between video and psychoanalysis are much older and more complex than video’s breakthrough in the late 1960s and early 1970s suggests. Looking back at video’s historical, technical, and etymological past, we found that both video and psychoanalysis owe their emergence to the same problem: the exposure of the Cartesian subject’s decentralized position, which no longer grants a unified view of the world.

3

4 5

The notion of interpellation refers to Louis Althusser’s concept of subjectivation in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970): “I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailings is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed.” Althusser’s concept shows that subjectivation is a medial process: it depends on a message that turns the addressee into a subject through the recognition that he or she is addressed. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 174. See chapter II. Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 52.

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The first part of this chapter focuses on this problem from the perspective of art theory and philosophy, situating video within the field of aesthetics and contextualizing Krauss’s claims. The second part analyzes the specific mechanisms of video in relation to the above-mentioned discourses and their effects on the subject, body, and medium. It thus investigates what Krauss offers as the “psychological model”—namely, the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism according to Freud and Lacan. Both parts shed light on the fundamental problem of Krauss’s argument: in identifying the medium of video as a “psychological rather than a physical condition,”6 Krauss presupposes a dualistic model of psyche and soma that is ultimately rooted in a prevalent understanding of Cartesian concepts. Psychoanalysis does not, however, follow this dualism, as will be discussed in chapter IV, which addresses the function of the drive and demonstrates how video relates to and exposes the premises of Cartesian perspective. Krauss’s dualistic assumption becomes apparent when she reverts to parapsychology and the spiritistic definition of a medium. Here the medium is completely disembodied; purely spirit. While this definition emphasizes the important dimension of a medium as a message (as a function that resides in language), the axiom on which it rests—the psyche understood as immaterial—cannot be sustained by the psychoanalytic means employed to support the argument. When Krauss declares narcissism as the foundation of video, she overlooks the dimension of language—and with it, the Lacanian registers of the symbolic and the real—in favor of a focus on the specular realm and Lacan’s register of the imaginary.7

6 Krauss, 50. 7 The real, the symbolic, and the imaginary (RSI) are the three registers Lacan defines as operating in the psychoanalytic field. While these registers first appear as separate, Lacan’s later work emphasizes their interdependence in the model of the Borromean knot. It is impossible to give a sufficient account of the functions of all three registers here, and I will later discuss their implications for video. However, to attempt a concise overview, it can be stated that the imaginary has to do with identification and the specular image, while the symbolic is the realm of language and the signifier. The third category, the real, is the most opaque notion, as it is not to be mistaken with reality (which is constructed by the imaginary and the symbolic) or the physical world. The real, we could say, is what is radically outside of reality—that is, what is not represented and not representable. See Jacques Lacan, R.S.I.: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. XXII, unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher, accessed August 29, 2019, http://www.lacaninire land.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/RSI-Complete-With-Diagrams.pdf.

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The omission of the dimension of language leads to an inaccuracy in Krauss’s use of psychoanalytic terms and in the conclusions that rest on this use. This error affects not only the medium but also the dimensions of the subject, the object, and the body as they appear in the text. All of these are central terms both for psychoanalysis and for a theory of video through a psychoanalytic lens. However, this critique of the construction of Krauss’s argument does not take away from her accuracy in identifying a close relation (which might best be described as collusion) between psychoanalysis and video. Instead, it calls for clarification, which this chapter seeks to provide. Finally, the third part of this chapter discusses the concept of narcissism as a root for media theory and for video as such: from narcissism’s mythological basis in Ovid’s tale “Narcissus and Echo” to the clinical concept elaborated by Freud and Lacan. Lastly, I identify other functions in video—namely, the phantasm and repetition—which are, I argue, more fundamental and make it possible to develop a convincing medial theory of video.

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“A Commonplace of Criticism”— Two Moments of Video’s Aesthetic Heritage

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Addressing a discipline that emerged only about a decade before it was written, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” tries to locate the characteristics of this art form, its medium, and the relation it constructs between subject and object. Krauss situates video against the backdrop of the prevalent questions of 1960s art criticism, especially the texts of Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell, which are emblematically subsumed under the heading of the modernist “aesthetics of acknowledgement.”8 Both Fried and Cavell stand here for a Greenbergian tradition that understands modernism as centered around painting—as “pointing to the center”9 of the canvas and thereby evoking the concept of the sublime.10 This emphasis on the center famously prompts Krauss to question what it means “to point to the center of a t.v. screen.”11 To unfold Krauss’s argument, let us thus begin with these two notions—the “aesthetics of acknowledgement” and “pointing at the center”—in order to develop a theory of video that takes into account its aesthetic roots.

8

Although Krauss does not explicitly name Michael Fried as the source of this “commonplace of criticism in the 1960s,” she specifically refers to Fried’s 1965 essay “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). For a detailed discussion of the reference to Fried in Krauss’s essay, see Colin Brent Epp, “The Education of Rosalind Krauss, Peter Eisenman, and Other Americans: Why the Fantasy of Postmodernism Still Remains,” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 2007), 251–52. 9 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 50. The sublime as aesthetic category (in a Kantian tradition followed, for instance, 10 by Adorno and Greenberg) refers here to the idea that something operates in aesthetic experience that exceeds representation. It is, in fact, fundamentally unrepresentable and confronts the experiencing subject with its own limitations. Adopting this concept of the sublime, 1960s art criticism focused mainly on abstract expressionism and minimalism such as Kenneth Noland’s “circle” paintings, Frank Stella’s “stretcher bar” paintings, Mark Rothko’s “multiform” paintings, or Jasper Johns’s “target” paintings (the latter can, however, already be seen as a somewhat ironic take on the concept). Krauss refers to this practice as “pointing to the center of the canvas”—namely, to the central yet ungraspable sublime that is supposedly hidden beyond what is shown in these paintings. She thus questions whether this concept can be applied to the screen and to video. 11 Krauss, 50.

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Aesthetics of Acknowledgement

The formula of the “aesthetics of acknowledgement” with which Krauss opens “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” and seeks to describe the aesthetic climate of the mid-twentieth century (before the rise of video) is coined by Stanley Cavell in The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1972). Here Cavell develops an understanding of modernist painting that is fueled by the art criticism of Michael Fried with regard to artists like Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Jackson Pollock,12 in which the modernist loss (or removal) of picturality (understood as representational) calls for a different relation between painting and reality,13 representation and (represented) world—and hence between the subject and the object of the painting.

1.1.1 Cavell/Fried: On Re-present-ation If it was once possible, due to the representational qualities of painting, to perceive a painting as a picture “that is, of or about something else,”14 Cavell argues that this mode of representation no longer operates in modernist painting. Disputing André Bazin, however, Cavell claims that painting “was not ‘freed’—and not by photography—from its obsession with likeness.”15 Rather, with the emergence of modernism,16 painting

12 13

Cavell specifically refers to Fried’s essay “Three American Painters.” Cavell uses the term “reality” to denote physical reality; in other words, the physical world. In the following sections, and with the introduction of Jacques Lacan’s work, I will, however, draw a distinction between the notions of reality and the real, in which “reality” is not used to denote the physical world, but rather a subject’s psychic representation of the world. At this point, however, I follow Cavell’s use of the term. 14 Cavell, The World Viewed, 21. 15 Cavell, 21. Bazin writes: “Perspective was the original sin of Western painting. It was redeemed from sin by Niepce and Lumière. In achieving the aims of baroque art, photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness. Painting was forced, as it turned out, to offer us illusion and this illusion was reckoned sufficient unto art. Photography and the cinema on the other hand are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism.” Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 12. 16 Cavell makes his point against Bazin with the help of the painter Édouard Manet, who is taken as a “crown witness” for the historical moment of the shift in painting from a representational to a modernist regime. Cavell, The World Viewed, 21.

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was forced to forgo likeness exactly because of its own obsession with reality, because the illusions it had learned to create did not provide the conviction in reality, the connection with reality, that it craved. One might even say that in withdrawing from likeness, painting freed photography to be invented.17 Since, according to Cavell, “painting and reality no longer assure one another,”18 another mode, another relation between physical reality and modernist painting has to be assumed. This mode, then, would be painting understood as establishing a “connection with reality” in the form of “presentness”19 that is “not exactly a conviction of the world’s presence to us, but of our presence to it.”20 “As objects of presentness,” Cavell writes, modernist painting “would be painting’s latest effort to maintain its conviction in its own power to establish connection with reality—by permitting us presentness to ourselves, apart from which there is no hope for a world.”21 Here we can clearly see not only a shift in the relation of world and painting but a reversal of the relation between world and spectating subject. The subject’s position is no longer an effect of painting and world, assuring (representing) each other’s existence. Instead, the subject itself is called into question as representation fades. In Cavell’s concept, painting therefore becomes that which mediates the subject to the world, and not vice versa. Thus, with modernism, according to Cavell, “subjectivity became what is present to us” and the “route to conviction in reality was through the acknowledgment of that endless presence of self.”22 In other words, there is representation of subjectivity (found in pre-modernism and before) and, opposing it, an acknowledgement of subjectivity (found in modernism) as assurance of reality and, simultaneously, of one’s own existence.

17 Cavell, 21. 18 Cavell, 21. 19 The term “presentness” is taken from Michael Fried’s 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood.” Fried refers to Clement Greenberg’s 1967 essay “Recentness of Sculpture,” in which Greenberg analyzes the “effect of presence” at work in minimal art. See Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 151–52; Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 20 Cavell, The World Viewed, 22. 21 Cavell, 22–23. 22 Cavell, 22.

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We can think here, as far as representation is concerned, of the Classical age as described by Michel Foucault, in which (artistic) representation is thought of as coherent with the natural order of things.23 A portrait of the emperor, for instance, not only represents the power of the person it depicts: through its representation, the portrait itself holds power, literally making the spectator its subject. When, in the nineteenth century, representation (in art and elsewhere) eventually disappears as a guarantee between (and for) subject and world, this change reveals that the supposed duality between subject and thing (both the real thing and its representation, with which it was, until then, coherent) actually contains a third element: that of the medium, which gives rise to both positions. When artworks cease to represent things—in other words, when they cease to represent the world for the subject (thereby guaranteeing the subject’s own position as a part of that world)—both world and subject can no longer be guaranteed. Each position can only be recognized momentarily and reciprocally by acknowledging that both positions are embedded in a medial structure in which this recognition takes place. In this sense, the very idea of a representation of “our presence” to the world (rather than “the world’s presence to us”) demonstrates a paradigmatic shift toward mediality as we encounter it with the advancements of nineteenth-century technology. With the emergence of video, this becomes a fundamental aesthetic problem: if subject and artwork are tied together in a medial structure that replaces representation with constant presentness—a presentness found in the acknowledgement between artwork and spectator at the moment of their encounter—video is the locus in which both presentness and the encounter are most visible.

23

“In this way, analysis has been able to show the coherence that existed, throughout the Classical age, between the theory of representation and the theories of language, of the natural orders, and of wealth and value. It is this configuration that, from the nineteenth century onward, changes entirely; the theory of representation disappears as the universal foundation of all possible orders; language as the spontaneous tabula, the primary grid of things, as an indispensable link between representation and things, is eclipsed in its turn; a profound historicity penetrates into the heart of things, isolates and defines them in their own coherence, imposes upon them the forms of order implied by the continuity of time; the analysis of exchange and money gives way to the study of production, that of the organism takes precedence over the search for taxonomic characteristics, and, above all, language loses its privileged position and becomes, in its turn, a historical form coherent with the density of its own past. But as things become increasingly reflexive, seeking the principle of their intelligibility only in their own development, and abandoning the space of representation, man enters in his turn, and for the first time, the field of Western knowledge.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2007), xxv.

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1.1.2 Hegel and the Dialectic Movement of Acknowledgement (Anerkennung) The roots for this understanding of acknowledgement and mediality lie in Hegelian dialectics. Hegel uses the term Anerkennung, which has been translated into English as “recognition.” This term builds the foundation of concepts of acknowledgement24 and is laid out in Hegel’s discussion of the master-slave dialectic in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Here Anerkennung introduces subjectivity and self-consciousness as an intersubjective structure: self-consciousness emerges as a condition of a dialectic movement of acknowledgement in which the subject is presented and confronted with its interdependence on an other (and, consequently, the subject is confronted with itself as an other for someone else).25 Thus, Hegel’s dialectic of acknowledgement proposes that a subject is always conditional: it is a subject for an other (another subject). This also means that the subject is reduplicated, as it is represented for itself as an other. The subject does not see the other but sees itself in the other.26 Hegel summarizes this dialectic movement in the formula: “Sie anerkennen sich als gegenseitig sich anerkennend“ (“They acknowledge themselves as mutually acknowledging one another

It is important to note here that in the English translation, anerkennen is usually rendered as “to recognize.” I have chosen to translate it as “to acknowledge” in order to highlight the roots of the concept of acknowledgement used by Fried and Cavell. To a German-speaker, both translations seem legitimate. The Englishspeaking world, however, differentiates between these terms although both refer to Anerkennung as used by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. For a detailed discussion of these terms, see Mattias Iser, “Recognition,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed December 12, 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/recognition/. 25 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013), 145–55 (German edition); Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 111–18 (English translation). Hegel defines the subject as “the unmoved, which is also self-moving”—as “the movement of reflecting itself into itself.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 12; Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 26. 26 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 111. In the German original: “Es ist für das Selbstbewußtsein ein anderes Selbstbewußtsein; es ist außer sich gekommen. Dies hat die gedoppelte Bedeutung: erstlich, es hat sich selbst verloren, denn es findet sich als ein anderes Wesen; zweitens, es hat damit das Andere aufgehoben, denn es sieht auch nicht das Andere als Wesen, sondern sich selbst im Anderen.” Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 146. 24

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[translation mine]”).27 This acknowledgement is aimed at one’s self in the same movement as it is aimed at the other. In one dialectical movement, the subject and its object (and vice versa) emerge as interdependent—as mediating terms. However, it is crucial to note that Hegel’s concept of acknowledgement is not symmetrical. It is, in fact, radically asymmetrical. With the introduction of what is known as the “master-slave dialectic,”28 Hegel points out that the two extremes of the dialectical movement of self-consciousness split self-consciousness into an acknowledged and an acknowledging part.29 The acknowledged part is the master, consciousness that is the being for itself, while the acknowledging part is the slave, the being for another, also called the other consciousness.30 While the master requires acknowledgement by the slave, he does not acknowledge that his status as subject is given to him—that his subjectivity is dependent on the other. The slave, on the other hand, does not acknowledge himself as acknowledging the master and therefore fails to acknowledge himself as a subject.31

27 Hegel, 147. In the English translation: “They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 112. 28 In the Oxford edition I quote here, the German Herr (master) and Knecht (servant, slave) are translated as “lord” and “bondsman” (see footnote 31 in this chapter ) 29 Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 147. 30 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 115–16. While the relation of two moments of selfconsciousness in the dialectical movement—the mediation in Hegel’s concept—is important for my argument, many other aspects of the master-slave dialectic are necessarily beyond the scope of this investigation. I focus here on Hegel’s discussion of Anerkennung in the first part of the chapter on the master-slave dialectic in Phenomenology of Spirit. My argument only addresses the second part, which develops the master-slave dialectic, insofar as the concept illuminates the inequality and asymmetry in Hegel’s notion of recognition/acknowledgement. The further implications of the master-slave dialectic for the economic, social, and political spheres—from Karl Marx’s Parisian Manuscripts through Alexandre Kojève’s rendering of Hegel’s concept to (post-)structuralist readings—must be excluded here. See Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1988); Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969). “But for recognition proper the moment is lacking, that what the lord does to the 31 other he also does to himself, and what the bondsman does to himself he should also do to the other. The outcome is a recognition that is one-sided and unequal. […] The truth of the independent consciousness is accordingly the servile consciousness of the bondsman. This, it is true, appears at first outside of itself and not as the truth of self-consciousness. But just as lordship showed that its essential nature is the reverse of what it wants to be, so too servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it immediately is; as a consciousness forced back into itself, it will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly independent consciousness.” Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 116–17.

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Thus, self-consciousness requires a misconception on the part of the subject, who must see itself as independent and unconditional. In other words, being self-conscious means veiling one’s own position as a subject: veiling the fact that one is subjected by an other. The subject, then, is the blind spot of self-consciousness. Simultaneously, the subject can only emerge as such where self-consciousness—a reflection on one’s own conscious position as identical with oneself—is not operative. Self-consciousness, when it appears, must deny its own subjectivity—that is, deny its dependence on an other’s acknowledgement; deny being subjected by the other. The subject, on the other hand, cannot be fully self-conscious, as it must deal with the structural dimension of the other. We thus encounter in Hegel’s model a division in self-consciousness itself: a split within subjectivity, which forms a basis for the dialectical movement.32

32

In this “misconception” of self-consciousness’ own position, which forms the basis of the dialectical movement (Hegel calls it the “reduplication of self-consciousness”), lies a dimension that Freud, following Romantic theories of the unconscious such as Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy of nature, will later address as “the unconscious”—namely, the reduplication of the psyche as a split between its conscious and unconscious parts. While Hegel does not explicitly speak of the unconscious in The Phenomenology of Spirit, he criticizes Schelling’s concept of the unconscious in The Philosophy of History, as Eduard von Hartmann points out in Philosophie des Unbewußten (Philosophy of the Unconscious, 1869). Von Hartmann argues that Hegel’s concept of self-consciousness (and, along with it, all of Idealism) presupposes a theory of the unconscious, as thought reaches consciousness only through mediation of its own “externalisation to nature”: “In Hegel, just as in Schelling’s later works, the notion of the Unconscious does not clearly appear […] Nevertheless Hegel’s absolute IDEA, in its pure selfhood, before its unfolding into Nature, thus also before its return to itself as Spirit, […] thoroughly agrees with Schelling’s ‘eternally Unconscious,’ if it is also only one aspect of the same, viz., the logical or the ideational, coincident with Fichte’s ‘substantial knowledge,’ and his infinite Reason devoid of consciousness. With Hegel, too, Thought only attains to consciousness when, through the mean of its externalization into Nature, it passes from mere being-in-self to being-for-self, and having become an object to itself, has come to itself as spirit. The Hegelian God as starting-point is at first per se and unconscious, only God as result is being ‘for-self’ and conscious, is Spirit. […] The theory of the Unconscious is the necessary, if also hitherto for the most part only tacit presupposition of every objective or absolute Idealism […].” Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious (New York: Routledge, 2010), 27–28.

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1.1.3 Symmetry and Modern Art The first moment of Hegel’s concept—the idea of intersubjective acknowledgement—is crucial for Fried’s and Cavell’s criticism of 1960s art. Understood as a fairly symmetrical process of reciprocal recognition of subject status, Hegel’s movement of acknowledgement serves as the foundation of modernist art according to both writers.33 The dimension of the other as a source for legitimizing one’s own place in the world (after all, acknowledgement also holds a dimension of affirmation), and vice versa, becomes the truth of modernism, expressed in the moment of “impact”— the moment of the encounter with the artwork—which Cavell addresses as “presentness” and “actuality.”34 According to Cavell, the key quality of modernist paintings is that “their existence as instances is carried on their face; labor is not in them; they look as if they might as well have been made instantaneously, and that their use should take no longer.”35 But while the work, in its materiality, is instantaneous, the instant itself “poses a permanent beauty” in the moment, and

33

It is important to note that there are, fundamentally, two traditions in the reading of Hegel’s concept of Anerkennung: one that interprets it as an “uncomplicated” and positivistic notion and one that problematizes the inequality and asymmetry introduced in the concept. Hannes Kuch’s Herr und Knecht gives a detailed overview of the different concepts of Anerkennung and its two lineages in Hegelian tradition. While, according to Kuch, the notion of Anerkennung makes it possible to understand the subject’s freedom as entangled with the freedom of the other, the “positive” tradition (which Kuch identifies with authors such as Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth) emphasizes the structure as the condition of possibility for the emergence of a subject, while the “negative” tradition (which is identified as existentialist and (post-)structuralist and is associated with authors such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser) accentuates the moment of the subject’s dependence on the other (25). Thus, Cavell’s and Fried’s use of Anerkennung can be seen as an example of the positive, affirmative lineage, while Rosalind Krauss’s criticism, influenced by post-structuralism and Jacques Lacan, relates to the second, negative tradition. For a detailed discussion of the reception of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and the concept of Anerkennung, see Hannes Kuch, Herr und Knecht: Anerkennung und symbolische Macht im Anschluss an Hegel [in German] (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2013). 34 Cavell, The World Viewed, 22; 117. 35 Cavell, 116.

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there is no physical assurance of its permanence; that it is momentary only the way time is, a regime of moments; and that no moment is to dictate its significance to us, if we are to claim autonomy, to become free.36 It is only when we accept such objects as modernist paintings, Cavell argues, that we gain an absolute “acceptance of the moment.”37 This moment of acceptance, of acknowledgement, is, on the one hand, the unstable ground upon which to establish our own subjectivity—a small moment of assurance, however elusive, to establish one’s own position in the world. On the other hand, it is a moment of absolute loss, as it involves knowledge of the elusiveness of the instant: Beauty and significance, except in youth, are born of loss. But otherwise everything is lost. The last knowledge will be to allow even that knowledge of loss to vanish, to see whether the world regains. The idea of infinite possibility is the pain, and the balm, of adolescence. The only return on becoming adult, the only justice in forgoing that world of possibility, is the reception of actuality—the pain and balm in the truth of the only world: that it exists, and I in it. In its absolute difference and absolute connection with others, each instance of a series maintains the haecceity (the sheer that-ness) of a material object, without the need of its substance. Perhaps this quality is something minimal art wants to convey. But modernist paintings acknowledge it, so that I must respond to it, if I am to know it, by acknowledging my own haecceity, that my existence is inescapable from my presentness. In response to minimal art I am deployed, dematerialized, unidentifiable; the moment is not grounded, but etherealized; the momentous is not defeated, but landscaped. In response to modernist painting, I am concentrated, finitized, incarnate.38

36 Cavell, 116. 37 Cavell, 116–7. 38 Cavell, 117.

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One could argue that Cavell’s claim that presentness or “haecceity” in modernist art is “born of loss” actually takes into account video’s emergence as a radically present medium. One could even say that it prefigures video theory in which this emphasis of the present becomes a precarious situation where the world is dependent on the spectator’s “constant watchfulness.”39 However, the difference lies in the substantialist undertones of Cavell’s concept of modernism: while the painting creates a fixed moment of mutual acknowledgement in the situation of being looked at—a moment in which the painting and the subject reassure each other of their presence—video does not offer such a moment, such pause and reassurance.

1.2

Pointing at the Center

For Rosalind Krauss, following Fried’s argument, the “aesthetics of acknowledgement” in modernist art can be found in the practice of “pointing at the center,” which is first and foremost understood as “pointing at the center of the canvas.”40 The reason for this relates to the significance of the center of a canvas (or other picture support) for artistic (that is, painting) practice since the beginning of the Renaissance, when central perspective became the prevalent structuring principle in art and science.41 The function of central perspective, commonly defined as a “mathematical representation of the external world,”42 is intricately linked to the modes of representation that developed in the early modern period as a “manifestation of a long-lasting process of cultural revolution in which subjects learn to situate and

39 40 41

Blom, “Video Water, Video Life, Videosociality,” 160. See also the introduction to chapter IV: “On Si[gh]t(e): The Video Condition.” Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 50. Central perspective is also known as linear perspective or perspectiva artificialis, which superseded perspectiva naturalis at the beginning of the Renaissance. For a detailed account of the history and theory of this notion, see Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Perspektive/Perspektivismus,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, vol. 4, ed. Karlheinz Barck [in German] (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010), 758–78; Dominique Raynaud, Studies on Binocular Vision: Optics, Vision and Perspective from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries (Cham: Springer, 2016), 1–12. 42 Raynaud, Studies on Binocular Vision, v.

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orient themselves.”43 The need for a perspective on the world of the “modern” subject44 that emerges at the beginning of the Renaissance is rooted in what Martin Heidegger calls Entgötterung (literally “de-deification” and translated as the “loss of the gods”45) and what Hans Blumenberg describes as “secularization,”46 that is, the shift away from a medieval concept of a world in which an all-seeing god guarantees

43 44

Schulte-Sasse, “Perspektive/Perspektivismus,” 759 (translated by the author). When I refer to the “modern subject” here, I do so from a historical and philosophical perspective, not from a psychoanalytic one. This difference is important with regard to the discussion in section 2 of this chapter, which focuses on the psychoanalytic “subject”—the subject of the unconscious. For now, I distinguish between “modern” and “premodern” subjects in order to mark the differences in their conceptualization at certain times in history. In other words, the differentiation between modern, premodern, etc. signifies a separation of concepts of subjectivity—I do not mean to state that there is a different subject for different historical eras. Psychoanalysis knows only one subject: the subject of the unconscious. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning 45 Technology, and Other Essays (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), 116. Here Heidegger discusses Besinnung (contemplation, literally “to be-sense,” “to add sense to something”) as the instrument of metaphysics and as “the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question” (116). To a German speaker, it is curious to see Besinnung translated in the English edition as “reflection.” This translation sheds light on the arguments of 1960s art criticism, which was preoccupied with the reflexive mode of modernist art. Tracing the term “reflection” back in Heidegger’s writing offers a different perspective on the matter, one that is closely linked to the question discussed here—the relation of subject and world since the start of modernity: “Certainly the modern age has, as a consequence of the liberation of man, introduced subjectivism and individualism. But it remains just as certain that no age before this one has produced a comparable objectivism and that in no age before this has the non-individual, in the form of the collective, come to acceptance as having worth. Essential here is the necessary interplay between subjectivism and objectivism. It is precisely this reciprocal conditioning of one by the other that points back to events more profound” (128, emphasis mine). When Heidegger uses the word Besinnung, he emphasizes the realm of the sensible—of aisthesis, aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience must be reflexive, as it emerges in relation to an external object in such a way that it demonstrates the structure of sensual experience as something that is presented (vorgestellt, literally “to be placed in front of” but also “to be imagined”) as an external object for an experiencing subject. In other words, subject and object are mutually dependent, but it is only in the aesthetic experience that they appear as two different and separate poles in the sense that they reflexively refer back to one another. See Heidegger, 115. 46 Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, here especially 391.

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world order.47 In contrast to this medieval world order in which everything and everyone has their (god-given) place,48 the early modern era is concerned, as Heidegger points out, with humans becoming “that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. But this is possible only when the comprehension of what is as a whole changes.”49 For Heidegger, this has two interesting effects on how the world is structured since early modernity. Firstly, a subject emerges as that which has to take responsibility for, or at least in some way deal with, its own Stellung (position) in the world; and secondly, the world becomes picture—becomes that which is represented for the subject as a picture.50 Thus, the “world as picture” is understood as the effect of subjectivism and its implied perspective on the world. If “man” becomes subject, the world becomes object for a subject in this new order, and this shift implicates a new mode of representation, one that previously had not been possible in ancient Greek or medieval thought. If, in an-

For a detailed account of the shift from medieval perspective (perspectiva naturalis)—in essence, a hierarchically structured perspective based on the meaning, importance, and status of what is depicted (which is why, for instance, angels are rendered larger than human figures in medieval paintings)—to central perspective, see Schulte-Sasse, “Perspektive/Perspektivismus,” 760. Moreover, Schulte-Sasse refers here to the centuries-old tradition of distinguishing between theōria and aísthēsis as a difference between mental/spiritual and physical seeing. This differentiation classically links theōria (following a false etymology of the word) with a “divine sight/view” while aísthēsis (sensation) is linked to the physical process of seeing. Schulte-Sasse specifically names Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei (1453) as a late attempt to conceptualize a theological “world view” rooted in, and organized by, the gaze of god (Leon Battista Alberti had published his groundbreaking manifesto on central perspective, De pictura, eighteen years earlier). See Schulte-Sasse, “Perspektive/Perspektivismus,” 761–63. Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” 130. 48 49 Heidegger, 128. For Heidegger, “world” denotes not only the physical realm and nature but also 50 history. Generally, it serves “as a name for what is, its entirety.” “Picture,” on the other hand, refers to that which “we mean by […] the world itself, the world as such, what is, in its entirety, just as it is normative and binding for us.” A “world picture,” then, according to Heidegger, is not understood as “a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth.” Heidegger, 129–30.

47

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cient Greek thought, “that which is does not come into being at all through the fact that man first looks upon it, in the sense of a representing that has the character of subjective perception,”51 but, on the contrary, “man is the one who is looked upon by that which is,” this relation is reversed in the modern age. Heidegger emphasizes that in contrast to Greek and medieval modes of thinking, “modern representing [Vorstellen], whose meaning the word repraesentatio first brings to its earliest expression, intends something quite different.”52 What is represented here literally means “to bring what is present at hand (das Vorhandene) before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm.”53 In other words, representation understood in this way is a relation between a spectating subject and an objectivized world; one in which, according to Heidegger, both are vorgestellt—represented—in the picture constructed from the perspectivism of subjectivity. It is crucial to mention here that the German word vorstellen not only means “to place in front of oneself” or “to (re-)present” but also “to imagine, conceptualize, visualize”—in Heidegger’s words, to make a picture of the world. Even more interesting in this context is how this act of representation not only affects and implies the world but also the position of the human being (imagined/represented as subject) as objectified, as “put into the picture”: But in that man puts himself into the picture in this way, he puts himself into the scene, i.e., into the open sphere of that which is generally and publicly represented. Therewith man sets himself up as the setting in which whatever is must henceforth set itself forth, must present itself [sich … präsentieren], i.e., be picture. Man becomes the representative [der Repräsentant] of that which is, in the sense of that which has the character of object.54

51 Heidegger, 131. 52 Heidegger, 131. 53 Heidegger, 131. 54 Heidegger, 131–32.

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Here we encounter the function of perspective—namely, the attempt to address precisely the problem of representation inherent in the rupture between “objectivized nature and subjective human interference”55 caused by Entgötterung or secularization in the early modern period. The result of this secularization is, according to Blumenberg, “world loss” (Weltverlust).56 Whereas the medieval cosmos (with god as the allseeing guarantor of world order) had offered an “escape into transcendence” in which “human hope had its vanishing point beyond the world,” early modernity was marked by the “facticity” of its world; that is, by a made, fabricated reality.57 Subsequently, the construction of reality in the modern age is first and foremost a construction of perspective for the emerging subject, who is implicated in his or her own construction as the (invisible) vanishing point for the picture he or she fabricates of the world—of the scene he or she is surrounded by.

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Karl Stockreither, “Freud und die Moderne: Der Einfluss der Zentralperspektive auf die Psychoanalyse,” Texte 1, no. 1 (2000): 82 (translated by the author). It is noteworthy that central perspective is not an invention of the early modern period (i.e., the mid-fifteenth century) but rather a rediscovery, since central perspective was already known in ancient Greece. 56 Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 137. 57 “Human hope had its vanishing point beyond the world. The reality that at the end of the Middle Ages comes to be seen as ‘fact’ (factum: something done or made, i.e., a contingent state of affairs) provokes the will to oppose it and concentrates the will’s attention upon it. The bad aspects of the world no longer appear as metaphysical marks of the quality of the world principle or punishing justice but rather as marks of the ‘facticity’ of reality. In it man appears not to be ‘taken into consideration,’ and the indifference of the self-preservation of everything in existence lets the bad appear to him as whatever opposes his own will to live. The Middle Ages came to an end when within their spiritual system creation as ‘providence’ ceased to be credible to man and the burden of self-assertion was therefore laid upon him.” Blumenberg, 138.

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1.2.1 The Representational Regime The shift toward representation in the early modern age, in which the world appears as a perspectively constructed picture for an implied subject, can be made productive for the realm of art and aesthetics by what Jacques Rancière refers to as the representational regime.58 The term derives from Rancière’s aesthetic theory, which distinguishes between three regimes in art “within the Western tradition,” each denoting “a specific type of connection between ways of producing works of art or developing practices, forms of visibility that disclose them, and ways of conceptualizing the former and the latter.”59 In other words, these regimes are understood as the way in which the sensible is divided

58

I will use the term “regime”—and here, specifically, “representational regime”— to address the rupture between different modes of thinking and making art. In what follows, other semantically and structurally similar notions are used to describe modes and ideas related to art at a particular time. These include Thomas Kuhn’s notion of the “paradigm” and Michel Foucault’s notion of the “episteme.” The “episteme” seeks to shed light on the relation between knowledge and modes of thinking, seeing, and knowing. The fundamental episteme of a period structures those modes and the ruptures between different eras that lead not only to a fundamentally different relation to knowledge but also to a fundamental difference in how empirical knowledge is defined in the first place. In order to show the two biggest “discontinuities” in “Western culture,” Foucault compares what he calls the “Classical age” (starting from the seventeenth century) with the “Modern age” (the beginning of the nineteenth century) and demonstrates that “the order on the basis of which we think today does not have the same mode of being as that of the Classical thinkers” (Foucault, The Order of Things, xxiv). Kuhn originally introduces the notion of the “paradigm” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions “to suggest that some accepted examples of actual scientific practice—examples which include law, theory, application, and instrumentation together—provide models from which spring particular coherent traditions of scientific research” (Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 10). Today, “paradigm” is used in a more general way, for instance in Hubert Damisch’s The Origin of Perspective, in which the term describes the fundamental presuppositions in a culture at a particular period of time. See Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). All three terms (regime, paradigm, and episteme) have in common the attempt to capture the framework for specific ideas and aesthetics operating at a certain period (roughly defined). Furthermore, all three terms try to account for the fact that these modes drastically change from period to period and that the history of ideas and aesthetics is not a continuously evolving epistemological flow; instead, it is full of ruptures and discontinuities. However, I prefer to use Rancière’s term “regime” here because it offers a way of conceptualizing modes of thinking that are not rendered historical, but structural. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (London: continuum, 2004). 59 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 20.

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and distributed within the artistic realm, defining a framework for the question of what art is and is not.60 Rancière differentiates between the ethical, representational, and aesthetic regimes, which are thought of as historical only insofar as their condition of possibility lies in a specific idea of art (and its objects) that appears at a certain historical age. This is, however, not to say that these three regimes are themselves historical.61 In fact, it proves more adequate to read Rancière’s three regimes as a structural mode of thinking and producing art. While the ethical regime of images is associated with Plato and his ideal state, the representational regime, with its emphasis on art as mimesis, endures roughly from Aristotle until the eighteenth century, at which time the aesthetic regime begins to emerge. We can thus locate two crucial differences in Rancière’s concept of regimes in contrast to the ontological arguments put forth by Heidegger or Blumenberg regarding the shift from medieval to early modern modes of thinking and producing art. First, as already noted, Rancière’s concept should not be understood historically, but structur-

60

61

All three regimes offer a specific “distribution of the sensible”—that is, a “system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it.” Rancière, 12. Rancière elaborates this thought with the help of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” and the example of modernism, in which, according to Rancière’s reading of Benjamin, “the difference between the arts is linked to the difference between their technological conditions or their specific medium or material” (31). In contrast to Benjamin’s claims, whose “persistent success” Rancière locates in the “crossing-over they allow for between the categories of Marxist materialist explanation and those of Heideggerian ontology, which ascribe the age of modernity to the unfurling of the essence of technology” (31), Rancière suggests that the relation ought to be thought of as reversed. Instead of presupposing that technological innovation precedes the “aesthetic and political properties of a form of art” (31), Rancière argues that “in order for the mechanical arts to be able to confer visibility on the masses, or rather on anonymous individuals, they first need to be recognized as arts. That is to say that they first need to be put into practice and recognized as something other than techniques of reproduction or transmission. […] We can even reverse the formula: it is because the anonymous became the subject matter of art that the act of recording such a subject matter can be an art. The fact that what is anonymous is not only susceptible to becoming the subject matter of art but also conveys a specific beauty is an exclusive characteristic of the aesthetic regime of the arts. Not only did the aesthetic regime begin well before the arts of mechanical reproduction, but it is actually this regime that made them possible by its new way of thinking art and its subject matter” (32). Thus, Rancière’s notion of “regime” is related to a structural (rather than historical) understanding of modes of thinking and doing. See Rancière, 31–32.

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ally. Each regime relates to a specific mode of thought and activity as its basis. We can thus conclude that different regimes may operate at the same time in history, or at least that the transition between two regimes is not as clear-cut as the idea of a historical age would presuppose. Second, and even more importantly, the term “representational regime” (which I will use from here on) is not congruent with what Heidegger calls “representation.” While “representation,” in Heidegger’s terms, contrasts the early modern age with a medieval cosmological world order, Rancière’s “representational regime” is a mimetic relation between “the sensible” and the experiencing subject as the expression of a “community”62 that does not belong to a certain era but stretches from Aristotle to the eighteenth century. To clarify this difference, let us return to the emergence of central perspective in early modernity. Applying Rancière’s ideas, central perspective can be seen as a symptom for a rupture in the representational regime—something about representation itself that no longer functions (self-evidently) and that only fully collapses in the eighteenth century with the appearance of the aesthetic regime.63 In other words, representation, expressed through central perspective, only becomes a problem in the early modern era because the mimetic presuppositions of a cosmological world order are no longer adequate in relation to “ways of doing and making”64 at that time. The representational regime persists, but it is already transformed from a godly perspective into a subjective one. That is, it takes on the burden every mimetic representation has to bear: the fact that every representation is predicated on a perspective—a vanishing point that is the blind spot for the construction of the representation it makes possible.

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Here community refers to the community of citizens: those who “have a part” in “the act of governing and being governed.” Rancière, 12. A detailed discussion of Rancière’s concept of regimes (and specifically the shift from the representational to the aesthetic regime) exceeds the limitations of this investigation. In brief, Rancière defines the representational (or poetic) regime as that which “identifies the substance of art—or rather of the arts—in the couple poiēsis/mimēsis. The mimetic principle is not at its core a normative principle stating that art must make copies resembling their models. It is first of all a pragmatic principle that isolates, within the general domain of the arts (ways of doing and making), certain particular forms of art that produce specific entities called imitations. These imitations are extricated, at one and the same time, from the ordinary control of artistic products by their use and from the legislative reign of truth over discourses and images.” Rancière, 21. 64 Rancière, 21.

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Thus, my use of the concept of the representational regime no longer corresponds with its Aristotelian roots or its medieval transformations expressed through hierarchical perspective. As the cosmological world order and the perspective of the all-seeing god fell apart with the beginning of the Renaissance, a need arose along with the newly emerging subject inserted into perspectival space: the need for a technique that could, with absolute mathematical accuracy, artificially reconstruct representation and thus eliminate any doubt regarding the subject’s position in the world.

1.2.2 Central Perspective as “Symbolic Form” Before I address how the idea of the emergence of central perspective as a symptom of a no longer adequate concept of representation can be linked to the ways in which modern and postmodern art deals with this legacy, let us first take a moment to consider the very principles upon which central perspective is built. In his famous text Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927), Erwin Panofsky defines central perspectival projection by quoting Albrecht Dürer, who notes that central perspective operates via “planar, transparent intersection of all those rays that fall from the eye onto the object it sees.”65 Following Dürer’s definition, Panofsky formulates three “laws” for central perspective: First, all perpendiculars or “orthogonals” meet at the so-called central vanishing point, which is determined by the perpendicular drawn from the eye to the picture plane. Second, all parallels, in whatever direction they lie, have a common vanishing point. If they lie in a horizontal plane, then their vanishing point lies always on the so-called horizon, that is, on the horizontal line through the central vanishing point. If, moreover, they happen to form a 45-degree

65

Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 28 (quotation: Konrad von Lange and Franz Louis Fuhse, Dürers Schriftlicher Nachlass auf Grund der Originalhandschriften und theilweise neu entdeckter alter Abschriften [in German] (Halle an der Saale: Max Niemeyer, 1893), 195).

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angle with the picture plane, then the distance between their vanishing point and the central vanishing point is equal to the distance between the eye and the picture plane. Finally, equal dimensions diminish progressively as they recede in space, so that any portion of the picture—assuming that the location of the eye is known—is calculable from the preceding or following portion.66 This need for absolute mathematical accuracy bears witness to the fact that central perspective emerges as a prop—a prosthesis to support the representational regime stripped of its cosmological guarantee. Moreover, by referring to central perspective as a “symbolic form,” Panofsky, following Ernst Cassirer, accounts for its status as a socially negotiated and negotiable form that offers mediation in the manner of representation. The no longer assumed transcendental “vanishing point,” god’s all-seeing eye, is replaced with a constructed one in the center of the painting. However, this mathematically constructed vanishing point is not part of the painting; instead, it is located in the infinite beyond. In other words, it is a constructed transcendental point. Panofsky points out that this central perspective is merely a “bold abstraction from reality” of “the actual subjective optical impression,” as it presupposes a “single and immobile eye” and “that the planar cross section of the visual pyramid can pass for an adequate reproduction of our optical image.”67 The precariousness of this constructed perspective becomes evident when we remind ourselves that central perspective establishes both the vanishing point and the subject as interdependent positions. Panofsky quotes Ernst Cassirer, who poignantly phrases the uncertainty of the positions central perspective (re-)produces: The ultimate basis of the homogeneity of geometric space is that all its elements, the ‘points’ which are joined in it, are mere determinations of position, possessing no independent content of their own outside of this relation, this position which they

66 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 28. 67 Panofsky, 29.

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occupy in relation to each other. Their reality is exhausted in their reciprocal relation: it is a purely functional and not a substantial reality.68 While the rules and limitations of central perspective are widely known and are discussed in countless aesthetic theories from Alberti onward, central perspective remains the way we claim to see: the “truthful” way of seeing.69 However, as Panofsky points out, exact perspectival construction is a systematic abstraction from the structure of […] psychophysiological space,” as it neglects that “homogeneity and boundlessness” are “foreign to the direct experience of that space.”70 Moreover, central perspective “forgets that we see not with a single fixed eye but with two constantly moving eyes, resulting in a spheroidal field of vision.” It also forgets that there is a discrepancy between “the psychologically conditioned ‘visual image’” and the “mechanically conditioned ‘retinal image’” which, with the aid of tactile sense, are assembled into a coherent image of physical objects that disregards the “distortions” these images “suffer on the retina.”71 In other words, the body and its experience with and in space is eliminated from central perspective and replaced with a single, unmoving eye. We have already encountered this problem in our discussion of the camera obscura.72 Within this mise-enscène, the subject must identify with the position of the unmoving eye. That is to say, the subject must confuse itself with this eye in order to assure its own existence.

68 Panofsky, 30 (quotation: Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 83–84). 69 See Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (1435–36; repr., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976). 70 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 30–31. 71 Panofsky, 31. 72 See chapter I.2.2.1: “The Camera Obscura.”

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1.2.3 “Shattering One-Point Perspective into a Thousand Pieces” With the onset of (late) modernity, perspective changed in two ways. While the optical technology that arose in the nineteenth century made central perspective overwhelmingly and incessantly available,73 the perspectival principles encountered in the arts at this time shifted to other paradigms. It is also important to clarify that the optical distortion a camera lens adds to an image is no more consistent with the mathematical structuring principles of central perspective than is the human vision described by Panofsky. The fact that this discrepancy usually goes unnoticed and does not disturb us as spectators might help us to realize just how much perspective veils.74 If we follow Cavell’s argument that photography (and, more generally, the rise of modern optics, specifically modern cameras) did not “free” painting from the burden of representation in the form of “likeness,”75 we can discern another reason for its validity: perspective, as the mode in which the representational regime operates, has been challenged across artistic disciplines from the beginning of modernity in the early modern period—not just at the onset of late modernity in the twentieth century. Thus, in both photography and painting, central perspective is always already a position from which to see, not a matter of likeness. The key to this argument lies in the change of practice more than in the change of technology that corresponds to the practice.76 Analogously, as Hubert Damisch points out in The Origin of Perspective (1994), it is not a matter of chance that studies of perspective enjoyed their greatest vogue at a moment in which it might have seemed that modern art had definitely turned away from it, as a result of its determination—

73 74

See chapter I.2: “Technology.” For a detailed account of how camera lenses distort, see Richard Latto and Bernhard Harper, “The Non-Realistic Nature of Photography: Further Reasons Why Turner Was Wrong,” Leonardo 40, no. 3 (June 2007): 243–47. 75 Cavell, The World Viewed, 21. 76 Rancière also stresses this point in opposition to Benjamin, who identifies technological reproduction as a source for a paradigm shift (31). Rancière argues that a change of thought in relation to art and its objects is the condition of possibility that technological forms can be attributed to art. See Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 31–32.

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as Malevitch put it—to “make paintings” rather than painting objects and “repeating nature,” and the current revival of interest in it is symptomatic too.77 In other words, the paradigm (or “regime,” to use Rancière’s term) changes with the beginning of late modernity: artistic practice breaks its representational obligations and instead begins to explore its own means of production—first and foremost, perspective itself. Thus, Damisch argues, what has been said about contemporary art—namely, that it has “shatter[ed] one-point perspective into a thousand pieces”78— does not mean that perspective is no longer relevant. On the contrary, perspective has itself become a central theme of artistic production, as can be seen throughout artistic practice: from Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon to the “optical deformations and transformations possible in electronic images.”79 It is curious, indeed symptomatic, that the end of representation—that is, of a secure and stable position for the subject in relation to the world represented by a painting—emphasizes the center of the canvas as source for the emergence of the subject. Modernist art offers a momentary assurance through the medial relation it constructs between the subject and the painting. The loss of perspective, rendering obsolete the very center of the canvas (the site of the vanishing point of central perspective), is essentially the loss of a centralized (Cartesian) subject. Analogous to the Cartesian cogito ergo sum—which, in its grammar, offers a location for the subject in a relational structure of (symbolic) representation—central perspective had been a relational structure guaranteeing the subject’s position in connection to (or even identified with) the vanishing point. The (one eye’s) position in central perspective guarantees a point of view for the subject from which the entire scene unfolds. With modernist painting, and, concretely, with the artworks discussed in the criticism of Fried and Cavell, the center of the canvas becomes relevant again in a way that echoes the structuring principle that was dominant in art from the Renaissance until the onset of modernism—namely, central perspective. Consequently, it is against the backdrop of (early) modern perspective and its focus on the center of the canvas that art criticism inter-

77 Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 29. 78 Damisch, 30. 79 Damisch, 30.

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rogates modernist art in the 1960s. Both Fried and Cavell discuss the treatment of the center of the canvas in works by artists such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella. Only a few years earlier, Greenberg defines painting’s unique medial quality as “flatness,” emphasizing the surface of a painting rather than perspectival construction—or, in his words, the “representation of […] space that recognizable objects can inhabit.”80 Although the two arguments are not entirely congruent, they nevertheless aim at the same problem: the question of how the end of the representational regime affects art, especially painting. If, as Damisch argues, perspective has since been “shattered into a thousand pieces,” the end of the representational regime has not simply eliminated central perspective in art but has multiplied its vanishing points, while the geometric principles that function as the basis for the relation between a vanishing point and its subject remain very much intact. Dealing with these remnants of central perspective thus becomes a persistent problem of modernism. It consequently comes as no surprise that Fried identifies the emergence (or “discovery”) of the center of a painting as the most intriguing characteristic of modernist art: Until 1960, when he made the unfurleds, Louis’s attitude towards the framing edge seems to have been much the same as Pollock’s and nowhere near as advanced as Newman’s: that is, he appears to have made an image and then framed it so as to leave, if possible, a roughly symmetrical border of raw canvas around three sides of it. […] Noland, on the other hand, broke through to his mature style only when, in his words, he “discovered the center” of the canvas— when he at last came to locate the central point of concentric or radiating motifs at the precise center of the canvas—thereby relating his stain images deductively to the shape, though not yet to the specific dimensions, of the picture support.81 Evidently, the center of the painting loses its meaning as a constructed transcendental point for its subject—that is, as the vanishing point of central perspective—and instead becomes an immanent problem of ar-

80 81

Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 87. Fried, “Three American Painters,” 239.

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tistic practice. Locating the center in relation to the “picture support” rather than in relation to the objectivized physical world means shifting painting away from representation and toward what Rancière calls the “aesthetic regime” of a self-reflexive artistic practice. In such a practice, the modes and means of art become the central problem—not what these modes depict or represent. This is what Fried and Krauss call “reflexiveness” in modernist art, and what they, together with Greenberg, Cavell, and other contemporaries, evoke with the notion of modernism’s inherent capacity of “self-criticism.”82 For these authors, the reflexiveness of artistic practice is a characteristic that is also found in early modernist painting (such as cubism), and not just in abstract expressionism and other painting practices of the 1950s and 1960s. Fried points out that this “extreme dependence upon the literal character of the picture support” and the “emphasis upon the flatness of the picture surface” refers back to the tendency for pictorial elements in both Analytic and Synthetic Cubist paintings to pull away from the edges of the canvas, especially from the corners, and to gravitate toward its center. The densest area, and structurally speaking the strongest, in a Cubist painting is almost always the neighborhood of its center; the painting often simply fades out, becomes insubstantial, toward its circumference.83 For Fried, the difference between cubism and modernist art of the 1960s—such as Frank Stella’s paintings—presents itself in how they treat the center of the canvas:

82

“Noland demands of his work that it constantly challenge not some abstract notion of general taste—it is hard to imagine that someone unfamiliar with modernist painting since the war would feel that his chevrons are more advanced or harder to take than his concentric circles, or vice versa—but his own sensibility and the sensibilities of those others who have been most deeply educated, influenced, and moved by his own prior work; and he makes this demand of his art and of his public not because he or they are infatuated with formal problems for their own sake, but because it is one of the prime, if tacit, convictions of modernist painting—a conviction matured out of painful experience, individual and collective—that only an art of constant formal self-criticism can bear or embody or communicate more than trivial meaning.” Fried, 236. 83 Fried, 252–53.

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The Cubists appear to have built their paintings out toward the edge, and the nearer to it they came the less consistent with their treatment of the main motif their handling seems to have become. Whereas in Stella’s paintings structure is generated from the framing edge in toward the center of the canvas—with the result that if any portion of his pictures tends to be problematic it is the center, rather than, as in Cubist works, the perimeter.84 It could be argued that the focus on the problem of the displaced and purposeless center had, since late modernity, increasingly been narrowed down to the place of its displacement, an argument that is very much in line with the claim made by Greenberg, Fried, Cavell, and others of an unparalleled self-reflexivity in modernist painting of the 1950s and 1960s. It makes sense, then, to ask what this Hegelian idea of “art coming to itself” by means of self-criticism85—and its supposed fulfillment in the reflexivity of modernist painting—means for the manifold and fundamentally different artistic practices that developed at that time, such as video, performance, and body art. It thus becomes evident why Krauss poses the problem of “pointing at the center” at the beginning of her essay on the newly emerging practice of video art. If art since late modernity had dealt with the end of representation, symptomatically presenting itself in the break with central perspective (which was eventually undermined as a cornerstone of artistic practice), then video, as the newest practice at the time, would have to respond to the problem just as previous practices had done. The way in which the problem is addressed cannot, however, be seen as a linear development, since video offers a fundamentally different relation to the questions of representation and perspective that emerge as a symptom of representation itself. Though entangled with familiar forms of modernist art, the structural premises of video cannot simply be derived from such forms, as we will soon see, without falling short of the ruptures and discontinuities that lie between the respective artistic practices of modernism and video.

84 Fried, 253. 85 For a discussion of the Hegelian idea of self-consciousness coming to itself, see the previous section 1.1 in this chapter on the “Aesthetics of Acknowledgement“ and Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit.

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Krauss’s essay takes the prevalent concepts of 1960s art criticism—medium specificity, flatness, the aesthetics of acknowledgement, and pointing at the center—and asks how they relate to the newly emerging artistic practice of video. By asking “what does it mean to point to the center of a t.v. screen?”86 Krauss exposes the limitations of these concepts when they are confronted with video and points to the coinciding shift in the very paradigm of what art is and does. In a manner that corresponds with the apparent simplicity of Krauss’s question, we can immediately answer that pointing at the center of a television screen is, of course, an altogether absurd gesture. However, if we ask ourselves where the absurdity of the gesture—as performed quite literally in Vito Acconci’s Centers (fig. 15)—lies, it is clear that it is rooted in the ideas that dominated the art world at the time Krauss published her essay. The formula “pointing at the center of a t.v. screen” turns modernist painting’s sternly displayed involvement with the empty center of the canvas—an involvement that, due to the lack of an external reference point, is elevated to a new and sacred principle—into an ironizing gesture. Pointing at the center of a television screen also exposes the fact that this center is not only empty in video but cannot even be located. This becomes clear if we try to reconstruct the scene Acconci creates in Centers. In the moment of pointing, Acconci points neither at a screen nor at a spectator, but at the lens of a camera. The television screen on which the video is later shown reproduces an inverted image of this setting. Now the image of

Fig. 15 Vito Acconci, Centers, video still, 1971, reproduced from Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 51.

86

Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 50.

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Acconci has replaced Acconci. The act of pointing is now directed at the center of the screen and, if we consider artistic conventions and the heritage of central perspective, at the spectator in front of it. Unlike the picture plane of both early modern and modernist painting, the center Acconci points to is not a geometric center—after all, it does not directly relate to a physical object. The center in Centers is structural: it relates image and spectator, scene of production and scene of reception in a peculiar, mirroring fashion. For Krauss, this way of pointing in video, understood as “parodying the critical terms of abstraction,”87 exposes the reflexive, dependent structure between artwork and subject: The kind of criticism Centers attacks is obviously one that takes seriously the formal qualities of a work, or tries to assay the particular logic of a given medium. And yet, by its very mis-en-scène, Centers typifies the structural characteristics of the video medium. For Centers was made by Acconci’s using the video monitor as a mirror. As we look at the artist sighting along his outstretched arm and forefinger towards the center of the screen we are watching, what we see is a sustained tautology: a line of sight that begins at Acconci’s plane of vision and ends at the eyes of his projected double. In that image of self-regard is configured a narcissism so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of the entire genre. Yet, what would it mean to say, “The medium of video is narcissism?”88

87 Krauss, 50. 88 Krauss, 50.

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This mirroring situation, the relation between subject and artwork under narcissism, will serve as a foundation of the theory of video I propose here. While Krauss states that this “remark tends to open up a rift between the nature of video and that of the other visual arts,”89 it should be emphasized that the rift video opens up in Krauss’s argument is first and foremost between the aesthetic premises of video and those emanating from a Greenbergian modernist stance. This is primarily due to the curious circumstance that Krauss’s argument, in her own words, “describes a psychological rather than a physical condition.”90 She concludes: and while we are accustomed to thinking of psychological states as the possible subject of works of art, we do not think of psychology as constituting their medium. Rather, the medium of painting, sculpture or film has much more to do with the objective, material factors specific to a particular form: pigment-bearing surfaces; matter extended through space; light projected through a moving strip of celluloid. That is, the notion of a medium contains the concept of an object-state, separate from the artist’s own being, through which his intentions must pass.91 In stark contrast to what can be seen as a commonplace in aesthetics and art history until today, Krauss dismisses the idea that technology precedes aesthetic experience. In other words, she dismisses the idea of technology as medium. This notion is largely rooted in a commonly accepted reading of Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” which suggests that technical conditions shape the way we think and act in relation to art. Krauss, on the other hand, roots the medium of video in a “psychological condition,” that of narcissism, thereby questioning all other media. Before we dive into

89 Krauss, 50. 90 Krauss, 50. 91 Krauss, 50–52.

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the question of what narcissism is and how it works, let us think for a moment about what it means to define a medium psychologically, or, in Krauss’s words, in opposition to “the concept of an object-state.”92 Krauss continues her definition of the medium with a reference to the (para-)psychological sense of the word as “the image of a human receiver (and sender) of communications arising from an invisible source” in which the “human conduit exists in a particular relation to the message, which is one of temporal concurrance.”93 Leaving aside the “common usage” of the term in the “mediumistic experience” of parapsychology,94 what interests Krauss and also may interest us in this definition has long since become a focus of media studies through the work of theorists like Friedrich Kittler: the shift from an understanding

92

Krauss, 52. Here Krauss uses “object” in a general way—that is, in the sense of a physical, material thing that exists outside of subjective experience. However, Krauss later introduces the psychoanalytic concepts of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to her argument. Hence, the usage of “object” in her essay tends to vacillate between the general and the psychoanalytic definitions. In psychoanalysis, “object” does not denote something external or physical; it has different, complex connotations. In “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” Freud defines the psychoanalytic object as the object of the drive. “The object of a [drive] is the thing in regard to which or through which the [drive] is able to achieve its aim. It is what is most variable about a [drive] and is not originally connected with it, but becomes assigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possible. The object is not necessarily something extraneous: it may equally well be part of the subject’s own body” (122). (Throughout this book, I have replaced the word “instinct” in the English translation with the accurate term “drive” (Trieb), as it is also used in more recent editions of Freud’s work.) In other words, in psychoanalytic terms, an object is not external to the subject or to the subject’s body, but gains its importance through its relation to a drive. The object is also central to Lacan’s psychoanalytic teaching. Here it usually appears as the objet a, which takes on a different status throughout the years. In his earlier work, Lacan emphasizes the relational and reflexive structure between the ego and the objet a as the “small other”— an object for the ego that is neither completely external nor completely internal (Lacan’s term for this is “extimacy”). I will return to the psychoanalytic object later, as a full account of its meanings cannot be given here. For now, it is important to note that there is a difference between the general and the psychoanalytic use of the term “object”: one refers to a physical object and the other to a psychic representation that does not have to be physical to be real for the subject. See Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” (1915) in Standard Edition, vol. 14, 122; Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. VII (New York: Norton , 1988), 101–14, 139. 93 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 52. 94 Krauss, 52.

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of the “medium” as a physical, materially based “object-state, separate from the artist’s own being, through which his intentions must pass”95 to a matter of the psyche, a “psychological condition.” This shift is radical, as it addresses the medial relation between the subject and the artwork rather than claiming a separation between the two.

2.1 Medium: Specificity and Matter When Krauss attests to video’s ability to “disrupt and dispense with an entire critical tradition” and to “render nonsensical a critical engagement with […] a genre of works—such as ‘video’,”96 she does so on the grounds we have just discussed: the Hegelian tradition of acknowledgement and the emphasis on the center as a formation of self-reflexive art under the aesthetic regime. One can thus conclude that when one points at the center of the video screen, as Acconci does, one no longer points at the empty center (a vanishing point) for a (Cartesian) subject (as we know it from painting since the Renaissance). Instead, one points at an unlocatable center that offers no such (fixed) place for a subject. Where, then, is the subject located in video? With Krauss it becomes clear that what is under attack by works like Acconci’s Centers—and, indeed, by the entirety of video practice— is “the kind of criticism […] that takes seriously the formal qualities of a work, or tries to assay the particular logic of a given medium.”97 The lack of a center in video’s “setting” challenges this kind of formalism, provoking a fundamental resignification in relation to how both art and the medium are defined, and ultimately resignifying the entire framing of art as such. Krauss points out, however, that this resignification in art—which we encounter in video in its rejection of formal medial attributions—does not imply that particular “structural characteristics of the video medium”98 cannot be named or exposed. On the contrary, video has made the question of the medium more pressing than ever, a fact that is found precisely in the discourse of 1960s criticism and, in particular, Clement Greenberg’s attempts to “save” art from the looming

95 Krauss, 52. 96 Krauss, 50. 97 Krauss, 50. 98 Krauss, 50.

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threat of mediality posed by new artistic forms—first and foremost video. As already indicated, Greenberg’s attempt to attribute medium specificity to artistic disciplines (for instance, by assigning flatness to painting) is merely a sign that the symptom99 of medium specificity had already become frail and no longer functioned under modernist internalized criticism.100 If it had previously been self-evident to define an artistic discipline by a certain set of rules, technical conditions, and genre-related specifications corresponding with a unified perspective of and on this discipline, modernity, in a long and multifaceted process, shattered these structuring principles. Video is an effect of this development—we can also call it a symptom—which emerges when the old symptom of medium specificity disintegrates. As such, video exposes the very problems brought about by mediality. We must keep in mind that “medium”—as a mediating structure, a means of “communication,” a third between two positions—is itself a modern concept that emerged in the mid-eighteenth century and occupies a central position in art theory as a “bearer of information that it no longer mediates more or less neutrally, but rather fundamentally shapes, to which it inscribes itself in a mediumspecific manner, and thus gives form to human access to reality.”101 In this sense, Krauss identifies “two features of the everyday use of ‘medium’ that are suggestive for a discussion of video: the simultaneous reception and projection of an image; and the human psyche used as a conduit.”102 However, this identification of a simultaneity of “reception and projection of an image” with the everyday use of “medium” already seems highly influenced by video’s mise-en-scène. Thus, it is

99

100 101

102

Here I refer to “symptom” in the Lacanian sense, in which a symptom is a signifier, an index of an unconscious structure on the part of the subject. “A symptom here is the signifier of a signified that has been repressed from the subject’s consciousness. A symbol written in the sand of the flesh and on the veil of Maia, it partakes of language by the semantic ambiguity that I have already highlighted in its constitution. But it is fully functioning speech, for it includes the other’s discourse in the secret of its cipher [chiffre].” Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits, 232. See chapter I.1.1: “Medial Struggles.” Jochen Schulte-Sasse, “Medien/medial,” in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, vol. 4, ed. Karlheinz Barck [in German] (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010), 1 (translated by the author); see also this chapter, section 1.2.1: “The Representational Regime” and chapter II.1: “The Medium.” Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 52.

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not solely Krauss’s own interpretation of video that leads her to define the medium in this way but, in fact, a discourse that was already prevalent for several decades before the emergence of video as such. As we have already seen, this discourse is marked by the emphasis of mediality in the early twentieth century, specifically with Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Benjamin’s essay argues that the technical possibilities of reproduction in art reshape its social function103 and it introduces the medium as the historically conditioned “way in which human perception is organized.”104 In other words, the notion of the medium already contains a dimension of perception—that is, a dimension of subjectivity105 that cannot be separated from the technical framework of an artistic discipline. We have already discussed how this relation is reversed in Rancière’s theory of the aesthetic regime, in which Rancière states that in order for the mechanical arts to be able to confer visibility on the masses, or rather on anonymous individuals, they first need to be recognized as arts. That is to say that they first need to be put into practice and recognized as something other than techniques of reproduction or transmission. […] Not only did the aesthetic regime begin well before the arts of mechanical reproduction, but it is actually this regime that made them possible by its new way of thinking art and its subject matter.106

103 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 25–26. 104 Benjamin, 23. 105 For a detailed discussion of why perception can be called a matter of subjectivity, see section 1 of this chapter. 106 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 32. See also this chapter, section 1.2.1: “The Representational Regime.”

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Rancière’s argument is of utmost importance for our considerations here. What emerges is a notion of the medium that, on the one hand, follows the lineage of Benjamin’s definition insofar as it recognizes its status as an organization of human perception—and, as such, as a link between the technical and psychological dimensions of art. On the other hand, in a reversal of Benjamin’s proposition, this medial relation is structural rather than merely historical. Perception does not change with the emergence of a particular technology at a particular time; instead, (changing) modes of thinking make it possible for certain technologies to become means of artistic practice. In other words, it is the relation between these modes and technologies that makes for the recognition of an art as art. We can thus think of the relation between Benjamin’s and Ranciére’s arguments as describing the topology and movement of mediation—that is, as a relational structure that links psyche, technology, thought, and history to produce new artistic forms. It is curious that Krauss’s discussion of the medium of video shifts from a technological to a psychological to a physical (bodily) angle, raising the question of how these three realms are linked. The first part of her argument—that video entails a “simultaneous reception and projection of an image”—has become one of the pillars of video art theory and is cited in almost every text on the subject. What often remains unmentioned, however, is the fact that Krauss does not tie this property to a purely technological understanding of video. Instead, she immediately adds that the “human psyche” acts as a “conduit” in this setting. In other words, video, according to Krauss, relies on the psyche to convey the simultaneously received and projected image. This claim implies a moment of reduplication; a double moment of simultaneous transmission of an image taking place in video’s setting. One moment is linked to the apparatus (the technical procedures of video technology) while the other is a psychic process of “temporal concurrance.” These processes are not to be confused with one another; nor are they symmetrical or congruent. Instead, their discordance characterizes the unique setting we encounter in video. The body, which Krauss introduces to this setting immediately after laying out these two processes, is, for her, the site where this discordance is unfurled and negotiated.

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2.2 Body/Subject At the center of Krauss’s model we find the human body as video’s “central instrument.”107 However, the body here is divided in two: for taped video, the body “has most often been the body of the artist-practitioner,” while in video installations “it has usually been the body of the responding viewer.”108 The split in Krauss’s argument presupposes a dualistic rendering of psyche and soma, for she seems to refer to the empirical physical body in question (that of either the practitioner or the viewer) as a reservoir for the human psyche operative in video. This reading raises several questions: What is the relation between the filmed (image of the) body and the physical body? What is the relation between the spectator’s body and the filmed body? While these questions are relevant and valuable, my interest lies in a more fundamental question— namely, whether it is at all fruitful to think of the body in video in terms of an empirical body, or whether a structural argument can, instead, help us arrive at a coherent theory of video. Is it not more interesting to think of the consequences of Krauss’s first (structural) statement that video “has used the human body as its central instrument” instead of trying to naturalize it by identifying this “body” with an actual, specific, physical body in a particular work? If this argument is taken as structural, the relation between psyche and body also shifts away from this naturalization—and, most importantly, from the dualism it contains. There is clearly a case for interpreting Krauss’s argument in a structuralist manner. This becomes evident when she further elaborates the role of the body in video by introducing a third condition: And no matter whose body has been selected for the occasion, there is a further condition which is always present. Unlike the other visual arts, video is capable of recording and transmitting at the same time—producing instant feedback. The body is therefore as it were centered between two machines that are the opening and closing of a parenthesis. The first of these is the camera; the second is the monitor, which re-projects the performer’s image with the immediacy of a mirror.109

107 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 52. 108 Krauss, 52. 109 Krauss, 52

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With this continuation, it is clear that Krauss’s argument no longer addresses an empirical body. Instead, what is at stake is “the body” that is “centered between two machines that are the opening and closing of a parenthesis.” In other words, the body is part of video’s apparatus. It is a link, a component in video’s setting—and not just any component, but the one around which video unfolds. We will have to take a closer look at this “parenthesis” that Krauss says is so central to video and ask about this “body” that is caught up in between. Krauss’s oscillation between an empirical and a structural argument weakens the impact of an otherwise radical proposition here—namely, that there is always a body in question in video, that this body is central to video’s setting, and that it is, in some way, exposed to this setting while simultaneously creating it. What is the relation between this body and the “human psyche used as a conduit” if not the articulation of a subject in this framing? When I say “subject” here, I am referring to the psychoanalytic rendering of the term following Jacques Lacan’s work and the formations of the unconscious elaborated by Sigmund Freud. In this sense, the subject is understood as “the subject of the unconscious”110 and is based on the structuralist principles derived from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Structural Anthropology (1958) and Lacan’s famous dictum that “the unconscious has the radical structure of language.”111 By referring to the “symbolic function” as the fundamental and atemporal structure of the unconscious upon which the subject builds its history, Lévi-Strauss adopts Sigmund Freud’s considerations of the formations of the unconscious as expressed in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1915/16), in which Freud attributes to the subject

110 111

Jacques Lacan, Television (New York: Norton, 1990), 6. “My doctrine of the signifier is first of all a discipline, in which those I train have to familiarize themselves with the ways the signifier effects the advent of the signified, which is the only way of conceiving how it is that interpretation, by inscribing itself therein, can produce anything new. For interpretation is not grounded in some assumption of divine archetypes, but in the fact that the unconscious has the radical structure of language and that a material operates in the unconscious according to certain laws, which are the same laws as those discovered in the study of natural languages (langues)—that is, languages (langues) that are or were actually spoken.” Jacques Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” in Ecrits, 496.

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unconscious knowledge, thought-relations, comparisons between different objects which result in the possibility that one can be constantly put in the place of the other. These comparisons are not re-made on each occasion, they lie ready at hand, they are complete [finished/ready/prefigured (fertig)] once and for all.112 It is from this point, and from Lévi-Strauss’s ascertainment that “the unconscious […] is always empty—or, more accurately, it is as alien to mental images as is the stomach to the foods which pass through it,”113 that Lacan develops his notion of the subject of the unconscious. LéviStrauss emphasizes that the unconscious is “the organ of a specific function,” which “imposes structural laws upon inarticulated elements which originate elsewhere—impulses, emotions, representations, and memories.”114 He distinguishes between “the individual lexicon” of the

112

“Bisher hatten wir nur notwendig, unbewußte Strebungen anzunehmen, solche, von denen man zeitweilig oder dauernd nichts weiß. Jetzt aber handelt es sich um mehr, geradezu um unbewußte Kenntnisse, um Denkbeziehungen, Vergleichungen zwischen verschiedenen Objekten, die dazu führen, daß das eine konstant an Stelle des anderen gesetzt werden kann. Diese Vergleichungen werden nicht jedesmal neu angestellt, sondern sie liegen bereit, sie sind ein- für allemal fertig; das geht ja aus ihrer Übereinstimmung bei verschiedenen Personen, ja vielleicht Übereinstimmung trotz der Sprachverschiedenheit, hervor. Woher soll die Kenntnis dieser Symbolbeziehungen kommen?” Sigmund Freud, “X. Die Symbolik im Traum,” (1916) in Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11 [in German] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998), 168 (translated by the author). Also see the Standard Edition: “Hitherto it has only been necessary for us to assume the existence of unconscious endeavours—endeavours, that is, of which, temporarily or permanently, we know nothing. Now, however, it is a question of more than this, of unconscious pieces of knowledge, of connections of thought, of comparisons between different objects which result in its being possible for one of them to be regularly put in place of the other. These comparisons are not freshly made on each occasion; they lie ready to hand and are complete, once and for all. This is implied by the fact of their agreeing in the case of different individuals—possibly, indeed, agreeing in spite of differences of language. What can be the origin of these symbolic relations?” Sigmund Freud, “X. Symbolism in Dreams,” (1916) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 15, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Part I/II (1915–1916) (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 165. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 203. 113 114 Lévi-Strauss, 203.

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preconscious, “where each of us accumulates the vocabulary of his personal history,” and the unconscious as that which makes “this vocabulary become […] significant, for us and for others” in that it “structures it according to its laws and thus transforms it into language.”115 LéviStrauss’s conclusion is that the vocabulary matters less than the structure. Whether the myth is re-created by the individual or borrowed from tradition, it derives from its sources—individual or collective (between which interpenetrations and exchanges constantly occur)— only the stock of representations with which it operates. But the structure remains the same, and through it the symbolic function is fulfilled.116 Thus, for Lacan, the subject owes its existence to the field of the unconscious as the place of “the Other’s discourse.”117 That is to say, it owes its existence to the register of the symbolic. Here we encounter a structure at the basis of the subject’s formation that is not merely outside of subjective history but, in fact, organizes and signifies the subject’s history. At the same time, the structure of this organization remains unaffected and is radically external. This structure is the dimension of the Symbolic that operates in the unconscious. Lacan elaborates on this concept by referring to the unconscious as the locus of the subject’s “ex-sistence” (existence in a place that is not one’s own but is, nevertheless, the condition of possibility of the subject’s existence). In this way, the subject is always displaced; it is not identical with its own position, but an effect of the unconscious “chain of signifiers.”118 The subject is an effect insofar as it emerges as the in-between of signifiers: “A signifier is what represents the subject to another signifier.”119

115 Lévi-Strauss, 203. 116 Lévi-Strauss, 203. 117 Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” in Ecrits, 10. 118 Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” 676–77. 119 Lacan, 694.

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In his later works, Lacan emphasizes the subject’s status as a speaking being (parlêtre).120 Central to this concept is that this parlêtre is a being based on having a body, and “that he speaks with his body, put differently, that he bespeaks by nature.”121 This speech, formulated in and with the body, is “defined as being the only locus, where being has a sense.”122 Thus, what we encounter here is not a split between a subject understood as a psychic function and a physical body (under a dualistic rendering of mind and body), but an organ-ized subject—in other words, a subject that is formulated in the body while this body is itself (re-)constructed as significant through its own speech. In relation to the subject’s significance located in the speaking body, it also becomes apparent that subject and ego are not the same, since the latter emerges “as constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications”123 while the former takes on “the strictly linguistic definition of I as signifier, where it is nothing but the shifter or indicative that, qua grammatical subject of the statement, designates the subject insofar as he is currently speaking.”124 Herein lies the reason why, for Lacan, the subject is divided or split. This split is also an effect of language, which divides the subject into a subject of statement and a subject of enunciation125—in

Jacques Lacan, “Joyce le Symptôme,” in Autres écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), 565; Jacques Lacan, “Joyce le Symptôme II,” 3 [565], address delivered at the opening of the fifth international Joyce Symposium, June 16, 1975, accessed September 11, 2019, https://www.freud2lacan.com/docs/Joyce-le-Sympt%C3%B4 me-2--3col.pdf. The subject’s speech will be the focus of section 3 of this chapter. 121 Lacan, 5 [566]. 122 Lacan, 4 [566]. 123 Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits, 347. 124 Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” 677. 125 Lacan continues: “That is to say, it designates the enunciating subject, but does not signify him. This is obvious from the fact that there may be no signifier of the enunciating subject in the statement—not to mention that there are signifiers that differ from I, and not only those that are inadequately called cases of the first person singular, even if we add that it can be lodged in the plural invocation or even in the Self [Soi] of auto-suggestion.” See Lacan, 677. 120

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Arthur Rimbaud’s words: I is always another.126 Thus, while the ego is formed of “alienating identifications” (that is, it belongs to the imaginary order),127 the subject is formed in the symbolic, as its locus is the “ex-sistence” of the unconscious as “the Other’s discourse.”128 The subject’s split is rooted in displacement as its constitutive moment, as the effect of being in the place of the Other’s discourse. We can now see that the question of the subject—“‘Who is speaking?’”129— is indeed the key to the question Krauss raises when she addresses both the body and the psyche in video. As Lacan points out, the relation between psyche and body is maintained only through the subject: In fact the subject of the unconscious is only in touch with the soul via the body, by introducing thought into it: here contradicting Aristotle. Man does not think with his soul, as the Philosopher imagined. He thinks as a consequence of the fact that a structure, that of language—the word implies it—a structure carves up his body, a structure that has nothing to do with anatomy. Witness the hysteric. This shearing happens to the soul through the obsessional symptom: a thought that burdens the soul, that it doesn’t know what to do with.130 The body is marked by the signifier of the unconscious, and only as such can thought emerge. One thinks not with the soul (psyche) but with the body that has been “carved up”—fragmented, organized, made significant. The psyche, however, is affected by thought, which can become a

126

“For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes on to the stage in a leap. If old imbeciles had not discovered only the false meaning of the Ego, we would not have to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, for time immemorial! have accumulated the results of their one-eyed intellects by claiming to be the authors!” Arthur Rimbaud, “Letter to Paul Demeny, Charleville, May 15, 1871,” in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 375. 127 I will elaborate this point in section 3, which focuses on the function of narcissism. 128 Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” 10. 129 Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” 677. 130 Lacan, Television, 6.

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symptom (meaning it can be inscribed in the flesh). Here we can see how the Lacanian triad of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real cannot be erased for the subject—which Krauss attempts to some degree—since it is “in the experience inaugurated by psychoanalysis that we can grasp by what oblique imaginary means the symbolic takes hold in even the deepest recesses of the human organism.”131 In other words—and this is why this brief elaboration of the status of the subject is so important to our discussion—the psyche is not to be confused with the mind (the realm of rational, conscious thought), nor is the subject merely part of the psyche. Instead, the subject is an effect of the incongruence of body and psyche as much as it is an effect of their inseparability. For this reason, we cannot help but see the subject itself as medium. To return to the problem of video as presented by Krauss, a few conclusions can be drawn from our excursion to the subject and the body in psychoanalysis. First, from an aesthetic position, we are urged not to maintain the somewhat artificial split between the aesthetic of production and the aesthetic of reception implied in the question of which body it is that is central in video (the body of the practitioner or that of the spectator). With the rise of video, it becomes evident that these are no longer fruitful categories (if they ever were). When a subject points a camera at itself, the practitioner turns into an object for this camera. And even if the body is not filmed, there is (and always must be) an experiencing body implied in any artistic experience. As already indicated, seeing is a productive process. And, conversely, production requires a dimension of seeing, observing, evaluating, and interpreting. From the insights psychoanalysis provides on the matter, the problem of a body in video becomes the structural question of the body in video, and we can only address this question by taking into account the subject as a medial, structural effect that operates within the video scene. Krauss addresses the body in video either as an empirical body or as an image of a body. Both, however, are the imaginary body of narcissism because they are presented as complete, unfragmented entities. The necessary question that is obscured here is: “From where is this scene seen?” and, most importantly, “By whom?” To ask these questions is to ask about the subject that is both product and producer of that scene. The “other” body that appears is the fragmented body, the “carved up” body that is in the scene, marked by the signifier. Krauss does not speak about this body. This other body

131

Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” 6.

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is the exposed body, the spectating body—the body that is constructed from the scene for which it is at once a central part and a trigger. It is only when this body appears that video’s scene is put into effect. Before this moment, video is simply a vague accumulation of technical devices.

2.3 Bracket and Parenthesis: On Object/Subject Two formulations in Krauss’s text are conspicuous in relation to the question of video’s setting and the role of both body and subject therein. Curiously, both are taken from the realm of writing, specifically from its structuring principle, punctuation: the parenthesis and the bracket. Krauss uses the former to describe the body’s position in video as “centered between two machines that are the opening and closing of a parenthesis”—a positioning between the camera on the one side and the monitor on the other—“which re-projects the performer’s image with the immediacy of a mirror.”132 This setting, which Krauss later calls the “parenthetical closure of the feedback situation,”133 forms the basis for her claim that video is narcissistic. Between the continuous feedback of camera and monitor, Krauss locates an infinite regress comparable to when two mirrors are made to face each other. In the middle of this infinite regress, Krauss situates the body. The second formulation is directed at the function of this parenthetical closure; namely, at what is “bracketed out” in video’s setting. Here Krauss names three things that are bracketed out—text, object, and world—all of which are part of a logical chain. In relation to the “collapsed time” encountered in video (an effect of its capability for instant feedback), Krauss states that “the nature of video performance is specified as an activity of bracketing out the text and substituting for it the mirror-reflection.”134 The substitution, Krauss informs us, results in an object “double” that cannot be called a “true external object” (for her, a physical object), but is “rather […] a displacement […] transforming the performer’s subjectivity into another, mirror, object.”135 Accordingly, Krauss specifies that “the

132 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 52. 133 Krauss, 61. 134 Krauss, 55. 135 Krauss, 55.

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mirror-reflection of absolute feedback is a process of bracketing out the object”136 (again, Krauss refers here to a physical object). From this process of substitution between (physical) object and “mirror-reflection,” Krauss derives the structural proximity of video’s mediality to narcissism, in which (here she claims to quote Freud) someone “abandoned the investment of objects with libido and transformed object-libido into egolibido.”137 Thus, Krauss describes “narcissism as a form of bracketing-out the world and its conditions.”138 While the following section of this chapter addresses Freud’s definition of narcissism, we must first discuss an erroneous assumption about psychoanalytic concepts—namely, about the quality of “objects.”

136 Krauss, 57. 137 Krauss, 57. To my knowledge, there is no Freud quote that speaks of the relation of object-libido and ego-libido in such a clear and discrete manner. What Freud does say in “On Narcissism” is that in the case of megalomania found in schizophrenia, “the libido that has been withdrawn from the external world has been directed to the ego and thus gives rise to an attitude which may be called narcissism” (Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” (1914) in Standard Edition, vol. 14, 75). Throughout his essay, Freud tries to determine whether it is accurate to presuppose two kinds of libido, ego-libido and object-libido, as a consequence of the difference between sexual- and ego-drives. Freud explains the need for this differentiation with the status of the individual as a “twofold existence: one to serve his own purposes and the other as a link in a chain, which he serves against his will, or at least involuntarily. The individual himself regards sexuality as one of his own ends; whereas from another point of view he is an appendage to his germ-plasm, at whose disposal he puts his energies in return for a bonus of pleasure. He is the mortal vehicle of a (possibly) immortal substance—like the inheritor of an entailed property, who is only the temporary holder of an estate which survives him. The separation of the sexual instincts from the ego-instincts would simply reflect this twofold function of the individual“ (78). At the same time, however, Freud states that “finally, as regards the differentiation of psychical energies, we are led to the conclusion that to begin with, during the state of narcissism, they exist together and that our analysis is too coarse to distinguish between them; not until there is object-cathexis is it possible to discriminate a sexual energy—the libido—from an energy of the ego-[drives]” (76). The driveeconomic problem that unfolds in the turning of the drive from ego to object (or vice versa) becomes a basis for the “dualism” Freud ascribes to the psychic apparatus, in which he distinguishes between death drives and life drives as a result of this “twofold existence” of the human being (Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 52–53). This tension persists throughout Freud’s work and we again need to emphasize that the dualism Freud speaks of is not directed at a split between psyche and soma; instead, it is a split within the psychic apparatus, which must itself always be thought of as based on the body as “vehicle” or “bearer” (Träger). See Freud, “On Narcissism,” 78. For a detailed and revised discussion of the drive, see Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 53–54. Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 64. 138

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For Krauss, an object is first and foremost an “external object,” which she describes as being synonymous with a “physical object.” Opposite such physical objects she places the realm of the psyche, which is why she can locate the medium of video there, as a psychological situation, the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object— an Other—and invest it in the Self.139 This definition of an external object is problematic for several reasons. For Freud, the object of psychoanalysis, of the psychic apparatus, is above all the object of the drive. As such, it is the thing in regard to which or through which the [drive] is able to achieve its aim. It is what is most variable about a [drive] and is not originally connected with it, but becomes assigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possible.140 The drive’s aim, as Freud informs us, is always satisfaction, “but although the ultimate aim of each [drive] remains unchangeable, there may yet be different paths leading to the same ultimate aim.”141 Different objects emerge according to these “different paths”— objects that, as Freud emphasizes, are “not necessarily something extraneous [ein fremder Gegenstand, a strange/alien object].”142 This object may just as well be a part of the subject’s own body. Furthermore, the object changes along with “the course of the vicissitudes which the [drive] undergoes during its existence.”143 Thus, in psychoanalysis, an object is not tied to a specific physical object. Instead, it can be virtually

139 Krauss, 57. As Krauss does not define this notion of the “Self” and uses it throughout the essay as synonymous with Freud’s notion of the “ego,” I prefer to use the psychoanalytic term “ego” so as not to muddy the waters. 140 Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” 122. 141 Freud, 122. 142 Freud, 122; Sigmund Freud, “Triebe und Triebschicksale,” in Werke aus den Jahren 1913–1917, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10 [in German] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), 215. 143 Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” 123; Freud, “Triebe und Triebschicksale,” 215. The German Lebensschicksale, which has been translated into English as “vicissitudes,” literally means “fates of life.”

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anything or change into anything at any time, according to the turns of the drive, which Freud calls “displacement” (Verschiebung).144 Freud also informs us, however, that a particularly close attachment of the [drive] to its object is distinguished by the term ‘fixation’. This frequently occurs at very early periods of the development of [a drive] and puts an end to its mobility through its intense opposition to detachment.145 This fixation of the drive and its object in an early developmental stage is an effect of what Freud calls “primal repression” (Urverdrängung).146 Another aspect of Freud’s concept of the object is striking here. He does not speak of an “external object” as opposed to “the subject’s own body,” but rather of an “alien object” as opposed to “one’s own body.” In other words, Freud does not speak of a difference that manifests in physical objects; he speaks merely of the difference between one’s own body and other objects. For Freud, what makes an object alien is far from determined by its physicality. Nor is there a distinction between “internal” and “external” in the sense of a dualism between psyche and soma. On the contrary, Freud argues in “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914) that for the psychic apparatus, “it is a matter of indifference whether this internal process of working-over is carried out upon real or imaginary objects.”147 “Internal” here refers to the psychic apparatus of a subject without presupposing a break with the external world understood as physical. “Alien,” we may conclude, is not only that which lies

144 Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” 123; Freud, “Triebe und Triebschicksale,” 215. 145 Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” 123. 146 “We have reason to assume that there is a primal repression, a first phase of repression, which consists in the psychical (ideational) representative of the [drive] being denied entrance into the conscious. With this a fixation is established; the representative in question persists unaltered from then onwards and the instinct remains attached to it. This is due to the properties of unconscious processes of which we shall speak later. The second stage of repression, repression proper, affects mental derivatives of the repressed representative, or such trains of thought as, originating elsewhere, have come into associative connection with it. On account of this association, these ideas experience the same fate as what was primally repressed. Repression proper, therefore, is actually an after-pressure [Nachdrängen].” Sigmund Freud, “Repression,” (1915) in Standard Edition, vol. 14, 148. 147 Freud, “On Narcissism,” 86.

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outside of the psyche but also that which is not recognized by it as part of itself. When Freud says of narcissism that it is signified by a withdrawal of the libido from “the external world,” he thus has in mind not the realm of physical objects, but all objects that are alien to one’s psychic reality. Freud emphasizes this point in his introductory remarks on the narcissism of the neurotic, where analysis shows that he has by no means broken off his erotic relations to people and things. He still retains them in phantasy; i.e. he has, on the one hand, substituted for real objects imaginary ones from his memory, or has mixed the latter with the former; and on the other hand, he has renounced the initiation of motor activities for the attainment of his aims in connection with those objects.148 To think of objects as objects of phantasy leads us to the interesting conclusion that for the psychic reality of a subject, it does not make a difference whether an object is “real” or “imaginary,” as both can affect the level of the drive. Thus, if the drive is unchangeable in its aim (satisfaction) but its objects are exchangeable and constantly displaced in the psychic apparatus, we can think of objects as representatives for—and, as such, materializations (symbolic manifestations) of—the drive. This is what Freud calls Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen (usually translated as “ideational representatives”). Such manifestations place a subject’s relation to its object in the realm of a (psychic) “presentation” (Vorstellung) of a “representation” (Repräsentanz). What is represented here is the drive, and Freud informs us that this representation can either be conscious or unconscious.149

148 Freud, 74. 149 “I am in fact of the opinion that the antithesis of conscious and unconscious is not applicable to [drives]. A [drive] can never become an object of consciousness— only the idea that represents the [drive] can. Even in the unconscious, moreover, a [drive] cannot be represented otherwise than by an idea. If the [drive] did not attach itself to an idea or manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing about it. When we nevertheless speak of an unconscious […] impulse [of the drive] or of a repressed […] impulse [of the drive], the looseness of phraseology is a harmless one. We can only mean an […] impulse [of the drive] the ideational representative of which is unconscious, for nothing else comes into consideration.” Freud, “The Unconscious,” 177.

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While Krauss does not (or at least not always) distinguish between physical and psychoanalytic objects, her examples and general argument nevertheless show that video is a perfect place to reveal their difference. The best example she gives in this regard is Richard Serra and Nancy Holt’s Boomerang (1974, fig. 16). In this piece, Nancy Holt speaks while wearing headphones that feed her words back to her with a small delay caused by the recording device—or, more precisely, the delay of the circulating electromagnetic signal. Holt’s monologue is interrupted by the feedback of her own words, which, according to Krauss, causes her “great difficulty coinciding with herself as a subject.”150 What Krauss’s example and formulation show, however, is that in video we find a difference, a discrepancy between the experiencing body (be it on the side of production or reception) and the subject. When Krauss uses Serra and Holt’s Boomerang as an example, she makes it clear that her concept of video does not depend on a physical body, as found in some video performances, such as Dan Graham’s Time Delay Room (1974, fig. 17). Instead, it is about an impossible location for a body—a position between two positions. Boomerang is not only a document of a performance, it is itself a video work. Holt’s two positions (in front of the camera and projected by the monitor) are not literally, but structurally simultaneous. Standing in front of a camera means having one’s picture taken (a literal understanding of this sentence recalls the uncanny dimension of photography and vague colonialist anecdotes about the fear of one’s picture being taken along with one’s soul). One’s picture is

Fig. 16 Richard Serra with Nancy Holt, Boomerang, video still, 1974, © Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York, courtesy Sprüth Magers.

150

Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 53.

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taken to “take on a life of its own” as a projected double. To reinforce this function of the camera, the video image returns, circulates, and is brought back to life only in this frozen movement of the recording. The body is “impossible” in video insofar as its position is imagined as simultaneously existing between two points. Thus, Krauss’s formulation already contains a phantasmatic structure induced by video’s setting, which I will soon elaborate.151 Krauss notes of Holt’s disrupted, fragmented, and “boomeranging” speech: Through that distracted reverberation of a single word— and even word-fragment—there forms an image of what it is like to be totally cut-off from history, even, in this case, the immediate history of the sentence one has just spoken. Another word for that history from which Holt feels herself to be disconnected is ‘text.’152

Fig. 17 Dan Graham, Time Delay Room, installation plan/illustration of the video installation with live feedback (8 second delay), 1974, reproduced from Marianne Brouwer, ed., Dan Graham. Werke 1965–2000, 149.

151 152

For the role of the phantasm in video, see chapter IV. Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 53

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The wording here—to be “cut-off from history”—is reminiscent of the function of the subject as an effect of the unconscious chain of signifiers. As indicated by Lévi-Strauss, history (first and foremost, the history of a subject) is based on the myth produced by the structure of language. The subject’s speech is testimony to how this history is constructed from the place of the Other that is language, which is both alien to the subject yet forms its very foundation. What is this text if not the unconscious structure of the symbolic, constantly and necessarily writing itself into the body?153 Krauss adds that the text Holt is disconnected from is about a “fixed choreography, a written script, a musical score, or a sketchy set of notes around which to improvise.” It is “something that existed before the given moment” and that in a larger way […] evokes the more general historical relationship between a specific text and the history constructed by all the texts of a given genre.154 For Krauss, Holt is severed from “a sense of text” by the mirror-reflection in the video (which, as she points out, is auditory here). The “way language connects her both to her own past and to a world of objects”155 is no longer functional. In other words, Krauss proposes what she has previously formulated as the “collapsed present,” in which time and the resulting logic of difference are still operative but no longer effective. The result, for Krauss, is self-encapsulation, defined as “the body or psyche as its own surround.”

153 See the previous section of this chapter on “Body/Subject.” 154 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 53. 155 Krauss, 53.

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2.4 Collapsed Present Krauss’s perspective on video is inevitably tied to an early video practice that largely focused on video’s capacity to simultaneously record and transmit. In this early practice, either the performer or the spectator (or both) was confronted with (and had to respond to) “the continually renewed image of himself.” Krauss formulated this setting as a “situation of spatial closure, promoting a condition of self-reflection.”156 Interestingly, it is this image that, for Krauss, “supplant[s] the consciousness of anything prior to it, [that] becomes the unchanging text of the performer.”157 There is, then, a moment of exchange—of interchangeability—between image and text, which is the most important aspect to take from this argument. Furthermore, we encounter a problem of temporality, as already indicated in the problem of video’s collapsed present.158 It must be emphasized here that what Krauss calls “a leveling out […] of temporality”159 or the “collapsed present”160 in her examples, which include Acconci’s Centers and Air Time, Serra and Holt’s Boomerang, and Lynda Benglis’s Now (figs. 18/19), is not limited to video works that directly depict this specific property of video. On the contrary, we find this effect in any video work, since it pertains to video’s inherent structure.

Figs. 18/19 Lynda Benglis, Now, video stills, 1973, reproduced from Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 56.

156 Krauss, 54. 157 Krauss, 54. 158 For a discussion of the problem of temporality and the “collapsed present” in relation to narcissism and the drive, see section 3 of this chapter and chapter IV.3.5: “Encircling the Hole: Drive.” 159 Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 55. 160 Krauss, 54.

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Krauss’s argument thus loses most of its urgency and persuasiveness at this point, for it misses the necessary step from examining video’s imagery to offering a structural analysis of what video is. Krauss’s argument gets entangled between technical characteristics of simultaneity and what appear as their psychic equivalents in narcissism on the one side and (empirical) examples performed by (empirical) bodies on the other. This methodological entanglement has been a recurring problem in discussions of video ever since. The reason for this is that such video theories do not problematize mediality as such. For Krauss and all those who follow her, there is a split between video’s technical side—its variable parts and devices, all of which are based on the fluctuating electromagnetic signal—and its “medial” side as a narcissistic mirror-reflection. This results in a methodology that reproduces this dualistic split without addressing it. Instead of following this dualism, I argue that video exposes the medium as that which inextricably links body and psyche through its own circulating movement, without suspending either of these two “poles.” Krauss speaks about the “infinite regress” of early video works that exemplify video’s unique capacity to simultaneously record and transmit. However, we must move beyond a discussion of the mirroring effects of video’s imagery to find the structure that enables this reflection, and ask what else it does. It is no doubt fascinating to follow this infinite regress, like standing between two mirrors and enjoying their infinite reprojections. But is this all that video does? Unlike a mirror, video records and registers—even if the material is not stored on tape or another recording device for later use. Video writes the image—even for just a second—into an electromagnetic circuit. The time delay of this image-writing process, of the circulation within the electromagnetic circuit, leads Krauss to speak of a collapsed present in video, and we can clearly see how this applies to all video. Video makes a cut; it records a piece of time and transposes it into a different temporal logic. As Krauss notes with reference to Benglis’s Now—in which Benglis records herself in front of a prerecorded rendition of the same performance, repeating the question “Is it now?” and the command “Now!”—“all layers of the ‘now’ are equally present.”161 I would specify that all layers of this “now” point to an unattainable past transformed into a continuous, stored, written now.

161 Krauss, 55.

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3. The Aesthetics of Narcissism 3.1 On Narcissism If it is true that “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology,”162 then the myth of Narcissus might indeed be crucial in shedding light on modernist thought and its refracted continuation in the postmodernist practice of video. The myth of Narcissus has inspired art, literature, and theory for two thousand years, and eventually, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it found itself transformed into an “ism” as one of the fundamental concepts of modernist thought rooted in psychoanalysis. With postmodernism, narcissism became an even more popular concept, particularly in the field of media studies. Even before Krauss, Marshall McLuhan used the concept of narcissism to formulate the premises of mediality. Here the subject emerges as “hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form.”163 Thus, for McLuhan, one etymological lineage is most instructive for narcissism as a media theory—namely, the lineage it shares with narcosis or numbness.164 For McLuhan, the medium unfolds and imposes its captivating narcissistic trance on the subject because it is as much an extension of the body as it is an “autoamputation” of its functions.165 Krauss, specifying this medial function of narcissism for video, is strongly influenced by McLuhan’s rendering of narcissism as narcosis insofar as it also presupposes the idea of an infinite mirrorreflection in which the subject is “bracketed”—in or out?—or in which, in

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), xviii. Adorno and Horkheimer demonstrate the relation between myth and enlightenment as both “difference between and the unity of mythical nature and enlightened mastery of nature” (xviii): “The cause of enlightenment’s relapse into mythology is to be sought not so much in the nationalist, pagan, or other modern mythologies concocted specifically to cause such a relapse as in the fear of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself. […] False clarity is only another name for myth. Myth was always obscure and luminous at once. It has always been distinguished by its familiarity and its exemption from the work of concepts” (xvi–xvii). Almut-Barbara Renger points out in Mythos Narziß that Narcissus is an example of how in modernity, a myth is built in such a way. In other words, it could be argued that the myth of Narcissus is itself a foundation of modernist thought, shedding light on the subject-object relation in modernism. See Almut-Barbara Renger, ed., Mythos Narziß: Texte von Ovid bis Jacques Lacan [in German] (Leipzig: Reclam, 2005). 163 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 11. 164 McLuhan, 41. 165 McLuhan, 42. 162

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McLuhan’s words, the subject and the image become “a closed system.”166 This rendering of video and new media as a narcissistic “hall of mirrors” remains a commonplace in video theory today. Video is depicted as illusionary, ephemeral, and elusive—as a bodiless (and disembodying) form. In psychoanalytic terms, there is an emphasis on video’s imaginary capacities.167 What is usually omitted, however, and what I seek to elaborate here, is the dimension of the Other on which narcissism, as a medial structure, depends. In order to fall in love with one’s own image— or, in McLuhan’s terms, to become a closed system under the influence of a medium—there needs to be an object to which the subject relates and toward which it positions itself. The myth of Narcissus is a story about love, no doubt, and about love relations, but it is also a story about media—namely, about image and language and how these are related. What is crucial, however, as Kenneth J. Knoespel points out in “Narcissus and the Invention of Personal History” (2016), is that from the beginning this myth held a psychological dimension toward the question of love relations, contrary to what many theories proclaim. Knoespel informs us that in antiquity the process of falling in love was conceived as an attraction to an image of the self seen in the retina of the beloved. In other words, falling in love with another was portrayed as falling in love with a reflection of oneself.168

166 McLuhan, 41. 167 For a detailed discussion, see chapter IV, specifically the introduction “On Si[gh]t(e): The Video Condition.” 168 Kenneth Jacob Knoespel, Narcissus and the Invention of Personal History (New York: Routledge, 2016), 11.

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Thus, the relation between subject and (love-)object in the myth of Narcissus emerges not only as mediatory but also as mediated through an image-reflection and—with Echo—through the reverberations of speech. In psychoanalytic terms, Ovid’s tale can be seen as prefiguring the objects of the gaze and the voice,169 exemplified in Narcissus and Echo, respectively. The myth reveals the conundrum of mediality understood as the function that links subjects together.170 Voice and gaze are exposed as “love objects par excellence—not in the sense that we fall in love with a voice or a gaze, but rather in the sense that they are a medium, a catalyst that sets off love.”171 We thus turn to both the myth and to narcissism as rendered by Freud and Lacan in order to determine the premises of mediality itself.

3.1.1 Ovid’s Narcissus and Echo Unlike other versions of the myth of Narcissus, Ovid’s version tells the story of Narcissus and Echo, and it is worth noting that their corresponding objects—the gaze and the voice—are also the basic objects of video. The tale begins with the prophecy of the seer Tiresias, who announces the fate of the young Narcissus. When asked whether Narcissus will “attain a ripe old age,” Tiresias responds: “si se non noverit”—“If he ne’er know himself.”172 Narcissus has many suitors, none of whom interest him. Echo

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Psychoanalysis knows five objects: Freud’s “partial objects”—the breast, the phallus, and feces—and Lacan’s addition of the voice and the gaze. As objects, Slavoj Žižek explains, “they are not on the side of the looking/hearing subject but on the side of what the subject sees or hears.” Both the voice and the gaze thus address the subject from the side of the object: “The object returns the gaze from this blind spot. The situation is homologous at the level of voice: it is as if, when we’re talking, whatever we say is an answer to a primordial address by the Other— we’re always already addressed, but this address is blank, it cannot be pinpointed to a specific agent, but is a kind of empty a priori, the formal ‘condition of possibility’ of our speaking.” Slavoj Žižek, “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 90. For further discussion of the gaze, see chapter IV.3.4: “Eye (I)/Gaze.” This function can also be named the function of the signifier as that which mediates a subject for another signifier. See also chapter II.1.1 “The Third.” Salecl and Žižek, Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, 3. Ovid, “Narcissus and Echo,” in Metamorphoses, vol. 1, bk. III (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 347–48. A literal translation of Tiresias’s prophecy is: “If he does not know himself.”

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also falls in love with Narcissus at first sight. But since she has been punished by Juno for her garrulity, she can no longer speak freely and can only partially repeat, mirror, and “return” the words of others as she hears them.173 We encounter two types of repetition here, auditory and visual, both of which operate in very different ways. The auditory repetition is encountered first and “belongs” to Echo. While Echo can only repeat what she has already heard, she uses the signifiers thrown at her in a subversive way, carefully selecting them so as to make them her own. Her “nature” forbids her to speak on her own,174 yet it is possible for her to wait for sounds that she will repeat.175 And so, in her conversation with Narcissus, she carefully chooses her words—which are, in fact, his words. Narcissus asks, “Is anyone here?” and Echo replies, “Here!”176 He asks, “Why do you run from me?” and she replies with the full sentence.177 He asks, “Let us come together here?” and she replies, “Come together!” (coeamus, which can refer both to a meeting and to sexual intercourse178). And eventually, as Echo leaves the forest and shows herself to Narcissus, she replies to his frantic outcry of “Hands off! I’d rather die than give you power over me” with only his last words, “Give you power over me.”179 What is striking about this sentence is its peculiar grammatical structure. While emoriar (I would die) is phrased in the first person singular, the last part of the sentence, nostri (of us / of ours) can refer to both the genitive plural of ego (from nos—“we,” which is both masculine and feminine) and to the masculine and neutral genitive or masculine nominative of noster—“our.”180 There is thus an ambivalence in Narcissus’s exclamation, “I’d rather die than give you power over us”—this

173 “tamen haec in fine loquendi ingeminat voces auditaque verba reportat.” Ovid 368–69. 174 “natura repugnat nec sinit, incipiat.” Ovid 376–77. 175 “sed, quod sinit, illa parata est exspectare sonos, ad quos sua verba remittat.” Ovid 377–78. 176 “ecquis adest?”—“adest!” Ovid 379–80. 177 “me fugis?” Ovid 384. 178 “huc coeamus?”—“coeamus.” Ovid 386–87. 179 “manus conplexibus aufer! ante ‘ait’ emoriar, quam sit tibi copia nostri.” Ovid 390–91. 180 Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. “nostri,” accessed September 7, 2018, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=nostri&la=la&can=nostri0.

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“us” can be male, female, neutral. It is not clear, then, whether Narcissus speaks of himself in the third person plural, treating himself as an other, or whether he refers to Echo and himself.181 This passage in Ovid’s myth has often led to an interpretation of Echo as weak, passive, and constrained.182 I argue, on the contrary, that Echo’s use of language subverts her verbal limitations. Echo’s speech is not her own; it is, in fact, located in the realm of the Other,183 yet she makes use of it. This Other is not to be confused with the (empirical) other who speaks; instead, it is understood as the symbolic function of language in its totality. Language, as Ovid’s tale teaches us, is a structure that does not belong to the subject. Instead, the subject is subjected to language, which is never private.184 Echo appropriates and subjectivizes language through her speech, through the way she cuts and edits the stream of signifiers given to her. She makes these signifiers her own, despite the knowledge that language is never solely hers. Narcissus, however, entirely misses this dimension of language. Unable to locate the place of speech as both subjective and radically outside of the subject, he confuses Echo’s words as her own and his words as his own. He is horrified by the repetition he encounters in Echo’s speech because he is confronted with the difference of the symbolic, which also signifies a difference between him and his “own” speech. By saying nostri he speaks of

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Although it is not uncommon to use the first person plural instead of the singular in Latin, Narcissus’s speech shows a conspicuous accumulation of these plural forms. For a discussion of the function of the plural in Narcissus’s speech, see Christian Kiening and Ulrich Johannes Beil, Urszenen des Medialen: Von Moses zu Caligari [in German] (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012), 88–9; Almut-Barbara Renger, “Narrating Narcissus, Reflecting Cognition: Illusion, Disillusion, ‘SelfCognition’ and ’Love as Passion’ in Ovid and Beyond,” Frontiers of Narrative Studies 3, no. 1 (2017): 9–32. For this reading of Echo as “silenced,” see, for instance, Judith de Luce, “‘O, For A Thousand Tongues to Sing’: A Footnote on Metamorphosis, Silence, and Power,” in Woman’s Power, Man’s Game: Essays on Classical Antiquity in Honor of Joy K. King, ed. Mary DeForest (Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1993), 305–21. I write “Other” with a capital O here in accordance with the Lacanian differentiation between the (imaginary) other and the (symbolic) Other. See, for further discussion, this chapter, section 3.2: “On the Other” and chapter IV.3: “The Phantasm—$ ◊ a.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968), §240ff.

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himself and his speech, the subject of statement and the subject of enunciation,185 and tries to unify both positions. At the same time, his horrific experience is initiated not only by speech but by a bodily encounter with Echo, who attempts to embrace him. Before she makes herself known to him by stepping out of the forest, Narcissus seems captivated by his words. It is only when he recognizes that the source of what he believes to be his own words is another body that he flees in terror. The second version of the repetitive structure encountered in Ovid’s tale is visual, and it famously pertains to Narcissus, who falls in love with his own image. While in Echo’s case the auditory repetition inserts a difference on the temporal level, Narcissus’s visual repetition is immediate and takes place in the present. It is an instantaneous mirror-reflection, a repetition of “temporal concurrance,”186 in Krauss’s words. Unlike Echo, Narcissus cannot find a way to appropriate this repetition: as he touches the water, the image is destroyed. Both Echo and Narcissus nevertheless share a similar fate, as both are eventually deprived of their bodies. Echo becomes voice187 and Narcissus turns into a flower. What is striking, however, is the ambiguous way both figures lose their bodies. It is not a complete loss—it is a transformation into “almost nothing,” but a small material remainder persists. Both metamorphoses work on a level of “frozenness”: the once moving body turns into something static, a stone or a flower, and something mute.188 It is as if the repetition Echo and Narcissus encounter petrifies them, captivates them in the frozen image or the echo. Narcissus falls in love with his image in the pond, with what Ovid calls a “bodiless/unsubstantial hope”; he “mistakes for a body what is only a shadow (image).”189 He does not recognize what he sees but he desires it, and the delusion deceives his eyes and causes an error in perception.190

185 186 187 188

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See footnote 125. Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 52. “vox tantum atque ossa supersunt: vox manet”—“the voice and bones are all that is left: the voice remains.” Ovid, “Narcissus and Echo,” 398–99. Especially in Echo’s case it makes one think of the etymology of the German words for “voice” (Stimme) and “mute” (stumm), which are closely related. See Kluge and Seebold, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, s.vv. “Stimme,” “stumm.” “visae correptus imagine formae spem sine corpore amat, corpus putat esse, quod umbra est.” Ovid, “Narcissus and Echo,” 416–17. In relation to the following chapter, which addresses the phantasm, it is interesting to note that in ancient Greek and Latin thought, the terms “image,” “shadow,” and “phantasma” have a close semantic relationship. See chapter IV.2.1: “Phantasma.” “quid videat, nescit; sed quod videt, uritur illo, atque oculos idem, qui decipit, incitat error.” Ovid 430–31.

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Unlike McLuhan—and an entire school of media theory in his tradition—who argues that our medial and social narcissism directly relates to a numbness to the fact that what we see in media is our own reflection (or, in other words, a technological extension of our body), I propose that Narcissus’s fate is sealed not at the moment when he falls in love with his reflection in the pond (the moment of narcosis or numbness, in McLuhan’s terms),191 but when he “knows himself”—that is, when he realizes that it is his reflection he sees; that it is an image of himself, and as such, this image is not identical with his body. The first stage of Narcissus’s experience with his image is, as it were, perfect. Ovid describes him gazing at his image, “stunned,”192 and that he “keeps motionless and with an unchanging expression on his face like a statue carved from Parian marble.”193 What is striking is the usage of no less than five different descriptions of motionlessness in this sentence: adstupet (stunned / struck senseless), inmotus (unmoving), eodem (at the same spot), haeret (fixated), and, finally, the likening to a marmore signum (a marble statue). Ovid continues to describe the relation between Narcissus and his image using reflexive pairs: “he admires for which he himself is admired,” “he desires and is desired himself,” “he seeks and is sought.”194 After countless attempts to grasp, embrace, and kiss his own reflection, Narcissus eventually realizes that he sees himself in the reflection of the pond: “iste ego sum!” (“That / he there is me!”), he cries,195 and continues: “I realized, my image no longer deceives me.”196 Only then, faced with the realization of having fallen in love with his own image—in other words, when he realizes that he is split; that

191 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 41–42. 192 Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. “astupeo/adstupet,” accessed September 11, 2018, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=adstupet&la=la; Lewis and Short, s.v. “stupeo/stupet,” accessed September 11, 2018, http://www.perseus. tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=stupet&la=la. 193 “adstupet ipse sibi vultuque inmotus eodem haeret ut e Pario formatum marmore signum.” Ovid, “Narcissus and Echo,” 418–19. 194 “cunctaque miratur, quibus est mirabilis ipse: se cupit inprudens et, qui probat, ipse probatur, dumque petit, petitur, pariterque accendit et ardet.” Ovid 424–26. 195 “The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.” McLuhan, Understanding Media, 41. 196 “sensi, nec me mea fallit imago.” Ovid, “Narcissus and Echo,” 463.

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he is a subject insofar as he is reduplicated both as image-object for himself and as spectating body—does Narcissus despair and eventually die. This difference between body and image and the associated reduplication in the ersonal pronoun “I” (which is used to describe both the body and the image) is the defining moment of the tale.197 Who is “I”? It is at this moment that Rimbaud’s famous dictum “Je est un autre” (“I is another”)198 again comes to mind, for it is a moment of separation between body and I (ego)—a moment in which it becomes clear that these are not identical and not even congruent. It is this encounter with one’s own difference from oneself that leads Narcissus to say: “Almost nothing it is that stands in the way of the loving.”199 And it is this minimal difference in the visual repetition that causes the entire scene to fall apart, confronting Narcissus with himself as an other. In other words: Narcissus’s fate is sealed not because he falls in love with himself, but because he encounters himself as an other and realizes that even in a “narcissistic” scene, there is always a love-object that is never identical with oneself, even if one chooses one’s own ego as said object.

3.1.2 Freud on Narcissism Narcissism emerged as a modern clinical category in 1899, when psychiatrist Paul Näcke used the term to describe what Sigmund Freud paraphrased in “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914) as “the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated.” 200 Freud defines narcissism as a form of “object-choice” 201 in the “regular

197 198 199 200 201

See also this chapter, section 3.1.3: “Lacan on Narcissism: Schema L.” Rimbaud, “Letter to Paul Demeny, Charleville, May 15, 1871,” 375. “minimum est, quod amantibus obstat.” Ovid, “Narcissus and Echo,” 453. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 73. Freud, 87–89. For a short introduction to the psychoanalytic definition of “object,” see footnote 92.

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course of human sexual development” 202 in which libido, or sexual energy,203 is withdrawn from external love-objects and “introverted” into one’s own ego. This “cathexis” (Besetzung)204 of the ego is a result of withdrawal from external objects, which presupposes a prior state in which external love-objects have been chosen. Freud defines different stages in the sexual development of the human psyche in relation to this object-choice: from auto-erotism in early childhood—which does not yet know object cathexis since there is not yet a distinction for the subject between internal and external, body and surrounding world—to the development of an ego through “a new psychical action—in order to bring

202 Freud, 73. 203 “Libido” is a term Freud uses for his economic model of the drive. Analogous to how hunger relates to the “[drive] of nutrition,” libido relates to the “sexual [drive]” (Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” (1905) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7, A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works (1901–1905) (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 135). As Freud elaborates in his “Three Essays,” this understanding presupposes a split both between self-preservation and sexual drives as well as between what we call instincts and drives. In other words, a drive is not an instinct since the satisfaction of a drive is not subject to a stimulus-response schema: there is no fixed object to satisfy a drive. For Freud, drives are located at the “frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” 121–22). Even before he develops his theory of the drives, Freud thus defines libido as a “psychical stimulus”—that is, as a “state” in which “somatic sexual excitation” becomes psychical (Sigmund Freud, “On the Grounds For Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description ‘Anxiety Neurosis’,” (1895) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 3, Early Psycho-Analytic Publications (1893–1899) (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), 109). In “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” Freud gives the most conclusive definition of libido: “Libido is an expression taken from the theory of the emotions. We call by that name the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude (though not at present actually measurable), of those [drives] which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word ‘love’” (Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” 90). In German, Besetzung literally means “occupation” in the sense of physical space. 204 It refers to a place that has been occupied, taken up for use by something or someone else. Freud defines Besetzung as a function in the psychic apparatus in which psychic energy, deriving from the drives, is cathected—in other words, “placed into” an object. It is important to add that such objects can be external, physical objects as well as intrapsychic objects. See Jean Laplanche and JeanBertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 2006), s.v. “cathexis.”

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about narcissism.”205 In his earlier text, “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia” (1911), Freud describes the emergence of narcissism as a developmental stage of the human psyche: Recent investigations have directed our attention to a stage in the development of the libido which it passes through on the way from auto-erotism to object-love. This stage has been given the name of narcissism. What happens is this. There comes a time in the development of the individual at which he unifies his sexual [drives] (which have hitherto been engaged in auto-erotic activities) in order to obtain a love-object; and he begins by taking himself, his own body, as his love-object, and only subsequently proceeds from this to the choice of some person other than himself as his object. This half-way phase between auto-erotism and object-love may perhaps be indispensable normally; but it appears that many people linger unusually long in this condition, and that many of its features are carried over by them into the later stages of their development.206 While Freud notes that the early stage of narcissism and the development from auto-erotism through the emergence of the ego to narcissism in early childhood is, for the efforts of a psychoanalytic theory formation, “obscured by a number of different influences,”207 it becomes clear that in order to emerge, narcissism requires the subject to distinguish between ego and object. Freud emphasizes that this difference does not exist for the subject from the beginning and that the ego develops over time.208 Narcissism is thus a movement of withdrawal from already established external objects. For Freud, an object is understood primarily as a loveobject—that is, as a “place” that is cathected with libidinal energy. He

205 Freud, “On Narcissism,” 77. 206 Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” (1911) in Standard Edition, vol. 12, 60–61. 207 Freud, “On Narcissism,” 75. 208 Freud, 77.

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divides the energy of the psychic apparatus into libidinal energy, which derives from the sexual drives, and self-preservation energy, which derives from the so-called ego- or self-preservation drives. While selfpreservation drives can “justifiably be attributed to every living creature,” the development of libidinal drives is characteristic of human beings, and narcissism is the “libidinal complement to the egoism of the [drive] of self-preservation.”209 The distinction between the two is as radical as it is crucial to Freud’s project, since it presupposes that the libidinal drives and the libido itself are not part of self-preservation but, on the contrary, separate from it—a point Freud emphasizes in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905). The evolution of the libido and its developmental stage of narcissism further introduce a distinction between ego-libido and object-libido. While object-libido refers to the cathexis of libido to external objects— objects external to the subject’s own body—ego-libido places this libidinal energy within the subject’s own ego. This cathexis of the ego is what we call “narcissism.” Freud emphasizes that this ego-libidinal state is primary to object-libido and, even more, it is the place from which object-cathexes are cast forth: Narcissistic or ego-libido seems to be the great reservoir from which the object-cathexes are sent out and into which they are withdrawn once more; the narcissistic libidinal cathexis of the ego is the original state of things, realized in earliest childhood, and is merely covered by the later extrusions of libido, but in essentials persists behind them.210 It is curious that Freud describes the narcissism encountered in adults as a “secondary narcissism”—in other words, a narcissism built upon a primary form that appears along with the ego itself. Logically, in order for the ego to emerge, the subject must have encountered difference in the sense that it recognizes a separation between itself and others. At the same time, “self-love” as found in narcissism (as love-cathexis of the own ego) can only develop based on a recognition of this difference. Narcissism is thus built on a knowledge of difference that enables the

209 Freud, 73–74. 210 Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” 218.

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subject to choose its own ego as love-object. Freud’s separation between object-libido and ego-libido thus becomes obscured in narcissism, as the ego itself becomes the object for the libido. At the same time, however, the ego is also the source of this libidinal energy. Also of interest here is the role of the ego and the corresponding function of narcissism as Freud develops it in Totem and Taboo (1912–13). Here Freud elaborates the different developmental stages of the libido, from early childhood auto-erotism to “adult forms”211 of libidinal manifestation based on an object-choice. Between these two states, autoerotism and object-libido, lies a third medial stage, that of narcissism, which “divide[s] the first stage, that of auto-erotism, into two.”212 Freud elaborates the function of this stage as an “organization of the drives”: At this intermediate stage, the importance of which is being made more and more evident by research, the hitherto isolated sexual [drives] have already come together into a single whole and have also found an object. But this object is not an external one, extraneous to the subject, but it is his own ego, which has been constituted at about this same time. Bearing in mind pathological fixations of this new stage, which become observable later, we have given it the name of ‘narcissism’. The subject behaves as though he were in love with himself; his egoistic [drives] and his libidinal wishes are not yet separable under our analysis. Although we are not yet in a position to describe with sufficient accuracy the characteristics of this narcissistic stage, at which the hitherto dissociated sexual [drives] come together into a single unity and cathect the ego as an object, we suspect already that this narcissistic organization is never wholly abandoned. A human being remains to some extent narcissistic even after he has found external objects for his libido.213

Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo,” (1913) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 13, Totem and Taboo and Other Works (1913–1914) (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 88. 212 Freud, 88. 213 Freud, 88–89. 211

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It becomes evident that in narcissism, the various sexual drives of the infant (the child’s “polymorphously perverse disposition”214) are bundled and unified into “ego cathexis.” This is what Freud refers to as “narcissistic organization” and we can take this term quite literally. What happens in this developmental stage of narcissism is an organ-ization, as the body’s multiple parts, its erogenous zones, and the emanating sexual drives are put together, structured under the newly emerging ego. The ego is the locus that accumulates and unifies body parts and their inherent psychical excitations. From the libido-cathected ego, libido is sent out to objects and can be drawn back again “much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out.”215 The question thus arises for Freud: Why is an object-cathexis with libido necessary if the ego is the original site of cathexis? The answer is given by the fact that external objects (objects outside of the subject’s body) have already been introduced to the subject once the ego has been established. In fact, the introduction of objects other than the body—which is at the center of auto-erotism before such a distinction is made—serves as the condition of the possibility to encounter oneself as an object. In other words, it serves as the condition of possibility for the ego. From this perspective, the ego is a product of an experience of oneself as an other; as an object. “That there is me” (as Narcissus exclaims) is the acknowledgement of this division as necessary for the proclaimed identity of the ego. It is only on the grounds of difference that the identifying forces of the ego can be built. Two aspects of Freud’s concept of narcissism are illuminating for our investigation of video. The first has to do with the function of narcissism in the subject’s development as a mediation between subject and object—a process in which an object is formed along with subjectivity. We can relate this medial movement in narcissism to Hegel’s dialectical movement of recognition/acknowledgement and to the mise-enscène of video, in which a spectating subject unfolds along with the images it encounters. The second aspect concerns the role of narcissism as organizing the body—that is, the signification of the body and the unification of the drives. This contradicts any reading of narcissism as body/mind-dualism, thus rendering obsolete the idea that video (understood as narcissistic) is a merely imaginary structure.

214 215

Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” 191. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 75.

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3.1.3 Lacan on Narcissism: Schema L For Jacques Lacan, narcissism, in accordance with its mythological roots, is closely linked to the crucial aspects we discussed in Freud’s theory: the image and the imaginary, and the resulting questions of identification and the subject’s relation to the other/Other. The mirror-reflection in the myth of Narcissus forms the core of Lacan’s conception of the ego and the imaginary, most famously in his essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949).216 Here Lacan discusses the function of the I in relation to the recognition the child experiences when it sees and identifies its own image in the mirror and enters into the symbolic: “Thou art that.”217 When this happens, according to Lacan, “the specular I turns into the social I.”218 The relation between the imaginary and the symbolic is thus introduced as a nexus of the constant tension between the subject’s identification with and alienation from its ego. Later, in “The Seminar on the Purloined Letter” (1955) and “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1953), Lacan introduces the Schema L (fig. 20) as an integral part of his early psychoanalytic concepts. This schema elaborates the relation between the imaginary and the symbolic as creating a realm in which the subject situates itself. Krauss’s argument is also based on the formula of the Schema L, as it describes the connection between the symbolic register (represented in fig. 20 as the “unconscious”) and the imaginary register, and how these registers structure the subject’s relation to the Other. According to this model, an imaginary relation between the ego (a) and its specular image (a') always interferes with the symbolic relation between subject and Other. This imaginary axis can also be called narcissistic, since a (the ego) and a' (the other as a specular image of the ego) are essentially identical. In other words—and not without a sense of irony—this schema can be understood as a communication model in which all communication always takes place first and foremost within the imaginary relation be-

216 Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Ecrits, 75–81. 217 Lacan, 81. 218 Lacan, 79.

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tween the ego and its image of the other (which is essentially an image of the ego itself; in psychology this is also called “projection”). If it does not breach this relation, communication remains entirely on the imaginary axis and is thus narcissistically encapsulated within itself. While Krauss situates video entirely on the imaginary axis and claims that that there is no reflexive dimension,219 I have already demonstrated that narcissism knows an object (even if that object is one’s own image) insofar as it is always already introduced into the differentiating capacity of the Symbolic. Thus, video’s narcissistic “reflection” must also already be reflexive: it must be inscribed in a medial relation of subject and object, whether or not this relation is acknowledged. What we encounter in video is the insistence of reappearing signifiers that speak of an object that is essentially absent.220 We can see this in the examples Krauss herself uses. Whether it is Vito Acconci pointing at an “empty center” or Nancy Holt confronted with the alienating dimension of her reverberating voice, the object in video is not non-existent, but lacking— and it is this lack that sets the imaginary and symbolic nexus of video in motion.

Fig. 20 The Schema L, as used in Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on the ‘Purloined Letter’,” in Écrits, 40.

219

220

Krauss differentiates between “reflection” (in video) and “reflexiveness” (in modernist painting). She refers to reflection as “mirror-reflection,” a mere congruence and infinite imaginary regress: “Reflexiveness is precisely this fracture into two categorically different entities which can elucidate one another insofar as their separateness is maintained. Mirror-reflection, on the other hand, implies the vanquishing of separateness. Its inherent movement is toward fusion.” Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 56. This refers to what Lacan calls the objet a, or “object-cause of desire,” and describes a lack in representation that can never be closed as it is impossible to fully represent the real. For a discussion of the objet a, see chapter IV.3: “$ ◊ a.”

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3.2 On the Other A subject, strictly speaking, is an other!221 “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism” makes use not only of Freud’s concept of narcissism and Lacan’s Schema L but also Lacan’s writing on the psychoanalytic setting, in which narcissism appears as the subject’s “monument”222 to his “being,” about which “he ends up recognizing that this being has never been anything more than his own construction (oeuvre) in the imaginary.”223 This construction, Lacan emphasizes, takes place through the analysand’s speech. And it is in the subject’s speech that these “rectifications […] do not succeed in isolating its [the subject’s being’s] essence” and that his “stays and defenses […] do not prevent his statue from tottering.”224 This monument, this tottering statue of the subject’s narcissism, is what is at stake in the analytic setting. Once the subject has taken up the work in psychoanalysis to reconstruct it [his construction/œuvre of his being] for another, he encounters anew the fundamental alienation that made him construct it like another, and that has always destined it to be taken away from him by another.225 This Other, which is not to be confused with (the body of) the analyst, is a structural Other. It is the function of the symbolic itself,226 inherent in the analysand’s speech and bearer of the frustration the subject encounters in its own discourse—the frustration of being incoherent with one’s own ego. Lacan tells us that the ego is indeed “frustration in its very essence,” but not insofar as it is built upon

221 Jacques Lacan, Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. VIII (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015), 145. 222 Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” 206. 223 Lacan, 207. 224 Lacan, 207. 225 Lacan, 207–8. 226 In “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan does not yet differentiate between a “small other” as imaginary (as a mirrorreflection of the subject’s ego) and a “big Other” as the symbolic function (as that which is radically different). However, what this passage points to is the dimension of the symbolic (not that of the imaginary) as it operates in the psychoanalytic setting.

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frustration of one of the subject’s desires, but frustration of an object in which his desire is alienated; and the more developed this object becomes, the more profoundly the subject becomes alienated from his jouissance.227 This process of alienation through identification (with one’s own image— that is, one’s ego) reveals the paradoxical problem the subject encounters in narcissism: the more the subject forms himself as a complete image “by displaying himself before the mirror,”228 the more this “passivating image” does not satisfy the subject because “even if he achieved the most perfect resemblance to that image, it would still be the other’s jouissance that he would have gotten recognized there.”229 We also encounter this frustration through the object of psychoanalysis: the objet a. In Lacanian terminology, this objet a is the object-cause of desire.230 It is what the subject seeks in the other, but what is a fundamental lack in the subject itself—an insistent trace of the real from which the Symbolic has emerged.231 This seemingly complicated relation between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real is clarified in the psychoanalytic setting. As the analysand speaks, he or she encounters the discrepancy between his or her self-image and the signifiers with which he or she attempts (yet fails) to fortify that image. And within the discrepancy, the analysand encounters the irreducible remnant that is the real. The place of this irreducible remnant is precisely the position that the analyst assumes for the analysand in the psychoanalytic setting: the position of the objet a,232 the object-cause of desire. In psychoanalysis, the analysand is thus constantly confronted with “an object in which his desire is alienated.”233

227 Lacan, 208. 228 Lacan, 208. 229 Lacan, 208. 230 For a further discussion, see chapter IV.3: “$ ◊ a.” 231 For a brief overview of the object a, see footnote 92 in this chapter. 232 Lacan, Television, 4. 233 Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” 208.

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As the object of desire, the objet a is always a partial object and is situated in “this abandoned field […] called desire” that is “excluded by philosophy” and “not accessible to its dialectic.” It is thus inaccessible to the logic of symmetry and equivalence encountered in the Hegelian idea of Anerkennung.234 In fact, the objet a is the something that is the aim of desire as such, the something that emphasizes one object among all the others as incommensurate with the others.235 When the analyst is placed in the position of the objet a, he or she is situated at the source of desire. This enables the transference as a supposition of knowledge (“You, the analyst, know what I desire”).236 To keep this transference active, however, “it is not enough that the analyst should support the function of Tiresias”237—that is to say, it is not enough for the analyst to support the response to a call made by language itself. Instead, it is essential that the operation and manipulation of the transference are to be regulated in a way that maintains a distance between the point at which the subject sees himself as lovable—and that other point where the subject sees himself caused as a lack by a, and where a fills the gap constituted by the inaugural division of the subject.238

234

At least with regard to the first part of Hegel’s argument concerning the relation of a subject to an other as “they acknowledge themselves as mutually acknowledging one another.” See this chapter, sections 1.1.2/3: “Hegel and the Dialectic Movement of Acknowledgement (Anerkennung)” / “Symmetry and Modern Art.” In Seminar XI, Lacan uses the field of perception to demonstrate that it is the dialectic of desire as desire of the Other that makes for the asymmetry in the subject’s constitution: “It is because the subject in question is not that of the reflexive consciousness, but that of desire. One thinks it is a question of the geometral eye-point, whereas it is a question of a quite different eye—that which flies in the foreground of The Ambassadors.” See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 89. 235 Lacan, Transference, 146. Lacan calls this function of transference “sujet suppose savoir” (the “subject 236 that is supposed to know”). See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 269. 237 Lacan, 270. 238 Lacan, 270.

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This reflexiveness is crucial in the psychoanalytic setting. It consists not merely in the analyst assuming the position of the objet a but in the subject subsequently encountering itself as the lack produced by the objet a. Once again, identification presents itself as a paradoxical structure: This a is presented precisely, in the field of the mirage of the narcissistic function of desire, as the object that cannot be swallowed, as it were, which remains stuck in the gullet of the signifier. It is at this point of lack that the subject has to recognize himself.239 Video is also located here, in the paradoxical situation of recognition with which the subject is confronted in order to emerge. Identification can only be achieved at the price of simultaneous alienation, and narcissism can merely disregard (or rather misconceive) this paradoxical structure—it cannot abolish it. The understanding that narcissism is a misconception of difference brings us back to the beginning of this chapter and to one of the fundamental premises of this book—namely, to the central role that perspectivity plays in video’s mise-en-scène, which constitutes a distinctive structural shift in relation to other artistic practices. With Freud’s rendering of narcissism, we have discovered that narcissism is already based on a (veiled) recognition of the difference between subject and object. From this we can conclude that the relation between subject and object is constructed as perspectival insofar as subject and object stand in a topological relation to one another. The subject receives its orientation from its structural relation to the object—the objet a as lacking. For video, this emphasis on the topological orientation and perspective entailed by the subject-object relation is much more illuminating than the assertion that video is a narcissistic “hall of mirrors” (or, in more contemporary terms, an “echo chamber”). I therefore propose a different concept to render video’s topological structure: the concept of the phantasm, which is the focus of the final chapter and promises to provide more instructive insights regarding the aesthetics of video art.

239 Lacan, 270.

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Video: The Aesthetics of Phantasm

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The Aesthetics of Phantasm

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Let us suppose the universe decomposed into elements possessing unchangeable qualities, the only alteration possible to such a system is an alteration of position, that is, motion; hence, the forces can be only moving forces dependent in their action upon conditions of space.1

On Si[gh]t(e): The Video Condition A body moving in space perceiving is very different from a body sitting and watching […]. There is a perceptual difference between looking at a surface and into an electronic moving image.2 Video’s sine qua non is the continuously circulating signal. As we have already seen, none of the parts commonly encountered in video—such as the camera, the screen, mixers, or other image generators—is indispensable. Video is structured solely by the circulation of the electronic signal, the resulting ability to simultaneously receive and transmit this signal, and the possibility of a feedback loop. Everything about video’s setting is “here and now,” yet it is this very moment of presence that is excluded from representation in the incessant repetition of the circulating electronic signal. Thus, video is, in a sense, the medium of immediacy, creating a paradoxical access to this “here and now” that is so fundamental to its existence. The present is either redoubled as a live feedback loop or rendered lacking by the looped, prerecorded material. The latter is undoubtedly more common in today’s video practice than the former, which has to do with the possibility to effortlessly record videos and with the fact that today’s digital video technology truly fulfills video’s promise of “electric seeing” as “tele-vision.” Nowadays, we can not only record and transmit videos but also immediately distribute them via data connectivity. Whether video is recorded or broadcast live, however, the center around which the loop is organized remains void and empty.

Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Conservation of Force,” in Scientific Memoirs, Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science, and from Foreign Journals: Natural Philosophy, ed. John Tyndall and William Francis (London: Taylor and Francis, 1853), 116. 2 Jennings, Abstract Video, 4.

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What we have already encountered in Rosalind Krauss’s essay on early video art as the problem of the unlocatability of the center of the screen will now serve as our central motif. Through the artificial eye of the camera, video confronts us with a different perspective—one that does not (and can never) coincide with the perceiving eye of the spectator. In other words, video makes the subject3 emerge as displaced in relation to video’s perspective. Perspective is thus a central problem for video, as is the lack of presence. Both problems are intricately linked, as I will demonstrate in this chapter, because each points to one aspect of the spatio-temporal condition of video, which circulates around an empty position—a void at the center of its setting. The center of video is empty, both spatially and temporally. On a spatial level, it could be argued that video simply has no place since its structure is based on a continuously circulating signal. Perspective thus becomes problematic on two levels. First, the empty center around which the signal-circulation gravitates continuously offers the spectator different positions; second, video involves the emergence of another eye (the camera), which is capable of constant watching but is not usually present at the moment of screening. The “all-seeing,” tireless camera-eye is often replaced by a projector or a screen in the gallery, museum, or screening venue. It could be argued that these, too, function like an artificial eye, incessantly throwing recorded images back at the spectator. We could call these projection devices an “inverted eye,” ejecting images onto the screen and into the eyes of the spectators. This creates a situation in which the spectators are watching, but from a displaced location. The act of watching thus emerges as a decentered operation performed by a seemingly uninvolved subject. The empty center of video is also an effect of precisely this decentered position of the subject, a position brought about by the technological structure of video itself. One can only watch a video (or a film, for that matter) from elsewhere, as there is no “here and now” in which the subject may situate itself in a moving image. Unlike film, however, the “here and now” in video is at once the modus operandi and unattainable. In video, the “here and now” is constantly changing: there is always another here and another now, and then another. We could conclude that film offers an “elsewhere” that is “there and then” while video’s

3

Unless otherwise indicated, I refer to the “subject” here in the psychoanalytic sense; that is, as “the subject of the unconscious” (Lacan, Television, 6.). The premise of this investigation is the neurotic subject. For a short, schematic differentiation between the three clinical structures in psychoanalysis (neurosis, psychosis, and perversion), see footnote 192.

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“elsewhere” is radically “here and now”—an undoubtedly more uncomfortable mode of “elsewhere.” In video the subject thus experiences its identifications with this “here and now” as always elsewhere; these identifications cannot be located, let alone inhabited. Video works account for this structural predisposition in different ways. We may think of, for instance, Peter Campus’s Three Transitions (1973), which tests the encounter between the screen and the (filmed) body in relation to a void. In the first “transition” (fig. 21), this void appears as a cut and tear in the material of the filmed paper screen and, simultaneously, as a cut in Campus’s body. Campus stands with his back to one of two cameras, facing a paper screen. As he cuts through the paper, the footage of the second camera becomes visible, overlapping with the first. We see Campus’s hands cutting through his own back from the other side of the screen. He eventually seems to “climb through” his body from the back of the screen, taping the cut back together. The other two “transitions” similarly point to the question of the void and to possible identifications with video’s constantly circulating present. In the second “transition” (fig. 22), Campus “repaints” his face using what is referred to in video editing as “chroma keying“ or “color keying.” As he applies blue paint, his face vanishes, revealing another shot that is almost identical and replacing one image of his face with another. Chroma keying is also used in the third “transition” (fig. 23), in which Campus burns what initially appears to be a mirror (and turns out to be a piece of paper functioning as a blue screen), thus destroying the “mirror reflection.” Campus’s work emphasizes the recursive structure of the endlessly circulating signal in video, which incessantly produces images that offer identification—images that are exposed as no more than that. These are images that must, in the next moment, vanish and make room for another image, another possible identification. Here the blunt exposition of video’s

Figs. 21–23 Peter Campus, Three Transitions (I + II + III), video stills, 1973, courtesy the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.

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technical possibilities ironically answers the question of what lies beyond the screen: for the subject, there is no beyond the screen, and any attempt to get there only means being captured by another image. Another illuminating example in this context is Janaina Tschäpe’s Lacrimacorpus (2004, fig. 24). While Tschäpe’s artistic strategy significantly differs from that of Three Transitions, Lacrimacorpus also exemplifies video’s inherent structure. We see a female figure in an early nineteenth-century dress, wearing a poke bonnet on her head and inflated latex balloons around her neck and shoulders. She stands with her back to the camera in the hall of a castle. The camera films from above, creating a rather dramatic central perspective with strong converging lines. The figure’s head is in the center. However, it is not in the perspectival center (which, if we follow the lines of perspective, would be outside of— that is, above—the image frame), but rather in the center of the image plane. As we hear a mechanical sound (perhaps the winding-up of a music box) and, a moment later, piano music, the figure slowly begins to turn. The poke bonnet completely covers her face. With the rising crescendo of the music, the figure’s spinning movements become faster and faster until she begins to tumble off-center and then collapses to the floor. Lacrimacorpus, Latin for “tear body,”4 was filmed at Ettersburg Castle near Weimar,5 a site that is historically significant in more than one sense. Under Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar (1739–1807), the castle became an important center for Weimar Classicism, hosting poets, artists, and musicians such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 2 (S. 111), the looming piano music we hear in the video, provides another reference to the history of the site: Liszt also visited and worked in the castle, and this particular piece is, of course, inspired by Goethe’s Faust. From 1937, the castle overlooked the grounds of Buchenwald concentration camp.6 Since

The title refers to the mythical lacrimacorpus dissolvens (also known as a “Squonk”), a creature that is capable of dissolving entirely into tears. It is described by William T. Cox in Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods and featured in Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero’s Book of Imaginary Beings. See William T. Cox, Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods: With a Few Desert and Mountain Beasts (Washington, D.C.: Press of Judd & Detweiler, 1910), 31; Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, The Book of Imaginary Beings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 136. 5 “Janaina Tschäpe,” artist entry, Guggenheim, accessed July 24, 2019, https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/janaina-tschape. 6 “Tiefe, spannungsvolle Kulturgeschichte,” Schloss Ettersburg, accessed July 24, 2019, https://schlossettersburg.de/dasschloss/geschichte/?.

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1999, the so-called Zeitschneise (time lane), a former hunting lane that has reopened as a hiking trail and commemorative artwork, connects the castle and the former concentration camp.7 Lacrimacorpus thus seems to take on the ambiguity and overdetermination of the place it depicts. Spinning around her own axis, the figure in the video is, as it were, caught between two poles of history: the epitome of German culture, Weimar Classicism, is confronted with its reverse side, the Shoah. Here the horrors of the Shoah emerge not merely as the opposite of culture but as a product of the very culture it seeks to destroy. Mephisto becomes the representative of this relation while Goethe’s Faust strangely seems to prefigure the link between Ettersburg and Buchenwald, between Classicism and Shoah, exposing their relation as a product of culture and its unleashed reverse: pure death drive.8

Fig. 24 Janaina Tschäpe, Lacrimacorpus, video still, 2004, © 2004 Janaina Tschäpe.

7 “Time Lane,” Buchenwald Memorial, accessed July 24, 2019, https://www.buchenwald.de/en/571/. 8 The “death drive” is a concept Freud develops in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” It is formulated as precisely that “beyond” of the pleasure principle: it is what, in the living organism, goes beyond life itself, a tendency for the living being to return to an inanimate state. Freud concludes that “it would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the [drives] if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time or other departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’” (38). The death drive appears in the function of the psychic apparatus as repetition compulsion—as a return to traumatic content that points to the “aim of life” as death. See Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 7–64.

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The video overlaps different timelines, merging them into one continuously repeated present. Under the intensifying music of the Mephisto Waltz, time is organized as a redoubled loop. The first loop is the video loop. This loop is duplicated by the circular movement of the spinning figure in the video. These loops are not congruent: one is an effect of the circulation of the video signal and the other is a response to what this circulation creates as a continuous present. One of the loops eventually breaks as the spinning figure collapses from exhaustion. The video loop, however, remains—and with it the paradoxical timeline created by the merging of different temporalities into one spatial setting. In other words, the timelines in Lacrimacorpus are conflated into the “time lane” of Ettersburg-Buchenwald, causing a spatio-temporal chiasm. From these two examples we can see that my focus does not pertain to narrative strategies or any other particular artistic strategy related to video. Instead, my interest lies in the structural conditions video poses to any artistic practice that revolves around it. This chapter will examine video’s structure by investigating concrete works of video art in relation to specific theoretical aspects of video and the moving image. In other words, it seeks to theorize the circulation of the electronic signal, which is defined as video’s sine qua non. The spatio-temporal chiasm I have just described is at the core of this structure. Video’s setting, its mise-en-scène, can only be expressed topologically—that is, in terms of the relation between different positions (such as the relation between the camera’s position and that of the spectator, the screen’s position and that of the camera, etc.). Accordingly, Paul Virilio states that video differs from other practices (such as theater and film) at the level of its location: Whereas theatrical or cinematic mise-en-scène involves the spatio-temporal organization of stage action or film narrative in an area used for public performances, and whereas, to a lesser degree, production for television requires a private stage or broadcasting area (the rooms of a private home), this no longer applies to video transmission. For ‘cine-videography’ solely consists in the commutation of more or less distant and disjointed appearances, and also in the commutation of interactive actors at varying distances. Commutation of the emission and reception of the video signal, at

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the monitoring terminal, indicates the mutation-commutation of distances (topology) into power (tele-topology), that is, into light energy as the union of relativist cinema and wave optics.9 Video’s mise-en-scène is thus topological in the sense that there is no prefigured organization of the stage; instead, it is a relational structure located in a place that I have described as “elsewhere.” This place is not commensurate with any specified setting. Following the repeated circulation of the electronic signal, it is, instead, a place of displacement. In this chapter, I will pursue the idea of video’s mise-en-scène as topology by means of psychoanalysis. Here topology plays a central role as the structure of what Freud calls “psychic locality” and what has gained a certain prominence in film and moving image theory as “the Other scene”10 (anderer Schauplatz) of the unconscious. Following the idea that video’s location is not prefigured by a physical stage but by a topology that is always set to work elsewhere, in an “Other scene,” we can see how frail the notion of reality (conceived as opposed to the “illusion” we perceive on the screen) becomes under the influence of video’s paradoxical setting: How can one fail to see here the essential characteristic of video technology: not a more or less up-to-theminute ‘representation’ of an event, but live presentation of a place or an electro-optical environment— the result, it would seem, of putting reality on waves by means of electro-magnetic physics?11 If video does not represent reality but presents it at all times, it forces us to reconsider our concepts about the relationship between representation, reality, and the world. Accordingly, Ina Blom argues that while “in film, we perceive a world recorded and separate from us, even if we may want to be part of it and secretly hope that it cannot exist without us,” it is in video that the

9 Virilio, Polar Inertia, 3. 10 I write “Other Scene” with a capital O to emphasize the Lacanian distinction between small (imaginary) other and big (symbolic) Other. The scene of the unconscious is, in Lacanian terms, the locus of the symbolic Other. See section 3 of this chapter and chapter III.3.2: “On the Other.” 11 Virilio, Polar Inertia, 1.

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constant stream of live signals keep us connected to a here and now that is understood as this world, our world, no matter the distances of transmission or the temporality of programmed contents.12 Blom renders this experience as “anxiety-ridden” because “the monitoring facilitated by signal streams constructs the world as a precarious entity whose survival seems to depend on our constant watchfulness.”13 In other words, the world emerges as a frail construction of a constantly streaming video signal that, for the spectating subject, calls into question the continuing existence of this/its world and also the continuation of its own existence as a subject within it. We must ask ourselves, then, how to conceptualize the frailty of both the world and the spectating subject that video produces. How is perception, here construed as “constant watchfulness,” affected by video? With these considerations, we leave behind those strands of discourse in video, film, and moving image theory that presuppose an opposition between the physical world beyond and the illusion on the screen. The distinction between a concrete world of matter and the “dematerialising spectacles of the phantasmagoria,” of “bringing an illusion of concrete form to the immaterial film image,”14 cannot be maintained where reality itself proves questionable as an effect of video’s continuous “presentation.”15 The idea that the moving image is constituted by “illusions,” “apparitions,” and “phantasmagorias” on the screen is rooted in the tradition of premodern spectacles and shadow plays, reaching back as far as Plato’s allegory of the cave as a founding myth.16 While I oppose the understanding of the video image (or, for that matter, the film image) as immaterial, I am nonetheless interested in the tradition proposed by these theories. As Lucy Reynolds emphasizes in reference to this tradition, the shadow functions “as an index of physical solidity and matter, through which light cannot pass” rather than “as an on-screen apparition.” It is precisely this indexical function, this pointing to a real outside of direct experience, that complicates the

12 Blom, “Video Water, Video Life, Videosociality,” 160. 13 Blom, 160. 14 Lucy Reynolds, “Magic Tricks? Shadow Play in British Expanded Cinema,” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 23 (2010): 23. 15 Virilio, Polar Inertia, 6. 16 See, for instance, Elwes, Installation and the Moving Image, 76–77.

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idea of the moving image as an “illusion”—a “phantasmagoria” in opposition to reality.17 Even if what appears on the screen is an “immaterial illusion,” the bodily presence of the spectator is brought into opposition with it. However, this chapter will show that what takes place in video is even more radical and cannot be thought of in these terms. We will examine the positions offered by the topology of video understood as a place, as a scene that is “elsewhere,” in which perspectivity—that is, a relation between subject, reality, and world—is constructed and constituted. We will trace this topology through the concept of the phantasm (the Greek term phantasma can be translated into English as “apparition,” “illusion,” or “phantasmagoria”), which is rooted in media theory as much as in psychoanalysis. We have already touched on the fact that psychoanalysis and media theory share a number of concepts as far as modern theories of subjectivity and perspective are concerned. Let us now explore the specific kinship between video and psychoanalysis under the auspices of the technological advancements taking place from the nineteenth century onward. While theorists in the psychoanalytic field have pointed out that the cinematograph and the “the talking cure” of psychoanalysis share their year of birth18 and that other technological inventions such as the radio, camera, and telephone serve as a basis for conceptualizing psychoanalysis in the writings of Freud, the close structural relation between video and psychoanalysis has never been investigated. One can certainly argue that this omission is due to video’s deferred emergence eighty years after the invention of its technological roots. Interestingly, however, even sixty years after the introduction of video, psychoanalytic texts have largely ignored video in favor of the more established moving

17

Reynolds, “Magic Tricks?,” 29. While Reynolds refers here to a physical, concrete material that the index on the screen points to, I argue that that which is pointed to is rather to be thought of as the real in psychoanalytic terms. In other words, it is something that lies radically outside of representation for the subject. 18 Both Studies on Hysteria and “Project for a Scientific Psychology” were published in 1895, the same year that the Lumière brothers presented their cinématographe. See, for instance, Borens, Psychoanalyse und Film, 7. See also Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” (1895) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1, Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts (1886–1899) (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), 295–343; Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, Studies on Hysteria by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud (1893–1895) (London: Hogarth Press, 1981).

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image practice in the field of film. This is curious for two reasons: first, because of video’s popularity and ubiquity; and second, because of its structural proximity to psychoanalysis and its concepts of the psyche. In this chapter, I will argue that video, despite its deferred rise as a socially, discursively visible art form, is more closely related to the structure of the human psyche than any of the other technological devices and medial practices that served to develop the vocabulary of psychoanalysis. In the following section, I will demonstrate that the technological devices and technologies addressed in psychoanalysis, particularly those having to do with electromagnetism, should not be understood as analogies for the functions of the psyche. Instead, I will show that both video and psychoanalysis relate to the same structure—namely, the structure of the endlessly circulating drive—and that we can learn about this structure (and about video and psychoanalysis) from both sides simultaneously. From the position of video, examining a structural relationship to psychoanalysis can reveal video’s complex setting and help us to name its notoriously elusive structure. From the position of psychoanalytic thought, electromagnetic inventions teach us about the psychic apparatus. And we will see that far from being “immaterial” or elusive, video is, in fact, made of the same matter as our phantasies.

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1 Apparatus Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, recognized the relationship between modern technology and psychoanalysis in various ways throughout his work. Famously, Freud draws analogies between photography and the psychical processes of the conscious and the unconscious,19 and between optical devices (such as cameras and microscopes) and the human psyche. However, a variety of other references to state-of-the-art nineteenth-century technology can be found in Freud’s writing. This is evident as early as 1895, when he introduces the notion of the “psychic apparatus.”20 It also manifests in other concepts and terms Freud uses, such as sublimation, condensation, (dis-)charge, and energy. The latter are taken from the realm of physics—specifically, from the field of classical electromagnetism.21 In Freudian terminology, the organs of the human body take on a technical character, turning into parts of an apparatus or an apparatus in and of themselves (besides the “psychic apparatus” we also find the “human sexual apparatus”22 in Freud’s writing). In “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1929), Freud clarifies the relation between bodily organs and technology by stating that “with every tool man is perfecting his own organs,

19 “A rough but not inadequate analogy to this supposed relation of conscious to unconscious activity might be drawn from the field of ordinary photography. The first stage of the photograph is the ‘negative’; every photographic picture has to pass through the ‘negative process’, and some of these negatives which have held good in examination are admitted to the ‘positive process’ ending in the picture [emphasis mine].” See Sigmund Freud, “A Note on the Unconscious in PsychoAnalysis,” (1912) in Standard Edition, vol. 12, 264. Also: “Let us assume that every mental process […] exists to begin with in an unconscious stage or phase and that it is only from there that the process passes over into the conscious phase, just as a photographic picture begins as a negative and only becomes a picture after being turned into a positive. Not every negative, however, necessarily becomes a positive; nor is it necessary that every unconscious mental process should turn into a conscious one [emphasis mine].” See Sigmund Freud, “XIX. Resistance and Repression,” (1917) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 16, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Part III (1916–1917) (London: Hogarth Press, 1963), 295. The notion is used both in “Project for a Scientific Psychology” and Studies 20 on Hysteria. 21 See, for instance, Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” 22 Sigmund Freud, “Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses,” (1895) in Standard Edition, vol. 3, 280.

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whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning.”23 To illustrate this relation, Freud continues with a more or less comprehensive account of contemporary technological advancements and their enhancement of human organs: Motor power places gigantic forces at his [the human’s] disposal, which, like his muscles, he can employ in any direction; thanks to ships and aircraft neither water nor air can hinder his movements; by means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance; and by means of the microscope he overcomes the limits of visibility set by the structure of his retina. In the photographic camera he has created an instrument which retains the fleeting visual impressions, just as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting auditory ones; both are at bottom materializations of the power he possesses of recollection, his memory. With the help of the telephone he can hear at distances which would be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale.24 We might object that the view of technology as the invention of tools aimed at enhancing or even perfecting human organs is a bit of a commonplace, but this would not do justice to the full scope of Freud’s argument. Freud’s assertion focuses not only on the function of technology for the human body (and the particular organ it seeks to enhance) but

23

24

Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” (1929) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 21, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 90. We can see that this understanding of technology as “removing the limits” of the bodily organs’ functioning coincides with Marshall McLuhan’s statement that a medium is defined as a technological extension of our own body. For McLuhan, this technology-induced extension of the body results in a fascination that misconstrues this extension as separate from one’s body. For McLuhan, this is the source of narcissism as a “closed circuit” and, just as Narcissus mistakes his image for another person in Ovid’s myth, we mistake technology as detached from the bodily organs that brought about their invention. A discussion of this concept and McLuhan’s notion of “autoamputation” goes beyond the capacities of this book, but it is too important not to be mentioned here for further reference. See McLuhan, Understanding Media, 41–42. Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 90–91.

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also on the function of the organ itself. When Freud refers to the psyche or the genitals as an “apparatus” and uses the physical terms mentioned above, he technifies—that is, de-naturalizes, artificializes—the human body itself. We are thus confronted with a materialism that vehemently opposes any kind of dualistic split between mind and body, but which, instead, uses the matter of technology—as both emerging from and reconstructing the human organism—to replace any naturalized (that is, anatomical or biological) imagery of the psyche. “Psychical locality,” as Freud calls it, therefore must not be identified with anatomical imaginings: We should picture the instrument which carries out our mental functions as resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind. On that basis, psychical locality will correspond to a point inside the apparatus at which one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being. In the microscope and telescope, as we know, these occur in part at ideal points, regions in which no tangible component of the apparatus is situated.25 Particularly striking is the fact that Freud’s aim to denaturalize the concept of a psychical locality leads him to the technical term “apparatus,” which, as he informs us, is something that is “put together” from components and produces an image at a point “in which no tangible component of the apparatus is situated.” Here one cannot help but notice the similarities to the video apparatus, in which no part is a conditio sine qua non and no particular point is the locus of the circulating image. What we can learn, then, from Freud’s model of technology as “perfecting one’s own organs” and the psyche as an “apparatus” is this: if nineteenth-century technology was driven by the invention and construction of artificial organs such as “the electric eye,”26 the invention of psychoanalysis showed that the human organism is itself always already a construct.

25

26

Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation Of Dreams (2nd Part),” (1900) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 5, The Interpretation of Dreams (2nd Part) and On Dreams (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 536. See chapter I.2.2.2: “The Electric Eye.”

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In other words, it is misleading to interpret Freudian concepts borrowed from technology as mere analogies. Quite literally, Freudian terminology moves beyond an analogous use of technological and physical terms. These terms point to the artificiality (the made-ness) in the functionality of the human organs and in the construction of the psyche, as well as in the effects and operations of psychoanalysis. In a Freudian rendering, the psyche resembles an electric circuit, as we shall soon see, and it would be fitting to turn this sentence around: the electric circuit resembles the psyche. This view can be supported not only by the aforementioned analogies with specific instruments, such as the telephone or the telegraph,27 but also by Freud’s use of physical terms often derived from electromagnetism. Besides the previously named examples (condensation, (dis-) charge, etc.), we can add the fundamental concept of Spannung (tension). Spannung takes on an important role explicitly (and famously) in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), which addresses the drive. However, the concept is also implied in earlier works, where it forms a premise underpinning the fundamental psychoanalytic concept of the psyche. Freud points out in “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence” (1894) that in mental functions something is to be distinguished—a quota of affect or sum of excitation— which possesses all the characteristics of a quantity (though we have no means of measuring it), which is capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body.28

Sigmund Freud, “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis,” (1909) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 10, Two Case Histories (1909) (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 223. 28 Sigmund Freud, “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence,” (1894) in Standard Edition, vol. 3, 60. 27

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He continues to ascribe this “sum of excitation,” this “quantity”—which he likens to an “electric charge” (and let us remember that a difference in electric charge is what creates electric tension)—to the theory he developed with Josef Breuer, stating that this hypothesis which, incidentally, already underlies our theory of “abreaction” in our “Preliminary Communication” (1893a), can be applied in the same sense as physicists apply the hypothesis of a flow of electric fluid. It is provisionally justified by its utility in co-ordinating and explaining a great variety of psychical states.29 Accordingly, Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria (1895) promotes the concept of the psyche as analogous to the electric circuit in many different ways. Tension thus emerges as a premise and is already formulated as a constant: We ought not to think of a cerebral path of conduction as resembling a telephone wire which is only excited electrically at the moment at which it has to function (that is, in the present context, when it has to transmit a signal). We ought to liken it to a telephone line through which there is a constant flow of galvanic current and which can no longer be excited if that current ceases. Or better, let us imagine a widely ramified electrical system for lighting and the transmission of motor power; what is expected of this system is that simple establishment of a contact shall be able to set any lamp or machine in operation. To make this possible, so that everything shall be ready to work, there must be a certain tension present throughout the entire network of lines of conduction,

29

Freud, 60–61.

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and the dynamo engine must expend a given quantity of energy for this purpose. In just the same way there is a certain amount of excitation present in the conductive paths of the brain when it is at rest but awake and prepared to work.30 Once again, we must note the congruence between this concept of excitation in the psyche as a “constant flow of galvanic current” and what we encounter as the only constitutive and fundamental attribute of video: the constant, ceaseless flow of the electronic signal. The idea that this tension must never cease for the system to function is found throughout Freud’s later works, most famously, as already mentioned, in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Here Freud explicates what he calls the (drive-) economic factor of the psyche—namely, that the mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant. This latter hypothesis is only another way of stating the pleasure principle; for if the work of the mental apparatus is directed towards keeping the quantity of excitation low, then anything that is calculated to increase

30

This paragraph is accompanied by a footnote clarifying the organic basis of these claims. Here Breuer writes: “I may perhaps venture here to indicate briefly the notion on which the above statements are based. We usually think of the sensory nerve cells as being passive receptive organs. This is a mistake. For the mere existence of a system of associative fibres proves that these sensory nerve-cells also send out excitation into the nerve-fibres. If excitation from two sensory cells flows into a nerve-fibre that connects them—whether per continuitatem or per contiguitatem—then a state of tension must exist in it. This state of tension has the same relation to the excitation flowing away in, for instance, a peripheral motor fibre as hydrostatic pressure has to the living force of flowing water or as electric tension has to an electric current. If all the nerve-cells are in a state of mean excitation and are exciting their nerve-processes, the whole immense network forms a single reservoir of ‘nervous tension’. Apart then from a potential energy which lies quiescent in the chemical substance of the cell and an unknown form of kinetic energy which is discharged when the fibres are in a state of excitation, we must assume the existence of yet another quiescent state of nervous excitation: tonic excitation or nervous tension.” Freud and Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, 193–94.

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that quantity is bound to be felt as adverse to the functioning of the apparatus, that is as unpleasurable. The pleasure principle follows from the principle of constancy: actually the latter principle was inferred from the facts which forced us to adopt the pleasure principle.31 We see here that while the quantity of excitation ought to be “as low as possible,” as far as the pleasure principle is concerned, there must always be a minimum of said quantity in the psychic system. This principle, as Freud explicitly states, is derived from Gustav Theodor Fechner’s “psychophysical” constancy method,32 in which the intensity of psychic stimuli is measured in physical terms and which is itself based on the “principle of conservation of force” (today known as the “law of conservation of energy”) formulated by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1847.33 Simply put, the principle of conservation of force indicates that in a closed system, energy can neither be gained nor lost; it can merely be transformed— from mechanical to thermal or electromagnetic energy (or vice versa). Helmholtz defines the principle of the conservation of force in the formula that “the sum of the existing tensions and vires vivæ is always constant.”34 The constancy principle is found in Helmholtz’s treatise specifically where it addresses electrical energy in the precise form of electric tension. The electric tension in an electrified body, Helmholtz informs us, must be constant and “distributed uniformly” over the surface of this body, creating an “electric equilibrium.”35

31 32

Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 9. See Gustav Theodor Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1860); Gustav Theodor Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966). See Hermann von Helmholtz, Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (Berlin: G. Reimer, 33 1847); Helmholtz, “On the Conservation of Force.” 34 Helmholtz, “On the Conservation of Force,” 124. 35 Helmholtz, 141. The degree to which Freud follows Helmholtz’s concept can be seen in “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence.” Here Freud adopts Helmholtz’s formulation in almost the exact wording when he describes the sum of excitation in the psyche as a quantity “which is capable of increase, diminution, displacement and discharge, and which is spread over the memory-traces of ideas somewhat as an electric charge is spread over the surface of a body.” Freud, “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence,” 60.

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In his psychophysical theory, Fechner transposes Helmholtz’s constancy principle to the functions of the psyche. With reference to Helmholtz, he calls the tension found in the psyche “potential energy”36 and further explains the ramifications of this constancy of energy for an understanding of what we call “balance,” “equilibrium,” or “stability”: Thus, it is in the sense of such combination [of the principle of stability and the principle of conservation of force] that no unlimited progress of the world to absolute stability, which consists in a complete rest of the particles, can take place; rather, the approximation to such a state is limited by the principle of the conservation of force. Indeed, through the tendency to stability, the living force in the world as a whole cannot be changed in terms of its quantity, but only in terms of the form in which it manifests itself.37 In short, the principle of conservation of force presupposes that energy cannot simply be gained or lost but must move within a system in different states of transformation, thus implying a constancy of energy. This constancy presupposes stability within the system, but not a total stability because then no energy would flow at all—there would be complete stasis. Energy presupposes tension: that is, a discrepancy between charges, a difference that enables a flow of energy, a movement, a circulation from transformation to transformation. Fechner points out that the approximation toward stability is as necessary for the existence of the principle of conservation of force as the latter is needed to limit the former. This rendering of the principle of conservation of force—dialectically entangled with the principle of stability—is clearly found at the

36 Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics, 28. 37 “So liegt es schon im Sinne solcher Combination, daß kein unbeschränkter Fortschritt der Welt zur absoluten Stabilität, welche in voller Ruhe der Theilchen besteht, stattfinden kann; vielmehr wird der Annäherung daran durch das Princip der Erhaltung der Kraft eine Grenze gesetzt. Ja es kann überhaupt durch die Tendenz zur Stabilität die lebendige Kraft in der Welt im Ganzen nicht ihrer Größe, sondern nur der Form, in der sie sich äussert, nach geändert werden.” Gustav Theodor Fechner, Einige Ideen zur Schöpfungs- und Entwickelungsgeschichte der Organismen (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1873), 34–35 (translation mine).

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core of Freud’s concept of tension and the economy of the drive. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud adopts this dialectical movement from Fechner, in particular insofar as Fechner’s definition of this movement of stability corresponds to the tension in the psyche: an approximation of stability as pleasurable and a deviation from stability as unpleasurable.38 We can conclude that Freud’s concept of the psyche as an apparatus and the terminology he adopts from applied and theoretical physics are not coincidentally related to the technological advancements of his time. Instead, they pertain to the same structure. The emergence of psychoanalysis throws light upon both the psyche and technology. If technology constructs artificial organs or their enhancements, psychoanalysis points out that it is not the psyche that is constructed in the manner of an electromagnetic circuit; rather, the electromagnetic circuit is constructed in the manner of the psyche. By applying the same principle (namely, the principle of conservation of force) to both physics and the psyche, it becomes clear that the human psyche is not a privileged (godlike) point, not the crown of creation, but, in fact, merely a part of this world—matter subjected to the movement of force, approximating stability. Accordingly, the psychoanalytic setting that Freud creates is no less apparatus-based than the psyche itself. In “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis” (1912), Freud famously compares the function of the analyst’s unconscious to a telephone receiver (and likens the analysand to the transmitter): Just as the patient must relate everything that his self-observation can detect, and keep back all the logical and affective objections that seek to induce him to make a selection from among them,

38

Here Freud quotes Fechner directly: “‘In so far as conscious impulses always have some relation to pleasure or unpleasure, pleasure and unpleasure too can be regarded as having a psycho-physical relation to conditions of stability and instability. […] According to this hypothesis, every psycho-physical motion rising above the threshold of consciousness is attended by pleasure in proportion as, beyond a certain limit, it approximates to complete stability, and is attended by unpleasure in proportion as, beyond a certain limit, it deviates from complete stability; while between the two limits, which may be described as qualitative thresholds of pleasure and unpleasure, there is a certain margin of aesthetic indifference.’” Fechner, Einige Ideen zur Schöpfungs- und Entwickelungsgeschichte der Organismen, 94, quoted in Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 8–9.

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so the doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told for the purposes of interpretation and of recognizing the concealed unconscious material without substituting a censorship of his own for the selection that the patient has forgone. To put it in a formula: he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the transmitting microphone. Just as the receiver converts back into soundwaves the electric oscillations in the telephone line which were set up by sound waves, so the doctor’s unconscious is able, from the derivatives of the unconscious which are communicated to him, to reconstruct that unconscious, which has determined the patient’s free associations.39 In this rendering of the psychoanalytic setting, we find what media theorist Johannes Binotto calls a rejection of any kind of romantic idea about the psychoanalytic process.40 Rather, as Binotto points out, psychoanalysis’ famous and fundamental principle of “evenly suspended attention” (gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit) can be read as nothing less than electric tension.41 We can conclude this brief account of the kinship between nineteenth-century technology and psychoanalysis and their relation to the later formation of video with a bold hypothesis about the link between video and psychoanalysis. In “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’” (1925), Freud states:

39 Sigmund Freud, “Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis,” (1912) in Standard Edition, vol. 12, 115–16. 40 Johannes Binotto, “Hors-champ. Vom psychoanalytischen Feld am Rand des Films” [in German], Riss: Psychoanalyse und Film 23, H. 72/73 (2009): 78. 41 Binotto, 78.

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All the forms of auxiliary apparatus which we have invented for the improvement or intensification of our sensory functions are built on the same model as the sense organs themselves or portions of them: for instance, spectacles, photographic cameras, ear-trumpets. Measured by this standard, devices to aid our memory seem particularly imperfect, since our mental apparatus accomplishes precisely what they cannot: it has an unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions and nevertheless lays down permanent—even though not unalterable—memory-traces of them.42 Freud writes this to introduce the “mystic writing pad” as a model for the psychic apparatus, but I argue that video provides the apparatus that Freud was missing here.43 As a technology, video, with its ability to simultaneously record and transmit, is capable of producing memory traces that are both permanent and alterable. In other words: video is the apparatus that most resembles the psyche and its functions.

42

43

Sigmund Freud, “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’,” (1924) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, The Ego and the Id and Other Works (1923–1925) (London: Hogarth Press, 1999), 228. While Baudry famously states that the contemporary inventions of cinema and the phonograph mimic the function of the mystic writing pad, I have demonstrated that a more compelling correspondence with Freud’s model of the psychic apparatus is found in the electric and electromagnetic inventions of his time, which eventually lead to video. See Jean-Louis Baudry, “The Apparatus,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 1, no. 1 (1976): 106.

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From the Imaginary to the Phantasm Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures. ‘We cannot do without auxiliary constructions’, as Theodor Fontane tells us. There are perhaps three such measures: powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it. Something of the kind is indispensable. Voltaire has deflections in mind when he ends Candide with the advice to cultivate one’s garden; and scientific activity is a deflection of this kind, too. The substitutive satisfactions, as offered by art, are illusions in contrast with reality, but they are none the less psychically effective, thanks to the role which phantasy has assumed in mental life.44

The threefold significance of the phantasm for art and aesthetics is conspicuous: first, as a concept defining both the image and imagination; second, its own status as a medium; and third, its relation to the visual field. However, what I am interested in goes beyond the general aesthetic concept of the phantasm in favor of a more specific approach to the structure of video. I turn to the concept of the phantasm in psychoanalytic theory because it proves to be the most helpful in “framing” video’s specific setting. This is not solely due to the integral role phantasy and the phantasm play here (an argument that could be applied to all visual arts). It also has to do with the fact that instruments operating within the visual field—and the visual field as such—play an important role in psychoanalytic theory. For film, this relation has been widely acknowledged both in the psychoanalytic field and in film theory. This relation has never been clearly articulated for video although, as demonstrated in the previous section, video’s structural relation to psychoanalysis (based on electric tension) is even more compelling than that of film. If I define my approach through the prism of one analytic concept in particular—namely, that of the phantasm—this is because it takes the central role in video’s setting. This role came to my attention in recent

44

Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 75.

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years through two major Berlin-based art events: the 11th Forum Expanded of the Berlinale 2016 and the 9th Berlin Biennale of that same year. From seemingly divergent positions, both events addressed the role of the phantasm in art, specifically in the realm of the moving image. While neither exhibition focused exclusively on video or spelled out video’s role for its curatorial premise, the notion of the phantasm they assumed was deeply rooted in video’s circulating signal as we encounter it everywhere in our contemporary world.45 The following sections will attempt to explain this claim. For its program “Traversing the Phantasm,” the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded appropriated the concept of the phantasm formulated by Jacques Lacan. This choice reflected the curatorial decision to open Forum Expanded to other positions, such as video, art installations, and “new discourses and perspectives, or films from parts of the world which do not correspond to the concept of experimental film as shaped by the West.”46 In the context of drastic geopolitical changes caused by war, famine, the “revival of the nation state,” and forced migration, the curators Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and Ulrich Ziemons sought to investigate and work through the realms of “ideology and mythology,” nationalism, history, archives, and (science) fiction by means of the phantasm as that “which encompasses both the imaginary and the real. The phantasm is not tangible, you can only work your way through it in order to then end up somewhere else.”47 This rendering of the phantasm is intriguing for our investigation, as this statement could just as well have been made about video.48

45 46

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When I discuss these two shows, I do so in regard to video specifically and allow myself to disregard other aspects of these exhibitions that are no less interesting. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus and Ulrich Ziemons, “Forum Expanded 2016: The Magic of the Phantasm,” interview with the curators of the 11th Forum Expanded “Traversing the Phantasm” of the 2016 Berlinale, accessed August 19, 2019, https:// www.berlinale.de/en/archive/jahresarchive/2016/06b_berlinale_themen_2016/ forum_expanded_2016.html. Schulte Strathaus and Ziemons, “Forum Expanded 2016.” This argument is directed mostly at the ubiquitous concept of video’s “elusiveness”— that is to say, the problem of defining video in any other way than through the circulating electromagnetic signal. In the first section of this chapter, I argued that Freud’s notion of psychic locality as an “ideal point” in which “no tangible component of the apparatus is situated” corresponds to video’s setting. See this chapter, section 1: “Apparatus,” footnote 25. For more on the characteristics of video, see also chapter I.2.3: “Electronic Medium.”

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The videos shown at Forum Expanded ranged from projects that explored concepts of nationalism and territory, such as Heba Y. Amin’s As Birds Flying (fig. 25), to works that challenged notions of history and juxtaposed them with fictionality/mythology, such as Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (fig. 26). While Amin’s video is concerned with the phantasmatic gaze as “total surveillance” required for the political organization of space under nationalism and territoriality, Sansour and Lind attempt to bring fiction into history itself, pointing out that all history is always also a fiction insofar as it posits itself to be an objective gaze onto the past. The phantasm appears in both cases as the gaze, as perspective, situated in the visual field.

Fig. 25 Heba Y. Amin, As Birds Flying, video still, 2016 (Forum Expanded), courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 26 Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, video still, 2015 (Forum Expanded), courtesy of the artists.

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In his keynote speech at “Traversing the Phantasm,” art historian Helmut Draxler attempted to conceptualize “how cinema, art, and ‘reality’ are connected,” proclaiming that “the phantasm cannot be sussed out like ideology. It can only be ‘traversed,’ which is nothing more than staggering from one phantasm to another.”49 Draxler concluded that phantasms can neither be intentionally shaped nor fundamentally overcome; to a certain degree we find ourselves always already at their mercy. They also cannot be located in the Other and dealt with there, because this Other is always already present in one’s own self. At any rate the phantasm cannot close itself off like some sort of perfectly manipulated world, precisely because it always already contains a moment of difference and of critique, without which it cannot be phantasmatic. […] It is thus neither a matter of a purely distanced attitude nor of an immersive submergence; exposing oneself to the ambivalence of phantasy and reality, distance and proximity, defense and critique becomes the requirement for being able to rework the structures and dynamics of the phantasmatic.50 “Traversing the Phantasm” thus rendered the phantasm as something that can never be discarded. Instead, it is a constitutive, necessary part of perception that must, however, constantly be traversed, questioned, and critically reformulated. The 9th Berlin Biennale “The Present in Drag,” which also consisted largely of video-based works, took a very different approach in dealing with the problem of the phantasm: Nothing about today’s world is particularly realistic; a world in which investing in fiction is more worthwhile than putting it into reality. […] Let us materialize

49

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Helmut Draxler, “Traversing Phantasms,” Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst e.V., accessed August 7, 2019, https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/berlinaleforum/archive/program-archive/2016/magazine/traversing-the-phantasm.html. Draxler, “Traversing Phantasms.”

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the problems of the present where they happen and make them a matter of action, not spectacle. The present is not exposed. This is The Present in Drag.51 This declaration of intent focuses on “working through” the present in a mode that is not interested in unveiling any hidden “reality” behind the fictions (of a digital age) we are constantly confronted with. Instead, the distinction between fiction and reality is simply deemed “no longer worthwhile.” What is of interest is thus not what lies “behind” the fiction, but fiction itself as it is actualized and materializes in the here and now of the exhibition. With this specific focus on “the present”—not as an index of truth but as a concrete, particular matter of continuous investigation at the level of actions—video is a constitutive component of “The Present in Drag.” Certain positions in the exhibition are particularly valuable for our investigation, such as Cécile B. Evans’s video installation What the Heart Wants (figs. 27/28), which investigates subjectivity in the digital age and the technological and social promises associated with it, such as “transhumanism” and “hyperreality.” Evans’s work, featuring (faceless) avatars, floating and detached body parts, and CGI-animated landscapes, constructs a “virtual” world in which the body seems to have become obsolete. At the same time, the

Figs. 27/28 Cécile B. Evans, What the Heart Wants, installation view / video still, 2016 (“The Present in Drag”), courtesy of the artist.

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Curatorial statement, “The Present in Drag,” Berlin Biennale, accessed August 19, 2019, http://bb9.berlinbiennale.de/the-present-in-drag-2/. In the German version, the curatorial text states: “Lasst uns die Probleme der Gegenwart dort materialisieren, wo sie geschehen, und sie zu einer Sache des Handelns—nicht des Zuschauens— machen [emphasis mine]” (“Let us materialize the problems of the present where they happen and make them a matter of action, not spectacle.”). The German version proves more accurate, as Zuschauen (to look on) emphasizes the active involvement of the subject while spectacle veils the activity on the part of the subject.

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spectating body assumes a central role in Evans’s installation: viewers must walk across a boardwalk surrounded by water to position themselves in front of the large-scale projection and they must wear wireless headphones to hear the sound clearly. The proclaimed “virtuality” of the video is interrupted by “commercial breaks” that form another layer of imagery and trap the spectator in an immersive spectacle in which the conceptual difference between “reality” and “projected image on the screen” is not maintained and is exposed as no longer interesting. Other works, such as Alexandra Pirici’s performance Signals (fig. 29), which could be called a “decomposed video,” follow the same conceptual premise. Signals features a group of performers in motion capture suits (as used for CGI animation), re-enacting “situations, images, events that […] should be a part of the popular collective history.”52 The performance is situated in a black box, and the audience selects the re-enacted material from a pre-curated list via the Biennale’s website. The selection is then ranked by a content-ranking algorithm, as used by Google or Facebook, and performed as what we might call a “digital tableau vivant” or an “embodied internet protocol.” The performers re-enact any kind of internet phenomenon, from a Coca-Cola commercial to the destruction of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph by Daesh to “Kim Kardashian breaking the internet.” Aside from the obvious

Fig. 29 Alexandra Pirici, Signals, performance, 2016 (“The Present in Drag”), courtesy of the artist.

52 Jeni Fulton, “Meet the Artist Performing the Internet IRL at BB9,” SLEEK, June 9, 2016, https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/alexandra-pirici-at-bb9/.

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references to the realm of video—the motion capture suits, the black box, the movement of the performers—the audience is not only allowed but invited (and instructed) to record videos during the performance: If you would like to film or take photographs, you can—for very short periods of time and from a distance—use your smartphone flashlight or collaborate with someone else’s (smartphone flashlight) in order to enable a better camera vison [sic].53 In other words, video is involved here on the part of the spectator, who is turned into a performer. Even more, the supposedly “immaterial” and “objective” mechanisms of internet protocols (and their resulting electronic signals) are embodied by the performers only to be transformed back into electronic signals again by means of the spectator’s smartphone. The performing body—both that of the performer and that of the spectator—is here exposed as a link that is implicated in the ever-circulating signal. Both “Traversing the Phantasm” and “The Present in Drag” make explicit or implicit use of the “phantasm” (from the Greek φαντάζω: “appearance,” “imagination,” “illusion”—“to make visible”) in their curatorial positions. In both cases, as different as they first appear, the phantasm is not just a concept in opposition to a “given” reality. Instead, both depend on a (social) construction of reality that is entangled with the phantasm. While the first approach reinforces the need for questioning, traversing, and positioning the phantasm in the field of the moving image, the second calls for supporting and reinforcing the phantasm against an obscure, unfathomable, and frail reality. Read together, these curatorial approaches yield an illuminating model of the phantasm’s function. On the one hand, the phantasm emerges as a necessity of human perception—a construction, a foundation for subjectivity, and a perspective from which to see the world. On the other hand, the phantasm is confronted with a concept of reality that no longer operates as an index of truth; instead, it is just as made, just as constructed, as the “fiction” of the phantasm itself. It is no longer relevant to find an “accurate” depiction of the world54 since, in

53 “Alexandra Pirici,” participant profile page, Berlin Biennale, accessed August 20, 2019, http://bb9.berlinbiennale.de/participants/pirici/. 54 See chapter III.1: “‘A Commonplace of Criticism’—Two Moments of Video’s Aesthetic Heritage.”

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this curatorial approach, reality and fiction are the same: they are a veil— they are “in drag”—for/against the real, which appears here as an absolute “present” and cannot be exposed by either the phantasm or reality. Thus, the “present in drag” can also be read in a temporal sense: the present is never just the present, it is dragged somewhere, to some other time, to be dealt with, to be perceived. In other words, the phantasm in “The Present in Drag” is also a necessity of perception, and in both curatorial concepts it emerges in an ambivalent position. On the one hand, it is an “illusion” and distortion in opposition to the real. On the other hand, it is a necessary protection—a veil, a screen from this real. To place these findings in a psychoanalytic context, we can conclude that the phantasm is not the Imaginary—at least, it is not limited to this register. Instead, it can be articulated in the following formula: The phantasm emerges at the very location in which a subject’s relation to things (or better: the Thing) is constituted. As such, it is what veils the (otherwise intolerable) Thing for the subject. In this manner, the phantasm is that which both constitutes and accommodates the subject while simultaneously inserting a screen between the subject and its object—the objet a.55 It comes as no surprise that both exhibitions negotiate the question of the phantasm and its relation to reality primarily in the field of the moving image since this relation has a long and established history in both psychoanalysis and film studies. Defining the phantasm as situated within the Other scene of the unconscious, Lacan himself drew analogies to the realm of cinema by emphasizing the function of the psychic screen and the frozen image that is projected onto it. This comparison has been condensed in film and art theory to the idea that the phantasm is like a “frozen image on the cinema screen.”56 However, the following sections will demonstrate that video, with its constantly circulating signal, is a far more compelling locus to exemplify the structure of the phantasm.

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See chapter III.3.2: “On the Other.” This formulation derives from Dylan Evans and is frequently quoted in film studies and other investigations of art. See Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 61. See also Alison Young, Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law (London: Routledge, 2005), 82; Laura González, Make Me Yours: How Art Seduces (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 134; Steve Nolan, Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Religious Film Analysis (London: Continuum, 2009), 112 (footnote 27).

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2.1 Phantasma One constantly returns to the scene of the cave: real-effect or impression of reality.57 To ask what the structure of the phantasm means for video, let us return to the historical roots of the concept and to the rise of media theory in the 1960 and 1970s. Jean-Louis Baudry’s famous article “The Apparatus” (1976)58 describes the relationship between film and psychoanalysis with regard to the phantasm, returning to the “primal scene”59 of media theory, Plato’s cave. Like Baudry, who discusses the “correspondences between cinematographic technique and our ability to produce mental images” and how the process of recording and reproducing images in “the basic cinematographic apparatus” is connected to psychoanalysis,60 I will attempt to analyze the correspondence between video and psychoanalysis through the concept of the phantasm by revisiting its etymological roots as found in the works of Plato and Aristotle. The Greek word φάντασμα (phantasma) means apparition, phantom, phantasm, vision, or dream and is closely related to φαντάζω (phantazo, to make visible) and φαντασία, (phantasia, appearance or appearing). With its close relation to phantasia, the phantasm takes on the meaning of “mere image” or “unreality,” especially in the works of Plato

57 58

Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 104. This article was first published in French as “Le Dispositif” (1975). The term dispositif can be translated into English as “arrangement,” “organization,” “apparatus,” “instrument,” or “fixture” and refers to a nexus of social practices, discourses, and instruments. Hence, the English translation of the title is somewhat unfortunate as the notion of the “apparatus” does not grasp the multilayered meanings of the term. Instead, “apparatus” creates a much more narrow understanding of the dispositif as technology-based, neglecting the interplay of disparate forms of social practice that lies at the core of the French notion. 59 Baudry formulates the relationship between Plato’s allegory of the cave and Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of the Other scene as the scene of the unconscious in the following statement: “But the first scene would seem to be the second’s other scene” (Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 104). For more on the “primal scene,” see section 2.2.: “The Scene.” 60 Baudry, 106.

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and the Platonic tradition.61 Here the phantasm situates itself between sensual perception (aisthesis) and thought/reason (nous).62 The very concept of the phantasm thus oscillates between apparition (as something—an idea even—that becomes visible) and appearance (as something that deceives, that only looks like something it is not). As such, the concept of the phantasm lays the foundation for a dualistic split between appearance (phantasia)—as something that only looks like something else, points to something else, but is in itself nothing (an “image” in the Platonic sense)—and reality, which is true, real, and identical (that is, nonreferential): a true being (an “idea” in the Platonic sense). At the same time, however, it poses a threat to this very dualism since it contains a third dimension—namely, that of an apparition, which can be both true and false.63 The phantasm, in this conceptualization, occupies a position of an “impossible” third, between the mere image of phantasy and reality understood as the pure, actual being: the idea. The phantasm thus claims a place for itself in the world without actually being—and without actually not being.64 We know this problem best from Plato’s allegory of the cave. Here the word “phantasm” first appears in a very curious manner: it is precisely that figure which stands between the shadows of the cave, the pure images, and the sun as pure idea. Still in the cave, the scene to which the spectators are forcibly exposed is a fixed perspective since they are tied up and unable to move. The spectators encounter shadows on the

61

62

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George Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. “Φάντασμα,” accessed April 4, 2019, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0058:entry=fa/ntasma&highlight=phantasm. It is beyond the scope of this book to provide a detailed discussion of Platonic thought in relation to the phantasm. In Platons Schauspiel der Ideen, Ulf Schmidt points out the character of the “third” that the phantasm takes on within Plato’s work between two kinds of seeing: sensual perception (aisthesis), that is, seeing with the bodily organ, and seeing with the organ of the psyche, the nous (201). For a detailed discussion of this topic, see the chapter “Arbeiten am Phantasma,” in Ulf Schmidt, Platons Schauspiel Der Ideen: Das “Geistige Auge” im Medien-Streit zwischen Schrift und Theater [in German] (Bielefeld: transcript, 2006), 201–94. Interestingly, Schmidt connects this status of the phantasm as a third between truth and lie with the grammatical structure of the medium (see chapter II of this book) and ascribes the phantasm to the realm of “self-deception.” See Schmidt, 201. Here we can see a curious conceptual proximity to Lacan’s rendering of the unconscious. Lacan states in Seminar XI that “what truly belongs to the order to [sic] the unconscious, is that it is neither being, nor non-being, but the unrealized.” See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 30.

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wall while the objects that cast these shadows are invisible.65 However, these shadows are not phantasms for Plato. On the contrary, the phantasm is only encountered once the cave is left: “He came out into the light, that his eyes would be filled with its beams so that he would not be able to see even one of the things that we call real?” “Why, no, not immediately,” he said. “Then there would be need of habituation, I take it, to enable him to see the things higher up. And at first he would most easily discern the shadows and, after that, the likenesses or reflections in water of men and other things, and later, the things themselves, and from these he would go on to contemplate the appearances in the heavens and heaven itself, more easily by night, looking at the light of the stars and the moon, than by day the sun and the sun’s light.” “Of course.” “And so, finally, I suppose, he would be able to look upon the sun itself and see its true nature, not by reflections in water or phantasms of it in an alien setting, but in and by itself in its own place.”66

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The scene in the cave calls for two observations. First, it has often been pointed how surprisingly close this setting is to a modern cinema. I mentioned Baudry earlier, but the analogy is ubiquitous. See, for instance, Elwes, Installation and the Moving Image, 76–77. For a more in-depth analysis, see also Nathan Andersen, Shadow Philosophy: Plato’s Cave and Cinema. (London: Routledge, 2014). Second, this scene could be described in Lacanian terms as phantasmatic: in these terms, the phantasm is understood as a defense against castration anxiety and the lack in the Other. Rather than taking on castration—that is, the recognition that the primary object has always already been lost (see this chapter, section 3.2: “The Veil/Screen”)—the subject creates a scene in which the primary object is not completely lost at the price of it being stolen by the Other (in this case, the other people carrying the objects), who prevents the subject from enjoying it—because the Other wants it all for itself. In other words, the phantasm states: There is the object that will completely satisfy me; it was taken from me by the Other. Lacan poses a version of the question in Seminar X: “What am I (for the Other)?” This is what the phantasm seeks to answer. The setting Plato creates thus precisely reenacts this phantasmatic structure. The others (who are they, anyway?) carry the objects, and all that the subjects in the cave are able to access is their shadow—or, in Lacanian terms, a small portion of the jouissance they contain. See Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. X (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2014). 66 Plato, The Republic: Books I–V, Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 516a–b.

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Thus, in Plato’s allegory, there is a long chain to follow from the shadow of images to the light of ideas: from the shadows on the cave wall; to the objects that cast these shadows; to the fire that illuminates these objects; to the shadows and reflections (phantasmata) of people and objects outside the cave, in the water, etc.; to the actual people and objects; to the light of the sun; to the sun itself. Here the phantasm takes a position of mediating the pure light to “unaccustomed eyes” that cannot see the light directly. The way in which the phantasm is distinguished from the pure idea as absolute truth (represented by the sun) is also instructive here. While the phantasms are “in an alien setting” (the footnote of this English translation also gives an alternative translation as in “a foreign medium”), the sun is “in and by itself in its own place.”67 In other words, there is something about the phantasm that is displaced; it is always elsewhere (anderwärts, in Friedrich Schleiermacher’s German translation68)—it can never be in its own place since it never “owns” the place from which it emerges. Instead, it merely occupies this place temporarily. For Aristotle, the phantasm is the result of the work of phantasia. Phantasia (usually translated into English as “imagination” and into German as Vorstellung—(re-)presentation) is a faculty of the soul, which for Aristotle in De Anima is describable only by negative definition: phantasia does not belong to any of the previously introduced faculties of the soul—neither to sensation (perception, aisthesis), nor to opinion (doxa), nor to knowledge (episteme), nor to intellect (thought, nous). Thus, phantasia is in itself a faculty—“the faculty in virtue of which we say that an image [phantasma] presents itself to us”—and as such, “some one of the faculties or habits in virtue of which we judge, and judge truly or falsely.”69 Phantasia therefore poses a problem for the (classic) logical judgment of “true or false” and its associated faculties, as Aristotle demonstrates. While “sensations are always true, […] imaginings prove for the most part false.” Unlike sensations, phantasia does not need a “faculty like sight or an activity like seeing” to produce an image. In fact, it “may have an image even when neither the one nor

67 Plato, 516b. 68 Platon, Werke in acht Bänden: Band 4. Der Staat (Darmstadt: wbg Edition, 2019), 516b. 69 Aristotle, De Anima, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 428a 1–5.

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the other is present: for example, the images in dreams.”70 Moreover, “sensation is always present” while phantasia may or may not be.71 The fact that these two points—that there can be an image (phantasma) even when there is no specific sensual perception to evoke it and that there is always sensual perception but not always phantasia—are not in opposition to each other shows that, for Aristotle, phantasia operates on an altogether different level than sensation. At the same time, it follows for Aristotle that phantasia “is never found by itself apart from perception.”72 As for knowledge (episteme) and intellect (nous), both, like sensation, also “always judge truly,”73 and therefore phantasia cannot be of the same order or similar to them. The only faculty that can also be either true or false, like phantasia, is opinion (doxa). However, while “opinion is attended by conviction, for it is impossible to hold opinions without being convinced of them,” phantasia can (and most likely does) occur without conviction.74 For Aristotle, phantasia is therefore not constituted by any of the other faculties. Nor is it constituted by a combination of faculties, although it maintains a relation to (at least) sensation and opinion, working directly on “that which we perceive.”75 The definition that follows from this distinction is that phantasia is a movement, “a motion generated by actual perception,”76 and Aristotle insists that sight is the principal sense on which it is based, pointing to the etymology of phantasia (φαντασια) as deriving from φαους (phaous,

70 Aristotle, 428a 5–12. 71 Aristotle, 428a 5–12. 72 Aristotle, 427b 15–16. 73 Aristotle, 428a 16–18. 74 Aristotle, 428a 16–428b 9. 75 Aristotle, 428a 16–428b 9. 76 Aristotle, 429a 1–2. In “The Signifier in Motion: The Movement of Language in Psychoanalysis and in Aristotle’s Linguistic Theory,” Shirley Sharon-Zisser draws a connection between the Aristotelian concept of movement as it is elaborated in his Rhetoric and the Freudian concept of Vorstellung (imagination, (re-)pre-sentation, which, as already stated, is the German translation for phantasia) as “subject to the general laws of motion” (Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 295) and as the motion of the drive. Sharon-Zisser argues that “corporisation”—that is, the “intaking of a chain of signifiers and its metabolization into speech and movement […] takes place in the life of any neurotic subject with respect to the scripted scenarios of the unconscious phantasm, which the subject enacts with his organs.” Shirley Sharon-Zisser, “The Signifier in Motion: The Movement of Language in Psychoanalysis and in Aristotle’s Linguistic Theory,” Fractal: Revista de Psicologia 28, no. 3 (September 2016): 313.

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light).77 The crucial point here is that for Aristotle there is no thought (νοεῖν, from nous) that does not include phantasia. And it is precisely phantasia that grounds thought on perception, thereby linking thought, as a faculty “peculiar to the soul,” to the body.78 What can be taken from this brief excursus on Plato and Aristotle, besides the emphasis on the visual field that we find in the concept of the phantasm, is the way in which the phantasm occupies a liminal place that is both truth and lie, both sensual perception and reason. This is an impossible place insofar as it is displaced; it is a place that cannot logically exist and whose very existence makes it difficult to distinguish between these terms: lie and truth, sensation and reason. Rather than standing in between them, however, the phantasm holds a piece of each of these realms. It thus becomes evident why Plato’s allegory of the cave may well be called a “primal scene” of media theory: The concept of the phantasm here prefigures the function of the medium as that which is not simply in between two states but holds a dimension of each of the positions it mediates. Understood in this way, the structure of the phantasm as mediating (as found in both Plato and Aristotle) is what will interest us further in our investigation of video. Thus, despite departing from the same point as Baudry and his apparatus theory (Plato’s cave), our concerns and conclusions are significantly different. For Baudry, the analogy between cinema and the cave is the constitutive moment for his assertions regarding cinema’s status as “a simulation apparatus.”79 When Baudry makes this claim, he only thinks of the events in the cave, stating that Plato’s prisoner is the victim of an illusion of reality, that is, of precisely what is known as an hallucination, if one is awake, as a dream, if asleep; he is the prey of an impression, of an impression of reality.80

77 Aristotle, De Anima, 429a 1–5. 78 “Thought, if anything, would seem to be peculiar to the soul. Yet, if thought is a sort of imagination, or not independent of imagination, it will follow that even thought cannot be independent of the body.” Aristotle, 403a 8–10. 79 Baudry, “The Apparatus,” 118. 80 Baudry, 107.

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Under this premise, cinema turns into an illusion apparatus, whereas reality is absent (or present only as an image of reality). Our concern, however, is not with the cave, but with the phantasm as that which mediates perception and reason. Rather than thinking of video (or the moving image in general, for that matter) as a “hallucination” or an “illusion,” the concept of the phantasm offers a way of understanding video as a medium situated, in Plato’s terms, as the border between perception and idea.

2.2 The Scene From one scene to the other: from Plato’s cave as the primal scene of media theory we have moved to video’s mise-en-scène as located in another place—the place in which the phantasm emerges as a medial structure that partakes in both perception and idea. I have already related video’s scene to Freud’s notions of “psychic locality” and the “Other scene” of the unconscious in order to adequately accommodate video’s temporally and spatially displaced structure. Let us now try to understand how the scene and the phantasm relate to one another. What is the video scene made of? How does it relate to the psychoanalytic rendering of scenes—of which there are many: traumatic scenes, memory scenes, and phantasy scenes, just to name a few? And how does the video scene relate to concepts of “reality” and “illusion,” which form the basis for most theories of video, media, and the moving image? I will begin our investigation of the video scene with Omer Fast’s Casting because this artwork analyzes the very function and structure of a scene. In examining this work, I aim to determine how the phantasm operates as a mediating structure. Fast’s four-channel video installation Casting perpetually slides from one scene to the next: from phantasy to memory to trauma, and back again. Two channels are projected on each side of the same screen, back-to-back. While the two channels on the front present a casting situation on a film set and images illustrating the story told in the work’s single audio track, the other side presents an interview situation, with one shot depicting the interviewee and a separate “countershot” depicting Fast conducting the interview. The scene and its premise are drastically different depending on which side the spectator watches first. In the first image pair on the front, the scenes are shown as tableaux vivants: the actors do not move but are frozen in characteristic poses that reflect the moods and narration of the audio track (figs. 30–32). Small motions break the illusion

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of a still image: clothes moving in the wind, eyes blinking, twitches, and tiny signs of the effort to keep still. Fast refers to these “accidental” movements as a “betrayal of the body” or the “body resisting direction.”81 “Can you improvise now?” the film director “asks” silently, unmoving. “No, I am sure I could. I guess it depends on the subject, something I am knowledgeable about,” “replies” the actor in the casting scene on the film set and begins to “tell” a story of a disastrous date on his first Christmas in Germany (fig. 32). Both channels offer similar but not identical image scenes to complement the audio, primarily differing in the camera angle. As the actor begins to recount the story, something is suddenly off; the scene depicted is no longer a small Bavarian town but a desert setting with women in hijabs

Fig. 30 Omer Fast, Casting, installation view at the Museum of Modern Art Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (front), 2007, four-channel video installation, courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York, photograph: MUMOK/RASTL.

81 “Omer Fast: The Casting,” artist talk (video), Cleveland Museum of Art, accessed August 23, 2019, https://www.clevelandart.org/exhibitions/omer-fast-casting.

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and abayas and American soldiers in a Humvee (fig. 30). The audio track slides smoothly from one story to the other, causing alternating scenes on the screen: one scene in Germany, one in Iraq; one telling the story of a date with a self-harming woman on Christmas Eve (fig. 31), one of the unintentional shooting of a civilian after a roadside bombing. It looks as if the storyteller has seamlessly interlaced two stories, and the video montage—which is itself split into two channels—exposes and unravels the mnemonic condensation of scenes.

Fig. 31 Omer Fast, Casting, 35 mm film stills by Lisa Wiegand (front), 2007, four-channel video installation, courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.

Fig. 32 Omer Fast, Casting, video still (front), 2007, four-channel video installation, courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York.

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The reverse side of the screen, however, offers a different reading. Here an interview situation with two portrait shots—one of an American soldier and one of Omer Fast—reveals that the audio track is the result of intensive editing (fig. 33). Two interviews about two different events have been stitched together to create the audio track, and the video editing in the back projection follows the cuts of the audio editing. The result is a staccato of hard cuts in the video scenes. However, it is only through these visible cuts in the video material that the audio track is exposed as equally fragmented. The audio material, which the spectator first encounters via the front screen of the casting scene, is now revealed to be the result of an actual interview between Fast and a soldier. However, this is not the same as saying that the back scene of Casting is “actual.” The work is not interested in revealing a truth behind or beyond the video scene, but merely depicts its reverse side. In the front projection, the unifying capacities of video are not so much broken up as they are exposed. Three different scenes are shown: Germany, Iraq, and the film set—all of which reflect their status as “scene” through the relative immobility in their shots. The third scene, the film set, reflects the work’s conditions of production while simultaneously organizing the other two

Fig. 33 Omer Fast, Casting, installation view at the Museum of Modern Art Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (back), 2007, four-channel video installation, courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York, photograph: MUMOK/RASTL.

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scenes, allowing them to oscillate somewhere between memory and phantasy. The dreamlike scenes that spectators see and the story they hear are integrated into the framework of a casting situation, which creates what is usually referred to in film theory as a “suspension of disbelief.”82 The scene in which an actor improvises in a casting situation establishes a reality that is coherent enough for the spectator to accept the fiction. However, this reality is broken up by the tableaux vivants, which defy the filmic conventions that create this suspension of disbelief and thus reveal the difference between “on-screen reality” (which is the same as “illusion” or “fiction”) and the reality of the spectator. In other words, the spectators of these scenes do not forget that they are watching. Casting’s reverse side dramatically complicates the understanding of video’s relation to reality and fiction as well as the role of the spectator since it simultaneously breaks up and exposes the unifying capacities of video as an effect of the mediating impact of the phantasm. The cuts in the video material enable the cuts in the audio material to emerge. Differences in tonality and mood become audible between the respective cuts—differences that are veiled on the front side of the screen by the conventions of montage and the suspension of disbelief they induce in the spectator. Thus, Casting not only asserts a difference between onscreen reality and the reality of the spectator but also brings to light how

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On Video by Roy Armes offers a good account of the suspension of disbelief: “The conventional fictional feature film offers a series of staged, totally contrived events, filmed out of order and rearranged during the editing, which present themselves as credible but not true. There is no ambiguity in our response: we are entertained without being fully taken in, happy to accept a fiction which gives us excitement, pleasure, and suspense without requiring from us more than a willing suspension of disbelief. But the fictional world created in such a film has several distinctive features. The images with their reinforcing, supportive sounds allow the events to unfold with a temporal and spatial logic within a closed, self-contained universe which is harmonious within its own bounds. The players act to the camera (and hence through it to us), while showing no awareness that they are being watched, either by the camera at the shooting or by us when the film is projected. Although we may be consciously aware of the actors—whether stars or character players—the boundary between actor and role is never in doubt. For example, we never confuse Cary Grant as he is in real life with the parts he plays, even though his ambiguous screen persona draws much from his tormented personality.” Roy Armes, On Video (London: Routledge, 1988), 145.

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both these scenes are an effect of the phantasm as it operates in spectating. Casting is constructed in such a way that it inevitably activates and reveals the spectator’s phantasm. Furthermore, Casting exposes that we cannot do without the phantasm’s mediation since there is no perception without it. It is this mediation of scenes that interests us here—a mediation that does not allow for a distinction between phantasy and reality. Instead, it uncovers the unifying capacities of phantasy (here on the part of the willingness of spectators to create coherence between the scenes they see) and how strongly this phantasy shapes every bit of perception. This example emphasizes that phantasy is not that which is opposed to reality: it is the reality of the subject and, as such, it operates at every moment of perception. The video scene thus emerges as a locus in which this relationship between reality and phantasy is revealed as nondichotomous, a circumstance we have already discussed in relation to psychoanalysis. For Freud, phantasy83 is not in opposition to reality: it is first and foremost psychic reality.84 As such, it is not simply “given” but is constructed from memories, which are themselves fabricated from

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Beyond sharing etymological roots, phantasy and the phantasm are closely related terms in psychoanalysis. In Lacan’s work, Freud’s notion of Phantasie turns into “the phantasm” (le fantasme) and takes on a different and more structural meaning. There are several examples of this kind of transformation between Freudian and Lacanian terms. These shifts are not solely a matter of translation, which is demonstrated by the fact that the new Lacanian terms take on an altogether different meaning when they are translated back into German. Freud also refers to the notion of the phantasma in The Interpretation of Dreams when he gives an account of the ancient Greek classification of dreams (Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 4, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 3). In the first chapter concerning the scientific literature on dreams, Freud uses the word “phantasm” in opposition to “hallucination” (41). In Between the Sign and the Gaze, a study on the phantasm and literature, Herman Rapaport points out that “phantasm” was introduced as a medical term in the early nineteenth century and was initially used as a synonym for “hallucination.” By the end of the century, “phantasm” took on the meaning we encounter in Freud as an “occurrence of everyday life” found in dreams and phantasies. See Herman Rapaport, Between the Sign and the Gaze (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 1. “The unconscious is the true psychical reality; in its inner­most nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communications of our sense organs.” Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams (2nd Part),” 613. See also chapter III.2.3: “Bracket and Parenthesis: On Object/Subject.”

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an inextricable agglomeration of both phantasies and actual events (and it therefore does not matter which belongs to which). Famously, when Freud abandoned what is now commonly known as the “seduction theory,” he realized that such memories—he calls them scenes—are not necessarily based on actual events. Following his work with Breuer, Freud had assumed that neurotic (specifically, hysterical) symptoms ought to be “traced back to their origin, which is always found in some event of the subject’s sexual life appropriate for the production of a distressing emotion” and that this “event,” which produces an unconscious memory, is the preconscious experience of sexual abuse in early childhood.85 With the realization that in many cases “these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only phantasies,”86 Freud’s work takes a fundamental turn and ascribes a whole new role to phantasies: When I had pulled myself together, I was able to draw the right conclusions from my discovery: namely, that the neurotic symptoms were not related directly to actual events but to wishful phantasies, and that as far as the neurosis was concerned psychical reality was of more importance than material reality.87 This shift in the role of phantasy in Freud’s theory is radical. Instead of rejecting these phantasized scenes of seduction as mere illusions without any truth claim, Freud points to their truth effect in and for psychic reality. Just because these scenes are not factually true does not mean they cannot have real effects on the subject. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis point out in The Language of Psychoanalysis (1967) that while a distinction is made between “psychical reality” and “material reality,” this is not equivalent to saying that “psychical reality” is not real: It is right to emphasise at this point, however, that the expression ‘psychical reality’ itself is not simply synonymous with ‘internal world’, ‘psychological

85 Sigmund Freud, “Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses,” (1896) in Standard Edition, vol. 3, 151. 86 Sigmund Freud, “An Autobiographical Study,” (1924) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 20, An Autobiographical Study; Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety; The Question of Lay Analysis and Other Works (1925–1926) (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), 34. 87 Freud, 34.

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domain’, etc. If taken in the most basic sense that it has for Freud, this expression denotes a nucleus within that domain which is heterogeneous and resistant and which is alone in being truly ‘real’ as compared with the majority of psychical phenomena.88 Thus, facticity—understood as a marker of “material reality”—is itself called into question under Freud’s discovery,89 which ultimately shifts the focus of psychoanalysis toward these scenes of phantasy and the unconscious desire (Wunsch, in Freudian terms) they repeatedly (re-) stage.90 We can once again note the specific role of phantasy both within the human psyche and, consequently, within the psychoanalytic treatment. Identifying the distortions within emerging scenes in order to locate latent (that is, unconscious) content does not mean that there is a “factual” reality behind the phantasy of these scenes which the analysand must get to with the help of the analyst. What Freud refers to as the “primal scene”91 is not originary in the sense of a chronology. Freud makes it clear that the scenes that emerge in the analysand’s speech during the analytic process are deferred, even those that seem to be infantile mem-

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Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 315. Let us recall that facticity—the made-ness of reality—is a mark of modernity. See chapter III.1.2: “Pointing at the Center.” The translation of Wunsch (wish) into désir (desire/wish) is another case of transformation between Freudian and Lacanian terminology. Lacan’s term désir returns to the German Begehren (desire), a far more compelling notion than Wunsch. It must be added here that Freud also speaks about Begierde, a term almost synonymous with Begehren—with the difference that Begierde is usually used in a more sexual context and that it is an adjective abstractum, while Begehren is a substantivized verb. Thus, we can argue that Begehren contains a dimension of activity or practice while Begierde is more of an attribute, something someone possesses or is possessed by. Begierde frequently appears in The Interpretation of Dreams, where Freud uses it vaguely in the same manner as Wunsch. Lacan also positions his notion of desire close to the Hegelian use of Begierde, emphasizing the dialectics of desire as the subject’s desire of (and for) the Other. See Jacques Lacan, “Presentation on Psychical Causality,” in Ecrits, 148; Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire,” 679. In Seminar VI, Lacan differentiates Wunsch from desire by stating: “Wunsch is not, in and of itself, desire; it is a formulated or articulated desire.” Jacques Lacan, Desire and Its Interpretation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. VI (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2019), 37. Freud refers to the primal scene first and foremost as the deferred traumatic infantile experience of the parental sexual act but also, in a wider sense, as the scene of the subject’s supposed “original” trauma. See Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” (1914) in Standard Edition, vol. 17, 47. See also this chapter, section 3.1: “Repetition: Missed Encounter.”

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ories of primal scenes. They are a product of construction in the analytic treatment, and it does not matter for the analysand’s psychic reality whether this unconscious material consists of actual memories or phantasies—or a mixture of both. What matters is how effective these primal scenes are for a subject for whom each and every phantasy, dream, and memory returns time and time again.92 Thus, phantasy is not just any scene among Freud’s scenic concepts (of which there are many, such as dreams or memories): it is a function of the psyche that partakes in all of the other scenes too—distorting and displacing their content as an effect of the subject’s psychic reality. There is, then, only one scene in psychoanalysis that relates to all the other scenes and structures a subject’s psychic reality: the Other scene (anderer Schauplatz)—that is, the scene of the unconscious. The Other scene is most famously encountered as the scene of dreams (Freud speaks of the interpretation of dreams as the “royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious”93), which is also where Freud first discovers its function

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“So far as my experience hitherto goes, these scenes from infancy are not reproduced during the treatment as recollections, they are the products of construction. […] Every analyst knows—and he has met with the experience on countless occasions—that in the course of a successful treatment the patient brings up a large number of spontaneous recollections from his childhood, for the appearance of which (a first appearance, perhaps) the physician feels himself entirely blameless, since he has not made any attempt at a construction which could have put any material of the sort into the patient’s head. It does not necessarily follow that these previously unconscious recollections are always true. They may be; but they are often distorted from the truth, and interspersed with imaginary elements, just like the so-called screen memories which are preserved spontaneously. All that I mean to say is this: scenes, like this one in my present patient’s case, which date from such an early period and exhibit a similar content, and which further lay claim to such an extraordinary significance for the history of the case, are as a rule not reproduced as recollections, but have to be divined— constructed—gradually and laboriously from an aggregate of indications. […] I am not of opinion, however, that such scenes must necessarily be phantasies because they do not reappear in the shape of recollections. It seems to me absolutely equivalent to a recollection, if the memories are replaced (as in the present case) by dreams the analysis of which invariably leads back to the same scene and which reproduce every portion of its content in an inexhaustible variety of new shapes. Indeed, dreaming is another kind of remembering, though one that is subject to the conditions that rule at night and to the laws of dream-formation. It is this recurrence in dreams that I regard as the explanation of the fact that the patients themselves gradually acquire a profound conviction of the reality of these primal scenes, a conviction which is in no respect inferior to one based on recollection.” Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” 50–51. 93 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 608.

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of staging (and fulfilling) an unconscious desire.94 It is another term Freud (and later Lacan) adopts from Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics.95 What is interesting is that the notion of the anderer Schauplatz as the scene of the unconscious has taken a central role in psychoanalysis (and, subsequently, in literary, cultural, and art theory) while Freud himself merely implies this reading.96 Freud first mentions Fechner’s considerations about “the essential difference between dreaming and waking life” in The Interpretation of Dreams. Quoting Fechner, he states that “neither the mere lowering of conscious mental life below the main threshold”, nor the withdrawal of attention from the influences of the external world, are enough to explain the characteristics of dream-life as contrasted with waking life, which leads him to conclude, in Fechner’s words, “that the scene of action of dreams is different [emphasis mine] from that of waking ideational life” (“daß auch der Schauplatz der Träume ein anderer ist als der des wachen Vorstellungslebens”—more literally translated: “that the scene

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For a detailed discussion of the function of dreams as wish fulfillment (even those dreams that do not seem to be pleasurable), see The Interpretation of Dreams, specifically the “Dream of Irma’s Injection” (“Dream of July 23rd–24th, 1895”), in which Freud states: “Der Traum stellt einen gewissen Sachverhalt so dar, wie ich ihn wünschen möchte; sein Inhalt ist also eine Wunscherfüllung, sein Motiv ein Wunsch.” (“The dream represent[s] a particular state of affairs as I should have wished it to be. Thus its content was the fulfilment of a wish and its motive was a wish.”) Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung. Über den Traum, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2/3 [in German] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998), 123; Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 118–19. See Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 520, quoted in Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 50–51; Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 48. For Fechner, the Other scene is not limited to dreams: as a “psychophysic scene” it is the sphere of an inner function of imagination/presentation (“Vorstellungsthätigkeit”), which is different from sensual perception. See Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, 450. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 48, 541–47; Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 8, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (London: Hogarth Press, 1999), 176. In my discussion of Baudry’s “Apparatus” essay, I have already emphasized the importance of this term in art and film theory. However, it is also a fundamental concept in various studies of art, literature, and the moving image. See, for instance, Nolan, Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion, 106; Shoshana Felman, “Lacan’s Psychoanalysis, or the Figure in the Screen,” Paragraph 14, no. 2 (1991): 137; Hal Foster, “What’s Neo about the Neo-Avant-Garde?,” October 70 (Autumn 1994): 30.

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of dreams is another scene than that of waking ideational life”).97 It has been pointed out that Freud’s and Fechner’s interpretations of this “Other scene” are significantly different.98 Unlike Fechner, Freud does not limit the effect of the Other scene to the state of dreaming and the distinction and relation between (inner) imagination and (outer) sensual perception. Instead, he attributes “more far-reaching conclusions”99 to Fechner’s considerations. For Freud, the Other scene lays the foundation for his concept of “psychic locality,” a topographical understanding of the psychic apparatus.100 The Other scene becomes for Freud a psychic scene101 that goes beyond dreams and toward the locus of the unconscious, for which dreams, like symptoms, are a possible formation.102 The “psychic apparatus” is then defined—in contrast to Fechner’s conception— under the premise of this Other scene as non-anatomical and structured in “agencies” or “systems.”103 These agencies are, in turn, likened to opti-

97 Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 541. 98 See, for instance, Mai Wegener, “Das psychophysische Unbewusste. Gustav Theodor Fechner und der Mond,” in Macht und Dynamik des Unbewussten: Auseinandersetzungen in Philosophie, Medizin und Psychoanalyse, ed. Michael B. Buchholz and Günter Gödde [in German] (Giessen: Psychosozial Verlag, 2005), 240–61. 99 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 48–49. 100 Freud, 48–49. 101 A few years later, Freud changes the notion to psychischer Schauplatz, also attributing this concept, which refers to the formations of the unconscious, to Fechner. See Sigmund Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewussten, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6 [in German] (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999), 200. Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams (2nd Part),” 592. Also: “The dream-work 102 is a process of quite a singular kind, of which the like has not yet become known in mental life. Condensations, displacements, regressive transformations of thoughts into images—such things are novelties whose discovery has already richly rewarded the labours of psycho-analysis. And you can see once more, from the parallels to the dream-work, the connections which have been revealed between psycho-analytic studies and other fields—especially those concerned in the development of speech and thought. You will only be able to form an idea of the further significance of these discoveries when you learn that the mechanism of dreamconstruction is the model of the manner in which neurotic symptoms arise.” Sigmund Freud, “XI. The Dream-Work,” (1916) in Standard Edition, vol. 15, 183. 103 Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams (2nd Part),” 537. In the first chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud states that “we may, I think, dismiss the possibility of giving the phrase an anatomical interpretation and supposing it to refer to physiological cerebral localization or even to the histological layers of the cerebral cortex. It may be, however, that the suggestion will eventually prove to be sagacious and fertile, if it can be applied to a mental [Freud uses seelisch here, a better translation would thus be “psychic”] apparatus built up of a number of agencies arranged in a series one behind the other.” Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 48–49.

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cal devices—“resembling a compound microscope or a photographic apparatus, or something of the kind.”104 Thus, as discussed earlier with regard to the kinship between video and psychoanalysis through the circulation of electric tension, this psychic locality is situated in the apparatus where “one of the preliminary stages of an image comes into being.” Characterized in the examples of the microscope, telescope, or camera, it occurs in such devices “at ideal points, regions in which no tangible component of the apparatus is situated.”105 We have already seen how Freud’s description of psychic locality based on optical instruments resembles the circulating, elusive, and (at its point of production) invisible image in video’s setting. Applied to video, “no tangible component” is perhaps the most clearly phrased conceptualization of video’s locus. Consequently, the images and scenes produced by both the Other scene and video possess another important structural congruence—they are, in both cases, distorted (entstellt) and displaced (verstellt). In Freud’s work, the Other scene appears primarily as that which is staged in various accounts of analysands’ dream scenarios. These recounted dream scenes are characterized by certain distortions or disfigurements (Entstellungen) that are applied to the psychic material in order to conceal the latent content of the dream.106 Again, the German term Entstellung contains a double meaning that the English term “distortion” is not able to capture. Moreover, Ent-stellung can be read as de-placement or de-positioning.107 Freud clarifies the function of Entstellung, stating that “die Entstellung erweist sich hier als absichtlich, als ein Mittel der Verstellung” (“distortion was shown in this case to be deliberate and to be a means of dissimulation”).108 Verstellung, however, could also be translated as displacement,

104 Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams (2nd Part),” 536. 105 Freud, 536. 106 For a discussion of distortion in dreams, see chapter IV of Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 141. Here Freud explains the function of these distortions as maintaining the wish fulfillment even though the latent content of the dream is not allowed to become conscious: “It is true that […] there are some dreams which are undisguised fulfilments of wishes. But in cases where the wish-fulfilment is unrecognizable, where it has been disguised, there must have existed some inclination to put up a defence against the wish; and owing to this defence the wish was unable to express itself except in a distorted shape.” 107 Lacan emphasizes this reading of the term Entstellung. See, for instance, Jacques Lacan, “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation ‘Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure’,” in Ecrits, 554. 108 Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 147; Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 141.

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as a relocation to a different and, as it were, “alien” spot (like displacing a book in a library repository109). In other words, the Other scene is characterized by its displacement, emerging in a spot that is not its own. Similarly, video treats the scenes it depicts by temporarily and spatially removing them, thus displacing and distorting them. While the same can be said of film, video does not veil its displacing function; on the contrary, it exposes it. As shown in the example of Fast’s Casting, video not only distorts and displaces but also exposes the fact that the spectating subject is implied in the topology of the scene. The subject emerges as a significant link and it becomes clear to the subject that his or her phantasy, his or her phantasm, structures the scene that he or she sees. Video thus becomes the spectator’s Schau-Platz: the position from which he or she sees is revealed as displaced and precarious. In other words, video does not maintain the difference between reality and illusion on the screen. Instead, it directly addresses the function of the spectator’s phantasm as inevitably structuring or mediating his or her perception. The “illusion” on the screen is thus thrown back at the spectator and exposed not as a mere illusion but as the phantasmatic veil of perception itself.

2.3 Grammar I (Phantasy) The realization that the phantasm inevitably structures a subject’s perception and that it is thus the perspective a subject takes toward the world by means of the Schau-Platz of the Other scene underscores the important role of the visual field in psychoanalytic concepts. As I have shown, this function is exposed by video art insofar as the spectator is confronted with his or her own phantasm as the operative structure in the process of viewing. The subject emerges as a significant link within the topology of the phantasm. To understand what this means, we need to consider the Other scene from the perspective of this semiotic structure and ask how the positions this scene offers operate. What we encounter here is a grammatical structure that explains the positioning of the subject’s phantasm and the subject’s location within it. A grammar emerges in Freud’s work at two levels: once within the phantasmatic scene and once at the level of

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Lacan uses this example in “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” to describe the function of the symbolic, which is always manque à sa place (missing in its place). See Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’,” 17.

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the drive. Read together, they lay the ground for a linguistic structure found in the psyche and its agencies. The idea that the Other scene produces (visual) scenes110 by means of a grammatical semiotic structure can shed light on the structure of video. In both the psychoanalytic concept of the phantasm and in video’s setting, we encounter language and image as inextricable, as two components that cross each other, thereby constructing subjective reality. Let us first attempt to elaborate the grammatical function of phantasy as it is found in Freud’s work. This will enable us to clarify the structure of phantasy as scene and define its relation to language under the auspices of the drive. In “Ein Kind wird geschlagen” (“A Child is Being Beaten,” 1919), Freud explores a Phantasievorstellung (representation of a phantasy)111 that is found surprisingly often among “people who seek analytic treatment for hysteria or an obsessional neurosis.”112 According to

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To call these scenes visual is not the same as saying they are imaginary. In fact, visuality requires “the image set to work in the signifying structure” (Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” 532). In “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” Norman Bryson accordingly defines the function of visuality as situated within the framework of the symbolic: “When I look, what I see is not simply light but intelligible form: the rays of light are caught in a rets, a network of meanings, in the same way that flotsam is caught in the net of the fishermen. […] Vision is socialized, and thereafter deviation from this social construction of visual reality can be measured and named, variously, as hallucination, misrecognition, or ‘visual disturbance.’ Between the subject and the world is inserted the entire sum of discourses which make up visuality, that cultural construct, and make visuality different from vision, the notion of unmediated visual experience. Between retina and world is inserted a screen of signs, a screen consisting of all the multiple discourses on vision built into the social arena.” See Norman Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 91–92. One cannot help but notice the kinship between Phantasievorstellung and what Freud earlier introduces as Vorstellungsrepräsentanz (see chapter III.2.3). Frequently found in Freud’s writing, the German word Vorstellung is not easily translated into English. Usually rendered as “representation” or “idea,” the term exceeds these meanings: Vor-stellung is literally a “putting or positioning in front of.” In other words, there is an act of separation between the one who has this Vorstellung and that which is represented by the Vorstellung. Vorstellung thus mediates between the subject and object. It therefore belongs neither to an “inner world” nor to the “outside.” For a short overview of different English translations of Vorstellung (and their accompanying interpretations), see Owen Hewitson, “Reading the Unconscious,” LacanOnline.com, May 3, 2010, http://www.lacanonline.com/ index/2010/05/reading-the-unconscious/. Sigmund Freud, “A Child is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions,” (1919) in Standard Edition, vol. 17, 179.

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Freud, this representation of a phantasy is cathected (besetzt) with pleasurable feelings, which leads to its voluntary reproduction for masturbatory purposes and, subsequently, to a compulsive repetitive structure (a repetition compulsion) of the scene.113 It is important for Freud to point out the difference between such imaginative, sexually pleasurable scenes (the analysand’s Vorstellung of a child being beaten) and actual situations in which the analysand has witnessed a child’s beating and which do not serve—or at least not only and not to the same extent—the same purpose of sexual pleasure.114 The grammatical structure of this phantasy-representation in the accounts of analysands is curious. “Ein Kind wird geschlagen” follows the German Vorgangspassiv (processual passive), which is structured around the verb werden (“to become”). Unlike its counterpart, Zustandspassiv (stative passive), which is constructed with sein (“to be”), the processual structure of the Vorgangspassiv emphasizes a motion that is unfinished in the moment of articulation. Thus, “a child is being beaten” is an ongoing process but, crucially, one that lacks an agent. Who is beating? In German, the Vorgangspassiv is used not only to emphasize the processual and ongoing situation but also to avoid naming a subject. In the structure of processual passive constructions, the object of the active phrase “X beats Y” is turned into the subject of the passive phrase “Y is being beaten” while the former subject of the active sentence is omitted. The process that is described here becomes impersonal: subject-less. In the specific sentence “A child is being beaten,” the impersonal wording “a child” reinforces this circumstance—which child, whose child; is it male or female? Confronted with this curious sentence, Freud’s thorough questions as to who is experiencing the beating, who is beating, whether there have been experiences of such scenes in the analysand’s life, or whether the beaten child is male or female yield no clarifying answers. As we will see, however, it is precisely the grammatical function and reformulation that offers the key to reading the scene. Freud concludes that the phantasies have been transformed and developed “in most respects more than once—as regards their relation to the author of the phantasy, and as regards their object, their content and their significance.”115

113 Freud, 179. 114 Freud, 180. 115 Freud, 184.

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Freud identifies three phases (fig. 34) in the transformation of this phantasy, drawing on the accounts of his female analysands.116 In phase one, the sentence reads: “The father is beating the child.”117 Freud then adds: “The father is beating the child whom I hate.” Freud attributes this first phase to early childhood as the verbalization of an incestuous love directed toward the father, while the beating phantasies are directed toward other children—siblings, who, as their being beaten signifies, are not as loved by the parent.118 In phase two, the object of the sentence from phase one has changed into the subject who speaks: “I am being beaten by the father,”119 and Freud attributes a new masochistic dimension to the phantasy. According to Freud, this second phase has never become conscious. Its emergence is “a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity.”120 Here incestuous love has fallen under repression, and in order to veil the incestuous content of the phantasy, it is distorted by “a transformation into the opposite.”121 Whereas earlier the other child(ren) were being beaten as an expression of parental love only for the speaking subject, the beating is now directed at the subject as a transformation of Phase 1

Phase 2 Phase 3

“The father beats (conscious) the child” – or, “The father beats the child whom I hate”

(sadistic)

“A child is being (conscious) beaten” (I am probably looking on)

(sadistic)

“I am beaten by the father”

other child

(unconscious) (masochistic) subject

father

father

other child representatives (mostly boys) of the father (teacher, etc.)

Fig. 34 Table of the three phases in “A Child is Being Beaten” and their transformations (adapted from Sigmund Freud, “A Child is Being Beaten,” in Standard Edition, vol. 17, 195–96).

116

Later in the text, Freud speaks about male analysands’ beating phantasies and emphasizes that the phases are structured differently here. While in male analysands’ phantasies the assailant is usually female, the agent of the scene in the primary phase is the father. Moreover, Freud states, the first phase in males is the same as the second phase in females. See Freud, 196–203. 117 Freud, 185. In the English translation, this sentence wrongly reads: “My father is beating the child.” 118 Freud, 187. 119 Freud, 185. In the English translation: “I am being beaten by my father.” 120 Freud, 185. 121 Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” 35.

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the phantasy backed by guilt. Freud notes that the transformation moves from the incestuous phantasy (“He (my father) loves only me, and not the other child, for he is beating it”) to a masochistic one (“No, he does not love you, for he is beating you”).122 What is most intriguing here is the shift of the personal pronoun from “me” to “you.” In general, this dimension of the linguistic “shifter”123 emerges only in phase two, while phase one is characterized by a strange impersonality (“the child,” “the father”). Only now does the subject enter the scene—as the positions start to shift, as there is a split between “you” and “me,” between the subject and an other. It is within this split that the subject is located. “You” and “me” become interchangeable positions in this phantasy. The subject can take the place of being beaten or ascribe this position to another. The third phase resembles the first. Now the sentence reads: “A child is being beaten.” Again, the agent of the scene, the father, is not named. In some accounts, he is substituted by “a representative of the father, such as a teacher.”124 However, the shift from “the child” (phase one) to “a child” (phase three) is noteworthy. It is a suspicious shift that indicates the interchangeability of positions that has emerged in the development of this phantasy. “The child” is no longer fixed to a particular person (or representation of a person) in the phantasy. It is a position to be taken within the scene. Moreover, the subject seems to have disappeared again. In the third phase, there are (again) no personal pronouns. When Freud specifically asks about the position the speaking subject occupies in this phantasy, the analysand forms a reply that is crucial for us: “Ich schaue wahrscheinlich zu” (“I am probably looking on”).125 In this phantasmatic scene, we encounter a spectator—and not just any spectator, but the speaking subject who is watching, who is constructing the scene, and from whose position the scene unfolds like a Renaissance painting. This position, however—and this is crucial—is veiled by the various transformations the scene undergoes.

122 Freud, “A Child is Being Beaten,” 189. 123 See chapter II.2.3: “Trace.” 124 Freud, “A Child is Being Beaten,” 185. 125 Freud, 186.

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We must not fail to see the relevance of this phantasmatic “I am probably looking on” to our question of how video situates itself. The premise of the 2016 Berlin Biennale “The Present in Drag”—“Let us materialize the problems of the present where they happen and make them a matter of action, not spectacle [emphasis mine]”—features precisely this phantasmatic structure. The spectacle, as “looking on,”126 emerges in opposition to action; “looking on” is rendered as passivity. However, with Freud’s concept of phantasy, it becomes clear that “looking on” is, in fact, an activity on the part of the subject. This recognition shatters those theories of the moving image that conceive of the phantasm of the spectator as passive, uninvolved in the function of the moving image and what Baudry calls the simulation apparatus. As already demonstrated, however, the spectator and the subject coincide as the instance that simultaneously structures the scene and is produced by it. In other words, the assumption of a separation between phantasy and reality, and between activity and passivity in video—as advocated by some video theory (and generally, moving image theory)—is already phantasmatic since it misconstrues the activity involved in perception as structuring the perceived scene. While this finding is illuminating for all visual arts, video specifically relates to the phantasmatic structure of “looking on”: it reveals the fact that the construction of reality always happens now, with and for the spectator. Producing elusive images, the circulating video signal demonstrates what is required for perception: to be engaged in the situation, to watch, actively.

2.4 Grammar II (Drive) “Looking on,” which forms the kernel of the phantasy of the beaten child, or perhaps the kernel of phantasy as such, is thus directly linked to Freud’s fundamental question concerning these findings: What is “the motive of repression” that leads to these distortions? That it is indeed a motive, in other words, a movement,127 that constitutes repression

126 127

See footnote 51. The German Motiv or English “motive” derives from the Latin movere, “to move.” See Kluge and Seebold, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, s.v. “Motiv.”

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becomes evident in the context of “Drives and their Vicissitudes” (1915),128 which Freud refers to in “A Child is Being Beaten.” In this earlier essay, movement emerges as the movement of the drive. Here, what is implied in the three phases of the beating phantasy is verbalized and exemplified by the three stages of the scopic drive and by the pair “sadism-masochism,” which is also encountered in the beating phantasy. Both examples of the movement of the drive are initially introduced in three possible modes: active, reflexive, and passive: Stage SADISM-MASOCHISM

SCOPIC DRIVE

b)

“object is given up and replaced by the subject’s self” → “turning round upon the self” changes the drive’s aim from active to passive

c)

“extraneous person is once more sought as object” → due to the turn in the drive’s aim, the object now “has to take over the role of the subject”

“Giving up of the object and turning REFLEXIVE of the scopophilic [drive] towards a part of the subject’s own body” → “transformation to passivity and setting up of a new aim—that of being looked at”

a)

“the exercise of violence or power “Looking as an activity directed upon some other person as object” towards an extraneous object”

“Introduction of a new subject to whom one displays oneself in order to be looked at by him” (Exhibitionism)

Mode

ACTIVE

PASSIVE

Fig. 35 Table of the three stages of the turn of the drive (adapted from Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” in Standard Edition, vol. 14, 127–30).

The middle phase (b) is rendered as “reflexive medium,”129 a grammatical term familiar from Latin. In this phase, the movement of the drive is made visible as a turn from the active to the passive—that is, from the object to the subject. The reflexive stage is thus both active and passive as the

128

129

In the Standard Edition, the German title “Triebe und Triebschicksale” is translated to “Instincts and their Vicissitudes.” For a discussion of the problematic decision to translate Trieb as “instinct” rather than “drive” in Strachey’s translation of Freud, see chapter III, footnote 92. Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” 128. The English translation in the Standard Edition speaks of the “reflexive, middle voice” (Freud refers to it as “reflexives Medium”). A footnote is added to explain that “the allusion here is to the voices of the Greek verb.” I have already elaborated the function of the reflexive mode in grammar, a mode that can be found in both ancient Greek and Latin and which in Latin is known as the medium. For a discussion of the Latin genus verbi, see chapter II.1: “The Medium”

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subject turns toward its own body to perform the action (here: seeing, beating) on itself. The subject makes itself an object for itself. The reflexive inflection of the verb involves the turn toward one’s own body, but this turn also introduces the possibility of passivity. The reflexive turn changes the aim of the drive130 to a passive mode while simultaneously maintaining the active mode. Here Freud encounters a problem in the chronology of his model since in the case of the scopic drive he presupposes an earlier stage of autoerotism that explains the development of both the active and passive stage. The new model looks like this:

Fig. 36 The turn of the scopic drive (Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” in Standard Edition, vol. 14, 130).

Freud does not address the relation between what he previously described as the “reflexive medium” of stage b to what he now calls an autoerotic “preliminary stage”131 prior to the three aforementioned stages. This is curious and to a certain extent puzzling, since both stages take the subject’s body as their object. What distinguishes the two, however,

130

131

As stated earlier, the aim of the drive (“Ziel des Triebes”) is always satisfaction (see chapter III.2.3: “Bracket and Parenthesis: On Object/Subject”). However, the paths toward satisfaction and the objects through which satisfaction is pursued may change. The turn of the drive that Freud describes here only denotes precisely that: another turn in the pursuit of satisfaction, whether the mode is active, passive, or reflexive. Lacan specifies the function of the Ziel (but in French) of the drive through the difference between two possible English translations. Aim, on the one hand, does not denote the final result, the destination, but the “way taken.” Goal, on the other hand, describes neither the way to a destination nor the destination itself, but “having scored a hit and thereby attained your but.” The “goal,” then, is satisfaction, while the “aim” is the circulating movement around the object. See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 179. For a more detailed discussion of the aim of the drive, see this chapter, section 3.5: “Encircling the Hole: Drive.” Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” 129–30.

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is the aspect of the turn itself, which presupposes that all stages already exist when phase b occurs. However, the preliminary autoerotic stage does not entail such a turn—otherwise, this stage would require yet another preliminary stage to which it could turn. Instead, it contains both the passive and the active mode without the prior establishment of a reflexive mode between them. Reflexivity presupposes a distinction between what Freud calls “ego–non-ego (external world),” subject, and object,132 which this stage of autoerotism (here synonymous with a narcissistic stage, autoerotism being the aim of this narcissism) does not entail. Therefore, Freud splits stage a into two parts: an active side and a passive side, which are not yet in a reflexive relation to one another. In other words, at this stage, the subject does not yet know about the split between looking and being looked at, between being a subject and an object. Based on Freud’s writings,133 I argue that this preliminary narcissistic, autoerotic stage—in which one’s own ego is the object through which (and on the basis of which) satisfaction of the drive is achieved—can be considered mythological only insofar as we can never actually know about this stage once we have assumed the split between the ego and the external world as a split within the subject itself.134 Logically, we can conclude that every turn, then, must be a return to the elements already entailed in this preliminary stage of narcissism. The “reflexive medium” is thus only the “making-visible” of the turn, of the circulation of the drive. Freud draws two important conclusions from this realization: that the stages are synchronic, not diachronic, and occur in a relation of ambivalence to each other135 and—this is fundamental—that “the antithesis active—passive must not be confused with the antithesis ego-subject—external world-object.”136 On the contrary, Freud continues: The relation of the ego to the external world is passive in so far as it receives stimuli from it and active when it reacts to these. It is forced by its [drives] into a quite special degree of activity towards the external world, so that we might

132 Freud, 134. 133 Especially “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” and “On Narcissism.” 134 See chapter III.3: “The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” 135 Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” 131. 136 Freud, 134.

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bring out the essential point if we say that the ego-subject is passive in respect of external stimuli but active through its own [drives].137 In other words, the two pairs do not operate on the same level. While the external world brings about stimuli for the subject, how these stimuli are treated within the psyche is a matter of the drive. It is only here that the relation between the ego and the external world is established through the activity/passivity of the drive. Passivity and activity (and their reflexive turns) are, then, the function of the drive. And, as such, they are not dependent on the difference between the ego and the external world. Instead, they treat the possible relations between the ego and the external world as a grammatical operation—that is, as a matter of language characterized by the possibility of changing the relations between subject and object according to grammatical structures. It thus becomes clear that the sentence “I am probably looking on” in “A Child is Being Beaten” is an articulation that exposes the scopic drive on which the entire phantasy hinges. As such, the phantasmatic scene is subject to the turns of the drive. Looking on—to what, to whom, from where? We have already encountered the different possible ways the scene looks through different turns of the available positions. However, the “I am probably looking on”—which is only uttered when Freud asks about the subject’s position in the phantasy—is always there as the structuring element of this scene. In other words, this I—this eye of the veiled subject—persists as a point of view from which the scene unfolds, regardless of whether the subject assumes the role of (grammatical) subject or object within that scene. The scene of the phantasm is produced by the intersection between the grammatical I as a shifter, as a placeholder, as representation, and the eye constructed around this I-function as an impossible phantasmatic point of identification. Thus, “I am probably looking on” is the Archimedean point of the phantasmatic scene in which all three moments of the drive are simultaneously implicated and overlap in what Lacan formulates (in Paul Valery’s words) as the phantasmatic structure of the gaze: “I see myself seeing myself.”138

137 Freud, 134. 138 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 80. I will return to the function of the gaze in Lacan’s rendering of the phantasm in the following section.

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The Phantasm—$ ◊ a The subject situates himself as determined by the phantasy.139

We now move from the fundamental Freudian concepts of phantasy to Lacan’s concepts of the phantasm as they pertain to the study of video. Lacan’s renderings of the phantasm pass through various vicissitudes throughout his teaching. We can trace these concepts back to Seminar IV, The Object Relation (1956–57), in which Lacan develops a schema of the screen as a veiling of the object (and what lies beyond that object) for the subject, and which he revisits much later in Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), from, as it were, the other side. Here, on the other side of the screen, lies the object, the objet a as both the cause of desire and as a remainder of what Lacan had earlier mysteriously called “au-déla”—“beyond,” as the void and hole in the symbolic that is the real.140 We will attempt to follow the vicissistudes of Lacan’s theorization of the phantasm with a focus on the aspects most relevant to video. Lacan locates the phantasm in the unconscious, that is to say, in the Other scene. In this sense, the phantasm assumes two dimensions that are relevant for our investigation: (1) the phantasmatic scene as a “psychic locality” staging an unconscious desire, and (2) the role of visuality in that scene, expressed through the scopic drive and the (phantasmatic) representations it induces. The prominence of the scopic drive in the phantasm points to another crucial aspect of the concept—namely, that the scene at stake is the scene of the drive. Indeed, the grammar of the drive structures the phantasmatic scene. Its turns and circulation open up the space in which the scene situates itself. Most importantly for us, however,

139 140

Lacan, 185. Lacan continues to develop his concept of the objet a and the real as “beyond” in later seminars, most famously in Seminar XVII, where he attributes this “beyond” to the Freudian “beyond the pleasure principle”—that is, to jouissance. Here the subject emerges as an effect of the symbolic as a “signifier […] representing a subject for another signifier.” The “inaugural repetition” caused by the symbolic articulating the subject is directed at jouissance, which is “beyond the limits imposed, under the term of pleasure, on the usual tensions of life.” Through the symbolic and its repetitions, there is a loss of jouissance “and it is in the place of this loss introduced by repetition that we see the function of the lost object emerge, of what I am calling the a.” See Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 48.

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Lacan’s rendering of the phantasm (le fantasme) shifts from an archaic or theater stage (Schau-Platz) to the stage and screen of the moving image. This occurs when Lacan superimposes the Freudian concept of phantasy with that of the fetish and screen memories, which he compares to a film, stating that what is projected on the screen “all of a sudden freezes.”141

3.1 Repetition: Missed Encounter For Lacan the fantasm is always constituted as repetition, and comes into appearance not simply because the Lacanian object a is lacking, but because that lack is iterated with special effects in each of the Lacanian topological orders. […] The fantasm, then, is the construction that accompanies or commemorates the repetition of disappearance and is what conserves the alienated “subject”.142 As already shown through the examples of Omer Fast’s Casting and Janaina Tschäpe’s Lacrimacorpus, video can momentarily dislocate the subject from his or her phantasm without suspending its function. This is achieved by revealing the phantasm’s repetitive structure: immersed in video’s radical “here and now,” the spectating subject finds that it is thrown back into the repetition of its phantasm—the subject finds itself to be the effect of said repetition. That is to say that when the subject encounters the phantasm, its own phantasm, in video—where it is exposed as creating the scene the subject is spectating—he or she is jolted out of the phantasm, alienated from his or her subject position. Simultaneously, however, the subject is thrown back into repetition because the repetition of the phantasm does not cease to work, even though its quality changes. The repetition in video is formed—looped—around a lack of spatio-temporal certainty so that the subject has no fixed position, no fixed relation to and within the video scene. However, the subject also experiences itself as dependent, as the effect of the repetition set in motion in relation to the lacking object.

141 Jacques Lacan, The Object Relation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. IV (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2020), 149. 142 Rapaport, Between the Sign and the Gaze, 146–47.

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In this respect, Yael Bartana’s one-channel video Trembling Time (fig. 37) is illuminating. Here we can analyze this repetition in relation to the encounter with the real that gives rise to the phantasm. Trembling Time depicts the moment of silence on Yom HaZikaron, the Israeli Memorial Day. On this day, howling sirens can be heard throughout the country. For one minute, people stand in silence and commemorate the fallen soldiers in the ongoing conflict since the founding of the State of Israel. Bartana shows this moment of silence from a bridge straddling a four-lane highway. It is dark; the cars drive with their headlights on. Although the scene seems to have been shot in the evening, it is hard to tell the exact time of day. The entire scene is bathed in the dim red light of the street lamps, accompanied by the swooshing sound of passing cars. After a few seconds, slow-motion effects, cross-fading, and the repetition of sequences defer time in the video. Cars reduplicate under this deferral, causing different timelines of the same material to emerge on the screen simultaneously. The sound shifts to a booming, vibrating noise, supplemented here and there by whistling feedback before shifting back to a spherical, soft howl. The scene has an uncanny and apocalyptic atmosphere as the cars come to a halt and people get out and stand still in silence. The cars’ eerily glowing yellow headlights stand out and place the focus on the vehicles rather than the people in the scene. Detached from its context, as Bartana presents it, the scene evokes associations with settings familiar from Hollywood blockbusters like Independence Day. In such films, cars stop and people get out and stare at the apocalyptic scenario of an alien invasion—or a comparably traumatic encounter (fig. 38). What

Fig. 37 Yael Bartana, Trembling Time, video still, 2001, courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv.

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makes the seemingly innocent association between Trembling Time and Independence Day so compelling is the very setting of Yom HaZikaron. Beginning at sunset of that same day (Israeli holidays begin at nightfall), Yom HaZikaron’s atmosphere of sorrow and grief is replaced with the raucous celebrations of Yom Ha’atzmaut, the Israeli Independence Day. Compared to the scene in Independence Day, Bartana’s video inverts the situation. The spectator does not see the cause of the traumatic scene (the reason why the cars stop). While the horror is shown, specified, and connected to a concrete object in Independence Day, Trembling Time shows the object of trauma as absent. While Independence Day seeks to represent trauma and give it a form (“alien invasion”), Trembling Time does not represent trauma, pointing instead to the impossibility of its representation. Bartana’s artistic strategies of temporal deferral, the loop, fading, and repeating scenes thuse expose the function of representation as the repetition of trauma. At the same time, the work shows Yom HaZikaron to be the locus of a condensation of traumatic events in this ever-repeating day of commemoration. With Memorial Day rendered in such a way, Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the event comes to mind. In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze writes that the French national holiday commemorating the Storming of the Bastille on the fourteenth of July already contains all of its repetitions (the annual holiday) in the event itself (the actual fourteenth of July, 1789): To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent. And perhaps this repetition at the level of external conduct echoes, for its own part, a more secret vibration

Fig. 38 The destruction of the Empire State Building in Independence Day (dir. Roland Emmerich, USA: Twentieth-Century–Fox,1996), scheme of camera perspective, illustration by author.

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which animates it, a more profound, internal repetition within the singular. This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an ‘unrepeatable’. They do not add a second and a third time to the first, but carry the first time to the ‘nth’ power. With respect to this power, repetition interiorizes and thereby reverses itself: as Péguy says, it is not Federation Day which commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille, but the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the Federation Days; or Monet’s first water lily which repeats all the others.143 However, unlike Bastille Day, Memorial Day does not actualize one past traumatic event: it accumulates thousands of traumatic events—past, present, and future—all at once. Thus, the title of Trembling Time refers not only to the time-deferring techniques in this video but also to the deferral of time inherent in Memorial Day itself. If there is, so to speak, one loop operative in regular holidays (all those holidays and commemoration days that memorialize one specific event, like Bastille Day in France), in Memorial Day, the diachronicity of time is bundled into one synchronic spot: all the different events (wars, terror attacks, every single “casualty” since 1948). Time literally stands still on Memorial Day while the siren howls and all public life congeals. Moreover, the accumulated events are equalized in their significance: they are all the same in a neverending series. The purpose of Memorial Day—“commemorating the soldiers fallen since 1948”—points to past and present events as well as to future deaths—a circumstance that gained public attention in advance of the Israeli elections in March 2015 through a group of political activists from the women’s group of the Parents Circle-Families Forum (PCFF). The PCFF, consisting of both Palestinian and Israeli parents who have lost children to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, built a temporary memorial on Tel Aviv’s busy Rothschild Boulevard to commemorate the “future victims of the conflict” (fig. 39).

143

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1.

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The grey cubic structure contained many small openings through which viewers could see a tombstone. The tombstone read (in English, Hebrew, and Arabic): “We don’t want you here,” while the mirror-covered interior of the cube multiplied the tombstone in infinite reflections.144 Yael Bartana’s video also addresses the deadly repetition of commemorating an ongoing conflict, as manifested in the Monument to the Future Victims of the Conflict. In Freudian terms, both projects unveil the repetition compulsion at work in Memorial Day itself, which continues to (re-)produce the scene of trauma. In psychoanalytic terms, we can render this structure of repetition operative (as veiled) in Yom HaZikaron and (as exposed) in Bartana’s Trembling Time as the structure of what Lacan calls a missed encounter with the real. In Seminar XI, Lacan conceptualizes two moments in the function of repetition: automaton and tuché. As the name suggests, automaton is the repetition compulsion we have just discussed: the constant repetition as the return of the same—as “the insistence of the signs.”145 In other words, automaton pertains to the function of the symbolic as what Lacan later calls that which never ceases to be written.146 “The real,”

Fig. 39 Monument to the Future Victims of the Conflict, Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv, March 16, 2015, photograph by author.

144

“Monument to the Future Victims of the Conflict,” Saatchi & Saatchi, March 20, 2015, http://saatchi.com/en-eg/news/monument-to-the-future-victims-of-theconflict/. A video of the installation is available on the PCFF website, accessed August 31, 2021: https://www.theparentscircle.org/en/pcff-communities_eng/ pcff-women_eng/international-women-day_eng/. 145 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 53–54. 146 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge; Encore 1972–1973; The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. XX (New York: Norton, 1999), 94.

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Lacan informs us, “is that which always lies behind the automaton” and is veiled by the phantasy.147 Tuché is the encounter with the real, the “real as encounter,”148 and it is always missed insofar as it is not represented, not representable, and, in fact, “unassimilable” for the subject. Tuché splits the subject.149 Thus, Lacan emphasizes that the real (as encounter) “at the origin of the analytic experience […] presented itself […] in the form of the trauma”150 —that is, as a piece or remainder of the real that cannot be subjectivized yet serves as a kernel or “nucleus”151 for the organization of the subject. Tuché, then, is the accident; it is that which happens “as if by chance”152 and sets in motion the mechanism of automaton, of repetition. The phantasm here assumes the role of “the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinant in the function of repetition,” which is to say the primal scene as the initial encounter with the real.153 Reality thus does not lie on the side of the real but on the side of representation. Reality is an effect of repetition as a symbolic function. The real only appears as remainder, as the objet a that cannot be reduced or assimilated by symbolic repetition and therefore insists. It serves as a kernel for the repetitive circulation that gravitates around it, seeking to cloak it with meaning.154 We can see the dimension of the real in Trembling Time. Incapable of grasping the real loss that Memorial Day contains and produces, Bartana exposes it as an incessant loop of representation: a repetition machine, an automaton. Memorial Day never ceases to write itself, and this constant writing process veils the real trauma that lies behind the screen of this holiday’s phantasmatic framework. By decontextualizing the material, Bartana unveils its traumatic content. The very name “Memorial Day”

147 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 54. 148 Lacan, 55. “That is why it is necessary to ground this repetition first of all in the very split 149 that occurs in the subject in relation to the encounter. This split constitutes the characteristic dimension of analytic discovery and experience; it enables us to apprehend the real, in its dialectical effects, as originally unwelcome. It is precisely through this that the real finds itself; in the subject, to a very great degree the accomplice of the drive—which we shall come to last, because only by following this way will we be able to conceive from what it returns.” Lacan, 69. 150 Lacan, 55. 151 Lacan, 68. 152 Lacan, 54. 153 Lacan, 69. See this chapter, section 2.2: “The Scene.” 154 Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 48.

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makes it clear that this day is not like other holidays—not in the Deleuzian sense of referring to an event. And another thing becomes clear in the way Bartana stretches time and creates a loop from Memorial Day footage: Independence Day never comes. In other words, there is no release from the initial trauma. Memorial Day is the scene of trauma itself, for its purpose is to remember and nothing more: there is no specific object attached to the function of remembrance. In its circular motion around an unidentified, unidentifiable object as the cause of trauma, remembrance becomes the only thing to cling to. As exposed by Trembling Time, Memorial Day thus circulates around the objet a as a remainder of the real, pointing to an encounter that is always missed. In The Return of the Real, Hal Foster emphasizes that the “shift in conception—from reality as an effect of representation to the real as a thing of trauma—may be definitive in contemporary art, let alone in contemporary theory, fiction, and film.”155 We can argue with our previous findings that video is indeed the best place within contemporary art to expose the function of the real as its constituent moment. Thus, when Foster elaborates (by means of Lacan and appropriation art) that repetition is not the same as reproduction—since “repetition in Warhol is not reproduction in the sense of representation (of a referent) or simulation (of a pure image, a detached signifier)”156 —we can easily and effectively apply this argument to video. If repetition, as it pertains to the real, is not representational and not a simulation, then its function in video is not, as so often claimed, to create an illusion of reality, but to expose the fact that reality itself is a construction to screen the real for the subject. This means, as Foster emphasizes, that repetition “also points to the real, and at this point the real ruptures the screen of repetition. It is a rupture less in the world than in the subject—between the perception and the consciousness of a subject touched by an image.”157 The function of repetition as pointing to a real beyond the screen of the phantasm is illuminating for all video, not just for Trembling Time. What we find in video is repetition understood as an ever-circulating structure that manifests itself in the electronic signal and in the spatio-temporal effects this structure produces within the video image. Repetition responds

155 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 146. 156 Foster, 132. 157 Foster, 132.

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to a trauma as the cause of this circulation, and this trauma is first and foremost the fact that one cannot coincide with one’s object of desire. Video exposes that every repetition compulsion requires tuché, an encounter “as if by chance” with the real; a traumatic impact that sets in motion both the repetitive structure and the constitution of the subject. The subject exists only in relation to this repetition. That is, its fundamental phantasm is constructed as a response to the repetition caused by the traumatic encounter with the real. In short, the subject’s constitutional framework is a repetition. Video reveals this framework, which is exemplified in the video setting itself. There is no getting “beyond” the image on the screen. Nevertheless, the circulating image points to this “beyond” as unattainable yet primary to the perception of the image.

3.2 The Veil/Screen Then, through a commerce whose secret appears to spill from her smile, without delay, she delivers unto you, across that last veil which always remains, the nudity of your concepts and silently writes your vision, like a Sign, which she is.158 “Behind a veil, another veil”159 is a device we could attribute to Ulla von Brandenburg’s Two Times Seven (figs. 40–43). The installation comprises fourteen (two times seven) masterfully draped curtains and a ten-minute 16 mm film converted into a video loop. After traversing curtain after curtain (figs. 40/41), the projected one-channel loop (fig. 42) becomes visible, although its spherical sound could already be heard during the spectator’s meandering walk through the installation. The video is itself an extension of the draped setting. In it, colorful fabrics (the artist’s collection of skirts) are pulled alternately left and right like curtains to reveal yet another layer, another skirt, and another, and another.

158 159

Stéphane Mallarmé and Evlyn Gould, “Ballets,” Performing Arts Journal 15, no. 1 (1993): 110. “It is that of a certain kind of mind—an anti-artistic one—which wants to see reality without veils, naked, from the point of view of indecency. Naked, in broad daylight, outside of the dark chamber of consciousness. It is the perspective of those who are unaware that, behind the veil, there is yet another veil.” Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura: Of Ideology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 42–43.

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There is no visible background. The skirts’ movements are mechanical, uncanny, as they are unworn and flat—lifeless (fig. 43). A body is missing from the scene. The mesmerizing shot is supported by strange choral music composed of all the letters in the last three verses of the poem Conversation with a Stone by Wisława Szymborska: I knock at the stone’s front door. “It’s only me, let me come in.” “I don’t have a door,” says the stone.160 In Two Times Seven, the veil and the screen become the same, with one crucial difference. Once the spectator has traversed the installation of drapes and encounters the projection, it becomes clear that behind or beyond the screen there is nothing. The screen emerges as the ultimate veil, a veil that is immediately understood as veiling nothing. Surprisingly, however, this understanding does not diminish the mesmerizing capacities of the video and the installation as a whole. On the contrary, it increases the viewer’s fascination for the moving pieces of fabric in the projection.

Figs. 40–43 Ulla von Brandenburg, Two Times Seven, installation views K21 Ständehaus, 2017, photographs: Achim Kukulies; and video still of C, Ü, I, T, H, E, A, K, O, G, N, B, D, F, R, M, P, L, 2017, courtesy . Kunstmuseum Bonn, permanent loan KiCo collection.

160

Wisława Szymborska, “Conversation with a Stone,” in Poems: New and Collected, 1957–1997, ed. Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak (New York: Harcourt, 1998), 64.

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Everything about this work seems impenetrable; there is no getting through the drapes to a “behind” just as there is no getting into the stone in Szymborska’s poem. However, there is persistence in trying and there is fascination in the never-ending exposition of yet another layer, an enjoyment that there is no end. In other words, von Brandenburg’s work does not expose the desire to find what lies behind the numerous veils: it exposes the desire for the veil itself. With von Brandenburg’s work, we may ask about the function of the screen as a projection and veil of desire. The function of the screen is first introduced by Lacan as a veil/curtain (voile/rideau) in Seminar IV, The Object Relation to schematize the relationship between the subject, the object, and a “beyond the object”161—that is to say, a “beyond the representation in the object”: the Real.162 To exemplify this relation, Lacan chooses the fetish because it is a “problem that actualises the question of the object in an especially keen fashion.”163 He overdetermines its function by condensing the concepts of the veil/curtain, the canvas, and the (film) screen (taken from the realm of visual arts) with the Freudian concepts of the fetish and screen memories. Lacan formulates the relation between the subject and the object thus: “that what is loved in the object is what the object lacks and that

Fig. 44 Modified schema of the veil (Jacques Lacan, Seminar IV, The Object Relation, 148).164

161 Lacan, The Object Relation, 143. 162 The object Lacan conceptualizes in his lecture on “The Function of the Veil” (January 30, 1957) is, in the first instance, the fetish object. As in the fetish function, the role of the object is laid bare in the most evident manner. Lacan, The Object Relation, 143–56. 163 Lacan, 143. 164 In the English translation, the schema reads “curtain” instead of “veil”. The term here was adjusted to “veil” in support of a consistent terminology.

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one gives only what one hasn’t got”165 In other words, the relation between the subject and the object is primarily signified by love, but this love is directed toward a fundamental lack in the object.166 This lack is at once accommodated by the love for the object and directed beyond (au-delà) that object.167 The veil or curtain occurs at the “position of interposition, which means that what is loved in the love-object is something that lies beyond it.”168 This “something is undoubtedly nothing,” Lacan states, but since it is represented by the object, it is there, as symbolic—as the presence of an absence.169 Thus, the veil or curtain is what “materializes” the intermediary relation, “which means that what is aimed at lies beyond what presents itself”170 in and with the object. In the following “schema of the veil,” Lacan offers a preliminary structure of what is later expanded in the schema of the phantasm as the function of the screen.

165

Lacan, 143. In the French (Staferla) version: “Que ce qui est aimé dans l’objet c’est ce dont il manque, et encore: qu’on ne donne que ce qu’on n’a pas” (“What is loved in the object is what it is lacking, and again: one does not give but that which one does not have”). Jacques Lacan, La Relation d’objet: Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre IV, unpublished version, Staferla, 1956, 77, http://staferla.free.fr/S4/S4% 20LA%20RELATION.pdf. 166 We can think here of Lacan’s analysis of Jacopo Zucchi’s Amor and Psyche in Seminar VIII, Transference, in which “nothing other than the relations between the soul and desire” are in question (225). In the center of the painting, where Eros’s (Amor’s) genitals should be, there is, instead, a strange structure, a flower bouquet, and it is clear that there is nothing behind it. Both Eros and Psyche gaze upon this empty spot from which light seems to emanate. For Lacan, the scene depicts aphanisis, disappearance; namely, that “what is at work in the castration complex is the fear aroused in the subject by the disappearance of desire” (229). See Lacan, Transference. It must be noted that at this point of his work, Lacan had not yet developed what 167 we have already discussed as the objet a (see chapter III.3.2: “On the Other”). The object appears in Seminar IV in a twofold manner: as the “imaginary other” (4–5) and as the object that lies “beyond.” Applying later concepts, particularly that of the phantasm, we can see that the object beyond the screen turns into the objet a as the object-cause of desire and as a remainder of the real au-delà. Later in the seminar, Lacan defines three possible objects, each ascribed to a register of the psyche, emerging in relation to a lack the subject experiences as a result of the oedipal triad: the imaginary phallus (object) as a product of symbolic castration (lack) by the real father (agent); the real breast as a product of imaginary frustration by the symbolic mother; and the symbolic phallus as real privation by the imaginary father. See Lacan, The Object Relation, 261. 168 Lacan, 147. 169 Lacan, 147. 170 Lacan, 147. In the French edition, the word used for aimed is visé, which can be translated as “pursued” or “sought” and has a close etymological relation to the visual realm. Lacan, La Relation d’objet, 77.

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Once the veil situates itself, “something can be painted onto it that indicates that the object lies beyond.”171 The object thus positions itself at the place of lack and, as such, becomes the “support of love,” while desire is not limited to this place, but is directed beyond it.172 It is noteworthy that this model entails a strong dimension of perspectivity. Outside of the subject’s view, there is a point that is not visible on the viewing plane, toward which seeing is directed and in which seeing accumulates. In art theory, this point is known as the vanishing point. Although it is not part of the image, the vanishing point is the sine qua non for its construction and it is hidden in a beyond of the construction of the image, “in the infinite.” The veil, then, is an image. As Lacan puts it, it is “one of the most fundamental images of the human relationship with the world.”173 What is as remarkable as the perspectivity in Lacan’s considerations is how close his models are to cinema: the image, the curtain, doubled in both examples—once as the curtain in front of the stage, veiling what is behind, and then as the stage or screen veiled behind that curtain, which itself functions as a veil. For Lacan, this veil is “an image of this fundamental situation of love,” “what lies beyond as a lack tends to be actualised as an image. The absence is painted onto the veil.”174 As the “absence is projected and imagined” onto the veil,175 we find here another condensation, an overlay between veil/curtain and screen in the fact that the veil not only hides something but also allows and requires projection and imagination (in the sense of image production). Furthermore, what the subject sees is not the (symbolic, lacking) object, but the overlay of the veil’s (imaginary, full) representation of a representation (the object)—in other words, a Vorstellungsrepräsentanz.176 The screen thus serves as a model to describe the entanglement of the imaginary and the symbolic in relation to the real, and, as such, it is found at the core of the structure of the phantasm.

171 Lacan, The Object Relation, 148. 172 Lacan, 148. 173 Lacan, 147. 174 Lacan, 147. Here both the French and the German translation offer a more concise phrasing, stating that “absence paints itself on the veil” (“Sur le voile se peint l’absence” / “Auf dem Schleier malt sich die Abwesenheit”). Lacan, La Relation d’objet, 77; Jacques Lacan, Die Objektbeziehung: Das Seminar, Buch IV (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2014), 182. 175 Lacan, The Object Relation, 147. 176 See this chapter, section 2.3/4: “Grammar I/II” and chapter III.2.3: “Bracket and Parenthesis: On Object/Subject.”

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The comparisons Lacan draws in his concept of the veil to the realm of the (visual) arts—and specifically to cinema—account for the condensation he undertakes of the Freudian concepts of screen memories, the fetish, and the scene of phantasy. For Lacan, the veil is at once a canvas onto which the image of the object is painted as the presence of an absence, the curtain of a theater or cinema, and a cinema screen. Cinema provides the perfect example for the ambivalent function of the veil, which both conceals and represents the object. Theories of film and the moving image have drawn from this comparison in numerous ways.177 However, the screen—or what is projected onto it, the image—has often been deemed “unreal” in relation to the “realness” of the object it represents.178 Yet Lacan’s analogy between the film screen and the function of the veil does not aim to state the unreality of images. In fact, pointing at the veil’s double function of concealing the object and projecting an image of the object indicates that there is a “beyond” the screen, but that the object situated there is always lacking.

177

178

The veil plays a significant role in theories that render cinema as a “simulation apparatus.” Bazin, for instance, emphasizes the self-understanding of early cinema as “a total and complete representation of reality; they saw in a trice the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief” (Bazin, What Is Cinema?, 20). According to Bazin, this idea of “total cinema” was rooted in the nineteenth century as a “mechanical age” that believed in an “integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image, an image unburdened by the freedom of interpretation of the artist or the irreversibility of time” (Bazin, 21). That is to say that while film theory in particular and moving image theory in general have extensively addressed the screen’s function as veil, this has been done in relation to the distinction between an on-screen illusion as “the unreality of the image” (Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 15) and the reality of the physical world. Thus, in these theories, the screen only takes on two possible roles: that of a simulation, illusion, or unreality hiding its made-ness or construction under a seemingly perfect, seamless “fictitious reality” and that of a simulation, illusion, or unreality that exposes its made-ness. We can see that the dualism of reality and fiction is a necessary premise for both of these ideas. However, Lacan’s psychoanalytic model offers a third possibility. Here the premise is not dualism but the triad of imaginary, symbolic, and real as interdependent: the screen as part of the phantasm, which allows for the construction of reality that veils the real. For instance: “The event described by live news coverage is real, but it occurs elsewhere. On the screen, it is unreal.” Metz, 24.

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In video, we encounter the screen in precisely this way, undermining the aforementioned theories in favor of presenting the screen as mediating the lacking object and articulating desire. It becomes clear that the screen, or the image on the screen, is not a simulation of reality but a necessary means of creating it. Many works, such as Jon Rafman’s You, the World and I (figs. 45–48) directly address the screen’s function of concealment and representation without assuming that there is a world for the subject that is not always already image. Rafman does so by using found CGI footage (figs. 45/46), his own distorted voice as “narrator,” and Google Street View’s imagery as the ultimate, solely reliable source for the construction of world—our world. “I don’t have one single photograph of her,“ Rafman’s strangely distorted voice says from the off, “even though we spent the better part of our youth together, traveling the globe.” The structure of the work makes it unmistakably clear that the narrator is not interested in finding “her” but rather in relentlessly searching for her image, and the difference is decisive. She never let anyone take pictures of her. She said she would rather think of things the way they were in her memory. The truth is I think she believed a picture could steal your soul. Or something like that. Now that she is gone, I wish more than ever I had some sort of records of our time together. Something to grab onto. A proof of our love. But I have none. But that’s not entirely true […]. He scours the internet for a picture; he skims through YouTube videos and Google Street View to find her: as an image, as a record, as proof, as a document of a relationship long gone. He returns, time and again, to the one picture of her that exists (fig. 47)—taken, he informs us, by a Google car and accessible via Google Street View—until, one day, it is no longer available (fig. 48). The distinction in You, the World and I between the object as lost and the image of the object as the source and aim of desire reveals the function of the screen. Here the object really does emerge as an image on the screen, but—and this is instructive—it points to the real object as lost.

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Thus, it is not enough to say that this image on the screen is an imaginary object. Its emergence is the effect of the real as irrepresentable and of representation as a function of both the symbolic and the imaginary. But what exactly is the role of the symbolic in the function of the screen? Lacan condenses the idea of the veil with the concepts of the fetish and screen memories. The term “screen memories” (Deckerinnerungen) derives from Freud and refers to “indifferent” memories from early childhood that serve to veil (ver-decken179) other repressed memories to which they are linked not by their own content but by association to the content of the repressed memory.180 The mechanism to which they owe their existence is displacement: Freud states that

Figs. 45–48 Jon Rafman, You, the World and I, video stills, 2010, © Jon Rafman, courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers.

179

180

Verdecken means to cover or veil. The noun Decke denotes both ceiling and blanket and, more generally, refers to a cover. In Freud’s work, the terms verdecken (to cover/veil), aufdecken (to uncover), Deckerinnerungen, and Deckeinfälle (screen associations) are central concepts to explain the mechanism of repression and the psychoanalytic treatment. See Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 6, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (London: Hogarth Press, 1981). “A recollection of this kind, whose value lies in the fact that it represents in the memory impressions and thoughts of a later date whose content is connected with its own by symbolic or similar links, may appropriately be called a ‘screen memory’.” Sigmund Freud, “Screen Memories,” (1899) in Standard Edition, vol. 3, 316.

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“they are substitutes [Ersatz].”181 Lacan, following Roman Jakobson,182 addresses the mechanism of displacement as metonymy in the symbolic chain—that is, the relation of one signifier to another signifier as endlessly displaceable. This metonymy allows for substitution (Lacan refers to it as metaphor).183 It is only through the incessant process of displacement in the signifying chain that one signifier can replace another, which is the operation that constitutes a screen memory. A screen memory is thus a metaphor just like a symptom is a metaphor,184 referring to repressed psychic content and intervening in the constant metonymic movement in the chain of signifiers. The metaphor “locks” two signifiers into the signifying chain—in other words, it involves a moment of fixation. For Lacan, it is this fixation that brings screen memories close to the fetish, for the fetish is also a metaphor insofar as it is a metaphorical replacement (Ersatz)185 for a metonymic lack (of the mother’s penis).186

Sigmund Freud, chapter IV: “Über Kindheits- und Deckerinnerungen,” in Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005), 51; Freud, chapter IV: “Childhood Memories and Screen Memories,” in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 43. 182 Jakobson characterizes metonymy as determined by “contiguity” and “remoteness” while metaphor is determined by “similarity” and “contrast” (232). He states that “the capacity of two words to replace one another is an instance of positional similarity, and, in addition, all these responses are linked to the stimulus by semantic similarity (or contrast). Metonymical responses to the same stimulus […] combine and contrast the positional similarity with semantic contiguity” (255). See Roman Jakobson, “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2. Thus, a distinction is made between metaphor as “positional” and metonymy as “semantic.” Lacan applies this to Freud’s differentiation between “condensation” (Verdichtung) and “displacement” (Verschiebung): “In general what Freud calls condensation is what in rhetoric one calls metaphor, what he calls displacement is metonymy” (221). Metonymy is the semantic structure that organizes the symbolic chain. Logically, then, metonymy must precede metaphor as “it has to be realized that without structuring by the signifier no transference of sense would be possible” (224). At the same time, Lacan emphasizes that “metaphor belongs to a different level than metonymy” (227), that is to say that the metonymy of the signifying chain offers the “framework” in which metaphor can “intervene” (228). See Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. III (New York: Norton, 1997). 183 Lacan, The Object Relation, 150. 184 Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud,” in Ecrits, 439. 185 Sigmund Freud, “Fetischismus,” in Werke aus den Jahren 1925–1931, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), 313; Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” (1927) in Standard Edition, vol. 21, 154. 186 In Freud’s work, this lack is the lack of the female penis, which is replaced by the fetish object. See Freud, “Fetishism,” 152–53. 181

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The connection between the screen (of screen memories) and the fetish that emerges in Lacan’s concept of the veil is relevant on three levels: (1) the emphasis on the visual field, (2) the moment of fixation, and (3) the metonymic lack as the motor for the articulation of both. The latter is most fundamental as it is the place through which desire is articulated as “caught in the rails of metonymy, eternally extending toward the desire for something else.”187 It is the desire for the Other (as lacking).188 This “something else” emerges at the place of fixation, “at the very point of suspension of the signifying chain at which the screen memory is immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish becomes frozen.”189 Lacan points out that this desire is unconscious and indestructible. It goes beyond demand, beyond biological needs, beyond satisfaction, and even beyond the organism, the body, as the bearer of this desire.190 Thus, screen memories and the fetish become congruent only in this spot that is the veil as fixation in the face of lack. Antonio Quinet summarizes Lacan’s concept of the veil as nothing less than what Freud calls Ichspaltung—in other words, “the division of the subject caused by its entry into language,” which is “equivalent to castration.”191 The response of the “visual perception” of the lack in the Other (that is, castration)

187

188

189 190

191

Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” 431. This structure of desire as desire for something else also brings Lacan to the conclusion: “For the symptom is a metaphor, whether one likes to admit it or not, just as desire is a metonymy” (Lacan, 439). “Let us nevertheless articulate what structures desire. Desire is what manifests itself in the interval demand excavates just shy of itself, insofar as the subject, articulating the signifying chain, brings to light his lack of being (manque à être) with his call to receive the complement of this lack from the Other—assuming that the Other, the locus of speech, is also the locus of this lack. What it is thus the Other’s job to provide—and, indeed, it is what he does not have, since he too lacks being—is what is called love, but it is also hate and ignorance.” Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” 524. Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” 431. “Although it always shows through in demand, as we see here, desire is nevertheless beyond demand. It is also shy of another demand in which the subject, echoing in the other’s locus, would like not so much to efface his dependence by a payback agreement as to fix the very being he proposes there. This means that it is only from a kind of speech (une parole) that would remove the mark the subject receives from what he says that he might obtain the absolution that would return him to his desire. But desire is nothing but the impossibility of such speech, which, in replying to the first speech can merely redouble its mark by consummating the split (Spaltung) the subject undergoes by virtue of being a subject only insofar as he speaks.” See Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” 530. Antonio Quinet, Le plus de regard: destins de la pulsion scopique (Paris: Ed. du Champ lacanien, 2004), 112.

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causes the subject’s division: “On one hand, he accepts the lack, on the other, he refuses it.”192 This resulting fixation or immobility is also found in the scene of phantasy in Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten,” and we can see here that the fixation causes a suspension of diachronicity in the symbolic chain rather than an actual break with diachronicity. Thus, the motif of indifference found in both screen memories and the scene of phantasy is the result of the subject’s division. Freud elucidates this function of veiling the subject within the scene of screen memories: In the majority of significant and in other respects unimpeachable childhood scenes the subject sees himself in the recollection as a child, with the knowledge that this child is himself; he sees this child, however, as an observer from outside the scene would see him. […] Now it is evident that such a picture cannot be an exact repetition of the impression that was originally received. For the subject was then in the middle of the situation and was attending not to himself but to the external world. Whenever in a memory the subject himself appears in this way as an object among other objects this contrast between the acting and the recollecting ego may be taken as evidence that the original impression has been worked over. It looks as though a memory-trace from childhood had here been translated back into a plastic and visual form at a later date—the date of the memory’s arousal. But no reproduction of the original impression has ever entered the subject’s consciousness.193 We can observe a fundamental difference between the concept of screen memories in Freud’s and Lacan’s work. In Freud’s conceptualization, screen memories are conscious, veiling another (unconscious) memory.

192 Quinet, 112. Quinet points out that there are different ways to respond to the lack of the Other according to the three clinical structures in psychoanalysis: neurosis, perversion, and psychosis. Each structure uses the veil in front of the lack in a different manner: “In perversion, the subject places this erected monument on the veil, or again, the veil is the fetish itself, like in transvestism. The neurotic projects there his phantasm and the psychotic builds there his delusion.” While the function of the veil operates in all three clinical structures, I am particularly interested here in the neurotic version. 193 Freud, “Screen Memories,” 321.

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However, read together with the concept of the fetish, as in the work of Lacan, the screen memory gains another role as an effect of the simultaneous acceptance and refusal of the lack. For Lacan, what is important about screen memories is that they are unconscious to the subject, just like the memory they veil. This reflexive function of veiling, rather than the screen memory itself, is what interests Lacan. The fetish and the screen memory each focus on one side of the veil: the fetish veils the object for the subject while the screen memory veils the subject itself. It is this reflexive structure of the veil that forms the core of the phantasm’s structure, where it emerges as screen. There is, then, another aspect of the function of the veil/screen in the phantasm that is illuminating for our investigation, and that is the role of the lacking object, the objet a, as constituting the visual field. Whereas in Lacan’s early concepts of the phantasm (specifically in Seminar VI) the objet a assumes the status of an imaginary (that is, narcissistic) object (i(a)),194 in Seminars X and XI, he begins to explain the role of the objet a in the phantasm by defining it first as a “remainder of the real”195 and then as “the object as cause of desire, of that which is lacking.”196 If the objet a is constituted by the lack, “the lack of the lack makes the real,” thus the real itself is characterized by “its antinomy to all verisimilitude.”197 The phantasm is now exposed as situated in relation to the real in a reflexive manner that recalls the function of the veil described earlier: The real supports the phantasy, the phantasy protects the real.198 The somewhat obscure rendering of the “beyond” of the veil takes on a more concrete form here—namely, as the real; as that which is radically beyond representation for the subject. What is more, it is the encounter with the real—it is the real as “first encounter”—that “brings with it the subject, almost by force.”199

194 Lacan, Desire and Its Interpretation, 109. 195 “There is the a, which is this remainder, this residue, this object whose status escapes the status of the object derived from the specular image, that is, the laws of transcendental aesthetics.” Lacan, Anxiety, 40. 196 Lacan, “Preface to the English-Language Edition,” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ix. 197 Lacan, ix. 198 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 41. 199 Lacan, 54.

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Simultaneously, the object in the schema of the veil now transforms into the objet a, a leftover of the real, a last irreducible part of it that remains irrepresentable and causes desire to fluctuate and the metonymy of the signifying chain to incessantly aim for another signifier as representative, and another, and another. This conceptualization of the objet a explains why desire is “beyond demand.”200 Unlike a demand, desire exceeds any concrete articulation. From a structural standpoint, it is and must always be the desire for something else. Thus, any manifestation of desire does not point to a concrete object but to the objet a as fundamentally missing, which makes the contingency of desire possible. This is the circuit in which the subject is implicated, and it all hinges on a point beyond representation: a point that, as already emphasized, relates to the order of the visual field and perspectivity: a “vanishing point.”201 Moreover, Lacan describes the phantasm as “never anything more than the screen that conceals something quite primary”202 (namely, the objet a as the cause of desire) and as that which allows the subject not to be “entirely caught up in this imaginary capture” but to “map himself in it.”203 The subject then isolates the function of the screen and plays with it. Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. The screen is here the locus of mediation.204 This definition highlights the screen’s mediatory role in the phantasm. The screen is not something that impedes a subject’s “true” perception of the real. On the contrary, it is what allows the subject to perceive anything at all. It is only through the screen that the object beyond the screen becomes visible: The screen re-establishes things, in their status as real. If, by being isolated, an effect of lighting dominates us, if, for example, a beam of light directing our gaze so captivates us that it appears

200 Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” 530. 201 For a more detailed discussion of the discrepancy between desire and demand, see the following section on “Aphanisis.” 202 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 60. 203 Lacan, 107. 204 Lacan, 107.

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as a milky cone and prevents us from seeing what it illuminates, the mere fact of introducing into this field a small screen, which cuts into that which is illuminated without being seen, makes the milky light retreat, as it were, into the shadow, and allows the object it concealed to emerge.205 The screen understood in this way, as a medium, requires a different reading than the one we might be accustomed to. Both sides of the phantasm are not only interdependent but dialectically related. The subject does not take place only on one side of the “equation”: it extends to the beyond insofar as it is the subject’s desire that is beyond the screen. The subject’s desire belongs to the field of the Other.206 The subject, then, ex-sists outside of “its” desire—as its desire is not its “own”—while the object a, as a fundamental absence, becomes the kernel of subjectivity around which the subject gravitates. The screen is thus located in a central position pointing to the objet a as fundamental lack (fig. 49). We can note two things here. First, the structure of the phantasm is primarily situated in the visual field. Second, the structure of the phantasm is to be read topologically; in other words, what we encounter here is an “optical structuring of space.”207 Instead of depicting a two-dimensional plane, the schema of the screen veiling

Fig. 49 Schema of the screen (Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 108).

205 Lacan, 107–8. 206 “Modifying the formula I have of desire as unconscious—man’s desire is the desire of the Other—I would say that it is a question of a sort of desire on the part of the Other, at the end of which is the showing (le donner-à-voir).” Lacan, 115. 207 Lacan, 93. In his later work, Lacan elucidates the role of topology in the constitution of the subject.

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the objet a can thus be understood as an image of another Lacanian model: the three-dimensional ring of the “torus.” The subject gravitates around the center of the torus and the objet a appears as a hole, a central void that emphasizes the subject’s constitution as ex-sistence in language.208 That is to say, the subject is constituted by his or her speech—his or her articulation as a subject—as “a center that is outside of language” and is characterized by the fact that its “peripheral exteriority and central exteriority constitute but one single region.”209 The dialectical movement of the subject210 is a “symbolic movement”211 insofar as it is induced by language’s effect of “extimacy” (its center lies outside of itself; the subject is ex-centric). The screen serves to veil this void at the center of the subject’s ex-sistence. This is the very function of the phantasm. If we tie these findings about the screen in psychoanalysis back to video, we return to Rosalind Krauss’s question of what it means to point at the center of the video screen. What has now become clear is that this central void, which Krauss finds most problematic in video, is the central void of the objet a in the subject’s phantasmatic, constitutive framework. Although this void at the center of the screen is operative in all visual arts (recall Krauss’s allusions to abstract expressionism, minimalism, and pop art), it is particularly exposed in video because the screen itself is exposed. The video screen openly veils the real. Thus, we understand the phantasm’s screen according to the function of repetition. It is not representation; instead, it points to, or is an index for, the real—it is that which veils the real for the subject and thereby consti-

208 209

210 211

See this chapter, section 3.3: “Aphanisis.” Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” 263–64. In Seminar XXIV, Lacan returns to the topology of the torus and states: “A topology, such as you can grasp simply by opening anything at all called General Topology, a topology is always founded on a torus, even if this torus is at times a Klein bottle, for a Klein bottle is a torus, a torus that crosses itself— I spoke about that a long time ago. There you are. Here, you see that in this torus, there is something which represents an absolute inside when one is in the void, in the hollow that a torus may constitute.” See Lacan, L’insu Que Sait … Final Sessions 1–12, 1976–1977. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. XXIV, unpublished translation by Cormac Gallagher, accessed August 29, 2019, http://www.lacanini reland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/insu-Seminar-XXIV-FinalSessions-1-12-1976-1977.pdf, 5. See chapter III.1.1.2: “Hegel and the Dialectic Movement of Acknowledgement (Anerkennung).” Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” 264.

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tutes the subject’s ex-sistence. Consequently, the question of video’s visuality (and more generally, that of the moving image) is not understood as a phantasmagoria, illusion, or simulation in relation to reality, but as a framework to mediate the real for a subject’s perception of the world. We can clearly see this function of video as framing the world in our previous examples, from Jon Rafman’s questioning of the premise that the world’s opacity becomes transparent under the ever-watchful eyes of Google cameras to Alexandra Pirici’s performance work, which exposes the spectating subject as a link in the chain of electronically fluctuating signals by allowing (or expecting) spectators to film the performance with their smartphones. In both examples, the screen emerges as a guarantor, not as an obstruction to perception. In the same spirit, Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV File (figs. 50–55) poignantly brings video’s function to the paradigmatic formula that “resolution determines visibility” and that therefore “whatever is not captured in resolution is invisible.” In other words, reality, under the auspices of video, is no longer perceived as a matter of representation of the world, but of visibility for a camera. The fact that this visibility for the camera is not merely representational but follows the logic of the phantasm as a response to the real can be seen in the way Steyerl—much like Rafman—situates the video image as a measurement of the world. The logic of the (physical) world and that of the electronic video image become blurred when Steyerl proposes ways to disappear: “To pretend not to be there” and “to hide in plain sight” are accompanied by strategies that pertain to the logic of the (touch)screen—“to wipe,” “to scroll,” “to erase,” “to shrink,” and “to become smaller or equal to a pixel.”

Figs. 50–55 Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV File, video stills, 2013, courtesy the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin, © Hito Steyerl & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2021.

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Accordingly, the world does not appear as a total illusion in video (as Bazin or Baudry suggest for film); it does not appear as an on-screen reality into which the subject is immersed without needing to reflect on its own position within the scene. Instead, it appears as a frail and precarious image of a world that needs to be continuously perpetuated and constantly watched by the subject in order not to break apart.212

3.3 Aphanisis Here we rediscover what I’ve already pointed out to you, namely that the unconscious is the discourse of the other. This discourse of the other is not the discourse of the abstract other, of the other in the dyad, of my correspondent, nor even of my slave, it is the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links.213 “Well I think I am someone who likes to be dominated, cause all the men I’ve had are quite dominating to me. So there must be something in that that I do like it,” says an approximately ten-year-old boy in a voice that is not his own. In alternating shots, Gillian Wearing’s 2 into 1 depicts a mother and her two sons speaking about themselves and their relationship with one another. However, the video footage shows the mother and sons lip-synching to a prerecorded audio track with their positions reversed: the mother “speaks” in her sons’ voices while the sons “speak” in their mother’s voice (figs. 56/57). With great precision, the mother and sons carefully adjust their facial expressions to the words spoken by the voice of the other. The illusion that they are themselves speaking is almost perfect. However, the voice causes a rupture within each scene, as neither intonation nor speech fit the speaker. While the mother describes herself, in her son’s words, as a “failure,” “lazy,” and someone who “thinks too

212 213

Blom, “Video Water, Video Life, Videosociality,” 160. Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk. II (New York, Norton, 1991), 89. Later in the same seminar, Lacan distinguishes between a small other, which belongs to the imaginary order, and a big Other, which belongs to the symbolic: “We must distinguish two others, at least two—an other with a capital O, and an other with a small o, which is the ego. In the function of speech, we are concerned with the Other” (236). The “Other,” whose discourse is the unconscious, is the Other with a capital O.

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much of herself,” the sons are characterized as “adorable,” “bright,” however, with “a terrible temper” and “quite cruel” at times. “I think having children brings out two very very extreme emotions in us, which is that one is constantly faced with the border of love and hate,” the mother’s voice says. The entire scene is unsettling and uncanny. The dislocation of the voice from its original speaking position and its relocation to another position seems to strengthen the emphasis on the actual spoken words. There is violence in this scene and a disparity between mother and sons that suggests family trauma. Similarly, and yet with a different aesthetic approach, Bjørn Melhus’s I’m not the enemy (figs. 58–61) examines how the position of the subject emerges within video’s mise-en-scène. Here, too, the parle-être is

Figs. 56/57 Gillian Wearing, 2 into 1, video stills, 1997, © Gillian Wearing, courtesy Maureen Paley, London.

Figs. 58–61 Bjørn Melhus, I’m not the enemy, production stills, 2011, courtesy the artist, © Bjørn Melhus, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, photograph: Ben Brix.

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revealed as transposed, similarly dislocated from its speaking position. And here, too, this dis-location is the scene of trauma. Combining audio fragments from various Hollywood films revolving around the return of soldiers from the Vietnam War with video footage taken in an oldfashioned German apartment, I’m not the enemy transposes speech from one speaking position to another. Melhus is seen lip-synching to the (auditory) cinematic commonplaces of Hollywood narratives: as homecoming soldier, as brother, as mother, and as friend. However, it would not be accurate to say that he plays a role since what he does exceeds the mere logic of representation. To take a role would mean to ascribe this position to someone—to the mother, the soldier, or the friend. This understanding of playing a role (and merely pointing to the fact that what he plays is a role) could be described by Lacan’s famous remark on the problem of identification: “It should be noted that if a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.”214 In other words, pointing to a role as role does not suffice to indicate the phantasmatic misconception of identifying with one’s ego, as Felix Ensslin emphasizes in “Between Two Deaths: From Mirror to Repetition”: A certain popularity has been enjoyed in art (and, in Germany, in theater) by the process of showing the gap between subject and “role.” Nothing, of course, was gained by that alone: showing that one plays a role means nothing. We all constantly play roles and know it. What is important is the excess within the role I play, that cannot be reduced to a “role”.215 Thus, Melhus exposes the positions he occupies as void, as a blank space, as “placeholders”216 filled only by their articulation in the scene. The subject emerges as speaking, while speaking, pointing to a void in the subject’s position that is real and not a matter of representation.

214 215

216

Lacan, “Presentation on Psychical Causality,” 139. Felix Ensslin, “Between Two Deaths: From the Mirror to Repetition,” in Between Two Deaths, exhibition catalog, ed. Felix Ensslin and Ellen Blumenstein (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2007), 28. Dany von Brücke, Introductory Text for “Live Action Hero, 2011,” quoted in “I’m not the enemy,” Bjørn Melhus (artist’s website), accessed September 5, 2019, https://Melhus.de/Im-Not-the-Enemy/.

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Where, then, do we locate the subject in video? Where does the subject situate itself in relation to the screen, the scene, the images, the things, and the persons depicted? Is it enough to say that the subject is the spectator in order to solve the problem and to position the subject in front of the screen, watching? As already discussed, watching is an act; watching means structuring and organizing a scene. Where, then, is the place for this subject who watches; who, as it watches, elides itself from the scene it creates? “I am probably looking on” is the mode of the subject as an effect of language.217 This “I” is a shifter; the ego that sees itself speak here is a phantasmatic construction: an identification with the position of the speaker. The speaking subject is thus an effect of the symbolic in relation to a desire that goes beyond symbolic representation: The imaginary tension a-a' between the ego and the other—that we could call, in certain regards, the tension between little a and the image of a—generally structures the relationship between the subject and the object, whereas the formula [of the phantasm] ($ ◊ a) specifically expresses the absence of the subject that is characteristic of the impact of desire on the relationship between the subject and the imaginary functions. Indeed, desire as such raises for man the question of his subjective elision, $, with regard to any and every possible object.218 In other words, the subject can emerge only at the cost of always already being omitted from the symbolic, and it can emerge only as a response to the lack that constitutes the symbolic. While the object—that is, the objet a in the formula of the phantasm ($ ◊ a)—still largely assumes the role of an imaginary object here, the emergence of both object and subject are rendered through the discrepancy between desire and demand insofar as desire goes beyond any

217 See chapter III.2.2: “Body/Subject.” 218 Lacan, Desire and Its Interpretation, 116.

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demand that can be articulated with regard to any particular object.219 This is to say that the objet a (as the object of desire) already differs here from the partial objects of demand. The phantasm’s function, then, is to unify these two objects in the phantasmatic image of the object—to fixate the subject’s perspective so that the objet a is veiled by the imaginary object. The phantasm “is the means by which the subject maintains himself at the level of his vanishing desire, vanishing inasmuch as the very satisfaction of demand deprives him of his object.”220 However, since the subject is an effect of the articulation of its desire, this phantasmatic fixation on the imaginary object brings about not only the vanishing—the aphanisis221—of desire but also the vanishing of the subject itself: Indeed, if the word “aphanisis”—disappearance or “fading,” as I put it—can serve us regarding fantasy, it is not as the aphanisis of desire; it is insofar as an aphanisis of the subject occurs at the height of desire. Where it speaks in the unconscious chain, the subject cannot situate himself in his place, or articulate himself as I. He can only indicate himself qua disappearing from his position as a subject. […] This is the extreme, imaginary point where the subject’s being resides, as it were, in its greatest density. […] The subject’s being must be articulated and named in the unconscious, but in the end, it cannot be. It is solely indicated at the level of fantasy by what turns out to be a slit, a structure based on a cut (structure de coupure).222

219

“It is, then, the neurotic’s position with respect to desire—let us say, to abbreviate, fantasy—that marks with its presence the subject’s response to demand, in other words, the signification of his need. But this fantasy has nothing to do with the signification in which it interferes. Indeed, this signification comes from the Other, insofar as it depends on the Other whether or not demand is met. But fantasy comes in here only to find itself on the return path of a broader circuit, a circuit that, in carrying demand to the limits of being, makes the subject wonder about the lack in which he appears to himself as desire.” Lacan, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power,” 533. 220 Lacan, 532. 221 Lacan uses the term “aphanisis” (disappearance), introduced by Ernest Jones, not as the disappearing of desire as “the substance of the fear of castration” but as the fading of the subject. See Lacan, Desire and Its Interpretation, 195–96. 222 Lacan, 424.

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This place of the subject as ex-sistence,223 as separated from its desire at the moment of its articulation, creates a paradoxical loop: while the subject is an effect of the articulation of its desire, the very act of this articulation of desire (which, we must remind ourselves, is always a desire for something else and, as such, excessive and unattainable) produces a demand and makes the object of desire disappear behind a partial imaginary object, depriving the subject of its own place in the unconscious scene. Who speaks? From where? These questions emerge as central in the examples of I’m not the enemy and 2 into 1. But it also becomes clear that video, in its very structure, constantly questions the subject’s position by revealing the subject’s continual circulation in the scene. Every possible position is an imaginary identification that will (and must) ultimately break. The dislocation of the subject observed in Melhus’s and Wearing’s works is present in any video. The subject as parle-être, as a speaking being, is exposed as mere function: a necessarily artificial (rather than natural) occurrence. In its transposition, speech materializes trauma—the trauma of being separated or dislocated from one’s speaking position. Words materialize as the locus of that trauma; language materializes as traumatic in the way it simultaneously constitutes and dislocates the subject. Both 2 into 1 and I’m not the enemy demonstrate that it is language that speaks the subject, and not vice versa.

3.4 Eye (I)/Gaze The fantasy is framed.224 Video—as temporally and spatially displaced; with its circulating signal as unlocalizable (other than in the process of the circular movement itself); its artificial, tireless eye; its framing screen; its capacity to simultaneously place the subject in the scene and let it fall out of it—leaves the center as a void, a hole around which the work is constructed. This central void emerges as a problem of perspectivity.

223

“‘What does the possibility of aphanisis signify in the structure of the subject?’ Doesn’t it oblige us to (postulate) a structuring of the human subject as such, precisely insofar as he is a subject for whom existence is supposable and presupposed beyond desire, a subject who exists and subsists outside of his desire?” Lacan, 101. 224 Lacan, Anxiety, 73.

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In psychoanalysis, we are confronted with a hole in the subject’s constitution. This hole is the objet a as both a remainder of the real and as the cause of desire. While these two facets of the hole are in many ways important for the clinical practice of psychoanalysis, two aspects of its function are relevant for theorizing video art: one is the visual field operative in the phantasm, which we will turn to now, and the other is the drive as it reveals itself in the visual field.225 In Lacan’s writing, the visual field is structured by the chiasm between the eye and the gaze: In the scopic field, everything is articulated between two terms that act in an antinomic way—on the side of things, there is the gaze, that is to say, things look at me, and yet I see them. This is how one should understand those words, so strongly stressed, in the Gospel, They have eyes that they might not see. That they might not see what? Precisely, that things are looking at them.226 Lacan draws the schema of each function as a triangle:

Fig. 62 Schema of the image/screen as field of the eye/gaze (Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 91).

The left triangle indicates the schema of the eye and the right triangle indicates that of the gaze. Let us begin with the left triangle. What is labeled as the “geometral point” is the position of the eye, which coincides with

225 We begin here with the visual field and will return to the drive in the next section. 226 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 109.

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the position of the (Cartesian) subject insofar as it is a subject of certainty.227 It is, we can argue, the conscious side of the chiasm and, in itself, it is the locus of Cartesian perspective—a perspective that misconceives the subject as independent of (and not constituted by) the Other’s gaze. In other words, the subject in this schema of the eye can mistake itself as unconditional—as structuring and subduing the world from its position. The homophony between “eye” and “I” points to their homology: the eye’s position in the triangle is that of the I (the ego), which mistakes itself to be “the master in its own house.”228 In this schema, the object appears as an image in psychoanalytic terms. The schema of the eye thus unfolds in the Imaginary register. We can draw a parallel, as Lacan does, to the visual arts, in which this schema appears as the principle of central perspective.

Fig. 63 Schema of linear perspective, in Brook Taylor, New Principles of Linear Perspective, 1719.

Fig. 64 Albrecht Dürer, Der Zeichner des liegenden Weibes, book illustration (wood cut), in Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt, 1512–1525.

227 See chapter III.1.2.3: “Shattering One-Point Perspective into a Thousand Pieces”; Quinet, Le plus de regard, 173. 228 Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” 143.

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The image appears here as projected onto an image plane, a screen, between the eye and the object. Lacan’s first triangle thus shows the image as structured from the point of the eye, analogous to what we find in the principles of central perspective.

Fig. 65–68 Schema of the eye point in linear perspective, in Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura e della statua, Milano, 1804.

What is missing from both this model of central perspective and Lacan’s schema of the eye, however, is the other point required for the construction of the image. Central perspective requires a point outside, beyond the constructed image—a point that directly corresponds to the position of the eye. As already discussed, this point is known as the vanishing point.229 The vanishing point lies beyond the image, as an invisible construction in the infinite.

229

See chapter I.2.2: “Optics”; chapter III.1.2: “Pointing at the Center”; and this chapter, section 3.2: “The Veil/Screen.”

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Fig. 69 Schema of the vanishing point (punto del centro) in linear perspective, in Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura e della statua, Milano, 1804.

As Alberti’s schema shows, the vanishing point is located at the same height as the eye point, on what is known as the horizontal line. A indicates the height (tre braccia—three cubits, roughly 1.80 meters) of the eye point (punto della veduta). In this figure, the position of the eye point is schematized from the side while the grid lines converging at the vanishing point are shown from the front. Thus, the actual location of the eye point would be in front of the grid, covering the vanishing point due to the perspective. Another similar schema by Alberti further clarifies the setting:

Fig. 70 Quadrangulus, schema of the visual pyramid, in Leon Battista Alberti, De punctis et lineis apud pictures, Lucca, Biblioteca Statale (cat. 15), reproduced from Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, fig. 40, 1997.

In Alberti’s second schema, the eye point and the vanishing point correspond both in their interdependent locations on the horizontal line as well as in the way the two “visual pyramids” meet from different sides on the image plane. As the eye point and the vanishing point correspond, the construction of the latter formulates a center beyond the image plane while also assigning a place to the spectator from which he or she must look at

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the image.230 However, the center of the image plane does not simply remain empty. Instead, the relation—the connecting axis between the eye and the vanishing point—pierces through the image plane and creates a hole in representation. With respect to the vanishing point, this seems immediately plausible, as it is not represented on the image plane. But the same is also true for the side of the eye, the eye point of the (Cartesian) subject: neither position is represented in the construction of central perspective; they are both irrepresentable. Thus, “to see, a hole is required,”231 and both the eye point and the vanishing point are holes around which representation unfurls. Accordingly, Lacan’s second triangle schema is based on the function of the vanishing point (here labeled as “point of light”). In Lacan’s theory, the vanishing point is identified with the objet a as gaze.232 Thus, the second triangle shows the reverse side of the construction of the object (which appears here only as imaginary)—namely, as the simultaneous construction of the subject. This reciprocal construction of the object and the subject in the visual field is plausible in the context of the principles of central perspective mentioned above. However, Lacan uses these principles to demonstrate that this reciprocity is not identical with symmetry. If the first triangle describes the conscious side of the visual field as divided and structured by the subject’s eye, the second triangle points to the unconscious side of the model. It extends from the side of the gaze (that is, the objet a) in the visual field to the subject that appears as screen in the picture of the gaze.233 This picture is the field of the gaze and it is not identical with the image addressed earlier. While the image is the imaginary object for the subject in the left triangle, the picture is what the gaze sees. The screen (also referred to as the stain) is, then, the representation of the subject for the gaze, as veiled.

230 Quinet, Le plus de regard, 174. 231 Quinet, 175 (translation by the author). 232 “The objet a in the field of the visible is the gaze.” Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 105. “In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it—that is what we call the gaze.” Lacan, 73. 233 Lacan, 97–98.

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Thus, the relation between the eye and the gaze is inverted. The gaze as punctiform is that which looks at the subject from the side of things, causing the subject to be “out of place in the picture.”234 This point is beyond the certainty of the (Cartesian) subject; it is the tychic punctuation235 of his or her certainty, the encounter that happens as if by chance, causing the subject to emerge as divided.236 The subject, not as “looking” but as “being looked at,” is thus not the agent of the construction. Instead, the subject is itself a construct, a result of the interdependence between subject and object. Hence, the relation between the subject and object is not symmetrical here. The gaze causes the subject to emerge in relation to it, but only as a screen, a stain in the picture that is the field of the gaze. Through the gaze, the subject is confronted with his or her own division—first and foremost with the fact that he or she is not identical with the eye (the ego). Nor can he or she be found in this position: I am not simply that punctiform being located at the geometral point from which the perspective is grasped. No doubt, in the depths of my eye, the picture is painted. The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I am not in the picture.237 The picture is thus the result of an overlap of the functions of the eye and the gaze. The gaze sees the subject not as a point but as a screen: the eye’s position as geometral point is not only invisible; it is a hole in representation. In other words, the gaze confronts the subject with the fact that the center of that with which the subject identifies—the eye, the geometral point—is a hole. The screen thus serves as a veil only from the side of the gaze because for the subject, the gaze exposes the hole at the center of the subject’s constitution. The subject is “caught, manipulated, captured, in the field of vision”238 while simultaneously unable to locate its own position

234 Lacan, 96. 235 For a discussion of tyché, see this chapter, section 3.1: “Repetition: Missed Encounter.” 236 Lacan points to this reverse side of the eye function that reveals itself in the function of the gaze when he calls the Cartesian subject “the subject of representation.” The certainty of the subject is undermined by the exposure of the place from which the subject gains existence, the place of the Other from which the subject is seen as a picture. 237 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 96. 238 Lacan, 92.

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within it. Furthermore, it is the subject who turns him- or herself into a picture (as eye/I) under the gaze of the Other239 and who is, as an effect, “elided as subject of the geometral plane.”240 Lacan thus draws both triangles as intersecting to show the interdependent structure of the eye and the gaze:

Fig. 71 Schema of the scopic field, the split of the eye and the gaze (Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 106).

We can see here that both the subject and the objet a as gaze are outside of the framework that constructs the visual field. “The gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture,”241 Lacan states, thereby marking the division between the imaginary I/eye and the subject as an effect of the reciprocity of the (imaginary) I and the (symbolic) Other in relation to the “nucleus”242 of the real that drives the structural entanglement of the two. The effect of the encounter with the gaze is thus that of an identification, which Lacan compares to the function of a photographic camera when he states: Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which— if you will allow me to use a word, as I often do, in a fragmented form—I am photo-graphed.243

239 Lacan, 105–6. 240 Lacan, 108. 241 Lacan, 106. 242 Lacan, 68. 243 Lacan, 106.

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Here Lacan directly refers to the “artificial eye” function of any kind of camera, which turns its subject into a picture (thereby mapping the subject’s position). However, in video, the function of the gaze is even more conspicuous: video “traps” the subject between two “artificial eye” functions—the camera and the projector. One relentlessly records, taking in the image, and one relentlessly projects, “spitting” it out. Neither coincides with the spectating eye, which means that in video the subject’s position must always be distorted, ent-stellt, anamorphic.244 The subject in video thus encounters the gaze as radically outside, as the gaze of the projector, the gaze of the camera, turning him or her into a picture. Moreover, we can now see that this “empty center” in video, the artificial eyes, and the electromagnetic, circulating signal are all constructed around a hole. This hole is the hole of representation itself, which structures the visual field through the intersection of eye and gaze and forms the mechanism operative in the phantasm. To understand this point, let us add another figure to Lacan’s schemas. This figure is composed of the previous schema of the eye/gaze and the formula of the phantasm:

S

(eye (I) / subject of representation

SCREEN / IMAGE

a

(gaze / object)

Fig. 72 Schema of the scopic field, the split of eye and the gaze as structural frame of the phantasm. Illustration by the author and Nicolas Zupfer.

244

Lacan demonstrates the distorting capacities of linear perspective in Seminar XI by introducing anamorphic distortion as it is found, for instance, in Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting The Ambassadors. Lacan states: “All this shows that at the very heart of the period in which the subject emerged and geometral optics was an object of research, Holbein makes visible for us here something that is simply the subject as annihilated—annihilated in the form that is, strictly speaking, the imaged embodiment of the minus-phi ((–Φ)) of castration, which for us, centres the whole organization of the desires through the framework of the fundamental drives” (88–89). Thus, it is important to note that the distortion of the subject as it is revealed in video is not limited to video but plays a role wherever there is a picture, as any picture is “a trap for the gaze” (89). However, video makes the distortion visible in its very mise-en-scène. See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.

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We can see that the two schemas are congruent in three positions: the subject, the objet a, and most intriguingly, the field of vision constructed as a frame by the chiasm of the eye and the gaze, which coincides with the diamond (also called the losange or lozenge) in the formula of the phantasm. Visualizing the relation between the schema of the eye/gaze and the formula of the phantasm in such a manner makes it possible to show both the function of the screen within the phantasm and the function of the frame within the chiasm of the visual field. We can thus see that the phantasm’s losange includes a screen—a visual screen through which perception (and hence imagination) is organized. For the schema of the visual field, we can see that the chiasm between the eye and the gaze forms a frame: the frame of the phantasm through which perception is organized and representation is ordered. Thus, the losange is the framework within the phantasm; Lacan reads it both as “desire of”245 and “desire for.”246 Later in Seminar XI he notes that the losange is placed “at the centre of any relation of the unconscious between reality and the subject”247 and is characterized by an “identity that is based on absolute non-reciprocity” that “is coextensive with the subject’s formations.”248 As already argued, the subject receives his or her ex-sistence from beyond. The subject is made from a desire that is not its own but emerges in the objet a.249 This becomes clear when Lacan states that the phantasm is framed: what is framed is the visual field as a field of phantasy that accommodates the circulation of desire. Furthermore, in this constant movement of desire, the subject remains for the most part hidden from perception:

245 Lacan, Anxiety, 100. 246 Jacques Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” in Ecrits, 653. 247 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 181. 248 Lacan, “Kant with Sade,” 653. 249 One of Lacan’s most famous and frequently cited sentences is “Desire is the desire of the Other.” The statement indicates that the subject receives its subjectivity from the (symbolic) Other as an effect of language. However, Seminar XI emphasizes the objet a as the cause of desire in relation to a real, and Lacan adjusts his famous sentence: “The formula I have of desire as unconscious—man’s desire is the desire of the Other—I would say that it is a question of a sort of desire on the part of the Other, at the end of which is the showing (le doner-à-voir).” That is to say that the Other, much like the subject, is an effect, a construct in response to the encounter with the real. If we return to the Schema L, the Other is just one of the positions within the frame of the phantasm. See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 115.

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In the phantasy, the subject is frequently unperceived, but he is always there, whether in the dream or in any of the more or less developed forms of day-dreaming. The subject situates himself as determined by the phantasy. The phantasy is the support of desire; it is not the object that is the support of desire. The subject sustains himself as desiring in relation to an ever more complex signifying ensemble. This is apparent enough in the form of the scenario it assumes, in which the subject, more or less recognizable, is somewhere, split, divided, generally double, in his relation to the object, which usually does not show its true face either.250 Because the subject elides itself from the scene of the phantasm (by veiling itself), the phantasm’s “other side”—the objet a—and the “beyond” of the real are hidden as well. The function of the screen now becomes evident: it protects the subject inasmuch as it protects the real. That is to say that the screen operative in the phantasm works from both sides. The real is veiled for the subject as that which lies beyond the objet a. The phantasm protects the subject from a direct encounter with the real. But this is equally a protection of the real since the real has the crucial function of operating as the object cause of the subject’s desire. A direct encounter with the real would be unbearable for the subject, but the screened, mediated encounter through the phantasm is necessary for its constitution. The phantasm is thus the prism through which the subject perceives the world. It does not stand in the way of perception but makes perception possible. The ego as I/eye is an image-effect of this prism. Lacan states that it “comes to serve in the place left empty for the subject […] causing there the distortion”251 that every representation entails—but here it is precisely the distortion, the displacement of the subject that occurs. The subject must be displaced as its designated place is taken by the ego, with which the subject does not coincide. Thus, Lacan notes that the phantasm takes on the form of a lens through which the subject can see, but always at the price of alienation:

250 251

Lacan, 185. Lacan, “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation,” 560. As discussed earlier in this chapter, I prefer to translate the German Entstellung as “dis-placement” since it indicates the topological dimension of spatial positioning in the subject’s ex-sistence. See this chapter, section 3.2: “The Veil/Screen.”

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There always has to be a lens, in effect, since the naked eye contains one. It is because the lens comes to occupy the place from which the subject can look, and alights on the object-holder that is in fact focused on there when the subject looks from elsewhere, that he superimposes himself, to the great detriment of the whole, on what can come to be ogled there.252 Since the subject must look from elsewhere, through a lens with which he or she is not identical, every perception is a displacement, a distortion in relation to the real. This recalls the formula discussed earlier: “The real supports the phantasy, the phantasy protects the real.”253 The real is the “nucleus”254 that provokes the phantasm in the form of a paradoxical loop. The subject is the result of the encounter with the real, built from this trauma to which it seeks to respond. The encounter with the real from which the phantasm seeks to protect the subject is thus an encounter that has always already happened. This form of Nachträglichkeit255 is reminiscent of Freud’s famous dictum, “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (literally translated: “Where id was, I shall become/come to be”).256 The mediation that the phantasm offers for the real and the subject bears a structural resemblance to this statement. We can argue analogously that “where the real was, the subject shall come to be,” implying that what is addressed here is a process inscribed in repetition, causing the paradoxical loop. The real has always already been where the subject comes to be—not where it is. The subject precisely is not—because where it is, it turns into a picture, an imaginary identification, and thus ceases to “be” a subject. To say that the subject is in the never-ending process of becoming is just the inversion of saying that the subject is in the process of fading, aphanisis. Both formulations refer to the same movement in different directions, and for both to be equally true means that the subject is in a temporal paradox known as a loop. Thus, for the subject to emerge, it must con-

252 Lacan, 560. 253 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 41. 254 Lacan, 68. 255 See chapter II.2: “The Index,” specifically footnote 73. 256 Freud, Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996), 86. This formula is most instructive for clinical practice: the more jouissance is voided in analysis, the more space is opened up for the subject to become.

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stantly emerge elsewhere, fluctuate in its position, and circulate through the phantasm. The phantasm is indeed a stage; better yet, it is a scene for unconscious desire that unfolds on the premise: “You never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see.”257 One never gets what one wishes for in the phantasm. But it is precisely that wish not to get what one wishes for that is always granted. The phantasm veils the objet a as lack while simultaneously revealing the void that the objet a creates so that desire can circulate. The phantasm itself is the support of desire insofar as it makes not seeing possible. “I see myself seeing myself”258 is thus the structure through which the asymmetry of the eye and the gaze is treated in the phantasm. This position is an impossible one, a truly phantasmatic gaze from everywhere onto everything in the phantasmatic scene. Just as in Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten,” the subject is always watching and just as in “Drives and their Vicissitudes,” there is a movement within the phantasm, the scopic drive, from “I see” (the active function of the eye) to “I am seen” (the passive function of the gaze) to “I see myself seeing myself” (the reflexive turn of the phantasmatic scene; treating the split, unifying). However, these movements—the circulation of the drive (which belongs, at least partially, to the real) and the circulation of desire (which is a response to the circulation of the drive and of which the subject is an effect)— are not congruent. We can now see why the structure of the phantasm and the perspectivity it contains through the function of the eye and the gaze are so indicative and compelling for our investigation of video. Video assigns the subject a place that is marginal and precarious, a place that allows for no confusion, no identification with the position of either the camera or the screen while making these devices the organs of perception for the spectating subject in the video scene. Simultaneously, video’s setting does not render central perspective obsolete. Instead, it exposes its full capacity to construct reality and desire by means of the phantasmatic relation between the eye and the gaze, the eye point and the vanishing point. What we encounter in video as the “circulation of desire,” then, is the constant production of imagery to which the subject is exposed and with which he or she can identify, albeit momentarily.

257 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 103. 258 Lacan, 80.

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3.5 Encircling the Hole: Drive We have already discussed the circulation of desire as the constant metonymic creation of new partial objects and constellations within the fixated framework of the phantasm as a screen from the real. In video, we encounter the circulation of desire as the constant circulation of images to which the spectating subject is exposed and through which his or her position is formed. What makes this desire emerge in the first place? What causes the metonymic, endlessly circulating structure? What does desire respond to? The answer to these questions lies at the level of the drive. The circulation of the drive is the second version of addressing the hole in the subject’s constitution as relevant for our investigation of video. And in video, we encounter this second circulation in the circulating electromagnetic signal. This version is significantly different from the way in which the hole is treated by the movement of desire in the phantasm. In fact, the phantasm and the drive do not belong to the same register. Their only point of contact is precisely where the objet a (as fundamental lack) constitutes the response of the subject (which is also the subject’s moment of emergence). This emergence is, to a large extent, marked by the disproportion between the level of the drive and that of desire, as it appears in the double function of the objet a as both the remainder of the real and the object-cause of desire. Already in this ambiguity of attributions, we find the oscillating structure of the objet a, which holds a status both in the symbolic and in the real. In the phantasm, the objet a emerges as lack—that is, as a symbolic lack in the Other.259 At the same time, “the lack of the lack makes the real,” Lacan states, and here the objet a emerges as the remainder of the real—of that which is left out after the Symbolic is introduced into the real.260 It is in relation to the objet a’s status as a remainder of the real that the circulation of the drive functions. Lacan emphasizes that what we encounter here at the core of the drive’s circulation is this object, which is in fact simply the presence of a hollow, a void, which can be occupied, Freud tells us, by any object, and whose agency we know only in the form of the lost object, the petit a. The objet petit a is not the origin of the oral drive. It is not introduced

259 This is specific to the period of Lacan’s teaching in Seminar X/XI. 260 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ix.

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as the original food, it is introduced from the fact that no food will ever satisfy the oral drive, except by circumventing the eternally lacking object.261 In other words, the objet a is not a “lost object” in the sense that there was ever an original object. Rather, the objet a pertains to the void of the real itself. Lacan’s example of the oral drive makes it very clear that there is nothing that can satisfy the drive as there is no object that would “fill” the void entirely (this is why a drive is not an instinct).262 The objet a thus lies beyond satisfaction and, accordingly, the drive’s aim is not satisfaction by means of attaining this one particular object. Its aim is simply to move, to circulate on its trajectory, circumventing the void that constitutes the objet a (fig. 73). What in Freud’s terms is the Ziel (aim) of the drive splits into aim and goal in Lacan’s theory: The aim is the way taken. The French word but may be translated by another word in English, goal. In archery, the goal is not the but either, it is not the bird you shot, it is having scored a hit and thereby attained your but.263

Fig. 73 Schema of the circulation of the drive (Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 178).

261 Lacan, 180. 262 See also chapter III.2: “Medium, Subject, Body.” 263 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 179.

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While the aim is simply the circulation of the drive itself, the goal is not the drive’s destination—it is the satisfaction gained from the circumvention of the objet a. This circuit, which “emerges from a rim, which redoubles its enclosed structure, following a course that returns, and of which nothing else ensures the consistency except the object, as something that must be circumvented”264 leads Lacan back to Freud’s observation of the drive as a “konstante Kraft”—a constant force—“that sustains it as a stationary tension.”265 Both the subject and the object emerge only as an effect of this turn, and their positions are variable. The subject is “situated only at the culmination of the loop.”266 Again, when the drive is rendered by its constant tension, an analogy is drawn to electromagnetism and, concretely, to Helmholtz’s theory of energetic constancy. The structure of the drive closely resembles video’s ever-circulating electromagnetic signal.267 Even more, under the constant circulation of the drive, the subject appears as acephalic: Lacan states that “the manifestation of the drive” follows “the mode of a headless subject, for everything is articulated in it in terms of tension, and has no relation to the subject other than one of

264

The rim appears as the “erogenous zone”: the source of the drive (Quelle). Freud differentiates between four terms that operate in the drive: “its ‘pressure’, its ‘aim’, its ‘object’ and its ‘source’” (122). “By the pressure (Drang) of an instinct we understand its motor factor,” Freud states, “the amount of force or the measure of the demand for work which it represents” (122). The aim (Ziel), as already discussed, is always satisfaction, and the path to satisfaction is flexible (see chapter III). The object (Objekt) of the drive is “the thing in regard to which or through which the [drive] is able to achieve its aim.” It is the “most variable about a [drive] and is not originally connected with it, but becomes assigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarly fitted to make satisfaction possible” (122). The source (Quelle) denotes “the somatic process which occurs in an organ or part of the body and whose stimulus is represented in mental life by [a drive]” (123). Freud emphasizes that “the study of the sources of [drives] lies outside the scope of psychology. Although [drives] are wholly determined by their origin in a somatic source, in mental life we know them only by their aims” (123). In other (more Lacanian) words, the source pertains to a real, which cannot be fully represented in the psychic apparatus. At the same time, this real is a part of the body from which a demand emanates. Lacan names the mouth (oral), the eye (scopic), the anus (anal), and the ear (invocatory) as erogenous zones (rims) of the drive. What must be noted here is how the circuit of the drive also defines the rim, not only its own trajectory, and how the somatic can only ever emerge as marginal in the representation of the drive. See Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes.” 265 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 181. 266 Lacan, 182. 267 As elaborated earlier, Freud’s concepts of the human psyche—indeed, the foundation of his psychoanalytic theory—are built on the physical models of electromagnetism as a closed circuit and the principle of energetic constancy developed by Helmholtz and his contemporaries. See this chapter, section 1: “Apparatus.”

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topological community.” In other words, the subject’s position within the circulation of the drive has neither “head nor tail”268 but can only be located topologically— that is, in relation to other positions. At this point, grammar is introduced into the function of the drive: Freud now introduces us to the drive by one of the most traditional ways, using at every moment the resources of the language, and not hesitating to base himself on something that belongs only to certain linguistic systems, the three voices, active, passive and reflexive. But this is merely an envelope. We must see that this signifying reversion is something other, something other than what it dresses in. What is fundamental at the level of each drive is the movement outwards and back in which it is structured. It is remarkable that Freud can designate these two poles simply by using something that is the verb. Beschauen und beschaut werden, to see and to be seen.269 It becomes clear, for once, that the subject here is only a grammatical function in relation to other grammatical functions (objects). What the drive introduces is the verb, the predicate, and it sets in motion a circulation that I have described as repetition compulsion with respect to the objet a.270 However, the possible manifestations of this circulation do not occur on the level of the drive but on the level of desire. We could say, then, that if the drive, in its constant circulation, contains a grammar through which it must incessantly pass (active-passive-reflexive, active-passive-reflexive, etc.), then the manifestations of subject and object as topological are already a symbolic operation based on this grammar. The fact that there is a gap (the objet a) sets in motion the drive and its constant metonymic interpretation by means of desire. The phantasm thus follows the structure of a (constantly repeated) sentence271 that utilizes this grammar of the drive to manifest itself—$ ◊ a, that is to say, the barred subject in relation to its object, or in grammatical terms: subject, predicate, object. Grammatically

268 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 169. 269 Lacan, 177–78. 270 See this chapter, section 3.1: “Repetition: Missed Encounter.” 271 Christoph Braun, Die Stellung des Subjekts: Lacans Psychoanalyse [in German] (Berlin: Parodos, 2010), 143.

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speaking, the predicate ties the subject and the object together.272 This verb, this articulation of a void, emerges on both the level of the drive ($ ◊ D, the barred subject in relation to his or her demand) and that of the phantasm ($ ◊ a, the barred subject in relation to the objet a as the cause of his or her desire). Lacan notes that the losange is, in fact, “a rim, a functioning rim. One has only to provide it with a vectorial direction” to indicate the “rim process, the circular process” of both the drive and desire.273 The proximity of this concept of the “rim process” to that of an electromagnetic circuit as constitutional for video is illuminating:

Fig. 74 The losange as algorithm for the rim’s circular process (Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 209).

A “vector field” models the direction and speed of the flow of electromagnetic force, for instance, in a closed electromagnetic circuit. In an electromagnetic circuit, the vector field thus circumvents a (magnetic) center that is left empty in the model and from which the force emanates.274 Tied back to the field of electromagnetism in this way, our earlier reading of the losange as a framework within the phantasm (and within the visual field as intersection between the eye and the gaze) can shed light on the structure of video. Since we encounter the losange not as a static frame but as a rim that is constituted by a (double) circular process, we can draw an analogy to the video screen as centrally void. This pertains to a symbolic lack, a lack in representation that is constituted by the constant circulation of the video signal, which relates to the ‘”central void”—a real lack—in the electromagnetic field.

272 Braun, 143. 273 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 209. 274 It is beyond the scope of this book to do justice to the physical concepts addressed here. It would be intriguing to continue to investigate the relationship between physics, mathematics, and psychoanalysis, especially with regard to Lacan’s topological models. For now, however, it is enough to indicate the close conceptual relationship between video and psychoanalysis as rooted in the technological and physical concepts of the electric age.

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Thus, the double circulation we find in both video and psychoanalysis can be rendered as a difference between construction and interpretation, as Slavoj Žižek argues in The Plague of Fantasies (1997). For Žižek, a distinction must be made between interpretation, which belongs to the realm of desire, and construction, which points to the drive. The phantasm, for Žižek, is on the side of construction insofar as it has the status of a knowledge which can never be subjectivized—that is, it can never be assumed by the subject as the truth about himself, the truth in which he recognizes the innermost kernel of his being.275 In contrast to interpretation, Žižek argues, a construction must therefore be (and remain) unconscious and can only ever emerge as purely explanatory logical presupposition, like the second stage (‘I am being beaten by my father’) of the child’s fantasy ‘A child is being beaten’ which, as Freud emphasizes, is so radically unconscious that it can never be remembered.276 Freud emphasizes that a drive “can never become an object of consciousness—only the idea that represents the [drive] can.” However, the drive is not unconscious either, nor can it be represented in the unconscious “otherwise than by an idea.” Freud concludes that if the [drive] did not attach itself to an idea or manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing about it. When we nevertheless speak of an unconscious […] impulse [of the drive] or of a repressed […] impulse [of the drive], the looseness of phraseology is a harmless one. We can only mean an […] impulse [of the drive] the ideational representative [Vorstellungsrepräsentanz] of which is unconscious, for nothing else comes into consideration.277

275 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 2008), 48. 276 Žižek, 48. 277 Freud, “The Unconscious,” 177.

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In other words, the drive can only be known through the ideational representatives made possible by the structure—that is, the framework of the phantasm. Understood in this way, the drive belongs to the register of the real (about which we know nothing), but as it attaches itself to ideas, it produces symptoms. If it is articulated—if it is manifested concretely in a specific constellation of signifiers—the drive becomes tangible. This is where the fundamental phantasm situates itself. The construction of the phantasm makes the drive tangible through the interpretation of desire. Thus, while the drive is real, headless, senseless, and endless, the phantasm is an attempt to represent the drive for the subject, the result being the movement of desire. The phantasm is the framework through which the drive passes, and its ceaseless circulation is translated (in other words, interpreted) into different positions within the phantasm. The grammar of the drive consists in passing through all possible positions—active, passive, reflexive. However, it is only through the phantasm’s mediation that it becomes possible to distinguish between these positions and to establish constellations between them. The “I am probably looking on” that Freud extracts from his analysand’s accounts of their phantasy shows that it is through the act of seeing that a subject is installed, creating the scene and interpreting the drive. We can say that the phantasm is a construction that frames the circulation of the drive and makes it manageable and treatable for the subject. The phantasm is thus linked to the drive through construction and to desire through interpretation. This occurs through its framing: the rim, the losange. The two ways of treating the void of desire (symbolic lack) and the void of the drive (real lack) are condensed—mediated in the losange of the phantasm. For video and media theory in general, we can thus summarize our findings in psychoanalytic theory with the realization that the phantasm is indeed a medium—something that was already apparent in Plato’s allegory of the cave. Moreover, we were able to specify what this medium mediates: namely, the drive and desire, and the real and symbolic lack of the objet a that causes both the drive and desire to circulate. In this sense, we have found an answer to one of the most pressing questions that coincides with the emergence of video: the question of the medium. If the medium is not understood as “between” form and content, but rather, in McLuhan’s words, “the medium is the message,” we cannot consider the medium without the perception it constitutes. We can say, with a McLuhanian twist—and the resulting unease—the medium is the phantasm.

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Video’s mise-en-scène, in its entirety, is a medium understood in this sense. In video, the structure of the losange is exposed as a physical screen onto which a circulating image is projected. The spectating subject is confronted with his or her marginality and precarious ex-sistence, rooted in the relentless circulation of the video signal. We can draw an analogy between the circulation of the signal and the circulation of the drive. In fact, we were able to see that Freud constructs the psychic apparatus in a way that resembles the principle of electromagnetism and the principle of the constancy of force and can therefore map out significant structural relations between video and psychoanalysis. While the circulating electronic signal is the sine qua non for video, the drive is the sine qua non for the psyche. However, the circulation of images relates to another endless structure, one that produces images and attributes a framework or an articulation for the circulation of the signal. The images on the video screen reveal the circular movement of desire as we have encountered it as framed in the phantasm. Representation on the screen seeks to make desire visible, palpable, and treatable. Identification, albeit never full and never abiding, becomes possible and is simultaneously revealed as alienating, lacking in relation to a real lack beyond representation.

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Transformation of a Missed Encounter: Circulation, Lack, Drive In every revolution there is the paradoxical presence of circulation. Engels remarks in June 1848: “The first assemblies take place on the large boulevards, where Parisian life circulates with the greatest intensity.”278 We began this chapter (and indeed this entire investigation) with an inquiry into the structural relation between video and psychoanalysis—a relation that is rooted in their simultaneous emergence at the end of the nineteenth century. This emergence, as we were able to discern, is a response to the problem of subjectivity that dominates modern discourse. Here “modern” refers to the aesthetic period of modernism in art and culture, which roughly extends from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. As has proven crucial for my argument, modernism coincides with the advent of the technological revolution known as the machine age, which I want to call, more precisely, the electric age. As demonstrated in chapter I, the technological advancements of the nineteenth century were to a large extent rooted in the various possibilities offered by electrification. Radio and telephone as “electric, long-distance hearing” and radar and television as “electric seeing” are just some examples of machines constructed on the basis of the continuously flowing electromagnetic signal. These findings point to two fundamentally different strands in nineteenth-century technology that affect any theorization of the moving image in general and video in particular: those inventions of the nineteenth century that are mechanical, such as film, and those that are based on electromagnetism, such as video. These two different structures constitute the basis of what we now call the moving image. However, their difference is usually blurred or insufficiently addressed. Video’s specificity is best discerned in contrast to film, due to its fundamentally distinct structure. In this section, we will thus return to the differences between these practices. The juxtaposition between film and video allows us to understand video’s aesthetic specificity as rooted in electromagnetism, and to see how video has, over time, replaced film. The differences pertain to four aspects: (1) The function of the camera as an artificial eye, constantly offering identification in film and, in video, constantly breaking

278 Virilio, Speed and Politics, 29.

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identification; (2) The role of suture as a means of veiling the cuts in film and, in video, as a means of exposing the stitching; (3) Film as ending, video as endless; (4) Movement as coherent image/still in film and, in video, as incoherent image/half image. This comparison sheds light on the fact that the outcome of this shift from a mechanical age to an electric age was the emphasis of “materials in continuous process of transformation at spatially removed sites.”279 That is to say, electricity redistributed the aesthetic, political, social, and economic organization of space and time, shifting “primacy to process”280 —a process of continuous circulation—instead of (spatial) location. Where location is called into question, the legitimacy of perspective— the central perspective of the Cartesian subject (cogito ergo sum), at least insofar as it is a “subject of certainty”—is under attack. Perspectivity shatters under the influence of electric technology or what Virilio calls “panoramic apperception”281—enhanced vision that is no longer dependent on a human eye or a subjective viewpoint. The ever-changing battlefields of World War I offered the first example of a spatio-temporal situation that could no longer be perceived by anything other than the artificial optical eye of a camera or the electromagnetic signal of a radar device. The effect was that “the process of perception itself had become, in various ways, a primary object of vision.”282 In other words, the shattering of perspectivity did not put an end to perspective; on the contrary, it exposed perspective as a structuring principle of vision—as constituting subjectivity. Video and psychoanalysis are thus two symptoms of this crisis of perspective. In both, the subject emerges as precarious, marginal, and inconsistent. If the rise of modernism (understood as technological, aesthetic, and psychic change) shifted the regime of vision from a spatial to a temporal model, it thereby debunked the cogito as the source of perspectivity in Descartes’s cogito ergo sum. The cogito does not emerge as the ontological, substantial, and unconditional ego, but as epistemological283—that is, as a

279 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 347. 280 McLuhan, 347. 281 Virilio, Polar Inertia, 27. 282 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 138. 283 I use this word in a Foucaultian sense that aligns with an understanding of history not as a linear process but as signified by unbreachable ruptures, which are the modes of thinking and doing in a specific era (episteme). See chapter III.1.2.3: “Shattering One-Point Perspective into a Thousand Pieces”; Foucault, The Order of Things.

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radically (historically, socially, aesthetically, technologically) dependent subject. Psychoanalysis has made this subject its field of expertise, stating that “the ego is not master in its own house.”284 Video responds to the questions of perspectivity in a specific manner. With the emergence of video (in its function as an “artificial eye”), geometral perspective was shattered into a thousand pieces.285 We must, however, specify that video exposes the fact that geometral perspective is always already made from these “thousand pieces”—from fragmented, shattered parts that the eye function is able to unify into one phantasmatic viewpoint. From video we learn that the eye is not natural; it is always an artificial eye insofar as it constructs, synthesizes, and responds to the ceaseless turn of the drive with endless formations of desire rather than following a schema of stimulus and response.286 The emergence of the “artificial eye”—which is not one but a whole multitude of artificial eyes constructed at more or less the same time (photographic, cinematic, and video cameras)—thus merely reveals the artificiality of any organ and its excessive function with regard to “instinctual needs.” The eye is not just for seeing. It also functions to veil the lack that is castration for the subject. Video exposes the phantasmatic condition of perception; it exposes the eye as artificial and the products of perception as necessarily deceptive in relation to the lack they seek to veil. Thus, when we criticize video for being phantasmagoric, a hall of mirrors, or, as Rosalind Krauss proposes, narcissistic, we miss the point that video does not veil the fact that its construction is phantasmatic, circulating around a fundamental lack or void at the center of its structure. One could argue that this void exists as a constitutive moment in any artwork and that it is precisely from this point of contingency that art can be constructed—something we have already seen with the vanishing point in linear perspective. However, video entails a specificity that other practices do not have: the process of the evercirculating electronic signal. Video is unlocalizable except in this very circulation around a void. The video image is only visible in the circulation of this signal. We can return here to the aforementioned shift brought about by the electric age, “primacy to process,” and specify that this process, as it emerges in video and shapes the medial age in which we live, reveals itself as circulation.

284 Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” 143. 285 Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 30. 286 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 102.

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We have seen that the introduction of modern cameras—not only video cameras—played a central role in exposing the subject as precarious and decentralized. With modern cameras, a second eye (and, following the homophony, a second “I,” a second “subject of representation”287) entered the stage: an artificial eye whose place can never be taken by the spectating subject—except in a phantasmatic way. Gilles Deleuze explains the function of the camera in the realm of cinema by quoting Dziga Vertov’s concept of the “cine-eye” as “that which ‘couples together any point whatsoever of the universe in any temporal order whatsoever.’” 288 For Deleuze, the cine-eye has the capacity to unify and survey anything, anytime—a truly panoptic vision. However, its very function demonstrates that this cine-eye “is not a human eye—even an improved one.”289 Deleuze argues that the cine-eye goes beyond the human eye’s condition of possibility in one particular point: the human eye’s “relative immobility as a receptive organ means that all images vary for a single one, in relation to a privileged image.”290 With the help of our previous findings in the field of psychoanalysis, we can add that this “privileged image” can be nothing other than the fundamental phantasm: that which structures the subject’s perception; that which is its true fixated viewpoint. Furthermore, the “pure vision of a non-human eye, of an eye which would be in things”291 reveals, for the subject, its own position as not allseeing. The camera casts its gaze on the subject, turns him or her into a picture, and painfully demonstrates for the subject that “I am not in the picture.”292 The (neurotic) subject encounters the camera’s gaze as part of his or her phantasmatic scene. Everything is seen by the all-seeing, nonhuman eye, but I cannot see myself in what the camera sees. This setting does not allow for an imaginary identity between the spectating eye and the camera-eye. Moreover, it does not even allow for their separation: the subject experiences itself as conditional, as dependent on the camera’s gaze. It would be a mistake, however, to naturalize this relation and to assume that the camera introduces the function of the gaze. The gaze is not

287

Lacan refers to the Cartesian ego as the subject of representation. See section 2 of this chapter and “What is a Picture?,” in Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 105–19. 288 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), 80. 289 Deleuze, 81. 290 Deleuze, 81. 291 Deleuze, 81. 292 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 96.

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always phantasmatic, and it emerges in this investigation solely to demonstrate the function of the objet a within the phantasm. While the camera serves as a perfect illustration for the function of the gaze in the phantasm, the latter does not need a camera to emerge. “There always was a gaze behind,”293 states Lacan, and we are familiar with the function of the gaze from certain beliefs, for instance, the ancient idea of the “evil eye”294 or the notion that God’s eye is all-seeing. These are other versions of the phantasmatic gaze of a non-human eye as it is also manifested in the camera. The gaze can demonstrate the function of the objet a in the phantasm when it is retracted from the subject and attributed to someone else. Famously, Lacan illustrates the gaze understood in this way with an example found long ago in Augustine, in which he sums up his entire fate, namely, that of the little child seeing his brother at his mother’s breast, looking at him amare conspectu, with a bitter look, which seems to tear him to pieces and has on himself the effect of a poison.295 The gaze emerges here as invidia (envy, but also hate) (fig. 75) for the other’s jouissance: it is the phantasmatic rendering that the other, unlike me, is not separated from the objet a and has complete satisfaction.296 The phantasm is that which produces, by means of the structure of the gaze, this complete image that corresponds to the idea of complete satisfaction. As Lacan informs us, invidia derives from videre (to see)—just like video. In-vidia, then, is that which is not seen; it is an impasse to seeing for the subject. The gaze, as invidia, returns to the subject from that which it emanates, as a message in inverted form. That is, the gaze now appears as the gaze of the Other.

293 Lacan, 113. 294 Lacan, 115–16. 295 Lacan, 116. 296 Lacan, 116.

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Under this prism, it is curious to see that the shift from “God’s eye” to “camera-eye” within the process of Entgötterung or “secularization” since the Renaissance297 bears very much the same results as far as the gaze is concerned. The gaze that comes from the Other is always operative as “a machine that counts everyone and puts them in their place.”298 This is precisely what makes the camera so compelling in its function of exposing the subject as inconsistent: not because it is the only place where the gaze is encountered as the gaze of the Other, but because it exposes the function of the gaze in detail. The camera, truly a machine, proves to be a perfect support, a perfect locus for the phantasmatic all-seeing gaze that appears to be radically exterior to the subject, threatening its subjectivity. Returning to Deleuze, it becomes clear why the “universal variation, universal interaction (modulation)” of the “cine-eye” only exists as a (phantasmatic) construction for the subject, as “it is given only to the eye which we do not have.”299

Fig. 75 Giotto di Bondone, Invidia (The Seven Vices—Envy), Fresco, Cappella degli Scrovegni, Padua, Italy, 1306, photograph: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Entgötterung (“loss of the gods,” Heidegger) and “secularization” (Blumenberg) are two ways to render the shift from a premodern to an (early) modern world. See chapter III.1.2: “Pointing at the Center.” 298 Ensslin, “Between Two Deaths,” 29. 299 Deleuze, Cinema I, 81. 297

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While the camera as “artificial eye” is not a particular characteristic of video, its effect on the subject’s position as inconsistent with that of the camera’s viewpoint can clarify the distinctive properties between different practices in the field of the moving image. We can distinguish between two major forms here: the cinematic field and the video field. While the aforementioned function of the artificial eye applies to both realms, differences emerge at the level of the subject’s positioning. With respect to film, Janna Houwen, following Baudry’s apparatus theory,300 argues that although the film spectator is not capable of taking up the exact (an often shifting) viewpoint constructed by the linear perspective images of film, the filmic apparatus does offer two singular, unified points with which the viewer can identify, namely, the camera and the projector.301 As already demonstrated, the camera and the projector are less important for video since they are ultimately dispensable. Nevertheless, when they do appear in video’s setting, they offer a point of identification for the spectator, though not in a very compelling way. Whereas film veils the camera and the projector in order to create identification, video shows how they function as a point of identification for the subject. In video, the camera and projector are essentially exposed as one point: the same point of identification. One takes the image in; the other spits it out. However, both pertain to the same viewpoint. Moreover, the difference between film and video can best be discerned when we take into account “the three related conventional cinematic aspects of continuity editing, suture, and narrativity.” These aspects endow the spectator of film “with the best possible viewpoint at each moment of the action” and “give an overview of one space in a more allembracing way than any single, static image could ever present.”302 What follows, for Houwen, is imaginary identification by means of these three techniques—especially suture:

300 See this chapter, section 2.1: “Phantasma.” 301 Janna Houwen, Film and Video Intermediality: The Question of Medium Specificity in Contemporary Moving Images (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 103. 302 Houwen, 103.

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The strategy of suture is, moreover, especially important in this regard, because it invites the spectator to imaginatively occupy the place a character occupies within the film, and to look with the character from a position inside the film’s illusionistic space.303 Suture was originally introduced as a psychoanalytic concept. Coined by Jacques-Alain Miller in 1965, it was initially described as “the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse,” which “figures there as the element which is lacking, in the form of a stand-in (tenant-lieu).”304 Since then, suture has assumed a central role in film theory as that which “stitches” together the spectating subject and the film by “transforming a vision or seeing of the film into a reading of it. It [suture] introduces the film (irreducible to its frames) into the realm of signification.”305 Daniel Dayan argues that “to see the film is not to perceive the frame, the camera angle and distance, etc.,” thus allowing the subject to perceive the “space between planes or objects on the screen […] as real.”306 However, the discovery that the frame and the camera are “hiding things” causes the spectator’s imaginary identification to shatter and “the triumph of his former possession of the image fades out.”307 Adopting Jean-Pierre Oudart’s ideas, Dayan argues that suture is thus the operation of sewing together the symbolic realm of film (which emerges as absence and pertains to a (real) lack beyond the frame, the camera angle, etc.) and the imaginary in order to assign a place to both the spectating subject and the symbolic Other. Suturing these two realms together is achieved through the technique of “shot-reverse shot,” in which the absent symbolic Other is given an imaginary placeholder on the screen: The absent-one’s glance is that of a nobody, which becomes (with the reverse shot) the glance of a somebody (a character present on the screen). Being on screen he can no longer compete with the spectator for

303 Houwen, 103. 304 Jacques-Alain Miller, “Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier),” in Concept and Form, Volume 1: Selections from the Cahiers Pour l’Analyse, ed. Alain Badiou, Yves Duroux, and Alain Groichard (London: Verso, 2014), 93. Daniel Dayan, “The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema,” Film Quarterly 28, no. 1 305 (October 1974): 29. 306 Dayan, 29. 307 Dayan, 29.

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the screen’s possession. The spectator can resume his previous relationship with the film. The reverse shot has “sutured” the hole opened in the spectator’s imaginary relationship with the filmic field by his perception of the absent-one. This effect and the system which produces it liberates the imaginary of the spectator, in order to manipulate it for its own ends.308 This understanding of film as located and operating in the imaginary field causes the differentiation between “illusion,” “unreality” (on the screen), and “reality” (on the part of the subject). As already demonstrated, the symbolic lack in video (as well as in film, for that matter) points to a real lack, which is omitted in the model of suture encountered in film theory. Once can thus conclude that the difference between cinema and film does not lie in the question of whether or not the symbolic and the imaginary operate within their respective settings. Instead, the difference relates to the function of suture itself. If suture succeeds it results in the phantasm, in which the imaginary and the symbolic are entangled in a way that allows the subject to misconceive its subjectivity as one coherent perspective, without gaps. The difference, however, is that the function of the phantasm demonstrates that the subject’s ex-sistence is given from beyond, from the symbolic Other, which is a merely inconsistent function in the face of an irreducible real. Suture does not operate in the same manner in video as it does in film, and this has nothing to do with whether or not cinematic techniques (such as “shot-reverse shot”) are used. While video frequently uses filmic techniques, it does not use suture. That is to say, it does not assign an imaginary place to the spectator but makes the subject emerge as decentralized and precarious. If filmic techniques are employed in video, they are exposed in their function of creating imaginary identification, resulting in the subject’s alienation. Where film uses suture—where film stitches together the subject and the image/screen—video, instead, shows the stitching. We can clearly see how the previous propositions pertain to a structural argument since the difference between cinema and video is rooted in the question of their respective positioning. While film seeks to unify the sub-

308 Dayan, 30.

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ject and the on-screen image, video constantly alienates the subject from what he or she sees and from his or her spectating position. This difference can be detected even on the level of their respective dispositive: Video allows the spectator to meander, sit, stand, and walk in and out of the black box, following the logic of art spaces, while cinema assigns a place for the spectator, a seat to be taken (and not to be left) until the end of the film. Film’s dispositive allows the spectator to mistakenly think that they are separated from the events on the screen and simultaneously implies that they possess or master these events by viewing. Video, however, does not offer such a privileged (or supposedly privileged) eye point for the subject. Instead, it presents continuously reproduced images that the subject identifies with momentarily and is alienated from incessantly. The subject can no longer assume that he or she is identical with the eye (I). Every identification must necessarily be fragmentary, partial, and phantasmatic. Simultaneously, it is only through these identifications that the subject can emerge. In other words, identification (and its other side: alienation) is the price the subject has to pay for its existence. The subject owes its ex-sistence to identification as part of the phantasm that forms its reality. In psychoanalysis, the phantasm is a frame. It is a screen through which to see the world but also through which to be seen—that is, it is a representation of and for the radically external, the real. In this framing, an Other is constructed as a guarantor for the subject’s position. In video’s logic of constant circular processuality—which, as previously demonstrated, follows the logic of the drive at the level of its signal and is framed by the phantasm’s articulation of desire at the level of the concrete mise-en-scène of the particular video work—these places are no longer seen as guaranteed (as in classic cinema) but emerge as fabricated, made, artificial, produced positions through the phantasmatic entanglement between the imaginary and the symbolic. As such, they are placeholders: Vorstellungsrepräsentanzen. Following this logic of circular process inherent in video, we arrive, one last time, at the continuously flowing electronic signal in opposition to the projected images of classic film. Quoting Peter Kubelka and Bill Viola, Catherine Elwes highlights this contrasting juxtaposition, stating that “‘cinema is not movement. […] cinema is a projection of stills’”309

309

Peter Kubelka, “Interview with Peter Kubelka,” in Film Culture Reader, interview by Jonas Mekas, ed P. A. Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), 291, quoted in Elwes, Installation and the Moving Image, 5.

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whereas “in the case of video, ‘a still image does not exist’ […] ‘in fact at any given moment, a complete image does not exist at all.’”310 While Elwes argues that the “impression of movement in film and video, the continuous flow of imagery that registers upon the viewer’s senses is not diminished by the technology’s structural stasis”311—for her, a case to subsume both film and video under the notion of the moving image— I disagree and insist on the difference between these techniques and the effects they have on the subject. The subject emerges in different ways through film and video. And even in times of convergence between film and video, artists position themselves in one of these realms or play with the overlap of the two (thus marking their difference). Moreover, one can argue that the contemporary converged “moving image” is, in fact, still video in the sense that it is based on an endless electronic signal. Even though scan lines have been replaced with binary encoded pixels (image points), there is still no “complete image” that can be found or perceived outside of the electronic signal. Film’s specificities, on the other hand, are reduced to social practice and contextualization. Nowadays, film depends less on technical specifications (although film reels still exist, here and there) than on contextualization within the cinematic tradition into which it is inscribed. Yvonne Spielmann notes that video’s “lack of fixity” is what “separates it from the passage of discrete images in film,” creating images in video that are “incomplete and discontinuous.”312 Film, then, is the true “moving image” insofar as film is comprised of the (motorical) motion of single frames, a process that creates the impression of fluid movement. Video, on the other hand, consists of half images comprised of scan lines (in the case of analog video) or binary encoded pixels (in the case of digital video) while the fluid movement is in the electronic signal itself. In other words, film simulates motion by means of fragmenting it into “whole” images (still frames) while video simulates a whole image by means of the constant movement of the electronic signal. Video thus reveals the function of the phantasm to create a supposedly “complete” image insofar as it exposes its own constant movement. The difference between these two “movements” is decisive. While film allows

310 Viola, “The Sound of One Line Scanning,“ quoted in Elwes, Installation and the Moving Image, 5. 311 Elwes, 5. 312 Spielmann, Video, 49.

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us to see movement as illusion, video reveals the fact that the fixation of the phantasm, which operates in both film and video, merely veils that there is constant movement—namely, the incessant movement of the drive. There is thus a fundamental difference between video and film in relation to the question of the frame. Film maintains a relation to death, to an end, in the cut and the gaps between frames. Video, however, relates to the drive as an endless structure that goes beyond the subject’s existence, as there are no cuts between frames. Put differently, one might see a still frame—understood as finite, as pertaining to a final cut, to death— as anxiety inducing. Video exemplifies the contingency inherent in the continuous movement of the drive that goes beyond the subject, which is unbearable and therefore veiled by the phantasm. The video signal emerges as a potentially endless structure producing never-ending identifications with incoherent images that point to the beyond of the screen as the incessantly pushing and circulating drive. To be exposed to video means to take on this position as subject—that is, to be confronted with a beyond of the screen, the real, as that upon which the existence of the subject depends. Whereas film ultimately has a beginning and an end— even if only for a moment, when the film reel is rewound, when we get up from our seats after a screening—video offers no end. What emerges in video’s incessant circulation is the subject’s precarious position, as poignantly phrased in Alenka Zupančič’s statement: “Not only are we not infinite, we are not even finite.”313 Understood in this way, film and video differ in one crucial point: film ends, video does not. Here we return to the opening quote of this section: “In every revolution there is the paradoxical presence of circulation.”314 In the context of our investigation of video’s circulating signal, it is tempting to read this remark in relation to what has been deemed “the video revolution.” It is evident that video has had a revolutionary effect on our world in how it has resignified, as new media do, the entirety of aesthetic practice. This is supported by the simple observation that the majority of the world’s current population carries a video camera in the form of a smartphone.

313 Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 53. 314 Virilio, Speed and Politics, 29.

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Virilio’s statement rests on a Hegelian understanding of revolution as that which must be repeated in order to exist—as that which is always already enveloped in a repetition once it is acknowledged as revolution.315 In other words, a revolution can only be a missed encounter with the real, since the goal of every revolution lies beyond the symbolic order (whose lack, the lack in the Other, the revolution points to). And it is precisely within that symbolic order that the revolution emerges as significant only as having missed this goal. If it is “successful,” a revolution might recharge the net of signifiers, introducing new signifiers, but it will itself be subdued to the logic of the symbolic in relation to the real to which it points. This is the logic of the dialectical movement of Aufhebung as it is encountered in Hegel’s work and revealed in Lacan’s structure of the phantasm and the missed encounter with the real on which the phantasm is based. Lacan’s formula of the “missed encounter” also recurs to Hegel as an Aufhebung that is a repetition that must not end up in an identification, but in a constant circulation. This is what video exemplifies and exposes. We are caught up in a circulation of the drive (and its interpretation) by means of the phantasm, which makes our existence possible. The phantasm is the locus in which this dialectical movement takes place, but its characteristic, as Lacan emphasizes, is to provide the opportunity to always say something Other. Something Other which corrects their [Hegel’s statements’] fantasmatic link with synthesis, while preserving the effect they have of exposing the lures of identification. That is my Aufhebung (sublation), which transforms Hegel’s (his own lure) into an occasion to point out—in lieu and place of the leaps of an “ideal progress”—the [transformation] of a lack.316

315

316

“Since in all periods of the world a political revolution is sanctioned in men’s opinions, when it repeats itself. Thus Napoleon was twice defeated, and the Bourbons twice expelled. By repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 332. Jacques Lacan, “Position of the Unconscious,” in Ecrits, 710. I have decided to translate the French avatar as “transformation” here (a change that served as the basis for this book’s working title: Transformation of a Missed Encounter) in order to point out that Lacan refers to the circuit of the drive. In Seminar XI, Lacan emphasizes that the term avatar would be the best translation for the German Triebwandlungen, which is most accurately translated as “transformations of the drive.” See Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 162.

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Thus, we return to the drive, to its aim and goal, which are incongruent.317 The drive’s “aim is simply this return into circuit.”318 In other words, it is infinite, just like video’s endlessly circulating signal. In video, finitude can always only emerge at the level of the subject who must position itself within this circuit and interpret its turns by means of desire. And it must always emerge as missed. Video accounts for the necessity to interpret the circuit of the drive, the circulation, through particular, subjective articulations in order to make subjectivity arise by exposing its own medial capacities. In Marshall McLuhan’s words: Again, as more is known about electrical “discharges” and energy, there is less and less tendency to speak of electricity as a thing that “flows” like water through a wire, or is “contained” in a battery. Rather, the tendency is to speak of electricity as painters speak of space; namely, that it is a variable condition that involves the special positions of two or more bodies.319 Thus, the analogies I have drawn between the realms of electromagnetism and the psyche are more than just metaphors: they pertain to a resignification of aesthetic practice. An encounter with video is always to some extent a missed encounter. As spectators, there is something that constantly escapes us while at the same time enveloping us in the everchanging spectacle of images. The encounter with video is a realm of possibility rather than certainty. The things it shows us are here, now, while they have also always already passed: they are stored, frozen in time, and replayed time and time again. We find ourselves caught in a paradoxical loop, in a temporality that is forced into constant circulation—a repetition that we, as spectators, must somehow confront. How must, and more importantly, how can we respond?

317 See the previous section of this chapter: “Encircling the Hole: Drive.” 318 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 179. 319 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 383.

Appendix

Bodies, Testifying: The Performance Works of Alexandra Pirici and Anne Imhof

Appendix

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The following text is based on my defense talk on April 29, 2020. I submitted my dissertation in January 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic began to hit Europe. Due to the resulting travel and assembly restrictions, my defense was one of the first to take place on Zoom. Having spent several years arguing why video and the video image have significantly changed human life and how they increasingly regulate our view of the world, this process intensified under the impact of Covid-19. Since this talk reflects not only the major changes we have seen since the start of the pandemic but also how the importance of video in our everyday lives has fundamentally increased over this period, I have decided to include it as an appendix to this book.

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It is not without a certain comedy that I am sitting in front of you all today like this: not in the flesh—not with four other bodies together in a room, exposed to one another. Instead, I sit in front of you as an image on a screen, socially distanced, my body, just as yours, “removed” from the social realm. I wrote my dissertation on the structure of video and the magnitude of the effect the video image has on our society and on shaping our subjectivity. One of my core arguments is that the video image is not, as we so often hear, a mere illusion on a screen, a simulacrum, a shadow play in opposition to a given reality that it veils. Rather, video shapes said reality by mediating it in the face of a real that cannot be mediated, interpreted, and subjectivized in any other way than partially, momentarily, elusively. In this way, the real is just like the video image. Video thus exposes the function of mediality itself as it shapes the subject and the subject’s perspective toward the real. Body and image are not separated in the video experience, just as body and psyche are not separated in psychoanalysis. Now, it seems, we are all part of a performative act to put this theory to a test. When I chose the topic for my defense talk, we lived in a world that was fundamentally different from the one we live in now. I was contemplating the role of the body in relation to the ubiquitous digital realm, the algorithms and screens we live with. The performances of both Anne Imhof and Alexandra Pirici drew my attention to this problem and relation, and I wanted to present them to you in a sort of avant-gardist light—as their performances being the beginning of something new. Recent global events seem to have pushed the problem more into the mainstream, making it less avant-garde. However, at the same time, they have also shown how crucial this problem is to our lives. My intention was to propose Imhof’s and Pirici’s works as circumventing and defying neoliberal ideology, which, a few weeks ago, I tried to capture as follows: Neoliberal ideology, as a self-proclaimed “postpolitical” order, tells us that there is no beyond the screen, no effect, no real—just endless possibilities to negotiate, make deals, buy/sell ideas, watch. In contrast, Pirici and Imhof expose the screen as a means for the subject “to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. The screen is here the locus of mediation.”1 Both artists address

1 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 107.

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the spectator as subject, inviting him or her to utilize the veiling function of the screen quite literally, by filming with their smartphone. Supposedly “immaterial” and “objective” mechanisms of internet protocols and electronic signals are embodied by the performers just to be transformed again into an electronic signal. These performances not only show the impact of the visual realm on politics through the function of the screen but also the underlying structure of the unconscious as the discourse of the Other, of the symbolic as circuit in which the subject is integrated as one of its links.2 Thus, they expose that watching is an act and that what is merely concealed but never eradicated by the screen is the political power of perspective and visuality as that which allows a subject to come to be, to take his or her part in the social order.3 Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum that “There’s no such thing as society,”4 which can be seen as the foundation of neoliberal thought, is presently being challenged yet again. If we presuppose that what neoliberalism itself seeks to destroy is the social bond in a Marxist sense, we currently see this social bond exposed as the vital foundation of all human life. Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer comes to mind, with its distinction between the Greek concepts of zoé as “bare life,” biological life, and bios, which we could call the aesthetic but also the political, the ethical life.5 Where biopolitics enter the stage, bare life becomes subjected to politics. The living human body thus becomes concealed under the political measures of control. What we see now, however, is the split inherent in biopolitics. Or, as the psychoanalyst Gustavo Dessal phrased it recently, “The infection is biological, but the pandemic is

2 Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 89. 3 I quote my first draft of this paper here, written just weeks before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. 4 Margaret Thatcher, “Interview for Woman’s Own (‘No Such Thing as Society’),” Woman’s Own, September 23, 1987, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/ document/106689. 5 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1998), 9.

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clearly political.”6 If zoé is senseless, replicatory life, we can argue that the virus is, in this sense, also alive. The other side, however, is the realm of the political, aesthetic, and ethical life. Through this split between zoé and bios, the body is made visible. It emerges before us as a precarious, fragile body. Paradoxically, the more we must socially distance our body from other bodies, the more apparent this becomes. Imhof’s performance Faust (2017) and Pirici’s performance Signals (2016) are pertinent to these new relations in our everyday life, and I want to point to how in these works the view on the (smartphone) screen in many ways predates what is now our everyday practice. The world has become images on screens on applications fed into other applications. This is a fundamental aspect of the structure of Pirici’s and Imhof’s respective work. And now, after the emergence of the coronavirus, their work can be read as demonstrating a sort of prescience in the way they phrased and even anticipated the relation of the body and the digital, virtual realm. Thus, the aim of this talk (and the selection of works) is to be understood in relation to this question of the body and the digital and less as a remark on contemporary performance in general.

Anne Imhof, Faust Anne Imhof describes her work Faust, shown in the German Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, as “collaborative” and as consisting of “installation, painting, live piece.”7 In a talk given by the artist in 2018 together with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Obrist emphasizes the practice of drawing as fundamental to Imhof’s work and as a practice that is simultaneously “at risk of getting lost in our digital 21st century.”8 However, drawing is not the only source for Faust. The work also includes installation pieces, first and foremost the prominent glass floor covering the entire main hall of the pavilion and blocking its main entrance. Imhof informs us that the floor was installed at a height of 93 cm, which is “the right height

6 7

8

Gustavo Dessal, “Virtual Reality,” The Lacanian Review Online, accessed April 13, 2020, https://www.thelacanianreviews.com/virtual-reality/. Anne Imhof and Hans Ulrich Obrist, “For the Grace of Thoughts (Anne Imhof, artist, & Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator) | DLD 18,” YouTube video, 51:11, uploaded by DLDconference, February 5, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mfoePaioRiw. Imhof and Obrist, “For the Grace of Thoughts.”

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to get a little bit dizzy on” and at the same time to “have a good diagonal view into the side rooms.” Water leaks from the building itself onto some fountain-like structures in the adjacent rooms. Where the glass floor ends, glass walls block access for the spectators (fig. 76). The performers, however, may slip from underneath the glass floor into the side rooms and even onto the glass floor itself, where the spectators are located (fig. 77). The 93 cm height also allows the performers to crawl under the spectators’ feet while the performers are under the floor (fig. 78)—like cave dwellers, perhaps, or like cockroaches, but not in the dark: in absolute transparency. On the walls, there are small pedestals, platforms (fig. 79) on which performers may climb. Their movements, the glass walls, and the total transparency that is claimed by the installation recall a zoo—the monkey house perhaps—begging the question: Who is the monkey here? Half a dozen young, beautiful people perform sparse rituals in pre-established spots. Some utensils are ready at hand; the actions performed seem prefigured and rehearsed, although the general sequence seems rather arbitrary. As the actions of the performers commence, visitors gather around and film or photograph every movement while watching through their smartphone screens. With a determined look on his face, a performer executes a small action: rubbing glycerin on the floor in a perfect line, placing cotton fibers on it, and throwing a lighter to another

Figs. 76–79 Anne Imhof, Faust, performance, installation view with spectators and glass walls, German Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale 2017.

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performer, who sets the entire structure on fire. The glass floor and wall separating the viewer from the apse functions as a mirror, duplicating the fire and doubling its length. After having set fire to the cotton/glycerin arrangement, a young female performer sits on the ground, letting her hand slide into her pants. Everyone is waiting for her to masturbate, but her hand just rests in her pants, her face empty and slightly bored. A dramatic crescendo of music accompanies the scene. But just like the performance, where scenes of hugging, stroking, and touching are constantly restaged as turning into wrestling, fighting, and struggling (fig. 80), the music doesn’t achieve the anticipated climax. Instead, it continues to function as a foreboding for something unarticulated that lies ahead. Imhof’s piece is an assemblage of options. The glass floor separates not only viewer and viewed, spectator and actor, but also turns the performers and the performance itself into an image. This effect is even stronger when combined with the countless smartphones and tablets directed at the performers underneath the floor. Almost every spectator watches the performance through a smartphone screen (figs. 81/82). The act of filming, although officially forbidden in the exhibition, becomes an essential part of the work and is doubled

Figs. 80–82 Anne Imhof, Faust, performance, installation view with spectators and glass walls, German Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale 2017.

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by the performers filming each other. Accordingly, Obrist calls what happens with the interaction of the audience—the images they create and distribute—a feedback loop. Anne Imhof replies that it’s “almost like a circuit that closed again.”9

Alexandra Pirici, Signals Alexandra Pirici, a dancer and choreographer by training, creates performance works that feature “embodied artworks,” architecture, pop culture, and internet phenomena. In my dissertation, I referred to her 2016 performance work Signals as a “‘digital tableau vivant’ or an ‘embodied internet protocol’.”10 Signals is situated in a black box, where a group of performers in CGI-animation motion-capture suits reenact said phenomena (fig. 83). The material ranges from poems and other literary sources through historical events such as “the dead Ceaucescu couple executed by firing squad during the Romanian revolution of 1989” and architectural monuments

Fig. 83 Alexandra Pirici, Signals, performance, screenshot of the performance’s website, Berlin Biennale, 2016.

9 10

Imhof and Obrist. I quote here from a paragraph of my manuscript of this book, see chapter IV, 217.

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such as the wailing wall of Jerusalem to internet phenomena like “Kim Kardashian breaks the internet.”11 Audience votes on the Biennale’s website and a content-ranking algorithm produce a list for the daily routine of the performance. As I pointed out in my dissertation, the audience is not merely invited but instructed to record videos during the performance. Thus, by filming with their smartphone camera, every spectator turns into a performer, much like the spectator-performers in Anne Imhof’s Faust. As I have previously concluded about this work, the supposedly “immaterial” and “objective” mechanisms of internet protocols (and their resulting electronic signals) are embodied by the performers only to be transformed back into electronic signals again by means of the spectator’s smartphone. The performing body, both that of the performer and that of the spectator, is here exposed as a link that is implicated in the ever-circulating signal.12 It is, however, crucial to add that the algorithm is exposed as highly subjective. Much like Imhof, Pirici sees her work less in the tradition of the artistic practice of performance. She states: The works that I make have different characteristics from, say, the performance turn of the 1960s and 1970s—that is, the artist is not necessarily present and part of the performative action, they don’t have a beginning or end in a narrative sense, and they don’t take an anti-institutional stance. So I try to avoid an association with that. I prefer terms like ongoing action, performative exhibition, or performative environment […].13

11 Berlin Biennale, “Alexandra Pirici.” 12 Chapter IV, 218. 13 Alexandra Pirici, “How Alexandra Pirici Telegraphs Big Ideas through Small Gestures,” interview by Elvia Wilk, Art Basel News (blog), accessed April 20, 2020, https://www.artbasel.com/news/how-alexandra-pirici-telegraphsbig-ideas-through-small-gestures.

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The Screen is Present Thus, instead of the artist, we find the screen present in both works. In Imhof’s case, “stage directions” are given to the performers via smartphone. In Pirici’s case, the artist is completely absent from the action. As stated earlier, the function of the screen—that is, the psychic screen of the subject—is here emphasized and exposed by means (quite literally) of a technological screen as “locus of mediation.” Psychoanalyst Eric Laurent states that nowadays, we are observed from every screen, and that resonates with the feeling that God is watching us. At the same time, these instruments are marvelous in the sense that they contain our whole life—the pictures, the sounds, our writings—all of this concentrated digitally in one solitary machine. This can offer us a way to live our lives better, but it also brings about judgment of our life at any given moment. The screen observes us and seems to ask, “Did you do the right thing to maximize your life today? Were your performances as good as those of your MacBook?”14 The (smartphone) screen thus reminds us of the dialectics of visibility and invisibility, seeing and being seen, the eye as identificatory point of view and the gaze as radically alienating outside, as cast from the place of the Other. This is where the subject encounters a split—namely, his or her own—as it exposes “one’s lack-in-being.”15 The subject is thrown back onto its fundamental split as a condition of the possibility of his or her existence. However, we can argue that the use of the screen veils (rather than exposes) this function and the split in the subject. Peggy Phelan remarks that In order to counter the physiological and psychic impoverishment of the eye/I, visual representation makes ever more elaborate promises to deliver

14

15

Eric Laurent, “Re-Tale Therapy: Why There Are No Short Cuts to Your Problems,” interview by Or Ezrati, Haaretz, July 20, 2012, https://ampblog2006.blogspot. com/search?q=screen. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 15.

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a satisfying and substantial real. Representation appeases a deep psychic impulse to employ the image seen as a mirror for the seeing eye/I and to forget that it is also a screen which erases the subject’s own blankness and blindness.16 Thus, we can conclude that when the smartphone or computer screen is introduced—separating subject and other, and body from body—what is produced is first and foremost an image: an image of a body, which promises to represent a real. The images produced can be thought of as a semblance of a social bond more than a social bond itself. The images of bodies take over the encounter of bodies; the serious rupture we encounter (not only since Covid-19) in the symbolic is patched up by the imaginary. We encounter three versions of the body here: in the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. The imaginary body is first and foremost the specular body: the I, the ego, the narcissistic body. But where I say, pointing at the image, “That there is me,” the symbolic body has already entered the stage—the body, paraphrasing Lacan, that is “carved up” by the signifier.17 The real body, we can argue, is the frail thing we are now supposed to remove from any encounter with another body. The real is not the same as the physical here. It is simply the “leftover,” the flesh that is irrepresentable by the symbolic and imaginary functions. These three functions, however, are inseparable. We can summarize this relation in the formula that “The real will persist as long as we have a body and as long as we speak”18—in other words, the subject as “parle-être,” as speaking body.19

16 Phelan, 15. 17 Lacan, Television, 6. 18 Marta Goldenberg, “The Analyst-Object and Psychoanalysis as a Mobile-Virtual-Installation,” The Lacanian Review Online, April 15, 2020, http://www.thelacanianreviews.com/the-analyst-object-and-psychoanalysisas-a-mobile-virtual-installation/. 19 Lacan, “Joyce Le Symptôme II.”

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Subject: Superject-Hypokeimenon-Über-Träger In Pirici’s and Imhof’s pieces, the subject becomes visible in its function as carrier; as medium and transmitter. In German, this wordplay is more compelling: the subject is Träger (bearer, carrier) and Überträger (transmitter, carrier). Übertragen here shows its double meaning of transcribing, transferring, and communicating but also transmitting (such as the transmitting of a virus). The hypokeimenon, the sub-ject, then, could be called an “Unter-träger.” It is that which carries; an underlying structure as a vehicle for mediation. The subject as “Überträger”—as infectant, as producing with its actions other subjects—can be rendered in a Deleuzian way as “super-ject,” 20 a subject not as an in-dividual (as in the disciplinary society) but as a di-vidual, which is signified by its anticipated, suspended, but never attained individuality.21 A super-ject is also a replicator of superjects. The super-ject is commensurate to a topological structure between a point of view and its object (or objectile), as Deleuze informs us.22 Both super-ject and objectile are thus not identified and characterized by their fixed spatial position but, as the suffixes “-ject” or “-jectile” indicate, by their movement, their trajectory: they are thrown, cast.

Witnessing-Testifying Pirici’s and Imhof’s respective works contrast the often-evoked notion of the witnessing body as a marker for performance art with that of the testifying body. In these works, however, witnessing alone is depicted as not enough. The body is under duress, after all, to testify to this moment of presence by (to use Paul Virilio’s slightly old-fashioned-sounding vocabulary) “tele-presence.”23 It is not about reinstalling a difference between here and there, the ephemeral of performance—either having been there or having missed it. Rather, “having been there” alone is not enough; the subject needs to testify to the body’s whereabouts. There is clearly an indexical moment to this testimony, just as we find it in some of the earliest

20 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (London: Athlone, 1993), 20. 21 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 5. 22 Deleuze, The Fold, 19–20. 23 Virilio, Polar Inertia, 5.

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artworks known to humanity: the prehistoric handprints on the cave walls of Maltravieso. This “I have been here, then,” testified by the silhouette of one’s hand, is here modified into a displaced place: “I have been elsewhere, some other time.” Both time and space are removed, but they are indexically connected to a moment and to a place (the moment and place of recording). It is more about the practice of documenting than the document itself. Who watches these videos that were once so important for the subject to make? If anyone watches them at all (we know this from personal experience) it is the people we send them to—others—creating a viral network of subjects. Whether we assume the subject’s unique and singular aesthetic experience with the artwork or rather a participatory, intersubjective aesthetic experience to be at the core of contemporary aesthetic discourse, the works discussed here do not conform to either of these models. The spectators are not alone in their aesthetic experience insofar as they find themselves part of a crowd of people performing the same action: filming the work. This situation exposes the neoliberal imperative to maximize one’s individuality through creative “self-realization” as constitutively structural. It also exposes the individualizing actions of the spectators as absolutely conformist. In seeing everyone else performing the same action, the subject cannot see itself as independently mastering its own gaze. Rather, the subject experiences him- or herself as an interdependent product of a social practice. Meanwhile—and this is interesting—this does not keep the subject from performing his or her “own” perspective. The subject insists on becoming the director of his or her own video-gaze. Thus, the aesthetic experience in these works is neither limited to the subject-work experience nor the intersubjective, communal experience. Instead, it points directly to the status of the subject as an interdependent, conditioned, precarious and yet insisting position.

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Loss of the Real? Despite Jean Baudrillard’s (and many others’) claims that the virtual realm not only conceals the real world but calls into question its very existence,24 we can see by means of Imhof’s and Pirici’s works, as well as our own current situation with Corona, that the Real is all but lost. In Polar Inertia, Paul Virilio points out how the laws of representation changed in a world in which the representational framework changed— namely, from Earth as “a solitary world, the single mundus of human experience” to a topological relation between, in Edmund Husserl’s words, “bases that have become bodies.”25 Virilio examines this in relation to the event of the moon landing and the medial spectacle around it: as the point of reference changes, the Earth is suddenly nothing but a body in relation to other celestial bodies; they move in relation to one another. Thus, we can draw two fundamental conclusions from this that are pertinent to our topic: 1. Topology creates bodies and vice versa, as a body is always a moving body in relation to other moving bodies. Performance practice accounts for this topology. 2. Mediation creates a redoubling, a simultaneous feedback loop. What is important here, Virilio emphasizes, is this: The event was not so much the transmission of television pictures to earth over a distance of more than 300,000 kilometres, as the simultaneous view of the moon on the TV screen and through the window26 In both Pirici’s and Imhof’s works, we encounter this simultaneous view at once on both the smartphone screen and in the live performance. However, in contrast to Virilio’s argument, the images the spectators produce are fed back once more into the circuit of the virtual realm, sent via WhatsApp, uploaded as blog posts, Facebook or Instagram stories, etc. Simultaneity becomes an ongoing, paradoxical “state of constant movement.”

See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 25 Virilio, Polar Inertia, 72. 26 Virilio, 72.

24

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Perhaps we can argue that the use of the screen both in the performances discussed above and in our current Corona-life—pointing to the dividuum in a Deleuzian sense or the split subject in the Lacanian formula— offers two avenues. One would be the often-assumed affirmation of the capitalist discourse in which the subject no longer maintains relations to other subjects, but only to libidinal objects. This version would also mean neglecting the body as real altogether, forgetting (or repressing) its existence and its inseparable entanglement with the subject. The other version, backed up by Imhof and Pirici, is fundamentally different. Here the split in the subject is itself exposed by seeing, being seen, filming something to testify to this relation, watching on a screen what is right in front of one’s eyes, introducing a separation between oneself and one’s “own” point of view. All this holds the key to a form of resistance against capitalist (specifically, neoliberal) forms of non-society. Only if I can experience myself as split, inconsistent, and ultimately lacking, a social bond with others becomes possible. Both Imhof and Pirici state that they create images. And maybe this is exactly what makes their work so compelling—namely, that the spectator’s response to these images is, on the one hand, to produce more images by means of their phone, and, on the other hand, to simultaneously introduce a symbolic framework by sharing these images with others. These performances thus teach us that there is, at the very core of each body, the mark of the unconscious signifier. Human bodies are not instinctual: they are driven; they are fundamentally useless and incapable. Biopolitics—as we feel them right now, stronger than ever (although they were always there)—can thus only seize the body to a certain extent. In our bodily incapacity, we cannot fully be subjected to neoliberalism or any other ideology. Our bodies just don’t work that well. They resist, in their fragility. So what these works, as well as our current Zoom-regulated encounters with others, testify to is this: to make oneself a link, to integrate oneself into the algorithmic signals of the digital, is to testify, by means of the unconscious, that the real exists.

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Illustrations

Charlotte Klink: Electric Seeing

Fig. 1 Image reproduced from Mike Leggett, “Eighteen Months Outside the Grounds of Obscenity & Libel,” in The Video Show: Festival of Independent Video at the Serpentine Gallery, 1975, exhibition catalog, unpaginated. Figs. 2–5 Video stills from Lanesville TV, WNET, Video and Television Review, 1973. Fig. 6 Schema of the selenium camera, reproduced from R. W. Burns, Television: An International History of the Formative Years, 50. Fig. 7 Schema of the Nipkow disk, reproduced from Richard C. Webb, Tele-Visionaries (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 8. Fig. 8 Comparison of the increased resolution resulting from an increased number of scanning lines, reproduced from Richard C. Webb, Tele-Visionaries, 11. Fig. 9 The scanning process, reproduced from Eugene Trundle, Newnes Guide to Television and Video Technology (Oxford: Newnes, 2001), 2. Fig. 10 1967 Sony Video Rover DV-2400 Portapak, © Sony. Fig. 11 The stages in kinescope recording (left) as opposed to videotape recording (right), reproduced from Rudy Bretz, “Video Tape,” 404.

Fig. 12 Vito Acconci, Airtime, video still, 1973, reproduced from Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 54. Figs. 13/14 Yael Bartana, video stills, Zamach (Assassination, part 3 of … and Europe will be stunned), 2011, courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. Fig. 15 Vito Acconci, Centers, video still, 1971, reproduced from Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 51. Fig. 16 Richard Serra with Nancy Holt, Boomerang, video still, 1974, © Holt/Smithson Foundation, Licensed by VAGA at ARS, New York, courtesy of Sprüth Magers. Fig. 17 Dan Graham, Time Delay Room, installation plan / illustration of the video installation with live feedback (8 second delay), 1974, reproduced from Marianne Brouwer, ed., Dan Graham. Werke 1965–2000, 149. Figs. 18/19 Lynda Benglis, Now, video stills, 1973, reproduced from Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” 56. Fig. 20 The Schéma L, as used in Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on the ‘Purloined Letter’,” in Écrits, 40.

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Fig. 21 Peter Campus, Three Transitions (I), video still, 1973, courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York. Fig. 22 Peter Campus, Three Transitions (II), video still, 1973, courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York. Fig. 23 Peter Campus, Three Transitions (III), video still, 1973, courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York. Fig. 24 Janaina Tschäpe, Lacrimacorpus, video still, 2004, © 2004 Janaina Tschäpe. Fig. 25 Heba Y. Amin, As Birds Flying, video still, 2016 (Forum Expanded), courtesy of the artist. Fig. 26 Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind, In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, video still, 2015 (Forum Expanded), courtesy of the artists. Fig. 27 Cécile B. Evans, What the Heart Wants, installation view, 2016 (“The Present in Drag”), courtesy of the artist. Fig. 28 Cécile B. Evans, What the Heart Wants, video still, 2016 (“The Present in Drag”), courtesy of the artist.

Illustrations

Fig. 29 Alexandra Pirici, Signals, performance, 2016 (“The Present in Drag”), courtesy of the artist. Fig. 30 Omer Fast, Casting, installation view at the Museum of Modern Art Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (front), 2007, fourchannel video installation, courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York, photograph: MUMOK/ RASTL. Fig. 31 Omer Fast, Casting, 35 mm film stills by Lisa Wiegand (front), 2007, four-channel video installation, courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Fig. 32 Omer Fast, Casting, video still (front), 2007, four-channel video installation, courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York. Fig. 33 Omer Fast, Casting, installation view at the Museum of Modern Art Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (back), 2007, fourchannel video installation, courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York, photograph: MUMOK/ RASTL. Fig. 34 Table of the three phases in “A Child is Being Beaten” and their transformations (adapted from Sigmund Freud, “A Child is Being Beaten,” in Standard Edition, vol. 17, 195–96).

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Fig. 35 Table of the three stages of the turn of the drive (adapted from Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” in Standard Edition, vol. 14, 127–30). Fig. 36 The turn of the scopic drive (Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” in Standard Edition, vol. 14, 130). Fig. 37 Yael Bartana, Trembling Time, video still, 2001, courtesy of Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, and Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv. Fig. 38 The destruction of the Empire State Building in Independence Day (dir. Roland Emmerich, USA: Twentieth-Century–Fox, 1996), scheme of camera perspective, illustration by author. Fig. 39 Monument to the Future Victims of the Conflict, Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv, March 16, 2015, photograph by author. Figs. 40–43 Ulla von Brandenburg, Two Times Seven, installation views K21 Ständehaus, 2017, photographs: Achim Kukulies; and video still of C, Ü, I, T, H, E, A, K, O, G, N, B, D, F, R, M, P, L, 2017, courtesy Kunstmuseum Bonn, permanent loan KiCo collection. Fig. 44 Modified schema of the veil (Jacques Lacan, Seminar IV, The Object Relation, 148).

Figs. 45–48 Jon Rafman, You, the World and I, video stills, 2010, © Jon Rafman, courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers. Fig. 49 Schema of the screen (Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 108). Figs. 50–55 Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational MOV File, video stills, 2013, courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and Esther Schipper, Berlin, © Hito Steyerl & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2021. Figs. 56/57 Gillian Wearing, 2 into 1, video stills, 1997, © Gillian Wearing, courtesy of Maureen Paley, London. Figs. 58–61 Bjørn Melhus, I’m not the enemy, production stills, 2011, courtesy of the artist, © Bjørn Melhus, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, photograph: Ben Brix. Fig. 62 Schema of the image/screen as field of the eye/gaze (Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 91). Fig. 63 Schema of linear perspective, in Brook Taylor, New Principles of Linear Perspective, 1719. Fig. 64 Albrecht Dürer, Der Zeichner des liegenden Weibes, book illustration (wood cut), in Underweysung der Messung mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt, 1512–1525.

Charlotte Klink: Electric Seeing

Figs. 65–68 Schema of the eye point in linear perspective, in Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura e della statua, Milano, 1804. Fig. 69 Schema of the vanishing point (punto del centro) in linear perspective, in Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura e della statua, Milano, 1804. Fig. 70 Quadrangulus, schema of the visual pyramid, in Leon Battista Alberti, De punctis et lineis apud pictures, Lucca, Biblioteca Statale (cat. 15), reproduced from Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, fig. 40, 1997. Fig. 71 Schema of the scopic field, the split of eye and the gaze (Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 106). Fig. 72 Schema of the scopic field, the split of eye and the gaze as structural frame of the phantasm. Illustration by the author and Nicolas Zupfer. Fig. 73 Schema of the circulation of the drive (Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 178). Fig. 74 The losange as algorithm for the rim’s circular process (Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 209).

Fig. 75 Giotto di Bondone, Invidia (The Seven Vices—Envy), Fresco, Cappella degli Scrovegni, Padua, Italy, 1306. Photograph: Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Fig. 76 Eliza Douglas, Franziska Aigner, Stine Omar, Lea Welsch, Theresa Patzschke in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, German Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, © Photography: Nadine Fraczkowski, courtesy of the artist, German Pavilion 2017. Fig. 77 Mickey Mahar, Franziska Aigner, Ian Edmonds, Eliza Douglas, Billy Bultheel, Frances Chiaverini, Lea Welsch in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, German Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, © Photography: Nadine Fraczkowski, courtesy of the artist, German Pavilion 2017. Fig. 78 Emma Daniel in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, German Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, © Photography: Nadine Fraczkowski, courtesy of the artist, German Pavilion 2017. Fig. 79 Frances Chiaverini in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, German Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, © Photography: Nadine Fraczkowski, courtesy of the artist, German Pavilion 2017.

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Fig. 80 Franziska Aigner and Emma Daniel in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, German Paviliont, 57th International Art Exhibition— La Biennale di Venezia, © Photography: Nadine Fraczkowski, courtesy of the artist, German Pavilion 2017. Fig. 81 Emma Daniel in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, German Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition–La Biennale di Venezia, © Photography: Nadine Fraczkowski, courtesy of the artist, German Pavilion 2017. Fig. 82 Eliza Douglas in Anne Imhof, Faust, 2017, German Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition–La Biennale di Venezia, © Photography: Nadine Fraczkowski, courtesy of the artist, German Pavilion 2017. Fig. 83 Alexandra Pirici, Signals, performance, screenshot of the performance’s website, Berlin Biennale, 2016.